Karma, Chameleon

SILVIA: What, angry, Sir Thurio?  Do you change color?
VALENTINE: Give him leave, madam; he is a kind of chameleon.
THURIO: That hath more mind to feed on your blood than live in your air.

--William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona

In exploring ethical behavior, the next pattern of conflict is the Chameleon.  Specifically, what I call the Chameleon is that behavior that occurs when one is upholding the ethical standards of a surrounding, foreign environment while going against one's own upbringing.  Like the Conformist and the Rebel, the Chameleon is a complicated condition with no easy answers.

A Chameleon can be something as innocent as trying to fit in, or it can be as sinister as using a difference of culture to exploit it.  The Bhopal disaster, for instance, was a direct result of corporate negligence--the company Union Carbide operating in India to exploit cheap labor and substandard safety conditions.

Not all fitting in is bad, as discussed more thoroughly in the posts on the Conformist.  But there is a subtle distinction between operating within one's own background and outside of it.  In the latter, there is an acknowledged, separate community of ethical standards.  You can think of the two ethical systems in terms of a Venn diagram.  In the area of intersection, the Conformist and the Chameleon are one and the same.  Where they diverge is slightly more complex.  The Chameleon is the specific case where one operates outside of one's own background ethics but still within the ethics of a surrounding (but foreign) community.  A good example may be smoking pot in Amsterdam, or Tobias Schneebaum's anthropophage experiences in Keep the River on Your Right.

Like it or not, we carry our cultural ethical upbringing with us.  It is a bias that is difficult to shed.  When we step out of our ethical comfort zones, we do so at a risk.  Sometimes we discover that our own cultural assumptions and biases are incorrect, and that there are other ways of thinking about things that feel "superior."  In other cases, we feel as if there are "backwards" or difficult to understand behaviors, which make us feel that our own culture is "superior."

Though we may want human rights to be universal, there are significant cultural hurdles.  The so-called "prime directive" in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek is a futuristic version of Westphalian sovereignty--that which establishes the boundaries of nation states and allows non-interference in other cultures.  And yet, the world of today is linked at the speed of the Internet and globalization.

If we ignore our own cultural values, we can find ourselves in uncomfortable or dangerous situations.  If we project them, we can find ourselves at risk of insulting the culture we are in.  It is a very fine line, based on the value of mutual respect.

The Prisoner and the Rebel

Like the Conformist, the theme of the Rebel has been explored at great length in the allegorical TV show "The Prisoner."  During a 1977 interview (original link, currently dead) with Warner Troyer, the series' star and creator, Patrick McGoohan explains a bit of the meaning behind the show:

Troyer: For the Village, what was the purpose, the goal?
McGoohan: I think it's going on every day all around us. I had to sign in to get into this joint!
Troyer: (Uh-huh) Downstairs, yeah.
Troyer: Made you angry, too? (Chuckle.)
McGoohan: Slightly, yeah. Pass-keys and, you know, let's go down to the basement and all this. That's Prisonership as far as I'm concerned,and that makes me mad! And that makes me rebel! And that's what the Prisoner was doing, was rebelling against that type of thing!
Troyer: But can you, in everyday life, summon the will and the energy to rebel every time any indignity occurs?
McGoohan: You can't, otherwise you go crazy! You have to live with it. That's what makes us prisoners! You can't totally rebel, otherwise you have to go live on your own, on a desert island. It's as simple as that.

In the final episode, "Fall Out," another young member of the Village, Number 48 (played by Alexis Kanner), is on trial for the simple rebellion of "youth."  Without revealing too much about the controversial ending of the series, we are confronted with the reality that too much rebellion is perhaps as difficult as too much conformity.  Number 6, when asked to address the assembly, can only mutter "I feel..." before he is interrupted by everyone else speaking simultaneously.  The apocalyptic destruction of the Village itself is a vision of the consequences of unchecked rebellion.  In the TV interview, McGoohan says:

McGoohan: I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself, and that goes with oneself, a two-handed pair with oneself and progress. I think we're gonna take good care of this planet shortly. They're making bigger and better bombs, faster planes, and all this stuff one day, I hate to say it, there's never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hadn't been used and that thing is gonna be used unless...I don't know how we're gonna stop it, no[w] it's too late, I think.

These themes are nothing new, though technology has made the stakes much higher.  The movement of Romanticism, placing an emphasis on the aesthetic experience, regardless of the consequences, led to a darker counter-Romanticist movement.  Quite possibly, the most famous or archetypal example of this movement is Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein.  The warning is stark: with every new technology (or, in Spider-Man's case, super-power), there are consequences.  Responsibility has to evolve in tandem.  Who can resist the lure of the Ring of Gyges?  Can it be tamed, like Boromir and other characters wish (in vain), in Lord of the Rings?  Or does all new power have to be thrust into the fires of Mount Doom, never to be used again?  Like the Invisible Man, will we all simply go mad with its power?


If the Rebel is thrust into the center of these questions, the consequences can be truly disastrous.  And yet, the Rebel is usually at the center of progress in the first place.  Imagine if we all thought the same thoughts, behaved the same way, and reacted the same way to everything we encountered.  Like the Parable of the Roast, we would never recognize an inefficiency, let alone seek out a way to improve it.  It was only the questioning of the Church's spiritual monopoly and earthly authority during the Renaissance that led to the Enlightenment (in contrast to Pope Benedict XVI's view of history), resulting in a new age of science and technology.  J. Robert Oppenheimer's innovations into the atomic bomb resulted in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which led him to reverse his personal stance and lobby against its future use.

I feel

Parable of the Roast

Another example of the dangerous side of the Conformist can be illustrated in a hand-me-down tale that I like to call "The Parable of the Roast."  I have heard several variants of this tale, so do not be surprised if it sounds familiar.

A young mother is preparing a roast for dinner.  Her daughter asks her, "mommy, why do you cut the ends off the roast before sticking it into the oven?"  The mother is flabbergasted.  "Gee, I don't know why, but my mother always did it that way."  They decide to ask the little girl's grandmother.  "Grandmother, in preparing a roast, why do we cut off the ends before sticking it into the oven?"  "I don't know," the grandmother replies, "but my mother always did it that way."  They decide to ask the venerable great-grandmother.  "Great-grandmother, why do we cut off the ends of the roast before putting it into the oven?"  "I don't know why you cut off the ends of your roasts," she replies, "but in my day, we had much smaller ovens and had to cut the ends off in order for it to fit."

The TV show "The Prisoner" shows how the Conformist and the dangers of a conformist society can lead to destructive behavior, as featured prominently in the excellent episode "A Change of Mind."

The Conformist

"Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away;
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air."

In the 1960's, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a now famous experiment.  The motivation behind the experiment was to test the limits of conformity, though it led to a more serious discussion of the ethics of deception in psychology experiments.  Subjects were told to administer electric shocks to a (unreal) patient who is taking a test.  The results were that 65% of the subjects (ages 26 to 40) administered shocks that they knew were fatal.

"You'd better watch out!
There may be dogs about"

In another experiment, psychologist Solomon Asch found that 75% of subjects would give an incorrect answer in a test if it was acknowledged by a larger group as the "correct" one.

"I looked over Jordan, and I've seen
Things are not what they seem."

As a young student on the streets of Boston, I would watch in horror as pedestrians would cross an intersection against the light, simply because another person in front of them did so--sometimes putting themselves in considerable danger without even paying much attention.  I began to wonder, are people sheep, as George Orwell has generally suggested?  And if so, is the controversial "Nuremburg Defense" ethically valid? 

"That's what you get for pretending the danger's not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel."

And yet, some element of conformity is in all of us.  Most of us don't wear clown suits to work because it would attract unwanted attention.  Even for the freethinking individual, there are some aspects of our lives that we surrender to the overwhelming herd.

"What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes."

It takes a great deal of social energy not to conform.  And yet, clearly a great deal of unethical behavior can arise from accepting the status quo.  In a previous post, I presented the hypothetical Culture 1 as a culture that tolerates lying.  And yet, lying is widely regarded as unethical behavior.  Still, there are real world cultures that tolerate certain kinds of lying and consider it unwise not to lie.  Do we have the right to criticize that behavior as unethical?

"Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is not a bad dream."

Spider-Man's famous mantra "with great power comes great responsibility" and his tragic origin demonstrate that some level of awareness and participation in ethics is required of all of us--especially by those who wield the most power.

And yet, a certain level of compassion is also required for judging those who do conform.

Lyrics: Pink Floyd, "Sheep"

Nihilism and Nature

When praying mantises mate, the female bites off the head of the male and consumes him.  Some research has shown that this may even be a strategy that helps with fertilization.  While the late Stephen Jay Gould considers sexual cannibalism to be statistically insignificant in prevalence in nature, one cannot ignore that it is an existing pattern.  If nature is defined by its least common denominator, everything about it is as brutally violent as violence can be.

So how does one consider the end of the slippery slope in nature, where violence is an end to itself?

I recall one conversation I had with a family member.  "Everything has a purpose in nature," that family member said.  "Everything...except war.  War serves no purpose whatsoever."

Had I been a bit more enlightened, I would have recognized that the family member was baiting me.  "War does serve a purpose," I said.  "It happens in nature."  Suddenly I was Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and George W. Bush all rolled into one.  I was looked upon with such horror and incredulity.  I am an evil man, evidently, simply because I think war has a purpose.  Many species of animals go to war.  Ants.  Chimpanzees.  And, of course, humans.  Even at the time of this discussion, I identified as a humanist and anti-war.  What I failed to realize was that the discussion was baited as to leave no room to distinguish between what has a purpose in nature and what has a utility for humanist ends--a linguistic trap.

Simple, black-and-white terms leave little room for the gray area known as real life.  Unfortunately, it is much easier to follow simple black-and-white rules most of the time than to channel individual thought all of the time.  Structure and order, simplicity and anti-intellectualism are ways in which the Conformist (discussed later) lives in harmony within the surrounding environment and conserves energy.

Moral relativism, in the slippery slope, leads to some of the following possibilities:

1. Nihilism: "every man for himself, and God against all."
2. Humanism: humans as ends to themselves.
3. A point of stasis: an evolving, codified set of practical ethics based on science and prevailing views.

None of these seem particularly dictatorial; nor are these results mutually exclusive.  In fact, one can go so far as to believe them all at the same time.

Equal vs. Equitable

The tenets of many human -isms begin with a simple feel-good statement: all humans are created equal.  But, as George Orwell has infamously pointed out, this degenerates into "some animals are more equal than others."

Folks, I hate to be the bearer of bad news.  We were not created equal.  There is a reason why Michael Jordan plays basketball well and I don't.  Some people are smarter than others.  Some have more musical talent.  And so on.  There is not even an implied parity in nature.  Just because somebody is good at math, it doesn't mean they suck at sports.  Some people are superior in every way (physically, mentally, etc.) than other people.  Some people, for example, are born severely physically and mentally challenged.

Now before we start to go down the slippery slope of Darwin to Nietzsche down into the Third Reich, this inequality is no basis for an unfair treatment based on an existing condition.  In the eyes of an objective judge, we would all like to be given a fair shake.  Civil rights, for instance, is rooted in equal treatment regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender, or religion (to name a few categories).  We would like to see this courtesy extended to most other aspects of appearance (well, maybe not to personal hygiene--I'd hate to see a National Association for the Advancement of the Smelly).

I bring up this point not because I am a language nerd, but because the distinction is important when dealing with some limitations in Immanuel Kant's first formulation.  If I am comfortable in a world that tolerates stealing but punishes lies severely, while you come from a world where lies are acceptable but stealing is intolerable, it does not mean that we have "incorrect" or "inconsistent" moral systems.  It means that we have different cultural values.  What is troubling to one person is not going to be the same thing to someone else.  If we call the culture that tolerates stealing "Culture A" and the culture that tolerates lying "Culture 1," let's examine some of the possibilities of what happens when they interact:

1. Within the domain of Culture 1 (tolerates lying, not stealing), someone from Culture 1 lies. 
2. Within the domain of Culture 1, someone from Culture 1 steals.
3. Within the domain of Culture A (tolerates stealing, not lying), someone from Culture 1 steals.
4. Within the domain of Culture A, someone from Culture 1 lies.

Ignoring the reciprocal scenarios as mirror images of these four cases, let's take a look at them in more detail.

In the first case, you have someone operating consistently within their own culture.  In the second case, we have a person rebelling against their own culture.  In the third case, we have someone assimilating themselves into a foreign culture.  Finally, in the last case, we have someone upholding their own culture against the prevailing attitude of the foreign culture.  I call these scenarios "the Conformist", "the Rebel", "the Chameleon", and "the Ugly American."  Each case has its own set of issues, which I will delve into further.  In the search for Universal Human Rights, these scenarios emerge not only from geographically isolated peoples, but in the melting pot of the United States with its emphasis on individuality, between individuals.

As mentioned in previous posts, Pope Benedict XVI's condemnation of Western individuality as a "Dictatorship of Relativism" shows a lack of respect and understanding.   It also shows a lack of appreciation of the benefits it has long brought the world--benefits he claims were sprung from Christianity.  Although this demonstrates a clash of two different systems of values, he also has a valid point that I will also delve into further: fear and moral nihilism.  Hyper-individual cultures could ostensibly lead to complete anarchy, where every individual is allowed to set the moral and ethical standards for him or herself.  I have already demonstrated, through the Little Old Lady Experiment, just how the slippery slope argument fails to produce actual fruit.  Still, I believe I have much more ground to cover in nature's patterns, what human societies are capable of, and what leads cultures to anti-human behavior, violence, and terror.

One more about that Golden Rule thing...

Tolerance for other religions, which includes the category of non-believers as well, can only occur if there is a mutual respect for the other person's point of view.  But such a respect can only be established if the following conditions are met:

• No assumption of superiority.  This is, perhaps, the most difficult to overcome.  Herr Ratzinger, for instance, loses points when he insists that Christianity is the cause of the Enlightenment (it wasn't) or that Christian values are what exclusively hold society and families together (they aren't).  I may seem a bit of a hypocrite for being the one to point these out, but I do not do so under the assumption that Christianity is somehow inherently flawed as a religion or point of view.  It only takes a quick perusal at Veritatis Splendor, for instance, to see why its language shows a Christian-superior attitude that I do not abide.
• No recruitment drive.  It is a moral offense to try to recruit someone, whose soul or life is seen as in "dire peril" simply because they do not believe the same things that you do.  Of course, in order to even begin a recruitment drive, you have to start with an assumption of superiority in the first place.  If you want people to join your cause, lead by example, not through propaganda.  This goes for Christopher Hitchens as easily as it does for Jack Chick.  Tone it down a bit, and realize that we are all different people and that we are never going to recruit certain people to our cause, no matter how we try.
• Keep the supernatural personal, but consider that objective reality wins.  Even if you are the most die-hard atheist, you have to come to terms with the fact that the human brain is designed to pick up patterns and draw connections that may not be logical or have any rational basis.  For instance, something like this may not be easily explained by science, but perhaps it does not have to be in order for us all to draw individual, personal conclusions.  On the other hand, your personal faith is not going to help you overcome gravity enough to enable you to jump from the top of a skyscraper, nor would it help you argue your way out of a parking ticket.  There is a concrete universe with concrete laws, and human ethical systems that exist outside of the realm of personal faith.
• In the gray zone of ethical dilemmas, consider compassion for existing fellow human beings who have equal rights as the primary objective.  If possible, err on the side of caution.  But consider the difference between equal and equitable, as discussed in detail later.  The biological definition of human life not a single, easily explained binary state, and it is less than compassionate to condemn others for seeing it differently than you.  To the converse, one who is biologically human according to all science is an ethical end.