I Am Interested In Ethics
Shallowness has become one of our highest cultural values, to the point where practicing it earns you social acceptance - and anyone who dares to defy that value - with depth or length or complexity of thought or opinion - is made to pay a price.
It's wrong - but most people's sense of right and wrong is born mostly out of what their society says is right and wrong. That's why things like slavery and Hitler were able to be accepted by the vast majority of the people in the countries where they've happened - because our ability to edit and ignore our conscience based on societal norms is nearly limitless. Slavery alone is proof of that - dozens of decades during which such obvious evil was done, again and again, in full view of everyone. Hitler hid things - he wove a pretty picture over the ugliness that was being done. But slavery was right there, right out in the open, for all to see. Anyone with a lick of conscience - of human decency - would have seen that it was wrong. But in the contest between personal conscience and cultural norms, the former will always be bludgeoned down by the latter, until the former becomes the latter, to the point where we start to believe that the opinions, no matter how unconscionable they are - were always our own.
At the end of the day, we all value doing the right thing, and being happy, and not enslaving people, and a million other things - but nearly all of those things fall lower on our value system than the value of fitting in. Of looking and acting and speaking and thinking enough like the rest of the herd that we're able to ensure and secure our place among their ranks. And we'll ignore and ostracize and argue against anything and everything - from bigotry to compassion to slavery to emancipation to mercy: we'll rail against it all - or rail against nothing, if railing is out of vogue this decade - and all for the sake of securing our place in the ranks of the pack.
And the most twisted part of it is that most of us don't even realize that we're doing it. In most of our minds, we're fighting for our values. Or we're not even fighting at all - we're just living. Just going to work and going to play and going to bed and spinning our cycles round and round as we tick our days away. But the truth is that vast swaths of the cycles of our days are born out of norms - society says that we should work 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, regardless of our situation or the size of our family or the cost of living. Society says that we should kill any and all creatures that are even slightly inconvenient to us, without an ounce of hesitation or regret, and without thought as to whether it's necessary. Society says that if this leader becomes that leader, or this party becomes that party, or this God becomes that god, or lack thereof - then all of the problems will go away. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. But what I'm talking about has nothing to do with those particular potential problems. It's about how we approach those problems.
How we approach them is simple: society says that we should work this kind of schedule, so let's do it and never question it. Lets add expenses to our lives until they match the income that society told us to achieve. Society says that the word "pest" means that lives no longer have value, so let's kill without regret. Society - around here anyway - says that this is the right God, and that this is the right kind of politics - so let's live within those lines and fight for them, and against the other side.
That's the limit of the personal history and the ethical development of most of our beliefs. That's as far as most of us go. It's as high as most of us climb on the ethical ladder.
This description isn't complete, because no description of human beings ever is. We're too complicated for that. In particular, it leaves out the idea of the ethical development of groups, and how that can drive the ethical development of their members even if their members never stop being sheep.
At the end of the day, it's only by taking a hundred passes through ourselves, from a hundred different angles, that we can even begin to understand ourselves. This is a piece of our puzzle - one that I believe is true, both in my mind and in my gut. But it's not complete.
It's wrong - but most people's sense of right and wrong is born mostly out of what their society says is right and wrong. That's why things like slavery and Hitler were able to be accepted by the vast majority of the people in the countries where they've happened - because our ability to edit and ignore our conscience based on societal norms is nearly limitless. Slavery alone is proof of that - dozens of decades during which such obvious evil was done, again and again, in full view of everyone. Hitler hid things - he wove a pretty picture over the ugliness that was being done. But slavery was right there, right out in the open, for all to see. Anyone with a lick of conscience - of human decency - would have seen that it was wrong. But in the contest between personal conscience and cultural norms, the former will always be bludgeoned down by the latter, until the former becomes the latter, to the point where we start to believe that the opinions, no matter how unconscionable they are - were always our own.
At the end of the day, we all value doing the right thing, and being happy, and not enslaving people, and a million other things - but nearly all of those things fall lower on our value system than the value of fitting in. Of looking and acting and speaking and thinking enough like the rest of the herd that we're able to ensure and secure our place among their ranks. And we'll ignore and ostracize and argue against anything and everything - from bigotry to compassion to slavery to emancipation to mercy: we'll rail against it all - or rail against nothing, if railing is out of vogue this decade - and all for the sake of securing our place in the ranks of the pack.
And the most twisted part of it is that most of us don't even realize that we're doing it. In most of our minds, we're fighting for our values. Or we're not even fighting at all - we're just living. Just going to work and going to play and going to bed and spinning our cycles round and round as we tick our days away. But the truth is that vast swaths of the cycles of our days are born out of norms - society says that we should work 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, regardless of our situation or the size of our family or the cost of living. Society says that we should kill any and all creatures that are even slightly inconvenient to us, without an ounce of hesitation or regret, and without thought as to whether it's necessary. Society says that if this leader becomes that leader, or this party becomes that party, or this God becomes that god, or lack thereof - then all of the problems will go away. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. But what I'm talking about has nothing to do with those particular potential problems. It's about how we approach those problems.
How we approach them is simple: society says that we should work this kind of schedule, so let's do it and never question it. Lets add expenses to our lives until they match the income that society told us to achieve. Society says that the word "pest" means that lives no longer have value, so let's kill without regret. Society - around here anyway - says that this is the right God, and that this is the right kind of politics - so let's live within those lines and fight for them, and against the other side.
That's the limit of the personal history and the ethical development of most of our beliefs. That's as far as most of us go. It's as high as most of us climb on the ethical ladder.
This description isn't complete, because no description of human beings ever is. We're too complicated for that. In particular, it leaves out the idea of the ethical development of groups, and how that can drive the ethical development of their members even if their members never stop being sheep.
At the end of the day, it's only by taking a hundred passes through ourselves, from a hundred different angles, that we can even begin to understand ourselves. This is a piece of our puzzle - one that I believe is true, both in my mind and in my gut. But it's not complete.
