More on Mores

I typically avoid accepting what mainstream media sources feed me, but just because I am biased against their bias, doesn’t mean I can’t accept when they publish the occasional gem.  Call me an opportunist, you wouldn’t be wrong.  But here’s what’s got me thinking, in today’s paper: an article entitled, “Facing an ethical decision? Trust your gut.”

“Although it’s widely believed that ethics engage reason, free from passion, a forthcoming study in the journal Administrative Science Quarterly finds gut instincts are more principled than logical thinking…. it seems people who trust their feelings are prone to donate more and cheat others less…
In a series of experiments…, participants were conditioned to either think rationally about a decision, ignoring their emotions, or to make choices based on gut feelings.  In both situations, the decision involved either treating a partner fairly or lying to him, with the latter scenario allowing the decision-maker to gain at the expense of the other person.
Fully 69 percent of the rational thinkers decided to cheat their partners, compared to just 27 percent f those directed to follow their feelings….
The research concludes that deliberative processes tend to focus too much on tangible outcomes while diminishing both compassion and guilt.
But though we may be treated ore fairly by those who are emotion-driven, Zhong finds that–paradoxically–we’re more likely to want to do business with rational decision-makers….
A 2008 study in the British Journal of Psychology found that intuition lies beyond consciousness, allowing people to rapidly process information by drawing on past experience and external cues.
The conclusion was that if your gut tells you something is amiss, chances are it is.”

While the article explains that our society still tends “to value rational thinking” more than intuition, its only shortcoming is in not boldly carrying this through to the conclusion that anyone who has studied our cultural heritage understands: we have been conditioned, over a few thousand years, to consider Reason and Logic to be pre-eminent.  In fact, in the last five hundred years, there is a notable conflation of God with Logic that has led to an entirely unbalanced valuation of the rational over the intuitive today.

It begins with the growth of mechanistic culture, printing press-literacy and natural sciences, around the 15th and 16th centuries (well, it begins far earlier, but waxes and wanes through time, and for the purposes of mainstream Anglo-Saxon/European culture…).  Already in the 17th century philosophers begin to strongly associate, even assume, that God is the ultimate form of Reason, and that our intuitive animality stands opposed to Him.  Through the so-called Enlightenment and the growth of Science into a theological institution on par with the Church(es), this conflation of God with Reason has grown into the replacement of God with Reason, as the scientific “death” of God creates a vacuum which Logic neatly fills.  As the humanists see it, God is simply a projection of the human mind, and since humans rightly observed that Reason is the highest form of being, and since we alone are the highest form, that means Reason is truly of value.  Reason gives us Science, and Science gives us the world as it truly is (not like Religion).  Thus began a conscious process of empowering logic and rationality throughout society to the detriment of our intuitive processes that has resulted in a culture that ridicules anything “illogical” and “unscientific.”  In Astrology, Science, and Culture: Pulling Down the Moon, the case is made that science and its practitioners are more violently opposed to astrology than the abuse of science (a la the creation of nuclear weapons), because astrology represents one of the last great vestiges of intuitive, enchanted, mystical experience in our otherwise rational, disenchanted, demystified world.  I find this convincing, particularly given their demystification of science as simply another cultural mythology with its own Holy Mass (the scientific method, which, when carried out, assures us of our logical purity and the divine validity of our findings).

I wouldn’t say reason or logic are bad.  I would say they are limited.  I would also say that our definitions of logic are limited.  We seem to perceive it as a singular form, a true process that we can only use consciously, rationally.  But intuition functions logically too.  In fact, I believe our “subconscious” mind functions with a logic far more powerful than our conscious mind.  This is because our subconscious mind is, ironically, conscious of our world on a far more profound level than our conscious mind.  Our brain only perceives so much of all the sensory information we absorb, and our consciousness perceives only a limited amount of even that information, whereas our subconsciousness retains all we are capable of retaining.  Thus when we perceive our world, our subconscious follows through on a series of rapid-fire logical associations that lead to a conclusion which, ultimately, filters into our conscious mind.  This is what happens when we have epiphanies; our brain has collected a constellation of related information which forms into an intuitive judgment that is usually about as accurate as we can hope to have.  And even if we can recognize faults in our subconscious logic, its far more difficult to shift our perception from the inside out than from the outside in.  That is, we can use logic to reason through why we shouldn’t feel a certain way or do or not do a certain thing, but our subconscious mind takes a lot more convincing than our conscious mind before it accepts our conclusions as true.

Thus, on some intuitive level, we understand when we are acting in a sociopathic manner, and our brain is hardwired to prevent this as much as possible.  When we lie consciously, for example, our subconscious mind often recognizes what is happening, and pangs us with bad feeling.  For this reason we need to develop a callused layer of self-belief to justify ourselves and mitigate these feelings; we need to actually believe the lies are true.  Chomsky makes this point in regards to journalists who must tow the party line, even when it contradicts their personal feelings or knowledge of a subject.  A friend of mine with a fascination for military subjects presented a relatable point regarding deliberate killing in war.

He found that studies through the 20th century found that soldiers in combat, particularly in modern combat wherein soldiers lack a warrior ethic and kill from a blind distance, people only shoot to kill about 20% of the time.  That is, for every five bullets fired, only one is, on average, intended to actually kill someone.  The other four are simply fired off in the general direction of the enemy.  In other words, we don’t intuitively desire to kill people, even in combat situations.  Recognizing this as a problem, military institutions in “developed” countries created programs to “reprogram” our soldiers, making them more effective killers.  So by Vietnam, a well-trained soldier automatically shoots to kill 60 to 80% of the time.  While Reason has bred the success of these programs, it is limited: the soldiers themselves are not more rational, but they have simply been retooled, intuitively, to aim “better.”  Thus, in Afghanistan for example, coalition troops, professional soldiers, are shooting to kill in the 60 to 80% range, whereas most of their “enemies,” untrained soldiers-for-hire, are probably still functioning at older levels, wherein they blindly “shoot to kill,” firing their weapon haphazardly and inaccurately in the direction of their enemies.

Perhaps, then, on some intuitive level, our brain only fires back its bullets out of desperation and fear, with little desire to really kill, just to make “it” go away.  Through intuitive reprogramming, we can train our brain to desire to kill, but somehow I think this is probably unhealthy.  If we don’t intuitively shoot-to-kill, that should say something.
I won’t address warrior culture and the more intimate combat of non-automated weaponry.  This is certainly a different case, probably more closely related to murder in self-defence than murder as fulfillment-of-our-targets.

Let’s put it this way: we feel our world with our senses, we don’t “think” with them; in fact, thinking can be seen as simply one more way in which we feel things.  If this is so, isn’t it counter-intuitive to give preference to “thought” over “feelings?”  And then doesn’t it make sense to trust our feelings first, our thoughts second?  When we follow intuition, we are trusting to our sensory engagement in the world; when we follow our thoughts, we are trusting to our disengagement from the world.  And that seems to open the door to all kinds of psychopathic tendencies and self-justifications.  Besides, we’re always going to make errors, whether we reason or intuit, but Reason leads us to believe we might, somehow, live in an error free world.  Intuition, perhaps pessimistically, pats us on the shoulder and says, “Shit happens.  Don’t worry about it.”

Just get intuit.

More Principles

Surely we need moral principles! Surely we need absolute guiding posts, those supportive beams of light reflected from the teeth of a smiling humanity that cut through the wavering of time and space to show us the always and constant form of the good, the good life!  Surely we need moral principles!

We are deadly afraid of situational ethics, for, as is often pointed out, if morality is relative, how can we say Hitler was bad?  Quite simply: by saying Hitler was bad.

The only way this philosophical conundrum in ethics can be made clear to me is that too many philosophers are raised under the influence of The Good Book (or the Book of Godness, perhaps) and cannot envision or experience the world without the framework of absolute behavioral principles.  Thou shalt prove the good absolutely!  They are, and mostly we all are, deathly afraid of situational ethics, because it represents a situation in which we can no longer say, “I am right and You are wrong!” a situation in which we must admit, “I am right, but so are You!”  But its not quite this simple, nor are our hands so tightly bound thus to inaction, as is supposed in the “nightmarish” Hitler example.

A better formulation is, “Hitler is bad, because I say so.”  Even better, to be specific, “Hitler is bad, insofar as the matters of humanitarian governance are concerned, for his outrageous abuse of political dissidents and minority groups, particularly Jews.”  Thus might we, in the situation of humanitarian governance, consider Hitler bad, while recognizing–as should be done–the immense success, and in many ways, goodness of other aspects of his political leadership.  In fact, we might even, then, permit ourselves to admit what we most fear: Hitler the vegetarian, dog-walking, family man was a decent person to those around him.  But he was seriously fucked up.  If we must insist that he was absolutely bad, indeed, evil, then we will forget all the “redeeming” qualities of his character that made him, on the international stage, one of the most respected leaders of his time (up until a certain little something called a blitzkrieg.)  And we would do well to remember that, situationally, many of our own “democratic, freedom-loving, human rights-respecting” leaders actually admired the way Hitler handled “the Jewish problem,” up to a point.  If our societies were so horrified by the marginalization and abuse of German and other European Jews, why wouldn’t they take in those that fled Germany in the 30s?  It wasn’t until the full extent of Hitler’s barbarous, stark-raving-mad Jew-hating was revealed in the camps that we finally, in our horror, said, “Wait a minute… we don’t hate them tha-at much.”

But I digress.  As I was saying, the key matter is that we, as a society or as individuals, consider Hitler’s actions bad.  Many others did not.  They may or may not have their reasons, the fact remains, they agreed with him.  And “they” is certainly not a synonym for Germans, in this case.   ”They” are still with us today (I can think of one in particular from Alberta, for example).  Many other people, whose moral principles were antithetically opposed to genocide, got on board, very enthusiastically even, because, situationally, it made sense, or felt right.  Kill or be killed, as they say.  In this way, situational ethics is different from principled ethics: it is descriptive, rather than proscriptive or prescriptive.  That is, situational ethics describes how or why we make our ethical decisions, principles tell us what decisions we should make.

Now, I tend towards being a moral “relativist,” as the jargon goes, but I am not without “principles.”  I tend to avoid killing people(s), or being dishonest with them, or stealing from them.  But I recognize their are moments when these might be necessary: to save my own life, for example.  And I’m not so egoistic as to assume that, in some truly desperate situation, I might not prove too weak to act in a way I would normally consider conscientious.  I can only determine what I consider to be the appropriate moral action in the moment of action itself; up until that point, I can only ruminate on the possibilities of moral action.  And ruminating on moral action is not the same thing as acting on morals.  Thus, in principle, I am opposed to the abuse and murder of a people on the basis of their race.  However, put to the test, I can’t be so certain I would pass, particularly were an SS officer knocking down my door.  My hope is that I will never have to be put to that test.  As it is, however, I will come to my point: while principles can guide us, while they speak to what we would do in most cases, moral action will ultimately depend on our situation.  I understand, for example, how an addict will steal to feed their addiction, because the moral principle “Thou shalt” cannot overcome the moral imperative “I need.”  And here may be the place to consider the balancing act of karmic redress.

All the same, principles and situations are cosmically inter-related and unified in what I would consider quantum ethics: principles act as waves, omnipresent and ever-flowing; situations act as particles.  They are not disconnected–in particular, we most often act in accordance with the flow of our principles–but we can only ever see one in isolation from the other.  That is, we can be aware of the principles, or we can be aware of the situation, and while in a given situation we might act within our principles, we can be open to breaking them if need be.

This understanding of ethics might best be made clear through some form of quantum leap.  George Orwell’s rules for good English writing form a sound basis for my suggestions for “righting.”  As he says, “one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails.”  Insofar as they are principles, he says “I think the following rules will cover most cases,” but he allows for the situational exception:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word when a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Good God!

In Anglo-Saxon, the language we call Old English, the words for good and God are spelled the same way: god.  Whereas many other Western Europeans use the Latin form of Deus (Dieu, Dios, etc.), English-speakers retain the Germanic form, God, while using the Latin form alternately (deity, deify, etc.).  I am not such an expert in Anglo-Saxon and its etymologies to suggest anything definitively, but I find the correlation and the potential for pun suggestive: God is good, and good is God.  In their original sense, God directly relates to the adjective for describing someone or something with divine or supernatural strengths or qualities, and good refers to those qualities of something or someone which are fitting or sensible to their being.  I have found, in reading Beowulf, a certain overlap in these meanings.  Beowulf’s god-qualities allow him to contend with supernatural beings, but only the goodness of God actually allows him to succeed.  That is, whenever good things happen for him or he does good things, it is by the grace of God; whenever bad things happen or he does bad things, it’s either his fault or fate’s.  More generally, anything good happening is considered a result of God’s grace: it is from God’s goodness that people succeed, help arrives, and, in one instance, that the deep freeze and dark cold of winter is thawed with the spring.  God brings the goodness of life, fate, inversely, brings the bad.  God means good, and good means God.

Perhaps that which I find most interesting, however, reflects less on how our linguistic ancestors understood God and good, but rather in how our linguistic peers understand Anglo-Saxon renderings of the words.  Those texts which are written in Old English use both god and God (not always capitalized).  The pronounciation of these words, in Anglo-Saxon, would sound more to our ears like “gud” or “guhd,” but, by appearance, there is nothing to separate them.  Yet, as far as I can tell, a great deal of effort is made in rendering Old English texts for modern readers, to denote a difference between them by adding a long-vowel line over the “o” in “god” and not doing so in the other form, as God.  Today, I feel, we are defensive of any early association between the words, one that might suggest the ways in which Christian missionaries tied our sense of God to our sense of good in such a way that those qualities which are considered good in a person are the same qualities that make such a person godly.  No good Christian scholar could believe in his heart that the Anglo-Saxons love of the Christian god came about for any reason other than God’s goodness.

Appendix A

So many of your words need appendices,
but your appendix is useless, cut it free.

Stabling Dionysus

If we were to suggest evolution had an end-goal, I think it likely that goal would be “stable form.”  That is, were evolution a process toward an end, it would be to the end of creating or finding stability, constant, balanced substance.  In this sense, evolution becomes evident as a process of substance taking shape in ways that are more stable than unstable, and the “success” or “failure” of an evolved form becomes measured by its stabilizing traits: regularity and homogeneity with which a form takes shape; capacity to maintain form notwithstanding changing environmental factors, etc.  Thus the “successful” evolution of an organism depends on its ability to transmit a form that harmonizes with its environment.  Thus rhythm and regularity are features of evolved forms, and we measure the success of an evolutionary form by its ability to maintain its self homogenously over a period of time.  Thus the sameness of space over the course of time becomes our measure of evolutionary success.

This same principle can be applied beyond evolved life forms, to cosmological forms as well.  Stars, for example, are far more “successfully” evolved forms than meteors: they maintain themselves in a relatively homogenous form for billions of years, and withstand just about any observable shift within their environment.  In fact, relative to humanity, stars form parts of an environment so large we can hardly grasp it, for we are but parts of the environment formed around an individual star.  Meteors, on the other hand, only exist for a fragment of the time that stars do, and are readily destroyed.  That is, they take form for only a short period of time, relatively, and they are extremely vulnerable to destruction by other elements of their environment.  So, in this way, models of evolution as a process towards stabilizing form can be understood.  Of course, particularly in organismic evolution, some “instability” is necessary to facilitate further stability: thus, for large forms of life particularly, there needs to be vulnerability to certain changes in the environment that allow, when necessary, the organism (and thus its genetic material) to continue to survive when the environment shifts dramatically.  The predisposition towards a flexible, complex brain that allows for cultural learning is one such “instability.”  Where the human body is physically adapted to particular environs, most likely life in trees and life in shallow water, our ability to spontaneously adapt our life patterns to the patterns of new environments has allowed us to expand our population and survive tremendously well up to now.  Though it might be suggested that too much “stability” breeds collapse, and the inflexibility of modern, literate, technologized culture is beginning to prove problematic, preventing us from adapting to our changing environment when we most need to.

Thus, we must recognize the integral role of instability, of chaos, set against stability, order.  We tend, in the “west” particularly, to valorize and idolize stable forms.  We acknowledge certain instabilities–individuality, for example–but only within a stable framework–social values.  We shy away from ideas that seem to suggest randomness and chaos are fundamental features of our existence–evolution, for example–or we re-interpret them to be contributors to stability–evolution with the end-goal, for example, humanity as the height of ape evolution.  Yet, in an odd way, we should remix our sense of cause and effect: rather than order that contains chaos, the universe, mechanistically, exists as chaos that takes on ordered form.  That is, out of chaos comes the drive to stabilize; in fact, this drive proves to be perhaps the most chaotic form of chaos, for what could be more chaotic than a chaos that orders itself against itself?  Thus, out of the dionysian explosion comes apollinian form set in opposition to its origins.  Evolution may be a stabilizing force within the universe, but it seems it might be but one more manifestation of the universal instability of material existence.

The Sun of Grace

If you have the capacity
To create the clouds of trouble,
Then God has the capacity
To create the sun of Grace.
For whom, if not for you,
For you alone?

- Sri Chinmoy

The Emigrants

The colonizing continues:

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/626544
http://www.thestar.com/article/623497

Reading these articles, its obvious how colonial attitudes persist in Canada.  We cannot continue to consider ourselves a bastion of human rights, a model nation of the world, until we can finally begin to treat our indigenous populations with the respect we owe them.  While its not the responsibility of Canadians to rescue First Nations communities from the disastrous state in which our past and present treatment has left most of them, we would do well to provide them with the resources necessary for them to stabilize and reconsitute their cultures.  Beyond that, we would do ourselves a favour in listening to the wisdom they can provide about living with and on this land we call home.

But there is one comment in response to the Hayden King article, albeit one made in support of the First Nations perspective, which I find troubling.  The reader makes a blanket statement: “all other cultures are immigrant cultures, meaning they or their relatives made a decision to emigrate and to assimilate.”  That all other cultures are immigrant cultures is certainly undeniable.  But we would do well to remember that many of our ancestors and relatives did not truly decide to emigrate for themselves or assimilate because they so desired.  As the descendant, maternally and paternally, of Gaelic Scots, I can attest to this.  On my father’s side, our ancestors emigrated to Virginia seven generations ago, during a time known as “The Clearances,” or to the “historians” as “The Improvements.”  During this time, the Gaels were repeatedly and systematically driven from their ancient homes in the highlands of Scotland to be replaced with sheep, or hunting estates for the wealthy and nobility.  While many were forced onto reserves, sent to live on the shittiest parcels of land on their lords’ estates, many more were forced to emigrate to North America or elsewhere.  Others, facing lack of employment, starvation, and disease, as well as constant oppression at the hands of their landlords, were left with little choice but to emigrate.  It is for this reason that at the beginning of the 20th century their existed a larger population of Gaelic speakers in Canada than in Scotland.  It is for this reason the highlands are, to this day, largely emptied of human life, over-run with sheep instead.

Maternally, my grandmother emigrated to Canada at age 5 with her family.  She spoke no English until they arrived.  No other members of their family came.  Only her, her borther, and her parents lived here, isolated from the rest of their family and their homeland of centuries.  To this day I still have cousins living on the Isle of Lewis.  They speak Gaelic as their first language, thanks largely to the efforts of the Gaels themselves, who in the past century have begun enormous efforts to restore and preserve their ancient culture.  For many, like my grandmothers’ family, opportunities were sought that were denied them in Scotland.  To this day, the oppression of the Lewis people continues.  Both the waters on and around Lewis, those of its rivers and of the Atlantic, are considered possessions of the crown.  Thus the people of Lewis are called poachers when they fish for the salmon that is their birthright, the salmon upon and with which our ancestors lived for centuries.  Further, they must watch as Norse fishing fleets deplete their stocks just off the coast.  So, in many ways and places, the Gaelic Scots are still forced to fight, daily, for their rights, whether tying up fishing wardens so as not to be denied the use of their traditional lands, or struggling through the bureaucracy of British parliament to secure rights previously denied them as a “barbarous, uncivilized” people.

I know the situation is little different for many other immigrants to Canada.  Many Europeans came to North America to escape oppression in their homelands.  Many Asians and Africans and South Americans, to this day, continue to come.  And upon arrival, they are often still denied opportunities.  Unless they assimilate.

I do not write of this to suggest, in any way, that we should consider the treatment of Canada’s indigenous populations less severe.  There is no doubt in my mind that they continue to face oppressions many of us have long since escaped.  But I also believe that, in remembering how many of us come and have come to be here, we will better understand why the oppression of First Nations peoples cannot continue.  While I remember how my own ancestors were brutally oppressed, while I remember how the homeland of my blood was colonized, while I remember how the clans were stripped of their language and culture and burned out of their homes, I cannot sit idly by and not feel outraged to see the same done to another people, a people in whose land my ancestors sought refuge in exile.  To me, we have much to learn from First Nations people.  They lived in these lands far longer than any of us, and they know them far more intimately than we could.  Their cultural knowledge is invaluable as we move ahead in these times of change, and to deny them the opportunity to use this knowledge to better their own situation and to teach us how to live with this land should be considered criminal.  And in remembering how many of our ancestors, many of our relatives, and many of our newly arrived community members did not, in fact, choose to come here, but came because they had so little choice to do otherwise, and do not, in fact, choose to assimilate, but do so because they’re refused opportunities if they don’t, we might better appreciate the necessity of respecting the First Nations of North America.

Suggested reading:
The Clearances and Culloden by John Prebble.