I often have conversations of a philosophical nature with my friend Stone Taggart. I find his musings so entertaining and thought-provoking that I wanted to share them with you. Our last conversation turned into a candid interview and the results of that are below.
Due to the length, I have broken this into three posts. The views expressed below are the sole property of Mr. Taggart and are not necessarily shared or endorsed by myself. This is the first of three installments. I didn't capture the very beginning of it, but he started by pontificating on morality and where humans derive it from.
Stone Taggart: Organisms—generation upon generation upon generation—they live long enough so that even if the individual organisms are not aware of the shortfall of the environment that they're in, the society as a whole is. And there are enough people to see the pressures, even if they're not consciously aware of them. Sort of like how an individual organism has its own balancing mechanisms for when you're trying to walk. You may not be concentrating on keeping yourself upright, but the rest of you is. And if you're pushed, you're not just going to go *boom* flat on your face; you're going to stumble forward a bit, because you've got instincts there, subconscious instincts to help you figure out what you need to do in order to maintain that balance.
Success in the short term is not success in the long term. And I think that on some level, societies as a whole, all societies all together, realize this, even if the members don't. That's basically what I was trying to say. But it's society that sets the moral tone, and when an individual deviates from society, society tends to react violently to that. It's sort of like our morality is an identification mechanism. The set of moral codes that we each carry can flag us as either part of or foreign to the society and whenever somebody who's too off the plane shows up, well, they get put in mental institutions, they're otherwise marginalized, they can't keep a job and sustain themselves. Or sometimes, they'll even actually be physically attacked and killed by members of the society they don't fit in on.
Thankfully humanity has enough in common—I mean, each strain of humanity, or most strains of humanity—have enough in common with each other that we're not just going to kill each other at first sight. But there are different strains of humanity that if they do catch sight of each other, they are definitely going to identify each other as foreign and they will go to war. Right off the bat. Although usually that's with cultures that have been isolated for tens of thousands of years and don't interact on a regular basis with other cultures.
I think that modern technology as a whole has sort of given us the ability to communicate with people that we just wouldn't be able to even comprehend on a moral level otherwise. The Internet, for instance, allows us to sort of filter it, so that when there's something objectionable about the person that we're talking to, that would otherwise end the conversation right there, we can ignore it more easily and focus on the things that we do find in common.
But the longer these individual cultures are separate from the rest of the cultures, the more distant they're going to grow. So if you take . . . if there are any indigenous people left in Siberia, for instance, you know, akin to the Eskimos, and you transport them to a place where they're going to meet native South Americans, from the deep jungle, they may have two completely different moral codes, and the moment they see each other . . . first of all, the language barrier's not going to help. And second of all, if their customs are too different, it's inevitable that one of these people is going to do something that the other group as a whole, finds as blasphemous.
I think it's rather unfortunate, but kind of inevitable to acknowledge that the prototype transmission system for our moral code has been religion. It was necessary. It was a way by which people could teach each other how to associate with the group. And it was more advanced than, say, individual scent-markings than we have with group animals, like wolves or lions. Because other humans can be taught it. But I think it's not the end-all, be-all; it's more of a step in the chain. And, ever more frequently, we're coming up with new ways, better ways, to sort of synchronize ourselves with the world, in general, so that all societies may eventually come to grasp—I mean we've already come to grasp several things that we basically all agree on. Murder is bad. Rape, in most countries, in most cultures, is also bad, though you will find some cultures where it's not only sanctioned, but the right thing to do. Heck, there are even some cultures out there where murder's not even a big thing.
And then you've got moral codes that are about completely arbitrary things, like what you're allowed to eat and when you're allowed to eat or . . . strange customs that people carry out throughout the day. Not to call the Muslim tradition strange, but if you're an outsider looking in, if you're like an alien from space that came to earth and you saw all these people, all at once, unanimously getting down on their knees facing toward one particular geographic region on their planet and start murmuring to themselves and bowing over and over and over for an hour, you'd think, “that's really strange and I don't see how that contributes to the society as a whole.” Really, that was just an identifying marker of one set of moral code.
I'm really going all over the place with this, but nowadays, there are a lot of things that we can agree on and synchronize with, without have to adopt really inconvenient and pointless traditions. And it's getting easier, I think. That's why I think that it is, not only really easy, but practically inevitable that everybody's going to be able to determine what right and wrong are, with a god or without a god. And at some point, I'm also pretty sure that it's going to be easier for people who don't have some sort of spiritual, imaginary authority figure telling them what's right or wrong. I'm going to have a better sense of what's right or wrong than someone who does have that authority figure.
Palaverer: Do you think that there are some things that can be absolutely defined as moral or immoral? Or is everything dependent upon context?
ST: If you don't have a context, you don't really have anything at all. Everything, even physics, requires a context. If you are trying to gauge the motion of an object through space, if you don't have another object to measure it against, a context, then that object really, for all intents and purposes, has no motion. Now, if you are a being in space, trying to measure the motion of that object and it is moving to you, or away from you, then that's just it in the context of you, the observer. But even in that situation, there's no real way to say which of the two are fixed, or which of the two is actually drifting. Or if you're sharing some velocity with that object, so that you're both shooting off in one direction, it's just that, that one is drifting a little to the side . . . or you are. It's just the same in Einstein's special relativity, that all motion in space is dependent on the position of all other objects in space. In fact, that's what inertia is. That's the tug of the entire universe resisting you accelerating. That's what mass is.
Yes, in that case, morals—much like everything else—are entirely bound by context. And to go even on a simpler level than that without jumping through all these metaphysical hoops, or trying to associate it with areas of science that are not directly attached to morality, is it moral to kill? Well, generally speaking, no, but what does that mean? Well, in general, is someone trying to kill you? Probably not. But if that person is trying to kill you, if someone is trying to destroy you or the people that you care about or your livelihood or just make it impossible for you to survive, is it still as immoral to kill them? No, not really. Especially if you can't stop them any other way. If it's kill or be killed than every being that exists kind of has . . . it's kind of imperative to kill before you can be killed. Hopefully, though we're going to be living in a society where that's no longer a question that needs to be asked on a daily basis.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment