The Moral Arrow: Illusions of the Kingdom

30Jun08

Imagine a group of 8 human beings interacting over a big pile of food. Strip away any experience of language, any history (they were all raised by wolves, or better yet, suddenly are born as adults with no past experience), and what would happen? What do these eight people do. Do they watch each other, grunt, sniff at the food, perhaps eat it? Do they copulate or fight, deficate, or fall asleep?

As you sit in your backyard this summer and listen to groups of neighbors around the Barbecue, ask yourself: How is this different from the a-historical human interaction, and why?

This question is prompted by considering and wondering about why people do the things they do, and how they explain themselves and their behaviors. If we can sometimes take people at their word, it seems that everyone has goals and rules, standards of self image that they attempt to live up to and balance with goal-seeking behaviors. But the goals themselves do not seem to be frequently deeply examined. Perhaps the most annoying thing you can ask someone is “Why do you think doing so and so is Good?”. Because most of these paths of inquiry end in flat statements of premise, without a consideration of the how and why of that premise.

Indeed, maybe all lines of non-scientific inquiry, all questions of character, all pursuits into non objective reality must end in terminal blind spots. And this does make one wonder about the whole purpose and mechanism of the conceptual world in human experience. Is it all self-deceit? self-conceit?

Do our proto-humans, with their total lack of preconception via experience (culture, learning, socialization, etc..) still arrive pre-packaged with some sort of preconceptions? We know that our biology does predispose us to certain things, like conceptualizing the sky as relatively smaller than it is (land animals tend to have more conceptual space for the horizon, where most activity takes place). And our biological drives will occur whether or not we have a history. But do we also have moral senses, social tendencies towards certain arrangements? Or do we have a simple capacity for logic, and thereby ethics and morality (since rules make sense in a social environment). Or is it just a light switch that triggers in the presence of rule-filled social environments, but which lays dormant without experience?

If it is fair to say that all perpetuating deceptions rest on unchallenged assumptions (and we can argue that another time), isn’t it possible that the entire moral mechanism…no, the entire choice-making mechanism, including morality, rests on such a self-deception? A deception we learn as infants and reinforce at every opportunity, as if to bulwark our ego identity with ‘more of the same’.

It is not difficult to see, on examining the myriad behaviors of which humans are capable of claiming as “necessary” or “good”, that we are easily capable of rationalizing many things. But rationalization itself is for a reason. We rationalize to subdue those things which could shatter the fragile shell (of social group or individual identity). Most notable is hypocrisy, which can be alarmingly clear and yet made to seem diffuse in the face of other stressors.

So is it identity, and the need for identity (drive to identity?) that push us beyond our concept-less state of just-having-been-born into the tangled and colorful morays and memes that characterize and predict our behavior?

When I examine a life, perhaps a person I’ve gotten to know fairly well, and I can imagine how they would answer the questions like: “So, having children and helping them to be as healthy and successful as possible is Good because….why?”, and I can sense that at some point we are going to end with either: “Because it makes me happy”, or “Because it is Good”, I start to really wonder whether any of us has any idea what we’re doing. And if we don’t (which seems rather likely), our self deceptions seem to be in the service of something other than our own wills.

Some have argued that we are but cogs in the cultural machine, and as our culture evolves we take up a role within it of some kind as a cell takes a role in a body: With these inputs and environmental conditions, the cell is going to behave like so and so…

But then again, cells don’t try to justify their behaviors as free will or because of some high moral nature or strength of character. So, why do we, if we are just Cogs?

Why is the nature of our behavior often hidden from us? When we climb the corporate ladder for the revisiting of the ecstatic feelings of foiling our siblings’ ploys for attention, but on a conscious level see our behavior as motivated by our praiseworthy ambition and our decision to make a million by 30 years old, what are we doing? Why the disconnect?

Our a-historical humans are eyeing each other cautiously, trying out various facial expressions to look for the alleviation of anxiety in the mirroring of threatening and powerful others. Some are pretending curiosity at the food, suggesting a group behavior (eating) to ease these same concerns. No one is comfortable because each experiences within them the simultaneous urge to do violence to the more threatening others, and the concurrent fear of receiving the same. If nobody gets through the barrier soon, the gathering will dissipate. Each will sneak back to feed when the hunger begins to outweigh the caution. They eat alone.

To be free of concept and history. To be truly alien to the human race and look upon our choices and chattering, and the sinewy and complex relationship between what we say and what we mean, what we claim and what we covet. Would we see anything then? Would we see the Moral arrow piercing our nature, pointing and dragging us to the lair of our unconcern?

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