So, the next question is: can we construct a social agreement for an ethic based on empathy, supported by our capacity to engage mirror neurons to experience vicariously the circumstances of another, and predicated on a fluid and open incorporation of all humanity into our own personal sphere of interest.
Well, we're actually a long way along that road already. But this business of continually forming and constructing our humanity is a pretty chaotic, experimental process. Just as our bodies incorporate a lot of genetics, characteristics, and capacities from our long journey through the biological process of evolution, our ideas also still incorporate all the various ideas and conceptual schemes we have constructed, collected and valued over the millenia of our human journey.
I know that lots of religious people, from lots of religious traditions, are going to tell me that all this could be avoided if we just took the words of God seriously and did as God says to do in scripture. We need to have another discussion sometime about the ways God works and the role of evolution, experimentation, and multiple trajectories in God's scheme of things. But we can't digress right now.
In the previous posts we have outlined the component elements of a natural morality. But we've also noted that these capacities must be trained, focused, developed. This natural morality isn't something that will just happen on its own. We have to work at it, construct it deliberately and consciously.
These are a set of skills we must learn and teach. But just as anyone can be taught and learn to type, swim, play piano or basketball, it depends on the motivation as to how well it is taught and how well learned. Both the motivation of the teacher and the motivation of the learner will affect the degree of skill attained. So part of the challenge of our humanity is to find ways to motivate both teaching and learning of these skills which are the component elements of a natural morality.
And just as in other things that we teach and learn, some people have more of a natural aptitude for developing particular skills while others have to work much harder to achieve some level of skill. But when we decide something is critically important for our humanity, we focus our full attention on overcoming the problems that might stand in the way of doing it.
We have determined that learning to read is of primary importance for our ongoing humanity, so we prioritize its teaching and learning. And when there are problems with either the teaching or learning capacities, we apply ourselves to finding ways to surmount those obstacles. We need to apply the same diligence to teaching and learning skills in developing a mutual morality based on the four areas of: empathy, our capacity to mirror the experience of others, our ever-evolving language habits, and our ability to re-configure our conceptions of the community that matters to us.
Not only do we need to teach and learn the individual skills, but we have to learn to develop the skills of using them in tandem with each other for the deliberate and conscious purpose of constructing a moral approach to life in our thoughts, words, and actions.
We have the pieces, each of which must be taught and learned. And then we have to integrate all of them into a mutually reinforcing vital pattern of life. Only then does it begin to create a natural sense of morality.
Not only has our biological expedition to humanity been long and convoluted, but so is our mental, conceptual, intellectual journey to becoming human extensive, wide-ranging, and diverse. We are all, always, continually constructing not only our own individual lives, but together we are creating our humanity. We definitely need to give it a lot more conscious effort!
It's an ongoing project. But it's probably more important to our evolving humanity than any other set of skills we apply our attention, effort, and resources to achieving.
next we explore another of the BIG questions about the nature of our humanity!
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