practical morality 2: morals, ethics and the real world

In the previous post in this new series we made the distinction between morals, the (extremely variable) quality of character which motivates the choices and actions of individuals, and ethics which is a set of rules that human societies get together and agree on for mutually hospitable co-habitation. Ethics are set down by societies, religions, political bodies, sports associations, to make sure everyone concerned behaves in a way that does not disrupt the entire group. Ethics are collectively articulated and socially enforced. They are usually in response to a particular variety of bad behavior that everyone decides they want to restrict in order to keep the peace.

Of course it may not be everyone deciding, just those in control of the community, politics, organization, whatever. And it may not really benefit everyone, just those in the power positions of the community, politics, organization, whatever. And the ethics decided and enforced may not even correspond to the inner moral sense of many of the people being enforced into compliance with the ethical standards of the community, politics, organization, whatever. So ethics are collectively decided and enforced with qualifications about who qualifies to decide and enforce.

Morals, on the other hand, are the personal internal gyroscope in each person's psyche that governs the direction, focus, and choices of their individual life. But we each derive our moral sense from a whole variety of sources.

Our families may foster a particular moral sense in either positive or negative ways. We decide from a young age that the morals we see in our family are those that we feel safe with, comfortable with, inspired by. Or we find that the family atmosphere is destroying our spirit and we decide to "never do it like they do." The same can be the case for the extended communities in which we grow up, receive our education and form our values.

Generally, some of us adopt the morals and ethics of our childhood environment without question. Some of us pick and choose what we will keep for ourselves and then go out to explore what other values and morals we might find in other places. Some just throw the whole thing over in disgust.

Morality, our personal set of values, can be based on shared cultural values; it can come from accepted divine revelation of a religious tradition; it can arise from a common historical tradition. It can be composed of bits of all of these and our own evaluations of our life experiences. And all of this may or may not integrate smoothly with the ethics of the community or society in which we each live and interact.

Hey, that's life! Life is inherently challenging. That's what makes it work. That's what drives the evolution of our humanity as well as all of the natural and biological structures of the universe. So is there any possibility for a universal ethic based on the natural human tendency for empathy, which could actually work both at the internal moral level of experience as well as the collective external ethical level of experience and actually make our lives together more interactively rewarding and emotionally safe and fulfilling?

To explore this possibility, see the next blog

practical morality 1: gaps between theory and life

Of course when discussing these types of ideas we have to either go at it from a purely theoretical abstract perspective or consider it in terms of the actual world we live in today. If we consider the real world, the first problem is that we've got lots of moral standards but nobody follows them. So just deciding on a moral standard is clearly not really enough. Even if just a few don't buy into the agreed moral standard, they will wreak havoc in a society.

In other words, we've already got people behaving badly 24-7. So we can't just talk about morality in terms of a blank slate, but must address the issues in terms of what is moral when people are already being uncivil and really making life miserable in multiple ways.

Societies have, from the beginning, set down ground rules for behavior - and there are people who have, from the beginning, ignored the rules and made things disagreeable for everyone. Religions have tried to address the problem by setting out divinely revealed laws of God. It's been marginally better at curtailing the bad behavior, but not by much.

There are just too many variables that knock us all off our best intentions, or that encourage our worst motivations. There's biology with raging hormones, malfunctioning or missing or duplicate chromosomes, and post traumatic stress from all the distress we inflict on each other or suffer from the natural environment. There are also the psychological shocks, emotional strains and anxieties, and just plain insufficient internal resources to cope as well as all sorts of stuff that just drives us over the edge. And that's not even to mention raging egos, uncontrolled narcissism, oblivious self-centeredness, and deluded irrationality which more often than not characterize us humans.

And bad behavior breeds further bad behavior. I'm fine with you until you do something (unintentionally or intentionally) that frightens, hurts, or disgusts me, and then I get angry with you and then you get offended at me and then we start yelling..... you know the routine.

There is something to be said for the social and religious ethical codes, however, at this point. They really do cut down on the escalating bad behavior. We will more often refrain from doing and saying bad stuff if we feel socially constrained to not embarrass ourselves by crossing established social boundaries.

I don't care if someone is acting decently or morally or ethically only because they're afraid of public censure. Yes, it is doing them no good as far as actually helping them reach more mature levels of their humanity. But in terms of improving the living environment for the rest of us, it works just fine.

But we are attempting to pursue, at least conceptually, the question of the practical possibility of a universal morality. So is there a realistic possibility, in our human world as we know it (and not just in theory) 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 (as outlined in the previous set of posts on the evolution of morality and spirit).

Next week we’ll look at morals and ethics in the real world

Meaning of life 7: the dark side

Meaning for an individual or a society does not necessarily need to be good, healthy, or beneficial meaning ; it can be bad meaning. This can be particularly so for an individual, a group or a subgroup of a population that begins embracing a negative framework of meaning. Meanings constructed around exclusivist, xenophobic, paranoid frames of reference can be extraordinarily damaging to the individual psyche as well as to the community and to wider society. Meanings generated from states of resentment, anger, arrogance, exploitation, are equally destructive to the soul and the community.

The construction of meaning is intimately involved in the construction of identity – both individual and collective. Groups which construct their shared meaning and personal and shared identity around such ideas as “everyone is going to hell but us,” or “nobody’s as good or as smart or as important, or as beautiful as us,” “nobody counts in the end but us,” are debilitating to the individuals, to the group and very difficult for the larger society which they impact.

The main shared component of these negative frameworks of meaning comes down to their separation of themselves from others and from the larger shared project and adventure of humanity as a whole. Any time we wall ourselves off from others, we begin to, consciously or unconsciously adopt a value scale with ourselves at the top and everyone else ranged lower and valued less.

Meanings which promote exclusivity or separation between ourselves and others are essentially non-productive to the human endeavor –to the natural flow of things. To self-identify in contrast and opposition to others instead of in connection and mutual respect, is a gateway to all sorts of awful behavior to one another.

It leads to exploitation of others – what I need from them is far more important than their comfort, needs, goals, purposes, pleasure. It generates disenfranchisement and marginalization of others. It doesn’t need to be extreme. Negatively skewed sets of meaning can be as simple as assessing the healthy as better than the unhealthy, the smart or educated as better than ignorant or uneducated, the fast as better than the slow. Value judgments which place others in hierarchical relation to ourselves and those like us are inherently negative frameworks of meaning.

Some see beauty only in those who look like themselves, some see truth only in those who share their ideas, perspectives, outlook. This sort of territorial exclusiveness of the mental sphere is debilitating not only to those who construct these meanings but brings harm to those who live around or come into contact with them in one form or another. It shrinks the humanity of those who frame their identity with these meanings.

At the far end these negative frames of meaning can lead to demonization of the other, the making of those who are different into non-humans, soul-less. And that is when we begin to act in truly evil ways toward one another. We have done this again and again in our rough road to becoming human.

Seeing that our worst tendencies can come out of the same urge to create meaning that inspires our greatest human achievements is part of the mystery of our humanity.

Meaning of life 6: possibilities of transformation

As human animals our minds have become characterized by a tendency toward creating, finding, seeing meaning. As individuals our felt need varies widely as does our ability to see, find, create meaning. But we’re all involved in this ongoing project of our evolving humanity and meaning plays a central part in this adventure.

We look for meaning in our own lives, our personal collection of knowledge, insight, experience. And we find it in our wider cultures and societies. Sometimes we have little need for it and at other times we feel a desperate need for meaning to sustain, preserve, heal our humanity and our soul.

Sometimes there are those with a strong sense of recklessness and high risk capacity in their personality, who are willing to make the very bold move to throw over the entire fabric of their lives up to that point and trade it in for something else they are beginning to feel matches or corresponds more to the way they are now experiencing their life. They deliberately and consciously trade out their meanings for new ones.

There are also those who have had no felt need for meaning, who gain their pleasure in life from other pursuits, but then their life throws them a curve ball. They can’t get what they need and can’t figure out how to get and keep the pleasure they desire, or avoid the pain or loss or discouragement flowing in. They lose their hold on whatever it is that has given direction and energy to their life. They have stepped off into the incomprehensible end of the pool, teeming with the confusing parts – the parts that can’t be explained or understood. They have run smack into the lived experience of the essential meaninglessness of the raw, un-adorned flow of life.

And they suddenly need meaning . Because meaning is precisely the capacity to transcend the debilitating emotional and psychological paralysis which overwhelms us when life fails us. Often this is an impetus to the mind to step back and begin to consciously sort through our life and begin to piece together those things which give meaning for us. It triggers an individual mental construction project that can be the door to a more consciously lived life, a life of awareness and deliberate engagement.

Or it precipitates a broader quest for meaning through the vast human archives of knowledge and insight. We can collect meanings from those whose sense of meaning corresponds fairly closely with our own sense of our life, our experience of life. When found or discovered meaning matches our own, our mind recognizes it as real, genuine, valid. Meanings are personal; if they are not constructed out of the fabric of ones own life they need to be matched to that fabric fairly closely.

And, of course, there are those for whom the crash into the darkness simply overwhelms them. No meaning can be found or created and they sink under the weight of life. But there are also some among us who have a gift for both meaning and empathy. They can step out of their own experience and enter into the experience of the other. And from within the darkness of the other they can listen until they see the fragmentary remnants there in the darkness of the other’s soul and feel their way along the contours of the broken parts to reclaim and re-construct.

Those who seek to become healing agents to the broken soul, must first be able to step outside of their own context and see through the eyes of the soul that is broken. Because the only stable and enduring meanings will be those which are drawn from the individual soul-mind-life which experiences them.

If you want to think about the dark side of meaning-creation you can go on to the next post.

Meaning of life 5: creating meaning

As humans we have a tendency to want meaning, create it, look for it, preserve it in thought systems of meaning passed down in our societies and cultures.

But there are times when we step outside of these culturally and socially bounded frames of meaning. These traditional sets of meaning complexes may have lost their capacity to give our lives brilliance, or to sustain and heal us in our pain. Or there are those who just like to wander through alternative mental landscapes.

As noted earlier, the felt need for meaning manifests in each of us individually, and over time, in a wide range from nearly non-existent to immensely significant. And similarly, the capacity or skill or aptitude for creating, seeing, finding meaning also runs in a spectrum from slight to strong.

Those who have an inherent felt need for meaning but who have a low capacity for creation of meaning – or who find themselves in such a state – will often turn to others who not only have a capacity to create meaning but to convey that meaning, to express it, to pass it along. We value those who have the capacity training, skill, or insight to show us meaning, construct meaning in our world in which we live out our lives.

There are many different types of meaning creators, with different levels of skill and different attraction or appeal. Societies develop public meaning creators who can articulate the meanings which many in that society have developed in concert with one another, that have become a public shared meanings. Those who can express shared meanings in culturally and socially accessible contexts – writers, musicians, artists, speakers, creators of film and dance – often become the touchstones of meaning for their generation.

In addition to the broad social creators of meaning, there are also numerous providers of meaning all through our communities and families. They serve smaller groups of shared needs, or shared interests. The ability to see and give meaning is an inherent ability for our human mind. We can all do it, sometimes better, sometimes not so much. Our own meanings are always more powerful and more transformative than acquired meanings. But often we will be able to come across those who are able to speak, present, manifest the meanings that we have known but not been able to articulate to ourselves. We can absorb these meanings and appropriate them as our own.

Our minds are always involved in accessing, evaluating, re-evaluating, configuring, and re-configuring all the information, knowledge, learning experiences, pattern identification, and innumerable other tools and resources for managing our lives. Meaning is one of the resources which our mind is continually re-considering, re-vamping, re-organizing in the context of the lived experiences through which we make our way. It’s all part of the wonderful and terrible adventure of living life as a human.

For more adventures introduced by meaning see the next post