Is Morality Dead?

So did you see anything in the mirror?  Did you look?  (See previous post).  As for me there were several things that came to mind not all of them necessarily complimentary or positive, including the necessity to make some decisions that have been a long time in coming and are well overdo. 

Last post I discussed the increasing belief that living a pleasing life and getting whatever we wanted had been transformed into a right and the growing number and kinds of justifications that allowed us to continue doing whatever it took to make this happen.  I also mentioned how we have learned to stretch of the “within reason” boundary to include what never would have been previously.  The more “modern” we become the better we get at compartmentalizing such that what was wrong yesterday just may be right today.

Yet as things always flow downhill, we couldn't stop rolling and gaining momentum until we shattered the boundary of a dual polarity categorization of morality - that of right and wrong.  This gave birth to the doing-allowing distinction.  The distinction here is between doing something bad ourselves and standing aside while allowing something bad to happen. 

The former, we decided is far worse than the latter.  Murdering someone is horrific, not preventing someone from being murdered - not actually so bad.  That made things far simpler.  Most of us can go about our lives doing what we need to do without murdering anyone.  Yet working towards preventing all those who are dying for lack of food or medical care around the world by joining Doctors Without Borders, well now we’ve just made things a whole lot more difficult.  But we had entered an era where it was considered perfectly fine to say, “I’d prefer to stick with door #1 please, Alex.”

There are those who are extremely socially adept, able to read exactly what another wants to hear, use an innate ability to act in a way that attracts attention.  They can cause others to become attached to them by gaining trust until they are automatically and instantly believed even when contradicting themselves.  Many such individuals are so desperate for the attention this behavior attracts that they are willing to create a hated other, causing the social network they are within to come to see the person based on whatever they were told. 

In terms of the doing-allowing distinction, for such individuals, it isn’t enough that they don’t use their skills to manipulate other, or  hurt others in the process, to obtain the attention and reputation they desire. Unless they do everything they can to use truthful, accurate information and deal fairly with others based on who they really are not who they pretend to be, rectifying any perceptions that are falsehoods, they are failing and badly.

Being good, or moral – doing the right thing – isn’t necessarily going to get you what you want or make you happy all the time.    Plus it’s hard predominantly because doing the right thing doesn’t just mean not doing the wrong thing.  It means taking definitive action to prevent yourself and others when appropriate from acting in a manner that is wrong.   

At times that may mean we don’t get what we want or are unhappy.  

When others are treating us badly for doing the right thing, we realize that the reality is that this idea we have that doing the right thing always results in positive outcomes is a bunch of bunk.  It sucks to be abused for taking the high ground.  Those rewards we all seek – most often it’s not the virtuous they go to but those who seemingly have no conscience.  Sometimes the life of being the good guy is miserable and incomprehensible.

I suppose it all boils down to one thing – who do you want to be?  Are you willing to become one of the immoral beings walking this earth illogicality your calling card, the prospect of hurting others to get what you want easily justified?  Or will you refuse to give in to your baser nature refusing to sink down to the level which may seem at times to be where everyone around you is hanging out? 

Who among us has the strength to become and remain this morally grounded person?  The truth will out.  

Morality Isn’t So Hard – The Psychology of Self Protection

In the previous post I talked about how far we’ve traveled away from the time when doing the right thing was what truly made us happy, until we have become a race that defines right through justifications that legitimize our own happiness without taking into account how we might be hurting others.   So what happened to us?  It seems we lost our understanding of logical reasoning and failed to see the flaws, even as we introduced them into our moral code.

The changes began with an ego flare.  This sudden eruption of ego caused us to question the accepted belief that if the only way to get what we wanted or what would make us happy was to do the wrong thing, then we didn’t actually want what we thought we did and it would never lead to true happiness. 

All of a sudden we started asking ourselves, “Who said I don’t really want that or that it won’t make me happy?   It seems like it will.  So if the Moral Life and the Pleasing Life are the same, gaining pleasure will not affect who I am morally.”  You don’t have to be students of logic to see the flaws in this reasoning.  It’s a simple transformation from A is a necessary condition for B although they exist simultaneously, to A and B are the same so when B exists A must also exist. 

Luckily, before we’d traveled too far off into the wilderness, religion stepped in to clean up this misconception.  Religious leaders admitted that doing the right thing wouldn’t always make us happy or get us what we wanted and that it was indeed a hard path to follow.  What religion added was that despite all this, doing the right thing was still in our best interests.  This was accomplished by introducing us to the concept of Heaven and Hell.  So while we may actually lose what we want and not be happy all the time in this world, doing the right thing will get us into Heaven, a very good thing, while doing wrong will send us to hell, a very bad thing.

But then we lost our footing once again when our intellect became dominant and faith without proof was no longer enough for us.  We entered an era when we believed nothing was required to earn being happy or getting what we wanted, because we had come to label these things “rights”.   Everyone had the right to be happy and have what they wanted.  So those running around talking about responsibility to ourselves and others just didn’t get it.  Morality was supposed to be natural not hard. 

We’d done a 360, arriving back at the belief that doing what it took, at least within reason, to be able to experience the pleasing life, now an actual right for all, was the proper order of things.  And since the moral life and the pleasing life go hand in hand, morality couldn’t really be compromised by exercising our right to happiness, to advancement, to admiration, to attention, to gain in all manner of things.  Logical flaws, anyone?

Unfortunately, although by this point we’d significantly shifted our moral code regarding what we believed defined the members of that magic circle, to the point of overcrowding, we weren’t done yet.  We had begun our struggle with what was becoming the ever expanding “within reason” criteria for what was morally right and there’d be no regaining control of the reigns in the foreseeable future. 

And then there’s the contribution of psychology which suddenly began to fascinate everyone so they learned just enough about the topic to create a huge amount of trouble.  As each day passed, more and more psychological verbiage was thrown around as justifications despite the complete lack of understanding of what we were holding up as to champion our words and behavior. 

And if others were hurt by what we did or say that wasn’t our fault it was theirs.  Entirely blameless, our moral selves could not be touched.  We created the adage that no one could be hurt unless they let themselves.  This allowed us to take it another step further.  Since we weren’t responsible for others pain, we became convinced it was our moral right to judge, deemed fully within reason (alas the slippery slope).  

However, we also refused others the same right.  Thus, any attempts at working through an issue or problem which entailed the slightest suggestion that we possibly could have played some part in whatever had gone wrong triggered our defenses.  Out they came in full force, disguised by what were now automatic justifications though accepted as absolute truth.  

First, the other was clearly, undeniably wrong.  Then came the reasoning or attack showing just why they were wrong.  Their oh so obviously incorrect position was based on low self-confidence, self-hatred creating the inability to respond to others in any manner other than hate, lack of self-esteem and poor self-concept.  Add a few maladaptive coping strategies the individual was clearly using to cover all this up in particular repression of self awareness and projection of their negative traits onto others.  Now mix well and bake.  What comes out of the over is the justification of all justifications, “Well, heck that person should be hurt, needs to be hurt so they can self-actualize.” 

While I find I’m still working through this topic, I’ll end here for tonight, but not before I challenge you to perform one task when you finish reading this.  Don’t worry, it’s simple, at least on the surface.  Take out a mirror, and look into to it for at least several minutes, longer if you dare.  For some nothing may happen other than confirming the exercise was as stupid as originally thought; for others it may trigger something.  I can’t say what exactly, as its specific to each person.  But the results are up to you.  For you will only see what you allow yourself to see.   Do you have the courage to permit even a sliver of the illusionary self we all hide beneath to be revealed?   And lest you think I hold myself apart as being above such things, be assured that you won’t be alone.  I’ll see you at the mirror.    

The Social Underpinning of Morality - Please Ignore My Intent to Harm

In today’s world it seems that few are willing to do what it takes to live a truly moral or ethical life.  That’s part due to changing definitions allowing behaviors previously considered outside the realm to be justified such that they can still remain within the magic circle.  The other part contributing to this newly emerging narcissism is, well, let’s face it; doing the right thing can be really hard.  And actually, the opposite can be said of some individuals, doing the wrong thing can sometimes feel really, really good.  Especially, if we gain rewards for our words or actions, a result that we believe would never have occurred if what we’d done or said were really all that bad. 

As we are social creatures the rewards are usually interpersonal in nature. Suddenly we belong to a group in a way we’d always pined for; we mean something special to someone we believe to be a person of worth, it gains us attention when don’t know how to do so since it was always automatic, a given taken for granted, but now we’ve lost the sources we’d relied upon.  

So considering the significance of such magnificent rewards, some of which we may feel we can’t live without, is a little give here or there, a slight loosening of a boundary on this side or that really bad?  How can it be if our behavior, despite having previously been convinced of its wrongness and if observed in another person still judged wrong, results in something we have convinced ourselves is necessary to our very survival?

Yet as a race, we weren’t always this way.  At one time we understood that at its extreme there were times that in order to do the right thing we had to give up what we wanted most in life.  And we did so as doing the right thing was what we couldn’t live without.  We didn’t just believe that doing the right thing would make us happy; it truly did make us happy.

Yet that is clearly not the way today.  We seem to have no qualms doing the wrong thing, even if it hurts someone else, wounds them beyond repair, as long as we can point to a justification repeated so often as to be delivered and accepted just as easy as you please. 

Is there a way to undo this?  Somehow turn back the clocks to a time when right was right and wrong was wrong, when we continuously attempted to see through others eyes, take their perspective before doing anything that might affect them, this an integral part of our moral code? 

For morality is meaningless in a world of one.  It is in the arena of human interaction where we can understand why it was accepted that the moral life and the pleasing life must go hand in hand.  For when the pleasing life with all its desires and ego syntonic rationalizations slips the grasp of the moral life, it will repress the separation.  And on its own, while there still may remain vestiges of its moral counterpart it develops its own definition of morality.  Without its true twin to provide the way the version it comes up with is bound to be skewed and anything but moral.  

I’ll continue this topic next post as there’s much to say and from what is shown on the news day after day, with all manner of violence, dehumanization and untold harm that we perpetrate against each other, we seem to have lost our moral sense of True North.  There appears to be a growing tolerance in terms of what it takes to horrify us.  Where along the way did what previously was considered entirely unacceptable without exception and enough to make us shudder in disbelief at the cruelty we were witnessing, become something we now respond to with little more than a halfhearted, “Isn’t that sad?”