Hello again Pax,
I share your wish that men would treat each other better. I work for a television station, and I invariably shudder at the content of the evening news. My network (CBS) does not make this stuff up; the bombs that shred innocent people’s lives are real; the bodies of the abducted children that turn up in a ditch are real as well. But it’s important to keep this in mind.
A medical specialist that treats rare diseases has his waiting room filled with people suffering from these rare diseases. Day in and day out, nearly everyone this physician meets suffers from this rare disease. Would it be correct to infer from his experience that this rare disease must be epidemic in the population? Of course not, it would be silly to form such a conclusion. It’s just that his sampling of the population is biased.
It’s the same with the evening news. We have a network of organizations whose specific job is to sort through all the daily activity of six billion humans in order to ferret out the worst behavior, the most tragic accidents, and the most sensational scandals. At the end of this daily freak and horror show, the news anchor calmly closes with, “And this was a look at our world today.” Meanwhile, we’re sitting in our chair with our fingernails dug into the armrests; shaken out of our wits at what we’ve just seen. Is there any wonder that people think that the world has gone to hell? We often hear old people say, “It wasn’t like that in my day.” And they are right. It wasn’t like that in their day, it was worse. They just didn’t hear about it.
In the year 1800 the earth’s population was one-sixth what it is today. There were one-sixth as many people to make the news; to rape and murder. Yet, at the turn of the 19th century the Napoleonic wars were raging across Europe. The Canadian writer, John Ralston Saul, remarked in his book, Voltaire’s Bastards, that Napoleon indirectly killed nearly as many men as did Hitler. I remember reading that in the days of Napoleon’s terror, a dust cloud was sighted on the horizon of a city in Eastern Europe (I forget which city). The city fathers, fearing it was Napoleon’s armies set their own city aflame to deny it to the enemy. It turned out that the dust was from a large herd of cattle being moved to market. Tough times, those.
As I understand it, Christians (for example) teach that we should obey God’s edicts not for the sake of goodness itself, but for reason of personal gain. Having myself endured 12 years of Catholic schools, the phrase, “The wages of sin is death,” springs readily to mind. Christian dogma would have us act so as to please God. If God is pleased with us we gain Paradise. If he is displeased with us we suffer eternal damnation. Pax, I simply don’t recollect hearing much about being good for the sake of goodness. I remember it being about saving one’s own soul.
Well yes, and theists are quite pleased with this linkage. I think Arthur C. Clark only slightly overstated the point when he wrote:
“The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.”
Men have acted horribly in the past despite believing that they would indeed suffer eternal damnation for their acts. Wicked men will act badly no matter what the prevailing beliefs. I recently came upon this quote by the physicist, Steven Weinberg:
“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.”
I’m still trying to make up my mind whether to agree with him or not.
Franz Kafka wrote, “Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon then their song, namely their silence…” Hmm…that’s easy for Kafka to say, he never had to endure Britney Spears.
This is an especially fine thing to write, Pax. For some time I’ve had this very same idea on my mental “backburner.” Is it possible that what we do to another we do to ourselves? In a recent exchange Brad and I skirted this idea. I quoted Thomas W. Clark:
Is there only one “I” in the universe? This question has often reoccurred in my mind since I was quite young. It began as a theological speculation, but it’s since taken on various guises. This question might be worth its own thread. What do you think?
It’s wonderful to hear that you choose to accept this idea while you search for a convincing grounding for your ethics. Since we need a working theory at this very moment, until we discover the “perfect” moral theory why not let’s adopt this unproven possibility; that what we do to others we do to ourselves? For lack of nothing better, let’s adopt Sponville’s little maxim, “Act as though you loved.” Someday, if and when philosophers find the “perfect” moral theory they might say, “Oh look, our foolish ancestors went around acting as though they loved each other,” but now we see that they didn’t have to be that good." These future philosophers might lament the fact that we needlessly wasted so much goodness on each other. But would it really be a shame that you and I squandered more goodness on each other than the “perfect” moral theory required of us? If there is anything else so worthy of squandering, I for one can’t think of it.
Michael