One of the major problems with the Great Morality Debate is that no-one ever seems to define their terms. The word ‘morality’ gets flung about like shit in an unstimulating chimp enclosure, but people often end up speaking at cross-purposes because they’re talking about different concepts. When the theofanboiz ask, ‘where does morality come from?’ they’re talking about absolute right and wrong, and how to distinguish between them.
The Tree of Knowledge’s (per Genesis) full title was, after all, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Quite aside from the fucking ridiculous theological knots this presents us with, the fundamental idea is that Good and Evil not only absolutely exist and are in some way in actual constant contest with each other, and the only reason we can tell the difference between the two sides is because that bitch Eve had no self-control around quinces. Which is odd, really, because if we can tell the difference as a result of a bit of inadvertent scrumping, then why would we need to be told? More fucking knots than Mistress Truss-em-up on a good Friday night…
In reality, there’s about as much evidence for the existence of Good and Evil as there is for God, which is to say bugger-all. To those of us minded to take our cues from reality as opposed to made-up bullshit, morality is nothing to do with these illusive constructs. Morality is an interplay between two things:
i) The group of behaviours exhibited by evolved social animals, which both grew out of and enabled the development of said social animals, also known as Why Not Everyone’s a Cunt; and
ii) The process – and product – of the application of abstract reasoning to our perceptions and experiences of our interaction with others and our wider environment, also known as Thinking About How Not to be a Cunt.
Where does morality come from? Well, it’s an artificial (as much as anything is) construct that pretty much just acts as an excuse for whatever it is that you’ve just done, or are about to do. That’s the very simplified answer dealing with the religious version of morality. It’s a fucking excuse. No foul, though, in a larger sense, since that’s pretty much what your consciousness acts as: a generator of excuses.
Our evolutionary development has armed us with certain behavioural responses to certain stimuli. Reciprocal altruism is one, and generally cast as a rather nice one. Tribalism may well be another, and if so, it’s a fucking ugly one. It fits, though.
The point is that even if my behavioural tendencies, inherited through selection over millions of years, are such that I’m inclined to be a right cunt, reason trumps that. I may, possibly, be hardwired to be wary or suspicious of people with brown skin. I don’t know if I am, but it stands out as a prominent example. I may be hardwired somehow to class women as some mysterious baby-generating devices. Even were that the case, I also have the capacity to weigh such behavioural tendencies and realise that they’re bullshit.
When the religious buggers come and spout ‘morality’ at us, it may behoove us to remember that they’re talking another language. They may be using words that sound the same, but they mean something completely fucking different.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Boundaries and Other Bullshit
One of the things that humans do, in trying to make sense of the world, is classify things. We segregate them. This is an orange, that is a banana, the other is a weasel and over there is the moon. We group things together, too, in varying nested groupings: these are fruits, this group are citrus fruits, and this one is an orange.
This is a very useful thing to do. Life would be rather different and more difficult if we were to periodically attempt to pluck the moon to stave off scurvy. Categories are helpful. But there’s a problem that arises from this, too, and it’s the problem of boundaries.
When you place something in a category, you are placing a conceptual boundary around it. In a rough-and-ready, daily existence fashion this works. It’s a sort of mental shorthand that’s useful for general purposes. It becomes a problem, though, when those abstract boundaries are attributed significance beyond mental shorthand, and viewed as rules which the real world follows.
Take the often-misunderstood field of taxonomy, and the notion of species, for example. Now, ‘species’ is a useful classification tool, but many people get confused and the evolution-deniers come from that confusion, because they insist on rigid boundaries where there really are none, either chronological or geographical. This insistence upon rigid boundaries of distinction allows them to insist that insipid bullshit like ‘evolution says that we come from apes, but what did the first human mate with? It couldn’t have been an ape, because they’re different species!’ is actually a valid argument, rather than a categorical and undeniable display of pig-shit ignorance.
It’s backwards thinking again, this idea that conceptual distinctions used to get a handle on the real world actually dictate how the real world works. It’s magical thinking, too, a sort of postmodernist ‘my brain creates the world’ assumption which appears to rest on the notion that you can dictate reality if you think really hard at it. But I digress.
The point is that we tend to think in terms of categories, but this tendency is revealed as not-really-reflective-of-the-real-world when we examine the notion of boundaries, those borders between things. It turns out, when you examine those borders, that they aren’t really there, or at the very least they’re extremely fuzzy, and become more and more fuzzy the closer you look at them.
I’ll look at the ‘when life emerged from the oceans’ idea to illustrate. The boundary between ‘ocean’ and ‘land’ seems pretty fucking clear-cut, yeah? So we’re looking for the first animal to crawl out of the water and start sunbathing or something, or so it might first appear. Actually, that’s fucking simple-minded and stupid – so stupid, in fact, that evolution-deniers can see the stupidity of it. They choose to stick with the rigid-boundaries notion, though, and that’s where their thinking fails them. Let’s go for a walk on the beach…
First off, lets take a fairly calm day. Even on a calm day, the ocean isn’t still. There’s swell, even if slight. So if you were to arbitrarily decide that the boundary between water and sand or rock is where you draw the distinction, well, that boundary moves – constantly. And there are forms of life which actually rely on that. It’s the environmental niche in which they fit. And they are diverse, being plants and animals, and I’ll give you short fucking odds that they include a fuck-off lot of bacteria.
That’s the thing: everywhere we’ve looked on this godforsaken planet, we’ve found life. Most of it’s bacterial, but it’s undeniably life. There are species of bacteria that are uniquely suited to life behind your left ear, for example. Again, I digress.
Now, go near to the edge of the water, on the beach side of our now-acknowledged-as-shifting boundary. Start digging. It won’t be long before you hit water. The ocean and the land bleed into each other. This boundary we had in our heads has become pretty blurry…
…and that’s because, in reality, and to ‘life’, the boundary isn’t there. Not really. Life hangs about wherever it is because it can, or if something changes in an organism or its environment, that organism hangs about if it can. Now, a deep-sea quid isn’t going to climb out of the ocean and start walking around, but that’s just absurdity talking. Life is, ultimately, a massive, complicated series of chemical reactions on (at least) a planetary scale. And the boundaries that we create in our heads – those boundaries that help us to eat fruit instead of car-parts – don’t really, ultimately, reflect reality. They are conceptual boundaries, they don’t really exist as we tend to think they do.
And that, incidentally, is why creationists think abiogenesis is such a big load of bogeyman’s bollocks. According tho their conceptual boundaries, there’s a great big boundary smack-bang in the middle between life and non-life. That boundary doesn’t really exist, though, as is becoming increasingly clear.
This is a very useful thing to do. Life would be rather different and more difficult if we were to periodically attempt to pluck the moon to stave off scurvy. Categories are helpful. But there’s a problem that arises from this, too, and it’s the problem of boundaries.
When you place something in a category, you are placing a conceptual boundary around it. In a rough-and-ready, daily existence fashion this works. It’s a sort of mental shorthand that’s useful for general purposes. It becomes a problem, though, when those abstract boundaries are attributed significance beyond mental shorthand, and viewed as rules which the real world follows.
Take the often-misunderstood field of taxonomy, and the notion of species, for example. Now, ‘species’ is a useful classification tool, but many people get confused and the evolution-deniers come from that confusion, because they insist on rigid boundaries where there really are none, either chronological or geographical. This insistence upon rigid boundaries of distinction allows them to insist that insipid bullshit like ‘evolution says that we come from apes, but what did the first human mate with? It couldn’t have been an ape, because they’re different species!’ is actually a valid argument, rather than a categorical and undeniable display of pig-shit ignorance.
It’s backwards thinking again, this idea that conceptual distinctions used to get a handle on the real world actually dictate how the real world works. It’s magical thinking, too, a sort of postmodernist ‘my brain creates the world’ assumption which appears to rest on the notion that you can dictate reality if you think really hard at it. But I digress.
The point is that we tend to think in terms of categories, but this tendency is revealed as not-really-reflective-of-the-real-world when we examine the notion of boundaries, those borders between things. It turns out, when you examine those borders, that they aren’t really there, or at the very least they’re extremely fuzzy, and become more and more fuzzy the closer you look at them.
I’ll look at the ‘when life emerged from the oceans’ idea to illustrate. The boundary between ‘ocean’ and ‘land’ seems pretty fucking clear-cut, yeah? So we’re looking for the first animal to crawl out of the water and start sunbathing or something, or so it might first appear. Actually, that’s fucking simple-minded and stupid – so stupid, in fact, that evolution-deniers can see the stupidity of it. They choose to stick with the rigid-boundaries notion, though, and that’s where their thinking fails them. Let’s go for a walk on the beach…
First off, lets take a fairly calm day. Even on a calm day, the ocean isn’t still. There’s swell, even if slight. So if you were to arbitrarily decide that the boundary between water and sand or rock is where you draw the distinction, well, that boundary moves – constantly. And there are forms of life which actually rely on that. It’s the environmental niche in which they fit. And they are diverse, being plants and animals, and I’ll give you short fucking odds that they include a fuck-off lot of bacteria.
That’s the thing: everywhere we’ve looked on this godforsaken planet, we’ve found life. Most of it’s bacterial, but it’s undeniably life. There are species of bacteria that are uniquely suited to life behind your left ear, for example. Again, I digress.
Now, go near to the edge of the water, on the beach side of our now-acknowledged-as-shifting boundary. Start digging. It won’t be long before you hit water. The ocean and the land bleed into each other. This boundary we had in our heads has become pretty blurry…
…and that’s because, in reality, and to ‘life’, the boundary isn’t there. Not really. Life hangs about wherever it is because it can, or if something changes in an organism or its environment, that organism hangs about if it can. Now, a deep-sea quid isn’t going to climb out of the ocean and start walking around, but that’s just absurdity talking. Life is, ultimately, a massive, complicated series of chemical reactions on (at least) a planetary scale. And the boundaries that we create in our heads – those boundaries that help us to eat fruit instead of car-parts – don’t really, ultimately, reflect reality. They are conceptual boundaries, they don’t really exist as we tend to think they do.
And that, incidentally, is why creationists think abiogenesis is such a big load of bogeyman’s bollocks. According tho their conceptual boundaries, there’s a great big boundary smack-bang in the middle between life and non-life. That boundary doesn’t really exist, though, as is becoming increasingly clear.
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