Although I have a read a good portion of the Bible, I have spent little time reading the holy books of other religions. I have read a bit of the Bhagavad Gita as for some reason it was sitting around in my doctor’s office waiting room for awhile. It’s actually kind of an interesting book. I science fiction book I had recently read made several references to the Upanisads and the Dhammapada and so I’ve been perusing those books. It has been interesting reading how other ancient cultures viewed the world. When you read things from the point of view of somebody from those times, when so very little was known about the world, you can appreciate the contents even though from the perspective of today much of it is nonsense. There is wisdom to be found there as well, and I found many similarities between the Bible and the Upanisads in terms of the moral lessons it was trying to teach. There are many possible stories that can teach the same lesson, and it seems pretty clear that even when you suspect they are trying to be literally true, it still represents a best guess, and that what they were really trying to do is find a way of communicating impressions and feelings about the universe even if their literal attempt of an explanation was incomplete.
Recently I was in my local coffee shop working and a group of women sat at the table next to me and they were having a Bible study together. Although I’d say more than half of the time they were just giggling and talking about things unrelated to the Bible, they did focus on their planned lesson. Of course this is typical of many Christians in which they have some guide that hand selects of few important verses to focus on so that the entirety of the narrative is not read by the follower. Like the Upanisads, I expect many church leaders recognize the irrelevance of much of the Bible and would rather not have discussions about many of the passages in the Old testament especially. Anyway, what was interesting is that when they contemplated the words of a specific verse they would often relate it to experiences in their own life. As I could not help but overhear, it was fascinating to me how the verses containing some wisdom seemed to be already known by the women, because life lessons had already taught them it was true. Nevertheless they didn’t seem cognitively aware and put the cart before the horse. “Look at the wisdom of this book, it is telling me something I already know…genius!” I think if you are led to believe in the inspiration and greatness of the word of God, it’s hard to think of it as anything but that. If the wisdom in the pages matches your own experience then this will only give you more respect for the book.
Now it’s not to say that people don’t discover wisdom from holy books. I am listening to a podcast right now where they are discussing some of the main problems in the field of social psychology in terms of how the work is performed. One of the main critiques of social psychology is that a field it has actually become too obsessed with the creation of little experiments for the purpose of following the scientific method and almost forcefully trying to demonstrate it’s scientific rigor. Social psychology is the study of the individual in a societal context and so they ask, why all these experiments, when none of these controlled situations are actually found in a social context? It’s a valid point. The hosts of the podcasts were arguing that what is missing from social psychology as compared to other scientific disciplines is scores of observations. They use the example of Tycho Brahe the famous Dutch astronomer, who really didn’t come up with anything novel on his own, but what he did have was mounds and mounds of careful observations of the stars and planets. Johannes Kepler was his student and came along and came up with his 3 laws of planetary motion. It is Kepler’s genius that is recognized today, but he certainly could not have come up his laws without all those observations. Just as Darwin could not have come up with the theory of evolution without all his observations on the Galapagos.
Astronomy is one of the oldest disciplines because there is little to do at night but look at the stars. It occurred to me that once you had civilizations and had a certain portion of the population doing the farming, a few who could afford to live a life of leisure had little to do during the day but observe humans. It seems no surprise to me that wisdom would be found in ancient texts based on many years of observations of people. Many of us figure things out on our own simply by paying attention to life and taking time to reflect and introspect. There was no formal scientific method back then, and we certainly aren’t using it in our everyday lives when we come to a conclusion like “Hey, maybe I’m spending too much time worrying about things that are out of my control. I would be happier if I focused on the moment.” This is the kind of good stuff we come up with through our experiences, and it seems to me that many of the scholars who wrote religious books were simply story tellers, weaving important moral and ethical lessons into the stories based on their observations of how people behaved and what consequences or rewards befell them. Whether they were joyful, fulfilled, empty, or anxious. Most of them I think were simply people who were observing constantly and coming to some conclusions about how to live a better life.
Pay attention, look inward, and talk to others for their stories. There is wisdom to be found in holy books, but the good news is that you also have a decent chance of figuring it out on your own.
Since I have left Facebook, I want to do more to create conversation that is productive and civil, so I’m hoping to have more discussion posts like this where I post a little bit of info that I hope leads to more expansive dialogue.
Part of the reason that I left Facebook was how angry I was often getting. One could argue that I wasn’t strong enough to resist the trappings of Facebook but it should be noted that this is part of the design of social media – to manufacture outrage. I strongly recommend reading this article on the topic, and I think reading the link to Dr. Molly Crockett’s Nature article on the topic is also an excellent read. From the CSM article:
“Moral outrage plays an essential role in human society. It drives people to expose and rise against injustice. At its best, social media can channel moral outrage into action, as seen in the success of petition drives, boycott campaigns, and protest planning.
But under the attention-driven model that underpins social media, there is little incentive to steer users toward action offscreen. Instead, it is in the interest of the social media companies to encourage sharing of moral outrage in a way that fosters amplification rather than action. Decoupling user attention from profit could break that cycle, say observers.”
On Facebook I would often see people expressing the same level of vitriol for those who might commit minor offenses against societal norms, to those who were truly monsters causing great levels of harm against other humans. As an example the amount of outrage towards comments from Matt Damon in regards to the #MeToo movement at times seemed indistinguishable from things said about Harvey Weinstein. Some questions come to mind and you can feel to address some or all of them:
Are there times when you have felt yourself feeling equal levels of anger for different levels of offensive behavior? Or do you think that equal levels of moral outrage are justified even for the full gamut of what might be considered microaggressions to serious offenses against societal norms. This seems very much like the “broken windows” approach to moral outrage. Is this valid?
Is social media causing us to lose our way in really addressing the big problems by diminishing our ability to detect nuance among the “bad actors” in our society? And as a byproduct of this do we risk pushing those who might just be slightly on the wrong side of some reasonable set of moral behaviors, further away from where we would like them to be? It seems like we so easily ostracize and shame even small offenses on social media.
Perhaps the net effect of social media is still positive, but even so how can we use social media to be more positive, given that the current model, as it stands, is designed to exacerbate outrage, and not promote productive conversation?
The recent stream of women standing up against sexual harassment and sexual criminal activity has once again brought to the fore the idea of heroes and perfection. Something I said I was done talking about, but the subject I guess is just an intriguing one to me and thought I’d share a few more thoughts. I’d like to extend this discussion beyond those accused of sexual harassment or other sex crimes in general, but to a discussion of flaws and the severity of those flaws.
I’ve been listening and reading discussions about where do we draw the line and forgive someone’s acts? I’ve wrote a piece about Bill Cosby some time ago, and I think most people agree that given he is a serial rapist it’s hard to ever watch him again. But some feel differently about Louis CK or Al Franken. Now some might say this is because politics are playing a role, like in the case of Franken, or because you are just such a big fan of their comedy in the case Louis CK. It’s hard to say that’s not the case, but I do think it’s more than that.
As I try to learn about human behavior there are two things that seem clear to me. We are all morally inconsistent to varying degrees, and we all draw lines that cannot be crossed and those lines are different for different people. As I’ve written before, I think we have this ability to elevate celebrities, leaders, and historical figures to unrealistic expectations of perfection. With historical figures of course we might be applying today’s moral standards to those people and unfairly judge them, but I don’t always think that doesn’t have value. We don’t have to judge, but I think there is value in looking at the flaws and inconsistencies in their thinking so that we can avoid those same pitfalls of character today. Gandhi was someone I idolized, and still do to a certain extent, but more reading into his character has revealed his racism against black people, and his misogyny. Should I throw away Gandhi as someone who is a waste of my time to even try to appreciate now that I know? I don’t think so, but I certainly see how he could have been more than he was, and can take those good parts, acknowledge (without judgment) the bad parts and move forward.
But what of those people who we find to be less than perfect today? People who we deem should know better. It’s a tricky business. There might be an average moral perspective, and that perspective might even be backed by empirical data that shows it is a more moral behavior, but culture varies widely, and even when we see the overwhelming benefits of something like gender equality it seems very hard to get everybody on board. If we investigate the most common set of moral values of people in a white evangelical community in the South, we’d find many differences between them and a community in Boulder, Colorado. And the difference may even deviate greater as we go beyond the borders of our country. What seems to be the prevailing moral view of our times is heavily biased by the culture we are currently in. It could be we are in the minority. And even if we are right about what is a more moral actions, and we are right to push those views on to society, it may be difficult for others to agree with our perspective. Of course it’s also true that any one moral perspective is not all that we care about in this world. We all have sets of moral values, and while it would be nice to think that anybody who is a feminist must automatically be also pro-environment, pro marriage equality, or against racism, the dots don’t always connect, nor do I think we should expect them to. If we can have a head of the human genome project also be an evangelical Christian, I think that we should expect that any human is able to hold as true, two widely disparate views on how the universe works.
But where does that leave the rest of us. It seems that it’s human nature to be constantly looking for people that we can look up to, that we can celebrate and that we can strive to be like. It maybe isn’t surprising that we should do this. Seeing something we value, embodied by another human being makes us feel like it’s possible for us to be that way to. Such people can also make us care about things we didn’t before, or care about things in a deep way we never thought possible. And when we find out their flaws there is a feeling of betrayal that feels personal even if we didn’t know them personally. But I think that on a deeper level what we really worry about is what it says about us. “This person I admired is not who I thought, so am I not who I thought as well?” I certainly had these thoughts growing up with an alcoholic father. My dad went from superhero to an extremely flawed individual, and I wondered how I might be flawed and how I would even recognize it? And to be honest I still do sometimes.
I’ve tried to incorporate the best of my dad into who I am, because there is no changing the past. I was born with dad I had, and there is no getting around that. I can be a better dad myself going forward and that’s all I can do. I’m not for burning people to the ground because of their flaws. Even with Bill Cosby I can acknowledge the skill in which he told jokes and stories, and his passion for education and I can say that these are good things and are meaningful. Maybe I can’t watch him anymore, but there was at least some goodness in him. I feel similarly for Scott Orson Card who wrote an incredibly beautiful science fiction story and won a well-deserved Hugo award. He is now a strong anti-gay activist in the Mormon community. But the ideas and themes in his story are worth preserving and even celebrating. I don’t want to turn those ideas to dust just because there is now a side of him I fundamentally disagree with. When I think of heroes in my personal life right now, there are 3 ladies that are supervisors for the program I do volunteer work for helping neglected and abused children. They work long hours, train volunteers, do fundraisers, and deeply care about the welfare of the most vulnerable members of our society. What if I found out that one of them donated money to a pro-life organization, or was racist? Does this invalidate all that they are? Have they still not made the lives better for 100s if not 1000s of children? At what point does the line get crossed? Perhaps if I found out they have abuse their own children. I in no way imagine that’s possible, but maybe given that we are walking paradoxes I should accept that such things are possible.
In the end maybe we all at least share some of the blame for the expectations we place on people, who can never be perfect. Perhaps the reason I think about “heroes” so much is because with an alcoholic father these are questions I’ve been asking all my life. What I’ve tried to do is to understand human behavior and accept the imperfections we all have. I’ve also tried to place value on growth. Knowing we all do things or have done things that are bad, what’s most important is that we accept responsibility, have true remorse and try to do better. I think the exposure of these imperfections is helpful to all of us in this respect, and even when it is sometimes hard to hear (or read) I am thankful to see the cracks in perfection. I actually prefer such a world, because it simply feels truer. It feels like there is somewhere to go. And it is a reminder to be humble, for we all have our cracks and flaws. It’s easy to push the famous people and the historical figures away, because they really aren’t part of our everyday life, but that line we draw can become real hard to draw when it’s someone who is actually close to us. So I think it’s always important to recognize that complexity, the dynamic nature, and the shades of gray in humans. Maybe it’s significant that the devil was only made by being cast down to the very depths of hell. Maybe we can make our stands and still find ways to love.
There was a very good question posed to Sam Harris on his podcast which was:
“If free will is an illusion, why are intentions morally relevant?”
Sam Harris’ answer was very good, but I wanted to throw in my own answer as well. This also brought to the fore questions I have been asking for years and has led me on a path to learn about the brain and cognitive science: “How effectively can we change our own minds about things? And what is the manner in which we can change our mind?” Now perhaps to some, the question posed to Sam Harris doesn’t seem related, but I think there is a very important connection here.
Whether or not you agree that freewill is an illusion or not, isn’t something I want to debate with right now. I haven’t heard a compelling reason in favor of the idea of free will in some time. I think what the more interest question is to understand why people are against the idea of free will being an illusion. Sure you could argue that religion is part of that reason, but even secular people are uncomfortable with the idea. The question posed to Sam Harris says it all. If there is no free will, how is anybody responsible for their actions?
The word responsible is the word that doesn’t belong here, and this is what most people seem to miss. This has important consequences for our justice system. So then why do intentions matter? The reason why intentions matter is because of what it says about your brain. Let’s say I’m driving and I accidentally hit a cyclist, what does this say about me as a person? I may be careless on the road. Maybe I need to take some more driver training classes. Maybe I need glasses. Maybe if I’ve gotten into numerous accidents it means I probably shouldn’t drive any more. What if I feel genuine remorse for what I’ve done? Doesn’t that say something about how my brain works as well? Do I belong in jail? I don’t think so. But if on the other hand I see that cyclist and get a sinister grin on my face and speed up and mow that cyclist down, what does this say about me? It says that I am a person who takes joy about causing harm to others. I might not feel remorse…maybe I do…but there would be something troubling about my mind that speaks to what future actions I am likely to take. What if I know the cyclist and hate the person and that’s why I mow them down? This also says something troubling about future actions I might make. Because who might be the next person I hate, and what might I do to them?
I have talked about the idea of “personal responsibility” before and as I write this post it becomes even clearer why that phrase confuses me. Having a party centered around personal responsibility seems to be an even bigger mistake. We are a social species and it’s easy to say we are responsible for ourselves, but I don’t think that’s really the case. It is the environment which shapes the individual and we have laws in large part not to control individual behaviors but to protect society. It seems to me that it is we as a society, as other people in a person’s life that intervene to impact someone’s behavior. And when a person does change their behavior it is a response to what society values, or through some personal experience in interacting with society or their environment that changes one’s mind. If I am going around running people down with my car, whether accidentally, or on purpose, it is society that in some way says hey you can’t be doing that and finds an appropriate way to make me less of a danger. If I take it upon myself to make changes, it is because of some emotional reaction to what I’ve done that is the impetus for change. Rather than a decision to change, my body, my mind doesn’t want to feel a certain way and thus pushes me in a direction to not feel that way again. My consciousness of that motivation is what gives me the illusion of free will.
Change in an individual seems to be a result not of an individual’s decisions, but rather the environmental context in which we live. If society hasn’t shaped us to be more receptive to changing our mind, it is actively intervening to try and convince us to reform our views. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. It seems that there is no real reason for me to want to change my mind about anything when I think about it. I mean if what I believe has kept me alive so far, to be of an age to reproduce and raise children to a sufficient age so they can reproduce then what I believe must be pretty reasonable. Now for a social species it could be that what I believe is very counter to surviving well with the people around me. But as long as I generally believe what the “group” believes I’ll probably be alright. Whether those beliefs are true or not makes no difference. It really doesn’t even make a difference if they are harmful, providing that harm doesn’t lead to any consequences that would significantly reduce my chances to reproduce.
As we realize the global society that we live in, and that more and more of us are infringing on each other cultural and intellectual space, as we become more acutely aware of the harm of certain beliefs and values, not just in our community but over the entirety of the planet, I feel it’s important we start asking how can we all get along? What values should this global community have? What differences can we afford to maintain and still get diversity? Does diversity’s value diminish over time if we hope for unity among humankind? And given how difficult it seems to be to change one’s mind, what are some beliefs we could have that would provide a backdrop to growth for a better future where less humans suffer, and well being is increased? It is this last question I want to explore a bit more in future posts. I think tied to this is the area of human emotion which I have become more intrigued with of late. I think that our emotional and reasoning side are more tied together than we think and that without emotions, at least for humans, growth isn’t possible.
I was thrust into a conversation recently where I debated a Christian fundamentalist on morality. Particular why would we care about well-being, that only an existing divine moral authority would give us that imperative.
It seems obvious to me that morality is born out of need to learn how to survive best. And this of course would be different for different species. An intelligent life that evolved from frogs might simply have large litters and leave them all to fend for themselves and have completely different morals that made sense for their particular mode of survival. For us as social primates we have our own set of behaviors that make us most successful. I was then asked over and over again, “Why survive?” As if the answer could only be some supernatural force at worked. And yet it seems to me that survival is just the nature of life. I would go so far as to say if the nature of life was not to survive, there wouldn’t be life. It’s sort of the very definition of life. I would imagine that this is part of the definition of life we can most agree on.
Thus it also seems obvious to me that as a species of primates who have evolved to survive rather well through cooperation, we survive best when we are compassionate and kind to others. Building bonds of trust and empathy are not only some of the most long lasting relationships, but also the most gratifying to our own well being. But clearly it can’t be so obvious, because there is a lot of the opposite going around.
I started to think that maybe there are two extremes of the type of person you can be. You can be one who thinks the least of us slow us down and prevent us from living in that wonderful future utopia, or you can one who thinks that it difficult to know who the least of us is. And that everybody, to a certain extent, has something to teach. Hopefully, that thing they have to teach isn’t what not to do. But even those are lessons well learned. Of course most of us are not those extremes. But we’re all hoping to be more like one than the other. I think the former can be measurable shown to be illusion, but if you think the latter is easy to achieve you’d be fooling yourself just as much. I can personally say that there are moments when the illusion seems simpler, and you find the appeal of the black and white view, even if you know that could never be you. The latter is the path of humility, a path that asks you to accept uncertainty as property of nature. Not only must you tolerate it, you must actually welcome it and embrace it. Such a path can be a painful journey, but the well-being you gain from prostrating yourself under the endless sky of uncertainty, baring your soul to the universe, is immense. Because it really is the best way to see the stars. It’s always just seemed apparent to me that humans were naturally kind creatures, because it always seemed to me the reason why we’ve survived until now. I hope I’m not wrong.
I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts called The Hidden Brain on NPR and they were talking about the climate change situation in a great episode called Losing Alaska. Basically they were saying that scientific arguments have little merit anymore in talking about climate change. I would have to say that I agree. As someone who holds a Ph.D. in the Atmospheric Sciences I can most certainly say that few people that I have debated with on the subject truly understand the problem scientifically and I don’t claim to be the smartest person in the world, this is simply the truth. My field is applied math and physics. Not only that, the climate system is complex.it Involves interdisciplinary knowledge as well in chemistry, oceanography and geology. To change someone’s mind from a scientific point of view, it would take a lot of study and learning. Now you may be saying, wait I accept man-made climate change, and it it’s pretty obvious. Well I would argue that you don’t really understand it, but it’s easier for you to accept because it already fits in with your ideology. And I don’t say that to be demeaning, especially I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad ideology to have. Specifically the one in which we recognize that something is very complex and we don’t have years to study it on our own so maybe I should listen to what experts are saying. Much like we tend to believe our doctor when they tell us we have cancer as opposed to learning the requisite knowledge we need in order to test ourselves.
Instead of a Heavenly Father, maybe a Mother Earth isn’t a bad person to start worshiping.
But more to the point it really does come down to our personal ideology whether we accept the science, because let’s face it the science is telling us some pretty harsh things. Not only is the Earth in a lot of trouble, but we actually might be responsible for it all. And in order to combat the problem we are causing we are going to have to give up a great deal. Transitioning away from a fuel source we heavily depend on will require large shifts in business and industry affecting the jobs of many. And of course such a transition cannot be made overnight, but even at a moderate pace will require a cultural change at a rate faster than many of us would have a hard time adjusting too. That of course does not make it any less compulsory. Interestingly this podcast made the argument that we all are capable of great sacrifices at times of war or crises, and that dealing with man-made climate change requires an approach that is used by religion rather than one that is used by science. I find myself having a hard time disagreeing. While I would love to live in a society where science had a much more powerful influence on changing minds ultimately it does seem that we need to change minds at an emotional level over an intellectual one (which is to me what the podcast suggested by saying a “religious approach”).
In that vein, I wanted to address some of the main arguments I see used by climate change deniers, which tend to be more ideologically based instead of arguments that attack the scientific data on the subject. They are more dangerous to me, because they seem reasonable. They seem irrefutable. This is not the case.
Science had been wrong before, why should we trust scientists?
The Geocentric Universe
This is quite true. Scientists have been wrong before. In fact progress is actually built on that very premise. But notice the word “progress”. It always strikes me as strange that people overlook this aspect of science. Much like we learn from our own mistakes and grow and get better as people, this is how science works as well. So we do get things wrong, but we also get a lot of things right. Your daily lives in this modern world are a living result of that. From the car you drive to the device in which you are punching out your arguments. Now you could be right that someday we will discover that we were all wrong about this, but if we do, it will not because we were willfully trying to mislead people, but rather a new discovery has allowed us to view the world in a different way thus disproving our theory. So unless you’ve got that said discovery I can guarantee you that our assessment about the state of the climate system is based on the best available knowledge we have about how it works. And personally I see no shame in acting in the best interest of all on this planet based on what we know of it.
Finally, just because you don’t trust science or want to focus on the things it got wrong makes it your problem, and not science’s problem. To refute climate change science on those grounds is to commit the genetic fallacy. Directly address the assertions being made by those advocating the position in terms of their conclusions analysis of their data. That is really your only option. To explain it more simply “Al Gore is a democrat, and I hate democrats. Al Gore gives evidence for why man-made climate change is happening, but since he is a democrat, he must be wrong.” That’s not how it works. Sorry.
Scientists are just doing it for the money. IPCC is corrupt. Liberal media…
This argument is the same as the genetic fallacy because it is again an attempt to discredit to the reliability of the source to simply argue away what the source has to say. I’ll admit that in such instances I will use the same fallacious argument back, because, quite honestly two can play that game, and I can play it better. Let’s say all of us scientists are ego driven money-grubbing bastards. My options are renewable energy companies and liberal governments, or oil companies. Hmmm…I wonder who has more money. Not only that with all the other scientists clearly in the wrong camp, all that sweet oil money could be mine (as it was for Wei-Hock Soon) as there are even less people to share it with.
In terms of fame, the fallacious argument made by deniers fall even shorter. If I had definitive proof that all the other scientists were wrong. I would be the one who was famous. I’d be on all the news programs, giving talks around the world on a sweet oil company payroll, and even the liberal media would have me on their shows even to abuse me while I valiantly stuck to my guns with the full conviction that I was doing my science right. I would be the hero of deniers everywhere.
Sometimes even fallacious arguments are hardly worth the effort.
The climate has changed before when humans weren’t around. It’s natural.
This is the first part of an argument constantly used. It’s also known in logic as a type of naturalistic fallacy. Just because something can happen naturally, doesn’t mean it can’t happen unnaturally. Do floods happen naturally? Sure. Can floods also happen because of human activities? Absolutely. Natural selection happens in evolution. But you know what also happens? “Unnatural selection”. The fruits and vegetables we eat, the dogs and cats we have as pets, and the horses we ride are all examples of this. The same thing can happen with or without intention.
We cannot have an impact on something as big as the Earth.
The ecosystem formerly known as rain forest.
This argument is made without any substantiation at all. It is often also used by people who are trying not to be religious but would rather take the James Inhofe argument that God controls the climate! Of course examples of how we have changed climate locally can be found all over through the building of structures like dams on rivers, cutting down forests and poor farming practices. In terms of the climate change issue specifically this person does a pretty nice break down of looking at how the amount of carbon we produce can quite easily explain the increase in carbon since pre-industrial levels. There is no reason to believe that we couldn’t have such a global impact. In fact that argument always seems to me a way of insulting or discrediting scientists again because it’s a pretty important question to answer before we would even start putting out evidence about climate change. I mean if the amount of carbon we produce paled in comparison to the amount of increase we’ve seen then I am not sure how the scientific consensus could be developed in the first place. It’s like when people say, the warming is being caused by the sun, and I think to myself “Oh my…we scientists all forgot to take into account the sun. I better make a few calls. Can’t believe we missed that one!”.
The Earth will survive. We’ve had major disasters before and life persists. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen.
This is the most insidious arguments, because it’s not fallacious at all in a logical sense. However it is apathetic and immoral. A lot of times people will say things like…”we’re just another species. Whatever we do is natural, and whatever happens will happens.”
Let’s say you are an emergency manager who works at a national park in a mountainous area. The weather is starting to warm and there has been heavy rains in the mountains and typically when such rains occur, especially in combination with some ice jams in the water flash flooding occurs. It’s not a guarantee, but likely. A town at the foot of the mountain in which the river runs through is going to get flooded, people could easily die if they are not warned. This is a natural event, it was going to happen whether humans are around are not do you warn them?
I think most people would answer that they would. To me arguing that doing nothing is the only option we have because the Earth is just going to do is thing is tantamount to doing nothing in this example, and simply letting people die. Many people who accept the fact that the climate is changing but don’t think man is responsible still must accept the consequences to this warming. Some of the one’s we are more sure of are:
Rising sea levels drowning coastal populations and increased damages and deaths from coastal hazards such as tropical storms and tsunamis
Increased heat waves and droughts
Increases in extreme weather events as climate patterns shift
Increased severity of extreme weather events.
What’s more is that these types of things will adversely impact the most vulnerable of the worlds population. People who are in poverty. People who depend on subsistence farming. When local hazards happen communities do make sacrifices, and do look for solutions, through re-zoning laws, construction improvements, and other engineering solutions to try and make the world safer and have less loss of life. So even if man has nothing do with the problem it doesn’t mean that we don’t have a responsibility to act to come up with a solution.
One can be logically sound but be ethically and morally irresponsible. Ignoring what experts are saying, making sweeping and unsubstantiated statements that there is nothing we can do, that it’s just nature, and the Earth will be fine is really the same as having the power to do something to save lives and not doing it. And this is why I agree that the conversation about climate change has to shift away from science and facts and be more about compassion, about love for our fellow human beings, valuing equality so that we all have the same chance to adapt and survive the changing climate, and about taking responsibility for the home that sustains us all. These are important values regardless of what is causing the climate to change and these are things we can address and even already have some solutions for. Of course I know that is even overly idealistic to think that such a solution of addressing people on an emotional level might work. Hell it’s difficult to find a religion that unanimously agrees poverty is something we should do something about. I feel pretty bleak in general about us actually doing something about climate change. It requires people to move beyond nationalism, beyond their own religious beliefs and worldview, which tend to not be very worldly at all. Maybe we can’t win against the forces of nature, but it sure would nice if we could overcome the forces that divide us as a species. We can try. Maybe in the end it really is easier to move mountains.
I was ‘talking’ with a fellow blogger who is a nurse, and as I am a meteorologist we were trying to figure out who had it worse. Was it more annoying to deal with the “climate change deniers” or the “anti-vaxxers”. I agreed his was more annoying, because while human induced climate changed is well-evidenced it is always going to receive a lot of political blowback in a fossil fuel dependent world and it is both a complex and new problem facing us. Vaccinations on the other hand have worked so well and have eradicated disease so completely that people don’t remember why they even get them and instead have invented dangers to receiving them because they can no longer see the purpose. It’s as routine as opening your mouth and saying “Ahhh”. People don’t really question that, but it doesn’t inject anything into you and is sort of hard to get upset about, but I think when some medical advancement has been around so long and so successful we forget the reason and just see it as possibly something that isn’t necessary.
This led me to wonder if the same thing wasn’t true for how we understand morals. One of the common things you hear from atheists is that many theists are under the impression that we do not have a moral and ethical code. That such thing is not possible if we don’t have God and some supernatural system of punishment and reward. I remember my mom, who is Christian, telling me at some point that our sense of right and wrong must come from God or else where would we get it from? The general answer is easy of course, we are taught them by our parents and others. We have authority figures that tell us what is right and what is wrong (even though you can convince a child that things that are wrong are actually write, like prejudice and intolerance). The point is if as children we seem to get our morality from the authority figures in our life, perhaps it’s not surprising that many people, especially those who have no qualms about relying on the “rightness” of authority, that morality comes from what many consider the ultimate authority, God. But it seems obvious to me that morality can easily be derived through scientific investigation. Morality though has been around well before the scientific method, but humans have been around for a long enough time that we’ve been living a social experiment of morality and have simply been learning. At one time the things we take as obvious might not have been overtly obvious, even though I think some of the big ones we could figure out rather quickly as they would not be a beneficial for survival. Just like we stopped questioning why vaccines are important, perhaps we stopped questioning why certain immoral acts are wrong, such that people assume that it all must have come from some other plane of existence.
Some morals are certainly cross-cultural, like physical and sexual harm to other people’s children. This one would be a pretty obvious natural (perhaps genetic) trait because our survival does depend on the survival of the next generation. Anything that threatens that would be considered immoral. Unfortunately in many places physically or psychologically hurting your own child is not seen as wrong. It wasn’t so long ago here that, unless something got really severe, you were hardly considered in the wrong for disciplining your child with a belt or the back of your hand. Some people still adopt that attitude unfortunately in North America, and it can be worse in other countries. Regardless though we generally do go to ridiculous (and perhaps psychologically detrimental) lengths to protect children. In general though killing is not quite viewed the same way. Many think it’s okay to kill criminals (apparently it sometimes doesn’t even matter the crime…resisting arrest is enough), and killing in war is not only tolerated, but often cheered about. For some time killing your wife in a crime of passion was often considered justifiable. And many civilizations have committed genocide in our past and that has gone unpunished. So even of the most basic commandments “thou shall not kill” isn’t clear cut, so this obvious sense of right and wrong we are supposed to get from God looks pretty muddy. And if we are worried about some sort of eternal punishment system it’s amazing the ways we can justify killing when we need to dodge that one.
But let’s look at it from the perspective of “unlawful killing” which is why modern translations say “murder” instead of kill in the 10 commandments. Thus we already have human law deciding what killing is lawful and unlawful. This is not an overly divine commandment already. We know that before civilization we roamed in smallish hunter gatherer bands. Maybe a few hundred people at most. This was a time before Christianity, before the 10 commandments, so let’s assume this group doesn’t know right from wrong. Like a small town, in these small groups, you knew everyone. Surviving in the wild is not easy and everybody had a role to play, and everybody shared and worked together. Studies of hunter-gatherer tribes today show them to be rather egalitarian in compared with much of civilized society so let’s look at this as a group that gets along. So we have a group of a few 100 people, and because they have no God to tell them between right and wrong they think murder might be just something that’s okay to do. What would be the results of a few people that decided to commit a murder every once in awhile:
Population decline and lack of genetic diversity – We could at the very least learn that there is a murder rate that is not healthy for the survival of the group. Through cooperation, life was made easier, but the group gets smaller, things get harder. Population can only increase so fast. So at the very least, if murder is okay, we can’t do it too often.
Loss of those with specialized or exceptional skill. While daily tasks required teamwork there would have been certain people with more extraordinary skill. A tribe may also only have one person who does a particular job. Murder could reduce the chance for survival if such people are killed.
Growing fear and distrust. If people are being murdered, people are less likely to cooperative. Some people will simply be scared they will be next and be more cautious and protective. Some people will be angry at the loss of their child, brother, sister, etc. This will cause others to fight back. There may be false accusations, which builds more anger and distrust.
They are diminishing their own chance for survival. Once a murderer is discovered, those that committed the murders may find themselves a victim.
Now there are probably even more things that could be listed as to why murdering would not be a good idea, the least of which that we are by definition a social species for whom survival depends on our being in a group, and being able to work well in that group. It simply isn’t in our nature to murder our own, and there is a lot of good reasons why murder would not be a good idea. However when it comes to other groups, all bets are off. We may be xenophobic due to bad experiences with other groups before, or simply be xenophobic because someone who we don’t know simply isn’t somebody we can implicitly trust, and thus we can justify killing others that are not part of our society. This is why war is not against the law, but murder is. We can do similar thought experiments with many other basic things that cause harm, like stealing, or any action that causes harm both physically and emotionally. But even if it was not in our nature, this social experiment has been going on for some time and it seems quite reasonable to assume that even if there was not a morality inherent in us through birth, if at the very least we have a driving force to survive then many of the morals we have today would result through experience and observation and concluding how to survive better.
As a population we continue to adjust. Different groups share moral truths just as they would share any other type of knowledge. And so perhaps much of what we consider right and wrong is handed to us without that rediscovering process, but you can still see the impact of people doing the right thing and wrong thing today. Because even though I think that on average humans are more moral in civilized society today than in the earlier days of civilization, we still have a ways to go. People who are doing good and bad things are not of one particular faith or philosophy. If you have compassion and care about how you make others feel, you will discover yourself how to behave in a way that’s more positive everyday as you grow and learn also. It is the scientist in us that helps us become more moral. If anything, the Bible demonstrates this more completely as the old testament has very much an eye-for-an-eye mentality, but the new testament is very much about forgiveness, redemption, and compassion. Even God seemed to find a more moral way of dealing with enemies. Thus I don’t think it’s surprising that morality should progress in the same way that science does.
Cloak Unfurled 