I thought I'd open up a bit on matters of morality today, give a more personal perspective. 

In the end, how are we to judge what other people really believe? For example, they may be agnostic deep inside, but lie about what they believe because it is simply easier, socially, to do so. Thus, even what they say sometimes can't be trusted as an indicator of what is going on inside of them. 

What they do, on the other hand, is real and, in most cases, irreversible. My actions reveal who I am, which can be a surprise even to me. I can apologize for mistakes I've made, but I can't take them back. They're in the past, and to reiterate the obvious, the past is set in concrete. It is what it is. It can't be undone. Long established patterns in words and deeds are the more reliable indicators of who we are, and even these evolve for every one of us over time. 

Let me offer a personal example of how actions reveal beliefs. 


                




For about six months after my first marriage broke up, I used to see cunning and manipulation in the faces of the pretty girls on the magazine covers in the drugstores and super-markets. An arch look. They were all, for me then, aiming to entice and control men. Hamlet has a similar period of anger and disillusionment in the play that bears his name. He does come out of it in the end, though sadly for him, only after Ophelia, the most innocent party in the play, is dead and gone. But he does come back to himself, I think, as I did after about six months of anger. My point is that I know that in those times, I said some mean things to women who had never done me a particle of harm. I could not hold the meanness in.    

As an aside, if you are a male who has periods of misogyny, let me point out the obvious for you: all of those women with the artful make-up and hairstyles, and the clothes that show various levels of cleavage, are mostly unaware of whatever effects such enticements may have on men because men show no reaction most of the time anyway. What those women are doing is imitating a look that they saw on a t.v. show or in a fashion magazine or even on some other confident women that they look up to. There is no diabolical plan, no maneuvering for control. The truth is that, just like most men, they aren't that organized. They are just trying to get by and preserve their own self-esteem. As Thoreau said, the mass of human beings truly lead lives of quiet desperation. We're mostly sad and scared and barely holding on. 



                            



What is really driving daily actions for all of us, men and women, is the cultural code of whatever nation we have grown up in. That code is written, never forget, to serve and preserve itself. If that means that it destroys the spirits of many of its citizens, both men and women, to the system, such little tragedies are irrelevant. The culture has been written by evolution to drive people to work, reproduce, and then raise their young to do the same. The rest is ornament, and much of the time, for both men and women, it doesn't work anyway.  



                


Where is this train of thought leading? 

My obsession, in spite of all of this, is to get ordinary people to see that our cultures are programmable. This means that we still can re-make our world from the inside. We only need to agree to look at what makes a "way of life", a culture, and then, together, begin to sift out the most logical, basic "ways" (that is, mores and customs) from many cultures and write those into a code of values and behavior that we will teach to all of the kids coming up. This task will be hard, but far from impossible. My suspicion is that it will be roughly as hard for each adult in the masses of human beings as learning to drive is for those who have never driven a car. In the meantime, for the children, if we do the work conscientiously, a universal moral code to guide all human behavior will soon come to seem natural, the way things are "supposed to be".

We will have to do the work together because freedom and love are prime values; they are parts of the foundation on which we must begin to build, the values that empower us over the long haul of millions of people and thousands of years to handle uncertainty, a basic trait of the universe. But it can be done. If we embark on this project and accomplish it, the hard work will almost certainly fall to elected representatives. Direct participation by seven and a half billion people would be impractical, though computers and "big data" have made all of us having some meaningful input doable. 

The theory is there; we only need to put it into practice.  

And why would we make the effort? Because the alternative, the one that history tells us has kept coming around again every generation or so for thousands of years, this time might very well be the end of us all. We would make this stupendous effort because it is rational, what reasoning and evidence tell us must be done and will not occur unless we make it so.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, have a nice day anyway.