Why morality sucks

 

I have just seen this quote by Jordan Peterson...

“You're going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don't do. You don't get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you're going to take. That's it.”

Now I am not one of the anti Peterson brigade, you know the ones...the ones who's first line of criticism is to point out that his fan base is 'predominantly young white males who lack a father figure'. And I do find a lot of what he says interesting.

The father figure comment is interesting though...as though there is a current need for some benign authority figure to come along and tell you to stand up straight, tidy your room and get your hair cut.

Of course that benign father figure who told you what to do was not always Jordan Peterson, it was once God.

So let's start with the idea that morality is someone telling you what is right or wrong. Now that someone might be yourself, but even here we personify this with the tiny angel and devil on our shoulders. We need to be the one telling ourselves what is right or wrong but we'll get to that.

Through-out history the ones that told you what to do were those in authority. This dynamic must have started before humans emerged (Peterson's lobsters?). 

Actions would have had consequences. Someone ate poison berries and died. That consequence would have been noted in the collective viewpoint of the group and measures would have been taken to store this useful knowledge within the group. Natural hierachies would have emerged and those at the top would have had to transmit this useful knowledge of consequences to the group and create strategies to pass this knowledge down through the generations.

As nasty consequences emerged over and over again, the antidote to these recuring bad consquences would have been formed into an over arching framework of rules and restrictions. As good group consequences would have been favourable, these good group consequences would have needed to overide good personal consequences. If someone conveniently killed anyone in the group that got in their way the group would have had to kill or at least stop that person to save the group. And in many cases this would have been someone trying to usurp those in authority, and those in authority would have in some case been tempted to act in a way that was personally beneficial and not group beneficial by arguing there position as as representative of the group. (sound familiar?)

At times of scarcity other groups would tried to come and take your stuff so a tribal morality would have developed. They may have come in peace but brought with them diseases your group were not immune to and infected your group.  Tribes would have become self protecting and self identifying.

Here we can see how ideas of the group and personal liberty start to rub each other up. Group mentality is tribal mentality and this links to our disgust urge.

Disgust is the primal morality. It's deep within all our systems as it developed so long ago. It's what stops us eating the poison berries, it's what makes us suspicious of other tribes, it's what makes us want to kill the murderer and it is the poison of which Dr Peterson speaks.

I have always found the work of Julian Jaynes really interesting. Jaynes was a researcher that developed a theory about the development of our consciousness. It goes like this (from wikipedia)

Jaynes explains (his theory) as a learned behavior that “arises ... from language, and specifically from metaphor.” With this understanding, Jaynes then demonstrated that ancient texts and archeology can reveal a history of human mentality alongside the histories of other cultural products. His analysis of the evidence led him not only to place the origin of consciousness during the 2nd millennium BCE but also to hypothesize the existence of an older non-conscious “mentality that he called the bicameral mind, referring to the brain’s two hemispheres”.

An older. non concious mentality!? Bicameralism can be described as

(the condition of being divided into "two-chambers") is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys

I remember reading this book as an early adult and being shocked that this theory was not well known to the wider public. It got me interested in the idea of the 'esoteric'; that certain ideas inherently remain hidden from the wider public and are only accessible with special knowledge.

I think this is one of those ideas. 

We are so used to having an inner monologue (the angels and devils on our shoulder) it is hard to believe that for the most part of human history we acted under the influence of an actual voice at our shoulder (auditory hallucinations tend to emanate from the behind your head just above your shoulder) That we were not concious but automatons reacting to voices that we hallucinated and that these voices told how to act and what to think!

For me this has incredible ramifications to understanding morality if it is the case. Morality would have started out as a voice that told you what to do. It would have been so easy for primitive humans to believe in animal spirits or worship the sun as they may have heard these entities telling them what to do and what not to do. And when their group leader died they would have carried on hearing them tell them what to do. This explains why kings often became gods after they died.

And it is easy to see how morality stopped being advice for good living constantly negotiated by humans and turned in an objective set of rules set out by the authoritarian voice of God.

Jordan Peterson has gained fame by (perhaps correctly) pointing out the tribal morality of the woke left. His ideas have explained how the void created by the confusion that is post modern philosphy has been filled by a return to a pre enlightenment tribalistic morality where the percieved interests of any subjectively determined underpriveleged group are ideologically indisputable regardless of competing moral principles of personal liberty and (most worrying) empiricism and rationalism.

For the social justice brigade a new authoritarian god has emerged. And this a god that states that 2+2 does not equal 4 and that the XX and XY chromosone is a social construct. (yes this is real)

But they have begat a corresponding authoritarian god who warns us to make our bed and choose our poison wisely. It is not healthy.

But every action or inaction does not always have to correspond with the taking of poison either. Again this this is someone trying to tell you what to do by drawing on the disgust urge. And this is the problem I have with that quote.

The disgust urge can be seen as a primal urge that developed in us before we even were humans.

This is contrasted by what could be called a group morality and has been discussed a lot in this post. At it's best we could call it a communitarian morality. At it's worst a totalitarian tribal morality. We have seen an upsetting emergence of this in recent times on both sides of the political debate.

And these two types of morality can be seen as contrasting with a morality based upon personal liberty, at its best a morality of individual freedom, at it's worst the morality of unchecked hedonism.

But I hope we can just keep in our mind the reason why morality sucks, and that is when we forget it's core and roots are in our humanity. For those religious types or those who find solace in the ideas of the extreme right or left they will find this hard to swallow. 

But for the rest of us please try and remember...

Morality is just advice for good living constantly negotiated by humans for humans.

(and if God exists he does not give a toss what we do)