Story of the moral

If I do not believe in God or absolute truth or even the spirit, how can I believe in right and wrong?

I believe we came here together and we cannot go on alone. I do not believe we made a covenant with God but I do believe we made one with each other. There was a point in our evolution, if you like, when we decided to swim together or sink together.

I have never doubted it. It's the fundament of my beliefs about human society. Breaching the covenant we have with each other is at the heart of the wrongs we do each other and honouring it is never a bad thing.

We built cities for each other, laid roads, made monuments to what we had together. You cannot put all that down to self-interest, even if it did play a part.

The way I see it, conservatives are the party of denying the covenant. Despite the evidence that we reached the present day through cooperating, they believe we need not cooperate. (BTW, if you do not believe this, you are not actually a conservative and might consider joining the guys in white hats over here.) I could no more become a conservative than I could become a bat. I do not have it in me to hate my fellow man enough.

More's the pity, I sometimes think. I'd be a rich man if I were tougher, if I could stop letting things matter. I'm smart enough and I think I could have found the gumption if it were needed. Of course, it's not much needed where I am.

It's not much cloth to build your morals out of and I find it leaves me happily mostly free of cant. Of course all of us are prey to the confusion that can be taken for hypocrisy if viewed without generosity (but is more often simply the outcome of having individual answers that each are good but do not make a coherent picture).

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Thinking further about the idea that Adam never awoke, it seems to me that the world is far too dreary to be a dream. It is astonishingly coherent, despite its underlying incoherence.

Do we ever spy, out of the corner of our eyes, parts that do not fit? Sometimes I believe we do until I can call in the rational cavalry to stamp on that nonsense.

But much of the incoherence we feel the world has lies in the differences in how we see it, not in how it looks. Not understanding that these are different things is the basis of a great deal of the pain we cause each other. Hang on, are they different? Well, as discussed, maybe they are not, but in that case, what I meant to say is that not acting as if they were different is the basis of the pain, and it is still the case that the incoherence lies in our vision.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:44 am