Dec 3, 2018 - of their warrior tribes, assisted by the elites' relatives - the committed ... influenced by the ideas of the Greek Intellectuals, who lived in ancient Athens. ... the Metaphysics of Quality that were the basis for his best-selling book.
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VALUES AN ESSAY ON THE NEED FOR A MODERN APPROACH TO PERSONAL AND SOCIAL CHOICE
© H. J. SPENCER [03 Dec. 2018: 44 Kw; 8 pages]
1.0 SUMMARY This short essay attempts to emphasize the central importance of the idea of Values in the lives of individuals and societies. This will explore the related ideas of Value, Ethics, Choice, Beliefs, Quality and the central concept of ‘The Good’. This attempt illustrates one of the central concerns of western philosophy: how should individuals live their lives in their day-to-day actions and in following GroupRules for their community. We follow the modern path based on knowledge of biology and history. We suggest new approaches based on novel ideas in psychology and neuro-science. We shall conclude with suggestions for how free societies need to evolve their rules of ‘Power-over-People’ (politics).
1.1 OBJECTIVE We shall attempt to show that Values are the basis of every individual’s behavior (morality) and the basic Rules of Behavior of a society (ethics). In order to achieve this aim we must expose the reader to some Metaphysics and Analytic (or modern Anglo-American) philosophy that is heavily verbal in trying to understand important concepts that have to go beyond the network of words that arise by relying on simple usage of dictionary terms, as implied by conventional education. This will prove to be a tough journey and a harsh lesson in the limitations of rationality (or human reason) and will ultimately appeal to the reader’s intuition [see my related essay Intuition]. This is because our thinking/memory is interlinked in complex, personal networks based on our unique personal experiences, while reason is forced to go from one idea to another in a series of separate steps, as in speaking: an approach sometimes called ‘discursive’.
1.2 INTRODUCTION Western thinkers have intellectualized about Ethics for over 2,000 years, without producing any agreed view that compels widespread support across multiple communities and countries. Most societies only adopted a unitary system of ethics when compelled to by the threats from the group of military leaders of their warrior tribes, assisted by the elites’ relatives - the committed priests, who reinforced their conservative views with their magical imagery. Most western nations today have been hugely influenced by the ideas of the Greek Intellectuals, who lived in ancient Athens. These powerful thinkers created theories of reality and social behavior that were (ever since) massively influential with many people, as described so well by Joseph Pearce in his best-seller “Crack in the Cosmic Egg” [as described in my essay: Omelet.] The Greek foundational idea was that of the world as “objects”. The philosophical approach has been to create linguistic schemes to describe objective (shared) reality. The heart of the western approach to language was the introduction of the concept or “idea of the idea”. The method is to group objects into a common type or kind based on a shared property, then to ignore all the differences between real examples (called abstraction) to produce a general verbal definition that we call a universal concept, valid for all time. We will focus on a schema involving the following related ideas: Value, Ethics, Choice, Beliefs, Quality and the central concept of ‘The Good’. It is a useful technique to appreciate one’s own understanding (before reading further) to create a “WordMap” by putting each of these words in boxes arranged around a circle and then draw lines between all the pairs you think are linked.
2 It has long been recognized that there are two complementary foundational concepts to view reality: quantity and quality. Western societies have dominated the world by emphasizing quantitative ideas, first promoted by mathematicians and then adopted by merchants, who have materialized it as money. This essay is an attempt to restore the original focus on quality: the notion of good and bad actions and decisions. Quality is a very abstract concept with very few agreed examples and, as we will show, only a very vague definition but everyone develops their own intuitive ideas about ideas, called conceptions. We (again intuitively) produce clusters of those conceptions that seem to share similar qualities; we call these clusters of vague ideas ‘values’ that contribute to the foundation layer of everyone’s own thinking. The thesis here is that everyone constructs their lives around a set of personal values that often remain mostly unexamined and only slowly change (if ever). The essay’s author was convinced of this perspective by reading “Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values” (1974) by Robert M. Pirsig over 40 years ago and still viewed as the most influential book in his life. Pirsig was a frustrated professor of classical philosophy at the State College level but he became convinced that our western ideas were ‘off-track’. He devoted the rest of his life quietly developing these ideas that he later called the Metaphysics of Quality that were the basis for his best-selling book (“Zen” and its sequel “Lila: an Inquiry into Morals” - 1991). Like Aristotle’s foundational book (“Metaphysics”), he saw this as a theory of reality that deliberately was based primarily on everyone’s personal experience, combining our common awareness (not formal education) of Greek philosophy [especially the split into Subject/Object constituents], elements drawn from East Asian philosophies (seen through an earlier, hugely influential book entitled “The Meeting of East and West” by F. S. C. Northrop [that inspired my essay ‘The German Idealist Philosophers’]) and recent American philosophy, forming the school called Pragmatism. I must confess that since reading “Zen” I have become increasingly drawn to ideas of quality and moving away from quantity. Dynamic change is key to understanding the universe but Greek philosophers simplified their model of the world (Metaphysics) by ‘abolishing’ time: focusing only on timeless definitions (accessed through static ‘names’ acting as indexes) and unchanging mathematical systems. Modern physics has exposed the weakness of this simplification.
2.0 VALUE 2.1 DEFINITION Webster’s Dictionary gives 13 different definitions for the word Value; the one closest to our present is that quality of a thing according to which it is thought of being more or less desirable. Unfortunately, in their earlier definition the commercial view appears as “the worth of a thing in money at a given time.”
2.2 PHILOSOPHY Philosophers have viewed Value as simply a property of things (what is valuable? – to whom?).
3.0 ETHICS 3.1 DEFINITION Webster’s defines Ethics as the standards of conduct and moral judgment.
3.2 PHILOSOPHY Philosophers define Ethics as moral philosophy. It was the Sophists (traveling sages) who introduced the notion that ethics could/should be a subject for discussion by intellectuals in the fifth century BC; since then, this has been a perennial topic of philosophy. There have been several philosophical treatises that proposed universal morals for everyone; few of these have accumulated many supporters.
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3.3 MIDGLEY Mary Midgley (1919-2018) was an important writer on ethics, the relations of humans and animals, our tendency to misconstrue science, and the role of myth and poetry. She was one of a strikingly able and forceful group of women philosophers, who went to Oxford before WW-II; she died aged 99. She was one of the first female philosophers to reject the academic approach to philosophy in the 20th century that she described as “a form of highbrow chess for graduate students”. She illustrated the kind of independent thinking that I have long hoped for from female intellectuals. From the mid-1970s onwards she published many books and articles in which she identified the limitations of Analysis (only trying to understand things by breaking them down into smaller parts) and losing sight of Synthesis (the many ways in which parts are dependent on the wholes, in which they exist). These atomist and reductive approaches are particularly unhelpful when it comes to human self-understanding and, in trenchant and witty style, Midgley pointed the way to a saner and more helpful overview of ourselves and our world. Her first successful book was “Beast and Man” (1978) that was well received. She opened discussion of a question to which she returned many times, namely the implications of advances in science and evolutionary theory for understanding human behavior. She believed that human achievements have their roots in abilities and patterns of response which we share with other animals. So, we are not (as some existentialist thinkers have imagined) totally free to create ourselves. But, Midgley insisted, we should not extrapolate from this insight to some depressing biological determinism. More careful reflection shows that our biological endowment includes a capacity to develop a shared culture, and our culture in turn sustains individual creativity. Beginning in 1979, she undertook a public debate with Richard Dawkins, who had shot to international fame with his best-selling “The Selfish Gene”. Although Dawkins tried to hide behind claims that he was only using metaphors to describe evolutionary theory, Midgley correctly pointed out that Dawkins’ overall message was the misleading idea that our genes doom us to individual selfishness. The huge repetition of Dawkins’ views since has proven a mainstay of conservative thought, confirming Midgley’s insights. In 1991, Midgley wrote the lead essay in “A Companion to Ethics” (edited by Peter Singer, Director of the Centre for Human Bioethics, Melbourne). Here she agrees that humans livings in groups need Rules to Keep the Peace within their social groups (families, through tribes to societies). She dismisses the two oldest views on Ethics: Firstly, the Cynical, such as Thomas Hobbes’ “egoistic prudence” requiring a powerful ruler (Leviathan) to ensure conformity and abolish internal violence; secondly, the Christian: the ‘Fall of Man’ for opposing God’s will. Midgley dismisses Hobbes’ view as ignoring the many examples of decent behavior such as: sense of fairness, friendship, loyalty, compassion, gratitude, generosity, sympathy, family love and affection. This broad range of positive modes of relationship, she sees as too vast to have arisen only by active, rational thinking about Fear-of-the-Other.
3.4 ANIMAL EVOLUTION I have been powerfully convinced of the value of P. D. MacLean's “Triune Brain Hypothesis”; so then most bad human behavior can be readily seen to match those of the reptiles: aggressive, competitive, obsessed with individual survival, etc. Since the Reptile Brain is seen as both deepest (on the brain stem) and primary, it is not surprising to find it still dominating in so many humans. A few (more females than males) have migrated to the next biological brain level - the mammalian (limbic) system that emphasizes co-operation, caring, feeling and empathy: values necessary in their role as mothers and needed more and more today, in most human affairs.
4 The highest level (neo-cortex) multiplies the powers of memory and imagination but relies on deeper levels for its motivations. This is why appeals to "intellectual solutions" (like theology, science and philosophy) have had so little impact on the growth of civilizations over the last 5,000 years; millennia dominated by the warrior/aristocratic ethos, especially in the western Greek/Roman history. My extensive readings have led me to focus more on deep (metaphysical) questions, like this, rather than the shallow, almost irrelevant areas of physics that became the false model of science for 300 years. Aristotle knew that biology and living systems promised a more rewarding research area than the abstract thoughts (especially mathematics) of his mentor, Plato. As a result, I will be developing a new research programme based on "Organic Metaphysics". Another new philosophical/neurological insight has been proposed by Ian McGilchrist, who identified two complementary approaches in his masterpiece: "The Master and the Emissary" with the two hemispheres in the brains of mammals. The left hemisphere (LH) is focused (and dominant in predators) while the rival right hemisphere (RH) is more developed in animals who are usually prey (still valid for all but Top Predators). The non-verbal RH has a more global awareness and takes a longer-term view. People can see that ALL world cultures today, as descendants of Warrior Predators, are still dominated by LH people, who lack empathy for the larger community. As a result of many years of intellectual training (rather ‘brain-washing’), I developed (as was planned) a general acceptance of the LH bias of Greco-Roman thinking as being "Objective". But I now see this as a Social Control Mechanism with little chance for the ordinary man to get a fair shake. Most people rightly rely on the RH for intuition about the most important aspects of their lives (LOVE, FAMILY, RELATIONSHIPS, etc.) based on their own experiences [one can call this "Rationality", if wished]. Moreover, few people have their minds changed by so-called Rational discussion, as their own Conceptions vary widely from the Orthodox meanings given to Concepts. Most intellectuals claim they run their lives by Reason (rationalizing) but most have little idea why they behave as they do, because our unconscious mind accounts for over 90% of the human brain activities. Most people follow the Pragmatists: "betting their lives on their beliefs [that they then call "True"], so they are NOT going to risk their life's trajectory by switching metaphysical beliefs just because someone verbalizes smoothly. I continue to admire the good sense of most people.
3.5 SOCIAL EVOLUTION I share Midgley’s criticisms of extreme individualism that has evolved from Ancient Greek styles of thinking (and most masculine philosophy). We both dismiss of ‘Survival of the Fittest’ propagated by my namesake in his popular interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution – a way of thinking she calls “pseudo-evolution”. Only the most aggressive and ruthless benefit from this level of social competition – the men who always rise to the top in Warrior Cultures; in effect, we are rewarding the most violent. This competition models the Newtonian view of physics: individual atoms banging into each other. In contrast, Midgley describes the co-operative activities between species and even in groups of social animals and insects. Humans have long demonized some wild animals (“beasts”) but few animals match humans for violence and especially cruelty to other members of their own species. The one behavior we share with most animals, especially mammals, is the care for our own offspring. We see this phenomenon in all kinds of human society, irrespective of culture and historical traditions. In fact, it is difficult to imagine any society surviving over extended time frames if they did not give preferential care to their own family. It is not surprising to find ‘Concern for Kith and Kin’ (friends and family) lie at the heart of all human ethics.
5 Even predators co-operate at the group level, trying to monopolize a given area of potential prey, for the exclusive diet of their own group. Perhaps humans exhibited this behavior when we were at the development stage of “Hunter-Gathers”, even largish tribes of up to 1,000 people; as can be found in Papua New Guinea today. Each tribe views its neighbors with suspicion and small wars sometimes break out. However, the development of agriculture produced excess calories for the group, so tribes could merge into much larger aggregates that sometimes resulted in some villages expanding to small cities in the neo-lithic (New Stone Age, around 10,000 years ago). The appearance of cities was a revolutionary step in human development for several reasons, including: living peacefully with strangers (most people are limited to about 500 ‘friends’); the appearance of paid killers (called soldiers) and the rise of successful merchants who were richer than most of their fellow citizens. When these militarized cities competed with each other, then single, larger groupings arose called Empires led by the most powerful city. It is very difficult to change human behaviour en masse because our Cultures have huge inertia (assisted deliberately by conservative institutions - not least schools and universities). Part of our problem in the Tribal Phase, is that far too many people are unsure of themselves and take their cues (answers) from their family, friends, society and professions!! Just look at how stuck we still are with the obsolete ideas of The Old Greeks, such as mathematics, logic and philosophy, which developed for, in and by primitive small City-States, like Athens with its tiny class of powerful, ruling rich families like Plato's. Really, do these pederasts have anything useful to tell us today? While Plato and Aristotle were concerned with character-centred virtue ethics, the Aztec approach is perhaps better described as socially-centred virtue ethics. If the Aztecs were right, then ‘Western’ philosophers have been too focused on individuals, too reliant on assessments of character, and too optimistic about the individuals’ ability to correct their own vices. Instead, according to the Aztecs, we should look around to our family and friends, as well as our ordinary rituals or routines, if we hope to lead a better, more worthwhile existence. Their values seem much more effective (social co-operation).
4.0 CHOICE 4.1 DEFINITION Webster’s defines a Choice as the result of the action of selecting out (by preference) from the things or activities available. I see people making choices based on their own values and sense of qualities.
4.2 PHILOSOPHY Philosophers view choosing as a mental activity from two or more possibilities (including not acting) that results in an external action. Deciding implies conscious mental activity, whereas choosing may just be a habit, like many animals.
5.0 BELIEFS 5.1 DEFINITION Webster’s defines a belief as the conviction that certain ideas are real or statements are true, even though certainty may be absent. Related ideas are faith, trust, confidence. As can be seen, this idea is foundational between mental models and external reality (existence, occurrence).
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5.2 PHILOSOPHY Philosophers have long viewed beliefs as mental states, representational in character; taking a statement as its content and considered by the holder as either true or false; the philosophy of mind views this as the primary cognitive state with other awareness states (such as knowledge, perception, memory and intention using beliefs as the building blocks of the mind). The pickiness of philosophers may be judged by their common agreement that the same idea (e.g. ‘snow is white’) is not the same thing when occurring in two different people’s heads. Beliefs are often sufficient to initiate actions. The recent American pragmatic philosopher, C. S. Peirce proposed that we will only “bet our life” on a belief that we believe to be true. It is this essay’s belief that: “Everything is a Belief”; whether religious, political or ideological. Beliefs are a personal response to one's life experiences; all are valid - comparisons are difficult but then I now believe in the Subjective being more valuable to each person than the Objective (group) Opinion.
6.0 QUALITY 6.1 DEFINITION Webster’s gives 10 different definitions for the word Quality; the one closest to our usage here is the degree of excellence (highest level of goodness) which a thing possesses.
6.2 PHILOSOPHY Philosophers have defined Quality as a property (or characteristic) that constitutes the basic nature of an object or thing (i.e. its necessary properties). Some have even viewed a quality as any property of a thing. In contemporary philosophy, this is still a vague and contentious subject that is usually skipped over quickly. Some, like Pirsig, view quality as preceding our intellectual awareness of sensory reality. This is closely connected to the British school of philosophy called Empiricism that we now know relates to the unconscious (pre-cognitive) processes of perception where animal brains organize their incoming sensory messages into groupings to simplify our reactions to the outside world prior to the results reaching our higher levels of attention and consciousness and long before we are able to link this information to our existing linguistic schemes. Pirsig assumed that quality is the basic physical interaction of the whole universe that I have identified with the interaction between electrons. At the human level, this basic interaction is perceived as attraction or repulsion, or in terms of regular vocabulary: love and hate. Love thus becomes the ultimate human form of pairing. In Pirsig’s conceptual hierarchy, he assigns qualities to four levels: Inorganic, Biological, Social, Intellectual. In my physics theory, change in the universe only occurs between pairs of electrons when they interact. It must always be remembered that Quality cannot be quantified as it is intrinsically dynamic but can be ‘frozen’ in our memories; it always defines the next happenings in reality. Doubling the amount of 'Good' stuff may be harmful or unnecessary (that way leads to greed). Quantity is the lazy person's way of avoiding quality judgements and personal responsibility. The ideal should always be sufficient ("enough") and this is a (personal) qualitative judgement, not a synonym for quantity. Most people can get an intuitive sense of dynamic quality when they listen to music they love.
7.0 THE GOOD 7.1 DEFINITION Webster’s gives 17 definitions of this basic word; the preferred definition is a general term for approval or commendation i.e. desirable. Only bizarre situations lead to anyone preferring the bad over the good.
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7.2 PHILOSOPHY Some philosophers have defined The Good as any property that anyone approves of (a pretty vague and therefore useless set of words). G. E. Moore was a leading professor of philosophy at Cambridge. He was notably unusual as an academic philosopher for his directness and simplicity, so that for example, in his most famous 1903 book “Principia Ethica”, he wrote that the idea of the Good was not definable but was a simple universal idea that was understood intuitively by everyone (and so, always subjective). This upsets philosophers who prefer universal, unchanging conceptual definitions, as then Aristotle must fail to find an objective, timeless definition of the ‘Greatest Good’ or ‘good-in-itself’. Pirsig’s “Zen” is ultimately about Goodness, although he became finally convinced (as stated at the end of ‘Lila’) that ‘Good was a noun, not an adjective’; this was his solution to the problem of Quality. One of the central beliefs of this essay is the proposition that ‘Good' is a biological decision as all life is contingent on life promoting/supporting actions that require suitable decisions to survive and thrive. This perspective applies to both individuals AND societies. It is not arbitrary or simply cultural; societies can disappear just like an individual life form. In this sense, Morality and Ethics are Absolute. It is one’ ordered set of VALUES that define if we make good decisions most of the time or not. Values are empirical !!! but occasionally powerful experiences will adjust the Value preferences.
8.0 POLITICS In a democracy, the official government has an agreed monopoly on legal violence. Thus, as there are deep separations in values (the Conservative and the Liberal) it is inevitable that there will then be deep political divisions over which group will control the government for the next agreed term of office. The real problem is that each group wants to use the state power, through the Law, to control those who do not share their values. In extreme cases, such as divisions over religious views, this can break down into Civil War: the ultimate breakdown in the agreed value of civil order. The solution must be the growth of toleration of differences and the avoidance of legalizing contentious positions. Historically, when people have been free to choose their values, two distinct clusters have arisen that have been called Conservative and Liberal. The primary difference are views on individualism versus the group or (by shorthand): Selfish versus Social. The usual set of values (often complementary) found within each cluster are as follows. Conservative: Strong preference for the self and (perhaps) their own family members, very resistant to all restrictions on their personal freedom, regular preference for the Old (and ‘proven’), belief in unchanging (bad) Human Nature, doubtful about science and experts, tolerant of inequalities (strong belief in ‘breeding’), trust in those in authority (Law & Justice), resistive to most changes (changes are unlikely to be positive), loyalty to old ideas (especially religion), suspicious of others (especially government), emphasis on self-discipline and personal responsibility for one’s action, broad respect for hierarchies and social leaders, minimal empathy for the suffering of others, tolerance for state violence (military & police), fascination with money, preferring quantity over quality; often (not always) highly risk averse. Liberal: Freedom of personal choice (sexual), easy divorce, faith in formal education (meritocracy), trust in science and experts, tolerant of strong, centralized (non-tyrannical) governments, suspicious of markets, commitment to fairness (justice), opposed to inherited wealth (to be minimized by redistribution), against religious intolerance, opposed to state violence, faith in legal rights and protections, belief in inevitable progress and social improvements.
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9.0 CONCLUSIONS Good/Bad is the basic spectrum of Values that each of us must use to make decisions as we navigate our lives. QUALITY is the essence of Life. The biological urge to SURVIVE can only be defeated by the "Urge to Merge" - in other words LOVE, with its miracle of replacement (BIRTH). Thus, the OLD can gracefully exit and allow the NEW to try to improve. The modern age is characterized by excessive, commercial activity that has generated an explosion of ‘products’. However, this blunts our ability to choose; so we need to remember that neither money nor ‘stuff’ are ultimately satisfying. History shows us that this usually involves rewarding activities, such as developing our personal relationships and cultivating genuine friends. Since values are both personal and foundational then this may explain why so many strongly resist theirs being changed by others, which makes them brakes on cultural changes. It is ironic that Liberal ideas arose with the Modern Age around 1600, particularly after the violent religious civil wars; it is a further irony of western history that this New Emergence was stimulated by the birth of Capitalism and (financial) markets. Unfortunately, our recent history (post 1914) has demonstrated that we can no longer put our faith in traditional Rationality and reliance on determining The Truth. Our civilization now desperately needs a new synthesis of our divergent traditions to produce a radical dynamism that is stable and sustainable. This requires a new consensus on the values that we can agree on. Perhaps, only by admitting that Values are Subjective will most people avoid the temptation to use the State to promote a group’s singular conception of the Good. This implies that we must be cautious about those attracted to "Power over (other) People" (i.e. Politics), who hold very powerful values that include compelling others to agree with them; they are too dangerous to be allowed to change the laws of the land. We are left with the critical question: Can the promotion of individual freedom (non-institutionalized value promotion) generate a self-sustaining society, especially in a multi-ethnic and diverse religious society?
