Moral corsets

The phrase ‘moral corset’ appeared during conversation this weekend and begs to be played with.

Moral corsets are socio-cultural creations which keep good stuff from leaking out and bad stuff from leaking in. Variations can be worn by individuals, families, communities and by a wide range of subcultural groups. Their main function is to support the process of enculturation which on the positive side involves education and training and, on the negative side, involves brainwashing and indoctrination.

All socio-cultural entities have a beginning, a middle and an end and change their moral corsets as they move from womb to tomb and find that norms crack and paradigms shift. (“The only constant thing is change.”)

A moral corset is a cognitive and emotive exoskeleton which has to be shed and replaced at the various development stages. (‘When I became a man I put away childish things.’) Culture is a corset factory which produces goods of varying quality and cost which are therefore status symbols. There is a standard set of moral corsets for ordinary folk and a transcendental set for radicals.

Special moral corsets are worn by soldiers and by those who support the war effort at home. They are quickly put in place by mainstream propaganda so as to demonise the enemy and make mass murder acceptable.

Moral corsets are stuffed with ethical considerations – eg good v bad, right v wrong - and with rules regulations, laws, customs, and habits.

Man is a social animal that is hard wired for foraging in small groups in the African savanna but now lives by shopping as individuals in supermarkets. To overcome the inconsistencies, we are now obliged to wear officially sanctioned moral corsets.

There are basically two sets of mainstream, moral corsets – conservative/republican and socialist/liberal; and there is a third, smaller group of anarchist/libertarian. (“You are either for us or against us.”)

Amoral evolution

This short article hangs on the Taoist notion that ‘the reality that can be described is not the real reality.’ I consider acts of God, People and Nature and the concept of an intentional agent

Consider this simple sentence – “People forage for food”.

It can be restated at a more general level – “Intentional agents act to achieve a result.”

Here are some more examples:

Intentional agent	Acts	Achieves a result
SUBJECT	VERB	OBJECT
People	Forage	Food
People	Have sex	Children
God	Rain	Good harvest
God	Flood	Homes washed away

We speak using sentences which require a subject, verb and object. But the concept of ‘subject’ as an ‘intentional agent’ and as ‘God’ is problematic if, like me, you are not convinced that ‘God’ exists.

People talk of Acts of God as if he (sic) was a superhuman bloke who works in mysterious ways such that his intentions are unclear. But this makes him (or the agentic devil) an easy scapegoat when things go wrong; and when myth and magic are called on to paper over the cracks and legitimise the role of the religious elite.

Some of what used to be acts of God can now be branded as acts of people (eg global warming) or as acts of nature (eg volcanoes). Acts of nature can be labelled as serendipitous and left at that. But we are hard wired to look for patterns and agents so that acts can be explained and understood. But, luckily, by taking thought, we can do away with the concept and metaphor of intentional agent.

The gap can be filled by the concept of ‘Evolution by natural selection’ because (a) it is not a self-conscious agent, and (b) it has no intention.

“Sitting quietly doing nothing, Spring comes
and the grass grows by itself.

Winter turns into Spring all by itself. There is no central, meteorological planning committee and no forward looking intention/purpose. And so it is with the ice ages, continental drift and the big bang.

Evolution has no ethics. It has no plans or planners. So nothing can go right or wrong.

Evolution can be viewed in retrospect as if it had been well planned and implemented but, unlike acts of people, the retrospect has no prospect.

Earlier we considered the phrase “Intentional agents act to achieve a result.” We can now revise it in four ways:

1	“Acts of God achieve a result.”	But there is no God
2	“Acts of People achieve a result.”	OK
3a	“Acts of Nature achieve a result.”	But there is no egoic actor
3b	“A non-agent without intention achieves a result”	Stuff happens

Therefore

Amoral evolution - Amen 

Mind minding

There are those who reckon human nature to be fundamentally benign. But much of what happens in the world is far from nice. Happenings include the physical (eg beautiful sunsets and massive volcanoes) and the social (feeding the hungry and large scale genocides). This calls to mind the pragmatics of the serenity prayer:

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference”

Serenity and suffering are mind-made by nature, nurture and serendipity. These are not cast in stone. There is neural plasticity. We are getting better at taking thought and changing minds - especially at being non-egoic.

The lists that follow were generated non-egoically: they deal with ‘I’ and mind.

>>>>>>>>>> 

Sometimes ‘I’ am thoroughly enmeshed by thought, feelings, and moods (TFM) such that ‘I’ operate like a zombie on auto-pilot. Typically, there is an unfocussed stream of short lived topics

Sometimes ‘I’ take a few minutes to just sit and witness the TFM that pass through the attention centre. It is then obvious that the mind has a mind of its own.

Sometimes ‘I’ take a few minutes to sit still and count breaths from one to ten. But the mind usually goes off at a tangent.

Sometimes ‘I’ am minded to mind the minding process. This follows the ancient Greek notion that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Sometimes ‘I’ operate in a state of non-egoic flow. Excellent work gets done but ‘I’ am not present eg an athlete in the zone, a musician in the groove, a dish washer in the kitchen. Me when writing blogposts and when doodling.

Sometimes ‘I’ follow Dogen’s advice to just sit and drop off body and mind. This is another way of being non-egoic and blissful.

>>>>>>>>>> 

The mind is gigantic and is made up of interacting modules that come hard wired from nature and more flexibly from nurture. Most of the interactions are in the unconscious.

The mind creates stories by relating past memories to present stimuli with a view to approaching, avoiding or ignoring them. A few of the stories pass into the self-conscious.

The mind can change. It is influenced by its immediate environment. Feed it good stuff and it will be positive, feed it bad stuff and it will be negative.

The mind appears very different when closely examined in social psychology experiments. (eg nudging, sunk cost, confirmation bias etc).

The mind is unpredictable. To which ‘I’ does it belong? Who or what pulls its strings from moment to moment?

>>>>>>>>>> 

Natural selection does not take account of morality, not even of karma. Belligerent, war mongering cultures tend to populate the future. I am minded of the preamble to the UNESCO constitution: "since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed".

Feel first

When the environment changes there is a physical and cognitive reaction in the unconscious. After the reaction ‘reason’ is used to justify it in the self-conscious.

Then we are choosy about the ‘evidence’ that is available. We accept what agrees with our reaction and reject what disagrees. This is confirmation bias.

Experimental evidence in support of this pattern of thinking comes from recent social psychology and moral philosophy.

The European Enlightenment in the 17-18^th century reified reason and put the unconscious on the back burner. But there is no need to polarise the topic. Self-consciousness will have its uses. Perhaps in helping to shape slower and more thoughtful responses.

Note that ‘truth’ is not an issue. Fast pragmatism rules when the issue is snakes, impetuous chiefs or war like neighbours.

In my retirement there is rarely a rush. The intention is to shut down the busy self-conscious and leave the unconscious in control. The mind has a mind of its own. Non-egoic flow. And the cunning conundrum – which ‘I’ is or should be in charge?

The game plan - feel first and allow the emergence of motivation and intention.

eagleman future brain

Building empires in perspective

Stuff happens - positive, negative and neutral. Some of it can become part of historical records – personal, local, national, and international. But such records are inevitably biased given that they are constructed by the idiosyncratically encultured mindbrains of particular historians.

I am presently reading T M Devine (2003) Scotland’s Empire 1600-1815 (474pp). He is a highly respected historian and I am fascinated by what he writes. Topics that have so far captured my attention include:

• In the 1600s there was a lot of traffic from Scotland into Europe and the Baltic.
• Emigration is a more complex topic than I have been led to believe.
• Scottish Presbyterianism has a lot to answer for
• In what I have read so far he has not said much about the native Americans.
• American settlers needed a wide range of skilIs and there were many openings for entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are risk taking business people who speculate and innovate. They are the shakers and movers who make things happen They are the rulers rather than the ruled. They are the Leaders, Managers, and Administrators (LMA) who make jobs for the workers (employees, servants, indentured labour, slaves, wage slaves). The bosses and the workers need each other.

Businessmen and politicians have to generate policy and figure strategy, tactics, and operations to implement it. But there is rarely enough facts and evidence to make an inarguable case so people fall back on bluster and bullshit. This can be a source of stress and burn out in the elites and the masses. But this discomfort can be viewed as both positive and necessary.

America was a new world. The many categories of migrants had to face up to new ways of living and working. Norms had to be cracked and paradigms shifted. Anxiety, panic, stress and depression were to be expected in the face of massive cognitive dissonance.

The new world would have looked different to different categories of citizens – old/young, male/female, boss/worker, slave driver/slave, rich/poor, businessman/politician, cleric/atheist, class/ethnicity, extravert/introvert.

SO – stuff happens - who lived the historical life? and who could/should write the history stories. Bias is inevitable but it can be held in perspective.