6.9.07: Graduation, Ethics, Spaceships

At breakfast my mother was eating off one of my commemorative plates — and she apologized quietly to the Queen Mum for putting bread on her face.

Over breakfast mom began to reminisce about a woman’s place in Scotland when she was growing up.

It was pre-war. There was (maybe still is) a test called the 11-plus that you would take when you were 11, and if you passed you were allowed to got to a high school that prepped you for college, and if you didn’t they taught you home ec and typing. There was no choice in the matter. Anyway, Glasgow didn’t have enough universities even if more folks were available to go. My mom passed, the only one in her class of 30, so she went to the high school, but eventually she was pressured by her family to drop out and get a job as they figured she’d only get married anyway, so why finish? Besides, they sort of claimed higher education might have been getting above her station, as her dad was a sign painter. Most women weren’t allowed into universities at that time anyway. So she was expressing some exasperation and regret — though later, when I was in high school, she went to night school at the local university in Baltimore and earned a teaching degree. She got a job teaching special ed kids and felt pretty fulfilled and stimulated for a while, even though fighting the school administration was always an uphill battle.

Then there was some talk of the war. Her younger sister was sent to the country, as were all children under 15 — to live with relatives if they had any or strangers if they didn’t. Air raids and getting up in the middle of the night with a pre-packed suitcase and hiding in a shelter or a sister-in-law’s basement.

At Malu's graduation dinner I sat next to Michael Daube, who has been building small clinics and hospitals in India and elsewhere. (He said the best place to have a suit made is now Nepal). [Link to Citta, Michael's organization.]

We were talking about fundamentalist Christians, I think — someone at the table had mentioned how the right made abortion the pivotal decisive issue in many elections. I mentioned the talk I’d heard by Jonathan Haidt at the New Yorker conference in which he attempted to briefly delineate the 2 kinds of morality at work in the world. (There’s a good interview with him in The Believer as well.)

Anyway, Haidt says something like this: in a cosmopolitan society like New York, San Francisco, London or many other contemporary cities in which various people and cultures must coexist, personal morality adjusts itself to accommodate the multiple moral codes of the surrounding people. The tendency is for people in multicultural places to adopt a live-and-let-live moral philosophy — what others do is OK as long as it does harm anyone else. This, however, is vastly different than the traditional set of moral codes that most societies live by. In most societies, where most people are more or less culturally the same, there exists a network of moral codes based on family, loyalty, respect for authority, justice, fairness and purity. Haidt claims that “liberal” societies have abandoned many of these moral codes — purity, for example — as being a personal matter for each individual and not something to be imposed by society. You can have religious laws inside your temple or house, the liberals would say, but don’t try to impose them on the whole society. In traditional societies — and, one might argue, also according to our genetic predisposition — the larger network of values holds sway. The two moralities, by nature, are mutually exclusive.

To me it seems that the ideas of the enlightenment have resonated out and are now tearing the world apart as they come into contact with traditional cultures, whether in Colorado or Lahore.

Here’s a paragraph from Haidt and his collaborators:

Moral foundations theory proposes that five innate psychological systems form the foundation of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture constructs its particular morality as a set of virtues, values, and ideas based on or related to these five foundations (as well as to many other non-moral aspects of the evolved mind). The current American culture war can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality using only the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five foundations, including In-group/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. The theory is an extension of Richard Shweder's theory of the "three ethics" commonly used around the world when people talk about morality: the ethics of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity.

So…apropos all of this, Michael mentioned he’d recently been to a town in Pakistan near the Afghan border where they practice a rather extreme form of self-punishment. Even little kids whip themselves with blades imbedded in the whips leaving steams of blood running down their backs. Some Western journalists were on hand to view the spectacle, and along with Michael they were rounded up and taken to a “safe” viewing area. I’d seen a similar spectacle in Malaysia, a Hindu ceremony called Taipusam, in which the adepts stick metal rods through their cheeks and hang limes from hooks stuck into their chests. Significantly, no blood gushes forth during the Taipusam ceremonies — there’s a mind-over-body control at work.

[Source]

Michael got to talking with some Pashtun lads who were asking him questions about the United States. At some point he could tell they had more burning questions but were hesitant in asking. He said they could ask him anything, no problem, anything they wanted to ask they could ask.

So they asked him, “Why do Americans have sex with animals?” This was, it seemed, not a question about some freakish subculture of zoophiles; the assumption was that it’s quite common in America. This is what Americans do. These boys have limited access to TV or any media — they may have seen some Hollywood movies — and apparently at sometime or other they viewed an American porno featuring animal sex. (My guess is those pornos are paraded and distributed as examples of the decadence of the West. Michael confirms this — “The lads were shown the film by the Wahabi religious leaders in the area! Its a direct way of controlling and rallying the culture against the west.”) These boys also made no distinction between what they saw in movies and what might be reality….movies which would include the decedent sexy behavior of the parade of tarts and slutty women featured in most Western films.

To these lads, whose morality is of the first, traditional, type, there is no question this is ungodly satanic behavior — which should be stamped out for the good of mankind. By any means necessary. And it is proof that the West, whose representatives are surrounding them in increasing numbers, is certainly Satan’s republic.

For members of the Christian Right I suspect the same viewpoint holds sway, at least amongst the churchgoers. I suspect a good number of the ministers, like Ted Haggart, Jimmy Swaggart and the others, are natural-born hypocrites who have become addicted to the power they have over their flocks. But for the congregation an issue like abortion, as Haidt implies, is not an isolated issue — it is a sign that the godless hoards are at the gates and must be stopped before the moral chains that hold us together as human beings are torn asunder.

It all seems pretty hopeless. Reconciliation, I mean. The worlds and viewpoints are mutually exclusive. There is no middle ground. Maybe understanding and empathy is possible, and that is a start, but from across a great divide.

I seem to remember Haidt might have quoted a study that claimed believers are, in general, happier — which makes intuitive sense to me. If a system of believe answers your most profound questions and supports your moral network then you will feel pretty secure and content. But another study (see previous posting) says exactly the opposite — that believers are less happy than one might expect. In fact that study says they’re less happy than atheists!

Yale (Luaka Bop) and I had a related talk the other day. He spoke about Tim Maia, the Brazilian RnB singer and how Maia had joined a religious cult in Brazil that believes that the righteous will be taken aboard a spaceship when the time comes. (The spaceship will take them to a better place; this is not about aliens engaged in sexual probes.) He cited Sun Ra and Elijah Mohammed of the Chicago Black Muslims as believers in alien saviors and wondered if there was a reason African-American millennials seem to have a tendency to incorporate spaceships into their beliefs. I said I didn’t know, but the spaceship image seems simply, as Jung would put it, an update of the Christian rapture concept. It’s something millions of fundamentalist Christians, Mormons and others believe in: that when the end days come, when the signs appear, then the baptized, the righteous and the saved will be “lifted up” to heaven and the rest of us will be destroyed along with the decadent earth we inhabited. It’s a really common Christian concept, so, to me, adding a spaceship to facilitate the “lifting up” part is no big deal.

But once again there is a separation between the chosen people, i.e. those to be rescued, and the rest of us infidels. George Bush believes this — that this lifting up will take place — which to me implies a mythical confirmation of what will happen if one breaks the traditional moral chains. Not only are certain behaviors morally wrong, but if George can’t stop the behavior with guns and ammo, then God will deal with it come the apocalypse. So, one way or another, the righteous will prevail. Both George and the Pashtun boys believe the same things…they’ll meet on the same spaceship. It should be an interesting flight.