True Morality

New Morality (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From certain perspectives, true morality comes from the quality of being able to resist cultural influences.

"Do You Still Love Me?" - Weakness And Selfishness

My Weakness Is None of Your Business (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I found there is a type of persons, who would always let others make choices for them. Or, if they know what to choose, they would "design" a complicated scenario to force others to choose for them. The "benefit" of acting like this is that when things don't go as they expected, they don't have to be responsible.

i.e., when they no longer love or like someone, instead of saying: "sorry I don't love you." or "I am sorry to say that I've been feeling very difficult to be your friend." they would say:" Do you still love me or not?" "Do you still want to be me friend or not?"

How Can We Not "Offend" Anyone? Are We All Equally Guilty?

English: "How dare I, Mrs Reed?
How dare I? Because it is the truth."
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I consider myself a highly "self-principled" person regarding morality. However my principles are simple and fundamental, not emphasizes on behaviors, courtesy or any kind of superficial traditions, and they are not made by any other human beings but myself. In a word, I follow my inner voice.

My first moral principle is clear and firm: never do anything to purposely hurt anyone. Just like Jane Eyre, I learned kindness through my hardship: When I was bullied during my childhood, the pain I felt when I was savagely beaten, only "inspired" me to make resolution, that I would never exert the same kind of pain to any other persons. Yes, I learned that before I heard the name of Jesus Christ, or Buddha, or any other "Saint"'s voice. And I can proudly say that in my life I've never done anything purposely hurt anyone.

Sense Of Shame Vs. Sense Of Guilt -- Two Different Phases Of Moral Development

Michelangelo Moses (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1. Human - social animals

We human are social animals. Our existence relies on cooperation, or communication. We were not necessarily more "superior" than any other types of animals in terms of physical ability. i.e., we cannot fly as birds, run like deer, bite like lions, hide like snakes, but we do excel in communicating. Perhaps, it was mostly due to this ability (to communicate and to cooperate), we not only survived, but prospered into civilization.

In order to cooperate, we much work as groups, and in order to work as groups, we must have stable communities, or societies. Therefor, there must be some forces that can bind us together. Looking into humans societies, we may find, that beside our natural needs to communicate, such as feelings, there are two main forces that group us together, one was made collectively and imposed on individuals; the other was also made collectively, but taught through tradition or education, and gradually ingrained into individuals' minds. The former is law, the latter is morality. So basically, morality is just a set of principle for individuals to follow, in order to establish social stability. And to make morality easier to comprehend, we invented the concept of "good" and "bad", or "right" and "wrong", grant those behaviors or thoughts that are helpful to our bond, condemn those that are harmful to it.

The history of morality is as long and complicated as human him/herself. Though religion has very simple explanation about the emergence of morality,  from historical view, morality was not endowed by "God", but created by humans, also it changes along time. If we look into history, it's not hard to see, that whatever we think is moral now or here, could be immoral then or there. There are plenty of examples which I would not bother to make.

The evolution of morality is a mega spider web, complicated and mysterious. However, what I am trying to take a closer look in this article is not this giant web, but two type of moral senses that have been ingrained in our human minds: sense of shame and sense of guilt.

2. Sense of shame vs. sense of guilt

I like to temporarily define a sense of shame as a feeling of guilt or even agony provoked by one's recognition that he/she is no longer innocent or decent in other people's eye; a sense of guilt is a self condemnation that one makes to him/herself due to his/her awareness of his/her wrong doings. There are similarities between these two, but also an fundamental difference: the sense of shame is evoked by others' judgment, while the sense of guilt is derived completely from one's self determination.  Due to this difference, we could easily see that in the case of sense of shame, because one's feeling of guilt is due to others judgment, so if other people or society do not condemn one's conducts, he/she would not feel guilty; but in the latter case  (sense of guilt), regardless how other people think, one would still condemn him/herself because the judgment of "right" or "wrong" is made by him/herself.

The individuals who only have sense of shame, usually value others opinion more than their own, thus when they found others no longer "look up" to them, they would feel insecure or abandoned, suffer a significant loss of self confidence; on the other hand, individuals who have sense of guilt would not share these feelings because the it is their own choice to condemn their misconducts. For individuals whose moral drive is sense of shame, they would sometime even conceal their wrong doings, for the purpose of keeping their faces clean in others' eyes, and those whose moral drive is sense of guilt, they would confess their wrong doings even if they don't have to.

3. Collectivism vs. individualism

Sense of shame is a product of collectivism. Collectivism is a moral ideology that put collective value over individuals'. As we discussed in the beginning, humans are social animals, and individuals' survival is almost fully relies upon groups', so in most part of human history, collectivism is the dominant ideology.

It is because of this fact that individuals could not survive without groups, human beings developed this strong sense of "belonging". We would be extremely upset if we were rejected by groups. In many cases people would prefer die than being left alone. And naturally, we developed a psychological tendency to please others, or majority, or powerful ones, and the sense of shame would naturally take place when we failed to do so.

The positive contribution that sense of shame made to human societies is, that it makes tight bond between individuals and groups, so it helps establishing social stability. The negative part of it is that when there were no supervision, individuals would act "wrongly", or destructively, due to lack of self motivation to cooperate.

Sense of guilt is a product of individualism. Contrary to collectivism, individualism is a moral ideology that places the value of individuals above the value of groups. Among societies that collectivism is dominant ideology, individuals don't have much freedom, but among societies that individualism is dominant idea, individual freedom is the goal of social effort.

The paradox here is, as mentioned earlier that we humans are social animals and cannot survive without group effort, so would individualism leads to damage to societies? My answer is yes and no. If individualism emerged during earlier stage of humans history, or in some societies that are not ready for individualism (that is being dominated by collectivism), it would have negative effects, because societies might be quickly broken up due to unbounded individual freedom. But if individualism emerged in the societies that most people already have self-motive to cooperate, it can do more good than harm. Historical fact is, that individualism as a social ideology only emerged (or evolved) in societies that were ready for it, i.e., western Europe after its dark middle age, when people had very strong sense of guilt (mostly due to Christianity). At this stage, basic altruism already ingrained inside the minds of many (though not "all") individuals. Also, humanism that was originated from ancient Greek culture also nurtured Europeans with independence, responsibility, fraternity, love, mutual respect, etc. So when freedom finally came, there was a strong moral buttress that kept people's freedom under certain conditions. The great example of this would be The declaration of rights of man and of the citizen of French revolution: "Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others." The "does not harm others" is the bottom line of this individual freedom, without which would only do more harm than good to societies.

Comparing with the sense of shame, sense of guilt is a more advanced phase of morality development. Not only it shares the same positive effect as of sense of guilt, which is binding individuals together, but also it has some advantage that sense of shame doesn't have, which is making individuals cooperate with others without external force (self motivated altruism).

Maybe it is not entirely accurate to say that sense of guilt is a product of individualism. They both could be mutually dependent, and it could be a long process of evolution. Same can be said to the relationship between sense of shame and collectivism.

4. Morality and social system

Sense of shame most existed in earlier stage of human history, it also widely exists in today, mostly among societies where collectivism is dominant ideology. Sense of guilt as ideology emerged in recent human history, among societies where individualism was dominant ideology (namely Europe).  Generally speaking, the equivalent social system for collectivism is despotism, for individualism is democracy.

As we already discussed, the development of European democracy was closely related to its moral development. That is, though its culture permit individual freedom, the societies can still keep their stability because of individuals' self motivated cooperating attitude. This is usually not the case in societies that ruled by despotic power - when given maximum individual freedom, the force that once keep societies together no longer exist, people's sense of shame would stop working, greed, selfishness, hatred, all these "evils" would unleashed and societies would simply collapse. Thus, after a short period anarchy, these societies usually had to go back despotism, in order to establish stability.

Based on this analysis, we may have better understanding of Chinese history, get better idea about why China walked through thousands years of repetition of extreme centralized ruling system and anarchy, still never developed democracy. We may also have better understanding about modern communism, when permit of killing was given, ordinary people could commit extraordinary atrocity. And maybe, we could understand, that the democracy in European civilization really was not something happened in one night, or by one revolution, but by a long evolutionary process. So, we may understand, arguably, an imposed democracy may not be very effective to those societies whose ideology is still dominated by collectivism.

Of course, there are individual differences. i.e., in despotic societies, we could often see people who have good sense of independence or responsibility, and in democratic societies, there are people who would also act irresponsibly. However, the overall change of a society does require collective effort. So only when an idea penetrate through majority, would the society change accordingly.

To conclude, both sense of shame and sense of guilt are parts of the development of human consciousness, and both function as the force to group individuals together. Most likely, all societies had been gone through the first phase - collectivism, under which people cooperated passively by their sense of shame, and only some societies evolved into a more advanced phase of ideology -individualism, under which people cooperate with each others by self motivation, or conscious choice.

So the question remains, if we humans started from the point, what made our societies so different now? Or, did we really start from the same point?

Understand Hatred

Image by Nick in exsiliovia Flickr

Definition from Wikipedia: Hatred (or hate) is a deep and emotional extreme dislike, directed against a certain object or class of objects.

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Like "Love", "hate" is a natural feeling which we all naturally possess. So there is nothing wrong with hatred itself.

"Love" and "hate" are two sides of one coin. One can love, one can also hate.

Any kinds of man-made disasters, such as wars, religion persecutions, miserable life experiences, etc., were not caused by "hatred", or at least "hatred" alone, but ignorance, narrow mind, selfishness, power abuse, etc.

A "hateful" person is not someone who doesn't love, but someone who only "love" him/herself. Because of this reason, a hateful person consider everyone else beside him/her as enemies, not as commensals (term?), or friends. This is how the life of a hateful person is full of hatred - because he/she is living in a "dangerous" environment everyday.

A hateful person can "love", but his/her "love" is rooted on possessiveness. This type of "love" may produce some temporary "happiness", but at the end it leads a person to miserable (even endless) sufferings.

A loving person can also "hate", but his/her hate is rooted on the love of life. This type of "hate" may riskly produce some sufferings, but it also creates chances to final justice and peace.

Like love can only do good when it grows in a loving heart, hate can only do harm when it grows in a hateful person.

Good and Evil, the seeds of our nature

More thinking about this issue.
By saying that Good and Evil are both our Human Nature, I did not mean that we hold those qualities one way or another completely by our nature. I rather take it like this way: these qualities are more like seeds implanted in our spirits from the beginning. How we end up with these qualities depend on many complicated issues, such as how we are raised, what is our social environment, relationships, etc.. So, as individual, our moral standards are shaped by all these life experiences together. It is a combination of born nature and life experience.

Good and Evil, by nature and by Teaching

Image via Wikipedia

I think we human beings all have some moral standards by NATURE called "conscience". This means even without the teachings of Jesus Christ or Confucian or whatever, we should still be able to comprehend things such as "love", "understanding", "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", etc.. We also without teachings should be able to recognize "evil spirit", because we understand what hurt ourselves must also hurt others.

This is what I meant earlier "human beings are born both Good and Evil". They come to us as part of our Nature. And the morality created by such nature like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", is something representing truth and we should never give them up.

However, there is another kind of moral standard made by MAN, usually under the name of "God", or "Saint", teaching us what is Good and what is Bad, such as pagan, adultery, homosexuality, abortion, divorce, etc.. These teachings were/are usually set up for certain purposes, and they all changing through history (I mean a history in a large picture, not history within hundreds or couple of thousands years). They may have done lots of "Good" but also lots of "Bad" at the same time, so they remain controversial to scholars or whoever asking questions.
These types of moral standards, are belong to what I said earlier as "Doctrine" (or someone help me to find a better English word please). They do NOT necessarily represent TRUTH.

"Kind" people

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By Ping Hu, an contemporary Chinese philosopher:

"People always put the word 'kind' to many weak individuals, but they may not realize that the only reason these weak individuals appear to be so 'kind' is because they do not have chance to be evil."

"Tolerance"

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When people are unable to tell right from wrong by their own judgement, they are easily puzzled and distressed. Thus "brotherhood" of all --- the "tolerance" literally for everything becomes the best sulotion.

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SEX SEX SEX!!!

Why people were (are, still) so concerned about Michael Jackson's sex life? i am watching Larry King and this lady (don't know her name) was so protective toward MJ and confirmed repeatedly that he (MJ) DID have SEX with that lady (debby?). I remember MJ also tried so hard to prove his sexuality ("yes, we had sex", he said so in front of audience while holding a lady's hand. Oh my God!).
What would be so wrong if he didn't have sexual interest toward women? What would be so wrong if he just didn't have any sexual interest at all?
SEX SEX SEX! Do we have to have sex at least once a day to prove our normality? And what exactly made people so proud of such a biological function which even an animal can handle (probably even better)?

I am not saying that sex is bad. Of course sex is good. But there are some people on this earth who don't have very strong sex drive (some of them are even asexual) and they are just fine. We don't have to be the same.

Michael Jackson and "2 different moral standards"

It is a coincidence that Michael just passed away at the time I have been thinking about this 2 different moral standards thing.
Yes, by social moral standard, sleeping in the same bed with children is not "morally" right for an adult. But what if really nothing sexual happened? What if Michael really just loved those children as friends, because he was not mentally grown up? And what is so wrong about sleeping with kids in same bed (without any sexual behaviors involve)?
I personally believe nothing is wrong with that. I only have one moral standard myself: do not hurt others for my own good.