The trajectory of the moral self – What we should really thank Christianity for!
As I have already questioned in my earlier post [here] there seems to be a false choice between being born with certain inbuilt characteristics or learning them through experience, there is an alternative way to not only understanding ourselves but also morality. Dawkins roughly calls these memes which are worth thinking like social genes which are past down from parents although this does not really help explain all that much, since common sense tells us that the racism of our parents is often not expressed through us or how we act within new cultural methods of communication cannot be taught top down (often it’s the younger members of the family teaching older members how to use new technologies). What should replace memes is the idea of social evolution, like all types of evolution, it certainly reflects badly for religion which holds the idea of constant stability as its gold standard. Steven Pinker presents the evidence quite nicely so I have put the video below; in short violence has reduced in rough correlation to modernity, one of the factors behind this is the period of enlightenment where religion suffered the most. It’s also evident the more religious a country happens to be the more violence occurs , along with more religious states in America being more violent than less religious ones. Pinker talks about murder in particular but violence here is linked, through my own opinion at least, with morality. The more moral a group of people are the less likely they are to kill each other, if you don’t agree then you might not like the rest of this post. I use this definition as an absolute since people can only die once and it perhaps is less questionable than others I could use.
I have often come to the rather frustrating position when talking with religious people about morality where they claim their holy book is the guide on how to live; still two things need to be said about this. The first is the bible for the most part has remained stable over the last two thousand years; the actual stories have been left untouched even though the words have changed significantly unless you happen to have a Hebrew or later on in our history a Latin bible. The second point is that there are awful stories in the Christian bible which are only made moral from the position that we happen to be sitting in at this moment in history, Hell as I have always maintained is an evil concept used to blackmail people into good behaviour which fundamentally does not work and does not appear in the old testament (for any Jesus fans). Still morality has changed over the last two thousand years, so we have to go back to really understand where it comes from. At this point I do note that I have already made the decision that morality does not come from religion anymore, at least in the western world to the most part since these areas of the world have gone through constant religious reformations unlike in Muslim countries where little to no reformation has occurred. In order to understand the social evolution of the moral self we first have to get to the self. In order to find this I have turned to the work of one anthropologist in particular, Norbert Elias whose book ‘the civilizing process’ details the development of the self.
It is somewhat difficult to explain any other position on the self since we are so firmly sure that we are individuals, still it is worth considering the words written by Thomas More in 1516 “[so] first you create thieves, and then you punish them for stealing!” the argument followed the line that if a society allowed for poverty and only a system of survival that relied on becoming a thief then no one should ever expect individuals to be anything different (taken from Turner’s translation, 1965). Thieves were not immoral creatures but rather the products of a society where they was little choice other than to become one, even though More wrote those words almost 500 years ago they still resonate since not only are they true today but they also break the notion that we are all individuals, conducting our lives out in a fashion which only is influenced by us as one. Even today there is a relationship between poverty and crime, one which will remain for as long as there is poverty. The suggestion is then that the self is open to social evolution and we configure ourselves based on the societies we happen to be born into. Marcel Moss our second anthropologist charts the history of Europe’s person. It was the Romans that first established the notion of the self within the concept of person and a non-person (in other words slaves). This is not to say that non-persons did not know about their arms or legs rather they were not individuals more like livestock who were numbers not names. The reason behind this development was very clear; it was only a person who had a name & position who could be given rights or held accountable for their actions. I need to mention this first otherwise there would be little sense, since we first need to be created before we could have the chance to become moral.
Next came the Latin and Greek moralists who introduced roughly over 600 years, starting from 200BC, moral conscience and for the first time in our western history at least you could be moral. The reasons behind this was not to improve our or anyone else’s lives, rather it was because without it there could be no laws, obligations or honour. Without a concept of being immoral you could not be judged or even free, since it was morality that determined what roles you could play in society in short it expanded the original Roman concept of a person to include more than it did, in other words it evolved as society required it to. It was then Christianity that later allowed for almost every individual to become a person (or self) as under this understanding it allowed morality to be applied. The aspect of the metaphysical made it more effective as it was then not possible to hide and the self became inadvisable as a unit. So without listing what morality is, it can be closely followed by the development of the self. If this seems strange consider this, a pet can misbehave, since it normally has an identity such as given a name, role and characteristics. It has a self so then can be judged within a set of expectations, on the other hand a wild bird or fish to most of us can’t misbehave since they have no identity. The story does not end there of course, the moral self does not end with Christianity and it should not. Going back to the rather simple definition of morality, since the formation of the Catholic Church murder has slowly been reduced. In fact as Pinker so nicely describes we not only care about other human beings who we will never meet from across the world but also animals and it’s an ever expanding group to which we feel we must be moral to. The evidence does not show us that Christianity is improving us to act more as moral creatures still we do have to give credit for its part in our social evolution. The most fundamental point here is that it does not make sense to see Christianity as coming from God, there were Gods and morality before it spread over Europe and so the moral self carried on from the Latin and Greek moralists redefining what was including & what it meant.
Over the last few centuries there have been debates from all sides about the nature of humans and along with it developed the notions of the moral self. Morality is never a fixed line and to make claims for that is what most religions do, making the dangerous mistake of ignorance, seeing things as black and white. This comes again down to our evolution, gay marriage is seen as moral by me & my peers, the objections coming mostly from the religious. Like sexuality our understanding of the term has and will keep changing, it is no longer that women are not considered to be equal to men despite the separation of gender being maintained by religion but religion cannot keep the lid on sexuality like it cannot control morality. We develop and move on, those who wish to make the claim that religion is the ultimate source of the moral self are either immoral themselves or are ignorant to the facts. Of course we have to thank Christianity for the development of a sort of morality but it happened along a very long line. It should be part of our history simply because it is; to answer morality now with dogma is a step backwards not forwards. I don’t make any claims of what is moral and what is not, other than murder because it would be pointless to do so. Even if I could define morality closely or even sexuality it does not mean the next generation won’t change it and I doubt if I could get it right. We have a shared sense of morality that is born from our history and one day we will all be part of that history. The moral self is not a statue that will stand in the same place for all time, the trajectory of the moral self is simply a road which humans are travelling down and we have already past Christianity.
