h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>On the subject of a rational basis for morality, I think that Revelations 13:10 which states that those who kill with the sword must be killed with the sword and those who lead into captivity must be led into captivity, is instructive.

Except that it is clearly nonsense. Murderers and enslavers frequently prosper. The universe is amoral.

I doubt that we can extrapolate from physics to morality.

What do you mean by 'prosper'?

At very least...they often get away with it.

I think we need to be very careful in extrapolating laws of nature into laws of morality. Something similar happened early in the evolution debate where the Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest morphed into Social Darwinism, and groups such as the Nazis felt that they were morally justified in weeding out "weaker species" because they believed they were following a law of nature. What absolute rot. Laws of nature are not moral instructions.

So when Newton finds out that actions generate reactions, he is only talking about physical matter. He is not extrapolating this to morality, where, for instance, a single act of violence against a child could have disproportionate consequences for the lifetime of that individual, or where a single act of forgiveness could help to mend fences between long-term enemies.

Happiness, surely a prime objective of any society, is not a physical commodity like mass or energy. Just because I am happy now doesn't mean that someone else must be sad to compensate for it.

I think we need to understand ourselves based on very different principles, and not to be extracting these principles from areas that are fundamentally different.

Just another thing, with a slightly different slant on this topic.

My dad took 10 years to die. It was the most harrowing thing I have ever seen in my life. Sheer, unadulerated misery for the poor man over an extended time period. And yet, he never lifted a finger in anger against anyone his whole life. Most everyone he knew liked him - a most inoffensive person: even as a teenage son I had a hard time getting angry with him. To say that his suffering was a direct result of his past actions is simply, objectively, wrong.

And yet, monsters such as Franco and Pinochet and Stalin and Mugabe have had long lives full of power and riches and the loyalty of millions. Loads of people have had disproportionately lucky and disproportionately unlucky lives.

How people die has no bearing whatsoever on how they lived. Fact.

So it's clear to me at least. In general, people do not reap what they sow. What goes around does not necessarily come around to the same person. In general, an awful lot of what is sown, fails and sometimes, if you are very lucky, you might reap rewards exponentially greater than how much you actually put in. And that's as close to a "law" of society, at I know.

Trying to set up things in some sort of accounting process so there is always a measured reaction to every action flies in the face of what is patently obvious about the way we live and how we interact with each other.

Well said Woodpigeon.

That is not to say, of course, that there's no link between the physical and ethical spheres. Happiness and unhappiness, goodness and badness are all biological phenomena, which themselves arise due to the transfer of electrons at molecular level. But it all gets impersonal well before we even get to genes.

yep.

Seems to me that atomic and ethical language are at opposite ends of a spectrum.

Of course, to have a spectrum you have to have opposite ends.

I feel a couple of rants coming on...

1) Whenever people get to talking about comparative religion, nobody seems to have anything bad to say about Buddhism. So let me take a potshot.

Now, I know they're all lovely people, and maybe they're on to something with their abandonment of materialism. What I refuse to accept, though, is that they're any more noble than the rest of us. I'm was thinking of a couple of examples:

Firstly, there's those guys who turn up at anti-war matrches, dressed in yellow and banging drums. All very nice and well meaning, sure. But it doesn't stop wars The *kindest* way I can see it is that they're teaching that if we embrace the ascetic life, wars will end. Except that we can't all do that. They rely on materialists to support them, and if materialism is the problem they're just as much part of it.

Second...I was speaking to someone who's been to The Holy Isle off Arran (formerly a Christian monastery, now Samye Ling Tibetan Buddhist) for a yoga retreat. All very lovely. There's a hardcore offshoot from the sect. A small handful of monks are living in isolation for five or so years at a time on adjacent islets. That's up to them. What I refuse to accept is that it's anything more than self indulgence. It's not making the world a better place. I think they believe it is.




(Old joke about Salman Rushdie's follow-up to The Satanic Verses:
'Buddha: Portrait of a Fat B-word.'

More to follow...

Rant 2)

It's become a general assumption that the wars in the middle east have come about due to 'Islamic Fundamentalism.'

Now, I'll have no truck with Islam than with any other religion...even though I fully accept that it can be just as fluffy as any other brand of superstition. But it seems to me that 'The West' is being utterly hypocritical in the alternate vision that it's offering. The opposition is said to be with 'liberal, enlightenment values.' I fully agree. Christians should also give up their brand of tosh and embrace the enlightenment. Perhaps then - only then - will they be in a position to show the way.

And I think that this is more than a theoretical argument. Take the current aggression against The Lebanon. The assumption is that 'the good guys' are facing the mindless fanatics of Hizbollah. I don't deny that Hizbollah are capable of great harm. Nor do I deny that they are religiously motivated - as much as any Israeli or British Prime Minister or American president. But 'mindless'?...when they've been playing a military blinder by pre-emptively drawing Israel into an ineviable conflict at a time of their own choosing?

Both sides are guilt of seeing it as a conflict of religious ideologies. It's not. We need some secular about the underlying issues.

I'm not sure how much it's seen as a religious issue by most of the people involved in this conflict. By and large, Israel itself is a fairly secular state, run in the main by secular people who base their responses on what they think they need to do to survive, rather than some sort of religious perspective on it. Syria are fairly secular too - and much more keen on extending their influence in regional politics than on erecting mosques. Iran at this present time might be something of an exception, but I don't really know enough to say much more. I would even take it that many in the Bush and Blair administrations take a secular political analysis of the situation also. It seems sensible that they should, although sense seems in short supply these days.

Religion comes in as a useful tool because it is a great device to communicate to the masses. Can't justify the invasion on political grounds? Then, why not pretend that it is the will of God and written in scripture, blah, blah, blah. There's bound to be a couple of useful hotheads out there that will take it hook, line and sinker.

Both sides at least identify themselves with religion. On one side, ther's 'The Army of God'. On the other there's a state that allows you to be a citizen so long as your mother can trace her antecedents back to Moses. Granted, that's not all there is to their respective societies, and for the US and Europe there's a lot of Realpolitik in the mix (although the US millenarians are scary).

It is hypocritical, though, that Hizbullah are singled out particularly as the religious fanatics.

>>the US millenarians are scary

Especially their hats.

I've been enthusing about this hither and yon: http://www.hayfestival.com/archive/2006/05/blasphemy-debate.aspx

It's a discussion involving Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, ostensibly centred around the (defunct) proposals for Religious Hatred laws, but also covering a lot of ground about religion.

Love him or loathe him, the elder Hitchens brother always provokes thought (while his younger brother just provokes fury).

I liked his comment on the 'white noise' one gets from religious people. When they talk about things like 'spirituality', they simply don't make any sense.

Re rant on Buddhism:

It is true that Buddhist monasteries have in the past gone to bloody war against each other. Buddhism is not necessarily successful.

What I like about Buddhism is its frank confession from the outset that there are no supreme beings. But Buddhism is not necessarily true to its origins.

In fact show me a religion that is true to the ideals of its founder and I'll show you a brand new religion. After a hundred years or so it becomes a corporation, much of whose energy goes into survival. Reliigions shouldn't survive.

I listened to the Fry/Hitchens/Bakewell "debate" (you have to turn down the bass on your speakers to cut the annoying hum) and found it excellent stuff. As an antidote I then read Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics (which he equates with religion and aesthetics) http://www.galilean-library.org/witt_ethics.html

I laughed out loud more than once, re-reading it after many years. Not that it's funny, but his clarity is just breathtaking.

There is a part of a sentence missing from the text at the above link.

The fourth paragraph should start "Now the first thing that strikes one about all these expressions is that each of them is actually used in two very different senses. I will call them the trivial or relative sense on the one hand and the ethical or absolute sense on the other."

Hmmm. I've been meaning to read Richard Hollaway's (quondam Edinburgh) book in which he talks about Art as 'the new spirituality'.

More soon - especially on the delusions of Buddhism. This week my mind's on earlier matters, such as finding a new mo'or.

I was in Dunoon at the weekend. We were sitting in the sun, drinkind white wine, when we gog Jehova'ed. What larks!

drikind? gog? You can't see my lips move!