right, reading her post reminded of an article in the TIMES magazine so i went to do a little digging and i found it buried under a ton of forgotten issues. it was dated the 3rd of december 2007. (i know, im quite astounded that i remembered ) the article was entitled "what makes us moral" and i thought a few of the many issues listed by xyun could be explained partially.
so I'll get straight to the point.
in one of the paragraphs,
I find myself taken aback sometimes to see how far I've come, how much i've changed & conformed to the society's unforgiving acceptance. It scares me to think that the very same girl who first stepped into Wesley Methodist is now more accepted compared to then. It wasnt that I had faked who i really was to the world, because if you really know me, you'll find that being someone I am not, to me, is harder than being ostracized by the very society whose acceptance everyone seems to crave.
i have highlighted the issue by which i am going to explain by directly quoting off the TIMES magazine.
At the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, de Waal was struck by how vigorously apes enforced group norms one evening when the zookeepers were calling their chimpanzees in for dinner. The keepers' rule at Arnhem was that no chimps would eat until the entire community was present, but two adolescents grew willful, staying outside the building. The hours it took to coax them inside caused the mood in the hungry colony to turn surly. That night the keepers put the delinquents to bed in a separate area—a sort of protective custody to shield them from reprisals. But the next day the adolescents were on their own, and the troop made its feelings plain, administering a sound beating. The chastened chimps were the first to come in that evening. Animals have what de Waal calls "oughts"—rules that the group must follow—and the community enforces them.
see, humans aren't the only one's that fear being ostracized.
One of the most powerful tools for enforcing group morals is the practice of shunning. If membership in a tribe is the way you ensure yourself food, family and protection from predators, being blackballed can be a terrifying thing. Religious believers as diverse as Roman Catholics, Mennonites and Jehovah's Witnesses have practiced their own forms of shunning—though the banishments may go by names like excommunication or disfellowshipping. Clubs, social groups and fraternities expel undesirable members, and the U.S. military retains the threat of discharge as a disciplinary tool, even grading the punishment as "other than honorable" or "dishonorable," darkening the mark a former service person must carry for life.
"Human beings were small, defenseless and vulnerable to predators," says Barbara J. King, biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary and author of Evolving God. "Avoiding banishment would be important to us."
in another paragraph,]
it's hard to continually understand why people do things and what has cause them to do something that causes pain to someone else. it is harder to continually excuse their actions and peg them as "they're only human" or "everyone is doing it". Because in all honesty, people should take responsibility for their actions. It's like saying a mass murderer should be excused from what he has done because it wasn't his fault his life was hell and his parents or the environment around him while he was still a boy conditioned him to be the person he is today. &then letting him go to do as he pleases. i know, this is a much larger scale compared to petty high school drama like "she stole my boyfriend" or "he lied to me" or "she bitched about me", but if you really look into, there's no real difference at all.
The deepest foundation on which morality is built is the phenomenon of empathy, the understanding that what hurts me would feel the same way to you. And human ego notwithstanding, it's a quality other species share.
Things are different in the case of the cool and deliberate serial killer, who knows the criminality of his deeds yet continues to commit them. For neuroscientists, the iciness of the acts calls to mind the case of Phineas Gage, the Vermont railway worker who in 1848 was injured when an explosion caused a tamping iron to be driven through his prefrontal cortex. Improbably, he survived, but he exhibited stark behavioral changes—becoming detached and irreverent, though never criminal. Ever since, scientists have looked for the roots of serial murder in the brain's physical state.
Schulman, the psychologist and author, works with delinquent adolescents at a residential treatment center in Yonkers, New York, and was struck one day by the outrage that swept through the place when the residents learned that three of the boys had mugged an elderly woman. "I wouldn't mug an old lady. That could be my grandmother," one said. Schulman asked whom it would be O.K. to mug. The boy answered, "A Chinese delivery guy." Explains Schulman: "The old lady is someone they could empathize with. The Chinese delivery guy is alien, literally and figuratively, to them."
This kind of brutal line between insiders and outsiders is evident everywhere—mobsters, say, who kill promiscuously yet go on rhapsodically about "family." But it has its most terrible expression in wars, in which the dehumanization of the outsider is essential for wholesale slaughter to occur. Volumes have been written about what goes on in the collective mind of a place like Nazi Germany or the collapsing Yugoslavia. While killers like Adolf Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic can never be put on the couch, it's possible to understand the xenophobic strings they play in their people
in another,&if everyone has their own thoughts, everyone has their own mind and mental capability to create and mould their own existence, then who is anyone to say that what i am doing right now is wrong if it is not to me? who is anyone to say that what he is doing is wrong when it is not to him? No one has the right to enforce a belief or practice unto someone else because, it is their belief, and their practice
What does, or ought to, separate us then is our highly developed sense of morality, a primal understanding of good and bad, of right and wrong, of what it means to suffer not only our own pain—something anything with a rudimentary nervous system can do—but also the pain of others. That quality is the distilled essence of what it means to be human. Why it's an essence that so often spoils, no one can say.
Morality may be a hard concept to grasp, but we acquire it fast. A preschooler will learn that it's not all right to eat in the classroom, because the teacher says it's not. If the rule is lifted and eating is approved, the child will happily comply. But if the same teacher says it's also O.K. to push another student off a chair, the child hesitates. "He'll respond, 'No, the teacher shouldn't say that,'" says psychologist Michael Schulman, co-author of Bringing Up a Moral Child. In both cases, somebody taught the child a rule, but the rule against pushing has a stickiness about it, one that resists coming unstuck even if someone in authority countenances it. That's the difference between a matter of morality and one of mere social convention, and Schulman and others believe kids feel it innately.
&because i know that despite everything i've just typed out, I, myself fall into the same category. the society which will only continue to live in its own denial and continue to destroy itself. Because neither am i above the very people i've just scorned &unless, although highly unlikely, i manage to practice what i preach, i'll only continue to live in disgust with myself
what do u preach?
sincerely, jc.
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