Primarily interested in the common ground of human existence. The dirt and what stems from it.
NoBadCake(Mark)
Karma: 4
Thanks for adding the James link.
Lewis has long been a fav author. Abolition of Man(3rd sec.) left a lasting impression(scars?).Re: “people have fought wars over how people should live, and still do. ”
I offer in response: “they have turned to God without turning from themselves; would be alive to God before they are dead to their own nature. Now religion in the hands of self, or corrupt nature, serves only to discover vices of a worse kind than in nature left to itself. Hence are all the disorderly passions of religious men, which burn in a worse flame than passions only employed about worldly matters; pride, self-exaltation, hatred and persecution, under a cloak of religious zeal, will sanctify actions which nature, left to itself, would be ashamed to own.”—
William Law via A.Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945Re:”even in the rationalist bubble, someone is always [saying] that there is no such thing as morality”
We all like to put what we read and observe in clear containers with familiar labels but IMO subjective human experience with all it’s ambiguities should be considered(1). Considering all human activity I find that when don’t get along we break things—even to the point of our our own determent. Cooperating provides better material results and greater, longer lasting satisfaction. Beyond the initial crisis or common interest cooperation requires ‘moral struggle’ which is summed up as the Golden Rule+(treat others like you want to be treated and try not to be a jerk about it)(I added the last part to remind myself : )
I’ll close with a quote from CSL’s 1952 pub:
”Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the “right” notes and the “wrong” ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. [my bold] The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.”Thanks for the exchange, Richard. Please do reply if you have something to add!
Mark
(1)Re-posted: Scott Alexander’s What is Mysticism? A working definition for skeptics
Also, Superb Owl’s Religion as an Ego-modulator, William James, Aldous Huxley, and the functions of religion. Lastly, I. McGilchrist 08, 22.
“started to slide down an icy mountain and had to pull their ice picks out”
—
Alive and toed was regret well spent, IMO!
Ages ago I spoke with a roofer who told me of a time he was on a steep two story roof and started to slide on some loose shingles. He quickly took our his straight claw hammer to slam it down into the plywood underneath. As he pounded the roof repeatedly while skidding to the edge he recalled having borrowed another guy’s curved claw hammer that day.
He fell but lived to tell the tale!Great article, thanks for posting!
“Some people7 call it a cult”
—
In distinguishing between a cult and something better:“And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ringer can ever have it.”
—CSL, The Inner Ring, 1944
“Once a technology genie is out of the bottle you can’t stop it”
Bloomberg, Feb 1st, 2023: ChatGPT Unleashes Stock Trader Stampede for Everything AI
The stock-market euphoria around AI is reminding traders of past bubbles like 2017’s blockchain frenzy.
-------It’s be fine. Try to figure out the right( or less wrong) thing to do and then make an effort to do it.
As always.
Thanks for the feedback Raemon. I’ll add some verbiage to the components and relationships. Maybe there’s a way to add hover-over pop-ups.
Downvotes, hmmm, at least a couple people read it. I wonder what they disagreed with?
Perhaps the Meaning of Life
An adventure in pluralistic morality.
Sept. 18, 2002
“All models are wrong but some are useful.”
—George BoxAt the core of every controversial issue, institutional dysfunction and inspiring human achievement is the conspicuous influence of how well a society of people “get along”. Splitting this atom exposes the sub-particles of human nature(~proton), moral agency(~electron) and the electromagnetic tension of choice around individual belief(~neutron). The following model is an ongoing effort to assemble and refine an understanding of this dynamic.
The first figure, entitled Moral Transitions, indicates the individual’s struggle against the less appealing aspects of human nature. The second, Relational Harmonics represents the near constant challenge of building and maintaining character. The third figure, Personal Growth indicates the not necessarily linear stages that can occur over a lifetime.
Footnotes a
Personal Growth (intellectual, moral, spiritual)
“There are of course many gradations within and between the four stages of spiritual development. [emphasis added]
...
My experience suggests that this progression of spiritual development holds true in all cultures and for all religions.
...
Again in my experience, the four stages of spiritual development also represent a paradigm for healthy psychological development”
--M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum, Chapter IX, The Stages Of Spiritual Growth, 1987
[A flawed but useful book]b
“The world judges many things; for it is the ignorance of its natural state that forms the true tribunal of man. Knowledge has two extremes which meet; the one is that pure natural ignorance, in which all are born; the other is that which is experienced by minds of the highest order. After traversing the whole circle, of human attainments, they find that they know nothing; and end in the same ignorance in which they set out. But it is the ignorance of learning only, that knows itself to be ignorant. Those who occupy an intermediate place, — who have just emerged from their natural ignorance, and yet not attained to that of learning, — possess a sort of smattering of knowledge, and are looked upon as clever. These are the people that keep the world in commotion, and blunder in everything. They, and the common people, constitute the great bulk of mankind. They despise the latter, and are despised by them in their turn. They are erroneous in their judgments of everything, and the world is right in its judgment of them.”
--Blasé Pascal, Miscellaneous Thoughts, ~1670
c
“When a man follows the way of the world, or the way of the flesh, or the way of tradition i.e. when he believes in religious rites and the letter of the scriptures, as though they were intrinsically sacred, knowledge of Reality cannot arise in him. The wise say that this threefold way is like an iron chain, binding the feet of him who aspires to escape from the prison-house of this world.”
--Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945
d
“there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet.
It consists of two parts: —
1. An uneasiness; and
2. Its solution.
1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.
2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.”
--William James, The Varieties Of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature, 1902
e
“That is why Fénelon, in the foregoing extract, insists upon the need for “calm and simplicity,” why St. François de Sales is never tired of preaching the serenity which he himself so consistently practiced, why all the Buddhist scriptures harp on tranquility of mind as a necessary condition of deliverance. The peace that passes all understanding is one of the fruits of the spirit. But there is also the peace that does not pass understanding, the humbler peace of emotional self-control and self-denial; this is not a fruit of the spirit, but rather one of its indispensable roots.”
--Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945
f
“But it is a fact, confirmed and re-confirmed during two or three thousand years of religious history, that the ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended, except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit. This being so, it is hardly surprising that a theology based upon the experience of nice, ordinary, unregenerate people should carry so little conviction.
...
Analogously, no amount of theorizing about such hints as may be darkly glimpsed within the ordinary, unregenerate experience of the manifold world can tell us as much about divine Reality as can be directly apprehended by a mind in a state of detachment, charity and humility.”
--Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945
g
“There are in every generation people who, beginning innocently, with no predetermined intention of becoming saints, find themselves drawn into the vortex by their interest in helping mankind, and by the understanding that comes from actually doing it. The abandonment of their old mode of life is like dust in the balance. It is done gradually, incidentally, imperceptibly. Thus the whole question of the abandonment of luxury is no question at all, but a mere incident to another question, namely, the degree to which we abandon ourselves to the remorseless logic of our love for others.””
--William James, The Varieties Of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature, 1902
h
“The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is Saintliness.151 The saintly character is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.152 They are these: —
1. A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s selfish little interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power. In Christian saintliness this power is always personified as God; but abstract moral ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner visions of holiness or right may also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of our life, in ways which I described in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen.153
2. A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control.
3. An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down.
4. A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections, towards “yes, yes” and away from “no,” where the claims of the non-ego are concerned. ”
--William James, The Varieties Of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature, 1902
During further research into topic of morality I discovered the following.
Per excerpt below which meshes with my current understanding, knowledge of “morality” is based on unchanging Natural Law(“Ground”) (essentially the Golden Rule) is restricted by who we are. Given that who we are fluctuates this adds even more variation into defining it. I’m not suggesting basic morality is relative to a person or culture but how we perceive it is. Applying basic morality to a current culture is another matter but first things first.
“In other words, the Ground can be denoted as being there, but not defined as having qualities. This means that discursive knowledge about the Ground is not merely, like all inferential knowledge, a thing at one remove, or even at several removes, from the reality of immediate acquaintance; it is and, because of the very nature of our language and our standard patterns of thought, it must be, paradoxical knowledge. Direct knowledge of the Ground cannot be had except by union, and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the “thou” from the “That.””
—Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945[Start edit/add]
Here’s a perspective on current issues—social need driven answers to moral questions. Still, first things first I say.
“Moral questions may not have objective answers but they do have rational ones, answers rooted in a rationality that emerges out of social need. To bring reason to bear upon social relations, to define a rational answer to a moral question, requires social engagement and collective action. It is the breakdown over the past century of such engagement and such action that has proved so devastating for moral thinking.”
—Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass, 2014
“HE SAYS HI”
—
LOL … <sigh>
“People who disagree about physical things can resolve their differences by reason applied to observation and experiment. Nothing of the sort seems to be available for morality.”
—
W. James applies the empirical method to various belief systems in presentation to a seemingly skeptical audience. The test for all are the resulting behavior. Not even the saints remain unscathed!“Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that the short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business,”
—William James, 1901 (lectures to book)[the last sentence of your post was unreadable due to blocks of text having been blacked out]
“Moral progress” is first and foremost what it takes for people to get along. An ongoing process at the individual and group levels.
“a lot of problems rarely discussed among EAs.”
While I’m floored by the civil, intelligent and sincere discussion I’ve recently found here at LW , the rootier problem to what is discussed often is, IMO, that no person seems immune to the avoidance of self-regulation. The imperative to do so noted in B. Russell’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech “The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior”(1950) in which he describes universal human desires that are insatiable.
Communities of those striving to self-regulate know they must be mindful of the constant maintenance required to balance individual and societal needs as well as wants.
cite: From Walden, 1854: “Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.” Also, Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean.
So, a couple general thoughts.
-In the 80s/90s we were obsessing over potential atom-splitting devastation and the resulting nuclear winter. Before that there were plagues wiping out huge swaths of humanity.
-Once a technology genie is out of the bottle you can’t stop it. Human nature. -In spite of the ‘miracles’ of science there’s A LOT humanity does not know. “There are know unknowns and unknown unknowns” D.R.
-In a few billion years our sun will extinguish and all remaining life on space rock Earth will perish. All material concerns are temporary. Sorry.
-Four thousand years of good advice suggests that the most interesting & meaningful stage of life starts when we begin to Know Thyself. Now in mid-life I’m starting to suspect there is some truth to this. Happy holidays everyone!
6. Pre-clean as necessary to keep dishes from stinking after three days when the dishwasher will be full and can be unloaded into the sink and washed manually because said dishwasher has been broken for three weeks!
[Bonus: discovered that manually washing dishes had ‘zen’ value.]
--
Supplemental:
”As an interesting thought experiment, invent my brutally honest slogans to make the point that most products have both an ostensible, ‘official’ function and an ulterior function. The main value of a dishwasher, I would argue, is not that it washes dirty dishes, but that it provides you with an out-of-sight place to put them.”
—Rory Sutherland, Alchemy, 2021