towards_a_secular

Towards a Secular Morality

By Philip Veasey

This is a quick adaptation of a chapter developed for "The Backslider's Guide To Success" that was chopped and plundered fairly early on in the editing process. It talks about some important issues but is very rough and ready. Its main merit is that it will hopefully provoke others into writing better material that will replace it.

What's morality?

In "The Backslider's Guide To Success", I described morals as guidelines on how to live, that help us make our daily decisions on how to act as our lives unfold. A more rigorous definition might be more precise about the scope of decisions covered by morality. For most people when they talk of morality, the core of their concern is a set of rules that govern the way we behave towards each other. This is because most of our avoidable suffering is caused by other people. The next logical extension of this scope is to how we behave towards ourselves. This is because, if we make ourselves miserable, it affects those that love us and, if we waste the talents we have been given, society is deprived of their benefits. It could also be argued that how we each treat the planet must be part of morality because we are increasingly affected by each others actions in that respect. Our relationships with a god or gods should be outside the scope of secular morality although many will insist these are the most important.

The more we widen the scope of anything, the harder it is to achieve any consensus on it. What most people long for is a world in which we can all feel safe, so in this chapter I am mainly thinking about morals that can make this more likely.

Do we need morality?

People who have lived under the tyranny of unkind religions or governments are naturally obsessed with a desire to rid themselves of rules. Most of them come to realise that their problem is with rules that are arbitrarily imposed on them, rather than with rules per se. People have morals whether they think so or not. Life would just be unliveable if we had to sit down and think, starting with no preconceptions, about every situation we encounter. Some people's morals are pretty much an unconscious, intuitive use of their previous experience. Some people can state quite clearly much of what guides their moral decision making but feel no motivation for doing so. What is more interesting is when the rules are codified and shared with other people. This creates the opportunity for people to understand the type of behaviour they can hope for from other people and this can be very reassuring.

Every day you can hear people saying in the media how we are living in an age that lacks morals. This is often a prelude to a call for a return to religion or to stiffer punishments for crime. There is no convincing evidence that we have lost some golden age when moral standards were higher; in fact many would argue that there has never been more interest in morality. What is true, however, is that we live in an age where mankind has roared ahead in terms of technological development to the point where we now have the capacity to destroy our planet many times over in several different ways. Technology has also led to us adopting lifestyles that may lead to our medium term destruction and we are finding it hard to change these behaviours. The only way in which we stand any chance of saving ourselves is if we, as a race, grow up morally and politically, as fast as we have been doing technically. This is a very tall order and in my view rather unlikely. Still, I believe in playing to win so we should understand and face what is needed to make such a radical change.

The morality market

The title of this section may seem a trifle disrespectful towards those who claim to be sources of morality and I am not one of those who believe that free markets are the answer to all society's woes. Nevertheless if we think in terms of a market, it may encourage us to consider some basic facts before getting too enamoured of a particular moral code. It is not unreasonable to ask such questions as:
· What exactly is this moral code, what does it give me and does it seem to make sense?
· What does it cost - will I be obliged to pay dues to some organisation?
· Who or what supplies it - what are their motives?

There are plenty of offerings. Surely somewhere amongst all this outpouring is more than enough moral advice to guide individuals to happier lives and the world to harmony and survival. So why is the future so bleak? Let us consider the potential sources.

Philosophy

Most philosophers have had something to say about morality and no doubt much of it is very valuable. Being philosophy, much of it is not so much proposing a moral code we can adopt as talking at a higher level about whether such codes can exist and what would be the constraints on them. These are things that may need to be thought about by people formulating moral codes but are mostly too obscure for those who just want an easily understandable moral code to follow.

Political and Social Theory

When philosophers start to get more interested in the real world they frequently become theorists in one of these areas. Here they meet scientists who feel that the scientific method might bring some objectivity to these vital subjects. This strong brew has resulted in a number of theories that have had massive impact on the world.

The theories have usually been adopted by their adherents, not only as explanations, but as formulae for how individuals, governments and organisations should behave. As such they become moral codes and start to exhibit the same issues as moral codes taken from religions. Just as what is good in many religions frequently gets distorted by those who achieve power through them, political and social theories often finish up enslaving mankind.

Capitalism and communism have battled in much the same way as opposing religions, with their followers frequently exhibiting the same closed minds that have fanned the flames of religious wars. Unregulated markets, let alone globalisation, make it all too easy for greedy and powerful people to seize an ever more unfair share of the world's resources. This makes them obvious targets for those who believe there should be more justice in the world, people who sometimes forget that markets are a very clever way of handling the overwhelming complexity of economic activity.

Communism foundered in the USSR partly because the Soviets refused to allow any freedom to the marketplace. They tried to control in detail something that was, by its nature, far too complex and dynamic for such an approach to work. Soviet communism also surrendered its leadership to people who were serious control freaks, quite prepared to wipe out any who disagreed with them. This and its rallying call that it would eventually defeat all other political systems made it an easy target for its detractors.

In the USA, the more egalitarian society promised by communism presented a great threat to the small but powerful group of people whose share of the country's wealth had grown massively under capitalism. They did all they could to see that communism was unsuccessful by attacking it wherever they could. The USA might have learned some useful lessons, that could have improved government at home, by befriending the communist governments in Cuba, Nicaragua and Chile. They in turn would have been more ready to see any mistakes they made and take advice from their neighbour. Instead fear and greed have led the USA into activities that must make its founders turn in their graves.

This is what happens when a group of powerful people have a vested interest in the continuance of some political system. Both capitalism and communism fall into these traps because their leaders fail to admit the limitations of their theories and let them evolve into something better. They close their minds because they feel their good ideas are under attack from others with closed minds. There are lessons in this for anyone trying to establish a moral code.

Religions

All religions offer some, and usually a lot, of moral guidance. Often it is very clearly coded as a set of rules such as in the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament; a key building block in the moral teachings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

An external observer of any religion could no doubt find inconsistencies in its teachings. Even those of its followers who were not ready to accept this would happily agree that their moral codes conflicted to some degree with the codes of all other religions. Although religions might all agree that, for instance, murder is a bad thing, nearly all secular societies have managed to come to that conclusion. I see no evidence of religion having any supernatural ability to arrive at some perfect moral code.

Religions conflict on moral guidance but, moving beyond other religions, the inconsistencies become even more dramatic. A striking example is the head on collision between the First Amendment to the Constitution of the USA that guarantees freedom of religion and the First Commandment which insists that its adherents believe in the god of the Old Testament and no other. At the same time we should not ignore the achievements of religion. Why is it, for instance, that I was reassured when a young Polish woman, that I took on to help keep my house clean, told me she was a devout Catholic. I knew that this meant she had had it driven into her for years that she should not steal and she was part of a community that would give her a hard time if she failed to keep these rules. I have frequently had a similar feeling of reassurance when dealing with people from the former Soviet Union who have been brought up to follow the morals inherent in socialism. Millions of people adopted communism fundamentally because of a belief that we should act with kindness to a wide community. I have no more felt threatened by some Stalinist ruthlessness from them than I have feared betrayal to the Spanish Inquisition from my cleaner.

I like to think that the morals I have thought out for myself demand more strongly that I treat others well than do those of my cleaner's, but I can understand why they don't provide anyone with instant reassurance. They would have to spend quite a bit of time talking to me to understand what they imply for my behaviour and then, after all, where is the community that might stop me ignoring them when I feel like it? Does the fact that someone is a follower, rather than a leader, of a religion make us feel they are not bold enough to hurt us? Probably not, there are far too many violent variations of religions to feel any comfort.

Many will think that their religion is the best if not the only source of morality. I cannot prove them wrong, but have already said enough in "The Backslider's Guide To Success" of why I don't believe them. With massive doubts about any claims to supernatural authority that they make, I am left with the conclusion that there is a lack of integrity at the heart of all religions. Political power was wrested from the priests years ago in most parts of the world. The time has come to take society's evolution to the next stage of maturity and take back their power to dictate our morality.

The Law

The criminal law reflects the consensus, at any time, about which morals should restrict individual behaviour. International law, constitutions and such documents as the Bill of Human Rights, similarly express what morals should restrict governments. Even rules about sentencing have a moral content but some laws, such as the rule that we must drive on the left in the UK, have to do with coordinating a society rather than moral issues.

Should we think of our laws as an expression of our morality, and why do we need anything else? There are people who feel passionately about the law but that is usually because of a fear of anarchy rather than any conviction that laws are a good representation of justice. There are few people who feel they should obey all laws in all circumstances.

The problem with the law is that for nearly everybody it is something imposed on us from above and there are usually some aspects of it that we resent. If people have no inclination towards decent behaviour, no amount of law can ensure that they will behave as the law makers hoped. Society is a complex system and cannot be completely controlled in such a top down fashion. We need also to have rules that individuals are educated in, and accept for themselves. From their application of such rules and the development of their moral judgement, order emerges (bottom up) without policing.

Humanism

The motives of the humanists are those that most closely resemble my own. They even have some fairly clear and brief statements of what it is to be a humanist. The Amsterdam Declaration 2002 of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (http://www.iheu.org/) states seven "fundamentals of modern Humanism":

1. Humanism is ethical.
2. Humanism is rational.
3. Humanism supports democracy and human rights.
4. Humanism insists that personal liberty must be combined with social responsibility.
5. Humanism is a response to the widespread demand for an alternative to dogmatic religion.
6. Humanism values artistic creativity and imagination.
7. Humanism is a lifestance aiming at the maximum possible fulfilment through the cultivation of ethical and creative living.

For some reason though, they do not seem to have captured the public imagination to the extent of competing with the main world religions. I can easily count on one hand the number of people who declared themselves as Humanists on meeting me. It is not enough merely to identify a workable moral code. It is not enough to understand and make a commitment to it. It has to be constantly reinforced by repetition of the understanding and commitment, and by membership of a community that will censure those who fail to live up to it. Humanism does not offer any simple rules that can be easily communicated. It is therefore unlikely ever to have the sort of mass following that is needed to create a "moral community".

What can we do about it?

I believe the Triax offers something new which might capture people's imagination. I hope that it can be developed and improved and that the www.thebackslidersguidetosuccess.co.uk website can be a focus for this. However, I would be more than delighted if the Triax was not adopted but stimulated better minds than mine to come up with something that met the same objectives more effectively. For that reason I have set up this www.secularmorality.org for people to propose alternatives to the Triax. I hope this can develop into a community and that a core of people sharing my objectives can emerge. I would like to think that people with and without religious beliefs will feel happy to participate, since it is in the interests of all to find common ground. However, I think it is unlikely that those with beliefs that defy reason, or who are anti-science, have much to offer.

I would like www.secularmorality.org to develop, not only a morality that will be widely acceptable, but also the methodology for getting it widely adopted. Some of the principles that I believe should be observed in this, and some questions that need to be answered, follow.

Moral codes should not hide in obscure language

Although many people are attracted by mysteries, and charlatans enjoy cloaking their deceits in ambiguity, I believe there is no place in the statement of a moral code for obscure language. Given the need to be able to translate successfully between languages this requirement is not easily met.

Moral codes should support the bottom-up aspects of social change and control

My apologies are due here for what may appear to be management consultant jargon but I believe that some very profound insights into social behaviour have been gained over the last 50 years and that we would be foolish not to take advantage of them. More recently, advances in mathematics such as catastrophe theory and chaos theory have led to complexity theory and deepened our understanding of such things as evolution and change in human organisations.

If something as complex as human society needs to be changed rapidly (and it surely does) then we must use both top-down and bottom-up techniques. A top down approach to morality would be for a government to define the moral code in detail and to try and enforce it. Top-down may work well for some aspects of society such as setting up frameworks within which it can function. The separation of powers defined in the American Constitution would be a good example. It does not work well when it is extended into micro-management of the economy as attempted by most communist regimes. It is simply impossible to predict all the rules you will need, let alone enforce them, and the lack of ability to respond quickly with common sense to new circumstances was undoubtedly one of the reasons for the failure of Soviet Communism.

It is easy to show (using computer models) how structure can emerge from a complex system without that structure having been requested or sometimes even imagined. The patterns formed by flocks of birds in the sky emerge in a computer system simply by defining a world in which there are randomly moving objects that obey simple rules, such as "try not to bump into each other". Top down rules for such a world might be, for instance some borders on the space in which the objects can "fly". A bottom up rule would be one that affects the nature of the objects, such as "when objects collide they must part at a lower speed than the one at which they met." This would change the pattern that emerged. When dealing with systems as complex as society we can get results from making these rules that operate at the individual level, but the results are uncertain. Nevertheless one can be sufficiently confident that the results will be good to give it a try. Anyone expecting to have an understanding of these issues would do well to invest some time in reading a book that explains these new theories in an approachable way (e.g. "The Web of Life" by Fritjof Kapra)

Despite the fact that society is far too complex for us to predict accurately the outcome of our interventions, we should at least make what design decisions we can, both top-down and bottom-up. To fail to do so is to leave ourselves to the mercy of unfettered evolution which has no interest in our happiness.

Axiomatic approach

As a mathematics student, I remember having limited respect for those of my colleagues who only knew how to remember formulae, and how to mechanically use them to give a correct answer. They were unable to prove the formulae they used from simple, self evident mathematical statements or create new ways of solving problems. In computer terms, they were happy to be computer operators blindly entering data into a program and getting the correct result back. I was determined at least to understand how the program worked and preferably to write the program myself.

I have the same feeling about life. As I said in "The Backslider's Guide To Success", I view human lives as unique puzzles that it is our duty to live as beautifully as possible. Each life is different and very complex and there is no pre-written program for living it. We need the moral equivalent of "self evident mathematical statements" and a willingness to work with them to solve the puzzle. To accept some old and detailed formula without question is to duck out of the challenge of life. At best your life is unlikely to produce all the beauty it could and at worst your formula may be wrong and give false and ugly results. Strictly speaking, what the Triax offers are not axioms but they do try to be "self evident moral statements".

This "axiomatic" approach to morality also has the advantage that everyone can remember what it is that forms the basis of their morality. If we are to achieve a new morality that people can feel confidence in, it needs to be something that we can sign up to and know just what we are taking on. If someone claimed to follow the Triax, anyone could understand what was being said and challenge that person to justify how their actions conformed to the Triax.

Rituals and allegories

Rituals and allegories clearly satisfy an important human need. From the fact that all religions provide them, it is safe to assume that a mass moral movement is not going to get far without offering them too. The humanists recognise this issue and have designed many rituals that they offer as suggestions to people who want to avoid a ritual based on a religion. Rituals are associated with times of great emotion such as birth and death and it is at such times that people are most suggestible. Religions use this opportunity to reinforce their teachings and there is no reason why a secular morality should not do the same - openly.

What are the best channels for spreading a new morality?

Some clear and honest thinking about this issue is needed, well beyond my own thoughts on the matter. So far I have talked about websites and rituals but there is a lot more. Citizenship classes already contain material with moral content. What would be the equivalent of a church, mosque or temple? These are places where people have their understanding of their religious moralities deepened and reinforced. One should also never forget that these are providing a community focus and in some places almost the only way of meeting people. A good friend of mine lived in Houston for many years and found it very difficult because virtually all social activity was centred around the churches he did not believe in. In such places the dominant religion finds itself in a very powerful situation.

The power of community to encourage conformity to a moral code is enormous. I remember as a young man going out to work in Khartoum filled with naive beliefs about how wicked my country had been to the poorer nations of the world and how I might help repay the debt. On arrival I refused to join the Sudan Club, the haunt of the remaining British imperialists, and tried to mix with the locals. What I failed to understand was that I would have very few opportunities to meet the ordinary people of the country and that many of the Sudanese and non-British expatriates, who surrounded me, were people who made it their business to exploit stupid foreigners and were most unrepresentative of their countries. No doubt the Sudan Club contained its own share of people who would happily cheat other foreigners but I learned that they were more constrained, by membership of the club, in how they behaved towards me. After several expensive incidents, I took refuge and became a member.

How do we stop morality being hijacked?

Most religions were started by people in whom most of us would find a great deal to admire. They all get hijacked eventually by people who use the religion for their own selfish ends. How heart-broken the founders would be by what is sometimes done in their name. We need to have some very clear ideas about how a morality can be hijacked in the way that religions can be hijacked. Leaders getting carried away with themselves, commercialism? We need some very precise tests that will tell us when something is going wrong.