Morals & Manners … Pt.2 

Last blog on morals ended with the assertion that we are seeing a pincer movement attack on the 'old morals'. One arm of this pincer is tearing down the old to make way for the new (brave world?). I will have something to say about that later. The other pincer is undermining formerly accepted ways of behaving which through the normal process of socialisation became so ingrained that people had the comfort of easily determining the right thing to do. Now they are constantly stressed trying to work it out almost from first principles.

I am not saying there is any human conspiracy behind these, just that they are happening.

Humans do not seem designed to be working everything out from scratch all the time. With noise and hearing our brains work this for us. After a short time they filter out the steady background noises and only bring new or strange noises to our conscious mind. You can doubtless think of many more examples along the same line. We could not function without this facility.

In human enterprises we do not try to get people to work things out each time. Hence the deprecatory saying : “He's re-inventing the wheel”. In all common enterprises a system, or protocol or code is developed that covers the majority of cases and people work to that.

An example from my line of work – building is this: engineering a house. For the common cases there is a code, I don't have to calculate bearer, joist or beam sizes from engineering principles (even with the head start of having gained a masters degree in engineering in my youth I would find that an almost impossible burden!) No, I just follow the code. It contains tables where someone has laboriously worked out things like safe floor loadings, the wind pressures experienced by buildings, the strength of materials like timber joists and studs. All I have to do is look up the table and it tells me what size to use. (actually it is even easier now that someone has put it all into a simple computer program.) Only the hard cases that are not covered by the code have to be referred to an engineer to work out.

So our brains have evolved to simplify things like auditory input to make life liveable. Our collective human enterprises have developed things like codes because it possible for ordinary people to know what to do. And as I said last post, our brains have developed a phenomenal ability (called socialisation) to learn and internalise very complex rules of behaviour.

So why on earth are we allowing the teaching and internalisation of moral rules to be destroyed?

This is no advance. It is counter evolutionary. It is against all logic. It is making life more stressful for individuals. It is making our society less functional.

So my point in these two posts is let us stop this madness! Re-develop social and moral rules of behaviour, teach them to our children, reinforce them in our schools and colleges. Stop being afraid of enforcing them with social sanctions. Wear the pain until this re-socialisation takes hold across society. Then reap for generations the benefits – for they are great and well worth the pain!