Roots of Morality
Delivered by
Ilona Forgeng, July 26, 2009
At the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, New Bern, NC
Hosea Ballou was an itinerant Universalist preacher
in early 1800’s
New England
, and he was probably the most influential of all Universalist ministers.
As the story goes, Ballou was once riding along with a Baptist
preacher. They were passing the time in friendly theological debate. The
Baptist offered the standard argument against the leniency of
Universalism: "Brother Ballou, if I were
a Universalist, and feared not the fires of Hell, I'd hit you over the
head and steal your horse and saddle." Ballou
answered, "My brother, if you were a Universalist the idea would
never occur to you!"
Most people seem to think that moral values are
divine values, and without God to promise rewards and punishments,
"Anything goes." You can’t be good without God. Historical and
cultural experience, however, have shown that values are relative and are
Man’s rules, not God’s.
The statement by some Christians that it requires a
belief in God to be a good, a moral person offends me. When they proclaim
that without God’s promise of reward and punishment, I will surely lie,
cheat, steal and murder, my back gets up. As a dedicated Humanist, I KNOW
that people are capable of behaving like angels or like devils, quite on
their own, without God or heaven or hell.
If God didn’t tell us, “you shall not murder,
commit adultery, steal, lie or covet your neighbor’s ass,” if God
doesn’t decide what is good and what is bad, where did “Do unto
others” come from?
In researching the great religious traditions for my
series here, I learned that all cultures share some basic values, values
of compassion, justice, mercy, respect. As John’s reading showed,
essentially all of them have some form of the golden rule, even if most of
them tend to say, do NOT do unto others as you DON’T like done to you.
Or as Ambrose Bierce said, Don’t do unto others– their tastes may not
be the same. When you see something like this across all cultures, you can
be pretty sure that what you are seeing is inherent and not cultural. It
comes from nature, not nurture.
Connie Barlow says that there are three stages of
evolution, and we are in the third stage; there was the evolution of the
universe, the evolution of living things, and now, social evolution, the
evolution of the way we live together and how we treat each other.
Did our moral sense develop in Barlow’s third
stage? Is there something in the human past that has given rise to our
sense of justice, compassion, cooperation
and loyalty? What are the roots of our morality?
Morality makes it possible for people to live
together. It is what makes society function. Morality
is a set of systems that work to regulate selfishness and make social life
possible.
We humans are social animals. All social animals,
from bees and termites to the great apes, have structured societies in
which each member has a place. Social order is governed by rules of
behavior, and dominant group members can be brutal in enforcing those
rules.
About five million years ago our human lineage split
off from the other great apes. For millions of years more, humans
continued to evolve, living in social groups on the savannahs of Africa,
foraging, hunting, collecting the minute genetic changes that led one
ancestor or another to be just slightly more successful in passing on
genes, just slightly more successful in hunting, in producing and raising
children and in group survival.
Somewhere in those millions of years, we developed
what neurologist V.S. Ramachandran calls “the driving force behind the
great leap forward” in human evolution. Ramachandran works with mirror
neurons, the so-called Dalai Lama neurons. These neural cells fire when we
perform a specific action; different neurons fire in response to different
actions. These are not command neurons, they are response neurons. The
same neuron also fires when you SEE
someone do that action. These neurons connect the self with the other.
Thou art that. I-thou. Dalai Lama neurons. Ramachandran thinks that these
neurons led to the development of language, the ability to imitate sounds,
to mimic someone else. And this, of course, led to the ability to
communicate ideas, history, technology, in short, to communicate culture.
These neurons would also have been responsible for the development of
empathy and compassion, the ability to put yourself in another’s place.
They would have led to social intelligence and the ability to understand
each other, to understand what another person is thinking, planning and
feeling.
With language and empathy, people living in these
social groups could communicate their intentions, help each other learn to
hunt, tell them where to pick berries, which berries to pick. They could
cooperate on an entirely different level.
If our ancestors were so smart, why would they go out
on the savannah on a hot day, get dirty, trudge for miles only to be
attacked by wild animals? Why not let someone else do the work? But
societies can’t allow selfish behavior or the group breaks down and
loses the advantages of social living.
As soon as we learned to communicate, we learned to
gossip, to attack people’s reputations. One of the strongest forces
discouraging bad behavior is the protection of one’s reputation, whether
on the African Savannah or in downtown New Bern.
A few weeks ago, Sydney touched on the cooperative
value of reciprocal altruism: “I will sacrifice for you today, because I
may need your help down the road.” Reciprocal altruism provides an extra
measure of cohesiveness, an extra measure of cooperation for social
living.
This sense of reciprocity, which we share with the
other great apes, is a great tool for binding us together. Research done
by Frans de Waal shows that many building blocks of human morality are
found in other apes and are evolutionary products of the highly social
primate life.
He does not claim that chimpanzees have morality,
only that they have some of the building blocks that humans use to
construct moral communities. Chimps exhibit emotions like sympathy, fear,
anger and affection. These building blocks plus mirror neurons plus a high
intelligence led to behavior in our ancestors that encouraged cooperative
traits and meant success for their social group.
As a very brief summary then: the evolution of the
brain led to social responses like reciprocity and language, which bred
cooperative behavior, like promise-keeping and communication, which led to
moral laws and social institutions that encouraged group cooperation which
made these social groups successful and enduring.
If evolutionary psychologists are right, we come into
this world with a genetic blueprint, prepared to use our evolutionary
moral building blocks to construct our own moral structures; we have what
brain scientist Gary Marcus calls a first draft. Built-in does not mean
written in stone. Nature provides the first draft that experience revises.
We all have our native nature, but nurture does the editing.
What does the first draft of the moral mind look
like? What is there in all of our minds and brains that provides the
working capital from which each of us constructs our world view?
Moral psychologist Jonathan Haight has found what he
calls the five foundations of morality.
According to Haight, first foundation is caring,
related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and the
ability to feel the pain of others. Care underlies the virtues of
compassion, kindness, empathy, and nurture.
The second foundation is fairness/reciprocity and is
related to reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and
autonomy; IT is the source of
“do unto others.”
The third foundation is in-group loyalty, related to
our long history as tribal creatures. This foundation underlies virtues of
conformity, patriotism and self-sacrifice. It is "one for all, and
all for one."
The fourth foundation is authority/respect, shaped by
our long primate history of hierarchical social structures. This
foundation underlies virtues of leadership, deference to authority and
respect for tradition.
The fifth foundation is purity/sanctity. This
foundation is about any kind of ideology that tells you that you can
attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling
what you put into your body. And while the cultural right may obsess about
sex, the left is pretty good at making a virtue of organic food, ecology,
carbon footprints, and recycling.
Did that list seem strange to you? Did you agree with
the first two, care and fairness, but somehow conformity just doesn’t
seem that important, or authority for that matter. It isn’t surprising.
In Haidt’s view, these systems are the first draft
of the virtues cultures transmit to their children. Western culture
emphasizes the individual and the first two foundations, fairness and
compassion. Eastern cultures emphasize one’s cooperative role in
society, a role that benefits the entire society.
More important, in Haight’s study of moral values
across cultures he has found one over-riding fact: wherever they live,
those who self-identify as liberals endorse moral values related to the
first two foundations, self-described conservatives endorse all five. For
conservatives it's not just about justice and mercy. It's also about the
binding virtues of loyalty, respect for authority, and a concept of
sacredness.
Unitarians are by definition religious liberals.
Probably most of us here would self-identify as cultural liberals, perhaps
some as libertarians, maybe even a few libertines, but there are unlikely
to be many cultural conservatives in a UU congregation.
The biggest difference between a liberal and a
conservative is openness. Religious liberals are open to experience,
diversity, new ideas. Conservatives are lower on openness and prefer the
familiar, the safe, the dependable. Liberals like change; conservatives
like tradition.
So here we are, a group of people who work for
justice and value compassion and cooperation, but we celebrate diversity,
we question authority and we say, "Don’t try to tell me what I can
do with my body."
Liberals have noble motives for this. Traditional
morality can be repressive to those at the bottom, to women, to people who
are different. Liberals want to change the system, even at the risk of
chaos. Conservatives speak for traditions. They want order, even at a cost
to those at the bottom.
The disagreement isn't over harm and fairness. Moral
arguments are usually about diversity, authority and purity, traits that
evolved to help us succeed as social animals.
These issues explain the most contentious questions
in the culture war. Liberals support legalizing gay marriage to be fair
and compassionate; conservatives resist changing the definition of
marriage and family. Liberals support a woman’s right to choose;
conservatives see abortion as a violation of the sanctity of human life.
These differences are not the result of liberals’
lack of respect for God. Religious conservatives say that God condemns
homosexuality, and that God wants women to be subservient to men, but it
is not God, it is Darwin who defines our moral foundations. Our moral
foundations have been shaped throughout our evolutionary history as social
animals, by our lives in societies that thrived as they acquired those
traits that we now see as “human values.” We are compassionate, not
because Jesus tells us to love our neighbors; we love justice, not because
Micah thought it was what god asked of us; we respect our parents, not
because of Moses’ tablets, and we try to walk gently on the earth, not
because God created it in six days. We value these things because they are
in our genes. They are part of who we are as human beings.
We can do it better, and belonging to a social group
like the fellowship here will encourage our better angels. Because we are
liberals, we will remain open to change, open to doing it better.
As a liberal, I find it encouraging to remember the
words of Charles Darwin, “It is not the strongest of the species that
survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to
change.”
May Darwin and Dawkins be with you.
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