One
of the most common things one hears from older people is how they are concerned
about the decline of moral principles in society. Perhaps this is something one hears in every
generation as society evolves and customary behavior changes. Today, however, this is not simply a casual
concern of older people in their conversations, but of many other groups of
people as well. Groups of more
conservative-oriented people stake out strong moral principles as a defense
against what they perceive as the onslaught of dangerous moral change. A moral decay that they perceive in the
behavior of so many of the people they see around them. These supposedly fallen people include
everyone from teenagers to politicians to Wall Street businesspeople to
ordinary everyday people. There is the
sense that something is different this time when people proclaim the decline of
morals in society. This is because
customary behavior appears to be so disconnected in so many areas of life from
what traditional moral principles teach us.
I
I
know that I have discussed moral behavior in modern technological society in
several of my previous articles, but it is something which I feel the need to
continue to explore. It has been much
easier for me to diagnose the problems of modern life than to find easy
solutions to these problems.
I
was at a philosophy conference a few weeks ago at Northwestern University in
Evanston, Illinois. The focus of the
conference was teaching morals in modern education. In other words, there was a focus on how to
teach moral virtues in modern schools in order to combat the perceived decline
in moral behavior among students. The
presenters and the audience at this conference were not particularly oriented
towards morality in a religious way. As
a matter of fact, they focused on the moral principles of the Greek philosopher
Aristotle. After all, this conference
was sponsored, at least in part, by the philosophy department of
Northwestern. For many people at the
conference, the perceived moral problems of young people today would diminish
considerably, if only they could absorb the virtues taught by Aristotle. Socrates and Plato were brought into the mix
as well.
All
three of these philosophers are wonderful thinkers and among the foundational
thinkers of our Western Civilization.
But times have changed significantly since these three were alive. When Aristotle and Plato wrote, there was a
great emphasis on principle-based morality (as there was with the prophets and
moral teachers of Western religion).
Moral philosophy was based on the need to develop strongly defined
figure principles as a way of psychologically transcending above the organic
perishability that surrounded people in traditional living environments. These principles were an attempt to prevent
people from giving in to their lusts and degenerating into animals.
But
in a living environment that is enveloped by a modern technology that is
evolving at an accelerated pace, people are becoming increasingly detached from
any natural living environments that would threaten organic perishability. Today the degeneration of the human nature in
a person could be in a different direction,
Today, the influences in the living environment lead to a person
becoming robotized. As a result, a very
different approach to morality is needed.
Rather
than concentrating on strongly defined transcendent figure moral principles,
the focus today should be on establishing a strong contextual grounding for
dealing with the larger circumstances in which human actions are carried out in
modern technological living environments.
Context-based morality is the use of strong contextual understanding to
keep people moral within the sensory distortion from the vacuum and the free-floating
figures in the vacuum that are being experienced today. Technologically-based sensory distortion
influences people to behave in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise behave.
If
technological figures are constantly evolving, new reactions from people are
constantly being elicited. Sometimes,
these reactions constitute behavior suitable to being judged from a moral
dimension. The context of the reaction
becomes as important, if not more important, than the abstract principle by
itself. There is a need to judge the
reaction within the new specific situation.
Yes
we still need principles. But in the old
days, the application of principles could shape how we mentally configured our
perception of the contexts of life situations.
Now we first really have to see and experience life situations as much
as possible free from the judgments of standard moral principles. And then we have to let the actual problems
created by our life situations shape not only the applications of moral
principles but even new basic moral principles.
This latter concept is going to appear radical. Religions as well as the judges in our legal
system have always tried to fit applications of standard fixed principles to
new situations. But modern technology
has ripple effects throughout human life and human society today, and it is
generating so many situations for which there are simply no good
precedents. Not only is it creating new
situations, but with the rapid evolution of technology today, it is creating
constantly new unprecedented situations.
This is why rigid discrete figure principles are not adequate anymore
for arriving at many moral decisions.
Blind application of abstract figure principles in today’s world leads
to a person degenerating into a robot.
And the one constant today to all of our specific potential moral
choices should be that they keep us bonded to our animal natures and receptive
to organic blendable continual stimuli.
Both of these are important for maintain a strong coherent sense of self
in a human being and preventing him from becoming a robot.
Sex
may be a perfect area of life to use in order to understand the importance of
contextual understanding to making moral decisions. I have shifted a little bit in my comparative
interpretation of sex outside of marriage in traditional societies vs. sex
outside of marriage in modern technological societies. I used to focus on unmarried sex in
preliterate societies as a way of reinforcing community bonding and creating a
collective imprint from a particular generation. This was in distinction to
unmarried sex in modern technological society, which is a way of getting a
variety of organic blendable continual stimuli from different bodies as a way
of compensating for the lack of variety of organic stimuli in modern living
environments. In most so-called
civilized societies, sex was primarily supposed to be reserved for marriage,
where one could leave a strong personal imprint with one partner and where one
could leave a strong personal imprint with the children one had. Sex outside of marriage was considered
immoral, because it blurred one’s capacity to make and preserve personal imprints,
and more important, because a person became less fully human in a transcendent
sense, by giving in to animal lusts.
Sex in modern technological society serves a different purpose. People today aren’t so concerned with being able to preserve imprints in the face of organic perishability. Today people are concerned with being able to even have the opportunity to make organic imprints in the face of a field of experience that is lacking in organic surfaces. And people today experience sex not so much as a giving into animal lusts, but rather as a desperate attempt to fight numbness and to use the organic stimuli from sex to fight degenerating into becoming robots.
This
context of sex today is totally different from when Western religious
principles were first formulated. Young
people feel a need for sex, at least partly because of sensory distortion, way
before they are in a position to be economically independent adults. And having sex with different bodies gives
them the variety of organic stimulation they no longer get in traditional
living environments. Unfortunately, with
more casual sex, young people diminish the opportunity to create deeper bonds,
to preserve organic imprints with their partners. But the deeper enemy today is robotization,
and the priority is actions to maintain a human balance within today’s living
situation. What should be discussed at
some point is if there is a way to put some formal boundaries to casual sex, so
that young people can get the opportunity to create some deeper bonds within
sexual diversity. Before the sexual
revolution came into full force, adolescents used to go steady. Perhaps such steady relationships with mature
sex can be institutionalized – sort of like early trial marriages. The one thing for sure is that the
traditional purposes of sex are clashing with newly developed modern purposes
for sex, and some way has to be developed to reconcile these different needs.
In
today’s world, sensory distortion from modern technology has been undermining
the very foundations of our patterns of life, our rhythms of life. It has created new human life situations and
new configurations of human life situations which require radically new
responses from people in order that they may survive psychologically. And with regard to morality, a moral solution
to a human life situation cannot be developed today without first taking into
account how modern technology has directly or indirectly affected the
situation. Modern technology is so
incredibly pervasive in its effects on all aspects of human life.
© 2013 Laurence Mesirow
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