- How morality changes and can be used to build a better world, with tips about improving your moral technology;
- How choices and options may or may not have made us free;
- Music: Now on to Shostakovich; here’s Symphony #10.
One of yesterday’s items included an older link that I collected last October but never used. Let’s look at it now.
Again, a working premise here is that the human nature and morality of our ancestors, what can be called the tribal mentality, became optimized over hundreds of thousands of years for life on a Savannah in small groups, extended families or tribes of a few hundred. Loyalty was paramount, then authority and a hierarchy of obedience. As humanity filled up the planet and all these tribes merged and interacted, new ways of living *had* to be discovered, in order to avoid endless tribal wars. (Like the ones in the Bible, I’m tempted to say.) Those new ways involved principles developed during the Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions — rules about equality and rule of law, rules placing empiricism above received wisdom, and so on, all meant to subvert or avoid those tribal instincts. They’ve worked for a while, but the instincts are inherent in many people, as we are seeing with the current MAGA folks and their authoritarian leaders, who delight in flouting law and ignoring objective facts about reality.
OnlySky, Adam Lee, 30 Oct 2024: Morality is a technology to build a better world, subtitled “It’s not just material technologies that make our lives better. Civilization is also a collection of moral technologies.”
Imagine you woke up one day and found that you’d been thrown back in time to the Stone Age.
You inhabit a hostile wilderness, with no electricity, no internet, no modern conveniences, nothing but the clothes on your back and whatever you have in your pockets. How would you fare? Would you survive?
… I’m fascinated by how humans make stuff. We started out in that hostile wilderness, just one species struggling for survival among many, at the mercy of predators and weather. We had no natural advantages like warm fur or sharp claws or venomous fangs—nothing but soft hands and squishy brains. Yet the collective power of our intellect has allowed us to harness nature to serve our purposes: first for survival, and later abundance and comfort, to the point where we now dominate the planet.
One of my favorite books is The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell, which aims to be an instruction manual for how to reboot civilization if the world ends. Reading Dartnell’s descriptions, you can see how humanity has climbed the ladder of progress, bootstrapping the resources of nature into more complex and useful products.
I have that Dartnell book; it’s one of my favorite books that I haven’t actually read yet. I like the idea, and I have a similar book by Guy P. Harrison.
Lee gives an example of a chain from limestone to glass. And fertilizer for crops.
Civilization is built on technology chains like this. As I’ve written before, the practical knowledge came before the theoretical understanding. We worked out how to do all of this before we knew anything about chemistry or atoms or the periodic table. But the scientific revolution enlarged and deepened our understanding, illuminating the laws of physics that undergird these transformations.
(With a link to another fascinating Lee essay.)
It’s not just material technologies that make our lives better. Civilization is also a collection of moral technologies. These are the implicit rules and principles that most of us have internalized: how to live together peacefully, how to treat strangers, how to trade and exchange, how to share and cooperate, how to resolve disputes. Like material technologies, we depend on them every day, yet they’re so common that we take them for granted.
It may sound strange to speak of morality as a technology, but it is. In the same way that a telescope improves your vision or a lever enhances your strength, morality is a cognitive prosthesis that expands the capabilities of the human mind. It’s how we overcome the Prisoner’s Dilemma problem of trusting others who might not reciprocate.
And so on, through stages of growth in moral reasoning. “Just as concrete and steel allow you to build more than you can with stone and wood, societies with higher levels of trust and cooperation can accomplish more than societies with less.”
And then ideas for “how to improve your moral technology.” I’ll quote the first.
The first of these is imagining better worlds. Defenders of tribalism, divine-right monarchy, colonialism, theocracy, slavery, feudalism, communism, neoliberal free-market capitalism, and many others have made the argument that their ideology is the immutable order of things, the end of history, impossible to improve upon. The fact that so many incompatible ideologies say the same thing is sufficient reason to distrust all of them.
We should never assume that the way society is currently organized is the only way or the best way. We should always question if the rules could be changed or if resources could be distributed differently to make society fairer, more just, or better at motivating people to use the talents they have. It’s a cognitive exercise that keeps us from getting trapped in hollow dogmatism.
And this is, ahem, how science fiction informs these realms of philosophy and morality.
His other steps: practice empathy, and read books, “as many and as often as possible.”
Literacy is the essential imagination-stretcher, transporting readers to different worlds and bringing them inside other people’s heads. It’s the best way to expose yourself to a diversity of perspectives and ideas you might never have considered. There’s good reason for the famous saying, “Beware the person of one book.”
Thus the book burners, especially among the fundamentalists.
And here’s the cue to cite Elon Musk, who said The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The context is waffling.
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Here’s a second-hand discussion; a review of a book I haven’t read, called The Age of Choice, by Sophia Rosenfeld.
NY Times, Stephen Greenblatt, 3 Feb 2025: Does Having Options Really Make Us Free?, subtitled “In ‘The Age of Choice,’ Sophia Rosenfeld questions whether choosing — what to buy, whom to vote for — is actually worth it.”
(Greenblatt is author of another book I have but have not yet read: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which is about Lucretius.)
I’ll quote the first three paragraphs. The concept here aligns with the idea that, for most of human history, people lived near where they were born and never traveled further than a day’s walk would take them. So there were no choices to make.
For centuries the right to choose for oneself in virtually all the key aspects of life would have seemed either absurd or wicked. “What death is worse for the soul,” wrote St. Augustine, “than the freedom to err?” After all, death came into the world when the original humans, exercising their freedom to err, reached out and made their first catastrophic choice.
In the wake of the expulsion from Eden, life was organized to reduce to a minimum the scope of decision-making. Anyone who was not perniciously rebelling against the order of things had to accept what the authorities in the family, the state and the church saw fit to impose. The notion that you should have some say in constituting those authorities — by giving or withholding your consent to this or that leader or by deciding for yourself how to worship God (let alone by considering whether to believe in God at all) — was fiercely denounced. And though obedience was expected of all, it was particularly insisted upon for women, for it was Eve who was the first and most disastrous chooser.
In “The Age of Choice,” the historian Sophia Rosenfeld offers a rich, compelling account of how the experience of choosing ceased to be the object of suspicion and condemnation and became instead the hallmark, at least in liberal, democratic societies, of any life worth living.
At the risk of misrepresenting what the book, or even the review, actually says, let me note that conservatives are generally in favor of conformity and against choice, while progressives, almost by definition, are for expanding choices (options). At the same time, there have been observations that the expansion of choices in the modern world, as in the abundance of cereal brands in the supermarket to take a trivial example, doesn’t actually lead to more happiness, but to confusion and uncertainty. This reflects styles of shopping. I’ve known obsessives who have to try every possible choice before making a decision; whereas I am the sort of shopper who shops only to find something that’s “good enough” and be done with it.
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And now I am on to Shostakovich. Even moreso than Mahler, every symphony was different from the others. He went back and forth being experimental or conformist, driven by political pressure. His 5th symphony is his most popular, but also his most conformist. I haven’t listened to most of his symphonies in years, but as I recall his 8th, 10th, and 11th were the best. (The 11th is especially slow and mysterious, depicting an event in Soviet history, with some of its tracks used in the 1980s Carl Sagan series Cosmos. Which is how I discovered it.) Here’s a YouTube video of the 10th, which is… energetic.
