If God is dead, what is sacred?
And what is impermissible?
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? —Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Like an old software project encumbered by needing to maintain backwards compatibility with previous versions of itself, organized religion doesn’t provide a relevant framework to inform the moral dilemmas of the modern world. Its rules and traditions, while internally meaningful, have and will continue to isolate those who, to paraphrase Lorde, were ‘raised by the Internet.’ A modern ethical system must be based on principles rather than faith-based origin stories, open to critical analysis, and help busy people organize their everyday thoughts and behavior.
Principle 1: Life is suffering.
This is meant to be an objective assessment of human perception that informs a plan-for-the-worst mindset rather than a grand, depressing inevitability. Life, of course, also includes happiness, joy, and love, but what it is, in its most core form, is suffering. In a grand sense, it’s our difficult evolutionary quest as an organism to grow, survive and reproduce before we die. On a more experiential level, it’s the background condition to everything else in which everything else happens to us: it’s what we’re doing when we’re doing nothing. It’s standing in the agonizingly long line at the grocery store at 7pm when everyone else seems to be in your way (while, of course, you’re getting in their way). [1]
Principle 2: Your job in life is to reduce suffering and/or increase happiness.
Importantly, this goes further than utilitarianism (i.e. ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’) in making a claim of duty, not just a distinction between what is right and wrong. This is why, even when we’re hustling to get out of the grocery store to start dinner, we still feel pangs of regret for cutting someone off in the parking lot. We know we’re violating an obligation to treat others how we would want to be treated. Similarly, when we live up to this obligation by helping others — offering our time/attention/resources, respecting etiquette, admitting vulnerability — we implicitly know we’re ‘doing the right thing.’ In this way, it is self-justifying. You can numb yourself to this through continual re-abuse, but it never fully goes away in its stronger forms, such as cheating/lying or violence/killing. Those who don’t understand or follow it, such as sociopaths or truly dispassionate criminals, seem deeply inhuman.
Principle 3: The optimal way for you to reduce suffering/increase happiness is to subordinate your desires to those of others.
Given the all-demanding pull of the ego, everyone basically spends all day thinking about themselves by default. Actively spending time thinking about others is a secular form of ‘praying for someone’ or ‘meditation on their suffering.’ So, paradoxically, the best strategy for you to selfishly maximize your happiness is to put others’ happiness before yours. In doing so, you escape the cycle of degenerating tit-for-tat-ism and into a virtuous cycle in which others reciprocate selflessness. In relationships, these cycles are called friendship, mentorship, love; in groups: family, neighborhood, community, country.
Corollary 1: By acting on these principles, your mind, instead of acting like an analytical instrument fiercely trying to determine the etiology of a problem or operating within the existing definition of the problem itself, starts to act as a creative instrument searching for new solutions, potentially through even re-defining the problem itself. In Buddhism, this can be seen as an example of the principle of dependent origination, the idea that the cause-and-effect are not actually distinct, but rather are entangled, and that there is an inherent interdependence in human mental models.
For example, consider a chair.
What is a chair? Something you sit on. So is a rock a chair? Well, I guess it can be. So, it stops being a chair when it’s not being sat on? I guess so. So, ‘chair-ness’ is context-dependent and not, in fact, inherent to an object. Alternate definitions that attempt to typify a chair physically as a wooden structure (what about an office chair?) or something with a seat (is an entire car then a chair?), a seat + back (what about a saddle?) and legs (what about a carseat or, perhaps, a giraffe?) are similarly incomplete or overreaching and, ultimately, mutable. You could argue that a chair is a class of chair-like objects (i.e. office chairs, carseats, saddles, stools, etc.); however, this is analogous to defining ‘red’ by enumerating a list of things that are red; you still have not provided a concrete, self-contained definition.
And this is basically how most of our knowledge representation works. We extend this hierarchical categorization of concepts to create an ontology, the unseen graph that you traverse when you find yourself lost in reading related Wikipedia articles. But inescapably, the graph hangs on nearly indefinable and seemingly unfathomable terms like ‘The Universe,’ ‘Philosophy,’ ‘Concepts,’ ‘Life,’ ‘Matter,’ ‘Society.’ [2] In a way, the reigning scientifically informed ontology is an merely our most updated version of previous terms we’ve hung on to to help resolve the majestic oneness around us — God, Yahweh, Allah. [3]
Corollary 2: Importantly, dependent origination also applies to the entity you think of as ‘you.’ You may feel that you have had a role in constructing your present identity or ‘you-ness’ (for example, your personal aesthetic, career path or value system), but you had almost no control over the environment that shaped your primary development. But, you may say, my ‘you-ness’ exists independently, just somewhere deep within the recesses of my brain, sort of like a secular soul. It’s always been there throughout my development and I’ve (or is it, it’s or we’ve?) chosen my current path, and my fundamental ‘you-ness’ has been there the whole time.
Unfortunately, the conscious sensation of choice is quite literally an illusion: if you’re asked to choose a button to press with either your left or right index fingers, you will become aware of your ‘choice’ about 1 second before performing the act itself. However, if an fMRI machine is monitoring your brain activity, it will be able to reliably predict your decision 7 seconds in advance of the act itself. [4] So then, what exactly is the 1-second-prior feeling if not an illusion, in the same way that we want to believe our entire internal monologue is coming from a little man/woman inside our heads, rather than some habits of thoughts we’ve picked up from others’ behavior? How far up the causality chain can we go with even more and better measurement instruments or more sophisticated simulations?
If the mind-body dualism is a false dichotomy, could also the body-body one be one as well? The early evidence provides some support for this hunch — you’re more likely to be overweight (or happy) if your friends and family are. [5] What I believe remains when you strip away the ‘inviolable you-ness myth’ is the communitarian idea of the self being primarily defined by the communities it inhabits (nation, race, religion, gender, family, college, industry) and its relationships with others. [6]
Then, if I truly become those around me, I should (1) carefully choose who I associate with and (2) do everything I can for them to help them thrive and develop as well.
The major organized religions espouse many (and potentially all) of the principles I’ve used to frame my ethical worldview, but they do so indirectly and inefficiently such that only the PhDs and most earnestly dedicated priests, rather than the median follower, truly grasp them. However, in the context of the history of civilization, the decline of organized religion seems obvious and inevitable to continue. The question then is:
What will we fill the void with?
—
[1] David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” commencement speech.
[3] And, of course, proponents (of which I am one) of the reigning ‘science ontology’ frequently neglect that their system rests on many assumptions (i.e. faith) itself. For instance, the scientific method implicitly assumes that if you do the same thing under the same set of conditions twice, you will get the same results; however, this itself is unverifiable (i.e. at a minimum, time will always be different across two experiments). We similarly forget (or don’t even realize) that there are many strands of ‘logic’ and schools of ‘economics,’ each themselves with their own ‘faith-based’ assumptions.
[4] ‘Thoughts on Free Will,’ http://feross.org/thoughts-on-free-will/; ‘Neuroscience vs. philosophy: Taking aim at free will,’ Nature, http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html
[6] We, of course, are affected by our relationships with the physical world as well, such as growing up not knowing where your next meal is going to come from; however, it seems our relationship with other similarly interdependent, self-modifying ‘I’s weighs much more significantly on our process of self-creation.
Further related reading/sources of inspiration: [direct:] I Am a Strange Loop, Toward a Psychology of Being, The Happiness Hypothesis, Justice: A Reader, Connected, The Life and Death of Great American Cities; [fiction:] Stranger in a Strange Land, The Metamorphosis, Siddhartha, Asimov’s Foundation series, The Fountainhead; [health:] The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Born to Run; [personal development:] Wooden.
