Re: Mind's Eye Re: Towards a modern morality

or the eternal promise, love.

On May 29, 6:37 am, gabbydott <gabbyd...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I understand "do no harm" to serve as a friendly response/reminder or added
> value to the real original law which is "survive".
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> On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Lee Douglas <leerevdoug...@gmail.com>wrote:
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> > Do no harm is broad brush, and kind of impossible to live by though innit?
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> > On Friday, 18 May 2012 05:13:01 UTC+1, archytas wrote:
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> >> My stance towards most moralising is one of incredulity, yet I'm a
> >> moraliser and believe most of our problems lie in our lack of personal
> >> and collective morality.  Economics as our political and business
> >> class practice it is fundamentally immoral against a scientific world-
> >> view,  My view of science is that it is full of values and the notion
> >> of it as value-free is a total and totalising dud.  Only lay people
> >> with no experience of doing science hold the "value-free" notion of
> >> science.
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> >> You can explore some of the moral issues arising in modern science in
> >> a lengthy book review at London Review of Books -
> >>http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n10/**malcolm-bull/what-is-the-**
> >> rational-response<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n10/malcolm-bull/what-is-the-rational-response>.
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> >> The book's topic is climate change.
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> >> Coming up to 60 I regard the world as a abject failure against the
> >> promises I thought were being made in politics.  I'm a world-weary old
> >> fart now, tending to see the generations coming up as narcissist
> >> wastrels who don't know what hard work is (etc.) though I think the
> >> blame is ours, not theirs.  I think the problem is our attitude
> >> towards morality.  The tendency in history is to focus on religion for
> >> moral advice - this is utterly corrupt and we have forgotten that much
> >> religious morality is actually a reaction against unfairness and the
> >> wicked control of our lives by the rich.  It is this latter factor
> >> that is repeating itself.
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> >> Much moralising concerns sex.  This all largely based in old fables
> >> for population control we can still find in primitive societies such
> >> as 'sperm control by fellatio' (Sambians) and non-penetrative youth
> >> sex (Kikuyu) etc. - and stuff like 'the silver ring thing'.  The
> >> modern issue is population control and that we can achieve this
> >> without sexual moralising - the moral issues are about quality of
> >> life, women as other than child-bearing vessels and so on.  We have
> >> failed almost entirely except in developed countries - to such an
> >> extent the world population has trebled in my lifetime despite
> >> economic factors driving down birth-rates in developed countries
> >> without the kind of restrictions such as China enforced.
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> >> We are still at war.
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> >> Our economics is still based in "growth" and "consumption" and notions
> >> human beings should work hard - when in fact the amount of work we
> >> need to do probably equates to 3 days a week for 6 months of a year.
> >> 75% of GDP is in services and only 6% in really hard work like
> >> agriculture.  We could have a great deal more through doing less and
> >> doing what we do with more regard for conservation and very different
> >> scientific advance.  My view is it's immoral that we won't take
> >> responsibility for this and review our failures.  I believe this
> >> failure inhibits our spiritual growth and renders us simply animal.
>
> >> Human life may be much less than I value it at and just a purposeless
> >> farce.  The first step in a new attitude towards morality is to
> >> consider living with a scientific world-view.  The implications of
> >> this are complex and probably entail shaking ourselves from a false-
> >> consciousness to be able to see what is being done in our name.  We
> >> need a modern morality not based in the creation of fear and demons to
> >> enforce it, or the feeble existential view of the individual.  We are
> >> social animals and need to get back to some basics developed with
> >> modern knowledge, not in past religious and empire disasters.
>
> >> Religion has a role in this in my view - religion we might recapture
> >> from sensible history - I'd recommend David Graeber's 'Debt: the first
> >> 5000 years' as a read here.