Everything you have heard about morality is wrong. When people hear stuff on the media about morality or moral values, they immediately think about Emperor Dobson. Then, we rise our hackles and scream at the TV. But everything you have heard is wrong.
You do not have to believe in a God in order to be a moral person. People who are athiests, freethinkers, and agnostics have been able to devise systems of morality that have nothing to do with a God who stands over people, ready to strike them down if they are bad enough.
Editor’s note: This will probably be a totally seperate feature from Kos, unless Voltaire wins here as well as over there.
In order to be a moral person, all you have to do is follow three simple precepts:
- All people are equal.
- All life is sacred.
- All religious, nontheistic, philisophical, and political belief systems that uphold 1 and 2 are valid.
From there, based on these, everybody decides for themselves what is right and what is wrong and congregates with like-minded people. When we give ourselves to a community based on these views, we then form a universal moral commonwealth dedicated to making lives better for all through the political process.
This online community is great for sharing views and exchanging ideas with likeminded people, for getting facts, and for getting ammunition. But this place is not a substitute for developing relationships with other people face to face and telling them about Progressive Democratic candidates who will stand up to the President.
To form such a commonwealth, the main work does not involve plunging yourself into the latest MoveOn campaign, looking up the next DFA gathering, or seeing where the next peace march or voter registration drive is. All of this should be above and beyond what I would ask people to do. Everybody between now and 2006 and 2008 should form their own commonwealth consisting of core people whom they can talk to about what they believe, why they believe it, and why it is important to vote for your favorite candidate of choice.
The Dean campaign, Move-On, and ACT Now were all good in getting people registered to vote and getting people involved in the process. But there is an inherent weakness in their approaches — people become firm supporters of your political views through developing a strong relationship with you, not just from seeing you once every 2-4 years around election day and then probably never seeing you again.
People are much more willing to listen to people whose judgement they trust as opposed to someone they have never met before. For instance, my dad and his new fiancee were wavering in their support of Feingold after his vote for John Roberts. But I was able to talk them into continuing their support by pointing out that he was one of the biggest opponents of Free Trade as well as being the first candidate to offer us a way out of the mess in Iraq.
In order to do that, we need to know what we believe and why we believe it. Not only that, we must be able to relate something back to universal truths that you and the other person both agree on. A common misconception among Republicans is that we somehow believe in moral relativism, where there is no objective right and wrong.
This, in part explains why they think the way they do. They think that we believe in moral relativism; therefore, when we speak out against torture, we are not really standing up for moral values, but really expressing hatred against Bush for partisan political purposes. All you would have to do is to ask someone how they would feel if they got falsely arrested, hauled off, and tortured.
Implicit in many of the beliefs of how right-wingers think is the belief in nationalism, or the belief that America is somehow superior to other countries. But given the shooting by American soldiers of 11 people, including five children, we can no longer credibly claim to be morally superior to any other country. This is on top of Paul Krugman’s column for today in which he explains that Katrina symbolizes the failure of Conservative ideology in solving this country’s problems.
The problem is that the Bush administration thinks they are morally superior to the people they deal with. Therefore, they feel no need to negotiate with political groups in Iraq that might hold the key to stopping the violence. Furthermore, they only grudgingly started talks with Iran over Iraq.
But we would not have been in this mess in the first place if we had treated people in Iraq as our equals instead of inferiors. We could have kept all of the structure of the old government in place and worked with people of all parties to form a government instead of tell the Sunnis that their opinions did not matter and deprive hundreds of thousands of people of their livelihoods overnight by disbanding the Iraqi Army. Now, the Sunni insurgents are our most dangerous enemies, attacking our forces with ever-greater sophistication.
I like to call stuff like this the “I know I’m right” syndrome. In other words, I am right, you are wrong, and we are all going to have a nice little war about it if you do not accept my obvious moral superiority. This, incidentally, is what makes someone a troll — they come into this community and expect us all to bow down before their superior wisdom uncritically. Or they set themselves up as the judge of how people can feel or what they can or cannot post.
If these reports of US soldiers killing 11 civilians are true, then that would not surprise me at all. It is a direct logical consequence of American nationalism because it dehumanizes other people by implying that they are suspect. In their twisted minds, these soldiers, if guilty, decided that the moral superiority of our country was such that their victims were not even human anymore.
But this is not just about what I think. The whole purpose of these diaries will be to help you decide what you believe and why you believe it. I plan to write many more such diaries. What I plan to do is to take the philosopher chosen by you and help you develop your own political views over this and give you ideas.
This selection will take two parts. The first, I will give the names of 9 philosophers and have you vote on them. You may nominate your own in the posts. After that, I will take your nominations and do a second poll. Here is my first list:
Plato: He was one of the most devastating debaters of his time; he was a master of exposing the contradictions and inconsitiencies of his opponents.
Aristotle: He was one of the first empiricists, or believers in the art of the possible. His methodology would later lead to the scientific method.
Locke: John Locke accepted the Hobbsian notion of government, but believed that a government was only legitimate if it had the consent of the governed. He formed the basis for American political thought, which used his principles as justification for their revolt against the British.
Rosseau: He took the ideas of Hobbes and Locke and went further. He argued that man was basically good and inherently equal. He developed the idea of equality for all, believing that wars and conflicts start when a healthy self-love turns into pride, where people compare themselves with others and take sadistic delight in their superiority over other people.
David Hume: He was one of the best defenders of modern skeptical thought. He was the one who taught that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. He would be a useful corrective to a world in which there is way too much faith-based thinking.
Immanuel Kant: His whole philosophy revolves around the belief in autonomy of thought. He taught that truth comes not from looking back to authority, but in taking and synthesizing pieces of knowledge to take people to higher ground.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: He believed that man becomes great by transcending traditional authority structures and focuses solely on his intuition and his spiritual well-being. Like Kant, he was highly individualistic.
Philip Selznick: Now, we move on to modern philosophers. Selznick’s book, the Moral Commonwealth, focuses on ways to develop community. He says that a strong community is not one totally in lockstep, and he rejects the mindless conformity of past times. But he argues that this country, thanks to our ever, increasing mobility, has become so fragmented that we have lost a sense of community.
As a result, he argues, we have gotten so wrapped up in causes that we see it as a substitute for developing individual relationships and building healthy communities. For him, an ideal community is one consisting of groups of people coming together in ways which celebrate each person’s individuality instead of supressing it.
John Dewey: He was the architecht of modern education. He taught that people learn the most by doing things. In other words, you do not prepare a teacher by making them recite all the stuff they need to know for the test. Instead, students actually learn by going out and practicing teaching kids in schools and then self-reflect in order to grow.
