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So, as a self-avowed atheist, how do I justify any sense of morality? Without the fear of retribution from an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful god, either here in life or in some kind of promised afterlife, why don’t I just indulge myself? I could rob, rape, murder anyone who displeases me. I could lapse into a life of hedonism, having sex with anyone who crossed my path and drinking, smoking, or shooting up any substance that met my fancy. Whoopee!
Well, there are the rules of society, either written down or unspoken and implied. I could be taken into custody, tried in court, and put in jail for doing violence. And the people I know and supposedly love would shun me for lapsing into insensate carnality. Of course, I didn’t have to work all this out for myself, because I had parents who metaphorically boxed my toddler’s, child’s, and adolescent’s ears—that is, repeatedly—when I acted out. They were showing me the results of temper, anger, selfishness, and sloth.
So, in this case, a moral society and good parenting took the place of an absent deity. Here are the rules, and here are the results.
But what about someone raised outside of a just and temperate society, with inadequate early education in the moral imperatives? What about the children of broken homes and addicted parents who are taught only by their peers in the neighborhood gang? These are children who are essentially raised by wolves. Do they have no recourse other than rape and murder?
That is a harder question. But children are not stupid, and children raised by other children learn a different kind of morality. Usually, it relies heavily on group loyalty. And it is results-oriented: break our rules and pay the price right now. A child who makes it to young adulthood under these conditions may not be able to assimilate into the greater society, or not easily—unless that society is itself gang- and group-oriented with results enforced by fear.
But then, is there any hope for the lone individual, the person trained early to think for him- or herself and reason things through? For the critical thinking and self-aware, the basis of morality would involve both observation and a notion of reciprocity. And that is how any society learns in the first place.
If I commit robbery, rape, and murder, I then expose myself to the people around me as someone they need to watch and guard against—and, conversely, as someone they need not care for or try to protect. Indeed, I become someone they should fear and, if possible, eliminate. On the other hand, if I act with grace and charity, protecting others and helping them when I can—even doing those small acts of courtesy and gratitude that people only subliminally notice—I then invite them to treat me in in a complementary way.
If I abandon myself to a life of casual sex and substance abuse, I eventually find that any pleasures a human being indulges without restraint soon diminish. This is a matter of our human neural anatomy: acts of pleasure release a measure of dopamine into the brain. That’s the feeling of pleasure. But as this system is repeatedly engaged, the dopamine receptors multiply until either the stimulus must grow in proportion or the feeling itself declines. Our brains are not fixed entities but reactive mechanisms. Balance is everything, and any imbalance—a life without moderation—throws the whole mechanism out of kilter.
These are not the lessons imposed by any external deity but by hard reality. They may be reflected in religious teaching and scripture, as they will be reflected in social norms and legal rulings, but they exist before them, out of time. In the case of human interactions, these realities pre-exist by the nature of potential engagements between self-aware and self-actuating entities. In the case of human pleasures and other emotions, they are hard-wired into our brains by generations of that same awareness and choices.
You can’t avoid reality, which is the greatest and oldest teacher of all.