Series:
Essay #9:
Synopsis:
It and Thou
Embodied Morality
Morality is embodied in social behavior; we’re born into it, it lives in our guts, and it continues after us in our children
All people have a moral framework of right and wrong. In Sources of the Self, Dr. Charles Taylor said, “It is a form of self-delusion to think that we do not speak from a moral orientation which we take to be right,” and elsewhere, “doing without frameworks is utterly impossible for us.” Someone without a moral frame is inhuman. The scariest villain in the movies, like Hannibal Lector, is alien because he has no moral frame and no concept of right and wrong. He stands outside our values and sees them as quirks to be manipulated. He’s a monster, and our primal impulse is to destroy him.
So I’m a moral being. The next question is, where does my morality come from? Mostly I learn morality by living with the people around me, and some of it I create on my journey. By the time each of my children was ten years old, each had a fundamental moral framework, and that’s not something a child can create alone. The moral framework was a joint production of the child and of our civilization, the latter expressing itself through family, peer groups, media, more. Right and wrong are a communal construct that we all share in.
Each of us inherits a moral structure, because each of us is embedded in a physical body, and family and friends. Growing up as children, we imitated the people around us. We imitated their language and physical behavior and everything, and our morality is coded therein. Morality is coded into social behavior, because all behavior has its OKs and not-OKs, its rights and wrongs. It’s OK to bite the dog but not mommy. Morality is embodied in social behavior just like the mind is embodied in the nervous system. We engage in social behavior at a level below self-consciousness and abstraction; we feel it and do it, and it becomes us. Much later, we abstract out the rules of morality and learn to talk about it, but it all started in the body, in a child’s imitation of family and friends at a level far below spoken language.
Do you feel like, as you’ve gotten older, you’ve taken on the behaviors and roles of your parents? Even though she’s gone, my mom is with me everyday. This is how moral behavior carries forward across generations, because the child who imitates his mom gets imitated by his children. We inherit morality in our guts. Roger Scruton in his book, The Uses of Pessimism, explains our inheritance as an evolved process that
“condenses into itself the fruits of a long history of human experience: it provides knowledge that can be neither contained in a formula nor confined to a single human head, but which is dispersed across time, in the historical experience of an evolving community…. This knowledge is bequeathed to us by customs, institutions and habits of thought that have shaped themselves over generations, through the trials and errors of people many of whom have perished in the course of acquiring it….in order to bring the experiences of indefinitely many others to bear on the decision taken by me, here, now.”
Today's morality is a subtle combination of nature and nurture evolving together in complex feedback loops over millions of years. As for the ultimate source, I believe it's God, and He’s still developing us through our natures and nurtures in an historical process that includes evolution (both biological and cultural).
Whatever the origin story, our moral evolution is as real as our physical evolution; our moral beliefs are as real as our bodies. Right and wrong are physical. Imagine being betrayed by someone whom you love and depend on: the feeling is a gut-punch, nausea, it’s mind and body all wound up together in pain. When something is morally wrong, we feel it as an undivided mass of emotion like anger and disgust, along with a judgment of wrongness that informs the emotion. Emotion and meaning: the feeling derives from the meaning which derives from the feeling, and for matters of right and wrong, it’s intense.
Rational values are like emotional mathematics: impossible. We don’t ratiocinate on moral values, we know and feel them. We know and feel the requirement to respect the life and autonomy of other living beings, to be responsible, fair, loyal, to respect truth and beauty. These are real and good in themselves, without need for rational or utilitarian support; they’re good-for-nothing except Thou. In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor said, “Virtually everyone feels these demands, and they have been and are acknowledged in all human societies. Of course the scope of the demand notoriously varies: earlier societies, and some present ones, restrict the class of beneficiaries to members of the tribe or race and exclude outsiders, who are fair game….”
So I don’t make up my morality as if I was the first human. Right and wrong are a part of me and I live with them, and they’re independent of me and I live up to them. I was born into them: “There is no priority of the individual’s sense of self over the society; our most primordial identity is as a new player being inducted into an old game,” per Charles Taylor from A Secular Age. And I play this game. I take my inherited moral standards and I work with them; I mold them to my life; I make my own judgments about right and wrong.
C.S. Lewis: “Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it.” Yes, I ought to behave a certain way. The moral code is real, it existed before me, it makes demands on me, and it makes me subject to judgment for how I fulfill those demands. I am responsible to you, and you to me, and both of us to God.