Ethics: The Golden Rule vs Family Values:
Evolution continues to roll along, which is not to say in any predictable fashion. Even the collective global epitome of wisdom—Abraham Lincoln—would have stumbled badly had he predicted what life in this country, or world, would be like in 2016, 151 years after his death. We now have an impressive human knowledge base compared to Lincoln’s day—and likewise impressive gains in civilized behavior and living (at least in some countries). More people today have rights which only certain others had back then. Similarly, quality of life for the affluent has improved immensely. Ethics, however, is our blindspot.
What is meant by ethics here? We certainly are not talking about ancient scriptures. Organized historical religions are trapped by the constraints imposed on them by scriptures all written, oddly enough, about the same time in history—what I like to call the age of prophets and modern religious sects. No reasonable or logical person can accept all the passages in any of these scriptures. There may be a lot of ethical truth in all of these scriptures, but they are mingled in with obvious historical, ethical, or scientific nonsense. Thus, the purists, the fundamentalists, and all like ilk, essentially ignore certain passages, or twist themselves into a pretzel trying to make sense out of certain scriptural passages. Why wouldn’t anything, purported to be the word of God, be innately clear, scientifically accurate, and written by God Himself instead of by the friends of a Prophet years after the death of that Prophet? Why would God use inheritance as the means to recruit followers? Things just don’t stack up here. This hardly means the Prophets were not truly ethical leaders of their day—they were.
The ethics thus referred to in this musing is the ethics embedded in the human genome. However we define ethics, it is a trait found most advanced in the human species. Like all genetic traits there is genetic variation. This also means a genetic trait evolves over time, just like other human traits have done. Stay with me on this.
The perception in this musing is that our ethical trait is not evolving fast enough to keep up with our advanced knowledge base and behavioral/other emotional states. Behind the substance of this musing lies an understanding of human ethics as a combination of the Golden Rule and the responsibility of family values. All human societies across our planet view the Golden Rule as an ethical principle. No one ever argues otherwise. Also, no religious scripture denies the responsibility of parents to raise their children properly.
We are, in the largest sense, all God’s children—the products of God’s evolutionary process. God’s laws govern this process—laws which we understand more and more over evolutionary time. There is no evidence that God ever nullifies any of these laws to protect or advance individual members of any species, or any species itself. This kind of God-interfering belief is a self-serving notion invented by humans. However, ethics exists as a reasoned pattern of behavior which benefits all members of any species genetically endowed with ethics. Family values is an ethical behavior pattern which benefits a huge range of species. The Golden Rule is an ethical behavioral principle which enables the human species to achieve personal contentment in their lives. Virtually all human cultures recognize the parental responsibility of parents to their offspring during their formative stage of life. We also know that human parental responsibility is essential for the survival of our species—we have one of the longest formative stages of any species. When we mess up the formative years, the damage can be lifelong. The Golden Rule exists as a means for individual humans to achieve varied degrees of contentment in their lives—in other words, serving others outside our own genetic cabal brings contentment to our lives. That is to say ethics (the Golden Rule) uses personal contentment as the reward for doing unto others as we would like them to do unto us.
Problems arise when the balance is off between the Golden Rule and family values. The Golden Rule exists to provide the best environmental existence for a whole species, in this case the human species. The Golden Rule takes precedent over family values. The whole is more important than individual parts. For example, preventing human overpopulation trumps any right of individuals to reproduce at whim. The Golden Rule trumps the right of any individual to drive as fast as they so feel. The Golden Rule is a lifetime responsibility; family values applies only to the formative years. Once a young person reaches adulthood they become the responsibility of the entire community, in most cases via culture and the government.
Another hitch here is that children themselves have rights which trump parental rights. So all of this gets a bit tricky. We all understand that due to genetic and environmental variations, some parenting is better than others. The Golden Rule dictates that government do what it can to level the playing fields for all children. Of course this cannot be totally accomplished due to genetic and environmental differences. For practical reasons this means that all children are entitled to healthy diets, good schools, good teachers, good health care, a safe environment and freedom from chronic stress. No group of individuals can ethically use family values as a means to ensure their kids get an advantage. For example, affluent communities should not be allowed to use property taxes to ensure their kids have better schools. Once the same amount of money is available to educate every child, then individual communities are free to design their own specific curriculum. This will help ensure the best curriculums develop. Competition is almost always a good thing. The Golden Rule takes precedent here because societies function best when all children are well educated, just like they do when all members of society are given good health care. Yes children do have individual rights once they have become uterus independent functional entities.
But even after government provides level playing fields, we also know that some parents are better parents than others for many different reasons. The science now exists to measure when children are under unacceptable chronic stress. Chronic stress generates high blood levels of certain hormones, and we now understand what the consequences are likely to be. At the same time we now know that certain psychological defenses, when available, can help protect the body from chronic stress. Clearly, the job now before us is fourfold:
1. Measure the blood levels of stress hormones once or twice a year to identify children in need of assistance
2. Determine what is causing the increased blood levels
3. Determine what measures can be taken by parents, or government or volunteers to correct the cause.
4. Determine which psychological defenses need bolstering, and the best way to accomplish this.
Where, the question immediately arises, are we going to find the manpower for all this? Well, for a start, much of excellent learning can be done over computers these days. Thus, teachers can let computers do more of the teaching and also be part of teams to administer the four tasks above. There is no longer any need for individual teachers to be lecturing all period long. Students will be busy absorbing quality information via quality computer presentations, and using emails to connect with an appropriate source of help. There would be fewer individual classrooms and more larger open areas for grade level activities in science, history, math, arts, etc. Students could then be preceding at their own pace. This allows for a large staff center to deal with chronic stress problems. This not the musing to pursue this in more detail, but it is all doable. In fact this attention to chronic stress in students will save teachers their jobs, which are even today being challenged by computers.
This attention to chronic stresses may well be the next big industry. Instead of locking up drug abusers we will be diagnosing the cause of the chronic stress generating the drug abuse and then treating the cause. If we can diagnose why a child is suffering from chronic stress we can then try to correct the cause. At the very least we can help the child become equipped with better psychological defenses to the stresses involved. We now understand that failure to treat the cause of chronic stress in the formative years greatly increases the likelihood that damage to various systems in the body will result in an adult— an adult who is neither a responsible citizen nor a productive financially independent citizen. Today we let such doomed children be jailed, live on welfare, enroll them in our armed forces, pay them non-livable wages, gate them away in ghettoes—all of which have just made our rural, urban, and suburban ghettoes grow worse with every decade, while the number of citizens reduced to poverty grows exponentially.
The silliest comments are being made by those who actually think they can protect their own grandchildren’s future by leaving their earned wealth solely to their own offspring. This is shortsighted and wrong on several fronts. Evolution doesn’t work this way at all. The societies in history which have prospered the longest have always managed to make the greatest percentage of their citizens contented. This is accomplished one way or another by the Golden Rule. When the lives of everyone matters then a nation has the basis for spreading maximum contentment to the greatest number of citizens.
While it may sound cruel and perhaps preposterous to suggest that family values is operative only doing the formative years, it is really neither cruel or preposterous. It in no way detracts from the noble goal of having family members have a close loving relationship till death do they part. Most offspring recognize their indebtedness to their parents for the effort and cost by the parents to raise them. It is quite another matter to claim this genetic connection entitles them to continued financial support for life, plus a right to an inheritance. Getting something for nothing other than a genetic tie-in belies logic. And when an entire society embraces this notion it dooms the fate of entire segments of citizens, and ensures such a society implodes on itself sooner or later. All grandchildren are dependent on the health of any society in the future. Thus dooming the future of any society by customs in the present spells disaster for all the descendants who will live in such a disaster.
Essentially then, to get it right, all parents are obligated to provide the proper formative environment for their offspring (family values) with the government striving to level the playing fields as best it can. Once the formative years are over, offspring are best expected to operate independently on their own and and it becomes the collective responsibility of everyone in that society to support the needs of all adults—via the Golden Rule.
The era of time is past when we can continue to allow chronic stress for millions of young people in their formative years create developmental limitations on these young people. Times are no longer so simple and rural. We now live in a congested global environment driven by all kinds of intercommunicative electronic devices. We might call all of this the age of unprecedented chronic stress. We don’t like the way people in our modern mass ghettoes act, or feel, or think. Well, they don’t either and therein lies the basis for global implosions. Only recently have we begun to more thoroughly understand the consequences of chronic stress and ways to reduce such stresses.
If we cannot get the ethical principles of the Golden Rule and family values to dominate our culture without creating genetic cabals centered around wealth as the divine value of life, then all this modernity will destroy us.
The Next Musing, titled Achieving a More Perfect Society, will attempt to redesign how we can create an environment to meet the needs of children everywhere—affluent, poor, of any ethnicity, any religion, any gender, any sexual orientation, and so on.
