Morality Part 3: Culture

THE OTHER NUMBER ONE SOURCES OF HUMAN MORALITY

A problem with our attempting to take a purely rational view of a subject is that our rationality is far from pure.

Our minds do not exist in a vacuum, a raw organic computer full of hard-wired operating instructions but without any data, and cannot operate as such, no matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise. We are, rather, creatures of society. We live within cultures, and on top of that, we have long maturation periods. That culture that we live in, even removed from religion, affects our rationality.

Keeping with the “raw organic computer” metaphor, culture affects the data in our mental machine, and it could even affect the processing instructions. Culture can be compared to a computer operating system, one that is powerful enough to potentially rewire the motherboard. The raw organic computer can run any of a variety of operating systems, each of which totally takes over the computer, making it a very different sort of machine for doing pretty much the same thing regardless of the operating system, just as with real computers. The operating systems Vista and Leopard and Linux all can connect to the internet or run a word processing application, but they each do it differently, with some aspects being done more easily and efficiently in one than the other, some being easier to learn, more malleable, whatever. Cultures are the same thing. Some are easy and welcoming, some are dense and closed, but they all contain the instruction set for individuals to live within a certain society, and they are in total albeit often subtle control of much that we consider individual behavior. The play of society and the individual, or culture and personality, is complex. No individual within a culture is without that culture, to torture a phrase. Culture is a part of the individual from the moment of birth, if not the moment of conception.

The first connection of the individual personality to the group culture is through the individual’s parents. This is where the long maturation period comes in. It is the parents, who are already enculturated, who are the first agents of the enculturation of the child. The parents themselves are already a part of the culture, transmitting that culture to the child. The child is very much like the dog in the parable of the pup, following whatever distinctions the parents make between good and bad behavior. The first thing the child learns about right and wrong is from the parents, which once again raises the question of where the parents/masters get it from. For the child, the source for the parents doesn’t matter, however, because the child, a not yet fully rational actor, will simply follow (or not follow) the instructions of the parents. Doing the right thing is not found in doing the action itself but in following the parents’ instructions, as doing the right thing for the dog is not found in doing the thing itself but obeying the master.

So it is easy to find the authority for children’s morality, which resides in the parents. It is similarly easy to find the authority for religious morality which resides in the revelations of God. But is there morality attached to culture aside from religion? If not, then the parents are simply channeling the morality of their religious training to their children, and in fact, this is the usual case. But there can be more to morality in culture than the purely religious. This too distracts us from our quest for a rational approach to morality, but can only be ignored at peril to our entire analysis, which is why we’re addressing it now.

Culture comprises all the common practices of a large group. For ease of analysis, we can equate a culture with a polity; let’s say we’re talking about an island nation, with a single state government. This island, separated from the rest of the world, has its own language, its own religion, its own music, its own art, its own history. Self-governed, it has its own laws. All of these, and more, contribute to the island’s culture, and that island’s culture, in turn contributes to the conceptions of morality of the island’s inhabitants. Another island nearby, with any variations on its practices from the first island, might have totally different conceptions of morality. Life is complicated, and rich in detail. Island A might be monogamous while Island B is polyandrous. Each would consider the other’s form of marriage immoral, but within the native culture, that form is the norm.

The preceding paragraph posits law as a part of culture, and therefore a determinant of morality. Law can also arguably be viewed as codified morality, that is, the legislated and enforced morality of a society. Personally I find this model inadequate to explain all law, but certainly some laws are exactly that. A law that claims that murder is illegal would be hard to separate from a cultural sense in the polity that murder is wrong. And certainly law is the result of a rational process of analyzing right and wrong in that a legislature of some sort has had to envision and describe that particular illegal act. But the morality of law is another footnote to this discussion, interesting perhaps, but not germane to pure rational analysis of right and wrong. Pursue it on your own time.

So we now have two gorillas in the morality room. The first is religion, but we’ve already explained how religion and moral philosophy can be compatible. Separating culture and moral philosophy may be more difficult, in that any attempt to rationalize anything by any individual is an attempt made within that individual’s culture, and therefore congruent with that culture’s “operating system.” How can I know if I’m not merely rationalizing my own preexisting cultural norms?

The short answer to that is, I can’t. But what I can do, as much as possible, is apply rational thought to morality on a cross-cultural basis. Whatever our conclusions are, they must be as valid in India as Guatemala as Japan as the USA. Since this is not intended as a cross-cultural analysis, and will not compare ideas from culture to culture, we will have to take our neutrality, to some degree, on faith. But as we have already explained, human beings are often, perhaps always, creatures of faith, so we do not ask for more than can be given. If at any point our analysis, because of its cultural bias, becomes too parochial, we should be taken to task on it. The promise is that, to the best of our ability, we will try to avoid that bias. It is not a hundred percent possible, but we can get close. And an understanding of morality that is close to perfect is only slightly less good than one that is completely perfect. We do not seek to prove absolutes in a short essay. We are simply trying to understand a few difficult ideas, to provide a meaningful framework for future inquiries.