Link - The New Jerusalem

While the green revolution is on its waning end in most of the western world, the United States could still do some catching up. I won't go into the Kyoto Protocol, or the heinous environmental policies of certain administrations, but rather offer some positive input:

It seems that Europe, on top of kicking our asses in every other area of common sense and progressivism, has quite the reputable think tank, cranking out super ideas about Combined Heat and Power systems, biomass energy, and green housing, all with the legislation to back them up. To get a better feel for their ideas, click here to be redirected to EfficienCity, a cute virtual town where seagulls chirp in the background as you enlighten yourself on the feasibility of a reduced-carbon future. Click around in the digital city to view videos and animations on cutting edge technology and real life operations that implement them.

The Value of One's Word

What's in a word? There's the sounds that compose the words (which linguists call phonemes), there's the letters that spell the word. There's also the history of the word (etymology), and the setting (time, place, social situation, surrounding words, genre) (or pragmatics), both of which help to contribute to the all around feeling of the word (connotation), and finally, its meaning to each unique mind with relation to all of the above (semantics). (NOTE: the links for these aren't mere Wikipedia articles. I did my research and the links are interesting!)

We also are quite aware that words have some type of power, beyond just the two-dimensional meaning of each word. Words themselves have not only referents outside themselves ("ring" refers to that thing you put on your finger) but can be used abstractly to refer to a whole world of complex and emotionally powerful meanings (follow the ring example?).

And when such impactful words are strung together to form more complex ideas, meaning can increase exponentially. When my family became members of my childhood church, the Pastor asked us a series of questions about our beliefs and intentions. By answering "I will"--just two simple words that apart from one another and this context have much less meaning--we declared our commitment and devotion to these things. There's a certain amount of aether involved, a level of the invisible that gets wrapped up in such words.

It is quite curious that, especially in religious or spiritual contexs, declaring our intent comes with such an expectation that what has been declared will be done to the highest efforts of the declarer. Such is the definition of a promise. (Oxford American Dictionary puts it: "A declaration or assurance that one will do a particular thing, or that guarantees that a particular thing will happen.") And should the promise be about a position or role that we are to assume, we call it a vow. (OAD: a solemn promise, (vows) a set of such promises committing one to a prescribed role, calling, or course of action). Should these promises involve an invocation of a god as witness or enforcer, we call it an oath.

What bothers me is the mutability of such oaths, especially today (divorce rate projected at something like 50%, and higher among religious Christians). In 1867, there was one divorce for every 35.9 marriages. Today (2000), that's at about one for every 2.46. So what kind of magic was in the words of all those married before? Was it male-dominated society's stranglehold over divorce laws? Probably had something to do with it. Could there have been the effect of conservative religious views? Perhaps. May it have been a higher level of duty and resposibility over today's rampant individualism? That's possible, too. A million other factors could be involved.

But there could also be something else involved; could it be that we no longer attatch such divine importance on our commitments? When I say I'll be at so-and-so's gathering on Friday night, I don't invoke a celestial witness. Even if my interlocutor depended upon me being there, and expected that I would, I'd say the same thing: "I will". I'd say it with the intention to do it. And were I to say this in a Church, nothing would change. I wouldn't worry that people were going to overhear me saying that and then find out that I wasn't there and say, "but you promised before God!"

Whatever the case, my generation has very few qualms with going back on one's word, especially if it doesn't hurt anyone directly; I no longer am "willing to give of their time, abilities, and resources to support the various church interests, according to their ability." But that doesn't bother me at all. I didn't say, "I will," with any more conviction than when I say "I wil" finish my homework before Monday." I intend to do it, but if something comes up that supersedes the desire to execute that action, I will go back on my word.

So what is it that gives certain I will's so much meaning, so much expectation, and so much...oath-iness? Is it the sea of religious people watching us? Is it the belief that God will punish you if you screw up, or the level of dependance upon the execution of the promise? Is it the loss of the magic surrounding words, or a laziness? Or is it something I've missed altogether?

Pinker on Morality

Steven Pinker, one of my favorite authors, is a linguist, psychologist, and, now it seems, somewhat a moralist. He was featured a couple of days ago on an episode of NPR's Talk of the Nation, after his column "The Moral Instinct" was printed in the 13 Jan edition of the NY Times. Both feature about the same information, so take your pick; are you an auditory or visual learner? Either way he raises some very interesting questions. Here's a recap from the article (cutting and pasting is so much easier) to start, then some notes from the radio show:

• "Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the ''moral'' setting isn't just a matter of how much harm it does. We don't show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles."

• If you're going to read the article, pay attention to the moral dilemmas on the third page. They reveal a lot about our moral psychology: "People don't generally engage in moral reasoning, ... but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification."

• Pinker goes into the physical psychology of moral judgments including the trolley dilemma. Different parts of the brain light up when making the moral judgment between throwing a fat man in front of the trolley barreling toward 5 unsuspecting victims, than when considering pulling a switch that will amount in about the same outcome. Three areas light up in the former: (1) "implicated in emotions about other people", (2) "implicated in ongoing mental computation (including nonmoral reasoning, like deciding whether to get somewhere by plane or train)", and (3) "an evolutionarily ancient strip lying at the base of the inner surface of each cerebral hemisphere, registers a conflict between an urge coming from one part of the brain and an advisory coming from another." In the latter, however, only the second area lit up, which "corroborate Greene's theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis."

• In listening to the radio show (at about 8:00 into the broadcast) Pinker answers an interesting question about war, implying that the way we do war, with kinship metaphors and communal meals, are ways of brainwashing people into thinking that they're fighting for their clan or family, rather than "a more abstract entity called the nation-state."

• The morality of certain issues, like homosexuality, is amoralized over time, and amoral issues of the past are now moralized; take smoking for example.

• Five ways to moralize: Purity (vs. Contamination), Group Loyalty/Conformity to Norms, Avoidance of Harm, Fairness, and Deference to Authority. Interestingly, Left wingers tend to appeal more to Avoidance of Harm and Fairness, whereas conservatives favor Purity, Group Loyalty, and Deference to Authority...

• One caller on the radio show poses the question of whether this is a more convincing approach for justifying morality than an appeal to something like a divine edict. Pinker, in his response says, "I don't think that Traditional religion is a viable source for morality." Rather, the more convincing source of morality lies in "rational interchangeability of perspectives (23:47)." He even implies that there is a higher standard for morality than the Bible, citing different contradictory commands in the bible in which we make a moral judgment one way or the other.

If there's one thing that this teaches us, it's that morality's origin is at least gray. Enough questions surround this topic to conclude that humility should be the name of the game. In any moral question, and in the questions surrounding the nature of morality itself, it must be assumed that you could be wrong.

Another point worth raising: morality, evolutionary or a result of something else, serves a purpose and is part of our make up for a reason. And morality for morality's sake seems an unlikely reason. As people began facing social pressures rather than environmental pressures as the primary obstacle to survival, we began to possess a negative reaction to behavior that compromised the community upon which humanity came to rely.

This is interesting, because it implies that morality is highly reasonable. And being reasonable has its benefits. We can talk about it in concrete (as concrete as concrete, at least) terms, and get out of our dogmatic bubbles when talking about "right" and "wrong."

And if morality has evolutionary origins, that hints that our existence in a community has a synergistic effect. We wouldn't evolve with socio-philic emotions hard wired within if it didn't benefit the species in some way to exist in community. And that offers a bit of hope, I suppose.