Reflections From a Murky Pond

I firmly believe that it is safe to say that most everyone realizes that there has been significant and ongoing moral decay in the West during the last half century or so, especially in America where people had further to fall. While there is great disagreement over the nature and cause of this erosion of character, all the camps seem to agree that the degeneration of our cultures’ ethical and moral character has occurred and continues to do so.

But, if one boils the issue down to purified essence, the root cause of the erosion of character, ethics, and morals is simply that our society has been twisted in such a way that many people receive that which they need and/or want without needing to earn it or feeling that they have truly earned it.

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The Liberals and Progressives have stepped up their screaming of insults at and about Americans, especially the patriots of the TEA Party, and they’ve stepped up the hand wringing, whining, and moaning at and about Obama.

In their eyes Americans are “terrorists,” “extremists” and “hostage takers” and Obama is “weak,” “indecisive,” and a “turncoat.”

Essentially these domestic enemies hate Americans because Americans stood up for their principles and core values, did as they swore to do despite personal risk, and refused to gracefully capitulate on matters of national importance. Yet at the same time these Liberals and Progressives loath Obama for not doing so.

It’s all too easy to chalk it up to the normal and, by this point, dismissible Liberal hypocrisy. For the Leftists’ rank and file though this might be an erroneous conclusion.

While the people behind them and the politicians working for them are likely being cynically hypocritical, it’s quite possible that the Liberals’ myrmidons actually do have such a cognitive disconnect that they can’t even see the ridiculousness of their juxtaposed positions.

I have a simple question; has, in the recorded history of Mankind, an Atheist ever had an original moral thought?

I have posted before about the ethics of reciprocity – the “Golden Rule” – as have others that I know online, which is not surprising since this Golden Rule seems fundamental to almost all ethical thought, philosophies, and religions.

The question arises though of whether we’ve all failed to fully grasp and internalize both sides of this ethical equation.

Have we focused too much upon the primary action and not enough upon the reciprocal reaction? Have we also failed to recognize that it functions much as an engine, a natural law that we’ve placed too many “higher order” considerations upon?

Any of the variations of, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” may serve well as admonishment or exhortation to right behavior by people, but we seem to fail to connect it with, “As you sow, so shall you reap,” which common sense tell us must be the reciprocating side of this ethical equation.

The greatest problem this schism causes is the cognitive dissonance it causes is in those cases where the primary action was a negative or harmful one.  This causes both internal conflict and hampers effective mitigation of the negative or harmful effects of the primary actor’s actions.

If the theory of Reciprocal Ethics is true than it must be true in all its parts or be claimed false. Therefor, natural law would require that negative actions lead to similarly negative responses as a normal course of events and to break this cycle requires conscious decision to engage in an unnatural course of response which might very well, due to its unnaturalness, be misunderstood as weakness, vulnerability or surrender of the point in contention by the original actor.

Some few in the course of history have understood this, though with mixed results.

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.

— Mahatma Gandhi (Disputed)

Gandhi, through his cult of personality and abetted by the nature and proclivities of the two cultures involved and the greater scope of world events, succeeded in breaking the natural laws of reciprocity and doing so in a manner that achieved his victory, India’s Independence from Britain.

Somewhere somebody must have some sense. Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

MLK seemed to understand the basic equation of reciprocity but did not seem to understand that sense was not what was called for, since sense would lead people to follow the natural order of action and reciprocation. As can be seen by the largely unalleviated and unabated levels of racial angst and hatred among the Black population in America, despite the legal and pragmatic success of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King was largely unsuccessful in his prescription.

One has to accept the basic nature of the reciprocal engine that is the foundation of Reciprocal Ethics and fully understand the difficulties involved in convincing people to behave otherwise.

It’s generally considered important for parents to start educating their children in the ways of the world and accepted social mores as soon as possible. Teaching these life lesson well and early gives them the best head start in growing up to be a successful part of their society.

Of course, while children are adaptable and normally learn easily, the overall outcome is more dependent upon the curriculum than anything else… 😉