Perception is an Illusion - FOLLOW UP

After the last post titled Perception is an Illusion one of the readers wrote to me - “You wrote that all choices are equally important and right. Please let me know how the choice to go into villages and ethnically cleanse, to rape children, to make children soldiers for the side that slaughtered their families is an equally right choice compared to not going into villages and doing all of the things that I just wrote.” I felt this needed some immediate clarification. And thank you so much for asking because this is what I need.

The easy answer is that in a perfect world no human would want to hurt any other human, that is where I hope our evolution will take us. But it is going to be a long journey and along the way humans will have to make some choices. But I want to take this question very seriously and answer two different questions that came to me from reading it - 1.) Would a choice to murder and rape ever be considered equally important and right? and 2.) How can I refine the concept of staying open to all forms of human expression so that we get to the ultimate goal stated above, ie, no human would ever choose or want to hurt any other human.

Let us take question number one first, and call to mind that part of evolution is trying many different things in order to evolve life into what? We tend to think the what of evolution is the survival of the fittest or something better. That process of evolution can happen in many ways including things that seem horrible. Of course we do not want to look at this as being an equally valid choice, and we can imagine the outcome if this were left unchecked. Using the principal question of murder and rape, it would seem that the majority of human diversity would eventually get wiped out and only murderers and rapists would remain, likely killing off humanity eventually. End of species. On a universal scale human extinction may be near meaningless if there are an infinite number of similar species testing out an infinite number of evolutionary paths. But enough of that, let us agree on two things, first that the majority of humans have evolved to a level of awareness that this behavior is unacceptable and second, that we humans have evolved to a level of awareness where we can make choices as to which evolutionary path we take. This level of awareness that allows us to participate in evolutionary choices is a blessing and a curse, a huge responsibility and privilege. Recognizing this ability to participate in the evolutionary process, we can see that in fact humans have already chosen to take the path toward live and let live and have established moral rules against murder and many other things. This is the direction humans have chosen and it deserves acknowledgement and great appreciation. Side note - this one aspect of human development has many interesting subtopics, including who made these moral decisions, man or God, and more down to earth, how we continue to improve abidance by all humans to whatever laws and morality we collectively implement.

Before we get to the second point, let me illustrate exactly how my interpretation of human evolution can get implemented using the principal that the choice for murder and rape can be considered equally important and right together with the principal that all humans must never hurt any other human. It is not necessary to look at an individual that would do violence to others as wrong or less equal, it is only necessary to make clear to that person that humans have collectively chosen to abide by the principal that all humans have the right to their choices and by hurting any other human that choice gets taken from the victim and is punishable. Because the goal is to keep further violence from happening and not to make the person who made that choice wrong, separation from the rest of society would be a valid choice. When viewed in a short period of time this seems archaic or counterproductive but if you look over a dozen generations with the hope that all the evolutionary forces concede to this rule and very few if any humans are born that choose violence, it might make sense. Why it is important to view the person that chooses violence as equal and right is because the view that this is part of a greater force implementing a wide variety of evolutionary scenarios, as opposed to the individual being made wrong, will allow for evolutionary morality to grow away from black and white views, evil and good views, that tend to divide humans, toward better and better methods of deterring that behavior. We have long suffered disagreements about the rights of condemned individuals and must come to a clear conclusion. Again, to sum this up, while I do not have the answers, my intuitive idea for a solution is to make certain principals part of the fabric of human morality, those principals would include the notion that there is no right or wrong outside of what we choose to make right or wrong as humans, and that all humans should have free choice to do whatever they want, provided they do no harm to any other individual.

And that last sentence is the answer to my second point. The caveat that no harm can get done to any other individual. This point would still allow for a wide variety of behaviors between consenting individuals because there are a wide variety of tendencies within the human populace. But another point is brought to light by this idea, at what age can someone properly be considered to possess the faculties to consent? Again, this is not new to humans and many age guidelines already exist. But no set of guidelines, rules, or laws is perfect and imperfections will exist, injustice will continue, horrible things will happen. But should that stop us from refining human morality? In my opinion it should not.

What is my primary point about all this human evolution as it regards morality, what am I trying to accomplish or even say? When we look back on history much of human morality got determined by who? Very wise people? God and gods? The majority of the people that were affected? What is the process for updating our morality? Does the evolution of human morality hold a primary place of importance for humans? It seems to me that these questions do not get asked enough, or that attempts to answer them are not important enough to human leadership or even the general populace. I want humans to make these moral questions the top priority. I do not have the answers and am certain there are many individuals and groups far more capable than I could ever be at finding the answers, but I am not seeing a whole lot of open discussion and work happening to move us toward rapid moral evolution. Which I think is critical to the survival of the human species. Especially right now.

I realize some of my views expressed in this article are radical and odd, and my views may change drastically over even as short a time as a few days, but the point is that I am not suggesting that I have the answers, only the questions. Beyond asking the questions I am a cheerleader for putting much more attention on the topic of human moral evolution. And I also happen to believe that there are three important parts of being human that are critical to that moral evolution’s success - 1.) a far greater awareness of how our minds and emotions work and how to deal with both, 2.) a far greater awareness of how beliefs get formed and that they are not necessarily true and therefore must be allowed to change, and 3.) a far greater awareness and acceptance of that which is beyond our comprehension, which I choose to call God even though I have no idea precisely what God is.