Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 14 October 2007

Thinking and Metaphor

Philosophers have tended to believe that thinking can be elevated beyond the human body so that we are able to speculate about things beyond experience. Religions depend upon it. But nothing at all, nothing, is done without that organ inside our head. Everything that has been thought and discovered by humanity has been conditioned by the experiences of the body that contains and carries it. Our very mode of thinking depends upon everyday activities—simple acts that we must do to live. H Johnson and G Lakoff have shown it from careful empirical work, explained in Philosophy in the Flesh. Almost all thought is necessarily expressed metaphorically, the metaphors being rooted in the commonplace activities we do as we grow, and have done as we have grown into human beings by evolving. Our explanations depend utterly on metaphors, and even our deepest thoughts are composed of series of mixed metaphors that any respectable grammarian would not accept. Reasoning has to be reassessed in the light of experimental cognitive studies like those surveyed by Johnson and Lakoff.

Reason is not purely abstract, free of what our material bodies and brains experience in life. It is not a transcendental property of the universe or of disembodied mind. It is the end product of the evolutionary process that brought us to where we are now, over millions of years, and is an extension of the perceptual and motor inference of animals evolving from the very lowest level. Reason evolves from the sense inference that gave animals the ability to respond to their environments. It therefore is conditioned by the environmental factors that were brought to bear in those environments. Theologers and philosophers have both seen reasoning as something that distinguishes us from animals, yet it should have been evident, at least since Darwin, that we are on a continuum with the whole of the rest of the organic kingdom, in respect of reasoning as everything else. We are exceptional in our reasoning ability compared with other animals only in the same way that an elephant has an exceptional nose and a giraffe an exceptional neck.

Plainly, therefore, reason is not a universal stuff or element that helps constitute the universe [†]Reason. It is universal only in that it must evolve in all organisms to fit them to their environments. . Reason is how the organism responds to to the stimuli it receives. The organism that responds appropriately survives better, and passes on its abilities, so the creature better able to reason has more offspring. Thinking is shaped entirely by practical responses in life—for us, the life of all of our ancestors—not by abstract fluids or forces from space or God. The mind cannot step outside of its body to survey itself abstractly. Because reason arises within the body of an organism, it cannot transcend it [†]Transcendence. Christians and Moslems always tell us we cannot know the mind of God, and that is why His ways are so mysterious, so they can understand that even thinking of being God outside the universe looking in is simply an artifact of human experience, like looking down from the balcony on to the illuminated stage in a theatre. Yet any number of them think they know just what God prescribes!. However, we have all had the common experiences of evolving to the human state, and what is common among us can be studied experimentally. Cognitive studies have shown that most of our thinking takes place unconsciously. We have no conscious access to most of our thoughts. We practice doing things, like driving a car or playing tennis, precisely so that we do not have to think about it, and when we do, our performance is often worse. Most thought is subliminal, like breathing.

As thought arises from the responses of an organism to its senses, it is fundamentally wrong, however convenient it might seem, to consider thinking as a separate “faculty” independent of our bodies. Thinking to us is a conscious extension of animal inference, unconscious responses to the environment. The environment has moulded our thinking to match itself just as animals moving in a dense medium like water develop a torpedo-like shape. What is real is defined by our sensorimotor system and the mechanisms that have evolved in our brains conditioned by it. Even very simple organisms respond to food, moving towards it to try to eat it. They do not do it consciously. The organism has evolved to move towards the “smell” of food, perhaps a chemical gradient in the water. [†]“Smell”. Note the metaphor in the quotation marks. We understand smell and it is the easiest way to describe what the simple organism experiences. Sensing is the beginning of thought. Somehow, the animal evolves a “memory” of the chemical gradient “smell” that “points” it towards food.

This organism’s simple brain has formed a Kantian category, an instinct. Mental categories evolve like that as a function of survival. They have always been a function of the survival of the organism, and so are embodied in it. We know and can identify obvious categories, conscious ones, all around us, trees, cats, cars, mobile phones. Our peers, parents and teachers show us these things, but there are more subtle categories in our brains that we do not have to think about, but which have grown there by evolution. Categories are part of our evolutionary experience, and came from the direct experience of our ancestral forms in their environments.

Metaphor and Abstract Ideas

Without our physical experiences and those of the line of creatures that preceded us, there could be no such “faculty” as thought. We see colors because we had a survival advantage in seeing colors in the environment we evolved in, probably so that we could see fruit against the background of leaves. So color is a category for us that a fully color-blind man cannot properly comprehend. We have basic categories that match the real world and allow us to interact with it confidently. We can invent other categories less attuned to our experience but our lack of familiarity with them, our lack of experience with them, reduce our level of confidence unless we determine to practice them diligently and make ourselves familiar with them. Returning a tennis ball on a court, or doing quantum mechanical calculations, is not necessary to most of us, and we are no good at them, but we might be with practice. If people who could not play tennis or calculate wave functions were to die by some natural phenomenon, the survivors would come to regard their skills as commonplace, perhaps God-given! God would be the heavenly tennis player or quantum mechanic, and we would all have been made in His image. Evolution like this is why our normal categories seem so well tuned with the world. Evolution has seen to it.

Abstract ideas like morality, beauty, evil, and importance, and affective experiences like love, virtue, envy and achievement, can only be described among ourselves in terms of experiences we can identify as having in common—the experiences we know we share of sensorimotor action because we can see the action in others. We understand an abstract concept by “grasping” it. When we do not “grasp” it, it has “gone over our heads”. The abstract notion is like a branch of a tree or a butterfly flitting past that we are trying to catch. The abstract is explained metaphorically. Our common metaphors are of solid, real-life things and activities, that few of us cannot have experienced, standing for less common notions—rarely the reverse.

We pick up the metaphors from our earliest experiences after birth, when we begin to experience the world external to the womb. The smallest infant feels the warmth of its mother nursing and cuddling it. It is a physical experience that requires no abstract intellectual effort, and so is quickly familiar. But it soon becomes the metaphor for affection. The infant also experiences the mother’s care and love, increasingly abstract concepts that the infant cannot possibly comprehend, but, as it begins to, it comprehends them metaphorically, as warmth, something it already understands. So, the growing child directly feels physical warmth, and from it comes to understand love as abstract warmth. The learning process is the process of distinguishing the two. Having learnt the metaphor, we do not advance to a stage of unlearning it because it is not correct. We continue to speak of warm feelings to some people, and feeling cold towards others.

In childhood, we learn a large number of primary metaphors in this sort of way, from direct sensorimotor experience, before we can distinguish one from another. It is involuntary. Physical and abstract ideas come to us already conflated, and we have to learn to distinguish them. When we do distinguish them into the physical and the abstract, we continue to use them throughout life, the physical experience acting as the abstract or affective one metaphorically. Warmth is affection, so too is closeness, seeing is knowing, greater is up and lesser is down, important is big, badness stinks, similarity is closeness, help is support, difficulties are burdens, time and change is movement, causes are forces, purposes are destinations, and so on. These metaphors map an abstract idea on to a physical experience. Without such maps we could not talk about anything abstract. To speak about similarity without the metaphor of closeness would take a great deal of effort. It is almost impossible, and certainly not practicable. The effort not to use “closeness” will necessitate the invention of some other, less familiar metaphor.

Mental Categories and Reality

The Greek philosophers like Aristotle decided that what there is could be matched with what we could know. Ontology and epistemology were not contradictory. The reason is the mental categories considered above—the mind has to reflect the world pretty accurately or people would be drowning, and falling over cliffs, we would not look where we are going, and do lots of other silly and dangerous things. Science, through cognitive studies, and evolution demonstrate it. The alternative is that the mind exists utterly independently of the body, and the two are united by some metaphysical means not at all understood. It is the view of religions which need to have the mind surviving the death of the body, and the main reason why anyone still thinks it. Some philosophers like Descartes, pandering to religion, took this view too. Descartes equated soul with mind, and thus became the intellectual as opposed to religious authority for a dichotomy of mind and body.

Analytically, Aristotle’s thesis has three components:

1. The material world is real—it exists objectively.
2. The body is real, but so too is the mind. They both exist in reality.
3. As the world exists, and the mind is in it, we can know it by our minds.

The religious view and Descartes’ deny (2), claiming the mind is spiritual not material, but they accept the other two components. The material body obeys physical laws, but the spiritual mind is supposed to be non-physical, so does not. Mind and matter, mental and physical, are two different, never overlapping things. How, though, can we know the world if the mind is not in it? What is the fundamental difference between mind and body? Descartes thought thoughts do not take up space, but matter does. That is the difference. Mind is pure intellect or reason, while the body is a mechanical system. Yet, the two must interact. What, then, in the brain allows the mind to experience the real world? How can there be interaction, even interdependence, between them? Theologians and theologically inspired philosophers like Descartes have no explanation except that somehow the mind mysteriously reflects the world in a way beyond comprehension. Ideas “correspond” with the world when they are true. The interaction is supposed to be via the pineal gland in the brain, but no one has ever elucidated it, so it remains beyond science—mysterious.

The modern evolutionary view accepts all three of Aristotle’s components and explains why the mind corresponds with the world, why it has categories that reflect the world. Evolution makes it necessary. Aristotle thought we could know the world absolutely, but modern cognitive science shows we only know it through our evolutionary experience, and there are many aspects of reality that had no bearing on the survival of living organisms. What is true for us is what we agree, through the systematic testing we call scientific method, corresponds with the world, but that depends on our experience in being human, how we conceive things and express them, and the limitations of our conceptions and expressions. When we imagine living in the physical world, we imagine what we have experienced—what has happened to us being in a world which has a reality independent of our minds. Our experience is embodied. It is what occurs to our bodies in the physical world. It depends upon our physical being. No link between mind and brain can ignore it without denying the reality of experience.

Our mental world is the sum of our experience. Experience defines what mental is. There is no a priori truth available to us. There is no metaphysical truth, only our physical truth—what has obliged us to conceive it to survive, to achieve our purposes, and to continue to function—unless “metaphysical” takes in all of this. There is no absolute truth equivalent to the pious truth imagined by religious believers. Truth is always our human truth, and though we are learning to extend our senses, we know we cannot ever know everything all at once. We have a sort of Heisenberg’s principle limiting our absolute knowledge, but we can always know relative truths, valid within bounds, and, like integrating round a singularity, we can approximate to truths as closely as we wish by scientific and mathematical methods.

Brain states describe the physical cause of the content of human experience. How can a brain state cause content of experience to exist? Brain states are the material cause of states of mind. They are the states that contain recollection of sensations and the understanding of them, or qualia—the impressions left by sensations. Neuroscience is gradually discerning the physical states of the brain that correspond with certain recollections. Confirmation of it will refute Descartes. The mental is the physical. States of the brain give us our states of mind. Many dualists have trouble with this. They cannot believe that a cinema projector can produce a movie. They cannot relate immaterial luminous images flickering on a silver screen with a strip of material plastic running through a beam of light. Nor can they get that a physical state can cause a mental impression.

Our view of the world is restricted by our limited experience. The way we sense the world is peculiar to us. We do not have X-ray vision, but we have learnt to understand X-rays in other ways, and even use them, but there must be aspects of reality we can never directly know, or perhaps know at all, and certain modern scientific theorems show this to be so. What we have is the systemization of evolution and experience in science that allows us to explore systematically what in the world is accessible to us. We cannot know the world absolutely, but there is simply no knowing how closely we can approximate to it through our experience. That is the challenge of science. The plural in these sentences, the “we”, the “our”, the “us”, is what keeps science from being subjective. It is what makes Charles Pierce right in his theory of Pragmatism. We each have purely subjective experiences, but we must agree on our observations for them to be scientific—to be accepted as true. That is why experiments and field observations are recorded so meticulously. It is so that others can attempt to repeat them. Only multiply repeated and agreed work is scientific. But science is never purely objective either, because we are always conditioned by our evolutionary experience.

Inasmuch as we have a space in the universe with which we interact, we can know what is in it that is common to us, and we can approximate as closely to an absolute understanding of that space that our experience and evolution permit. That is reality to us. There might be much more to reality, but for it to be our reality, it must react with us in some way to allow us to know it. The world exists independently of us, but to speculate about its metaphysical nature is absurd when all we can ever know is what we can experience, or have experienced. We shall be inventing metaphors for what can never be experienced, never tried. We might as well speculate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Metaphysics is metaphor without the benefit of any accompanying experience. It is mainly fancy. Metaphor means something to us because it is what we have experienced. It is explaining the unknown in terms of the known, but the explanation must have a utility—it must match our experience or it is pure fancy.

Metaphor is used in literature in a way that is meant to conjure fanciful images, but this poetic use of metaphor is just one particular extension of the common use of metaphor in explanation. Metaphor is actually how we do most of our thinking. Any abstract thought has a ghost of an outline in our own minds, but it is given form and substance through metaphors that are often mixed from different sources and actions. Theorizing is done through metaphors because theories, like concepts, have to be brought into our realm of experience to be understood. If any objective truth exists, it will forever be a fancy to us because our understanding comes from the way we have been conditioned by our environment, and must always be limited by it. So, our reason, no matter how lofty it might seem, cannot be transcendent, but is an entirely immanent property of the world, for we are organisms in it. All of our basic concepts are expressed metaphorically—events, causes, time, self, mind, morals. We cannot think without them.

And concepts themselves cannot be expressed without experience to give the basic metaphors of expression. Time cannot be conceived until some events happen and are experienced, because time is someone’s experience of a sequence of events. Then time is imagined metaphorically as a movement of events past us, or in the alternative metaphor of moving past the events. Either metaphor puts events of the past, present and future as objects already existing in a landscape so that time is marked as we pass them, or they pass us. Our basic temporal metaphor conceptualizes time as an additional spatial dimension which we move in to give the impression of time passing as events pass us, or we them. Here is Einsteinian relativity already encapsulated in our primary metaphor of time. And all events are fixed in the space-time landscape of our metaphor, implying determinism. Then we have to wonder whether ideas like determinism are simply consequences of our metaphors for thinking. Our metaphors might be good pictures of actuality, but we cannot be sure only by speculation. Experiment is needed to test our speculations to avoid a circularity built in by our primary metaphors. If space-time began in the big bang, our metaphorical landscape is somehow bounded in actuality, or it is unbounded but is the surface of a higher dimensional sphere. We have to recognize the metaphorical basis of our thinking. Does time flow—really? We think of it as flowing, but the metaphor is our way of picturing something quite different. Our artificial concept of time suits us in our situation. We have done it automatically through evolution and personal experience.

Morality and Society

Morality is one of the most important concepts that influence the way people live, but is of no concern to solitary animals and could be of no concern to human beings if we were solitary. Humans are physically feeble animals whose survival depends on them being a member of a group willing to cooperate with each other for mutual benefits like defence, welfare and food procurement. In the modern world we are dependent on others for almost everything. Morality is about how we treat each other socially because we are social not solitary creatures and have to live together in society. We depend on cooperation—helping each other. A society of egotists—purely selfish people—is impossible, as the philosopher G E Moore showed. By definition, the interest of every egoist is to preserve only their own happiness, but, in a society, they must negotiate with the others to do it, so they cannot act only to maintain their own interest. To preserve a society of egotists, individual egotists cannot be concerned only about themselves—a contradiction.

So morality is the word we have for the complex of concerns we have about our relationships in society—justice, fairness, caring, virtue, tolerance, freedom, rights and compassion. None of these apply to animals living alone, independent of society. Once people live together they have to pay due regard for the welfare of each other. People live together for its advantages, but there could be serious disadvantages in having so many rivals for food, mates and the social benefits available, so society has to control people’s possible negative responses to disappointments by minimizing them, and offering justice when the occur. Morality is the code of behavior society inculcates to prevent the social order from decaying into chaos leaving everyone effectively as solitary humans because it becomes “everyone for themself”.

Since society is meant to be beneficial, morality is expressed in terms of personal welfare. The question is how do all of us fare well in a herd of others, all of whom could seek an advantage over the rest, and to whom we might become a burden? Our social ideals are expressed in terms of our not being a burden, but being sane, healthy and strong, not unbalanced, sick, bent or weak, and our food and drink should be relied upon not to be polluted by others. Everyone else in society has the same hopes and expectations. So morality gets expressed as metaphors of uprightness, balance, health, strength, wealth, cleanliness, purity, and so on.

Living socially necessarily means a certain loss of freedom when it adversely affects others, but no one wants to be an ant or even a bee. Society ought not become the organism instead of the person. As the individual has given up some personal freedom to live communally in society, they cannot be as personally free in society as they could be living alone, when they are responsible to no one. Yet they want as much personal freedom as they can get, compatible with preserving society and the security of it. Freedom remains the ideal, and society is meant to offer security in exchange for minimal losses of freedom.

Society is not for the benefit of the elite few, with everyone else being slaves or drones—which is fascism—nor is it the impossible leveling of everyone to an artificial equality—which is idealistic communism—but it is a balance between security in society and individual freedom within it, so that everyone benefits equally from communal living without suppressing personal contributions and creativity. That is the liberal position. When social compulsion exceeds personal freedom we get totalitarianism, whether fascist or communist, and in either case an elite benefits in practice. The elite are elite because they are not subject to the social compulsions of the rest. They are free but no one else is.

It is the balance between social necessity and individual freedom that brings us to a common metaphor for morality—it is a deal, a covenant or contract between two parties in which each hopes for a benefit, and the outcome is good when both sides feel satisfied that each has done well out of it. Moral accounting is the balance of welfare to be had from living socially. Each person has to feel that they have something to gain out of the social contract. If you do something that gives someone a sense of loss, while you feel you have gained, then you have not acted morally. You are morally indebted to the person that has lost on the deal. Real wealth is at the root of the metaphor in fact, because living socially offers gains, but they would soon disappear if others could thieve them willy-nilly from those who have been persuaded of the advantages of voluntarily being a citizen. Theft is therefore morally wrong in society. When a wrong is committed, then the wrongdoer is in moral debt, and justice is society’s way of making you pay your moral debts.

Moral Accounting in Practice

In primitive societies, debts can be balanced by forcibly extracting the moral equivalent from someone who has done you a wrong. It is called revenge, and had some purpose in tribal and clan societies which had an inadequate overall moral authority, or system for enforcing moral equality. Modern societies have laws, justice systems and police forces, and as long as they are not “corrupt”, the primitive need for revenge and its accompanying notion of family or tribal honor has been superseded. Honor now is the virtue of those who can be relied upon to be good citizens, not those in need of revenge. In modern society, revenge is simply multiplying wrongs when the aim of society is to reduce them to a minimum, to compensate those who have been wronged, and to exact legal retribution from wrongdoers by enforced community service, fines and imprisonment. Civilized people do not seek to balance the moral books by direct action, except in negotiation. When negotiation fails or is impossible, civilized people put their trust in the law, which must therefore be trustworthy, and the purpose of democracy is that every citizen can, via politics, influence what the law is.

If there is any such thing as a Christian principle, then this is it. People do not seek revenge, they turn the other cheek personally while looking to the law to right wrongs and balance the moral balance sheet. It means accepting the law, even though it can never be perfect for everyone. Taking someone’s life is the ultimate revenge. It is not civilized, and not permissible in any civilized society, nor has it been for four or five thousand years. No one wants to live in a society where they might lose their life. Death, being final, is what normal people fear above all, making them keen to avoid it. The first protection society should provide is safety from arbitrary death at the hands of a fellow citizen. The most effective way of doing it is to forbid the carrying of lethal weapons, and that is what civilized communities do. Carrying a lethal weapon must mean you are ready to use it. You are willing to kill someone, and that is unacceptable in a civilized society[†]Guns and God. The US is unique among advanced civilizations in allowing people to freely carry lethal weapons, and that is psychologically why it is also unique in its religious piety. People are seeking an imaginary security that society denies them, and its rulers know it and therefore refuse to ban weapons, and instead encourage religious belief..

The upright human is effectively the altruistic human, the human who personally behaves morally, and wants no repayment of the moral credits their moral generosity accrues. If social justice is accepted as applying to everyone, and no one has any need to pursue personal vendettas, everyone in society can aspire to being altruistic. Inasmuch as the law is effective and just, citizens of civilized societies should act altruistically confident that if they are deliberately wronged or taken unfair advantage of, the law will deal with it. If they feel slighted, they can rely on justice to satisfy any temptation there is for them to feel vengeful. This is being Christian—acting like Christ. Aristotle believed that the truly good human being did good naturally. They did not have to be forced to do it. People become good by practice. Every time we resist a bad action, it becomes easier to resist, and every time we do good, it becomes easier to repeat. Practice makes people do the right thing and avoid what is wrong, and it becomes automatic, like skill at tennis or driving. Being Christ-like is a social norm for civilized people. God is a metaphor for the law. It is justice pre-agreed by everyone, to dole out fairness among all, and is relied upon to be God on earth, handing out to social wrongdoers the justice they deserve. Primitive people need to believe in a supernatural God of justice to obey the law. Intelligent people ought not need to believe in super beings to be law-abiding. The law is for our own good.

Rights and Duties

Moral accounting also comes into the concepts of rights and duties. Society provides everyone with the same rights under the law, and people are to use them instead of taking the law into their own hands—a prescription for social chaos—but they also have responsibilities, the social duties of a good citizen. The one necessitates the other, and failure to do your duty means you are not a good citizen and cannot expect the rights of one. A “right” is like a dollar bill. It promises something to the bearer of it—certain social privileges. Today people seem to think rights are what they are entitled to have irrespective of any commitment, responsibilities or duties. That is not so. Rights are a consequence of citizenship, and that requires duties, so rights are consequent on the performance of those duties. Duties must be done to entitle the citizen to their rights! But duties are not onerous. Being personally law abiding, and undertaking to bring up your children in the same way is the minimum. Anyone can do more, though they cannot expect extra rights for undertaking extra duties. The reward is admiration and respect. All of this is using the metaphor of the balance sheet for something less tangible than money—how we want to be treated and therefore how we treat others in a fair society—the credit and debit sides of society’s balanced moral books.

What, though, of so-called moral self-interest? Anyone’s moral self-interest within society requires that they will not attempt to do what is contrary to the best interests of society. By living in society, everyone accepts it is in their own best interest—the whole basis of moral accounting is the welfare of the individual in society. It assumes that living socially is beneficial to everyone, because anyone who thinks they can do better on their own should do it. They should leave society and live like Robinson Crusoe on a desert island, because the absolute maximum of personal freedom is to be had outside society, but then one has no social benefits to enjoy.

It was possible to do it at the outset of society, but not now, and it is because we have no real choice about it nowadays that the liberal social ideal is one of maximum possible personal freedom, and minimum legal constraint, conducive with the perpetuation of society. So, moral self-interest cannot mean absolute freedom to do as you wish within society. It cannot mean that acting utterly selfishly is in the best interests of society, as well as the person. As long as the individual is best served by being in society, then it is in their own self-interest that society should continue, and when someone’s self-interest goes counter to the general wellbeing of society, they accept society has the legitimate power to stop it.

Being free to improve one’s own personal circumstances, while not harming society, generally benefits society itself, and that is what is meant by personal self-interest. People are free to improve themselves as long as others are not hurt in the process, and everyone benefits indirectly. Morality can never be simply the pursuit of self-interest, for unconditional self-interest can damage society, and so is morally wrong. Morals are about preserving everyone’s mutual self-interest, it does not mean, “Do as thou wilt”! The motto is fine but is conditional on not harming others doing the same. Adelphiasophism takes it further, linking the whole of Nature in a social kinunity, and then the condition becomes “but do not offend the earth directly or indirectly”. Harming the earth directly harms us all later on, and harming it indirectly means gratuitously harming any of its kinunity, which includes human beings as well as other life on earth.

The original view of morality was that acting immorally invited revenge or retribution, and so ultimately was not in anyone’s self-interest. It could lead to a serious loss of welfare. That is why moral self-interest involves the social qualification. It is not unbounded self-interest. Now we can see it is not bounded simply in social terms but in environmental ones too and therefore temporally—we can harm our own children by what we do now, and our children are members of our society. A civilized society must have a concern for its future, as well as its present. Adelphiasophists accept moral self-interest but children need to be taught and shown from infancy what it really means. Thus the will to do what is right is inculcated early, and will power is moral strength, another metaphor.

Moral Strength

Strength requires poise and balance so morally strong people are seen as upright, but the morally weak are low, they creep or are bent. The antithesis of uprightness is to fall, and even upright people can stumble. Each of us has a personal battle to uphold social behavior, and in doing that we are metaphorically morally strong and upright. “Evil” means anti-social behavior, and the battle is that we do not ourselves succumb to it. Society is moral to the extent that all of us succeed. The battle is not against an external demon, but an internal one, and it is supernatural only in the sense that it is not a physical battle but a psychological one. It is an abstract battle within our own personality, not a real battle in the world.

In the world, as long as we live in society, society will judge the degree to which we have won the battle against evil. We have failed if we are weak, act anti-socially, contrary to the rules and mores set by society, and society will punish us for it, according to its own laws. Religion has reified the psychological personal battle we experience into a supposedly real battle between God and the Devil—both “real” external agents—but God metaphorocally stands for social justice, and the Devil is our atavistic wish to avoid it. If we fall, the Devil has tripped us, in this view, but the choice is entirely ours, and we fall because of it.

Evil is embodied in our atavistic side, the side that wants to be absolutely free, to be a solitary animal with no responsibilities to anyone, free to do just as we want. In society we cannot. We have our duty to society, and this is what the battle of Good and Evil is all about. We have to suppress atavistic behavior in the social contract we have entered by living in, and enjoying the benefits of, society. When we succeed we are upright, we have not stumbled, but when we fail we have fallen to the wiles of Satan. If everyone, or even most people, obeyed their atavistic impulses, then society could not function. That is how important morality is, but it has nothing to do with the supernatural. Our personal demons are not external forces, but our own personal struggle to be upright citizens against primaeval instincts to do just as we want. Moral weakness is a lack of personal discipline, so that we are tempted to do socially undesirable things. Moral weakness is seen as incipient immorality, and so it too is considered undesirable in society.

The opposite of self-discipline is self-indulgence. Assurance of food is one of the reason people set up and join societies. The division of labour and communal effort possible in societies, improves labour productivity, improving the ability of societies to feed their citizens, especially by using marginal land impossible for isolated animals to benefit from. Taken more broadly, it is general welfare and prosperity. The essence of communal living and social justice is that no one is entitled to or gets more than others for the same effort. Indulgence requires the taking of excess, more than is healthy or than you deserve. If over-indulgence causes sickness, society has to bear the burden, but everyone had less anyway. So, indulgence is not usually considered good. Today, we know it also involves excessive exploitation of natural resources, and that offends the earth. Self-indulgence then is a social vice, whereas frugality is virtuous.

In our world, whole societies are over-indulgent, and others aspire to it! For the time being, it is fine, but our children will have to pay. Though it seems that we can be self-indulgent, it remains immoral because we are indulging in a live-now-pay-later world that simply defers the costs to the next generation. The ancient seven deadly sins—greed, gluttony, sloth, pride, envy and anger—are no less deadly than they were. None of them can be sins in a solitary species of animal. They are social crimes that take from others or place burdens onto them. Their opposites do not, and so are virtues—charity, chastity, temperance, industry, modesty, contentedness, and calm. They keep you balanced and upright, and such that others can trust you. You are morally strong.

It has to be noted that unless individual freedom in society is suppressed utterly, no one can expect a personal battle for virtue to be replaced by law. If excessive drinking is forbidden by law, then the individual does not feel free, and has no personal battle to fight to resist booze. Indeed, the enemy can become the law itself, and therefore the society that imposes it, and this restrictive society manufactures criminals. This is just what the US did in the prohibition days. The law is not to put absolute stops on some habit but to stop excessive indulgence in it. The best way to get people to be moral is to teach them this early in life. Not, “It is forbidden”, but, “Enough is sufficient”. What is forbidden is having more than enough.

Society, through its laws, has the ultimate definition of what enough should be, and what excesses deserve punishment, but history shows that excessive repression is also unstable. Citizens must feel free. Society gives its authority to certain officers like soldiers, judges and policemen, and their authority is metaphorically the strength of society, and they uphold its morals. Figures of authority must be respected, and so must deserve respect. Respect for authority is taught by parents, one of whose social duties is to bring up children as good citizens—they must train, nurture and protect them, so that they are ready to do the same, that is to be moral. Parents are big and powerful, while children are small and weak. The moral authority of parents is reinforced by their physical strength, a necessary power but one which should be replaced by the power of reason as soon as the child can “follow” it. Children have a duty to obey their parents, and not to make their lives difficult, but, if they do, physical coercion is justified. Good parents will have little need for it, but they must have the power to coerce their children when necessary. Parents should teach their children by example more than by words or, especially force, but they should be ready to explain to children that their cooperation is needed if society is not to collapse or become authoritarian, either of which will have dire consequences for the kids’ future. In short, parents and kids have their own rights and duties which they should be taught early on, together with the reasons for them.

God, Morality, and Religions

Religions teach that there is a natural moral order in the world, based on the idea that a super being called God issued absolute standards and laws at some stage in human evolution. As we have seen, morals are rules of social living, applicable only to social animals intelligent enough to be morally aware—aware that we cannot do just as we please if we want to live together. These rules were laid down as societies formed, and our modern day sacred books, like the bible, are ancient moral codes. The moral codes and social norms of ancient societies two thousand years ago, and half a world away now control the lives of modern human beings in their quite different world, and all because of religious dogmatism. Not that many of the ancient morals are not still valid in modern society—some are even more so, as modern justice is more reliable than ancient justice—but others are now quite inappropriate though they still have the force of God for some half deranged zealots.

The point is that there is nothing God-given, or even natural—as opposed to humanly devized—about morals. Human societies devized them to become civilized, and as civilization evolves, then so too do morals. To take an example, to maintain and improve their standards, ancient societies wanted labor, because work of all kinds was labor intensive, so people were urged to multiply, and anything inhibiting procreation was declared sinful. Now populations are huge, work is not labor intensive, for machines do much of it for us, and the problem is unemployment which is falsely kept low by having millions of people employed in none-jobs. To insist upon an ancient morality of procreation when it is not only unnecessary but is harming the earth is absurd. It is not God who enforces such standards but self-serving zealots.

Christian zealots in the USA object to Islamic morality, though it is closer to biblical mores than that of modern US fundamentalists. Americans have liberalized ancient morals, yet they persist in the illusion that the bible is absolutely God’s word. We no longer stone adulterers, but the bible shows that the ancient Jews did. Few, even fundamentalists, have any trouble with such barbaric God-given “morals”, but they do with homosexuality, a human trait that is utterly appropriate in our overcrowded world, because homosexuals are useful, and generally caring and creative human beings who do not reproduce. Islamic fundamentalists insist that women should be covered. So too did the apostle Paul, but few Christians get uptight that modern women, even Christians ignore Paul. Enforcing irrelevant and absurd morals might work in ignorant societies, but cannot work in modern ones where people are expected to have and use a brain.

Enforcing repressive morals today undermines society by creating frustration, tension and ultimately social rebellion. It goes counter to the desire for freedom, and so is self-defeating and cannot be acceptable to liberal-minded people. Repressive societies are fascist societies in which the elite is free of the obligations forced upon the rest. Those who talk of moral order are the ones who want to impress a morality that they will be free to ignore, and the morality of US TV evangelists shows it, though their flocks continue to love them. They are like the Nizari Ismailis whose leader, the Aga Khan, is utterly free of the duties of his followers, living the life of a western playboy. Modern society ought not to allow trickery like this, as traditional ones did, and do.

Another moral metaphor is that of the moral landscape with acceptable paths and ways through it. Those who step off the acceptable path are deviating from it and so are called deviants, or they have deviated from the way accidentally, they have lost their way, or have wandered off limits. Moral authoritarians claim that such deviants threaten the whole moral order, meaning the morality that they are zealous about. In fact, the balance to be struck is again that between society and the individual.

Yet another popular moral metaphor is that of purity—the moral person is pure and unpolluted or clean. Wicked people are unclean, polluted, blemished or have a stain on their character. Character itself is moral character, whether someone is virtuous or subject to vices, and they are born like it or have disciplined themselves to be moral. Since many vices are excessively indulging in bodily pleasures, flesh is metaphysically impure, but the spirit or the will is pure, or should be pure. Pollution can spread and so impure behavior is considered contagious like a disease—leprosy in the bible—lepers were unclean, and moral uncleanness meant someone was metaphorically leprous [†]Ancient Justice. It is all ancient, and dangerous thinking applicable to a time when eastern potentates had absolute power, they were God on earth, and did just as they liked. Many Christians might like the sound of it as long as they are the potentates’ favourites. Having suffered arbitrary justice, they would change their minds, but by then it is too late..

Strict Father or Nurturing Parent?

What is lacking among US fundamentalist Christians is the basic notions spread by their supposed God—empathy and love. Empathy seems simple enough but many American Christians are incapable of it. It is being able to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, to feel what it is like to be them in their situation, and therefore to act on their behalf in the situation you are in. It is expressed in the Christian metaphor, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which fundamentalist Christians have plainly erased from their bibles. Without empathy, no action you take will properly consider the consequences for others. The action will be likely to be the wrong action, or it will be mechanical, ill thought out and therefore with no useful outcome, and possibly a disastrous one. Caring for others requires empathy, and fundamentalists have it for those close to them, but not for others more distant. It also requires humility, the ability to be self-critical, to think that your action might be wrong, something quite absent among fundamentalists of every persuasion, US Christians no less than others. Nurturing requires empathy, and its absence in the US among swaths of people is why many in the world’s richest country are left in poverty and destitution.

George Lakoff has explained the main political divide into left and right, metaphors for liberal and conservative, as being a reflexion of the types of parental morality—the strictly authoritarian, father-dominated family, and the nurturing parent type of family, the first emphasizing moral strength and the second nurturing and caring. US fundamentalists only understand the strict father model. They are uniformly conservatives who confuse physical power for moral strength. Each type of parental morality tends to perpetuate itself into the next generation by showing and teaching the children its way of bringing them up. When children become delinquent, society usually assumes the role of the strict father in discipling them. Empathy, though, is necessary for the nurturing model, and tends to be lacking in the strict model, explaining why many Americans, dominated by strict fathers, show little wider understanding of others in the world, and adopt foreign policies that assume everyone thinks, or ought to think, like a red-neck Texan.

In the nurturant family, moral strength is not confused with physical strength, but with the will to stick to loving, despite accusations from Christian zealots of namby-pamby liberalism. Crudely but illustratively, the strict family is excessively masculine, and that is why the paternal religions appeal to them. Nurturant families incline to the feminine. Now Christ, in emphasizing love over wrath, is a nurturant and therefore feminized god, the equivalent of the ancient goddesses, and possibly would have been a goddess had goddesses not been forbidden in the paternal scheme of things. That is why the Jesus who saves fundamentalists bears no relationship to the loving and caring pacifist of the gospels. Instead their Jesus only loves them, and otherwise is a red-necked Rambo.

Another metaphor is to think of the whole of humanity as a family with God as the father, and, therefore, every man being a son of God! Jesus at the time of Christ certainly thought it so. Women, of course, God made only as an afterthought from a man’s rib, and so were inferior, though He made the men from mud! Our modern bibles have Christ speaking of children not sons, so all of them, the females too, are worthy, though the male priests and theologians of Christ have always disagreed when it comes to the religious hierarchy. God is masculine and He is the supreme authority of the universal family. He set up the moral order. He favours the upright and punishes wrongdoers—but only when they are dead! This God is a strict father, and as goddesses were forbidden, paternalistic religions in the Jewish mould—Judaism, Islam and Christianity—had little scope for nurture and love, of the caring as opposed to domineering kind. What Christianity tried to do was to put love and caring into Judaism, so it is typically perverse of authoritarian brands of Christianity that they undermine the central aim of the religion. The God of Christ says He loves us even though we are wayward children [†]Teaching of Christ or Church? Admittedly it might not have been the view of the historical Christ, but no one is sure what his views were, though everything points to his being a pious Jew, not an iconoclast. The early church decided what Christ had said, not God. They said it was God’s view that even worthless people will respond to love and attention. Ever since Christians believed it was God’s prescription, and so it ought to be how Christians live their lives..

In older religions, love was the domain of Aphrodite, a goddess, and doves stood for her. Christ had become the caring, loving, pacific male, the non-macho male with feminine, not overtly masculine qualities, dominating his nature. It was a way of bringing the goddess back into the exclusively paternalistic religious system of Judaism, to get rid of paternalistic rites like circumcision, oppressive strict father laws like the Mosaic law and sabbath observance, and to bring in the care for others that had been lacking. Essentially, the nurturant view is more social, putting its emphasis on others, that all might thereby benefit, whereas the strict father outlook put the emphasis on personal feeling, that whatever the individual wants is best for everyone because everyone thinks, or should think, in the same way. They do not. What therefore happens is that the authoritarian figures dominate and become an elite, while others suffer, and eventually formulate rebellious outlooks and religions that benefit everyone rather than just the few.

Psychological studies show that the strict father model of the family often fails to produce the balanced, upright and self-assured person it is meant to. It produces adults who depend on authority, who are unable to work out their own moral direction when it is not prescribed in a particular situation, have less conscience or compunction, have little regard for others, and generally do not turn out to be particularly good citizens. Rather than feeling compassion for weakness, they disdain it, and, when they are themselves weak and poor, they often find someone else weaker and poorer to scorn.

All of it, remember, is metaphorical. There is no universal father—or mother—telling us to behave. Behavior is prescribed by society to regulate itself by formulating morals and laws. In early mass societies, an emergent “big man” or chief could command, and the model became mainly one of the strict father, though the aim of betterment for all was clear to everyone, for previous societies had been more democratic, being ruled by councils of elders whom women could influence as well as the men, even though councilors were rarely themselves women. So, the preceding model was more nurturant, and all polytheistic systems of religion allowed for both strict fathers, and various carers, healers and other specialists. The dominant father, monotheistic system got rid of the specialists because God did the whole lot Himself, but the forms of society—kingdoms and empires—favored a universal king, with a king’s powers. Under Christianity, meant to restore love and care, God headed back towards becoming the fearful father of the Wee Frees like modern fundamentalists—and even Jesus himself, as the eternal feminine ideal of love and care became just a buddy Jesus, a Harvey the Rabbit, standing by with a bit of advice or personal support.

The whole rationale of the nurturant parent needs to be reformulated in modern terms. We cannot really love our enemies, it is asking too much, but we do not have to hate them—to build up antagonism towards them to create a negative moral balance of equal hatred. We can empathize with them. It just requires a little imagination, and use of the question, “What would it be like for me if I were in their shoes?” Having thought seriously about it, we might begin to understand their antagonism for us! Whether that is true or not, we ought to be better able to understand their problems and to think of ways of trying to relieve them, thereby easing their antagonism towards us. We might not be able to love our enemies but we can be charitable and benevolent towards them—be concerned for them. That is what the communion of Christians is meant to mean, the fellowship of everyone, but is lost on fundamentalists except in respect of those attending the same church. Their love is love of each other. It is self-love!

How many of the Christian show offs in the US can actually understand the meaning of human fellowship? The ones who are political prove it extends only as far as their voters, so we can guess the rest are similar. US foreign policy, which characterizes the rest of the world as at best stupid and otherwise evil, is additional proof, and the fact that US Christians do not object to it, and more often openly approve it is conclusive. Christian churches in the US are actually closed to anyone who shows the least inclination to love their enemies! Strict father morality leads to a society of mindless clones, robots programmed by unscrupulous pastors without a Christian thought in their heads, taking “Christian” to be defined as what Christ taught and did. They have developed rigid habits, but not good ones because they are entirely self-indulgent and self-directed, the precise opposite of Christian teaching which is directed to the service of others, not the bullying and murder of them. The horizon of US Christians extends no further than their preferred church, it is fixed and static, and least of all extends as far as self-criticism. Benevolence towards the wider human community based upon self-knowledge and criticism builds up excellence in character. Stasis is death. Growth is life. We should all be aiming to build excellence in ourselves.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line of morality is security. Humans gathered together into social groups to find security. To preserve that advantage, they needed a set of standards in their societies to make sure the advantage was not undermined internally by some exploiting others within the group. The aim is worthy but has only been partially achieved. Some people always have an advantage, and when it gets gross and excessive, it necessitates a revolution to return us to basic moral principles. Morals and laws are to try to avoid the need for extreme measures. Laws are enforced by the group against those who try to get unacceptable advantages, and morals give individuals the principles that allow them to judge whether their own behavior is acceptable to society. When people act morally, there is no need for laws.

Morality has a real basis in society, it is not merely opinion, and it is not imposed by any supernatural entity called God—unless God is accepted as a proxy for society. God commands what is good for society, as opposed to the primitive urges that motivate the solitary individual. God is a metaphor for society. Everything about morality, though it is real and essential to social living, is expressed metaphorically. As it is centered on security, it is primarily expressed in metaphors of safety, security, health and stability—being strong, being wealthy, being upright, being loved, and not being abandoned in the darkness. These reflect primitive fears that are common to most human beings wherever they are born. People naturally want to preserve their life, and that means being free from harm and free from constraint. Thus society has to guarantee the prime rights of life and liberty. Thomas Jefferson thought we should also have a right to happiness, though obviously not at the expense of the others, something right-wing Americans always ignore. Ultimately we should be happy that we are alive and free.

Our morals are meant to keep us safe from one another, but the two main moral systems, strength and compassion are not always easily reconciled. Everything about morality depends upon people. It is obvious, once considered, that morality cannot be and is not absolute nor universal. It cannot be transcendent unless there is something transcendent about society, and as God is a solitary being, how can society be transcendent? For society to be transcendent polytheism would have to be the right outlook for religion.

Only to a degree, is sociability natural. Generally, species have no basis for regard of other species, except as food, and sometimes because they live in a symbiotic relationship, but most species do have some regard for their own kind. In fights for food or mates, when one animal yields, the victor does not kill it gratuitously. Only the great moral animal, the human being does that, and often the ones among them who think they are the most moral!

Ultimately, then, how do you judge what is moral? If morals are supernatural gifts from God, when we are faced with a novel dilemma, we have no way of judging what is the moral way to act. Either God has given us the gift of moral judgement, or He has not—we are good or we are wicked through the grace of God, and our choices depend on that. If, on the other hand, morality is devised by humans living together to provide individual security, then the moral act is the one that causes least harm, or does more good, for other people. A terrorist throws a bomb into a restaurant. He is plainly immoral. He is harming innocent people for his own personal reasons. A waiter falls on to the bomb, smothering the blast with his own body. He dies but saves twenty others. He is a hero. It is an obvious and extreme case, but the morality of it is that, though the waiter lost his own life, he saved all those others. The most extreme such case is that of Christ, whom Christians say died to save the whole of humanity! So, morality is the welfare of other people in society. The instinct is to preserve oneself. That is what a solitary animal would do. The moral animal tries to save others, tries to be a Christ!

Modern wars are often caused by selfishness and greed expressed as economic rivalry, but they are often presented in propaganda as cultural differences. It is because it is moral to support your own form of society against others. Other cultures are represented as being evil, and so killing their people is a morally good act. For anyone who accepts all humans are God’s family, it is not. It is the ultimate example of the relationship of morality and politics. Lakoff showed that conservatives mainly had a strict father model of of morality and tend to be authoritarian and even totalitarian, whereas liberals have the nurturant view tending towards permissiveness and caring. Conservatives prefer corporal and capital punishment for wrongdoing, showing their confusion of physical and moral strength, while liberals look for the causes of criminality in social faults that could be corrected to make society better for more people. Conservatives will go to war more readily than liberals for whom all life is precious, and negotiation and compromise is always better than sending people to die.

We have to be aware of the proper meaning of morals to us, and how they are expressed. Then we can lift ourselves from the trap of imagining they are sent from another world or dimension, and are permanently fixed, and so we can seek the best morality for our modern world.

• More about Morality, and Fairness, and the Principle of Humanity

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