Digest 19

Morality/Religion &Justice

“The only thing I know for sure is that people are a lot more honest when they know they’re being watched.” Attributed to Alan “Ace” Greenberg (1924-2014), who was the chairman of the now defunct brokerage firm Bear, Stearns Companies, Inc. when Reagan began systematically imposing a policy of deregulation in the financial industry.

I worked during the decade of the 70’s in the gambling business, as a professional Poker dealer, and I was a stockbroker for five years before that. As noted before, I always felt that the gambling business was more legitimate, because as a broker I had to convince my clients that I knew the future, whereas if anyone in the Poker game believed I knew the outcome, they would’ve called the cops.

Back when technology was much less sophisticated, my boss, Joe Sammut (known as Artichoke Joe—but that’s a story for another day), made sure to have cameras recording everything and hired notorious cheaters to observe the action. This was a regular practice in the Big Casinos in Las Vegas and around the country, as ”It takes one to know one”. Two reasons: to maintain his reputation for operating a “clean” joint, and to provide solid evidence if someone should be barred from the joint for misbehavior.

All of which serves as an introduction to the subject of this issue, which will examine the complex relationship between Morality, Religion and Justice, prompted by a book I just

finished reading, The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt, who bills himself as a Moral Psychologist rather than a Moral Philosopher because he has spent his career doing experiments and recording/analyzing the results of those experiments. Philosophers just think about stuff. And speculate about that stuff. There has never been any dearth of moral philosophers, but until now, very few moral psychologists.

When Haidt began to create thiis new discipline, his first project was to survey as many cultures as possible to determine their concept of morality. Turns out most have their own, often unique, definitions, many of which seem pretty peculiar to us (or to me, at least). Haidt’s intial summary of his early studies:

“The moral domain varies by culture. It is unusually narrow in Western,educated and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life… Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication.”

This last sentence is just a fancy way of saying that we often make up stories to justify feelings/ideas that originate in the subconscious mind, a practice common to all of us, most of the time. As Neuropsychology is regularly learning these days, we seldom have any idea why we are doing or thinking anything. (Another subject for a later issue.)
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“Can we all get along here?

This plaintive question, which opens Haidt’s book, was posed by Rodney King, a black man, on May 1,1992, after the riots in Los Angeles precipitated by the acquittal of 4 Los Angeles Police Officers who had beaten him nearly to death following a routine traffic stop a year earlier, an event that was videotaped and seen by milions around the world. The riots lasted six days. Fifty-three people were killed and more than seven thousand buildings torched.

Lest we “dream otherwise”, we have always been a pretty violent society. The insurrection earlier this month was but the latest example. Significantly, whereas the Rodney King rioters were dismissed as “just blacks,” the violence this time was perpetrated almost entirely by whites.

Religion:

Time to talk about the relationship of morality and religion. Let’s begin by noting that religion is a human attempt to formalize spritual experiences. As such, it inevitably acquires some non-spiritual characteristics. Political baggage, if you will. For example, Christianity became the official religion ot the Roman Empire because Constantine was seeking a means of unifying his contentious, fragmented empire. He only finally converted on his deathbed, as a form of insurance. His “seeing-a cross-in-the-sky” experience (“In hoc signo vences”) just prior to an important battle was probably just a campaign slogan.

The Roman Catholic Church that grew out of hiis experience was misogynistic, anti-semitic, authoritarian and about as far from the teachings of Jesus (what we actually know of them) as it was possible to be. Can you say “Inquisition”? The Reformation was not really much of an improvement. Luther and Calvin were misanthropic and equally authoritarian. St. Augustine’s concept of Original Sin (blamed on Eve) was embraced enthusiastically by all branches of Christianity, That concept alone has caused untold suffering and punitive dogma.

Back to Haidt, who proposes a few legitimate benefits to offset these deficiencies. Perhaps the most important is that religion enables a group to accomplish things that an individual never could. And there are innumerable examples of wonderful things that have been done by wonderful people (especially nuns!).

“The Hive Switch” is Haidt’s term for the part of our brain that is activated when we feel part of a larger group. Religion is the most likely mode for activating this switch, though not the only one. Treating other members of our group fairly and compassionately is natural. Many other activities, even moving in unison (marching, dancing, singing, playing sports) can turn on the Hive Switch. Brain chemistry is also activated by Oxycontin, “a hormone and neurotransmitter produced by the hypothalamus.” Oxycontin is good stuff, indeed, but it only works among members of a group, however defined. Churches are rife with it, but so are many secular groups. Interested readers are encouraged to learn more about it.

Another benefit of religion is the belief that one’s God cares about our treatment of each other and is watching (note the quote that opens this issue), thereby minimizing bad behaviors and maximizing good ones.

One longstanding social problem is that of so-called “free riders,” i.e. those who take more than they give to the group. Haidt: “Communes are natural experiments in cooperation without kinship.” Studies he quoted found that only 6 percent of secular communes were still functioning twenty years after their founding, compared to 39 percent of religious communes, and complaints about free riders was the most frequent cause of the secular failures. Clearly, most religions descry free riding. In fact, opposition to Socialism and similar systems based on cooperation is often based on concerns that free riders will take advantage. The recent Tea Party movement in our country was most hostile to what they called “takers,” who leached off “makers.”

An aside: my personal belief is that the most deleterious free riders in our world are those known as “rentiers,” who do no productive work, but rather make money from their money (see the Henry Miller quote in Issue #15) or other assets. Just my opinion, of course, but they do control our Plutocracy, which determines all the important conditions of our lives—for their benefit, at our expense .

Justice: I have already devoted an entire issue to this subject (#6), but recent events have provided further evidence of the injustice we live with—the Second Impeachment trial, a classic “Show Trial,” the likes of which we thought more likely to be found in less “democratic” societies. What a joke! We can only hope that now that He Who Shall Not be Named has lost the protection of his “executive privilege” the civic authorities will begin to file criminal and civil charges against him and proceed forthwith to prosecute and convict him. There is already a plethora of evidence, and no dearth of those who eager to use their authority to get the job done.