Morals, What Are They Good For?
Absolutely Nothing!
Before getting started, I should mention that accurately estimating what percentage of our population is as flustered as it seems gets more difficult by the hour. ALL corporate media thrives on sensationalism. Provoking reactions from as many as possible keeps the revenue coming in. It’s no longer enough to simply report events, and the loudest voices get the most attention. OK. Let’s go!
Almost every day, another batch of new memes appear on everybody’s social media. A few might actually survive long enough to become adages; most will not. That’s a good thing because far too many are fueled by blind hate of the ‘other.’ In today’s USA, ‘those a**holes ‘ outnumber us ‘good folks’ by a factor of ten. As someone who has held ‘fringe’ opinions for five and a half decades, I know what I’m talking about. I have been trapped in the ‘worst persons’ category for my entire adulthood. I propose to start redeeming myself with this offering.
Whether sparked by religious conviction, frustrated common decency, or dozens of other complaints, too many of us are full of ‘bad vibes’ and send out ‘negative energy.’ Whatever the cause, we can measure the creator of a meme’s level of anxiety by their VOLUME and choice of words. It should be noted that neither of those show the depth of conviction.
If I have confidence in my opinion, it’s easy to remain calm in the face of attacks on that opinion. Screaming at me may be upsetting, but it won’t put a dent in my opinion, and even if you’re providing a valid argument against it, I’m unlikely to change it while you’re ‘in my face.’ Nobody likes to get yelled at. So the volume of so many memes is just plain bad strategy, unless you’re content with only “preaching to the choir.” But let’s get back to the moral aspect of it all.
One of my opinions that put me in the ‘worst persons’ category is that morals shouldn’t be the basis for any argument. As I discussed elsewhere,* I have always preferred taking the perspective of ‘self-interest.’ So I am anti-racist, not only because it’s immoral (It is.), but because it puts an artificial barrier between me and most of the world, shutting me off from any wonderful experiences I might have with ‘those’ folks, or at least making it more difficult.
The USA, despite all of the interdenominational fighting, is populated by millions of people who consider themselves to be highly ‘moral.’ The obvious problem, of course, is that once we all agree that murder and stealing are bad, most ‘moral’ judgements become personal. Our individual morals can reflect the church/synagogue/mosque we attend, others can be dictated by some form of humanism, and still others may be based on nothing in particular.
Unfortunately, USAians are also known to be opinionated; some of us can even be bull-headed (Guilty.). Bull-headed and anxious/angry/frustrated is a bad combination. But it’s where we are right now. Here’s an essay specifically about opinions.** What is to be done?
A sad side note is that we live in a country where some adults think that Lance Armstrong was the first human to walk on the sun, that Queen Elizabeth was either from Egypt or Brazil, that Venice, Italy is in the country of Paris, and that Europe is the biggest city in the world.
There are two main and related arenas where our battles are being fought - politics and the so-called Culture Wars. The extremes in these areas are as unhinged as believing that the queen of England was from Brazil. The difference, of course, is that deciding one’s vote based on the existence of a basement pedophile ring in a building with no basement or on the fabricated accusations of meaningful Russian interference in the election process leads to much more serious consequences than the foolish idea that someone could walk on the sun.
When it comes to morality, we have never agreed on everything, and we never will. As with so many other issues, what used to be accepted as a given, a fact that didn’t cause much of a stir, has now become, literally, a life and death problem, for the country and as the holder of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, for all life on the planet.
It’s more than a little ironic that at the same time that we have, overall, become a much more tolerant and accepting society, we find ourselves on the brink of civil unrest of an intensity not seen since the earliest days of the Civil Rights Movement. If we want to avoid our society coming apart at the seams, we must return to the days when our moral disagreements were not cause for so much anger and fury. We must ‘agree to disagree.’
* https://jstuckey.substack.com/p/is-self-interest-selfishness
**https://jstuckey.substack.com/p/opinions-opinions-everywhere