I Have Seen The Enemy

Ah, the ole meditation and near death experience connection. Two peas in a pod as they say.

“…the transformative effects it had on their lives…”

Actually, this is not as preposterous as it seems.

Don’t get me wrong: somebody is selling something.

But aren’t we all selling something in the end?

We are.

But consider the time-perception work of David Eagleman.

To me, Eagleman is creating a pseudo near-death experience to tell us that TIME SLOWS DOWN.

Not yet 21 years old I just missed a bad car accident and I can still remember with great detail the moments prior - the maroon colored car, my friend Jimmy Bell yelling, his hands on the dash, the field in the distance, the chrome bumper -because it seemed to be going in a slow motion.

Can Eagleman and his work lead to treatments for mental illness?

Maybe.

Maybe it can be tied to athletic performance to SLOW DOWN the opposition or the baseball or…?

You see where this is headed...MONEY.

This isn’t to say Eagleman doesn’t have altruistic intentions. He may.

That’s not really important.

What is important is our relationship with time.

Consider this sentence from Proust and The Squid: “Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.”

Why should time be any different?

Time changes our lives and our lives change time.

Yes?

No?

Maybe?

Another thing I’ll never forget is my existentialism professor talking about time and how time will change for you when the doctor tells you its cancer.

Relativity isn’t the enemy folks. Be it time or ethics. Relativity is the truth that will set you free.

Tacit Conventions

From Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: the Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21^st Century

So how can we reconcile the conviction that certain usages are wrong with the absence of any authority that ever decided what was right?  The key is to recognize that the rules of usage are tacit conventions. A convention is an agreement among the members of a community to abide by a single way of doing things. There need not be any inherent advantage to which choice is made, but there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice. Familiar examples include standardized weights and measures, electrical voltages and cables, computer file formats, and paper currency.
(pg. 190)

This is from the chapter Telling Right From Wrong: How to Make Sense of the Rule of Correct Grammar, Word Choice, and Punctuation

I’d like to take this in a different direction…than grammatical rules.

Let us substitute just a few terms and see what happens.

So how can we reconcile the conviction that certain acts are wrong with the absence of any authority that ever decided what was right?  The key is to recognize that morality is a tacit convention. A convention is an agreement among the members of a community to abide by a single way of doing things. There need not be any inherent advantage to which choice is made, but there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice. Familiar examples include standardized weights and measures, electrical voltages and cables, computer file formats, and paper currency.

Further…

So how can we reconcile the conviction that certain acts are wrong with the absence of any authority that ever decided what was right?  The key is to recognize that morality is a tacit convention. A convention is an agreement among the members of a community to abide by a single way of doing things. There need not be any inherent advantage to which acts are deemed moral or immoral, but there is an advantage to everyone accepting the same  acts as moral or immoral. Familiar examples include standardized weights and measures, electrical voltages and cables, computer file formats, and paper currency.

Ask yourself how much you weigh in kilos. You don’t know because you don’t use the metric system (convention). You use pounds (a different convention). One convention isn’t innately superior or correct because if it were, the other wouldn’t exist.

But are you comfortable with this relativity stretching to your acts?

Now some may counter that there is an authority, namely god…but that won’t really get you very far. Which god? How did god communicate the morality…the bible…the translated-by-humans-innumerable-timesbook that condones acts we now deem immoral? And what about the problem of Euthyphro where god is a rubber stamp or where acts can be deemed moral or immoral as flippantly as fashion trends?

So the authority position is a non-starter.

So are we stuck with relativism?

De facto, yes. We can massage it and claim to be moral nihilists or amoralists but we would still end up with ethical conventions that are relative to time and place.

Just as the rules of grammar are not set in stone, neither are your moral/immoral acts.

Take heart, it’s not as bad as it sounds…

Maybe we’re finding The BetterAngels of Our Nature

Baltimore and Football's Morality Problem

Thinking about Baltimore 

My wife and I were watching Real Time with Bill Maher and DL Hughely was talking about why people would set fire to their own community. His answer was in essence, hopelessness. One of my go-to questions is: what is the proximate cause of x? And what is the ultimate cause of x? Now you may think I am going to ask what is the ultimate cause of people committing violent acts or destroying property but I think the more interesting question is what is the ultimate cause for hopelessness? In talking with my big-brained wife, who is a psychologist and hears the woes of people for a living, she opined that hopelessness may stem from a failure to control one’s environment. 

So much of one’s environment is out of control when living in poverty it must seem like the sun could rise in the west and when supposed caretakers of the people in the environment turn out to harm, the sun does in fact rise in the west. And fires are lit. The fires may not prove beneficial except for what must be immense sense of control. There are no jobs, my physical well-being is at-risk, my options for the future are nil, much of what I see and hear is dysfunctional but right now I can light this fire and watch it burn, I can control that and I will.

The Rules of the NFL and how it relates to Morality

Are you a fan of football, more precisely NFL football? Were you born circa 1970? Do you remember when quarterbacks could be hit, more precisely, when quarterbacks could be maimed, clotheslined and in all ways crushed during the course of a game? Now you can’t so much as look at a quarterback’s cleats and they throw a flag. The rules changed. Did you hear me, the rules changed! What have we learned: NFL rules are arbitrary or relative if you like: it depends on the era, depends on the money coming in and that relates to positional importance, etc etc…it DEPENDS.

Morality, by definition, is about rules that cannot change. Did you hear me? Cannot change! Now of course the NFL is not in the morality business but the ire that is sent flying up every fall Sunday in living rooms and man caves across the country does lead us to ask, why are there rules in the first place if they can be changed? 

And so you’ll say I have a rule that can’t be changed. 

And I will say show it to me. 

And then I will say: what is the use of a timeless rule that has timelessly been broken?