Roots of morality? Pt.2

This was one of the major questions I struggled with when I was reading “The God Delusion”. Dawkins, of course quoted extensively from the Bible to make the point that wherever we get or morals from, it’s most certainly not from that book. He might be right. I haven’t read the whole testament, but what I have read, i.e. the first few books up to Job, don’t disprove his claims in anyway. The Old testament god seems to be a rather jealous, vindictive, and violent deity. And he eggs on his followers to do the same. Time after time before they enter the promised land, the Israelites are reminded to show the original inhabitants there no mercy and massacre the lot. But there are exhortations to act morally too, even if only with one’s religious kin. There are, however, numerous examples that bear out Dawkins’ claim. But he doesn’t delve further into it and lets it go at that.
Be that as it may, I still think morality had its roots in religion. Not the bible per se but in various interpretations of it. God was merciful, at leas tin his later iterations. There was talk about goodwill towards all and helping your fellow man, and more importantly on good acts. We would all have to pay for our sins come judgement day! Of course Hindus believed in rebirth and that your past sins would come to haunt you in the next life. But in every case, it was the idea of balance in nature that a belief in god and a cosmic order brought about that made man moral. And I come back to the same question. In the absence of that cosmic order, why be moral?
Or to strike even deeper, why define morality like this? Who’s to say what action is moral or immoral? What’s right and what’s wrong? On what basis do you ground your basic ethic? How do you define that basis? How can you defend it? Morality become nothing more than a set of common rules that we agree upon to play fair, and the person who can break those rules without getting caught is the most successful. Which brings me back to square one. I’m tired of thinking in circles and yet I can’t seem to find a way to break free from it.
Of course, no matter how much I want to believe that the existence of god would make some sense out of this chaos, it doesn’t make it real. I forget who said, “If God did not exist, mankind would have found it necessary to create him.” True words, indeed.

Roots of morality?

Morality. It’s a question I can’t get out of my head. And I don’t mean morality as it’s interpreted today, in terms of sexuality. Who’s having sex with who and how and are they married and what not. That seems to be the only thing morality is concerned with today. Greed, corruption, theft, murder are all bad and condemnable, but show us a sexually ‘immoral’ person and we all get up in a lather. Not I, though. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about all the other immoral things. To cheat, to lie, to wrong, to kill, and so on. And the moral actions too. Altruism, philanthropy, kindness, helping the needy and so on. What is the root behind all this? What stops us from wronging someone? What makes us help others, especially those who can’t return the favour?
Tough questions. I struggle to find the answer. Why should it make us feel good to do the ‘moral thing’? After all, it’s not giving us any tangible benefit. Not cheating at cards, for instance, might lead to me losing the game, and that doesn’t make me happy. Spending my hard-earned money on someone else in charity only means I have less to spend on myself. I’m sure similar emotions would be felt by almost everyone. Then why do we do it?
Some researchers in such fields, socio-anthropologists perhaps, say that it’s a social imperative. Any group where individuals don’t help each other is doomed to fail when competing with a group where they do help each other out. On the face of it, it makes sense. ‘Higher’ animals like primates do show some rudiments of social responsibility more than ‘lower’ animals. Makes sense that a group would prosper if its members were aiding each other. But which individual would be most benefited in such a group? The one who was most ‘moral’ and helped everyone else, or the one who helped only those who were in a position to reciprocate and not others? The latter, of course. He’s conserving his resources and making use of them in the most efficient manner and evolution would reward him. Similarly with humans, the person who cheated just a little bit, enough to benefit himself but not to trouble others too much, or one who could cheat more but slyly enough so as not to get caught would be the most successful. The one who doesn’t give to charity or help those in need would have more for himself. So why do we do it?
I think it’s because of the belief in god. That there is balance in the world. The belief, ingrained in us from childhood, that if we do good it will come back to us. If we help others, we would get it when we needed the same. That there were consequences for our actions. And this belief gave us meaning. “tu bhala kar tera bhala hoga. Aur darvesh ki sada kya hai?”
But take god out of the equation and you have nothing that ensures this balance. Then why would you do right by anyone? Why wouldn’t I cheat at that game of cards, once I was sure I wouldn’t get caught? Why wouldn’t you murder someone if it helped you in anyway? Why would you or I give to charity to help unknown people who couldn’t repay you? Why would Bill Gates set up a charity worth millions instead of spending it all on himself, buying everything on this earth? Why would I teach any hypothetical kids of mine to be moral, do good, help others, be kind? Why would I not tell them to be supremely selfish and do whatever it took to succeed? Why wouldn’t I do it myself?
If the law of averages governs my life events and some good and bad things are going to happen to me irrespective of my actions, I might as well do all the bad I can safely do to maximize my chances of getting as much ‘good’ as I can in life. After all, all my wrongdoings aren’t going to come back and bite me in the ass! Why would you help a person dying on the street? He will almost certainly not be there if ever you are in such a situation! The same principle would apply to every human transaction, every interchange. Greed, selfishness, callousness would characterise our actions. Even the most intellectual people would find it hard to rationalize moral actions on an individual level (how I hope I’m wrong!). No, if there is no doctrine of ‘karma’ that holds true, we might as well do pretty much what we please.
This was one of the major questions I struggled with when I was reading “The God Delusion”. Dawkins, of course quoted extensively from the Bible to make the point that wherever we get or morals from, it’s most certainly not from that book. He might be right. I haven’t read the whole testament, but what I have read, i.e. the first few books up to Job, don’t disprove his claims in anyway.

Been thinking about God and morality off and on these past couple of months. I feel every thinking man, if he really examines the question, will find it hard to justify hie faith in God. Is there a God? If yes, then what is his contribution to this world? How does he play a part its day to day workings? The more I look at it, I find myself veering to the point of atheism. But years of religious background doesn’t wash off that easily. And I find myself retreating to the cosy, safer and much more comfortable embrace of Deism, the belief that the Creator set out some rules at the beginning of Creation and hasn’t since then taken an active role in the play of existence. I look at the formation of stars and planets and they seem to follow strict physical and chemical rules. I look at the emergence of life and there seems nothing divine about it. An amalgamation of self-replicating molecules in a constant struggle to multiply and pass themselves on, in an unending battle against others of its own kind. In a few hundred million years, the sun will die out and earth will be uninhabitable and there’s nothing God is going to do about that either. Meanwhile the struggle for the survival of the fittest continues in its own ferocious, pitiless way and I don’t see any intervention there either. So if creation, nurture and annihilation are preset in our universe according to known, immutable laws, whither God? Wherefore God? Did He just set some rules and then sat back to enjoy the show? Something like making a complex graphic program and executing it for His amusement? Where is the evidence of his direct intervention? “Ishwar Allah, terey jahan mein, nafrat kyon hai, jung hai kyon?” the Upanishads ask, “Why is it that Brahma made this world and leaves it so? If, being all-powerful he leaves it so, he is not good; if not all-powerful, he is not God”
These are valid questions and I find the answers religious men give to them almost farcical. The good that happens in your life is due to His benevolence, the bad is despite His efforts. I can’t find a more masochistic system of thought. If I win, it’s not because of all the effort at preparation I put in, but all due to God, who presumably likes me more than all the other competitors. If I lose then it wasn’t because God failed me, but because I deserved it. Such was my fate. Of course the weapon of last resort that religion has is to claim that we are too ignorant and small minded to really understand God’s master plan for us all. Maybe your kid who dies at the age of 2 due to some horrifying genetic disease was sent to you to teach you suffering. I might ask why that poor infant was made to suffer on my account. And if I were to ask how exactly God bring this whole thing about? Did he knowing that I needed to suffer pain, brought me to fall in love with and sire a child with the one woman with the exact genetic makeup to compliment mine and then make sure that on the sperm with the relevant genes to cause that specific abnormality ended up fertilizing the egg? Imagine God messing around the Fallopian tubes! Not to mention the 256 people who set about mating 8 generations ago to bring about me with this specific genetic makeup. Like I said, farcical. Look at anything you attribute to God and ask yourself what did God do to make this thing so? Anything. I have yet to find one thing I can truly say was made by God to be exactly like that. All that you see around you is like it is for a reason. A chemical, physical, biological rule explains it fully. If not, then you can rest assured there is a reason though we haven’t worked it out yet. And don’t go around ascribing these rare things to God, for once they are explained, God will be responsible for one less thing in your count. Like the formation of the earth, our heliocentric planetary system, the evolution of myriad forms of life with the same basic genetic code, our descent from ape-like ancestors and so on. Look at the things we attributed to God and can’t anymore.
So I return to my original question, is there a God? I honestly don’t think so though I just as honestly hope there is something akin to Him. Even coming from a family with the least little bit of religiosity in its veins, I still find it disconcerting to completely disbelieve in God. I hear voices saying, “There still is meaning in life” but I find a little measure of despair. The idea that there is no Great Plan makes sense to me in a logical sense, but it’s a hard thing to accept. I consider myself an intelligent, thinking individual and if I find it so difficult to accept, how much more so would it be for a person of lower intelligence (not being vain or anything here; I know there are people with greater intelligence than me and similarly those with lesser), especially one brought up with a religious background to accept atheism. His whole world would come crashing down around him. Religion is one of the strongest moorings for so many that I think it would be impossible for them to imagine a world without God.

Been reading a lot on the evolutionist-creationist debate recently. Of course from the evolutionists’ point of view, coz that’s where my belief lies. One chapter I recently read was on how there were so many imperfections in the human body and how that was clear proof that man was not ‘designed’ by a higher intelligence but rather evolved from non-human ancestors. A number of examples are mentioned, not the least of which in the spine, never designed to remain upright. In fact even walking which we take in our stride (bad pun) is not a very smooth process. If looked at in detail with a fast motion camera and by studying the actual muscle motions involved, the human walk appears to be a series of ungainly motions, in fact it’s said that we actually fall from one step to the other. The examples are endless, truly. Our body architecture is just not designed to work as efficiently as possible. It’s merely a working model of ill-fitting parts that compromises here and there to make things work. It has been shown that if the optics of the eye were better, human vision would be in the range of 6/3, not 6/6. I could keep on pointing out such instances. The more I think about it, the more come to mind. I can’t possibly imagine what creationists have to say about all this, but I’m sure they’ll think of something, or they’ll just refuse to accept these as true. Whatever. But the chapter I was reading also gave examples from the animal kingdom of various ‘inefficient’ designs. One particular example was the marsupial Koala bear, whose baby pouch is upside down! Apparently the Koalas developed from a burrowing ancestor in which the turned around pouch served the purpose of keeping dirt out of the infant’s eyes and mouth as the mother dug. While explaining why the pouch had not turned right side up once the Koalas started climbing trees, the author (Dawkins) hypothesizes that the genetic change necessary to bring that about might be creating a lot of embryological turmoil, ultimately leading to non-viability of the foetus. He puts forward this theory in a number of places, for example the extraordinary course of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in the giraffe and so on. He postulates that the evolutionary benefit of changing the design to a more efficient pattern must be outweighed by the other deleterious effects that the same mutation, necessary for the beneficial effect, had on the embryo. On the face of it, it sounds plausible. Makes sense and it does explain a lot of odd things we see in anatomy. Even when we look at the cellular level and try to imagine what it would entail to change some embryological development pattern in the foetus, we can see that, for example, changing the sites of development of the kidney-ureter system and the testes-vas deferens system so that the vas doesn’t end up looping over the ureter and goes straight to the penis could only result from a profound change in foetal development. And every medical student how even small changes in embryonic development can have such disastrous consequences.
But it occurred to me that surely not every change for the better ( i.e. towards a more efficient body part) would necessarily require such major upheavals. Some changes like maybe the disappearance of the appendix in humans might not require whole scale alterations and some other changes might even bring with them other beneficial changes. Quite possible. After all the narrowing of our larynx is thought to be responsible for humans developing vocal communication which lay the groundwork for our social and cultural evolution. Maybe the change that brings about, say, the inverting of our retinas also makes our peripheral vision better by improving the acuity of the peri-macular retina. My point is that just because certain beneficial changes are not seen in our or any animal’s bodies doesn’t mean that change is improbable, or carries with it a baggage in terms of negative, deleterious effects. That is a very narrow Darwinian perspective of looking at random imperfections. One thing that everyone seems to have forgotten is the element of chance.
Maybe, the beneficial mutation to bring about the specific change has never happened. Darwinian Theory is based upon random mutations which get selected because they have something better to provide to the body that carries it. Granted. 100% correct in my view. But that doesn’t mean that all possible combinations of genetic code have been tried out. Maybe a mutation turning the koala baby-sac downside up is just around the corner. And maybe it has no other effect on the koala embryo, or maybe it even makes it better at climbing trees. After all, the way I see it, all mutations are a question of odds. When the DNA is being duplicated, there is a specific odds ratio that a mistake will occur. The odds may be high or low, depending on how stable that particular segment is. And the higher the odds, the less the chance of that particular change occurring. Let’s say for example’s sake, that the odds are 1 in a 1000 that a generation of Koalas would have one baby with the inverted pouch. Let’s say that the change would have no other effect on the Koala. All hypothetical, of course. I haven’t the faintest idea how such odds could be calculated, or in fact if they could be calculated at all. But assuming those odds, people think that in a thousand generations, the change would be brought about. And that’s where the fallacy lies. 1 in a 1000 are odds, not certainties. It’s just a chance that this particular change would appear in a thousand generations. But it might not. 1 in a 1000 doesn’t mean literally 1 in 1000, 2 in 2000 and so on. It might not even mean 100 in 100,000. These are just odds and might hold true at very large numbers or maybe not true at all. So what I mean is that chances are chances, not certainties and maybe the right mutation is right around the corner!

In late ’93, I was in class 12th at DAV College. It was our first experience at staggered classes, having been in school with a fixed system of classes one after another. In college, we had free periods in between. In the second term, we had our practicals, I forget whether biology or physics, in the afternoon, around 2PM or so. So instead of going back home for lunch even though it was a ten minute bicycle ride away, we preferred to hang around college in a bunch, having lunch in the hostel mess (4.50/-, can you believe it?) and chatting away the idle hours. Maybe a trip to the neighbouring girl’s college. But most of those afternoons have slipped out of memory. I don’t recall what exactly we did all those years ago. One afternoon, however, remains fixed in mind. It was late autumn, and a balmy sun shone down on a few boys, full stomached and lazy enough to want to do nothing but lie in the college lawns and chat. I lay on my back feeling the warming tendrils of the weakening winter sun tickle my skin. The grass was fresh cut and scented. Pillowed on my arms I looked up at the sky, blue and clear. The more I looked, the bluer it seemed. As I lay there gazing, an eagle entered my field of view, wheeling around in the stratosphere, a black speck in the deep blue. I followed it in its course. It glided effortlessly, seldom flapping its wings. From that distance it was a like a beautiful dance unfolding before my eyes. It was truly a beautiful sight, but what I remember most of that moment is that as I lay there watching the eagle, I felt that never again would I have such leisurely carefree pleasure. That as I grew older I would yearn for such moments when I could just put my cares aside and immerse myself in one moment.
Today, over a decade and a half later, as I walked in a dewy garden, my laptop weighing my shoulder down, waiting for my conveyance to take me to work, thinking about the surgeries I had to do today, wondering if yesterday’s case had gone fine, about what I chores I had pending for the evening, I suddenly realized how prescient I had been all that time back.

An IG of police in Madhya Pradesh was transferred today. In a speech to cadets yesterday, he was heard exhorting them to learn from Ajmal Kasab, the 26/11 terrorist. That, apparently, was a good enough reason to transfer said officer to the boondocks (police HQ as it were, where he can do no mischief; the police equivalent of the detention room I guess). I for one, see no reason for this administrative punishment. I heard the relevant part of his speech and found nothing offensive in it. All he did was to make Kasab an example to his men. He said if an uneducated man, not even a matriculate, a drug addict like Kasab could learn so much through training in less than an year, why not our police constables. He talked about how Kasab learnt to use firearms, explosives, GPS, advanced technologies and even learnt to speak Hindi (Marathi?) in less than an year, then what was stopping our policemen? He said that he was sure his force had men much better than Kasab, both in intelligence and valour, but they needed to inculcate the passion Kasab showed.
Now what is wrong in saying, “learn from your enemy, and try to better him at his own game”? he wasn’t asking the men to become terrorists, just to see how far the enemy had gone and catch up fast. And he was ‘punished’ just for saying the words ‘Kasab’ and ‘example’ in the same sentence. I live in a crooked country!

Finished reading Sean Carroll’s “Remarkable Creatures” a couple of days back. I’d actually bought it thinking it would be about odd, impossible fossils and the extraordinary creatures that were to be seen in prehistoric ages. Always been a childhood fantasy of mine, you see. But it was nothing like that at all. Carroll documented the people who were behind the discovery of some of the most important fossils. From Darwin’s voyage aboard the Beagle to the discovery of tiktaalik, he describes the incredible adventures these people had and the hardships they endured and the effort they put in to unearth these historic finds. And it was an engrossing read. From Wallace to the Leakeys, I was fascinated. Here were the men (and one woman, Mary Leakey alone finds mention) who went out into the most barren, forbidding, wild, unreachable, unexplored, dangerous, inhospitable terrains and step by painstaking step, fleshed out Darwin’s Theory (ever since reading Dawkins elucidation on how this word in misinterpreted, I’m more and more attracted towards the idea of calling it ‘Fact’) of Evolution and gave us a more complete picture of how we came to be. I read how one by one, the arguments against evolution, both in a general sense and in the more personal sense of human evolution, were struck down. In fact, having grown up taking evolution as scientific fact, I was surprised at the level and amount of opposition it faced in the past. This, of course, stands true even today, but that’s another story.
One thing that showed through was our incredible human ego. Our desperate need to place ourselves at the top of the heap that is Nature. First we were the chosen specie, made in God’s own image. When that was struck down (down but not out, mind you), we found it hard to believe we had been on earth for only a miniscule portion of its history (I remember reading somewhere that if the entire history of earth were to be compressed into a week, life came into being on the last day, and we made it onto the stage about 5 seconds before midnight). So it was a hard task believing the earth was billions of years old. Then when that was proved incontrovertibly, we had to believe that ‘our’ line split from that of the apes at least 30 million years ago and we have been different (read superior) since. Of course, that’s another fallacy and has been disproved too. Then we had to believe that at a genetic level we were far superior to other animals so surely, our genome would have thousands upon thousands of genes thereby marking us as so much more complex than the ‘lower’ creatures (I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve learned to hyphenate that word from Dawkins). But when the whole genome was finally unraveled, lo and behold, the entire difference between us and the earthworm, was a few thousand genes! Our pretensions to being the only intelligent specie, or the only one capable of learning and even transmitting that learning are belied everyday in some corner of the world or the other. I wonder what form our ‘specie egotism’ will take next?