Preface:
I seriously contemplated not writing this last article. The response to ‘Emortalism 103’ was so insipid (well, not to put too fine a point of it, it was zero) that I started wondering if I might be wasting my time. I don’t write these things to hear myself talking. But I also believe in finishing what I started—and this article basically rounds off what I began with the other three. So, here it is. I anticipate the response to be equally limp and unethusiastic. If so, it’ll just confirm my dim view of the prospects of anybody listening. I guess, as usual, people would rather read something that’ll support their already-existing opinions, or which dovetails with their current preoccupations and existing world-image and things-are-just-so.
Emortalism 104
Emortalist Ethics
‘Ethics’ is that branch of philosophy which deals with what, if anything, is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, or, if one wants to couch it in moralistic terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’. A lot of people think that in humans, ethics is innate (i.e. ‘inborn’); while others maintain that it is acquired through what may be broadly called ‘education’, which covers everything from brainwashing to educating-by-example. Some claim that it is a feature of individual psychology, others consider it a mostly ‘social’ construct. The majority of humans being probably would consider ethics to be ultimately determined by the ‘divine’. The rest vary: they either deny that it exists at all, or they assert that it is a purely human construct. Thinkers have been trying to sell us one variant or the other for millennia. They’ve never been very good at it, and they aren’t getting any better either.
Ethics, however it pans out, is tied to human beings: even the sort that purports to serve the glory of some non-existent deity ultimately affects human being, if for no other reason but that it determines their life-styles and, to greater or lesser extent, their daily behavior.
Actually, I don’t think it makes much sense to speak about ‘ethics’ as such. What we’re really talking about is people acting—or not—in a manner that conforms to the standards set for ‘ethically positive’ behavior. In other words, we’re talking about what people do; how they behave toward their fellow human beings, their group, their society, the species as a whole (insofar as anybody can be expected to take such a wide-ranging perspective). Also, we could well be talking about how they behave toward themselves, as me-toward-me.
There is no argument that our social context effectively determines much, if not almost-all, of our ethical behavior. The greatest portion of ethics is concerned with the behavior of me-toward-others. Indeed, sometimes it appears like all of it is, with the me-toward-me component relegated to either insignificance or the realm of not-quite-ethically-positive behavior.
There is a counter-current to this sentiment, which is embodied in a number of ethical systems, which range from the Ayn Rand like excesses of ‘self’-glorification to the ‘self’-indulgences of the New Age Oprah culture; from existentialism to Christianity and Islam, where, for the most part, if not necessarily for all, ‘service-to-God’ is just a thinly veiled pretense for ‘service-to-self’: looking after Number One. Sometimes I think that, indeed, on the whole, ‘divine ethics’ probably causes the most ethically-negative behavior of all.
‘Ethically-negative’ by whose standards?
Good question—and the answer is: ‘mine’. This makes it suspect, because, not being of a ‘universalist’ disposition, I cannot claim to any position elevated above anybody else.
Still, the dilemma is real, and the introduction of Emortalism will make it even more so.
It cannot really be disputed that ethical constraints usually ‘work’, with varying efficacy; but they do have an effect. The usual cause for this is what you might call ‘contextual pressure’: if you act ‘ethically negative’, as determined by your social environment, you will suffer varying degrees of censure whose aim it is to effect your compliance: anything from mum’s disapproving look to public execution. People know this and, by and large, behave in ‘ethically acceptable’ ways—or at least pretend to behave in such a way—in order to avoid censure, which tends to be unpleasant.
Ethical behavior therefore may be associated with our ability to project and extrapolate into the short-to-mid-term-future the consequences of actions to be taken in the very-immediate future (which often is called the ‘now’). We usually act such as to maximize the beneficial outcomes of our actions and to minimize the non-beneficial ones. This governs our lives. It is actually an evolutionary trait, for ultimately ‘benefit’ translates into ‘survival—and the only question that remains is about the ‘who’ that’s supposed to survive. I? My children? My wife? My tribe/nation/species? There is, as you will admit, a hierarchy of priorities here. More on that later.
There are those who would maintain that there’s far more to ethical behavior than a simple effect-assessment with a desirability analysis attached to evaluate the best action to take. Social ethics, they would claim, is not all there is. There’s got to be something more ‘fundamental’ about it; possibly ‘divine’. Don’t people ‘know’ what’s right and wrong at a far deeper level than mere social coercion and long-term behavior habituation?
It’s quite possible that they do, but there’s no need to invoke divinity to explain it: just a simple natural law, which—though it tends to work statistically like so much else in this often-wasteful and inefficient universe, and is therefore not totally reliable in any given instant—we, physical creatures that we are, ‘understand’ at a level so implicit and sublime, that we can never actually ‘explain’ it, because it’s one of those things that just is. I’ve alluded to this fundamental law in Emortalism 103: it is Vance’s ‘Principle of Cosmic Equipoise’ (PCE), which in physics shows up in a string of ‘conservation’ laws, and which in ethics assumes some odd, but not entirely incomprehensible forms, such as ‘love thy neighbor’.
It’s not really about ‘loving’ your neighbor at all, but about treating him or her in such a way as is ultimately advantageous to the community that you and your neighbor live in, and therefore to you as well. Let’s face it: if your neighbor is a maniacal axe murderer, nobody really expects you to love him, but if you really have to, do so by expressing your love for yourself and others through killing him before he kills one of them. Here, too, is an order of priorities.
Our profound in-built understanding of the PCE influences almost all of those actions that can be said to have ‘ethical’ aspects to them. There is an area of the brain which, if rendered dysfunctional, somehow ‘disconnects’ this action-consequence understanding, making people with the defect behaving in odd ways. They understand perfectly that they are doing something ethically questionable, and will admit to doing so (meaning they understand the ethical rules), but they are prone to performing the act in question anyway, because somehow they don’t ‘understand’ the action-consequence chain. The effect is not dissimilar to what may be observed in people with other cognitive dysfunctions, such as those who will, say, perceive an object and correctly identify its nature and existence, but who will still behave as if the object were not there. Such people often have lesions in the corpus callosum. The details are unimportant though. What matters is that there are neurological correlates, structural and functional, to our tendency to understand ethics (in terms of actions-and-consequences) and therefore to act ethically positive. This is where we must look when we search for the ‘built-ins’, for the ‘innate’. There is no ‘why’, just ‘how’.
Maybe because of the existence of the neural structures that make us ‘understand’ such things do we actually perceive—or maybe just phrase in the appropriate terms—the world in terms of ‘laws of conservation’. Still, even if this were so, that doesn’t make this formulation of ‘cosmic law’ in any way ‘wrong’. Indeed, one might argue that if the cosmos were not organized in terms of the PCE at all levels of existence, then we couldn’t actually formulate a coherent theory using such principles. But we have done it, and we are working on making it better, and it looks pretty coherent to me. That appears to me to imply that the PCE is probably as ‘real’ a fundamental ‘cosmic law’ as you can possibly get.
I know of no human philosophy and religion that does not have, at its core, a series of axioms or precepts based on the PCE—only that in the case of religions the precepts usually refer not to the ‘cosmos’ but to deity. Do the right thing and you will reap reward. Do the wrong thing and be damned.
Humans in general agree that the ultimate ‘wrong thing’ is extinction of the individual. The only difference between the variants is what they mean by it. (I know Buddhists would argue about the premise. I’ll happily argue with them in another context.)
[Sidebar: Maybe I shouldn’t say ‘human beings in general’, for in parts of the world human life apparently is worth is very little indeed. Still, I am talking from what you might call a ‘western’ perspective.]
Evolution is, at its heart, the process of development of organisms who try to avoid extinction—but all of whom got and are getting wiped out anyway, because that’s the mechanism by which ‘natural selection’ operates. In other words, evolution is inherently and profoundly schizophrenic. The desire to survive and the apparent evolutionary necessity not to are in constant conflict—and one could argue that it is that very schizophrenia which provides what you might call the ‘power source’ of the evolutionary process. Without it, there would be no human beings. Without it, esteemed reader, you would not exist.
Back to ethics, which appears to be, at this level, a social tool, more than anything else. Still, every so often we get a sense that there may be more to it, that maybe there is a very personal element at work, that goes beyond socialization mechanisms. And, of course, there is. The ultimate evil for most of us is not the extinction of other individuals, even if they are close to us, but of ourselves.
Or is it? It certainly seems to be—and especially so in those dark moments when we wake up late in the night and, though we may be sharing our bed with someone, we are totally alone with the darkness and our thoughts and our dismal fears, when it seems that we can’t breathe with the weight of an inevitable fate crushing us and our spirit.
But…should our fears really define our ethics?
It’s a difficult question, and I won’t try to tackle it. Ethics-determined-by-fear has brought upon mankind some of its worst self-inflicted horrors. Among other things, it has also brought us religion, which is just a nice way of saying ‘superstition’—and that’s just for starters…
I do not think that ‘fear’ is a good guide to figuring out ‘good’ and ‘evil’. And the fear of death doesn’t make death into something evil. It may be undesirable on a personal level, but ‘evil’? I think not. And I also think that the first thing emortals should admit is that their quest to live for a long time or ‘forever’—whatever they think that means—is primarily born out of the built-in to survive, which is one of the Janus faces of the evolutionary process they so often gripe about.
This, to me at least, appears to be a sign of profound dishonesty; the kind of simple-minded greed that you’ll also find in people who actually believe that just because there’s a ‘20% more FREE’ sign on the packet they actually do get something ‘free’—or the people who believe that they can actually have ‘freedom’ and ‘peace’ all at once.
Emortals can’t afford that kind of ethical turpitude. They can’t because the world cannot afford it; because if we are going to create a viable world of emortals we need a profound reorientation of our ethical standards—or else that world is not going to last for long, but will self-destruct more efficiently than we’re trying to do it now. And that should touch on the ‘survival’ instincts of everybody, even if they basically don’t give a damn about ethics, except insofar as everything that serves their interests is conveniently defined and suitably rationalized as being ‘good’, and what doesn’t isn’t.
Actions have consequences. The understanding of that fact is the basis of rational and ethical behavior. Indeed, the two could be considered one and the same. The only thing it requires is that rationality takes into account the PCE as the fundamental operational principle of the cosmos. Emortals are more subject than mortals to the consequences of their actions, because they will be around for long enough to suffer under, or benefit from, them.
People who die after a few pathetic years do not have to live in the world they helped to create.
Emortals do.
The world emortals help to create is, by and large—as it has always been—a social world. We will become emortal as a consequence of that social structure known as ‘civilization’, whose essence is ‘society’. Our continued survival will depend crucially on the survival of that civilization. Without it there is no science, no technology, no research, no nothing. If the kind of civilization that has made emortality possible ceases to exist so will emortality.
Therefore part of our survival strategy has to be to contribute what we can to the survival of civilization. Not just the ‘species’, but ‘civilization’! Meaning ‘society’. Meaning that we need to continue work on a society founded on ethical systems that allow it to persist and function—and preferably better than it is functioning now, because as things stand it isn’t going to work.
I’m not talking about ‘survival threats’ to the species in the form of asteroids or malignant computers, but of threats to the survival to our civilization by our stupidity and self-centeredness: by ‘mortalist’ thinking that doesn’t really see much beyond the demise of the thinker, and therefore cannot embrace an ethics that accepts that what we do today will have consequences not just for our descendants and their descendants in the next few centuries, but for ourselves.
When I look at those who would live forever I do not see an awareness of these issues. I see mortals afraid of dying and wanting—quite sensibly!—to avoid it. But so far I fail to discern anything even remotely resembling an emortalist consciousness or, even less so, an emortalist ethics.
But why? Let’s face it, most people aged 50 or below, unless they have some genetic predisposition toward an early death, or unless something catastrophic happens to our civilization and/or species within the next few decades, should rightly consider themselves ‘emortals’—if they wish it to be that way. It’s not a question of ‘maybe’, but of ‘almost certainly’.
Then why not start to act like emortals? To think like emortals? To plan like emortals? To assume the responsibilities of emortals? To prepare to become the guides for those who have no awareness of the coming changes? If we’re not going to do it, who is?
Instead of acting like frightened children, why do wannabe emortalists not put their actions where their desires are? Let’s face it, unless they’re scientists they’re not likely to be able to contribute much to the actual effort of making-it-so. Neither are they likely to do a lot to ‘save’ the planet from asteroids or perform other lofty deeds. But that doesn’t mean they’re useless. The effort involved in seeing an utterly unprepared society into what will be a new and promising and also dangerous age is just as important as the science and technology which produces it. It’s not a necessarily a question of vigorous proselytizing. Indeed, maybe one shouldn’t at this stage. Not any more. But someone needs to be there to lend a helping hand. Someone who is prepared.
This appears like a laudable, worthy, and indeed essential, task—for it might contribute toward the effort of not making our civilization collapse under the most fundamental change ever to hit it in the face. But it cannot be performed unless the emortals of today shed their pathetic selfish viewpoints and perspectives, or hide behind grandiose but ultimately futile schemes and deluded goals and ambitions.
So far, I do not see it happening. I see mortals panicking about their mortality and with nary a thought for the full implications of what is coming and their responsibility for, and potential position in, this change. I see frightened children, not emortals.
I understand their fear, because I share it. But it is time to grow up—like all humanity will have to if they are to survive the coming years. We are leaving puberty behind and embarking on a new, scary phase of life. Let’s not screw it up by remaining frozen in juvenile fear, selfishness and stupidity.
To repeat: there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by acting as if we were already emortal. Assume the scientific work has been done and that there is a reasonable certainty of the technology coming on-line with the usual apparent inexorability of technology.
But now what?
Do you really think you’re going to be able to answer that question unless you get down to do some real work? For that matter, do you think you have a right to even presume to aspire to be emortal if you are unwilling to assume your responsibilities as adults and pay your dues?
In one of the better war movies of recent times, Black Hawk Down, one of the characters finally came to understand that it’s really all about ‘the man next to you’. This is a profound truth about all of human existence, and here lies the Emortal’s true Categorical Imperative.
Shun it at your own peril.
Till Noever
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