Attitude and the Arrow of Morality

This week I have been fighting against a negative attitude. Physically I have felt exhausted even after a full night's sleep. Psychologically I have been fighting against a general disdain for humanity, a disappointment in people. When I am at the low pole of my bipolar disorder it isn't so much that I am automatically sad, it is that I am very vulnerable to negative thoughts and experiences.

My disappointment with people is that there have been examples of people still thinking in terms of "Us" and "Them". The first example was people celebrating the death of Osama bin-Laden, people not thinking of him as a person, either directly (I have read someone stating that he wasn't human) or indirectly (calling his assassination the "death of evil"). It isn't often that I follow the lead of the Catholic Church but I thought this release from the Vatican Press Office was excellent,

"Osama Bin Laden, as is known, claimed responsibility for grave acts that spread division and hate among the peoples, manipulating religion to that end. A Christian never takes pleasure from the fact of a man's death, but sees it as an opportunity to reflect on each person's responsibility, before God and humanity, and to hope and commit oneself to seeing that no event become another occasion to disseminate hate but rather to foster peace."

The second example was a blog by my good friend Dade in which he used this opportunity to disparage George W. Bush and his failure to kill Osama bin-Laden. While I am no admirer of George W. Bush I am in no doubt whatsoever that he tried to kill Osama bin-Laden, and if he had the same opportunity as Barak Obama to do so he would have taken the chance. There's no doubt in my mind that George W. Bush was as prepared as Barak Obama to take political risks in using the military, after all how else can you describe invading Iraq in the face of the largest worldwide popular and political opposition of all time? When two people doing the same thing are described in almost opposite ways then what is going on is "us versus them."

The reason that this bothers me is that I think the best way for the world to be is that there is not an "us or them" but simply a we. Within that we, people will have different opinions, sometimes enormously different opinions and sometimes with terrible consequences. Deaths, misery can result from stupid, ignorant and unpleasant opinions. But there simply isn't a significant number of people in the world who do things because they think it is the wrong thing to do. The people who do horrible things are still trying to make the world a better place, just a better place from their point of view.

The thing about "Us versus Them" is that it is a built-in default position within humanity, but it enables people to think that other humans are not really human. When you think that people aren't fully human it enables you to do things to them that you would never do to a person. It enables you to be outraged at how your mother, or son, might be treated while cheering someone else's mother or son being treated in the same way. It closes the mind to the ideas of entire groups, it removes sympathy for their position and it makes understanding, compassion, negotiation and compromise almost impossible. When you think there are the white hats and the black hats it enables you to think anything the white hats do is OK. In my opinion if you are willing to do anything you become the black hats. White hats versus black hats makes everyone a black hat. "Four legs good, two legs bad" as George Orwell put it in 1984.

So that's why I was feeling disappointed, because these are good people, kind hearted, warm, intelligent people caught up in this natural feeling. It is one of the characteristics of Us versus Them that people can be beautifully good people to those within the group and awful to those outside of the group. These aren't crimes, or sins. These are simply attitudes that I find disappointing.

However, I bucked myself up by remembering the direction of the Arrow of Morality. The lesson of history, particularly more recent history, is that of moving away from Us versus Them. It is a movement that expands what it is to be human, deserving of all the love, protection, and respect that any human is due. It is but a few centuries since it was considered morally reasonable to own human beings. It is around a century since women were first considered human enough to be able to vote. It's only one hundred and fifty years since the Geneva Convention was first enacted in which the idea that the enemy had rights. In our lifetime the idea that you might be homosexual is moving from being an abomination to simply a part of some humans.

The world is not a utopia, and the human animal is still an animal that evolved in a frightening, violent and confusing world. It is a wonder how much we have been able to overcome and I am certain that we will progress as time goes by. What is the namby-pamby liberal, wet blanket of the present is the foundation of the moral values of the future conservative.