Technique and morals

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No future for morality, only a past, or, better, the lost world of animal life. All our moral obligations and taboos have a simple and unique origin: the preservation of forms of life as they have appeared in the planet and consolidated through evolutionary solutions. Protection of offspring, solidarity within the species (from inhibition of harming to offering support, help and food), avoidance of inbreeding (incest taboo) (that Freud never thought of this is something prodigious), all these commandments are the translations in a book of detailed instructions of the logic of living nature. Humans are the animals gone astray, males more than females (and here there may be some connection with fact that autism is a prevailingly male disorder).

Why man has gone astray? Because he has become addicted to technical shortcuts. Technique is the fatal illness of man. Everything is distorted, amplified or frustrated by the fact that technique makes easier to kill and destroy. What happens is a gradual disappearance and wearing off of a interconnected system of moral commandments. Compact and understandable commandments are displaced by laws and regulations which lose their original coherence and grip on individuals. Different systems of morality coexist and battle each other without respite, constantly losing contact with the original instinctual brain hardwired values. Division of labor means, division of morals. A marksman is trained to kill without knowing exactly whom and why.

No state apparatus succeeds in abolish or contain impure traffics (prostitution, drugs, betting) and these impure traffics are protected and regulated by mobs. There is non single developed country without its mafia, or triad or yakuza organization, states inside the states, with which the self defined “sovereign” state is forced to come to terms. This weakening of the value systems of the “state” is progressive and unstoppable. So there is no future for a shared morality.

It don't seem to me that pre-technological societies were any more moral than the ones around today.

If human males have gone further astray then females, I don't get the impression that any significant number of females are objecting.

The manufacture of alcohol was invented thousands of years before the manufacture of soap, and gambling and prostitution are probably even older.

Warlords have been around longer than nations, so it's not surprising that they're still around. Modern people admire them just like ancient people. Why do you think the Godfather movies and so many similar ones are so popular.

Exactly when did a moral society ever exist?

yes, my ancestors were Celts and Vikings. I think their morals were not based on protection of life on the planet, but protection of the Clan. They were always a lot closer to death than we are. Their children died of disease. They could die from infections or in battle. They died (on average) much younger than us.

IMHO its because in our technological age, we are mostly unfamiliar with death, and we avoid thinking about it, so that we do not think about spirituality, I think that is more the cause of man going astray (if he has) than technology.

For a counter example, technological advances in amateur fishing equipment makes it easier to catch more fish, yet people keep less fish and practice catch and release. In the 19C bag limits were unheard of and I bet no one in Australia ever released anything. People now are more concerned about ecological systems than they ever were.

DNA evidence indicates that modern humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago
Until c. 10,000 years ago, most humans lived as hunter-gatherers. They generally lived in small nomadic groups known as band societies
The use of proto-money may date back to at least 100,000 years ago.
There was no money 100.000 years ago. Consequently there could not be and there was not prostitution, though rape was probably largely practiced.
There were not warlords, because there were not organized armies in earlier epochs, as there was not a state, and the largest forms of societal groupings were tribes, deriving from alliances between families and clans.
Before the agrarian revolution human population was below 6m now is 6.6 b.
While life in prehistory was short (probably below 30 years) and difficult, there was no one who had the possibility to destroy not only humanity, but the entire planet. In a sense this has already happened with the destruction of a high percentage of animal and vegetal species.
This does not mean that we should go back to gathering-hunting. We cannot do nothing to reverse the trends and we should do nothing in that direction (Pol Pot?).
But the span of times to be considered are not that of the Chinese, Egiptian or Mesopotamic empires. In an optic of 100,000 years the reasoning about humankind should be different.

There really is such a thing as being too smart for your own good. Paolo, if I had your intelligence I definitely would have stepped in front of a train by now.

It seems like the first examples of "industrial gestalt" were ...religion, war and land holders. Those have been around long before nuclear weapon. Have you read of how many were killed in the USA civil war? We put Iraq's civil war to shame. Technologically, we can kill in greater numbers then ever but nature has been beating us to it lately.

I don't know why people killed before mass killing technology, but I think they killed for resources to survive more then actual insane greed (wanting more then you can ever possibly use). No other animals hoards in this way, so I am thinking that perhaps it is evolution gone terribly wrong. A little might have been helpful in passing on your genes but the kind that humans have now is likely to kill us all. We also kill for "ideas" like the crusades of past and present but it all seems to prove the same thing to me...humans are and have always been, insane. The exceptions mearly prove the rule.

Technique doesn’t mean only ideation, invention, experimentation and implementation of mechanical, material devices like weaponry, but also the organization of humans in armies and bureaucracies to make them “instruments” of state military actions. The testudo used in the Roman legions, the construction of military streets and bridges and the organization of fiscal levy to pour resources in the wars, patriotic indoctrination to transform people in robotic warriors, were all progresses on the way of mechanization of slaughter and genocide. As Simon Weil observed, the Romans were masters in this. The systematic “obliteration” of Chartage 140 BC in a cold blooded systematic way, and the genocides conducted by Caesar one hundred years later in Gaul were the forerunners of modern genocides.

Paolo, you do not mention how the ancient Romans were such consummate eaters, drinkers, copulators, party-throwers, and general makers of merry. Therefore your entire concept of history is faulty. From a scholar I would have expected more.

I say Good Day to you, sir.

We start talking of morals or morality when we feel something is gone awry. Religions are ways to apologize for having been seduced by the devil (the shortcuts of technique, the apple of the instrumental reason). All moral systems may only be born out of a mystical aura. A vague humanistic morality is empty babble. What does it mean "the moral law within me, the starred sky above me"? Nothing. Moral commandments are only evolutionary laws, laws of life and personally I am attachedto life. But the problem, which is posed here in an eccessive shorthand is: how is it possible to organize future life (my life, not the life of humankind or of the planet)in a world without an imaginable future? Some kind of sophisticated Epicureism? Stoicism? Cynicism, the Cynicism of Diogenes, not lawless indifference? The Tao? Early Christianity was born in an environment of despair, where the only future was that of Doom. We have lived in an intoxication of false hopes. What now? Do you really believe that after at least one century of senseless apocalypses (WW1, Spain, Turkey, the East as conceived and practiced by The Nazis and the Stalinists, we can now enjoy a future? I am posing a practical question, I am not ranting or wailing. Autism may be, after all, a useful voyage into the void.
"The horror, the horror!" Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. And he had experienced personally the Belgian colonization of Congo.

Dude, you are seriously bumming me out.

I think this is the kind of existential crisis I have experienced at least since I was 5. Since the space craft has not returned for me, as I thought they would at the time, it does appear that I have had to make a choice of living just to learn and act "as if". I have learned to embrace my self delusions as a mean to stop thinking about killing myself. I found no meaning, so I created one that worked for me. This meaning (for me) is simply to enjoy my interests and "do unto others" as often as I can because it gives me some pleasure even though I realize it will not change the basic inhumanity of anyone but myself.

I do wonder if the hyper-sensitivities of autistics also applies to their emotional and psychological self. I kind of invision it as a snail who has to create or find a shell to protect itself from the (emotional/psychological),violence of the world as much as the physical violations of sight and sound. I am probably just projecting my own experience but I do wonder if they have gotten the concept of AS wrong...thinking us unfeeling when we really have to shut down because actually we feel to much, I think specifically in regards to empathy).

The meaning of life?...create one or someone will create one for you or ou will actively or passively kill yourself, (thats just my experience)..I'm only 44 for so I reserve the right to change my opinions as I learn more.

This was meant somewhere else, but is all right here.

Some one told me once “you live on short lived flare ups”: I took badly the observation, though it was a correct observation. Being (as they call it now) “bipolar”, I have always lived this way. In the midst of deep depression I look desperately and with a fixed gaze to some sign of a turn of the road. When something appears I throw myself on it, like sucking a carrot that might contain unexpected (hoped for) energies and some minimum success in sucking the carrot is at the origin of the flare up. Like a gamer in the gambling house seeing the sign, I throw everything in it. And I do things for a while. Better so that just lying at the bottom of the pit waiting passively for some general Lasalle arriving with his troops.

To clarify: the end of The Pit and the Pendulum by E.A.Poe.

I shrank back -- but the closing walls pressed me resistlessly onward . At length for my seared and writhing body there was no longer an inch of foothold on the firm floor of the prison. I struggled no more, but the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long, and final scream of despair. I felt that I tottered upon the brink -- I averted my eyes --

There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell fainting into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.

That's brilliant, Poe's writing. Awesome!

Does one ever get used to the swings I wonder? To experience them both with equanimity would require a Buddha-like detachment which I'm not sure is possible. And are the highs worth suffering the lows for? Not that one has a choice of course. I sometimes think they are. And what would happen if the pendulum stopped swinging and settled on a dull, middling, 'OK'- where would energy come from then? These are the questions I ask myself, but they are academic, of course.