ACT I
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We’ve been talking about how people use their abilities and ideas in their environments to live their lives. We think of new ideas in the process. Those create the stories of the world we believe in, and our worldviews.
Now here we are in America, in the 2020s, where so many Americans have grown so distrustful of other Americans. Now here’s the big question about worldviews and functional communities.
What do you think of other people’s worldviews?
How similar do you have to believe they are to yours to feel they’re compatible?
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This leads us back to the importance of shared stories giving a group of people a shared moral framework and a shared understanding of cause and effect. And it leads back to in groups and out groups.
How rigid or flexible your beliefs in your worldview are depends on how much you feel you depend on it to make good decisions, and how bad you feel the decisions are of people who don’t believe in it.
Rigid morality works well in some situations. Especially for people who are surrounded by a lot of potential danger.
If you grew up on a farm and you’ve been driving tractors and hunting since you were 10 years old, whoever taught you to do those things probably made sure you learned the right way to do them, and made sure you didn’t learn to do them the wrong way.
That’s why you always treat every gun as if it’s loaded. That’s why you never point a gun at anyone you don’t intend to kill. You know all five rules of firearm safety, and you’d never go hunting with anyone who didn’t know them all.
If you teach your kids to drive tractors and hunt when they turn 10, you’re going to make sure they learn the difference between the right and wrong ways to do them.
ACT II
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All of our traditional stories come from far back in our history.
The environmental crisis aside, the further back in history you look, the more dangerous people’s lives were. Humanity’s collective efforts at creating better lives for ourselves over the centuries have led to less war and famine, better medicine and justice, and in general, fewer ways to die.
Any story of the world from before 1945 is a story of a world where the United Nations hadn’t been founded yet.
Any story of the world from before 1928 is a story about the world before penicillin was discovered.
Any story of the world from before 1776 is a story where all the most powerful countries in the world were monarchies, not democracies.
Rigid morality doesn’t just protect people from the immediate dangers of making bad decisions with guns and farm equipment. It also helps the people of a society work together and depend on each other in the face of unknown danger.
In a world where you can be forced to pay more taxes or fight a war any time your king feels like it, and diseases seem to kill people at random, rigid morality can be part of a plan that keeps people working together instead of drifting apart or turning on each other. If working together makes people’s lives better in ways they can’t recognize, they need a story of the world that tells them how it does make their lives better.
Even if the stories you tell them are nothing but superstitions, and have nothing to do with the real ways people’s lives are getting better, if you can keep the people working together long enough, their efforts will pay off in ways they can recognize eventually.
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Unfortunately, every good idea someone can think of, someone else can find a way to ruin.
Rigid moral frameworks don’t just make people remember to make good decisions and help keep them courageous in the face of unknown danger. Rigid moral frameworks are also a way to control people. They’re also a way to spread hate and fear. They’re also a way to destroy enemies.
So wherever people believe in rigid moral frameworks that help keep them safe and keep their communities functioning, other people who want to control people, want to spread hate and fear, or want to destroy other people, can find a way to take control of the morality, if they can just convince those people to listen to them.
If the rigid morality is based largely on superstitions, so much the better for people who want to control it for other reasons. If you’re charismatic enough and know enough about the kinds of things they believe, you can convince them of pretty much anything.
If the men in your society have been hunting and driving tractors since they were 10 years old, and they’ve depended on that morality of making good decisions in dangerous situations ever since, and that’s how they make their livings in dangerous jobs now, part of that morality could say that it was wrong for some men to want to stay home with the women while the other men went out to work. That’s a weakness that sets bad examples for your children.
So you could say that men who want to stay home are acting like women. You could call that homosexuality as hyperbole, by saying these men act like women so much they want to have sex with men.
That would make people equate homosexuality with selfishness and laziness and moral weakness.
If you get people to believe that homosexuality is really bad, that makes it sound like a disease.
And if it’s a disease, it could be contagious.
That could mean that being friends with homosexuals could turn you into a homosexual.
And if homosexuality is a bad disease that’s contagious, it might not even be transmitted the way other diseases are.
It might be transmitted through sound.
That could mean that listening to music by homosexual musicians could turn you into a homosexual.
And if homosexuality could be transmitted that easily, listening to music by musicians who might be homosexuals could turn you into a homosexual.
(And I’m not making this up, by the way. I grew up around people who believe stuff like this.)
If people are willing to believe that, what would that do to their sense of morality toward homosexuals?
If homosexuality is a highly contagious, incurable disease that causes selfishness, laziness, and moral weakness, the only way to protect yourself from the disease would be to protect yourself from the people who already have it, by keeping them away from the healthy people by doing things like throwing them in prison, socially ostracizing them, threatening them or harming them so much they move away, or by killing them.
People started out with a fairly good plan for how to make things better for themselves, their families, and their communities, by raising their boys to have good attitudes for working with powerful machinery. But somewhere along the way, people who hate homosexuals got hold of the story and twisted it into what they wanted people to believe.
Now parents’ lessons for their boys, that even when they have to get out of bed at 4:30 in the morning and work outside in the snow all day, they have to pay attention to safety every minute of the day to keep from killing anyone by accident, have been turned into the beginning of a lesson for why they should murder people.
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Rural America is the place everyone hears about where boys learn to shoot rifles and drive tractors when they’re 10, and they’re intolerant of diversity. If there’s a lot of danger around you, you depend on people sticking to your moral framework to keep your society functioning. Anyone who doesn’t sets a bad example for your kids.
Then a lot of people get confused why homosexuals are so unsafe in Black neighborhoods. Something like 95% of Black adults vote for Democrats. So why are so many of them so intolerant of LGBTQ people?
Remember what I just said, about people who live in dangerous conditions depending on people sticking to their moral frameworks to make their societies function.
Black people aren’t a race of liberals. 90% of Black Americans identify themselves as religious, which is far more than any other racial group in our country too. That doesn’t mean Black people are a race of religious people.
Black Americans have had a lot of dangerous living conditions forced upon them over the centuries. So most Black people don’t vote for conservatives who want to keep doing things according to our traditions. Most Black people vote for candidates who want to change things in America, to improve the living conditions of people who have been oppressed.
But at the same time, Black people have depended a lot on traditions that give them shared moral frameworks to help keep them focused and working together to make things better for themselves.
If a lot of things have gone wrong for you in life, and you know that people are responsible for it, and everyone around you knows it too, and you don’t have any way to stop them, that makes you look, and feel, like someone other people can push around. That feels like a big threat to your social status. And to everything that depends on your social status.
So what can you do to improve your social status? What can you do to keep people from looking down on you?
One thing you can do is prove that you can make bad things happen to other people. To prove you’re not at the bottom of the people pushing other people around hierarchy.
And if there are some people around you who you and a lot of the people around you already look down on because you have a lot of shared stories about them being lazy, selfish, immoral people, if you make bad things happen to them, that will make you and a lot of people who know you feel like you’re fighting an enemy.
Whichever part of the country we’re talking about, some individual people decide that there’s more to life than this, and move away from their dangerous lives and intolerant neighbors.
But that usually means moving away from their families too. Many Americans, like many people everywhere else in the world, don’t want to do that.
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Moral frameworks are adaptations people make to their environments. They’re ideas that people evolve to help them live in their environments. There’s an easy clue to look for in how much people in an area have done that.
Compare the average life spans of two areas.
Wherever people have shorter average lifespans, it means they die more often.
They die more often because there are more things there that can kill them.
Regardless of which political party people vote for, the higher their death rates, the more their communities depend on their moral frameworks.
So the more they depend on people setting good examples for their children on how stick to their moral frameworks.
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This brings us back to in groups and out groups.
Your in group are the people you feel have good morals.
Your out group are the people you feel have unacceptable morals.
In between those two are more groups of people whose morals you feel are pretty good but not ideal. Even though you don’t completely agree with their morals, you agree with them enough to feel you can depend on them for some things.
Maybe you learn your morality from a good role model. Maybe you and a lot of the people you know learn your morality from strong spiritual leaders. Or maybe you and your friends grew up without good role models or leaders, and you just piece your morality together on your own, little by little.
The point is, for good or bad, the more rigid your morality, the smaller your in groups are.
Just to be clear here, I’m not condoning homophobia. I’m just telling you about one big reason for it that I heard a lot about growing up that I’ve never heard anyone in the LGBTQ rights movement talk about.
ACT III
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Religions are the easiest way for a body of ideas to lead its believers to absurd conclusions like these. Because religious stories are the oldest stories of the world that we have, from times long before the Scientific Revolution, and from times when life was much different from the way it is now.
But any body of ideas that people use as a story of the world can lead to things like this. Whether it’s a political ideology, an economic model, an academic field, or a philosophy, if you believe that your body of ideas tells you all the most important ideas about life, that means you believe it can lead you to good conclusions about any ideas.
In the pandemic a lot of people refused to wear masks because they felt that self determination is a more fundamental part of life than germ transmission.
Once you believe that your way of thinking is the source of all truth, you’ve decided that you don’t need to pay attention to anyone or anything that tells you anything you don’t already believe.
