On Virtue

Once one decides what makes a society good, it comes time to consider the individual. There are responsibilities society and its institutions should satisfy. There are also obligations that individuals should engage as members of the community. They are actions and conduct that allow the system to serve its purpose and maximize people’s potential to live. The enlightened strive to live by this higher conduct due to a devotion that rests in mind and spirit. People want to be good because their reason dictates they should. Their spirit dictates decency by affinitarian dictate. It simply feels good. For whichever dominates in the drive toward uprightness, without it, society would be incapable of functioning well. The first components of this higher conduct are the virtues. These virtues are self discipline, responsibility, courage, perseverance, honesty, loyalty, faith, work, friendship, and compassion.

To be self disciplined is to let reason govern one’s actions. How it works is by using reason to set one’s priorities. It can be a decision to stop eating sweets in order to prevent cavities. The priority is healthy teeth over sweets. Once one establishes the priority, then comes the hard part. The person must start controlling passions and impulses through practice. The desire for candy and cakes must be overcome.

Responsibility is to own one’s own actions and to be held accountable for them. Many try to blame others for mistakes they make. When this is not possible, they oftentimes deter attention from themselves by pointing out the faults in others. They seek these faults in an attempt to pull themselves up at the expense of other’s integrity. To be responsible is not to succumb to these reductions. It is to face one’s own mistakes and weaknesses.

Plato suggested that courage, like most virtues, work because we have the capacity to reason. He believed that valiancy is knowing what to fear as dictated by reason. Many times, when approached by an unreasonable fear, it is through self determination that we find the courage to confront it. Yet, there may be more to the courageous than mere intelligence. True bravery is to overcome justifiable fear by a stronger more compassionate will. Exposing oneself to risk, absent of self interest, one endeavors to be of service to others. This is the courage of heroes in legend.

Perseverance, like Plato’s courage, only works when used in conjunction with reason. It is the capacity to continue trying to succeed at an endeavor until it is completed. But, if reason dictates the quest irrelevant, the perseverance may not yield fulfillment. The deed becomes foolish.

Honesty is to adhere to the truth. It is to express oneself accurately to oneself as well as others. When living in a society where the means of exchange is an aesthetic and altruistic dynamic, honesty is very important. It is important to define truthfully one’s own faults, weaknesses, goals, feelings, and beliefs. This way, people can do a better job of helping one achieve their dreams.

Loyalty is caring for other persons, groups, beliefs, or institutions regardless of the inconvenience. It generates trust as its product.

Faith is an firm belief in goodness and its inevitable capacity to overcome evil. It is a commitment to goodness that prevents people from going morally adrift. Decency is practiced and supported even at the risk to one’s own life. It is an acceptance that there is an underlying “goodness” to the universe. This notion is supported by a consistency of forms and systems that exist within people as well as the rest of nature. As products of nature, people reflect its character in their interests. It is not that the world is good. It is considered good only by human attribution. Nature simply is.

Work is an activity one engages to achieve an end. Some types of work can serve as an expression of one’s own character or integrity. A volunteer, who works to save lives, does so for an end that serves as an expression of their character.

But the product work serves doesn’t have to be the only end. The means by which the end is accomplished can be an end in itself. This is achieved through the choice of technique one employs to accomplish the work. The worker can design their own coarse of action. To find solutions to each obstacle in the means becomes an expression of integrity and strength. In this, both the activity and the products of work can serve as expressions of character.

But work can move beyond the expression of ego. It has the capacity to become an end in itself on a truer level. By this, productivity is assured due to an inherent need to be productive. The means become ends in and of themselves where the love and challenge of technique is practiced and an inherent need to accomplish something relevant prevails.

Compassion is to come to the aid of others in distress perhaps because one sees a bit of the self in the other. But it even rests inherent when given no regard by reason.

Friendship is the acquaintance and affection for others. It yields levels of benevolence that serve as the best pattern for all relationships. It usually arises out of mutual interests. Friends may see a bit of themselves in the other. The relationship requires honesty, especially about oneself, the ability to hold enough respect and affection for the other to take their criticism with their praise, loyalty, and love.

It is clear that if all members of a community wish to be friends, they should aspire to practice these virtues. If individuals practice these virtues so shall the community as a whole. The community shall then find alliance with other communities of the same noble standing.


The Precepts

The golden rule asserts individuals do unto others as they would have done unto themselves. This suggests a person who practices virtue would want to live in a community where its members also practice virtue. The rule might also be restated that one must not do unto others as one wishes not done unto themselves. One is dealing with precepts rather than virtues in this sense. While virtues are activities one should engage, precepts are conduct one should not. The precepts are: not to kill, not to steal, not to lie, not to be unchaste, and not to take intoxicants.

One should never commit murder. Cherish and nurture life instead. Support and protect the lives of others in the community. Include the interests of children, the sick, and the elderly.

Do not steal. Respect the private space and property of others for this is their dream space. Its aggregate leads to the meditations and reflections that can augment the community as a whole.

Do not lie. Be honest with yourself and those in your community. It is important to determine an accurate account of one’s ambitions, beliefs, gifts, and overall condition. This is very important if trade is engaged on an altruistic level. If people wish to give one a gift, they have no idea what that person truly wants if that person has not been honest about their appetites.
Truthful expression insures that resources are not wasted on developments that never matter.

Do not commit adultery. There are obvious biological motives to restrict ones sexual habits. The spread of sexually transmitted diseases can be increased without a conservative predilection. There is also the prospect of reduced genetic variability in small communities when some members are not allowed to contribute to the future gene pool. There is also the risk of paternal disenfranchisement. Fathers are essential in developing psychologically healthy children.

Finally, the last precept insists one should not take recreational drugs. These impair good judgment, lead to poverty, and even psychological and physical malice.

A racial memory of a mythical golden age suggests a past when people were more extraordinary beings. Eden, Camelot, and Atlantis suggest an enlightened prehistory which was lost to human weakness. They remind us of what can be destroyed when we turn on goodness and virtuosity. These legends also promise what could come to pass if we return to correctness. It is important not to under estimate one’s affect on the environment. One’s environment is often a reflection of one’s character. A community is an expression of its people. This implies that the world is what one makes of it. Individual philosophy can make the difference between whether heaven or hell should prevail on Earth.

An obvious dependence on personal behavior should be considered when wishing to bring back myth’s golden age. The practice of virtue by individuals can lead to its conveyance to the entire community.


Reason, Foresight, and Altruism

In people there is selfishness, competition, fear, jealousy, and propensities toward violence which can drive people to act viciously in their world. These characteristics are sometimes justified in the name of technological progress. After all, we owe World War II for advances in radar technology, rocket science, and nuclear physics. But this rational may serve humanities undoing in a world where small groups wield atomic and biological weapons of genocidal proportions. People are also capable of reason, foresight, a capacity for love, and a passion for beauty that are undeniably the tools and motives to their survival. It is clear that the former inherent dispositions should be displaced by these. To do this, one must understand what these noble characteristics are and secure the promise they allow one to aspire to.

Reason is the mental practice of interpreting the nature of reality. To know it is to know science, mathematics, history, and philosophy. It begins by generating concepts true by definition. It finishes by producing the most likely theories on the nature of the human predicament. Time tests their credibility. But even with the greatest tests of time, theories are tentative and soidisant. Reason never proves anything. It only disproves.

Foresight is another human capability that can contribute to humanities survival. This is the ability to make a reasonable guess as to the outcome of events by placing reality’s interpretation into account. By developing an understanding of the most likely truths, one can determine one’s best course of action in life. Reason combined with foresight allow one to make choices that should secure desirable objectives.

While reason and foresight serve as the means behind the wise person’s actions, beauty and love serve as their motive. The splendor of love and all other things comparable in beauty feed the soul. In this, people move beyond existence to live. Reason and foresight can decide the way things will be. But the soul insists that one must not ask what the essence of nature is but of what it ought to be. Should it be a world driven by greed, hatred, and fear or should it be based on reason, foresight, beauty, and love? The affinity of soul would choose the loveliness of the later as primary. The darker motives would find audience only in the poet’s sense of aesthetic. In a roundabout way, they too would find their course to the soul but only in the context of intangible beauty. Beginning and maintaining this suggests the brighter constitutions make up the foundation of good life. They lie essential to humanity’s future success.


Love, the Reptilian Brain, and Selfish Genes

If altruism does exist, where did it come from? How was it evolved to? To answer this, one has to go back to a time when love may not have existed, a time when reptiles, rather than mammals, ruled the earth.

Life arose on earth three and a half billion years ago. For the first three billion years, the conservation of replicating molecules would reign supreme over the activities of life. Some scientists dub these replicating molecules as “selfish genes” because of their self conserving predisposition. These primitive molecules started interacting with others to compose cellular structure. Multicellular organisms arose no less than seven-hundred million years ago. An explosion of life occurred shortly thereafter. By five-hundred billion years ago, life had managed to colonize land. The development of complex nervous systems and brains were soon to follow.

14 - 12 billion years ago - formation of the universe
4.6 billion years ago supernova
4.5 - 3.6 billion Hadean Eon
3.8 billion Iron catastrophe
3.5 billion first cyanobacteria, photosynthetic and methanogens, atmosphere: CO2, NH4, stromatolites
3.5 - 2.5 billion Archeon Eon
2.5 billion - proliferation of cyanobacteria rise of aerobic photosynthesis
2.0 billion - possibly Eukaryotic cells arise (certainly by 700 million years)
~700 million years - multicellular organisms arise
570 million to present Phanerozoic Eon
570 - 240 million years ago - Paleozoic Era proliferation of multicellular organisms
435 million - ozone layer formed, plants colonize land (Silurian period)
365 million - amphibians and insects thrive
240 - 63 million years Mesozoic Era - age of reptiles
63 million to present Cenozoic Era - age of mammals

The brain has evolved and grown like a city, where, as the city expands, the inner city remains intact and continues to operate within the confines of the elder intent. The new city or suburbs lie outside the inner city and employ a more neoteric plan. Six hundred million years ago, our ancestors had brains that were limited to controlling automatic systems like heartbeat and breathing. The name of this inner brain is the neural chassis. The neural chassis still operates in the human brain today. It still controls essentially the same activities it has always directed. But much more exists in the human brain than merely this system. About the age of the reptiles a new part of the brain evolved outside the neural chassis. This part is called the reptilian complex or R-complex. The behavior and function of this brain region is much more advanced than the neural chassis. It is from this part of the brain that selfish motivation arises. Selfishness, before the R-complex evolved, had presence only in the mimicry of the “selfish” gene. It is suggested, that the selfish gene’s agenda reaches extra genetic potential in the reptilian brain. The extra genetic potential for selfishness is suggested to be reflected in the lives of dinosaurs. But selfish motivation wasn’t enough. A new creature appeared on the circuit. Nature found out that sometimes it was advantageous for “selfish” genes to cooperate. To raise young required an organism to be sensitive to the needs of others. To live and hunt in packs required collaboration. With this, a new layer of the brain evolved over the other two. Mammals came into being. The layer outside the R-complex is called the limbic system. This is the home of higher brain functions like altruism. Birds and mammals have well developed limbic systems.