think about how you know grammar rules. the weird ones in english. things like how “you oughtn’t do that” looks right, but “you ought’nt do that” doesn’t. there are rules, lots of them, but that’s not how you learned is it? you just know that some things are right just by looking at them, and some things are not. it’s instant, and often hard to explain people who are still learning english.
now, consider the possibility that morality works in the same way as language: absorbed at a formative age by what we see in others, with rules being created later to explain our own reactions to ourselves. note that when you see something that requires a moral judgement, you don’t consult a rulebook, but instead know. even in ambiguous situations, our response isn’t to start following a logical process and try and resolve it, but usually to freeze and be not sure what to do.
what if all our rules for morality, all the religious, philosophical, societal, etc ponderings are all just navel gazing of the “is it ok to split an infinitive” type? what if we already know the answers based on what feels right to us, and instead just argue because black-and-white rules make us feel more comfortable with ourselves?
ambiguity is scary, and so is the idea that everything holding our societies together might not actually be imposed by laws, gods, or anything of the sort, and the moral failings of others are as mutable as their desire to spell ‘you’ as ‘u’
I do like to think there are principals behind my morals. Like, say The Golden Rule, or Work Shall Set You Free. They have to flex a lot, but mostly they are there. The principles are fair game too, but they help me feel less arbitrary as I go along. And the apostrophe replaces the removed vowel, so I always know where it goes.
It’s possible, but it’s also possible that the principals were created afterwards to explain to us why we feel good when helping others, and feel bad if we hurt them for our own profit.
so let’s say you’re reading/watching some fantasy thing and you hear the phrase “dark magic”. yes, it’s cheesy, but you inherently understand what it means: someone is using a magic ritual that will give him power while hurting innocent people. an unfair magic ritual. it’s inherently understood as morally bad.
now, let’s turn that around. think of the phrase “dark mathematics”. doesn’t work, does it? the brain automatically goes “no, that’s stupid, mathematics is amoral, it’s how you use it”.
so why does magic have an inherent morality while mathematics doesn’t? what about other words?
dark physics – no
dark engineering – no
dark science – maybe
dark experiments – yes
dark acts – very yes
dark programming – lolno
so the rule appears to be “things that are understood as implying action are inherently moral, things that don’t, aren’t” even when the logic makes no sense (programming, after all, is in fact an action, ditto chemistry).
not really going anywhere with this one. i came up with the phrase “towers where adepts practice dark mathematics” while in the shower, thought it was hilarious, pondered why, and needed to write it down in over 140 characters.
so life is a performance. yes, we choose our role moment to moment, and yes it would be disingenuous to say that our choices are really limitless. being human and herd animals we are limited but what we feel is the limit of what others expect of us.
but that’s a tangent though. life is a performance, and as it is a performance there is a certain quality to it that we call authenticity. it’s hard to pin down, but i ran across a few things that got me to thinking about it
so let’s start by talking about alt-sex cause people love alt-sex or so i’m told. at the defcon jeopardy game (drunk social event for hackers) there was a girl there whose job was to basically dress up like a dom and hit people who answer incorrectly. she (and all the previous incarnations of her) did a great job, people had fun, cheering was had, but at the same time it was clear that she wasn’t a domina, not really, and i was wondering about why exactly.
it’s not a question in context in this case, i’m not speaking of attempting to subdue a room full of boisterous drunks, i’m talking about the reaction i had as she was still walking in before hand. it was one where the instant reaction was ”aww, sweetie, i know what you’re going for and you certainly dressed the part, but you’re doing it all wrong. no idea how, but you are”
the dom thing isn’t attire or any physical action, in the end it’s something that’s an immediate emotional reaction. you either instantly understand upon seeing the person, or you don’t. if they don’t broadcast this authenticity in the first moment, there is no way to sort of back up and try again.
i guess i don’t mean in the first moment, but in the first moment it’s “turned on”. it is a performance and an act. keep in mind that those words don’t mean it’s “fake” to me, just that it is something we consciously choose to do. it’s fake only in the sense as our performance of being students, teachers, parents, or children is fake just because it’s possible for us to theoretically not act that way.
and i’m not saying that this is about some magical quality that comes from being in a culture. that’s stupid. it is absolutely possible to fake the performance with enough authenticity to make it real to anyone, but you would find that as you do so, you would no longer be faking it. yes, it’s catch-22ish. as soon as you pretend it well enough, you’re no longer pretending.
example 2: i was at a show not too long ago, 3 bands played. 2 of them were ‘normal’ to me, 1 of them the singer and frontman never felt like one. he dressed like a frontman, he spoke one, he sang into the mic, but at no point did i believe it. again, the authenticity wasn’t broadcast.
this is something i’m a bit hypersensitive to now that i’m fronting the band for real. the live show is a double performance, the band pretending to be the band, and the audience pretending to be the audience. if the singer can’t act like a band, soon the audience will feel stupid acting like an audience. there’s words that we use for it that vary from genre to genre, ‘energy’ being a common one, ‘feeling it’ is another, ‘getting us’, whatever. in the end it’s ‘we believed your performance, you believed ours, and we chose to have fun tonight’
another example: nerd core. yes, i’m taking, you kicking and screaming, from bdsm to geek rappers. let it go.
two rappers: mc chris, and mc plus+
mc chris:
mc++:
(what the hell, we don’t get pics of the girl dom but we get two nerd dudes?)
life’s a bitch, deal with it. btw, i originally wrote “pasty white dudes” but having googled him i now realize that mc plus+ isn’t very pasty. thanks for making me lose a great phrase.
so here’s the thing. i believe mc chris. and i don’t mean that i take what he says literally since that would include believing he owns a batmobile with a mcdonald’s inside, but the authenticity of his performance is there for me. i’m saying that when he talks about being a geek, i emotionally relate to him. i don’t feel it from mc plus+. and i’m not questioning mc plus+’s street cred, inasmuch as that term can possibly apply to someone who not only never claims to spend time on the streets but in fact claims to never leave their bedroom. i really believe he is a geek in real life, but his performance of being a geek doesn’t feel authentic.
“how can you possibly come across inauthentic at being yourself?”. because yourself is an act. because this requires performing a swagger and not just being geeky. and because there is more to this bravado than simply stating it and having the balls to hold a mic in front of a crowd of people, and that something is enjoying it to the point where you forget you’re only pretending to be enjoying it.
fourth and last example, this guy:
tim minchin performing “if i didn’t have you”, at the secret policeman’s ball.
btw, that’s officially my favorite love song of all time now.
there’s a geek culture thing to this song, like him trying to explain the word special as he’s using it, those 3 lines have more honesty in them than pretty much all other love songs combined. not just in what he’s saying (cause for all i know whitney will in fact always love you and is just as truthful), but in how honest his performance of it is. it’s someone who first screws up by saying his girlfriend/wife isn’t special, then tries to dig himself out, then realizes that even more importantly he’s now being ambiguous about what he meant by the word ‘special’ and the best way to explain that is with statistical analysis.
this post probably would here go on to start talking about dimitri martin and his palindrome, and then finish on comparing the comics smbb and “the warehouse comic”, but at this point i finished showering and stopped pondering this.
oh, and also something about how our ability to detect authenticity being in part our exposure to the role at hand. i’m positive i have a different standard of authenticity of a domina than 99% of defcon, probably 95% one way, and 4% the other way. or thereabouts.
that “blame the outsider” mentality is why i think that the terms “native american” / “african american” etc, while unwieldy, were a good idea. they subconsciously reinforce that the groups are permanent part of the country and makes it a bit harder for us to perform the mental ‘exile’ ritual
your brain is hardwired into protecting your tribe. as such, given any problem, your body will head towards into believing that the problem is caused by a foreign presence in your tribe (for whatever that definition is in practice), and is best resolved by scapegoating that presence, and expelling it.
anytime you catch yourself thinking a sentence along the lines of “it’s the new hires fault”, or “i just need to get rid of this one part of my personality”, or “it’s the fault of this racial/religious/national group, we need them to go home”, well, you’re probably wrong. you’re just letting your brain go on easy mode and that’s the simplest response
it’s wrong because ‘tribe’ is usually the wrong metaphor for the situation. your body is not a collaboration of independent mental archetypes, and nations and workplaces are better served by rules, checks and balances, and inspections that keep order and guide even culturally new people into productivity and greater good.
it’s interesting how many cultures had (have?) actual scapegoating rituals where an animal, often a goat, would be ritually blamed for everything wrong in the tribe, then either slaughtered, or just thrown out. this was the origin of yom kippur, the greeks did it, so did african tribes. the greeks i think later upgraded to using slaves though since i guess those were cheaper than hooved livestock
it’s just frustrating to see the same stupid solution applied to everything over and over, on every scale, and knowing that it will not achieve anything besides keep splintering us into more fragmented mental concepts of “tribe”.
please attempt to force your brains into post-invention-of-agriculture states, plox.
PK are discussing. 
Gene 4:29 am on April 9, 2010 Permalink
I do like to think there are principals behind my morals. Like, say The Golden Rule, or Work Shall Set You Free. They have to flex a lot, but mostly they are there. The principles are fair game too, but they help me feel less arbitrary as I go along. And the apostrophe replaces the removed vowel, so I always know where it goes.
.e 4:32 am on April 9, 2010 Permalink
It’s possible, but it’s also possible that the principals were created afterwards to explain to us why we feel good when helping others, and feel bad if we hurt them for our own profit.