Pinging Ruru for any more observations here?
Well, I guess I can’t be selfish with my thoughts after an invite like that.
Actually, having read the essay there are a few thoughts.
First that popped up and was later seconded was how the claims made line up with a discussion on “How Modern Liberals Think” from a few years ago that had a,IIRC, thread hereabouts.
As I recall, Mr.Sayet’s principal point was that for some folks they now see the effort to be right,to be good, as the principal cause of all that is wrong with the world.
What further interests me about the claims made in the attached article is how at first blush it seems like an obversation that can only be made if someone has at least treaded the waters Sayet talks about and here I would also make mention of C.S.Lewis’ The Abolition of Man to help back me up.
As you may recall, Lewis spoke of men who may try to reinvent Man, changing their sense of moral and ethical reality through manipulative “education”. One of the things he at least implied, been a while since I read it and other things may be leaking in here, that their “morality” and “ethics” would be somehow scientifically derived.
Random aside: I actually used these ideas for some of the backstory behind my Transformers: Genesis books. In that backstory something from the original cartoon series, the “hate plague” was actually Primacron’s first effort where the spores he released were to strip out the natural moral sense and supplant it with another he considered valid ... but since those affected with the spores had only experience with the natural Tao, “Tao” used as Lewis did, when they lost their old sense of order and had no awareness of the strictures of the new or how to employ them, however derived, they invariably behaved as madmen, as senselessly irrational and violent little bundles on “me” and “I”. Now that I’ve actually typed that out in this context ... Heh, more in a moment....
Anyhoo, ask yourself what sort of person is looking for a scientific, or valid, basis to understand moral or ethical outrage?
These people may go some way to give away who they really are, though it’s enourmously hard to say on so little from them, still, speculating on what is available: I would consider it at least possible that their emphasis on “selfishness”, which is both curiously what people are being asked to condemn AND how they describe evolution.
And of course not knowing what they presented as selfish to those in the study is huge!
“Selfishness” is a heavily laden concept, as if being “fair minded”. No way around it. Did the people they invited to be punished (or not) not share money they didn’t earn but which were given? That seems likely. The reward scheme of the study where people choose to punish them or not for their selfishness is certainly money based.
Curiously, my inability to say more is because those responsible for the study selfishly want me to pony up to read it! *snerk*
So this is hereafter pure speculation based on what little is available:
At a minimum those running the study seem to be aware of the world view that seeks to relent from judging, from trying to be right, or, much as Sayet said: trying to vomit up the apple. They may not be such persons, but that is not necessarily be important. They still seem to think the natural Tao, as Lewis called it, is a mishmash without an author and that their efforts are then to discover a scientific basis for having moral or ethical outrage at all, to thereby back end legitimacy into the whole affair.
They may or may not be rallying in defense of moral outrage. They may or may not be of a party that things a new, scientific Tao may be yet invented.
Essentially, though, they are seeing outrage through the lens of “me” and “I”, as if people are peacocks strutting their stuff, not “as example of Man” but as accidents of nature.
This probably won’t be useful for my fanfics, though it may be, but if they found themselves in the cartoon Transformers universe they may very well reflect back on the hate plague as an outrage plague, where the loss of the Tao meant what they considered to be “evolution” was laid bare ... everyone alienated from kin and kind, no longer recognizing each other as fellow men (or whatever).
Of course, the thing is the modern era fanfic, starting with the The Hall of Dead Gods, wasn’t going in the direction of explaining the Hate Plague, so the cartoon universe version of these guys getting Primacron’s early work wrong just doesn’t seem viable as story telling.
Of course it should be obvious that I, like Lewis, consider the Tao valid, having an Author as it does.
Those were my the sort of thoughts about the ideology behind the study, at least as revealed by the free article.
I found it interesting that they chose selfishness as the wrongdoing invited to punish. That they did so, I must confess, predisposes me to think them some of Sayet’s modern liberals. Something I have to fight against.
Imagine for a moment that you are such a person.
You have bought into a system of thought where outrage is outrageous. But you need outrage, you recognize that you do, if only to resist those still trying to be right and moral and thereby harming their fellow man.
So your outrage needs a basis besides philosophy or theology: it has to be scientific.
If you hold to the materialistic naturalist view of existence the only place to find a valid, scientific basis for outrage, an outrage you can employ, is found in evolution. If you view evolution as an inherently selfish affair it would seem only natural that you should focus of selfishness to try to discover such a scientific basis for outrage.
Here you are aided by the conventions of society: that egalitarianism, which is then about as unlike evolution as anything can be, can be used to examine selfishness.
That doesn’t mean you’d be working to go back to the old morality of “Thou Shalt Not” , only that you are looking for a new way to justify outrage to be used against those who may.
Now, it would be flatly unjustified to accuse the authors of the study, or of the article, of all that on so little. But if they were such men ... as Terence was to have said: I’m human, nothing human is alien to me.
(Terence wouldn’t have had a high opinion of our ideas of blackness or whiteness, especially how some believe those outside their group just cannot get it)
Aaaaand ... I just wrote quite a bit about “why” they may have been curious about the foundations of outrage rather than their conclusions.
“Why”, of course, helps to define conclusions. It’s why Lewis wrote that one can often get the science that they want.
My answer reveals a lot about me. Hardly a mystery what it is since I outright state that I accept the idea of the Tao, as Lewis write of it, as valid, not just humane but something vital to being Man at all.
And it is not a Christian or a Jewish thing either, for all Mankind is heirs of the consequences of eating that fruit. And make no mistake about it: it was the knowledge of good and evil, not just evil. The problem with Mankind is not that we know about good and evil but that, knowing it, we are not in or basic nature holy beings.
For my own part, trying to imagine why I would pose such an issue, curiously I’ve done so not because I’m doing anything like looking for a basis for outrage or and explanation of it, but because of those self same fanfics.....