Morality’s Origins And Effects On Culture Essay, Research Paper

With the development of each individual’s personal belief system, the development of a cult, or body of thought, there may be be the birth of a new concept of creation, morality, and life. Religions and belief systems traditionally have focused on the same basic rules of morality to guide the followers of those religions to “heaven,” another stage toward “nirvana,” or in some cases another mortal body. My research focuses on attempting to uncover the origin of morality and identify and define the role that it plays in nearly every person’s day-to-day life. In short, we can say that our morals come from religions established from earlier beliefs, possibly myths, our “inner conscience,” and society. All three of these origins have developed and expanded from simpler ideas. As time has progressed, we have taken some of the moral rules established through religions and incorporated them into our judicial system, our schools, and our daily lives. It seems obvious that religion has played the biggest role in determining the rights and wrong of society. However, we must first understand our history and origins to discover why we as a culture place so much emphasis on the morals of our religions. When did morals first enter into our culture? There was a point at which prehistory became history, and this is where most of studied history begins. Daniel Quinn emphasizes this very subject in his novel The Story of B. The people of our culture, western culture that is, developed a type of agriculture he calls “totalitarian agriculture,” and began to believe that the world and everything in it was made for man and could be used at man’s discretion. When religions were developed, this belief was incorporated into the holy texts and fundamental values of the religion. The Agricultural Revolution was that time when humans are thought to have abandoned their former hunter-gatherer and foraging lifestyle for one of much more supposed ease and leisure — agriculture. When humanity started believing that man ruled the world, they needed a way to justify it. Quinn says: “It’s a sign of our cultural collapse that supporting our vision has come to be seen as wicked, while undermining that vision has come to be seen as noble. . . . [C]hildren . . . are never encouraged to want the material rewards of success. Business leaders . . . would never be offered as role models because they have luxurious homes, exotic cars, and servants to attend to every need. In the world of our children’s textbooks, an admirable person would never do anything just for money.” With the introduction of salvation into religions, all moral responsibility was taken off the shoulders of the people and placed on those of the central deity of the religion. As we see in Christianity, all a person must do to assure himself or herself of salvation is to “accept Jesus Christ, the Lord, our Savior” into his or her heart, believe in the resurrection from the tomb, and follow the Ten Commandments. Even if one of these rules is broken, salvation is still attainable because “God is just, and will forgive if the doer of the deed is truly sorry.” In essence, religions gave the people an escape from following the moral code to its strictest degree. Some of the early great philosophers might argue that humans possess an “inner conscience,” an innate idea of right and wrong. If an inner conscience exists, it must have always been there, yet we do not understand just how such an inner conscience came to exist. Another question we must ask is: Does this innate knowledge of right and wrong correspond with what we learn from society? The Sophist philosopher Protagorus said, “Man is the measure of all things.” By this he meant that the question of whether or not a thing was right or wrong, good or bad, must always be considered in relation to a person’s needs. The Sophist philosophers were one of the first to actually contemplate whether or not an action was “natural” or “socially induced.” Socrates said that, “He who knows what good is will do good.” He meant that right insight leads to right action, but man can only achieve right insight through intellectual stimulation and search towards the truth, a thing which can never be found in a single lifetime, even by Socrates method of rational thought. Socrates believed that people’s ability to distinguish between right and wrong lies in their reason and not in society. Plato, the pupil of Socrates, harbored the belief that “we can never have a true knowledge of anything that is in a constant state of change. We can only have opinions about things that belong to the world of the senses, tangible things. We can only have true knowledge of things that can be understood with our reason.” But our idea of reason is forever changing and being influenced by our surroundings, so each person’s view of right and wrong, according to their reasoning, could ultimately end up being different. This statement seems most relevant to the topic. So, do our instincts as creatures in the natural world play a larger part in our “conscience” than we know? In other words, do we perform an action because it feels natural, and only later feel guilty about it because it is how we have been trained? Immanuel Kant, considered on of the more modern philosophers, believed that “a genuine moral act is one that is performed purely out of duty.” It seems that Kant believes what a person has been trained to do — serve society — is overwhelmingly more moral than any natural act that person could perform, which goes against any argument that a moral conscience is innate.

So where do these centuries of philosophical pondering bring us? A few steps closer to uncovering the mystery of our own moral actions. However, it should be noted that our morals evolve over time as we are exposed to many more beliefs different from our own. What we may have been taught will not necessarily be what we practice. Too often morals we have been taught have been used as fear tactics to persuade individuals to follow a certain behavior pattern. Take, for example, Christianity, which threatens a life in hell — “. . . and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, . . . and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night . . .And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire,” (Rev. 14:10-11, 20:15)if certain rules — the Ten Commandments — are not followed. Even at the same time that these philosophers were contemplating the natural state of humans, religion had an immense effect on the actions of the people. So, we must ask: Just how much do religions contribute to our ideas of right and wrong? According to Christianity, “love and fellowship should be the basis of human relations.” To most, this does not seem to be a bad precept to follow. Notice, however, that in nearly all other of the major religions, this guide is written in other forms: for Islam, it is that “individuals should transcend their pettiness and enlarge themselves;” Judaism: “humanity can become a harmonious part of the cosmos by living in accordance with God’s laws and submitting to divine law;” and in Hinduism there is much uniformity of behavior because the canon of the religion is defined not by what people think, but by what they do. In short, Hindus attempt to maintain a level of conformity so that they will be considered “righteous.” There are also those who believe that religion and God do not need to play a part in the development of a moral attitude. Hugo Grotius, a Dutch jurist, defined “natural law” as “that body of rules which can be discovered by the use of reason . . . [but] would have validity even if there were no God or if the affairs of human beings were of no concern to God.” Those cultures and people that have not been introduced to the popular belief of what “God” is would not have come to the same conclusion that Grotius did. People that have not been touched nor tainted by the current common culture most likely would not have any idea of what Grotius was talking about. It would not have occurred to them to see morals as something to be thought about. It is simply a part of each and every human being, and need not be contemplated to be put into action. According to Emile Durkheim, a French social theorist, “the common values shared by a society, . . . or the collective conscience, are the cohesive bonds that hold the social order together. A breakdown of these values . . . leads to a loss of social stability and to individual feelings of anxiety and dissatisfaction.” Here we see morals coming together as what holds a society intact. So how exactly did morals come into our culture, or any culture for that matter? It is not clear yet, and perhaps will never be clear. It does seem evident, however, that morals are a necessary element in every culture and in every individual. It is also evident that religions have played the largest role in determining what an individual will consider right and wrong, and to what degree they will follow their moral convictions. It is possible to conclude that a knowledge of the origin of our morality is not needed for one to follow those rules.

35a