On Progress in Human Moral Behavior

The other day I mentioned that I had more to say on the subject of progress in human moral behavior. I didn’t have time yesterday to commit my ideas on the subject to writing but I’ll attempt to do so now. I don’t believe that progress in human moral behavior is likely.

As I use the term technology means the application of human ingenuity to exploit natural phenomena in solving problems. The light bulb, computers, the arch, the wheel, and double entry bookkeeping are all technologies. The light bulb, for example, applies knowledge of the principles of the properties of materials and the way that electricity functions to solving the problem of human beings’ vision being inadequate to perform many tasks after the sun goes down or in an enclosed space without an endogenous natural light source. Simply stated, it produces enough light to see by.

The moon, trees, manatees, and your next door neighbor aren’t technologies. At least as far as we know.

We don’t usually think of it that way but government, too, is a technology. It exploits the knowledge of human behavior to help us get along better together and help us cope with the natural world. You can see that thinking of government in this way, as I do, is the reason I’m not antithetical towards government. I don’t think it’s any more reasonable to say that government is bad per se because the power of government can be abused in such a way as to make people less happy any more than it is to sit in the dark because light bulbs might throw a spark and burn the house down.

I know people who would deny the notion vehemently but I think that religion is a technology. While I think the wisdom that inspires any particular religion might well be the working of the Holy Spirit through individual human beings, I don’t believe that any religion is the direct working of the Almighty in human affairs. All religions are just technologies for managing the relationships among human beings, the natural world, and anything that might be above or beyond the natural world.

It’s reasonable to talk about progress in technologies. Lighting technology has progressed from open fires to grease and oil lamps to kerosene lamps to gaslights to incandescent electric lights to fluorescent electric lights to light-emitting diodes. I have no doubt that lighting technology will continue to progress as long as there are human beings, darkness, and human beings need to see in the dark.

It’s not reasonable to talk about progress in the moon or in trees. The moon reacts to the principles of motion and of matter. Trees change in response to natural and manmade phenomena and their species evolve, like all living things, in response to changes in the environment. But they do not make progress.

Human behavior is not synonymous with the technologies like government and religion that human beings have created to manage human behavior. Human behavior is made up of the billions and billions of individual choices that human beings make each and every day and have made through history and the actions those choices motivate. Government and religion are technologies we’ve developed to influence those choices. But they’re not the choices.

It is important to recognize the significance of these individual moral choices. We become virtuous by making the practice of formulating moral choices and acting on them into habits. Although I can be inspired by your model, your virtue will never make me virtuous. It is your habit not mine. Your bravery won’t make me courageous. My charity won’t make you kinder. Because virtue is a habit we only become virtuous through our own moral choices and our own actions. We do not build virtue on the accomplishments of those who’ve come before us. It is something we each must do for ourselves. It is through these individual choices and actions that we become better, that we progress.

I think that our form of government was an enormous leap forward in that particular sort of technology and our government has continued to progress over the years (although I know lots of people who would deny that statement to the death). That human chattel slavery was once permissible under our law and is no longer is as far as I’m concerned prima facie evidence to that effect. I’m not really sure whether all of the changes in our government over the years are actually progress or not. Technology advances in fits and starts. Some ideas are worse than the ones that preceded them. Some are blind alleys.

I see precious little evidence that human beings as a species have progressed from a moral standpoint, that human moral behavior has progressed, and for counter-evidence you need only look around you. Confucius, Lao Tse, Siddharta, Jesus of Nazareth, and Mohammed all taught systems for allowing human beings to lead better lives, to make progress, and, while not claiming that all of these systems are equivalent, I have no doubt that all of them in their own ways are pretty good technologies for doing just that. Human beings, however, are just as reluctant now to follow any of those teachings as when Siddharta got up from the Bodhi tree or when Jesus walked the roads in Galilee and preached the gospel there. As G. K. Chesterton put it, it’s not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting but that it’s been found difficult and not tried.

There won’t be progress in human moral behavior until human nature changes and that won’t be progress at all. It will merely be change.

Individuals through their own individual moral choices and actions do make progress. But that’s no more inevitable than my sticking to that diet or not barking at my wife when I’m tired and irritable are.