Moral matrix expansion

by Potential Frolic

Perhaps morality consists in individual rules or Sententiae stored somewhere in the mind. These would be abstract image-calculation algorithms, where one plugs in the images of other people and things to get the result. Then again perhaps morality consists in matrices containing perspectives of other people with whom one is close. We could imagine a matrix like this:

father, mother, sister, brother, friend1, friend2, teacher, neighbor1, neighbor2, neighbor3 ... etc, etc.

Each item in the matrix represents a perspective that one has acquired or modeled; the word ‘modeling’ reflects accurately the action but implies more consciousness than the matrix-former actually possesses. A more accurate term might be “absorbing other people’s evaluations”. Each perspective contains a list of weighted evaluations of things. Father’s evaluations of doing drugs may be -5, but friend1’s evaluation of doing drugs is +0.5 and friend2’s is 2.5, so friends may prevail with a young person to try drugs. When the young person inhabiting this matrix makes a decision about whether to try drugs, they cross-check each perspective in the matrix for evaluations and arrive at some form of weighted average, which guides their behavior.

I imagine these moral matrices start out as imitated opinions/evaluations, and evolve as one ages. The function of evaluating is outsourced from foreign perspectives to innately derived perspectives, which are inserted into the matrix increasingly as one gains life experience and a self-concept. The perspectives then remain primarily as “people putatively affected by the consequences of my actions”. People in our moral matrix are people for whom we will make calculations about our actions’ possible effects, so as to not allow, for example, any permutation of actions to flow from us which might endanger them in any possible future. The people who we care about, in other words.

Imagine you are looking down upon one enormous three-dimensional matrix containing the totality of perspectives which relate to human affairs. This matrix includes all perspectives that have ever existed, and each which could be imagined to exist. Not only does it expand horizontally outward from our circle of friends and relatives to include everyone presently on earth, but it also extends temporally, in our envisioned matrix we can say ‘vertically’, forward and backward to include all potential past and future perspectives.

Within this super-matrix, our moral matrix is a pitiful little square, encompassing all of 15 or 25 or 100 perspectives. Since we are in the game of refining our moral sense, however, we aim to grow this matrix. This matrix can be expanded horizontally outward to our contemporaries. It can likewise be extended backwards to contain past perspectives - those of relatives long-dead, for example. It can also be extended forwards to contain the perspectives of children and the unborn. All of this is being modelled in the mind using extrapolative imagining; if the question now arises which of the two directions of expansion is the most realistic, the answer lies in what aspects of these perspectives are being incorporated into the model. As one gets farther from oneself in time and space, the quality of available data for perspective modelling is degraded, and our models about distant perspectives may only contain one or two pieces of information. For example, those Canadians who donated extensive sums of money to rebuild Haiti, have included Haitians in their moral matrix. There is no way these Canadians could reasonably model the perspective of Haitians, except in a few particulars: they assume that, as humans, they prefer running water to the lack thereof, food to the lack thereof, and medical supplies to the lack thereof. Likewise, when modelling one’s ancestors, one can have very little knowledge of them, but one can be relatively sure that they would oppose the dispossession of their progeny. It seems a fair bet that given a conflict of interest between their progeny and foreigners, they would side with their progeny.

Now which perspectives are more worthy of inclusion in one’s moral matrix: the perspectives of the hunger-struck Haitians, or the perspectives of our ancestors? This is an important question. Men and women go through development windows, after which matrix expansion becomes difficult; furthermore the energy to be expended on this sort of effort is limited. Therefore it is a question of some interest, in which direction our matrices are expanded. It is a question primarily determined by the dominant Zeitgeist of the day, in our case Liberalism.

In it’s refusal to recognize the importance of pre-rational, pre-volitional structures such as kinship ties, liberalism commands that genetically related perspectives not receive precedence over non-related perspectives. Historically, the outer bound for horizontal expansion of one’s moral matrix was the tribe. There was no possibility of including perspectives from The Other, known at most as an enemy, a seasonal trading partner, or a wandering guest receiving short hospitality. The assumptions of liberalism demand that matrices expand horizontally until they reach the outer bound of the human populace, including millions, even billions, of faceless people with whom one has never seen nor spoken to. You may have seen effette whites take turns shaming each other, if one of them had been so stupid to evince carelessness about the victims of a foreign disaster. “Why don’t you include them? They are theoretically just as important as your mother!”.

Intelligent matrix-expansion could only be achieved after answering two questions. One pertains to authorship: who do we have to thank for our lives/to whom do we owe the pleasure? Another pertains to adaptiveness: whom does it help us to be thankful/considerate towards?

Liberalism sidesteps these questions by having established a framework where nothing has been “authored” (i.e. the positive gains of Western cultural and genetic accumulation are set in a faux counterbalance by supposed “wrongs” which accompanied said progress, demanding an ambivalent evaluation), and where the survival of one’s nation is not a question of legitimate interest. It therefore follows that we should be nice to everything equally, because all things had a hand in our making (who is “we”? were we “made”?) and the bloodless viewpoint we are adopting is free from all considerations of survival (who is “we”? how can this “we” entity “die”?)

These assumptions of liberalism cause its adherents’ matrices to distend to an enormous width, something without precedent among human beings. Previously, one’s moral matrices were small, but full of data-rich entries with high weightings: mother, father, cousins, aunts, second cousins, tribal elders, etc. Liberal matrices are bloated, and are mostly full of zeros. The idea of quality mattering over quantity hasn’t arrived, since any gesture of sympathy is considered a precious distillation of higher human nature.

Most destructive for our nation is the historic criticism that results when these horizontally bloated matrices are expanded again - this time backwards. Not only are all of the world’s peoples to be treated the same as one’s brother, but the actions of our own ancestors are retroactively critiqued with the expectation that they should have behaved morally towards unrelated out-groups. Such critiques find unending material to catalog in the long list of wrongs done to foreign nations by white nations in history. Yet the bounds of our former moral universe were those of the tribe, so such an expectation is ahistorical. This isn’t to indicate that human groups should not attempt to maintain peaceful relations and honor their agreements with each other, but these international rules are a recent, fragile outgrowth of white moral universalism, and the critique that expects their manifestation at all prior epochs is anachronistic. It would be similar to critiquing these nations for the state of their dental hygiene, and in this respect comparing them with the present. White nations in history are being critiqued for lacking moral technology which was recently developed by whites, but which is presumed as a precondition of decency in liberalism. Here as elsewhere, liberalism’s unspoken assumptions are driving the analysis. No one who is smart enough to point out the assumption is allowed to speak.

The last thoughts I had on this are that moralities which are expanded horizontally beyond tribal limits are typically “punctured grainsack” moralities - i.e. they involve the redistribution of wealth in exchange for feelings engendered. Moralities which are extended to ancestors and progeny typically involve reciprocative demands on oneself, of loyalty and service. Faceless zeroes cannot make demands nor fulfill them, so neither party in liberalism’s moral experiments can grow by back-and-forth demands placed on one another. If this is attempted there will be permanent efficacy and trust issues confounding it. In experiencing the utter impossibility of reciprocity in these theoretical dealings, we’ve arrived at the genetic bounds of moral universalism, which was posited in liberalism to extend out to infinity, but in reality scarcely extends south of the Bay of Biscay, and peters out somewhere east of Vienna.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 05:12 PM in Liberalism & the Left
Comments (8) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Next entry: Happy St. George’s Day!

Previous entry: Minority Rule: The Rise of Political Correctness