Primordial Ethics
It is not possible to consider morality outside of understanding human culture. Human culture begins with the consciousness that life depends upon death, that in order to live others must die, and the facticity of human death. Morality begins in human culture with taboos around who can eat who --- or, in other words, who gets to live and who has to die.
The Greek worldview that we moderns have inherited, which tried to isolate moral virtues such as “courage,” “eros,” and “agape” --- established a transcendental realm that opened up a rupture between mind and earth, human and nature. But for Paleolithic man, togetherness and kinship were the primary qualities of culture, and this extended into the natural world and non-human beings. We talked about this in our course on the origins of human culture --- that at some point in history, people stopped telling the story of themselves as part of a story of the universe, and started tracing their origins to founding human ancestors, often associated with territorial claims.
The term Moral Animal, then is meant to remind us of what David Hinton calls the primordial ethics, of kindship and togetherness that constitutes the “single tissue” that we share with all planetary beginnings, beings, and becomings. Hinton echoes Whitehead’s notions of external and internal relations when he writes “we inhabit this tissue, and this tissue inhabits us.”
In his book Wild Mind, Wild Earth, David Hinton describes the deep unrecognized wound in us ---
Our Paleolithic kinship with the web of life torn so completely asunder, mind no longer wild and integral to wild earth.
It must be an elemental sorrow--- to be separated from the wondrous expanse of planetary life, its origins and the forces that drive it. Paelolithic stories tell of that planetary togetherness, speak of creatures like orcas as sisters and brothers, as ancestors. But the foundational stories of our Greek-Christian West describe a self-enclosed human realm separate from everything else. It’s a wound so complete we can’t see it anymore, for it defines the very nature of what we assume ourselves to be: centers of spirit-identity fundamentally separate from the world around us.
Hinton identifies kinship as the true primordial ethics, “an ethics before question and argument.”
For if the ten thousand things of this earth are kindred, their self-realization must have no less value than our own, and harming them must be no less problematic than harming our fellow humans. At bottom, rescuing this planet from its sixth great mass-extinction even is a spiritual/philosophical problem, for it is the unthought assumptions defining us and our relation to the earth that are driving the destruction: the wound that insists we are radically different and qualitatively more valuable than the rest of existence.
Hinton sees the possibility of a vast cultural transformation, based on a return to Paleolithic understanding--- an event that has happened before, nearly four thousand years ago in early China, which had similarly become exiled from their geneaology will the living earth. Hinton writes:
In a vast cultural transformation, it [the wound] was replaced by the Paleolithic paradigm that had survived beneath the surface of political power structures, a paradigm that revealed our entanglement with existence to be everywhere, all through everything we are. In this alternative paradigm, wild mind kindred to wild earth became the unthought assumption shaping experience--- experience, and ethics, too.
In our culture course, we talked about the two functions of culture (from two different perspectives). From the top-down perspective, culture provides a shared identity that transcends the individual. From the bottom-up perspective, culture solves the belonging needs of all prosocial species. Primordial ethics served both those functions. Given the universe of kindred beings, no individual could ever be alone; and our shared genealogy with the Earth helps us transcend our identity as isolated beings.
The Moral Animal
The idea of the moral animal begins with questioning culture itself: If culture creates the rules of ethics and morality, what happens when the culture itself is immoral? The moral animal is meant to replace culture-based morality first, with an origin story that includes the cosmos and how it unfolds the genealogy of the living Earth, and secondly, by turning toward the living Earth as the source and ground of moral imagination and action.
The story would suggest that humans are the moral organ of the planet.
Except, of course, we are neither fully aware of this, nor (yet) fully capable of this. The notion of the moral animal points to something like the emergence of a new instinct, which suggests that the moral imperative would arise in us as a deep desire, a strong arousal state to create more life.
We now come first circle, from the initial realization that life feeds on life, to the realization that there is a transmutation possible wherein *even more life *is created.
Creating more life refers not only to the biosphere and the planetary forces upon which the living earth depends, but also to the noosphere (which includes non-human relations) as well as the human built environment.
As I wrote in the Prelude for the Before Socrates Series:
We live in a time of great existential precarity, and our bones are littered with holes, fragmented and fragile. God only knows how much more we can endure, before we break down under our own weight. The purpose of this series --- why it matters to me--- is to contribute to those pockets of wisdom and practice that are keen to marry something like a cognitive revolution with a resurgence of Leopold’s land ethic which “enlarges the boundaries of the ethical community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land… and warns us that “obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of social conscience from people to land. To assert with conviction that:
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
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