MORAL ORDER IS A CULTURAL UNIVERSAL

We are not involved in the Middle East to intervene in civil wars: Sunni verses Shiite as Chris Matthews said that is why we are sticking our nose into their business. He is wrong. We are not in the Middle East to promote Christianity over Islam as some in the United States want. We are deeply involved in the region to promote the idea of democracy. It is the idea that the people should decide who their leaders are. We all understand fairness and equality for all. An idea has been with us since the first stirring of biopoiesis but codified since 1776. It was not only new to us but it was new to the entire world. The people of the Middle East saw it and liked it. We all know this. We all live with this. The only real question is should we be involved in nation building. I argue that we should be involved because caliphates are an invitation to war—a struggle to declare one religion is dominant over the next.

Democracy is at variance with biology.  The natural order established through evolution is with the strongest at the top. However, we continue to define and redefine ‘strongest’ in a number of different ways. We have transited from physical strength, to some form of riches. It may well have been some form of food in the hunter-gatherer era to any form of money in the 21^st century. Now, we are changing the definition to a nebulous thing we have trouble labeling—power to the people. In a democracy, the person with power is the person the majority of people want to have in power. In one sense, it is bandwagon logic; we select at the voting box the person most of us respect, like, believe trust, etc. It is equivalent to a flock of chickens in a barnyard, we recognized the “top chicken” but we cannot tell precisely what it is about that chicken that makes him or her the boss—the same is true of people.

Cultures treat the concept differently while retaining the idea of a “natural order”, which we struggle to define and even codify. The definition has to do with something as basic as survival of the fittest, which we have modified over thousands of years of humanization.  In that process, we changed the biological label of hierarchy dominance from “natural order” to “moral order”.  We have defined “moral punishment” to mean we keep the “order” pure by punishing any deviation from “normal”; a concept refined by the church for centuries; only church members from that specific church can go to heaven, everyone else burns in a lake of fire.

The church leaders, by whatever name, are the civic leaders; they set on the “right hand of God”. Therefore, in a fit of perverse logic, God appoints the civic leader; God makes the appointment; therefore, people cannot vote for a civic leader; no one can or should vote against God. This is ingrained church dogma. Upsetting that dogma is what the current Middle East revolution is all about.  The people, especially the young people, of the Middle East are seeking to change this “false” hierarchy to what we in the United States and Europe and much of the world understand as “democracy” They want a taste of the fairness and equality such a system of government implies—they all want to go to heaven. It really is not Sunni against Shiite, although church leaders want to shape the struggle in those terms, in hopes that their sect will be the winner. It is democracy against caliphate; it is pitting voter freedom against the church dogma.

The cultural universal is “natural” or “moral order”, with all of its variations; it has an evolutionary or biological basis. Actually, the connotation of the expression “moral order” is that democracy cannot be “moral”; morality is the exclusive province of the church; secular morality is fairness and equality. What the young people in the Middle East are saying is that they can have morality without the church. If we can be good to each other with or without dropping a tithe in the collection plate every Sunday, so can they.

In fact, the only biological correct thing to do is for all people to be kind, fair, and equal; the only justification for moral punishment is to direct it at those who are not kind, fair and do not treat all others as equal. We can claim superiority over Sunni and Shiite for not following that universal mode of behavior but if we do, we have to look closely at our own society; racism, gay people, gender equality, and get over this damn Yankee residue from the Civil War that seems to be ruling North Carolina.

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