MORALITY GREED AND CHRISTMAS SPIRIT

Christmas, the time to spread good cheer and morality, is here again. We should be kind to one another all year but especially now, which begs the question of what does it mean to be kind to someone. We hear all kinds of nice things such as, “Do onto others as you would have them do on to you”.

As someone who is interested in evolution and believes we evolved form and behavior from a bestial beginning modified by what can be referred to as our humanization—the refinements that lifts us above our bestial beginning and makes us unique. Without certainty, we seem to believe we are the only species that appreciates what it means to know we can die. Obviously, many other species act as if they know pain, fear, etc, and know that the extreme consequences of pain and not having fear, which is death. Humans have evolved a sense of the worth of these things as they relate not only to their self-survival as in other animals but we have refined the ability to project that feeling or sense of importance of the feeling to others including other species as well as ourselves. The Darwinian inspired “survival of the fittest” or after all the necessary mental twist and turns, to mean self-preservation, our strongest instinct. Therefore, morality is just that. We do things for other people to help them avoid pain and otherwise to survive. It is an extension of a hen’s behavior of setting on an egg to a mothers care for a newborn; morality is a refinement of gene-based behavior.

Unfortunately, genetic-based morality seems counterbalanced by greed or selfishness. In spite of the fact in our culture, we look at greed, as a pejorative, we as with animals, could not survive without some degree of greed; we cannot survive without that some instinct. We look around us during this holiday season and see both acts kindness and acts of greed. At Christmas time see people going to extremes to deny and cover up their greed just as we see people hurting their own well-being with generosity.

As humans, our great hope should be that each season, little by little and year-after-year, we see morality expand just a little bit more, that is let the goodness of kindness outweigh evil of greed. Stephen Pinker said it in his book title, The Better Angles of our Nature (2011). He referred to the decline of violence in his subtitle, which is really what I am talking about but in a more gentle way; after all, it is Christmas! 

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