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noam wrote:nice phrase but i disagree

Depends on how you take it.
I take it to mean that whatever may change for the human race, be it technological, scientific, cultural etc, there is a constant human decency to be considered a standard that must endure.

kay wrote:However, as history has shown, it does not take much to bring something from the level of jovial fun-poking to full-blown anger, hatred and violence.

We agree that this is a bad thing and needs to be stamped out. The only question, really, is how to go about eradicating this mentality completely. Is it due to cultural/environmental factors or is it hardwired into our genes? Some parts of society find such behaviour abhorrent, so we know that at least part of humanity does not have it hardwired or that the hardwiring can be overridden in some people. A cultural/environmental change would be much easier/quicker to effect, compared to a change in the genetic make-up.

*WOW, this answer got long.

If people feel a connection or kinship with each other, they tend to feel bad about hatred and inequality.. we're unfailingly empathetic. You can only break empathy by making people feel disconnected from each other - using slangy/insulting terms for competitors/rivals, communicating anonymously (see YouTube comments, trolling etc etc), subscribing to racist/classist viewpoints - the more charicatured and less 'human', the less empathy we naturally feel. This is exploited intentionally by people like eugenicists and unintentionally by the people who started Chavscum.co.uk

Society is an extended family at its heart. Other hominids had big family groups, but they didn't do the Homo Sapiens trick of sticking with every other group of non-related humans they found... whereas Neanderthal's seemingly lived in groups of up to 20 or so, we banded together into groups of hundreds, thousands, millions and these days, billions... this isn't the behaviour of a naturally hateful animal... our history suggests that we used to inately understand the reason for society - together, we are stronger - but the intervening millennia and never-ending competition for scarce resources have confused the issue to the point we find it difficult to even define society these days.

The sections of society that get most offended by sectarian thought do so because they naturally realise that humanity should be one - they realise it's better for everyone to live in a society without alienated populations, so therefore everyone's struggle must be everyone else's. If the kids on the estate can't afford to live dignified lives and are shown by the age of 10 that society doesn't care about them, then they're going to cause problems for the rest of us... it's everyone's responsibility; society isn't autonomous, it's an aggregation of all our personal actions. We have to think about the collective experience as much as the personal.

Those who spend their lives looking for and pointing out differences are doing so for the same reasons and are often even well-meaning with regard to their friends/family, but (IMHO) are simply short-sighted. It might seem personally beneficial in the short term to insultingly exclude a section of society... they can be ghettoised, they can be omitted from large parts of the economy and they can be looked down on as if they chose their situation, making us all feel a bit better about ourselves - but in the long run, we see a life-of-crime staying in families for generations, we see riots, we see Jeremy Kyle guests... they don't give a damn about anyone because nobody ever gave a damn about them.... it should never boil down to "Me Against The World". Society has failed if it does.

Of course, there is another ethical/philosophical question to ask: Who are we, the ones who see such behaviour as being deplorable, to say that such behaviour is unacceptable? It's almost the ultimate question of "Us vs Them".

Definitely this. I would've been laughed out of most places on the Internet by now for being a bleeding heart liberal hippy throwback.

Laszlo wrote:Oh, actually, if you want something to bond us all we need something we can all hate together.... alien invasion?

It's a shortcut, but that would definitely help.

kay wrote:I begin to think I should've studied philosphy instead.

My Dad and eldest brother are both philosophy graduates... it might explain a fair bit that my teenage years were spent having these conversations every day at the dinner table... debate for debate's sake sort of runs in the family... Christmas Dinner is a classic these days!

magma wrote:
Society is an extended family at its heart. Other hominids had big family groups, but they didn't do the Homo Sapiens trick of sticking with every other group of non-related humans they found... whereas Neanderthal's seemingly lived in groups of up to 20 or so, we banded together into groups of hundreds, thousands, millions and these days, billions... this isn't the behaviour of a naturally hateful animal... our history suggests that we used to inately understand the reason for society - together, we are stronger - but the intervening millennia and never-ending competition for scarce resources have confused the issue to the point we find it difficult to even define society these days.

i think you're making a classic mistake of assigning conceptual and emotional roles to what was pretty much a utilitarian move

i'd argue it had little to do with innately loving one another and more to do with surviving, since out of all the other species we were essentially the weakest but amongst the smartest

intelligence in nature rarely relies on 'love' and more commonly relies on tactics

i'd argue humanity has little to no concept of innate love, it has attachment, dependence and co-dependance

'love' is a separate entity all together, but not one i'd say is a fundamental unit of the growth and survival of mankind - the world wasn't built on love. thats a massive, massive indulgence in romanticism

history is full of so little love that reflection constantly reinforces our ideal that we live in the best time to have ever lived!

separate point i know but one i thought was interesting and worthwhile

before i get accused of being a a stone-hearted Draconian thats not to say it hasn't played a role, but i dont think one of humanity's greatest traits will be its ability to love

and again, that isn't to say i value it any less, i value it more - i just dont believe it is strictly as important or useful as is suggested by saying we 'innately loved each other' and thats why we survived and prevailed

noam wrote:
i'd argue humanity has little to no concept of innate love, it has attachment, dependence and co-dependance

mmhm yeah, nice one.

noam wrote:before i get accused of being a a stone-hearted Draconian thats not to say it hasn't played a role, but i dont think one of humanity's greatest traits will be its ability to love

and again, that isn't to say i value it any less, i value it more - i just dont believe it is strictly as important or useful as is suggested by saying we 'innately loved each other' and thats why we survived and prevailed

Hmm, I didn't say we loved each other... I said we treated each other as extended family. Love is empathy at it's most extreme - you can be empathetic without loving. You can care for your cousin without loving him in the same way that you do your Mother.

Lacking empathy is such an inhuman trait we call it a mental illness - psychopathy.

Yes, it's a utilitarian move - but it was a "built in" move... no other hominids did it naturally... we did. We did it before complex language, we did it before there was even a word for love. Neanderthals, who had bigger brains didn't do the same thing... it's a human trait.

you said it was an innate love

that was the point i contested

edit: no you didn't - where did i read that then

ffs.

magma wrote:Lacking empathy is such an inhuman trait we call it a mental illness - psychopathy.

So are psychopaths not human? I know i'm getting words muddled up here but could you just humor me?
Are people with reduced affect less human than others - I mean, is there a scale?

Or you just mean they lack humanity?

clearly human

lack society's emotional conventions/structures

to some people the world and the rest of the human race are very odd, alien creatures - some of histories greatest people, thinkers and artists have been these people

to me society and humanity is every single one of us that makes it up with no exceptions

society is our rules, always changing, our cities, our towns, our people, our accents, our attitudes - everything.

if you leave one out you risk losing everything

its so tempting to try and single out specifics, like i said before i dont think its possible to single out unifying qualities in a species of 70million, let alone 6billion humans

we're entirely unique in the animal world in that we can fully define ourselves into being

maybe thats the universal factor that has eluded me?

Just checking to see if Hitler has been mentioned yet...No?...Carry on.

I think that somewhere along the line our genes for herding instinct got switched on (its probably been buried in us since we were fish). It's in constant conflict with our tribal group genes. So we group together in much larger numbers than our cousin hominids, but we're still only really comfortable with our small tribal units of 20-30 individuals. I think that the Internet is a pretty good way of potentially breaking past these limits and so we can probably expect the size of the "acceptable" tribal unit to grow over the coming generations.

Tribal nature in nature has nothing directly to do with hate. You don't say that one tribe of monkeys hates another tribe of monkeys. Instead, it's viewed as competition for resources. But, apply the same consideration to humanity, and competition can become twisted by our notions of civilisation, language and prejudices into an emotion called hate. Normal forms of competition still exist, but we have added an additional layer to it.

noam wrote:to me society and humanity is every single one of us that makes it up with no exceptions

if you leave one out you risk losing everything

This is how I feel, but in our society (utilitarian?) the needs, hopes and wishes of the inter quartile range is what's considered while everyone else can like it or lump it.
Or have I got a very skewed idea of things?

^^^
society on a conceptual, humanitarian level is different to the way society ACTUALLY works, so yeh you're spot on

like Kay said we're still in some ways tribal, look after our own, always will be until it just doesn't work well enough for the strongest so they're forced to change, theoretically that will be when the strongest aren't the strongest anymore purely by definition and thus either the balance of power shifts more equally or just changes hands

in terms of people, we're paradoxical beings, capable of holding conflicting thoughts and emotions, acting in ways that contradict logic and contradict our natural inclinations (irrationality for one) in the pursuit of logically beneficial goals

to claim we are either/or big pack creatures or small pack creatures of better suited purely individually is to ignore the paradoxes that make us up, each and every one of us

i keep going back to the idea cityzen mentioned of seeing the world as a whole made up of divisible parts - a paradoxical idea of everything being one whole and at the same time being defined by what separates it from something else

that is a person

noam wrote:clearly human

lack society's emotional conventions/structures

to some people the world and the rest of the human race are very odd, alien creatures - some of histories greatest people, thinkers and artists have been these people

to me society and humanity is every single one of us that makes it up with no exceptions

society is our rules, always changing, our cities, our towns, our people, our accents, our attitudes - everything.

if you leave one out you risk losing everything

its so tempting to try and single out specifics, like i said before i dont think its possible to single out unifying qualities in a species of 70million, let alone 6billion humans

we're entirely unique in the animal world in that we can fully define ourselves into being

maybe thats the universal factor that has eluded me?

I'm not suggesting psychopaths can be excluded (a lot are pretty successful too!) - I'm saying that the lack of empathy differs from human norm so extremely that they're considered unwell... it's not just a differing personality, it's a fundamental difference in the brain's structure possibly stemming from genetics, injury or trauma.

It's more of a point about empathy than psychopaths, they were just the best example for how naturally we view empathy as a species. We see people without it as fundamentally odd, even dangerous.

A better example for the natural roots of empathy, perhaps:

Babies have been shown to be empathetic. If you show pre-talking infants a cartoon of a red toy stealing something from a yellow toy, they'll reliably choose the yellow toy when offered and often cry when given the red... the desire for people to be nice to each other, even strangers and non-humans, is something pretty fundamental to our nature. At some point in time, we must have favoured the empathetic as mating partners for it to be so ingrained in the species... our desire to group ourselves together, to look out for each other and, in turn, to be looked out for is therefore something we had before society - babies have no knowledge of society.

It follows that society is an extension of our nature... it's the natural product of being human. Complicate it with tens of millennia of thought, conversation and technology and you end up with "Modern Society".

Real-world modern society is obviously incredibly complex due to being made up of 7 billion personalities living within countless different cultures, ideologies and education systems... I don't think we can stamp out tribal unpleasantness overnight, or possibly even at all... but I do find it an immensely interesting conversation as you might have all noticed.

I think that's a lot to do with how humanity seems to be so insistent on artificial notions of physical boundaries which prevents true mobility. People talk so much about how global and interconnected we are these days and how small the world is and how easy it is to get from place to place. But in reality, it's actually quite difficult to move around. If people were allowed to move around to form groups of like-minded individuals part of the problem would be lessened.

The remaining part of the problem would then be to convince each of these groupings to stop interfering with one another. Which I think is an almost impossibility without radical genetic modification. A more workable solution is to space disparate groups far away enough from each other that they never have reason to meet.

Hence why I believe space travel is a necessity for the future. Clearly, even separations by thousands of miles is not enough to stop nations from meddling with each other. We need space. Then each disparate element of humanity can go along on its own happy way.

So I present my 5-step plan to save humanity:
Step 1: Develop effective space travel
Step 2: Identify suitable colony worlds
Step 3: Allow humanity to self-re-organise
Step 4: Send each group to its own colony world
Step 5: Destroy spaceships after offloading

Alternatively, we just need to LEARN how to live with one another. Some people seem to think that we already know how to live with one another, but I don't think we do.
Accept,
Debate,
Do not denigrate.

Hmm... but what would stop your groups falling apart after the first generation when all the kids form personalities different to their parents? I'm sure we've all known sets of brothers/sisters, even twins, that find it hard to see eye-to-eye... I think learning to get along might be a bit better in the long run than finding enough space to avoid each other...

magma wrote:Hmm... but what would stop your groups falling apart after the first generation when all the kids form personalities different to their parents? I'm sure we've all known sets of brothers/sisters, even twins, that find it hard to see eye-to-eye...

Ah, we just let them merrily kill each other, or until enough people develop new group mentalities to overflow the new planet, and then they go off and colonise new ones. There's plenty of room in space.

I think learning to get along might be a bit better in the long run than finding enough space to avoid each other...

Yes, but it would be soooo much more effort.

Plus, if you can make a spaceship that can travel far enough, how long would it take before someone gets paranoid, straps a warhead to one and sends it to the other human colonies?
We need to learn to live cheek by jowl because (I believe) the problems with society are so deeply set in humanity that space colonies would go arse over tit before you can say lv426.

magma wrote:
A better example for the natural roots of empathy, perhaps:

Babies have been shown to be empathetic. If you show pre-talking infants a cartoon of a red toy stealing something from a yellow toy, they'll reliably choose the yellow toy when offered and often cry when given the red...

do you have a source for that claim? keyword is ''have been shown' but don't you think this is more of an exception to the rule? take two year olds for example, most are not emphatic and must be taught to share and all that, they're little cave men. i don't believe empathy is ingrained at all, just learned.

wish i could type out a more coherent response but i'm heading out in a few min.