Hi Everybody,
Beautiful spring day here today. Just amazing running in the park with Gatsby early on with the dew still on the grass and the clear blue sky...already having done an hours chanting! Can't think of a better way to start the day. Richmond Park of course is where the cover photograph for this book was taken. And in fact Gatsby was running around and was just out of frame to the right. Didn't quite make it onto the cover.
Right, we're into the closing passage of Chapter 5, with a section which is headed...
Co-operation with others is the key to our humanity.
' That really brings us to what is perhaps the greatest question of them all, the question that, when it comes down to it, all great philosophies are really about. Where do we turn to acquire our moral or our ethical values, that guide us in the complex maze of relationships and encounters that makes up all our lives? How do we understand, deep within ourselves, that behaving like this say is fine and to be commended and makes us feel good about ourselves, whereas behaving like that isn't really good enough, and leaves us feeling not so good about ourselves, or worse? How do we know that?
It's an important question isn't it? And we learn from the scientists that it sits right at the heart of the human psyche. We find a really fascinating persepctive from the evolutionary biologists for example, who suggest that since the very earliest stages of our existence we have always lived as social animals, always. Therefore how we relate to others must have been a major factor in our evolution. It is they argue, buried deep within our heritage, deep within our DNA. The idea is known technically as group selection, but put simply all that means is that our unique ability to support and cooperate with one another has been the absolutely key factor in the survival and flourishing of mankind. As the evolutionary biologists point out, we're not a particualrly impressive animal physically. We don't have the benefit ot natural armour, or strength, or speed, or stealth relative to many other species. We are in fact a pretty easy lunch! Essentially therefore it has been our ability to reason and to plan, and above all to work together, that has really set us apart. Our survival and growth and spreading around the world depended on our collective abilities, on our ability to work closely together and band together with others in overcoming difficulties and pursuing a collective goal.
So, the argument goes, in our early history, any groups or tribes who learned how best to co-operate, and support one another and work together, then that entire group would inevitably have a much greater chance of success and survival, over any other group, whatever they were doing, hunting or seeking shelter or coping with a hard winter. The co-operative group would have by far the greater chance of survival, and so their entire gene pool would be passed onto future generations.To us that is, and so become embedded as a essential part of our human nature.
In a sense that idea provides a sort of scientific underpinning for many of the fundamental ideas we find in religion and philosophy. Christianity for example tells us to love they neighbour as thyself. Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest moral philosopher of the western world, gave us in the 18th Century, his famous categorical imperative, which argues that, in addition to displaying respect for others, if we are searching for a single, over-arching guiding principle as the basis for our actions and behaviour towards others, then it always to how we would wish others to behave towards us.
Buddhist ethics, I would argue, embodies both those views, and that in fact is where we go next, to look at the deeply interestign issue of Buddhism and ethics. '
Hope you've managed to stay with it so far. I promiose that we deal with ethics in a really down-to-earth and practical way. No head in the clouds stuff.
See you then.
Best wishes,
William
No comments:
Post a Comment