42

The answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything (LUE). In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books by Douglas Adams (H2G2 and DNA accordingly). One of the many additions to our culture and language given by this brilliant man. But one that's not so well understood. So here it is. Some of it is verbatim from the books, and some of it is just my opinion of it. With the emphasis on opinion. You'll understand at the end.

42 is the answer given by the second greatest computer ever created, to LUE. The only problem is, it's a meaningless answer without knowing the ACTUAL, concise question. So the computer, Deep Thought, created a greater computer, which was run by lab rats, and is more commonly named, "Earth". The program unfortunatly was ended early when a Vorgon Constructor fleet came a long and demolished Earth to create a new hypersteller by-pass. (Don't you just HATE when that happens?)

In the course of the travels, we find that the actual question, the one that the vast computer called Earth is coming up with, is this. "What do you get when you multiply six by nine". This question, while being absolutly foolproof, and completly rigid, also has the distiction of being 100% wrong at every level. This is a very cynical message of course, being that the Earth is completly more fucked up than anybody ever could possibly think.

What a lot of people miss, and is not widly known as well, is that there's a SECOND question to the answer of LUE. Marvin recites it to a bunch of depressed matresses. So what is the second question?

"Pick a number. Any number"

This is the real question. What does life mean? Pick a number. Any number. Life is whatever you define it to be..the answer to the meaning of life is the answer to what your personal question is. If I could beam any one thing into the heads of everybody on this planet. That would be the one thing.

The funny thing is..my wife mentioned..considering how cool of a message this is, why isn't it pushed to the nines. Because that would break the whole concept of it. You can get out of the books what you WANT to get out of them. That's the key. It's up to you to define the experience you have out of the books.

It's up to you to define the experience you have out of life.

Structural Morality

I was considering a post over at Street Prophets, a religious based off-shoot of the DailyKos community (btw. Good luck and best wishes.), when my mind wandered to the role of religion, and charity as a whole. And thinking wouldn't be it a wonderful world if everybody was as charitable as some of these churches....

Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if we didn't HAVE to be.

Wouldn't it be great if we all had healthcare, and didn't have to worry about destroying our familes if they got sick. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the environment we lived in didn't make us sick. Wouldn't it be amazing, if every worker who worked hard, and played by the rules was able to comfortably raise a family, and send their kids to college.

Wouldn't it be simply heaven on earth?

Morality isn't just for individuals. We are social creatures. We live in communities. Our communites, on a number of scales, have morals, and moral values of our own. But often times, we accept structural immorality, because it doesn't affect us. It's not hurting us, so we don't care.

This in and of itself, really is completly and totally immoral. Structural immorality should never be accepted. If it's what works, then a cost-benefit..a real one with ALL factors included should be made to determine the best course of action. But I'll tell you something.

It rarely works.

Because anything that's structurally immoral, is hurting somebody. It's probably hurting a lot of people. And it's tearing the fabric of society to bits. And this is usually a very bad thing over the long-run. You can keep on pushing the problems off..down the road. But eventually, it'll come back to get you in the end.

Morality and Consumption.

This is for Jerome a paris, over at DailyKos, who's REALLY banging his head against the way trying to get people to pay attention to the massive problem of energy instrastructure meltdown.

And he's right about the actual problem. But he expects anything to be doen about it? Not gonna happen. Why? It does come down to moral considerations...or at least amoral ones.

See, modern morality..."family values" just dont' let that happen. They don't do sacrifice. Especially for THOSE people. Racist? Not really. THOSE people could be blacks. It also could be liberals. Or people who live in the North. Or people who live in California. Or people who live in San Francisco.

THOSE people could also be their neighbours. Who just happen to go walking in the wilderness instead of going to church.

But the point is, these people will not do shared sacrifice. They believe that any sacrifice, the gains should directly benefit them. And this, where they're losing their cheap transportation to drive from their gated community for an hour to go into the city to work. Damnit, that's their god-given right.

And this isn't hardcore consevatives I'm talking about here. This is the average reaction. This is the cultural poison. Greed has gone way too far.

So Jerome. I feel for you. I really do. But we need to win the bigger, nastier, tougher war to even stand a chance to win the more important ones.

What is Moralcraft?

I'm interested in morality. I've been interested in morality for a while. It's very important, in that it determines how we treat other people.

And it's something that I think is dying an ugly, horrible death, for a variety of reasons, but it all stems down to one thing. People know morals, through a variety of methods. Through traditions, through religion, through family. But much rarer, is that people know HOW those morals are crafted. They don't know the threads that make up those morals. They don't know how they got there, and why they're there. This makes them incapable of creating new moral fabric, and the moral fabric we have is never good enough.

We need to learn moralcraft. We need to know how to weave the threads together to create new moral fabric, in order to cover every situation.

So the question is..what is that thread? What is the moral arithmetic, the numbers we need to add together to decide what to do? In order to do that, we need to realize the nature of morality to begin with. To know WHY morality.

Why morality? The whole idea of morality, is that you shouldn't hurt others. There's a good reason for this. If you don't hurt others, the idea goes, and that's what is socially acceptable, then other people will not hurt you for the same reason. Which makes for a better society/world for us all to live in.

So then is morality the damage/aid that you give to others? Personally, I'd say that's a little simplistic. There has to be a modifier there. People can do good things, but for bad reasons, or
they might do bad things, but their intentions were good.

Intentions.

That's what we're looking for. Intentions DO matter, in terms of morality. Because it's the only way to actually decide what you should do. Intent without actions is meaningless. Actions without good intent is either reckless, or unreliable.

So the "math", so to speak, is actions, modified by intent. So when discussing morality, we need to do so in these two terms.

First Post

For the first post on this site, I'm going to link to one of my favorite other commentor-cum-bloggers, Driftglass.

"But Character is what you are in the dark."

No, not really. It's far too simplistic. The whole idea of character/values/morality being what you are in the dark, is to limit morals to things of a personal nature. The alternate translation is that character is what you are in your bedroom, in a nutshell. Which makes things like sex, or the art you like to partake in moral issues.

They're not.

Moral issues are things that affect other people. Period. If something doesn't affect another person, to call it immoral, well..it's none of your business. Morality then becomes useless to our society. And that's the last thing we want.

There IS something that is quite true about that phrase however, people will often do good things just to grandstand, not doing it for doing good itself, but doing it as to gain favor or popularity. Although the actions might be good in and of itself, it doesn't really make these people any more trustworthy, because the second that everybody turns their back, BAM, stabbity stab stab stab.

So I would say that a better pithy quote is "Character is not stabbing society in the back".

That sounds about right.