Weekly Thoughts 6/3/23

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse!!!!!! So good!! Seriously, it’s a work of art! Just like the first one, this movie really pushes what animation can and should be. Truly beautiful to watch. The performances are great, with some really great characters. The story is good and solid, but because it is a part one, I can’t express a full opinion on the story and, by extension, the movie as a whole. We’ll see how it all turns out. From what we have seen, I do think it’ll be a top tier movie once the second part is available. Dropping the “part one” from the marketing was probably a mistake, because I’m sure there are people who didn’t see it was originally called “part one” and will leave disappointed it’s half the story. But what a first half, right?

Now to the main topic, which I wrote up earlier in the week. I watched a stupid video suggested by Facebook where a guy talked about morality. His argument was that if God isn’t real, then morality is relative, and nothing is right or wrong; his proof that this was flawed was that the existentialists who put forth moral relativism still thought the Holocaust was bad, showing that people can’t live that sort of ideal. And like, the real flaw there was that this dude fundamentally doesn’t understand how moral stances work?

Like, I’m no philosopher, and I haven’t read up on moral relativism or the existentialists. I’m not going to explain that stuff in detail or say I know what they were saying on the subject. But I am an atheist with morality, a thing I grew up being told was impossible by religious blowhards, and I have enough of a brain to identity a logical fallacy when I hear one. The point of saying we can all have different ideas on what’s right and wrong – that there’s no objective morality in the universe — isn’t to say that we’re not allowed to have moral opinions or act on them lest we be philosophically inconsistent. That would be stupid. In fact, dude’s whole position was backwards. Saying we all have different moral positions and there’s no central objective means we all have to come together and decide how to live and what we will and will not accept. It’s not lawless chaos; it’s democracy. You can see it in various degrees and shades across time and space, with the development of legal, political, and religious structures. An argument to abandon such a project by getting everyone to believe in the same religious code is not only backwards, but kind of hypocritical in itself, because that argument is still trying to convince people of something democratically.

I never saw any need for an absolute God to tell me right from wrong, but I also understand why people turn to religion for that guidance. Life is hard and messy, and having rules and structure to know how to best live and know you’re doing good is valuable. For as much as I dislike the idea of a deity running the show, I don’t fault or think less of those that seek one out and see the many gifts it offers them. And, much like the idiot from this video Facebook mistakenly suggested to me, people often ask where I think morality comes from. It seems pretty simple, really. On one level, I think the point of recognizing that we’re here on our own in the world is to stand on our own feet and reach out to one another. We never know exactly what’s in someone else’s head or heart, and our great project is taking that step to learn more and express ourselves. You don’t need an objective moral standard to take a stance for yourself and know you’re joining others with like minds, or that you could have others join you. To me, that’s intuitive.

On a deeper level, it’s pretty clear that basically all cultures across time and space have a basic set of morals in agreement. It’s wrong to purposefully hurt other people’s bodies and feelings. Killing is just about the worst thing you can do. It’s bad to damage or take another’s property. Rape is bad. It’s important to respect interpersonal relationships, and family is typically the most important relationship. Helping people in need is always the right thing to do. All of this is held true no matter where you go. And all of it stems from the golden and platinum rules; it’s simply a matter of doing to others what you would want done to yourself, and considering the needs and desires of others when you act. In other words, it’s a basic logic that flows from being a sentient organism that recognizes the sentience of other organisms, and that we all want basic comfort, safety, and happiness. Being alive makes you a moral being, at its basic core. Like I said, intuitive.

And I know to some, that sounds like I’m saying morality is just another chemical reaction, that our humanity is insignificant in the lawless cosmos. But once again, that’s backwards from where I sit. To the extent that morality is an emergent property of biology, I think it’s a grand, marvelous statement about the world. We aren’t increasingly insignificant combinations of meaningless specks of dust; these specks of dust, which are themselves more than “meaningless,” come together to make something greater than we can know, something with real moral and spiritual quality. Our humanity is something truly miraculous and special. Whether you think that because you agree with what I said, or because of a religious framework, we can agree on that. So to me, denying our moral agency in favor of some top-down dogma is not the moral position to take, though I don’t begrudge people for using whatever framework they grew up with as their starting point.