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    Against Our Better Nature: Why Good People Do Bad Things
    Against Our Better Nature: Why Good People Do Bad Things
    Against Our Better Nature: Why Good People Do Bad Things
    Ebook314 pages3 hours

    Against Our Better Nature: Why Good People Do Bad Things

    By Barry Pomeroy

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    About this ebook

    When discussing morality, people typically focus on the big questions and ignore the decisions we make at nearly every moment of our lives. We are not often asked to choose between a baby’s life and an animal, whether to cheat on a loved one or betray a friend, but we are constantly bombarded by opportunities to act either ethically or merely self-serving.
    The stories in this collection are more concerned with the everyday events which try our values, the choices we are faced with on a daily basis which are not featured in Hollywood movies or famous novels, but nonetheless prove to exercise our ethical selves. Like anyone else, these characters are confronted by moral choices even as they are torn between following their own selfish desires or the urge to perform an altruistic act. As diverse as the people who make up our world, the characters ask themselves if they should cheat on their spouse, steal money or goods, lie to a friend, think only about themselves, or give others the benefit of the doubt.
    Follow along as people you recognize are faced with choosing between good and evil. That most essential human exercise of our moral selves defines whether we are merely slaves to another’s rules or sociopaths who heed none.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarry Pomeroy
    Release dateMar 20, 2019
    ISBN9781987922707
    Against Our Better Nature: Why Good People Do Bad Things
    Author

    Barry Pomeroy

    Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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      Against Our Better Nature - Barry Pomeroy

      Anyone who has been faced with an ethical dilemma, and I presume that would include nearly everyone, is not surprised to learn that upon closer examination moral decisions are not black and white. As social beings we have learned to lie about a friend’s appearance in order to support their flagging self-esteem, or compliment a child’s drawing even if it resembles the fecal smearing of a monkey more than the self-portrait the child claims it to be. For the moral dilemmas that concern larger groups, such as those about the health and safety of many others, we hesitate, rethink, and by times make a decision on the basis of what we’ve been taught and what we fear. For some people, all moral choices are like that. Even while they listen when others claim to see a straight path that leads them not into temptation as though the middle line on the road were directing their feet, they agonize over the implications of each choice.

      Others, more cynically, can’t help but question the notion that ethical behaviour is a topic which even deserves reflection. They are not so conflicted. Whether that is due to their indifference to the feelings or wellbeing of others, a narcissism that hides their fellows behind the looming presence of themselves, or their radically divergent view of the moral choice, some moral agents abdicate decisions, or make quite questionable choices based on an ethical reasoning that to others might seem opaque. Those people are more inviting characters in the literary text—with their highly adaptable moral selves, as well as their obfuscation and omissions—largely due to how they rationalize their behaviour to their social mirror. That is, in part, their attraction as fictional characters. Even if they appear like an alien species to us, the rationale that informs their choices might just as easily expose uncomfortable truths about our own decisions that we would rather keep hidden, regardless of how moral we imagine ourselves to be.

      Many ethical choices are fraught with indecision and handwringing, but we are usually wringing our hands over ourselves more than others even if we are aware of the distinction. In a short but provocative exchange between Doctor Frankenstein and Igor in Mel Brooks’ 1974 parody Young Frankenstein, Igor makes a profound statement about our lack of self-knowledge. The doctor asks him if he wishes to consider a surgical alternative to the hump on his back, but Igor, with a gleam in his eye that confounds further questions, asks, "What hump?"

      This scene, with Igor’s oblivious obstinacy, his utter unwillingness to admit the truth about his physical deformity, always reminds me of that aspect of the human condition which makes us unable or unwilling to admit our foibles and concerns.

      Although we point to our ability to recognize ourselves in the mirror with great glee, as if that accomplishment incontrovertibly sets us apart from the other animals, we are most exercised when we try to probe our own motivations and desires. We claim that we understand what we want, can explain what we do, and are not mystified when we stymie our own aims, but in fact stepping aside from the only perspective our life offers us is more difficult than we pretend.

      One of the most pernicious aspects of mental illness, for example, is the inability to recognize its effects, even if the sufferer openly acknowledges his or her plight. Like the friend who refused medication because it messed with his mind, it could be that we need our mind messed with. Even if the person with mental illness can admit their situation, they somehow avoid using that most salient information to evaluate their own behaviour and ideation.

      There are a few techniques we can use to force us to acknowledge another point of view. When we were young someone probably told us that we needed to walk in another’s shoes, and that advice is still valuable even when we are theoretically more mature. If we evaluated all of our behaviour from this outside perspective, and examined each of our choices and statements as if another were to do the same, we can get that sense of dislocation that is the closest to objectivity that we are liable to get.

      If you have ever watched a beloved movie with a friend who didn’t care for it, you have already had an inkling of the power of perspective. Because humans are social animals, we automatically place ourselves in the subject position of our peers, even if that position conflicts with our opinion or values. When our friend tells us the narrative choices in our favourite film are weak, we can either argue—and thus learn nothing from this valuable moment—or we can look with fresh eyes at the hump that has been hidden by our enjoyment. If the film is worthy of our accolades then it can endure some criticism. If we realize that our enjoyment is based on fond, unshared memories, or other less obvious emotional tags, then we can learn to evaluate our own likes more clearly.

      In our lives, we need to learn to evoke this same dislocating critical eye. We can do that by imagining another were making the same statements, or thinking of our audience as another person whose opinion we possibly value more. If an utterance is true, then we should be able to make it before our best friend, our parents, and our lover. If the action we have just preformed—such as a petty crime—can be explained in a way that salves our conscience, then how well does it fare against the more exacting evaluative process of the court?

      This book is an attempt to provide this broken mirror, these multi-coloured lenses we can use to look at a variety of ethical dilemmas though the eyes of characters concerned about their behaviour and consideration of others and those who are more reckless about those around them.

      I have a friend who evades all of this responsibility for his actions by trying to ensure that no one knows anything about him. He has a deep-seated social anxiety, he tells me, and therefore worries that no one will like him if they knew the real self that he keeps deeply buried. His answer to his anxiety is not to make sure both selves are worthy of approbation, but rather he tries to keeps his depredations secret. He has no fear of engaging in quite reprehensible actions, as long as no one finds out. His fear that people will not like him once they get to know the real him is therefore quite valid. He engages in morally unsettling behaviour, and yet that does not trouble him in the least, since normally no one is privy to his actions and he is not called to account. He hides his hump under a thick cloak that he never takes off, even on a summer day.

      When he is found out, he suffers all the agony of the socially fearful, but a stern look at his situation demands that we ask why he doesn’t change his behaviour. We all have secrets that we’d rather people not know, shabby furtive things we have done or thought, but social anxiety is unimaginably worse when your secrets expose that you have spent more of your time hiding your deeds rather than trying to act ethically.

      When a friend’s child was in the bathroom next to the kitchen and they were discussing his lack of attention to his schoolwork, he was listening attentively. One phrase they used excited him enough to burst from the bathroom with demands and expostulations. One parent had said to another, Maybe it’s time we got Ritalin. If you have never heard the name of the drug, and you were a child listening through a bathroom door, you might hear something quite different. The child heard, Maybe it’s time we got rid-of-him.

      When the parents told me this story my first reaction was to laugh with them as they described how they placated his fears, but upon reflection I realized an odd aspect of the child’s behaviour. He burst from the bathroom demanding that they don’t get rid of him. For me, that defined a way of thinking. He did not quietly listen for more information that he might use to ensure they kept him. He didn’t reconsider how lazy he had been with his schoolwork or even ask what they meant. Instead, he was sure of what he had heard, and he leapt straight to demands. He never considered that his behaviour was the problem they were discussing and therefore needed to be modified. He was fine, in his own mind. Instead he wanted to modify their behaviour. What hump? he came out yelling.

      Another friend was treating me to a four-day diatribe about her ex-boyfriends, complete with all of the shades of meaning that she attached to each of their interactions, when I began to notice a pattern. In every story, she would mention how angry she was, or how mad something made her. We were walking when I made this observation; perhaps I hoped that she would rethink her interactions with others, but I certainly wanted to minimize the torrent of invective she was willing to level against those who had thwarted her in the past. You always talk about how angry you were each time something happens. As if you are angry all the time. She defended her ideation by merely replying flippantly, Didn’t you know I have anger issues?

      The gay tone of her voice belied her statement, although I had ample evidence to indicate that her anger issues were rampant; I wondered why—if she understood that to be a flaw in herself—she did not try to excise that tendency. She might have asked if those anger issues informed her interactions with her boyfriends and helped to explain why simple conversations might go awry. Instead, she was both blind to her own hump and was able to use it as a ready excuse, all the while keeping her anger intact and justified.

      If we have a hump it behooves us to recognize it. We need not belabour it in public, we need not parade it before others, but we should recognize that having a hump will affect our ability to buy a fitted suit off the rack. And even in approaching a tailor, we might want to realize that it is our hump that drives us to the professionals. That is not the tailor’s fault, or that of anyone else. If the hump cannot be removed, even though we nightly saw away at it, then we should at least acknowledge its influence on our way of thinking, and more importantly, our interactions.

      If we examine our motivations in the same way we would another, the reactions of our peers can provide a clue. If they are taken aback by something we have said, we should re-examine why we are saying it. Were we angry when making the statement, or influenced by alcohol, drugs, hunger, or exhaustion? Like a tired baby, we can become cranky without knowing what it means or whose fault it is. My good friend was quite annoyed recently and at one point she said, Why are you being so irritating today? I suspected that the answer—that she was tired and had had a bad day—would have little currency until she was more rested, but I was surprised that it didn’t occur to her.

      It’s not easy to carry a hump, but at least if our issues are in the open we can point to them as we strive to transcend their limitations. When Igor asks the question, Doctor Frankenstein merely looks to one side and then abruptly changes the topic. Likewise, with our secret hump, we are left pretending that it does not exist, lying about its effect, or going through our lives oblivious and unconcerned, while around us others bend and sway and modify themselves to avoid discommoding the hump they refuse to identify or ameliorate.

      Some moral problems are due to us trying to apply policy to ourselves, or debating whether policy should be applied in general. For instance, nearly everyone I know who rails against large corporations and how they both destroy the planet and are driven only by greed, either have investments or wish to have them once they earn enough money to invest. This seems counter to their stated opinion, but in fact they are as driven by greed as the corporations.

      Truly there are some large companies which are more ethical than others, at least in some of their business practices or in the resultant use of their product. We may compare solar panels as a device which has only one largely positive use, to guns, which are more limited in their use and whose result is not nearly as positive. The ethical investor puts their money in companies which produce devices like solar panels hoping that their sources for minerals, their treatment of their workers, and environmental practices surrounding their factories, match up to their public statements. That means that the ethical investor can grow their money at the same time as the environmentally sound company with good labour practices, thus helping to ensure the company’s success.

      Unfortunately, those companies do not provide nearly as much of a return as those from the military industrial complex involved in making arms, the big oil multinationals, pharmaceuticals with huge markups, and the investment firms themselves, as well as banks. Those more suspect organizations make huge profits off their manipulation of markets, unethical labour practices in countries with lower labour standards, control over the market share, and government lobbying. All of that combines to ensure that their bottom line is the most profitable, but investing in them is telling them, with every dollar, that you want to support what they are doing. Similarly, every time we buy a certain product we are voting to let the business practices responsible for the product continue.

      This is a more complicated issue than whether we should cheat on a spouse. The disastrous effects of such companies are diverted into externalities the consumer never sees, as the companies abscond just before the mine needs to be cleaned up, or the unsafe labour practices have led to suicide or deformity. It’s worth recalling that when Apple found too many workers in their Chinese factory were jumping from windows they installed safety nets around the buildings instead of modifying the conditions of their labour.

      Any of our practices which affect the lives of people in developing nations are worth some examination. When the Asian market crashed, I knew someone who was teaching in Korea for the experience, so she told me, but she broke her contract and left before her income was not as much as she had signed for. In fact it was, but the currency difference between the two countries meant that she earned less in Canadian dollars, so for her that meant they were not fulfilling their terms.

      In another instance, when I was talking to my friend about teaching overseas we discussed that as a moral problem having to do with colonial influence and the avidity with which the westerner takes advantage of the developing nations. She suggested that one of the problems of teaching English overseas is that it adds to the growing homogenization of the world, largely due to English being both a colonial language as well as the lingua franca of international business. The fallout from this is obvious. With less people speaking their own languages, their cultures will begin to disappear, and as Werner Herzog says, speaking in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, we will be left as though naked in the world: we will probably have one of the last feature films with authentic natives in it, they are fading away very quickly, and it’s a catastrophe and a tragedy that’s going on and we are losing riches and riches and riches and we lose cultures and individualities and languages and mythologies and we’ll be stark naked at the end... we’ll end up like all the cities in the world now with skyscrapers and a universal kind of culture like the American culture.

      This is already happening and can be observed nearly anywhere fluency in an indigenous language used to be commonplace and is now a rarity. Teaching English overseas merely exacerbates that problem. The more we contribute to unilingualism—by producing films in the west, writing books only in one language, and teaching people living in other countries English or another colonial language—the more we are contributing to a bland world of tepid cultural pabulum.

      The converse to this argument—which in no way conflicts with the fact of language instruction as a form of cultural genocide—is that there are people who want to learn the language. For their own reasons—likely having to do with job security in a world that colonialism has insisted must be English—they need or want the language skills enough to pay to learn it. They are not learning the colonizer’s language in order to kill their own, but rather they are considering their own precarious economic future which could be enhanced by playing the international neocolonial game. It’s unpleasant that their culture is disappearing, but for them, it is more unpleasant that they can’t find work, or that their children cannot attend school or in some cases have enough to eat because their parents are not competitive in a world market.

      For the person contemplating teaching overseas, they are caught on the twin horns of this dilemma. Do I teach English to these people, knowing that I am eroding vibrant cultures and replacing them with international flavourlessness, or do I choose to reject the job because even though they want me to teach them, I need to consider the future of their culture? We also need to ask ourselves if we are making the decision for those in developing nations to preserve their culture because we don’t think they are able or worthy to make their own decisions about what is in their best interest. If I choose to consider their felt desires then I will help them achieve what they need educationally in order to succeed although I may contribute to destroying the distinctive qualities of their culture.

      The decision not to teach English in order to make sure the students’ culture has greater longevity is ultimately a colonial decision. The implication of the choice is that the people themselves cannot choose what they think is best for them, and that therefore the wise English speaker must protect them from themselves. Much of the world threw us out of their countries politically if not economically, for exactly that type of reasoning, and surely they have suffered from our patronizing condescension enough.

      This moral choice is very similar to that of having a child, not personally but rather as a matter of policy. A proposal I have floated before some of my friends is that of paying five thousand dollars for any who choose to have a vasectomy. There are many good environmental reasons to lower the birthrate on the planet, and this policy would certainly achieve that. Many people who need quick money would be spared having to provide for a child, and anyone short-sighted enough to do it merely for money when they want a child would not be missed in the gene pool.

      Where this issue grows emotionally sticky is when we consider the question of economic background, and that becomes evident in the implicit classism in the sentence above. The person who would take five thousand dollars for a vasectomy is in a similar situation as the person from the developing world who needs to know English in order to get ahead more quickly in their particular neocolonial setting. Only the poor would find such minor but significant surgery attractive because of the cash.

      When I proposed this to my communist friend, he responded that it targeted the poor unfairly. That is true. The rich would not bother to get surgery they didn’t want for such a measly sum, but someone down on their luck, or having difficulty making rent, or who didn’t have health care coverage but needed medicine, would jump at the chance. We avoid many policy choices because they unfairly affect those who are the most vulnerable, although this case is quite different than that of teaching English, however, at least in terms of how many would be affected by the negative or positive choice.

      While teaching English overseas would exacerbate the colonial enterprise, and promote a kind of homogenized world culture at the expense of the richness of our current although threatened heterogeneity, it would be a positive force in the life of the particular person. The world in general would grow slightly more culturally impoverished because of my decision to make money teaching English, but some of my students’ lives might become better. In the case of the five-thousand-dollar vasectomies, however, the world in general would improve almost immediately, and the effect would be lasting. Although the particular person’s life might well become worse—at least after the five thousand is gone—their financial quality of life would likely improve with a vasectomy even as their perceived quality of life in terms of the wish to have a child would deteriorate.

      When the policy behind the heavy fees that accompanied driving in London was first proposed, its advocates were no doubt inspired by a very logical solution to a difficult problem. Without a tax on anti-social behaviors, people tend to persist in them. Their reasoning was flawless in this pecuniary way, but they seemed to remember how such a tax might affect the poor, for they discussed how it might be instituted in order to mitigate its effect on those less fortunate. The effect of the new bylaw, that London traffic was greatly reduced, was celebrated as a triumph of policy. What they had forgotten—although some cynical evaluations have suggested that this was a deliberate side effect—was the effect on the rich.

      Those wealthy enough to disregard an extra charge now had their way cleared of plebeians, and could drive where they wished without confronting the irritating, albeit democratizing effect of other drivers. When traffic was heavy, rich and poor alike were caught in its maw, but with a policy which unfairly—in terms of their ability to afford it—taxed the poor, the rich might drive with impunity. The policy might well have had good intentions, but the quality of life of the wealthy was once again enhanced. The overall result is a London with better air quality, however, and if some poorer people need to get into the city with a car, then subsidies could more easily ameliorate that situation than choking London with so much traffic that all urban lives are shortened.

      These types of moral questions are fraught with the concern over the majority of people, the planet itself, and the feelings or situation of a smaller group versus a larger one. We have some idea what might be best, although we have to consider that those ideas come from a perception of the world that may not be especially accurate, but when we make a decision we have to consider the effect of our actions.

      The ballerina will destroy her hips and tendons if she goes on to dance professionally, and the boxer will suffer brain damage and bodily deterioration, but they are still capable of deciding what is best for them. Should we tell the ballerina and boxer that we refuse to teach them the skill they most want to learn? We can tell them that their desired profession will hurt them in the long run, but it’s a decision they need to make for themselves. More importantly, in the end, their decision does not affect the outsider who chooses to

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