coming to the heading of the post, this has led me to consider that a great strength and powerful tool we could use in the pursuit towards a higher morality, in the absence of guides like religion or faith, is the idea that if nothing matters, then you are freed from the limitations inferred by Stalin's quote. You are free to care about masses of people suffering, and free from any quantifying limitations of significance. It could offer people a means to reflecting on issues in a way that doesn't dehumanize those who suffer just because of the volume of suffering, and facilitate a strengthen stance against suffering -effectively implying meaninglessness grants us a limitless capacity for caring. — dermanhuby

I must admit, I’m struggling to understand the rationale here. On first glance, the thought that sprang to my mind was ‘compassion fatigue’ - the well-known tendency of affluent audiences to ‘turn off’ in the face of terrible humanitarian catastrophes in the developing world.

But then this doesn’t seem to be the point you’re arguing. You say, ‘if nothing matters, then we are freed from the limitations implied by Stalin’s quote’. Again, really struggling to see how this follows. I mean, we are already free to do that - indeed some people dedicate their lives to helping refugees or the homeless. The fact that many people might not respond that way doesn’t really detract from this point. So I’m not seeing the logic of the calculus you’re suggesting. Perhaps you might enlarge the point a little more?

You might be interested in the work of Paul Bloom, who I think covers something of what you might be getting at. I agree with Wayfarer that it's a bit unclear what you're saying, but Bloom's book "Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion" argues that most of the time our Empathy (feeling how the other person is feeling) gets in the way of our compassion (desire to act in such a way as to reduce the suffering of others). Not being able to handle the pain of actually empathising with millions of victims and so just 'switching off' is one such example. Is that the sort of thing you mean?

the limitations implied by stalins quote = the limitations being that there's a ceiling on how much we can measurably care about one thing at one time. That there's a limit to how much we can not only take, but comprehend at an emotional level.

So when I say "we are free from the limitations implied by Stalin's quote" what I mean to get at is how we there is in every human a threshold of how much they can feel about something. So in the case of an individual person (tom) who helps the homeless. they cannot feel 1000 times more sympathy for 1000 homeless people than the sympathy they feel for one homeless person. The increased suffering cannot be directly proportional to increase in sympathy indefinitely. But one story may be enough to drive him to help 1000's or alternatively he may see a documentary about the life of homeless people, and the prevelance of it. Seeing the scale of the issue he cares deeply, more profoundly that seeing one story, or even 20. So his ressolve to help isn't directly equal to how he feels about individuals, but rather in his feelings about wanting to do something himself.

But when we are talking about society collectively, it's a different animal to the individual. The collective moral code which causes society to react to things, and create laws etc, is something that has less autonomy that Tom. Society is reactionary and my idea was that if society lost religion and spirituality, then society as a whole would fall in danger of having no adhesive to stick together a moral code. But my above argument was that if society evolved with no offerings of meaning or order for living, then while it would lack a lot of what drives us forward, it could also free us from feeling like we have to tune out stuff (the extreme version of this mentality that I've never understood of being devoted to the people you know, but seeing the rest of world as not my problem.) where racism or tribalism or indifference to suffering experienced by strangers all can be traced to in some form.

While you say some people dedicate their lives to helping homeless etc, that's an individual decision. When talking about a collective moral code there's the larger issue of how all the individuals from altruistic to sinister, collectively produce an administered (expected) moral compass which we refer to as guidance. If society collectively doesn't measure one suffering as meaning more or less than an other, then the individual living in that societty can be free to use intelligence, humanity and progress as reasons to care about all incidents of suffering which occur within society, irrespective of the proximity or scale of the particular suffering. IE people can care infinitely without a cap on their feelings, when the zeitgeist they are reared in puts no significance on meaning.

(probably totally waffling but i promise i have a point - just don't think Ive the linguistic or cognitive prowess to get it accross!)

Thanks. I'll check it out.

Ya, kinda what i mean but even at every level, not just "suffering of millions"
Like how people don't help each other as an instinctive reaction at every opportunity. That choosing not to help people that need help is a conscious decision often made acceptable by rationalizing the significance of that person to you, to your other priorities, to your own experiences, or to your tribe. All could arguably be traced back to the individuals inner barometer of what matters, and how much.

If religion and faith become less important to people, and the idea that there is a "reason" for the universe loses plausibility or interest, then how best can we approach the path of collective morality? — dermanhuby

Our moral sense predates God. Morality has never relied on God. In varying degrees we have emotional responses to acts committed upon our fellows. Our responses are innate and subjective, but as we share the same genes they can be for the most part similar to other people.
Without god anything is possible, even love. For the first time we can freely love whom we chose without the threat of punishment or the promise of reward.
The invention of god was nothing more than a system to codify behaviour. We still have the law of the land which places our rewards and punishments to a more immediate and pragmatic level. And it is here that our 'collective morality' resides. No different from any time since the invention of god, except that the law of the land do not involve the lie of the supernatural.

There is no problem here. Life has never been better, and criminality predicts high among the godly. perhaps were we to abandon god more thoroughly, crime would fall further?

Yes, well two things.

Firstly I purposely avoided the merits of, and origins of god and religion etc so as not to deviate from the main thought i was exploring - society post religion or order.

Secondly I take your point but I think the crucial element that I have failed to explain properly is that I'm considering these things in a society that was, prior to its secular state, heavily reliant on religion for guidance. So the transition that society would experience from the simplicity of being offerred clearly defined answers to a world of uncertainty and no answers is the factor i'm considering.


Our society becoming more secular is often only seen as a result of progress, and evolution (within academic circles). But aside from the debate of the pros and cons of that actuality, there's also another thing worth considering. Whether we arrived at this secular society through beliefs or by enforced dogma

- A secular environment could have, as one example, evolved to serve a political or social elite, with dogma, trend, academic biases filtering into systems of education, or distractions (entertainment) etc creating a societal acceptence that religion or faith has been all but disproved.

So just because a society is secular in disposition, it doesn't mean it arrived there by slick mastery of the great philisophical questions. With that in mind, if we continued with the same level of

. In varying degrees we have emotional responses to acts committed upon our fellows. — charleton

Yes, that is the individual's morality. The collective morality is built on cross sections of experience, history, increased intelligence, local and globalised needs, protecting a society's progress and order, to name a few. The collective morality is far more vague, and in a constant state of flux. But it is there. For example I don't think there's a reasonable argument within any fraction of humanity that disputes that killing innocent people for fun is morally sound. Nor would I think there's any fraction that would contest that helping another person for the sole purpose of improving that person's life, with no harmful consequences arising from the action, is morally sound.

So there is, albeit murky in the middle, a frame of collective morality, however it came to be. So there are examples of actions that can be universally agreed upon that are moral or immoral, even if my above ones have holes I failed to see. This range, this spectrum is what I would see as shifting without religion in the mix. And the baseline of what's morally abhorrent could drop in a world jolted into a state of anomie. And this would be a real possibility if reliigion and meaning waned at a faster rate than we could evolve to understand a world without it.

I

The invention of god was nothing more than a system to codify behaviour. We still have the law of the land which places our rewards and punishments to a more immediate and pragmatic level. And it is here that our 'collective morality' resides. No different from any time since the invention of god, except that the law of the land do not involve the lie of the supernatural. — charleton

Whether you believe in god or not, and whether the world will be better or worse without religion is not pertinent to my points. I'm exploring the implications of how a transition from a world with religion to one without would have on the range within our universal moral code would sit.

If there was a wave of secularism across the educated population, and the trickle down effects reached the disadvantaged majority of humanity, who may accept their fate based on the assumption of order, then (and this was my original assumption) people who developed their individual moral code with respect to the collective moral code, could grow less loyal to a collective morality. Without the optimism or hope of there being reason for a person's pain, there lays the foundation for asking questions that lead to nonacceptance of the status quo (enter the central point I found interesting)

This happening at an individual level then affecting the collective's response to the status quo. We can look at how this could lead to every man for himself, and the lowering of the baseline of what is considered unacceptable, and I thought that this was the mainly represent outcome.

But optimistically I looked at the flip side, and thought about ways this could be a positive change.(remember i'm not talking about a circumstance where we are all living in equality and that we became civilized and efficient and secular as a result. I'm considering the not so distant future where the inequality of the world weighs heavily on the larger percentage of people.)

And one potential positive by product of the change in our understanding of order or meaning is that we could realize that the "reason" or "order" we relied on to accept our place in the world have been shackles as well as anchors, and that we don't have a reason to live half lives, or accept dictatorial classes etc .. People of all parts of society questioning their surroundings and why they should accept the way of things could then affect how we question our own actions. This could then reveal the abundance of hypocrisy and contradiction in our moral codes, and as people see this of their individual morality, the collective morality could improve. So an example of collective morality being addressed as a result- justifying homelessness in cities where there's an allocated budget for entertainment events that exceeds the money needed to minimize the homelessness. An individual accepts this and the collective does so. The little lies we use to accept and explain such things collectively could become highlighted in the shift of our perception of order, and in the pursuit of a better personal existence, the collective may see the unacceptability of suffering that is within our power to eradicate. That without the excuse of saying there's a reason for this beyond our own lack of action, we could develop an inerrant societal obligation in raising the baseline of the collective moral code to a level that universally perceives all suffering endured by all people unacceptable wherever we have the power to eradicate it. This could be tied in with an understanding of the merits of this to the individual as well.

God I hope that makes sense (pun intended).

I wrote a response below to another person's post, and think I may have been a tad clearer in it if you're interested

So the transition that society would experience from the simplicity of being offerred clearly defined answers to a world of uncertainty and no answers is the factor i'm considering. — dermanhuby

But you are assuming that a godly society make any sense to the people. I doubt that.

he collective morality is built on cross sections of experience, history, increased intelligence, local and globalised needs, protecting a society's progress and order, to name a few. — dermanhuby

You forgot to mention its main function: social control of the masses by the elites.

There seems to be a conflation of ideas here that don't quite relate. The sense I make of Stalin's quote is that empathy is always individual - I feel for you; I cannot feel for you if I am feeling for someone else, because I am only one person and can only have one feel at a time. It's not a question of turning down the volume so much as being distracted. The million people are conceptual, I never experience them, and cannot empathise with a concept.

Now consider the surgeon. In order to do his job of cutting your flesh with care, he has to turn off his empathy. We don't want him wincing and bursting into tears every time he uses the scalpel. It's not a question of how many people he is operating on. One might say that empathy is an emotion, whereas caring is an action motivated by empathy, but not necessarily accompanied by it.

And then we have the title: If nothing matters (to God), I still care about whatever I care about, which is not everything, but might be quite a lot. So my empathy is for the op who cares about the sort of thing I care about, but is having some difficulty in clarifying things conceptually, and my action is to write something that uses the scalpel of analysis, hopefully with enough skill to assist anyone who cares to consider the matter.

I'm on sabbatical at the moment - working on a job in meatspace which needs constant attention. Be back much later.

It does seem rather laborious to me I’m sorry. I think I could be described as a ‘religious naturalist’ - I believe that empathy and compassion are real human attributes, they’re important, and they need to be preserved and encouraged. Religion, in the formal sense, wraps that up in various dogmas, but the original idea behind the dogmas is still real, in my view. Humans are caring by nature; the inability to care is a defect or a flaw, for which remedy ought to be sought, if necessary.

I’ve been listing to a really old rock song, Doctor My Eyes, Jackson Browne, which is about this very thing.

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what you see
I hear their cries
Just say if it's too late for me

Doctor, my eyes
Cannot see the sky
Is this the prize
For having learned how not to cry