"Poor people can't afford ethics; rich people don't need them."

Western morality shares more than a passing similitude with nutrition. Consider how the language of religious morality--"sin", guilt", indulgence", etc.--has been adopted by diet faddists and commentators (possibly as a way of subtly inducing failures of willpower, thereby insuring diet industry profits, by painting the Enemy Food as forbidden fruit). Both morality and healthy nutrition function as irritants in the lives of many people--something they'd rather not bother with but feel obligated about, periodically genuflecting by skipping the chocolate dessert in favour of a low-fat Heart Savr(TM) salad, or donating a modest sum to whichever cause-of-the-week caught their sympathy. Their guilt assuaged, they resume their gluttonous/amoral lifestyles.

Desperate people don't have the time to be ethical--indeed, asking someone to be "ethical" in a survival situation rings like an oxymoron; a little like asking warriors to "fight fair". Thus, excluding order-keeping structures like religion, culture, and family, most people have no need, nor can be reasonably expected, to be ethical. Yet if one is not desperate, then ethics become a game, to play at one's leisure. How many practical questions of morality does the typical First World-er address each day? I would venture: none. People don't kill and loot because killing and looting is too troublesome and unrewarding to bother with--it's less of a hassle to avoid people one hates, and pay for groceries before attempting to exit the corner store, than it is to assassinate people or pull off a b&e. These usually only become serious options when one is subject to privation and strife.

I pose these questions from the understanding that there is no way to ascertain objective truth; that all knowledge-seeking amounts to accumulating techniques to achieve goals; that all religion and myth equal spiritual hedonism, and that all attitudes are forms of habituation and drug use. Under this, the concept of "ethics" becomes a very shaky proposition, because one realises that all codes of behaviour are fabricated out of ultimate chaos, and thus ultimately meaningless.

Nature evinces no appreciable morality, and indeed is often invoked as exemplifying amorality. Nature evolves, though, or so we are told; and after a very, very long time Nature eventually evolved “us”. The dawn of humanity was simultaneously the dawn of morality as a world shaping force, its power increasing in lockstep with technology. Yet the human moral experiment is a dismal failure. History is an interminable chronicle of cruelty, with no abatement in sight short of global thermonuclear war or equivalent merciful catastrophe.

Could morality be just a phase, though? A half-assed measure mapping out hominid dreams of divinity? Many people, when confronted by the inscrutable meaninglessness of existence, shrug their way back into animalism and pure amorality. I question whether this phenomenon does not bespeak some urgent desire in the human psyche, namely the desire to live according to, and in harmony with, natural law. For billions of years, life lived according to the practical, ruthless laws and exigencies of natural selection, competition, symbiosis, family loyalty, and so on. Then came Homo sapiens, who it might be argued with Biblical allusions, really did "fall" from the natural order and into history.  In my opinion, most likely as a result of a conflux of unique selective pressures and psychedelic metabolites, we fell from the original innocent state of "Do as thou wilt", to the flawed state called morality, epitomised as "Do as thou wilt, an ye harm none", a.k.a. "The Golden Rule" etc. In perfecting ourselves, we may in fact have to do away with morality entirely, finally achieving the Thelemic concept "'Do as thou Wilt' shall be the whole of the Law".

What I've noticed from considering history is that humans don't, as a rule, solve their problems; they merely transcend them (often by dying). The abortion debate, for instance, will remain deadlocked and will never be solved, but will only be transcended when technology changes the playing field to render the debate as obsolete as arguments over the precise thickness of the crystal spheres holding the stars up. Touching back to the nutrition parallel, note how the fortification of sundry foods with nutrients is erasing the relevance of a "well-balanced meal". Soon enough children will be able to eat nothing but candy and junk food and still maintain healthier bodies than any humans in history. Preaching the virtues of eating right won't solve nutrition; it will be solved by biochemists.

Architecture can demonstrably mould how people behave toward each other, both by the signals it gives off and by the physical limits it defines. Certain colour-environments relax people (green); others cause stress and anger (red). In an apartment fire, well-designed corridors and stairwells will prevent bottlenecks and ease escape; poorly designed ones will lead to panic-induced trampling-deaths and fights. Instead of combating crime or deconstructing it, the wealthy simply wall it out; living in impenetrable gated communities and anonymous high-rises. Similarly, social structures and economic systems wall out the visual incentive to make ethical eating choices.  People purchase pretty plastic-packaged muscles at grocery stores, paying no mind to the suffering and death that such selection requires, since all the killing is neatly kept forever out of sight, and the food is abstracted from its source.  In the end, Michel Foucault's "carceral city" moulds us as much as our vaunted "morality" does.

Humans extrude their imaginings into physical reality by way of, and in the form of, technology. Art, I'll divide and subsume the physical as a form of technology, and the sensory as a form of semiotics. Technology lets us do things we couldn't otherwise do. Is it then unreasonable or implausible to wonder if technology cannot or will not also advance the moral perfection of humanity? Why can we not extrude morality into physical form? I write this on the edge of a cyborg future, as what one means by "contemporary human" becomes less and less distinguishable from what one means by "contemporary environment". Again, I must pause as I often do in writing of the future, to highlight how few people grasp just how truly radical the future may be, and how elemental the powers humans are unleashing are. With the completion of the Human Genome Project, we have embarked on our species' ultimate project: nothing less than the revision and re-engineering of humanity itself.

As humanity blends with its environment in ever-crazier copulative configurations, will not the human mind come more and more under the sway of technical evolution? As we lay down into the concrete and ergonomic Ferro plastic, splicing our nervous systems into the cybernetic grid, on the road to the trans-human, the uploaded personality, the AI, will not the concept of a "carceral city" (in a general sense) blend with the concept of "morality"? I don't mean to suggest that such a grand project would lend itself to top-down construction--such an era will be grown, not built--but rather to point out that engineering techniques and psychological insights shall inform one flesh. And why shouldn't it? Imagine a state of existence where there is nothing that can be done that shouldn't be done; nothing that can be done that will cause others cruelty; no way to violate any law; where any avenue of self-development is pursuable. This is a good working definition of Heaven. After all, there is no morality in Heaven, since everyone there is morally perfect and free from sin. After investing in crutches to make up for broken legs, we will simply re-grow our legs. As biospherians, then, we invest in morality to make up for a broken unity with Nature. To correct this it is plausible humanity will combine magick and engineering, and ultimately jettison ethics as irrelevant--junk mimetic left-over from when we were human beings.

Prehistoric = amorality -->

Historic = morality -->

Posthistoric = transmorality

Copyright © 2000 Kim Chessex All Rights Reserved

Kim Chessex lives in the Dominion of Canada, writes the odd essay now and then, tries not to kill anything, and is generally far less cool than this bio-blurb would have you believe.

comment? discuss this article on our discussion board