erraticwisdom

The emergence of morality can be most easily assessed when we, again, return to its primal state as a simple descriptor of right and wrong. At this stage, only two options existed, good or bad, and life was based upon increasing the positive and minimizing occurrences of the negative. The original concept of morality is not necessarily limited to humans or advanced primates. In all living creatures, there exists an innate need for self-propagation that has created various mechanisms to “increase” the positive morality and extend the creature’s chance of survival. Obviously, this is a much more selfish system, but we must also remember that at this time no society existed to label any emotion such as selfishness as “immoral”. Thus, the birth of morality coincided with the dawn of life; morality is therefore as natural an impulse as flight from danger.

The evolution of morality to its present state was caused by a combination of elements mainly arising from the intellectual “advancement” of humans. With their growth, humans arranged into groups, villages, and eventually civilizations that gave rise to the societal influence on morality that was described in the preceding entry. This created a cage around individual morality, such that the individual could only judge their actions within the preset scale. Another aspect that changed morality is separation. As a primitive species, Homo sapiens did not segregate because of color or any other aspects; only the environment was able to separate them into different continents and eventually into sub-species. Why was morality not a prominent issue on a primitive earth? Because without any separation (social, racial, spiritual, religious…) there is only a single moral system because the individual is the whole. This does not mean that there is no individuality within this group, only equality. One event has the same moral implications for everyone in that the individual’s moral reaction is equivalent to the group’s.

The distance between all the sub-species of humans created a minute biological difference but an enormous mental difference. The effects of the environment from an intellectual and biological point-of-view have been studied and proven by examining the adaptive radiation of a species across a single continent. The different surroundings on a single continent created marked changes in the lives of the species; therefore an even more prominent change can be expected of humans who spread across the entire globe. The evolution of humans into subspecies illustrates the birth of modern morality because the diversity and individuality that was created by evolution also created a moral diversity representative, again, of their surroundings. This does not mean that all North Americans now have the exact same “morality”, since the very knowledge of diversity propagates it. Individuality is the root of morality. When the first creature distinguished “I” from “us”, the moral scope of everything changed to incorporate another world.