Moral Comparisons

I can see why you would say that the left is more moral than the right, but I always thought it was the other way around. Maybe it's just the illusion of central position. I suppose there's more than one way to look at it, though. You could define morality as an extension of altruism, but you could also define it as doing the right thing. The next question is, how do you know what's the right thing? At our age we should have developed an internalized moral code, but a newborn baby has no such thing. As the baby grows up, it will pick up it's moral code from other people, so it depends on what kind of people it grows up with. At first the primary influence comes from family and friends of the family. Later, the kid is likely to transfer it's allegiance to other kids, so it depends on what kinds of kids it associates with. It is always possible for a kid to read something in a book that introduces yet another moral influence, but I doubt that most people pay much attention to that. Maybe it's just that the left and the right have different moral codes. Abortion and homosexuality are certainly moral issues, but the left and the right generally come down on opposite sides of both of them. Altruism is cool, but somebody from my ilk might say that not everybody deserves to be the recipient of altruism. Your ilk might counter that everybody deserves our kindness, well, everybody except those nasty conservatives. And so it goes.

The authors of our book refer to the civil rights people as "liberals", the Black power people as "radicals", and the White power people as "conservatives". Silly me, I thought they were all radicals. It just goes to show that you are never too old to learn something.

I didn't know there was such a thing a urban music, although I do remember when Black music was called "soul music", and I even remember when it was called "rhythm and blues". Maybe they call it urban music to distinguish it from country music, although most of that comes from Nashville. I have never been  to Nashville, but I think it's pretty urban. The reason I said that racial conflict is an urban problem was because that's where most of it seems to happen. Maybe it also happens in the country, but you never hear about it. Sherlock Holmes once said something about evil lurking in the moors and heather because there are few witnesses and fewer policemen out there, but of course he lived in London. As you once pointed out, though,  Northern Michigan is mostly White, so how could we have racial problems? We do seem to have our share of drug addicts and child molesters, though, so maybe rural people are not more virtuous than urban people after all.

It takes me at least an hour to write one of these blogs, but that includes the time spent in the garage smoking cigarettes and thinking about what I'm going to write next. I used to be able to write faster when I smoked in the house, but it turns out that's no good for the computer. Too bad, the journalists in those old movies smoked like chimneys and it seemed to enhance their productivity. They didn't need no fancy computers either, they had those old clackety clack typewriters, and it didn't slow them down a bit.