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Morals or ethics

By John Turner - posted Friday, 11 July 2008


Had man been born of a fallen angel, then the contemporary predicament would lie as far beyond solution as it would lie beyond explanation. Our wars and our atrocities, our crimes and our quarrels, our tyrannies and our injustices could be ascribed to nothing other than singular human achievement. And we should be left with a clear-cut portrait of man as a degenerate being endowed at birth with virtue's treasury whose only notable talent had been to squander it. But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished? The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

Ardrey first wrote that comment in his African Genesis in 1961. Fifteen years later in 1976 he included the passage, unaltered, in The Hunting Hypothesis and commented:

Much has happened in the sciences since I published those lines for it has been a time of discovery and controversy. Just as in the time of Darwin himself, the evolutionist has been drawn, quartered, boiled in oil, burned at blithe stakes. We are pessimists; we endanger the human future. Yet I can today no more discover pessimism in those lines when I wrote them in 1961. Man is a marvel- yet not so marvellous as to demand miraculous explanation.

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I cannot help but wonder what unworthy influence has kept Ardrey’s writings out of the school syllabus. His grammar and sentence construction is excellent and the evidence he presents thought provoking. Possibly that is a problem for those of an indoctrination mindset.

As a society we need to do all we can to improve the development of ethics in our children and choose honest and the easiest ways to do so. We need to ensure just teachers, and teaching practices with no indoctrination, and just rules and just coaches and referees in sport.

A major improvement could be achieved over time in the ethics of our society by the introduction of one modern concept into education from Year-1, Philosophy for Children. That concept will allow those children with well developed concepts of justice and ethics, probably from families with the best educated and most enlightened parents, to have increased influence in the lives of those children less advantaged.

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About the Author

John Turner has an applied science degree on top of a diploma in metallurgy.

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