Auckland Clip 3: The Dawning of the Moral Sense

It's not all that happens though when they eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because it's not called the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of nakedness. It's called the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

And I thought about that for a tremendous amount of time. It's like, what in the world? Because I assumed these old stories make sense. You know, it's a game I play. It's like they're old. They've been around a long time. I'm not sure why they're there, but there they are; they're at the basis of our culture, like many, many of the stories that we depend on.

Depend on them; our whole culture grew out of their roots, let's say, and so I assume that our ancestors, who managed to survive conditions that would have done a lot of us in very rapidly— I can tell you—were a lot smarter than we think.

And that the mysterious processes that produce these stories and compelled us to remember them are a lot more psychologically significant than we generally tend to presume. So I give them the benefit of the doubt and try to understand why it is that they might make sense instead of assuming that they don't. And that's not easy, as they are complicated stories.

And so I thought about this nakedness, knowledge of good and evil idea for a very, very long time, like about 20 years, puzzling it out. What the hell is the relationship between discovering that you're naked and discovering good and evil? And then one day, mostly because of studying totalitarianism and the atrocity that proclivity for people to commit atrocity in the service of their group belief— or maybe just because that's what they were like—clued me in, and I thought, I see.

This is one of the things that really makes people different than animals. It's like, you know, it's one thing to realize that you're naked. To realize that you're naked means that you know that you're limited in time and space, that you're mortal and that you're subject to degeneration and to social humiliation and to your own harsh judgment—all of that nakedness—to know that you're vulnerable against the world and definitely a source of shame because of that.

And a felt lack of self-sufficiency. And then, no wonder, and no wonder it's understandable. But the other thing is that this is—and this is the rub—it's like if you're out in the veldt and you're not being very careful and a hungry lion jumps on you and eats you, you don't really think of the lion as evil. I mean, you might right at that moment, but you know philosophically, it's not evil. It's just hungry.

And as soon as it's not hungry, then it goes and has a sleep, and it's not up to some malevolent trick. It's done for the day. But human beings, that's a whole different sort of creature. And because human beings are capable of doing terrible things to someone else and consciously so, you think, well, what's the connection between that and nakedness itself?

And it seems to be this—is like, here's the thing: once I realize that I can be hurt, you know, I have a self-conscious model of my own vulnerability. Then I can generalize that to other people. I can think, oh, this is interesting. Here's how I can be hurt by myself. Here's how I can be hurt by society. Here's how I can be hurt by nature and by the unknown.

And what that implies is that, well, you can be hurt with exactly the same mechanisms, and that, indeed, immediately becomes part of my—what would you say?—my repertoire of ability. And then all of a sudden the world is no longer a walled garden and a well-watered place, but it's a moral story.

Because with that ability to inflict suffering comes the knowledge of good and evil. As far as I'm concerned, those are identical propositions because now we have the choice—a deep choice—about how we're going to treat ourselves and each other.

We can inflict tremendous pain and suffering on each other in a very voluntary and conscious manner in a way that no other animal can manage. And that's the dawning of the moral sense: that capacity we now have to choose to mitigate or exaggerate suffering. And that's not all, but it's a huge part of it.