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Comment by nickbauman | Hacker News Reader

The article is missing the forest for the trees. It assumes morality is relative. Morality is the product of the intersection of narrative and mythology on a group. Morality is the story a particular group (or civilization) is enacting: the program they're executing. All groups hold myths. Even atheist groups hold myths. They just think their myths are just "the world" or "reality" or "how we got here". Civilizations that have (generally) nurturing, curious, equanimous, generative, cooperative myths survive and grow. Civilizations that have (generally) destructive, punitive, insular, judging, self-righteous, and violent myths don't.

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Civilizations that have (generally) destructive, punitive, insular, judging, self-righteous, and violent myths don't.

This seems to be the opposite of history. Until recently, violence was one of the only ways for any civilization to persist. The advent of nuclear weapons changed that somewhat (but not if civilizations begin to use them). And most of the myths of a civilization seem to be a byproduct of their actions.

Despite complaining about the Quakers below, I'd have to disagree here, too. It's possible to be too peaceful, but it's also possible -- and very easy and common -- to be too violent.

Being warlike enough to defend your society is one thing; being warlike enough to conquer neighbors who hate you, or to throw away lives and wealth in pursuit of glory, is something else. Sparta, Assyria, and the Aztec Empire didn't turn out so well, after all...

In the case of the Aztecs, they quite arguably happened to run into someone even more destructive, punitive, insular, judging, self-righteous, and violent then they were.

Cortez and his 300-odd men could never have taken down the Aztecs, were it not for how all their neighbors hated them so passionately that they'd rather be ruled by smelly, strange-looking, gold-hungry space aliens.

Far more important were the western diseases they had no idea they were carrying

The diseases certainly had an effect (after the Night of Sorrow and before the conquest of Tenochtitlan, smallpox struck the whole Valley of Mexico); but Tlaxcala had an effect too, and if the Aztecs' subject peoples had rallied to their arms in the same way the Tlaxcalans rallied to the Spanish (after some initial fighting against them), there's no way Cortez could have won.

The Aztec civilization was already in a massive decline for over 150 years when Cortez arrived.

The Aztec Empire wasn't even 150 years old; if memory serves, Tlacallel flourished about 80 years before Cortes. Nor were they in decline -- Montezuma had stopped the empire's opportunistic conquests, and was focused on conquering the independent countries that still formed pockets of resistance geographically surrounded by the Aztecs. Tlaxcala was the most important of these, as it happens...

The empire is not the civilization. The civilization arguably goes back more than 1000 years, certainly since the Toltecs, which was a considered successor and collector of the Olmec, Teotihuacano and Maya people's cultures. The Aztecs themselves considered the vanquished Toltec their cultural superiors. By the time Montezuma II came to power, the Aztec world was already winding down, consumed by resource wars; and had entered a period of insular medieval-like culture that shunned their once great, open cities in favor of fortress-like enclaves.

Didn't Sparta get taken down by Macedonia. Who in turn got taken down by Rome? Sparta existed for ~500 years.

By that standard, we have extremely few dynasties who could be called "successful" these days. But I do agree that transitioning from very warlike to just somewhat warlike tends to help survival.

Sparta _existed_ for 500 years; they flourished for zero. They existed at the cost of innumerable distorted or ruined lives, and contributed nothing to the human patrimony except possibly the idea of totalitarianism (which is not much of a contribution).

They fell well before the Macedonians, too: a commander of a minor city -- Corinth, I think -- noticed that the Spartans always used the exact same tactics, deployed his troops in a preposterous formation that ensured that the Spartans would lose if they changed nothing, and won decisively. The Helots immediately revolted and recovered their independence, and that was the end of Sparta.

Your claim brings to mind the idea that a man falling from a 50 storey building passes the 25th floor thinking "Everything is going great so far!"

Case in point: Nassim Taleb, The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dominance of the Stubborn Minority

http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf

Since "myth" has massive connotations of "it isn't true", I'd sooner use "worldview" for what you're speaking of. (Or "Weltanschauung" if you don't mind being hard to spell in English.)

Atheist world views aren't true (in general). I know dozens who (claim to) believe in Darwinism and evolution and yet claim that we can (and should) protect species from extinction.

Yet an argument based on Darwinism that we can't fight extinctions by compensating for maladaptation is so blindingly obvious ... Compensating for maladapted species will need an amount of resources that evolves exponentially over time, even if the numbers of the "saved" species don't increase. Therefore it will fail, it is only a question of time.

Atheists at least see that particular myths are utilitarian. To make a society work and produce, for instance. Or to make a society fight, like some other religions. But they fail to look in the mirror and see that their myths are utilitarian as well, and when they are true, that's not a great factor in their adoption. Belief systems are like computer viruses : correctness, correct use of the system, style of the code doesn't matter (in fact it is often an obstacle). What matters is whether the code spreads.

And just like atheist myths can be true, religious myths can be true. The bible contains quite a bit of true history, and I would argue at least a bit of good advice. It also contains lots of instructions for various things, from architecture to agriculture, and those instructions work, even if they can be said to not be perfectly optimal. Likewise, you can make an argument that the quran contains instructions for warfare that are certainly not stupid, even if some of those tactics make "realpolitik" look like two girls trying to feed bambi.

Of course the above is the non-cynical view of their position. The cynical view would be that conservation is not in fact done to help species, but rather to increase the luxuries surrounding rich conservationists. That conservation efforts are just a very expensive 50" tv, and the beneficiaries of conservation efforts will be chucked in the bin when something else catches our fancy just like said tv.

>article ... assumes morality is relative

I didn't get that from the article. The author seems to have looked at how people justify violence and found they gave moral explanations. Whether their morality is relative or absolute doesn't seem that important to the argument.

Yes, exactly. It's an article about the psychology of violence, not morality. It's point is that people who commit violence believe themselves to be moral. ie, they are acting in accordance with whatever system of morality they happen to hold. Their actions might be totally immoral according to another morality system, but that person is still moral in their own mind.

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