Spiders and ethics

In class today we started the new topic of ethics with an introductionary discussion. One question that came up was what happens if we take away ethics? How would a society look like without ethics?
Personally, I think it is not possible to achieve. If the definition of ethics is a code of conduct regarding right or wrong, good or bad then the notion of no ethics is simply impossible. In our lives there will always be some things we prefer over something else, were one is right and the other is wrong. We always make choices based on what can be called an ethical code, weather it be personal ethics or the ethics of our country implemented by laws or norms. If we couldn't say that one choice is better than another, we would live in a sort of limbo without progress because right and wrong doesn't exist. Why is it that we have larger equality between men and women today compared to 100 years ago. Because someone thought it was wrong to suppress women and decided to change it. I think ethics deals a lot with what works and what doesn't work. You create a hypothesis and test it. So when people saw that women could actually contribute to society, it turned around and suppressing women became a concept of something wrong. This is how the world changes, when someone thinks that something is right and something else is wrong. Unfortunatly this has also been the case for things like the nazi-regime where something that we now look at as bad or wrong was then for millions of people right and good. This is also an example of how ethics is not something absolute or universal but rather something largely determined by our environment.
We might think that it is innate not to kill another person, but by looking at examples like the one above and for example child soldiers who are trained to kill from they are small and thereby don’t find it wrong, that right and wrong is not something innate but something learnt. Later in our lives, I think that our ethical choices are built both on egoism and on the environmental influences that we underwent earlier. If we use the example we discussed in class of weater to take a job in a well paid bank or in the UN, I believe that what has a major influence is bad conscience. If you were taught that capitalism destroyes the world and that we all need to make an effort to create a better situation for everyone, the bad conscience of going against that ethical value is so great that the money from the other job cannot make up for it. So, to avoid feeling guilty, you would choose the job in the UN. Obviously is not as black and white as that, but I think that our choices, ethical and other, are often built upon unconscious calculations where you weigh potential satisfaction against potential distress. To use the example of killing the spider or not, the distress I would feel by killing a spider would be so minimal that the fear of it creeping into my bed is much greater than the guilt of killing it, so I wouldn’t have hesitated to do so. For other people, plus and minus might weigh completely different and lead to a different choice.

Sorry for the chaos of this post…

Thoughts from an internetcafe

So, its finally happening. I'm doing what I've waited desperatly for for several weeks; I'm travelling with my family! Beside from the fact that it is amazing, it has also almost made me be in favor of dictatorship. We are 6 people travelling together, my parents, my two brothers, my cousin and me. Only 6 people. It shouldn't be so hard should it? Well, it is. Everything takes time. Deciding where to eat takes time, deciding what to see takes time, deciding weather or not to go back to the hotel to take a sweater takes time. Basically, efficiency levels are quite low at the moment. I hate to bring up MUWCI when I'm in such a realm of freedom sitting in an internet cafe in Varanasi( though writing these blogs) but this is exactly what is going on in MUWCI. Our efficiancy levels to get anything done is almost equal to zero just because everyone wants their saying and their personal wishes to come forth. So when I'm in the hotel arguing with my brothers weather to eat chinese or indian, I get deja vu's back to countless student meetings where noone is willing to compromise.

In the case of my family I would suggest dictatorship( with me as the despot of course) but as in MUWCI, the personal ego is too big in everyone to let someone else decide what is best for them. Which I guess can be reasonable since I myself don't trust someone else to know exactly what is best for me at all times either. In society today most people are too much aware of their rights and focused on individuality to let someone else take complete controle over their lives.

The actual problem of efficency is not created when people refuse to be dictated by some one, allmighty character but when this personal ego comes in the way even of choosing representatives to prsent their views in a collective gathering or to an authority. This system, it seems, is plausible to make function in most developed countries, where representatives are chosen by the people in some way or the other. So why cannot this function in MUWCI or in my family for example?

I think this cannot only be explained through huge egoes. According to Mill, though talking about a dictatorship, the less power the people feel they have over their own destinies, the less they care about taking part in desicion-making regarding their own life. I think this notion can clearly be shown in smaller and larger groups of people like let's say MUWCI vs the US, to create a proper contrast. While in the previous US selection only 56,8% voted( despite the huge focus on the election in both media and around the country) in MUWCI, everyone wants to say their opinion on weather to vote or not or weather we should have a student council.

My conclusion is that we in MUWCI are not just a bunch of big-headed people( slightly maybe) but that due to the massive influence we know we have over how things will be conducted on campus, everyone wants to take part because they actually have a saying about what's going to happen( like in other smaller groups like families, small communities etc) compared to again the US or other democracies where people might feel that their vote counts for so little that the effort of getting engaging is not worth it....

Limbo

Another topic which is brought up in 1984, perhaps more in the book than in the movie, is language. Does language shape who you are, and does the limitations of language limit your thoughts? Obviously in the book it is taken to the extreme with a language created to shape a certain way of thinking, but you can also see this in real life, maybe especially here in MUWCI where a lot of us comes from a different language background than English while here we speak it everyday.
Personally, Im currently in a state of limbo. I realized it all too well when I tried to write my World Lit in Norwegian and when my family came to visit me. I dont speak my own language anymore. Ïm searching for the words, maybe finding them in English but not in Norwegian. And, at the same time, my English is not good enough for me to adapt it as a first language. Basically, Im screwed.
But the combination of this state of limbo and living in India, getting to know concepts that does not exist in my language, has also made me realize that I can actually think without words. When youre at home and everyone around you speak your mothertongue, using only familiar expressions, it is harder to be aware of this area where langauge does not play a role, simply because your sourroundings are so familiar and you dont need to expand your notion of conceptions. Your language is adapted to your suroundings.
Exactly because I have this gap of missing words and expressions somewhere between Norwegian and English, Ive realized that even if I dont have the means of explaining it and expressing it orally to other people, be it my friends here in MUWCI or my family, I can formulate thoughts in my head that are abstract and not connected to any language. Obviously it is quite frustrating, because most of your thoughts and ideas you want to communicate them to other people, but it does weaken Orwells idea of that simply by creating a new language, one can shape how people think. Just as I have concepts that I cannot express in any language, even if a completely new language was taught to a child, he or she would still have conceptions and ideas that are outside the range of this language. Of course, the idea of that a society can be controlled by means of language is not that far-fetched, because even if one can formulate ideas, the words are not there and thereby not the communication between people either. And without being able to communicate these ideas, action is difficult and the idea of a government controlling a people in that way is not at all impossible...

Selfinflicted censorship

Since we are watching 1984 in class, I thought it would be appropriate to adress the issue of censorship. Not censorship related to government but to the media and its influence on the information we are provided with.
We like to believe in these liberal time that censorship is something that existed in the past and perhaps in dictatorships like North Korea or communist China. Of course you have the theories of Noam Chomsky saying that media is in fact still censored, but that is not what I would like to adress. I would like to talk about another type of censorship that is more subtle but still influencal as to what information we receive through the media.
The type of censorship Im talking about is happening through the choice and viewpoint of different information related to events reported by media. A good example of what Im talking about can be shown through an article in one of the biggest newspapers in Norway where a political youth organization has decided to sue the Norwegian press association for bad coverage of the climate conference happening in Denmark. The accusation is tsating that Norwegian newspapers only wrote articles concerning the violence and arrest of 200 protestors, not mentioning the 100.000 peaceful protestants that filled the streets of Copenhagen to get their voices heard.
This is only one example of how coverage of an event can be completely focused on a minor detail. And why is this? Because the minor details contain the x-factor that is supposed to and do in fact sell newspapers or attain viewers. It seems as if catastrophe is what we want to hear about, so catastrophe they give us. It makes me wonder if Nietzche was right when claiming that humans find pleasure in other peoples suffering, because it seems as if the greatest entertainmentfactor is people being imprisoned, killed, beaten up etc. And this need for death and destruction leads to what can be called self-inflicted censorship or filtering, that leads us to, in a case like the climate conference in Copenhagen, get the details of how many people were arrested for what violent actions, rather thn what is actually going on and what can have an actual influence on our lives, more than just entertainment...

Balls of cotton

In class we read the article by JS Mill arguing that tyranny leads to passivity because the people don't have a saying in their own lives while Hobbes argues that democracy might lead to passivity due to the idea that your vote doesn't count and that you're not able to make a difference anyways. We can discuss weather passivity is good or bad but at least for a society to progress within the areas of economics and technology it is a necassary factor for people to be active, interested and innovative. In this post I would like to look at how wealth creates passivity and how it affects my country Norway...
Norway is a country rich on oil. After World War 2 we were poor as church mice and had to start everything from scratch. The hard work we had to put in to rebuild our country made us united as a people right untill the mid 1970's when we discovered oil in the North Sea. From that point on, we are to be considered a wealthy nation with the opportunity to create a complex welfaresystem for the Norwegian people. Up untill this point, everything seems fine and dandy. One would think that with so many resources one would be able to build a Utopia of happy-go-lucky people without any problems. Wrong.
The development of our welfaresystem, which other countries drool at, has created a bunch of lazy, passive, uninterested people without any care for their own future( exuse me the lack of patriotism). How? By offering every kind of social assistance in every aspect of our lives, the government has(unintentionally) wrapped every single Norwegian into a ball of cotton so no matter how hard you smash us against the wall, we wont notice anything.
Neglect to wake up for work, get fired and try to find another job so you wont have to sleep on the street. Wrong. If you loose your job, the government will pay you money unntill you can find another job and even get you a job if you're too lazy to find it yourself. You feel sick and you stay at home for a day or two to get better and get back to work. Wrong. Since the government will pay you the same salary from not working if you declare yourself sick, you can get payed for up untill one year without doing anything. In a Utopian society no-one would take advantage of these arrangements and it would all work out fine, but since we're not living in the land of ponies, rainbowes and pink candyfloss fairies, the Norwegian people rip the government off for what it's worth.
One would think that when given such an enormous resource, one would use it to develop other resources that can be utilized when the oil is over, but due to the constant padding by the government we are like kids that will never learn to swim because the floating devices are not taken off. We will never have the need to put any effort into progress because we are in such a comfortable place, buried deep inside our balls of cotton...

Silence

A nice conversation dies down, people looking away, trying to think of something to say but fail. Silence. The most awkward thing one can encounter in Muwci as well as most other social settings. Somehow not having anything to say has become the greatest fear of all, because what are you if you have nothing to say? Boring. A word even worse than silence. Especially here in this place were you're expected to be Superman, Einstein and Leonardo Da Vinci at once. Being one of those people who don't say interesting, smart and original things every hour of the day is even worse than failing your IB, it means that you're boring.
This extreme fear of silence has lead to two things. One, the awkward turtle, where to make things less awkward when the conversation has reached its natural end, one moves ones hands to imitate a turtle in the hope that the gesture will create a conversation-starter( this rarely works and tend to create an even more awkward mood, even in settings where the silence was not awkward). The second, and much more effective, result of the SilenceMonster is bullshit. The sweet salvation we reach for when there is nothing left to say or when the need to show that we are in fact the offspring of Superman becomes too strong. The skill of bullshitting is the most valued skill of all and if you master it well you might even achieve the Nobel Peace Prize just from talking.
Personally, I've gotten a lot better at bullshitting since I came to Muwci but I'm still an amateur, constantly finding myself in situations where I don't have anything to say or where I don't have an opinion, to relate this to democracy. You might shoot me, but I'm not capable of having an opinion of absolutely everything and on certain issues I just don't care. And in those cases, when there is voting involved, why on earth should I screw up the result with my "uneducated" vote when I don't care about the outcome? It would be rather unfair to those actually caring about the result and voting out of actual conviction. Unfortunatly I think we do tend to vote and speak even when we don't have an opinion or anything to say( I can only speak for myself of course). But if we are so active and always have something to say, when do we find the time to think?....

20 grams of chicken and a piece of lettuce

Vietnamese Special Chicken Filet Salad for 200 rupies at a restaurant in Delhi. I felt very exited untill my dish of 20 grams of chicken and a piece of lettuce were set before me by a smiling and slightly condecending vaitor. Is this it, I asked? A nod shattered my hopes that this was some kind of appetizer. I wondered how on earth they could charge 200 rupies for something I had to wear my glasses to be able to see and reached the conclusion that yet another restaurant had become "Sophisticated". Many people have suggested that in the future, the time we now live in will be called the Data Age, but I think the Age of Sophistication would be a better term. After people reach a certain point of satisfying basic needs, the need for something more, something luxurious, something "sophisticated" takes over - a way to stand out of the crowd. It is a constant battle both on a materialistic and an intellectual level to show off your "sophistication" by wearing brand clothes, driving fancy cars or spending hours reading Nietszche, Marx and Tolstoj to be able to talk about at the next dinner party. This phenomena, one would think, could only appear in upper class society but as things are, the strive for "sophistication" is present in almost all parts of society where the basic needs are already covered. A lower middle class woman might not be able to afford a Prada handbag so she buys a fake one to appear "sophisticated".

The actual meaning of sophisticated is "one who pursues wisdom", but today I would say it represents quite the opposite. It is quite funny how after having the priviledge of satisfying our basic needs like for example eating we have gone back to starving for the cause of "sophistication".If to be sophisticated I have to pay per fancy word in the name of the dish rather than the actual food, I prefer being a barbarian having a proper meal at McDonalds.