Composing Morality

• In Eucivic Morality, we looked at the characteristics of a eucivic morality.  For a morality to be eucivic, it must function to increase both the quality of its human capital and the growth in its institutional leverage.
• Yet it is not enough to simply characterise a desired morality.  For it to function, it is necessary to actualise that morality in a people, together in a place.
• To achieve this requires a level of detail well beyond the characteristics described, yet detail that produces those characteristics as an outcome.
• Consider at first the task of changing your own moral basis. This first requires recognition of specific aspects you wish to change, then holding a new frame in the face of your existing morals, until the frame is internalised.
• Moreover, doing this for a people requires undertaking that process in community. It’s going to be messy. To change morals requires a period of intentional immorality.
• Yet we see morals change — more specifically, we see morals decay — on an ongoing basis as a community interacts.  Not everyone has to be intentionally immoral, there just has to be leadership and exhortation in that direction.
• Moving towards degeneracy is downhill though; it merely requires the removal of constraint.  Moving morality towards an Order is uphill, and requires a driving force, an urgency. There is a reason morality typically becomes ordered under conditions of hardship, and disordered in the face of abundance.
• Thus to create an ordered, eucivic morality, take a group under existential threat and then provide a functional basis by which that threat can be overcome as a group.
• While that seems harsh — and artificially imposing it would be — there are more and more groups in the world that are under existential threat. It behoves us to locate these groups and work with them, both to provide them with a moral basis by which that threat can be overcome, and to gain experience in composing moral basis.
• It seems reasonable to anticipate that under the conditions of modernity we currently face, more and larger groups will continue to come under and realise that they are under existential threat, that their extant moral basis has been inadequate to prevent.  Upgrades are going to be required; upgrades are going to be valuable, if not necessarily valued.

END