27. Duties Done

Synopsis - Four kids on a round-the-world holiday tell Mom they'd write home. All four do but none of their letters reach home. Have they fulfilled their moral obligations?

Nice names. I was looking for some kind of code in Hew, Drew, Sue and Lou.

Anyways, Baggini explains that the story of simple letter writing and non-receipt has greater implications to bigger moral issues. Kinda freaky but the extrapolation is valid.

All four kids made attempts to communicate with their mother and through no or little fault of their own, no letter made it to mom. Their intention though genuine, sincere and manifested, the intended outcome did not materialise. Is this a question of responsibility? All four kid did as required of them. So in their minds, it's a non-issue. "Yeah Mom, I wrote. What nothing came through? Shucks"

It sounds a little like politics. When it's time for elections, politicians may promise the Earth and when it comes to deliver, no one really knows what happened down the line. "Yeah, I promise to clean up the streets." and months later, "I blame the police for not seeing this through." (Sorry, I am generalising. Too much Law & Order).

The example Baggini brought up was about calling off a nuke attack. Ok, that is a very big difference. The Chief of the Nuke Forces better listen to the President then and execute orders immediately, dammit. So follow through, is that what we should be concerned about? Expectations of performance come into play. I was a Project Manager in a digital agency for 3 years and it that time, I understood what it means to see things through all the way to the end. Yes, you need to trust everyone you work with to do their job but my job was to question and check every step of the way. Just like Hew, Drew and Lou trusted different sets of people down the 'postal line' to facilitate the transfer of each letter, we all have to trust that people do their job too. Especially managers and bosses. Else nothing would work. Society would fumble back to cavemen times.

If something didn't work, who's fault would it be? As a PM I would look at the problem in steps - who did what, who didn't do what, what did happen, what didn't happen what didn't the PM do. That's all logical and clinical. Hew could go confront his friends. Lou could go see someone in the post office.

But we all have expectations, appropriately measured, for all aspects of our interactions. The kids had to rely on the postal service to fulfill their moral duty. Maybe they would or wouldn't expect the letters to get delivered because of past experiences. In Singapore, the postal service guarantees local mail arrives the next day unless there's a problem. Most Singaporeans have come to have this expectation of service too. I have to trust the eggs are fresh when I buy them at the market because I wouldn't know if they are. My moral duty ends when I had the money over, I think.

This is also why Fedex, UPS and DHL make a lot of money. Trust them to get things delivered.

26. Pain's Remains

This is a good chapter - it helps us think a lot about what pain means and what its consequences are, beyond the physical but the emotional and ethical.

When we grow up we learn that pain hurts. We touch something sharp and cut ourselves, the bacteria on the outside start to attack and our nervous systems reacts by sending pain signals to the brain. Kids cry, adults not so much. We touch something hot and we reflexively jerk away the offended hand. Apparently, the reflex happens before the brain can tell you it hurts (I read this in another book). So pain is important in letting us know what hurts the body.

If hurting is suffering then idea of ethical treatment of animals holds sway. Killing animals is not nice but we do it for food, protection and maintain the balance of some predator/prey numbers. There are some arses who kill for fun and those guys deserve to be shot in the knees. Vegetarians probably have a field day rubbing it in, that were bad people to eat meat. It's also harmful to the environment it seems, to eat meat. I try to ensure its quick when I get that roach. Not hurt the animal so much. Like in those movies where the kid is crying as farmer dad has to put down the hurt horse.

The kid in that movie is shattered emotionally. Just like people who have fallen out of love, it hurts. That pain of loss or rejection stays with you for a long time. The hearts tears and the brain etches the scar of that pain forever. Time heals all wounds but the scar remains. So what that pain does is that it helps us learn about what hurts the heart. Pain that may help us with future interactions or cause us to shun contact.

So is having no pain good? The story somehow justifies not having the memory of pain but harm is being done to the body (so that it can heal later). Not using anaesthesia is a great thing. But it is worrisome that someone could do something to you and you not feel it. It somehow makes us less human i feel.

Remember that guy in the Bond film who got hurt in the head such that he couldn't feel pain? Some Russian dude. He was a baddie and he would grab hot metal to prove a point to his minions and victims. Feeling no pain made it easy for him to hurt other people. It made him robotic and clinical in his mission. Heartless perhaps.

If the memory of pain and how our brain processes memories is more relevant to the experience of pain and the learning behind pain, then yes, different creatures would "feel" pain differently. But I guess that how we evolved up the evolutionary ladder - to recognise pain and treat it; to remember pain and not repeat what caused it; and not to inflict pain on others. Some of us haven't evolved, clearly.

25. Buridan's an ass

Odd description for a man in eventual peril. Well maybe because he is in peril of himself.

This is an interesting story followed by an equally thought-provoking explanation from the author. So it seems that sometimes we mix up the idea of non-rational and irrational - that's the take-away. That's fair.

The story's dilemma of the coin toss and the explanation's example of herbal medicine are clear instances of using non-rational means to solve a problem. There could be more such situations I guess like why some people like their yolks squishy and some don't. Preferences we can't explain but meet a need.

Can processes be irrational though? A coin toss is non-rational but it helps us choose between two equally-weighted options. If we has to toss a coin, hop on one foot, sing the national anthemn and only accept the result if the coin hit the ground and bounced off in a westerly direction, that would be irrational I imagine.

24. Squaring The Circle

The God introduced to us in this chapter is a very tough God. He sounds very early Biblical, circa Moses' time, or one of those that lived on Mount Olympus. They seemed to be able to command mankind at whim and fancy, usually at the threat of untold misery in the form of miraculous catastrophes.

As cavemen developed into mankind in societies, we needed explanations for many natural occurrences around them. LIghtning and thunder became manifestations of anger of the higher powers, so were disease, famine and war. Blessings from the gods came in the form of good weather, bountiful harvests and accidental discoveries of gold. It was easy to attribute these occurrences to religion. A society where followers of a dominant religion were prosperous and powerful were often described as blessed by the Gods and thus had the right to impose themselves on others.

Anyway, what I am trying to get at is, early man needed God to explain things he could not fathom. It was easy to do so. Animism, and some religions like Hinduism and Catholicism, and many superstitions factor highly on the 'work of higher powers' scale to validate certain practices. We were asked in junior college, "Did Man create God or did God create Man?". That really got us thinking.

The science came along. Since some bloke said the Earth went around the Sun and got in trouble with the Church, there has been no let up in the revisions organised religion has had to do to keep 'up-to-date' with popular belief and the rationality we in the 21st century have come to subscribe to. I recently read a book Why the Toast Always Lands Butter-Side Down: The Science of Murphy's Law by Richard Robinson which explained many phenomena we had come to accept as bad luck or Murphy's Law - even why bad things happen in threes.

Yes, by definition we cannot square a circle. That amount of logic requires us to be rational about it. Being rational about things we have to deal with helps us get through life. Being irrational will probably make one lose friends. But being rational and logical about everything will turn most of us into atheists bent on applying science and reason. It might be interesting to find out how many physicists are religious.

So we need reason to live our lives, but faith to believe in and not get too far ahead of ourselves. I bet there are some people who can compartmentalise their logic and faith bits, and turn them on and off at the right time. It helps them get by. If you take religion as a way to basic ethics and to differentiate good and bad, and perhaps to build communities, the pain of questioning God in light of science and reason goes away.

An Apology

I have not been attending to this blog for a long long time. I'm sorry. I stopped writing since my PDA died and it was a habit I had - reading each story on the way to work and writing out my opinion straight into a digital format on my PDA. The demise of my PDA somehow made me stop altogether. And the book had been gathering dust.

Since my last post I have been receiving comments on my posts and lately, there have been too many to ignore. Better yet, there have been comments that spark debate and discussion - brilliant! Certainly one of my initial aims for setting up this blog. Thank you for your comments and ideas.

So I am going to take this seriously once more and hope not to let apathy or laziness take over. A Sunday afternoon ritual for 2009.