Sensibility governs justice

Have you ever been to Australia? I was fortunate to visit for two weeks with my wife and youngest daughter.

My takeaway?

Australia makes sense.

It seemed like a sensible country with sensible rules. The idea of ‘sensible’ permeates my experience of this wonderful country.

Sensibility, Reason, Logic, and Science

For a hot minute, I was a philosophy major. Practicality, my father, and the pressures of the status quo convinced me to change my major to something that might get me a job. That’s a long story, but I should have stayed the course.

During my brief study, I learned about different philosopher’s thoughts about how we think. Systems of thinking, if you will. If I recall correctly, different people thought different ways of thinking were better than others. I still think about this, though I can’t say I completely understand what all the others have said.

Humans, though, need a way to interpret the experience of reality in ways that facilitate a shared experience. We are here together. Cooperation is more helpful than competition. To get along together we need some rules.

Defining the rules requires some structure. Spitballing without editing is not always the best approach (though my writing may suggest otherwise). Reason, logic, and science were developed as ways of thinking that follow standardized rules and structure. Science has a precise method of steps and experiments necessary to figure out reality. Without trying to discuss things I don’t understand very well, I’ll just say that there are multiple ways to interpret reality.

Sensory Experience

Each human is unique. Evolution intends this. But we need to interact. As such, we need commonality and standardization of reality. Otherwise, disagreements can come between us and cause all sorts of problems.

How do we balance these subjective and objective realities? What systems allow for and even promote the differences while focusing on some subset that is (mostly) universal?

I refer to this utopian feature as Natural Law. When we ask how or why, should we not consult the natural processes and features that govern our existence? Are biology, ecology, and physics not valuable sources of information? Aren’t millions of years’ worth of evolutionary evidence useful, even when applied to an individual?

The best sources of information I can think of are our senses. Buddhism says there are six: sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and mind. The five are obvious and the mind is simply the integrator of these five.

But our senses are limited. We only see, hear, touch, taste, and smell what our biological hardware allows. Our ears cannot perceive radio waves, our eyes cannot interpret the infrared and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum, and we cannot perceive temperatures or sounds outside a narrow range without injury. Our senses are tactile.

Our mind is also limited. We receive environmental stimuli via our five senses and then interpret and integrate them into our mind and central nervous system. These interpretations are hugely subjective and influenced by how our brains work. This means the reality we perceive is just a perception and might not resemble actual reality at all. Our minds exist simply to protect us and keep us alive so we can reproduce and perpetuate life.

Rules Facilitate Coexistence

I often wonder how male sexuality and the drive to reproduce were regulated in early primate society. Probably, tons of work has been done on this subject but it is necessarily speculative as we have no real evidence. So we are free to wonder what happened.

I imagine sexual maturity in male primates is fraught with the desire to copulate. I mean, we’ve all seen Jersey Shore, right? Anyway, I think shame evolved as a mechanism for regulating these behaviors. I think Jean M. Auel describes a reasonable societal framework for sexuality in her “Clan of the Cave Bear” series, but I wonder what happened after that.

In her books, females simply allowed males to copulate whenever they desired. This seems reasonable at first, but I can’t help but think this was eventually improved upon evolutionarily. I think shame probably evolved as a mechanism to ostracise ‘overexcited’ males and risk exclusion.

As with shame, increasing complexity in the human brain stimulates massive social structure. Social groups require collective reason which can only be achieved collectively. Rules, norms, and laws were invented to manage villages, cities, and global communities.

Unfortunately, modernity saw rules trickling down in the same reductionist direction as everything else. How many rules do we have today around tax structure, for example? Or for avoiding lawsuits? We have moved into the minutia of regulating human behavior.

Natural Law Governs All

They say rules are meant to be broken and I can’t agree more. As a neurodivergent person who experiences Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, I despise rules that make no sense. The intent of a rule matters far more than whether one follows a rule or not. Rules that agree with Nature and evolution make sense and are easier to accept. When rules are meant to protect certain individuals or corporations, I quickly lose interest. Unfortunately, for rules to work, they have to be followed by everyone.

Natural Law promotes species evolution and individual cohabitation. Rules informed by Nature encourage homeostasis and longevity for individuals, groups, and species. Yes, Nature can be violent. But cooperation is far more beneficial than competition. When resources aren’t limited, competition doesn’t exist. There are far more ways to reduce competition than fighting.

Natural Law has developed over millions of years and trial and error. What we see around us today is representative of this process. The easiest example is capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system based on infinite growth. Infinite growth does not, however, exist in nature. The closest thing we can find is cancer, which eventually kills the host.

Why would we implement a system that doesn’t exist in Nature? Because we think we are superior. We believe our complex minds are the ultimate in evolutionary sophistication. We think we can create systems better than Nature.

Redefining Global Values

It isn’t too late to check in with Nature. Most well-run companies and relationships conduct inventories or analytic assessments to determine how things are going. When I worked in conservation, this was referred to as ‘adaptive management’ where, at some interval, we got together and went over what we had done, what we were doing, and what kind of results we were achieving.

Making adjustments as we evolve is critical. It is essentially what Natural Selection does. New individuals, born with unique genotypic and phenotypic features, are assessed by their environments to determine their ability to exist and reproduce. Any system with rules requires this type of check-in. Without periodic assessment, why follow the rules in the first place?

Humans suck at periodic assessment. We assume as system is good and then ignore any results that don’t agree. Homeless people? It’s not capitalism’s fault, it is the individual. Obesity? It isn’t the corporate food business’s fault, it is the individual. It is too easy to gaslight the individual and protect the systems. Especially when the systems benefit the people making the rules.

Systemic rules need to be redefined to promote bottom-up regulation. We, the people, need rules we agree with. A value shift from large corporations to single human beings is a good start. Accepting rules that don’t benefit you is difficult at the least. It doesn’t make sense to protect a giant company instead of myself and my family. I need rules that make sense to me and my fellow human beings.

It is past the time to reframe our global systems and associated rules to protect individuals at the bottom. The end user, if you will. If the rules are made for us, we may be more likely to follow them. A value system that includes periodic assessment instead of doubling down on the existing rules may facilitate positive change.

Originally published on Medium