This is half philosophy, half morals, and half science. Those are three different paradigms in different dimensions of thought so that statement isn't as wrong as it looks. There sort of are three halves here. What makes a person who they are? The nature/nurture discussion. How much is genetic, and how much is upbringing and experience? This is all my opinion and lots of it are facts in my head, but they might not be true facts and whatever. Using that context to read about more context, here we go. It gets around to the topic eventually. I don’t think in direct lines, sorry.
Our brains are pattern matching machines with a little skiff on top that holds our sense of self, our awareness, but mostly our brains match patterns. Watch a small child taking a drink of water from a cup. They have to figure out how every muscle flex affects the movement of the glass to their mouth. They are programming their brain with patterns. After their brain figures out all that coordination stuff, the brain just executes that pattern when there is a glass near them and they are thirsty. Everything we ever do, physically, follows that pattern matching paradigm. It is why practicing at something makes you better - whether it is physical or mental. The main evolutionary purpose of that rational bit is to take over in emergencies, when a pattern falls apart, and do 'something'. That 'something’ is why it had to figure out how to figure stuff out.
If you're driving along the road somewhere, carrying on a conversation with the person beside you in the car, and the truck in front of you slams on his breaks and starts fishtailing and stuff, the pattern breaks - your rational brain comes up with something to do, some other pattern to match the situation with, or something rational, or it just freezes, whatevs. You will have absolutely no clue as to what the last bit of your conversation was about, because the amygdala was short circuited in the emergency and you literally never coded whatever you were talking about and placed it in memory. As far as your brain is concerned, it never happened.
If you have seen trucks swerve in front of you so many times that your brain has coded a pattern to follow when that happens, you don't have a problem remembering the conversation, and might not even stop talking until you finish your thought. That's the reality (as far as I understand at this moment of time) of how the brain works. Everything we (our society) thought we new about how the brain worked fifteen or twenty years ago turned out to be way too much of a simplification and kinda wrong. The functional MRI has totally revolutionised our understanding of that wonderfully complex cross-linked neural net we call a brain.
That thing that we perceive as 'our mind', the home of our consciousness, is that emergency action bit on top of the pattern matching stuff, which sits on autonomic and emotional stuff, even further down. The hugely massive majority of the things we do during our existence never touch our consciousness, they are pure pattern matching. We can train ourselves to trigger our consciousness at certain events, and intervene or interrupt our pattern matching, but we usually don't unless a pattern breaks. Racism and sexism and most -isms are patterns we never think about in the moment, we just let our patterns do their thing. It is unconscious bias. That (object of bias) is from another tribe/group/sex so is ‘other’ to me, and I don’t have to treat them like I would treat myself or my brother.
Compared to most species, humans have children really really early. We do a ton of physical development outside the womb - after we are born. That includes lots of physical development in our brains along with our bodies. If we took a fully matured human - physically and in brain structure - and gave birth to one that way (in some artificial environment, cus it would be hard on a mother), what would we end up with in the moment of birth? A weak, not very agile, not very fast, very adaptive animal. It would starve to death very quickly, but would already be dead from thirst by then, so it wouldn't matter. That corpse is a self made man. They do not exist in this world.
Without knowledge we are helpless and inept at everything. Where do we get our knowledge? Our parents, or school, our community - the society. That individual takes that learning and experience they have while growing up and eventually becomes an adult. The society has produced that adult, and what it knows, and what it has experienced are a result of that society. During that period, we put together observations and knowledge and gain understanding of lots of things. That understanding is really valuable, and that individual may be the only person on the planet that has come up with a particular understanding, or the one who shares it, so get 'credit' for it. Einstein. Newton. Da Vinci et al. are famous examples.
My view isn't 'my view' in an ownership sense. Rather, it is the way I have synthesised what I know into a rationally code-able set of ideas, and other people have coded it in similar ways and probably the exact same way somewhere. It's not 'my idea' even if the way I've combined my experience and knowledge and understanding of things is unique. A big part of it belongs to the society that encouraged/disciplined/taught me stuff as I lived within it. Most of it belongs to that society, and is a product of that society.
Should I have copyright on an expression of thought when it mostly belongs to that society? In the sense that I have to eat, so getting a return on the time I've spent becoming an expert (to the degree I have) in a way that might help the society evolve towards a 'better place’, I could get a reward, sure - but that is a practical detail, it is mostly the society that is responsible for that idea - good or ill. That is the context that makes me weary of IP controls as they exist in America and that America has pressured the rest of the world to accept. Knowledge and, even more so, understanding wants to be free within all levels of society, both free as in beer, and free as in speech - to the degree a abstract concept can want anything, whatevs.
Within that context, how much do we owe back into the society we were brought up in? I'd argue, on a moral level, almost everything we have. Now on a practical level, if we tried to live that way, people with different contexts would 'dominate the battlespace', and we wouldn't do very well. We carry the urges and mechanics of our evolution, and if we want to live a 'just life', we have to figure out how to within the reality of that evolution.
/start aside
I’ve used quotes around ‘just life’ and ‘better world’ and stuff because this is blog is already a lot of stuff, and it would get totally derailed - I mean even more than it does by all the other stuff in here, were I to include boundaries for that stuff. Stick something in those considering the golden rule, and not treating others like crap while getting good stuff for yourself and considering fairness and not being a selfish ass, or a violent ass, or any other kind of ass in whatever quantity you’d prefer.
/end aside
On a practical needs level, we need an economy. A social structure that distributes scarce resources throughout a society, and transfers knowledge and spreads understanding so they can penetrate deeply into a society. Competitive Capitalism (note the competitive part, Bezos and Zuck) has proven to work pretty well doing that, but it is not a moral argument, it is a practical one.
In a moral one, if we want that ‘just life’, we should all share what we have and work to the extent of our abilities for the good of the society. We won't because man is only a somewhat moral creature and mostly an amoral animal. It is only that wee little crust of consciousness on top that is capable of fathoming an idea as complex as ‘being a good person’, while dealing with emotions, who totally don’t think that way, trying to do all sorts of crap when the little crust it isn’t paying attention. Most of the brain is just pattern matching away, and your body is doing stuff according to patterns and emotional drivers, and engaging the conscious mind only as needs require, when they need to adjust or fix a pattern.
So what. Well, let’s look at people with skin that isn’t melanin deficient, and indigenous peoples in North America. Stealing a line from a friend of mine while discussing indigenous people. He said we need a solution better "...than giving the indigenous people continued free rides as we say ’sorry’ forever. We need a plan to wean them off of being a burden to society.” Now he is a really kind and awesome guy, and I view that response as mostly a pattern matching reflection of society. Institutional, structural racism. Unconscious bias. I’m hoping he reconsiders, and have asked him to. In fact most of this blog was written as the form of me asking. That is why it is about indigenous relations primarily, but all of it is applicable to everything.
If we wanted an amoral solution to societal stresses with the indigenous people, a few generations of taking away indigenous children and giving them to others to raise, or hell, just killing them all would work. We have tried variations of this (our society has) and I think it is a very good we failed. The society’s guilt for such an act would be even more wearing than we carry for just trying to. Personally, I'd rather die fighting those things, than see that happen. So what do we do in a moral universe where we want to have a ‘just life’. How do we improve the present lived reality, in a morally acceptable way.
My colleagues and university friends are all experts at technical things. The practical ability that expertise gives is to imagine a future state of something in the context of available interventions, and make that future state a reality. If we write computer code in a particular way, if someone fills a form, it will be moved into a database, and make collating information of a particular type automatic-ish. If we add a chemical reactant to that other one and form the result in a particular way, it will produce a good we can sell for a good price. It is the nature of applied science / engineering to make predictions, and come up with a way to move events/goods/labour/energy whatevs, using knowledge and understanding, to a particular conclusion. It is the part of politics (policy), medicine, and a lot of other occupations.
Now we get into a confusing bit, where we have a society (indigenous) that presently sits both along side the rest of Canadian society, and within it. This is part of discussing this kind of topic, and is part of it being a topic with three halves. There is a Western Society that includes parts of Europe and Australia et. al. and local societies and tribes and families and they all exist separately and within each other. There are parts of Canadian society that I personally don’t like/hate/love/like/oppose and a bunch of other verbs-ish stuff and I am still fully part of the Canadian society. Let’s just accept that can all works somehow and continue, cus otherwise it makes my brain hurt.
So let’s use knowledge and understanding to work out how we can better interact with the indigenous people and move towards a more ‘just society’. How do we get indigenous society to more seamlessly exist within and beside the broader Canadian society for the ‘betterment’ of all.
The indigenous had a bunch of functional societies in North America, and they interacted in an combined indigenous society (that whole separate, along, and within problem). It all worked in North America before the Western World turned up. The indigenous had rules and training methods, and sharing of knowledge and understanding, and sharing of physical objects, and interaction between distinct other groups that shared many of the same traits. A society. Not always a ‘just’ or ‘pleasant’ society, but societies never are. That would get boring.
So the ‘white man’ comes. Bad things happen to the indigenous people, really bad things. Tribes are destroyed through conflict and disease and their society is crushed. Pockets of indigenous people survive, but there is widespread loss of knowledge and understanding, on top of the physical damage, and restriction of mobility.
Now here is where we throw in a serving of morality. We are all a sum of the knowledge and understanding within our society. Our societies knowledge and understanding was gathered, in part, by the commission of morally indefensible acts, or at least they are indefensible in my morality, you can do whatever you want in your morality and I can’t speak for you, so I’m not. More on that later.
Western society threw, and are continuing to push, the indigenous society out of equilibrium and are constantly picking at their healing wounds. Indigenous society is trying to adjust to western society being next door and interacting with and surrounded theirs. The Indigenous people are trying to adjust and keep their identity alive, because keeping an identity alive is a big player in evolution and is really hard to drive out of a population. ‘Diversity is a strength’ is a belief of Canadian society (there are, regrettably, societies with Canadian society that don’t think so, but it is part of Canadian society on net), so we should work to maintain their society and need to account for it..
Now we trip across fairness. That is another really fundamental drive in humanity - in all primates, in fact. It has been with us as we evolved as a social lubricant for tribal creatures. It is why we need to view another group as ‘other’ before we can treat it horribly (unless we suffer from antisocial personality disorder - a sociopath, colloquially). Different colour, different sex, different preferences, different taste in music, different hair cut, whatevs. It is at the root of tribalism and nationalism (which is just a fancier name for a tribalism).
Is it fair, at this moment, that indigenous people are born into a stressed society? It wasn't their unborn essence that stressed that society. A stress that disconnected a people from the parts of their historical knowledge and understanding and stole most of their physical goods (the most important one, access to the land). Who is at fault for that stress, and do they owe anything to people being brought up in that stressed society.
Do we, hundreds of years later, have any responsibility for the present situation? Our society, that cluster of knowledge and understanding and infrastructure, that made us who we are, and that, morally, we owe almost everything too, is guilty. We, individually, own that guilt as a consequence of accepting the knowledge and understanding from our culture. Morally, I contend, we need to try and help the indigenous heal that wound our ancestors caused, in the best way we can. If we don’t, it is difficult to argue our society is ‘just’.
So how do we progress on that task? We negotiate with them as to what relationship with their stressed society will help them improve their society and help that society heal itself the best it can. We can’t heal it for them, but we can help them heal the wounds our ancestors caused. Previous offers to help created more wounds, so we need to build trust.
The exchange shouldn’t be one way. Indigenous society had a lot of respect for nature, we can learn from that. Not just the 'we should respect nature' thing, but how did they integrate a respect for nature into a stable society? What connection did their religious beliefs, their practical politics, economy et. al. have with that accomplishment? Can we apply any of their societal structures to our society? What other knowledge and understanding do they have that can help make us ‘better’.
Maybe they could learn from us how material wealth, and personal greed can be harnessed into a self correcting economy that generates piles of production. They may be able to better adapt those ideas into their society in a way that doesn’t harm the environment as much as the way Canadian society does. Or they can reject it completely. Whatevs. That’s up to them.
They may consider that the focus on material things makes our society uncivilized, and I'd certainly agree with them. I would point out that many in western society are trying to tame capitalism so it raises all boats, and limits destructive impulses, and towards making some progress towards a 'better’ world. They may think that’s a futile effort. Whatevs again.
Once their society is healed, we may continue to integrate our collective ‘stuff’ and help each other get to a combined ‘better’ place. Diversity is strength. Taking responsibility for the consequences of your ancestors mistakes comes along with exploiting your ancestors knowledge, understanding, and physical infrastructure.
If none of that seems relevant to you, that's fine. I'll assume I didn't explain it well enough and work on my delivery. If none of this makes any sense, let me know cus it means I'm either wrong, or I didn't explain it well. It's hard to explain well.
It certainly all holds for America and the descendants of slaves. Taking the benefits from your ancestors and ignoring their sins is theft. You need to pay the tab. Canadian society has benefited from America's society, and had some slavery here. We are totally obligated here, the same way. Racism coming that isn’t emanating from historical wrongs is I’ve used indigenous societies above because that was the context of the discussion I had with my friend, and that let me cut and paste a lot of this, and I’m lazy.