The Organic Morality Of Social Sustainability 10 The culture change that will evolve from the introduction of the Clinics for Sustainable Families will provide the initiative for the realignment of social policies, statutes, and common law considerations throughout all democratic nations. While the development of socially functional families will initiate that culture change, the more powerful culture change will be in the social evolution of social, political, and economic institutions. As this will be new territory for the institutions of education, healthcare, justice, government, politics, and economics, a rational and integrated means of examining their respective issues will be essential to the full integration of a democratic society that is moving toward social sustainability. Fortunately, a code of decision-making based on the values that have sustained our species will provide that strategic tool — the Organic Morality of Social Sustainability.
“Organic Morality” simply means that the seven values of social sustainability are organic to Homo sapiens and have been the decision-making criteria that have successfully sustained humans for approximately 200,000 years. Used regularly for decision-making, these values become a way of living and of making decisions, a morality. Because this morality is based on the values that are as ancient as our species, it is a humanist morality and not associated with religions or social institutions.
When consistently used by individuals, organizations, and social institutions to make every-day decisions as well as strategic decisions, these values have the capability of giving all organizations, governments, and whole societies the same ageless sustainability as our species. Used consistently, these values will move our families, communities, and societies toward social stability, peace, and social sustainability in terms of centuries and millennia.
Bad code. The word “morality” in this context is defined simply as an integrated “code” for making consistent decisions. Think of these values as the basis for a “social computer language” for solving social problems, similarly as computer code uses numbers to solve mathematical problems. The traditional morality of western civilization for the last 4,000 years is a form or morality that is “bad code” meaning that it may solve some problems but not others, and it may solve problems inconsistently depending upon who is using it. As you can imagine, because there are literally tens of thousands of social problems being handled in civil and criminal courts each week, there is little consistency for understanding “what is fair,” and how to determine “social justice,” and “social equity,” or “the common good.” And, as we know too well, raging social, political, and economic controversies without understandable resolution continue unabated.
Evolving computer codes began before FLOW-MATIC invented by Grace Hopper, to COBOL, BASIC, Pascal, C, and contemporarily to SQL, Java, JavaScript, C#, and Python to name a few. Yet the “social computer language” of many billions of people has languished in its most archaic form for many centuries. To make a vast understatement, wouldn’t it be interesting if we could invent a new social computer language that could actually be written as computer code to help humans make moral decisions that inherently bring about the general good for everyone? What must occur first is to understand the “language of human motivation” the motivation that is indigenous to each and every Homo sapiens who has ever lived and all those who become the next generations on our planet.
This new form of morality inherently aids the material and social sustainability of humans, whether individually, in families, societies, or as a civilization. Individuals who are interested in computer languages and solving complex social problems may find this a challenge, but a very beneficial one when they discover how easy it is to use. This morality provides a means for option-development, choice-making, decision-making, and action-implementation that supports material and social sustainability. Essentially it is a decision-making process that is consistent with the best attributes of our species and benefits social evolution. And, yes, there are “rules” that support those outcomes.
Moral cognitive dissonance. Because the values that have sustained our species were not identified until 2008, very few people can speak easily about them and the repercussions involved in using them. The values that most people use, whether they live in democratic nations or otherwise, are peripheral and disconnected, that fail to be of much assistance to making consistent, humane, and socially sustainable decisions. Because values underlie all decision-making, it is no wonder that we see such disparate decision-making among and between nations and even members of the same family.
The seven values that have sustained our species and provided the motivation for social, technical, material, and economic “progress” exist as an integral, mutually self-supporting system of values. They are fundamental to healing existent social disparities, and to creating socially stable, even affable, relationships, from the levels of the intra-personal to the international. When used together, these values become an integrated system of values that will provide consistent results.
Cognitively, the morality of social sustainability is as similar to traditional morality as trigonometry is to basic arithmetic. …and you remember what a cognitive leap that took to get your mind around! The words are the same, but their new relationship usually causes a cognitive break in the thought processes of listeners and readers. The usual response is a blank stare by the listener, then “Huh?” and a gap in the conversation. What follows requires a much higher rationality of thought than the traditional knee-jerk moral responses of past centuries.
Decision-Making – The historic, perennial failure of all organizations.Using the morality of social sustainability bears down upon decision-making. Decision-making in the 3rd millennium will become far different from the decision-making of all preceding millennia of human history. Why? Simply because there will be no society or nation that will survive without making far more effective and proactive decisions that lead organizations and societies to become self-sustaining, peaceful, stable, and eventually socially sustainable.
The archaic, traditional morality. As all decision-making is values based, the sole reason for the long history of organizational failure is due to the underlying, interpreted values used to make those decisions. Those values do not support organizations to become self-sustaining and sustainable. In a few words, the traditional morality of western civilization has produced inconsistent results from narrowly considered decisions using a set of values that were inaccurately interpreted from the organic values of our species.
The bottom line for all decision-making is in this order: survival, existence, continued existence, self-sustainability, and perpetual social sustainability. This applies to individuals as it does to governments and profit-making businesses. But without a consistent set of values for making integrated, consistent, systems-capable decision-making that supports sustainability, then those organizations will face eventual extinction.
A pivotal time for social evolution. This is the first time in the history of our planet that it has become fully occupied, and at a time when the old problems of national sovereignty, militarism and its increased capability for swift and violent action, belligerence of national leaders, violent radical social, political, and economic groups, and many more have not been resolved. In other words, we live in an ongoing violent, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) global situation with no one capable as a referee or facilitator of peace and social, political, and economic stability. That highly desired outcome is impossible when no one is using a universal set of values that is applicable to everyone of every race, culture, ethnicity, nation, and gender.
This is a critical time for decision-making that could lead to the peaceful social evolution of social institutions, political entities, and economic policies. This is a time when a proven set of integrated and universally applicable values must be presented to the world as a social-systems morality that is applicable to the holism of all human activity. Necessarily, the values that form such a morality must be capable of being easily used by the average citizen in every local community to validate their decisions and those of their public executives, and the decisions of corporations.
It is foreseeable, as the U. N. and the “Club of Rome” have determined decades ago, that there surely is a “terminal point of time” for the erroneously assumed continuation of “sustainable growth.” Such an assumption will be seen eventually as the stuff of grand ignorance, (Al Bartlett, professor emeritus, University of Colorado), the kind of ignorance that is existentially incurable except by the demise of the cultures that support it. The alternative view is not utopian but pragmatically linked to the practices and morality of social sustainability, with organically consistent moral decision-making that produces sound social policies.
10 Raphael, Daniel. Organic Morality – Answering the Critically Important Moral Questions of the 3rd Millennium. (An unpublished manuscript. Available as a PDF.)