The source of your personal morality

[Maria]

Books had an inordinate amount of influence on my moral development, since my parents raised me without any exposure to religion at all, and didn't teach me much themselves either. Other than, "If you kill it, you have to eat it" and ,"No fighting, no biting" I was pretty much left in a moral vacuum. Culture didn't play much of a role, either, since my adolescent and teen years were spent living in the back woods with no television or telephone and few near neighbors to associate with. My only associations with other kids were at school.

I read all Robert Heinlein's books as an early teen, and they filled the gap for me. Later on I got burned, as many of his philosophies aren't really workable in real life. I also read Tolkien in the same timeframe, but it didn't make much of a difference, morality-wise. Good and bad are pretty clear cut in there.

I had started reading the Tarzan novels in 3rd grade (about 8 years old) and they definitely molded me. Even before we moved out into the woods, I was primed to believe that understanding animals was a good thing as was climbing trees half naked and going barefoot all the time. That being a wild thing was a good thing. I went one whole summer never brushing my (long) hair once. I paid for it when my mom finally sat me down and detangled me for school starting up that fall. She made me wear braids for quite a while after that, as a preventative.

Anyway, people pull their ideas of right and wrong from all over. If some avenues are blocked, they'll rely more heavily on the sources they do have.

[sauronsfinger]

from Maria

I read all Robert Heinlein's books as an early teen, and they filled the gap for me. Later on I got burned, as many of his philosophies aren't really workable in real life.

I am with you on that. When I got out of college I only wanted to read fiction - being a poli sci major - and having my fill of political theory as a senior. So I too read a stack of Heinlein and liked him as a writer. But as a philosopher - no thanks.

Probably the single fiction book that made the greatest impact on me was Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH. Wow! I can still remember passages from it even now. As far as non-fiction goes, Arthur Schlesinger wrote THE CRISIS OF THE OLD ORDER in the mid 1950's and it is still as great now as it was then. I reread it again before Christmas and you can change the names and dates and think you are reading about current history. I do not see how anyone could talk intelligently about either the Depression, Hoover or Roosevelt without reading it.

In the last 15 years the single most thought provoking thing I read is GENERATIONS by Straus and Howe and I know you have read it also.

I would agree with the others here who said that they love LOTR but its not the same kind of thing as some other important books that give you lessons or even beliefs to live by.

[MithLuin]

I did a silly little quiz earlier today, but one of the questions intrigued me:

Where does your personal morality come from?
a. Religion
b. your parents
c. society/culture
d. your personal life experience

It is worth pointing out that this quiz sought to separate people into four categories based on where they fell on two sliding scales. One was chaos/order, and the other was reason/morality. So, if you view the four choices as the four combinations, you could assign:

religion = order/morality Hufflepuff
parents = order/reason Ravenclaw
culture = chaos/morality Gryffindor
personal experience = chaos/reason Slytherin


(At least, I think is how they divied up this question - I'm open to challenges.)

[River]

I've been pondering this.

I think most of mine came from my parents, followed by the society I've grown up in, and from doing martial arts. I'm not sure if the latter constitutes as culture or personal experience. I've been practicing aikido for a long time - I started when I was 11, actually. Funny thing is, aikido in and of itself is rather amoral. It's a thing you do, for good or for bad, though the art itself is constructed for self-defense only and the philosophy behind it is useful for more than physical confrontations (in fact, I use aikido far more often in verbal or written confrontations than the physical kind; the only physical confrontations I've ever used aikido for were the ones where I had to confront the ground...fast ). Thing is, aikido, like so many other martial arts, is founded on bushido and that's a code I picked up on. I can't say I follow it to the core, but it does guide me in some of my relationships and is also why I've felt so angered and betrayed by my advisor. He hasn't held up his end of the bargain. I'll add that the influences these things have had on me are very nuanced so if you're inclined to make assumptions based on what I've written here, don't.