by John Young
http://www.westernvoices.com/audio/john_young/jy20070325.mp3
During our last broadcast, we went into the reasons why a common code of ethics is necessary for our community. As a quick refresher, those four reasons are:
1) Notwithstanding any evil intentions on the part of other people, the crucial ingredient that has led to the problems our people face today has been a lack of ethical behavior on the part of European-Americans. Most certainly, the unethical behavior of our political, corporate and even religious leaders has been a core problem, but I also demonstrated how ordinary white people also contribute to the problems we now face.
2) We are endeavoring to further the best-interests of European-Americans. Those interests are not best-served by a free lunch, but rather by uplifting our folk so they can fulfill their highest aspirations. While we certainly should not ignore the evil intentions of other groups; concentrating solely on pointing the finger at external causes holds us back. To be a force for positive social change for our people, we must first uplift ourselves.
3) A common and consistent application of ethical principles fosters trust and communication within the European Americans United community, and therefore serves to improve the efficiency of our efforts.
4) A community that has common ethical standards has a symbiotic relationship with the individuals comprising the community. Thus, the ethical standards are positively reinforced and the levels of achievement possible for both the individual and the community are increased.
In short, ethics are not merely optional, but a prerequisite for the achievement of our objectives.Now that we have covered why ethics are necessary, in this podcast and the next one I plan to cover the details. I’m going to cover the details in two sections. Today, I will cover core ethical principles and fundamental methods for resolving ethical conflicts. The next podcast in two weeks will cover explicit aspects of ethical behavior required by European Americans United.
There are two reasons why we need to cover the core ethical principles and methods for resolving ethical conflicts.
First, it is absolutely impossible for any code of ethics to encompass every possible circumstance, and if it could, it would become so unwieldy as to be useless. Witness, for example, the nine chapters that encompass the Ethics Handbook for the U.S. House of Representatives. The House Ethics Handbook includes hundreds of rules, examples, footnoted points of clarification and so forth. Yet, without reference to core principles, it simply becomes a manual for how to be corrupt without getting in trouble. Such weighty tomes lack context. A grounding in core principles gives us the sort of vital context that permits good decisions in ambiguous, unfamiliar or unanticipated situations.
Second, as in the classic question about whether or not it is right to steal an apple to save a starving child’s life, values can come into conflict. An understanding of the methods for resolving such conflicts will instill confidence in your ability to act rightly under any situation.
So let me start at the beginning. We know the purposes of ethics, but from whence are the particulars derived? How do we know a given set of particulars is sufficiently grounded that it can transcend differences in religion and other traditional sources for rules of conduct? After all, many people, like our House of Representatives, sit around and concoct rules. How do we discover rules that we know to be correct and aren’t just someone’s idea written down in a book?
Because instead of turning to a book, we turn instead to fundamental objective reality devoid of any preconceptions, just like a scientist, and infer rules from observation of that reality. I am not going to get philosophical here and debate whether or not the world we observe is real or imaginary, or whether, as some physicists say, it is a holographic projection on the interior of an 11-dimensional sphere. Such debate may be interesting for those so inclined, but for the purposes of ethics it is sufficient to understand that if you step off the Empire State building, you will fall to your death without regard to your beliefs, perceptions or theories. We exist in the world of observable reality and deal with undeniable laws of cause and effect. That is where our ethics need to be applied.
Fundamental ethical principles are based on the needs of the community as a whole, and long-range in nature. That is because humans of any sort are innately social creatures. While there may be some exceptions, the social nature of humans has been proven by numerous studies that explain phenomena such as peer pressure. http://www.family.org/parenting/A000001200.cfm Thus, an approach to ethics based strictly on the individual wouldn’t work out very well. Likewise, behavior that may have minimal short-term effects can have major effects in the long run. Since European-Americans are human, their ethical system needs to account for their social nature and the long-range interests of their communities.
At the same time, one must be wary of calls for action that claim something is needed “for the good of society,” “for the community,” or “for the children.” Unscrupulous people know and understand our automatic reaction to such calls and abuse our instincts in order to advance ideas, causes and programs that truly benefit only a small group of people, a narrow special interest, or are detrimental in the long run. Communism is certainly a notable example in that it dispenses with the individual altogether. We all know how that little experiment turned out. Strong and productive communities depend upon strong and productive members, so a solid ethical system is community-based, while respecting the individual. In other words, there must be a balance, especially in the case of European Americans, as I’ll explain shortly.
Our biological role is also a physical fundmeental. We can see this from looking at nature. Our role is to survive. Therefore, the survival of the community as a whole is the highest standard of value upon which our ethics are based. Since a community is composed of individuals, it is implicitly understood that survival of each individual is also important, forming a second basis for our ethics. A corollary to these is that sometimes, as in war, an individual may put himself or herself at risk individually in order to protect the community as a whole. This form of altruism, in nature, is greater the more closely the individual is related genetically to those being protected,http://www.springerlink.com/content/q6768048728l2840/ and is based upon the benefit of aggregated survival of shared genes.
Just as with other members of the animal kingdom, it is not enough to merely survive. Rather, we must seek to thrive. The mere act of survival can be accomodated through reproduction and a feeding tube. But that is not enough — human beings require more. All humans, of all types, have common needs for survival: food, shelter, water, and offspring. And all humans have, in broad terms, common needs to thrive: community, the arts, spirituality and laughter. But when you start to get specific about these things, you discover that the requirements for thriving differ between different sorts of humans both in terms of degree and substance. That is because, as much as humans share in common, our genetic predispositions require us to create slightly different environments within our respective communities. This, necessarily, requires a slightly different approach to ethics between groups since the ethics of a community affect, ultimately, everything it contains.
This concept may be a little unfamiliar to some listeners, so let me state it a bit differently and give an example. Each animal in the animal kingdom has somewhat different characteristics, and thus requires a slightly different environment in order to thrive. Likewise, each animal needs a different set of behaviors or ethics in order to thrive within that environment. Very small genetic differences result in significant differences in environmental requirements. For example, there are five types of Copperhead snake that are related closely enough that they are capable of interbreeding. Yet, while some of their environmental ranges overlap, you won’t find a Trans-pecos Copperhead in Massachusetts or an Osage Copperhead in Virginia. Since, for humans, their communities largely constitute their environments and the features of their societies are the results of their values, different types of humans will have slightly different ethical requirements.
It is obvious that persons of different continental ancestry have different physical characteristics, so different that they can be told apart reliably from just looking at bones.http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/gill.html But since even within a given population group the level of intelligence may vary considerably between individuals, this is not the only biological explanation for the differences in the societies developed by different population groups.
Recently, evolutionary psychologists and others have explored heritable differences in personality traits and worldview between persons of different continental origin, and the results of their work is striking.
Asians and Europeans, for example, don’t even look at a picture the same way, with Europeans paying more attention to the focus of the picture and Asians paying more attention to its background. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/35/12629 Thus, while many ideals of ethical behavior will be shared between cultures, there will also be necessary differences. Cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all ethics, and the cultures built upon them, will necessarily yield suboptimal results. They may allow a people to survive, but not thrive. This is one of the reasons why “multiculturalism” is such a disaster.
This leads to the third concept: a suitable ethical system must be an outgrowth of the people for whom it is intended.
In our case, all members of EAU are of European ancestry, so our Statement of Ethics is oriented toward the best interests of such people. We will go over the details of that statement and how it was derived in the next program, which will be the last on this topic for a while.
Many people have looked at our Statement of Ethics and asked: “Why doesn’t it explicitly prohibit this” or “why doesn’t it explicitly require that.” There are a number of reasons but the simplest is that the number of conceivably dis-allowed or required behaviors is seemingly infinite. It is better to put forth a set of principles that will encompass all of these matters. A simple majority vote of our board is all that is required to expel a member if those principles are violated. This allows our community to police itself without being tied up with infinite internal legal debates.
But there is another important reason. The Western World has been most effective at repelling enemies all the way from the Persian wars through the Battle of Midway when its forces:
1) Had a clear stake in the outcome,
2) Had the flexibility to use individual initiative,
and
3) Had the ability to criticize and thus improve their own efforts.http://www.amazon.com/Carnage-Culture-Landmark-Battles-Western/dp/0385720386/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-1325412-5102417?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174878520&sr=8-1
The first and third of these factors were taken into account in deciding how EAU would be organized, but the second factor — flexibility to use individual initiative — was specifically referenced in the formulation of our Statement of Ethics. Saddling our volunteers with a nine-chapter book of rules like that used by the U.S. House of Representatives would not materially improve behavior for people inclined toward unethical behavior anyway, and would be an anchor around the necks of our best and brightest that effectively prevented them from using their knowledge and skills to their best effect. Centuries of experience have shown that Western peoples consistently achieve their best when given objectives and guidelines, but not micro-managed.
So these are the ideas, derived via observation of objective reality, that were used in the overall structure and formulation of our Statement of Ethics.
Now we will explore, briefly, how to resolve ethical conflicts.
Earlier, I presented the classic ethical question that every first-year student of ethics asks: is it okay to steal an apple to save a starving child? The answer, necessarily is “yes,” but much more important is understanding how and why it is okay.
Ethics is based upon values. Community survival, individual survival, establishing conditions necessary for our people to thrive, and so forth. Other values germane to a European-American value system include honor, pride, truth, righteousness, fairness, personal achievement, education and environmental preservation. There are reasons for all of these values, and we will go into them in particular in our next broadcast. But, for now, understand that these values exist in a hierarchy; meaning that when these values come into conflict, depending upon the circumstance some of them are more important than others.
Survival and truth are both important values. Assume, for a moment, that you are home alone and your husband and kids have left for a couple of hours. A stranger breaks into the home, holds you at gunpoint, and demands to know where to find your kids so he can kill them. What is more important — truth, or survival? Survival is more important than truth, particularly in a circumstance where the person asking the questions has no right to do so.
Assume an acquaintance asks you to keep a secret, to which you agree before knowing what the secret is and he reveals plans to rob a bank. In this case, honor has come into conflict with the individual survival of innocent people. So your obligation is to break that promise. Your obligation is all the greater because by keeping your mouth shut, you are assisting with the perpetration of an act that will bring dishonor on your acquaintance, yourself and the community at large. Pick better friends in the future so you aren’t put in this position.
I’ve used the foregoing examples because they clearly illustrate the concept of a hierarchy of values. In some circumstances, the ordering of the priorities of these values depends on your own personal judgment. If you see a 60-year-old man and a 9-year-old girl fall into the water but you are only a strong enough swimmer to save one – which do you choose? Ideally, you would be omniscient and already have a full knowledge of each person’s value or potential value to the community, but in reality you will have to react based upon minimal knowledge. It pays to consider potential ethical conflicts in advance. EAU presents guidelines, and you have to reconcile your own personal moral code with those guidelines. But within those guidelines and outside of the most clearcut circumstances, we can’t second-guess your decisions. It is your job as an individual to consider these values, and rank them in a hierarchy that works best for you.
In two weeks we will complete our discussion on ethics with an examination of the details of our Code of Ethics and Membership Application, and consider what the practical import of these will be in your daily life as an individual, and for our EAU community.
This is John Young with the Western Voices broadcast made possible by the dedicated men and women of European Americans United. Thank you for joining me again today.
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=82
http://www.family.org/parenting/A000001200.cfm
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q6768048728l2840/
http://ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushtonpdfs/Genetic%20Similarity%201989.pdf
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/gill.html
http://www.amazon.com/Race-Differences-Intelligence-Evolutionary-Analysis/dp/159368021X/ref=sr_1_1/002-9628638-2664040?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174778297&sr=1-1
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/35/12629
http://www.amren.com/0207issue/0207issue.html#cover
http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327752jpa8501_05
http://www.amazon.com/Carnage-Culture-Landmark-Battles-Western/dp/0385720386/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-1325412-5102417?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174878520&sr=8-1
Acknowledgments: Music for today’s podcast was produced by Sound Radius and released under the Creative Commons License. EAU’s use of Sound Radius’ music should not be construed to imply the artist’s endorsement of EAU or EAU’s endorsement of the artist.