Conscience – the unerring monitor (part 2)

(quick note: sorry for those who don’t quite follow – i’m just thinking out loud and i know it can be frustrating if you’re not a regular reader or you’re not attuned to some of the issues that are commonly raised on this blog. i’ll increase pedantic level. + 1.)

To summarize the previous post, one can use a Chinese phrase like “良心过意不去”, or a diagram, something like:

One problem with this diagram is that it doesn’t show how clear certain things are in one’s mind. Conscience, is usually a blur. Whatever people around say about their conscience is probably a derivative of their conscience that they made into a “fundamental assumption” (thanks Mark for coining the right phrase to fill in my argumentative void – I love suppers 🙂 ). An alternative word would be “belief”, but I thought that had too much a religious connotation. For example, a young guy who joins MCA Youth would make a fundamental assumption that for a “better Malaysia” (and for his political career to take flight), he needs to incite change from “within” the incumbent, while another who guy who joins PKR would make a totally different fundamental assumption, that the incumbent is where things rot, and change needs to happen outside. Both of these fundamental assumptions are “correct” – there’s nothing observable really to prove that it’s true or otherwise except that it must be instructed by their own conscience. But if you were to ask both these 2 guys about their conscience, the guiding principle of their fundamental assumption, all they could probably muster would be “isn’t it obvious?”

Perhaps I’m treading into what Descartes refers to as the “Natural Light”! w00t Philo 101!! If you don’t have a good idea about this set of literature I suggest you try reading some passages online on how Descartes prove the existence of God. A quick simplistic understanding would be:

…though one idea may originate from another, an infinite regress is not possible here. At some point one must come to the archetype of the idea which must possess formally all of the perfection or reality which is present in the idea objectively. So Descartes says, it is clear by the natural light that while it is possible for an image or idea to fall short of the perfection of the things from which it is taken, it cannot contain anything greater or more perfect than its source. This reference to the natural light marks this claim as one which Descartes claims to know for certain…

Therefore, your get the “isn’t it obvious” remark from the two aspiring politicians earlier. It’s “clear as light of day” that blah blah blah. And as I lay down my own fundamental assumptions, I have tried to justify why I made such an assumption, to find out exactly whether there’s an even more fundamental assumption or it’s just the “natural light” or “conscience” as referred to in this writing. This exercise is dangerous in many ways, for example:

Fundamental Assumption: It’s nice to be home. Nope, deeper: It’s nice to have a wife. Nope, deeper: It’s nice to have someone to talk to after a long day of work. Nope, deeper: It’s nice to have someone to talk to in bed after a long day of work and then maybe … Nope, deeper: I’m a mammal you idiot.

Fundamental Assumption: It’s ok for China to suppress human liberties like many countries do in one way or another officially, because it’s only fair that the citizens give up something in exchange for other benefits including security, ala Rousseau’s Wealth of Nations. Nope, deeper: It’s ok for China to suppress human liberties because everyone at every position of the government needs to toe the party line, which in this case is to showcase the Olympics. Nope, deeper: It’s ok for China to suppress human liberties anyway because they are the government, and governments can do whatever they like to their people, as evident in 5000 years of Chinese history. Nope, deeper: It’s ok for China, nevermind, guards! shoot him.

I realize that, deconstructing fundamental assumptions is the wrong direction, because it wakes up a different part of your brain, the part that creates “excuses”. It’s weirdly natural that most people aren’t honest to themselves, sometimes they are more honest to other people. I do. I find it easier to bluff myself (which I referred to as “hiding my conscience” in the previous post) than to have a closely watched conversation with someone who can argue rationally (there are plenty in my social circle fortunately), where I’m forced to logically and rationally construct my own situation and position, and be ready to face the consequence of that construction, at least in discussion.

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Sometimes I wish I could melt into the music and vanish. It’s “perfection”, cannot be argued because even though there are “rules” in music, say, baroque rules like no consecutive forth/fifths, double the third on first inversion, etc. the end result rings to the natural instinct of the human nature. In fact the more deconstruction you do to Bach’s choral works, the less pretty it becomes, much like how Sibelius won’t deconstruct his music:

He likened talking about his music to handling a butterfly: it crumble’s at a touch. So it is with [his] compositions, the very mention of them is fatal.

But people still get PhDs from analyzing how great a C major he made out of his 7th Symphony.

Or maybe we can think of our conscience using the Heisenberg principle – measuring your conscience would make your conscience uncertain. Asking yourself do you really believe in God makes your believe more uncertain than if you just don’t think about that question and fulfill God’s words and do His duties. Questioning yourself whether making a commercial arrangement for early termination of a contract is betraying the faith that many tax payers has put in you and breaking a promise that cannot be undone would tie in so many other fundamental assumptions that the conscience is shaken.

The conscience is weak. Ok fine, MY conscience is weak, I don’t know about yours. I have lived by many fundamental assumptions that’s derived from social conformance because it’s the easiest way to avoid unnecessary attraction and give me a peace of mind when confronting others, being the shy person I am. But these fundamental assumptions are constantly at war with the conscious self, the person who swore to do this and uphold that and believe in this and fight for that, and that tension requires a resolution. It requires a resolution very very soon, because it could decay the soul.

Oh yes, the thing I didn’t bring into this discussion. The soul. I thought it would not be appropriate because the soul is a much deeper level thing. One can have a clear conscience that being a policeman, it’s his duty to uphold the law and shoot the criminal under particular S.O.P., but his soul would be destroyed after that, for he’s a murderer himself. One can have a clear conscience that a child that wasn’t meant to be born to be aborted to avoid the sufferings on earth, but the soul would also be destroyed. A less morbid example would be that one can work for a foreign country and help that country destroy one’s own (e.g. economically) as one’s conscience tells one to serve one’s employer wholeheartedly, especially when one’s own country has become so remote from one, but some part of one’s soul will still belong to one’s home country, and another one could still see the raised eyebrows of one when one’s homeland is under attack.

A fine line, at least to me, is that my soul is ME, but my conscience is something that gets affected by my environment, perhaps by my education, perhaps by my loved ones. It can be shaken but it cannot be deconstructed. Therefore, in order for me to make all my fundamental assumptions right, I can only go by a experimentation method – try out working here and see if I’m happy doing what I do, try out taking up this hobby to see if I feel that my time was fulfilling, whether it is in sync with some unwritten long term ambition that I have. And that’s what I need to do, now, today.

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(to be continued. Need to fix breakfast + lunch.. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs…)