Groups have no Morality

“Most of us pick up morality in the course of growing up, in an unorganized manner through bits and pieces of our scattered and fragmented experiences.” I’m quoting Avichal again. The book was mentioned in my last post which was inspired by it. This book, whose subtitle is Moral Philosophy, Organisational Theory and Hostage Rescue, keeps provoking me every now and then though I haven’t developed a liking for it in general because of its tendency to scientify matters (see a page below, for example). 

Morality is a personal affair. Where do we get it from? That’s the direction in which my thoughts shot off as I read Avichal’s paragraphs on the subject.

I was born and brought up in an extremely orthodox Catholic family in the rural backyards of Kerala. The children woke up when the rouser bell tolled at 5.30 am from the parish church not far from home. We were too many children, ten of us to be precise, because our parents were strict adherents of their Church’s injunctions on contraception. I never believed that my parents actually wanted all of us.

And my moral learning probably started there. From that deep-rooted feeling of unwantedness, though I was only the third offspring and seven more followed at intervals of clockwork precision.  

I attended all the church services meticulously. I had no choice, of course. I prayed a lot at home. Again, no choice. In case, I felt sleepy during the evening prayers, I had to kneel down on a thin layer of sand and pray loud with arms stretched out like Jesus lamenting on his cross. When I, any child of my generation for that matter, erred – as humans do all the time – I was caned mercilessly by parents at home and teachers at school.

You’d think my sense of morality would be founded on a biblical rock with such upbringing. On the contrary, I grew up terribly confused. What I was taught by parents, teachers, and most importantly my church, had nothing to do with the actual life I had to live.

That actual life taught me all my morality which wasn’t much until I grew old enough to unlearn all that and shape my own personal morality mostly with the help of the books I read. It took a long while for me to do that. I strayed much and endured more until then.

Morality cannot be taught. When I joined a school in Kerala as a teacher in 2015, as soon as I returned in a terrible fit of depression to my home-village from Delhi, I was asked to teach moral science in a particular class in addition to my regular teaching of English in the senior secondary classes. The moral science class was a farce. I tried to make it meaningful by leading the students to serious discussions on contemporary moral issues of the sociopolitical reality around. The students converted the discussions into a farce too merely because it was moral science class. Who wants moral science?

Probably my students went through confusing experiences as I did in my childhood though in different ways. Generation Alpha had little in common with the Baby Boomers. But the sense of morality was a casualty all the time, I think.

The funniest part of my experience as a moral science teacher was the evaluation process. I chose to make a change in it by preparing a question paper that would test the student’s ‘moral sense’ instead of ‘moral knowledge.’ So I prepared questions with imaginary situations in which the student had to make a choice and write the reason for their choice. Something like this:

You are walking home from school when you find a wallet lying on the ground. There is no one else around. You pick it up and find that it contains a large amount of cash, an ID card, and a few receipts. The address on the ID is a few blocks away from your home.

You have three options:

1.     Take the money and throw away the wallet. No one saw you pick it up, and the person will probably cancel their cards anyway.

2.     Take the wallet to the address and return it with everything intact. You won’t gain anything, but the owner will be grateful.

3.     Leave the wallet where it is. Maybe the owner will come back looking for it.

What would you do, and why?

I was not allowed to do that, however. A traditional question paper came from a mysterious source instead with all memory-based questions from the prescribed moral science textbook which I hadn’t really taught in the classroom. My students scored high nevertheless because they knew the system.  

That’s it: the system. Our morality is a both a product and a victim of the system in which we live, move and have our being. Do you know why 6 million Jews could be killed brutally during the WW2? Or, on a much lower scale, why a few hundred Muslims could be killed equally brutally in Modi’s Gujarat of 2002? Avichal’s book, which I mentioned at the beginning of this post has the answer.

A crowd has no morality. A crowd is a Hobbesian leviathan. It has what Avichal calls groupthink, a term taken from psychology to mean “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group…” In that mode of thinking, Avichal points out, “there is a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgement that results from in-group pressures.” As a result, “irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against out-groups” follow all too easily.

Groups have leaders who are the authorities that determine the morality of the group. “Authority,” asserts Avichal, “is a potential pathogen of human organisations.” Authority is a plague of sorts. Avichal goes on to say that “Criminal acts of the worst kind have been perpetrated everywhere as a result of obedience to authority.”

Next time when your leader tells you to do something in the name of notions like nationalism, think again. Think independently.