The “Golden Rule” Redux: For our pets and us humans too?!

Well, just a tiny little something to note. It looks like the rhyming version below (of the so-called “Golden Rule” – that seems to have fed into Kant’s “categorical imperative“, should the latter ring a clearer bell to you) is not recorded online. So here we go, with Creative Commons Licence sense of intellectual ownership 🙂

For Our Bio-relatives and Us Humans, Too:

Why not

do

as I/you/she/he…they’d want to

be done

to?!

As shown above, the Rhyming Rule can be variously conjugated, depending on the applicable personal point of view.

If you recall, sometime ago I blogged out a list of Golden Rule variants across time and space, in various religions/teachings and cultures – of which you may still be able to obtain a poster.

Although some of those instances may have been cross-cultural borrowings (say, Judaism ~ Christianity ~ Islam), in some other cases it looks like human societies/communities have also arrived at the same nugget “independently”. I find this significant because the nuggets of wisdom – whether initially “borrowed” or “independently arrived at” – must have persisted as a result of hundreds, and millenia, of historical years of trial and error.

So I’d venture a link to Berkeley U psychologist Dacher Keltner’s hypothesis that there are deep, survival related reasons for our species to have developed the ability, and motivation, to cooperate (see e.g. his interview in Tom Shadyac’s documentary I Am).

Evidence of altruism in animals abounds, too, including as reported in the docu above – see interview with Thom Hartmann, a.o., author of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.

Is there evidence – for both us and our animal relatives – that can go either way, i.e. “we” are by nature cooperative-amicable, or by nature competitive-aggressive? YES.

YET, Darwin’s evolutionary theory, for example, has been grossly misrepresented as supporting a survival-of-the-fittest worldview – and world order!!! In The Descent of Man, he argued that the strongest instinct in “man” is SYMPATHY (see D. Keltner’s interview above).

Here’s my thought [since the Golden Rhyming Rule of human conduct exists in such a lovely, portable form now]

Isn’t

the conscious and consistent,

purposful and persistent

resolution of the cooperative/competitive ambiguity our lucky chance to actually demonstrate that our claims to reason/rationality

just might

be justified?

Black-and-white DISCLAIMER. I’m only saying, more amicable than aggressive, and only certain modes of cooperation and competition – “naturally”.

Tom Shadyac co-signs G.K.Chesterton’s “I Am” [answer2: what’s wrong with the world?]

Following Natasha’s tip (THANKU!!!), I saw Tom Shadyac’s 2011 documentary I Am.

From growing up learning to “succeed”–to directing Jim Carrie movies–to success that reaps no happiness–to a documentary with 2 research questions, posed to some of today’s “significant minds”:

1. “What’s wrong with our world?”

and–in his words the more important one,

2. “What can we do about it?”

Tom’s “I am” answer to Q1 reiterates the famed reply by G. K. Chesterton, some 84 years his senior (cf.)

The official I Am website and activities reported there are, no doubt, Tom’s steps toward a personal Q2 answer.