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Back to the Forum Archives How do we define conscience? This also leaves some room for questions. For example, we
could ask, do right or be good with respect to what? This is important because we have to deal with this concept of conscience in children. Regardless of how it comes about we are obliged to reenforce it because that sense of responsibility is a large part of what makes communities functional. To be sure, there are many reasons for doing well by our community. These have to do with enlightened self interest. Unless we do right with respect to our community it will cease to function. Without community, we will quickly degenerate to anarchy. Humans discovered long ago that a community is much superior to anarchy for the safety and comfort of all members. However, the logic of those motives and ideas will usually escape a five year old kid. We will be talking over his head. It is much easier and more effective to reenforce the kids sense of conscience. "Good boy!" Now, is conscience intrinsic, a result of evolution, or is it a result of conditioning? Picture a cat with a mouse or a baby rabbit. There is no conscience there. What we see as torturing is natural to animals and also primitive people. Did these primitive people not evolve properly or did they have a conscience and repress it? Do they lose their conscience or did they never have one? It is interesting that primitive people, like religious fundamentalists, wherever we find them, appear to have a great deal less conscience than more civilized people. It is even more curious that these are the very people who claim to have great compassion for and faith in certain fundamentalist value systems, yet torture and murder seems to come easily to them. They are more animal like in the treatment of their victims. They find it rather easy to dehumanize people who are different than they. I do not mean to imply that this behavior is unique to religious fundamentalists. It is true of all primitive minded peoples that I know about. More recently, the Nazis did this to Jews and others in World War Two. I am convinced that the Nazi party was dominated by very primitive minded bullies and thugs. I am also convinced that the Muslim extremist groups are dominated by primitive minded people. So conscience seems to be, at least in part, related to the degree of civilization of a person. Perhaps conscience is due to a combination of conditioning and evolution. Or, are conditioning and evolution just two different ways of saying the same thing? Perhaps we condition our kids because we have evolved with an intrinsic sense of conscience. If that is the case, the acculturation effort is one of reenforcing and directing the focus of an existing function. Think of teaching a child to walk. This is a similar situation. Upright locomotion is an evolved characteristic of humans. So teaching kids to walk is a matter of reenforcing an existing capability. So too, I think, is conscience development. If we can understand how conscience arises in the human, we could have a better measure of how difficult or easy it is to suppress. That different people have more or less conscience seems to be demonstrable. That some people appear to have no conscience at all is a matter of public record and personal experience. We have all encountered the sociopathic type who seems to see other people as objects to be manipulated for personal gain or pleasure. I have personally known a few of these. We can also consider psychopaths like the children at the Columbine school in Littleton. It is very evident that the culturally conditioned part of conscience was poorly developed or not impressed at all in these people. So, what they had to suppress, if anything, would be their inherent sense of conscience. Apparently, assuming it existed in them, they were able to suppress it very successfully. I believe this intrinsic part of our conscience does exist as a result of evolution. It is a natural part of being a higher animal. The more evolved we are, the stronger it will be in us. It may be developed weakly or strongly, depending on cultural and environmental factors, but I believe it is a part of all of us. In any case, our task is to reenforce the sense of conscience in our kids at every opportunity. Perhaps if we continue to do that, our evolved sense of conscience will become stronger. Eventually the whole world could become and extended community. Sure it's a dream, but a worthwhile one.
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