Category: Unit 02

unit 02 — part two

health
enjoyment
independence
integrity
personal development

personal accomplishment
wisdom
location
security
family
friendship
creativity
loyalty
community
service
expertness
wealth
leadership
power
prestige

What did I do today? Ha! How much time have you got? I woke up at 6am to work out, followed by a two-plus hour wake-up ritual, worked a nominal but financially providing number of hours, then went for an 8-mile run along the river paths.  Huh. I guess that didn’t take as much time as I thought.

My sister is staying with me while she’s in town, so we did what siblings do: a little secret-drinking and more than a little giggling/judging. We watched The View at some point which mostly resulted in outrage – hypothetical god, I love a good outrage.  But I’m getting side-tracked…

I often defer to a personal motto when explaining my life/decision-making processes to folks: I treat every day like I’m camping. As a rule I try not to let an excessive number of rules into my life – health/fitness being the major exception – and, you know, the whole rule about not having rules.

I’ve spent a lot of time rejecting propriety and actively unlearning value systems endemic to society, my family, friends, folks I know. Though ultimately futile — it’s unknowable whether or not successful– I’ve never found it beneficial to compare my experience to another’s – which goes a long way to explaining my top five priorities (as defined by the glossary provided).

I’ve been on the receiving end of a decent amount of marginalization in my life which I suspect goes a long way towards contributing to the pursuit of independent thought and individual interests. It comes easy when folks remove you, in so many ways, from the collective experience — treat you as “other.” I feel like in these circumstances things go one of two ways: you either become defined by that experience or you embrace it and redefine yourself, beliefs, and values. If you follow the first route, you fall victim to external values. If you choose the latter, you begin choosing yourself and your experience above all else.

unit 02 — part one

One thing is certain: the process of value construction and subsequent exploration into instinct and free will is a complicated one. I neither completely agree nor deny the arguments presented by H. Lewis in the excerpt from A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives. I believe polarization in such circumstances to be needless and ultimately fails to answer the question, how do we choose our values? That said…

Lewis asserts “there is a good deal of evidence that human beings are not primarily driven by genetically determined instincts but are rather free to make their own choices,” (p7) citing sexual drive and self-preservation as primary instincts human beings have been known to reject in the process of value construction – specifically identifying ritual suicides in medieval and modern Japan (p7).

This perspective, however, is limited. It fails to consider a common cultural anthropologic belief that religion evolved as a genetic adaptation. In his book, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, Nicholas Wade states that “religion itself is a phenotype which was subject to natural selection,” (Wade, Nicholas. The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures. Penguin Press, HC. 2009.). Furthermore in a critical analysis of his book, author Razib Khan presents an alternative view, “that religion is a byproduct of other traits that have survival value,” (Khan, Razib. “The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Has Endured.” Discover: Science for the Curious. Discover Magazine, November 19, 2009. Web. July 24, 2014.).

Considering this, culturally informed ritual suicides would not, in actuality, snub the biological impulse for self-preservation, but would instead make an argument for the complicated web of adaptation human beings have constructed in the pursuit of collective survival.

Human beings are social creatures dependent on one another to assert their dominance over their environment and potential threats therein. Without collective effort we, as a species, would fail to achieve biological success. It stands to reason that there is good evidence for the instinctual need for religion – rendering not of free will, but of self-preservation: instinct.

As stated in my opening paragraph, the concept is expansive and too complicated to be polarized – as is more often than not the case in life. Though it does beg the question, can we ever conclude an answer? Does everything come down to faith? And is that faith merely instinctual? The circle continues…