THE IMPORTANCE OF CONSCIENCE

Do you hear that little voice within you when you do something bad? Does everyone have an inner voice and does everyone's voice say the same kinds of things? Are those voices taught or are they innate? Of course, these questions relate to the existence and content of consciences. When we hear of horrendous behavior and, when the perpetrator is caught, we hear his or her justification for the insidious act, we wonder how a person can believe in what he or she is saying; how can that person possibly believe that what he or she did is justified? The bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building and the justification that Timothy McVeigh provided comes to mind. I saw the interview; I believe he believed in what he was saying. How does that happen? How can someone's moral compass be so out of whack with what the vast majority of people agree is evil?

In the last several postings, I have been sharing my view of what an entity within a federated union is. First, entities are members of a federation. An entity can be an individual or a group. A review of the attributes of an entity is useful when one is looking at the actions of a federation. By understanding what entities are gives students a handle on one of the important elements that constitute a federation. The last few postings of this blog described and explained the importance of status. Each member of a federation has status and that reflects either the power a member has or that member's reputed power. Status affects how members interact.

A second attribute of an entity is the entity's conscience. Conscience refers to the ideal domain of an entity's thinking. I believe thinking and feeling can be seen as constituting three different domains: the domain of the real, the domain of the ideal, and the domain of the physiological. The real is what we hold to be objective truth. The ideal refers to what we believe should be. And the physiological refers to what our chemical makeup either forces us to do – as in the case of breathing, if not impeded – or encourages us to do – as in engaging in sexual behavior. Some of this encouraging can be quite strong and oftentimes influences us on subconscious levels.

Be that as it may, a conscience, in terms of federated commitments, relates to how an entity believes and feels about the values and norms of the federation in which the entity belongs. That is, it relates to the entity's ideal domain. Of course, the union has an interest in encouraging its members to have positive beliefs and feelings toward those values and norms. A smartly run union will expend resources to encourage those beliefs and feelings. I emphasize the word “encourage” – as opposed to “enforce.” For one thing, it is impossible to force anyone to believe in or feel positively toward any set of values. But beyond that, any attempt to force such beliefs or feelings in a society we generally describe as a free society will most likely backfire and the “instructed” member will probably look for ways to exit or undermine the union.

But I stray from my purpose in this posting. Here, I want to address how studying entities benefit by analyzing their consciences. Whether the object of a study is to look at the general nature of federations or how the members of a union behave, the student is well served by looking at what motivates the members. Primary motivational force for any actor – be it a person or group – is the sense an entity has in what is moral or immoral. And while morality can have a variety of foundational standards – from religious standards to informal norms – which can lead us to a variety of expectations, the moral expressions of a federation need to be included in any analysis. Why? Because, as a unit capable of collective action, the health of a federation and the manner in which it acts can be described, explained, understood, and even predicted, to a great extent, by how it defines and binds its membership. What is generally seen as good or evil, to the extent the perception is shared, provides a powerful insight into what binds the membership and what motivates it to act. A student, therefore, should ask what those values are and how strongly they are held by the membership both individually and collectively.

A simple illustration would be to look at the antebellum period of American history. While the disagreement over the morality of slavery is obvious, it is only one of the many value conflicts that existed. The North was becoming an industrial giant and the South wanted to maintain its plantation economy. This intensified a series of antagonizing values and norms. Views on religion, gender issues, etiquette standards, and the like became more pronounced. For example, dueling was still in vogue in the South and almost passe in the North. The nation had been drifting apart on many fronts and what constituted the content inhabiting the consciences of the different sections of the country became starkly distinguishable and contradictory.

Contemporary examples include nations such as Egypt. Looking at the period after the uprisings of 2011, there seem to be profound moral conflicts brewing which are pitting the more traditional Islamist believers against more secular segments of the population. The issues separating these interests are ones of conscience. The health of the nation can be judged to be in peril because moral disagreements are neither easily glossed over nor amenable to compromise. Hence, the upcoming years for Egypt, whether one considers it a formal federation or an informal one, will probably be highly challenging and its prospects of establishing a stable political environment are not at all guaranteed.

So, where are the values of a federated union expressed? In a formal federation, a collective is formed by its members agreeing to the provisions of a covenant or a compact, and the values of the union are stated in the bill of rights of that agreement. The terms of the bill of rights consist of agreed upon values in the form of individual negative rights – actions that the collective cannot call on its members to perform or advantages to give up – positive rights – actions the collective is committed to perform for the benefit of the members – and/or actions that the federation or an entity should or should not perform. In the history of our nation's compact, the initial expression of values is contained in the Declaration of Independence. By mostly condemning the king of Great Britain for committing a list of atrocities, the Continental Congress expressed the values this new nation was to uphold as being sacred. If what the king “did” was immoral, it would be wrong or immoral for an American government to do likewise. This list of values was later superseded by the first ten amendments to our Constitution – our formal Bill of Rights. To the degree we all share in the imbedded values of these documents, they have become part of the little voice that defines what is moral and what is immoral – it becomes imbedded in our conscience.

Our own current conditions point out one more aspect of how conscience serves us by affecting how we define our values. As I was watching the news tonight, there seems to be a slew of charges that, in the name of fighting terrorism, our national government is being with violating some of our collective values. It seems that the national government has been monitoring our phone calls and emails. So far, it hasn't been established that the government has been listening in on our calls, but whom we call and who calls us has been recorded. The same goes for emails which is even “worse” in that I believe they are being subject to being read. This pits our values concerning privacy against our values concerning security. And that points out that any expression of values in the form of rights or otherwise needs to be spelled out through experience because values we hold can easily conflict and reality is complicated. Time and the development of historical forces need to be experienced before we know what we strongly value both in absolute terms and in terms of their relative strength. It is our conscience that inhibits us from allowing us to betray our values by rationalizing them away for what is opportune in a given situation. As such, conscience is that attribute in which an entity fights, in tempting situations, against giving up who the entity is. By not abandoning what the entity believes, he, she, or it establishes its true identity through those values or principles making up the entity's conscience.