I’ve written in the past that we can think, with proper qualifications and definitions, of physical matter including our bodies as being frozen soul: see Frozen Soul and Other Delicacies for a recent essay discussing that claim. This language of “frozen soul” is another way of thinking about the spectrum of created being:
- God manifested the truths He chose as the raw stuff of Creation.
- The Almighty shaped more particular forms of abstract being from those pure truths.
- After some unknown number of steps of increasing particularity (maybe just one but I suspect more), God shaped the concrete stuff of this universe and began to use it to tell a story which I call our world.
I was motivated to change the rules of the metaphysical game a little bit by changes inside of me which came as I recovered a strong form of Christian faith and then began to read substantial books, including books and other works in the fields of mathematics, physics, and brain-sciences. Those led to other fields such as evolutionary biology but, at least at first, I was quite affected by some accessible but serious works in cosmology and relativity and quantum physics. Specifically, I learned of the discovery of modern physicists that some of the concrete forces and particles of our universe are particular entities which come from the breaking of more elegant or more symmetric entities. For an example, see Electroweak interaction for a brief description of the electroweak force which breaks down or freezes into, in relatively low-energy environments, to the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. The electroweak force, so far as I understand matters, couldn’t be observed, it couldn’t exist as such, under the conditions we would consider normal, including even such extreme environments as the plasma atmosphere of the sun — millions of degrees hot.
As go forces, so go the associated particles, leptons (such as electrons and neutrinos) with W-bosons and photons as particles which exchange the forces. As the best current theories have it, the particles of our universe are the results of more symmetric entities breaking. The current celebrity particle, the Higgs boson is also incorporated into the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam model. See Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow, and Abdus Salam for short articles on the three theorists awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for developing this model.
In other terms, the electroweak force doesn’t exist as such in this concrete realm of Creation, but I could say it does exist in those pieces from its shattered self. It’s pretty general knowledge what electromagnetic force does. The weak nuclear force brings about the transitions between a neutron and two particles — a proton and an electron. The electromagnetic force and the electroweak force are, in a manner of thinking, shards of the same force and yet they operate in completely different ways. Forces, interactions, relationships are part of created being and also lie on a spectrum from the more abstract to the more concrete.
Moral relationships are the ties between social beings and also the ties between individuals or communities and lesser or greater realms of Creation. They are also the relationships between creatures, including communities of creatures, and their Creator.
Particular sorts of relationships correspond to particular sorts of entities or to particular aspects of complex entities. They are particularized forms of more symmetric and more elegant relationships. Moral relationships, speaking in general terms, are those which connect us to other complex entities, most especially to other morally aware entities. In this case, I include such totalities as the Universe or all of Creation and such communities as the body of physicists or the body of Orthodox Jews and also complex environments such as the local watershed including its plants and animals and fungi.
The political communities exist to establish and maintain public order, internally in the case of all levels of politics and externally in the case of national governments — in terms of human political organizations in 2012. The economic communities exist to produce the goods we need to survive or to enjoy life beyond simple survival. Political communities seek a certain sort of public order in which citizens feel safe from street-criminals and fraudulent businessmen at the same time that economic communities seek a sort of order which involves such local turbulence as the destruction of entire industries when no longer needed or the downgrading of the reward to certain lines of work. The morality appropriate to economic activities would include such matters, some coming under the Ten Commandments, as honesty to customers and to employees and to employers and to governments. It includes a desire to obey the legitimate criminal statues and, at times, a pragmatic willingness to obey the abusive or over-expanded criminal statues as well. It doesn’t include a desire for justice nor even a pragmatic willingness to see justice done as part of the economic system. The better man, the man of high virtue, might have the lesser skills as an entrepreneur or salesman or machinist. Obeying the basic rules of economic behavior should, with very few exceptions, allow that virtuous man to make an honest and decent living as defined by his place and times, but the scoundrel might every well be the one living in the mansion on the hill. Moreover, his ruthlessness might have played a role in his successful rescue of a struggling company, perhaps cutting the employment in half but keeping at least those jobs and that wealth-producing capacity. Living in a city of crumbling factories shouldn’t deny a man a fair day in court but they might deny him a good living without the businessmen and business communities being at all guilty of immoral behavior. Harm can come as a result of morally condemnable criminal acts or as a result of bad luck in the economy. A man can lose all he has but such losses occur in the economic realm with no moral guilt involved.
None of this is new, only put in terms of a new metaphysics, a new view of Creation and the entities it contains. This is to say I’ve tried to view the issues and to write about them in a way consistent with my proposed ways of viewing all of Creation in its different realms. As the title of this essay goes: As bodies are frozen soul, politics and economics are frozen morality. As electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force are results of a shattering of electroweak force as this universe began to expand to a cooler and more particular form, a more concrete form, so political morality and economic morality are the results of a similar shattering of more abstract forms of relationship as particular entities came into existence. They involve overlapping communities and mostly the same individuals but largely separate relationships.
I’m gaining confidence that my way of viewing Creation is quite plausible given what my Christian faith teaches me and given modern empirical knowledge. So it is that I’m pretty confident in the plausibility of what I’m proposing as a general framework for reworking our moral systems into related entities/communities and relationships which are entities in a world of particularity which is the result of the shattering of higher-level symmetries.
I think there has been a modern recognition that something like this is the proper way to view moral systems but there is mostly an inherited tendency to think that there is one sort of moral man formed according to one moral system. So it is that we have politicians, even the honest ones, who tend to believe that the economic system should obey some rule of uniform justice — the good man who has committed no crime shouldn’t be prosecuted or persecuted because he lives in a disordered region and he should also not suffer hardship because he is a skilled machinist in a region where such work is disappearing. In a similar way, those who believe in a specific form of justice of the sort administered by political systems think to impose, for example, a sex-equal form of justice inside the family and inside religious organizations. The political ideologues of this modern sort are not willing to accept that women might be willing to give up such a form of equality because they think and feel the way which is plausible for a sex specialized to bear and raise children. Nor do those ideologues, with their sense of justice appropriate for criminal court systems, accept some might believe God ordained or commanded sex-specific roles inside families and at the altar. To criticize in the other direction, we see those who believe in a specific form of charity wishing to impose the moral beliefs and behaviors of charitable activities upon the political and economic realms — perhaps most especially because the zealots in the political and economic realms have already invaded the realm of charity and set up a free-for-all. (This isn’t to say that a businessman can’t be active in Christian or Jewish or secular charitable organizations or in political movements, only that he shouldn’t be supporting particular charities or particular political causes through his businesses.)
The unity of moral relationships can come into synchronization — in theory — but only in the individual who honors the different sorts of moral relationships proper to the various realms of human activity. The businessman can obey the limited moral rules of the economic realm, oblivious to justice and charity, but he can go home and give proper support to his favorite political organizations and can write checks to send to the synagogue or a struggling monastery or the local animal shelter.