I often use the phrase “universal morality” in my writing, or refer to that morality. It’s a paraphrase of a quote by Robert Heinlein, to wit:
All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a “perfect society” on any foundation other than “Women and children first!” is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying. – Time Enough For Love
In the context he was writing, “racial” here doesn’t refer to “ethnic” but rather the “human race.” While I don’t agree with everything the man wrote, his ability to distill ideas was remarkable. Even as his work and characterizations seem more archaic and even offensive with time, that very fact is because we are finally internalizing realities that in some cases Heinlein was once very much ahead of when the rest of the world was behind.
This basic truth, that human morality can and ultimately must boil down to “what keeps the species alive and propagating,” leads to other inevitable realities. And it is not merely “a” basic truth but the basic truth of the human species or any other. To whatever extent possible, both we internally as a species and all the other species to whatever extent it is possible for them, work to ensure out own perpetuation, and one of the important ways we do that is through strength in numbers.
However, with human beings the more educated and affluent they are, the more “necessary work” can be done by fewer actual human beings, because they will continue to develop technology both for production and recreation, which means they’ve got things to do both for fun and to help ensure their ability to survive, other than reproduce.
Over time as the species becomes better educated and more affluent, ideas like human rights, gender equality, women not having to be enslaved to their reproductive ability, humans not treated as “less than” because they own a smaller piece of the planet’s wealth or they have different skin color or shape to their facial features or texture to their hair, all become both more self-evident and more imperative to pursue to ensure the further progress, survival, and propagation of the species.
However, the paradigms that are now beginning to seriously crumble as I write this in the early summer of 2020 rely on aspects of inequality and prejudice and privilege and entitlement to perpetuate themselves to the detriment of this universal morality, and those who are unable to or refuse to abandon them thus ultimately will be a terminal subspecies. I don’t say they “should be eliminated” or any such provocative nonsense, and that’s important. They are being eliminated right now, by natural occurrence often brought on as the direct consequences of their own behavior, and the longer a subset of us exist who continue to try to avoid this reality, the longer it will be until we can truly progress forward as a species in the never-ending pursuit of survival and propagation.
Nobody’s “doing that” or enjoying the fact that it’s happening; it’s the natural consequence of us continuing to work against our own interests as well as those of the other species on this planet whose lives are critical to our own one way or another. It will continue until we stop acting that way, because we are a threat to the universal morality not only within our own species but for every other, and those species together create a discrete system of life which also has its own collective survival and propagation as its number one universal priority on which all other activity is based at every level, and they act the same way.
That’s where the viruses come in and even the earthquakes from fracking. Literally we’re breaking the planet for everything, and everything including ourselves absolutely will come together, one way or the other, being it by some “natural” agent like a pandemic or disaster, or “man-made” through war or greed, to mitigate our influence on the rest of the planet to a survivable nature and level.
Because at all levels of life human and otherwise, the one universal and fundamental morality is and must always be the survival and propagation of life.
