Shortcuts
Learning to take the long way
One of the things I find myself doing that I really hate myself for is looking for shortcuts. I think it’s a problem that extends beyond me, but I’m not sure that most people see it for the absolute baseness that it is.
So let’s start with some clarifications.
There is a difference in my mind between seeking efficiencies and seeking shortcuts. As I am a intense fan of car racing (/sarcasm) I’m going to use that as my example. Vroom vroom. Seeking efficiencies is following the ideal racing line; taking shortcuts is cheating by skipping over a portion of the track when no one is supposed to be looking. One is a perfection of one’s craft; the other is doing something that is wrong, but justifying it because it achieves the end result.
In my cross country career I did both. I always aimed to hit the racing line when I could at meets—I sucked but I wanted to do it as best I could to make up for what I lacked in skill with mental acuity. I was somewhat successful: I shaved seconds off my time (though I needed minutes more than seconds if I wanted to actually be good). I also cut corners during workouts. Sometimes I ran for minutes instead of miles as if they were equivalent. 40 minutes of running could be equal to a 5-minute run, except that I was dogging it because no one was looking: those were like 10 minute miles, but I still counted the workout as the full 5 that I should have run. And ultimately I think that contributed to my failures as a distance runner; I took shortcuts during workouts and my improvement suffered from it compared to those putting in the full effort (though in my defense I don’t think my body was built to run with cross-country boys).
But this article isn’t really about running, or car racing, or even working hard to achieve something. It’s about the moral failings of humans.
Shortcuts as Moral Dereliction
A wise author (Kate Bornstein, to be exact) wrote a fine book that helped me out early in my transition titled My New Gender Workbook. The book was kind of mid in terms of steps to succeed as a trans girl who didn’t know anything about what was going on inside of me and starting to leak out, but there is a weird digression near the end about morality that stuck fast in my brain.
Bornstein defines morality tiers based on your proximity to an enlightened state where you do what’s right because you are incapable of doing anything wrong—or you wouldn’t actually be in that apical tier. In Bornstein’s hierarchy one’s tier is determined by how internally your sense of right and wrong is. Higher tiers have principles and ethics determined by contemplation, awareness, and mindfulness. Lower tiers look for morality from external sources such as laws and other codified lists of wrong behaviors.
I read this section and was initially baffled. Who got morality mixed in with my how-to-be-trans book? Now, a year or so later I remember practically nothing else from the book except this section; it stuck deep, deep in my brain.
Americans, who I can speak of with my 0-hand experience of being one myself, in my mind are by-and-large among the lowest order: they only do good out of fear of punishment. Raised Christian I was told I was doomed to eternal pain and suffering unless I repented for original sins that I personally hadn’t committed, in addition to those I committed myself unless I devoted my life to being good in eyes of the one who might arbitrarily decide to punish me anyway. In driver’s ed I was told to meticulously follow or I’d be violently ripped limb from limb in graphic detail, or charged ridiculous fines (which are only meaningful to the poor since they implicitly declare being able to pay gives you impunity to the law). I had to be a good student and work hard for exceptional grades or I’d be a “ditchdigging bonehead” condemned to eternal poverty.
From birth Americans are taught that bad behavior will be punished, but we quickly learn that bad behavior will only be punished if we are caught. Being good becomes a mental calculus of how likely we are to be caught. As I drive down the highway meticulously matching the speed limit (being autistic to the extent that I get physically ill from the possibility of breaking a rule) I see drivers flying by me with no concern for public safety or risk of death and injury. They know that the likelihood of being caught by the police and punished in any meaningful way is remote enough as to not enter their decision-making; personal injury also doesn’t apply to them—understandable, since obviously it will never happen to an elite driver like them (/sarcasm). Meanwhile god’s chosen people spread hate, violence, and bigotry as they know that they are immune to damnation by simple virtue of having a Jesus-fish applied to their tailgate.
Beyond the hypocrisy and idiocy, though, what stands out to me is that to none of these people does it occur to be good for the sake of being good. They are good when it suits them to avoid punishment or obtain a certain outcome, but beyond that they reach to an external source to avoid contemplating what is actually good.
They tell us we need the Ten Commandments in schools in order to teach children what is good, or that we need to follow diet restrictions defined in an ancient pre-scientific fantasy novel. As if, we don’t know in our hearts that it is not good to be hurtful to people—no, we must have books and laws and philosophy to define and spell out moral behavior.
Even a tier above the vulgar mass of humans, where we do good because we feel guilty doing otherwise or for not doing anything, are we not just sparing ourselves the discomfort-punishment of self-hate?
Following laws, or moral codes, or our metaphysical conscience, all of these are shortcuts—why should I deliberate and consider the situation, nuance, and other perspective when there is an outside authority that tells me what is right and wrong?
Think Harder
Because deep down, we all know what is right and wrong; it just takes effort to detach all that crap that has been drilled into us to make it quicker and easier to decide what to do. Thinking hard about our actions is hard. We might end up realizing that some of those shortcuts were cheating, or worse, complete divergence from the moral path they were supposed to lead us down.
Take for example, the story of Abraham and Isaac. Trust God: there’s a reason to do it. Murder your innocent child because your external source of morality told you to. You know that God is the villain in this story; we all know it. We can rationalize it or try to justify it: God has more information about the situation; it’s part of a grander plan than mortal minds can comprehend. No. It’s evil. If God was testing Abraham, then Abraham failed: intent to kill his son was evil and an omnipotent all-powerful God that gave that order with full knowledge of what it would lead to must also be evil.
I know that killing a person is always evil—even bad people: it’s a shortcut. I don’t know how to solve this other than to commit an evil act, so I’ll fall back on evil rather than actually try. If we imprison them for life they get to live in prison at my expense—so, it’s actually about your devotion to your money? or that you are jealous that they get to eat when you have to work for the same? In the movies, vigilantes become heroes for taking the law into their own hands. The flawed criminal justice system let them go, so I’m going to kill them to stop them from doing it again. But the vigilante is a killer: that’s not heroic. That’s an evil act to prevent potential evil acts that never actually occurred. But it feels like Justice: an Eye for an Eye.
But that’s not being good, if we really think about it—it’s a shortcut.
The Efficiency of being Good
So, what is the racing line of morality? We can’t look externally to laws, or tracts, or wise teachers—we can’t even trust our heart or feelings! Are we just supposed to use cold logic? Or deliberate endlessly exploring all angles and be paralyzed with no idea what to do?
Let’s confront that directly.
Laws, tracts, and wise teachers are not to be ignored. Those are how we learn to be good. At their best, these sources are essential in our decision-making process. The shortcut is not having a decision-making process. If your answer to why did you do something is, I was told to do it by an authority, then any flaw in that authority has made your action flawed. There are no perfect sources of truth. Even if such a source existed, it would be in constant flux: you understood how it applied in one situation, but perhaps your understanding didn’t account for a tiny nuance that completely invalidated the truth.
Similarly our hearts and feelings are pretty good at what they do. Evolution and weeding out of maladaptive traits has done a decent job of telling us what is adaptive to do. But adaptivity is not the same as good. Lion stepdads eating their step-children is adaptive since it frees up resources for their biological gene-carrying children. But it’s not good. Old rich men marrying young fertile-signaling women is adaptive. Young fertile-signaling women marrying old rich men for their money is adaptive. Whether those marriages are good or not cannot be determined with the information given. It requires nuance; everything does Except lion stepdads, that’s just bad behavior.
The most efficient path to doing good is to be a good person.
That line isn’t as stupid obvious as it looks. I promise it’s not a circular definition.
In my reckoning a person is not good because they do what is good. That’s a good-doing robot. A good person is not good because they avoid doing bad: that’s a shortcut to avoiding punishment. No, a good person is efficient at doing good because they intuitively know what the good thing to do is, and that intuition was learned by carefully listening to good laws, good role-models, good feelings, your selfish genes’ affinity to adaptive behaviors, and then thinking about them hard enough to know when they are leading you to do good and when they aren’t.
A master of chess thinks a thousand moves ahead not because they think better than a mere mortal, but because they have spent a lifetime recognizing patterns and considering the good move as it relates to those patterns. They have learned to intuit when the pattern applies and when it does not, but also when it applies and then does not, and adapt to new information and nuance. A great artist may have a natural inclination to create masterworks of art, but those gifts are reinforced by 10,000 hours of drilling, experimenting, and putting them to use.
Thus, we must spend our 10,000 hours thinking about what it is to be good so that in the crucial instant we know what to do. We must spend those hours building the muscle memory to be good and do good. We must learn from the consequences of what seemed good at the time and be mindful enough to recognize the nuances we missed.
Anything less is a shortcut.
Thank you for this journey, spot on.