Kindness as an outcome or a foundation 

For one, because for many people, the foundation is what produces and supports the structure. If the story is merely arbitrary, these people happened to be nice and did this nice thing isn’t that nice, is a pleasant story, but it’s essentially subjective and relative (its really just about those people and their situation), it isn’t tied to and nlmeta-narrative that validates and supports what they do or compels others to do the same. Because acts of great sacrifice, while inspiring, represent a minority among humans. If your hope for general change is based purely on the theory that people will arbitrarily decide to embrace self sacrifice and self discipline and generosity because they just feel like it you’re likely to be disappointed. You’ve insufficiently appreciated the human capacity for apathy and general self interest. Even more importantly, apathy and self interest only make up the middle proportion of humans. There’s a whole other thing extreme at the opposite from selflessness that’s just as common. Extreme selfishness, brutality, cruelty, a total lack of regard for others, a willingness to profit at their expense, or even revel in it. If you’re just hoping people will decide not to be apathetic or not evil because it seems nice, or some other subjective reason, that’s not going to be generally compelling. People need a pretty strong lever to move them from their natural state and survival strategy. And they need a pretty big stick, often to compel them to restrain their actions if they truly don’t care about others and are willing to use abberant strategies.

That’s why connecting acts of goodness to a compelling meta-narrative that reinforces them and adds moral and cultural and personal context is so important. For a lot of people, absent the pressure of the meta-narrative, they wouldn’t engage in those costly, annoying acts of virtue and kindness and care, or they would bother restraining their impulses toward abuse and exploitation. If all they have to go on is their own feelings and their feelings already don’t place them in the minority of people who feel naturally compelled toward kindness and altruism and duty, then that’s mostly a non-starter. An argument that fails to connect to a meta-narrative that makes sense of virtuous actions also fails to appreciate the potential destructive power of positive impulses. A whole lot of evil has been done because people thought they were pursuing good and doing the right thing, often accidentally and unintentionally, but sometimes even the best ambitions and values can become destructive and tyrannical when allowed to be balloon into overriding values in isolation from a larger restraining context.

So you can hope that it will turn out that people are nice. And for some proportion of people you will be right and get lucky. But you won’t have a solution to deal effectively with the other three quarters of people. That isn’t the whole truth of humanity, so that hope is ultimately doomed to fail. It’s also a bad idea to just assume that everyone is absolutely craven and will respond only to the blunt force of the law and social punishment to restrain them. There is nothing else that can guide or restrain humans, there is only force. Yes, there are a good number of people who will prove that theory true. But again, it’s not the whole truth.

That’s why it’s so important to connect both ends, and the middle, to the overarching moral meta-narrative. That’s the only hope of covering all cases and actually uniting people into some sort of common goal and system that guides everyone and makes sense of and reinforces the approach for everyone. A system that makes it clear that some people, in their acts, are serving and following and working out in life the principles and foundational values of the meta-narrative, and are being recognized for it. And the antisocial (likely criminal) abberant folks at the other end are living lives in opposition to it and are being actively restrained and, if necessary, punished for their actions against others if they won’t restrain them. And hopefully, even if they can’t be convinced to internalize the virtues of the cultural ethic, they can at least be convinced not to actively cross them and harm others. And the people in the middle, who don’t feel strongly compelled either way, as monsters or as saints, will find themselves nested in a value structure that discourages them from the role of the villain and encourages them toward the role of the hero, that reinforces and makes sense of the negative value of one and the positive value of the other and guides them with appropriate levels of reward or punishment to nudge them toward developing a better path. They might not feel like being a hero, but they’ll know that they should and why, that it’s a fixed thing about the world, and so they’ll give it its due. Because it’s something objective about the world, a meta-narrative, it’s larger than the identity and tastes and actions of any one particular group. It speaks to and informs and responds to all of them. It’s true and has relevance across all cases. It’s a common ground we can all share in, despite not all being the same in our tastes, inclination, strategies, or actions.

The thought that you can cut the legs out from under the moral structure, ideologically, and hope the thing will still stand just float in midair is an optimistic one indeed. And it might stand for a while, first among those who were raised taking it for granted and have a hard time giving up the thought habits it ingrained in them. Second, among those with a natural bent that happens to align their tastes with its former content. But ultimately, with the foundational justification gone, the structure will be erodes by the two groups that fall outside those. New generations who don’t take the old position for granted and feel no need to pay lip service to a faith they never had. And those whose inclinations don’t naturally line up with the old value system. And there won’t be any really compelling objective arguments to convince those people, if they don’t already have a natural prejudice in its favor. Ultimately, though, if you don’t have an objective meta-narrative that all the different groups can access and nestle within to unite them, you’re just going to end up with an increasing push and pull between differing factions (with a lot left in the middle who don’t care much either way), and society will sway back and forth between the extremes of different groups’ personal tastes and strategies and habits and ideas and inclinations. Because that’s all that’s really left. A subjective power struggle in which your way seems obviously good to you, but that’s exactly how things seem to everyone else. Valuation is reduced to personal taste, and since your taste is what makes an argument compelling to you, you only find it compelling because you’re you. And I’m not.

The real power of the meta-narrative is its ability to teach you things outside your personal realm of preference. It can tell you things you don’t like, that don’t suit your interests or taste or instincts. It’s meant to be describing a higher, overarching description of moral or ontological reality that transcends all mere perspectives and preferences. It makes sense of and contextualizes them all within itself. It has something to say to correct and something to say to validate them all. It will please you and line up with you on some points and fight you on others, because there will be some areas you see clearly and your natural intuitions are correct and there will be some where you don’t see clearly (or see incompletely) and your natural intuitions are leading you wrong.

So the question, “Why bring God into it?” is a good one. And it has a very good answer. It’s worth considering what we mean by God. Not in some specific religious or historical sense, but just as a definition. What is meant by the concept? And I think you can boil it down mostly to two ideas (at least in the Western tradition, that was informed by Judeo-Christian and Greek thought). First, we mean the highest possible conception of truth, beauty, and goodness. Ultimate goodness, ultimate health, ultimate truth, ultimate beauty. And not singly, but the point at which all those are one and the same in a divine unity, the one reality of which all those dimensions are mere aspects of expression and understanding.

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