Groups and Morality:
As I watched a group of young boys play outside a mosque in Melaka, I reflected on how often people say some variation of the following phrase: “I believe that people are basically good.” It’s hard not to feel this way when surrounded by frolicking children. Harder still when one hesitantly approaches you asking for a picture, and upon the answer of “yes”, as if a reservoir held back by a dam was suddenly released, the other boys surge forward, crowding around this oddity that is me: the strange white man from America. Smiling and giggling, they seem to point to an optimistic view of humanity.
If we are good, though, where then does all the rottenness of humanity come from? And if we are good, why has it taken us thousands of years of civilization to realize truths like: “slavery is wrong”, and “women deserve the same opportunities as men”? The truth is a bit obvious, but I’ll say it anyway.
A long time ago a group of apes began to work together instead of working alone. This sacrifice of working together ended up benefitting each individual member so much that the genes for this “group” gained in immense advantage. The trait was selected for, and our ancestors began to work together. This is where our goodness comes from: from the genes that construct us as social beings.
The evil, interestingly, comes from the same place. The neurotransmitter (trans lives matter, and so do transmitters) oxytocin is often called (by those who refer to such things often) the “love chemical”. It bonds us to our mothers, to our siblings, to our partners and infants. It also, as has been shown in multiple studies, increases our aversion to people we don’t know. Put another way, it helps us to identify and bond with the people who are likely to help us survive, and to identify and keep at a distance (or kill) people who are likely to compete with us.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously wrote that “the line between good and evil passes through the heart of every man”, implying that good and evil exist in all of us. What makes us decide to cross that line? Well, one of the largest reasons we commit atrocities is in the name of our group. As there is a line through our hearts dividing our souls into halves of good and evil, there seems to be a line through our brains that divides the world into “us” and “them”. Our group, to which we owe love, loyalty, compassion, and respect, and “the others”, who are beneath contempt. Whether it is religion, nationality, race, gender, or any metric by which we divide ourselves by defining ourselves, groups like nothing else cause us to lose sight of the suffering that we are capable of inflicting, and the readiness with which we are capable of inflicting it. This tendency to separate the world into “us” – the people who help us, who look out for us, who are “in the same boat” as us – and “them” – the others, is not the only reason why we do bad things, but it is what we in the military would call a “force multiplier”. It helps us forget our moral qualms, tear infants from the arms of their mothers, stone our sisters to death, and march our former neighbors into the gas chamber.
Humans have grouped themselves by religion for a longer period of time than some religions believe the universe has existed (think about that for a second). This brings me, in a roundabout way, back to where I began this preamble: the mosque.
Masjid Selat:
Before I walked into the Masjid Selak (literally “straits mosque”) in Melaka, I’d never been in a mosque in my life. I’ve been outside the famous “Dome of the Rock” in Jerusalem, but didn’t have the opportunity to go inside (my tour group was Jewish, and focused on the Wailing Wall). The point is, I didn’t know what to expect. Would they be angry with me since I didn’t believe any of the Quran? Would I somehow offend them without meaning to, or make a fool of myself by wearing the wrong thing, or saying the wrong thing (or failing to say or perform some ritual)?
Anyway, why go into a mosque at all? For one, I’m pretty firmly convinced that there’s no reason to trust in any religion, and I’m also convinced that the Muslim religion, frankly, needs to get its shit together in many ways. People talk about how Islam is a religion of peace (what a cliche that), and yet if we look at people in modern times who murder in the name of their faith, the list is mostly Muslims. Given the fact that I feel this prejudice towards members of the Muslim faith (that they are at least more likely to behave like violent psychopaths), would it ever be truly possible for me to see them in an objective way?
Second, give that I’m an atheist, and a white Westerner from a secular society, would they even want me there?
This brings me back to a question I’ve asked a few times over the course of this journey: why travel? Why spend the money, and tolerate the discomfort, of packing a few things and heading to far-off lands, to meet people who aren’t like you and often can’t even speak to you, who eat different food and have strange rituals? For some, the answer is unthinking hedonism. Young backpackers travel to exotic lands and simply drink alcohol and fuck each other. To them travel is an escape from the confines of their ordinary lives. The strange places in which they find themselves act as cloaks of anonymity, allowing them to drop the inhibitions they normally feel – the need to preserve their reputation – and just let loose. Others seek new experiences. They want to skydive, or SCUBA dive, to ride on camels or on elephants, to see old places and new cities. Some simply seek independence, a time away from it all. There are a ton of reasons to travel, and I’ll offer a new one: travel allows us the chance to move groups of people from the group of “them” to the group of “us”.
In this sense, travel takes on a moral dimension. If I want to avoid the trappings that have caused many people to behave in evil ways, I have to direct my efforts towards seeing people as us and not them. If being good and not evil is important to me, it’s in my interest to try to see people in this way. This is distinct from the obvious benefits to them (I won’t want to kill them) – it is a way for me to be the type of person that I want to be: someone who doesn’t operate from a base of ignorance and prejudice, but who bases his beliefs on rationality and experience.
So I entered the mosque. And in many ways, it wasn’t surprising. They tried to recruit me. They talked about the obviously praiseworthy aspects of their religion, and downplayed what we could call the recent bad publicity. They even said that if I converted I would have 72 virgins in heaven, which was something I honestly thought wasn’t a real Muslim belief. Or that it was, but was something like the old Jewish prohibitions on marring your beard: something that most Muslims agreed was stupid and shouldn’t be taken seriously. But it actually didn’t take the man long to come to this incentive, nor did it seem to offend the woman standing next to him that this was an incentive.
I also wasn’t surprised by my own reaction. I was uncomfortable as I walked the line between my code of honesty, which forced me to tell the truth, and my code of civility, which required me to be tactful with the man and woman. At one point he asked me, “don’t you want to go to Heaven?” and I had to answer truthfully, “of course, if I believed such a place existed.”
Other things did surprise me. I was surprised by how much the discipline of the religion appealed to me. If you leave aside the myriad ways in which women seem to be treated awfully by the religion: forced to wear burkhas, niqabs or hijabs (or taught from birth that only by covering oneself in such a way can one be “modest”), subjected to inferior legal status, the horrors of genital mutilation that fall on them, if you edit all that out, what you have are several practices that strike me as noble and self-effacing, if misguided. Religion is often like this, actually. It is a set of beliefs that one performs perhaps because one expects to be rewarded, but which has the effect of producing, in many cases, someone who is actually modest, more insulated from hubris, and with greater mastery and conscientiousness than otherwise.
It doesn’t mean that being a Muslim, or a member of any religion, makes you a better person. But it probably makes many people into better people. What I’m saying is that if I wasn’t so skeptical of the things that, interestingly, seem to be the most important things (there is a god, there is an afterlife, and so on), I would probably join a religion. I might even become a Muslim, since it seems to involve the most discipline.
Think of it: you must wake up every morning around dawn to pray, then pray 4 more times that day. You cannot drink alcohol. One month out of the year, you fast during all the daylight hours as a symbol of self-effacement and will. If you can afford it, you must give to the poor. You must also travel, albeit to one place, Mecca, once a year if you can afford it. You must learn Arabic so that you can read the Quran in the native tongue. The list goes on.
I like the idea of a way of life being difficult. As Teddy Roosevelt once said, “I have never envied a man who led an easy life. I’ve envied a great many men who led difficult lives, and led them well.” So for me, the Muslim discipline is an admirable quality, and one that many Westerners could learn from.
The problem is that at the core of it, these are all practices which show loyalty to a group, and this ultimately makes them vulnerable to evil influences. In fact, the reason that the Muslim faith may be more vulnerable to evil than other religions is because Muslims take their religion so seriously. Christians, at this point in the religion’s history, don’t really care about the differences between each others’ separate faiths. In my home town of Palmyra, New York, there’s an intersection with a different protestant denomination’s church on each corner. Four churches within walking distance, and a Roman Catholic church down the street, and no bombs have gone off yet.
Contrast this with the fact that Muslims kill each other every day over minute differences in faith. Of course, they wouldn’t call these differences minute, but hopefully you get my point. The fact that you must show so much, be so devoted to gain group access seems to increase group cohesion, but also out-group aversion. The Muslim faith is also the only faith remaining which still insists, in most interpretations, that the punishment for apostasy is death.
So you can see my mind hasn’t been changed on the beliefs. But what of the people? Well, first of all, it must be said, not everyone who says they are a Muslim has the same set of beliefs. Anyone who says otherwise is giving in to prejudice. Some Muslims believe in the literal truth of the Quran, that we must impose Sharia law, and that infidels should be beheaded. And some simply find that the discipline and faith of being a Muslim brings them peace and joy, and are content with that.
Having said that, my biggest surprise, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been, was that Muslims seemed almost identical to Christians. Something has gone wrong with some part, or some sect, at this moment in history, and we have to deal with that, but these Muslims in Melaka offered me the exact same thing, with minor variations, that the Christians did. Eternal bliss, a ticket away from infinite torture, and (cherry on top) 72 virgin women who don’t get jealous of each other.
So, did I succeed? Are these people now members of my “us” group? Well, in the first place, I’m not in a rush to unleash a murderous onslaught on anybody. But the truthful answer is hard to come to. I respected the way that these people chose to live their lives, and I feel like seeing them and talking to them, especially the woman, made me consider that there are some people for whom religion is a great comfort and source of strength. I already knew this to some extent – most of my family is religious – but I’d had little exposure to that from the Muslim faith. I’ve also seen more broadly in Malaysia many women wearing hijabs who aren’t facing the threat of death if they don’t. And I grew to respect the aspect of discipline in the Muslim faith, even though I also believe that this discipline and sense of seriousness is probably what makes some members so readily violent.
Melaka:
Melaka is called a historic city, which when you think about it is kind of a backhanded compliment. It’s a nice way of saying that there’s not much going on there these days, and not much likely to be going on there in the future. “But oh, does it have a past!”
Named for the Melaka tree, the city sits atop the busiest trade lane in the world, the imaginatively titled Straits of Melaka. Yet, the city hasn’t benefitted from this trade in over two hundred years. First colonized by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the British, and finally returned to local governance along with the rest of the country following WWII, I could probably have told you that Melaka means “hot potato” and some of you would have been convinced…
These days, the city makes most of its money from tourism, being titled a UNESCO World Heritage site for its colonial history. It is surprisingly bad, given that fact, at delivering on that. Seeing that it was a world heritage site, I booked four days there, only to find that I’d seen everything of note in, well, an afternoon. This history is interesting, but it’s mostly not played out in the architecture or in museums. The architecture that remains is really one city block, a few churches, and an area called “Jonker Walk” that used to be Dutch barracks and now becomes a lively night market on the weekends.
What was far more interesting to me was the future of Melaka. The city has a tourism industry that sustains it, but it honestly felt dismal. There weren’t many tourists, they mostly just came for an afternoon from KL (that’s Kuala Lumpur, a two-hour drive to the north), and really only on the weekends. A few, like me, who hadn’t done their research, came for longer and ended up downloaded SNES emulators and beating games that had mystified them as children.
The future, though, holds potential. Signs posted in some areas talk about a revival of Melaka as a trade hub. One politician claims that “we are bringing back the glory of Melaka and it shall return”, while signs posted throughout the area confidently warn: “Don’t Mess With Melaka.” A locally-based hospitality firm called the Hatten Group is building an ambitious (to say the least) series of buildings including an enormous luxury apartment complex, a building called “Satori” which might be the world’s largest spa, and a gargantuan structure that will contain a mega-mall, apartment complex, an amusement park, and at the top level, even a beach.
The hope is to turn Melaka into, well, Kuala Lumpur, or, ideally, Singapore. Singapore, after all, gains most of its wealth from the fact that its ships patrol the Melaka straits, and a huge amount of trade flows through the area. I spent time in Singapore, on both ships that I served on in the Navy, and there’s probably enough ships that come in to the port to sustain two cities. As it stands, ships spend large periods waiting to be offloaded, sometimes days or weeks. These ships could be redirected to Melaka, but Melaka would need to build up its port infrastructure first.
Still, this kind of project has been tried before. And it also sounds something like the empty phrases that you hear from a lot of old US cities that used to be relevant. In the shadow of their former glory, they yearn for future achievement the way as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses. In areas of Melaka not in the historical district, rows of unused buildings stretch for countless blocks like something out of a Soviet wasteland. And one local man informed me that these Hatten construction projects often have some kind of issue, perhaps funding, that causes them to proceed in a lurching manner, stopping for months or years, then starting again and moving forward for some time, then stopping again.
Other locals are just finding ways to live their lives like everyone does. At the Oriental Cottage Cafe on the Jonker Walk, I met two locals, brother and sister, who were from Melaka and who enjoyed meeting tourists from other walks of life. They worked in the expensive part of town – the part catering to tourists – but ate in the cheaper parts of town (only a few blocks away, but the difference in price was sometimes as much as ten times). The man had a collection of vinyl records that made him so proud he insisted on taking a (frankly ridiculous) number of photos with me standing near them, while the woman was a dedicated cook, who on my last day made me a batch of “real Malaysian fried rice” which was so spicy I nearly felt sick.
And my final Melaka interaction was with my Grab driver, a dark-skinned Malaysian who was 22, a student engineer, and an aspiring politician. I’ll admit that when I got into the cab I carried with me my suitcase, my backpack, and a bag of assumptions about the man that were wrong. His english was perfect, he was educated, and he wanted to change the world for the better.
You might ask: did I really think he didn’t want to change the world? Or that he wasn’t educated? How crude of me. But how often do we honestly think about the assumptions that are just stuck in our minds about the people we’ve never met? How often do we let ourselves casually believe that our cab driver is probably uneducated, probably can’t be trusted (especially in a foreign country), and will probably be boring or rude?
It ended up being on of the most pleasurable interactions of my trip, despite its short length. It was also informative. The young man told me that, as mentioned above, he was still in school to become a mechanical engineer, and he planned to continue his education to obtain a Ph.D. So I asked him if he enjoyed engineering, or wanted to be a professor. He told me that he actually didn’t, and that he wanted to go into politics, but he felt that it was important for politicians to be well-educated, so they could make the best policies to help their people. Looking me in the eye, he told me that it was a personal standard that he had for himself. I talked to him about Trump, and how a lot of politicians in America could use an education. He laughed and said that there were politicians everywhere, in America and in Malaysia, who won their office using lies and false promises. But there were also politicians who wanted to help. Since Malaysia won its independence, he said, there had only been one party in power. People have been changing their minds, though, and soon there might be new leaders. He wanted to be ready to be one of them.
This inspired me. Melaka was a city that felt as if it had been left behind, all but a narrow splinter of history that had been preserved and was now marketed to tourists. Malaysia is, in the eyes of most Americans, also a country that’s pretty much irrelevant. And it is irrelevant on the world stage – that’s not likely to change soon. But in Melaka I saw a quality that I admire as much as discipline: the confidence that a bright future lies ahead, if only we have the wisdom and prudence to prepare ourselves to meet it.