I believe the theme was cultural models.

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“If you allow us to execute one man, gas will be free for 5 years.  Do we have your blessing?”  This question has never been posed but had it been, I suspect many would issue one answer from their mouth and hold another in their head.  Morals and ethics are little more than something to argue about, i.e. they exist in degrees.    Good and bad are ambiguous and challenging people’s perceptions of them is extremely taboo.

Take for instance the Star Wars movies where the rag tag rebels are the protagonists and the empire is the antagonist.  However, this same scenario is playing out at present, third world (rag tag) countries rebelling against the first world (empire), but you’d be hard pressed to find many Americans who would see the rag tag as the heroes.

Ironically, we do not identify ourselves with the empire.  The Death Star destroyed by a small projectile fired into an exhaust shaft, about as low tech as flying a plane into a building.  Ethics and morals reside within the structure of every society but this fact seems to elude the majority.

Religion is an institution, which has strengthened the field of morals.  Morals are to religion as culture is to anthropology as technology is to science.  Dualism and the creation of a Satan as a mascot for morals and ethics, for Satan is presented as the one who can offer all the worldly pleasures if only you will drop your morals.

At present, the controversy of stem cell research, which seems to be a ‘no-brainer’ in the cause of curing many ailments is stifled by a moral argument rooted in religion.  Thus creating an argument pertaining to the ‘beginning’ of life and when we are we free from moral obligation or when our moral obligation begins.   Yet, the fate of full grown and productive life is held in relatively low regard when one considers the practice of capital punishment.  When arguments begin debating what is right and what is wrong and the result is: there is no right and wrong only the perception.  I believe our (human) behavior, as a whole, sum total, will result in one of two possible global outcomes.

These dual outcomes are like a football game where each team has two possible outcomes win or lose.  Winning and losing a football game is good or bad depending on which side you are on.  Perception.  What is endemic to human life is the way in which the game is played and within the paradigm of the object of the game.  The object of the game is to outscore the opponent by moving forward until you penetrate the opposing teams territory more times than they do yours.  However, whether you win or lose, both teams will have at one point advanced and regressed until one of the two outcomes is reached.  Nevertheless, when the time comes that it is evident one team will lose there is nothing physically stopping that team from giving up.  Why then is this something we rarely if ever see?

Even though one team wants to defeat the other or one team wants to liberate themselves from the oppression of the other it can only be achieved by themselves becoming the oppressor.  The difference is the point of view.  For, the team that wins does not see themselves as the oppressor (bad).  Both teams praying to God to grant them victory over the other best illustrate this.  I believe there exist one global ‘culture of dominance,’ it is the ‘invisible culture’ whose alternative is the global ‘culture of non-dominance.’  However, in this time, on this planet, humans have chosen, through action and idea, the culture of dominance and it must play through to the end.  Though, near the end, it may be recognized for what it is but it will make no sense to derail it.  I’m not going to speculate how a ‘culture of non-dominance’ would operate because I think it can only be determined while in practice.

These thoughts and ideas were inspired by my readings of  D’Andrade also Cornel West.