Outsourcing understanding: What explains mass devotion to ethical abstractions such as economic equality or "the environment"?

It has been statistically normal for so many generations that the mass of people have some kind of principled, ethical devotion to an abstraction - that the extreme strangeness of it gets unnoticed. 

An early form was Marxism/ Communism, which asked people to devote their lives - even sacrifice their lives - to the almost mathematical abstraction of global economic equality. And, in vast numbers they did!

Yet how very weird it is that modern people - people who naturally and firmly believe that the universe has no purpose or meaning but happened by accidents, and that life and Men evolved by the blind workings of natural selection - should care strongly about the abstraction of economic equality, or justice. 

Something that can only be measured by research and which concerns remote strangers, of whose existence they know only vaguely by unreliable report.

The particular abstraction about which the masses (mostly) care varies through time, almost arbitrarily; and indeed people and institutions may profess several or many abstract principles, regardless of whether these cohere or contradict. 

Nowadays, the analogous ethical concern to Marxism is with that abstraction called "the environment", and in particular with abstractions to do with supposed concentrations of carbon dioxide, and theories and data to do with its generation and effect on the abstraction of global climate. 

So we have the phenomenon of people who argue strenuously that they are themselves merely higher animals or naked apes, whose lives have no relevance or relation to the universe - and that everything which exists does so because of "physics"... 

And yet these same people regard it as an urgent moral imperative that they themselves, and everybody else, and indeed every living being on the planet! - be organized and regulated in order to maintain a certain average global temperature - because that is best for "the earth"! 

The Big unasked question is: From whence cometh this moral imperative? 

Why should creature of the kind modern people assume themselves to be, and living in such a pointless and indifferent reality as modern people assume the universe to be; express (and sometimes live-by) the conviction that we have a moral duty towards abstractions as Communism or 21st Century Environmentalism? 

This is surely a bizarre combination. In the first place, why do people feel a binding morality for anything at all? But secondly: why for such remote abstractions? 

(It has often been observed that many of those who care for "the people" are indifferent or actively cruel to actual human beings around them; and that a "passionate" devotion to "the environment" has led to gross destruction of nature - and its replacement with technology, in and around the same people's actual homes and work-places.)

There is no explicit and coherent answer, and there can be none. 

This bizarre situation must arise from unacknowledged and implicit causes; not from acknowledged fundamental beliefs.

The fact that people regard themselves as moral, and live in pursuit of these abstract moral abstractions; suggests that there is a deep but denied basis for "morality" at work unconsciously and invisibly. 

My best guess is that it is exactly because the basis for our actual mass morality is inexplicit, unconscious and denied. 

And this secondhand nature of values also explains the fact that the actual mass morality is highly arbitrary and unstable, and reactive rather than innate. Public morality changes in line with the perceived needs of the ruling authorities; and when these needs change, morality changes. 

The mass of people have simply got used to living with the mismatch between mandatory and aggressive superficial abstract moral beliefs on one hand; and on the other, an explicit and supposedly science-based rejection of any basis for such beliefs.

To assert that one can have a meaningful and purposive personal life in a random and undirected universe of determined or selfish entities; is something that is so general as to seem like common sense.   

This situation has been building-up for a couple of centuries - and the tacit assumption is that therefore it doesn't really matter. Even though people don't understand why they should care about the survival and equality of the human species; or the survival and temperature of the planet. 

In particular, people don't have any understanding of why they should care more for these remote secondhand abstractions than they care about the people and life around them. 

But a vital part of this modern world-view is that understanding is itself outsourced. 

In other words; people have become used-to the idea that "other people" - experts and the like - will do their understanding for them! 

That, after all, is what churches have mostly told the masses for centuries (millennia?), and that is the basis of the division of labour that underlies modern industrial society.  

To live one's morality and get one's strongest values amidst incomprehension, incoherence and even stark contradiction; is therefore regarded as just another component of the modern human condition. 

Very few are immune to this socially-endorsed habit of outsourcing values; as can be seen by the willingness of so-many Christians to accept incomprehension/ incoherence/ contradiction as articles of faith... 

And thereby not only to take their faith secondhand; and to prize institutional/ social loyalty and obedience as their highest religious value -- but to regard this delegation of responsibility for life-itself as necessary (as well as sufficient) to being-a-Christian.