hence, also, what Campbell terms the Great Bronze Age Myth (which Confucious championed) of civilization as a means of orienting the individual and great mass of individuals to this formless way.  i believe Wilber (whom i am far from an expert on) refers to this as the Great Nest of Being; composed of what my be conceived as concentric spheres, each of which ‘transcends and includes’ the sphere immediately prior to it, while being transcended and included in the sphere immediately post.  Virtue, in this scheme, is ultimately that mysterious quality that keeps all the spheres integrated with one another.

this, if you read Elaine Pagels “Adam, Eve and the Serpent”, was essentially the notion of virtute common to the pagan Roman world of antiquity that was challenged by the Christian revolution, which viewed this Great Nest of powers as a prison system which blinded the immortal soul by its demands and enticements.  we find this same split, of course, in the story of the Buddha, and Socrates, the Gita and so on.

the basic struggle might be expressed in the ethic of being “in the world but not of it.”  hence the basic practice, as i understand it, of cultivating both a profound detachment and a mindful involvement.  Virtue, you might say, is the child of the marriage of these two opposites.  this is very powerfully expressed in Kipling’s IF.

frankly it’s a very tall order; and moreover, something that is a great lure to vanity.

as to how i decide: the Golden Rule, imperfectly.  as to the familiar tug of the heart: my personal problem with that is that my tends to be of two minds.  there are – as i’m fond of saying! – ditches on both sides of the road.  i’ve been too soft and too hard.  sometimes kindness is a greater cruelty and cruelty a kindness.

or put another way, we live in a world composed of vastly different sorts of dynamics.  we can, i think, suppose a general symmetry across scale; but not an absolute identity across scale.  as Lao Tzu said, more or less: view the individual as an individual, the family as a family, the town as a town and the nation as a nation.  if these things were all identical, the matter of virtue would be vastly simpler than it is.  the great challenge arises, i think, in trying to reconcile the virtue of the family (which is to say the values that succeed within a family) and the virtues of the empire.

the tension between these two is well-attested by economic history – in particular, the end of feudal society (which treated all social relations, at least ideally, as an extended family, so that everyone lived within a series of nested spheres of responsibility but without freedom) and the rise of capitalism.  as Ken Wilber says, echoing Max Weber, capitalism brought about a differentiation of interpersonal and economic mores.  lending money at interest, for example, became permissable, though according to religious social theory it had long been denounced as one of the most severe sins (i.e. usury).

it seems to me that you’re engaged in what Wilber calls the “pre/trans fallacy”, which is a sort of emotional idealism that fails to take into account what we might call the facts on the ground.  those being that the values the prove successful in different spheres of activity are different.  again, if they weren’t, virtue would be a far simpler matter.  it’s complicated and elusive exactly because it cannot be reduced.

in the next post, i wrote described what i’d call the ‘trans version of virtue’, as a sort of alchemical fusion (which is to say a reconcilation of opposites) of ecological values and individuality.  that’s what i’m positing in favor of what i take you to be saying… though i appreciate the importance of the emotional transactions of the family/clan group as a sort of ecological microcosm.  we’re in deep water here, so i’ll leave off trying to be comprehensive and get back to the paying work i need to get moving on.  here’s a relevant quote, from Children of Dune:

There exist obvious higher-order influences in any planetary system. This is often demonstrated by introducing terraform life onto newly discovered planets. In all such cases, the life in similar zones develops striking similarities of adaptive form. This form signifies much more than shape; it connotes a survival organization and a relationship of such organizations. The human quest for this interdependent order and our niche within it represents a profound necessity. The quest can, however, be perverted into a conservative grip on sameness. This has always proved deadly for the entire system.

-The Dune Catastrophe, After Harq al-Ada

it seems to me that’s the perspective you’re proceeding from.  that you’re inclined to believe that there exists a genuine morality inherent to the limbic system.  i’d agree with that, except for one thing:

the morality of the limbic system evolved on a tribal level.  thus, the sense of propriety as regards emotional transactions relates to that level.  the transactions of politics are on a different level.  as Stalin said, the death of one person is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.

for a while now i’ve been considering the interplay of these two senses of propriety on dkos.  on the one hand, people emotionally bond with their party and candidate (and the dkos community in general) as if it were an extended family.  and of course politicians work to come across in that way.  hence all of the rhetoric during the primaries by both Clinton and Obama against policies like NAFTA, which neither ever intended seriously to change.  were Obama to dissemble in his personal life as frequently as he does on the political stage he’d be diagnosed with some sort of disorder.  but there’s an evolving sense, very clear on dkos if you watch long enough, of acceptance of such dissembling as a necessary part of politics.  this evolution is marked by periodic flare-ups of outrage by people made cognizant of the dissimilarity between limbically oriented rhetoric and the statistically oriented policy choices.

the question then becomes Who is Obama deceiving?  is he appearing to play the game so as to slip past the defenses of the status quo; or is he, in the fashion of an anti-christ, acting the part of the compassionate savior so as to anesthetize the masses while the last remnants of their legal society are unwoven.

personally, i don’t know.  he certainly does come across as a good family man; a person, that is, with a healthy sense of emotional transactions.  again, though, the transactions of statecraft are not the transactions of a family, all political rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.