beyond good and evil
i don’t mean to say that a culture’s notion of virtue is nothing more than the glorified self-interest of the dominant class. that, i think, certainly is one possibility – what you might call the road more travelled. i believe, however, in the existence of the road less traveled. however, it seems to me that the two roads have a tendency to turn into one another. tyranny can come out of good intentions, and aggrandized self-interest can be a progressive force.
the development of Capitalism provides an excellent example of the intercourse of these two sorts of virtue. as i read Lao Tzu, whose wisdom i trust more than most any other, the Way is exactly a vital exchange between Good and Evil. Hence, the Fall from Grace (i.e. the Fall from the Way) is exactly a disruption of this intercourse of self-interest and integrated survival (what is called imperialism). for radical ecologists, this Fall is nothing other than civilization as we know it. this is the essential Christian view as well, though it is much distorted by integration into a system of worldly power. Islam, too.
Judgment Day
the Day of Judgment that is an article of faith in the Christian and Islamic traditions expresses the understanding of Imperial Civilization as founded upon a Fall from Grace; Grace being the State in which Good and Evil (compassion and self-interest) engage in a vital living intercourse. This, incidentally, is the Real foundation of the more or less fictional transgressive morality (the special rules for special people) that is inherent to all systems of the self-selected Elect. That is: all of those transgressive moralities (from the Jewish slaughter of the inhabitants of Canaan on down) are rooted in the dynamic Reality of the Way, which mixes up the categories of Good and Evil as part of an integrated Ecology.
The Key element of society, as Confucious said, is jen, humanity. Same thing Socrates called Virtue. This being the sentient action that links social forms to the vital, trans-conceptual, dynamic Way that the entire universe depends upon and expresses. The Human Endeavor is to marry Nature and Culture; or from the opposite perspective, Heaven and Earth. it’s not easy. all you need is Love, but there’s nothing harder to find and keep.
Cheney and Ritual Existence
I don’t think Cheney would describe his actions as immoral. I take Cheney for one of those guys who firmly believes himself engaged in the higher morality, the transgressive morality, of a self-selecting Elect. There are of course real consequences to embracing such a morality, but all high officials use these sorts of denial mechanisms to one degree or another. The wise, as Lao Tzu said, treat people like straw dogs – which is to say, as instruments in the great ceremony of civilized existence.
Ethics and Shame
i agree with your basic sense of ethics. it sounds like you think i don’t, but i’m not sure why. i’ve previously described accountability as a developmental tool. what i’ve said is that i don’t know, personally, what amounts to true accountability. i think the key is to satisfy one’s own sense of accountability, which is complicated by the imposition of what we might call false shame.
as i see it, we live in a society governed by false, imposed, shame. hence the pandemic hypocrisy of every institution from bank to church to state to marriage. the world as i see it is full of people embracing standards with some degree of deception, just as a means of survival. being confused is one way to comprehend the dissonance.
i, personally, am not a paragon of virtue. you ask what makes me ineffective? it’s that, in a nutshell. so, yeah, i’m working on it. right now, i’m working through The 7 Habits book. it’s actually quite fantastic, if you’ve never read it. i got it from Audible.com for free, as an audiobook. i highly recommend it. (an open door right there, jake) i’ve been listening to it as i work. i’m also getting more serious about meditation and physical practice again. and becoming more financially stable. oh, and re-engaging music as a practice. all in all, the Human Endeavor, on the microcosmic level.
Virtue
i agree with Socrates, and i’ve paid for that belief. my sympathies lie with the idealists, but the real issue is not what one believes, but whether or not one embodies that belief… which is to say, whether or not one truly understands. i don’t. but i definitely feel the necessity of becoming better at making an effort to. i always have felt that necessity, probably too much, too soon. as has been said: foolishness consists of arriving too early and waiting too late. thus, as Hamlet says, losing the name of action.
July 12th, 2009 at 12:42 am
r.e. Cheney, i meant i think Cheney would describe his acts as immoral if they were completely abstracted from any personal accountability for him. “mr cheney, if a person were to deliberately deceive the world in order to invade another country, murder hundreds of thousands of people and plunder their resources, would that be morally wrong?” in a magical universe where that question doesn’t obviously point at him, he’d angrily duckquack “of course.”
thnx 4 response. more latr…
Reply
July 12th, 2009 at 1:13 am
so ur saying u believe in arete/ren/virtue intellectually, but don’t yet feel that u grok it on a deep level, and so that’s the direction ur trying to move >> is that right?
do u agree/disagree that taking ownership of needs and behavior (as u say, the embodiment of virtue) between oneself and the other party(s) in an emotional transaction is necessary for the ‘virtue instinct’ to properly measure out a healthy, equitable balance?
do u want 2 expand on how you paid for believing in socrates’ idea of virtue? i’m curious at this ‘mcguyver gives props 2 socrates and pays the terrible price – tonight at 8pm!’-esque story hook, but only if it’s not too personal given the open-invitation nature of the blogosphere.
Trunk reports fun times at the circus. his bowl seems so empty.
Reply
July 12th, 2009 at 3:17 am
not quite. i feel i grok it on a deep level, i’m just not consistently virtuous. lots of epiphanies, little follow-through. and yes, remedying that is the direction i’m aiming at.
i agree that taking ownership is the necessary act… though i’d add that as this is necessarily limited, and so complicated, by awareness (as in, you can only own what you’re aware of, and you can imagine yourself aware of things that aren’t real).
i was partly joking about paying for it. it is a nice hook. objectively put, it *seemed* that way to me when i was reading Plato in college and butting heads with my professor, who apparently thought Socrates was impolite.
on a related note, some years ago i was driving from San Jose to Berkeley with two friends, reading them the Apology as we went. after some time reading, i was thinking how amazing Socrates was and paused to reflect on that with my friends, who immediately declared into the silence, “What an asshole!”
there is, i think, in general a danger (as history has repeatedly demonstrated) in being what’s considered too concerned with genuine virtue (as opposed to virtue as defined by the interests of the local power structure). on Dkos, people deemed such are labeled concern trolls. which means too worried (by the dominant standard) about divergence from principle.
and i think there is a danger in being overly concerned. but the issue is where those lines of ‘too concerned’ and ‘too permissive’ are drawn. there are ditches on both sides of the road. personally, i’ve always felt the most draw toward the gadflies. the only problem with this, aside from the social danger, is that i haven’t been very successful in biting my own ass…
so to speak.
oh, and i still disagree on Cheney. i think he’s the sort of person who considers those horrors as an inevitable part of the great game. though i don’t think he’d admit to that attitude outside the company of other players. i never saw the movie, but i’m tempted to say it’s like Fight Club. did you watch the video in the last post? if not, i suggest it highly. eye-opening as regards the transgressive morality people might agree to within the company of their particular circle of ‘the elect.’
Reply
July 12th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
i think we’re argugreeing on cheney. i agree he thinks the ‘chosen’ (or ‘worthwhile people’ or the ‘empire’, whatever word he uses) play by a different set of rules, which includes ‘permissible’ lying toward what he sees as the greater good (of the elite, or maybe just him personally). i’m saying his heart (limbic system) knows the truth and his head chooses instead to listen to his serpent (brainstem).
Reply
July 12th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
urbandictionary.com mostly defines a ‘concern troll’ as someone perceived to be insincere in their claim to virtue. did u get that brand somewhere?
Reply
July 12th, 2009 at 11:56 pm
re Cheney: so, do you think all people in power bear a secret shame for the deaths they initiate? outside, it’d be considered highly pathological to, even accidentally, kill people in pursuit of your aims. yet people in power do it regularly, at least in America. if the truth is that they all feel appropriately revolted by their own acts, doesn’t that make them all in a sense insane, insofar they have dissociated from their genuine conscience?
—
my understanding of concern troll comes from dkos, where i might have been labled as such by someone at some point. i really can’t recall. i did create an alter ego there under the username ‘concern troll’, though i don’t know if i ever used it. as i see it, the perception of insincerity at dkos is often deeply tied up with the general faith in kos’ strategy of ‘more and better democrats.’ as to labels like insincere, seems to me that people most often categorize others motives as such in an attempt to discredit them. there’s only a blurry line at best between insincere and too stupid to understand how to best serve their own interest (and so insincere from ignorance of real sincerity rooted in appropriate concern).
anyway, long story short, my sense of concern troll comes from personal experience of its usage on dkos, in general not directed at me. to qualify concern as insincere isn’t so much different than calling it excessive. the point is that the concern is reckoned as inappropriate and so disruptive to whatever the dominant position is.
Reply
July 13th, 2009 at 12:15 am
yes, i think all of us carry our disowned transactions as blights on our soul till we reclaim ownership. the blights allow us to act in a self-serving way by dissociating us from our inbuilt sense for healthy interactions. but those blights also block us from the joy that can only be felt from mutually healthy emotional transactions (love). it’s a slippery slope; that’s why total bastards, no matter how big the mansion, how pneumatic the mistress, r hollow inside, living like vampires on the thin meal of dominion.
Reply
July 13th, 2009 at 12:30 am
so what about Obama? is he carrying some tremendous shame burden for all the civilians killed in actions he’s authorized?
Reply
July 13th, 2009 at 12:53 am
honestly i don’t follow politics very closely and don’t know much about obama. but from what i’ve seen, i think he is genuinely concerned with trying to do the right thing, more than any president we’ve had in memory. i think anyone who kills wears the stain on their soul. i think the soldiers saying ‘i’m killing in war, i’m only following orders’ are closing themselves off to a piece of their humanity (maybe in rare instances that’s the only answer). i do think the psychic wound can be healed. my guess (maybe i’m wrong) is obama is honest with himself about the burden he’s taking on his soul, and his greater good is genuinely his best approximation of the greater good for mankind, as opposed to cheney’s greater good for cheney. or maybe obama is all smoke & mirrors; u tell me.
Reply
July 14th, 2009 at 12:57 am
so do you regard the difference between Cheney and Obama as the sincerity of their belief? that is: is it the sincerity of their belief or the accuracy of their belief that matters? my guess is that you regard sincerity and accuracy as being somehow dependent upon one another. as in: a person can only be genuinely sincere toward a limbically accurate sense of the common good. this because the virtue instinct would rebel against an inaccurate belief, generating an emotional dissonance that would disturb genuine sincerity.
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.
Reply
July 14th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
socrates used the same word arete (virtue) inclusive of the relationships between friends, lovers, families, and larger political structures. my instinct is he’s correct – virtue is always the same across scale, only our approximation systems change.
ur idea that our biological virtue circuit evolved during a certain culture, and thus only applies to that culture is interesting. it feels to me like tribal culture ideas of right/wrong are still clearly ethics, and virtue is more to do with biology. for instance, sometimes on nature documentaries there’s not enough food to go around, so the mother animal will portion out rations to all her cubs and herself. she won’t just gobble it all. seems like that’s social virtue, that instinct for ‘fairness.’ so it seems like our biological sense of equitable behavior is animal, and predates tribal culture. all primates share.
i can’t prove it, but the tingly feeling in my gutt when i see an animal share food socially is the same as when i see one of those rare decency-motivated CEOs pay a higher salary than he could get away with. do u have that same tingly gut feeling when observing decent/indecent bavior? doesn’t it feel of a slightly different quality than the gutt feeling of not getting things ur own way, or when observing a gap between behavior and ethical norms? for me there’s definitely a difference in the quality of those feeligns. the more of a vested interest i have in an outcome, the harder it is to sort out which feelings are which, but i hope i get better as i get older at playing fair. i think the feeling of emotional happiness (in contrast with temporary hedonistic pleasure) is the body’s complexely evolved reward system for acting with virtue. so like socrates, i find the closer i move to virtue, the closer i move to happiness.
i don’t know enuf about obama 2 discuss him. maybe we could instead abstract as ‘the virtuous man.’ in my opinion cheney’s behavior is wholly lacking in virtue, so i’m happy to keep him as antithesis.
Reply
July 15th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
regarding the fairness instinct, that’s still a tribal situation – even if the tribe isn’t human – which is vastly different than an empire. in politics, as i see it, evoking feelings of tribal identity is generally a rhetorical ploy, not a substantive policy. i’m not saying that real virtue (which is in essence a mystical ideal) is unreal, but rather that i don’t think you can reduce virtue to the values of a familial dynamic.
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
Reply
July 16th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
would u agree that the moral philosophers we’ve been discussing – socrates, confuscious and lao tzu – all chose to use a consistent term (arete, ren, the tao te) to refer to a virtuous balance for personal, family and state relationships inclusive?
it FEELS to me they’re all the same thing, and when i quiet my ego-voice sufficiently in any situation, i can feel that tug of the virtuous path in my heart well enough to balance the needs of the other party(s) against my personal needs well enuff 2 play fair. i agree i cannot prove symettric virtue, but it feels true to me. the moral philosophers i respect most seem to treat virtue as symettric across scale (i suppose that’s a roundabout way to repeat that I believe that).
maybe this symettry across scale is related to the golden rule, as u suggest. maybe not. i suspect that socrates/lao tzu are correct in their idea that virtue can never be defined in words, but can still be apprehended (and doing so is man’s highest calling). i want to avoid getting stuck in the trap of needing a logical understanding of virtue to be able to honor it, both since i agree with Soc. it’s not possible to have (at least until the brain scientists figure it out someday, maybe), and also if i did have one, my conscious mind would probably interfere and obstruct the weighing of virtue i’m learning to do with my heart.
i’m starting to see for instance situations where i’ve behaved disrespectfully and been frustrated that no one could explain to my logical satisfaction what i was doing ‘wrong’ – i see that my disrepect was in dismissing the feelings of others because those feelings had no place in my understanding of ethics, and i only understood virtue thru the imperfect stained-glass-window metaphor of ethics. my disrespect (i see now) was in closing my heart to everyone who didn’t happen to rationally agreed with me. my meaningless high IQ score reinforced my impression that i saw things ‘correctly.’
i’m not familiar with ken wilbur. what r ur fave books by him, and which of his ideas do u find most interesting? blog posts on him seem to fall in2 2 camps: (1) he’s the absolute top genius breakthru modern philosopher or (2) he’s a laughably grandiose crackpot. where do u fall?
if u don’t apprehend virtue as i do, by queiting the ego-mind to hear that particular familiar tug at the heart, what’s ur moral process? how do u decide ur position when negotating transactions with other people?
Reply
July 17th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
i agree that the quality of ‘virtue’ has been used comprehensively. i’ve simply been saying that this comprehensive quality cannot be reduced to a single sphere. as in: the definition of virtue that might seem inherent to, say, a family is not applicable to, say, the governing of an empire. that’s not to say that virtue itself is not inclusive, but that the particular notion of virtue derived from the transactions of one particular sphere is not correct. hence for both Socrates and Lao Tzu, the transcendent (of any particular context), comprehensive (of all contexts), Way of Virtue cannot be named.
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.
Reply
July 17th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
to put that first sentence of the last comment more clearly: i agree that the term ‘virtue’ (in whatever language) has been used by the philosophers in question to indicate a comphrehensive quality. it is, i’ve been trying to say, this very comprehensiveness that makes this quality not reducible to the transactions of any particular sphere of activity.
Reply
July 17th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
i hear u. we may be approaching the point where we’ll have to agree to disagree. i can’t prove that the tug in my heart when making moral decisions = virtue, or that virtue in statecraft is the same (on some biological level) as virtue within a family, that virtue can never be defined in words, or that ethics can never be more than a crude approximation of virtue – but that’s what i believe.
as u pointed out, ethical system can vary widely, and just about any act is justified by some ethical system. so if u don’t use the heart’s ‘tug of virtue’ as a control during emotional transactions, how do u avoid ur brainstem just talking ur neocortex into whichever ethical perspective best supports ur own goals in the moment?
i skimmed the ken wilber page on wikipedia & some of the external links. i’m basically an engineer at heart, and my shields go up whenever anyone uses fluffy-sounding yet grandiose words while implying certainty, so I’m having an immediate negative reaction. on the other hand, i nearly always have a negative reaction to modern philosophers of the berkeley ilk (check out the ‘behind the matrix’ documentary interviewing berkeley philosophy professors and be ye stunned at how much $ people can pull down for empty, meaningless, pot-fueled bullshit), but surely there are some gems in the field. i hate to think there’s a modern Plato, and my knee-jerk prejudice against modern philosophers is keeping me from finding him/her.
there’s so much text by wilber, it’s hard for me to make even a rough approximation on the bullshit-to-useful spectrum. one review claims wilber dismisses out of hand all criticism from the ‘mean green meme,’ which is wilber’s definition for everyone who does not agree with his core philosophy. in other words, in his system u are only allowed to disagree with him if u broadly agree with him – is this tru? what do u make of wilber’s famous response to his critics?
http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/46
Reply
July 18th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
discussion continues in this post…
Reply