From: John Beasley (beasley@austarnet.com.au)
Date: Sat Oct 12 2002 - 14:28:20 BST
Hi all,
I rarely take part in the debates on current issues, for numerous reasons,
but in today's batch of emails I received a petition, sent by a friend in
England, asking me to sign up against any US led war on Iraq. In the same
mail is Pantophobic's little piece contrasting the concern for victims of
9.11 with the vastly greater toll caused by the US in its many overt and
covert wars of recent years, followed by Platt's outrage that the US should
be singled out for causing atrocities in the Twentieth Century.
These posts disconcert and unsettle me. I did not sign the petition since I
am of the view that war, terrible though it is, is not necessarily the worst
thing that can happen, and that Saddham's pursuit of chemical and biological
weapons needs to be stopped, as should the US's pursuit of the same. (If
'New Scientist' is to be believed, the anthrax released in the US had been
'weaponised' in a US lab, in a program in contravention of international
treaties that the US has signed.)
While I agree that much of the material in Pantophobic's piece is correct,
that most terrorist activity is initiated by states, and that the US has
been just as ruthless as any other in this regard, I can't see the benefit
of pushing biased and one-sided propaganda as a way of changing the world
for the better. Most countries have been ruthless when it suited them.
Meanwhile Platt's response seems on a level with the morality that suggests
that making the world safe for Americans is about the most noble thing there
is.
So I ask, how does our understanding of the MOQ help? Does it throw any
light on how such issues might be viewed? Let's try.
It would suggest that while biological threats are indeed controlled by
social forces, those social forces in turn need appropriate intellectual
control. Saddham's threat is biological, social and intellectual. [Those who
see it as biological only can stop reading here. We cannot communicate, and
I am not interested in receiving your noxious responses.] Those who find it
hard to unravel the three levels - welcome. So do I. This is one weakness of
the MOQ, that we need to categorize complex actions and interactions in
order to apply the moral hierarchy it supposedly incorporates. But the
moment I characterize Saddhem as a 'germ', or some such, I have lost the
plot.
I have been struggling to remember the author of a book I read many years
ago, titled 'Moral man and Immoral Society', (Niebuhr?) in which the author
argued that while it made sense to expect man to be moral, it made little
sense to expect the same of nations. How much more difficult is it to make
sense of a dictatorship, where the nation is substantially controlled by one
man. And how are we to make sense of Western democracies, supposedly ruled
by their populace, yet generally managed by loose aggregations of business
interests with close links to the military?
So the MOQ seems to founder on the complexity of real life situations, that
are not so easily explained as biology dominating society, or some such.
Then we have the issue of how to determine the facts in any situation. Not
only which facts are true, but also which are pertinent. If we accept that
Saddhem has biological weapons, are they really a threat to the US? If we
accept that Saddhem controls large volumes of 'cheap to produce' oil, is
this what really motivates US policy? We may live in an 'information age',
but when it comes to the crunch our information is generally second or third
hand, and intensely manipulated by vested interests, politicians seeking
re-election, and so on. Plus our own incorrigible final vocabularies have
closed our minds in advance to information and ideas that offend our value
systems.
The MOQ does not offer much help here. Pirsig pursues his own demons, be
they the issue of insanity or the death of his son Chris, through his books,
and all too often we sense that incorrigibility behind the 'rational'
facade. (The diatribe against biological values at the end of Ch 24 of Lila
is an example of this.)
One thing Pirsig does not doubt is that moral choices are to be made, and
that they matter. Hence his leaving Benares Hindu University, and his strong
views on many issues that are elaborated in Lila and ZMM. But his chief
opponents in formulating a MOQ, as he sees it, would be the mystics. And
their view of morality, as I see it, differs radically from Pirsig's.
On my reading, the mystic consensus would be that ultimately all is good.
This includes torture (Rorty), the biological taking precedence over the
social, or whatever. It is all part of the eternal lila, the play of
creative realisation of being. The only moral good to the mystic is to be
wholly open to what is in the moment, while 'evil' is to kill that immediacy
with judgments and projections based on the past. (I am not sure 'evil' is
the appropriate word, but there is certainly a preference for immediacy.)
This translates into a preference for dealing with 'what is' rather than
with 'fantasy'.
To the mystic all moral codes, including Pirsig's, are a kind of playing at
God, a presumption that we, as partial expressions of 'what is', are able to
judge the rest. And this relates to our egoic separation from the totality.
(Our sense of isolation and loneliness, which Pirsig identifies and seems
unable to critique, stems from this same separation.) Wilber would have it
that the mystic must return to the market place, and get involved in
politics and social issues and so on, but this seems to be his view rather
than reflecting the mystic tradition. Bodhisattva's return to the market
place to help men find salvation, not run soup kitchens and organise
political movements, though they are not actually precluded from such
goings-on should they choose to become involved.
To the mystic, then, moral action is action spontaneously arising from
immediate experience. It is not calculated using the intellect, nor is it
driven by social values or biological values. It is perhaps best expressed
in the term "the wisdom of the organism", which operates as a whole. Unlike
Pirsig, who claims there is a hierarchy of values, which are quite different
from level to level, the mystic, while not denying that such values arise as
an outworking of lila, is content to let them be. They come and they go, and
influence us just as pleasure and pain influence us. The mistake we are
prone to is believing that these values and their clash is somehow
fundamental, important in itself.
I find the mystic view foreign to my temperament, and almost alarming. It
assumes that all our social constructs which are predicated on making the
world a safer place for us all are fundamentally misguided. They are
insidious as fantasies, and not particularly important or interesting as
aspects of our existence. And they are based on fear.
But the alternatives are equally grim. Resting my faith in a system, even
one so enlightened as the MOQ, will not do. The other alternative seems to
be to live in existential angst, making decisions despite never having the
information to justify them, and living with the consequences in a world
where "Hell is other people". All things considered I find the mystic path
the most appealing.
Thanks for your time,
John B
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