From: Maggie Hettinger (hettingr@iglou.com)
Date: Sat Oct 12 2002 - 16:05:32 BST
Thanks, John. This is a keeper. For me, it seems to be a constructive
summary of the last years' posts and issues.
thx
maggie
On Saturday, October 12, 2002, at 09:28 AM, John Beasley wrote:
> 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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