I can only conclude that right and wrong can never be absolutized. Always there is a context and there is always a limit. The very idea of civic punishment attempts to apply the boundaries of action; killing human beings, in all cultures, has never been considered absolutely wrong; it has in most cases been considered the most moral thing a person can do. In essence, a lynching is no different morally from a state execution. Its perpetrators congratulate themselves and the villagers applaud. What kind of conscience can emerge devoid of the social force behind it? Medals of honor go to killers of human beings; we call it valor and love of country. We applaud loudly and the recipient wipes back a tear of gratitude. Yet others saw the same acts, and murder! they cried. There is no getting around that. All is bound up in contingencies and intricately honed rationales. We are a murderous species, predators within our own domain and of our own conspecifics. Our overactive empathic gift merely charges our imagination to find an acceptable excuse. The violence of the day, in action and in rhetoric, is not an anomaly. It is natural human expression and activity. There will never be an end to it; there is no time to evolve away from it. And protecting a foetus vehemently is so much less complicated than protecting a teenage boy of a cursed out-group. A foetus is invisible to its protectors, and is actually not a human, but an idea, a fantasy of purity and innocence, not a proliferation of proteins coming into existence at the behest of the iron hand of physics. Albert Camus, in The Fall, insisted that as individuals, each of us consider ourselves to be innocent, and all others guilty. Only a foetus can have an equivalent innocent purity to my own. Life itself, and the social milieu it requires, can only be lived by an abiding sense of the ungodly guilt of all others that is always a threat to our own innocence. We all think that way, I too, though in my understanding of it, I try not to let it bother me, and I try to act in ways that contradict it. But I know it isnt gone; it crops us constantly, and takes enormous effort to keep it down. It is exhausting to love because you want to love, and understand that love is actually a mirage of desire. One that must be kept actual by whatever means possible, or else being human will collapse to its base condition, that of absolute reality. The only absolute. And the eternally unacceptable.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 18:22:41 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015