[lit-ideas] Re: Malevolence (Was: The Evil That We Do)
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2011 10:04:41 -0700 (PDT)
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Mike: Is it immoral to leave a newborn baby out on a hill to die when there is
not enough food to feed the family?
Andy: Seems to me that having a baby if one can't afford one is the immoral
part. If one cannot afford a baby, one has no business having one. There are
circumstances, no doubt, but for the most part it's those human spirits again.
Curiously it would be just common sense, i.e., if there's less food, then let's
not invite more people to the party. Instead, it's more like tomorrow we die,
so let's have sex today, however much we compound our misery. Do I ask too
much of people?
Mike: How culpable are Southern whites in their racism when their society
taught them to believe as they do?
Andy: It's like having babies one can't afford. It feels good with no
thought to tomorrow, so let's squash this or that class, whoever serves that
purpose in whatever society, whether it be shades of melanin, religion, women,
children, or whatever other reason, such as the Aztecs did. Forget the
consequences to the overall society. It's like what the drug dealers are doing
in Mexico, or what any and every country has done to any and every other
country and within their own countries forever.
I'm visiting (as opposed to revisiting) Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations at the
moment through a lecture on tape that I didn't know I had (I may write it up, I
may not). Interesting point: in Adam Smith's time in England, the poor spent
60 to 80% of their income on food in good times. They would get clothes maybe
a couple of times in their lives, sometimes taken enthusiastically from plague
victims when they could get the clothes. The dynamic of the rich, however
(paraphrasing from memory), was that two producers couldn't get together that
they weren't talking about how they could economically subjugate whoever they
could. Basically, Adam Smith knew, said in so many words, that the rich
conspire to stay rich. The point is, racism is just an extension of
humanity's need for power, financial or any other kind, all based in feelings
of powerlessness. BTW, based on how far I've gotten, it's obvious there is
absolutely no capitalism in this
country, none, except maybe in meaningless ways. We really have a
self-serving, non-Marxian socialism on the corporate level. That may be why
people are so deathly afraid of the word socialism, because corporations
want socialism for themselves and use Orwellian means to get the masses to stay
away from their cash cow.
Mike: Was bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki immoral? How many more might have
died otherwise?
Andy: This may be yet another corporate self-serving meme. I can't remember
the source (NYRB possibly), but it seems that the Japanese did not surrender
because of the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb was just another, if bigger, bomb
to them. They surrendered because after Berlin went down, the Russians were
pumped up from their victory and starting seizing the northern islands of
Japan, and went into Manchuria. The Japanese at that point knew they couldn't
fight yet another front and surrendered. The bomb did not scare them. And
truly, how do you scare a population that is trained to commit seppuku
(hara-kiri)? They shunned their own radiation victims after the bomb was
dropped. The Americans no more cared about life than the Japanese did, or the
Nazis did, or the Communists did. We just created a narrative to justify it,
that's all. If we cared about life, we would not have racism, or poverty, or
any other ills, including climate
change.
Mike: How are these hypotheticals to be aswered through moral principles such
as "Thou shalt not kill"?
Andy: This principle has no meaning in the Old Testament. Without looking it
up, there are books in the bible that are just a litany of wipe out this city,
wipe out that city. There's at least one really graphic line. If anything,
the world lives by the principles of the Old Testament. The East is no
better. Confucius and all the rest of it are just wallpaper over an amazingly
rotten structure.
Mike: So what is morality based on? One's culture. Hmmmm. Maybe God truly
is other people.
Andy: The movie Children of a Lesser God (I did a paper on it once for a
American Sign Language class) essentially says that the lesser god is man, at
least as I interpreted the movie. Beautiful movie, good use of symbolism in my
opinion anyway. I suffered through the movie A Nun's Story last night (PBS,
not Netflix; actually, it was pretty good, just not my movie). I think Audrey
Hepburn may have been in it, although it looked like a made for television
movie. Audrey Hepburn (if it was her) wants to do boots on the ground work in
a hospital in the Congo where her institution sent her, while the church wants
her to focus on God, on the purely spiritual side. The bottom line is she
winds up having a crisis over religious spirituality as opposed to the
spirituality that's possible in the here and now working with her fellow man.
On a bit of a tangent, I came across what I thought was an interesting idea. I
heard another lecture (on music) where the speaker made the point that the
distance in time from us to, say, the mid 1700's is only three human
lifetimes. We think Eric Burdon was so long ago, yet the speaker's perspective
is that Mozart, at least musically, was yesterday in a sense. Maybe looking
back 250 years is a shorter time span than looking ahead 250 years, which does
seem impossibly far in the future, even if it's only another three human
lifetimes. Whether times and circumstances will be better 250 years from now
than they are today is of course unknowable. I tend to think nothing will
change unless nature forces it, which it probably will.
Andy
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