[Xmca-l] Re: Anniversary for Sakharov's Essay

Sat Jul 21 17:58:01 PDT 2018

Peter and venerable others,

The name of your study reminds me of George Lakoff's "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think."

I was poking around the University of Chicago Press website and see that it is now in its third edition (1996, 2002, and 2016)

Lakoff has also written an essay on Trump which is probably included in the latest edition:

http://press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2016/lakoff_trump.html

As a student of Vedanta, I have the view that unethical behavior has a high possibility when I see myself as separate from the environment and others around me. Separateness creates fear, and fear invokes self-protection whereby my action is against the other who is not as human, nor as valuable as me and mine.

That dearness of myself is not about ego or narcissism, it is a reality in all humans, no matter the culture. What is different is how that "me-ness" is expressed. Is it as individuals? as tribes? as an element of the universe? as an entity one with nature? as an entity against nature? etc. That's likely what culture is about, how is that "me-ness" expressed and how does it come to develop to be expressed as we find it.

If I see myself reflected in others and also in the environment around me, then there is something (myself) to keep me connected because I can hold less fear, and if I have less fear, then even with the fear I do hold, my behavior of self-protection includes the environment and others, they are no longer different from me, because they are me. Thus, I (have the ability to) keep hold upon my thinking mind rather than sinking into the fight/flight that comes from an intense fear whereby self-preservation becomes a mechanical reflex of survival, a human response that even the most disciplined person may not be able to rein in. Perhaps Socrates was that kind of person.

It has often bothered me that in times of war that when submerging humans into that colosseum of violence, the worst of human behavior becomes irrational, sadistic, and gratuitous, and it's fairly consistent that this happens. But then it is not the norm to live in a theater of war, it is the exception. The rationalization of war is to protect something, a spectrum between an interest on the one end to the homeland upon the other; it's always (and should be) treated as a means of last resort, yet in modern times, that mandate seems to side on interests more than anything else, and to hell with diplomacy. I think that is why people (in general) are so distressed and pissed off about the state of affairs we find ourselves today.

These acts of protection have to do with where the self is placed and where the self is not (considered to exist).

In "Sir, No Sir!," a film documentary about the disobedience of soldiers in the field tells us that there are soldiers that refuse to fight on the ground, especially when they believe that the laying down of their lives is done frivolously by their commanders. There are multiple stories of this in modern times. It was something that gave me a lot of hope that the ordinary person is not "just" a pawn in a larger scheme.

The word "dharma," as I understand it, and different from the Buddhist definition, is difficult to translate into English (and others may have a different view than mine), but the assertion as I was taught is that dharma IS the order of the creation, like an invisible force of balance. As an aside, I use the word "creation" not in the Judeo-Christian sense of a god in the clouds throwing the earth into being like a donut into hot oil, but in the sense of a universe that infinitely creates itself, forever unfolding. It's something like gravity, pervasive throughout all material subtle and gross, like a "law." Hence dharma explains the dynamics of karma and why what goes around comes around, etc. Because we are situated in this universe, we are a part of it. We are all stardust, right? Of course the law of karma is a belief system, because it can't be independently verified, but it is reasonable, it isn't irrational. How can scientific method which lies within the creation be used to understand the creation?

I was in the lumberyard yesterday to have some wood cut to my specifications for a furniture project of mine. The clerk cutting my wood signaled to me to stand back, and then he said, "Watch your eyes!" and after the saw stopped, I said, "Please sir, tell me, how do I watch my eyes? Do I pull one eyeball out to look at the other one?" He laughed.

Anyway, if we are in harmony of the order, then all goes well. We all know this somewhere in the fiber of our being. If we don't, we have the tendency to consider this ignorance as an aberration of some sort, the stuff of which the criminal is made. If we are not in harmony, well then participants of an act pay the price at some point in one way or another. Ethics, in this sense, is being in harmony with the order, which is ahimsa or "non-injury." Non-injury is not absence of harm, it is acting with minimal harm, and to do that requires a person who is a master of one's own mind and body, one who creates minimal disturbance and lives peacefully.

I believe that this is what Spinoza was trying to sort out, what a universal order looks like. He didn't exactly pull out his eyeball, but he certainly ground up a lot of glass.

As I see it, we have too many people today in positions of power who don't possess this understanding of dharma (which is not a religious idea, but a word-meaning that references something that is beyond human existence). Instead, these actors on the worldstage believe they can be strongmen and assault the liberty of others with impunity. It just can't last; it is not sustainable. Any addict eventually succumbs to one's addiction, especially an addiction to power. History is littered with these kinds of foolish people.

The ordinary person from afar sees that this kind of "power" is nothing but an illusion.

The material of the master and of the slave is the same material of two people who see themselves to be equal to one another. The difference is a state of mind. If state power were true power it would last for an eternity, but it doesn't. It changes, it develops, and that is why we should keep the candle of hope aflame.

To what others have said about ethics recently on the list, I can understand Marx's desire to remove questions of ethics from a study of economics as a path to a clear view unsullied by religious dogma. But then he'd have to put the ethics (not dogma) back. Actually all human acts, economic or otherwise are for self-preservation alone. Darwin was clear about this.

The mistake here was for Marx to think that ethics is the sole realm of the religious mind, which in time seems to become ossified dogma in its religious contexts. Perhaps Spinoza has something to say here, and that may be why Vygotsky was taken by Spinoza, as having a germ in his thinking that could develop into a real answer.

I can't make an informed comment upon Andy's view that the way to return ethics into Marxist thought is through Hegel, though it is provocative. It's sort of a u-turn in the flow of historical discourse, as if Marx took the wrong freeway off-ramp and drove off the map and now we are left with no landmarks for navigation.

However, if one can momentarily accept dharma as being the order in the universe in which we must play well with others and within the environment in which we live, then the answer is already available in the here and now, and it is not something for humans to invent, but it is there latent to us for us to discover, if only because dharma was here before us and will remain after we are long gone.

Gravity, which we cannot deny, even if we assert its relativity, we can't deny its existence. Dharma is the same, the reason we don't like its presence is because it puts us square with ourselves, and the work which we must do to exist in harmony takes a great deal of work, not just political work, but inner work.

Dharma makes *sense." If we hold power to annihilate ourselves with nuclear devastation then we get what we deserve because that order-built-into-the-universe cannot be altered and the boomerang we have thrown outward away from ourselves, will hit only us in the face at full force. The earth will just continue without us.

So it means in order to survive we really do have to do some deep inner work, which boils down to seeing ourselves in the other. It means we must look at the leaders who act against dharma as if they were rehabilitative versions of ourselves, rather than as "not-me others."

Our search for harmony can only be achieved by ensuring intellectual freedom, then we are free to ask the important questions and to listen to the possible answers. How else can higher functions develop?

It's just common sense of our material world. More common and pervasive than we perceive, think, or feel.

Kind regards,

Annalisa

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