Thank you, Corn, for your reasoned response. It's a rare opportunity to dip beneath the surface in order to put some body on the ideas that come through ATO usuall in skeletal form.
My first question will be 'What do you think is going on here in this discussion?' What is your and my motivation for having the opinions we do? If, as you suggest, the Iraqis must want their suffering, then we too must have some desire to think as we think.
Let?s go through your ideas:
----------------
Perhaps kill the parents?:
-----------------
We know that in our society we remove children from abusive families, take pretty small steps (an interesting topic in itself and perhaps profoundly related to our theme here), but we don't kill the parents. And in Iraq, it will be rather difficult even with precision munitions to 'spoil the parent and spare the child'. Your next statement is much more challenging (just a factual statement not intended to imply I just dispatched your first point. I see the 'perhaps' and understand the implications that weren't talking your favorite idea here, probably for some of the reasons I suggested.)
-------------
The more prudent action would be to do nothing....they must enjoy their suffering, or at least a critical mass do, otherwise they would change it:
-------------------
I can't pretend to have the answer to 'Saddam' but I definitely do not favor doing nothing. Sanctions it seems have been the source of the deaths of lots of Iraqi children already with no effect. (Your 'choice-theory') War will kill them too. We have the 'Between Iraq and a hard place' syndrome. Our world is filled with tragedy yet we have seen the fall of more terrible systems than the one in Iraq.
Your second theme, that Iraqis must enjoy their misery or they would change it is not an opinion I think many would share. Strictly speaking I do, but the caveats I would place on it may render the concept something entirely foreign to your intent. What do I mean:
In the first place I think you ran into your own rock and a hard place here. My impression is that you want to be able to assign responsibility to the Iraqi people for the quality of their leadership. We get the leaders we deserve. (America must be really guilty of something too.
) You can't blame or hold responsible, you can't go to war with a group of people who is innocent. You can't feel they deserve what they get. And responsibility might eventually find its way back around to you. We don't want that do we?.
But at the same time, you have to preserve the notion that you, or at least your father, would be different if you lived in Iraq (later with your EngineNr9 stuff we see that in fact some genetic component has crept into your argument) So you assign responsibility to 'most' Iraqis. That of course opens up a huge can of worms as to whose what and why with all its ramifications.
We come here face to face with the conservative notion of personal responsibility and the liberal notion of societal cause, and inevitably here, Moonbeam's notion of a higher synthesis. I have already described some of what's at stake. Briefly, we need self-justification to punish, i.e. a murderer. They fill us with hate, loathing, and a desire for revenge. Can't have that tempered by the fact that we are a product of our environment as powerfully obvious and undeniable as that is. Without the notion of personal responsibility, what do we make of our hate? What are we to do with it? Love the sinner hate the sin. (Maybe when hell freezes over)
I am suggesting then, that much of what is at stake in this discussion, the inner motivations, are directly tied to this, personal responsibility and self image thingi, the need to be above reproach, to be able to point and to condemn cleanly and without the annoyance of self reflective doubt.
Why would I want to separate Church and State? Clearly I did so because arguments that apply to the former can be retained by the latter. There is no need for an absolute anchoring of morality in religion because it anchors identically without it. My train admits all passengers. It has the virtue of inclusiveness. Religion is a philosophy, but one built on a premise not all accept. There is no higher authority than one's god, yes, but I tried to show that what god is can be something open to all, the atheist, agnostic, and believer. I opened a door to the source of spirituality, a personal experience of the transcendental, one written into our being. That is where you will find the original test. The texts you refer to are a crystallization of those who could read the original and interpret it for their time, place, and context. They contain universal truths, but time and the inevitable accretion of the mechanical inevitably erode their effectiveness. Only the living exponent can refresh and vivify these truths. One need not be irreligious, either, to see what evil has been done in the name of religion. The problem of creeping situational ethics is inescapable. The war between fundamentalism and modernity is just one of the resultsof the attempt to rely to heavily on the preservation of text as the only guide. Truth is in the heart. The 'books' are only cleaning rags.
The notion that Iraqis love their children is not supported by the previous paragraph:
Let?s look at the paragraph:
Since I want, as a policy in a civil state, to maintain a separation between philosophical and religious ideas, I think it better to speak of the kind of rare psychological event I just described as a contact with some universal truth, it being of the nature of the beast that those who have it claim a universality with others who have similarly done so. That implies a number of possibilities the truth of one over the other of which I don't think makes the slightest difference. There is a God, there is a state of consciousness which creates the impression of a God, there is a true but seldom discovered true human nature. So whether we were created in Gods image, or we created him out of what we can become, we all have our birth and being in that thing. That is why Iraqis love their children. Where is the love? It is what we are and don't know we are.
I really can?t believe that the connection I?m drawing here is so difficult or abstract as to pose a challenge to ordinary comprehension, but I will make it differently if that will help. I appealed to the notion that there is a universal truth and corollary ethics that is written into our nature. Our true nature can be corrupted, but not destroyed. It is recoverable given intention and guidance. The natural inclination to love your children can not be excised from human nature. It is a fundamental aspect of the mammalian brain. You are focused on the surface, I on a deeper reality. Pointing out the deeper reality is vital to any diagnostic we wish to apply to Iraq. How you see people is dependent on your focus. Herein lies the origin, I think, of the Golden Rule. We are created in God?s image. What we truly are is vastly more than what we are.
Finally we have:
---------------------------
I understand your confusion Moonbeam. You still believe that you know yourself and therefore you know everyone. Perhaps you do know yourself, or perhaps you only desperately believe that you know yourself. Even if the affirmative is true, it only brings inspiration, not insight, about the souls of others.
We are not the same Moonbeam. You must relearn what you've unlearned. Someone has played a terrible joke at your expense. Don't let them get away with it.
---------------------
You make the mistake of focusing on me rather than my ideas. I could be a psychopath locked in a mental institution with my rubber keyboard and it would say nothing whatsoever about the validity of my ideas. I am not important. I only used myself as a person of self-knowledge as a joke devise to introduce the notion. What I know or don?t know does not change the potential contained therein. Plato said a million years ago that the unexamined life is not worth living. We know all about the potential for psychotherapy for self-healing, etc.
So what we have here is a philosophical disagreement (our debate) enacted in the abstract without possibility of proof one way or the other. The issue is not whether I know myself, but does self-knowledge lead to empathy, to profound and fundamental understanding of everybody and everything. Surely only he who experiences can really know for sure. I would suggest that Christ?s remark, ?Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.? would seem to imply so.
We have, I think, to hone in on why you and a huge number of people cling to the notion of their separate and unique selves and defend that so vigorously. It goes back, I think, to that notion of personal responsibility. There is a disease afoot in the world and it is called guilt. It is how we are controlled. Be good and not bad you bad boy. Oh no, not me, I?m not a bad boy. Look, Mommy and Daddy, I have constructed a shiny new me. Please, please love me now. I will never be that old me again. I hate that old me just like you do. I will punish anything that looks like that old me just like you do. I?m just like you Mommy and Daddy. I?ll never be like bad, bad Ivan or Omar again. I?m one of us now, one of the good guys now. See the shinny new me. This is the great me, the American me, the Christian me, the us-me. I am unique, great, above reproach, the judgment-bringer, God?s right hand man. Nobody will ever get me to look inside. That?s where that horrible old me is entombed under tons of reinforced concrete.
?In the sea there are riches beyond compare, but if you seek safety it?s on the shore.? A saying.
Mulla Nasrudin used to say that he could see in the dark. ?Well then why do we see you running around at night with a lantern then?? ?Oh that?, said the Mulla, that?s so YOU won?t run into ME.
Facebook
Twitter