Irene: Why not? Even if he's wrong, who is he hurting?
T : Didn't we already cover this? By arguing for this position, he moves us a little closer to that unnecessarily dangerous and deplorable situation in which indifference to life and death has become the norm. Ever visit the inner city, and talk to some of the gang bangers there? As a teacher, I had the experience of doing just that. And you know, the one common thread that ran through the commentary of those who insisted on making a lifestyle out of doing truly foolhardy things, was that they didn't even care if they died.
If someone is truly unafraid of anything, even death, then what happens to the deterrent power of the threat of punishment? What happens to the ability of the police, even when armed, to maintain civil order, if those would breach it have been given such a false sense of security, that they have become indifferent to any weapon an officer may bring out? Look at the moonscapes that our inner cities have become and the blood that their streets are drowning in, and then try to tell me that the sort of lassez-faire attitude that Robert promotes has proved harmless where it has been adopted.
Quite the contrary. It has lead to the notion that getting oneself killed senselessly is a sign of heroism and manhood, because people can still see the bravado and be impressed by it - but they will no longer let themselves think about the tragedy or ask themselves whether it served any purpose. The praise showered on those who act foolishly and the scorn heaped on the more sensible, by those who are no longer willing to think about the reasons they may have to refrain from unnecessary risks, makes bloodshed a thing not averted, but rather sought for its own sake, as if it were a good!
Irene: While you treat incivility as a thing to be desired for its own sake. Do two wrongs make a right?
T : Should we be prepared to trade that which makes it even possible to have a civil order, in exchange for the illusion of kindness we maintain by not challenging the irresponsible things we hear, and the irresponsible people who utter them? Let us not imagine that the streets of our communities will be any safer, if we should discard that reverence and treasuring of life among our peoples, that have served to keep them so, in so many other, gentler places, beyond the smoking ruins of what once were living communities.
Look at what has happened, when those now approaching adulthood, thinking themselves to be the first who ever questioned tradition, have rejected those values with a sneer, and not a second thought. Gangs have been seen to form, in towns that had never seen a single murder. It is our ability to feel for ourselves, and others, through the insights we so gain - and our resulting ability to see reason - that makes us more than bloodthirsty animals, that kill when the first senseless impulse arises. Remove that, and all the world may be another Englewood, if not worse.
Indeed, worse is to be expected. When the threat of personal harm no longer suffices to deter our now uncaring masses, from lawless conduct, the authorities may find themselves having to choose between allowing the end of the rule of law, or engaging in horrific reprisals against innocent third parties - the families, friends and loved ones of the perpetrators. As those in power have felt forced to do in other times, and other places, when people have become indifferent to their own survival. Even if our criminal feels pride and even pleasure in going to the injection chamber, our ruler of a decaying society might think, let's see how much pride he feels in getting his children dismembered, or how much pleasure he may feel as he is roasted alive. Barbarism, in the name of law. But, history teaches us, that is where this brand of "courage" leads us.
Irene: This fear seems exaggerated to me.
T : If you think this overdramatic, read a little Middle Eastern history, and see where Robert's brand of bravado ultimately lead. Or, for that matter, Medieval or Renaissance European history. Or present day life in most of Africa. If you wish to be less scholarly about it, go visit the inner city, where the gang lords have become the effective law, and see how comfortable that they have become with violently going after the families of their opponents, and with the atrocities they commit. The caving of a young woman's skull in, as her body is raped in its' death throes. The burning alive of one who can't pay his debts, until, too disfigured to be gazed on, he is sent onto the El with a box hanging by the stumps of his arms. As one of the members of the gang that did it watches their victim beg for money, he laughs as he watches him collect a few dollars each night, trying to repay a debt that is compounding daily.
(As for where the law is, while all of this is going on, in clear sight of those who would look, it is where it has always been. Down at Dunkin Donuts, waiting for the next bribe, surrounded by a public that couldn't care less, and takes pride in this.)
But then, having met Michael, you know of whom I speak. How eye opening it might have been, if you had met one of the young witnesses. You know, it'll probably come as a shock, but as the terrorised populace of such places huddles behind locked doors at night, ettiquette does not tend to be its primary concern.
When life is held cheaply, these are the experiences that it brings in its brief, ghastly course. That which is not treasured, is rarely protected. Yet, those who lead us in this direction, are still thought of as being kind and gentle souls.
These are the fruits of Robert's brand of enlightenment. And of absolute tolerance being so relentlessly demanded as a condition for being regarded as a civilised human being, that it comes at the expense of the survival of human compassion, as people find their hands tied whenever they try to oppose the rising tide of barbarism. Until those hands get burned off, I suppose.
Irene: Yes, but those gang leaders are just sociopaths with a little power, not a societal phenomenon.
T : How did they get their power, except through the influence they gained over others? You speak of power as if it were a force of nature, untouchable by man, instead of a reflection of how man has conditioned himself to behave. Those sociopaths were molded, in part, by their society, and rose to prominence because the social conditions around them proved advantageous for the realisation of their ambitions. These conditions are mutable, as are the prevalent attitudes that lead to their creation.
Even so, are we always so far removed from the savagery mentioned, as we'd like to believe? Or do some of us merely show more skill, in sweeping our sins under the carpet? Those kids in Iraq who were incinerated on the road of death, surely suffered as much as Michael, for as little reason, and yet those who fired upon them from behind were received as returning heroes. Relable the killing of those who didn't want to be there, as they fled for their lives, as a strategic choice, and watch how much trouble our "civilised" citizenry is now having remembering the most basic concepts of right and wrong. Is this a path we should proceed down any further?
One might argue that standard ettiquette does great harm in cases such as these, by allowing people to take pride in their exercise of virtues that they need not take the trouble to actually develop, as it silences those who would force them to face the true nature of their conduct. By helping to keep our consciences silent, by falsely reassuring them that all we do is wonderful.
The reaping of innocents and the use of torture aren't abberations in human history, they are the unacceptable norm. One that our species laboriously rose above through centuries of bargaining, and experiencing, and thinking, as we constructed ways of life that gave us the opportunity to be more than the monsters that unthinking nature made us to be - becoming more as the gods would have us. The creation that took ages, and yet can be forgotten in a generation.
Irene: I don't see what this has to do with Robert.
T : At the foundation of the assumptions that this common understanding rests on, is a reverence for life. One that a man such as Robert would persuade us to throw away, just to get a little attention. Cut away at its foundation, and our conceptual edifice will not survive, at the instinctual level where it must function in order to be effective.
With it will die the way of life it defines.
Irene: And Robert will do all of this by himself? I had no idea that he was so formidable an adversary.
T : True, Robert won't substantially change the world on his own, but he'll contribute to a change that we'd best not accept. Think of it like this. If I throw a bit of garbage out into the street, you can't see the difference. But if everyone feels free to do a little bit of damage, in this way, soon we are living in a sewer. We must act, not merely with the immediate consequences of our own actions in mind, but with the understanding of what the attitude it reflects will make of the world around us, if it should spread. Many small contributions, for good or evil, together will have a major impact on the life each of us faces.
Irene: Is it not the inevitable reality of life, though, that people won't think that way?
T : If it is inevitable, then why isn't it universal?
If one travels, and sees the broad variation in the quality of life to be found from place to place, one soon sees that it is indeed possible for the people of a place to appreciate this, and for the most part, refrain from doing that which they would agree would make for a bad custom. Unthinking selfishness is not the inevitable norm. Nor is it the one that endures, for those societies that embrace it wither and die, to be displaced by those living by more cooperative norms. One need not travel far either, to see such places. A Metra ticket will still suffice. (*) But much is lost and suffered in the process, so it is best that social progress be achieved through thought and rational discussion, and not some societal analog of natural selection.
But if people feel no obligation to be reasonable, and really think about the things they say, such discussion becomes impossible.
Irene: But you do seem to go unusually ballistic when the question is one of a philosophical nature.
T : I would disagree. If my words should summon forth emotion, I do not apologise. We are speaking of morality, and how its observance or breach shall impact on life. It is only natural that emotions should be stirred by the suggestion of such an impact. But what I have said has been offered with an understanding of emotion, not framed by it. Would it be rational for me to look past the ills that an attitude would bring about if adopted, because we will feel ill toward it on thinking about them, or should I recognise that this is a sign that the issue is important enough to us to command our attention?
As for the precedence I give such subjects, remember that in speaking of them, we do not merely express our own thoughts, but also influence those of others, and so more is at stake. Given the memory of how people have responded, it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
Irene: Even so, is what Robert is doing here, really that bad?
T : We must remember that as we act and speak, we influence those around us, who influence others in turn ... and our actions are thus felt by those who never know of us, much as a ripple on the surface of a lake will reach places far from where it originated. But unlike that ripple, our influence, if it is a fresh one, in capturing the attention and imagination of those who it reaches, may pick up strenghth. Imagine the tempest that our seas would soon be consumed by, if waves were to behave like that.
Yet, such is the nature of public discourse, because our ettiquette calls on dissenters to not dissent too effectively, while all around rush in to agree with the consensus of the moment, each eager to do so a little more forcefully than the ones before, in order to win the favorable attention of his peers. The slight breeze that is the wind that each wishes to blow with, soon becomes an unreasoning storm, as the popular consensus is driven to a new absurd extreme. One that people will find increasingly difficult to dissipate.
Robert and Elaine's philosophy, of ignoring that which makes one unhappy, removes a counterbalancing force, to this drive toward extremism through conformity. The hope might be, that as the consequences of ill conceived ideas become more horrific, a backlash might arise. But our courageous couple would have us merely change what our idea of good was, in order to be able to think of the unpleasant consequences of our actions as if they were pleasant ones. This dulls the awareness of the harm being done, and keeps those doing it from stepping back, and thinking about their actions.
This sort of attitude destabilises society. We do right, when we defy the foolish code of ettiquette that inspires it, sensibly electing to help undermine it in a small way, by doing so.
Irene: Be that as it may, aren't you being unreasonably apocalyptic?
T : You mean, in anticipating the possible decay of societal values, and the civil order they make possible?
Look back at what is left of our cities, if you think that we aren't well on our way there. Places where the police extract confessions out of suspects through beatings, burnings and electroshock torture, to public approval. Cities so much of which have been leveled, as people have torched buildings for the sheer delight of watching them burn, that it is often hard to tell that the land one gazes on is theoretically part of a city. Where 1,000 people can be on official record as having been gunned down in the course of a year, without anyone seeing anything unusual about this. I'm not sure what I'd call this state of affairs, but "civilisation" is not the word that comes to mind.
One need not speculate on how those who act to make this reality happen can bring themselves to accept it. They use almost the exact same words that Robert has used here. "We all have to die sometime, so who cares?" Only, when Robert says this to suburbanites, the nihilism is a trendy novelty for them, while it's established custom in the inner city. Robert is pushing those around him into trying a social experiment that has already been carried out - with consequences that have been documented in exhaustive, nightmarish detail. Consequences that we are seeing repeated elsewhere, now, and can expect to see in greater depth if the attitudes in question take hold more firmly.
Shouldn't we, as a society, have pulled back, long before going down this unpleasant path? Where is the virtue in waiting for for such absolutely predictable horrors, to unfold, before making the attempt to avoid them? Why knowingly start in a bad direction? Having had its unpleasantness thrust in our faces, why proceed down it any further than we already have?
One doesn't have the right to contribute to that which makes such unfortunate realities as those just mentioned, possible.
your options
- continue with this discussion
- question : aren't these discussions getting rather unnecessarily long?
click here for an answer to that
(*) Metra is a commuter rail system for the Chicago metropolitan area. A trip on Metra could not take one any further out than the suburbs.