A Double Standard in Popular Moral Distinctions
Sometimes I get caught up in the issue of a double standard when it comes to moral distinctions. For example, if some people will ban books that mention beds because it might bring an unprincipled or premature arousal to innocent young men and women, why won't they ban barbers who use scissors on hair, thereby blurring the distinction between sharp objects--which ordinarily only touch a biological organism when it is ready for the slaughter--and ordinary working tools, as though to subtly suggest that so long as there are barbers we will live in a society where some people are murderers. Surely murder is a greater sin than sex, since sex is already blurred on so many levels that one would think to always look for a higher moral authority on the matter--at least someone of the opposite gender.
And what would follow? Would we ban doors because they enclose people like coffins, or level all forests, because they stand upright in an all-too-phallic manner? Why not declare astrophysics to be scatological because wormholes poop people in and out of the same dimension? Or make all utensils stainless steel, because rust reminds us of our mortal blood?
The rule of relative contradiction states that something will seem wrong within the context of our new perspective, and I might add, only insofar as our perspective is wrong. Paint everything white with black stripes, and keep it climate controlled and teach everybody science, and suddenly vapor--once a sign of the heavens--will come to represent something too vacuous or maleable, and then everything will be bones.
What was it we were trying to remember? There is something wrong with nothing! Too often we confuse peace, or truth, or blackness, or space, with nothingness. But we are lucky that nothing cannot touch us. Doesn't it make sense that the many lurid masks are nothing other than that nothingness trying to gleam at us? Nothing is that substance out of which all things can be made, and to which all things can return. And it is grotesque because it cannot do other than be covered.
When there is a hole in the middle of existence, nothing is true without perspective. The infinite axes radiating from the center describe a balance, a balance that can only be conceived of by considering opposites. When we exclude ourselves from the play of contradictions--the amelioration of transmutative substances, the alchemy of ideas--then we dwell in innocence and can conceive of no world other than the objective, of barriers, of the things that do not make us explode.
But that place is a kind of limbo, it doesn't grasp onto the many handles that the world profers. We are not truly still until we move into ourselves. That is a balanced stillness, the stillness engendered by fixing the eye on two simultaneous perspectives. Thus there is a folded ladder, a paradoxical ladder: we embrace one state, then we embrace that state considered with its opposite, and finally we follow the path laid out by the truth between them.
There is something sexual about beds, but there is also a virtue in its dedication to that purpose. Scissors serve a peaceful function even though they are sharp. On a physical level they are moral, while on a conceptual level they are seductive. Ultimately good and evil are still a matter of the virtues or evil inclinations of the individuals in question. A padded room can be a horror to someone with a need to know. On the other hand, if an ordinary person inherited a cosmic machine that would allow them to transform the world as they wished, they would become quickly lost.
There is an innocence in seeking objectivity, when in reality it is only the tools that are objective. If there is absolute innocence, it is the innocence of inheriting tools. All of us should know that something that can be shaped does not exist in the same sense that language or rhetoric exists. It is a mutable truth, but a truth nonetheless. When we consider nonsense, or chance, or associations between works of art, we are considering that mutable world.
Ethics is a collection of tools we hold in common. Aesthetic ethics, a thing proposed by Wittgenstein and others, is really concerned with the nature of meaning, because it is the only place where those two worlds--the common tools of ethics and the mutable world of uncertain meanings--converge.
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