Welcome to the Moggie Sabi blog. I hope you find this a place of solace and peace as you pilgrimage through your own life. We would all do well to make the journey emulating the cat.
Blessings and Joy
To me this Moggie Sabi post really deals with the problem of moral life in the world post Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
I’ve understood the question as one concerning whether we are creators of our fate or artifacts of our circumstances. It is true that our circumstances shape who we are, but it is not all that we can be. Until they became the diseases invented by Freud and his ilk, the Gods were inspirations to be more than our circumstances, not an excuse to wallow in them.
Up until the modern industrial era, think Charles Dickens, it was inconceivable that we would build our moralities on either our vices or our weaknesses. Since then, with psychologists and economist leading the way, we’ve substituted a spineless reductionism for heroic callings. And, worse, we have a notion of health that is just as impossible. We substitute benign understanding for wrestling with god and struggling with right and wrong, truth and beauty. We no longer know what is means to be engaged in a noble struggle of competing noble ends. We are reduced to living in a moral cesspool, where “I want” and “I deserve” and “well, what do you expect from me, I’m just a XYZ” becomes the justification for despicable behavior.
Interestingly enough, many of those who seem to find a respectable moral ground are living in what I would call a “Victorian” world. Not the hypocrisy that has come to typify Victorian colonialism, but a world of hopeful optimism and sense of moral compass that lead to heroic exploration. Not the greed of Boss Tweed, but the Trust Busting of Teddy Roosevelt.
All those heroic ideals were butchered in the trenches of WWI and the world has never been the same. The darkness of Hitler is possible because of that absence of heroic idealism, as is the raving of Limbaugh, Beck and the rest of those marketers who care little for citizenship, little for truth and whose only courage comes from stirring up the mob.
OMG I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS CAT!!! OMG! OMG!!!!
ReplyDeleteJust signed up to follow you through Blogger....woooooooo hooooo!!!!!!!
This is sooooooooo much easier this way and I can go directly to the blog!
To me this Moggie Sabi post really deals with the problem of moral life in the world post Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
ReplyDeleteI’ve understood the question as one concerning whether we are creators of our fate or artifacts of our circumstances. It is true that our circumstances shape who we are, but it is not all that we can be. Until they became the diseases invented by Freud and his ilk, the Gods were inspirations to be more than our circumstances, not an excuse to wallow in them.
Up until the modern industrial era, think Charles Dickens, it was inconceivable that we would build our moralities on either our vices or our weaknesses. Since then, with psychologists and economist leading the way, we’ve substituted a spineless reductionism for heroic callings. And, worse, we have a notion of health that is just as impossible. We substitute benign understanding for wrestling with god and struggling with right and wrong, truth and beauty. We no longer know what is means to be engaged in a noble struggle of competing noble ends. We are reduced to living in a moral cesspool, where “I want” and “I deserve” and “well, what do you expect from me, I’m just a XYZ” becomes the justification for despicable behavior.
Interestingly enough, many of those who seem to find a respectable moral ground are living in what I would call a “Victorian” world. Not the hypocrisy that has come to typify Victorian colonialism, but a world of hopeful optimism and sense of moral compass that lead to heroic exploration. Not the greed of Boss Tweed, but the Trust Busting of Teddy Roosevelt.
All those heroic ideals were butchered in the trenches of WWI and the world has never been the same. The darkness of Hitler is possible because of that absence of heroic idealism, as is the raving of Limbaugh, Beck and the rest of those marketers who care little for citizenship, little for truth and whose only courage comes from stirring up the mob.
Well, there I go, rambling on and on.