To take a dark view of things, I’m feeling some type of way and a little stoned so this may not make much good sense.
TL;DR: Morality is impossible, shoot for ‘Best-Practices’ instead.
The post-modernists may be technically right - that nothing has meaning. That everything is relative. This may be a consequence of time - everything is in flux, in a very real sense. You can’t pin anything down, nothing is static, and anything which appears to be is a mental construct. An abstraction, right? So you think, maybe you can define an abstract Morality - a perfect social construct. Some Eternal Law. However, perception changes too with the times, in ages at first, generationally, now every day. And the immutable law necessarily mutates.
Hard times forge strong people. Strong people yield soft times. Soft times, soft people. And this is a subtle age, with the thin veneer of progress concealing a harrowing machine. Is it just me or is this an age of ambiguity? Lost my train of thought for a moment there. As such, judgement softens, every exception chips away at any semblance of Order. The slippery slope, snakes and ladders, a race to the bottom.
There’s a passage in the Dao De Jing:
When the Way is lost, there is Virtue
When Virtue is lost, there is Benevolence
When Benevolence is lost, there is Righteousness
When Righteousness is lost, there is Etiquette
Etiquette is the flower of the Way.
Isn’t that where the Globo-Homo World finds itself? In this nightmarish politically-correct climate of egoic hypersensitivity? Etiquette is worthless without Righteousness - and Righteousness has most certainly been lost. It’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t in some way tangentially related to just one of the horrific crimes of the Modern age. Let alone their own faults and failures. Though I’m not without sin, so who am I to judge.
Regardless, any imagining of a moral code, of an Eternal Law, of the Way, has to yield to what actually Is. That ever-changing present moment. And there are models, and methods, and modes that veer very close to what Is. The problem is how this material reality propagates is nightmarish in it’s complexity. And it only seems to get more complex over time. As such, the models only point to what Is. The methods are unproven in an individual sense - and there is no guarantee in the doing. The modes - as in a mode of being - get closer, a mess of models and methods.
I don’t think society is lost. It’s exactly what it should be, where it should be, all things considered. The modern world is the capstone of thousands of years of cultural evolution: from the brutal Natural Law of anitiquity, the Way of Man; the rise of deism and it’s associated Virtues; the prosperity of civilization and Benevolence extending to tibes of tribes, to nations; the Righteousness of hundreds of years of war, of hundreds of wars ended. Every flower petal falls.
And then it all starts again. Helixical, rhyming with itself.
TL;DR: Morality is impossible, shoot for ‘Best-Practices’ instead.
The post-modernists may be technically right - that nothing has meaning. That everything is relative. This may be a consequence of time - everything is in flux, in a very real sense. You can’t pin anything down, nothing is static, and anything which appears to be is a mental construct. An abstraction, right? So you think, maybe you can define an abstract Morality - a perfect social construct. Some Eternal Law. However, perception changes too with the times, in ages at first, generationally, now every day. And the immutable law necessarily mutates.
Hard times forge strong people. Strong people yield soft times. Soft times, soft people. And this is a subtle age, with the thin veneer of progress concealing a harrowing machine. Is it just me or is this an age of ambiguity? Lost my train of thought for a moment there. As such, judgement softens, every exception chips away at any semblance of Order. The slippery slope, snakes and ladders, a race to the bottom.
There’s a passage in the Dao De Jing:
When the Way is lost, there is Virtue
When Virtue is lost, there is Benevolence
When Benevolence is lost, there is Righteousness
When Righteousness is lost, there is Etiquette
Etiquette is the flower of the Way.
Isn’t that where the Globo-Homo World finds itself? In this nightmarish politically-correct climate of egoic hypersensitivity? Etiquette is worthless without Righteousness - and Righteousness has most certainly been lost. It’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t in some way tangentially related to just one of the horrific crimes of the Modern age. Let alone their own faults and failures. Though I’m not without sin, so who am I to judge.
Regardless, any imagining of a moral code, of an Eternal Law, of the Way, has to yield to what actually Is. That ever-changing present moment. And there are models, and methods, and modes that veer very close to what Is. The problem is how this material reality propagates is nightmarish in it’s complexity. And it only seems to get more complex over time. As such, the models only point to what Is. The methods are unproven in an individual sense - and there is no guarantee in the doing. The modes - as in a mode of being - get closer, a mess of models and methods.
I don’t think society is lost. It’s exactly what it should be, where it should be, all things considered. The modern world is the capstone of thousands of years of cultural evolution: from the brutal Natural Law of anitiquity, the Way of Man; the rise of deism and it’s associated Virtues; the prosperity of civilization and Benevolence extending to tibes of tribes, to nations; the Righteousness of hundreds of years of war, of hundreds of wars ended. Every flower petal falls.
And then it all starts again. Helixical, rhyming with itself.