Words&Dirt

“On the collective level, once we have begun to justify our conduct publicly, reason leads us to develop and expand our moral concerns, drawing us on toward an objective point of view.  On the individual level reason is less compelling; while it leads us to see inconsistencies between our beliefs and our actions, or between what we profess in public and what we do in private, the desire to avoid these inconsistencies is not always strong enough to overcome other desires.  As a result, reason can get channeled into narrower pursuits than we can justify from an objective standpoint.  The shape of human ethical systems is an outcome of the attempt of human societies to cope with this tension between collective reasoning and the biologically based desires of individual human beings.”

––The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress, by Peter Singer, pg. 147

“‘He’s just like his father underneath.  All soft heart.  I suppose that’s why men rule the world.  They’re all heart.’

‘That’s an unusual view.’

‘Is it?  It’s what they keep telling you in church.  Men are all heart and women are all body.  I don’t know who’s suppose to have the brains.  God, I suppose.’

Eccles smiles, wondering if the Lutheran church gives everyone such ideas.  Luther himself was a little like this, perhaps––overstating half-truths in a kind of comic wrath.  The whole black Protestant paradox-thumping maybe begins there.  Helpless, predestined Man, the king of Creation.  Utterly fallen: a hubris in  shoving the particular aside.  Maybe: he’s forgotten most of the theology they made him absorb.”

––Rabbit, Run, by John Updike, pg. 138-9