Words&Dirt

“‘What’s a chakra?’

‘You’ll know when I find it.’

Some time later, she did, and then the procedure took on greater intensity, to say the least.  Suspended between Eliza’s two hands, like a scale in a market-place, Jack could feel his balance-point shifting as quantities of fluids were pumped between internal reservoirs, all in preparation for some Event.  Finally, the crisis––Jack’s legs thrashed in the hot water as if his body were trying to flee, but he was staked, impaled.  A bubble of numenous light, as if the sun were mistakenly attempting to rise inside his head.  Some kind of Hindoo apocalypse played out.  He died, went to Hell, ascended to Heaven, was reincarnated as various braying, screeching, and howling beasts, and repeated this cycle many times over.  In the end he was reincarnated, just barely, as a Man.  Not a very alert one.

‘Did you get what you wanted?’ she inquired.  Very close to him.

Jack laughed or wept soundlessly for a while.

‘In some of these strange Gothickal German towns,’ he at last said, ‘they have ancient clocks that are as big as houses, all sealed up most of the time, with a little door where a cuckoo pops out upon the hour to sing.  But once a day, it does something special, involving more doors, and once a week, something even specialer, and, for all I know, at the year, decade, and century marks, rows of great doors, all sealed shut by dust and age, creak open, driven by sudden descent of ancient weights on rusted chains, and the whole inner workings of the thing unfold through those openings.  Hitherto unseen machines grind into action, strange and surprising things fly out––flags wave, mechanical birds sing––old pigeon-shit and cobwebs raining down on spectators’ heads––Death comes out and does a fandango––Angels blow trumpets––Jesus writhes on the cross and expires––a mock naval battle plays out with repeated discharged of cannons––and would you please take your arm out of my asshole now?”

––Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 411-2

“There is no more an exclusively ‘religious’ experience than there is an exclusively ‘moral,’ ‘political,’ ‘scientific,’ or ‘aesthetic’ experience.  Instead, these names mark aspects of the rich and thick multidimensionality of any given experience.  Sometimes in our inquiries, we may happen to find one selected aspect more important in light of our present situation, interests, and values, and so we focus exclusively on that dimension.  For example, calling an experience ‘moral’ is characteristically our way of highlighting the fact that in some measure its outcome and development pertains to well-being.  Nevertheless, there are typically aesthetic, political, technical, and scientific dimensions, among others, tied up in any developing experience of well-being.  As soon as we hypostatize any selected quality, we overlook most of the complexity and depth of that situation and the moral judgments we subsequently make about it.

It is long past time to abandon the conviction that there are distinctively moral situations that require uniquely moral judgments issuing from an innate moral organ.  If situations don’t come pre-stamped  as ‘moral’ or ‘aesthetic’ or ‘technical,’ then it becomes far less tempting to go searching for some innate moral faculty to generate distinctively moral judgments.

I have argued that we should see morality as a form of complex problem-solving––the reworking of a situation that has become problematic and has inhibited our ability to skillfully, meaningfully, and harmoniously navigate our social space.  We could then recognize all of the capacities and operations that Hauser and others have identified (under their mistaken notion of the moral faculty or moral grammar) as relevant to our ability to negotiate our moral space, and we could then treat them for what they are––namely, not a unified moral organ, but a constellation of human capacities and propensities for making sense of our experience and engaging in problem-solving forms of inquiry.”

––Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science, by Mark Johnson, pg. 159-60