2 + 2 = 3
It doesn’t add up, does it? We get so used to the notion that the books should balance. Things should make sense in such a way that comports with science and nature, but it doesn’t. It is askew, and by it, I mean life.
I was thinking about Tim Scott, and everything I think that is so wrong with him, and thinking about our various views of him, and by extension, one another, and still further…everyone. Tim Scott seems to be wrong with laboratory precision. But, he isn’t wrong. He isn’t right, but he’s not wrong.
Scott has made a choice, (maybe many choices), to do what seems to me to be surrendering his dignity for what he deems necessary. From my perspective, that seems like a desire to be powerful, or at least adjacent to the power. Objectivity can not be found here. I am as opposed to his choices today as I was when I watched him attempt to seduce Donald Trump, but I can’t go so far as to say that he’s wrong.
Power and ethics are an oscillating wave that exists within everyone’s perspective and actions. We grab power, and we gravitate toward it at some point or other. And doing the right thing is something that we all pursue, with varying degrees of devotion, and wisdom. When we can agree to draw the line somewhere, all is peaceful. Most often we wont agree where to draw lines. It is an unsolvable equation. It was always thus, and thus it shall always be. The greatest, most terroristic act, and the purest benign sacrifice all exist on this same continuum. We all set the balance differently.
Kosher’s comment on my previous post set me on this course. I don’t mean to imply that this is the meaning of his comment, but rather that it turned on the light that revealed this to me. The rest of your comments apply in this regard as well. And, to add one more into the mix, I just finished “Spare” by Prince Harry. I recommend it if you have not read it. It was one of my Christmas gift books this year. This biography is extraordinary in its telling. There is a stunning amount of conflict in this family’s main players. None of them are wrong. In so many ways, the life experiences are so foreign, for reasons that you can assume. And then, those things that made his life so extraordinary also made it so…misunderstood. For example, as you might imagine, he grew up in palaces, yet, he lived out of a suitcase, never really having a home. None of the privileges that we have seen about how that family lives would be worth it to me, to have to live how they must live. Not for a day, not for an hour. There is one description that he gives near the end, while discussing a walk he took with his brother William, on some royal estate with giant yew trees, and manicured lawns. His description of it was “paradise”. Yet, this walk was to make an attempt to mend the deep, boiling discord, in his family, at the hands of the press…and members of his family. His definition of “paradise” and mine are very different. For me, that scene would be far from it, and not for lack of appreciation for yew trees. But, he’s not wrong.
Similarly, something has made Tim Scott. I know few details about his life, and I am not likely to discover many. That said, Scott has arrived at who he is by necessity. I would not trade places with him for an hour either, but he is not wrong to make his choices.
02/01/2024 @ 9:16 am
I’d be very careful with that conclusion. Most people can be understood given enough context, but that context can lead to some extremely immoral things. Understandable is a far cry from right. One could take a bunch of extremely understandable lessons from the life of an average Hamas member or an average Nazi. There are people who think about morality in these terms, but my wife would explain that these people are stuck in an early stage of moral development. By the way, from a developmental standpoint, this kind of thinking is common among college sophomores, though the theory on this is more about straight development than moral development in particular. It usually happens at a fairly specific age. I know from experience that you’re WAY past this stage but we’ve known people in blogging communities who aren’t.
As regards the power/ethics continuum, one right now where there is a major average partisan difference, I once read a good book about that: Henry Adams’ Democracy. It’s nearly a century and a half old and it’s exactly about this.
02/01/2024 @ 11:30 am
Yes, this is leaving morals out of it altogether. I didn’t want to include the word because it frames the context in the way that you described.
It is a little difficult to get where I was going, and this essay was a laboratory for the thought. Admittedly, I lost the thread part of the way through. It should go a little more like this.
Power is natural, morals are a response to them. Morals, like civilization, would not exist without having been invented. One might choose morals: justice, civilization, etc, over pure power, but it is the Sisyphean struggle. That boulder is eventually coming back down that hill. Is the boulder wrong?
Born in the 60s, I spent my life trying to get to the top of the hill where the Coke commercial was being filmed. I thought everyone else was too. After a while, I came to find out that there are individuals on that hill rolling boulders down on those trying to get there. Tim Scott is one example. I’m exhausted trying to contemplate why someone like Scott is rolling boulders down on me…and us. While Scott, the Nazis, MAGA, John Birch society are rolling boulders, they are preemptively shouting down at us, calling us racists. The task is hard enough without shouting up to them, ‘I’m not a racist, you’re the racists’, and then turning to people next to me and below me and repeating, ‘I’m not the racist, they’re the racists’. The correctness of the moral response to the power doesn’t seem to matter. And the fact that some misguided soul will align himself with the powerful is predictable and constant.
In a variety of ways, those dedicated to morality, civilization, etc, have tried to make power behind morality by inventing things like Hell, and moral codes intended to regulate and organize the effort against natural power, but it always breaks down. At least part of the reason that it breaks down is that there is the recognized use for power between individuals, no matter where they are positioned in this struggle. Uses of power always pop up. It is in our nature to see it, use it, and sometimes entirely become devoted to it. I want Tim Scott to be different, and dedicate himself to something entirely unnatural to him. My desire for that hasn’t diminished, I just can’t declare that he is wrong. He has just abandoned his humanity for the safety of entropy.
02/01/2024 @ 3:52 pm
Wrong as in incorrect? Wrong means two things.
He’s being internally consistent, but that’s really only if he isn’t lying to himself, and that’s not something I’d bet against. If by “he’s not wrong” you mean that he’s consistent with his priorities, yes.
02/01/2024 @ 4:04 pm
I don’t even mean consistent. I mean, he is absolved from any moral qualification that I have license to determine. Even being consistent would be a condition relevant to me, but maybe not to him.
It’s like acknowledging his right to nihilism. Every philosophical arrangement that I would hold him accountable to would essentially annihilate him. He’d walk the plank, be ridden out on a rail, ostracized, declared unfit, etc. But, my point of view requires accepting certain assumptions and values. Among those values are morality, decency, civilization, dignity, tribe…etc. I recognize that Scott, and those like him, may live in defiance of those things entirely, or periodically, and it is not for me to hold him accountable for that. In his worldview facts are not immutable. As such, his equation adds up to me being the racist. Trump is Jesus. Who am I to say that that is wrong?
02/01/2024 @ 11:04 pm
That’s sort of like saying “Who am I to blog?” The day you give up your moral voice is the day you give up, period.
There are moral basics, things that are close to universal as ideals. Try not to hurt others, try to help others who need it, try to protect those who need it, apply rules to a whole society with exceptions based on exceptional difficulties rather than on exceptional privilege. Most people we know would agree to those points. Any set of rules that conflicts with these is inherently unstable because it’s guaranteed to create resentment, and justifiably so.
02/01/2024 @ 8:52 pm
Power is one reason to enter politics, but not the only reason.
I’ve always thought that anyone who’d run for high office was somewhere on a spectrum of personality disorders, holes in the soul, e.g. unfinished business with a parent, or a savior complex, or a compulsive need for attention.
Tim Scott basks in the light of white attention. Marjorie Taylor Greene basks in the light of male attention. For some, the attention is the power.
02/01/2024 @ 9:35 pm
Right. Power has many forms, but the ability to manipulate others for something you want is what power is. Babies use crying and cuteness as power. Wealth/money is the closest thing to power because everyone can use money, and it is easy to know how to use it.
Some enter politics to ‘fight the power’, and bring justice. They either become corrupted by money, or they get shot. Clarence Thomas started out as a Black Panther. (Some seek justice thru power). Those either become corrupted by money, or they get shot by spearing to be a threat to someone else’s power. In Thomas’s case, he decided that he could carry the bags for the powerful, and then inherit the bags.
No civilization on Earth is grounded in morals. Everything is power based. Even our morality institutions become infected with power. The Catholic Church is a massive power system, ostensibly for a moral purpose. Power and ethics are at cross purposes.
My wife explained to me a few years ago that correctness and reality are essentially ethical. They can’t exist in abeyance of facts and logic. Conversely, power does quite well without facts and logic. Ultimately, power comes in conflict with ethics. Power gets its way by coercion or agreement. It ceases to be power when it achieves agreement because it becomes service. But, power has no need for the expense of seeking agreement. The easiest path for power is leverage and manipulation.
Is knowledge power? Nope. It’s a slogan. It can be a resource, but it isn’t power. It takes agreement and good government for knowledge to be powerful. Knowledge can be conquered by leverage and ignorance. Knowledge has to be created and cultivated like civilization. And they can be abandoned like they were in the Dark Ages, for power’s benefit.
02/01/2024 @ 11:09 pm
No civilization on Earth is grounded in morals. Yes and no. If you mean based solely on morals, you’re correct. If you mean not based on morals at all, I don’t agree. The Pledge of Allegiance is not just to keep people in line, it’s to keep people focused on what we like to think are American morals.
02/02/2024 @ 7:04 am
I do hope you’re right about this, Kosher. For most of my life, this is how I would have described my worldview. At a certain point, fairly recently, I began to think that my worldview needed corrective lenses.
I remember a portion of a speech that was given to us as a class in the LAPD Academy. The portion that sticks with me is where the speaker explained that they were preparing recruits who saw the world one way to deal with, and to understand, a portion of the public who saw the world very differently. The recruits were described as coming from stable family backgrounds, familiar with being immersed in our cultural institutions. One portion that I recall was, “having been told stories of Santa Claus as a child…and believing”, etc. By contrast, there is a small portion of the public that we would have to deal with daily which saw physical structures and philosophical constructs differently.
At the time I thought this was about following rules or not, valuing family, things like that. What I now think it was really about was how everything was examined for how it could be exploited as a resource for their power. Our morals and folkways are how we paint over the blemishes in our broader human conduct, or fences that we erect to try to contain our innate wildness. To build and maintain civilization we are constantly negotiating with an innate brutality.
People have a base assumption about others that they come across, and that assumption is that the others are motivated by a desire to grab some sort of power. Years after I had left the LAPD, people who did not know me had certain assumptions about why I did that job. I never could understand it. The people I heard from tended to see my motivations as some sort of grab for power, and the desire to exert power over others. Indeed, the basic understanding of the position generally is about power. I have explained until I was out of breath that that is not what motivated me, nor is it what a day in the life is generally like. A lot of people scoffed at my perspective. I don’t know how many think like I did verses how many who didn’t, but I mostly heard from those who believed differently. And, what I came to realize is that those I heard from analyzed me based upon the power-ethics dichotomy. (I put this dichotomy together as a principle much more recently). Looking at the world this way, and at all of human history through this prism, which is still experimental at this point, leads me to very different conclusions. Among those is that power, the perception of it, the belief in it, and the desire for it, is at the foundation of everything. Civilization is how we negotiate and mitigate that fundamental force. Growing up, and until fairly recently, I believed that civilization was fundamental. It isn’t. Instinctive drives are fundamental, and civilization was invented to, as you put it, prevent resentments.
02/02/2024 @ 6:55 am
Someday we’ll have to discuss Clarence Thomas in a dedicated topic. He deserves his own graduate level college course. What I know about him is from a Frontline episode, and the Black Panther thing was a big surprise! I’d add though, his emotional issues seem deep and plentiful and firmly on the disorder spectrum.
Mass attention is weird. I’ve only held it in small ways, standing in front of a class, teaching or demonstrating something, several times to an auditorium audience, in the dark on a stage under a spotlight. Many eyes and ears on me, listening, taking vids on their phones, asking questions, writing down my responses. It make me nauseous, skittery, drained, and it takes me a day to get over. I get how some love it though.
Steve, I think lots of people start into politics with good intentions, and a desire to make change. If they are on solid emotional ground however, they don’t run for senator on their way to running for president. Someone who desires that level of political power has issues. That doesn’t mean they can’t hold power well. The Clintons are a good example. Would I want them for my mom and dad? Not even if they established a trust fund to pay for my psychotherapy.
02/06/2024 @ 9:20 pm
I agree
02/01/2024 @ 11:10 pm
There’s always the possibility that some run for high office because they’re fed up with watching people do it wrong.