Money Quotes from JMG’s Zeno’s Laughter

Quotes from John Michael Greer’s article: Zeno’s Laughter

1.

it’s an odd fact of contemporary life that very few people seem to be able to handle the idea that there can be more than one right answer to any of life’s questions

2.

It’s entertaining, at least to someone of my sensibilities, to watch people on opposite sides of any of today’s cultural donnybrooks — dietary, political, religious, you name it — striking identical poses as kindly and innocent defenders of truth, justice, and apple pie for all, unfairly assailed by the sneering minions of evil for evil’s sake. It adds to the fun that they inevitably strike this pose just before bellyflopping into the mud-wrestling pit to mix it up enthusiastically with their opponents. Still, beyond the entertainment value, there’s an important point to be made: something has gone disastrously wrong with the language of ethics in our time.

3.

If you don’t have a supernatural sanction for your claim about the immorality of bean-eating, though, you’re going to land plop in the middle of an infinite regress. Why shouldn’t you eat beans? Why, you might say, because they make you fart, and farting is immoral. What’s wrong with farting? Why, because it subjects the people around you to awful smells. And what’s wrong with that? Away you go down the rabbit hole, because you’ve made an elementary logical mistake: you’re trying to derive a value from a fact.

4.

If you believe that the point of ethics is that they give you the right to tell other people what to do, the lack of a way to bridge the gap between facts and values is a real problem. A great many people these days do in fact want to use ethics as an excuse for telling other people what to do. The usual gambit is thus simply to claim that one’s own value judgments are objectively true, and everyone else’s are simply wrong . . .

5.

It’s far more relevant to the point I want to make that other civilizations have reached the same point we’re at now, the point at which the supernatural sanctions of the civilization’s traditional religion lose their power to convince, and people have to find some other basis for ethics. In point of fact, as Oswald Spengler pointed out a long time ago, every civilization reaches that point sooner or later, and ours is only getting around to it now because we’re the Johnny-come-latelies of the historical sequence, the most recent civilization to trace out the familiar arc of rise and fall.

6.

Stoic ethics, like the other major ethical systems of the great age of Greek philosophy, basically doesn’t use the word “should” at all. Instead, it looks for values that pretty much everyone has in common, and presents its ethical rules as ways to put those values into practice: not “you should do X,” but “if you want Y, then try Z.”

7.

Many of us don’t realize that our inner lives have a voluntary dimension, and most of us have no idea how far that voluntary dimension extends. We treat our thoughts, beliefs, and values as though they’re handed to us from outside, and of course there are plenty of people who want to do exactly that, and feed us on prechewed thoughts, beliefs, and values. Accepting that mental fodder, though, is not necessarily to our advantage — quite the contrary, the people who want to do our thinking, believing, and valuing for us by and large expect to profit at our expense.