Morality

Alan Waller
Sep 7, 2018 · 8 min read

I am “discovering” many things about morality lately. Or, to rephrase, I am changing my mind on many things concerning morality. I am starting to understand, more and more, what Slavoj Zizek says concerning pessimism: that the only light at the end of the tunnel is the train coming towards you. Now, I am a natural optimist, so I take that in a slightly different way. But I’m taking it, nonetheless. The key is a slightly Buddhist one: all is suffering. In Samsara, all is suffering. You can perform a charitable deed, a good action, but I am starting to the get intuition that all the strings tied to that good action also lead to other bad actions. You may do a good deed, but maybe by doing it, you’re committing many other bad deeds. Maybe it’s impossible to avoid bad deeds. Or, another way of saying it, that the suffering of Samsara is inextricably linked to responsibility for that suffering. No one is free from responsibility. No one is less guilty than another. Aha, but! Even then, I do believe in the value of good deeds, and I do believe that some actions are worse than others. Cutting someone with a knife, against their will, seems to be worse than not doing it. So how do I consolidate those two facts? Well, let’s try.

To talk about the “good deeds” part I will touch on a touchy topic, but the only one that comes to mind, because it has become important to me as of late: vegetarianism / veganism, all kinds of ethical eating. I have stopped eating meat this summer, so far only for a month. The reasons being, mainly, that “I wanted to”. I have trouble identifying the reasons beyond this. I simply felt like stopping eating meat. I simply didn’t feel like eating meat. Now, were feelings towards animals involved in the decision? Probably. But it’s hard to know. In any case, I have contemplated that possibility. The possibility that I have stopped eating meat because I feel bad about the killing of animals. I have watched slaughterhouse footage, and yes, it has horrified and saddened me. I have read Animal Liberation, the description of lab tests on animals, seen footage of that too, and yes, it has affected me too. Let’s say that these were the reasons. Am I doing something “better” by being a vegetarian than by being a meat eater? Well, for one, I still eat dairy and eggs, so I am still eating the products of depressed, enslaved animals. But even if I were fully vegan: would I be acting more ethically? I suppose I would. But I am not so sure nowadays. If there is such a thing as a “more ethical” lifestyle, could a person, theoretically, rid oneself of responsibility for the suffering of the world? Rid oneself of a certain portion of that responsibility / become less responsible / guilty than the rest? Maybe. I’m not sure. After all, everything is smeared in suffering: the computers we use, the clothes we wear, the furniture we live on, the houses, the streets we walk on. The entire world seems to be constructed on abusive relations of power. If one stops doing one or two of the “bad things”…what about all the rest? Does it “help” to stop doing one or two of those things? Does it alleviate the suffering a little bit? I think it does. I do think so. But maybe not for the conventional reasons.

Like Zizek says, “the only light is a train”. To me this means: if you fetishise one of these “good deeds”, and hold onto it like a beacon of hope, you’re blinding yourself to the depth of suffering. The suffering goes right down to the roots. It doesn’t seem to be something you could shovel away with one or two spadefuls of work. One can easily feel better than the rest, above the rest, more “saved” from doom than the rest, but i don’t think that is possible. Even the Bodhisattva partakes of the guilt for the sins of the world. It’s the classic Christ story: Christ dies for the sins of the world, he doesn’t feel better than the rest, or above criticism: he receives all the criticism. Of course, as Jung saw, this is an archetypal fable: one does not embody this archetype, otherwise it is an inflation from the unconscious. In this sense, any sense of “hope”, any sense of “light at the end of the tunnel”, a path to take that is different form the other paths, is just an illusion. All material, external actions are the same. However, inner action is different, inner action is the light at the end of the tunnel precisely because it is non-action. But material action is still valuable, in a symbolic way: doing a good deed is like a symbol. At least that’s how I feel about it today. It is a magic ritual, one could say. You take a symbol and commit to it somehow. Vegetarianism is symbolic. And I don’t meant this in the sense that “it doesn’t have real effects”. Obviously, if less people eat meat, less animals will be killed, because the demand for meat in the market will go down. But this result, “less animals being killed”, is not a victory per se. It is a victory, but only if one takes it as a symbol. If it is held onto as an “improvement in external reality”, one can fall pray to repressing all the other suffering.

It reminds me of psychoanalysis, or my experience of psychoanalytical therapy. When I was seeing a psychoanalyst, I slowly saw connections between things I hadn’t wanted to see connections before. How this suffering was connected to my own choices and actions, or at least, to what extend I could disentangle myself from toxic situations in the real world by changing myself, not the world itself. This “drawing of connections” gave me peace, albeit being tough, because now things were less chaotic. They were more connected, there was a clearer picture, and with it, a clearer plan of action. However, it is tough, because suddenly all your separate problems become one big ball, one single problem. Or, to put it another way, you realise that all your individual problems are connected like a yarn ball. Their roots are all entangled in a central node, a central root. It all affects everything else. So, even if I stop doing this bad habit, or start doing that good habit, it’s not doing any good if I tell myself that by solving that little problem, I will feel better. If you fetishise the problem, put it on an altar, and solve it like one would sacrifice a lamb, in the hopes that it appeases the gods, you are mistaken imo. If your crops are failing, and your children are dying, and you sacrifice a child to the gods in order to appease them and solve your life, it won’t. Because the crops, and death, and all the problems, don’t have such a simple solution. They’re connected in a horrific knot, a deep deep root. Ah, but it does help, and that is actually a problem — these sacrifices give a short-lived rush which satisfies you long enough to forget about your suffering until the pain has grown to unbearable extents again (and then you sacrifice something else). For instance: I feel bad, so I’ll eat some cake. Clearly, the bad feeling was emotional, it had nothing to do with hunger. The cake will appease you for a while, but while you’re in coo-coo land, ignoring the real cause of the problem, that cause is growing, and growing, and making things worse and worse, until the confrontation is traumatic.

The bizarre thing is, that the solution is the exact same thing, but with awareness of the all-encompassing nature of the problem. It’s the “pessimism” Zizek talks about, I think. If you see that is connected, and that therefore the “cause” of your problems isn’t a surface one, a material one, but an inner one, then you see that no “surface action” will solve anything. But hey — there is only surface action! There is no other kind of action. Action is material, by nature. So all you can do are things. If you do them with the goal of attaining a goal that is inner, your are treating them symbolically. So you perform the sacrifice, but it is a symbolic one. Now, it does differ from the previous example, in truth: if you feel an emotional pain, you don’t eat cake, in the hopes that cake was the cause of your suffering. Instead, you try and perform an action that will symbolically satisfy that hunger, and in my experience, art seems to be the way. This doesn’t mean everyone should be an artist in the conventional sense of the word. Art is self-expression, creativity. Expressing your Self, allowing your Self to come out into the open. That’s “art” for me. Of course, there may be more to it — art also includes a certain “magic circle” mechanism around it. Art is done in a specific ritualised space and time, or at least it seems to be that way. I hesitate to define art, really, beyond “self-expression”, because that’s the point: everyone will express themselves differently. I would say this, though: eating cake when you’re feeling emotional pain may not be self-expression. It may be expressing your urges, but not the Self with a capital S. That’s the “problem”, that what I’m speaking about assumes a certain “faith” in the Self, in the mandalic orderedness of the unconsciousness. And this is not a faith that can be explained, probably (although art, and thus writing, reading, can point towards the subjective experience which will then show you directly, I do think that is true). So I am speaking of faith. That’s the funny thing. It took me ages to realise that, that I am speaking of faith in a certain way. The knowledge of the Self is a spiritual experience, there is no way of dodging the question, of avoiding it in secular language. And it’s the key, because when you believe in the Self, you believe in a “subjective right or wrong”. Not an objective right or wrong, necessarily — my heaven is someone else’s hell, etc. Which goes back to the “symbolic actions” thing: maybe “not eating meat” is not “better” than any other objective action, since while I stop eating meat, I am continuing to do every other thing, and all of them cause suffering. BUT, from a subjective point of view, it follows my own heart, my own sense of inner good and bad, dictated by my Self. So maybe this refines my definition of art: art is Self expression, not self-expression. Expressing, or aiming to express, the Self. This is an alien thing to do, because it is the ego who endeavours to express the Self, and by doing so try and bridge the gap between them. To encluster the ego within the Self mandala.

Well, that seems to be enough. See you soon! I’ll write more posts. Oh, I will!

Alan Waller

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