Lifeboat

Seriously, now, for a second: what the fuck is up with ethics? I don't understand them. Anyone who writes about them just asserts them. Religious leaders assert them like we can see them up on that stage like a table or a chair. Family always try to instill them. Society tries to guilt them into you as if it were Zeus shooting a thunderbolt of superego into your skull. But, seriously, what the fuck? The best explanation of ethics I have heard has been "it's pretty fucking obvious some things would make you a bad person" (you know who you are). That is true, but seems deeply unsatisfactory.

Today I want to explore the "seems" in that last sentence. Because I don't actually doubt the "it's obvious" approach works. I just want to expunge the kind of objections that naturally arise, namely (1) "but, sir, then you're just being hopelessly relativistic", or (2) "this just means you do what you want", or (3) "ethical just means approved by you", which are really saying very closely overlapping things. I suppose is springs from a desre to build ethics like we would build a house or a table or a chair. From solid ingredients arranged in various ways in predictable patterns to yield some phenomenologically unified and meaningful complex. But it's not like that; it's not received wisdom. It's not enlightement. It's not revelation. No book can contain the record of people's kindnesses and failures. Oh, they grive broad strokes and approximations which do fine on a herd-level or military-command level: where you have masses of people with conformity instilled by drills and/or gossip. At the everyday level, one might imagine great ethical heroism disappears, is obscured by the endless drills and routines of driving from place to place and finding something to eat or fretting about what co-workers think of us. But that's not the case. I've tried to espouse this: every crossed street is its own little rock opera; there is a one-act play in every act of waiting for a bus; there is a set of lighting cues every time someone lights up outside the 7/11; there is a choreographic effort every time you try to dodge someone on the street but they go the same way and then you have that awkward series of moments where you are all unsure; there is witty playwrighing going into every rude full-scale joke; there's a buddy novel in every trip to the skating rink with the children. What I am trying to say is the mundane is the monumental portion of our lives where the ethical gets palyed out. It's not sexy to study or report on, but it is where every human being pursues their need to be esteemed and loved, and does the job adequately in most cases. But everyone ignores that. Why? Because it does not lend itself to theory-building, or to tendentious debates over the meaning of meaning, or the earnestness of irony or any other number of essay-season themes. Look at it this way: yo ualready know what to do. I'm here as a midwife. If you don't know what to do, talk to someone. You don't have to take their advice, just crystallize the issue in your head. And make the choice. Objectively, you have no free will. But you feel as if you do, so you do.

Clearly, nothing was proven. Take these thoughts. Pick through them if you want. Throw some away. Do whatever you want. Synthesize them and link them up to whatever you want. Our strength lies in our spiderweb-like networks that bounce from psychology to sociology to history to political science to sports to technology without limit. Maybe one day a reasonable facsimile of the truth will emerge.

Consider: "Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing; only when everything is in place does the door open."