Lawrie Douglas (Lawrie.Douglas@btinternet.com)
Mon, 23 Feb 1998 10:04:39 +0100
Sorry, I know this post is a bit late and that the discussion of ethics
expired about three weeks ago . . . I fell a bit behind then - you know how
it is, miss a few days and suddenly you've got thirty or forty very dense
little essays to get through . . . So forgive me if this point was actually
made before . . . although, judging by lots of the comments I keep reading,
I doubt it was.
It strikes me that it is silly to say that for a lower level to overrule a
higher is always IMMORAL; morality is an INTELLECTUAL concept. Looking down
from this intellectual level, as those who think philosophically do, we can
say that for bacteria to wipe out humankind (bang goes Shakespeare,
Beethoven, Pirsig and the whole idea of Quality) would be immoral, but then
what we'd really be doing was placing ourselves, as intellectual beings, in
the role of microbes. Microbes in themselves do not have this advantage, and
so we shouldn't blame them for what they do. In fact, in overall terms, they
fulfil a necessary role, and will, of course, out live us, literature and
philosophy . . . This doesn't make them better (God I hate those scientists,
naming no names, Richard Dawkins et al, who argue the superiority of genes /
germs / you name it, over the works of human society) . . . Overall, human
beings, being intellectual, are the most important things in existence, the
zenith of creation. If we say that we are part of the universe, then, in
saying this, the universe knows itself, achieves consciousness . . . It
can't have any higher purpose.
Back to my original point, I wouldn't bother talking about morality for the
lower levels. Besides anything, this attitude suggests that there is a
danger (why else the talk of contravening codes of morality, the threat of
punishment latent in this?) that evolution will not occur. Certainly, in
individual cases, sometimes things will go backwards, and a lower level will
triumph over a higher. But this never holds for good. Life cannot but get
ever more structured. We could therefore simply talk about the story of
existence (any fans of Vico out there? He's one of my favourites, and fits
in with Pirsig very well. One of his big ideas is the Ideal Eternal
History - there is one big story of life, things moving from anarchy to
order, but also from dynamism to inertia) and say this is the way things
are. There's no need to worry that progress might not occur, and no need to
extend intellectual concepts, which only have any meaning when applied to
the actions performed by intellectual beings, where they don't apply.
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