Old News...

Looking over old papers, I found one from about two years ago, here in severely altered format. I was just getting out of school for the second time, and this paper was my final for the English Capstone course. Hopelessly confident and idealistic, I wrote it on ethical and moral contingency in Iain Pears The Dream of Scipio, a book I still return to even now to remind myself of my ethical process.  


Reading this paper again, I find I have become far more cynical in the past two years than even Iris Murdoch, who writes:  


"Good is mysterious because of human frailty, because of the immense distance which is involved. If there were angels they might be able to define good but we would not understand the definition. We are largely mechanical creatures, the slaves of relentlessly strong selfish forces the nature of which we scarcely comprehend. At best, as decent persons, we are usually very specialized . We behave well in areas where this can be done fairly easily and let other areas of possible virtue remain undeveloped...the self is a divided thing and the whole of it cannot be redeemed any more than it can be known" (Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 89).


Now I'm a little older, a little less wide-eyed, this reads truer than it ever did before. Goodness, such as it exists, is a fragile and rare thing. I thought then that it might be all the more beautiful because it happens so infrequently. The question I ask myself now is again existential and spiritual, but framed very differently. Whereas in my paper I saw the Good as glorious because of its mysteriousness, as good because of its nearly unreachable place in the sun (see the Allegory of the Cave), I now see it as opaque and unattainable: a world of darkness punctuated only by haphazard flashes of insight and selflessness. How do we find salvation when so much of our capacity to do good is outside our control?

The only light I can find here is the same one that Murdoch and Pears find: we invariably sacrifice to protect and nurture the things we love (or think we love) whether or not that seems right. Now, often the thing we love is ourselves, or a figment, or an outright lie, but nonetheless it is nearly always out of a kind of love that we act. Does it suffice then, that we act on occasion out of love for the other? Is that enough to save us (and I don't mean 'save us' only in the protestant Christian sense, in terms of personal salvation, but more in terms of palpable communities and relationships)? I don't really know anymore. I know only that we could stand to talk about it more, struggle with it more, and stop being self-righteous about it.

To close, I plagiarize myself of two years ago:

"Presupposing a Platonic divinity, and thinking back on the influence of Scipio’s remarkable text, what is to keep the liberal-ironist from becoming disheartened by the implication that what an individual perceives as “the Good” may simply be the false reflection of the divine, or as also posited, the mistranslation of historical fragments? What if “the warmth and light of the sun” merely implicates us all in a lie of reflection, where all of our ethical and moral choices represent at least as much wrong as right (if not more)? At the end of the day, the ironists may find themselves racked by “resentment, fantasy, and despair. The refusal to attend may even induce a fictitious sense of freedom: I may as well toss a coin" (Murdoch, 77, 89).

If nothing else seems transparent, it seems clear that we can never afford to "toss a coin."

I bid you peace.