As the West sinks into its moral quagmire, will it see the treasure hidden in its muck?

What are the costs of low-wisdom, and thus inflexible, moral conviction? Put differently, can a truly wise person be morally inflexible?

Argument 1

If someone were superior to you in every way, would that grant them the right to abuse you?

Can an entity’s inferiority be such that its mere existence endangers yours? If yes, if you find someone’s ‘savage’ inferiority threatening, do you then have a moral obligation to make them like you, so much so that if they refuse to comply, you become obliged to kill them to preemptively preserve your superior self and ways?

Perhaps that sounds offensive. Perhaps this moral logic is only valid at the scale of tribes, or nation states, or when directed at viruses, pests, climate change, ignorance, terrorism. For example, nobody weeps today over the destroyed peoples of antiquity, or would weep if we, The Good Guys, defeated The Bad Guys. But does humanity really want to remain mired in the perma-enmity that Might Makes Right feeds and sustains? If we do, is it a wise desire? Can perma-enmity one day produce the fittest of all possible worlds, accomplish the end of savagery? Or are enmity-means in fact enmity-ends, perpetually?

If you trap an animal, it seeks escape. Life wills to survive, to live unmolested. A living system has a very hard time seeing itself as The Problem, as fundamentally wrong. If it does, it starts malfunctioning and often wants to die.

Though I’m singling out The West, it hardly matters which culture we put under the microscope. “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Some literature examines the sad human longing for the Final Triumph of the Familiar over the Weird. In European history, this longing famously manifested in 1930s and ‘40s Germany, Austria, Japan, etc. But no matter where it manifests, it always does so fuelled by sophomoric and brutish logic: 

‘We are best because we know ourselves and our culture best. Those people who differ from us are Weird and thus inferior. Behold! The things we excel at are the best things! Marvel at our neatly built roads, bureaucracies and machines! To excel at anything else is uninteresting at best, savage at worst. Because we are best, we are morally obliged to refashion the rest of the world in our image. There can be only one! Evolution mercilessly sorts the wheat from the chaff. Only the fittest survive. There is the Garden (familiar), and the Jungle (weird). We are the Garden, which is self-evidently the best possible thing because it is what we know. Destiny demands we transform the Jungle into the Garden!’

To itself, the condemned Jungle is a Garden of the familiar, and our civilised Garden is a weird and savage Jungle. Following the above logic, the Jungle is morally obliged to recreate our Garden in its image.

More importantly still, if you do not understand a thing intimately, your ability to assess its value is poor. Today, for example, we are aware that rain forests are miracles of biodiversity and self-regulation, a slow-burn accomplishment civilisation cannot even dream of matching. And yet our Western institutions and their managers still propagate the threadbare Jungle-Garden dichotomy first expressed, I believe by Rudyard Kipling, to justify Great Britain’s haughty mission.

Argument 2

If I couch the above logic in terms of ‘wisdom’, ‘love’ and ‘health’ as superior to “neatly built roads, bureaucracies and machines” – when I argue, in other words, that my favoured principles will ‘win’ in the ‘end’ – am I any different to the cultures I critique? Is my position fundamentally hypocritical?

It will not surprise you to learn my slippery response: Yes, but also no. One can understand principles from multiple perspectives without, I assert, being a moral relativist. The key is to understand, deeply, the dynamics of enmity. My position is that a proper and mature relationship with enmity is in fact a natural transcendence of the polarised morality expressed in Argument 1. If we do our work properly, with the right balance of humility and courage, our need, or even ability, to remain in enmity with others disappears.

I could oppose you in several ways, but I think they would all boil down to “cooperatively” or “competitively”. The former could be called humble opposition, the latter belligerent. We might also say loving or fearful opposition. 

If we were willingly and knowingly to choose love as a guiding principle for our new governance systems and institutions, we could only do so with a concomitant and deeply felt sense of our own frailty and ‘imperfection’. From this flows the knowing that those who oppose us are best placed to help us see where we are in error; opposition (a difference of perspective, aka diversity) is healthy for our evolution. This means that a healthy relationship with enmity (opposition, diversity) experiences ‘enmity’ as an opportunity to evolve, to improve. The result of this is that enmity itself ceases to be possible.

Can there be evolution without diversity, without opposition of some kind? The idea makes no sense to me.

If humans can learn to love their enemies, there would need to be no fear of being ‘wrong’, of losing face, especially if systems and institutions evolve to functioning maturity guided by love.

I could couch all this as “Love is mightier than fear and will win in the end!” I can also say “health will out” or “love will out”. Doing so, however, is an incomplete expression of the evolutionary process I am bringing into relief here when not qualified by additional observations about what evolution actually entails.

It is also true that we learn the health of love and wisdom by experiencing, again and again in a multitude of settings and contexts, the long-term dysfunction of embittered and entrenched enmity. The road to the hells we live through is also the road to heaven. Indeed, it is because we find the fruit of uncorrected fear and enmity hellish that we can know love is the healthier way to travel. So this is not competition in the belligerent, existential sense caricatured in Argument 1. Argument 2 is an attempt to describe the challenging process of increasingly complex cooperation that evolution is. It has as much to do with perspective (diversity) as it has to do with mechanical functionality.

Conclusion implied

This has not been a “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” article.