[lbo-talk] Re: Framed (Was Everything's coming up roses)

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Tue Jun 24 01:29:53 PDT 2003


``..in my not so humble opinion, the issue isn't so much who's guilty and who isn't but how many of the connected are never charged.'' R

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Well that's the service and pleasure of the Law and Moral Philosophy isn't it? The well connected write it. Meanwhile us cruffie camel drivers never get to climb Mount Sinai, piss on the burning bush, strangle Mosses and write our own damned laws. No, we get to drink, dance, cavort with the Golden Calf and get told we are fucking up again.

Meanwhile the great imponderables are left to dangle up there in the empyrean for experts like god, nature, reason or the necon state prosecutor to hand down the Law to us mortals, who then get to genuflect before the high worships and whine over the extravagant cruelty of our ubiquitous punishments.

Among the vast array of problems with the moral universe, beside the obvious fact it has no ontological standing whatsoever, are the difficulties that arise from degree. Since there is no such thing as the Good except as an abstract ideal, we are always left with a lesser good embedded in the messy materiality of the real. On the other hand the ideal Good admits of little or no qualification, for can a Good become a lesser good and still be good, and from there a less good still, until we find ourselves in the realm of debating between lesser evils? For the sake of symmetry, we could start with the ideal Bad and argue from lesser bads to lesser goods until we arrive at the other pole.

In either case, where do we cut the smooth spectrum of the good that ranges over to bad? Let's say there is such a cut, a midpoint. Is that imaginary fulcrum where the division finds equal measure between good and evil, indifference?

from my vantage point in the mire, most of life's events are found packed into that single point, a midpoint of indifference between good and bad.

But we seem blessed to live in an society and time dominated by a ruling order who are convinced they know to an absolute certainty what is Good. And so, that imaginary point of balance where I would find most of life to reside in blissful indifference, has been forcibly moved toward the Good, and has thereby defined, by default, most of human conduct to be comprehended by the Bad.

As we continue along this direction, I see a time where, as in the Dark Ages, only the ideal Good, is good, while all the rest of human existence and its struggles are conceived as bad, vile, and corrupt.

There will be of course the exceptions of a very few, wondrous and ideal people of light, truth, beauty and goodness, and those of course would be the Princes together with their entourage, the Cardinals of Moral Philosophy, and the Bishops of the Law. It would of course be only natural that they should be rich and therefore more deserving of their elevated stature, closer as it were to the ideal Good, than all others.

Chuck Grimes



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