The Loose Meaning of Middle-Class

Just as “proletarian” once was to the communist model, “middle-class” has become a rallying term of endearment for a capitalist society. Although frequently references, it exists nowadays loosely as a flexible term of political rhetoric, instead of any true economic bracket. Election season demonstrates this better than most other times. In the purview of political campaigns, I’m middle-class, and you’re middle-class; the guy cleaning the toilets at my work is middle-class, and the managers of major corporations are middle-class; just as the elected officials sitting in Congress are middle-class–sometimes it sounds as if everybody is middle-class, regardless of their actual earnings. The reason for this is that the term serves as a nice label onto which one can project all things a society might deem as decent personal attributes. Hence, giving skilled orators the opportunity to tweak its definition just enough to meet their specific agenda. “We need to strengthen the middle-class!”, “I stand for the men and women of the middle-class America!”, “My plan is to help rebuild middle-class America!” And, bit by bit, each tweak eventually brings us to an economic model where individuals earning $40,000 a year are placed in the same income group as individuals earning $140,000 a year, as if their interests and hardships can be addressed by the same universal platform.

It would be incorrect to ascribe middle-class as a word whose meaning has died, or is on the verge of dying. Rather, it is a label that has become wholly undefinable, which makes its usage as good as dead from my perspective. Literally speaking, there certainly exists a class of people whose earning wage places them in, or near, the center bracket of the population, and in that sense, it is fair to refer to such individuals as being middle-class. However, the disparity between those on the high end of the “middle-class” spectrum has so drastically exceeded those on the low end, that to continually categorize the two within the same income realm seems to me as not just nonsensical, but incoherent.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think that something is clearly off when those making over three times more than your income are considered your class equals.

A further issue I have with the term is that it so easily serves as a smokescreen against enacting substantial reform needed to alleviate the plight of the lower working class, as well as the downright poor. And, sadly, this is an offense committed by the political Left, which claims to hold the plight of the poor far more to heart than the political Right. Because, while the Left will rightly dismiss trickle-down economics when it’s set-up on the fallacious belief that wealth will naturally distribute itself evenly amongst all sectors of society as long as the affluent top is given the economic means and versatility to prosper, much of this same Left will often wholeheartedly embrace the equally fallacious idea that by focusing on the interests of the middle-class, it will trickle-down aid to the lower-class sectors of society. It hasn’t, it doesn’t, it won’t; namely, because the concerns of the former do not evenly align with the concerns of the latter, and benefits enacted to aid one class can (and often will) conflict with the interests of the other. To pretend otherwise, and insist that elevating the concerns of the middle-class will also somehow elevate the plight of the downright poor (not those tightening their belts, or just getting by living paycheck to paycheck–the actual no-belt, no-steady-paycheck, forgotten-and-ignored poor-poor), is to be willfully ignorant and choose a one-size fits all solution to a problem that cannot have one quick fix.

And no amount of political rhetoric will change that, regardless of which side of the political spectrum it’s coming from.

Nietzsche on the Origin of Justice

Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society – Western Society of Criminology

Similar to the sentiment found in Hobbes’ Leviathan, in section 92 of his 1878 work Human, All-Too-Human, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that the concept of what is just correlates from mutual agreements between persons. Hobbes calls these agreements covenants, Nietzsche refers to it more pointedly by stating that, “the initial character of justice is the character of a trade,” and “justice is repayment and exchange on the assumptions of an approximately equal power position.” Furthermore, Nietzsche follows Hobbes’ thinking that the root cause driving mankind to establish such ties is the desire for preservation, “Justice naturally derives from prudent concern with self-preservation.” However, despite agreeing with Hobbes’ position on the natural origin of justice, Nietzsche differs sharply from the English philosopher in his analysis on man’s comprehension of justice.

Whereas Hobbes deems man as a rational animal, and his desire to forge a community, and maintain it justly, as the natural extension of his intellectual fortitude, Nietzsche has no such respect for human intellect. He states, “In accordance with their intellectual habits, men have forgotten the original purpose of the so-called just, fair actions, and for millennia children have been taught to admire and emulate such actions.” But if the origin of justice resides within man’s natural instinct for self-preservation, then–according to Nietzsche–it is by definition that just actions are egotistic. Yet, mankind has forgotten this. Instead, what one sees is the propagation of the idea that just actions are the result of selfless impulses, causing this false sentiment to be heralded in ever higher esteem as it gets passed on through the generations. As this false notion of justice becomes more ingrained, individuals add value to this baseless sentiment, causing the morals of society to be founded on a flimsy structure of self-delusions, causing Nietzsche to declare: “How little the world would look moral without forgetfulness!”

The problem with what Nietzsche states here is the dubious premise he starts out with when he declares, “Justice (fairness) originates among those who are approximately equally powerful.” However, it can reasonably be argued that, rather that originating amongst equals, the concept of justice traces its origin to the very presence of power inequality. In an aristocratic system, justice is meant to preserve the hierarchical order by keeping the non-aristocratic masses content enough to not rebel. In a democratic system, justice is meant to uphold the universal application of the nation’s laws, without regard to one’s individual power or influence (remember we’re speaking ideally here, not in practice). In either case, justice did not originate among the equally powerful out of a fear of mutual destruction, but out of the sentiment that if a society is to function on all levels, some institutional gestures must be made to protect individuals from the influence of power disparity (even if such gestures are only superficially enforced).

Nietzsche’s point about justice being an extension of man’s egotistic instinct for self-preservation is still viable within this setting, however the strength of his assertion concerning the character of justice being a character of trade becomes problematic, since in the two examples above justice is not a mutual trade amongst equals but a bridging amongst societal antipodes. It is true that justice can be an understanding between those of equal power, however the premise that this is the origin of justice, as opposed to being merely a derivative (or subset) of a broader notion of justice, is a matter that needs to be demonstrate, rather than simply granted as a given.

Truly, Nietzsche’s greatest blunder here is that he abandoned one of his own core principles; he attempted to give an absolutist answer to an issue that is largely provisional. All-too-human, indeed.

Bibliography

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All-Too-Human. Section 92, “Origin of Justice.”

All quotes used are taken from Walter Kaufmann’s The Basic Writings of Nietzsche (2000 reprint, 1967 original), pages 148-149.

Fearing Our Dangerous Children

There is a bad perception a lot of people have about teenagers. They think of them as too moody, too violent, too energetic, and too unhinged in some way, to be fully trusted. And I have to admit, I have had experiences with some adolescents who fit that description, just as I have had experiences with some adults who fit that description. Most teenagers are fairly well-adjust, somewhat socially awkward, but nothing to get too bend out of shape about. Due to their age they are a bit self-conscious about how to respond to their emotions properly, but that has more to do with gaining enough situational experience than some dire personality disorder. Also, the much dreaded teen angst I keep hearing about doesn’t seem to be all the more present than the less discussed adult angst I see, with the only difference being that adults have learned through years of emotional repression to keep it at bay. To be honest, I’m more concerned that the affect of our preemptive worry about the potential threat of adolescents will work to actually create the very danger we are trying to avoid. I mean, how long can you treat a person as a common criminal, with zero-tolerance policies, before s/he begins to assume the role as a result? Now, please don’t misunderstand what I’m trying to say. I thoroughly support safety precautions, but what I can’t support are precautions that stretch the bounds of reason.

I constantly hear figures being thrown around to support the notion that teenagers are the greatest threat to humanity since the bubonic plague. School shootings on the rise; no one’s safe; blame the music industry; what we need is to crack down on these punks with force and teach them that violence is not the answer; all kids care about is sex, drugs and rock n’ roll (apparently the corniness of the pubescent plague knows no bounds). But what these people seem to miss in their statistical analyses is that for every teen who shoots up a school, there are thousands of others who don’t. By the standards we use to justify our zero-tolerance policies towards students, shouldn’t we also be asking all teachers and school administrators to register as potential sex offenders, on the grounds that there are just so many darn news reports of inappropriate teacher-student relations that we just can’t be too careful. Personally, I don’t think I would enjoy being treated as a pedophile simply because of my profession, and I assume that students don’t enjoy being treated as would-be murderers because a minority of their classmates were psychologically disturbed. By all means, let us be vigilant and keep an eye out for those we suspect need serious help, and lets have security guards and cameras keeping watch over our schools. But we cannot justify turning school campuses into quasi-prisons on the basis of keeping everyone safe, because our goal should be about more than just making sure every child goes back home alive (one of the biggest problems I have with education system nowadays is that they’ve practically become large daycare centers, rather than places of academia).

The warning signs to a potential danger are almost always present to those who bother to pay attention, but if we start to psych ourselves out preemptively, we are certainly setting ourselves up for failure as we will begin to frantically see threats where non exist, creating the very danger we are desperate to combat. Thus, ironically, increasing the danger of us missing something we should have been looking out for, but didn’t, due to the fear and mistrust we have of our children.

Utilitarianism vs. Common Sense

Ethics word cloud — Stock Vector © Boris15 #60996871

Utilitarianism is a simple ethical theory that a lot of people fail to understand. The reason for the confusions appears to result from approaching the philosophy either too broadly, or too narrowly. Thus, I think its useful to take a look at the core points of utilitarianism, in order to get a clear analysis.

In simplest terms, utilitarianism is the ethical theory that actions are to be judged right and wrong solely by virtue of their consequences, and right actions are those that produce the greatest balance of happiness over unhappiness. With everyone’s collective happiness being counted as equally important.

The main line of objections one hears deals with the claim the utilitarianism conflicts with moral common sense. An argument that best illustrates this line of reasoning is known as the McCloskey Case. This case uses a hypothetical example to illustrate its point: Suppose that a utilitarian finds himself in an area that has a great deal of racial strife. Furthermore, suppose that during his stay there, a black man rapes a white woman, causing a violent backlash to ensue against the black community in search of the culprit. Now, if the utilitarian has the option of testifying against a particular black man (any black man), who happens to be innocent, in order to end the racist backlash and prevent further violence against other innocent people, by the reasoning of utilitarian standards he would be required to allow the conviction of the innocent man to produce a greater balance of happiness over unhappiness. Here, the McCloskey case attempts to show how doing something that would otherwise be considered morally wrong, is acceptable by the principle of utility, as long as the good consequences that result outweigh the bad (such as bearing false witness against one innocent man to prevent the death of dozens of innocent men). However, common sense dictates that it is still wrong to let an innocent man die on the grounds that it conflicts with our ideal of justice, which requires us to treat people fairly and in accordance to the merits of the particular situation. Thus, as an ethical theory that places the demand for utility above the demand for justice, utilitarianism cannot be right as it conflicts with our moral common sense.

A related (less dire) objection against utilitarianism is based on what one might call backward-looking reasoning. Here, you’re asked to imagine a scenario where you promised a friend you’d meetup with him later in the day, but as you prepare to leave you remember that you could instead spent the time reviewing your school work for the upcoming test. By utilitarian standards, it is argued, you are justified in staying home and breaking your promise, because the consequences of you getting a better grade outweigh the irritation your friend might feel for being stood up. Once again, the case can be made that this conflicts with our moral common sense, as most people would want to affirm that your obligations to keeping a promise are not something that can be so easily escaped just for a small gain in utility. The argument maintains that because utilitarianism places such exclusive concern on the consequences our actions will have, it limits out attention only on future results. But, normally, most people think that past considerations are also important, like keeping a promise to a friend. Thus, utilitarianism seems to be faulty, because it excludes backward-looking considerations.

These objections have prompted utilitarians to respond with several rebuttals in defense of their ethical theory. The first line of defense denies that utilitarians conflicts with moral common sense at all, as the examples given don’t sufficiently discredit utilitarianism because one could easily argue that acts such as bearing false witness (per the first example above) and breaking promises to friends (per the second example) don’t result in good consequences. Thus, these acts would not be done or endorsed by utilitarians. Lying under oath can get you in trouble with the authorities, and delay the capture of the guilty culprit. Not to mention, broken promises lead to broken friendships. Merely because one thinks that a particular action will have the best result, it is not possible to be completely certain, and since experience shows the contrary, utilitarians would not condone such behavior. The best response against these utilitarian defenses is that it’s fundamentally weak, as it assumes that utilitarianism and moral common sense must be compatible because morally right decisions always yield good consequences. But it is reasonable to assume that in at least some cases it is possible to achieve a good result by something moral common sense condemns. Therefore, attempts to reconcile utilitarianism with moral common sense fails on principle.

A much better rebuttal made against the claim that utilitarianism conflicts with moral common sense is for utilitarians to just bite the bullet, and say, “Yeah, it does. So what?” After all, there is nothing inherent in the notion that a matter which follows in line with our common sense is necessarily correct. Common sense would also tell us that the sun moves across the sky, as was once believed, but we now know to be false. The impression that the earth is flat and stationary can also be defended rather easily just by appealing to common sense, but that still doesn’t change the fact that the planet is spherical and rotating on an axis as we speak.

As to the qualifier concerning moral common sense, a similar approach can be made. For centuries, white people in American held it as a point of moral common sense that they were superior to other races. Does appealing to common sense make them right? What about a sexist male, whose moral common sense tells him that his misogyny is justified by the superiority of men over women? These are not hypothetical examples; people like this actually do exist, and they do appeal to their moral common sense to vindicate prejudices the rest of us repudiate as absurdly wrong. So, a utilitarian could easily argue that in certain circumstances it is quite appropriate (even necessary) to question whether it is our moral common sense that needs to be discarded in favor of utility.

A Failure to Communicate

I occasionally like to rummage through the old files and papers I have lying around in my storage closet (it’s what I call my back-up reserve of documents collective hardware dust), because it’s a good way to see how my writings and ideas have developed over the years (and, sometimes, I also stumble across a good literary critique/analysis that I can post on this blog).

Unfortunately, I haven’t stumble onto any forgotten masterpieces I had composed, but I did find a pamphlet that was handed to me during my freshman year in college from the Humanities department.

It reads:

The indicative self-measure that postulates itself through the adolescent weltanschauung has a tendency to both hyper-diversify, and hyper-conflate the delicate stimuli, out through which decision making agencies are subverted by the consistent array of submission-intensive exaction.

This sentence, for me, perfectly embodies the reason why so much of academia cannot take the Humanities department seriously. I mean, what the fuck is this crap. And it’s not that I can’t decipher what the pamphlet is saying, but the way it is being said is so needlessly pretentious and obtuse, that I’m basically drowning in a sea of sophistry. Why would anyone choose to write the above when the can just as easily write:

The ego-centric mindset common to adolescents can both over-complicate, and over-generalize the various factors that are looking to influence, and subvert, their decision-making process.

There. Same message as before, written with a similar academic flair, but much more legible. Seriously, what is the point of having an entire department, whose academic objective is to teach students how to communicate and express themselves clearly, only to produce this sort of drivel. Yes, when writing one shouldn’t be afraid of experimenting with different techniques and styles, but it is also important to keep in mind the medium one is using, and most importantly, the audience being addressed. It should never be a showboating contest on how many “scholarly” sounding words can be crammed into a single sentence. Never dumb yourself down, never use a simple word to replace a perfectly valid technical term, but don’t overwhelm the page with this redundant attempt at so-called sophisticated scholarship.

In his essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell gave six rules for writers to follow:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

From where I stand, #2-5 have been completely violated by the pamphlet writer(s) (and that’s only one sentence, the pamphlet goes on for a good few more). If this mode of communication continues to be pushed in literary-critique courses (and various other humanities courses, such as the social sciences), the ironic result will be the desire to express oneself in more elaborate words, only to end up depriving one’s prose of any relevant meaning. A failure to communicate, indeed.

Examining Rousseau’s Thoughts on the Significance of Children’s Tears

Crying is an infant’s native language, and tears are the syntax by which he first learns to articulate himself to the world. At least, so much is true for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in his groundbreaking thought experiment, Emile, attempts to give insight to the proper way of rearing a child to adulthood. The significance of an infant’s tears is held to be most seminal in their early occurrences, as they will serve to determine the infant’s initial experience with a secondary person. And, even more importantly, the reaction of the caretaker to these first cries will be the formative influence on the child’s future relations and expectations within society.

Infants are naturally subjective thinkers; having to learn about external objects and secondary persons through their repeated interactions with them. The method by which all children eventually achieve an understanding of the other is through movement, or as Rousseau puts it, “It is only by movement that we learn that there are things which are not us, and it is only by our own movement that we acquire the idea of extension.”[1] Nonetheless, this ability to use motion as a means to relate to our surroundings is a learned trait, hence the newborn infant suffers a great discomfort as he experiences a need to know and grasp the objects around him, but has to rely on others—constituting more exteriors he is also quite ignorant of—to satisfy this need. The child is conflicted between the highly personal world he experiences, and the dependence he has for others to satisfy his needs; and “this is the source of children’s screams.”[2] Tears are the words by which children make their needs intelligible to the world. But because the infant is much closer to the nature of man, than the grown and corrupted adult, the language utilized is simple and basic, where all ills and discomforts are vocalized as pain.[3] Although, Rousseau’s philosophy adamantly insists that man is a solitary being, self-sufficient by nature, here he does admit that in the earliest stages of life a person is in need of others for survival. However, this apparent contradiction can be rectified by emphasizing the role self-preservation plays in Rousseau’s natural man. An infant cries when he is in need of something, experiencing a specific discomfort, never to arbitrarily bond with his caretaker; his tears are an indication of a matter that he needs taken care of, not a want for pampered attention. For if the latter was true it would stifle the solitary disposition of the newborn man. A gross impossibility, since freedom is Rousseau’s man’s primary need. Hence, it is not the cries of a child calling to satisfy his basic needs that set him on the path to social degradation, but the improper response rendered on to them by his misguided caretakers.

It is a natural phenomenon of modern childrearing to zealously fret over a child in order to prevent any harm from coming to him, only to cause him the greatest long-term harm conceivable in the process; a dependence on servitude, and an unnatural yearning for domination. “As long as children find resistance only in things and never in wills, they will become neither rebellious nor irascible and will preserve their health better.”[4] Unfortunately, this lesson is easily ignored, and children are nagged over under the false impression that providing for children’s needs entails accommodating their whims as a servant. Rousseau urges on parents and caretakers to recognize the ills of this trend as a primary cause for the softening of societal children, in comparison to their more rural counterparts, and recognize how with every pampering, coddling, and needless fussing, a further step is taken to rob the child from becoming a wholly well-adjusted adult. Tears originate as a means for children to communicate some legitimate distress they may have, but, “if one is not careful they soon become orders.”[5] This is where man’s fall from the natural order starts. Man has no need for the concept of servitude, either to serve or to be served, thus any implication to the contrary (including a constant yielding to his arbitrary wishes during infancy) immediately acts to take man away from his natural disposition. Thus, it can be said that our entire notion of social relations is perverted because our caretaker’s lacked the patience to distinguish between our inherent needs for preservation and our acquired wants for dependence.

As stated previously, a child learns about his surroundings through movement, implying that he must be given the upmost freedom to roam and experience the environment around him. Rousseau insists that exploration is natural for an infant, and gives the example of a child stretching out his hand to reach a far off object (page 66). However, because he is incapable of estimating the distance of the object, his attempts to reach the object fail. Now, the child will cry and scream in anger, not because he does not understand his own external relation to the distant object, but because he wants to will it to him through sheer force. When such a situation arises the proper response is to ignore the child’s tears for obedience, as it will teach him immediately that he is not the master of those around him, nor can he command inanimate objects to obey him. This sort of disciplining is also important as it will eventually lead to a general decrease in the amount of tears as children become “accustomed to shed them only when pain forces them to do so.”[6]

Although tears are clearly a natural mode of communication for children, the ease by which they are misused, and the potential dangers this leads to if the behavior is left uncorrected, is the formative cause of society’s degradation. Rousseau argues that children’s dependency on other’s to satisfy their needs is a weakness, aggravated by the servile response of their caretakers, and that in this weakness “is subsequently born the idea of empire and domination.”[7] When children learn from early on that their every whim can be satisfied through fury, rage, and temper tantrums, a dangerous precedent is set for how they will interact with the world as adults; they will grow accustomed to the servitude bestowed on them in infancy and through it develop an unrelenting demand for submission from their fellow man, who may or may not reciprocate kindly to the demand. A struggle for power is thereby established amongst individual persons, each vying for dominance over the other, which will reflect in the despotic mores of society. And man’s natural solitary state will be lost to the vices of anger, conceit, control, and power; otherwise known as the despicable world we are living in.

Emile is not meant by Rousseau to be a serious manual on how to rear a child from infancy to healthy adulthood, it is a philosophical reflection on how man has fallen to the state he is in, and how this fall begins with the first sounds we make. Like man, the tears of children start out innocent, used to satisfy a natural need, but excess indulgence leads to the corruption of this natural feature, thus allowing man’s ominous passions to arise from it. These passions corrupt precisely because they are unnatural, and due to the fact that society is built on these unnatural responses, the degradation is further agitated by each subsequent generation that is nurtured in the civilized fronts of existence. And if the dilemma is to be remedied, then it must begin at the first whimpering made.

[1] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile, translated by Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1979), p. 64.

[2] Rousseau, p. 64.

[3] Rousseau, p. 65.

[4] Rousseau, p. 66.

[5] Rousseau, p. 66.

[6] Rousseau, p. 69.

[7] Rousseau, p. 66.

The Impact of Moral Prohibition

People have a tendency to define morality strictly by altruistic terms, focusing on empathy and compassion in regard to the moral relationships we share with others. But, to me, this is a very myopic view on moral values, which ignores the fact that human beings do not seek to simply elevate particular positive attributes we consider to be moral, we also seek to shape the moral compass of others to align with our own image of what is to be deemed good and bad. The implementation of prohibition and imposition are inseparable from our species’ moral practices. It is not enough for us to hold to a particular moral standard, others must recognize the superiority of our personal values, too, and thereafter adopt it as their own standard, or face some degree of punishment (either in this life, or an ascribed next one). Morals built around human sexuality are the clearest example of the prohibitory nature of human values.

Take, for example, homosexuality. It would be one of the gravest of understatements to say that, historically, we heterosexuals care about the sexual practices of gay individuals (we are apparently absolutely obsessed with it!). Even though, technically, it has no binding affect on us, we have convinced ourselves through various moral inferences that somehow the sexuality of gay men and women is of the utmost priority to maintaining our own sexual “purity.” Why? Because it conflicts with the moral standard we have accepted, and, therefore, it is seen as a challenge to our values. Many self-appointed moralists will shriek for hours on end about the perversity of homosexuality, and the need to “cleanse” it out of human consciousness, lest we want to witness every moral framework of society crumble before our very eyes. Employing roundabout arguments that hold no real practical application to morality:

“Homosexuality is clearly immoral.”

“Why?”

“Because human sexual anatomy has clearly made opposite genders sexually compatible for the sake of reproduction. To do otherwise would be unnatural.”

“Even if we concede to the first part, how does that make homosexuality unnatural and/or immoral.”

“Well, if the point of sex is to reproduce, sexual relation that negates this will lead to less reproduction among the species, making it unnatural; thus, it poses a survival risk to humanity, which makes it immoral.

“Homosexual relations are not novel, but extend back to antiquity, and across the animal kingdom (including other members of our Great Ape family), and it has caused no detriment to human survival. In addition, on a planet that houses now 7 billion members of the human species, the greater threat to human health is increased overpopulation, not underpopulation. Furthermore, by your standard of what is unnatural and immoral, the fact that I wear glasses to correct my naturally weak eyesight is not natural, either. Would you, therefore, conclude that wearing glasses is immoral, because it is also unnatural?”

“No, because wearing glasses has no adverse affect on human survival.”

“Sure it does. If my myopia is genetic, then my children can inherit the adverse trait, contributing to its spread into the greater human population. One could argue that good eyesight can be quite salient to the survival of humanity. Thus, for us near-sighted individuals to procreate, and pass on our poor vision, is a negation of something that is vital to human survival; hence, by your logic, it is immoral. Not only that, but the fact that we wear glasses is itself immoral, since it is ‘unnatural’ to begin with.”

“Having poor vision is hardly crippling anymore in today’s age, and wearing glasses is not immoral since you did not choose to be near-sighted.”

“Worrying about human procreation is also redundant in a world inhabited by 7 billion people. And by what measure did gay people choose to be gay, and how does this relate to morality?”

“You can choose who you have sex with.”

“But you can’t choose who you’re attracted to.”

“No.”

“And is there not a direct line between who you’re attracted to and who you want to have sex with?”

“Yes.”

“So, how is being gay a choice?”

“Look, I’m not saying that being attracted to someone of the same sex is itself immoral, just that to engage in homosexual relations is not a natural expression of human sexuality.”

“My disagreement with you on the natural vs unnatural part is irrelevant in this discussion, since my greater issue lies with how you arrive at the conclusion that having gay sex is immoral.”

“It is simply my belief that it is so.”

“How does your personal belief and preference translate to a universal moral framework?”

“Well, I didn’t say it was universal.”

“But you didn’t qualify it as subjective, either. Meaning that you see your moral values as the ideal standard for others to follow.”

“Yes, I think ideally people shouldn’t be having sex with the same gender. You obviously disagree.”

“Again, my disagreement is irrelevant. I’m question the part in which you are trying to overextend your personal preferences to human morality. I would even go further to say that even if homosexuality did somehow cause some adverse affects on our current social conduct, you still have not demonstrated that it is by definition immoral, rather than simply undesirable to the current societal structure we happen to reside in.”

“Well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”

“I don’t agree with that.”

If such arguments seem lackluster, it’s because they are. I deliberately chose to discuss the morality of homosexuality because it is (at least, here in the American South) the primary example of how people tend to blur the distinction between what they might consider to be personally displeasing and what is morally wrong. For the sake of complete disclosure, the above scenario is one I know too well, since it was only a few years back that I was (much to my present shame) openly engaging in circular reasoning similar to the hypothetical person above [though my former homophobic stance didn’t rest on morality, as much as my idiotic cultural indoctrination that heterosexuality was the more normal mode of sexual expression, maintained through the stubborn fervor of adolescent arrogance]; realizing my error in thinking was only hard for as long as I bothered to construct faulty premises to support a prejudiced conclusion. Once this was pointed out to me, I had no choice but to tuck my tail between my legs and admit that my stance rested on nothing more but my acceptance of the mores of my cultural upbringing, and since I had in childhood never bothered to accept the prevalent values of my surroundings, it was downright baseless to continue upholding this one.

Much of what we deem moral is determined by both internal preferences, and external influences. It is also within our nature, as humans, to consider our personal moral preferences alone as insufficient standards on which to judge the actions of others, thus we are forced to create a greater authority for the origin of our moral values than ourselves, because we must convince others of the superiority in our way of thinking. In that, we profess not to be arbitrarily determining what is right and wrong, good and evil, but are merely vassals of a higher virtue that deep down everyone innately recognizes. Until, of course, we change our minds about something, then our new stance totally becomes the new higher virtue that everyone recognizes (no matter if it completely contradicts the innate virtue we were previously sure was the moral standard). We can’t just empathize through altruistic gestures, we must also prohibit that which is dangerous to our moral framework. Otherwise, how is it to reign supreme?

William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

William Blake is a fascinating character in the world of literature. A deeply spiritual man, whose writings seek to promote what he saw as the ideals of Christian virtue, but equally antagonistic towards all churches and established expressions of religion. It is this sort of irony that is raised repeatedly in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), which explores ideas of traditional theology and ethical logic, to uncover what the poet thought to be the true spark of man’s divine spirit.

Anyone looking to seriously discuss the doctrine of Contraries set forth in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, must first grasp the rhetorical, and perhaps more importantly, the theological implications that come along with realizing that notions such as good and evil are not and cannot be described as antitheses of one another. Plate 3 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, firmly calls on the reader to reflect on how s/he could honestly be able to fully comprehend positive components (such as attraction, reason, and love), unless there exist negative contraries (in this case, repulsion, energy, and hate) that must be known and understood to truly see the goodness of its opposites. If these negatives (i.e. Evil) are absent, then there is no rational way to detect the positives (i.e. Good), thus gaining an understanding of evil is detrimental in recognizing good. Plate 3 goes on to imply that Evil is the driving force of knowledge; it is the active factor that through its guiding principle, energy, focuses the senses of the passive recipient, Good, and allows its guiding principle, reason, to judge a given situation. Blake finishes by affirming, “Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell”, a clear attempt to distinguish between the two concepts. But, while it is certainly true that the existence of Heaven is not contingent on there also being a Hell, any description associating Heaven with Good will lose all meaning in the absence of Hell. If Heaven is the sole transcended plane, then to label it Good (or anything else for that matter) is an arbitrary description, akin to saying that Color is Heaven. In such a case, what would anything outside Heaven be, non-Color, but what would that describe?—Nothing, which is precisely why it is vital for us to be able to articulately conceive of the Evil of Hell, so that we may understand the Good of Heaven.

It must be kept in mind that in Blake’s spiritualist view, these traditionally divine and damned settings are considered to be more psychologically real, than physical representations of actual places (as the churches teach). Thus, Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil, are dependent on one another to ensure the promulgation of both entities in human consciousness. A fact that is acknowledged and plainly stated by Blake, and (in his view) secretly acknowledged but never stated by the churches. In plate 4, the voice of the Devil is presented in the form of a rational argument (even though reason is a component of Good), articulating Blake’s stance that although transcendent experience is real, any attribute we give to it is limited by the imagination of our minds, thereby making this real entity imaginary when we aim to analyze and categorize it rationally. Resulting in irony, because whereas reason is supposed to be a principle of Good, it becomes entrenched by our energetic drive to grasp it (energy being the principle of Evil), which ultimately takes us further away from the divine truth but also gives us our only possible insight to divinity. Meaning that, unlike what the church or organized religion teaches us, our physical and mental cravings are neither sin nor salvation, but manifestations of one transcendent property incapable of being dissevered. Our projection outward towards the heavens is in truth just a reflection inward—where Heaven truly resides—towards our soul.