Caustic Ramblings

Please forgive me if the following comes off as moralistic preaching, but I feel compelled to shout from the rooftops that I have no business telling other people how to live their lives. Nor do you. Specifically, I mean that I have no business providing unsolicited advice to strangers and casual acquaintances. Now, what about those people within my own little circle of immediate family and close friends? If I feel so inclined, I may offer a few pointers and other forms of light feedback on whatever is it they are doing or expressing, granted the person in question seems at all interested in what my opinion might be on whatever is troubling them. And even if the issue is something that’s bugging me quite a bit, I’ve learned over the years to tread lightly, and mind my own P’s and Q’s before gawking at the mote in an eye that is not mine.

I’m going to define Moralism here as the art and science of telling strangers how they should and shouldn’t conduct their own affairs. It’s an art and science usually based on some sort of religious or philosophical code, or simply whatever the prevailing social norms happen to be at the time. But first, we need to get definitions out of the way. What is a stranger? Well, pretty much the entirety of humanity, I’d have to say. I think I sort of get at this in the above paragraph. Since those of us who are inmates of the contemporary industrialized Western word are now mostly atomized, and thus without community-proper, anyone outside of our own personal bubbles is effectively a stranger.

When your Facts touch my Feelings

Am I going to get a bit cranky when I see someone wearing ratty sweat pants out in public, like say in the supermarket? Sure. How about those skin-tight, spandex “yoga pants” that are all the rage these days among young women? No comment. Ditto for vulgar displays of tattoos, piercings, and other forms of so-called “body art” that come off to some of us as an expression of self-vandalism rather than beauty. How about when someone dumps their garbage out their car window and onto the road? How about when someone drives like an utter maniac on the same road I happen to be driving on?

Fortunately there are laws and ordinances in place to address those last couple items. But I think you might be getting the point here. One of the great struggles of life here on this planet is dealing with how utterly obnoxious, rude, and self-unaware other people can be. Those behaviors which yield manifest externalities can be justifiably dealt with via the aforementioned legal process. But it’s the subtle things that often irk us the most. It’s when we attempt to legislate against those subtle transgressions of common decency that the problems start happening. This is when the situation calls for a priesthood of one type or another to determine when, where, and how to censure those behaviors and actions which don’t do any harm in a directly-measurable manner, but might do harm in the long term if not contained, according to the gut feelings of many members of the community. Now we get into the icky territory where facts and feelings collide and create an intractable mess.

Middle Class Insecurities

I’m going to assert that Moralism is a modern-day phenomenon. It’s a very middle class (bourgeois, in the old lingo) type of social control. Our Moralism arose long after the dissolution of the self-policing societies of yore. By this, I mean the clans, tribes, extended families, and other intimate forms of social organization; those that had no need to write down their systems of rules, obligations, and entitlements. Contrast this with the Nation State, which is an entirely modern creature. Or really, it’s the Polis expanded out onto a wider territory. The modern Nation State is the vain attempt to create a family where there’s only masses of strangers who happen to inhabit the same geographic expanse, speak the same language, and have some vague sense of common origin or collective purpose. It actually seems to work ok (to an extent) when everyone residing within the geographic expanse-in-question does in-fact speak the same language, follow the same type of religion, and most members of the nation look not too dissimilar from one another. But nothing beats the old-type family network, where the web of accountability and reciprocity was an up close and personal affair. Under this arrangement, transgressions against familial norms elicited face-to-face consequences. Compare this to the impersonal state of the modern era, where it’s some form of byzantine jurisprudence that has been put in place to deal with myriad forms of social turbulence which might arise.

Fear-based Righteousness

Now we might see that Moralism is the outer expression of an inner angst that goes something like, “THAT PERSON is behaving in a way that makes my blood boil but there is nothing I can actually do about it!! Arrrgh!!” That’s right, it’s the type of existential torment known as powerlessness.

The Old Ways would of course counter with this simple piece of advice, “If they’re not your family, why do you even care?”

I think I have to defer to the ancients on this one. Really, if you have no formal social connections with another person, and they are not directly doing harm to you, then why is their business your business? On what authority do you have the right to police their conduct?

The inner turmoil of the Moralist is one that is fueled by the loss of membership in meaningful social arrangements. When we feel a sense of powerless over our surroundings, fear starts to bubble up. And that fear grows until it finds a release. The is the stuff or moral panics and “mass formation” sorts of collective outbursts that end up making life miserable for anyone within earshot.

Moral Sovereignty

Back in the ancient past, it was the Clan Chieftain, or Tribal Elder, or Parish Priest (or some equivalent figure) who was tasked with nipping these things in the bud; they were empowered to take quick, decisive action before the petulant whiners and complainers of the tribe could slowly brew up a fresh batch of bubbling hysteria over this or that contentious issue. That Clan Elder, or Friendly Neighborhood Rabbi was probably on a first-name-basis with anyone in the community who mattered.

So fast forward back to our crappy today. Instead of getting all in tizzy about what the countless human abstractions around us are doing, why not find or join a family? (Whatever that Family is, it can take on many forms; blood relation need not be required) And then stopping stressing out about whatever harmless idiosyncrasies non-family might be acting out?

I suppose now I can boast about my blissful indifference to total strangers thumbing their nose at what is proper and decent.

One of the greatest cliches out there in the land of political discourse is the idea that something called "the people" is a meaningful representation of anything that actually operates in the real world.

Let's try a little thought experiment and entertain the idea that there is in fact no such thing as "the people"....that perhaps such an utterance is silly, near-meaningless abstraction; and more often that not, this utterance that is little more than a emotional slogan; one that has for a long time been a favorite of agitation propagandists and rabble-rousers.

On the contrary, We could say that in actuality (empirically), people and peoples are sorted into factions, tribes, ethnic groups, religious sects, priesthoods, socio-economic classes, cultures, subcultures, ideological cults, professional societies, oligarch cliques, ect. Each of these groupings has their own collective interests and that "real politics" when shorn of all its bloviating, moralistic pretensions, is the process of negotiating and mediating the often-conflicting interests of these groups.

And by this, "the state" is nothing the enforcement arm of whatever coalition of the above type of groups happen to exert the most control over it at any given time. "The state" itself is just an administrative abstraction.

I do believe True Friendships do occur, but they aren't all that common.

In my view, friendships between non-related individuals are usually more temporary and situational than they are enduring beyond specific situations. By situational, I mean friendship based on a common intellectual interest, occupation, hobby, athletic activity, ect. Such situations are usually bound to a specific place and span of time. Being time-based there is a built-in expiration date on these common types of friendships.

For example, a friendship with a workmate might come to an abrupt close if I were to move to another job and after that we had little in else in common to converse about. We could see from that particular situation, our amicable social interactions probably revolved around things confined to the work environment; conversational topics like complaining about the bosses, gossiping about co-workers. On top of that we may have discussed frivolous things like sports, pop culture, and things of that nature. And perhaps being on good terms with that workmate conferred material advantages for me. Let's say he was chummy with our immediate manager and thus maintaining a friendly rapport with this workmate would reduce the probability that he might speak despairingly about me behind my back to the boss. Upon leaving that job, there's no real material reward from investing the time and energy required to maintain this rapport. And thus when the investment ceases, the relational bond begins to degrade until finally both parties become completely estranged from each-other.

Aristotle, in his great work on ethics, distinguished three types of friendship:
(1) Friendships of use
(2) Friendships of pleasure
(3) Philia, or True Friendships

Friendships of use are those relationships based on mutual advantage, where we hang out with people who do us some good; business acquaintances, e.g. Use-Friends wish each other something of use. Like pleasure-friends, use-friends can easily stop being friends; they do whenever one is no longer of any use to the other. Such friendship can be criticized, says Aristotle.

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