Ideology and Mutuality
Will we ever feel together if moral outrage continues to spray on each others' shoes?
There is a common thread among ideas that I’ve been attempting to Marie Kondo (yes, she is now a verb) lately: any notion-set whose nutrition facts include more than 1% daily value of Vitamin M. M is for Morality; they are good, that is evil. How could you! What were they thinking!? Exclamations of mock confusion, bravado-propaganda to sow team-togetherness. In addition to failing to spark joy, morality ideologies inhabit their consumers with a sense of acidic superiority.
Yes, terrible (and a full spectrum of moderately awful) things happen and are both perpetrated & experienced by individuals and groups. However, when one’s posture toward every interaction, moment, and sentence becomes a moral posture, the possibility for global mutuality diminishes. Perhaps a person or government has recently done something horrible; immediate steps ought to be taken to remedy such things, to the degree possible. It’s an innate part of interactions between we fallible humans, and we must build suitable structures, rituals, and behaviors to respond. But when retaliation, rage, and resentment stultify into ideology and people constantly bathe themselves in these notions, destruction, erasure, and domination become imaginable and often desired.
There are so-called philosophers who claim that scapegoats and enemies are natural human constructions. There are others who argue that competition and struggle and power are essential fruits of the human experience, to be plucked by the strong, capable, and meritorious. In the face of such calls for us, them, and continuously evaluative postures, thoughtful humans must consider extending the forgiveness and understanding offered to close family and friends to those they fear or find themselves far from. One need not be a parent to forgive a tantrum. One need not be a brother to extend a hand when one appears to have been wronged. And one need not develop a razor wire morality to live harmoniously.
Where do ideology and morality seethe in our world? It’s all over the news in any medium (they had to do it, or the advertisers would have entirely deserted them). It’s evident in mass interpersonal communications (see Twitter, government press conferences & releases, and text groups). Books carry high-yield, radioactive ideological morality, as do images and video.
It is possible to detox. Don’t consume the above. Get in touch with the cutting edge of your present moment and the people within handshake & hug’s reach. Consider the tree in front of you carefully, with its cloud-obscured sun-afternoon backdrop and winter-dried leaves. Many have argued that controlling information and ideology inflow and becoming resistant to both is the equivalent of “burying your head in the sand”. An anti-intellectual ignorance, apparently. However, people who follow their senses and experiences, listening attentively to themselves and their immediate environments, walk in the tradition of humanity’s kindest and most thoughtful members. Imbibing moral content and developing a moral compass may not be ethically wrong, but these traditions are self- and group-destructive when one takes up permanent residence inside their compass needle.