Where do our values come from, anyway?

[morgan_dhu]

Whan and how did you arrive at your essential political, ethical and religious/spiritual philosophies? Have you always tended in certain directions and simply found the influences that brought you to where you are today, or did someone or something teach you/influence you/make you think about these positions and values?

Last night, I was talking with my partner glaurung about some of the books and authors from my youth that I've been re-reading of late (details available on my book journal, bibliogramma. I noticed that a lot of them, quite unbeknownst to me at the time, were fairly radical in some ways - Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Suzette Haden Elgin's At The Seventh Level, Samuel Delany's work... in fact, the other night, I was re-reading Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset, published in 1963, and ran across a small passage in which her attempt at a historical King Arthur is looking around at his band of companions, sitting around socializing after a hard day's work of hunting down Saxons, and sees two of his warriors having a cuddle in the corner. His thoughts are basically - lots of warriors form such relationships while on campaign and away from women, but these two really seem to be in love, which is only going to make them better warriors because they won't want to fight poorly in front of their lover.

So I was sort of wondering if perhaps, it was all of this stuff I'd read as a child that had started me on the path to becoming a left-wing radical with some very strong feelings about social justice, a pagan animist with some very strong feelings about the unity of all things, and all of those other values that underpin who I am.

But then my partner pointed out that I'd also read everything Heinlein had ever written when I was a child, and a lot of books by other people, some fairly right-wing, militaristic, crypto-fascist, etc., and hadn't been particularly influenced by them, other than to think about what was wrong in their worldviews, from my perspective, anyway.

Having a working mother back in the early 60s when this was not really common for a white middleclass child may have had something to do with my becoming a feminist at a very early age, but my mother was far from being a radical in political terms. I was raised until the age of about 12 or 13 without any continuing religious influences, except for one grandmother who kept trying to put me into Bible classes, but I didn't see her often at all. Then my mother converted to Judaism, but I was old enough that she simply asked my to keep kosher in the house out of respect for her, so while I studied the basic principles with her, I wasn't being pressured to adopt any particular faith, which was a good thing because by then I'd already developed the basic structure of my own beliefs, which were not at all like those of Judaism or Christianity.

So what was it? What made me initially susceptible to a left-wing/socialist and at the same distinctly spiritual and mystical set of perspectives on the world I live in? Sometimes it seems to me as though I have always felt this way, and that I uncovered my core beliefs rather than developed them, as I would read or hear one thing that said to me "yes, of course, that just feels right" and then read or hear something else and feel that there was something basically wrong about it - and that the rest was simply refining my feelings of "rightness" and "wrongness" with evidence and reason.

And how about you?

Comments

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

(1) is what we've been using in the South West Pacific with some degree of success and without alienating the population. But the cost has been high - the development of a cargo cult situation in which these states have steadily become more rather than less dependent, both economically and militarily. It has enormous dangers and in my opinion should only be used when the situation is desperate as it was in East Timor. While the left had urged military intevention there for nearly 20 years, the rest of the population only came round when things got too bad, because there was always a fear that war with Indonesia could cause that country to break up.

(2) was the general strategy that had been used, and it seemed pretty good as it had worked in most parts of the world and was seen as a low-cost minimum effort strategy which worked well in South Africa and the Cold War. However, it was failing spectacularly in the Middle East. In Iraq, the sanctions and thrice-weekly bombings seemed to be becoming cruel and making no little or impact (although we now know that the 1993-2003 bombing campaign was more effective than first assumed). [Also, the death rate attributed to war and sectarian violence still, inexplicably, remains below that attribted to sanctions.] But, as the Ethics profs drummed into us, inaction also has its cost and consequences. And in the wake of 9/11 and Bali, that was seen as too high. Now it turns out that the reaction of people in the Middle East when their government is corrupt or oppressive is to turn to Islam - and it will be because Islam is the root of their problems in the first place. So it turns out that (2) is actually as agressive as response a (1), because the West remains on the offensive economically, scientifically and culturally. So all we can expect from this approach is escalating violence and conflict, as the Middle East sinks into economic depression and in response into religious fundamentalism.

New strategy urgently required.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

New strategy urgently required.

Agreed. Both existing appraoches have had some modest sucesses in some places, and spectacular failures in others. I suspect that where either has had any success, it's been because the people planning the strategy thought very carefully about what was the "best" approach in those precise circumstances, and how "best" to implement it (bearing in mind that "best" may not be very good), and got lots of good information both on the situation and on what was possible in terms of their own resources. Either that or sheer luck.