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

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Behind my appraoch to any large military engagement is the fact that I am a pacifict - up to a point. Of course I'll kill - or try to, anyway, it's not easy for most human being to kill others, that's part of why soldiers need intensive training - if my life or the life of someone dear to me is in danger and I can't se any other way of dealing with the situation.

As a philosophical choice, that runs all the way up - I'll support a small scale intervention (like that attempt to capture bin Laden I discussed above) if it's demonstrably the only way to deal with the situation.

I need to have a hell of a lot of evidence that everything else has been tried and nothing else can possibly work before I can feel that a large scale military intervention is justified.

Such a force requires the direct support of thousands of ordinary people. It receives support in the form of money and aid from hundreds of thousands. (Australians are know this well from Vietnam, which is studied in schools these days.) Legally, every one of them is a legitimate miltary target under the Geneva Convention.

I try to balance two points of view at once. I agree that people must be held accountable for their actions.

I also feel that people who have been victimised and forced or deceived into supporting a criminal action, committed either by a state or by an organisation located within a state and receiving support from that state, should not be victimised a second time.

It's far too clear to me that large scale engagements end up hurting not just the people who wanted to commit some form of aggression, and the people who were willing to provide support, but also the people who had no idea what was going on, the people who were terrorised into standing by, if not actively supporting, the wives and children and employees of supporters, who in many countries may have no way at all to choose other than their husband/father/employer has chosen, and so on.

I think we are seeing that bombing a country and killing large numbers of civilians - complicit or not - is not an effective way of saving the people of that country from oppressive and/or criminal leaderships.

I freely admit that I have no idea what might be an effective way, and I sometimes suspect that there is no way to do it - one has to wait until the people themselves are ready, and then, if you want to support them, fine, but leave them to lead the regime change in their own country. I am becoming more and more sure that military occupation or imposing "peace" or "democracy" isn't the answer.

Afterall, it was a totalitarian and military rule that kept warring factions in both the former Yugoslavia and in Hussein's Irag working relatively well together for decades in both countries - remove the force imposing peace from above, and chaos ensues.

[hawkeye7.livejournal.com]

like that attempt to capture bin Laden I discussed above
Yes, I know, it failed dismally. Then the Americans tried aerial bombing without success. Finally, they provided direct support to the rebels, which worked. But this is hindsight... and Afghanistan.

It's far too clear to me that large scale engagements end up hurting not just the people who wanted to commit some form of aggression, and the people who were willing to provide support, but also the people ...
I was at a military conference discussing East Timor and a colonel put up a slide showing a sattelite photo of a scattered mass of people with arrows pointing to it saying "terrorists", "militias", "Indonesian Army", "bystanders", etc. Illustrating the intelligence problem involved.

Yet the ethical problem is not neccessarily to spare the innocent, because ethically we have to trade off these people against office workers, firemen and airline passengers. Failure to invade Afghanistan in 1998 was highly unethical because it led to the loss of thousands more lives than invasion utimately cost. (Which, as you may recall, was what I was saying back then -- not just hindsight.)

But that doesn't mean that I disagree with you. Far from it. We can impose peace. We can even impose democracy. But we just can't breathe life into the governments of these places. We have already tried and failed dismally in Vietnam, in New Guinea, in Vanuatu, in the Solomon Islands and in East Timor. I just cannot see how one can ever expect anything better in countries where people would rather fight than engage in any meaningful discourse with each other.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

But that doesn't mean that I disagree with you. Far from it. We can impose peace. We can even impose democracy. But we just can't breathe life into the governments of these places.

This is the core of the problem. And so far, I can only think of two general lines of response:

1. Intervene diectly in these kinds of states over and over again and hope that eventually something shifts
2. Stand back, using only minimal direct intervention to limit the risks these states pose to the rest of the world, and see what develops - while trying, where appropriate, to support progressive factions within the country and using diplomatic/economic measures to encourage change (as with South Africa).

The problem, as I see it, with the first tack, and at times to a lesser extent with the second tack as well, is that you risk alienating the populace, to the point that whatever develops, develops in directions that you don't want - for instance, ending up with most of the citizens of Lebanon supporting Hezbollah.

I think there are some places where the accumulated weight of everyone's actions, on all sides, over decades or even centuries (in those places where the consequnces of colonialism and imperialism are underlying everything else), is such that there are no ways to act at the present moment that will end in solutions everyone would accept. In those places, my inclination is to try to figure out what action would cause the least blow-back, if you will.

[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.