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Kant's Moral Values in the Light of Maya Harmonics. (08/16/2001)
Following along in the wake behind, or in the aftermath of,
the comments just concluded (in Maya Calendrical Geometry)
about the absence of meaningful distinction between opposite spaces
arranged in harmonic constructs, as the Maya probably conceived
of such ideas during their Classic period (250 AD-800 AD), where
opposite poles in binary structures are seen as mirror-images
of one another, and hence as identical twins, so to speak, it
might be useful to examine a specific western European philosophical
argument that makes use of binary opposition, even the one between
good and evil, to see how well or how badly it stands
in the face of a challenge brought to bear against it from the
thoroughly other point-of-view of Maya philosophy. An obvious
fact that cannot be overlooked here is that whatever follows this
value-laden opening gambit, whether for the good or the ill of
human society, the argument articulated is going to be heavily
weighted, even predominantly biased, in favor of the native American
perspective. Taking this approach to the dominant philosophy of
the western world, especially in light of the fact that its pronouncements
have always been associated with the divine word of God, and hence
seem virtually unassailable, any reasonably knowledgeable person
can expect fierce opposition to the notion that native Americans
have a useful contribution to make to a subject already settled
in the minds of those who adhere to that dominant ideology.
Be that as it may, and even for that reason, I have chosen
statements made by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Practical
Reason as a point of departure for the analysis. In that work,
where Kant investigates the moral implications of some of the
ideas he established in the Critique of Pure Reason, he
asserts that
"The only objects of practical reason are therefore those
of good and evil. For by the former is meant an
object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason;
by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle
of reason."
Only a few paragraphs later, Kant clarifies his meaning by
saying that "What we call good must be an object of
desire in the judgement of every rational man, and evil
an object of aversion in the eyes of everyone." Kant also
takes the trouble to differentiate carefully between reason and
instinct, making the "objects of practical reason" something
more than just a bare matter of desire and aversion. He says,
for instance, that
"For the possession of reason would not raise his worth
above that of the brutes, if it is to serve him only for the same
purpose that instinct serves in them; it would in that case be
only a particular method which nature had employed to equip man
for the same ends for which it has qualified brutes, without qualifying
him for any higher purpose."
Several problems seem apparent here even before one brings
a concept of harmony to bear against them. For instance, it is
not difficult to imagine a case in which "everyone"
on the ground of "a principle of reason" desired, even
strongly desired, the total and absolute annihilation of a group
of people who were opposed to this or that kind of a political
action or religious belief that characterized the majority opinion
of a society. In England during the 13th Century, for
example, a story was circulated that an enclave (ghetto) of Jewish
people kidnapped a Christian child, tortured him to death in bloodthirsty
rituals, and buried his body in a latrine to conceal the crime.
This story, which was completely false, so incited the Christians
in England against their Jewish neighbors that the King and Parliament
ordered the expulsion of every Jewish person from the realm. Those
Jews who were not executed were driven from England without recourse
to due process of any kind and without being allowed to take with
them any of their possessions whatsoever. Clearly, and in hindsight,
one can question the rationality of this act but, at the time,
and when it mattered, even for several centuries afterward, this
behavior was perceived by "everyone," with the exception
perhaps of the Jews who were expelled, as being a perfectly reasonable,
good and moral thing to do.
More recently a question over the nature (whether good
or evil) of scientific research conducted with stem cells
taken from human embryos has arisen in the political arena. At
stake is whether or not federal money should be appropriated to
fund that research. What inevitably happens in the Kantian moral
context, of course, and only because there is no innate and universally
consistent moral reality inherent in the human soul, is that an
ideological struggle is initiated in an effort to constitute a
hegemonic consensus favoring one side of the dispute (such research
is inherently good) over and against the other side (such
research is inherently evil). The "moral" issue
is then settled according to which side generates the most support
for its position, according to which side is able to mount the
most convincing argument in support of funding the research, in
the most benign circumstances, or which side can bring the most
coercive force to bear against forbidding the option of its opponents
in the worst case. Kant's position, then, fosters a belief that
morality depends more on public opinion than it does on any rational
faculty in the human soul or mind. A recent ABC-News poll found
that 56% of those questioned favor the approach George W. Bush
has taken to resolving the issue. While it certainly cannot be
argued that "everyone" holds the opinion that such research
is morally good, or that the determining factor in choosing
that course of action is grounded in a "principle of reason,"
where most people react instead from an emotional depth beyond
calculation to the substance of the issue, it is nevertheless
true that in this particular case federal funding, even if on
a rather limited basis, has been judged morally acceptable by
a majority of the people who have expressed an opinion. Tomorrow,
however, that percentage of acceptance may very well shift in
the opposite direction, making the good suddenly evil,
and the evil just as quickly good.
In a pluralistic society, where no coercive, hegemonic consensus
exists on one side or the other to establish, a priori
as it were, which of two alternatives represents the good,
and where, as a consequence, every choice comes down to a popular
vote, to the results of an opinion poll, Kant's view of morality
simply fails to create any reasonable or sensible ground for determining
what course of action should be preferred as morally sound. The
problem with Kant's position, of course, is that the Good
simply does not exist as an inherent quality in the human mind
(or soul) but only comes into existence as such when coercive
pressure of one kind or another is brought to bear by society,
even by a small and elitist segment of it, by a priesthood for
instance, in an effort to convince the majority of its citizens
that one action is preferable to another because an elitist enclave
deems it better and more morally sound than its opposite. Morality
by hegemonic consensus, then, is really all that Kant's position
offers.
This problem has its essential ground in the idea that "man"
was placed on the earth, inserted, as it were, like the wholly
finished product of a divine Creative will, into a pre-existent
and completely defined hierarchical structure, with the worst
at the bottom and the best at the top, and left to drift between
the two, fully endowed with freedom of choice, but pulled upward
by the existence of a supposed "higher purpose" than
the one that dominated everything residing at the lower levels
of the structure whose necessarily contrary purpose was to pull
"man" down to the depths of its own opposite brutish
level. Everything here makes a kind of sense as long as there
is no opposing view to the one that insists on binary distinctions
between good and evil. In the context of Maya harmonics,
however, where such distinctions are not just blurred but fundamentally
annihilated, simply by virtue of the fact that opposite poles
in every binary structure become indistinguishable twined mirror-images
of each other, the possibility of calling one thing good
and the other evil, one thing high the other low, one best
the other worst, is reduced to a distinction without quantifiable
meaning. Binary morality, then, is reduced to its proper level
in the context of harmonic reality, to a level that cannot rise
above meaningless, even groundless, absurdity. Put simply, there
is no such thing as a meaningful difference between good
and evil, between God and the Devil, when any element of
harmony is allowed to enter the distinction.
Immediately after the first encounter between Europeans and
native Americans, old world observers began describing the inhabitants
of the Americas as a people without any sense of morality whatsoever.
This was probably the only true statement Europeans ever uttered
in their aggregate characterization of the indigenous inhabitants
of the Western hemisphere. While that might be perceived as a
condemnation of tribal people, which is certainly the way in which
Europeans meant it to be taken, the truth is that saying such
a thing about the other is the highest compliment (if such a hierarchical
distinction could actually be said to exist) that can be expressed.
This is true because the existence of binary distinction in the
first place is the only thing that makes it possible to characterize
anything at all as being evil in the face of an equally
non-existent, wholly imaginary, and purely invented opposite category
identified as being good. In other words, the only reason
it was ever possible for 13th Century Christians to
expel the Jews from England was because Christian ideology provides
and generates a first necessary distinction between what is good
and what is evil. Rather than admitting the truth, that
Christians in England simply wanted to appropriate Jewish property
without fear of legal ramification and/or social condemnation
for a blatant act of thievery, they simply characterized Jewish
people as vicious savages who killed Christ as an innocent child
in their brutish and bloodthirsty religious rituals. Characterizing
the other as evil both permits and encourages action against
them that cannot be defined except as essentially evil.
Genocide, mass expulsion, forced conversion, is both never good
and never justifiable except, and/or unless, it is first possible
to characterize the victim as evil in opposition to the
hegemonic consensus that always defines itself as the good.
As soon as that is accomplished, it becomes not only possible
but absolutely inevitable that the good will exercise whatever
program of absolute evil it perceives as necessary to annihilate
the stain of otherness from its realm. Put simply, binary morality
is the only sure and consistent cause of evil in the world.
When Europeans invaded native America they found a continent of people who had not the slightest inkling of the concepts associated with binary opposition and binary morality. Instead, they found a people harmonically joined to each other and to their environment where concepts of good and evil, high and low, moral and immoral, had simply never been used to characterize the state of any known or imagined condition of the human experience. Native Americans also had not the slightest inkling of the fate that awaited them. Once Europeans characterized native Americans as being without any sense of binary morality, which was certainly true, they were freed from any restraint that might have prevented them from initiating the most horrific program of genocide, mass murder, and blatant thievery, the world has ever witnessed. That the Eurocentric killing machine continues to grind its way through the naked and defenseless fields of its victims, even past the beginning of the 21st Century, without even a single backward glance at the 100,000,000 native corpses its has already managed to amass as the foundation stones of it legacy, ought to make it abundantly obvious why there is so little hope that any American child, European or otherwise, will survive to secure its own patrimony.