[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Dan Lusthaus]

Joy,

>There also is the alternative of a more multilateral approach,
> where one admits one hasn't the monopoly on right view and action.

When such options, pursue them. When those options are exhausted, more
forceful means may be necessary. Chamberlain didn't solve the Hitler
problem, did he? Same question from the same logic as before. Conceding the
Sudetenland to Hitler and declaring that giddily as "peace in our time" was
quite self-deceptive. By your logic Britain and the US should have done to
France what Chamberlain did to the Sudetenland. Curt is eager to do that to
Israel. That is not an ethical world.


> Lance and Stephen brought up another opinion about it, different from
> yours. I will need to look into this to form my own opinion.

Neither can account for the timing of the surrender. Without rendering the
bomb unnecessary, or willing to state directly that the bomb is so evil that
it would have been better if lots more people had died than died from the
bomb just to keep that evil genie in its bottle, it becomes difficult to
dismiss the positives.

> Everybody seems to be lost in darkness, except the USA,

Actually that would be a very poor reading of my politics. As Lance
suggested, both demonizing or sanctifying the US (or Muslims, or whatever)
are extremes. That doesn't mean one turns to artificial parities -- 
pretending something pernicious is better than it is, nor pretending
something good is worse than it is. It means seeing things as they are,
yathaabhuutam. I did not vote for either Bush senior or junior, some of my
students when I taught in Florida (I don't live there now -- thank goodness)
thought I was a hopeless Liberal (probably similar to what Richard is
undergoing with his current crop of students), and probably with as equal
conviction that they were reading me correctly as some members of this list
suspect I am a fanatical rightwing flagwaving American nationalist.

...so he asked Buddha Har"sitaagaara, "Is the right right?"

Har"sitaagaara replied: "I do not hold that view."

"Is the left right?"

Har"sitaagaara replied: "I do not hold that view."

"Are both the right and left right?"

Har"sitaagaara replied: "I do not hold that view."

"Are neither the right nor left right?"

Har"sitaagaara replied: "Let me think about that one..."

>The
> positive side of this reasoning is that it removes counterproductive
> righteousness, the negative side is that there is no incentive to
> refrain from killing and greater violence.

And that's where ethics comes in -- precisely to sort out one type of
violence from another, to try to turn poison into medicine. Moral absolutes
just leave one at the impasses you identify.

> The reign of quantity. That should make ethics a whole lot easier.

Don't reduce ethics to the anti-quantification rhetoric. Ethics is about
thinking, weighing alternatives. It may employ quantification formulas from
time to time, but it wouldn't be ethical to reduce everything to
quantification.

> Where does
> renunciation
> come in?

It's one of the options to be ethically considered.

> If ethics are necessarily messy -because the world is messy (not
> absolute good/bad)- why do we
> need ethics, when we already have the law of the survival of the fittest
> (better/worse)
> and why should we then intervene at all? On the basis of what ethics, that
> isn't of this world, if the world already has its own ethics that leaves
no
> alternative as you suggest?

Precisely because we have the capacity to not act like beasts, to poke our
heads above the kama-loka, we have an ethical responsibility to do so. And
to do so with and for each other.

> But I think Rabbi Petura was right

I thought you would. The point of that ethical tradition is that both
opinions are recorded, and it was not a true/false question, so they both
provide legitimate responses. Note that Akiva does not mandate that he MUST
drink his own water, Akiva only allows that he would not be wrong to do so.
Telushkin points out that every single person who survived the camps did so
by, in one way or another, followng Akiva. Life is indeed complicated.

Dan Lusthaus