[Buddha-l] Jung and Dignaga and social mores

[Bob Zeuschner]

The topic that has interested me in this discussion of Freud and Jung is 
how much we are all formed by our own era.
It may be true that there are near absolutes in moral behavior and that 
Jung and Freud and everyone else should have recognized those during 
their own lifetimes.
I cannot help but wonder about how deeply and profoundly our own social 
assumptions affect our world-views in the year 2008.
I notice that my favorite films of the 1930s and 1940s were filled with 
smokers everywhere.
Today in southern California it is rather rude to be a smoker, and it is 
difficult not to apply so. Cal. values to Bogart and Bacall, to Astaire 
and Rogers, to Nick and Nora Charles ...
I am confident that 75 years from now, some of the values that we 
consider so un-objectionable and so accepted, that we don't recognize as 
moral issues, will be seen as a severe violation of morality perhaps 100 
years from now.
I'd like to think that I'd have rejected anti-Semitism if I'd lived in 
the 1880s or 1920s, that I'd have rejected slavery if I'd lived in the 
1830s, but I don't know.
I wonder what it is that I accept today, that my great-grandchildren 
will shake their heads at, and find it hard to believe that I did not 
recognize how morally objectionable such behavior is.
I just don't know.
However, I do wish everyone a Happy New Year and the reverent wish that 
2009 will be a whole lot better than 2008, and 2007, and ...
Bob Zeuschner

jkirk wrote:
> Seeking to fix a kind of social guilt on someone (in this case
> Jung): who lived and worked in a social context which was
> ambiguous and dangerous, a society where different ethnic hatreds
> were rampant throughout the entire society including among the
> Jews, where anti-semitism had long been justified by the majority
> Christian religion, and who finally broke with the Nazi
> politicians rather than wholeheartedly going along with them as
> did other intellectuals of the period -- is the consequence of
> delusion and hatred. 
> Buddhism does not support such an attitude. The aim in this
> forum, at least as I understand it, is the practice of metta
> (unless of course some members are playing games), as well as
> seeking and commenting on the causes of destructive human
> behavior.