![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
What corrupts
Sep. 16th, 2016 11:25 amFrom my response to a comment on the previous post:
"What tends to corrupt, to my mind (though not always), is certainty; the absolute conviction of one's own rightness, first on a single issue, and then, progressively, on more and more. Eventually the conviction can assume the potency of a personal religion--'I am right on this because I am always right'--and how far one actually goes in defence of that rightness becomes less significant."
What also tends (though not always) to give rise to corruption is detachment. If you treat things, and people, as not quite real, if you block off parts of your response to them as irrelevant, it becomes easier to excuse doing the most atrocious things to them. Your goal, your cause, your desire, because it is fully real to you, becomes more important than those who suffer in your pursuit of it. Religious torturers learned to ignore the bodily sufferings of their victims, certain in their own minds that those souls would experience bliss unending in heaven if only they could be brought to repent. Scientists learn to inflict unimaginable cruelties upon animals, and in some cases people, secure in the knowledge that untold millions of people in the future will live better lives, or perhaps simply have a slightly less irksome hair-washing experience, as a result of their endeavours. There is no difference, here, between the possibly genuine words of Arnaud Amalric at the siege of Beziers ("Kill them all. God will know his own.") and the fictional but horrifyingly plausible words of Sir Julian Freke in Dorothy L Sayers' Whose Body? ("The knowledge of good and evil is a phenomenon of the brain and is removable."). Both are danger signs. Both indicate a mind that has stood so far back as to be unable to recognise that what it is seeing is actual reality, the world we share, the people of whom we are part.
It is, of course, possible to err in the other direction--to be too emotionally involved, too passionate to see things objectively--just as it is possible to be too hesitant, too full of doubt to take action when action is needed. The combination of certainty and detachment, though--the unassailable conviction of rightness, allied to the reassuring idea that the imagined end justifies the means and nothing outside oneself is quite real, or really that important anyway--is a sure path to hell.
At least, that's how I feel.
"What tends to corrupt, to my mind (though not always), is certainty; the absolute conviction of one's own rightness, first on a single issue, and then, progressively, on more and more. Eventually the conviction can assume the potency of a personal religion--'I am right on this because I am always right'--and how far one actually goes in defence of that rightness becomes less significant."
What also tends (though not always) to give rise to corruption is detachment. If you treat things, and people, as not quite real, if you block off parts of your response to them as irrelevant, it becomes easier to excuse doing the most atrocious things to them. Your goal, your cause, your desire, because it is fully real to you, becomes more important than those who suffer in your pursuit of it. Religious torturers learned to ignore the bodily sufferings of their victims, certain in their own minds that those souls would experience bliss unending in heaven if only they could be brought to repent. Scientists learn to inflict unimaginable cruelties upon animals, and in some cases people, secure in the knowledge that untold millions of people in the future will live better lives, or perhaps simply have a slightly less irksome hair-washing experience, as a result of their endeavours. There is no difference, here, between the possibly genuine words of Arnaud Amalric at the siege of Beziers ("Kill them all. God will know his own.") and the fictional but horrifyingly plausible words of Sir Julian Freke in Dorothy L Sayers' Whose Body? ("The knowledge of good and evil is a phenomenon of the brain and is removable."). Both are danger signs. Both indicate a mind that has stood so far back as to be unable to recognise that what it is seeing is actual reality, the world we share, the people of whom we are part.
It is, of course, possible to err in the other direction--to be too emotionally involved, too passionate to see things objectively--just as it is possible to be too hesitant, too full of doubt to take action when action is needed. The combination of certainty and detachment, though--the unassailable conviction of rightness, allied to the reassuring idea that the imagined end justifies the means and nothing outside oneself is quite real, or really that important anyway--is a sure path to hell.
At least, that's how I feel.