Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 23:10:39 -0800
From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: The Moral Order


The caesura that the French Enlightenment represents (and which 
allowed the distancing from the existential moment which enabled
Voltaire, Rousseau etc to THINK 'the noble savage') is supposed 
to mean this: 

Unlike us, Primitive Man is immersed in the world,  convinced that 
the Universe contains moral order, within which Man and
Not-Man are bound together, and also that this moral order exists
exogenetically even though humans are coterminous with it and their
fates imbricated in its fate.

The Savage is supposedly oppressed by a sense that the sky is pregnant 
with immanent justice that can fall upon his head at any moment. Awareness 
of crushing omniscient judgment is allegedly what separates
the Primitive from post-Enlightenment persons.

The Universe is Morally Significant. It cares. What Man sees out there, 
that which is not himself and yet in which he somehow participates, is a
great drama of conduct. Whether it be the spirit-inhabited water-hole 
or the still more powerful sexuality of one's own being, as in the case 
of the Arapesh, or the rain-gods and maize-plants of the Zuni, or the 
divine authorities of the Mesopotamiam invisible state, these entities 
and dispositions are part of a Man-including moral system. The Universe 
is spun of moral duty and ethical judgment and even where Not-Man acts 
not as a man should, because the supernaturals are unjust (or indecent) 
the conduct of these Gods can still only be imagined and thought about 
according to the morality that prevails here on earth, or more properly, 
here inside the reservation liquor-store.

So we find that everywhere in the uncivilized societies - and we may
therefore attribute the characteristic to the precivilised societies
also - when Man acts practically towards Nature, his actions are
limited by moral considerations which spring from his own life.

The difference, BTW, between the world view of Primitive Man, in which
the universe is seen as morally significant, and that of 'civilised'
western peoples, in which that significance is doubted or nor conceived at
all, is brought out in certain investigations in the concept of Immanent
Justice held by Amerindian children one the one hand and Swiss children
on the other. Research shows that more than 80% of Swiss children believe 
in some form of immanent justice but cease to believe in it after puberty. 

70% of Hopi kids, and almost 90% of Navajos children, believe in
immanent justice and still believe in it after age 18.

Acculturation proceeds differently among each cohort, and brain functions 
are differentiated. Patterns of ratiocination acquire cerebral substrates 
in western children which are not as prevalent among so-called primitive
'indigenous' peoples. These difference underly the racism embedded even within
perceptual psychology and account for the unyielding arrogance and invincible
condescension displayed towards so-called 'primitive' peoples. These 
physiological differences, which are acquired during childhood and 
socialisation generally, are a prima facie reason for genocide as a 
social policy: cultural genocide, qua assimilation, or actual genocide 
failing that.

Obviously only socialism can safeguard the existence of all the variants
of Homo Sapiens, 'productive' or otherwise from the lethal monotheism 
of capital.

>From the point of view of 'Primitive' Man, the hypertophy of reason
among the victims of Enlightenment civilisation may seem a moral canker,
a tumorous outgrowth. For the person supposedly 'submerged' in Nature, 
but whose good luck is thereby to avoid ab initio the psychoses of
western schizoidal cultures, the prevalence of Justice is simply the 
poetry of life. 

For the westerner, the Age of Reason did not actually dethrone Immanent 
Justice,  only made of it superstition and neurosis and by installing 
within it Time become an exogenous series of punctuation-marks, rather
than an immanent quality of growth and decay, removes 
from Justice the possibility of redemption, converting it to a countdown
 to death, pension, mortgage-payments, whatever.

Mark Jones
 PS Last Year we debated Ireland on the LeninList. I have been 
looking back over that debate and I think now that the position Jim Hillier
took was correct, as well as brave. My position was wrong: unqualified
support for the Irish struggle for national liberation comes before any
criticism of the forms it takes.


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