When heroes go down They go down fast So don't expect any time to Equivocate the past - Suzanne Vega, "When Heroes Go Down" An interaction today: A: Many of us are still Diogenes out here hoping you find (or are) the one honest man. B: Nobody is entirely honest. We are all terrified children in the world. Don't put the responsibility on me to be the one honest man.
Very good question! That, from what we know of history, is exactly the cycle. Hero rescues the oppressed from bad ruler. Hero sucks as ruler. Another hero rises to depose first hero turned bad ruler, who is in turn deposed.... Sort of like where we were at we at right now. We're looking for the next hero.
To be fair, the "jungle" Rousseau always envisioned was a near-literal Christian Eden where humans existed in a state of semi-insentient grace, sort of God's pets or a noble savage free of original sin.
I have heard Adam and Eve also spun as a parable of humanity achieving sentience with all the discomfort and personal responsibility that comes with it. The heroes and villains are reversed.
This is not very different from how the Cathars (Christians) saw it.
Jan 19, 2023·edited Jan 19, 2023Liked by Guttermouth
Not to mention that hero didn't use to mean morally good or good in the general present or modern sense, but someone who for whatever reason perform superhuman feats. During the 19th and 18th centuries, the old tales and stories were written down and tidied up for the new urban middle class, since that class was coming into prominence and would become the major and dominant class during the 20th century, finally achieving full dominance and control post-WW2.
And there's the problem.
Workers, farmers, rulers, soliders (police are in essence soldiers too), and nobles all knew and still knows where wealth comes from, why Order is paramount and that rights really means privilege and always rests on violence.
The middle class denies all this; for them wealth comes not from work - labour - or struggle but from trading goods made by others or providing services. Order (societal such) for them is something to be exploited for personal gain, no matter which order or what the large-scale orlong-term consequences of exploitation are.
And the middle class, the bourgeoisie, belives in rights as something which actually exist outside of human consciousness, and do not acknowledge that rights rest on violence, coercion and brutality. The middle class believes that if you do right, good things happen to you: ergo, if someone has bad things happen to them, they've done or lived wrong. The old idea of god manifesting his pleasure with you via your success: the rationalisation became necessary during the 18th century when there clearly was more than enough wealth (collectively speaking) to be shared around so as to eliminate starvation, abject poverty and so on - yet said wealth wasn't shared, wasn't spread and the working poor were kept working and kept poor.
(That's the thing modern decriers of communism and other marxist ideas always consciously blot out: capitalism failed so hard that communism seemed a good idea.)
Then sharing the wealth became a way for democracies to keep a portion of the voters as voting cattle, and a way for "community leaders" to be absorbed into the party/state apparatus, chaining it to dependency of the modern lumpenproletariat on one end and global corporate capitalism on the other.
So a society has grown up around a class that have never lacked anything they needed (as opposed to wanted, or to keep up with the Joneses), never faced any existential threats whether as private individuals or as a group (and indeed, the middle class is the one group that sees itself as individuals; that lacks class consciousness), and who sees the state of affairs as natural where natural means simply the way things are in the vein of water running downhill, and not as something constructed by humans.
Such a society, no matter the race or kultur, will not survive unless it morphs into either a more localised anarchic-democratic coalition of smaller states, or into a totalitarian super-state where Order is confused with and replaced by Control.
Example: the caliphates of old. Surfing on the greco-roman heritage of Order and science, they looked good and was a serious contender with Europe until the Mongols and the Black Plague hit. While Europe bounced back and evolved, the moslem-arabic world regressed. Because (islamic fundamentalists and dogmatists aside) they had previous to the disasters started to grow a huge - for its time - middle class of functionaires, wheelers and dealers, and middlemen. So they were neither ruled by self-made Big Men nor were they ruled by people with life-experience of the harsher kind. Ergo, the de facto rulers couldn't comprehend that the state fo affairs awarding them their luxurient life wasn't natural (or rather god-given, which amounts to the same thing here) and thus couldn't identify the threats, far less respond other than in random ways.
But don't we as modern readers of old tales or history subconsciously expect moral, morals and morality, both recognisable and alien?
(Is that some politician-level hedging or what!? he said, patting himself on the back)
A kurdish man I studied with (same study group doing rethorics at college) once brought up Saladin as the greatest king his people never had. As the legend goes, Saladin had the choice to take his troops and resources and set up a kingdom of his own for his people, but instead chose to obey his oath to his ruler.
The actual historical details matters less in this case, than the moral (hah!); it is so long ago it is borderline as fictional as Enkidu and Gilgamesh, yet the horns of the dilemma are always there with us.
>> But don't we as modern readers of old tales or history subconsciously expect moral, morals and morality, both recognisable and alien?
I would like to believe that I don't. One thing I point out very frequently when I talk with people about the sagas or the Havamal or the Voluspir is that absolute morality is never handed down by the gods: everyone is doing what they have to do and having feelings about it, and that's it.
The Havamal is how to be successful and honorable and relatively happy. Sometimes the gods act like good guys, sometimes they don't.
While I believe morality is valuable as a concept, it is not something that everything in the universe has as a natural valence.
The old ones, not just the Norse, Svear, Götar and the rest but all old ones had moral systems based in the material, not the metaphysical. At somepoint between Hastings and Newton, moral systems (being intrinsically tied into religion) went from material to metaphysical.
Havamal and Voluspa are full of sage advice based in common generic wisdom, most of it concerned how to look after yourself, your house(hold), how to carry yourself before others, and soon because that was what worked.
The more top-down religions of the East were and are more concerned wth obeying the divine will and plan, and this is what mutated into trying to divine (pardom the pun) what is Good, morally speaking, according to god.
Which the further mutated into whatis Good morally speaking without reference to god (god is dead as the man said).
Moral valence as you call it iscreated when we explain the "why" of our actions beyond the material and the immediately emotional - let me borrow an example from swedish professor of philosphy Torbjörn Tännsjö (who is something of an enfant terrible in that he delights in causing controversy by pushing ideas to their logical conclusion):
Why do we punish murder? If the idea is to compensate the victim, it falls flat since the victim is dead. If we punish to make an example to deter others, we must prove that deternce in effect works, which is impossible; you can't prove why a crime wasn't committed. If we punish because murder is forbidden by the rules, it is not murder as such but the breaking of the rules we punish.
He goes on for pages and ages like that, his point being that punishment for murder is a wholly moral concept.
Tangent, the images above, are they generated by an RNG loaded with various associations?
Most emulate someone (or most likely a mixture if someones) to create a role model, and most want a hero figure to take the sling and arrows of oppression, but most do not want to be yoked to a someone, who like the rest of us is fallible and flawed.
We all (a generalization) want that duality of fearless but gentle, light touch of the saintly but willingly to disembowel thine enemy, warrior poet, when it is convenient, timely and doesn't interrupt our normal daily programming.
When we look to the fallible to be infallible we have set ourselves up, to realize once again, heroes are meant to be symbolic, not always present.
Wait, Susan Vega is still making music? Maybe that means that--
*Goes off to check the internets*
Dagnabbit. The Bobs have been gone since 2017.
Not enough cycles left tonight to do justice to your post. You seem, from this old LCMS fart's perspective, to be reinventing the wheel, with stone knives and bearskins. "What is natural law" and "the entropy of human nature" aka "sin". Why are both rape and altruism natural to h. Sap.?
It's true, I could never hope to be as original as anything in your Substack. And humans should only ever really discuss any philosophical question once, ever.
Is the hero rightly a ruler, or the person who saves from rulers?
Could go either way!
Very good question! That, from what we know of history, is exactly the cycle. Hero rescues the oppressed from bad ruler. Hero sucks as ruler. Another hero rises to depose first hero turned bad ruler, who is in turn deposed.... Sort of like where we were at we at right now. We're looking for the next hero.
I think Rousseau was kind of down with the pure jungle thing.
Yeah, but judging from his portrait I think he'd have been burger pretty quickly.
Soft hands
To be fair, the "jungle" Rousseau always envisioned was a near-literal Christian Eden where humans existed in a state of semi-insentient grace, sort of God's pets or a noble savage free of original sin.
That's what we would have if that whore eve didn't eat that fruit
Hmm.
Can't have been a whore; she didn't sell herself nor was she unfaithful to Adam.
Curious, trusting, sociable - yes.
Traits easily exploitable by those who prey on insecurities.
I meant whore more in the colloquial misogynistic sense
Different morality.
I have heard Adam and Eve also spun as a parable of humanity achieving sentience with all the discomfort and personal responsibility that comes with it. The heroes and villains are reversed.
This is not very different from how the Cathars (Christians) saw it.
Not to mention that hero didn't use to mean morally good or good in the general present or modern sense, but someone who for whatever reason perform superhuman feats. During the 19th and 18th centuries, the old tales and stories were written down and tidied up for the new urban middle class, since that class was coming into prominence and would become the major and dominant class during the 20th century, finally achieving full dominance and control post-WW2.
And there's the problem.
Workers, farmers, rulers, soliders (police are in essence soldiers too), and nobles all knew and still knows where wealth comes from, why Order is paramount and that rights really means privilege and always rests on violence.
The middle class denies all this; for them wealth comes not from work - labour - or struggle but from trading goods made by others or providing services. Order (societal such) for them is something to be exploited for personal gain, no matter which order or what the large-scale orlong-term consequences of exploitation are.
And the middle class, the bourgeoisie, belives in rights as something which actually exist outside of human consciousness, and do not acknowledge that rights rest on violence, coercion and brutality. The middle class believes that if you do right, good things happen to you: ergo, if someone has bad things happen to them, they've done or lived wrong. The old idea of god manifesting his pleasure with you via your success: the rationalisation became necessary during the 18th century when there clearly was more than enough wealth (collectively speaking) to be shared around so as to eliminate starvation, abject poverty and so on - yet said wealth wasn't shared, wasn't spread and the working poor were kept working and kept poor.
(That's the thing modern decriers of communism and other marxist ideas always consciously blot out: capitalism failed so hard that communism seemed a good idea.)
Then sharing the wealth became a way for democracies to keep a portion of the voters as voting cattle, and a way for "community leaders" to be absorbed into the party/state apparatus, chaining it to dependency of the modern lumpenproletariat on one end and global corporate capitalism on the other.
So a society has grown up around a class that have never lacked anything they needed (as opposed to wanted, or to keep up with the Joneses), never faced any existential threats whether as private individuals or as a group (and indeed, the middle class is the one group that sees itself as individuals; that lacks class consciousness), and who sees the state of affairs as natural where natural means simply the way things are in the vein of water running downhill, and not as something constructed by humans.
Such a society, no matter the race or kultur, will not survive unless it morphs into either a more localised anarchic-democratic coalition of smaller states, or into a totalitarian super-state where Order is confused with and replaced by Control.
Example: the caliphates of old. Surfing on the greco-roman heritage of Order and science, they looked good and was a serious contender with Europe until the Mongols and the Black Plague hit. While Europe bounced back and evolved, the moslem-arabic world regressed. Because (islamic fundamentalists and dogmatists aside) they had previous to the disasters started to grow a huge - for its time - middle class of functionaires, wheelers and dealers, and middlemen. So they were neither ruled by self-made Big Men nor were they ruled by people with life-experience of the harsher kind. Ergo, the de facto rulers couldn't comprehend that the state fo affairs awarding them their luxurient life wasn't natural (or rather god-given, which amounts to the same thing here) and thus couldn't identify the threats, far less respond other than in random ways.
I knew you had this in you.
And for the record, you'll note my discussion of the hero did not imply morality, just expectations.
Well, sure.
But don't we as modern readers of old tales or history subconsciously expect moral, morals and morality, both recognisable and alien?
(Is that some politician-level hedging or what!? he said, patting himself on the back)
A kurdish man I studied with (same study group doing rethorics at college) once brought up Saladin as the greatest king his people never had. As the legend goes, Saladin had the choice to take his troops and resources and set up a kingdom of his own for his people, but instead chose to obey his oath to his ruler.
The actual historical details matters less in this case, than the moral (hah!); it is so long ago it is borderline as fictional as Enkidu and Gilgamesh, yet the horns of the dilemma are always there with us.
>> But don't we as modern readers of old tales or history subconsciously expect moral, morals and morality, both recognisable and alien?
I would like to believe that I don't. One thing I point out very frequently when I talk with people about the sagas or the Havamal or the Voluspir is that absolute morality is never handed down by the gods: everyone is doing what they have to do and having feelings about it, and that's it.
The Havamal is how to be successful and honorable and relatively happy. Sometimes the gods act like good guys, sometimes they don't.
While I believe morality is valuable as a concept, it is not something that everything in the universe has as a natural valence.
The old ones, not just the Norse, Svear, Götar and the rest but all old ones had moral systems based in the material, not the metaphysical. At somepoint between Hastings and Newton, moral systems (being intrinsically tied into religion) went from material to metaphysical.
Havamal and Voluspa are full of sage advice based in common generic wisdom, most of it concerned how to look after yourself, your house(hold), how to carry yourself before others, and soon because that was what worked.
The more top-down religions of the East were and are more concerned wth obeying the divine will and plan, and this is what mutated into trying to divine (pardom the pun) what is Good, morally speaking, according to god.
Which the further mutated into whatis Good morally speaking without reference to god (god is dead as the man said).
Moral valence as you call it iscreated when we explain the "why" of our actions beyond the material and the immediately emotional - let me borrow an example from swedish professor of philosphy Torbjörn Tännsjö (who is something of an enfant terrible in that he delights in causing controversy by pushing ideas to their logical conclusion):
Why do we punish murder? If the idea is to compensate the victim, it falls flat since the victim is dead. If we punish to make an example to deter others, we must prove that deternce in effect works, which is impossible; you can't prove why a crime wasn't committed. If we punish because murder is forbidden by the rules, it is not murder as such but the breaking of the rules we punish.
He goes on for pages and ages like that, his point being that punishment for murder is a wholly moral concept.
Tangent, the images above, are they generated by an RNG loaded with various associations?
I like the cut of this Tännsjö's jib.
They're created by an ai program with the prompts in the captions.
there are no heroes only flawed beings
only flawed beings that all die without exception
no i wont be your hero but i do try not to lie, its all we can do
But who is the hero's hero?
Most emulate someone (or most likely a mixture if someones) to create a role model, and most want a hero figure to take the sling and arrows of oppression, but most do not want to be yoked to a someone, who like the rest of us is fallible and flawed.
We all (a generalization) want that duality of fearless but gentle, light touch of the saintly but willingly to disembowel thine enemy, warrior poet, when it is convenient, timely and doesn't interrupt our normal daily programming.
When we look to the fallible to be infallible we have set ourselves up, to realize once again, heroes are meant to be symbolic, not always present.
Wait, Susan Vega is still making music? Maybe that means that--
*Goes off to check the internets*
Dagnabbit. The Bobs have been gone since 2017.
Not enough cycles left tonight to do justice to your post. You seem, from this old LCMS fart's perspective, to be reinventing the wheel, with stone knives and bearskins. "What is natural law" and "the entropy of human nature" aka "sin". Why are both rape and altruism natural to h. Sap.?
Good questions, mind you.
It's true, I could never hope to be as original as anything in your Substack. And humans should only ever really discuss any philosophical question once, ever.
No we have to keep discussing them over and over again.
Because we forget, and human nature keeps being what it is.
Originality is overated.
Your mom is overrated.
Especially on Yelp.
Maybe after coffee
Sorry.
Been up since 5. Just now getting coffee. Not sure I am braining to well.