GRGR (15): Good & Evil (was Enzian...)

[Doug Millison]

At 3:19 PM +1100 12/11/99, rj wrote:
>Imo "evil" doesn't inhere in human nature: morality is simply a product
>of cultural conditioning. Witness the different attitudes to murder and
>retribution amongst different cultures, and even the changing foci of
>morality through the history of Western Christianity.

What would be the different "attitudes" that are expressed re Nazi crimes
(in GR or outside the novel in the world at large)?  Only a lunatic fringe
seriously promotes the idea that the Nazi program of genocide might not be
considered evil, or that some consequence of those crimes makes the crimes
something less than evil.  Nor can you  make a persuasive case for
situating Thomas Pynchon on that fringe. Nowhere in GR does Pynchon
undercut the judgement against the Nazis which is made plain in the novel's
depiction of the crimes against the people who were tortured and killed in
order to manufacture the A4 rocket. Nor does Pynchon undercut the similarly
obvious -- and equally painful -- judgement against other governments,
corporations, and individuals who would use humans for their own profit or
prestige, or exterminate them for ideological or racial reasons, and thus
deny those individuals the ability to develop and blossom unmolested.  Any
theory of moral relativism applied to GR is bound to founder on these
rocks.  When it comes to the sanctity of Nature and individual human lives,
and the condemnation of those who violate this sanctity, Pynchon doesn't
cut any slack. That doesn't stop some readers from trying to project their
own moral relativism onto Pynchon's novel, of course.

d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n
http://www.dougmillison.com
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