BTZ42: WvB's epigraph and Elie Wiesel

[David Morris]

If Kharma is really a universal law, then ethics are unavoidable.

On Thursday, June 9, 2016, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I have to say that Weisel’s analysis and prescription seem dishonest,
> simplistic, and inadequate, both for their historical inaccuracy as Kai
> mentions and because of the larger historic failures of ethical systems
> and teachings. The Torah celebrates ethnic cleansing aginst Canaanites and
> Philistines as a great moral achievement.  The British Empire in totality
> was as cruel and racist as Germany in WW2. The British also stopped the
> African slave trade before the theoretically anti-colonialist  US did
> without bloodshed.   The hypocrisies of ethical teachings increase as they
> take political expression. In some ways the assumption that there is a
> universal ethic that would address the mass violence which plagues humanity
> is deeply fraught. In other ways the core of most ethical systems would
> bring peace on earth if only they were embraced without coercion and were
> flexible and reasonably non violent in application. It is the crisis of the
> now which shows how we actually fare in this aspiration.   There is more
> than one voice prophetically  shouting “fire, I see fire".
>
>
> The great difficulty of ethical teaching is the ease with which ethical
> values are applied unequally, and the ease with which political sysems
> rooted in violence use the plasticity of ethical ideas to organize armies
> to steal land and resources and favor those with power. Just say 3 hail
> Marys and blow them sand niggers away.
>
>  I read Weisel for awhile some years ago. A theme of one of his later
> books is the portrayal of God as mad, laughing insanely at the human
> condition. In this work he seems himself honestly and justifiably unsure
> that there is any foundation in this universe for ethics.   The strength of
> his work is the degree to which it arouses compassion and resistance to
> scapegoating.  He turns this social capacity to direct fear and blame into
> a candle illuminating the infinite dimensions of the humanity of the Jewish
> soul and by extension the dimensons of every people. If only Jews were
> protected by the ethos that emerges, then it is destined to be the scaffold
> for more of the same.
>
> > On Jun 8, 2016, at 3:55 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >
> >
> > > ... ethics. Germany did not make them a compulsory part of education,
> as all nations now must.
> >
> > I don't know what this refers to. In a historical perspective, German
> schoolkids were among the earliest in Europe to receive religious
> instructions including ethical teaching, because Luther and others thought
> that parents couldn't do the job properly.
> >
> > > Ganz allgemein gilt, dass der Religionsunterricht in Deutschland in
> der Schule eine vergleichsweise starke Stellung besitzt. Darin spiegelt
> sich geschichtlich gesehen eine Entscheidung der Reformation, die von
> Anfang an die Schule auch für die religiöse Erziehung in Pflicht genommen
> hat. Hinter dieser Entscheidung stand wiederum die Wahrnehmung, dass die
> Eltern in vielen Fällen nicht willens oder in der Lage wären, die religiöse
> Erziehung zu übernehmen. Deshalb, so etwa Luther, sollte die Schule - und
> d.h. das Gemeinwesen - in diese Aufgabe eintreten. <
> >
> > http://www.rpi-loccum.de/material/aufsaetze/frieschw
> >
> > Sure, this was ethical teaching in the form of Christian religious
> education (10 commandments, Sermon on the Mount etc.) - philosophy, as in
> alternative in secular times, wasn't introduced before the 1970s (in
> socialist East Germany there was a-religious ethical teaching in schools
> since the late 1940s, though) - and it will certainly not always have been
> good ethical teaching on how to treat Jews correctly. But to say that
> Germany had, compared to other European nations, a lack in ethical
> education appears to me as a pseudo-explanation without empirical basis.
> Also when you look at philosophy. While Hegel is indeed not very interested
> in ethics, Kant ("Primat der praktischen Vernunft") puts it in the center
> of his philosophy! And in 1919 Max Weber said that politicians have to
> balance out an ethic of moral conviction ("Gesinnungsethik") by an ethic of
> responsibility ("Verantwortungsethik").
> > But perhaps you mean something else?
> >
> >
> >
> > On 07.06.2016 16:06, Smoke Teff wrote:
> >> I was skimming some of the Weisenburger in advance of leading this next
> episode, here. Was reading the full source for GR's epigraph, which source
> Weis calls "a little homily by Wernher von Braun."
> >>
> >> WvB opens: "Today, more than ever before, our survival--yours and mine
> and our children's--depends on our adherence to ethical principles. Ethics
> alone will decide whether atomic energy will be an earthly blessing or the
> source of mankind's utter destruction."
> >>
> >> He says the desire for ethical action comes from a belief in A) a Last
> Judgment and B) an immortal soul "which will cherish the reward or suffer
> the penalty decreed in a final Judgment."
> >>
> >>
> >> Reminds me of seeing Elie Wiesel speak maybe five or six years ago
> (with all kinds of protests going on outside the building).
> >>
> >> He said he has been persistently plagued by the question (from others
> and from himself) of how WWII Germany, then the most well-educated,
> culturally/technologically advanced civilization the world had ever known
> would also be capable of producing such atrocity. And the pursuant question
> of how something like that might be avoided.
> >>
> >> He said the answer was ethics. Germany did not make them a compulsory
> part of education, as all nations now must. Knowledge becomes is at best
> worthless, at worst dangerous, without ethics.
> >>
> >> Apologies if I've mentioned this around here before.
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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