BTZ42: WvB's epigraph and Elie Wiesel

[Mark Kohut]

Another of your fine mini-essays, stated well,  which I can largely agree with. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 11, 2016, at 1:55 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I agree with you Mark. Wrong is a better word. I think in personal terms that my own wrong ideas come from being dishonest with myself. But the word wrong imputes no motives, just a miss. Clearly Wiesel wants something that most people claim to want, a society undergirded by ethical thought and practice. But such values are not to be had by classes in school, they come with personal cost; they must be lived. Ethics are about losing improperly assumed power in the cause of justice, losing ego and status to bring healing and transcendence.  There are many powerful ethical voices alive now as there were many in pre-war Germany.  These voices sometimes gain heroic proportions, but it is easier for those who have sacrificed ethics for power to make statues and eulogies than to live as these ethical voices  call us to live. I certainly agree that P sees the world with  intense moral intelligence, an eye for hypocrisy  and courage in expected and unexpected places.
> 
> Universal Human Rights obviouly imply universal human responsibilities. Every right I want must be accorded to others to form anything like a universal ethic; otherwise, who will enforce and uphold the rights?  The US constitution and the US government has universal rights which have never been constitutionally reversed but the government  has a long and continuing habit of ignoring those rights and getting away with the most extreme violations of those rights.  We are governed instead by imperial assumptions and maneuverings and propaganda where the scale of of enforcement of human rights goes from zero for Aghans or Black people, native Americans, or Japanese citizens in WW2, to the ability to get away with rape murder and torture for the well connected.   
> 
>> On Jun 10, 2016, at 6:43 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Universal human rights can provide The framework for the Universal human ethics that you suggest are so deeply fraught. 
>> The word 'ethics' and ' morality' can sometimes be defined too small---not done on these threads necessarily--when the meanings and judgments must be all-encompassing. 
>> The last time I spoke of p's ' moral vision' here, some objected--because he is more than that too, as I recall. 
>> But it is, as with great writers. He sees with a fierce moral intelligence, encompassing judgment (in some way) on Weisel's Germany, on America, on the whole modern world. 
>> PS although I know Weisel too superficially to say much, until someone showed me real proof, I prefer to call him wrong on this, for example,  rather than dishonest. Yes, a moral judgment, I guess. 
>> 
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
>> 
>> On Jun 9, 2016, at 1:47 PM, 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> 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.
>>> 
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