nunia
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加入时间: 2005/11/04
文章: 2184
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作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Transformative traditions
THE CONVERSION EXPERIENCE is the key to grasping the nature of
transformative customs and traditions. A convinced ethical relativist
may hold that one ethical norm is no higher or lower than another, but
he cannot deny that others have been sincerely convinced that the
ethical norms they have consciously adopted are vastly superior to those
of their own collectively recollected past. He may call it an illusion,
but he must acknowledge the power of this illusion to generate profound
and lasting behavioral differences in those groups under its spell.
It is important to be clear about the experiential source of this sense
of ethical superiority. It arises not from a feeling of being born
superior to others, but from a feeling of having become superior to what
we ourselves once were. In the Christian tradition, this experience is
called being born again; in the Jewish tradition, it is identified with
the story of the Exodus, the transformation of former slaves into the
Chosen People. In both cases, the outcome of the transformative
experience is the same: a firm determination to be lifted from a stage
of ethical experience that has now come to be seen as lower, and an
aspiration to a stage of ethical experience that is higher.
A transformative custom takes us from a more natural (or more probable)
state of being to a less natural (or more improbable) one. Thus, it is
important for a community to signal the critical significance of the
transformative custom it has adopted--indeed, to make it uniquely
sacred--because it is a custom that departs so drastically from the path
of instinctive nature. No one needs to be taught to strike back; it is
the refusal to strike back that must be instilled by our ethical training.
Furthermore, a transformative custom may also be understood as a barrier,
a device to keep those who have reached a higher ethical stage from
backsliding. Such a custom is by nature intolerant. It may permit us to
change our manner of doing things in certain areas of life, but it
prohibits us from changing the way we embody those essential values
without which we would fall back into the old ways. We are determined
not to return to our transcended past, and we establish our set of
transformative customs and traditions to make sure that neither we nor
our children, nor our children's children, will do so.
There is an important qualification here: We must retain a collective
memory of what we were like before we had mastered the technique of
transcending our lower nature. If we no longer know what it is that we
have escaped from, we will be unable to appreciate the significance of
the technique that permitted us to escape. Indeed, at the maximal point
of societal forgetfulness, there is the danger that even the most
critical transformative customs will no longer be grasped for what they
are. Instead of being understood as techniques for the achievement of
collective self-mastery, they are reduced to being mere folkways--or, to
use the language of contemporary enlightened rationality, "residual
personal prejudice."
There is a safe and certain way of passing on these transformative
customs, and in the most compelling manner possible--through the ethical
institution known as the family. Of course, the family must first be
raised to the ethical plane where the parents' first concern is to
compel their biological offspring to abandon their original state of
nature and take on a transformed identity as civilized adults.
The ethical, as opposed to the merely biological, family is the site for
the making of civilized human beings out of id-governed monsters. It
turns man's purely animalist collection of impulses and urges into a
vehicle for passing on not merely accidental memes, but deliberately
engineered transformative customs across generations. It is, in a sense,
a meta-custom--the transformative custom that is responsible for the
existence of all other transformative customs. You must first be trained
to pass on the ethical family itself before you can hope to transmit
what the ethical family finds so valuable, namely, the civilizing
process by which men and women obtain self-mastery.
Seen from this perspective, marriage has nothing to do with biology: It
is an elaborate social construction that has been erected against the
anarchy of the human id, not merely to keep it from doing damage, but
for the purpose of transforming the id nature into the highest ethical
ideal--the father who raises his son to be a good father, so that his
grandson will have a life no worse than his own, and hopefully better.
And the mother who does the same.
- From "The Future of Tradition" by Lee Harris
作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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非理性的人
