15/09/2024

Gods have always been a helpful vehicle for conveying guidance. For Incans in the Andes, 15700 ft high, on rope-strung highways, describing their creator god Kon as travelling straight is a fit, helpful, general warning. The statements set within these gods, generally destined to be represented forever, are most often hard learnt lessons. In time, what may have been specific guidance becomes a general statement or adage. This general form is perfect for memorisation and transport.

At the point of accepting any adage, you risk confusion. Confusion rears itself when these adages are too general. In general, people are free to choose from the multiplicity of alternatives that the adage allows. We arbitrate the fit of a general principle to the specific situation. Do I choose to get off my rope system, under the presumption that travelling straight is fatally crucial, at my destination, because it beckons me to take a bend? Of course. The adage only extends so far. But, in some circumstances, I have surely broken my following of a sacred, life-affirming guiding statement? Moral absolutism is best remedied by those willing to rebel and reform them. Adages only have so much utility.

Outside of the minds and applications of these participants, maxims lose their function and worth. Even general adages only have their power when manifest in a person. The arbitrary, removed state of a helpful adage is no use. Much like a recipe never used. When used, maxims are properly in the hands of those who are willing to see the world as it changes.

It’s best to always be kind, surely? This can’t be reasonably said. In such a world, there is no retort to those exploitative few who source the good efforts of the morally compliant. Is the maintenance of the no-harm principle paramount over recompense when someone slaps your child? The maxim flies in the face of life. Ask Nietzsche and hear that the monk who forgoes their bodily wishes is exalting a life-denying spirit. They stunt their virility. Guidance is not absolution.

I don’t believe this to tell the whole picture. The monks choice now is to be shunned, but in what world was that original conversion made in? If chastity was a response to depravity (rape, sexual obsession, exploitation) then the original conversion to chastity was remedy, albeit extreme, to an ill. Only in the passage from one blight to it’s remedy do we understand the production of current ideas. Retroactively appreciating these for their worth does not mean they have not ossified for today.

We find ourselves following a throughline of having an instinct to what “should be done”, codifying it in a general ethic for the next time, seeing it ossify as the world changes and replenishing the fit according to what now achieves said “should”. General adages form from what comes to be the common themes among our instinctive wants, and wants for “shoulds”, along some timespan. General adages may even ossify underneath our changing personal wants. The world, and ourselves, do not stand still. As such, adages become placeholders.

Those clutching rules and maxims, apparently fit for perpetuity, are the same ones that welcome disorder and destruction in due time. Bridges wear down to where crossing is of risk but we rest knowing they let many cross before.

words for spare parchment