Dog Philosophers II

Dog Philosophers, Part II

By John Taylor; 7 December, 2005

"My son, do not forget my teaching; But let your heart keep my
commandments: For length of days, and years of life, and peace, will
they add to you." (Prov 3:1-2)

The above is usually taken as wisdom literature rather than prophesy
but studies over past decades have shown how prophetic it is, that
long term religious commitment literally adds years to the life
expectancy of believers. It does not much matter what the group is, it
need not even be a faith organization, the key factor in long life is
a positive involvement and mutual support. Consider the following
study that came through the pipes of the daily news feeds yesterday:

"Arguments dramatically slow wound healing,"
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8418 "The stress a married
couple experiences during a 30-minute argument can delay their bodies
ability to heal a wound by at least a day, according to a new study.
And if the couples relationship endures routine hostility, the delay
can be even longer. There could be important implications for people
suffering from chronic wounds, such as skin ulcers. `We knew that
chronic stress causes reduced immunity, but to find that an argument
of just half an hour has such a profound effect on wound healing is
quite shocking,' says Patricia Price at the Wound Healing Research
Unit at Cardiff University, Wales, who was not involved in the study."

Needless to say, this finding is of prime interest to Baha'is. The
ideals of peace, unity and freedom from contention are pretty much the
be all and end all of the philosophy established in the writings of
Baha'u'llah. His law, in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, forbids contention, the
argumentation that this study found retards healing. More broadly,
every other teaching of Baha'u'llah in one way or another supports
this dual goal of unity and avoidance of conflict.

Such studies underline what should have been obvious from the start,
that just as the body's immune system is weakened and degraded by
tension with others, so in the broad picture war, inequality, tension
are all highly destructive to the defenses of the body politic. Yet
ever since Karl Marx, political and sociological theorists has come
back again and again like a dog to its vomit to the reverse in what is
now known as conflict theory, the extraordinary delusion that
contention is if not a good then at least characteristic, inevitable,
and the formative factor in human relationships. In fact argument and
tension make life bloody, brutal and short, while godly thinking takes
us beyond problems of the present to what conduces to life in the long
term,

"With aged men is wisdom, In length of days understanding. With God is
wisdom and might. He has counsel and understanding." (Job 12:12-13)

Only in the past few decades have we come around to realizing the
urgent need to avoid fighting by eliminating its tinder, scrupulously
to entertain only what conduces to harmony and severely exclude
whatever is likely to turn into a bone of contention. It took two
world wars for leaders of thought to realize that racist delusions are
highly contagious, how urgent it is to vigorously stamp out the spark
before it can spread into a social wildfire. And again, feminists
successfully critiqued both structural and conflict theory, pointing
out that both the status quo and class struggle are signs not of a
natural order but of imbalance caused by exclusion of women from the
commanding heights and the front lines of social creativity. Timely
and vigorous intervention on behalf of truth and right are necessary
to keep our collective immune system in good condition.

The Cheyenne lived between the two most warlike of the tribes of the
plains, the Dakota and the Apache; with neighbors like that, wimps did
not survive long. Among Cheyenne warriors rode an elite corps called
"dog soldiers." When a dog soldier rode through the village the
children gathered behind in awe and respect crying, "There goes a dog
soldier. How I would love to be one of them when I grow up!" Decades
later the Germans almost turned around the trench warfare at the
eleventh hour of WWI by applying highly trained shock troops they
called storm troopers. Allied armies in the next war learned from that
technique and changed the name to commandoes, but the technique was
the same as that pioneered by the Cheyenne, pick out an elite to take
it to the enemy at his weakest points.

Meanwhile, the soldiers who defend unity and peace are mush, nothing
but cannon fodder. This is why I believe so strongly that Plato's
thesis that we excerpted yesterday is crucial. He advocated that
philosophers be as vigorous and energetic as watch dogs in defending
what is true from what is false. A loyal watch dog is angry at
strangers and overjoyed to meet friends of its master, even though the
former has never harmed it nor the latter helped it. What we need are
not dog soldiers but dog philosophers, elite thinkers trained to take
it the real enemy where he is weakest, yet who can still avoid getting
sucked into contention and conflict. We need dog philosophers, acute
academics and dedicated social scientists, to plan out vigorous
defenses of peace, to follow through on the anti-racist and feminist
critiques of conflict theory and all it sees as good and essential,
class struggle, class consciousness, and however people degrade
themselves by taking sides and fighting over things. It is the dog
philosopher's prime duty to nip war in the bud, to fight the good
fight against whatever leads to widespread fighting.

Sexual morality is an example of where the watchdog has gone to sleep
on the job of protecting its master, society, against a dangerous
stranger. One headline going through the newswires of the world over
the past few days reports that in Jakarta the government is sending
police officers to serve official notice to wives that their husband's
HIV test has shown up positive. But wait a minute, the political
consensus over the past four decades has been that the state has no
place in the bedrooms of the nation, that promiscuity is a purely
personal problem between the two spouses involved. Yet this process
serving in Jakarta does not seem unjustified, since whoring husbands
who pick up the AIDS virus are in effect pronouncing a death penalty
on their wives as soon as they have sexual contact with them.
Notifying the wives of the situation, albeit usually too late, at
least gives them a small chance to avoid becoming a statistic of this
world threatening epidemic.

There is a lovely satire on our contradictory sexual mores in the 1997
film, "Mating Habits of the Earthborn Human." This is a love story, or
tries to be, told as if aliens were watching our every move and
drawing general conclusions based upon what they see. Naturally they
have no way of knowing that most of this is fairly recent. Along with
the usual mating rituals, "boy meets girl," "boy falls in love with
girl," and "boy meets girl's parents," are new rituals like "boy and
girl take ritual AIDS-HIV test," and only after that proves negative
comes the next stage, "boy has protected copulation with girl," and
then, accidentally, "boy has unprotected sex with girl," followed by
-- at last! cry out the aliens -- conception of a new human life. Then
comes "girl suggests marriage," "boy refuses," and the obligatory,
"girl goes to abortionist," "boy changes mind and fortunately girl at
last minute changes her mind," followed at last by love, marriage and
raising a newborn human. The aliens rightly conclude that it is a
tremendous wonder that any new human babies at all get to see the
light of day.

Although lovers in this movie are probably more responsible than most
these days, one still comes away with the impression that what we call
a responsible sex life is just doing out of fear the exact same thing
that traditional chastity and marital fidelity did for love and
romance. If and only if all adhered strictly to that high ideal there
would be no need for an AIDS/HIV test stage in the mating ritual.
Indeed there would be no AIDS epidemic at all. As it is, in places
like Africa where the epidemic has caught tight hold, even a perfectly
chaste person who in a marriage adheres to total fidelity in thought
and deed is still at high risk should their spouse transgress, be it
now or any time in the past. As always, women and girls tend to be the
first and most innocent victims of an STD epidemic.

Let me cite at this juncture another practice that, however unsound,
is catching on like wildfire among young people, the so-called
"choking game." It is just what it sounds, they choke each other
almost to death in order to get a high as they recover. Like suicide
crazes, adolescents imitate one another so closely that any insanity
can become widespread with frightening rapidity. Moral philosophers
are quiescent since they know that this cheap high is only a more
extreme form of many other "normal" thrill seeking highs, like drugs
and alcohol, which society widely tolerates. The fad will leave many
dead before the coolness fades; in the meantime they argue that
choking a friend half to death for a thrill may well be more dangerous
than booze or drugs, but it only seems worse because it is so much
quicker, and also because, unlike other highs, no money changes hands
and so there are no vested interests in keeping it going. This is a
valid point, but it only makes it that much more urgent for the
watchdog to condemn artificial highs of all sorts. Only careful
preparation from early childhood in school, essentially training
youths to seek truth independently and thus stamp out imitation, will
give sound protection against crazes, highs and thrill seeking.

How, specifically, should intellectual watchdogs be protecting us from
such parlous quandaries? What is the weak point of the
conflict-mongering hoards? I will deal with that next time, should
there be a next time.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com