There is a fundamental clash of purpose between morality and experience.
Logically it ought not to be possible for one person to pronounce on another: "Oh, you could not have had the experience you have had, as that would put you and your experiences outside our ability to take in reality via our moral lens." At the same time, it is a most common occurrence for people to to be proclaiming that. Perhaps one who perceives such proclamations is not only immoral but almost certainly crazy, for ideally one ought not to be able to see these sorts of things. To perceive everything that takes place with a beneficent eye, whilst resting in the bosom of community spirit, is quite different from this other kind of perception that partakes of reality in a critically-minded manner.
The majority of what I have experienced has taken place outside of the purview of conventional morality. The only reason I am aware of this is that conventional morality does not pronounce on them at all, except for a dismissive, "Oh, that couldn't have happened!"
There may be cultural matrices that allow for a broader set of events to be "allowed to have happened", but conventional, Western 1990s morality is not one of these. It allows that a very narrow range of events could have happened and that anything that falls outside of its purview is something akin to false perception: It makes it seem that those events it hasn't already accounted for, as being definitively normal, did not ever occur. Only very narrowly defined events may actually have happened, one might surmise. Nothing horrifying or confusing occurs, unless distantly removed by other skins and other cultures and their barriers. In any case, we cannot sympathetically experience the horrific thing. It has to be kept unreal by some psychological distance and some positing of cultural exoticism. But I am white and just like you, hence my experiences are deemed not to have occurred.
It's quite simple: one is not expected to paint outside of the designated lines of culturally safe emotions and culturally normal sensations. Experiences occurring outside of these margins are deemed to the work of an unruly eye, that simply will not suckle from the breast of the community, but wants to roam beyond the narrow and constrained, into the world at large. To reject the bulging breast, to reject suckling, is to be an alien, an "other", possibly a criminal, but something at any rate outside the realm of all that's good and quiet and pleasant. The willful child is thus punished for its roving eye, by being deemed Satanic.
Perhaps there is another mode of morality outside of the hearth and home of the community and its intrinsic order, but this isn't countenanced by the community itself. To be deemed to tell the truth is to be willing to suckle. Those who are not suckling in a mode of deep dependency are judged to be untrustworthy liars.
Morality is thereby constructed as a state of being that evinces deep dependency. I throw myself on your mercy and my experiences suddenly take on a different shade and seem to become colored with the views and values of community. To the extent this happens, I am deemed to be more real, less alien and insubstantial than I'd been earlier. My quality of being unreadable becomes significantly reduced, even to the point that my horns and cloven feet start to seem less obnoxious. I may even learn to baaah quite obsequiously -- as finishing touches to my new-found redemption.
But my experiences themselves remain outside the purview of the general community. They can't be allowed in, as they are substantially disruptive in themselves.
The morality of the herd still insists: we will accept you OR your experiences, as your experiences are immoral and cannot be allowed to exist, but please take more honeyed sheep's milk from this pleasant breast.
Logically it ought not to be possible for one person to pronounce on another: "Oh, you could not have had the experience you have had, as that would put you and your experiences outside our ability to take in reality via our moral lens." At the same time, it is a most common occurrence for people to to be proclaiming that. Perhaps one who perceives such proclamations is not only immoral but almost certainly crazy, for ideally one ought not to be able to see these sorts of things. To perceive everything that takes place with a beneficent eye, whilst resting in the bosom of community spirit, is quite different from this other kind of perception that partakes of reality in a critically-minded manner.
The majority of what I have experienced has taken place outside of the purview of conventional morality. The only reason I am aware of this is that conventional morality does not pronounce on them at all, except for a dismissive, "Oh, that couldn't have happened!"
There may be cultural matrices that allow for a broader set of events to be "allowed to have happened", but conventional, Western 1990s morality is not one of these. It allows that a very narrow range of events could have happened and that anything that falls outside of its purview is something akin to false perception: It makes it seem that those events it hasn't already accounted for, as being definitively normal, did not ever occur. Only very narrowly defined events may actually have happened, one might surmise. Nothing horrifying or confusing occurs, unless distantly removed by other skins and other cultures and their barriers. In any case, we cannot sympathetically experience the horrific thing. It has to be kept unreal by some psychological distance and some positing of cultural exoticism. But I am white and just like you, hence my experiences are deemed not to have occurred.
It's quite simple: one is not expected to paint outside of the designated lines of culturally safe emotions and culturally normal sensations. Experiences occurring outside of these margins are deemed to the work of an unruly eye, that simply will not suckle from the breast of the community, but wants to roam beyond the narrow and constrained, into the world at large. To reject the bulging breast, to reject suckling, is to be an alien, an "other", possibly a criminal, but something at any rate outside the realm of all that's good and quiet and pleasant. The willful child is thus punished for its roving eye, by being deemed Satanic.
Perhaps there is another mode of morality outside of the hearth and home of the community and its intrinsic order, but this isn't countenanced by the community itself. To be deemed to tell the truth is to be willing to suckle. Those who are not suckling in a mode of deep dependency are judged to be untrustworthy liars.
Morality is thereby constructed as a state of being that evinces deep dependency. I throw myself on your mercy and my experiences suddenly take on a different shade and seem to become colored with the views and values of community. To the extent this happens, I am deemed to be more real, less alien and insubstantial than I'd been earlier. My quality of being unreadable becomes significantly reduced, even to the point that my horns and cloven feet start to seem less obnoxious. I may even learn to baaah quite obsequiously -- as finishing touches to my new-found redemption.
But my experiences themselves remain outside the purview of the general community. They can't be allowed in, as they are substantially disruptive in themselves.
The morality of the herd still insists: we will accept you OR your experiences, as your experiences are immoral and cannot be allowed to exist, but please take more honeyed sheep's milk from this pleasant breast.
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