CHAPTER TWO:
“Moral Education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational” page 26
I am struck by two things in this chapter. First, the concept of beauty. Even the author seems to understand that love of beauty is innate. So much so that he has to work for years, using extremely harsh methods, to eradicate it.
Again we have the stark contrast between the “institute” and color. 
“
”They were in a large bare room, very bright and sunny;”
“…their hair aseptically hidden under white caps”
“…opened invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or foul”
Even the children’s clothing has been designed in only the most bland of colors…green, khaki, grey and black. It’s obvious even to the king of relativism, the Director himself, that objectively, color is beautiful. If he didn’t know this, then he would not go to such lengths to remove it. He must root out that which the children have been born with, an attraction to beauty, through extreme methods (electrical shock/sirens and alarms). He hasn’t figured out how to remove this attraction genetically. It leaves me wondering if this is because love of beauty, and perhaps truth and love, is part of the soul, the very fabric of what makes a human, human. This is only chapter 2, so I have no way of knowing yet, whether the Director has been able to “remove” this attraction, or simply repress it. Personally, I don’t think you can remove it. I believe you might be able to alter things in the brain. But I do not think that you can alter the soul. I think a person can alter their own soul, but I don’t think another human being can do so.
I suppose you could argue that the love of color, or beauty is simply a reaction between the eye and the brain, releasing chemicals that produce the sensation of pleasure…but that leads me to ask, why? How could loving color, or beauty, advance civilization? How could it advance the species? What practical value is there in appreciating a rose?
The second thing that struck me is the manipulation of morality. Like beauty, I
believe that morality lives in the soul, not the brain. Heir Director, is trying to manipulate morality by manipulating the brain. And he appears to be successful. Again, we are only in chapter 2. The unanswered question is, is morality dead? Or just asleep? Can it be reawakened?
Don’t we today, view things that are objectively immoral, as moral? Are our consciences seared? Irrevocably? Or are they just asleep? Can we reawaken our sense of right and wrong? Isn’t the world doing to us (ie: Pip’s quote on the “All Dressed Up” thread “Yep they are Kim. I have no doubt that when my generation continues to grow then gay marriage will be legalized.” ) exactly what the Director is doing. Reconditioning a population to accept things that were once thought morally unacceptable? Are we really changing, or are we simply being hypnotized? Can the spell be broken, once it has been cast?
If a man grows up with prejudice, is he doomed to prejudice? Or can he overcome it? Is morality something that we must work to keep alive? Or are we simply that which we are taught? Can morality be discovered, if it has been hidden from us? I love the key?
Or is morality relative? Is morality based on what we are told that it is? Is it inherent? Or learned? Or does it change with the wind? Do we choose our morality? Or are we fooled into believing that we are choosing, when in reality, we have been programmed? Does PIP’s generation really believe that homosexuality is good? Or does her generation believe it because it has been “placed there”? After all, since childhood, she and her peers have been told over and over that judging is wrong. That everyone is “Beautiful”. Imagine there’s no Heaven. War is always bad. The world is melting.
How do you know what’s real? Is it possible to know what’s real? Is real what you choose it to be? Or is there an objective truth that can be repressed, but not eliminated?
Guess we’ll have to wait for chapter 3 to find out….
Whoa, whoa, whoa – that’s a lotta stuff!!!
Let’s take it one at a time…
“Moral Education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational” page 26 I don’t understand this line – it caught my attention in the book, because I didn’t understand it. Enlighten me!
How could loving color, or beauty, advance civilization? How could it advance the species? What practical value is there in appreciating a rose?
Perhaps it is not to advance our species , but to advance the species of the thing we find beautiful, delicious or enlightening. I read a great book some time ago called “The Botany of Desire”. The premise was that we do not propagate certain species of plants based on our own free will, but rather we are influenced and manipulated by the species itself, for their own survival. The book analyzed the evolution and human intervention for 4 plants – potatoes, apples, roses and marijuana. It described how each sub species fought to be the most desirable within the species to ensure humans would propagate that sub species and thereby ensure it’s survival. It was fascinating. Perhaps there is more at work than just man’s chemical reactions to the world around him/her.
Reconditioning a population to accept things that were once thought morally unacceptable? Are we really changing, or are we simply being hypnotized? Can the spell be broken, once it has been cast?
I believe it is the slow and steady progress of indoctrination. It tagged a ride on the heels of the Civil Rights movement, and tried to present itself in the same light as slavery and discrimination. I do not have the eloquence to reason why they are not the same, I just know that morally, they are not the same.
Can the spell be broken, once it has been cast?
The pendulum swings, sometimes on the side or morality and good, and others to the side of evil and immoral. Throughout recorded history, and in oral history as well, each culture has it’s own version of the fight between good and evil. Each generation decides to what degree the pendulum will swing to either side. (Brings to mind another wonderful tale – “Lord of the Rings Trilogy”. These decisions, whether they be made by the rulers or the masses, influence and dictate the fate of the people.
Add to that economic uncertainty, hunger and fear, and soon the masses are willing to follow anyone who promises “Hope” and “Change”. Hitler convinced an entire nation to do and support unspeakable atrocities. I am pretty sure he promoted “Hope” and “Change”. I have always kind of had the prickling on the back of my neck that Obama reminds me of the “Pied Piper”.
I am afraid democracy cannot survive past the timeframe of a few hundred years – especially if one removes the morality factor and encourages an environment of everything goes and whatever feels good, “What’s in it for me?”
I hope I am wrong.
The Catholic Church bases it’s morality on reason. Once you know the basics (ie: Never choose the lesser evil, choose the greater good…Love one another as I have loved you…Do unto to others as you would have them do unto you…) you can pretty much reason for yourself what is right and wrong. There is a reason for each and every mandate of the Church.
The Director is saying that that is nonsense. NEVER let them figure it out for themselves. Morality is to be DICTATED by those who know best…like himself…not for the greater good of all, but for the greater good of the select. They don’t need reasons, nor do they need to understand why something is done. They just need to do it.
Many Catholics have what we call blind faith and just do what they’re supposed to do without asking why. Which is fine. The difference is that if they WANT to know, they can.
…………..
I don’t understand this statement:
It tagged a ride on the heels of the Civil Rights movement, and tried to present itself in the same light as slavery and discrimination.
What tagged a ride on the heels, and what two things are not the same?
That was a way interesting way of looking at why roses are beautiful. It doesn’t explain what it is in us that recognizes the beauty, but it sure would explain what the utilitarian reason for their beauty is.
I wish Alexandra was in on this. She always has some really intense insights.
As for the pied piper, I think I did a post on that a while back…complete with picture. Are we slaves then, to our emotions? Or are we actively choosing to follow the hopey/changey guys?
Equal rights for and acceptance of homosexuals and same sex marriage tagged along on the heels of the civil rights movement.
I get the moral education line now, thanks
Ahhhhhh…gotcha! What time are you picking me up tomorrow????
“I wish Alexandra was in on this. She always has some really intense insights.”
I’m in!
The first two chapters of this made me wish John McDonnell was in on this as well. The part about conditioning people to only enjoy things that require consumption of goods and services resonates so strongly in me, and I imagine it would in him as well. I think even of things like Monsanto and genetic use restriction technology in seeds – where second-generation seeds from plants would be infertile, so that farmers would need to buy seeds again every year to grow food; this natural extension of unchecked capitalism to commercialize even the most naturally-occurring processes, control it, and make a buck off of it. Like reproduction – in seeds or in people. Everything must benefit SOMEONE.
Food quality is a huge, huge cause of mine – it’s something I don’t often get into here, because there’s little reason to, but a lot of it echoes the “conditioning” aspects of this book. I really do subscribe to the idea that people LEARN to enjoy eating unhealthily – I don’t think there’s anything inherently more pleasurable about candy or fries, as compared to fruit or grilled vegetables. I think the American diet is and has been for some time one that conditions people to prefer unhealthy food. And I think that the formative and childhood years are so vital in this respect – that people can be conditioned to think of grapes or cookies as the desired level of sweetness, etc. My parents weren’t strict about food at all when I was a kid, but we didn’t often have sweets like cookies and candy; all three of us tend to find most junk food TOO sweet for our tastes, now. By contrast we did eat more salty junk foods – fries, chips, etc – on a somewhat regular basis and we ALL prefer food saltier than is healthy. It’s purely anecdotal but I’m not really in a position to cite things right now, and I really do believe that we psychologically and physically condition ourselves to prefer these things. It’s a topic I find fascinating.
I read of a taste-test a year or two ago where they gave “Mexican” Coke, which is still mostly made with real sugar, and “American” Coke, which is made with high-fructose corn syrup, to teenagers, and a majority of the teenagers actually voted that the real-sugar Coke tasted like chemicals, whereas the HFCS Coke tasted “normal.” It totally freaked me out. A completely unchecked quest for profit will often result in a conditioning of people to prefer the choice that makes the largest profit for the company in question.
The part about conditioning people not to really like nature, in particular, struck a chord in me that has always been fiercely grateful for the attitudes towards public parks of some of our political ancestors. I probably differ from most people on this site in that I am most certainly not opposed to public works projects; I think that, done well, they are some of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves. Whether it’s the landscaped Central Park, or the sites Roosevelt protected, these are things that, unprotected by a body whose primary motive is not profit, would have just become cul-de-sacs and high-rise condos like everything else; yet we are so much richer for having them, and for having them accessible to everyone. If everything is private industry, everything by nature becomes a commodity.
I have more to say but I don’t want to just keep venting so I’ll stop.
I agree totally with the food stuff. Not only is “junk” food more readily available, cheaper and advertised, fruits and vegetables are often so tasteless, waxed, pesticeded (totally made up word) and expensive that eating them becomes painful.
You really have to work (go to a special store, pay more) to get truly tasty fruits and veggies that I tend to just not eat them. In the summer I’ll go to the Fruit Market, but in the winter we eat frozen or canned, which are the only ones with any real nutrients anyway…
As for public parks, etc, I’m with you 100%. This is one area where I have NO problem with the government stepping in. It’s not a moral dilemma, or a politcal one. I don’t think ANYONE wishes the Smoky Mountain National Park, or the State Parks didn’t exist. And I take plenty of advantage of them. Even the Forest Preserves here in the city are places that I frequently visit.
Yeah, this whole brainwashing, controlling EVERYTHING two chapters really unnerved me.
BTW, I AM SO SO SO HAPPY You joined us!!!!! And John seems to have internet access, as he’s emailed me, so maybe he’ll join us also.
Oh don’t even get me STARTED on farm subsidies and the effect on the price of unhealthy versus healthy food.
It’s interesting to me how so much of our development of “convenience,” culturally, dovetails with “profitable.” The rise of alleged convenience is the rise of disposability, the rise of car culture, etc.
I had some of Mr. Alexandra’s college friends visit us last October, and we walked all over the city together. They were shocked and excited by it all, etc etc, but the thing that really struck me as surreal was how they were just dumbfounded that these nationally-famous things were so ACCESSIBLE. We would be like, “That, across the street, is Madison Square Garden,” and they just could not believe that the Madison Square Garden they saw on TV all the time was the place we’d just gotten to on our own two feet.
I mean obviously they could BELIEVE it. But to them, “places” are things you drive to, things that exist in the center of a parking lot, for the most part. You drive to the store, you drive to the basketball game, you drive to the movies. I think it fosters a kind of disconnect, that there’s this constant intermediary step in between you and your community. People in some ways are conditioned to view a separation between themselves and their community, or their homes and their cities, or whatever. And I get that not every American city has been structured to support a car-independent infrastructure – this topic, urban and suburban planning etc, is another passion of mine that I don’t often discuss here – but that’s my point: we developed this way rather than another way, for a reason. Well for a variety of reasons, but for one that touches very closely on the themes in this book. As our idea of “convenience” grew more important and simultaneously more limited, our communities became places you had to own cars and buy gas to find convenient, or to survive in at all to some extent. It’s the conditioning of a culture, in a way. To the point where people feel astounded on a subconscious level when the buffer, the necessary intermediary step between them and the world at large, is removed.
(Side tangent! Some people find it very inconvenient, on a theoretical level, that I live like 5 miles from Times Square but have a 35-minute commute. But I find that a limited interpretation of convenience – who decides which speed of travel is “normal?” I would rather have 20 minutes of straight walking than 20 minutes of driving, even if the distance I traversed walking in those 20 minutes was far shorter. By and large I find relying on public transportation and my own two legs more convenient than driving, even if my speed of travel is slower. I can access all the same things, they’re just closer together; and if I can get to everything I want and need in a comfortable amount of time, who cares how fast and how far I’m traveling to reach them? “If we were in a car, and there was no traffic, we could be there in 10 minutes!” Yeah, but would IT be there if we were in a car and there was no traffic?)
Anyway it kind of made me think of that. About five years ago, as I really became an adult, I began to seriously question commonly-held notions of convenience, and for my own purposes I often found that “convenient” was merely a stand-in for “profitable for someone.” I eventually came to the conclusion that so many things I accepted as “more convenient” were just things I’d been conditioned to find convenient. Even just little things. Paper towels – yeah, sometimes they ARE legitimately the more convenient option, like when the cat pukes, because I am NOT scraping cat puke off of a cloth towel and then washing the towel with the dishrags. But in most situations I find bar towels at least as convenient, and often more convenient – the difference is, I buy bar towels once (I imagine I’ll have to replace them eventually, but it’s been 5 years and they’re fine). etc.
Anyway.
I should note, before someone misunderstands, that I’m not saying that American culture developed this way due to some control-happy conspiracy led by elites, like the conditioning and controlling in the book. Just that the situation in the book is the extreme version of what a solely profit-driven social mindset can lead to. It’s interesting to me that, although the society in the book is dystopian and obviously not an example of the freedom we commonly associate with a capitalist economy, their hero is Ford – an icon of capitalist development. And that makes sense – like so many things, it’s not that the profit motivations at the heart of capitalism are “good” or “bad” by their nature, but that there can be both “too much” and “too little,” in terms of the influence they have on social development. Ford’s efficiency revolutionized whole industries and even the way we think about work in general, and that has been by and large a good thing. But that mindset of thinking needs to be balanced by bodies motivated by something besides profit (ie, unions, public parks, etc) – otherwise we are all just part of one gigantic assembly line, valuable only for what we can produce and what we can consume.
Oh my gosh, Kim and I had almost that verbatim conversation yesterday at the hospital. We walked to two different churches and then to lunch and it got us thinking of how we have lost a sense of community by all the “driving’ that we do. And how as a result we are so out of shape. We LIVE in our cars, often eating garbage in them at the same time!
Understood, natch.
I celebrate the fact that America has the greatest abundance of “different food” in the world.
All the nations of the world are represented in the USA.Italian, Greek, Chinese,Thai, Mexican, Korean, French, German, and many more. If multi-culturism works anywhere, it works with the food introduced into the society of America.
You may make your own bread, but you don’t
You may make your own candies,but you don’t.
You may grow your own vegetables, but you don’t
You may make your own potato chips, but you don’t.
You may make your own ice cream, but you don’t.
If one is to blame the capitalist agricultural market for the ill’s of a nation, one need look no further then the U.S.S.R. Famine occurs in nations where there is no incentive to better the individual life by his labor. Federal Express? ran a commercial where the Soviet women were having a “fashion show, and all were overweight and in drab clothes. That’s what socializing a industry ends up as. A joke.
I’ve been trying to type a reply all day, and there’s always some distraction.
So short and sweet – I found it fascinating how they solved the problem of who was going to be the worker bees – the khaki guys were conditioned to accept this as their lot in life, and I am curious how that will work out in the end.
I got to the part where the guy who writes for the state run television is questioning the relativity of what he writes about, (he also writes the subliminal scripts that are played for the conditioning) but he doesn’t know anything that would allow him to exercise his passion…
It gets more interesting as the chapters progress. I just finished “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” so I have to read the next chapter in this book.
Can’t wait to talk about the “sex”!
Kim,
STOP! STOP! STOP! That’s not fair! No reading ahead, and NO SPOILERS! Brat!
How’s Parker? I can come tomorrow. I’ll call in the morning unless you show up tonight…
I am going to 9:00 Mass @ ST. Clements and then I asked the Chaplain to ask the Priest to come and annoint Parker. It would be nice if you could be there.
I am on duty from approx. 9:45 am until…