[Newspoetry] Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?

[Donald L Emerick]

Dear Eric:

Thanks for the Zizek piece.  While I have read several of his texts, I do not track his current opinions in the press.  He is an incisive writer, who does not mind showing that any understanding requires some careful thinking that considers what it values to be matters that necessarily surpass and transcend all immediate circumstances, even as those same values are implicated in those very circumstances.

The other mode of thinking, as against this strategic view, is the tactical one of pure utility, wherein all is calculated against some standards of progress and gain.

Hence, as Zizek might say, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, and many such leaders, could easily endorse torture because they have short run perspectives that require (permit, encourage) the deployment of "progress" and "gain" calculations.

An outcropping of utility thinking -- as it dismisses values not included within its calculus -- is that it dismisses the other as any kind of figure who is inherently worthy of absolute respect, as an autonomous being who is endowed with certain inalienable rights.  The matter of that endowment would not require any traditional God-as-figural-source, but only the belief that such rights are beyond the authority of any individual (or collection thereof) to alter (hence, their transcendental quality).

By like thought, one sees the beauty of Kant's thinking on this problem -- in the Prologue to any Future Metaphysics of Morals -- wherein he explores and endorses the idea that no person should aim at the "use" of another (human) being, as the object of that person's actions.  One does not, under such a mode of true thinking as Kant's, have to work very hard to arrive at the validity of the moral premise, that any practice of torture, as such, would always offend any true morality.

Zizek, who follows Kant's thinking in various ways, demonstrates for us the primary characteristic failures of thinking, in contemporary political society, when utility calculus supplants (roots out and eliminates) true thinking.  Zizek shows us, pathologically, what symptoms the diseases of that diseased thinking of utility, in all its sinuous twistings of moral truth, must entail and express.

Thinking that eases life for one at the expense of the other should always be diseasing to us, as well.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick
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