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Aswad -> RE: Sadly, A Central Tenet Of Our Public Morality Is The Ethic Of Revenge (1/5/2013 4:09:23 PM)
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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
In any other circumstance, a 'cost' implies a benefit to someone else/other people.
When I'm buying something at the store, I don't necessarily think in terms of the jobs I will be paying into by buying the item. I think in terms of the cost to me of having what I want, first and foremost. A price paid toward an ends. Usually, I go for the things that are worth the price to be paid for having them, rather than those that cost more than they're worth.
If some bugger kills someone I love, in Norway, the cost is up to 21 years to avenge that. If I don't have anything to lose, that cost may well be worth it. If I do have something to lose, then that's an added cost, in practice. One that may not be worth it. If I'm warlord over a village in wherever, the cost of attacking ISAF forces in the area for whatever reason may or may not be worth the cost. Even if I feel it's justified to attack, it may be better to just write off past losses and tend to my remaining people. Assuming that's an option.
Once you get bogged down in vengeance, all that goes out the window, and you lose sight of the goal, which should probably be a good life for you and yours. And when you get into disporportionate retribution, you end up creating more aggravation than you're addressing, and you violate any possible sense of parity on the part of those hit by what you do, setting up more opposition, accelerating the cycle (or, perhaps more aptly, the frequently-downward spiral), which is worse than just perpetuating the cycle.
Part of what let us get anywhere in the West was setting aside our conflicts to work toward a common good.
A theme that's been strong with the Abrahamic traditions for a while.
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I don't know. If the Bible indicates that God isn't all-powerful and omniscient, then yes, we could put that down to the Church.
Indicates is a matter of interpretation. It's the words of people whose idea of powerful was rulers with less influence than a modest gang these days, and to whom access to Google might well be deemed omniscience. We've been to the moon since then, and what we think of as omnipotence now is something that encompasses things they couldn't even imagine, for the most part, indeed probably didn't realize there was to imagine. I think we have to consider their words within the context they were spoken (and later written down).
«A mother is god in the eyes of her child,» as the phrase from Silent Hill goes.
Should illustrate the problem of perspective here.
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I think you got it in the first and the last sentences, there. Yes, it should have been known that 'we'd bungle it'. But that calls into question the wisdom of the writers of the Bible.
I routinely call into question their wisdom. Crucially, I call it into question. I don't dismiss it out of hand, and I don't take it as scripture, if you'll pardon the pun.
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Since neither of us feels it important enough to go and find it, I don't suppose it matters here. [;)]
I'm not even sure it's still around. You were on about how American media are saturated with guns and violence and glorify both, and how that would be a negative influence, something you also touched on in a thread where you (and I'm still grateful) reminded me that there's a purpose behind killings most of the time, that guns and bombs are chosen for reasons other than efficiency, etc. So, yes, it's something you've mentioned in the past, more than once, and no, I don't see it as necessary to go hunting for it.
Violence has dropped off with the increase in consumption of violent media, which is one of those persistent problems in the argument that violent media are to blame for the nonexistent increase in violence itself. The only correlation we've found around these parts is, a number of people with difficulties seek refuge in games and other media, effectively self neutralizing for a while, strongly suggesting a causal order where we can't really pin anything on violence in media, but might potentially ascribe to violent media a curbing effect.
This is sort of amusingly apropos the bit where Japan experienced an increase in sex offences when temporarily outlawing materials that depict minors (e.g. certain genres of anime). Media can apparently serve as an outlet for things that would be harmful without the outlet. I'm inclined to think there's quite a few people that take their frustrations out on pixels on a screen, rather than real people, and that this is probably beneficial. A bit of opium for the masses, if you will. The data I've seen tend to support that.
Vengeance in the culture, and in the media, however, seems plausible as a cause of some harm.
One of the problems with vengeance being that it's not very well targetted. When you get angry enough to go killing people out of a personal idea of vengeance, you usually aren't in a frame of mind to be very discriminate about who deserves what and why. If you have a look at vincentML's thread about the rehab vs punishment side of things after Sandy Hook, or even now in the football rapists' thread, the sentiment isn't exactly governed by logic; when emotion carries the day, outcomes tend to go the wrong way (kind of like the whole "road to hell is paved with good intentions" thing, which is a positive emote leading- predictably- to a negative outcome).
Columbine was clearly vengeance. It occured to me, too, at that age. I just happened to be more levelheaded. Enough so to realize going amok would just harm a lot of people that had never hurt me. At minimum, the parents of those that actually had, and the bystanders. In general, though, people don't have that degree of specificity of direction to their emotions. Just look at all the people that wanted to have Lanza tortured to death, without a care for what needless suffering that would inflict on his remaining relatives, for instance. And that was supposedly adult, mature people, whose emotions should be more under control and more well directed than that of children. Blows my mind that we're even considering the notion that these are people capable of consent in a meaningful sense, with such reasoning as that (if we can even call it reasoning when it's probably emotionally driven), but that's a sidebar and straying far OT.
No, forgiveness seems like a more productive route, though more challenging.
It's a route I'm glad I chose, myself, and one I try to stick with.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
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