Chapter 4
Am I, a Mortal, Moral or Immoral
And should I, who do not walk around every insect, and would be totally immobile and something else than human to even try, be allowed to think of myself as a moral human being when brazenly assailing sentient life? Furthermore, from birth, I was wrought into a predator’s biosphere with an ecosystem in which white blood cells of my own making contend against deleterious microorganisms, and these microorganisms contend against my cells. It is true that with innocuous or useful intestinal bacteria and mitochondrial DNA innate in every replicating cell (these diminutive beings acting for their own survival just like Smith’s invisible hand extended18) they unwittingly sustain me and I unwittingly sanction their existences by not sending white blood cell stealth bombers to destroy them, but this hardly makes me into a moral entity.
No, I am not a moral being, nor do I particularly aspire to be one, especially when in large crowds. After a day of teaching the dull witted of Siam the ideas of the sages, all to no avail, or spending time with people whom I am generally good to to be once again swept into the masses, I am often surprised, albeit not so much unpleasantly so, to find myself morphed into such a churlish alter ego. This being of me pushes his way through crowds of strangers and, in his brain there are these disjointed negative thoughts awry without volition despising the bumptious and boisterous alterity on city busses and water taxis, the slow, doddering and lingering who, as much as the sidewalk merchants and food venders, block sidewalks, especially when texting and talking on telephones, and these motorcycles galore that come all too close to my feet. But the possibilities of injury or death, even on a sidewalk, are very real in every step, and unless in this helter-skelter movement in all directions one cares to die in the blunt blows, he has to silently demur to the near misses that happen in urban existence.
Sensitive and caring by nature toward those whom I might help –especially the downtrodden of sentient creatures, in part because when I was a boy I was run over incessantly by the tanks of family, I have no particular need to feign goodness. I don’t even feel any major compulsion to smile in the Land of Smiles. After all, smiling is just another instinct –an instinct to charm and ingratiate oneself to those around him, especially in business when smiles are not toward the customers as people per se but as ambulatory money. Nor do I feel the inclination to emulate a nonexistent god based upon what “scripture” indicates him as being. So if in the dark thickets of society, unable to know anything absolutely, I brandish my machete too vigorously for your approval, you will have to forgive me. The blade is dull and nobody usually notices anything but my grave intensity anyway, if that, and it usually changes to a pleasant enough countenance when I am able to be of service to someone.
Now, does this lack of moral certainty in a godless universe in which even the most steadfast pacifist is a killing machine, and society at large (at least during times of conflict) seems, ostensibly, to be worse than the individual, mean that anyone can go out and kill others for any perceived injustice? Are the Reds and the Yellows of Thailand justified to slaughter each other willy-nilly? A man, if not brought down by anything else, may well die by catching a common cold that turns into pneumonia, so no one should ever say that predation is relegated exclusively to the realm of animals especially when man is the main predator of animals, and microorganisms of man; but still, he is able to refrain from killing where this less than optimal world allows for it, and so he should.
Civilized man, for whatever Rousseau erroneously says on this matter19 (he no doubt was smirking as he wrote his idea, knowing Hobbes was essentially, but not completely right), if losing all restraint on his emotions, would become savage once again,20 or as Rousseau says it with his over-romanticized zeal, in the “state of nature.”21 So, people do not have a right to kill from a moral standpoint –or at least from our limited vantage point as mere mortals-- unless we consider the fact that as Marx phrases it, to move society out of its injustices material force must be prepared to counter material force,22But this sullied truth is only true in the realm of government and, luckily, does not need to be considered in most situations. However, to make the subject even murkier, when human society is revisited hundreds, thousands, and possibly millions of years from now, who killed whom will be tantamount to concerning oneself with chaffing skin cells when raking the yard. Personally, I think that the greatest of all blessings is never to have brought injury on anyone as an unsullied conscience at least to this realm of time and space buoys through one’s years and needs no ablution.