Moral choices

 

Ayn Rand said that the primacy of values in human life is not an irreducible primary, that it rests on man's faculty of reason. The faculty of reason is the faculty of volition. Nobody can force you to think. Circumstances often demand quick thinking, but it only works well if you're in the habit of conscious awareness and made previous progress in thinking, at least to the extent of considering what to do in case of emergency. Young people are at a disadvantage because they are naive and lack experience. Smart ones learn fast, use the power of choice to study carefully, sometimes quickly, and use logic to identify the scope of values at stake. A stubborn mental marriage to an arbitrary conjectural value is suicidal self imposed deafness to more information, because you want what you want and that's all there is to it — a passionate thirst for triumph by gazing in a mirror.

 

All rational examination is cold blooded and deliberate, a marker in time, when a moral choice must be decided. In the second chapter of The Good Walk Alone the heroine is berated by an angry partner and in the aftermath Janet acknowledges that her proclivity to launch bold action was a value to reconsider. "Hell two clicks thataway, sister," she reflects in the cold focus of thought, not an emotional process, but a sober issue of policy as a senior police officer who has to evaluate what's best for all concerned. Each of us faces similar issues, because our lives are intertwined with the fate of others whom we care about and too often forget in the heat of moral action.

 

A flood of emotion in action makes sense in pursuit of values, the kind of valor that men are capable of in war, for instance, or the passion of romantic love consummated in joy. Some people never go to war, never fall in love and puzzle at everything wrapped in mystery, defeated by unexpected complications and knocked for a loop that feels like failure. No man is 100% clairvoyant or infinitely knowledgeable. That's the pitfall in Platonism and Marxism, claiming perfect knowledge about life in every respect. The practitioners of "system building" are usually bombastic clowns with horrid personal karma, nattering elitists who deny the existence of real world practical knowledge that tends to spoil and snicker at their airbrushed fantasy of abstract utopia or looming dystopia, as the case may be.

 

So, what can a mere mortal do, facing a data-rich mountain of complexity? Look, listen, deploy cognitive virtues, see and evaluate as much as possible, a steady job of thoughtful awareness. Try to make daily progress. Rest is good from time to time, to sift information and consider what experience teaches by deduction or empirical observation. Ultimately it's a question of policy, moral choices to be articulated, remembered, and acted upon. Benchmarks are good. All things noble are as difficult as they are rare. Emotions are not tools of cognition. Contradictions cannot exist. If you fuck up, confess it to those who you forgot to consider and may have harmed. In the third act of Chiseltown, Jennifer apologizes to her twin sister: “I'm sorry I yelled at you. I'm not perfect a hundred percent of the time.”

 

I'm thinking of moral hygiene as a character trait of Billy Larko, the protagonist of Steam Punk. He's an experienced man, age 40 and settled in his purpose and orientation, thoughtfully alert and prepared to deal with life on life's terms, however unexpectedly he might encounter something awkward.

 

His antagonist is a black female Supreme Court nominee who claimed that she didn't know what a woman was, or when life begins, or what critical race theory is — despite her studying CRT at Harvard Law School and mentioning CRT in a University of Chicago speech as a factor in criminal sentencing.

 

Can't make this shit up, folks. No one would believe it.