Originally posted by maycocksean
As suspected...nope, I hadn't understood well what kinds of issues you were looking to get at.
I was nodding and smiling all the way through this though, wonderful post.
At the end of the book she describes a system that is essentially set up to use the poor for the benefit of the rich and I thought to myself:
This is such a sin.
I thought of it again browsing through a book in the airport which touched on aspects of game theory including the "prisoner's dilemma" a part of which is this idea, which I lifted from Wikipedia:
"rational choice leads the two players to both play defect even though each player's individual reward would be greater if they both played cooperate. In equilibrium, each prisoner chooses to defect even though both would be better off by cooperating, hence the dilemma."
I remember thinking to myself: This is the nature of sin.
.................
At least sin the way I, as a Christian, understand it. I suppose I would call it "sin in the macro sense." I see sin in a somewhat magical, storytelling sense (or maybe I'm just feeling that more as I just finished the final installment of the Harry Potter series--something else that gave me occasion to meditate on the nature of sin); it is that inexplicably self-destructive streak that has mysteriously infected humanity, and in a sense, the planet itself. It's what we call in Christianese "the consequences of living in a sinful world."
It is this that demands an explanation--not why humans are good, why we make the moral decisions, the evolutionarily advantageous ones, but when we do the opposite. Something is seriously wrong when our species has developed the capacity to completely annihilate ourselves. When I began teaching my high school freshman Bible class the basic foundational teachings of Christianity, we began by talking not about goodness but evil as the evidence for belief. For this is where I believe all religions originate--trying to explain suffering and death. For whatever reason, humans cannot seem to accept and be at peace with the inevitability and unpredictability of human suffering and death. The Buddhists say that suffering is rooted in desire and overcoming desire and attachment will free one from suffering. Christians say that suffering comes from sin--a poison in the human system.
At this "macro"-level anyhow, your examples to me more have the connotation of 'injustice' than 'sin', at least the way English speakers normally use those terms--although the prisoner's dilemma example (which we often use in political science when discussing deterrence theory) does, I guess, form a kind of bridge between the two by inquiring into
why people behave in this way. In Judaism, we sometimes talk about 'sin' and 'injustice' arising from our
yetzer ha'ra, which is usually translated by the rather fatalistic-sounding phrase "Evil (
ra) Inclination (
yetzer)." But
yetzer actually means to give form to something by applying pressure--God
yetzers Adam from the dust, for example--while
ra means shattering, tumult, cacophany. An old fable preserved in the Talmud talks about a man who captured the
yetzer ha'ra and sealed it in a barrel, thinking he was doing the world a great favor; but the results were disastrous--farmers didn't get up and plow their fields, hens stopped laying eggs, no one and nothing got anything productive done. So it's not so much an 'Evil Inclination' as a drive to achieve, acquire, and experience...but a potentially dangerous one which can sabotage its own bearer, if not properly directed with the aid of the
yetzer ha'tov,
tov meaning 'good' in the fullest sense: not 'simply' righteous and just, but also properly productive; suited to grant and nurture contentment and joy (to refer to Genesis again,
tov is what God is said to find everything created to be).
That may or may not be the most germane Jewish concept to cite in this context; it's just what sprang to mind first for me. I guess I see it as somewhere in between your 'Buddhist concept' (which in this case is also the Hindu concept) and 'Christian concept' of where injustice, and in a broader sense 'suffering', come from. The Hebrew word
cheyt, literally 'to miss the mark,' is the most commonly used word for 'sin' in the Hebrew Bible, and the only one which can denote a 'sinful' act in itself. Its Aramaic cognate,
chat, is the aforementioned word explained as 'disharmony' in Kabbalah, and that interpretation ties it in to both
yetzer ha'ra and injustice or suffering in the collective (and, in Kabbalah, cosmic) sense. Again,
cheyt doesn't necessarily mean 'sin' in a 'moral' way; it can also mean 'missing the mark' in terms of those religious practices we call
chukkim ('fiat'), such as the kosher laws, which help cultivate a kind of spiritual discipline but aren't per se seen as 'moral' injunctions--whereas, for example, the
mishpatim ('justice') or laws governing relations between people definitely are. For Jews, as for Christians and Muslims, it's those that are seen as The Biggies. (Or as Jesus' contemporary Hillel
[? 70 BC-10 AD] said: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor
[Lev 19:18]--that is the entire Torah; all the rest is just commentary.") On the other hand, in both Buddhism and Hinduism, the hallmark of a person who has overcome desire and attachment is a life of selfless compassion and service, and that can be understood in the collective as well; also, as a Jew, I was always fascinated by the analogies between the role
yoga (cognate of English
yoke, and conveying that same idea of achieving harmony of purpose by "harnessing") plays in Hinduism and Buddhism, and the role 'the observant life' plays in Judaism, especially in Kabbalist understanding.
Death and suffering in, say, the sense of grave illness or natural disasters though, I personally don't look at in the above context (although someone who took Kabbalistic scripture literally might); I take them as inevitabilities of the human condition, and am content to remain agnostic as to what, if any, their 'purpose' might be. Leviticus says that the goal of an observant life is to
badal the
qodesh from the
chol--to draw forth the sacred from the 'pierced,' i.e., the wounded or 'profaned'--above all socially and morally, but also ritually. (And, one last Genesis reference here:
badal is what God does with the light and the darkness, and the waters above and below: to separate out by making distinctions; so, it's also a creative power.) Maybe doing so also helps achieve that 'cosmically,' maybe not, but for me the rest is privilege enough,
qodesh enough. We call this
tikkun olam--the work of 'repairing' and 'transforming' a broken world.
I thought of it again, reading an article yesterday in a back issue of TIME about how slavery evolved in the English colonies in the United States. This was no, "oops, they made a mistake" or "Well, they just didn't know any better" kind of mild immorality. This was in the opinion of Yale Historian Edmund Morgan, a white elite "actively promoting racism and a racially exclusive popular democracy as a way of dividing and ruling black and white workers. By glorifying whiteness and restricting the electorate to whites, a bond of racial solidarity emerged between all classes of whites predicated on the permanent exclusion of blacks." And I thought, this willful creation of racism for the sake of greed. . .
That "dividing and ruling" dimension was still very apparent where I grew up...almost invariably, the in-your-face Rebel Flag waving types were the poorest white people, and more than once I had the thought, Now why would
you romanticize those days? The ruling class didn't care about your folk then, guess whose descendants still run the local government now, and they aren't doing too much about your (appalling) housing conditions and neighborhood "roads" and open sewers and all that, are they? Don't see that in their neighborhoods, do you? All for the false security of "Well at least I'm not a..." thinking. Which ironically, now makes them feel all the more justified in simply looking down on you.
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Anyways, I look forward to reading the rest of your thoughts on the subject. (Just so long as it doesn't mean you'll be hunched bleary-eyed in some Starbucks for hours, feverishly typing away, when you could be out strolling around Waikiki...if that's not "disharmony" I don't know what is!)
an awful lot of questions.
