Life is a placeholder
We're doing this experiment at work involving speech recognition in the presence of noise. When the noise gets too loud, the speech recognizer gets confused, of course. One of the mis-transcriptions it gave for my speech: "Life is a placeholder."
Fun office conversation: Sid, Gus and I were taking a break, talking about Gandhi's pacifist movement in India.
I love my workplace.
Sid was telling us about a particular incident involving a salt tax imposed by the British. The Indians weren't happy about it, so they were protesting. The protest went like this: the Indians would go to the place to collect salt. The British police would be there waiting for them. The Indians would step up to the British police, and the police would thump them with nightsticks, the Indians would fall down and get carted off, and other Indians would step up, get thumped, fall down. They'd line up for this. Sometimes if the Indians weren't too badly injured from their first thumping, they'd get up and get back in line.
According to Sid, the idea there was to induce shame in the British police, for acting in a violent way against people who were not behaving violently.
Well, this got us talking about other sorts of nonviolence and pacifism, including the Jains, who are a sort of pacifist-extremist religious sect. They go to amazing lengths to avoid killing anything, for instance by wearing masks over their mouths to keep from inhaling insects or bacteria, thereby killing them. I mentioned that to a Jain, it's better to let themselves be eaten by a tiger than to kill the tiger in self defense.
Gus had what seems to me the stereotypical problem that most people have when considering that sort of pacifism, which is, that's just not acceptable. If someone attacks me, the argument goes, then I can and should defend myself. If pacifism tells me that I can't do that, then pacifism is wrong.
This misses the point. The ploint of religion in this context is to have you act while alive in such a way as to stand you in good stead in the afterlife. In this view it's the afterlife that's most important, so actions in life that mess up your afterlife for you should be avoided, maybe at all costs. ("Life is a placeholder.") To a Jain, or other sorts of religious pacifists, any violence in this life will ruin/detract from their afterlife. Since the afterlife is more important, nonviolence while alive is the ultimate good.
What Gus's argument assumes instead is that a person's own continued life is the ultimate good. So, then, any action that brings about the end of your life goes against that ultimate good. So clearly that would be unacceptable. Unless, of course, the real important thing is the afterlife, and violence is messing that up for you, like the Jains say.
Which isn't to say that I'm converting to Jainism. I'm just saying that this argument from the non-pacifists is missing the point of the religious pacifists' argument.
Fun office conversation: Sid, Gus and I were taking a break, talking about Gandhi's pacifist movement in India.
I love my workplace.
Sid was telling us about a particular incident involving a salt tax imposed by the British. The Indians weren't happy about it, so they were protesting. The protest went like this: the Indians would go to the place to collect salt. The British police would be there waiting for them. The Indians would step up to the British police, and the police would thump them with nightsticks, the Indians would fall down and get carted off, and other Indians would step up, get thumped, fall down. They'd line up for this. Sometimes if the Indians weren't too badly injured from their first thumping, they'd get up and get back in line.
According to Sid, the idea there was to induce shame in the British police, for acting in a violent way against people who were not behaving violently.
Well, this got us talking about other sorts of nonviolence and pacifism, including the Jains, who are a sort of pacifist-extremist religious sect. They go to amazing lengths to avoid killing anything, for instance by wearing masks over their mouths to keep from inhaling insects or bacteria, thereby killing them. I mentioned that to a Jain, it's better to let themselves be eaten by a tiger than to kill the tiger in self defense.
Gus had what seems to me the stereotypical problem that most people have when considering that sort of pacifism, which is, that's just not acceptable. If someone attacks me, the argument goes, then I can and should defend myself. If pacifism tells me that I can't do that, then pacifism is wrong.
This misses the point. The ploint of religion in this context is to have you act while alive in such a way as to stand you in good stead in the afterlife. In this view it's the afterlife that's most important, so actions in life that mess up your afterlife for you should be avoided, maybe at all costs. ("Life is a placeholder.") To a Jain, or other sorts of religious pacifists, any violence in this life will ruin/detract from their afterlife. Since the afterlife is more important, nonviolence while alive is the ultimate good.
What Gus's argument assumes instead is that a person's own continued life is the ultimate good. So, then, any action that brings about the end of your life goes against that ultimate good. So clearly that would be unacceptable. Unless, of course, the real important thing is the afterlife, and violence is messing that up for you, like the Jains say.
Which isn't to say that I'm converting to Jainism. I'm just saying that this argument from the non-pacifists is missing the point of the religious pacifists' argument.
posted by Craig at 8:54 AM
2 Comments:
What about non-religious pacifism?
I guess I'm a little less familiar with that argument, except to assume that the goals of non-religious pacifists are about consequences of actions while alive, rather than after-life consequences (if any).
If I posed the same dilemma to the non-religious pacifist that I posed to the Jain, i.e., "Fight or die," what would the non-religious pacifist say, and on what grounds?
This I don't know. But I do know what the Jain would say, and why.
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