The Good Of The Many Outweighs...

A Dinosaur at Chicxulub, Yucatan,

viewing an oncoming meteor

This Vulcan Utilitarianism is a commonplace, and it is false - in my opinion. For example, I have denied recently that the morality of our Civil War may be decided without taking into consideration the almost one million individuals who died as a result of it. The fact that the USA still is existing and is a great power is, at the present juncture of history, not a very good argument in my eyes for the slaughter. In short, there should be two memorials in D.C., one for Lincoln and Emancipation, and the other for John C. Calhoun and the realisation that Communion and Union never justify Fratricide. As far as the philosophy behind it, it is - like everything else - a story, a narrative. It is far from whatever we might consider a Truth. What it is is a commonplace, something we come to believe in and have parroted so long that it looks like Common Sense and - thereby - true. In 1713, Addison wrote his tragedy Cato. It's effect was such, that in 1765, Dr. Johnson wrote in the Preface to his Edition of Shakespeare that " Voltaire expresses his wonder, that 'Shakespeare's extravagances' are endured by a nation, which has seen the tragedy of Cato." To Addison's play, Alexander Pope wrote a Prologue dismissive of individual tragedies, and in favor of social ones: of a larger community - the nation; in particular, the tragedy of Rome when it accepted tyranny in place of republican rule of law. It was the Age of Reason which created the story of the Nation, and showed us tragedy based on the faceless crowds. It was the Age of Reason that argued for the freedom of all men, so that they might easier be melded into that one Neronic wish: a populace with one neck that it may be more easily garroted! The words of religious geniuses focus on the individual, not the communality. If good men form a communion, then the good of that communion derives from the goodness of the individuals who form its constituency, not the reverse. The age of the Global, the Immense, the Preponderant is coming to an end. The great, heavy, lumbering dinosaurs of our world's nations and their economic systems and their beliefs are running in panic, trying not to be the last one at the Yucatan water hole named Chicxulub!