The Ethos of The Slave

 Absolute Compulsion and Obsession

We have recently wondered why mankind allows itself to be pushed into social and political dead-ends that seem to require bloodshed to come back to a semblance of equilibrium. Taking the American Civil War as an example is instructive: things moved along in a flood to a waterfall of destruction, and after a certain critical mass had been reached, the mutual loathing was such that there was no turning back from bloodshed.
Even the Christian Establishments of the South were four-square in their support of Slavery, considering it part of God's plan for mankind. Only within the past 15 years have a number of Churches apologized for their stand one hundred and fifty years ago.
The bloodletting, or the Bloodletting as we should capitalize it, brings things down from a fever pitch, but the infectious hatreds still remain.

How many hatreds could there be? I mean, how many based in a real physical act or atrocity. Consider the violence in the Lebanon Civil War: could there have been enough acts worthy of blood feuds and vendettas accumulated to account for that climax of violence?

I think not.

This is why I am reading Dr. Cunningham's book on Moral Agency and Albert the Great, and I am focused more on Agency than Albert right now.
Moral Agency considers morality from the standpoint of Man as a Moral Agent, not a Moral whirly-gig turned in the winds of Absolute Commandments.

We are used to a Juridical view of morality now. We are used to Absolute truth and Ten Commandments - even to the manifestly laughable extent that some of us think that good behavior will be restored if only the municipality could install a plaque inscribed with the Ten Commandments in front of the Town Hall!
The Holy is the Attractor, not the Constrainer!
We focus on Laws, not the Actor... the agent... the one doing things. We consider that Morality is forged in the forge of Laws and Justice and Judgement, not within the everyday actions of mankind. We think what men do is either follow laws, or ignore laws, and that is all they do according to our Morality.

This is Slave Morality.
We allow ourselves to imagine that we are driven and compelled by forces that are beyond our control. At the first inkling of discord, we point to old grudges, old crimes, and old attitudes that force our subjugation to the yoke of violence.

We believe that God and the Devil are possessed of absolute power to compel, and they do so in a ghastly meddlesome way, weaving influences through our lives and depriving us of Agency for our own acts.
The Holy is not somewhere beyond us in a realm of Absolutes. We are in the midst of it. If we believe God to be situate somewhere else, we believe that somewhere else to be a Heaven of Absolute Laws where He holds his Court to enforce the Laws.

The Holy is not somewhere else. We are in the midst of the Holy. We not only bear responsibility for our actions, but we establish the Kingdom of God or of Discord by our every action.We cannot resist evil if we allow ourselves to imagine ourselves living under the sway of the Force-of-Events or the Laws-of-Retribution or any other absolute denial of our Agency!

We are either free and absolutely Free! ... or we are Slaves!
So far, we still brood over the length of our chains.

Someone once said that if God is dead, everything is permitted.
That is the true ethos of a Slave. A moral agent acts virtuously whether he senses divine compulsion or not; a moral being does not equate being good with genuflecting, kowtowing, nor prostrating oneself before changeable tyrants. Virtue Is Its Own Reward... it is not a Pascal wager nor a fearful obeisance.

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