Moral Phenomena

I came across it, just a link to a story, part of the endless fountain of distract-o-media that some random algorithm creates Just For Me.

It was a random thing, a small but intensely painful tragedy, a bit of local news that fluttered briefly to the subsurface of the collective consciousness before floating down again into the dark realm of the forgotten.

It involved an Arizona mom of twin toddlers, walking them on a path on the side of a drainage culvert.  They were in their jogging stroller.

And a wasp or a bee started pestering them.  Just buzzing about, as stinging insects do.  The mom swatted at it, and it got angry, and she swatted more.  In that process, she let go of the stroller for just a moment.  And the stroller, being on an incline and being a jogging stroller, rolled down the sidewalk, then off it.  She raced after it, but could not catch her children.  The stroller tumbled into the culvert, filled with fast flowing water, and though she threw herself in after it, and desperately tried to wrestle it to the bank, the current tore the stroller from her grasp.

Both of her little ones drowned, still strapped into their stroller.  It was tragic, and heartbreaking, and absurd.  Here, a simple cascade of events, a moment of distraction...almost laughable, in how trivial and familiar and human it was...and utterly devastating.

Because...why?

We want to ascribe purpose to such things, to weave them into some plan or intent.  We want to feel that there's a reason behind them, some larger justification.  But I just can't believe it is so.  We are small, and we break easily, and we all die.  Two deaths every second of every day, or so the statistics about human dying go.  Some are expected, others tragic and untimely.  Every one, the momentous end to a story.  Every one, just a droplet diffused in the endless tide of our dying.

But are such tragic things imbued with purpose?

Meaning: are they part of some great moral narrative?

One the one hand, you can say, no, no they're not.  My ol' buddy Nietzsche certainly would.  "There are no moral phenomena," he'd say.  "Only moral interpretation of phenomena."  For those moments of mortal fragility, I'd agree.  There is no moral imperative demanding the deaths of those little twins, or the deaths of that pastor-couple who just happened to be driving under a bridge at the exact instant that part of our crumbling infrastructure crumbled.

The Tower of Siloam falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike, say I, willfully mashing up my scripture.

But then there are those phenomena that only occur because sentience chooses them.  Actions taken from my moral purpose are non-random, and directly serve a moral end.  When I choose to do X because my faith demands it of me, that is a moral phenomena.  That act has ontological impacts, meaning, it's a real thing, dude.

Like comforting the bereaved.  That's real.  Like an embrace, or a kind word, or showing respect to a human being used to being mistreated.  Like a warm meal, given to an empty stomach.

Or words of forgiveness, delivered from a place where a curse might be expected.

The Word "Tragedy"

The images of the scattered, burning debris of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 were still fresh, and the fires were still burning, as the first words describing the event were put out there.

And for some reason, a single word--or the nuance of the meaning of that word--just felt wrong.

A "tragedy," they were calling it.  "Tragedy."

That was the word from the White House.  That was the specific word used by Vladimir Putin.  That was how Fox News described it, and CNN.  "Tragedy."

And it was tragic, in the most rudimentary sense of the term.  Hundreds of dead, meaning thousands and thousands in mourning.  Here, scores of lives that were promising and full of potential, now ended.  In that, it is immensely sad, and a somber thing.

But tragedy has other connotations, deeper and more complex ones, and that's where the word seems to break down for this terrible event.

Classical tragedy, of course, is a narrative form that revolves around fate and human hubris.  A person has a single abiding flaw, one that is typically woven up with their greatest strength.  Their pride.  Their strength of purpose.  Their passion.  Their love for one another.  Their commitment to their promises.  Their desire to return home, having proved themselves worthy by killing bullies and oppressors just like dad used to do, and finding a wife who reminds them of dear ol' mom.  Their calculating, world-weary cynicism.

In a tragic narrative, that flaw destroys them.

But those who died yesterday had no such flaw.  In that classical sense, their deaths were not tragedy, not quite.

Tragedy weaves up deeply with the idea of fate, of an unchosen, inexorable destiny.  When an accident of fate places human being in harm's way, it is tragedy.  It is tragic, for instance, when thousands die because they happen to be small living things in the path of a tsunami or a tornado.  When a beautiful spirit succumbs to cancer, that is tragic.

But all of those deaths yesterday were not tragic, not completely.

They were chosen.  It was a choice that they should die.

A group of soldiers have been placed into a disputed region by a singularly calculating tyrant, who masks his involvement there behind a thicket of lies and subterfuge.  Operating in secret, they are equipped with a sophisticated weapons system, which they use to target a passing aircraft.  Their intent was to destroy that aircraft, and to kill all of the people on board.

That was precisely what they did.  Oh, sure, they weren't the people they'd intended to kill, any more than that gangbanger intends to shoot the little girl when he sprays gunfire from a passing car.

They believed it to be a transport plane, although no Ukrainian transport craft looks even vaguely like a 777.  Soviet-era radar guidance may not be quite so discerning, though.

And so they shoot down the plane they tried to shoot down.  They kill hundreds of Dutch, Australian, and Malaysian human beings, where they hoped to only kill dozens of Ukrainian human beings.

This is not tragedy.  It could be tragedy, but it is not yet.  Tragedy comes with awareness of the reality of what hubris has wrought.  It is Othello, realizing he has killed his faithful Desdemona.  It is Juliet, awaking to her dead Romeo.  It is Oedipus, tear-filled eyes wide with horror, the needles clutched in his hands.  It is the smell of the smoke in Jephthah's nostrils.  It is Eugene Onegin, seeing Tatyana's beauty too late, with new eyes.

I do not doubt that some of the men involved this morning feel that sense of tragedy, as the images of families and children from that flight play through the world's consciousness.  Those men may or may not be allowed to express their pain.  When you are acting covertly and in secret, agents of a power that wants your involvement in a conflict kept hidden, your ability to express regret is limited.

As for that power?

I am not sure that existential knowledge of the meaning of tragedy yet rests behind the cool, precise eyes of Vladimir Putin.