Ferocity and compassion

Interesting to read Hume on human nature, on our practice of seeing regularities across time and space, examples of avarice and ambition, generosity and public spirit. In some ways, perhaps, the best of Hume's work.

I have been in Norwich, talked to A about Nietzsche, and realised how easy it is to conflate 'the herd' with 'slaves'. I wrote about the herd or what is herdlike only a couple of days ago. One can easily be disdainful and dismissive in talking about Christianity, say, as a religion of slaves. But one needs to be more cautious than that. I think more and more that what we call morality has to be understood in terms of our primal emotions in conditions of (extreme) adversity, of terror and instability, where there is an intense need and desire for compassion or mercy, or pity. What is expressed in the gaze of a Mithras, as opposed to a Christ or a Buddha, and what is the source of our need to find something in that gaze? We are casually relativistic about the values of the warrior elite as opposed, say, to those of Buddhists or other religionists, and it is certainly true that the former are silent about or contemptuous of the latter. But, on the other hand, the warrior elites require values that are functional in maintaining their fitness to act, and, nevertheless, ferocity brings horror, carnage and devastation in its wake and awakens other values in us, born of a bone-weariness of slaughter, so that we cannot simply 'compare' two apparently incommensurable value- systems, but need to see the one emerging as a result of the other ... or as light in darkness ... and nor is there a neutral self that stands over against these possibilities to elect one or the other, the self is rather constituted by the conflict between them, and its orientation is already there in its language, by which I mean, roughly, that a preference for the light is already implied in the nature of our talk of 'temptation', etc. The significant thing is that out of our deepest consciousness we seek rescue, and it is this which is the source of our orientation. Nor is this to be understood in terms of some transcendent agency beyond the human, a redeemer, for instance, though we may project our yearning into the form of such a possibility. But of course, we also have to incorporate the values of the slaves into a larger morality that includes that of the masters, we don't want nerveless exhaustion ... or for that matter the passionate intensity of 'the worst'.