I think I grew up with something like the “innocence as the moral ideal” mindset, and it’s been a shift in my adult life to think of myself as having the moral obligation to be powerful (if you want goodness to exist in the universe, someone needs to be defending it), and the moral obligation to be wise enough to do useful things with that power.
I think if I had written these two posts I would have framed them differently. (“conquer” sort of leans into a connotation of power that is specifically, ya know, the bad parts). But, naming things is hard, and the intensity of the word is doing some useful work.
Curated.
Trying to be moral has many failure modes. I’m curating this (“Do not conquer what you cannot defend”), kind of in combination with the next post (“Let goodness conquer all that it can defend”). Together, they make both halves of a point that seems pretty important.
I think I grew up with something like the “innocence as the moral ideal” mindset, and it’s been a shift in my adult life to think of myself as having the moral obligation to be powerful (if you want goodness to exist in the universe, someone needs to be defending it), and the moral obligation to be wise enough to do useful things with that power.
I think if I had written these two posts I would have framed them differently. (“conquer” sort of leans into a connotation of power that is specifically, ya know, the bad parts). But, naming things is hard, and the intensity of the word is doing some useful work.