Containment and Morality

Containment and morality or containment and ethics. What to say, really? As I write this, I am listening to a chorus of vicious dogs whose bark is not stronger than their bite and their bark is ferociously frightening. Tibetans keep dogs. Some are nice house dogs and pets in the sense that EuroAmericans think of them. Many, however, are made to violent by constraining them with short chains, beating them, and whatever else you do to make and animal angry, violent, hateful, and dangerous. The irony is that they are too dangerous to be let off their short chains and they also therefore cannot really do anything but impotently bark with a guttural compaction and projection of sonic anger. Death in sound, an old sound that every human mammalian brain knows from way back before any of us were born. That brain hears the coming violence and recoils as they are supposed to do by the wealth that demands animal protection. What are the ethics in violent dogs. Surely, dogs do not have the means to do other than they are beaten to do. What then are the ethics and morality of beating a dog so that they are angry enough to protect one’s walled compound from those without walls and, perhaps, without roofs?

All this is to set the stage, encode the emotion, and plant the seeds for a discussion about containment and morality. And/or ethics. Expansion was always a rule by which I lived my life. Onward and upward. Forward as my home state’s motto urges. Always moving on and away and avoiding again. Taking down the shingle and packing the light bag and moving. Where to and when to and how to were the adventure. Expansion beyond the current state, the status quo, was not only a physical movement beyond here, but a blowing up of inside, mind, knowledge, sight, sensitivity, awareness, and all the other mystery things that make me, and you, I suspect, human. This kind of expansion has grown up in me and I wonder where I have gone and why I am here and what has happened to me. And I am afraid.

Thus containment. So much have I pushed beyond and more and up and on inside of me, that I now need (and always did, probably) a container. This is a very difficult thing to know and realize now because for so long containers have been my enemy, I have fought them, I have resisted them, I have run from them, I have destroyed them, I have spoken against them, I have ignored them, and I have feared them. Was it instinctual or trained to fear containment, I do not know. Now, however, after what feels like a long career of deconstructing containers, I am charged with building my own.

Is it a prison I should build or is it a tool? Surely it is a prison because it eliminates opportunity and growth in the wild and nuclear fashion and replaces it with cultivation and concentration. I am not sure that I want that or even if I did, that I would know how to do it. Luckily, I have teachers who I do not know as well as I would like who know what container building is like, how to do it, and nice things like that. The work is there, it is hard and often not tasty, but I know what it is. That makes its it all the harder when I do not do it.

I am very much better at destruction than construction.

I realize I did not get to morality and ethics explicitly here. Though, I believe this passage is laced with its roots. Anyone care to take a shot at it? Where do ethics and morality fit in here?