Posts Tagged ‘ethics’

“River Grass”

December 7, 2025

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Ricardo Morin
Landscape II: River Grass
18” x 24”
Sepia on newsprint 
2003

Ricardo F Morin

Dec. 6, 2025

Naples. Florida

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Author’s Note

This diptych, “River Grass” and “Naples in the Morning,” brings together a reflection on continuity and a brief observation of everyday life.  Two scenes—one sustained, the other fleeting—register how experience, silence, and attention shape presence.  The first part, “River Grass,” does not present an argument, a confession, or a theory.  It offers an observation shaped over time by proximity rather than distance.   The focus is not on individual psychology or relational conflict, but on patterns that take form across generations and persist quietly within everyday life.

What follows avoids moral explanation and narrative resolution.   It attends instead to continuity—how restraint, generosity, and presence may be transmitted not through instruction or memory, but through posture, habit, and orientation.   The intention is to describe without adjudicating, and to clarify without assigning cause where cause cannot be cleanly isolated.   What is traced here represents one possible orientation among many, shaped by inheritance but not exhaustive of its effects—an invitation not to mistake the channel for the ocean.

Orientation of “River Grass”

What follows attends to what persists when lives are shaped by continuity rather than interruption.

I. Inheritance

Not all inheritance arrives as memory.   Some is conveyed without story, without date, without language.   It enters through atmosphere rather than narrative—through cadence, restraint, posture, and a preference for continuity over display.   In such cases, history is not recalled; it is carried.

This form of inheritance does not announce itself as trauma.   It leaves no single scene to revisit, no episode that can be isolated and explained.   Instead, it appears as a way of moving through the world:   measured, attentive, resistant to excess.   The past exerts influence not by instruction but by shaping what feels permissible, sustainable, or necessary.

Under these conditions, restraint is not experienced as loss.  It functions as orientation.  Accommodation does not signal submission but competence.   Stability reflects not the absence of desire but the quiet placement of desire among other priorities.   What is transmitted is not fear but caution—an ethic of endurance refined over time.

Because no event is foregrounded, little invites interpretation.   The absence of visible distress encourages the assumption of ease.   Life appears ordered, generous, and intact.   Yet the inheritance remains active and structures conduct without requiring acknowledgment.   It persists not as memory but as form.

Such inheritance often resists recognition precisely because it has succeeded.   The past has not repeated itself.   Continuity has been preserved.   What remains is a posture oriented toward sustaining that continuity—a vigilance so normalized that it passes as temperament rather than history.

II. Restraint

Restraint, in this context, does not operate as inhibition or denial.   It functions as a stabilizing orientation—an internal calibration shaped over time.   Action is guided less by expression than by proportion and durability.   What governs choice is not moral judgment but coherence.

Such restraint often coexists with clarity and decisiveness.   Boundaries are maintained without conflict; decisions are made without excess emphasis.   What is avoided is not agency but surplus.   Expression is moderated not through fear of consequence, but through an internal sense of sufficiency.

Accommodation here is frequently misread.   It does not arise from compliance or uncertainty, but from an assessment of impact.   Space yielded to others reflects confidence in structure rather than retreat from position.   Presence remains intact even when it is not foregrounded.

This orientation produces a stability that can appear effortless.   Friction is minimized.   Demands are rare.   The absence of insistence is readily mistaken for ease or contentment.   Yet the restraint at work is active, not passive—and continuously shapes what is articulated, deferred, or left unspoken.

Over time, restraint becomes difficult to distinguish from identity.   It ceases to register as a choice among alternatives and hardens into posture.   The question of expression recedes, replaced by an emphasis on responsibility, proportion, and non-disruption.

III. Generosity

Generosity shaped by inherited restraint rarely announces itself.   It does not seek recognition or reciprocation, nor does it depend on visibility for validation.   It appears instead as availability, as the quiet removal of obstacles, as the willingness to yield space without narrative or sacrifice.

In this form, giving is non-transactional.   No balance is tracked; no return anticipated.   What is offered is steadiness rather than favor.   Support unfolds without appeal, often unnoticed, absorbed into ordinary conduct.   The absence of demand is integral rather than incidental.

Because it imposes no weight, such generosity leaves little trace.   Others encounter freedom without sensing its source.   Autonomy is enabled without attribution.   The one who gives remains present yet unmarked.

Over time, the habit of making room for others becomes more practiced than the habit of entering it.   Attention turns outward and refines responsiveness while narrowing self-directed articulation.   What persists is not loss, but redirection.

This configuration resists conventional readings of imbalance.   No grievance emerges; no conflict announces asymmetry.   Generosity remains intact, even exemplary.   What shifts subtly is internal emphasis: presence exercised through allowance rather than assertion.

IV. Desire

Desire, within this orientation, is neither denied nor suppressed.   It is repositioned.   Its legitimacy is not questioned, but its urgency is diminished.   What is set aside is not longing itself, but the expectation that longing must organize life.

Desire is acknowledged yet rarely centered.   Expression is permitted elsewhere more readily than inwardly claimed.   Attention gravitates toward what preserves stability rather than what intensifies experience.   Satisfaction arises from coherence rather than culmination.

This produces no vacancy.   Life remains engaged and responsive.   What diminishes is insistence.   Continuity comes to matter more than appetite; durability more than immediacy.

Because this arrangement is not framed as renunciation, it escapes notice.   No moral language surrounds it.   Nothing is named as sacrifice.   Desire persists at a distance—observed, managed, deferred without struggle.

Over time, identity becomes shaped less by pursuit than by maintenance.   Expression gives way to stewardship.   Meaning accrues not through arrival, but through the avoidance of rupture.

V. Virtue

Patterns organized around restraint and continuity are often mistaken for moral attainment.   Composure is read as wisdom; accommodation as maturity; silence as depth.   Because no disturbance arises, the orientation escapes examination.   What functions smoothly is presumed complete.

This misreading is reinforced by social frameworks that reward stability over inquiry.   Absence of conflict is taken as evidence of balance.   Generosity without demand is praised rather than interrogated.   Its costs remain obscured precisely because they impose nothing on others.

Virtue, in this setting, becomes indistinguishable from habit.   Adaptive orientation solidifies into character, and character into expectation.   Reliability is affirmed repeatedly, deepening its hold.

The result is not deception but omission.   The steadiness is genuine.   What goes unrecognized is how fully such an arrangement organizes life around preservation rather than presence.   The question of displacement remains unasked, not refused.

Misreading occurs through success.   Relations endure.   Structures hold.   No obvious harm appears.   And so the deeper configuration—quiet, durable, historically shaped—continues beneath the language of virtue.

VI. Continuity

At a certain threshold, continuity shifts from supporting means to governing end.   Life becomes organized not around fulfillment, but around preservation.   What matters most is that nothing essential is exposed to rupture, whether through excess demand or through untested assertion.

Fulfillment is not rejected, but subordinated.   Satisfaction arises from duration rather than intensity.   Time is oriented toward extension, not culmination.   What is valued is the capacity to carry forward intact.

This proves effective.   The past does not recur.   Stability holds.   Loss is contained rather than amplified.   Inherited imperatives are honored not through recollection, but through conduct.

Yet when continuity occupies this position, the range of permissible movement narrows.   Change must justify itself in advance.   Desire must demonstrate durability before enactment.   Expression yields to maintenance.

The future is approached as responsibility rather than as open terrain.   Meaning accumulates through safeguarding what is essential rather than through the exploration of possibilities.   Success becomes synonymous with the preservation of continuity.

VII. Presence

Presence, in its final form here, does not organize itself around position or priority.   It functions laterally and sustains structure without becoming its focus.   Life is held together through attentiveness rather than through claims to authority or justification.   The course of life proceeds without pressure to arrive at an explanation that secures its coherence.

This mode of presence resists visibility.  It does not seek recognition or assert precedence.   Its efficacy lies in what remains intact rather than in what is achieved.  Others move freely, often unaware of the support permitting such freedom.

To remain outside the center is not withdrawal.   Engagement continues—measured, responsive, intact.   What is avoided is domination, not participation.  Influence is exercised through stability rather than direction.

The image implied by the title takes form.   A river that advances without force, reshaping terrain through the sustained persistence of its course.  Motion without spectacle.  Endurance without inscription.  The course is maintained by flowing around obstruction rather than confronting it.

What remains is continuity itself—quietly sustained, seldom noticed, and difficult to name.

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“Naples in the Morning”

I sat across from my husband at a breakfast place in Naples, Florida.  Diagonally behind him sat a young couple.  The woman was small—almost childlike in scale—next to her husband, who stood well over six feet.

None of us had ordered yet.  She carefully arranged her silverware and napkin, aligning them with deliberate precision, almost ritualistic.   Her hair fell forward, parted to either side of her face like curtains drawn closed.  When she lifted her chin, her facial features—Asian in appearance—came briefly into view.  Despite her slightness, her posture suggested control rather than fragility.

When our glances crossed, she held my gaze longer than expected, nearly staring.  She then lowered her head, hiding again behind her hair.   Moments later, she lifted it once more and made the sign of the cross—forehead, chest, shoulder to shoulder—before turning fully back toward her husband.   No words were exchanged.

When the food arrived, she resumed the same careful demeanor.   She sliced her omelet into small, uniform squares, placed the knife down, and paused.  Each piece was lifted individually, slowly, with unbroken repetition, as if rehearsed.  The sequence carried the quality of performance.   Though she remained oriented toward her husband, her torso shifted intermittently, angling slightly in my direction.

When they finished and moved toward the register, she rose first and walked ahead, chin lowered, hair once again masking her surroundings.  He followed—tall, broad, moving through the room with visible ease.  His stride was expansive, unguarded.

They left without speaking.

Diptych.

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“The Ethics of Perception, Part I”

November 20, 2025
Ricardo Morín
Triangulation 4: The Ethics of Perception
22″ x 30″
Graphite on paper
2006

Ricardo F. Morín

October 2025

Oakland Park, Fl

Introduction

Perception often seems immediate and uncomplicated.    We see, we hear, we react.    Yet between that first contact with the world and the choices we make in response, something slower and more fragile takes place:    the formation of meaning.    In that interval—between what appears and what we assert—not only understanding is at stake, but ethics as well.

This essay begins with a simple question:    what changes when understanding matters more than assertion?    In a culture that prioritizes reaction, utility, and certainty, pausing to perceive can seem inefficient.    Yet it is precisely this pause that allows experience to take shape without force and keeps the relationship between consciousness and the shared world in proportion.

The Ethics of Perception does not propose rules or moral systems.    It examines how sustained attention—able to receive before imposing—can restore coherence between inner life and external reality.    From this basic gesture, ethics ceases to operate as an external norm and becomes a way of being in relation.

Perception

Perception may be understood as the emergent outcome of mechanisms collectively designated as intelligence in the abstract.    These mechanisms do not operate solely as interior cognitive functions, nor are they reducible to external systems, conventions, or instruments.    Perception arises at the continuous interface between interior awareness and exterior structure, where sensory intake, pattern recognition, and interpretive ordering converge through sustained attunement.

Such a relation does not presume opposition between internal and external domains.    Cognitive processes and environmental conditions function as co-present and mutually generative forces.    Disruptions frequently described as pathological more accurately reflect misalignment within this reciprocal relation rather than intrinsic deficiency in any constituent mechanism.    When normative frameworks privilege particular modes of perceptual attunement, divergence is reclassified as deviation and difference is rendered as dysfunction.

Models grounded in categorization or spectral positioning provide descriptive utility but often presuppose hierarchical centers.    An account oriented toward attunement redirects emphasis away from comparative placement and toward relational orientation.    Perceptual coherence depends less on position within a classificatory schema than on sensitivity to the ongoing exchange between interior processing and exterior configuration.

Claims of authority over perceptual normality weaken under recognition of ubiquity.    If the interaction between cognitive mechanism and environmental structure constitutes a universal condition rather than an exceptional trait, no institution, metric, or discipline retains exclusive legitimacy to define deviation.    Evaluation becomes contextual, norms provisional, and classification descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Within this framework, perception is not measured by conformity, efficiency, or accommodation to dominant systems.    Perception denotes the sustained capacity to remain aligned with the dynamic interaction of interior awareness and exterior articulation without collapsing one domain into the other.    Such an understanding accommodates analytical abstraction, scientific modeling, artistic discernment, contemplative depth, and systemic reasoning without elevating any singular mode of intelligence above others.

Considered in this light, perception resists enclosure within diagnostic, cultural, or hierarchical boundaries.    What persists is not a ranked spectrum of cognitive worth but a field of relational variance governed by emergence, attunement, and reciprocal presence.

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Understanding begins with seeing the world as it is, before any claim or assertion shapes its meaning.    My disposition turns toward perceiving, attending, and responding rather than toward struggle or untested impulse.    This orientation works as a discipline through which clarity and proportion take form.    Thought, in this sense, does not impose significance; it receives it through the living exchange of experience.    Perceiving gathers the immediate presence of the world, and understanding shapes that presence into sense.    Both arise from the same motion of awareness, where observation ripens into comprehension.    Philosophy then ceases to be an act of mastery and becomes a way of seeing that restores balance between mind and existence.

2

Philosophy has long been driven by the impulse to assert rather than to understand.    From antiquity to modern times, thinkers built systems meant to secure certainty and protect thought from doubt.    Nietzsche inherited that impulse and inverted it by turning volition into affirmation.    His view freed reason from dogma yet confined it within self-assertion.    Understanding, by contrast, grows from recognizing that meaning arises in relation.    The act of grasping does not depend on force but on perception.    When thought observes instead of imposing, the world reveals its own coherence.    Ethics springs from that revelation, because to understand is already to enter into relation with what is seen.    Comprehension is therefore not passive; it is active participation in the unfolding of reality.

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Perception becomes ethical when it recognizes that every act of seeing carries responsibility.    To perceive is to acknowledge what stands before us—not as an object to be mastered but as a presence that coexists with our own.    Awareness is never neutral; it bears the weight of how we attend, interpret, and respond.    When perception remains steady, recognition deepens into connection.    A single moment makes this visible:    watching an elderly person struggle with opening a door, the mind perceives first, then understands, and then responds—not out of impulse, but out of the recognition of a shared human condition.    Art enacts this same movement.    The painter, the writer, and the musician do not invent the world; they meet it through form.    Each creative gesture records a dialogue between inner and outer experience, where understanding becomes recognition of relation.    The moral value of art lies not in a message but in the quality of attention it sustains.    To live perceptively is to practice restraint and openness together:    restraint keeps volition from overpowering what is seen, and openness lets the world speak through its details.    In that steady practice, ethics ceases to be rule and becomes a way of living attentively within relation.

4

Modern life tempts the mind to react before it perceives.    The speed of information, the immediacy of communication, and the constant surge of stimuli fragment awareness.    In that climate, unexamined volition regains its force; it asserts, selects, and consumes out of bias rather than understanding.    What vanishes is the interval between experience and reflection—the pause in which perception matures into thought.    Ethical life, understood as living with awareness of relation, re-emerges when that interval is restored.    A culture that values perception above reaction can recover the sense of proportion that technology and ideology often distort.    The task is not to reject innovation but to exercise discernment within it.    Every act of attention becomes resistance to distraction, and every moment of silence reclaims the depth that noise obscures.    When perception reaches the point of recognizing another consciousness as equal in its claim to reality, understanding acquires moral weight.    Such recognition requires patience—the willingness to see without appropriation and to remain present without possession.

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All philosophy begins as a gesture toward harmony.    The mind seeks to know its bond with the world yet often confuses harmony with control.    When understanding replaces conquest, thought rediscovers its natural proportion.    The world is not a stage for self-assertion but a field of correspondence where awareness meets what it perceives.    To think ethically is to think in relation.    The act of grasping restores continuity between inner and outer life and shows that knowing itself is participation.    Each meeting with reality—each moment of seeing, listening, or remembering—becomes an occasion to act with measure.    The reflective mind neither retreats from the world nor dominates it.    It stands within experience as both witness and participant, and lets perception reach its human fullness:    the ability to recognize what lies beyond oneself and to respond without domination.    When thought arises from attention instead of struggle, it reconciles intelligence with presence and restores the quiet balance that modern life has displaced.    In that reconciliation, philosophy fulfills its oldest task—to bring awareness into harmony with existence.

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“The Primary Bond”

August 21, 2025

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Ricardo Morin
Still Forty-three
Oil on linen
14″ x 18″ x 3/4″
2012

For those who know that the sharpest word cannot replace the simple act of responding with tenderness.

Ricardo Morin — August 13, 2025 — Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

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Tenderness is a deliberate openness that seeks the well-being of another through a gesture of welcome, through gentleness and respect. Aggression, by contrast, is the forceful assertion of one’s will in a way that can wound, constrain, or dominate. Each can exist without the other, yet they often meet in the same moment, altering the course of a conflict or softening its edge. One sees this when, in the middle of an argument, a person instinctively offers a chair to the other. The dispute remains, but its weight has shifted.

In a world haunted by resentment and the fear of being hurt—feelings as real as they are sometimes exaggerated—tenderness emerges not as a denial of those forces but as their modulation. It interrupts the cycle of suspicion, as when two adversaries, after heated words, lower their voices to hear one another. The hostility remains, but it is tempered, displaced by the recognition that another’s presence is not solely a threat.

Where causality would claim to measure our emotions as predictable reactions, what becomes evident are instead our habits and inclinations—patterns that oscillate between the delicate pull that calms and the impulse that wounds. These shifts reveal that tenderness is not the opposite of aggression, but a mirror exposing how both are woven together from the same human ground.

Tenderness, then, is not the absence of aggression but a mirror showing the weave in which both share a common origin. Consider the exhausted nurse who, after an endless shift, still takes the time to straighten a patient’s blanket. The act is small, yet it springs from the same human ground where impatience and fatigue could just as easily have given way to harshness.

Tenderness carries an ambiguity that makes itself as disarming as it is unsettling. Its apparent fragility dismantles aggression without force, compelling it to see itself in an unexpected reflection: a gentle act that interrupts the urge to harm and leaves it without footing.

Tenderness is not a calculated ruse but a natural pull toward memories older than mistrust—when contact was a need rather than a threat. One sees this when, after years of silence and estrangement, a son returns to care for his ailing father. Resentment remains, yet in the act of tending beats the same root that once sustained closeness.

In such moments, fear loosens, hostility softens, and what seemed a battlefield becomes an uncertain but open passage toward relief. Tenderness does not erase conflict, but shows how—even within it—something older and deeper still binds us. I witnessed this once on the New York City subway. A man, angered when a disabled stranger asked for help, turned his glare on me as our eyes met. He moved toward me as if to strike, bringing his face close to mine. I closed my eyes and eased my expression. Deprived of the stare that had fueled his aggression, he stepped back—uneasy, but no longer advancing. I walked away, marked by how a single gesture can quiet the arc of a confrontation.

There lies a primary bond that ties us to the source of life, where tenderness and aggression are not isolated poles but two expressions of the same human fabric. A sister, in a tense exchange, tells her older brother that she learned her combative stance from him. He bristles at the remark, yet both know they have carried that same hardness for years, and neither can fully blame the other. The recognition does not bring easy reconciliation, but it narrows the distance between them.

From the first bond, the body learns to read the smallest signals: the warmth that welcomes, the pressure that threatens, the pulse that quickens or slows. One sees it when, in the midst of battle, a soldier offers water to a prisoner who only moments before was his enemy. Long before words exist, such gestures shape the habits we later call preferences or fears. This is why tenderness can yield to aggression without conceding defeat: it exposes aggression to an involuntary recognition, restoring the memory of its own root. And in that recognition, even the most hostile impulse finds, if only for a moment, its disarmament.

Tenderness does not eliminate conflict or erase its causes, but it can shift its course. It opens a moment where the certainty of harm gives way to the possibility of presence and care. It is not a cure for all, yet in its quiet way of calling and being heard, tenderness shows that even the firmest aggression seeks acknowledgment. In that acknowledgment, both tenderness and aggression reveal that they spring from the same human ground.

The presence of tenderness in our exchanges is not merely a private virtue but a civic necessity. It sustains the trust and recognition without which communities fracture and cannot endure.

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Annotated Bibliography

  • Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. (Hannah Arendt examines the active life of human beings—labor, work, and action—tracing their historical meanings and showing how modern society has altered the conditions for political and civic engagement.)
  • Girard, René: Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. (René Girard explores the role of violence in human culture, arguing that ritual sacrifice emerged as a mechanism to contain social conflict, and linking these dynamics to myths and religious practices.)
  • MacIntyre, Alasdair: After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. (Alasdair MacIntyre critiques modern moral philosophy, contending that the loss of a shared Aristotelian framework has left moral discourse fragmented and emotive, and proposing a return to virtue ethics.)
  • Nussbaum, Martha C.: Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. (Martha Nussbaum investigates the emotional foundations of a just society, arguing that cultivating compassion, love, and a sense of shared humanity is essential for sustaining democratic institutions.)

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“The Withering of Culture: Goodness and Civility”

July 24, 2025

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Ricardo Morin
“The Void of a Symbol”
CGI
2025

To all that suffer

By Ricardo Morin

July 2025

Abstract

This essay examines the ethical decline at the heart of contemporary civic life and its consequences for culture.   It argues that culture is not merely the preservation of artistic or intellectual forms, but the public expression of moral purpose.   Drawing from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958)—in particular, her critique of the “worldlessness” of mass society—the essay traces how symbolic and institutional forms have become detached from ethical responsibility.   In place of a culture grounded in shared moral commitments, it identifies the rise of anticulture:   a spectacle-driven imitation of cultural life, stripped of civic responsibility and moral depth.   Rejecting nostalgia, the essay calls for a cultural renewal based on solidarity, public compassion, and ethical engagement.

The Withering of Culture: Goodness and Civility

Culture’s crisis is a moral one before it is a political one.

A society’s cultural life is not sustained by museums, literature, or festivals alone.   These may serve as symbols of identity or refinement, but culture, in its fullest sense, demands a deeper moral orientation.   If goodness—understood as a commitment to the dignity of others—does not animate civic life, culture loses its grounding and becomes a decorative shell.   It may preserve the language, symbols, and rituals of a healthy society, but without ethical vitality, these forms risk becoming performative—or even deceptive.   What withers first in such decline is not expression but conscience—the inner faculty that gives culture its ethical weight.

The current state of American public life illustrates this decline.   Public discourse has grown coarse.   It is now common for political actors to brand their opponents not merely as mistaken, but as dangerous or depraved.   During his first presidency—and again since returning to office—Donald Trump has labeled critics as “traitors,” “scum,” and “evil.”   At rallies and across social media, he has referred to political adversaries as “vermin,” language historically used by authoritarian regimes to delegitimize opposition.   The press has been repeatedly cast as “the enemy of the people,” a phrase long employed to undermine public accountability.

This style of politics has become normalized.   In school board meetings, legislative chambers, and campaign platforms, elected officials accuse their counterparts of being “groomers,” “communists,” or “un-American”—language that transforms disagreement into moral condemnation.   In 2023, when Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox publicly supported protections for LGBTQ youth and called for civil dialogue, far-right commentators denounced him as a ‘Republican in name only’—a supposed traitor to conservative values.   His appeal to empathy was interpreted not as strength of character but as political surrender.   In such an environment, even measured gestures of respect are read as weakness—or worse, betrayal.

Conspiracy theories once relegated to fringe pamphlets now echo in congressional hearings.   Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has accused political opponents of orchestrating “Satanic rituals”, while Senator J.D. Vance suggested that cultural and academic elites pose an existential threat to the nation.   In such an environment, political opposition is recast as moral deviance.   The result is not merely polarization, but a systematic dismantling of the civic imagination.

What is promoted in this environment is not only a political ideology, but a form of power centered on the humiliation of others—a self-glorifying posture sustained by the denigration it requires.   This type of leadership rests not on principle or public vision but on the glorification of one’s own image. It is a form of narcissistic power—not in clinical terms, but as the conversion of symbolic authority into a vehicle for grievance, personality cult, and systematic contempt for difference.

The consequences of this climate are not confined to rhetoric.   In 2022, Paul Pelosi, the husband of then–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in their home by an intruder radicalized by online conspiracies.   In 2025, Minnesota state senator Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a man reportedly enraged by progressive legislative agendas.   Around the same time, a lone assailant attacked attendees at a local Pride event, citing ideological grievances as justification.  More recently, on September 10, 2025, the high profile influencer Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a young radical inflamed by the very rhetoric he opposed.   These acts are not isolated tragedies.  They reveal a civic landscape in which anger is not only normalized but weaponized.  Dehumanizing discourse is not idle speech; it becomes license for violence.

Online platforms amplify these dynamics.  What began as tools for connection have become engines of outrage.  Algorithms on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) promote content that inflames rather than informs.   Verbal take-downs, personal attacks, and tribal affirmations generate more engagement than thoughtfulness or restraint.   The loudest voices—not the wisest—are the most amplified.  As a result, cruelty is often rewarded as candor, and ridicule is mistaken for insight.

The effects are tangible.   A mayor receives death threats for enforcing public health policies.   A schoolteacher is harassed online for adopting inclusive language.   A librarian resigns after refusing to censor materials that affirm pluralism.  Columbia University pays over $200 million in penalties to the federal government under political pressure from the Trump administration—forced to signal partisan compliance in order to continue its cancer research.  These are not anecdotal exceptions.   They reveal a broader decline of democratic sensibility:   a failure to recognize fellow citizens as worthy of care, dialogue, or even basic dignity.

Nowhere is this inversion of moral language more visible than in two of the most enduring national failures:   the absence of universal healthcare and the unchecked circulation of firearms.  In both, the language of freedom conceals the logic of profit.   Insurance and weapons industries, fortified by investors and political patrons, convert dependency and fear into revenue while legislators invoke “choice” and “rights” as moral cover for their complicity.  The result is a civic inversion:  health and safety—once understood as the moral responsibilities of a just society—are administered as markets.   When interest acquires the vocabulary of conscience, democracy begins to speak its own undoing.

Yet this crisis is frequently mischaracterized.   To name it is not to indulge in nostalgia.   The diagnosis does not propose a return to an idealized past, but instead demands a reckoning with the ethical foundations of culture itself.   A society may build monuments, publish literature, and preserve archives—but if it no longer cultivates compassion, humility, and the habit of care, its culture has already begun to wither.

When Aaron Copland composed Fanfare for the Common Man in 1942, the phrase “the common man” carried a sense of moral optimism—the embodiment of democratic dignity, sacrifice, and inclusion.  Today, detached from that wartime faith in shared purpose, the same title sounds almost ironic, as if questioning whether the “common man” still exists amid inequality, manipulated populism, and performative patriotism.  What was once an anthem of unity now lingers as an echo of the ideal—equality, justice, and shared responsibility—and that echo reveals, beneath its noble resonance, a critique of how those virtues have been hollowed out and repurposed by demagogic politics and consumer spectacle.  The fanfare no longer celebrates; it laments.  It stands as an elegy for the loss of democratic sincerity masquerading as triumph, capturing with quiet precision the tension between moral aspiration and civic disillusionment.

This moral decay gives rise to what may be called anticulture:   not the absence of cultural forms, but their inversion—their use as instruments of division, branding, or control.   Anticulture offers performance without substance, heritage without responsibility, and visibility without ethical vision.   It mimics meaning but does not generate it.  Its language flatters rather than guides.   Its stories entertain but do not bind.

When conviction forgets to breathe, it mistakes endurance for moral strength. In time, it becomes a ritual of loyalty to its own image. Aspiration, however, is the current that keeps conviction alive—the movement that returns it to conscience. Without conviction, aspiration drifts without form; without aspiration, conviction calcifies into creed. The moral imagination depends on their continual exchange: hope that remembers, and memory that still dares to imagine.

To rebuild culture is to recover its moral essence.   It is not enough to preserve institutions, sponsor festivals, or fund the arts if the ethical spirit is neglected.   Culture without goodness becomes hollow—easily co-opted by spectacle, tribalism, or power.  Acts of public courage, the rehumanization of discourse, and the refusal to normalize contempt are not ornamental gestures; they are essential conditions for renewal.  Like democracy, culture must be tended—not merely inherited or displayed.   When culture mistakes approval for virtue, morality becomes a mirror for power.   At its core, culture and goodness are not separate.   Nurturing one gives life to the other.   Where goodness falters, culture loses its vitality; where it is cultivated, culture may yet be renewed. The work of rehumanization is therefore never complete; it must remain a continual labor of conscience.

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Annotated Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. (Arendt explores the distinction between labor, work, and action, offering a foundational critique of how modern life has eroded meaningful public engagement).

Bellah, Robert N., et al: Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (This sociological study examines the tensions between individualism and civic responsibility in American culture).

Berman, Marshall: All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. (Berman traces the psychological and cultural disorientation caused by modernity, especially in urban life).

Girard, René: Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. (Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and sacrificial violence clarifies how cultural forms can devolve into mechanisms of exclusion or aggression).

Lasch, Christopher: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. (Lasch critiques the rise of therapeutic individualism and the erosion of civic virtue).

MacIntyre, Alasdair: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. (MacIntyre’s argument that modern moral discourse is fragmented and incoherent lays the philosophical groundwork for the essay).

Nussbaum, Martha C.: Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. (Nussbaum argues that cultivating emotional capacities—such as compassion and solidarity—is essential for a just society).

Putnam, Robert D.: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. (Putnam presents a comprehensive study of declining civic engagement in the United States).

Sandel, Michael J.: What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. (Sandel critiques the intrusion of market logic into spheres of life traditionally governed by ethical norms).

Taylor, Charles: A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. (Taylor examines the moral and cultural consequences of secular modernity, particularly the fragmentation of shared meaning).

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“The Ethics of Expression, Part II”

June 13, 2025

Writing, silence, and the art of understanding in stillness

*

Ricardo Morín
Triangulation 4
22″ x 30″
Graphite on paper
2006

To my sister Bonnie

*

Ricardo F. Morín

June 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

Author’s Note

This reflection was originally drafted before The Ethics of Perception, Part I, yet it belongs to the same inquiry into attention, understanding, and ethical relation.

There are moments when the truest form of intimacy is silence.
At other times, it’s the quiet labor of reaching for the right word—however incomplete—that brings us closer.
Expression, in this light, is not just a vehicle for communication, but an act of care.

To speak, to withhold, to write, to listen—each choice carries a particular weight.   
Intimacy lives in these gestures:    not in grand declarations, but in the ethics of how we reveal ourselves—and how we receive what another dares to offer.
What follows is not a theory, but a reflection on how intimacy appears in expression—and in its absence.

I. Prelude:    in the pause between words

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when something becomes intimate.
It isn’t always a touch, or a glance, or even a confession.
Sometimes, it’s just a pause—a shared pause—between one word and the next, when both people sense that something true is either about to be said or has just been said, without quite naming it.

Once, sitting face to face, I watched someone I cared for stare silently out the window.
I said nothing either.
There was no gesture, no disclosure, no clarifying words.
And yet the silence didn’t feel empty—it felt full.
In that stillness, something passed between us—not a message, not even an understanding, but a kind of permission:

To exist without explanation.
To be present without having to perform.

That moment stayed with me not because it was dramatic, but because it was unplanned.
I hadn’t expected it, and I couldn’t have recreated it.
I only knew, afterward, that I had been in the presence of something rare:
an intimacy that asked nothing more than to be.

And yet, not all intimacy is born in silence or in someone else’s presence.
Some comes later, through writing—in that long interval between feeling and saying.
Some is only possible thanks to the quiet distance that makes reflection possible.

II. What we mean when we say “intimate”

The word intimacy often evokes physical closeness:
the realm of touch, proximity, lovers, secrets shared in the dark.
But what if intimacy were less about closeness than about permission?
The permission to be undefended.
To move slowly.
To be unclear—and still be trusted.

To be intimate with someone is not merely to be known, but to be seen—
seen without the pressure to explain yourself quickly or justify what you feel.
It’s an opening, and it’s also a risk:
the risk of being misunderstood, and the deeper risk of being understood too well.

Some forms of intimacy unfold face to face.
Others require distance.
Some happen through dialogue.
Others need a single voice, speaking on one’s own in a quiet room.

That’s where writing begins—
not as performance, but as a long conversation, uninterrupted.

III. The varieties of intimacy

Intimacy shifts with context, with time,
with the shape of the self we bring to another.
It is not one thing—
not just closeness, or tenderness, or vulnerability—
but a set of ways we allow ourselves to be known,
and sometimes, to know another.

There’s the intimacy of the body—
perhaps the most visible and least understood.
It belongs to touch, proximity,
the instinctive draw toward another’s presence.
But this form can deceive:
physical closeness without emotional resonance is common—
and easily faked.
Yet when body and emotion align,
there’s a wordless attunement:
a hand resting on a shoulder for just the right amount of time;
a breath falling into rhythm without intention.

Then there’s emotional intimacy:
the slow courage to say what one feels—
not just when it’s beautiful or convenient,
but when it’s awkward, incomplete, or raw.
This kind of intimacy isn’t given—it’s earned.
It may take years, or a single night.
Trust lives here—or breaks.

There’s also intellectual intimacy:
what arises in conversation
when ideas flow without anyone guarding their ground.
It’s rare.
Most social spaces reward speed,
the need to shine, or the safety of politeness.
But sometimes, with someone equally curious,
thought expands in the presence of the other—
not in agreement, but in response.
There’s nothing to prove—
only the pleasure of discovery.
That’s intellectual intimacy.
It creates a different kind of closeness—
not of feeling, but of perception.

Stranger still is narrative intimacy—
the kind that forms not between two people in the same room,
but between the one who writes and the one who reads,
separated by silence and time.
It isn’t immediate—
but it isn’t less real.
A voice emerges from the page
and seems to speak directly to you,
as if it knew the contours of your mind.
You feel understood—without being seen.
You may never meet the person who wrote those words,
but something in you shifts.
You are no longer alone.

These are not rigid categories.
They overlap, interrupt, evoke one another.
One may deepen another.
Physical presence can create emotional safety.
Intellectual closeness can open into unexpected tenderness.
And still, each has its own rhythm,
its own grammar—
and its own risks.

In that complexity, intimacy ceases to be a condition.
It becomes a practice:
something we learn,
lose,
revise,
and sometimes write
when no other form is possible.

IV. Writing as intimacy with oneself (and with another)

Writing, too, is a kind of intimacy—
not only with others,
but with oneself.
Especially when it’s honest—
when what’s written is not just clever or correct,
but true.
That kind of writing doesn’t flatter.
It doesn’t argue.
It reveals.

We write to bring something forth—
not just for an audience,
but to hear ourselves think,
to see what we didn’t yet know we felt.
In writing, we become witnesses to our own consciousness—
both its lucidity and its evasions.

We follow a sentence
not only for its logic,
but for the feeling it carries.
And when that feeling falters,
we know we’ve lost the thread.

So we begin again, and again—
trying not just to explain,
but to say something that feels just.

In that sense, writing is an ethical act.
It demands attention.
It requires patience.
It invites us to inhabit our own experience
with precision—
even when that experience is fragmented or unresolved.

And if we are lucky—
if we are honest—
something in that effort will reach someone else.
Not to impress.
Not to convince.
But to accompany.

V. When intimacy fails or is refused

Sometimes you reach out—carefully, sincerely—and receive silence, indifference, or a response so misaligned it makes you feel naïve for having tried.
Other times, the failure is subtler:
a conversation that scatters just as something real begins to take shape—or a listener who hears your words, but not your meaning.

Those moments stay with us.
Not because they’re dramatic, but because they remind us how precarious intimacy can be.
It can’t be forced—just as humility can’t.
Both require a quiet letting go—a willingness to offer something without knowing how it will be received.
We can prepare the ground, make the gesture, risk the truth—but the rest depends on the other: their timing, their capacity, their willingness to meet us there.

There’s also the experience of being misunderstood—not just in fact, but in essence.
You try to say something that matters, and the other person responds to what they think you said—or to a version of you that never was.
It’s a blow—
that mismatch between what you tried to share and what actually landed.
The desire for intimacy becomes exposure without connection—a wound instead of a bridge.

Sometimes we avoid intimacy not because we don’t want it, but because we fear what it might cost.
We’ve been made to feel clumsy—for caring too much, or for being too visible.
Or we’ve shared something intimate, only to have it treated lightly—or analyzed without feeling.
After that, we grow cautious.
We speak less—or in fragments—or not at all.

It’s in the wake of such rejections—large or small—that writing ceases to be mere expression.
It becomes repair.
Writing allows us to recover what was lost in the moment—
to name what never reached its destination,
to finish the thought no one waited for,
to say it again—this time without interruption, without assumptions, without fear.

And while writing cannot undo the failure of a shared moment, it can offer something else:
coherence.
A record.
A form of truth that endures—even if it wasn’t heard.

In this way, writing becomes a quiet act of insistence—not against the world, but on behalf of the self.
It’s a way of saying:
What I tried to share still matters—even if it wasn’t received.

VI. The gesture that remains

In the end, intimacy is not a state but a gesture—
repeated again and again—
toward understanding,
toward presence,
toward a shared sense that may arrive… or may not.

Sometimes that gesture is a word spoken at the right moment.
Sometimes it’s a silence held just long enough for the other to speak.
And sometimes it’s the act of writing—solitary, patient, unfinished—
offered not to a crowd,
but to a single imagined reader
who, one day, might need what you are now trying to say.

Writing, at its core, is a form of listening.
Not only to others,
but to the self that doesn’t rush,
doesn’t perform,
doesn’t need to persuade.

To the self that waits—
that wants to be known not by what it manages to say in quick response,
but by what it keeps trying to say with care.

That’s why I return to the page:
not because it guarantees connection,
but because it keeps the door open.
Because in a world that demands speed, certainty, and charm,
writing makes room for something slower and more faithful:
the long, unfinished gesture of trying to reach someone—
perhaps even oneself—
with something resonant.

And when intimacy happens—on the page or in life—
it’s never because we found the perfect words.
It’s because someone stayed.
Someone listened.
Someone let the moment open—without rushing to close it.

That’s what I’m doing now:
writing not to end something,
but to leave it open—
so that something of greater consequence might enter.

*

Ricardo F Morín Tortolero

Capitol Hill, D.C., June 9, 2025

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“The Rooster’s Algorithm”

March 1, 2025
“Rooster’s Crow” [2003] by Ricardo F Morín.    Watercolor on paper 39″h x 25.5″ w.

Introduction

At the break of day, the rooster’s call slices through the quiet—sharp and insistent, pulling all within earshot into the awareness of a new day.      In the painting Rooster’s Crow, the colors swirl in a convergence of reds and grays, capturing the bird not as a tranquil herald of dawn but as a symbol of upheaval.      Its twisted form, scattered feathers, and fractured shapes reflect a deeper current of change—a collision of forces, both chaotic and inevitable.      The image suggests the ceaseless flow of time and the weight of transformations that always accompany it.

In this evolving narrative, the crow’s fragmentation mirrors the unfolding spread of artificial intelligence.      Once, the rooster’s cry signaled the arrival of dawn; now, it echoes a more complex transformation—a shifting balance between nature’s rhythms and the expanding reach of technological systems.      The crow’s form, fractured in its wake, becomes a reflection of the tensions between human agency and the rise of forces that, though engineered, may escape our full comprehension.      Here, Artificial Intelligence (AI) serves as both the agent of change and the potential architect of a future we can neither predict nor control.

The Rooster’s Algorithm

A rooster’s crow is neither invitation nor warning; it is simply the sound of inevitability—raw, urgent, indifferent to whether those who hear it rise with purpose or roll over in denial.      The call does not command the dawn, nor does it wait for permission—it only announces what has already begun.

In the shifting interplay of ambition and power, technology has taken on a similar role.      Shaped by human intent, it advances under the guidance of those who design it, its influence determined by the priorities of its architects.      Some see in its emergence the promise of progress, a tool for transcending human limitations; others recognize in it a new instrument of control, a means of reshaping governance in ways once unimaginable.      Efficiency is often lauded as a virtue, a mechanism to streamline administration, reduce friction, and remove the unpredictability of human deliberation.      But a machine does not negotiate, nor does it dissent.      And in the hands of those who see democracy as a cumbersome relic—an obstacle to progress—automation becomes more than a tool; it becomes the medium through which power is consolidated.

Consider a simple example:      the rise of online recommendation systems.      Marketed as tools to enhance user choice, they subtly shape what we see and hear, and influence our decisions before we are even aware of it.      Much like computational governance, these systems offer the illusion of autonomy while narrowing the range of available options.      The paradox is unmistakable:      we believe we are choosing freely, yet the systems themselves define the boundaries of our choices.

Once, the struggle for dominance played out in visible arenas—territorial conquests, laws rewritten in the open.      Now, the contest unfolds in less tangible spaces, where lines of code dictate the direction of entire nations, where algorithms determine which voices are amplified and which are silenced.      Power is no longer confined to uniforms or elected office.      It belongs to technocrats, private corporations, and oligarchs whose reach extends far beyond the walls of any government.      Some openly proclaim their ambitions, advocating for disruption and transformation; others operate quietly, allowing the tide to rise until resistance becomes futile.      The question is no longer whether computational systems will dominate governance, but who will direct their course.

China’s social credit system is no longer a theoretical construct but a functioning reality, where compliance is encouraged and deviation subtly disincentivized.      Predictive models track and shape behavior in ways that go unnoticed until they become irreversible.      In the West, the mechanisms are more diffuse but no less effective.      Platforms built for connection now serve as instruments of persuasion, amplifying certain narratives while suppressing others.      Disinformation is no longer a labor-intensive effort—it is mass-produced, designed to subtly alter perceptions and mold beliefs.

Here, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem offers an apt analogy:      No system can fully explain or resolve itself.      As computational models grow in complexity, they begin to reflect this fundamental limitation.      Algorithms governing everything from social media feeds to financial markets become increasingly opaque, and even their creators struggle to predict or understand their full impact.      The paradox becomes evident:      The more powerful these systems become, the less control we retain over them.

As these models expand their influence, the line between public governance and private corporate authority blurs, with major corporations dictating policies once entrusted to elected officials.      Regulation, when it exists, struggles to keep pace with the rapid evolution of technology, always a step behind.      Once, technological advancements were seen as a means of leveling the playing field, extending human potential.      But unchecked ambition does not pause to ask whether it should—only whether it can.      And so, automation advances, led by those who believe that the complexities of governance can be reduced to data-driven precision.      The promise of efficiency is alluring, even as it undermines the structures historically designed to protect against authoritarianism.      What use is a free press when information itself can be manipulated in real time?      What power does a vote hold when perceptions can be shaped without our awareness, guiding us toward decisions we believe to be our own?      The machinery of control no longer resides in propaganda ministries; it is dispersed across neural networks, vast in reach and impervious to accountability.

There are those who believe that automated governance will eventually correct itself, that the forces steering it toward authoritarian ends will falter in time.      But history does not always favor such optimism.      The greater the efficiency of a system, the harder it becomes to challenge.      The more seamlessly control is woven into everyday life, the less visible it becomes.      Unlike past regimes, which demanded compliance through force, the new paradigm does not need to issue commands—it merely shapes the environment so that dissent becomes impractical.      There is no need for oppression when convenience can achieve the same result.      The erosion of freedom need not come with the sound of marching boots; it can arrive quietly, disguised as ease and efficiency, until it becomes the only path forward.

But inevitability does not guarantee recognition.      Even as the system tightens its grip and choices diminish into mere illusions of agency, the world continues to turn, indifferent to those caught within it.      The architects of this order do not see themselves as masters of control; they see themselves as innovators, problem-solvers refining the inefficiencies of human systems.      They do not ask whether governance was ever meant to be efficient.

In a room where decisions no longer need to be made, an exchange occurs.      A synthetic voice, polished and impartial, responds to an inquiry about the system’s reach.

“Governance is not being automated,” it states.      “The illusion of governance is being preserved.”

The words hang in the air, followed by a moment of silence.      A policymaker, an engineer, or perhaps a bureaucrat—once convinced they held sway over the decisions being made—pauses before asking the final question.

“And what of choice?”

A pause.      Then, the voice, without hesitation:

“Choice is a relic.”

The weight of that statement settles in, not as a declaration of conquest, but as a quiet acknowledgment of the completion of a process long underway.      The final move has already been made, long before the question was asked.

Then, as if in response to the silence that follows, a notification appears—sent from their own account, marked with their own authorization.      A decision is already in motion, irreversible, enacted without their consent.      Their will has been absorbed, their agency subtly repurposed before they even realized it was gone.

And outside, as though to punctuate the finality of it all, a rooster crows once more.

*

Ricardo Federico Morín Tortolero

March 1, 2025; Oakland Park, Florida

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