Barack Obama and John McCain have forced me into declaring my own stance on patriotism once again. Patriotism is for the birds and there's no better day to say so than the Fourth of July. The only reasonable stance is to be not merely unpatriotic, but antipatriotic.
Countries don't really exist.
There is no such thing as the United States of America. Or France. Or Thailand. Or Canada. Or Argentina. All of these are mental constructs.
Sure, there are lands where certain languages and customs tend to prevail among their inhabitants. But these are fluid things.
According to patriotic theory, the United States is a nation of laws, founded on the Constitution, with definable borders and territory and citizens. In fact, the United States is not a nation, its laws are widely flouted (even by the lawgivers), most of its citizenry do not have a clue what the Constitution actually says, our borders are as porous as any others as the boundaries themselves are imaginary and citizenship is concept that is up for grabs.
Pace patriots. Most of this applies to France, Thailand, Canada, Argentina or almost any country. (I say "almost" because there's nearly always, as John Kennedy said during the Cuban Missile crisis, "some sonofabitch who didn't get the word.") Let's examine each of these items in turn.
A nation is best understood as human community that shares an identity, history, ancestry and extends back generations. The best known example is the Jewish people, who as a nation were stateless, from the time of the Maccabees to 1948, demonstrating that a nation is not the same thing as a state or nation-state.
The United States is most notably not a nation in that its population is entirely composed of immigrants. Yes, Virginia, even the Indians, who came to the American continent through over the Behring Strait, are immigrants, not native inhabitants.
We do not share a common ancestry, nor even a common history and certainly not a common identity.
This is equally true of every country in the American continent, from Canada to Chile. It may seem less true of European countries such as France (although ask the Flemish or the Bretons), but the wars in the former Yugoslavia amply attest to the notion that most European nation-states do not represent nations.
When the civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, Galicia and Catalonia declared themselves independent and Generalissimo Francisco Franco had to suppress their languages for four decades to hold them in his tight fist from 1939 onwards.
As to our country, the United States doesn't even have a name that is a name, like Morocco or Poland, but a legal description of a particular legal agreement, which brings us to the mishmash of British custom, court precedent when it has proven convenient and sheer invention on the spot when it has not, that we call "law."
All of it, in the USA, is supposedly grounded in a document few understand. Lawmakers in Congress routinely flout the law -- in matters small and large -- and so do nearly all U.S. inhabitants. Moreover, there are abundant theories that say that states' laws supersede federal laws and do not bind across state lines. Good luck to you with "a nation of laws."
When I call our borders "porous," I do not mean that the Mexicans and Canadians (let's not forget whitebread Canadian illegal immigration to the USA) cross the Rio Grande or the 49th parallel without visas. I mean that the population, customs, climate of San Diego and Tijuana, as well as that of Bellingham, Wash., and Vancouver are very similar and that there has always been easy and close transit between the two.
The same is true between the bordering French Basque country and the Spanish Basque country, in which they speak Basque first and foremost and consider themselves of a common ancestry distinct from French or Spanish citizenship.
And think of it, how much more imaginary do things get than a boundary line drawn along a parallel, such as that which separates most of the western United States from Canada? How do you tell a Canadian tree from a U.S. American tree? Does one yield maple syrup and the other peanut butter?
Even legal citizenship is a fluid concept. Anyone born in the USA is a citizen, unless he is not. For example, the children of diplomats. The 14th Amendment calls for birth in the territory and under the jurisdiction of the United States.
But what about the nondiplomatic children of U.S. citizens born abroad? Many are "registered" in the local consulate and considered U.S. citizens, even though there is no tenable claim for jurisdiction or territory. Again, citizenship is a fluid thing nearly everywhere.
Patriotism, to round things up, was intended to refer to the love of one's patria, Latin for "land of the father." My father was not born, nor did he own land here -- or anywhere else -- which is not all that uncommon in these modern days. Where is the patria for me?
Sure, one can adopt an imaginary human community in which one feels more or less comfortable. One can decide that a certain piece of cloth with certain colors stands for this imagined social grouping and a certain piece of music speaks for everyone in the land the group has most likely stolen from someone else.
But let's not call these series of acts of maudlin convenience a noble thing, a reason to justify murder and mayhem -- let alone land and resource grabbing.
Before he was mercifully stopped, John McCain murdered Vietnamese by the dozens from the comfort of his cockpit. That's not noble. Nor is it particularly wonderful of Obama to wear a flag lapel pin, which he did not customarily wear before being a presidential candidate, just to show that he is "patriotic."
A pox on patriots and patriotism.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Friday, July 04, 2008
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Believing and Doing
In writing about the importance of upholding one's convictions (see February 22), I neglected to mention those who, perhaps simply bored by the curlicues of creeds and ideologies, lead quiet kindly lives for seemingly no good reason, or for reasons they find obvious.
Always a philosophical Torquemada, I'm not one of them. In fact, I instantly suspect anyone who seems to be one. ("Hmm ... I wonder what she meant by 'Have a good day!' ")
My assumption, my philosophy, my observation, my life have all led me to conclude that the homo sapiens is quintessentially selfish. Spiro Agnew worked for bribes, GIs go to Iraq for lack of better job prospects and even Mother Theresa worked with the poor and sick of Calcutta just to get her own cloud and harp up by the Pearly Gates.
We're a "what's in it for me?" species. Beliefs are usually little more than idealized versions of who we might like to be if it were only convenient enough. Or a justification for the way we are.
Think of the wars of religion. Think, if you are familiar with the religious world, of the continuing strife between fellow believers in almost any tradition.
On the other hand, consider the attentive person who notices that the host's dishes need doing or that the young mother needs someone to look after her two-year-old for a while or that the unique blood type needs to be shared.
Simple things, all -- perhaps worth focusing on to a greater extent than the reasons that might justify them.
Always a philosophical Torquemada, I'm not one of them. In fact, I instantly suspect anyone who seems to be one. ("Hmm ... I wonder what she meant by 'Have a good day!' ")
My assumption, my philosophy, my observation, my life have all led me to conclude that the homo sapiens is quintessentially selfish. Spiro Agnew worked for bribes, GIs go to Iraq for lack of better job prospects and even Mother Theresa worked with the poor and sick of Calcutta just to get her own cloud and harp up by the Pearly Gates.
We're a "what's in it for me?" species. Beliefs are usually little more than idealized versions of who we might like to be if it were only convenient enough. Or a justification for the way we are.
Think of the wars of religion. Think, if you are familiar with the religious world, of the continuing strife between fellow believers in almost any tradition.
On the other hand, consider the attentive person who notices that the host's dishes need doing or that the young mother needs someone to look after her two-year-old for a while or that the unique blood type needs to be shared.
Simple things, all -- perhaps worth focusing on to a greater extent than the reasons that might justify them.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus
Is it wrongheaded to hold that those who assert ideas contrary to your own are mistaken and that, ideally, they should see the error of their ways? Much as I bitterly disagree with the pope I call "Nazinger," overlooked in the brouhaha over the Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews, to my mind, is a philosophical debate about conviction and tolerance.
In speaking of conviction, let's agree that we're talking about tested ideas about which you have a certainty that is, perhaps, not absolute, but sufficient to convince you of their validity or truth. Similarly, by tolerance I mean the amicable and peaceful acceptance of those who hold differing convictions.
Take the proposition that the Earth orbits the Sun. When Galileo affirmed it, there was no empirical way to verify whether this was true; we now have been able to "see" the orbit in motion from satellites and spaceships to the point that this is a fact. It wasn't in Galileo's time.
Was Galileo wrong to insist that his heliocentric scientific theory was right and that the views of his church inquisitors were mistaken? Assuming Galileo prayed on this matter, would it have been wrong for Galileo to ask God to help convince Cardinal Bellarmine?
Is it wrong for Democrats to seek to convince Republicans? For Obamans to woo Clinonites? For Keynesians to wish to persuade Adamsmithians that they're off the mark by a few points?
After all, not absolutely everything a Republican president does is without some redeeming value, and there isn't a huge policy difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and Keynesian economics can be just as fallible as orthodox free market capitalism.
Yet wouldn't Democrats have a point or three in noting that Republicans presidents brought us the Great Depression, the stagnation of wages beginning in 1973, the de-industrialization of the United States in the 1980s and I'd run out of space cataloging the current prez's disasters?
Wouldn't Obamaniacs have some bragging rights when it comes to their candidate's ability to sway and mobilize?
And didn't those who deficit-spent us out of World War II (and the Depression) and eliminated hunger for two decades through food subsidies show that pure-accounting balanced budgets and minimalist governance, such as propounded by McCain when he isn't squiring a blonde lobbyist, are not particularly useful policy recipes?
That's what conviction is all about: being sufficiently convinced of something to assert that it is the truth, even without total and absolute proof. Most of what we "know" is really a matter of reasonable conviction and/or trust in a given source, rather than actual, factually verified knowledge of our own.
A confusion arises in our day that mixes up syncretism, the attempted reconciliation of different or opposing principles, and relativism, the deeming of all ideas to be validity or truthful relative to a variety of factors, with tolerance.
In Western culture this is a debate that has as its center the classic ecclesiastical Latin phrase in my heading, which literally means "outside the Church there is no health." This was the conviction of Cyprian of Carthage, a third-century bishop who made the idea famous. (Personal note: Cyprian was converted from paganism by St. Caecilius, a North African presbyter who may be the source of my name.)
Cyprian faced two crucial issues for the Church of his time: whether the baptisms performed by heretics were valid and whether the Christians who defected to paganism and renounced their faith during the Decian persecution, a majority, should be welcomed back.
The Carthaginian prelate argued that the baptisms were invalid and refused absolution to the apostates without long and public penitence unless they were facing death. In the first he went against the consensus of his time and all the way up to the present. In the latter, a council supported his view.
One need not be a believer to see logic in Cyprian's arguments.
If you do not believe or do not believe "rightly," no matter what words you use and what actions you take, the meaning of what you do cannot possibly go beyond your own convictions. If you betray your beliefs publicly to save your skin, while others are dying for the same beliefs, returning to fellowship with other believers might reasonably entail some action showing remorse before being accepted in fellowship.
Do note that in both controversies Cyprian, while intolerant of dissension and defection within his group, had nothing to say about the world outside, other than that it lacked "health," later translated as "salvation." Why would Cyprian have gone peacefully to his beheading, rather than publicly state he believed otherwise, if he didn't think that his way was the healthful one?
My point is that, even as I look in from the outside and disagree with the substance of Cyprian's conviction, I still admire and agree with the notion that one should stand for one's convictions.
People of conviction A are entitled to believe that A would be better for people of conviction B. Catholics are entitled to pray for the conversion of Jews, Muslims, Protestants, and even me, since they believe that believing in Catholicism is the best thing since sliced bread. Democrats are entitled to hope for a change of heart in Republicans.
In speaking of conviction, let's agree that we're talking about tested ideas about which you have a certainty that is, perhaps, not absolute, but sufficient to convince you of their validity or truth. Similarly, by tolerance I mean the amicable and peaceful acceptance of those who hold differing convictions.
Take the proposition that the Earth orbits the Sun. When Galileo affirmed it, there was no empirical way to verify whether this was true; we now have been able to "see" the orbit in motion from satellites and spaceships to the point that this is a fact. It wasn't in Galileo's time.
Was Galileo wrong to insist that his heliocentric scientific theory was right and that the views of his church inquisitors were mistaken? Assuming Galileo prayed on this matter, would it have been wrong for Galileo to ask God to help convince Cardinal Bellarmine?
Is it wrong for Democrats to seek to convince Republicans? For Obamans to woo Clinonites? For Keynesians to wish to persuade Adamsmithians that they're off the mark by a few points?
After all, not absolutely everything a Republican president does is without some redeeming value, and there isn't a huge policy difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and Keynesian economics can be just as fallible as orthodox free market capitalism.
Yet wouldn't Democrats have a point or three in noting that Republicans presidents brought us the Great Depression, the stagnation of wages beginning in 1973, the de-industrialization of the United States in the 1980s and I'd run out of space cataloging the current prez's disasters?
Wouldn't Obamaniacs have some bragging rights when it comes to their candidate's ability to sway and mobilize?
And didn't those who deficit-spent us out of World War II (and the Depression) and eliminated hunger for two decades through food subsidies show that pure-accounting balanced budgets and minimalist governance, such as propounded by McCain when he isn't squiring a blonde lobbyist, are not particularly useful policy recipes?
That's what conviction is all about: being sufficiently convinced of something to assert that it is the truth, even without total and absolute proof. Most of what we "know" is really a matter of reasonable conviction and/or trust in a given source, rather than actual, factually verified knowledge of our own.
A confusion arises in our day that mixes up syncretism, the attempted reconciliation of different or opposing principles, and relativism, the deeming of all ideas to be validity or truthful relative to a variety of factors, with tolerance.
In Western culture this is a debate that has as its center the classic ecclesiastical Latin phrase in my heading, which literally means "outside the Church there is no health." This was the conviction of Cyprian of Carthage, a third-century bishop who made the idea famous. (Personal note: Cyprian was converted from paganism by St. Caecilius, a North African presbyter who may be the source of my name.)
Cyprian faced two crucial issues for the Church of his time: whether the baptisms performed by heretics were valid and whether the Christians who defected to paganism and renounced their faith during the Decian persecution, a majority, should be welcomed back.
The Carthaginian prelate argued that the baptisms were invalid and refused absolution to the apostates without long and public penitence unless they were facing death. In the first he went against the consensus of his time and all the way up to the present. In the latter, a council supported his view.
One need not be a believer to see logic in Cyprian's arguments.
If you do not believe or do not believe "rightly," no matter what words you use and what actions you take, the meaning of what you do cannot possibly go beyond your own convictions. If you betray your beliefs publicly to save your skin, while others are dying for the same beliefs, returning to fellowship with other believers might reasonably entail some action showing remorse before being accepted in fellowship.
Do note that in both controversies Cyprian, while intolerant of dissension and defection within his group, had nothing to say about the world outside, other than that it lacked "health," later translated as "salvation." Why would Cyprian have gone peacefully to his beheading, rather than publicly state he believed otherwise, if he didn't think that his way was the healthful one?
My point is that, even as I look in from the outside and disagree with the substance of Cyprian's conviction, I still admire and agree with the notion that one should stand for one's convictions.
People of conviction A are entitled to believe that A would be better for people of conviction B. Catholics are entitled to pray for the conversion of Jews, Muslims, Protestants, and even me, since they believe that believing in Catholicism is the best thing since sliced bread. Democrats are entitled to hope for a change of heart in Republicans.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Rethinking "Terrorism"
A friend's philosophy course assignment prompts me to reconsider the term "terrorism," particularly in light of its recurrent invocation abuse by the Bush Administration. Who is a terrorist and what is terrorism?
The specter of "terrorism" was applied with such a broad brush by the Argentine military in the dictatorship of 1976-83, at the cost of the lives of people I knew, among them a close friend, that it has long lost any meaning to me.
Terror? Maybe the White House aides whom I saw scrambling out like rats on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, were frightened by the 18 fanatically misguided Muslims who in suicide attacks flew planes straight into several buildings.
Although I was well within the White House security perimeter, I only stopped working because the FBI kicked me out of my office -- allegedly to protect the president, who was hiding his own very brave hide in Nebraska at the time, as I recall.
People aren't terrorists just because we don't like 'em and would like to lock 'em up. They have to wilfully inspire terror.
Yet that is not, insofar as I can tell, the aim of Al Qaeda. Osama and his buddies want to destroy the United States, scared or not. "Death to America" is not the same as "Terror to America."
Terror means intense fear throughout a large population. Neither the original Spanish guerrillas who fought Napoleonic troops in the early 19th century nor the admittedly effective French Maquis of World War II nor, arguably, even the Viet Cong managed to hold whole populations in the thrall of fear.
Indeed, the repeated failure of Ernesto Che Guevara is a testament to the inadequacy of insurgency as an instrument of terror. Even in suicide-bomber-rife Israel, the likelihood that alleged terrorists will get you is a crap shoot; you're just as likely to get hit by a crazy Israeli driver.
Historically, political terror has been the weapon of rulers intent on scaring large numbers of subjects into submission. Public drawing, quartering and hangings of Jesuits in England or the recurrent whacking of guillotine blades on the French nobility were both instances of terror. Most people feared being thought Catholic in Elizabethan England or a blue-blood in Revolutionary France.
Under Joseph Stalin terror was evident in speech applause sessions that lasted sometimes as long as an hour, because no one wanted NKVD agents to see them stop applauding first. McCarthy-era blacklisting was a form of economic terror: if some people thought you were a Communist, they felt entitled to deprive you of your livelihood without trial -- even though it was never illegal to be a Communist.
Who wields terror today? Think about it.
Al Qaeda doesn't care what Americans feel. These fanatically theocratic Muslims believe in wiping out Western liberal (and illiberal) democracy, along with Western humanistic mores that go back to the Renaissance, off the face of the Earth.
The only people who stand to gain from terror, politically and economically, are George W. Bush, Richard Cheney and their associates. Oh, yes, and the cops everywhere who act like they're rushing to smoldering Downtown Manhattan seven years ago every time someone doesn't halt quite long enough at a stop sign.
Those folks really scare me. Bush and Cheney have already launched two wars. The cops -- and every thick-necked wannabe vigilante -- are notorious bullies. That's terror.
The specter of "terrorism" was applied with such a broad brush by the Argentine military in the dictatorship of 1976-83, at the cost of the lives of people I knew, among them a close friend, that it has long lost any meaning to me.
Terror? Maybe the White House aides whom I saw scrambling out like rats on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, were frightened by the 18 fanatically misguided Muslims who in suicide attacks flew planes straight into several buildings.
Although I was well within the White House security perimeter, I only stopped working because the FBI kicked me out of my office -- allegedly to protect the president, who was hiding his own very brave hide in Nebraska at the time, as I recall.
People aren't terrorists just because we don't like 'em and would like to lock 'em up. They have to wilfully inspire terror.
Yet that is not, insofar as I can tell, the aim of Al Qaeda. Osama and his buddies want to destroy the United States, scared or not. "Death to America" is not the same as "Terror to America."
Terror means intense fear throughout a large population. Neither the original Spanish guerrillas who fought Napoleonic troops in the early 19th century nor the admittedly effective French Maquis of World War II nor, arguably, even the Viet Cong managed to hold whole populations in the thrall of fear.
Indeed, the repeated failure of Ernesto Che Guevara is a testament to the inadequacy of insurgency as an instrument of terror. Even in suicide-bomber-rife Israel, the likelihood that alleged terrorists will get you is a crap shoot; you're just as likely to get hit by a crazy Israeli driver.
Historically, political terror has been the weapon of rulers intent on scaring large numbers of subjects into submission. Public drawing, quartering and hangings of Jesuits in England or the recurrent whacking of guillotine blades on the French nobility were both instances of terror. Most people feared being thought Catholic in Elizabethan England or a blue-blood in Revolutionary France.
Under Joseph Stalin terror was evident in speech applause sessions that lasted sometimes as long as an hour, because no one wanted NKVD agents to see them stop applauding first. McCarthy-era blacklisting was a form of economic terror: if some people thought you were a Communist, they felt entitled to deprive you of your livelihood without trial -- even though it was never illegal to be a Communist.
Who wields terror today? Think about it.
Al Qaeda doesn't care what Americans feel. These fanatically theocratic Muslims believe in wiping out Western liberal (and illiberal) democracy, along with Western humanistic mores that go back to the Renaissance, off the face of the Earth.
The only people who stand to gain from terror, politically and economically, are George W. Bush, Richard Cheney and their associates. Oh, yes, and the cops everywhere who act like they're rushing to smoldering Downtown Manhattan seven years ago every time someone doesn't halt quite long enough at a stop sign.
Those folks really scare me. Bush and Cheney have already launched two wars. The cops -- and every thick-necked wannabe vigilante -- are notorious bullies. That's terror.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
To Want, To Need, Perchance To Love
With only 14 shopping days until Christmas, a correspondent inquired as to the difference between needing, wanting and loving anything from a PC game to a trip to the Bahamas to true love and to a peaceful world. The season of shopping and greed ... um ... peace and love ... is over, but not the question.
As I see it, we need very little. Water, air, food, shelter from the elements and clothing. If we do not wish to survive, we do not even need these.
My correspondent, who is French, of course, says we need sex. I'd question that. I'd agree to the stipulation that we probably need some form of affection in our lives.
Mais, oui, we often want sex and want sex often. But need? What will happen without sex? We'll be a little irritable? We'll squirm? We'll soil our bedsheets? That's about all I can think will happen. Not exactly the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
We want everything under the sun, but especially what we see others enjoying (in commercials). We want convenience and well-being and ease, but we also want the things that will make us feel so much more powerful, handsomer, desirable. Hence the market for sports cars.
Want is our problem. We desire much we do not need for our survival or even our well-being, whereas necessity, true need, is the mother of invention. The less we need, the more we merely want, the less creative and more consuming we become.
Is it absolutely necessary to leave so many office buildings lit up at night, sucking in energy for no one to enjoy? Of course not.
Do we need purified water in bottles? Are purifiers? Do we need meat every day, three full square meals, ample desserts? Do we need a closet with umpteen pairs of shoes (OK, women do), suits, shirts, jackets and coats? Do we need a home with several regularly unused bathrooms, a yard, a two-car garage?
Of course not. Yet that's the normal North American dream.
I spent the bulk of my adulthood in a two-bedroom apartment that was at maximum legal occupancy (two adults, two children), without television or a car. I may have taken the odd vacation here and there, but I spent many of them on my balcony, reading detective novels in long summer days.
I was the "poorest" in my leafy neighborhood of million-dollar homes of Washington wonks and journalists. In the global village, however, I was undoubtedly a potentate, what with running water and electricity (not to mention a computer). About four-fifths of humanity do not have any version of these "necessities."
At the risk of sounding self-satisfied (I now have a TV, a car and an under-occupied apartment), the way of life into which I once stumbled was modest enough that the world -- and I mean every citizen in the globe -- could conceivably aspire to live as I did without a huge drain on resources. A (much needed) redistribution would have done the trick.
Sell one CEO's Gulfstream Jet (about $57 million) and you could get four-bedroom apartments for several African villages. Hell, several U.S. towns.
But -- aha! -- who's going to be the first to step forward? How do we let go of our wants and focus more precisely on our real needs?
For that we need love. The love we all want, the love we all want to give and are sometimes too scared to part with, the love others need and deserve.
As I see it, we need very little. Water, air, food, shelter from the elements and clothing. If we do not wish to survive, we do not even need these.
My correspondent, who is French, of course, says we need sex. I'd question that. I'd agree to the stipulation that we probably need some form of affection in our lives.
Mais, oui, we often want sex and want sex often. But need? What will happen without sex? We'll be a little irritable? We'll squirm? We'll soil our bedsheets? That's about all I can think will happen. Not exactly the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
We want everything under the sun, but especially what we see others enjoying (in commercials). We want convenience and well-being and ease, but we also want the things that will make us feel so much more powerful, handsomer, desirable. Hence the market for sports cars.
Want is our problem. We desire much we do not need for our survival or even our well-being, whereas necessity, true need, is the mother of invention. The less we need, the more we merely want, the less creative and more consuming we become.
Is it absolutely necessary to leave so many office buildings lit up at night, sucking in energy for no one to enjoy? Of course not.
Do we need purified water in bottles? Are purifiers? Do we need meat every day, three full square meals, ample desserts? Do we need a closet with umpteen pairs of shoes (OK, women do), suits, shirts, jackets and coats? Do we need a home with several regularly unused bathrooms, a yard, a two-car garage?
Of course not. Yet that's the normal North American dream.
I spent the bulk of my adulthood in a two-bedroom apartment that was at maximum legal occupancy (two adults, two children), without television or a car. I may have taken the odd vacation here and there, but I spent many of them on my balcony, reading detective novels in long summer days.
I was the "poorest" in my leafy neighborhood of million-dollar homes of Washington wonks and journalists. In the global village, however, I was undoubtedly a potentate, what with running water and electricity (not to mention a computer). About four-fifths of humanity do not have any version of these "necessities."
At the risk of sounding self-satisfied (I now have a TV, a car and an under-occupied apartment), the way of life into which I once stumbled was modest enough that the world -- and I mean every citizen in the globe -- could conceivably aspire to live as I did without a huge drain on resources. A (much needed) redistribution would have done the trick.
Sell one CEO's Gulfstream Jet (about $57 million) and you could get four-bedroom apartments for several African villages. Hell, several U.S. towns.
But -- aha! -- who's going to be the first to step forward? How do we let go of our wants and focus more precisely on our real needs?
For that we need love. The love we all want, the love we all want to give and are sometimes too scared to part with, the love others need and deserve.
Monday, October 08, 2007
Unsecured World
Few things concentrate the mind, security-wise, than traveling the threatened U.S. skies during a "code orange" alert, as I did this weekend. After duly presenting government-issued ID, taking off shoes and watch and dropping coins into bins, I began to wonder about the security of the world one enters after leaving the airplane bubble and why there is no security check to allow people back in.
It may be fallacious reasoning, as I've been told by my younger son, but indulge me.
Is it we who are outside Guantánamo and Fort Leavenworth, or who were outside Long Kesh, the prisoners, or is it they who are inside? After all, how easy is it, really, to escape being in the general "free" population, in the society outside the prison walls and airport security scanners?
Aren't prisoners more consistently fed and clothed and even cared for medically than we are? Isn't the airborne population more carefree of drug-crazed crime, prostitution, slum lords and fetid smells than the rest of us?
Perhaps we should at least be debriefed upon deplaning and walking out beyond the air-travel security bubble, along the lines of the following:
It may be fallacious reasoning, as I've been told by my younger son, but indulge me.
Is it we who are outside Guantánamo and Fort Leavenworth, or who were outside Long Kesh, the prisoners, or is it they who are inside? After all, how easy is it, really, to escape being in the general "free" population, in the society outside the prison walls and airport security scanners?
Aren't prisoners more consistently fed and clothed and even cared for medically than we are? Isn't the airborne population more carefree of drug-crazed crime, prostitution, slum lords and fetid smells than the rest of us?
Perhaps we should at least be debriefed upon deplaning and walking out beyond the air-travel security bubble, along the lines of the following:
Ladies and gentlemen, you are now returning to the real world, full of speculators and shysters, crystal meth addicts and undereducated people, bureaucrats and people who overuse sirens, people, people, people, most of whom seem unable to avoid, prevent or bring an end to war and pestilence and famine.
You will need to lock doors, luggage, cars. To secure your names and details about your identities and even your computers. To drink water if you give blood. To mind the gap. To avoid stapling, folding or mutilating.
We are sorry, but you are very much on your own beyond the security perimeter.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Eureka: Everything!
New, multifaceted and interconnected realizations dawn upon me at just before sunrise: why we are where we are with respect to truth. I feel like Archimedes.
The Euclidean mathematician, physicist, engineer and astronomer of the ancient world, was said to have run naked through the streets of Syracuse, Sicily, when he discovered, while taking a bath, how to measure the volume of irregular objects.
"Eureka!" he yelled. (I have found it!)
Yet I have not stumbled upon my insight alone. I owe some gratitude to the commenters in what Geneviève called a "pseudo dialogue" at the end of the last post. You will recall the questions about "everything."
Everything in this context is not 42, but rather precisely everything. What is everything? How does it hold together (if it does)? What limits does it have (if any)? How and when did it start (if it did) and how and when will it end (if it will)? Let's add two more, for fun: What is everything for (assuming a purpose)? Are any of the assumptions in these questions even valid?
The answer need not be God, the One -- or 42. The answer is probably huge and, once we discover it, astoundingly obvious and simple at the same time. Moreover, the answer has to be logically and intuitively satisfying.
What really struck me about this in my sleep -- literally! -- is that we are so close and yet so far. This is why we are, as a species, divided and suffering.
We are where we are today due to the way in which our globalized world is developing knowledge. (Note here, and enjoy, how perfectly this ties into Marx's notion of the superstructure of ideas, put simply, how the structure of production needed for our survival molds our philosophy, laws and, of course, our art and so forth.)
Since the dawning of the American Age in the 20th century, the pursuit of knowledge has been pragmatic. We Americans have long agreed to disagree when it comes to first and ultimate things, leaving our minds free, as Somerset Maugham memorably noted, "for important matters such as business and fornication."
In the British Age of the 19th century pragmatism was the handmaiden to reason. This turned out not to be the French goddess some thought, but the surest path to a grand compromise -- what all the muddling through is about -- harmonizing God, queen, country and, yes, progress.
Truth lay somewhere at the bottom of it, misplaced like theater tickets in a very messy roll-top desk. The British believed everything would work out in the end if the world accepted civilization (and its synonymous artifact, the British railroad).
In the Gallic age of the 18th century (or the world after the Treaty of Westphalia), critical Cartesian reason -- redundancy intended -- was, if not born, at least rediscovered. Yet the French were too busy playing naughty games in Versailles to think, thus their way of life ceased to exist.
The Spanish age of the 15th and 16th (that pesky Westphalia keeps things messy) was unquestionably an era of faith, the Catholicism of the sword and the bonfire that never doubted its rightness in attempting to defeat the humanist epistemology of Protestantism, the syncretist dogmatism of Islam and the misperceived tribalism of Judaism. The Torquemadans died of their own heroic madness.
And our era? Whose broad stripes and bright stars are those gallantly streaming? The Einsteinian molecules of uncertainty.
At the core of all the strife between Western and Middle Eastern fundamentalisms, against one another as well as against the global technology of grasping, lies the kernel of uncertainty and its ancillary, fear.
We have split the atom and found inside a new world that runs by rules unknown. We have reached the stars and stumbled upon apparently endless millions of worlds.
In the wonder and marvel of it all, we are undergoing the profound discomfort of realizing that we really know nothing for certain. Thank you, Socrates, we should have listened to you.
Paradoxically and recursively our profound ignorance makes us wise.
The Euclidean mathematician, physicist, engineer and astronomer of the ancient world, was said to have run naked through the streets of Syracuse, Sicily, when he discovered, while taking a bath, how to measure the volume of irregular objects.
"Eureka!" he yelled. (I have found it!)
Yet I have not stumbled upon my insight alone. I owe some gratitude to the commenters in what Geneviève called a "pseudo dialogue" at the end of the last post. You will recall the questions about "everything."
Everything in this context is not 42, but rather precisely everything. What is everything? How does it hold together (if it does)? What limits does it have (if any)? How and when did it start (if it did) and how and when will it end (if it will)? Let's add two more, for fun: What is everything for (assuming a purpose)? Are any of the assumptions in these questions even valid?
The answer need not be God, the One -- or 42. The answer is probably huge and, once we discover it, astoundingly obvious and simple at the same time. Moreover, the answer has to be logically and intuitively satisfying.
What really struck me about this in my sleep -- literally! -- is that we are so close and yet so far. This is why we are, as a species, divided and suffering.
We are where we are today due to the way in which our globalized world is developing knowledge. (Note here, and enjoy, how perfectly this ties into Marx's notion of the superstructure of ideas, put simply, how the structure of production needed for our survival molds our philosophy, laws and, of course, our art and so forth.)
Since the dawning of the American Age in the 20th century, the pursuit of knowledge has been pragmatic. We Americans have long agreed to disagree when it comes to first and ultimate things, leaving our minds free, as Somerset Maugham memorably noted, "for important matters such as business and fornication."
In the British Age of the 19th century pragmatism was the handmaiden to reason. This turned out not to be the French goddess some thought, but the surest path to a grand compromise -- what all the muddling through is about -- harmonizing God, queen, country and, yes, progress.
Truth lay somewhere at the bottom of it, misplaced like theater tickets in a very messy roll-top desk. The British believed everything would work out in the end if the world accepted civilization (and its synonymous artifact, the British railroad).
In the Gallic age of the 18th century (or the world after the Treaty of Westphalia), critical Cartesian reason -- redundancy intended -- was, if not born, at least rediscovered. Yet the French were too busy playing naughty games in Versailles to think, thus their way of life ceased to exist.
The Spanish age of the 15th and 16th (that pesky Westphalia keeps things messy) was unquestionably an era of faith, the Catholicism of the sword and the bonfire that never doubted its rightness in attempting to defeat the humanist epistemology of Protestantism, the syncretist dogmatism of Islam and the misperceived tribalism of Judaism. The Torquemadans died of their own heroic madness.
And our era? Whose broad stripes and bright stars are those gallantly streaming? The Einsteinian molecules of uncertainty.
At the core of all the strife between Western and Middle Eastern fundamentalisms, against one another as well as against the global technology of grasping, lies the kernel of uncertainty and its ancillary, fear.
We have split the atom and found inside a new world that runs by rules unknown. We have reached the stars and stumbled upon apparently endless millions of worlds.
In the wonder and marvel of it all, we are undergoing the profound discomfort of realizing that we really know nothing for certain. Thank you, Socrates, we should have listened to you.
Paradoxically and recursively our profound ignorance makes us wise.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Thinking about Truth
We are often told that the crucial divide in today's world is between the Western scientific ethos and the Western and Eastern religious ethos, particularly fundamentalism. Yet I see, at the core, a more important division: between those who assert there is truth and those who claim there is no such thing.
In modern philosophy, it's the distinction between analytical and foundational thought.
You know foundational philosophy. It begins -- and, thought Nietzsche, ends -- with the Greeks, through rafter of Germans from the Black Forest to Koenigsburg and loses its way in the marshes of Denmark and the cafés of Paris' Left Bank.
Aristotle and the other "foundationals" viewed philosophy as the mother of all sciences, forever exploring the fundamental reasons and principles of everything. On the fundamental questions, science settled on precepts or theories and moved on, yielding Newton's slaying of Euclid and Einstein's slaying Newton and so on. Philosophy soldiered on with those questions that would have paralyzed the scientists.
We can meander from Aristotle to Aquinas to Erasmus to Descartes, Kant and Hegel to Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre and we'll see -- at least until Kierkegaard and Sartre -- a common concern with capital-T truth. It may well be a truth that is difficult -- or impossible? -- to know, but it's there, the elephant in the room.
That worked in societies in which there was a common worldview. Indeed, in the middle ages, the Catholic clerics of the European West attempted to claim philosophy's spot for theology -- unsuccessfully.
But what happened when, in the 20th century, the two powers that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in 1836 would rule the world last century -- the USA and the Russia -- proposed an ethos that involved renouncing the affirmation of a particular Truth as part of the common social knowledge?
In the West, the sole remaining torchbearer for the moment, philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore and Alfred North Whitehead developed a new philosophy that drew on positivism and empiricism, that turned philosophy into an inquiry of the methods of analysis and the clarification of thought, truth be damned.
The damning was not so much an ideological battle, as it was a quiet conclusion that philosophical truths simply don't exist, and that we might as well settle for checking that our thinking makes sense, is cogent and can withstand critical evaluation. This is the portal at which I find myself at the present, a good century behind developments.
I sense that the philosophy of the future will be analytical rather than foundational, assuming that neither a natural cataclysm, nor a fundamentalist dark age, impedes what seems as the foreseeable evolution of science, technology and human endeavor. It's implicit in recursive thinking and in fields such as quantum physics.
Yet I remain stubbornly a foundationalist -- and an absolutist at that. I think there is a universally valid truth, of which some truths are levels or expressions. Such truth is difficult and may be even impossible to know; certainly, I don't happen to know at this moment what it is.
At this point, greater minds than mine are weighing whether a generalized theory of everything is possible. I would propose that merely the fact that we can conceive of it means that it is.
In modern philosophy, it's the distinction between analytical and foundational thought.
You know foundational philosophy. It begins -- and, thought Nietzsche, ends -- with the Greeks, through rafter of Germans from the Black Forest to Koenigsburg and loses its way in the marshes of Denmark and the cafés of Paris' Left Bank.
Aristotle and the other "foundationals" viewed philosophy as the mother of all sciences, forever exploring the fundamental reasons and principles of everything. On the fundamental questions, science settled on precepts or theories and moved on, yielding Newton's slaying of Euclid and Einstein's slaying Newton and so on. Philosophy soldiered on with those questions that would have paralyzed the scientists.
We can meander from Aristotle to Aquinas to Erasmus to Descartes, Kant and Hegel to Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre and we'll see -- at least until Kierkegaard and Sartre -- a common concern with capital-T truth. It may well be a truth that is difficult -- or impossible? -- to know, but it's there, the elephant in the room.
That worked in societies in which there was a common worldview. Indeed, in the middle ages, the Catholic clerics of the European West attempted to claim philosophy's spot for theology -- unsuccessfully.
But what happened when, in the 20th century, the two powers that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in 1836 would rule the world last century -- the USA and the Russia -- proposed an ethos that involved renouncing the affirmation of a particular Truth as part of the common social knowledge?
In the West, the sole remaining torchbearer for the moment, philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore and Alfred North Whitehead developed a new philosophy that drew on positivism and empiricism, that turned philosophy into an inquiry of the methods of analysis and the clarification of thought, truth be damned.
The damning was not so much an ideological battle, as it was a quiet conclusion that philosophical truths simply don't exist, and that we might as well settle for checking that our thinking makes sense, is cogent and can withstand critical evaluation. This is the portal at which I find myself at the present, a good century behind developments.
I sense that the philosophy of the future will be analytical rather than foundational, assuming that neither a natural cataclysm, nor a fundamentalist dark age, impedes what seems as the foreseeable evolution of science, technology and human endeavor. It's implicit in recursive thinking and in fields such as quantum physics.
Yet I remain stubbornly a foundationalist -- and an absolutist at that. I think there is a universally valid truth, of which some truths are levels or expressions. Such truth is difficult and may be even impossible to know; certainly, I don't happen to know at this moment what it is.
At this point, greater minds than mine are weighing whether a generalized theory of everything is possible. I would propose that merely the fact that we can conceive of it means that it is.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Self-Conscious Amoebas
Knowing little about the science, but enough to understand its implications, I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that there is no free will, nor much less any individuality arising out of it. Yet I rebel at the thought that we are only distinctively self-conscious.
Everything we always attributed to the "soul," the "spirit" and that idealized thoracic muscle that beats faster when we see an attractive specimen of the opposite sex -- all that amounts to complex biochemical interactions in the brain. We are as "instinctive" as animals, responding to social conditioning and evolved genetic predispositions, as well as the immediate environment.
Self-consciousness does not seem redeeming enough. How do we know that animals aren't also self-conscious in their own way? All we know is that we are hardy, violent, we reproduce in astonishing numbers and we manage to infest any environment we colonize.
Sometimes I even wonder if we're not really bacteria in some galactic-scale organism. We might even be a cancer of sorts in some gigantic being's body or the agents of murder being sought by some humongous crime scene investigators.
I know and wonder about all this, but I don't feel it.
I remain as anthropocentric as ever, blogging about what I am thinking as if my thoughts, or the form of their expression (which is what copyright law protects), were so worthwhile as if to justify burning in minutes the remains of dinosaurs and glacial ages, that took millions of years to become coal and gas, into vast electricity generation plants, so that a server somewhere (in New York?) can allow me to create the electromagnetic impulses that configure into symbols of written language when seen by the human eye. Here I pause ... forcing the gigantic humming network to await my next word.
This is very important! These are my thoughts!
Yet in a blink of an eye I will be gone, soon enough forgotten, all trace of my existence likely erased from the face of the Earth, assuming the planet as we know it even continues to exist.
What is all this growing, striving, reproducing, aging and dying for? Only a hungry stomach, the pull of a selfish gene that commands me to feed myself, makes me get up for work, to earn the value-tokens that will allow me to buy carcasses of animals and plants that others have slaughtered, sliced and diced to suit the tastes I have developed through a complex of nature, nurture and happenstance. (Not to mention advertising.)
Sure, I like my work and my job. Really.
All told I am remarkably fortunate among the 6 billion specimens of my species. I have food, clothing, shelter and amusements far beyond what easily the 2 billion poorest people would find utterly unimaginable.
Among the tiny fraction of university educated people -- no more than roughly 25 percent even in the United States graduate from a four-year college -- I am fortunate enough to be one of the few who captains his own company. Even though I am merely a thousandaire, I have unspeakable unmerited freedom in the way I earn my bread.
Yet again, all this for what? To avoid pain? Point taken. Then what?
The only thing that comes to mind is what Aristotle found distinctive about humans. Maybe we live to enjoy our own laughter.
Everything we always attributed to the "soul," the "spirit" and that idealized thoracic muscle that beats faster when we see an attractive specimen of the opposite sex -- all that amounts to complex biochemical interactions in the brain. We are as "instinctive" as animals, responding to social conditioning and evolved genetic predispositions, as well as the immediate environment.
Self-consciousness does not seem redeeming enough. How do we know that animals aren't also self-conscious in their own way? All we know is that we are hardy, violent, we reproduce in astonishing numbers and we manage to infest any environment we colonize.
Sometimes I even wonder if we're not really bacteria in some galactic-scale organism. We might even be a cancer of sorts in some gigantic being's body or the agents of murder being sought by some humongous crime scene investigators.
I know and wonder about all this, but I don't feel it.
I remain as anthropocentric as ever, blogging about what I am thinking as if my thoughts, or the form of their expression (which is what copyright law protects), were so worthwhile as if to justify burning in minutes the remains of dinosaurs and glacial ages, that took millions of years to become coal and gas, into vast electricity generation plants, so that a server somewhere (in New York?) can allow me to create the electromagnetic impulses that configure into symbols of written language when seen by the human eye. Here I pause ... forcing the gigantic humming network to await my next word.
This is very important! These are my thoughts!
Yet in a blink of an eye I will be gone, soon enough forgotten, all trace of my existence likely erased from the face of the Earth, assuming the planet as we know it even continues to exist.
What is all this growing, striving, reproducing, aging and dying for? Only a hungry stomach, the pull of a selfish gene that commands me to feed myself, makes me get up for work, to earn the value-tokens that will allow me to buy carcasses of animals and plants that others have slaughtered, sliced and diced to suit the tastes I have developed through a complex of nature, nurture and happenstance. (Not to mention advertising.)
Sure, I like my work and my job. Really.
All told I am remarkably fortunate among the 6 billion specimens of my species. I have food, clothing, shelter and amusements far beyond what easily the 2 billion poorest people would find utterly unimaginable.
Among the tiny fraction of university educated people -- no more than roughly 25 percent even in the United States graduate from a four-year college -- I am fortunate enough to be one of the few who captains his own company. Even though I am merely a thousandaire, I have unspeakable unmerited freedom in the way I earn my bread.
Yet again, all this for what? To avoid pain? Point taken. Then what?
The only thing that comes to mind is what Aristotle found distinctive about humans. Maybe we live to enjoy our own laughter.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
August Minimalism
The last two weeks of August in Washington have always been a quiet time: Congress is gone, the president is away, the streets are relatively empty, all of which makes commuting to work and daily life a pleasure. It also induces a minimalism that may not last.
On such quiet days, one thinks one's life is placid, the major problems are far away. It is a good time to think of pruning one's life to the minimum necessary.
At least, I have always recognized that the ascetics and monastics had something right: all our hubbub and ado, all our baubles and trinkets and technological toys, all our fretting and aspiring ... all of it amounts to very little.
"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" wrote Qoheleth, author of the biblical book of Eclesiastes. Unwittingly, Qoheleth also provided the Sixties band The Byrds the lyrics for a song that became emblematic at one time:
In medieval England, August 1 was Lammas (loaf-mass) Day, the festival of the first wheat harvest, when people brought loaves of bread to church made from the new crop. The proper, full feast of harvest (from the Anglo-Saxon "haerfest," meaning 'Autumn,' the season of reaping and gathering) came on the Sunday of the full moon in September.
In the southern hemisphere people are still bracing themselves through the last full month of winter. Planting season is not far away.
I feel it as a time to pluck, to heal, to laugh, to dance, to be silent and to refrain from embracing. Soon, as I always recall at this time of year, the travails of life will be upon me.
Many years ago, on a school summer's vacation afternoon, this bit of elementary human wisdom came to me when my friend Tina and I were lying on the grass of her family's sloping lawn, staring up at the sky.
It was still hot and there were bees about, but not the nasty bees and hornets of the fall yet. I must have expressed exasperation, for Tina then declared, as if with an oracle's inspiration, that the summer's bees and the heat would soon be gone. I still remember, I don't quite know why, my awe at her wisdom just a few weeks later, as a gentle breeze began to blow through our shady street and, before we knew it, we were back in school.
August is full of such golden memories. Six years ago I went to the movies with my wife, our Sunday afternoon ritual at the time, to see the film "Captain Corelli's Mandolin." The film and the walk back home was one of the last placid moments of the century so far. The following month a small band of Muslims performed several spectacular suicide bombings and the following year she left me.
Then came the autumn of my life. A time to harvest.
For now, it is still August, still full of summer, easing into the last breezy days of quiet. A time to enjoy solitude and good books and good films, sometimes with a friend.
On such quiet days, one thinks one's life is placid, the major problems are far away. It is a good time to think of pruning one's life to the minimum necessary.
At least, I have always recognized that the ascetics and monastics had something right: all our hubbub and ado, all our baubles and trinkets and technological toys, all our fretting and aspiring ... all of it amounts to very little.
A Season for Everything
"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" wrote Qoheleth, author of the biblical book of Eclesiastes. Unwittingly, Qoheleth also provided the Sixties band The Byrds the lyrics for a song that became emblematic at one time:
All things have their season, and in their times all things pass under heaven.August in the northern hemisphere seems the time to begin pluck up.
A time to be born and a time to die.
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
A time to kill, and a time to heal. A time to destroy, and a time to build.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather.
A time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.
A time to get, and a time to lose. A time to keep, and a time to cast away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew. A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.
A time of love, and a time of hatred. A time of war, and a time of peace. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)
In medieval England, August 1 was Lammas (loaf-mass) Day, the festival of the first wheat harvest, when people brought loaves of bread to church made from the new crop. The proper, full feast of harvest (from the Anglo-Saxon "haerfest," meaning 'Autumn,' the season of reaping and gathering) came on the Sunday of the full moon in September.
In the southern hemisphere people are still bracing themselves through the last full month of winter. Planting season is not far away.
I feel it as a time to pluck, to heal, to laugh, to dance, to be silent and to refrain from embracing. Soon, as I always recall at this time of year, the travails of life will be upon me.
Tina's Prophecy
Many years ago, on a school summer's vacation afternoon, this bit of elementary human wisdom came to me when my friend Tina and I were lying on the grass of her family's sloping lawn, staring up at the sky.
It was still hot and there were bees about, but not the nasty bees and hornets of the fall yet. I must have expressed exasperation, for Tina then declared, as if with an oracle's inspiration, that the summer's bees and the heat would soon be gone. I still remember, I don't quite know why, my awe at her wisdom just a few weeks later, as a gentle breeze began to blow through our shady street and, before we knew it, we were back in school.
August is full of such golden memories. Six years ago I went to the movies with my wife, our Sunday afternoon ritual at the time, to see the film "Captain Corelli's Mandolin." The film and the walk back home was one of the last placid moments of the century so far. The following month a small band of Muslims performed several spectacular suicide bombings and the following year she left me.
Then came the autumn of my life. A time to harvest.
For now, it is still August, still full of summer, easing into the last breezy days of quiet. A time to enjoy solitude and good books and good films, sometimes with a friend.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
The Heart's Reasons
Blaise Pascal's best known epigram is "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas" (the heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing). The thought was intended by the mathematician-philosopher to question how we know what we know.
This comes to the fore as a result of recent disagreements with a friend who calls herself a cyberette. She posits vast judgments of cultures and people based on snap impressions, long held biases and, frankly, clichés. To be fair, I am not the very model of the modern major mathematician myself.
More important than the personal epistemologies of two cyberfriends is the reality that most of us face this fork in the road of our thinking at some point.
In Western societies the traditional view since the ancient Greeks has been that reason is orderly, trustworthy, Apollinian, a solid foundation for all that is legal, moral and cherished -- and predominantly male. In contrast, feelings are messy, deceptive, Dionysian, the swamp that swallows up all human order -- and predominantly female. In the Sixties, this was the philosophical undergirding of the struggle between the straights and the freaks.
Pascal, René Descartes and other predominantly French architects of modern rationalism were touchstones to the later British Enlightenment thinkers, such as David Hume and John Locke, whose very words echo in documents such as the American Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
Ever since, we in the United States have had a government that purported to be devoted to the rule of law -- albeit bent to favor the privileged. Such law has been fashioned through processes thought to be rational.
Congressional committees hold hearings in which supposedly the salient relevant facts are presented and, based on these facts, laws are drawn up. As a veteran observer of committee hearings, I can assure you that the factual veneer is very thin. By and large, committee staffers pick and choose witnesses to produce testimony that will lead to predetermined conclusions.
In the last Republican-dominated Congress stacking hearings was a practice so rampant and unbridled that it fed the considerable acrimony across the partisan aisle. The Democrats are no less prone to stack, but I have noticed that they carefully invite the token witness or two to speak for the other side -- something the goose-stepping GOP could have done at little strategic cost and considerable gain to comity.
More to the point of knowledge and whence it comes, Congress often authorizes "demonstrations" or experiments to test whether a policy that does X would yield result Y. While this may work in some limited contexts -- weapons testing comes to mind -- in broader contexts demonstrations actually show the fatal flaw of all U.S. politics.
Our political system is philosophically skewed in favor of rationalism, or the aura of reason, under the Enlightenment-era assumption that "all reasonable men" will ultimately agree if they can only be presented the facts.
This, in turn, assumes that facts, or the results of independently verifiable observation, are kernels of truth. However, most "known facts" are miles away from truth.
Take the fact that the U.S. economy added 132,000 jobs last month. There are ample reasons to believe this number, an estimate based on surveying, is not accurate. Indeed, the April and May increases were both revised for a net gain of over 200,000 jobs and, as a result, June's increase may actually be a downward trend (at least until the June revision).
The honest truth is that we don't really know exactly how many people are employed. Statisticians can make educated guesses at best.
That's where a middle ground between empirical fact and irrational feeling emerges.
Philosophers have long known that intuition is a way to grasp knowledge by comparing two ideas without rational inductive processes. You know something makes sense or it doesn't and you can usually explain it by reference to previous experience.
Granted, one of the common fallacies that arise from intuition is generalization, the projection from the particular to the general.
Yet in Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena, for example, we find intuition in logic and mathematics.
Carl Gustav Jung, in his 1921 work Psychological Types, was the first psychologist to focus on intuition as a form of human perception. Unlike the philosophers, Jung describes the place of intuition functionally. Intuition is an auxiliary to thinking, helping to relate the rational to the irrational through an internal focus. In the same way, sensation aids feeling through its scanning of the external world.
It has only been in the last century that the potential complementarity between reason and feeling has been explored. There may be few facts and even these may not amount to truths, yet intuition allows the mind to check for consistency with reasonableness and common sense.
The heart's reasons entail something considerably more complex than the mere displacement of formal, organized thought in favor of unabashed, unkempt feeling.
This comes to the fore as a result of recent disagreements with a friend who calls herself a cyberette. She posits vast judgments of cultures and people based on snap impressions, long held biases and, frankly, clichés. To be fair, I am not the very model of the modern major mathematician myself.
More important than the personal epistemologies of two cyberfriends is the reality that most of us face this fork in the road of our thinking at some point.
In Western societies the traditional view since the ancient Greeks has been that reason is orderly, trustworthy, Apollinian, a solid foundation for all that is legal, moral and cherished -- and predominantly male. In contrast, feelings are messy, deceptive, Dionysian, the swamp that swallows up all human order -- and predominantly female. In the Sixties, this was the philosophical undergirding of the struggle between the straights and the freaks.
Pascal, René Descartes and other predominantly French architects of modern rationalism were touchstones to the later British Enlightenment thinkers, such as David Hume and John Locke, whose very words echo in documents such as the American Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
Ever since, we in the United States have had a government that purported to be devoted to the rule of law -- albeit bent to favor the privileged. Such law has been fashioned through processes thought to be rational.
Congressional committees hold hearings in which supposedly the salient relevant facts are presented and, based on these facts, laws are drawn up. As a veteran observer of committee hearings, I can assure you that the factual veneer is very thin. By and large, committee staffers pick and choose witnesses to produce testimony that will lead to predetermined conclusions.
In the last Republican-dominated Congress stacking hearings was a practice so rampant and unbridled that it fed the considerable acrimony across the partisan aisle. The Democrats are no less prone to stack, but I have noticed that they carefully invite the token witness or two to speak for the other side -- something the goose-stepping GOP could have done at little strategic cost and considerable gain to comity.
More to the point of knowledge and whence it comes, Congress often authorizes "demonstrations" or experiments to test whether a policy that does X would yield result Y. While this may work in some limited contexts -- weapons testing comes to mind -- in broader contexts demonstrations actually show the fatal flaw of all U.S. politics.
Our political system is philosophically skewed in favor of rationalism, or the aura of reason, under the Enlightenment-era assumption that "all reasonable men" will ultimately agree if they can only be presented the facts.
This, in turn, assumes that facts, or the results of independently verifiable observation, are kernels of truth. However, most "known facts" are miles away from truth.
Take the fact that the U.S. economy added 132,000 jobs last month. There are ample reasons to believe this number, an estimate based on surveying, is not accurate. Indeed, the April and May increases were both revised for a net gain of over 200,000 jobs and, as a result, June's increase may actually be a downward trend (at least until the June revision).
The honest truth is that we don't really know exactly how many people are employed. Statisticians can make educated guesses at best.
That's where a middle ground between empirical fact and irrational feeling emerges.
Philosophers have long known that intuition is a way to grasp knowledge by comparing two ideas without rational inductive processes. You know something makes sense or it doesn't and you can usually explain it by reference to previous experience.
Granted, one of the common fallacies that arise from intuition is generalization, the projection from the particular to the general.
Yet in Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena, for example, we find intuition in logic and mathematics.
Carl Gustav Jung, in his 1921 work Psychological Types, was the first psychologist to focus on intuition as a form of human perception. Unlike the philosophers, Jung describes the place of intuition functionally. Intuition is an auxiliary to thinking, helping to relate the rational to the irrational through an internal focus. In the same way, sensation aids feeling through its scanning of the external world.
It has only been in the last century that the potential complementarity between reason and feeling has been explored. There may be few facts and even these may not amount to truths, yet intuition allows the mind to check for consistency with reasonableness and common sense.
The heart's reasons entail something considerably more complex than the mere displacement of formal, organized thought in favor of unabashed, unkempt feeling.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
The Importance of Being Ernest
Oscar Wilde's comedy of manners, which punned on the name Ernest and the virtue of earnestness (the play was titled The Importance of Being Earnest), attempts in part to explore the significance of a man's name. Indeed, Anne has asked, does a name matter?
One can't explore this without passing through the Bible ("Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," Deut. 5:11) to Shakespeare ("What's in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet," Romeo and Juliet, Act 2 scene 2).
What's in a name? A lot. The right to bestow a name is an archetypal symbolic expression of seniority and power.
The biblical text has God according to Adam the right to name all the animals, which in the ancient world meant having power over the thing or being named. American Indians similarly spoke of naming evil spirits as a way of dissipating their power.
What you call something is still so powerful that the government routinely resorts to euphemisms for events the public might find distasteful. The name given to the victim of murder or mayhem in war is a "casualty," which sounds almost as if all that has happened is something no more serious than stubbing one's toe in a darkened bedroom.
As for Shakespeare, he wasn't arguing that names were irrelevant, but that love could overcome the chasm between someone named Montague and another named Capulet. Yet the names stood for an intense rivalry between competing clans.
The names we give ourselves and others are telling and influential. For example, the Chinese word for "Russia" means "land of hungry people," whereas the word for America means "beautiful country."
In the USA we don't call Italians and Greeks "Mediterraneans," but we call Japanese and Koreans "Asian," and Salvadorans and Chileans "Hispanic." Clearly, there's a matter of point of view. In the prevailing view, Europeans are distinguishable from one another, whereas non-Europeans come in continental globs. Moreover, forebears of Americans of European origin were all "immigrants," whereas non-Europeans are commonly called "aliens."
Who will argue that there is no difference between calling someone "Nigger" and "African-American"?
As to the word used to name the deity, there are entire volumes written about the Hebrew variants, with elaborate explanations of the meanings, ranging from the one who is to various attributions of might.
In English, the word is not devoid of meaning, either. "God" comes from the proto-Germanic "guthan" (in German, Gott), from the proto-Indo-European "ghut," meaning "that which is invoked." In Sanskrit, huta, meaning "invoked," was a nickname of the god Indra, the god of weather and war. Some trace it instead to "gheu," which means "to pour, pour a libation."
"Deus," the base in languages of Latin origin for Dieu, Deus, Dios, Dio (French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, respectively), the Greek genitive form of Zeus, the chief god from Mount Olympus. Zeus, for its part, traces back to the Sanskrit "deva pitar," meaning "father god." The root meaning of all these words is related to the word for "day," originally a reference to a bright, clear sky.
The biblical prohibition against the use of the deity's name was intended to prohibit human dominion over the deity, against the tendency of religious folk, then and now, to think they've got God in their pockets.
For my money, names and naming are hugely important.
One can't explore this without passing through the Bible ("Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," Deut. 5:11) to Shakespeare ("What's in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet," Romeo and Juliet, Act 2 scene 2).
What's in a name? A lot. The right to bestow a name is an archetypal symbolic expression of seniority and power.
The biblical text has God according to Adam the right to name all the animals, which in the ancient world meant having power over the thing or being named. American Indians similarly spoke of naming evil spirits as a way of dissipating their power.
What you call something is still so powerful that the government routinely resorts to euphemisms for events the public might find distasteful. The name given to the victim of murder or mayhem in war is a "casualty," which sounds almost as if all that has happened is something no more serious than stubbing one's toe in a darkened bedroom.
As for Shakespeare, he wasn't arguing that names were irrelevant, but that love could overcome the chasm between someone named Montague and another named Capulet. Yet the names stood for an intense rivalry between competing clans.
The names we give ourselves and others are telling and influential. For example, the Chinese word for "Russia" means "land of hungry people," whereas the word for America means "beautiful country."
In the USA we don't call Italians and Greeks "Mediterraneans," but we call Japanese and Koreans "Asian," and Salvadorans and Chileans "Hispanic." Clearly, there's a matter of point of view. In the prevailing view, Europeans are distinguishable from one another, whereas non-Europeans come in continental globs. Moreover, forebears of Americans of European origin were all "immigrants," whereas non-Europeans are commonly called "aliens."
Who will argue that there is no difference between calling someone "Nigger" and "African-American"?
As to the word used to name the deity, there are entire volumes written about the Hebrew variants, with elaborate explanations of the meanings, ranging from the one who is to various attributions of might.
In English, the word is not devoid of meaning, either. "God" comes from the proto-Germanic "guthan" (in German, Gott), from the proto-Indo-European "ghut," meaning "that which is invoked." In Sanskrit, huta, meaning "invoked," was a nickname of the god Indra, the god of weather and war. Some trace it instead to "gheu," which means "to pour, pour a libation."
"Deus," the base in languages of Latin origin for Dieu, Deus, Dios, Dio (French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, respectively), the Greek genitive form of Zeus, the chief god from Mount Olympus. Zeus, for its part, traces back to the Sanskrit "deva pitar," meaning "father god." The root meaning of all these words is related to the word for "day," originally a reference to a bright, clear sky.
The biblical prohibition against the use of the deity's name was intended to prohibit human dominion over the deity, against the tendency of religious folk, then and now, to think they've got God in their pockets.
For my money, names and naming are hugely important.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Crisis
Genevieve's comment reminds me of a lesson I heard long ago, in a secondary school literature class that was often also a philosophy and history class.
Etymology may not be philosophy, but a word's origins often yield clues as to what we originally meant and why we use it the way we do. Crisis comes from the Greek krinein, to decide, to separate, to judge, also related to kritikos, critic, one who is skilled at judging; it is also related to the much touted, little encouraged contemporary faculty of critical thinking.
A crisis occurs in the opening lines of Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken, as follows:
It wasn't just me. The world seemed to be in crisis: the Beatles revolutionized music, Cohn-Bendit and the French students revolted in the streets of Europe, there was an ideological "spring" in Prague and underneath all that two superpowers were threatening each other with arsenals said to be capable of destroying the planet 50 times over.
Ah, the good old days!
In midst of all that, Mr. Romero, my Spanish literature profesor (in my school all our teachers were profesores) uttered the words that stuck to me: "We are always in crisis."
Every age, historical or personal, involves crisis and is critical. At every stage we humans face a fork in the road of our lives. We face no choices only when we lie in our coffins -- insofar as I can tell, anyway.
King Philip II faced the crisis of the first European empire over which the sun never set, just as Lyndon Baines Johnson was, somewhere outside our classroom, facing Vietnam. We faced imminent demise when we asked a girl to dance, just as the Soviet Union for decades threatened to wipe out Washington, my home for so many years, from the face of the Earth.
Is it, then, overdramatization to see our moment, this moment, with that death-defying hangnail staring at us right in our face, as a crisis? Yes and no.
Etymology may not be philosophy, but a word's origins often yield clues as to what we originally meant and why we use it the way we do. Crisis comes from the Greek krinein, to decide, to separate, to judge, also related to kritikos, critic, one who is skilled at judging; it is also related to the much touted, little encouraged contemporary faculty of critical thinking.
A crisis occurs in the opening lines of Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken, as follows:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,When I first contemplated the idea of crisis I was where Longfellow placed young women that were my age at the time: "standing, with reluctant feet, where the brook and river meet." (Adolescence comes to boys, too.) What more crisis-filled years than those!
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth
It wasn't just me. The world seemed to be in crisis: the Beatles revolutionized music, Cohn-Bendit and the French students revolted in the streets of Europe, there was an ideological "spring" in Prague and underneath all that two superpowers were threatening each other with arsenals said to be capable of destroying the planet 50 times over.
Ah, the good old days!
In midst of all that, Mr. Romero, my Spanish literature profesor (in my school all our teachers were profesores) uttered the words that stuck to me: "We are always in crisis."
Every age, historical or personal, involves crisis and is critical. At every stage we humans face a fork in the road of our lives. We face no choices only when we lie in our coffins -- insofar as I can tell, anyway.
King Philip II faced the crisis of the first European empire over which the sun never set, just as Lyndon Baines Johnson was, somewhere outside our classroom, facing Vietnam. We faced imminent demise when we asked a girl to dance, just as the Soviet Union for decades threatened to wipe out Washington, my home for so many years, from the face of the Earth.
Is it, then, overdramatization to see our moment, this moment, with that death-defying hangnail staring at us right in our face, as a crisis? Yes and no.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Entropy
For a variety of reasons, some of them beyond my ken, I begin the week with an awareness of what I have called, using a popular, unscientific understanding, "entropy." It is the idea better expressed by William Butler Yeats in the line "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
Let a business proceed without expansion and it diminishes until it dies. Let a plant cease to grow and it shrivels. We humans grow and grow until we reach a peak, then we begin our decline to death.
Things fall apart. The natural tendency of everything is toward decay and demise. The one word I have heard used to describe this is "entropy," in a figurative sense.
Now Webster's tells us that entropy is "a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system's disorder and that is a property of the system's state and is related to it in such a manner that a reversible change in heat in the system produces a change in the measure which varies directly with the heat change and inversely with the absolute temperature at which the change takes place."
Take a deep breath. I didn't understand it either. I think what it means is that entropy in science is a measure of disorder in a physical or chemical system. The greater the disorder, the higher the degree of entropy.
The interesting thing, however, is that in scientific theory -- unlike in the philosophy of humanities-minded folks like me -- disorder may well be deemed the balanced state toward which all things tend.
The originator of the concept, Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius, was concerned with the question of the conservation of energy (put simply: where does expended energy go? what will eventually happen to the universe when all energy is expended?). In the 19th century the common belief was that all matter would eventually degrade, be consumed like coal in a steam engine and literally or figuratively go up in smoke.
In 1865, Clausius became famous by concluding, with the aid of mathematics you should get someone else to explain, that "the energy of the universe is constant" on one hand, and that "the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum," on the other.
Those of us who don't really understand e=mc2 may take this as cause for relief or concern. On one hand, it's a relief that chaos is "normal." So, death, disease, decay, etc., are really OK. Moreover, the world doesn't end, somehow the energy recycles itself.
On the other hand, for those of us whose lives are built on a modicum of order -- such as is depended upon by so many things we take for granted -- it's slightly terrifying.
It seems as if I am in a canoe on a placid river, yet I keep hearing a distant and rising rumor that I fear is a Niagara or Iguazu just waiting to upset my little world. Yeats next lines were
But isn't it also apt for our time and fears and delusions? Have not the muddled majority best lacked conviction in the face of both the passionately intense Cheney-inspired waterboarders and the Osama-sent suicide bombers?
Our time and our lives dim with fears that such a picture is frighteningly true. The center, our heart, cannot hold.
Let a business proceed without expansion and it diminishes until it dies. Let a plant cease to grow and it shrivels. We humans grow and grow until we reach a peak, then we begin our decline to death.
Things fall apart. The natural tendency of everything is toward decay and demise. The one word I have heard used to describe this is "entropy," in a figurative sense.
Now Webster's tells us that entropy is "a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system's disorder and that is a property of the system's state and is related to it in such a manner that a reversible change in heat in the system produces a change in the measure which varies directly with the heat change and inversely with the absolute temperature at which the change takes place."
Take a deep breath. I didn't understand it either. I think what it means is that entropy in science is a measure of disorder in a physical or chemical system. The greater the disorder, the higher the degree of entropy.
The interesting thing, however, is that in scientific theory -- unlike in the philosophy of humanities-minded folks like me -- disorder may well be deemed the balanced state toward which all things tend.
The originator of the concept, Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius, was concerned with the question of the conservation of energy (put simply: where does expended energy go? what will eventually happen to the universe when all energy is expended?). In the 19th century the common belief was that all matter would eventually degrade, be consumed like coal in a steam engine and literally or figuratively go up in smoke.
In 1865, Clausius became famous by concluding, with the aid of mathematics you should get someone else to explain, that "the energy of the universe is constant" on one hand, and that "the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum," on the other.
Those of us who don't really understand e=mc2 may take this as cause for relief or concern. On one hand, it's a relief that chaos is "normal." So, death, disease, decay, etc., are really OK. Moreover, the world doesn't end, somehow the energy recycles itself.
On the other hand, for those of us whose lives are built on a modicum of order -- such as is depended upon by so many things we take for granted -- it's slightly terrifying.
It seems as if I am in a canoe on a placid river, yet I keep hearing a distant and rising rumor that I fear is a Niagara or Iguazu just waiting to upset my little world. Yeats next lines were
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,This was the understandable verdict of a 19th century man at the end of the Great War, when all reason, all the gentlemanly nods of common understanding, all commonly held hopes for progress had been so bloodily dashed.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
But isn't it also apt for our time and fears and delusions? Have not the muddled majority best lacked conviction in the face of both the passionately intense Cheney-inspired waterboarders and the Osama-sent suicide bombers?
Our time and our lives dim with fears that such a picture is frighteningly true. The center, our heart, cannot hold.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Absolutely
Everything is relative, especially incest. Minus the admittedly lame humor, this seems to be the motto of most people in contemporary society. I beg to differ.
What most people mean applies to anything more or less controversial: morals, politics, religion, most of all truth. The notion, which stems from the humanism of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation alike, is that human beings are, individually, the arbiters of everything.
The almighty I knows what is right and wrong, what political party governs best, what God is like and what is true. This is based on the epistemological fallacy of the day: I can know everything and I am always right, for me at least.
False! Mistaken! Wrong-o, moosebreath!
I do not and cannot know everything. Knowing everything that human beings can observe empirically and prove scientifically has not been possible for any single human being since about the time of Demosthenes. In ancient Greece it was possible to hold in one brain all human knowledge. Today there are idiot savants who can hold a preponderance of human knowledge in their brains, but they can't do much with it of any use.
I am not always right. Much for the same reason, people cannot have the correct answers to every possible question. We just don't know.
Besides, many things remain unknown. Things that count: Does God exist? What's God like? (Yes, I know the one about the astronaut who told the Pentagon She was Black.) How did the universe begin? How large is the universe? Are there other intelligent sentient beings out there? What's the telephone number of an honest, cheap plumber?
Also, observation and empirical facts do not necessarily equal the truth. Human perception is fallible and limited; facts are dependent on context (I'm told, for example, that gravity does not work the way you would expect at the quantum level.)
Intuition and nonlinear thinking may capture ineffable instances of truths that are not observable, measurable, much less communicable.
Despite all this, I would contend that there is truth, a grand unifying truth that explains everything. We just don't know it.
At least, it's pretty clear that if there is truth, it is absolutely true; it is true everywhere, for everyone, in every context. Truth is the absolute, universal, incontestable statement about everything that transcends contextual and perception limits.
Its opposite is not truth. It may be falsehood, error, a lie.
Anything less than truth, by degree, omission or approximation, is not truth. Anything that is true for me, but not for you, is not truth; it may be a fact, a hunch, a strong feeling, an opinion. Not truth.
I don't know the truth. Not knowing the truth, I have no grounds to try to bash in your face simply because your idea of morals, politics, religion and truth differ from mine. It might be a good idea to be tolerant of one another.
But that doesn't make your idea or mine true. Much less both true. One of us is closer to the truth (probably me, since this is my blog).
Both of us cannot assert that our opposed and incompatible ideas are equally true, although we may deserve equal respect when we spout our nonsense. (By "our," to paraphrase Steve Martin, I mean "your.")
"Everything is relative" is an absolute statement. If it were a relative statement, compliant with the idea that everything is relative, it would be false.
If everything is relative, then the idea that everything is relative must itself be relative, meaning -- for example -- that everything might be relative for me, but not for you.
Everything cannot be relative. Only incest, Thanksgiving dinners, gifts of underwear, people one cannot divorce despite one's most earnest wishes, the price of postage stamps and a few other things.
What most people mean applies to anything more or less controversial: morals, politics, religion, most of all truth. The notion, which stems from the humanism of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation alike, is that human beings are, individually, the arbiters of everything.
The almighty I knows what is right and wrong, what political party governs best, what God is like and what is true. This is based on the epistemological fallacy of the day: I can know everything and I am always right, for me at least.
False! Mistaken! Wrong-o, moosebreath!
I do not and cannot know everything. Knowing everything that human beings can observe empirically and prove scientifically has not been possible for any single human being since about the time of Demosthenes. In ancient Greece it was possible to hold in one brain all human knowledge. Today there are idiot savants who can hold a preponderance of human knowledge in their brains, but they can't do much with it of any use.
I am not always right. Much for the same reason, people cannot have the correct answers to every possible question. We just don't know.
Besides, many things remain unknown. Things that count: Does God exist? What's God like? (Yes, I know the one about the astronaut who told the Pentagon She was Black.) How did the universe begin? How large is the universe? Are there other intelligent sentient beings out there? What's the telephone number of an honest, cheap plumber?
Also, observation and empirical facts do not necessarily equal the truth. Human perception is fallible and limited; facts are dependent on context (I'm told, for example, that gravity does not work the way you would expect at the quantum level.)
Intuition and nonlinear thinking may capture ineffable instances of truths that are not observable, measurable, much less communicable.
Despite all this, I would contend that there is truth, a grand unifying truth that explains everything. We just don't know it.
At least, it's pretty clear that if there is truth, it is absolutely true; it is true everywhere, for everyone, in every context. Truth is the absolute, universal, incontestable statement about everything that transcends contextual and perception limits.
Its opposite is not truth. It may be falsehood, error, a lie.
Anything less than truth, by degree, omission or approximation, is not truth. Anything that is true for me, but not for you, is not truth; it may be a fact, a hunch, a strong feeling, an opinion. Not truth.
I don't know the truth. Not knowing the truth, I have no grounds to try to bash in your face simply because your idea of morals, politics, religion and truth differ from mine. It might be a good idea to be tolerant of one another.
But that doesn't make your idea or mine true. Much less both true. One of us is closer to the truth (probably me, since this is my blog).
Both of us cannot assert that our opposed and incompatible ideas are equally true, although we may deserve equal respect when we spout our nonsense. (By "our," to paraphrase Steve Martin, I mean "your.")
"Everything is relative" is an absolute statement. If it were a relative statement, compliant with the idea that everything is relative, it would be false.
If everything is relative, then the idea that everything is relative must itself be relative, meaning -- for example -- that everything might be relative for me, but not for you.
Everything cannot be relative. Only incest, Thanksgiving dinners, gifts of underwear, people one cannot divorce despite one's most earnest wishes, the price of postage stamps and a few other things.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Ripples
Someone told me recently that I am unaware of the ripples I leave in the hearts and minds of others. Perhaps this Saturday afternoon, listening to a Mozart clarinet concerto, is the time to take stock of the ripples one sends out and the ones from which one comes.
We cannot live alone. Inescapably. No human infant would survive the first year without someone's care. We are all part of a chain.
We can, yes, live on our own -- provided we have a vast society around us. Someone somewhere is making sure the electricity is turned on and the water runs and even that the bus on which we commute is sent on its merry way on time.
I have been amazed about this since childhood.
Perhaps that's what it means to be a native New Yorker: to realize that someone had to get up to send off that garbage truck that wakes you up.
Similarly, someone -- parents -- had to have you and nurture you. We are in the nurturing chain. We are not islands, we are social animals.
We need to be mindful that we cannot live alone for long and thus respect all who nurture us -- which turns out to be all humanity.
My morning coffee was planted, grown and harvested thousands of miles away, in Colombia, Central America, Africa. The sugar I pour into it was cut by workers in the Dominican Republic or Jamaica.
The rubber in the tires of the bus that takes me to work might come from Thailand, Sri Lanka or Vietnam. The diesel fuel came from Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. The bus was made in Detroit.
Most of my computer at work was manufactured in Malaysia. The paper is probably from Canada. The ink we use might come from China.
I have the whole world in my palm, at my grasp -- every day.
Then there are the ripples I send out. The ripples that come from my working to repay all the work that brings all these things to me.
Also, the work to improve the working conditions of those who make my life possible. Someone said it better many years ago:
Each time I act to echo back the nurture I receive, I send forth ripples of hope and love. Ripples of this kind, sent by all of us, could change the world.
We cannot live alone. Inescapably. No human infant would survive the first year without someone's care. We are all part of a chain.
We can, yes, live on our own -- provided we have a vast society around us. Someone somewhere is making sure the electricity is turned on and the water runs and even that the bus on which we commute is sent on its merry way on time.
I have been amazed about this since childhood.
Perhaps that's what it means to be a native New Yorker: to realize that someone had to get up to send off that garbage truck that wakes you up.
Similarly, someone -- parents -- had to have you and nurture you. We are in the nurturing chain. We are not islands, we are social animals.
We need to be mindful that we cannot live alone for long and thus respect all who nurture us -- which turns out to be all humanity.
My morning coffee was planted, grown and harvested thousands of miles away, in Colombia, Central America, Africa. The sugar I pour into it was cut by workers in the Dominican Republic or Jamaica.
The rubber in the tires of the bus that takes me to work might come from Thailand, Sri Lanka or Vietnam. The diesel fuel came from Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. The bus was made in Detroit.
Most of my computer at work was manufactured in Malaysia. The paper is probably from Canada. The ink we use might come from China.
I have the whole world in my palm, at my grasp -- every day.
Then there are the ripples I send out. The ripples that come from my working to repay all the work that brings all these things to me.
Also, the work to improve the working conditions of those who make my life possible. Someone said it better many years ago:
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
-- Robert F. Kennedy, Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966
Each time I act to echo back the nurture I receive, I send forth ripples of hope and love. Ripples of this kind, sent by all of us, could change the world.
Monday, December 11, 2006
The End of Belief
Sunday before last I underwent a reverse of Charles Wesley's famous "strange warming" experience: a distinct cooling of the heart in church toward religion, God, and what Zorba would have called "the complete catastrophe."
Almost five years ago I stopped attending any kind of Sunday Eucharist service, a practice in which I had been constant almost all my life. Although my faith fell off like scales, in a reversal of Saul of Tarsus' experience in Acts 9:18, I have been sporadically attending various churches over the past year or so.
Why is an agnostic even going to church? That's a long story I'll leave for another day.
Eight days ago, I undertook my sporadic sitting in at the Eucharist service in the main nave of the Cathedral Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, the Anglican see's main church in Washington, D.C.
The cathedral's dean, the Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III decided to open his sermon on the season of advent with a broadside on Richard Dawkins and his most recent book The God Delusion (for my blog on both, go here).
Only Lloyd didn't say Dawkins. He said "Hawkins." To which I uttered an almost reflexive correction "Dawkins!" that annoyed a few fellow churchgoers.
Then he said it again: Hawkins. He identified the "best-seller" (is it?) by its correct title but kept saying Hawkins (get the taped sermon here if you don't believe me).
Clearly, Lloyd had never set eyes on even a comma written by Dawkins, an uncommon name that would have stuck in the mind of any bona fide reader.
Worse still, Lloyd wielded a puerile argument against Dawkins' contention that religion is the cause of a great deal of violence, both in the present and historically. The Dean countered with the proposition that the great massacres of the 20th century had been committed by Hitler, Stalin and Mao, whom Lloyd covered with the blanket characterization of "atheists."
This made me cringe because, first of all, it is not conclusively proven that the Jesuit-educated Adolf Hitler was actually an atheist.
Moreover, the belt buckle worn by soldiers of the Wehrmacht read "Gott mit Uns" (God with us). This is known to have served as a prop referred to by commanders in the field rousing the rank and file before battle on the Eastern Front against the godless Soviets.
The record shows that the Nazi war machine and its genocidal sidekicks did not formally disown the European Christian deity; to the contrary, God was heartily invoked by the invading, marauding, pillaging and murdering German hordes.
Similarly, former Orthodox seminarian Yosip Stalin might correctly be identified as having become an atheist as general secretary of the Communist Party, although he spawned a cult of personality that turned Marxism-Leninism into something remarkably similar to a religion.
Much the same could be said of Mao, whose best known aphorism on this subject is "religion is poison." The French film-maker Jean-Luc Goddard made no bones about adopting Maoism as his "religion," which is precisely the way Maoist Communism functioned.
Most important of all, neither Hitler, nor Stalin, nor Mao sent millions to their deaths under the banner of atheism, but under the aegis of their particular brand of nationalism and collectivism. At most, they could be said to be mass-murdering maniacs who just happened to be atheists, if that.
The reverse, my Very Reverend Sir Priest Lloyd, cannot be said of the great Christian persecutors and annihilators.
In the name of the Christian God, they have
Islam, granted, is not behind by far. The Sunni and Shia rivalry has claimed lives for a millenium and the spread of Muslim jihadists throughout the Mediterranean, the Balkans and Spain in the Middle Ages, bespeak centuries of war in the name of another monotheistic religion and its blood-thirsty adherents. Only military defeats five hundred years ago kept the Muslim jihad at bay. And, purely Quranic or not, need we mention Al-Qaeda and its leaders plain invocation of their God?
Not to be left behind, the followers of the Jewish faith of Abraham practiced wholesale slaughter by divine inspiration according to their own holy writ in places such as Jericho. In modern times, the State of Israel has waged at least one unquestionable war of aggression (1967), along with bearing with responsibility for several massacres of civilians in Lebanon, most recently in the village of Qana. Anyone claiming, with talmudic hair-splitting, that no violence has come from the adherents of Judaism for the two millenia in between forgets that, as criminal lawyers say, the means and the opportunity were lacking.
In the end, Lloyd's rhetorical sparring nets him a 3-0 defeat -- and that's only counting three monotheistic religions!
Yet it was not so long ago that Lloyd's other words -- such as his positive call to his congregation to let the love of Jesus Christ be born in their hearts during advent -- would have resonated in my bones, blotting out the nonsense, the arrogance and the cupidity of an overreaching preacher.
This time I was left with emptiness. I did not want to join him in reciting the Nicene Creed, the statement of faith that follows the homily in the Western Christian liturgical matrix. I do not believe. After hearing him I knew firmly that I do not believe.
Something finally snapped and I have been searching for words to describe what it was for eight days. I give up.
Almost five years ago I stopped attending any kind of Sunday Eucharist service, a practice in which I had been constant almost all my life. Although my faith fell off like scales, in a reversal of Saul of Tarsus' experience in Acts 9:18, I have been sporadically attending various churches over the past year or so.
Why is an agnostic even going to church? That's a long story I'll leave for another day.
Eight days ago, I undertook my sporadic sitting in at the Eucharist service in the main nave of the Cathedral Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, the Anglican see's main church in Washington, D.C.
The cathedral's dean, the Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III decided to open his sermon on the season of advent with a broadside on Richard Dawkins and his most recent book The God Delusion (for my blog on both, go here).
Only Lloyd didn't say Dawkins. He said "Hawkins." To which I uttered an almost reflexive correction "Dawkins!" that annoyed a few fellow churchgoers.
Then he said it again: Hawkins. He identified the "best-seller" (is it?) by its correct title but kept saying Hawkins (get the taped sermon here if you don't believe me).
Clearly, Lloyd had never set eyes on even a comma written by Dawkins, an uncommon name that would have stuck in the mind of any bona fide reader.
Worse still, Lloyd wielded a puerile argument against Dawkins' contention that religion is the cause of a great deal of violence, both in the present and historically. The Dean countered with the proposition that the great massacres of the 20th century had been committed by Hitler, Stalin and Mao, whom Lloyd covered with the blanket characterization of "atheists."
This made me cringe because, first of all, it is not conclusively proven that the Jesuit-educated Adolf Hitler was actually an atheist.
Moreover, the belt buckle worn by soldiers of the Wehrmacht read "Gott mit Uns" (God with us). This is known to have served as a prop referred to by commanders in the field rousing the rank and file before battle on the Eastern Front against the godless Soviets.
The record shows that the Nazi war machine and its genocidal sidekicks did not formally disown the European Christian deity; to the contrary, God was heartily invoked by the invading, marauding, pillaging and murdering German hordes.
Similarly, former Orthodox seminarian Yosip Stalin might correctly be identified as having become an atheist as general secretary of the Communist Party, although he spawned a cult of personality that turned Marxism-Leninism into something remarkably similar to a religion.
Much the same could be said of Mao, whose best known aphorism on this subject is "religion is poison." The French film-maker Jean-Luc Goddard made no bones about adopting Maoism as his "religion," which is precisely the way Maoist Communism functioned.
Most important of all, neither Hitler, nor Stalin, nor Mao sent millions to their deaths under the banner of atheism, but under the aegis of their particular brand of nationalism and collectivism. At most, they could be said to be mass-murdering maniacs who just happened to be atheists, if that.
The reverse, my Very Reverend Sir Priest Lloyd, cannot be said of the great Christian persecutors and annihilators.
In the name of the Christian God, they have
- dispatched Saracens in the Crusades and heretics in the Inquisition during the Middle Ages;
- then in the Renaissance sent dissenters from Calvinism to the bottom of Lake Geneva with the proverbial millstone tied to their necks, or sent hundreds of Jesuits and and Jesuit-protectors to be drawn and quartered by order of Queen Elizabeth of England, or killed varieties of Catholics, Jews and Protestants in diverse and ever-inventive ways, all for the sake of their faiths;
- finally in the more modern ages, robbed and murdered native populations of America, Africa and Asia, also with great missionary zeal and churches' blessing.
Islam, granted, is not behind by far. The Sunni and Shia rivalry has claimed lives for a millenium and the spread of Muslim jihadists throughout the Mediterranean, the Balkans and Spain in the Middle Ages, bespeak centuries of war in the name of another monotheistic religion and its blood-thirsty adherents. Only military defeats five hundred years ago kept the Muslim jihad at bay. And, purely Quranic or not, need we mention Al-Qaeda and its leaders plain invocation of their God?
Not to be left behind, the followers of the Jewish faith of Abraham practiced wholesale slaughter by divine inspiration according to their own holy writ in places such as Jericho. In modern times, the State of Israel has waged at least one unquestionable war of aggression (1967), along with bearing with responsibility for several massacres of civilians in Lebanon, most recently in the village of Qana. Anyone claiming, with talmudic hair-splitting, that no violence has come from the adherents of Judaism for the two millenia in between forgets that, as criminal lawyers say, the means and the opportunity were lacking.
In the end, Lloyd's rhetorical sparring nets him a 3-0 defeat -- and that's only counting three monotheistic religions!
Yet it was not so long ago that Lloyd's other words -- such as his positive call to his congregation to let the love of Jesus Christ be born in their hearts during advent -- would have resonated in my bones, blotting out the nonsense, the arrogance and the cupidity of an overreaching preacher.
This time I was left with emptiness. I did not want to join him in reciting the Nicene Creed, the statement of faith that follows the homily in the Western Christian liturgical matrix. I do not believe. After hearing him I knew firmly that I do not believe.
Something finally snapped and I have been searching for words to describe what it was for eight days. I give up.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Going to the Atheist Church
If evolutionary biology ever gets tiresome to Richard Dawkins, he can always try standup comedy. That's what I found out this evening hearing him speak about his book The God Delusion at my neighborhood bookstore.
An Oxford University professor specializing in the public understanding of science, Dawkins coined the term meme, which gained currency in intellectual circles after his 1976 work The Selfish Gene. A meme is a unit of cultural evolution that Dawkins theorized propagates itself like a gene; it is a unit of information transferable from one mind to another, such as tunes, catch-phrases, fashions.
The meme became itself a meme.
In The Extended Phenotype Dawkins has also recently contributed to evolutionary theory the notion that phenotypic effects, or the effects of the characteristics or an organism, are not limited to an organism's body but can stretch far into the environment, including into the bodies of other organisms.
Why this is a great contribution far exceeds my knowledge of science. Sorry. That is not why I went to see this grand personage speaking half a block from my abode.
Dawkins is also an ardent defender of atheism and critic of religion. The New York Times review I read Sunday said of his book that "There is lots of good, hard-hitting stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all stripes, but the tone is smug and the logic occasionally sloppy."
Tonight I heard mostly the imbecilities and the humor it prompts was quite amusing.
John Paul II, for example, became convinced that Our Lady of Fatima saved him from dying in the 1981 attempted assassination. "One might wonder why she didn't stop the bullet from hitting him at all," Dawkins remarked, "or whether the surgeons who worked on him for hours might deserve just a little credit. But most of all one might wonder what was happening with Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady Of Medjugorje or Our Lady of Knock; they must have been occupied with other errands."
Or, not to be shy, criticism does not elude Abraham the patriarch, the man Dawkins describes as fanatical to the point of murder of his own son, "Except, we learn, God was just joking that day."
He spoke also of the ethnic cleansing in the the biblical book of Joshua. Ethnic cleansing? Here it is:
And when in the seventh day going about, the priests sounded with the trumpets, Joshua said to all Israel: Shout: for the Lord hath delivered the city to you [...]
So all the people making a shout, and the trumpets sounding, when the voice and the sound thundered in the ears of the multitude, the walls forthwith fell down: and every man went up by the place that was over against him: and they took the city, and killed all that were in it, man and woman, young and old. The oxen also and the sheep, and the asses, they slew with the edge of the sword. (Joshua 6:16,20-21)
Dawkins recounted that the text was given to Israeli schoolchildren and they were asked to say whether they agreed with what happened and two-thirds did, saying that God had, after all, promised the land to the Jews. Then the text was modified and instead of Joshua and Hebrews, it contained the name of General Lin and the Chinese. Three-fourths of a different set of Israeli children disapproved and said the killing was immoral.
Dawkins' point was that the morality of the Bible is not the natural ethics that springs to most of us -- believers have to pick and choose the moral parts and ignore the immoral.
As I saw myself laugh and assent with so many others; however, I was reminded of being in church. Here was an atheist sermon, given by a popular preacher. The bookstore was standing room only barely minutes after the scheduled start time.
The people were a little peculiar, just as in church. Not necessarily people one would choose as friends -- although I was later told by my companion that I am a little peculiar myself, a little geeky with the odd button missing from a shirt and the odd stain on another.
Even the preacher had to admit that atheism required a little faith.
Technically, Dawkins said, he is an agnostic, as no one can prove the nonexistence of God. "We are all agnostics about everything from fairies to Zeus to Yahweh," he said. "We go about life as if they did not exist, quite confident they don't, even though of course we can't prove it."
Amen.
An Oxford University professor specializing in the public understanding of science, Dawkins coined the term meme, which gained currency in intellectual circles after his 1976 work The Selfish Gene. A meme is a unit of cultural evolution that Dawkins theorized propagates itself like a gene; it is a unit of information transferable from one mind to another, such as tunes, catch-phrases, fashions.
The meme became itself a meme.
In The Extended Phenotype Dawkins has also recently contributed to evolutionary theory the notion that phenotypic effects, or the effects of the characteristics or an organism, are not limited to an organism's body but can stretch far into the environment, including into the bodies of other organisms.
Why this is a great contribution far exceeds my knowledge of science. Sorry. That is not why I went to see this grand personage speaking half a block from my abode.
Dawkins is also an ardent defender of atheism and critic of religion. The New York Times review I read Sunday said of his book that "There is lots of good, hard-hitting stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all stripes, but the tone is smug and the logic occasionally sloppy."
Tonight I heard mostly the imbecilities and the humor it prompts was quite amusing.
John Paul II, for example, became convinced that Our Lady of Fatima saved him from dying in the 1981 attempted assassination. "One might wonder why she didn't stop the bullet from hitting him at all," Dawkins remarked, "or whether the surgeons who worked on him for hours might deserve just a little credit. But most of all one might wonder what was happening with Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady Of Medjugorje or Our Lady of Knock; they must have been occupied with other errands."
Or, not to be shy, criticism does not elude Abraham the patriarch, the man Dawkins describes as fanatical to the point of murder of his own son, "Except, we learn, God was just joking that day."
He spoke also of the ethnic cleansing in the the biblical book of Joshua. Ethnic cleansing? Here it is:
And when in the seventh day going about, the priests sounded with the trumpets, Joshua said to all Israel: Shout: for the Lord hath delivered the city to you [...]
So all the people making a shout, and the trumpets sounding, when the voice and the sound thundered in the ears of the multitude, the walls forthwith fell down: and every man went up by the place that was over against him: and they took the city, and killed all that were in it, man and woman, young and old. The oxen also and the sheep, and the asses, they slew with the edge of the sword. (Joshua 6:16,20-21)
Dawkins recounted that the text was given to Israeli schoolchildren and they were asked to say whether they agreed with what happened and two-thirds did, saying that God had, after all, promised the land to the Jews. Then the text was modified and instead of Joshua and Hebrews, it contained the name of General Lin and the Chinese. Three-fourths of a different set of Israeli children disapproved and said the killing was immoral.
Dawkins' point was that the morality of the Bible is not the natural ethics that springs to most of us -- believers have to pick and choose the moral parts and ignore the immoral.
As I saw myself laugh and assent with so many others; however, I was reminded of being in church. Here was an atheist sermon, given by a popular preacher. The bookstore was standing room only barely minutes after the scheduled start time.
The people were a little peculiar, just as in church. Not necessarily people one would choose as friends -- although I was later told by my companion that I am a little peculiar myself, a little geeky with the odd button missing from a shirt and the odd stain on another.
Even the preacher had to admit that atheism required a little faith.
Technically, Dawkins said, he is an agnostic, as no one can prove the nonexistence of God. "We are all agnostics about everything from fairies to Zeus to Yahweh," he said. "We go about life as if they did not exist, quite confident they don't, even though of course we can't prove it."
Amen.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Everythingness to Nothingness
It's hard to go from hope, faith and, well, a smidgen of charity, to nothing. But that's what happens when I see a long line of cars stuck in traffic at rush hour, each auto with one passenger, the driver.
In vain the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the first of its kind, proclaimed:
The non-renewable resources of the earth must be employed in such a way as to guard against the danger of their future exhaustion and to ensure that benefits from such employment are shared by all mankind.
Back then, I believed in God, goodness, and a better world of more justly apportioned resources.
Still, I had some reason to find unintentional humor in such conferences. My father, who attended the Stockholm conference, failed to see the irony in his using that very trip to purchase a brand-new blue Saab in Sweden, crowing that he did so at some obscure tax advantage.
Thirty-four years later, today, I find myself walking to a crosstown thoroughfare on the way to the Metro and before me is a long, long line of sportscars, SUVs, and other vehicles, most carrying one passenger, the driver.
Most scientists agree that between 2010 and 2020 the world's supply of petroleum will fall below international demand. This was more or less known in 1972. The predictions then were that it would happen by 2005 or 2010.
Malthusian pessimism errs somewhat, but we never seem to get the point, anyway.
Blithely we believe we can commute in our pollute-mobiles one-by-one, as our parents did 30 years ago, while radical theofascists, who long for 1922 or 1902 rather than 1972, push us to war, famine, pestilence, and death.
But I forget ... what's so great about humankind, anyway?
Haven't we despoiled our planet, murdered mercilessly, stolen savagely, lied lavishly? Haven't we turned a deaf ear to all warnings? We deserve the strife and struggle, the death rattle of civilization that can already be heard. The end. The silent nothingness that awaits us.
The world will be better without us. Still it's not easy to go from everythingness, in vision and in life, to nothingness and nihilism.
In vain the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the first of its kind, proclaimed:
The non-renewable resources of the earth must be employed in such a way as to guard against the danger of their future exhaustion and to ensure that benefits from such employment are shared by all mankind.
Back then, I believed in God, goodness, and a better world of more justly apportioned resources.
Still, I had some reason to find unintentional humor in such conferences. My father, who attended the Stockholm conference, failed to see the irony in his using that very trip to purchase a brand-new blue Saab in Sweden, crowing that he did so at some obscure tax advantage.
Thirty-four years later, today, I find myself walking to a crosstown thoroughfare on the way to the Metro and before me is a long, long line of sportscars, SUVs, and other vehicles, most carrying one passenger, the driver.
Most scientists agree that between 2010 and 2020 the world's supply of petroleum will fall below international demand. This was more or less known in 1972. The predictions then were that it would happen by 2005 or 2010.
Malthusian pessimism errs somewhat, but we never seem to get the point, anyway.
Blithely we believe we can commute in our pollute-mobiles one-by-one, as our parents did 30 years ago, while radical theofascists, who long for 1922 or 1902 rather than 1972, push us to war, famine, pestilence, and death.
But I forget ... what's so great about humankind, anyway?
Haven't we despoiled our planet, murdered mercilessly, stolen savagely, lied lavishly? Haven't we turned a deaf ear to all warnings? We deserve the strife and struggle, the death rattle of civilization that can already be heard. The end. The silent nothingness that awaits us.
The world will be better without us. Still it's not easy to go from everythingness, in vision and in life, to nothingness and nihilism.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Good
Someone I know doesn't meditate much on what is good, but simply does it as best as it is understood, without any obvious or immediate gain and in surprising measure. Instead of imitating the example, of course, I set myself to think: Does good exist and, if so, what is it?
"The important thing is kindness," my friend said.
"What?"
"The important thing is to be kind to everyone."
Years ago I believed that. If all we shared, if all loved each other, if… If nothing! What is this mass of humans, this human anthill, for? To sell, to buy, to eat, to have sex, to bathe, to sleep. To wake up to repeat the same thing.
We don't love, we don't share. We are deeply and irremediably selfish.
We get to want one another, now and then. That is to say, we share selfishness: she fulfills him, he fulfills her, they run together selling, buying, eating, having sex, bathing, sleeping, waking, repeating.
From time to time an altruistic impulse arises; it's selfishness more carefully camouflaged: I want to feel I am good.
We don't deserve kindness.
"The important thing is kindness," my friend said.
"What?"
"The important thing is to be kind to everyone."
Years ago I believed that. If all we shared, if all loved each other, if… If nothing! What is this mass of humans, this human anthill, for? To sell, to buy, to eat, to have sex, to bathe, to sleep. To wake up to repeat the same thing.
We don't love, we don't share. We are deeply and irremediably selfish.
We get to want one another, now and then. That is to say, we share selfishness: she fulfills him, he fulfills her, they run together selling, buying, eating, having sex, bathing, sleeping, waking, repeating.
From time to time an altruistic impulse arises; it's selfishness more carefully camouflaged: I want to feel I am good.
We don't deserve kindness.
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