Well, AM I fighting the good fight? Who really gives a shit what I have to say? Not many people.
And then I got to thinking that persuasion is a laudable and valuable goal, but it can virtually NEVER be approached from a stance of anger or judgement. If you claim to want to persuade people, and you are yelling at them–as I have always tended to do–then you are deceiving yourself.
I need to take the anger out. Step back. The world clearly will end one day, perhaps one day soon, but it has no plans to ask me first, and there is no reason not to get as much sunshine and light in the meantime as I can. You know, the jacket, the wind and rain, and the Sun. Old story.
By chance I spent the day at a college. I used to get excited going to colleges. There was so much possibility, so much learning. Now, I find them depressing. You go there to learn how to live a better life? Ain’t gonna happen. You read all the English authors. Or you major in German or Spanish or Portuguese. Latin or Greek. Philosophy. Psychology. Who will provide you with a comprehensive template for personal growth?
Kids come there with all sorts of hopes and dreams. They want to make a difference. But the Western world has lost the capacity to respect individual moral growth. It can’t define it, because it can’t differentiate good and bad outside of social contexts which are themselves based on political contexts. Is rape wrong? Well you have to tell me who is raping whom and why. Yes, of course, in general, but surely the bombs being dropped on ISIS are far worse than their crimes against women? It’s Western Imperialists imposing Western Imperialist values.
And I thought, as an African-appearing man walked by me (have you noticed that you can usually tell the difference between African born blacks and American born blacks by the dignity and seriousness of the former’s carriage?) that in the early 1960’s Britain was decolonizing. Imperialism was still a very real thing. But that was over 50 years ago. Not many years before that, Japanese Zero planes were crashing into our aircraft carriers, and Jews were being turned into soap.
Virtually all the language and thought of today was formed in that period. The professors teaching today still look back on that era as a Golden Age. It is all they have. And what they have is deficient and pathetic. It is based on lies, willful misunderstandings, sloppy thinking, and infantile fantasies both of power and freedom from responsibility.
We need an individual moral code. It is possible that before Christianity all religions were intrinsically social, and thus in conformity with our ancestral, evolutionary past. But Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, is individualistic. It is about an individual’s relationship with God, unmediated by society and political structures. This is a powerful means of forming the individual conscience, and moving humankind along. But it no longer works. We need something new.
This continues to be a project of mine. Progress has been slow, but shit I’ve only been off the bottle for a month now.