I was in the shower this morning and this thought popped in my head. And my answer was I would not do anything differently. If I was making coffee, I would continue making coffee. As I was in the shower, I finished my shower.
You are dying every moment. Who you are is who you have been, and who you will be is who you are now. What do you focus on? What is valuable to you?
To me, it is odd to be my age and have so little to show materially. But I have followed a path somewhat monomaniacally all my life. I remember sitting in Mr. Johnson’s Sophomore Biology class and encountering the idea of Evolution through Natural Selection for the first time. It struck me instantly that such a doctrine did not require a God for its operation. I still remember that shock. I got a little dizzy.
Ever since then, I have been obsessed with building and understanding meaning systems at a thought level, with investigating how the world actually seems to work, with building something up to replace what was lost. That has been my life. It will be my life in five minutes. And five minutes after that.
One day I will end, but I can’t imagine anything more important, and I can’t imagine living my life any other way. I wish I had been more successful, but it has not been for lack of trying. I simply have a finite pain tolerance, even if it is quite substantial. I can’t do what I can’t do, and I have a pretty idea where that line is because I have tested it many times.
I did this in high school, in something called Lincoln-Douglas debate. It dealt mainly with moral issues, like abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia and the like. You would do three debates, and had to do both sides. You would alternate between defending a proposition, and attacking it. If your task was to support, say “Resolved: that abortion is inherently immoral and should be made illegal again”, you were on the Affirmative side. If you opposed it, you were Negative (or so I recall). A speaks 5 minutes, say, then is cross examined by N. N then speaks 8 minutes, then is cross examined by A. A then gets the final 3 minutes. Something like that. If you did A the first round, you did N the second, and A the third. Since A got the last word, most people preferred it.
To win, you need to clearly define your terms. “Abortion” for example, could as one rhetorical method be confined to any killing of fetuses that are older than, say 6 months. You could call it infanticide, and note the general historical cultural rejection of infanticide. You would need to define immoral (Golden Rule, Categorical Imperative, Christian teaching: the choice is yours. I tended to use Kant and Rousseau), and define illegal–such as HOW illegal (felony, misdemeanor), illegal for who (doctor, pregnant woman, helpers), and under what jurisdiction (Federal, State, City, County).
And you need criteria by which to judge the claims. Obviously, getting the judges to accept your criteria then showing how your case best fits those criteria is the way to win. Obviously, you will have two opposed ways of looking at it. You may have one person making a narrow claim, and the other claiming everything else, or two people fighting it out for the middle. Many things are possible, and many approaches are possible.
But you need something like, say: “Murder is inherently immoral”. You then perform a logical operation, such as: Abortion constitutes a murder. Therefore abortion is immoral.
The negative, say, on this one, will be to define murder as the killing of a human person who is breathing and viable.
But overall, and over time, you learn to think in terms of principles, and you learn to value the use of clear language. You learn to see the merits of both sides in complex questions like these.
And obviously politically, it would be useful to do survey courses such as “modern political theories” where students learn in detail what conservatives think and why, and what leftists of all varieties think and why. They could read, say, “Conscience of a Conservative”, and Edmund Burke, and John Stuart Mill. They could read Hayek and perhaps even Ayn Rand. Then they could read whatever else the teacher sees fit.
And at the end of the semester they could have a debate tournament, with the top five finishers guaranteed an A in the class, where they debate a political question from both a conservative and a leftist point of view. If there are any conservatives, they get to see things from a leftist perspective, and vastly more importantly, the many leftists at least learn to use the words, principles, and ideas of conservatives in a way which is not cartoonish and highly prejudicial.
Tonight, I am looking at the process of connection. So often we look straight ahead. We see out of our eyes, and look for people who can meet us there. If they do, we connect. If they can’t, we wonder what is wrong with them, with people, or perhaps even with us.
Imagine a line. I line up, and look forwards. Imagine someone else lining up five feet to my left, and also looking forward. We don’t align. We don’t connect. We are close, but distant. Our relationship is a failure.
Agility is being able to move five feet to the left, and to the right, to doing the work other people cannot even conceive is possible. To doing work other people cannot even see, to being invisible while moving, and misunderstood when arrive.
To being there when they arrive, and seeing them, and being recognized. Oh, it is all so OBVIOUS, no?
We all of us flail around in the wind like helpless newborn birds. We fail to see what is possible for us, and we fail to pursue it. Then we blame life or circumstance or something else.
Somehow, somewhere, God has given us the clues for this Escape Room adventure. He/She/It/Them has created a path forward, which leads to fulfillment, peace, joy, and a sense of connection.
You, yes you: you were born with something special to express, and a life to do it. On one level you cannot fail, but on another, you will feel so much more joyous if you do fulfill the mission. Have at it. Carry on.
I have no idea if all this makes sense, but this is a good approximation of what floats around my brain all day, when I am not focused on doing the work of close reasoning.
Tonight I was listening to Mondo Cozmo–who I saw live not too long ago, and thoroughly enjoyed–Then I drank beer–can I go out there on that long and fragile limb and speculate “I like beer” may play a role in our culture for a time?–and forgot what the fuck I was going to post about. It was emotionally deep, and heart felt. And there it remains, unrediscovered.
I thought that link to Mondo Cozmo, who would presumably hate my politics, was still worth sharing. Their bassist/keyboardist, who is female, which I find fantastic, looks from a distance like she is 15.
The only other mixed band I can think of is Talking Heads, which has or had a female bass player. I always thought that was cool. It’s nearly always all dudes, unless it is all women, like the Go-Go’s.
My takeaway is that it is ultimately superficial. Bradbury, as a literary man, seems to think of literature as an end in itself, and a published novel which pleased someone to be inherently valuable. I see no strong basis for making this claim, EXCEPT in contradistinction to, in being less bad than, a television addiction.
We all know TV makes people stupider. At least that seems to be true, and a great many of us think we know that. The internet, perhaps, is even worse. I was playing yesterday with the idea of “Twitterthink” as something to be compared and contrasted with Doublethink. I may develop that later, but I’m not at the moment sure what I myself think and feel about all that.
Be all that as it may, is Justine by Sade really a book whose loss human civilization should bemoan? Lolita? Anything by Sartre?
Here is the problem: the problem arises within the proposed solution. We are told by public intellectual, by “literary sorts”, that we need to think, and to think we need to read. But if I spent the next five years reading, say, everything by Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the remaining books on common Top 50 lists of various sorts, would I REALLY be that much wiser?
I very much doubt it. I think that, in terms of learning how to live intelligently, the Captain is not entirely wrong in calling it all retrogressive. Postmodernism came out of all that. Political fascism and totalitarianism came out of all that.
The books, you see, created the book burners. The book burners are merely the descendants of the book writers, who were also lost.
There is no merit in being publicly and articulately lost.
Vastly better to, say, memorize the books of Tarthang Tulku, the Dhammapada, the Bhagavid Gita, even the Bible, which I will note was unrepresented (although a similar theme emerges in “The Book of Eli”). Certainly, certainly, certainly, the Tao Te Ching.
And my paradise is not a host of hypnotized islands of human beings wandering all day reciting books, but sitting in meditation, seeking to transform all their attachments into active energy and joy. It is singing, dancing, celebration, creation.
Why do we admire the people we admire? Rather, why do good minds choose to fill themselves with mediocrity? I read and listen to good books to further my education (I am at present slowly working my way through David Copperfield), but not out of any hope they will make me much wiser. I do think the thesis, I believe of Stephen Pinker, that books build empathy is likely true. This is to the good. But empathy only goes so far, and meditation will build it more reliably, more deeply, and in most cases faster.
There was a time after the Second World War when much of the West seemingly fetishized authors. We can ask why, and I think the answer is BECAUSE THAT WAS ALL THEY HAD. They had already killed “God”, they were examining an unimaginably horrific conflict, and all they had left was aesthetics and creation. Then they killed aesthetics, because they couldn’t come up with any more ideas, and to a great extent that is where things stand today.
These are my views, at any rate.
Life is uncertain. But we cannot allow this fact to cause us to constrict what remains. If you shrink from what may be, you lose what is–all of it.
We are surrounded by waves in an endless sea, which vary in direction, and vary in intensity. We bob up and down, we are moved here, and moved there.
But in the end, we can always choose what we see. We can widen and we can shrink our perceptual horizons. We can destroy or ignore miracles, or we can feed them. This is a choice given to all of us.
But things become more clear when you change the categories.
How do you feel about “always believe the men”?
Or “Always believe the white person”?
Or “Always believe the person in authority”?
Or “Always believe the black person”?
There is a reason our court system evolved to work the way it does. When evidence must be produced to support claims, then you get less false claims, and are entitled to feel better about the ones which survive.
I do think that many men have gotten away with terrible crimes. I know several women who can say this. This is awful.
But it is also awful, as I’ve said, engineering a system in which women can blackmail and extort men any time they want, requiring only modest skill in dissimulation.
All women know that other women can be petty “triflin'” bitches. They fuck with each others minds continually. And so I can’t say it surprises me too much, although it does a little, how vehemently so many women have come out in support of Kavanaugh.
No ones career should be forced to hang at the end of a rope created by a few crocodile tears and a small bit of planning.
But it’s hard to process the feeling of this. I almost said “to know how to feel”, but that’s really an odd phrase, isn’t it? As if we can choose how to feel.
In the face of all this uncertainty, though, I think anger and intellectualism are safe refuges. They take us OUT of this place and time, but in doing so they create some stability.
I see something every day to be angry about. Don’t you? Don’t we all, on every particle of the political spectrum?
And is not the news nearly 100% abstract? Are we not always reading about people in some other country or city saying things we have not witnessed? Has the whole world, outside of our small circle, not become abstract, and do we not even then make our own small circles abstract? When you see a group of girls–it seems more often to be girls, although of course I am generalizing–sitting around, together, but each on their phone texting someone else–they, too, have become abstract to each other.
A robot is an abstraction of a human being. It is what a human being would be if you took all emotion, and all physical need out of it. Does this abstraction make it perfect? Of course not. Not to me.
Abstraction and the cult of efficiently go together. Jacques Ellul pointed out, back in the early 1960’s, how the cult of efficiency was a peculiarly American form of propaganda. We ingest it, and we rarely question it. Well, the hippies did, and the slackers do, but they more or less oppose it because they want to remain perennial children. They have nothing creative to offer as a genuine alternative.
But I think this whole background needs to be noticed. It is the backdrop of much of the rage so many people feel about so many things. Fear leads easily to rage, and it is really impossible for anyone who thinks and feels not to wonder where this is all leading, if our world will still exist anything like it does today in 20 years.
So we shout and scream at each other. Anger both presumes and breeds certainty, and certainty–even a little, even for a short time–is an emotional analgesic.