whither the future?

Yesterday my daily perusing started with the Chronicle of Higher Ed where I learned of a new book by James P. Carse. I was once quite fond of the two or three of his books I'd read, but I'd kind of forgotten about him. A quick look for the book led me to something called The Long Now, which led me to a very neat little essay by Michael Chabon about the future and how we've kind of abandoned it on a cultural level:

This is the paradox that lies at the heart of our loss of belief or interest in the Future, which has in turn produced a collective cultural failure to imagine that future, any Future, beyond the rim of a couple of centuries. The Future was represented so often
and for so long, in the terms and characteristic styles of so many historical periods from, say, Jules Verne forward, that at some point the idea of the Future—along with the cultural appetite for it—came itself to feel like something historical, outmoded, no longer viable or attainable.

It touches on a theme I've mentioned before, our been there done that attitude toward history.

"My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart.

This--the "we're at the end" sentiment--is the Tony Soprano attitude I've talked about before. I understand its pull but I have come to view it with disdain. It's regrettable, maybe even laughable. Somewhere in the midst of all the other perusing I stumbled on this interview with Julian Barbour, a physicist who claims that time isn't real. Obviously I don't understand a good bit of what he's talking about but it reinforced something I've been thinking about quite a bit. We don't know much. Saying so does not discount what knowledge we do possess or its value, it's simply an admission that we're still at the beginning.

trickgnosis?

David Brooks in the NYT describing the Buddhist conception of the self. Sweet Jesus. What's next? Bill Kristol on Nagarjuna?

Brooks describing what he calls "neural Buddhism," or the result of the "cognitive revolution":

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

He gets the first part, concerning the self, right from a Buddhist perspective. The rest is a bit more speculative. He places all this in the context of the recent jabber about atheism:

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

To some extent this sounds like the logical conclusion of the now cliched "I'm not religious I'm spiritual" mantra that one hears so often these days. But that mostly represents a tepid apathy, whereas Brooks, I think, may be getting at something a bit more profound. Maybe.

Maybe something like this from theoretical biologist Stuart Kaufmann:

So the unfolding of the universe - biotic, and perhaps abiotic too - appears to be partially beyond natural law. In its place is a ceaseless creativity, with no supernatural creator. If, as a result of this creativity, we cannot know what will happen, then reason, the Enlightenment's highest human virtue, is an insufficient guide to living our lives. We must use reason, emotion, intuition, all that our evolution has brought us. But that means understanding our full humanity: we need Einstein and Shakespeare in the same room.

Shall we use the "God" word? We do not have to, yet it is still our most powerful invented symbol. Our sense of God has evolved from Yahweh in the desert some 4500 years ago, a jealous, law-giving warrior God, to the God of love that Jesus taught. How many versions have people worshipped in the past 100,000 years?

Yet what is more awesome: to believe that God created everything in six days, or to believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and partially lawlessly? I find the latter proposition so stunning, so worthy of awe and respect, that I am happy to accept this natural creativity in the universe as a reinvention of "God". From it, we can build a sense of the sacred that encompasses all life and the planet itself. From it, we can change our value system across the globe and try, together, to ease the fears of religious fundamentalists with a safe, sacred space we can share.

This is sort of interesting. Kind of a reinvigorated (or maybe just rehashed depending on your perspective) pantheism. You have to read the whole article to see how the biology informs it, but I can see how this holds some appeal. As a crusty old agnostic I have some vestigial God habits and I sometimes entertain the idea of undertaking a Jamesian sort of experiment and deciding that I will believe. But I quickly realize that while I can say quite clearly what I know I cannot believe, I cannot really say what I would believe were I to decide to believe. I can't go in for all the particulars that Brooks talks about, all the theological specifics that make a religion a religion. But something like Kaufmann is proposing, well, I guess it's vague enough, but shit, I don't know, yeah it is awe inspiring and stunning and beautiful and horrifying all at the same time, but...oy. Without a religion would that make me spiritual? Poor tricky can't abide that thought.

prayer for consumers

I saw this credited to Saint Teresa of Avila. I can't vouch for the source but this made me feel good when I read it:

"Thank God for the things I do not own."

That's some wise shit by golly.

I read it not in some self-righteous way, but more as an acknowledgment that it is good that my craving has been frequently thwarted. I am no champion of austerity but I've been around long enough now to realize that if I'd gotten a lot more of what I thought I wanted I'd likely have more troubles than I already do.

Of course some of you are much more subtle and experienced at this prayer business than I am so feel free to enlighten me.

addendum: my south Atlanta sweetie seems to know the words to most every pop country hit of the 90's and she informs me that St. Teresa has a lot in common with Garth Brooks to judge by this song: unanswered prayers. Oy.

lay my burden down

Today I had the sensation of freedom, of being freed form the burden of time. Feeling free, momentarily, made me realize how completely my existence is structured by the feelings time inspires. These feelings are a product of a lifetime's pattern, they are a physical habit, so much a part of me that feeling free of them was a bit startling. It seemed to me that I could simply set it all aside, that it wasn't really real, and be free. Of course I immediately wondered if after freeing myself I would still be myself. Or perhaps like coffee that's been decaffeinated, or diet soda, I would be flavorless and lacking something essential. I think I owe it to myself to find out.

I know that this really does go all the way back to childhood and my feelings about school. It's a long established pattern of anticipation but it lingers when the circumstances that gave rise to it have long since expired. My schedule suits me perfectly and it's very rare that I have to do anything at all that I really don't want to do. But still I find myself with this heaviness on a Sunday that starts creeping up on me Saturday night. As I get older I have something new to accompany the malaise of anticipation: a changing perception of time. It now goes much faster and this gives rise to a new set of worries and a new set of bodily sensations. Actually they may be the same feelings or perhaps they are closely related. In any case, time is a burden I feel in my body. But what if this need not be the case? I think I will undertake a controlled trial. I have a methodology in mind. I owe it to myself to find out.

12/13/07: better world?

Read an article by Steven Pinker tonight at work: "A History of Violence" in which he argues that the world--of human beings--is less violent now than it has ever been. This idea runs contrary to the dominant narratives of decline at work these days (not that they are new by any means) which hold that everything is pretty much going to hell in a hand basket. All of this ties in to the old argument about humans in their natural state vs. humans under the influence of social institutions. The noble savage and all that, corrupted by civilization. As a young man I bought into it. Now I tend to think that it is not just simplistic but quite wrong. Hobbes was right. Violence, murder, warfare are all fundamentally part of what we are. Fundamentally but not exclusively. These unpleasant tendencies are countered by reciprocity, a successful evolutionary strategy, and by those social institutions that supposedly corrupted the noble savage. Pinker agrees: "Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler." I will admit that the hell in a hand basket hero in me reads that and wants to start ranting about Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the like, but I think Pinker is ultimately correct and he marshals some good evidence. Following Peter Singer he suggests that perhaps the empathy born of that kernel of reciprocity and cooperation is expanded outward by social institutions and historical change to encompass ever larger groups of people. This has made violence less and less acceptable over time and made us more acutely aware of it and its effects. But, Pinker warns, this is not necessarily reason for optimism about the future.

Why do I bring this up. Well, it is interesting in and of itself, but it has made me think about The Wire. The Wire presents a world in which people are mostly helpless in the face of our bureaucratic institutions which now serve mostly to thwart those ends they are intended to further. The Wire, as David Simon points out, owes much to the Greeks. Individuals move in a world in which they find themselves rendered hopeless by forces beyond their control. Though in fairness, steadfast individual effort is one of the few things that can make a difference in the world of The Wire. But reading Pinker makes me think about some of those institutions in a new light. Sure they are problematic at best, and often horrible, but they're mostly the best human beings have ever done. And it is because of their effects on us, the changes they have wrought, that we are so acutely aware of their many shortcomings. In other words, we couldn't have the sort of criticism of dysfunctional social institutions that The Wire does so well if those same institutions had not been successful at countering some of our worst tendencies and encouraging some of our best. Again, however, this is no reason to feel smug or even content. Those institutions require heavy maintenance, and as The Wire shows us, many of their parts no longer work.

6/7/07: God 1(2)

The Fugee responded to my God musing:

One cranky reply: Even when you leave behind the God of the philosophers, you write as if one could stand outside of a way of life centered on some notion of God, separate out a list of truth-claims from the way of life in which they live, decide (empirically?) if they were true, and then base your decision on whether or not to take up the way of life on that determination. But why should - how could - competent judgment precede extensive immersion in practice? (You're the one with pragmatist affinities, after all.) This way of approaching the question is like trying to decide if there are qualitative differences in musical performances just from reading reviews. And going to Candler doesn't count - still second-order. But what if you went to a dying Presbyterian church in South Philly for a decade and shared fully in its life and made yourself an apprentice to some of its aging masters? Then you'd be in a position to make a decision. Practice, participation, and community almost always precede understanding. Why should this case be different?

It has taken me a while to think about a response Fugs. One thing I was not trying to do was formulate an argument. It was more of a brass tacks proposition: what do I really believe? Now one thing this does is make me look like the fundamentalist I claimed I might be, considering truth claims in stark terms without too much context. I suppose I could take refuge in the fact that this is how many of your co-religionists approach their religion, and indeed how lots and lots of folks do. There are often certain creeds and such that one must indicate agreement with in order to join the community in the first place. Particular communities are claiming universal truths that aren't dependent on context. So truth claims often are front and center, and even if they are not always central, they are never irrelevant. Not out there anyway, though maybe in the academy, and that probably indicates why I could be a second-order fish out of water. One doesn't always have the chance to live the life before coming to any sort of decision with regards to these matters. So while this move might be justified, to an extent, it would leave some important things unanswered. No refuge here.

First, it's funny, but one of the reasons I would be reluctant to go to that little community in south Philly, or with the Sufis in Cairo or wherever else, is that I feel like it would be disrespectful of me to go and try to be a part of their community and everything it offers when I can't look them in the eye and tell them that I believe what they believe. I abstain out of respect. Does that sound like a bunch of shit? I don't know, but I feel it. Maybe I feel wrongly. Maybe I am a fundy. Second, I don't think I'm separating these particular truth claims out from any particular community or its way of life as you say. I think this particular question, God, is my question too. I'm laying claim to these truth claims. I'm standing right in the middle of my way of life and having a look. And I think that's valid here, even if it means I've got my head up my ass for the moment. I don't think it is unfair to expect that if I try I might find God in my life, as it stands, however Godless its practices, participations and communities may be (and I don't mean that in a snippy way). Which leads me to my final point: if I were to immerse myself in a religious community and its practices, exactly what decision would I be in a position to make? No doubt I'd find something deep and meaningful down there in south Philly but obviously it would be a simple matter to simply slap the name God on whatever I please. Which is not to deny the possibility that I might just find God. Oy, I don't want this to devolve into a chicken and egg/community and God argument, I'll let you duke that out with Durkheim, but I did want to clarify this because it's important. I'm not sure if I've clarified anything actually, maybe I'll have to try again. Thanks for your thoughtful response.

5/20/07: God

question 1, seeing as it's Sunday : God--yay or nay?

My first thought is to abstain. And in a sense that would be honest enough. If pushed to have to choose one or the other, I would have to say nay. But the question begs another: what do you mean by God? If the question simply means invisible superdude in the sky, then indeed nay. If it's the scholastic sort of God, he of the omni-predicates and puzzling logical paradoxes, well, still nay. I simply don't see the evidence for an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good creator/source of being/first cause/prime mover. Take away the "all-good" and I might start listening intently, but more out of curiosity than anything else. I can't get past theodicy, can't explain away suffering and evil, and can't take very seriously those who want to counter with the free-will argument. Disposing of "all-powerful" would also be interesting but leads to some other philosophical problems.

The question becomes more interesting if we move to scripture. Hebrew Bible God? Well, seems more internally consistent to me in some ways, but not a God I could love. Fear, certainly, but not love. Who's to say I need to love God? Or believe in him for that matter? Though I will say that, empirically, I feel like one could make a case for an angry, vengeful, spiteful, capricious, warlike and often indifferent God. But morally, I feel the need to object to that God. How's about Jesus? Hmmm. There are so many obstacles here. There's the relationship to the aforementioned Hebrew God--philosophically, scripturally, historically. I cannot get around the history. Just can't. I mean that in many ways, ways that need not be elaborated. If it could just be about the love and compassion, the lowest and the meek, the good, dark, bloody narratives, the community and some good music, well damn, it'd be sorely tempting. And I was surprised when I met folks at the seminary for whom that was pretty much it. They had many of the same grave doubts that I did, weren't too sure about miracles and resurrections and the rest, but they were happy to call themselves Christians. The funny thing was, I had no problem with that, but I couldn't do it. I am perhaps a fundamentalist about certain things.

A friend told me once that he'd tried hard to not believe in God, really made an effort, but at the end of the day he just couldn't do it. That made sense to me. I sort around in my head and my gut and my heart, and there's just no belief there in Jesus, or Yahweh or the Trinity. That leaves room for other specific possibilities but I'm not sure they interest me at all. I'm not a polytheist or a pagan or blah blah blah. But neither can I consent to being called an atheist. And this is where it starts to get tricky. I may not believe that Jesus died for my sins, but I'm pretty amazed that I exist at all. And that you do and any of this does. Now don't get me wrong, evolution explains a whole lot and quite simply and elegantly. But it does not get to some very basic questions, despite what Richard Dawkins may say (and I don't have a dog in that fight). Natural selection cannot tell me why anything is. Or perhaps more accurately, why everything is, at all. Do you understand what I'm saying here? Maybe there is no reason, but that still sort of misses the point. That anything is at all is pretty fucking strange. And I don't have an answer for it. And I've yet to hear one that convinced me. But I cannot claim to know with certainty, or even to believe, that there is nothing behind it. I fear I'm stumbling here, but the terrain is treacherous. Oh, it is also worth noting that many atheists can be every bit as annoying as the most overbearing evangelical. So I guess this makes me an agnostic by default. That seems kind of unsatisfying, but so be it.

A postscript to the God question: I sometimes describe myself as a friendly agnostic or a hopeful agnostic. And the truth is, that I think it would be nice if there were a loving Creator and if this world was just an important stop on the way to somewhere better. It would be nice if after I died I got to see all my loved ones who went before me, and got to be with them forever. It would be nice if in the end it was all ok. I just don't believe all that to be the case. For the most part anyway. I suppose the closest I come to being religious is in my occasional sneaking suspicion that somehow, in the end, it'll be ok. Which does not, I should add, mitigate all the real suffering in the meantime.

5/18/07: Happiness?

question 7a: What makes for a happy life?

I've thought a lot about this one, and so has most everyone. I believe there is a reasonably simple answer to this question: other people and meaningful activity. Broadly speaking happiness comes from two things: our relationships with others and our work, which may or may not be our job. We are social creatures and our relationships with our partners, our families and our friends all go a long way toward determining our happiness. Or lack thereof. Too often we take others for granted, but a person with deep and meaningful friendships and relationships is likely to be a happy person. We also spend much of our adult lives working at a job or pursuing a vocation. What's important, I think, is that we have some activity that we devote our time to pursuing as an end in itself, that we partake of simply because we enjoy the process itself, and not only because we hope it will lead to other rewards. If we are lucky, we earn our livelihoods in this way. If we simply have a job that cannot provide us this satisfaction then we must find it elsewhere, but it is important that we find it somewhere.

disclaimer: these are my mostly unedited thoughts. Obviously they are not academic in nature. I myself, and pretty much everyone who reads this, has an academic background of some sort and that's fine, but the context here is clearly different. Depth, complexity, erudition--won't find em here!

5/6/07 blame and responsibility

Here's Emory Religion Prof Thee Smith writing in response to the Virgina Tech massacre:

Deep justice knows something better about human nature than mere blame can ever acknowledge, something more true about our common humanity — our co-humanity with one another. That deeper truth is something like this declaration I learned from one of my teachers, Harvey Jackins, founder and chief theoretician of Re-evaluation Counseling: “Every single human being, when the entire situation is taken into account, has always, at every moment of the past, done the very best that he or she could do, and so deserves neither blame nor reproach from anyone, including self. This, in particular, is true of you.”

I find this hard to swallow. The Jackins quote that is. Is this why I am not religious? I don't find this helpful. I would add that I don't find simple blame to be terribly helpful either, but when I read this, I find myself thinking that it simply isn't true. Maybe that shouldn't matter? Maybe we should adopt it as an attitude anyway because it might prove more helpful than simply casting blame?

Here's something I wrote two weeks ago, just a few quick unedited thoughts which may or may not be coherent:

Reading this morning about the Va. Tech killer and attempts to diagnose him after the fact. Gets me thinking about anger, revenge and responsibility. And how it is pretty rare that we want to take responsibility for our situation. A distinction must be made of course between blame and responsibility. Often we find ourselves having to deal with problems for which we are not to blame, indeed sometimes no one is to blame (and that can be even harder), but which we must nonetheless assume responsibility for because no one else can. A troubled person may blame his or her parents for their failures as parents and that blame may be deserved, but only she is responsible for her life. (needless to say this does not extend to children but that exemption runs out pretty fast) Now there are situations so extreme and unfortunate or bizarre that responsibility as a concept seems inadequate or even absurd in such a context. And we may have special legal or medical dispensations for such situations--I'm thinking of mental illness and criminal behavior here--but we still require responsibility as a foundational philosophical idea. Our whole kit and kaboodle runs on it. So we are saddled with responsibility for ourselves whether we like it or not. If we do not have the tools to assume responsibility and deal with it, we get a whole bunch of further problems and complications. What are these tools? Critical thinking, self-reflection, the ability to be honest with oneself and others and there are no doubt others. Not exactly the skill set our culture imparts to us. So we find ourselves a nation of angry people full of indignation and vitriol for others. We unthinkingly assume the role of victim, we cast blame and refuse responsibility, and we end up with most unfortunate results: strife, murder, war, a polarized culture.

I wonder if Jackins "everyone has done their best" doesn't negate the possibility of responsibility. I am living breathing incontrovertible proof that not everyone has always done their best. Does conflict resolution require that sort of attitude? Am I missing something here? If we do stop and think about "the entire situation," to whatever extent we are capable of doing so, does responsibility suddenly become simply an illusion?

4/13/07: a little existential wonder

Has your thinking about history changed?

Yes, very much so. I think for a while I fell into this sort of "end of history" nonsense without even realizing it (and no I'm not specifically referencing the Fukuyama dude). It's a blase sort of mindset I caught in grad school. I think it's cultural and technological in nature: we're just awfully impressed with ourselves and our achievements. The sort of pie-eyed fantasizing about the future that characterized science-fiction and pop culture in much of the 20th century came to seem ridiculous, something that could only be appreciated ironically. But I've come to think that this attitude says a whole lot more about this particular moment in history than that particular moment in history. Of course there are all sorts of folks out there still cooking up all kinds of crazy visions about the future, but whereas I used to respond to this sort of thing with a practiced weariness, I now find it perfectly reasonable. We have no idea. We have some educated guesses that amount to little more than a drop in the bucket. But really we don't know. What I mean to say is, I think I've gotten back a little existential wonder. The sort of thing that doesn't fit so well in an environment of codified professionalism. And it leads me to see that our historical moment is no less than any other historical moment in its strangeness, its patterns, its unpredictability, its fleetingness.

Tony Soprano, speaking of history, of America, says something like "I missed the best part, I came in at the end." To which his psychiatrist replies "I think a lot of Americans feel that way." And I think this is true--that people tend to feel that way in these parts. And maybe if one cared to, it would be possible to explain how that feeling is a product of capitalism and the eschatological legacy of Western monotheism or something. Who knows. Well maybe you know better than I.

But in any case I don't think that feeling is...accurate. In the big picture. I think it is a failure of imagination, an inability to see beyond a momentary perspective. All this shit is as crazy as it ever was.

chatting with Arthur

Perusing some Schopenhauer on my dad’s birthday.

Not the least of the torments which plague our existence is the constant pressure of time, which never lets us so much as draw breath but pursues us all like a taskmaster with a whip. It ceases to persecute only him it has delivered over to boredom.

I think I’ll write that into a little handmade birthday card for dad.

My relationship with time has always been strained. I can remember the frustrations it caused me even as a child and they only got worse as I got older. Time has seemed to me to be both inexorable and untrustworthy. Deceitful perhaps on a banal level, but more profoundly it seems like a bit of a joke at our expense; existentially it’s not quite there is it? Of course on some level it seems ridiculous to express such thoughts. Everybody knows what time is. We don’t have to think about it. As Augustine says “if no one asks me, I know what it is.” But there’s the rub, if anyone should ask Augustine to explain it, he must admit that he does not know. Past is gone, future ain’t here and the present, well, where exactly is it now? Can’t quite pin it down.

Nonetheless we perceive the passage of time. And what may seem distressing is that as we get older the future seems to become the past much faster than it did when we were younger. When I was a kid I thought this was just more adult nonsense. I know better now. Or I know different anyway. My growing awareness of this change in time was perhaps arrested by years spent in graduate school which, in many ways, perpetuates the oh so very slow passage of time that kids know only too well. I can remember many a long morning spent under fluorescent lights in a cold uncomfortable room at some awful early hour discussing some text or other in ways that seemed concerned with maintaining the appearance of sophistication at the expense of any real engagement with, or God forbid love for, ideas. Time froze. Or maybe it was just the Zoloft.

But now that I am a working stiff, time moves much differently. Weeks pass so quickly as to leave me dizzy. But whereas time used to feel to me much as Schopenhauer describes it, it no longer does. Time does not whip me, not any more. It gradually shapes me as it flows past, slowly wearing away habits that once seemed intractable and occasionally bringing new surprises to the surface. Or something like that. So what’s the difference? What’s changed? Is this something inevitable that comes with age and experience? Maybe. Maybe not. For me the difference is a bit more profound: I think I may have learned, good Lord, how to be happy. I don’t know that Arthur would approve of that conclusion but that’s ok.

In no particular order

1. Many of the things we take for granted are simply not true.
2. Hence, many of our institutions are firmly rooted in nonsense.
3. Free will as typically conceived is silly.
4. Alberto Gonzales is a miserable toad.
5. Given the absurd political climate in our country right now, I am surprised at the relative lack of inspired music being made. Reagan was very good for music wasn’t he?

nefarious theories

Ok, I think I've got it straight. Hurricane Katrina, indeed the entire recent onslaught of hurricanes, was caused by the Yakuza using technology originally invented by Tesla. Sounds a bit peculiar, granted, but hey...there's proof. Heheh.

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho – A Pocatello weatherman who gained attention for an unusual theory that Hurricane Katrina was caused by the Japanese mafia using a Russian electromagnetic generator has quit the television station.

You can read the whole article here. And better yet, you can see this weatherman's website here.

Of course there are alternative theories. It might not be the Japanese mafia, it might be...you'll never guess...the government of the United States of America:

One U.S. project that is looked on with deep suspicion by the weather control crowd is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in Gakona, Alaska. The government-run web site for this project states that its goal is "to further advance our knowledge of the physical and electrical properties of the Earth's ionosphere."

To those who are wary of government activities and familiar with the legends around Tesla's weather control research, this remote site with its huge array of radio antenna bouncing electrical waves around in the ionosphere seems awfully darn suspicious, and dangerous.

You can read the whole thing in the Macon Telegraph, which apparently is tuned in to some of the stranger frequencies coming from the world of conspiracy theories. You should also check out the HAARP website, but mysteriously, when I tried to open it, it wouldn't. So I can't provide a link right now. Clearly nefarious forces are at work. Or just google HAARP for all sorts of...fun?

I probably should not poke fun given my own lowgrade weather schizophrenia,* but this shit always gets me. The truth is there ARE nefarious forces at work in the world. We all know that. And I have no doubt that the military is sinking lots and lots of money into weather research and would in fact desperately love to be able to control the weather. But ominous forces who secretly control the world are not the root fear that informs conspiratorial thinking. Nope. In fact, they are a preferable alternative to a more potent set of fears. Namely that we are living in a world in which we have no real control and are subject to destructive natural forces that are completely indifferent to our suffering, our fear, and our hope and that therefore imply that there is nothing at all behind any of this. No God, no Karma, no meaning. Nothing. And that, for many of us, is the ultimate horror. So the conspiracy theory serves as a patchwork solution to an urgent metaphysical and existential dilemma by providing a narrative, the hope of resolution and the promise of some larger purpose that might redeem our suffering.

Or maybe that's just what THEY want me to think.

* Given my propensity to obsess over, and complain about, the weather I feel I should acknowledge that September was a beautiful month here. Warm and dry and not too hot. I shall remember it fondly come February and March.

you are going to die

I am not a computer nerd, or a tech nerd of any sort, and I don't give a whit for Steve Jobs one way or another, but I did like this excerpt from his commencement speech at Stanford:

When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

It is refreshingly earnest--a quality not in fashion in our culture, I know. I am, in my own way, in the habit of doing what Jobs suggests (remembering that I'll be dead soon), but it is a difficult standard to meet. Delayed gratification and preparation for the future are important for our continued survival, but neither would matter much if we really knew that our death was imminent. Of course we don't actually know, maybe our death is imminent. And even if it's not immediately on the horizon it's not that far off. Perhaps the problem isn't that we will die, but that we live too long?

the way we were

Umberto Eco in the L.A. Times:

"If there is something that we call soul, that's memory — it makes up your identity," Eco, 73, says, his voice twisted by a thick Italian accent and interrupted by quick, explosive chortles. "All your befores, all your afters — without memory you are an animal. You have no human soul. Even for a believer, you cannot go to hell without memory. Why to suffer so much if you don't know why you suffer? It doesn't make sense. If, in time, you lose your memory, there's no meaning in paradise and no meaning in hell."

no memory=no self? I hadn't thought about this much before...to what extent are we our memories? And if our memories are such an essential element of our identity, what do we make of the fact that memory is so fallible?

My own understanding of the self, such as it is, is rather informed by certain strains of Buddhist thought, and this relationship seems fitting in that context: the self, like memory, is contingent, fleeting, impermanent. Which is not to deny either of them any sort of reality or potency; both are real conventionally, but not in some idealist, Platonic, metaphysical sense.

If I were to forget everything would there still be any me to remember? Anybody up for some Madhyamika/Nagarjuna/Buddhist metaphysics talk? Me neither I guess.

Madhyamika? What? Yo mama kid.

patterns

Perhaps the people and events that make up our lives are connected in ways we only dimly perceive?

The human mind is wonderfully adept at recognizing and creating patterns but occasionally this goes awry and we call it schizophrenia, or paranoia, or astrology. Anyone who has spent time in the company of the seriously mentally ill can probably attest to the intensity with which they draw seemingly inexplicable connections, seeing ominous signs in the most innocuous details; causality seems to have gone amok and left them trapped in an inescapable web of malign interrelation.

Science of course tells us that we are in fact connected in many ways that are not immediately evident. Biologically we appear to be discreet but we are porous and our environment moves through us just as we move through it. But this sort of connectivity is ultimately material in nature and the skeptic will say that we are wrong to assign it any particular significance. Those who want to find some greater meaning, some pattern, something more than pure contingency, in existence must still fall back on older, usually religious, explanations: divine ordinance, karma, fate. Our skeptic may scoff at these with Nietzschean glee but for many of us one or another of these notions still inform our worldview. Perhaps in the end they are simply life affirming illusions that enable us to endure an otherwise pointless existence. Perhaps.

But we have all, I suspect, had experiences that seem to suggest, if not an inevitability to the unfolding of events, then at least the likelihood of some sort of ordering logic at work. Now I don't mean to sound supernatural--the skeptic in me is alive and well--but what if there are patterns of relation and connectivity that mostly escape our notice? Don't get out your ouija board just yet. Could it not be the case that our understanding of causality is still simplistic and naïve? We are quick to congratulate ourselves for our technological prowess but we are no closer to understanding certain elemental problems than the Greeks were more than two millennia ago. Perhaps future generations will look back on us and shake their heads in astonishment at our misplaced arrogance?

If I were a betting man I'd guess the military is way ahead of the curve on this one. Somewhere in some unnoticeable lab there's a schizophrenic undergoing fMRI or some other sort of brain monitoring and a team of well trained functionaries poring over all of his scribblings and rantings trying to tease out the patterns in the chaos. Where is my tinfoil hat?

: ) The bright side!

Night before last, I attended the bachelor party of a friend and regular reader. After he got good and drunk he told me, in so many words, that Trickgnosis is rather…grim. A bit bleak. A little gloomy. Now I can’t really argue with that. But he implied that perhaps this was a little…unbalanced.

My first thought was that this was spoken like someone surrounded by friends, riding a wave of good cheer and Jameson, and about to marry someone he loved. In other words, things were looking pretty good for him. And I don’t begrudge him that. When life takes an occasional break from kicking us in the ass, it is indeed to be celebrated for as long as it lasts. But I feel compelled to defend my outlook on the world. It is true that I have a hard time ignoring all the banal evil, the senseless brutality and the ubiquitous suffering the world has to offer. Clearly, I do not shop enough. Or maybe I need to put those books down and start watching some more television.

William James made a distinction between two types of character he referred to as “the healthy minded” and “the sick soul.” The healthy minded are those fortunate enough to be born with a happy, easygoing disposition. The sick soul, on the other hand, is…rather grim, a bit bleak, a little gloomy. The cheerful-by-nature most likely lead happier, more fulfilling lives, but, according to James, they are just a bit out of touch with reality:

The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude is therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is anything but absurd. In fact, we all do cultivate it more or less, even when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.

In our culture today our fictions are no longer even very poetic. Damn that was grim. Give me a minute, I’ll get the hang of this mindless good cheer eventually. James himself did his best to be a cheerful sort, but he thought that acknowledging the realities of the world was a philosophical necessity:

It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth...

So I’m not going to run out and join the optimist’s club. However, in the interest of balance, I will try to pay more attention to those things in life that I take secret delight in: friends, family, music, literature. But keep an eye on me and sound the alarm in the event I start sounding too cheerful. Living too long "in the light of good" has been shown to cause cancer.

that curious mania

Terry Eagleton on Wittgenstein's affliction: "Wittgenstein was grotesquely, absurdly, ethical: he was afflicted by that curious mania known as Protestantism, for which everything is a potential sign of salvation or damnation."

This reminds me of something I've mentioned previously, Allen Guelzo on Lincoln's religiosity:

...Lincoln's moralism, far from puzzling, was driven precisely because he was "wholly wanting" in "piety." It was the mark of many Victorian unbelievers who came from pious Protestant households...to imbibe from those households a puritanical demand for earnestness and relentless truthfulness and then turn it on their own Christianity. Duty became the moral surrogate of religion. And often, it was the very high-mindedness of their honesty which led them to reject Christianity as untrue or lapse into unbelief if they felt they could not honestly describe themselves as Christians. The ethics of Protestant Christianity outlasted its theology, and almost as a compensation for the absence of faith, "infidels" like Lincoln redoubled their own pursuit of conscientiousness.

I mention this because, well, I see myself reflected here. Yup, me, Lincoln and Wittgenstein: three of a kind. I'm kidding of course (though don't Lincoln and Wittgenstein seem to bear some sort of family resemblance?). What intrigues me is this Protestant worldview with all the piety removed. Or at least all the theological specifics that we associate with piety: take God out of the picture, mind you this leaves a big hole and an acute sense of absence, and even if you cling to some distant, inscrutable and unknowable God you can still go ahead and forget all about trinities and Christologies and other strange Greek formulas. And what's left? The grotesquely, absurdly ethical? A puritanical demand for earnestness and relentless truthfulness that turns on itself?

Yeah, that, and superstition for the agnostic, always on the lookout for those potential signs of salvation and damnation in a universe seemingly devoid of any such notions.

The Elementary Particles

I finished Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles. Whew. I figured there was a good chance that I was going to hate it. I’d read reviews of it a while back that made me think it was not for me. Houellebecq has been described as humorless, self-important, misogynistic, misanthropic…the whole shebang. Then I read this, which made me think twice and actually check it out for myself. I’m glad I did. Make no mistake, it’s a damn bleak book (“darker even than Beckett”):

Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end there’s only death.

But there’s something…palpable, sorrow perhaps, below the surface, that kept me giving Houellebecq the benefit of the doubt as it implied, for me anyway, an author with a heart capable of moral despair and perhaps even love.

What the boy had felt was something pure, something gentle, something that predates sex or sensual fulfillment. It was the simple desire to reach out and touch a loving body, to be held in loving arms. Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope.

Oh, it’s a pretty good read too—it imagines the genesis of a possible future through the story of two brothers. Houellebecq depicts our time as rushing toward dissolution and entropy, but he implies a future that resists being labeled either utopian or dystopian, though I suspect others might disagree, strongly, given the way the book ends: the imminent extinction of the human race. The future itself is only hinted at:

We live today under a new world order,
The web which weaves together all things envelops our bodies,
Bathes our limbs,
In a halo of joy.
A state to which men of old sometimes acceded through music.

Yes music can bring joy to life. It's small acknowledgements like that that preserve the book's humanity. Though Tricky must admit that he himself felt skewered, and rightfully so perhaps, by one passage in particular.

“I’m useless,” he said resignedly. “I couldn’t breed pigs, I don’t have the faintest idea how to make sausages or forks or mobile phones. I’m surrounded by all this stuff that I eat or use and I couldn’t actually make a single thing—couldn’t even begin to understand how they’re made. If industrial production ceased tomorrow, if all the engineers and the specialist technicians disappeared off the face of the earth, I couldn’t do anything to start things over again. In fact, outside the industrialized world, I couldn’t even survive; I wouldn’t know how to feed or clothe myself, or protect myself from the weather. My technical competence falls far short of Neanderthal man. I’m completely dependent on my society, but I play no useful role in it. The only thing I know how to do is write dubious commentaries on outdated cultural issues.

Ouch. I'll share some more pithy Houellebecq wisdom in the next couple days. Right now there are some other controversial novels of the nineties I need to tend to, and some nineteenth century history I've been meaning to comment on. Ouch.

William James on suicide and hope

A timely discovery given recent talk of suicide: I was perusing pragmatism.org and looking through the contents of the journal published by the William James Society when I found a most interesting article. The author, while mounting a convincing defense of James and his defense of religion, discusses James's depression and his reflections on suicide:

In an address to the Harvard YMCA later published
in the volume titled The Will to Believe, James
set out to tend to the “profounder bass note of life” by
addressing the question that became the title of the
essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” His approach here is
simple and direct: what would we say to convince
someone suicidal that life is in fact worth living? James
distinguishes between suicide as the product of genuine
insanity, in which case we can be of no help, and a
more reflective melancholia that results from the studious
life, which may be remedied with yet more reflection.

James identified the hope that life might be anything other than utterly meaningless as a religious impulse. But this was far from any sort of orthodoxy--James, being the good empiricist, believed anyone paying attention to the world would have a hard time assenting to any sort of orthodox theism. The author quotes him:

The visible surfaces of heaven and earth refuse to be
brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Every phenomenon
that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl
with some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious
effect upon the mind. Beauty and hideousness, love
and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble
partnership, and there gradually steals over us,
instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that
of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all
things together meaninglessly to a common doom.

Gotta love that James. He looked around at the world and understood perfectly well why someone might want to checkout permanently. But despite his own troubles, James could not allow himself to succumb to despair. He held on to hope and he believed that belief might prove to be self-fulfilling. As the author puts it, both paraphrasing and quoting James:

We have a hand in creating the worlds we inhabit; life is worth living because we have some say in the matter: “believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

Good stuff. I find James a helpful philosophical companion because he does not shy away from difficult truths even while sounding an upbeat note. I take solace from that. But I'm still ok with suicide.

If you want to read the whole article, and it's quite good, it's available as a PDF here.