Welcome Home, Rich (June 2016 Junque Communications)

     I was away for about ten days and had my USPS mail on hold. It has been delivered, and the portion within shouting distance of mail I want rounds up to .5kg/1 pound, counting what feels like a doggie blanket from the SPCA, which I'll hand on to neighbors who actually have dogs. The mail I don't want, the junk mail, weighs in at 2.4kg/5.28 pounds. And I recall deleting something like 238 spam e-mails.

      That is for one old man, living alone, who has about all he needs in the way of possessions and doesn't buy many new things or take extravagant trips or contribute all that much to the Democrats or other objects of charity.

       In his hopeful dystopian story, "To the Chicago Abyss" (1949), Ray Bradbury's crazy-old-man protagonist will help restore civilization by remembering the junk products of "a race-track civilization that ran last over a precipice": i.e., ours. Bradbury challenges us with an intriguing paradoxical conceit we might call homeopathic: his unlikely hero feeds the survivors the words for the "clamored-after [...] absurd [... products] of a never never-ending river of robots and robot-mad owners." The recovery of civilization will require lusting after the lost materialist crap whose production and consumption had doomed civilization.

      As I said, it's a hopeful story, relatively speaking. Looking at the crap being shoved my way without my asking — looking at the waste of all that paper and time and energy — I suspect another couple generations will be time enough for us to run out over that precipice.

This is the way the world ends;

this is the way the world ends:

not with a bang or a whimper,  

but with a pitch and a hustle and an inundation of ads.

                  (And with mild apologies to T. S. Eliot)

Doing the Right Deed for the Wrong Reason (22 Jan. 2013)

         One of my favorite couplets is from T.S. Eliot's verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral, Thomas Becket's crucial insight into his impending martyrdom, "The last temptation is the greatest treason: / To do the right deed, for the wrong reason."

         For Thomas to seek martyrdom, to choose martyrdom as a personal goal, would be for him — given who he is, given his historical context, given his place in a Christian world — it would be for him a strong spiritual temptation and, for him, the greatest treason.

         In more mundane contexts, though, the "last temptation" idea is pretty much sentimental bullshit.

         I mean the "sentimental" here in an old-fashioned and fairly literal way: "sentimental" as in sentiments, as in having the right ones; "sentimental" in the set of ideas that includes the line, "I don't like your attitude."

         There are places where I respect sentimentality, two anyway, where it's at the core of works that are rigorously, even savagely logical and ethical. Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (1729) depends on our visceral rejection of the idea that eating babies — even Irish babies, even babies of poor Irish who are economically worthless — on our revulsion at the image of literally eating babies, as opposed, say, to our complicity in letting them starve. And William Shakespeare's King Lear (ca. 1605) presents a vision of the world, a true vision I think, where ethics and morality start with feeling, start with compassion — including the "visceral" reaction of most people that blinding a helpless old man is wrong. In a universe in which there may be no God or gods, or in which the gods may be bratty little boys torturing humans for sport, in a universe where Nature may be thoroughly "red in tooth and claw" and where social norms go along with the whims of the powerful — in a Machiavellian universe, one starts ethical thinking with feeling; and if such appeals have little philosophical respectability or practical power among the hard-assed, well, that is still where we have to start.

         Most of the time, though, stick to the cliché and extend it: don't do too detailed a dental examine on a free horse, and don't question too hard the deep motives of people doing the right thing.

         Indeed, hypocrisy is widespread and pretty disgusting, but if some politician hypocritically and cynically pushes a program in the public interest, just say "Thank you" and stay alert. Hypocrisy is "on the one hand"; on the other hand is the simple fact that human motivation is complex, even for saints less problematic than Thomas Becket, St. Thomas of Canterbury.  (Thomas died opposing the principle of one law for all people in a country and in other ways defending the privileges of an overprivileged Church. His causes weren't so good; his integrity was and remains admirable.)

         In a climactic trial scene in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s first novel, Player Piano (1952), the protagonist is most seriously accused of fomenting revolution, with the most damning part of the accusation that his motive was to get back at his father. Similar accusations were repeated against radicals in the 1960s: our rebellion was based in our psyches, adolescent rebellion against authority taken to the streets.

         Part of the lesson of Player Piano and of the debates of the 1960s is, "So what?" In Player Piano, the revolution was doomed but justified and necessary. That's what counts, not the motives of its titular leader. Similarly of the Movements of the long 1960s: were the political analyses, on balance, right or wrong? Were the various causes generally just? If Civil Rights and ending the Vietnam War were just stupid goals, okay, then one might get curious about what sort of psychopathologies or arrested developments got people thinking such weird thoughts, and acting on them. If the political analyses were at least arguable, then argue about them. If the causes might have been just, argue the issues and how they might have been pursued better at the time and perhaps still better today.

         What's going on in people's "hearts and minds" — brains and hormone systems or whatever — isn't easily knowable and generally no one's business except those people and their families and close friends.

         If you don't like someone's attitude, say so, and then move the conversation on or move on yourself. If people are doing the right thing, you've definitely got the right to try to determine if they will continue to do so. But on social issues that's a political analysis, where people's sentiments and attitudes are usually less important than their situations.

         If you don't trust someone's motives for doing "the right deed," try to make sure that the pressures on him are such that he'll continuing doing so; in terms of his soul, those pressures may be "the wrong reason," but his soul isn’t your business. 

Prayer-Book Meditation 2: Human Worth (∞ and Zip) [16 Sept. 2013]

            According to my prayer book for the Jewish High Holidays, the Hassidim of the 18^th century taught, "Keep two truths in your pocket, and take them out according to the need of the moment. Let one be: 'For my sake was the world created.' And the other: 'I am dust and ashes.'"

            I liked this teaching and intended to write on it, but my rabbi liked it more: she had cards printed up suitable for literally keeping in one's pocket.

            Realistically speaking — which for me means viewed in terms of post-Enlightenment science — realistically speaking, neither assertion is correct, but the "dust and ashes" one is closer to reality. We humans are the product of evolution and mostly water and microorganisms with unique DNA defining us as a species. Eventually we will all become like dust and ashes, but first we'll compost and become food for worms and putrefactive bacteria and such; meanwhile, though, it's more scientifically accurate to say something like, "I am a living variation on the theme of the primate, a larger but weaker chimp, with language and some other talents."

            The Enlightenment, however, is part of what the 18^th-c. Hassidic movement was in reaction against, and even on what Medieval Christian theologians would call "the Literal Level," the assertions are figurative: hyperbole with metaphor. Plus, when one talks of Creation and the purpose of Creation, one is in the world of mythos, not logos: stories of the sacred, not of logic.

            Most of all, though, the Hassidic teaching is of practical use, psychologically. That "need of the moment" for most of us, much of the time, is to be brought down several pegs — a point I'll return to — but for most of us also, some of the time, we need reassurance that we're somehow of worth.

            If you are Hassid, one of the pious ones, you can believe, fairly often, that the Creator of the universe loves not only the world and humankind but also you, personally, individually: "For my sake," in the wording of the card, "the world was created." Now such a belief is probably delusional, but to recycle an idea and a half from T. S. Eliot and Henrik Ibsen, "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality," and pretty much all of us need a "vital lie," starting with that idea that we and our lives are somehow significant.

            At least now and then, "the need of the moment" is reassurance.

            More often we need our gratuitous lies undermined: our cockiness, our arrogance, our inevitable but dangerous Illusion of Central Position; then, "the need of the moment" is to remind oneself "I am dust and ashes": in Modern terms, I am one of seven billion human beings living on a pretty but minor planet on the edge of a pretty but unexceptional galaxy in a universe doomed to the Big Crunch of final collapse or — if the currently less fashionable theory proves right — the Big Fizzle of the final entropic winding down. Or, if there are an infinite number of universes — then I'm worth even less, like approaching zero-value as a limit and pretty much arriving at zero.

            And with such thoughts in our hearts as well as our minds, take out the card and read, "For my sake the world was created."