The faces of the elderly, especially those of old men, often betray disillusionment with life: they've seen through it. It's a business that doesn't cover its costs. (Schopenhauer) Women too are among the disillusioned, but they are 'under-represented.' That is because women as a group are more child-like than men as a group. Is that a sexist remark? Not if it is true. And it is true as anyone with any experience of life knows. Therein lies the charm of so many old ladies: they've retained their girlish enthusiasm. They are still eager to 'do things' and they complain of their men that they 'don't want to do anything.' My wife's an old lady, older than me: she's into drinking and dancing with her girlfriends. Me, I'm into thinking and trancing in solitude. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo!
Category: Human Predicament
Jeopardy! The TV Show
Starring Alex Trebek!
One observes very bright people displaying their cleverness and mental agility via recall of isolated facts. Meanwhile the horrors of life continue unabated. Now surely there is nothing wrong with some escapist entertainment. Right? The other night the trivia questions were about the First World War. And the clever contestants had all the answers. But as Jack Kerouac asked:
Truth and Consolation
Nothing is true because it is consoling, but that does not preclude certain truths from being consoling. So one cannot refute a position by showing that some derive consolation from it. Equally, no support for a position is forthcoming from the fact that it thwarts our interests or dashes our hopes.
Moral Sickness
Few are indifferent to their physical sickness, but most to their moral, if they are aware of it at all.
Where Less is More
Alexander Pope advises that we drink deep of the Pierian spring, for a little learning is a dangerous thing. A little knowledge, like a little learning, is indeed a dangerous thing except in the case of persons, where a lot of knowledge endangers love, respect, and admiration. Propinquity breeds familiarity, and familiarity contempt. Distance preserves and augments what propinquity diminishes. In matters sartorial this holds as well, as witness the robes of the judge which add an aura of dignity and majesty to a poor mortal who, under the aspect of eternity, and under the distancing attire, is as wretched as the man in the dock.
Adapted from Teilhard de Chardin
We are not human beings on a spiritual journey; we are spiritual beings on a human journey.
Moral Failure and Moral Capacity
Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. So I had the thought: we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of. So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin. I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.
A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.
On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.
The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually. That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.
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*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.
Self-Love and Self-Respect
Self-love can extend to love of the smell of one's own excrement, at which point self-respect raises an eyebrow. But are we not just clever land mammals? How is self-respect possible for such critters? It is actual, so it is possible.
The Peninsular Man
No man is an island. He can't be. Ought he be a continent? No.
The healthy man is a peninsula. He is connected to the mainland, and nourished by that connection, but he doesn't allow himself to be influenced from all sides. A part of him juts into the oceanic.
The peninsular life is best.
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A long-time reader responds (30 November 2018):
So I read your post just now a) at the outer extremity of a literal peninsula; b) linked to my life-partner only by the narrow isthmus of the telephone; c) suddenly disconnected from the quotidian working world by my recent layoff; d) having spent the last decade or two immersing myself in old books and questioning all that I thought I knew; and e) generally projecting myself further and further outward from the presentist mass-society craton into the "oceanic" of the past, the unknowable future, and the great mystery of creation and human awareness.
In other words: peninsular.
Many are the pleasures of blog. One is the pleasure of giving food for thought. Another is the pleasure of receiving appreciation.
Socializing and Idle Talk
Some good comes from socializing if only as a concession to our ineluctable social nature. Only a beast or a god could live without it. But even I do too much of it. In society one is apt to talk too much about too little. Review the previous day's unnecessary conversations. On balance, did they profit you or not? Did they enhance your peace of mind, or damage it?
You might think that intellectual talk is better than talking about the weather. But it can be as bad as mundane trivial talk, an empty posturing, a vain showmanship without roots or results. But worse still is ‘spiritual talk’ which can distract us from both action and (what is better) contemplative inaction.
There is a deep paradox here. It is speech that elevates man above the animals and makes him god-like. And yet it is speech by which he debases himself in a way no animal could, not that the above examples are the most debasing.
Compare MT 12:36, "But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment." (KJV)
Whether or not Christ was God, he was one of humanity's great teachers. One does well to ponder the above verse, and in particular, its harshness. Just why should every idle word get one in trouble with the Moral Authority of the universe?
Welcome to Finitude
You are largely stuck with the guy you are and you have to make the most of it. There are things you don't like about him, but some of them just can't be helped. Change what can be changed; accept what can't.
Neither god nor beast, a man is a being in-between.
Our predicament is at once horrifying and exhilarating. Not to mention a source of endless blog fodder.
The Human Predicament
Part of what makes the human condition a predicament is dispute over whether it is a predicament and whether, if it is, it has a solution, and if it does, what it is. This is just what one would expect if our condition is indeed a predicament.
In the Dark
They dispute whether we are in the dark and whether, if we are, there is away to the light, and if there is, what it is. All of which goes to show that we are — in the dark.
Why Are People So Easy to Swindle?
People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects. When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing. In the end he swindles himself.
How is it, for example, that Bernie Madoff 'made off' with so much loot? You have otherwise intelligent people who are lazy, greedy and vain: too lazy to do their own research and exercise due diligence, too greedy to be satisfied with the going rate of return, and too vain to think that anything bad can happen to such high-placed and sophisticated investors as themselves.
Or take the Enron employees. They invested their 401 K money in the very firm that that paid their salaries! Now how stupid is that? But they weren't stupid; they enstupidated themselves by allowing the subornation of their good sense by their vices.
The older I get the more I appreciate that our problems, most of them and at bottom, are moral in nature. Why, for example, are we and our government in dangerous debt? A lack of money? No, a lack of virtue. People cannot curtail desire, defer gratification, be satisfied with what they have, control their lower natures, and pursue truly choice-worthy ends.
Acting with Others versus Talking with Others
An excellent insight from Alain's essay, "The Ills of Others":
To act with others is always good; to talk with others for the sake of talking, complaining, and recriminating, is one of the greatest scourges on earth . . . . (Alain on Happiness, Frederick Ungar 1973, p. 160)
I once built a small dock with another man. We had little or nothing in common intellectually or spiritually. You could say we lived on different planets. Conversation with him about any matter beyond the sensibly present was pointless or worse. But with tools in hand, confronting the recalcitrance of matter, with a definite physical end in view, engaged in a common project, his words were guided and anchored, and our words together served a purpose. Acting together we achieved something. The job done, the handiwork admired, I found myself actually liking the guy.
But had we been just talking, I would have found it a moral challenge not to be disgusted with him. Few possess the mental equipment and discipline to engage in fruitful conversation that is not anchored in the mundane.
Again I note, as in an earlier Alain post, the French love of the universal quantifier: "To act with others is always good. . . ." Obviously, acting with others is not always good, for reasons you an easily supply yourself. So why the exaggeration? For literary effect.
Please don't accuse me of committing a hasty generalization. I am not inferring some such proposition as 'French writers misuse universal quantifiers for literary effect' from this one instance, or this instance plus the one cited in the earlier post; what I am doing is illustrating an antecedently established general proposition. This is a distinction one should observe, but is too often not observed, namely, the distinction between generalizing and illustrating. Someone who illustrates a general claim by providing an example is not inferring the general claim from the example.