Human Predicament – Page 22 – Maverick Philosopher

Up or Out!

Academic tenure is sometimes described as 'up or out.' You either gain
tenure, within a limited probationary period, or you must leave. I
tend to think of life like that: either up or out, either promotion to a Higher Life or
annihilation. I wouldn't want an indefinitely prolonged stay in this
vale of probation.

In plain English: I wouldn't want to live forever
in this world. Thus for metaphysical reasons alone I have no interest
in cryogenic or cryonic life extension. Up or out!
It would be interesting to delve into some of the issues surrounding
cryonics and the transhumanist fantasies that subserve this hare-brained scheme. The possibilities of fraud and foul play seem endless. Some controversies reported here. But for now I will merely note that Alcor is located in
Scottsdale, Arizona. The infernal Valle del Sol would not be my first
choice for such an operation. One hopes that they have good backup in
case of a power outage.

Related (and rather more substantive) post: Will Science Put Religion out of Business? A Preliminary Tilt at Transhumanism

Neighbors and Relatives

It doesn't bother me in the least that my neighbors and casual acquaintances do not engage me where I live. I expect such relations to be superficial and conventional. But I expect more from relatives even though this expectation is irrational.

I have no trouble accepting that propinquity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity. Why then do I suppose that consanguinity should be such a guarantee?

Blood is thicker than water, but for a Luftmensch, pneuma is what counts.

Relations With Relatives

Our relations with our relatives are too often like the relations of Arabs and Israelis: too much past, no future. But with the Arabs and Israelis it is even worse: too much history, not enough geography.

Worldly Success: How Much is Enough?

You have enough world success if it enables you to advance the project of self-realization on the important fronts including the moral, the intellectual, and the spiritual. The vita contemplativa cannot be well lived by the grindingly poor, the sick, the politically and socially oppressed, the sorely afflicted and tormented. Boethius wrote his Consolations of Philosophy in prison, but you are not Boethius.

You have too much worldly success when it becomes a snare and a burden and a distraction.

We need some social acceptance and human contact, but fame is worse than obscurity. Reflect for a moment on the character of those who enjoy fame and the character of those whose fickle regard confers it.

We need a modicum of worldly wherewithal to live well, but more is not better. Only the terminally deluded could believe, as the saying goes, that "You can't be too thin or too rich." You could be anorexic or like unto the New Testament camel who couldn't pass through the eye of a needle.

We need health but not hypertrophy.

We need power, but not the power over others that corrupts but the power over oneself that does not.

On the Brevity of Life

The lament comes down through the centuries: Vita brevis est. What is the point of this observation? There are two main possible points.

A. One point, call it classical, is to warn people that this life is not ultimate, that it is preliminary and probationary if not positively punitive, that it is not an end in itself, that it is pilgrimage and preparation for what lies beyond the portals of death. One part of the idea is that the brevity of life shows life's non-ultimacy as to reality and value. Back of this is the Platonic sense, found also in Buddhism, that impermanence argues (relative) unreality and (relative) lack of value. Brevity entails vanity, emptiness. This life is empty and insubstantial, a vanishing quantity, a vain play of interdependent appearances. That which vanishes is vain, empty of self-nature, ontologically and axiologically deficient, if not utterly nonexistent. And all finite things must vanish. Vanity and vanishment are inscribed into their very nature.

The other part of the classical idea is that the vanity of life hides a reality the attainment of which depends on how we comport ourselves in this vale of soul-making behind the veil of sense-induced ignorance (avidya). Since life is short, we must work out our salvation with diligence while the sun shines. For it is soon to set. It is later than we think in a world whose temporal determinations are indices of its relative unreality.

The brevity of life thus points both to its vanity and to the necessity of doing the work necessary to transcend it, toil possible only while caught within its coils. To put it in the form of a little ditty:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So renounce it we must.

B. The other point of vita brevis est, call it modern, is to advise people to make the most of life. Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it. Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets. Make the most of it because there is not much of it but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon.

The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us. One should make friends with finitude enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what might be. Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

Which of these attitudes should one adopt toward the brevity of life? At the end of the day it comes down to a free decision on the part of the individual. After all the arguments and counterarguments have been canvassed, you must decide which to credit and which to reject, what to believe and how to live. Or as a gastroenterologist once said,"It depends on the liver."

Realpolitik

The weak invite attack. That is a law of nature. Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other. Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism. There is none. Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state. The same goes for diplomacy. There needs be a hard fist behind the diplomat's smiling mask. There had better be iron and the willingness to shed blood back of that persona.

Or as Herr Blut-und-Eisen himself is reported to have said, "Diplomacy unbacked by force is like music without instruments."

Measurement by Regrets

We are measurable by the nature of our regrets. What do you regret? Not having drunk enough good wine? Not having amassed more wealth? Not having given in to the temptation to commit adultery with willing women or men in faraway places? Or is it rather your intellectual mistakes and moral failures that you regret?

We can be measured by the nature of our regrets as much as by the altitude of our aspirations.

Delicious Obscurity

We who are obscure ought to be grateful for it. It is wonderful to be able to walk down the street and be taken, and left, for an average schlep. A little recognition from a few high-quality individuals is all one needs. Fame can be a curse. The unhinged Mark David Chapman, animated by Holden Caulfield's animus against phoniness, decided that John Lennon was a phony, and so had to be shot.

The value of fame may also be inferred from the moral and intellectual quality of those who confer it.

The mad pursuit of empty celebrity by so many in our society shows their and its spiritual vacuity.

UPDATE: By this metric, however, I count as famous. Well, we live in an age of low standards.

What It Takes to Appreciate Nature

Those who must wrest a living from nature by hard toil are not likely to see her beauty, let alone appreciate it. But her charms are also lost on the sedentary city dwellers for whom nature is little more than backdrop and stage setting for what they take to be the really real, the social tragi-comedy. The same goes for the windshield tourists who, seated in air-conditioned comfort, merely look upon nature as upon a pretty picture.

The true acolyte of nature must combine in one person a robust and energetic physique, a contemplative mind, and a healthy measure of contempt for the world of the human-all-too-human, or to transpose into a positive key, a deep love of solitude. One thinks of Henry David Thoreau, who famously remarked, "I have no walks to throw away on company." Of the same type, but not on the same lofty plane: Edward Abbey.

Compensation for Decline

I tune in to CNN and hear about some academic who is taking a conspiracy line on the Sandy Hook massacre. Deplorable, but in compensation there is the fascination of watching one's country unravel. We owls of Minerva may not welcome the onset of dusk, but it is the time when we spread our wings. And there is the consolation of knowing that one is fairly well insulated from the effects of the unraveling, both spatially and temporally. Spatially, in that one can afford to live in a safe and defensible enclave. Temporally, in that one can reasonably hope to be dead before things reach their nadir.

Am I depressed? Not in the least. I wake up rarin' to go at another day of banging my head against this predicament we call life. It's all grist for the mill of Minerva: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the indifferent.

Dalrymple on Inhumanity

Here. Excerpt:

Nevertheless, no one could read this book [Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross] without being, yet again, horrified by man’s inhumanity to man. Indeed, the term inhumanity seems almost an odd one in the circumstances, assuming as it does that Man’s default setting is to decency and kindness, whereas the evidence presented in this book is that, once legal and social restraints are removed, Man becomes an utter savage.

Exactly right. One of the most pernicious illusions of the Left is that human beings are basically good and decent, and that society has corrupted them.

According to Gross, people of all social strata in Poland gladly, even joyfully, plundered their Jewish neighbours; if so, they were not unique in having done so, for it happened across Europe during Nazi occupation, while in Rwanda, in 1994, ordinary Hutus happily and without conscience appropriated the property of their erstwhile but now massacred Tutsi neighbours.

On Being 26 Rather Than 62

W. K. writes,

You recently mentioned your being very happy, given what's wrong with the world, to be 62 rather than 26; I am 26. Although, sadly, I think liberalism will run until it destroys itself as a parasite that destroys its host, this metaphysical fact of evil's being self-destructive is reason enough for hope. People have always sensed that the world is falling apart, because in a sense it always has been, but even greater than the mystery of evil is the mystery of goodness. Rather than regretting my being 26 rather than 62, I remember, in my Mavphil-inspired gratitude exercises, that the cruelest regime in the history of mankind fell during my lifetime.

I have always believed that Good and Evil are not opposites on a par, but that somehow Good is more fundamental and that Evil is somehow derivative or interstitial or parasitic or privative. The Thomist doctrine of evil as privatio boni is one way of explaining this relation, though that doctrine is open to objections.

So I agree with my correspondent that, in the end, Good triumphs. Unfortunately, it is a long way to the end, a long march along a via dolorosa with many stations of suffering. I don't relish making that journey. Hence my satisfaction at the thought that my life is, most likely, three-quarters over. As I said in that post-election post,

One can hope to be dead before it all comes apart. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am in the habit of taking care of myself and could be facing another 25 years entangled in the mortal coil. When barbarism descends this will be no country for old men.

I too am grateful that the Evil Empire fell during my lifetime. But now we have an incompetent jackass in the White House, a hard-core leftist, who was given four more years by a foolish electorate for whom panem et circenses are the supreme desiderata. Innocent of the ways of world, trapped in leftist fantasy land, he is the polar opposite of Ronald Reagan. We are in deep trouble.

But I do not counsel despair. We live by hope, within this life and beyond it. We shall hope on and fight on.

How Did We Get to be So Proud?

Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?

In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine."

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

A School of Humility?

Perhaps we are here to be taught humility. Some indications that this could be so:

1. War is endless and ubiquitous at every level and there is nothing much we can do about it. A 'war to end all wars" in Woodrow Wilson's claptrap phrase would be a war that put an end to humanity. It is an excellent bet that there will be wars as long as there are human beings. There are wars within families and between tribes and nations and gangs and interest groups. There is class warfare and racial hatred and the battle of the sexes. There are inter-generational tensions ("Don't trust anyone over 30!") and intrapsychic conflicts. There is inter-species predation. Not only is man a wolf to man, wolves are wolves to men, and men to wolves. If extraterrestrials should show up it is a good bet that a 'war of the worlds' would ensue. If they came to serve man, it would be to serve him for dinner, as in the famous Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man."

Some warn of the militarization of space as if it has not already been militarized. It has been, and for a long time now. How long depending on how high up you deem space begins. Are they who warn unaware of spy satellites? Of Gary Powers and the U-2 incident? Of the V-2s that crashed down on London? Of the crude Luftwaffen, air-weapons, of the First World War? The Roman catapults? The first javelin thrown by some Neanderthal spear chucker? It travelled through space to pierce the heart of some poor effer and was an early weaponization of the space between chucker and effer.

"I will not weaponize space," said Obama while a candidate in 2008. That empty promise came too late, and is irresponsible to boot: if our weapons are not there, theirs will be.

The very notion that outer space could be reserved for wholly peaceful purposes shows a deep
lack of understanding of the human condition. Show me a space with human beings in it and I will show you a space that potentially if not actually is militarized and weaponized. Man is, was, and will be a bellicose son of a bitch. If you doubt this, study history, with particular attention to the 20th century. You can bet that the future will resemble the past in this respect. Note that the turn of the millenium has not brought anything new in this regard. And whatever happened to the Age of Aquarius?

Older is not wiser. All spaces, near, far, inner, outer, are potential scenes of contention, which is why I subscribe to the Latin saying:

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

If you want peace, prepare for war.

2. At the level of ideas there is unending controversy, often acrimonious, in almost every field. There is the strife of systems, not to mention the strife of the systematic with the anti-systematic. (Hegel versus Kierkegaard, for example.) Despite invincible ignorance ignorant of itself as ignorance, contentious humans proudly proclaim their 'knowledge' — and are contradicted by fools of opposing stripes.

3. My third point is subsumable under my first, but so important that it deserves separate mention. Homo homini lupus. Never eradicated, man's inhumanity to man is seemingly ineradicable. As we speak, people are being poisoned, shot, stabbed for the flimsiest of reasons or no reason at all. Girls are being raped and sold into slavery. The abortion 'doctors' are slaughtering innocent human beings while apologists whose intellects have been suborned by their lusts cook up justifications. The Iranian head of state calls for the destruction of Israel and its inhabitants. Meanwhile benighted leftists ignore the threat of radical Islam and label 'islamophobic' those who see straight. Every hour of every day extends the litany of the 'lupine.' And there is not much we can do about it.

4. And then there is the eventual if not present corruption of all the institutions that are supposed to ameliorate the human condition: the churches, the criminal justice system, the U. N., governments. The reformers reform until they too become corrupted. And there is little we can do about it.

5. Let's not leave out our animal nature that insures fragility, sickness, death and untold miseries. Transhumanist fantasies aside, there is not much we can do about it. (We can do something, and we have, and that is good; but sickness, old age, and death are as much with us as in the days of the Buddha.)

Meditating on such points as these one might hazard the inference that this world is a vale of soul-making wherein a chief virtue to be learned is that of humility. Our minds are dark, our wills weak, our hearts foul. What is to be so proud about?

The other side of the coin: Proud to be a Human Being.

On Socializing

He who avoids socializing avoids pointless conversations, some of which are worse than pointless. For example, chatting with a stranger can turn ugly very quickly if it happens that you differ politically. Still, socializing is not all bad. Like whisky, a little is good now and again. But more is not better.