Human Predicament – Page 23 – Maverick Philosopher

Be Gracious

Does someone want to do something for you? Buy you lunch? Give you a gift? Bring something to the dinner?

Be gracious. Don't say, "You don't have to buy me lunch," or "Let me buy you lunch," or "You didn't have to bring that." Humbly accept and grant the donor the pleasure of being a donor.

Lack of graciousness often bespeaks an excess of ego.

We were re-hydrating at a bar in Tortilla Flat, Arizona, after an ankle-busting hike up a stream bed. I offered to buy Alex a drink. Instead of graciously accepting my hospitality, he had the chutzpah to ask me to lend him money so that he could buy me a drink!

Another type of ungraciousness is replying 'Thank you' to 'Thank you.' If I thank you for something, say 'You're welcome,' not 'Thank You.' Graciously acquiesce in the fact that I have done you a favor. Don't try to get the upper hand by thanking me.

I grant that there are situations in which mutual thanking is appropriate.

Some people feel that they must 'reciprocate.' Why exactly? I gave you a little Christmas present because I felt like it. And now you feel you must give me one in return? Is this a tit for tat game?

Suppose I compliment you sincerely. Will you throw the compliment back in my face by denigrating that which I complimented you for, thereby impugning my judgment?

The Killer Mountains Strike Again: Jesse Capen’s Remains Found

The Superstitions are not called the Killer Mountains for nothing. Many a man has been lured to his death in this rugged wilderness by lust for gold. A few days ago, what appear to be the remains of Jesse Capen were finally found after nearly three years of searching. Another obsessive Dutchman Hunter in quest of a nonexistent object, he went missing in December of 2009.

I've seen the movie and it ain't bad. And of course any self-respecting aficionado of the legends and lore, tales and trails of the magnificent Superstitions must see it. Tom Kollenborn comments in Lust for Gold I and Lust for Gold II.

As I wrote in Richard Peck, Seeker of Lost Gold,

. . . to live well, a man needs a quest. Without a quest, a life lacks the invigorating "strenuosity" that William James preached. But if he quests for something paltry such as lost treasure, it is perhaps best that he never find it. For on a finite quest, the 'gold' is in the seeking, not in the finding. A quest worthy of us, however, cannot be for gold or silver or anything finite and transitory. A quest worthy of us must aim beyond the ephemeral, towards something whose finding would complete rather than debilitate us. Nevertheless, every quest has something in it of the ultimate quest, and can be respected in some measure for that reason.

Human Height

True human height is not measured in feet and inches but in the altitude of the thoughts we think and the problems we engage. The higher the problems, the higher the man.

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 stupified 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, pursue truly choice-worthy ends.

False Modesty

To appear modest, some of us preface our remarks with, "Correct me if I'm wrong." But we say it only when we know we are not.

Human Perversity

People want sympathy and understanding. But we must be careful how we show them. "I understand exactly how you feel" may earn the response, "You have no idea how I feel, how the hell could you?"

No Man is a Beast Merely

It is natural for a beast to be bestial, but not for a man. He must degrade and denature himself, and that only a spiritual being can do. Freely degrading himself, he becomes like a beast thereby proving that he is — more than a beast.

Obama the Feckless

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."

Having demonstrated his domestic incompetence, Obama is now showing us his fecklessness in matters foreign. Is it 1979 all over again? As a certain American philosopher of Spanish extraction is supposed to have said . . . .

One can hope that Romney will play Reagan to Obama's Carter. For the good of all of us, those who understand these matters, and the liberal fools who don't.

At the Zoo: The Aspiring Animal

And here we have an animal who aspires. Unfortunately, his aspirations arise from a material substratum that mocks them, and whose collapse will soon enough spell their end. Or so it seems. If the seeming is so, is not the life of these animals absurd?

Looking Beyond for Meaning

We look beyond the moments of this life for meaning. And we must look beyond the 'moment' of this life as a whole if this life is to have meaning.

Relatives

Some want to stay in touch, not on the basis of what one actually and presently is, but on the basis of what one was or was imagined by them to be. And so I rarely visit the homes of my relatives. For, as Emerson brilliantly quips in a related connection, "I do not want to be alone."

On Living Too Long

Old age for some is a sort of afterlife in a foreign country. One has lived beyond one's own time and now finds oneself among strangers.

Merton, Marilyn, and David Carradine

Today, August 5th, is the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death. What follows is a post from 13 June 2009.

………………..

Thomas Merton, Journal (IV, 240), writing about Marilyn Monroe around the time of her death in 1962:

. . .the death was as much a symbol as the bomb – symbol of uselessness and of tragedy, of misused humanity.

He’s right of course: Monroe’s was a life wasted on glamour, sexiness, and frivolity. She serves as a lovely
warning: Make good use of your human incarnation! Be in the flesh, but not of the flesh.

The fascination with empty celebrity, a fascination as inane as its object, says something about what we have become in the West. We in some measure merit the revulsion of the Islamic world. We value liberty, and rightly, but we fail to make good use of it as Marilyn and Anna Nicole Smith failed to make good use of their time in the body. Curiously enough, a failure to make good use of one's time in the body often leads to its early destruction, and with it, perhaps, the possibility of spiritual improvement.

Curiously, Merton and Carradine both died in Bangkok, the first of accidental electrocution on 10 December 1968, the second a few days ago apparently of autoerotic asphyxiation. The extremity and perversity of the latter practice is a clear proof of the tremendous power of the sex drive to corrupt and derange the human spirit if it is allowed unfettered expression. One with any spiritual sensitivity and depth ought to shudder at the thought of ending his life in the manner of Carradine, in the heteronomy and diremption of the flesh, utterly enslaved to one's lusts, one's soul emptied out into the dust. To risk one's very life in pursuit of intensity of orgasm shows a mind unhinged. Thinking of Carradine's frightful example, one ought to pray, as Merton did thousands of times: Ora pro nobis peccatoribus. Nunc et in hora mortis.

There is Beauty in the World

I look out my study window, over the Superstition ridgeline, and marvel at the beauty of the roseate stratonimbus of sunrise. There is beauty in the world and we do well to appreciate it. There is also beauty and nobility in human nature. It peeps out now and again. A young man took a bullet during the Aurora massacre to shield his girlfriend.

It can be a moral challenge to avoid misanthropy. But avoid it we must. The timber of humanity, though crooked, is nonetheless mostly sturdy and termite-free. Or is the rosiness of this Arizona sunrise biasing me toward too optimistic a view?

The hardest task in the world is to achieve a just view of things and people and their good and evil.