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The Best Laid Plans of Birds And Bats
To say we are bird-brained is not so much to scramble as to fry a truth overeasy.
Yet we’re not so different from the crow, who avoids that garden with the great-horned plastic owl perched at its gate. Like that scared crow, some part of the human brain mistakes counterfeits of nature for nature, and takes flight.
When my children were younger — about two and three years old — we’d go shopping for clothes. I’d get a kick watching them react to mannequins. Sometimes, the mannequins modeled dresses, and my kids would sneak up, lift the dresses, and peek. I’d check over my shoulder, blush, laugh, and redirect their attention. Look, over there! It’s Dora The Explorer! And off they’d go.
(Come to think of it, they never once asked if this or that Dora was the real Dora. And a monkey in boots never once troubled them. Little literalists, they, believing as they did in The Map. What they’d see is what they’d get, and that’s the way it was — our childhood is more ancient than we suppose.)
I’m really not so different from my children, though I’m a bit less literal, a bit less inclined to pull up a mannequin’s dress. Still, I’ve noticed that I’m wired to do something quite the same, and as literal — but in the yoga-pants aisle. Passing those well-muscled mannequins, perched as they are above an ancient garden, my eyes, of their own accord and disobedient, peek.
I mean, I catch myself, and I avoid gawking. (I am, afterall, a grown and civilized man, who does his best not to embarrass his family.) Yet my eyes, my eyes the windows of a soul much older than my own, duck-like, take flight without me, in the direction of an ancient objective, blind to the fact that these yoga-pants but cover a well-placed decoy. And unlike my eyes — or that unconscious part of my brain which has intention but not volition — I know this world to be filled with duck blinds, behind which hunters take aim at our wallets, treating our credit cards like sporting clays.
Our modern world is much made up of such plastic illusions. Just as in a dream, during which that part of us sleeps that might call the dream a dream, we mistake our visions for reality; so in waking, we respond to what we see, in part, as it were the Great-Horned Owl itself, perched at the gate. Part of us does not distinguish between the real and the unreal. For that part of us, what we see is what we get. For that part of us — as old as the most ancient of fish — it is all real. (It is not for that other, newer part of ourselves to distinguish between light and shadow, but to distinguish between meals, lures, and lies.)
Once, in Costco, approaching Halloween, pushing my then four-year-old daughter along in a shopping cart, I spotted decorations — pumpkins, skeletons, scarecrows — and grew excited at the prospect of decorating our home for all the little trick-or-treaters who were to come for candy. But as we rounded the corner, my daughter panicked, crow-like, on spotting three life-sized witches stirring their wicked brew in a wicked cauldron while laughing their wicked laughs, with their eyes lighting red, and with lightning flashing against a backdrop of night.
One of the trio turned her head directly to my daughter, chanting Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble! My little girl burst immediately into tears, screaming for me to turn around, which I did, after what was for her a forever moment.
But, being a dad, and curious, I got no farther than the underwear aisle, when I got bored, and found my eyes taking flight, bat-like; and the cart’s wheels found themselves following, slowly, slowly, until we could hear a witch laughing again: I come, Graymalkin! My daughter’s eyes turned to me, her protector, as if to ask, Really, Daddy? Are you fucking with me? We’re going back there?
Of course we were.
But as we again approached the corner, and she began to cry, I told her not to worry, that the witches are not real, that they are just plugged-in plastic, a superstition. What she said next exactly defines what separates us from fishes, birds and bats: “I know they’re not real, Daddy! But they scare me anyway!”
The Poverty of Richness
“Give me that poverty which makes me inwardly rich.” –Henry David Thoreau
There was an old man who lived down by the river, who, when asked, What’s the secret to living a long, happy, and rich life? answered, “Keep your mind full, and your bowels empty.” The older I get, the more I come to appreciate the utter simplicity of all that we’d call wisdom.
Wisdom is simple. But our lives are complex. And we live as the multiplication charts were the proper guide to life. We multiply entities beyond necessity, and pay no heed to Occam’s Razor when forming an economy of life. We live as if living well were to be surrounded by a million particular and interesting things, paying no mind to the singular element which would unify the million.
As a life, so a man or a woman is one. Counting fingers and toes cannot change this fact. We live once; we are born to die. Nor will the sun rise ever again on a life after the final sunset. But it does not ultimately help to enrich life by filling it with many things; life still remains one, albeit a fragmented life. And a fragmented life is a life divided and diminished.
How many times I have met a man or a woman who has become dejected. Life has ceased to smile. He looks on his old car, frowns, buys a new car, and sells himself, his time, to make payments on a shiny new vehicle which gets him not where he longs to be. She looks on her small, dank apartment, and sets her sights on a new apartment on the richer side of town, though it be far from her work, and now she needs a better car to get her to the job which she is not sure fits her and to which she is now more than ever shackled to, a slave of longing.
We long to be free. Freedom is simple. Life is one. Except that the parts would fit seamlessly, the many do not make one, and would fracture the universe; and thus ever we seek to step into the universe next door, where the stars are brighter.
Richness is inward. Nor is richness an appearance. It is too common a condition that a man, living a life of quiet desperation, surrounds himself with seductive shiny objects, though they financially strain him and push him to the edge. Sometimes that edge is a 21st floor window, and he’d jump.
Richness is inward. It is substantial. As the old man by that old river called life tells us, living well is keeping the mind full, and the bowels empty.
Keeping the mind full keeps it clear, rich, and able to apprehend beauty; or, when one finds himself lost in a dark wood and surrounded by wolves, having an inwardly rich mind will more quickly apprehend the safe path out. The rich mind is clear enough to imagine the wolf, and what the wolf would want; for the wolf is not so different from himself. Life is one. And imagining the wolf for what he is, the mane does not present himself to be a meal.
Having a rich mind is having that mind which knows how to feed not only itself but the body. A well kept and fed body is that body which keeps empty bowels.
Any man or woman of wisdom recognizes that the earliest sign of stress is sluggish digestion. And a sluggish digestion leads to a sluggish and suffering mind. A wise man, like the old man by the river, recognizes full well that the body is a temple. It houses the mind, the sacred mind. Any pursuit which compromises health is unwise; for without health, life is hardly worth living. Indeed, men and women who suffer from extremely poor health beg that life would end. To abuse the body is sacrilege.
So the woman gets her apartment across town, has therefore to buy a new car, and has consequently two meaty new payments which necessitates that she has to keep her job which is itself destroying her health. She goes to work now for ten to twelve hours, sits in meetings stressed, takes on the problems of others though unable to solve her own, and then gets into her new car to sit and drive for an hour to get to a home in which she can sleep for but a few hours before she has to get up and sit in that car to go to work yet again.
Though now she has prestige, which is but an external semblance of some ill conceived fantasy, her digestion is poor, her body is stressed, and she cannot understand why she bursts into tears longing for freedom.
Wisdom is simpler. Cut, cut, cut!
Cut out the million things which draw the mind from its proper object, which is to support itself and seek out what it is to live. And this wisdom achieved, from abundance, the mind may then take on the responsibility of supporting others, of helping them to solve their problems.
The first object of wisdom is learning how to support the body that the body may best support the mind. That goal achieved, the mind may then turn itself to beauty, and take a long afternoon down by the river. Having then an abundance of wisdom which proceeds from health, so wisdom may venture to help others.
It’s Literature Literature, Lolita
We have little problem when a Dostoyevski brings us up a set of stairs to bury an ax in an old woman’s head. But when Nabokov brings us on a little tour of the United States and has Humbert Humbert bury himself in his insane fantasy of a twelve year old nymphet, we are quick to call Nabokov an immoral pervert who encourages pedophilia. Indeed, when vandals attacked the St.Petersburg museum dedicated to Nobokov, they left a note which read, “How can you remain unafraid of God’s wrath promoting Nabokov’s pedophilia?”
Yet even literate readers level a similar charge against Nabokov.
Just this week, I debated a scientifically-minded philosopher on the topic. He told me that Nabokov is a horrible man for penning such immoral smut. He told me that such a book does not belong on any shelf a teenager might peruse. He admitted that he had not read the book.
Having got his confession, I told him that when my one year old daughter is literate and mature enough, I want her to read the book — the sooner the better. I want her to be wise to the Humbert Humberts of the world.
We should be thankful that we have such a beautiful, moral book as Lolita. We should be thankful we have this first-person account so that we may explore perversion sublimated par excellence. I for one am thankful for having been made wiser to the world for having read this first person account of a cruel, mad mind, driven to divine idolatry.
Countering, my philosopher friend gave an account of a scientific book which gives us to understand how rape is an unsavory impulse embedded in our genetic pattern, and that understanding this scientific account can help us to understand why we should not throw gasoline on that little red coal which burns in the darker corners of the human genome, of hotels, and of Hollywood.
And yet he did not think his scientific book an immoral book. Yet he, like so many, considers Lolita smut, perverse and pornographic.
I pressed him to distinguish why Nabokov’s account of a child rapist is a sick and immoral account, while the scientific account is not.
I asked him if it had to do with presentation, if it had to do with our relation to pronouns, if it had to do with the fact that a scientific account is not given in the first person, but is rather given in the third person or in the passive voice, in which the personal pronoun is neatly and happily hidden, like so many in our culture.
(According to Humbert Humbert, some seventeen percent of men have enjoyed a nymphet — yet Humbert Humbert is not a scientist. He is an unreliable narrator, and Lolita is unreliably narrated.)
My philosopher friend considered, and we have yet to conclude this conversation. Nonetheless, this lively debate led me to think about what we fancy Literature to be, and what we imagine Literature to give us. Scientific Literature, the prejudice goes, gives us knowledge — impersonal, sane and sanitary. Literature Literature, on the other hand, can give us a Humbert Humbert — but not knowledge.
Literature Literature alone can present for us the first person account, alone can present us with precision an individual, and alone can widen our understanding, knowledge, and humanity as the third person or passive voice cannot. Literature Literature can show us with precision what the scientific imagination alone cannot.
“A writer should have the precision of a poet, and the imagination of a scientist.” —Nabokov
Buffoons of Truth: Evolution Under Attack in Korea
Here in Korea, my science students tell me that though on any corner you can see half a dozen red neon crosses reaching for heaven; that though not even in the corner of your living room are you safe from missionaries magically transubstantiating your doorbell into a church bell; that though here Bible thumpers everywhere corner you and thump their Book with more zeal than thump traditional Korean drummers their buk; that, despite all this, Creationists will not corner Korea. They tell me that all the students here learn evolution without theological qualms; and they tell me that, despite the universal, catholic, eternal and unchanging truth claims of Abrahamic theology, omnipresently valid, the likes of which not even Jonah could escape, that there is no tension here, locally, between science and religion. Creationism, they tell me, is an American disease. When they tell me this, I stand back askance, and sidle to the nearest window to see if God again has stopped the Sun, if not all critical thinking, that Joshua may win his battle.
My science students tell me that the roots here are very different than those of the United States, which has again shown its old worrisome tendency towards theocratic puritanism; and they tell me that their sindansu roots protect these old rain-worn Korean mountains from land-sliding into old Creationist abysses. They tell me that Korean mythology does not celebrate a creator of the universe so much as it celebrates and venerates clan lineages and leaders, who teach the people how to live upright and virtuous lives.
To an extent, what my students tell me makes sense. Korea does have a unique mythology which is latent in their formative and regulative concepts. We can see this mythical dynamic expressed in the god-status of North Korean leaders whose sons are given to rule. We can also see this in South Korean capitalism, where the fathers like Samsung or Hyundai naturally give their sons to rule. Here, Abraham’s sacrifice makes less sense. Yet Korea’s sons’ are now increasingly tied upon Abraham’s alter by an organized and zealous minority who would presume the godly authority to “correct” biology text books and “delete” the error of evolution. Would that Korean science educators sent us an angel, the likes of a Carl Sagan, to abort this sacrifice. Would that a Korean angel lit a scientific candle in this dark, demon haunted world. Would that The Society for Textbook Revise [sic] learned to read. First lesson: of fruit and metaphor. Eat up, boys.
Korean origin myths are different than Genesis. They don’t begin at The Beginning. Rather, they establish how Koreans came to be and are staged in an already existing world. In philosophical parlance, these myths are not concerned with the speculative question, Why is there something, rather than nothing? Korean mythology is not concerned with the infinitely regressive and speculative problem of how Being came to be. Rather, Korean mythology is concerned with establishing a unifying narrative, and in establishing a practical foundation for a Korean civilization and ethics.
Consider the Korean island of Jeju, and its unique culture. It has a rich array of cultural myths. Among these is the founding myth of Samsonghyol, in which three divine men emerge from three holes near the already existing Mt. Halla. These men are the ancestors of the three family names: Go, Yang, and Bu. The people of Jeju have traditionally traced their historical narrative back to these three divine men. Neither do the people of Jeju fear that Darwin would threaten their unique island culture; nor do they rally behind the battle flag of the king of kings–well, not until recently, when many among them enlisted in The Army of The Lord, and found a peculiar admiration for Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son’s scientific education.
Jeju also has a story about the origin of people, which is infinitely more naturalistic than the story of Genesis. In this myth, the two giants Maitreya and Sakyamuni fight in an already existing world. Maitreya kills Sakyamuni and makes earth out of the corpse; and the maggots which form on it become people. In this, we can clearly see one species changing into another: maggots to people. Clearly, one might think, Darwin will have less of a problem here; for who is so attached to maggots as to become a zealot? Who on this myth would suppress science education? Who for maggots would stop the Sun, and declare Truth changeless?
Peninsular Koreans have the myth of Dangun to establish their origin and ancestral lineage. In this story, a heavenly prince named Hwanung looks down on an already existing world. He wishes to possess it and to rule over the mortal men who live there. His father Hwanin knows that Hwanung will be a good ruler and will make the people happy; and so this father sends his son down to earth, setting him on Baekdu Mountain; this father sends his son down to earth, not in order to sacrifice him, but to establish the holy city of Sinsi. Moses-like, this good god-son establishes laws, moral codes, and the cultural order.
Later, a male tiger and a female bear pray to Hwanung in order that they would become human. So he tells them to spend a hundred days out of the sunlight, in a kind of maternal cave, with only the sacred foods mugwort and garlic to eat. (We can deduce from this that fruit is among the oral pleasures forbidden them.) Naturally, the male tiger gives in to temptation and is delivered to evil. He leaves this maternal cave a kind of oedipal miscarriage, while the female bear manages to supress her natural desires and oral fixation; thus she is transformed into a human who knows, a Lacanian might observe, le-nom-du-père. (After all, every person has to get beyond the oral attachment to mother’s sweet breast milk in order to become a healthy human citizen.)
This obedient and virginal Eve-bear lacks a husband, and so naturally prays for one at a sindansu tree. Though no serpent tempts her, Hwanung is happy to answer her prayer, and blesses her with a son named Dangun, who is given to rule, who establishes a walled city near Pyongyang, and who thus begins the old kingdom of Gojeosan and Korean history in about 2333 BCE.
Nearly four thousand years later, in 1603, just thirty years before the Inquisition would jail Galileo for his scientific heresy; and just eighty-nine years before the Salem Witch Trials condemn nineteen Americans to death for witchcraft, justifying this on sound theological grounds; just four thousand years later, I say, a Korean carries an atlas of theology into Korea, and Korea begins to learn a new but already dying story, and to help ensure their children might one day inherit the wind, flatulent a wind though it may be. The scent of history is rank; when on disguised theological grounds creationists suppress science in the classroom; when on theological grounds tired old judges burn witches or burn books to forward their drive for wealth and power. Vive la suppression!
Yet it was not until the mid 1960s, some forty years after Tennessee put John Scopes on trial, and but a thin decade after the Korean War, that the number of Korean Christians spiked and began to outnumber adherents of traditional religions. Interestingly, this spike parallels the radical westernization of South Korea; there is a common causal link between sightings of both Ronald McDonald and sweet Jesus–forsooth, man cannot live on garlic and mugwort alone!
My students are right to point out that, like mad cow disease, the conflict between science and religion is not native to Korean soil; yet the infection is here. There is nothing in the traditional Korean mythology which claims eternal authority on an unchanging and otherworldly Truth; yet the infection is here. The Korean mythos tends to be pragmatic, not speculative, not worried about eternal and unchanging Truth, not inclined to mud-over cracks in the fortress of theology, not inclined to suppress science education. Yet unscientific creationists are getting into the business of science text books.
Korean philosophy is traditionally Confucian, which tends toward creating social order and to defining virtuous living. It is less concerned with the ultimate structure of reality. Even in Buddhism, metaphysical speculation is seen to be a waste of time and effort, to which point we have the parable of the poison arrow.
“Suppose,” the Buddha says, “that a man is shot with a poisoned arrow, and the doctor wants to remove it immediately. Suppose the man refuses to let the doctor remove the arrow until he knows who shot it, what his age is, who his parents are, and why he shot it. If he waits to answer all of these questions before removing it, he may die.”
Korean science expresses this pragmatic tendency, and a kind of economic urgency, trying to pull out a poison arrow called poverty; wherefore Koreans tend to fund well the applied sciences, which have helped to build such economic giants as Samsung; and they tend to underfund speculative science, which does not fit well into practical economic structures and does not quickly fill empty rice bowls.
One consequence of this is that Korean scientists have not, as a whole, taken a keen interest in Darwinism as a question of ultimate origins, and have been able to ignore the profound zero-sum contradiction between modern science and the Abrahamic religion–Abraham, who is usurping Dangun’s claim for mythical origins. In place of a virtuous and chaste she-bear, Koreans are increasingly meditating on Eve and Mary; and for their love of Christ, they are increasingly denying empirical science, biting the hand which feeds it. And Korean scientists, going about their daily business, have been caught flat-footed, thinking, like my students, that there is no need to worry.
There is need to worry; and the sovereign mind of free-thinking Koreans, who would do right by their country to practically solve real problems; indeed, the sovereign mind of free-thinking people everywhere; this sovereign mind of a first born, I say, risks to become a blood sacrifice to an Abrahamic Metaphor.
Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Gay Marriage
Richard Rorty points out in his book “Philosophy and Social Hope” that, the single best indicator of a culture’s progress toward a fully fledged human rights culture is perhaps the extent to which it stops interfering with its children’s marriage plans. A fully fledged human rights culture will not prohibit marriage based on class, wealth, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation. A fully fledged human rights culture will protect the rights of its members to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The Christian Religion deserves credit for its role in creating the idea of universal human rights. Their doctrine of The Brotherhood of Man is its greatest contribution to culture. Yet Christians now stand most squarely in the way of the fulfillment of their beautiful ideal.
Granted, the Bible contains clear statements which condemn homosexuality, the most clear of which is Leviticus 18:22, which reads, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is an abomination.” Yet there are other, clearly absurd statements which the believer is happy to look over, such as Leviticus 25:44-45, which reads, “And as for your male and female slaves whom you may have—from the nations that are around you, from them you may buy male and female slaves. Moreover you may buy the children of the strangers who dwell among you, and their families who are with you, which they beget in your land; and they shall become your property.” Clearly, the contemporary ethos plays a major role in which lines we read, and which we ignore.
Yet in the 19th Century, even with such abominable lines as Leviticus 25:44-45, some Christian brothers and sisters managed to use their religious texts for inspiration, and to expand their notion of The Brotherhood of Man in order to first make slaves free, and then, in the 20th Century, to form the language which parted the cultural sea for the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s. Though I am a thoroughgoing atheist, these Christians are my brothers and sisters.
Christians know well Luke 6:31, which reads, “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” Popularly, we call this The Golden Rule. This great principle, which we is the heart of The Brotherhood of Man, has been handed down through the ages, and so culture has gotten better, more tolerant, more inclusive, and more pluralistic.
The Enlightenment can be understood in part as a secularization of Christian values. Among these Christian values are the very elements which put God to rest: the insistence on Truth, and the desire for a universal brotherhood which cannot be realized in sectarian language.
America, worts and all, is the greatest realization of Enlightenment egalitarianism. Our Declaration of Independence is a clear embodiment of these values, that all are created equal. We still struggle to realize this dream. We want that all would have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Some of us are created gay; and the right to marry would only increase the collective happiness, harming none. As we should protect religion under the law, so we should protect those who would commit to and love one another. A fully fledged human rights culture would have it no other way. We are Americans; we are greater than our ancestors.
The American Philosopher John Rawls expresses the content of Luke 6:31 in his uniquely American theory of justice. In his theory, he has us imagine a “veil of ignorance.” Under this metaphorical veil, we cannot know in advance which social position we might chance to be in when the veil is lifted. We could chance to be rich or poor, black or white, straight or gay. We would not want to have the veil lifted only to discover that the law has been written out of our favor just because we had chanced to have been born gay. So we should write laws blindly, under the veil of ignorance, in keeping with Luke 6:31 and The Golden Rule.
If we, as a culture, could learn to write laws or amend constitutions so not to discriminate on the basis of class, wealth, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation, if we could learn to write laws so that chance of birth would give us no legal disadvantage, our society would be a fully fledged human rights society.
What Friends Are Made Of
“ A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.”
–R.W. Emerson
As a boy, I counted friendship cheaply. Anyone who’d play ball with me I’d call a friend. And maybe in a boy’s world that is enough. But as we get older, the consequences of friendship are deeper and profounder. And we come to learn the deep and sacred value that is a friendship. It is a rare soul that I’ll count among my friends.
When I was a senior in high school, readying to leave that boy’s world and enter into the world of men, a teacher of mine often told me that I could count myself a lucky man if, when counting those on whom I might call a friend, I could fill up a whole hand. Just five fingers, and I could count myself lucky.
Five friends seems a most meager number, yet the value of one friend is infinite. Five would indeed seem superfluous were it not also true that every friend represents a unique infinity, and did not every friend alone hold some one-of-a-kind key that unlocked some secret door in your soul. Friends unlock who we are, help us to discover what we can be, help us to fulfill the old Socratic dictum, Know thyself.
I’ve met many a kind man or woman, and would not diminish the value of pleasant acquaintances. But I do not want to diminish the meaning of the word friend by applying the word friend too liberally. And granted, I may use the word casually in my day to day conversation; yet in my deeper hours, I would place to word as carefully as I’d place a newborn child in a cradle.
After university, where I counted myself rich with friends, most of whom I’ve lost contact with, I travelled to Russia as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and there I learned a deeper sense of the word friend when I learned the Russian word druk. Now, in any Russian-English Dictionary, druk translates to friend. But though a dictionary can help us crack a word open as a nutcracker might a nut, we cannot understand a word till we have eaten of its flesh. Living with Russians I learned what no dictionary can teach, what experience alone can offer: wisdom.
After having lived for several months with a host family, with whom I lived for my basic cultural and language training, I shipped off to live in the tiny Far Easter village named Yagodnoye. The village is tiny, about a two hour drive down the Amur River from Komsomolsk-on-The-Amur. There, I lived as an English teacher, and as the only foreigner. I adapted, roughly, and learned how to get along. Every day an old PE teacher named Vladimir came over and taught me to speak red-neck Russian passably well through the winter I lived there. I had a handful of other buddies who’d come over and help me out as well. But none helped me so much as did Vladimir.
During one holiday, I took leave of the village, proud of what I had learned, though exhausted. I went back to Vladivostok to visit my host family and host mother. My host mother was thrilled that I had learned to speak Russian so well, and that, for the first time, we could hold a decent conversation. She asked me how I had adapted, and I told her that I had adapted well. I told her how I got along, and then told her casually that I had made many friends in the village. She looked at me, serious as death, and told me that I was naive. She told me that I had not made so many friends. She told me, Those are your acquaintances, and that I could not call a single person druk until they had proven utter trustworthiness. She went on to explain that, in Russia, the meaning of the word druk had formed a special meaning owing to historical conditions. In Stalinist Russia, for example, calling the wrong person druk could lead to the dreaded midnight knock, grab, and stuff into a train car, which lead to some remote labor village. Indeed, the village in which I taught was a labor village built by Stalin.
I never got to test any of my relationships long enough in Russia to learn if any of my buddies were worthy of the word druk. I suspect Vladimir I could call druk. But he, like several of my other buddies, loved his country, and was dirt poor. All of my colleagues who had experience with Russia warned me that I had at least one government shadow making sure that I was not spying. Indeed, the Peace Corps was accused by the Russian Government to be spying. The Cold War had created deep suspicion. And that suspicion leads me even to this day to ask if my best buddy in the village was my friend. Nor can I blame him if he was paid to shadow me.
Now of course I was no spy. I lack that competence and ability to keep my mouth shut. And I had a tendency to get too often too drunk with my buddies to keep sensitive information hid. I was just an English teacher out in the adventure of life trying to learn what this thing called life is.
Every year that passes, I take Emerson’s words more and more profoundly. “A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.”
When we have a person whom we may endeavor to call a friend, if we do not trust to speak our mind fully and honestly, we cannot yet call him a friend. And if we do speak honestly, and that person would not use what we would say for his advantage against us, we have that far in him a friend. If we find that we must calculate carefully what we would disclose, the assuredly the word friend does not apply.
With Vladimir, even if he were hired to be my shadow, there was nothing I would have kept from him that was in his interest. And I think he knew this, and so enjoyed our time together. I suspect, based on the wisdom of my gut, though I spent but one long Russian winter drinking tea and chatting with him, that he would have backed me, because he would have learned that I would do the same for him. So I do think of him as my friend. But the other guys—they’re buddies.
Most of the guys I know are buddies, and buddies are great. But a to be a friend—that’s another thing altogether.
Death’s Delivery: The Evolution of Beauty
We owe Death a profound debt, and shall not default.
Did we not die, we could not have evolved our most humane attributes. Thought, Art, Music, Compassion, Love: all these are strictly indebted to Death and his cold, churlish claws. Without Death, the very faculties which make the sweet fruits of civilization possible could not be.
We have made our way from simple, single-celled organisms to complex, self-aware and infinitely creative beings who even long for immortality. But it is not to be. No individual has the right to default on our great debt.
The birth of one individual child, of one beautiful child, is dependent on the death of trillions of generations which struggled and adapted to survive and procreate. Slowly, generation after generation, century after century, millennium after millennium, age after age, the simple cell–without a single break in the biological chain between it and the child–moved from the simple to the complex; it moved from simple reactive behavior to the reflections of Kant; it moved from the calls of lower primates to the poetry of Shakespeare; it moved from mating calls of beasts to the music of Beethoven; it moved from scraping the walls of caves to the art of Van Gogh; it moved from the first dream to the science of Einstein. Onward it goes, this simple, single-celled odyssey.
Seeking refuge from death, we have procreated and shed less clever and less brilliant forms until at last we learned how to live for something, not merely to live running from death. We have learned to love, the greatest of all evolutionary adaptations. And maybe now we can learn to respect death in a new way, and learn to be somehow thankful.
At the heart of love is the infinite vulnerability, which is mortal through and through. Without this vulnerability, without our mortality, our need for care would be no need at all. Nor would we have learned to care for those who would show us also love. Death is at the heart of beautiful love, just as the birth of a baby implies the pending death of loving parents. Without death, love is not possible.
And the hope that parents have for their beloved children! For children embody our deepest longings. They embody our struggle for immortality, to survive beyond death; or, more properly, they are born that we will be survived. And we hope that our children will rise to the greatest blessed and immortal height that evolutionary adaptation has made possible. What will the child give? Will that child be an artist? A philosopher? A healer? Kind?
Kindness also latently imlplies death’s cold shadow: eternal night. Kindness is the warm fire built this night, around which we invite our blessed friends to stay warm, to share in a conversation, to share a story, even to sing a song that our breath will rise and reach for an eternally mysterious canopy of stars.
The Sacred Ground of Truth
The progress of civilizations owes as much to the skeptical spirit as it does the speculative spirit. But in few do these qualities commingle in balanced and complimentary form.
Too often one finds that the skeptic permits of no possibility which does not explicitly or implicitly conform with a given and established model, which is hardly different in stern heart than the conservative dogmas which so emasculated the creative minds of antiquity. Typically, the model of the universe to which the obtuse skeptic adheres even to the brink of irrationality is materialistic, in the cold sense of the term. It holds doggedly to modes of causality as would be sacrosanct in the Church of Reason. These modes of causality are invariably linear, wherein all effects proceed from causes which are spatially proximate or linked thereto. Further, all connections or associations which are not causal are either accidental or peripherally causal.
I feel the cold barrel hard against my own teeth, so having aimed this gun. Now let me get my head out of the way.
This kind of strict and established model–as I have generically sketched it out–is both powerful and useful. Yet it is but a representation of what we have been for centuries trying to understand; and by following the lines, contours and logic implied by it, we have launched spacecraft and cured disease. Yet we cannot say with certainty that other modes of causality, which would either subsume or compliment our present models, do not exist. We simply do not know, and so we go with the best which we have got.
Yet there may be radically different structures and forms of understanding by which we may grasp being. Where the dogmatic kind of skeptic is obstinate to the point of stultifying the progress of knowledge is when he dismisses other descriptions of the universe before even having given a full or sufficient hearing to the matter. Too quickly the skeptic dismisses a description as pseudoscience or quack science. As a result, there are areas of our ignorance which professional scientists ignore in order to avoid career suicide.
Such taboo areas include such things as dreams (when analyzed in a non-traditional or established mode), telepathy, prescience, etc. Hell, I get nervous even mentioning them, though my professional reputation has little to do with my opinions on these matters.
Let me clarify. We should be skeptical of claims which fall into contradiction with our hard-earned understanding of the universe. But we should not be so skeptical as to rule out other possibilities. Furthermore, we should not give credence or put any kind of serious weight on alternative explanations until they have been sufficiently beat to hell. Too much depends on our definition of the word knowledge for us to fuzzy-up its pretty little edges.
The error is when we reject claims prematurely, and thereby contribute to an epistemological culture which bars potential understanding, a culture which knows so much that it understands but little.
My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,
Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,
I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.
Writing and talk do not prove me,
I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,
With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic. –Whitman
As honest intellectuals, we should be open to a great variety of proposition, prejudiced as little as possible. When a proposition is proposed, we ought to find the best means to test it, and let no proposition by which does not pass. But where no test can be sufficiently designed or conceived, we must not simply rule out the proposition. Nor should we commit the graver error: letting it pass for knowledge.
It is upon this word–knowledge–and the preservation thereof, that the skeptic should keep his or her focus. We need a stout definition and criterion. What we do not need is the skeptic ruling out all other modes of inquiry before they even get to the point of making a claim upon truth or knowledge. Let, I say, the mind be free to play.
Now I have devoted the bulk of my remarks to skepticism, though the skeptic is a minority class. Far fewer people are skeptical than are speculative. The few we have therefore play a profounder role. The skeptic guards what is sacred to the intellectual: knowledge and the pursuit thereof. The skeptic preserves the conditions by which we may rightly call knowledge divine.
Speculative minds make leaps of logic that make the most lethargic of mothers wince and worry. The most talented among the speculative minds appear almost to fly unaided; and were it not for the skeptics, too many would take it that they did fly. Yet aided by the criticism of skeptics, we have learned how in fact to fly.
But like the skeptic who sometimes refuses too much on the basis of an assumed knowledge where in fact there is none, the speculative mind out of a similar vanity claims knowledge far too quickly. Thus the speculative mind is at least as guilty for creating an environment which is hostile to creative thinking and investigation. Every time a thinker disrespects what the word knowledge means, he or she ignores the importance the definition of that word has in landing astronauts safely and in the healing of sick children; he or she thus helps to create a hostile climate wherein speculative investigation is mocked ever more harshly.
Speculative minds should make their leaps of logic, but they have a profound responsibility: in a secular culture, the meaning of the word knowledge as based on the criteria of science is nothing short of sacred. And this it is for reasons more justified than even the most subtle of speculations.
Let us then seek to find this balance in ourselves: that we would make room for the speculative mode, but become the fiercest of skeptics when anyone would dare to approach knowledge and make a claim on the sacred ground of Truth.
Where Wisdom Finds Home
“Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.” –Juvenal
Eyes see but light and shadow; the mind gives form. But not all forms or ideas we impose on nature belong to her; nor do all minds have wisdom. Nature’s curves and contrasts are more subtle; her steps and strides are more savvy than the common mind.
Commonly, a mind foolishly assumes one of two things. The cocky common mind assumes that it, bespectacaled by a book or two, has knowledge and knows what or whom he sees. Religious books, philosophical books, even the arguments and experiments of Science can blind.
sweet spontaneous- earth how often have
- the
- doting
- fingers of
- prurient philosophers pinched
- and
- poked
- thee
- , has the naughty thumb
- of science prodded
- thy
- beauty, how
- often have religions taken
- thee upon their scraggy knees
- squeezing and
- buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
- gods
- (but
- true
- to the incomparable
- couch of death thy
- rhythmic
- lover
- thou answerest
- them only with
- spring)
by: e.e. cummings (1894-1962)
The second mistake of the common mind is that he or she is not up to the task, is too stupid, is better off leaving the important questions of life to other, more worthy thinkers and teachers.
Both of these positions–the pompous assumption of knowledge, and the cowardly assumption of incompetence–are the very antithesis of a mind in which wisdom finds a home.
Wisdom is not being clever. It is not being bookish or erudite. These qualities are useful for wisdom, provided that the assumption of knowledge does not paralyze. But the want of these qualities does not preclude that wisdom will find a comfortable home in such a head.
Wisdom loves the open and aware mind. Neither openess nor awareness are directly dependent on ideas, though certain ideas can chase them out and down the road, can even lynch them, leaving ignorance in their stead: a lonely home filled with leased furniture and hoarded comfort.
HE Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls- are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
- (also, with the church’s protestant blessings
- daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)
- they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
- are invariably interested in so many things–
- at the present writing one still finds
- delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
- perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
- scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
- …. the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
- Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
- sky lavender and cornerless, the
- moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
- by: e.e. cummings (1894-1962)
Rather than assume widely accepted things and imposing these garments on nature, wisdom empties himself, becomes open. Wisdom watches, notices nature, and lets her suggest a question; he does not blindly assume or suppose; he does not impose prefabricated or rehearsed one-liner questions. This would assume an improper familiarity, or would suggest tawdriness .
She is not his, is not a plaything, is her own, will answer only perceptive questions given rise through clean and clear eyes. She will only answer specific questions about her, not about a class of things into which category she belongs. She is not just an example of one among many. She is always original and unique, always new.
And where she would appear to resemble another, this is not a case of her being one among many members of a class, but rather of the self-same beautiful girl peaking from around an arras, now here and now there, flirting playfully, trustingly. To wisdom alone does she tell her one and only secret, which wisdom will never betray. To her, he is ever faithful.
In Awe of Godless Dirt
Dawkins opens his book, The God Delusion, with a quote of Douglas Adams. “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
This quote cuts to the bottom, and finds dirt. At which point, theists or theistically leaning agnostics are wont to say that atheistic concepts of the universe are dreary, melancholy, pessimistic, and hopeless conceptions, even as if this were sufficient grounds for rejecting such conceptions.
But that dirt were all that supported a garden, and that garden were beautiful, then would not dirt be laden with the stuff of amazement? Need we gods to acknowledge beauty? That there were no god, beauty were then but a cruel illusion?
This is most perplexing, a most immature habit, a want of sensibility. If dirt supports the blossoming of a carnation or a sunflower, then so much more is dirt!
But flowers die, as we do, and return to dirt. Corpses rot. And so, would that a life had meaning, we assert a soul, and an immaterial, imperishable realm: spirit, the unseen, the eternal, the abode of soul and god. This soothes our anxieties, and seems to guarantee that our short lives would have meaning. We build our lives around such concepts, though the best of evidence for it is as solid as the water upon which Christ purportedly walked, as sound as the words uttered by a . . . snake?
Granted, a great many believers do not take these stories at face value. They read them as metaphors, which is somewhat more understandable. But these do not serve as proofs. They are objects of meditation, from which understanding is to be gained, and perhaps even wisdom. And there are those who reject the texts completely, yet must keep the concept of a god in their conception of the universe, which brings us back to the original point.
If one is to reject the semitic religions, the monotheistic religions which so plague the western mind and which are infecting ever more widely the world, why then retain a theistic conception? The theistic conceptions of the semitic religions use as their evidence the texts they call holy, and some anecdotal evidence. I’ve never been presented with anything other than these two, save the so-called proofs of reason, all of which have been destroyed under critical analysis, to support the retention of a god.
Yet people insist on retaining the conception of a god. When I press them to discover their reasons, they invariably make one of two moves in the end. And these two moves may turn out to be fundamentally the same.
The first move–if it can be properly so called–is to sustain the argument as long as they are able, and then they crumble under the weight of their emotional attachment to the concept of a god–which is really an ego attachemnt. And then I am the bad guy for pressing them to dig so deeply. But I’m not out to hurt anyone’s feelings. I’m only pressing people to examine their lives and the values upon which they form their lives, and, where I can, get some glimpse into the truth of the human condition.
Then the darkness sets in. A garden without fairies at the bottom is nothing but dirt, not beautiful. And I, accused of forwarding this pessimistic thesis, am a sordid kind of fellow.
But I forward no such thesis. I am an atheist. I see a world filled with both suffering and beauty. But I see no reason to keep a god in my philosophy.
The second kind of response I get when I enter into the questions of fairies in the bottom of the garden is overtly intellectual. This tends to be a more honest kind of conversation, though in most cases there is a kind of emotional clinging to a god, if only to hedge their bets.
Often the conversation goes to evolution. This kind of person understands full well that the established theories of science have a mountain of evidence kissing the very sky. They grant that the earth is very, very old. They grand evolution, but insist that some kind of god simply must have started the whole process. It is too complex and amazing to have started by chance.
Anyone who has examined this issue knows that this position is riddled with flaws and misunderstandings. First, evolution by natural selection does not function by chance, though chance is one concept contained in the theory. But this is not the place for that analysis. Second, the theory of evolution does not explain the origin of life, though some scientists are doing their honest best to understand this profound question.
But the final point I’d like to discuss is of their use of the word “must.” They argue that since the fundamental building block of life–the cell–is so complicated, it could not have just happened without God to kickstart it. Yet there is nothing in the concept of complexity from which it follows that there must have been God to bring the specimen into existence.
There is simply the feeling of awe.
Theists from here feel justified in retaining a concept of God, though there be nothing in the issue to suggest to the impartial mind which is not emotionally crippled by the concept of a God who guarantees that life is meaningful. This is a kind of ego attachment, rooted in the fear of annihilation, which keeps the argument alive. There is nothing in the evidence that even remotely suggests the existence of God. Nothing.
But there is nothing in the evidence which suggests that a garden is not beautiful, or that dirt cannot bring the imaginative mind into a profound state of awe.
Lawnchair Philosopher 
