Seventy-eight

Children are natural philosophers, seeking order in the seeming chaos of a world new to them. Most adults are too busy struggling to survive in that world to think about it, so they accept the word of others that it has an order. Only children and the rich have time to think.  

When I was a child, I looked forward to growing old and retiring, because then I would again have time to think; but the mind, like the body, must be exercised or it grows weak. Now when I try to think, I merely remember what I thought when I was young; and when I read what I wrote then, I see how much stronger my mind was when I was young.

Professional philosophers, who are paid to think, say ours is a post-modern age. How, I wondered when I was a child, is it possible to be post-modern? But it’s true.

The modern age was one of revolutions intellectual and social, technological and industrial. It's over now. Ours is a counter-revolutionary age.

When I was a child, it seemed to me that our society, perhaps even our species, had stopped evolving and was now devolving. Even the best modern thinkers – Hegel and Nietzsche, Freud and Marx – were no more than footnotes to Plato. They had rediscovered the ideas of our ancestors, which seem to us controversial only because we post-moderns had forgotten our pre-modern ancestors.

Now that I'm retired, I don't waste whatever time I have left reading new books. The best of them only repeat what our ancestors said, but not as well. I reread the old books on my shelves.  

I just finished rereading a book that asks whether Marx is still relevant, a question often asked when I was a child. Professional thinkers have been saying since I was a child that the moderns are no longer relevant. There's no longer any need, they claim, for grand narratives that seek order in the world's seeming chaos, because history is over. I'm sure ours is. 

It made me think of Goethe’s Faust with his grand project for reclaiming land from the sea, as the Dutch do. The Dutch republic was, for the moderns, a model not only of the ideal polity but a metaphor for bringing order out of chaos. 

I thought also of Freud’s description of the conscious mind as an island of order in a sea of the unconscious. Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. 

Marx can’t be ignored, nor can Freud. We must build on the past if we are to have a future. But instead of continuing the modernist project of remaking our world, post-moderns seek to unmake it and pretend it never happened.

They refuse to admit that change continues to happen despite their efforts to stop and reverse it. The sea is rising, and threatens to drown our oldest cities, the coastal cities our ancestors built when travel was primarily by water, the mother cities of what we used to call civilization. 

Those who can afford to do so have fled to the suburbs, leaving the cities to die. Soon the sea will drown them, as Plato said it did Atlantis.  

Our masters hate what little remains of the modern world and its republics. They're dismantling the state until it’s small enough to drown in a bathtub, in the words of Grover Norquist, after which they'll throw that dead baby out with the bathwater because they want to forget the past and don't want to think about the future. Neither do I.

Seventy-seven

Why do we laugh? How can we laugh when we know, if we know anything, that this world we’ve created is filled with suffering and pain? To deny it, and look instead for joy and beauty - even worse, tell ourselves we've found it - is not to love this world. Love based on a denial of the beloved’s true nature ends in disillusionment and turns to hate.

Of course there's more to this world - and to us, the creators of this world - than we know. Some claim this proves we’re wrong about our world, and what in it seems to us evil is ultimately for the best. But knowing there's more to our world than we know doesn't prove it’s better than we know; only that it’s different. We don’t know enough to judge it, to love or hate it. We laugh at ourselves, at our foolishness in thinking that we could know.

Seventy-six

Last night I lay in bed reading, as usual; and as I fell asleep, as usual certain words from what I'd read stayed in my mind.   

These words aren’t seeds from which my dreams grow. They're planted in the conscious layer of my mind, and remain there. While I sleep they germinate, coming to fruition when I’m awake again, as conscious thoughts.

I'd been reading an article about an art installation in some New York gallery. It consisted of televisions playing documentary film footage of atrocities. The ostensible goal is to awaken the spectator, arouse his or her compassion for the suffering of others; the same suffering from which technology, including television, exists to protect middle class art patrons. It doesn’t require Nietzsche to appreciate the irony and recognize the Schadenfreude of this.   

The word I'd read in the article that stayed in my mind was involve. It reminded me of related words, revolve and evolve.

Yeats' words Turning and turning in the widening gyre were in my mind when I awoke this morning; but it’s not because the centre cannot hold that things fall apart. It holds them all too well. It’s because we do not wish to be involved with others that we turn in upon ourselves. What we call capitalism and/or the market is a solipsistic black hole that devours everything.

We are dreamers, restlessly turning in our sleep, troubled by the nightmare that is history. But better to remain asleep, we think, than wake and face reality.

Seventy-five

How to live? Why to live? What is life? Is it possible to know these things? If so, how? What would it mean to know them, to know anything? Why should I care? I’ll be dead soon (though not soon enough), then I won’t care. We’ll all be dead soon. Then there’ll be no one to ask these questions, and no one to care what the answers are.

Seventy-four

Justin telephoned me last night. I was so surprised that I answered.

He said he's now in Australia. He didn't mention our disagreement, and neither did I. I suspect he didn't think I would answer, because it was obvious he hadn't prepared a script. We just talked.

Seventy-three

Thanks to bad health and poverty, my social life has taken a turn for the better.

I’ve reached the age at which the body starts to fall apart. Nothing life-threatening (yet), only ailments that become painful if left untreated. If they were life-threatening – if, for example, my cancer returned – I wouldn’t do anything about it. I’d welcome death, but minor problems I attend to. I want to die in order to escape a painful life; but while I remain alive, I don’t want to live in physical pain as well, so I spend more and more of my time visiting doctors.

Now that I’m poor, the only doctors I can afford are those who run walk-in clinics catering to low income patients. They're mostly in the inner city, and that’s where I’ve been going.

These doctors are all black, and their patients are all black. I’m always the only white person in a waiting room full of blacks, and I’m always amazed by how comfortable I feel among them.

Instead of sitting quietly and avoiding each others’ eyes, as white people do in a suburban doctor’s waiting room, these people are eager to talk, using any pretext to start a conversation not only with each other, but with me. They always take care to include me in their conversations. 

I’ve been wondering, during the last couple of weeks, why I feel so comfortable being the only white person among all these blacks when so many white policemen, strong and healthy men half my age, are so terrified by the sight of a black man that they shoot and kill him out of fear for their lives. Of course young people, black or white, are often filled with rage because they don’t have what they think they deserve – and those who have the most think they deserve everything – while the black people in the waiting room with me are my age, resigned as I am to the fact that no one gets what s/he deserves.

Perhaps I like these people because the doctors’ offices are close to the neighborhood where I grew up. They would be my neighbors if I hadn’t left them behind.

After visiting a doctor yesterday, I decided to drive through the old neighborhood and see how it had changed. 

It was silent and deserted. The houses were in ruins, charred and blackened by fires probably deliberately set. Surely it's the worst slum in a city of slums. But it was beautiful. The grass was waist high, full of wild flowers, and the tree branches met overhead, enclosing everything in green shadows. It was like being deep in a forest. If this is the city dying, I hope I die as peacefully.

Seventy-two

We can’t help others. We can’t even help ourselves. Especially not ourselves.

It’s easier to help others than it is to help ourselves, because we know them, and what is good for them, better than we know ourselves and what is good for us. Knowing others is the way we avoid knowing ourselves.

But we don’t want to help others.

Socrates said we all want to do good. If people don’t do good, it’s because they don’t know what the good is. But we all know what the good is. People can't or won’t do what is good for others because they can’t or won't do what is good for themselves. Why would they help others when they can’t or won't help themselves?

We tell ourselves that we do what we have to do, or we tell ourselves that what we do is by definition good because we are good. These are the most common excuses for not doing what we know is good. But the real reason why we don’t do what we know is good is we don't want to do it. At best, we want to want to. What we really want is to seem good, to others and to ourselves, without doing anything to deserve it.