Eighty-two

Justin called early this morning. He was in an airport in Kuala Lumpur, waiting to board a plane to Melbourne. 

He said he's impressed by how different Malaysia is from Kuwait, even though they're both Muslim countries, so apparently he's realized Islam isn't monolithic.    .

He anticipates doing a lot of business in SE Asia, but still won't tell me what that business will be.

Eighty-one

The more we learn, the more we want to know. But not what we need to know.

Once what we call science seemed able to answer all our questions, something that what we call religion failed to do; but science also failed us, and now many people have returned to religion – pretending to believe in gods, just as they pretended to believe in science, because they can’t believe in themselves.   

Scientists of the mind, mindful of science’s failure, and ours, now claim belief in gods is not only natural, but beneficent; a survival strategy we evolved because believing ourselves under the protection of a god gives us the confidence to act in a mysterious world. If this belief was once beneficent, it now threatens to destroy us.

Believing in beings whom we know, consciously or unconsciously, are our own invention makes us warlike, ready to fight those who believe in other gods. We must prove to ourselves, even more than to them, the strength of our faith in our gods. 

Believing ourselves under the protection of a god that, no matter what we do, will save us from the consequences of our actions so long as we remain faithful to it, makes us reckless. A realistic awareness of our limits would be better now that we have the power to destroy the world. Instead we retreat further and further into the fantasy that Gott mit uns. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Eighty

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were—I have not seen

As others saw—I could not bring

My passions from a common spring—

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow—I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone—

And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—

But what is love?

Love is god, said those who called themselves religious when I was a child, and god is love. They needed faith to believe this because they knew neither love nor god.

Belief in gods has become the definition of religion - there are probably more people alive today who profess to believe in a god than there were during what historians call the Age of Faith - but the decline of what I call religion began with the invention of the gods.

Those I call religious know we’re finite parts of a seemingly infinite mystery, and what we know of it is infinitesimal compared to what we don’t. Giving that mystery a name may help us think about it, but it also hinders us. 

We invented language, said Tallyrand, in order to conceal our thoughts from each other; and not only from each other. Spinoza said it’s blasphemy to give the mystery a name and imagine that, by naming it, we know it; whereupon he was excommunicated for blasphemy by those whose profession it is to know it.  

The ignorant aren’t awed by what seems to others an infinite mystery because they don’t know it’s infinite. Like the rest of us, they know only what it’s not. They presume to define the unknown for the rest of us because they imagine that, while they know they don’t know everything, they know everything worth knowing. 

In attempting to define the mystery for others, the ignorant may become aware of their own ignorance; but if they’ve acquired a reputation for wisdom, they usually deny their ignorance not only to others but to themselves.

Haldane said the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine, because it's infinite and we are finite; but we are infinitely curious, and can’t stop asking questions. 

When our ancestors grew tired of asking questions no one could answer, they invented gods and pretended that, by giving the mystery a name, they knew it; but they knew, consciously or unconsciously, that gods are not the answer. They are only the point at which people give up asking questions because the more they learn about the world, the more aware they become of how much of it they still don’t know and will probably never know; and that knowledge was driving them mad.

We keep our sanity, or what we call sanity, by imposing order, or what we call order, on what seems to us the chaos of the world. To infants, and those who don’t know or won’t admit they’re ignorant, order means knowing the world exists for them and because of them; but obviously something must have existed before they did. Ex nihilo nihil fit. They can’t imagine a world without them and/or beings in it like them, so they imagine a being or beings like them, only greater, created them in its image and the world for them.

The first scientists believed in a god, and sought to know their creator by studying his creation. When they found no evidence of him in the world, they decided he exists only in us. 

Those who now call themselves religious, and for whom belief in gods is the definition of religion, blame scientists for undermining religion by offering answers to our questions that do not assume god is ultimately the answer to every question. But what we call science is merely the latest stage in that decay of religion which began with the invention of the gods. In this stage, ignorant priests who imagine that while they don’t know everything, they know everything worth knowing, have been joined by equally ignorant scientists.

Those who call themselves religious claim to explain why god created the world, and us. Scientists seek to explain only how the world works, not why.  

Those who call themselves religious say their god created the world for them because he loves them as they love themselves; indeed their god is them, their greater self (but not necessarily their better self; knowing their god loves them gives people the courage to fight their enemies - theirs and their god's - not only when reason tells them they’re outnumbered, but when it tells them they’re wrong). In worshipping their god, they worship themselves.

The world of infants, and of adults who call themselves religious, is a small one in which only they and their god are real; and the two of them are really one, as the Hindu’s Ātman and Brahman or Descartes’ finite and infinite mind/soul are really one. Everything and everyone else is an illusion. 

Those we used to call wise sought to withdraw from this world of illusion and become become one with the ultimate reality they called god. But if there is another world, infinite and eternal, it’s death for finite and temporal beings like us. Only that which has never been born will never die.

Seventy-nine

Justin called today. 

He's currently in Kuwait, staying at a hotel on the beach within walking distance of the Gulf. He says he’s starting his own business, and is in Kuwait to establish business contacts, but won’t tell me what that business is. I’d suspect it's something illegal if I didn’t know laws that supposedly regulate business are infinitely elastic, so it’s probably just unethical.

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.