Desiderata

I've been reflecting on the intrinsic hopelessness of influencing the world. The only people who can change the world are the ones with immense wealth and power, and even those people are constrained by the strings attached to the acquisition or inheritance of power (assuming it's not renounced) -- and those strings include the willingness to accept marching orders from any predator higher up in the food chain, or equivalently, to relinquish the moral autonomy that is the foundation of what I believe most people mean when they speak of having a soul. (Or maybe it's just what I mean. I incline to the Quaker view that what is within us of God, and to me the strongest evidence of the existence of God, is our moral compass, and it is this, when no other directive from the Deity appears to be "incoming," to which I think we are bidden at all times to pay heed. I do think, by way of a sidebar within the parenthetical, that God sometimes speaks to us more directly, and I will admit that this is because it happened to me once, in a way that was unambiguous and could be attributed to no other cause.) Anyway, the upshot of these beliefs, and the set of commandments supplementary and perhaps superordinate to the ones most of us who belong to the Judeo-Christian tradition (and many other people of good faith) embrace, are the following. Maybe, if I were Jefferson, I would characterize them as moral "truths [to be held] self-evident." I consider them moral imperatives, and will on no account violate them, not at cost of my life.

So, as it turns out "desiderata" was probably the wrong title for this post. "Commandments" is already taken, and has a specific referent within the Judeo-Christian traditions. "What must remain inviolate" is a bit convoluted and also prolix. So I'm going to call these:

IMPERATIVES

1) Make no Faustian bargains. Never trade your soul (or your moral autonomy, or your faith, or any element, howsoever small, of your covenant with God) for power, for wealth, for belonging or protection or "connectedness" or even your life.
2) DO NO HARM to other humans. (the Hippocratic provision, which I think should apply to a broader spectrum of humanity, specifically to all of it, than just to physicians) I know also that none of us is omniscient, and none of us can foresee all the outcomes (such as those alluded to in chaos theory whereby the flapping of butterfly wings precipitates a tsunami 12,000 miles away) of any one our acts. Or the case I'll borrow from Douglas Adams, in which the incidental utterance of a completely innocuous phrase by an unknowing speaker travels through a randomly-generated mini-wormhole and thereby causes a thousand-year war on the other side of the galaxy. If we cannot plausibly foresee, if no reasonable person could be expected to foresee, that eating a salad on a given day would cause someone else to be hurt 30 years later (or 30 seconds later), then there's no moral foul. Maybe there would be for an omniscient being, but there's only one of those, and He wouldn't commit a moral transgression. Anyway, this clause naturally and necessarily exempts all such cases, but focuses on acts that have injurious outcomes to other humans of high probability that can reasonably be anticipated by the doer. Those are the ones herewith prohibited.
3) Never seek power.
4) Never take orders, or join a group that requires you to relinquish your moral autonomy. In general, never join any group other than the one to which you already belong -- the human race. Never seek to subdivide it. No other person is worth less than you are in the eyes of God, either intrinsically, or by dint of belonging to or having a different appearance, intelligence, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, genetic provenience, socioeconomic status... or religion (unless it's satanism, which would actively and compulsively reject all of these moral desiderata, in any case).
5) Never take up a weapon, no matter what pretext you're given. You may be assured that someone else will point it for you, to the detriment of another human, and that the outcome will violate not only God's will, but, with overwhelming probability, your own moral values. (This is not meant as a reference to rank-and-file members of the armed forces, who are mostly people of good intentions who sincerely believe that they are acting to protect their families and their country. I think they have been atrociously abused by the system (by all the systems), but I do not doubt that most of them act out of a) genuine personal conviction and/or b) perceived economic necessity. Obviously, I think everyone, soldiers included, should obey their moral compasses, but nor do I regret the liberation of Dachau, which obviously involved weapons. It's an evil world, and an impossible moral Gordian Knot. I do, however, universally condemn the taking up of arms in secret, for unofficial, undeclared and hidden and/or private agendas. I do NOT mean to heap opprobrium on anyone already trapped in a hell not of his or her own making.)
6) Love God by doing what you can to help others.

I think that pretty much captures my moral values. Perhaps #6 should be #1, but I think any violation of one of the first five deprives one of the ability (and also, usually, the willingness) aggressively to pursue the very last.

Luke 23:24

I've been having what the galactic champion in "litotes in appallingly bad taste"* might call a bad week (month, year). But the last few days, especially -- though I've also encountered some random acts of unaccountable kindness, which my trauma-impaired state of mind has prevented me from reacting to in an optimally appreciative way. That same state of mind (or mental affliction) has had me making decisions reminiscent of one of those experiences in which you're attempting to navigate an unfamiliar city, and every turn seems to be the wrong one. (Or one of those experiments in which you give a hallucinogen to a rat, and then put it into a maze to rival the labyrinth of the Minotaur. I've never, for the record, taken any form of hallucinogen, and I hope I'm no closer to the order rodentia than most of my fellow humans -- and hope also that compassion for animals, if not for humans, has prevailed to put a stop to those abominable testimonials to Skinner -- but it does have that laboratory feel to it.)

There seem to be anima (plural of "animus;" not spirits from a Hayazaki movie) everywhere. I suppose nearly everyone on this unspeakable and incommunicable plane is frustrated, angry and afraid, and for very understandable reasons. "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner," according to Sartre, so that may have to be the final word -- though I'd rather have had one from a Christian theologian than the inventor of existentialism. A good one direct from scripture is the title of this post, and it couldn't come from a better source.

My last post was a "clamo ad te" in the form of a book report, and a cry of frustration I quickly opted to delete, though the author of the book was quite gracious about it. This post is an expression of exhaustion and Weltschmerz, more than any personal anguish. Anguish doesn't seem to do any good. One has to leave it in the hands of the Ultimate Decider (not George Bush). And for me, anyway, Robert Burns is a more appealing non-scriptural literary source than the author of "les Jeux sont Faits." The last line of one of Burns' more famous products was simply: "Youth shows but half; trust God, see all, nor be afraid."

* Zaphod Beeblebrox, possibly; he seems like a plausible candidate

Book Report Cancelled

I recently posted my reactions to a book I've been reading that, rather than affording me the solace I suppose I was looking for, had the effect (unintended, I'm sure, by the author) of exacerbating my frustration and distress. On reflection, I think it was ok to say this, but not ok (nor consistent with my Christian principles) to identify or criticize the book or the author in question (of whom I did say that I felt "admiration for the author's almost unparalleled ecumenicism, spirit of tolerance, and authenticity of spiritual introspection and exploration"). So I'm excising my earlier post, apologizing to the author, though I doubt that he (or anyone) has seen it or could care less, and resolving not to publish further posts that make specific references to persons (in contradistinction to philosophical positions), even ones in the public view, unless those persons have specifically solicited my opinion (also, given the obscurity of this blog), a cosmically unlikely event).

Recommended Readings

D.A.V.E. of Work in Digress was kind enough recently to commend this blog to his readers, so let me hasten to reciprocate. What really distinguishes D.A.V.E.'s site from the multitude of other journals and cris de borborygme in the cybernetic darkling plain, apart from wit and entertainment value, is his phenomenal verbal erudition. This is prose that's fun to read, fraught with recondite lexemes, and hypoallergenic of diction, a balm to the sensibilities of those of us (fans, e.g., of the works of Lynne Truss) unreasonably annoyed by the ubiquitousness elsewhere in the logosphere of grating and disharmonic solecisms.

Two other blogs I follow attentively, likewise characterized by conspicuous erudition and superlative wordcraft, are:

Ikaryos: An unsparing and exquisitely honest and articulate (and sometimes ineffably poetic) expression of the author's internal theological struggles: angst interspersed with serious insights and occasional epiphanies.

Journeyman Philosopher: This blogger, though relentlessly modest, has a better and broader command of a range of abstruse scientific and metamathematical issues than most of the professional philosophers I've had occasion to traffic with in the hallowed graves of academe (pace Richard Mitchell). Fascinating reading, and a tenaciously rational author.

Eternal Questions

1) Où sont les neiges d'antan?

In the rain gauge, fool! Why do you ask?

2) What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?

A silly, mutant ninja leg-changer.

3) Do you know the way to Sand José?

Why? Does José need sanding, particularly?

4) Why-o, why-o, why-o, did I ever leave Ohio?

I didn't actually, since I've never lived there, but who in his right mind wouldn't?

5) Do you know the muffin man who lives on Drury Lane?

Yes. Stay away! He is seventeen days past expiration, and very green and smelly. Might be a good antibiotic, though.

6) Once again, where does it rain?

Anywhere there are upper-atmospheric particulates combined with a clash of fronts of radically different thermal characteristics. Forget that crap about "plains."

7) Why is the sky blue?

The fourth-power frequency dependence of Rayleigh scattering. Duh. (Also, it is nice and calming.)

8) Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?

Biological decomposition accounts for a lot. And then there are all those bands of marauding florists.

9) What do you get if you multiply six times seven?

Cooties.

10) Wer, wenn ich schriee, hoerte mich denn, aus des Engel Ordnungen?

The ones without hearing aids. Get a life, Rilke.

These answers to vacuous questions have been brought to you by the same folks who brought you global economic meltdown. We'll have fun, fun, fun, till your daddy takes the T-bill away!

Despair and Prayer

There are upwards of seven billion humans on this planet (maybe more; that was only the last time I looked, which may have been 5 years ago). and most of them are in torment of one sort or another. Because of my own despair, because of the so-inescapable fulminating presence of evil (of human agency, ultimately, even if inspired by a greater Evil; we *do* still have "free will"), everywhere we look, I do not begin to imagine that my own "patience" (in Eliot's sense, or that of Job) is unique or even particularly important, except in my universe. So is it wrong for me to vex the issue of evil, to issue these impulsive "clamo(s) ad te," when all of humanity turns on the wheel? I haven't received any clear answer, at least not in my own mind, so perhaps I am just not praying in the right manner. Obviously, what I want is to see suffering obliterated for *everyone*, and by some less draconian expedient than the end of the world. Hardly a unique sentiment, for all of its endlessly manifest futility, and so *that* prayer must go up daily from billions of souls, and my contribution, except insofar as it touches my own condition, says absolutely nothing new to God. I do not know any other anodyne, though, or any other answer at all, but to pray, and I do know that there's one prayer that I have been told by an Unimpeachable Source *is* a right one.

Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.

And I think I'll stop talking about evil. That it's ubiquitous has probably escaped absolutely no one but the sociopaths who cannot call it by its true name, so why bother? Perhaps, to acknowledge the Beast is only to feed it. Confusing, though, since I know it hates the Light. But I am certainly without temporal power, and do not seek it, so invocations from me have no resonance except in the ears of God. Who can hear me without my resorting to a blog post.

Hell

Whose hell this is, I do not know;
It's not of God, nor of Godot.
I had no choice in stopping here,
To watch the works of Mammon grow.
Mephitic odors, fetid, damp,
Suffuse this desecration camp.
Between those stricken with despair,
In darkness, reft of any lamp.

The hell is depthless, darkness hedged,
And owned by those to Satan pledged.
And there's no solace to be dredged,
From this, our haven, mis-alleged.

Pace Frost (Robert, not the one wreaking havoc in this unspeakable and incommunicable temporal realm)

------

I believe there is a God. I believe He created the world. I believe that, for whatever reason, He has allowed Evil Incarnate to reign in this temporal realm. I cannot understand why, and I do not believe I have the right to question His choice, any more than did Job. But that is how I see it. For the record, I'd give up "free will" -- or at least the freedom to harm others -- in a nanosecond, if it would disempower the sociopaths who make all our lives hell. It seems to me an insufficiently gratifying form of compensation. I, for one, have no desire to exercise the option to trample and torture other humans in a demented quest for wealth and power, or just for the "fun" of it. People who do have that desire tend to become CEO's or talk radio hosts.Why not simply deprive us of the ability to harm one another? We can't hurt or help God, so the only way we can demonstrate our love of the Creator is to love one another. Depriving us of the options afforded by sociopathic Schadenfreude (which relatively few of us exercise, in any case) would not deprive us of the ability to love one another, or to love Him (which, for the record, I do). But that's just human reasoning. And I'm just a human, who can't get the first line of Psalm 22 out of his head.

God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten son... I am sure He loves us. I am sure satan is not more powerful, in the cosmic scheme of things. Jesus exhorted us to love one another, and was crucified for His efforts. What is wrong, here? I am prostrate, unable to see the sense in empowering the wicked and painting targets on the innocent. Jesus, I know you're listening. This *is* by way of a prayer. For understanding, if nothing else.