We Who Shun Chaos for Community
Posted on | February 24, 2010 | No Comments
We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest — which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive.
— Thomas Jefferson
Let’s get out of here, you and me.
Let’s run up a tab, get a boat, ruin our credit scores and never return. We’ll just get good and lost for a while until we hit land. And we’ll build our own nation there, free of all these entrapments that make us less human each day. Let’s get back to the romance of living and curse convenience back to that dark little corner in the universe from whence it came. All so that lifetimes from now, if we’re lucky, the benefactors of our great experiment will call us their founding fathers but not know all of our names. (And they will confuse our original intentions in order to create something not wholly unlike what we had been trying to escape all along.)
But I emphatically insist, it’ll have been worth it, even if only for those short, lovely years in which our progeny gets it right. Even if just to see the looks on our country of origin during those years, those flakes who cry “Liberty!” yet deny men that ultimate freedom—to exist as they ought. We will be the bridegrooms of our nature apart from post-industry, throwing off the yokes of our individualistic Abaddon for the honeymoon of our collective spirit and lust for empathy.
The Human Nature of God
Posted on | February 17, 2010 | 4 Comments
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.
— Abraham Lincoln
Faith is the conclusion we draw from the understanding that man is not something that merely is, but is instead something constantly becoming. To become requires faith, because why would we try to do more than just be as we are if not for the hope that we could become something more than what we are right now? It is only through having faith in the existence of the formal good that any person can will themselves to become better. This is a small leap that we all make, every day: that this year, this month, this day, we will be better than we were in the last. This is what we live for.
That so many of us stagnate in lieu of improving is merely a byproduct of our myopic and distractive nature, not our innate want to be good; that some may constantly fail to meet or attempt their goals does not mean they do not have those goals. Apathy or lack of desire to improve could be considered a defense mechanism built up over time as patterns of failure impress themselves upon anemic spirits: the more often the weak-willed person’s attempts to improve are thwarted, the more unconscious resistance they build against trying at all. You’ll find in these people who’ve discovered safe haven in their appetite that they often see life as a chaotic meaninglessness, with a “play to win” attitude void of principle and dignity. In them we can see the self in regress.
In health, we all search for that ideal iteration of the self, the key with which to unlock and negate the door which separates all that we are from all that we could be. In this light it isn’t so absurd to have faith not only in the potential for good, but in that for the best; it is only by trusting to the future the existence of some perfect good that we may ever perform our actions in its general direction. If we have no model for success, we are incapable of meeting success. No runner starts without a finish line.
In this same vein, if so many of us seek God—in the context of omni-benevolence, omniscience, and omnipotency—then it is in our conception of God that we can see the depth of our human nature. God is our finish line. In him, we seek to be good, wise or powerful. God is only the vessel through which many of us intend to reach these traits. But he is more telling of our source goodness than our salvation. That God exists allows us to have faith in more than just a creator, but also (and more importantly) the ideal iteration of the self. God is not merely who we pray to, but who we aspire to become. This is why when we are at our lowest points, we turn to our conception of God: to remind ourselves what we’re capable of when we feel incompetent. Our image of God is really the well of faith in ourselves.
Revisions
Posted on | February 16, 2010 | 3 Comments
I’m chasing my history and finding discrepancies between who I am and who I’ve thought I should become.
I fashioned myself in the image of a spirited warrior from the start, but so many scars later and I don’t know what I’ve gained from all of these fabrications. I was the toddler seeking diplomacy to avoid a fight his brazen confrontation got him into. I was the little boy daring: chasing the assailant, only to shamble back to his mother, wheezing for his inhaler. The youth with the megaphone, then silent and punched, kicked, beaten up and around the neighborhood once that final school bell rang. The enlistee asking for infantry, assigned to journalism. Begging and pleading with the military doctor to ignore my asthma, my twisted spine, my feeble figure. The one at the back of the formation runs in boot camp, struggling to catch up. Eventually assigned to a desk and told that, right here, I was a genius, maybe the best in the service. No awards for valor, no combat deployments. Just a kid serving with all the guys who beat me up in middle school. Doing a poorer job of fooling others than I did myself.
Like nations facing a great loss, all my life I’ve salted my wounds with introspection, following each failure with reflection. But if this boldness was just a face I presented to the world, then whom was it hiding?
My greatest source of frustration until now has been my perpetual attempt to juggle at once the contradicting notions of proud aggression and somber deliberation. I’ve always been ashamed of being a dreamer; thinking as the means and the end was selfish and unproductive. No, I had to do something great with all that thinking.
I could trace it back to that imaginary country I built up as a coping mechanism. When reality put me in my place, I made my ideals grand enough for residency. But what use is he who spends his life in his mind, I thought? I projected in order avoid the humiliation of being satisfied with thought alone. And wherever reality couldn’t ever match the image I’d constructed in my mind, I resented and hated it.
Instead, I couldn’t just be interested in policy; I would have to be a politician. I couldn’t just be a guy trying to figure out how things could be better; I would have to be the one changing them. In order to justify the obscene amount of time I spent thinking, I would doom myself to become the leader of the free world. But the people in the free world aren’t like their iterations in my imagination. And the free world isn’t as free as my mind.
I’m tired of denying myself for the sake of stoic resistance. I’m tired of who it makes me. Some people out there I just don’t have the mercy required to call my brethren. Some people I just don’t want to fight for.
I must be willing to accept the whole of these weaknesses before I can reach the zenith of my strengths. Until then, I’m only bogging myself down in perpetual defeat, entangled in the knowledge that I’m trying to portray someone whom I was never intended to be. All this time and energy used up on creating a convincing enough face, it could all be better spent.
Maybe behind all the skewing of my personal history that led to the invention of myself as a warrior, I’m just the boy who believed he could fly when nobody was looking. I used to paint on the world like a canvas with my thoughts. And to this day, in spite of everything I’ve learned that would have me deny it, I still believe deep down that I did fly. Would it really be so terrible to stick with that? To stop worrying about what’s real and go back to focusing my life on what’s possible?
Gone the Prodigal Son: Marx, the Prodigal Son/the Bastard (5 of 5)
Posted on | December 10, 2009 | No Comments
Marx’s fuzziness allows him to stand directly on the line between ruthless and revolutionary, but he makes sure to leave enough open to interpretation that you can’t tell whether he would have been expressly against the Gulag or understood it as a necessary transient evil in the course of industrializing a nation that jumped the gun on the golden mean a bit too soon. Pontuso describes the Gulag:
The work norms were set so inhumanly high that the extra rations awarded if the goal was met did not compensate the worker for the energy expended: a method intended to drive the always-hungry prisoners to toil by dangling food in front of them. The goal was to extract the maximum amount of labor at the minimum cost (except in human lives, of course) (24).
In this light, it almost seems as though Marx intended, through his silence on easily prescient issues, to damn humanity to material equality. The problem is that he not only outcasts from his summit the previously wealthy, who would be at just as little fault by his calculations as those determined by their environment to be poor, but that he changes the dominant system of currency. What would cost other nations in dollars costs his in lives. And this is forgivable under the auspices of the collective good. His economist’s thinking turns men into statistics, and their deaths become a part of a sinister cost-benefit analysis that places Stalin’s five-year plans (Pontuso 47) and Lenin’s insistence that only by “‘shooting hostile classes wholesale’ could the proletarian victory be gained.” (Pontuso 60)
Ultimately, Marx alienates himself from the whole of philosophy when he relegates humanity to the position of breathing math. That he chooses to be so keen on the details of numbers but unclear on issues of common humanity makes his work monstrous. Marx has his own opinions of his family:
Marx denigrates previous philosophers for making a distinction between thought and action. He proposes that whatever differences exist between theory and practice must be settled in favor of practice—praxis. Indeed, he goes so far as to assert that for something to be true, it must occur in the physical world and not just in mind. (Pontuso 118)
I wonder what the philosophers he devalues would say in response to his ironic assertion that he should be judged by the work of Stalin and Lenin.
Plato would probably say he was ruled by the lowest of functions: “the appetites, which form the greater part of each man’s soul and are by nature insatiably covetous” (38).
St. Augustine would awe at his call for permanent revolution—after all, the saint assumes that “no man seeks war by making peace. For even they who intentionally interrupt the peace in which they are living have no hatred of peace, but only wish it changed into a peace that suits them better” (110). What of men such as Lenin and Stalin whose best-suited peace is war?
Rousseau would suggest Marx rescind his dedication to praxis, noting that “it cannot say: ‘What he wills to-morrow, I too shall will’ because it is absurd for the will to bind itself for the future” (231).
Personally, I’d just call him a bastard who conceived a gruesome philosophy. But perhaps it isn’t his philosophy’s fault, if I take into account his social determinism: for what else is to be expected when one is born to an environment of illegitimacy?
Gone the Prodigal Son: Marx and Rousseau, the Better Brother (4 of 5)
Posted on | December 10, 2009 | No Comments
Rousseau, the Better Brother
If there is any (likeable) philosopher who might give Marx some love, it’s Rousseau. Where Rousseau believes we are determined by our culture, Marx says it is our class. The General Will, which Rousseau claims is for the “good of all”, may as well be for the good of the Party for its stipulation that “to be general, a will need not always be unanimous; but every vote must be counted: an exclusion is a breach of generality.” (231) So every vote must be counted, but not every vote has to count. (Rousseau may have as many gaps in his philosophy as Marx, but at least he acknowledges them with style.) This, in effect, is like a mother who feeds her children a dose of cod oil each morning for their future health. The children may object to the taste, but they at least acknowledge that it is for the best in the long run. Marx’s expectation that “for the success of the cause … the alteration of man on a mass scale is necessary” (qtd. in Pontuso 92) seems to follow along this line. However, Rousseau and Marx both ignore the possibility that the mother might one day begin substituting cod oil with a sledgehammer. What say the little ones then?
While Marx sees private property as a notion to overcome, Rousseau seems to think it just goes against man’s nature. Both Marx and Rousseau’s fundamental want for society is equality, but Rousseau makes it particularly clear that he is willing to sacrifice at least a kind of liberty in order to do that (a sincerity Marx doesn’t ever seem to share.) Rousseau is a pre-industrial precursor to Marx in that he still feels there is a turning point and humanity can undo all the alleged nonsense of culture and civilization. He asserts that this can be done by the whole of society, not through uprising but by cooperative resolve. In order to be a true sovereignty, he explains, it “neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs … The Sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, is always what it should be.” By Marx’s epoch, it seems the philosophy becomes more akin to: if you can’t join them, beat them. In broad fashion, he predicts:
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians. (Marx 306)
Never mind that he leaves open to interpretation whether he expects you to use a gun or a coffeemaker on your oppressors, Marx cries out for equality while whispering to men how different they are from each other. Whereas there’s a confused sort of kindness in Rousseau’s noble savage, you can’t help but feel the sheer force of anger that comes through in Marx’s writing. That he claims to come from a place of love is disingenuous for anybody who’s read St. Augustine, to say the least. In each area wherein Rousseau wants to strip everybody of all differences, Marx wants to spread those differences around—because it’s more fun for a bitter soul to appropriate some of your property than to decide that nobody owns any property anymore, period.
Gone the Prodigal Son: Marx and St. Augustine, the Spoiling Mother (3 of 5)
Posted on | December 10, 2009 | No Comments
St. Augustine, the Spoiling Mother
St. Augustine helped forge the primary Christian model as one of foregoing earthly pursuits in better interest of God. I believe his conception had a peculiar impact on the beginnings of Communism and public sentiment during the Bolshevik revolution. According to Pontuso, the Orthodox Church before the revolution “had given a justification for the social order and had provided a spiritual basis on which the inequalities within Russian society could be accepted” (55).
As public confidence in the church waned, along went faith in the tsarist government of the time. The Augustinian construct that led men to be “more concerned with the salvation of their souls than with the satisfaction of their bodies” (Pontuso 55) would become the perfect model for self-devaluation in communist society . It is in this way that Marx brings Augustine’s God down to earth and paints him red. By removing religion from practicing society, there remains an implication—voids are meant to be filled. Due to the unique circumstances during the Bolshevik revolution that combined an “utterly decrepit and demoralized” (Pontuso 55) Church with the opportunity to be a part of something else still greater than them, people became more willing to forsake religion in favor of a spirited rebellion. If a man once sought his spiritual renewal from God, he could now find it in the Party. In contrast to tsarist rule, men who didn’t “profess themselves to be wise [but instead sought] reward in the society of the saints, of holy angels as well as holy men, that God may be all in all” (Augustine 105) would under Communist rule seek their reward in the collective good. Once faith was brought down and collectives could be worshipped, it made it even easier for men to transfer that worship to them later on.
Immediately after Stalin came into power, he made this potential for secular faith in one man embarrassingly palpable. His “cult of personality” was one of self-deification, and Solzhenitsyn suggests, “[he] wants to cure humanity of its maladies; a feat he can accomplish only by making everyone follow a single lead” (Pontuso 44). Stalin’s need for glorification, and his understanding that deeds alone would give him honor in history, led to the massive tragedies of humanity through his aims toward hyper-industrialization (Pontuso 46). It is in part the ambiguity of Marx’s teachings, held then as the new Scripture, which gave Stalin his perceived right. Marx commits a “sin of omission [with doctrine that] makes no provision for governing, institutes no checks against tyranny, and lays down no limitations on the exercise of power” (Pontuso 84). The dangers of a vehemently secular revolution in a religious culture is that it expects people will abandon their basic understanding of the world without any further consequence:
Marx’s disregard for the importance of politics led him to misunderstand one of the most elemental of human desires. When one ruling class is overthrown, the leaders of the revolution are bound to take its place. (Pontuso 85)
Augustine makes it clear in The City of God that in order to gain acceptance into the City of God, one must also respect the laws of the City of Man (106). He probably finds reason for this in the Scripture, wherein “[the] authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted” (New International Version Bible, Rom. 13.7). If faulty reason leads one to replace God with Marxism, why would they not be expected then to attribute to Marx some of the features they’ve until now associated with God? The problem with trying to superimpose an entirely new perspective onto a world that’s just not there yet is that it forces a distortion on previous beliefs.
For it leaks like acid through the gaps of the Manifesto and distorts everything touched by the philosophies on top of which it has been set.
Gone the Prodigal Son: Marx and Plato, the Father at Odds (2 of 5)
Posted on | December 10, 2009 | No Comments
Plato, the Father at Odds
Plato created the prototype for all political philosophy and suggested states with his Republic. For Marx to have even set out to write his considerations of political economy owed much to Plato’s groundbreaking, and that they both wrote works on ideal governments is at least one thing they share completely in kind. But these men would not sing over beers together. If Marx were the freed prisoner in Plato’s cave allegory, he’d escape only to see the halogen light of the corporate workplace—if Plato’s light revealed to him a case for absolute truth, Marx’s dim assessment shone but a dollar trail.
This is no doubt influenced by Marx’s own youth, during which he was witness to the material value of virtue: after a long-held rabbinical tradition in the men of his family, his father abandoned Judaism and converted to Christianity to enhance his job opportunities. This would play out in Marx’s own valuation of faith and perception of what is at the root of all things.
Whereas Plato’s obsession with truth and justice leads the Greek to center his Republic on the concept of rule by the wise—namely, the philosopher-king—Marx’s materialistic obsession forces society into an uncomfortable box and makes it stay there until it’s learned its lesson. Hypothetically responding to Plato’s case that the state is necessary because “no individual is self-sufficing; we all have many needs” (19), Marx argues that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (303). The former lauds the division of labor as something that makes each man best at any particular thing and the latter considers it a form of alienation.
It’s almost as though Marx sat down at his desk with only a paper and quill and copy of Plato’s dialogues, and then set out to explicitly create something that would surely piss the old man off royally. Plato embraces the class structure: he accepts a communitarian system within his guardian and auxiliary classes, ruled respectively by reason and spirit, but denies it for workers, whom he sees as too appetitive and beneath the honor required of such an environment (18). Marx puts this on its head, arguing that the workers are the only ones worth a damn and the bourgeois—Plato’s would-be guardians—writing in Capital, that their currency “lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”
Plato is an absolutist and tackles the issue not merely as one of building an ideal state but of building the ideal state. While he did not define matters of foreign policy in his Republic, it can be inferred that justice-spreading Plato would not coexist peacefully with the Procrustean brand of equality Marx propones to proliferate. Instead, he would agree with Solzhenitsyn in his critique of the West’s relaxing standards of truth:
A truly farsighted policy must recognize that freedom is indivisible. The world cannot exist half slave and half free. … [If the West] comes to doubt that value judgments of the kind that attribute superiority to one way of life as opposed to another, are impossible to make, then the West will not be able to defend its own highest principles. (Pontuso 184)
It is spiritedness, Solzhenitsyn asserts (and I think Plato would agree), that gives us the upper hand among the live-and-let-live relativists that, yes, “there are such things as morality and justice” (Pontuso 194). Plato’s lens of the tripartite soul would surely not allow rulers led by appetite and not temperance or spirit to sustain. If Lenin gave the Germans everything they needed to invade the Soviet Union, and worse, Stalin “could not conquer Finland and … panicked during the Nazi advance” (Pontuso 197), while using his position “to satisfy his desire for female companionship, good wine, and good food,” (Pontuso 41), then to Plato, both were unfit to lead. It was Plato who claimed, “a passion for honours or for money is rightly regarded as something to be ashamed of” (18). Having been taught by his mentor Socrates that “to know the good is to do the good,” he would have certainly taken notice and made advancements to free the Soviet Union from the grips of its shameless leaders.
Gone the Prodigal Son: Analyzing Marx through Plato, Augustine and Rousseau (1 of 5)
Posted on | December 10, 2009 | No Comments
Some families are united through history by their influences and distortions on one another, and some men are born bastards apart from the prestige of their progenitorial design. If Karl Marx is the youngest child in a family of philosophers, then he rebels against father Plato; finds solace in the comfort of mother St. Augustine; and maintains both deep rivalry and connection with brother Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One can find the building material of Marxism in the writings of each these great thinkers, either by virtue of agreement or his wholesale rejection of their judgments.
But the entire structure dooms itself to constant collapse—both in ideology and practice—because Marx chooses ambiguity for moments that demand detail, and torturous precision for those better left interpreted in their time. Raymond Aron writes, “The philosophy of Marx, precisely because of its intrinsic ambiguity, … has always lent itself to many interpretations, some of which are more convincing, … but all of which, strictly speaking, are tolerable.” (qtd. in Pontuso 73). More disastrous than anything is that Marx lays down the foundation for his vision on shaky settlement. At best, Marx’s bold obsession with materialism dooms his potential genius. At worst: the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin.
On Social Determinism
Posted on | December 4, 2009 | 1 Comment
Social determinism is a dangerous excuse for not trying.
While it’s true that we are all born with the burden or gift of our respective histories, these histories alone cannot dictate success or failure. That is to say, the pre-conceptional past encourages making choices that we might consider more immediately viable, but it does not rob us of the ability to choose the eventually phenomenal. Social determinism is that gentleman who opens the door for fatalism, suggesting that there’s no use in trying if you’re born at a low enough rung – the suitor quips, “Let me get that for you, dear. You’re doomed either way.”
It not only forgives the thief, but it defends him, saying, look far enough into this one’s path and you’ll see justification. But does this math of balances fulfill our sympathies? If it does, we should all be just as willing to consider the numerous environmental factors that lead to rape, or to murder, or to genocide. Determinism unravels reason by offering math and proofs why this or that choice isn’t really so. But if reason is the root of our capacity for respect, then the suggestion that reason isn’t owned by individuals can only lead to a lack of self-respect. It is through the hyperopic lens of determinism that we can forgive the rapist, the murderer, the tyrant. This philosophy is a social prototype for regress, held up from its legs by the two groups who benefit from it most: the exploited and the exploiting. For the mob, it is an excuse for failure. For the tyrant, it is a justification for evil: a philosophy that shows us that we’re captives but not to whom we’re captive. Or as Nietzsche asserts in The Antichrist, “One must not let oneself be misled: they say ‘Judge not!’ but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.”
When we allow ourselves to become automatons, moved by our environment like pebbles in a strong current, we can no less lambast our Hitlers and Stalins than laud our Lincolns and Gandhis. Black and white cease to exist in this new and contrived world, overwhelmed now by a vast, collective grey stealing all credit and absorbing all blame for the actions of its individual citizens. It’s true that we’re all born bearing the load of our fathers and ancestors, but the difference between the determinist and the willing is that the determinist crawls through life with a crushing awareness of this load’s weight, while the willing recognizes the load for what’s inside: a collection of experiences assisting him in his personal choice on the path to greatness.
I say, travel boldly and learn as much as you can. Examine for yourself what the substance of reality is. But before you act on the values you create for yourself, be sure that your actions are performed with reason, lest young faith condemn you to an older, wiser remorse. Truth is to reality as the stars are to the earth: pretty, but irrelevant. I have nothing against faith, but we must not fool ourselves into thinking it is on equal ground with reason. Faith is the will not to know. Though there will always be gaps in human comprehension that some choose to fill with this unsure trust, to enact first judgment against others based on faith in any god, country or cause will consign in the course of history your alleged leap nearer to a long, uneasy stumble. He who claims he knows for sure what is true and absolute will only go on to demonstrate how dangerous unchecked stupidity can be.
For even if truth and justice exist, it is our perceptions that make up the whole of human nature, and we can figure for ourselves by examining our individual and collective past what we and our brethren have done to be proud of, and that over which we share a common regret. Choosing to learn from our past, rather than resign ourselves to it, is what separates the doing from the done.
A first analysis of Job
Posted on | December 2, 2009 | 1 Comment
I just had a thought this morning: What if Job and not Adam had been the common natural father of humanity? In the Book of Job, Job loses everything but faith in God’s will. His wife even tempts him at one point to curse God, but he instead retreats to prayer to apologize to God for her and others who would have him do wrong in defiance of God. Imagine a conversation with Eve, holding that forbidden fruit in her hand. He surely would have dropped to his knees and prayed for God to forgive this “foolish woman,” as he calls his own wife in his story.
Of course, this can also be used to prove that the knowledge of good and evil (read: reason and not faith alone) is necessary in order to respect God’s will, or further, that the knowledge of good and evil (read: reason and not faith alone) is necessary to truly love God.
If God only allows exactly enough suffering as He considers necessary for the greater good, then the gratuitous violence shown in the Book of Job answers the question, “Why is there so much evil in the world?” with a resounding, “Because we need it.”
Job can only come closer to knowing (and thereby loving) God by having so much evil committed upon him. He can only suffer unto this evil once he knows that it exists and that it is not good. Hence, we must recognize evil in order to know the good (i.e. love.)
And this is why Adam partook in the forbidden fruit: without knowing the difference between good and evil, he only had in him a want to love God; so it was that only through the constant temptation of evil that he could love God. If evil is the gauge by which we measure good, it is only through suffering can we truly understand love.
I think this is a reasonable theological explanation for why so many Christians come into faith at the lowest points in their lives.
