Dear David,
In case you haven't time to read Kundera's obit in The Guardian -- https://www.theguardian.
"His Kafkaesque view of power led to disagreements with the dissident playwright Václav Havel, whom Kundera attacked for encouraging the illusion of hope (“moral exhibitionism”) in a situation where history preordained defeat."
I am a big fan of Hope and oppose those who try to erode it. In fact, I think it is a fundamental human obligation to try to keep hope alive.
Prepare for a jump...
Unlike Mao, I do not equate catastrophes with "progress." (i.e., Saith Mao: "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.")
But if "things" - despite our best efforts - "sort out" so that a third of humankind dies in the next Black Plague, I will welcome the diminution in population-pressure without wanting it to have happened, and without reveling in the macabre cause of the "turnaround" from a disastrous demographic trajectory to a trajectory more favorable in a number of demonstrable ways. Sort of like volunteers jumping off an overburdened lifeboat.
Plus I've been around long enough to know that, as my father used to say: "95% of what the wisest of men thought would happen, never happened."
On the left side of the aisle, it's embarrassing how wrong George Bernard Shaw was... not to mention how long he persisted in his wrongness. (And Shaw was one INCREDIBLY bright guy. Furthermore, he had plenty of time to think, research, meditate and ponder. He didn't marry until he was 41, and he never had children.)
It's never over till the Fat Lady sings.
And, en route to that fateful concert, WHO KNOWS what sudden transformation-of-
An agnostic, culturally-Jewish friend of mine -- David Kattenberg -- with whom I shared an office at the Managua Medical School, said he was seriously tempted to believe in God because Bob Dylan and The Beatles graced our planet at the same time.
Meantime, it seems certain (at least to me) that we are embedded in a Magnum Mystery. (Consider the proposition by a University of Rhode Island black hole physicist from earlier this week that earth is inside a black hole. https://www.livescience.
Well, maybe... Ad maiorem gloriam mysterium.
What has bedazzled me since "boyhood" is the fact that inanimate earth became conscious -- indeed self-conscious. This transformative circumstance impresses me as a meaningful portent, although I don't know what it portends.
Imagine muck-mire-mud slowly rising up out of itself to become you and me and all sentient beings - everyone we love.
The purely physical actually became the metaphysical.
When I lived in Colombia in the late sixties, I ran with a small group of hippy-like Colombians named "Los Nómadas."
The one with whom I was closest, a caleño artist named Hector Fabio Gomez Brand, used to say "Nosotros, los seres humanos, somos la conciencia de la tierra."
I don't think Hector knew about Pere Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere but Hector's observation was, in my mind, strikingly similar.
Rev. Pierre Teilhard De Chardin SJ: "Research Is Adoration"
And consider that Love exists.
I understand that statistical probabilities - and a confluence of sheerly physical circumstances - might convene to engender anything (and everything) given enough time.
But there is also a directionality embedded in time -- in existence itself.
And lo! Consider the minutely subdivided, highly-differentiated results when existence could have remained "undifferentiated stuff."
Consider that existence could have remained unanimated, as apparently it has throughout the universe that we currently know.
Or maybe the laws of "existence" could NOT have remained "undifferentiated stuff" which begs a whole other set of mysterious, unresolvable questions.
Since the proposed "answers" to every metaphysical question come down to premises (or what we can rightly call "acts of faith"), my sense is that we should choose the most hopeful premises -- the most uplifting acts of faith -- and in my case, I choose to believe (along with John, the epistle writer) that "God is Love."
Then, there is the question, first posed by Ed Myer in reaction to my relentless musing: "But, what's the meaning of all this!?!"
Love
Alan
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