Caribou
Several evenings ago, after out nightfall "debate" on the back deck, I realized that it is a deep working hypothesis of mine that I am fundamentally Catholic -- which is to say that my values were formed in the Roman Catholic tradition -- whereas your upbringing has been fundamentally secular, which is to say your values are formed by the values of this world (which does include Christian values).
But secular value systems, as the word implies, "have to do with time," whereas a fundamentally Christian focus (at least as I understand "the sacred and the secular") aspires after a value system that is equally "incarnate" AND "supernatural" (which is to say "above nature").
The "sacred" and the "secular" are The Two Poles of human experience and all of us "sort out" along this dialectical spectrum.
Intrinsically, this polarity-and-positioning is not a bad thing.
It is "the way things are."
But it is also a spectrum, along which we can determine (to some extent) which pole -- or which mix of sacred/secular characteristics along the spectrum -- works better, if by "working better" we posit (as I do) "happiness" as a primary good - and perhaps even more meaningfully, "joy," as the conjoined standard.
(Fretfulness and anxiety, which are foundational hallmarks of the modern world definitely suck, and I think we should all take a philosophical - and perhaps theological - look at how to forfend these "downers.")
"Pagan And Christian In An Age Of Anxiety"
Hannah Arendt, a 20th Jewish intellectual titan for whom I have very high regard made the following statement, one of the most remarkable (and I believe) most fundamentally insightful observations I have come across.
In Hannah's view (and mine), "What has come to an end is the distinction between the sensual and the supersensual, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses... is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears; that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses... In increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in this development. The sensual... cannot survive the death of the supersensual." Hannah Arendt
"The sensual cannot survive the death of the supersensual."
I am reminded of Vaclav Havel, the philosopher-dramatist-revolutionary-president of Checkoslovakia, after he and his fellow revolutionaries toppled the Iron Curtain just a coupe years before Mommy and I visited in 1992. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1clav_Havel
In Vaclav's "Prison Letters to Olga," Havel stated flatly: "Consciousness is prior to Being."
(It may interest you to know that Havel and Frank Zappa were bosom buddies... I don't know why, but the Czech people are unusually fond of Frank Zappa.)
So here we are, increasingly surrounded by "two kinds of people" - those who believe only in the sensory/sensual, and those who believe in their senses (which is inevitable) but who also believe in the supersensual.
"Bread And Circuses", My First Properly Thought-Out-And-Edited Essay, Written c. 1995
I realize that many people have reflexively bad feelings about Catholicism -- indeed about many, if not all, religions -- but let's not forget Einstein's reminder:
"Science Depends On The Religious Attitude," Albert Einstein's Writings On Religion
"While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge. If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements."
Einstein
Do Scientists Pray? Einstein Answers a Little Girl’s Question about Science vs. Religion
Who Woulda Thunk It?!? Shakespeare, Einstein, J. B. S. Haldane And Wendell Berry Converge On Truth
"Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling and The Redemption Of The Modern World"
Nor should we forget that Bob Dylan is an ardent believer: As for what Dylan has said about his own faith, he opened up to The Wall Street Journal in 2022. “I'm a religious person,” he said. “I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination.Oct 26, 2023
Nor should we forget that Bob Dylan is an ardent believer: As for what Dylan has said about his own faith, he opened up to The Wall Street Journal in 2022. “I'm a religious person,” he said. “I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination.Oct 26, 2023
Why a new book may be key to understanding the faith of Bob Dylan
A new book shows the ‘seeds’ of Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity, Oct 26, 2023
https://www.deseret.com/2023/10/26/23933620/is-bob-dylan-religious/
*****
I will tell you a story.
Yesterday, at Ixtapa, I saw something that tempted me to despair.
Someone had left their unoccupied SUV running in a roadside parking space, presumably so the car would be cool when the Ixtapa diner got back toa her vehicle after lunch.
Clearly, we are all blinkered and blindfolded in different ways - and to different extents.
But it has become commonplace for people to remain in runnning vehicles while one (or more) members of their party go shopping, or do some other business.
I have had only one car in my life - bought from Arthur Clark -- that even had functioning AC.
And! I knew how to use it! (Since Janet gifted me with her Ford Focus last year, I now have my second air-conditioned vehicle. But! Alas! I do not know how to use it.)
Perhaps, 20 years ago, Lino and I were eating at my dining room table (my yummy "Heroic" shrimp pasta) when he look up from his plate and said to me, "El problema con ustedes los gringos es que no saben sufrir."
Although he only said these words once, they burned themselves in memory.
My takeaway was (and is) that the ability to cope, to "put up with shit," to exercise the virtue of what used to be called (throughout Christendom) "long-suffering patience", has now -- like the concepts of "The Common Good," "The General Welfare" and a truly human "Social Contract" -- pretty much disappeared from our collective conscience.
Even the "taxonomic categories" of what we once contemplated and considered to be "The Good" no longer exist.
Withered on the vine... replaced by banality and the relentless quest for consumer goods -- with which we try to fill the hole (where abandoned Joy once resided).
And now, we try to fill that hole with purchasable consumer goods, accumulating a riotous surfeit of these "purchaseable pleasures" as if this piecemeal assemblage could somehow re-constitute the a priori inexplicableness of Joy. (I'm reminded of Trump trying to buy Love and Happiness by purchasing sex from porn queens.)
This is the fundamental ruse of Cowboy Capitalism: replace Joy (which is boundlessly satisfying... so satisfying in fact that there is precious little need for anything else); and then try to restore Joy/Happiness by trying to fill the resulting void with the ever-receding attraction of purchasable "stuff" a mad hunt which NEVER reconstitutes a single instant of Joy.
We gringos want EVERYTHING, and we want it now.
Or better yet, we want it yesterday. (This sentence begs a deep dive into the fact that the Spanish verb, "esperar" means both "to hope" and to wait. But it will have to wait.... I hope.
Furthermore, we want no pain, even though Buddha's "First Nobel Truth" is clear: "Life is suffering."
And since no thing satisfies us in a lasting way, the greedy pigs who take advantage of our craven, never-ending acquisitiveness, laugh all the way to the bank.
Meanwhile, erstwhile citizens... now-
Notably, the bag has a bag-size hole in it. Notice how the bag pretty much reverts to emptiness as soon as you put anything in it.
Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up. Fill her up.
Ad nauseam. Ad infinitum.
And so, everyday people have been suckered into taking the bait from the ungodly wealthy fat cats and slop-slurp capitalist pigs who giddily go about the business of trashing the biosphere.
Degraded as everyday people have become.... it is now our customary practice to participate in the mad pursuit of trying to "fill her up, fill her up, fill her up..."
But our collective backs are to the wall. "The Common Good," "The General Welfare" and a meaningful "Social Contract" are no longer "on the radar," as evermore ignorant/uninformed Americans don't even know how to choose, nor do they know how to push (as part of a consolidated political effort) in order to restore social and political conditions that might give workers a shot. (The workers themselves have been so dumbed down that in the main, they can't even contemplate voting for anyone but Jack Shit.
And so we have been "diminished," and with shocking regularity, we settle into our ruggedly individualistic trenches and tiny cubicles, slaving away in the fey hope that the next time we "fill her up," we will -- miraculously -- find our streets paved with gold... and back to where we once belonged.
Capitalism Is America's Invisible Propellant Of Moral Degradation
Capitalism Is That Hand In Your Pants, Seducing You, Caressing You To Near-Climax... While Going About The Machine's Abiding Purpose Of Picking Your Pocket, Leaving You Raped, Ravaged And Degraded
Capitalism Is That Hand In Your Pants, Seducing You, Caressing You To Near-Climax... While Going About The Machine's Abiding Purpose Of Picking Your Pocket, Leaving You Raped, Ravaged And Degraded
Cowboy Capitalism Dependably Degrades -- And Often Ruins -- The Lives Of The People It Marginalizes, While Persistently -- Eagerly -- Trashing The Biosphere: An Updated Compendium
Capitalism Is Coming To The Crunch: Will People "Just Say No," Or Will Capitalism Say "We're Going To F*ck The Biosphere In The Name Of Profits Over People." (A Great "Media Matters" Podcast From NPR)
The Original And Enduring Conspiracy: It's About Keeping The Filthy Rich, Filthy Rich
Capitalism: A 2023 Compendium Of Best "Pax-Barbaria" Posts
Capitalist Piggery
The Deep State Is Real: Plutocratic, Oligarchic, Unbridled Capitalism
Billionaire Nick Hanauer's TED Talk: "Capitalism's Dirty Little Secret"
"The Rich Plunder The Poor, Then Pile The Blame On The Dispossessed"
https://newsfrombarbaria.
Unbridled Capitalism has become an impregnable fortress for scoundrels... and worse.
In its current manifestation, unregulated "Cowboy Capitalism" protects and advances the self-seeking greed of "profiteering opportunists," all of them cut from the same cloth as Malignant Messiah, people who, like the Sacklers, treat corporate crime fines as the cost of doing business with out a thought to creating a better world. Indeed they are fully prepared to degrade the biosphere beyond whatever environmental "breaking points" just to earn even more money they don't need and can NEVER spend.
The Sacklers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family
*****
But there's Good News in The Bonus Round
"The Hidden History Of Corporations" --- And Ronald Reagan's "Stakeholder Capitalism" (Which Elizabeth Warren Is "High On" Too)
"The Hidden History Of Corporations" And Ronald Reagan's "Stakeholder Capitalism" (Good Things You Should Know About...)
https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-hidden-history-of-corporations-and.html
A&W Hamburgers... And The End Of The World As We Knew It
*****
Getting back to my story about the guy who left his SUV running while eating at Ixtapa...
I don't think cars even had AC until I was a fully-fledged adult.
But my point is that "I see this whole spectrum -- from pre-AC to leaving-the-AC-running with no one in the car"--makes it hard for me to "evaluate" the situation since most people -- who simply "grew up" with AC -- don't even see the bizarre weirdness of letting the car run for the trivial reason of insuring that the interior will be cool when they return to their car an hour later.
These folks do not even flinch at letting the AC run, while the whole while (and ever faster) global warming envelopes us, and while our coasts (where 50% of humankind lives" submerge.
*****
One day, while feeling down about global warming, I was at lunch with Arthur Clark (who,in his youth, was within a hair's breadth of getting his doctorate in geology at Cal, Berkeley, when, in 1941, he chose to enlist for WWII) and I asked him: "What will The 1% do when they finally acknowledge that the east coast and the Gulf coast are actually "going under."
He calmly replied: "They will move to higher ground."
This is not the answer I wanted, but it is also true that we humans are exceedingly clever, resourceful people, and it is always helpful for me to recall that just 10,000 years ago, my childhood home in Irondequoit, New York (and Cynthia's home in Pittsford, New York) were under a permanent field/glacier of ice, perhaps a mile thick, the same ice sheet that permanently covered the northeastern United States nearly as far south as YOUR childhood home.
Just 10,000 years ago!
*****
There is also the phenomenon of "punctuated equilibrium" - which I first learned about as an undergraduate at University of Toronto.
The theory appealed to me immediately.
The fact is that we do not know what will happen.
But we must "raise the alarm" even if what is currently a "reasonable prediction" never becomes reality.
It's a fact that accompanies any human quest, that we must be reasonable as we go about the business of making intelligent policy.
My Dad, who, as an Irondequoit Town Counselor was a professional planner, used to say that "95% of what the wisest men predicted would happen, never happened. (I cannot remember the exact number Dad used. He may have said "98% of the wisest men.")
The wonder, reverence and even adoration, that we owe to the Earth, to Life and to the Biosphere, are bound up with The Magnum Mysterium, whose unfolding we do not know, and cannot know.
And so, when it comes to all matters that are irresolvably mysterious, we -- inevitably -- make "acts of faith" about "what will be."
One example of these inevitable "acts of faith" is whether there is an afterlife - whether it be a reincarnational afterlife, or the existence of "another shore."
We do not know.
We cannot know.
We're here now.
How did THAT happen?!?!?
In any event, we must (at least) have working hypotheses about what will be, and these hypotheses distill to, "NO!!! There is nothing after the curtain falls on our individual lives."
Or, "Yes, we can answer the question bh there is some new dimension that opens up after death."
Think it through.
Whenever we do not know and cannot know, we choose (albeit reflexively) to believe "something."
Seems to me that it's wise to choose optimistic scenarios rather than pessimistic ones.
And in this realm of "ultimate questions," one hypothetical response is pretty much as plausible as another.
*****
The other night, during our intense debate on the back deck, you said (in so many words) that I was being pessimistic and not allowing any hope into my view of the world, and the way I teach/communicate about the future which strikes you as pessimistic.
I would suggest that those who do not make acts of faith in the existence of "another shore" are the true pessimists, the FINAL pessimists, the absolutely hopeless pessimists.
Then there's this.
I may have tried to explain this thought/feeling to you before, but I don't think so.
I have long felt that the role of terrestrial consciousness is something I "feel" and "understand," and that there is the "truth" in it.
If Vaclav Havel is right, and "Consciousness is prior to Being" (which is consistent with the view of Judeo-Christianity's "Creator God"), then every "thing" that effuses from "pure Consciousness" (which is "prior to Being") is, in every sense of the word, an effusion of a "Creator God" by virtue of "The Big Bang." (This effusion has been pondered time-out-of-mind as a "pleroma," most particularly a "pleroma" as conceived by the early Gnostics. "(In Gnostocism, the pleroma stands in start antithesis to the essential, absolutely otherly, non-material, incomprehensible Godhead).
As Wikipedia puts it, 'the circle of the Divine attributes,' the various means by which God reveals Himself, is the totality of the thirty aeons or emanations which proceed from God, but are separated alike from Him and from the material universe." (It's as if the thirty emanations are a kind of cushioning that "absolutely" separates the "transcendent deity" from the "incarnate deity" rather like sleight-of-hand that actually and ontologically separates transcendent Deity from "the manifest world" (which Christianity has always see as incarnate Deity. In theological terms, it's the universal movement from God the Father to God the Son -- from The Word into The Flesh.)
I don't want to "get lost" in the "the thirty emanantions," but I do want ot point out that the emanations of "the material world" from "the immaterial world," from "pure consciousness prior to Being" into "incomplete consciousness in Being" makes me think that we conscious beings are -- at least functionally -- the "sensors" that "God/Consciousness before Being" has "created" or "emanated" into the material world in order to "feel" what the material world is, and to know "from experience" which requires time/space because there can be no "movement" without time and space, and so, without time/space, there is no where for experience to "play out."
(I would like to jam with you about this concept of "us humans and other sentient beings" BEING effusions of God, upwellings of God - and that we seem to be separate, when in fact God/Consciousness effused into us so that God/Consciousness might actually know the "fullness" of who God IS when God is "manifest," when "incarnated," when "made flesh," when made into what you and I "know" as material Reality (at least that band-on-the-spectrum-of-Reality that you and I can percieve with our innately limited sensoriums).
Deep down inside I am more satisfied with this explanation than others, at least as this hypothetical explanation relates to the "phenomenological world" and "WHY" we humans -- why we "beings" -- are embedded in it.
(I will mention in passing that I believe that this "effusion" theory of mine also answers The Theodicy Question": "If God is all-good, then why is there evil."
And the answer goes something like this, "If we are -- as Gandhi -- said, "drops in the divine ocean," then our drops partake of the divine nature and, in consequence, God is visiting Evil on his own "manifest, incarnate self," and "He" is NOT visitng evil (or unaleviable suffering) on us as intrinsically separate beings, because we are not separate.
And we would not BE at all unless the Divinity of a "Creator God" had effused into us.
Gandhi: "Everyone has faith in God though everyone does not know ti. For everyone has faith in himself and that multiplied to the nth degree is God. The sum total of all the lives is God. We may not be God, but we are of God, even as a little drop of water is of the ocean."
Moving on... (We're almost there!)
As a theater person, you know -- as does every thespian -- that "the play's the thing," and that there comes a moment when it is time to "strike the set."
And, as every thespian also knows, this is not cause for sadness.
Rather it is time to celebrate a job well done.
And to clear the space for the new production that comes next.
The unique experience of play - with everyone playing a different part - is cause gratitude, and for feeling good about oneself for having had a "role" in the joy of "putting on the show."
And so, there will come a time -- at least for planet Earth -- when "the stage is struck."
But without the stage there would have been NONE of the joy - nor the love - that "the play" made possible. (For medieval philosphers, the distinction between "potential" and "act" was the sine que non of any abundant reality. The potential -- although it exists as potential -- is not enacted. And to the extent that "enactment" is the very nature of Reality (as we know it), this transition form potential to act is indispensable.
It actually denotes the process of "reality" coming into "Being."
*****
And now, turning to The Grand Finale.
I have long thought that even if we are on a ship that is certainly going down, the sinking itself presents our most significant opportunity to "play" - and to perform well.
And how well we play -- in light of Love and Truth -- is, I think, our highest calling.
And what amounts to this "Call"-and-"Response" might just be the most beautiful music that we humans -- in co-evolution with God can make, and we make it BES and most BEAUTIFULLY when we "play well together."
Here's the story, Morning Glory...
Titanic orchestra
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