Escaping alienation into Art, or maybe Mythology?

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I think I first became fully aware of alienation - the meaninglessness, purposelessness, disconnectedness of mainstream modern life - in the summer of 1981 (a very similar summer and in the same place as this one, which is why I am reminded of it) when reading JD Salinger's 'Glass Family' novellas (Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters, Franny, Zooey, Seymour).

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What I got from Salinger, was that the escape from alienation was into Art - probably into being an artist (and thus living inside the process of creation); and this became as kind of 'hidden agenda' for me from that time and for many years.

(Salinger also talks much of Eastern Meditative religions and of a Christianity seem through this lens - but these are means to Art, rather than ends in themselves.)

Escape into Art didn't work - and probably it never really has worked^, except maybe with Goethe - although one can be misled into thinking it has worked by artistic recreations of an artist's life.

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Around 20 years later I engaged with Joseph Campbell and began to re-re-re-read Jung from the perspective that alienated meaninglessness could be cured by escaping into myth - and that myth was actually a representation of humanity's shared inner reality.

Thus myth, heroic journeys and quests; stories from all kinds of places and cultures which seemed to have a special power, breadth, resonance; were perceived as symbolically depicting not merely the escape from misery, or the search for pleasure, nor even the pursuit of assimilating ecstasy... but an adventure or task undertaken for the well-being of other people, of the community.

But this simply kicked the can further down the road.

Because if my life would not be justified - wold not be meaningful or purposeful - by seeking comfort, distraction, and ecstasy - then why should things be different when my life is dedicated to enabling increased comfort, distraction and ecstasy for other people?

Somewhere, there has to be some-thing worthwhile in and of itself.

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One response to my earlier desire to escape alienation into Art had been to leave medicine for science - which was supposed to sustain and advance medicine; then to leave science for Art, specifically the study and practice of literature - which I supposed to be the 'end' for which medicine and science provided the 'means'.

Yet Art turned out to be just another means, and not an end in itself.

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What of mythology? I perceived mythology to underlie Art, to be even-more-fundamental than Art - such that the best Art was mythical.

Yet if myth was supposed to move us, I found that sometimes it did and sometimes (more often) it didn't - and although myth was asserted to be universal and powerful (The Power of Myth was the name of Joseph Campbell's popular PBS TV documentary) - in actuality myth often was not powerful, and no myth seemed to be universally powerful - such that most people preferred soap operas, sexual titillation and trashy news stories and never exposed themselves to actual myths or anything approaching such.

So myth turned-out to be as atomic, subjective and variable, and as alienated, as anything else in modern culture - not an answer nor an antidote.

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Only after I had exhausted medicine, science, art and mythology did I finally turn to religion; and to Christianity, which I had previously always excluded from my search.

And there was the answer - the problem framed, described, its consequences delineated. Staring me in the face.

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^The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion, by Gordon Graham

But seriously, what are the prospects for Catholic Christianity in the West? (Whether Roman or Orthodox)

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When the leadership are the problem, the priesthood; then for the laity under corrupt authorities who are leading them astray as fast as they can contrive - well, there is a real problem.

My impression is that - consequently - there is a strong Protestant element especially in the most orthodox and traditional Catholics.

I honestly don't see any positive tidal trends in Catholic Christianity in the West - just small eddies and counter-currents, memories, ideas and hopes, as the ocean recedes.

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Pluralism is true, God is within reality: a metaphysical proof

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If God made every particle of stuff and all the rules and laws and forces by which they interact; then God would be responsible for absolutely everything - both in terms of having made the nature of things and underwriting from moment to moment everything that happens.

This is monism.

Essentially there is God only - and everything else is a kind of swirling within God.

Clearly, there is no place for free will in such a monistic concept - everything is God.

(There is no such distinct thing as Good that could be compared with God - because Good is just a part of God. Good is God.)

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If God is conceptualized as eternal within reality, and having shaped pre-existing stuff using pre-existing rules and laws and forces; then God is not responsible for everything.

This is - one type of - pluralism.

Essentially there is God and at least one other thing. Some things are within God, but others are not.

With pluralism, God is not everything; and is therefore contained by everything (as the most powerful thing, vastly the most powerful thing - but not infinitely the most powerful thing: not every-thing).

Free will is a possible consequence of the fact that some things are not (or to be exact, not wholly) within God.

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Thus free will is not a gift of God but either:

1. An illusion - if monism is true;

or else  

2. a possible but not necessary fact of reality if pluralism is true.

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However, for Christians, the reality of free will is a truth given by revelation.

Therefore, since free will entails pluralism; then pluralism is true.

Thus, reality is plural - God is within reality, and not vice versa.

*


Note: clearly, Christianity is not strictly monist, but Trinitarian - and the Godhead is Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Q: What difference does this make? A: The above argument is not affected. Either the Godhead is everything, contains everything; or else the Godhead is not everything, and is contained by everything.  

Graphic sexual slang on secular Right blogs - what does it mean?

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Most secular Right blogs make frequent use of graphic sexual slang and analogies - and often they take this to considerable extremes of inventiveness and explicitness.

(The exceptions are among the sR bloggers I like best; such as Steve Sailer, Dennis Mangan and Foseti - who maintain good manners and gentlemanly standards in their posting; although I wish they would censor comments more ruthlessly.)

I presume that they swear and cuss in order to advertise their 'Red Pill' credentials and appear as someone who sees-though hypocrisy and sham, knows all-about sin and corruption, and is unafraid-of the seamy side of life...

But to me it shows that these people are radicals not reactionaries, nihilists not traditionalists, on the side of evil against Good.

It is quite simple: strategic use of sexual slang by a blogger demonstrates that they have not rejected the sexual revolution.

And if you have not rejected the sexual revolution, then you are a progressive at heart, a Leftist; however you may choose to self identify.

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In this refulgent summer...

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In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.

The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay.

Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy.

The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation.

One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which our senses converse. How wide; how rich; what invitation from every property it gives to every faculty of man! 

Ralph Waldo Emerson - 'Divinity School Address', Harvard, July 15 1838

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Refulgent means something like sparkling with reflected light. 

Here in Newcastle upon Tyne for the past few weeks, we too have been enjoying a refulgent summer - and these words of Emerson's have come to mind more than once as I step outside.

(I try not to think of the fact that the rest of Emerson's address goes-on to advocate the most extreme, proto--Nietzschian and anti-Christian, subjectivism!) 

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The sophomoric Red Pill nonsense

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Well isn't it sophomoric?

I gather that in a movie called The Matrix, the protagonist was offered a Red Pill which allowed the perception of tough reality, while the chooser of the Blue Pill lives a life of deluded happiness.

At any rate, the Red Pill has - I notice - become a self-congratulatory trope beloved of self-styled secular realists who want to self-advertise their brand of tough, selfish realism about politics (and sex).

This term - like The Cathedral - seems to be another of those unfortunate obfuscatory memes inadvertently launched by Mencius Moldbug.

So, what is the motivation of those who claim to have swallowed the Red Pill? Apparently, inferentially, it enables more effective understanding, prediction and manipulation of the world with the ultimate goal of increased status, pleasure and power, and avoidance of suffering.

In sum, the Red Pill enables its smug users to outwit pathetic, wishful-thinking, soft-headed, reality shirking dupes - including the mass of Leftists and the minority of Christians - and run the world for their advantage.

Oh yes, I nearly forgot... and for somebody else's advantage as well, according to various theories - those who it is mutually advantageous to help, or the family, or the nation, or race...or when helping someone else increases personal satisfaction.

Yes, well... I would be more impressed by the protestations of realism if the users of this term were more realistic about what actually has been and is successful; rather than wildly theoretical abstract schemes of what might/ would/ could be a successful strategy (if only everybody else would go along with it...)

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Note: I wonder what the Red Pill is supposed to contain? Cocaine, perhaps? Most likely anabolic steroids to enhance the effects of body building and provide chemically-fueled machismo rage. 

Free will is not exactly God-given but, ultimately, a product of us being eternal autonomous beings

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My current understanding is that each person has existed eternally as an autonomous (but not, initially, personal) essence - and that at some point in Time we became Sons of God, which made us into persons.

(God shaped us into personhood when we became his spirit children, before we entered mortal life.)

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Our free will is rooted in our eternal autonomous existence, but was made effectual - choices were made possible - by our having become Children of God.

This is what made The Fall possible.

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On the one hand, our personhood comes from God and the reality of our situation is that we are in a profound relationship with God since He is our Father and made us persons; but on the other hand we existed as essences before we had a relationship with God; and this pre-existence is what enables us to reject God, and to deny the primacy of our relationship with Him.

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It is because our free will derives from eternal agency that we are able to choose (to have the divine attribute of being unmoved movers, or first causes).

And it is because our free will derives from eternal agency that we must choose to acknowledge God's Fatherly love for us, and our child-like love of Him - because we cannot be compelled (not even by God - it is vital to recognize this) to acknowledge God's love, nor can we be compelled to love Him.

To be Christian is a choice because it must be a choice.

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Therefore, Satan could not and cannot remove the ultimate (metaphysical) autonomy of persons, nor can Satan control free will - although he can of course enslave the body and compel actions.

Satan can influence autonomy only indirectly - principally by demoralization and corruption of the will - so that a person will choose to use his autonomy to deny his autonomy; and deliberately, repeatedly, systematically choose to sin and to destroy Good - while denying at every moment that he could choose otherwise.

And this is, of course, the great triumph of Satan in this modern era: to have so deeply confused and corrupted modern man that he uses his eternal and indestructible freedom of will in actively-denying the reality of his own freedom.

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[Note: The above schema is the only one that (currently) seems to make sense of free will to me, therefore I present it for consideration. It leaves intact all core Christian doctrine, but modifies the metaphysical back story - so that some things are re-explained. It is, I think, pretty much identical with the implications of Mormon theology as I get it from Sterling McMurrin and Terryl Givens - but there are quite likely aspects which go beyond, or conflict with, what many or most Mormon theologians seem to say - so far as I can tell - which is not very far.] 

A breakthrough in understanding creativity - the primacy of Long Term Memory

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This morning I seem to have experienced a breakthrough in my understanding of creativity, and its links to the mode of thinking associated with dreaming sleep and psychosis.

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I have been puzzling over the nature of dream logic - that is to say, the principles by which dream association works.

I had got as far as recognizing that the strange nature of dreams (which I take it are selective and partial samples of a mostly unconscious and fundamental brain process going-on especially during REM sleep), and the creativity of dreaming (such that new phenomena are produced and not just a mosaic of our previous experiences) are both a reflection of the different principles of dream processing, compared with waking processing.

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In other words, I had got so far as understanding that dreams are not just a quantitative variation on the logic of the awake mind, dreams are not merely a matter of 'looser associations' in which the associations are of the same sort as waking associations, nor are strange and unreal dream contents wholly explicable in terms of errors in memory - but rather, the association of ideas and meanings which is going-on in dreaming sleep is qualitatively different from the associations of the awake state, and operating according to a different set of rules than during the waking state.

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However, my attempts to understand dream logic were getting nowhere - except that I recognized that dreaming was something to do with Long Term Memory (LTM) being autonomous from the Short Term Memory (STM - and equivalent to Working Memory) which dominates the waking state; and dream logic had something to do with associations via emotions or feelings which formed some degree of contrast with waking logic which was at least relatively (or potentially) more-independent of emotions and feelings.

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The breakthrough came, as so often, when I un-asked the question - when I recognized that I was asking for an explanation of that which was primary, and taking for granted that which was secondary.

In other words, I suddenly recognized (and remembered) that Long Term Memory was primary and Short Term Memory (Waking Memory) was a secondary phenomenon - a tiny sample of the content of perception and of Long Term Memory which was represented as patterns of neurons activated for a matter of seconds (this is what are aware of and attend to, and can manipulate by will/ executive function).

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Therefore the associative principles or logic of Long Term Memory (which is also dream logic, and also the logic of creativity) is actually the full range of associative processes of which the human brain is capable - that is to say, all humanly-possible associations. 

But this is implicit; it is the hidden part of the iceberg of which Short Term Memory is the only part that is explicitly available to introspection (becoming explicit by being activated in Short Term Memory).

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By contrast, waking logic is a tightly-constrained, partial, distorted and tiny sub-set of the vast amount of information and vast richness of associations which are located in Long Term Memory.

So, creativity is the business of becoming aware of the vast richness of information and associations in Long Term Memory - and making these explicit and available to introspection in Short Term Memory.

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Creativity deploys the enormous knowledge and densely rich associations of Long Term Memory - and brings the results into Short Term Memory.

Thus (to emphasize the point) creativity does not interfere with the processes of LTM; in particualr creativity does not impose STM processing onto LTM contents - it only takes the outcomes of LTM processing. 

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But how does creativity access the contents of Long Term memory, when these contents are mostly inexplicit and inaccessible to introspection?

This is where emotions and feelings come in: Creativity is the means by which STM accesses LTM through emotions and feelings.

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Let us suppose that the processes of LTM have led to certain insights or conclusions, then this will in turn lead to an emotion; and that emotion may be experienced consciously - which is what we call a feeling. 

Therefore, creativity is about the feelings we have in response to the goings-on in LTM - the feelings serve as evaluations, and these evaluations derive from the enormously complex and mysterious processes of Long Term Memory - that embody all the knowledge and associations (interconnection) of which we are capable.

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Creativity works by feelings. For example there are positive (happy or pleasurable) and negative (uncomfortable, maybe painful) feelings that may provide an evaluation of ideas and experiences.

There are hunches which point us toward doing this, rather than that; there are felt-links between what superficially appear to be diverse and unrelated facts and domains; there is the sense of knowing when we are right (or on the right lines) and conversely the dissatisfaction and irritation when we are wrong (or going down a blind alley, or following a red herring).

This is the stuff of creativity! And it is a matter of feelings.

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But of course these creative feelings are ultimately dependent on the knowledge and experience stored in Long Term Memory. these feelings can be no better a guide than the LTM stores which sustain and generate them.

And this conception explains how creativity becomes linked to a specific problem or domain in which the individual becomes 'expert'.

What is happening is that, by focusing their experiences and their thinking over a prolonged period of time, the creative person is orientating their LTM towards a particular problem or domain - such that Long Term Memory begins to deploy its vast informational and processing resources upon that problem or domain.

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The creative person has a LTM which is, in the first place, well-filled with relevant knowledge to a theme, and in the second place orientated towards that theme so that during dreaming sleep (plus other times) LTM is working-on that theme.

If or when Long Term Memory comes up with answers or insights, then the creative person becomes aware of this fact during the waking state by becoming aware of the emotions which are engendered in relation to that theme - and then it is a matter of STM discovering and making-explicit the implicit and not-directly accessible associations of LTM that underlay those answers or insights.

***



More to follow, no doubt... Interestingly this breakthrough, as it seems, followed a discussion with my daughter in which we tried to understand the associations of her dream last night. Afterwards I realized that we were trying as to make explicit the primary and actual associations of the dream - we were using awake STM to explain dreaming LTM... 

What is the use of mathematics in biology?

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I can think of two uses:

1. Statistical summary of complex phenomena - so they may be comprehended 'at a glance' - or patterns seen. A prime example of this is the tabulation of measurements.

It's hard to argue against the usefulness of this kind of summary use of maths in biology - certainly I've done it a lot; but equally it is a long way from being the essence of biology - and it certainly doesn't 'tell you' what is true and what isn't.

(For example, statistical 'tests of significance' have nothing (i.e. nothing) to do with determining biological causality - in the sense that they are orthogonal to understanding causality.). 

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2. Modelling - when biological entities are given mathematical identities, and real life processes are selectively summarized in mathematical processes - and the resultant construct is used to simulate reality.

It's a case of if this and that and the other, in such and such amounts, and if nothing else matters - then the following will follow.

In modelling, pretty much everything depends on the 'ifs' - and it is always hard to know when nothing else significant is going-on in reality so that the model really does capture the essence; but in sum, modelling is - or ought to be - only a small part of biology; embedded (as it were) in the larger subject.

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To put it another way - when maths is applied to biology, reality is transformed into abstraction - quantities and processes - in order that reality can be studied and manipulated in various ways.

Assuming no calculation errors, the validity of modelling therefore hinges entirely on whether the transformation of reality into an abstract mathematical entity is valid.

We must always evaluate whether any particular model - an abstract mathematical entity - matches-up with biological reality in its essential attributes: and evaluating this match-up is something which the model itself (obviously!) cannot do.

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It is noteworthy that the greatest users of mathematics in biology, who are among the greatest biologists, were generally immersed in biological reality in one way or another, or had spent a significant chunk of their lives in this fashion; so that their mathematical representations were in a feedback-relationship with biological reality.

This was the value of large scope sciences and practical subjects as a training for science - Biology and Medicine, for instance - replete with a lot of field work, clinical work and the like, which provided an open-ended and immersive (personality-changing) contact with the realities of the subject.

These early years of immersive experience have the potential to discipline the emotions in-line with the realities of the subject - so that people may develop a feeling for the subject - so that their 'gut feelings' may become a (generally) valid guide to reality.

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This broad and immersive experiential education leading to an emotional identification with the-science-as-a-whole, is probably (or so it seems ) the only antidote (albeit partial) against scientists becoming captured by their methodology - and coming to believe that the tool in which they personally have expertise is the only thing that matters; believing that their technique captures the essence of the whole of biological reality.

And this belief rapidly hardens into delusion - because once you believe that your own technique captures all that is important in biology, then you will use that technique to evaluate everything in biology and reject anything which disagrees with this evaluations, and reject anything which is not amenable to this evaluation.

Modern science is full of such people - indeed there are few (very few) people in modern science who are not of this type, and modern science is run by deluded methodologists.

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But (insofar as this is how they function) such people aren't scientists - no matter how powerful or prestigious, no matter how clever or ingenious - they are technicians posing as scientists.

They are merely a specific instance of the general phenomenon that when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

A real biologist is not a hammer, but a person who wields a hammer, as necessary - plus many other tools, as appropriate.

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2008 - We were warned but it did no good. We did not repent.

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I was thinking about the 2008 economic crisis, which I now regard as less of a profound international crisis and more of a warning.

It was a warning that we in the West were spending more than we were producing, that apparent 'economic growth' was an illusory mixture of borrowing and inflation, and we were living off capital not income.  

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What should have happened was a recognition and repentance, followed by reform - first to cut consumption, then to decide whether or how much to increase production.

But 2008 was a warning which has not been heeded.

*

There was no recognition, and no repentance - but instead there has been denial, lying and wishful thinking.

Consequently there has been more of the same: corrupt spending; frivolous and harmful consumption, reckless squandering of resources; raids on property and the productive population; mass immigration of economic dependents and continued channelling of resources to economic dependents: in sum, a continued destruction of productivity and all that sustains it.

There has been not just zero but negative significant remedial change since 2008 - whatever were the mechanisms that led to the 2008 crisis are in place and in operation, taking us towards another and inevitably far more severe crisis.

*

We were warned, and did nothing. 

But how could it be otherwise?

As a society we utterly lack motivational resources - and lacking these, there is no incentive to recognize reality and take personal responsibility.

(If you already know there is not going to be any effective action - you might as well blind yourself to dangers and live by soothing lies - for as long as possible.)

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We are morally bankrupt, and the 2008 crisis has revealed this bankruptcy.

Instead of recognizing the problem, we lied; instead of doing something helpful, we prevent any helpful responses and amplify the destruction on all fronts.

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The non-response, the anti-response to 2008 reveals that knowledge is irrelevant in a world without motivation.

In a world without motivation, nothing else matters - because motivation is an aspect of courage, without motivation there can be no courage because there is no reason for it; and without courage there can be no virtue.

Nothing motivates but religion, and for us - who lack  it - nothing matters but getting religion; yet nothing seem less likely in the West than repentance of secular Leftism and a Christian revival.

But that is our choice. The consequences will follow.

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Dignity in Dying - Your choice: prolonged torture or swift murder

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The patrons of the pressure group Dignity in Dying include some people I know (or have known) personally, plus many others I have considerable respect for, in some way; plus some others who are famous and/or influential.

http://www.dignityindying.org.uk/about-us/patrons.html

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It is interesting, therefore to reflect on how it is they find themselves supporting such a wicked policy, and one which is absolutely certain to be widely and savagely abused even beyond its intrinsic wickedness.

The reason seems clear from the justifications or rationalizations given for the patrons support of this cause.

They perceive that at the end of life there is for many - and increasing numbers of - people a stark choice between prolonged torture and swift murder.

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The assumption which is accepted as inevitable, is that modern medicine, health and social service institutions now control death - and that their intractable default is to perpetuate life at any cost until finally defeated by death.

Therefore, these patrons reason, since prolonged torture is the worst imaginable thing; the only solution is for this same set of medical, health and social services that currently maintain people alive as a torture, should instead murder them before they have to suffer prolonged torture.

Anyone who works for such organizations as the National Health Service will therefore have to commit murder when required by their bosses, as part of their job; or to collude in murder.

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(This outcome is what is termed Death or Dying with Dignity - although I can't see what dignity has to do with it - surely it is about pain and suffering?)

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My (inevitably incomplete) solution to this impossible dilemma is quite simple: to distinguish between life-extending treatments and palliative or suffering-reducing treatments - and as a default, unless requested otherwise, as the norm, to refrain from life-extending treatments in the elderly and terminally ill.

Everybody must die of something, and towards the end of life people need to be aware that someone saved from dying from X now, will inevitably die from X, Y or Z later - and the dying later may be much, much worse than the dying now.

In particular, we each need to be aware of this in ourselves. If we insist in being dragged back from death's doors (or refuse to step through them when called) - than that is not the end of the matter.

Those who refuse to consent willingly to death will have death nonetheless forced upon them - willing or not.

If we become willing to die, and let die, when the time comes - then this will mostly eliminate the pressure for people to be 'humanely murdered' in order to avoid the terrifying and horrifying consequences of what passes for modern 'health care'.

* 

Socially-conditioned ingratitude - Leftist family life as a 'perfect bureaucracy'

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It is interesting to notice how pervasive is the Leftist anti-family social conditioning which trains children that they should not be grateful to their parents: that they 'didn't ask to be born', that it is therefore their parents duty to provide, and that gratitude is not just needless but inappropriate (when things are thus properly considered...).

On the other side, parents are told that they have chosen to have a child like a fashion accessory - for their own pleasure, and must therefore serve that child's needs with no expectation of gratitude, nor of a personal and loving relationship.

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In sum, the parent is supposed, as an ideal, to be a dutiful official who impartially distributes and administers the necessary goods and services to their clients (children) whose 'right' it is to receive them.

Parents are conceptualized as if perfect, detached, ideal-bureaucrats; diligently serving a deserving minority. Children are simply receiving what is their due.

Any emotions that might accompany this neutral transaction would be... inappropriate.

*

One particularly appealing antidote to this nightmare scenario of modernity (and one which sustains the family) comes from that aspect of  Mormon theology which sees each of us as precisely having asked to be born; and being born into a situation in which mortal and immortal powers are personal, and necessarily - and properly - have passions such as love, sorrow, compassion.

In such a world view, the natural propensity for personalizing human relationships does not need to be suppressed - and certainly suppression of the personal is not regarded as a virtue.

Rather, from God and Christ and the Holy Ghost on downwards through angels and men, the most important reality is of personal relationships - in which gratitude for help is both natural and desirable; and the lack of gratitude is correctly seen as a moral failure rather than a consequence of superior insight.

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Max, Nigel Molesworth, Just William, Horrid Henry - nasty/ mean kids made heroes

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As a good kid (or, at least, one who tried to be good ) I thoroughly disliked the way some authors would portray bad kids in an approving fashion.

By bad kids, I mean nasty, mean, selfish, sadistic kids; the kind who would deliberately smash your toys for a laugh, chuck your hat into a tree where it was lost, or burst the football so nobody could play.

(You can tell a bad kid by the look on his face - this will be a sneer, of one or another type.) 

I now look back and perceive such fictional characters as early weapons in the anti-Good culture wars - part of a concerted, and almost-wholly-successful, attempt to subvert, ridicule and actively-attack those kids - or adults - who sincerely try to be helpful, honest, smart and truthful.

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Everybody wants 'a happy life' - differences are about the perceived nature of 'life'

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When someone asks the purpose of life, the answer can become a bit convoluted - but the simple and universal answer is to be happy.

On this, I think, everyone agrees - everyone seeks a happy life.

The differences come when considering the scope of 'life'.

*

The three main variables are:

1. Time-scale - short-term versus long-term

There are trade-offs between being happy immediately and being as happy as possible overall, across life; between the immediate certainty of here-and-now happiness by doing exactly what you want, and deferring happiness now - or accepting suffering - as an investment in building less-certain but potentially greater happiness later.


2. Mortal life versus post-mortal life

The modern secular person is concerned only by happiness during mortal life, but most religious people are concerned with happiness across a life which extends beyond mortality. Therefore the scope of a happy life varies in duration between a finite (but uncertain) number of hours, days or decades; up to some greater unit than mortality, which varies between religions and extends up to infinity.


3. Personal happiness versus the happiness of a larger unit

There is a wide variation in the understanding of that unit whose happiness is to be pursued and maximized. At one extreme it is just me - the individual; but beyond that there are many increasingly larger units of all believers; the family, tribe, nation; all humans, the living world - potentially up to the whole existing universe.

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If it is assumed that the desire for a happiness is intrinsic and universal, this scheme can be used to classify all religions (whether private or public) in terms of whether the aimed-at happiness is now or later, for mortal life or beyond, and just for me or some larger group.

Both the modern secular hedonist and the devout Christian seek a happy, but the differences in attitudes and behaviour may be vast - not because they conceptualize happiness differently, but because they perceive reality differently; and therefore conceptualize the scope of happiness and the scope of life differently.

If you see 'life' as ending in death, and only concerning your-self, then a strategy of maximizing happiness leads to quite different results from a person who sees 'life' as extending beyond death and encompassing others people - past, present and/or future.

*

All people are the same insofar as they all want to be happy, their aim is to have a happy life; and differences between people can be reduced to differences in the perceived nature of reality. 

*


[Note: Differences between people 'can be' reduced to differences in perceived nature of reality - and this is enlightening in some ways; but this analysis (this kind of analysis) is necessarily a reduction. Meaning that much is left-out by it. To put it mildly.]

On re-reading Ralph Waldo Emerson - two comments, and some remarks on Joseph Smith

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From the middle 1990s for a decade, I was reading and re-reading Emerson with tremendous avidity - not only in a literary way, but as a guide for life.

Having not looked at him for several years, and not since I became a Christian, I have returned to re-read some favorite bits and pieces in the past couple of weeks - and was struck by two things.

*

1. Emerson is a really good writer; I mean really good. The quality of his prose is unique and unsurpassed (that is, other writers are equally good, but in different ways) - I find it elating, intoxicating, almost too powerful to bear for any length of time.

2. Emerson's anti-Christian agenda is now blazingly clear and obvious to me, from almost everything he ever wrote and said; as is his staggering egotism/ pride, and these are linked. Emerson's work is a vast and unbounded, extended assertion of himself, his potential and his adequacy against anyone or any thing (including God) that tries to constrain or direct it.

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(Emerson was raised as a Unitarian and became a prominent Unitarian minister - and Unitarianism is already anti-Christian in its profoundest implications - although the first generation of Unitarians refused to acknowledge this, and generational inertia meant that the fundamental anti-Christanity of Unitarianism took a while to emerge. So, Emerson was never a Christian, although perhaps he supposed he was - but nonetheless he found the rebel sect of Unitarianism to be already stultifying, empty and spiritually dead: which was a just criticism since it amounted to merely a system of secular ethics and an ungrounded and unjustifiably exclusive usage of Christian scriptures and form loosely associated with an impersonal theistic God. Naturally this rapidly slid into exactly the kind of eclectic 'spirituality' - that we now term New Age - which Emerson pioneered with such glorious eloquence.) 

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I conclude that Emerson is, exactly has his contemporaries saw him, a terribly perilous writer! - precisely because he is such a great writer, and has so many stunning insights - yet ultimately these are put to the service of a doctrine of such extreme, such total self-centredness that I struggle to comprehend it.

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Perhaps Emerson's greatest and most valuable (and most often repeated) insight is that each person must appropriate the world for himself and in his own terms; a living religion (that is to say any true religion) simply cannot be just a following of rules and rituals.

To put it as Emerson did in an early work, to be properly alive, each individual must experience (again and again, day by day, indeed hour by hour) their own personal revelation - they must experience direct and divine communications of reality.

For Emerson this imperative was pretty-much the entire aim of life - so that the ideal life became in one sense that moment of revelation timelessly filling all; in another sense (because, experience seemed to show that these moments did come to an end) an incessant search for the next moment of revelation - life as a sequence of such moments.

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But Emerson's error, which led him into paradox and the evil advocacy - if not practice - of Pride as a principle of life - as indeed the only principle of life; was to reject the past, to reject the unity of humanity, to perceive himself (his soul) as the only thing that was really real - to argue for a subjectivism so extreme as to amount almost to solipsism. 

In his burning desire to shed the constraints of history and society, which seemed to be shackling his imagination, and focus all meaning on his own individual moments of revelation (the total affirmation of Me! Here! Now!); Emerson destroyed the basis of humanity, of sharing, shape and purpose - and consequently his influence (among those who actually read what he wrote and try to live by it) has been substantially pernicious.

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What was needed and what was necessary was to accept Emerson's assertion of the absolute necessity of personal revelation, albeit perilous, as an addition (or restoration) to Christianity.

This absolute and inflexible demand for modern, personal revelation, I perceive as the point of unity between Emerson and the other great long-term spiritual influence born in the United States at almost exactly the same time: Joseph Smith, the Mormon 'living prophet' of modern, latter day revelation.

Joseph Smith could have endorsed Emerson's cry by which he opened his first great published work Nature -

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism, The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?

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The religious difference between Emerson and Smith is essentially that Emerson took this demand to behold God face to face, and enjoy an original relation to the universe as his sole aim and principle, while Smith added it (and its products, such as the Book of Mormon and his other collected revelations) to existing Christianity.

Smith thus achieved what Emerson, in his scandalous 1838 address to Harvard Divinity School, had declared was impossible:

I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason, — to-day, pasteboard and fillagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder.  

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Even as Emerson wrote his speech, Joseph Smith had already built a new city (the first of three) as headquarters for the saints in Kirtland, Ohio; and the years since the above words were spoken, Smith's 'Cultus' - with its 'new rites and forms' added-to, modifying, re-interpreting existing modes of Christianity - was (contrary to Emerson's characterization of it as 'vain') indeed 'established'; and has continued to grow into a major world religion - and has been neither a dead religion of pasteboard and fillagree (rather, a tremendously motivating religion which sustains great devoutness and other-worldliness), nor has it ended in madness and murder.

But, on the other hand, a stripped-down New Age version of Emerson's spirituality of individualism and subjectivism has merged with mainstream secular Leftism, and grown and grown to become the dominant mode of thought in the West almost entirely discarding Emerson in the process.

(And quite naturally so, since Emerson was not necessary to the development of New Age spirituality - rather he was a prophet, herald or advance guard of it.).

But what a fascinating divergence from such close roots and similar demands are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith - both emerging in the North Eastern corner of the USA in the 1830s!

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One cannot be pro- or anti- "war"

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Or rather, to be for- or against-"war" is senseless - it all depends on what type of war.

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War includes several objectives - for example plunder, defense against plunder; empire building or defense against empire building; religious conquest or resistance to such - and war can be proactive (e.g. exterminating pirates nests) or reactive (arming against raids from pirate ships).

Each of these is a different scenario - some of them are very different from each other (e.g. a treasure-seeking war for the expansion of an Empire versus a village fighting a band of robbers who have come to burn, steal, slaughter and enslave).

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My point here is that it turns-out that 'war' is one of those fake Leftist concepts (such as 'immigration' or 'education') which bundle together opposing entities and thereby sow confusion, create chaos and prevent resolution.

The concept of 'war', in its modern sense, is a product of pacifism (or 'anti-war') which arose in the late 1700s as an early sign of the conquest of the Left, and spread among the intellectual elites.

Pacifism - by being anti-the-thing-it-called-war thus led to the phony problem of 'war', which is that it divided the world into themselves (the pacifists) and their opponents were labeled as pro-war, warmongers.

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(We see analogous phenomenon with Left-defined pro- and anti- positions in relation to open-borders-mass-immigration, education, diversity, human rights and so on. The 'pro concepts are nonsensical, undefined, incapable of definition, obviously wrong, intrinsically destructive etc - but the Left promotes them as nice/kind things, things which we need more-of, and more, and yet more; such that any dissent from the destroying nonsense is vilified as evidence of the opponent being a nasty/torturing kind of individual.)

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Consequently, there are volumes of inconsequential nonsense spouted on the general theme of 'war', and how terrible it is, thus whether 'war' may be morally justified or otherwise...

trying (and, obviously, failing) to use this incoherent and undefined notion of 'war' as the basis for short universally-intended and context-free formalizations and rules concerning how 'war' should be conducted and what is necessary and forbidden in that conduct...

and then enforcing these nonsensical bureaucratic formalizations (only) onto those who are stupid or weak or confused enough to allow them to be enforced upon themselves...

and them congratulating themselves on this as evidence of the moral progress of humanity - in the face of those Right-wing remnants of societal evil who actually want 'war'...

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But because there is no such thing as war: we must un-ask all questions concerning its nature and desirability and conduct.

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The Fall of Arthur by JRR Tolkien - Review

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http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/review-of-fall-of-arthur-by-jrr-tolkien.html
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The coming Great Simplification

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I feel that what is coming is a Great Simplification in which all sub-issues that concern us (economics, populations-ethnicities-personalities-intelligences, law and order, science, the mass media, military matters, education, health services...) will fall-away; to leave just that one great organizing principle: religion.

The simplification will be into those (few) who have a religion and who live-by that religion, and those who have an anti-religion and live by that.

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Only those who have a religion have the basis for cohesion, for doing anything.

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The mass majority who live by anti-religion; that currently dominant secular multitude who adhere to a fluid collection of incoherent, and un-cohere-able micro-principles, simply have no possibility of responding to the vast intricacy life and its problems.

Lacking which their numbers, wealth, power etc. mean absolutely nothing.

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It is not just that the anti-religious majority lack the basis for cohesion - it is much worse than that. It is that their strongest-held and most zealously-enforced ideas work against cohesion - actively seeking-out, subverting and destroying every glimmer of possible hope; all chance or plans for any effective response, or organizing goal.  

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It really is terribly simple (and simply terrible, in all likelihood).

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This blog versus "Tolkien's Notion Club Papers"

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It is interesting to compare this blog with my other main one

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/

This one takes much more time and effort, and gets more comment, but only about 80 readers per post on the day it is posted - while the NCP blog gets about three times as many readers per day's entry but seldom attracts comments.

This blog gets more than 1000 readers per day - but spread thinly across loads of past entries.

I get the feeling that this blog is dying...

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The savage triviality of modern media morality

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As yet another of my friends and colleagues (this is now happening annually, or more often, in my circle) gets into a vicious media firestorm over an utterly trivial remark, I reflect on the horrific combination of causal non-offense with consequential unrestrained condemnation and vengefulness that is characteristic of modern 'morality'.

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This stuff is not going away, on the contrary it is getting worse - with the advent of blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the like such narratives have, indeed, become a mass media daily staple.

It is impossible to exaggerate the mismatch between the alleged (non-) offence and the scale and fervour of condemnation - which can lead, nowadays (at least in the UK) to sanctions up to and including prison - since (in a bizarre variant of the butterfly-causing-a-hurricane story) it is argued that any remark on any topic which 'offends' anybody can be extrapolated to some possible catastrophic conclusion.

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So, on the one hand, nothing is too trivial to dominate world media discussion; yet on the other hand no truly abhorrent moral offense is so serious that it cannot be ignored, hidden or re-framed into either victimhood or even a virtue.

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It is a despicable, shameful state of affairs.

It reveals the utter evil of modern morality as initiated and sustained by the mass media and those who consume it and allow it to dictate their world view (which is, in practice, almost everyone).

And that's about all I can say on the topic.

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Why is Sexy/Hot a term of approbation?

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Sexy/Hot means that a person is deliberately and by contrivance (it cannot occur by accident) projecting or radiating a sexual signal - a signal implicitly of availability and desire; which is why it is so difficult to ignore this signal, and why it is so powerful a means of getting attention and manipulating others.

But why is being Sexy/Hot regarded - as it all-but-universally is in mainstream modern culture - as a Good Thing?

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In all traditional societies, probably all societies until about 60 years ago, Sexy/Hot was recognized for what it is - extremely dangerous and invariably disruptive and potentially absolutely destructive: in short, something to be squashed ruthlessly.

I date the change to the 1950s and the key figures of Marylin Monroe and Elvis Presley - probably the first major mass media stars celebrated for being Sexy/Hot.

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So why the change?

Godlessness, obviously.

Without God there is only this world, and in this world only pleasurable distraction, and among pleasures (short term, selfish pleasures - which are obviously the easiest pleasures to sell) sex is about the most powerful (at least, in a world where people have enough to drink and eat, and are warm and dry).

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So this is what we find; and people have ceased to notice that in celebrating and promoting and adopting as a universal lifestyle the ideal of being Sexy/Hot, we are purposefully and with zeal contriving to destroy... well... everything, pretty much.

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