Humanism as Worship
Posted on | July 26, 2010 | 4 Comments
Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’
— Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Matthew 25:34-40 (NIV)
The burden of consummating God’s success rests squarely on the shoulders of humanity.
If we are God’s creation, then we are also Their experiment. As such, it is only through our achievements and deficiencies here on earth that Their success or failure can be determined. Our God’s right to divine claim exists in direct proportion to our austerity in this fleshy life. In this way, tribute to the Creator cannot be paid only through quiet reflection, but must be waged actively and with zealous devotion to the progress of humanity. In order to love God, we must first love man; for we are Their creation, and what fool is fascinated by the cobbler while traversing indignantly on blackened soles?
We determine the substance of our God by the quality of our actions. If those actions are insubstantial in our complacency and apathy for the sacral privilege of having existed and even lived, then much as though we make ourselves inconsequential, we also snub God out of any meaningful quality of existence. We cannot undo God, be assured and I am not claiming that our incompetence renders us atheists; though if humanity is worship and living its church, then it does make us a lazy congregation, and all the apolitical laity are sleeping in the sweeping pews of civilization. The Creator of an irrelevant thing renders Themselves illogical. The God that speaks to a sleeping congregation serves no purpose but to provide a consistent droning sound by which their unproductive slumber is made all the more gentle in its insolence as they and They slip deeper into unconsciousness. We being the physically expressed qualities of a metaphysical Divine, give it its physical substance, and if we lack momentum, then we relegate God from a position of sentience to that of a stone. And a stone becomes no more useful when spelled with a capital S.
This is our interesting dilemma: to act upon each other in kindness and charity reflects these qualities on God, which in turn shifts God’s motive factor for our creation and continuity as having been from those same qualities. This then increases the value of our worship, because it increases the value of God. The propensity of our meaningful worship through action in life makes life itself both a gift and a responsibility to God to maintain Their image for posterity. The coffers of our divine reason for being are only as great as the contributions we are willing to make. The question now is, are we willing to tithe for humanity or will we continue to greedily hoard the contents of our lives to ourselves?
On State and Society: The Bureaucratic Death of Culture
Posted on | June 12, 2010 | No Comments
“What has been so apparent in the modern history of the family will be no less apparent in the future histories of profession, university, labor union, and all other forms of association in our culture. Deprive these entities of the authorities over their members through increasing centralization of political power in society, and these associations, like the extended family, the church, and the local community, must shrink immeasurably in their potential contributions to culture.”
— Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community
One’s outlook on the political movement of humanity is primarily founded on their linguistic perspective—how they interpret words such as nationalism, liberalism, freedom, individualism, etc. For in each of these, where some see potential for dark devices, others see devices for hope. Where some discover disorder, others find the necessary checks on centralized authority. It is the question of the function of state in relation to society.
Whereas the state serves at the function of individuals, society serves at the function of individual associations. This is a great distinction, for the culture of man is dictated not by internal machinations and the structure of the individual, but by the quality of space between men, determined by their common ties. If the state is personal and comprised of individuals, then a society is interpersonal and comprised of communities.
The popular understanding of the world today is founded on the peculiar concept of political culture, that which fuses a state’s historical traditions to its cultural institutions and values. In reality, however, there is no state culture because culture is a tool of society, created through man’s voluntary association to man. When the state absorbs what once contained culture, it can only become contract. This is because a state is incapable of creating a singular unity, but through the dissolution of warmer unities instilled by entities outside of its control.
Law as Empathy, or: Natural Man’s Need for Society
Posted on | June 5, 2010 | No Comments
Law requires faith. Man must be faithful in the institution of law and in his contracted brethren with whom he shares the empathy of petition — namely, that they share the common bond of having signed the social contract and agreed with each other to follow it in its legal manifest.
Those not involved in such contracts are, by definition, not citizens, and are neither obliged to treat others with the empathy of petition (to follow the laws of that institution) nor can they be guarded by such from harm, because they have chosen by exclusion to live in an anarchic state apart from social man. These men will not last long, either in death or resignation to the system at large, for a man not interested in his own social cultivation is in fact, by the very nature of things, no man at all.
Man has found it exceedingly difficult to live permanently in anarchy, for in his natural state he has an innate desire to design social contracts with others to ensure his and their livelihood. The closer one is to his brethren, the more he feels a natural bond to them, and the more a state of anarchy feels contrived and alien to him. At present, the only perpetual anarchy men have been able to achieve is that of the world stage, where each government represents a systemic Leviathan-man composed of all men in his boundaries, and for whom diplomacy and war are both bred from the very human hopes and fears that play out on the individual level as conversation and barbarity (but where one man only has a club to defend his fears against others, the Leviathan has a multitude of clubs, all beating in synchronicity to the drumbeat of collective war.)
In any other sense, fighting at the anarchic, systemic level is no different from fighting in those anarchies we see on the individual level during transitions between governments. This occurs in that murky fog of revolution that leads to riot and tumult when the sense pervades, during a changeover wherein the national flag is not completely in the hands of one leader or the other, that the flag is owned by nothing and therefore ceases for a moment to represent anyone.
This need for contract denotes a feeling of common purpose shared by all men, though they may not understand the contents of such purpose. When order becomes too overbearing, he chases increasingly apparent manifestations of anarchy, but recognizing that anarchy requires no order, and places no demand on self-regulation, man places on himself a wholly new and unnatural demand for order: that of apathy. In the unnatural state of social man apart from the order of social contract, he forces himself to lose the natural state of his own mind; in other words, man in the absence of state takes absence from his own mind.
This contrived apathy (for words such as apathy and anarchy at this point can be used interchangeably,) leads ironically to an empathy with all other men in the same nothing-state. In the very pursuit of their goal apart from each other, the citizens of nowhere find that they share the common bond of nothing, and its familiar discontents of constant fear and want for order. Again familiarized with one another, they awkwardly approach each other in the midst of violence and together sign contracts which place an increasing number of regulations and demands on themselves. This is born from the learned understanding that man has an innate want for order because he recognizes that apart from order he exists in too much fear to pursue worthy goals.
Hobbes and Locke, then, were both only partially correct in their diagnoses of man in the state of nature, but when synthesized paint the whole picture of man. For life of man in the state of nature is not merely, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” as Hobbes suggests; nor is it simply an extension of his God-given rights of “life, liberty and property,” as Locke purports. Instead, man in the state of nature is as complex as man in any other state, carrying on a Hobbesian natural existence only when he has not accomplished what desire was put into him by nature’s God — namely, the creation of social contracts. Hobbesian man is therefore only natural man in a state of psychological regress, a psychopathic entity necessitated by what psychologist Erik Erikson would call the fundamental failure in the [socio-political] formative state of basic trust versus mistrust. This is because, unrecognized by Hobbes, man in the state of nature creates states.
The Vast Ocean of Thoughts
Posted on | March 27, 2010 | No Comments
All has been thought, but travel boldly in pursuit of that novel idea. The tragic comedy by which all great men live: boarding majestic ships of purpose with prior knowledge of the impending wreck.
For there is no host country to original thought, but instead a sinking into the vast ocean of thoughts. And still we set sail, if for no other consolation than that of a suitable burial among the bodies of our brethren.
We Who Shun Chaos for Community
Posted on | February 24, 2010 | 3 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.
