The Wastelands

A lot of our favorite philosophies, theologies, ideologies arrive as rebellious retaliation of the previous generation’s values. In theology, this often looks like a pendulum of: God is love, God is justice; in culture we are working towards an equilibrium of personal value for all human persons: women, non-white racial opportunity, civil rights options for those with varying sexual preferences, though cultural mindset moves slowly, pushing against a mountainous inertia of bigotry; and our ideologies often gag on war most following a bloodthirsty example, and most feast on imperialism after a brief spat of peace.

This swing has tempered a little as the freight of the internet wakes by, leaving only the opinions and arguments of anonymous naysayers and the burnt-road pathways of those waging new battles – it’s a graveyard, a haunted cathedral, a thousand lasers flying through empty space, never touching. And everyone, opinions or no, wants that flare-up-high of attention, that brief, orgasmic stardom, that glimmer of disgust, anger, joy, or reaction and then out like magnesium, blinding and then gone.

But if you want something lasting, what then? If your appetite is larger than immediate and next, how to whet the sacred hungers? More than many, my life seesaws on a balance, not merely camping on gluttony, but swinging between fasting and feasting. It’s not bipolar, but a antsy flailing for balance, as I stand on the barrel of life and roll down the whitewater rapids.

And happiness can be a drug. Until you’ve found it, you cannot imagine the addiction, the drag, the earnest importance of more,more,more. In the same way running releases endorphins, as sex releases oxytocin and endorphins, as every drug inhibits or multiplies enzymes and neurotransmitters, a fluctuating, dramatic instability of reality. Everything we intake alters internal physiology to some extent, whether it’s food, sunlight, touch, or sound.  

Happiness is strange in that I can’t remember a time I rebounded from it. A cause of happiness might unsettle me if I’m rebelling from the ideologies behind it, and I may even be disgusted by my happiness at gluttony, sloth, or pride at certain times, but from the happiness itself I rarely find myself aghast. I never think, “I wish I had less cause for smiling today” or “today was depressing and I hope tomorrow is a real downer.”

I don’t believe many people truly seek sorrow in permanence, though such people exist. Why? For the same two-second spotlight? For a sympathetic touch or love in passing? There are always reasons. But those are not my shoes. Today, I’m happy. I don’t want to pendulate, or seesaw, or whip back into any other place; I like this one, and here I’ll stay.

Was I always happy? I believe I might have been. But I haven’t found the endless bounds yet. 

Imagining Worlds (Part Deux)

Let’s imagine another world. In our first, we imagined a world where innocents were protected, shielded by spiritual firewalls from harm beyond their ken. That world has trouble with variables as collateral damage might affect a community where the target was one evil individual. You cannot lose a finger without hurting the whole. In that way, bad things might happen to innocents by proxy: a mother losing a son, a community losing an individual.

        That world struggled to maintain a sense of fairness while still allowing room for free will. It’s a tragic element of humanity that free will precipitates ill and not good will. But there are other options of worlds that might offer a greater sense of fairness.

        In our new world, good is defined in a similar fashion as the last, as that which increases life and encourages well-being, family, friendship, kindness, and love. Instead of spiritual firewalls surrounding the righteous (of varying degrees of good), we’re going to assault the core of evil. There are a couple of methods for this: evildoers are unable to consider/contemplate/actuate anything that might affect an innocent. If an evildoer tries to hurt, even by collateral, an innocent, something (god, nature, physical etc) prevents the evil from occurring.

        Some examples: a man tries to set fire to his own house overnight because of depression. The fire either cannot start if there are innocents in the house, or everyone notices immediately and his attempt is thwarted. Possibly his wife wakes up and removes the children from the house. The trick here is: what if the husband dies? That is collateral and hurts those innocent children a great deal. What if the house does burn down? How are the children and wife protected from that sort of evil? Is the burning of the house prevented in general?

        This actually causes a lot of problems within this world at large. Things such as bombs, guns, and weaponry in general could scarcely exist because the possibility for collateral is too great. Also, we run into a similar problem of definitions: is only greater harm prevented and what or who defines greater harm? If an innocent child is incredibly close to their great grandfather, closer even than to their parents, and that relative dies of old age gently in their sleep, that might still cause traumatic pain for a young child. Nothing of great evil occurred, only the natural flow of life. Is the argument here that the child should learn of death? Perhaps death isn’t a great evil, or only in some cases. Maybe we claim that no evil here occurred at all, only sadness, and sadness is necessary and good in some instances. But it is hard wishing sadness of any sort on a child.

Let’s consider other examples. A father is a poor worker, either from laziness or injury, and is removed from his job. The entire family is affected and possibly short on food.  A teenager is tired of life and wishes to end it, poised on the brink of a bridge over dark, turbulent waters – how will his lover feel, his family? How are they affected? A bright new prodigy for sports breaks his ankle and misses a draft; a mother who cannot support her children births triplets instead of a single child; a little child crosses the road when his mother isn’t looking; a father and mother don’t get along, and a messy divorce tears up their children; a teenager gets pregnant due to choices made, but what of the child? Whose life is sacrificed for whose life chances? Just read the news. A million things occur every day that aren’t necessarily evil in intent, but precurse negative outcomes. A simple sickness, a misstep, a series of events that elicits shame, a feeling of negativity – countless pieces of this puzzle that is mankind, and no man is an island.

There was an experiment done by Japanese scientists regarding negativity. A bunch of individuals were told to direct negative emotions at water or ice, and the scientists compared the molecular structure of the water with positive feelings and noticed distinct differences. Our emotions are not isolated within us. One of the great causes for depression and sorrow is loneliness, but our existence never affects only ourselves. But if lightning strikes a tight mob of people holding hands, more than one person will feel the surge of electricity. We find ourselves in a difficult place of limiting actions for everyone due to collateral evil.  I couldn’t jump off a mountain, but not from fear, but due to the horror and trauma it might cause those innocents near to me.

What about a perfect world? Where none of these things mattered? We consider it a breach of free will, but what if evil was impossible? It’s not a breach of free will that I cannot fly, because my limbs don’t support that behavior. What if our human bodies didn’t support evil?

There used to be an argument against the existence of a god based on omnipotence: “can god create a rock so heavy he cannot lift it?” The counterargument usually explains that such a rock cannot be created since it is against the nature of rocks to exist at such a capacity. In the same way, god cannot create a square circle because geometrically that is nonsense.  If our bodies could not support any action of evil or malign behavior, the behaviors would not be missed. Seeing birds fly, I might wistfully imagine myself flying, but I don’t actually miss the behaviors because I, myself, have never flown. If evil did not exist, would we miss the opportunity to behave in such a manner?

We enter into a strange theoretical landscape with a perfect world. Is there death? Is there sickness? Is there natural disaster? It is interesting to imagine the status of such a universe and all of the differences that must exist. If there is no death, is there reproduction? There wouldn’t be a need for reproduction beyond a certain point. And is there no bacteria or parasitic organisms? Fungus feast off of detritus, bacteria endlessly splitting without death, animals living an eternity – would the world find itself soon overcrowded with a burgeoning of life? Where would the resources for all this life come from? I suppose from inorganic matter and perhaps the fruit of trees, though when the earth lost its savory richness, what then? A perfect world seems to thrive on a different chemistry. It’s almost unfathomable from the vantage point of a world where everything seems based on little deaths.

But is it plausible? I don’t know. I suppose it seems almost elvish and surreal, where each seeming day might be an aeon and each eternity a day. There wouldn’t be any need for reproduction, really, and merely an endless feasting of Epicurean proportions. 

        Yet in the end, all of these worlds are hypothetical. We could have a perfect world, though we might not know what that entails. The problem is, a lot of us like to keep our imperfect world, but we want those innocents to be untouched. It’s hard, because there is no such possible world. I did, actually, imagine another world, similar to the first two. What if we imagined a world where only the most extreme of innocents was protected while the rest were on their own? In a sense, this world is like an rpg where someone who has just created their character is invincible for several hours until they get their character under control. Is this viable? I’ll leave this open for thought. I imagine at some point it falters under the same stresses of our other worlds. 

Abraham and Isaac

One of the hardest Biblical passages to swallow for me, and I doubt these experiences are mine alone, is the Binding of Isaac. Even reading the anonymous Hebrews author’s comments on faith, even reading commentaries and the various viewpoints that attempt to reconcile the request of a perfectly good, loving, kind God asking a faithful servant to sacrifice his promised son, this passage sits unwell within my gut. Even the story of Job I find more palatable at times, though not reasonably so, than this story. I think the story feels more visceral and relatable than the mythological, archetypal, fabular book of Job.

                The problem of evil is the most difficult of challenges. I grapple with this question constantly and not as doubt but as opposition, as competition, as that foe that subverts directed motion. So I dreamt up a world without. Not a world entirely bereft of terrible things, but a world devoid of evil allowed to target that which is considered good. A couple of difficulties immediately presented themselves.

1.       What determines goodness? Is goodness a spectrum? A black and white? Are there those who are “innocent” and “guilty”, and the innocents are immune to damage while the guilty are laser-sighted and hunted down? Or is goodness and innocence a graph. You can be good but not innocent, innocent and good, or guilty and evil, or varying degrees of each. This graph helps a little, because those same horrors which afflict the overall good might be justified if they also were not innocent. Is it possible to be good and guilty (not guilt-ridden, but objectively guilty)?

2.       Assuming levels of goodness, what does this effectually mean in this world? Is there a standard bar like a height mark at an amusement park: only those of a goodness greater than this height are protected from this level of evil? For instance, a perfectly good human being who has commit no sins won’t even get sick, while someone who has transgressed (whatever standard determines transgression), depending on their level of iniquity, might experience colds, the flu, or even food poisoning. If their sin is great, they might even experience the greater of evils possible (as determined by randomness? God? Natural selection? Nature?)

3.       Who determines goodness? And is it a balance? Common Christian belief argues that sin is final and irrevocable without grace. A murder in cold blood cannot be outweighed by a thousand acts of kindness and giving in terms of eternity, or even a million. But since I’m god of this imaginary world, what do I believe is the most culturally fair, according to conventional philosophical premises? Let’s believe that a contrite and willing soul might eradicate the stain of sin in an earthly purgatory of sorts. A good person might commit an atrocity which dips his/her soul-goodness down into evil for a short time until such time as his/her actions raise that level back into “the safe zone” once more.

At this juncture, everything is so ephemeral and intangible that this world doesn’t even make sense. So I’ll throw out a couple of analogies to add flesh onto the dust of this earth. First, we have to add a standard of goodness. There are a lot of philosophical and ethical measures by which to determine good that sages have discussed for centuries. For ease of conversation, I’m going to suggest a simple utilitarian ethics, and “good” under this system promotes love, life, kindness, care, gentleness, giving, peace, patience, honesty, and integrity. This is all a bit of an oversimplification. World-building is intricate and I have not the time for it in great detail in this thought-experiment.

        Let’s say that in this world, a god decides at the end what is good and what is not, and we’ll define God by that system of good. We’ll pick a god whose entire purpose is computation: determining statistics of good, updating a few csv files on behavior of individuals, and does some server maintenance every once in a while. God isn’t arbitrarily deciding, but is following a clear system of good and evil like a computer. There is no random number generation in the decision making, only a series of variables. God is without emotional capacity in this thought experiment.

       

        In our world, there is a type of game called an rpg, or a role-playing-game. DnD, online role playing games, or single-played versions where the user controls a character in an imagined world and makes decisions. Because this is what we are doing, of a fashion, this will provide some good analogies to our world. In these worlds, there are often a couple types of zones: Player vs Player zones, Player vs Enemy zones, and gladiator zones. Gladiator zones are really just PvP zones that you enter willingly in order to test strength; Player vs Player zones means that you enter at your risk; a stronger player might be lying in wait to destroy you. Player vs Enemy zones are the safe zones, where you can battle beside unknown players and they are unable to apply damage to your character.

        This gives us a good analogy. Let’s give ourselves a spectrum of good. At each level of good (or evil), players are subject to different types of damage. If you are perfect, you are untouchable. If you are almost completely good, with light iniquity, casual evil might befall: light sickness, bumping your nose, stubbing your toe, burning your tongue lightly on tea.  If the black plague hits your city, the chances of catching it are nil. And on down the spectrum: middling people experience middling evils; completely evil persons are subject to manipulation of person and evils embodying the gravest harm. The goal of this system, of course, is fairness. And it isn’t apparent goodness that determines a person, but the underlying statistics of their being. A secret murderer might appear good to his family and friends, but his internal infestation of evil would be great according to the system.

        The system does not take sides. There is a natural selection of evil and good. But there are some problems. Let’s say I’m perfectly good. I’m also a daredevil. So I jump off a mountain cliff with a squirrel suit without adequate training. Do I die? I’m young and naïve, but unquestionably perfect. Am I miraculously saved? Next: I’m a perfectly evil person, and I can do what I want. I get into a truck loaded up with explosives and drive it into a preschool. What happens? All the kids miraculously survive and there is no damage? And what about situations with no criminal intent: it’s an icy day and I’m doing a little distracted driving and my car slips into the other lane and into an oncoming car. Does the system reach out and replace me like a Mario Kart vehicle?

        Imagine it like this: good people possess a semi-permeable firewall spiritual membrane about their being. This firewall prevents untoward activity and negative outcome. A natural phenomenon hits the town, but they are unaffected. There is no chance of them being affected. They don’t even need faith. Abraham walking up that mountain doesn’t need faith – his goodness prevents Isaac’s death, right? And that begs another question, even about that murderer.

        Let’s say that someone is a terrible murderer, in secret (let’s not consider, for the moment, who he’s allowed to murder. Let’s assume this person is very, very bad of heart), but that he’s well loved by a younger brother and his mother and father and family. They are all innocent and perfect. His death affects not only them, but everyone within his perfect community. Is that not an evil befalling the entire population? How can a nuclear bomb strike a city and kill only those who deserve it? The problem here exists that distinction of collateral damage is impossible as long as damage exists.

        So we could consider another world, a world without collateral damage or damage at all. Let’s imagine that world. Nothing bad could happen. Is this the Garden of Eve without the central component: the tree of good and evil? In this situation, we also run into problems. Either there is no concept of evil – I couldn’t steal your waffle. It would be physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually impossible to steal – or evil is prevented. If evil is prevented, if I’m driving a car around and try and force it into another lane, I’m prevented from doing so by “the great preventative rules from the heavens”. In a way, these are like borderline cases in programming. Can I walk over that mountain in the video game? Not if I can’t jump over the fence or if there is an invisible wall bordering the town.

        But my world isn’t working, and I’m not sure how to fix it. And if I cannot fix it, I have to remedy this world in my head, this God in my head with the perfect God that told Abraham to sacrifice his son, with innocents being sexually abused, with refugees from nations being forced out by militant extremists and terrorists, with war and famine and malnutrition for children. I have to reconcile the inequality extant with a God capable of preventing it who doesn’t.  I have to walk with Abraham up that mountain, expecting the sacrifice and having faith that God will provide.

        This is a harder walk. I cannot simply level-up my goodness and make achievements and rewards by following a life-checklist. I will get sick, my relatives may die, but the price was free will and humanity chose poorly.

        Do I struggle with Abraham’s perspective more, or Isaac’s? Isaac the promised son, whose loving father bound him onto the altar and raised the kris above his head. Salvation was found in sacrifice, even then. It’s so hard to swallow all of this. What was God telling us about our world? What should I be learning that I am missing?

        Kierkegaard wrong a novel on an imagined journey with Abraham at this time.  He wrote some interesting statements that have provoked some thought along these lines.

        For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.

~ Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling)

       

Then faith's paradox is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual determines his relation to the universal through his relation to God, not his relation to God through his relation through the universal... Unless this is how it is, faith has no place in existence; and faith is then a temptation.

        ~ Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling)

The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac—but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is.

        ~ Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling)

        I’m not certain what I think. There is too much here to reconcile in my head that I simply cannot contain it. I read and re-read this passage, and find little that is comforting in my philosophical meditations over it. Earlier I mentioned the ethical standard of utilitarianism. This is the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But this is impossible to know with our angle of knowledge, isn’t it? Without God’s understanding of cause and effect, how are we to know whether our actions will provide the greatest good for the greatest number.

        Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled with the concept of peace in the face of evil himself. He wrote:

If I see a madman driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can't as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver

        He says that, “Silence in the face of evil is evil itself. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”  I think about this in relation to utilitarianism. What if killing Hitler made things worse? Utilitarianism suggests that murder in this case would be a greater evil. And you cannot always know the ends to the means that you practice. So what is ethically good cannot rely on an intellectual void of chance, can it? The end does not justify the means, and certainly the means cannot justify the end, either, right?            

        So that which is good must be based on intention and values, a Quality of sorts, such as that present in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (by Robert Pirsig). This is a great Platonic Form, and our adhering to its designs as closely as we may, knowing only that we attempt to draw nearer to divine perfection in our actions, is good.  Good isn’t actions only, but intent, purpose, belief, and heart that initiate the behavior.

        And I reach the end of the trails of thought, finding myself once more at the beginning. But the beginning offers new paths that I failed to notice before, and I must travel down each, hoping I’ll find the finish line eventually. I have no answers, only rambles and empty thought experiments. Nothing of any particular meaning or anything worth taking away in the long run. There are more holes in these arguments and thoughts than a perforated straw man. It is, in a sense, a red herring, a non sequitur, but what purpose is stream of consciousness save this?