mcnamara

“Who is man? Is he a rational animal? If he is, then the goals can ultimately be achieved. If he is not, then there is little point in making the effort. All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal but with a near infinite capacity for folly. His history seems largely a halting, but persistent, effort to raise his reason above his animality. He draws blueprints for utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand: his own part-comic, part-tragic, part-cussed, but part-glorious nature.”

"What makes us omniscient? Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning."

a quiet death

Our blogging compatriot RL recently posted a fascinating commentary on our (collective) obsession with apocalypta. It has led me to wonder why humans as a whole, and I personally, find the concept of Armageddon so interesting and perhaps even appealing. Since my childhood, our societal visions of apocalypse have evolved from ones filled with mushroom clouds and Australian biker gangs, to diseased corpses, and now Atlantian tombs. Every now and then, an ironic cynic or cynical ironist provides us with a humorous psychological outlet: zombie apocalypse scores high on our cultural preference (e.g., Dawn of the Dead, The Walking Dead), but I also find old-fashioned monster Armageddon satisfying as well (e.g. Godzilla, Crush Crumble & Chomp!).


But in the end, our greatest tragedy may be that we don't actually go out with a bang, and with nary a whimper. More likely than death by meteor or hadron, there lies the possibility of our dissolution through inauthenticity. This has become increasingly fertile ground for bioethicists and philosophers concerned with how scientific and cultural "progress" has fundamentally eroded our very nature. It's not like we're going to wake up tomorrow and half our town is dead with some virulent flu (although I suppose it's a possibility) - but rather, our grandchildren will wake up in a town/nation/world full of metaphysical zombies (reference: first 15 minutes of Shaun of the Dead). Some examples...

Fukuyama is infamous for declaring the "end of history," but I found his treatise on the philosophical implications of biotechnology to be a tour de force. In Our Posthuman Future, he explores how genetic engineering, pharmacotherapy, and other revolutionary breakthroughts of the modern age have the potential to destroy defining aspects of our being. For example, the use of Prozac (and other anti-depressants) to treat painful mood disorders seems a great step forward in psychiatry. Certainly, these drugs have provided profound psychological relief to millions of patients, and helped prevent thousands of suicides from occurring.

However, we must consider the possibility that depression itself is periodically functional. If we eradicate the possibility of psychic pain, we lose a critical facet of our humanity. Fukuyama suggests that depression (on a societal scale) may be a reflection of a vast undercurrent of popular dissatisfaction with the status quo - and that in our historical past, such disenfranchisement led to revolution. What effect might pharmacotherapy be having on our cultural evolution? Are we feeding ourselves a version of state-sanctioned Soma that placates us proles as the elite few rape and pillage our world to stark oblivion?

When I first opened The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben, I expected something more speculative and hyperbolic. And, at times, I'll admit that it reads a little too "fruity" and unscientific for my taste. But his primary argument rang deeply true with me, as I'm sure it has with anyone even moderately concerned with how humans have affected their environment over the past several hundred years. A quote:

"...Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly if at all, is the result of a subtly warped perspective. Changes that can affect us can happen in our lifetime in our world--not just changes like wars but bigger and more sweeping events. I believe that without recognizing it we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change; that we are at the end of nature. By the end of nature I do not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall and the sun shine, though differently than before. When I say 'nature,' I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it."

One of McKibben's primary arguments is that by altering our atmosphere, humans have eradicated the line between man-made and natural. Nothing in our environment, at this point, is untouched by man since we have affected the very sky we live under. This corruption of nature's "purity," if you will, can have a profound impact on our own sense of well-being and pride. In addition to being concerned with the physical damage that global warming and other environmental hazards threaten, we might also worry about the psychological toll of living in a concrete empire.


As an aside, Tolkien was well-aware of this as he wrote his Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I am convinced that Sauron (and perhaps to a more obvious degree Saruman) represent the threat of burgeoning industrialization in the post-War era. The "temptation" of the rings of power that Man falls prey to is this very notion that one can exert control over one's environment. Elves (and hobbits, and other fairie-folk) have always represented a more balanced and respectful relationship with nature. I hope that my nieces at least absorbed some of this, at a subconscious level, as they consumed the absurd Peter Jackson extravaganzas.

Perhaps my favorite piece of post-apocalyptic fiction, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is a fascinating examination of our philosophical dissolution. I'll choose just one of the many incredible examples from the book: ChickieNobs. Atwood suggests that in our near future, we will genetically engineer animals to provide meat more efficiently. We are already doing this, by breeding chickens with a greater percentage of breast meat, for example - but taken to its extreme, one can imagine something quite horrifying.

The protagonist, Jimmy, is touring a biotech facility run by his former high-school friend, Crake:

"Next they went to NeoAgriculturals. AgriCouture was its nickname among the students. They had to put on biosuits before they entered the facility, and scrub their hands and wear nose-cone filters, because what they were about to see hadn't been bioform-proofed, or not completely. A woman with a laugh like Woody Woodpecker led them through the corridors.
'This is the latest,' said Crake. What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.
'What the hell is it?' said Jimmy.
'Those are chickens,' said Crake. 'Chicken parts. Just the breasts on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve on a growth unit.'
'But there aren't any heads,' said Jimmy...
'That's the head in the middle,' said the woman. 'There's a mouth opening at the top, they dump the nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don't need those.'
'This is horrible,' said Jimmy. The thing was a nightmare. It was like an animal-protein tuber.
'Picture the sea-anemone body plan,' said Crake. 'That helps.'

Of course, after a couple years pass, Jimmy (and the rest of the populace) find themselves happily easting cheap, tasty fast-food chicken provided by ChickieNobs. Wouldn't our society behave in a similar manner? Aren't we already?

And finally, my favorite song by Outkast. If you ignore the forgettable gangsta opening stanzas by Big Boi, Andre 3000's astute analysis of our growing inauthenticity may give you pause.

Synthesize, microwave me
Give me a drug so I can make seven babies
Pump my breasts up, can you suck the fat up
Please make my life appear
like ain't no such thing as bad luck
My nose ain't right
Like I need a new one
Just take your pick, a yellow, red
A black or a blue on
Virtual reality, virtual BULLSHIT
Synthesizer preachers can reach you
up in the pulpit
Who a bitch?
Give me my gat so that I can smoke this nigga
Tell his momma not to cry
because they can clone him quicker
than it took his daddy to make him
Niggaz bitin verbatim
Thought provokin records radio never played dem
Instant, quick grits, new, improved
Hurry hurry, rush rush, world on the move
Marijuana illegal but cigarettes cool
I might LOOK kinda funny but I ain't no fool
Now if you wanna synthesize, I empa-thize
Now if you wanna synthesize, I empa-thize
But if you synthasize, I will understand
Your synthasizer MAN.

LHC is Cthulhu

First paragraph from Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu (1928)...

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

Of course, he may be referring to the Great Old Ones, dreaming in R'lyeh until they wake and destroy us all (see Cloverfield).

Cthulhu fhtagn!

But might not the "terrifying vistas of reality" also be these trauma-inducing images from the Hubble?

Oh mighty crab nebula, I worship thee

Or the tentacled limbs of the Large Hadron Collider, and the dark mysteries it will reveal?

freedom in meaningless

There's a sublime freedom that comes from adopting an atheist metaphysics. In the Ivory Tower, one often hears intellectual explanations for human belief in God or gods, such as:

• A belief in God provides people with a sense of security and control. A universe without a Puppetmaster, or at the very least, benevolent Observer, is frightening and disturbing to the fragile human psyche.
  
• Theism not only provides us with a divine (and therefore, unassailable) source to a moral code but also a means of reward and punishment via the afterlife (or karma, if you're into that kind of thing). Without God, there is no objective basis to good and evil and man may as well do as he wishes.
• Religious belief is comforting in times of despair - when one's life seems to be collapsing, and perhaps meaningless, one can turn to God or some manifestation thereof for guidance, comfort, and friendship.
• Belief in the otherworldly soothes the anxiety we feel over our own mortality (see TMT).
  
• etc.

While I suspect there's at least some truth behind these reasons for people's belief in God/gods, I'm not so naive as to think they're a complete explanation. More to the point, I've found that my belief in a "universe wild" provides just as much comfort.

Anytime I begin to worry about...

• the number of publications I have out/should have out
• how I made a mistake in lecture yesterday
  
• the health of myself or family members
• the economic situation of our country
• the prospect of putting an HPU-communications major one fragile heartbeat away from our nation's highest office
  
• the environmental state of our world
• etc.

... I remind myself that one day, we're all gonna be just dirt in the ground. When I was growing up, it was commonplace at the dinner-table for my father to talk about how the dinosaurs dominated the earth for millions of years - and now, don't exist. Given his particular existential position, he interpreted this in a fairly pessimistic light: that life is fundamentally meaningless and that we should beware of hubris. I took his thoughts to heart, but as I have grown to adulthood I find the existential emptiness of the universe to be comforting not depressing. It lends itself to a way of being where each moment and event is taken individually and unto itself, rather than as a mark in some penultimate tally. I don't feel the chains or burdens of sentience as much as I think I would if I thought anything I did actually mattered, in the end.

dirt in the ground

I really don't need to worry about the number of publications I have, or am ever going to have, because one day, we'll all be just dirt in the ground. One day, the sun will burn out. One day, this galaxy won't exist. That level of perspective - of SCALE - really helps me deal with, on a day to day basis, the minor (and sometimes major) annoyances of being human. Everytime I remind myself of that, I find the anxiety and stress begin to lift away - much as I suspect it lifts away in theists who have faith in God's will and protection.

the Sombreo galaxy - and you're trying to tell me that Wall St. matters?

Furthermore, in times of greatest despair, I needn't worry about the philosophical quagmire raised by evil and pain existing in a universe created by an omnipotent & benevolent God. Pain simply happens, because we are alive, and should serve as a reminder that we are equally capable of experiencing joy and ecstasy. I don't derive my morality from a religious system, and so can feel an honest guilt when I behave poorly and an honest pride when I do good by my fellow man. For me, there is a greater sense of Reality and Meaning (to my actions) in a world without heaven and hell.



Sing it, Tom.