Making Nobody Happy

For one, because for many people, the foundation is what produces and supports the structure. If the story is merely arbitrary, these people happened to be nice and did this nice thing isn’t that nice, is a pleasant story, but it’s essentially subjective and relative (its really just about those people and their situation), it isn’t tied to and nlmeta-narrative that validates and supports what they do or compels others to do the same. Because acts of great sacrifice, while inspiring, represent a minority among humans. If your hope for general change is based purely on the theory that people will arbitrarily decide to embrace self sacrifice and self discipline and generosity because they just feel like it you’re likely to be disappointed. You’ve insufficiently appreciated the human capacity for apathy and general self interest. Even more importantly, apathy and self interest only make up the middle proportion of humans. There’s a whole other thing extreme at the opposite from selflessness that’s just as common. Extreme selfishness, brutality, cruelty, a total lack of regard for others, a willingness to profit at their expense, or even revel in it. If you’re just hoping people will decide not to be apathetic or not evil because it seems nice, or some other subjective reason, that’s not going to be generally compelling. People need a pretty strong lever to move them from their natural state and survival strategy. And they need a pretty big stick, often to compel them to restrain their actions if they truly don’t care about others and are willing to use abberant strategies.

That’s why connecting acts of goodness to a compelling meta-narrative that reinforces them and adds moral and cultural and personal context is so important. For a lot of people, absent the pressure of the meta-narrative, they wouldn’t engage in those costly, annoying acts of virtue and kindness and care, or they would bother restraining their impulses toward abuse and exploitation. If all they have to go on is their own feelings and their feelings already don’t place them in the minority of people who feel naturally compelled toward kindness and altruism and duty, then that’s mostly a non-starter. An argument that fails to connect to a meta-narrative that makes sense of virtuous actions also fails to appreciate the potential destructive power of positive impulses. A whole lot of evil has been done because people thought they were pursuing good and doing the right thing, often accidentally and unintentionally, but sometimes even the best ambitions and values can become destructive and tyrannical when allowed to be balloon into overriding values in isolation from a larger restraining context.

So you can hope that it will turn out that people are nice. And for some proportion of people you will be right and get lucky. But you won’t have a solution to deal effectively with the other three quarters of people. That isn’t the whole truth of humanity, so that hope is ultimately doomed to fail. It’s also a bad idea to just assume that everyone is absolutely craven and will respond only to the blunt force of the law and social punishment to restrain them. There is nothing else that can guide or restrain humans, there is only force. Yes, there are a good number of people who will prove that theory true. But again, it’s not the whole truth.

That’s why it’s so important to connect both ends, and the middle, to the overarching moral meta-narrative. That’s the only hope of covering all cases and actually uniting people into some sort of common goal and system that guides everyone and makes sense of and reinforces the approach for everyone. A system that makes it clear that some people, in their acts, are serving and following and working out in life the principles and foundational values of the meta-narrative, and are being recognized for it. And the antisocial (likely criminal) abberant folks at the other end are living lives in opposition to it and are being actively restrained and, if necessary, punished for their actions against others if they won’t restrain them. And hopefully, even if they can’t be convinced to internalize the virtues of the cultural ethic, they can at least be convinced not to actively cross them and harm others. And the people in the middle, who don’t feel strongly compelled either way, as monsters or as saints, will find themselves nested in a value structure that discourages them from the role of the villain and encourages them toward the role of the hero, that reinforces and makes sense of the negative value of one and the positive value of the other and guides them with appropriate levels of reward or punishment to nudge them toward developing a better path. They might not feel like being a hero, but they’ll know that they should and why, that it’s a fixed thing about the world, and so they’ll give it its due. Because it’s something objective about the world, a meta-narrative, it’s larger than the identity and tastes and actions of any one particular group. It speaks to and informs and responds to all of them. It’s true and has relevance across all cases. It’s a common ground we can all share in, despite not all being the same in our tastes, inclination, strategies, or actions.

The thought that you can cut the legs out from under the moral structure, ideologically, and hope the thing will still stand just float in midair is an optimistic one indeed. And it might stand for a while, first among those who were raised taking it for granted and have a hard time giving up the thought habits it ingrained in them. Second, among those with a natural bent that happens to align their tastes with its former content. But ultimately, with the foundational justification gone, the structure will be erodes by the two groups that fall outside those. New generations who don’t take the old position for granted and feel no need to pay lip service to a faith they never had. And those whose inclinations don’t naturally line up with the old value system. And there won’t be any really compelling objective arguments to convince those people, if they don’t already have a natural prejudice in its favor. Ultimately, though, if you don’t have an objective meta-narrative that all the different groups can access and nestle within to unite them, you’re just going to end up with an increasing push and pull between differing factions (with a lot left in the middle who don’t care much either way), and society will sway back and forth between the extremes of different groups’ personal tastes and strategies and habits and ideas and inclinations. Because that’s all that’s really left. A subjective power struggle in which your way seems obviously good to you, but that’s exactly how things seem to everyone else. Valuation is reduced to personal taste, and since your taste is what makes an argument compelling to you, you only find it compelling because you’re you. And I’m not.

The real power of the meta-narrative is its ability to teach you things outside your personal realm of preference. It can tell you things you don’t like, that don’t suit your interests or taste or instincts. It’s meant to be describing a higher, overarching description of moral or ontological reality that transcends all mere perspectives and preferences. It makes sense of and contextualizes them all within itself. It has something to say to correct and something to say to validate them all. It will please you and line up with you on some points and fight you on others, because there will be some areas you see clearly and your natural intuitions are correct and there will be some where you don’t see clearly (or see incompletely) and your natural intuitions are leading you wrong.

So the question, “Why bring God into it?” is a good one. And it has a very good answer. It’s worth considering what we mean by God. Not in some specific religious or historical sense, but just as a definition. What is meant by the concept? And I think you can boil it down mostly to two ideas (at least in the Western tradition, that was informed by Judeo-Christian and Greek thought). First, we mean the highest possible conception of truth, beauty, and goodness. Ultimate goodness, ultimate health, ultimate truth, ultimate beauty. And not singly, but the point at which all those are one and the same in a divine unity, the one reality of which all those dimensions are mere aspects of expression and understanding.

There’s too much to get into in individual situations to unpack what the meaning and justification of the term is for humans. It’s enough to observe that everybody uses it, and that it’s fundamental function is the justification of force in demolishing the strength of an enemy. That’s the work it does in our psychology. It’s a useful idea, it’s been used time and again to instigate change, usually with violence. It’s part of the nature of the concept that violence is an almost inevitable outcome, because of how it frames the problem.

The idea does several things that help us prepare for the use of force. First, it divides the world clearly into oppressor and oppressed. That’s both a power dynamic and a moral dynamic. These people have power and these people don’t. These people are evil perpetrators and these people are innocent victims. You’ve got a clear dichotomy. And there’s a clear implicit judgment that the position of the people in power is itself a corruption. There isn’t a good reason for it, they haven’t earned it. They aren’t justified in their position. They’re parasitical. They maintain their power at the expense of the oppressed (an argument made by both Soviets and Nazis about their enemies). And this is also often an argument for the viability of the fight. The power of the oppressors is a trick. It’s not necessary, not supported by the nature of the universe; this state of things is not inevitable, the universe is on our side.

The problem is neatly framed, so the solution is also clear. Either the bad people or their power need to be removed. Revolution. Turning. Take the people on top and move them to the bottom. Take the morally superior oppressed and move them to the top. Give them power. And the world will be fixed. You’re preparing a narrative whose thrust is, “What I see as being wrong with the world will be fixed if we overthrow these people.”

Simplification is also one of the implicit features of this narrative. Reducing categories down to oppressor and oppressed, those who are the problem and those who are victims. Good and bad. Defeat the bad, solve the problem of the good. You need that kind of clarity in order to wage war. Complexity will make you hesitate, and in an outright conflict against a powerful foe (implicit in their role as oppressor), you can’t afford it.

Now, it’s worth noting that this weapon is a powerful weapon for a reason. We often need it in a hostile world of great injustices. It’s very important for our survival and development. To confront great dangers you need something that makes you equally dangerous. When you start building this type of narrative, you’re setting up your nuclear options. You’re gearing your mind for war. That’s why this narrative is such a common precursor to actual wars across the globe and throughout history. It conditions the mind for the task ahead. It prepares the people. If grows the army. It clarifies the enemy. Clarification, identification, simplification, militarization. It makes the problem clear, it tells who who is on what side, it reduces the conflict and its solution to a clear course of action, and it prepares the people to confront the problem.

The function and power and danger of the oppressor narrative exist simply as a fact, outside any judgements about how it was used and whether it was justified. Often the arguments seem good at the time, but the end result is just more instability, failure to see the goals and the new utopia materialize, the rise of a new form of oppression or new class of oppressors, mass destruction, cruelty, incompetence and mismanagement, or in a more banal case things just don’t really get much better or easier once the initial elation wears off. Revolution so often merely turns the wheel of who is being crushed, or how, or why, and starts a new cycle. And round and round it goes.

So what are the potential problems that the oppressor narrative might run into that can lead to these disappointing outcomes? Well, they occur on all four of the chief points: clarification, identification, simplification, and militarization. First, you might have identified the problem incorrectly or insufficiently, so your revolution will fail to really address it. Second, you might have incorrectly identified the perpetrators, either including some that weren’t to blame or not blaming some who were. Third, you might have oversimplified both the problem and who was to blame, as well as how to fix it. Your explanation might have been too reductive and failed to account for the complexity of the situation, leading you to improperly address it. Fourth, you might fail to properly direct or restrain your use of force.

People are inherently challenge and conflict driven. They have a natural need to identify and confront danger and defeat enemies (or build a safe space apart from those dangers, which often requires defending the walls or defending against internal threats). We all want a walled garden in which to thrive, and we all have different ideas about how best to get it and maintain it, but ultimately it’s all about recognizing and dealing with or eliminating threats. We identify dangers and we confront them. It’s helped us survive and develop and promote justice and order, but it’s also caused a huge amount of suffering and injustice and chaos. If the enemies to be confronted aren’t obvious, if they aren’t to be found outside us, it’s still a guarantee that we won’t be content. We’ll still be suffering. It’s part of the reality of human existence. And we’ll want to find the source, the people to blame, and we’ll want to confront the problem. We’ll find enemies; we’ll find them within if we can’t find them without. And if we can’t restrain how we use force, it’s easy for it to get out of hand. And if we’re applying it internally, within our own structures, there’s just as much potential for destruction as when we go to war with an external foe, possibly more.

Confrontation is often necessary in life. Soft power often fails, and you have to meet force with force. Not all the time, but more often than we would like. But how you do that, how you militarize your response, how willing you are to use force rather than soft power, how necessary you see it as being, can be a danger area. Soft power, a lighter touch, diplomacy, negotiation, finding common ground, seeking peaceful solutions can often yield much better and less costly results. And it’s very easy to make hasty judgments about the need to end the words and bring out the guns. Talk is useless, empty placating and mere comisserstion, some would argue. We need action, is the argument of the revolution. And once you’ve made the move to force, it’s not an easy thing to restrain. You’re committed to a certain amount of chaos and destruction by bringing it to bear. So you’d better be pretty sure that you haven’t made any mistake on the first three points and watch very carefully how much free rein you give the fourth, because there are going to be real consequences. You need to make sure that the price you’re going to pay is worth the prize you seek. Thanks to the first three points, for those embracing the narrative, they’re usually quite certain that it is.

It’s often a problem talking to people about the four points. It’s often a problem because any criticism of how they’re approaching the problem might make them decide to lump you in with the people who are the problem. I’ve often read people’s arguments about injustice and felt unable to criticize them. You can’t criticize them without denying their suffering, without denying the injustice, and without therefore being on the side of the oppressors.

And if you’re concerned that the outcome of someone’s arguments might actually be dangerous because of their mistakes and might fail to address their problems, and wonder if maybe the story isn’t so simple as they see it and maybe their identification of the enemy isn’t as clear as they make it, well, you might as well just declare yourself a traitor. Because in war there’s no room for any of that. We’re fighting for our lives here. You’re helping preserve the corrupt power structures. You’re a collaborator. You’re culpable for the wrongs being done by the (possibly small minority, possibly large majority) cruelest, most active oppressors. So you’re condemned with them.

We’re outside the world of personal negotiation or compromise or growth or freedom or discussion here, and we’ve moved into the spheres of the law and war. Criminal justice and deliberate force. Guilt, innocence, and punishment. You’re either for the prosecution or you’re for the defense. You’re either our ally or our enemy. There’s not a lot of room left for discussion when we’ve moved to a criminal trial or open confrontation. All you can do is pick a side.

So how, then, does one criticize an approach that has already elevated rhetoric to the level of the oppressor narrative? It’s not easy. That’s why we need to be so cautious about elevating our rhetoric that high. It’s why we should be cautious about calling the police or army to resolve our concerns. The law and the military and increasingly brute forces. They tend to remove the possibility of peaceful solutions. You’re committing yourself to confrontation. And that doesn’t just militarize you, it militarizes your enemy. They will perceive the threat and the approach you’re taking to them, and they’ll respond in kind. They will recognize how they’re being categorized and the threat of force and they’ll also start to tighten ranks. The situation will escalate.

Once you’ve set the machinery of the oppression narrative to work, it’s not easy to slow it down or stop it or add subtlety. It naturally works to clarify, identify, simplify, and arm us. It turns us into warriors. Not diplomats or counselors or politicians or neighbors or friends or partners or brothers or sisters. Warriors. And that kind of excites us. It’s part of our nature, part of what makes us strong and able to survive and conquer the threats within and without. It changes how we approach resistance and criticism. The criticism itself becomes part of the force we are confronting.

And this, I suppose, it why it’s often the case that revolutions go wrong or don’t really change things much, or get out of hand, or get taken over for the benefit of someone else. Some people instinct ly know how to fan the flames and sieze the reins for their own personal benefit. Because someone is going to benefit from the revolution. When the wheel turns there’s going to be a massive loss of power by someone and some serious gains by others. If you can take care to channel and redirect those gains to yourself, how much the better! And it’s a terrible temptation, if you’re leading the revolution, to not merely stop at increased equity but to keep going and assign power to yourself and your people, and to install yourself as the primary and deserving beneficiary of the revolution. After all, you’re likely to be hailed as the beloved savior of the people and cause you championed, regardless of the outcomes. And if you can keep blaming any problems on the former oppressors and their structures, then you’ll always have a handy way to set aside criticisms of your approach and get people to fall in behind you. The Soviets had the capitalists, Cuba had the USA, Trump had his deep state and Hilary Clinton, Mugabe had the colonialists, China had the Western powers and Japan, Germany had the Jewish conspiracy, Turkey has the Kurds, Iraq has Iran, and so on and so on. You can always put off internal criticism with a reminder that you’re in a battle against an enemy, and they’re to blame, and you need to either get behind us or be branded a traitor.

And let’s be honest, sometimes there isn’t room or time for subtlety. The military works on authority and loyalty, not argument and discussion. It needs that structure to be effective. That’s what makes it dangerous, both positively (in its capacity to match and overcome danger itself), and negatively (it’s not a subtle instrument and is going to have results). Any subtlety or discussion needs to either take place beforehand or only at the highest levels of decision. And thats one reason our country has so much red tape and checks of power when it comes to the use of force, why there are so many restrictions on law and military and how they can use their force. Yes, it’s powerful for good because it’s just plain powerful. If we use it carelessly it can cause great harm as well as great good.

Female abuse as perfect example.

There’s a real conflict between the world as it is and the world as we wish it to be. And on an individual level we’ve all got competing ideas about what we wish the world was what we were, and a private reality would be infinitely preferable for most of us. A world where we’re gods, where we’re the most important, attractive, talented person and everything about us is great and everything we do turns to gold and everyone appreciates us and we get exactly what we wanted and needed. That’s the world things like pornography and video games tend to offer us. But that’s not the world we live in, and trying too hard to live in that world can actually harm us.

Nevertheless, we need our idea of what the world could be. We need to be able to challenge our ideas of what the world is. We need to discover areas where it could actually be better (in a way we can agree on, there’s no shortage of ways the world could be better for me personally). We don’t want to get trapped into a kind of false determinism or fatalism, thinking there’s nothing we couldn’t do and we know everything and nothing can be learned or changed. Both approaches are seeking truth and seeking our good, but through different strategies.

There is a broader range of situations where the standard approach will work and things are the way they need to be and the conventional cultural or moral or practical shorthand applies, but there are also a huge amount of situations that don’t conform to the norm and require some creative, flexible thinking to solve. They may only add up to a tiny fraction of cases, but they’re still numerous enough that if we don’t have some flexibility and perspective we won’t get the best results. And as conditions change we need to be able to adapt our expressions to the new conditions so we still get the intended results. Still, I don’t think that comes from taking a shallower view of reality or denying reality, but from taking a deeper look at it, returning to the source instead of relying on the shorthand.

Unfortunately, the approach these days seems to be more structured around the assertion that there are no higher or deeper realities or levels of truth, and that the existing known levels also don’t really exist. That the shorthand isn’t derived from any underlying reality, but is merely an artifice of power. And you don’t improve it by returning to the source for a better, more accurate shorthand that’s better tailored to the current conditions, you improve it by disposing of it or denying it or just replacing it with something more to your personal taste.

Sexism isn’t currently being solved by discovering a better, more balanced and nuanced idea of sex, it’s being solved by attacking the entire concept of sex and deconstructing it. Sex is whatever you want it to be. Having found some problems in the functions of various social and political and religious and cultural and moral structures, there seems to be a movment to abolish and tear down and deplatform them altogether. They’re seen as purely arbitrary, merely machines of power, fundamentally unjust, with no reality behind their discrimination or structure; so tear them down and replace them (or better yet don’t replace them at all) and the utopia will follow. That seems to be the most popular idea at the moment. Tear down the very mechanisms of discrimination that prevent some people from getting their happy endings and everyone will get their happy endings in the new utopia.

We live in a world where ease of life and advancement of accrued historical and technological benefits have made imagining such a world, or even feeling entitled to it, is fairly easy.

I think a lot of politics is really about this divide in human perspective. Order and realism vs experimentation and imagination. Practicality vs creativity. And there are some very clear personality tendencies when it comes to party affiliation. And there seems to be an divide across rural and urban, worlds closer to the harsh realities of nature and closer to the creative constructions of humankind. And there seems to be a divide between more masculine and more feminine approaches.

This is one of those cases where our instincts get in the way of our higher thinking and drive us away from the truth instead of toward it. Because even when it comes to plants and foods, it’s not that simple. Being toxic isn’t an absolute measure, it’s a measure of dosage. A high enough dosage of salt is toxic, it will kill you. But you need salt to survive. Too little is bad, too much is bad. You need vitamins, but people often blithely assume that more is always better and start loading on the micronutrients. But they’re “micronutrients”, you’re only supposed to get a little. If you suddenly artificially force yourself to get a lot, your body will either have to eliminate them, if they’re water soluble, or be poisoned by them, if they’re fat soluble. And you can get sick and die from too many vitamins. Even water will kill you in too low or too high of doses. Pretty much everything that necessary for life, Al the really important and worthwhile things, cannot be reduced down to good or bad. It’s all about the balance, all about how much and in what way you take them into yourself.

Life in general is much the same. Pretty much everything worth having as part of your life could become a problem if you get too much or too little of it, if you allow it run rampant and overwhelm the rest of your life balance or if you remove it from your life balance.

The real mistake people make isnt actually any bigger than just asking the wrong questions. They want to ask, is this good or bad? What they should be asking is, what is its utility (what is this good for), and what is its pathology (how can this go wrong)? Anything worth having will have both of these aspects to its nature. It will have a benefit, a way it can help us and be good for us, and it will have a way it can become pathological and become the dark shadow of itself, working against us instead of for us.

You can apply this approach with almost everything. Food, activities, ideas, pasttimes, even people. You’re likely to encounter people and ideas different from yourself. And they’ll all likely have something powering them that has some utility, some energy and value, some power and function. And it may be obvious to you what it is, it may be easy for you to see. But even if the person or idea is completely pathological, somewhere under there there’s the germ of something that had power and utility, and it’s actually that power that’s driving the pathology. If there wasn’t potential power for good there there wouldn’t also be potential power for harm. If it was merely dark energy, not interacting or capable of having an effect on things, it couldn’t have produced such bad effects. The mere fact that it has power means it has the potential to be a tool, if we can learn how to use it and use it well.

Guilt and shame are powerfully unpleasant. Everyone knows they’re associated with being unhappy. But did you also know they’re powerfully associated with being happy? Guilt and shame are primary emotions for conscientious people. They feel them keenly and often, they internalize criticism easily, they heavily inform their motivations. And, after intelligence, the most consistent marker for long term success, happiness, and stability is conscientiousness. Those people are the most likely by personality (since intelligence isn’t part of personality exactly) to have happy and successful lives. The most likely. Out of everyone.

So there’s clearly some power there, some utility, that drives both the happiness and unhappiness. There’s a real benefit, so it comes with some real risks and real potential for pathology, and keeping it in balance is going to be terribly important. You won’t make things better by just labeling it good or bad. It has a powerful pathology because of its innate effectiveness. And you can’t just throw it out because you don’t like the bad feelings it can create either. If you throw out, fight, or reject that tool, you’re throwing out one of the most powerful forces for human happiness and success.

So we’re left with a much harder question. Not, is it good or bad, but how shall we then live? How shall we live with it? How shall we learn from it? How do we keep it in bakance? How do we maximize the good version of it and get the maximum benefits from it without it becoming a pathological tyrant and turning those healthy benefits into disease and oppression?

Because if we take a simplified approach with anything truly powerful, no matter what approach you choose, labeling it good or bad, I guarantee you will go wrong, cause harm to others, cause harm to yourself, become disillusioned (likely, and then flip to the opposing error), and subvert the potential good you could have had.

When you reductively label something powerful merely as good, you won’t sufficiently watch it or control it or restrain and direct it. You’ll assume it can do no wrong, and you’re super wrong about that. You’ll let its power run wild. And if you reductively label something powerful as bad, you’ll lock it up and restrain it far too much, you’ll suppress it and try to destroy it. You’ll assume it can do no right, and you’re super wrong about that too. And you’ll lose everything it could have done for you, quite likely things you really needed to thrive. Both those paths will come back to bite you in the end. And a whole lot of people spend their lives running from one extreme to another. With their diets, with their relationships, with their politics, with their work, with their play, with their personalities, with everything.

The world isn’t simple. Health, physical or mental or emotional or ideological, isn’t simple. It’s complex. It’s dynamic. It’s founded on potential for either great good or great dysfunction. Sin isn’t something with a nature unto itself, it’s just goodness gone wrong. And the greater the potential good, the greater the potential evil and harm. Whether you take it as literal or symbolic, there’s a fundamental truth being explained in the origin of Satan. He wasn’t some low spirit, he was an archangel, the highest good. The greatest threats are generated from the greatest potential goods.

Hitler and Stalin and Mao didn’t cause so much suffering because they were weak, degenerate men. And there had to be powerful cultures behind them to accomplish all they did. They caused so much suffering because they were brilliant and passionate and driven and cunning. They could have used those qualities to better themselves and others, but instead they subverted the power within themselves and used the power of their cultures (cultures capable of achieving amazing things) to cause untold suffering and destruction. Even modern children’s books like Harry Potter repeat this idea. That Voldemort did great things, terrible things, but great. Darth Vader didn’t start out of Jar Jar Binks, he started out as Anakin Skywalker.

The important question isn’t “Are they good or bad?”, it’s “How could they become good or bad?”

The potential for people, traits, governments, ideas, pleasures, and abilities is there to be either good or bad, sometimes successively, often at the same time. And even when they’re great, they’re still not complete. Even the best mathematician is likely a pretty poor plumber. Even the best scientific theory might fail to comfort a grieving child. Even the best-planned liberal democracy might fail if its citizens lacked courage to defend themselves. And they’ll all have their way to go wrong, or just fail to achieve their potential. Every good leader is always in danger of becoming a self-serving tyrant, even when he or she is at their best. In fact, abuse is the most likely outcome of every good idea, every revolution, and every good leader. It’s only by great care and exertion and caution and humility that we prevent our gods from becoming our downfall. The higher we lift them up, the more they lift us, the less we question them, the less we care we take with them, the more we’re willing to accept them as unquestionable and incapable of leading to bad outcomes. And because no one and no single structure or approach is perfect and complete, there will always be a corrosive influence to being held up in such a godlike position. The more we treat something that isn’t a god like it is, the more likely it will become pathological, no matter how great and good it is.

It would be easy to go on forever because this principle is almost infinitely applicable. People ask the wrong questions and draw the wrong conclusions in virtually every area of life. The entire approach is what’s wrong. It’s useful as a kind of shorthand, a basic way to avoid things that are bad for you and pursue things that are good for you. It makes a handy reference sheet for personal and cultural goals and behaviors. It’s a good way to start a person’s education and understanding. It’s a fine beginning. And it’s not really feasible for a lot of people, especially the young (physically or psychologically), to be constantly running a lot of complex moral calculus and judgements in their heads.

That’s why we’re so attracted to leaders and teachers and heroes and exemplars. We’re not sure we can work everything out ourselves. So we look for an example of someone we judge to have achieved a good end result and intuit that they must have worked things out fairly well to get there and become who they are. So we’ll follow and imitate them and hold them up as an example. That’s who we want to be. We become their disciples.

There can be problems with that approach though. Sometimes the appearance doesn’t match the reality. Sometimes the shortcut of just getting behind what that person holds up as the right way will actually lead us places we shouldn’t go. And often the problem is just simply that humans are too limited and no single human is able to be the perfect be all, end all of life and human excellence, and there will be some areas they’re wrong or just shortsighted, some area where that’s not their area of expertise and understanding, and their blind spot and weakness happens to line up dangerously with your personal situation, or even a particular moment in time.

A great leader of one type might not be the best leader for every possible situation. Sometimes you need a different kind of person, and that good leader, as powerful as they are, can’t adapt to being a completely different sort of person. The better a drill something is, the more specialized and powerful and dedicated to that purpose it becomes, the more likely it won’t make a great saw. And although there is a general sense and principle to human good and virtue and health and flourishing, individual humans are all quite different from one another. What it looks like from person to person and what people need to reach it varies from person to person. None of us are a perfect middle balance of all potential strengths and weaknesses.

And that’s why we need wisdom. Wisdom is more than knowledge or intelligence. Wisdom is the ability to walk the path. To see it, to see the potential good and the potential pathology, and know where to steer to strike the path between tyranny of expression and repression, to hit the proper use of power dead on. That’s what wisdom is. The ability to go beyond simple questions or simple answers to the heart of what actually creates those outcomes, and steer the ship of your heart and mind accordingly.

And anyone has the potential for it. It’s not dependent on being a certain type of person, because everyone is some type, wisdom is just a approach to how you will handle being whatever you are like. It’s equally available to all personalities. And it doesn’t require exceptional intelligence. Intelligence might be useful, it might make the judgements come faster and easier. But wisdom can come to anyone with time and care and practice.

In fact, an intelligent person without wisdom is far harder to move or help than an unintelligent person. Their minds can come up with reasoning to justify their pathology as fast as you can come up with objections. Everything can be rationalized with the best arguments. Intelligence is merely a tool, itself. And if that tool is being used to support pathology, that just makes it all the harder to overcome that power. A really smart person with depression or narcissism (or what have you) is much harder to help because they have the force of their intelligence behind it. A smart criminal is much harder to stop than a foolish one. And there is no shortage of fools and cheats and the mentally ill among the intelligent. I’m fairly intelligent myself, and I know it to be true by personal experience. Not of others (though that’s true), but of myself. Being smart makes it easy to lie and cheat and manipulate and avoid any consequences. It makes it easy to rationalize my behavior and think I’ve criticized it and justified it perfectly. It makes it almost impossible to escape the trap of my own unhealthy thinking because I already have all the answers and can talk circles around other people and their ideas and I’m not interested in listening or learning.

There’s a lesson I tried to teach my girls tonight. It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. What matters is learning to be a good winner and a good loser. Because you can win badly and lose poorly, and they’re both far worse than mere losing (for you as a person). And learning to be a good sport, learning to be a gracious winner and a gracious loser is an invaluable flexible skill. Because it will serve you and guide you right in any situation, no matter the circumstances. You can’t control the the whole world, so you can’t make it so you’ll always win. You can’t avoid the chance of losing unless you take no risks. But you can win in a way that makes people resent you for it and not want to play any more. This isn’t only true of humans, it’s true of rats. Rats like to wrestle and play. But if the big rats don’t let the little rats win at least a decent part of the time, the little rats won’t invite them to play any more and the game will be over. No one likes to play with someone who gloats and brags and rags on the losers. It’s great to be a winner. But you can’t always control that. It’s even better to be the sort of person who knows how to do and be their best whether they win or lose. The truth is, either outcome can harm you, and either outcome could benefit you. And wisdom is the path that makes a victory of any circumstance. It helps you learn the right lesson from losing and helps you stay in the game and it prevents you from learning the wrong lesson from winning and driving others out of the game.

1. Is God real?
2. If he is real, did he really create the world?
3. Is there proof that God is real?
4. Are the people in the Bible real? Did they live?
5. How do we know we’re real and the world is real, that it isn’t an illusion or game, like when I play with my Barbies and create a world in my head?
And these last two are connected and require some of her explaining.
6. Nothing is nothing, so if there’s nothing there’s nothing. If there’s nothing, how can there no be nothing? (I believe what she meant was, since the universe had a beginning, how do we even understand what there was before there was even a spacetime for there to be nothing in. Also, how do you bridge the gap from there being nothing, a nothingness that is so nothing that it can’t even contain emptiness, to there being something. If there really was nothing, how could it give rise to something? I believe her question was along those lines. How do we comprehend the concept of a state outside the universe of space and time and how do you go from that state to the current organized state of existence, space, and time.)
7. If everything didn’t just appear, where did it come from? (This is really a continuation of her previous question. I believe it stems from her dissatisfaction with the explanation that “it just happened, we can’t explain or understand that part of it, it’s just there; there isn’t a reason, as such, we can only observe what did happen”. Her question implies and assumes a dissatisfaction with the explanation that the universe “just appeared”, there is no teleology to be studied; you just have to take it and what it unfolded to be as a given. I think another way of stating her question, based on her talk with me, is “Why is the universe the way it is? Is there any reason?”)

So that was an interesting night. They weren’t simple questions, they were big enough and smart enough to merit more than simple yes and no answers. So I did my best to give her a basic primer in theology, philosophy, cosmology, and theories of Biblical interpretation rather than just answer the questions. I gave her a sample of the best alternative answers people have given to those questions and let her mull them over.
She’s engaged in some conscious worldview building, which I appreciate. Her most basic question that she wanted to consider was the most fundamental. Is there any reason for why things are the way they are, or not? If not, then you’ve just got to deal with a senseless, mechanistic, nihilistic universe that was born by chance, became what it is by chance, you were born by chance, and you and the universe will also eventually cease to be by chance. So it may be amusing to see how it all works, but there’s no great purpose or destiny or path or reason for anything to be discovered. You just have to take the world for what it is, because there’s nothing else it’s supposed to or could be. We can describe the way it works, but there’s no intention, it’s not for anything. It just is, and what it is and what happens in it is the result of arbitrary forces that have no explanation. They have a description, but no explanation. Because explanation implies intention, and blind physical forces have no intentions.
I couldn’t be honest in my conversation with my daughter without admitting that that was one possible option. It’s a good explanation too, in its own way, because it covers all possible cases. You don’t need any other explanations, it doesn’t leave room for them. It’s very thorough, it has very large explanatory power and application, and it’s consistent. That makes it a good answer. It may not be a pleasant answer, but intellectually it’s compelling because of its thoroughness and consistency. And a lot of people have put work into finding a way to build a practical approach to life out of it (with mixed results, admittedly). And since it’s an explanantion she’s likely to hear a lot in her life, I wanted to make sure she didn’t dismiss it out of hand without considering its merits. I don’t think you can avoid nihilism, no matter what you believe. Because at some point you’re going to struggle with it, at least emotionally, even if you don’t assent to it intellectually (much as you will struggle emotionally with the need for meaning and purpose even if you intellectually conclude that there ultimately isn’t one). The tension between the dueling answers and reactions to that question are part of the fabric of human life.
My daughter, for her part, decided she wasn’t convinced by nihilism. Understandable. There aren’t a lot of child nihilists, especially among children who haven’t experienced a lot of arbitrary suffering. Among children who have been crushed and abused and psychologically and emotionally crippled by a hard and unforgiving world, you understandably find some more nihilistic perspectives. Suffering, especially apparently unjust or pointless suffering, often seems to us like a rebuke to the very idea of purpose or meaning in the universe itself. She finds the world to be full of goodness and meaning, so she isn’t putting much stock in nihilistic explanations. That’s understandable. So that’s brick one in her search for answers to life’s big questions.

Afterword:
Of course, you can argue that humans are just the sort of creatures whose success and thriving depends upon their ability to both see and comprehend the world and maintain their ability to believe in structures of meaning and purpose. That that’s our adaptation that allows us to survive and grow in power the way we do. We can see and understand the world, but we can also invent fictions and constructions of meaning that let us apply that knowledge in our own lives and cooperatively.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re true, only that they work and make us succeed, so we have to act as if they were true. We’re just the sort of creatures that need to act as though the world had meaning and purpose to build the kind of lives we build. In a way, that would make life a kind of cosmic joke on us, because we’re obligated to act in a way that doesn’t reflect true reality but is necessary for our life in that reality. It’s a joke in our favor, at least, you could argue. But our continuing success and mental stability depends on preserving those illusions/fictions/constructions.
I mean, we can gain all the scientific knowledge and power we like, but if we can’t operate as people, who have a fundamental need for meaning, relationships, intelligibility, justice, etc and exist primarily in a world of concepts and ideas and story and intelligence and purposes and intentions (in a physical world that often defies those needs and rebukes our search), then that doesn’t really get us anywhere. We still have to be functioning people to make use of any of that knowledge and power. We can’t live as functioning humans outside our world of intention and purpose. We need to be in that world to make use of our knowledge of the material world.
And so it’s at least possible that that conflict, between nihilism and meaningism, is inevitable, baked into what we are. And maybe nihilism is the true underlying reality, but we can never actually live in that reality without undoing what we are (and losing our primary advantage in that world). In which case, we’re presented with a world that we can never be truly honest with ourselves about, and that’s the joke. Maybe that’s just the sort of funny things we are.

It certainly dovetails with the history of philosophy. You’ve got the teleological view of the universe, then the rise of modernism and materialism, asserting that as the primary or true reality (motivated by the immense amounts of power understanding of the material world gained us and losing interest in what a teleological approach to the universe and ourselves gained us, which was really just a more stable and balanced soul/being), the hope that we could live without the teleological perspective (the world of mind and meaning) and just replace it with sonething built from the “real” foundation, the eventual collapse of those rationalistic efforts into skepticism, nihilism, and existentialism, and the eventual disillusionment with rationalism and the turn to post-modernism.
Rationalism failed to pay dividends for most people, so we built a sort of conscious illusion to replace it. Let’s enjoy the practical benefits of materialism, but let’s pretend and live in our actual lives like it’s not true. Let’s have a bifurcated approach to reality. We still have to live as people, inside the world of meaning, but we know it isn’t real. So let’s just find a way to live with that.
And I think that’s why in Europe there’s been a big return to magic and superstition. And in America there’s been a huge erosion of confidence in authority and big turn toward our modern versions of magic: psuedoscience, alternative medicine, spiritualism (in much less defined and structured forms) all the stuff that stands outside the traditional rationalistic and scientific structure and speaks more to our instinctive experience of life and thought.
It’s very understandable. People just haven’t been able to live in and make sense of the way they’re asked to live and think in the world the materialists, rationalists, and nihilists have given them. But they feel like they should, and they can’t deny all the results of the power the materialists have gained by their approach. So they’re trying to maintain a two level approach, paying lip service to one while living more in the other. And gradually they’re losing confidence even in the supposed power and benefits of materialism (partly because they’ve never had to live without them; it’s easy to assume you can skip medically treating your kids and use some nice smells instead if you’ve never been in the position of not living behind that wall of protection where you have no defenses and really need and want to know if there’s something that will really work).
And I don’t want to overstate the value of nihilism. Nihilism isn’t what gave us all these material benefits, it was a side effect, an unintended result. It’s the world of meaning, our belief in consistency and intention and intelligibility that made us capable of learning everything we did. Nihilism was the end result of the Enlightenment, not the source from which it sprang. And I also think nihilism is a natural emotional and intellectual reaction to the reality of suffering. We know from psychologists that the beliefs that nihilism and pure materialism engender tend to result in psychological dysfunction. And whether it’s true or not, if you want to escape from depression and isolation and uselessness, you often have to convince yourself, against your better judgment (or at least act like) those beliefs aren’t true. I know this from personal experience because I find nihilism terribly convincing. But it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, and it often results in depression. And often my intellectual side traps me in my depression because I’m able to argue my nihilistic viewpoint so convincingly to myself as being quite appropriate.

Buddhism itself is a kind of non-theistic post-modernism. It assumes that life is pain and that there’s no good explanation for it, that’s just what the world is, but on a practical level there are things we can do and choose to believe to avoid or remove that pain. So what do you want, a consistent explanation and understanding of the world that makes sense of why everything is the way it is, or do you want to feel better? And that’s what Buddha says he can provide, a way to live in this life of senseless pain that will make it more liveable and bearable. Buddhism didn’t need the enlightenment or scientific materialism to come to that same end, it got there purely on what people could already see and feel and understand on an elemental level.

So in that sense the rise of Western scientific thought isn’t really necessary for the subsequent movement to nihilism or post-modernism. Buddha (and frankly many others) got there way ahead of that. So you can get to post-modernism and nihilism without science qnd materialism, and you can get to science without nihilism and strict materialism (which we know because we did, they arose afterward in our modern rationalistic tradition). In fact the main consequence intellectually of strict materialism seems to be a self-defeating nihilism and schizophrenic post-modernism. So the result of the philosophies that science engendered has been the end of belief in science. Whereas the end result of teleological thought in the Western tradition was the university, philosophy, and science.

Teleology causes you, as a human, to grow and thrive and leads you to believe that the universe is consistent and ordered and intelligible, and so the philosophers sought to understand it and themselves. And so we got the whole Western tradition. Buddhism understandably did not lead to modern science because it presents the world as painful and arbitrary and incomprehensible and offers primarily a practicum for surviving it, not a theorum for making sense of it. That’s not to say Buddhism is wrong, only that such an outlook does not naturally lead to philosophy of a type that leads to modern scientific understanding.

One thing I wonder very much is whether our post-modernism will eventually collapse entirely into a new kind of restored pre-modernism. A genuine fading of rationalism and a return to the old pagan days. We are in our private lives, but it’s hard to say if we’ll keep at it consistently enough to erode our big institutions. One of the key differences between pagan ideas about the world and the Jude-Christian/Greek philosophical tradition that became dominant over them was a shift from a view of the world as cyclical and arbitrary to view of the world as procedural and intelligible. The pagan gods were very capricious, and humans were typically small playthings at the mercy of the whims of those gods. Time was a wheel that went round and round, repeating itself, grinding each generation away. In Eastern thought, life itself is a cycle of birth and rebirth even at an individual level. Why we’re born into that cycle isn’t clear; it’s just our fate.

Even the great heroes of the Iliad are ultimately just poor pawns in a capricious battle between the gods, and eventually they meet the same end as all who came before them, victims of unhappy accident and cruel fate. Odysseus, meeting his once great friend Achilles in the underworld, finds him despondent about the fate of mankind. Achilles is the greatest among the dead, but he laments that he would rather be a slave on Earth than a king in hades. All his heroism came to nothing in the end. Even if the gods are taken as symbolic (and they were, even then, by many people, some Platonic dialogues virtually assume it as the default position). But it is still the fate of mankind to live out the repetition of the cycle of being that those gods represent. Whether they’re literal or personal isn’t really the point. We’re still just pawns in the capricious war between the forces that the gods represent.

So life doesn’t give us great choices. It requires us to live in the world of teleology, but refuses to give us the answers we want in the material world. And when we encounter suffering and hardship and betrayal and chance and loss of meaning, our whole idea of the universe is shaken. Because the fundamental answers to our questions, why is the universe the way it is, is there a purpose, does my life have purpose, why are we born, and what happens when we die, can’t be discovered in the material realm. For all the amazing tools we have at our disposal for gathering scientific knowledge, knowledge about the world and ourselves, we live daily in a very different world of intentions and stories and concepts and ideas and purposes and meaning and information, none of which strictly exist in the material world. We can’t seem to quite comfortably unite the two so they form a consistent whole that preserves both. Usually we settle for reducing everything down to one or the other, or more schizophrenically trying to hold both uneasily in separate parts of our mind at the same time, a balancing act where we try to keep matter and antimatter separate, lest one eradicate the other.

The advantage of the split approach is we don’t have to fully submit ourselves to either and can enjoy the benefits of both. Or at least that seems to be the idea. I think it’s fully possible we share, rather, in the problems of both and contain within ourselves an inherent contradiction that is constantly threatening to make nonsense of both. But people are used to inconsistency. We easily switch hats to materialists when it suits us and dob the garb of mystics when it seems most convenient.

By not quite acknowledging supernature, we can maintain our independence and power. There’s nothing bigger than us we don’t understand or control that we have to submit to. We leave room for us to be god and judge our gods and fashion them as we wish, because they aren’t quite an objective reality, just a nice thing we entertain for our our amusement and pleasure and meaning.

By not quite acknowledging the hegemony of materialism, we leave room for ourselves to invent and immerse ourselves in our private meaning and a world of intelligence (that makes sense). Our lives are nihilistic, arbitrary, purposeless blips, accidents of physics, inevitable playacting of chemicals, life perpetuating life until it doesn’t. We can enjoy the metaphysical hauntings of love and truth and art and meaning that make up human life and indulge our instincts, even though we know on some level that they’re wrong and don’t give us real information about the world and its true nature, or ours.

It’s hard to say if this constitutes being the supermen of Nietszche or not. I think he would wish us to be more intentional, to properly face killing our gods and living with the consequences, to realize what it means, and then find a new way to live in whatever universe we find ourselves in. I think he would see post-modernism as the failure of the whole project, a failure to come up with a new life that results in the worship of a reanimated corpse puppet of God. I don’t think acting like God is dead so we can do what we want but needing to pretend like God isn’t dead so we can keep living our lives because we can’t survive otherwise really constitutes the victory of the overman. It’s a rather bloodless parody. And it’s hard to see it surviving long in the face of more red blooded philosophies that actually accept what they believe and have some conviction and are willing to submit themselves to their god, whether nature or supernature. Still, I could be wrong. Perhaps post-modernism is really the best of both worlds.

I do think I misunderstood Kierkegaard, or perhaps he was misrepresented to me. His ideas about nihilism as being essentially unavoidable and faith as the bridge the takes you beyond it once struck me ad very post-modern, in a bad way. Wishful thinking. Willful irrationality. But I think he was really just making a point about the nature of reality and human life. In life, you can’t escape the threat of nihilism, if you live long enough. Eventually you’ll see things that challenge the structures upon which your sane concepts of the universe are built, eventually you’ll find them tested and not be able to directly prove that you’re correct. You can’t really prove, in the best way, that you or anyone exists, that your life means anything, that goodness is goodness or beauty is beauty or that life really amounts to anything or is intelligible. It’s just not possible.

We’re not gods, so we can’t observe the world except from the tiny limited corner of our life and mind. And that corner itself is always changing and lacks permanence. We don’t have access to the viewpoint that will let us see where our consciousness exists, where our ideas exist, where meaning exists, where nature and supernature touch. The Bible is quite clear that no one has seen God. No one has seen Plato’s forms. No one has seen the laws of logic. No one has seen a mind. We’ve seen a brain, we’ve experienced a mind by encountering it with our own. But we haven’t seen a mind. And we never will. They don’t exist in the same sense, in the same nature. I think Kierkegaard is just admitting this fact.

So how do we bridge the gap between what is seen and unseen? And his answer is: faith. Not irrational faith, because we do experience all these things, specifically in the realm of the mind and our actual existential experience. They rule and define our experience of existence as much or even more than our actual material existence, because it is only by them that we become aware of and learn about our material existence. But we cannot see them. Having used them to learn about our material existence, we become convinced that our existential experience is, in fact, dependent on our material existence, that it is ontologically prior if not epistemologically prior.

And we wonder, since the mind does not seem to exist, strictly, within the material, whether it exists at all or is not just some curious byproduct, an illusion. And we have no good way to prove that it isn’t. Because those things can’t be seen. So the question is, do we have confidence in what we cannot see? If we don’t, what then can we have confidence in, if what we cannot see is ultimately all we have and are? I cannot see myself or my knowledge and understanding except by my inner eye.

It’s quite a pickle. Kierkegaard, as well in their own way some existentialists, have characterized the solution as a leap, or a turn toward. We cannot make the bridging of the gap necessary, inevitable, easy, a non-problem, because we cannot make the unseen seen. How then shall we trust any of the products of our consciousness? How shall we know whether we are any different from a madman, seeing ghosts and demons, inventing strange logics, and inhabiting an imaginary world? How are our ghosts and hauntings any different if they do no exist in the “real” world? How shall we sufficiently prove to ourselves the reality of any of the things upon which our sanity and happiness and meaning depend?

Kierkegaard and various existentialists try to offer some hope (being human and so cravenly unwilling to let go of such things). I have to take the argument of many existentialists as essentially being that we can fool ourselves into believing life is meaningful (and this is the postmodernist’s hope also). No, there is no meaning or purpose or sense in anything, but we can find and invent it even if it isn’t. It won’t be Meaning, but it might be meaning. And if you can just content yourself that that’s all there ever was (a private, temporary illusion to sustain a fragile, mortal creature through the burden of its conscious existence), then maybe you’ll feel fine about it.

I don’t think Kierkegaard is so skeptical, though. I think he does think that meaning is real, supernature is real, but because it can’t be seen we can’t resolve the question of its existence and nature the same way we would if it were something that could be plainly seen. We can approach it, experience it, theorize about it, deduce, question. But ultimately, it’s a thing that is unseen, so we must approach it by faith, by aligning our choice and confidence in how we approach life in alignment with it, trusting that it is, in fact, real and determinate of our existence. We really can’t prove we’re not a brain in a jar or living in a hologram or in a diabolical Cartesian illusion. I can’t even prove that 2+2=4 in a purely material sense (which is truly problematic). I don’t even understand and can’t see how I get from one moment to the next, how I proceed through time. But I do. And, as Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. Or at least seem to be. And he meant it in a purely non-material sense.

So faith, according the Keirkegaard, is something we all have and engage in constantly, whether we do so consciously or not. His experience of faith is simply that of faith that has become conscious, that has met its test and challenge and decided to endure in spite of that challenge.

Possibly the greatest challenge to regaining faith in our postmodern world is our own unwillingness to lose it.

Given something worthwhile to live for and die for, the war boy Nox showed how who he was and what he was willing to do could be used for good, to protect and preserve and sacrifice for others, even Max. The kindness and beauty (holistically, an asthetic vision of goodness and purity and life) of the wives inspired him, helped him see a better idea of being than he knew or had. And he was willing to give himself up for it.

Furiosa and Max were both characters who used their strength and ruthlessness to survive. They pursued their own survival and their own good, forgetting others. But they were both haunted by their choices and their failures and had failed to find peace or satisfaction in mere survival. Their strength wasn’t serving life or hope, it was only furthering their own pain and the pain of others, in many ways.

Immortan Joe was an awful villain because he aligned everyone and everything around him as his possessions and exploited them purely for his own gain. Nothing was of value except insofar as it gave value to him. The mothers, the wives, the warboys, the rabble. Even Nox’s failed attempt to repeatedly give his life for Joe only merited a dismissive “Mediocre” from Joe. He made himself god. The whole universe was just there was his personal pleasure and gain. And he violated the fundamental rule of virtuous masculinity. That strength isn’t for yourself, it is for others. He used his strength for himself, and used the strength of others for himself. He made the whole world a nightmare by subverting the purpose and true power of strength.

In their own ways, Max and Furiosa, in a similarly harsh world, made a similar choice. Being very strong, they used their strength for themselves (though they didn’t seek to devour and use the strength of others too). But then they had a change of heart and both sought redemption. They decided to use their strength to help and protect and serve others. And suddenly the world started working again, and their souls started to come back to life again. They started to understand what their strength was for. Not for devouring, like Joe, not for mere survival, like in their past lives, but for the help and protection and betterment of others.

Immortan Joe’s world was a terrible one because it reduced all humanity to mere property. Men, women, children, everything. Everything was property to him. He never gave anything, only took. Even his giving was a way to take, to enslave, as he did with the water and the rabble. Even his blessing on the deaths of the war boys was a way to take from them, a way to make them die for his uncaring pleasure and benefit. His giving of luxuries and safety, food and water, to his wives was a way to take from them. In all these cases, he trapped people by offering them things they needed, not as a gift, not as generosity, not at his own expense, but purely for himself, purely as a way to control them and make them depend on him without admitting any need or debt of his own. He never had to give up anything of himself. And that’s a terrible perversion of human relationships.

And it can’t be solved simply by evening the scales and saying no one will give, everyone will be a taker. Everyone will be like Joe: close-fisted, never risking anything, never giving up anything, all of us equally independent little gods. Even if it could work, somehow, all these competing independent citadels, it would not make us safe, or good, or happy. We don’t need to all become Joe, mutual exploiters.

What changed things was when people were willing to give. That’s what perverts possession, not being willing to also be possessed, to also give yourself completely. You cannot possess someone by force without subverting your own nature and the nature and dignity of humanity. But we can give ourselves willing to and for one another. Love cannot be safe, it cannot only be about taking or receiving. It isn’t love unless you are giving. And sometimes a little giving can start to change someone, as it did with Nox. Just a little love, a little kindness, a little mercy, a little risk, a little understanding, and he saw the vision, and he was ready to give his everything for it.

There are many ways you could understand Fury Road. The triumph of the weak over the strong. The triumph of the mothers and women over the men and boys. The triumph of civilization over barbarism. But all of these are somehow inadequate or wrong. Deep consideration reveals the truth to be more complex, less reductive. I think if I had to sum it up to characterize the movie, it is the triumph of love over selfishness.

The wives didn’t win simply by becoming killers themselves. Max and Furiosa still used their strength to achieve victory. Nox still used his devotion to a vision to empower his strength for sacrifice at the end as much as at the beginning. The bad men were defeated, but not all the men were evil. The examples of Max and Nox show that even some very dangerous ones could become heroes. Good strength overcame bad strength. Love overcame selfishness. Courage overcame fear. Cruelty and callousness became care and protection. The world needed Max and Furiosa to be dangerous, but dangerous to evil, not merely dispassionate or dangerous to whatever got in their own way.

In their unwillingness to kill for no reason and their desire to see a better world realized, the wives were in many ways the most dangerous of all. They represented a vision for a different kind of world, a different kind of relationship. One that wasn’t based on ruthlessness and selfishness and exploitation and cruelty and callousness and ugliness. Furiosa was willing to risk everything for that vision, then Max too, then Nox.

The wives didn’t merely defeat or destroy their enemies, they turned them into a different kind of person, brought them into their world. Yes, because of what the world was, they still needed dangerous people like Furiosa and Max and Nox. But they didn’t become like them, they changed them. They saved the dangerous people as much as the dangerous people saved them. They made them wish to be good.

So then life is defined by purpose and goal. And for the small portion of it that is able to observe itself consciously, we call our awareness of our understanding or fulfillment of that purpose meaning. A purely reductive, materialistic view of the universe essentially defines life out of existence by exounging the concepts of goals, purpose, and meaning from the universe. Such an act is antithetical to the nature of life. It is life-destroying. We cannot survive and function in such a universe. And yet we are, we do live, we do function. And by our very existence defy the dead world of materialism.

However you conceive the connection between materials and the non material, it does exist, and the content of intelligence is observable by other intelligent, purposeful agents. My car is not a mere hunk of metal and plastic. It is designed, it has a specific use. It has things that can be done to it to improve or degrade its ability to serve that purpose. On a purely physical level it is just a hunk of metal and plastic. But it’s not merely that. It’s not reducible to that. It’s efficacy in fulfilling its function proves that. And the more intelligently something is designed, the more carefully the materials are ordered according to their purpose, the more wholly they inhabit the form of their teleology, the more powerful a tool toward that end they become. A rock makes a crude hammer. A carefully selected rock a better one. A shaped rock with a handle an even better one. A metal hammer even better. A metal hammer with a comfy leather grip even better than that. And then we get into more powerful expansions of the concept, such a hammer drills, jackhammers, and all that. The bigger the idea and purpose becomes, and the more the materials can be made to embody and follow it.

One of the curious facts of such purpose animating material in a life form is that they don’t exist in isolation. Our ability to imprint our purposes into other objects, essentially infusing them with a purpose from within ourselves is fairly well known. But other creatures do it all the time. We exist in a web of purpose and goals, some independent, some harmonic, some competitive. Even eating is an imposition of our goals onto something else. The prey becomes the food of the predator, and it’s own goals are overridden in favor of the predator’s stronger ability to enforce their purposes on their surroundings.

One of the most interesting things humans have done is to breed plants and animals for our own use and purposes. We’re not entirely unique in this way. There are farmer ants and shepherd ants and warrior ants and enslaving ants and ants that use the constructions of other creatures for their own use. There’s nothing terribly natural about corn or wheat. We’ve been infusing them with our purpose, changing them into technological objects, for thousands of years and generations. Our crops of objects of immense technological effort, immense design and refinement to make them what we wanted them to be. Domesticated animals are much the same. We created all kinds of different dogs for our various needs and purposes. We used the best raw material we could find, which happened to be wolves, but we made dogs. We created them. And we’re still creating them, making new things from the material. As I said, many animals and even insects can and do do this, but none so deliberately and consciously and effectively as us. We are aware of our purposes, and are able to evaluate the characteristics and purposes of other creatures (not just unliving matter), and we can capitalize on that understanding to accomplish in mere moments of time what might take another species eons. That understanding is what gives us our immense power and success above and beyond anything else on earth.

Authentic morality, art, and philosophy all seek a a connection to something higher and greater and more perfect than yourself.

False religion and false art are quite similar. They concern themselves more with themselves, and seeking the approval and regard of others, than any actual search for higher truth or beauty. A vain appreciator of art buys only those thing which it is trendy and status enhancing to buy. A vain philosopher seeks to believe and restate those things that will gain them praise and acclaim and make them seem clever and refined and current. Virtue signaling, whether the old fashioned religious kind or the modern political kind, is the all the same brand of colorful, feathery display. It is aimed toward the feeling of self righteousness and the appearance of righteousness relative to the masses. All such pursuits are at heart pursuits of your own value or the value of how you appear to others.

That is why the face of religious pretension and false piety and that of artistic pretension seem to similar to us. They are substantially the same thing.

Still, false religion and false art and bad philosophy still carry the weight of truth and justice and beauty seeking, and have a real relation to it. They aren’t an absence of truth or justice, merely a subversion of it. The content may even be good content, the right content. And others finding the results hollow or self serving may even be deceived about the content, thinking that it too was vain, and not merely it’s supplicant. Many works of great beauty and truth have been maligned by how poorly their adherents wore them. As humans, we find stories, the living out of an idea, much more convincing and relatable than mere data or arguments. Unfortunately that tendency to find story so convincing leads very easily into distortion, when the primary way we corrupt truth, beauty, and goodness is to make them about ourselves. So when we fall, when the illusion we project falls, or when our selfish pursuit eventually yields bad ends, our truth falls, our art, our ethic. Because we made it too much about us.

Wise art seeks the good that we do not possess. It reverences something beyond itself that it discovers. It is more like a new country we have found than a society we have built. So when we inevitably fail in life or, even standing, die, it does not die with us. We lived in it, not it in us.

That is why it is so important that righteousness is not a heritable condition, but a choice. Beauty, goodness, and truth are not birthrights. They are allegiances. They are a recognition of something greater. They are a fidelity, a covenant.

Our instinctual fidelity is to ourselves and our own godhood, definitive of goodness, truth, and beauty. We define them by ourselves, by our desires and needs, as children. And we will always see and experience them through the lens of our own individuality, our tastes and our sensitivities, our capabilities, our limitations. The skill is in learning to find the transcendent through the particular. It doesn’t matter what bit of the particular you’re attuned to. If there is truly anything greater than yourself out there to be found, you should be able to come nearer to it from any point. All paths should eventually draw closer as they near the whole that is greater than all perspective. But the nearer we seek to draw, the more willing and able to see beyond our own perspective and limitations we will have to be have to be. And for some that journey will be too arduous.

Of course, if there is no greater conception than that which you privately hold and are born with, then there’s no journey to take, and little value in seeking it. Cooperation and clustering with nearer paths to advance our own agenda and avoidance or elimination of more distant paths to protect our agenda will be the limit of our collaboration. It would be naive to hope for much more from bare nature.

If supernature existed and had broad claims upon us, regardless of our differences, there could be a case for broader cooperation. But if it does not, then our alliances and peace exist only as long as we can either maintain the illusion in our imaginations that there is some higher authority we and other must submit to, or as long as it takes for people to realize its no longer in their benefit to cooperate. And, barring forceful restrictions of law that impose as if there was an incumbent supernature, most people would find that limit much sooner than you would expect. One has only to look at how many average people are willing to cheat on their taxes or their partners or in their driving to realize how quick we are to seize the opportunity to violate higher values we have supposedly submitted to the moment it seems we might benefit from disposing of them.

In a civilization, this is why you see decadence invading across all levels of art, law, and thought. The three aren’t divisible, though one may hangon longer or lead the pack downward or upward. Great art can inspire and guide and be the fire behind a growing civilization, bad art can be the bellwether of its demise. In the great, visionary minds that either guide or warn civilizations, often they will create something in the dimension closest to their own heart and talents and strengthen them, and it has effects across all dimensions. As artistic people are made good they communicate that goodness and the longing for unity and enlightenment in their art. Good guards of justice will see the vision of beauty and try to realize it in their laws. Great thinkers will see the goodness of just conduct and laws and the power and majesty of art and beauty and seek to understand and explain it.

No one person, or single society, can hope to find and achieve perfection in their own time. But the same great truths get expressed in new ways and lift civilizations up into a more perfect form. And great lies recur and degrade order and beauty as well.

Considering the past, I’m largely filled with horror and regret and disappointment. Considering the future, I don’t expect anything better, and if I spend any time thinking about it the mere act of contemplation is so sickening and terrifying that I would rather imagine my life ceasing to exist. My greatest hope is to just not kill myself and be perfectly miserable and dysfunctional now, today. To keep living and be able to live with my existence.

I suppose that’s a pretty extreme emotional stance to take. But I wonder if a lot of people aren’t actually doing exactly that. Just trying to live with themselves and be somewhat happy in the moment and make it through today. I just allow myself to face and conceptualize it unusually clearly because I don’t allow myself the comforts of drugs, alcohol, or any other major numbing or distracting vices. And I’ve always been a bit more willing to look distressing ideas in the face (mentally, if not in life).

I can’t really think about where my marriage is going, or our country, or our church, or my life in any of its dimensions, because all my own thoughts and feelings are too awful and depressing to consider. The tolerability of life often seems like an illusion you’re just hoping to enjoy until the day it finally comes crashing down. Eventually it will. Disaster will come on slowly or suddenly. You just hope to forget about that and have an ok time in the now. Life, in all its dimensions, or my life at least, seems like a mirage I’m hoping will last as long as possible, a shiny bubble that will one day pop and reveal its substance was mere illusion.

It goes without saying that I see a lot of appeal in existentialism. I find it terribly convincing. It’s hard to form any kind of workable approach to life that isn’t completely arbitrary though, and terribly disheartening and dishonest.

So I never know how to answer the sort of questions my wife asks me, because they’re all predicated on the assumption that I’m doing something other than hanging on to life and sanity by my bare fingernails. That I’m not on the edge of complete nervous collapse. That I have any hope or efficacy or happiness left in me. That I think our country or church or marriage or my life is anything but a momentary illusion of stability that’s heading toward inevitable destruction, chaos, and dissolution.

Depression is difficult to quantify, because it’s fundamentally a reaction to a perception. And we label it as pathological either because it’s harming us, or because it’s not accurate to the real facts. But that’s a tricky thing to evaluate. Depression can often be the correct response to the things that have happened to some people. It’s an accurate marker of the kind of distress someone should feel given what they’ve gone through. So it’s hard for me to say whether my thoughts and feelings are what they are because I’m depressed, and that’s how depressed people think, or whether my thoughts and feelings are in fact quite appropriate for what I think and know and have experienced. Quite possibly, my evaluation of the underlying situations is factually accurate. It may not be exhaustively accurate, but I have some pretty good reasons for thinking what I think. I didn’t get to them based on my natural prejudice, I got there reluctantly, based on what I saw and learned and concluded. And other intellectuals have concluded similarly to myself.

Lord Byron said “Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.”

Bertrand Russell said, in a long, eloquent passage on materialism and existentialism, “Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

Solomon said, “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.”

Hemingway said, “Happiness among intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

I’m not saying that just because these famously depressed smart people said these things (and this is a cherry picked sample, not a random one) that they’re necessarily true or right. As a smart person, it’s easy to organize the evidence behind your theory. To me, my depression and fear seem quite understandable, quite reasonable, completely justified. But I could be wrong. It certainly doesn’t make me happy if I’m right. I certainly don’t wish to be right. I’ve just been unfortunately proved right again and again. And being right about things you wish you weren’t right about can be pretty depressing.

Lately I’ve been trying to to think, not to use that part of my brain that gets into those subjects. Because my intellectual mind gets my feelings so depressed, I’ve been trying not to use it. I’ve been keeping my eyes closer to home. I’ve been coming and cleaning. Doing things for my wife and kids. And that’s all great. I can’t help but feel that I am avoiding some things though maybe even some things that I should be confronting in my life. But some of the best advice I’ve been given, as someone struggling with depression, is to set my sights as low as I need and work on that. Build up strength, build up confidence, create a pattern of repeatable successes. And chip away at life and build myself up until I can lift the heavier loads I had to give up.

My kids have been what’s gotten me through it all. My youngest especially. I think because her needs and desires are so simple. Not a lot of complex talking or explaining. Just love and play and care and a bit of guidance. She’s only six. And her world is small enough for me to control and improve and make a good place. I’m still big enough to be really big in her world. And that makes me feel good. And she’s so affectionate and appreciative and trusting. Comforting her after a nightmare, wrestling with her, tickling her, holding her, pretending to be animals with her, reading to her, all these things impact her in such a big way. It’s not possible to overstate what that has meant to me. It’s kept me sane, kept me alive.

Sometimes I wish I could just make the world smaller. Let go of and get away from all the big complex relationships and responsibilities and endeavors in life and just narrow everything down to just me and my kids and taking care of them. I feel like I could be happy doing just that. But I don’t know, I don’t think it would be good for them; I don’t think it would make them happy. It’s a selfish thought, and would be about fulfilling and protecting myself. So I sacrifice for them and decide to keep living and moving forward in the world for their sake. I don’t really want to, but they force me to contend with the world, if I want to make it better for them.

Sometimes I wish it would all just come down. That my business would just be taken away and ended, that my wife would leave me, that my family would write me off, that the country would descend into chaos, that the church would just collapse, that it would all just be over so I wouldn’t have to worry about it or carry it or dread the future any more. To just have an end to it all would be a relief, in a way. To have the prophecies come true.

I suppose, like a doomsday prophet, I feel that temptation to wish for the end of the world. Not to fear it, even though you know it’s fearful, but to wish for it. That is desire it. To just see it done and fulfilled so the anticipation can be over. So much of pleasure and of fear is in the anticipation. And sometimes you wish for the simplicity of the actual arrival. Then, in that crisis of passion or pain, you only have to deal with the present. I know that to wish for pain and ruin and instability and chaos is bad, so it’s an instinct I try to fight. And it’s an end I fear more than anything, that paralyzes and depresses me enormously, so how could I desire it? Maybe I just desire an end to the pain, or to the pain of anticipation. But I know, deep down, that that wouldn’t be the end of the pain, but a new beginning. And so I resist the urge to hasten the day.

Considering how much time I’ve spent being afraid and depressed and thinking about self harm and suicide, why don’t I ever take any steps to end my pain, either negatively or positively? If it’s really that bad, wouldn’t it be worth trying to make things better and confront the problems, rather than hide from them in the moment or hide from them in extinction? Surely that’s a better option? I’m pretty sure even Tom Hank in Joe Vs the Volcano made that argument.

Together, they’re hydrophobic (they resist the universal solvent, water) and have one of lowest friction coefficients of any solid. Teflon is often used as a coating for containers that hold hazardous chemical because it’s so non-reactive. Even strong, corrosive chemicals will just pass right through. The bond between carbon and fluorine is so strong and inseparable that they just won’t come apart to react with anything else. Teflon even helps prevent infections in hospitals; because it prevents bacteria from getting a grip on medical devices coated in it. Insects can’t get a grip on it. They use it in the seals on atomic bombs, it’s so perfectly resistant to damage, corrosion, and friction. It’s the only known surface to which a gecko cannot stick!

The components of Teflon are so attracted and fused to one another, in fact, the hardest problem to solve is how to get it to stick to something you want to use it on. In order to be useful, you have to attach it to something with structure, and this is usually done in kitchen pans with intense heat. The heat helps fuse it to the primed substrate, and you get a Teflon pan. Once it’s stuck there, everything that touches it can just be scraped off or will slide off. It’s been to outer and inner space, it’s used by NASA and in medical implants. It can be used to safely handle the most dangerous of chemicals. It can go anywhere because of its amazing bond between its paired elements that allows it to shrug off all other intrusions.

It’s not invincible though. It can be chipped away at. It can be damaged by a scratch, creating a weak point between the components and the underlying structure that holds them (the pan). Bit by bit it will flake off and degrade until there’s nothing left. The intense heat that was used to bind the Teflon to its foundation can also be used to destabilize that bond and slowly boil it away.

Do you have a Teflon relationship? Is the bond between you and your partner so strong that it protects and strengthens you both and helps the sticky situations of life slide off you? Are the two of you connected to your foundation, your marriage, in a way that makes your partnership useful? Do you have any wounds in your relationship, any weak points that might start to chip away at your bond? Are you allowing your relationship to be exposed to dangerous heat that might start to break it down? What would it take to change your relationship to a Teflon bond? How can you give more energy, direct more attraction, bend the bonds closer and tighter, connect to a larger chain and structure that strengthens the whole?

Life is often pleasant, but it’s full of sticky substances, corrosive situations, dangerous ventures, and malevolent diseases. At some point, you’re going to find yourself among them. Whether your bond will survive them, in those moments, will depend a lot on what kind of connection you built. And maybe you want to be able to do more than just survive. Maybe you want to be strong enough to enter the dangerous situations and be useful. You’ll need resilience to do that. Maybe it’s worth asking whether your inability to be useful, whether your fragility, has any basis in the strength of your bond to your spouse (or lack of it). Are you giving your attraction to one another? Are you giving your energy? What might you become together if you really were?

The stability and usefulness of Teflon far outstrips the properties of the individual substances that make it up. It’s power arise from their interaction and interdependence. They make each other stronger. People are like that. A good draft horse can pull up to 6000 pounds. That’s a huge amount, far more than it weighs. But a pair of draft horses can’t pull twice as much together. They can pull three times as much. And if they’re trained to pull together, if they’re experienced working together, they can pull four times as much. 24,000 pounds. Enormously more than their own weight! A particular pair of famous Shire horses are recorded as having pulled a load of logs weighing 100,000 pounds. However much they’ve pulled, under what conditions, the principle holds. And it’s scalability. The impact of a properly bonded and trained pair on the world is far outsized to their own individual strength.

— Notes for Further Reading (for the hardcore)

In fact the molecules undergo something called hyperconjugation, which isn’t easy to explain but essentially involves the sharing of electrons across the molecule, between the atoms, attenuating the charge and increasing stability and making the bond stronger. Their ability to share energy, their unique charges, across their bond allows them to become a closer, stronger, more stable whole. The electrons are given by one component, they travel out to the other side and back, the other side accepts them, and in the exchange its own energy orbitals are drawn back toward the other side, closer and closer, becoming more and more stable, literally bending their atomic bonds toward one another.

On their own carbon and fluorine are fairly reactive, but together they become almost impervious. The way they give and receive is perfectly matched. Carbon really likes to form bonds with other little atoms, which is why it’s the basis of all life. It’s very happy to get together in lots of little structures with other carbon atoms and other similar atoms and form connections. Fluorine is the most reactive halogen gas, it’s extremely electronegative, meaning it’s hungry for electrons and will react with almost anything to get them. Put them together and you get something with the structure of carbon held together by the intensity of fluorine.

The carbon electrons are shared with the fluorine and mostly hang out there, but they still belong to the carbon structure, and the whole construction pulls in closer and closer. The fluorine becomes so attached to the carbon and its energy that it stops being able to react to anything else. And the carbon chain structure within is protected from everything by the surrounding fluorine. The structure of the carbon tames the hunger of the fluorine and uses it to pull them together instead of tearing them apart, its sharing of energy transforms the reactivity of the fluorine and protects it from the world; and the protective structure of the fluorine builds a wall around the carbon, and its hunger for the energy of the carbon pulls them closer together.

Maybe you can find yourself or your partner somewhere in this relationship. Maybe in different moments you’ll see yourself in one role or the other. The important thing to realize is that it’s the action of both that protects the other. It’s not a one sided reaction. It’s what they need and what they can give one another that makes the bond strong.

Me, it’s easier to find myself in the fluorine. I’m a bit more needy, more driven toward my wife, both physically and emotionally. I’m a pursuer. And that power, that need, is part of what pulls us together. My desire and need for her pulls me to her, and her acceptance of that pursuit draws her toward me. At the same time, it’s her willingness to share herself, her giving of her own energy and creativity and essence that fulfills my need and makes me able to handle the harsh, corrosive conditions of the world. If she wasn’t willing to share, if she was withholding or ungenerous, that pull would be frustrated and would make me more unstable and reactive with my environment.

And she does help connect me to the structures and substance of life, to relationships and endeavors. She accepts my desire for her, but it has to connect to the structure she approves and represents. She’s more conscientious and more concerned about others than I am. She helps direct and take my desire for her and uses it help connect me to the productive and connective structures of life.

In return I can use that energy and the resilience she gave me and use it to better both our lives, to protect her interests and build a wall around her. I will and can do almost anything to help and protect her. I’m more needy, but she’s a bit more fragile. And my strength can be made to serve and protect her, to strengthen her. But I didn’t get that power from myself. I got it from from us, from our interrelationship. If we didn’t each come to the table with what we have, the bond wouldn’t be able to be so strong. Our strength comes from our willingness to embrace our surrender to one another. And if we compromise and try to step away from what we contribute, that bond will weaken.

My need, my instability, my passion isn’t a liability, but it could be. In the right circumstances it’s a powerful tool. It bends those bonds closer instead of resulting in destructive connections and reactions. But if I try to preserve my emotional safety and independence by denying my pursuit, my need, or by redirecting it toward outside connections, I’ll weaken our bond. We won’t be so strong, so durable, so able to enter and escape difficult situations without having them stick to us. She won’t be pulled in return toward me.

And if she stonewalls me, if she’s ungenerous, impossible to please, unwilling to give or receive, too harsh in her judgment of the worth of investing in the connection, it will erode our bond. It won’t draw in my pursuit and use it to bind me to her, it’ll push me away. It won’t be a sufficiently close acceptance of that bond to make it effectively strong.

And if she didn’t have structure, if she didn’t maintain her standards and expectations and connections and so that something useful and complex and durable was being built, it would weaken our bond. The reaction would be consumptive rather than constructive. The carbon atom doesn’t just give up its electrons and let the fluorine go. It shares them so they can be connected, drawn closer, it uses them to link the flourine to the chain. And the bigger and more complex the chain gets, the stronger it gets, the closer the bonds between the atoms get.

Love is an almost terrifying admission of weakness. It’s an admission that we lack something, that it’s not good for us to be alone. It’s an admission that the other person has something we need. But if we admit that they have something that we need, we’re forced to admit our own limitations and the fact that there are things we are missing. We’re not independent, self-creative, self-sufficient, infinite and complete. We’re missing out on something by lacking what the other person provides.

That’s a truly terrifying thought, an immense threat to our autonomy and happiness. There is something we need, and possessing it is not in our direct control. Instead, it’s in the hands of the other. An entirely different and strange creature. Someone quite different from ourselves, however much we comfort ourselves and idealize our partner by imagining them as a mere mirror image, a reflection of our own desires and preferences.

When love truly becomes love is when it finally loses those illusions and recognizes the true differences of the other person…and decides to accept them and desire them in spite of them, or even because of them. Puppy love is a naive love. But true love takes something chancy, something naive, and transforms it into something enduring, something wise and aware, something that, instead of being defined by the world and by chance, begins to order and organize the world around it.

It takes chemistry and converts it into life, into something growing and evolving and taking on purpose and drawing other things and relationships and people into its purpose. It takes a random moment, a meeting, a feeling, an attraction, a perception, and turns it into something that feels like destiny in retrospect. The story of our lives, an unremovable part of the meaning of life, part of who we are.

Death is the dissolution of purpose and order, the return of chaos to erase order and meaning. Love is the action of life: taking the chance interactions, the chaos, and transforming them, using them to build something with purpose and endurance, creation. Love creates new life, new order, new purpose, a new destiny and identity out of a mere moment of chance and the combinations of chemistry. Psychologically, but also literally. Love is stronger than death. Not because of some obscure emotional logic or arcane symbolism. Because of its very nature, because of what it is and what it does.

Love is the animus of life, the spirit of creation, the love of particularity, the desire for being, the I that finds its I-ness in discovering you. Love cannot help but create more life, more meaning, more purpose, more organization. It’s the organizing principle of the ultimate universal conception of life itself. God is love.

Afterword:

There was a particular writer who described his own identity in terms of love, as “the disciple whom Jesus loved”. And he had an immense amount to say on the subject of love (including that final quote). He even called his readers his beloved. And you can get into all the technicalities of the different areas where love plays out and how it operates differently in those arenas (family, friendship, country, art, erotic, spiritual, social). But it all ultimately flows from the necessary principle. God is love. Unless we are to deny life itself (God himself, the essence of life), we must love. Therefore we must love one another. You’ve never seen God. But when you love, God lives within you.

John wasn’t throwing out some crazy, feel good, hippy talk. He was drawing some necessary philosophical conclusions from what Jesus had taught him about life and about God. He suddenly could see what the essence of God was, and what that meant for us. God, through Moses and the prophets, had been trying to explain that concept for a long time, by demonstrating it with a single family that grew into a nation. And it was like pulling teeth or trying to love a two year old. It didn’t always go well. And it wasn’t a perfect revelation, not a complete one. It was like seeing God’s back, basically (to borrow from the theophany of Moses).

Seeing what Jesus did was like seeing God’s face. Suddenly, shockingly, John understood the nature of God in a way he never had before. God’s love was made manifest to him. And he realized, if I want to be part of that life, to have that life in me, then I have to love as he loves, because that’s what the nature of God and life is: love. And Paul had a similar revelation. Paul was a scholar, a brilliant student and leader and teacher and academic. And he wrote very passionately (probably because it spoke to his own deepest weaknesses and mistakes) about how it didn’t matter how smart of how great a speaker someone was, how brilliant or perfect they were. If they didn’t have love, they had nothing. They didn’t have God in them.

This rift gets more clear when people are sorted and separated by their exposure (or lack of exposure) to those influences. So college educated people have been exposed far more than non-college educated. Rural populations, which tend to be more homogenous and change much slower, because there isn’t any big reason for newcomers to pour in (often the opposite) are less exposed. Even the tendency to spend more time consuming media in an urban environment is a potential factor.

It’s a bit like how capitalism conquered the soviet union. Not by force, but by attrition. Eventually we built a McDonald’s in Red Square, and that was it. Socialism didn’t die, but it did change tactics and expressions. It hybridized itself a bit. And now that the memory of the reality of it as a competing civilization ethic is largely forgotten, it’s making a comeback, in a new, hip cultural form.

Our species is only that both loves and hates virtue. We love it for the value we perceive in it, the beauty and goodness and truth of it, and we desire it when we have grasped it. But having grasped it, we often are quite at a loss of how to use it properly. We love the feeling of virtue, but are often reluctant to embrace its substance, which is often painful and asks us to criticize and sacrifice parts of ourself. We would much rather have the feeling of virtue without suffering the pain and effort of it. And so our first instrinct is to wield it as a club for others, rather than a discipline for ourselves. How many of us, reading and recognizing some moral truth or bit of advice, some conviction, find ourselves thinking “Yes, people do do this! I need to tell so and so about it so they can follow this and make a change!”

How many of us, reading a bit of scripture (or whatever passes for it in our circles), recognize immediately the bits that condemn the wrongs and hurts we have experienced and sieze them and use them to slap people upside the head and say, “See, it says here you shouldn’t do that! You should be this way instead! Feel bad about what you’re doing!” We feel the justification of our own outrage, and all the conviction is directed against someone else.

Much like children, whose first instinct is to take any correction given to them by their parents and pass it on to their siblings, we must remind ourselves, as them, “No, that wasn’t for them. It was for you.” That verse about being greedy wasn’t intended as ammunition for you to use to criticize your neighbor, it was to help you criticize yourself. Outrage is the currency of the law without conviction, and conviction is the prison of virtue without outrage.

The prophecies of punishment and destruction if Israel didn’t stop ignoring their poor and helpless weren’t for their neighbors, it was for them. That letter about how husbands should treat their wives wasn’t for wives to use against their husbands; it was for husbands to use to better themselves. Whenever we seek to sieze the content of virtue for our own ends and make justice a state of affairs purely outside us, we subvert it and convert it, slowly but surely, to tyranny. We forget what the good was that virtue was seeking and become enamored with the rules and outward signs the violations and outrages and forget what the object all this fury was (for justice/virtue exists primarily within ourselves, and its presence in the world is essentially an outgrowth of the virtue or lack of it within individuals, or relationships between individuals; it makes no sense to talk of justice or virtue absent the foundation of the individual, all other modes of its existence are merely superconstructions of individual justice and virtue, or injustice and vice). Social justice that is not founded on the concept of individual virtue is incoherent because society is nothing and exists nowhere except in the beings of and relations between the individuals that possess and enact and delineate and embody that virtue.

There’s no such thing as justice among rocks, no matter how many rocks you get together. There is no sense in the idea of a healthy society absent the health of the individuals who make up that society. An ecosystem that contains no life cannot coherently be described as healthy or growing, because it doesn’t exist; it only exists in the content of life itself. The societies of man are only sensibly described as just or unjust insofar as the people who make them up are themselves cruel and selfish or generous and humble.

And you cannot produce virtue through external force alone, you can only limit the destructive power and influence of injustice. That itself may create conditions conducive to the development of virtue, but the power of the state is in forcible compulsion, in punishment, which is external. Unless someone willingly takes it into themselves, it cannot make them good or beautiful. It can only restrict their ability to enact ugliness and evil on others. That is why a good man or women cannot be harmed by the actions of an unjust society upon them, as Socrates argued. He might be made to suffer evil, but he cannot be made to become it.

Similarly, we might be able to protect goodness, or even show it to someone who is truly malevolent, but unless they choose to take it within themselves, we cannot force them externally to become good. The law has the power to reveal identity, it does not have the power to compel identification, if you will not submit internally to its claims upon your person. If you will not submit, you only pay lip service. Your heart is unchanged. Jesus argued this point strenuously against the Pharisees, as well as well as the point of a Socrates. The Pharisees complained that his followers weren’t showing respect to the traditions of cleanness and uncleanness (hand washing rituals of symbolic value), that they were blowing it on virtue by failing to display the proper signs of it. And Jesus argued back that they were the ones who were denying virtue, because they acted selfishly and proudly and put all their value in the fulfillment of external lip service while ignoring the heart and point of what those rituals were meant to convict us to change about ourselves.

“This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”

And he called the people to him and said to them, “Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” Then the disciples came and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?… Explain the parable to us.”

And he said, “Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart comes all evil. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.”

Virtue that is not internalized is meaningless. Evil that is not internalized is powerless.

When the power of virtue and justice is located primarily in the power of the mob, when the biggest questions were asking are “Who should we be shunning? What should we be outraged about? How am I displaying my righteousness?” we are being like the Pharisees. And we will not achieve the ends that justice and the law and knowledge of sin were directed toward. We will forget the good we sought and only remember the judgment, the tyranny. Because there’s no shortage of imperfection and dishonesty and disease in the human soul. There is no limit to how much we could find, how many people or groups or actions we could condemn and feed our outrage and self righteousness with. The real question is, what corner will be left safe for any of us to stand on if that is the approach we take to justice, to find it only in signs of external perfection and in the ruthless vengeance of authority upon the recreant?

In situations such as that, the judged won’t see or internalize the validity of the claims made against them, because they are being hypocritically ignored by those who level them. Those people are not vulnerable to judgment. They get to wield it as a weapon without fear. It doesn’t apply to them or transcend them, it belong to them. So they gave denied the true universality of the claims. They are really just claims of one against another. They are merely rights, claims against the actions of another, with no attendant responsibilities. So it’s really just a struggle of you against me, your weapon against mine. So I’ll bring my own weapon against you that affirms me and judges you. And we’ll carefully beat one another to death.

I’m reminded, oddly enough, of the wisdom of Avatar: The Last Airbender, when Uncle Iro refuses to use his power (which is probably comparable, under the comet) to defeat the Firelord. When asked why he can’t defeat his brother, he says that he must not. Because if he does, it will merely be seen as an internal struggle for power, one brother overthrowing another. The true victor must be something greater, something that represents a transcendent justice, not the mere victory of man over man. Only the Avatar can be safely allowed to defeat the firelord and hope to end in peace and reconciliation, a justice that all sides can agree to and recognize and not abuse for vengeance or false virtue.

Of course, in our own world, we don’t have an Avatar. So we’re always flirting with danger every time we seek justice on one another. We aren’t God, so our justice won’t be perfectly impartial or selfless or necessary. The closest we can come to becoming the Avatar is in our willingness to submit ourselves to the same judgment by which we judge, to wielding only that sword that we are willing to lay our own necks under. Only in our consistency, in our willingness to apply our law first to ourselves, in our recognition of ourselves as first among the condemned, can we hope to safely wield the sword of justice. Thus the warning, judge not lest ye be judged, that I referenced earlier. “For with the judgment that you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

I do not think the” judge not” comment is a flat prosciption, for we are called daily to make judgments, and in fact this passage is an explanation of the very process I have just laid out of how we should best learn to be able to make judgements. It is a warning againsttaking the power and authority of judgement as something that belongs to us rather than something above us that we all submit to equally. It is an encouragement to deal first with yourself. First find your own conviction, first accept its claims upon yourself, before you can hope to see the claims of justice on another and truly help them and truly serve justice. Judgment that only serves you cannot also serve the cause of virtue. A man cannot have two masters. One or the other is going to get shortchanged. A flame that you cannot endure will not give light or warmth to the world.

In this passage, Jesus identified the primary distortion of justice, the sign that most clearly reveals it as corrupt, useless, and most likely to end in conflict and resentment rather than virtue: hypocrisy. Nothing destroys the universal validity and compulsion of justice more than hypocrisy. Nothing affirms it and makes it more apparent than consistency (even when it hurts, even when it costs you something, even when it lowers your status and apparent perfection in the eyes of others). Nothing proves the power of justice like putting personal submission before public judgment. What greater proof could you make of its claims than to sacrifice the one thing you truly have, yourself, to its judgment? What greater surety of the safety and goodwill of that submission could you give than to take the risk yourself? People will only trust the law when they perceive that it proceeds from love. A law that is seen as the vessel of personal power will always be resented and resisted, even when it is technically just.

The examples of moral criticism I’ve picked here are from the Bible, although the issues they address are just as valid across all cultures and religions and secular philosophies. The Bible is fairly unique among ancient documents because of its willingness (often not shared by Jews or Christians) to be consistent. The faults, flaws, and failings of the greatest kings and leaders (as well as those of the Jewish people and the disciples and the early churches) are the main subject of discussion. Rather than spending much time recounting their moral successes, the ways they proved their righteousness of God’s people, the Bible makes fairly clear that they’re all a total bust in that. They’re only God’s people because he chose to love them, and the whole book is about how hard it is for them to try to live up to their own identity. The Bible presents us with a concept of virtue and justice, then explains it by dealing with the total inability of the Jews or Christians to not immediately turn it into false pride and vanity and hypocrisy.

The power of the law of the Jews is that they recognized and recorded its judgments against themselves. It didn’t belong to them, they belonged to it. And it’s a good thing, because they sucked at it. And they got super resentful whenever that fact was pointed out to them and tended to kill the people who did it. And then they wrote all that down too so they wouldn’t forget it. No sooner does Paul finish telling people something about how they should love than he has to write them a letter to tell them that they missed the point entirely and to stop going after one another; the whole point was to let God convict them, not to criticize one another and turn virtue into an internal power struggle. The Bible scores enormous marks for reliability and authenticity simply because it’s brutally honest about what actually happened every time people tried to enact a bit of justice and virtue, every time they were given a bit of knowledge and wisdom, how they subverted it to their own ends. Rather than telling the story how they wish it had happened, where they did everything right and they all became the perfect people of God once they saw the light, the whole book from end to end is about how quickly and completely they blew it and turned what was meant for their good into their misery and corruption the moment they had it.

However it’s framed, that’s the essence of history, of honesty. Telling it how it happened instead of elevating themselves and their story to the mythological and archytpical. All the best ancient literature does this. It honestly reveals a picture of ourselves we can recognize today. If there was one thing that the Jews were fully honest about and handed down to us in a way that transcends all other cultural and literary and historical and philosophical differences between us, to reach us clearly and without distortion, it was this. They were honest about themselves. Or at least tried hard to be.

Their law was a true law, a divine law, because it wasn’t just for them. It was above them. It was a law of love they struggled with, but they preserved (including their inability to follow it) because they had submitted themselves to it and taken its claims within themselves, believing it to be right and desirable and true beyond their own ability to consistently act like it was. They were hypocrites, but they were at least honest hypocrites who constantly reminded themselves they were hypocrites, which is maybe about as good as they could hope for. They didn’t admit any claims they weren’t willing to have brought against themselves, and so, for once, touched the universal. They blazed a trail, an example, we should be careful to follow. If you’re not willing to record and recognize your own sins, then you probably aren’t as full of justice and virtue as you think.

The Christian gospel of course continues this story, but with the added complexity of grace and redemption and belonging becoming permanent, individual realities, not just a fixture of ritual and symbolism at a societal level. Having illustrated in ritual and demonstrated historically the difficulties of enacting justice on a collective scale, the gospel brings it home to the individual level where it can really live and indwell (to then eventually return, fulfilled, to the world as a natural outgrowth of the love and goodness of God). Like a child growing up, we have fully internalized the nature of the law at long last, taking the goodness within ourselves rather than as mere structures of restriction and direction around us. Not as something to posses or wield, not as something we swallow or control, but as something we give ourselves to, something that takes us up into itself. Now that we gave grasped the greatness of truth, beauty, and goodness, the universality of the claims of their claims upon ourselves, and we have at last submitted our own identity as small and dishonest and ugly things and have given them to be nailed upon the cross (an act not unlike what the Jews did collectively by nailing their failures up in full view of humanity), in full view of the world, we can finally begin to be free of them. Like the Jews, we will probably never be without our failures in our day to day reality, but we at least have this hope, that we have dislocated them from our identity. By giving up our control over justice, our rights as gods and judges, and centering our approach henceforth in the knowledge that we have given ourselves over to virtue itself, we have ceased to be our own people and become the people of God. Our virtue no longer belongs to us, and so neither does our sin. And if Virtue loves us and is willing to cover over our sin, so that we may receive its full fire of knowledge within us and not be destroyed, but illuminated, then that is a victory truly worth celebrating.

Of course the record shows that people were just as quick to reenslave themselves to their former systems of judgment, just as quick to try to retake either grace or sin for themselves. But that’s just the continuation of personal honesty, of nailing ourselves up on th at cross for the world to see. It’s a difficult, dangerous task, and people are fallible. We take the greatest gifts and freedoms and try to make punishments and chains out of them. We try to make things small so they can belong to us as our private possessions. And we do it almost as fast as the gifts can be given.

If anything has puzzled or troubled me lately, it’s this fact. That so little in us seems to really change. That the Jews had learned or changed so little by the end of their journey. That they still seemed just as lost, still making the same mistakes. That individual Christians seem to suffer the same fate in their own lives. Unable to hold on to their gifts for more than a generation of thought, swift to turn away, swift to corrupt. No better than they were before. Maybe worse, because they took back with them some of the memory of the power of grace or conviction with them and still think they have it or can use it for their own ends. Where, I wonder, is this new life that was promised, this new spirit, this new covenant? Like the new covenant of the Jews (for it was new to them when it first arrived on the scene), it seems just as prone to end in disaster and be forgotten and abused as theirs. What was gained, what accomplished, what reality was really altered? Where is the proof of new life? I suppose my mistake, like before, is trying to find it in the large outward signs, the society, the movement, the show. I must look closer, at the individual heart, at the private stories. At the hidden moments of grace and goodness. If I spend all my time looking for the outward signs of weakness and failure and reasons for outrage I will never find an end of examples. Jung said that modern man cannot find God because he will not look low enough. Jesus said that this was how people would know that we were his followers: by the love that we have for one another. You have to look small and close to see love. You have to know someone and get personal. Love is patient and kind. It doesn’t envy or boast; it isn’t proud. It doesn’t dishonor others, it isn’t self-seeking. It doesn’t delight in evil. It rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. It never fails.

That description doesn’t really sound like people much to me. Maybe for a few brief moments in our lives that’s what we are. Maybe across our whole lives we manage to be some part of that. Most of us can can find much more in common in humanity with the warning that proceeded that description of love: If we speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, we are only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If we have the gifts of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if we have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, we are nothing. If we give all we possess to the poor and give over our bodies to hardship that we may boast, but do not have love, we gain nothing.

To what end is all our virtue and justice and knowledge if we don’t have love? And who among us, having read that description, can say that we do?

I would assume that the answers to this problem should lie in the concluding paragraph of that particular letter, but I’m honestly not sure what to make of them. They seem more like a vision than an explanation:

“But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

I have no idea what this means, except that I think it’s saying that what we’re seeing is just the first fruits, the stilness of spring, the signs of the thing approaching, not its fulfillment and completeness, not the thing full-grown, a reflection of reality, not the final revelation of it. Maybe it’s saying that the reality is there, but the signs are small and imperfect, and it can be hard to see the future oak in the smallness and oddness of the acorn. Maybe it’s saying that what we see now is just a symbol of what’s to come, a third new covenant; as the rituals of the first covenant were a symbol of what was to come in the second, the personal struggles of sin and absolution in the second are a symbol of what is to come in the third and final. The outer pursuit of justice leads to and points to the inner pursuits, which finally returns to the outer, fulfilling it, bringing its wholeness with it, resolving both. I understand the logical progression there. But it would be a pretty big surprise to see it actually happen, as much as the first two surprises. I don’t know. As this letter says, life is confusing and it’s hard to see the realities of the things we belive in. But these three things remain: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of them is love. Just hang onto those three things, and to love most of all, and you’ll be doing as well as you can in this life. You’re coming as close as you can to the path where justice leads to virtue.

I think my own personal sin is that it’s very easy for me to lose faith, hope, and love for others when they aren’t speaking in the tongues of men and angels. I think my wife has a harder time when they aren’t being patient and kind. It’s very very easy for me to give up on people when they disappoint me with the things they say. It’s very easy for me to get frustrated and dismissive.

So what is virtue?

Virtue is the strength that develops from learning to submit our disordered self to a higher order. Virtue is the beauty of the harmony that results when the various powerful parts of us are tamed and made to operate in balance and interconnection, toward a purpose. It is the unity of chaos and order where the power of chaos serves the meaning of order. It is when the knowledge of the past and investment in the future exist together in the wisdom of the present. It is when the unknown unconscious of the id becomes known, the puerility of the ego becomes mature, and the loftiness of superego descends to live with them as a brother. It is the state of health that is most likely to create goodness and beauty and truth in the world and in us.

Virtue is when the three lenses within us, what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful, draw close and overlap, so that what seems lovely and desirable, what is known to be true, and what seems good and useful are indistinguishable from one another and exist in a single, unified whole. Virtue is when knowledge, desire, and duty become one within us, when all the several parts of us share one desire, one understanding, one action.

Virtue is that quality that life possesses when it is flourishing, when the various disordered powers within a thing are organized and made to serve a purpose and design, a logos, when that logos permeates every cell within it and brings all into harmony to create and grow, to make more of the harmony that is within. In this sense, virtue is as much biological as it is psychological, moral, intellectual, and spiritual. In virtue, all levels of being are united, and we see the truth and purpose and growth and beauty expressed in all functions. The logos, the word, purpose, meaning, intention, function is the essence of what life is.

Virtue is the fulfillment of the essence of life, the movement away from death, from disorder, from purposelessness, from meaninglessness, from raw material and matter. Life is the submission of that raw material, that chaos, to a higher order and purpose, being drawn up into it, becoming part of it. Death is merely the dissolution of that connection, the disconnection of the parts from that purpose and goal, scattering back into the primordial chaos from which they were drawn. The logos is imposed at the physical level, the emotional level, the psychological level, the intellectual level, when life is flourishing.

In what dimension the logos truly exists, where it is ultimately located and imposed from, is unclear. Because purpose and meaning and intention exist only within a mind (even if they may be expressed and embodied at any level, as my thoughts are expressed and embodied on this page), and can only be perceived by a mind (as only a mind can understand my thoughts written on this page), it must be speculated that the fundamental nature of life, where it exists, is mind (awareness, intention, being in itself, the I, the I am).

Where such a strange thing and place could exist or come from is a complete mystery. It is the most strange thing in the universe, for it cannot be said to be part of it, strictly. The organization of my “I” may be seen making its presence known in its organizational effect upon the materials of the world, I can find that pattern of organization written into my cells, in the artifacts like this writing I produce, in my actions, in my thoughts, in my relationships, in my story. It is seen and known by I and other Is. But where and what it is, what kind of thing it is in itself, what sort of being purpose and meaning and intention are composed of, is not clear. That, I suppose, if what we mean by soul. And why we distinguish different levels of that logos at different levels of existence. The soul of matter, the particular way it behaves and is organized (though the why remains a mystery). The soul of animals, those who serve and follow a purpose they are not conscious of, the structure and design of the body and species. And there is the soul of that which knows itself and relates to its own design and speaks back to it, that seeks to understand and add to its own logos and the logos of other things. The things with a spark of creative power, that know and understand and can appreciate and manipulate that power. The little I ams. That is the third type of soul, and the strangest, for it can create a bit of meaning, a soul, out of itself and knowingly form matter (ink in a book, pieces of metal in a tool, paint on a canvas, shapes in a carved stone) to contain it.

Truth is the knowledge outside us. Desire/feeling is the knowledge within us. Duty/morality exists in the middle plane between them, where we negotiate and interpret and attempt to integrate them within us, making judgements that seek to fulfill the demands of one or other or both. Hedonism is the collapsing of truth into desire. Asceticism is the collapsing of desire into truth. True virtue is the unity and preservation and alignment of both in truth and love. The unity of truth and love within us is virtue in us. Beauty and truth become identical, and so become goodness. Goodness that desires truth and knows loveliness will only create more of itself, more beauty, more goodness, more truth.

We can grasp truth but miss goodness when its heart is dead and cold. We can desire beauty but miss goodness when we are blind to the light of truth. We have the beginnings of virtue, a path toward it. But unless we add to our knowledge love or to our love knowledge, we may never find it. And that finding can be terribly painful. They only find their opposite when we allow them to pass beyond ourselves.

The problem with social justice is the same problem as that with personal righteousness. One cannot exist without the other, the absence of their opposite always inevitably leads to tyranny and selfishness and hypocrisy. Virtue that exists only outside us costs us nothing. It is only ultimately a tool to be wielded against others to please ourselves, however we dress it up. Virtue that makes claims only upon others and lives to serve your own self is not virtue. It is a contradiction. The submission of the world to the good and the true must necessarily include submission of myself as it’s first end. I can hardly hope to bring others to good if I have not sought the good and rooted out the evil and disorder in myself first. That is why the Bible enjoins us to “First pluck the plank from our own eye before we seek to remove the speck from our neighbor’s”. Before we can lay the claims of justice upon someone else, we must first lay them at our own door. We will never have the proper understanding, never show the proper value and mercy toward the sins of others, never understand how apply them for growth and life instead of oppression and destruction, until we discover and confront them in ourselves. When we have known the weakness and disorder and pain within ourselves, when we have found the plank within our own eyes, when we have taken the flame to ourselves and learned how to use its power for life and light and warmth, then and only then. If we use our virtue and our loud proclaiming of our devotion, when we make our phylacteries great, when we go to the temple of public approval and make great gestures so all can see, all we are doing is bending the claims of justice to serve ourselves and our own safety. We must know what it is to be the sinner before we can confront the sins of others. Only when we see the sins of others as our own, belonging and finding a home as much in us as in them, only when we can recognize ourselves as the guilty as well as the judge, will we take the proper care and lay out a law designed and understood as a path to our good, our healing, our preservation, a truth spoken in love. So long as we are lighting beacons we think cannot burn us, we will fail to give light and warmth to others, but only arouse their fury and pain by igniting the ground beneath their feet. The light of justice for others proceeds directly from the knowledge of our own injustice.

Justice that does not present a threat to what is wrong within us is not a fire that will cleanse the wrongs of the world. We are ourselves one of those wrongs, we are ourselves complicit, and any fire that cannot harm us is not a holy fire of sacrifice and purification, but an infernal fire of torment (the very picture of hell, a fire that burns but cannot consume).

That is why both the Holy Spirit and the torments of Hell are conceived of as flames. The Spirit is a consuming fire, because it consumes all that cannot stand, all that must be given up, the sacrifice, so that what could be can emerge from the ashes. It is the fire of the phoenix. The death that restores life. The self is given up, and in so giving, it is preserved. The bush is not devoured but is transformed into a thing of glory. The light of the flame does not eradicate us but becomes part of us. But the fire of hell is one of torment, because the self will not be given, will not be sacrificed. And so the fire burns but cannot burn away, cannot consume. It is the action of refinement upon that which will not be refined. It holds itself in eternal suspension, forever unable to resist the fires that it invoked against others, forever unable to give itself to them. It is the clinging to life that creates death.

Likewise, virtue that seeks only itself and seeks no good and shares no love for others outside itself finds nowhere to go, nothing to touch, nowhere to live and exist and be made manifest. Submission of the self to a greater reality of love and ultimate truth and goodness that remains contained within and exists only for itself is incoherent; it’s a contradiction. You’ve merely tried to swallow your God, not worship him. It is the barest hypocrisy. It is a fruitless flower. It is worse than a tree with no bloom. Because it has what it needs, what exists to give fruit, and refuses it’s natural function. It is knowingly barren. Grace and goodness that is freely given by necessity must be given to others, or you deny its nature, and are still merely trapped within yourself.

That is why it says that we love because God first loved us. We were broken, knowing our illness, in knowledge of our disorder and chaos, our selfishness and ugliness and dishonesty and the pain it caused us and others. But we were freed from it because of a love that transcended it. We were freed because our sin belonged to us, but our beauty belonged to God. He made a door that could give us hope and value beyond the knowledge of our own limited nature, a glimpse of a higher harmony, a truth and beauty and goodness beyond us. To say that such a thing is only for us, that it is a private possession, for our good only, a love for us only, is to deny the very means of our freedom. It is a denial of the gospel itself. The preserving love of God is for all, as the purifying fire of the law is for all. We cannot lock ourselves into eternal bliss in that love or eternal torment in that fire without invoking a power beyond ourselves that denies our right to either. We must submit ourselves to both, seek justice within and justice without, if we want either. We must seek also to commit ourselves to love within and love without, if we wish for either, and would not be trapped by one or the other. We must submit to both love and destruction of ourselves and cannot hold back from either if we do not wish to be ruined by them.

If we wish for justice outside us, we must let it do its work within us. If we wish for justice within, we must serve its work outside us. The fires of justice will only burn down the world if we will not let it inside us. The fires of justice will give no light or warmth if we do not take it outside us.

The law without grace is hopeless. Grace without the law is pointless.

I’m not saying these experiences are beyond reason or irrational. Rather, they’re super-rational. They’re actual tangible realities, not merely ideas, that cannot be accurately or completely expressed or understood by a single human perspective, a simple definition. They’re the sort of things that it takes all of us collectively, working at the truth, adding to it, complimenting, correcting, counterbalancing one another, to say of them what is true.

Prophecy, to me, is that brief moment when you lift your head above your own individuality and limited perspective and for just a moment get a tiny glimpse of things as they are in themselves. It comes when you truly put your mind to solving a seemingly insolvable problem and seek it with all your heart, enough that you’re willing to let go of yourself and your own smallness so something larger, more transcendent, can for a moment find its way into you. And then maybe, once in a lifetime, or for some more often, you see it. Then the vision fades, it can’t be maintained, because it’s like trying to be and contain many souls at once, and you hope to bring back some part of what you saw to enlighten and transform the limited and specific perspectives you hold and encounter.

My first vision was in college, when I suddenly grasped how all theology and philosophy fit together, the nature of truth (and beauty and goodness, all the subjects of both disciplines). That one was the most pleasant of the three, but it gave me a headache, and it was the most brief. I was walking along, working my brain harder and harder. Trying to make my view on the world fit together by adding more and more pieces and more and more layers, more and more angles. I was on a sloped lawn near some bushes next to one of the dorms close to the English building. And suddenly, for just a moment, it all came together and locked, and I saw how all truth converged on a single point. A sort of reverse big bang, seeing backward to the point of origin, a great reassembling. Just one quick glimpse. And then it was gone. And all I could really say of it was that I knew that it was.

My second experience was around the time of graduate school, when I was pondering some questions of science and puzzling over some intractable fundamental concerns about the nature of biological life. And suddenly it seemed to me that I saw through it, that the structure of things around me literally became transparent and I could see through them to what they really were, to what the fundamental structure of the world was and how it worked, what its true nature was and what the nature of life was. That one was the clearest and easiest to hang on to, and the longest. I wrote a message to myself about it as fast as I could, just notes, as it was happening. It was like seeing behind a curtain. Like the veils that divide the levels of reality, material and understanding, were parted for just a while and all were finally seen as one and and the same.

My third experience was when I was almost 38. And I was wrestling with some question about people and how they see themselves, and all the twists and turns of history, and trying to see people of different times and different perspectives as they saw themselves, to see the world as they saw it, and figure out how all those different owrso ctives could possibly fit together, to preserve my critical faculty so I could see the common elements. And it was like a wind suddenly took me and lifted me bodily and bodilessly into the air, into a wild and windblown perch where my eyes could look across the landscape. And I looked, and I suddenly perceived the nature of the human mind and heart, what it was in its essence, and I could see its history and the movement of human thought and belief and knowledge and perspective, and how it went back and forth in an endless sesaw, growing, changing, striving, coalescing, devouring itself, reinventing itself, correcting itself, overbalancing itself. I saw us all as shards of a single connected whole, repeating in each one of us its whole story and living that story across time in all that live. It was marvelous and maddening.

That experience was the most depressing. That made me so depressed for months that I briefly started cutting again and had constant suicidal thoughts. Seeing into the nature of what we are and how we work individually and through history was rather horrifying, at first. A vision of something amazing somehow gone horribly wrong. I had a hard time coming to terms with it.

I express all these experiences with words and ideas, because that’s all I can do. But a sculpture or painting or film would do it better. They were experiences, visions. Seeing, not thinking. Thought attends to one specific thought or aspect, draws one perspective out into a crystallized facet from which to view a thing. This was more like an encounter.

God, the world, and the human heart, I suppose, are what you could summarize the content of those glimpses as. The only time I ever mentioned these moments of transcendent prophecy and understanding to someone, they looked at me like I was genuinely crazy. And I would have done the same and been quite incredulous and dismissive. But I think this might be what prophecy actually is and how it works. I think it squares with accounts of prophecy given. I think it makes sense from a philosophical and psychological and spiritual standpoint.

Socrates had his moment of personal prophecy and mission. He was so puzzled by the oracle given about him at Delphi. He couldn’t solve it. And then suddenly he saw, he had his vision, a vision into the nature of wisdom and truth and his own heart. Something happened to him. It awakened something in him that pulled him right out of the world of Athens that he daily inhabited. And as a result he invented modern philosophy and was made a martyr. He had a mission from God. And he even died for it, and predicted that his death would not silence his oracle, but only expand it across time and space. And he was darn right.

I think the nature of his revelation was very similar to that of Solomon (who clearly saw a vision of the struggle of the life of mankind across time, in Ecclesiastes). I don’t think the content was the same, but the way they both got at their visions was similar.

In Athens Socrates found a world much like the inner world of Solomon: luxurious, powerful, bursting with opportunity, and brilliant beyond compare. Yet the oracle declared Socrates to be the wisest of all men. And Socrates wrestled and wrestled with that idea, trying to make sense of it, and he suddenly got it; he saw it. He had the vision of his wisdom. And he realized that the greatness of his wisdom was that he was the only one in all that excess of brilliance and power who was truly aware of how foolish he was. His wisdom was knowledge of his own smallness, his ignorance, and the need to seek truth and wisdom in something (a process, a thing, maybe both) larger and more transcendent than himself. He was able to see himself and the wisdom of great Athens, and the wisdom of God (or however you express it) for what they truly were, and what the relation between them truly was.

Solomon summarized this same idea exactly by saying “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom”. The realization of the not-God, limited, perspectival, fallible nature of us all. The need to seek out the true source and come to it by any means possible. That’s the beginning of Solomonic wisdom. Realizing that you yourself are not its source and being willing to empty yourself and become more than what you are, to let some of the larger, more complete reality reach you and touch you and instruct you and correct your excesses and fill your voids and destroy your illusions. Without that bit of realization, we can never be more than what we are. We may revolve, but we will never evolve.

That is the wisdom of Solomon, and it is the same as the wisdom of Socrates. It was the gateway that opened the path to everything they learned and became. It showed them a landscape to traverse and explore. It oriented them in life. They had a real desire to seek the wisdom that transcended themselves. And they didn’t always know what to think or what to make of it. Socrates often speculates and doubts. Solomon also speculates and doubts and ponders truths that tear at the walls of his narrowly defined reality. There is almost a sense of injury from this wrestling with God, with the spirit and truth behind existence. Socrates paid with his life. Solomon did not, but he seems to have lived a life of no small amount of internal struggle and torment. Neither seems to have been willing to forget or forgo their experiences. As many difficulties as they present, they are still the things that structure their whole lives. Socrates chose his over life itself. Solomon was willing to choose his over wealth and power and long life.

My mom

My mom’s mom

Samantha from Bewitched

Bonnie Hunt

Harriet Vane from Dorothy L Sayers mysteries (someday I hope I’ll find someone as complex and difficult as that!)

My early ideals of romantic beauty and awakening erotic interest. Childhood crushes, in other words.

Stephanie Tanner (from Full House)

Anna Chlumsky (from My Girl)

Ariel, Jasmine, and Jessica Rabbit

Amy Jo Johnson (the pink Power Ranger)

Natalie Portman

Lacey Chabert (from Lost in Space)

The girl from Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes (a very short but very intense crush)

The really big two that lasted the longest were definitely Amy Jo Johnson and Natalie Portman. I was in love with those two girls. I idolized them a bit.

Honorable Mentions (these were noticed by me, impacted me, but I was in some way conflicted, so they never were a real crush, I just was aware that they were attractive), The Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Michele Pfeifer, Kirsten Dunst (from Jumanji), Clarissa (from Clarissa Explains it All), Kelly (from Saved by the Bell)

Special consideration awards, girls I liked a lot but didn’t quite see as either romantic ideals or as spousal ideals. Women I just liked a lot, but more like a sister

Princess Leia

Ripley from Aliens

Anne from the Anne of Green Gables mini series (maybe a little romantic interest in that last one, but I think it was more that identified with her a lot)