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| You keep using that word... |
Ponderous parables for pivotal paraboles
Once upon a time, there was a human child who wanted to know the Good. Being the insufferably inquisitive and rather philosophically minded youth they were, they figured that the problem wasn't so much identifying the Good, (there were already lots of suggested candidates), but rather determining a method by which to validate the Good. Well, the kid did find a sort of litmus test, a rather radical one at that.
You see, this kid was raised Christian, and so they were already quite familiar with the traditional parables. In fact, this kid would ultimately go on to endure most of their Confirmation before dropping out at the last moment. This kid wondered whether they needed religion in order to live and be just, whether the Good was predicated on traditions and consensual wisdom, or whether it had any contingencies at all as alluded by some of its progenitors.
On the way home from elementary school one day, this kid was contemplating hell. You know. The bad one. Where one would burn. Forever. The kid was already skeptical of the existence of hell, especially since they had already studied how allegorizing hell became a tool of church compliance and coercion from the 15th to the 20th centuries historically and even earlier pre-historically. As this kid approached the turn in the sidewalk that redirected to their home street, they stopped walking as their reflection shifted to a consideration of Jesus's divine sacrifice, especially the willingness to sacrifice mortal existence. Within this space of reflection, this kid noted that a morality becomes transcendental in character, relative to Christian systems, the moment the agent has identified a conviction for which they would be willing to sacrifice beyond their mortal existence, assuming the verity of a transcendental existence. Hell was conceived, or at the very least <used>, as a method of enforcing compliance to an alleged transcendental morality. However, this threat and its invoked fear are consequential only when one's moral system is subject to and therefore determined (at least in part) by the threat of hell. The moment you believe in a moral code self-righteously such that you would bear that code in any and all eternities in any and all transcendental existences, this coercive form of Christianity no longer has any power over you.
Furthermore, this conviction that authentically survived an existential threat of eternal damnation likely comprises or can be characterized by the Good, if we're conceiving the Good as its progenitors did: as a universal, unchanging, and all-encompassing form. For how could the substance of that imperative be naught but Good for someone to willingly suffer eternally? If it did not comprise the sum total value of everything they believed and/or assumed to be right or good, would the willingness to suffer eternally be naught but insanity?
In the words that the kid used to articulate this insight at the time, the moment you become "willing to burn in hell for all eternity for what you believe", you become liberated from all preceding and subsequent moral systems. It's a different kind of freedom.
Although this kid grew up to be relatively agnostic, exercising a reasonable measure of doubt with regards to any kind of afterlife, since that moment, that kid has been relatively fearless.
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A word has been frequently floating in and out of my reflections as of late: "subsumption." It seems that every action, resistance, and aspiration to significance supports or is eventually constitutive of a subsumption, a subsuming of the intents and character of the action, resistance, or aspiration into a more general category—notably, in democracies a category generally acquiescing of what people call the "middle class". Historically, people called this latter process gentrification; i.e. the process of changing the nature of actions and contexts such that they further satisfy the gentry, the traditional middle and upper classes (think "gentlemen" and "gentlewomen").
I've often attributed this trend to tribalistic exigencies and the dominant classes' exclusive rights to delineate the parameters of signification. Self-identifying groups of people are naturally inclined to defend and further their common interests. The middle class emerges as the bulk of the normal distribution of their collective needs and subsequent demands. Notably, this collective reserves control over signification: the identification, renewal, and creation of significance. For evidence of this control, look no further than the burgeoning demands and sequitur supplies of popularized formulaic T.V. shows and movies. Especially in democracies, this dominant group generally dictates which meanings have the most power.
Subsumption, then, presents the means by which the middle class renews its power. As both the product and producer of subsumptions, the middle class regulates meaning-making and the power (read: significance) of meanings.
I've commented on this Blog before about the cyclical nature of dominance and resistance, especially how both sets of aspirations eventually normalize; i.e., that the status quo/societal homeostasis necessitates their constant renewal. These days, I would characterize these Sisyphean (r)evolutions as yet other forms of subsumption.
Why does this happen?
Simply, they're engaged in the classical pursuit of meaning and purpose.
On my own permutation of this quest, I infrequently engage in the following thought experiment: if we're trying to identify the most meaningful and significant values—the usual source of purpose—and actions, then start from the opposite. What is the most meaningless thing a person can believe or do? I usually turn to expressions like "all tautologies are tautologies." But even the categorization of expressions of A = A has meaning and significance, especially since the meaningfulness of other expressions of relations hinges on the alleged meaninglessness of simpler expressions. Maybe it's the void? It's telling that vacuousness draws from the same etymology as "vacuum."
Or, maybe it's more useful to consider meaninglessness according to its (in)significance. However, this merely politicizes the question of meaning by evaluating meaning according to its power, as what does "significance" signify?
Logically, if the most meaningless choices, values, and actions were dichotomized, then the most meaningful choices, values, and actions could be characterized as the most exhaustive, unique, and powerful.
Yet, in the endless pursuit of purpose and meaning, a staggering proportion of people find themselves "settling down to start families." Inhabiting the aforementioned logic of this post, this domestication follows from a subsumption of intents and purposes under a set of generalizable traditions. But I remain perplexed as to the following: is it not suspect that so many individuals' pursuits of purpose and meaning have been resolved in starting families? That after millenia of human development, the consistent stopgap for the problem of living with meaning is to furnish the next generation of people who will undoubtedly have the same problem?
Potential vacuousness notwithstanding, even monogamy raises the specter of a failure of the imagination to do something with one's intelligence before or after the status quo. "Welp, I have run out of ideas. Might as well chase tail."
I realize that the more nihilist-leaning among my readers might counter with the axiomatic assumption that existence has only the meaning that we ascribe to it; i.e., there is no guarantee to any inherent purpose or meaning in anything. But can we not do better?
Especially when faced with an existential threat?
Obviously the species needs to reproduce itself at some point, but there's a threshold after which existence is merely existed for the sake of existence.
What does it mean to succeed in the midst of global turmoil? Does it mean the same to you now as it did in September, 2019?
People tend to define success in numbers. Equity, valuations, and margins. There are people who I've encountered that I pity every day because the system is so absolutely rigged against them. I have yet to encounter a "successful" company or personality cult that doesn't have at least 1-2 bodies mortaring its foundations. I promised myself in the earliest days of my social justice and peace studies course work that I would never slit a single throat, metaphorically or otherwise, to get ahead; I'm increasingly convinced that many of my classmates didn't share that conviction. The global pandemic just aggravates these moral and integrous discrepancies.
This world doesn't know what to do with its intelligence. Our public schooling systems in Ontario are about to crumble wholesale because our administrations, among the ministry, school boards, and unions lack the organizational and creative capacity to imagine and to implement a new vision of schooling necessitated by one of the greatest threats of our lifetimes. Smarts won't save us; they might give us a better way to mitigate the effects and infectivity of this virus, but this is just one relatively benign pathogen. I predicted at about the age of 16 that antibiotic resistance alone could bring this world to its knees; you don't need to search too deeply into Google to ascertain with relative certainty that this is only the beginning.
We've survived this long because we've adapted. The most maladaptive systems will degrade and degenerate as we're witnessing on the daily. Classists hate change, yet I'm not calling for a "Marxist (r)evolution." Our systems, starting with our schools, need to refocus and reconstitute their operations in accordance with their long-standing mandates.
And this stuff aerosols. For the love of reason, don't pack elementary school students into enclosed spaces with no exit or contingency plan.
I worry that the problem is less about whether we have the collective intellect to survive this, than about whether we have the moral convictions and courage to think laterally and take risks.
Otherwise, private industry is going to take over every failing public system; it was already happening among pre-college schooling in Ontario; this crisis has been an invitation for private schools (especially those structured and equipped for online learning) and for privatized health care to build and to consolidate empires in Canada. My own school is restructuring in anticipation that publicly schooled students could fall behind their private and home schooled peers by almost a year as of September, 2021. Theodore Sizer is/would be churning in his grave.
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"Civilization" is a derivative Anglicization of its root, "cīvis", a rough Latin equivalent to our current word "citizen." It's legal definition succeeds its essential and primordial meaning of "city-dweller". Citizen-ship, or the rights and responsibilities inherent to constituting a city, implies higher duties than simply participating in the governance and perpetuity of the polis; thriving usually requires more of us than surviving. We can still thrive under these conditions, as we should; but we need to commit to this end. I know it's hard. My own commitment wavered after March, partly due to my experiences with the bad faith of certain members of the graduate student community of UofT.
But we cannot give up. Doomscrolling is a deontological necessity, in moderation of course. Our appreciations for and exhaustive grasping of the significance and consequence of the Good and the right depend in part on our lucidity of the darkness.
This world cannot abide the unwillingness to speak the honest, good faith truth of our experiences, courageously in adversity. Wisdom cannot be wasted on the wise unwilling or too dispassionate to act Justly when we're on the brink.
