Socrates Knows Nothing

Note: this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

If a materialist believes that a man is nothing more than his body, can a materialist really believe in death? After all, immediately after a man dies, there's nothing in his body which is missing in his corpse. Granted, his corpse moves noticeably less. But in what way is his corpse any less of him than it was before?

Obviously, the standard response is that the man was the particular arrangement of the matter in such a way that it frequently moved on its own. Yet this is hardly a satisfying answer; a man is not therefore a single thing, but an entire collection of states. This makes the word him very unsatisfying. A man, in this model, is like a wave in the ocean — fleeting things which obviously lack any sort of reality or substance. Actually, that makes it sound an awful lot like Buddhism, which materialism is. I suppose that further similarity shouldn't be very surprising, then.

The modern mind conceives of the self as imminent. This is the key, I'm beginning to believe, to understanding the modern mindset.

Descartes famously started off his proof with I think therefore I am. He went on to discuss what that means, but because he was looking for a self-evident premise, he took the concept of the self to have the barest possible meaning. And though the blame can't all be laid on him, yet in doing so he plunged the world into a darkness which it has yet to recover from.

For the barest possible definition of the self is simply a collection of memories. People manage somehow to deny the self-evidently true existence of free will, but no one — not even the most committed Buddhist or the most insane materialist — has as yet tried to deny the existence of memory. The self has memory, but defining the self as memory is very dangerous indeed. Descartes was able to do it safely so far as his personal sanity was concerned because he was a mathematician, and mathematicians are used to abstracting things and remembering that the abstraction is not the whole. Alas for the world, Descartes was not careful who he talked to.

This theme was developed more fully by others, after Descartes tried and failed to provide a mathematical grounding for real knowledge. (Mathematics is knowledge of what might be, if the premises are granted, but never what actually is.) What Descartes took as a convenient definition, others took as a complete definition. The self stopped being an actual substance, and became merely a collection, and depending how reductionist the philosopher, perhaps also a velocity (that is, a particular tendency toward what new memories get added).

Any amputation of part of the soul will naturally be disastrous, but this was a lopping off of most of the soul. It is perhaps odd that it was so barely noticed; the soothing effect of a voluminous flow of long words with uncommon definitions may have something to do with it initially. Gone from the soul is form, will, intellect, and even substance. It should hardly be surprising that the cultural ideal of man which followed is an unthinking hedonist with a pleasing face and convenient impulses.

But even those who amputate their intellect still think, they just think badly. So the self the modern mind has to think about is a purely imminent self — a collection of experiences. A man's worth is, therefore, the sum of the worth of his experiences. (This, incidentally, is why dying men wish that they had seen something which their working for accomplishments prevented; the accomplishments are not part of him, while the work is.) But here there is a great problem for the modern mind. What are a man's experiences worth?

There have been a few people mad and desperate enough to try to claim that man can be the ground of his own worth, but it's just too blisteringly obvious that man is a contingent being for anyone to maintain this without impressive quantities of drugs taken without intermission. A functioning human brain just can't take the idea seriously, however impressive its ability to lie to itself. Death and taxes are the two great certainties in life, to use a common proverb, and both disprove the self-existence of a man.

A man cannot be a premise. God can be a premise, but to the modern mind God is dead. Without premises, you can't have a valid argument, but you can have something which looks like a valid argument. Circular arguments are not valid, but they do have many of the qualities of valid arguments. In particular, there's more than one step, which is not self-evidently false, and each statement in the argument does at least follow from the one before it.

So from where does the worth of a man's life come from? From another man. In the ancient world this took the form of glory, where you just had enough men, continuing on into the future that you didn't have to notice that it's a circular argument. One might call this argument by exhaustion. If you have enough steps in your argument, not one can follow it, and so it can't be pronounced invalid. It was also done in the ancient world by friendship, which is similar to how it's done in the modern world, except that it was less pronounced (typically) in the ancient world because the ancient world was pagan, which one can loosely define as the suspicion that something worthwhile is true.

In the modern world, science has killed the hope that there's something outside of the world of men, so friendship is more pronounced. By a strange irony, though, friendship has through its conquering lost its name, and turned into the concept of a soul-mate. This needs a little explanation, I think.

C.S. Lewis in his book The Four Loves described the difference between friends and lovers in that friends look together at the world, lovers at each other. If the classic position of friends is shoulder-to-shoulder, the classic position of lovers is face-to-face. Well and good while there's a world to look at, but how if there's no world for the friends to look at together? During the death of the intellect which strangely bears the name The Enlightenment, the world shrank and eventually all but disappeared. With the inability to criticize came the inability to praise, and so all that was left was talking about oneself ("this painting makes me feel..."). Nothing is knowable except what reveals itself, and to the modern mind nothing reveals itself except verbally. (There is a special exception where sharing the same experience makes another knowable in that aspect since that aspect of the other is identical with that aspect of oneself, and so the other can be known through the self, since in that aspect the two are one.) In the modern world, the only position available to friends is face-to-face.

So friends become lovers and lovers friends and everyone must find his soul mate. For it is the soul mate who gives one's self validity. The soul mate knows one's self (that is, has heard all of your stories), and values one's self, and so gives it value. But in this vale of tears doubt springs eternal, or more charitably, contingent beings need continual nourishment. How is the soul mate to know the relationship still exists?

From this dilemma springs the modern conception of sex. Sex is no longer the participation with God in the act of creation: God is dead and anyway, a child doesn't exist until it has experiences, so sex can't in any sense create it. But sex is something which people are not generally willing to do with each other, so it can serve as an outward sign of the value that each partner feels for, and therefore imparts to, the other. That is, it becomes a sacrament of the relationship.

Sacraments have an air of arbitrariness about them. Certainly, it's not obvious that Christ could not have chosen to make rice and not wheat the sacrament of his body. It's not obvious that God could not have chosen to use oil for baptism and water for confirmation. Doubtless God has good reasons for the choices he made, but they have about them the air of choice.

And so when two soul mates make a sacrament to nourish their union, there is an air of arbitrariness in its form. Here, of course, the goodness of the reasons admits of doubt, but in a real sense anything will do so long as its fixed. The traditional choice is of course a penis in a vagina, but for this purpose there's no reason that a penis in a mouth or an anus won't do. A finger in a vagina has all the same qualifications. And at the end of the day, so long as a man isn't willing to let anyone but his soul mate do it, and is willing to let his soul mate do it, anything will really do. A finger in an ear, drinking from the same milk shake, anything with a general reluctance and individual acceptance will do. And in fact a general reluctance which is specifically overcome can be a stronger sign and more nourishing sacrament than something one's soul mate is inclined to. If they value you so much that they're willing to let you do something painful or disgusting to them, the value they set on you must be high indeed. Hence perversion. (The reverse logic also holds — if you're willing to let someone do something painful or disgusting to you, it shows how much you love them, and so they will have to love you back.)

This is why celibacy is so hated in the modern world. Marriage (another sacrament of the soul-mate) means life. Being alone is, effectively, death. This also explains the importance of divorce; if a soul-mate relationship has disintegrated, it is imperative that the bonds which prevent a new soul-mate from being found be immediately dissolved. Marriage is not a suicide pact.

This is why there's such an emotional attachment on the part of straight people to gay marriage, and why the opponents of gay marriage are called haters — opposing gay marriage is tantamount to wanting to execute gays. This is also why a man who is sexually attracted to other men but resists this impulse is called self-loathing: he's committing suicide.

This also generates an unending river of advice columns on the subject of the tension between having a soul mate and the experiences that being with that soul mate generate not being ones that you want. In some cases, such as physical abuse, the answer is invariable to leave and find another soul mate, since no matter how much someone values you, there's also the question of the person who you're becoming. In twenty years it won't matter that you once loved hiking (since memory fades) if all you've done for those twenty years is get beaten and try to hide. No one wants to be a victim, and that's not a characteristic, but actually an identity. If you remain a victim for long enough, that's all that you are. There is no you apart from the victim.

There's also the concept of being subsumed into another; this problem requires one to consider one's velocity as part of oneself. That is, part of oneself is the sort of new experiences that you seek out and add to yourself. If your interests become dominated by those of your soul mate so that the new experiences you add to yourself are the sort that he would add to himself, and not the sort that you would otherwise have added to yourself, you are literally becoming him. Your memories are becoming the same, and your velocity is becoming the same. You will in time no longer be distinguishable. But this is why there's the unending flow of advice not to allow yourself to be subsumed in your lover, why its important to have space and a soul mate who respects your need for space. Maintaining a constant flow of unique experiences is the only way to stay alive.

There are many other insanities of modern life that the imminent self explains, as well. For example, it's one reason why travel is so popular (there are other, more legitimate reasons). Visiting Paris makes Paris part of you. People love Paris, and so by identity they love you, too. Italy is great, and by acquiring memories of Italy, it becomes part of you, and so you become great.

I suspect that this also gives a partial explanation of the wedding-industrial complex. Cultures throughout the globe and throughout history have loved to throw extravagant parties, so the thing needs no uniquely modern explanation. Big parties are fun. Yet the imminent self does help to feed this industry, and especially to the concept of the bridezilla. One's wedding day becomes a part of one, and since big parties are quite rare, one will have few of them in one's self. Hence the importance of everything going exactly how the bridezilla wants it — in controlling what happens on her wedding day, she's crafting herself. The self she will be for the rest of time is at stake. Indeed, the worst thing that she can have is a sense of perspective; seeing how much is at stake means that she needs to get unconditional surrender.

There is, incidentally, a curious question that the imminent self raises about concepts such as forgiveness and repentance. In particular, is repentance even possible with an imminent self? In one sense, the answer is clearly no, since repentance is really a form of suicide. Repudiating the past, to the degree that one believes it possible, means destroying a part of the self. Sin is privation of form, but no action no matter how vile can do ought but add to one's form with the imminent self. Guilt — the desire to repudiate parts of the past — then becomes the true privation of form, or at least the one real temptation, with repentance being the sin. One certainly sees this theory, but human beings have only very limited skill at acting according to obviously wrong theories (which is, by the way, one of the better proofs for the existence of God).

A poem I wrote recently:

A fascinating articles on the history of european views of witchcraft.

G. K. Chesterton was a man in many ways larger than life, but his popularity was mainly due, I think, to the fact that his writing showed people how large life really was.

So I'll give it. He's got a post up about HR Cafe, which I gather is a former employer of his.

In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton said that:

...But this notion of something smooth and slow, like the ascent of a slope, is a great part the illusion. It is an illogicality as well as an illusion; for slowness has really nothing to do with the question. An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves... Yet there runs through all the rationalistic treatment of history this curious and confused idea that difficulty is avoided, or even mystery eliminated, by dwelling on mere delay or on something dilatory in the process of things.

Of course, Chesterton is right if one takes this idea in a strictly explanatory sense. A complete explanation which moves slowly is no more plausible than a complete explanation which moves quickly. Chesterton's mistake is that evolution is offered as an incomplete explanation. Incomplete explanations benefit from moving slowly, because slow movement leaves more room for agnosticism. The slower something moves — the more millions of the steps involved — the less anyone can claim to know about those steps.

There are many examples (e.g. bats, eyes, rhinoceroses, flagella, etc.) where the steps necessary to develop the thing are so complicated as to be unimaginable. Insisting on an unimaginably long time for evolution to occur in therefore makes this more palatable.

It's really the same reason why Job was comforted by God pointing out Job's ignorance. To summarize Chesterton's introduction to the Book of Job: Job says, "pain doesn't make any sense in the universe". God says, "You don't understand anything else, either, so you have no reason to believe that pain isn't part of a good world, or at least a good plan for the world." Job says, "good point," and is happy.

Evolution entails an unimaginable process; the unimaginably long period of time is necessary to making it palatable, since that's the only way for the process to remain unimaginable. Imaginable evolution is implausible.

In short, evolution requires unimaginable quantities of time so that it can be a mystery. Like the doctrine of the trinity, evolution can only be accepted as a mystery which nevertheless seems to fit the world we find ourselves in. The origin of our solar system is likewise a mystery which can only remain plausible as long as it's shrouded by something (again, in this case, near-infinite time) that keeps you from trying to fit it into your head.

I believe that Winston Churchill said, "Many forms of government have and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. Indeed, it has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others which have been tried from time to time."

I'm in a bad mood at the moment, and to me at the moment, the obvious explanation is that Democracy means rule by the majority of men, who are bad, whereas every other form of government means rule by a select few, who are very bad.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that in Season 2 of Dawson's Creek, Joey leaves Dawson in order to "find herself". More about that later, but it reminds me of an exchange from The Thin Blue Line:

"It's an alternative culture now, Sir. People are asking questions. They want to know who they are."

"Then they should damn well look at their passports."

To the idea that a person is trying to find themselves, there are several tempting responses:

1. Go look in a mirror. There you are.
2. Look around. You're right here.
3. Check your driver's license. It's supposed to have a current address.

There's some validity to the idea of a person needing to find themselves, in that a person can be in a situation so overbearing that no decision that the person makes is ever their own; it's highly dubious, though, that people ever really fall into this. There's an idea that some people have that they can be so much in love with someone else that they themselves disappear. If this were ever to really be true, I suspect the relationship between the people would be more like a dog and its master than a relationship between two people.

But even so, I don't know that the one person would be truly subsumed in the other. To use the names from Dawson's creek (since they sound better than "Person A" and "Person B"), if all of Joey's interests were actually Dawson's interests, it means that the energy to enjoy them came mainly from Dawson. (Interest, like all good things, always requires energy. As Chesterton observed, "There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.") The nature of friendship is to look together at something else; even if it starts by Dawson providing all of the energy, the friendship could never last if Joey couldn't look at them herself. In the worst case, she would gain an appreciation of Dawson's interests that she could share with someone else. The great thing about knowledge is that it doesn't lose anything by being borrowed.

Stories require conflict; it's more or less a truism that in order to have a plot you have to have some challenge facing the main character; your hero must be in danger. In order to come up with conflict, many (screen) writers go for the easy way out: they have their characters make stupid or immoral decisions, and the danger ends up being whether they're going to pay for their sins.

(Drama is a separate category, of course. Drama is supposed to be about the repercussions of immoral actions. In its Greek origins it was largely about people paying for their sins, or the gods sins, or someone's sins. Occasionally for the sins that they would later commit.)

But with a little more skill, I think that something far less morally offensive would be equally as interesting, and really more so, since it would leave you with characters who you could care whether they survive their danger. In particular, the danger can be whether the character gives in to temptation. I don't mean this in the morality-play sense, but rather in a realistic sense. Let me give an example:

Suppose that you have a happily married man who has a life, and so meets women. Being an actually healthy man, he'll become friends with some of them, some of them will be attractive women, and some of them will be attractive women that he makes friends with. You could have quite a series of plots of the man nearly falling for the women he meets, and nearly cheating on his wife. Some people will object that unless he occasionally cheats, people won't believe that the danger is real. These same people rarely suggest that the hero of an action series should die occasionally to show that the danger is real. And besides, fiction is all about getting caught up in the moment. Believing the danger isn't about how many times people have succumbed before, it's all about story telling. In Serenity, several main characters were killed off, but I never for a moment doubted whether River was going to be killed by the gang of Reavers she was fighting. When the door opened to reveal her standing, the only thing that I doubted was whether she was going to be standing there alone, or finishing off the last Reaver. The story wasn't crafted in a way that would make any sense if River didn't win the fight easily, so I never believed that anything else would happen. Making danger believable is about crafting a story that would make sense either if the hero avoid the trap or if the hero falls into the trap. If the story would make (artistic) sense with the bad ending, it will feel dangerous. If the story has only one conclusion in which the story isn't a steaming pile of crap, no one will expect the story to go anywhere else. If you craft a police drama in which nothing supernatural has happened for the first 15 seasons, and there's a character that the hero grows fond of who claims to have been abducted by aliens, it's true that the most likely explanation is that the character is crazy. But if you write the story so that it would make sense if the aliens really existed — if you really give it emotional reality and somewhere to go — the audience will wonder if the character really was abducted by aliens.

I pick the example of possible infidelity because it's an example where you can really dwell on the temptation. The temptation can be interesting, and in some sense shared. You can almost start to root for the character to do the wrong thing, and then share in the triumph when they don't. And to some degree in the regret, too; someone who is tempted will always be tempted to wonder what it might have been like if they had given in.

There are other possibilities, of course. Most other sins have fairly ugly or esoteric temptations, or the temptations are very short lived. If you show a person tempted to murder another, the immediate temptation of having both strong motive and opportunity are not likely to last long. Stealing would be very difficult to examine simply because the temptation is generally too petty or too pathetic. The damage done is also less obvious, since what is stolen can always be restored. Still, it might be possible to come up with a story about nearly stealing. At least a few good stories have been told about rehabilitated jewel thieves, now that I think of it. (To Catch a Thief.)

Having watched Season 1 and most of Season 2 of Dawson's Creek, and having read the episode synopses for the remaining 4 seasons, one of the things which really struck me is that a drama — written like Dawson's Creek — is fundamentally cruel. The same people need to be fodder for drama all the time, and so they must be constantly tormented. Everything given must eventually be taken back, and it often is before long.

This is the fundamental weakness of television — it can't tell love stories. Television doesn't end, so it can't have a "happily ever after"; it must go on, and it must be entertaining.

I think that dramatic series are fundamentally stronger when something good is permitted to last. I occasionally think that television is largely written by sadists who can't stand there to be anything good. It's very difficult to find a television show with an arc which isn't all about destruction. (Another thing which television suffers from is that actors often move on, making television character's lives even more unstable.)

The exception, I think, are comedies. The Nanny was about a romance between Miss Fine and Mr Sheffeild; eventually they were married. There are, surely, other examples of this, though they don't come to mind at the moment. The reason, if I'm correct about this trend, is that comedies get their primary material from the small things, whereas drama takes its main material from the big things. Thus comedies can have happy characters, whereas dramas are always mean to their characters.

In literature, characters are never interesting for their flaws. They're always interesting for their virtues.

Opinions to the contrary stem from the fact that when writing it's often easier to show a person's virtues by way of their flaws. Heroes don't need burning buildings, it's just easy to show them off as a hero when there is a burning building.

Incidentally, there's a really great song by The Mountain Goats, called "Love Love Love":

King Saul fell on his sword
when it all went wrong
and Joseph's brothers sold him down the river
for a song
and Sonny Liston rubbed some tiger balm
into his glove
some things you do for money
and some you do for love love love

Raskolnikov felt sick
but he couldn't say why
when he saw his face reflected
in his victim's twinkling eye
some things you do for money
and some you'll do for fun
but the things you do for love
are gonna come back to you one by one

love love is gonna lead you by the hand
into a white and soundless place
now we see things
as in a mirror dimly
then we shall see each other
face to face

way out in seattle
young Kurt Cobain
snuck out to the garden
put a bullet in his brain
snakes in the grass beneath our feet
rain in the clouds above
some moments last forever
and some flare out with love love love

You really need to listen to the song. It's got a beautiful melody and the singer really sings it with a pretty voice. But the point is the singer/writer's explanation of the song:

the point of the song is we are very well damaged by the legacy of the romantic poet, that we think of love as a thing that is with strings and is this force for good and then if something bad happens thats not love...I don't know so much about that I don't know that the Greeks weren't right, I think that they were, that love can beat a path through everytihng, that it will destroy alot of things on the way to its objective which is just its expression of itself. You know my stepfather mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us and well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing aot of what I percieve is terrible damage, yet we talk about love as this benign comfortable force: it is wild.

Love doesn't always mean romantic love. In English, love doesn't always even mean love. Sometimes it means desire. Sometimes it means need. Sometimes it means a gaping hole in a person's soul that they're desperately trying to fill. Sometimes it means slave-like devotion to some ideal gone mad because it was taken in isolation. In English, the word love can mean nearly anything at all.

You can show how much a character loves something by how willing they are to be immoral for the sake of their love. Most of the time*, writers use characters' flaws in order to show their love for something.

*When the flaws aren't simply a crutch to move the plot along, that is.

So, I'm watching Dawson's Creek, which is a drama full of, well, drama. Anyhow, one of the characters is writing a love story, and an ex-girlfriend of his offers him the advice not to give it a happy ending, because they're unrealistic. Now, this is largely supposed to be a highly cynical comment (the person saying it is drunk towards the end of a spiral out of control). Yet it actually contains a rather insightful metaphysical point, though it's in the words that the person said, rather than in the meaning that she had for them.

There are no happy endings, there are only happy middles.

Happiness comes from something real, something that is, something that has being. Endings are a transition from existence to nothing; when the end is over, there is nothing. (In the physical world in which we live, there are no complete endings; all endings are also beginnings. In the spiritual world there are, presumable, complete endings.) And nothing can never bring happiness.

Discussions of movies always muddy this, because the movie's ending is (if you take the fictional reality seriously) not an end to the events in the movie, but only an end to the viewer's glimpse into it. Movie endings are almost universally ambiguous: "And they lived happily ever after" doesn't mean that the characters were henceforth immortal. In most cases it means that nothing very remarkable happened to them. They did at some point die, and few deaths are completely without suffering. What "happily ever after" means is that the characters never again had the same sort of troubles that made them interesting to us. It doesn't mean that they were free from all human cares.

In the book C.S. Lewis at the breakfast table, Derek Brewer told of a compliment given to C.S. Lewis which has always struck me:

A very eminent Cambridge scientist, who had practically nothing in common with Lewis, once remarked to me — and it is one of the finest tributes to Lewis I have heard — that he met Lewis only once, at some evening occasion, and felt that he was a very good man, to whom goodness did not come easily.