thoughts negligible

observation

Does anyone else find it ironic that most of our "morality" comes from the same media you get Fear Factor (is that still around?), entertainment and porn from? That is, like George Clooney said, actors are "ahead of the curve"! No wonder half of marriages fail.

"Eating Animals"

New Yorker review of a new book about eating animals

I want to read this book. Ok, this is becoming more of a question for me, and I'm not unsympathetic to a PART/reason of this cause (although it needs more fatty and juicy reason yet), and I need to seriously start thinking about it, but I tend to agree with Pollan: "The problem with factory-farmed meat isn’t the meat; it’s the factory." But a few things stand out at first glance:

1. What's that Stalin quote: 5 deaths is a tragedy; 50 million is a statistic?

2. "Male piglets also have their testicles removed, a procedure performed without anesthetic." People have been castrating male domesticated animals for as long as domestication has existed - Should I tell you that I held a calf down once while it was castrated?, it was a very painful-looking pocket-knife procedure, although I can't say I wept over it, sorry - and I don't think anyone's EVER used anesthesia.

3. I love the billboard I recently saw which is replicated in this article. It features one smiling puppy and one smiling piglet, with the caption, "Why would you love one and eat the other?" Of course there's something arbitrary about this choice! Wouldn't the really political statement be to eat the dog now instead and keep the pig as the family pet? Some people in the world eat dogs; I don't consider them monsters or hypocrites. 

4. "C spotted one chick splayed out on the floor, trembling. Its eyes were crusted over and its head was shaking back and forth. C slit its throat."

5. The closing comments that the "logical conclusions" of the moral argument against eating animals fall into the same problems with just about every thing we eat and consume, and rather suggests, with Foer, that the problem is our maniacal and hedonistic consumption, that renunciation is a good lesson in this post-economic apocalypse that evidenced the same human problem, which is much deeper, much more dangerous and profound than just glazing the depravity with "Eating animals is bad," or even that "They suffer as a result." As far as logical conclusions go, I would like to start pointing out how many bugs and animal that the person making this argument has displaced and killed by living in their house, their city, driving their car, walking, using poisons, aerosols, supporting the construction of a new church building, supporting a company like Whole foods that builds buildings, clears lands, thereby displacing and killing untold numbers of fauna, etc. Regardless, I'm glad the conversation is actually moving toward productivity instead of sensationalism that auto-deconstructs under the weight of its own grandiose and hyper-moralisms. Now, if the same thing could happen with any number of contemporary problems that face us with our OWN extinction and suffering and annihilation and degradation!

The Risk of Faith, or How to Be Useless to the World

I've been doing an independent study with my advisor this semester on Kierkegaard, and finally I'm realizing why I've always loved him--in some weird way, kind of atemporal if you think about it, the truth of my love is finally reaching its original form.  Thus I want to speak very briefly about faith and risk.  

Kierkegaard says, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, that without risk, there is no faith. Abraham, for example, risked everything--literally everything--in taking Isaac up the mountain (alone): his future nations, whose number would rival that of the stars and sands, his beloved only ("legitimate") son whom he loved, his image and respect among his community for such a barbarous and obscene act, perhaps Sarah would've left him, etc.  Another example, of course, is Paul, who lost and gained so much, in turn, for his faith. 

So it strikes me today to begin to think of our risks, our relation to risks, and our subsequent faith.  We live in a risk-evasive society--all except for Wall Street; we do everything to avoid risk: we budget and count and climb and crave, we grow our Facebook friend lists and make sure everyone knows what we're doing on this day or that day; we wear safety belts and leave an escape hatch in our hearts in every relationship, just in case it turns sour, that way we can get out without being too hurt for too long; we childproof everything.  Christianly speaking, we learn all our arguments for why Christ literally rose from the dead, how a Prime Mover is necessary for the existence of the world (ergo, God!), we find out right doctrine and how to align our lives with Scripture in order not to go to hell or be misled; we fortress our faith against the "world" and teach our kids that evolution is evil, otherwise they'll also be misled and think contingency created everything (Though one must ask à la Zizek: What is the Incarnation but contingency, the contingency of a particular individual being the God of the Universe, an individual embodying the Universal?). 

Thus our risk is diminished. We learn nowadays how to be tube-fed life, we feed our online personas and lavish affection on the virtual lives of TV show characters and the actors who play them, up to including president's and philosophers among this grouping.  Recently I saw Surrogates with Bruce Willis. It wasn't a great movie, with its plot holes and all, but it nevertheless demonstrated if not the literal outcome then at least the metaphorical corrolary of how we increasingly substitute a digital/surrogate us for the life we should be living, thereby eradicating risk and danger, not least the danger and risk of the interpersonal, as I've already mentioned. As difficult as it was, Bruce Willis destroyed all the surrogates and their world a lot easier than we will be able to pull ourselves out of ours. 

Thus our risk is diminished. Thus our faith is diminished. What is faith if it is not the risk of being an absurd, obscene, disgusting primordial remainder in a world that no longer needs faith or risk? A little piece of shit in the world?  Even us good ole existentialists can prop our faith upon the certainty of absurdity, or that our choices in the world have to be oriented to changing the world, that we are useless if without "concrete results": we increase our "community," our presence in the "community," we weep for social justice and what we can and cannot do to be among the beautiful souls of the world-historical. Thus we latch on to the world-historical enthusiasm of Bono's recent NYTimes guest op-ed in desiring to "rebrand America" as the "virtual that is the real"--that is, that we must fit ourselves within the world's wildly unrealistic, equally narcissistic image of us. Be the savior because everybody believes you are now that Obama is (conservative) king. 

Thus we pad all of our actions with the certainty that an African child will not die from diphtheria.  Thus we pad our actions knowing that we have "done good," despite the irrevocable fact that our good intentions can lead to evil results. We have faith in our actions, faith in what we can do - does this ring a 500-year-old bell?

Kierkegaard rather insists that we seek to replace God with ourselves, that we help him and lift up ourselves by obsessing over the world-historical, the big moves of history that effectively should be called "accidents," according to SK. If you don't believe me, you should consider the fact that Obama now opposes one of the key pieces of his healthcare platform during and shortly after his election: a public option. Perhaps one of my friends was right to ask, "Why do I even vote?" Not to mention that he's leaving in place very much of the executive privilege/power that the Bush administration gun-slingingly put into place (see "The Imperial Presidency").  I'm embarrassed now for my youthful and stupid enthusiasm of my messianism. I really thought things could or would change. We live and learn - at least, I might argue, I took a risk! But I'm not here to lament the world-historical, just to admonish us to forget about it. The accidental of the world-historical could be summed up with this: Health-care reform will pass, something new will come, whether you or I oppose or propose; in 50 years it will most likely be a joke that we ever fought so much about it; the poor will starve and be saved from starvation; disease will proliferate and be cured, only to evolve and morph into something more potent and dangerous. This is the world moving as it does (not necessarily progressing), with me now, and just as it will without me someday. Living in this lighted darkness, it's easy to conclude with Kevin Spacey's character in a good movie I just watched, called Shrink: "It's all bullshit and then you die."  What matters then has to be something "eternal," not accidental. Is the world-historical also not the impotence of emergent? By obsessing over the empirical reality of life - poverty, depression, etc - we stalemate in the impotency of both too many choices - and that's exactly what our proliferation of "global causes/virtual causes" is causing - and neglecting the faith, the risk, of our choices without any assurance of their validity or conclusion or goals as acts - we "cast a covetous eye on the outcome" (135), become fetishists of the outcome, products and results, and forget that "the external is not in [our] power and therefore means nothing."  We become only "observer" because we cannot be central parts of the "accidental":

Spoiled by constant association with world history, people want the momentous and only that, are concerned only with the accidental, the world-historical outcome, instead of being concerned with the essential, the innermost, freedom, the ethical (Kierkegaard, Concluding Unsceintific Postscript, 135)

Rather we must insist on our radical subjectivity and its "ethical relation to God."  "You and I are alone in this" (137).  As Carl Raschke recently told me, "You still go up the mountain alone; no one goes with you." We must choose the risk of faith and what that means in every relationship, which seems to mean, apropos Matthew 25, in the language of Levinas, infinite responsibility in the face of every other. 

So, you will say, we are to neglect our neighbor (who is a real neighbor based on the conundrum of globalization) in Africa for some inward selfishness?  It is a little more difficult than that, although I would like to work more on it. But, in part, yes. It's true that global warming and other globalized threats makes us all sisters in brothers against a shared threat that threatens every human life, and that we must work in faithfulness to each other in regards to it, work for each other (In his newest book trying to relieve and revive communism, Zizek explains that we are all now as a race the "proletariat" and have to muster arms against this threat to the commons).  But these virtual causes proliferate so much today that I as someone who wants to be responsible not only spin at the "options" but fail to attend to the real people who confront me everyday for the sake of these "purposes."

This is precisely why, it seems to me, the “loving” liberal—who stereotypically cares or loves too much at the sake of responsibility—can be more cruel and evil than the four-issue-voting, “bigoted,” anti-gay marriage, capitalist conservative: they can forsake the ethical for the call and cause of the world-historical.  They will love the animals and the environment but destroy their lives and the lives of others due to their absentmindedness when it comes to real people.  The virtual causes take precedence over real existences.  This same process is not only exhibited in the greed of the billionaire CEO who will most likely start a war when his wages are garnished by the new Obama injunction that came last week….Here is where the conservative has got it right.  Due no doubt to myopia, they have staked their claim in what they foresee as the real and cannot convince themselves of the urgency of a million virtual causes.  The liberal on the other hand, today is threatened by an overabundance of causes – real and otherwise – that all his causes are threatened with virtuality.  If one has too many friends, one can have no friends, cites Derrida, citing another. 

Zizek, I fear, is completely right when he says that the only access to larger reality that the filthy rich and celebrities have is through humanitarianism.  Therefore, what suffering of the small man and woman, the one who is still so large in the world, can we ignore if we accept so thoughtlessly the thoughtless kitsch “rich ethic”?

Zizek argues for a most absurd wisdom in today’s fast-paced, high-volume and high-impact decision-making.  In the last few years he has said several times, slow down, stopping just acting, and lets give reflection a chance.  Hop out of what Climacus calls “the paragraph parade” (133).  Stop casting “a covetous eye on the outcome” (135).  In his newest work, reflecting on last year’s bail-out, Žižek insists:

“Instead of such impotent acting, we should control our fury and transform it into an icy determination to think—to think things through in a really radical way, and to ask what kind of a society it is that renders such blackmail possible” (First as Tragedy).

Let's think about where we're headed and what Christ calls us to. Is it a semblance of changing the world or the risk of faith, even if it resembles impotence in the eyes of the world:

How blessed to be able to fulfill God's requirements while smiling at the demands of the times. How blessed to despair over not being able to do it as long as one does not let go of God!"

A truly great ethical individuality would consummate his life as follows: he would develop     himself to the utmost of his capability; in the process he perhaps would produce a great effect in the external world, but this would not occupy him at all, because he would know that the external is not in his ower and therefore means nothing either pro or contra....He would, then, remain in ignorance about it through a resolution of the will, and even in death he would will not to know that his life had had any significance other than that of having ethically prepared the development of his soul. Then if the power governing all things would want to dispose circumstances so that he became a world-historical figure---well, that is something that he would first inquire about jestingly in eternity, for not until then is there time for the light-minded questions of carelessness.

Alright, I need to get back to reading....

From Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday"

Syme asks God, "Have you ever suffered?" God's Reply:

As [Syme] gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, 'Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?'"

William Faulkner's Nobel Acceptance Speech - 1950

"I decline to accept the end of man"

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

-William Faulkner, 1950

Zizek on Revolutionary Violence

"But the problem is how to actualize it today. In any case, there are moments when the radical gesture is to do nothing. The question is, as always, that of temporality, of timing. But, look: the real problem is that it is very difficult to be truly violent. The violence of real transformation. The task of the revolutionary is indeed to be violent, but also to avoid the type of violence that is, in fact, merely an impotent passage à l’acte. Often, the most brutal explosions of violence are admissions of impotence—even of a fear before the real act."

( http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/web/zizek.php )

a few aphorisms for your pleasure

Prepositions are the confusion of all language, all philosophy, and all religion. They are the root of all confusion and death and war, and nothing properly exists without them.

It is a bit funny, to say the least, that all of our activities, breaths, hopes and days all add up to a big heaping pile of death in the end. For most this exchange seems unjust.

Any philosophy or theology - any view for that matter - believed by or ascribed to by all or most people cannot be true. Go to a group, for example, of anthropologists or theologians, and find what they all can agree upon and affirm as the overriding bias of the group, and discount that from your human understanding.

We must reject and be critical of whatever the herd so easily agrees upon.

A bee is no more qualified to fly than a human.
    This thought arises from seeing a bumble-bee thud to the ground in mid-flight, a minute later, to rise and fly over my head, no doubt embarrassed. I have seen one die in this very same way.

"One -- a'day" is the suckle of addiction.

A Christian whose liberation is alcohol or cursing might as well be a drunk driver too.

A Christian is the worst enemy of the kingdom when she suspects anyone else but herself of being its worst enemy.

The Herd that Can't Pray Together Can't Stay Together

I was reminded today - via Facebook, A.S. - that there are a lot of Christians who still see themselves as victims of secularization, a persecuted minority, as the warred-against faithful who seek to resist the encroachment of the barbarian hordes of "secular humanists," evolutionists, and Muslims. Someone was defending Kirk Cameron (and his newly inspired stupidity of plagiarizing The Origin of Species) as a swell guy and Christ-lover who should not be ridiculed for defending Christianity against "darwanism." While I am tempted to go on a tirade against the idiocy of Kirk Cameron and his ilk's fundamental misunderstanding of Scripture and the point of God's visit to earth, I will leave that aside and focus on the mentality that is evidenced in the defense of such a man and such a vision.

It is baffling to me that Christians see themselves as victims of the "secular world," although I think I nevertheless understand the reasons. The very true truth that Christ-followers will be despised can be fundamentally bastardized to support a particular system and world-view that must be defended at the sake of defending the true message of Christ, in this case, a system of anti-intellectualism and a fundamental misunderstanding of the boundaries and interactions of science and faith, or more generally, "faith and reason." There are of course social and economic factors: those liberals (who have more money than me, mostly, and statistically, when one is looking at the blue-state-read-state divide, longer lasting and healthier families and marriages) hold fast to their evolutionism and their gay marriage and don't care about the fundamentals of the Bible and family. 

In short, it pays to be a reactionary, and pays to maintain the us-them mentality that is being purported in such a "debate" - "debates" normally can't be defined as a one-sided, degenerate soliloquy, however. It pays a particular kind of socio-spiritual currency: I am rich because I am having all my "rights" taken away from me, because I am a holdout. Leaving aside the fact that Christians have no rights in the first place, I think one of the fundamental insights being expressed is that my "fundamentals" are essentially trite social pendants that allow me still to scream my Christianity out and lambast those who are gainst me. How are my kids supposed to be Christian if they can't pray in school like they used to? (nothing's stopping them, I would like to scream!). I wonder if Jesus' criticism of those who love to pray in public has any reference to such a situation? Thus we can define our Christian identity in relation to our reaction, our reaction against this or that, and not to the qualities and teachings of Christ and our new lives in him.

In short, we may rightly begin to question our Christianity because we are so liked and free. To bitch about our losses of freedom and rights as Christians is just vacuous and stupid; we are among the freest people on all the earth, who have ever lived. Our rights and privileges overflow.

There are plenty of enemies of Christ out there. It's not without of the realm of possibility for me to conceive Cameran and the IDers right along with them. What message is really being touted by such folk? That science is the enemy? That the Bible, understood the way I see it, is the revelation of God? No, Christ is the revelation, and Christ and his Church had and have little time for the quotidities of "proving" that God fashioned the world and designed it (not that he didn't and doesn't, mind you). Darwin wasn't the enemy. 

There are powers and principalities that far outstrip the influence of evolutionary theory and Darwin that now threaten to leave us dead and opposed to Christ (as indicated in my last post). Now, we are the enemy. 

Elaborating on the despair of our age

I almost put this up on Facebook but decided, why don't I use the blog I'm paying for that no one looks at instead, thus imposing some sense of double irony on the topic of talking about technology and spreading ourselves thin digitally where no one reads or comes; secondly, decrying the death of the human soul due to technology through means of technology. I'll just quote from an essay by Heidegger that I continually go back to lately, called, "Why Poets?"

"What has long threatened man with death, indeed with the death of his essence, is the absoluteness of his sheer willing in the sense of his deliberate self-assertion in everything. What threatens man in his essence is the willful opinion that through the peaceful release, transformation, stockpiling, and delivery of natural energies, man could make man's being bearable for all and happy in general. However, the peace of this peacefulness is merely the undisturbed, lasting frenzied restlessness of self-assertion deliberately thrown back on itself....What threatens man in his essence is the opinion that technological production would bring the world into order, when it is exactly this ordering that flattens out each ordo, that is, each rank, into the uniformity of production and so destroys in advance the realm that is the potential source from which rank and appreciation originate out of being.

...

The essence of technology is dawning only slowly. This day is the world's night made over as the purely technological day. This day is the shortest day. It raises the threat of a single endless winter...What is whole withdraws. The world is being emptied of what is whole and heals. As a result, not only does the holy remain hidden as the track to the godhead, but even what is whole, the track to the holy, appears extinguished. Unless there are still mortals capable of seeing what is unwhole and unhealing threaten as unwhole and unhealing."

Combine this "essence of technology" with what Freud said about the individual consumed within the "mass mind"

“The mass is impulsive, inconstant and excitable. It is ‘guided almost exclusively by unconscious motives’…Nothing about it is premeditated…it is incapable of any long-term intention.  It cannot abide any delay between its desire and realization of the thing desired. It has a sense of omnipotence; for the individual in the mass the concept of impossibility vanishes” (Mass Psychology 25). 

What do we have today other than a politics and a religion (combined under the auspices of what I call "Americanity") completely and solely dominated by the socialization of the herd, the blind inconstancy of a group mind, ever growing and expanding with the aid of the internet and round-the-clock communication. We can now easily think with one mind, share the opinions more faithfully and thoughtlessly of our group/clan/tradition/party.

Take for one example, the hysteria over the health care reform bill. Why are so many so irrationally opposed to it. I say "irrational" because of the fear of euthanasia panels and the sort, not through any reasonable opposition, although there are no doubt rational fears. What I believe is coming out more in the opposition (other problems arise with the proponents, but let's be honest, nothing so crazy) is a mass expression of guilt and the fear of death. After all, what is health-care other than "death-prevention"? When the word of letting the government (obama, no less!) kill our grand parents and disabled children arises, it seems as if something within us, some unconscious motive, as Freud calls it, peaks its head out. Are we not already euthanizing our parents and grandparents by shoving them off into homes and hospitals to die alone? Do we not suffer from some massive guilt in our hearts for how we treat and see the dying, the disabled, the sick? Thus we can say "THEY" want to kill our old people, all the while the guilt of us killing our old people, and our children through different means

I've long pondered the offense of Nietzsche's critique of democracy, that it will usher in a new and stronger herd from which it is more impossible to distinguish or individuate oneself, that the free spirit is dead under the torrential flood. Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot help but fear Nietzsche was more right than I ever wanted him to be. 

Isolation is unheard of; therefore the individual is too, increasingly so. We seem to increasingly be shedding our skins as humans, draining the marrow from our bones and meat from our flesh until "human" might altogether seem like a misnomer someday. 

Americanity at its most obvious