When we take our advantage, indulge our desires, or pursue
our passions, the implication, like the fact, is that this always comes at some cost to others. No matter how benign we may mean to be
there is nothing benign about living and most of the world’s religions tell us
we’re in for it. It could be
eternal damnation ---but in good Calvinist terms we can’t know that--- or bad karma in this or subsequent births. We can’t really know that either. All we do is assert such consequences
as if they are true. But one way
or another, the threat provides more
than incentive or admonishment: it’s a warning from The Beyond in the here and
now.
I’m no believer in The Beyond of any ilk, at least not one
we live to experience. Others may
have to cope beyond our lives but, gratefully speaking, I’m glad I won’t. By this I mean we can ask how such
claims provide something that empowers us without having to decide if they are
true or not, or whether our answers aren’t more than just another empty platitude. Empowering would mean something like we feel better doing the
next thing that addresses our needs and that we really do have the option to
care now about what carries on beyond
our finite lives, not for ourselves but for those who survive us.
As if we don’t suffer enough the usual slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune, we create for ourselves haunting conscience, guilt, ghosts,
and karma-knows-what because we can.
I’m not given to dismissing those feelings or emotions just because they
are “negative” but rather to wonder aloud how to address a life in which nature
has no concern for the future whatsoever and so invites us to contemplate that fact. If hope is for a future then it can’t be grounded on
anything nature provides as the basis of life. Mr. Darwin put it succinctly enough, “The universe we
observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom,
no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless
indifference.” We should refuse
to live in fantasies or dreams of what could be without grounding ourselves in
how nature does her business.
Nature is a “her” in the same way that hope is a reality: it’s something
we say, even something we may feel,
and so is real enough to make a difference in what we do no matter how little it tells us about our nature as natural
beings. I want to know how hope
can be efficacious in some way that invests in happiness (whatever that might be) as we humans imagine it. For how we live in our imaginations is what is vital to the
reality of hope, if it is to contribute something of value to our lives. I need neither faith nor charity to
realize this need. What I need is
to learn is how to imagine more vividly.
Hope may only exist as a cultural peculiarity of we humans and
it matters not to this argument if other living beings possess it. Whether it
aids or betrays us requires us to consider it in light of the fact that it
plays no part in nature’s actions.
I may need to believe this not only because it is true but also to
create a more fecund imaginary life. Whether I do or not will not come naturally. However nature nurtures us, culture is
learnt, willfully and, of course, despite our choices.
My teacher was both an empathetic historian and a
revolutionary with little need to espouse dogmas much less romanticize
religious beliefs. He never
begrudged people their beliefs and spent a lifetime learning and explaining
ideas he did not himself maintain.
This is what good scholars, especially scholars of religions, do. They imagine lives they have never led and aren’t likely to lead. When I say he was a revolutionary, I
mean he did far more than defy social conventions to trust that I would live in
his home respectful of a culture he was determined to change. I mean as well that he welcomed, nay,
demanded that the conversation of his own understanding of yoga go far beyond
the claims, assertions, ideals, and values of the past. If something is true because we know more about the natural world now than at any
time in the past and if something is wrong because culture has created
mechanisms of oppression or false beliefs (including religious beliefs about
nature), then the revolution must deliberately put in jeopardy any cherished
belief, hope, or claim that prevents us from learning these greater
possibilities. If we can’t put our
beliefs at risk then they aren’t worth having.
It’s important, I think, to note that we aren’t obliged to
believe anything, much less support
the advocacies of others. Rather
we invite the understanding that people will live with and act upon their
beliefs no matter how they found them. And that includes on groundless
grounds. My teacher also understood
how orthodoxies provide the boundary of permission and prohibition that is the
mark of “sacred.” Sacred isn’t
things or any thing; sacred is how we
understand and act in relationships.
We all confer the values of sacred on beliefs: we assume a stance,
knowingly or not, that asserts, sometimes with empirical evidence, honest
skepticism, and experimental means and sometimes by mere conviction, what we believe we know. We make our cow
sacred when it is the position from which we cannot retreat no matter how
deeply we engage the doubt that even that
position could be mistaken. Given that beliefs are best designed when
we permit them to be revised, changed, abandoned, or refuted, the agency of
knowledge isn’t so much slippery as it is subject to terms.
What I’m suggesting here is that we can’t rely on the past
alone to tell us what we need to do unless we abandon the present or believe
that the future somehow already knows.
No one, no thing, nothing knows the future: that is why we are
free. The consequence of that is
that nature makes no promises even if we can imagine into being. We
need not give in to either fantasizing that those in the past knew it all or
that the future knows what we cannot.
We can become more willing to imagine what more there is, what more we
can create in culture given what nature is providing as her terms.
Can we hold beliefs that root us in unrealized hopes that
aren’t mere fantasies, well-wishing when we know
---because experience tells us so--- that so
far as we know our reality-based choices must prioritize evidence of actions? What we may want or wish is one thing; what we do may require us to address more
complicated choices, complicated not just because the variables are complex but
also because they require us to be
compromised rather than create compromise.
I have in mind the recent public discussions of our American
President’s decision to kill Americans living overseas, particularly or, as it
is claimed, exclusively those plotting to kill other Americans. We espouse
in our most cherished documents both ideals and forms of accountability, we
even hold public hearings and talk about how we are supposed to stand for
better, that we are in fundamental violation of our principles, etc. I think we actually do understand the dangers, the folly,
the compromised values, and the immorality of the choice to act. That we can talk about them, however
couched in agendas, dramas, and dissimulations of partial facts, we know we are compromised. We then ask and perhaps should in the
very same breath: do we want to leave bad guys alone while they are happily
planning to kill? Where do ideals
meet The Road? Cormac McCarthy
gets this. Philosophers and
politicians rarely address the discomforts of reality as well as the
storytellers. This is because the
storytellers aren’t obliged to solve problems but rather help us understand
them. I think the storytellers
know something else: we can’t solve
these dilemmas because they are real.
Of course, it’s disappointing that reality-based choices
invariably compromise cherished hopes and trample values. Who would not love if we all loved our
neighbor as ourselves or if we could relieve the suffering of all beings? We hold these truths to be self-evident
and then we realize that there is nothing self-evident about the choices we
make in the world. Should we espouse
ideals that we know don’t work well in a reality-based world of compromised
choices? Who would not wish for
equality and justice with transparent accountability? And yet short of being reduced to venality, we understand
that the stakes dictate asymmetries, invite our bias, and cause incongruities
of values. Nothing about hope is
going to make situations that compel compromised choices untrue, much less
alleviate them.
When Machiavelli tells us that “"It needs to be said of
men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid
danger and covetous of gain," I can only disagree to the extent that it is
sometimes the case that the inverse is just as true. People can be grateful, altruistic, and self-sacrificing as
they are naturally selfish. Both realities may be demonstrated with
more than anecdotal examples ---we humans seemingly have always been this
way. Sometimes when you need it,
the exaggerations like the plaintive, sometimes sanguine claims of hope are
welcome intrusions upon reality.
When my surgeon corrected my last waking words, “Good luck
in there…” with “There is no luck.
Only skill,” I knew he was wrong but you gotta’ love the attitude. He imagined more world than the one
that exists, he imagined a world where skill alone would produce his results
and he wasn’t about to act without clinging to resources of imagination just as
fiercely as reality fiercely refuses to acknowledge them, and so kept himself
on task. Since there is no way to
create flawless skill much less luck ---good, bad, or indifferent---if what we
mean is really beyond our ability to control or to fathom, we can prioritize
the powers of imagination, forego fantasy when it’s unhelpful (but not when
it’s just too little fun) and get on with it. That doesn’t mean the lucky doesn’t exist or that we can’t
wish for it anymore than we are determined only by the facts of nature. The reality we imagine determines as
much the culture we hope to create when we give nature her due.
When does hope bring us an advantage if it can’t bring us
an outcome? Everything of value
will come at some cost. Perhaps
when we realize that Machiavelli was only half right because he spoke with
brutal candor of the natural state of our humanity. What is the next half?
That’s up to us.
