Seriously – Rory Williams is the best Companion ever.
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Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear –
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
– Percey Shelley
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Rebellion
So where were we? Ah yes, entropy.
In the Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus considered the greatest challenge of philosophy to be “the problem of suicide” – that is, given that we live in a universe with no inherent meaning, why not kill ourselves? His answer is that a person, upon realizing that life is absurd, can contentedly accept that absurdity, finding happiness in meaninglessness.
I think that Camus was partially correct. He’s right that one has to find meaning in the midst of the absurd, but I don’t think that a contended acceptance is the right way to think of it.
Let me tell you the most powerful metaphor for life I’ve even encountered, which comes from one of the wisest stories ever told in the guise of a franchise science fiction film. That’s the Kobyashi Maru test in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
In the film, the Kobyashi Maru test is something that commanding officers at Starfleet Academy go through. The ship is sent on a rescue mission into disputed territory, where the cadet is then faced with an unstoppable fleet of enemy ships. No matter what the cadet does, no matter how the cadet reacts, he will lose. He will fail. The ship and everyone on it will die. It’s a no win scenario.
Lt. Saavik, who undergoes this test at the beginning of the movie, complained about it to Admiral James T. Kirk.
“I do not believe this was a fair test of my command abilities.”
“And why not?”
“Because… there was no way to win.”
“A no-win situation is a possibility every commander may face. Has that never occurred to you?”
“No, sir, it has not.”
“And how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn’t you say?”
“As I indicated, Admiral, that thought had not occurred to me.”
Of course, as the film goes on, it’s clear that Kirk didn’t actually understand the wisdom of his own words. That’s something we’ll touch back on in a later installment. But he was right – how we deal with death is as important as how we deal with life. Indeed, whether we avoid it or not, death is inevitable, so how we treat the two is one and the same.
Camus’ thought that we should essentially adopt a contentment to our life is, I think, the wrong approach. The right approach isn’t contentment – it’s rebellion. An emotional conviction that one has to create meaning where none exists. Create order in a universe condemned to chaos. Strive for immortality in a world where we are all doomed to die. And we should rebel knowing full well that we will fail. We should build Babel even though we know God will strike us down. Fly too close to the sun knowing full well that the wax will melt and we will plummet to our deaths.
We have to know deep within our minds that life is absurd.
And we have to know, deep within our hearts, that it is not.
How to constructively rebel against the absurdity of the universe is what we’ll talk about in the rest of this series.
So Why Are We Here, Anyway?
Part One – The Challenge of Entropy
Part Two – Rebellion
Part Three – Storytelling
Part Four – Science
Part Five – Changing the Conditions of the Test
Part Six etc. – TBD
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I am positively obsessed with Roy Orbison at the moment, and I think this might be the saddest song I’ve ever heard.
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In discussing a probable Biblical allusion in Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Alan Jacobs notes that a prominent scholar appears to have missed the allusion, and notes:
the Bible is not the sort of thing we are interested in, thus even a direct quotation can be invisible to us. Given that this alteration has happened in little more than a century, it makes one wonder how much else we scholars have managed to lose sight of. Perhaps every English department should keep a Christian around just to catch Biblical allusions that his or her colleagues won’t recognize.
I think that this will, more and more, be a consequence of people “outsourcing their brains” to Google instead of relying on their own memory. I think it’s a bad idea to treat knowledge as trivia that you can always “look up later.” When you do that, you miss patterns and connections. It’s those connections that lead to creativity and wisdom. This is not to dismiss that convenience of internet research. But the speed of research is a supplementary tool to education – it can’t replace it.
Gaining knowledge is hard work — harder than tapping keys on a smartphone. But it’s worth it.
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Fear not – there’s more in the “Why Are We Here?” series coming. I’m trying to get a few written in advance so they’ll come more quickly together, but that means a big gap between one and two. Sorry!
In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the basics of politics lately, and in doing so I stumbled across this note on the nature of government that I thought was just perfect. Enjoy it.
The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere. The desirable things which the individuals of a people cannot do, or cannot well do, for themselves, fall into two classes: those which have relation to wrongs, and those which have not. Each of these branches off into an infinite variety of subdivisions.
The first—that in relation to wrongs—embraces all crimes, misdemeanors, and non-performance of contracts. The other embraces all which, in its nature, and without wrong, requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.
From this it appears that if all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need of government.
Emphasis mine.
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I don’t know if it’s the stalled debt talks or what, but lately I’ve been completely obsessed with Alexander Hamilton. Obsession with a Founding Father isn’t new for me – I tend to rotate favorite Founding Fathers, read everything about them, and move on to the next one, but Hamilton’s making me take it to a new level for me. I’m currently working my way through a compilation of essays called The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton, which I highly recommend. One thing I can tell you about this complicated man, though: he’d totally be ready to kick some Tea Party ass – they’re like the Anti-Federalists and Whiskey Rebels rolled into one!
At any rate, it’s my weekend, since I decided to take a few days off. So there must be music. About Alexander Hamilton.
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This is the beginning of the current state of my musings on philosophy, something I was inspired to write by commenter tom p, who asked – jokingly, according to him – for me to answer the question “Why are we here?”
My first responses to this were just quotes and ideas – nothing more than conversation starters. This is the first part of my more substantive answer to the question. I don’t know how many parts there will be. I know what the first couple of posts are going to look like, but I thought it might be a little bit more interesting – and more honest – if I did this a little bit more ad hoc. This is a bit more true to blogging, but also due to the fact that my philosophy is a rough draft, and I hope you folks out there will help me refine things.
I look forward to discussing a lot of this stuff with you. So let’s begin, shall we?
Part One: The Challenge of Entropy
“Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.”
The starting point for my philosophy of life is, paradoxically enough, death. I am obviously not alone in this, as one of my favorite books is the Book of Dead Philosophers, which is a compilation about various philosophers and their musings on death.
This is not to say that I’m obsessed with death, or walk around in black leather and eyeliner. It’s simply that the existence of death is a challenge to the meaning of life. And I don’t just mean my own, personal death. I mean that eventually, assuming that we understand physics correctly, everything is going to die – including the universe – as entropy maximizes and the universe dies a slow heat-death.
Entropy, as characterized in thermodynamics, is the amount of disorder in any given system. As work is performed in the system, a certain amount of the energy used is lost as heat. If no energy is added to the system, eventually all the energy is lost and nothing can happen anymore. In physics, this is the “arrow of time” that pushes events to move forward, even though the math says they could go either forward or backwards.
This is an easy thing to grasp intellectually. Emotionally, it’s a lot rougher. Easy to forget, given what short lives we lead compared to the whole of the universe.
But if you take some time to internalize it, there’s a simple, inescapable thought that occurs: in the long run, nothing we do matters. We’re going to die. So will our kids. Our cities will become ruins. Our bones turn to stone. The stars will burn out and in the end, trillions of years from now, there will be nothing but dust. (Assuming, that is, that there isn’t sufficient mass to cause the universe to collapse back in on itself. But that’s an end, too.)
Entropy and death mock our planning. They’re a specter, hovering over everything we do. Time, despite our wishes or dreams, moves inexorably on. The greatest civilizations will fall. Books will turn to dust and the greatest of men become bones.
I’ve always been fascinated by the Riddle of the Sphinx in the story of Oedipus. The riddle, if you don’t remember, is this:
“Which creature in the morning goes on four legs, at mid-day on two, and in the evening upon three, and the more legs it has, the weaker it be?”
The answer, of course, is a human being: who crawls in the “morning” of his life as a baby, walks on two legs during adulthood, and uses a cane in old age.
What fascinated me about this as a kid wasn’t the riddle itself, but rather that nobody answered it correctly for so long. How could you miss the obvious that we all start young, become adults, grow older, and eventually die? As an adult, I know the answer. Because nobody wants to think about their own mortality.
And that’s because, I think that when you truly confront yourself with the simple fact that, in the end, nothing you do will matter to the universe, how can there be any meaning? How can there be any purpose?
How I answer that question is the subject of this series of posts. But it all starts with the simple fact of death.
Stay tuned….
So Why Are We Here, Anyway?
Part One – The Challenge of Entropy
Part Two – Rebellion
Part Three – Storytelling
Part Four – Science
Part Five – Changing the Conditions of the Test
Part Six etc. – TBD
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America’s smartest cultural critic, Alyssa Rosenberg, has a wish for the upcoming John Carter movie:
But there’s one question that her set visit doesn’t answer. Is John Carter going to be a former Confederate soldier like he is in Burroughs’ original?
[...]
And while it could be convenient, from a plot perspective, to explain that a human who has ended up on a strange planet would be good at organizing an alien insurgency because he developed his skills in a specific, analogous conflict. But it’s probably better to make it almost any other conflict than the Civil War. The Confederacy doesn’t get retroactive points just because fighting in it helps someone achieve justice for another species down the road.
Personally, I think that keeping John Carter as a Confederate opens up a unique storytelling possibility: John Carter’s insurgency on Mars can become an act of redemption for his fighting on the Confederate side. All it takes is a 10 minute prologue with John Carter coming home and seeing the absolute jubilation of the freed slaves as they cheer the Yankees coming into town. Let him be confronted with the reality of the side he fought for.
Then, when we cut to him a few years later, we can make it clear that Carter is out prospecting out West, drunk most of the time, trying to forget the war. Then his trip to Mars can be more than just using the guerrilla tactics he learned as a Confederate — it can be his way of penance for his sins.
Done that way, I think John Carter can still be a Confederate vet without glorifying the Confederacy.
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I’ve been meaning to respond to this post by Leah Libresco for awhile, so let me give it a shot. Leah is responding to a comment I made in another one of her posts, in which I discuss the difference between argument for persuasion and argument in favor of finding the truth. I originally wrote:
It’s important to seek knowledge and truth, and engaging with others is a part of that. But the goal with engaging with others should simply be to listen to and understand critiques to your own position, see what you can learn from them, and get closer to the truth.
Persuasion is a dead end. Just try to find the truth. If you get closer, great! If others come with you, even better!
But if your goal is “conversion”, then you will never question your own underlying ideas and the search for truth is lost.
The post I was commenting on is here, where Leah talks about her rhetorical approach to “converting” the religious to atheism.
Leah states that she thinks its possible to push for Christians to “convert” while still looking for the truth:
I think my answer is correct and I think there are adverse consequences to being wrong, so I try to persuade others. Seeking out a fight doesn’t mean forfeiting my ability to be persuaded in turn. It’s important (and hard!) to avoid being so prideful that we can’t give up if the evidence goes against us, but I don’t think it makes sense to try to pursue truth in a vacuum (or an armchair).
I disagree with this. I think human nature is such that once you’ve put yourself on one “side” or the other, confirmation bias and other psychological aspects of human nature make it very difficult to let go. It’s one thing to argue issues or ideas. For example, on the politics side I’ve argued in favor of or against several different issues in the past few weeks.
But it’s a very different thing to argue that, say, “there’s no harm from raising marginal tax rates” to “liberals are usually right, so you shouldn’t be a conservative.” Likewise, it’s a different thing to argue that “there’s not a lot of evidence to support that the God of the Bible exists” to “you shouldn’t be a Christian, you should be an atheist.”
In both cases, the former argument centers around a single issue, where you can develop criteria and mull over evidence. The latter argument is “you shouldn’t be in YOUR group, you should be in MY group.” And that’s a very different qualitative thing altogether, even if they are superficially similar. Because even if the abstract issues can be resisted because ideas can become part of your identity (as I’ve discussed before), discussing ideas is different from discussing group identity. How you feel about yourself, and what groups you align yourself to, are far more emotional and primal things that just ideas.
Over the past few years, I’ve become very hostile to the idea of aligning myself with any group identity apart from my family and friends. It’s simply too easy for me to go overboard and think ideologically, and that’s a part of myself that I have taken great pains to remove from my identity. I’m not always successful at this (especially when it comes to politics), but I’ve found it’s been worth the effort.
In order to figure out the truth, I find that you have to strip away your thinking about identity, affiliation, and ideology. That’s next to impossible to do if your goal is to get other people to join your side because your side is better than theirs.
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Alex Knapp writes about pretty much everything under the sun, including politics, art, religion, philosophy, sports, music, culture, and science. He also actively writes about politics at the political blog