Consolations of Continuity

Boethius wrote his enduring classic Consolations of Philosophy after he had been condemned to death by his Roman emperor. A sad story, we think, but with a smug twinge of admiration at his accomplishment at a difficult time.

Like the rest of us, Boethius was mortal. Like the rest of us, condemned to death sooner or later. For us elders, of course, it’s sooner. We may have less time to do anything then Boethius. We may have far less chance of producing anything significant. He was after all in the literate elite of Rome – a tiny fraction of a powerful population. We inhabit a world of 8 billion, all of them equally literate (or illiterate) on social media .

I suspect from all the chatter, few classics will emerge, let alone endure for thousands of years .

So my attempts in the face of fate have been reduced to revisiting my life, producing a stream of continuity – in words and artifacts, memories and conversations and even hidden thoughts. Directed at me. A consolation, if only for an hour, or late at night. Recall of a thread of being, meaningful in spite of its cosmic insignificance .

A philosophy? I guess. At this point, I’m happy to discover and utilize anything that increases my enchantment with existence. A busy pen, a happy mind .

Analog Tradition

Law is binary. You are either guilty or not. Lawyers make lots of money “proving” one thing or another. In general, you can push right up against the line (and even tiptoe a little over it) and still be completely “innocent” .

Tradition, on the other hand, is analog. It is also where we spend most of our lives. There is rarely, for example, a thin line dividing rude behavior from acceptable, but it is certainly possible to act more and more rudely .

When we interact with society, we expect rules based on law to be in place, but those are almost invisible most of the time. We are buffeted by tradition and its expectations – how far to stand apart, how loudly to express opinions, what to wear, general demeanor and behavior .

It is therefore far more jarring when traditions change dramatically then when most laws do. Old people especially can be blindsided and upset by all the terrible erosion of “normal” behavior as the young sweep away the “olden days”.

Everyone eventually settles into the “new normal” and adjusts their expectations accordingly. Traditional change – lacking enforcement apparatus – is often less jarring than law change.

The old people do occasionally try to get their revenge by passing laws to formalize those old traditions .

Rural

Since antiquity, common sense and solid values were supposed to reside in country folk. Not the unwashed peasants (of course) so much as a virtuous landowner. Cincinnatus returning overnight to his plow. Western Europe – the English in particular – made a fetish of the landed aristocracy .

In the US, Thomas Jefferson created the myth of a country-filled with yeoman farmers, who lived on small self-sufficient farms and in their spare time discussed philosophy and engaged in politics. The countryside contained value, cities were filled with vice. That has congealed into a nostalgic view of “olden” days when (“real”) men were men, and everyone else knew their place and stayed in it .

These days, of course, most people live in suburban situations, neither quite rural nor quite urban. Suburbs contain few of the virtues and most of the vices of each. The global Internet further scrambles the mix .

Ah, but we continue to be told how solid rural living is. No matter that farming is done with huge complicated machines produced elsewhere. It suits the ruling oligarchs to fan the embers of this mythology, since the actual potential power of this constituency is so small .

All harmless enough. Unless, of course, the ruling class becomes ignorant and stupid enough to take it seriously .

Infanticide!

There, that got your attention! And such is the real purpose of shock words these days – to condense a slur, rally a slogan, and sometimes promote a hidden message. I remember when students would shout “hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today .”

Some issues are tangled, mysterious, insoluble. Abortion and women’s rights _ or potentially crippled-child rights _ is one of the toughest. Definitions are almost impossible. The world refuses to be solved .

For the record, I am in favor of all children, everywhere, being born normal, healthy, and into circumstances where they are well cared for until their late teens. For the record, in our real world, even if babies are born normal and healthy, society often lets them die or suffer from neglect, starvation, war, disease, or other violence. And genetic luck guarantees that many embryos do not produce normally healthy babies. It used to be far worse – nature was never kind .

But “baby killer” is an effective slur. Nobody wants to be so labeled. The problem is that those who use it are – like those anti-war demonstrators – really pursuing a deeper agenda One in which it is the duty of women to produce and raise children and leave the rest of the stuff to men.

I dislike such people and their agenda. Perhaps one day I too will have to find something simplistic to shout back. Isn’t that really the true problem with our civilization? Not stupidity, not evil, just fatigue at complex, seemingly insoluble, issues .

Judeo Christian

Evangelical Christians blather on about how the United States – “western civilization” in general – was founded on “Judeo-Christian” values. The Bible as the ultimate source of morality. They wish to establish a kind of “Judeo-Christian” state, kind of like Iran but (of course!) different .

Real history shows that “Western Civilization” arose from three major and almost unique cultural foundations. One was the classic Greeks who invented a worldview of logic and observation, and who regarded their deities about as we do comic book figures. The Romans generated a true rule of law in which order was maintained by professional bureaucrats, rather than priests or warlords. The Romans paid lip service to gods the way we do superstitions – Romans always believed they were the reality. And finally – not least – the Teutonic worship of individual power and rights – a healthy counterpoise to logic and rule .

The “dark ages” and “middle ages” were cruel and Christian. Only by reversion to Greek/Roman/Teutonic did the West break into the Renaissance and all that followed .

The United States’ Founders were steeped in classism, and based the Constitution on Greco-Roman-individual rights values. The Bible was a convenient shared cultural experience with some useful moral ideas, kind of like television in the ’70s .

But – until the last few elections – most of us never wanted interpretations of holy scripture to circumscribe our daily lives. Its rise is another example of the failure of social education in this country .

Jonestown

There are many examples of “the madness of crowds.” Somehow most of us can temporarily lose our own rationality in a mass action. More permanently we can narrow and harden our logic and belief into a small cult, or a larger “movement.” Some are mindless and temporary such as mobs; others have deep underpinnings supported by leaders and philosophers, like the Nazis .

The prime modern example to my mind was Jonestown, where a large group of “normal” people gave up their ordinary life. Believing in a charismatic leader, they cut ties, liquidated assets, followed him into a jungle community. When times got tough they followed him into mass suicide.

Although Americans are prone to fads, for the most part citizens here have been saved from massive indoctrination by an inborn cynicism. No matter the cause, we often ask “who profits?” “follow the money”, and “what’s in it for you?” This streak of skepticism may not protect us from momentary enthusiasms, but it does tend to make our allegiances quite fragile. For most of us, true belief can flip overnight, with or without external cause .

Not always, of course. Hence Jonestown. The cautionary note there was that apparently more than a few of the “suicides” were “murders”. Crazy powerful leaders are a lot more dangerous than any neighbor following an influencer primrose path.

Conservative Follies

Liberals imagine a better world that is based on shiny visions of what might be. Conservatives fear that the best world has already passed them by .

Both positions, of course, can be silly, especially in extremes. Liberals tend to optimistic views of people that have little reality in experience. Conservatives dream fondly of a past that never was.

As someone who reads a lot of history and science, the one thing I fully believe is that nothing stays the same for long. Our bodies are seething masses of churning chemical reactions. We age. Life evolves. And yet – it does not do so too quickly, our DNA was billed to be mostly conservative.

Conservatives say they fear change and simply want to return to when things were better. They usually confuse what was actually happening in those olden days with their own visions of what they believe should have been happening .

It’s an old, old story. From first shards of clay texts, there were those predicting disaster (because the stupid younger generation ignored the most important rituals and beliefs.) Age of gold devalued to silver through bronze and iron to maybe sand.

Unfortunately, for all of us, things do keep changing. Even more unfortunately, we have a lot less control over events – especially from beyond our limited circle – then we would like to believe .

Simple-Minded

In nostalgic eras past, unfortunate individuals with low mental capacity were known as “village idiots” or “simple-minded’” folks. Now we inhabit supposedly kinder times, but those “simple-minded” are still with us. However I refer tp people mentally constrained by their own choice.

Some are intellectually lazy, and find it easier to accept or reject anything they hear without troubling to investigate further. Nevertheless, they hold their opinion – whatever it may be – arrogantly. Others reach the same condition simply because there is too much to know and life requires us to focus on what is relevant .

The harm in so many people willingly becoming simple-minded is that in the myth of our society, citizens are supposed to be well informed. About everything. Admitting that one is fully ignorant or confused or even unsure about anything is not rewarded. To admit ignorance (even to yourself) when you are ignorant is quite healthy. But many of the unthinking may label you as stupid .

We have a voting population certain of their shallow beliefs, too involved in other things to care much except when egged on by volatile wannabe leaders .

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king. In the land of the simple-minded the wise person remains as unobtrusive as possible .

Magic

When I was a boy, “magic” had been confined to church. After world war II, everyone assumed “Yankee ingenuity” could fix anything, often with little more than “string and bailing wire”. Farm boys were all mechanical geniuses, City kids knew how to outfox anybody. All was – or would soon be – knowable and under control .

As examples, we fixed our own flat tires, changed oil. When a TV or radio didn’t function, I’d take vacuum tubes out to test and buy at Radio Shack. Even later, I knew how transistor “gates” worked and could program in binary (zeros and ones) or assembly. TV or newspaper news was limited, trustworthy, opinion confined to editorial pages .

Now? It’s all magic. Even mechanics can’t fix new cars, God himself couldn’t repair a broken circuit board. I have no idea how quantum computers work, nor how AI is programmed. And all sources of “news” are slanted and suspect .

In fact, once again, we inhabit a world of magic as profound and (possibly) as dark as anything in the Middle Ages. We know how to (mostly) talk and provide services for money, shop, consume, and be entertained. A few “experts” know a lot – or claim they know a lot – about increasingly tiny bits of esoterica .

That makes the residual child in me quite uneasy. Without understanding I still believe real control is impossible .

Flash Tsunami

Earthquakes and tsunamis often strike without warning, many times in places where they occur only every hundred years or so. These days, there are often warnings. But they seem to be more and more a metaphor for the various “flash” events created by an instantly interconnected world

You can, for example, be sitting quietly on a bench in a deserted park and be suddenly surrounded by a crowd. Maybe just having fun, maybe robbing everyone in sight, maybe engaged in gang warfare. The point is, it’s a lot of people suddenly appearing at a small place without warning. Only their social media knows why .

Similarly, there can be flash shortages of almost any good or service as advice or warnings go viral and everyone grabs as much of whatever as possible, paying much more than usual. Frantic hoarding clearing shelves instantly .

And of course there is the mental flash information known as “memes”. Suddenly everyone “knows” something they never knew before. Maybe true, maybe false, usually irrelevant but when thousands or millions of people are affected, even mental illusions have an impact .

It seems that such social flashes are more and more frequent. Almost like the “good old days” of the unexpected earthquake or tsunami .