As long as I have been writing here at Stoic Observations, I have emphasized what I consider to be a generally constructive outlook in the context of what to see, how to interpret it and what are practical actions that follow. Mostly, I’d say, this is done in the interest of individual mental health. My major bete noir would be the constant streaming of short attention span theater in social media and the ease with which propaganda is mixed into the interwebz. I think it makes people crazy and sick.
Above and beyond that is my interpretation of cosmic matters. The Stoic believes, as Marcus Aurelius believed, that there is logic in the universe. Similarly, I have aligned myself with that thing we used to call the Intellectual Dark Web and what I see as a Rationality Movement to preserve the integrity of Enlightenment liberalism and Christian ethics. And specifically within the lessons of Christian ethics is that they render unto Caesar, that is they can provide canon law that peacefully coexists with secular law. So for various aspects or our human lives we can choose from this palette of reason, humility, humor and discovery without succumbing to ideology. Moreover that this is the path to wisdom in the never ending search for a better understanding of the order of the universe, the laws of physics and the mind of God. That is my trinity.
But there are limits to that worldview and I think I know what to do about it. Now that I’ve heard political philosopher John Gray. Thanks again to the smartest interviewer on the planet goes to Tyler Cowen, whom I have slavishly followed for decades. While I’m on this brief tangent, I think I am giving up on my idea of the T50, those thinkers whose work I will consume. There are way more than 50 (living and dead) and I just have to deal with that.
I have been watching films about Napoleon, including the new one by Ridley Scott. Also I am consuming at least the 100th documentary on WW2. This one is prominent on Netflix right now. Check it out. I have only recently walked through the dark corridors of the Holocaust Museum in our nation’s capitol, and I think I just saw a headline that tells me Ayaan Hirsi Ali is converting to Christianity. So I wonder, if most any chaotic thing is possible, what my role might be if it came down to war. A real war to preserve liberty and the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. How could I square myself, myself being one who has lived in peacetime all of my adult life? If the bombs began exploding in Los Angeles, where would I go?
Listening to John Gray made me think about my answer, and I will be rethinking it again, because my answer would be to turn to God in order to rally my men to fight in the absolute absurd chaos of battle where the meaning of humanity is inverted in unimaginable ways. War, I think, might turn all of us into jihadis. So why not subscribe, in that situation where staring down the barrel of an enemy’s gun, and seeing the determination in their eyes, to godly purpose? What would I do in the cauldron of battle to preserve my own life? My family’s life? The lives entrusted to me? Maybe anything. I have enough dark imagination to wreck havoc. I know why I don’t feed that bad wolf, because live in peacetime. My peaceful soul has not been broken. But watching episode six of Bass Reeves made me know I could cross that Rubicon. My own experience watching a teenager pull a pistol out and threaten an old man 10 feet from me reminds me. At the moment of death, I would fight back, by any capable means available to me. If I had a gun that day, that kid would be dead. But I didn’t and so my soul wasn’t broken.
John Gray sounds to me like a Stoic, but he takes no comfort in the presumption that the universe makes sense. I’m already in agreement with him that civilization breaks on a regular basis and that in the course of a lifetime of sure things, all such confidence can be broken in a day. The same thing that makes him doubt the Effective Altruists is the same as my reason. The same doubts he has about the capacity for elective government to deliver us from evil are my doubts. Where he takes me past the aegis of my own settled thinking is in the matter of purpose.
What if humanity has no sustainable purpose?
What if history doesn’t repeat itself, but human beings always end up walking in the same circles regardless of the reality of their circumstances? What if, as I believe, war erases meaning? Overwhelms it? Bends us into something alien, yet always latent in ourselves? What if everything civilized just stands in abeyance of a sufficient amount of time passing, like castles made of sand? We keep pretending that what we discover always adds to the account of progress. Yet we keep forgetting stuff out the backside. Nobody’s attention span is so very long. We’re not evolved for that. We are evolved to find solutions, even when there are no problems. We invent problems and then congratulate ourselves on our solutions - like the man who never learned to tie his shoes invented huaraches. Like the suburbanites who can no longer twist their spines pay for backup cameras on their cars. Like the affluent people who have never been punched in the nose form self-congratulatory alliances with ‘freedom fighters’. We find reasons to have purpose regardless of the sanity of that purpose. This is why we find metaphorical wars to occupy our time and energy. Maybe we always did. Maybe we always will.
If the universe is chaotic, or even only stochastic, we will always draw false conclusions from it. Our willingness to abstract may be our fatal flaw if there is no underlying or supreme order to things. For some, the very existence of non-Newtonian physics in quantum mechanics is proof. For me, I have to deal with the modern understanding of humanism itself. In other words, I keep the idea of political and ideological fallibility very close at hand as a Stoic, so I don’t immediately trust what sounds good. I want to know if a concept has been proven and works in reality. I want to understand the mechanisms that make it work consistently. How do those boots march on the ground, I ask metaphorically.
Well, maybe how those boots march is with actual non-metaphorical boots. When people fail to make sense of the world and have no purpose and expect only chaos from life, then they will find the only absolute confidence available in man’s mortality. So that means dear friends that I must look back to Hobbes. I’ll let it be Gray who takes me there - the man who would save his cats before his government. The man who suggests that with all the benefits of deliberation and the reasonable order democracy might make of it, that we are always animal and fundamentally self-deluded by our high-falutin’ words, politics and philosophies. Dearie me. What of the Logos, dear children? What of the Logos? Into whose capable hands might it fall, or might it simply fall? This is what I must be prepared for. So I will study to know the pessimist’s edge.
When ruin’s upon us, perceivably near
Then aim well to reckon the wages of fear.
What give ye the man of possessions today?
For double or nothing, he’ll gamble away.
If chaos is all he can see in his turn
Should he lose, he cares not, and lets the world burn.