Continuing from my recent post about Morrissey, immigration and racism, I think I should make a distinction clear here (the problem with my blog is that I write almost all posts in one sitting, and there's always something left unaddressed). I started off by talking about James Watson and saying that I felt uncomfortable calling him racist. I then went on pretty much to say that saying negative things about immigration did not make Morrissey racist, and it could have been inferred (incorrectly) that I thought Watson's and Morrissey's remarks in some way equivalent. Of course, they're not. If racism is an unfounded belief in the inferiority of a particular race, then saying that one's country is losing its identity because of the number of immigrants is clearly not a racist statement. Suggesting that Africans inherently (as a matter of genetic inheritance) have lower intelligence than caucasians, with no evidence, would seem, almost by definition, racist. In the case of Watson, in the quotes of which I am aware, he referred vaguely to tests that showed Africans to have lower intelligence, and stated his belief that in a few years we would discover that there is a genetically determined lower intelligence among Africans. There are a number of things to be said about this. It would appear to be part of the whole scientific racism phenomenon, of which one famous example is the 1994 best-selling study The Bell Curve. Scientific racism is, in itself, a huge subject, so I'll have to really limit my remarks here. First of all, I'm not aware that anyone has yet come up with a satisfactory definition of intelligence that would make it possible to reliably test for it, anyway, so that all tests so far must be assumed to be in one way or another biased. Secondly, Watson seemed intent on anticipating a future discovery of genetically lower intelligence. There are all kinds of questions here, as to why he would even wish to anticipate that, and so on, but, once again, I will limit myself. How will something as nebulous and indefinable as intelligence be correlated with DNA? That's my question. In the same way that it's correlated with answers to culturally-biased examination papers today? I mean, first of all, you have to decide whether or not someone is intelligent in order to correlate it with genes, surely? Without spending paragraphs and paragraphs on the subject of racist science, I'm going to stick my neck out and say, quite simply, that I think Watson is wrong. At the moment, I don't really feel the need to say more than that.
Perhaps, given the fact that Watson's comments so well fit the bill for the definition of racism above, you might wonder why I feel uncomfortable calling him racist. I think there are a number of reasons for this, and one of them is that I feel that people have become trigger-happy with the word in recent years. I do think that people have recognised that they can shift attention away from themselves and their own shortcomings by pointing at someone else and saying, "Racist!" I also think this is a deeply cowardly and unhelpful tactic. Since I don't particularly like Watson, I felt there was an element of that in my own accusation, and I didn't really like that. To be honest, whether or not Watson is racist was, for me, almost a side issue. What I found myself taking exception to were his values as expressed in the kind of society he would apparently like to engineer (genetically) – a society in which "all girls are pretty". If he's being serious here, and I assume he is, then I can only say that I think his aims are vile. I don't think that his vision could ever be acheived, anyway, but it's a 'master-race' vision. His comments about Africans were therefore interesting to me because, of course, racism is a huge factor in any 'master-race' vision. I was keen to speculate about whether there might be something inherently racist and 'master-race' within the ethos of the whole field of genetics, and it was pretty convenient for me to rope Watson in to support my speculation. In the end, I don't have daily (or any personal) dealings with Watson, and there's no actual need for me to comment on whether or not he is racist. But since his comments are in the public domain, I can still comment on them. Beyond that, I'd rather give him the benefit of the doubt, as I would hope that people would give it to me.
There's another factor in why I would rather not sling about accusations of racism. That is, I think that racism is one part of a wider problem, and the basic problem of being human, which is simply how to live with other people's differences. If I were to give a single word to the wider problem of which racism is part, I would call it 'dehumanisation'. In other words, by characterising a particular race as inferior, you are dehumanising them. But it's as easy – perhaps easier – to dehumanise someone by calling them racist, as it is to dehumanise them through the use of derogatory racial stereotype. I don't believe that people are born with a tattoo behind the ear saying "racist" or "not racist". As I've said before, I think anyone is capable of racism. Racism is as nebulous as identity. If someone expresses a racist view, surely it's far more helpful to talk about it than to turn them into an outcast. (Yes, I know some people are more difficult to reach than others, and do present a very real problem.)
This brings me back to Morrissey, who has now issued a statement in response to the NME article. It's a fairly interesting read, though I note that Morrissey is not really as good a prose writer as he is a lyricist. I noted in particular his full support of the Love Music, Hate Racism campaign. I found this interesting because I'm not sure I would support that organisation myself (incidentally, despite being a vegetarian and oppoosed to vivisection, I don't particularly support PETA, either; I don't like Pete Singer's utilitarian philosophy). Why am I unsure? Because they oppose the invitation made to the BNP to speak in an Oxford debate about free speech. As a writer, if I am passionate about anything, then it has to be free speech. My impression is that the people of Love Music, Hate Racism, like many, many people who would probably say they support free speech, don't actually understand what free speech is. It's very tedious to have to say this for the thousandth time, but free speech doesn't mean letting people say anything as long as you agree with them. It means letting people say anything even if you don't agree with them. It's always better to talk than to fight, surely? I suppose that the invitation to the BNP could be seen as a deliberate move to stir things up a bit, but really, what's the point of even having a debate on free speech if you're only going to invite people who agree with each other?
I'm reminded here of the stance inevitably taken by governments with regard to terrorism. "We don't negotiate with terrorists," they always say, as if to prove how strong and morally upright they are. This is really another permutation of the pointing a finger at someone else to distract people from one's own shortcomings. Now, though, instead of "racist" we have the word "terrorist". They're terrorists, we're not. They're racists, we're not. No negotiation. No talking about things. If we talk to racists, that makes us racist. If we talk to terrorists, that makes us terrorists. And we wouldn't want that, because we're good people, aren't we? And the fight goes on.
I'm going to wander off into left-field a bit, here, I'm afraid, and say that my final musings in my blog post about the whole Morrissey debacle – the musings about whether or not nations should exist – have a lot to do with the idea of enlightenment. As in, yes, Zen and all that. I mentioned that I almost always write my posts in one sitting, and I'd like to do that this time, too, and now I've only just got onto another VAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSTTT subject. I'm beginning to flag, but I shall try to rally. Let me just get some water.
So, where was I?
It occurred to me that one possible problem with my thinking on questions of race and immigration was the tendency to look at some abstract big picture and take things to their 'logical conclusion' (always a bad idea). I did mention what has often been my antidote to logical conclusions and 'big picture' thinking – individualism, or my own version of it, which is simply taking each person as I find them and each moment as it comes. I don't want to dismiss the immigration debate entirely, but as I'm sitting here writing this, immigration is certainly not a problem for me, and perhaps, as Eckhart Tolle suggests, nothing is really a problem in the here and now. This is linked with an old idea of mine, and one which I'm almost certain is not originally my idea, that the answer to all our social and international frictions is not political, but spiritual – that we will continue having violence on an individual and a mass level until everyone is enlightened.
By the way, I hope that no one reading this is imagining that I'm going to come to some great conclusion at the end of all this? No? Good.
Enlightenment is something that interests me deeply. I'm not even sure if it exists, but it seems to me that it might constitute the only possible redemption for the individual and the race.
What is enlightenment? Er… don't ask me, Guv. Apparently it's pretty fucking ineffable. For those not overly familiar with the 'concept' I'll try and give some (undoubtedly unhelpful) pointers in a minute.
I am not aware that I've ever actually met anyone who is enlightened, though I am informed by someone I trust that he has. Still, I'd rather rely on my own experience in being able to say definitively that enlightenment is 'natural and real'. There are, however, many, many accounts of enlightenment available, in books, on the Internet, and all over the place.
Some time back, the writer Thomas Ligotti published, for a limited time, his long essay The Conspiracy Against the Human Race on the Internet. The essay was a discussion of horror fiction heavily slanted towards an exploration of pessimistic philosophy, with the overall effect of being an argument for the voluntary extinction of the human race in order to put an end to human suffering. One by one, Ligotti examined and dismissed possible answers to suffering. Naturally, one of these possible answers was enlightenment. This was dismissed, too, as something that only ever happens accidentally, and that very rarely, and which, if it happened wholesale, would reduce us to beings interested in nothing more than our next meal, if that. I found this exploration of the subject of enlightenment (and by extension, the essay as a whole) to be weakened considerably by the fact that it seemed to rely on the figure U.G Krishnamurti as the ultimate authority (or anti-authority) on all things enlightened. U. G. seems to present us with a particularly curmudgeonly version of enlightenment, and blasts all other enlightened beings (apparently including the original Buddha, by which I suppose is meant the prince Gautama Sakyamuni) as charlatans. However, there are other accounts of the subject to be taken into consideration, such as that, for instance, of Suzanne Segal.
For myself, I find that I have become, over the last few years, strangely interested in the reputedly enlightened figure of Eckhart Tolle, author of a number of books on the subject (more-or-less) of enlightenment, most notably, The Power of Now. I mention him here in particular, because of certain remarks he has made on the subject of group identity:
The self does not want to be free of that; that's not where the longing for freedom comes from. The longing for freedom does not come from self. The self speaks of freedom, but then sabotages it continuously. It says, 'I'm looking for peace', and then creates conflict. And then you can see how it operates collectively, the same mindset operates collectively. 'Let's have another peace conference.' And in the meantime they produce massive amounts of weapons. So… 'Let's talk about peace.' The peace process. They're still talking about the peace process, and they're continually throwing grenades and machine-gunning… The peace process. Peace – they don't want peace. Because the mindset depends on non-peace for its survival. And so whether your sense of self is predominantly a personalised sense of self or whether it's predominantly a collective egoic sense of self – a religion, or a nation, or a racial thing – then it can be even stronger than the personalised; it's actually exactly the same principle at work, exactly the same mechanism at work, but can be even more mad than the personalised sense of self, which is mad enough. But you can see how mad humanity can become when they identify with a collective 'me'. That's the height of madness.
As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, it is identity itself (the self itself), that appears to be the source of all conflict. This is something that Tolle says, and something that I'm inclined to agree with. The thing is, I personally don't know what to do about such a situation. I appear to have a self, and it doesn't seem to be disappearing anytime soon. Also, in the same way that there's some lingering doubt in me that we should simply do away with national identity, I can't help feeling there's something of value in the self, too. For instance, I'm not sure how love is possible without a self. (Who would be loving whom?) But I'm aware of counter-arguments – that it's precisely the self that obstructs love. In any case, if enlightenment exists, it doesn't appear to be something that can be understood or arrived at by reasoned argument. It seems to be in the nature of a quantum leap of consciousness that happens without being willed, and does not happen when it is willed.
All of this is an ongoing internal debate for me, that I engage in, and then let go, engage in and let go…
On the question of whether Eckhart Tolle is himself enlightened, well, first of all, I'm not sure such a question is even important, but I'd be disingenuous if I said it wasn't a question that interested me. I'm inclined to think that, of all the examples of reputed enlightenment I have encountered, he is the most convincing candidate so far. I cannot fault anything he says. I find no pettiness there, nothing pernicious or manipulative or wilfully obscure. I am, however, not without reservations on the question, which, just for the record, I will list below, though they probably serve as a list of my own shortcomings more than anything else:
1) I have reservations simply because I am a doubting kind of person in many ways. I think doubt is an important part of keeping an open mind.
2) I hate the title 'The Power of Now', which reminds me of the song The Power, by Snap!. It's a curious question as to whether being enlightened should enhance one's taste. Why should I anticipate that it should? (And why should I put such faith in my own taste?) Nonetheless, this kind of thing bothers me. I remember seeing the website of someone who claimed a near death experience, and gagging at how tacky it was. "If you've died and gone to the shining edge of the cosmos and back," I thought to myself, "how come your poetry is so utterly shite?"
3) Tolle changed his first name from 'Ulrich' to 'Eckhart', apparently post-enlightenment, as an allusion to the mystic Meister Eckhart. If the basis of enlightenment is having no identity, why change your name, which shows a concern with identity?
4) Does being enlightened oblige you to write the same kind of insipid self-help books as everyone else? This is a bit of a worry for me, as I'd rather keep writing a rather dark vein of… stuff. Also, there's a samey-ness here that's not entirely attractive.
5) After having read pretty much everything Tolle's written and watched his DVDs and so on, I still don't feel especially enlightened, which is bound to be my fault. However, even assuming that Tolle is enlightened, and this is my fault, what's the use of going on reading the books and watching the DVDs?
6) It's not only me. I haven't actually heard of a case of anyone becoming enlightened after reading any of his books or watching his DVDs.
7) Tolle's apparently quite wealthy now, and continues to make money from his teachings. This does bother me a bit. But then, maybe this is a problem with perceptions of enlightenment. Why shouldn't someone enlightened have money, as long as they're not attached to it, and as long as that's not what motivates them? I suppose one answer to that question would be that they might want to avoid more than average material wealth simply in order not to hoard.
8) He's 'too nice'. This sounds like complaining for the sake of complaining, but I think I do trust people a bit more if they show their dark side. I like the tai chi symbol that shows darkness and light intertwined. Is it possible to deny the darkness? That's not a rhetorical question. I think it's worth considering. I mean, I'm not sure I want violence to continue forever just for aesthetic reasons. I'll give an example of Tolle being 'too nice': He's blandly dismissive of drug use. Okay, so he doesn't take an authoritarian tone, and what he says is fair enough (if you have highs, you'll have lows), but he seems unwilling to look at the fact that it's possible even to have 'noble' drug use, as in certain tribal rites of passage. This strikes me as a slightly 'radio-friendly' approach.
9) Not showing one's dark side, somehow, also seems to have implications about sexuality. I haven't entirely fathomed why this is. I suppose that I tend to subscribe to the Woody Allen view that "Sex can be dirty, but only if it's done right." I find it hard to imagine healthy, wholesome sex without wanting to puke. Eckhart does talk a little about sex, describing it as "the most deeply satisfying experience you can have on a physical level", and does apparently have a partner (no prurience here, please), but I honestly find sexual desire and the kind of enlightenment he presents to be somehow incongruous. Interestingly, Buddhism, too, has a tradition marked with asexuality. There is the celibacy of the monks, of course, and there's even the fact that there's no Buddhist wedding ceremony. As someone who has at least a nodding acquaintance with sexuality, I suppose I'd like a better idea of how that fits in the enlightenment picture without having to resort to castration or something.
Actually, I think that's pretty much it – my list of petty excuses for not being enlightened, but, like everyone else, contributing to all the horrible conflict of human society. I suppose that makes me a terrorist, too. But I think, as we're all terrorists together, we should try and negotiate with each other.
Justin Isis writes:
Ikkyu was supposed to be enlightened, or at least he received a slip of paper from his teacher certifying this, which he proceeded to tear to shreds. He also wrote the following:”a crazy lecher shuttling between whorehouse and barthis past master paints south north east west with his cock “”don’t hesitate get laid that’s wisdomsitting around chanting what crap””all koans just lead you onbut not the delicious pussy of the young girls I go down on””the crow’s caw was okay but one night with a lovely whoreopened a wisdom deeper than what that bird said”Here`s him talking about vaginas:”It has the original mouth but remains wordless;It is surrounded by a magnificent mound of hair.Sentient beings can get completely lost in itBut it is also the birthplace of all the Buddhas of the ten thousand worlds.”Most of his poems seem to be about either 1) Pussy or 2) How other Zen masters are not as cool as he is.
See, that’s exactly the kind of thing I want to hear Tolle saying.
abbass writes:
i thoroughly enjoyed this post.. I wish i’d read ur watson-related stuff earlier..those poems were pretty cool as well š
Hello Abbass. Well, thank you for reading and commenting.Always reassuring to know that the blog is not one hundred per cent gibberish.
āThe Bawdy Buddhistā..? Sorry, Iām a sucker for alliteration. Anyway, agreed, a great read.āthe answer to all our social and international frictions is not political, but spiritual – that we will continue having violence on an individual and a mass level until everyone is enlightened.āI canāt think of the title, or the author right now, but I want to say that someone told me of a book that discussed the theory that if there is life in other planets, civilization on this planet is at the low end of the enlightened totem-pole. Something along the lines of, that there are certain phases a civilization needs to work through in order to get to the point where collectively, everyone is humming along at higher frequencies. And I suppose thatās a zeny-lovey, get along with everybody kind of place. A reality that, as you say is too āineffableā, for us to grasp. What did Bill Hicks say?…āNothingās working anymore because weāre evolving, and going through change, weāre due for changeā. Of course Iām paraphrasing.
“I canāt think of the title, or the author right now, but I want to say that someone told me of a book that discussed the theory that if there is life in other planets, civilization on this planet is at the low end of the enlightened totem-pole.”Well, although I have mixed feelings about the idea of progress, it is sometimes comforting to reflect that change has apparently occurred in the history of the planet. Ligotti, whom I mentioned above, takes the position that “it’s a damned shame that intelligent life ever evolved in the first place”. That’s a position I understand and empathise with. I actually find it quite difficult to be normally cheerful in a way that would allow me to get on with, I don’t know, working in information technology and having children with a lovely wife, since for some reason a part of me demands that such things actually mean something rather just being pieces of a gibbering nightmare spoken in the language of the blind idiot god Azathoth, who rules all things from the heart of the atomic chaos of the universe while lulled by the monotonous droning of noxious pipes played by hideous, amorphous flopping things. So… I’ve lost what I was going to say… Oh yeah, so if human consciousness is going nowhere, that to me is worse than tragic. The fact that it exists at all can sometimes be reassuring, in that, it’s a pretty amazing phenomenon. And if something like human consciousness arose out of matter – if such a change has taken place – who knows what else might develop over thousands or millions of years?Actually, I’ve been in a pretty Ligottian mood since reading that interview with him to which I posted a link above, and going last night to a really, really dismal show of “clairvoyance and mediumship”. It was just the kind of thing I’d expect to turn up in a Ligotti story. This medium was getting a hell of a lot of “no” responses to her, “I’m getting a picture of a tulip. A lovely tulip with purple veins. Can you understand that for me, please?” and so on. I think her miss rate was at least around fifty per cent. It was gruelling to watch. I feel like writing something about it. It conjured up for me a world in which the dead are shuffling about in some kind of limbo of senility, full of images of giant keys and empty handbags, and the number nine, fuzzily intent on bringing messages to people such as, “Remember to leave the jar by the door.” Reminds me a bit of this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph-vEN2DlPk&feature=related
I guarantee you that most people in the IT field, and other fields for that matter, with children and a lovely wife are not normally cheerful. Itās precisely the monotonous droning of the everyday grind that is a nightmare. But, on the other hand, that might make some people very, happy. Donāt know. So youāre saying that we might be the stuff that makes up the thought, dream, or nightmare of some ominous being sitting at the center of something, somewhere? We could be part of a long running joke, āHey, try the veal, Iām here through eternityā. But doesnāt Europe as a whole have great vacation plans? Iāve heard that you get something like six weeks off per year. And thatās when you start the job. In the US, you only get two weeks to start with. That speaks volumes. You know what,ā¦ I knew he was going to say John, before he said John. Ooooooo, what does that meanā¦
My first paragraph (after the quote) was largely a pastiche of Lovecraft, based on his fictional (?) deity Azathoth:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AzathothFirst there was Poe, then there was Lovecraft, now there is Ligotti. I actually think there’s a real progression there, but the subject’s probably a bit too big for me to get into at the moment.I’ve just been looking for soundbites to try and sum up the Ligottian fictional ethos. I can’t seem to find anything very snappy or to the point right now, but from the recent interview, there’s this:”It really doesnāt work to tell someone whoās already alive that itās better not to have been born. Theyāve already been born. Itās too late for them. So they make the best of things. They try to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Even pessimists for the most part follow this course. It would be suicide not to, and committing suicide is really hard to pull off in cold blood. Almost no one kills themselves because they think nonexistence is preferable to existence, or because they want to avoid any extraordinary psychological or physical suffering that may be awaiting them. Suicides wait until things are so awful that they canāt stand being alive anymore. Sometimes theyāll kill themselves when it looks like things are going to become really awful in the near future, but there are a lot of pressures against being a proactive suicide. And when it comes around to facing the facts, almost everyone is afraid of death, so they do what they can to hang on as long as they can. They choose the path that they perceive to lead to the lesser of two horrors and keep following it until they keel over dead. And no hedonistic philosophy is going to convince them or anyone else that this isnāt the way to go.”That might give some idea of his tone, anyway. But I suppose, to create my own soundbite, his fiction carries the sense that existence is, in the most literal sense possible, a nightmare, and not one from which it is possible to awake.As I said, I have a lot of sympathy with this view, but, as he says, since I’ve already been born, I do what I can to make my life as good as I can. I wouldn’t necessarily want to champion Ligotti’s view, as such. I mean, if he is correct, then there seems little doubt that madness is preferable to sanity anyway.This is a really long-winded way of trying to explain the point I was trying to make before, which is, I have never yet been entirely able…(to be continued)
(continued) Just had a phonecall. So, to continue…I have never yet been entirely able to rid myself of a kind of background white noise of Ligotti-esque (to understate the case hugely) unease with the universe, and this actively seems to prevent me from taking on certain social roles that seem to require a kind of belief. I personally find it hard to believe people who tell me that they don’t believe in anything and then go out very energetically pursuing career and relationships, and often procreating and thus perpetuating the human life in which (apparently) they don’t believe. So, I think they’re lying. My own cosmic unease is, I think, far more open-ended than that of Ligotti. I honestly can’t see him ever changing his position, and it’s a position that has already concluded and closed. However, I don’t seem to have that whatever-it-is that most people seem to have (and with many people it’s something very obvious like a Christian faith) that effectively plugs up the sucking hole of white noise and makes it possible to put your feet on the ground as if it’s solid and… be affirmative.One result of all this is that I’m fairly fuzzy on such things as how much holiday we’re supposed to get a year here in Britain, but I believe you’re right and that’s it’s more than in the US.
Robin Davies writes:
“I personally find it hard to believe people who tell me that they don’t believe in anything and then go out very energetically pursuing career and relationships, and often procreating and thus perpetuating the human life in which (apparently) they don’t believe. So, I think they’re lying.”When someone says they “don’t believe in anything”, presumably they mean that they don’t believe in an ultimate meaning or purpose to their existence. But surely that doesn’t prevent someone pursuing a career, relationships and raising children as pleasurable ends in themselves.I think your posts on racism contain a lot of good sense. It seems to me that the energy people spend on attacking racist speech could be more usefully aimed at attacking racist actions.
“When someone says they ‘don’t believe in anything’, presumably they mean that they don’t believe in an ultimate meaning or purpose to their existence. But surely that doesn’t prevent someone pursuing a career, relationships and raising children as pleasurable ends in themselves.”I’ve been thinking about this – always a bad sign. Life seems to have a momentum of its own. Maybe that could be seen in terms of Schopenhauer’s idea of the ‘will’, which Ligotti is influenced by. This is speculation, but animals might not have any beliefs or sense of purpose (people tend to assume they don’t, but surely that’s just as much projection as so-called ‘anthropomorphosising’ them). Anyway, assuming that they don’t for the moment, nonetheless, they are animated by some kind of drive. And humans are, of course, animals. So, in a sense, it really doesn’t – or shouldn’t – matter what they believe or profess to believe, since at some fundamental, unconscious level, they are driven, and no one really seems to understand the nature of that driving prime mover. However, in my case, I can state with some certainty, that lack of belief has interfered with my functioning to the extent that I don’t seem to be doing all of the animal things that I should be driven to do. This makes me think that there’s at least some kind of connection between belief and motivation. I mean, as in the general motivation just to get on and do things and live. Maybe the direction of causation is different, though. Maybe I was somehow forced out of the stream of survivalism in some biological sense and one symptom of this was a lack of belief in things.Which is not to say that I’m entirely passive, but looking around and observing, I can honestly say that I’m not driven in the same way other people seem to be. Almost the only thing now that seems to bring out something proactive in me is writing.Anyway, I’m getting slightly off the track.I experience a fundamental lack of something, maybe simply the ability to identify with that fact that I am life, but I feel like, whatever it is, it’s a something very much taken for granted by the majority of other people, to the extent that they don’t notice its existence or realise that there could be an experience of life without it. The basic function of that whatever-it-is, simply, seems to be life-affirmation. Which is what animals seem to have naturally. Everything seems to drive them to procreate and perpetuate the species – life affirmation, life for the sake of life. Obviously, in some way, self-awareness, as developed in humans, complicated this whole life-for-the-sake-of-life, which is why we have things like religion, and why, religion having, in many ways, failed, we have, for instance, Ligotti lamenting that consciousness ever evolved in the first place. And yet, there does seem to be enough of the animal legacy of a simple, unthinking, life-for-the-sake-of-life in most people, that even the obvious malfunctions that have arisen with consciousness do not perturb them in any fundamental way. Horror to most people (if they experience it at all) is Stephen King horror – an average American family is threatened by forces from outside that are soon enough vanquished and then things return to ‘normality’. It’s not Lovecraftian horror, which says that the real normality is, from any human point of view, a madness that stretches into infinity and for which there is no farther shore to reach. And yet, it seems to me, the majority of people who profess to believe in nothing, atheists, for instance, are basically exactly the same as those who profess belief in Jesus or any other such ‘supernatural’ thing. At a fundamental, biological level, they still have the life-for-the-sake-of-life drive as any other animal. I don’t seem to have that, even though I wouldn’t describe myself as atheist, or nihilist or anything like that. So, I do get frustrated when, from my standpoint, at least, people’s words and actions are in such conflict.There’s just some basic assumption at work that no longer seems to work for me, and I think that ‘basic assumption’ of life affirmation, actually is what many people, no, what everyone is referring to when they talk about god. So, I find it difficult to take atheists seriously if they have children. To me, they are either a) unable really to think their atheism through or b) having children as some sort of grotesque existential experiment. Having said that, it’s quite possible (probable even) that the minds and life experiences of the people I’m talking about are so different to my own, that my feelings and concepts just don’t apply to them (naturally, the same thing works in reverse, and if I can’t claim to understand them, they can’t claim to understand me). I would say, however, that an atheist is always in danger of having a child like me, who really would not appreciate being a mere existential experiment. Actually, there’s a lot more I could say on this subject, but I don’t want to sound like a lecturer, so maybe I should save it for one of the novels I’m working on.”I think your posts on racism contain a lot of good sense. It seems to me that the energy people spend on attacking racist speech could be more usefully aimed at attacking racist actions.”Thank you. Actually, I wanted to say a bit more about this, but I’ve rambled on for long enough at the moment. Maybe later.
Robin Davies writes:
“There’s just some basic assumption at work that no longer seems to work for me, and I think that ‘basic assumption’ of life affirmation, actually is what many people, no, what everyone is referring to when they talk about god. So, I find it difficult to take atheists seriously if they have children. To me, they are either a) unable really to think their atheism through or b) having children as some sort of grotesque existential experiment.”As an atheist I would disagree with this, and I don’t think you really believe point b)! I can’t quite imagine Richard Dawkins cackling evilly into Lalla Ward’s ear in bed as he says “C’mon love, lets start a grotesque existential experiment!” Life affirmation doesn’t require a belief in god. It’s possible to get enough out of life (the pleasures of good food, music, books, friendship, sex, humour, scenery etc) without any requirement for a long-term or deeper “meaning”. It’s a matter of attitude and perspective but of course one can’t just change those easily because I suspect they derive partly from genetic factors and partly from one’s upbringing.
Well, no, I didn’t really believe b), at least, not as a widespread phenomenon, although that is, I suppose, how I personally would feel as the child in such circumstances, and pretty much how I feel anyway, in terms of my being the result of procreation. So, anyway, I either have to think in terms of a) or the point I think I mentioned later that the experience of simply existing is so very different that it’s not something I can really understand, at least linguistically.
“Life affirmation doesn’t require a belief in god. It’s possible to get enough out of life (the pleasures of good food, music, books, friendship, sex, humour, scenery etc) without any requirement for a long-term or deeper ‘meaning’.”I suppose I agree with this in a way, but not to the extent that I’d feel happy to have children and force on them the conundrum of existence.There are obvious problems with my ‘position’; logically it requires people to be certain that there’s a meaning to life before having children. Which could be a problem if you think the intrinsic value of humanity is such that it should be perpetuated – and I am sympathetic to this view. To quote from the musical Hair, “How dare they try to end this beauty?”But I kind of get tired with the limitations of words in explaining myself. It’s frustrating. I mean, it’s entirely possible (I don’t know) that I give the impression on this blog (false, by the way) that in my daily life I go around angrily biting atheists’ ankles or something. I’m a great believer (ha ha) in the quote from The Little Prince, “Words are the source of all misunderstandings.”In The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, there’s a passage where the narrator says that language is basically designed for controversy and conflict. What, he asks rhetorically, do two heterosexual men really have to say to each other? And then he says that language can only ever take on a harmonious quality within the context of a sexual relationship. Well, that’s Houellebecq. Unlike many of the artists I admire (Mishima, Houellebecq, Momus) I do believe in Platonic love. But I think Houellebecq has a point about language being made for conflict. If we know a person only through their opinions as expressed in words, sooner or later we are bound to find them objectionable.I feel like I want to make it clear here, just because I’m keen to avoid being seen as some sort of stereotypical, smug atheist-baiter, that (without doing a head-count) I think I’m right in saying that most of my friends are atheist (I can state pretty positively that most of them are non-theist). If I bang on about it on my blog a bit, it’s probably the result of years sitting in rooms with friends and hearing the same conversation, more-or-less:”Hey, there are still some people who aren’t atheist, can you imagine that?””Ha ha ha ha. It’s incredible, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t be atheist? They must be real silly so-and-sos.””Exactly. That’s exactly what I think. I mean, you wouldn’t catch me being not-atheist. No way. That would be really embarrassing.””Yeah. I mean, people who are not atheist are basically apologists for Catholic paedophilia and should probably be chemically castrated or something.””Yes. It’s a good thing we’re all atheists here, isn’t it?””It certainly is. Could you please pass me that copy of Atheists’ Weekly?””Yes, I could. It’s full of interesting and witty articles about why we should never ever think about life being anything more than dust.”And so on and so on, out of some insecurity repeatedly putting the stake in the heart of an absent vampire whom they profess to believe is dead anyway.And I have actually felt – probably ‘my stuff’, my insecurity – that if I said, “Well, I don’t know actually, I mean, our whole society is built on Christian values, some of which aren’t bad. I mean, liberalism itself is surely a Christian invention. Besides which I don’t think there should be this atheist/monotheist dichotomy. I’d rather we were able to relax and explore the idea that there might be infinite ways of interpreting existence”, that, to repeat myself, if I said that or something like it, the room would fall silent, and then a voice would rise up saying, “Get thee hence! Go and never return until you have thought about what you’ve just said and realised that you’re wrong and some kind of proto-Catholic sent here to corrupt us.”And, I wouldn’t really like that, because I feel quite attached to my friends, and certainly would not like to provoke their opprobrium.So, a lot of what I write on this blog is probably the equivalent of someone who has given up smoking going on and on about how bad cigarettes are. It’s probably just a phase.
I’m not sure how related this is – I suppose it’s related in some way – but I’ve been reading more about the extinction of languages:http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,825613,00.htmlIt’s very sad. I certainly don’t want a world in which everyone just speaks Newspeak.
Robin Davies writes:
“And I have actually felt – probably ‘my stuff’, my insecurity – that if I said, “Well, I don’t know actually, I mean, our whole society is built on Christian values, some of which aren’t bad. I mean, liberalism itself is surely a Christian invention. Besides which I don’t think there should be this atheist/monotheist dichotomy. I’d rather we were able to relax and explore the idea that there might be infinite ways of interpreting existence”, that, to repeat myself, if I said that or something like it, the room would fall silent, and then a voice would rise up saying, “Get thee hence! Go and never return until you have thought about what you’ve just said and realised that you’re wrong and some kind of proto-Catholic sent here to corrupt us.””Your comments seems reasonable to me and if they reply in that way then you should tell ’em that atheists should be amenable to reasoned debate rather than hurling insults at someone they don’t agree with! I must admit the rudeness of some of the posters on Richard Dawkins’ website strikes me as very counterproductive.
Well, as I said, it’s probably my own insecurity. I’m sure – I hope – any friends reading this will be finding it very funny.
I don’t know if this is related (obviously it is in some way), but it’s a great quote:”I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.” -Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, and author (1872-1970)