Getting existential

When I was 20, I got bit by a bug that wouldn’t let go. It could go dormant for years, but symptoms would eventually reemerge.

The bug was existentialism, a philosophy popular in the post-World War II era but long since out of fashion.

It wasn’t really a school of thought. Thinkers associated with it generally denied the label and disagreed with each other. They spanned a century and were all over the place politically. Some were religious, others atheistic. Some were authors and artists more than philosophers. People associated with it include Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvior, Karl Jaspers, Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, Frantz Fanon and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

It was more mood than system, but one theme is that we are thrown into this world (to echo The Doors) without being consulted about it (to echo Kierkegaard). Then we have to improvise.

Other animals have more of a genetic script. Our lives would be easier if that were the case. We’d spend less time wondering about what we’re going to do next.

We’re here first and then have to figure out what to become within the limits of our situation. To get fancy, our existence precedes our essence — hence the term.

In other words, we have a kind of freedom. For existentialists, this isn’t freedom as in, “you can do or be whatever you want,” but more like a weight, as in, “you will always bear the burden of your decisions.”

For Sartre, “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

Here’s a simple example. I’m a longtime runner, although these days it looks more like walking (my rule: you’re running when you think you are).

Imagine we’re running a 15K (9.3-mile) local race, like the Poca River Run or the Dirty Dog Trail Run. You start out. It’s cold. Your lungs hurt. Ditto legs, feet and body. Part of you wants to cry or quit or walk, speaking from experience. What to do? If you quit, you must ask if you could have kept going. Could you have gone any faster? Should you have stopped to avoid injury?

It’s a decision you must make. There’s no external coercion.

That’s a mild example. But existentialists remind us that we make our decisions in the context of mortality. We are fragile and, at some point, we’re going to die. As for what, if anything, happens after that, there are beliefs but no certainty. It is our finiteness and mortality that make our decisions matter.

In an essay published shortly after the end of WWII, Sartre wrote: “We [the French people] were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free.”

He meant that people were responsible for their decisions of whether to resist or collaborate with the Nazis at whatever cost.

He went on to say: “Exile, captivity and especially death (which we usually shrink from facing at all in happier times) became for us the habitual objects of our concern. We learned that they were neither inevitable accidents, nor even constant and exterior dangers, but that they must be considered as our lot itself, our destiny, the profound source of our reality as men. At every instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase: ‘Man is mortal!’ And the choice that each of us made of his life and of his being was an authentic choice ...”

It’s when we hit these “limit situations,” in an expression of Jaspers, that we realize the burden of our freedom, our choices and our decisions — which brings us back to our current situation in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

At this moment, rich or poor, lucky or unlucky, mainstream or marginal, we are all facing a limit situation. (Actually, we’re always in one but mostly choose to ignore it.) We don’t know how long it will last, how bad it will get, who will be next, who will die or who will recover. Outbreak or not, we’re all temporary problems. But the things we think, say and do matter now.

Here’s the question: Knowing that we’re just here for a little while, what do we do with the time we have?

I can’t think of anything more shameful than to have to say at the end, “I spent my life making lots of money while making life worse for other people.” Or “I devoted my career to taking away health care from millions of Americans.” Or “I stood in the way of people taking meaningful action about catastrophic climate change.” Or “I spread hatred and fear of people who were different.”

That’s true whether we die to God, to karma or to nothingness. Our decisions matter.

We own them. And they own us.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Escape from freedom?

This op-ed of mine appeared in the Sunday Gazette-Mail.

Sometimes I get in the mood for a big fat Russian novel. It’s kind of like having a craving for a corn dog.

One hot mess of a novel that’s been on my mind lately is Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. It’s about the relationships between three brothers, the passionate and impulsive Dmitri, the saintly Alyosha and the tortured intellectual Ivan.

(If you think your family is weird, this book just might make you feel better.)

The most memorable part for me is the discussion about freedom and authority. It’s a riff on the New Testament story of the temptation of Jesus by Satan in the wilderness at the start of his ministry. In the novel, it takes the form of a “poem” or story told by Ivan about an imaginary encounter between Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor at the height of the Spanish Inquisition.

In it, Jesus appears as he did on earth even while heretics are being burned at the stake. He doesn’t make a scene but the people recognize him instantly and, drawn by his love and compassion, surround him asking for healing and his blessing.

The Grand Inquisitor is having none of it. He orders Jesus to be arrested immediately. The people are so used to being obedient to authority that they don’t object. That night he visits his prisoner in the dungeon and harangues him, asking “Why have you come to hinder us?”

In his view, Jesus’ fatal flaw was wanting people to be free to choose to follow him without coercion. The Inquisitor argues that freedom is the last thing people want and need, saying “nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom … I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.”

In other words, what people really crave is a strong authoritarian leader who will tell them what they want to hear and overawe them with spectacle. The “wise and dread spirit” who tempted Jesus in the desert called it: Give the people “miracle, mystery and authority” (or at least the lying promise of it) and they will throw themselves at the feet of the charismatic leader.

Jesus listens in silence, gazing gently at his jailer. In the end, “he suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips.” The old man shuddered, opened the cell door and told him to go away and never come again.

Jesus disappears into the night.

As for the Grand Inquisitor, “The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.”

This story within a story isn’t really about an unfortunate period in European history. It’s about an unfortunate but periodically recurring tendency in humanity to willingly submit to authoritarian leaders, systems and regimes.

This was also the theme of Erich Fromm’s classic study “Escape From Freedom,” which was first published 1941. Fromm had fled Germany shortly after the Nazi takeover, which also prompted him to write the book.

His basic argument was that modern capitalist societies affect people in two contradictory ways: people become “more independent, self-reliant, and critical” while also becoming “more isolated, alone, and afraid.”

This leaves us with two alternatives: We can either move toward “positive freedom,” the often difficult step of creatively relating to others in work and love; or we can surrender to authoritarianism or conformity, both of which come at the cost of an authentic life. Of these, the former is more dangerous, particularly in hard times, while the latter is more common.

Those who give way to authoritarianism are aroused by and ready to submit to powerful leaders, whether they are individuals or institutions. They are also contemptuous of the weak and frequently target marginalized groups. For them, “the world is composed of people with power and those without it, of superior ones and inferior ones” and the lack of power of the “losers” is seen as a sign of guilt and inferiority.

Leaders of authoritarian political movements play on these feelings and on the resentments and frustrations of people in uncertain times. In “Mein Kampf,” for example, the worst of the lot wrote that the German masses really wanted after years of defeat and depression was “the victory of the stronger and the annihilation or the unconditional surrender of the weaker.” They “are far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival than by the grant of liberal freedom …”

He described in detail how authoritarian movements help people overcome their sense of isolation:

“The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who in becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people. … If he steps for the first time out of his small workshop or out of the big enterprise, in which he feels very small, into the mass meeting and is now surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction … he himself succumbs to the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion.”

That sounds like a contemporary political rally. It’s not a coincidence that both the Washington Post and the New York Times have recently published columns and news stories about the renewed debate on fascism in the United States and around the world.

Authoritarian movements and leaders can be tempting. At different times, many admirable peoples and cultures have fallen for them. The results generally aren’t good, either for their victims or supporters. The temptations of “the wise and dread spirit” and the Grand Inquisitor will always be there and at times they can seem very alluring.

It comes down to a choice.

(Note: Over 20 years ago I listened to a recorded lecture on this topic by now retired Barnard College professor Dennis Dalton. I found it fascinating but remote at the time. Recent events prompted me to revisit the sources.)

Bumper sticker thoughts

In lieu of a real blog post, I'd like to report on some of the more interesting bumper stickers I've seen lately.
The first of these is on a topic frequently discussed here but one which, sadly, has been neglected lately: to wit, zombies.

In the parking lot of a Kroger store, I saw one that said something like "The hardest part of a zombie apocalypse will be pretending I'm not excited." I don't exactly look forward to one, but it would no doubt put a certain zest into one's days.

Another good one, which by coincidence or not was seen near where the WV legislature meets said "Come to the Dark Side! We have cookies." That would probably be all it would take for some folks. Probably for me too if it was in the afternoon and they had coffee as well.

Finally, I'm still trying to figure this one out. I saw a vehicle with a Dostoevsky bumper sticker, which is fine, AND a "Who is John Galt" Ayn Rand bumper sticker.

I'm sorry. El Cabrero is all about freedom of expression but you can't have it both ways. It's either got to be Dostoevsky or Rand but not both. One has to choose between being a real and compassionate person or a moral insect. Father Zossima and Alyosha Karamazov would be mortified.

Interestingly, the vehicle also had a 13.1 sticker, signifying the mileage a half marathon. The Spousal Unit and I are going to try to do one on trails at Babcock State Park tomorrow. I estimate that it will take me a week to finish. Don't wait up. And don't mix your bumper stickers!

KALOO KALAY no links today. We're cabbages and kings.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PSYCHED OUT

Photo credit: Dave Hogg, courtesy of EveryStockPhoto.

It used to be a joke that every college freshperson wanted to be a psychology major. That is the age when people are trying, generally with very limited success, to figure out themselves and other people.

El Cabrero fit that pattern back in the previous geological age. I had somehow stumbled on to Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche in high school and imagined that psychology classes would be that cool.

Would that it were so.

To my horror, I seemed to have stumbled in to a den of behaviorists. If there is one ideology I like even less than Stalinism or economic libertarianism, it's gotta be behaviorism.

I would probably have a lot less trouble learning that a good friend was a cannibal than I would to learn that he or she was a fan of B. F. Skinner. Actually, that happened recently and I'm still trying to deal with it.

Clarification: by behaviorism, I don't mean attempting to study behavior in measurable ways. That's fine. I mean metaphysical behaviorism, where people pretend that there's no such thing as conscious or unconscious mental activity and that we're all balls of stimulus response conditioning.

I remember some professors ridiculing the idea of consciousness, mind, and similar ideas and thinking "These people are idiots."

It seems to me the height of loopiness for beings who are only aware of the world through their own consciousness to deny that it exists. And I think there's something evil about reductionism, the attempt to reduce the complexity of human life to any simple deterministic factor, whether it's conditioning, genes, economics, "rational choice," etc. We're way too messy for that. Sometimes I wish we weren't.

As Dmitri Karamazov said in Dostoevsky's classic novel,

Yes, man is broad, too broad. I’d have him narrower. The devil knows what to make of it!

That was the end of my psych major.

Fortunately, it appears that the discipline has recovered from this mental disorder, thanks in part to research from many quarters, including brain science, evolution, ethology, etc., not to mention common sense.

SHOCKING IRAQ. Here's a video segment of Keith Olbermann discussing the application of the "shock doctrine" in Iraq with Naomi Klein.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS. Corporate lobbyists, nervous about 2008, are pressing to grab all they can in the months ahead.

MINE SAFETY then and now, courtesy of the Gazette's Ken Ward.

TWISTS AND TURNS. There have been some strange developments in the Megan Williams case lately. First, the WV Attorney General Darrell McGraw's office declined a request of the Logan County prosecutor to offer an opinion on pressing hate crimes charges in the case. Then the AG expressed a desire to take over the the case. Both moves were not well received by prosecutor Brian Abraham.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS, A LITERARY BONUS AND AN ONION

Caption: This is him.

The more you learn about President Bush's proposed federal budget, the less there is to like.

Here is a fairly detailed but still readable analysis from the American Friends Service Committee's
Washington Office.

Here's the intro:

The federal budget is the ultimate embodiment of our nation’s priorities and direction, a roadmap of our shared plans as a society. What will our tax money buy? What are the moral mandates we share? What are our national aspirations today? What are our intentions with regard to future generations?

The Fiscal Year 2008 budget request released by the Administration this week offers a troubling response to these questions. The request seeks the highest level of military spending in two decades – even before supplemental funds for current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are taken into account.

It includes supplemental FY07 war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan that would bring the annual expenditure for those conflicts to a level more than five times higher than the entire State Department budget for the same period. It proposes cuts to essential programs that help children receive health care and elders pay their heating bills, while spending billions for a “virtual fence” on our southern border.

And that's just the intro.

SPEAKING OF THE DEVIL, here's another Brothers Karamazov moment brought to you by Dostoevsky. It involves the retelling of an old Russian folk tale about "a very wicked old woman" who never did a single good deed in all her life.

Her guardian angel was desperate to think of some way to rescue her from the devils who threw her into the lake of fire. He finally told God that he once remembered seeing the old woman pull an onion from her garden and give it to a beggar...

And God said to him: Well, take that onion and hold it out to her in the lake, let her catch hold of it and pull, and if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.

Well, the angel held out the onion and told her to pull herself out.

And he began pulling her cautiously and was on the point of pulling her out when the other sinners in the lake, seeing that she was being pulled out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But the woman was terribly wicked and she began kicking them. 'It's me who's being pulled out,' she said, 'and not you. It's my onion, not yours.'

You can probably guess the end. The onion broke and she fell back in.

Moral of the story: methinks the big boys need to do a better job of sharing the onions and stop kicking people down. The rest of us probably should too.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

JOHNNY CASH, DOSTOEVSKY, JESUS AND THE GRAND INQUISITOR: HOW'S THAT FOR A LINEUP?

Caption: This man could easily be a character of Dostoevsky's.

Lately El Cabrero has been listening to Johnny Cash and re-reading Dostoevsky (specifically the Brothers K.).

Not at the same time--that would really mess with your mind. But they do go pretty well together.

Both share a concern for the marginalized and down and out. Shared themes are sin and redemption, mercy and compassion.

The main difference is that it's easier to play Johnny than Fyodor on a guitar--three chords and a bass run can take you a long way.

I went back to this book to refresh my memory on one of literature's most memorable parables, Ivan Karamazov's "poem" (the kind that don't rhyme) about Christ and the Grand Inquisitor.

It's pretty relevant to the state of religion and of differing versions of Christianity in today's world.

(In the sad history of much of institutional Christianity, the score has been something like Grand Inquisitor 97-Christ 6.)

In this story within a story, Christ returns in human form as of old to Spain in the 1500s

...during the most terrible time of the Inquisition, when the fires were lighted everyday throughout the land to the glory of God and

In the splendid autos-da-fe'
Wicked heretics were burnt

Christ walks in silence among the crowd, blessing and healing the sick and raising the dead when he is spotted by the Grand Inquisitor (GI for short), a Cardinal of nearly 90 years, who orders his guards to arrest him at once and confine him to a dungeon.

The GI is not exactly happy to see JC. As the latter sits in silence, he says

...you have no right to add anything to what you have said already in the days of old. Why, then, did you come to meddle with us? For you have come to meddle with us, and you know it. But do you know what is going to happen tomorrow?...tomorrow I shall condemn you and burn you at the state as the vilest of heretics, and the same people who today kissed your feet, will at the first sign from me rush up to rake up the coals at your stake tomorrow.

Not very hospitable, huh? Then follows a long monologue from the GI on human freedom where he scorns Christ for wanting people to be able to choose for themselves:

For fifteen centuries we've been troubled by this freedom, but now it's over and done with for good.

From his viewpoint, freedom is a curse for humanity:

I tell you man has no more agonizing anxiety than to find someone to whom he can had over with all speed the gift of freedom with which the unhappy creature is born...Or did you forget that a tranquil mind and even death is dearer to man than the free choice in the knowledge of good and evil?

In the place of a religion of justice and compassion, the Grand Inquisitor and his ilk have built an edifice based on mystery, miracle and authority--spectacle awe, entertainment, and fear--which keeps the masses in a state of happy bondage.

Uhhh...

To conclude the story, Christ listens in silence, then he

suddenly approached the old man and kissed him gently on his bloodless, aged lips. That was all his answer. The old man gave a start. There was an imperceptible movement at the corners of his mouth; he went to the door, opened it and said to him: "Go, and come no more--don't come at all--never, never!" And he let him out into "the dark streets and lanes of the city." The Prisoner went away.'

It makes you wonder what kind of welcome some of the purveyors of authoritarian versions of Christianity today would give if they were in the same situation...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED