Restatement of Mission

Which, wow, after almost five months of blog silence has probably been quite a long time coming.

I've just seen this film:

I'm not going to go into it except to mention that you should watch it, as if you're going to listen. It is, as the poster and tagline imply, about life and death and trees and a bald guy floating around in space.

I was watching it today for something like the fifth time since it came out, and it didn't shake my world as much as it had some of those previous times, except for what I later understood to be the surprisingly novel sensation of giving serious consideration to metaphysical issues.

My mind has been occupied, when it in fact had been occupied, by moral issues instead. It had and still does disturb me how ignorant people are of the moral consequences of their general complacency.

I do still mean what I said a few posts and more months back about our collective thinking being hijacked by self-impelling institutions like nationalism, orthodoxism, and fascism (as expressed by adoration for the strong and contempt for the weak - a trait very prominent in capitalism, for one).
People have a general tendency to accept that what serves the nation, custom, or unrestrained enterprise is good, without pausing long enough to consider who this kind of thinking serves and who it causes untold suffering to.

So I've been trying very hard to keep my mind clean of this, and it's even managed to spill a little into my behaviour and conversation, but what I've only noticed now is that it appears to have taken over the whole of the area of my brain devoted to "serious issues" and to have pushed out almost all of my previous musings about spirit and beauty and love and emotion almost clean out.

I stopped being religious close to a year ago now, essentially because of the moral issues I occasionally try to explain here. Its spiritual aspect seemed genuine but not exclusive enough to itself to warrant the intellectual subjugation that it by definition demands. So I'm left now with a fragile but sincere and workable moral framework in its stead, but almost none of the presumedly much easier to get hold of spiritual take on the world.

Because I haven't been looking. It's difficult to speak (or even think) metaphysical mumbo jumbo without having a very rich religious tradition backing you up. The fact is, on this subject, you are always blowing up a bubble. You can be made to feel comfortable inside it if other, "respectable" people have tried to blow it up before you, but otherwise, I guess you just have to feel less comfortable inside it.

Or you could try to find more about the non-denominationally affiliated people whose work you're continuing. I'm not the first secular man or even just non-frothingly-exclusivist-Jew (Rav Kook comes to mind) to take the issue of spirit seriously. So I guess I'm setting myself some rather vague reading assignments, as well as reminding myself to write here more often and allow and actively encourage myself to think seriously too about matters not involving morality and nefarious forces' relentless scramble for my brain.

Neil Young is not really relevant to any of this but he is awesome, so have a song:

Sunsets and Community

In the bus, today, out of the corner of my eye I was a little startled to find an unusually bloody, stunning sunset covering most of the sky.

Besides being generally impressive to look at, sunsets seem to create a very particular atmosphere. Lately I've wondered what stands behind this, and if there are any generally accepted theories on the matter. My rash pop-psych suggestion is that the twilight of the sky leads to a kind of twilight of the mind, where you're suddenly both more secure and more questioning - more open, in a word, to whatever may come.

What came was a flashback to Shabbat evening meals in the Kibbutz. People from different families gathered together in the dining room, singing Shabbat songs and psalms. I remember the rabbi being particularly into this. It's a beautiful, mellow memory, and would usually take place when the sky was similarly lighted.

The reason this would require openness is that, the sweetness of this memory notwithstanding, it has been years since I've entertained the notion of community as anything beyond an enormous evil.

Community, to me, means conformity, hasty hurtful judgement, mob mentality, dissolution of the self. I'm not even seriously reconsidering this assessment, but it seems to me I've ignored some of the other things community is.

I've always gotten stuck on community pretending to be love, because I don't like lies in general, and like that specific one even less. Community is a partnership of convenience. That's all it has been and probably all it can be. A community cannot be a family, but what can it be?

Perhaps just a collection of moving human moments. A sunset isn't love either, and doesn't "mean" anything, but that doesn't lead me to disdain it. You don't need to justify enjoying things. What you need to justify is moral convictions.

It's the moral convictions attached to the concept of community that disturb me. Conformity, tribalism, jingoism, even a kind of enthusiastic obedience - in short, the collectivist idea that the group is more important than the sum of the individuals that make it up.

But this doesn't have to be the only way of setting up a community. What's wrong with the idea of an ideologically neutralized community of convenience? A place where people live together for the sake of company and nothing else? I suppose small agricultural settlements are technically like this, but my understanding is these places aren't usually very communal in character. People keep to themselves unless they feel they share an ideology with their surroundings.

I don't know exactly about Islam, but it seems that one of the major things that have kept Judaism and Christianity alive even after the secularization of the political and professional world is the synagogue/church which implies a community - one that even many fervently secular people are eager to take part in. It seems a lot of people feel comfortable refraining from thinking too hard about the religious ideology they're purporting to follow, because what they're really after is the community that comes as a major unexpected perk, as it were.

So what we need is a new religion. A more sympathetic one, with less absolutism. One that recognizes our spiritual, emotional needs and doesn't promulgate any far-reaching moral assertions.

Why do we always have to mix spirituality and politics? The only ideology a community needs is that which involves the way the members deal with one another - whatever can neutralize the dangers that a community represents. A community needs to consider the emotional and spiritual welfare of its members. Otherwise it just needs to enjoy itself.

Community is positive in enjoyment and in action; it is repugnant in thought and in feeling.

Historical Overview (of Western Civilization)

My historical knowledge is fairly limited, but it appears that traditionally, we regular folk have had our shit ruined by the monarchy, the Church, and the aristocracy.

For some sort of bizarre reason we thought it sensible to give our allegiance to the king, our fealty to the Pope, and our deference to those of bluer blood and larger stacks of cash.

The innate idiocy of this can be readily recognized by most in at least the free parts of the world today, but I'm not entirely sure we as a society have fully internalized this understanding.

I still see the aristocracy ruling through capitalism, the Church through the way we assess morality using terms like "appropriate", "unnatural" and "vulgar" rather than exclusively equality, and the monarchy through patriotism.



This last point probably needs elaboration. The monarchy doesn't even exist in any real way in the Western world any more.
I think most of us can agree that the reason to support the monarch - if any - was pragmatic rather than romantic or idealistic. A king must rule not because of his "divine right" but because in his absence we'd have anarchy and people would eat each other.

But when you think about it, what more reason do we have to support "the country"? What is "a country" anyway? The land and the people who live on it. To love your country is to love your countrymen and a patch of soil up to some arbitrarily decided line. I'm all for fraternity of man (which is here suffocated into fraternity of citizen), but other than that all the things we get excited about - flag, symbol, anthem - are abstract concepts as arbitrarily invented as the divine right of kings.

This leaves us with ethnic identity - and granted, history, language and culture are not (entirely) arbitrarily invented - but I still can't see how you can love them. I don't even see how you can be proud of them, seeing as you weren't personally responsible for any of them, but never mind that. There's all this love and passion and allegiance going on, and it's unclear whom it's directed towards.

Some would say that it's directed towards your countrymen, but I don't buy that. "Your countrymen" aren't an interested power - they're not the ones who instituted this attitude - that was the government. To love your country is to love your government. Maybe not even this specific incarnation of the government - but the government in general, when it comes into conflict with any out-of-state element, regardless of the legitimacy of the actual claims of either party. You side with the one you love.

Instead of a royal "office" to swear our undying loyalty to, we now have a democratic, rotating bureaucracy to which we do the same thing. What once was justified in the name of "the divine right of kings" can now be justified in the name of "the divine right of nations", and patriotism has become the new royalism.



I realize this isn't being entirely fair, as democracy of itself gives a government incomparably greater legitimacy than any autocracy can hope
for - but what bothers me is the almost holy aura surrounding "national missions". I can accept (reluctantly and tentatively) that a nation might have needs, but to imbue this with quasi-religious, supernatural significance is akin to mistaking the monarch's role of maintaining order for a divine right to do whatever the fuck he wants to the country.

And as for that fraternity of man argument I shrugged off a little too quickly earlier - that seems to me akin to deciding that Church-directed religious coercion is necessary for people to behave decently towards one another. We're not children. We're civil to one another because we have internalized principles of behaviour. We can love each other through understanding we are all brothers - all - not just those within the state borders. Nobody's claiming we're there yet, but the enforced national distinctions certainly aren't helping.

To summarize my point - in what might have been the fifth paragraph of this entry - it seems that in order to be free men and have a chance to advance spiritually, we must free our moral judgement from organized-religious notions like obedience, our politics from knee-jerk chauvinism, and our assignation of value from attributes of money and property.

Where does this leave us? With a Marxist revolution, so it appears. If we are to be free from repression, it's certainly not enough just to go vote every few years. It's not sensible to not be political if you're not completely free. The advantage of living in a liberal democracy is that it allows you to be political at very little risk; not that it erases the need. It may not be strictly necessary to take up arms and revolt, but it becomes patently ridiculous to be even remotely indifferent to political developments.