Pretty Purposes, Reasonable Rhetoric

As a philosopher, I am deeply moved by the diversity of methods that human beings have devised in order to survive on the face of the Earth. From faith all the way to reason, mankind has proved to himself again and again that, despite the rough terrain of reality, he is capable of leveling it - if only for a moment - in order to pass on to the next leg of the journey. We see the Middle Ages, wrought with pestilence and famine, and shiver to think that men and women had to live through them; but a glance at their Earth-centered cosmology, their comfort in faith and their sublime superstitions reveals not only an awesome ability to deal with a bad situation, but also the process by which they dealt with it: falsification. 

 

Our species has passed through a number of trials and tribulations, and at each step of the way has devised their own particular myth that helps them cope with (and often enough arrive at) the Truth. In fact, when one considers the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the birth pangs of Romanticism and the death throes of Modernism - when one considers these different paradigms in relation to the more general Truth that they all but obscured, it is evident that each favored its own limited method for arriving at Truth, and this to the exclusion of all others. What this amounts to, for a moralist, is that every generation of epistemology has falsified and obscured almost all of reality in order to clarify a specific particle thereof - in short, that human progress is built upon a history of lies. 

 

It is indeed strange for our modern minds to try and comprehend, for instance, a Cubist representation of reality as a chaotic flux, when we know that this particular aesthetic form grew up under the most systematic, highly-organized despot-machines hitherto known to mankind. But when we put ourselves in the place of these artists, and try to comprehend the fact that the atrocities committed during the first few decades of the last century were indeed committed by vast, human organizations - well-ordered human social machines, if you will - why, it's quite easy to see why the artists and intellectuals of the time preferred chaos! "Human beings," they must have thought, "especially organized bodies thereof, cannot be capable of such monstrosities - it's nothing more than fate! accident! forces beyond our control!" This particular little lie - most likely propagated without any consciousness of its falsity - provided those poor men and women with the will to live through a horror movie. 

 

If we move our historical perspective a bit further out, and consider a much larger portion of mankind's progress, it's obvious that two dynamically opposed fictions have pervaded Western epistemology since the ancient Greeks: namely, faith and reason. They have acquired different names throughout the years - "art/science," "irrationality/rationality," and "subject/object," just to name a few - but the basic concepts have remained the same. The two most prevalent (and, naturally, antagonistic) modes of thought today still consider reality as one of two things, neither of which it actually is: either completely unknowable, chaotic and master-of-man; or entirely knowable, lawful and subject to man's intellect. 

 

It is these two antagonizing elements in the western world that are responsible for almost all of the technological, scientific, political and humanitarian progress that our society has made in the past two thousand years; and it is these elements that, after a long and arduous battle, are yearning to be reconciled. This is evident enough from the most cutting-edge in both the sciences and the arts: I refer you to the irrational beauty of method by which the "truth" of string theory is usually asserted, or the rigorous industrial rationale that produces our popular music. The aesthetic appeal of science, not to mention the faith placed in reason by our leading scientific minds, shows us quite clearly that these lies, these "coping mechanisms" we call faith and reason, are no longer working on their own and respective of each other - for our sake, they must join forces, in order to keep mankind sane and on the road to tomorrow. Our will to live - assuming it is still intact - would not settle for anything less. 

Fall Follows Summer: '69 is over

Dear "Lover,"

Despite how enchantingly honorable you may try to make it seem, the chintzy moral fabric that makes up your ethical wardrobe is more repugnant than the smell of the Chinese sweatshop from whence it came. Now I've seen some outlandish adornments - I'm a musician, for Christ's sake - but as far as hypocrisy, slavishness and intellectual swindling go, your get-up takes the cake. And eats it, too.

At first glance, the uneducated eye would say you were a lover: you loathe war on principle, are contemptuous of all that evidences great power and strength - you even abstain from eating meat, out of fear that your bacon or beefsteak might once have been conscious of its abysmal standard of living. Every manifestation of conflict (even the mere possibility thereof) incites your moral indignation, and would probably reduce you to [crocodile] tears if brought up in conversation. Now I will grant you this, that the ability to shed those tears prevents me from going as far as to say that you're soulless beneath all that frou-frou - it's just that your soul's been horribly misplaced.

Take, for instance, your bourgeoning, overwhelming, gushing-forth-like-Old-Faithful love for animals. Psychiatrists of late have diagnosed similar sentiments as "bestiality," and usually attempt to redirect their patients' errant emotional complex back towards their own species. Not to say that I've never seen you in coitus with a lapdog - an amusing mental image though it may be - but the fact that you can treat your husband like one gives me good reason to believe that your interests do lie somewhere near/around that playing field. That is, of course, assuming that someone as frigid as yourself does copulate from time to time.

And this point brings me right to the one I'm trying to make: that neither you, nor anyone else in this post-modern apocalypse, can "dress up" your general contempt for humanity and expect it to pass for "love." As far as power struggle and war go, anyone with half a brain can see that they are not only necessary for mankind, but inherent in his nature - we don't even need to open that can of worms. What concerns me, and needs to be addressed, is your continual looking-down, your "moral superiority complex" that stems from the simple fact that you know how to string four letters together [l-o-v-e] to form a word - and that you use this to justify your hollow-man ethics. Please admit - and for all to hear! - that this word means absolutely nothing in your mouth; for if it did, you would be helping all of us "down below" rise up to your heights, because that is what a lover does. But you...you prefer rather to poke and prod us, disillusion and confuse us, and tell us that we're bad - and when you finally have us all chasing our tails, wondering how in the hell we'll ever repent for all the "hate" we've bred, you blame our confusion on "the inherent worthlessness of the world." Well I guess I'm wondering, if the world is so inherently worthless, why do you worry so much about it? Why all the moralizing? Why all the "activism"? Why so serious?

Now I'm impressed, of course, that you've been able to achieve such a manipulative, malicious clairvoyance: it's something every human being should envy, and you can be sure that my jealousy is not overshadowed by my respect. I only want you to know - and all those like you as well - that I can see right through the clouds of rhetoric that you call "love." In fact, all I can see is a frightened, self-conscious, resentful little bitch, who shouldn't need someone like me to tell her that fear and resentment don't get along so well with Love. You're going to need to find some new clothes, honey - the sixties are dead, and smelling something awful. 

Yours in a nutshell,

Nicholas Penske

A letter to no one...

To whom it probably doesn't concern:

There seem to be some discrepancies here. Now I'm not known as one to complain (habitually), but I think it's high time that someone started voicing an honest opinion in this world. And while I can't promise that the opinion voiced herein will be my own - reason has a way of leading one far beyond a strictly "personal" perspective - I can at least assure you all, that the complaints this blog will contain certainly merit being made. The discrepancies are just too many to tolerate any longer. 

It is well known that humans beings are by nature a sensitive bunch of organisms. My unique sensitivity, or what you could call my "specific beef with shit," is that I cannot be aware of a contradiction without trying to dig up its roots and find out why it exists. For example: when someone tells me that abortion is immoral, and that the war in Iraq is not; when I hear some self-righteous politician telling us that the war is inhuman, and that abortions = a woman's right to choose - these things make my hair stand on end. I start sniffing. I wonder about the why. I want to know 'why the one,' and 'not the other' - human life either has some sort of intrinsic value, or it doesn't. The problem with trying to discuss such paradoxes is that the maintainers thereof almost invariably lapse into "Piss off" mode when that wonderful little why is to them posed. 

So I guess my goal with this literary excursion is to bring some of these discrepancies to light: pull them out of the musty little glory-hole dens where they grow and into the fresh, clean air, where good things grow and bad things die. I can only hope that my readers are not too sensitive to listen with open ears...but then that's probably too much to hope for, now isnt it? 

Yours truly,

Monsieur Penske