I am that I am

We lived for a time in a place without limits. At least, that is to say, each and every day was our own to do with as we wished. It sounds like a blessing. It was. But it was also an effort. Each day had to be made from scratch.

I suspect many people would prefer boundaries and limitations of some sort, rather than be left contemplating a void that passes itself off as freedom.

But I was talking then about our daily world, with its need for daily bread. What of our spiritual world? Can we live without boundaries there?

Tolstoy said that faith was one of the forces by which we live.

So only with some difficulty then.

And so it is that most people on this earth retain their faith, despite the unflagging efforts of the proselytisers of reason.

The proselytisers of reason are left baffled by those who insist on retaining their communion with a spiritual reality.

The proselytisers of reason have small minds.

A life based on the answer ‘I don’t know’ to the question ‘Why?’ is hard to endure. Why are we here, to what end, for what purpose? Why must there be so much struggle in life—even in the midst of plenty—why so much suffering, so much pain? Why are my days filled with so much I care nothing for? Why so much drudgery? So much tedium?

‘What is missing from the misery of the world, as well as from its moments of happiness, is some principle by which they can be explained’—Camus.

Looking up at the countless stars of the heavens may well give you a sense of stupendous awe, but it will never give you a sense of meaning.

There is a certain irony, methinks, in all this, because we only have ourselves to blame—we have disturbed our own sleep by digging around so much in the earth, by insisting on prising open the secrets of the heavens. The more we have understood this universe and our place in it, the less secure we have become in it—and in ourselves.

We have reasoned ourselves into a state of terrifying doubt.

‘For humankind’s chief malady,’ Pascal once suggested, ‘is its uneasy curiosity about things it cannot know—and it is not so bad for it to be wrong as so vainly curious.’ John Stuart Mill said he’d rather be Socrates, sad but wise, than a happy yet ignorant pig. I think most would opt to be the pig.

But then the prophet of reason exclaims, now look here, I offer you freedom from superstition and myth, I bring light where there was darkness, I give you your liberty!—and the sane response of most is to curse the prophet of reason (who is too stupid and vain to understand why) as a destroyer of the foundations on which alone a tolerable existence might be constructed.

So much freedom, so much burden.

Better, they say, to pass our days according to precepts that tell us why we live as we do, suffer what we must and die as we will, than to believe that our lives and all that is attendant on them, the good and the evil, have no real meaning at all, or at least none that we can discern.

It does not matter in the slightest if what you believe is entirely fanciful—there need be no congruence between belief and reality for belief to be wholly real for the believer. And, if real, in that sense, then the dulling of the psychic pain such belief brings will be as real as that which a dose of morphine gives to the dying.

It is preferable, in other words, to live a life hemmed in, both from without and from within, than to be burdened with a life the entire responsibility for which lies with no one but one’s own self.

I read once of an Epicurean whose epitaph simply read NFFNSNC. It stands for non fui, fui, non sum, non curo—I was not, I was, I am not, I care not. I’m fine with it all until I reach non curo.

God telling Moses who He is.

I Am that I Am, announced the Lord to Moses, thereby setting the template for all of us (which, I suppose, is as it should be—we are, after all, made in His image). And so I am that I am, and I had no say in who I am—no one ever does, it is simply the fate of everyone that we must be someone—and so I am a devout unbeliever, an ardent atheist, who sometimes wonders if it wouldn’t be a fine and pleasant thing to have faith in a benevolent maker who watches over all of creation. But I have no such faith, and no means of conjuring it into existence—I am, perversely, to that extent exactly like that unbending believer Luther—‘Here I stand, I can do nothing else’.

 

(Ig)noble Suffering and the Persistence of Faith

I have suffered too much in this life not to expect another . . . . All the subtleties of metaphysics will not make me doubt the immortality of the soul for a moment; I feel it, I believe it, I want it, I hope for it, I shall defend it to my last breath. J.-J. Rousseau

Noble suffering we can endure. Perhaps it is for a worthy ideal that we suffer, perhaps at the hands of a brutish tyrant who would crush our spirit and vanquish our will. In the face of such suffering, we stiffen our resolve and harden our hearts and know that we will not be broken. We know that the pains we suffer today will be rewarded tomorrow with glorious redemption. Our suffering will be recognised as worthy and righteous. And knowing this, we can endure it.

But most suffering is nothing like that. Most suffering is appallingly mundane. Maliciously quotidian. Disastrously ordinary. Bills must be paid. Rent found. Mortgages kept up. We make our weary way to work. We are anonymous among the anonymous crowd. Our fellow-sufferers. We toil at our jobs, unsure why. We make our way home, minds numb, souls worn.

A bit late for prayer?

None of this produces the obvious and grand signs of suffering, of servitude, of punishment. There are no marks of the lash across our backs, no chains about our feet, nothing to suggest that here is noble suffering. There is nothing noble in eternal tedium and the knowledge that tomorrow will be unrelentingly like today. And this simply makes the suffering harder to endure. There is no promise of redemption, no promise that one day someone will say, ‘See how he suffered for his cause. See how he endured and how he fought for freedom or justice or something decent on the TV’. There is, that is to say, no point to our suffering, and it is this—this abject pointlessness—which so strips it of anything noble. The worst malady a human can suffer is an abiding sense of pointlessness. Without a reason why, the smallest pin-prick can become a torment worse than anything imagined in Dante’s hell. But give us that reason, explain to us why, and then we can endure.

Those latter-day prophets of rationalism like Richard Dawkins or the late (and tediously boorish) Christopher Hitchens who shriek hysterically about the evils of faith are like an excitable teenager who has just discovered Nietzsche and goes around daringly proclaiming to the world that God is dead. While it’s excusable in a teenager, it becomes less so once a person is of more advanced years, say twenty. From the comfortable and lofty heights which zealots such as Dawkins proclaim their message, it is easy to be unbowed by the meaninglessness of it all, but if your life is not quite so privileged, or yours is a disposition—unelected—which simply can find no comfort in science and reason, then faith in something unseen, glorious and transcendent may be all you have to make this life bearable. And so be it.

With an ideology clasped to your bosom....

 Another word for ‘ideology’ is ‘faith’. And the tremendously convenient thing about faith of any kind is that you don’t have to worry about anything as absurd as how the world actually is. With an ideology clasped reverently to your bosom, you can confidently step out into the world knowing that, whatever the reality, you have an answer for every question, wherever there is doubt, you have certainty, and where there is darkness, you’ll have a torch. To change t(r)ack, when one is imbued with the fierce flames of ideology, it is as if one is the boiler in a run-away steam train, hurtling uncontrollably down the tracks, destined to crash through the walls of reality as they loom one by one in front of you. And because you have faith, it just doesn’t matter!

Prime Minister John Key takes a moment to reflect on how much
the government's policies have increased his personal wealth.

 

All that is by way of saying that – yet again – New Zealand finds itself the passenger aboard an out-of-control ideologically-driven steam train, with a government shoving coal into the boiler with the furious intent of a madman. Hell-bent on pursuing the prescribed economic policies of yesteryear, the government is giving nary a thought to the possibility that, just perhaps, what they are doing is destroying whatever chance this country might have of salvaging the last vestiges of a functioning economy. But don’t take my word for. Take Bernard Hickey’s – for one thing, he’s very clever, and for another, his writings have all the pungency of sheer good sense. Read his article, and then look aghast at the shameless jib-jabbering of this government as it crashes through yet another wall, laughing the hysterical laugh of the ideological zealot.