On Socrates, pigs, and happiness

‘For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’ – Ecclesiastes 1:18

John Stuart Mill would rather have been Socrates unhappy than a happy pig. Or even a happy fool. We are taught, rightly enough we think, to venerate knowledge, and that is the point underscored by Mill. It is the summum bonum, the greatest good. But the obverse side of that particular coin is that knowledge is to be desired, whether it brings happiness or no. But is that right?

It's hard to look good without make-up.
(Vanitas, Pieter Claesz, 1630)

Ecclesiastes. We should never forget Ecclesiastes. I still have no idea how it found its way into the Bible – it’s hardly in keeping with the spirit of the enterprise, so to speak – but  it is perhaps the greatest text ever written. In a single line of verse, everything you ever needed to know is revealed. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. And so, if that is the case, are the fool and the pig, pace Mill, actually better off?

(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.' - Jean-Jacques 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, our minds numb, our souls worn.

None of this produces the obvious 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 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 may be all you have to make this life bearable. And so be it.

Amazing Grace

This week the Australian Prime Minister, Joolya Gillard, announced that a royal commission of inquiry is to be held to investigate the abuse of children in the care of the Catholic Church. Responding to the announcement, the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, spoke in the only way a man in his position could do: with grace. Acknowledging that the church might have something of a problem with the apparent proclivity of many of its priests to take more than confession from parishioners, he then suggested that the church was hardly alone in this regard. ‘It’s not like we’re the only ones fiddling the kids,’ he said (or words to that effect). Then His Grace, deftly slipping from one defensive manoeuvre to another like a well-drilled Prussian regiment, turned on the media, exclaiming that none of this furore would have happened if they had done the decent thing and not gone snooping around where they didn’t belong. Now, this is the kind of defence that even a nutcase like Radovan Karadzic wouldn’t have bothered with, but the Archbishop wasn’t done yet. Not only were the media responsible for this – rather than, say, I don’t know, the rampant paedophilic tendencies amongst the church’s clergy? -  but they were responsible for further traumatising the victims of the abuse by dredging up suffering from the past. Now, at this point, you really begin to think the Archbishop has some balls – if you’ll pardon the use of that expression in this context – even if he clearly has not a shred of decency or good sense.

This, of course, is the same man who suggested that because the confessional is sacrosanct no matter what revelations(!) are aired, priests should refrain from hearing the confession of their fellows suspected of committing abuses. This amounts to an admission that it is more or less common knowledge amongst the clergy that some of their members have certain tendencies (‘Oh look, Father O'Donnell, there goes Father Gerald O’Rafferty, now you know he likes the boys, wink-wink-nudge-nudge….') best not shared in the confessional (because if that happened, then the father-confessor would be put in the invidious position of knowing of abuse but not being able to do anything about it other than recommend many, many, many Hail Marys). But just one second there, old boy…that means that knowing that a certain priest is committing abuse, you should refrain from hearing his confession lest you find out that he’s committing abuse….

Amazing.

George Pell, His Grace, the Archbishop of Sydney - he's amazing.

Wellington Phoenix need marquee player

It was suggested recently that the Wellington Phoenix football team needs to purchase a marquee midfielder to strengthen the squad. If the team is successful in acquiring such a player, here's how I reckon we should line up....

The Phoenix could play the classic 6-1-3 formation, taking advantage
of the presence of the marquee in the midfield.

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.

Better not to speechify too sweetly

‘My fellow Americans. The road is long. The path is steep. Our legs are short. Our sandals are silly. But we shall overcome. Because I have a dream. And so it shall be. Together we will walk that road. Together we can ascend that path, no matter how treacherous, no matter the obstacles. In unity is our strength, our bond is our faith. Four score and twenty minutes ago, you were there. And now we are here. Because we have faith. And each other. And together we are. Glorious will be our kingdom, for we shall beat our swords into ploughshares and reap as we sow. So join with me. Come with me. Abide with me and we can do this, together we can, as one people we can, united we can, you know we can! Who can? We can! God bless!’

This is the speech Barack Obama gave just two weeks before the election in 2008. Actually, that’s not exactly true. In fact, it’s not even vaguely true. But you can almost imagine him giving that kind of speech. You can hear his strangely staccato cadences, his stopping. And then. Starting at. Odd points. But it’s so deeply effective, and people are swept away by his rhetoric. They feel as if in the presence of something transcendent, something great, something special. A new dawn is breaking, a new world is being born, and they are witness to this moment. Amen and hallelujah. And all this because someone like Obama is so fine at the art of speechifying. He can take words and turn them into lightning bolts that strike deep into the hearts of those who listen. He can conjure images from the depths and prestidigitate phantasmagoria from the ether. He can convince us that truly something good will come to us, if only we go with him. Yes he can.

And that’s a problem. Because he can’t. Between the fantasy world the orator creates with words and the real world a President lives in (along with the rest of us), there is a chasm that can never be crossed. And as the great orator’s words soar into the stratosphere, so too do the expectations of those listening. They actually believe that the words spoken will become deeds done. But unlike the words which can keep flying forever – and if they never return, so much the better for the orator – at some point those expectations will have to return to earth, and the landing is unlikely to be gentle.

So what is to be done? Take a leaf, I suggest, from those who ingeniously temper their words so as not to raise expectations to a fever pitch. There’s no disappointment when your President says things like this: ‘I'm the commander -- see, I don't need to explain -- I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president.’ Or this: ‘I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family’. When  George W. Bush opened his mouth and the words fell out, people knew what they were getting. He offered incomprehensible idiocy, and that’s what they got, and you can’t blame a man when he delivers on what he promised.

'What am I saying? How would I know?'

 

 

Are we too damned civilised?

Having, as I do, a neurotic aversion to dirt and grime of any sort, I naturally enough could not help but watch a programme last night called Filthy Cities. This particular episode was looking at just how filthy Paris was during the French Revolution, and things were well under way when I tuned in. It was really filthy, particularly in light of all the heads that were being removed from all the bodies. The presenter – a youngish man with a boyish charm and a certain swagger – was at that point describing, with great glee and animation, the sound the guillotine would make as it sliced its merry way through yet another appendage of skin and bone and muscle and blood. Apparently it made quite a thwack! But in case we didn’t get the idea sufficiently clearly, a wonderfully animated depiction showed us what it was like (I’m assuming it was animated, but given the lengths to which shows will now go to achieve verisimilitude, perhaps it was real), complete with a close-up of the blood running out of the basket and onto the street. Then a close-up of a dog – actually, it looked more like a wolf – greedily lapping at the blood, complete with greedy slurping sounds. Then the presenter was standing in the Place de la Concorde (ironically enough) or somewhere equally grand, surrounded by what looked like a passing group of tourists who had all suddenly fainted – no doubt overcome with the thought of all that blood – but who were, I think, supposed to represent some of the guillotine's victims (although given that they still had their heads on this bit wasn’t very convincing). ‘The oldest victim was 93’ – here the presenter was almost shaking with excitement at the information he was imparting – ‘and the youngest was just 10!’ – by this stage I think he was actually beginning to foam at the mouth. Then, having asked us to imagine how much blood comes out of a body when it’s just had its head lopped off, he grabbed a bucket and tossed its contents onto the street to illustrate the point. A red liquid with what looked like little chunks of meat in it (surely we don’t have bits of meat floating around in our arteries, do we?) washed across the pavement. And then the dog – or wolf – again.

We then cut to the spot where mass burials of all these headless bodies had taken place. Even Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been tossed in here – disgraceful! All the while the presenter was getting more and more excited. ‘Can you imagine,’ he breathlessly asked, ‘just how bad the smell was at the height of summer?’ Pretty bad, I imagine, but luckily there was now an expert to help us in case our imaginations weren’t up to the task. The expert – who had apparently attended actual mass graves and so knew of what he spoke – said this to the presenter: ‘Well, you know what the smell of rotting meat is like….’. I have to confess that at this point I turned it off.

A European grey wolf watches in anticipation for the fall of the guillotine.

So, this is what I was wondering. Here in the blessed civilised world, are we beginning to feel too civilised, too peaceable, too averse to a decent bit of murder and mayhem to satisfy our primal urges? Is that why we need this kind of thing – I say ‘need’ because presumably someone’s watching it if they’re showing it – to address this gap in our lives, this absence, this appalling gentility which frowns upon guillotining 300 citizens of a weekend? And have we become so detached from reality that it seems perfectly normal to be asked to imagine the smell of rotting meat so as to become better acquainted with the stench of decomposing corpses? Are people actually watching this kind of thing and going, ‘hmmm, yes, interesting, I guess that is what it would smell like’? Really?