God and Greatness: Attainable Virtue

It is a very good book, as I said before. It SUCKS, as I said before, but it is a very good book. You all have to read it, on pain of dire disgrace.

I liked this bit:
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God had said that it was only the men who could give up their jealous selves, their futile individualities of happiness and sorrow, who would die peacefully and enter the ring. He that would save his life was asked to lose it.

Yet there was something in the old white head which could not accept the godly view. Obviously you might cure a cancer of the womb by not having a womb in the first place. Sweeping and drastic remedies could cut out anything — and life with the cut. Ideal advice, which nobody was built to follow, was no advice at all. Advising heaven to earth was useless.

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I love that last paragraph. Not the particular application to which it’s put — I just included that for context — but the central idea. It’s why I’m saying so much of what I’m trying to say — why, even if the church WORKS as it is, we drastically need to revise what we do with it in our lives.

Any religion of Man which makes it evil to BE a Man, is doomed from the start (although, if human history is any example, destined to be quite popular). We can’t HELP being people, we were made that way. It needs to be a starting point, not a destination avoided at all costs! Egads!

Anyway, I’m drained and spent. Stupid, stupid, stupid history! Danged dirty Mordred. If ever anyone needs a punch in the face, it was him. Seriously, this is worse than Gladiator (at least in that, it was Russel Crowe getting the whack). This is…Germanicus. Well…it’s King Arthur. Real tragedy. Damn.

Go pick up a copy. Read it. We can share in the cursing.

Greatness: The Seventh Sense

I have a quote for you today, a passage from “The Once and Future King.” First, though, let me mention the book to you.

You should read it. You, personally, should read it, if you haven’t already (or haven’t otherwise made your own study of King Arthur’s legend).

It’s the story of King Arthur. It’s actually (at least presented as) the STORY of “Le Morte d’Arthur,” Mallory’s ancient work on the legend. It is much more readable, HIGHLY political in nature (that is, the author uses the story to make some very deliberate and apparent points which I quite doubt are inherent to the legend), but still a very worthwhile read.

You have heard of King Arthur. It’s really a good idea to learn something about the man. About the legend, rather, which is more meaningful in its way.

Also (and this perhaps more than all the rest I’ve said) there should be a LAW that no one is allowed to watch the movie “First Knight” unless they’ve first read “The Once and Future King.” I mean that most earnestly! Dirty stinkin’ movie….

*Mutter, grumble.*

Okay! On to the nature of Man, and the human experience:
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There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can’t teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically–she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. And then, when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living–not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She no longer hopes to live by seeking the truth–if women ever do hope this–but continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one–knowledge of the world.
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I don’t think the author is being particularly sexist here–White refers to women so often in this passage because the characters under discussion are Guinever and Elaine–both young women. And the “seeking the truth” bit is a direct reference to the motives of Lancelot, who is the common link between them.

I like this passage a lot. I like the idea of developing a special sense of balance to get through life, even when it refuses to obey any logical rules. (For one thing, it makes me hopeful.) I have my doubts that the world is ever as logical as you guys all think it is.

White says that young people believe in order and rules, and older people give up on that (obviously that appears briefly in the quoted passage, but there is more detail on it later). I don’t feel like I’m old before my time (which is a change, really — for all of my childhood I felt that way, even through high school). But I think I see more chaos in life than most of you do. I like the idea of learning, with time and experience, not see some order beneath it, but just to find a way to weather it.

Also, I really like this passage because it feels like something I would write. The voice and the sentiment…it works for me.

Greatness: Reading Recommendation

(First, let me say this: if you people don’t COMMENT, how am I going to know how wrong I am? C’mon!)

Okay, finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (it’s mentioned in the Recommended Reading post I made earlier). I now highly urge you to read this book. Not just because it’s got ideas relevant to these Conversations (which is why I recommended it before), but just because it’s a tremendous read. Everyone who reads this blog at all, will enjoy reading that book.

It’s amazing what the book is attempting to do. Y’know how the Romans didn’t feel like their people had a strong enough sense of pride in their Romanity, so they made up the story of Aeneas to connect their history to the ancient Greek mythology?

No? Well, they did. And it worked. And I think, at some point, Julius Caesar ended up tracing his ancestry back to Mars or Apollo or some such. The deMedicis did the same thing, creating a myth that they were somehow part of a much greater, ancient mythos.

It feels like Samantha Clarke is trying to do that for Britain today. She’s telling this story that is clearly fictional as though it were history, and she is setting up precisely that kind of myth. It’s as big as King Arthur, in its own way. It’s one of those stories that is more real than actual history, because it brings Meaning to the lives of the people.

Daniel and I have often discussed the need for more mythology in today’s world, and pretty much decided it would have to be some new kind of thing. Something that incorporated technology and naturalism and (*shudder*) logic, in order to WORK with today’s expectations.

Samantha Clarke didn’t bother with that. This is pure, old-fashioned, highly Brit-Lit mythology. I love it. It’s incredibly fun to read.

Also, I get the impression there’s going to be a sequel, but the book is quite excellent as a standalone.

Anyway, go buy it. Read it. And, also, comment on my posts, or else!

God: A Tangent on Paul

This is a link Daniel sent me forever ago, which I only just now got around to reading through.

http://www.metalog.org/files/paul_p1.html

It’s mostly absurd, with some pretty ugly misunderstandings thrown in to REALLY upset you. In other words, I’m not advocating or agreeing with this guy’s ideas. But it’s an interesting read, and I recommend it to all of you. It’s not too long, and you can always stop early if you just have to….

Greatness: Existentialism, Nihilism, and You!

Dan and Trish and I watched “I Heart Huckabees” last night (against my wishes!). It’s about an existential detective agency which you hire to spy on you, and figure out your innermost…whatnot.

I don’t like Existentialism because it stikes me as an entirely Constructed method of Deconstruction (in the movie they called it “dismantling,” but the philosophical and literary term “Deconstruction” came out of Existentialism — I believe.)

Existentialism calls for an understanding of and intimacy with the principle that all things are one. It’s got its similarities to Buddhism, with a higher degree of New Age thrown in, and here’s my problem with it: even though the language of Existentialism completely escapes the greatest problems of Buddhism (ego-centricity), the practice of Existentialism achieves the exact same effect. The one-ness is entirely internal. An Existentialist brings everything in the universe into his own consciousness, ties everything to himself, and then reacts to everything in an entirely selfish way (after all, his “self” is now the whole universe, so that’s an unselfish attitude, right?).

The LANGUAGE of Existentialism is focused on others and respect for all things and et and cetera, but the drive of Existentialism, really, is to break everything in existence down until you understand how it relates to you (oneness, right), which is essentially stripping it of its independent existence, its independent reality, and leaving behind only the ghost of it that was your constructed version.

Because, yes, everything in YOUR universe is wholly One, because all of it is the product of your mind. You can attain perfect Oneness within your universe by divorcing yourself from the connections with other Constructing realities, leaving only yours, unchallenged.

Thereby removing yourself from the human drama (as they put it in the movie) and gaining a pure understanding of everything going on in the whole universe (because it’s all the product of your own mind).

Nihilism does a very similar thing, with opposite language. Nihilism recognizes the utter incomprehensibility of Unconstructed reality, and rather than trying to draw Meaning from it (where the incomprehensible is, in my opinion, the only source of Meaning), Nihilism concludes that the whole universe is a dark, chaotic, unfriendly place. Nihilism brings people closer to Real Truth (by focusing on the incomprehensible and ignoring the Constructed), but gives them no hope and no tools to react to Real Truth once they’ve found it.

It boils down to this: Life is not Nihilistic. Life is not Existential. Life is not Christian. Life is not our explanations of Life, it’s the thing they’re explaining. At one point in the movie, Mark E. Mark asks, “Why is it we only ask the big questions when things go terribly wrong? And then, when it gets better, we forget all about it….” That’s an easy one: Life isn’t what you read about in philosophy books. Life is the normal human experience. When it starts to confuse us, though, we begin to look for a rational explanation, and so we begin constructing.

Existentialism CAN describe the human condition (Creators that we are, any philosophy can eventually be built up to describe the human condition). The thing is, it’s not how we live most of our lives. It’s not the consistent thing across human experience, it’s a manufactured and TAUGHT method of understanding that experience. All philosophies are constructed. All religions are constructed. All logical frameworks are constructed.

The thing about Existentialism, though, is that it uses the language of Deconstruction as its method of Construction. That annoys me. Really, deep down, it makes me want to punch a hippy.

Nihilism gets to me, too, because it achieves what I WANT to achieve, but leaves you at the end of your journey with none of the resources necessary to enjoy the destination. I feel sorry for people who go that route, because I can’t even argue that it’s an ineffective method, just that it’s ultimately unrewarding, and I believe better options are available.

(Argh! RELIGIONS, I said! Not God. Not Real Truth. The temporal structure we use to worship God is Constructed. That’s no heresy. The Temple was Constructed (physically, manually), but it was still a viable place to worship God. It’s no more terrible to say the methods themselves are Constructed. That’s all I was getting at.)

P. S. – I’m actually not saying anything for or against the movie here. It was a fun watch, in a delightfully wacky kinda way, it brought up some good conversation. This article is about some of the things they discussed, not what they did with them. I was impressed with the structure of the movie, in spite of its alarming hippiness. Oh, and I hate Jude Law.