Herculodge

"Between the Act and an Idea a Whole Kingdom Lies"

A student from ten years ago e-mailed me recently wanting to know if I remember a short story I taught his class in which a character reads a quote on a napkin that said "between the act and an idea a whole kingdom lies." I can't remember what the story was, but I do think it's from an old edition of Fiction 100. The quote also reminds me of a strange novella-length fable I taught a few years ago, Magnus Mills' Three to See the King, which chronicles a mysterious exodus of townspeople who follow their dubious Messiah figure out of the wilderness. In fact, another novel by Mills, All Quiet on the Orient Express, also focuses on the theme that "between the act and an idea a whole kingdom lies."

The quote about the kingdom that separates the act from an idea reminds me of a saying a Japanese student told me: "Koi ni koi sure," which translates roughly into "Being in love with the idea of love more than love itself."

My hunch is that the chasm that separates our chimera-soaked ideas of things and how things actually are is the difference between insanity and sanity. For an example, I'm reminded of an NPR story 15 years ago about two Albanian men arrested by Italian police as they crossed the border. The emaciated Albanians, dressed in tattered rags and covered with grime and filth, were asked to explain why they were trying to sneak across the border by the police. Unable to speak Italian, they muttered lugubriously "Morris the Cat" over and over. Finally, an interpreter was called into police headquarters and it was ascertained that the Albanians had, by some fluke, received Italian TV waves on their satellite dish and saw an American Morris the Cat Food commercial adapted for Italian audiences. If you don't remember the Morris the Cat commercials, they featured a grumpy finicky cat whose appetites are indulged by its doting owners. The Albanian men inferred that if cats were accommodated with such diligence, then Italian people must really be living high on the hog. Their delusion almost cost them their lives and landed them some time in jail.

Between the act and an idea a whole kingdom lies indeed.

The Tough Love Doctrine of Erich Fromm

In Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving he argues that the challenge of being human is confronting our “separateness” from the world, from others, and ourselves. Confronting our essential loneliness and isolation is terrifying and we can respond like most with misguided attempts at overcoming our frightening isolation: consumerism, disappearing into a person or institution larger than ourselves who becomes our “parent” in the worst sense of the word, which is to say we try not to overcome our loneliness by letting some other entity suffocate us and make all our decisions and be the sole provider of our identity and in the process we become emotionally crippled children.

The only way to overcome our separateness, according to Fromm, happens to be our strongest desire: the urge for “interpersonal fusion,” which is romantic love, both spiritual and physical, combined with an orientation in which the person loves all of humanity, which is the only way he can truly love himself. Failure to achieve this interpersonal fusion means to grovel in emotional retardation as one tries feebly to transcend one’s loneliness with all sorts of absurd self-destructive compulsions.

What’s amazing is that in 123 pages Fromm gives us both the problem of human existence and the solution and he does so without resorting to the easy homilies and platitudes of odious self-help books. His solution to the human condition, namely that we must love as an art and to do so requires dedication, commitment, and consistency, is a prescription that many will find intimidating and repellant.

In this regard, Fromm, a non-theist, is like the religious prophet who tells the people that the cure for their ails will be a painful albeit rewarding one.

Finally, offering a plan of self-transformation that requires diligence and ardor is in many ways un-American, for what is more American than the quick fix and the 10-Step salvation program?

Pascal Knew the Main Psychological Weakness That Afflicts Even the Best and the Brightest of Us

Blaise Pascal, writing in his Pensees, summed up our incurable vanity that seeks to flatter ourselves with a trumped-up image at the expense of our substance and moral character. He writes:

We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.

In a more succinct way of expressing a similar observation, the narrator of Jim Harrison's novella  The Beast God Forgot to Invent begins his tale by writing  that  "The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense."

A more purposeful life, one that steers away from vanity and inflating one's self-image, is given a compelling expression in  Viktor Frankl's  PREFACE to his masterpiece Man's Search for Meaning.

Man's Misguided Search for Success

Viktor Frankl’s masterpiece  Man's Search for Meaning has been translated in close to twenty languages. English editions have sold more than 2.5 million copies. Frankl appears chagrined by his own success and when interviewed about the phenomenal sales of his book, he must speak the truth: That his book’s robust sales are, Frankl explains in his book’s Preface, “an expression of the misery of our time: if hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails.”

Reading Frank’s Preface, it becomes clear that he had no intention to be successful or famous or rich from writing his book. To the contrary, his original intent was to publish his book anonymously. Only at the “urging” of his friends, did he at the last minute put his name on the book. His desire to be anonymous was rooted in his “absolute conviction” that literary fame would obscure the purity of his objective: “that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.” It ended up being both “strange and remarkable” to Frankl that the one book that he deliberately wanted to be published anonymously ended up being the one book that would become a huge success.

The success was not the aim. The aim was to be meaningful and to write about something that was born of necessity. Frankl learned this lesson and felt compelled to share this wisdom with his students. He would repeatedly say to them, “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success; you have to let it happen by not caring about it.” He concludes by telling his students that “success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”

People who care too much about success--much to their detriment--were the subject of today's 89.3 KPCC radio show Air Talk. Host Larry Mantle interviewed Carl Honore, who discussed his book Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting. Honore talked about tunnel-visioned parents who are so hell-bent on their children's success that they both coddle and bully their children into becoming extensions of their own narcissistic selves. These parents accompany their children to job interviews. When an adult child is reprimanded at work the parent will call the supervisor to complain of "harsh treatment," as if the employer is equivalent to a school. Honore said these parents have an all-or-nothing view of success: Either my child goes to Yale or he is homeless under a bridge." He spoke of this binary code of base one or zero. Also he is fatigued of going to social events and the only conversation is about how people's children are doing. Such a narrow definition of success will inevitably result in an emotional crash. I imagine these children will someday feel a "burning under their fingernails" and pick up a copy of Viktor Frankl's book. 

A Reptilian Critique of Peter Singer’s “What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?”

Peter Singer's persuasive essay strips us bare of our selfish wants as he equates our tendency to accumulate all the crap we don’t need with ignoring the plight of drowning children and as such being responsible for the death of those children. We are, Singer convincingly argues, products of our fortunate “social capital”; therefore, we have an obligation to those who do not have a social capital. Furthermore, because we patronize and live in a state of interdependence on international corporations for our goods and services, we are obliged to help the poor in developing countries. For after all, these countries, led by despots and other unsavory characters, make deals with international corporations, selling raw materials for a higher price than they would by keeping their resources in their own countries. The result is that people living in developing countries starve as their resources are leeched by international corporations.

Now if we follow Singer’s logical moral imperative to its ultimate conclusion, then we are forced to accept that we must renounce our worldly desires and achieve a spiritual condition that is so disdainful of personal comforts and luxuries that we must live only on bare necessities while giving all else to the poor. Anything short of this ideal would be, to use Singer’s analogy, equivalent to being responsible for the deaths of drowning children.

While part of me would like to embrace Singer’s moral imperative and spread Singer’s gospel of uncompromising charity throughout the world, the skeptical part of me questions just how realistic Singer’s ideal is. For what Singer is arguing for is nothing short than a form of spiritual socialism, that is a condition in which human beings renounce their selfish desires for the “finer things in life” in order that they distribute their wealth as evenly as possible. This is a noble ideal indeed, but it contradicts our reptilian hard-wiring. I’m sad to say this, but without selfish motivation, most of us will not be creative or innovative. A world in which we all share our things in a communal potluck and don’t aspire to materialistic excellence is a banal and dreary and colorless world without creativity and innovation. Only when we are enticed by technological razzle-dazzle and model dream homes and exquisite clothing glorified by the silky-tongued fashionistas do we find the reptilian sparks in our brains’ creative nerve centers exploding in glorious paroxysms and it is in these nerve explosions that we create and innovate. Sad as it is, my friends, selfishness is high-octane rocket fuel for creativity. 

I’m not arguing that we should be selfish pigs in order to encourage our creativity and aspiration. What I am arguing for is a balance. It was Aristotle who wrote about finding the golden mean. If we error too much in selfishness, we’re thoughtless imbeciles, moral gnats, and reptilian subhumans. On the other hand, if we strive to become spiritual socialists, we will become drab, stagnant and bovine. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. 

Peter Singer's persuasive essay strips us bare of our selfish wants as he equates our tendency to accumulate all the crap we don’t need with ignoring the plight of drowning children and as such being responsible for the death of those children. We are, Singer convincingly argues, products of our fortunate “social capital”; therefore, we have an obligation to those who do not have a social capital. Furthermore, because we patronize and live in a state of interdependence on international corporations for our goods and services, we are obliged to help the poor in developing countries. For after all, these countries, led by despots and other unsavory characters, make deals with international corporations, selling raw materials for a higher price than they would by keeping their resources in their own countries. The result is that people living in developing countries starve as their resources are leeched by international corporations.

Now if we follow Singer’s logical moral imperative to its ultimate conclusion, then we are forced to accept that we must renounce our worldly desires and achieve a spiritual condition that is so disdainful of personal comforts and luxuries that we must live only on bare necessities while giving all else to the poor. Anything short of this ideal would be, to use Singer’s analogy, equivalent to being responsible for the deaths of drowning children.

While part of me would like to embrace Singer’s moral imperative and spread Singer’s gospel of uncompromising charity throughout the world, the skeptical part of me questions just how realistic Singer’s ideal is. For what Singer is arguing for is nothing short than a form of spiritual socialism, that is a condition in which human beings renounce their selfish desires for the “finer things in life” in order that they distribute their wealth as evenly as possible. This is a noble ideal indeed, but it contradicts our reptilian hard-wiring. I’m sad to say this, but without selfish motivation, most of us will not be creative or innovative. A world in which we all share our things in a communal potluck and don’t aspire to materialistic excellence is a banal and dreary and colorless world without creativity and innovation. Only when we are enticed by technological razzle-dazzle and model dream homes and exquisite clothing glorified by the silky-tongued fashionistas do we find the reptilian sparks in our brains’ creative nerve centers exploding in glorious paroxysms and it is in these nerve explosions that we create and innovate. Sad as it is, my friends, selfishness is high-octane rocket fuel for creativity. 

I’m not arguing that we should be selfish pigs in order to encourage our creativity and aspiration. What I am arguing for is a balance. It was Aristotle who wrote about finding the golden mean. If we error too much in selfishness, we’re thoughtless imbeciles, moral gnats, and reptilian subhumans. On the other hand, if we strive to become spiritual socialists, we will become drab, stagnant and bovine. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. 

Dr. Dean Edell's Hobbesian Worldview

Dr. Dean Edell, the popular radio talk show host, airs on weekends here in Los Angeles on 640 KFI. I've been listening to him for the last 20 years and I've noticed that he has a Hobbesian worldview, that is a rather unflattering opinion of the intellectual and moral development of the average human animal. This was most evident on this afternoon's broadcast in which he started by saying that our medical system is designed so that we're actually at an advantage to have a huge pool of smokers who, statistically speaking, die prematurely and as such lighten the burden on the medical care system. Edell stated that if there were no smokers the hospitals would be overwhelmed with caring for people living well into their old age and the medical care field would have to address other health concerns that hit healthier people as they live into their eighties and beyond. To live under a health system in which we need to rely on people's life-shortening habits attests to the moral bankruptcy of our health care system.

The second point Edell made today addresses stupidity and the institutions that indulge it. Case in point. Edell discussed a woman who bought straws for her daughter at Wal-mart.  Some of the straws were shaped like hearts. But others, in the mind of this woman, had a strong resemblance to the male penis and she issued a complaint, so vociferous, that Wal-mart has agreed to remove these "dangerous" straws from their shelves. Edell of course believes this woman is being ridiculous and needs to "see a psychiatrist." The bigger issue isn't one crackpot, but that the store policy of a huge institution like Wal-mart can be influenced by such a crackpot. We live in a Hobbesian world indeed. 

Admirable Writers Who Explain the Psychology of Religion

Part 1: Writers Who Chronicle Their Own Spiritual Journey

1. Julia Sweeney in performance of Letting Go of God.  Her book My Beautiful Loss of Faith Story is due in May of 2009.
2. Martin Gardner: The Flight of Peter Fromm and his collection of essays The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener.
3. H.G. Wells: God the Invisible King 

Part 2: Writers Who Examine the Reliability of Scriptures

1. Bart Ehrman: Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium and Misquoting Jesus, to name just a couple of many.
2. Elaine Pagels: Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, to name just one of many.
3. H.L. Mencken: Treatise on the Gods

Part 3: Writers Who Question the Motives of St. Paul

1. Hyam Maccoby: The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity
2. AN Wilson: Paul: The Mind of the Apostle

Part 4: Writers Who Argue That Morality Exists, and in Fact Works More Effectively, in a Non-Theistic Worldview

1. Elizabeth Anderson:  Her essay "If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?" is published in  Philosophers Without Gods and The Portable Atheist.
2. Sam Harris: The End of Faith
3. Christopher Hitchens: God Is Not Great

Part 5: Writers Who Explain the Psychology Behind Religion

1. Alfred North Whitehead: Religion in the Making
2. Erich Fromm: Escape from Freedom and The Art of Loving

Part 6: Theist But Non Literalist Writers Who Interpret Scripture to Rescue a Loving God from the Jaws of a Tribal God:

1. Marcus Borg: The Heart of Christianity and Reading the Bible Again for the First Time   
2. Rubel Shelly: Divorce and Remarriage: A Redemptive Theology
3. Rufus M. Jones: Fundamental Ends of Life
 

Tolstoy Rails Against the Vanity of Life

Quoted from Albert Camus Notebooks  in which Camus quotes Tolstoy:

"The existence of death compels us to either give up life of our own free will, or to change our life in such a way as to give it a meaning that cannot be taken from it by death."