Recategorization

The Tarpits

• Care
• Fairness
• Liberty
• Loyalty
• Authority
• Sanctity

Ronald C. White narrated the final of the five audiobooks I indulged in last week, his delightful Lincoln in Private. It completed tidily, in a consciously unintended but universally directed manner (so it goes), the week’s series in a way that felt rather unexpected.

A Raisin in the Sun (The Original Broadway Cast) by Lorraine Hansberry, Undelivered by Jeff Nussbaum, High Conflict by Amanda Ripley, The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber & Wengrow, Lincoln in Private by Ronald C. White.

I use Libby, as the thought of paying for digital audio content squeegees and scraps against my sternum. I recently added a second library system into the app, and I cannot emphasize to you enough, reader, how much of an upgrade in content I felt. If one could track the chemical systems of my brain in that moment, the surge of endorphins would register most resoundingly. Bliss. Progressive delight at the thought of the number of resources to which I now had this privileged access. Such access! Completely free! The Davids taught me last week that we distinguish, in linguistic origin, the slaves and the free by the ability to make friends. Free – friend. Now, thanks to the great public service of the library , I am free to befriend these Davids; free to converse with Abe Lincoln; free to explore the great spread of humankind . Get yourself a library account, pronto!

Hearing the private words of Abraham Lincoln reassures me in this caustic moment, as a good portion of our country insists on barreling towards conflict at all costs. It has happened before, and it shall happen again. Perhaps, once again, we shall be better off for it, for when I reflect on history I think it so: if it took a million Americans dead to end the sick institution of slavery, well then let it take a million more to end all identity oppression and class warfare. So damnably did rich bastards want to continue the cruelest of human oppressions that they did not blink at eye at sending a generation of working boys to fertilize the nation’s soil to make it so, and so unjust was this cause that the union could not stand for such truculence. Oh, what familiar ground.

Narrative controls us. Uncertain nature demands survival’s response, and civilization responds with a story.

Fatigued before even beginning the effort, I don’t want to get into the sins of organized religion, particularly as it pertains to our dear US of A, but it seems almost needless in stating at this point that evangelicals are tearing this country apart. In a devil’s bargain with certain sectors of ever-bloating greedmongers, they have taken to tread the path of power, and now we all suffer at their ill-considered whiplash demands. Abortion moves beyond childish moral issues (see P. Singer), but enters instead the realm of needing a pragmatic response, and it is here I find it most ironic that the puritans win. In philosophy, America is known as the home of pragmatism, philosophers looking to just get on with the real effort of enlightened living in a society and how best to do it (I now flinch here at using the term enlightened after the insights of the Davids, as there does not seem too much enlightened about The Enlightenment). Women get abortions. Nothing more really need be said on the issue, as the evolutionary imperative alone tells us this posses a challenge. Without continuation, humans fail, unless we are so socially determinative now that we operate like worker bees for the civilizational hive, wholly willing to sterilize ourselves for the Queen. The evolutionary imperative seems to also demand of us self-preservation, and if birthing a child risks that drive of self-preservation, logic naturally leads to elimination. It sounds cold, but such is logic, hence its required partnership against emotion’s harsher judgements.

Ruth did not want to forsake the unsought pregnancy in Hansberry’s Raisin, but the socio-psychic state of Walter seemed to demand it. Mama disagrees, blaming such tragedy as the loss of an innocent child on the fallen state of her son, a man beaten down by his place in the social system. Would Mama be right in forcing that child on Ruth? If Mama did force the child on Ruth, rather than leaving the choice of the child in Ruth’s hands, would Ruth ever truly accept the birth of the child as she conclusively seems to at the plays end, or would it instead always remain a socially enforced burden that one learned to love? Mama passes her judgments, and the family brings it under due consideration, but the living of our life is our own. The responsibility of motherhood is on the mother, the choice hers, and if conditions make the choice of life untenable, the mother has the power. That’s all any of us have in anything, the power of choice, and how we choose to live in every moment. Ruth chose life for that poorly timed pregnancy, and the audience rejoices. Mama rejoices.

Yet, in this sick country, perhaps that baby chosen, that life that the mother chose to live, will just get shot down before their eleventh birthday in their elementary school classroom. How do these defenders of life defend this? Why not make the option for life the obvious right answer? Why not make our social condition so clearly trying for widespread happiness and contented living for all people that no mother in any condition could imaging choosing termination? Instead we leave public spaces exposed to these continued acts of war trauma in the form of gun violence, seemingly impotent at doing anything even close to preventing the next tragedy. We watch as our social condition actively degrades before our eyes, our leaders fail to meet the demands of the moment, and agents of cruelty and oppression making active gains at every seeming turn, and we just continue. The moment is met with a whimper, because standing up against this cruel apathy will bring violence.

We live in morally bankrupt times. I look in almost every sector of society, and I see corruption and the implicit endorsements of bad actors by those benefiting from their gains. That said, live and let live. My judgements end at that: judgements. I do not then seek to become Justice, and dispense my verdicts upon the Earth. Long have we passed the need for such virtue signaling avatars, and the irony is that this is the entire message of the new testament, the entire purpose of the son’s sacrifice: to relieve of us strife. Worry ye not, for I die for all sins. Absolution! Freedom! Oh, but how that persistent need for narrative siren-calls, and the conflict peddlers in the boat swim us shoreward. No, still they feel the need to fight. The crusaders would say fight and die for their cause, and perhaps death is the risk for their escapade, for what these crusaders really seek is to fight and kill for their cause. They don’t want to fight and die, they want to fight and kill, and the understanding of fight and kill is that the risk is death. This is a mental sickness called fascism, and it will not go quietly into the good night. They want the fight, and they’ll do everything they can do bring it. Nothing makes money like war.

I’ve been saying this my entire philosophical conscious life, around 12, 13 years old, and now 28 I no longer feel a fool, just a sad validation, and an even sadder realization of what’s to come. I wrote about it in one of my first essays, The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword, But What About the Camera? , and the point bears repeating here: conflict. So desperately do sectors of American society hold true to the evangelical narrative socially rooted in wealth-based, gendered white supremacy that they will burn the entire country to the ground to maintain it. Previously satisfied to uphold this position with implicit state-sponsored terrorism still basically in place due to the inaction of the federal government to act as a bulwark against violent threat, the narrative slips in the generational changing of the guard, as the internet has opened up the previously locked gates to social communion. I can join the forums of any social group, I can sit on the shoulders of soldiers in war made ever more exemplified by this latest Russian War, and I can come to understand that we are all human. We all want to make a good life for ourselves. Should we so choose, we all want to make a good life for our kids. We want to head-off all our threats, and in this well-intentioned aim we become oppressors.

To walk into the world today is to see interracial romance in abundance, and the hybrid blooms of their union, and nothing represents a greater threat to the old narrative. Whitey has tasted from the forbidden fruit, and now has elected to leave the pure garden for the foul world of culture. How could they? Women maintain their agency over sex and their bodies, and by virtue their lives, threatening the purpose of the protector patriarch. The sexual revolution of the 1960’s will never be undone, but the counter-revolution strikes with equal force. The old fabric of reality became upended, and faith profiteers sensed the opening. Oh, you seek answers to all these questions? You’re confused, and scared about feeling left behind in the new world order? Well, I’ll tell you who’s to blame, and I’ll tell you where to find reassurance: in me, and always in the father. Trust in god, and everything will be okay. Oh, you don’t know how to do that? Let me show you:

Schismogenesis

I cannot stress enough the brilliance of The Dawn of Everything. Succinctly and with the brutal efficiency of a true expert, the Davids fillet our current conceptualization of social theory and present an alternative framework that surveys a much fuller remit of the true human experience in our quarter million year dance with Gaia, offering a much realer picture of our journey so far, the journey that has so far led me to be me and you to be you, and all the thems to become these thems in between us.

A word the Davids repeat throughout the book, and a concept they seem to believe has played a fundamentally critical role in the social development of our species is schismogenesis: definition from opposition. They go to great lengths giving exhibition to schismogenesis, and the more I chew upon the word and the concept, the more useful I find it as a linguistic tool towards creating social dialectic understanding. So many of our most foundational concepts of understanding come from relative opposition to something else. Knowledge is a building block of relativity, with the journey being one of understanding the differentiation of all things in fully linguistic terms, a feat of near infinite difficulty, so difficult that the foundational philosopher of Western Canon is told to be the wisest of all people because all he knows is that he knows nothing. How easy to say, how utterly impossible to practice.

This is the great bane of evolving human, destined to be caught between two realms of existence – the seemingly perpetual teenager. Clearly separate in some ethereal regard from the creatures of Earth, but still trapped by its constraints, we know there’s more. This is why, as DEATH tells us, “HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE”. We don’t know what tomorrow might bring for our journeying tribe, but we do know that there will be something more over the next horizon, something other than this now. We are, in fact, certain of it, as over every horizon thus far there has been something else. It’s the nature of a globe. Then, after our journey around the globe and our coming back home, we remember our Heraclitus and jump all the more fully into the familiar new streams.

Fitting that we return to these PreSocratics, those last years before philosophy fell to the violent demands of the elevated horde. Not since the wise men decided Socrates must die have we had true open debate, and not since Constantine took up the symbol of the cross have we heard of the genuine miracles of Christ, so wrapped up have they been in the interests of the state. The political and the spiritual meet at the intersection of existence known as a person, but serve different interests completely. The political is our journey outward shared with our fellow people, the attempt to all live out our lives on this same single planet together. The spiritual is our attempt to live within ourselves as individuals, our trying to make sense of why we’ve on this single planet in this single body to begin with. Existentialism, in short.

It does feel difficult here to refrain from exemplifying my point by relaying to you my own spiritual journey, but herein lies, I believe, the great crux over which the fate of our humble species is repeatedly decided, and the great contention which shall forever hold us in a state of arrested development until we realize the need to collectively overcome it: the spiritual journey is singular. How can we allow for such moral relativism in our clearly physically objective universe? How can we square away subjectivity in the mess of the objectivity? By appreciating our own limits has well as our awareness. Kierkegaard gave us that great expression “leap of faith” to help instruct us on how to respond when the path of logic ends and we must therefore choose for ourselves the narrative leap to which we must commit. In our faith, will we leap towards family? Tradition? The altruistic spirit of man, woman, and child all? Freedom? The Self? Wherever one leaps in faith, we all leap, and the reason we must make the leap from the logical path at all is because our logic forever has limits.

A clarifying moment for this Sam, where I turned from butter to ghee, was when I read a stray online comment somewhere saying that perhaps the tree of good & evil is not so simply defined as that, but better understood to be the tree of differentiation, and when those first people ate that nourishing fruit, they no longer existed in the unity of the universe, but we’re now privy to the segmentation of all things. No longer were we part of The One, but now of The Many. Perhaps we should call it The Tree of SchismoGenesis.

Because this leap is so blind and so scary, and because we cannot be certain upon leaping that we’ve made the right choice, we try to convince others they must follow our path. The more insecure in our choices, the more insistently we need others to duplicate them. This is why the evangelicals are willing to tear the country apart, because a country is a changing thing, but tradition is eternal. Who cares if the tradition brings suffering, who cares if the tradition was just meant to be a stopgap until a better solution could be discovered, who cares if the tradition is rooted in domination and oppression? Tradition does not live beyond living memory, and always gets decided by the elders of the time, for nobody can know the true reality of time before our own existence, and so must trust in those who came before us to tell us of the ways of then, the things that worked and did not work so that, moving in to the future, we are best equipped to meet the challenges of tomorrow, and more importantly, of today.

Yet our tribal elders came about in a time of racial and sexual repression, a time when society more fully controlled the manner of individual expression inherent in the amalgamation of experiences one body goes through throughout its lifetime. Now, as they watch this world almost completely wash away as a new generation begins to come in to power no longer respectful of their deceptions and manipulations, they panic. Rather than adapt and accord to a welcoming lifestyle, too many faith leaders sow discord and division, unable to resist the Rheingold‘s temptation. A good life needs no explanation, as it exemplifies itself. One need never preach, for if one’s leap of faith truly leads to further solid ground, and one has truly helped clear a path which future logic will make clear, then others will most naturally follow, as the impulse towards personal progress in some form or another is most natural. If I see you where I want to go, most naturally I shall mimic your steps in getting there.

Why – my question keeps boiling down to – do we keep schismogenesizing against other people and each other, and not against the challenges of just living, broadening our focus beyond people. Climate change offers a ready opponent, or perhaps that eternal enemy gravity can be met once again in the arena. Why, Russian bear, do you not commit to conquering space and nature, and gear your economy towards the future, instead of oligarchic greed and lost dreams of empire? Did you not see how imperial dreams have turned to ash in Britain’s mouth? Do you not watch as the American Empire tears at every apparent seem, so overburdened are its responsibilities too much divided? No, apparently Vladimir never read his T.H. White, and still believes that might is right, but this shall certainly not make him the once and future king so central to Russian dreams.

It’s so easy to hate ourselves, to listen to our inner saboteur, and relent. To allow the negativity power of the reigns, to let the horse guide the chariot, damns our collective soul to such torment, yet we must learn to love ourselves if we are to learn to love anything else, and nobody who truly loves themselves would dominate someone else. To what end? I think, oftentimes, on the nature of love as it relates to Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Donald Trump. Sure, power, wow. But who loves you? Truly, not fearfully? Perhaps you’ll live the mighty Prince that old Niccolo described, but remember that he described him in exile, alone on his farm. What manner of that is it to live? A wonderful one if chosen, but tragic if forced, as with all things. Ruth must choose to have her baby, not be forced to bear it, and in the power of that choice does she find life’s salvation. Every baby born is a miracle because it was a chosen baby, nothing is more beautiful than the power of choice. Perhaps this is the lesson Lorraine Hansberry really means to impart, the true lesson of the character’s biblical namesake. So little of life is under our control, even more so in certain regards for women by pure virtue of physical logic, but there are few moments in this life where we have true power, where we have a voice, where we have a choice and real agency. No narrative, no tradition, no moral imperative supersedes the individuals right to choose life, but it’s a choice that always must be made. Sometimes it is easy, sought after and always desired, but other instances can easily make it life’s most difficult. Why should an outsider have a say?

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

“Choose life.
Choose a job.
Choose a career.
Choose a family,

Choose a fucking big television
Choose washing machines, cars,
Compact disc players, and electrical tin openers.
Choose good health, low cholesterol

And dental insurance.
Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments.
Choose a starter home.
Choose your friends.

Choose leisure wear and matching luggage.
Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase
In a range of fucking fabrics.
Choose DIY and wondering who you

Are on a Sunday morning.
Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing
Sprit-crushing ga me shows
Stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth.

Choose rotting away at the end of it all,
Pishing you last in a miserable home
Nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish,
Fucked-up brats

You have spawned to replace yourself.
Choose your future. Choose life.”