Let There Be Light

I thought it might be fitting, on Halloween, to describe a personal experience that I once had of Hell:

It happened when I was a young man, of twenty-one or twenty-two years of age. This was a period of my life when I was experimenting with drugs. I think that it is safe for me to admit this, given that decades have now since passed, and also because even U.S. Presidential candidates have admitted to using drugs in the days of their youth. And for me, at that time, “experimenting” is the appropriate phrase to use. I was never addicted to any particular drug, but was fascinated by the effects that drugs had upon the mind. Some affected mood, others bolstered self-confidence and induced more spontaneous, self-expressive behavior, while others seemed to alter perception itself, tempting the user to believe that he or she was encountering profound, enlightening insights. And, given my propensity for an analytical frame of mind, I actually recorded, in a notebook, the various effects of different drugs upon me. I did not do this dispassionately: In my youth I suffered from a painful shyness, which persisted into adulthood, and, even though I had passed out of my teens, the lingering effects of adolescence only magnified the angst that I felt because of it. I wondered if there was some perfect combination of drugs that might make me more comfortably assertive, spontaneous, and expressive. It really was a sort of “Jekyll and Hyde” experiment that I was engaging in: a “personality dialectic”, in which I hoped to release those elements of my personality which had been suppressed, and which only emerged intermittently, generally as the result of a unique combination of social circumstances and/or mood-altering substances.

After several trials, with several different drugs, I finally decided upon a specific “cocktail” of drugs: a combination which I felt would produce the desired effect. My plan was to ingest these at home, and then travel to a nightclub which was about a half hour’s drive from my home. All went according to plan, at least up to the point where I arrived at the club. I sat down at the bar and waited, excitedly, for the drugs to take full effect.

But then something horribly wrong began to happen. I noticed it first when I realized that the music playing in the background no longer seemed to have any rhythm or recognizable, coherent melody. And a bartender who was speaking to me was completely incomprehensible, as if he were speaking in a foreign language. Then I noticed that the bottle of beer that I had ordered was lying horizontally on the bar. I managed to set the bottle upright (I think), but immediately retreated outside to the parking lot, and headed back to the van that I had driven to get there.

What happened next almost defies description. There was blackness, just blackness. Only gradually did I become aware of the fact that I even existed. But I had no idea where I was. I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. Even worse, I had no idea what I was. I was this entity, in the middle of nowhere, that didn’t know who it was, what it looked like, what its history was, or how to even find answers to any of these questions. In this empty void, I tried to convince myself that there was something out there beside myself, although there was no evidence to support this belief. I cried out, in a language without words, to this “thing”, begging it to make itself known, and to tell me who – or at least what – I was. But there was only silence, and the void. Words cannot convey the terror that I felt, and the lonely isolation. I was a being with no identity, no history, no belonging, and no connection.

I don’t know how long I was in this state, because there was no standard by which to judge the passage of time. In desperation, I tried to conjure up a memory: if not of myself, then at least of some other being that had known me, and had interacted with me. I reasoned that if I could remember such a being, than through that being’s reactions, I could surmise who or what I was. Finally, a recognizable image appeared in my mind. It was the image of my mother. And, seeing what she looked like, I began to piece together what I might look like: a human being, with a face, two arms, and two legs. The images of friends then began to follow, and memories soon returned in their wake. I remembered the name that I had been called by these others, and soon was able to reconstruct, in my mind, a complete image of myself, and a history of what I had been.

Not long after this restoration of identity had been completed, I was able to restore my sense of perception as well, and locate myself within my van, within the parking lot of that nightclub. After another stretch of time, I found the strength and willpower to position myself on the driver’s seat, start the van, drive back home, and get into bed.

It took me a couple of weeks before I was completely back to normal (during that time I experienced difficulties with both sleeping and “taking in” the world around me), but eventually was able to restore a normal sense of equilibrium to my life. The irony was that I really had succeeded in what I had set out to do that night: I had managed to destroy the personality that seemed so awkward and ill-suited to me at the time, but in its absence there was apparently nothing left to replace it with.

And the experience also left me with a revelation of what a real “hell” would be like: a state of existence that is completely separate and unconnected from anything or anyone else. Hell, I realized, is separation –total isolation; no communion with any other sentient being.

As I have reflected on this nightmarish experience, in the many years since it happened, I have occasionally wondered: isn’t this the supposed goal of many “enlightened” spiritual practices - to annihilate the self? But upon further reflection, I realized that this is not, in fact, what had happened to me. It was not the “self” that was annihilated, but rather any and all connections that this self had with any external reality. It was left completely and utterly alone and isolated, without even the consolation of memories of connectedness to ground its being. Enlightenment traditions, on the other hand, seem to counsel a sort of dissolution of the self, along with a merging with some greater reality. In my own personal experiences of meditation, when I have managed to quiet the mind, and attain a quiescent state in which distracting trains of thought subside, leaving only a sort of empty, non-reflective awareness of the world, the ensuing feeling of peaceful bliss does not arise from having severed my connections with everyone and everything around me. Rather, it stems from feeling more grounded and connected, with everything, and less wedded to an abstract concept of the self. And yet, no matter how far into this meditative state I have gone, I have never lost a sense of who I was, or of my own personal history, or of where I was at the moment. And so I can only conclude that what I experienced, during that altered, drug-induced state so many years ago, was a sort of anti-enlightenment: the opposite of what it is that so many spiritual, meditative disciplines exhort us to attain.

But I have also wondered: wouldn’t God have experienced something like what I had during that great stretch of time (an eternity, in fact), before the universe was created: a sense of being an entity in a void, with no identity, no past, and no connection with anything else? And during this infinite stretch of complete, empty solitude, how would an entity know that it even had the power to change this situation? After all, if things had been this way for an eternity, what evidence would there be that anything different was even possible? To me, such an existence would not only be unbearably lonely, but unbearably terrifying as well. I recently put this question to a friend of mine, and he replied that such a scenario would not present a problem or a difficulty to God, since God is perfect. Now, such an answer is rather trite, but I have to confess that there is a certain logic in it. After all, any being that perceived a sense of lack in its existence could surely not be perfect.

And yet, there was – according to so many religious traditions – a moment when a perfect, supreme being willed the universe into existence, a moment when the Creator declared, in the words of the Old Testament, “Let there be light”. It seems unthinkable that such an act would occur without an underlying need or desire to perform it, but “need” or “desire” are verbs that would be entirely incongruent with an uncaused First Cause, or unmoved Prime Mover. One can understand, when confronting this puzzle, why the Gnostics believed that the “god” that created this universe, and who identified himself as the “creator”, was in fact created by some higher, more sublime Being. Perhaps the Kabbalists are closer to the truth with their theory that Godhood manifests itself through a series of emanations, called “sefirot”, which arise from a primordial source know as “Ein Sof”, a word which has been interpreted to mean “nothingness”, but also “without end or limit”.

In the year preceding the one during which I performed my terrifying experiment, I had written the following poem, which I titled “In the Beginning. . .”:

In the beginning there was Change.
God created Change in his
own image . . .

And yet God remained a static
force during an eternity before
Change.

There was no change of time
nor change of place
No change of mind
nor change of face

In Change there was a
Beginning.

I suppose that it is unthinkable – maybe even blasphemous – to imagine that a Supreme Being once experienced the horrifying loneliness of being an isolated entity with no history, and no self-concept, as I did during that bad drug experience. All that I can conclude is that such an experience, if permanent, would truly be an unimaginable hell for any ordinary conscious being. And, as an ordinary, conscious being, I am now permanently grateful that I am not alone in this huge universe, and will leave the question of how this existence came about to greater minds than my own.

The Great Divide

I had the great privilege of attending a ceremony recently in Washington, D.C. at which Olympia Snowe was given the 2013 Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government. (The late Paul H. Douglas, a man of strong moral convictions, a liberal who championed fiscal conservatism, and an ardent crusader for civil rights in the mid-twentieth century, was once described by the Rev. Martin Luther King as “the greatest of all the Senators”.) Senator Snowe had a long and distinguished career, serving in both houses of the U.S. Congress. As I listened to the speeches of some of her peers in government, along with her own acceptance speech, I could perceive a common theme that emerged among them. This was that Senator Snowe, and others like her, were able to achieve great things in government because they were willing to work with members of the opposite political party to achieve important goals. “Compromise” was a word that came up more than once during the ceremony, and it was not used in a pejorative sense. Rather, it described the ability of Snowe and other legislators to make small sacrifices in return for significant gains: pieces of legislation that – while not entirely satisfying the original objectives of either party –nevertheless represented tangible and important contributions to the nation that could find support in both parties.

How different things seem now, in a Congress where “compromise” has become a dirty word. Factions regularly prefer to hold the entire government hostage through their intransigence in such important matters as long-term national debt reduction, rather than work with elements in both parties to affect a workable compromise. In a recent marathon 21-hour speech, a senator dredged up the name of Neville Chamberlain, suggesting that to compromise with his political opposition on a budget bill was comparable to that British prime minister’s policy of appeasement with Adolph Hitler.

When did “compromise” become such an ugly word in politics? It has certainly been an element of the U.S. political tradition, going back to the drafting of the Constitution itself. That was an instance where the perfect was recognized as the enemy of the good, and the founders – after several weeks of intensive, old-fashioned “horse-trading” – produced an instrument of government that merely succeeded in satisfying, rather than impressing, most of them. As Benjamin Franklin put it, shortly after the document was completed:

I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. . . .

I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best. . . .

On the whole, Sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility -- and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

Sadly, the wisdom of a Benjamin Franklin – or a Paul H. Douglas or Olympia Snowe – seems to be in increasingly short supply in the U.S. Congress, which is now become that confounding Babel of discordant, uncompromising selfish interests, some of whom are driven by simple self-aggrandizement, others by an almost fanatical devotion to ideology, and others by a craven timidity, fearing that any overture to compromise will prematurely end their political careers.

Meanwhile, the country continues to careen toward disaster, with an unsustainable growth in national debt, an underemployed youth that cannot afford a decent college education without throwing themselves into a hopeless mountain of debt, a crumbling infrastructure, and a shrinking middle class that is leaving in its wake a growing divide between the very rich and the very poor.

We can only hope that a growing number of our political representatives will learn – and learn quickly – that brinkmanship is not statesmanship, that compromise in politics is not the same as compromise with a dictator, terrorist, or foreign enemy, and that the higher ground is only reached when we are able to understand and work with others who are not like us, who do not share all of our particular views, but who nevertheless want to bring about a future that is better for all of us.

The Wedding Toast

In 1998, I had the honor of being the best man at my youngest brother’s wedding.  It was a great privilege to do it, but added to the prestige of doing so was something else: it was a chance for me to vindicate myself after having had this honor once before in my life and falling down on the job.  That was on the occasion of my best friend’s wedding, a couple of decades earlier.  I was completely oblivious to what my roles and responsibilities were as a best man, including making a wedding toast, and so did not perform them at all.  In my defense, both my best friend and I were still just teenagers at the time.  I think that we were both confronted with roles and responsibilities that most men don’t have to contend with until they are at a more mature age.  Still, after my friend’s wedding, I developed the growing realization that I had really stumbled rather badly in my role as his best man, and it bothered me.  In fact, for years afterward, I was like one of those restless, roving spirits, cursed to wander the earth because of some terrible wrong that was committed during its lifetime, perpetually re-enacting the critical event in the vain hope that it might be rectified or set right.  In my case, I became a sort of “wedding crasher”: not because I went to weddings uninvited, but because, after the official best man made his toast, I would wander (or rather stagger, because I would usually pretend that I was drunk) up to the wedding party’s table and offer up a toast of my own, using jokes mainly memorized from a book that I had found called 2000 Insults for All Occasions.   My wedding “roast” was generally met with peals of laughter from the audience, though I always felt guilty when I looked over at the best man and invariably saw a downcast expression on his face, because he now clearly felt that his own toast had come up short by comparison.  But now, finally, I had an opportunity to genuinely set things right, with this second chance to be a legitimate best man myself.

And yet, with my brother’s wedding only days away, I found that I had no idea what to say in my speech.  Could it really be that, after all those years of successfully making toasts at weddings where I had not been the best man, that I would fall down, again, when I legitimately had the role?

I desperately searched about for something to say – something to speak about.  Aside from the salutary jokes (I still had the book that had served me so well in all those other weddings), what could I offer that was more genuine, and more substantial?  Was there something from my own life experiences that I could share?

As it happened, there was something which occurred very recently that had left a very profound impact upon me.  It came about as the result of an inspirational tape series that I had been listening to during that year, which prescribed a series of exercises that one should undertake to get in touch with one’s spirituality.  One of these exercises was to go away on a personal retreat, away from other people, with nothing brought along that might keep one engaged with and bound to the usual day-to-day activities: no phones, no pagers, no homework from the office, and nothing to disturb the mind, like alcohol or caffeine.  For my personal retreat, I rented a small, simple oak cabin in the southern part of the state of Michigan, in a heavily wooded area called the Dunes (so named because of the very tall sand dunes that are scattered about not far from the beaches of Lake Michigan).

Now I hardly expected anything genuinely profound or life-changing to happen.  After all, I was really not that far from civilization at all, and my stay was very short: just three days and two nights.  This was a far cry from the extended seclusion undertaken by a solitary monk, yogi, or shaman, and was even just a minute fraction of the time that Henry David Thoreau had spent in his cabin on Walden Pond.  I nearly laughed at the idea that I would get anything out of this.  Still, I decided to keep an open mind, and go ahead with the experiment.  I quickly found, after the first day or so, that I really was enjoying this solitude.  It had turned out to be a perfect time to do this: in early September, when the days are still warm, but the nights are cool, and, since the regular camping season had drawn to a close, the area was nearly completely desolate.  As the second full day drew to a close, I resigned myself to the fact that, while the experience had not and probably would not produce any profound – let alone life-changing – insights, it had still been a satisfying one, and a happy one.  Of course, it is exactly at that point, when one genuinely expects nothing, that one is often rewarded.  And it was my final experience at this retreat that I decided to share at my brother’s wedding.

On that second and final night of my retreat, I was sitting outside of my cabin, silently looking up at the sky.  While gazing at the stars, I recalled reading as a child that the sun is also a star, no different than any of these others that dotted the night sky.  In fact, it was explained that the sun is really undistinguished when it comes to stars, in terms of its size, age, and brightness.  The sun’s brilliance to us is merely an illusion, the result of its greater proximity.  The night was getting cold and very dark, and so I retreated back into my cabin to go to sleep.

But then I woke up in the very early morning hours.  It was still very dark outside, and cold, but I felt a compulsion to leave my cabin and go out for a walk.  I returned to a very tall dune that I had visited earlier in my trip.  It was easy to find, even in the dark, because of the pathway of white sand that led up vertically along one of its faces.  I had scaled the face along this path a day or so earlier, and it had been no easy undertaking, because of the steepness of the climb.  After advancing each couple of meters, I would find myself short of breath and feeling a tightness in the chest that compelled me to rest for a few minutes before continuing on for the next leg of the climb.  But after several of these halting advances, I had managed to reach the top, which afforded a comfortable flat place to sit and to take in a view of the surrounding woods.  Now, in the cold darkness, I repeated this climb, with the same halting, labored advance upwards, until I was finally at the top.  I looked around from my perch, but there was only blackness, and a deathly silence.  For a long stretch of time I sat there, feeling the chill of the air, hearing nothing, and seeing nothing.

Suddenly, the sky began to brighten in the distance, and turned purple.  The enveloping darkness began to disappear, even before the orb of the sun started to arise on the horizon, and as it did so, the world around me began to change.  I could hear sounds: first the random chirping of a solitary bird, which quickly grew to a chorus of songs from many birds.  There was movement, as many of these birds began to take wing.  It was as if the whole world was coming to life.  I began to see brilliant colors where there had only been shades of grey before.  An entire panorama of deep surrounding valleys and tall majestic trees around me became visible.  I realized that each tree had grown tall in a mutual competition to get closer to the sun, and that in fact every single leaf of every tree had oriented itself in the best way to catch the life-sustaining rays of sunlight.  And this experience awakened me to a profound insight: the magnificence of the sun was no illusion at all – it was in fact the source of light and life to a world full of variety and beauty, and this set it apart from most, if not all, of the other stars in the heavens.  And as I reflected upon this, I realized that this truth could be applied to human beings.  While there are many ways that human beings are measured – in terms of intelligence, or physical attributes, or personal wealth – the true measure of a man or a woman is in how many lives they touch, how many people they reach as a source of love and inspiration.  And, while there are many ways to touch people in this way, such as by being a counselor or a teacher, one of the most natural and immediate ways is through marriage.  Because through marriage, one becomes a source of love, comfort, and inspiration to another, and, if children are produced, both partners become such a source to them and, eventually, to the extended family that develops.  After I recounted this story at the wedding, I finished by asking that God bless my brother and his wife in their marriage, and invited the audience to join me in a toast.

And so I had finally vindicated myself as a best man.  But the lesson that I had shared on that night came back to me in a very personal, intense, and immediate way eleven years later, in 2009, when a serious accident landed me in the hospital.  As I lay there, virtually helpless, I was completely dependent on the goodwill of others.  And my angel of mercy came in a most unusual form.  She was a woman who looked like someone who had been raised in a very bad neighborhood, someone who had to fight for everything that she had.  She was rather stout in build, and had a hard, cold countenance that seemed to say “Stay away”.  Had I seen a woman like this during my regular daily travels on the subway, I would have made a point of avoiding her – not out of condescension, but because I would be genuinely afraid to get too close to her.  But this was the woman who – on many if not most of my days that I was in the hospital – cared for me each morning: bathing me, attending to my wounds, and dressing me afterwards.  She did it with a stoic dedication, but also with a gentleness and compassion that I sorely craved at that time, when I felt so damaged, helpless, and lonely.

I was in that hospital for two and half weeks, and one would think that after such an experience, a former patient would want to never return there.  But for me, at least, the opposite was true.  I loved returning to that hospital for follow-up visits: it was like taking a nostalgic visit to a college that one has graduated from.  The time at that institution might have been grueling, and stressful, but the happy outcome bathed all of these memories in a pleasant, nostalgic hue.

I think that I saw her during my very first return visit.  Since it had been only a short time since my release, she recognized me as well.  (I’m sure that it becomes progressively more difficult for hospital caregivers to remember their former charges over time, given the sheer volume of them that they must tend to.)  My face erupted into a spontaneous grin, which she answered in kind, and then, after I rushed up to her, we embraced each other.  I think that tears even welled up in my eyes as I held her close to me.

Were I to see this woman on a subway now, I might still feel hesitant about sitting next to her, but only because now I might feel that I would be unworthy, taking a place alongside one of God’s own elect, an earth angel, a human sun unselfishly radiating love, warmth, and compassion on those who need such sustaining rays the most.

May the Force Breed with You

In my last entry (“Rational Religion”), I shared my conviction that our civilization needs to find a new path to spirituality, which is purged of myth, superstition, empty rituals, and intellectual chicanery, but is not, as a consequence of this purging, sterile, artificial, or dryly intellectual.  The new path, I believe, would have to inspire, and provide higher guidance to one’s life whenever reason comes up short (and perhaps even overrule reason).  What would such a religion look like?  What would its adherents be like, and, perhaps even more importantly, what would be the qualities possessed by its holy men and women?

Every religion, every culture, and every tribe seems to have its holy people, whether these be saints, priests, mystics, spiritual teachers, medicine men, shamans, or witch doctors.  Usually, these are people who have simply answered a personal call to a higher vocation, although in some cases they do seem to possess unusual abilities as well, either as the result of some form of disciplined practice, or simply because they were endowed with special gifts from birth.  Occasionally, as with the Levites of the Old Testament, there is an entire priestly tribe.  In fiction – particularly science fiction – this idea of a race of spiritual adepts appears often, in the form of persons who have psychic abilities because they come from a family line along which these abilities were passed down, from generation to generation.

When I was in my twenties, I began to wonder if it might be possible to create such a priestly tribe.  Could a colony of people set up the conditions under which they not only cultivated a high level of spiritual advancement through natural means (disciplined study and practice), but also augmented this through hereditary means, by ensuring that their descendents had a greater inherent capacity for developing and exercising spiritual proclivities?  The idea fascinated me, and, as only a young and naïve idealist can do, I set about crafting a design for making it possible.

First there was the natural cultivation.  For me, this would simply mean that my colony (or “cult”, or “intentional community”) would dedicate themselves to discovering genuine means for elevating one’s consciousness, and do so both by studying the existing religious and mystical traditions of the world, with a critical eye, distilling truth from fable and empty ritual, and also through independent, open-minded exploration.  I suspect that the most fertile sources for this project from existing traditions would come from Zen, Yoga, and elements of the mystical traditions among each of the major religions, but that is just my own personal bias.  This tribe would have no autocratic spiritual head – no “pope” – and it would have no sacred book, either.  Instead, ideas and practices that had the most merit would survive naturally, as future generations continued to preserve the inspirations and discoveries of certain luminaries among them simply because of their demonstrated merit and effectiveness.

And what of hereditary cultivation?  How did I plan to create a tribe of wizards?  To make this possible, I envisioned a sort of benign eugenics that involved two things: polygamy and sexual selection.  The idea boiled down to these two precepts: every man and woman would be allowed to produce no more than one child of his or her own gender, and every man would be entitled to have more than one wife.

Here’s how it would work in practice:  Suppose each man in the community has three wives.  (Whether this is a rigid ratio, or simply an average among the colony, is immaterial.)  Each wife would be entitled to have one daughter.  The man would similarly be entitled to produce a son, but here is where the eugenics comes in.  Prior to deciding which of his wives will bear the man’s son, each of them must be tested for their “psychic” abilities.  (What this means in practice I’m not really sure:  Telepathy?  Telekinesis?  Clairvoyance?  A combination, with perhaps different weightings assigned to each ability?  Such things would have to be determined by the tribe beforehand, along with suitable tests for measurement, and the appropriate definition might change over the generations, as different abilities were eventually determined to be more relevant, and more important, for the fundamental project of the colony.)  The wife who scored the highest on this test would bear the man’s son, in addition to the daughter that she had already been allowed to conceive with him.  Now since the son in turn will be able to take three wives in the next generation, it becomes clear that his mother, who was the most psychically gifted among his father’s three wives, will be distributing her genetic “footprint” among a much larger posterity than her husband’s two other wives.  This is so because her son will father four children (including a son for the succeeding generation), her daughter will bear either one or two children, while the other two wives’ daughters will each only bear one or two children.  So her genetic posterity passed on to the next generation of the tribe will be at a minimum 25% higher than that of her husband’s two other wives combined, or as much as 3 times higher than theirs collectively.

There are of course some practical complications with this plan, which might cause persons some discomfort to consider.  What of polygamy, for example?  Is this really consistent with a group of people committed to a communal spiritual life?  The idea didn’t bother me at the time (especially if I would one day be one of the founding members of this tribe), because of course there is at least one religion that did practice polygamy in America for an extended period of time, and it didn’t seem to interfere with the fundamental practice of the religion.  And I remembered reading a quote from a woman who had lived under such an arrangement, who said (perhaps jokingly) that she found it was much easier to live with a man when he had to divide his time among two other women.  And so I convinced myself that polygamy would not interfere with the success of my colony.  The other potentially discomforting feature of this plan is sexual selection, as it brings to mind the terrible practice of female infanticide that is so common these days in third world countries.  It is little consolation to say that in my model there would be many more females than males, if any sort of abortion or infanticide is still required.  At the time that I was conducting this little thought experiment, though, I happened to read somewhere that there are certain conditions (whether involving timing, or food intake, or something else, I can’t remember) that make a woman more likely to conceive a child of one particular gender rather than another.  And so again I satisfied myself that my tribe would be able to work this little technicality out without having to resort to brute measures.  (Still another complication might be that the policy of one son per father, and one daughter per mother, would prevent the colony from expanding, because the reproductive rate would not be high enough.  But this policy is not essential to make the general hereditary scheme work.  The only essential part of the mechanism is that the right to produce male offspring is conferred upon specific mothers, based on the criteria established by the tribe.)

Having worked out this model, while on a summer break from college, I decided to run a simulation on my new personal computer (a novelty back in the 1980s), to see how fast my colony would develop the desired traits that would enhance their psychic abilities.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that the trait would become widespread among the tribe within a matter of just a few generations – not only if the trait existed on one particular gene, but even if more than one gene located on separate chromosomes had to appear simultaneously in a single person before the gift could manifest itself.  Overjoyed at this discovery, I was ready to go out and fulfill my duty of becoming one of the founding patriarchs of this new priestly tribe, and seek out several women who might be willing to join me in my noble and holy endeavor.  (I fancied that for my own little “harem”, I would try to choose a woman from each of the major races of peoples, so that the tribe would suitably represent, from the very start, a representative cross section of humanity.)

There were of course some technicalities to attend to.  The commune, or intentional community, would have to have certain codes and rules to abide by, to ensure that the primary mission of spiritual development was being carried out, and these would have to include some form of governance structure.  To prevent inbreeding over time, and excessive isolation from society at large, converts would always be accepted (and of course members would be allowed to leave the community), though as a condition of entry any prospective convert would have to demonstrate a commitment to abide by the rules, demands, and practices of the community.  (This in itself would constitute a form of natural selection, as converts willing to abide by these potentially demanding codes would probably have a greater innate capacity to engage in committed study and intellectual/spiritual development.)  And, in order for the hereditary plan to succeed, it would be prudent to only extend the right of polygamy to males who were born within the tribe, while male converts would be limited to having only a single wife.  As the community grew and expanded over succeeding generations, it would invariably have to branch out and form separate communities, and a level of autonomy would have to be accepted among these, yet some form of productive interaction and exchange (of both people and ideas) between them would have to be encouraged and fostered.  But these details, I imagined, could easily be worked out as the community (or communities) took shape.

Still, as I contemplated the outcome of this project more carefully, I began to realize that potentially serious problems could emerge.  A society in which women outnumbered men by three to one might produce a pernicious “peacock” mentality among the men: an excessive sense of self-worth and entitlement that could engender some unpleasant behavioral characteristics.  And the selective breeding program could result in unintended consequences in the form of genetic traits that are rare in the general population, such as six fingers on each hand, or other mental and physical abnormalities, or a greater susceptibility to certain genetic diseases.  If the program produced a people with abilities that were significantly superior to those of the general population, this could tempt them to develop an unduly exalted sense of themselves, manifesting itself in some form of racism.  Conversely, rather than revering this priestly tribe, and relying upon them for spiritual guidance and counseling, the general population might come to distrust them and fear them because of their special abilities, and even wish to destroy them, like the mutants in the X-Men movies.  And, too, there would always be the risk of a particularly gifted member “going rogue”, and embarking on a malicious path of self-aggrandizement and personal hegemony, like the evil Emperor and Darth Vader characters in the Star Wars movies.

            But ultimately, I realized that there was a much more fundamental flaw in my plan, and that is that it simply couldn’t work.  The program of selective breeding would not produce the results that I intended.  Here is why – I call it the “paradox of the psychic rabbit”:

            Suppose, in nature, that a rabbit was born with innate psychic abilities along the lines that I hoped to select for in my tribe.  It had a “sixth sense” that allowed it to sense when a predator was nearby, and would therefore remain in its burrow, until its intuition told it that the danger had passed.  Now by the conventional laws of natural selection, such a rabbit would invariably have a survival advantage over other rabbits, and would be much more likely to live long enough to produce several offspring.  Within a few generations, this particular trait, with its immense survival advantage, would become widespread among all rabbits.  Consequently, any natural predators in the food chain that depended upon these rabbits to survive would die out, and rabbits would be left with no natural enemies (and probably ultimately die out themselves as a consequence, when overpopulation stripped them of their own food supply).  Of course, if one of the predators came to be endowed with the same psychic trait, it might neutralize the advantage held by its prey.  Then, for the same reason that the trait became widespread in the rabbits, it would become widespread in the predators as well.  Each and every day, a sort of psychic game of potential move and countermove would play out in the minds of these creatures – both predator and prey – before they ever stepped out of their burrows or dens.  We would have an entire animal kingdom of clairvoyants, telepaths, and possibly even creatures with psychokinetic powers, because any of these abilities would confer an immense survival advantage upon the bearer, and hence would become widespread in just a few generations.  Now, anecdotal stories about animals fleeing the site of an earthquake or other natural disaster on the eve of the event notwithstanding, I think it is safe to say that we do not see evidence of widespread psychic powers among the animal kingdom.  And if such a trait would confer an immense survival advantage on a wild animal, it would have certainly done at least as much for any human being so endowed in our prehistoric past, and so, if it was a heritable trait, we all would have been heavily gifted with these abilities by now.

            Sadly, I was forced to concede that psychic abilities cannot possibly exist as a heritable trait which can be passed on genetically, else it would already have happened long ago.  This means that if they do genuinely occur among human beings, then it must be the result of some spiritual practice or discipline, or else a consequence of some external set of circumstances that galvanized an ability which actually is innate within all of us.  Or, as professional magicians and illusionists have been contending for centuries, these abilities have never genuinely existed, and those who claim to have possessed them have invariably been quacks, frauds, confidence men, or lunatics.

            Ah, the shattered dreams of youth.  Having faced these sobering facts during that particular summer, so many years ago, I solemnly put away my hopes of being the patriarch of a modern Levite tribe, and resigned myself to the fact that I would have to return to college and my (more earth-bound) studies when the new term commenced.  My belief in the need for a new, rational religion has survived the decades, but any fantasies about a priestly tribe perished with that psychic rabbit.

Rational Religion

It has not been a good time for religion.  Scandals involving abuse of children by Catholic priests, terrorist acts committed by Islamist fundamentalists, and support for the continued spread of settlements in Palestine by a government in Israel propped up by religious conservatives are just some of the more prominent examples of acts that seem to fly in the face of what religion is supposed to be all about: cultivating an enlightened relationship with the Creator that guides our values, goals, and everyday actions by providing a moral compass.   But has it ever been a good time for religion?  Of course, it could be argued that it is religious extremism and/or the abuse of power by those in positions of religious authority that are the causes of all of these problems, and not religion itself.  But some would counter that this is being too conciliatory: that there is in fact something fundamentally wrong with believing in myths that have no basis in fact or reason, and that it is this adherence to belief in absurdities that is the rottenness at the core of religion and that makes irrational behavior almost inevitable as a consequence.  The goal of the Enlightenment, in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, was to replace religion with reason, and bring about a better society as a consequence.  Perhaps the strongest rebuttal to a complete renunciation of religion is that the project of the Enlightenment ultimately failed.  The cataclysmic wars and mass murders of the 20^th century were not caused by religious zealots, and the underlying beliefs and world views of the leaders responsible for these (to the extent that they had any), were based upon secular ideologies, some of which ostensibly had science at their base.

The project of nobler living through science – if such a project ever was seriously pursued – seems to be stumbling, and may have already failed.  I have written elsewhere about my own cynicism about recent advances in physics – particularly in its quest to find “a theory of everything”.  And my opinion of the sciences of psychology and particularly psychiatry is just about as low.  Contemporary psychiatry seems to favor the administration of mood-altering drugs as the cure of choice for mental and emotional disturbances, and the distinction between these and the illegal drugs which are abused by addicts seems to be a difference in degree, rather than in kind.

Is there a direct relationship between a rational – rather than faith-based – belief system and a stronger moral character?  I must say that I have met and known persons who believe some pretty incredible things – based upon their particular religious faiths – who are very good people, and who seem to be incredibly rational in their life choices and activities.  (In fact many would argue that this is to be expected, since it is the very belief – even if it might be illusory – in some sort of ultimate divine reward and punishment that causes the religious to live more moral – and perhaps even well-ordered – lives.)  And I remember reading a study once on the brainwashing of persons who had been prisoners in the Korean War.  The study found that those who had strong religious faiths prior to the experience tended to be more resistant to such programs, while agnostics and atheists tended to be more susceptible.  It seems that there is truth to the old maxim, “he who believes in nothing can be made to believe in anything”.  I remember, too, a recovering heroin addict who I knew many years ago, and that the one really strong personality trait that stood out was that he was a person who didn’t believe in anything, and had the deepest contempt for anybody who did.  In the absence of a faith in some type of deeper, more sublime happiness that will be found in this world and/or the next, I suppose that all is left is a sort of hedonism.  One would have to be content with finding pleasures of a worldlier sort, and this could tempt one to follow either the Nietzschean project of becoming bold enough and strong enough to find the sources of these and exploit them, or the path of the addict, who attempts to produce his or her daily joys through “shortcuts”, often involving artificial means.

In my own life, I have explored a number of alternative religious pathways, and have ultimately come away feeling dissatisfied and disillusioned with each one, particularly when the pathway has involved belonging to a formal religion.  There is the inevitable hierarchy, their need for money, and the eventual discovery on my part that this money is being used for other things than merely supporting the spiritual development of the flock, or the alleviation of suffering in the world.  But I have never been able to adopt instead the mindset of the atheist, or even the agnostic.  It seems to me unthinkable that intelligent beings could exist in this vast universe – really a miracle in its own right – without some greater Intelligence, something that is capable of comprehending the fullest extent of this existence – across the limitless stretches of both time and space.  I know that efforts over the centuries for formal proofs along these lines have repeatedly fallen short, but this does not dissuade me from my own personal conviction that there is a vastly superior intelligence out there, which probably coincides with that of the Creator of this existent universe.  And I believe just as strongly that what we do in this existence matters: that in the great scheme of things it is better to be good rather than not good.  Now this second tenet really does require a leap of faith, and I cannot defend it on any logical grounds.  I can only appeal to admittedly piecemeal support of it from personal experience, as I have seen, repeatedly, evidences of the “law of karma” – of “what goes around comes around” – when actions of mine or of those around me have led to consequences which either suitably chastened, or suitably rewarded, the author of them.

Is it possible to have a rational religion, or is this an oxymoron?  Can one create a religion devoid of antiquated myths, empty rituals and ceremonies, and the intellectual chicanery that accompanies much of occultism and religious mysticism, without going down the sterile path of scientific enquiry?  Such a religion would, I think, have to be more than just a synthesis of what is perceived to be the best of all existing religious views.  It would have to go beyond these, and beneath them, to the genuine, vibrant core of human spirituality, purged of the dross of cultural biases, prejudices, and mythology.  It would have to be passionate and dispassionate at the same time: thoroughly, meticulously, rooting out the “noble lies” of past religious endeavor, while finding something that would truly uplift, inspire, and provide a vital, sustaining root for the aspirations and endeavors of modern humanity.

Perhaps it is time for the appearance of another Moses, Buddha, Jesus, or Mohammed: a prophet who could guide our souls into the next age of modernity.  The contemporary world would be much more demanding of such a prophet.  But there is a gaping, spiritual need to be fulfilled, and it is perhaps vital to the ultimate survival of our species that we find a higher direction to guide us in what seems to be the final, most critical phases of the evolution of our collective civilization.

In my next blog entry, I will describe the plan that I had developed as a young man for this project, but which I ultimately realized was foolhardy, and certain of future failure.

The New World Order?

In my occupation as an economist, I have acquired a nickname among my peers:  They call me “Dr. Doom”.  Anyone who has read this blog would probably feel that the nickname is a very appropriate one for me, but I actually earned it for a different reason.  As part of my job, I am called upon to give periodic outlooks to various audiences on the state of the economy, and I was always among the ranks of the extreme pessimists back at the start of the Great Recession, when I predicted that it would be a long and severe one, and then again, at the beginning of the recovery, when I predicted that it would be long and painful.  Now of course I wasn’t alone in making these predictions, and in fact the general outlook of most economists was rather bleak, but my relatively extreme pessimism, which has been rather relentless for the past six years, apparently set me apart in the eyes of my audiences.  It probably didn’t help that I took an equally dim long-term view, contending that unless our society makes some fundamental changes – reining in the national debt, raising the educational standards of our next generation, and making significant investments in replacing and improving our aging infrastructure – we are heading down a path of inexorable decline, and even crisis.  Again, I am certainly not the only one who has said such things, but apparently, to my audiences, mine has been one of the more shrill voices of warning. 

I have sometimes joked that the Great Recession was caused by a number of large companies trying to make a lot of money without actually producing anything, and the weak recovery has been caused by manufacturers trying to produce things without using any people.  This is hyperbole, of course, but as I look at the dismal state of employment – not just in the United States but also in parts of Europe and elsewhere in the world – I can’t help but think back to a remark supposedly once made by Henry Ford: that he liked to have a sizable, decently-paid workforce so that there would be people who could afford to buy his cars.  Such a sentiment seems quaint these days.

Now as an economist, I would be ostracized by my peers if I suggested that we should resort to artificial means to create jobs, such as paying people to build pyramids, or to dig holes and then fill them up again.  Still, as technology increasingly enables us to rely upon machinery to produce our most important goods and services, I can’t help but imagine a future world where everything is produced by machines – or at least all of the most important essentials, such as food, shelter, and home appliances.  To take this thought experiment even further, imagine that all of these machines were owned by a single corporation, or even a single person.  What would the rest of humanity have to do to procure these products?  One scenario might be that the world would be regulated by a socialist government, in which the products were allocated to those who needed them.  But would the owner of the machinery producing these tolerate such a system, and if so, why?  It would seem that the balance of power would lie squarely in favor of this owner, particularly if the machines were the sole producers of weapons, in addition to the other vital goods and services.  If not – if the owner were compelled to distribute everything for free by a government with the military capability to do so – then for all intents and purposes the production facilities would really be “owned” by that government.

So let us assume – either by ownership or by force – that these production facilities are controlled by a single entity: in fact a single person.  The socialist regime would then only come about as a result of a sort of voluntary altruism on the part of that person, and the rest of the world would be comprised of an entire population on the dole.  More likely, the procurement of vital goods would come at a price, and one that was set by him or her, on very monopolistic terms.  And since nobody else would be contributing to the production of these things, the ability to pay this “price” would become problematic.  The owner would literally have the lives of everyone else in his or her hands.

It reminds me of an episode from that classic television series, The Twilight Zone, in which a young boy has been endowed with god-like powers.  The world has been reduced to a handful of persons – his immediate family and their neighbors – who have been terrorized into a craven submission, endeavoring to only say and do things that will not displease him, lest they meet the unpleasant fate of all of those others who ran afoul of him.  Even if our ultimate capitalist is not quite so malevolent, his total power over others will compel them to find ways to offer something of “value” to him or her, in order to receive the necessaries of existence in return.  Now this may simply involve – at least for the most part – benign forms of entertainment or personal service – but it is hard to imagine anything else that could be offered.

In some ways, this actually does seem to be the trajectory that we are on.  In America, the proportion of manufacturing jobs has been steadily declining, while that of service jobs has increased, and a third type of employment, in which persons are compensated for thinking (e.g., as executives, consultants, accountants, engineers, and other professionals), has rapidly grown.  We seem to be moving toward a two-tiered society, in which “cognitive” employment and more skilled service jobs are well compensated (although, as satirized in movies such as Office Space, even these jobs can devolve into degrading, poorly paid lackey positions), while lower-level service and unskilled manufacturing jobs receive very meager wages.  And of course, our most successful entertainers – including professional athletes – are extremely well paid.  Another form of “entertainer”, the drug dealer, has become a prominent figure in the underclass and the underground economy (and those who control the production of these drugs are often at the heads of powerful private empires in foreign countries), while the less successful members of this group make up the huge prison population that is now a part of the American social system.  Other less successful and less powerful “entertainers”, such as strippers and prostitutes, lead lives that are only at one or two removes from those of prisoners and the destitute. 

One of my vices is watching American court TV programs, and based on my viewing of these, I’ve come to the unhappy conclusion that a whole social milieu has developed among the ranks of the unemployed and underemployed, particularly among young men.  One of the most common court cases involves a dispute between a young woman and a young man (usually an ex-boyfriend), in which she has given him a large sum of money, and contends that it was a loan, while he argues that it was a gift.  Almost invariably, the young men involved in these cases have smirks on their faces, indicating a sense of pride in what they have done, as if separating naïve young women from their money has become a new sport among their peers.  These “players”, who apparently have few avenues, or motivations (or both) to find productive employment, have resorted to this form of non-violent predation to demonstrate their intellectual prowess and social mastery over women.  Meanwhile, the number of unwed mothers continues to skyrocket within these social classes, and it is often the government, rather than the fathers of these children, that provide the necessary additional support to care for the children.

Of course, it is dangerous to wax too nostalgic about the “good old days” when most people were engaged in genuinely productive activities.  Primitive farm labor, grueling and often dangerous factory jobs in the industrial revolution, and the sweat shops that exist in developing nations today can hardly be regarded as the most ideal avenues for human beings to be producers of value.  And while drug dealing, scamming, and dodging paternal responsibilities are certainly not ways that young men should be occupying themselves, is it worse than being enlisted to kill other people, in military service?

If the trajectory of the modern economy is moving us away from one involving producing things, in the conventional sense, then we must take a clear-eyed view of what exactly it is moving us toward.  Will it continue to evolve into a two-tiered society, with thinkers, capitalists and successful entertainers at the top, and drug dealers, welfare recipients, scammers, and convicted felons at the bottom?  Is this an inevitable trajectory?  Or is a future economy possible in which everyone – or nearly everyone – can find avenues for providing something of value that will ensure a level of compensation commensurate with a dignified life?  It admittedly sounds like a utopian hope, but for me, contemplating it at least gives me the strength to face the increasingly dystopian world that seems to be unfolding, even in “affluent” countries such as America.

Apocalypse Then

What if the world ended and nobody knew about it . . . or cared?  It’s a strange question, and one that I never would have considered had it not been for Rick Roderick, a philosophy professor from Duke University, who sadly is no longer with us, having passed away over ten years ago.  I discovered Rick Roderick through his recorded lectures with the Teaching Company.  One of Professor Roderick’s areas of special interest was “postmodernism”, and if that sounds like a stodgy subject, then one is in for a real shock (and not an unpleasant one) when hearing Professor Roderick discuss it.  Listening to a lecture by this self-described son of a “con man”, with his west Texas drawl and sarcastic wit, is a little like having a conversation with a close friend about the meaning of life after you’ve just finished your first twelve-pack of beer.  Nothing is sacred, or taken too seriously; all beliefs – no matter how seemingly sound – are challenged; and no person is above suspicion . . . or ridicule.  Professor Roderick is particularly partial to those German and French philosophers who have cut through dogmatic and sterile presumptions about truth and meaning with a blunt axe, and proposed radical new conceptions of how to make sense of who we are and how we got that way: thinkers like Nietzsche, Sartre, Habermas, Foucalt, Derrida.  For him, they are kindred spirits, “hell-raisers” I suppose he might call them.  You may not agree with them, may not want to join their ranks, but you’re grateful that they came by and bashed the party, because the host and the guests were phony snobs, and things were getting very dull before these guys showed up.  (I highly recommend Rick Roderick’s lectures by the way: there are three sets of eight of them, all available for free for viewing and MP3 download at rickroderick.org.)

One of these Continental philosophers that Professor Roderick discussed was a man named Jean Baudrillard, and it is he that inspired the question I raised at the beginning of this entry about the end of the world.  Because Baudrillard believed that the apocalypse already has happened, some time late in the twentieth century.  It was not the result of a nuclear war, or a massive plague, or a worldwide geographical catastrophe like an asteroid strike.  No, the end came silently one day, when there were no longer any real people left in the world.  Our civilization had subtly transformed all of us in such a way that we had collectively become products conditioned by mass media, where the fictional dramas and other entertainments of television and the movies became more real and important to us than anything happening in our personal lives, and our own tastes, beliefs, desires, and goals were manufactured for us by the market-driven media apparatus that has dominated our conscious existence almost from birth.  In a sense, Baudrillard is suggesting that we have become a race of beings who only appear to be alive, awake, and volitional: a type of zombie.  And after reading Baudrillard, one can’t help but wonder if this is why zombie movies and television programs have become so popular these days.  It brings to mind a funny scene in one of those movies, Dawn of the Dead, where the zombies are milling about in a mall, pushing shopping carts and standing in front of shelves.  It is explained that these creatures, though dead, continue to engage in many of the activities that occupied their time when they were alive, because, after all, these activities didn’t really require any higher brain function.

But Baudrillard might have actually protested against such a comparison.  Zombies, after all, are still capable of a primal sort of violence, a “lust for life” as it were, as they pursue, capture, and tear apart living victims to eat their flesh.  We, on the other hand, have managed to completely divorce ourselves from any tangible evidence of the violence that underlies much of the basis of our existence.  Animals raised in factory farms, in conditions so inhumane that any pet lover would cringe if they allowed themselves to see it, are safely hidden away, and we need only encounter their remains as unrecognizable precision-cut pieces, neatly packaged in plastic, cardboard, and Styrofoam boxes.  And, for that matter, we’ve managed to insulate ourselves from our fellow human beings who have failed to succeed, and to conform, lest we feel an unsettling rush of compassion . . . or fear.  They are efficiently tucked away in prisons (America has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world), homeless shelters, and asylums.  For the most successful members of our society, our emotions are safely channeled into the manufactured dramas and entertainments that serve as our principle daily diversions.

Baudrillard’s dystopian vision of our world was one where we had been subtly stripped of everything that made us authentic selves, and we didn’t care.  Reality has become a manufactured thing – a sort of high tech “bread and circuses” that was perhaps at one time deliberately crafted by big business and big government, but now is being orchestrated by the impersonal machine of civilization itself, because there aren’t even any authentic selves left in the upper echelons of society to direct the levers and curtains.  If this sounds strangely similar to some Hollywood movies that you might remember, it is no coincidence.  Baudrillard’s views inspired the movie The Matrix, where machines literally have taken over and created a synthetic, virtual world for entrapped human beings to live in.  And Baudrillard’s skepticism is actually just a modern incarnation of a grand tradition among French philosophers who have tackled the question of what it means to have an authentic existence, beginning with Descartes, who wondered how we would ever be able to tell if our lives were just illusions, projected into our minds by some sort of demon who could make us believe that we were living active lives, when we really were not.  It was the nightmare of The Matrix, imagined nearly four hundred years ago.  Other popular movies seem to have been inspired by this same vision: if not by direct exposure to Baudrillard and other postmodernists (because I doubt that many Hollywood writers and producers read philosophy), then maybe by exposure to Rick Roderick’s lectures.  The Truman Show comes to mind, in which a man is living in a television situation comedy and doesn’t even know it, and Wag the Dog, where government agents team up with a Hollywood filmmaker to create a fictitious war, in order to divert national attention away from a Presidential sex scandal.

But Professor Roderick, who was generally sympathetic to the views of the postmodernists, was not prepared to go to Baudrillard’s extreme conclusions.  In Roderick’s view, while our trajectory seemed to be in the direction of Baudrillard’s dystopia, we had not arrived there, yet.  The self is “under siege”, he contended, but it has not been extinguished.  He relates in one of his lectures how he read Baudrillard’s description of the war between the U.S. and Iraq (the first one, with the elder President Bush in charge) as merely a staged spectacle, and felt that here, for certain, Baudrillard had gone too far.  But then Roderick admitted that, when he spoke with persons who had participated in the war, as soldiers, they confessed that they had not seen much in the way of actual battle, but had witnessed it pretty much the same way that Americans back home had, via television monitors.  Roderick wondered if Baudrillard might not be so far off the mark after all.

In retrospect, it is easy to see how Professor Roderick, who made his Teaching Company lectures in the early 1990s, could imagine that we were imminently approaching a sort of apocalypse where the self would be overwhelmed by the synthetic reality of a post-modern age.  This was the era of the “Pax Americana”: just a few short years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when it seemed that there really were no genuine adversaries left in the world, and that all we had left to fear was ourselves (and our overseers).  In this era of American hegemony, coming on the heels of the victory of consumerism in the yuppie, “shop till you drop”, 1980s, one could imagine a “brave new world” where the citizenry was kept in check by a steady stream of entertaining diversions, along with vague, nondescript terrors that required constant government vigilance and intervention, like the “war on drugs”.  It seemed that, by the 1990s, the revolt against mediocrity, conformity, and social coercion which began with the beatniks in the 1950s and flowered with the hippies and civil rights activists of the 1960s had finally been beaten back into a permanent submission.  Yes, everyone was free to express himself or herself in any way that they chose (a token act of obeisance to those cultural revolutionaries and nonconformists of decades past), as long as these modes of expression were not truly threatening to the established order.  Wear a striped tie on a checkered shirt.  But don’t do anything genuinely subversive.

Still, even in the 1990s, I wonder if we were any less authentic as selves than, say, the typical serf living in Europe six hundred years ago, a factory worker during the first decades of the industrial revolution, or a contemporary Tupi tribesman of the Amazon rainforest.  Were their lives more rich, more autonomous, more engaged than our own?  Was the quality of their experiences more interesting, or more authentic?  And what of those persons who somehow managed to look away during the 20^th century calamites of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia?  Were they really living lives more authentic, purposeful, and self-directed than those of the succeeding generation?  If the authentic self has really gone into extinction, then perhaps that extinction occurred long before the emergence of “modernism” and “post-modernism”.

Rick Roderick passed away in 2002.  Had he lived to see the second Iraq War, he might have had even more cause for cynicism about Baudrillard’s theories.  There was nothing comfortable, or pleasantly distracting, about this war, even for its witnesses back home, and its legacy still haunts us.  Still, there is something uncomfortably Orwellian about the “war on terror”, which has now joined the “war on drugs” as one with no end in sight, no tangible enemy, and an ongoing justification for the government to compromise both our property rights and our civil liberties.

Professor Roderick, like many of the French intellectuals that he admired, was a fan of the cinema, and used examples from movies to exemplify many of his points.  One of his favorites was Blade Runner.  At the end of one of his lectures, he described the climactic scene of that movie, where the leader of the rebel androids impales his hand with a nail - an act which echoes that of a character in Jean Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom.  It is an irrational, painful, self-destructive act, and for that very reason is the highest expression of freedom, because it defies the innate, fundamental drive for self-preservation, for seeking self-gratification and avoiding pain, as well as all conditioning, all logic, and all social conventions that motivate one to behave in a manner that is not . . . counter-productive.

I don’t know if there is a silent apocalypse looming in our future like the one that Baudrillard envisioned, or, indeed, if it has actually already happened.  How does one remedy the death of the self?  Many years ago, I told a friend of mine of a nightmare that I had, in which I was in a world dominated by zombies, and I myself was a zombie, but harbored a secret desire to find a cure.  My friend said that he suspected that we all have had the same nightmare.  For Baudrillard, the cure was to out-absurd the absurdity of non-existence, to push this synthetic reality to the limits of endurance, and in doing so perhaps create the conditions for the re-emergence of an authentic self.  That sounds suspiciously like the counter-culture of the 1960s.  I suppose that it almost worked once.  Maybe it’s time to give it another try.