I realize this comes as a shock, particularly to 2021, but life itself is... how shall we say?... overrated. Even if we live our best possible life, it's not that great, and it ends in decline and death. All that striving and striving to make life better than it is..., only for our efforts to come to so little. We work and wait, some reach success, and even every successful effort has unintended bad consequences.
The truth seems to be that it's all an empty void in which we're saved by hope of something better, but amid our hope so many moments arrive us at something worse, and even the 'better' is just a series of moments; instant islands between seas of boredom and irritation when you feel love, amusement, pleasure, joy, only to find ourselves compelled like the Flying Dutchman to leave them and sail the sea of meaninglessness until the next joyful moment, which might not be until tomorrow, or next month, or next year...
Furthermore, the greater a person's capacity for joy, the greater their capacity for disappointment. Those temperamentally disposed to love too quickly, easily amused and pleased, are most prone to dismay. If we try very, very hard, we're somewhat saved by the hope that things eventually improve, but the hope of change is itself a leap of faith. Faith that a better life lies just beyond the next hill saves us from emotional oblivion, but there is no proof that it's true. And those of us who can only enjoy ourselves when we have proof that things will improve will never find what we seek. It's a Catch-22. There is no hope of something better until you doggedly work at it for years, and even if you put in all the work, the possibilities of improvement offer no guarantee.
And even if our lives improve from work, the improvement so often comes at others' expense. How many rise to the top of the world's privileges and professions at the expense of their subordinates: employees, servants, relatives? The world most rewards interpersonal steamrollers who steal happiness from the rest of us.
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And once we realize all that, what can we do?
Some take comfort in religion. They believe that if they behave well enough and keep the faith, there is a beneficent overseer who will reward their virtue. And therefore are they a little happier. Others take comfort in justice; that if they work hard enough to improve the world, the world improves. And therefore are they a little happier.
But where's the proof of either?
Christians and Muslims can point to the fact that their religions dominate the world for thousands of years, but for thousands of years, where is the proof of heaven or Jannah? And in the heavenly pursuit, they've created so many hells on earth of mass execution, genocide, torture, rape, and slavery.
And those who pursue justice on earth without god, where is their proof of justice? The guillotine and Napoleon? The gulags? The Great Leap Forward? The Killing Fields? The Rape of Nanking? Unit 731? The bloodlands between Hitler and Stalin? The concentration camps?
And others still who are on neither side but think religion a useful mass dupe take comfort in the individual's heroism. They believe that by the will of great men, individuals can improve the earth. But where is their proof? Millennia of slavery? The conquest of Empires? The fact that the earth might demand our extinction from their pollution? Perhaps those few who dominate the earth are truly happy, but their biographies don't make them seem happy. They frankly seem miserable; slaves to ego, full of anxiety that others will cheat them, full of fear that their assassination is imminent, who can only gain a modicum of joy from knowing others are their inferiors.
In spite of all that, the proof that life might be better is just as much everywhere as the proof that life gets worse. Would you really rather live in the 12th century than the 21st? But we don't know, and so many times to so many people, success feels like such a disappointment, if there's no point to success except to spare us from horror and remind us of what we still don't have, what point is there in striving for success at all?
But even if everything we ever do comes to failure, the failure itself is what's interesting about living on this planet. The one thing that never ceases is the fascination of why humans are what they are. Why do people pursue success when so much ends in failure? Why do people see the best in each other when there's so much evidence of their worst? Hope is based on faith, not fact, and that's fascinating. Many people can adjust to the fact that life is terribly disappointing by holding out hope that it can get better, others adjust to disappointment by settling for nothing more than life's small comforts. What's fascinating is that every person has a different response to the impossibilities of life. Every person has their own response to antagonistic stimuli that is all their own. Personally, I believe that studying the particularity of individuals in their response to challenges is, more than anything else, the key to improving the human lot.
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But whatever hope there is for the future, where is the proof that we should reserve our hopes for this world rather than a one which we don't know about? The vast majority of human beings who've ever lived on this planet believed this world cannot be healed. Of all the civilizations in history, the nameless and the grand; our civilization, the America dominated world around the turn of the millennium, is at most the fourth civilization in all human history to believe that progress is anything worth pursuing - it's the America-led world, Imperial-era Europe and their world, the Romans, and certain classical Greek city-states. That's it. Other civilizations certainly contributed to progress, and one could certainly argue that progress was one of the key aims of Golden Age Islamic Civilization and the very long Chinese Empire, nevertheless progress was not their PRIMARY aim as it is for the civilization in which we grew up. One cannot serve progress and an omnipotent and omniscient god at the same time as both Islamic Caliphates and theocratic Christian kingdoms did, nor can one serve progress and simultaneously base a civilization on the futility of striving as Confucian/Buddhist Chinese civilization did.
By current standards, all three of the progressive civilizations before us went colossally wrong. Many today think these civilizations practiced inhumanity even beyond the stagnant civilizations surrounding them, and many now think our civilization has already gone so cataclysmically wrong that rather than letting it continue they'd sooner pull it down with no guarantee of a new civilization to replace it. So is there really much hope that those who progress after us will do any better?
It really is an amazing irony that our brave new world is one that both believes in material progress, an almost entirely Western concept, and wants to bring progress to people of the East. The average person from another civilization would view our desire for their progress as the ultimate imperialism.
Why? Because even today, if we explained what we wanted for the average person from places who've barely heard of us, they'd be somewhere between mystified and offended. They'd think we've committed grave offenses against their gods and ancestors, and if they ever collaborated with us, they would be severely punished. If you want to really listen to people from other cultures and let their worldview affect ours, go ahead and listen to them, but their worldviews are largely based on homeostasis and the idea that there are much more important things in the cosmos than humanism and progress, and we must accept that we're just specs of dust in a greater plan.
They've certainly got a point. We live every day with the anxiety that every bit of progress we've made is an illusion - material, scientific, and political. Perhaps more important than improving our world is figuring out what existence is and getting a little closer to knowing our place within it. Maybe science is the way, but there is no definitive proof that science is a more beneficial force to us than anything else. Science gave us the technology to extend life and improve its quality. It also gave us the capacity to destroy every bit of organic life we've ever seen.
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The world is divided politically between those who believe science is our best bet and those who still throw everything behind religion. Both are mostly western concepts, and they both could lead us to destroying the world. I believe existence will probably not be solved through either politics or science or religion. The closest we currently come to figuring things out is the places where there is no solid divide between things which are and are not, should be and should not, can be and cannot be. These places are metaphysics, humanities, art, and love.
Metaphysics - space and time, cause and effect, necessity and possibility, mind and matter, ontology and being, identity and change - that philosophical place which is not quite science and not quite religion, where we speculate on what experience truly is and posit hidden dimensions beyond our crude material understanding that animate everything from creation of the universe to its evolution, to evolution on our planet, to evolution of humans, to history, to the motivations of modern humans. The study of which leads us to...
Humanities - archeology, anthropology, history, linguistics, law, philosophy, journalism, and only THEN religion and science and politics - that place where we take those possibilities of existence and apply them directly to humans; where we might understand the reasons for human existence better, and with a firmer intellectual foundation, we can better guarantee that our moves into progress won't collapse before we understand them. We approach the definite articles of politics, religion, and science not as true believers but as speculators about WHY we believe greater existence might be possible through these avenues which history clearly shows to be poisoned chalices that hurt as much as they help precisely because we believe in them too much. Maybe, just maybe, if we studied these vaguer human questions before we applied them to things of this earth which are so definite, our progress would have better aim.
Art - theater, literature, music, dance, drawing, painting, sculpture, movies, tv, even video games. If the art is good, it's where we can demonstrate the lessons of everything humans are. Art itself is like a scientific model that teaches us the complications of religion, poltiics, and science directly. without dogma. It's the place where we demonstrate the complications of living within history, living within or without the law. The art of the past shows how we're connected to archeologically distant civilizations, and how our worldview may be anthropologically different or the same to the human beings who live at distant remove from us. In a process the Greeks called 'Mimesis,' the direct experience fosters connections to the people we know, and after we experience a great work of art, we understand the people we know better, and we're better bonded to them. Which brings us to..
Love - Love of self, love of family, love of friends, love of physical being, love of country, love of distant peoples, love of humanity, love of animals and plants, love of the living and love of the dead, universal love, love of whatever there is in the cosmos both far and near.
What can I say about love beyond that, but every other pathway to love seems to inspire hatred on a mass scale. Maybe my way of prioritizing the world would be no better, but it's not like anybody's currently trying it. Everything in the arts and humanities now seems to serve a didactic political purpose, but politics currently seems a dead end more and more, whereas art and humanities and metaphysics can inspire you to view the world differently, not as an arm of activism. Whether your activism to remake the world is political, religious, or scientific, it will aim better if inspired by those vague, undefinable contemplations of metaphysics, humanities, art, and love, that do not strictly categorize the world into an exclusive us vs. them, but see connections between all sorts of disparate things of the universe that otherwise seem unrelated. I believe that is how we surmount the divides that are tearing the world apart, and that sort of deep contemplation of existence can inform our activism to remake the world in the best possible way. Not the other way around.
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