Someone with a tumblr A Numbskull with a Chainsaw Hand wrote:

The Horror genre exists to make you scared, uncomfortable and shocked at what is abnormal and non standard to the human world. It is supposed to trigger a reaction in you, it is there to be used as controlled fear and chaos and we use it as a way to escape our boring, monotonous reality and explore all that could harm and kill us in a controlled environment (tv, movies, games, books, haunted houses even!). The horror genre is important and I will defend it forever until I die. And then I will come back as a poltergeist and defend it some more.

This was relayed to me by another tumblr I’m not going to kill you (Warning: autoplay music!), and I indulged a quick response on my disturbing images tumblr.

The horror genre also exists to encode for and transmit to us truths far too unpleasant for most of us to face: that life can only go on by feeding on other life, that we spend most of our lives in a slow but ever-accelerating process of decay, that for all our proud pretensions of free will our psyches are governed by often-destructive forces we do not control and scarcely understand, that the world is filled with immense and arbitrary suffering, that the universe cares no more for us than we do for the least insect, and that death stalks us all and will catch every last one of us fairly soon. And because I think we need these horrible truths even if most of us cannot face them directly, I will always defend the horror genre.

I forgot to add the clause “that the human species will itself someday go extinct,” which is also both a truth and a popular trope of horror (e.g. apocalypse stories). Still, not too bad at the social networking thing for an old dude.

“Oh wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon.”

–“The Wisdom of Silenus,”⁰

Apologias for Mortality

I’ve recently read Greta Christina’s short book Comforting Thoughs about Death That Have Nothing To Do with God.¹ Christina is a major atheist blogger who wrote a book about why atheists are angry which rather liked. I’m a infidel crank with an interest in death. So it was a natural thing to attract some of my attention. I’m sorry to say that a fair amount of the book irritated me, except for the part of Christina’s cat, which only made me sad.

Irritation is an invitation to reflection, so here goes.

Continue reading →

I am currently engaged in a long-term listening project of trying to hear every episode of the horror-fiction podcast Pseudopod, which has some pretty good stuff. Also, even the most horrible of horror stories make a welcome distraction from my daily commute, so it’s a good bargain for me.

Starting sometime vaguely in Pseudopod’s present (they’re now up to Episode 434) I am listening in reverse order. Sometime in the pre-dawn darkness today I reached back to Episode 108, which features a story by written Paul G. Tremblay and narrated by Mur Lafferty, “The Teacher.” I don’t want to give away the story, but there’s a rather sinister high-school teacher named Mr. Sorrent who takes his small group of advanced students for a most interesting lesson:

Jake sits in a chair at the front of the room. Jake is elderly and has no hair. His face is a rotting fruit, and he moves like a marionette with tangled strings. He grins. Big yellow teeth break through purple lips. He wears only a hospital gown, blue and white socks, and brown slippers. None of us want to be here. Jake says “Thanks to the loving support of family and friends, even if I don’t beat this disease, I’ll still have won. You know what I mean?”

We don’t know what he means. We couldn’t possibly know. He says more heroic things, things that win us over, things taht speak to the indomitable human spirit we always hear about, things that inspire us, that make us want to be better people, things that make us believe. Then Mr. Sorrent says, “Okay, Jake.”

Jake drops the curtain on his yellow teeth and he slouches into his chair, his marionette strings cut. He tells us everything he just said is bullshit. He tells us to fuck off. He hates our fucking guts because of our health and our youth and our beauty. He hates us because we expect and demand him to be brave in facing his own withering existence, because we expect him to make our own lives seem better, or more tolerable. He tells us that we’re selfish and that he’ll die angry and bitter if he wants, that he’s not here to die the right way for us.

“Fuck you, you fucks,” he tells us. And he doesn’t give two shits about us and he tells that we’ll all die the same way he will, alone. He limps out of the room, limbs shaking and moving in wrong directions.

You go old man! That’s a real lesson that everyone should get early in life. If you want to get it yourself, look here for the episode and its associated notes.

Perhaps it was the fact that it was Tax Day in the U.S., but I forgot to blog this when it first appeared, an article by Tim Lott at Alternet, apparently reprinted from The Guardian: “Please, Everyone, Can We Stop Pretending We Must All be Constantly Happy?” There’s much agreeable here, especially the deployment of the useful descriptor “happiness fascism” and also this:

We can, it is suggested, find happiness through good works. This is also an ideology. I am as likely to be disappointed by “doing the right thing” as I am elevated. That’s why it’s so hard to do. The secret truth is that being unselfish can leave you just as empty as being selfish.

Well put, Tim Lott. I do wish I had a nickel for every time some sententious would-be wise person replied to someone’s enduring sadness or crushing disappointment with the advice that they ought to go work in a soup kitchen (or whatever) for a while, and that doing so will somehow give them “perspective” or fill their life with “meaning.” (It wouldn’t make me a rich man by any means, but I bet it would add up to enough to take myself and a friend out for a nice boozy lunch somewhere, and that’s not to be sneered at.) The brutal truth is that while it might be a fine and noble thing to work in a soup kitchen or otherwise volunteer one’s services to wretched of the world, it ain’t going to fix what’s wrong with you, your life, or human existence.

Now if only someone would tell Peter Singer…

Update: I must have been low on blood sugar when I wrote this post before lunch, because I left off the punchline. It’s something like this: if it were the case that do-gooding could heal the misery of the do-gooder’s life, well then we’d expect to observe a lot of do-gooding and not very much misery. Do-gooding would be like delicious ice cream that comes for free and never makes you fat, only better. But what we actually observe is only some do-gooding and a lot of misery. Therefore, by the logical magic of the modus tollens we can infer… (and the rest is left to you to work out yourself, dear reader).

So there’s this philosophy professor out there named Peter Boghossian, who recently published a book called called A Manual for Creating Atheists in which he advances all sorts of techniques of gentle Socratic persuasion aimed at getting people out of religion. Let’s all be sensitive to reason and evidence, etc. etc. Fine.

In the very same book, he advances some interesting views on the subject of the meaning of life, conveyed in this charming passage:

If life has no meaning for someone unless they know something they don’t know, then I would strongly urge extensive therapy and counseling. This is particularly true if feelings of meaninglessness and lack of purpose lead to depression, which is a serious illness. Absent a mental disorder or head trauma, there is no reason an adult should find life meaningless without maintaining some form of delusion. (p. 161)

I see. You’d better own up to the fact that life has meaning, and if you won’t, off to the padded room with you!

Whether life has meaning or not would seem to be a rather serious and challenging question, precisely the sort of thing that your intellectually-engaged professional philosopher would want to weigh arguments for and against. And indeed, certain professional philosophers rather higher up on the academic ladder than Boghossian himself has managed to reach do in fact reject the notion that life has meaning.

Not that this matters to him, apparently. If you’re not persuaded that life has meaning, then there will be no arguments and no Socratic persuasion for you. You’re just dismissed as insane, full stop.

There’s a dictionary in the Boghossian household from which the word “irony” has been excised, I’ll bet.

The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effects, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.

—The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

There seem, broadly, to be two ways to endure life. One is to buy into some kind of snake oil: God loves you, your country is the awesomest ever, the arc of history is long but bends toward justice, etc. etc. For those of us unable or unwilling to buy the snake oil, the best way of dealing with reality (if you don’t want to commit suicide) is some for of escape, some sort of way out, some sort of ecbasis^*, to derive a word from the Greek.

Here are some forms of ecbasis.

1. Imaginative culture — escapism in prose, illustration, comics, animations, movies, games, and so forth. And yes, porn has an important role here, which is part of the reason why I’m a pro bono pornographer.
2. Fun, meaningless sex.
3. Drugs.
4. Friendship, outreach, and solidarity among fans of (1-3). This is a subject I’ve written about before as an aspect of, and reason for making your own imaginative culture, as well as its importance as an aspect of freedom of association.
5. Various self-hacks to change away from being a miserable human, possibly including alterations to one’s life span.
6. “The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night.”^**

To the extent that you can do the sorts of things on my list without being sent to jail or a mental institution, losing your job, etc., you enjoy ecbasic liberty. It is a depressing commentary on our culture that we don’t actually enjoy much. Most drugs are illegal or controlled. It’s also illegal in most places to have fun, meaningless sex if you pay for it, and even if no money changes hands you still face a world full of finger-wagging moralists busily denouncing “moral decay” and “hookup culture,” etc. Most of the means that could make suicide a reasonable possibility (fast-acting barbiturates) are controlled substances, and suicide itself is effectively prohibited. And of course, lots of people want to censor the internet, which will encroach both on (1) and (4).

The reasons why people are so awful with respect to ecbases or doubtless varied. Vendors of snake oil, like all merchants everywhere, are quite happy to bring in the power of the state to squash competition. We also oughtn’t underestimate the common human desire not to see other people have a good time. Ecbasic liberty is much encroached upon.

I’ll ask this: if you want to encroach on my and my friends’ ecbasic liberty, why should I regard you with anything other than hatred? Life is enough of a burden as it is, and you want to make it worse. Why should we think of you the encroacher as anything other than an enemy?

—
^*ἔκβασις, which doesn’t seem too frequent in Greek, but did have a long history, appearing in the Odyssey (V.410) to describe the “way out” of the sea that Odysseus is seeking to get onto the island of the Phaiakians.

ὤ μοι, ἐπεὶ δὴ γαῖαν ἀελπέα δῶκεν ἰδέσθαι
Ζεύς, καὶ δὴ τόδε λαῖτμα διατμήξας ἐπέρησα,
ἔκβασις οὔ πῃ φαίνεθ᾽ ἁλὸς πολιοῖο θύραζε:
ἔκτοσθεν μὲν γὰρ πάγοι ὀξέες, ἀμφὶ δὲ κῦμα
βέβρυχεν ῥόθιον, λισσὴ δ᾽ ἀναδέδρομε πέτρη,
ἀγχιβαθὴς δὲ θάλασσα, καὶ οὔ πως ἔστι πόδεσσι
στήμεναι ἀμφοτέροισι καὶ ἐκφυγέειν κακότητα:

The text is from Perseus. In Richard Lattimore’s translation:

Ah me, now that Zeus has granted a sight of unhoped-for
land, and now I have made a crossing of this great distance,

I see no way for me to get out of the gray sea water,
for on the out side are sharp rocks, and the surf above them
breaks and roars, the sheer of the cliff runs up above them,
and the sea is deep close in shore so there is no place
to stand bracing on both my feet and so avoid trouble.

The word also appears in 1 Corinthians 10:13:

πειρασμὸς ὑμᾶς οὐκ εἴληφεν εἰ μὴ ἀνθρώπινος: πιστὸς δὲ ὁ θεός, ὃς οὐκ ἐάσει ὑμᾶς πειρασθῆναι ὑπὲρ ὃ δύνασθε, ἀλλὰ ποιήσει σὺν τῷ πειρασμῷ καὶ τὴν ἔκβασιν τοῦ δύνασθαι ὑπενεγκεῖν.

In the Authorized Version:

There hath no temptation taken you, but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to bee tempted above that you are able: but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.

(Comment on this choice bit of snake-oil salesmanship is superfluous, save to recall a naughty song of my childhood: “♫Oh St. Paul the Apostle, he had an epistle/So wonderfully long, it made the girls whistle!♫”)

A transliteration of “ekbasis” would be more scholarly, but as it happens the word has made a previous appearance in English. The Oxford English Dictionary notes uses in 1706 and again in 1847 as a term in rhetoric, meaning roughly a digression. In those uses the word is spelled “ecbasis,” and since that’s how it was first welcomed into the language I shall be using that spelling here. Back to main text.

^**Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 157, in Walter Kaufmann’s translation. The original German text (from here) is “Der Gedanke an den Selbstmord ist ein starkes Trostmittel: mit ihm kommt man gut über manche böse Nacht hinweg.” Back to main text.

I am imagining an alternate-world version of myself: let’s call him Faustus-ב (pronounced “Faustus-bet,” following my convention of using Hebrew letters to designate alternate worlds). I happen to know a lot about Faustus-ב, because he is very much like me in most respects save one, in that Faustus-ב is out to find himself a romantic life partner who will make him enduringly happy. An analysis of how difficult this is will offer some insight into both one of my negations (#14, there isn’t someone for everyone) and also into why I am not interested in spending time and resources in finding a life partner that will make me enduringly happy.

Faustus-ב isn’t particularly picky about the kind of romantic partners who might make him enduringly happy, but there is something that he can’t really compromise on. Like me, Faustus-ב reveals his strange personality through blogging, and he knows that he won’t be happy with someone from whom he has to hide himself and smile through. A real romantic partner, a chance for real intimacy for Faustus-ב would require that a romantic partner would be able to take in all of Faustus-ב’s written strangeness — the bleak pessimism of this blog, the adolescent lusting and strange cultural nostalgias of Hedonix, the icky-squicky squees of Infernal Wonders, and the utter madness of his comics writing, the Tales of Gnosis College and We Must Boost the Signal (when published) and Lady of the Shadows (when written) — and still potentially love Faustus-ב. And by “love Faustus-ב” he means absolutely not “love him in spite of what he writes” nor “loves Faustus-ב and nourishes a secret hope that the love of a good woman^* will ‘heal’ or ‘redeem’ him and make him give up all that.” Faustus-ב knows full well that neither of those will ever work. Only “read it all and potentially loves Faustus-ב, full stop” will work.

The “read it all and potentially loves Faustus-ב, full stop” would have to be a pretty rare woman. Lots of people find my, or in this instance Faustus-ב’s, writing objectionable. Pessimists are generally disdained or hated, mostly, as are pornographers, even if they are pornographers pro bono. I think that perhaps an estimate of 1 in ten-thousand potential partners might meet this criterion. So P(“potentially loves Faustus-ב”) is equal to 1e-4. This doesn’t seem unreasonable at all. It suggests that in a small city there’s on average at least one woman who fits. In the New York Metropolitan Statistical Area, about a thousand.

Of course, the potential partner would need to be appealing to Faustus-ב, too. I’ve said he isn’t too picky, but he’s not completely indiscriminate either. (Before you sneer, dear reader, try to think how many people walking down a city street you could see yourself falling in love with.) I’ll make an optimistic estimate for Faustus-ב here and say that he could fall in love with 1 woman in 100. However, the relevant probability here may not be independent of P(“potentially loves Faustus-ב”). Someone who actually has the property of “read his work and potentially loves Faustus-ב” is probably pretty atypical in ways that Faustus-ב would find appealing. Perhaps she has an intellect twisted in ways that Faustus-ב finds appealing. Or perhaps she just has a really, really big heart. Even in this mean old world there are still people like that, after all. So perhaps we should say that the relevant probability is P(“Faustus-ב potentially loves her”|”she potentially loves Faustus-ב), which it seems reasonable to estimate as 1 in 10, or 1e-1.

So for any candidate partner for Faustus-ב, the probability that she’s the one, that rare somebody for him that would mean a form of enduring happiness the joint event (“Faustus-ב could love her”|”loves Faustus-ב”) & (“loves Faustus-ב”). Using a bit of basic probability theory:
P(“Faustus-ב potentially loves her”|”she potentially loves Faustus-ב”) * P(“she potentially loves Faustus-ב)

= 1e-4 * 1e-1

= 1e-5 (that is, one in a hundred thousand)

Suppose Faustus-ב starts searching through potential partners. The probability of his finding a “hit” after r iterations is given by the formula

P(“hit”) = 1 – [(1-1e-5)^r]

Let’s optimistically imagine that Faustus-ב can vet one potential partner per day. That’s unlikely to be a modal time, ticking steadily away at one partner per day. But maybe it isn’t an unrealistic mean time. Some will show up as hopeless in seconds (“Huh. A member of the American Family Association.”) Others he might date for weeks or months (perhaps as long as 56 months!) before it becomes obvious it won’t work. How long might it be before we might expect him to succeed?

Thanks to the modern miracle of spreadsheets (thank you Libre Office!) we can apply our formula and estimate Faustus-ב’s chances of success over varying intervals of time.

That doesn’t look so good, does it? Feeble chances of success in any human timescale, and he’d have to live into his third century (with no weekends or vacation days) before his odds of success go past break-even.

Poor Faustus-ב! It’s enough to make you want life extension on his behalf. Or perhaps suicide. I could see it going either way.

—

^*Faustus-ב is male and straight. He would doubtless be a finer, better, happier person if his sexuality were more ecumenical than it happens to be, and he knows this. It’s just that he doesn’t find that in himself, though believe me, he has looked for it. Hence “woman.” Back to main text.

Few will note this, but I should. Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of Operation Meetinghouse. More than 300 B-29 Superfortresses took off from the Pacific island of Tinian and dropped incendiaries on Tokyo on a day with high winds. We Americans were testing a fine new invention called napalm and it worked quite effectively on the wooden dwellings of that great city, burning to death perhaps 105,000 civilians, many of the women, children, and old people. That’s more than died at Hamburg or Dresden, or at Hiroshima or Nagasaki Yet few remember this remarkable event, save for the occasional grumpy leftist journal. (And to be fair, the BBC World Service put a short bit in this morning’s World Update program about the bombings.)

So few talk of this. But hey, it doesn’t matter, right? After all, we were the good guys, right?

While I’m inclined to agree with a noted authority on the subject that British journalist Brian Appleyard is more than a bit of a dumbass when it comes to writing about science, pessimists like myself cannot but take at least some dark pleasure in a recent column of his in the New Statesman. Money grafs:

..[W]e are no longer allowed to be dark, ironic or, indeed, pessimistic. Neo-optimism is now as brutally enforced in Britain as it is in the United States. “In America, optimism has become almost like a cult,” the social psychologist Aaron Sackett told Psychology Today. “In this country,” says another American psychologist, “pessimism comes with a deep stigma.”

As with any cult, even reluctant individuals are forced to conform. In the same Psychology Today article, B Cade Massey, a professor of organisational behaviour [Faustus: forgive his spelling — he’s British] at Yale, says: “It has gotten to the point where people feel pressure to think and talk in an optimistic way.” Massey’s research shows that, when assessing the risks of investments or surgical procedures, people make predictions they know are overly optimistic just because they want to belong, even in life- or wealth-threatening crises, to the clan of idiot grinning optimists who seem to be in charge.”

Summary: he’s better at writing about movies than about science. Was worth my time to read. Probably worth yours.

The first item on my list of negations was “the world is not beautiful.” Here is a reason for thinking so: the great Stendahl has given us a succinct definition of beauty that to my mind can scarcely be contested: “La beauté n’est que la promesse du bonheur.”. But if we accept that, perhaps we should also accept the symmetrical thought “La laideur n’est que la promesse du malheur.” No one can reasonably deny that there is much about the world that portends a vast amount of sadness, misfortune, misery, all that might be encompassed inside the concept of malheur and that, especially if one accepts negation 9, that life is on balance suffering, then the world correctly read promises rather more malheur than bonheur. But granting that, the world can hardly be said to be beautiful, n’est pas?