True to the stereotype of a crazy person,^* I sometimes hear little voices in my head. I had such an experience a few months back reading an article at Alternet by someone named Derek Penwell, who identifies himself as a Christian pastor. Penwell was taking to task Franklin Graham, scion of the noted evangelist Billy Graham. Graham the Younger (Penwell refers to him as “Franklin”) has taken his hostility meta, insisting that we need the “courage” not just to bash LGBT folks and people involved in abortion, but also those who will not themselves bash LGBT folks and people who’ve been involved in abortions and gays. Penwell thinks that Franklin really ought to cut that shit out; it makes Christians look bad. That’s a perfectly fair point, I think, but some comments of Penwell’s near the end of his article bring out a little voice.

[T]hose people who are already disposed to seeing faith as a bludgeon (or who are at least wary about the possibility) hear “God hates certain kinds of people” and find themselves justified in rejecting faith as a medieval form of crowd control.^**

The little voice in my head is that of the plain-spoken honest Tommy, Private S. Baldrick, “That’s because they are.”

Pastor Penwell goes on:

In a culture increasingly filled with people who believe religion is a problem, Franklin affirms every stereotype of religion as filled with a bunch of slack-jawed goons who can’t wait to rid the world of heresy.

Private Baldrick again, “Again…”

Update: For those among you not familiar with Blackadder Goes Forth, the whole thing might more sense if you watch. The relevant scene begins at about 04:00.

—

^*I would not want to disappoint after all, dear reader. Back to main text.

^**In a 2001 interview, “Disillusionment Can Be Glamorous,” Thomas Wagner asked Thomas Ligotti “What does religion mean to you.” Ligotti’s answer was “Crowd control.” It was not Ligotti’s voice I heard, however. I am not that disturbed. Not yet, anyway. Back to main text.

I don’t know if what follows counts as much of a post, but I felt like I ought to do something for Arthur Schopenhauer’s birthday, so in that spirit here are some Negations.

1. The world is not beautiful.
2. Life is not a gift.
3. Nature is not good.
4. Natural selection is not your friend.
5. It would have been better for me never to have been.
6. Come to think of it, it would have been better for everyone never to have been.
7. “What if your mother had decided to abort you?” It’s a pity she didn’t, really.
8. “If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.” (Happy 227th, Arthur!)
9. Less grandly, life is on balance suffering.
10. No, we didn’t do anything to deserve (9).
11. No, (9) is not on balance somehow a good thing on other grounds. While the presence of suffering might engender things that give us a nice warm feeling (e.g. encouraging us us to cultivate the virtue of compassion, perhaps), it is by no means on balance justified.
12. A decent society will let competent adults who judge their future prospects to be sufficiently poor to end their lives, and permit them access to painless, efficient means for doing so.
13. There is even remotely nothing special about the length of “natural life,” and the optimal length of life might easily be something longer or shorter than this.
14. We crave intimate relationships and the long-term experience of not having one is the emotional equivalent of starvation, but all the same is is simply not the case that there is someone out there for everyone. And no, this can’t be fixed.
15. Romantic relationships produce an overbalance of misery so great for me that I’d rather just spend my time with amazing porn. No, this can’t be fixed either.
16. Apropos of (14), I wish sex work were legal and non-stigmatized so that it would be easier to rely on the services of a caring and competent professional in meeting my erotic needs.
17. If there were something like Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine (though perhaps not configured exactly as Nozick described it) I would plug into it, probably for life.
18. Even though I am not suicidal now in middle age, I often regret not having killed myself in early adulthood.
19. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” That was your first big mistake, asshole.

The Negations are things that I accept. Or mostly so. Sometimes I think some of them are too harsh, sometimes I think some of them not harsh enough. From as far back as I can remember thinking about anything philosophical (1-4) were propositions I accepted. The other accreted as I went through life and accumulated knowledge and experience. I could probably come up with more with only minimal effort.

One of the graces of pseudonymous blogging is that you can actually write up and publish lists like this one of Negations. In my “real” life I would not and do not utter Negations in public. Indeed, I wouldn’t utter them in private except to a few very old and intimate friends. Utter them elsewhere and you will attract all sorts of hate, much of it masquerading as concern. The sort of people who will take it upon themselves to attack you for uttering Negations — for want of a better name let’s call them Refuters — will not listen to anything you have to say in support of your position. Listening is an activity premised upon the possibility that you have something to learn from the person speaking to you, and that’s a possibility the Refuters have ruled out a priori (some form of religion is often involved, although with this as with so many other evils in life there are secular variants as well). Refuters might in some sense process the words you utter, but that process is a combing-through in search of psychological weak points of yours the better to be able to bully or manipulate you into recantation of your Negations or at least into silence. (To be sure, even though none of them listen some of them might “play listener,” feigning sympathy and making encouraging conversational noises, but these gestures are flummery analogous to that used by professional confidence men to gain the trust of their marks.) Needless to say, it is highly unpleasant to on the receiving end of the Refuter treatment. A pointless waste of time, also.

Those who are not Refuters are Shunners and Shamers. All do their part in making life even more of a burden than it would otherwise be.

If you accept any Negations, you’re well advised to go through life silent. Of course, silence about subject matters as personally pressing as those covered by the Negations is also highly uncomfortable…

You’re welcome. Sourced to a tumblr called angryblackman.

I have a little test for whether you’re a decent person about other people’s sexuality or not. I call it the Noumenon Test. It’s named after a commenter who responded to a post at economist Robin Hanson’s blog Overcoming Bias many years ago. The comment struck me so much at the time that is became part of a post I wrote at ErosBlog and I yet moved to write about it some more.

Here’s how Noumenon gets through life.

I’m so darn nurturing, but not sexy, so what I do is go over to my sister’s house and play with her little babies until I am all out of love, then I go home and watch amazing porn in peace and quiet. It’s a good life, I hope all the unsexy men adapt as well.

There are many reactions Noumenon’s self-revelation. One class I’d call Hard Disdain, revulsion at Noumenon that doesn’t bother to mask itself: He’s sick. He’s sinful. There’s something wrong with him. He’s a pervert. He’s horrible. Another class of reactions might be called Soft Disdain. It’s still disdain, really, but comes wrapped in counterfeit concern and respect for Noumenon: That’s sad. I pity him. He must have a problem. He should get professional help, get into therapy or counseling. He’s missing out on something really wonderful that would be totally worth it for him if he would just make the effort. He just hasn’t met the right girl (or guy!) yet, but she’s (he’s?) surely out there because there’s someone for everyone in this world you just have to have faith that that’s true. I’ll pray for him.

If you feel either Hard or Soft Disdain for Noumenon then I’m sorry, but you’ve failed the Noumenon Test and that means you are an asshole. You don’t respect him enough to realize that he can think for himself and structure his life to meet his needs as best he can with the resources available to him just as readily as you can. On the basis of knowing him for the length of a 56-word statement (perhaps just a little longer if you read his whole comment), you are declaring that you know better how to live his life than he does. Seriously, just where do you get off? What exactly is it that assures you so much of your own automatic superiority?

And if you want to take Noumenon’s amazing porn away from him “for his own good,” then you are an arch-asshole.

It was with no small pleasure that I listened last week to Sarah Perry being interviewed on the Review the Future podcast. The occasion was the publication (at long last) of her book Every Cradle is a Grave, a review of the ethics of birth and suicide, by someone who thinks that birth is a real problem and is pro-choice on suicide — thus a kindred soul. The podcast being what it is, it took up issues generally associated with transhumanism and the right to alter one’s consciousness. It’s a good listen — by all means go and download it. Also, please go and show Sarah the love she deserves and buy her book. I’ll probably be commenting on it in a number of future posts.

It might seem odd for pessimistic me to say this, but I’m broadly sympathetic to transhumanism, precisely because I have such a sense that life is filled with suffering. I don’t think failure in attempts to alleviate suffering is inevitable, and I like radical proposals. Build a virtual reality in which we could have amazing experiences for the rest of our lives? Sign me up! Come up with pharmacological interventions that will make everyone vastly happier and cut off sentient suffering at its neural roots — the project that philosopher David Pearce has been promoting? Excellent idea. And curiously, and like Sarah and the hosts of Review the Future, I’m rather sympathetic to proposals for life extension technology. Such sympathies might seem highly paradoxical in someone who who thinks, as I do, that life is on balance suffering. I mean, if life is so bad, why on earth would anyone want more of it than that with which nature has seen fit to burden us?

[Interstitial comment I can’t resist: the currency of transhumanism, and the fact that there are so many very smart people willing to contemplate very radical changes to themselves as a means of escaping their current existence, strikes me as highly compelling evidence in favor of the proposition that human life as it currently exists is a state of much misery and deprivation, even if the highly-smart people who espouse transhumanism wouldn’t be caught dead putting that framing on the matter.]

Part of the reason is just an attempt at consistency. If you think — and I do — that in a decent society people ought to have the right of making their lives shorter than they otherwise would have been, then it’s hard to justify breaking the moral symmetry and insisting that people do not have the right to make their lives longer than they otherwise would have been. But deeper than that there is a reflection that one important source of life’s suffering is our mortality, or to put matters more precisely, the way in which our mortality comes about.

After getting to early adulthood you will spend your life breaking down and decaying. You get slower, you get weaker, you get less flexible. Your memory gets fuzzier and weaker. You learn new things and acquire new skills ever more slowly. Your attractiveness diminishes. You heal more slowly and bounce back from illnesses less quickly. You accumulate both major and minor medical conditions which reduce your quality of life and impair your productivity.

An implication of this ugly set of facts is that you’d better be pretty damn lucky in how the first decade of your adult life goes, or else you are screwed. Maybe a little screwed or maybe a lot screwed. Why? Well, let’s put it this way. There are some at-least relatively fulfilling ways of spending your life and other that basically are going to suck. Fulfilling ways for many people: being a teacher, a performer, an artist, a philosopher, a scientist. And the not fulfilling, which is to say, most of the actual jobs that people do all day. As a young adult, you might want to try your hand at something fulfilling: after all, you only live once. It’s going to be a lot of work for you to acquire the relevant skills and relationships, but maybe just maybe, things will work out. Unfortunately, since the thing that you happen to find fulfilling is likely to be something that lots of other people find fulfilling, there’s going to be a lot of competition for what few slots the world has for paying work doing the fulfilling thing. And this means that no matter how talented you are or how hard you work, the most likely outcome of aiming for fulfilling work will not be fulfillment but failure.

And what then? Well, then you’re likely to find yourself being about thirty or so finally admitting to yourself that your attempt at fulfillment was a failure, and now you need to just settle for having a paycheck. But now there’s a problem, which is that while you were off pursuing your dreams, other people who were twentysomething at the same time that you were twentysomething have been busy building up the skills and the relationships to do the not-fulfilling jobs. So now they’re ahead of you in the queue of careers and you are busy competing to get in on the ground floor of some job where you are competing against a lot of people who are a decade or so younger than you are. Due to the ugly facts about aging, you are going to be, other things being equal, a step slower and a thought duller than they are. So basically now you’re life is going to suck even more than it would have had you just gone out for the crappy work in the first place.

[The reflections of the two paragraphs above are intensely personal for me, because they’re autobiographical. I spent my twenties working at becoming something that mattered to me, with the result that I found myself sitting at home on my thirtieth birthday, lonely and alone, with a few hundred dollars in a checking account and no realistic career prospects. That experience nearly broke me. I spent my thirties playing professional catch-up in a very different job against people who were younger and faster than I was. That was painful, to put it mildly.]

Of course, you might also have just yourself gone out for the crappy work in the first place. How many people sadly spend lives of drudgery, not even trying to become something they care about, out of fear of what will happen if they do. What a life to look forward to!

The ugly facts of getting older have a longer-term consequence as well, which is that if you live enough — a result which the relentless advance of medical science has condemned most of us to — then you’re eventually going to find yourself in an enfeebled condition where you can do very little work at all — and this even if you manage to be spared the ravages of old age disease and dementias. In practical terms this means you’d better spend much of your working life saving up money for that extended period of pre-death known as retirement or be prepared for an old age even more miserable than it might otherwise be. (In a humane society sufficient resources would be put aside to prevent impoverishment in old age from happening. To some extent this has been done, but we also now live in a world, in North America and Europe anyway, where the better people who rule us have decided, under the banners of Austerity and Shared Sacrifice, that a measure of comfort and dignity in old age is a nice thing we are no longer to be allowed to have. Since the ruling betters have more power than the rest of us, they’re likely to get what they want. Too bad.) The fact that you are likely to someday face old age means that we must live in fear of economic failure before we are old. Naturally this is a fear that others exploit. Your boss can get away with being shitty to you because he knows and you know that you really can’t afford to be fired, for fear of the future.

So aging poisons our lives, long before we even get old. If we could remain mentally and physically twenty for as long as we felt life was not a burden, life would not be so poisoned. Were we to fail in what we wanted, we could just pick up and do something else with no penalty of being older. Perhaps we could try again in the future under more favorable conditions.

Would we get bored eventually? Come to feel like Emilia Marty in The Makropoulos Case that life has nothing left for us? Perhaps. Since no one has ever lived to be as old as the fictional Emilia, and since we therefore have no real first-hand reports about what it like to have lived to be 337, I think that it would be unwise to speculate about what a centuries-long or longer life would be like. But let’s admit the possibility. Well, that’s were being pro-choice on suicide would be a blessing. Long life would not be a curse if we could freely exit it.

Here’s a piece of relationship advice our culture likes to hand out rather freely: don’t try to impress people, just be yourself! Not everyone is for you, but of course if you just be yourself in time you will find someone for you. This is bad advice if you’re in any way unusual, however.

If you are going to be yourself, then you are following a policy of Protecting Your Integrity. You will follow a policy of honesty with the world. You will not pretend to esteem that which you disdain nor pretend to esteem that which you disdain. You’re so honorable — good for you! Unfortunately would-be romantic partners (“RPs” hereafter) are unlikely to take a generous view of such a policy. Perhaps you’re an infidel and RP is religious. If RP is religious enough RP will want to drag you along to their services, and by Jebus you’d better clap and sing when you’re supposed to and act like mean it. True, you might get out of it if you stand firm, but trust me that if you do RP will make you to suffer for it in other ways. What goes for religion will generally go for politics, philosophy, their opinions of their relatives and your friends. Don’t get me started on what it’s like if you incline toward antinatalism and RP decides that RP really wants kids. Unless you get very lucky with respect to whatever potential RP will have you — and we’re talking lottery-winner lucky here, folks^* — a policy of Protecting Your Integrity will result in a life of Forever Alone.

I deeply admire people who can sustain Forever Alone — it is a state for the noble and the strong. Most of us are not that noble or strong. Loneliness is a terrible form of human suffering. For those who are not, there is an alternative strategy which might work, call it Smile Through. Teach yourself to be a good enough actor that you can a convincing simulacrum of the person your RP wants you to be. Learn to keep your mouth shut. Get used to saying “yes, dear” a lot. It might work. But be warned: it is very psychically wearing to have to Smile Through, to have your life constantly being a stage in which your are acting a role of someone who you are not, and you might find that the costs of this wear are not worth the benefits in sex and companionship.

Of course if you just happen to be a conformist mediocrity then you need not really worry much about either Protecting Your Integrity or learning to Smile Through. Because then there are lots of potential RPs out there for you, and since you’re none too distinctive as a person, you needn’t worry much about what you are grating on the sensibilities of what other people are.

So that’s what life offers, folks. Protect Your Integrity and be Forever Alone, Smile Through and live as an unhappy stranger to yourself, be a conformist mediocrity, or hope to win the lottery. Another instance of why it is better never to have been.

—

^*You will have been a rare successful solver of a nigh-unsolvable sorting problem, one which I have discussed here and here. Back to main post.

In my late twenties I sometimes fantasized about having something like a monastic order to join. Not a religious order; that would be ridiculous for someone like me. And not necessarily a group of the single gender, either. Just a group of adults would would agree to forswear both family life and romantic love in return for a common life of mutual friendship and support. Since I had aspirations of being a scholar at the time, I imagined this order having branches near university campuses, elegant buildings with areas for common meals and life and private rooms for scholarly reflection. Life in such an order wouldn’t exactly have been celibate — autoerotic activity by its members would be warmly celebrated. Sometimes I imagined that surgical sterilization would be a requirement for full membership. As its members proceeded into old age, they would be cared for by the order. And in place of a wedding band on the fourth finger of the left hand, members would wear an stainless steel ring a a token of membership.

I really did think about this. Sometimes a lot.

To the best of my recollection, I did not invent the story that follows. Though I have reached an age at which even the best of my recollection isn’t terribly good, so I cannot recall where I actually did hear it.

In ancient China there was a Taoist Adept whose commitment to knowing the Way was unsurpassed. He practiced arcane arts and strange disciplines without fail for years and years until at last he had achieved such a state of perfect equilibrium with his natural surroundings that he was able to walk on water. Filled with excitement at this achievement, he summoned his Master and demonstrated this extraordinary ability. Instead of being astonished or praising the Adept, the Master merely turned aside and shook his head sadly. “Oh my son,” he said, “why do you bother with such foolishness when only a hundred yards downstream Old Ling the Ferryman would have been happy to carry you across the river for a few pennies.”

This charming anecdote might be about many things, but I myself happen to think that it is best told to anyone contemplating entry into a romantic relationship.

Recently I have been reading with pleasure a book about pleasure. Or rather, a book about the origins of the philosophy of pleasure. This is classicist Kurt Lampe‘s The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life. Dr. Lampe has recalled to my attention a somewhat obscure figure, Hegesias of Cyrene, whom the good doctor identifies as possibly the one truly thoroughgoing pessimist among all the philosophers of antiquity. What little we know about him comes down to us from doxographical material, but what there is is pretty intriguing. Here is a claim passed on to us by Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations (Book I, paragraph 34). The Latin text is taken from Wikisource and the English translation by C.D. Younge from from Project Gutenberg.

Now that’s persuasion, folks!

As I’ve noted before, I live in the United States and I’m surrounded by people who really believe that their country is a beacon of hope, light, goodness, etc. to the world. To listen to the rhetoric of public figures they admire they seem to believe that America invented collective democratic self-government (Uh, no) as well as the notion that individuals possess rights that the government cannot violate (Wrong again, I’m afraid). Occasionally the overweaning collective self-regard of my fellow citizens can be the source of considerable entertainment. When they’re confronted with evidence of unseemly behavior on the part of their country, the effect can rather be like watching firecrackers go off (be sure to stand well back, though). But generally they can manage heroic ignorance of the unseemly and affect a patriotism which is a source of great meaning in their lives. It’s rare American who doesn’t think of vis country as a model the world should look to.

Non-Americans can find some interesting meaning in America too, as it happens. In 1940 and 1941, some energetic people were making plans, and they too had a model to look to. Professor Timothy Snyder explains:

After the corrupt Soviet cities were razed, German farmers would establish, in Himmler’s words, “pearls of settlement,” utopian farming communities that would produce a bounty of food for Europe. German settlements of fifteen to twenty thousand people would be surrounded by German villages within a radius of ten kilometers. The German settlers would defend Europe itself at the Ural Mountains, against the Asiatic barbarism that would be forced back to the east. Strife at civilization’s edge would test the manhood of coming generation of German settlers. Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based on exterminatory colonialism and slave labor. The East was Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view,”in the East a similar process will repeat itself a second time as in America.” As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, would be Germany’s Mississippi.¹

Professor Snyder’s is hardly an isolated or eccentric interpretation of the Nazi understanding of American history. As equally-eminent historian Adam Tooze notes “The vision that inspired the German colonial project in the East had more in commonplace with the American ideology of the frontier than it did with the Middle Ages.”²

One might note many things about this project, but one detail that stands out in my memory is that one key component of it involved a deliberate plan to starve thirty million people to death over the course of the winter of 1941-2 (see Snyder, pp. 162-3 and Tooze 476-85). Colonel John Chivington could only have watched in awe had they pulled it off.

Naturally, it wasn’t just in matters of genocide that the Nazis found American antecedents and inspiration. In their earlier activity of drafting the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, they needed to resolve the question “who is a Jew?” in order that officials of the German Reich would know whom to persecute (and, ultimately, murder). Since Germany at the time had quite a few people who had both “Aryan” and Jewish forebears, the question naturally arose what percentage of Jewishness was necessary to make one a subhuman enemy of the German people. Happily for them, there were other people who had been thinking about analogous questions: the statesmen of the American south who had grappled with the question of how much black blood was enough to make a person into a outcaste. Sometimes this created contentions among the Nazis: at one point a Nazi ideologue named Achim Gercke argued that even someone one-sixteenth Jewish should be regarded as a Jew. Gercke’s argument in favor of his position appears to have been that it would be unseemly for Germany to have a less stringent standard for outcaste status than that contemplated in American antimiscegenation laws.³

Gercke was not alone in looking across the Atlantic for inspiration. Germany’s highly-educated lawyers thought like him.

As trained jurists, these ethnocrats thought analogically and reasoned from precedent. Although they considered the 1928 law against venereal disease and a ban on polygamy, they ignored the antimiscegenation law passed in the German colonies in Africa between 1905 and 1907. Instead, they expressed their admiration for the United States as a model both because antimiscegenation laws and immigration quotas seemed so clear-cut and because public opinion accepted them as natural. (from Koonz, p. 176)

Yep, a real city on a hill we are.

Notes:

¹Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010. p. 160. Back to main text.

^2<Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London: Allen Lane, 2006. p. 469. Back to main text.

³Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. p. 171. Back to main text.