Twilight of the Idols, Phajaan of the Humans

"To call the taming of an animal its "improvement" sounds almost like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in kennels doubts that dogs are "improved" there. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, and through the depressive effect of fear, through pain, through wounds, and through hunger, they become sickly beasts. It is no different with the tamed man whom the priest has "improved." In the early Middle Ages, when the church was indeed, above all, a kennel, the most perfect specimens of the "blond beast" were hunted down everywhere; and the noble Teutons, for example, were "improved." But how did such an "improved" Teuton look after he had been drawn into a monastery? Like a caricature of man, a miscarriage: he had become a "sinner," he was stuck in a cage, tormented with all sorts of painful concepts. And there he lay, sick, miserable, hateful to himself, full of evil feelings against the impulses of his own life, full of suspicion against all that was still strong and happy. In short, a "Christian."

"Physiologically speaking: in the struggle with beasts, making them sick may be the only way to make them weak. The church understood this: it sickened and weakened man — and by so doing "improved" him."

--Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

One of the nice things about meeting back up with my friend was it turned out he had brought with him a copy of The Portable Nietzsche, the same copy, in fact, that I had given to him a year or so ago to keep him company in Japan (along with Crime and Punishment, which he quite enjoyed). He told me he hadn't read any of it, but as I didn't have a book, I was able to while away some of the time on buses and such reading through The Antichrist and (re-)reading through Twilight of the Idols. As much as Walter Kaufmann makes of Nietzsche's 'insanity' at the time of his writing of The Antichrist, I believe it to be a powerful critique of Christianity and the rather demeaning effect that it has on the human spirit.

When I read the above quote, I thought about the Phajaan ceremony that goes on in Thailand. Phajaan is loosely translated as 'elephant crushing', and is basically what all elephants have to go through in order to be the servants to mankind that you see during many tourist ventures in Southeast Asia.

But then it is rather interesting that this 'torture' to crush the spirit of an elephant in order that the elephant will do the bidding of their captors is not seen in a more similar light to a lot of the ways in which religion (especially Western religion) has resulted in the 'improvement' of people the world over: improvement in the form of docility, being open to suggestion, and, in general, as Dennett once said, "a gold-plated excuse to stop thinking".

Just like the elephants, they are trained to no longer fight back against conflicting ideologies. The elephant wants to stay with its mother, it wants to eat, drink, and be able to roam free, etc. On the other hand, isn't this what the human wants as well? Or is it simply the fact that the elephant is not conscious of its own metaphysical position in the cosmos and therefore has no idea of the ease and automation with which its post-Phajaan life will be.

No more decision-making, just follow your master. What could be simpler?

The Morals of the Wretched (Conclusion)

Well, it's nice to wake up for the second straight day to a fire-and-brimstone-free morning. However, there are likely a fair few (including Harold Camping) that are NOT waking up to an egg-on-face-free morning. Though I AM waking up to another been-to-Mzoli's-free day, as the plan for Sunday failed to materialize. Such as it is.

As I mentioned in my previous post, (oh, and by the way, here is the B.I.N. Laden parody I mentioned), we were supposed to experience the end of the world on Saturday. It failed to materialize (as far as I can see, though it seems people continue to justify that there was an apocalypse in SOME domain and the world will, indeed, end on October 21... after what will likely be a disappointingly tame six months of fire and brimstone), and there a fair few articles about the after-effects, but one of the most interesting articles includes a psychologist's assessment:

"It's very hard for us to say, 'Boy, was I stupid!' " says Elliot Aronson, a prominent psychologist and co-author of the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, And Hurtful Acts.

"The more committed a person is to their prophecy," he says, "the more likely they are to justify that action, and to try to convince people that their belief was in some way right or good."

I mention that simply because a lot of what I have talked about during this thread has to do with psychology and its 'consequences. So with that in mind, let's move on to the two anecdotes I promised:

The first involves a family I stayed with in Elsiesrivier, one of the more notoriously dangerous 'coloured' suburbs in Cape Town. Because the train ends early and the taxi service ends early, there were more than a few instances where I had to walk about twenty blocks through said 'notorious' neighbourhood to get back to where I was staying, and when I arrived safely, it was always 'a miracle' that I survived. But that's not really the story; it just sets the tone.

This family is devoutly Christian. The father is born-again, or some such, saying that he turned to it as a means to getting his anger and violence in check. And from the stories I've heard he's a pretty crazy mofo telling me about numerous times when he let his fists do the talking with some fairly extreme consequences for others (he kind of has to being a white South African in a coloured neighbourhood) and also about the insane shit that he went through while 'fighting the Cubans in Angola' during the early 80s.

Anyway, during one exchange about religion, I was pressed about whether or not I believed in God. I replied that I had no opinion. I was told that that is not possible. I replied that I don't know enough about it to conclude one way or the other, so I just let it be; at the end of the day, whether God exists or not is beyond my comprehension, and it won't affect the way I live my life, so who cares? Just like I don't know enough about quantum physics or string theory or M-theory or the Higgs Boson or who knows what else to have an opinion. Why is it that the existence of God seems to be the one highly contentious metaphysical issue in the world that you have to have an opinion on??

So anyway, as a demonstration of my apparent 'stupidity', the daughter of 17 called in the 5 to come into the room. And she proceeded to put him on the spot: "Wilfred, does God exist?" He had a very wide-eyed anxious look on his face, and didn't answer. She repeated the question. Still the only response was him searching the eyes of everybody in the room (the sister, the mother, and I, all of whom he knew quite well and was very comfortable around by the time). After a third time, he let out a barely audible, totally unconfident 'yeaaaahhhh'. He was then sent from the room and the daughter triumphantly declared, 'there, you see? A 5-year-old!' I could have gone on and told her how completely ridiculous this 'proof' was, but I decided to save my breath because I knew I wouldn't get anywhere. Whenever I need some sort of religious insight, I always turn to Herr Kierkegaard, and this instance is no exception:

"If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd."

"The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever."

But the inquiries kept coming as to how I could not be religious. So one day, I sat down at my laptop, and composed a brief text file, which was basically an outline of the argument put forward by Nietzsche in 'The Genealogy of Morals' that I've already briefly summarized in Part I. After reading through it, the mother said something to the effect of 'if I didn't know you better, I would think that the Devil was in you'. And I immediately launched my usual counter-attack to these sorts of absurd allegations, namely if the sole purpose of the Devil is to corrupt Christians, then surely he would have been clever enough to write a book, claim it was actually written by God, and have all Christians follow it blindly...

Anyway, perhaps the ending of that was rather anti-climactic. I find most religious debates are, since it usually ends with people agreeing to disagree because neither will budge from their position. But let me speak of another thing that happened to me, the irony of which was so incredibly amusing, and everything set up so incredibly perfectly, if anything would have made me religious it would have been that. But then the way Christians proclaim God as dolefully caring and just, rather than a trickster having a rich sense of humour, the god I would be forced to believe in would be nothing like that. If anything I would have to choose a Loki-esque god. But anyway, here goes (this is a cut-and-paste job I sent to a friend of mine from back in January):

A few days ago I had to invigilate on a math exam. When it ended at 7PM I headed to the train station. There, a man with few teeth and whom age had seemingly not been kind to poked his head around the corner and told me that when he saw me, Jesus came to mind, and, predictably, started launching into a monologue that I have heard many times before wherein people talk about how much they had sinned in the past, then found Jesus and dropped all their bad habits because they had given themselves over to God, God was watching, God would judge, etc. So eventually the train arrived, we went our separate ways and whatever.

Today, I got on the train and found that this same guy was coming towards me trying to sell things to various traingoers (as many in this country do), but he hadnt seen me as he was too busy selling. And even despite the narrow passageway, he didnt look up when he squeezed past me standing in the middle of the aisle, but all the while I was observing him. Then a funny thing happened:

I was standing near the end of the traincar, with only about 4 people on each side in the seats between me and the end of the traincar. And as he got to the very end, he turned to a girl who had apparently asked for what he was selling, but instead of conducting himself in an appropriate manner, he took what he was selling (small sealed packages of razorblades) and made an attempt to place it between the rather massive cleavage that was hanging out the top of her shirt. She appeared very disconcerted about it and he quickly righted himself by jokingly saying 'no sorry let me place it in your hand, all the while sporting the sly grin of an old pervert'.

So of course I started to laugh inside at the irony of it: that he had basically confessed to me as if I was Jesus one day, and then, after walking past me as if I wasnt there, proceeded to 'sin' in front of me, all the while, unbeknownst to him, 'God' was indeed watching.

So after this little episode, he started back, noticed me, asked if i remembered him and what we had talked about. I, still quite amused, said nonchalantly 'dont you think thats a bit hypocritical after that?' and nodded in the direction of the 'incident'. So he murmured some excuse that it was her who had asked him to place it in her breasts and he (gentleman that he was) had declined and placed it in her hand instead ('didn't you see?' he asked). After which he quickly changed the subject to loudly mentioning something about my apparent non-committal to religion and slunk away out of the traincar at the next station.

Maybe next time, he'll take a quick look about to see if 'God' is watching before he decides to 'sin' again, no?

The Morals of the Wretched (Interlude: The Walk of Life)

I didnt actually expect to create this entry, but neither did I expect to create the last interlude to my entry on (see causality of this article) et al. But just like in that instance, 'something came up', and it just happened to fit with the theme (with a little stretching involved).

In January, a Toronto police representative made an ill-advised comment that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”. And so the SlutWalk was born to 'take back the word slut' and bring the public's attention to the manner in which people (predominantly women) are marginalized, bullied, and generally treated with contempt when their freedom of expression goes against the often dominant voice that advocates sexual conservatism, and the dangerous precedent that this stereotyped objectification sets. Marches have been held in many cities throughout North America, and over the next few months, these demonstrations are being planned in Amsterdam, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

The phenomenon was originally brought to my attention by a feminist activist friend of mine, and at the time I didn't really think much of it other than 'huh... interesting concept', but on Sunday there was a BBC article that gave it a good deal of publicity, and the following day, a second BBC article announced details of the SlutWalk planned in London for June 4, rightly saying: "Organisers say the aim is to highlight a culture in which the victim, rather than rapist or abuser, is blamed. So what started as an 'interesting concept' was suddenly becoming a global phenomenon.

So the request, as put to me was "I would like to see an entry on people's delusion that they can provide any help for a cause by participating in a 'walk'". Now, I'm not a psychologist, nor do I have the ability to read minds, so I cannot know for sure how close my assessment will come to the reality of the situation, and clearly different people have different reasons for participating in public demonstrations, but I'll give it a go, but before I do, let me motivate the topic a bit by mentioning a few anecdotes about the situation in South Africa.

First and foremost is the HIV/AIDS problem. Sub-Saharan Africa, especially Southern Africa, has probably the highest proportion of HIV positive cases in the world, and the prevalence of rape, which, up until very recently when it was updated, was justified by a "Sexual Offences Act [that] dates back to 1957: the days of apartheid when the country's rulers were not only all white, but also all male." It doesn't help that the country's president is a polygamist with five wives, two fiancees, and twenty children, and had gone through an infamous rape trial when he had sex with an HIV positive woman (and later revealed he had 'showered to avoid HIV'). Indeed, under the previous government, president Thabo Mbeki pretended there was no HIV problem, and dismissed anti-retroviral treatment as 'toxic and dangerous'. Things are getting better, with groups especially from the townships like Khayelitsha coming together and boldly wearing shirts describing themselves as HIV positive, and billboards with celebrities like Ryan Giggs saying things like 'Be a man. Know your status." with regard to HIV.

Another, more personal story, occurred when I was sitting in the pub in a discussion with some friends of mine. For some reason we got into the topic of rape, and the gal at the table, who I didn't know, volunteered that there was an instance when she had been at a party and would have been raped but for a friend of hers happening to walk in 'just in the nick of time'. The gentleman to my left then volunteered that he 'had heard' that most rape instances 'are actually when women have second thoughts after the fact'. I told him flat out that this simply wasn't true, that if it is truly consensual, then there shouldnt be any 'second thoughts' and if there is any doubt there shouldnt be any sex. I told him about the historical accounts of women being intimidated and marginalized to the point where they rarely report rape cases, where too often the burden of proof is on them to prove that it wasn't consensual and that it often simply comes down to her word against his and she usually ends up losing out. A story was brought to my attention by friends of mine in Ghana about a purported 'thief' in a student housing block who was eventually mass-raped by a group of students. I have followed people's reactions (i.e. friends of friends in Ghana) on the story, and most of them (who are males) tend to offer little sympathy, justifying it by saying 'she got what she deserved'.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that there is a problem. As I alluded to in my gender bender story, the history of patriarchy means that gender equality is still not taken very seriously by many, even in 'developed' countries (and this includes the current Prime Minister of Canada). And this apparent 'ignorance' seems to grow in proportion to conservatism, especially religious conservatism. So what can be done about it? Well it appears that one may run into difficulties and general inaction if one petitions one's government representative to take it up as an issue, so there must be another way (though this is usually how it is).

I will start by saying that such a 'walk' is a form of 'direct democracy', a "form of governance in which people collectively make decisions for themselves, rather than having their political affairs decided by representatives." The truth is that if democracy was all about voting every couple of years, any majority government could do whatever they pleased (we will see if that is the case in Canada), when, in fact, mass protests are the means for people to tell their representatives in no uncertain terms that they are not doing a very good job if they refuse to deal with issues that are important to those that they purport to represent. Moreover, it sends a message to the general public that this is, indeed, an important issue that cannot be absorbed or swept under the carpet. Instead of dropping hints here and there, there is an active and very real component that brings people together in protest, and also brings people who may never have thought about such an issue to get the gears in their mind turning, and (hopefully) they may begin to ask themselves what they really think about the issue and why. Even if they do not agree, critical engagement and dissenting voices are always important democratically to figure out the best way forward.

And protests are important to keep governments in check. Oftentimes it turns out that violent protests, though riskier, are often much more effective (my Ghanaian friend's treatise on student activism gave me an intimate look into this world), but one must remember that non-violent protests are a show of obstinate defiance and (assuming the Declaration of Human Rights is upheld) insulates protesters from being victims of violence themselves. This is also what eventually allowed Gandhi to free India from British colonial rule.

So I ask who is responsible enough to stand up and fight for the rights and morals of the wretched, in this case, victims who have to carry the burden of the shame of objectification, marginalization, manipulation, and egregious invasions of their personal privacy?

Lest we forget also that protests are a means by which like-minded people come together for a cause, so it also presents the opportunity for a very interesting and often very rewarding social experience for everybody.

Hmmm... I had better get that 'SlutWalk Cape Town' ball rolling...

The Morals of the Wretched (Part I)

The Genealogy of Morals is a book written by Friedrich Nietzsche talking about his perception of how morality arrived at its present state as upholding asceticism, piety, and pacifism.

I would recommend it as an interesting historical account of the power balance between politics and religion that is ongoing, but basically he surmises that way back when, when 'good' was associated with power and 'bad' was associated with inferiority, the clerics sought to upset the system, suddenly defining 'good' as pious and 'evil' as powerful. Meanwhile, the clerics could now count on an army of people wishing to be 'saved' which would bring them power and control.

It is an interesting idea, and one that I take seriously. The situation that exists between politics and religion is still a very real one, and it just goes to show the somewhat paradoxical outcome of colonialism which ended with the colonized accusing the colonizers of tyrannical brutality, yet embracing the religion that these 'tyrants' brought with them:

"All values, in fact, are irrevocably poisoned and diseased as soon as they are allowed in contact with the colonized race. The customs of the colonized people, their traditions, their myths—above all, their myths—are the very sign of that poverty of spirit and of their constitutional depravity. That is why we must put the DDT which destroys parasites, the bearers of disease, on the same level as the Christian religion which wages war on embryonic heresies and instincts, and on evil as yet unborn. The recession of yellow fever and the advance of evangelization form part of the same balance sheet. But the triumphant communiqués from the mission are in fact a source of information concerning the implantation of foreign influences in the core of the colonized people. I speak of the Christian religion, and no one need be astonished. The Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few are chosen."

--Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

But then what comes of this? Today as I was walking to the university, an individual called out to me ('Jesus!') from the place by the river where he regularly squats with other destitute individuals. He told me of his situation. That they are harassed constantly by the authorities, that the situation is so unfair because whenever he has bread, he shares it with his comrades but they do not reciprocate. That he cries a fair bit because of his destitute situation (though when he mentioned this to me, I wasnt sure if this was actual or metaphorical), that he was born in Guguletu, and had a pretty rough life, that he was born in 1974 and had lost his mother recently, that he had talents and liked to sing, and wanted to somehow find a change for the better and no longer live and be treated like an animal. During that time, a 'Groote Schuur Community Officer' came and started harassing him and his fellow strugglers, and forced them to disperse, while they protested that they werent cheating and stealing; they were just trying to live. And so during the conversation, we moved from the open to a more discrete location away from the main road while he continued his talk. And after this, he did indeed start to weep at his miserable plight. But a common theme kept arising: his Christian faith.

Although I often lend an ear to such people, I am not always inclined to help them. When I was in Oxford, and even back in Canada, people ask for money on a lot of occasions but it is fairly easy to shut them out. You wonder what has crept into their situation: if you give them money, how will it be used? Yesterday at the pub, my friend pointed out a grizzled elderly white woman that had tried her best to add some notion of beauty to her features with little dabs of makeup here and there. She had started coming to the pub fairly recently (as far as I could see), but I thought I remembered seeing her somewhere before. And then my friend said 'I see this old woman in Observatory all the time and I always give her a bit of change when she asks me for it. Seeing her in here purchasing beers, I now know where my money is going.' Sad.

But you cannot blame these people, as I mentioned in the post on death, I spoke of the book 'Better Never To Have Lived', and the difficulty that children face when they are brought into this world. Of course, some have it much more difficult than others, and it is not always easy to deal with hardship and have the strength to continue. Sometimes when I see Rasta at the house after a hard day's work, it really pains me that I can't do more. But when it comes to randoms, Cambodia always comes to mind, and I remind myself that I can't save everybody. And so anyway, these people must find a way to continue the struggle, often by bypassing the reality of the situation through substance abuse, domestic violence,... or religion:

"Here on the level of communal organizations we clearly discern the well-known behavior patterns of avoidance. It is as if plunging into fraternal blood-bath allowed them to ignore the obstacle, and to put off till later the choice, nevertheless inevitable, which opens up the question of armed resistance to colonialism. Thus collective autodestruction in a very concrete form is one of the ways in which the native’s muscular tension is set free. All these patterns of conduct are those of the death reflex when faced with danger, a suicidal behavior which proves to the settler (whose existence and domination is by them all the more justified) that these men are not reasonable human beings. In the same way the native manages to by-pass the settler. A belief in fatality removes all blame from the oppressor; the cause of misfortunes and of poverty is attributed to God: He is Fate. In this way the individual accepts the disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior restabilization acquires a stony calm."

--Ibid.

Anyway, this individual, 'Albert', wanted me to sing with him, and went into some hymn or something or other about how Jesus saves and all that, while all the while I watched him and the other passersby who were curious about this white man being entertained by a homeless local. The Officer came back briefly but didnt approach us while I was with this man. Then Albert asked me for food, as I knew he inevitably would. Normally I say no to these people, but he had done some work: telling me about his situation, about the situation of many of his ilk in Cape Town, singing for me, etc. He had wanted to follow me into the shop, but as he approached, he was barred from entry but the security guy, so I went in myself. As I had left him to go in, he had called after me requesting a veritable smorgasbord of food. I at first thought that I would 'do the usual' and just buy him a loaf of bread, but then as I was near the deli, my eye looked over the possibilities on offer, and there was a fairly cheap chicken curry and rice, so I went for that and repaid him in kind with some rice and chicken curry from the Pick n Pay that came to about R18 ($2.50). I emerged from the store just in time to see a group of these guys (including Albert) getting shooed away by the security staff, and as he moved away, I caught up to him, gave my offering to him, said 'best of luck', and walked off.

I had to go, and I wasnt particularly interested in hearing his long-winded lamentations about how he had just been treated.

On Death and Dying

I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

--T.S. Eliot, "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"

"The situation is an ambiguous one. Observed from without, human beings obviously have a natural lifespan and cannot live much longer than a hundred years. A man's sense of his own experience, on the other hand, does not embody this idea of a natural limit. His existence defines for him an essentially open-ended possible future, containing the usual mixture of goods and evils that he has found so tolerable in the past. Having been gratuitously introduced to the world by a collection of natural, historical, and social accidents, he finds himself the subject of a life, with an indeterminate and not essentially limited future. Viewed in this way, death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods. Normality seems to have nothing to do with it, for the fact that we will all inevitably die in a few score years cannot by itself imply that it would be good to live longer. Suppose that we were all inevitably going to die in agony -- physical agony lasting six months. Would inevitability make that prospect any less unpleasant? And why should it be different for a deprivation? If the normal lifespan were a thousand years, death at 80 would be a tragedy. As things are, it may just be a more widespread tragedy. If there is no limit to the amount of life that it would be good to have, then it may be that a bad end is in store for us all."

--Thomas Nagel, "Death"

I have chosen this morbid topic because it seemed there was no better time. Yesterday, after excusing myself from the home of my friends to return home quickly to drop my things off before going to the pub to watch the Champions League fixture, my landlady of 81 came to me with a rather distressed look on her face, saying "I think Danny's dead. Can you go into his room and see if you can get a pulse?"

When I first moved in at the beginning of March, I was told that there was an individual 'Danny' who was living for free in the house in return for being a 'handyman' but, they told me, he really didnt do much. I only ever saw him once before, an instant where he had made his made to the kitchen one afternoon. A very frail individual, I wasnt sure what had been expected of him. My landlady kept me informed of his worsening condition. He had gone to Groote Schurr hospital and both he and the landlady herself had been rather put out by the conditions. It was Danny's wish that he shouldnt go back and that he should be simply left with his whiskey and cigarettes to die in his bed. So there was plenty to say that this was going to happen. Later, she would tell me what basically amounted to admitting that he had been in his death throes recently: evacuating his body at regular intervals and general in a great state of weakness. She had brought him the Fanta and Sprite he had requested, went to feed the cats and dogs, and then returned to watch television with him, only to discover that in that short span, he was no longer.

As for me, I have been to a few funerals in my day. Not just of 'older' individuals, but of young ones as well. During my first few years of school, I had a best friend who was a year older than me, and I would always spend a lot of time with him. He eventually moved away and I never heard from him again until I saw a large article in the newspaper: he had been a poster child for cancer research for the past few years, and had done his utmost to battle on, but eventually succumbed. I had spent some time doing Muay Thai between about 9 and 12 to keep my fitness up, and at the time there was a fighter named Roy Lilley that everybody looked up to and idolized. The night of his last fight, which I had been present at, he was killed running into the middle of the highway, supposedly he had wanted to get out of the car he was riding in because he was 'going crazy' from LSD that he had taken. I went to his funeral too. And then when I was in university in Edmonton, I came home one day and turned on the news. They had announced that there was another motorcycle fatality in the city. I thought to myself 'Why can't these people before more careful??' Then they cut to the person in question. It was a guy from my soccer team. I remember a particular moment at the funeral when me and a bunch of teammates were at the internment; we were huddled together in a collective gloom when the guy's mother came over and said, in the most matter of fact way, "Don't worry. Just have faith and God will take care of you all." I don't know what moved me more, the mother's stony demeanor, or the manner in which she dealt with her pain. (Everything seems to remind me of Fanon these days, but) as Fanon describes one means to deal with hardship: "A belief in fatality removes all blame from the oppressor; the cause of misfortunes and of poverty is attributed to God: He is Fate. In this way the individual accepts the disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior restabilization acquires a stony calm."

But it was rather strange walking in on this frail old man, sprawled on the bed, head tilted back, mouth open as if he had died in a moment of catatonic rigidity. I had not seen him in the weeks leading up to this moment, so I didnt know whether his face had a deep purple tinge to it because of these sudden death throes, or if it had slowly grown on him as his condition worsened. I walked around the bed and leaned down to feel first his wrist and then his neck. What does having no pulse feel like? It is difficult to know when it is too easy to think that the pulse of another is only the blood moving through your own fingers. I had never really done this before, and worse I had just come out of the cold, wet weather, so my hands were freezing cold, whereas, almost ironically, the wrist and neck of this man was still warm. I tried jostling him a bit. Nothing. What does one do in such a situation without some sort of understanding of what to expect? You are used to waking stubborn people from their sleep but death, one could say, is the most obstinate sleep of all. I couldnt be absolutely sure, but it seemed to me that if he wasnt already dead, he was past any sort of state where a return to even a semi-conscious state was possible. I went to comfort the landlady as much as I could. Trying times, especially for one so vulnerable. As with everything that happens to her: people not paying rent, thefts, verbal abuse, she proceeded to rationalize it away: "I should be used to death by now," she told me, and showed me a picture of her son at his grad night. He had been killed that night by a drunk driver at the age of 17. She told me of others that she knew, her husband, some that had resided in the house, Danny's fiance who had died of cancer. She put her hope in her metaphysical assessment of a spirit world, cosmic nudges, etc., to hope that their souls were now free to mingle in some ethereal plane. Such as it is.

As Thomas Nagel says in his assessment, there is not much to say about death if one does not go into conjecture about immortality, reincarnation, etc. It is the ultimate judgment. I recall from my Junior High School health class that we would always walk into the class to see a quote on the board that we would have to copy down. The only one I really remember was "Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" (well... I also remember the quote "Objects in the rear-view mirror are closer than they appear", but only because I remember commenting about how it was very close to the title of a song by Meat Loaf and asked if she knew of this song). Permanent indeed.

And there are other issues. I recall a brother and sister from Australia that I befriended during my time in Oxford. I was told that Huntington's Chorea was present in their genetic line. Basically, if you have the proper genetic inheritance (and it is autosomal dominant, so you have a 50-50 chance of inheriting it), you die around the age of 50. There is a test that tells you immediately whether this is the case or not. From what I understand, neither of them wished to take the test. It is a double-edged sword: take the test and get a negative, live 'normally', take the test and get a positive, live in fear. I don't know if I could do it.

But one must be careful. The head of the philosophy department here at the University of Cape Town has published a book entitled 'Better Never To Have Lived', where he argues that people are actually doing their children a disservice by bringing them into a world of suffering and strife. The reactions that he received from critics was idiotic: they made the leap that equated 'dont bring people into the world' to 'take everybody out of the world', i.e. saying, for example, that 'it is of his opinion that we should all be dead'. And, of course, that is not it at all. If you are not brought into the world, then you cannot know what your missing; you maintain 'ignorance' in a void of non-existence (if that makes any sense), whereas if you are killed, this ends certain prospects that are now achievable. It is a fine line that sometimes borders on absurdity, but a line that must be considered nonetheless.

It is like the argument I put forward with respect to animal ethics: these mice are being bred for the sole purpose of being sacrificed at the bio-altar; is it 'better that they not have lived'? Perhaps. It all depends on which species' well-being takes priority. They are being utilized, yes, but utilized by a group of overseers that 'puppetize' them. A form of oppression? Also a possibility.

But the idea of death and various thought experiments that may go with it provide interesting philosophical insights into teleological assessments of humanity. If humans' purpose is to procreate the species, then, if it would be possible to slow down the 'telomerization' of DNA and allow us to live to be closer to the age of Methusaleh, yet were still only given a window of 20 to 30 years to reproduce, what would this say about purpose? And wouldn't overpopulation became a major problem? The birth rate wouldn't change, but the turnover would be a lot slower: imagine the brunt of the population from the past 600 years still living? It seems chaos would reign. But perhaps not. Perhaps, like everything else, the need to curb such problems would have been dealt with earlier before they reached a critical stage. Who knows?

At any rate, as morbid as death and discussions about it sounds and is, it really is also a very interesting topic of discussion. I also seem to remember something else in health class when we were talking about the topic of suicide: that those who are more likely to talk about it are much less likely to take it as a valid 'way out', whereas those who tend to avoid the issue may have it in close quarters in the back of their mind somewhere. But of course, this fatalistic psychological assessment shouldn't be universalized past 'the vulnerable', i.e. those that one has a genuine concern for the personal safety of.

As is evident from the quote from Nagel (or, for that matter, Eliot) at the beginning, many simply dont want to discuss it because it reminds them of their own mortality.

Our Animal Friends?

A conflict of interest was recently brought to my attention in conversation with a dear friend of mine. Having sought to increase knowledge about Schistosoma mansori ‘for the betterment of mankind’ by doing immunology research, she recently paused to reflect on the well-being of the dear little rodents that were giving up their lives for the sake of humankind and felt a pang or two of sympathy (to say the least). She said to me "I'm sure you have an opinion on this." At the time I didn't, but as I thought more and more about it, I thought maybe it was something that might prove valuable to explore. So here goes...

Animal ethics. A very difficult topic for so many reasons, least of which is the prevailing trend of anthropocentrism in many, if not most, major religious and socio-political ideologies prevalent today. One only need read through Genesis to see that according to Christianity, the rest of the universe exists in relation to humanity. Marxist ontology describes the major dialectical clash as the one existing between man and nature: “Neither nature objectively nor nature subjectively is adequate to the human being… History is the true natural history of man.” Arendt speaks of ‘The Human Condition’: “Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes he character of a condition of human existence.” Even Hinduism, which treats the sacred cow with so much respect and dignity (and I really do miss their random presence in the streets everywhere), is merely returning a favour for the manner in which this animal almost single-handedly provided a means for human survival at one point. There are exceptions of course, chiefly Buddhism in which some sects refuse to deal with even the most difficult problems created by natural pests (I recall a fairly recent story of a group somewhere in Southeast Asia whose situation was so bad that they had to call in an exterminator to deal with a major ant problem: although they weren’t allowed to harm these beings, it seemed that the situation was so desperate that they felt that they could call in someone else to do the ‘harming’ for them).

Of course we now have many Animal Rights groups that protect the livelihood of other species of the Animal Kingdom, but when it comes to putting our own well-being ahead of those of any ‘lesser’ species, most individuals don’t seem to worry too much. And they often wield this lack of general concern in strange ways, the ‘mongoose incident’ in the late 1800s in Hawaii being one such abuse of nature, which ended up providing a greater problem than the original one (mongooses hunt during the day and rats are largely nocturnal, idiots!). And then there is the recent hubbub about whether transplanting lemurs from Madagascar to one of the British Virgin Islands owned by Richard Branson is such a good idea with respect to guaranteeing their survival (and whether it is not just about guaranteeing their survival but also about increasing profits to his multi-million dollar resorts on the island). Animal rights has led the way in overseeing and imposing more ‘humane’ treatment of animals, even those that will inevitably be led to the slaughter to grace our hamburger buns with a large dollop of tasty protein. But there is not too much of an issue here: the presence of a carnivorous bent to the animal kingdom has been ever-present since the first prehistoric fishes some time ago in the middle Paleozoic era (just a guess, but somewhere around there). Though there will always be grumblings about extent, the presence of meat in the human diet has become something of a given, just as we seldom spare a thought for the poor lettuce that has recently been decapitated and is soon to become the basis for a tasty Caesar salad.

Though killing animals for food is seemingly more than justifiable (after all, if I don’t eat the scrumptiously delicious and magically nutritious foreleg of this critically endangered white rhinoceros, some pride of lions somewhere in the sub-Saharan savannah will, right?), when it comes to science there is seemingly a sliding scale about what is and is not acceptable. These animals are no longer directly sustaining our well-being by sacrificing their thoroughly delicious hindquarters to our butchers and/or sadistic sportsmen; instead we are pumping them full of drugs, making them dance on hot plates, and carefully noting the exact second that each of rodent number one and rodent number two finally became so exhausted that they no longer have any choice but to sizzle. Or, if we step it up a few stages, we are pumping them full of drugs, cuffing them to a wall, and carefully noting the exact second that each of chimpanzee number one and chimpanzee number two shuffle off to the much less torturous and much more forgiving shadowy realm of dreamland… (or, at the very least, sleepland…)

Yet I mentioned a 'sliding scale' and with good reason. Who knows where the world of genetics (and/or the biology lab experiments that it spurned) would be without the ever-present Drosophila melanogaster? Of course, it is a lot more difficult to cry foul at the ‘torture’ and ‘indiscriminate killings’ of insects (come to think of it, where was the aforementioned individual’s sympathy to all of those parasitic nematodes that she was sending to a rodenty grave?), especially since much of the medical research that is being done is with one eye on ATTEMPTING to kill 'exponentially lesser' beings like viruses, bacteria, nematodes, flukes, mosquitoes, etc. And most shan't really miss them if/when they are gone. But research can only go so far on such simple beings, chiefly because they share almost no physiological traits with human beings. 'We ain't nothin but mammals', so we have to start somewhere, and mice, being the smallest, the most readily available, and traditionally a bit of nuisance were nominated as the de facto playthings of sadistic biologists.

The question is 'why do we care?' I know from personal experience walking around at night in Mumbai with gigantic rats in constant chorus scurrying across streets and through the tiniest gaps is a bit unnerving; they are often harbingers of disease both as vectors for the diseases themselves and vectors in terms of spreading around large amounts of garbage and/or filth, for all intents and purposes making less than sanitary areas even worse. But the mutant rats of Mumbai are not cute white mice. And these mice are factory-made and settled completely for the purposes of satisfying the aforementioned sadistic biologists. Is this wrong? Is it any more wrong to breed such victims for the purposes of selling them to people who need to satisfy the cravings of their pet amphisbaena or whatever they might have in their aquarium upstairs? Again, as with the discussion above, these furry little creatures are properly involved in 'the circle of life' in the latter case, but only artificially so in the former case. But what's so unethical about sending them to the sacrificial bio-altar? We gave them life for the explicit purposes of taking it away. Without these sadistic biologists, these mice wouldn't have existed in the first place...

Well for starters, it is true that according to the ideal life-world model we are only really transforming existing particles, molecules, cells from one state to another. Remember the principle of conservation of matter from Grade 10 science? 'Matter is neither created nor destroyed, it is only transformed': well quantum physicists and general relativity junkies might have something to say about that, but it is approximate enough. However, when we change matter from dormant cells to living cells, and then throw them out as refuse when we are done with them, they tend to accumulate in not so nice ways. In theory we could grind them up into some nice milkshakes for our cats, but this is not normally done for obvious reasons, chief of which is that these mice have just been pumped with possibly harmful substances that could have nasty side-effects if ingested. So instead of that their disposal must be much better thought out. Mouse disintegration can lead to its drug-laced bodily fluids leaching into groundwater, etc, and this is not such a nice prospect for the animals and human beings that are affected by this groundwater, unless, perhaps, they were testing for more potent forms of LSD.

So from a purely environmental point of view, there is a problem. What about from an ethical point of view? Well unlike viruses, bacteria, and plants (aside from mandrakes, of course) animals have sensory receptors that allow them to feel pain. So technically what is being done to them amounts to torture. In effect, biologists are playing out the good cop, bad cop routine: "I'll put you in this nice house where you can gorge yourself silly and have all of the exercise you want on this little wheel... AND NOW I WILL INJECT WITH THIS TRUTH SERUM... TELL ME WHAT IT DOES THROUGH THE OBSERVABILITY OF YOUR UNWITTING ACTIONS!!" But they're just mice, right? Just like that baby that was unplanned and couldn't be aborted because of various state-imposed laws was just found in a dumpster because nothing else could be done for it. Simple, no? What is our responsibility to these creatures when we play God for the sake of discovering ways for God to live a healthier and fuller life? Or are there any?

Opinions vary, but tend to be less and less forgiving the more 'complex' and 'conscious' the animal in question is: you won't find too many people agreeable to monkeys being put on exercise wheels, injected with drugs, and then checked for time of death, partly because they are not as physiologically dispensable given their gestation and maturation time, and they are also not as ethically dispensable because the pain and suffering that they feel garners much more sympathy in the people who are the direct cause of it. It is a real ontological conundrum: are some life-forms more valuable and/or disposable than others? And if so, what makes them so? Consciousness or lack thereof? Pain and suffering or lack thereof? Their ability to garner sympathy (i.e. 'cuteness') or lack thereof? Other physiological qualities such as gestation time, maturation time, upkeep, complexity, etc?

And then there are the humans themselves. If we want what's best for the human race, why not limit our studies to human 'victims'. That way no unsuspecting or unconsenting animal gets hurt. There are even more problems with this, though there have been many rumours (and real incidences, e.g. MK-ULTRA) where this has indeed gone on. Maybe its not so far-fetched that this is the new scientific norm that is being implemented to avoid sacrificing these poor animals: another 'massive social experiment' as Heidegger once called the Nazi movement.

Let's just hope that this one doesn't also 'go horribly wrong'...

Some Reflections on Selfishness (or 'The Significance of Valentine's Day')

Last night I was again in my usual place in Rondebosch and got into a fairly heated debate with a friend of a friend from Tanzania. He had said he was 'interested in economics', so I pushed for a clarification of this by saying 'you mean your interested in capitalist economics, i.e. making money.' And he agreed. So I got to thinking about this notion of greed. Is it inherent? Or is it dependent on our social milieu, e.g. does it develop because of the idolization of those in power over others?

And since today is Valentine's Day when we (supposedly) should be thinking about our significant others, maybe a discussion of whether or not selfishness is inherent is a good topic. Does he really love you, or he is just offering you this cheap card because he has a hidden agenda? (But maybe you're accepting it because you also have a hidden agenda... but then maybe he knows that you know that he knows that you know... you get the picture...). To raise your suspicions even further (because my primary goal by publishing this post is to plant a seed of doubt about the value of 'superstition' in terms of certain days being supposedly 'more important' than others in terms of showing someone else you care, and so, in this instance I'm unfortunately out to make war, not love) let me share a humourous anecdote shared with me by some friends here in South Africa:

The son of a certain family is well-known by his family and most of his friends to be something of a 'Don Juan' (though I've not been able to affirm this through personal experience since he's currently in a detention center and I've only visited him once). Given that Valentine's Day was coming up, they told me about how there is a very large Valentine card that one of his aunts received some years ago. As luck would have it, the card was completely generic and not personalized. So every year on February 14 he takes this same gigantic card and gives it to whichever female is the apple of his eye at the time, and even though as the years go by its appearance has gotten old and crusty, as far as I know it's always greeted exceptionally favourably ('ohhh... the sacrifice you must have made to get such a Valentine card JUST FOR ME!!!'), and the guy usually gets what he wants (the substance of which is probably fairly obvious). So they joked that they should contact him and ask him who 'the Valentine' should go to this year... (so ladies, maybe this year you should check your Valentine cards a bit more carefully than years past for signs that it might have actually come from years past...)

But let's get back to theory, shall we? In Book 2 of The Republic, Plato tells the story of 'The Ring of Gyges'. He describes a shepherd named Gyges, who finds a ring that is able to make him invisible at will. He describes a sequence of events wherein the shepherd uses the powers of the ring to kill the king, marry the queen, and rule over the domain. Plato then declares that if a just man had found the ring, his actions would be the same as the unjust man,

"For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice."

In other words, Plato argues that the only reason why we are moral beings is because of the consequences that we face due to our actions. (Recall I previously brought up this notion of consequentialism at the end of the discussion of 'Sadist morality' in the post Exegesis in the Bedroom). If, in the case of having such a ring, you can do whatever you wish and no one could ever charge you with any action since they could never trace the action to you, there are seemingly no consequences. (If you've seen it, maybe think of Kevin Bacon in Hollow Man). Although this sequence of events could never conceivably happen, let's take this a step further.

Often an argument against materialistic greed is "he who dies with the most toys still dies" or, equivalently, "no matter what you have, you can't take it with", but let's look at it from a more 'statistical' vantage point. If one is to play Russian Roulette, and the revolver in question has six chambers only one of which contains a bullet, then you have only a 1/6 chances of dying. But the problem with statistics is that they only really 'work' long term. In normal roulette, if you lose, you can ante up and try again, but in Russian Roulette if you end up on the fatal chamber, you can't say 'the odds weren't in my favour, so let me try again', because you're dead and that's the bottom line.

So consider the following argument: what we really should blame human greed on is human finiteness, because in the end all 'worldly' consequences (i.e., death doesn't count), no matter how large, are, in the end, only temporary (consider, for example, the old adage that 'suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem'). For example, it may be all well and good to say 'we need to protect the Earth for future generations', but talk is cheap; in the end, any individual will be dead long before 'future generations' come into being. Conceivably, one can argue 'well surely my own future generations are equivalent to my existing in future generations': children, children's children, etc, but even if this is true, it really is an 'out of sight out of mind' problem, and, when the chip's are down, most people are willing to (deliberately or not) turn a blind eye to this sort of idea and show a real lack of foresight by exploiting the world's resources in whatever way tickles their fancy.

And this claim of finiteness extends to other's memories of events and consequences, which is why someone who 'holds a grudge' is so dangerous:

"How little the world would look moral without forgetfulness! A poet might say that God made forgetfulness the guard he placed at the threshold of human dignity."
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Perhaps, then, this is the real reason why Heaven is such a perfect place: everybody has to be moral because 'it's a loooooooooooooooong (i.e. infinite) ride and if I screw someone over, its gonna come back to haunt me' (But if that's the case, shouldn't Hell, which is also eternal, be equally perfect?)

Indeed, one sometimes wonders how those who believe in an otherworldly paradise can be so selfish and greedy, since if they happen to meet anyone up there who they screwed over down here, they're going to be hearing about it for a long time.

Or maybe not: maybe chronic amnesia is a prerequisite for human perfection, and is therefore an attribute of all residents of Heaven (save for God Himself, of course, who is omniscient)...

In Praise of Idleness

"To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre." -- Albert Camus, A Happy Death

In truth, the quote above has been cheaply lifted from wikiquote. I've never read A Happy Death, nor have I read Bertrand Russell's essay from which I stole the title of the present topic. However, the notion of idleness is one that has become increasingly meaningful in the hustle and bustle of the present 'Western world' ruled by corporate imperialism and the prospect of get-rich-quick schemes.

Firstly, one should make sure to make a distinction between 'idleness' and 'laziness', although contemporary definitions have often blended the two. For example, if I allow my car to idle, I have not shut it off, nor have I made it in any way lazy; I have merely put it in a state of temporary stasis, neither entirely dormant, nor entirely active.

My interpretation of the above quote (and, since I have already admitted that I do not know the context in which it is written), is simply to say that there are those that treat idleness as a from of evasiveness or procrastination, while others treat idleness as a means to gather ones forces for a final onslaught.

Although the depiction of the battle of Stirling in Braveheart is entirely fictitious (it is usually referred to as the Battle of Stirling Bridge, because rather than being an open plain, there existed a bridge which was of tactical importance to the Scots in their victory), one could refer to the Scots as being 'idle' in the manner in which they wait for the English attack, but one could hardly accuse them of begin 'lazy'. It is the same, for example, with Fanon's depiction of the black man in The Wretched of the Earth, with muscles constantly tensed for an attack against the enemy, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually an attack will be inevitable.

And so, it seems that the problem with the 'mediocre' is that they submerge themselves in idleness in order to shirk from or avoid their duties. On the other hand, those that have a more 'advanced' idea of the tactical advantage of remaining idle for a period of time only to use the power reserved by this idleness to explode into vigorous action at a later date, are able to exploit 'idleness' as an opportunity.

In other words, it is the difference between how one approaches one's situation: i.e. it is the difference between 'we must avoid' and 'we must prepare'.

Exegesis in the Bedroom

As outlandish and immoral as it may seem, Sade's 'approach' is not only shocking in terms of its details, it is also very important in terms of questioning some very fundamental moral values.

Having read du Plessix's Gray's At Home With the Marquis de Sade, it is known that the descriptions in his works are no mere fantasy, but, in some sense, accurately depict Sade's own 'approach' to life. Thus, works like Philosophy in the Bedroom may be seen as a sort of attempted justification and a challenge to the rest of the world, asking "why should the way I (choose to) live my life (i.e. with libertinism and debauchery aplenty) be deemed immoral and/or criminal?"

This is indeed a very good question, and one, in my opinion that shakes us to the very core. It is not difficult to come up with some fairly valid reasons why it should be deemed immoral for one to go out on rampages and commit mass murder, simply because your happiness is clearly at the expense of others, and it is a great expense; often another's life is the price one pays for the pleasures of such a 'homicidal maniac'.

But with morality 'in the bedroom', where (ideally) each is happy because of the pleasure that they are experiencing, why should such things be deemed 'sordid' and 'immoral'? After all, "it is only by sacrificing everything to the senses' pleasure that this individual, who never asked to be cast into this universe of woe, that this poor creature who goes under the name of Man, may be able to sow a smattering of roses atop the thorny path of life."

It is easy to come up with fairly substantial arguments that justify this stance towards debauchery when one considers it under the watchful eye of religion. In Christianity and many other religions that preach asceticism, such as many Eastern religions (Buddhism, Hinduishm, etc), the 'pleasures of the flesh' are quite clearly deemed 'sinful' since they fly in the face of the manner of self-denial and self-mortification that such religions dictate. But can one say that this treatment of debauchery as 'sordid' and 'immoral' can be ENTIRELY traced back to religion or, at the very least, some other authoritarian (e.g. monarchical or autocratic) creed?

Issues of health aside, there are issues of power and control that arise. A certain idea of 'freedom' can become very much under threat if the event is not completely 'egalitarian'. This is especially a concern when considered with regard to the largely patriarchal history of humanity, and indeed the simple biological fact that men are able to 'spread their seed' at will, while women are left to 'carry the can' for nine months at a time seems to tip the balance in favour of some sort of inequality. Of course, this does not apply to sexual practices where pregnancy cannot result for whatever reason, and these are most often treated as the most heinous of all. And although 'pleasure' might seem to be a substitute for happiness, issues of dignity and self-worth also come into play with regard to such an issue, so psychology also plays a major role: by being objectified, it becomes easier for one to objectify oneself, and this is, in some sense, a form of dehumanization. At the same time, though, this becomes a sort of chicken-egg problem: did self-worth and dignity arise because of asceticism and morality, or is it the other way around? In other words, is such sexual objectification of oneself or others deemed a form of dehumanization simply because it is, in most cases, not a socially acceptable human practice? E.g., education, which is seen as primary for the human race would never be seen as a form of dehumanization, even though it often seems to be becoming more and more the case that students are treated like cattle on an assembly line to cater to capitalistic needs/desires. This 'educational dehumanization' is especially a valid consideration with regard to some of the (supposedly) despotic educational set-ups they sometimes (supposedly) maintain in Eastern Europe and the Far East, though one can argue that 'rehumanization' occurs when the individual re-enters the greater world being able to reap education's benefits, whilst with debaucherous practices, the resulting advantage is not immediately clear.

Whatever the 'reasons', it is an important issue to consider. If we leave aside divine judgment, then who is to judge such an act but ourselves? And if this is so, why does it make us uncomfortable, especially if (if the heavy traffic on pornography sites is to be taken for an accurate survey of the interests of the general population), we are able to so easily fantasize about it? Is it due to social conditioning? Psychology? Conscience? Biology?

Or is it simply down to consequentialism, that one worries about opening a proverbial can of worms, since the penalties for debauchery are numerous (even outside social stigmata like criminal punishment and/or religious judgment), including injury, disease, being egregiously harmed by a jealous lover, etc: i.e., if one wishes to lead such a life, must they not only be a moral nihilist, but also an existential nihilist? And is this question based on the fact that such practices would now surely exist in the minority with respect to the general population (and therefore be treated with the utmost scrutiny, rather than accepted as justified), and not for any other reason?