House of Eratosthenes

Rick brings to our attention a lamentation from The Doctor, which seems to conclude that we have either lost our way or we are perilously close to doing so.

There was, at the first, the video: a teenage girl, lured into a trap, then brutally beaten by six other girls her age for thirty minutes continually, carefully recorded on video for upload to YouTube.

Then came the Yale “artist” who repeatedly impregnated herself by artificial insemination, then aborted the fetus with drugs, carefully saving the results for display wrapped in plastic and Vaseline for her senior art exhibit.

Then this morning, in the local paper: a man — a school bus driver — convicted for sexually assaulting a 4-year-old girl left alone on his bus.

One could multiply such incidents, ad nauseum, on almost any given day, in any part of the world — beheadings and genocide, ghoulish scenes of body parts and bloodied walls from yet another heroic martyr seeking virgins through hyperviolence. Yet these events, small on such a savage scale, in some way troubled me more than most.

One wants to rail at a society gone mad, at a civilization which has lost its bearings and moral compass, at a decadence fed by materialism and secularism, force-fed with the rotgut wine of postmodern relativism, drunk with the notion that ideas have no consequence and idols worshiped bring no destruction.

Yet the time for such anguished mourning seems long past, its passing but a point in a pitiful past history. We have, it seems, entered the post-human age.

The Doctor went on to talk about the “consensus among the civilized that certain behavior and unrestrained license threaten [civilization’s] very existence” that is the real mortar holding together the bricks of our society, much more responsible for our continuing survival than any fighting force.

One thing I notice is that this wandering into such dark territory, seems to coincide not with so much a relaxation of classical standards of decency, as with a sudden ratcheting-up of new ones. As I said over at Rick’s place, “Our ability to blow the whistle & call shenanigans on each other, is just as robust and sensitive as it as ever been. What we’ve lost is the willingness to do it out of a sense of decency.” Not s’poseda have a gun in your home. Not s’poseda flush the Koran. Not s’poseda eat meat, pray in school, wear a flag lapel pin, support the Boy Scouts, call out the race of someone running from the police, invade nations pre-emptively…et cetera. And then there are all the quotas. Can’t emit more than so-many tons of carbon, can’t hire more than X percent straight-white-guys, can’t pay less than Z dollars per hour.

I notice with the global warming, the central thesis to it is that if you read the data the right way, you can plot a graph across certain segments of time in which “global temperature” is shown to reach a sharp upswing in recent years. It’s that sharp upswing that scares us. We see the line zipping upward like a bottle rocket at the right side of the graph, representing the present or the point of time closest to the present, and we think zowee! Something bad must be about to happen! That something bad really is about to happen, is perhaps the most weakly asserted portion of this “science” of global warming because it doesn’t have to be very strong. Our minds supply us with a psychological tendency to fill that part in…triggered by the bottle-rocket upswing at the right side of the graph.

It’s odd that we don’t do this with phony rules. The rules some faceless aristocrat pulled out of his arse — rules that exist more to service an elitist layer among us, than to reflect any lessons learned from any decent survey of history. Because who among us, with an adequate command of history, can deny that a graphing of phony-rules would fail to display the bottle-rocket curve on the right side of such a graph?

Jehovah is out; Gaea is in. Abandonment of rules is not the problem. We’re rapping each other across the knuckles left & right, day in and day out. We’re just cranking out the rules in service of a false deity. The rules multiplying so rapidly of late, don’t have anything to do with treating each other in a neighborly way. They just have to do with fanciful theories about what might & might not bring harm to certain segments of our society to whom we’re supposed to be especially sensitive, or to the “environment” itself.

Humanity, in a generic sense — as in, the sense of defining a species of which all of us humans are a part, regardless of our birth nation, skin color, sex, or political leanings — is the last beneficiary of the rules we make today. We are much quicker to crank out one more rule in service of this chunk of it, or that one. And then we use the word “environment” to refer to some more of those rules, because it rankles us to admit this-or-that rule is not intended to help anyone.

So it stands to reason…we are becoming less decent, at the same time we are becoming less free.

Thing I Know #196. Real freedom is actually pretty boring. It has very little to do with noteworthy events, save for the one event marking its arrival. When classes of people take turns, over time, enjoying special privileges, not one man among them enjoys genuine freedom.

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The Pornography of BarbarismMonday, April 21st, 2008

The Pornography of Barbarism
Monday, April 21st, 2008