The present is unavoidable

Martin Amis is a major figure in Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22. They were friends from their twenties, with some sticky patches described in the memoir. I'm left with the impression, which I plan to double-check by re-reading Hitch-22 before the year is out, that Hitchens may have done something to alienate Amis at some point, for some passages read like attempts to get back in Amis's good graces.
    At any rate, for an example, here is a mention of Amis in Hitchens's chapter titled "Something of Myself," in which Hitchens answers "The Proust Questionnaire" that seemed to be an office fixture at Vanity Fair magazine, where Hitchens was a contributing editor starting in November 1992:

Your proudest achievement? Since I can't claim the children as solely "mine," being the dedicatee of books by Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, and poems by James Fenton and Robert Conquest. [p. 370]

    I've downloaded a half-dozen of Amis's books to listen to, or to at least try to read. I started with his 1991 novel, Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offence. Hitchens doesn't mention the book, but Sean Carroll does in From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, in which he cites the novel's telling a story in reverse. Real time can flow only forward, but must a story?
    I think it must. Or for me at least. I listened to about ten pages before growing weary of the game, but not without being impressed with how Amis's narrator dealt with recounting conversations. He learned how to "translate" language heard backward into its forward equivalent. Sort of like decoding Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks by holding them up to a mirror.
    I listened to the beginning of each of the Amis books I'd downloaded, but none of them was dedicated to Christopher Hitchens. I have yet to discover the one (or ones) that were.
    I turned next to Amis's 2001 non-fiction book, The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000, which quickly provided a statement that indicted me of some recent idleness I'd engaged in:

It is the summit of idleness to deplore the present, to deplore actuality. Say whatever else you will about it, the present is unavoidable.

    The present is unavoidable. It's just the way it had to be. And the Judeo-Christian ethic could not have developed with any more inclusive affirmation of life than it did. "What if" conjectures about its (or anything else's) having been different from what it was are of mostly academic interest. Mostly idle.
    The Amis statement prompted me to revise the conclusion of Sunday's essay, "Them's the breaks":

Like Walter [Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad], we might individually resist—or become conscious that something in us seems to want to resist—but happenings both within us and around us continue to roll on just the way they individually and collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.^*

    There, less of a muddle, I hope.
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* The original paragraph:

Like Walter, we might individually resist, but happenings continue to roll on just the way they collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.

    That paragraph wasn't literally the conclusion. It was followed by a sort of coda about the unrolling of things' being believed by some as "God's plan in action," with special favors doled out to the believers.
    That idea—that the concept of "God's plan" sprang from the sense that events just happen without our having much or any control over them—deserves an essay of its own.

Them's the breaks

Bryan Cranston stars
as Walter White

Episode 5 in Season 1 of Breaking Bad ("Gray Matter," which aired on February 24, 2008) features a speech by high school chemistry teacher Walter White that could have informed Sam Harris's thinking about free will.
    In the first episode, Walter was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and resorted to selling crystal methamphetamine to provide for his family when he is dead. But he didn't let his wife (Skyler) know he was sick until the fourth episode.
    Having learned the news, Skyler becomes determined that Walter will undertake chemotherapy, and she doesn't hesitate to let Walter's wealthy former graduate school research partner know or to urge Walter to accept his old colleague's offer to pay for everything.
    But Walter resists.
    In an emotional power play, Skyler engineers an intervention to show Walter how much his family loves him and needs for him to do the therapy. Her sister and brother-in-law don't behave as she expects, they think it should be Walter's decision.

But can it be Walter's decision? That's the question Sam Harris raises.
    Walter responds in as affecting a speech as you can hear in television drama (or in feature film):

Sometimes I feel like I never actually make any of my own choices. My entire life, it just seems I never had a real say about any of it. With this last one—cancer—all I have left is how I choose to approach this...What good is it to just survive, if I am too sick to work...?I choose not to do it.

    [I didn't think I could quote that verbatim, given the difficulty of writing down dialogue from a Netflix download, but then I thought of YouTube, where you can actually see the scene:]



    So, Walter refuses...until, as usually happens with all of us, the balance of forces shifts in favor of the stronger ones' tending toward our compliance. "I'll do the therapy."

Friday I asked what if Judeo-Christian ethics had been all-life affirming (rather than in-group-affirming)?
    A friend commented simply that not enough people think and feel the way I do.
    And probably no one in ancient times thought or felt that way. The forces that produced the Judeo-Christian ethic could have produced no other ethic than the one it did produce. And the forces working now can but have us slaughtering and eating animals, fighting to control oil, tearing down mountains to mine coal, driving just the fuel-inefficient automobiles we do, building pipelines across tracts of wilderness, decimating rain forests, continuing to overpopulate the planet.
    Like Walter, we might individually resist—or become conscious that something in us seems to want to resist—but happenings both within us and around us continue to roll on just the way they individually and collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.
_______________
Wiktionary on "Them's the breaks"
[follow-up]

What if Judeo-Christian ethics had been all-life affirming?

Photo taken a year ago by holding
a Nikon D60 by hand to the narrow
eyepiece of a Nikon ED-50 fieldscope
[It's not the moon as I thought
when I found the photo, but the
vignetting of the image, which is
the daytime sky behind a dead tree.]

Apparently scholars agree that the Israelites only meant the Sixth Commandment to restrain their members from killing other Israelites. The Old Testament is chock full of incidents of murder, rape, and enslavement of other people, most of the mayhem being portrayed as not only condoned but as explicitly commanded by their deity.
    I don't know what I'd eaten, but the other day I found myself wondering whether, if the Judeo-Christian ethic could have grown up protecting not only one's own group but all mankind—and not only just all mankind, but even all mammalian life on Earth—and not only just all mammalian life on Earth, but even all animal life on our planet—and not only all animal life, but even our living, breathing Earth...what a different world this might be.

We might not put other animals in confined, dark spaces and shoot them full of growth hormones to speed their fattening to slaughter.
    We might not slaughter animals at all, we might not eat them.
    We might not invade countries to control the oil beneath their ground.
    We might not tear down mountains to extricate coal.
    We might not use fuel-inefficient means of transportation.
    We might not waste wildernesses to build pipelines.
    We might not level rain forests to raise beef.
    We might not have overpopulated the planet.
    ...

If we stepped abruptly from the world we know into that might-have-been world, we would not recognize it.
    I stepped abruptly into wondering, and I can hardly think coherently of the things we might not do if the Judeo-Christian ethic hadn't been geared to protecting the in-group but to protecting life collectively, and its mother, Earth.
    I was just wondering.
    Maybe tomorrow I'll come back to reality.
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[follow-up]