47 Days to Retirement

Today I told a professional colleague in South Florida (whom I've never met but with whom I've had a pleasant relationship working via email) that I had 47 days left until retirement. He kindly sent me best wishes and three wry quotations about the uncertain advantages of retiring:

"A retired husband is often a wife's full-time job." –Ella Harris
"Don't play too much golf. Two rounds a day are plenty." –Harry Vardon
"The trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off." –Abe Lemons

    Yes, even though most retired people I've talked with put a positive spin on retirement, there are two sides to it. I'll be exploring them soon.

Graven Images

Yesterday's utterance here about the god of the Old Testament's being a literary character made me realize that it was rather clever of Moses to exempt reports of what that god had said to him from that god's supposed injunction against graven images.

Peaceful Unneediness

I find myself this morning in one of those blessèdly relaxed moods of unneediness, having nothing to say, needing to say nothing. But enjoying the irony, the paradox of saying so....

Freedom is not perfect

I speak of freedom in all its grand imperfection, constrained by many variables, including our genomic inheritance, our early environment, how we were indoctrinated, traumatic experiences we have suffered, the weight of our habits.

And we are hedged in by constraints of available means. We must exercise our freedom in the places we occupy (or in other places to which we have the means to move). A rich man in America (where rich men are becoming richer and poor men are becoming poorer) has more latitude to exercise his freedom than a poor man has.

Or he seems to. For when I speak of freedom, I am mindful of the context of the responsibility it entails. Another “actual constraint of means” is the array of consequences that may follow from our acts. Clearly, when we act consciously and with as much knowledge as we can bring to bear, we must take into account what is likely to flow from acting (or from not acting). And we are responsible for consequences. In fact, if we aren’t responsible for consequences, what could the “responsibility of freedom” even mean?

A rich man can cause a lot more havoc than a poor man can. (This is also true of rich nations in relation to poor. The United States and Western Europe contribute about two-thirds of the Earth’s greenhouse emissions. The poor people of Africa, who will be among those most affected by the disastrous results of atmospheric warming, contribute only about three percent.) The rich therefore have more responsibility for using their freedom wisely.

I do not mean this observation as an apologia for inequality of wealth in American (or in the world). I deplore the widening divide between the “haves” and the “have nots.” In fact, one reason the divide between rich and poor is widening seems to be that many of the rich, rather than live up to their responsibility, are instead greedily exploiting their economic advantage (for short-term gain and long-term catastrophe). And the rich includes us who choose to drive when we could walk or take a bus.

Nevertheless, I speak of freedom as a fact, however constrained it may be by means (including consequences) and the various contributing causes (congenital, environmental, educational, habitual). For if freedom isn’t even possible in this time/space continuum, then what are we even talking about here? And why are we talking at all? And how could you choose to walk today?

The latest on my religion survey

On Sunday last, Susie P (my dear friend of 40+ years) responded to my religion survey. Because that survey was posted quite a while ago (and hardly anyone is following it now), I share here Susie’s response:

1. Religiously, how would you describe or classify yourself?

I am a Jew. [Name withheld] says he does not believe in god and maggi averred the same, but I do. I also believe in “the force,” in elves and fairies, go figure, oh, and throw in a few Norse and other myth gods while you’re at it. Oh! And god as depicted on Dad’s album cover for My Fair Lady—George Bernard Shaw. But I also have fears that there is nothing there, and that this is all there is and it has NO MEANING, cause after we leave?? And cause we can’t seem to really improve as a species and I now have trouble with the passover seder language, as I don’t believe in better, I don’t see peace in our time

2. Whatever you answered, what is it about you that leads you to say that?

As you know, I was raised a liberal jew and I remain such, years after education and regular temple attendance. And I believe in both the christian (activist) version “DO unto others as you would have them do unto you” and the jewish version “DO NOT do unto others that which you would not have them do unto you” (stay outta my face). I went to easter services at a Lutheran church as mike wound up singing in a choir, it was nice, I liked the Ner Tamid (eternal flame) same as ours, (I always seem more that is the same all over- like, all cuisines have a blintz) I liked the pastors homily, I liked the choir, I did not say “he is risen” at every opportunity, I believe Jesus was one of many great and good prophets but that he was the one with GREAT PR, so he has lasted. I suspect Peter on that account, and as the reading for the day said it was Peter who went back to the cave and saw the “linen” I immediately wanted to know if he had gone alone, were there other witnesses, where did the linen REALLY come from etc (too much CSI)?

Further (I was obviously dying to share all this, thanks for the opportunity) I noticed also in the bible readings for the service that at first Jesus felt that the Jews were discriminating and he wanted everyone to share in gods blessings, but in the next reading the “church” said, “only us that is good [our definition] get to play” hunh? Turned his inclusiveness right around, that’s ORGANIZED religion and bureacracy for you!

3. If you answered Christian, how much, if any, do your religious beliefs influence how you vote?

As a jew, I’m liberal to my core, too many relatives would roll in their…ashes, if I voted republican, ’sides, never agreed with one as much as I agree with dems. daddy never admitted to voting FOR anyone, only against someone worse, when I asked him who he WOULD like to vote FOR, he said “Chester Bowles”

4. If you answered Muslim, do you approve of martyrdom “in defense of Islam”?

na, but I know that is wrong in terms of the Koran when it kills others

5. If you answered Judaic, how do you feel about Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians?

Frequently not happy, but I haven’t lived with suicide bombers in my market (just old dudes with their lead foots on the accelerator) I think that in the face of that, it takes super-human and/or insanity to continue to love and try to get folks to see we are more the same than different, but someone has a great stake in keeping folks apart, I suspect power greed and not enough water to go around, and some non-jews are bred to hate us and want us pushed into the mediterranean, no matter how we try to get along, they think we should never have been given part of Palestine, and so it goes on and on and on

6. Anything else you’d like to say by way of your “religious statement”?

good lord! I think I’ve said quite enough!!!

On which I commented:

Susie seems to be, like me and my learned poet friend, a “believer in all things.”

It has turned out, quite unexpectedly but to my satisfation, that my musings about how it is possible to “believe all things” have led to a number of insights into the paradox of freedom (both God’s and mankind’s) that inhabits “the seminal nut of being.” These insights have shed light not only on the human condition but also on the nature of God—in particular the revelation that God is morally neutral, or amoral. God’s amorality explains why it’s futile for the opposing parties in a bloodbath to all call on God to bless their killing enterprise. It’s all the same to God, just mankind’s sophisticated elaboration on the workings of the food chain.

Or, as the Zen philosopher Alan Watts said (approximately), Man is but a worm with a brain to amuse himself while food passes from his mouth to his anus.

Morally superior to God?

The paradox of freedom at the core of Being (oh, so mysterious Being!) requires everything—that there be hunger as well as satiety, drought as well as rainfall, death as well as birth, deformity as well as perfection. The same paradox permits everything—that we murder as well as aid, rape as well as love, lie as well as say true, waste as well as conserve. Shall we, therefore, choose to do anything whatsoever? What is to stop us?

If indeed the world was "made by the Being his beings into Being prayed" (to quote Howard Nemerov's couplet on "The Myth of Creation on a Moebius Band"), perhaps His beings prayed Him into Being as much to protect them from themselves (and from others) as to be able to believe that they would live forever. Were they not sure enough of themselves to be good without the fear of punishment to keep them from being bad? (It's easy to see, certainly, that they might not have been sure enough of others if their choices weren't regulated by a fear of divine punishment.)

But since we are free to choose—at least to the extent that we are able to exercise the choice—I say let's choose to do good without being constrained to do it by fear of punishment. Why, just because everything is permitted, should we imitate God?

Socrates drank hemlock

As a teenager I had great faith in reason, and whatever faith I may have been born with was no doubt strengthened by my youthful reading of Plato's dialogues. I believed that if a person presented a logical argument for something, then everyone who could understand it was bound to accept it. I eventually realized, however, that such rationality failed many more times than it succeeded. People just wouldn't be bound by logic. And in time I remembered that Socrates ended up drinking hemlock.

But now it seems to me consistent with the paradox of freedom tucked inside the Seminal Nut of Being that logic doesn't rule the affairs of the universe any more than it rules the affairs of humankind. Miracles (expressions of God's freedom?) demonstrate its misrule in the one, and human freedom its misrule in the other.

We're heard of the possibility that if humans are utterly free to act (that is, without correction from God) then everything is permitted. But even more fundamental, now, it seems that everything is required: not only the svelte grace of the gazelle, but also the gazelle's glazed eye as the lion takes it down for dinner; not only the perfectly born baby, but also the still birth; not only the hero's recognition in public adulation and fable, but also the innocent man's execution for another man's crime; and on and on, world without end.

In the droll English film I watched last night ("Keeping Mum"¹), the Reverend Walter Goodfellow, Vicar of the Parish of Little Wollop, sums it up in his opening address at an Anglican convention:

Isaiah, Chapter 55, Verse 8:

My ways are not your ways.

And I think what He basically means by that is:

I'm mysterious, folks. Live with it!

_______________

1. Released in 2005, directed by Niall Johnson, with Rowan Atkinson as Rev. Goodfellow, Kristin Scott Thomas as his wife, Maggie Smith as Grace Hawkins, and Patrick Swayze as Lance.

Ramifications of paradox

The freedom paradox from which springs all things possible (and all beliefs possible) bears a family resemblance to Howard Nemerov's "Creation Myth on a Moebius Band":

This world's just mad enough to have been made
By the Being his beings into Being Prayed

and to Martin Heideggar's metaphysical question:

Why is there something rather than nothing?
["There isn't nothing." ≡ "There's something."]

on which David Lodge embroidered in his tragicomic novel How Far Can You Go? [Souls and Bodies in the U.S.]:

Our friends had started life with too many beliefs—the penalty of a Catholic upbringing. They were weighed down with beliefs, useless answers to non-questions. To work their way back to the fundamental ones—what can we know? why is there anything at all? why not nothing? what may we hope? why are we here? what is it all about?—they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece....[p. 143]

And all such paradoxes are akin to miracles, whose paradox is to seem to shatter science by contravening natural law.

These paradoxes are family, but is one of them the Grandaddy? Or, as the paradox has been put colloquially for generations:

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

A seminal paradox

Something I wrote yesterday has continued to nibble at my thoughts like a bird pecking seeds:

For does it make sense to say, "You are free, but don't act freely"?

Actually, what has been nibbling is the subtle paradox hiding in the positive variant, God's presumed command: "You are free, go and act freely."

The paradox is that if I go and act freely, I'm doing as I'm told and am therefore not acting freely." Or, if I act freely by choosing not to act freely, then am I acting freely or not acting freely (or perhaps both)? (It's like Russell's paradox: if a barber shaves men if and only if they do not shave themselves, then should the barber shave himself or not?)

Freedom may be the seminal logical contradiction by which it is possible to believe all things (and maybe even by which "All things are possible with God" [Mark 10:27]). (Russell pointed out that if you admit a contradiction into your logical system, then you can prove anything whatsoever.)