If you’re a writer (and you are exceedingly fortunate), you might write one thing in your life that captures something inherently true.
And by “true,” I think what I’m really saying is “universal and important.” Because that’s how I define truth—a thing that is important and universal.[1]
Here I am not speaking of “my truth.” There is no “my truth,” unless by “my truth” one means “my qualia.”[2]
I remember reading Douglas Coupland’s masterpiece, Generation X, when it was first published. To me, the characters were nondescript, the plot banal, and the writing workmanlike. But still, there was something ineffable but strikingly familiar there.
Generation X was true, and I felt the same way about Patrick Süskind’s one and only novel, Parfum.
By way of further exploration, Coupland’s second novel, Shampoo Planet, was painfully dissonant. Math, gravity, and logic might all be undefeated; but seeing an author crash back down to earth is exquisitely painful to me for reasons I can’t quite understand.
Truly exploring the furthest parameters of the world bounded by time and space can be intensely alarming if one thinks too much about them, which might be why so few people are willing to become professional philosophers.
This perceived reality of ours seems as ubiquitous as the sea must seem to a creature of the deep. I wonder whether Leviathan ever ruminates on those terrestrial lives lived between sea, sky, and land. We are intruders into Leviathan’s realm, but Leviathan rarely ventures into ours.
The best understanding amongst our species is that the Cetaceans[3] were once terrestrial themselves, evidenced by the presence of a pelvis. Is there some ancestral memory Cetaceans can access? Do they dream of walking on the unyielding surface of terra firma; and, if so, to what do they attribute those dreams? The mind reels.
And in its reeling, we must ask: What do our own dreams signify?
(My wife appears to firmly believe that dreams are the mechanism by which one accesses other realities, perhaps even one’s “higher self.” (I say “appears to believe” because I find it impossibly difficult to extract from her a systematic hypothesis of what exactly she means.[4]))
I find that most of my lived experience is similarly bewildering. I live in a world in which talk about universal First Principles is almost universally considered “bad form.”
“Surely,” I have mused, literally since infancy. “These beings staggering through their lives amidst shadows and images that they think are actual reality would want to better understand if there are strata outside of their assumptions?”
Fat chance.
But a stubborn sense of fundamental fairness denies me the “easy out” of thinking their aversion is informed by bad faith.
Rather, I suspect it is because they intuitively sense that the work I do is unimaginably perilous. One of the few popular understandings applied to the work of Herr Nietzsche is, “When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you.”
And to avoid the gaze of the abyss, human beings invariably seek refuge in Reductivism.
There is an old joke that perfectly encapsulates this deeply human habit: Three students – a German kid, a French kid, and a Jewish kid – are given a simple assignment by their instructor: “Write a paper on elephants.”
The German student submits: “The Elephant, the Ivory Trade, and Economic Development in German Southeast Africa.”
The French student submits: “The Elephant as a Metaphor for Romantic Love and Focault’s Notion of A Life Authentically Lived.”
The Jewish student submits: “‘Elephant’ as a Codeword for Anti-Semitism.”
While I experienced precisely none of this specific reductivism during my time in Israel laboring alongside the Levantine Hebrews, I seem incapable of avoiding it everywhere else.
Which brings me to the podcaster and historian Darryl Cooper.
A few years ago, Mr. Cooper produced a monumental series titled Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, exploring the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I found it to be a masterpiece of historical empathy applied to all sides. (Well, except the British Imperial Authorities who promised the entire place to three separate groups.)
Cooper waded into the abyss of human tribalism, attempting to discern the universal principles that drove ordinary men to extraordinary violence. I found his analysis deeply researched, scrupulously balanced, exquisitely crafted, and profoundly delivered.
Now, Mr. Cooper has released a new series, Enemy: The Germans’ War, and I am afraid to share this new production with trusted colleagues of mine – reasonable men of deep intellect
and unshakable principle, men whose judgment I value immensely – because they emphatically accuse Mr. Cooper of being a raging anti-semite.
We cannot both be correct, and this alienation is intensely painful to me. The pain is not for Mr. Cooper, whom I do not know and will likely never meet. My distress is for myself. For the injustice, as I see it, being visited upon Darryl Cooper is an exemplary punishment inflicted on those who dare to question the status quo in this over-politicized, under-informed world.
I have always tried to explain to the people around me that the primary difference between human beings and lemmings is that humans encourage dissent. I have seen too much of what humans actually are to believe that we do so out of some enlightened sense of charity or open-mindedness.
Rather, I suspect we do so for ruthlessly pragmatic reasons: Because our species has a terrifying habit of falling under the sway of charismatic madmen, plunging into the grips of mass delusion, and enthusiastically committing acts of mass murder.
Dissent – the willingness to look at the abyss without flinching and report back what is actually going on – is our only evolutionary fail-safe against the pogrom.
And yet, here we are, living in a world where charlatans take that which is complex, make it complicated, and then offer cartoonishly “simple solutions” to the complicated problems they caused in the first place.
This pathological behavior seems hardwired into the human psyche, and I suspect it is a byproduct of the wiring necessary for a vulnerable species to survive in a world full of things better at killing us than we are.
Naked and alone, we invented pointy sticks to avoid getting instantly eaten. Then, grateful for our survival, we began worshiping pointy sticks as the source – rather than the means – of our salvation.
After hundreds of thousands of years of animistically worshiping pointy sticks, we pivoted to worshiping innovation as the root cause of the pointy stick—as if “innovation” in and of itself can answer the deepest “Whys?” of the mystery of being.
We enthusiastically, cataleptically grasp anvils, utterly convinced they are life preservers.
This is the core of my deep, abiding resentment toward the Baby Boomers. They stripped away the societal stability that once acted as a buffer against this type of stupid madness. They offloaded the agonizing pursuit of Universal Truth and replaced it with the relentless, anomic curation of the Self (a cultural dreck perfectly immortalized in the agonizingly self-absorbed 1983 film, The Big Chill).
I recently received a “Good Friday Reflection” from a professional colleague – a self-professed atheist – who hijacked the crucifixion of Jesus Christ to announce he was tweaking his interpersonal HR metrics to be less of a “cranky old man.”
This is what happens when we replace the search for truth with the worship of the self. We substitute the only tool we have to survive and prosper as a species for the utterly barren modality of onanism.
But the most unforgivable sin of this Boomer-inherited anomie is what it has done to the generation that followed mine. By stripping away our stabilizing institutions in heedless self-absorption, they have created a society that forces my son – and millions of young men like him, men who desperately want to build and contribute – to suffer for the lie that they are the fundamental source of everything bad in the world.
That is not just a lie. It is a dangerous, deadly lie. It adds nothing to the life of the one who traffics in it, and it does incalculable damage to young men who have done absolutely nothing wrong.
It is fundamentally unjust.
Why do we elevate foolishness as a paragon of wisdom? Why do we punish those who dare to warn us that we are worshiping pointy sticks?
In the present crisis, hating Darryl Cooper – or hating me, or hating the virile young men of the West – isn’t the solution to the problem.
It is the problem.
Hating the dissenter for daring to dissent is the problem.
[1] As a technical matter, my definition of a true thing is “a thing which possesses a host of characteristics, none of which are susceptible of actual [as opposed to “apparent”] contradiction by any other true thing.”
[2] In philosophy of mind, qualia are defined as instances of subjective experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form of the Latin adjective quālis meaning “of what sort” or “of what kind” in relation to a specific instance, such as “what it is like to taste a specific apple—this particular apple now.” See, e.g., Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction.
[3] Marine mammals that include whales, dolphins, and porpoises and which constitute a secondarily aquatic clade under the order Artiodactyla.
[4] Such are the highly questionable pleasures of being married to me.
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