Three Reflections On Being Human Today
Party life.— Stay out of the partisan ruse that passes itself off as politics today. No taking sides, no “lesser of two evils” rationalizations, no caring about the parties’ mutual assured destruction shadow play as though you were not their intended victim. To care is to delude oneself that there is something within the realm of practical possibility which would be better, and that all this is not inevitable and beyond one’s control. Detach yourself from it. (Easier said than done, I know, because the indoctrination runs deep; but it is the better path nonetheless.)
Aftermath creatures.— Even a cataclysmic explosion leaves a few signs of life lying around, perhaps wounded or deformed, but still functioning, and if not able to walk, then at least to crawl with some measure of purpose. If you are one of those, then crawl as well as you can, and maintain your dignity and civility among your brethren in the dirt, reminding yourself that your condition is not the worst, but rather the best that is possible now.
Missing perspective.– We are infinitesimal points on a speck of dust in a dark corner of the cosmos, say today’s sages of materialist wisdom, in their attempt at humbling or awe-inspiring gravity. But as usual the materialist sages are guilty of a sin of omission, or rather, to state the matter more frankly, their limiting wisdom tends to blind them (and hence their hearers) to the obvious, namely that in a cosmos comprised entirely of infinitesimal points on specks of dust in dark corners, we, and we alone, are capable of perceiving ourselves as points on specks in dark corners. For we alone see the dark corners and specks of dust as a comprehensible unity, a cosmos, within which we ourselves are situated, and situated not merely as infinitesimal points, but as points that reflect, and reflect upon, the whole. That is, we alone see ourselves simultaneously as both infinitesimal point and cosmos. And this perspective — the distinctly human perspective — is not a choice or a preference. It must be both or neither; for there can be no infinitesimal point without a cosmos, but neither can there be a cosmos without the infinitesimal point, and specifically without that specific type of infinitesimal point which is capable of perceiving — which is to say defining, forming — a cosmos.
