Dictionary of Micro Rants: Beauty

Beauty: in the human form, the biological equivalent of a backhanded compliment.

One of the biological markers of facial beauty is averageness: those faces that stray from the human or from a racial average are considered plain or ugly, while faces that are most average are the most beautiful--and by “average,” I take it, the finding is that a beautiful face is the one whose measurements occupy middle positions and are thus average in the sense of the median rather than the mean or the mode. For example, most noses are either large or small, round or thin, whereas the beautiful nose falls somewhere in between.

Of course, there’s also a qualitative aspect of beauty, which is that the most normal face is commonly identified as the most desirable. This teleological aspect seems strongly influenced by Plato, the point being that normality reflects ideality: the most normal face, for example, stands as an exemplar of the abstract Form of the perfect face, a face that doesn’t exist in nature, like the perfect circle or the perfectly straight line; meanwhile, actual faces strive to embody that ideal, as imperfect copies. Thus, we sometimes say someone is “achingly beautiful,” and the ache is due to the reminder when we behold such a face that the whole natural order is flawed compared to a more ideal realm that taunts most of us with such blatant evidence of our deficiencies.

A similarly curious reaction to a beautiful body occurs when a male sees a curvaceous female and feels compelled to exclaim “Damn!”--short for "God damn that ass!" Often, the man who's struck by those curves is left with his eyes squinting and mouth agape from exasperation, as though he'd been punched in the gut. Why the apparent anger or frustration with such a beautiful sight? There are mundane reasons, such as the fact that seeing a woman’s extreme curves can cause a man to have an uncomfortable erection and may compel him to think, at least, of going through the time-consuming and humiliating rigmarole of wooing her. He may also be jealous of the shapely woman’s boyfriend or husband. 

But there’s a deeper reason for the oddness of any hidden hostility to beauty, which is that we dread the prospect of an alien, supernatural realm that surpasses our understanding. Whereas facial beauty is largely a matter of the face’s abundant normality, the parts of a woman’s body most likely to arouse a curiously mixed reaction from a heterosexual man, which is to say her large and round, or “phat,” buttocks, are recognized for their strangeness. The man’s reaction to a woman’s phat rear is similar to how a person would respond to the sight of an extraterrestrial creature: with shock, incomprehension, and even annoyance that the sight is so apparent even as it defies familiar categories. And so physical beauty can be otherworldly, symbolizing the limits of our understanding and thus the absurdity of our way of life from an objective or foreign perspective that transcends those limits. Thus, beauty can repel even as it attracts, like a backhanded compliment.

Dictionary of Micro Rants: Prayer

Prayer: obviously among the top five most embarrassingly asinine acts a person can undertake while clothed. (The top five such acts done while unclothed are all sexual in nature.)

To begin briefly to count the ways (and to paraphrase Wittgenstein), prayer is as pointless as a widget attached to nothing: either the outcome you ask God for comes to pass and would have happened anyway or it doesn’t because God knows better.

Then there’s the blatant contradiction of assuming that God is knowledgeable and powerful enough to be listening to all prayers and able to fulfill them, not to mention to have created the universe in the first place, but also dimwitted and pliable enough to need a lowly human’s advice on how to run things or to be the least bit pressured by our entreaties.

Next, there’s another contradiction. Whoever prays is sure to clasp her hands together and close her eyes, thus signifying that she poses no threat, that she comes to God humbly and doesn’t demand anything with a threat of laughably inadequate force. Moreover, prayers are generally sprinkled with self-deprecating qualifications, with incantations designed seemingly to assure any god who’s listening that here’s someone hard done by who could use a favour. However, all of this clearly amounts to the falsest humility, since the very notion of prayer presupposes that the creature can influence or control the Creator. As is apparent from so-called primitive, shamanic religions, the medicine man goes as far as to explicitly cast spells on divine forces, as though gods could be hypnotized by magic formulas.

Thus, the contradictions of modern prayer betray the origin of that form of pseudocommunication. Evidently, religions began with visionary states of consciousness caused by psychedelic drugs or trance states, in which an authoritative, seemingly all-knowing voice is heard from within. In Hinduism this gave rise to mystical monism, to the view that there’s only one true consciousness and that our minds and all material forms are mere disguises worn by God. To that extent, then, prayer has at least a modicum of logic behind it: even we can influence God because we’re really identical with God; moreover, we can communicate with God by closing our eyes, turning inwards or perhaps whispering, since as indicated by the psychedelic voice, God resides within as pure consciousness.

But western religions are individualistic, holding such monism as blasphemy. Thus, the modern prayerful theist must play an awkward charade, attesting to her profound humility while acting like she has power over God. She’s superficially passive and pleasant when she prays, since there’s no point in getting mad at herself; after all, religions are based on the misinterpreted experience of being identical with God. But she nevertheless means to cast her more sophisticated magic spell, to enchant God to do her bidding, since her modernist religion elevates the individual human as the one who Nietzsche will later call the god killer.

It goes without saying that every such act of prayer is a grotesque fiasco. At best, prayer distracts and comforts the one who prays, but so do a million less preposterous pastimes, like taking a long walk or reading a good book. 

The final absurdity of prayer, though, befalls those who ridicule prayer, like the present writer, but who nevertheless find themselves instinctively calling out to no one when scared or angry. Prayer thus avenges itself on those who know better than to try to converse with an invisible person, since prayer apparently has some genetic support which drives even the most self-conscious atheist to debase herself in that fashion.

Dictionary of Micro Rants: Love

Love: key to the illusion of immortality.

Especially after the troubadours and thanks to the modern celebration of the individual, most people now think love is the most important and meaningful thing in the universe. And by “love,” they mean mainly romantic love between life partners and parental love for children. This conviction is represented in the philosophical movie (with the disappointing, New Agey ending), Tree of Life, in which a character says, “Unless you love, your life will flash by.”

From a biological perspective, the centrality of those two kinds of love makes sense, since such strong emotional bonds are clearly mechanisms needed to preserve our genes: romantic love steps in after the particular sexual impulse wanes, keeping a couple together to care for the helpless infant that’s naturally produced by the sex act, and parental love binds parents to their children, the latter being the vessels that carry their parents’ genes into the future. So indeed, if you don’t love in those ways, the genetic code that supports your life, at least, will likely be erased with your death. The movie Tree of Life spiritualizes this biological truth, pandering to American theists with a vision of an afterlife, implying that love is needed to avoid hell or to maintain a social network to make heaven enjoyable, or some such mob fodder.  

Psychologically rather than biologically, the point would be that people who love tend to build up a rich store of memories, so that time doesn’t seem to pass as quickly to them; they’re too busy living to notice the months and years ticking by.

An existential cosmicist, though, would rewrite the movie’s line as follows: “Unless you love, you’ll appreciate that all life flashes by (compared to the duration of the cosmos).” Love preserves the genes and creates new individuals, but doesn’t actually make anyone immortal; instead, love creates the illusion of immortality by preoccupying a person with a host of day-to-day familial chores, social functions, celebrations, and so on. Without the rich experience caused by romantic and parental love, a person is free to dwell on the horrible philosophical facts of natural life. The loveless soul then lapses into alienating angst, cutting the person off from the community and thus depriving him or her of a wealth of distracting memories. Time then seems to leap forward for such a person, as shown in the film Synecdoche, New York. Love is crucial, then, not as the key to actual immortality, but as the stage for the play of a “life well-lived,” the bright lights and drama of which distract from the horrors that lie behind the scenes.

Thus, the choice to succumb to biological instinct as opposed to philosophical or mystical anxiety is the choice between two forms of alienation. You can detach from cosmic reality and live in our now mass-concocted fantasy world in which romantic myths paper over uglier biological truths or you can commune with the undead god (mindlessly creative nature) and forgo the social games that most people play.

Dictionary of Micro Rants: Mistake

Mistake: what business graduates who lack a refined vocabulary call an act of vice.

When you pull your underwear on backwards, add a quarter rather than the needed half of a teaspoon of sugar to your sauce, or make a left turn instead of the needed one on the right, you make a mistake. That is, you absentmindedly fail, usually in some minor way for which there’s little or no culpability. But when you’re a politician, a businessperson, or a lawyer, for example, and you naturally lie, cheat, and steal your way to the top, you don’t err at all but knowingly play the social games that require perverse excellence in vice, that is, great demonstrations of selfishness, deceitfulness, cold-heartedness, brazenness, short-sightedness, and so forth.

When a Machiavellian power-player gets caught practicing those dark arts, he invariably seeks to avoid responsibility for his choices by labeling them mere mistakes. For example, western CEOs are notorious for pretending to be dunces or ignorant figureheads when they’re caught trying to pull off billion dollar frauds and their companies blow up in their faces. They then act like they never even deserved the hundreds of millions they were raking in thanks to their hand-picked board members who rubberstamp their pay packages, like they had no knowledge that their company was engaging in the very frauds that have become standard operating procedure in so-called post-industrial, financialized societies. Instead, they humbly concede, before senators who are equipped only to “grill” and never to roast, boil, or skin--so says the mass media’s meme--that they’re guilty of a mistake or two, albeit a mistake with disastrous consequences, but nevertheless an innocent moment of absentmindedness. To be sure, a power player never publicly owns up to her year after year of accrued experience at honing the vices that’s a prerequisite for advancing any politician or free market businessperson within her hierarchy. Moreover, because few people want to admit that most sectors of their society consist of just such practically amoral hierarchies, a nihilistic or sociopathic Machiavellian is quickly forgiven for his or her “mistake.” After all, as the saying goes, anyone can make a mistake (i.e. everyone sins in a declining, corrupt society).

The first such mistake was committed by Satan, the Prince of Evil, and I happen to have the transcript. “Verily, Lord,” said Satan to God, “I’ve jealously watched you waste your divine powers on this petty Creation, on these beasts you call humans. I’ve burned with ambition at the thought of what I would do instead were I seated on your throne, and I relished the prospects of waging an angelic war on your hosts and then either of unseating you and becoming master of all or of losing my station in a blaze of glory and then of marshaling all the demonic forces of Hell to sabotage every one of your foolish endeavours. Nevertheless, I say to you now with respect to all of that, on this Judgment Day at the end of all things, with the blood of trillions of your humans dripping from my claws and fangs, that I merely made a mistake.”

God is then reported to have grilled Satan for hours in front of TV cameras, before punishing him with a fine of 0.003% of Satan’s total net worth.

Dictionary of Micro Rants: Gods, Undead and Personal

Gods, undead and personal: gods exist but hide in plain sight, so that ironically atheists surpass theists in their respective knowledge of the divine.

If gods are ultimate creative powers, there are two kinds of gods which are obviously real: natural evolution and higher animal consciousness. The former is just the evident power of matter and energy to combine in various forms which interact and develop new forms in time, from molecules to galaxies and perhaps infinite universes. Nature’s creativity gives rise to complex patterns throughout the cosmos, but this prodigious power is impersonal; to be sure, like naïve children we anthropomorphize the sun, the wind, and the rain, but that’s just projection, the over-extension of our personhood onto the inhuman, so that we might mitigate our alienation from nature. Nevertheless, natural forces are divinely creative. Nature is thus neither living nor dead. The natural creator gods, named now by those modern wizards, the physicists, astronomers, biologists, and other scientists, are undead: creative but monstrous, inhuman, terrifyingly other than what we’re most familiar with and best capable of understanding, which is ourselves. 

Consciousness is the living, personal god which creates what the philosopher Kant called the phenomenal world by interpreting experience, beholding everything within a worldview, applying concepts and values, identifying the natural form and thus acquiring power over it. There’s no good reason to think that consciousness is naturally or metaphysically prior to nature; no mind created the universe out of nothing. However, the subjective aspect of everything in nature depends on conscious creatures. The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics calls this aspect the "collapse of the wave function." The point is that were life never to have evolved anywhere, there would still have been stars, planets, atoms, and all the other products of undead gods, but these products would differ from the ways we experience the world, given how our brains happen to process information we receive from our senses. We help create the world we experience, and to that extent we’re all divinely creative.

However, most conscious beings are doubly oppressed rather than reigning in glory. We’re entombed within the decaying body of the undead god, that is, within the natural totality that evolves as a result of the interplay of mindlessly creative forces. Also, most of us are forced to occupy lowly positions in power hierarchies dominated by conscious beings that, unlike so-called Christians, are genuinely twice born and doubly divine. The oligarchs who tend to rule societies conquer nature by understanding their experience within a worldview, but they also conquer their fellow conscious beings, identifying with the undead gods as the oligarchs compete according to social versions of the principles of natural selection. Oligarchs are thus avatars of monstrous nature, their sociopathic depths of vice symbolizing the menacing inhumanity of natural forces which afflict us despite our more modest divinity and limited power over nature.

Dictionary of Micro Rants: Oligarchy

Oligarchy: rule by the most vicious few over the more innocent many; the default way of organizing societies.

There are in practice three kinds of government: naked oligarchies, covert oligarchies, and non-oligarchies which tend to degenerate into oligarchies. The explanation of why this is so has at least three levels, each deeper and broader than the next. At the highest, most apparent level, there is what Robert Michels called in 1911 the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which is that the centralization of power is the most efficient way of organizing large groups. Bureaucracies form as control needs to be specialized and delegated, and as the bureaucracy grows, higher and higher levels of command need to be put into place to avoid a regress to anarchy, whereupon those near the pyramid’s apex tend either to be corrupted by the greater power they acquire or to have been sufficiently vicious in advance to have successfully worked their way to the top of the hierarchy, wining out against cut-throat competitors.

More broadly, the most stable social structure in species whose members live in large groups, including birds, fish, and primates, is the dominance hierarchy in which power is centralized in a minority of alpha males or females who maintain a social order by rigorously enforcing rules of which members enjoy such benefits as privileged access to food or to mates. Oligarchy in human societies is just our form of the dominance hierarchy, which is to say that the underlying structure of our myriad social systems is naturally selected.

Deeper still, the inevitability of oligarchy and the injustice entailed by any such gross inequality have Gnostic flavours, revealing the existential, mythical status of our ultimate position within nature as accursed, imprisoned beings too clever to maintain our peace of mind. The undead god, which is the monstrous power of cosmic creativity, blindly spits up creatures that are instinctively opposed to living alone, only to create a second dead end for these social beings: when they huddle to escape the anguish of loneliness, the majority who are relatively docile place themselves in the clutches of oligarchs.  

Dictionary of Micro Rants: Politics

Politics: the secret application of vices in preserving group cohesion; in professional circles, politics features the art of telling noble lies to convince people, in effect, that Sartre was wrong when he said that hell is other people.

When many people choose to live together in cities and nations, a dominance hierarchy emerges as the most stable social structure, as it does in most social animal species. However, most people are too vain to consider themselves animals whose lives are governed largely by power relations. From a genetic viewpoint, our great intelligence is a byproduct that leads us astray, filling our heads with diversions and delusions of grandeur. Whereas many kings, emperors, tsars, and dictators have foregone the political enterprise, preferring to rule as unashamed beasts with displays of absolute power, modern rulers are forced to resort to Machiavellian maneuvers. This is because modernists preach secular humanism, which inspires people to think of themselves as heroes, boldly confronting the forces that hinder our progress. Spreading that myth and then undermining it with brutal oppression of the masses would obviously be counterproductive, and yet modern myths hardly prevent the emergence of dominance hierarchies. Thus, modern politicians apologize for and exploit power imbalances with covert rather than with open forms of corruption.

Politics is a charade in which leaders and followers pretend to be rational and virtuous while demonstrating the opposite at every opportunity. After all, politics isn’t just for professional politicians; no, whenever people interact socially in a group of whatever size, we resort to political maneuvers to maintain the power dynamic while distracting ourselves with our group’s loftier stated purpose--lest we break our social bonds, since we’re too vain and clever to sustain transparently-degrading group dynamics. With political posturing, spin-doctoring, white lying, backstabbing, double dealing, flip-flopping, gossip, and brinksmanship, we concede that we’re animals vying for power while maintaining the legend of our nobility.

Dictionary of Micro Rants: Conservatism

Conservatism: a paradigm of shamefulness.

Conservatism is a cynical rallying cry against what liberals have wrought, when powerful conservatives pretend to favour premodern traditions while relishing the modern way of imposing the eternal dominance hierarchy. However, when preached by the poor, social conservatives, conservatism’s a preference for premodern myths that please, at least, compared to the modern ones that evoke horror and angst. Either way, conservatism is the sheerest chutzpah, the most appalling concatenation of noises by those with the least capacity for shame. Theoretically, a retrograde mindset is a check on the excesses of modern liberalism, but in practice the conservative either approves of the modern form of social engineering, worshipping the apex predators who emerge triumphant from the social Darwinian struggle, or else actually espouses a preposterous premodern worldview (Christianity, Islam, etc), as though she arrived from a time machine, skipping over the European Age of Reason. Conservatives pretend to cherish ancient wisdom, but they embrace either the stealth oligarchy, which deploys modern methods of social control, or else ancient theistic drivel.

The United States was founded by deistic hyper-rationalists who wanted to build a New World, free from Old World religious tyrannies. Today, the U.S. is perhaps the most conservative and thus the most confused modern Western society, reveling in the military power and wealth that flow from technoscience and from individualistic institutions (democracy and capitalism), while paying lip service to old time, authoritarian religion. “Freedom” and “liberty” are American shibboleths, but Americans have managed to make liberalism taboo. Liberalism, says the American conservative, is socialism, a form of tyranny in which the individual serves the State. But a stealth oligarchy can also be officially individualistic, as in the U.S since its founding. American conservatism is thus a colossal distraction, a carnival of follies that prevents many Americans from appreciating where they actually stand as victims of scientistic, self-destructive modernism.  

Dictionary of Micro Rants: Liberalism

I’m starting a new series of mini rants at this blog, defining an array of relevant terms in around three hundred words or fewer per entry. This series will amount to a sort of snarky personal dictionary, inspired by John Ralston Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. 

So, to begin...

Liberalism: modern ideology of individual freedom, now anathema to the United States, the so-called land of the free.

Originally, liberalism was the salvation of modernists from the Dark Ages, a celebration of Reason, Freedom, and Progress. Liberals were grim secular humanists, scientists, and renaissance men, God’s blood staining their faces as they set about creating a New World, free from superstition, oppression, and squalor, with each liberal serving as her own rationally self-controlling and creative sovereign. Now liberals are reduced to effeminate, vacillating, double-talking managers of the new form of dominance hierarchy they created, the stealth oligarchy in which the strongest and most vicious use democracy and free markets to enslave the mob. Ironically, liberal myths of our potential godhood have backfired, thanks to the liberal’s science-centered philosophy which corrodes all grand delusions, leaving the postmodern wasteland in which liberals know enough to be miserable and are free to endlessly consume as an oligarch’s branded cattle.

The very instrument that modern, classic liberals considered sacred, namely technoscience, has been used to control society and not just nature, and so armed with market research and cognitive science, American demagogues have demonized liberals, counting on the public’s ignorance of the liberal’s role in the birth of modern civilization. Liberals armed and unleashed a new breed of human predator and parasite, whose ill-gotten wealth co-opts liberal governments against the majority’s interests or whose perfected demagoguery creates the modern dictatorship. Thus has liberalism demonstrated our gross inequality, making nonsense of the liberal’s myth of universal human dignity. Liberalism was a paean to the end of the Old World, directing the modern experiment in social engineering which didn’t eradicate kings and other pseudo-gods but merely improved their methods of control. Liberalism is the myth of human progress, but liberals have shown that sometimes change is an illusion.