The Work

I paused this weekend to reflect upon my proposed project here, to make a better me by publicly defending myself from my past self, and I’m now inclined to think that this is not a constructive way to work toward self-improvement. (Which just goes to show that hey, it works! Re-thinking things does help make a better me.) By putting myself into a defensive posture, even toward the person I was before, what I was seeking was justification if not flat-out approval, which emphatically is not the same thing as personal betterment. If I’m justified, I don’t need to change, and if I’m applauded (or worse and more likely, applaud myself) for it that only reinforces my feeling of justification and I don’t need to keep working on myself. Eventually, through a mix of complacency, sanctimony and self-satisfaction, I’ll be right back where I was when I started, i.e. unhappy with who I’ve become and trying again to separate myself from my past self. The perceived cure reinforcing the disease is the very definition of a vicious cycle, and that’s what I am to avoid.

Instead, if I take aim at the thoughts and ideas themselves, abstracted away from the me who thought them, it becomes far less about proving myself to be right now and wrong then and therefore no longer a justification for why I believe the things I think and believe presently–which, I’ve proved in this very post, could in fact change as I go through the re-thinking process. Of course I still have to focus upon the matters that have dominated my mind (and my mouth and my writing, when I’ve put myself to it) in the past and up ’til today, not merely because they’re where my interests and/or passions lie and as such I’m more readily able to write about them, but because that’s the only honest way to proceed. At a later point, after I’ve read and interacted with other subject matter and other people who are passionate about it and whose passion generates interest on my part, then I’d be able to address new topics in a capable and honest manner. But for right now, I really have to talk about war. I imagine most of what I’ll have to say has been covered more ably and extensively by other thinkers, but I have to talk about them nonetheless.

Memories of Wars Unfought

There is truly only one place I can begin, and I’m glad that it’s happening on Armistice Day/Remembrance Day: The wars of past and present, in which I’ve never fought or even seen for myself but nevertheless about which I must be accountable for my thoughts and words. Even in microcosm what I’ve said and done has hardly mattered beyond possibly convincing a few people and reinforcing a few others; not even the votes I cast had any affect on election outcomes, but this isn’t about trying to make up for past mistakes. It’s about owning up to them.

For a long time, I subscribed to the “Just War Theory” of human conflict, posited by Augustine and other would-be authorities. The thinking goes, this is a fallen world and there are vicious people in it who take from others even if that means killing or enslaving them, rather than sharing and working in cooperation with them to secure the fruits of the Earth for each other. That being the case, we have a natural and fundamental right to protect ourselves, our lands and possessions from bad neighbors. Similarly, we also have an obligation–because we are all human, we all have to live here on this world and we’re better off when we get along–to protect our neighbors from having that fate befall them, and by that I mean either being conquered or becoming the sort of neighbor who goes out and conquers others. While I no longer agree with its premise (and I’ll get into that later), Just War Theory isn’t a problem in and of itself since no one would dispute that there are vicious people. The problem is, what does it offer when you are the bad neighbor?

The answer I’ve come to realize, much too late unfortunately, is it offers cover. It lets me say that I’m the victim and I’m right in pursing justice against those who’ve made me their enemy, regardless of whether or not my actions made them my enemy. Rome always fought defensive wars, so the saying goes. Plant enough colonies, enough companies in foreign lands to get noticed by someone who doesn’t particularly want you so close by, and when push eventually comes to shove you can say “I’m defending myself!” And that goes for either party, since either can be an aggressor and human migration is an unstoppable force that can’t be ignored so long as humans exist. Being the defender is always the moral and ethical proposition (aside: I know that makes this site’s title highly convenient, but I’m fine with that since I want to be more moral and ethical than I am) so, knowing that, it’s what people recur to whether their actions deserve it or not.

There are many reasons why this is a problem, such as sorting out the facts of the conflict, whether it was justified or not, and how to proceed with bringing things to an equitable resolution, but most fundamentally is still this: what are you to do when the facts say you’re in the wrong? Dig in your heels? Move the goalposts? Make your own facts? Or disregard facts entirely, substituting them with symbolism and rhetoric? With apologies to myself, and to all those with whom I struggled over matters of war, that’s precisely what I did. And the tragedy of that–aside from the clear violation of my own intellectual honesty–is it’s not even me that I was defending. I may be an American, but I’m not and never was personally involved in any war effort nor even affected by it beyond how I chose to be affected.

I should go back and dig up quotations and arguments I made between 2001 and 2007, on everything from the Middle East to the Two World Wars, Korea, Viet Nam, Mexico, the Philippeans, the Indian Wars, and further back to the European wars of empire, religion and revolution, the Crusades, the Jewish Revolt, the Gallic Wars, Parthian Wars, Punic Wars, Peloponnesian Wars, Persian Wars… holy shit, was I ever a war fanboy! Is that because I watched the movie “Patton” as a fourth grader and thus too young to understand the underlying anti-war themes? No, it couldn’t be that simple. Or maybe it is, and it’s that I was caught up in an ideal mixed with a male genetic trait and packaged as “patriotism.” And, being nerdy and zealous as I am, I read everything I could that explained and justified all of these monstrosities of humankind, to the point that I felt like I was there, felt that I had real memories of war. I wonder if that’s why Patton believed he was reincarnated across time from battles with Napoleon and Hannibal. My username, after all, is no accident. I’ll keep it, if only as a reminder of who I was.

The point is, that strong identification with being on the right side of war meant going to any lengths to prove it, whether with truth or truthiness. Breaking free of that is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it’s still ongoing.

I Live!

It’s a strange thing to come back to a place after so long, especially one where I only spent a few choice moments and yet still has meaning for me.

When I decided to write on the interweb one final time, I considered opening up a new site and starting fresh and so of course put way too much thought into possible titles, themes, subject material, etc., to the point where I realized I hadn’t actually started anything yet. So, in order to finally get myself moving again I figured the best way to do that was to come back here. Besides, I quite like the Caspar David Friedrich banner, and the title “Last Defense” is still fitting for my objective. No, not defending “culture” or “heroism” or anything as abstract and pretentious as that. I aim to defend something far more concrete and real to me: Myself. And the enemy is something equally concrete and in-my-face, not a fabricated horror like “deconstructivism” or ”fundamentalism”: again, Myself.

Note that this is not going to be a “cry on my own shoulder” kind of place. <The audience sighs in relief.> What it is, is a place for me to examine some of the things I’ve had the wrong ideas about so that, hopefully, I can look back at it and protect myself from the same kinds of thinking errors again. Maybe that makes this an “intellectual navel-gazing” kind of place, but even if it is I promise that the self-corrective sentiment is genuine. I’ve had considerable time to think about this–unemployment and isolation from others will do that, especially since even in the best of times or with my favorite distractions I’ve always struggled to quiet my brain–and I’ve taken inspiration from other writers I respect to do this, so I’m going to go ahead and do it, open myself and my past assumptions up to my own criticism in order to defend and assert who I am today, tomorrow, and each day ahead, without fear or regret.

There’s definitely enough material in there to get more than four posts out of this. But, at times when I don’t feel up to grappling with myself (everyone needs mental health breaks), I reserve the right to write about stuff I like. I don’t mean to set this up as a false dilemma, but after all the fact that I was on the wrong side of the war party/peace party divide doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy Warcraft and D&D. Or Bordeaux and Belgian Black Ale. Or football and soccer. Or whatever else catches my imagination, something I know I can rely on to make a better me.

Cultural changes drive human evolution

Am busy ahead of deadlines today, but I did want to share this story: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=culture-speeds-up-human-evolution

 There are other articles on the internets about this covering various angles (including reactions to potentials for racism from this study), though I chose one that I thought treated it comprehensively and fairly. I am unsure what to offer in the way of comment at this time, lacking proper understanding of genetics, but from the fact that people tens of thousands of years ago were moving into new climates with new circumstances the species hadn’t yet faced, and yet managed to both survive and thrive in greater numbers, it would seem to follow that there was considerable evolving and passing along of acquired traits. Making the connection from the movement from tribe to city-state (and from Africa to Europe and Asia) to biological evolution seems like a leap though, but that could be those post-Industrial Age sensibilities kicking in. 

But I still have to wonder, if evolution sped up in the periods of migration and settlement in new places where the species wasn’t acclimated, have we slowed down our own development down by occupying every spot on the Earth’s surface, and if so what’s it going to take to speed it up again? Underwater settlements? Colonizing the Moon? That’s interesting to consider.

Why does one write?

I haven’t fared quite so well as I had hoped. The difficulty of writing for a living on someone else’s schedule (i.e. commercially) is always in finding time and energy to write on one’s own schedule afterward. Likewise transitioning from reporting the news to critiquing art and literature is a challenge of shifting mindsets, though it oughtn’t be so difficult for one who at least claims to love the subject matter and enjoys writing about it.

Which got me to thinking on the existential question, why do I write? The initial (written) answer is, because I have something to say that I can express better this way than through speech. (The initial thought was “for myself” but I know that’s much too simplistic.) Better because it’s more permanent, more conducive to thoughtfulness than reactive or emotional responses are, and because of how my mind has been trained to communicate (though I do think some of our epistemology is natural/intrinsic). All of that is true, and yet all of it misses the mark, because by a wide margin at least currently, I write because it pays the bills.

To be able to earn a living simply by communicating is a nice advantage of our leisure-based economy, that much I recognize. We have grown successful enough as a species in large part through the division of labor, which has allowed us to create a specialised class of workers whose jobs solely are to record and transmit information from its sources to its consumers. Much easier that way than relying on Joe Everyman to find things out for himself, let alone tell others what he’s discovered–aside from ability and credibility concerns, how many would even consistently undertake those efforts? From the standpoint of History, looking back to the days before the printing press when information was passed from town to town by traveling merchants or vagabonds, very few would bother. Most of us only care about our own small circle of influence.

Which brings me to my point: I write for the local paper of a small, insular community to which I have no ties, which means I write about them for them, within their circle. It’s information that they know, far better than I do, but these are stories that are important to them and that they need to tell, or rather to have told. As a card-carrying member of this particular class of workers, I knew that I would be a vessel for information, that’s the life I chose long ago and I do enjoy writing about other people, past and present, real and imagined. What I wonder though is, when do I get to write the story I want to tell?

To answer my own question, that’s what I need to use this site for, and use it for as long as it takes until I can write what I want, for myself, and pay the bills by doing so.

The Romantic Ideal

To my view, there have been at least three major epochs of Western Civilisation that have celebrated the ideal of heroism for its own sake: the Ancients of the Near East and Mediterranean, popularised by the Homeric Epic; the Early Middle Ages of Northern Europe, with its own form of epic or Saga; and the Age of Romanticism, though for that much of it was too entangled with corresponding political idealism coming out of the Revolutions to remain untainted when those ideals went unrealised. (As an aside, it’s also interesting they never produced a successful epic of their own.)

 While visions of perfect liberty and brotherhood were quickly shattered (as they, being immature beliefs, always are) by the ambitious Few and the iconoclast Many, even in their ruin remained a sense of the unconquered Self. I do not suggest that the Self had been unrealised to that point, though it certainly had been sublimated to the Mass from the rise of medieval Christendom through to the end of absolute monarchy. Oddly, Imperial Rome likewise sublimated self-will, and yet the idealised beauty of the individual will has rarely been so championed as in Romanticism.

There was a time–oddly enough in my youth–when Romanticism held little appeal to me, and still I regard it with misgivings because of its unfettered political idealism, but in terms of art as expression of self-will, I look on it now with a certain respect. There is a reason I chose “Wanderer Above the Mists” by Caspar David Friedrich to visually represent my site:

There are several worthwhile interpretations of this painting. Contextually, it is a self-portrait of the artist, but radically so: with back turned to the viewer, he is not the subject of the painting, he is in the painting. Even without knowing it’s a self-portrait, we can still see that the painted figure’s own experience trumps that of the viewers, since he’s hiked out to the promontory and been rewarded with the awe-inspiring view that we on only minimally appreciate here on the other side.

Adding to that interpretation but going beyond it, what I see is the lone individual standing out above the Formless Void, the Nothing itself. While the motion of the scene draws the viewers into the center of the storm of Chaos, the individual, the very principia individuationis, superimposes himself above it; perhaps defiantly, perhaps even triumphantly, but he is there nonetheless, and while we are not we want to be. That, I think, is a model of heroism.

There are other, greater, models of the heroic ideal than the self-assertion of Art contra Nature of the Romantic Age, which I hope to explore as time allows, but it is a good enough place to begin since they were often the ones who brought those models back into the Modern era, even if not always for the right ends.

Into the breach

A beginning is a difficult thing. Sallying forth into the Outer Chaos of the Internet with naught but a computer and my own will to guide me, I stand little chance of success in the oath I have sworn–to fight the good, yet hopeless fight against the dark forces of deconstruction. But I shall meet them in battle nonetheless, and though the war is lost perhaps I will win a few small victories until, by whatever cause or blame, I am forced to leave the field.

If all of that reads like hogwash from a pompous student who’s read too many medieval tales, played too many wargames and deluded himself into thinking he’s a would-be hero of the culture war, it is exactly that. And yet, what I’m really on about with this is that I do believe there has been a significant downturn in the Culture since the advent of the Twentieth Century (and perhaps since the failure of Romanticism). Its perpetrators range from Anglo-American Democracy to Germanic Nationalism, from fundamentalist world religions to relativist secular humanism, from materialist socio-economic systems (capitalist and collectivist alike) that reduce humanity to the lowest common denominator in the name of equality, to the inexorable march of Technology and with it the rise of all-devouring Apathy and Laziness, but in truth we are all to blame, every one of us who hasn’t stood up in the face of that Everything-and-Nothing, that great cacophonous Mass, and said “Enough.”

We need heroes. No, not the sword-and-shield fighting men of yore, we need heroes armed for discourse, but there is much we can learn of the cultures that produced them, in particular those out of Northern European myth-history. I have my own reasons for asserting those traditions, which I intend to make clear in time (my username is a small hint), but even from an objective viewpoint they are valid. I think  J.R.R. Tolkien said it best in his seminal work, Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics:

“In Norse, at any rate, the gods are within Time, doomed with their allies to death. Their battle is with the monsters and the outer darkness. They gather heroes for the last defence… It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the centre, gave them victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage. ‘As a working theory absolutely impregnable.’ So potent is it, that while the older southern imagination has faded forever into literary ornament, the northern has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times. It can work, even as it did with the gođlauss viking, without gods: martial heroism as its own end.”

Aristotle had much the same idea centuries before, reflecting back upon the Homeric Age when he defined the virtue of Courage as “doing of great deeds” while “enduring pain”, including the pain of death. Admittedly we are fortunate to be shielded from the fear of elemental danger and violent death, but nevertheless we have our own monsters to contend with today, even if they are predominantly rhetorical, and though their triumph is virtually assured we who have not yet been crushed by that Mass ought to stand in the breach for as long as we may endure.

 How I shall proceed to do that exactly, I’m honestly not quite sure, but since I have many different kinds of arrows in my quiver, which is to say many different interests–in art, architecture, cinema, history, languages, literature, music, mythology, photography, to name several, not to mention the stuff of life in general–there are at least a few things I can write about until the end comes.