Value and the search for order
There is a word that the neuroscientists use when talking about why a certain series of circuits or group of circuits in the brain is activated. The word is value. There are pathways in the brain that have survival value. So when a stimulus comes in and the brain has 50,000 different ways of responding to it, some of those are useful for survival and some of those will either prevent survival or mar survival, and the human brain, in classical evolutionary pattern, will pick the one that is healthiest, that gives greatest pleasure. So I think of this as natural selection in a form, in an emotional form, and I think it is almost like choice because when you’re talking about selection in the brain, there are processes of choice. The brain has a way of evaluating what is best for the organism. And what is best for the organism is not just survival and reproduction but beauty, but an esthetic sense.
It’s an unconscious process, but what we know about unconscious processes are that for every conscious process there are 8 million zillion trillion unconscious ones, and they are in fact what will eventually determine what’s conscious and what we can understand. So again, to reiterate, this is a process of natural selection. A stimulus comes in. There are many, many ways of responding to it. Some of those ways are counterproductive, some are kind of ordinary, and some really give satisfaction and enhance the richness of our lives. And without knowing it, our circuits are choosing those, and this is what I feel is human spirit.
It’s exciting. Here are these 75 trillion cells, and every cell has hundreds of thousands of protein molecules in it and they are constantly interacting with one another in what would appear to be chaos. And in fact, if you were to be able to lower yourself into a cell, you’d be terrified because it would seem so chaotic. If it had sound, you couldn’t live with it, it would be so noisy. And yet what is actually occurring is that these reactions are all counteracting threats to the survival of that cell. And I think that there is within the human organism, only the human organism because of our cortex and our ability to process information, I think that there is an awareness of the closeness of chaos.
And I think there’s a lot of evidence for that, including cultural evidence. I think often about the polarity of our thinking. I talk about good and evil, and one of my favorite examples of this is something I extracted from my own background, which is the principle of the good inclination living in balance with the evil inclination, and one must make that choice at all times. Now, the Greeks, who expressed it as chaos versus cosmos, already, without knowing anything about cells or anything about how the body really worked, they had a sense that there was an order up there in the universe, but we live in chaos. And we can use the example of the cosmos to seek the reassurance of that stability. And you know and I know we all listen to popular music, and if we listen carefully we’re always going to hear the heartbeat in the background.
Now, the spirit, for all of its wonder and the good that we associate with it, also has base qualities and has a dark side. I think it has to do with the nearness of chaos, which is always a temptation. It’s like the butterfly and the flame. We are tempting ourselves with evil, we are tempting ourselves with that which is destructive, and we, to some extent, succumb to it. If you talk to psychoanalysts about severe neurotic disease, they often talk about the personality that skates to the edge and then rescues itself from the edge. We are so tempted to go to hell with ourselves, as it were, that’s a theological expression, that we actually do come near it, even recognizing the other pole. And this is what the Greeks meant when they were talking about Eros versus Thanatos, the love and life sense against the death sense. I don’t think it’s in very many of us to deliberately choose destruction, but we play with it and it licks us and burns us and can ruin lives. So this is all part of that polarity that I was talking about, the fear of chaos, which makes us look for order.
Hubris
Sometimes I think I understand human societies and human nature. For certain, I understand that because we live in a fallen world, because we often don’t get to pick between good and evil but between evil and more evil, we must always ask for forgiveness and be very frightened of hubris.
Resources, women and industry
Reserving and protecting resources is extremely important, and especially for people who live in highly industrialized enriched countries. Often people who live in such countries have a feeling that even if they don’t have resources within their borders, they can get them from wherever those resources are. But even if you can buy those resources, even in that anonymous place, there is a limit to what extent you can get those resources and not create a conflict. Because remember, in the resources that are left behind, people have to fight over them. And because the world is now so interconnected, conflict anywhere in the world will come right into your living room, either through television or peacekeeping forces from areas where there is peace.
As a party to the finance and media world, I tell myself we are in a completely new era when we are learning to find resources not in a place, but rather in ourselves. I often see how quickly women, often very competent women, are sacrificed on an altar of political convenience.
The truth of the matter is we are all resources. We are a human resource. And one of the greatest problems that I have witnessed, especially from a women’s perspective, is trying to convince some other half that we are an important resource and we do make great contributions, and therefore we should be respected, we should be appreciated, our work should be quantified, we should be compensated, and that we should not be taken for granted.
You
We are sitting at the table. Your eyes light up a room.
Luminescent, your large hands stir the air as you speak
To me, or quiet in sleep on the black cloth remain.
I want to touch them every day. Their lifelines know my name.
Their transparent veins conceal the course of my fate, the beat
Of our blood that changes the white of your cheeks to desire’s mottled bloom.
The back door blows open. The first drops of rain rustle through
The trees, sprinkling the wind-shaken window in which you sit glowing,
A light which shows me myself, into whom I may fade and pass.
You pile up the plates, brush the crumbs off an fill up my glass.
From the kitchen I hear the clink of knives and blue porcelain echoing,
Far off. My legs are aching with not being able to go to you.
On the origin of geometry
Slipping
and that’s how you fall
off
you fall into
it
the verdict
stretches
extends
honour
to the sentinel –
you fall
into it
and slip
It is
not the man who points
who cracks
he yawns
the gap open and rises
up
that’s nice
good to know
on scientific stand-by
the bridging of a valley
in three-quarter time
when the stealth-dance speaks
and the candleman leaps
then all the lecterns flower
they are put
up with
without a hearing
Look, the craneman comes
between
both of them now start jamming
the great leap forward, and even longer march, the step never taken
that puts everthing in a different light
the twenty-seventh letter
It is with the deepest conviction
that I stand before you now
to tell you, ladies and gentlemen,
that a limit has been reached
that boundaries have been crossed
that we must go back
if we don’t want to jeopardise
Growth in prospects
This I can assure you
and I know
that you know
that I’m counting on you
because you’re counting on me
Racing down the right
an eel slips one in.
the camp has been evacuated
the circuit disabled, incessantly,
incessantly
over
never over
you know
not this
never this
did you know
it’s not the dimensions that count
not the calibre, the standard
the banner of shifting positions
you mean?
This is clear
you see
this lucid line
never shown before
innocence lost
purity renounced
ah
systemic contractions
configured dysfunctions
ha
It is
the slight disparity
in a fine-tuned difference
almost inaudible
the subtle
opening of the dispute
It is
because
that’s why,
that’s why.
Yardbird
I would like to place
that nightly blackbird
on a branch in a poem,
but after all why should
I, it’s perched there
where it should be: in
a poem out there.
Every cliché has a reason
God did something much more clever than create a clockwork world, He created a world that could make itself.
And you know what else He did — let’s say categorically we’re all people of faith — He gave humankind free will, and free will becomes the essence of the whole thing. Because it’s not just free will in the conscious sense, but He would have created the free will that makes the synapses and the nerve cells and the neurotransmitters, allows them to make choices. And given the opportunity to make choices, they will always choose the more, let’s use that big word, salubrious way, and salubrious in the classical sense of healthy way, physically healthy, emotionally healthy, the thing that’s going to make it survive most likely and provide it with the most pleasure.
And the moral sense provides people with more pleasure than anything.
That’s been my experience, that a sense of oneself as a good person whose life isn’t sacrificed for others but is based around community and love gives one a sense of self that is the greatest pleasure that anybody can have. We say virtue is its own reward. And, you know, it’s a little homily, but there’s a lot of stuff behind that homily. Every cliché has a reason.
Emblems of rationalism and religion
What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? And what does secularization have to do with religious proliferation and pluralism?
The answer to both questions is the same. Athens and Jerusalem have created a whole history through their interaction with each other, and so have religion and secularization. In both cases, as soon as one achieves a kind of dominance, the other swoops back from exile to challenge it. When reason and intellect begin to ride high, they invariably make unrealistic claims. And faith and intuition awaken to question their hegemony. Then, just as the sacral begins to feel its oats and reach out for civilizational supremacy, reason and cognition question its pretentiousness. In past eras, this seesaw battle often took centuries.
Today, events move more swiftly; we haven’t the bandwidth for hysteria.
Concordat
Where is space for agnostics, say, in the wise sense of T.H. Huxley, who coined the word in identifying such open-minded skepticism as the only rational position because, truly, one cannot know.
Nonetheless, they purport to have great respect for religion.
This subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball). Much of this fascination lies in the stunning historical paradox that organized religion has fostered throughout Western history, both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heartrending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger.
I understand a respectful, even loving, concordat between the magisteria of science and religion, on moral and intellectual grounds, not a merely diplomatic solution. However, this cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions residing properly within the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution. This mutual humility leads to important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions. So, who would do well to embrace the principle and enjoy the consequences.
Lissom love
Come on in, reader, make yourself
comfortable, don’t trip over the
syntax and kicked-off shoes, have a seat.
(Meanwhile we hold onto each other in this
sentence in brackets, that way
the others won’t see us.) What do you think of it,
this is a window to look at
reality, all that you see out there
exists, isn’t it exactly
the way it is in a poem.
To live accordingly
I’m deeply aware of how strangely tricky it is to make goodness seem relevant or, at least, as perversely thrilling as evil. As perpetually horrified as we are of terror and brutality and war, we are riveted by them, and we let them define our take on reality. The communications miracles of the 21st century make wondrous connections possible, and yet, they also bring us images of horror with an immediacy and vividness that are debilitating.
Violent images seem altogether more solid and substantial, more decisive and telling, somehow, than kindness, goodness, and lived peace. It is easy to bow down before these images and give in to the despair they preach. But if I’ve learned anything, it is that goodness prevails, not in the absence of reasons to despair, but in spite of them.
If we wait for clean heroes and clear choices and evidence on our side to act, we will wait forever, and my experiences to now have taught me that people who bring light into the world wrench it out of darkness, and contend openly with darkness all of their days. For me, their goodness is more interesting, more genuinely inspiring because of that reality. The spiritual geniuses of the ages and of the everyday simply don’t let despair have the last word, nor do they close their eyes to its pictures or deny the enormity of its facts. They say, ‘Yes, and …,’ and they wake up the next day, and the day after that, to live accordingly.
Gunnar Fahlström
An ornithologist is a person with a powerful urge to watch birds.
If two ornithologists catch sight of one another, one of them will mention a figure. It might be a high figure, let’s say 267, or a somewhat lower figure, 113 for example. The ornithologist who has cited the lower figure will eye the other ornithologist, the one who has cited the higher figure, appreciatively and possibly give a whistle of admiration. The ornithologist with the high figure will shrug his shoulders. They will then part and go their separate ways.
The reason for this is that the figures 267 or 113 refer to the number of different species of bird which the ornithologist in question has crossed off in his copy of The Colour Guide to Birds of the World, a book by Swede Gunnar Fahlström. Gunnar Fahlström is the ornithologist who has cited the highest figure. The number of crosses can vary widely, depending on the ornithologist’s age and keenness.
It should be added that ornithologists are honest souls. In general they wear clothes in simple, natural colours, and some carry small pairs of binoculars on leather straps around their necks. The Colour Guide to Birds of the World comes in a handy pocket format. To save a lot of unnecessary flicking back and forth through the reference, the practice of gluing together those pages on which every bird has been crossed off has been introduced.
It is said that all the pages of Gunnar Fahlström’s own copy of are glued together, and that this book, which is nothing but an unreadable, glued-up clump, is wedged under a table leg in a mountain hut in north-east Lapland, to prevent the table from wobbling.
What I dreamt of
Fresh air and the sun’s warmth, almond and apricot and lemon trees, fresh bread and strong moroccan coffee, the ocean in late afternoon — these are the immediate elements.
Just prior, I have handed in my resignation, believing I am headed for London in a matter of months. But before this I return to one of the most beautiful places I have ever lived — Deia, a village ringed by mountains on the Spanish island of Mallorca. I put my furniture into storage and pack two suitcases, out of which I live, as it turns out, for the next ten years.
Finally, I begin to realize how tired I am. I feel this physically, before I can turn it into ideas and words. It is salutary for me.
I had made my way through the world up to now — and this is still my greatest virtue and vice rolled together — by my wits alone, headfirst. I forced myself out of bed at daybreak every day and rushed a silly novel of a life into being.
My task now is to write.
In moments I determine are not productive, I look out the tiny window by my desk. I see a mountain, sky, and air that dwarfs nuclear weapons and the life and death they seem to threaten. I will breathe deeply. The world realigns itself more generously, or rather my visions do.
None of this is logical, none of it makes sense.
Quite early, I put away most of the books I brought along. I learn to have patience with everything unresolved in my heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. I stop searching for the answers, which could not be given to me now because I would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday in the future, I will gradually, without even noticing it, live my way into the answers.
Sensation rewind
I have tried to stay out of this story but here I am.
I am standing on a street in the city. On my way to the R train. I can see someone standing in a window several stories high in an ornate building overlooking the park. If I were up in that building, I’d look out of the window too and wonder who was down on the ground and how we got here and why and I would admit what I have already admitted a thousand times: We are not much. We are confused and brilliant and daft.
On this street at this hour is a thin man in a huge coat. I overtake him easily as he makes his way down the avenue. With the old fashioned streetlights and the backdrop of the park, it could be another decade altogether. He reminds me of dad in several years.
A man and his dog walk toward me and move to pass on either side. He lowers the dog’s leash so that I can easily step over and for a fraction of a second while my foot is suspended in the air, I’m a little girl about to skip rope and he’s my friend swinging the jump rope handle. Then he and the dog are gone, along with the sensation.
Threshold is a line
If you go back to the etymology of the word “threshold,” it comes from “threshing,” which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness. And I think there are huge thresholds in every life. I mean, for instance, I’ll give a very simple example of it: you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, there are 50 things to do and you suddenly get a phone call that somebody you love is gone. It takes 10 seconds to communicate that information, but when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. Because suddenly everything that seemed so important before is all gone, and now you are thinking of this.
So the given world that we think is there and the solid ground we are on is tentative. And I think a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and I think how we cross it is the key thing.
There is beauty in that — because beauty isn’t all about just nice, loveliness like. Beauty is about more rounded substantial becoming. It stands to reason when we cross a new threshold what we do is heal patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught up somewhere. And in our crossing them, we cross on to new ground where we just don’t repeat what we’ve been through in the last place we were. So beauty in this sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the memory of an unfolding life.
Correspondance.1
Dear brother:
Yesterday I cleaned out my coat pocket file and found among other things an unmailed letter to you – filed for lack of a stamp. I was responding to your Valentine’s greetings with somewhat too much caution. Better I burned the letter.
I didn’t set out to argue. I only wanted to say that you mustn’t misunderstand those of us who cling to our illusion that life isn’t a hoax as you cling to your own illusions — which are not illusions, not such things as dreams are made of but such things as are the very source of life. We all live by faith, but our faiths are various, and they aren’t all equally sound. Perhaps I am not as grounded as you are — but there are small points on which I think I am more realistic — more of a Thomas who needs wounds to lay her hands on, and that goes for others, doesn’t it.
I have been going through some major readjustments in my relations. Not in thought but inside. I am not out of it. But I see light. I can’t understand why I am so incredibly stupid, so slow in learning obvious things. I think I’ve had a complex or something, which was, however, no more than overweening trailer park ambition..
I’m finishing this letter two weeks after starting it, having in the meanwhile successfully contended with a little attack of melancholy.
I think I just wanted to write to say that though I can’t see eye to eye with you I think I understand you and that in your battle I am an ally if not a soldier in the same division, and I love you.
As ever,
Natalie
Adaptation, thanatos and eros
Responding to sensory input from the body and its surroundings, delivered over incoming fibers and via chemical messengers, the human brain has, I believe, engaged itself in the instinctual battle between stability and chaos, echoing up from its deepest cellular self. That battle is expressed in the psychological conflict between Thanatos and Eros — the forces of death instinct against the forces of life. Because the two are irreconcilable, the central nervous system has had, since the time it originally came into existence with the birth of the first Homo sapiens, to conjure with itself — to try various combinations of circuitry and chemistry, and to turn to its excess reserve capacity in exploratory ways — until it became what it is today, a vast machine works of intellect, spirituality, and unfortuantely neurosis.
It might be pointed out, and properly so, that all of the foregoing presupposes a state of constant improvement, and therefore presents Pollyanna’s view of the mind and its potentialities. But my definition of the human spirit is not restricted to the sublime qualities developed within our species. It includes, I think, those other characteristics of which we are far less proud, the baser qualities in all that is subsumed under the rubric of humanness. If there is an antonym for everything we customarily associate with spiritual, it must surely be mean-spirited. The same adaptive use of circuitry and molecular interactions that allows humankind to perform the mental gymnastics leading to our finest accomplishments is also in thrall to our baser instincts. Like all adaptations, some are maladaptive. The maladaptations, the conflict between order and chaos, as well as the imperatives of living in societies in which individualistic drives must be restrained in the interest of community — these are the stuff of antisocial behavior and neurosis. This is part of humanity.
The very instability of the multitudinous mechanisms that maintain our homeostasis is reflected in the instability and ambivalence with which we view our fellows and the universe, but especially ourselves. Echoing our inner physiology, we are engaged in a constant struggle to maintain the equilibrium that permits daily living. The conflict between constancy and consistency on the one hand and chaos and destruction on the other is mirrored in the mind’s equally persistent struggle between the goodness that is in us and the dark drives of anarchic catastrophe. That luminous quality of reason that we value so highly is precariously perched on the unsettled knife edge between good and evil. The human mind being some 200 million years younger than the mammalian body to which it can trace its origin, the quality we might call mental homeostasis is not yet as effective as its physical counterpart. We function not only physically but mentally too, in a crucible of conflicting forces; we continue in stable emotional life only because a degree of balance is achieved by the internalized morality that is sustained by our individual and societal equivalents of enzymes and other regulatory mechanisms. Sometimes we lose the uneasy equilibrium we have attained with so much effort. The result is mental illness, injustice, and the maleficence to which we give daily witness.
Civilization began and persists because the maintenance of what might be called social homeostasis, and therefore a civilized society, demands that the forces of equilibrium — the forces of the good — win out. But the history of the twenty-first century and the events of which we read in our daily newspapers tell us that this is an ideal too often unattained.
Society’s struggle, like ours, never ends.
Light inside
The soul, like Dante in the woods, is always losing its way. It obsesses and broods. Like Proust, it is drawn back and back into a childhood still vivid and full of causes.
It is with our souls that we truly inhabit our lives, tasting fresh black coffee, so delicious, so bad for us, and the kiss, brief and full of consequences. The soul is always learning, always fallible. It develops well or ill. It grows and deepens and responds to our late-learned tenderness toward it. Through soul we bless our lives and come to love them in all their moods and aspect. It is always trying to embrace things, to inhabit the brokenness of the world. Its light is made real by the surrounding dark. Its bounty earned by a perilous journey.
The world is understandable
Paul Dirac was one of the founding fathers of quantum theory, and he spent his life looking for beautiful equations. It may sound a rather odd idea, but mathematical beauty is something that those familiar with such matters recognize.
Dirac looked for beautiful equations because time and again, he found that they were the ones that described the physical world. He once said that it was more important to have beauty in your equations than to have them agree with the experiment. I don’t believe he meant that it didn’t matter whether or not the equations fitted the facts, but if there was a discrepancy it might be due to not solving the equations correctly, or, even, that the experiments themselves were wrong. At least, there was a chance that it would all work out in the end, but, if the equations were ugly — well, then there was no chance at all.
When we use mathematics in this way, as the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe, something very unique is happening. Mathematics is pure thought. My mathematical friends sit in their studies and they dream up, out of their heads, the beautiful patterns of pure mathematics, and that’s what mathematics is really about, making and analyzing patterns.
What I’m saying is that some of the most beautiful of these patterns are actually found to occur out there, in the structure of the physical world around us. So, what ties together reason within — the mathematics in our heads — and the reason without — the structure of the physical world. It’s a very integral connection, going far beyond anything we need for everyday survival. In this sense, the world is understandable.
In the fire, what you get is fire
You know, I think that “depression” is one of the most misleading and inadequate words in our vocabulary. When I try to describe the experience, I find myself grasping to say what it is not. Depression is not essentially about being sad, or down, or blue, though these may be symptoms. The opposite of depression is not happiness — it is “human vitality.” It can have purely physiological origins. It may be triggered by old sadnesses grown unbearable or anger turned inward, as one saying goes. But it becomes a way of being in, and moving through, the world.
I think that all of the talk about, ‘Oh, well, this time will, you know, be really good for your soul or your character, this will make a better person of you,’ feels like absolute rubbish when you’re in the midst of the wretchedness of depression. But I think that in a way it almost feels sort of physiological. If the soul were material, I think depression sort of works on it the way you could work a piece of clay, so that it softens and it becomes more malleable. It becomes wider. It becomes able to take in more. But that’s only afterward. In the fire, what you get is the fire.
And there is a poem called “Questo Muro.” It is a phrase from a passage in Dante’s Purgatory. Dante has been in the depths of depression, in the depths of the inferno, and he’s now working his way out of it toward Beatrice, who is — you know, you could call her the soul or the anima. And he and Virgil are climbing the mountain, and all of a sudden they get to a wall of fire, and you can’t go any farther unless you go through it. So this is really is a poem, I think, about finding the courage to persist, to go through that fire.
I am walking through that fire.
For Oleg
The imaginary part I[z] of a complex number (z = x + i y) is the real number multiplying i.
So I[ x + i y] = y.
A complex number is said to be purely imaginary if it has no real part, i.e., R [z] = 0.
We actually haven’t got a clue how the laws of physics are embedded in the universe. We know they’re there and we know they’re effected. We don’t know how they are embedded. Almost anything where there are quantities involved there’s a mathematical model.
Here’s your quote. I copied this down. You conceded that if God existed, there might be special reasons for subscribing to morality. But concluded, “Unfortunately, the very concept of God is incoherent. Religion itself is incurably unintelligible.” I mean, is that a kind of attitude that was familiar to you previously as a researcher. Or does it make you think about the limits of science.
The fake language of intimacy
You know, everybody says, ‘Have a nice day’. Can you imagine if you went — like turned back to them and said, ‘God, I really wonder if I’ll have a nice day or what the day will be like,’ things could get complicated very suddenly, you know.
I don’t think we’re less capable of love and commitment and relationship in a mature sense in our time than previous generations were. I think we’re more unpracticed at it and therefore more desperate for it. And I think it’s a matter of attention really, just attention. That if you realize how vital to your whole spirit — and being and character and mind and health — friendship actually is, you will take time for it, you know. And the trouble is though for so many of us is that we have to be in trouble before we remember what’s essential. And sometimes it’s one of the lonelinesses of humans to hold on desperately to things that make us miserable and that sometimes we only realize what we have when we’re almost about to lose it.
So, I think that it would be great to step back a little from one’s life, and see who are those that hold us dear, that truly see us, and those that we need, and to be able to go to them in a different way. Because the amazing thing about humans is we have immense capacity to reawaken in each other the profound ability to be with each other and to be intimate. That’s one of the things I’ve always noticed is that, you know, there is this intense loneliness everywhere which is covered over by a fake language of intimacy similarly met everywhere.
Niebuhr (cont.), new realities and the liberal self
The world has changed in ways that would make it practically unrecognizable to Reinholt Niebuhr and his contemporaries. In Moscow, the ten minute walk between the Kremlin and the Lenin Library now passes through an American-style shopping mall with your choice of familiar fast food outlets. South Africa has its second black president. Europe has its own parliament. So does Scotland. The alleged leader of the most dangerous force arrayed against the combined military might of the Western democracies is purported to live in a cave somewhere on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Reinnie would think that we have gone crazy.
But Niebuhr’s past analyses are more than a series of astute observations that he made about the events of his time. His work rested both on paying careful attention to events and on a theological understanding of human nature and history that transcends its application to his own times. Certain key ideas in that understanding are easily summarized: The human being is both a finite, limited creature and an image of God. The final judgment on human history lies beyond history, and it falls equally on every particular human project, no matter how good or how evil that project may appear within history. Precisely because of that eschatological judgment, relative good and evil are real and make a difference within history. And, we are human beings, not God.
Niebuhr’s balanced realism, however, anticipated neither the systematic defense of liberal democracy nor the intense moral criticism of it that developed in the three decades following his death. His vindication is insufficiently appreciative for a Rawlsian liberal, and yet from the perspective of the cohesive moral community of Aladair MacIntyre or Stanley Hauerwas, Niebuhr’s idea of democracy is insufficiently coherent to vindicate anything.
A realist who is also a moral skeptic will not be particularly troubled by this. A realist who is also a moral skeptic will say, “Of course public discourse is moral gibberish. It isn’t supposed to mean anything. It’s merely cover for the self-interested, power-driven decisions that political actors make. Realism is designed to explain what people in politics do. What they say while they are doing it is irrelevant.”
But not all realists are moral skeptics. Many of them make claims like MacIntyre’s claims, based on a substantive notion of the human good and the perennial requirements of human community. That is why Niebuhr’s elaboration of those moral base points in the Christian tradition had such resonance with so many of them. So realists, especially religious realists, feel a certain affinity for the Hauerwas/MacIntyre critique of liberalism, despite the fact that Hauerwas and MacIntyre say unkind things about realism that suggest that realism is just a particularly sloppy way of being a liberal. Realists suspect that the procedural rules of liberal political discourse are too abstract to trace the complex interaction of interests and ideals that shapes real politics. Liberal reasons fall too neatly into categories of public and private reasons, religious reasons and secular reasons. The liberal self is too clearly an intellectual construct.
The liberal self is, to put it briefly, unrealistic.
Inner landscape
An awful lot of urban planning, particularly in poor areas, has doubly impoverished the population by the ugliness which surrounds them. And it’s understandable that it is so difficult to reach and sustain gentleness in these places. And I do think, like, a friend of mine, just in the last week, who was absolutely exhausted in NYC, just went away to southern Maine and spent the week by the slow ocean and she’s totally recovered, you know, come back to herself.
Though it’s not simply a matter of the outer presence of the landscape. I mean, the dawn goes up and the twilight comes down even in the roughest inner-city place. And I think that connecting to the elemental can be a way of coming into rhythm with the universe that’s here. And I do think that there is a way in which the outer presence — often in my case through memory or imagination — can be brought inward as a sustaining thing. I mean, I know that as I am writing, that there are individuals holding out on frontlines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity, where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they are able to sustain it, because there is in them some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really called to in some way. I love Pascal’s phrase, you know, that you should always “keep something beautiful in your mind.” And I have often — like in times when it’s been really difficult for me — if you can keep some kind of contour that you can glimpse sideways at now and again, you can endure great bleakness.
Black holes
Black holes are places where big stars have collapsed and effectively disappeared from the universe, except that there’s left behind a hole where the star used to be. So you have there a very strong gravitational field without any bottom. The black hole is the only place where space and time are really so mixed up that they behave in a totally different way. I mean, if you fall into a black hole, your space is converted into time and your time is converted into space.
It is sort of the ultimate relativity.
