HOLLY DAYS

I have lumped these three into a single post in the past, mostly because the hubbub of Christmas makes it hard to find time to keep up with these daily posts. But also because they became philosophically of-a-piece for me back when I was in college.

I’m not one to ever accept a revelation from authority. I can only respect a rule if I can deconstruct its rationale and agree with its intent. I need to build everything from first principles; “Because I said so” seems stupid and meaningless to me.

I constructed some of my earliest cohesive philosophy around a naive hedonic vision. Darwinian evolution had been a very profound revelation for me. It was a rational creation story, by which I could finally understand how the chaos of randomly crashing particles could eventually arrive at what was, still back then, the black box of our minds. The magnificent creativity of a handful of simple rules almost infinitely reiterated felt like a profound grand unified theory of everything. I assumed evolution had guided the structure of our minds to an optimal balance of desire and fright. I saw that when we followed these innate reinforcers of pleasure and pain as they bubbled up, we generally and automatically tended toward positive outcomes, eating when hungry, drinking when thirsty, stepping carefully to avoid a fall, or lashing out when wronged.

Of course by the time I was on my own and in college, my perspective had grown enormously. I could no longer relegate the distant horrors of history to particular perversions of our natural and primal state. It became clear that the clash of any peoples’ desires and fears could become cataclysmic. And of course that even within myself, one desire would crash into another, and mediating them was complex to the point of being impossible. I realized (duh!) that rules and values had been, and would need to be continuously formulated, organized, and enforced to resolve the dizzying matrix of these motivations and their alternatingly crossed or reinforcing interactions. It was pretty obvious that values like “I am a jealous god, have no others above me!” was useless fascist bullshit. The 7 deadly sins were a little more operant, but still, all they really said was “balance” (double duh!). Even a value I had cherished, Lost Horizon’s “Be Kind.” was obviously too simplistic to be workable.

Not only that, the universe is obviously a dynamic place, so that values that may be powerfully protective in one time or place, can become obsolete and destructive in another. The hedonic values I had imagined had indeed been created by the wisdom of evolution, but the shifting alliances and ideologies, the accelerating technologies of human societies vastly outpaced the of the evolution of our minds, which were built for a world that no longer existed. We countered the tragedy of that mismatch by crafting ideas like sin and hell, by writing commandments and building systems of jurisprudence to tune our minds and cultures and compensate for this loss of synchronization between form and function that the biological evolution of our minds was just too pokey to manage.

But even our social structures are too slow to keep up to date, and rules are too often obsolete as soon as they get implemented. What I really wanted was an value system structured to continuously generate solutions to problems rather than a fixed set of rules to attack them with.

The first priority in such a system needs to be to understand the problem then be thorough and ruthless in analyzing and judging outcomes. Moreover it seems obvious that the whole point of evolving a mind with a perceptual system in the first place is to discover objective reality and tune one’s behavior to coincide with it. Therefore Truth must be primary.

The obvious central flaw with a hedonic value is that it is fundamentally selfish; our cognitive systems for altruism and fairness notwithstanding. But in bulk, our built-in selfishness will inevitably led to conflict within any community, and of course for humans at this point, our survival depends on a functioning community. It seems obvious to me that the most fundamental value that binds us into a community, that mitigates the conflict of crossed purposes is of course Love. Almost all brotherhood, fellowship, and selflessness springs from Love.

Finally, I might say that biggest obstacle to implementing and testing solutions we may arrive at through clarity and love would be opposition from other forces or persons–but so what? Are they going to chain us to a radiator? No. What fundamentally prevents us from progressing is our fear of that opposition, too often anticipated and imagined within ourselves, and causing us to shrink from action. Fear’s most formidable enemy is Courage.

So, Happy Truth, Love, and Courage. Three beacons I have used for decades to maintain a true course despite having no revealed scripture, gurus, gods or universal truths.

Happy Holly Days