Month: August 2018

I am getting married very soon, and that milestone is giving me plenty of opportunities to reflect on what it means to love and belong within that very special bond.  These reflections would make a great essay – but it is not this one! Because as I plan this milestone, I learned that getting married is about much more than the celebrated relationship.  The whole event includes family and friends, and even – somehow – the whole community of married couple.  It also includes all the traditions, norms and etiquette, all the expectations of what a wedding and a bride ought to be.  Let me tell you: everyone has very strong opinions about how best to perform the deed!

First of all, I don’t know if it is the shallowness of our times, but all the unsolicited advices I am receiving are squarely about what I should, ought or cannot do on my‘Big Day’– the wedding -, as opposed to the very real commitment of partnership ‘till death do us part’ I am signing up for – the marriage. At this point, I am very open and willing to talk about the unconditionally of love and loyalty to my future husband, and how the ‘Good Life’ is not so easy when our growth – as individuals – is the foundation of our happiness as a couple.  We are having these deep conversations together; about commitment, intimacy, fears, the inevitability of change…  Still, I wished we lived in a time when our relatives and acquaintances would venture to share their best practices to ‘Love Well’ instead of projecting their wedding day fantasies onto me.

Most days, there is no reason to conflict over one’s dress colour.  Everyone is too busy leading his or her own lives to care about how we lead ours. But the wedding day is – somehow – fair game: a time where conventions have a fighting chance against radical individuality.  The whole wedding ‘industry’ claims that you can do anything on ‘Your’ day.  Yet the template of the religious or spiritual ceremony, followed by a cocktail and sit down formal dinner, is so engrained that any deviance from that is (almost) sacrilege.  I did not expect to have to defend (so bloody hard) my desire to host a simple bbq and campfire.  {Which in the end, I am not getting – because surrendering is sometimes easier than continuing to fight the strong headwinds of traditions and expectations…}

Personally, I value my authentic life much more than I respect traditions (or extravagances for that matter).  I strive to make all my decisions consciously; which is much easier said than done, but it is nonetheless how I cultivate the ‘Good Life’.  As a result, I am very sensitive to instances where one ‘ought to’ something simply because it has always been so.  [This argument does not fly in my book.]  If one ‘ought to’ something as a symbol of cultural belonging, of family affiliation, of etiquette amongst friends, or of compromise, I believe one should rationally (ie: consciously) decide to participate or not.  And similarly, one should get the chance to consent before being imposed any obligations by one’s well meaning but over-bearing relatives.

The details of the situations causing my current outburst are really not important.  But going through these experiences reminded me that social participation, while for the most part voluntary, often involves embedded social obligations.  Tick for tack – you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.  Aristotle talks about those utilitarian relationships, where we engage in bartered services based on trust and mutual respect.  There is nothing wrong with those relationships, unless one party expects more than the agreed upon (often non-verbally) transaction. Aristotle also describes pleasure relationships, where people would get together based on a common interest and share the joy of engaging in that interest, but not necessarily in any other aspect of their lives.  Again, nothing wrong with that – as long as shared pleasure is all that is expected !!!

With our wedding, we – somehow – escalated a few relationships from these categories to another, more special, of ‘primary friendship’ (this is also Aristotle’s classification).  These are supposed to be your life-long friends, people who know your character and love you for it anyway.  Usually, you would count them on your hand, because the emotional intimacy and time required in maintaining the relationships prevents one from having 100’s of them.  These relationships are not necessarily unconditional (ie: one doesn’t have to keep enabling an addicted friend for example) but are non-transactional either.  They are (meant to be) relationships for their own sake.

These days, we are so used to exchange our labour and goods in the marketplace that just to ‘be’ with one another has become a more foreign and somewhat uncomfortable concept.  And that is the crux of the issue: when we first announce our upcoming nuptials, we invited our friends and family to mark this occasion with us.  In the initial plan, we didn’t even envisage to have the actual civil ceremony in their presence.  The wedding was just an excuse – very good indeed – to gather together, especially since lots of our family and friends live far away.  But it grew and grew, and it took on a life of its own: mostly because we called it a wedding, and hence it picked up all the cultural baggage associated with that tradition.  Somehow, I didn’t see that coming!

I assumed that my friends and family – la crème de la crème folks in our lives – already know that I am an unconventional free-thinker.  Hence I assumed that they wouldn’t expect a traditional ‘anything’ from me.  But some are still very emotionally attached to etiquette and customs.  Hence I realized that they are more attached to their social norms than accepting of my authenticity, as flawed as I might be sometimes.  That was a realization that I didn’t expect either!

We will still have the wedding, and more importantly – the marriage-, that we desire.  As we do with the rest of our live, we will consciously focus on what matters most to us, and hence we will build our vision of paradise and our own definition of perfect.

I sometimes struggle with the impression that this sounds like a ‘my way or the highway’ attitude.  It is not intended as such – I am no bridezilla !!!  It is a radical authenticity, one in which ‘truth to one self’ simply must triumph.  This authenticity is actually primordial to me, because only that ‘truth-ness’ allows for everything subsequent to be built on a solid foundation. And I prefer to build my life slow, steady and strong, then to risk having it crumble under the weight of illusions built with good intentions.  On that, I will not compromise.

[And if you do not understand that about me, then I am not sure that you could ever know me…]

—

I let this rant decant for a few weeks before posting it.  Since then, Mark nudged me to place myself within a broader context, one of millennia of cultural evolution.  Not too long ago, I would not have decided anything about my wedding day: the whole deed was orchestrated by religion.  A little before that, I could not even have chosen my spouse, since securing relationships between families was more important than a luxury such as love. And more importantly, the wedding and subsequent marriage would not have been about ‘me’ – the individual – but about my role in the reproduction of society: a male and female producing offsprings who’s paternity is known for the purpose of social and financial inheritance.

In that vein, I am quite lucky to be free to choose the husband I wish, and to have lived with him through both years of plenty and hardships, and to know in my heart that I still want to be his bride. I know my future husband to be imperfect, for he is human, but I love him anyway, for he is not an illusion to me. He is not who I envision him to be, he is not what I think a husband ought to be, he is merely himself.  And I am very lucky to be marrying him, for he makes me smile and laugh, and feel safe and treasured.

I look forward to my wedding day, to share my joy with all our family and friends.  Yes, we are having a meal that is fancier than a family bbq, but in the end, I am still getting what I want : HIM to call mine !

In retrospect, this situation highlights an eternal (if such a thing exists!) tension between social cohesion and individual freedom.  I am currently reading “The History of Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell, where he mentions in the introduction that “social cohesion and individual liberty, like religion and science, are in a state of conflict or uneasy compromise…” basically always.  Both tensions are clearly subjects we would wish to investigate in this website, if only for the purpose of living consciously.

We live in a particular time and place where our individual freedoms are at a high water mark, thanks to the 70+ years of neo-liberal experiment and the ease of our technology-assisted lives.  I also acknowledge that my personal freedoms -as a somewhat well-off and highly educated Millenial Canadian- are actually much higher than the vast majority of my contemporaries.  [I might not be in the wealthiest 1%, but I would argue that I am certainly in the freest 1%].

It is easy to forget how much our freedom, and the habit of being free, permeates what we expect out of life.  Like a navel-gazing infant, I wailed about the intrusions of social conventions on my radical individuality – on my wedding day no less!  However, in the grand scheme of things, my right to lead an authentic life is the aberration; it is the historical anomaly.  The depth and breath of what I can do, as a unique individual, far exceeds the wildest dreams of people living even only a few generations ago.  And furthermore, there are 7.6 billions other individuals on this planet that aspire to be as free as I am.

To paraphrase Peter, morality is to accept that each of us has the right to express ourselves as individuals.  I radically express myself, and I – unabashedly – expect others to ‘deal with it’; meaning that if they have a problem with that, they must say so.  In other words, I expect others to radically express themselves too.  And somehow, I expect their radical individuality to be different than social conventions.

However, there are people for whom the reproduction of traditions IS what they want as individuals.  Maybe they have not thought though all the range of options of what they might want, or they have pondered long and hard the philosophical questions and decided that the norms are what is best (in their humble opinion).  Based on Peter’s definition of morality, I ought to respect their right to express that they desire social conventions more than their individuality.  Somehow, I find it very hard to relate with individuals who decide to ‘delegate’ or ‘align’ their individual choices to conform to social norms.

Allow me now an hypothesis: as a radically authentic individual, I benefit from my right to express myself (since this is how I wish to lead my life).  By tick-for-tack, but ultimately for the sake of self-preservation, I extend the right to individuality to all others.  But for the traditionalists, this logic does not apply: they themselves wish to conform (and for the social norms to remain what they are).  Hence, there is no embedded incentive to accept others’ radical individuality.

So how can we resolve this tension? Bertrand Russell mentions that, in the realm of ethical disagreement, there is no ‘scientific methods’ to fall back on.  “Ethical disagreement can only be decided by emotional appeals, or by force – in the ultimate resort, by war.” (p.116)  This observation is aligned with what we are witnessing in America today, and what brought most civil wars in history.

As we progress toward defining, discussing and testing new ways to live -authentically yet together- (as the social individuals that we are), let’s be aware that “ethical disputes resolve themselves into contests of power”.   We will ultimately have to face them, and find ways to resolve them; and these conflicts will not be as trivial as those related to my wedding day !

I don’t normally like to take topics “ripped from the headlines,” but I have to admit a certain amount of sympathy earlier this week for Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s many lawyers, who was caught out last week declaring that “truth isn’t truth” on one of the many endless news talking head shows.  The soundbite was, without question, bad for the President; but it also wasn’t wrong.  Don’t get me wrong: Giuliani is defending a fascist, and his cause is abominable.  But we can find value in the statements of those who are fighting a lost or even ignoble cause; and I think that we should open ourselves to statements which are worth considering even when they come from people who are on the side of evil.  It gets back to the notion in recent posts that artists without the concept of goodness, who exhibit only immoral actions, can still create works which we have to consider as containing beauty.  I don’t like the fact that they can create beauty but I have to acknowledge that they still do so.

Continue reading “Truth isn’t truth”

We took my son to Mass the weekend before last, to the church I used to go to as a child.  The Church of the Bug-Eyed Jesus, as my sacrilegious friend used to call it, was built sometime in the late fifties or early sixties on the site of probably an only slightly older church of the same name (not the Church of the Bug-Eyed Jesus, of course).  The way you knew it was a new church was because the parish school and the sacristy were of the standard turn of the century Maine brick style – both constructed clearly to avoid being burned down the way Portland had been in the great fire of 1866, the way all buildings of the late nineteenth century around here were built, with granite windowsills and external stairways and a solid design that said this building will not come down except with high explosives.  The new church, on the other hand, is midcentury modern, light and airy with thin curving walls, geometric without being boxy, with material chosen not so much for local access and heaviness as for color and harmony of form.  As a church, it felt (and feels) universal in appearance – fitting for a Catholicism which claims divine universality – even as it sits comfortably across the street from an old gas station, the local walk-up ice cream stand, and a dry cleaner.

Continue reading “Midcentury medieval”

There is a lot of wisdom in the words of dead philosophers.  But since they are dead, how can they possibly know what we are facing today ?  How can they help us find the solutions to our problems?  We assume that our current era is just so extraordinary – too complex and deeply interconnected – that dead thinkers can’t possibly have anything relevant to say about our current predicaments.   So we dismiss their life work, their thought experiments and observations, their carefully argued conclusions.   In the meantime, we remain lost and confused, nagged by the feeling that we are ‘missing something’…

The ancients, the newly dead as well as the long gone, didn’t have all of our technologies and sciences to find the solutions of questions.  Some questions indeed require science to be solved, like physics and biology.  Our understanding of the natural world – while still far from perfect – nonetheless exceeds their wildest dreams.  And since most philosophers have historically been involved in both natural and philosophical disciplines, we chuckles at how they misunderstood genetics and we use their errors to justify dismissing the rest of their treatises.

From our technological and scientific knowledge, we are learning more and more how to control our environment.  We are doing so experimentally, meaning that we don’t really know the possible consequences and ramifications of our choices.  We could be causing our own doom with the development of “MAD” nuclear energy – for example.  But we proceed with our technology and science – often at breakneck speed – mostly because it works in our favor to do so.  We deploy our techniques to make humans thrive and reign over all other species and matters on Earth.  After all, it is via our technology that humanity has become almighty: able to change the acidity of lakes, the composition of the atmosphere, capable of altering the sequence of DNA, and doing countless other miracles that couldn’t even be contemplated by our dead philosophers.

We actually know so much that, in our arrogance, we think that we can know everything.  We have incredible faith in our technical prowess; so much so that we believe that we will be able to solve our emerging and future problems with more advanced science and technology.  If only we were to discover the right tools, invent the right machines, make that next breakthrough.  We believe that science can solve everything.  After all, living people – and to an even greater extent, future people – ought certainly be smarter than dead people.

Written like that, the statement seems both natural and incongruous.  Of course, each new generation stands on the shoulders of giants.  But if we were to discard the contributions of our dead friends, what would keep us from falling?  Are we imitating Icarus here, putting all our faith in our technology as we sore to great heights?

I have studied my fair share of the past: nothing in the evolution of human thoughts and societies guarantee a linear relationship of increased wisdom over time.  Actually, history tends to suggest a more cyclical path to human civilization, with a constant rise and fall in the centers of knowledge.  The Greeks rose and fell, so did the Romans.  After Alexandria and Athens, Baghdad was celebrated as a center of intellectual achievements, attracting scholars from all over the known world.  Today, they flock to Silicon Valley.  And as you might imagine, our contemporary methods and subjects of inquiries differ vastly than our ancestors’.

From history, we know that pockets of wisdom have existed across time and space.  They emerge especially when societies are in ascendancy, as economic surpluses allow some men (at least, historically speaking, men – today let’s say people) to spare time to think (and not merely labor to survive).  One such time of greatness, an era whose influence on Western civilization can’t hardly be denied, is the combined century of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  By the third generation of brilliant student/teacher succession, we can only imagine the depth and breath of their speculation and pondering.

We can only imagine because, frankly, who reads Aristotle these days.  Some of his work has been destroyed and lost forever.  The remaining is in a dead language requiring careful translation.  Once in actual English, the primary texts are still opaque: written at a time and within a culture that is so foreign to us that we can’t hardly relate.  And most of his texts were written for colleagues and other philosophers already versed in the language of debates.

Meanwhile, we – the moderns – have seemingly lost the ability to collectively ponder and debate.  First of all, we are deeply uncomfortable with ideas and opinions that cannot be proved by data and facts.  When we face questions for which science and technology cannot provide answers, we feel so lost that we instinctively choose the facts that fits our point of view, our prejudices and our traditions without employing our full rationality.  With our opinion firmly held, we just attempt to shout out or impose it onto others…  And if it doesn’t work, we shout louder, claim that our position is the moral high ground, and simply denounce the skeptics and unbelievers as lost souls.  This feels pretty medieval to me.  Inquisition?  Anyone?

Our inability today to publicly debate proves – at least in part – that wisdom is cyclical, that it emerges and retreats, not only with the lives of man and woman who make their life work to study wisdom, but also with the extend that society is interested in applying their work to public decision-making.

Please notice that I am focusing on wisdom: a form of integrative and reflective intelligence marked by “…the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight.” (Quote from Wikipedia – our most trusted source of collective knowledge).

Wisdom combines practical intelligence, good judgment, intuition and awareness of oneself, others and the world at large to make the correct (ie: optimal and most beneficial) decisions; not just for us, but for all involved, present and future.  Amongst other things, it requires considering the likely impacts of our choices on others; hence it is often associated with empathy, compassion, ethics and benevolence.  Given this definition, wisdom is the practice of morality (ie: seeking to do what is right) in all aspect of ones’ existence, both big and small.

In our era, it is widely assumed that a wise person is “…one who knows how to live well”.  A wise man or woman is one that achieved and cultivates the Holy Grail of the “Good Life”.  The most prized reward of being wise is a general feeling of happiness, more akin to fulfillment than that reached from pleasures alone.  It is fueled by a deep sense of living an authentic life, one with a purpose; one where the joy of leading a meaningful life is interwoven with the realization of one’s individual potential within a social context.  A wise person also tends to enjoy a broad satisfaction with one’s relationships with others and one’s place in the world; not because they were endowed with good relationships to begin with, but because they cultivate goodness in everything they do, including within their relationships.

Wisdom is not easy to achieve, but it is certainly sought after by most secular and all major religious traditions.  It is the omega of our human evolution, combining intellectual and emotional intelligence.  It is the nirvana of our soul, one that we can actually be alive to enjoy…

So; with all our data, all our facts (both actual and alternative), all our historical records, all our studies of sciences, philosophies and comparative religions; why isn’t the pursuit of wisdom our most cherished objective?  If there is only one thing that we should learn from dead philosophers; it is that Wisdom is the only goal worth pursuing.

There are good summers – the ones that linger in your memory for the rest of your life, the ones that even while you’re living them, make you marvel at how they could ever even happen.  I had one of those three years ago.

Continue reading “Board games”