Control Thyself

I don’t know if it has always been this way (I suspect it has), but people today do seem to have a tendency to want to control the world around them by dictating what other people should do.

I’ve spent a lot of time driving, possibly more than average, and I’ve observed myself and others while doing this. We aren’t just driving, we’re also judging every other driver we encounter. Ultimately, each of us is thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?” But the sad fact of the matter is that they are driving the way we drive; they’re driving along thinking, “Why can’t everyone just drive the way I drive?”

We bring the same attitude, the same self-justified view of things, to life in general: “Why can’t everyone just live the way I live?” And the problem is the same: Everyone does live the way we live: self-absorbed and thinking we know better than everyone else.

The philosophical attitude is of course somewhat different: We should examine ourselves first, and only when we’re sure we’ve gotten it all figured out (which of course, philosophically speaking, is never) should we turn our attention to telling other people what to do.

This approach tends to strike people as unrealistic, impractical, other-worldly. And those criticisms are true. The truly philosophical life contributes nothing to the growth of the economy, the advance of science and technology, the expansion of human domination over nature. On the contrary, it tends to heap scorn on the pursuit of such things, to call attention to the impermanence, and thus the emptiness, of all achievements along these lines.

This leaves philosophers open to the criticism of being anti-humanistic: Science and medicine and so on have improved the human condition immeasurably over the centuries, and surely no one can claim that there’s no value in this improvement. There’s a certain amount of exaggeration in this claim of progress, but there’s also a certain amount of truth: People do live significantly longer today than they did even a century ago, and anyone who wants to argue that this isn’t an improvement is going to have a hard time convincing anyone.

At the same time, however, we seem to have paid, and are continuing to pay, a steep price: in consumption of the Earth’s resources, destruction of the environment and deterioration in our social, political and spiritual circumstances.

There are lots of rhythms in life. In human life in particular, there’s an upbeat, an inhalation, a rising tide in our youth as we grow and go out into the world to make our mark, raise families, change the institutions and situations into which we’re born. And there’s a downbeat, an exhalation, an ebbing tide in our later years as we seek to preserve and conserve what we’ve learned and what we’ve found worthy of valuing, and to protect what we’ve acquired.

There will always be a tension between these movements, and likely a swinging of the pendulum between one and the other. What seems likely to be most harmful, most likely to render us unable to keep our social world going, is the belief that we can freeze the pendulum at some point in its swing, to believe we can say, “This much freedom, this much exploration, and no more.” And that applies to the carved-in-stone principles of science as much as it does to the conventions of bourgeois society or the commandments of religion.

It’s precisely at the point when we think we have it all figured out that the stuff we don’t know comes up behind us and clubs us on the back of the head.

Where There's a Will There's an Excuse

Looking back at the stuff I’ve written since I reactivated this blog a few weeks ago, it struck me that a casual reader might get the impression that my thought processes are pretty chaotic. I could claim that I’ve deliberately been picking random topics as a way to enable “emergent order” to work its magic on my muddled thoughts in the same way it’s supposed to account for the existence of order in physical processes that are alleged to be random in their underlying dynamics. But just as I believe that the order in our cosmos is there from the beginning, I also want to claim that there has been method in my madness all along.


One of the nagging questions about human beings, one that gets asked over and over again under all kinds of circumstances, is this: How could anyone do that? We hear about some awful, horrible thing that has happened, something that seems to violate every rule as we understand the rules, and we wonder how or why another human being could behave in such a grossly and grotesquely wrong way: committing serial murders, genocide, child-rape, conning old people out of their life savings, condemning miners to unmarked graves in unsafe coal pits, feeding children toxic chemicals with their formula, aiding and abetting dictators just to get at the minerals buried under their subjects’ homes, etc. etc. etc.

Frankly, I don’t think the answer is as difficult or mystifying as people seem to believe. Let’s start here: Socrates said (according to Plato) that no one does evil willingly. And Aristotle said, famously, “All beings by nature desire the good.” People do what they do because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that what they’re doing is good – if not for the world at large, at least for themselves.

And people are able to convince themselves that very bad things are actually very good things. Even a psycho- or sociopath may have some inkling that society in general disapproves of the bad, terrible, awful things he or she wants to do, but there’s always a way to claim that “I am right, you (all) are wrong.”

Because we all live in a constructed reality, each of us in his or her own constructed reality: an intellectual or psychological bubble built with the materials at hand, personal, social, political, intellectual, what have you.

As I pointed out here, it’s impossible for a human being to have a complete picture of the universe as it really exists at any moment. As a result, we're forced to go through life with an understanding of the universe and our place in it that is, and will always remain, largely hypothetical. The nature of reality forces us to fill in a lot of blanks with our best guesses, which often are supplied to us by those around us.

That gives us wide latitude to indulge whatever predispositions we bring to the table, whether from personal or social conditioning or out of the fundaments of our souls. In essence, we learn to construct arguments in support of whatever it is we want to believe, whatever we want to do.

We can make anything fit, if we just put our minds to the task: skimping on safety equipment in mines and on oil platforms so as to keep our costs low and our profits high, for instance; selling drugs (“prescription medications”) that ravage people’s bodies or minds, because we can whip out a “clinical study” that shows that 51 percent of the test subjects felt slightly better after swallowing our pill, and only 10 percent had “adverse reactions;” forcing the migration of indigenous people or just chewing through the ground beneath their feet because they didn’t understand the value of what was down there and weren’t exploiting it like we can; or “she said no but I could see she really meant yes.”

There does remain some fairly widespread agreement, even in our fragmented world, about what’s right and what’s wrong. Unfortunately, it seems more and more as though the people who share that agreement are the least able to do anything about it. The social, political and economic predators not only have clawed their way to the top, they’ve embedded their self-justifications at the heart of our society, to the point where demanding that a (foreign) corporation compensate people for the catastrophic damage it has caused through its utterly unconscionable activities can be characterized by a “people’s representative” as a form of extortion.

This is exactly what I mean about living in a “bubble”: Anyone who could see British Petroleum as the victim in the current catastrophe is living in his imagination, not reality. Man may be, as Aristotle said, a rational animal, but he’s very talented at putting his rationality to work in the service of what pleases him most, no matter how destructive or downright disgusting that may be.

No Fuel Like an Old Fuel

Since the 1970s, the media have habitually referred to the various fuels we use - oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, etc. etc. - as "energy." And since the '70s, in a futile, passive-aggressive sort of way, I've found this terminology regrettable and irritating.

It's true in a technical sense that these fuels constitute "potential" energy - as contrasted with "kinetic" energy, i.e., energy that's actually making something happen - but then so does almost everything. But the reason I object to referring to fuel willy-nilly as energy is precisely because it blurs this distinction and glosses over the sometimes ugly and dangerous process of converting "potential" to "actual."

This dualistic understanding of energy is already present in ancient Greek thought, as enunciated by Aristotle, in the distinction between δυναμις and ένέργεια, potentiality and actuality. But I think the Chinese duality of "fiery yang energy" and "cool, watery yin energy" provides a better frame of reference for our cultural inclination to burn stuff as a way of making things happen.

Or rather, a way of making "magic" or "miracles." Because that's where a lot of fuel is being spent, to overcome some of the natural limitations on human freedom.

For instance, as physical beings, we humans are not free to violate the law of gravity. I'm certainly free to walk off the edge of a steep cliff if I want, but certain unavoidable penalties will follow. But thanks to modern technological wizardry, I can exploit loopholes in the law of gravity and go flying around the world or even to other worlds. But this quasi-magical feat can be achieved only by converting significant amounts of fuel into energy to counteract gravity.

So, too, with all our other modern marvels, from light bulbs to CAT scans to telephones to toasters. Every one of our "miracles of science" requires us to send a little more fuel up in smoke.

How much? Well, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, the United States is currently consuming oil and other petroleum products at a rate of about 600 million barrels a month. That's about 25 billion gallons, which works out to about 80 gallons a month for every man, woman and child in the nation.

And that's actually down from the all-time high, which was set in August 2005, when Americans consumed about 671 million barrels. It would be nice to believe that the 12 percent drop since then was a result of a sharp increase in our awareness of the high environmental and sociopolitical costs of fuel, but alas, it's more likely a result of the economy's less-than-stellar performance the past few years.

Just for the record, the EIA figures going back to January 1981 show Americans have consumed a total of 8.1 trillion barrels of petroleum products over that period (through March of this year), or about 341 trillion gallons.

It required millions of years, of course, for all that petroleum and all the coal and other fuels we use to accumulate inside the Earth - an operation, beyond all doubt, of "receptive" yin energy. But our outgoing yang-dominated society has a hard time seeing value in keeping something in a state of potentiality, stored up for possible future use. We want to convert these substances into energy, and cash, as fast as possible. So it is that we had the "Drill here, drill now!" movement, though it has gone a bit quiet the past few weeks as we all watch crude oil spew into the Gulf of Mexico.

Integral to the traditional understanding of the dualisms of potential/actual and yin/yang are notions of proportionality and balance: When things get out of balance, when we lose our sense of proportion, bad stuff happens. Or from another point of view, an environmental catastrophe could be God's way of telling us we're leaning way too far to one side.