Books II

 XXII

 October 3, 198-

I have to chuckle a little when I think about Mr. Sage who, apparently, lives totally in his little world of books. Perhaps you have seen the painting by Carl Spitzweg titled The Bookworm. I can’t imagine a better illustration of our bibliophile. The bookworm is shown standing on a stepladder surrounded by shelves of book. He holds a book in each hand, one of which he is reading nearsightedly, another one under his arm and still another between his legs. Like me, Mr. Sage is a story dweller, except he has lived a thousand stories. In fact, the bookworm in Spitzweg’s painting could be standing in Mr. Sage’s mind, which is itself a mental library. As a disembodied spirit I find his bookish life a little incredible. Given the opportunity, however, I would abandon the world of books and enter into the real world where one breathes the cold, clean air of morning and feels the flesh warmed by the sun. But I like this Mr. Sage, nonetheless. He and I are cousins, in a way. He almost seems disembodied himself, his flesh burned from his soul by a thousand books. And that cramped little bookstore! I would image that it would be like living in a dusty, dimly-lit cave.

Yet it is a world, many worlds really. The little bookstore is like a galaxy filled with thousands of new and strange worlds, each one waiting to be explored. So Mr. Sage’s world is not so small after all, much larger than what most people would imagine if they entered the store and saw Mr. Sage sitting at his tidy oak teacher’s desk, reading one of his own volumes. My guess would be that he would remind them of a little mouse sitting in its tiny hole in the wall, nibbling at a bit of cheese, but I don’t believe such is the case at all. In fact, being a story dweller myself, I think of Mr. Sage as a cosmic traveler, ranging through space and time, exploring world after world just as if he really were a disembodied spirit. One day he is marching with Caesar’s legions against the rude warriors of ancient Britannia, the next day journeying with Bashō along the narrow road north that leads to spiritual enlightenment, and the day after that traveling to the edge of the cosmos to visit the Star Maker and to look upon the face of God.

It should be obvious by now that the interior of the bookstore is quite deceiving to those who are not story dwellers. It is not a dead end as some would believe, but a place of departure, like a train or bus station, better yet a space-time portal, each book a journey and destination. Yes, Mr. Sage’s little bookstore is not exactly what it appears to be. It is another world, or other worlds, that Mr. Sage inhabits, another plane, if you will. I wouldn’t call it a higher plane, but it is certainly a purer one. The air is thinner, but one can see farther, and it is easier to travel about. That’s because books actually do burn away the flesh and release the souls of readers, allowing them to take wing like birds freed from their cages to explore the vast world of human experience across the boundaries of time and space. It is the mind that enables the individual to overcome confinement to a particular position in space and time required by bodily existence, but the space and time of books are infinite realms of the imagination that allow the souls of readers to roam freely.

And because books are written, the journey is always through the realm of mind, someone else’s mind, that of a fellow traveler like you my good reader. Still, though the journey is a mental one, spiritual if you like, it is no less hazardous than traveling through the concrete world. I was about to say the real world, but each possesses its own reality, and thus capable of harm. The hazards that lurk in the realm of ideas differ from those of the concrete world. Mr. Rieneau and Mr. Sage, both experienced explorers, have suggested that voyaging into the darker regions of thought, the soul is exposed to conceptions that can cause it to become dismayed and forlorn, devastated and heartbroken. Ideas, presented in their pure form or cloaked in narrative, can buffet the soul, leaving the individual dispirited. The resulting pain is no less real than a physical wound. Consider the pain caused to body by death and disease, yet is it any less severe than the spiritual pain caused by the soul’s understanding of the meaning and significance of death and disease?  You may recall Mr. Sage’s account of the sorrow of Gilgamesh that resulted from the death of his friend—Enkidu. That sorrow was for himself as well.

Ironically, it is not the cessation of one’s existence that is painful (since pain requires one’s existence) but the contemplation of one’s own nonexistence and that of cherished others. The idea cuts like a knife and leaves the individual feeling empty. Could it be that those two old men, the fisherman and the bookseller, fear that Christine, once having embarked upon her reading journey, may return to find her world forever changed from the way it was before she left? Neither believes she should forsake her quest for understanding but only to proceed cautiously. Having reached that age when the body has grown weary but the mind is still active, the old men know there is time enough later to meditate upon life’s meaning, a time when the fullness of one’s own experience can serve as a promontory providing a more complete view of that which one seeks to understand.

Being unable to leave my own world of words, I can’t say with certainty whether or not it is too soon for Christine to begin her intellectual voyage, or how much such a voyage will alter her view of life. I recall the innkeeper’s words to Gilgamesh: 

Why are your cheeks emaciated, your expression desolate!

Why is your heart so wretched, your features so haggard!

Why is there such sadness deep within you! 

He replied that the fate of mankind had overtaken his friend, and you would probably agree that the felt-knowledge of death had overtaken Gilgamesh. I also recall Mr. Rieneau’s mentioning Ecclesiastes, and perhaps he fears Christine will become desolate like the preacher in that most famous work on the vanity of existence, who says, “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” I do know that Christine’s experience in the corporeal world has already deeply changed her thinking, and not in a happier way, and as a story dweller I know that as a reader she will find the conceptual realities explored in books equally enchanting and terrifying as those in the mundane world of earth and sky. It is not unreasonable to ask whether she should embark on a new and different voyage at the very time she struggles amid confusion caused by death and disease, not to mention the feelings of betrayal and guilt she has brought with her from the home-world she has fled. The question of when is the best time for Christine to begin her intellectual voyage is not unreasonable, but I do not know the answer. Perhaps this is the best time to begin given her earthly encounters with death and dying. It seems needed now more than ever. How else is one to make sense of the sorrow and perplexity that are so much a part of life if faith is not an option? Acceptance through understanding seems to me the only other way.

Mr. Rieneau seems to want to keep Christine out of the world he has explored. Does the old seaman fear the young woman will not be able to weather the storm? Hah! Perhaps, I go too far. Mr. Sage, however, does seem to have greater faith in Christine. He is cautious, but he will not deny her wings, he being a kind of archangel welcomes any and all to his paradise built from words. He is a reader, I mean a serious reader, and all serious readers know that those poor souls not suited for the world of books will not be allowed to enter. Their wings simply are not strong enough to take flight. Like chickens they flap their feeble wings and briefly ascend a few feet above the ground, seeing barely further than before. You accuse me of being flippant and condescending. It is true, but it is also true that we admire the soaring eagle and belittle the comical chicken whose sight never leaves the ground before it. Perhaps I am biased by being a book dweller who can be brought to life only by a reader—one of those whose soul soars upon words.

Yet even those whose wings are strong enough to fly to higher altitudes of thought will find at times the journey difficult, dark, and disorienting—but also that the voyager never travels alone. There is always present the mind and the spirit of the storyteller. Reading is always a shared journey. So I think there is every reason to share Mr. Sage’s confidence that Christine is capable of the literary journey she is about to begin. It will not be easy, but her wings are strong and her soul is bright enough to illuminate any darkness that she might encounter.

From Frank Kyle's unpublished The Girl and the Philosopher.

 

France, Euthanasia, and Suicide Cabins

Kudos to France's continuing humanitarianism and Macron's endorsing euthanasia. Unlike Putin, Macron is one of those men who seek to lessen human suffering rather than increase it.

 The French president has announced new legislation to legalize “aid in dying” that will allow adults facing end-of-life illness to take lethal medication. He is right to want to allow euthanasia for those suffering incurable illnesses that are mentally and physically painful and often debilitating. Euthanasia is a form of suicide (assisted suicide). However, suicide is not immoral. Here is why.

Voluntary euthanasia is not immoral.

Suicide, the taking one’s life, isn’t immoral. It isn’t self-murder. Morality has to do with how people treat others—people, creatures, nature, property, etc. Emmanuel Kant offers the foundational principle of morality: the principle of autonomy. Which says that the autonomy of others should be respected. And that can be extended to people’s property. What is the defining difference between killing others and killing oneself? Choice. When a person harms himself, he chooses to do so, thus acts in accordance with his free will. The same is true if he chooses to die by euthanasia. Morality condemns violating other people’s autonomy against their will. Thus, euthanasia performed without consent would be immoral. On the other hand, euthanasia requested by someone experiencing incurable pain and suffering is not immoral. In such a case, euthanasia could be considered an act of kindness. 

Suicide is already with us, like it or not.

France experiences about 9,000 suicides each year, about 25 each day. In 2021, 48,183 people died by suicide in the US. None of these suicides were immoral. They are acts of desperation to escape suffering of some kind. However, there are two categories that need to be considered. The first involves situations that cause suffering, but the situations can be treated, remedied, and eliminated so the person no longer suffers and can go back to living a normal life. The situations are various and require different forms of treatment by doctors, psychotherapists, social workers, etc.

The second involves conditions caused by disease or old age that cannot be remedied. Years ago I read about a child that suffered from cancer. He underwent endless treatments, some experimental. And one day he said enough. Let me die. He chose death rather than more treatments because his fight for life was hopeless and too painful.

My brother John suffered lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos during the Vietnam War. He suffered painful treatments for months, though the doctors knew his cancer couldn’t be cured. (They weren’t greedy or evil, but their Hippocratic Oath would not allow them to give up.) In a moment of great pain he attempted suicide. His wife called emergency services and he died weeks later in hospice. Was his attempted suicide immoral? Of course not. Would euthanasia been a less painful and terrifying option. I think so.

A close friend of mine, Bill, died of cirrhosis of the liver. He was bedridden for months before he died. For years we were involved with judo and weightlifting and heading out to the mountains and deserts. Bill was a plumber who had spent two years in Vietnam. He was a very active guy. However, he was also a big drinker and smoker. He burnt the candle of life at both ends. Would he have opted for euthanasia? I don’t know. Should he have been given the option of euthanasia knowing he would never leave his bed? I think so.

I had a cousin farmer, Warren, who was more of an uncle to me because he was much older. He had a small farm near the Mississippi River. When he wasn’t farming he was hunting and fishing. He was a modern-day Daniel Boone, but he was a heavy smoker. He came down with incurable cancer and like Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun. Would he have preferred the chemical death of euthanasia to that of death by a shotgun blast? I don’t know. Probably not. Should he have had euthanasia as an option? I think so. His wife found his body. The sight must have been horrific. Sometimes euthanasia is also a better option for the family.

The outrage against euthanasia is ironic when thousands of people kill themselves each year with knives, rope, pills, gas, plastic bags, electricity, by jumping from buildings or in front of trains or trucks. Suicide is going to happen. People deserve the option of treatment or a gentle and easy death when treatment is of no avail. 

Is Suicide a Sin?

The Bible says very little about suicide. Suicide was accepted in ancient times. Samson and Saul committed suicide, and it can be argued that Jesus sought his own death. Some early Christians sought out Christ-like martyrdom. Christians argue that the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” forbids suicide, but the fact is God does a lot of killing in the Bible with floods, plagues, and fire and brimstone, so his commandment has to be taken with a grain of salt coming from the biggest mass-murdering hypocrite in history. And in the Old Testament Yahweh encourages Jews to engage in endless murder of pagans.

Murder is defined as “the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction.” Killing oneself then hardly qualifies as an immoral act, and making it illegal would be mean-spirited. Sin is a religious notion. Ingénue Eve committed a sin for disobeying God (eating forbidden fruit) and was given a death sentence by God for her disobedience. Actually, the death sentence was extended to include all human beings. That alone disqualifies God as a moral authority.

If religious people want to believe suicide is a sin or self-murder, that’s fine and dandy. Then they can avoid committing suicide. However, what is immoral (via Kant’s principle of autonomy) is imposing their beliefs on others who do not share their religious ideology. Christians have been very good at forcing their views on others using threats of burning, drowning, crushed under rocks, or various forms of torture. Once again, morality is concerned with the treatment of others, not about how one treats oneself. Euthanasia is no worse than masturbation. Of course Christians consider masturbation a sin! 

Two deaths: Socrates and Jesus

Socrates chose suicide rather than escape. In David’s painting The Death of Socrates he welcomes the cup that contains the poison hemlock:

He didn’t have to drink the hemlock. He could have left the city. Even his accusers hoped that he would. Durant says, “It still remained open to him to escape from the prison.” But he chose to stay and drink the hemlock; thus he committed suicide. And he’s considered by both philosophers and Christians a big hero for doing so!

Some argue that Socrates was looking forward to the afterlife (in the painting he's pointing upward) once his spiritual soul was set free from his lowly mundane body. This is often referred to Socrates’ four arguments for the immortality of the soul as described in in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo. However, the views expressed are Plato’s, not those of Socrates. Historian Will Durant says that Socrates accepted the “relativism of Protagoras” and “refused to dogmatize” because he was “certain only of his ignorance.” He gave “lip service to the gods of the his city,” and said “of the gods we know nothing.” He “applied his skepticism even more rigorously to the physical sciences.” That’s serious skepticism. “Philosophy was for Socrates neither theology nor metaphysics.” (The Life of Greece)

Philosophy for Plato was both theology and metaphysics. Plato’s mentor was Pythagoras. Says Wikipedia, “Aristotle states that the philosophy of Plato was heavily dependent on the teachings of the Pythagoreans.” And “The historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston states that Plato probably borrowed his tripartite theory of the soul from the Pythagoreans” (“Pythagoras”). So the theory of the soul winging its way from the body to eternal bliss originated in the West with Pythagoras, who probably got the idea from the Egyptians, adopted by Plato, and from him by Apostle Paul who passed it on in his version of Christianity. Jesus speaks of the soul rarely, only in the gospels of Matthew and John written 40 to 60 years after Jesus’s death by men who never met Jesus.

Okay, let’s suspend historical evidence for the moment and assume that the view of the soul in the Phaedo is that of Socrates. If so, he apparently didn’t believe that suicide was a sin or would compromise the soul’s journey in the afterlife.

Jesus also chose to die, but his death involved excruciating pain that lasted about six hours on the cross. At one point he cries out in pain, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:33-34). Suffering Christians have asked the same question over the centuries. Yet, Christians believe that everyone should face death as Jesus did—with all its excruciating pain and suffering. However, he didn’t seem to feel the same way. To Catholics suicide is considered a mortal sin that destroys one's relationship with God. Well I think God sinned against his son Jesus by allowing him to suffer on the cross rather than showing up as he does in the Transfiguration of Jesus (Mark 9:7). According to his book God’s Problem (the problem of horrific evil) Bible scholar Bart Ehrman believes that God has failed to live up to his relationship to humanity. For example, as many as 50 million people, mostly Christians, perished, perhaps 50% of Europe's 14th century population, during the Black Plague. Those people could have asked “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?” The Jews could have asked the same question during the Holocaust that killed approximately six million of his chosen people.

I’ll end this segment with the extinction event caused by God: “I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made” (Genesis 7:4). Of course, Jews, Christians, and Muslims point out that he saved two of each species crowded onto Noah’s ark, though I doubt a billion creatures could be herded onto an ark. How are insect herded? I assume that those left behind became extinct. And then what about the millions if not billions of humans and other creatures that drowned? Apparently, they didn’t matter. And we should worry about what God thinks about suicide when suicide harms no creature other than the person ending his or her life because its suffering can no longer be endured? Oh, says the deity's defender, the story of the Flood is just a story not to be taken literally. If so, then we can ignore anything the rest of the story (Genesis to Revelation) might say or imply about suicide.

Two of my favorite human beings—Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath—committed suicide because their lives had become unbearable to them. Yet, the goodness of those two women is infinite compared to that of the so-called omnibenevolent deity who can only be described as the greatest mass murderer in the history of the Universe.

Taoism, Existentialism, and Noble Suicide

Unlike the Abrahamic religions Taoism is a humanitarian spiritual philosophy in part because it is human-centered rather than God-centered and because it seeks peace, harmony, and serenity, rather than conflict, oppression, and disquiet. It is aligned with nature in that nature allows her creatures to live freely. Religious and secular ideologies, on the other hand, are artificial, inherently oppressive and controlling. Such societies operate like bureaucratic machines. It can be argued that societies are created to benefit people; however, to oppress people, to control them as if they were societal pawns does not benefit them. Certainly, some control is necessary such as Kant’s principle of autonomy that says people should be free but should not interfere with other people’s freedom. That’s a very Taoist principle, existentialist as well.

The Taoist Lao-tzu was the wisest of the wise, even wiser than wise Buddha, who sought detachment from the world that Lao-tzu was devoted to. Buddha’s goal was to investigate of the causes of suffering and how to avoid them. Like Lao-tzu, Buddha was a humanitarian, yet his humanitarian concern included the suffering of all life forms. These two spiritual philosophies are affable cousins unlike the Abrahamic religions that have been for centuries at war with one another and the world. The principle that separates Taoism and Buddhism from the Abrahamic religions is that of letting be rather than being domineering, oppressive, abusive, and manipulative. Jesus was a bit of a Taoist-Buddhist, often protecting women from the Pharisees who sought to stone them to death. His philosophy can be summed up with the phrase “Leave her be.” Why? Because those who sought to harm her were also sinners. They became sinners when they sought to stone a woman. Unlike them, Jesus believed that control (moral = spiritual) should come from within, not from without. That is his central gospel.

The Taoist principle most relevant to suicide is wu-wei* or no-action. The idea is “letting be,” or perhaps “letting go” of life in the case o suicide. An idea that is alien to patriarchal totalitarian societies, yet essential to allow people to achieve self-realization and to allow societies to flourish. (Lao Tzu was especially concern with oppressive warmongering governments like his home country today’s communist China.) The root of the idea is to let nature take its course, but that does not mean that one must allow himself to be eaten by a tiger. It means “letting people go their own way” (J. Koller’s Oriental Philosophies 289). Imagine a person a person being painfully and debilitatingly consumed by an incurable disease or old age. The choice is to either to allow the disease/old age to take its course in tiger-like fashion or to allow the person to decide what is to be done: either to let nature take its course or to “let go” of life and embrace death.**

*Wu-wei does imply “nonintervention” and imitating “the Tao by not intervening in the course of things, thereby permitting all things to unfold in accordance with their own nature” (The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, “Wu-wei”). When it comes to suicide wu-wei appears to create a conundrum, but it doesn’t. First, wu-wei is not the primary principle in the Taoist program. It is a means to realizing the greater humane principle of creating peace, harmony, and serenity. Is this a moral principle to be achieved? That would depend on circumstances. However, it is a practical goal. So practically or morally at times it would be necessary to suspend the strict sense of wu-wei.

Second, morality overrides the principle of allowing nature to take its course. In fact, not doing nothing would be unnatural. In Stephen Crane’s short story "The Open Boat" a group of men in a lifeboat are caught in a storm at sea. If they do not struggle against nature, then they drown. For them not to struggle against nature would be unnatural.

Third, to require a dying person endure pain and suffering until death comes to the rescue would be immoral according to existentialism (a very Western philosophy) because it requires the person to relinquish freedom to become merely a victim (an object) of the malady. Only in freedom is dignity possible. In other words, noninterference must also apply to the will of the person as long as it doesn’t violate Kant’s principle of autonomy. And to a dying person the freedom to choose how to die may be the last profound free act available to him or her. It can be consider an act of defiance against disease and suffering, a rage against being treated as an object by an affliction.

**Death is not evil only tragic, more so for humans because of their awareness of what is lost and their complex attachment to life—not just to their own life but to the lives of loved ones, be they humans or other creatures. (We put animals down when they are in incurable pain. Why do they deserve such compassion and humans don’t? James Herriot of All Creatures Great and Small fame didn’t believe animals should be allowed to suffer just because their owners wanted to keep them alive. His philosophy of euthanasia was based on concern for the welfare of the creature, not on what its owners wanted. He served as an advocate for the welfare of creatures who were unable to speak for themselves. Humans, however, can speak for themselves and their freedom of choice must be considered the cardinal principle in deciding to die by euthanasia. And that moral right should not—morally—be usurped by others. Dying with dignity means to act freely in the face of pain and suffering: to choose to end one’s life or to allow nature to take its course. However, there can be no freedom if there is only one option.) Life is inherently a tragic affair because it is the nature of reality that nothing endures forever. That doesn’t make accepting death any easier but only recognizes that death is unavoidable. The tragic aspect of life should inspire a greater love and appreciation of life. It, unfortunately, doesn’t in dull-minded, egocentric males who enjoy causing others to suffer.

Such men are evil because they make life more tragic than it need be. As Lucretius points out in his poem De rerum natura (on the nature of things), all pain and suffering and evil people happen in life not in the postmortem because there is no postmortem existence, except for those who can’t face reality but believe the dead will live again, a creepy notion. As if that isn’t bad enough they add the fires of hell to the afterlife. At least Plato wasn’t so hateful as to wish or believe that suffering should continue in the afterlife.

Christianity and Islam deny the tragic side of life with a pie-in-the-sky afterlife, and by doing so commit an injustice toward the dead by falsely claiming that they are or will be in a better place. This lie is often use for the purpose of manipulation. To encourage aggression and terrorist acts Muslims are told that they will be admitted to Paradise if killed in battle or while engaging in terrorism. Russian Orthodox priests tell Russian soldiers, as they sprinkle them with holy water, that if they die in Ukraine while murdering Ukrainians they will go to Heaven with all sins forgiven, even the sin of murdering Ukrainians.

However, that is not true. They will simply die murderers, their lives wasted and lost to lies—those of Putin and those of the Russian Orthodox Church that serves him. The fancy dress of priests should not be seen as evidence of the truth of their religious ideology, though that is exactly its purpose.

Jesus’s suicide could be considered a noble suicide that rejected the malevolence of Judaism, a religion that bred hatred rather than love, compassion, and forgiveness. Russian soldiers could do the same by committing suicide rather than obeying a malevolent tyrant who oppresses his own people as he seeks to realize his blood-stained will to power. That would be a noble suicide. Taoists would say refusing to participate in a program that is contrary to achieving peace, harmony, and serenity can only be noble.That would be a noble suicide.

Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc made the ultimate sacrifice of self-immolation (June 11, 1963) to protest the oppressive Catholic regime of Diem and its persecution of Buddhists. His suicide suspended the principle of wu-wei on moral grounds. In Buddhist fashion he protested the suffering being inflicted upon Buddhists.* To him allowing evil to continue its course was unthinkable. Thus, he chose heroism rather than submission. Existentialists would say one should assert his or her freedom by refusing to be the slaves of madmen even if doing so means death. Alexei Navalny also stood up to evil and became a hero for his courage and goodness.

*Religious and secular ideologies are simply tools made to serve the masculine will to power. They are inherently nihilistic because the ideologies declare the people who reject them to be without value or to be nothing of value, thus having no moral rights. Buddhism isn't an ideology, nor was the polytheism of the ancient Greeks. An ideology is a us-versus-them system of ideas that always include an enemy to be either converted or destroyed. Thus, "letting be" is a principle contrary to religious and secular ideologies, which are inherently intolerant of other belief systems and ways of life. Native Americans found that out when Christians arrived in North America. Letting Native Americans be as pagans was out  of the question because it would have been inconsistent to Judaeo-Christian ideology.

Wu-wei is not the goal of Taoism but only the means to achieving it. The goal is a life of peace, harmony, and serenity. If incurable disease and old age reduce life to ongoing agony, then letting go of life should be an option for the sufferer.

In regard to the principle of wu-wei, existentialism and Taoism are compatible because both emphasize the important role of freedom as a categorical principle in human life. This means that people’s freedom is to be respected unless they allow their freedom to impinge upon the freedom of others. (The principle is so simple, so just and decent yet beyond the comprehension of dull-minded men.) To be human is to be free; thus, denying a person’s freedom dehumanizes the person. In his essay “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Jean-Paul Sartre says that “man will only attain existence [actualization] when he is what he purposes [proposes] to be.” That is what makes existentialism a humanism: it argues that humans must be free to achieve self-realization because self-realization is the process of overcoming one’s nothingness (such as the unrealized state of infancy).

To be human is to be free, which is why slavery is abhorrently dehumanizing. Yet, billions of people live in a state of slavery imposed by (masculine) ideologies. Ideology is made only of words. Yet, oppressive states use those words to justify the bureaucratic cages in which they imprison their citizens. It is interesting that keeping animals in cages is frowned upon, but billions of people are forced to live in societies that are essentially bureaucratic dystopias. Encaging people is immoral, of course, but that is how states based on ideologies work. Take the ideology of Judaism as an example. It says that one must do whatever God demands (according to the ideology). Thus, if God (i.e., the ideology) tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, he must do so. What about his son Isaac who is to be sacrificed? From the point of view of the ideology, he collateral damage. As with God, obedience to the ideology is supreme, and disobedience is unforgivable.

Abraham is God’s slave. Of course, like Eve he has he freedom to disobey God, but as in the case of Eve the consequences would be catastrophic. Yahweh doesn’t mess around when it comes to punishment. That he comes up horrific tests of faith (as in the case of Job as well) reveals that he is a brutal totalitarian deity—pure masculinity on steroids. Isaac represents the sacrifices that must be made in the service to God because as God is the supreme authority of right and wrong. The incident reveals the two categories people fall into according to the ideologies of the Abrahamic religions as well as secular totalitarian ideologies: those who serve the ideology and those who are sacrificed to it. As the story continues, Isaac is given a reprieve because his father is willing to kill him if demanded by God (i.e., by the ideology). However, there will be no reprieve for pagans/gentiles that God wants exterminated later in the story. Who’s to argue? In all patriarchal societies Daddy knows best, Daddy being the ideology enforced by the men who serve it.

How does this relate to suicide? First of all, neither God nor ideologies are true logically or empirically—the only two categories of truth. They are inventions in the way the game of chess is an invention. If you play the game, then you must obey its rules. But the rules of the game do not extend beyond the game itself. Secular and religious ideologies are life games, but they have no logical or empirical validity outside the ideology, just as their rules have no validity beyond the ideological game itself. And it should be noted that religious ideologies and many secular ideologies are based on myths. Religious myths are replete with supernaturals entities and events. Also with mythical assumptions such as Jews were chosen by God to introduce him to the world or Hitler’s myth that the Aryan race is inherently superior to other races thus is destined to rule the world (that’s two myths).

These myths/ideologies are either true or false. If false, they have no bearing on the issue of euthanasia. If true, they have no bearing on euthanasia. For example, let’s assume that Yahweh actually existed when he commanded Abraham to kill his son. Moral logic says that Abraham has every right to disobey the command for two reasons. First, God is not a moral authority; second, even if he were considered such does not logically or morally require an individual to obey him. Deciding to obey or not to obey is a matter of choice, requiring the individual to decide the morally right action to take.

The problem of lockstep, mindless obedience to an ideology or authority of any kind should be obvious. Putin’s war on Ukraine illustrates the nature and enormity of the problem. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers invade a nation based on the words of a single person. They are treated by Putin as robots and they treat Ukrainians as objects. Like Hitler before him, Putin represents an idea of his own invention. It is his personal ideology. He uses that ideology to program the Russian people so they will do what he says. The question that comes to mind is whether or not people are capable of acting freely once programmed. Hitler transformed Germany, one of the most intellectually advanced nations in the world, into a nation of robots. Only people of great compassion and sensitivity were capable of rejecting such programming, mostly for moral reasons.Hans and Sophie Scholl were two such persons.They were executed by guillotine on February 22, 1943.* Even the so-called great philosopher Martin Heidegger succumbed to Hitler’s programming. Apparently, his wife was an even more vicious Nazi. It really is quite amazing how easily entire populations can be turned into robots.

*Sartre refers to a form of suicide that is moral in the altruistic sense and truly noble. His reference is to the captured resistance fighter who commits suicide rather than face interrogation that might cause him to give up information that would compromise his comrades. Russian soldiers could do the same an act of defiance against their evil puppet master Putin, who treats the Russian people as pawns in his private game of will to power and turns his soldiers into murderous robots in Ukraine.

Suicide Cabins: from the sci-fi novel Her Quest

As we continued, I had to pee, so when I saw what looked like an old homeless woman waiting outside a small building I assumed she was waiting to enter a restroom.

“Peno, I have to pee. Can I use the restroom where that old woman is standing?”

“Oh Cora! That’s not a restroom. It’s a suicide cabin.”

“A suicide cabin?”

“The old woman is waiting to end her life.”

“Inside the cabin?”

“Yes.”

“That seems cruel. Why would she do that?”

“Because her life has become unbearable.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If you stay with me long enough, you will. For many people life becomes so hard that they choose to end it. In death, there is no pain, disappointment, sadness, or despair—only the peace that comes when one no longer exists.”

“Is the suicide painful?”

“Not at all. Though I have never experience what goes on in a suicide cabin, I do know what happens. In fact, what occurs is described on the door or can be listened to for people who can’t read. You can go over and read the description for yourself.”

“No!” The woman had entered the cabin. “Still, I want to know.”

“I’m not surprised. Knowing is what you do. Okay. The suicide enters the cabin and lies on a bed. The AI tells the suicide to relax. Relaxing music begins to play and an aromatic gas is released into the compartment. As the suicide relaxes the AI asks her to choose a pleasant scene. The cabin then illuminates as various scenes or landscapes are paraded before her. Once she chooses one then another gas is released that induces a feeling of peace and happiness. Another gas puts her to sleep and the final gas causes death. The bed lowers, and the suicide is transported for cremation.”

“It sounds awful.”

“It’s not awful. It is the most pleasant way to die. What is awful is the life the suicide seeks to escape.”

“Okay, I understand.”

“No you don’t, but you will. Now let’s get you some food. First go pee.” 

  

Putin's Bloody Little Playground

 

Putin’s Playground

Any Town, Ukraine

Simon Clark says,

"I miss the playground as it used to be,

Laughter, fun and frivolity,

Sliding down and spinning ‘round,

Chasing the breeze and winning the race."

My Friend Ray Mungo

Ray can be fully appreciated only by those of us who were young during the Vietnam War. He wrote for the anti-war underground as one of those intellectuals LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover wanted incarcerated—and many were, more than in today's Russia where Russians have been brainwashed to think Putin is their Savior sent to them by Jesus Christ. America’s counterculture generation was one of a kind never to be seen again. To quote Wordsworth: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” They were free thinking rebels who read books and watched movies from Europe. Philosophy classes were packed with students looking for answers since they concluded that the thinking of adults who could go along with LBJ’s war and accept police dogs being turned loose on black people was as primitive as that of the Puritans who hanged women for witchcraft.

Unlike today the young were free thinkers because religious and secular ideologies had not yet imprisoned their minds. It was an age that celebrated love unlike today when Hollywood has demoted love to sex. The Golden Age of Hollywood had come to an end but a few intellectual, aesthetic golden nuggets were produced. It was a time before Hollywood became America’s Pravda. The great movie stars and directors were departing leaving a void where once there was inspired creativity. When Ray was writing young people were reading, not comic books and graphic novels (as fascinating as they can be; I’ve read plenty) but weighty philosophical tombs by Paul Tillich, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and novels by Albert Camus,  Ralph Ellison, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy (who lived before Russia was lobotomized by Marx). That glorious time came to an end of course, and was replaced by mediocrity. (Simply consider America’s last two presidents.)

Free thinking existentialism succumbed to the hive-mind thinking of religious and secular ideologies or to the no-thinking of nihilistic anarchism. Today America lives in an age defined by social media communication via Facebook, Twitter, Tik Toc, etc. Very different from the age of the rebellious Transcendentalism, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. Or even Fenimore Cooper who had given up on the American enterprise and escape with Natty Bumppo into the world of the Noble Savage for whom freedom and spirituality was more important than the dollar. The 1920s were anything but boring, as were the 1930s that gave birth to America’s Greatest Generation, and 1940s when that generation fought the greatest evildoer history has known (though Putin might catch up with his nukes). Even the 1950s had hot rods and the most glorious music that celebrated—not sex—but teenage love. Then there were the sixties, the apex of American culture for young people. LBJ and the Cold Warriors tried to destroy their love of life but failed. Thousands were drafted from their lives to die over there. Over here they were imprisoned or shot dead on campus by National Guard (guarding whom?) for their rejection of LBJ’s evil war, a war America started unlike WWI, WWII, and Putin’s war. Refusing to surrender, America’s youth celebrated love and life and created music that was heartbreakingly sublime.

And Ray and I were there. I was there as an observing participant, he as an anti-war activist who fought against evil men and their evil war not with a tank but with a typewriter. That is who Ray Mungo was. 

My favorite books by Ray Mungo: 

  

The Limits of Postmodernism

Preface: The Journey that Became a Destination

Coleman College paid for me to take a train to University of Nebraska at Kearney to present a paper titled “Seeking the Postmodern Project.” The conference was “Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Problem of Reception: Nietzsche and the Consequences.” It was put on by the German language department. It became a special experience for me for reasons having nothing to do with the conference. Coleman College allowed me to take a train from Fullerton, California, to Hastings, Nebraska. The train would get me closer to Kearney than a plane would. The train let me off at about 3 AM. It was a wintery morning and the town was asleep. The car I reserved was all alone in the train station parking lot with the keys inside. During the drive to Kearney I saw migrating geese. I got out of the car to watch and listen to them as they passed over high above in the gray sky. During the conference I drove out to a prairie-grass reserve. There I stood and looked upon a remnant of the ancient prairie. A mystical experience? Perhaps.

Seeing the geese and prairie grass meant more to me than the talk about Nietzsche, though I didn’t say that to my boss Dr. Coleman Furr, though I think he would have understood because he had a desert home in Yuma, Arizona. My talk was on Nietzsche and Hemingway. But I rewrote it for its publication in the Platte Valley Review (winter 1995, volume 23, number 1). Nietzsche was still present, but having viewed the Great Plains from the train and in person I replaced Hemingway with the Pawnee Indians, the ancient dwellers of that ancient land. In the words of poet William Cullen Bryant, it was the place where, 

The red man came—

The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,

And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.

The solitude of centuries untold

Has settled where they dwelt. (“The Prairies”) 

The title of my article became “The Limits of Postmodernism.” A question that came to mind was “Are our lives, more comfortable and less vulnerable to daily hazards, more meaningful than the early lives of the red and white settlers of the prairies?” 

The Limits of Postmodernism 

I want to reflect on the project of postmodernism and pay tribute to this place—the city of Kearney and the state of Nebraska. Also pay tribute to the peoples who have called this place home—Americans and the native peoples, most recently the Pawnee—and indirectly to Nietzsche, who valued perhaps most of all living simply and honestly, who understood life to be a drama of very basic forces, who believed Western culture had created a worldview so cluttered by false notions and meaningless distractions that it had lost sight of the simple yet dramatic realities of living.

Postmodernism is essentially a historical period, not a project. But once people like ourselves become aware of the postmodern condition and begin to explore it, define it, and respond to it, it evolves into a kind of project. Even if the postmodern means that all projects are finished, insofar as they no longer have final legitimacy, then learning to live meaningfully, truthfully, beneficially in such a world becomes our project.

Having a clearly defined project enables individuals and cultures to move confidently into the future by giving them a clear sense of direction. And though many postmodern thinkers suggest certain directions, certainly the postmodern condition is characterized by the lack of a universal project capable of giving definition to society or to the individual. Western society has been characterized by its universal religious and secular projects contained in grand mythic narratives. The postmodern world, on the other hand, offers no clear project that society or the individual can aspire to, no imperatives for living rooted in a general ontology.

The first task is to reconsider whether the worldview of postmodernism or modernism or the Western religious tradition can adequately serve as the basis for a new project. Western culture has taken a good deal of pride in replacing traditional cultures, even those of its own. But now in this post-modern period, when even the final projects of modernism have been called into question, it is time to consider whether or not the culture that evolved out of Western philosophy, religion, science, and technology is really truer, better, more meaningful than even those first cultures that existed before the great civilizations.

Take, for example, the Pawnee who lived in the region. Are our truths more profound and satisfying? Do they more accurately express the reality of the lifeworld? To think that these people whose relationship to the world was one of immediacy did not understand the world seems to me arrogant and misguided. Do we really understand life more clearly? I do not think we do. How can we, isolated as we are from the primordial world, that first and final world, by the clutter of our intellectual, artistic, and technological creations? I believe that we, the critics and philosophers of the postmodern, have created a complex symbolic universe that may provide us with a fascinating dwelling place but does not effectively serve the lives of most people. Do we really need all this? Do the people of this city Kearny—these farmers, merchants, parents, and children–need what we have to offer? Does our talk really get to some important truth that can lead them or anyone to a way of life that is truer and more noble than the one we see about us here on the great plains of Nebraska? Or is what we have to offer simply more of the intellectual clutter that has poured so profusely from the Western tradition?

Note the words of planting from one of the primordials, those people who dwelled in the first world, these the words of the Navaho: 

The sacred blue corn-seed I am planting

In one night it will grow and flourish

In one night the corn increases

In the garden of the House God 

The sacred white corn-seed I am planting,

In one day it will grow and ripen,

In one day the corn increases,

In its beauty it increases.[1] 

Does all of our knowledge enable us to live more truthfully, meaningfully, and appreciatively than this? What do we offer instead? This was once a world where all things and activities were sacred. This was a world where life and language were simple and profound.

Language creates, translates, and reveals reality for human beings, but I ask what greater thing our modern theoretical systems do than are accomplish by the simple expressions of the Navaho. Is our world truer? Is it more noble? Have we greater insight? Or have we created a universe of words that imprison us, that separate us from the world that is truly our flesh, our mother, our origin, and our end? Language can create the illusion of reality; it can become an artificial reality. Moderns are awash in language and yet have, it seems to me, very little experience or understanding of reality. And the postmoderns seem to have lost their way in this complex linguistic universe, and even seem to be cheerful at having become lost.

The Pawnee who once grew their corn and hunted buffalo here, the farmers who still take their living from the earth, they are not lost, and they have little need of what we offer. So what is it we as postmoderns offer? What are we about? If it is we who are the educators, then we must accept the responsibility of leadership, but the direction of that leadership remains unclear to me. Or if there is some direction but we cannot communicate it simply and clearly to ordinary people, to farmers, merchants, students, then what we do is really of little value and we have little to offer. For unlike doctors who help their patients with treatments and medicines, we have only our language to offer to those who seek some direction in the postmodern world. When I offer direction to my students, I do not send them to the texts of the postmoderns, which they cannot comprehend, but to those simple words of the believers, artists, or Native Americans, who I believe lived lives far more simple, truthful, honest, and beautiful than those of moderns or postmoderns. I fear that we have lost our way and are not really interested in finding a direction, which would, as a result, dislocate the self from the center of attention.

Is reality as complex as our philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, and even religious systems would have us believe? Yesterday I drove about the countryside, walked upon a dusty road, and even walked upon a remnant of ancient prairie. What I saw was wonderful yet to very simple. Certainly the individual forms of this vast expanse—the river, sky, land, and the animals and plants—are complex, and wonderful in their complexity, even mystery; but their purpose, their ultimate reason for being, seems to me to be manifest. They simply are. It is the appearance, not its cause, that is the final and important reality.

I marvel at the red-tailed hawk that sails overhead on giant wings, its ancient head gazing keenly at the world below. If I dissect this beast and master the mechanics of its organism, do I really understand its reality any better? I do not think so. It is what it appears to be, a creature of the world that seeks to continue its being, to stay out of harm’s way, to enjoy the simple pleasures that happen to be associated with its particular form. I believe we have overly complicated our lives, and postmodern theory has simply added to the muddle. As leaders, experts in the present condition of humanity, we must consider carefully what it is we should be conveying to others. Are we leading our students to some place where the vision of life is clear, fine, and satisfying, or are we continuing the long history of complicating life and obfuscating what is real?

The Western tradition began with the complex symbolic universe of ideas created out of ancient religious narratives and Greek philosophy. The tradition has spent 2000 years adding to, understanding, verifying, and more recently, attempting to simplify itself. Postmodernism seems to be the last stage—a realization that we have been investigating a world of our own creation more than the world itself, perhaps as a result never fully living in or understanding the real world. Historically, most people continued to live in the real world in spite of the fact that philosophers, theologians, and scientists told them that they were not living in the real world and that their worldly lives were really not so very real or important.

Priests and philosophers, cloistered from the activities of the earth world, studying scripture or inventing metaphysical systems, told them that reality was hidden and obscured, that it revealed itself only through their contemplative activities, mental inventions that expressed human reality as it truly is. The theologian told them that the true world lay elsewhere and that people’s lives were insignificant because they occurred in a subordinate realm of inferior reality. Native Americans, however, understood that there was nothing other than the act of living. For them the value and reality of every act of living was absolute and self-evident. This attitude is expressed in what Beverly Hungry Wolf says of the life of women among the Blackfeet: 

Let me just say that in the culture of my people the work of the woman was generally respected and honored, for the men knew very well that they could not live without them. The people of the past thought it a great honor that the women should bear and rear the children, ensuring that there would be people in the future. Equally honorable was the woman’s work of creating the lodges that made the homes, putting them up and taking down when camp moved, heating them, and providing the bedding and clothing for the household members. In the social life of my grandmothers, a household was judged not only by the bravery and generosity of the man, but also by the kindness and work habits of the woman. Even the wife of a poor man could find honor among the people by being a good housekeeper.[2] 

Do her words somehow miss the mark? Is there some hidden, essential dimension of reality if overlooked life cannot be fully lived? Is her view of the reality and significance of the lifeworld naive and unsophisticated? Again, I do not think so. Whatever we might add would be at best superfluous, at worst falsify reality. And perhaps the great tragedy of the postmodern condition is to have lost complete sight and experience of the fundamentals of life. What has the modern world invented that gives life greater meaning than the forms of being of the native peoples? In fact, if we look at the monstrous projects of modernism, we find that what continues to matter most to people are the simplest of things—love, work, pleasure, family, friends, community, the forms of nature, and a clear sense of purpose. The modern world remains in spite of its technological wonders a universe in which people still seek most those primordial elements of being human. If anything, modernism has transformed these elements into grotesque mutations. The tragedy of modern projects is that in the process of creating a world of greater comfort and security, sight of the fundamentals of being human has been lost.

Traditional Western man believed that nothing mattered so much as the presence of himself in the world, that he was the sovereign of the earth and its creatures and the object of universal, cosmic concern. On the other hand, modern man, rejecting all anthropomorphic metaphysics knows he means nothing to the universe, so he kills or captures its creatures so that his power at least makes him sovereign of the earth. If there is no God, then man will become God. To the Indian both attitudes would have seemed perverse. The Indian sought to be noticed by the great forces of the world, but did so not from a sense of self-importance but, to the contrary, from a profound sense of insignificance within the great scheme of things. The Indian knew that the universe—the “Wholly Other”[3] that was also home and mother—was the true object of wonder, not its human offspring. The Indian’s attitude was ultimately one of respect and adoration without the narcissistic egoism of the Jew or Christian. The Lakota prayer to the Great Mystery begins, 

Great Mystery, you existed from the first.

The sky, this earth you created;

Great mystery—look upon me, pity me,

that the Nation may live.[4] 

For 2000 years Westerners have suffered from delusion of grandeur and self-infatuation, which have, ironically, stripped the world of meaning for humans. Commencing with the Jewish and Greek worldviews and continued and refined by the Christian worldview, Western culture has embarked upon a process of establishing humanity as the supreme object and purpose of the cosmos. All the world leads to the human doorstep. (The religious traditions have often been critical of secular humanism, but both attitudes are egocentric and self-infatuated.) Yet, we rejected or destroyed the native cultures because their cultures and beliefs were considered nothing more than childish superstition. But it has been we who have been children, continuing to surrender ourselves to a Great Savior or wrap ourselves in ideological security blankets that negate and oppress rather than enhance life, afraid to accept our humble status in the world, misusing our technical prowess like a frustrated child angrily demanding the focus of every attention and the satisfaction of every wish. When we learn to accept the red-tailed hawk as our equal, then we will share in its nobility. But I am afraid that opportunity has already passed; the people who understood most clearly the ways of life and the place of humanity among nature’s other creatures have already existed.

Said Chief Luther Standing Bear f the Lakota, or Sioux, 

[The Lakota] loved the Earth and all things of the Earth, the attachment growing with age. The old people came literally to love the soil. They sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. 

Their tepees were built upon the Earth and their altars were made of Earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the Earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing. 

That is why the Indian still sits upon the Earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. 

Kinship with all creatures of the Earth, sky and water was a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them and so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.[5] 

The focus of life for Indians was worldly rather than otherworldly. They were a people at home in the real world, the primordial world of nature. They lived in the midst of its forms and knew them intimately. They were not lords of the earth but merely one form of being among millions of others. In their struggle to survive they knew they participated in that single principle of being—to endure and survive meaningfully. They understood also that all forms of life were of one family bound together in this struggle. It was a worldview that required courage and humility—a sense that the self mattered less than the whole and the greatest virtue was humility expressed through self-sacrifice.

The postmodern, with certain important exceptions such as ecofeminism, which in fact seeks a return to the abandoned organic lifeworld,[6] is not an advancement over the follies of the traditional Western and modern worldviews. At least the older Western worldviews required some sense of humility or before some great human project. But now, with the traditional and modern projects dismantled, we are left only with our self-centeredness. And the center is empty because the periphery of the world has disappeared.  Without the world we are nothing, and modern technological society sacrificed the world long ago.

In this place, Kearney, Nebraska, one can still see the world that was once there for everyone. It is the earth. It humbled us, fed us, gave us work to do, and sustained a sense of wonder for Being—as it still does for these people. Here we can see clearly the horizon of that primordial world that invented us and will one day reclaim each of us, our ideas, and our civilizations. It is the horizon of Being, and it is neither the creation of God or a god. It is simply our home, our mysterious home, mysterious only because of its presence, just as each one of us is mysterious by the very fact that we are. To seek more than that, to seek further justification of our being, to demand a final explanation or purpose, results not only in becoming lost—and I believe that no people have become more lost than we—but also in losing a sense of wonder and mystery for the very act of living—being here and having the opportunity of seeing (as an act of reverent appreciation) the world and its magnificent forms.

We may have no ultimate purpose beyond our being here, beyond wanting to endure and to see those whom we love endure for the length of their allotted time, but that does not lessen our value, because our being is the stuff of our purpose and our values. Our eyes enable us to see the beauty of the world; our ears allow us to hear its mystery; our hearts enable thus to love our own; our hearts and minds allow us to know, appreciate, and love all the forms being—living and non-living; our families friends, and neighbors enable us to commit ourselves to others and to endure the suffering that comes with sacrificing for others.

We can still be heroes and saints. Even without God, we can aspire to the divine life of Jesus—who loved all things of the world, whose life was heroic, noble and sacred because it was a life of concern and sacrifice. It was a life of power, but not the power of control, manipulation, and destruction, not the power of accumulation and domination; it was the power of love, the power of transforming oneself into a gift for others. Such a life is needed in a world with or without God.

But this is not the message of the postmodern world. If anything the postmodern world lives in in greater forgetfulness than the traditional or modern. It is a small, claustrophobic world of illuminated mirrors that reflect only one another. The music and dance of life has become a disco of artificiality, a TechNoir,[7] where the rock music and colored strobe-lights become a formless noise that has no connection with the world beyond. Where in the artificial capsule of the technological society is one going to find a place and time to sit upon the earth in order to experience its life-giving forces? Nowhere. Life in the postmodern is completely alienated from the first world, the primordial world.

Whether we rediscover the world before we destroy most of it remains to be seen. If we do not then we will finish our existence like Sartre’s hell—condemned to live alone with one another, in a world from which the beautiful and mysterious forms of Being were driven into extinction, with what is left being displayed in in cages or reserves so curious humans can view remnants of the world they have lost. We have created a prison and then happily became its prisoners, living not even in cages but cells that would be dark were it not for electric lights and television that glimmer like the illuminated shadows that dance upon the walls of Plato’s cave. In creating the modern world we destroyed or at least eclipsed not only an older world but a universe. Certainly, if the postmodern world seeks to create a new universe, it will have to begin by searching through the ruins of the old, for as of yet it has no materials of its own to build with. 

* * * 

This journal article was published in the Platte Valley Review, January 1994. It was based on my presentation “Seeking the Postmodern Project” that I gave at University of Nebraska at Kearney for a conference put on by the German language department: “Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Problem of Reception: Nietzsche and the Consequences” (April 15-17, 1993).

The author wrote Her Quest, a science fiction novel that describes a young teenage girl who embarks on a long, arduous journey to find the wisdom of the Native Americans. She lives in Usatopia, a technological society that is so artificial that birds are tiny robots. That is her world, the one that made her. She knows nothing of the world she seeks. Her quest was inspired by the words of her father, emperor of the Usatopia. Broodingly pacing back and forth and talking to himself unaware of his daughter’s presence, he says that his society lost the wisdom possessed by the ancient people who came before technology took control of the world, eventually destroying global civilization because it was misused by men. Her journey is a return to the old ways of an ancient people.

---

[1] John Bierhorst, ed., The Trail of the Wind: American Indian Poems and Ritual Orations (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,1987) 115. 

[2] Beverly Hungry Wolf, The Ways of My Grandmothers. See “Learning to Camp Like My Grandmothers” (New York: Quill, 1980) 120-129. 

[3] Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London University Press, 1969) 25. 

[4] Quoted in Curtis’ Western Indians by Ralph W. Andrews (New York: Bonanza Books, 1962) 93. 

[5] Luther Standing Bear, Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence, ed., T.C. McLuhan (New York: Promontory Press, 1971) 6. 

[6] The meaning of organic need not be limited to organisms. For the Native American all of nature was alive—rivers, streams, fire, shooting stars, the waxing and waning of the moon, the sun passing overhead, rain, snow, and clouds, wind, storms, and dust devils, the passing and arriving seasons, and so on. The earth has been an evolving organism since its birth, and it will grow old (if we don’t destroy it) and die. What the Native Americans knew that the Western tradition has forgotten with its religions, philosophies, sciences, and ideologies is that each entity of nature has a life of its own.

Who would have ever expected the beaver to be wiser than humans who killed them to near-extinction for hats and perfumes? They build their homes and care for their families. They are aggressive only toward threatening intruders; otherwise, their philosophy is live and let live. Tortoises also possess greater wisdom than humans. They too are not aggressive creatures by nature. They don’t go out looking for trouble as humans do. They are loners. Like the beaver they will protect their home territory. And like other loners they can moody. However, the greatest wisdom of the tortoise is that he/she doesn’t race though life, as we humans do. He/she seems to realize that goal of life isn’t about winning or reaching an invented destination.

The wisdom of these creatures is that the primordial raison d'être of life is simply being/existing in the world, better yet living life with the appreciative awareness possessed by Native Americans but forgotten by moderns and postmoderns who surrendered their minds and lives to invented fantasies, ideologies, and technologies.  Busily they hurry to this destination or that, often leaving trails of blood, oblivious to the world about them. It’s hardly a sign of wisdom that humans engage in war as ants and chimpanzee do. You would think we would know better. Apparently we’re no smarter than them just better armed. We even go so far as to invent religious and secular ideologies to justify our love of war, but that too is hardly an indication of wisdom but euphemized stupidity.

[7] The name of the discotheque in the film The Terminator.