Book: A Canticle For Leibowitz; and the Nuclear Question

I just finished reading A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr. It is a remarkable book, a classic in science fiction writing (though it really doesn't strike me as too sci-fi). Though it was first published in 1960, the style of it seems like something that could have been written today; the storytelling is superb, somewhat satirical, and there's an almost absurd sense to it, verging on comical, but not in a ridiculous way. Maybe more in an existential way, but don't take that to mean it's some dense philosophical novel. It's very readable and accessible, despite the oft-used Latin, which is usually explained, or otherwise just there for atmosphere. The novel does, though, have important underlying themes-- namely, the cyclical course of history, the conflict between the church and secular society, and of course the nuclear threat. For, this book is about a post apocalyptic world slowly rebuilding itself after near annihilation in the mid-20th century. The book is in three parts (Fiat Homo, Fiat Lux, and Fiat Voluntas Tua), each set roughly 600 years apart. 

Thus, Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man) begins in the 25th century. The country (we hear nothing of the other continents until part three), or what little is left of it, is nearly totally illiterate-- immediately after "the Flame Deluge" the people rampaged against learning, proudly calling themselves Simpletons and burning books, as well as killing scientists, and later, anyone who could read. Only the the surviving Roman Catholic Church, centered in New Rome (somewhere, seemingly, roundabout St Louis) maintains learning of any kind. 

The Church preserves scraps and remnants of books in a monastery in the Southwest Desert, run by the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, set up by Leibowitz (an electrical engineer of the 20th century) for just such a purpose during the book burnings. Compare to what the Irish monks did in the dark age after Rome fell. The monks copy the now largely incomprehensible but highly venerated, almost worshipped works of science in the 20th century, things like circuit diagrams and other texts and literature. They do this in the hopes that someday, someone will understand them and be able to rebuild to pre-Deluge science, technology and culture. 

The section focuses on Francis Gerard, a novice monk who finds, during a Lenten fast, an old bomb shelter containing a box that holds within it scraps that appear to be the property of Leibowitz himself, which eventually end up contributing to Leibowits being canonized as a saint. It's a hard life for Francis in the monastery, but the world outside is worse, full of monsters (genetic mutants) and roving bands of highwaymen and tribal folk. 

Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light) is set in 3174, in a time of building war between growing city-states of south-central "America" and the nomadic herders on the Central Plains, as well as a time of renewed abilities in science, including the rediscovery of electricity; rather like the European Renaissance. In the microcosm of the same monastery, we see the split growing between secular science and Church-run science growing, really the basic split between science and faith/morals. 

Finally, Fiat Voluntas Tua (Let Thy Will Be Done) is set in 3781. The world has progressed beyond even what the 20th century had, complete with space travel and even extra-solar colonies. That same monestary lives on, despite its duty to preserve the old knowledge being now unnecessary. There is a new cold war between the Atlantic Confederacy and the Asian Coalition. There are nuclear incidents, and the book culminates in ruminations on free will, good and evil, euthanasia, and again the cyclical nature of history, whether it is inherent. 

I have avoided giving many details so as not to spoil this jewel of a book for any of you who may wish to read it (highly recommended). I wish they'd had us read this in school, though of course, the Church vs Science/State issue would have been too risque for a public high school. But the discussions would have been enjoyable, I always liked classroom discussions like that. And the themes are important, and worth thinking about. That's probably why I've long been a fan of the dystopian and post-apocalyptic genres in books and movies. 

I have often though of nuclear weapons as humanity's greatest test. Well, not a test so much, as tests are administered from outside; more a situation that will really allow us to find out what we're made of. We either get a handle on our animal rage and control our apelike tribalism and hate, or else we die. Nuclear holocaust is not probably something we could survive, certainly civilization would not. And the idea that we'd eventually build up to this level, even if it took thousands of years, seems to me unlikely. 

For so many things to fall back into place, cultural, philosophical, technological, governmental, religious... sometimes it seems to me that high-tech civilization may have been a lucky accident. Like the evolution of humans itself-- the rise of such intelligent creatures depended on a lot of historical luck. If the climate in Africa hadn't changed from forests to grassland, we might still be howling in the trees. Or even if it had, but we hadn't adapted just as we did, we'd be extinct, or maybe just living like baboons, who also live in grasslands, quadrupedal and not all that bright. If (some of) the Greeks hadn't ditched the myths for that little window of philosophy they gave us, our society might never have been. Study the history of science, and you will see that this is so; the Chinese, Indian, and Islamic civilizations had science, yes, but never a Renaissance, never a truly secular, empirical culture. Until Imperial Europeans imposed it. There's no guarantee they'd have ever gotten there, though of course we'll never know. 

There is much to feel despair about in the world today. I find myself, when I allow myself to think long on it, almost totally stopped, knocked into inaction by thoughts of mass extinction, climate change, ecological rape, resource extraction run amok, chemical pollution, overfishing, dead rivers, the loss of the Amazon's forests, the slide in America and elsewhere towards fascism, overpopulation, famine and disease in the Third World, the widening wealth gap, even just the horrible environments we set up for ourselves to live in. But behind it all, and almost undiscussed, is the nuclear threat.

Oh I know there's the very public Iran debacle, and North Korea. Definitely both are a concern, and the fewer countries that have such weapons, the better. But North Korea having a few nukes with short range and pretty bad engineering, and Iran trying to attain them, worry me far less than the thousands upon thousands owned by the USA, Russia, and China, and to a lesser extent, the UK and France. Also quite worrisome are the Pakistani and Indian nukes, two countries that hate each other, and of course, little ol' war hawk Israel which almost certainly has them. With nuclear India and Pakistan on one side, and Israel on the other, you can see why Iran would want such weapons, though they deny it. 

I remember being taught in English class back in high school about foreshadowing: if the author, even in passing, mentions, say, a gun, chances are good that someone's going to use it eventually. This is my concern with nuclear weapons. Sure, the Cold War is more or less over (though Putin's Russia and quasi-Fascist America seem almost eager to resume it), and while it's been over 65 years since a full scale nuclear bomb has been used in war, the potential remains. The likelihood almost seems to increase, the longer we hold these missiles of death, hold them by the thousands. To say nothing of dirty bombs used by terrorists or rogue nations. 

Everything is on the line with this issue. I heard a quote not too long ago, something like "there is no ecological justice without social justice" meaning that social justice is more important. Makes sense in its way. You know, get the Third World, everyone really, educated, healthy, and stable; birth rates will fall, people won't have to denude their environment for sheer survival, etc. With the nuclear issue, it is made very clear: if we save all the forests and oceans, keep the whales and tigers and pandas alive, if we switch to clean energy and save the Appalachian hills, if we get Clean Air and Clean Rivers and more roadless areas and stop soil erosion... but go ahead and have a nuclear war, what the fuck does it matter? It's one thing for civilization to collapse from Peak Oil or Global Climate Change, but it's quite another to nuke ourselves into annihilation. 

Lastly, here's something weird I found out on Wikipedia. The USA's first nuclear test was named Trinity, and India's first was named Smiling Buddha. That these names would be chosen for the ugliest weapons the world has ever seen does not give me much hope. 

Religion, Stories, and the Spoken Word

You know, I've long heard modern consumerism compared to or likened to a religion, our national religion. I never took this seriously, thought it was more of a clever turn of phrase or a nice metaphor, but clearly not actually a religion. I'm no longer quite so sure. I was reading this essay, "Only the Poets Can Save Us Now," by Richard Reese, and came across thses paragraphs:

Spoken stories, poems, and songs create trances. Stories are utterly irresistible. Television is a story machine. People cannot turn it off, no matter how incredibly stupid the programs are. Advertisements are also stories. They create evil trances that strip away your self-esteem. ...

An advertising executive once nicely summed up the purpose of his business. He said, "Our job is to make women unhappy." Advertising is an evil trance. And it works! People are entranced by the commercials, and then they buy the products. If you ever go to a mall or supermarket, pay attention to the consumers. They roam up and down the aisles in a glassy-eyed, zombie-like state. They are searching for the product that will remove the curse on them. They are religious pilgrims seeking salvation.

And when you think about it, how is this any different from "the Fall" and the endless quest for redemption? We are fallen, our souls tarnished and broken, the priests tell us, and we may find healing only in the love of God, through the death and the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Very convenient, to be told how evil and hopeless we are, then offered just the right solution. Provided we play by their rules. And really, it's the same as being told by the commercials on the TV that we are uncool, ugly, somehow deficient, and the only way to be whole human beings is to buy this product, the message all neatly tucked into a 20 second spot. It's a depraved, parasitic form of religion that follows the same pattern as the corrupt remnants of the Old Religion, itself long thin on real spirituality.

The only shift at all, really, is the one away from a spiritual basis to the story, to one of materialism. If we can understand religion to be not necessarily anything to do with some spirit world, that any idea of a spirit world is simply one perspective and one solution-- but instead see that religion is more fundamentally about making us feel whole, to tie us back together (religion comes from the Latin, literally "re-tie"), I think we get a better understanding. I'd say it's more a psychological thing in reality, if I didn't know that psychology is also just a perspective. A way of talking, a way of seeing.

But the essay's author also talks about the power of the spoken word. His whole thesis is, "Our world is sick and crazy, because it's under the spell of bad stories. We suffer from black magic, a voodoo curse." His point is that the stories we tell are whack, and we need better ones. He gives some great examples along the way, but I like this part, where he says, "Writing was invented to allow the accurate transmission of messages. ... Writing conveys information, but it has little power to enchant or entrance-- compared to the sung or spoken word." And as I think about it, I realize that this is true.

When I hear a poem spoken aloud, I find it easy to lose track of the meanings of the words, and simply flow with the rhythms and sounds. It becomes then like music, a song sung in a foreign language, which can still take you places you never thought to go. Sure, the meaning is an added layer, and not unimportant, and I sometimes struggle to understand on that level, those times when my mind is slipping away from meanings and into pure sound. And, reading a book can defintely blow your mind, but it usually stays on an intellectual level, it's dry, not alive.

There is a great energy associated with the spoken word that is absent in writing. Writing depends on the brilliant argument, but speaking is to the heart as well as the mind. They say the Devil can quote scripture, and can use it towards his own perverse aims. Note that he isn't writing his own scripture. It's the quoting, the speaking, that matters.

I am reminded again of that book, Orality and Literacy, which I spoke of here once. That bit about sound and hearing being that sense that is most closely allied with a sense of power, life, and being; the part about the reverence held for words among primitive cultures. We all know the start of the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word..." And here, quoted from the same essay, is this quote from Jakob Grimm, of fairy tale renown. "A yet stronger power than that of herb or stone lies in the spoken word, and all nations use it for both blessing and cursing. But these, to be effective, must be choice, well knit, rhythmic words, must have lilt and tune; hence all that is strong in the speech wielded by priest, physician, and magician, is allied to the forms of poetry."

I don't know how far to take that. Do I believe in the chanted spell? Hard to say, hard in this world to rule anything out, especially not in a knee-jerk fashion. Surely the great speakers and persuaders, those with the magnetic charisma, have been able to talk people into some pretty crazy things. Hitler is the easy example, but think of the cultists who thought the spaceship of salvation was coming in the comet, and they all drank the Kool-aid. Think of all the politicians and advertisers, singers and poets, teachers and pundits. I don't know if there are spells that can unlock doors or change the weather, but to have effects like that on someone's consciousness, that's pretty powerful, and pretty real.

I'm pretty well in agreement that we need new stories, new songs, a new teaching. But, it's not going to work if we occasionally talk to our kids about recycling, the need to reduce our carbon footprint, while not just some of the time but all of the time we are humming the song of Growth and of Progress. We can't expect to have any change if we keep taking the kids to church, to hear how humans above all other living things are special and that the world was made for us, then park them in front of the TV to hear a similar message of egotism and narcissism. They may learn otherwise in science class, but the vast weight of the cultural stories we have now are against that. And as true as this is for the kids, the coming generation, it is true for us adults as well. What stories do we tell ourselves?

To Tao From Zen

I love the little book of wisdom that is the Tao Te Ching, but sometimes it strikes me as extremely useless. All this stuff about how the sage does this, the sage does that... well, that's fine and good for the sage, but what about the rest of us? If we try to emulate what the book says denotes a master, all we end up with is hypocrisy. We're aping the saints, not a saint ourselves. You need only look as far as the religious right to see what I'm talking about. They're rigid legalists, not Jesus-like Christ figures. They're faking it. A real sage doesn't read in a book how to act, it comes from his or her inner nature, from their oneness with Tao. If a sage lives as an ascetic, it isn't out of self-denial from guilt, or to set an example, or to not pollute the world with reckless consumption; it's because he realized he didn't need all that stuff to begin with. If he is generous and full of kindness to all, it isn't because he should, but because he deep down must.

The Tao Te Ching often just seems not like a how-to book, but more of a snapshot of the sage. Full of lofty sayings and statements that tantalize but don't quite deliver. Interesting, in a way, but not always entirely helpful. What we all want is to know how to actually embody such sagacity. How do I find the Tao? I know it's a ridiculous question to even ask, knowing intellectually that it is all around us (so sayeth the texts and wise ones), it is all that is, as well as all that isn't, we couldn't get away from it if we wanted to.

How do you do without doing? It's a bootstrap problem: wei wu wei, doing non-doing, is impossible to achieve. Attempt it, and you are acting with expectation, forcing things, and forcing is wei, not wu wei. Like in Buddhism, when you accept that desire causes all suffering (dukkha), and go on to desire to end desiring. This is the hypocrisy, and actually dangerous, because you may be deluding yourself, and get the spiritual pride going. You're doing all this religion/philosophy stuff to achieve enlightenment, which is something you (think you) don't have, but want to attain in the future, and thus you're always a seeker, never a finder. You are getting in your own way.

So how does one get out of one's own way so as to flow with the Tao? There is nothing simpler, nor harder; it's always the most obvious thing that gets missed. But as always, I circle around to acceptance in the broadest sense. The only way to act without expectation is to not be in the future, by being in the present. You get there through surrender, surrender to your experience, whatever it currently is, without comment or opinion. In the present, you can't act with expectation, because it's all there, and you're just grooving with it. This is the point of insight meditation

Or perhaps this bootstrap problem is the point, to throw you against your ego's incapability, and knock you sideways into the Void-- a sort of Taoist version of a Zen koan-- Taoism being the mother of Zen (who's father was Mahayana Buddhism). You read the TTC, see how impossible it is to do this, get wrapped up in the dilemma, until the whole thing dissolves in a sort of ego-death or satori, if only for a moment. Sometimes I think this is the main point of sacred writings, from the Law in Judaism, Jesus' teachings, the Tao Te Ching, the Buddhist sutras, and so forth. Not to show you the way, but to prove that the way is impossible for the "i" to attain, thus pushing you into the realization of "I".

This post is also posted on The Rambling Taoists as a guest post.

The Natural Capacity For God

"I devoted myself to Renaissance philosophers and I discovered that the men of secular modernity, once they had emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages, had found nothing better to do than devote themselves to cabala and magic."
                           Umberto Eco, in Foucault's Pendulum

Why are we humans always drawn to the occult, to spiritual things, to religions and UFOs, to the unexplained and unexplainable. A friend of mine says humans have a natural capacity or urge for the sacred. He then, being a fundamentalist Christian (strange how I hate to levy that word, 'fundamentalist,' on a friend!), goes on to say that all other religions are falsehoods spread by Satan, who capitalizes on this urge, but I digress. I like how he put that notion of an inborn draw towards... well, we won't name what, but towards something.

Now, I've long been a skeptic, and even went through a straight up "atheist stage" in my late teens. But I thought that was behind me; I'd discovered eastern religion at age 19 and finally had a system or spiritual basis that appealed to my mind as well as my heart. Yet, as I was hiking, looking at Nature with a mind that wasn't daily ingesting books, blogs, movies and even music sprinkled or saturated with spiritual undertones, away from a culture that, though post-Christian, still has Christian underpinnings, after the mental echoes of these things had died away and my mind had cleared enough to think its own thoughts, I realized I'm still an atheist. I wrote an essay on it, which I may post later; for now, I'll just say I was struck with how deep that goes. I began to doubt even all the Zen stuff, the notion of inner peace and balance, higher states of consciousness, all of it.

Of course, there's much I don't know. I don't really know anything. Descartes built a whole system of thought on his phrase "Cogito, ergo sum: I think therefore I am." I can't seem to go any further than that statement, in itself. I know that I am, because I experience things. Beyond that, what am I? What the hell is this world? Don't know.

So there's a sort of confusion in me. My friend is right; there does seem to be a natural inclination towards spirituality. Even now I'm attracted to philosophical and even spiritual books. I'm considering taking yoga, and I still meditate, if rarely now, and erratically. I wonder if all my life I've been trying first one thing, than another, going first one place, then another, looking for something outside myself that would bring satisfaction, and think maybe I just finally need to get serious with the spiritual thing.

But another part ridicules that thought. I just don't know anymore. Nature seems totally blind to us, random and indifferent. When I'm out there for extended periods, and am theoretically at my clearest, it really does seem empty of all meaning, like that poem Dover Beach gets at. So I wonder if I'm just again being deluded by any of the various myths and fairy tales we've been telling ourselves for centuries, a miserable soul grasping at straws.

I'll likely expand on some of these topics later.

What is Worship?

I always wondered what worship really was. Is it just singing songs of praise, burning sacrifices, and giving lip service to your god? No one ever seemed to have a good definition of this, and I never understood what it meant. How do you do it? What am I supposed to be feeling? Finally I heard a good definition of worship: listening.

Worship as listening... yes, this seems more worshipful than anything. To silence the self and all its commotion, to settle into the underlying Silence of... what? Divinity? Reality? Whatever. I remember Kazantzakis wrote something like, of all the angels flying around God, the one named Silence flies the closest, a lovely image.

Every tradition has it's meditative parts. Yet western religion, like western life, focuses almost exclusively on activity: reading the texts, singing, chanting, praying, endless talking about God, and of course, social improvement. All have their place; social improvement through charity and such are good, and we must talk to one another about our shared faiths if we are to sustain a church (one could question the need for organized religion, but as a social species, I'm willing to let that go for now).

A moment of silence at church doesn't get it, either, because no real understanding is ever taught of what that really means. We may pause in the hymns and prayers, but no one ever said it meant internal silence too. The point was never made; for myself I always thought I was supposed to pray silently, that is, "think" to God instead of talking to him. The upshot is we talk to God so much in prayer that no one takes a moment to listen for a response, which is never going to come like a booming voice from the sky.

I really like the story of Elijah on the mountain. He hears a whirlwind, but God isn't in the whirlwind. He hears an earthquake, but God isn't in the earthquake. He beholds a roaring fire, but God is not in the fire. Finally, he hears God as a still, small voice.

Now, the difference between a loud sound and a quiet sound is far less than the difference between any sound and silence. And the passage is pointing to a profound qualitative difference from the tremendous events that he just witnessed and the still small voice. So I think that line would be better understood as referring to Silence than a whisper.

Elijah was listening, he was worshipping.

Lastly, every time I write worship I seem to type whorship, which I think is sort of funny.