Why Do Good?

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[Image found at the Volunteering England site]

Yesterday’s New York Times (online edition) carried a new entry [JES: link now fixed!] in their “Opinionator” series of weighty questions: “Is Pure Altruism Possible?”

At a certain level, this is the stuff of unresolvable university-level dorm/roommate bull-session debate. The arguments against “pure altruism” seem cold-bloodedly obvious — even if taken to the extreme. Someone who knowingly and apparently willingly sacrifices his/her own life to save someone else’s, well, aren’t they just acting out of a desire to feel good about themselves, to show off as it were, to be noble and be sure we know it? The author of the column (Judith Lichtenberg, a Georgetown University professor of philosophy) isn’t so sure, though. She concludes:

Altruism is possible and altruism is real, although in healthy people it intertwines subtly with the well-being of the agent who does good. And this is crucial for seeing how to increase the amount of altruism in the world. Aristotle had it right in his “Nicomachean Ethics” [link added]: we have to raise people from their “very youth” and educate them “so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought.”

But yes: that right there, that troublesome “ought.” How much does altruism just (or “just,” in quotes) fulfill a sense of obligation — of mere duty, per society’s “rules” — as opposed to a genuine sense of self-sacrifice?

And if you’re not ready for philosophy today, or at the moment, can a purely altruistic character ever work in fiction? Must they all have dark and selfish sides in order to be believable? Can dark and selfish characters sacrifice themselves without sacrificing credibility?

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Update: Querulous Squirrel, who comments at RAMH often, has come up with a fictional diarist — one Serena Passion — whose most recent entry brooded about those who like to think of themselves as (but never quite are, in SP’s eyes) good people.

Update : Duh! For reasons I can’t explain, I used a link not to the Times Opinionator column, but to a post on Froog’s blog. Corrected. Apologies to those who might have been confused, and also to Froog (who perhaps wondered why his stats had mysteriously nudged upward for 24 hours).

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Just Who Do You Think You Are, Anyway?

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[For information about the video, see the note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There is never anything more truthful
Than what you yourself make of it
Except the possibility that is always there
Behind you, at the back of the mirror,
Behind the brain, in back of the universe —
And that also as you will make it.

(Peyton Houston, from The Changes [source])

…and:

When you find yourself asking, irritably and rhetorically, “Why the hell does he keep doing that?!” — I strongly recommend you answer the rhetorical question. The causal story revealed in the answer, which always has roots outside the person, might reduce counter-productive blaming and contempt, and it will give you vital information about how the behavior might be changed.

(Thomas Clark, from Encountering Naturalism)

…and (italicized portion):

We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. “I came into this world.” “You must face reality.” “The conquest of nature.”

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not come into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated egos inside bags of skin.

(Alan Watts, from The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

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Val-deri,Val-dera

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[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]

[Below, click Play button to begin The Happy Wanderer. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:17 long.

[audio:thehappywanderer_timothyseaman.mp3|titles=’The Happy Wanderer’|artists=Timothy Seaman]

The Missus and I have a favorite, half-kidding/half-serious theory about the modern world: that it’s set up to drive its denizens (especially us) crazy. Just in case you haven’t noticed: the pace of life never slows down, and there’s more and more stuff to fill every minute, and every bit of it is urgent and ever more resistant to prioritization. Music is louder and faster, TV commercials more obstreporous, money tighter, our friends and families both frailer and more distant, food and drink more dangerous, streets more crowded and more polluted (despite new regulations every year pretending to fight both traffic volume and air pollution), “communication” trivially easy and also easily trivial, civic discourse threatening to run off the rails at every nerve-jangling second…

Furthermore, of course, no one we know is getting any younger — a situation thorned with a thousand frustrations all its own. Speaking for myself, I am certain that gravity is much stronger than when I was a kid, and air resistance much weaker, and objects theoretically meant to be held in the hands seem aerodynamically designed these days to leap away and down to the floor almost as soon as I touch them.

And knowledge? Pfft! When it comes to knowledge, the situation really gets dire. Computers and networks grow ever more stubborn, refusing not only to play with one another but to play with me, dammit. I can download books tens of thousands of times faster than I can read their first chapters. Facts once gluey slither around in my head like greased marbles…

Note the peculiarly Baby-Boomer view of the world: if something hasn’t been set up to make life easier, it’s because we must be beset by enemies, entire wicked cabals of them, bent on keeping us from whatever we want at the moment. Because, you know, it’s all about us.

This crazy-makingness, I am convinced, is tied in somehow with the laws of thermodynamics. You know: matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, at best just turned into other forms of matter and energy. The total amount of matter (or energy) in the universe is a constant. All that. Because, see — so my theory goes — the total amount of information in the universe is a constant, too. When you move 150 pounds of information from a blog to Twitter, let’s say, it remains at 150 pounds total — just diffused and vaporous and spread out so no one can see the whole anymore, just the individual molecules…

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It Went Right By You

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[Image: “Lodz, PL, 1994.” A photo by Mark Pimlott from his 2008 exhibit, All Things Pass,
at Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (click for original)]

From whiskey river:

Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It’s the first week of October. Season of woolen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.

(Margaret Atwood, from The Blind Assassin [source])

…and:

Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afternoon that did not fade toward evening. There never was a day yet that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night.

(John O’Donohue, from Anam Cara [source])

…and:

Sleepless

Can’t get clear of this dream,
can’t get sober.

Spring breeze chilly
on the flesh: me all alone.

My orphan sail
finds the bank
where reed flowers fall.

All night
the river sounds
the rain falling:
listen.

(Yuan Mei, from I Don’t Bow to Buddhas [source])

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Bon Mot for the Week*

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From poet David Kirby, who will be participating in a cross-disciplinary conference on creativity around these parts later this week:

I tell my own stu­dents that art is the deliberate transformed by the accidental, that you pursue your plan doggedly while staying open to the startling revelations that can kick your work up to a new level.

“The deliberate transformed by the accidental”: I like it.

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* Post title shamelessly cribbed from Froog. For simplicity and directness, it just can’t be improved upon (although I don’t plan to steal it for good!).

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Is It Love? (Local Edition)

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Among the valued newcomers to RAMH‘s roll of occasional commenters, you may have encountered one “Ashleigh Burrows.”

(I use the quotation marks there because that name, as I understand it, is a nom de plume. Which makes it interesting that she calls her blog The Burrow: it’s an eponym for a pseudonym, and how many times can one claim to have seen one of those before?)

a/b, as she styles herself in her comments here, there, and elsewhere, is (like many of us) a writer still unconvinced that simply writing well is enough. When not actively fretting along those lines, she fills in the blog with, well, good writing on a wide variety of topics — provocative questions, political commentary, accounts of daily life with a cast of bizarrely nicknamed characters (The Big Guy and G’ma, sure, got them, and the Big and Little Cuter I pretty much understand to be her kids — but Amster? Aged Parm?)…

Anyway, I direct your attention to a recent post at The Burrow, “Is It Love?” It’s full of the sort of nagging, not-quite-rhetorical questions which some of us (yes) love to chew on:

  • Can one look at another with devotion and desire, knowing that the feelings are not returned, and still call it love?
  • Is there a cognitive component that is necessary for love to exist?
  • Can you love someone you do not need? If the loved one were to vanish and you felt no pain, did you really love at all?

And so on. She sums up:

Many, many questions. I’m not sure the answers are available. I’m not sure that your answers would be mine (or [jilted lover of Aeneas] Dido’s). I just know that love is strange.

Aye. That it is… strange, and troublesome as hell. Even more than “the sex talk,” I wonder how parents manage “the love talk” for their blossoming charges. I don’t have any kids myself, of course. But if I did, what follows would be how I might try to explain it to them — in hopes of arming them before the first thunderbolt hit.*

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When It’s Not Quite (Yet, Still) Light

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[Image: “Zodiacal Light vs. Milky Way,” by Daniel López;
featured at Astronomy Picture of the Day on March 20, 2010]

From whiskey river:

Incandescence at Dusk

(Homage to Dionysius the Areopagite)

There is fire in everything,
shining and hidden —
Or so the saint believed. And I believe the saint:
Nothing stays the same
in the shimmering heat
Of dusk during Indian summer in the country.

Out here it is possible to perceive
That those brilliant red welts
slashed into the horizon
Are like a drunken whip
whistling across a horse’s back,
And that round ball flaring in the trees
Is like a coal sizzling
in the mouth of a desert prophet.

Be careful.
Someone has called the orange leaves
sweeping off the branches
The colorful palmprints of God
brushing against our faces.
Someone has called the banked piles
of twigs and twisted veins
The handprints of the underworld
Gathering at our ankles and burning
through the soles of our feet.
We have to bear the sunset deep inside us.
I don’t believe in ultimate things.
I don’t believe in the inextinguishable light
of the other world.
I don’t believe that we will be lifted up
and transfixed by radiance.
One incandescent dusky world is all there is.

But I like this vigilant saint
Who stood by the river at nightfall
And saw the angels descending
as burnished mirrors and fiery wheels,
As living creatures of fire,
as streams of white flame….

1500 years in his wake,
I can almost imagine
his disappointment and joy
When the first cool wind
starts to rise on the prairie,
When the soothing blue rain begins
to fall out of the cerulean night.

(Edward Hirsch [source]; here‘s a good place to start learning about the mysterious figure whose name appears in the epigraph)

…and:

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

(Jeanette Winterson, from Gut Symmetries [source])

…and:

I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.

(Haruki Murakami, from The Sputnik Sweetheart (translated by J. Philip Gabriel) [source])

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Marching in Place After My Own Hat

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Would I like to report that I’ve been so busy and preoccupied with my writing recently that I’ve skimped on blog posts — and comments on your blogs — for the last couple weeks or so?

Boy, wouldn’t I. But no. I’ve been so busy and preoccupied with everything else that I’ve been cutting corners online. Still, I thought you might appreciate a couple of items in the meantime, not that you need me to entertain you:

First, I’d never have guessed that enough “backwards music videos” have been made that someone reflecting on the matter could actually come up with a list of the top ten of “all time.” (By the way, the backwards here refers to the direction of motion — people running in reverse, fruit falling up into trees, and so on.) So I was surprised that Jason Newman, at the Urlesque site (“Exposing bits of the web”), could post just such a list. His number one selection interested me, all right: a “champion eater… unstuffs his face,” over a song called “From Your Mouth” by a group called God Lives Underwater. But my favorite — the only one I wanted to watch more than once — placed only third in his estimation:

Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water”

One of Michel Gondry’s best videos involves split-screening Cibo Matto members Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, running one member forward and the other backward before they meet and switch positions halfway through. Yeah, it’s complicated. Just watch.

What they said.


Alternatively, if you’ve got a little more time available, I highly recommend this hilarious (and ultimately sobering) account by Jo Walton of an entity she calls the Suck Fairy:

The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading — well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time — or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck. The longer the book has been on the shelf unread, the more time she’s had to get into it.

For those of you who are writers, I don’t have to point out that your personal Suck Fairy especially loves exsanguinating your own work.

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One, and One, and One…

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From whiskey river:

Dogs

Many times loneliness
is someone else
an absence
then when loneliness is no longer
someone else many times
it is someone else’s dog
that you’re keeping
then when the dog disappears
and the dog’s absence
you are alone at last
and loneliness many times
is yourself
that absence
but at last it may be
that you are your own dog
hungry on the way
the one sound climbing a mountain
higher than time

(W. S. Merwin, from Writings To An Unfinished Accompaniment)

…and:

I have figured for you the distance between the horns of a dilemma, night and day, and A to Z. I have computed how far is Up, how long it takes to get Away, and what becomes of Gone. I have discovered the length of the sea serpent, the price of priceless, and the square of the hippopotamus. I know where you are when you are at Sixes and Sevens, how much Is you have to have to make an Are, and how many birds you can catch with the salt in the ocean – 187,796,132, if it would interest you.

(James Thurber, Many Moons [source])

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