A Foolish Consistency

Somewhere in the multiverse, that is the name of this blog. It was my first alternative and I spent a lot of time deciding between the two. Perhaps I chose wrong. That phrase comes from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, entitled Self-Reliance. The essay, which I highly recommend, is a diatribe against conformance. It was written by a man who felt that the common standards had become both a strait-jacket on imagination and independence, and a licence to behave in a boorish and self-centered manner.

The whole paragraph is never quoted. In fact, the entire sentence itself is almost never found intact. This is a shame, as it is a bit of writing that we could well use in this year, as people are urged to vote for party unity against their own interests and the interests of the common good. (And I say that of all parties, and not just those in the United States of America.) I cite it here, so that you can see what Emerson meant.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.— 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' —Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

I have a reputation at work for ignoring awards. Those that I have been given sit abandoned upon shelves in Human Resources and my supervisors' offices until they finally heed my response to their calls to claim them and dispose of them in some way or another. I don't attend ceremonies and I did not bother to collect my high school or college diplomas. I have no need for these things. I can understand that others value them and collect them like treasure, but that does not affect me one way or the other. I have no disdain for those for whom these awards have merit, but at the same time, I give them no credit. If I have no knowledge of the accomplishment, I have no knowledge of the value of the award, while on the other hand, if I know the accomplishment, the award adds nothing to my appreciation of the effort or the level of achievement. Emerson spoke of this, as well:

Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

I choose to interrupt the usual meaningless ramblings presented in this blog to cite Emerson and to urge you to read Self-Reliance because I can see that in near future some of my posts will need to refer to my beliefs, for the sake of understanding. These beliefs are incoherent and inconsistent. They make no sense to anyone but me, because I am the only one who has to live by them. I hold no others to the tenets of my belief system, just as I accept no binding from the beliefs of others.

My beliefs change through time. This does not make them unique; anyone who claims that their beliefs are fixed and unchanging is ignorant, arrogant, or foolish beyond imagination. They are also wrong, but stand too close to the painting to see the image. All they see is the brush strokes and pigment, and they fail to see how they change through the day as the light moves from window to window and as the fire flickers in the night.

I hold no belief in the divine, whether a universal God who created everything in the beginning, but who does not interfere in day-to-day matters, or in a personal God who answers prayers from individuals and who requires obsequence and adoration. To me, God is synonymous with "I don't know."

"In the beginning, there was God and God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was." This is the equivalent to me to the sentence, "I don't know what there was before there was a universe, nor do I know what caused the universe to appear, but it did." After that, I'd argue that there is much more empirical evidence for how we got to this point for those who aren't big believers in continuous divine intervention. When I say that I'd argue that point, I'm speaking metaphorically. I don't try to convert people and I don't tolerate those who try to convert me. Enough studies have been done to show that you can't argue someone out of a belief system and attempting to do so only makes her more determined to believe.

So what do I believe? Today at least, I believe in the elder gods, both good and evil, who battled throughout time, raising mountains and crushing them flat again. Only today, these gods no longer deal with furious thunder, howling winds, and raging seas. Instead, they have taken up new roles as gods of technology, who delight in tormenting those who do not properly serve them. I believe in titans who dwell in plumbing, causing the mysterious need to fine-tune the settings for the shower each morning and who cause the drain to clog fifteen minutes before a houseful of guests arrive. I believe in sprites who cause doorknobs to fall off when you are in a hurry to leave, who can kill a light bulb in the one fixture that you need to work, and who can divert a cloud burst a few hundred meters to where you left your windows rolled down.

What happens when we die? Some would say God. I say that I don't know. But despite that, I believe in karma; both the variety that passes through eternity, chasing you through lifetimes; and the kind that opens up a parking spot right when you need it after that week when you left particularly good tips for all of the waiters and waitresses, including the one who brought the wrong plate, but who apologized and rushed the right order through the kitchen.

I believe that no person is really gone until the last person whose life he affected no longer remembers him. I believe that we are here to do good things. Spectacular things. To create art. To advance science. To help those around us. And to be kind to each other.

Because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

I do not believe that the unjust, the cruel, the foul, and the evil are punished, unless we rise up and punish them. I do not believe in retribution in the afterlife. We need to get those bastards here and now. At the same time, I do not believe that goodness will be rewarded after death. If someone does something good, reward them now. Or better yet, go out and do three good things of your own, instead. You'll leave the world a better place and that works toward the goal that the good people have.

I do not believe in bigotry of any kind. Hatred of a whole class of people is the worst intellectual laziness. If you're going to hate someone, hate them one at a time for a specific reason. The best and most common reason that I have found is because they are an asshole. That is a suitable reason to hate someone. Being an asshole is a choice and it's perfectly fine to hate someone because of a choice that they made. The color of a person's skin, her nationality, his sexual orientation, mental and/or physical handicaps, and economic status are not choices. They came as part of the original equipment and unless a lot of expense has been put into aftermarket components, a person is pretty much stuck with the model that he got at birth.

What about religion? It's clearly a choice. Is it alright to hate someone because of their religion?

For this, I'll point you back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. A person, regardless of which religion they espouse, who works to bring good to the world, who takes the parts of his religion that improves the human condition; the parts about loving one's neighbor, about caring for the stranger, about tending to the Earth; that is a good person who makes good choices and you have no right to hate him for his beliefs. On the other hand, the person who picks out the poisonous threads from the cloth of her religion and who uses them to spew bile at those who are different and who don't have the same religion, who uses her life to do evil to others and to the world; regardless of the name of the religion she professes, she is a blazing asshole and you have not merely the right, but the responsibility to do everything in your power to crush her and everything that she believes in.

And so maybe the two names are interchangeable: viewing the world as symmetric, with good and evil balancing each other, with tolerance and hatred as equals, with independent thought and mindless devotion both considered virtuous is a foolish consistency, and it is only by breaking that symmetry that we can be all that we are meant to be.