"For commonsense physical events, we have ways of verifying what's real or not. For moral judgments, we have nothing." This pissed me off too. Reason, anybody? Does anyone out there still value it? Or have we decided that, because it's not concrete, it doesn't exist? Am I alone in reading Plato, and finding something true there? The world we live in is, literally (and I do not use words loosely) a world of shadows. We climb higher, and find light, and reality, elsewhere.
I'm rather angrier than usual, because it is precisely this sort of thinking that will get more of us killed. If we do not respect the spiritual side of things, and decide that we can deal with all people as Game Theory driven automata, we will lose the real war. The war that is even now being played out, between freedom and death. Our enemies have, at the moment, a weapon that too many of us lack, and one which is, finally, invincible. I refer to their will. They have focused it, and drive themselves to destroy us. All our monies and inventions and great tall buildings are nothing to them--because they see what we lack.
A rational agent can be turned aside. They have made themselves into a weapon that cannot be detered: they are no longer rational. Who then can lose this war? We are the only side that might surrender.
We are too clever to deceive ourselves as they are deceived. We are cynical about such things as religion and the soul. Oh, we might pick up religion, the way I pick up a book from my nightstand, flip through a few pages, and return it, remaining unmoved, uninvolved with it. We have, unknowingly, decided that the only stricture is to "be true to ourselves", whatever that means, and that to change in any non-superficial way is morally wrong. So we will not be deceived as they are deceived.
But still there is no resting place. If we cannot summon the resolve that drives them, they will, finally, win. And we are too clever to settle for their shadows. How then can we meet them? By remembering what we have forgotten. We are too clever for lies about the soul. We can only hope to remember the truth of it. That we are immortal. That we die, and die, and live again.
Faulkner:
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
Send me no lessons in cold, silly logic based on false premises. I will reason, and reason rightly, from the truth. I can come to my own conclusions, unfogged by misled directives from my ancestors. We do not need to be irrational to fight the irrational. But we must be clear-headed enough to see the truth of what we are.
