THE HARVEST HOLIDAY KNOWN AS ‘THANKSGIVING’

So there I am, sitting in my reading chair early in the morning on Thanksgiving Day. It’s a particularly cold California dawn that spreads its thin and insubstantial warmth over the landscape as I sit, valiantly ploughing through a rather excellent paper on the classical German pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer, and as usual my cerebral neurons struggle to fire properly as they experience metaphysical coitus with the caffeine.

By my left side, my Siberian bitch, Nala, sits gazing soulfully up at me with her arctic blue eyes as I struggle to balance a strong cup of coffee with the papers clutched in my left hand. Her liquid nitrogen gaze transmits a perfectly clear message: put those papers down and rub my neck NOW!

This is the eternal and never-ending dilemma I face every morning, when I sit here trying to simultaneously wake up, drink my coffee and scratch Nala’s luxurious winter fur. It never fails to occur to me at such times that I actually need three hands, not two. One for each of the above tasks: One to hold the book, one to grasp the coffee and one (the left-most) to give Nala her accustomed attention. Not really a perfect set-up that promotes intense concentration. And meanwhile, I’m trying to get my mind around some of Schopenhauer’s more complex concepts of the ‘noumenal realm’.

At this very moment wifie comes into the room, clutching a small furball, admonishing me to empty the washer/drier lint filter (a regular, semi-daily lecture that seems to fulfill her sense of being the Home Captain, or is it ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’?). It’s enough to send that last vestige of sharply focused effort I am exerting to grasp my reading material’s central thesis to dash crazily off into the misty Sierra foothills, wordlessly howling like a possessed Irish banshee!

Sigh. Schopenhauer is correct, of course: life is suffering, all experience is pain, the Universe is meaningless, God is dead and our chief efforts should be directed towards minimizing the resulting pain (by lessening attachment to things and subduing the ‘Will’ that is the human ego). [Schopenhauer, by the way, enjoyed the company of two French Poodles named Atma (likely a disambiguation of the Buddhist concept of higher self, or Universal Consciousness) and Butz (possibly a shortened form of the Middle Chinese word for the name of Buddha, Butsu), so I suspect he was not totally unfamiliar with this quandary of desperately divided attentions.]

A fine philosophical state of affairs! At any rate, as I sat there, alternating gulps of coffee with neck scratches and pagination concerns, I recall having caught a particularly sappy snippet on the CBS Evening News the night before. The anchor person described a, incident in the New York City Metro tunnels involving those ubiquitous little multi-colored 3M ‘Post-it Notes’ that you use to leave messages for others (among other uses). It seems that in the subway stations, someone left piles of these along with a pen, next to a sign encouraging subway riders to use them to leave a short comment on life.

As might be imagined, these brightly colored little bits of paper were soon plastered all over the walls of the NYC Metro stations, each containing a fragment of populist ‘wisdom’ from some passer-by as he paused en route from somewhere to wherever, to record a thought or feeling about post-election America. The news anchor spinning this story had made some consequent Pollyanna’ish observation about how this act of social spontaneity constituted (somehow) an inspiring vignette, providing an uplifting moment possessed of benefit for all who offered candid observations on our lives.

It was, of course, nothing of the sort, but rather another perfectly brilliant example of how the United States of America’s specific form of commonised ‘democracy’ has further degenerated into the sort of maudlin mish-mash of intellectually retarded sentimentality that today passes for collective American consciousness, and that has effectively replaced whatever former disciplines of intellect may have previously existed in our country.

The German philosopher Martin Heiddeger expressed contempt (considerably justified, in my opinion) for much that has arisen from America’s unique attempt to interpret (capitalistic/materialistic) democracy. For Heidegger, America was the figurative representation of acute social crisis of our present age (“…which is also the deepest crisis of our time”). Heidegger went on to say that “…America represents the greatest alienation of man, the profoundest loss of ‘authenticity’, and a supreme impediment to spiritual awakening.”

This belief was resoundingly echoed by Sigmund Freud, who thought America ‘a mistake’.

Heidegger felt that the ‘brave new experiment’ that was the American system “…reduced everything to its lowest common denominator, all experience to trivial—all was trivialised & bland.” Having stumbled across this gem in Peter Watson’s excellent apothesistic paean to the brilliance of the German intellectual tradition (‘The German Genius’, 2010, ISBN 9780060760229), it serves to exponentially underscore what has been the essence of my central complaint about American ‘culture’ (or lack of it) for the past 40 years: that America…and democracy in general…has created a politicized social system in which mediocrity has been elevated to a near-science (a circumstance resulting chiefly from the ascendance of the commercial corporatism that has transformed a nation of political ‘freedom & equality’ seekers into a near slave-economy of mindless, unthinking consumers of material superfluity).

Schopenhauer deplored this very same model, since it deifies the belief that happiness can be and is the (idealized) result of endless acquisition of material possessions (including endless pursuit of wealth, creature comforts, personal power and ‘things’). Not just deifies, but promotes the concept on a world stage that is powered by unimaginable aggregate wealth concentrated in the hands of an ultra-privileged few super-rich individuals who ‘own’ all that power, and who promote it with a dynamic marketing forcefulness unequalled in the history of the entire world.

Schopenhauer soundly criticized the American system of ‘purchasing’ happiness, characterizing it as the antithesis of what the striven for ideal properly ought to be: that is, the lessening of pain and the reduction of the unmanageable collective vanity that drives humankind along on its path of cyclical spiritual non-achievement. This presupposes, as did Schopenhauer, that the Universe is an uncaring, totally detached and non-interactive entity, that there can be no ultimate ‘improvement’ of the basic human condition (despite our blind worship of science & technology as ends in themselves) and that all human effort being consequently directed towards conflict, antagonism and destructiveness can be productive of little more than falsely contrived schemes of baseless hope. This is the antitheis of ALL religious dogma that promises some sort of ultimate salvation to believers, some sort of eventual reward (for so-called ‘humane’ and moral behavior), and in short is a flat rejection of the sort of smarmy, suffocatingly optimistitic beneficence proffered by a (personalized) ‘deity’ (read: ‘God’ or supreme being).

Christianity, is among the worst offenders in this context, at least as practiced by those who subscribe to the extremely simplistic beliefs of fundamentalist Christian dogma (read: evangelical Pentecostals, etc.), since a chief supposition of these afflicted souls is that not only IS there a ‘God’, but that ‘He’ is actually aware (no one dares to explain exactly how this might be possible, of course, since it involves that irrational bugaboo of all philosophers…faith) of each individual and is moreover interested in highly personalized interactions with individuals (i.e. ‘prayer’, the ostensible power of which…if it even does exist…is obviously misunderstood, mischaracterised and not at all analytically graspable, unless it be somehow a manifestation of some inexplicable force we are unable to quantify that seems nevertheless to exist). Quantum explanations aside, this belief requires a leap of faith that defies all logic and intelligent inquiry.

Be all this as it may, I watched that segment of the CBS Evening News with the usual sense of dismay, since it panders to the worst aspirations of any democracy…bringing the higher thoughtfulness of those who ARE intellectually gifted down, whilst simultaneously elevating the most pitiful specimens of Homo sapiens to peer status with their intellectual superiors!

Instead of encouraging all to aspire to the greatest achievable heights of applied intelligence, American democracy reduces all social wisdom and enlightened thoughtfulness to that same base level wherein live those who…were it not for Christian benevolence and ‘humane’ regard for ‘all God’s creatures’…would certainly perish (and in doing so, help clean the collective gene pool of our species remarkably). The ‘Post-it Note’ anecdote therefore strikes me as a breathtakingly excellent illustration of how this ‘herd of mediocrity’ that is America’s diverse population has come into its ascendance.

Interestingly, it strikes me as exceedingly odd that no one pauses to observe the fact that by deliberately promoting mass mediocrity throughout our culture, those powerful few who possess the behind-the-scenes ability to manipulate the herd gain remarkably, since it is far more difficult (and expensive) to ‘convince’ those possessed of intelligent reflectivity (and who routinely exercise it, moreover) than it is those who react emotionally (and usually assisted by a reduced level of intellectual capacity, as well). Today’s ‘social media’ youth culture is very likely one of the best examples of this devastating dynamic at cultural work, but so is the guiding modus operandi of the Progressive Left today (e.g. attitudinal & behavioral conduct guided and motivated principally by ‘political correctness’).

I used to find myself highly irritated by the absolutely loathsome stupidity reflected in most television commercials until I realised (early in life) that these exhortations to mindlessly (reflexively) buy are not aimed at reflectively intelligent individuals, but at those on the bottom-feeder level, who aren’t capable of applied critical reflectivity). OK, they’re still highly annoying, but at least I understand the mechanism at work.

Social media is another venue in which this dumbing-down effect has devastating impact, since it encourages everyone…regardless of their intellectual ability…to instantly weigh in on any and all issues brought to the public’s attention in a knee-jerk manner. Decades ago, inferior individuals were encouraged to simply stay addicted to (or intoxicated by) whatever consciousness altering substance worked most effectively to render them negligible to the process of organizing (controlling?) mass social interactions; today, we’ve brought them into the colloquy as equal worthies and made them feel as if their opinions, reactions, thoughts and attitudes are just as important as those of the most enlightened members of our society. The phenomenon we now know as ‘blogging’ has also served this purpose significantly, since the ease of recording thoughts, opinions and attitudes afforded by modern electronic media effectively makes the most illiterate, most puerile, most ignorant individual appear to be on the same par as a scholarly university professor.

Back in the day, people who ‘wrote’, although always undervalued and never paid what they were actually worth (like school teachers, policemen and other critical foundational units of any thriving society), were at least regarded as somewhat more enlightened (or at least more intellectually aware) and were looked to for their higher-level thoughts and observations on otherwise chaotic human affairs. The reverse today is the norm, with every low-lifer, marginally intelligent bottom-dweller and reactive materialist adding his or her two cents worth at the drop of a hat.

Sad? Yes, but more to the point, these tendencies served to undermine the very strength and fibre of our society by reducing the concept of intelligent observation to that of a bowel movement (i.e. everyone has them, but some are a lot smellier than others)!

A few days ago I caught a news segment concerning some performer (unknown to me) named Kanye West who interrupted a stage appearance at a local auditorium by breaking into a rant totally unrelated to the performance (or music, whatever). Not knowing who exactly this ‘Kanye West’ was, I dismissed it as simply a strange aberration without larger implications…until yesterday, when a friend informed me that ‘Kanye West’ is the husband of reality television star Kim Kardashian. The friend also provided me with the backstory about how this West fellow (whose claim to fame is that he is a ‘rap-artist’…in my opinion a synonym for ‘trash-talking, probably Black & talentless babbler’) appeared on the MTV Music Awards stage in 2009, grabbed the microphone from Taylor Swift’s hands and proceeded to deliver a great load of verbal horseshit to his captive audience (who had paid lots of money to hear his ‘music’).

I should state here that the fact that ‘reality TV’ has become such an important part of today’s mass pop-culture is in itself a symptom of the profound level of social dysfunction our culture glibly regards as ‘entertainment’. The fact that someone like Kim Kardashian, whose principal claim to fame is possession of a massive set of admittedly appealing tits & ass, can be elevated to the celebrity status of the universally known and regarded among most Americans. The fact that her ‘husband’ is the idiot known as Kanye West explains a lot (they have a daughter named…wait for it…”North West”; now isn’t that just precious?).

My point in even remarking on all of the above is that America has within largely the past 30 years become the social & cultural wasteland philosophers predicted, perfectly fulfilling both Freud and Heidegger’s allegation that ‘America is a (spiritual) mistake’.

Sadly, the new American Progressive Left, a group that comes about as close to embracing the broader social precepts of Marxist theory as any American political party since the fall of the Wobblies (i.e. The IWW), has taken over our nation’s collective consciousness to the extent where mediocrity (in the form of the underclasses) has become instituted as a state religion.

But what are the more devastating effects this transmogrification of American cultural consciousness is having on America today? It should come as no surprise that, when you truly believe in the core theological dogma of a religion (such as Christianity) which teaches the Christian virtues of brotherly love, universal compassion, humane regard for (human) life, etc., you inherently support the broadly encompassing ‘dumbing-down’ effect that is so rampant in America (and in other countries that embrace the American model).

Instead of responding decisively and forcefully to deal constructively with deleterious social forces that undermine the collective good (good examples are crime, substance abuse, perverted forms of ‘entertainment’ that prostitute intelligent thought and well-intended behavioral conduct, et al), we prefer, as liberal progressives just chock full of compassion (and guilt), to turn the other cheek and pretend that all these unfortunate individuals are simply ‘misunderstood’ and in need of more love & compassion. Nope! Sorry! That sends entirely the wrong message and adds Teflon to the skids upon which American is inexorably bob-sledding merrily downwards to national oblivion.

There are some enlightened souls (I like to include myself in that category) who favor a more draconian solution to the chaotic disorder we now face as a nation: the adoption of social Darwinism, perhaps even a form of enlightened eugenics. Instead of endless permissiveness and acquiescence to the many outrageous demands upon our patience made by social morons, we should harden our attitudes across the board.

The ‘homeless’, who now plague every urban area of the nation, should be shut out, excluded and economically ‘cauterised’. That is, instead of making them feel ‘entitled’ and supporting their parasitic dependence on the kindness of well-intended but morally confused souls, we should be make them feel like the pariahs they actually are (mental health problems? Sorry, but we have institutions for socially disaffected souls who refuse to adjust...of course this presupposes that they possess a vestige of rationality, an expectation precluded by substance abuse) and let them wither away….unless they can be made to understand that nothing in life is ever ultimately ’free’. If you can’t afford to pay the price, you can’t expect co-dependence from those of us who understand that basic rule of society (sorry Christians, but ‘charity’ doesn’t cut it under social Darwinism). If that sounds heartless, sorry...life's a b**ch.

Cultural minorities? They need to understand that unless they willingly accept the need to acculturate in America by becoming a self-supportive, responsible member of society sharing traditional American values, acts of extreme anti-social behavior are not only unwelcome, they cannot be tolerated.

Students? Our spineless Progressive Left Liberals need to ‘get’ the message that students only appear to be adult beings, and are incapable of reaching mature understandings of reality. In actual fact, until the age of 30, it is generally regarded by most scholars in the field of human development that a full 20% of the human brain isn’t completely developed yet (80% of the human brain, it is said, is fully developed at age 3…BUT). Accordingly, they need to ‘get’ the fact that students, although over-endowed with the gifts of energy, spirit, enthusiasm and physical vigor that youthfulness confers, are still not fully balanced creatures imbued with the balanced, moderating effects of age & experience…and therefore should not be treated as if they actually know much of value in a chaotic society ruled more by emotional volatility than reason.

Christians? Christians need to ‘grow beyond’ their supernatural belief in gods and heavenly ‘saviors’. They need to open up their eyes and see the factual dynamics underlying all human interactions in our so-called ‘civilised’ world: vanity, ego, self-centeredness, irrational willfulness, cruelty, anger, bias, prejudice, racism….and the whole lexicon of abhorrent characteristics that goody-good Christians like to pretend are not man’s ‘true nature’.

Schopenhauer believed, contrary to the grossly optimistic beliefs of Christians, that humankind has not and will never make progress in perfecting these deficits in our character; that human behavior of the type referenced by George Santayana is the inalterable and permanent norm. As such, spiritual and moral imperfection is not merely a transitory stage on the path towards God-like perfection as religionists believe, but an immutable, inalterable status quo that all human beings are doomed to be enmired in for all eternity. Pessimism, such as that espoused by Arthur Schopenhauer in the 1800s, holds that human beings are fatally flawed, that our nature is bigeminal and that systems of erstwhile morality are all highly artificial constructs with no metaphysical substance whatsoever.

That is not to say that there are not other than morally imperative motivations for adopting a set of civil and humane responses towards both the race and human conditions: there are. However, at the same time we absolutely cannot let ourselves be blind-sided by highly chimerical and grossly deluded hopes that the categorically unachievable nature of mankind may actually be improved. It cannot be.

Schopenhauer was, interestingly, a dog lover (so was Hitler, of course, not that these are related subjects), and as already mentioned had two French Poodles that he was inordinately fond of. He was willing to make excuses for the sometimes frustrating behavioral excesses of his canine charges, since they were creatures of pure instinct and could not make high-level abstractions upon which to govern their circumstances. Not so, for humanity, which HAS been given both a brain and the frontal lobe equipage with which to determine right from wrong and act accordingly. For this reason, he could find no possible basis upon which to give his fellow human beings the benefit of the doubt when they transgressed the rules of ‘civilised’ behavior. Neither am I able to. And it is for that reason that I personally abhor unthinking acts of reactive charity (such as giving all those poor homeless people…sob, sob!…a real Thanksgiving dinner of their own, by way of one particularly relevant example).

Neither can I excuse those who believe that women do not possess the absolute right to govern the conditions and circumstances of their own physical bodies, just as I cannot countenance those who feel that euthanasia is a ‘mortal sin’, or who believe that somewhere out there is a supernatural deity who will get REALLY peeved if they don’t live according to ‘His’ (or Her) supposed laws of human conduct.

Dogs, on the other hand and aside from being our most wonderful and loyal companions (in this sad and solitary existence we call the human life experience), deserve every consideration from us, in their reliance upon us to treat them with care, respect and the love they so rightfully deserve.

Schopenhauer believed this, as do I. And so it goes on this annual orgiastic day of supposed American ‘thankfulness’ for all the ‘blessings’ that so many sadly deluded souls believe have been bestowed upon us by a ‘generous Creator’. Personally, I wish everyone took a hard look at the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche…no, REALLY looked at them. It might actually loosen up a few hermetically sealed minds in the process.

Myself? I’m grateful enough for a warm cozy house, for a good woman who cares for me, for the few friends who seem to be able to see into me deeply enough to understand some of that which is there, and for a couple of big gloriously furry pseudo wolf-clones who deign to warm my feet on cold nights by the hearth. But make no mistake. I have paid my earthly dues and I am well aware that in this cold, often callous and capricious (human) world we inhabit, there are no unpaid rides, no ‘free gifts’ and no effortless shortcuts in the path we all travel towards an uncertain state of extinguished psycho-sensory non-viability that we call (for lack of a more suitable word) Death. 

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Some useful resources (on and about the works of Arthur Schopenhauer):

1) Arthur Schopenhauer, by Robin Wicks (2003/11)

2) Heidegger on Americanism and Democracy

3) On the Vanity of Existence, by A. Schopenhauer (Essays)

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