"SURRENDERING TO BINARY CODE"
On fairly frequent occasion I visit the Religion forum on Craigslist. When I do, I am invariably frustrated by all the conversation stoppers. A thoughtful person, say, yourself -- who's never visited the forum might in your ignorance of its goings on imagine that it facilitates interpretation of the Scriptures and their assimilation into modern thought and realities. But this is not so. Instead, you'll probably find on the forum two camps of howler monkeys, one "atheist" and one "theist". The content posted is largely a swift stream of debilitatingly summary and presumptive assertions which would make a visiting extra-terrestrial conclude that human beings approach open discussion as a zero-sum game not in any way constructive. It would seem to the alien that we seek to reject and profanely discredit rather than formally argue and mutually illuminate truths, powers, forces, nuances and paradoxes. Both monkey camps on the forum are guilty of howling hollow slogans that conscientious people remember hearing countless times before. In fact it is quite typical for a thread to quickly dissipate into exchanges of snide personal attacks and flaccid sadism. As I write this article I wonder how I can even qualify differences between the two camps; the task daunts me!
What is the fundamental difference between the two camps' empty rhetoric? Neither camp wants to put out the effort to doubt and question themselves... they both defer to authority. One side says the other is authoritatively false; the faith in falseness matters more than positive belief and understanding. This makes no sense; since when was mere disbelief sufficient qualification for being enlightened? This is intellectual sloth. Laziness. The theist most typically attributes the authority of the Scriptures to the divine and ignores historicity. They let themselves off the geopolitical hook by rendering the verses irrelevant. For example, they defer and relieve themselves of the duty to grapple with ethnic diversity (especially the kind that should be respected and embraced) by "believing" in the entities of Adam, Eve, Noah, et cetera as matters of biological absoluteness. And then there's the secularists doing the same thing. Take my sister. I ask her if she believes intellectually in evolution by means of natural selection. She says yes. I ask why. She says "because there's people a lot 'smarter' than me who believe in it." Does that statement sound like a good recipe for combating culturally corrosive globalism and upholding the dignity, native traditions, ecological soulfulness and God-given strengths of other races (including other animals)? No. Not in the least -- it just sounds like a categorical statistic for a cheap and politically deceptive telephone survey.
Another issue is violence. The theist camp blames war on worldly attempts at eugenics. The atheists say (as if they've never observed the behavior of lions and hyenas) that religion is the cause of all war. Does either camp want to take notice of the reality that man evolved as a ruthless, dogged mammalian predator whose viciousness and savagery is still deeply ingrained in the nature and even the intelligence of us all? It does not appear so, even though this monstrous caveat of civilization is a matter of life and death. The Iraq War was a direct result of public psittacosis.
What this cigarette-smoking writer, yours truly, is really trying to expose here is a disease killing our lexicon. English is meant to be enjoyed as itself -- something vigorous, dynamic and free spiritually. If you approach a language as a utilitarian, you make money but disempower yourself. Because you seek the sanctification of each and every one of your vocabulary's constituent words, your comprehension fails you, and you wind up with the word "ocean" having as little symbolic potential as the term "corn flakes". People confuse definition with essence. The dictionary is a tool, not a canon. Nor is a physics textbook, and in some sense neither is the Bible.
I consistently notice my fellow human beings' attempts to liberate themselves from linguistic constraint; it's a shame, but many attempt it with drugs, alcohol and cussing. They want access to meaning that is prevented by the officialism and ceremoniousness of mankind's conceit of dominion over the natural world. And again, this is facilitated by a utilitarian geopolitical philosophy. The violence of the savage is sublimated into the violence of pasteurization. And everybody loses.
I wonder if honest etymology scares people because they'd rather not admit that all words and names began, truly, once upon a time as grunts or whoops or wails in the deep, deep past. If they did, they'd have to face up to the unknowable question of what communication really is in its essence, and why we cannot perfect it, and why it is not inherently superior to that of a school of dolphins, or even to the chemical signals of ants and wild dogs. We are now moving in the direction of surrender to binary code; to put it poetically our lexicon may one day consist simply of "fuck" and "not-fuck", and nothing else. Is that how we want to approach philosophy; science; religion? Is that how we want to approach love; friendship; fraternity? Could that ever be an approach? How would the religious man pray at his table before he eats his corn flakes?
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