"Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down"

You can't conceive, my child, nor I nor anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.--Graham Greene

Been working on this for some time, but it was going in circles until now. So I take my opening text from Thought Criminal:

In regard to the incapacity of secular philosophy to do that, I've pointed out before, I. F. Stone observed when commenting on Socrates in Plato's set-up job ran circles around a shoe-maker, that the shoe maker could make a pair of shoes while the entire 2400 year tradition of Socratic philosophy had never come up with even one universal truth. Adding scientific method to that has not seemed to improve their odds of getting to one. And morals are hardly the easiest aspect of philosophical inquiry to find them in. 

I will also point out that the various modern attempts to replace revealed religion with formal philosophy, the various and uniformly idiotic schemes of utilitarianism, the modern field of ethics which seems to have turned back to the eugenicist and Nazi projects of drawing up lists of those it is desirable to kill, something which you can do and not only keep but flourish in a modern, university based philosophy department almost eighty years after the largest of the modern scientifically conducted genocides was revealed to the world, only one of a myriad of the 20th centuries modern genocides that outdo past ones.

Socrates didn’t offer himself as a sacrifice, he always offered his companion in dialogue as a sacrifice. In just (!) one example, he tosses Euthyphro on the funeral pyre of the latter’s ethics, a pyre Socrates has built during the dialogue, then happily watches him burn. He goes on to mock the city of Athens in the next dialogue, and then accept their judgment as a matter of ethics that polishes his apple quite nicely. It’s a rare feat to be a relentless critic of both ethics and morality in life (at least the life portrayed in Plato’s dialogues) and yet die a moral and ethical exemplar, to be even considered for millennia a pre-cursor Christ figure.

One admires Socrates his ethics while it’s easier to consider Thomas More a sanctimonious prig (and I think he was). But More is moral; Socrates is self-satisfied. More reminds us of our selfishness. Socrates makes us wish we could be as admired because ultimately:”My death; is it possible?” As long as we can’t really conceive our own death, our own personal extinction, we can imagine ourselves in the company of the admiring as we make the “ultimate sacrifice” without really making it, because we want to prolong being the center of that admiration, and because we can’t really imagine our own death. Especially since death, as Wittgenstein observed, is the only experience of life that is not lived through. It’s a fine thing, to be admired; but when you’re dead, how do you experience that admiration?

When does Socrates ever guide someone out of a moral dilemma, or ever offer an ethical solution, even useful ethical guidance? More argues against the ruling power for the sake of morality; Socrates argues for a personal reward for teaching people how unethical he’s shown them to be, without teaching them what moral (the opposition to ethical, implicitly, in the Euthyphro dialogue) would be. Socrates (as Kierkegaard pointed out) is purely negative, and the telos of that is purely self-satisfaction. Who wouldn’t prefer that to the sacrifice required of being moral?

Dilbert cartoonist says he got canceled even though 'everyone agreed' with his racist tiradehttps://t.co/hpBFq8UFhD

— Raw Story (@RawStory) February 27, 2023

Scott Adams is satisfied that he is “ethical,” because “everyone agrees with him.” What he means is, the people who agree with him are the only ones that matter. The rest are presumably a hate group who should get as far away from him and the “right people” as possible. Who wouldn’t prefer that to the sacrifice required of being moral? Far easier to sacrifice others than to make a meaningful sacrifice yourself.

There is, to use the metaphor, the Church of Meaning and Belonging, and there is the Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging.  We don't have to use the word "church" here as only an ecclesial institution.  We can apply it to any grouping of people, such as the people who believe Donald Trump was the greatest President in U.S. history, or Scott Adams is right and "everyone agrees" with MTG about a "national divorce."  It's a way of identifying a grouping of similarly minded persons, in other words, which is pretty much what Protestant churches in America have always been (one reason they use to split and fission so freely.  My last church had a history of people going literally down the street to start a new church because the congregation voted to carpet the sanctuary.  I was never sure if it was the fact of the carpet, or the color, that was the breaking point.  That church was a Baptist church when I was the pastor of the "parent" church; it's now a Korean one.  My old church is still in the same denomination, but is a "gay" church, something that was anathema to the people when I was there.  Things continually change.).  So "church" in this discussion means a loose collection of people gathered by ideology, not necessarily religious commitment or even belief.

"Church" as a metaphor, then.  "Meaning and belonging" provided a source of identity; even if that identity is white and the belonging comes from thinking there is such a thing extant in America as "anti-white racism."  Contrast this free floating association of those who simply agree with sentiments expressed by someone somewhere on the internet, with the Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging.  "Sacrifice" is the key, and that's a tough nut.

It's so frustrating to be alive in an era of extreme irrationality, in which accuracy, science and truth simply have limited influence.https://t.co/fcXsdpGTf1

— Mark Pitcavage (@egavactip) February 27, 2023

The framing of that tweet intrigues me.  When, pray tell, was the era of extreme rationality where "accuracy, science, and truth" had unlimited influence?  The year of Buck v. Bell?  The years of Nazi genocide, based on genetics from England (Darwin, et al.) and laws from America (back to Buck v. Bell).  The years of the Tuskegee experiments?  The years of slavery when it was established by phrenology (then a science) that blacks were inferior to whites because of brain capacity in skulls, or just the shape of skulls?  (Stephen Gould wrote a fascinating book on the subject; I wish I still had it.) I could go on, but you get the idea.  Sacrifice, as I say, is the key, and one sacrifice that must be made is that my pet ideas, like "accuracy, science, and truth" all walk hand in hand, never err, and are "objectively sound," are perhaps indeed subject to scrutiny, criticism, and even rejection.  "Sacrifice" is a very personal term here, and it exacts a very high cost.

So it is in the arena of morality (which I distinguish from ethics, but take it as read for now).  Thought Criminal is right, "morals are hardly the easiest aspect of philosophical inquiry to find" a universal truth in.  Which is why I started with Socrates, a man so lauded by Western philosophy (and theology, to be fair) that he was considered a pre-Christian (see., e.g., Dante) and a moral exemplar second only to Christ (a laughable assertion, to be honest).  Socrates entire effort (again, per Kierkegaard) was to undermine the very concept of a universal truth.  One might say, indeed, that per Socrates the only universal truth was that there was no universal truth (I know this runs up against his seeming sentiments in the Crito, but as I say, Socrates was burnishing his apple there, as he prepared to leave the stage).  Why is morality such a difficult subject to find a universal truth in, in philosophy at least?  Because it requires sacrifice and Socrates is the philosophical exemplar of a man who always expected sacrifice of someone else, but never of himself.  Even his death was a noble offering, versus the screaming anquish of a man nailed to a cross crying out "Eli, eli, lama sabachtani?" There is sacrifice, and then there is accepting the cup of hemlock because you really don't want to live in exile from Athens.

Which is why philosophers are not so big on sacrifice except when they can make the other person make it.  But then, how is that different from most of us?

ASHES, ashes, all fall down. How could I have forgotten? Didn't I see the heavens wiped shut just yesterday, on the road walking? Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisome days? The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the mill-stones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other-for the world and all the products of extension-is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.

--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, HarperCollins, 1977.

IN some monastic communities, monks go up to receive the ashes barefoot. Going barefoot is a joyous thing. It is good to feel the floor or the earth under your feet. It is good when the whole church is silent, filled with the hush of people walking without shoes. One wonders why we wear such things as shoes anyway. Prayer is so much more meaningful without them. It would be good to take them off in church all the time. But perhaps this might appear quixotic to those who have forgotten such very elementary satisfactions. Someone might catch cold at the mere thought of it.

--Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration 

And then we return to where I'd meant to have started, until I found the right way to start.  I wanted to meditate further on these two passages.  One by the Discalced Cistercian monk praising the shoelessness of his monastery, a place I visited once and found to be one of the truly remarkable places on earth.  The other a poetic exultation by a writer who elsewhere reminds us that all places on earth are truly remarkable, and no one of them "out of the way" unless you privilege your place, and who gives you the privilege to do that?  Which is appropriate, since the monk is preaching humility, too.

But what does it mean to arc "to the realm of spirit bare"?  Or to be "stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, ...a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting."  Do wires long and grieve?  Is longing and grieving like the electricity sparking off and through a live wire?  We think it is, and at the same time we think it isn't.  But holding "one end of a love" is like holding a live wire.  You are still sending the energy down it even though "your father drops, and your mother."  Even when "a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead and you dying."  Some of this I remember as a pastor, standing by the coffins of babies, of adolescents, or husbands and wives and fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, and trying to say words of comfort, trying to understand what it was like to hear what I was expected to say, what needed to be said.  You are surely a live wire then, and if it isn't love you are sparking, what are you doing there?

Which is to say it isn't just about you; it is, and always is, about them.  Language is that.  Language is not what you tell yourself; it's what you tell others.  You may think in words and hear your thoughts in your voice, but do you need language for yourself?  You only need it for others; and it's no coincidence our memories don't really begin until we being to speak, to share with others through words.  Perhaps you have pre-verbal, pre-literate (speaking), memories; but it's rare.  Memory is preserved mostly by telling them to yourself, over and over again.  As you get older it gets harder to keep them all, because you can't tell yourself memories of 60 years of 365 days each.  Even eidetic memory is stored in words, not just sensations.  We know because we speak; and we only speak to each other.  Like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting."

But grief is not everlasting.  That, surely, is the good news.  And I don't mean because time heals all wounds because, more accurately, time wounds all heals.

Memento mori. I do think at least once on the liturgical calendar we should publicly acknowledge that we are mortals and bound to die. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return” is an ancient funeral formulary. It is not a condemnation so much as a reminder that our humility has a physical basis, and that is in our common humanity. Rather more difficult to think you have conquered life or found the secret to existence or deserve what you have while others don’t, if you are asked to remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.  It is not, I think, a lesson Joel Osteen ever ponders, especially since his charity is limited to what’s convenient for him, or what he can be publicly shamed into.

Ashes, ashes, all fall down. Into these senselit and noisome days. Into a world where we are not in control. Where we are caught holding one end of a live wire, stripped to spirit bare, and grief seems to be everlasting. Grief is isolating. We endure it alone, for ourselves, for what we have lost.  In grief, we become most fully human, and most fully connected to the dead, and the living.

The difference between the philosopher and the poet is evident here.  The philosopher makes us examine what it means to be human, by challenging us to examine our own ideas on any given subject.  The poet makes us feel what it is to be human: to be one end of a live wire loosed to the sky, loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.  And in that image to know this is a constant of the human condition; this is something in which you are not alone.  This is something we all, in the cell of ourselves, understand.

To understand what I mean we need to divorce grief from depression.  Depression is a natural consequence of loss, especially great personal loss, especially depression that is simply sadness, not something so clinical it requires careful treatment.  Depression as sadness is an indication that we are alive, and that we did know love, and that we will not soon forget those who are gone.  Grief is the public acknowledgement of our loss.  It joins us together with others:  with family, with friends, with those who share our grief and our need for comforting.  When my mother died my cousins and surviving aunts and uncles (her siblings and in-laws and neices and nephews) were gathered around one table in a restaurant after the graveside service, and it was a memory from my childhood when my mother's two brothers and two sisters and their spouses and children were all gathered at her parent's house for one winter holiday or another.  And in our grief we actually rejoiced, and felt our common humanity, our common connection forged over years of being, however briefly, all together for one purpose.  Yes, it was like holding a wire loosing electricity to the clouds, but it was an affirmation of being human.  If you do not grieve your family, your friends, when it is time for grieving, what is the point of being human?

It is as much about our commonality and our shared lives as praying barefoot in the chapel, and going barefoot down the aisle to receive the ashes and a gentle reminded of your mortality. "My death, is it possible?"  It's not the worst thing to meditate on, once in a while.  And if that's what scares you, what truly upsets you, then perhaps experiencing the question among so many others, in such a peaceful condition, in a ritual, might not be such a bad thing.  We all need to grieve.  We all need to face our mortality.  It is a part of the human condition.  We join in our common humanity when we open ourselves, even a little bit, to such things.

The sacrifices are not easy, and sometimes the smallest ones are the hardest to bear.  No one can make them for you, no one should force them on you.  It is up to you to choose them.  But you should choose the sacrifices for meaning and belonging; those are the ones that are the hardest, but also the most worthwhile.  "Meaning" of what?  "Belonging" to what?  Aye, there's the rub.  Something more than just a city you finally acknowledge you owe a debt to.  Call it a common humanity; not just a common locality.