Annual Christmas/New Years Message 2021

 One of my favorite Christmas songs is "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," written in  1943 by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine; it became a standard, albeit with altered lyrics, when it was sung by Judy Garland in the 1944 film, Meet Me In Saint Louis.

The original song began as follows:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas,

it may be your last

Can you imagine a more un-American way to begin a song than with these opening lines? America, which has been the global Jingle Bells bellwether, spreading its sometimes mindless gospel of optimism around the world. Since the 1920s, America has swept death under the table; in this song, which, despite death and destruction (the song, I remind you, was written in 1943, when the defeat of fascism was far from certain), advocates having a Merry Christmas, albeit a little one, now.

The opening lines remind one of the mementos mori of 'yore.'  I imagine the following scene: a small family sits around a holiday table determined to celebrate despite everything. (The shades are drawn in anticipation of a possible air raid). One of the family members, feeling that the festive mood is a bit forced, lifts up the bright-green Christmas tablecloth, to see, as it were, what underlies the roasted turkey on the table. Suddenly he sees a skull, staring back from sockets which once sheltered eyes. Nevertheless, he lets the cloth fall back and continues the celebration with an ambiguous smile on his face.

This is not Schubert's  Winterreise, however; the song does indeed celebrate life despite its negative aspects.

The song ends with the following lines:

Faithful friends who were near to us

will be near to us no more.

But at least we all will be together,

if the Lord allows,

Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow;

so have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

(Italics mine.)

Uh-oh. There is at least a potential problem here. The song posits an afterlife compared to which all the suffering of this life is a mere 'flash in the pan.' Many moderns, myself included, have at best a very uneasy relationship with anything that sounds like 'pie-in-the sky.'  For us the sky extends in all directions for unimaginably long distances; we might look up at the universe and smile, but there is absolutely no evidence that the universe will ever smile back.

Is there room for optimism? You bet; remember, I'm writing a basically upbeat message. If we are involved with work which has a positive effect on society; if we focus on relationships; if we focus on loving our neighbor as ourselves; if we realize that everything is connected (wisdom), we will experience profound joy--at least to the degree that these habits are assiduously practiced. If one lives life in this way, one becomes inevitably spiritual, loving, and wise. What better fulfilment can one hope to have?

All right, let's admit it. The self is an illusion; elements within us, albeit in different proportions, are the same elements in the outside world. Bergson was wrong; there is no life principle that animates flesh. Evolution developed a sense of self for survival purposes--and, 'thank God' it did, for without it the glories of culture and science, etc, would not have been possible. But that's the subject of another essay, one, in fact, that I've already written.

Let's return to having a merry little Christmas. The song, as we have seen, advocates the celebration of life despite its negative aspects. The latter aspects are always there; they shouldn't, however, stop us from making merry periodically. When negativity looms larger, though, Christmases become more and more little.

We are, alas! living in such an age now. Climate change, the result of untrammeled greed, (in which, by the way, so many of our problems have their origin), assures that we cannot continue living lives of mindless consumption. (How can it be that the world is run by ostriches with their heads in the sand--sand, by the way, that was once, not long ago, fertile soil?)

Climate change, of course, is not the only major problem. Inequality has reached painful levels. For instance, the richest country in the world has yet to provide its citizens with universal health care! In a country plagued by violence, we have yet to pass meaningful gun-control legislation! Our country, like much of the world, is almost hopelessly divided! The great American experiment, democracy, is in grave danger!

Serious problems indeed.

We must simplify our lives. Climate change demands it. Chicken littles eating beef while the sky is falling...Is it too late? 

It is never too late.

If we opened Pandora's box now, I imagine that a Trumpy puppet  would pop up like a Mad Hatter Jack-in-the-Box. But hope, that thing with feathers, would still remain.

Never give up trying to make this world a better place. Have faith and be thankful; love and wisdom will get us through somehow. In other words, have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

It may be your last.

Failure:Success Part ll: De Religione Neminis

In part l, I alluded to my many failures under the pseudonym, Andrew K. I think I had been reading too much Kafka, (I recently gave a lecture about Kafka)--truth is that I have had a good deal of successes in my life as well.

In this essay, I would like to discuss one of my greatest failures of all: the failure to be an atheist. I don't know how I do it, but I do. After all, I know well that every statement about God is untrue. In the Upanishads, the source of being is called Brahman. If one makes a statement about Brahman, the correct response is Neti-Neti, i.e Not This, Not That. How many adherents to one of the three Abrahamic faiths would respond to the doctrine that God loves us with an absolute negation? Nemo. Sed quis nemo sum.

The Catholic catechism might forge a community of believers; none of its statements, however, makes any literal sense--unless one is ready to give up science. When the great mathematician, LaPlace was asked by Napoleon how God fit into his philosophy, he replied, "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là," "I never had any need for that hypothesis." Most scientists today would agree with him.

For me, God is just a word. Regarding religion, I sometimes paraphrase Tina Turner's famous hit with "What does God have to do with it?" Do I believe in God? No. Do I believe in Silence? You bet.

Can you believe two things at the same time? Aristotle says no. Nicholas de Cuna says yes. (The latter is the  philosopher best known for the concept of 'coincidentia oppositorum,' or the unity of opposites.) In mathematics, you don't want anyone telling you that, while e=mc2, e can equal m times the square of something else as well. But life, but consciousness, but religion, but God, is not mathematics. 

We Westerners tend to use logic to prove a hypothesis which simultaneously disproves its opposite. This is quite valid when, say, transmission photometry indicates that an exoplanet contains oxygen in its atmosphere. This is thence accepted as a scientific fact, unless someone can falsify the results by proving the methodology of determining the atmospheric composition was faulty. This is science.

Linear reasoning, however, gets a bit dicey when describing the attributes of consciousness. For instance, many scientists are pure materialists--how can consciousness, a product of the brain, affect matter? That would be a form of dualism, a belief, as it were, in a Ghost in the Machine. Therefore, such scientists conclude, there is no free will. Does that mean we shouldn't plan for tomorrow?

Of course not. Evolution has convinced us that free will exists; without it, culture, not to mention jurisprudence,  would collapse. As long as the I is believed to be a separate entity, the concept of free will is essential. Thus, for practical purposes, free will and its lack exist simultaneously. (If you exist in a realm where free will doesn't exist, you're either dead or living in Nirvana. Maybe someone has actually achieved Nirvana in their lifetime; if so, such entities are extremely rare--in addition, I sure wouldn't want to vote for Mr. or Ms. Nirvana to be our next president! Who puts down the sword dies on the Cross, wrote Simone Weil).

Similarly with religion and science. I am at home with the scientific view of the world. I do not believe in any of the basic tenets of the three Abrahamic religions. This means I don't literally believe that God gave the decalogue on Mount Sinai, nor do I believe that Jesus of Nazareth is literally the son of God, nor do I believe that Muhammad was the last of the prophets. But I do believe that all three are poetic expressions of a universal truth. 

Before the enlightenment, it was possible to believe in dogma and Silence. Dogma, however, was always prose that posed as poetry; literal belief in dogma is no longer possible for those with a functioning, informed head on their shoulders. Silence, a matter of the heart, however, has and cannot ever be wounded by the sticks and stones of Doubting Thomases.

I think that many stick to the old dogmas because they want certainty and consolation. Why do we suffer so? A question for which there are no convincing dogmatic answers. Grown-ups realize that the cosmos isn't able to embrace us; it has no arms. That it 'fans fresh our wits with wonder' I have no doubt. If we want something that fans fresh our hearts with wonder, we have to immerse ourselves in the human realm; we have to experience the miracle of human relationships. The cosmos teaches us awe; humanity teaches us love--what more do we need? Silence is the umbrella that includes and shelters both.

The paradoxical nature of reality was beautifully captured by Buddha when he taught that those who believe in life after death are wrong while those who don't believe in an afterlife are wrong as well. On a prose level, the level on which most of our lives are lived, life is ambiguous. It has its joyous peaks; it has its terrible valleys. We must learn to live with this ambiguity, as the great scientist, Carl Sagan, taught. What better way to forget death for a while than through meaningful work and relationships? What better way to forget death forever than through Silence?

Death is going to hit us hard if it hasn't deeply wounded us already. It wounds us even more deeply by earlier removals from life of those whom we love. There is no getting around that. 

There is a time for mourning, as Ecclesiastes wisely proclaims. But death does not negate the continuation of life, as Nietzsche knew. An individual might not survive the death of a loved one, but no individual is the center of the world; to think so, as many do, is hubris of the worst kind. Those individuals who know what Silence 'means' will, with the help of loved ones who remain, survive and even thrive once again.

Hindus speak of jnana, wisdom; it is the awe we feel when we experience and study the wonders of the cosmos. Hindus also speak of bhakti, the wisdom of devotion, the wisdom of love. The wisest Hindus teach their version of coincidentia oppositorum, namely that jnana and bhakti are one. 

Silence has known that from before the beginning of time. Do you?