You're Always Sorry, You're Always Grateful

Last week there was a cute item in the news about a wacky book title contest in which one of the finalists was "Better Never To Have Been: The Harm Of Coming Into Existence" by one Professor David Benatar. According to a cursory web search, Benatar argues that (quoting from the cover copy) "Although the good things in one's life make one's life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence." In other words, if I stub my toe (Bad Event) on my way to my Dream Date with Gillian Anderson (Good Event) then I come out behind. A Bad Event (stubbed toe) is inherently more significant than the Good Event (Dream date with Gillian Anderson).

The obvious response to this logic is to move to the other side of the bus. Or to tell Prof. Emo to get off the cross cuz we need the wood. Still, I feel compelled to s--b this argument in the groin, because once I would have found it a fairly persuasive notion, with possibly horrid results.

Caveat: Admittedly I haven't read the book, but I'll tear up the cover copy, by gum.

So, for starters, only someone who's been hiding out in the academic oxygen tent for a lifetime could ever buy the arithmetic of Benatar's logic (not that academia is bad, but there are those who use it to hide out from the real slings and arrows). This notion that Bad Things in a life always have more "weight" than the Good Things doesn't add up. Get your thumb off the scale, Benatar! If I get to skip through the park hand-in-hand with Gillian Anderson, I'll happily kiss a stubbed toe up the The Man Upstairs.

And Another Thing: Professor Weteyed Wimpywuss seems to think that Good Things and Bad Things are steady-state. No. Often what seems like a Bad Thing in one's life (say, working as a carpet cleaner, and thus spending 12+ hour days driving all over the county, cleaning filthy homes and/or bowing and scraping to the idle rich) turns out to be a good thing (got me out of my insular poor-little-rich-boy bubble, showed me how a diverse array of humans live, taught me that happiness and sadness aren't tied to income). I'm not a moral relativist, but often good and bad aren't Good and Bad, they're "good" and "bad." A life is open to interpretation, and attitude is key. For example, is the sadness of heartache bad? Sometimes it's achingly delightful. Sometimes it motivates one to seek more successful love.

Also from the cover copy: "...it would be better if humanity became extinct." You first, Dave. I sometimes suspect that humanity has done more harm than good, but I could be wrong, and we may do better with time. I also suspect that we are accidental side effects of cosmic forces, rather than the glorious end product, but so what? Grant Morrison pointed out in an interview (that I can't find right) now that once England realized it couldn't be the Big Bad Empire anymore, it also realized it could have The Beatles and Swinging London and other fun, relaxed things. Perhaps humanity should adopt a similar attitude. If we don't matter in the cosmic scheme of things, that's cool. Stop grubbing for power and have a good time.

You know that popular quote from Reverend Chuck Swindoll about attitude? It ends with "I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it." Preach, Chuck!

P.S. Holla to Frank Thompson for inspiring the Sondheim quote in the title.

My [CENSORED] Belongs To Daddy

This article by Mary Zeiss Stange probably won't be online long, but it's an intriguing editorial about Purity Balls, a new attempt by the abstinence-only crowd to get young women to take abstinence seriously. The sons and mothers are conspicuous by their absence. Perhaps they figure teaching boys to abstain is a lost cause. How Victorian. I'm extremely conflicted on this stuff. On the one hand I'm totally in sympathy with the daddies in this. I don't think young people should be having sex, and if I had a daughter I'd be desperate to keep boys from seducing her. But consider the narrative they're creating here; abstaining equals purity and faithfulness to Daddy; not abstaining means losing one's "purity" and betraying Daddy. As the article points out, studies show that these girls are going to break their purity vows at a ratio comparable to girls who don't get the abstinence-only treatment. What narrative obligations will they be compelled to live out when they do so? Will they carefully select decent partners, protect themselves and maximize their erotic and emotional pleasure? Not on your life; they've been taught that not abstaining=A SECOND FALL FROM GRACE, and they'll take it as a duty to live out that narrative, choosing the worst partners and having really awful times. When you're in thrall to the patriarchy it's possible to defy Daddy's will, but not to defy his narrative.

And another thing; having run with members of the abstinence-only crowd, I know that for some of them it's very important to discourage the use of condoms and other protections for the very simple reason that unwanted pregnancy and disease are God's divinely ordained punishment for fornicators. The fact that fornicators can beat the system drives a substantial subset of the abstinence-only crowd into a fury. If you fornicate, they want you to get sick or pregnant; it's God's will.

And Another Thing

There have been many deaths and births in my social circle lately. About a year ago I realized that whenever I heard about a birth I neurotically resented it because, since death exists to clear the way for new life, every birth is a divine assertion that I must die. Or so it seemed to me. It felt like every baby was killing me a little. That's pretty stupid, and I knew it, but it still felt true to me. Perhaps my recent fascination with vampires and the mythic warning they provide against clinging to life at the expense of others has helped heal me of that sad anti-birth viewpoint, or maybe it's just the timing of the death and birth announcements. It does seem as if every death announcement has been quickly followed by a birth announcement, establishing that birth doesn't necessitate death as I so cheerlessly believed; birth compensates for death.

And Another Thing...

There's a meme floating around the blogosphere to the effect that these church burnings may have been part of a Methodist vs. Baptist proto-masonic conspiracy. This meme isn't getting any traction at ground zero because we know how stupid this meme is. There's no serious sectarian strife between Methodists and Baptists here. Period. It makes more sense to speculate (as some have) that the burners did pass by more affluent churches, but that's probably more to do with socioeconomic class conciousness than anything.

Another thing: some bloggers have made much of one burner's profession of Satanism, and the kind of anti-social rhetoric these guys posted to each other over the net. I think that's relevant, but not the way some folks want it to be. The notion that these twits were in the grip of some Dark Satanic Power is obviously tempting, but let's get real- "Satanists" are poseurs. Anton Levay made no bones about it-the Satanism thing was just a hook for his highly theatrical athiestic evangelism. These kids' Satanism schtick was more a symptom than a cause; it's Bad Boy Big Talk. It's part of the rhetoric these clowns used to turn their pathetic activities into a Wagnerian Happening. But churches and other houses of worship, respectable businesses and PTA meetings are full of guys who, as youngsters, drank, cursed, professed shocking religious/political/social values and reveled in Bad Boy Big Talk (and many of their well-behaved upstanding wives are yesterday's polyamorous bisexuals.) Their surface-level shockingness doesn't reveal the core wickedness; it actually concealed it. It made them fit in with many, many other college kids who act "bad" but would never do something so evil.

Intelligent Design

You know what Intelligent Design is like? Back when computers had cassette tape drives instead of disk drives, my Dad put Michael Jackson's Thriller in the TI 99 4A Cassette Drive to see what the TI would make of it. Of course the answer was: nothing. As far as the TI was concerned there was no readable data on the tape. Not because there was nothing on the tape: the tape contained some of Quincy Jones's most commercially succesful music (and that Jackson guy.) Not because the computer was useless: it was great for spreadsheets, Zork, etc. The computrer could do nothing with the music because the computer could only function within a specific set of parameters, and no amount of naivete or wishful thinking could make it dance to Quincy's beat.

Science is that TI 99 4A, and God is that cassette of Thriller. Sorry, not God; the Intelligent Designer. Those Heritage Foundation drones have adopted denying Him three times before the cock crows as a key legal strategy.

And another thing that leaps to my mind when I think of ID: the first edition AD&D Deities and Demigods sourcebook. AD&D rules statistically quantified the strength, intelligence, heath etc. of all the characters and monsters in the game, and so the Deities and Demigods sourcebook, devoted to mythological figures whom one might wish to incorporate into the game, tried to quantify mythological figures in a comically procrustian fashion.

Science is all about the measurable, the quantifiable, the testable. I was raised to believe God can't be measured or quantified, and that He Himself declared "Do not put The Lord Your God to the test." Trying to shoehorn God into science per se is like the D&D sourcebook declaring that Zeus has 400 hit points. It's a heretical reductionism, a confusion of catagories, that may be well intentioned but belittles God and coarsens science.

But wait, they say. "Teach the controversy." What controversy? The philosophical controversy about whether or not God made the universe is perfectly legit for a philosophy class; the subject of the controversy is fine for a social studies class. But there's no real scientific controversy here. Just because the IDs have duped one or two tenured activist professors into siding with them doesn't mean that the scientific community is really split over ID, any more than the existence of a few tenured history teachin' holocaust deniers means that there's any legit controversy over the reality of the Holocaust. "Teach the controversy." Harumph. Any controversy that was whipped up in a right-wing think tank isn't a controversy; it's a distraction.