Reach exceeding grasp…

A confession: I’m trying to have the face of a stoic or live through the Tirthankars‘ spirit. I’m trying but failing. I’m at a crossroads between my brain trying to make me eat and giving up.

Supposedly, the fascinating Famine Response is underway like some odd biochemical superhero and the next four days will improve. I find the whole concept of this to be incredibly appealing and interesting. Evolution is out-thinking our brain. My brain wants to tell me, “Eat, you idiot or I ain’t working over here no more.” My concentration is down, my energy level is down. And tomorrow, apparently a series of hormones will conspire with my liver to tell the brain it doesn’t know what’s really going on.

The funny thing is I think the brain rarely knows what’s really going on. Popular culture, war stories, and great dramas are made that glorify the magnificence of the “survival instinct”. There’s an underlying theory that people will do anything they can to survive. To most, this is supposed to encourage us by showing – what? – a human need to live through anything. This fast has only increased my belief that this view is completely and utterly fallacious.

Newsflash: you’re gonna die soon. So am I. There are no ifs, ands, or buts. This is certain. The human race will go extinct. America will eventually disappear, Survivor will cease to air. The greatest poems, hopes, civilizations, whales, and skyscrapers are just moonshine over the span of time. That’s the objective reality of the matter. (True, subjective reality is where it gets trickier.)

Mortality is assured. It’s a certainty so certain that it might be cliche to bring up. But, I wonder how seriously we take our own mortality. As I’ve brought up earlier, I think we constantly optimize in the short-term without understanding our long term needs.

Let’s start with the first concept: the survival instinct brings out the “best” in us, teaching us to transcend. For some, sure. There are some marvelous tales of human survival and endurance. But, is this not the classic example of survivor bias? In trolling for stories on a tragedy (war, famine, natural disaster), the living tend to be able to relate their tales better than the dead. Anyone moderately conversant with some of the 20th century’s great tragedies (the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, the Rwanda Genocide of 1994, or the Cultural Revolution to name a few) will run into countless tales where survival was on a razor’s edge. Two people would pursue the same outcome and one lives. Why?

If this were just about stories that let us sleep at night, that would be one thing. But as someone concerned with human violence, I don’t think this is the whole of the matter. Buried in the supposed “lessons” of human tragedy is the exaltation of our predatory instincts; the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict begat the tragedy of the War on Terror. We say we don’t want to inherit the crises of Israel, the suicide bombings, the horrors. And of course we don’t. But it is odd that we never asked how Israelis felt about what it is taking them to hold back the bombings and terror? I imagine few of them have the moral stupidity to say “bring it on” in regards to Palestinian dissidents.

I am confident that Israelis are at best ambivalent about the situation they are in. Perhaps this is partly because they are witness daily to the acts and outcomes of their security forces. Again, American civilization has led the world in obfuscation of moral questions. It is easy to tolerate or casually ignore a war, routine torturing, or endorsements of abhorrent tyrants around the world if you don’t see it. Sort of like how we tolerate sweatshops, brutal treatment of migrant workers, and sexual slavery. (To say nothing about slaughterhouse conditions.)

What are we seeing ourselves as? What is a person without principle? I’ve long wondered this simple question: if we see ourselves as animals, what is the value of any principle or ethical system? And I wonder if that’s a key question of this age: what will we live as? Biological products that are dependent only on their instincts or something unique with freewill, hope, and yes, love?