Higher than the Animals, Lower than the Angels, Yet Unhappier than Both...

When thinking about the problem of evil and suffering that philosophers and theologians commonly grapple with, I think also of animals and their lot in life (so memorably described in that poem by Walt Whitman (see below*), how little they complain despite all the "injustices" they endure on this earth, their constant struggle to survive, the harsh elements they're exposed to, their soon-forgotten pains and deprivations, their subordinate position relative to us, the hostile forces that that make them expendable as creatures, their scary self-reliance, locked in (as they all are) to the vicious cycle of predator and prey, forced to kill or be killed, lacking the comforts of technology and civilization. No matter how nightmarish their environment may seem, their limited, insular, brutish mode of awareness keeps them somehow "placid" and "self-contained" - even "serene" - as Whitman might say, while we humans, by contrast, emerging from the same environment, have taught ourselves (over time) the art of unhappiness - fueled by feelings of outrage, indignation, disappointment, regret - which we see as normal because we can imagine better outcomes unconstrained by fate or necessity; we have dreams and ideals, we build,  we create, we envision - thereby leap-frogging over our fellow mammals who never expect much more beyond than what already is. Our more restless form of consciousness -  wired as it is to visions of possibility and transformation -  seems like a major anomaly, the source of greater pride, dominion, feelings of superiority, but also greater misery.  Animals in general seem more normal and well-adjusted precisely because of their complacency; by contrast, we are the sick ones possessed by expectations that can never be fully satisfied, who make demands that defy plausibility, who measure ourselves against the status and privilege of others, who crave increased levels of power and control over circumstances, who "live for" improvements sometimes to no avail - and when our demands are rejected,  this lack of "progress" infuriates us,  embitters us, renders us,  by turns, angry or distraught, headstrong or hyped-up. But are we correct to react this way? Do we have rationality and morality on our side here? Isn't there something entirely needless and gratuitous about this tendency of ours to "make a stink" whenever anything goes wrong? Unhappiness seems unnatural. Because to be human (if it means anything) calls for us to reject the way of animals and seek for something higher. But by claiming this spiritual ground beyond what Fate or evolutionary biology has ordained for us, we cannot help but stumble upon a theology* of sorts in which some God or vision of God comes to mind as the goal - i.e. the model for the type of existence we are aiming at, as well as the invisible antagonist to our immediate demands. God's transcendence helps fill the vacuum, helps account for our human rebellion against the [harshly impersonal] "way of the world." One could look at this refusal of our lower animal nature in one sense as a necessary rebellion, born out of our first burgeoning awareness of this strange malady - our unique unhappiness, our sense of what might have been if only... our feeling of being out of joint as creatures within the natural horizon.  Out of such misery, there grows a desire for healing,  a demand for justice,  an inchoate faith, a search for answers, a quest for wholeness. As faith - it is a in fact a rational striving, a yearning to bring about whatever is intangible - i.e.  "not fully present" or "not fully actualized" "not fully humanized" in response to some sacred/divine prompting to "overcome" the world. Understood in this sense, faith would appear as our most basic human tendency - a secular tendency - the underlying attitude with which we project ourselves freely, defiantly and willfully into the future so as to negate the present set of circumstances/injustices. But if faith (so defined) does indeed represent a new stage of human development, a form of consciousness that is teleological - i.e. oriented toward a higher set of goals - released from the constraints of animal life,  then it would seem that the question about God (about who or what God is) would emerge simultaneously as a form of discourse relating to this self-conscious activity. Call it religion or religious speculation, or even mere story-telling or myth-making about God or gods. Such a discourse, as evidenced by a particular mode of civilization, is necessary to help us imagine that upper echelon of divine perfection, the ideal realm, which always relates by way of contrast to our present sense of identity. [Note: If at this point, you are tempted to interject: that this higher realm comprised of God, heaven, angels, etc. is a mere product of imagination and has no physical reality - i.e. science has no evidence of such realities - is it also the case that as an upper echelon of possibility - a category forever hovering above and beyond our present state of existence - that it has no ontological status? I'm not so sure we can simply dismiss this question - despite its metaphysical overtones.]

I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self contained;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied-not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is responsible or industrious over the whole earth.”
― Walt Whitman

Does Biology = Morality?

With sociobiology gaining credibility these days since its first debut back the 1970s, people have recourse more and more to their "evolutionary script" as rationale for various messy behaviors and random motivations.  Instead of "the heart wants what it wants," we have "natural selection made me do it!" This underlying biological imperative provides a logic as it were to what otherwise might be a simple appeal to instinct, passion or appetite as wildly impulsive drives holding the ego captive...

Incantation (of the Sacred Forest)

Incantation by Paul Serusier

The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil's amazing book is a hidden gem and arguably the most under-rated, overlooked, under-read novel of the 20th century - yet still very prophetic and timely...

How to Read the Bible by James Kugel

If you're looking to read a thought-provoking account of the Bible from an expert in the field (i.e. former Harvard professor) with  a very fine appreciation of ancient Hebrew and all its subtle nuances,  and if you don't mind having your complacent set of assumptions challenged somewhat, this might be the book for you. If you already know how to read the Bible just fine thank you - without any knowledge of ancient Hebrew or ancient Greek (for that matter) or familiarity with basic hermeneutics or reliance upon the vast field of biblical scholarship that has grown up over the past 200 years or consultation on the subject from people with first-rate minds, and you feel like just "going solo" as it were, relying on personal intuition or inspiration or external authority or sacred adamantine tradition,  then please let me know what your secret is... [I mean, what would you say in reply to what this author has to say? Is it possible to simply avoid what these scholars have said?] Alternatively, if you're feeling lost, disoriented, confused, spiritually empty, restless, aimless, longing for insight, guidance and direction,  willing to make your pilgrimage for even one drop of divine revelation, this might not be the book for you - because this book deals with how different generations of people going back to ancient times- understood the stories and edicts and prophecies of the scriptures - oftentimes at odds with we might wish as the "moral interpretation" of text.  It shows us the history of interpretation gradually altering content.  

Philip Rieff and the Curse of Modernity

"Rieff’s first book (his best, in my opinion) was a penetrating and imaginative study, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959). At the time, most people considered Freud an immoralist—a proponent of liberation. Morality was supposedly what made us ill, posing unreasonable demands on behalf of “civilization” and forcing our healthy instinctual passions underground, into the unconscious, from which they tried to escape by way of “symptoms.” These symptoms were strangled protests against the tyranny of culture over nature. The psychoanalytic cure was a protracted guerrilla campaign, aiming to take over one inner stronghold after another without provoking an all-out counterattack in the form of a nervous breakdown...The Mind of the Moralist was a vigorous dissent from this standard interpretation. Rieff’s point was not just that, unlike his noisier disciples, Freud was temperamentally conservative, rating order as highly as freedom and restraint as highly as expression. This stance could be (and regularly was) dismissed as reflexive Victorian/Viennese caution. On the contrary, Rieff argued, Freud’s caution was well-founded. He understood that he had not really explained away our primal, nameless sense of guilt, which lay beneath the more superficial and intelligible constraints imposed by culture, with the implausible hypothesis of a primal crime. And yet, for this resolute unbeliever, such guilt could have no rational basis—who, after all, was humankind accountable to?

Rieff’s explanation of what there is to be guilty about was repeated in many books over many years, with increasing urgency (and, it must be said, portentousness). Human possibilities are limitless; about this he seemed to agree with Freud’s liberationist successors. But what excited them terrified him—and, he claimed, everyone else, at least before the triumph of the therapeutic ethos. Our primal endowment—formless, destructive, uncontrollable instinct—paralyzes and isolates us. We cannot trust ourselves or one another until a firm structure of interdictions has been installed in everyone’s psyche. These must be expounded by an interpretive elite, ratified through a calendar of rituals, and enforced by stern authority. Every culture is a dialectic of prohibition and permission, renunciation and release. Freud would have agreed; but whereas his followers concluded that the original “yes” of instinct was silenced, or at least muted, by the “no” of repressive authority, Rieff countered that instinct was cacophonous and only the original, creative “no” gave it a distinct voice. As he put it in The Mind of the Moralist—his style, already a little melodramatic, foreshadowing his later, full-blown apocalyptic abstractions—the primal self is “in a panic to express the fecundity of its own emptiness” and must be mastered by “unalterable authority.” For if “everything could be expressed by everyone identically,” then “nothing would remain to be expressed individually.” Hence the “irreducible and supreme activity of culture” is to “prevent the expression of everything,” thereby precluding “the one truly egalitarian dominion: nothingness.”

For most educated (and even many uneducated) Westerners, however, all formerly unalterable authorities now lie in the dust, like Ozymandias. Science has banished the supernatural, technology has vanquished scarcity, and so, having lost its parents, ignorance and misery, morality is now an orphan. This is the triumphalist view of modernity, and Rieff shared it; only instead of a triumph, he thought it a catastrophe. The dimensions of this catastrophe dawned on him gradually. The last chapter of Freud is “The Emergence of Psychological Man,” a tentative sketch of what modernity had wrought. Until the twentieth century, in Rieff’s account, three character types had successively prevailed in Western culture: political man, the ideal of classical times, dedicated to the glory of his city; religious man, the ideal of the Christian era, dedicated to the glory of God; and a transitional figure, economic man, a creature of Enlightenment liberalism. Economic man believed in doing good unto others by doing well for himself. This convenient compromise did not last long, and what survived of it was not the altruism but the egoism. Psychological man was frankly and shrewdly selfish, beyond ideals and illusions, at best a charming narcissist, at worst boorish or hypochondriacal, according to his temperament." - from George Scialabba, "The Curse of Modernity" in The Boston Review.

Philip Rieff - Cultural Theorist