“da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo “
Never mind; translation follows. This was a prayer of St. Augustine in the year 384, two years before he converted to Christianity. At his mother’s urging, he had abandoned his concubine and become engaged to marry a woman of high station in Milan. But since his fiancee was underage, he had two years to wait, so he took up with another woman in the meantime. His famous prayer means:
“Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”
Continence?
At a three-day golf outing recently, rife with the existential angst of decadent athletes wielding senescent muscles to advance a 1-3/4-inch sphere over the surface of an 8,000 mile sphere, the conversation at one wine-drenched dinner inevitably turned to existentialism.
Someone noted that such non-philosophers as talk show hosts, newspaper columnists, sportswriters, and play-by-play announcers were increasingly finding “existential” moments in everything they covered, and he wondered if any of them had the slightest idea what the word means.
“Can you define existentialism?” he asked me.
“I wouldn’t even if I could,” I said. A challenge to define a term is always a trap, and I had played out of enough traps for one day.
What emerged was the appalling fact that none of the golfers were French (though some were actively supporting the Free French of Bordeaux that night) and only three had studied even a smattering of philosophy, except for the kind dispensed at management seminars (Time is money. Think outside the box. Change is not what it used to be. Only the paranoid survive.)
Four of the participants were hampered in their efforts to characterize existentialism by their inability to pronounce it. These are much more brilliant people than talk show hosts or sportswriters, so this may have been the voice of Bordeaux, which silences the “x.” Another had spent two years in a Jesuit seminary learning that Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir were the Axis of Evil.
In order to resolve this matter and get back to telling bawdy jokes, the decision was made that I would write a post about existentialism and they would all read it, a self-defining individual responsibility which – given the demands of their existence between being and nothingness – they are not likely to fulfill.
The first principle to note is that French existentialists write thin books and German existentialists write fat ones. This is because resveratrol, the ingredient in red wine that supports cardiovascular health even among people who eat pate de foie gras, also causes flat chests and astringent prose. Then too, people who take three hours to eat dinner have little time to write.
After one such dinner, Jean Paul Sartre wrote a novel called La Nausee about the overwhelming unease of a person in La Havre thrown into existence without a roadmap and struggling to define who and what he is. The English equivalent is nausea – as distinct from exanthema, which is a skin rash — and we usually get our nausea from unrefrigerated salad dressing.
This is not to take the existential dilemma lightly. To Plato, Aristotle, and a long line of European philosophers down through Thomas Aquinas and Descartes, it is the essence – the fundamental nature – of a person or a thing that matters. To many such thinkers, this underlying nature was determined by God, so the individual could turn to religion to learn about God’s plan and then spend his life trying to fulfill it. A questionable deal, to be sure, but not at all confusing. To Plato and Aristotle, it was not so simple. The ancient Greeks had dozens of gods who were constantly feuding with each other, turning into birds to seduce earthlings and/or transforming humans into trees or animals or carrying them off to Hades. So the divine plan was a bit more complicated.
To Descartes, it was thinking that counted, and thinking established his existence – Cogito ergo sum. To which the existentialist replies, “Hey, froggy – you wouldn’t cogito a goddam thing if you didn’t already exist.”
To most existentialists, there is no preordained essence, purpose, or plan. The individual finds himself stranded in an unasked for, nonrational existence. He has to create his own meaning and destiny – and is responsible for doing exactly that. “Responsible to whom?” you might reasonably ask, and that will get you an existential moment but no convincing answer.
The philosophers at our golf outing all had enjoyed successful careers, cunningly exploiting some of the most exploitative corporations in America from their outposts at various advertising agencies. They had happily shrugged off the existentialist’s fixation with dread, boredom, and alienation and had reveled in absurdity rather than trembling in fear of it. They assumed human destiny was a matter of providing for your family (commitment) but living it up when you’re out of town (nothingness).
And through all this time, the word “existential” was quietly creeping into common parlance, probably facilitated by Woody Allen’s film dialogues, so that now the first definition of existential in the dictionary is, “pertaining to human existence.” A very broad, nay, inescapable category.
Assuming you’re human, from now on everything you do will be an existential act.
Just a question. If you had just discovered a neurotransmitter – a chemical of fundamental importance to proper operation of the brain – don’t you think you could come up with a better name than “dopamine”?
Bobby Jindal, the colorful Bollywood impersonator masquerading as governor of Louisiana (and highly touted as John McCain’s running mate), is reportedly ready to sign a state law encouraging the teaching of creationism and banning any state funding for stem cell research.
Just in the nick of time.
Think of all the vast plans by Nobel Prize winners to conduct stem cell research in Louisiana, which will now have to be relocated to more sophisticated venues like West Virginia, Kentucky, Turkmenistan, and Zimbabwe.
As for the creationism provision in the new “law,” that surprised no one who is familiar with the Louisiana state legislature. Understandably, the teaching of evolution is often feared by primates who have yet to experience it.
I’m sure your family heard some version of this story back in the days of the first oil shocks of the 1970s. In Pittsburgh, the bad news was that UFOs had landed on Grant Street (where all the city and county offices are). The good news was that the aliens eat bureaucrats and piss gasoline.
As of this morning, I had reached page 43 of the current New York Review, where there is a major article by Freeman Dyson: “The Question of Global Warming.” And in Saturday’s New York Times, Joe Nocera refers to the same article, which he was reading on a plane headed for the Exxon-Mobil annual meeting in Dallas. Small world, and warm.
The interesting thing about Dyson is that he thinks global warming is a question. The science is far from settled, he says: looming catastrophe is not necessarily at hand — though the possibility has to be taken seriously – and some of the solutions being touted would be disastrous.
Dyson is no shill for the oil companies. He’s an eminent theoretical physicist and mathematician, an emeritus professor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and a tireless proponent of nuclear disarmament. His interest in climate change is to understand it better and thus to devise realistic solutions. As the ethanol fiasco has demonstrated, the wrong approaches can lead to unintended consequences like sky high food prices and the threat of widespread starvation, without really doing anything to alleviate the energy or climate crises.
Other voices:
A book called What Are You Optimistic About? ( John Brockman, the Edge Foundation, www.edge.org) poses its title question to 145 of our best thinkers. A number of them talk about energy and global warming, and several point out that the sun not only causes global warming, it also gives us 7,000 times as much energy as we’re currently using (including the solar energy locked up in oil and coal).
Every hour, enough clean, green solar energy rains down on earth to supply all our needs for a year. Unlike the plants, we haven’t yet learned to use it efficiently, or we wouldn’t have a greenhouse problem.
There are a number of promising developments making solar collection less expensive and more efficient, but some of the essayists see bigger strides coming; e.g., artificial photosynthesis and polymer solar cells that can be ink-jetted onto plastics by the acre.
Gregory Cochran goes a step further. “Hardly anyone seems to realize it,” he says, “but we’re on the threshold of an era of unbelievable abundance.” Within a generation, according to Cochran – and sooner if we want it enough – we will be able to make self-replicating machines. Well, why not? That’s what we are.
These would eat dirt, soak up sunshine, and use the resulting minerals and energy to clone or extend themselves as far as we would like. If some of these machines were self-replicating solar panels, they could equal the amount of energy the world is now using by covering two tenths of one percent of the world’s surface – or less if we augment this from the much greater collection area of space.
We may not even need the self-replicators. At the World Science Festival in New York last week, futurist Dr. Ray Kurzweil (whose predictions have been extraordinarily accurate) said that thanks to rapid progress in nanotechnology, solar power will be cost-competitive with fossil fuels five years from now. And within 20 years, all of our energy will come from clean sources.
Dyson sees comparable promise in biotechnology – carbon-eating varieties of trees that would preserve the forest habitats while reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide by half within fifty years.
There you have it. The technological equivalent of aliens who eat bureaucrats and piss gasoline.
