CONCEPT
Chapter 8. The Culture of Life.
We’ve been asked to aspire to a culture of life. It’s an aspiration we grant continually and perpetually, but it is contested against inertia. Intertia obtains victory against galaxies, so why shouldn’t it obtain victory over us? Moreover, those most vocally waging this war are fixing bayonets in a elliptical space. They fix bayonets against themselves.
Let us pledge to create this life.
Life is carbon. Life is divine goo that aims to make more goo. Life is divine goo that moves on its impulse to move. A culture of life, then, epitomizes the highest aspirations that a goo can conceive; the highest movement that we can mentally visualize. More, we can act on impulses driving directions with unforseen results. When we embrace the unpredictable (and hazardous) nature of this transaction we both open ourselves to the highest potential while broaching the need for omnipresent prudence. Why do so many tyrants quote Nietzsche? This doesn’t mean that he was wrong. It means that amorality is not only dangerous to ourselves and others, but is the epitome of destructive intererence. Where so many primal instincts, the mightier winning out, strive against one another (because will from person to person as calculated within large groups can only fall out along arbitrary lines; one of the many lessons of Flint) the net result can only dance about zero.
We need a socially conceived positive value. We can term this “socialist.” Yet we must not be tempted so far into the all-too-flawed arguments of certain other dead Germans to believe that individual initiative does not matter. If there is one argument that must be applied to our global discourse from the Judeo-Christian-Muslim perspective, it is that the soul of an individual matters, that sometimes the person trumps the people.
Not to endorse capitalism, either. We need a government that doesn’t encourage competition among independently conceived enterprises, but which is an enterprise in and of itself. That competes against its people, all whilst competing against itself, that is, that is defined as an conceived as an institutional challange. The government of any real culture of life must provide more care for its people, must assure equality in terms that don’t redistribute wealth, but transcend wealth. Some obvious initial steps, for example, could be providing a sanitary minimum standard of housing, and base assurence of medical care. But if other institutions encourage striving, than striving will occur. If autonomy is available, and the lowering of the stakes corresponds to energies freed from a desperate groping for basic needs, than individuals will strive. This is the true culture of life. Life that asserts itself as life, but does not obliterate life. This is a human society that truly integrates itself into the ecological pattern. The caretaker provokes. Our friends collude with our enemies and we forgive them all and feed with them, and this is our society. We must progress. Our progress is driven, not lulled into Scandenavian complacency, because we stand upon a trapdoor that opens at any moment and drops us, drops us into darkness. Meanwhile, meanwhile, there’s no need for this American predator-prey bullshit; the pretense that everyone is “alright in the end.” They’re not. The Plataens surrenders and were murdered, so not surrender.
This culture is comprised of individuals, supremely disciplined and passionate, striving with all energy towards whatever better end they fix most objectively. There is destructive interference, not because we endorse some moral relativisim, but because we recognize different people will arrive at different lowest common denominators. Where there is more striving, however, there will be a net result of more objectivity. More objectivity combined with the expedience and experience and energy of our culture of life translates to more progress. More progress means change, positive change, happens more quickly. And more positive change more quickly means we are more likely to extricate ourself from the mounting mess in which
we’ve mired ourselves. Namely that our instituions are ill prepared to cope with the innumerable catastrophes with which we’re prepared.
Is this conspiracy theory?
No conspiracy is necessary.
In the mid-nineties the ebola virus was only contained by a vigorously enacted quarantine because the virus was discovered within a critical one week frame. Our population has been all but obliterated several, if not dozens, of times, over the last tens thousands of years. We are naive if we think our current prosperity is self-sustaining. A culture of life is truly committed to extrication. Our growth and prosperity is a priority that supplants the desires of the flesh. Read this against Paul. And listen. The act of extrication transcends the question of our success. We, as complex carbon compounds or as beings created in divine image are striving endlessly to articulate the most transcendent and particular paradox of our existence, this is an act that justifies ourselves.
When we try to say, to put into into what is bigger than shapes, than Artaud’s shadows or Brecht’s arguments, to become, that is the only culture of life.
Marilyn Manson, whom I did not admire in high school, sings a song: Cryptorchid.
At the end he sings:
Prick your finger. It is done.
The moon has now eclipsed the sun.
The angel has spread his wings.
The time has come for bitter things.
I heard the fellow wrong, but I wish I’d heard him right:
The time has come for bigger things.