I imbibe a lot of science fiction, although it’s not called that.

It comes in the forms of blog posts about laughing cats that eviscerate security contracting companies, or in the guise of a swarm of autonomous drones building an art exhibit. It comes as news stories, with headlines too absurd to be believed. Avian flu has been mixed with the common cold in a lab, and a new form of tuberculosis resists everything doctors have attempted to treat it with. Methane plumes pepper the Russian north coast and mines scar the Canadian prairies. A circus of candidates are jockeying to oppose the liberal/moderate/socialist [do words still mean things?] incumbent, who has won a Nobel Peace Prize while sending human or robotic troops into 7 countries in his first term. Temporary autonomous zones popped up in city centers across the United States for months, and financial sector technocrats have taken over two European states amidst large-scale protests. Drug cartels have their own makeshift submarines and tanks, and one in particular is doing a good side business selling black market oil it steals from the state that can’t seem to snuff it out. The leader of the Maoist opposition in India dies, in an event and a war that has perhaps never seen the evening news in the West.

It feels as if world history has taken a hit of a potent accelerant. Understandably, most people just find the whole situation too knotted, obtuse and frightening to warrant unravelling. Occasionally someone comes by with an ideological cleaver and attempt to sort the Gordian knot of present history once and for all, but the optimism fades after repeated unsuccessful hacks.

But the fears are still there, and the fear that is most present to us is that of losing control. Just one step removed from death anxiety, the constant flux of the world in 2012 brings events and change agents into our lives at faster-than-human speeds. Our filters fail, and we respond reflexively, or by retreating into isolationism. In 1848 Karl Marx wrote:

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

A better posthuman manifesto could not be written. When the terrible wrath of Texan wildfires and Japanese tsunamis draw forth our awe and mass die-offs of bats and bees generate tingling sensations down our spines, our simple worldviews and heuristics fail to find referents, and we are presented with an opportunity to truly examine ourselves. To contemplate the human condition, and your very limited place within it. To acknowledge its limitations and revel in its freedoms.

Originally, this post was to be about something else entirely, but this message decided it needed to be spoken, first. I’ll follow up next week with some thoughts on human autonomy.

My first real articulation of doubt occurred in eighth grade. I have no recollection of what prompted it, but I remember finding adequate resolution to my questions in the pages of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. Well over a decade later, I’ve moved on to other thinkers, other ideas, other arguments. What I remembered of Lewis’ argumentation hadn’t aged well. But when Dave Burkum, pastor of the church I am a part of, put forth the challenge of reading Mere Christianity together as a congregation, I decided to pick it up again, and see how it held up.

Originally produced as a radio series during World War II in England, Lewis, a veteran of World War I, gave a simple and clear articulation of what he described as “mere” Christianity—that shared core of assumptions, beliefs and orientations that have inspired and provoked Christ-followers over the ages, in all limbs of the (lower-case c) catholic church.

Since this month’s discussion only focuses on Books I and II, that is all I’ll cover this month. I’ll follow up with Book II in a week or two, and then with Book III and Book IV in February and March, respectively.

Section 1.1 of Book I begins with a heap of generalizations. Lewis appeals to a universal sense of reciprocity, which he later acknowledges is graded [in 1.2 he claims a line exists that separates the “Law of Human Nature” (an absolute) with “Rules for Decent Behavior” (socially constructed), but with no explanation of where that line lies, or how one might discover one from the other], with the possibility open of some people genuinely not knowing this “law of human nature”. A straw man is constructed that “does not believe in right or wrong”, but is cast aside before much damage is done. The chapter ends with Lewis’ axioms:

1. Right and Wrong are real.
2. None of us keep to the right.

If you followed Luke Muehlhauser and Alonzo Fyfe’s podcast on morality at all, you’ll notice right away the fuzzy language. What does it mean that Right is real? Euthryphro’s dilemma is casually tossed aside, and what it means for morality to even be “real” in any sense beyond is unexplained. What is clear in this prose is that right and wrong is not merely subjective to human experience, but somehow rests above it. Unfortunately, that’s simply not sufficient for moral argumentation.

In Section 1.2, Lewis proactively addresses some potential objects to his argument; couldn’t this all be herd instinct or social convention? He attempts to ward of these encroachments with an appeal to conscience as a meta-instinct; since we require cues for whether our instincts are helpful or harmful, our conscience provides the judgement to sort our possible responses. It’s a little unclear which direction Lewis is going; it could be as simple as describing cognition itself, absent from any spiritual component, but it reads more along the lines of a sensus divinitas. He also insists, here and later in the book, on paralleling morality with mathematics. I’m not sure that’s the secure foundation he thinks it is, particularly after mathematicians such as Kurt Gödel and Gregory Chaitin have shaken the absolutist foundations of that discipline.

Towards the end of the section, Lewis makes an astute observation; that it’s not an impressive feat of morality to no longer burn witches once we no longer believe in them. This principle extends to the domain of desires, I believe. If I, having no desire to have sex with children, avoid pedophilia; what of it? That’s not particularly morally praiseworthy. Someone who has that desire and withstands temptation and instead seeks help, is morally praiseworthy in a way that I am not, even though in both cases, no children were molested. In the same sense, Lewis is on to something, and I think this is a type of thinking that pervades thoughts about the “Other”. As with desires, so with beliefs. Richard Beck wrote (in a blog post I can no longer find) about a similar dilemma between so-called “liberal” vs. “conservative” believers; the former, not considering the literal texts of the bible as binding, are much more able to adapt and adopt to shifts in cultural mores. The same effect exists in international politics, particularly between secular, European and American democracy activists and their Muslim counterparts, a phenomenon well discussed at The Immanent Frame.

Section 1.3-1.5 makes a series of assertions that range from problematic to flat-out wrong. Lewis says we ought to be unselfish because it’s good for society. Well, that’s all well and good, but it simply pushes the problem upward. Why is unselfishness good for society? An answer that is currently being floated is that unselfishness developed as a function of social bonding, longevity and through the benefits of mutual exchange and support. Even then, it’s relative, and the effect weakens with one’s degree of relationship. An innate propensity for sin layered over an original, uncorrupted creation doesn’t explain this gradation of selfishness as well as the evolution of human social relations does. (Plus, society rewards certain kinds of selfishness as “good”; what did Lewis make of that, I wonder?)

Conscience, Lewis also claims, implies a universal consciousness. I have no idea how this leap was made, nor whether there are any justifications for it. This, like the statement about our consciences being unobservable, strikes me as sheer assertion.

More interestingly, Lewis explains that conscience does not track with convenience, and can sometimes be quite inconvenient. He looks at the psychological and sociological reasons, and then jumps to a higher plane of argumentation, but I think moral questions simply fall into a sort of 47-body problem; theoretically solvable, but practically impossible to solve, therefore justifying the need to use heuristics instead.

Lewis closes with two evidences:

1. The universe implies an artist.
2. Our conscience implies a moral law.

Strangely, the first comes from nowhere, having been pulled from a back room at the last minute, and looking a bit disheveled. The second suffers from the problems discussed above, compounded by the caveat that according to Lewis, Christianity assumes you understand the moral law exists which you are guilty of; an assumption which, when coupled with his earlier admission that some people may not have the moral equipment with which to understand moral law, makes from some odd results when you argue that all people are culpable for their sins.

It’s a daring book but it feels as if Lewis, rather than grasping the doubts and concerns of the age and pushing through the terrors towards new answers, instead retreated gracefully and barred the windows, reinforced the doors. His epigram towards the end of Section 1.6 should be meditated on by the readers of this work:

If you look for truth, you may find comfort – if you look for comfort, you will find neither.

As one of a near-dozen Republican presidential hopefuls competing in some sort of perverse, quadrennial American civic ritual, there have been few opportunities for noticing Rick Santorum until his campaign pulled even with Mitt Romney’s, resulting in them tieing for the lead in the Iowa Republican caucuses with 25% of the vote each. But having noticed him, there’s a lot that can be learned. Functionally, he’s not much different from some of the other candidates, but there is a refined purity to his politics (particularly with his views of the nation, the family and of sexuality) that allows us to address some broader concerns.

Specifically, on Santorum’s campaign website he cites his belief in American exceptionalism at the international level and “traditional” (read: Christian, heterosexual couples with children) families at the domestic level as the foundations for his policy positions; positions that include an orientation towards war (with Iran) and capitulation to corporatism (through reduced regulations). Embedded beneath these position statements are axioms about the world, axioms which assume a societal ordering that is grounded in a divine plan, an eternal structure, a “natural order”.

With that in mind, let’s turn our attentions to philosopher and former psychoanalyst Levi Bryant. In his recent blog posts on object-oriented ontology and politics (Part I, II) examined the differences between Lucretius and Aristotle’s attitudes about the nature of the social order. Whereas Plato and Aristotle saw a sort of natural sense to the social order—women being inferior to men, the necessity of a philosopher-king (read, technocrat), etc—Lucretius held that:

Whatever exists you will always find connected to these two things, or as by-products of them; connected meaning that the quality can never be subtracted from its object no more than weight from stone, or heat from fire, wetness from water. On the other hand, slavery, riches, freedom, poverty, war, peace, and so on, transitory things whose comings and goings do not alter substance– these, and quite properly, we call by-products.

(De Rerum Natura, Humphries translation, 33)

Lucretius was on to something. As the years have wound on all that was solid has melted into air: we have learned of our evolved origins and shared ancestors, found seemingly immutable laws to be probabilistic, debilitated the hopes of hobgoblins for consistency in mathematics, begun deconstructing anthropomorphism (with bees, dolphins, octopi and other animals), and are gradually deflating our beliefs in morality and ethics, free will, God and even our own rationality. Even our rigid notions of the universe are at risk, first with the relativity of space and time, and now with talk of parallel universes with alternate physics, and the contingency of elementary particles and mirror images of the Big Bang. I hope to unpack each of these in future posts.

The common thread here is what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls ”the necessity of contingency”. Whether or not Meillassoux’s thesis is entirely correct, he’s on the right track; time after time after time, the “natural order” of things turns out to be surprisingly…contingent. This is troubling news, particularly for those who, having been fortunate to enough to benefit from contingent events of history, hold power and maintain it by insisting upon a fictitious natural order. It makes little difference whether these are kings hypothesizing a god-granted throne, environmentalists yearning for a return to Eden, or hedge-fund managers lobbying against government regulations against finance; the implicit assumptions are the same.

This is why there can be such a deviation between the policies and the politics one supports. For example, the ideas Ron Paul expresses on this video about foreign policy resonate well with me, but I am far from a libertarian. Libertarianism, like humanism and many other ideologies, is founded upon assumptions of the natural order; the basic rights of man, property rights, and others. Much Enlightenment thinking was grounded in similar assumptions whose hegemony has been and is being contested by the landless, the proletariat, the queer, the female, the young, the indigenous, the non-citizen, the ecological and the non-human.

And much of what passes for politics on the left (whatever that is) is equally guilty. Whether in the name of the environment, or of human rights, or of tolerance or what-have-you, the well-meaning have tossed aside the strange liberties that a full reckoning of the world provides. Bryant describes the tension between the “natural order” and the “necessity of contingency” as the difference between internal relations within a consilient “object” (using the onticological term) and external relations between different objects. Quoting Bryant:

Lucretius articulates the thesis that has been common to all leftist thought for the last two thousand years: relations are external to their terms. […] And in demonstrating the contingency of these sorting and structuring mechanisms, what thinkers such as Foucault, Butler, and Marx above all show is the possibility of other ways of relating. Their point is never to say that we are ineluctably trapped in these relations– though it can be damned hard to escape them –but that these relations aren’t “natural”, they aren’t internal, they don’t have to be this way.

Thus, where Burke attempts to situate politics in a stable universe and a natural mode of governance and economics, Marx instead argues for communism on the basis of a contingent history of capitalism.

This does not make the ideas of leftist politics necessarily better, by any metric. They may be worse, even far worse, but what they never are is natural. When they go wrong, they can and ought to be changed, and that change, that difference, makes all the difference.

So when I hear Rick Santorum extol the American nation or the American family or heterosexuality as normative and natural and right and good, I hear the worst of Aristotle’s apologetics for the perverse contingencies of power, and my imagination is piqued and my anger aroused, because another world is possible.

Warning: Spoilers

Justine, Claire and Claire’s son sit in a makeshift tipi, bracing for the impending impact of a foreign planet, and the destruction of all life. Tengo, Aomame and the little one inside her climb, freezing, up emergency ladders and scuttle over catwalks to reach a parallel world, and consign the one they have been living in to memory and oblivion. And January 1st, 2012, is a threshold crossed that, while possessing none of the gravitas with which the apocalyptic have attempted to endow it, is subtle and transformative personally, in its own way. A world has died, and a new world has been born, and this inaugural post is the birth certificate.

My wife and I brought in the new year quietly; apple cider, a couple rounds of Blockus (the triangle edition, which is, in my opinion, vastly superior to the rectangular) and a late-night showing of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia in our living room. The “science-fiction plot as poetry in film” echoed many of the traits I appreciated most of Darren Aronofsky’s earlier graphic novel and film The Fountain. The change in registers between the profoundly personal stories (a disaster of a wedding, coping with the depression of a sibling) and cosmic disaster (in the form planetary collision) is jarring; mixing but never being mixed, a streak of oil across a plot of water. This resonated.

John Caputo, lecturing on the future of continental philosophy, gives a synopsis of Ray Brassier’s book, Nihil Unbound. It is not enough to reckon with the death of meanings that occur when philosophy is uncoupled from anthropocentrism; one must stare into the void and reckon with the heat death of the universe itself. Peter Rollins spoke in an interview about a kind of belief in God that lies hidden within atheism, a belief-on-our-behalf that is a comfort for atheists who are able to claim the intellectual high ground of denouncing theological answers, but who draw comfort from the belief of their parents, their children, or their culture. Brassier pushes towards a more devastating philosophy, one that pulls the roots out of every safe place.

But, strangely, that is not yet the end. That there is a philosophy at all, after the end of the world, is a curious, miraculous thing. Haruki Murakami explores this notion almost incidentally in his novel, 1Q84. The characters are dropped into a world that is a shadow of the world that they knew, and as situations evolve beyond their control, their options constrict until it seems that only death or self-imposed exile remain. But Murakami, like an accomplished illusionist, reveals a hope that escapes the pull of the world of 1Q84. Like the little one growing inside of Aomame (presumably woven from strands plucked from the air by mysterious hands) a new philosophy is pulled from the void, and strand intersects with strand until, with a trying journey fueled by a shared love and a hope without ground, a new world is entered into.

I’m skeptical of Murakami’s sleight-of-hand, and of the notion that a simple vector of escape will present itself, to draw us out of this world and its historically-contingent constraints. But I am open to constructing my own air chrysalis, pulling thoughts from the air and working them into words.

I hope to present my weavings in this venue over the coming year. You are welcome here.