It's My Father's Birthday: "Keep Your Goodness"

 

Today is my father’s birthday.  Kit would’ve been 91.  He died in May last year at the age of 89.  As my grief continues, a process of remembrance across decades of philosophical discussions, as well as our time analyzing countless games of chess together, browsing through bookstores, eating at a range of restaurants, going to movies, taking hikes, and so much more, the whole odyssey of joys and pains that family share, and too the simple habits and routines that fondly demarcate individual quirks and preferences, I am feeling considerable relief that he did not live to witness what just happened to our country:  the election of a fascist to the office of the president, an egomaniacal man without conscience, who will do whatever it takes to become a full-fledged dictator and destroy the Constitution which founded the United States in liberty and human rights.

My father was a strong advocate of democracy and a foe of fascism.  He spent the last few decades of his life working on a book that not only laid a foundation of philosophical arguments for the importance of what he considered the only decent form of government, but which in addition developed an outline for its most ethical and effective expression [1].   One could quibble about specifics, whether Kit was right about this or that, but there’s no doubt that he took up the call of Enlightenment values.  The dignity of humanism.  It is a hopeful perspective, one that ennobles and frames the human condition as a stimulus for great and beautiful deeds.

One cornerstone of a humanist ethic is the idea that we can elevate each other, moving forward together, to sculpt better a world, by championing our unique human ability to reason.

Fascism, conversely, champions ignorance.  It blares the cultish call of a charismatic dictator, whose aura of might strives for two things:  (A) to dominate and direct the minds of about one third of the citizenry (this seems to be the average, on historical analysis) through a zealous rhetoric of divisive propaganda, and (B) to wield the resultant obedient herd as a weapon to menace and bully the dismayed and disorganized majority.

The championing of a cult versus the championing of reason.  These are the two paths.  Deceit or truth.

It’s a well-worn platitude that one’s character is an expression of one’s soul, manifesting in behavior that shapes the environment.  The person is known by their deeds.  Metaphorically, the tree is known by its fruit.  As it stands, the American people have chosen the tree of fascism.  In the USA, this is to submit to the superiority of the White male, and the inferiority of all others.

Isabel Wilkerson, in her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, argues that the USA has always had a caste system, similar in some ways to India’s caste system.  She discusses how Martin Luther King, Jr., after arrival in India in 1959 and while receiving accolades, was shocked to hear himself described as a member of the “Untouchable class” of America.  At first offended, King accepted the label upon reflection.

So, here we are.  Embracing our traditions of racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ and similar embedded otherisms.

Humanity could go on forever being ignorant and fanatic, locked in oppressive hierarchies, except for one thing:  the weapons we have evolved over millennia of war are now capable of annihilating civilization itself.

If not for this fact, we could go on being prisoners of our own ignorance and the dark karma it generates.  We could simply continue the cycle:  to fight and war and fear and butcher and slaughter and enslave and hate from our various hilltops, marked with our little flags of prejudice, always seeing the other sides as less human, more stupid, more sinful, more animal or even as insect, as when a scapegoat group is referred to as "cockroaches."  

One might say, we deserve an eternal fate, similar to crabs in a bucket, always pulling each other down.  And yet the children are innocent.  And very many adults desperately want change, and they do their best to be good and kind, not just to people of their own skin color, but to everyone.  And yet the innocent cannot stop the demagogic kings who control the police and the military and who can impoverish, jail or otherwise torment anyone they choose.  

Hitlerian propaganda, such as the Elders of Zion, saw the Jews as cannibals who fed on infants during Satanic rituals.  Recently, in a case dubbed “Pizzagate,” a man fired a rifle inside a pizza shop because he believed the shop hosted satanic pedophile rituals performed by Democrats:

 

“The unfounded "Pizzagate" Internet rumor at the center of this case accused the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria of being the home of a Satanic child sex abuse ring involving top Democrats such as Hillary Clinton. "Speculation and fabrications tied to the bizarre conspiracy theory have been relentlessly circulated by politically motivated fringe sites," as The Two-Way has reported.”  (NPR.org)

 

This level of ignorant violence and cruelty has an ancient history.  Long ago, humans proved their susceptibility to superstition, so much that we have stained our history with many battles, atrocities and oppressions of the utmost horrible nature due to the darkest, most irrational reactions of fear, outrage and hate.  

And yet these sorts of irrational reactions are a perverse mana-from-heaven to the mentally deluded men who sit atop thrones and proclaim themselves gods.  Such weaknesses--the exploits in the human mind-- are the reins they tug to steer the herd, to determine where it goes and grazes; and where it tramples.

It was a truly fantastic, beautiful moment in history, only hundreds of years ago, when a few countries began to break out of tyrany to advance democracy.  This change led to hundred of years of slowly improving conditions here in America.  An increase in fairness and equality. In the quality and dignity of our lives. 

Slavery was made illegal.  Black men gained the right to vote.  And then all women, too.  In 2015, gay marriage became legal, something I never thought I would celebrate in my lifetime.

But it is all crumbling away.  All America’s ethical advances are sliding down the slope of a sandtrap, which is the widening maw of fascism.  Once again, a disgusting, macho dictator with no conscience will lead us into a dark place of White male superiority in counterpoint to the inferiority of everyone else, with corresponding privileges or privations, powers or degradations, elevations or segregations.

Was my father, Kit, wrong to think that we could rise up above this evil?  No, he was not.  Democracy has been shown to be a plausible route.  After WWII, Hitler and other fascists were defeated.  Before that, the armies that defended slavery were overcome during the Civil War.  Despite frequent falls and failures, somehow in its broken, brutal journey the USA has managed to stumble toward the Light.

So, again, no, Kit was not wrong to champion democracy.  

Consider, too, the effect of our own individual choices, yours and mine, on our own souls.

I believe that every one of us who harbors a conscience--a sensitivity and reactivity to good and evil--is being watched by some part of their own mind, an internal judge capable of meting out sizeable sentences, whatever their mysterious nature and innermost effect might be.  Our own internal judge is immune to the denials, masks, deflections and even the self-loathing we erect to hide from the truth.  Even if we shut away the internal judge forever, still, it watches from the subconscious, and troubles the currents below the surface on which the completeness and quality of life depends. 

Whatever happens to humanity, even ultimate doom, I believe that somewhere, somehow, someone is watching us, aside from our own internal judgement.  Maybe it is aliens, though I don’t think so.  Maybe it is the Universe, whatever that means.  Or maybe it is Angels, as I like to call them.

Of course, we also watch each other and feel each others' gaze.  This fellow assessment can exert a pressure to conform.  But we are also drawn to honor the good people in our lives by acting in accord with their conscience and our own.  The alternative is to disappoint those we admire and to shame ourselves by bowing down to evil and its big lies.

My father’s last words to me were, “Keep your Goodness.” 

Thank you Kit, for your courageous philosophy.  We humans have wings that want to spread, to fly, even if it is only through the heavens of our own mind. 

 

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11/12 ... eds throughout the day

11/11 ... This is going to need editing, but I wanted to publish it on the actual birthday of my father.