A Slight Digression

Today our world is beyond absurd it has become 100% thoroughly insane. Absurd is testing love by asking your wife to cast your corpse into the public square just before your death, only to find in the afterworld that she fulfilled your wish. But then imagine you were allowed to return to this world to chastise her for committing an act that is so contrary to love only to find that this world is so enchanting, so filled with heart and body and beauty and upon seeing her and she you, you know you cannot leave and you know immediately there was nothing to forgive and together you laugh like small children with all your soul because this realization of happiness is all eternity. It is to hold this life for all that you can and to have no wish greater than to live on. That is how it was for Sisyphus if legend tells it straight—and why should we doubt myth when we live in a world where we are ordered to obey religions and ideologies who will serve up our slaughter as a recipe for martyrdom?

Still myth tells us that Mercury had to snatch poor Sisyphus up by the scruff of his neck and return him to Pluto’s dominion and there it stood waiting for him—his eternal rock. What does such a rock hold for us in our day and age? Well we have those who already live in the afterworld and refuse this world by calling it a sin—they say that this world is not really the real one but rather it is the one yet to come that is the true one. Thus they deny life. Yet the means by which they refuse this life is not by hiding away in a monastery but rather by believing they can liberate themselves from sin by committing sin—thus they fail life and consequently they fail God as well. But this rock of Sisyphus is by no means the rock of ages, well perhaps one might be tempted to claim it is Kierkegaard’s repetition, but Sisyphus is no Christian. For Sisyphus it is not a question of having the ability to choose right from wrong or to avoid sin—because he has none because he knows none. Life is not a sin would be his answer to Jesus—so sweet Lord do not die on my account I know what I do and I have been doing it for an eternity. My crime great Lord is that I love life too much and thus this rock and roll. His labor which will see him die an eternal death crushed by its weight but it will see him rise to do it once again and so on but he will in his bliss of life and death know eternal truth like a pulsating universe that expands and contracts like the great breath of Brahman and that truth will be the long walk down into valley and the arduous task of rolling the great stone to the top only to fail, because he will say I am only human. And we must answer—is that the truth or is it a myth?

In General the whole show reminds me of taking a peek through the door of sophism
Antiquity knew the meaning of crisis just as well as we do. Sophism, for example, was an intellectual movement in ancient Athens where democracy flourished and where social mobility had taken on a new dimension—thus citizens had a possibility to move in rank via positions in commerce, law and politics. Apparently a key tool for this mobility was the individual’s ability to make impressions on those that mattered and perhaps most important of all was the ability to persuade. Thus the art of persuasion and of fine speaking abilities became the Sophist’s skill—it was the object of their teaching.
This led to public competitions—the agon of words—which meant all that had ever been spoken about was fair game for the competition of words. Thus everything from the education of children to such diffuse subjects as those of the Eleatic philosophy (being and non-being) were part of the show. Due to this activity the rules of logic and rhetoric were developed into sciences. The openness of the debates had in a sense created a revolution because while we in our present day and age are conditioned to view “myths” as tall tales of antiquity (unless these tall tales converge towards our own beliefs then they are spiritualized), the old myths had in this ancient epoch already obtained the status of old wives tales told for the pleasure of children. But for all this openness there arose a certain sense of fear because the very moral foundations of the society were being played with as though all were a mere play of words while a great number of the society’s inhabitants were incapable of playing this game further—the game was experienced as threatening their well-being.
Eventually this game took on a form where what can be manipulated can be expanded in terms of not what one could learn through discourse but in how one’s power could grow via the means to manipulate. One of the most famous of the sophists, Protagoras claimed that he could make the weaker cause the stronger, which I guess in legal matters meant nothing less than one ought not assume that victory is a foregone conclusion because a master of words such a Protagoras could conceivably make the weaker cause the stronger cause . But soon this idea was used (expanded upon) to imply that right was wrong and wrong was right.
This proved to be an unfortunate development. For ancient Greeks and many other cultures as well, religion rests on the back of tradition (the Greek word nomos meaning law and also tradition was a key element to sophism). Sophism seemed to carry in its nature a sort of sociological relativism where laws are made by men and consequently they can be altered by men. Well when the playground of the sophist was “laws” and “customs” they soon began to play with the very foundations of religion. When Protagoras wrote his book On Gods (only a fragment remains) it begins “About the gods I cannot say either that they are or that they are not, nor how they are constituted in shape; for there is much that prevents knowledge, the unclarity of the subject, and the shortness of human life.” The effect of the book was so provoking that he was put on trail and in his escape he drowned at sea. (which was apparently viewed as fitting—the God’s took their revenge). But this same game went further. When the philosopher Anaxagoras made a statement in regards to Helios—that it was like other heavenly bodies—a glowing lump of burning metal he too was brought to trail for blasphemy and had to leave the city (A deduction he made based on his observation from the remains of meteorites). An opponent of Anaxagoras who may well have been directing his attack against Pericles (who supported natural philosophy as means to explain the world) was the seer Diopeithes who managed to push through a decree that those who do not believe in the divinity of divine beings or teach doctrines about things in the sky are to be denounced. It is so to speak here the war between piety and natural science is forged. (As we see today this war is by no means over) But the witch hunt and divisions inside Greek society did not end there just as the arguments in regards to religion did not end there either. The sophist as well as the atheist expanded on their arguments concerning religion.
Perhaps the pinnacle of natural philosophy in antiquity was to be found in the atomist Democritus, whose views on religion were in part similar to those expressed by Prodikos and Kritias. In Prodikos we find that he takes the origin of religion to arise out of language and seeks via “names” to answer the question, “How did the God’s get their names?” Where he concludes that on the one hand people called God and worshipped what was useful to them—like sun, moon, springs and rivers, moisture, fire, etc. which gave Gods like Poseidon, Hephaistos etc. As men settled from their wandering state this brought about new things of use like cultivated plants and for example wine which gave birth to Demeter and Dionysos etc. ….The consequence of this sort of speculative activity created a sort of anti-establishmentarianism in regards to the state religion.
Another theory was that religion was a purposive lie. This one is particularly relevant and comes from either Euripides or Kritias. That is man in his original state is rather brutish and men set up laws so that law should be tyrant. Yet secret evildoers go unpunished. So a clever individual created fear of the Gods by persuading men that there was an unseen, imperishable daimon who hears and sees all men’s thoughts and this daimon allots to men both terror and goodness according to one’s actions. Ultimately this war between sophist and religion led to the death of Socrates. Socrates was charged with not believing in the Gods of Athens, for introducing other diamonic beings and also for corrupting the youth. At the time of his death many other were also executed for having false beliefs. I guess when we consider that it is from this Greek controversy way back in antiquity that so much of our world view was created—the Academy of Plato as well as the school of Aristotle or say Epicurus or the Atomists roots starting with Democritus we must recognize that this great genius of ancient Greece was also created out of great turmoil—a turmoil that in our modern day America demands the heart of a stoic but the openness upon which this nation was forged—if its explosive power is to be held in balance.
I was indeed glad to see Katrina Vanden Heuvel shine while I must admit that Pat Buchanan made the hair on my arms stand on end—he seems to think Bachman was basically right in her call for a deeper purge of American society than we have just experience under the ill omens of George W. Bush. The failure to recognize that Vietnam was an abortion of power that weakened us beyond all measure must be recognized. John McCain good soul that he is ought not ride on the laurels of Vietnam. He must stand for what he did as man in the House and Senate—he need not fear his acts as a politician in the house and senate. The Vietnam War is not something to be proud of. Had individuals of sound mind been in command of the government we would never have gone to war in Vietnam. Those who opposed that abortion of power are not “anti-American”, but equally so, we cannot call those who obeyed the command to stand and fight on foreign soil “anti-American” either—for we must believe that leadership is in general wise. But in regards to the world, and in regards to why we actually were in a war in Vietnam one must place blame on ignorance. To stand against the perversion that was introduced into the US by McCarthyism demands to be called into account. McCarthyism was anti-American. We had and have nothing to fear of communism or communist ideology, just as we have nothing to fear of radicalized fundamentalists of some particular religion. What we must stand against are those who will sell out the foundations of our government and the foundations of our ideology out of fear—because those are the real cowards! Those who sell our freedom they are the enemy of an open society and in an open society true strength is not ignorance—for it is fear that breeds ignorance.