The Return of the Gods: An Introduction

Those who know their history know we are doomed to repeat it.

That formulation came to mind a few days ago in a conversation about history; it was meant in jest, but I almost immediately seized upon its import, and it has been coursing about my head for a bit, desiring me to do something with it. Running concurrently with that is the culmination of tempered dealings with a certain difficult person, who has lately moved me to condemnation (not directly with this person, since that would achieve nothing), leading me to begin writing a blog post. After two paragraphs and a day's reflection, I realized that I was writing a few essays in one: a rant, essentially, and that I was skirting about the what I really needed and wanted to focus on. Reenter the heading line of this post; I realized that what I needed to focus on was a topic of great interest to me since I first heard about it, for it is a Big Idea. First learning of him in the critical writings of Harold Bloom, Giambattista Vico proposed in his magnum opus Scienza Nuova (The New Science) a revolution of history in which there are three "distinct stages (corsi): the ages of gods, heroes, and men," until there is a return (ricorsi) to a theocracy, in which people are most poetical (Bloom proposes a fourth, intermediate stage, at least in literature: a chaotic age, a transitional period back to a theocratic age).  Bloom believes that we are in the final stages of the Chaotic Age, and indeed are already in the midst of a new Time of Gods; this series of posts is my acceptance, reasoning, and explication of this notion.

What is most central for me is the concern of what this ricorsi already looks like (and hence why I think it is upon us), where it could go, and the question of authority. There will be plenty of compare and contrast between the previous Theocratic Age and the incoming one, at least as much as I can muster. anyway Since this is a blog, I feel the need to be short, concise, and must forbear deep research and thorough essaying; consider it the first foray into a possibly larger project. I do not have all the posts planned, but since I am writing about a new Dawn of Deities, I will start with Religion, and I know I will follow it with Science; indeed, the rest of the series will focus on the institutions of authority present in our world.

Like Fortuna here.

"But enough about me. Why don't you talk about me . . ."

It is not in my nature to talk about myself (at least directly). Part of it is a feeling of inferiority, another part is a flight from solipsism, which I always fear I am sinking into. Even in this blog, I try to stay away from myself and focus more on the topic, so that anything relating to me personally is incidental. This can be great for aesthetic pursuits, as with that paragon Shakespeare, who so removed his self from his works that we know, to paraphrase Borges, everything and nothing about him. It is not so great in life.

Despite so much praise and so much belief from others that I will succeed fabulously, I must admit that I suffer from a rather low sense of self-regard and an immense doubt that I'll amount to even a hill of beans, and it is nothing new. I had two small nervous breakdowns before college, and almost another one, which, in an attempt to quell it before it overtook me, led to telling my parents I am bi, which only helped in taking my mind from one issue to another. The first two dealt specifically with the immense burden I felt to succeed (mostly coming from myself), while the almost-one was related to my sexuality. But they all were connected by the feeling of unworth. I did not think I could succeed, and I did not like myself at the time for liking all sexes (oh, younger me. . .). Only now am I fully getting over the latter, but now that the stakes are higher, the former is even more troublesome. As a composer, I have to go in with a certain mentality that what I am doing is good, at least worthy of performance, or why bother? Almost every day, though, I face the fear that I am outmoded, old-fashioned, and practically every new piece is a reluctant embrace of more "modern" practices (though I am really embracing the expansion of my personal art). This inferiority is also a hindrance to conversation, for rarely do I feel like I have something of interest to say (which compounds my natural shyness and difficulty with words while talking).

As stated above, another part of the problem is the desire to avoid falling into myself. Solipsism, "the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist," is great in art (Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest is a great example), but you should probably turn the other way if you encounter a solipsist. For me, the temptation to fall into such a state is a defensive measure, a shielding from  that which could cause me trouble. To ward it off, I try to take myself as un-seriously as possible. The title of this blog is a somewhat serious thing, but it is also my joke on the egotism involved in blogging. Also, I think arrogance can coincide with solipsism; a friend asked about the difference between arrogance and confidence, and among the answers, I offered that arrogance is the opinion of others that one has padded his resume; for a solipsist, his resume is everything. It is a dangerous trait to have, because, as I understand it, it comes at the expense of empathy. At any rate, though I don't think I will truly become such, I fear it nonetheless.

I offer this much of myself, first, to get it out of it the way (so I can avoid bringing it up again and again on this blog), but also to discuss the notion of talking about oneself. How far can one go in self-praise before it becomes boasting? How much should one reveal to anyone and everyone? Is there such a thing as full disclosure, and if so, is it a good thing? And how much should privacy be sacrificed? I have chosen to forgo some privacy for myself by writing having this blog, but I still retain the right to my self. These are self-revealing times, and people leave much too little to be desired.

A Fest of Many Colors

Just returned from Pridefest '11 at Tower Grove Park in St. Louis, and I had a good time (this was my first time). Though I was expecting much more activity, it still had excitement (aside from some pastor walking around the perimeter spewing vitriol against the whole thing, though very briefly, it was good excitement). Some good acts (go Gateway Men's Chorus!), many great vendors, and the largest collection of non-straight people I've seen, some of whom were advertising their goods, to put it politely. I spent most of the time with my best friend/ex-girlfriend, who, when I left her, was more bedecked in pride then myself, including a brand new rainbow purse.

Indeed, I ended up with only a bracelet (one of those of the LiveStrong kind) because it was tossed out for free. I had a certain peculiar shame of sexuality for much of my life, and I'm only recently getting over it; this, along with my naturally reserved nature, leads me to be quiet about expressing myself very noticeably. My embarrassment was peculiar because my stance on sexuality was very equivocal, which is to say that I didn't know what it was, it was changing every time I thought about it. Over the years though, as I became more comfortable with myself, my views became more specified and pacified. I prefer to keep many private things private, so I'm not going to get more specific about my life relative to this matter. However, for all the victories that PrideFests around the world celebrate, for me, going today was about celebrating my victory over past qualms over a part of myself and others.

A work of beauty that a friend posted on Facebook, by Debussy.

Walking

 Today, I walked for some 2 hours (with a 5-10 minute break and plenty of brief pauses to sightsee) around the Central West End (St. Louis, MO), for around 4 1/2 miles, certainly one of the longest walking sprees I've taken. Though my legs were passing tired when I got back, they aren't sore, though I don't feel soreness until the next day, so we'll see. When I lived in St. Jacob, there were a couple years when I would walk almost every single day, even in the harsher temperatures. The town was small enough that if I wanted I could easily take in the whole place within 2 hours, though I usually didn't. Now that I live Collinsville, which is about 25 times bigger, I don't have that luxury, but I do have much more variety, so it's a good tradeoff. It was variety that drove me to walk to such an extent, and since I'm housesitting for the week near the CWE area, I decided to stroll through some of it.

I learned a few things. There is even more beauty in this neighborhood than I had previously known; there is much more variety of people and places intermixed in this small area than in the whole of a place like Collinsville, my current home of 25,000 people and the typical separation of residential and commercial; a place like this is where I really want to live (God I need a job!). More pertinent to this post, however, is that I truly rediscovered my love for walking. It's not that I'd forsaken strolling about, but the walks I've taken lately were more constitutionals than pleasures. I revamped my regular walks last summer to help lose weight, but I rarely enjoyed them as I used to. The muggy, miserable summer weather didn't help, but the unfamiliarity of my new home (this was only 2-3 years after moving, which may seem like a long time, but I rarely got out into the community) hampered my interest, and it certainly didn't have the glamor of a neighborhood like the area around Forest Park. But I realized today, along with my new-found passion for ambling about, my new community had become familiar and that I could finally begin enjoy my walks around it. Though I knew St. Jacob very intimately from 18 years of dwelling there, I was never bored with the surroundings; rather, I would be startled by some subtlety, some minutiae that I had never seen before, or I would be too occupied with thoughts to really care.

Another thing, which was more emphasized than realized, was that I enjoy observation too much to whiz past things. There was so much to see that I would need to see it again to truly begin to see it, but none of this could I truly appreciate if I just ran by it all. Mark Twain said that "golf is a good walk spoiled." Replace "golf" with "jogging," and you get my sentiment. I chuckle a little inside when ever I pass a jogger (or they pass me), and I've always thought jogging was a silly thing, though for a long time I just accepted that as an opinion, perhaps unfounded. (Also, my body just never accepted long-distance running, so that might have influenced it.) Last year I read The Primal Lifestyle, which helped me lose weight, become healthier, and gave me a reason for my suspicions of sustained running. The author, Mark Sisson, was a former long-distance runner (an Olympic one, I think) who would jog and run for many miles almost every day. He writes that such a lifestyle, coupled with runners' diet filled with carbohydrates, was actually making him unhealthy. Sure, he was incredibly fit, but build of body does good health denote. Such sustained fast paces depresses the immune system, which accounts for a higher amount of minor illnesses among runners. There are scientists who also say it smacks of evolution, that mankind didn't evolve to constantly run but to walk, and that sprinting was merely a survival technique.

So maybe my physical and mental instincts are right, that walking with intermittent sprinting is the most healthful option. At the least, I will see the things that I would miss if I just ran past it.

Got Trust?

    In reading a book called The Politically Incorrect Guide on Socialism, I was moved to thought by a marginalia, which posited that trust is more inherent in capitalism than socialism, and I was so stirred because it made clear to me a perplexing observation, that so many people I know have no faith in people or society at large. It now occurs to me that most of these same people are advocates of either socialist or welfare-statist ideas, whether knowingly or not. With capitalism, trust is required of a large group of people (consumers) to tell businesses and industries what they want and need, while with socialism, the trust is in a small group of people (central planners) to direct goods and service. I think people find it easier to trust a few people who are seemingly smart, philosopher kings who claim to know things the public simply can not, than a large mass that consists of a range from imbeciles to geniuses. We have, however, already run into the fatal flaw of socialism, which is that consumers know what they want and need and therefore businesses get direct intelligence on what to offer; with socialism, this direct communication is removed, and central planners, who can never have enough knowledge to know everyone's wants and needs, regulate things for the "average citizen" in the ideal case (if this can be called ideal), or, as is the frequent case in the real world, for some national ideal and egotistic purposes, i.e. personal gain and glory. Experience has shown that philosopher kings are anathema to a good, free society, because it is the will of the few over many, so trust in them is misplace.

   It really does trouble me that so many people lack fidelity in their fellow people. When ever they say that a group of people have been and are so easily led astray and do awful things, I think two things: first, that it was an individual or individuals (a cult of personality) that did such (Hitler's Germany, for example); and second, just as easily as they can be led astray, so too can they be brought down the straight and narrow way. However, I find it distasteful to speak of the need of leading anyone as such. People, in most cases, at least want to do good, and usually will when it suits them. "Ah," some will say, "that's the problem. If they only do it when it's good for them, then how are we to believe that they ever will?" For one thing, why would anyone do something bad for themselves? They may not see the long-term problems in some cases (eating all those cookies ruining your health and waistline), but if they can't derive immediate satisfaction (cookies are just so delicious), then they wouldn't do it all. But let's look at a large, long-term problem: pollution. Several people I know say the public can't be trusted to solve our pollution problems. Their view of solutions runs contrary to real world examples of what actually happened during the start of the Industrial Revolution that kept pollution at bay. If people are jealous of anything, it is their own property, and they will seek retribution if it is transgressed upon. When this happened in the early 19th century America, with the pollution of factories going downstream and harming people's land and waterways, the property owners sued successfully and the industries were required to somehow clean-up and deal with industrial waste. The threat of lawsuits therefore gives companies an incentive to invest in technologies that reduce waste and pollution. Then this was taken away by activist judges who claimed that, for public benefit, there was a certain amount of pollution that was allowable, since industries could therefore reap larger profits. This hasn't changed. All this is opposite of what many environmentalists propose as a solution, that is, government involvement in setting straight a wayward people, when it was actually these people who would have long ago had control of the issue if it weren't for government.

    I say, in short, that the common mistrust of society is gravely misplaced. The cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that "A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." She meant something uplifting, but I also find, in this context, the shadow of a painful truth, for plenty of small groups of "thoughtful people" have changed the world much for the worse.

    What are your thoughts? How much trust do you place in humanity? What are your reasons?

And now for a thing of beauty. All this talk of socialism leads me to think of Dmitri Shostakovich, who lived in fear under Soviet Russia (which practiced socialism's twin, communism). I'm really just going to pick a symphony at random; let's see. . . and. . . Symphony No. 11 it is, fourth movement.