NASA’s multi-year project of finding life on Mars is fine for a country that has the luxury of putting out billions of dollars for it. We don’t, what with all the social problems we have, especially now with the arrival of Covid-19. China, however, can afford it since they have solved most of their social problems, although now, it seems their success is being threatened by our continued failure in the U.S.
Legend has it that originally the world consisted of two people who cooperated in the challenges they faced to survive. Then came a third, and the two asked him to cooperate. He realized that the two would compete for his help. So it came about that competition replaced cooperation.
Thousands of years later China and the United States emerged as two systems of government, two systems of democracy or expression of the Will of the People. The Chinese built its system on cooperation; the United States built its system on competition.
Another version of the legend is the Biblical one: the original two people were a man and a woman, Adam and Eve. So the issue of competition vs cooperation became even more complicated.
Camus writes at the end of The Stranger, “And I, too, [referring to his mother] felt ready to start life all over again.” To me that rings hollow. Surely life is mostly suffering, as Buddhism holds, and even as Camus admits, for example, in speaking of the worst time of day being when he wakes up in the morning to get ready to go to work at his employer’s; so surely one cannot be ready to “start life all over again.”
Somehow, though, Camus’ “negative novel” (as Elaine and others regard it) can be raised to a positive philosophy by blending it with Buddhism—i.e. escaping suffering by not being born again.
When I first read The Stranger as an undergraduate I completely identified with it; my inner life was like Meursault’s. In the final paragraph of the book Meursault says “I’d been happy and…I was happy still” and he lays his heart open to “the benign indifference of the universe”—a wonderful phrase that I have used often. Now, however, I see that phrase in the context of science—i.e. philosophy from Democritus to Darwin—that transcends the happiness of the individual to the happiness that can be achieved in spite of the suffering brought by natural selection to human beings (beings aware of their awarenesses).
Another perspective on Meursault is that he could be regarded as autistic–emotionally unresponsive and flat. For example, when he is asked by his neighbor, suspected of being a pimp, whether he is disgusted by the terrible way Salerno has treated his dog for eight years, Meursault answers, “No.”
As an undergraduate I often felt such a strong identity with authors I read—Plato in particular—that I would say to myself, “That’s precisely what I think; that’s me.” From the standpoint of consciousness that is correct; my thought was his thought; we are the same consciousness. But from the physical standpoint, of course, it is nonsense—although there is something in Plato’s Meno and Phaedrus that makes us want to believe that we are the person we identify with, having passed through the river Lethe to come back to life.
Philosophy professors don’t have an interest in trying to understand the the growing knowledge of existence provided by science, but fortunately found a way out, a way to identify their traditional concerns with “science.” The date, of course, was 1913—the publication of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, which showed that logic (Aristotle) as identical to mathematics (science). Problem solved. No need to study/understand physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, even traditional philosophy itself—will do. Hence analytic philosophy was born, and it could flourish within the protected environment of universities where students are selected on the basis of their potential to become clones of their professors.
When I talk to someone I am functioning in the mode of “Mind.” When I read an article in Nature or Science I am functioning in the mode of “Matter.” They are like the duck/rabbit or vase/profile gestalts: you can’t see both at once. And yet Neutral Monism requires it, and I think it can be done if you don’t try too hard—as the Zen story says: “Master, how long will it take to reach Enlightenment?” “About ten years.” “But what if I try really hard?” “About twenty.”
In this country we are constantly harping about human rights. But I have a right to be left alone—it’s one of the two human rights as I wrote in Classical Dialogues: the right to the necessities of life and the right to live life as I choose. I am not being left alone if I am constantly being pestered by people serving their own interests.
What is truly infuriating is that if we on this planet did as China did when COVID-19 was first detected, namely locking everyone down, the virus would have disappeared, having exhausted its 72-hour life existence. This planet would have had a chance of joining those in the universe where human life was part of all existence, commensurate with it as Spinoza viewed things. As it is, however, life on this planet will disappear and join all those planets in the universe where it takes millions of years for life to evolve again.
When consciousness appears it is better to snuff it out as the Buddha sought to do in the state of Nirvana. “Think back to what it was like before you were born” Nisargatta Maharaj would say on the mezzanine of his house on Ketwahdi street in Bombay in the afternoon sessions I attended—gesturing, toothless mouth open, laughing—but all the time keeping an eye on things. I was lucky that my life turned out to include a couple of weeks with him.
This evening on PBS Shields and Brooks said this has been the worst week since the COVID-19 pandemic began last December. “What needs to be done?” they ask. Everyone is asking the same question.
What needs to be done is to decide when a democracy becomes so large that cooperation turns into competition, and then to abandon democracy altogether and join China in its efforts to create world cooperation. Simple as that. But Americans, even older experienced thoughtful ones like Shields and Brooks, won’t even consider it. Their idea of the Chinese system of socialism is firmly set in Mao’s cultural revolution of 1979, that disastrous version of a 5-year plan culminating in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Americans don’t connect that with the following 40 year astonishing success of 5-year plans introducing a market economy, virtually eliminating poverty, and bringing China’s GDP to second behind the U.S. That’s what “needs to be done,” not just temporary “fixes” depending on the influence of whatever politicians happen to be elected to office.
5-year plans in China provide the time to try social, economic, and cultural changes to see if they work. Lenin’s “rule” of unanimous agreement after debate in the National People’s Congress and the various committees in the CCP is not willy-nilly, especially with the changes in Party membership from mere ideological loyalty in the Mao era to science and education since 1980. If mistakes are discovered in the course of a first 5-year plan they can be corrected or a new direction taken. This is what has happened during the last forty years in China.
If the U.S. and European countries had responded as China did to COVID-19 when it struck at the end of December 2019 and early January the pandemic would have been manageable.
It is interesting that Buddhist scriptures never mention the word craving—they go straight from “Suffering Has a Cure,” (the Fourth Noble Truth)” to “The Eight-fold Path.” They only refer to suffering. It’s hard to explain. All the Hindu Vedas and Upanishads celebrate soma, a plant which seems to have had no bad side effects like hangovers. The Tankas picture the pig, the snake, and the cock—ignorance, hatred, and desire. But craving, the source and heart of the problem of existence, receives no mention.
Perhaps it is only a matter of word choice and translation. But still, it is interesting that Buddhist scriptures plunge right into the Eight-fold Path without attempting to analyze the nature of craving. Now, of course, we understand craving in its Darwinian context of survival of the individual and the species.