About a year ago, I read an online article about how very popular the color blue is: a far higher percentage of people claim blue as their favorite color (57% of men, 35% of women, by one study) than any other single color. And somewhere else I’d previously read that a preference for blue was often indicative of a few interesting aspects of personality. Blues tend to be relatively more oriented to order and structure than some among the other colors.
It is a familiar convention to walk and drive on one’s right, so, when I walk in public places I always stay to my right… I don’t want to be (correctly) declared wrong in any instance! And I guess that this is perfectly normal. But it is really perfectly me – perfectly ‘normal’ for me; I’m a blue. Mentally, I have a clear apprehension of “right” and “wrong”, justified and unjustified, acceptable and unacceptable. You might think then that I am a person who routinely judges and accuses others. But, not so! My judgment falls substantially on myself too. Therefore, I cannot accuse others, because I cannot be completely sure of the rightness of the judgment itself, and also the way in which I expressed my disapproval. Surely another’s transgression is not reliably gauged by the intensity of an accuser’s invective. Aristotle once remarked, “It is easy to be angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and a the right time, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” How do we navigate that most unsolvable of paradoxes – to give assent to the need to distinguish the right and wrong of things so to advocate for the right – but simultaneously fully acknowledge that there are many aspects to things, numerous matters to weigh, a plethora of factors and influences to consider? And when something seems so unarguably wrong, still, surely, that wrongness cannot equate that any response that comes to my consciousness is somehow then axiomatically right.
The definite article “the” is dubious and risky when placed before the word “truth”, and the more circumspect among us will shy away from declaring something the truth, when we can just as easily identify it merely true. And I’ve often marveled that common women and young women seem to occupy a separate, distinct perception of things, a worldview very strange to me. I recall once, for example, where I had a brief exchange with a lady in her mid-40s along with two teenage girls. I told the three of them that it seemed to me inexplicable when a woman or girl would use the term “cute” to refer to a tiny kitten and also a hairy, monstrous, six-foot six football player. Without too much effort on my part, I got them to confess that the “cute” adjective reflected felt experience, and not indicative of any quality possessed independently by the thing thus described.
Most of us feel resentful even of the suggestion that we not reflexively assess and judge things. For goodness’ sake, isn’t that what my brain is for? However, we always think and act with partial information; and our thoughts are political, and both sides of an argument are (usually) not equally right. But thinkers on both sides of a polemic think tendentiously; the mental processes corroborate and justify and validate (extant views and wants) at least as much as they veritably reason. Isn’t it so much more natural and agreeable that the rebel of 1860 says to himself that “states’ rights” must be defended and that the American father in 1970 believes his son is on the right side of history, merely defending human freedom, in Indochina! The self-supportive, reassuring pseudo-logic that got us into and through Tuesday is the commanding god of Wednesday. And does anyone need reminding that quotidian gods are usurpers and savages?
Nature crafted the human brain over thousands of millennia. And it never for an instant had as its purpose (in creating, designing, orienting the brain) the attainment of the virtue of being wholly right, absolutely just, perfectly knowledgeable as the brain went about its utilitarian tasks; nature and natural selection had only the enhancement of survival prospects as its goal, and survival only for the prospect of enhancing reproductive chances. Nowhere in the wiring of the human brain is there any substantial reckoning of far-reaching, absolute right. It may not be very tactful to state it bluntly, but ours is a neurological wiring that designs only that we reproduce, not that we achieve any wider and more illustrious moral ends – such as determining something wrong with the immaculate perspicacity and circumspection of unassailable omniscience.
For our purposes here, we have to ask a very important question: What is the ultimate blameworthiness of the wrongdoer in a world where each person reasons/cogitates based on a different calculus? Is there any such thing as final culpability? Can anyone be completely wrong when operating mechanistically within, and guided by, a mechanism-dependent physical universe? At the very most fundamental level, to judge all human conduct fairly we must all be acting from the same array of awareness, the same level of understanding and the same perceived set of advantages and disadvantages, and we must all be utilizing identically arranged grey matter.
The foregoing is no description of our earthly reality, of course. Yet we judge.
I look at something – a bluebird or blue jay, for example – and say it is unarguably blue. And I say that its color is the most attractive of all colors. Another looks at precisely the same thing and declares contrarily. Is she looking at the same thing?
When I examine in my mind the decisions a particular polity makes in its selection of a political leader – a mayor, a governor, a senator, a prime minister, a president – am I really looking at their choice from their perspective(s), or rather, exclusively from mine?
There are multitudinous ways of analyzing, understanding and interpreting. Several months back, my brother recommended a movie for me, Sling Blade. He liked the movie and highly praised the story and the acting. He repeatedly remarked that the main character in the film, a mentally retarded man in his thirties, was “a very good man.” I saw the film and came to a different conclusion. I did not see the protagonist as a ‘good man’ so much as a troubled man. And (spoiler alert) when I considered his final misdeed at the end of the movie, I had to consider it from his disadvantaged perspective, from the mindset and the limitations of a mentally handicapped individual. He, the mentally retarded man, was apprehensive about a very difficult, threatening and violent alcoholic; he was, justifiably, concerned about the safety and welfare of people he regarded as close friends. And he seemed to come to the conclusion that the alcoholic bastard needed to be erased; surely the world is better off without this person, he must have reasoned.
But the guy was limited. The answer to his one question sufficed to give him all the surety he needed. All that was left was to then mechanically sharpen his blade and employ it.
I am not similarly challenged. I asked myself additional questions. I agreed with the answer to the original question: yes, the world is better off without the alcoholic bastard in it. But I had another question to answer: Is not the world also better off with fewer murders in it? (Indeed, there must be something very good in human nature, for so very few mentally retarded persons are murderers.)
I’ve had two months now to weigh and consider the shocking results of the American presidential election of 2016 and its results. My shock and grief have not subsided. I now live in a world rendered surreal, where I can no longer understand such a word as shame the same way, cannot look at America the same way, cannot believe now that humankind can survive the next several centuries. I know now that humankind will definitely destroy itself; it is just a matter of when and how it happens. The final element of the grim equation arrived on November 8th, 2016. It seems dubious at best to blame the Electoral College for what sixty-two millions have chosen to toss into the trash bin.
My horror was not primarily pertaining to the ignorant, bloviating president-elect. After all, Hitler was just one guy. There will need to be countless other moral weaklings and dastards and villains and shortsighted ignoramuses to make the Hitler we know from history. Hence, I have been far the most disturbed by the nearly 62-odd million people who saw the vile businessperson as a viable president. These voters have collectively rendered the USA unrecognizable. It cannot any longer profess to know and promote coherent civilizational values. The president-elect is completely disdainful of human rights, and civilizational survival in this century is fixed on human rights requisites. The election of the 45th president imputes to humankind’s epitaph: Here lies humanity. They couldn’t make it.
In the last two weeks of December 2016, with the inauguration of the 45th president still almost a month away, the media (December 24, the New York Times) reported that the president-elect was intent on renewing a nuclear arms race. And his precise words to the media: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” As there are only eight other nuclear powers in the world, in context, “them” cannot be understood to reference anything beyond those eight nations.
But what was he talking about? Is the United States in danger? Are its “interests” in danger around the world? The answer to that question is definitely Yes, but the “dangers” are inordinately terrorists and other problems that cannot be effectively treated by expanding the United States’ nuclear arsenal to (perhaps) double its present destructive capability. No sane president (no reference to the current president-elect, of course) would propose to treat terrorist concerns with nuclear weapons, just as no one uses an assault rifle on a pesky housefly. This president-elect is a boon only to comedians and arms manufacturers, and an immediate danger to the rest of us. (The German people in 1933 were in danger because of the psychological maladjustment of their Fuhrer, whether they realized it or not.)
On the subject of maladjusted leaders and the dangers they represent: the famous actress Meryl Streep gave a spectacular acceptance speech at the Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles California on the evening of 8 January 2017. In that speech, she criticized the president-elect (without naming him) by declaring it irresponsible and a debasement of human dignity to imitate the gestures and movements of a physically disabled person in the same act where the speaker is discrediting that disabled person’s remarks/commentary.
However, my greatest concern is not the “permission” that the president-elect’s vulgar conduct affords, but what Americans have done in raising such a misanthropic ignoramus and sociopath to such a high position. As it is inexplicable, it must have many, many causative factors!
And what did the tens of millions of supporters of the president-elect get from their champion on that night that Meryl Streep gave her famous speech? They got a response Tweet from presidential thumbs, stating that Meryl Streep was “overrated”. What can it mean – when the matter necessitates absolutely no more corroboration – when a famous actress alleges that a particular person is immature and shameful in his conduct, and he himself, without hesitation, responds immaturely and shamefully?
Through it all, one comes to the conclusion that in the very final analysis the American voters of 2016 who voted for that “president-elect” were wrong in what they did. The bluebird is blue, and no degree of perturbation or convenience-want can make it otherwise.
But their wrongness cannot equal my rightness. I am much older and more educated than the average voter (especially regarding politics and history and current affairs), and these peculiarities surely influence my view of all things political and geopolitical. When they look at the person I view with such revulsion, do they really look upon the same thing? Do they see with identical eyes, and with the same mind? Do they really reason, or do they emote more than reason? Is theirs an allegiance to truth, or to the agreement of the new things with the egoistically-implanted, ingrained and hidebound old?
Millions of “the 45th president’s” strongest supporters have no substantial grasp of history, the academic mathematical study called logic, or geopolitics. A strong supporter of the president-elect at my workplace, a 56 year-old man who has been in this country for thirty years, actually thought that institutional slavery endured in the United States into the 1960s. I informed him that he was a century off, but such dearth of awareness is irremediable. Such a person is never going to see the world with any deeply informed and intellectually-sound mindfulness and perspicuity.
In early 2017, I was visiting a real estate mortgage broker on Long Island New York to discuss a mortgage loan. The general election was very recent, and we – the broker and I – got to discussing the election and its results. He confided with only a hint of embarrassment that he voted for the misanthrope. And he justified his vote by saying that the other candidate would have been “terrible” for his business interests. So, it was obvious from his confession that he cast his vote for himself by casting his vote for his business. But this wasn’t a matter of calling the bluebird blue or calling it a bird: it was a matter of voting rather as a dog ‘votes’ – for the immediate and ultra-selfish wants of the palate – and not for any wider societal or virtuous purpose. Desiring not to embarrass and trump my substantial interlocutor (he was over six feet tall and surely over 300 pounds) – though it came to my mind – I decided not to ask him what he thought I voted for.
I voted for civilization, and for the United States of America to uphold the integrity of that august value.
In the final analysis, the (instrumental, 2016) American voters were almost certainly wrong. What does most excellent fairness and magnanimity extend to the 2016 American voter who cast his or her vote for the most unfavorable candidate of a major party candidate ever? And for the most temperamentally unsuitable candidate ever? And for the least informed and least experienced in the ways of politics, international relations, and diplomacy ever? And to the candidate who steadfastly and repeatedly clung to well-known trumpery and prevarications? And for the most outwardly xenophobic major party candidate ever? And to the candidate most disdainful of human rights? What can fairness extend to them?
History has gone “off” before: barbarous tribes, civilizations, and leaders have brought forth a lesser justice and prosperity by their imprudent, wrongheaded actions. But this time it is different. Going off this time means that the world is at its end… that is what the nuclear era dictates. We cannot discount the geopolitical nuclear reality of the contemporary world simply because not discounting it is unsettling.
It is still possible that the United States and the world may survive the current century, but this selection of president means that humankind could not maintain the scant prospect of its own survival. Pardon me, but I can’t be dumber than I am: however far off, human extinction now seems certain.
No need for one to believe in a netherworld hell. This one’s enough.
As justice and decency breed more of the same, so too do wrong and misdeed. Among the innumerable causes of the American electoral disaster of 2016: the shocking barbarism of ISIS terrorists. The witness has infected the mind and erstwhile “morality” of voters in many places, including the American voter; savagery insidiously infected the nervous system. Ordinary citizens saw in the emotional mind-eye the image of heads being sundered from bodies by hideous hooded barbarians, and their politics were rendered more illiberal – a great boon to the terrorist! The voters were moved from the relatively greater sanity of calm acceptance to an outraged and indignant vengeance agenda, however invisibly, within their own limbic-cogitative processes. Their blue skies were effaced, their outlook besmudged, aggrieved, grayed. And this is the result of that piteous dialectic. Now all our skies are effaced. “Fearing night, I become my enemy.” The nation has come to a disposition closer to its enemys’; indeed, in very fundamental ways the USA has shown by its election catastrophe that it is now more like its terrorist enemies. And, for us to be exceedingly aggrieved by offense is for us to relatively incline to offense, so head-shaking ironical is human history.
And so it is and will always be in this untiringly unforgiving universe.
What you see at the ‘cerulean’ zenith is illusory. And it matters little what we call it. No more blue skies.