On Letting the Dead Bury the Dead

The wages of Sin and learning to swim

Recently I had a very unsettling experience. Related perhaps you can say to the npc question, of the experience of meeting people where "the light is on but nobody's home". Of someone I wanted to befriend and help, and be a friend to, who I realized in an intimate way, was entirely beyond me to influence, that all my well wishes for him were powerless. Despairing at my own impotence, I thought: they are all dead, they just don't know it yet. This unease about the future that permeates our culture is another case of projecting into the future what is already the case: billions are dead. The blood-lust of the youth who say it in the prescriptive is performative, a ritual to cope with their experience of their emotional reality: we project into the future conceptually, what we find is already the case emotionally. All Science Fiction is about the day it was written in.

A long time ago, before the new generation of chatbots, I once said: “The conceptual horror of “artificial intelligence” is the implication that once you know the recipe for sentience well enough to replicate it, you will no longer be able to coherently deny that most people don't qualify”. The fact that this new technology is a scam doesn't change this fundamental reality.

Turning my cheek and forgiving, and trying to guide and inspire, I was met with Total Failure, total disaster: an acute feeling of betrayal. Every betrayal carries within it of every other previous betrayal in history. It is timeless, yet compounds. Within this one betrayal is every betrayal I have ever suffered, and every one I have committed. And I suddenly know, because I must: "if there is a hell, you're going". I don't know if there is, I don't know if I am going: But I know that you are. Its not my judgement, and it's not a fear, because I still love him and forgive him. I just know it, in a revelatory sense, in a coherent sense. The thought unsettles me, but it doesn’t horrify me. The horror is at myself, at the following thought: and there's nothing I can do about it.

Because morality is objective and universal, and he is not only unrepentant, but openly tempting - begging - me to join him . My forgiveness, discarded, un-valued, even invisible. And then I feel something which I had always wondered about, and never understood: Someone once told me that the souls in heaven delight in the justice of God, when they see the souls in hell. That’s something I had a very hard time understanding. That’s not quite what I felt. But I think I understand it a little bit better. It’s not that I desire it, it’s not my Will that condemns. I don’t feel myself acting, it’s not an activity, me projecting onto him. It’s entirely passive. I just look at him and I can see Hell, right here and now.

It's hard to know what think about life after death, but it might be helpful to you, as it was to me, to consider the opposite: You can see with your eyes, every day, that sin is death before death.

A big political, philosophical problem for Christianity today in our digital, global age, is the problem of "who is my neighbor", and many correctly point to the hypocrisy of calling the third world your neighbor and taking pride in your good works to them, while ignoring your actual literal physical next door neighbor in Despair. Of a virtual, digital, even fantastical and made up neighbor, rather than any actual person: Ukraine flags in social media profiles et cetera.

I believe I can add to that. We do this - we, none of us are free from sin - because the real thing is painful. The neighbor betrays us, hurts us, he is ungrateful, he rejects us. The starving African, the Ukrainian soldier, the internet victim, is the object of desire at a safe distance - when he betrays you -when, not if- it isn't painful. Either because you never expected much from him in the first place, or sometimes, he is so distant that its impossible for you to ever notice his betrayal.

And the pain is certain, it's not merely a random, rare bad outcome. Betrayal is certain, pain is non-negotiable. The metaphor of taking up your cross is not a metaphor. You’re gonna be tortured. I am in this sense a biblical literalist.

All life guards and professional swimmers are taught this: it is extremely dangerous to save someone from drowning, because they will fight you, and drag you down with them, and you have to be prepared to overpower them and put them in a headlock, to get them out of the water safely. This is doubly true for morality.

The swimming thing is a neat little illustration of what I mean when I say to think about faith as a skill, and not as a choice or a logical deduction. You could also say “floating is just “choosing” to not drown”, which is true in a sense, but it’s generally more useful to conceptualize and talk about swimming as a skill.

I know many people are drawn to me because they sense that I am alive, even though they might not know it themselves, articulate it the same way that I do. I meet a lot of people who can tell that the lights are on, AND, someone is home, and I dissapont a lot of people because I don't invite them inside. Both online and offline. I should be more neighborly. But I also don’t want to become a landlord for vagrants - not because I don’t like them, but because I want them to have their own houses. I want them as neighbors. I’m very afraid of people depending on me. And to be perfectly honest, the little life I have in me, I’m afraid of losing. I’m afraid the little bit of fire I have left is going to be stolen, by the people who are colder, lonelier, and more desperate than me. This is not me excusing myself: This is confession.

I am writing this, because thinking about this the past couple of days, I had the thought, that this is probably what CS Lewis and others are talking about, when they talk about “taking part in the christ-life”. I once again recommend “Mere Christianity” to any and everyone, it’s a good book.

“The wages of sin is death”. What does this mean? “Adam's sin is the cause of Death in the world”. Okay, that’s one level. Another level: People are “living in Sin”. What does this mean? In rejection of God, rejection of the morality that’s “writtin on their hearts”, in self-rejection: “Unconscious”. Without self-reflection, in any other circumstances, we would call this unconscious. The Buddhists say all sentience is pain, all self-reflection is torture, and obliteration is the only solution. Christians say, Christ “washes away our sins”, and when we partake in the christ-life, we are being self-aware, sentient, higher consciousness, regardless of the pain. Picking up your cross and carrying it. Life is pain - and yet we choose life. We choose consciousness, even though it means regret, suffering, disappointment, betrayal. This is, I think, the Christ-life.

Most peoples heads are filled with nothing but repetition. Slogans, expressions and language that doesn’t originite in themselves, from themselves, but is learned from “culture”, media and propaganda. People go trough life repeting other people’s words. Memes and propaganda, drowning our the generative principle, that all human beings are born with.

Saying “people are the walking dead” or calling them “npcs”, is more provocative than saying an institution is dead, but I mean it exactly in the same sense: People are dead like the university system is dead, like cinema is dead, like a political paradigm is dead: the generative principle is drowned out in mindless repetition of empty language.

I can write 4 chapters of “the npc question”, some guy reads it and directly applies it to a genuinely new techno-social phenomenon, and posts on twitter about it, reaching half a million sets of eyeballs: This is real, this is alive, this is generative. Real people read it, something happens.

https://twitter.com/Foz89107323/status/1714353087941320911

If I was at a university I would write about how Kant’s aesthetics are not an ad hoc afterthought to his ontology and morality, which is the general academic consensus, but rather an integral part of his three critiques, intended to be applied to his own previous two critiques, and core to his total philosophy, a bedrock upon which the rest rests, not the other way around: in short, his argument is that his ontology is beautiful. This is furthermore in direct response to the christian tradition, and the notion of the unity between truth, beauty and love: Ontology, aesthetics, and morality.

The text I would produce would be forced and bloated, because it's a simple idea that's not worth stretching to 100 pages of arguments and examples, but is perfectly fully expressed in a couple of sentences, and it would be read by a total of ten people, who read it professionally and disinterested, because they are paid to. A pointless curiosity that changes nothing, generates nothing, and is, as the philosopher's love to say "knowledge for it's own sake" - dead. A finger pointing to itself, an empty circle.

I don't mean dead as just a cute metaphor, “oh they are lifeless and slow”. I mean it literally and mechanically. Life is generative, growing, expanding, acceleration, and if your entire inner life is repetition of slogans, which originate from a source outside of you, if you never have a new thought, what is the difference between your blood flowing or not? What, technically, does your body produce? If nothing is produced by your biological process, except the process itself, then how can we call it a process? What is processed?

It’s a very small thing. But it’s life. A drop of life in a sea of death. I know we’re all threading water right now. But one day we will walk on water.