New Year New Life

Lost my notebook a week back. This is the first one I've lost through stupidity in all the years I've been keeping them. I did at one time lose two through theft, and in my middle twenties I went through a period when I just threw them away after I was done, saying that I meant them only to be a means to sharpen observation and clarify thought and that I didn't want to get into the position of considering them literary work, while my literary work was still to be done. That was a sane enough orientation, but I remember feeling that it was a loss, and I remember saying? "Well, after all, it doesn't take much space to store something that has, after all, taken-up several hundred hours of concentration." And since then I've saved them all. Until this last loss. --I can't remember what was in it but I do know I had detailed observations of ma in her decline, and my emotions as I was forced to watch and interact. That's gone, and won't be repeated.

Anyway, I feel a loss, and that's led to an odd and surprising but strong sensation that I have to put some of my "significant" writing somewhere else and just now that seems to mean the blog.

This will mean a different kind of blog. I can't put in the purely personal stuff but I can certainly put in more than just politics. I've always felt the blog would be more than just politics, but it's hard to know what to include because I don't consider any of my thoughts important: There's no thought I've ever had that somebody else hasn't had first. But there is "significance".

There are just things in life that matter. I think about them, other people think about them, therefore they're worthy of careful expression. If I carefully and accurately express something I've thought about there will be communication because other people will have thought about it as well and will recognize what is said. And in communication there's development and there's energy. I read men who know more than I, but not every man knows more than I, and not on every issue, and I know that I often know more than the man I'm reading, yet the reading can be valuable: I get what I can.

So this would be the nature of my own writing, to express as clearly and as well as I can (and this to my benefit), with the recognition that to the right reader there will be benefit as well. And if exchange and debate does occur, then how fortunate! There will be a sharing and a contesting, and that's how all men develop.

So for the time being this is my judgment: If I think it's important I'll put it down, because it is important. In the sense that human matters are important what I carefully state is important, even as I know there are other men who could state the same matter with more force.

So I escape the paralysis of humility. Humility is good, but too much of it can be a drag.

But this does mean that my blog is hodgepodge. Oh well, for a while it's okay. I do have to start posting again.

Which leads naturally to New Year's Resolutions:

• To eat less
• To drink less coffee
• To drink more water
• To smoke less

This is the same list I made last year. I did well on three out of the four, but that smoking one was a bugger. I'll add one additional:

• To post more often

With my new, softer standards that shouldn't be difficult. The only standard remaining is that within my capacities my writing must still be clear, must still be accurate. --(I rather like this new standard, I must say; "just politics" really poops me out.)

And so I start my new inclusiveness by including an email (of which I now presume there will be two versions) on a matter both of entertainment and anger.


Dear K, (K stands for: Kind of a decent guy but confused.)

Pleased to get your email, it may have partially cleared up a mystification.

I've said I don't understand how you can find it meaningful that in 50,000 years men might have evolved to a higher capacity for concentration. So what?! Not only is there nothing in evolutionary theory that suggests it's going to happen but, my God, it's 50,000 years away; how can it possibly personally matter! I said: "This is pure belief, it's not science," and I wrote:

A pure belief I have, one to match yours and which I utterly can not prove, is that in time man will be resurrected in both body and soul. True, it won't happen for a while, in my individual case certainly not until after I'm dead, and perhaps not for a billion years, but still it's a meaningful belief and makes sense because it makes my present life mean something. It's a fructifying belief, because it gives energy to my struggle.

To which you replied:

To me the hypothesis that humans are continuing to evolve mentally is also a "fructifying belief"...

And then at that moment from out of somewhere it popped into my mind: "He believes in the western world's conception of the Inevitability of Progress, it's just that he's misapplied it from societal struggle to evolution!"

This was an insight. What does it mean?

I start at some disadvantage here because I'm not big into this particular belief either.

• I know that individuals who struggle to get better do.
• I know that small social groups who believe in the amelioration of suffering to some degree succeed in that amelioration.
• I know that nations that struggle towards values I respect have a better chance of getting somewhere close than nations that don't so struggle or struggle towards values I despise.
• I know that the belief you can get there has an element in it of "self fulfilling prophesy" in that it energizes...
• And I know that none of this psychological common sense explains the belief in the inevitability of progress. Somehow this belief is teleological and religious: Simply having the belief makes a man larger and better, never mind whatever might be it's pragmatic benefit in present life.

And here, my insights, such as they are, end; because it's just not much a part of my personality. But I'm not going to knock it. It does seem to work, it may even be true. I am glad the West has it, and I note that Islam, except in more secularized areas, doesn't; and I do believe the West has done extraordinary things in the last 25 hundred years. I note specifically wealth, ease, and freedom; and there certainly have been extraordinary achievments of intellect and culture. Progress is good. But what in the world does that have to do with Darwinian Evolution?

All I can say is that in this case a particular religiosity has evoluted to the Darwinian Conception. (This sounds vaguely theological).

But I still don't intuitively grasp it.

I'll go back to my formulae: This is a belief through which by the simple act of believing I am made a larger and a better man.

Okay. In 50,000 years evoluted man is going to look back on me and consider me a Chimpanzee and that makes me a better and larger man...?

I still find this hard to grasp, intuitionally, I mean. In 50,000 years I'll be a monkey, and that makes me better...

I suppose it could be some very great humility, this belief, (certainly something beyond anything I've got); a very great love that takes joy in the vision of a future species superior to the inelegance of present self; this self, after-all, but a momentary way-station along the emergent path to evolutionary perfection; this detritus, this self, not even archeology anymore but reconstructed fossil, remembered in study and on occasion, nostalgically, as an image of the fertile rankness of being in creation, the misshapen evolutionary promise of the primitive. --Could be true. And if believing that gives any one of my friends a sense of power and meaning in this present life, why... Shucks.

Incidentally, I lost my notebook by placing it on the top of the trunk of my car and driving away. 50,000 years from now that won't happen.