When one realizes all the near extinctions that humans and proto-humans have encountered; also the massive distruptions of both flora and fauna by those not yet acknowledged as fully homo sapien - not really knowing what they were doing - it’s kind of hard to think of evolution as god in action.
I think of god as a wholly impersonal process of nature; impersonal to the point of you, me and ALL being thoroughly dispensable if the experiment failed due to too many negative memes infecting the human psyche.Within nature we are still animals though of a kind where memes take over where genes end, the former with the greatest potential to be the most destructive. Do you believe there could be an echo of our demise anywhere in the universe? Perhaps so since we’ve recently sent out a profuse amount of broadcasts to attest to our existence…if it ever gets picked up and packed away in some cosmic archive. Time and evolution regrets nothing having killed or dispensed with anything.
For an intense mystic like Blake such a statement would make sense since, according to his view, all of creation derives from a divine mandate. For me it’s more akin to everything that lives is unique and adds to the diversity necessary in keeping the ecosystem stable.
BTW, I read a lot of Blake, not merely his most popular and quoted poems. In my much earlier days, I wrote a few of those myself though they were more metaphysical than religious. Like Blake and John Donne they all rhymed. What I’m saying is one can be inspired by their verse without submitting to their views. Nevertheless, referring to inner & outer, there’s still a great deal which remains mystical when everything turns inside-out in the persistent hope of coming into contact with some final goal and purpose.
Thanks, Monad, for your insightful post.
There has also been much good in the human reach for truth as the enlightenment exemplifies. That there has also been much bad does not exclude our propensity for hope as a viable meme with possible genetic underpinnings. On the mystical level, however, belonging to all that exists should awaken one to the responsibility of being a part of ecosystems. But the isolated “I” is still a most powerful Western idea.
Glad to hear you like Blake. I had a course in Blake in grad school and, like you. I was inspired to write imitative poems. Blake “woke me from my dogmatic slumber”, which at the time was Christian fundamentalism.
“Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things. (Sp.—Blake’s)
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.”–Blake, from"The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"
Very true! It reminds me of the following section of poetry under the title Dawn or Dusk…
Come restoration and with your empire ray
forebode dimensions to which the soul shall pray.
Make palpable in your unsharded view
investitures which gods pervade as mortals do.
Hail the untempled sinuous sublime
God unrendered that renders gods divine,
recurrent beacon of perennial birth,
host of visions of deeds on Earth.
All gods are man-made which doesn’t negate their value as long as not taken literally. Powerful myths & metaphors are created to diminish the grinding impacts of reality though it often also goes in the opposite direction…hellfire for example.
Among the myths we need to rid ourselves of are original sin, Jesus as scapegoat for the punishment of our sins, and eternal punishment in hell’s fire. I don’t believe the early Christians held such beliefs. Blake loved Christ but detested Christianity. Gandhi said something similar. There is a distinction between who Jesus said he was and the myths that were built around the concept of Jesus as God. Jesus had said,“I am the way, the truth and the life.” Thus Jesus followed is the Way; Jesus worshiped is idolatry. Our natures include good and evil. The good must be cultivated, the evil transcended. Neither alone is our true nature. We are in need of salvation from ourselves, from our fear-based opinion of our place in the natural world. As Marianne Williamson noted-- where there is fear there is no love, In other words a fear-based religion cannot be a religion of love. “Perfect love casts out all fear”, even fear of impending damnation. Where love rules peace is possible.
In principle it may be true since all religions are fear based one way or another…meaning there is no such thing as a religion of love. That sentiment amounts to an oxymoron. There is also no such thing as perfect love; even Jesus had short-comings in that respect making perfect love a complete myth.
Also, where love rules peace is possible is ironically a great summary of why peace was never possible. In all of history has there ever been an instance of it? It’s not even realistic to think it is possible and, given our nature, less desirable than sentimentally supposed being too vulnerable to mutilation. Instead we have always been ruled by expediencies in all of its guises; they inflect the current moment but, to our detriment, without consideration of the ones consequent.
Love - if it’s more than just a word - is very much localized to a small group and even then it’s fair to question its motives if in many cases it doesn’t translate to just another form of personal expediency. Love is a coin that can easily flip to its opposite forcing that outcome to be so much more intense than if it had started from a position of indifference. Love & hate have a lot in common!
Bluntly stated, we don’t need all that love BS. What we need is a common sense approach to reality which goes beyond the current moment. If life were to be played successfully its symbol for me would be one of three dimensional chess played in a time limited manner in which love is not a factor.
I don’t wish to sound rude or derisive but Where love rules peace is possible is just a noble sounding sentiment thoroughly useless when it comes to implementation. Peace does not depend on love but compromise where willingness to reach an agreement more often than not, depends on fear especially where mutual interests abound. Love does not foreshadow compromise, except possibly in personal matters. Compromise has always been fundamental to peace, a process by which to reach an acceptable conclusion for all parties; nothing whatever to do with love. Groups who negotiate to reach a consensus don’t usually love each other. They do so to avoid an outcome unfavorable and possibly dangerous to both.
Love, overall, has too many deep-rooted defects informing it to be of any use. It’s a word which especially these days means nothing…if it ever really meant anything. Within the human psyche it resembles a giant soap bubble that can burst anytime.
“We must love one another or die.”—W. H.Auden
Compromise is owing to conflicting ideologies or mindsets, if you will. There can be no compromise in addressing the devastation of ecosystems of which we are integral parts and to which we owe our very existence. Nature does not compromise. Only we can do that. Post modern ethical relativism puts the burden of healing the world on the minds that, because they see themselves as isolate entities in conflict, cannot or will not take on the task. Only stark natural disasters appear able to bring folks together for the common good or for any hope of working together to insure future life on this planet.
We either have a purpose or cease to exist, its the main problem.
Indeed as long as humans do not as a rule have a purpose for the world, the planet, its lifeforms, the system it is part of, our species is a cloud of dark ghosts hovering over the abyss.
Auden is an excellent poet but if that were true we would have died out a long time ago. We will not ever love one another as demonstrated by the entire history of the human race. Also for certain, nature never gave it the least priority.
True! There can be no compromise against a power with the means to exterminate all life.
That too is true, though unfortunately, like the Roadrunner, we invariably fail to brake before the edge of the cliff. The only direction after that is down. In the meantime there are still too many corporate interests willing to walk over corpses for a profit now. They appear to compromise only to procrastinate.
What compromise for peace after a war has not engendered a new war? In many instances some compromises are just kicking the can of destruction on down the road.
The Auden quote is from a poem he wrote on the eve of the second world war. (“Sept., 1939”) The warming of the seas among other things is a harbinger of impending disaster. While Auden was writing about a world in conflict, his poem fits our condition of destruction of ecosystems. In what sense is compromise not a settling for less than was wanted? Especially since the stakes are so high?
The end of any conflict may be the start of a new one, but the EU was grounded with the intention of stopping endless wars within Europe. Except for a new nationalism, that peace has kept for sixty years. It has always been about compromise and a surrendering of a certain amount of sovereignty that has been the issue with those opposed to it. The pompous will never die out, as we see in GB at present, but the project EU has been successful for many states.
That has long been known but only recently started circulating among the masses when it was made clear, not by what anyone said but by demonstration, that it’s no-longer a theory.
I read it a long time ago but reread it again since you mention it. Auden despised the poem almost as soon as it was written, especially its most famous line, the one you quoted. He thought it ludicrous and dishonest. Nevertheless, the poem remains popular with the masses mostly due to a line of duplicitous sentimentality. Even though there are some very good lines in it, I agree with Auden on its overall merit. He wrote much better ones. Again I’d say that fear not love is the main motivator in the human psyche…the one that forces compromise among ourselves or a total retreat realizing the war is lost if we war against nature.
I’m not sure in what context the question is asked. Compromises are made among people and nations. All sides start out asking for more but expecting to receive less to achieve equilibrium that’s mutually beneficial or at least acceptable for the time being. Compromises with nature, as you pointed out, is not possible. A natural process forced to mutate cannot be bargained with.