There's a World

Yesterday, over the lunch table, my folks got around to discussing a cousin of mine who recently graduated with two majors. Leslie's gotten a job since graduating -- but it's part-time, doesn't pay much more than minimum wage, and she's still looking for work. I thought I knew what I was in for: the standard grumblings of "Well, what good is that liberal-arts double-major?"

Just a few days before, I'd told a friend, "They probably wouldn't be nagging me so much over majors and job prospects if I were going to major in business or science as opposed to the liberal arts."

Instead, my father told my brother and me that no kind of major guaranteed more success, stability or respectability than the other. I could major in almost anything and I'd be fine, so long as I put everything I had -- my heart, mind, soul -- into it. (The main issue, of course, is that I haven't exactly been doing that.)

But in our currently shittastic economy, sometimes I wonder if even that's enough.

I've been telling my parents and Kory (much to their dismay) that I've counted on fully identifying with my job, just as I've fully identified with my role as a student for, what, fourteen, fifteen years? It's kind of ingrained into my mindset, if not my DNA. It rather shocks me that the most obvious danger of tying my identity to my job didn't really occur to me till I read this article.

It's kind of hard to think right now (mental overstimulation, perhaps?) so I'll probably have to return to this later. But will I actually come back and complete this post? Both my computer and my room are littered with things -- letters, books, journal entries -- that I always mean to come back and finish but never get to it because I'm either too busy or too lazy. Not a good way to be if you plan to have a career that happens to revolve around deadlines.

(Of course, said career has been undergoing a painful paradigm shift for the past year or two, but more on that later, perhaps.)

Mudedeism #1

This morning found me mulling over the late Senator Kennedy's rather odd relationship with his cradle faith after watching his televised funeral. Cardinal O'Malley mentioned the surety of the congregation's collective belief that Senator Kennedy had passed into the eternal glory of Heaven. I'm fairly sure that that's a standard line in the funeral Mass, but the National Catholic Register seems to have doubts:

For Kennedy, the judgment that counts for eternity is at hand. Here below, his many public achievements have been lavishly praised. His was the most public of lives — famous for who he was before he was known for what he did — so that his private life was part of the public record. He experienced more than most the truth of those foreboding words of Scripture, that all that is done in secret will be brought to light, and that which is whispered will be shouted from the rooftops. There were few Catholics in America whose successes and sins were more published, discussed and judged. Now, his fellow Catholics surely pray for his merciful judgment.

Father de Souza's main beef with the Senator, predictably, is his stance on abortion.

I'm tempted at this moment to meditate upon (or perhaps lament?) the single-mindedness exhibited by the Register and many more conservative Catholics, who appear to join some of their evangelical brethren in hawking over 'values' (Abortion is murder! Keep homos out of marriage! End the Darwinian hegemony in our schools!) to the detriment of at least equally pressing social-justice issues such as poverty, crime, racism, and immigration rights. But perhaps that is best saved for another post, when I'm feeling somewhat less partisan. The troubling thought that arose this morning had little to do with either side of the aisle.

Those who oppose abortion call themselves 'pro-life'. Why? Ostensibly, abortion kills babies. Regardless of the reason or the stage at which the procedure is conducted, a human that was once living, even in utero, is destroyed by the wanton whims of the adults that are supposed to care for it. Pro-lifers find this morally unacceptable.

Yet most of these pro-lifers (and Westerners across the political spectrum) would probably agree that unwanted pregnancies are a bad thing because, well, they're unwanted -- for a variety of reasons. Many of these pro-lifers, particularly Vatican-aligned Catholics, also promote abstinence as the only acceptable form of contraception -- and sex education programs that promote abstinence as such. Wait until marriage, they say, then it's okay to have sex and as many babies as you can handle. But in the meantime, pro-lifers are adamant that unwanted pregnancies should not be created in the first place.

A mini-Mudedeism just occurred to me: We wish to control the circumstances under which life is created.

A Fundamentalist who believes that God is solely in charge of assigning souls to bodies to birthdates might have problems with this agenda. After all, should not new life be welcomed with joy as a great gift from the Almighty, rather than a burden? Even the Register urges the faithful to think baby-positive, not pregnancy-negative: "The more life, the better."

Deacon Ferris would immediately scold me for taking him out of context, and he'd be partly right. But let's think about it for a second. It's reasonable to assume that many pro-lifers, especially religious pro-lifers, are opposed to the proliferation of life outside of 'the optimal', or 'the divinely ordained': that is, heterosexual, religiously-sanctioned marriage. At the same time that they decry the termination of a pregnancy once it's begun, they discourage the creation of that human in the first place, in that time and place, between those people. The propagation of human life is sacred, a gift from above -- and it must be controlled down here, on Earth, by none other than us fallen mortals. It is evil to destroy life, yet outside certain conditions, it is also evil to create life. This second is the lesser of the two evils, for a life cannot be destroyed if it is not created.

Anti-abortionists are not pro-life. They are anti-infanticide.

Preliminary Question

Who makes the world?

Why do we exist?

Is there even a reason to our existence?

Does the reason matter?

The only thing I know is that I know nothing.

'Dude. What's with all the stupid white rabbit references?'

The origins of the White Rabbit will probably be one of the many, many things that I should research and ultimately don't. It'd seem that the reference originated with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I've yet to read the book or see the film, but the book's on my to-read list.

This particular White Rabbit appears in Sophie's World, a novel by Jostein Gaarder.

A white rabbit is pulled out of a top hat. Because it is an extremely large rabbit, the trick takes many billions of years. All mortals are born at the very tip of the rabbit's fine hairs, where they are in a position to wonder at the impossibility of the trick. But as they grow older they work themselves ever deeper into the fur. And there they stay. They become so comfortable they never risk crawling back up the fragile hairs again. Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink.
     'Ladies and gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care.
     'What a bunch of troublemakers!' they say. And they keep on chatting: Would you pass the butter, please?

—Alberto, Sophie's World

The full title is Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy. A year or so ago I read it about halfway through and found it fascinating, but got a bit wrapped up in what we call 'life' and abandoned my readings. I'm starting from the beginning now.

To put it in rather simpler terms, living deep in the rabbit's fur is like living inside the Matrix and accepting it as reality, taking the world for granted partly in order to survive and partly for the sake of feeling happy. It's a lot preferable to the grey world of philosophy, where even the nature of reality is never certain.

Lately I feel like I've been burrowing pretty deep into the rabbit's fur. What you're reading is my attempt to climb back out and see the stars again. Whether or not I'll succeed remains to be seen.

Don't get too comfortable.