Just say yes

I wouldn't recommend carrying a copy of Nietzsche whilst deer hunting to everyone, but it works for me. The deer weren't in the neighborhood at the time anyway so the book was good company.

Nietzsche is sometimes called a nihilist, but that is far from the truth. His main quarrel with many kinds of religion and philosophical idealism was that they were nihilistic to his way of thinking in that they sought for some other reality beyond the one we live in.

One theme of his that shows up again and again is the challenge to say "yes" to life in spite of all its nastiness, or, to put it another way, to try to live in such a way that we can and want to say yes to the whole package. Here's how he expresses it in terms of a New Year's resolution:

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati [love of fate]: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole, some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

DENIED. A move to extend emergency unemployment insurance failed in the Senate. But the banks are doing fine.

HIGHLIGHTING HISTORY. A new map and poster highlight black history in West Virginia and the many ways events here have shaped the nation.

THE MEANING OF LIFE. Some people do just fine without worrying about it.

ANIMAL EXTINCTIONS are bad for your health.

AT LEAST THERE'S NO SHORTAGE of stars.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Lucky you

This guy had some bad luck.

El Cabrero has been musing lately about the role of luck in human affairs. By luck, I mean things that affect us for good or ill that we can't anticipate or control. We go though our lives vacillating between automatic pilot and conscious planning, but even when we try to leave nothing to chance,the universe gets a vote of its own.

My sense is that while the universe is not out to get anybody personally, it probably won't stay up nights worrying about us.

Even on those rare occasions when things work out according to plan, I'd say we were pretty lucky. Think of all the things that could have happened that didn't.

I know that some people believe there is no luck or chance, but I choose not to blame God for everything that happens and could never work my mind into a strict naturalistic determinism. Even if the universe really was a closed, deterministic system, we don't experience it that way and certainly don't have a God's eye view.

Whilst perusing many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore on the subject of luck, I came across this little quote by the American philosopher John Dewey:

No one knows what a year or even a day my bring forth, The healthy become ill; the rich poor; the mighty are cast down' fame changes to obloquy. Men live at the mercy of forces they cannot control. Belief in fortune and luck, good and evil, is one of the most widespread and persistent of human beliefs. Chance has been deified by many peoples. Fate has been set up as an overlord to whom even the Gods must bow. Belief in a Goddess of Luck is in ill repute among pious folk but their belief in providence is a tribute to the fact no individual controls his own destiny.

So good luck out there today.

SPEAKING OF CHANGING LUCK, big business lobbyists are anticipating some, according to this item from McClatchy papers.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. Retail sales took a nosedive in October.

LOOKING BACK (AND AHEAD). This New Yorker item ponders the presidency.

THE NEXT BIG CRUNCH is likely to be ecological.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A turning of the wheel

Imagine having it all--fame, status, respect, wealth and more--and then suddenly losing it. (Some people are going through that right now.) How do you think you would deal with a big reversal of fortune (or Fortuna)?

That was pretty much the real situation of the Roman patrician Boethius (circa 480-535), who held high office in that twilight zone between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages.

Rome had fallen under the power of the Ostrogoths, although for a time much of daily life remained unchanged. Boethius fell afoul of King Theodoric and was stripped of wealth and position, imprisoned and executed in what no doubt was a pretty nasty way.

It was during this period of imprisonment that he composed a classic work, The Consolation of Philosophy. As he bemoans his fate, Lady Philosophy visits him in prison and instructs him in wisdom so that he can face his end with composure. While that might sound contrived in a work of fiction, Boethius' situation was all too real.

The book is interesting to me largely for its view of the role of Fortune in human affairs. As Richard Green wrote in the introduction to his translation,

The conception of Fortune as the feminine personification of changeable, unpredictable fate is drawn from pagan sources, notably from the Roman poets and moralists, where she is described as blind, vagrant, inconstant, meretricious. But, as Seneca had observed, there are limits to her power: she cannot give a man virtue, nor deprive him of it, and so virtue becomes the wise man's weapon against her. She represented fate as a random, uncontrollable force, to be feared or courted, opposed or despised, according to the theological and philosophical dispositions of those who, largely through the experience of misfortune, felt her power.

A basic point of the book is that it is the very nature of Fortune to change. Those who put themselves in its/her power by basing our happiness on things that aren't within our own power to keep are helpless when things change--as they will.

Fortune herself is quoted by Philosophy as saying

Here is the source of my power, the game I always play: I spin my wheel and find pleasure in raising the low to a high place and lowering those who were on tip. Go up, if you like, but only on condition that you will not feel abused when my sport requires your fall.

There is a very old wisdom tradition among many cultures that while we can't control everything that happens to us, we can control our own responses and thus acquire a degree of independence from fortune.

Too bad that's easier said than done.

THE AMERICAN DREAM of social mobility seems to have migrated to northern Europe, according to a new report on economic inequality.

A GOOD QUESTION. Have there been any pay cuts on Wall Street for CEOs since the bailout?

NOT TO BE. The US suicide rate is increasing for the first time in a decade. Women have shown the largest increase.

URGENT ANCIENT DINOSAUR/BIRD UPDATE here. You really have to see the picture.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Time and chance

Venus the goat is pretty random.

In his book Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that a person's view of the world is more a matter of biography than of logic and conscious reasoning. He wrote

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir...

Today, some people might go even farther in arguing that worldview is shaped by temperament which itself is to a significant degree the result of genes.

Sorting through that question is beyond El Cabrero at the moment, but for whatever reason I've always tended to see the world as a place ruled in large part by chance, luck and randomness. There is a part of me that is kind of surprised that the same math problems yield the same results on different days. As far as the "laws" of nature are concerned, I tend to view these more as habits or recurring patterns.

Of course, this leads to all kinds of disagreements with my deterministically-inclined friends who tend to follow Einstein in saying that God doesn't play dice with the world. For me, cosmic dice playing might be another name for God.

At any rate, I'm with the author of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, who said

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

SPEAKING OF A CHANGE OF FORTUNE, the economic crisis has many people rethinking Reaganomics. Here's a similar item from Newsweek as well.

THE MORTGAGE MESS and how to fix it is the subject of this item.

SPEAKING OF MESSES, here's a book review discussing the cost of the Iraq war.

YOU MUST CHECK OUT THIS PICTURE of the world's longest insect. We're talking over one foot.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED