What do you do to remain violent in modernity?

It has dawned on me that it is likely a relatively new phenomenon that an able bodied man in the prime of his life does not use violence for basic sustenance in food and shelter, doesn't use violence to promote himself in sexual selection, celebrate in violence when the conqueror and has evolved away from teaching the ways of severe violence to his children whether it be against animals or other men.

At top of mind (from reading the aforementioned book on Comanches), just as far back as 150 years ago, if you are a native Texan, your grandfather's father was likely savagely killing other men, impaling, torturing and likely enjoying it a little bit too. It was either that or his kids were being stolen, his wife was being gang-raped and he was being killed and tortured with his testicles in his mouth or burned to death on a skewer. Respectable men and not just trained militia and military -- preachers, lawyers, sheriffs, teachers, land owning gentry-- were hardened in the ways of killing fellow man.

Men that could be fit, and later were in Andrew Jackson's case who lived the rest of his life with lead in his body from a duel he survived, to be a President of the United States used violence as an acceptable tool in their problem solving kit of life.

Sixty years ago we had a massive World War that sped boys through the threshold to manhood in warp speed and provided a built in rite of passage. These boys and later men were in general shown to be wise, judicious, smart, strong, responsible and reasonable people. The greatest Americans to ever live, as we so dub them with the "Greatest Generation" moniker, was nurtured by violence. 

If we treat that last statement as one devoid of irony then it must be held as evidence, the exhibit A (or B or C), that violence as a psychological or character trait is endemic to the success, "goodness", and glory of the American people.

And yet, today and in the recent past, we have attempted to "evolve" away from it. Outside of the USMC on the front line or whatever and the dispassionate poor mired in poverty (a modern day "Noble Savage" in the J.F.Cooper archetype), there is a conspicuous lack of violence both in our culture and everyday lives as we hold keeping peace as the higher and more noble ideal in much the same way we view humility as being superior to pride.

The question then is: Is the lack of violence a good thing? On an intuitive level we would knee-jerk a response "Yes", but I think the more important question is: What are the social costs?

To you personally: What do you do to keep refined your sense and ability to impart violence in a modern world?

Do you watch or participate in physical sports like football, boxing and MMA type training?

Do you get drunk and high and shoot semi-automatic guns with your buffoon friends?

Do you shoulder check people at baseball games or otherwise get in bar fights?

Do you get online and call people fagets and virtually talk shit/e-fight?

I, for one, need to focus on being a better American by way of being a better man, I think. Excuse me while I have a glass:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI-mDTdeKR8

The Old Man and the Sea

When a book like The Old Man and the Sea is made the icon and becomes a synecdoche for “Made-in-the-USA” literary genius, for an entire generation, it generally means that for it to be made palatable enough to become the zeitgeist of mainstream America and to reach the level of ubiquity it has, it had to be distilled to a point where the original compounds have been removed. What is left – this sober and simple caricature of what was once an intoxicating and clever portrait- becomes an object that is all too easy for the subsequent generation to view with a sense of cynicism or outright dismissiveness. The afore, coupled with my memory of my father making my twelve year old brother read and write a report on this book as a form punishment for some reason, led me to thirty years of “The Old Man and the Sea” avoidance.

It wasn’t until I recently finished a hackneyed, heavy-handed, and disastrous first draft of a manuscript that I thought it imperative to read this book and only then because of a selfish and fancifully sociopathic turn. I had inadvertently titled my MS with the same compound sentence structure: The ___ and the ___. 

Once I realized this I had to read the book. I mean, Hemingway was not only one of my favorite authors but one of my life’s idols and even though we respectfully disagreed on matters of taste, like Victorian aesthetics and terse, Spartan sentences, maybe there was a fundamental driver that compelled us both to independently arrive at a similar naming convention. My heart swelled when the thought first flowed to my brain; did we share a muse?

I’ll save you the suspense. The above compound sentence structure is one of the most common found in the English language and I am an idiot. 

What I did find, however and finally to the point, is that I really enjoyed this novella and thought it to be very profound and illustrative of, if we are lucky (or unlucky, as one may argue), an honest acceptance of our own old age, a review of our life lead up until our old age and what it has meant, and ultimately the inevitable end of it all.

What I read was not just a story about an old man fishing, but the story of love and sacrifice. This story is the song of the stoic and the ballad of the martyr. It is simply an understanding that life as we know it thus far (and likely have always known it) is inherently an exercise in futility with which the only control one can hope to wrest is the control of your attitude and how to give other people pleasure and love. 

In my opinion the sea was a wonderful metaphor a vast and treacherous life that is intellectually unknowable by virtue of our physical and mortal limitations compared to the deep secrets and power of said vast and treacherous sea. The entire lifespan, experience and expertise of one man with a sole focus, who in this case was “born to be a fisherman”, cannot but put a dent into what can be truly known. Our fisherman, old, frail and barely able to “fish” anymore had in his short span only come to really understand the dynamics and characters at play in a small pool of water north of Cuba. With what hope can a man truly know the world and life if he is disabled with a built-in expiration date that makes investigation of every inch of the sea impossible? 

One can’t, I think the author argues, but one can make the best of his nautical miles and pass the lessons on to our inspired youth with love and sacrifice.

The Irony of People Who Do Not Believe in Evolution...

The Irony of People Who Do Not Believe in Evolution, Why Mainstream Christianity in the West is the iPhone of Religion, and a Case for Why China is More Evolved Than America.

Let me first acknowledge from what perch I derive my view. I am an Absurdist through and through and as such, I find staunch and devout atheists just as annoying as the similarly described religious.

To expound on my personal belief, the first thing you need to know is that my belief presupposes that, as a species, we have realized that our survival is more likely encouraged if we group and work together. (There is a meaningful distinction I should make here in that "group together" does not mean every human being should live, this is as paradox in that it is concurrently exclusive and inclusive.)

To that end, religion in general and the flavor of Christianity that is mainstream in America, is equal to all philosophical beliefs in that it is nothing more than a construct to help groups, by way of individuals, survive this world.  Whether it be a philosophy that inspires one to live for its own purposes, a religion that obligates one to live in a certain way, or any of the other infinite possibilities a human mind can conjure up and put a flawed and mortal sense of belief or faith in, the dictation of a behavior code and pattern is being adopted to promote the creation of a standard; a standard which will serve to stabilize the (also, perhaps, infinite) possibilities of human behavior in an attempt to, as a group, avoid being lost in the human ignorance and resulting chaos of our material universe and world.

My personal belief further dictates that because we as a people and a condition cannot know inherent meaning for life (ergo, we cannot know "God"), we are free to conceptualize and implement whatever the fuck philosophy (or religion, which can be used interchangeably at this point in my explanation) we want as long as it helps to yield the result of our survival. It is in this way that religion is nothing more than the best product our species has been able to produce for easing the lives of and maintaining the order for our kind. (As a side point and at the risk of delving into political philosophy, it’s my belief that this is why until the modern era you see religion as a basis of laws and rights, as well.)

Because our species has evolved to believe that the best case for survival is through banding together and creating standards to promote harmony and convenience for the most basic needs of human life, and because philosophy and the group adoption of said philosophy is a product of this evolution, one can only surmise that philosophy is a product of evolution, ergo religion is a product of evolution.

It is in that sense, not through a pejorative or dismissive tone, that I say Christianity in the West (and specifically in America) is the equivalent of the iPhone and Jesus was Steve Jobs. Jesus (or his executive handlers depending on the Apocrypha to which one subscribes) and the latter, evolved iterations that we see today, is a democratized product whose design is very easy to digest without much work or thought.

The packaging of a product that solves the human problems of having to work to create a personal meaning to live is important because instead of each individual being compelled to actively live, experience, think and create a philosophy by which to live, the inheriting or otherwise accepting a philosophy that one has not earned (or in the modern case, even understands) eliminates the need to know and critically think about anything in the world one lives in, and instead frees these specimens to eat, sleep and procreate in larger numbers.

It is in this way that religion has a tipping point from being beneficial to survival to detrimental to survival, through the encouragement of the procreation of people who have shown a propensity to be indoctrinated as well as have exhibited a lack of appetite for critical analysis*.

Because as a species we have historically ascribed the philosophy that encourages the survival of the group, it can be deduced that societies birthing larger percentages of a population that has not inherited cheap dogma, defined as any philosophy not sufficiently earned, is more evolved. If we are to accept the aforementioned definitions and controls then logically we can interpret that China is an example of a more evolved society than America **.

Notes

*Religious people who have come by their religion through a personal interest, study, or experience are not included in the inherited and indoctrinated as it could be said their philosophy is just as legitimate and valid as any other.

** China has reports of 60-80% of its 1.3 Billion people as non-religious or beholden to an inherited doctrine (780 million on the low end). America has reports of 20% of its 313 Million people as non-religious or beholden to an inherited doctrine (62 million).