How to Become Small

 

Photo by Manfred Majer

We humans love ourselves, don't we? We all love, and I include myself, the story of heroes overcoming evil and of humanity overcoming great obstacles to achieve something. The Greatest Generation of WWII. The first flight of the Wright Brothers. In the modern age, the dream that socialism will cure our many ills, that a human-invented mass framework for living will usher us into the golden age. Or conversely, the dream that America is the shining city on the hill when it is anything but.

And I, perhaps more than most, love the idea that humans could be noble and good - even though I know it to be a lie. I love Tolkien's Lord of the Rings precisely because it shows what isn't true and cannot be true in this world, a noble humanity. Unfortunately this nobility frequently expresses itself in war, and war is the opposite of noble. That the wars of the 20th Century have not permanently invalidated the idea of the nobility of humanity and sent us all into sackcloth and ashes to repent of our evil, is a testament to the refusal of the human species to learn or repent or even think.

Of course the stories never tell of people being noble and good at home, tending their gardens or washing their dishes or being good to their spouses or children. It must always be grand, and grand usually either means violent or dangerous, and neither of those things are in truth good things. Violence and danger should only be undertaken in the utmost extremity, and is no more glorious than surviving a bad cancer operation.

The fictions we tell ourselves, even under the pretext of expressing nobility, all involve one thing: the exercise of power. And that is the biggest lie of all. Power always corrupts. Some say that pride is the primal sin, but if it is, power is its close companion.

Aragorn wouldn't have been much of a hero if he couldn't lop off orc heads with the best of them. Luke Skywalker wouldn't have amounted to much if he couldn't wield mystic power and a lightsaber. Spider-Man wouldn't be worth reading or watching if he couldn't kick some ass, even non-lethally. Force is always the threat, and force is always the response to that threat. And this leads to a world where force is always meeting force violently forever. And worse, we glorify force meeting force violently forever.

And I am not saying you shouldn't meet force with force. I have guns, and probably I would use them in defense of hearth and home. I admit liking stories and games with violence in them. As long as that illusory context of nobility is preserved, I probably like them more than most. Perhaps we are quite irredeemable in that respect: humans love violence. Violence is dramatic. Violence adds spice to stories.Where would fiction be without violence? And I happen to like fiction.

My point is that this should make us think long and hard about our true condition in the world. We should lament that condition. For centuries humans have sought paradise, and for centuries they have proven themselves incapable of living in it. Where is the literature of peace, as there is the literature of war? What poet or novelist writes elegies to peace as they do to war? They don't.

So, lament the war in the human soul. Lament our thirst for power. Grieve for the fact that we are not noble, we are warlike greedy arseholes and always have been.

UNDERSTAND THAT, every time you are tempted to glorify the human.

UNDERSTAND THAT, every time you are tempted to support a "noble war."

UNDERSTAND THAT, every time you propose or support some grand top-down solution to solving human problems. What, humans, these monsters, will fix everything? They will not. They will destroy everything.

UNDERSTAND THAT, every time you imagine some noble yet actually violent hero.

UNDERSTAND THAT, every time you are tempted to glorify those who wield POWER of whatever form, whether light sabers or money or technology or politics or a gun.

UNDERSTAND IT.

And having understood it, RENOUNCE POWER. Become small. Accept your true condition in this world, which is to either be small or be evil. Do not use what you don't need. Don't go where you don't need to go. Do not glorify yourself, or your country, or your ideology, or human power. Do what the people of the 20th Century didn't do, which is lament and repent of our wars and the many ways in which we have destroyed the Earth. Put on that sackcloth, take on those ashes. Wear black, do not smile lightly. Accept the discipline of grief. Put on an armband for the sins of humanity. Mourn that humans are such.

And then live small. Learn what you absolutely need and seek to get those things in the most reliable way, and forget about other things. Perhaps, as I have done, seek to extract yourself from the human world and human society because they will never learn and they will carry on as they have done forever. In ignorance.

But at least one person here and there will not.