Finding "the meaning of life" in dirty work

"Howard Roark’s bold claim in [the novel] The Fountainhead [is] that “the meaning of life” is “your work. ...

"[P]opular culture[however] reflect widespread attitudes about work: it’s not fun, is at best useful for paying the bills and funding more enjoyable activities, and should be avoided if at all possible ...

"It’s easy for those who live in industrialised countries and cities to picture suits and ties, paycheques, uniforms, store shelves laden with goods, and rush-hour commuter traffic when thinking about work. The trappings of complex market societies direct our focus in the realm of work to making and spending money. However, whether Eve plucks a piece of fruit from a tree or John Locke imagines gathering acorns from the woods, ultimately all labour—physical and intellectual—is first of all about producing in order to live. As Ayn Rand puts it, 'a man works in order to support his own life,' using his mind and effort to solve 'the problem of survival.' ...

"[Mike Rowe's TV series] 'Dirty Jobs and Somebody’s Gotta Do It' brought hundreds of examples of sooty, grimy, sweaty people—who were also happy, flourishing, and paid well—to millions of television screens for well over a decade. Some, like Les Swanson, even chose to leave the white-collar job of guidance counsellor for a career in cleaning septic tanks. 

"Rowe noticed that folks like Swanson 'seemed to be better balanced and happier than most of the people [he] knew,' and asked, '[W]hat in the world do these people know that the rest of us don’t?' In an inversion of a seeker’s stereotypical trek to the top of a mountain to ask a cross-legged sage about the secret to a happy and meaningful life, Rowe put the question to Swanson while helping him 'suck . . . the shit out of people’s septic tanks.' Swanson’s response? 'What came first was the fact that nobody was doing this. What came second was my own, hardheaded commitment to be very good at it. And then, I did the thing that is the hardest thing to do. And that is figure out how to love something that you didn’t think you did.'

"Swanson paid attention to the reality of the market to capitalise on an opportunity to fill a gap he perceived and was more than willing to become excellent at his new job. It’s in the last step he identifies of learning how to love work that was not in his original game plan—a reality for countless workers—that the key to meaning exists. Even those who do follow their passion and fortunately land work they love right out of the gate are not always sure that their work is meaningful. 

"They, too, need to wrestle with 'the meaning question.' So, what is meaningful work? And how can that make for a meaningful life? ...

"We can look to philosopher-mechanic Matthew B. Crawford for a more current embodiment and articulation of this insight. When reflecting on what being an electrician’s assistant meant to him (a job he held as a teenager and young man), he says:

'I never ceased to take pleasure in the moment, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch. "And there was light." It was an experience of agency and competence. The effects of my work were visible for all to see, so my competence was real for others as well; it had a social currency. . . . Maybe another electrician would see it someday. Even if not, I felt responsible to my better self. Or rather, to the thing itself—craftsmanship has been said to consist simply in the desire to do something well.'

"Crawford’s thoughtful account of what the work of electrician’s assistant meant to him—which transfers to his approach to all of his current work as a philosopher and motorcycle mechanic—reflects insights offered by Rowe [and others] about what makes work both subjectively and objectively meaningful. ...

"[T]he spiritual values you produce through your work [summarises] Rand also 'make his life worth living.' ...

"[L]ife takes work and ... such work requires taking personal responsibility for building a character and self capable of working. It also involves consciously choosing to engage in meaningful work and finding ways to illuminate how that work provides meaning in your life. When these are all in place, alienation and other ills get crowded out. You can look with pride at your life that you stocked with values you created through your work, smile, and say, 'I made this!'

"When Rowe replaces 'follow your passion' with 'bring your passion with you,' that’s a call to bring your passion for living with you no matter where you go or what job you have. Whether you’re building houses or bridges, painting a canvas, or writing a book, you’re always busy with the work of building your life. Roark’s proclamation that 'the meaning of life” is 'your work' is thus not so startling after all."

~ Carry-Ann Biondi from her symposium paper 'Mike Rowe, Work, and Meaning in Life'

"I find it astonishing that out of a population that contains the wealth of talent present in the United States, two such mediocre candidates have been nominated for the most powerful office in the world."

"In a by now text book example of 'progressive' thinking, [the Herald's Simon] Wilson suggests that taxing the tech billionaires isn’t actually going to hurt them. And this is where the Left gets it wrong.
    "Wilson and his ilk are of the view that those who are better off, who are 'richer,' who have taken risks to get where they have reached, who have used initiative and creativity to develop products which the market clearly wants — that they should be made to pay. For what? Wilson isn’t clear on this.
    "The approach seems to be that the Silicon Valley elites have more than many others, and so they should have less because they can afford to do without. It is this thinking that underpins the criticisms of the socialist approach made by Ayn Rand in 'Atlas Shrugged' and 'The Fountainhead.' ...

"As far as the US election is concerned I find it astonishing that out of a population that contains the wealth of talent present in the United States, two such mediocre candidates have been nominated for the most powerful office in the world. ...
    "The problem with Trump is that he is a crook. ... [H]e will allow the dictators and fellow authoritarians in Russia, North Korea, Iran and China to flourish and become more powerful. ... Harris will do damage to the economy and it is doubtful that she has the heft to maintain the US position on the international stage.
    "Anyone but Trump, sadly, is not an answer. ...
    "One wonders if 5 November 2024 will see the beginning of the destruction of the American experiment with democracy."

~ David Harvey on 'Reflections on an Election'

"My Conversion from Anti-Industrialist to Lover of Human Progress'"

"Sometimes when I talk and write about the importance of science, technology, and entrepreneurship to human opportunity and living standards, people ask me why I seem so obsessed with progress.
    "There is a simple reason: I did not use to believe in it.
    "When I was around fifteen, I shared many of the ideas of the people I now spend my time arguing against. I was very unhappy about modern, industrial civilisation. I looked upon highways, cars, trucks, and factories as blights on the landscape. I thought the hustle, bustle, and stress of consumerism and modernity were unnatural and unhealthy. ...

"I thought that there must have been a better time in the past, when we lived in harmony with one another and with nature. ... There, I thought, were the good old days. This view predisposed me to look at technology and construction and consumption only in terms of their negative impacts on traditional lifestyles, livelihoods, and the environment. ...

"I read the Existentialists, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Henry David Thoreau; I read Franz Kafka and plenty of other disturbing fiction, all of which reinforced my sense that something was seriously wrong with the world and humanity. It made me a pessimist, almost even a misanthrope. Such stupid people, to ruin their world like that!

"... I don’t think that I ever became clinically depressed, but as a friend of mine put it, I had made myself 'philosophically depressed.' The world and everything in it just seemed hopeless. And that became a self-fulfilling despair.
    "Two things began to lift me out of the intellectual hole that I had dug for myself: reading about history—boy, was that an eye-opener—and studying politics. ...

"Whatever period I read about, and whichever region I turned to, the 'good old days' were nowhere to be found. ... I found that the desperate struggle to find something, anything, to feed your family and stave off hunger for another few weeks was the defining experience of all previous eras. ... My ancestors in northern Sweden had not lived a good life; they had fought hard for food, shelter, and clothing, and when the weather was bad, the crop failed, and they starved. In bad times, they had to dry and grind tree bark into flour to prepare their daily bread. ...
    "Once I began to pull this thread, I found it hard to stop. I just had to find out what made the difference between their lives and ours. Why is it that for ten thousand years, people did not experience any lasting improvement in their material condition, and then suddenly, in the past five or six generations, we saw an explosion of wealth and technology?
    "For the first time, I started to actually think about the impact of railways, steamboats, international trade, corporations, financial markets, and so on. I had to ask myself: Where would I have been without them? Probably in the graveyard, or never born. ...

"This was the beginning of my obsession with human progress. I could no longer take modern civilisation as a given—or a curse.
    "Step by step, I realised that the modern world was not so bad after all. But my heart was not in it. ... Then some friends in [the freedom] community told me that I had to read Ayn Rand, whom I had never heard of. It happened at an important moment in my thought process. ... 

    "I had yet to experience, in visceral form, the meaning of industrialisation and commerce, and so I was left with a hollow, less-than-inspired ideal. That began to change when I read Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s nonfiction books.

    "For the first time, I read someone who talked about man as a heroic being, with happiness as his moral purpose, and science, technology, and industry his noblest activities. I was appalled. And deeply fascinated!
    "Rand had this annoying ability to get to the bottom of every question and challenge my every belief. ...
    "If scientists and entrepreneurs provide us with the knowledge and wealth that make the world an amazing place, why weren’t they the heroes in my story? And why were the whiners and moaners good guys—just because they dressed in black like me and had the better tunes? Previously, I had identified government intervention as a bad thing and had been involved in libertarian activism against it, but I had not clearly identified or articulated the good that deserved protection against it. Thanks to Rand, I began to shift from fighting against what’s bad to fighting for what’s good—for progress, and not just against oppression.
    "Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, the biggest impact of reading Rand was on my emotional outlook—the part of my personality that had not kept up with my intellectual transformation. She helped me see the beauty in exploration and achievement and that technology and innovation can be romantic adventures. I credit her at least partly with my bright sense of life, my belief in mankind, in progress and the future. In Rand’s novel 'The Fountainhead,' the sight of one man’s achievement provides a young boy with “the courage to face a lifetime.” In time, that’s what Rand’s works provided me.
    "This intellectual journey of discovery is why I am obsessed with progress. It is fueled in part by my gratitude for the people who keep on working and thinking and producing, even when people like my old self denigrate them. I had always taken progress for granted. I did not recognise it, and I did not understand it, and now I am trying to make up for it.
    "As a convert to the cause, I hope you will forgive my missionary zeal. You see, I am trying to get a younger version of myself to see the error of his ways."

~ Johan Norberg from his article 'My Conversion from Anti-Industrialist to Lover of Human Progress'. His most recent book is The Capitalist Manifesto – Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World

'Selfishness' without a self

 

"It’s what I couldn’t understand about people for a long time. They have no self. They live within others. They live second-hand. ...
    "[T]oo selfish? In what act or thought of [theirs] has there ever been a self? ...  [Their] aim in life? Greatness — in other people’s eyes. Fame, admiration, envy — all that which comes from others. ... [They do]n’t want to be great, but to be thought great. ... There’s your actual selflessness. ... But everybody calls [that] selfish. . . .

    “Isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison. . . . They’re second-handers. . . .
    “They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: ‘Is this true?’ They ask: ‘Is this what others think is true?’ ...
    "Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation — anchored to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people. That’s what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility."

~ Ayn Rand, the character Howard Roark speaking, from her novel The Fountainhead — excerpted as part of 'The Nature of the Second-Hander' in her book For the New Intellectual

"Rulers of men are not egoists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others."

 

"Rulers of men are not egoists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of the dependence does not matter."

          ~ Ayn Rand on 'The Soul of the Individualist,' from her novel The Fountainhead

Quote of the Day: "Yes!"

"What you feel in the presence of a thing you admire is just one word - 'Yes.' The affirmation, the acceptance, the sign of admittance. And that 'Yes' is more than an answer to one thing, it's a kind of 'Amen' to life, to the earth that holds this thing, to the thought that created it, to yourself for being able to see it...
...."There is no affirmation without the one who affirms. In this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours."
~ Ayn Rand, from a character in her novel The Fountainhead

.

Quote of the Day: On betraying your self

 

"It’s what I couldn’t understand about people for a long time. They have no self. They live within others. They live second-hand. Look at Peter Keating. . . . I’ve looked at him—at what’s left of him—and it’s helped me to understand. He’s paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself that he’s been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness—in other people’s eyes. Fame, admiration, envy—all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn’t want to be great, but to be thought great. He didn’t want to build, but to be admired as a builder. He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There’s your actual selflessness. It’s his ego that he’s betrayed and given up. But everybody calls him selfish." 
~ Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, excerpted in the article ‘The Nature of the Second-Hander’ – part of “a flood” of full-length Rand essays now online for the first time, at Campus.AynRand.Org

.

“The concept of God is degrading to man”

 

Philosopher Robert Mayhew discusses what he calls “Ayn Rand’s sacred atheism”:

At the age of thirteen, Ayn Rand decided she was an atheist. Her reason: “the concept of God is degrading to man.” One major form of this degradation is religion’s effect on genuine values, including sacred values. This idea is prominent in her early writings and continues to be featured in ‘The Fountainhead’ and ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ as well as in her nonfiction.

“God, whatever you choose to call God,” she recognised, “is one’s conception of the highest possible.” If the highest possible is both unknowable and omnisicient, then that places the source of our values elsewhere  – and it places our consciousness in a state of subservience.

A state inappropriate to life on this earth, and degrading to anyone calling themselves a man.

.

How to rule mankind—if you’d like to

Dictators, would-be dictators and power-lusting second-handers everywhere already know this stuff instinctively.

You should too – as intellectual self-defence.

[From Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, Ellsworth Toohey explains the primary technique used by politicians, government officials and other ‘community leaders’ to wrestle power from the people. Hat tip Adriano Melo]

Saturday Reprise: How to Live Without Irony

From the extensive NOT PC archives …

---

“A life without passion is not a life - it is merely an existence.”
                     - Lesley Fieger

“"When a culture is dedicated to the destruction of values - of all values,
of values as such - men's psychological destruction has to follow."
- Ayn Rand

After the carnage of the First World War Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises about a “lost generation” who were outwardly still alive after the cataclysm, but inwardly dead.  “Give them irony and give them pity” exhorts one of the novel’s many expatriates who drift idly through Europe, wondering without caring if they might prefer it somewhere else. Or not.

For these characters, irony is a “cultivated aloofness,” “a strategy of containment and a rejection of idealism” after a war that seemed to destroy virtually every human value.

At least those gorgeous bastards had the war as an excuse.  These days hipsters cultivate aloofness for no reason at all but fashion. To fit in. To be one of the herd. To “go with the flow.”

“If irony is the ethos of our age—and it is,” observes Christy Wampole in a great op-ed in the New York Times, “then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living.”

The hipster haunts every city street and university town.. .He harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny. The hipster is a scholar of social forms, a student of cool. He studies relentlessly, foraging for what has yet to be found by the mainstream. He is a walking citation; his clothes refer to much more than themselves. He tries to negotiate the age-old problem of individuality, not with concepts, but with material things…
    [Today’s hipster] is merely a symptom and the most extreme manifestation of ironic living. For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s — members of Generation Y, or Millennials — particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt.

Where previous generations followed causes, lived with passion, stormed the barricades, this one sits around swapping ironic stories and examining its navel fluff. Blokes wear heavy beards and swandris as if they’re ironic woodsmen, but are incapable even of changing a tyre. Being aroused by anything is uncool. Feeling actual passion for things is unwelcome. Not for them the stirring sounds  of exhortations “to strive, to seek, to find, but not to yield,” which they might once have felt when younger. Life now, instead, as adults, can be summed up in ironic tweets amounting to “Meh,” LOL, “Whatevers.”

The hipster “goes with the flow,” regardless of where it’s headed; declares that “perception is reality,” synonymous with saying “nothing is real anyway”; affirms that ideals are things “you’ll grow out of,” while not noticing that without them they have become grown-ups who neither  know what they are doing nor care.* They live  lives in the world while detaching themselves from  it, making them dead inside while devaluing everything in the world they touch—made dead and devalued by what amounts to quotidian self-immolation, a steady drip, drip, drip of what was once their passions, values, enthusiasms and loves. Wampole speaks for that generation’s destruction of themselves:

Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings — of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems relatively irony-free. The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude, with a combative stance against authority, which the punk movement had also embraced. In my perhaps over-nostalgic memory, feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed: all of these stirrings contained within them the same electricity and euphoria touching generations that witness a centennial or millennial changeover.
    But Y2K came and went without disaster. We were hopeful throughout the ’90s, but hope is such a vulnerable emotion; we needed a self-defense mechanism, for every generation has one. For Gen Xers, it was a kind of diligent apathy. We actively did not care. Our archetype was the slacker who slouched through life in plaid flannel, alone in his room, misunderstood. And when we were bored with not caring, we were vaguely angry and melancholic, eating anti-depressants like they were candy.
    From this vantage, the ironic clique appears simply too comfortable, too brainlessly compliant. Ironic living is a first-world problem. For the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime. He doesn’t own anything he possesses.
    Obviously, hipsters (male or female) produce a distinct irritation in me, one that until recently I could not explain. They provoke me, I realized, because they are, despite the distance from which I observe them, an amplified version of me.

Self-awareness is the beginning of self –cure. “The simple act of noticing my self-defensive behaviour,” she says, “has made me think deeply about how potentially toxic ironic posturing could be.”

As a function of fear and pre-emptive shame, ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise? Or a symptom?

Or both?

Bewailing the cavalcade of coolness in which modern life is drowning, and offering his own antidotes to avoid what he calls “the swamp sirens,” Lindsay Perigo quotes Ayn Rand:

In her Journals, making notes for her upcoming novel, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand said:

"This may sound naïve. But - is our life ever to have any reality? Are we ever going to live on the level? Or is life always to be something else, something different from what it should be? A real life, simple and sincere, even naïve, is the only life where all the potential grandeur and beauty of human existence can be found. Are there real reasons for accepting the substitute, that which we have today? No one has shown today's life as it really is, with its real meaning and its reasons. I'm going to show it. If it's not a pretty picture - well, what is the alternative?"

In The Fountainhead, of course, she showed us, not just today's life as it really is, but the alternative also. And many years later, writing a weekly newspaper column for the Los Angeles Times, she said:

"When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some undefinable splendour, of the unusual, the exciting, the great, is an attribute of youth - and the process of aging is the process of that expectation's gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen."

One doesn't - and one shouldn't. To let it happen is to succumb to spiritual death long before one's physical demise - to spend maybe half one's life jaundiced, jaded, cynical, listless, atrophied, desiccated …. Or, in the case of many of today's youth, to spend nearly all one's life like that.

Tragic. The best lack all conviction … and the world is the worse for it.  But intense passion is the effect of profound conviction, observes Perigo.

[The hipster however] says that intense passion is improper, unseemly, bad form, or in modern parlance, "uncool." "Hot" is "uncool." "Cool" - neither hot nor cold - is "cool." By implication, the best way to avoid the embarrassment of intense passion is to eschew its cause - profound conviction. So if you find yourself starting to believe in something, abandon it quickly, before you make a fool of yourself.

This is no way to live, is it. Christy Wampole offers her own antidotes to begin making your way back into the world.

What would it take to overcome the cultural pull of irony? Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks. It means undertaking the cultivation of sincerity, humility and self-effacement, and demoting the frivolous and the kitschy on our collective scale of values. It might also consist of an honest self-inventory.

Saying what you mean and meaning what you say.

Considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities.

The cultivation of sincerity.

These are all frightening prospects, right? But they offer an excellent recipe for beginning to find your way back to life.

Take as your fuel for that journey these words by Ayn Rand addressed to the hero within each of you:

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not at all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved but have never been able to reach. Check your road, and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."

[Hat tip Paul Litterick]

POSTSCRIPT:

Here’s a link to seven websites poking fun at hipsters. My favourite, from which the pics above and below are purloined, is Unhappy Hipsters.

Easter Week, Part 4: Surely There Are Better Stories to Tell?

Today’s final reflection on the celebrations of Easter Week, and their source…

Let’s summarise. In Pagan times, Easter was the time in the Northern calendar when the coming of spring was celebrated -- the celebration of new life, of coming fecundity.  Hence the eggs and rabbits and celebrations of fertility. Indeed, the very word "Easter" comes from Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, and means, symbolically, the festival celebrating the rebirth of light after the darkness of winter.

But with the coming of Christianity, the celebration was hijacked to become this veneration of torture and sacrifice I talked about yesterday.  Remember here the true nature of sacrifice:

    “ ‘Sacrifice’ [says Rand] does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.

That’s why of itself it’s barbaric. It is, to quote Nietzsche, a revolt of everything that crawls against everything that’s high.  That’s why the barbarity of the Christian sacrifice is so stark.

If it were true.  Because unfortunately, as PZ Myers points out, Jesus isn't even saving us from anything real, and even in the made-up story he makes no change in the world with his death.

And the story itself was not even original.  In the Norse myths (to quote just one of many similar myths) the head god Odin hung himself on the World Tree Yggdrasil—although not simply to sacrifice himself to himself, but to achieve greater understanding thereby. As the Icelandic Edda tells the story,

I ween that I hung of the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was,
To Othin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none may ever know
what root beneath it runs.
None made me happy with loaf or horn,
And there below I looked;
I took up the runes, shrieking I took them,
And forthwith back I fell.
Then began I to thrive, and wisdom to get,
I grew and well I was;
Each word led me to another word,
Each deed to another deed.

As Joseph Campbell observes,

No one can miss the parallels here to the Gospel themes of Jesus’ three hours on the Cross (3 x 3 = 9), the spear in his side, his death and resurrection, and the boon of redemption thereby obtained. The phrase “and offered I was/To Othin, myself to myself” is interesting in the light of the Christian dogma of Christ and the Father as One.

These are the sort of stories the Christian myth supplanted, as I mentioned in Part 1.  And in hijacking the pagan celebrations of spring,  they overtook a mostly joyful celebration of growth and fertility, of peace and new understanding, and added to it a new ingredient: the ethic of sacrifice -- the murder and torture of tall poppies -- the sacrifice of the Christian's highest possible for the sake of the meanest most rotten 'sinner,' whose redemption Christ's murder was supposed to buy.

For Christians, then, Easter is a time to revere that sacrifice and to remind themselves (and us) of the centrality of sacrifice to their fantasy. Oh yes, there's a 'rebirth' of sorts in their fantasy, but not one on this earth realm, and not before a celebration of intense pain and suffering that supposedly bought redemption and virtue for those who possessed neither. 

As Robert Tracinski says so bluntly, "Easter's Mixture of the Benevolent and the Horrific Reveals Religion's Antagonism to Human Life." And so it does.

BUT MYTHOLOGY IS A strange beast. It was, in ancient times, a form of pre-philosophical, metaphorical knowledge and inquiry. Joseph Campbell argues that “in thinking of the Crucifixion only in historical terms [Christians] lose the reference of the symbol immediately to [themselves].”

The metaphor obscured by the torture and bloodshed is still the one celebrated by all the myths of springtime, “"matching the bursting forth of flowers and the return of the sun … the plangent longing we experience at this season … very much the longing to be born anew the way nature is.”

The calculation of Easter’s date by reference to both lunar and solar calendars, to both sun and moon – the two largest beings of ancient life around which all of life was organised-- is a clue we’re talking about more than just a dead carpenter.

All these elements fit together … What we have to recognise is that these celestial bodies represented to the ancients two different modes of eternal life, one engaged in the field of time, like throwing off death, as the moon it’s shadow, to be born again; the other, disengaged and eternal…
    [Other folk symbols have similar lunar and solar resonations]. There is, to begin with, the rabbit, the Easter bunny… The rabbit is associated with the dying and resurrection of the moon.  The egg is shelled off by the chicks as the shadow of the moon is the moon reborn …

In short, the overarching pagan metaphor is a call to change, or at least renewal. ‘Cos as Bob Dylan liked to say, “He not being busy being born is busy dying.”

It’s this spirit that the composer Richard Wagner tried to capture in his beautiful Good Friday Spell music, part of the culminating wonder of his final opera Parsifal:

THE PAGAN METAPHOR undergirds the Christian, giving it whatever real life it has.

I can’t help pointing out here there is another story standing in complete contrast to the Christian story of torture and sacrifice, that is in all senses its polar opposite. A much, much better story to tell and retell.

Unlike the anti-heroes of Bach's Passion--who murder their hero in a vain attempt to save their desiccated souls—or Dostoyevsky’s—who torture themselves with thoughts of a “malevolent universe” in which they are “trapped”--the heroes of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead shun sacrifice and venerate their own human powers on this earth.

The hero of that novel, Howard Roark, appears in court in a similar position dramatically in which Bach places his own hero. Thrown to the mob and fighting for his life in court, rather than acquiesce as Bach’s hero does, Roark states instead—as clearly and categorically as he knows how—his own terms.

    “I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.
    "I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
    "It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
    "I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man's creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who're destroying the world.
    "I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.
    "I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.”

Instead of embracing the sacrifice demanded by the mob, as Paul and the Christian writers who followed him had their hero do, this hero rejects it. Rejects it emphatically.

The contrast to the other story is stark,wouldn’t you say?

The ethic of The Fountainhead, one for which each of the leading characters fights in their own way, is one in which genius has the right to live for its own sake.  The contrast with the demand of Christianity that The Good inheres in the act of suffering and dying for the expiation of others could not be stronger, or the question more important!  Rather than demanding and worshipping the sacrifice of the highest to the lowest -- or as Nietzsche did, retaining the ethic but reversing the beneficiary of the sacrifice by demanding the sacrifice of the lowest to the highest -- the ethic of The Fountainhead insists that The Good is not to suffer and to die, but to enjoy yourself and live -- without any sacrifice at all of anyone to anyone else.

In my book, that really is an ethic worthy of reverence.

NOW, I'M ALL TOO aware that if you believe the Christian's Easter Myth, then anything I say here is going to pass right by you.  So if you do insist on venerating sacrifice this weekend, and especially if you're intending a bit of crucifixion yourself, or even just a bit of mildly flogging or self-torture, then here are a few simple Easter Safety Tips for you from the Church, which are not unfortunately intended as satire.

And now, for all the bureaucrats who will be working tomorrow while insisting that others don’t, here's that Nick Kim cartoon again ...

Have a happy holiday!

Quote of the day:

“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly
evident which everybody had decided not to see.”
-- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

[Hat tip Dr Michael Hurd]

Three Women Who Launched a Movement

Sorry, I missed International Women’s Day last week. So here, in a Guest Post by the Cato Institute, is a tribute to three women I guarantee the mainstream celebrations would have missed, three women whose stories don’t “fit the narrative” – three women who “saved capitalism from the capitalists” and without whom the modern libertarian movement would not exist.

This Women’s History Month, the Cato Institute pays homage to three women, who in the early 1940s unabashedly defended free-market capitalism and individualism in an age that widely considered American capitalism dead and socialism the future. In 1943, Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand published three ground-breaking books (The God of the Machine, The Discovery of Freedom and The Fountainhead), which laid the foundations of the modern libertarian movement.

Tall Poppies, Cyber Bullies, Culture Wars & Antidotes–updated

It sounds like a joke, but in fact it’s deadly serious. What do a tennis player, two actors and a model-turned TV presenter have in common? The answer is: being cut down from below by the culture.

The difference between them is how they responded.

The death of Charlotte Dawson is the immediate reason for asking the question – a death she seems to have chosen in response not just to depression, but to a vicious online hate campaign she could never allow herself to ignore.

Deborah Hill Cone wrote a column about the death of Charlotte Dawson, suggesting the path to the freedom she never found in life would have been to abandon the idea that what others think about you matters – “the path to freedom” for women over fifty, for example, (the age of which Dawson was only a whisker away), being to “embrace the idea of being subversive, powerful, batty old broads.”

Ayn Rand Campus

The Ayn Rand Institute’s ‘Online Campus’ has just gone live, a major new educational initiative promising “free courses on Ayn Rand and her ideas in an innovative and interactive learning environment!”

That’s what it says on the label, and it’s looking pretty good.

Initial course offerings include: 
•       Ayn Rand: A Writer's Life
•       Ayn Rand: Radical Thinker
•       The Ayn Rand Bookshelf
•       Anthem
•       We the Living
•       The Fountainhead
•       Moral Virtue
•       Philosophy of Education
•       Philosophy: Who Needs It

New courses will be added regularly—the first release post-launch will be an in-depth look at the novel Atlas Shrugged, taught by Dr. Onkar Ghate and appearing in February. The full, public launch of ARI Campus is slated for September of 2012.

Looks like a great online resource!

Shelf Life for Dummies

I’m pinching this idea from Craig Ranapia, who pinched it from the “Shelf Life” feature from The Spectator’s Book Blog.

1) What are you reading at the moment?

Umberto Eco’s new one The Prague Cemetery, and Detlev Schlicter’s Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Meltdown.  (Come on, everyone reads at least two books at once, don’t they?)
I’m not finding Eco’s as enjoyable as his other novels—so far it seems like a rehash of his much better Foucault’s Pendulum but without the drama, humour or sympathetic characters, which leaves me disappointed. Detlev’s book is fantastic in explaining the dangers of central banking and the modern system of paper money creation—why it is both iniquitous and leads inevitably to collapse. Well written, it fills a number of holes in the money creation story.

2) As a child, what did you read under the covers?

I did some of my best childhood reading under the covers. I recall reading the likes of E.W. Hildick’s Jim Starling series, Bertrand Brinley’s The Mad Scientists’ Club and even C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series under the bed clothes, and have turned out none the worse for it. (Quiet at the back!) Thank Galt for good torch batteries. But curious that parents want you to read, then complain enough when you do that you have to hide under the covers to do it.

3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?

No (although several scenes from Les Miserables always comes close), but a few carefully placed books did on a couple of occasions save me from crying by being placed down my pants when the cane was being applied. See, you should always have books with you.

4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?

Hmm, you’d want something that could be read and re-read and studies and thought about wouldn’t you.  So how about Gibbon’s Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. Between them that should offer plenty of food for thought. (Mind you, if I were only given one choice it would have to be Arthur Koestler’s Darkness At Noon. Because if I was given only one choice, I would undoubtedly be in a position to learn much from the fate of Koestler’s protagonist.)

5) Which literary character would you most like to sleep with?

Now there’s a question. How many strong, intelligent, sexy women are there in literature? Not many.
But I confess I wouldn’t push Robert Heinlein’s girl Friday out of bed for leaving crumbs. Or Dagny. (And if The Avengers could be reclassified as literature…)

6) If you could write a self-help book, what would you call it?

How to Write a Self-Help Book Without Sounding Like an Arsehole. And if I could pull that off, then maybe I’d start on Things Your Teachers Never Taught You (But Should Have), and Did Teach You (But Shouldn’t Have). Because that’s an important one.
But it would be very, very long.

7) Which book, which play, and which poem would you make compulsory reading in high school English classes?

Not being a fan of compulsion, I’d prefer to make them “highly recommended.” But these would be my choices:

• The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. Offers the crucial lesson to teenagers that if living second-hand (by peer pressure) doesn’t kill you outright immediately, it will certainly kill your soul eventually. (Edward Cline’s Sparrowhawk series would be a close second—an inspiring series of stories about history’s most momentous, inspired and beneficent revolution ever, giving the sort of inspiration that can fire a whole life, and the demonstration that it is ideas that move the world.)
• The Winslow Boy, by Terence Rattigan. Demonstrates the craft of good theatre, and the importance of standing on principle—how when you fight for a better world, you live in that world today.  (Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People would be a close second. It’s all about principle.)
• If, by Rudyard Kipling. Because if youngsters discover they can keep their heads while all around them are losing theirs, why then they will create everything there is on earth that’s worth having. (Robert Frost’s Two Tramps in Mud Time would be a close second, with good wisdom on uniting vocation and avocation.)

8) Which party from literature would you most like to have attended?

Well if it’s a fictional party, then one of Hunter S. Thompson’s bashes might be worth the notional damage. If you could remember it.

9) What would you title your memoirs?

Mind Your Own Business.

They’d be very short.

10) If you were an actor, which literary character do you dream of playing?

Francisco d’Anconia. And I’d do a far better job than the slob in the current film version of Atlas Shrugged. But then, who couldn’t?

11) What book would you give to a lover?

Atlas Shrugged. And I’d tell them they’d be examined on it in four weeks time. (Yes, I’m kidding. I’d give them a full six weeks. )
I do confess that being given Shakespeare’s Love Sonnets by a lover was quite a buzz, however, so perhaps I would return the favour.

12) Spying Mein Kampf or Dan Brown on someone’s bookshelf can spell havoc for a friendship. What’s your literary deal breaker?

What wouldn’t be good would be Someone with no bookshelves at all in the house, but shelves full of movies instead: which usually means a house full of crap and a head full of mush. But you can usually spot that long before visiting their home.
But if they did have shelves and they were full of crystal healing, homeopathy and “the facts” about how the Jews and the Masons brought down the Twin Towers, that would see me heading for the door quick smart.

Thought for the day: On suffering…

‎"Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering
of others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries
to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test
of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life…
The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life. Yet
the work of the creators have eliminated one form of disease after
another, in man’s body and spirit, and brought more relief from
suffering than any altruist could ever conceive…"
            - Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

GUEST POST: The crab-bucket mentality

Another guest post from the archives of The Free Radical, this time from tennis ace and all-round fine bloke Chris Lewis, on the sort of envy that’s stifling. And everywhere.
A post so relevant, it could have been written this morning …

Anyone familiar with the behaviour of a bunch of crabs trapped at the bottom of a bucket will know what happens when one of them tries to climb to the top; instead of attempting the climb themselves, those left at the bottom of the bucket will do all in their collective power to drag the climber back down. And although crab behaviour should not in any way be analogous to human behaviour, I can think of many instances where it is.

Take what is commonly called "The Tall Poppy Syndrome." This is where anyone who is brazen enough to strive for success — or, god forbid, to achieve it — immediately becomes a target for the "crab bucket mentalities" who, rather than strive for success themselves, derive enormous pleasure from attempting to cut the tall poppy back down.

As a tennis coach running a comprehensive junior & senior development programme for Auckland Tennis Inc., it is my job to produce future tennis champions. Among other things, this involves demanding the maximum amount of effort from every player with whom I work. If a player is to become the best he can be, he must dedicate himself from a relatively early age to the single-minded pursuit of his tennis career. Along the way many obstacles & barriers will be put in his path. One such obstacle, which brings me to the point of my article, is the tremendous amount of negative peer pressure that is brought to bear on anyone who attempts to climb life's peaks by those who have defaulted on the climb.

And whether those peaks represent success on the sporting field, in the business world, in the academic arena, or in any other realm of life, including life itself, there will always be those who give up on their quest to climb life's mountains, and instead choose to remain at the bottom of life's bucket — which would be fine, as long as they didn't then devote their destructive efforts, like the crabs, to pulling the climbers back down.

Consider for a moment the following three scenarios, & ask yourself how you would react in each situation. Then ask yourself if each situation has a ring of familiarity to it.

1. You attempt to do well in exams; however, one of your low-achieving peers tells you not to study but to enjoy yourself. Do you continue to bury your head in the books? Or do you get mindlessly drunk at that night's party?
2. You have done really well in your exams, but another one of your less successful peers accuses you of being a "try-hard" — the implication being that effort is bad & non-effort is good. Do you ignore him? Or, next time, do you take pains to show him that you do not try hard?
3. You conclude that taking drugs is harmful — anti-life — but your friends tell you that to refrain from smoking dope is incredibly "uncool." Do you light up? Or do you keep your own company until you find some new friends?

When these three typical teenage scenarios & their accompanying questions are reduced to a single philosophical question — a question of principle — it should become clear to you that your answer has serious implications for the way you choose to conduct your life.

That question is: in the face of pressure from your peers, do you act to pursue your chosen values? Or do you reject them & embrace the non- or anti-values that others have prescribed in their place? In other words, do you run your own life by selecting, then scaling, your own mountain peaks? Or, by letting others run your life for you, do you default on the climb?

Did Christopher Columbus listen when everyone told him he would sail over the edge of the earth? Did Henry Ford listen when everyone told him that attempting to replace the horse & cart with the automobile was a futility? Did the Wright Brothers listen when everyone told them that building a "flying machine" was impossible? No, they did not. They did not — because they refused to consider the opinions of others above the conclusions they had reached with their own minds — conclusions they were not prepared to sacrifice in order to satisfy the mediocrities who exhorted them to give up.

It is heroic role models like these who have demonstrated that no matter what obstacles are put in your path, whether those obstacles be the exertion of negative peer pressure designed to drag you down or the masses telling you that attempting to build a "flying machine" is absurd, achieving your goals is possible.

And in a world where the predominant trend is toward anti-achievement & anti-success, motivational fuel is something that we all need from time to time to propel us toward our goals. Which is why I would like to commend to your attention a book that provided me with a tremendous amount of motivational fuel very early on in my tennis career.

The book is entitled The Fountainhead, by the Russian/American novelist Ayn Rand. In the introduction to her book, she tells us, "Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees & lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it ... Yet a few hold on & move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose & reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature & of life's potential. There are very few guideposts to find. The Fountainhead is one of them."

At a time when, as a seventeen-year-old, I was just setting out to conquer the tennis courts around the world, an attempt that demanded excellence & achievement every step of the way, it was The Fountainhead that helped to inspire me in the face of discouragement from the "crab bucket mentalities" who told me I was wasting my time.

For anyone who believes in the importance of achieving his or her values & goals, who believes that happiness is the end result of such achievement, & that happiness is the norm when independence, in thought & action is promoted, encouraged & pursued, The Fountainhead comes with my highest recommendation.

Chris Lewis

Man, the Builder

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window – no, I don’t feel how small I am – but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”
                       – Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

[Hat tip Temple of the Human Spirit]

It’s Easter. [updated]

IT'S EASTER. GOOD FRIDAY. A day off. A day out. A day to get nailed up and talk about torture.

A day to sing hymns, sit in traffic and eat hot cross buns and Easter eggs. A day not to go shopping, of course, because today is one day the religionists still have control over us. A day when flunkies fan out around the country bearing clipboards,  hoping to fine someone for the crime of selling someone a pot plant, or a pint of milk. Seeking to sacrifice shop-owners to the God of zealotry.

Meanwhile, the Christians who insist on this sacrifice of shop-owners to the gods of unionism and bureaucracy celebrate the sacrifice of their ideal man two-thousand years ago.

Any way you look at it, it’s hardly a happy story to celebrate.

EVERY RELIGION HAS ITS own core myths portraying the very heart of their beliefs. The pagan Greeks told stories of their gods, those Attic super-men, consuming Ambrosia and gambolling on Olympus.  The Norse heroes told stories of their gods lustily wenching and feasting in Valhalla while waiting for Ragnarok.  And the Christians? They tell about the time when their god sent his son down to be nailed up to a piece of wood.

As a myth, it’s hardly something to celebrate.

The Easter Myth is central to Christianity, and all too revealing of the ethic at Christianity's heart. 

Art reveals that core. Look at that painting above, by Salvador Dali. A great, powerful, awe-inspiring, revealing piece of art.  What does it represent? It represents man-worship -- the presentation of an ideal.  Note how the main figure is larger than life and seemingly immune to pain or destruction; a figure, incongruously in this context, portrayed without pain or fear or guilt.

The figure at left is Dali's wife Gala, who looks up at the Christ figure with a look of literal man-worship. If we have a question here, when looking at a man nailed up to a piece of wood, it might be this: "How can you worship the destruction of your ideal?”  “Why would you celebrate his torture?” Fair questions, especially when confronted with splatter-fests like Mel Gibson’s Passion, which lovingly depict every act of torture and every drop of blood in high-definition Technicolor.

That’s what paining and film can do. How about music?  Bach’s St Matthew Passion musically and beautifully dramatises this Myth while revealing the true nature of it.The Passion’s thematic centre occurs when Jesus appears before Pilate and the mob.

When Pilate asks the crowd who should be freed, Barbaras or Jesus. The crowd replies, "Barabbas!" and Pilate asks, "When what should I do with Jesus, who is called the Christ?" The crowd shouts, "Let him be Crucified!" This final shout is musically rendered in such an awful way that the hearer is almost struck dumb. One can feel the terrible doom being called down. Pilate then asks (in Part 56), "Why, what has this man done?" His question is answered by what is probably the loneliest Soprano ever, who says, "He has done good to us all, He gave sight to the blind, The lame he made to walk; He told us his father's word, He drove the devils forth; The wretched he has raised up; He received and sheltered sinners, Nothing else has my Jesus done."
    Following this is an even more poignant aria that begins, "Out of love my Savior is willing to die." After that the chorus repeats the sentence, which is made worse by what we have just heard.

Just think, Christians revere Christ as their ideal, and Bach has his chorus and soloists praise him, worship him, and eulogise Him – this, above all, was their hero (Bach tells us); a man known only for good deeds; the man they believe their god sent to earth as an example of the highest possible on this earth -- and then they and that god went and had him killed. Tortured, Crucified.

That's the story. This, says Bach in the true honesty that great art reveals, is what Christians revere: The murder of their ideal man.  

It’s an astonishing ethic to celebrate, isn’t it: the sacrifice of the ideal man just to appease and placate the mob.

THE SACRIFICE, YOU SEE, is the thing. Sacrifice is the central ethical thesis of Christianity—so important that an all-powerful god was supposed to sacrifice his own son (who is also himself) to himself just to make the important point: that sacrifice of a higher value—of the very highest—to everything that crawls on earth is central to the Christian ethics.

In the Easter Myth giving voice to this ethic of sacrifice, we are invited to praise the willing sacrifice of the man they hold up as their ideal to a mob of the vilest  sinners--sacrificed as a point of ethical and religious necessity in the most vile and bloodthirsty way imaginable.

It's of no avail whether in the Christ myth we hear that he was arrested for blasphemy, or for preaching without a police permit, or that he came to replace one stone-age form of witch-doctory for another. It's of no avail because none of those points are central to the Easter Myth, or of the central Christian ethic portrayed therein: they’re all just plot devices to get the story to Golgotha, and the god-son nailed up.

That is the vile story we are invited to admire and the ethic we are enjoined to emulate. What would Jesus do (WWJD)? Why, he would give his very life up to the mob, and his very body up to be tortured by it. Why? To save (somehow) all you miserable sinners.

The sacrifice, you see, is the thing. And just to be clear:

“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values…

That a story is celebrated in which a divine sacrifice, a human being, a son of the “all-powerful” is offered up in the most vile, most bloodthirsty way possible--to "save" a mob who, according to those same Christians, are created as vile sinners--and to "appease" a bloodthirsty and omnipotent God who intended all this to happen, and (according to the story) sent this ideal man down to earth to make sure that it did …. now if that's not a vile story, even if t'were true, then my name is Odin.

And there's certainly nothing enlightening there on which to base an ethics. And base an ethics on it the religionists certainly do. One they insist is “sublime.”

No wonder the religionists see nothing to apologise for today when priests quietly sacrifice young children to their own misbegotten lusts.

HANS HOBEIN’S ‘CHRIST AFTER CRUCIFIXION’ lays bare the reality of the sacrifice even more directly than Mel Gibson’s splatter movie.

It’s not a pretty painting, as this detail makes plain:

A good subtitle for this 1521 painting might be ‘A Christian Confronts Reality.’  That, at least, was how the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky felt when confronted with this naturalistic depiction of the battered Christian corpse in 1867: confronted with the horrific reality of crucifixion and its results, Dostoyevsky was struck by the importance of this confrontation for his faith, and inspired to dramatise in his next novel what that confrontation meant. Said his wife, “The figure of Christ taken from the cross, whose body already showed signs of decomposition, haunted him like a horrible nightmare.  In his notes to [his novel] The Idiot and in the novel itself he returns again and again to his theme.”

Holbein confronts the Christian viewer with a powerful choice: One must either believe that God raised this ravaged body from the dead, and that the Christian myth, therefore, “offers hope for humanity beyond this life”; or else accept that the dead stay dead, that such an event did not and could not occur, that reality is what it is – with all that follows therefrom. As Dostoyevsky has a character in The Idiot explain it,

His body on the cross was therefore fully and entirely subject to the laws of nature. In the picture the face is terribly smashed with blows, swollen, covered with terrible, swollen, and bloodstained bruises, the eyes open and squinting; the large, open whites of the eyes have a sort of dead and glassy glint. . . .
   Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem strange, as some huge engine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up–impassively and unfeelingly–a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being!

Good art need not be a thing of beauty, but it must have something to say.  This certainly does that. If you believe the Creation myth and all that goes with it, the idea that all this was designed by something supernatural and omnipotent, then you must believe this torture too was designed. That it was intended.  That the God who once insisted that Abraham sacrifice his own son now makes the mob insist on the sacrifice of their ideal.

Let me ask you again, Don’t you think it astonishing to celebrate this barbarity?

IT WOULD BE EVEN MORE astonishing if that were what Easter really meant.  Thankfully, it’s not.

In Pagan times you see, Easter was the time in the Northern calendar when the coming of spring was celebrated -- the celebration of new life, of coming fecundity.  Hence the eggs and rabbits and celebrations of fertility. Indeed, the very word "Easter" comes from Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, and means, symbolically, the festival celebrating the rebirth of light after the darkness of winter. 

But with the coming of Christianity, the celebration was hijacked to become this veneration of torture and sacrifice.

And the story itself was not even original.  In the Norse myths (to quote just one of many similar myths) the head god Odin hung himself on the World Tree Yggdrasil—not to sacrifice himself to himself, but to achieve greater understanding. As the Icelandic Edda tells the story,

I ween that I hung of the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was,
To Othin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none may ever know
what root beneath it runs.
None made me happy with loaf or horn,
And there below I looked;
I took up the runes, shrieking I took them,
And forthwith back I fell.
Then began I to thrive, and wisdom to get,
I grew and well I was;
Each word led me to another word,
Each deed to another deed.

As Joseph Campbell observes,

No one can miss the parallels here to the Gospel themes of Jesus’ three hours on the Cross (3 x 3 = 9), the spear in his side, his death and resurrection, and the boon of redemption thereby obtained. The phrase “and offered I was/To Othin, myself to myself” is interesting in the light of the Christian dogma of Christ and the Father as One.”

These are the stories the Christian myth supplanted.  And in hijacking the pagan celebration of spring,  they overtook a joyful celebration of growth and fertility, of peace and new understanding, and added to it a new ingredient: the ethic of sacrifice -- the murder and torture of tall poppies -- the sacrifice of the Christian's highest possible for the sake of the meanest most rotten 'sinner,' whose redemption Christ's murder was supposed to buy.

To put it bluntly, the Easter myth that Bach dramatises so well is one of suffering and sacrifice and murder, and the collusion of a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient god in the murder of his own son -- and if you subscribe to the whole sick fantasy then that is what you are required to believe—to believe in every rotten, blood-dripping detail. For in the name of religion Bach shows us that the good (by Christian standards) must be sacrificed to the rotten; the constant to the inconstant; the talented and inspirational to the lumpen dross -- the ideal to the worthless.

For Christians, then, Easter is a time to revere that sacrifice and to remind themselves (and us) of the centrality of sacrifice to their fantasy. Oh yes, there's a 'rebirth' of sorts in their fantasy, but not one on this earth realm, and not before a celebration of intense pain and suffering that supposedly bought redemption and virtue for those who possessed neither.  

As Robert Tracinski says so bluntly, "Easter's Mixture of the Benevolent and the Horrific Reveals Religion's Antagonism to Human Life." And so it does.

IT’S SAID BY SOME THAT the real point of the Crucifixion Myth is not the torture but the resurrection; not death or the manner of it, but life.  This is just nuts—but then, without the resurrection, there is no Christianity.

The myth erected by Paul on the back of some poor slaughtered Jewish prophet is intended to tell you how to live your life. To do so it offers a tale of torture grafted onto a fairy story about resurrection. (WWJD, eh?)

Even in the unlikely event the whole tawdry tale from earth to sky were proven true (and I invite you to take the Easter Challenge to tell us all precisely what happened on Easter), what would it prove for life here on this earth: It would still tell the story that the bloodthirsty Sky God who inflicted that torture on his son requires of you unconditional fawning of him, and unconditional sacrifice of yourself to others. As I said, that's just vile in and of itself, let alone as a basis on which to construct an ethics.

So it's an ethics based on a fairy story and founded in rottenness.

No wonder the early Christians grafted the tale about a murdered Jewish carpenter on to the Pagan Easter festival (which really did celebrate rebirth and fertility and new life) and then weaved the two together in this way--because they hoped to somehow that sacrifice is life-affirming instead of life-destroying. Sadly, however, all that their story shows is that unless you add a the supernatural to your fairy story, the result of sacrifice on this earth is not life and fertility and rebirth, but death, and destruction and torture.

In other words, if you want to erect a morality for life on this earth , then a good place to start is not one based upon sacrifice and suffering and torture. Not unless you wish to ensure the destruction of everything that you value.

THERE IS ANOTHER STORY that stands in complete contrast to this one however, that is in all senses its polar opposite. Unlike the anti-heroes of Bach's Passion—who murder their hero in a vain attempt to save their desiccated souls—or Dostoyevsky’s—who torture themselves with thoughts of a mechanistic “malevolent universe” in which they are somehow “trapped”—the heroes of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead shun sacrifice and suffering and the temptations of another world, and venerate instead their own human powers on this earth. 

The hero of that novel, Howard Roark, appears in court before another baying mob, in a similar position dramatically in which Bach places his own hero. Thrown to the mob and fighting for his life in court, rather than acquiesce as Bach’s hero does, Roark states instead—as clearly and categorically as he knows how—his own terms.

I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.
    "I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
    "It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
    "I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man's creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who're destroying the world.
    "I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others.
    "I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.”

This time, the hero says, the sacrifice demanded by the mob is rejected.

The contrast to the other story is stark,wouldn’t you say?

The ethic of The Fountainhead, one for which each of the leading characters fights in their own way, is one in which genius has the right to live for its own sake.  The contrast with the demand of Christianity that The Good inheres in the act of suffering and dying for the expiation of others could not be stronger, or the question more important!  Rather than demanding and worshipping the sacrifice of the highest to the lowest -- or as Nietzsche did, retaining the ethic but reversing the beneficiary of the sacrifice by demanding the sacrifice of the lowest to the highest -- the ethic of The Fountainhead insists that The Good is not to suffer and to die, but to enjoy yourself and live -- without any sacrifice at all of anyone to anyone else.

In my book, that really is an ethic worthy of reverence.

NOW, I'M ALL TOO aware that if you believe the Easter Myth, then anything I say here is going to pass right by you. 

You might call my "world view" a "mechanistic one," which is odd really because because it's that view which is taken by Dostoyevksy in the passage I cite above (where he whines about being "trapped" in a malevolent "mechanistic universe").

But the universe is not "mechanistic": it is knowable; it is not causeless; it is open to our manifest human powers—it is  not a mechanistic nightmare in which we are trapped, but a benevolent one in which we can both achieve our values and keep them, with no sacrifice at all from anyone, by anyone or to anyone.

I would have thought any honest commentator would find that idea compelling—if, that is, he weren't already imbued with the fatuous corruption of ethics that upholds sacrifice and suffering as a "noble" moral ideal.

SO IF, DESPITE MY best exhortations, if you still insist on venerating sacrifice this weekend and making yourself suffer, and especially if you're intending a bit of crucifixion yourself (or even just a mild bit of flogging or self-torture) then here are a few simple Easter Safety Tips for you from the Church, which are not unfortunately intended as satire. They include advice on how to whip yourself safely, how to flay others without major injury, and which size nails to use to have yourself fixed firmly to a piece of wood. 

And accept Richard Wagner’s sublime ‘Good Friday Spell’ from Parsifal, and a gorgeous Parsifal Fantasia, as balm to soothe your wounds both mental and physical.

And  for all the bureaucrats who are working while they insist that others don’t, here's that Nick Kim cartoon again celebrating the sacrifice of the Easter Bunny...

Have a happy holiday!

PS: By the way, did you know that Jesus was Yahweh's 111th Killing? Pretty cool god, huh?

It's hard to imagine something worse than a father planning to kill his own son. Except maybe a father killing his son in order to keep himself from torturing billions of others forever.
    ‘‘He that spared not his own son’ shouldn't be trusted by anyone.

UPDATE: Good Christian folk complain that “it’s not about the torture,” that “it’s all about the resurrection.”

Really?

Who are you trying to kid.

Good Xtian folk LOVE the torture.

Good Xtian LOVe the suffering.

It really is all bout the suffering—all about sacrificing human joy to human pain.

No surprise then that suffering is the very thing thing that unites the crusaders against abortion (a hatred of sex plus a love of suffering) with the crusaders against voluntary euthanasia (a hatred of human choice plus a love of suffering).

The total, evil, vicious bastards.

On this day of rebirth, Easter Sunday, in the weekend named after the Persian goddess of fertility, I suggest we replace that Xtian symbol of torture, the cross, with this unabashed symbol of human joy below. Who’s with me?

Image source: Temple of the Human Spirit