Look Long at the Beggar

Afternotes |II| VII: On Not Saving the World

As human beings, in the words of Heidegger we are thrown into the world - into a particular family, culture, and time - and lacking the wide repertoire of instinct of other animals, we are “programmed” by the surrounds we have been thrown into. The culture of the time and place is “sedimented” into our flesh and that becomes a large part of who we are.

In the language of my last letter, we adjust progressively over the course of our lives, until close to the very end when everything begins to fall apart.

This adjustment typically supports the pursuit of the kinds of things near universally valued and desired: finding partners and friends, gaining status and satisfaction by contributing in a valued way to the group, and developing a secure place and sense of oneself in the group, among other things.

The trouble is that at a certain point this pursuit of adjustment begins to result in diminishing returns. A quantitative increase in the number of partners and friends and the amount of money and status past that brings little reward, and sometimes indeed something like its opposite: a sense of emptiness.

That point is typically somewhere around mid-life - the 40’s or so, which is on average the most miserable decade in a person’s life. Jung characterized that point as the “afternoon” of life, and this is how he framed the problem:

Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.

Mornings are for adjustment. The afternoon is the beginning of a new phase that - if one hopes to avoid the slough of despond and then stasis that so many face - requires a different approach. One focused on - to again use the language of the previous letter - growth.

But as we saw, that typically does not happen. Indeed, growth on many dimensions begins to flatline at or before the 40’s.

How to orient oneself to that truth? That’s something that has vexed me on and off over the course of most of my life. Last letter my tone was largely that of a disappointed schoolmarm, which I have mixed feelings about - but it reflects what is often my disposition.

And for multiple reasons. For one, it is a tragedy for more than just the individual. On an existential level, our survival may very well depend on it. Bateson’s battle cry that “the organism that destroys its environment destroys itself” rings out over the decades, warning that a narrow instrumental rationality oriented around the cult of the ego threatens planet-wide disaster.

And what are the consequences of having multiple generations that perhaps progressively more often have all of jack shit usefulness on anything outside of fitting in? It would seem to me self-evident that half the point of having an elder generation is that they might be the voice of reason and wisdom, to call on the better angels of our nature. Instead, it appears they’re stuck competing with the children, chasing the same glittery objects they were when they were 15.

And finally, there are network effects of this, such that the less there is of this, the less it leads to. Growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum - but in an environment that supports it, and around people that are doing the same. In its absence, individuals and communities and indeed nations fall into ruts and worse.

So this is not some bullshit narcissistic woo-woo enlightenment prattle, but a direct address to the core of many of the most dire issues of our time.

Although me putting on my schoolmarm outfit and going “tsk, tsk” isn’t going to do shit. I think we have to face the possibility that this is just the way things are, and will be for the foreseeable future. We can hope for a small shift, but expecting a 180 on the average trajectory seems delusional.

But what to make of this? How not to turn into a bitter turd?

This will be an ongoing question, which will partially answer itself in the course of this longer discourse. But as a preliminary stab, it’s to embrace our own impotence, look at the beggar and learn for once in our god-damn lives to simply be:

After so much imposture, so much fraud, it is comforting to contemplate a beggar. He, at least, neither lies nor lies to himself: his doctrine, if he has one, he embodies; work he dislikes, and he proves it; wanting to possess nothing, he cultivates his impoverishment, the condition of his freedom. His thought is resolved into his being and his being into his thought. He has nothing, he is himself, he endures: to live on a footing with eternity is to live from day to day, from hand to mouth… His sloth, of a very rare quality, truly “delivers” him from a world of fools and dupes. About renunciation he knows more than many of your esoteric works. To be convinced of this, you need only walk out into the street…

One recalls that half the point of becoming is to learn how to be, to find that elusive unity of conscious doctrine and embodiment the hobo wandering the streets often lives.

And to realize that at the end of the day the best reason to grow - and perhaps the only reason anyone does - is that one cannot do otherwise. What does Jesus say about the rich man? He who has a choice does not have a choice. But for the grace of God I too would be somnolescent like the rest, and perhaps at times indeed happier.

Though as evening draws nigh, it tends to be an empty happiness. As an outlier on the edge, perhaps one is nearer at hand to another option. A trajectory and a state of being one might even call a destiny.

And beyond what happens to the few one chooses to make oneself responsible for, is that not enough?