Artwork © Richard Spisak

 

Ethics Chapter 2
Do We Have a Right to Be Happy; Do We Have a Right to Be Real

Just as this less than real state, existence, can sometimes seem more solid and beautiful than what it really is, so it is true of the world, for any entity born into it, like a child of an abusive family, knows nothing else. And as a child cannot critically assess his situation, so we cannot assess ours. Whether existence is truly good and whether life 3.5 billion years ago should have proliferated on it like ants on the shelves of a food pantry is a perplexing question given the fact that predation is at its core, and exploitation is not only rife but such a refined art of the human animal. Any conjectures on this point would have to be predicated on the amounts and degrees of countless factors. Among them would be his religious conditioning, his ability to appreciate simple pleasures, his having a role in society providing him with the delusion of self-worth, and this sense that he is a viable competitor when attempting to procure material resources. Personal backgrounds are biases that alter even the consideration as to whether the world is a good place.

The affluent in any society will always be susceptible to the influence of groups from which they belong, and ones which provide them with excuse to retreat complacently and ignore the rife injustices that happen locally, nationally, and internationally. For such “happy” individuals there is a certain deliberate and willful solipsism or egotism in their smug attitudes conflated with a belief that ignorance is bliss, and I fear most Americans are of this low caliber of man –this sort with a proclivity and preference to stay as insular or parochial as human beings can do in order to believe that the world and existence are good.

But most surprisingly, thousands of university students on many campuses throughout America are now actively protesting against the vile destruction of Gaza in which 40,000 Palestinian casualties have been rendered collateral damage if not retribution–which is better God only knows– against the 1500 Israelites abhorrently slain by Muslim extremists. Young people are once again empathic even when it concerns a remote area of the world that has no bearing on them personally, and that, after all, has to be the core tenet of morality–this taking a statistic or other abstraction and transforming into solicitude for individuals whom one has no vested interest in caring about because decency demands it.

The state of Israel and Jewish people in general seem oblivious to the fact that locking people in a splintered disconnected box (Gaza and the West Bank) for nearly a hundred years without the ability to form a state of their own, get out of dire poverty, or flee the box by going abroad is deleterious to their own interests with all things having nexus and all things connecting inextricably. It should have dawned on the government of the importance of actively addressing grievances and rectifying wrongs as the best form of self defense that any nation can take. It should have been apparent just as moral clarity should become apparent and integrity honed when seeing police brutality and reacting against it despite that protective impulse to stay on the fringes totally uninvolved. As Aristotle points out, character is shaped by repeated action, so it is incumbent on each individual to oppose the injustices that he sees around him, not for the purpose of eliminating them, if that is possible, or even changing the discourse, which is plausible and has a higher chance of occurring, but so as to grow into ones humanity. Morality is not simply accepting oneself as a good person. It comes about through interaction in daily affairs. Aristotle, in speaking of friendships of inequality states that the giver cannot complain that the relationship is a one-way street of giving to the friend for by doing these actions for him he gains something of more importance, which is virtue itself.

Injustices abound, and Rousseau reminds us that they are both natural and manmade. Maybe he was bit eristic–certainly he was polemical–when trying to make a name for himself in repudiating Thomas Hobbes’s social contract theory, this idea that government exists to rein in our worst instincts and behavior. His alternative argument is that we were once as pure as honey in the state of nature and only when famine forced us to band together as hunters and farmers, acquiring language to communicate, did we become corrupt. Neither author is probably wrong. The corruption is probably twofold if not more. Instinctual hungers and responses that saved some of us when in the state of nature was and is an inherent corruption of the rational prowess that each of us possesses, but language and the ability to lie and deceive as well as make claims on property does add a new corruptive element to our mantle. Language is like a bridge for transporting truths to isolated islands of human minds, and lies sabotage that bridge. They sabotage the worth of language in procuring those goals. Property, this idea that mortal man owns a sliver of the Earth for perpetuity is the most absurd of these lies. The stoic slave and philosopher Epictetus posits that we should think of everything that we “have” and the people in our lives as borrowed for a brief time.

As for natural injustices, they are multifarious and in all spheres from ectopic pregnancies leading to miscarriages to incurable genetic diseases and disorders, and predispositions to cancer and other anomalies, and all forms of natural disasters from the usual to the bizarre such as that rarity of being changed into an ash fossil during the volcanic explosion that preserved the Roman city of Pompeii, but it is the accidents of life that are in man’s charge and man’s intention to hurt other men that seem more grievous than anything done by nature. Maybe that is because that which is not termed as a natural disaster, as natural as it might be for primates, hominids, and present-day humans to kill one another, or through neglect, to commit sins of omission, can be made into a culpable source. God, however, cannot be blamed as to do so would be to admit to consciousness a repressed conclusion formed long ago that he, if he exists, is a malevolent being and his great creation is a greater mistake. Montaigne quips by saying that a tortoise fell out of the talons of a flying eagle and landed onto the head of the playwright-poet Aeschylus causing his early demise. Outside of that bit of dark humor, his writing is quite sobering, if not jarring, in delineating how precarious one’s life really is and how subject it is to myriad unforeseen and tragic outcomes.

Marcy Borders who successfully fled one of the twin towers in New York after a plane slammed into it became enmeshed in a cloud of toxic debris immediately afterwards. After years of trauma, she finally came closer to making some level of recovery psychologically with fewer panic attacks only to be diagnosed with terminal cancer, so events like this are not to be belied by fabrications of the mind as clouds with silver linings or in any way serendipitous. As much as we might want to believe in a god protector or a kindness in fate whose aegis shields true believers or truly good people like ourselves, this simply is not true despite devout believers of every faith, contemporary and archaic, believing otherwise. Our lives are the breath of chance, and by chance life can be snatched at any moment even in the safeguards of society. This week amongst thousands of other internationally noteworthy injustices, was the story of the deaths of a Palestinian couple in one particular blast as a Caesarian section was done of the wife either immediately before or after her death, a baby was brought into the world, relatives gave the baby a name reflecting hope, and then the baby died several days later. It is like the faint ember of the potential for something good to happen, and most often it never materializes fully like budded flowers dying in the heat or a nascent friendship connecting well on so many deeper levels suggesting Aristotle’s friendship of goodness of two individuals becoming better in each other’s presence and yet this “permanent contract” of perfect friendship never hardly gets off the ground. The Chinese philosopher Liou Tzu reminds us that in this universe creation forms out of destruction, but he does not tell us that most of that created is stillborn, deformed, or miscarried in a world where solid connections rarely happen, and when occurring, happen only for a bit of time in this world of continual change. After all, it is a world where nothing ever is but is ever becoming.

To be a victim of trauma, whether it be psychological or physical in nature, means becoming revictimized. The traumas that we endure in life weaken the foundation and metaphorically, the victims of a mauling have lame legs that make them easily victimized again in both the worlds of exploitation and predation. Literal predation has come about as a byproduct of population check in the fecundity of life in which vegetation is often sparse, and as repugnant as it is, this animalistic predation and consumption of other animals does have a pragmatic aim. But there is no such justification for inflicting psychological trauma on others. It is merely done by a perpetrator to ruin another in order to feel powerful and self-aggrandized at his expense. In such situations the only silver lining is telling oneself it is God’s will, but if that is God, again he is a most sadistic heavenly father and I certainly would hate to deign such an association in heaven, but then I think I would hate heaven even in his absence as it must be overcrowded with self-righteous souls. People being what they are, I would much rather go to the dogs.

Smugly tuning out the injustices of the world is tantamount to fleeing them, and being that afraid does not enrich a life intellectually or emotionally and even for those affluent runaways life cannot be all that felicitous if even those snug in a smug sense of happiness have to live in daydreams or need extramarital affairs, vacation paradises, and other romantic fantasies to redeem them from the dreary mundane aspects of life. So the only apposite formula that I can think of is to be an aware individual empathic to life and a libertine becoming ever more bold in forging one’s own sense of morality; and with life being so imperfect and subject to so many changes there is little point in being wistful about what one once was or had any more than one would care to be chained to a corpse. Instead, we must ride the changes of life like professional surfers. Not only is it an exercise of balance, but embracing change provides a whole array of new life experiences, and new life experiences is the experiencing of life.

Irrespective of whether life is more inclined to be good or bad, we have to live in this less than ideal space, cognizant that the absence of “it,” whatever it is, is worse. That brings us into a most perplexing problem. With entities physically being some form of electromagnetic energy/mass (the atomic bomb explosions suggesting mass changing to energy and the particle accelerator experiments suggesting energy changing into the density of mass), Plato saying that life is a flawed carbon copy of ideas, and Parmenides suggesting that the only reality is that which is immortal and permanent, and never subject to change, life just is not real. It isn’t unreal any more than a hologram is unreal, but it isn’t real.

Marcus Aurelius says that people during his time had no concept of Augustus beyond that name and label. Although to Aurelius he was the most illustrious man to have ever lived in Ancient Rome, memory of his presence on this planet had diminished considerably in the estimations of common people and common perceptions. Everything decomposes in one way or another, and in death elements and energy get transferred to new entities. So people who delude themselves that they, their roles, and their societies are real and that all that once existed led the way to what is are more mistaken than they are accurate as one level of now buries over the previous now like layers of topsoil and what is becomes that which was.
But we can accept the unreality of life and be content in it although I must say that when business at my language school plummeted, an employer did not pay me, and I ended up losing all my possessions in Bangkok including hundreds of books, furniture, clothes, kitchenware, appliances, etcetera, and had to take a job in the remote realms of Issan provinces I was moderately depressed–Change and loss is even difficult for those accepting the unreality of it all. Goodbye “Marvel,” my Scottish Fold cat. The pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus is known for saying that no one walks through the same river twice and he no doubt did so as a counterpoise to human denial in which, contrary to our interests, we seek a spouse, family, monthly economic infusions and a position in society, and an inebriated sense of being in love (infatuation as though the word fatuous, foolish, were not part of it) that will go on forever as though our lives are forever.

Immanuel Kant reiterates that happiness is empirical and requires continuous bombardments of a positively perceived stimuli to create this sense of happiness. Thus, he urges us away from happiness toward fulfillment which is living by principles of integrity in which there is a compassionate response to others. We should do this irrespective of it generating any practical benefits in a world in which good intentions often go awry. I look at this as another prime directive of life even though in the eyes of the world a kind person is a weak person and thus by the laws of predation an individual who should be taken advantage of.

Petty happiness or noble fulfillment notwithstanding, clogging our minds with wistful reflections of the past needles any contentment with the here and now, which is as real as reality gets, as does the sense of wanting more and urgently needing a future to which one would look down on an imagined cornucopia below. Discontent with the not so unreal present as though it were ants in one’s pants would mean to spend one’s life in even more unreal spheres with no appreciation for the simple pleasures of life. Discontent is contempt at the perceived indignities of the present and it seems to me that one does care to spend his whole life feeling indignant and aiming to live in a future that does not exist.

Last night in hearing the cries of cats in a fight, perhaps in challenging each other so as to be unobstructed in breeding with an adjacent female, if they were males, or competing to procure limited food, the wickedness of domesticating animals only for them to become strays proliferating on the streets with little ability to survive long in these conditions, while their gentleness is eviscerated from them, these sounds began to haunt me and I thought of farm animals fed and raised duplicity for slaughter, and then, disconnectedly, of a ten year old student of mine who died driving a motorcycle, and all of the indistinct shadows of injustices from every quarter of the globe, past and present, which began sweeping through my mind. Acknowledging my own inability to help, and seeing myself as part of the problem in which another superfluous human who by his own presence on the planet consumes, adds waste, and pollutes the environment, I wondered for a moment if it might be better to not exist at all. Then I thought of my sister that one time in which she closed her eyes tightly when going to the beach or playas in Tijuana, Mexico. Her eyes were not closed because of the pain of feeling the pangs of injustices that others go through but of having come into this realm of subhumans. “Get me the hell out of here” she said, and so would most Americans; but our journey needs to be one of life and not fantasy, and for that eyes must be open.

 

Steven David Justin Sills is an American poet and novelist living in Thailand. Some of his early works can be seen on the Online Book Page at the University of Pennsylvania. His poetry book, An American Papyrus is in various libraries including a scanned copy of a library book that is in the Internet Archive. Of this early work, one reviewer said, “Sills’ vision is often a dark one. He writes of the homeless, the abused, the forgotten people. He is also intrigued with the mystical, the sensual/sexual, loss–as in losing those whom we hold dear, such as a spouse or lover–as well as the lost, such as someone who is autistic, who seems unreachable. Sills’ skillful use of the language to impart the telling moments of a life is his strength. He chooses his words carefully, employing a well-developed vocabulary. He is thoughtful about punctuation, where to break lines and when to make a new stanza. He’s obviously well versed in “great” literature. Sills’ command of language helps to soften the blows of some of the seamier passages found in his poems. Seamy may not be the best word to use. Perhaps gritty is a better word or just plain matter-of-fact…” Following the rewriting of his last novel, The Three Hour Lady, the Russo-Ukrainian War began and he felt that its significance needed to be captured in verse. As his Master’s degree is a humanities/classical studies emphasis (great books of the Western Canon) to which he cited Aristotle a lot in his papers, he has been hoping for a reason to write an ethical treatise.

Richard Spisak began his artistic career as a light artist in the Lumonics Studios of Mel Tanner, a legendary Light Artist. After serving under Jack Horkheimer as a planetarium operator at the Miami Space-Transit Planetarium, he left to begin traveling with Lumist Kenvin Lyman, whose show Dazzleland Studios traveled across America. Richard later worked as a Laserist with LASERIUM and Laser Productions, served as a technical producer for the festival company PACE Concerts, and later as operations Manager and Senior Producer at WWHP and WTCN-TV in Stuart Florida.

Richard writes for Theatre, TV, radio, and the web. He published two short story collections, Two Small Windows, in a Pair of Mirror Doors, and Between the Silences. Followed by his poetry collection 7370 Allen Drive and the recently released STONE POETRY. Richard also produces “POETS of the East,” a televised webcast featuring poets from across the globe.