Humanity. The ape that thought it could.
Or, laugh or I'll kill you
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
A disclaimer for the dense: I use the word 'Man' in its general and now much derided sense of humanity generally. The term 'humanity generally' includes the female members of the human race - in other words, in my usage 'Man' includes woman. This is an old way of writing and is no longer considered to be politically correct. I don't care. I don't care if you care. When used in the sense of 'humanity generally' that's how the word 'Man' is to be understood while you read this essay. If you find that problematic - go read something else.
'The World of Man' is a term that forms part of my personal shorthand for how the various spaces in which human beings exist socially are organized, developed, and utilised. The term includes everything from the purposes of the State and the agencies of government to the conversations people have around their breakfast tables over coffee in the morning. It designates the entire set of personal, economic, and political relationships that we organize under the term 'society'. 'The World of Man' has nothing in particular to do with the world. The world is what we understand when we talk about physical restraints on what we do, and what we are able to do. The world includes the fact that human beings cannot breathe in water, that if you injure us in certain ways we die, that we cannot travel to the moon by flapping our arms up and down.
The world is the set of physical constraints that mark us out as being human. It's also the physical locations (along with the constraints on behaviour they impose and the benefits they grant) in which human existence takes place and in which physical resources are exploited (or not, depending on how we understand and relate to what is now called 'the environment'). The world is what is constituted by Physics - both the scientific understanding and the philosophy which underpins it, and the practical consequences (toasters, hybrid cars, moon rockets, particle accelerators, iPhones, microwave ovens etc.) which have flowed from the development of Physics as a practical discipline.
The World of Man, and the world, are not the same. Though it should be understood that I don't say there is no relationship between them. While the world exists outside of us and has reality of its own (to imagine anything else is to take Philosophical Idealism to the point of solipsism) how we understand the world and agree to make use of it is the point at which the world and the World of Man come together.
The world came into being as a consequence of our limitations. The World of Man comes into being as a consequence of our aspirations - we construct it according to our desire, and the disappointment of being human is nothing more than this: that our ability to realise our desires has never been and will never be equal to our capacity to desire. We imagine systems of government based upon the equality of citizens, and the autonomy of citizens, and what we create instead is mass Party Democracy. We imagine systems of Justice and create police departments. We imagine good governance, and instead live according to the prejudices of the patrician castes we create to rule us.
We imagine creativity and produce Hollywood. We imagine systems of international peace and harmony and produce the UN. We imagine Leadership, and produce the likes of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, of Mugabe, of 'Papa Doc' Duvalier and Idi Amin (and yes, Bush and Blair both belong among that gallery of failures, bigots, imbeciles, and tyrants - in my opinion, though perhaps not for the reasons you might think. I don't consider either of them to be 'war criminals', for example.). Bush belongs because of his unmitigated incompetence. Blair (or 'Bliar' as he became known in the UK) because of his deceit, and his contempt for those who elected him.
As Lovecraft said, the human condition is such that we can appreciate our nature - but do nothing about it.
We are a plague on the face of the earth, a cancer, devouring ourselves and everything around us. We make the places in which we live dens of filth, vice, misery, terror, and horror. We slaughter each other for any reason and no reason. We worship the inane, the stupid, those who exceed us in wealth and those who exceed us in physical activities that have no productive qualities of any kind.
We pay countless millions to those who can kick, throw, hit, or otherwise manipulate a ball better than we can; we amass vast armouries of weapons that go unused because no one has the balls to order that they be used; we countenance gross inequalities of all kinds; we tolerate bitter injustices; we perpetrate vile cruelties on every hand; and we do all these things with a blind, insouciant hubris that expects that all things will continue just as they are, forever, because we are the Crown of Creation, practicing a total disregard for the lesson of history that teaches that all things inevitably fail, pass away, and are lost.
One day, some human being will look back at the world we inhabit and marvel at it in just the way that we now marvel at the dead cultures of ancient Egypt and Babylon. What we are cannot and will not last. What we are will die, just as the society the Pharoahs ruled over and lived in died. The cities we have built and the civilizations we have made are our greatest achievements. They are the foundations of the World of Man. And they are as fleeting, as tenuous, as any insect that lives for a day and then dies. They last longer than a day, but their end is just as certain.
They are things we have made that will be superseded and passed over in the ongoing development of human civilization as a whole. Some of us can grasp, and understand, that cultures die just as men do. But who among us can grasp and understand that we, eventually, will be no more than dinosaurs are now - entries in the fossil record. One day, there will be no more human beings.
And everything we have ever striven for, dreamed of, died for, will be as empty and vain and useless as the appetites that drove dinosaurs to eat, mate, compete with each other. Everything we, as a species, have ever desired is a fist raised up in the face of universal death - and the emptiest and most futile of gestures. Not that that has ever prevented us from raising our fist or making the gesture. Which is why human existence is both a tragedy and a comedy. We will never refuse to make the gesture - and the gesture will always be empty and pointless - because we, along with everything we have ever known and will ever know, will die.
This is why the human comedy is more tragedy than comedy - because, unlike the commedias of the Middle Ages, this one has no propitious or even meaningful end. There is, only, the universal end of everything that could be considered human. All that will remain of us, for awhile, are the ruins we leave behind. What each of us faces is not simply the certain knowledge of our own personal death - but the knowledge of the inevitable death of everything we value. The end of every hope and aspiration: not merely for ourselves but for humankind as a whole.
Unless, of course, you have some kind of religious faith, a belief in immortality, purpose, and the triumph of some inscrutable Will that sets us at the center of the Universe and seperates us from all those things that die. Then you have a lifeline, a reason to go on, a reason for hope. And that, in the end, is to my mind the basis of every religion that insists there is personal survival after death, a point of view for which there can be no proof this side of the grave and against which there is no argument. The terror of the thought that such religion is nothing more than one more futile gesture in the face of death is what motivates the zealot and the martyr: I'll die to prove that I'm not afraid of death, because my religion is true, and yours is false.
Religion is the coin in which we pay for whatever comfort we have in the face of the knowledge that we, and everyone we love, will die.This is why there is no rationality in religion: the object against which religion is directed, the thing it deals with, death, is not amenable to rationality.
Death is the period at the end of the sentence "The universe is subject to rational principles."
Perhaps the Universe actually is subject to rational principles. But you'll still die. And your death, like your life, measured against the life and death of the universe, is meaningless.
As is mine.
So what else can you do but laugh?
If everything is meaningless than everything is possible and nothing is prohibited. But if everything is meaningless then there can be no criterion of choice between any of the possibilities open to a human being. Nothing is left but animal satisfaction, the feeding of the hungers of the body and mind. But appetite dwindles, passion decreases, hunger wains and fails. All that's left is laughter, the last gesture of defiance.
If laughter was more appreciated than it is, then the World of Man would be a less desperate place than it is - because laughter is the only real measure of our value in the face of death. Laughter. Not what we've done, for ourselves and others. Because everything we do will be forgotten. Not the degree to which we 'change the world' - because any change we manage to make, even a change so fundamental that it's acknowledged and remembered over the remaining life of the human species - even a change of such magnitude, will pass away and become meaningless with the death of the last human being.
Laughter is the only thing that can define us and measure us in the face of death - because our laughter is uniquely ours and it marks the degree to which we can overcome the futility of our existence, its emptiness and meaninglessness.
The trick to being happy in life is not to expect happiness - and to be grateful for those moments of happiness which occasionally come our way - grace notes to an endless fugue of misery. And to laugh. To laugh often, and loudly, and with real appreciation for the joke that is humanity.
Humanity. The ape that thought it could.
If you were expecting some hopeful or positive conclusion to this little essay you're going to be sadly disappointed. Because there isn't one. I will die one day. So will you. I sometimes imagine that, if we're all lucky, that will be the end of it. But I honestly don't believe so.
Anything cruel enough, and humorous enough, to make a human being is too cruel and too humorous to leave it at that. And I sometimes imagine that, if we're all really unlucky, what's waiting for us after death is simply more of the same - forever.
Which makes suicide doubly funny.
'The World of Man' is a term that forms part of my personal shorthand for how the various spaces in which human beings exist socially are organized, developed, and utilised. The term includes everything from the purposes of the State and the agencies of government to the conversations people have around their breakfast tables over coffee in the morning. It designates the entire set of personal, economic, and political relationships that we organize under the term 'society'. 'The World of Man' has nothing in particular to do with the world. The world is what we understand when we talk about physical restraints on what we do, and what we are able to do. The world includes the fact that human beings cannot breathe in water, that if you injure us in certain ways we die, that we cannot travel to the moon by flapping our arms up and down.
The world is the set of physical constraints that mark us out as being human. It's also the physical locations (along with the constraints on behaviour they impose and the benefits they grant) in which human existence takes place and in which physical resources are exploited (or not, depending on how we understand and relate to what is now called 'the environment'). The world is what is constituted by Physics - both the scientific understanding and the philosophy which underpins it, and the practical consequences (toasters, hybrid cars, moon rockets, particle accelerators, iPhones, microwave ovens etc.) which have flowed from the development of Physics as a practical discipline.
The World of Man, and the world, are not the same. Though it should be understood that I don't say there is no relationship between them. While the world exists outside of us and has reality of its own (to imagine anything else is to take Philosophical Idealism to the point of solipsism) how we understand the world and agree to make use of it is the point at which the world and the World of Man come together.
The world came into being as a consequence of our limitations. The World of Man comes into being as a consequence of our aspirations - we construct it according to our desire, and the disappointment of being human is nothing more than this: that our ability to realise our desires has never been and will never be equal to our capacity to desire. We imagine systems of government based upon the equality of citizens, and the autonomy of citizens, and what we create instead is mass Party Democracy. We imagine systems of Justice and create police departments. We imagine good governance, and instead live according to the prejudices of the patrician castes we create to rule us.
We imagine creativity and produce Hollywood. We imagine systems of international peace and harmony and produce the UN. We imagine Leadership, and produce the likes of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, of Mugabe, of 'Papa Doc' Duvalier and Idi Amin (and yes, Bush and Blair both belong among that gallery of failures, bigots, imbeciles, and tyrants - in my opinion, though perhaps not for the reasons you might think. I don't consider either of them to be 'war criminals', for example.). Bush belongs because of his unmitigated incompetence. Blair (or 'Bliar' as he became known in the UK) because of his deceit, and his contempt for those who elected him.
As Lovecraft said, the human condition is such that we can appreciate our nature - but do nothing about it.
We are a plague on the face of the earth, a cancer, devouring ourselves and everything around us. We make the places in which we live dens of filth, vice, misery, terror, and horror. We slaughter each other for any reason and no reason. We worship the inane, the stupid, those who exceed us in wealth and those who exceed us in physical activities that have no productive qualities of any kind.
We pay countless millions to those who can kick, throw, hit, or otherwise manipulate a ball better than we can; we amass vast armouries of weapons that go unused because no one has the balls to order that they be used; we countenance gross inequalities of all kinds; we tolerate bitter injustices; we perpetrate vile cruelties on every hand; and we do all these things with a blind, insouciant hubris that expects that all things will continue just as they are, forever, because we are the Crown of Creation, practicing a total disregard for the lesson of history that teaches that all things inevitably fail, pass away, and are lost.
One day, some human being will look back at the world we inhabit and marvel at it in just the way that we now marvel at the dead cultures of ancient Egypt and Babylon. What we are cannot and will not last. What we are will die, just as the society the Pharoahs ruled over and lived in died. The cities we have built and the civilizations we have made are our greatest achievements. They are the foundations of the World of Man. And they are as fleeting, as tenuous, as any insect that lives for a day and then dies. They last longer than a day, but their end is just as certain.
They are things we have made that will be superseded and passed over in the ongoing development of human civilization as a whole. Some of us can grasp, and understand, that cultures die just as men do. But who among us can grasp and understand that we, eventually, will be no more than dinosaurs are now - entries in the fossil record. One day, there will be no more human beings.
And everything we have ever striven for, dreamed of, died for, will be as empty and vain and useless as the appetites that drove dinosaurs to eat, mate, compete with each other. Everything we, as a species, have ever desired is a fist raised up in the face of universal death - and the emptiest and most futile of gestures. Not that that has ever prevented us from raising our fist or making the gesture. Which is why human existence is both a tragedy and a comedy. We will never refuse to make the gesture - and the gesture will always be empty and pointless - because we, along with everything we have ever known and will ever know, will die.
This is why the human comedy is more tragedy than comedy - because, unlike the commedias of the Middle Ages, this one has no propitious or even meaningful end. There is, only, the universal end of everything that could be considered human. All that will remain of us, for awhile, are the ruins we leave behind. What each of us faces is not simply the certain knowledge of our own personal death - but the knowledge of the inevitable death of everything we value. The end of every hope and aspiration: not merely for ourselves but for humankind as a whole.
Unless, of course, you have some kind of religious faith, a belief in immortality, purpose, and the triumph of some inscrutable Will that sets us at the center of the Universe and seperates us from all those things that die. Then you have a lifeline, a reason to go on, a reason for hope. And that, in the end, is to my mind the basis of every religion that insists there is personal survival after death, a point of view for which there can be no proof this side of the grave and against which there is no argument. The terror of the thought that such religion is nothing more than one more futile gesture in the face of death is what motivates the zealot and the martyr: I'll die to prove that I'm not afraid of death, because my religion is true, and yours is false.
Religion is the coin in which we pay for whatever comfort we have in the face of the knowledge that we, and everyone we love, will die.This is why there is no rationality in religion: the object against which religion is directed, the thing it deals with, death, is not amenable to rationality.
Death is the period at the end of the sentence "The universe is subject to rational principles."
Perhaps the Universe actually is subject to rational principles. But you'll still die. And your death, like your life, measured against the life and death of the universe, is meaningless.
As is mine.
So what else can you do but laugh?
If everything is meaningless than everything is possible and nothing is prohibited. But if everything is meaningless then there can be no criterion of choice between any of the possibilities open to a human being. Nothing is left but animal satisfaction, the feeding of the hungers of the body and mind. But appetite dwindles, passion decreases, hunger wains and fails. All that's left is laughter, the last gesture of defiance.
If laughter was more appreciated than it is, then the World of Man would be a less desperate place than it is - because laughter is the only real measure of our value in the face of death. Laughter. Not what we've done, for ourselves and others. Because everything we do will be forgotten. Not the degree to which we 'change the world' - because any change we manage to make, even a change so fundamental that it's acknowledged and remembered over the remaining life of the human species - even a change of such magnitude, will pass away and become meaningless with the death of the last human being.
Laughter is the only thing that can define us and measure us in the face of death - because our laughter is uniquely ours and it marks the degree to which we can overcome the futility of our existence, its emptiness and meaninglessness.
The trick to being happy in life is not to expect happiness - and to be grateful for those moments of happiness which occasionally come our way - grace notes to an endless fugue of misery. And to laugh. To laugh often, and loudly, and with real appreciation for the joke that is humanity.
Humanity. The ape that thought it could.
If you were expecting some hopeful or positive conclusion to this little essay you're going to be sadly disappointed. Because there isn't one. I will die one day. So will you. I sometimes imagine that, if we're all lucky, that will be the end of it. But I honestly don't believe so.
Anything cruel enough, and humorous enough, to make a human being is too cruel and too humorous to leave it at that. And I sometimes imagine that, if we're all really unlucky, what's waiting for us after death is simply more of the same - forever.
Which makes suicide doubly funny.
