Frozen Toothpaste

All communication is narcissistic. By writing something that I intend for others to read, I am saying that my idea — the one expressed in this, the prior, and next sentences — is good enough, clever enough, interesting enough, that people should pay attention to it. By making any effort to communicate with anyone, I’m saying that I’m worthy of their time.

Even a passing “Hello” to someone is a subtle insistence that it’ll matter to them that I’ve said it. A wave, too, is a statement that you’ll care that I waved to you. And it’s hard to doubt that public speaking is an overt argument that the people amassed in the room will be interested in what you have to say.

Now, it’s worth clarifying what is meant by “narcissism.” Though it is often understood as excessive self-love, especially admiration for your physical appearance, that is not my intent. Instead, I mean simply to imply a level of admiration for one’s self, ideas, and potential contribution. It’s not always excessive, and in many cases is directly in proportion to the healthy amount of self-admiration that a person needs to go on living.

For though it’s narcissistic for me to wave and say “hello” to my neighbor, they likely expect that my respect for our relationship and regard for them means that I will do so. Because of the history and mutual respect in the relationship, they’d likely and reasonably think there was something wrong if I were to not do so.

And here is another point, refusal to communicate can be as narcissistic as communication itself. If I intentionally neglect to say hello to my neighbors, that can be a silent statement that my self-regard makes me too important to say hello to them. Perhaps this is because of my new job, car, or my understanding that they lied to me about something. Whatever the reason, it’s unquestionably a statement meant to signify — even more than my telling them would — that I don’t want to talk to them.

This is, however, different from not saying “hello” to someone out of shyness. Shyness is — as people tend to forget — an intense humbleness that insists that not only have I nothing to contribute, but I’m of so little importance that you needn’t regard me.

As with shyness, so too is there a form of writing devoid of narcissism. Journaling, when done for the self alone, and with no intent the it should ever be public, is essentially literary shyness. An assertion that though you may be writing, you don’t think it’s good enough to others to pay attention to.

Blogging is, in this way, a form that is not necessarily narcissistic. Some people keep blogs with the honest intent that no one will read them (though they are, I would say, the vast minority). But if one writes, as I am, with the intent that what I write be read, I am thereby insisting that I am worthy of people’s time an attention. (This is the point I made, more narrowly, in “On Being an Egomaniac.”)

To say that communication is an act of narcissism is not to be against it. Communication is vitally important for people to reach a better understanding of those they share an address, workplace, city, state, nation, or planet with. Belief that communication is vital to understand each other can be reason enough to feel that the need to speak up and be heard. But that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of narcissism.

raspberreh (ASA)

A few years ago, my understanding of the state of the world and it’s need for change was rather pessimistic. I saw a great flood of things going wrong. That the dam that had been holding catastrophe back for decades was beginning to leak. At best, I thought, I could hope to plug a few of those leaks with my fingers and toes. There was nothing that would stop the dam from breaking. Nothing that would halt the forthcoming flood.

And that the flood was unstoppable meant that it wasn’t worth trying. It was hardly worth trying to change “hearts and minds.” After all, a couple more people putting fingers and toes into holes would do little to stop the oncoming rush of water.

Today, I’m rather certain that was silly. And it’s not that the world has changed dramatically in the interim, it’s simply that I’ve changed. And my attitude toward changing the world is probably the most noticeable difference.

Today I recognize that I’m still working on drops. Though societies move in waves and tides, individual people can only influence drops. And thinking that you’re just a single drop in the ocean can be an incredibly depressing thought. But it need not be.

Anything I do will only be a metaphorical drop in the bucket. But one drop can change other drops. Groups of drops can make ripples. Ripples can coalesce into waves. Large waves can create floods. Surely that’s getting ahead of ourselves. We are, after all, still just drops.

But being “just a drop in the bucket,” isn’t so bad. If you change yourself, that means there’s one more drop like you want all the others to be. One more drop working toward the world that you want. And one drop can change other drops.

It’s not as if changing other drops is easy. Even if you’re one red drop in an ocean of plain old water, you’re not going to change the entire complexion of that water by yourself. You may be shunned and mocked by some of those plain old water drops. But at some point you’ll find another drop that wants to be red like you. And they may know someone else who thinks it’s a good idea. And so on it’ll go. It’s not inevitable that everyone will come to understand, and it’s certainly not inevitable that the whole group will suddenly embrace their redness. But if you’re sure that the world should be red, you shouldn’t worry about the color of anyone else.

That then, is the fundamental difference between the nihilistic pessimism of my past and and the reserved optimism of my present. And if my drop changes only one thing, I would like it to lead others suffering from a bad case of pessimism to see that optimism is almost always a wiser and healther choice.

Sam UL

Fear is rightly synonymous with anxiety. Like anxiety, fear is essentially a feeling of discomfort or unease with a given situation. Dark alleys in dangerous neighborhoods are something of which I am fearful. They make me anxious.

Such a fear is reasonable in the proper amount. And should my fear make me more aware of my surroundings — better on guard — it may even be valuable. But that certainly doesn’t mean that fear itself is rational.

I think all fear nonrational. (I thought of both the terms “arational” and “subrational,” but this seemed best.) That is, it’s a subconscious process that serves unquestionable evolutionary purpose, but is generally maladjusted to the peaceful suburban life that most Americans — and others in the “first world” — lead.

Fear leads to discomfort in unknown situations. Two things can be said conclusively about “stage fright”: it grows out of being in an unfamiliar situation, and it has no constructive purpose. But as thousand of ten-year-olds can tell you, that doesn’t make it any less real. Your pulse quickens, your breathing becomes shallow, you quickly become either too hot or too cold.

Were your life in mortal danger, this fear could be a useful advance warning system that causes you to get the heck out of the there. And because you, as one who properly feels fear, knew when to get away to save your life, you’re the kind of person that gets to live long enough to reproduce. And because you reproduce, your offspring get this same useful thing called fear.

But eventually your offspring became domesticated. They don’t hunt much anymore, they don’t go to war as much as they used to. They rarely, for that matter, get in any meaningful danger for which fear is a proper response. And in a life such as this, fear is more a vestigial organ than a useful appendage. It’s like the tails humans have no use for, but still have visible remnants of.

Now certainly, fear is not vestigial for many people in the world. Those who live in close proximity with wild animals or armed humans can benefit from feeling that fear. It can be a useful warning that they’re in danger and need to flee.

And fear may have some useful purpose when you’re addressing a superior. Even if you live in a place where your boss or arresting officer has no (legal) ability to do you physical harm, it may be useful to be humbled by your fear and act subservient enough to prevent your firing.

But going before a small group of people to speak, read, or converse is no a useful time for anxiety. Your preformance is much more likely to suffer as a result of hyper-awareness than it is to benefit.

Make no mistake, I have nothing against fear. And honestly, in today’s world I’d rather experience it at times when it serves no purpose than not have it when it may do me honest good. But I sure like the thought that some day all forms of fear will be truly and completely vestigial.

wickenden (ASA)

It can seem like there are hundreds of them. Those little phrases that tell you that you should make the most of today. Like, “Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.” Or “We’re only dancing on this earth for a short while.” Or “Live everyday as if it were your last.” Or “Tomorrow, you’ll be dead.” OK, admittedly the last one isn’t one you’ve heard before.

I think it’s odd that most of these sayings insist that today is only important if tomorrow you won’t be here and alive. As if, when you find yourself alive tomorrow, everything that was important about today will be unimportant. As if “the fierce urgency of now” is only fierce or urgent in the face of impending death.

Perhaps it’s not actually odd. It’s somewhat sensible: the so-often-ignored remarkableness of being alive is much easier to see if tomorrow we won’t have this so-often-ignored thing anymore. To quote Joni Mitchell, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?” Perhaps it’s only when we the see the clear difference between being alive and being dead that we understand the unmistakable value in this thing called life.

And to quote — because this seems to be a topic much discussed in the literature — Marcel Proust wrote:

I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were suddenly threatened to die… Think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, our life hides from us, made invisible by our laziness, which certain of a future, delays them incessantly.

But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.

I think Proust, like all those other sayings and songs and phrases, makes a valuable point. And I suppose what I want to say is that I wish that it didn’t take the thought of our impending end to make us realize that every single day you wake up alive is truly an amazing day. Surely there may be some terrible things you’ll go through today, and tomorrow, and the next week, but you’re still alive. “It goes on.”

And so while I intimately understand why writers and poets so often bring up the thought of death, I wish we could learn to take note of life in itself. I’ve not said this as eloquently as I would like, but I’m just glad I got a day in which to say it. And I’ll leave you with Proust’s more eloquent — and somewhat ironic — elucidation of the problem with constantly valuing life only in the face of tomorrow’s death:

The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.

The wars about which there is the least dissent, both contemporary and historical, are those which are judged to have been good, necessary, and just. And though there can be extensive debate against how much any war fits any or all of these categories, it’s hard to doubt that a war that is seen as good, just, and necessary is a “better” war than one that fit into none of those categories.

We can use Iraq as an example. Some would contend that America’s invasion of Iraq was none of the above. Not good, not necessary, not just. The vast consensus at the time, however, was that it was a good war, and if not a just war, at least necessitated by weapons of mass destruction.

Goodness in war is something judged by external moral absolutes. America’s mythical neoconservatives like to fight wars against evil. In such a black-and-white world, all wars waged by America are inherently good. Even if one doesn’t believe that America is always on the side of the good, there are some clear situation where we unquestionably wage wars on the side of the good. World War II, which is generally the most clear-cut war in history, saw the Allies fighting the good fight. It would be essentially impossible to define either the Nazis or the Japanese, both of whom believed they were racially superior and thus engaged in genocidal tactics, as much other than evil.

Necessity is perhaps more difficult to pin down than good. Realists, who believe in unwavering pragmatism in foreign policy, generally prefer to fight only the necessary wars. One can easily say that it is necessary to fight back when your territory has been invaded and your citizens are being killed. Leaving aside the Dalai Lama, who doubts the necessity of war for even self-defense, it’s generally acknowledged that a defensive war is a necessary war. More recently, it has also become recognized that in cases of genocide, war is necessary. It is with this belief that the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia — ending the reign of the Khmer Rouge — was necessary, that United Nations intervention in Bosnia was necessitated, and NATO action in Kosovo was legitimate.

This, however, gets to the final and most difficult point. When is a war just? Some liberal institutionalists believe that a war is only just if it has the blessing of the biggest international body of all: the UN. In this view, only the intervention into Bosnia was just. Because NATO intervention into Kosovo didn’t come with United Nations assent that it was good and necessary, the war was unjust. Others would say that assent from any existing multilateral institutions can make a war just. Thus, intervention in Kosovo, because it was blessed by NATO, was more legitimate than intervention in Iraq, where assent only came from an ad-hoc “coalition of the willing.” As it was viewed at the time, Vietnam’s intervention into Cambodia was actually the least just of all of these; it was completely unilateral.

But most commentators now agree that Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia was if not just, at least good and necessary, and thus worthy of respect. Rarely is a war waged by anyone seen by the whole world is good, necessary, and just. In this respect, WWII is a widely recognized exception.

It should also be noted that a war that seems good and necessary, if not just, when it begins is not necessary seen as such when it ends (or in historical hindsight). It’s hard to deny that America’s involvement in Vietnam, beginning with Eisenhower and not ending until the presidency of Gerald Ford, was initially seen as good and necessary. Good because Communism was broadly seen in America and the western world as irredeemably evil, necessary because without it all of Asia would fall to the evil of Communism. Yet today — and in some quarters, at the start of the war — it’s recognized that it was neither good nor necessary. The Vietnamese may have embraced communism, but are widely seen to have been seeking only independence. And the string of dominoes theory — if one falls the rest will too — is widely recognized as both unrealistic and silly.

Thus, in hindsight, Vietnam is seen as neither good nor necessary (it was never widely seen as just). It is thus widely seen as one of America’s lowest moments and worst wars. Wars that were not good, and not necessary, and not just are usually and understandably sources of national shame.

And though one could reasonably argue that all wars are a shame, it’s hard to deny that without at least goodness and necessity, or justness and goodness, or justness and necessity, a war truly is a shame.