Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (53 page)

It is an inescapable truth that no man can take all credit to himself and at the same time feel any gratitude to any for his blessings. If you earned it, it is not a gift. If you earned it by yourself with no one’s aid, you owe no thanks to anyone.

And this indeed was the attitude, which I take to be the modern attitude. The Abolisher triumphantly announced that he needed no good fairies, no magic, no grace, no gift from heaven to achieve all his dreams. He disdained to take a magic sword of Efland; he would forge it by himself, for himself, or do without.

I had a prophetic vision then, and saw how Siegfried, who did indeed forge his magic sword for himself, and relied on none but his own strength, came to an end. For he is foredoomed to fall speared in the back, a coward’s blow, by Hagen, a man with the heart and heritage of a dwarf. The man who lives by himself cannot escape his fate, which is to die by himself.

I hope I will not be misunderstood. I do not mock. I bow my head almost in respect akin to fear. I salute the melancholy, doomed, and gloomy pride of this sad and great pagan with whom I spoke. I do not doubt his word, no, not by an iota, the tiniest of letters. I think he is entirely responsible for his life, and he accepts no aid.

And he will die, and his loved ones will die. Some of his loved ones will die in slow pain, and others in merciful swiftness. Some will die before him, so that he will weep by their graves, and there will be no consolation; and some will die after him, so that they will weep by his, and likewise find no consolation.

I bow my head, because at once, as if with a stroke of lightning, I saw that he and all his kind live in a universe that is a sepulcher.

To be sure, it is a coffin of appalling vastness, fifteen billion light-years in radius, too large for the imagination of man to comprehend even its smallest moiety, godlike in its sheer magnitude of size;: but it is a coffin nonetheless, an airtight coffin, hermetically sealed with all the stars trapped inside, and all within are the prey and sport of death and entropy. Everything dreamt and everything done inside the sepulcher will come to nothing in the end. Escape is not merely impossible, it is unimaginable.

They cannot wish upon a star because to them the sky is black. There are no stars, nor Star-Maker, nor light.

For the pagan, there is by definition no outside, no other realm, no home to which to return, no happy ending, no efland, no magic, no hope, and if you wish upon a star, you are a childish fool.

And if you pray to that sovereign Providence who fashioned the stars, when all the Sons of Light shouted aloud for joy, then you are both fool and enemy.

For the noble pagan did not spare to tell all his audience how terrible the false beliefs of the Christian were, and how strong and great the fairies and spiritual beings and princes of the middle air he worshiped were. No, I am not speaking in a metaphor: the man was an occultist.

By no means is every Liberal, Leftist, Progressive, Nihilist, Socialist or other Abolisher of Man a warlock trafficking with unseen powers in hopes of worldly gain; but they all share his goal and his spirit. Only their methods differ.

Let me explain what I mean. I propose that, with minor variations or precursors, in the modern world, there are only three true and honest philosophies which make an honest attempt to deal with the intolerable truth of the world of despair and death in which we live.

Here again is the intolerable truth: without hope of heaven, without true love, every single desire and aspiration of any kind whatsoever is in vain, for in time, long or short, all pleasure will be gone, and even the pleasure of memory will fail as memory fades.

Death comes unto all estates: princes, prelate, potentates, both rich and poor of all degree. His awful strike no man can flee.
Timor Mortis Conturbat Me
.

Even an elf as immortal as Oberon would perish when the Earth is swallowed by the sun; even a living machine, long ago having lost all trace of his human origin, who flees beyond the farthest star, will in time be overcome by entropy, degrade, and perish.

The three ways to deal with this intolerable truth are Stoicism, Hedonism, Christianity. Stoicism is true to the character of the noble pagan; Hedonism to that of the ignoble.

When I speak of pagans, I do not mean only those who serve the classical gods and spirits of wood and mountain, sky and underworld. I include their modern brethren who believe in nothing but mortal matter and mortal minds.

Those who speak in cold tones about how life is a Darwinian war of all against all, and pity and mercy have no place, but the state needs self-sacrifice and noble courage to fall in battle if the state is to survive — such men are pagans even if they are atheists, because they are Stoics. They are dignified and noble, but doomed, for in their world mankind is the most rough and tough hardcore streetfighter in the circus of life, and we will flourish until some monsters rougher and tougher overwhelm us, and we go down fighting, gaily, to the unmarked grave. Read Robert Heinlein’s STARSHIP TROOPERS if you want an undisguised dose of such rhetoric.

Likewise, those who speak of life as a hunt for pleasure, the soaring fumes of wine sparkling in the sun or the profound kisses of women in the dark, and that the deep matters of the end of life or the ends of life need not concern us, for today we laugh, and scorn those who mock our fellowship and cheer — such men are pagans, even if they are atheists, for they crown themselves with floral wreathes and loll at ease like lotus-eaters. Read
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley to see the logical outcome of such a philosophy in action.

Hedonism seeks to distract the mind with pleasures, and find fulfillment in them, as a means to turn away from the looming and silent inevitability of death. It says, let us eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

Stoicism turns to look at the oncoming night, and, knowing there is no remedy, seeks to train the soul to die without fear or tears. The choice is to die with dignity like a man or to die shrieking and begging like a slave. The Stoic logic is cold and irrefutable: man has no power to avert death forever, nor to escape pain, but he does have the power to do his duty and to adjust his mind to reality, and live according to nature, that is, according to logic. What he cannot avert or avoid, such as death, he accepts with tranquility; what he can avert and avoid, such as falsehood or immodesty or cravenness, he rejects absolutely.

The Stoic teaches that man can only find what tranquility is open to him, within his own mind, where he is sovereign, but in absolute obedience to reason, which is to say, to the conscience. And he leaves the world to inflict pain and wounds and death upon him when so events decree, and he suffers without fear and without regret, knowing that these external things are indeed indifferent to him. He takes firm hold only of what is in his grasp, namely, his soul, and he does not reach for things beyond him, namely, his fortune and his body and his life.

The Christian is akin to the Stoic in despising the world, but surrenders more, even his own soul, into hands he trusts more than he trusts his own, and he hopes for more than merely tranquility and the hope of enduring pain with dignity. He does not resign himself to death, because his Master has overcome it, and promises to share the endless joy of that infinite victory with any who follow Him.

For the pagan, wishing on a star, or holding a feather of hope to help one to fly, or trying to overcome the rude nature of our birth so as to grow one day into a real boy, all these things, if at all, are pleasing distractions.

They are the distractions of the hedonist, the child’s version of sex and drugs and rock and roll, and the suicide by morphine in the needle of a euthanasia doctor, once hope for luxurious pleasure in life is gone.

For the Christian, wishing on a star is childhood practice to train the sterner mind of young women and men to wish upon the Bethlehem Star. Holding onto hope as thin and light as a feather is practice to train for grasping angels’ feathers as they bear us aloft in rapture. Seeing puppets made in the image and likeness of man grow by miracle into the higher life of man is practice for man growing into the higher life into which he is made.

Fairy tales are sometimes claimed by the pagans to be their special property, growing from their traditions. Nonsense. They are as thoroughly Christian as diatonic music, or chivalry, or the Gothic Arch, or the romance, or the Gregorian calendar, and the pagan names for months and weekdays mean only that those lesser gods are now vassals of our greater.

Greek tragedies, I grant you, belong to the pagans, and express in perfect clarity the hopelessness of a world where death leads either to nothingness, or to the endless suffering of an endless torture-wheel of reincarnation.

No doubt some alert reader will object that there are many other views of life, many other ways of addressing the tragedy of the human condition aside from these three. What about the Eudaimonism of Aristotle, or the sober philosophy of Confucius? What about the mysticism of Lao Tzu, the sublime visions of Theosophy, the rash boldness of Nietzsche, or the Millenarianism of Marx? What about the faithful Mohammedan or the observant Jew? Surely none of these fit into those three categories.

If the categories are taken in their broad sense, these three suffice: whatever is not done for duty and not done for pleasure is done for the sake of the divine. Buddha preached a mystical form of Stoicism, but it was still an attempt to reject the attachments human nature forms to vain and transitory life in this world. Confucius sought the good in the discipline of the social order, and this was to serve human ends defined by duties and pleasures: a combination of Stoic and Hedonistic philosophy. Nietzsche was a pure hedonist, but his pleasure was in spiritual pride, and he scorned bodily pleasures. Mohammedanism is an offshoot of Christianity and Judaism is a precursor, but both place faith in God rather than in duty or pleasure. In sum, there are only three reasons for any ethical imperative: you should do this because you ought to, (and it is noble to do as one ought, no matter any pain involved); you should do this because you want to, (or you should want to, considering your long term best interest); you should do this because God wants you to.

If I wanted to be technically accurate, I would distinguish between Hedonists, who seek base and bodily pleasures only, and Epicureans, who seek the longer lasting and truer pleasures involved in a clean conscience, good fellowship, the educated life and the uplifted sentiment — but even this endless essay must have some metes.

Back to the matter:

So the second clatter of the tumbler falling into place was hearing this sad, doomed voice of a tired old man, old as Nestor, still talking with the zest of youth about how he had created his own life himself, by his rules, made himself, saved himself, and owed nothing to any.

And I seemed to see his face, still boasting vainly and smiling an empty smile, as it might look if he were trapped in a coffin of glass like Snow White, and sinking ever deeper into a dark and silent ocean with no farther shore and no bottom, drifting slowly out of sight into oblivion, void, and darkness. If his nerve does not break, he can spend his last hours in the airless oblong box playing with his fingers and toes, or writing brave sonnets in his blood on the inner surface of the cover.

Do not think for a moment I am mocking or joking. I would honor and salute any man brave enough to face that prospect unafraid. All my life I sought such stoic courage as that, and indeed, deemed it the only prize in life worth having: the Stoic fortitude to live life without craving life. Ah, but experience is a cunning jester. The only time I ever lost my fear of death and become a true Stoic was the hour when the Holy Spirit came to me and baptized my soul, and I became a Christian and left the vain and empty arrogance of Stoicism behind forever. Throwing my Stoic philosophy to the wind, I found the Christ returned that and more to me.

Because Christianity is the fulfillment and perfection of human nature, and humans should not fear death, not after death is swallowed up in Christ. Stoicism, much as I admire it, was an early attempt to abolish human nature, by decreeing certain fears and desires absolutely central to human nature, such as the desire for life and fear of death, to be illogical and unbecoming.

Let us return to the question from whose seed this oak of vast and sprawling essay sprung. Why are the Abolishers of Man filled with hatred for all things normal to human sentiment and human pleasure, of which Disney, by his sheer charm and goodwill, surely must serve as the best example of optimism, hope, wishing upon those highest and fairest and brightest of things we call stars?

Why are the Abolishers so angry, so unhappy, so noisy, so bent on destruction and on self-destruction?

I will tell you the secret of happiness Oriental sages sought in vain for eons. It is gratitude. When you are grateful for it, a spoonful is a feast. When ungrateful, a feast is a spoonful.

The Abolishers have fled their source of strength, which is Christ. The noble ones fled to Stoicism or some form or variation of it, such as Buddhism, the hardheaded willingness to take the harsh world at it is, without complaint. The ignoble ones fled to the harem and the barroom and the opium joint, seeking to drown their awareness of life’s harsh reality in the soft haze of distraction and entertainment. The ignoble pagan becomes infantile and whiny, and wants his Nanny and Nurse to do everything for him, from wipe his bottom to pat his fluffy head and feed him pablum. These cravings are shifted by a psychological maladjustment to the government in this modern time, hence, the modern Liberal movement.

Do you see? The noble pagan condemns Christian hope as if it were the false haze of distraction and diversion of the ignoble pagan. The noble pagan cannot tell the difference between the ignoble pagan’s desire for the opium of paradise, and the hard command of Christ that we take up our crosses and follow Him. One moron actually called Christianity the opium of the masses.