The past few days haven't been real cheerful for me, save-the-world (or 137 acres, at least) wise. My wife and I have been leading a fight against a proposed subdivision on groundwater limited farmland adjacent to our neighborhood.
Wednesday we got screwed by a purely political decision by our county Board of Commissioners. They ignored an independent hydrogeologic assessment and their own Planning Commission. That night I had trouble getting to sleep, as travesty of justice visions kept running through my brain.
Thursday I got to vent to a television news reporter. That made me feel a bit better, even though just a few seconds of my sage observations got on the air.
So what do you do when you're confused, discouraged, and out of sorts? I was bummed out by a material world disappointment. But I've had the same feelings when my spiritual aspirations were dashed by cold, hard, unfeeling reality.
For about a day and a half I struggled to regain some sort of balance. I alternated between Screw social activism because it all comes down to bullshit politics and Those ignoramus county commissioners have to be stopped before they kill (the environment) again.
It was interesting to observe how I reacted to my own thoughts and intentions. Whenever I envisioned continuing to fight the subdivision to the bitter end, no matter what it took, I'd feel a burst of positive energy. Giving up, or engaging in a half-hearted attempt to stop the development, left me listless.
There's a few things I like about "The Secret." Just a few. One is that your emotions are signposts pointing to the Way for you. When you're doing what you should, it feels good. Not necessarily pleasant (climbing a steep mountain, for example), but right.
Hard to put into words – "right" isn't quite right as a descriptor – but you know it when you feel it.
Which I did sometime Friday afternoon. I stopped conducting mental cost-benefit analyses, the odds of winning an appeal vs. how much we and our neighbors would have to raise to pay the attorney fees. I realized that what mattered to me wasn't what might happen in the end; it was what I felt driven to do now.
And that was to battle on. If the rolling hills I drive by every day eventually are covered by homes, it'll bother me a lot less if I feel like I left everything on the field rather than throwing in the towel (sports metaphors come easily after watching the College World Series a little while ago. Go Beavers!).
I'm reading a book about Spinoza, an appealingly heretical seventeenth-century philosopher. Here's what I came across this morning:
Happiness is freedom, says Spinoza. It follows when we act in accordance with our own deepest nature – when we "realize ourselves," as it were. Unfortunately, we humans rarely have the privilege of acting according to our deepest nature, for in our ignorance of ourselves and of the world we submit ourselves to the guidance of forces beyond our control.
…Most people most of the time, concludes Spinoza, are passive. But the point of life is to be active.
…The conatus is a drive or desire – in essence, the desire to persist in one's own being. Every person – and indeed every rock, tree, and thing in the world – has a conatus to act, live, preserve itself, and realize itself by pursuing its own interest (or "advantage").
"Pleasure" is the state that results from anything that contributes to the project of this conatus, that is, anything that increases a thing's power or level of "perfection": and "pain" is the state that results from anything that does the opposite, that diminishes the power of a thing.
Well, I didn't need a philosopher to tell me this. It was nice to read an explanation of what I'd been going through the past few days, though. I could tell when I was in, or close to, my conatus' energetic groove. Also, when I was out of it.
Relating this to being churched or churchless, faithful or faithless, devoted or doubtful, something in each of us yells Oh, yeah, this is SO right! to ourselves when we're really grooving to the beat of our inner drummer.
Our dance might not be visible to other people (or, it might). But (shifting metaphors) we know when our conatus is firing on all twelve-cylinders and smoke is pouring from our racing slicks as we shoot down our Way fueled by high-octane confidence.
Confidence that we're doing what we should, even if we're the only ones on that road, because there's nothing else we can do. The engine's warmed up, the gas tank's full, the windshield is clean, and we've got some traveling to do.
Life is good, even when it isn't, so long as we keep moving. Staying still isn't an option unless we're dead. As I remember Davy Crockett saying in a Disney movie from my childhood, "Be sure you're right, then go ahead."
Spinoza would agree.
Spinoza may have added that the members of the county Board of Commissioners may have equally felt right about their 'purely political decision'.
He writes the following two passages in his Ethics Part III PROPOSITION 31
"each of us strives, so far as he can, that everyone should love what he loves, and hate what he hates."
"... so we see that each of us, by his nature, wants the others to live according to his temperament; when all alike want this, they are alike an obstacle to one another, and when all wish to be praised, or loved, by all, they hate one another."
My take on that:
A person will mistakenly seek sameness in others' diffences and differences in their sameness.
We are all different. We all have different desires which follow from our different natures. Yet, we essentially strives as equal. Anyone's appetites, wishes or needs, considered in themselves, do not express greater or lesser perfection than anyone else's desires.
But, somehow, we normally see or imagine things up side down. We all want and wish to build a new world where everybody would have the same desires and agree. But the acceptance of this vision is conditional on the truth that the individuals conceive and expect that the shared desires would be those that follow from their nature only and no one else. The reason is that each individual considers her desires as displaying greater perfection than those of others - on the sole account that they belong to her.
Spinoza was only a heretic because he was right! :)
JP
Posted by: JP | June 17, 2007 at 06:09 AM
JP, I don't know what Spinoza would have thought of the subdivision decision. I do know that he was the forerunner of our modern secular, liberal, democratic way of looking at the world: non-dogmatic and scientific.
Ideally. The reality, unfortunately, is quite different. We still have people, like two of the county commissioners, who are locked into rigid ways of seeing the world. That is very un-Spinozaish.
They elevate their concepts of reality above reality itself. I'm pretty sure Spinoza would have decried that. For him, nature is reality. There isn't something transcendent above and beyond the reality in which we live and breathe. We are part and parcel of "God."
So when we deny that reality, we deny Spinoza's "God." This is how Einstein could admire Spinoza so much. Science is completely compatible with Spinoza's philosophy.
By contrast, the commissioners' refused to look at the facts about the real water beneath the development and substituted their imaginative conception of "property rights" and other conservative idols.
I like to think that Spinoza would be on our side.
Posted by: Brian | June 17, 2007 at 10:33 AM
Yikes!
Science is the language of nature and nature is always right? A corollary being that the language of right nature is always true science...
That's fairly fanatical.
But that's cool. You have really captured the process we all go through, feeling we are Right, with a capital 'R', the rush of having a purpose clear, and a place to go.
This is almost exactly how people with OCD describe life without 'normals' applying socially acceptable behavior to get in the way: "When you're doing what you should, it feels good. Not necessarily pleasant... but right." Yet normals percieve the obsessive to be almost completely ignorant of the reality of their environment. Remarkable.
This is a marvelous story of thinking globally, acting locally, swinging for the fence cosmically.
Posted by: Edward | June 18, 2007 at 05:26 AM
I've felt the sting of betrayal by local elected officials. The real estate developers find a way to influence them, even if it's just having a charming attorney take them to lunch every week. There's so much money to be made so quickly. The innocent critters that live on the land are not represented in the political process.
In our neighborhood, there's a Super Walmart just over the hill from our home where there once was small farms.
There was 100 acres of beautiful forest with a 10 acre lake at the end of our street -- the lake has been drained and the trees cut, waiting for 275 homes to be built.
I understand your despair.
Posted by: Myke | June 22, 2007 at 08:24 PM