I just finished Alan Watts’ The Book and it has me thinking about a couple of things. He’s talking about the necessity of dualisms and opposition for us to understand ourselves. Without evil there is no good, that sort of thing.
My ears perked up when he was describing Protestantism as the natural religion for what he calls the Automatic Universe, meaning a scientific, materialist one. Where there are forces that just force, and things spin around, and we are just, as Watts said, quivering masses of electric protoplasm. His complaint with this religiosity, and as a backdrop for culture, is that it makes much of the material world, and our ability to control it and ourselves. Thus, he says, he feels chronic guilt and makes the most heroic efforts to placate his conscience.
Guilt and shame as a source of good works is not sustainable, he points out, but also that there is no possible end to this need. Because you know, once we save all the savable, we can upgrade the least fortunate among the saved. A sort of hedonic treadmill of good works to assuage the guilty conscience.
He wrote this in 1966. Watts was English, but his reasoning is very American, which jibes perfectly with his adopted home of Sausalito. We love absolutism when we’re talking about philosophy. Good and evil and picking sides. How we love to pick a side in the USA!
This is the thing though. Does this logic even work in 2021? There is a time for philosophizing, and one for compassion, and I think the time for philosophizing might be over if we’re talking about the relative ability of people in the Global North to help everyone else suffer less. Because a little counts. A lot. This isn’t a news blog, but I’m sure you’ve seen the numbers on billionaires fortunes before and after the pandemic. Or this incredibly effective visualization of wealth: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
It might be that we Americans are just hopeless gangsters (and gangster worshipers). Maybe it’s true that we deserve what we get, but I just can’t accept that who actually gets it is who deserves it. Conscience placation be damned.
Watts tells us before the book is done that us Americans have to get better at actually enjoying life and loving each other, that joy is a choice we have to make. It would be cool to update these Zen ideas for the Americans to make sure we know that making joy a possible choice for everyone, when we have the means to choose ourselves, is part of the trick.