Epilogue:

What's the point?

Let me set this up by telling you a pretty long story. Years ago, I was teaching a course in critical thinking, and the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings were on the tube. I told my students, "This will be a good exercise. One of these people is telling the truth, and one is lying. Either, based on what we now know, could be telling the truth. But what a person says has implications. You listen to the testimony and answer these questions: If he is telling the truth, what else has to be true? Are these things true? If she's telling the truth, what else has to be true? Are these true? Based on the answers, you might be able to find out who's lying."

I, of course, myself did what I asked the students to do, and from the testimony, I concluded that if Thomas was telling the truth, Anita Hill had to be lying. If she was telling the truth, then he and seven--I think it was--other people who had no particular connection with him (people like the head of the University of Oklahoma) were lying or mistaken. Not to mention that if she was telling the truth, it somehow in all those years never occurred to a woman lawyer dealing with sexual harassment (the EEOC, after all) that all she had to do to get him dead to rights was conceal a tape recorder (à la Linda Tripp) on her person and record his incriminating remarks, especially since she'd testified that he actually told her that if she could prove what was going on, he'd be ruined. It was no contest.

The next year, 1991-92, I taught the course again, this time using a new textbook I hadn't looked at too carefully beforehand, and which, I found, had all kinds of political examples, as usual slanted heavily to the left. No problem, it was a logic course. But I happened to have a student who was far to the right of Rush Limbaugh and a young girl Democrat from Arkansas in the class--this was the Clinton election year, remember. Well, as you can imagine, discussions frequently got off the topic of logic, and some weren't exactly quiet; there was one time when I actually had to leave my position behind my desk, because the conservative was about to get up from his chair, and it looked like something physical might happen. An exciting course. (It was fun to teach.)

But since we were then at the point in the course of dealing with the fallacy of using emotions instead of reason to draw conclusions, I thought I'd introduce it with an illustration. The next class, I came in, and in a subdued air told the kids that the dean had heard the uproar in the class, and--with a catch in my voice--I said that he had called me into his office and told me that this wasn't the first time I'd used classes for political propaganda (at which I got indignant and told the class, "I don't know who reported this, but you know as well as I do that I've always been neutral!"), and then described my discussion with him, and--with tears in my eyes now--I said that nothing I could say made any difference, and (sob) the upshot was that this was the last class I'd be teaching. I didn't know who'd take over, but I wanted the class to know that I didn't mean to do anything but teach them how to think, and...And there's not a word of truth in anything I've been saying.

My little speech lasted a good ten minutes, and I could hear during it that electric silence where no one is breathing or moving, and I could see the shocked looks and the tears in the eyes of several of the students. Of course, they got mad at me when the last line sank in, and I said, "You see? You believed me, didn't you? I was 'credible.' It's the easiest thing in the world to be credible in that sense if you happen to have had some acting lessons. And the point is, all I did was play on your emotions; since I looked sincere, you believed I was sincere, and it never occurred to you to think that since I have tenure and there's such a thing as academic freedom, if Thomas More fired me for something like this, I could sue them for millions. They wouldn't dare."

That's not the end of the story. As it happened, I was surfing the TV one night the next year and I happened to catch Clarence Thomas's speech to that eighth-grade graduating class, where he had been invited by the teacher and then disinvited by the (black) Principal, and there was such a stink that he was invited again--and the speech was a masterpiece of humble nobility and encouragement to the kids to try their hardest and not let adversity or what people thought stand in their way; what was great about this country was that they could still make it. I had also read several of his decisions, and they struck me as very intelligent and cogently reasoned.

Still not the end of the story. Since he is still the object of a smear campaign, I decided one day to write him and tell him about all this, to let him know that there are people who know what the real situation is, and who are behind him and admire him. I kind of hoped for a note thanking me, but nothing happened. What the hell, who am I, and he's a Justice of the Supreme Court. That's the way things are.

Months later, my wife called me at school and said out of the blue, "Clarence Thomas called and wants to talk to you. Yes, it's the Clarence Thomas; I recognized his voice. Call this number." Thinking it was a trick, I called the number, and got, "United States Supreme Court, Justice Thomas's Chambers." Wow! Well, I said I was returning the call, and a short time later he called back, saying he'd been meaning to call me for some time--and we talked for almost two hours, one guy to another, with him encouraging me to keep up the good work of getting people to think instead of feel, and on and on, trading anecdotes and views. I was overwhelmed.

This is one side. This man, a brilliant person and a paragon of noblesse, humility, decency, and--yes, charity--is regularly scorned and vilified by the people who should be looking up to him as a model of what black people have a right to aspire to in our society. And all because he didn't take the easy course and capitulate to the New Morality and ignore the truth; all because he was black and dared to perpetrate independent thought. And he will doubtless go to his grave with a reputation of being scum--because people choose to believe the New Moralist who was "credible."

And on the other side we have Bill Clinton, who everyone knows had sordid sex in the oval office of the White House and lied about it and suborned perjury and obstructed justice--and was acquitted by a pusillanimous Senate, and finally not prosecuted at all by the Independent Counsel. Nothing happened to him, in other words. And we learned also that a woman says he actually raped her, and everybody yawns, even though the White House itself doesn't deny that there was something going on, but says it was "consensual." Consensual rape, that's rich! Tell that to Mike Tyson. Yeah, but see, in his mind, if she actually was in the same room with him, she "really wanted it, deep down."

(It was interesting to see people like Richard Cohen, the liberal columnist, eventually getting a bit disturbed by the sleaze. On March 3, 1999, he wrote that he thought he knew Bill Clinton, and now he's wondering. "Who is this guy?" he asked. I'll tell him who he is. He's a liar.)

But there are still plenty of people who admire the man, and will till the day he dies. (There are people who admire Stalin, for that matter, and some that still admire Hitler.) The point is that Bill Clinton is not going to suffer for what he did. Other people get life for rape, but he won't. And as to the future, he's home free. No one can bring up the charges again, or it's double jeopardy, and no one will dare touch him for anything he does from now on, no matter what it is--and so why shouldn't he keep doing what he damn well pleases?

Not even Monica suffered--though you can bet she would have if it hadn't been for that stained dress. It looks as if she's not only going to be rich, but will be the latest Victim the media put in the Church of the New Sanctity. So she's learned her lesson, hasn't she? If you want to really get ahead, sometimes you have to give one. And why not? What has she lost, really? Sure, the Ken Starrs of this world think she's a slut; but look at what all decent-minded people think of Ken Starr. Apparently Mommy and Daddy knew this; they seem to have been proud she was of service to the President, even if they didn't foresee what the service was.

There it is, ladies and gentlemen. There's the real issue in all of this. Why be decent, if what happened to Clarence Thomas is what you get? Why not do what you know is wrong, if it doesn't make any difference and is fun? If you're actually a lot better off for it?

And, in the last analysis, who cares even if other people suffer, as long as you come out ahead? Why should you put yourself out for other people? You're the one that matters to you. How does it do you any good if you suffer so other people will be happy? And don't give me that crap about how good you feel when you suffer to make other people happy. You know, "Give to the United Appeal and have that warm glow for the rest of the year." Better I should keep the money and buy a space heater.

Let's be realistic here. None of you like to be lied to, so you know that lying is wrong. Now, how many of you have lied? Oh? And how many of you lied and got away with it? Really! And I'll bet you feel really bad about yourself for that; you can't live with yourself, right?. I mean, everybody lies. So it's a "sin," I suppose, but everybody does it, and if you're clever at it, nobody's the wiser and nobody's harmed, so what's really wrong with it?

--You know what's wrong with it, as I said, because you don't like to be lied to, even if you aren't harmed by it. If someone says he's telling you the facts, you want what he thinks the facts are, not some fantasy that serves his purpose.

Well sure, but what difference does it make?

Precisely.

To do what is wrong is for you to act as if you weren't what you are: to pretend that you're something that you know you aren't. We're not talking about mistakes here; we're talking about those times when you know that what you're doing is inconsistent with what you are (however you define it), and you knowingly and deliberately choose to do it--because if you don't, you stand to lose a lot more than you gain. You're a fool if you don't act immorally, because you're a fool if you deliberately bring harm on yourself.

And let's face it, if you don't do what's immoral, you can bring tremendous harm on yourself. If Bill Clinton hadn't lied and obstructed Ken Starr's investigation in such a clever way, he'd be, not the first elected President to be impeached, but the first President to be impeached and thrown out of office--with no legacy except that. As it is, he had two more years as President, and the American people, as usual, had an attention span of two weeks. (And think of all the people who are just aglow with admiration at how clever he was!)

One time when I was discussing this sort of thing in class, a woman came to my office after the session and told me, "I actually am an inmate at a minimum-security prison around here; they let me out to attend class. The reason I'm in prison is that I came home one night to find my husband lying on the floor in a pool of blood, and a gun beside him. I fainted, and woke up with a policeman looking down at me. They arrested me, and I was told by the public defender (I'm a poor woman) that if I pled guilty to a lesser charge, I'd get a ten-year sentence, and with good behavior, I'd be out in two years; if I pled not guilty, it'd be murder, and he'd defend me, but he could guarantee I'd be found guilty, which is twenty-five years minimum, and it would be ten years before I could get out. What could I do? I have two kids. This is my second year." She knew that it was wrong to lie, and very wrong to lie in court (otherwise why would she be telling me?); but she believed she had to lie under oath, not only for her sake, but for the sake of the kids. And of course we now know that everyone lies under oath. Perjury is only perjury if you get found out--and not always even then, is it? The President had to admit to the Special Prosecutor that he deliberately made false statements under oath, after which his lawyer went before the microphones and said, "But that doesn't mean he lied! He never admitted that he lied!" Sure. It all depends on what "is" is.

Now you have a choice. You can say either that human beings should act as though they're human, or that human beings should do what is to their advantage. Because very often it's not possible to do both. Values (what lead you to the goals you want), as I said in the interlude after the Second New Commandment, are not the same as morals. Then why should we pay attention to morals?

But still, since the essence of humanity is to set goals for yourself and work to achieve them, then the human thing to do is to pursue your goals. What I'm saying here, however, is that the way (and sometimes the only way) to achieve these goals is to do the inhuman thing. But then that means that it's often human to do what is inhuman. That doesn't make sense.

Once again, don't give me the pablum that in the long run, the decent person will win out over the crook; open your eyes; it doesn't happen. Why are there so many crooks? Precisely because it so patently doesn't happen. Who would do what is inhuman if he knew that in addition to its being inhuman, he'd be worse off for doing it? You know darn well that if you got into an embarrassing situation, you'd probably lie your way out of it if you could. Why shouldn't you? And you know darn well that nothing beyond a momentary twinge is going to happen to you.

Or how many women are there who know that their fetuses are human beings, and that when they have an abortion, they're actually tearing their own child apart limb from limb? And how many women, knowing this, put it out of their minds and have the abortion anyway? And what happens to them? Sure, there's remorse, but they can finish their college career and become the doctor they always dreamed of being, and can help thousands--can save hundreds of lives--and the pro-choicers they meet will applaud their courage, and even the pro-lifers will sympathize. And they justify themselves by the fact that it was such an "agonizing decision." See, in the New Morality, the more you emote about it, the more noble and righteous your heinous act becomes.

But suppose they don't make the agonizing decision, and they don't have the abortion. Do you think that there's no remorse at the life they had to give up? Do you think there'd be no agony here? Why do you think they made the decision the way they did in the first place? And the point is, why shouldn't they have? What have they got to lose?

"Integrity," you say. Integrity! Big deal! Integrity doesn't put food on the table, and who's got integrity anyway? We've all lied, haven't we? We've all pretended that things aren't the way they really are, and we get along just fine, don't we? Why shouldn't we go on doing it?

Because it's not right, damn it! True, but who cares? If it gets you what you want, and if you do the right thing and are miserable for the rest of your life, then what's the percentage? And it's so simple to be like Billy the Clint and Jesse Jackson and just to "put all this behind us" and get on with our life as if it never happened. And it never did happen if we don't think about it. Remember the First Great New Commandment.

So it's human to do what's inhuman. But that doesn't make sense.

But is this life all there is?

You remember way back in the interlude after the First New Commandment, I talked about the basis of science, that it wasn't actually measurement, but confronting some apparently contradictory set of facts, the assumption being that reality can't really contradict itself. Well, what I've been trying to say here is that human life is so constructed that it almost inevitably runs into a contradiction. It's almost impossible to set goals for yourself and pursue them without somewhere along the line--often, in fact--facing a situation where you have to either give up the goal or violate your present reality; where you have to contradict that "true reality" of yours that is the goal, or the actual reality which is your present self. And either of these is contrary to what it is to be human.

Human life would make sense if the only way we could frustrate ourselves (that is, pursue a goal we couldn't reach) would be to do what is inconsistent with what we now are. That is, if lying inevitably kept you from what it was you wanted to achieve by the lie, no one would lie; if murder automatically made you worse off for killing the other person, no one would be murdered. That way, the human thing to do would also be the advantageous thing to do, and what is disadvantageous would automatically be inhuman.

But that's not the way things are; and so life as we observe it doesn't make sense. At least, if this life is all there is.

And there are other ways in which life as we observe it doesn't make sense. There's a long story here which I'm just going to sketch in an extremely superficial way; if you want a longer discussion of it, see my Living Bodies or Modes of the Finite.

(1) I mentioned that consciousness, in which the conscious act reacts to itself reacting as well as to what it is reacting to, implies that consciousness can't have a degree (or it would be twice as great as it is, which is absurd), and therefore is spiritual and not a form of energy. But if it is spiritual, then by definition, it can't "run down," which would be to lose some of itself--which that would imply that it had a degree, which can be lessened. So consciousness ought not to be able to go out of existence. Now when we sleep, there's a sense in which our consciousness "goes out of existence"; but since it wakes up again, it was only dormant. But when we die, it seems there's no consciousness any more. That doesn't make sense; it doesn't need energy to act, and so why should it stop acting when we die?

(2) The thrust of life, as is obvious, is self-preservation. Every living thing, as living, tries to continue living as long as possible, fighting at every moment the tendency it has as a body to run down and decay. This reinforces the notion I was mentioning about consciousness, which is a form of life, after all. Life is greater than the energy of the body; it controls the energy of the body, and lifts it beyond its capabilities as energy; and as life, it tends to keep going as long as it can.

But if consciousness could survive death because it is spiritual, and consciousness is a form of life, and life tends to go on as long as it is capable of going on, then it doesn't make sense for conscious life to stop at death. That is, its essence as life would say that if it could survive death, it would; and its essence as spiritual says that it can. Therefore, the conclusion is that it does.

(3) The essence of the human being as free, as I have repeatedly said, is, within the limits given by his genes, to set his own goal for himself and to work to achieve it: to define himself and then work to achieve that definition. Now a being in process is in a self-contradictory situation; its true reality is the goal at the end of the process (because it can't exist as it now exists, and that's what moves it toward the goal, where it can exist); so as it now exists it both is and is not itself. It is unstable, in other words, because it can't exist as it is, and must act to achieve the final equilibrium--just as a rock, when released, can't stay up in the air, but must fall down to the lowest place available to it.

Thus, once you have set the goal for yourself, and said, "I will be X," and started working toward it, your reality is in a self-contradictory condition that can only be resolved by being at the goal; you aren't really yourself--you're only incompletely yourself, as Aristotle would say--until you've achieved your goal.

But suppose you die before you've attained your goal. Then your whole life has been a contradiction, because (as I was just saying) it takes its only real meaning from the goal you gave it, and that meaning is never achieved. Well then, suppose you do attain your goal. You will find that you immediately have at least one other goal: that of not losing what you've attained. "To be thus is nothing," said Macbeth on being made King, "but to be safely thus."

In a way, having to give up a goal you've attained is even worse than dying in the pursuit of it, because when you've attained your goal, you know who you are, and that you're what you want to be. You are completely yourself. So if you give it up, you have to give up yourself, and what could be more self-contradictory than that? "Smart lad," A. E. Housman says to the athlete dying young, "to slip betimes away/from fields where glory does not stay." Which is worse, to be an athlete who dies just before the pinnacle of his powers, or someone like Hank Aaron, who has to go on living without doing the one thing that made life really worth it?

The point, of course, is that neither of these really makes sense. And the more ambitious you are, the worse it gets. If you try the really human, lofty, heroic things, you can almost guarantee a life of frustration; if you set your goals low, then you may be able to fulfill them at least for a while. So the thing to do, as Epicurus said, is to live your life just on this side of boredom; that way, when you come to die, it won't be any great loss, and you can claim that it was, on the whole, happier than it was unhappy.

If life ends with death, this is the meaning of life; don't be ambitious; don't try to do great things, because you'll only make yourself miserable, and for what? You'll never get what you want anyway--or if you get it, you'll have to give it up, which is worse. Actually, it isn't just Epicurus who holds this. Buddhism and Hindu philosophy in general teach that involvement in this world is the way to unhappiness. That is, don't set goals for yourself, and you'll be happy; set the goal of goallessness if you want to make sense out of life.

But this means that, since humans are goal-setters, and yet die, then it doesn't make sense to set goals, least of all, lofty human goals. What it means to be human is directly contradicted when you spell it out in practice, if life ends with death. And yet, it's not really humanly possible to avoid setting goals, as Jean-Paul Sartre points out; every time you choose, you inevitably set a goal for yourself. And you can't avoid choosing when confronted with alternatives, because to choose not to choose (to let circumstances determine the outcome) is to choose. So we can't help setting goals, and we can't achieve the goals we set. It doesn't make sense. Do you wonder why people like Sartre concluded that life is absurd?

(4) Now if we add to this what I was saying in the previous section--that the goals we do set can be best achieved, at least temporarily, if we violate the reality of ourselves who pursue these goals--we have another way in which the essence of human life contradicts itself. All these four things mean that life is a contradiction unless there is a life after death, such that the goals you set for yourself will be achieved, provided only that they are not themselves self-contradictory and impossible--in which case, there's no way they can be achieved.

What do I mean by that? When a person chooses something morally wrong, he knows that he's pretending to be what he really isn't; so he has a goal for himself that he knows (in some respect) can't really be achieved. I mentioned early on the person who has a sex change. He knows he doesn't really change his sex, and this is what he'd really like; but he can act as if he'd done it by the operation, and so he can achieve more of his goal than if he didn't have the operation. A thief would like to have the thing he steals belong to him, and he can't do that by taking it; but he can use it as if it did, and so most of his goal is achieved, though there's this niggling bit that it doesn't really belong to him that he can't do anything about. The murderer wants his own life to be inviolate (because he's human); but he kills the other human as if the other person weren't really human and human life wasn't inviolate.

And so on. There's always something about the immoral choice that sets up a goal that can't in principle be achieved, because it's a contradiction in terms. And so every immoral choice is in part frustrating; necessarily so. What I was talking about in the preceding section is that in this life it's not as frustrating as doing the right thing and giving up the main goal you were pursuing.

So what have I done by all of this? I've sketched out a case that this life can't be all there is to life. If it is, then our consciousness contradicts itself, because it need not stop with death, and yet it does; our life contradicts itself, because its essence is to preserve itself, and it stops when it could in principle continue; human choice contradicts itself, because it necessarily involves setting a goals which are the only meaning your life has, but goals which, in the last analysis, can't be fulfilled; and acting consistently with what you are contradicts itself, because this guarantees that you'll be farthest from achieving the goals you set for yourself. The most important aspects of human life are simply absurd and self-contradictory if our life ends with death.

From which it follows that conscious life must continue after death, in such a way that all legitimate goals we set will be achieved, and all self-contradictory ones will lead to a worse condition than if we had not set them.

Now to those who say, "Oh, puh-leeze! You expect us to believe that crap?" I answer, "Why not? You believe that there are such things as radio waves, which are in principle unobservable, simply on the grounds that without them, it doesn't make sense that the receiver receives what the transmitter sends. When you think about it, you have no problem believing that you can throw little pictures invisibly through the nothingness from the moon or Mars to the earth; that's pretty wild, wouldn't you say? You believe that there were dinosaurs, even though no one has ever seen one, because otherwise the bones don't make sense."

New-morality science has so entrenched itself that any evidence that there might be something not material is rejected out of hand; whereas the most fantastic theories, if they deal with materiality, are accepted without batting an eye. After all, Einstein said, in essence, that straight lines in the presence of massive bodies are what normal people would call curves; there isn't any force acting on things; it's just that things follow the geometry of nothing, and time is part of space. Geometry of nothing? Time is part of space? Why do scientists accept this kind of thing? Because otherwise, what we observe doesn't make sense. Exactly.

The ultimate gamble.

Let me now be a little Pascalian. You are now confronted with two alternatives. Either, as I say, life goes on after death in such a way that if you're moral, you'll achieve all your ambitions, and if you're immoral, you'll be more frustrated than if you were moral--or it doesn't, and when you die, there's nothing. You have to bet one way or the other, because you won't be able to verify it for yourself until it's too late.

If you bet that life doesn't continue after death, you're a New Moralist, essentially; and what this implies is that you should be smart, be a Clinton, and never mind being moral. You should, of course, appear moral if you can get away with it, because that way, people will think highly of you and your life will be that much easier. But don't be moral whenever it's to your disadvantage, because then you're a fool. Or rather, since "to be immoral" is to act inhumanly, then what you do is follow the First New Commandment and simply redefine "humanity" to be what you're "comfortable with." It's only good in the abstract to do what's objectively right; in the concrete, you do what will get you where you want to go.

But before you leap too quickly on this Clintonian bandwagon, consider the implications. What you're saying is that Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein, and Fidel Castro, to name just a few, did what people should do. They've done just fine for themselves, thank you, and if there's a few million Georgians starved to death or a few hundred Kurds gassed, so what? Notice Saddam Hussein. His people seem to love him; they hate the Great Satan of the United States, who's causing all their misery. (And, given what I've said in this book about the New Morality, of which the United States is a prime exponent, could it be that they might just have a point?) Fidel also is doing quite nicely, even if the Cubans are miserable--but that again is our fault, not his, of course. And what do you want to bet that each of these won't die in their beds and be mourned by thousands?

What are these people doing but betting that this life is all there is, and that after it there's just nothing? If after this life there is nothing, then they'd be idiots to do anything but what they've done. The fact that because of them millions of humans have been treated like cockroaches is irrelevant; they have managed to achieve the most that human beings can achieve. You never get anywhere in this life without walking on other people's heads.

So this kind of thing is what really makes sense out of life. Well it does, if this life is all there is. But then, life itself doesn't make sense.

--Unless there's a life after death. You can bet that way. And, as I said, there's evidence to support you. Real evidence, though not, I admit, knock-you-in-the-eye convincing evidence.

And in Living Bodies and Modes of the Finite I drew some conclusions about what this life after death would have to be like, based on the evidence for saying that there is one. First of all, since only bodies can change, the life after death, as conscious life, would have to be in complete equilibrium, totally unchanging (though eternally active). You can't die or develop any further.

Secondly, since in this life, consciousness (though not the same as the brain's activity) depends on the brain's activity, it follows that when the brain stops putting out energy, either all consciousness ceases (in which case, there's no life after death, so we can rule that out), or consciousness becomes total consciousness--since there's no longer any nerve to determine which act you will have and which you will not have.

Presumably, then, when you die, you don't go to sleep, but you wake up--with every single act you've ever had present to you "all at once," so to speak, in all its vividness, just as you originally lived it. (There's a hint of verification of this, by the way, in many so-called "near-death experiences," in which the person's whole life flashes before him at once.) In other words, after death you are your absolutely complete self: the act of consciousness which is expressed in this sentence, "So this is what it really means to be me." This is the act that never ends, the act by which you are all that you have made yourself.

But this act contains also all the choices you've made (they're conscious acts), together with the goals they imply. If those choices were immoral, then, as I said, you've set up a goal in them which is in principle impossible of achievement, and so is necessarily frustrating. And since you can no longer change, that frustration never disappears; you spend eternity striving for a goal you know you can't reach, determined to reach it, knowing that you never will.

The interesting thing is that even in this life, we can't get rid of an act of consciousness once we've made it. You can forget it, but it's there, as you can test by simply sending energy into the proper nerves. In my sixties, I find myself waking up humming songs I learned in Kindergarten, which I haven't thought of for decades. And if I'm not careful, I'm apt to think of some of the really awful things that have happened to me, and there they are again after all these years, in all their agonizing vividness. Ask someone who's been through combat.

But when you lose your brain's nerves, it's got to be all or nothing--and the evidence seems to indicate that it's all.

So once you've made an immoral choice, you're stuck. You may forget it for years and years--for the rest of this life--but it's there, with its goal you want to achieve but can't. And it will wake up, in all its vividness, once you die, and you will forever be striving for the impossible, knowing (a) that it's impossible, and (b) that you could have had it, if only you had turned away from this immoral means and done the right thing, in spite of the fact that it seemed that you wouldn't be able to attain it in this way.

Just think. If Bill Clinton had let Monica and Paula and Gennifer and Juanita and how many others alone, then whatever satisfaction he could have had from them he would eternally have, without the unfulfillable desire to make a wife of someone who wasn't his wife. Whatever he really wanted from them was something he couldn't really have--from them. But it was something he could have had, if he hadn't tried to find it in them. But now he never will. And he'll always want it, and always try to find it, knowing that it's not there.

You see, the other side of this coin is that goals that are not immoral, that are in principle possible, however unlikely, will be fulfilled after death. Otherwise, this aspect of life contradicts itself, and the immoral person is better off in the long run than the moral one, because the immoral person has at least partially fulfilled himself, while the moral one has foregone his goal to act consistently with his reality; and so it isn't his fault he didn't achieve it while he lived.

The meaning of life.

So what this theory basically says is that you were constructed in such a way that in this life, you decide what it is to be you, and to confirm that this is a true choice and not a daydream, you work to achieve that goal; and then after you die, you are what you have made yourself (you do what you have done and have chosen to do), forever and ever--always supposing that you didn't choose to do what is in principle impossible. In that case, you are eternally not your true, complete self, and are eternally trying to get there and eternally failing.

Presumably, this eternal frustration is the meaning of "the fires of hell," since fire has always been a metaphor for desire. I should point out, however, that eternal frustration doesn't necessarily imply complete frustration. The immoral person has never been absolutely depraved, and so, we can assume, is fulfilled in some respects, and only frustrated in others. I would guess that the degree of frustration depends on how important the impossible goal is in your life--and importance, as I said, like the goal itself, is subjectively established. Thus, a person who in a moment of weakness cheats on a test he didn't really need to cheat on will be eternally frustrated for this lapse, but the frustration will be minuscule; and so he could on balance be much more happy than unhappy forever; while a person who had to cheat or his whole future is ruined will find that his whole life turns on the impossible goal, and will be miserable.

Consider the suicide, on this view. He finds his life here so intolerable that he chooses (let's suppose he's not driven out of his mind by emotions, and actually chooses this) to go out of existence. This theory implies that he spends eternity trying to go out of existence because he can't stand existing--and knowing he can't ever actually go out of existence. No matter how horrible your life now is, don't take this way out; because this theory might just be true, and it's not worth it; you won't succeed in being nothing, and you won't be able to stop trying.

Makes sense out of being moral, doesn't it, in spite of what I said earlier in this chapter?

I can also add another probable conclusion, that the more often you do something which in itself is insignificant, the more important it becomes in your life, and the more of your personality is wrapped up in it. For instance, I gave up smoking a pipe on July 4, 1980--note that I still remember the date. By that time smoking was an act which I didn't really enjoy any more anyway; but after I quit, I spent a whole year unable to write, and I'm a compulsive writer; I write the way some people eat. As soon as I'd sit down at the typewriter (those were the old days), I'd automatically reach for the nonexistent pipe, and try to organize my thoughts without gazing at the keyboard through the miasma of tobacco smoke--and nothing would happen. My handwriting changed, and so did my personality, in some respects not for the better. I was amazed at how much of myself was involved in this little act; how important it had become to me, even in spite of the meager pleasure it offered. Ask anyone who smokes.

So the immoral choice is self-frustrating, and the degree of frustration depends on how much a part of your life it has become; it's just that you can't ever get rid of it. Notice what I'm talking about here is absolutely perfect poetic justice. There is no "punishment" for sin; the punishment is the sin; the sin is what the frustration is, because the sin precisely consists in wanting what you know is impossible and refusing to accept the limitations you can't do anything about. Many people want to commit the sin and escape the punishment for it; but that's a contradiction in terms: what they want is to frustrate themselves without being frustrated.

We can seem to do this in this life, because good and bad things happen to us in this life based on our acts, irrespective of what our choices are. A man who tries to murder another one, and sneaks into his hospital room and scares him enough so that the patient recovers from his sickness has chosen to kill him, but has actually saved his life, and let us say is hailed as a hero for it. And yet, it doesn't make sense to be rewarded for the opposite of what you intended; and for life to make sense, the choice itself (which is the only thing, in the last analysis, we have absolute control over) is what should ultimately have its good and bad effect. And it does, but only after death, if this theory is true.

Well, but suppose you repent. Doesn't that solve the problem? Not at all, any more than if you cut off your arm, your being sorry will put it back on. Repentance simply adds another unrealistic choice saying, "If I had it to do over again (which I don't) I wouldn't do it; I choose not to have done what I did." You can't erase a choice once you've made it, any more than you can erase any other act of your consciousness; the old choice is there along with the contradictory new choice, forever and ever, fighting with each other.

Now I submit that any temporary suffering you endure in this life, however severe, will always be less than eternal frustration, however insignificant the frustration might be. Let me take an extreme example. Let us say that you are captured by the enemy and you can save all two hundred million of your people from nuclear destruction if you tell a lie. It's worth it, right? Wrong. Let us say that the minor frustration you endure for a million years is equal to the pain of the average person's death by the nuclear blast. Then a million years after you die, the amount of suffering you have experienced balances out the suffering you saved one person among the two hundred million. Fine. Now multiply that million years by two hundred million, and it's a wash; you've added the same amount of suffering you saved people from. But that's just the beginning of eternity, and from then on, it's a net loss.

"Well," comes the objection, "but you did save other people's lives." No you didn't. They all died anyway, didn't they? Not by a nuclear blast, but somehow. And the point of this theory is that death is a transition to completeness, not the disaster to end all disasters. Each person who died achieves after death (a) all that he actually accomplished in this life, and (b) all that he intended to accomplish; and so he is as completely fulfilled as he wishes to be, eternally. The few moments we have in this life vanish to a point when considered in relation to the life we live after we die; that is our life; this life is simply a kind of gestation. You might just as well mourn the death of a seed while you look at the plant that grew from it as repine over the fact of somebody's death, if there's such a thing as eternal fulfillment afterwards.

But the point here is that you must never, ever, deliberately do what is morally wrong, or you have locked yourself into a box you can't get out of, and you're frustrated eternally. And that's why, whether you're a New Moralist or an Old Moralist, you know you can't violate the code you think is the right one, no matter how much you might gain from it. There seems to be something built into us which says, "It's not just bad to do what's inhuman; I had better not do it." And is this surprising, if there is a God who made us master over our lives, but gave us limitations which we can't surpass and must accept?

"But God loves me too much to do a thing like this to me!" I beg your pardon; he loves you too much not to do it, if that's what you want. Love is in essence respect for the reality of the beloved, not imposing one's own will on him by force. God made you free, but limited; you can choose to be anything; but you can only be human--and you know this. You've got plenty of wiggle room within the limits of human possibilities; but once you go outside those possibilities (and know you're doing it), what you're saying is, "What I really want is to be frustrated. I'd rather be frustrated pursuing this chimera than content myself with the limitations of my human reality."

Fine; if that's what you want, then that's what God wants for you, because that's what you've made yourself, which means that it's his eternal plan for you too. It would destroy your essence if He said, "Now laddie, you don't really want that; I know what's good for you, and I'm going to give it to you even if you hate it." If I happen to think that Beethoven's Missa Solemnis is better music than Snoop Doggy Dogg's stuff, and I drag you to a concert and have you sit through three hours of it, have I made you happy? Happiness is subjectively determined, remember, by the goals you freely set; you can't make a person happy by substituting something else for the goal he wants. And the point is that the sinner would be more unhappy accepting the limitations he was born with; and not even God can make him happier by making him more miserable.

Put it another way: This life consists in figuring out and deciding what "happiness" means in your case. Some people perversely define frustration as greater happiness than its lack. Those people too get what they ask for, forever and ever. That's what it means to be free.

Then we're all damned.

But since we've all sinned, then all of us are more or less eternally frustrated, and there's nothing we can do about it. You're catching on. And this, unfortunately, is as far as philosophy goes. But, as I mentioned, I happen to believe that this isn't the whole truth of life.

We've all made a mess of our lives; but no one of us realized, when we sinned, the full implications of the sin--though it was no sin unless we had some idea that it was a self-defeating act. Hence, our whole personality, unlike that of, say, Satan, was not wrapped up in this act, even if, as I mentioned with my smoking, more of it might be than we realized when we did it.

And in this life, we can change; our whole life is not present to us; it stretches out from the past to the future. Hence, it is possible for God to erase the choice as an operative choice (as long as we live in our bodies) without destroying our reality. There's no particular reason why he should do this, since we did deliberately make the choice; but he could if he wanted to. It would be a kind of miracle, because we can't get rid of the choice by our own efforts; but he can do it, since everything about us is ultimately under his control.

This, by the way, is what is meant by "supernatural." Supernatural doesn't mean against nature, or impossible, but impossible by nature left to itself. For instance, if you send a birthday card to your mother and you take your dog and hold a pen in its paw and guide the paw and pen to write "Trixie" on the card, the dog's signature is a supernatural act. The dog couldn't write its name; but its paw could be directed to do it by a higher power--in this case, yours.

And, since, as I said, God can do this for us, I believe he does do it, under two conditions: First, since the choice does in fact permeate our whole personality, we must be willing to reject the self we have made for ourselves up to this point, and be willing to be made over into someone else we know not who. ("Unless you deny yourself, you cannot enter.")

Let me expand on this a minute. Those who treat alcoholics and smokers and drug addicts know that the real problem with these people is not giving up the act. The drinker's problem isn't that he has to give up drinking; he has to give up the drinker. And who will he be after he's done it? His whole life is tied up with having alcohol available in case he needs it. What will he be if it's not there any more?

No one can tell him. He has to make an act of faith that he will find himself--a different self, but himself--on the other side, and be willing to say, "All right, I refuse to be myself. But I can't give myself up by myself. How could I? I'm me. I'm helpless. You take me away from myself; make me into someone else. I trust you that the self will be someone I'll be glad I became." This is what I'm talking about.

The second thing is that the person has to be willing to love God more than he loves himself. And that's not so hard, once you make the first leap. The fact is that you aren't the most important person in the universe; objectively, you have no importance whatever, because importance, as I've mentioned, is subjective. You can regard yourself as just another creature of a loving God, a creature God as made to create himself unto his own image and likeness, and now has rescued to be able to do it without the botch the creature made of it up to now.

And there's an added fillip to this. Once you have given yourself up, rejected yourself, and asked God to remake you, he remakes you in two ways: You are first of all the finite self that you choose with your newly-partly-erased life to be; but secondly, your consciousness (which in the abstract is unlimited, but in practice must limit itself) is miraculously expanded so that it also thinks The Infinite Thought, whose name is YHWH, and who calls Himself Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. "It is not I who live any more," says St. Paul; "Christ, the Prince, lives in me." "I pray," says Jesus at the Last Supper, "that they will all be one and the same thing [hen, the neuter singular of "one"; one thing] in us, just exactly [hosper, not hos] as you are one in me and I am one in you, Father." Jesus is one "with" God in that he is God; in exactly the same way, we are made one thing in Him. "We will be like him, because we will see him as he is," says St. John. We will, in some sense, be God, without losing the finite self we are.

--Don't ask me. I'm just telling you what's there in the Book I believe in. I don't understand it.

In fact, no one knows what this entails; no one can desire it, because it is inconceivable. It is a pure gift, beyond anything we can imagine. But it is promised us, if Christianity is true. If it isn't, of course, then we still have our sins, and they will be with us eternally.

"But you can't believe all this! It's all just wishful thinking; it's too good to be true!" I beg your pardon. If there is a God who needs nothing from this world (and there is; I can prove it), and therefore who created us purely and simply for our sake and not for his own amusement, isn't it too good not to be true? What else would you expect?

But there's a catch.

Still, it's not all quite that rosy and simple. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that what I said above might actually be true. What it means is that you'll be just exactly what you choose to be, no more and no less, forever and ever and ever; and even if you made perverse and stupid choices, if you actually want to get rid of them, you are rescued from them, and your eternal life won't be frustrated by them.

So what's the problem? Just this. You get what you choose, not what you would like to have. You have to want it enough to say, "Yes, that's what I'm going to be; I'll start work on that right now." You don't have to make it the be-all and end-all of your life; it doesn't have to be your only goal; but it has to be an actual goal, not just a daydream.

Let me tell you a Blairian parable. There was a man who was assistant office manager in a firm; and it happened that his desk looked out into the door of the president's office, where he could see the eight-foot mahogany desk with its secretary-arranged little piles of papers to sign, and behind it the recliner chair--and the closet with the golf clubs for "power conferences." He would dream, "What I wouldn't give to be president! Look at the life he lives!"

Now it came to pass one day that the manager of that little section of the office moved up, and the personnel director said to our hero, "The manager's slot is open, and you're the logical choice. What do you say?" And our friend became afraid. He answered, "Look, it's Friday. Could I have the weekend to think it over?" The director said, "Sure, no problem. But I want a definite answer by Monday; we can't let that post go vacant."

And over the weekend, our man could not sleep. He thought, "How often have I seen the manager about to make a foolish decision that would have cost the company money, and maybe himself his job; and I saved him by pointing out where he was going wrong. If I do something like that, who is going to save me? I could lose my job."

And so on the following Monday, he said to the personnel director, "Really, Smith is an up-and-coming guy who needs the extra salary more than I do; I think he'd do a fine job. And if I stay where I am, I can steer him right if he's going to do something wrong. I think you'd be better off with him, actually." And the director answered, saying, "Actually, I'm glad to hear you say that. We considered him, but felt we had to ask you first, because you're next in line. You're sure this is the way you want it?" "Oh yes," said the man.

And so the man kept his little position and his desk, and kept looking through the door of the president's office and saying to himself, "What I wouldn't give to be president of this company!"

The moral? He'd give anything not to be president of the company. What is the president except the one who is responsible for all the decisions of the whole company? And this man didn't want the responsibility for the little decisions of his small corner of it. And so, he had defined his happiness--his eternal happiness--to be sitting there at that desk, looking through the door to the president's office, and dreaming of being something he would reject if he were actually offered it.

That's what I mean by saying you have to actually make the choice. It's not enough to say "wouldn't it be nice if..." You have to say, "I'm going to have it; at least, I'm going to try." You'll be what you've chosen to be--and you can choose to be anything that's not a contradiction in terms--but you have to choose to be it. God is not going to give you after you die something you had a chance to go for and decided wasn't worth it.

You may have noticed in the course of this book how many things I've said I "do." I'm an amateur in just about everything. My field of expertise is philosophy, and specifically two Greek words that Aristotle used; I know more than anybody in the whole world about those two words. But that's not something to base a life on. So I paint paintings, and given a couple of art shows (and sold some); I used to sing (until I found out what my voice sounded like to others), and plan to do some composing now that I've retired; I've acted in amateur theater, and even made money playing Charles Dickens reading his novels and I still do a solo performance of John's Gospel; I invented a camera which can take more-or-less three-dimensional pictures (which I call "natural-eye" pictures) you can see without glasses or special processing; I've translated the New Testament and gone into detail in physics and biology, and I think I've been able to see some things there that not even physicists or biologists have; I've written novels (some of which I hope will be published some day); I lift weights; I have, of course, taught for years, just about every aspect of philosophy.

Why am I saying this? Not to make you think, "Wow! What a person Blair is!" What am I? Nobody. The point, and the only reason for mentioning all of this is that I believe in what I was just saying--at least enough so that I think it's worth a try. So what if I'm not Cézanne or Monet? So what if I'm not Pavarotti or Beethoven? So what if I'm not Einstein or Tolstoy or Aristotle or Tyndale or Daguerre or Leonardo? These things interest me, and I see no reason for not pursuing my interest. As G. K. Chesterton once said, "If a thing is worth doing at all, it's worth doing badly." Many of the things I've done wouldn't have been done at all if I hadn't undertaken them, because there's nobody else with the weirdo point of view that I have who would even bother to do them. And who knows? Even if what I've done is mediocre or worse, it may be a start for somebody else to pursue to great heights. If it's possible for you, as the Army says, to "be all that you can be," I intend to be something really complex.

Because, even if I fail now, and I'm right, I'll succeed after I die. And I'll tell you a not-very-well-kept secret: my ambition in life is to change the way the world thinks for the next thousand years--minimum (always supposing the world has that much time left). Why not? Socrates did it, and he never wrote a word; he's still doing it through Plato's writings. St. Augustine did it; Thomas Aquinas did it. Why not me?

You see, the beauty of this theory is that your success after death doesn't depend on your actual abilities, but your ambition. All you have to do is try. And the higher you set your goals, the more your life here will be a failure and a frustration, because what you do here depends on your abilities and your luck; but your life after death is the real life, and that just depends on what you tried to do--provided always that you didn't cheat to get there.

My students would sometimes laugh at me when I told them what my ambition was. They could see what I'd accomplished. There I was, wanting to change the lives of millions upon millions of people, give them hope and ambition, inspire them to strive for greatness, and I was talking to maybe twenty people, perhaps five of whom were anything but bored right out of their minds--especially when I got to the "not cheating" part. And when I dared to bring up sex--well. And in my whole career of teaching, I've had to print my books myself, because publishers I've sent them to have said, "Well sure, that's very nice and interesting and everything, but who's going to use it except you in class; we can't make money that way." And they have a point.

And now I'm retired, and not even teaching any more; and so far I haven't even got a nibble to the queries I've sent out about this book. But I'm not asking for your sympathy any more than I was asking for your admiration a minute ago. My life is an experiment.

If I'm right, two hundred years from now, people will be talking about George Blair the way they talk now about David Hume or Thomas Aquinas, or Leonardo--because, after all, part of the experiment is to prove that the Renaissance Man isn't impossible in our day and age. Not that it matters that they'll be talking about me--except in this sense: it matters because of the prediction I'm making now. This son of a piano tuner and a farmer's daughter, a blind man and an alcoholic, the dope of the family, changed the course of world culture from one headed for disaster to one headed for hope and glory. And that must be because he was right. Therefore, let's get on the bandwagon and set lofty goals for ourselves. He did it, why can't we?

And if I'm wrong, well, I will have tried. No one will know about me two hundred years from now; but then I won't be anything two hundred years from now, and nothingness won't care that nobody knows about it. But my life up to now, at least, has been fascinating. Not a lot of fun, I'll admit, in many ways; but certainly interesting; and it makes sense. How few in our present age can make that statement!

Notice something very important: It simply doesn't matter what you are now, whether you're black or white or Asian or Indian or male or female or handsome or ugly or short or tall, or whether you were abused as a child or whether you had a wonderful life; what matters is what you choose to be; and in the last analysis, that's all that matters, because that's what you will be forever and ever. Just don't give up and keep trying.

You'll fail, in this life. So what. Fail forward, and I'll see you on the other side--millions upon millions of you, I hope; and I'll modestly laugh when you tell me, "Without you I never would have even thought of trying to be what I am, and look at me! I made it!" and I'll say, "I know; isn't God wonderful?"

Think of it. What more can you ask out of life than to get out of it exactly what you ask of it, forever and ever and ever? And yet that's the conclusion that seems to emerge if you have the courage to face all the evidence about what life is, and face it squarely, without the bias that life is at bottom a fraud and a cheat that cons us into thinking we're in control and our life can make sense, even though it really doesn't.

Well, maybe it doesn't. But maybe--just maybe--it does. Is it worth a try? That's up to you.