Letter #7: A Happenstance of Atoms

The Human Experience is no Illusion

Mon Cher Spensoir,

I read about this electric Johnson guy too! And no, that creepy old man hanging around outside your house with a syringe wasn’t me coming for your blood. It was just a guy who looked like me and who had a very hard time getting home to your mother after he was spotted by a passing patrol car.

But your point that Johnson, with his pitiful quest for not-even-immortality, has taken “exactly the opposite of our worldview,” is not only correct but necessarily correct. When we go back to the essay that started this month’s conversation — Those Who Remain — we find our friend Ivan Karamazov making the case. “For every individual…who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and…egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognized as the inevitable, the most rational, even honorable outcome of his position.” [bold and italics mine]

In my last letter, I pointed out that we know ourselves in the unity of our memory but that our memory cannot contain the self who remembers — which indicates that the whole self is held in the mind of our old pal Uncle God. It’s from this unity that our perceptions, both physical and moral, derive their legitimacy. I know I must travel north to get to Canada and I know that abortion is an evil. I could be wrong in this knowledge, but the very fact that I know I could be wrong shows that I could be right, and that I’m capable of perceiving rightly. The human experience is not an illusion — if it were, all science and philosophy, all kindness and conversation, would be meaningless.

But if we’re just a happenstance of Democritus’s atoms, our conscience is mere static, and the sadistic Marquis de Sade was right when he said, “Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.” If my self is an illusion, so is yours, so why should I not serve my own ego even unto crime, as Ivan said?

What greater reversal of the Golden Rule could there be than to put your own life above the life of your children? To invigorate yourself with their blood, to abort them in service to your freedom, to sacrifice them to win the favor of your idols? As you know, the ancient valley where children were burned in sacrifice was called Gehenna. Christ used the name as a synonym for hell. Likewise Planned Parenthood.

All that said, your refusal to send a glob or two of refreshing hemoglobin to your dear old Dad hints at ingratitude – and so I end this week’s conversation in a sulk of disgruntlement and move on to tomorrow’s (absolutely brilliant) commentary on a work of art for paid subscribers.

Yer rapidly decaying,

Dad