A Modest Proposal in Light of the 21st Century

This essay is inspired by Jonathon Swift's "A Modest Proposal" which too uses satire to make point. I do turn sincere though- even passionate by the end.

I'm still editing this piece so if you have any suggestions, I'm interested in reading them.

Mike

For the coming to grips with what seems like an intractable failure 
to feel our selves constantly astonished by this ability 
we have to live the human life
—whether our roots be planted in science or religion—
I offer this modest proposal to move us more coherently toward this failure.
 Or, The Making of a Cynic, and the Making of His Recovery.

As I write this with you in mind dear reader, I realize, and even take for granted, that you are situated in a space while reading this. Space has such a generic sense about it doesn't it? Yet at the same time, it's incredibly esoteric; how many of us have been beyond the earth's atmosphere?

So I'm finding myself becoming quite affectionate over the simple word place- which feels like a sibling of the word space to me. Notice for instance, that when you look around, you're likely experiencing something distinct about your surroundings. You might even be able to discern a style. And If you're in your own place, beyond style, you're experiencing intimacy because of the very fact that you filled your space with things; your things, in your space, transform's it from something generic, to something personal. How different this is from a nest. A nest guards its inhabitants from the light of cold thermodynamics. A place in human life however, does more. 

[What I wonder is, what's this "more" that creates warmth, yet is a kind of warmth that can't be illuminated by the study of thermodynamics?.]

One of those things in my place where I'm writing this, is my 90's era Bianchi road bike, with its beautifully lugged steel frame painted in their classic sea-foam green that Bianchi named "celeste". I took this bike to its ultimate level though, when I trekked through the forest of eBay,and piece by piece, collected a full group of Campagnolo C-Record era components; mounting them, I witnessed first hand the phenomenon of "something becoming greater than its parts." This quintessential export of Italy sings aria's from the stage between art and mechanics. (Most of the time this bike serves as art for me in this place, as I prefer to ride it as a special occasion and leave it to my other 90's era road bikes to shoulder the load of riding.) Besides this work of art,  among other things turning this space into place, are books containing the thoughts and times of their authors in their place; a wine glass from last night sporting a bit of red residue of a wine that came from a place we've called California; a window that overlooks a residential street in the city of Minneapolis- which is a name that combines the language of the American Indian with that of the ancient Greek and means "city of lakes". 

Speaking of ancient, (I admit- a gratuitous transition...) let's point the lens of our consideration of place, back to those moments when a biological organism entered into the possibility of being human and felt for the first time the weight of the night time sky; their environment became a new place and compare that to ours.

If you would, consider another experience of space, and recall those moments when staring into the nighttime sky, you experienced a quiet but dense sense of awe. Most likely, you felt your true size handed to you as you stood beneath the night's infinite depth. Even though that infinite night was bedazzled in stars and robed in magic, it probably felt as ominous as it did majestic. It was in moments like we're recalling here, where the word, "awe" was invented. 

In fact, when I imagine that time so long ago, when those of us alive today were given the originating birth, I wonder if those first ancestors, being so new to the experience of something being ominous, first used fire to make a gathering place where they could share warmth and band together in holding the night's ominous portion at bay? Would there after all, have been any better means for them to experience peace along side their awe? Maybe it was only then did they finally get the idea for using a "camp fire" to cook their meat instead of eating it raw. But I'm digressing . . . while I'm willing to be grateful for their invention of cooking (my grills are charcoal- not gas) they can keep their superstitious ways of shared campfires: as we moderns know, it's the power of big houses, big cars, and big accumulation that truly staves the night. 

Back to your space, my space, and outer space. 

We now know, through the eyes of scientific discovery, that even though outer space is infinite, its most prevalent characteristic is sameness. The vast sweep of basic black is all pretty much the same any where you look, as orbs made of compacted dirt or gas revolve around suns according to an age-old code which Newton unlocked only 400 years ago, but in which planets have been stuck for billions. In fact, just a couple of generations ago, Einstein refined Newton's thinking and amplified how much the universe exists through sameness. He showed us that planets weren't just flying freely according to laws of motion, more, they're "rolling along ruts grooved into the fabric of space-time," in some incessant keeping of sameness, by going around, and round, and round;  around, and round, and round in the same ruts over a length of time too long to humanly fathom. (I have a hard time eating leftovers two nights in a row; being forced to walk in the same circle over and over? Can anyone say Hell?) 

Maybe our awe is misplaced. Maybe not.

Everywhere in the universe sameness rules the day but for one place: a planet we call with affection, "The Little Blue Dot;" with scientific acumen, "Earth;" with the experience of being humanly alive, "Eden".

As fond as we might be of Little Blue, I think it's time we recognize its brazen aberration to the rest of the universe for what it is: a pesky little anomaly that were we big enough, we'd just swat it out of the air. But we're not big enough. So how long are we to go on compensating for its errant lack of sameness (and our lack of size) as we go about forcing everything about it into the basic mechanisms of planets? It takes work to make O'l Blue into a planet like every other one, to comply with the universal sameness so brilliantly depicted by Newton and Einstein, to just let stuff be stuff instead of decorating it with any meaning other than brute mechanics. The truth is, in the eyes of physics, there are only two things we can count on being truly real: matter—the stuff we commonly see around us, and energy—the stuff we can't see, but makes the stuff we do see happen. Why then, should I keep fawning over my Bianchi in the way I do, when the best Physicists show me that my fawning is misplaced and even superstitious? I'm tired from playing this charade of believing that anything more than matter and energy can be really real. That, and being made into someone stupid in the face of physics.

Here's my dilemma in a nutshell: I like fawning over my Bianchi for the reasons I do. But I don't like being stupid for believing in the experiences that give birth to my fawning i.e., beauty, elegance, soul etc.. I could give in and take my lot with Jupiter, but I'm not at all confident that when those experiences--which all begin out side of matter--show up, that I'll have the power to let their beckoning calls go unrequited.   

So dear reader, I'm wondering if you too are tired from having to live with the pretensions we're forced into--not through any choice of our own (were you consulted before you arrived?) but through the simple fact we eventually showed up in this aberration from sameness that's so blatantly displayed on The Little Blue Dot—this Eden so fallen from the rest of the universe because it rebels against the planetary laws. Please don't take me for a complete curmudgeon; I'm grateful to anyone working to make all this into something truly mechanistic and  bringing it all back into universe-styled compliance. Still, making us a cog in a machine without being able to make our human mind into kind the planet Jupiter has, only exacerbates the problem: to bear the stigma of being so oddly different from any vast sameness, is itself burdensome—to see a way out only for it to turn into a dead-end though, makes for a crushing form of madness: In the end we're left with yet another task of holding something at bay.

Well, if you recognize the basis of my fatigue and still have the energy to do something about it, I have a modest proposal for you to consider.  Actually, I have three takes on it, and the one we end up choosing depends on what we decide about the reality at play in all this.

Take One.

Take one, resides in our judgement that Little Blue's radical non-compliance with the vast sameness of the universe, like all non-compliance, bestows to us the moral duty of eradicating it. After all, the feature of reality we've learned to give weight to, is the one with the most real estate- is it not? Considering the case before us then, which has the most real estate, earth or the universe?  What this size difference--embodied in this spec v. infinity--means then, is that by way of being human, we face a responsibility for which no other organism is capable. The moral duty to annihilate this planet, thereby ridding the universe of its only offensive member and returning it all to pure sameness, falls to us. I know this sounds like an order so much taller than any we've accomplished together. Still, I'll remind you, human kind's had plenty of practice eradicating things that exist non-compliantly to innumerable forms of sameness. I say, what's the use of practicing if there's never a "big game"? Right? I think we're ready for this one. Don't you?

Here then, is my idea for how we could accomplish this goal, which is more than a goal: we get to turn this into a moral duty--a higher calling mandated by the rules of non-compliance which we've devised derived from standards set by ratio of "real estate". 

This Grand End begins by gathering our best geo-scientists and teaming them together with our best nuclear-scientists. Next, we couple the theoretical to the practical by drafting the best drillers and bomb makers to drill shafts and construct the nuclear devices according to the plans conceived by our star theorists. After the requisite shafts are drilled into O'l Blue, the nuclear devices get inserted and the clock gets set: We set the clocks with enough time before nuclear detonation, to make this technological accomplishment into our greatest holiday ever! Everyone would get to celebrate their last hurrah in any way they saw fit--whether that fit be final war, final love-making, final freedom from attachment, or a final hope for a second coming! Why, it could even be as simple as relishing the relish on one last Chicago-style hot dog! And because none of this would be possible without science (through no fault of its own) I think we should build "observatory spacecraft" and launch them in time for the best physicists to observe our greatest feat ever and witness whether Einstein's theory of gravity held true or not--finally making their last hurrah aptly experienced, because they'd get to theorize the results and maybe even get to name a new asteroid belt!

Like many, you might be thinking this first take is feeling a bit too Draconian. I'm down with all that; after all, so much of earth truly behaves as any other planet does. You could be thinking to yourself,"this first idea feels like we're using a hatchet when we should be using a scalpel." Okay then, let's consider my second idea: 

Take Two.

Since we've switched to scalpels for this second approach toward bringing this planet into compliance, we need to decide which part of the earth's reality needs to be "sliced" away so that its conforming aspects can remain remain un-tainted and realigned to infinite sameness. (You'll come to realize that take two doesn't shrink the tall-ness of the order befalling to us--but who else can conduct this kind of surgery for heaven's morality's sake?). What is that portion to be condemned, because it can't doesn't comply with the basic and simple laws of planetary physics? On first glance you wouldn't be far off if you chose nature. But for me there's a feature in nature that truly is the rebel against the universe's infinite sameness: agency. 

When ever agency shows up in an evolutionary setting, motion no longer depends on physics alone. For instance, a rock, which epitomizes the opposite of agency, can only sit there until some exterior force moves it—, A rock in order to move, needs forces like gravity coupled to a down hill slope, or Opie skipping it across his favorite fishin' hole (made favorite because its shore was lined in towering southern pines, and only a stone's throw from Mayberry). When an organism embodies the power of agency however, it doesn't have to wait around for some random exterior force. Why? Because it has its own internal forces to move with.

Were you to look inside your body, you'd see the stuff you see in anatomy maps- only juicier. Where would you find your agency though? 

But that's only half of it. As if self motivation weren't enough, an organism with agency, not only has the power to move itself, it has the power to decide where to move. Are you getting this?  Because it participates in the reality of agency, even a simple organism like a bacterium, has more power to decide about its movement than the planet Jupiter does. But again- be amazed as you might by the ratio of real estate displayed in comparing a bacterium to Jupiter, comparing Little Blue to the universe is not very analogous: If I were to begin my trek toward the horizon of Infinity today, and you began a million years from now, neither of us would be closer to that horizon than the other- even after a gazillion years. On the other hand, a bacterium beginning a trek to Jupiter would achieve its goal before we could.

This lack of analogy is simply due to the nature of infinity.

 It's too bad this situation in which we find ourselves, exists because of O'l Blue's shameless acts of rebellion in light of the universe. For any of us of moral based righteousness, this flagrant flagrancy can only incite in us, an immense moral imperative. Were it otherwise, this situation where the biggest planet in our solar system can't do anything but roll in a rut, while the tiniest of organisms can move at will through its own size of agency, would be pretty funny—maybe even ironic.

I wonder if this second take needs an even more nuanced consideration before we start in with the scalpels though. While we share in the agency that so many living organisms do, no other organism participates in agency to the level we do. Because of this asymmetry in our different levels of participation, I can't bring myself to judge some Bambi-like fawn with the same moral righteousness we use to judge human agents. It would feel better to me in all this, if when we expelled agency from O'l Blue, we'd limit our expulsion to organisms that participate in human level agency, and let every organism without that participation stay. I know by doing it this way, we'd still be leaving behind the very thing that makes Little Blue so flagrant in its departure from the ways of the universe. But all this agency left remaining would easily fit under nature's cover, since no other embodiment of agency, save the human one, seeks to live beyond nature. Our over-arching justification for this scaled-back plan of action, would be the argument that nature without the human level agency around, could still let earth pretty look like any other planet except for having a fuzzier surface. 

In the end, this more refined plan, which admits up front to a lapse in our pursuit of purity, would work because none would be the wiser would they? After all, by removing the human level of agency, there'd no longer be any eyes over which, wool could be pulled over. Therefore, I think the case I'm making for letting non-human agency remain while expelling human agency, follows the spirit of our moral based aspirations. Besides- we'd still get to eradicate more non-conforming humans than we've ever been able to before this plan of action under consideration!

Is there any weapon more powerful than morality? 

 Hold on moral super hero, there's a "twofer" in "Take Two." When I consider the suffering encountered in human life, it's not so much the natural environment which causes our suffering, as it is the type of agency we've been forced into simply for being human. Pause and think about this for a moment: no other biological organism, besides the human one, embodies a level of agency that seeks to live beyond natural environments—let alone its own biology. This difference is so stark, I wonder if we'd be more aligned with this situation, if we were to recognize that the agency we embody is different in kind from the agency embodied any where else? In other words, no other organism suffers in the ways human organisms suffer, because nothing else lives with the human kind of agency. 

Here's an example of what I'm trying to get at. In light of human anxiety, some psychologists have turned to studying animals like gazelles for their ability to idyllically graze the Savannah grass having just dodged yet another ravenous cheetah and yet again feeling death's hot breath on its rump. The thinking is that this capacity for such an instant change of state from, "oh shit!" to, "ho-hum" exhibited by the likes of gazelles, could be isolated and translated to human animals as a cure for our anxiety. I'm afraid this scheme is bound to hit a dead end though because this "amazing" change of state isn't about having a capacity, but about lacking one: gazelles lack the agency which is only experienced in the human level of order, an order of which no human being devised but is still something we're forced to participate in. 

[Here's a big side question: If gazelles did evolve to a point where they too got to participate in this kind of agency we do, how would we recognize that event?  A dialogue wouldn't be the first sign, since sentences don't show up in new human sentience for quite some time after its reckoning. Would the first sign be their building of campfires?]   

Back to the matters at hand. Without this human kind of agency, a gazelle's horizon is immediate to its biology and biological surroundings; no lions chasing? no danger. For you and me? Our horizons extend beyond our biology into the infinity of time and space; before there, our eventual deaths; before there, all manner of infliction, whether such infliction be delivered from lions, tigers, and bears, or car accidents, or randomness in general. (Without human life, could affliction itself even exist? Wouldn't things just be generic happenings?) It seems to me then, if we could somehow shed this human level of order, and simply reside in the level gazelles reside, we'd do away with the lion's share of our suffering.

There's an irony in our aspirations to be "king of the jungle": becoming a lion amounts to a demotion in levels of agency . . . .

This human level of order—through which we human beings "get" to participate with Reality in—while lions don't, is a two edged sword— one edge being The Awe and the other, The Awry. Though humbling and at times ominous, awe can be quite exhilarating to experience. The problem, which is easier to write about—than to live in—resides in the reality, that this opening which ushers us into awe, is exactly the one which ushers us into the awry: Both are sibling children of the opening we call freedom. A word in fashion today among contemporary conservatives, their cavalier shouts of it make use of a simplified version of the Freedom essential to being human (this Freedom which can't be had by bullets and banners, is by magnitudes more profound than their version made fit for posters). This trait of profundity then, like all things hereditary, is passed down to Freedom's children of Awe and Awry. The problem is, The Awry too often feels like a bastard child. 

Toward a more nuanced context of human life.

The events that go awry and merely end in do-overs are one thing. But those experiences of things gone awry which end in grief—or despair—are something else entirely. In my immediate circle of love for instance, four women recently faced cancer; one died leaving behind two young children; one is contemplating her impending death; the third and fourth are thankfully, thriving (the third, after winning heavy-weight bouts against two separate opponents). Another beautiful woman struggles with M.S.. There's two men- each of whom were robust and athletic until recently—when the awry showed up in a stroke for one, and Parkinson's for the other. The awry embodied in these seven loved ones of mine is only half of it though: each of them are loved by partners, children, and friends, who face their own encounter of the awry in all this. And you, I'm sure, are replete with your own experiences of the awry bound by grief. Here's the thing: remove from us, profound freedom, and all this dissolves- including our sharing in this essay together.

Without this Profound Freedom, we could still be politically free; consider the Great Apes for instance. 

Somehow, in spite of any intelligence we attribute to ourselves, we're stupid when it comes to understanding the difficulty which arises exactly from having this profound freedom foisted on us--or any organism partaking of the human level of order for that matter. This freedom, by way of its innate reality, ushers us into the awry as well as the awe.

[Another big aside: The mass of an atom is found in its nucleus. The "nucleus of Profound Freedom is found in the awry. The freedom Contemporary Conservatives are so readily fond of, lacks recognition of the awry-- hence their blindness to the freedom I'm working to illuminate here. Their freedom is analogous to electrons buzzing about space without any source of mass. It's this brand of freedom that so easily makes morality into the binary of black and white.]    

If this profound freedom could be had without the awry, leaving us only to face the awe, ideas like Martha Stewart's would go most of the way in expressing the human life and making it unequivocally, "a good thing." But try as we mightily might, encountering the awry can't be reduced to recipes just as cooking well can't . . . it doesn't matter whether a moment gone awry is bound by problem solving, or bound by grief: either moment requires from us something else than pat answering. 

Somehow, we need the likes of Shakespeare as well as Martha Stewart. Or Einstein for that matter.

Shakespeare wasn't born in the 1500's C.E. as is commonly held, he was born at the time when the camp fire was born. The one born in 1564 was only another iteration of that first one who contemplated seriously The Awe and The Awry beneath the "virgin" night time sky over-arching that ancient Savannah. We read the writing of that lineage when we read about odyssies in Homer; The Ideal and cave shadows in Plato; The Fall in Genesis; Attachment in Buddhism. These examples represent to us something sacred because they engage the awry seriously. When it comes to Science, our modern attempt at living with the awry, I see something both pragmatic and supremely human coming into play: it's become for us one our most powerful powers in mitigating awry's effects. 

Yet when it comes to our actual living with events that go awry, like Buddhism, Science admonishes us to ignore any possible meaning behind it. Even Christianity's hope of a Heaven where perfection will magically displace the existence of the awry, feels equally pallid. (As for Plato, I'll say something about his approach later.) Such admonitions only frustrate me since my mind is human-like—not Jupiter-like. It's in this mind—which rocks like Jupiter lack—where I experience a kind of awe that has so much backbone to it, I can't dismiss it out of hand. (Maybe this is why I was drawn to art before science: artists can't seem to buy into schemes of dismissal the way scientists can.) 

Sorry, I'm getting ahead of things here. We still have to consider how to pull off our scheme outlined in Take Two. Here goes:

I know it's become cliche', so maybe instead of Kool Aid, we could mix up pitchers of Arnie Palmers. I'd be amenable to beverages made from fermentation or distillation. While the variety of liquid vehicles are almost endless, the doses of lethality are somewhat limited. Again we'll call on our scientific and engineering talent. I think we could also consider some lobotic means of reducing our experience of agency to that of gazelles and lions as well. There's something funny in take two in that its scope is scaled back from the first take, but it seems more difficult to carry out.

Maybe there's another way. If there were, how would we notice it?

Take Three. (My personal favorite.)

This proposal takes a different tack altogether. Instead of seeing our little corner(s) of the universe as some aberration from it, we see The Blue Beauty, and our lives with her, more like Realty's reach.

In sailing, boats sail their best when their heading (direction)--in relation to the wind--is neither straight into it, nor straight down from it, but adjacent to it. And out of all the angles within a boat's adjacent  relationship to the wind, sailor's identify their favorite portion with the name, Reach. In other words, the best sailing is done when a boat is reaching with the wind and not just in line with it. Unless that is, you consider the tall ships of yesteryear. They were rigged in sails that were square, and therefore sailed their best when headed straight down wind; any other angle made for difficulty. (Reaching is often perpendicular to the wind.) It's the modern boat, rigged with sails made into the familiar triangular shape and able to act as airfoils--in the way airplane wings do--that creates the ability to sail elegantly along adjacent angles as well as in line. 

In the regularity of daily life, there's a zone around ourselves where things can easily be picked up. Just beyond its edge, are those things we have to reach for. If the heart of Evolution isn't about reaching, then what's it about?

I noted earlier, that the force behind deciding which of the three takes on this modest proposal we should pursue, ensued from our judgement about the reality at play behind all this. Take three is no exception. So let's turn to that question.

Anywhere you look in the universe are the elementary building blocks of particles, atoms, and molecules. A popular notion is that this elementary stuff is the ultimate stuff. A Bianchi road bike, no matter its soul, is ultimately speaking, meh- molecules. And yet for me, who's mind is drawn into Art and equally so into Science, I can't help but see the miraculous before my very eyes that moment by moment is wrought from the molecular. For any who shudder at a mere whiff of miracles, I would point out that the most elementary definition of miracle is an event, that when it comes to happening, it 1.usually doesn't, 2. shouldn't, or 3. can't. Look any where you want in the universe, and nothing out there points to The Blue Beauty happening. In this universe, how is earth not miraculous? 

If "God" were to exist, would that existence be any less miraculous than The Little Blue Dot's?

The metaphor of sailing that begins Take Three, feels apt for our time; in my lifetime I've watched daily life transformed by a war between Religion and Science as each side battles for the highest ground when it comes to depicting the really real. While both see a sense of ultimacy differently, in terms of one dynamic, they see things a like. First though, the differences then to the aptness of the metaphor. 

Inspiration: a wind that propels one to look beyond their grasp.

Religion of course is older; its roots go back to those first camp fires. Here's the thing. Human life is a pretty big event in a lot of dimensions. Even so, it's not big enough to get itself onto the other side of infinity. So when it comes to making sense of things larger than themselves,  beings who are human, have to some how reach toward those larger aspects through something that is at the same time, both smaller and within the "picking up zone". Our means for this accomplishment is Metaphor. To conceive metaphor as one trick in a bag of grammar tricks misses entirely what it truly is: it's our very power to bridge the gaps between the finite and the in-finite, and the time bound and the time less--that is, to reach into the eternal. This dynamic of Metaphor, is as real today as it was that first time a being in the throes of human agency discovered its power.

When you see how profoundly operational metaphor is in living humanly, then you'll see the fundamental difference between religion and science. Methods of understanding, while important, are secondary.

To the fundamental difference between Science and Religion. While there's so much around us that fit metaphor's criteria of being immediately available, not as much of it can help us reach into ultimacy and bridge that gap between finite reality and its infinite partner. In the ancient world, the most apt and immediate knowable was The Emperor. Since the name "God" was given to ultimacy, and the metaphor reaching into ultimacy was Emperor, guess what the ultimate sense of reality became? An Emperor in the sky. And why was the Emperor enthroned in the sky? because human culture at large viewed the night time sky as the Greeks did: it was there where perfection reigned.

Newton finally dethroned the Sky Emperor, when he showed us that what was happening in the  Heavens, wasn't acting any differently than what was happening on earth--which in the Greek mind was where im-perfection ruled the day. The "threat" this dethroning posed then, involved more than locations as typically thought: it involved the power of perfection and its existence.

What didn't change since Newton dethroned the Sky Emperor, is that the power of metaphor is still at work as much as ever. What did change, was the thing at hand providing a metaphor's ground: The Enlightenment marks a tipping point when the ground shifts from Emperor to Machine, and we've been at work normalizing ourselves to the ultimate reality of machine ever since. In reality, all the rigmarole and dust ups between religion and science, in actuality, boils down to which metaphor--Emperor or Machine--best conceives the reality we should, or want to live in.

A balance sheet merely diagrams inputs and outputs. Employees are lumped in with raw materials.

So here's where religion and science--the keepers of the metaphors of Emperor and Machine respectively--have remained, unwittingly, sibling relatives: Both believe in the premise that perfection is the ultimate power, and our most powerful relation to that power, is to be in line with it. Of course their manifestations of this faith are different--one tends toward black and white ideology/morality and the other toward mechanistic efficiency. Still, in the end, both parties are made "siblings" through their shared faith in the power of perfection and their drive to approach reality in the same way the Tall Ships did.

Here's another question; which is more powerful- Profound Freedom or Perfection?

Both Emperors and Machines depict realities made from "subjects" and "out-puts" existing in line with their respective sources. What we see before us however, is a situation that exists only from this fact: our situation is not in a simple in-line relationship to reality's wind. In other words, and hearkening back to a question asked earlier, if you were to draw a straight line from Little Blue to a location in the universe, where upon observing that location, you'd easily conclude, "well of course- the next obvious step is nature!" (with the same kind of realization that you could've had a V-8) where would you draw that line to?  In other words again, if a bread crumb trail was formed at the big bang to you and I, the trail stops cold at solar systems. From this moment between you and I, to particles atoms and molecules, there exists a gap as wide as this universe. So far, our means understanding how this gap was bridged has been Emperor and Machine. 

The problem is, when the concept of evolution is considered it's been considered in the context of these two metaphors we've been engaging reality through.

As long as we ground our faith in the metaphors of Emperor and Machine, we'll fall short of understanding Reality, our Human relationship to it, and ultimately, what should be the coolest experience in the universe: being fully human--whether or not, the word god is invoked. After all, the word "god" itself, is only a vessel to contain a pertinent metaphor we judge to be worthy to center a human life.

Take Three then, is about recognizing that both the metaphors of Emperor and Machine are insufficient to let us into the reality we in the 21st century are becoming aware of. Our's is a time of reaching anew for a metaphor with more room for the Reality coming into view. A view that turns Plato's ideas upside down: the earth is not some shadow version of "The Ideal" but rather is the place in this universe where Reality's light has the possibility to shine its brightest. Nowhere does this possibility exist larger than it does in human life.

What does it mean for a possibility to exist?  

If you dear reader agree with the direction espoused in this third take, then we'll need to begin our searching together for a new metaphor by looking around our immediate spaces at hand for some everyday thing within our grasp. To fit this criteria, I'm nominating something that can't be said to be a thing; it exists apart from matter, but can't be witnessed without it; is pictured better by reaching to the wind rather than following in line with it; ultimately, it exists as a dynamic that can't be reduced to anything: Creativity.

Not just any creativity, but the kind that in the words of a favorite thinker of mine, is "utter and ceaseless." The wind of Evolution's reach. The ignored member of what should the fundamental trio--not duo with matter and energy. Without Creativity, Particles and Energy have no means of becoming more than blobs pulsating in equilibrium (think universe sized lava lamps). This Creativity creates confusion because it can't be contained in the metaphors of Emperor and Machine that ground our faith today.

(As I'm writing these words, which are feeling crescendo like to me, Aaron Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" is playing on the radio.)

Coming to the end of this modest proposal, I'm seeing a pattern emerge and I wonder if you see it too: each take presents responses to our human situation that progress from large to small on the one hand (nuclear bomb/scalpel/metaphor, while on the other they progress from easiest to hardest.

Is this ironic? funny? or just sad that what should be easiest is more difficult than annihilation? 

It's no small thing for us to tinker with the ideas and ultimate metaphors that ground our faith. That part of us that can see beyond our biology, needs as much orientation that our biology does. The only difference is that this "other part" of us, utilizes ideas instead of horizon lines and inner ears and the like. Because of this feature, found uniquely in human agency, you and I have to personally choose which ideas out of millions, are capable of grounding our orientation, by being credible enough to believe in. The ones you choose constitute your faith--whether you're religious or not. Because faith doesn't ensue from religion, it ensues from our human level of agency. Tinkering with one's faith, you'll come to realize, can induce an experience similar to experiencing the disorientation that we feel biologically in earthquakes.

If you don't believe me in this, just look at Jesus' experience: he worked at shifting the metaphor from Emperor to something else, and was in technical terms, crucified; in real terms, he was lynched. By who? those who loved their metaphor more than the Well Spring from which metaphors emerge--than point to.

I hope you'll join me in pursuing the third take in this modest proposal which is the smallest in scale, but the most difficult for us to pull off.