Phamous Philsophical Phailures

Phirst:
"During 2011, Americans spent more at commercial casinos than they did on music, movies, and outdoor equipment combined."  My wife, who took a friend to a casino at the frined's request as an "outing," found it an exceedingly grim place.  No bells or cherries; people are so hooked that they just feed numbers into a kind of calculator. No one smiles and even the occasional "winner" goes right back at it with doubly serious intensity. The handicapped spaces are always filled up first thing when they open.

I think this is the ultimate irrationality of Darwinism--a grim place where greed proceeds and precedes and outvotes everything else, and it's every person for him/herself. And what's the key word? Not even such  pleasurous sounding words as "luck" or "Dame Fortune," but now the idea has been reduced to a no-frills "random chance." Luck ain't no lady no mo'.

  As one atheist said of the human race, "We got lucky." and won the cosmic lottery.  But from chance-no-dance it quickly degenerates to the raw question, what did we win?  The Responsibility for the Planet, as most now acknowledge, this being common knowledge from Genesis onwards until the Mighty 19th Century came along. Most people have abandoned Manifest Destiny as leftovers from the Divine Right of Kings. This of course tends to drain life of all purpose and meaning if not replaced by something at least as compelling--so how are we supposed to conjure up the energy or organization to deal with our self-made greed problems when we have undercut all telos? So that "existence" is all there is?

Which is only to say, isn't it "speciesist" to even try to save ourselves?  Suppose we are just like the very successful species of dinosaurs, doomed to extinction?  Why wouldn't we succumb, eventually to supposedly sinless, neutral or hostile nature?

It has struck me in particular that white Americans have lost most of their reasons for existence, now that public philosophy is not only a mere clone of existentialism but "value neutral" at that.  It may be that the "Global South" may go on to greater things, if they learn from us--but chances are they won't.  There is no way to globally prop up a  human world like ours except on Darwin's terms; esp. since since Darwinian philosophy is what we have exported to the world most successfully.

There is the  the added consequence that, just like a colony of mold or bacteria, we are limited after all in our growth by the toxic wastes that we produce. This being so, any given species can eliminate itself, and success seems to be particularly deadly, and success by rapid succession even worse.  We don't learn fast enough to exceed our grasping nature.
 
Some may see this as hopeless--and of course it is, in itself, whether we speak of the species or the individual. But this is simply failure of philosophy which leads to an unbalanced failure of will to live or especially to reproduce. Philosophy is usually a late development in any given civilization but it is not an entity in itself and so cannot balance itself in the face of its own inner contradictions, certainly not enough to face up to the unseen capacities of Reality as seen more thoroughly than we can yet imagine. At worst it is simply an excretory toxin specific to our species.  At its best it could serve as a corrective to the more extreme kinds of human behaviors but it soon busies itself, like all other human institutions, in becoming a self-justifying entity with a professional elite who compete amongst themselves but have no use for the rest of us except as appalling demonstrations of ignorance. But since human ignorance is universal, the kind of hubris that increasingly oozes from department "chairs" et. all, all are poorly armed to be able to point fingers at others on the basis of mere human wisdom and our 15 second rushes to judgement.  Of, say, "the wrong sort of white people"

One might call this musing a kind of prose Psalm--I wouldn't want to set it to lyre music--and only in that David often thought similar thoughts, and then turned to God at the end.  But in other Psalms, God is much more than an addendum; so I will devote more time next time to the Parallel Universe of God.