The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (11 page)

Yet there are some desperados among us who are not overjoyed to be anxious all their days. Some would say that if human beings must exist, the condition in which U. G. and Wren-Lewis are living is the optimum model, one in which everyone’s ego has been annulled and our consciousness of ourselves as individuals entirely disappears. We would still function as beings that needed the basics—food, shelter, and clothing—but life would not be any more than that. It would not need to be. We would be content with whatever we had, a change of habit enormously diametric to our customary ways. We always want something else, something more. And when we get it, we still want something else, something more. No time or place of satisfaction awaits us. We live and die with deficiency and privation gnawing our guts. Life is not perfect, as any rube will accede, but for human beings it is a bloody shambles. We do not even dream of wanting something less by current standards of measurement. Inattentive to where the road to more and more leads, we just keep shuffling down that lane like zombies. If “less is more,” then nothingness would be the most an ego, a self, could want.

As the ego-dead, our existence would be even more dissimilar than it already is from that of most mammals. They feed on one another without the etiquette of the slaughterhouse, and the fed-upon, one imagines, suffer more pain and anxiety than they would from a businesslike execution before the meal begins. Naturally, we would still have to feed, but we would not be omnivorous gourmands who eat for amusement, gobbling everything in nature and turning to the laboratory for more. Like other animals, we would continue to suffer pain in one form or another—that is the essence of existence—but we would not be cozened by our egos to take it personally, an attitude that escalates natural pain into unsustainable horror. To most people, this kind of world might seem drab—no competition, no art, no entertainment because all of these things are based on conflict, and in the world of the ego-dead there would be no conflict of the kind that fills stadiums and battlegrounds. There would also be no ego-boosting activities such as those which derive from working and acquiring more money than one needs, no scientific activity because we would not be driven to improve the world or know much about anything in it or outside it, no religious beliefs because those emerge from desperations and illusions 52

from which we would no longer suffer. Our sights would be set no further than our natural needs, for the tastes and habits of our own invention only subjugate us to a life made unimaginable without them. (Ask any tobacco addict who goes into mourning the day he must choose between smoking and breathing.) Best of all, after becoming so excellently revised as human beings, we would never again have to “agree to disagree.”

For onlookers interested in the future of enlightenment, the field of neuroscience has made unmistakable headway. In Being No One (2003), the German neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger provides a theoretical model of how the brain manufacturers the subjective sense of our existence as discrete “selves,” even though, as Metzinger explains, we would be more rigorously specified as information-processing systems for which it is expedient to create the illusion of “being someone.” This is precisely the crux of Buddhist enlightenment—the realization that we are not what we think we are. More honest and skeptical than Buddhist gurus, Metzinger concludes that it is practically impossible for us to attain willed realization of our unreality due to inbuilt manacles of human perception that keep our minds in a state of dream and delusion.4 But perhaps Metzinger never heard of U. G. and Wren-Lewis, both of whom speculate that scientists at any time could stumble upon a technique for disabusing us of our selves. U. G.’s prediction is that, should such a technique come to gestation in a lab somewhere, it will probably be used by governments as a means of controlling their populations or by corporations to buck up their quarterly earnings, legitimate science being on record as serving the powers that be or those that finance it. Political and commercial bodies are not known for ignoring whatever they may turn to their advantage, and that includes meditation, yoga, and similar techniques of “realization” whose physiological effects are observable in the laboratory.

Research has been mounting that spiritual seekers measurably diddle with the way their brains, neurological circuitry, and other bodily systems function, with the pursuit of deliverance from or in the phenomenal or non-phenomenal world triggering their efforts while not being essential to the results. Anyone without deliverance aforethought could do the same and chart as well on a scientist’s monitors. This suggests to the doubting mind that the whole business of enlightenment, as Asian Buddhists have insisted, is

“nothing special” and at a future date may be folded into our accustomed feelings and perceptions, including the jumble of emotional highs and lows to which we as a species are susceptible. In the meantime, people will knock on your door, eager to hawk some gimmick that will get you into their heaven. Naturally, these godly salesmen do not have a clue regarding what things are like in heaven. Are there levels of heaven? Could someone be in heaven and not know it? And how often have we heard that many who are alive today will not suffer physical death but instead will proceed directly to paradise when the rapture is upon us? This means that millions have already dropped dead with the unfulfilled hope of not having to suffer the agony of dying the same death as the unsaved. What disillusionment must have incommoded them while they lay in extremis.

Death would not be so bad if we could just push a button and disappear into it. But even those who expect the doors of heaven will open for them would prefer not to make their entrance after the physical trials of fighting for the life that God gave them. For the rest of us, the carousel of consciousness spins round and round, enlightening us only to the 53

bloodcurdling probability that the worst will be saved for last. Not graced with impunity from the personal pains of living and the personal fear of dying, as luck-outs such as U.

G. and Wren-Lewis got without trying, we grow dizzy and nauseated trying to hang on and get off at the same time. What kind of beings would “choose” such a fate for themselves? Answer: the same kind who chose it for you.

INTOLERANCE

Due to our consciousness of being alive and destined for death, some of us not only invent schemes for blocking out this knowledge but also burn to discredit, or murder, anyone who would controvert our patented certitudes. (“We think, therefore we should make everyone think what we think.”) The consequence of having a crush of competing creeds is that every person and group must brook the intolerance, whether maniac or controlled, of those who do not share their customized fanaticism. Such intolerance is often a petty affair of taste. Someone unyieldingly swears that everything which gives him pleasure, bringing momentary relief from the pain of consciousness, is superior to what is pleasurable to someone else. “My music is better than your music. My music is an outpouring of genius, while your music is lackluster and couldn’t possibly give pleasure (relief) to anyone who knows anything about good music.” My music. My movies. My distractions. (The ante may be upped to “My nationality. My race. My self.”) A further example of this situation: horror writers have been recurrently asked, “Why would anyone want to supplement the horrors of this world by writing horror stories?”

Too witless to deserve an answer apposite to horror stories, the question rightly spotlights that the world is indeed well-stocked with horror, which means only one thing: death and everything that culminates in death. Perhaps the world should keep this kind of thing to a minimum. But this is not the way it is with us. Instead, we augment every horror that crosses our path. Human beings seem all too ready to cover up a lesser horror by contriving a greater one. (It is a straight shot from the spear to the atomic bomb.) For sure, we cannot see all the ramifications of the things we do, but even if we could we would do them anyway. Any “advancement” seems like a good idea at the time and will be put to use. And if it should become a tool for unremitting horror, we just mutter “Oh well” and move on to our next boner. That is what we call “being human.” Animals have lived by the same instincts for millions of years; we extemporize, instinctually superposing new horrors over the old, positioning them tier upon tier, as if we were building a pyramid never to be capped with a peak. Then we ask ourselves and our gods how everything got to be such a mess.

People who live with horror every day are going to want answers pertaining to how they sunk into this quagmire. This is one of the drawbacks of being creatures with consciousness. Our brains are a breeding ground for questions as a swamp is for insects.

They also incubate answers regarding our lot on this rotating compost heap we call home, with a preference for those answers that bloviate about spirituality. Although this is practically a universal impulse, it seems that not all have been ensnared by it. As Yi-Fu Tuan documents in his Landscapes of Fear (1979), certain primitive social groups, more prevalent during the “ascent” of humanity than in its latter days, have had no use for the spiritual. Interestingly, these people’s lives have also been more comfortable than most—

hunter-gatherer tribes with ready access food and drink, no enemies, good weather, and 54

not much in the way of curiosity or ambition. But this idyllic lifestyle, perhaps too frequently romanticized in comparison with those of succeeding ages, is not how things have been for our species generally speaking.

Overall, people have not been safe and comfortable. They have been fearful and pained and badly accommodated by the world around them . . . and they wanted answers to why they have been so abused, why they should be subject to an epic hose job. They wanted the meanness of their lives to mean something. They always have, which is why at any stage in world history we will be harried by far-fetched theologies hatched in antiquity.

At least they would seem far-fetched if we were normal by an absolute paradigm rather than normal by consensus. (Does belief in a god really make a believer’s life more

“meaningful,” by any definition, than that of an unbeliever? That would seem to depend on the individual rather than the god.) Not taking part in those ancient cults—whatever modern mask they wear—not sharing in their madness, makes it a real chore to have a good-faith tolerance of them. The difficulty in tolerating religions is not that they are groundwork of so many cruel laws, so many cruel and unusual mores, and so much of the cruel but entirely usual violence that magnifies the natural suffering of our lives. Human beings are most proficient at cooking up reasons for their cruelty without the persuasions of religion. If all religious faith were bled out of us, nothing would change, cruelty-wise.

What makes an unbelievers skin crawl is the voodoo-like horror that religions inject into our lives. Bad enough to be in a tight existential spot such as a foxhole during a battle, but what an addition of insult to injury (or death) to have long-abandoned prayers well up inside us at these times of crisis. How much more preferable it is to cry for one’s mother as a conditioned response to being in terror for one’s life. For the fear that religion has sown in the human race, there can be no forgiveness and no tolerance. That horror aside, it is also embarrassing to be in the company of the religious when they are most earnestly devout. One would like to apologize to the universe for them and scuttle off, red-faced, into some hole in the ground. The conundrum for unbelievers is that virtually all of them have loved ones who follow some religious faith. So what are the faithless to do—dump infinite derision on their blood relations and others they favor with fondness and respect?

No philosophic principle has ever deserved such fidelity.

Fortunately, only a fraction of those who call themselves believers are peremptorily religious. Sometimes it even seems that scarcely anyone is a full-out religioso—they are simply keeping up the appearances of their culture, which cannot be detested out of hand without impugning the conduct of everyone. Does belief in a god really take the sting out of death for run-of-the-mill churchgoers? They seem to think it will, but they cannot be sure until the time comes. Luckily, the depth of any mortal’s religious faith cannot be measured, nor would it be if it could. Social and economic powers would never allow it.

The stock market would plunge, the Bible would fall from the bestseller list, and calendars would have to be amended to delete major holidays. These may seem small sacrifices to those ardent to drain the earth of its oceans of pious sputum. But the loss would still be felt in some circles, and that is quite a responsibility to take upon oneself.

So why not be tolerant? What if religious hotheads are abominable . . . if no deity ever weighed in the scales has been found worthy of either belief or disbelief, not to speak of devotion and prayers . . . and if every house of worship is an emporium run by cretins and 55

criminals with one hand on their heart and the other in your purse? The culpability is not the believer’s but the very air that the believer breathes. Indeed, the unbeliever would not be off-track to be tolerant, if only to effectuate comity with the well-armed forces of organized religion. Beyond cavil, the world is glutted with horror, but banning religion, or horror stories, would not ameliorate our condition one whit. Something will always be there to beat us down with its tonnage of terrors. As granted above, a world without religion would be as cruel and unusual as any other, for those who care. Excuses to massacre or anathematize one another have never been scarce. They are, indeed, a fatality.

Aside from such persons as Nietzsche and such parties as Pan-Aryanists, Ayn Randian Objectivists, extremist Libertarians, and other cheerleaders for the survival of the

“fittest,” most people like to think they would stand up for the weak against the persecution and plundering of the strong. God helps those who help themselves, but sometimes the strong go overboard in helping themselves at the expense of the weak.