Moon-soon.
Prelude
He wiped the blood out of the corner of his mouth as his opponent continued speaking.
“You see Mr. Armstrong [1], we are not so ‘chigau [2],’ you and I. To you, the diamond world is your heartless Christian god, whereas I see the only true diamond is the equality of suffering imposed by a communist regime.”
Armstrong’s heart queued up a beat as he planned his next assault.
Section I : Thesis
All philosophies [3] that aren’t anti-philosophies at heart end up dividing the world in half.
There’s the earth and the sky. There’s the essence and the accident. There’s the objective and the subjective. There’s the perfect and there’s life.
¶
It is commonly known that in the nineteen sixties the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a race to first establish a foothold on the moon. Less commonly known is the real reason for this contest. Most people foolishly attribute it to nationalistic pride. Indeed, since no other reason could be publicly offered, the program was allowed to wither as soon as the United States had demonstrated its dominance. No, this was not the actual purpose of the so-called “space-race.”
¶
Neil Armstrong is driving his car down the highway on a sunny summer day. It is late June and the hot Georgia sun is unrelenting in its punishment of the young astronaut.
¶
Every night for as long as humanity has been around, someone, somewhere has looked up at the moon. It has received the collective gaze of unknown billions. It has received the hopes and dreams of countless lovers and lovelorn souls. Every night, someone has looked up while the light shone in their eye. Beams of pure sunlight strike the moon and scatter in all directions. Reflecting down to earth the moonbeam is transformed into an electrical impulse by the eye. Behind every eye is a mind. Behind every mind is a soul.
¶
A bit later, he is looking into his coffee cup as he speaks.
“I mean, of course, I’ve talked to the wife and kids; it’s just… I don’t want to burden them with it, you know? I feel like you guys are the only ones I can really talk with.”
Trailing off, he looks into the eyes of two young men behind the counter, seeking out some sign of the soul behind them.
¶
Heisenberg [4] realized that there is no such thing as a passive observer. All observation is interference. Watching induces change. The observer is drawn into the system of the observed.
¶
Before that, in a sleek red Mustang, Neil Armstrong sped up I-95. He is unaware of being observed. However, behind him by a quarter mile or so is what only appears to be a bedraggled hippie on a motorcycle. The hippie wears a leather jacket. On his back is a guitar case.
¶
All those eyes on the moon, night after night. All the minds keenly focused. All those poems. All those sonnets, haikus, movies, plays, stories. Myths. Spells that work only in the full moonlight.
¶
Every philosophy that isn’t anti-philosophy cuts the world in two, like a fresh summer melon. There is the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the essence and the accident, reality and appearance. There is the earth and the heavens.
Plato [5] called the eternal realm the Forms [6], and in their hallowed halls he strived to walk. Aristotle [7] called it the unmoved mover. Augustine [8] and Aquinas [9] called it Father God.
¶
Neil pulled into the parking lot of a small restaurant in Avondale Estates [10], a small town outside of Atlanta. He remembered stopping by last year on a family trip. On today’s trip, however, he would be alone. He had come to talk to the co-owners of the waffle shop. They had seemed so understanding before. He didn’t know who else to spill his guts at, and they seemed like a logical choice. A choice that resonated also with his pursuer.
Hidden away in the distance, unknown to those in the restaurant, Neil’s shadow took note.
“Here! … Ha, an interesting coincidence. However, it changes not my mission. Or my resolve! Here, Mr. Armstrong, it ends,” chuckled the hippie to himself.
Though they saw him not, soon their fates would collide.
¶
But the eternal world, if it exists, is hidden from us by an unbridgeable distance. We were cast out of its golden chambers even before our births, and now we can see it only in the briefest of glimpses. The eternal world is now invisible to us, and haunts us unseen. Though we do not see it, everything we do see is a mere reflection of it, and from these reflections, we may only guess its form.
¶
Neil had come to the first Waffle House [11]. It was the weekend before what he knew to be his greatest and final mission. Though he had once before slipped the bonds of Earth’s gravity, he knew his next feat would be consist of the highest audacity, for which he may perforce answer to the gods themselves. Riding astride the colossal Saturn V [12], he would be sent on a course for the surface of the moon. This much, or rather this little, had been publicly revealed. But before this mission, he needed time alone, time away, time for mediation, and time to prepare for the challenge that lay ahead. It would be his Garden of Gethsemane. It was this time that the hippie in the parking lot planned to usurp.
¶
It is through repetition [13] that the realm of the heavens expresses itself. Though the meager items that comprise are world could never fully convey the shape of that which animates them, through their repeated motions, we are given a hint at its nature. Things that were dropped fell, and from that we say things that are dropped will fall. Repetition has illuminated a small corner of the eternal substrate. In the past, summer followed spring. In every prior case, men grew old and died. In all recorded instances, the sun has set only to rise again. We know the future to the extent that we know that which will bring the future into being, and we know that which will bring the future into being through the repetitions it has played out in the past.
¶
“You—! You’ve returned!”
“Like a dog to his vomit, I’m afraid. But this will be my last visit if I have my way.”
“What have you come for? You’ll find us as ready for you now as we were fourteen years before!”
“You exaggerate your own importance. It is not you I want. It is your customer. This house of waffle is a trifle.”
Section II : Antithesis
Thus far, philosophers have been spoken of, but the topic of anti-philosophy has been left untouched. Anti-philosophy has a force of immense power since almost the very founding of philosophy, twenty five hundred years ago. Not long after the rise of Socrates and Plato, there came one to challenge them, Aristotle. Raphael elegantly summed up the differences between Aristotle and his forebears in a few gobs of paint.
Plato points up, at the heavens; Aristotle points out, at the world.[14]
![[14]](http://artchive.com/artchive/r/raphael/school_athens.jpg){kind=link}
Aristotle, himself, did not depart so radically from the tradition in which he was placed. But the way he comported himself within that tradition makes clear the extent to which he was divorced from it. While Plato sought certainty for the inconstant world in the eternal realm of the Forms, Aristotle sought the inconstant pattern of the forms in the eternality of the world. It is a difference as sharp as night and day.
As shown in their forefather Aristotle, the career of typical anti-Philosopher begins steeped in the robes of philosophy. ‘All through my youth,’ they lament with gnashing of teeth, ‘I have sought a great ladder, by means of which I could ascend from the particulars of the world to the essence of the forms. Only now, at the end of my career do I see clearly and only now can I deliver the wisdom revealed by my search. There is no ladder. There is no tower to the gods. What we sought so long is not out beyond the clouds, but here, right here on earth, in the soil of the fields, in the mud of the trail, in the dirt of the floor. The forms,’ they solemnly intone, ‘are in the world around us.’
All the anti-Philosopher shows is that they are in no need of philosophy. They have the certainty they once sought. The philosopher is, of course, still hungry, still yearning. Philosophy is not a calm, sophisticated lover of wisdom. He is an insatiable lech, consumed by the lust for certainty that has through reason driven reason from his soul. For such men, what would the anti-Philosopher do? What can those without sickness tell the ill about cure? They size themselves up, breath deep the clean air, and pronounce disease an illusion. “Just try to get out more. Try some exercises. Stop moping around.” As though illness should be dispelled by the same means that health is maintained.
¶
In the decade of the nineteen-sixties, mankind attempted to build the ladder which previously had only been sought. During the space race, a mighty tower to the heavens was constructed. As the decade drew to a close, a chariot unto the gods was conceived. And with the fullness of time, this idea became shape, and this shape became name. And its name was Apollo. And its name is the Saturn V.
The Apollo Program was something new, something that had never been done before. Not since Babel had man attempted something so audacious. And not since Babel had man been so clearly on the cusp of the miraculous.
¶
Hume once explained that there can be no miracles. In order to deal with the world normally, we must assume that something underlies the repetitions we see in the world. From a thousand apples falling, gravity; from a thousand test tubes, the atom; from a thousand light bulbs, the electron. However, since this method of deduction is our only means of coping with the world, when we run into a one off— a situation never seen before and that doesn’t fit into our established patterns— we still must assume that yet another larger pattern accounts for it. Thus, even if we observe with certainty the transformation of water to wine, and with the utmost cynicism rule out any possibility of chicanery, even still we must suppose the existence of some natural mechanism, heretofore unexposed, that transforms water into wine. If we fail to suppose such a mechanism, then consistency would demand that we throw out all of our other unseen mechanisms, ascribing them also to extraordinary circumstance. Either we assume everything is miraculous or nothing is.
Take magic. Suppose it were readily verifiable, and witches really could transform themselves with eye of newt and toe of sloth. If that were the seen to be the case, then magic would no longer be magic, but be science instead. Great laboratories would spring up to test the exact proportions necessary to invoke a curse. Great teams would test which words and languages give an incantation greatest efficacy.
The extraordinary must succumb to the merely ordinary as soon as the exceptional becomes the everyday. No matter what our lives are like, they must be normal for us for reasons of familiarity and pragmatism if nothing else.
¶
Through their explorations of space, both the Soviets and Americans had learned something incredible. Astronauts and cosmonauts, exposed to the rigors of space and the unblinking eyes of world public, were able to escape the realm of the mundane during their flights. In their weightlessness, these young men became detached from ordinary existence and the limitations placed upon it. They stepped temporarily outside the bounds of earth and all of the social conventions that weigh so heavily upon it. They became magicians and immortals, if only for the length of one orbit. The concerned observation of a billion earthbound eyes did, as Heisenberg supposed, alter their destiny. Though unobserved, they could not rightly be said to be either within or without the laws of earthly convention, as they were more closely observed, their position became better and better known. In knowing their position, their momentum was lost to foreknowledge. This momentum became, therefore, the providence of free will. Knowing this complete freedom of the will, science unwittingly learned that we are social convention, straight down to the bone. Gravity was an illusion of course, but it went further than that. Up there in space, who is to say what a human being is or is not capable of? The Enlightenment Project was reaching its fruition, there among the stars.
This was the great secret that drove space exploration, and that had to be kept from the public at all costs.
It was magic. But magic, it turned out, was science, and not magic.
¶
“I have come for Mr. Armstrong. He will come with me, and there will be no more trouble.”
“Look here, I don’t what kinda games y’all’re playin’, but we established house rules to prevent exactly this here type of situation. Now, you can either sit down and order, or you can kindly leave.”
“Heh. Ah yes, I see. So it is indeed. It appears you have caught me in a dilemma. I can either violate those house rules, and in so doing give greater power to their normative divisions— good and evil, right and wrong, lawful and unlawful— or I can obey them like a good little boy. Heh. Social conventions are a powerful thing, ne? Even in transgressing them, we give them more strength. Only by neglecting them can we hope for their dissolution. Ja, for this moment, I shall order. I leave the transgressive act for future fulfillment, and with it the destruction of this entire restaurant.”
His dark promise hanging in the hashbrown scented air, the hippie smiled a snarl at the men behind the counter.
“I will have an All Star spshecial, onégaisuru.”
The reply came with distrust and sense of foreboding repetition, “right away.”
The drama swirling around, with him at the center of its hurricane, Neil looked back to his quarter cheese plate. Sighing to himself, he poured a little ketchup on the plate and resumed eating.
¶
Based on previous missions, the Soviets and the Americans had learned something important. Those in space are free men in a way that you and I are not. Freed of both weight and conscience, they were able to choice freely and authentically between all of life’s options. This in itself was something incredible enough. These astromen were free to accept or reject the self-authentication of the forms handed down to them. However, it was not quite as much as could be hoped for. Though free to accept or reject the forms as such, they could not create new forms or impose those forms on the world below. More importantly, on seeing another human being, their magic was lost, as they returned to the enmeshing web of social law. What was needed was a way to maintain their new freedoms, even in the face of the old order. To do such a thing, steady ground was needed. Mere circling the Earth was not enough. A new gravity must be created, to bind the space farer to the new world of his own devising. In other words, one small step for man is needed for a giant leap, and the moon is the place for such a step.
¶
Neil finished first, got up, and said, “I’ll be waiting outside.”
“I won’t be long. Make your time.”
The co-owners, already jittery in the extreme could contain themselves no longer.
“Don’t do it, Neil! Run! Run, while you still can!”
“We tangled with this supposed hippie before, Neil! He’s dangerous! Before, we were lucky—but, you’re mission it’s too important for this! The man is a ninja!!”
“Heh,” interrupted the ninja, “you think Mr. Armstrong didn’t know this?… He is not so foolish as you suppose.”
“He’s right. I knew,” said Neil laconically. “And I’m afraid, that I’ve gotta do what must be done here, and there’s no use in running.”
Neil had known even before knew, and once he knew, he knew he wasn’t free, at least not free to run. His freedom remained a matter for the stars. Here, in this slightly dirty restaurant, his choices were no choices at all. He would stay and face whatever his foe had planned.
“Very wise my friend,” said the ninja before returning to cutting up his waffle in broad, precise strokes.
¶
What the anti-Philosopher forgot during his quest is that the forms, though real and distant, are also always already present to us. You see, the forms are self-identifying, and thus we know their truth without anyone telling us. Philosophy is just the process of trying to give names to these things we know, to categorize them so that nothing slips our mind, or we don’t confuse what we know for what we want to believe.
Plato said that we know the forms from a past life, and that true knowledge cannot be taught, it is instead remembered. Heidegger [15] added to this and explained that the reason we already know the forms is that they are socially constructed.
Take poor Descartes [16], for example. If he just stepped back and looked at what he was doing, he would have realized that going through the whole process of writing a book meant that he clearly didn’t really even believe his all consuming doubts. He just forgot for a moment that he didn’t believe them. The purpose of philosophy is to clear up these moments of forgetfulness.
¶
“Make no mistake, Mr. Armstrong, I will kill you, replace you, and visit the moon in your stead.”
“Well, let’s take this one step at time. How do you intend to kill me.”
The hippie took off his jacket and lay it on the ground before opening his guitar case and taking out a katana.
“Well, that’ll just about do it.”
“Do you want to start this or shall I?”
Neil motioned with his hand to indicate his readiness.
“Have at you then.”
The hippie held the blade out horizontally from his body and ran with the soft, practiced steps of a ninja toward his foe. He came to within a few feet of Neil, before beginning to swing the sword forward with a powerful swipe. The sword, however, continued through the position that Neil’s body had been in just moments before, causing the ninja to spin around completely and almost lose his balance. He looked up spitefully.
“So, you’ve learned the truth about gravity.”
“Yup, Gemini 8.”
“No matter.”
¶
Ninja are, of course, master’s of stealthy and sneakiness. Hiding in plain sight is the ninja’s stock in trade. But, the Apollo capsule was too small to risk the possibility of being caught and the mission scrubbed. He might get launched into orbit as a stowaway and then kill the astronauts, but without NASA’s help on the ground, he wouldn’t be able to land. He could wait until the landing to kill the astronauts, but by then, he almost certainly would have been spotted and confronted by an astronaut. No, the most sensible plan was to kill a member of the crew and assume his identity with such convincing realism that none of the other crew members would suspect the treachery until it was too late to prevent its fruition. And the person to kill was, of course, the person slated to first step foot on soil outside of our Earth: Neil Armstrong.
¶
Kant [17] had the same insight as Heidegger, only much earlier. He realized that underneath the quest for certainty, there were a number of values that were hiding in plain sight. These were the transcendental values or synthetic a priori truths. In order to deal with the world, we are forced to think about it in certain terms. So, when we think we think using space and time, for example, as a way of categorizing our perceptions into before and after, here and there. True, one could try to imagine a being of some sort that was without space or time, but like a square circle, that we can say it doesn’t mean we can really imagine it. Though we can logically think through parts of the experience of being without those synthetic restrictions, we cannot grasp the whole. We can never know what it would be really, really be like to experience something without space or time, unless we had been made that way. Such a restriction is so plainly evident that it is hidden from us entirely.
¶
“Hover there smugly if you like, but defying gravity won’t save you. For you see, there are other social laws which you yourself have not yet transcended. You may have rained death down over the Koreas from thousands of feet in the air, and you may have escaped death in your spinning Gemini capsule or your faulty lunar trainer, but be that as it may, until you take the life of a man using the force of your own hands to do it, you can never know how truly fragile a thing human life is. That, Mr. Armstrong, is why I am able to kill you, and you will not be able to kill me!”
Neil stood there in the sky for another few seconds, before looking up and down the street. No one else had yet seen him. With a sigh, he gracefully floated in an arc onto the roof on the Waffle House. The ninja followed soon thereafter hopping atop the building with a leap and a wall kick.
“Now, it’s true what you say. I’ve never killed a man with my own hands, and nor do I intend to do so. But, I’ve buried loved ones, and I’ve seen my own life hanging in the balance but pulled through. That is why I’ll win. The moon… It doesn’t belong to you or me or this nation or that one. The moon belongs to the mankind, and I intend to make good on that promise. I’m not going there as Lieutenant or Sergeant. I’m going there as a civilian and an explorer. We shall come in peace for all mankind.”
“Pff, you scientists intend only to steal the moon from the poets, but you forget that nothing of value was ever stolen without violence. You speak of peace as though it were more than a deprived state. Man is ruled by his viciousness, a lesson of which your body will soon bear witness. There is only one thing that can fell a man of iron will, and that is hubris. Hubris sets in when one forgets the will of the gods. You are forgetting something equally important, Mr. Armstrong. This blade shall be your nemesis reminder.”
The Georgia sun bleached the earth around them with heat and light, and the air between them shimmered blisteringly. Beads of sweat began to collect around both of their hairlines.
“Enough talk,” said Neil.
¶
To harness Promethean fire and clasp Diana’s realm to the bosom of man—Can one think of greater hubris?
¶
The ninja started his charge, unsure if he would be able to keep up with his opponent with his relatively earthbound attacks but confident that sooner or latter his target would be lured into the deadly range of his blade by stubborn, American pride if nothing else. Americans, he thought, are a rather proud and optimistic people. Their many accomplishments are due to these qualities, but they are also ultimately sources of great weakness as well. Failing to acknowledge a stubborn truth can undo even a would-be giant. These astronauts, he was confident, would be no different than any other Americans in this respect.
¶
Back in side the restaurant, Tom and Joe were nervous.
“We can’t just leave him out there on his own…”
“I know, I know, but…”
“Yeah. What?”
“How did we do this before?[18]”
“I don’t know, all seemed lost until…”
“What was it?…”
“I’m just not sure.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
Section III : Synthesis
The ninja swung back and forth wildly. Neil dodged each thrust with aplomb, floating and spinning with a gymnastic elegance. Then, pantingly, almost out of breath, the ninja called out.
“Tell me, why is it do you think that you are fighting, Mr. Armstrong? What belief is it that compels you in your useless resistance of the inevitable? But wait, let me tell you first what is driving me, then let me guess what is driving you. Is it agreeable?”
“I have a feeling that I’m going to hear the same long winded speech either way.”
“Heh. Your feelings are uncannily accurate.”
¶
Freedom, true freedom, is impossible in almost any system of social cooperation between human beings, particularly democracy. Democracy is possible only when most people already agree on most issues. Of course, none of these issues are ever discussed in a substantive way during debates within a democracy. Key among those undiscussed (perhaps undiscussable) issues is whether the current system should be immediately and violently destroyed. This issue cannot be discussed because those who believe the system should be immediately and violently destroyed are compelled to act towards the immediate and violent destruction of the forum in which discussion is to take place. Instead, they must enter into the democratic forum on the terms of their society, whether they agree with those terms or not. Being controlled by no one in particular, debates end up instead controlled by everyone whosoever.
Instead, the forum is occupied by those who agree that things should be made better, that crime should be stopped and justice promoted, that virtue should flourish and vice should perish, that government should be made better through its involvement and non-involvement in people’s lives. Of course, all those agreements, while a vital precondition of debate, are covered up by a more heated debate about the meanings of better, crime, justice, virtue, and vice and where more government involvement is helpful and where less government involvement is warranted. Though democracy is best suited to making decisions about the kinds of goals a society should choose in order to satisfy the largest number of citizens, in most elections the issues debated— health care, defense, education, the economy, sanitation services, on and on— revolve around how to best implement a commonly accepted goal rather than the goals themselves.
People agree on which Forms are Good, but disagree on how those Forms express themselves in the material world. Because these Forms transcend political discussions, those involved in a democracy are not free to choose the Forms they hold dear but are forced by necessity to debate only what can be debated.
¶
“As you no doubt have surmised, I am a Communist agent as well as an able swordsman. I have chosen this affiliation not lightly but based on my most core convictions. My own life’s story is a long one, touched upon by the effects of two World Wars and the vagaries of war and revolution. My own parents were Vladivostok Poles killed during the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution [19]. For that, I harbor no resentment. Because of that twist of historical fate, I have been able to, forced to, wander the globe. In Japan, I studied ancient martial arts, and in Red China, I deepened my studies. There also, I embraced Communism and began training for life as an operative. Since then, I have wandered the earth, sneaking from place to place, and changing national identity as my mood has suited me. I have attracted and trained followers, battled men, and taken lives. Various agencies claim me and provide me with missions, though I pay fealty to none. In my life, I have seen many things and learned through reason and experience that in violence alone is man free and life certain, but those men whom violence strikes are without freedom and their lives without certainty.”
¶
Though anti-philosophers have tried through out history to leave the Forms behind, their quest is self-defeating. In order to judge life based on solely on experience without reference to eternalities, it is necessary to find patterns repeated through time and threads connecting them in order to build up a pragmatic guide to the past, “what works.” Of course, as Hume said, no amount of a priori reasoning makes it more reasonable that one pool ball should bounce off another or the sun should rise together. But it is necessary to have a priori categories in order to say that the yellow ball seen today is the same sort of yellow ball seen yesterday, or even the moment before. Making hash out of our simplest sense impressions requires the prerequisite forms and shapes of the world to be always already available to us. One can try, like Rorty [20], to judge the world based only on pragmatic reasoning without reference to “the Real,” but eventually the question of deciding between two competing pragmatic solutions will force the question of how we decide which claim “really” does pragmatically work, and the Real reenters the picture. As Plato pointed out, we must know the Forms before our birth, or no knowledge, or even coping without claims of real knowledge, is possible. Though the pragmatists and anti-philosophers would escape claims about the real, in the end they must become what they most hate and claim that one purported pragmatic solution is better than another for reasons that are “self-evident” or obvious or otherwise undeniable, lest they be unable to support any conclusion whatsoever. Self-evidence or self-identification is, of course, the single most important hallmark of the Forms and must lurk at the heart of every philosophical or anti-philosophical system that claims to aid in any sort of judgment, even if only tentatively.
¶
There is a non-trivial amount of truth to the old cliché that in fighting an enemy you risk becoming that enemy. The government of the United States in particular ran headlong into that difficulty during the Twentieth Century [21]. In the struggle for peace and freedom, war and imprisonment were frequent weapons. Similarly, in order to put down the specter of a massive totalitarian state that spies on its own people, regulates all industries, and builds up a powerful war machine, it was necessary for the United States to spy on some of its citizens, regulate some of its industries, and build up a powerful war machine.
NASA[22] also reflected this truth. Its massive, bureaucratic structure more resembled the structures from which its German scientists had come and the Soviet structures which they hoped to defeat than an traditionally American enterprises. There were few Horiatio Alger stories among its vast ranks of identically crewcut engineers and middle managers. Further, its structure was hardly democratic, with objectives issuing from the top being met by endless work from those at the bottom, rather than the goals of those on the bottom directing the actions of those on top.
Yet, in spite of these limitations, NASA still managed to advance one American ideal— the myth of the pioneer— now embodied in its new form as the intrepid Astronaut, fearlessly charting the stars. This myth, of course, completely glossed over the role of all those men on the ground whose sacrifices made the astronaut’s risks and glories possible, but in this respect, it was probably more similar to the original myth of the pioneer than was commonly admitted at the time.
¶
“To me, uncertainty is the greatest torture, and in my quest to eliminate it, I have become smitten with Communist ideology. I love it. I love the idea that someday the power of the state will be naturally utilized by the proletariat to crush the bourgeois from the inside, and in so doing transform the proletariat themselves, while the state effortlessly dissolves. And I know what the dissolved state will look like as well. The men who remain will know certainty, true certainty, as freedom and slavery become one in violence and total state control. Thesis and antithesis will finally form a stable synthesis, and history will cease its permutations in a final, transcendent state. The age of reason will reach its final climax, and history find its end. And that, Mr. Armstrong is the dream that drives me.”
¶
Modernity was an incredibly audacious project. The idea was to finally marry Plato and Aristotle, Forms and Experience, Thesis and Antithesis, Philosophy and Life. One way that modernity tried to do this was by finding a compromise to the struggle between the individual and society, kingdoms and democracies, the man and the mob.
Plato in his Republic, imagined a state in which the philosopher kings could be free, since it would be apparent to all that their rule was for the best of all. Thus, all the little people would naturally fulfill the jobs assigned to them by their superiors, and everyone ends up as happy as they can be.
Democracy works by the opposite principle. No one is in charge of anyone else, so we all naturally pursue happiness as we see fit and in so doing everyone ends up as happy as they can be.
Of course, observation shows that in both kinds of societies, sorrow persists. As explained before, if every individual is free as in democracy, then everyone is a slave to everyone else, and especially to the million things they all must agree on before they may disagree on anything else. Contrastingly, in a kingdom, one man is free and everyone else is a slave to the whims of that man. But of course, that man is also a slave, for he exists at the mercy of the mob, as Damocles [23] so accurately saw. So in both societies, freedom, true freedom, total freedom, is impossible.
The totalitarian state tried to resolve this paradox once and for all by making the leader a true man of the people. Leaders like Hitler weren’t kings over the people, they were the embodiment of all those things the people wanted. They were the whole mob made one man. Through propaganda, the will of Hitler became the will of the mob, and through his natural sympathy, the will of the mob became the will of Hitler. The two were to become one at last.
But it never worked. The gap couldn’t be bridged. There were always those unwilling to accept the leader, and those who opposed the leader (and thus the people whom he embodied) had to be liquidated. As a result, the leader was never quite able to make his will identical to that of his masses without self-interest emerging to divide them. Further, there was a part of the mob that hated itself and loved violence, and so that part of society had to find its expression in more cruelty and self-destruction.
In the end, rather then finally ending the problems of individuals and society, modernity created a hideous new hybrid that combined the disadvantages of both and created greater sorrow than any previous system.
¶
“In my years of study, I learned an important principle, Mr. Armstrong. There are two worlds of existence: the Womb World and the Diamond World [24]. The Womb World is the fickle world of our perceptions, and the Diamond World is the fixed world of the gods. Similar concepts exist in many cultures. Dualism is not unique to Esoteric Buddhism. The key insight of my training is that it is the Womb World that is objective and the Diamond World that is subjective, not the other way around. And so, from the lofty vantage of the moon, I intend to create a new diamond world, for all of mankind to share. I will reform the eternal and with it the subjective life of all the world. And in that world at last will man be made perfect, through fear!”
¶
Somewhere in the middle of his long speech, the ninja had resumed fighting.
“And if I may guess what it is that propels you, Mr. Armstrong, I would guess that it is nothing more than blind loyalty and misplaced faith in the American way, ne?”
Neil instinctively rolled his eyes at the uncharacteristic brevity of the ninja’s concluding remark. But then, the cost of his momentary inattention became apparent. Slashing as he was distracted, the ninja’s blade swiftly severed the tip of his finger [25]. After the blow, the two separated by a few feet. Blood gushed forth quickly at first, then slowed. His face went pale, then regained its color. Inside the astronaut, something changed.
Seeing the effect of his lucky strike, the ninja moved forward to strike again. But, the ghost that Armstrong now was stood stock still as the ninja’s once fearsome blade passed through its body harmlessly. Armstrong was flesh made phantom.
Somehow, Armstrong had overcome the presence of the ninja and was now immune to his attacks, even as they connected with what should have been flesh. He had become an ooky, spooky ghost, more idea than man.
This went on for a half a minute before, exasperated, the ninja chucked his sword at Armstrong. As soon as it passed through Armstrong, the ninja ran up and punched the astronaut square in the face.
The blow miraculously connected, displacing his nose and busting his lip. Armstrong shoved the ninja back instinctively. For the first time in the long fight, his eyes filled momentarily with abject terror. He returned abruptly from the world of spirits, bone and muscle once more.
The ninja stumbled back slightly, then caught himself just before tripping. He beamed broadly.
The two tussled for a while, the ninja using spin kicks to transition into dragon punches, Armstrong using boxing stance and footwork to deliver jabs and sidekicks. Armstrong managed to plant a widowmaker to the ninja’s jaw, but he just took it in stride. The ninja planted foot in Armstrong’s face, pushing him back onto an exhaust fan. The ninja was saying something, but Armstrong missed it while he pulled himself back onto his feet.
“You see Mr. Armstrong, we are not so ‘chigau,’ you and I. To you, the diamond world is your heartless Christian god, whereas I see the only true diamond is the equality of suffering imposed by a communist regime.”
Armstrong’s heart queued up a beat as he planned his next assault.
Section IV : Asynthesis
Armstrong’s blows were fast and furious. Hard punches struck the ninja in the face and chest. Rapid kicks pounded the ninja’s body. The ninja tried to dodge, but his enemy had become a blur of limbs and pain. He was numb with pain until a high kick to the ear momentarily relieved the ninja of his punch drunken stupor.
“Give up. It’s over,” commanded Armstrong. “Go on, git.”
Not convinced and not thinking clearly from the blows, the ninja rubbed his aching jaw, as Armstrong prepared for a speech of his own.
“Listen, that’s last crack of yours just about did it for me. Thanks to you, I’ve finally figured out what I’m going to do up there, what I’ll say.”
After being knocked onto the fan, Armstrong seemed to find his source, and ninja couldn’t land another hit. Something in the ninja’s last remarks had caused Armstrong to become enlightened in those lifetime.
“To get into space, what you really have to do is cut away everything that’s tying you down. You cut out your family. You cut out your friends. You cut out your nationality, your hopes, and your beliefs. But in the end, there’s always one thread left. Nietzsche called it power. The Buddha called it compassion. NASA-types call it a tether or an umbilical line. Whatever you call it, you’ve always got to have one last motivator, or you shall surely die.
“Mankind has gone through a number of different phases. First, the Pre-Socratics tried to find the essence of all things, then the Sophists said argue only for money. First, Plato and Aristotle found the Academy and the Lyceum, then the Dark Ages set in. First, the Moderns built an age of reason, and now… Now, the modern age is going to close, and I’m going to do it.
“When I go up there, I’m going to start an era that’s only a small change in man’s progress, but will be a giant leap for mankind’s civility. With modernity, you don’t care how many skulls get crushed, so long as the tank wheels keep moving forward. You don’t care how many people die to make the people one with their leader, through fear or brainwashing or whatever else. All that matters is your one big idea, and everything else depends on that.
“Well, the trouble is, you can do what you want, but you can’t want what you want. You can use reason to bend all desires according to reason, but reason itself must serve desire. Modernity tried to get around that by cutting off all desires but one, since without even that one there’s nothing left but nihilism. You cut all the lines but one then float to space. Cut the last line, and you’ll choke in space. Well, I’m ready to put an end to all that. The one thread left is a noose and getting tangled in it can strangle all the hope out of world. I’m looking for the new gravity. I’m looking for new lines. Gravity maybe weaker on the moon, but given the choice between that and floating in orbit with modernism or drifting in space with nihilism, there’s no other choice. Anymore, it’s too late to go back to earth, to go back to the old connections where life was ruled by dirt and the soil and tribe. If we tried to go back to that kind of life, the world would burn up on reentry. All that’s left for mankind right now is the moon, cold and sterile as it is.
“So, here’s what I’m getting at, in the after-modern age, we’re not going to be chasing big ideas anymore. No one will be striving for utopia. We’re just going to live and let live, and our only big idea will be letting other people live and let live too. No more mass killing for ideology. Sure, there will still be killing, I can’t stop that. But I’m going to put a damper on big dreams for the next few hundred years. So the world can be better prepared when we try to go into space again. That’s right, this is also going to be the end of manned space exploration and positive philosophy for a while. From now until man is ready to find the Diamond World without losing the Womb World, science and philosophy are going to be ground to halt by what I create up there.
“And what I create up there will be simply this: ‘We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t…’ And people will finish that sentence themselves.”
¶
Why is it we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t solve world hunger? End all war? Eliminate poverty? Erase the hate? Increase the peace? The thing is, some ideas get passed on from generation to generation, and some don’t. No one questions the Millikan oil drop experiment or argues that plastics are a social construction, but one’s parents’ moral experience, it just doesn’t seem to transmit. For a while, the hope was that since scientific information is able to aggregate through education and experiments, that moral information could do the same. But it seems like everyone has to make their own mistakes. Somehow, just hearing about other people’s past experiences, and sometimes even our own, it isn’t enough to keep us from making rookie mistakes. Sure, if you focus, you can keep some mistakes from repeating but that just opens the door to others. With science, a few examples are all that are needed to stamp out error. When the tragedy stuck, investigators knew it wasn’t going to be an O-ring that failed the Columbia. But out there in space, the scientists, those would-be anti-philosophers, were made to take on the mantel of their great rival, philosophy, and it sunk them. They became their enemy, and there was no reason left to fight.
We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t end poverty.
We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t halt crime.
We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t stop tooth decay.
We can put a man on the moon, but the commute just takes longer everyday.
Science failed, and, for better or worse, took modernity with it.
¶
“Of course, the earth was going to continue in its turmoil no matter what I did up there. I can change human expression, but I can’t change human nature. Listen, you’re no more the embodiment of stealth than I am of American virtue. In our earthly forms, we are flawed representations. In our heavenly forms, we may incarnate a truth, but then what? In such a state, there is no movement. We are that we are, and nothing changes. But though the LORD is a burning fire, the bush was not consumed. It’s hubris to think we can be the living Form and Experience. There’s only One who can do that. Standards are prescriptive, not descriptive. That means as fallible beings with non-trivial standards for our dealings with others, failure must be possible, if not inevitable. Failure is a trait that’s hidden in plain sight for every moral code possible. That means from now until we rejoin the Forms, the after-modern era of disappointment will be nipping at our heels.”
And there, on the roof of that chain dinner and in the full moon that was rising over their heads, post-modernism was born.
Postlude
Back in the Waffle House, Neil, now Neil again, resumed drinking his coffee as he listened to the two waffle men ask their frantic questions.
“What happened?” “How did you do it?” “Were you completely defenseless up there?” “What about his sword?” “How did you convince him to go?” “Is he coming back?” “What’s going to happen next?”“Is it going to be OK?” “Will this stop the mission next month?”
Neil laughed and put down his cup.
“Calm down fellas. Yeah, it’s over. At least for me.”
“We finally figured out what got rid of him last time was the dawn,” said the one waffle man.
“Yeah, he didn’t want to be seen by the waking world. But then this time, he attacked during the day, right? So that meant he didn’t care about exposure?” said the other.
“Yup, well, he was going to have to become me and replace me, in order to preserve his stealth. But then he realized that in order to do that, in order to really become me, he was now stuck becoming something he didn’t want to be. He knew that if he became me, he would end up bringing on the end of the modern age just like me, plus he would be stuck on the moon. It would have been a double loss for him, so he chose to leave me be and try to find some way to bring more chaos into the world that’s coming. You see, whenever anybody fights they end up becoming their enemy. But for that guy, it was about more than that. Becoming his enemy was his whole life’s mission. Once he knew me enough to replace me, he knew he couldn’t do it without betraying himself. And I’ll tell you who he is: the philosopher.
“He’s obsessed with finding his certainty, with ordering the world into A and not-A and finding a resolution to all dilemmas. Once he knew that going to the moon meant leaving more dilemmas unresolved, he wanted no part in it.”
“What about your finger, will it be OK?”
Neil wiggled the finger, wrapped in a napkin and some tape.
“I think it’ll be fine. When I go up there, I’m going to split, like an electron in a diffraction grate. There will be two me’s, the wave and the particle, or the experience and the essence. My essence will stay on the moon, but my experience will come back to earth. My moon form will be essential and thus whole again. My earth form will still be hurt, but I’m sure I can get a prosthetic finger, and if anything else happens to that, whatever. The glove of my spacesuit can cover me in the meanwhile. The two forms are going to be separated out, but the two won’t be resolved.
“To be honest, I’m not entirely happy with the future that’s coming either. We’re going to have to keep soldiering on with separate quantum physics and relativistic physics. Separate earth and separate heavens. Separate eternal and separate particulars. The gap between the essence and the accident will be wider than it has been since the Middle Ages, and there won’t be much to be done about it. But, if it must be done to drain the bloodlust out of the modern age, so be it. Frankly, the first half of this century had enough misguided idealism to last for a while. Life without theory will be the order of the day for the coming years.”
“Until when?”
“I can’t say. But I’ll be watching from up there, and when it’s time, I’ll let us try another shot at the whole philosophy thing.”
They continued talking about their strange experiences with the ninja, talking and laughing, bullshitting and philosophizing, joking and debating, until late in the night. Finally, it was time for the three new friends to part.
“Look, thanks for everything. It was hard coming here, but I’m glad I came. I don’t know if I would have been able to do it if it weren’t for you guys. The American space program owes you a debt of gratitude.”
“Aw, it was nothing.”
“No, I’m serious. You guys really helped me out. Now I can finally guard the moon from Commies. I hope your business goes so well that you open a thousandth restaurant just down the block [26].”
“Well, we’ll see what we can do, OK? You take care up there, all right?”
¶
As the sun grew brighter again the next day, Neil stretched in the rest area parking lot, then returned to his car, now filled with the smell of his sleep. He rubbed his eyes, and once more stretched before resuming the trip home. Today, the sun seemed less punishing, and the long, uncertain road in front of him seemed more like a promise than a curse.
A future without theory would be hard, but Neil knew he was ready for it at last.