Today is Sunday so no post but I hope to receive two books soon and will sooner or later resume rereading The Makeshift Rocket. Meanwhile, I have got stuck into rereading and posting about Neil Gaiman's Sandman with a corresponding increase in page views on the Comics Appreciation blog. Am I alone in seeing parallels between Anderson and Gaiman?
Here is an issue from Anderson and maybe from literature generally. Anderson, like my regular correspondent, Sean Brooks, was skeptical about human perfectability. Anderson was agnostic but Sean, as a Catholic, believes in the Fall of mankind. I certainly do not accept the theology of a "Fall." However, empirically, there is a lot of imperfection in human beings, both individually and collectively. I am coming to realize for myself the significance of the Buddhist teaching of "unsatisfactoriness."
This has practical implications. For example, I should stop regretting my inadequate responses to certain interpersonal interactions in the past when the plain fact is that neither I nor the other people involved were capable of any greater degree of insight or empathy at the time. But we can and are obliged to learn.
What does anyone else think?
4 comments:
Hi, Paul!
Thanks for the nice mention you made of me! Yes, Poul Anderson and I both believed, as an empirically obvious fact, that all human beings are imperfect. And, yes, as a Catholic I trace that imperfection back to an event in the remote past to a mysterious testing which mankind failed.
Yes, Poul Anderson called himself an agnostic in one of his letters to me. But, I wonder how much of an agnostic he truly was? I get the impression in many of his works that he at least wished to believe in God. And that poem he wrote called "Prayer in War" (which you can find in ORION SHALL RISE) does not seem in the least agnostic.
As I've said before, the Catholic Church does not reject anything found in other philosophies or faiths which are true. So, the Buddhist notion of "unsatisfactoriness" seems to mean that Buddhist thinkers are quite aware of how flawed human beings are.
I would interpret your comment about "...inadequate responses to certain interpersonal interactions in the past" to simply mean we all have made mistakes, or worse, in how we behaved with other persons. My view is that at least sometimes we could have done better, and should have. And we certainly should at least try to learn from our mistakes.
Sean
Sean,
My answer is that we were not designed but evolved by random processes and, since then, have either progressed or retrogressed through intra-species conflicts, so we are lucky to have made as much progress as we have.
Paul.
'For example, I should stop regretting my inadequate responses to certain interpersonal interactions in the past when the plain fact is that neither I nor the other people involved were capable of any greater degree of insight or empathy at the time.'
This is only your opinion and in any case, who decides whether a response to an interpersonal interaction is inadequate if not the people involved.
' the plain fact is that neither I nor the other people involved were capable of any greater degree of insight or empathy at the time'
Opinion only, and who is to say you're correct?
This is too personal, in my opinion, to discuss on an open forum like this blog.
Hi, Paul!
Of course I agree evolution played a role in the rise of the human race, but I don't believe it was the only factor. As Pius XII declared in his encyclical letter HUMANI GENERIS in 1950, evolution in itself is not contrary to revelation.
And to tie this in with something written by Poul Anderson, he had his character Lieutenant Philippe Rocheforte thinking as he listened to a lecture about the Ythrians in Chapter IV of THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND: "The reproductive pattern--sexual characteristics, requirements of the young--does seem to determine most of the basics in any intelligent species. As if the cynic's remark were true, that an organism is simply a DNA's molecule way of making more DNA molecules. Or whatever the chemicals of heredity may be on a given world....but, no, a Jerusalem Catholic can't believe that. Biological evolution inclines, it does not compel."
But, yes, I can see how lucky we were that the pre hominid primates from which mankind sprang were not wiped out due to natural accidents or being hunted to extinction by stronger animals. I was reminded of how Poul Anderson speculated on hard it was for "dawn men" to live in his story "The Little Monster."
Sean
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