The Fundamental Human Problems, A Short Introduction

Let us start with a man named Huston Smith. Huston Smith was a professor at Harvard in comparative religions, and is the ultimate guide to comparative religion in the English language. He was not a minister. He attended either an American Methodist or an American Episcopal Church, and referred to himself as a Vedic-Christian. He attended a fairly standard Christian-liberal Church, and ran a coffee-klastch on the Vedas for the Church once a month.

He had a list of four basic fundamental human questions. The list is succinct and it does leave many things out, but it is a very good distillation of our problems as people. The list goes as follows:

1. Where do I come from?
2. Where am I?
3. Where am I going?
4. Why am I here?

There was an author of a great UK radio-show called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," named Douglas Adams. Adams must have been acquainted with Smith's list and joked that civilization inevitably proceeds through three fundamental states. First, to question, "Where do we come from?," then second to question, "Where are we going?" and then third - to ask - "Where do we do lunch?"

So let us attack our first question, "Where do I come from?" Let us imagine an abstract idea - but one that I think fits a simple article. It comes from Camus and Santanyana's existentialism, and it is called, "thrown-ness." The basic idea is that you arrived in this world as a human as an infant, and you don't remember your origins, so now you are, "thrown," into the mix of a very puzzling and queer human world.

In other words, we have a fundamental disconnection in our experience as people. We've arrived at the restaurant at the end of the universe, but we're not quite sure how we arrived here. As people we search for our origins in different ways - through geneaeology, through family stories, through our cultural myths, through religious tradition, and through philosophy. What you can't really know is exactly what it was before you got thrown into this queer madhouse.

Orwell noted that it is the victorss who (not write) but re-write history, after an old Latin maxim. Throughout history, every historian has had an axe to grind. As objective as we want to be, history has evaporated because the victors re-canted their history in order to remain victors in the next spam-news program. We as people are such human fools. It gets pretty pathetic.

So there you are, a reasonable man or woman, and the simple question, "How the eff did I get here?" - remains something of a mystery to you. If you dug into case after case of spam, you would still only get spam out of the bargain bin. You can achieve very little veracity with history, although archaeology helps a great deal. It helps.

Imagine this joke. An archaeologist is going through a garbage heap of our culture, and our culture and its ideals are long gone. He keeps finding Snickers bar wrappers. There is wrapper after wrapper, the wrappers are immortal and unfaded, and the font on the wrapper is large and proud. This Snickers must have been significant religion to these people! Yes, the religion of marketing!

Garbage heaps are great archaeological finds, and you wonder if our interpretations of what we see in these ancient garbage heaps might not be as corny as the one I just mentioned. Meanwhile, the victors write a spam-treat every time an actual history might be a bit too real to keep them in power. The point being, that being thrown into the mix of our human asylum is a state we all live in, and a state that can't be fully cured. We can only wonder at what real meat once lay in the bargain-bin of spam-treats.

There was a sketch on the original Monty Python show - this is real - and not most people's kind of humor - called "The Philosopher's Soccer Game." Alright so the game starts, the rules are the same as soccer. Plato, Socrates, Camus, Sartre, and everyone wanders about the soccer field pontificating for a great while. Nietzsche kicks the ball into the net and scores! No one else bothers to score a point, they just wander around and continue to pontificate. Nietzsche wins the soccer game!

The joke is that while Nietzsche did love to pontificate, he was also one of the first philosophers who had the gall to admit that pragmatism, "if it's effective, that is truth enough," might be valuable as a sound philosophy. So Nietzche decides, "There is no fundamental meaning to the rules of this game. However, it is truth enough that in this game, scoring points by kicking the ball into the net is the manner of winning the game. I will kick the ball into the net in order to win the game." Meanwhile, everyone else continues to pontificate on more sound philosophies.

Pragmatic philosophy is not dumb. As people we need to be pragmatic. Take most people's day in an office - "Gee, there is no reason why this office should run this way. This is fruity nonsense. I would like to keep my job though, so in this game, I will just play by the rules of this office." Your reward is a continuing career and a paycheck. Nothing wrong with that philosophy. Nothing at all. Very simple, functional reasoning, and it makes the world go 'round - and 'round and 'round.

The only problem with pragmatism is when it goes to the end of its logical chain. That would be something like, "I can make a lot more money as a swindler and get away with it if I do it in a certain way. I want to satisfy my unlimited desires and I have limited resources. I will keep myself in the right place to receive my swindling-rewards, as it is a more effective way to obtain the resources I desire." This is also a common pragmatic-philosophy in the world, and that kind of pragmatism is malignant.

So how do you find a more sound fundamental principle over simple-pragmatism as a person? A simple enough answer is moderation. Everyone has unlimited desires. Everyone has limited resources. You say to yourself, "I will moderate what desires I will achieve." Civilization would run majestically if more of our members chose to do this in their lives. As it is, civilization has never worked out so entirely well. It runs like a very queer asylum full of maniacs - always did - and continues to do so.

To end this article, a moderate-pragmatism is about all a functional human being needs as a philosopher. You will be pragmatic in your approach, "However meaningless the rules of these human games, you score points in a certain way," and part two, "I will moderate how many points I score, because it is simply malignant to live any other way." That is all a person needs. Two very functional bits of reasoning, and you have the philosophy for succesful living.

In the meantime people like me wander about the field pontificating about more sound philosophies. However, you maniacs need maniacs like me, and I do not spit at my state-rewards check too often, as I use those two functional principles to maintain my very little, clay-crawling life and my little warren in that clay beneath a shrub. We're going to do an article on mathematics next, and that will be in the abstract category. Then we'll see if I'm up for producing more spam treats.