To Be or Not To Be Nothing?

To be or not to be nothing is one of the questions that’s addressed by a branch of philosophy known as Noneism. Noneists maintain the view that some entities have no existence. In a review of Graham Priest’s Towards Non-Being (TLS, 2/23/18), Tom Graham indicates that the problem with such a proposition, is that “denying it would be ridiculous in any ordinary context” since there are plainly some things that don’t exist like "unicorns, the largest number, Sherlock Holmes.” Thus Noneists tend to get into trouble. But the kind of protests Noneism has elicited are full of flourishes all their own, as Graham illustrates in the following passage from his review: “A fundamental motivation for the dominant view is that to lack existence, it seems, is to be nothing at all. Things, by contrast, are not ‘nothing’—they are things! If so then ‘being a thing’ and ‘existing’ go hand in hand, and there cannot be ‘things’ that do not exist. Adherents of this view thus read the noneist’s claim ‘some things don’t exist’ as entailing the self-refuting ‘some things are not things’ and therefore to be self-contradictory.” Wow! Noneism is really something! And any movement that foments such flights of philosophic fancy must be doing something right. What would Noneism have to say about Sartre’s Being and Nothingness or Heidegger's Being and Time. Though “none” and “nothing” are country cousins, probably not a helluva lot.

Eleanor Rigby

What goes around comes around and it all comes out in the wash are two expressions that are frequently used in describing the inescapability of things. Is it the Calvinist concept of predestination that's being referred to, a biologic or Freudian determinism or merely the anecdotal truth that no stone goes unturned. Of course, despite the show-all tell-all nature of our current culture centuries have gone by in which enormous secrets were kept. That’s what makes bestsellers of out of books like The Da Vinci Code. Of course the latest incidence of airing dirty laundry is the Russian Investigation. Will the truth ever come out or will Robert Mueller be fired by the president? The true facts of the Kennedy assassination may never have been revealed and there are letters and unpublished manuscripts by J.D. Salinger that may never see the light of day. "The Lost Children of Tuam," Dan Barry’s story of unwed Irish mothers and their children (NYT, l0/28/17) and the abuses they suffered was successfully kept under the wraps for decades. And then there are the cases that no one ever hears about. The  stories which fit into no demonstrable category beyond the fact that they produced hardship or pain are the ones that will likely never get told. These are perhaps the saddest to the extent that they will eventually be buried under the rubble of history. "All the lonely people/Where do they all come from?" sang The Beatles.

Sabotage

Is there such a thing a bad person? When you examine the lives of those people who commit horrible crimes, Mark Anthony Conditt, the Austin Bomber, Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter, Stephen Paddock, who committed the Las Vegas massacre which, with 58 deaths, made it the worst mass shooting in US history, Omar Mateen, the 29 year old security guard who was responsible for the murder of 49 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Adam Lanza who shot 20 children at the Sandy Hook School in Newton Connecticut and Devin Patrick Kelley who was responsible for 26 deaths at the Sutherland Springs Baptist church outside San Antonio, you're more likely to think of mental illness than you are to make a moral judgment. If you're someone who lost loved ones in any of these tragedies or in say 9/11, you might not be interested in an analysis of motive. If the perpetrator had not only died at his or someone else’s hands you're either the kind of person who finds solace in justice, which means having the guilty person pay (perhaps with his or her life) or not. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber was sentenced to life imprisonment in a Super maximum security prison which ended the threat he posed, but it’s hard to get one’s hands around whether he was or is the embodiment of evil. Are rats evil? Certainly the terrorists whose violence is committed in the name of millenarian ideologies seem closer to what might be called evil simply due to their indifference to human life. A terrorist with a reasoning mind seems worse than a person who's hearing voices. Maybe one way to look at serial killers is the way one does hurricanes and other natural disasters. In the way that global warming has caused environmental catastrophes like the melting of polar ice caps, so too genetic, social and psychological factors get unleashed which make innocent babies turn into bombers. Remember the famous scene from Alfred Hitchock’s Sabotage (1936) based on Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent about political extremism, in which a young boy is unwittingly turned into a bomber? How prescient the filmmaker turned out to be?

Googled Into Oblivion

Mark Twain (Abdullah freres)

“The report of my death was an exaggeration,” said Mark Twain. The situation  Twain humorously alludes to became a frustrating reality for a New York Times journalist named Rachel Abrams , "Google Thinks I’m Dead (I know otherwise),” NYT, 12/16/17). Abrams found her biography confused with that of the "late wife of Elliot Abrams, who held prominent positions during the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.” The article recounts a Kafkaesque journey into the juggernaut of a powerful search engine for which there's no court of last resort. Once you fall into the purgatory of the misinformation wasteland you run the risk of being a lost soul. Not fake news, but a case of a search engine going to the wrong stop. Of course everyone knows that inaccurate death notices can provide a practical function. Imagine your dentist or doctor posting an "in memoriam" salute on line in lieu of those robo calls reminding you of your upcoming appointment. However, in the process of doing a story about her predicament Abrams actually maintained the hope that her Times credential would get her somewhere. But it was a little like David and Goliath. As Abrams points out in her piece Google is owned by Alphabet which is worth hundreds of billions. The Times is a runt by comparison. One’s first response to being declared out of the ballgame might be that it’s not fair. After all once you’re no longer a player, you lose your place in the batting order. It’s hard enough being a journalist these days, but Google is capable of creating the feeling that you don’t exist into a reality.

When the Caribbean Becomes a Ghastly Form of Torture

If you're used to being active you're likely to find even the most idyllic destinations to be somewhat boring. What does one do to occupy the day? Yes, the winters are cold if you are an inhabitant of a city like Boston, Chicago or New York and the poster of the couple holding hands or lying on settees in all-inclusive resorts like Sandals, which advertises to the tune of the Dirty Dancing theme “Now I had the time of my life…,” can seem appealing until you get there and find yourself squabbling while self-satisfied looking post-coital couples display their unattainable lotion-covered bodies in the sand. One of the requirements for resort life is to read those  mindless commercial novels by authors like James Patterson, but if you're someone who takes literature seriously you’ll undoubtedly find that they’re the equivalent of going to Red Lobster when you’re looking for one of those quaint little fishermen's shacks on the Maine coast. And how is it possible to relax amidst the constant humming of air conditioning units in the warrens of identical looking buildings. You never seem able to locate your room. Then there's the procrustean cheeriness of the adult counselors who will not tolerate even a crumb of real emotion. However, the worst thing it’s possible to do is to go to one of those very exclusive resorts on a French island like St. Barts where all the women you can’t have are topless. That's truly torture.