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For the homeward route I chose to go by bus, via Dallas, because I had not seen it so far, and traveling through the South I could prolong the warm days before the coming of winter. By the way, why do we keep in mind only titles like "The Long Hot Summer", or "The Green Grass of Home", and not something like "Our sweetheart Sleet" or "Waltzing on the Glazed Frost of the Road"? It would seem wonderful for those who had never known frost. People’s trend to escape from reality is well known—even religion is an escape from reality. As for the traveling by bus, with all its disadvantages, it is the best solution for a tourist like me. And it is not only because it is the cheapest way. From a bus you can see places and meet people. Not the best of them but some real ones! I experienced train travel three years ago, from Los Angeles to New York. The Americans do not use trains. For small distances, there are cars, and few of them travel beyond journeys of one day. Those who must go farther prefer to fly. A few of them take trains. From Los Angeles to Chicago, my travel was civilized but extremely boring and tiring. It was like in planes, with the difference that, instead of some hours, a train journey lasts some days. The worst is that, because of lack of long stops, you cannot walk, moving your feet. Between Chicago and New York, the travel was not in the least civilized. A lot of noisy and unpleasant–smelling people got in. Even the toilet, usually clean, became hard to use.
So, I am leaving Los Angeles on the highway in a Greyhound bus toward Dallas. I think the bus is leaving on time for the first time. In the beginning there are few passengers. The town looks to be varied. Modest houses alternate with rich ones, commercial and industrial areas, and above all many depots. One may say that USA is a country of depots and car parks. After an hour and five minutes, the first non–built–up area appears, and not for long, as another locality arises. And what a locality! Almost endless!
The farther we go from the ocean, the more evident the pollution becomes. The eastern part of Los Angeles is quite unpleasant from this reason. After more than two hours we definitely leave the urban area, entering among the mountains. Here, several forests of pillars with propellers on top turn the Aeolian energy into an electric one. Their number is really impressive. I do not know how profitable they are but it is obviously that when the Americans decide to do something, they certainly do it.
As usually during the travels, my mind flies free.
It reminds me of a Thomas Nagel’s essay about the death, (Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press, 1979) discussing times before and after one’s death, wanting to establish if death is a good or a bad event. His ingenious approach to the topic makes the discussion not only interesting, but also inciting. His analysis would still follow another way if we first define the concept of time.
The debates about time always seem odd and apparently senseless. That is because we’ve got into the habit of using this concept before spelling it out it. Even so, it is necessary to define the concept we use to make clear enough its subsequent utilization. I shall not deeply develop here this concept, but some specifics are necessary to approach our initial topic. This is what I am trying to do in the following paragraph.
We accept the conception according to time as a sum of the events happened in an interval. If between two successive events a third one does not exist, we would not have any reason to consider the two events not to be consecutive. The length of such interval is nil. Instead, some intermediate events between the initial two make the interval seem longer. The more they are, the longer the interval is. Therefore we can look at time as a warehouse of events, a collection, a history of them. The length is a contouring of the events that occur in an interval. The length may seem different to different observers, depending on the events that each of them observes. And so it is. Each observer has his own imagine about the world, his history, his time. Universal time is a wrapper of all individual times. The usual physical time is nothing else but a bringing to the same denominator, a common value scale, useful for communication among us. Shortly, we conceive the time in its essence like a succession of events and not as a pre–established, existing, and everlasting matrix, in which some events could happen or not.
Let us return to our topic. Death is not a deed, strictly speaking. Life is a deed, an activity; death is nothing but the end of life. Death is an event only in the sense that it can be recorded in history. An analogy for life is a liquid flowing from a reservoir. Death is the moment when the liquid has finished itself and nothing more flows. Whether a person’s life ended suddenly, by a fatal accident for instance, or slowly at old age, it does not matter. One of our subjective estimation is that the first case is tragic and unfortunate, and the second one is natural. But we actually never knew how much liquid had been in the reservoir. It is only in our imagination the thought that all reservoirs of life are equal to each other. To extend the life/reservoir analogy, considering how fast or slow the liquid flows, would go beyond of our purpose. Therefore death is only the end of life and we should not assign it a great role.
If death is not worth speaking about, and life is, then the initial question must be changed a little: is there a significant difference between the time before someone’s birth and after his death? In both situations, the person’s life does not exist. Therefore the two times seem to be equivalent: times in which he does not exist. We see now, after the concept of time has been defined as such, that the answer to the first question is definitely NO. That is because the first time, looked as history of the previous events, does not contain the person’s life, while the history of after his death does. History has been enriched with another life, another deed.
Maybe just the awareness of the idea that our life becomes history, our history, makes death seem important to each of us, because we ourselves become responsible for the trace we leave behind. Maybe if our life were longer, just a bit, we would succeed in giving our traces more consistency, or making it seem at least honorable. It is from here probably that the fear of death comes, like the final judgment, such as death leaves us undressed by what we sometimes try to put on to seem more beautiful.
Surely, such an intense topic could be approached in many ways and the conclusions would be equally different. This approach was only a way. A definitive solution would be the most awkward thing in the world.
Life, in old philosophic thought, has a cyclic character. Even the Greeks did not go far away from this conception. They invented a beginning of mankind, but not an end. Judaism did that, but they invented also the messianic idea, according to which somebody will come to make them masters of the world. In this way, Judaism is more a national creed than a universal religion. Besides, from the philosophical point of view, its meaning is not much different: the same blind obedience in the face of fate, the same lack of will to change something by one’s own effort. That which has carried the idea up till its last consequences was Christianity: The God is for all the people, and the future is in our hands. It has given mankind a chance, and man has become dignified. He is a fighter for his own future. The Arthurian Legends were fundamental for European education. In a symbolic way, Lancelot turns his life from a careless one —to live the moment—into a man able to make the supreme sacrifice for a noble dream. I do not know if it was a good idea—maybe yes— but this was the theoretic education of any knight. Besides, man does not fight alone, but together with God’s other children, like a family. The searching for the Holy Grail symbolizes the endeavor of putting questions about the sense of life, of seeking the truth.
Judaism was the moral support of Jewish people in his fight against the invaders, from the Babylonians to the Romans. Many of their wishes are for understanding for that time, but they are no longer actually.
Before making known his ideas, Jesus had to persuade his contemporaries that he was God’s son. For this purpose, he needed to perform some miracles, and he did so. If he were to come in our time, when nobody believes in wonders, he should do things according to the mentality of the people today. That’s why priests using Jesus’ arguments now, are similar to those pretending to be his adepts only by wearing sandals through snow at minus 20 degrees Celsius, because Jesus used to wear sandals. What is important is Jesus’ message, not His sandals.
It was Plato who deals with the relations between man and divinity. Speaking about divinity, he does not have in view a being of cult, but the idea of well. Plato’ syllogism is well equal to Supreme Virtue. I did not mention Plato accidentally; he is considered to be the first systematic theologian, with the mention that he does not invite us to belief but to enter into dialogue.
Hellenism did not disappeared yet. We, the Europeans, are its products. Greek culture separated the humanist Europe from tyrannical Asia. Only the Russian communism tried to mix them, without success. Asia was tyrannical in politics, while Europe humanist in culture. Unfortunately, politics rarely had anything in common with culture, so that there is not so much difference between East and West.
Unlike the myth of perpetual returning of the Greeks, Christianity brings history, and gives it a sense: salvation. (Mircea Eliade analyses these ideas very well in one of his books, entitled "The Myth of the Eternal Return".) Unhappily, Christianity cancels any evolution after the Final Judgement that will put it at an end. "When Messiah will come, mankind will be saved once and for all, and history will cease to exist". This seems to come back to the condition of primitive man, for which time does not exist, without speaking about the evolution, or history. Primitive man, like animals, lives for the moment in a perpetual continuation. Christianity seems to suggest a returning to the "lost paradise of the animal".
Oriental faiths, looked at from the European view, seem to be more inclined to philosophy, while Christianity pays much attention to small stories. And still, the great modern philosophies belong to Europe. Yes, but only after Rationalism overcame Christianity. Or maybe just Christianity stimulated the birth of Rationalism, due to its exaggerations.
Socrates was the one who discovered the Rationalism. People from the old times used to have many gods, half–gods, heroes, etc. From this reason, they were more responsive, more ready to accept alternative possibilities. They had larger conception. After several centuries of the black religious Middle Age, the whole European cultural evolution was under the Rationalism sign, culminating with Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, etc. But Rationalism has its limits. I am not the first to say it. Jose Ortega y Gasset has shown it repeatedly. Communism is also an exaggeration of democratic ideas, as democracy has its limits too.
Rationalism holds history, with its way to the progress, but ignores the end of Christian theology. Progress seems to be infinite. Unhappily, between a previous future and a later one, we seem to be a tiny infinite. And still something remains: hope. The ancient people named it better: soul, which is going to be updated as spirit. Man never accepted that he is only a decaying body, so always sought for something transcendental, surviving him, so all our aspirations have in view something eternal, if possible.
The basic law of nature is the struggle for existence. As an alternative, civilized society recommend moral norms, mostly theoretical, often ones that cannot be fulfilled, sometimes idealist and usually naive. The wisdom of reconciliation of the two extremes belongs to common people, whose real life occurs in a dialectical equilibrium of the contraries. Due to their position, priests are speakers of the moral extremity. They cannot say to the parishioners they should be half a believer, but only repeat endless the same small stories. The question is what happens when they take it all seriously. In the first stage, some maladjusted, unhappy people result. In the second stage, such easy–manipulating people are turned into robots, among which suicide–terrorists are only examples.
Unfortunately, mankind went even beyond the limits, and through democracy and socialism, invented communism too. Yes, communism before being a political system, was a religion, or at least wanted to be one. As a matter of fact, this was the reason why the first Russian communist leaders forbade any other religion, except Marxism–Leninism doctrine as their single new bible.
From the "Man is nothing more than a shadow of a smoke: (Aeschylus) to the "Man as creator", mankind crossed the entirely spectrum.
Willing or not, any religion has implications in its meaning. For those who are not quite bigots, the meaning is the main purpose of any religion. Thinking in this way, Christianity is that which gave us dignity. We are no more some offspring of the Universe, as it happens in oriental faiths, a kind of wrecks, but God’s children. Besides, we are equal in front of God, therefore equal to one another. This is the beginning of the real democracy.
It is true that the ancient Greeks invented this word, democracy, with the meaning of the government by the people, and they really did it, but not for all the people. Their society was a slave–owning one; people were divided in social classes, with different rights. Democracy used to be for the upper classes. This mentality was in a perfect accord with their mythology, where gods, like people, had different powers, according to their position in the genealogical tree, starting with Uranus and Gaea, the first ones, and Zeus, the almighty one—but not in front of women— Smile!
As every religion has its Deluge, Greek Mythology has one as well, but its final is a little different. Zeus, being angry with people, decides to kill them, so that he unleashed the waters. But Prometheus, yet chained on Mount Elbrus, used to have the gift of foreseeing, and he advised his son, Deucalion, to make a boat and row as far as the mount Parnassus—the highest mountain. Deucalion took his wife, and did what his father had taught him. After water’ withdrawal, they were the only people on earth, exactly like Noah from the Bible. Hence, all people have them as ancestors. The difference is that, in the Greek Mythology, besides Deucalion’s heirs, there is another kind of people: accordingly to a dream, going down from the mountain, they threw back in their trace all the stones they met in the way. From every stone, immediately rose a man. Consequently, there are two categories of people: the natural heirs of Deucalion and those born from the stones.
As for the general idea of classifying in gods, heroes and people, this could be seen as a motivation for monarchies.
Coming back to equality between people, it is clear now that Christianity is that which does it for all the people, and Jesus’ sacrifice has given fruit, even after centuries. A joke says, “The proof that faith is from God is that it resists against the priests”. The President Lincoln’s "The Gettysburg Address" proved that the idea of democracy is now part of our conscience. He began by saying "... all the men are created equally" and ended with the words "... this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that of the government of the people, by the people, for the people..."
There are two trends in religion.
God’s promise is an optimistic one: if we follow his guidance, our future will be a happy one. And his promise is approachable because he is kind and not capricious. People are his children, and he, as every parent, loves his children. Consequently, our task does not consist any longer of invoking the mercy and help, but to follow the guidance. As the sportsman does not implore his coach to bring him a great performance on the plateau, but works under his guidance, in the same way, we do not ask God to give us something for which we did not work. That’s why it is demagogical to ask God to fulfill our wishes, and as a reward, to rise to him glorifying hymns. First, we should ask ourselves if our wishes are quite correct. This is what church should give us: some yardstick to judge our purpose and acts.
A bird coming to peck from our hand is not gentle, as we are tempted to think, but bold. Also, when we ask God to help us too frequently, we are not his obedient children; we are disrespectful. God’s glory is ensured without our everyday hymns. Coming from our part, the glorifying hymn sounds like flattery, as disgusting as afterwards an appeal follows. God, help me please! And we ask his help for anything, even if our demands are not always just some Christian ones.
I have just remembered a joke. Two Jews at the Wailing Wall, in their characteristic style, were beseeching God to help them. One of them, poorer, was content with some food for his children. The other, a rich man, was asking help in the success in a large business, which he was going to open. Disturbed, the rich man said to the poor man: "Look here! Here is some money, go and buy some food for your children, and leave God to think quietly about important things.
We pass through Arizona’s southern part. Some weeks ago I passed through in opposite sense through the North, and I remember now the Meteor Crater and that I wrote something about the historians. What else do they teach us? For example, King Louis IV of France is shown as one of the greatest kings in the world; almost all his acts are mentioned in the top of civilization. In reality, they were all more mistakes than intelligent acts. As a consequence, he was the last important king of France, as after him the monarchy felt. He was the gravedigger of the monarchy, not its star.
In time, the vegetation of the desert, as little as it is, begins to be enjoyable, just because it is scarce. Each plant has its charm, and when you find a new one, you rejoice at it as at a great discovery.
The sunset is different in the desert. If there is a veil of clouds, it gets an outline more and more well–marked and colored till almost red. The whole air turns to a pink hue, especially in Arizona and New Mexico, where the soil is reddish.
In a car park, from a huge truck, instead of a pitiless "macho" — as I was imagining the driver would be —a woman of thirty and no more than fifty kilos, got off the truck, bought a sandwich, got in the truck and left.
There are lots of books and especially films about the conquest of America by the English people, and nothing remarkable about the Spanish or even French, even if the French are known to be very prolific with regard to words. It is surprising they are dumb on this topic. For example, there is not much difference to make between Napoleon and Hitler. But, while Hitler is rightly put at the infamy wall, Napoleon is praised up to the skies, just because he belongs to French history, and French people knew to speak about it. Tolstoi was right to protest against such a partiality. For proving that the distance between sublime and ridicule is rather smaller than a step—pas— in French, which make an allusion to a famous reply with Pas de Calais. Chateaubriand asked himself in his travel notes through Italy what was the utility of so many bathrooms. It is known that French people were using more perfume than water in Chateaubriand’s time. That’s why their discretion regarding their colonial conquers surprise me. Only Voltaire makes exception and recognizes the superiority of Latin and Greek civilization.
In the bus station, where we have just stopped, I can see six different restaurants, and other ones are to be just a little further away. It is a large car park. Curiously, all the bus passengers went to McDonald’s, even if it is not the nearest, cheapest, most modest, elegant, or anything else. Nobody granted any attention to the others, no matter what they offered. Why? McDonald’s is not the best, and also its offer is limited and boring. And just because of this you know exactly what food is to be found, and their prices. When you have neither time nor desire to try something different, go to something well known before and without risk. Here is how the uniformity – so boring and cursed generally – could be preferred. And it is advantageous not only for the consumers, but also for the merchants. It is the same for all kind of chain of motels, restaurants, busses, shops and so on. Besides, they are organized industrially, with the smallest expenses and prices. It is hard, if not impossible, for the modest investors to succeed with such competition. In Greyhound bus system – I am in such a bus now – it is the same: drivers, mechanics and all the employees are different companies, but they keep the same standard rules, and so the system works. The openness is in fine points. The group is planned. Then it is good! And it is good if it is a result of a natural process of evolution, or it was well envisaged.
There is a paradox: such networks of busses, motels, restaurants, etc. work well in the US and did not work in the former "socialist" East European countries. In a dispersed economy people succeeded in centralizing some activities, but in a centralized economy the small systems did not work properly. The cause is simple, but difficult to accept by arrogant people: the human system is too complex to be conceived and achieved by someone. The socialist government is a great stupidity, proof of a great ignorance. We cannot build a cell, not a plant or an animal, but we want to build a human system with millions of people living in a nature almost unknown in its details. Nonsense! Such a huge and complex system could not be conceived but wrongly. It was wrong from the beginning. The government elaborates wrong rules, but impose them to the people. In exchange, the people dislike the rules and hate the government. Nothing works harmoniously, and soon the system collapses.
The US is a young country, where people have just adopted their rules, natural rules, generalized by the government. People trust in rules. They know that things could be better, yet McDonald’s is trustworthier.
I have often thought the Americans do not know how close they are to the communist system. Mainly their propaganda is still awkwardly similar to the Soviet one of the 50’s years. And now there are these nets of services, organized at national level. Fortunately, unlike the Russians, the Americans know to avoid the precipice in the last moment, before becoming ridiculous or provoking a disaster. They renounced in time the McCarthy doctrine. Another example is anti–trust laws in economy. This confirms the idea that the key of the art of government is the equilibrium. Monarchy, democracy, or anything else is not as important as the equilibrium.
El Paso is near Mexico. Three years ago I persuaded Eric to make a short visit in this country. Even shortly, for me it would be a new country visited. We entered Tijuana, and with his little car took a round as far as we could in a one–day trip. Now, the vicinity of Mexico brings again to my mind the different evolutions of Latin America and USA. There are not so much the political arguments able to convince me, but the psychological ones, because they are different due to their mentality. In the north, people feel to be conquerors, while in the south they feel like conquered people, even if they were "los conquistadors".
Spain send there its army and catholic missionaries. Concerning their mission, this was immoral from the beginning, and people knew it. Besides plundering, they introduced the slave system – abolished in Europe a thousand years ago— and preached the religion of Europe’s Middle Age, when Europe itself was passing into the New Era of Rationalism and Encyclopedia’s, without the church, even against it. But Spain itself was lagging behind England, where some democratic acts had already been history, from Magna Charta up till Cromwell’s time.
In such conditions, many soldiers deserted from the army and passed on the other side, joining with the natives. That’s why the South American population is mixed. English soldiers probably were not braver, but England sent on the new continent not only soldiers, but also free people. It is true that England did this in order to get rid of them, but it does not change much, on the contrary, these men felt really free. Besides, the army helped them when needed. Conquering the West, the first were the pioneers. The army came later and supported them. That’s why people still trust in authorities. Instead, in Latin America the army came first and nothing good happened afterwards for the common people. Between authorities and population there is a precipice.
Another explanation of American economical development is that they need not remove a feudal class. Instead, the Spaniards first installed a feudal regime, and people still endeavor to remove its traces. The Americans definitely solved this problem with their War of Independence.
In El Paso, a couple of nice Asian youths got on the bus. What draws attention are their clothes and language, or to be more exactly their languages. I learnt he was from Vietnam. His father— a former American soldier—succeeded in bringing the child in USA, five years after the war. The wish to be as American as possible could explain the exaggerations concerning his clothes. His wife is from Hong Kong, where he was visiting as a tourist not long ago. She does not speak English almost at all. Instead, he speaks Vietnamese, Cambodian, Tagalog, Chinese and many other languages about the existence of which I never heard. In their conversation, each of them speaks in his mother tongue. In this way, they express themselves correctly and understand each other. After my taste, her Chinese is much more melodious than his Vietnamese. Surprisingly his English is very bad. Maybe his coming in US is more recent then he said, or his whole story was a fabrication.
From El Paso we are in Texas.
This Asian young couple makes me to think at their faiths. There are some differences between religions in Chinese and Russian communism. The Chinese faith has been mainly unchanged for almost three thousand years and, most importantly, their religions Zen, Buddhism, Confucianism were never state religions. In other words, the political power and the people’s faith are two different things. Zen is the people’s faith, without priests.
None of their religions are hierarchical, that is, organized in an official structure so that it would be nothing to abolish on an official way. It is not surprising that Chinese communists did not forbid religious fêtes.
And there is one more difference. Buddhism is an aristocratic religion, Buddha himself was an aristocrat, and his teaching was assimilated by the people as wisdom, as salvation by the means of knowing, of meditation, of understanding. One might not ask people to renounce wisdom, as the religion for a Buddhist believer is the wisdom itself. Buddhism does not offer a stern system, in which the believer must be integrated, but only a way of meditation. At the opposite pole, Judaism and Christianity appear as religions of poor people from countries occupied by foreigners, and/or oppressed by their own leaders. These religions offer a hope in the future, and too easy solutions for the moment, frequently limited at prayers and hosannas. That’s why those in power used the Christian religion as a boomerang for handling the people. Religion was often similar to the doctrine of the single party in authoritative regimes, particularly the monarchic ones. As for the communists, removing the religion was strictly necessary in their opinion, as they wanted to replace it with their communist doctrine. And it was not difficult at all, as people no longer believe in old stories, anyway. For the Europeans, religion and wisdom is not similar.
Mao Zedong, who was a clever man, probably thought that mixing politics and faith would be a mistake. Lenin instead did it, but it is not surprising. Why? He had a European education. Most Europeans are Christians. Lenin was too, but not entirely. Marx and Engels, his ideological mentors, were not at all. In Europe, as soon as Charlemagne accepted the crown from the Pope in the year 800, all the countries had Christianity as state religion till 1789 when France removed the monarchy and religion at the same time. It is not the French that invented democracy but they made the most noise around it. The mentors of Communism thought to replace the Christian doctrine with the communist one. That’s why they saw in church their ideological adversary. As Christianity was the single doctrine of Middle Age, Marxism–Leninist doctrine was to be the religion of the new epoch.
For those who lived under the Soviet influence it was clear that the communist party, as the single party, and the Inquisition of 14th and 15th centuries are more similar than different. The communists had one more reasons to be afraid of the Church. They started from the idea that, in any democracy, the politicians come to power thanks to the people’s vote. We want universal vote, don’t we? Most people are uneducated and easy to handle with simple and lying arguments.
This is the essence of the communist doctrine: handling people with simple ideas. Consequently, the intellectuals and priests were the communists’ enemies. That’s why the first thing that the Russians did in Romania after the WW2 was to get rid off them. And they did it mostly by killing.
What a devilish trick our mind is! There is not a single Romanian person in the bus, I did not hear a Romanian word for several good weeks, about two months, and now it seems to me that people around utter Romanian words, even those two Chinese youngsters. It has never happened so far, but now, when I am on my way home, this thought is increasingly present in my mind.
The approach of a great town is announced from a distance. Officially, Forth Worth is an independent town, but it is stuck with Dallas. With or without Forth Worth, Dallas is a very large town.
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