Your Soul Is Made of Money

I was musing over the state of my life the other night while trying to get to sleep, and I realised something quite profound.  I realised that every single regret I have, every missed opportunity and moment I wish I could have extended, is at heart down to a lack of money.  Money is the thing which enables life to happen in so many more ways than we like to admit to.  You have money and you are a successful citizen, you can pay your bills, improve your education and that of your children, you will dress well, eat well, travel well, experience much more of life than those without money.  I would very much like to be able to talk about the wealth of experience, spritual and otherwise, which is afforded outside of the magnetic pulse of cashflow, but I fear it is pretty much impossible in the society we have built for ourselves.  Even those who meditate can afford to take time out to stop working for enough time to transcend themselves. 

Is this right?  What are we to infer, for example, from new government policy  - that millionaire overseas businesspeople can enter the country and have normal visa requirements streteched to accommodate them, and, it seems, essentially act with impunity, simply because they have a shitload of cash - other than the clear notion that one's value is inextricable from one's wealth. 

Niall Ferguson (the most smouldering of Historian Bonfires) is currently on Channel 4 fronting a show called "Civilisation: The West vs The Rest", in which he expounds his at times bone-crunchingly honest views about the nature of empire, with the cold yet inexpressibly hot arrogance of a man of complete objectivity (so far as such a thing is possible).  This Sunday's episode, Work, discussed the Protestant Work Ethic as the driving force behind economic growth and modernisation - potentially over 30 million Chinese have moved away from Confucianism and Buddhism (less kerching! more I Ching) towards Protestantism since Mao died, for example, which, Ferguson argues, is one of the main reasons why Chinese ecomonic growth has been so consolidated and so fast, as it once was in Europe and America. 

Once you kill God then what do you have left?  You have man. 
Once you kill the primacy of the Pope, then what do you have left?  You have man as an individual. 

Damien Hirst's The Death of God - Towards a Better Understanding of Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools, a collection of 28 sculptures and paintings first presented at Hilario Galguera, Mexico in 2006.

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125

When every moment of your life is no longer controlled by edicts from On High, you must introduce a system of self-regulation, which was actually already very neatly done by the twin Protestant towers of hard work and renunciation of material wealth in order to glorify God.  Whereas Europeans used the scientific and philosophical freedoms this world eventually afforded them to experience an almighty existential crisis, the Americans kept the faith but inadvertently fell either into abject greed, or else religious extremism (see last week's post), yet China (so far at least) seems to have maintained some modicum of self-control, saving and investing and building and, subsequently, terrifying the West with its shimmering potential. 

The largest Christian church in Beijing, China http://bit.ly/g9ZhIu

So the question is this: are we content to only take the death of God so far?  I have spoken before about the beauty and ubiquity of myth, story, advernture and legend until very very recently.  The vacuousness and stale, dried-up sick on a Sunday morning vibe of modern Western Europe is such that we end up going through the motions of worship, exhausted as we all are by the compunction to work, but devoid of the glory that working for a God brings.  Guess we're all our own Gods now.

Jonny Depp as Jesus at http://www.magazine13.com/if-celebrities-were-gods/

Can we come up with something which can unite and inspire us, drive us forward into a future, rather than allow ourselves to get so far and give up?  I had a conversation with a Professor of Philospophy the other day who expounded the ontological argument - look at how complex this watch is, we musty infer a maker, look at how complex the universe is, there must also be a maker - genuinely thought we had gotten over that idea at least 250 years ago - and he represented what is true about all religion which falsely purports to belong to the Waking World.  This is what we know, they say, here is what is proved.  Here is what we do not know, they say, and this is what is God.  They pay no mind to the fact that their mentality, if shared by everyone, would have meant a complete and utter lack of scientific, humanitarian, techonological and intellectual growth.  It is only by the constant reduction of God's power (i.e. finding out that which we do not yet know) that we move forwards.  As I have said before, progress in civilisation is not a one way ticket - we can Decline and Fall just like everyone else.  We have gone so far as to realise some truths which do not necessarily make us feel comforted and cherished - the lack of specialness, the loss of the Holy Parent, whatever this may be - but it seems that we are now those embarrassing teenagers who still get into bed with mommy and daddy after a bad dream.  We should be brave enough not to regress into ever more fervent religiosity, or a rejection of the merits of science, and stand on the plateau, shaking our fists into the sky and fucking daring ourselves to be scared in the face of the truth. 

If we don't work out how to do that, then we have died in the water, like so many dead sardines or birds fallen from the sky.