Christmas Lights And Genesis

The perfect happiness of men on the earth (if it ever comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the satisfaction of animals. It will be an exact and perilous balance; like that of a desperate romance. Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them. - GK Chesterton

Intro

Christmas is approaching in Basel and we decided to do a bit of shopping and see if we could find some nice Christmas lights. Suffice it to say we were not disappointed. We must have seen on the order of 100 Christmas trees on the walk which was about 15 minutes each way. So many that they inspired the meditation you will read below. Along the way we made a few little discoveries. There is a massive hidden Christmas tree in the city hall building. We had a peek at the famous Christmas market, and we discovered a somewhat hidden meditative labrynth. And of course we added to our collection of business names that translate poorly to English. What follows is something of a stream of consciousness around the meaning of Christmas trees and our modern times. I haven’t had time to proof-read or structure the text at all, hopefully I will get back to it at some point but for now accept my apologies for any difficulties when rading.

The Christmas Tree, Knowledge, and COVID

I had never seen such a commitment to the Christmas tree. It got to the point where I started to wonder why that is the case. Of course you can say its just money. When stores put up a Christmas tree they are more likely to draw in customers. But why are the customers drawn to Christmas trees? I don’t really have an answer but it certainly seems like a funny trait. Maybe we are just nostalgic for our childhoods looking forward to presents under the tree. You’ll see later in the video how in the town hall there was a large crowd gathered just watching the tree. But again I can ask why we even do that in the first place. I’m afraid the most common answer you get today is that its a silly superstition. That could be right but to explain away such a monumental superstition we should do a great deal of explaining. Chesterton has a good quote here

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

So when we got home I did a quick Wikipedia about the Christmas tree. As a side note. I recently saw a tweet from the co-founder of Wikipedia There was lots of history around its origins in 1600s Germany and its possible origins as a way to bring pagan tree worshiping traditions into the christian ones. What most struck me was when I learned that the tree is thought to be a symbol of the tree of life in the garden of eden. And that the red spheres we hang on it are meant to remind us of the apple Eve was tempted to taste. We go so far as to put a star on it, almost like an asterisk, “keep this in mind”. Jordan Peterson often says that in the process of forming knowledge that we can articulate and explain we first have to embody it. We have to act it out instinctively, we dance or we play music or make paintings before we can understand something. This is why it is very silly when looking at a painting or reading a book to ask what the author meant by a certain artistic choice. His answer is just as good as yours, he is just acting out some raw knowledge that he has mined in his imagination. And of course in the tree there is also the snake that tempted eve to bite into the apple. What is even crazier is that all of this should exist simultaneously in the same place (it is no coincidence that the cross is also a symbol of intersection, or a collision of opposites). Our highest ideal, the thing we worship the most that has pure light at its pinnacle is oddly enough at the same time the place of temptation and of our downfall. We see this motif repeated in the tower of babel story. It seems as though something inside us drives us towards perfection, completeness, absolute knowledge, that quality is probably the seal of the divine that many would say is the very thing that makes us human. But alas we are still human, fundamentally limited. So a wise reminder is to never forget that lest our towers crumble. I believe we see this happening all the time. The ideological possessions that characterizes the 20th century were just that.

Our desire for total knowledge and control was egged on by a serpent, it showed us a shiny red apple. Its roundness a symbol of totality. And so we got the doomed attempts at achieving totality in this limited life, be it Marxism or fascism, or any ism. Today I think covid has made it clear that the new temptation comes from the technocrat, the scientific expert who instead of presenting knowledge of the world begins to rule the world. The apple of science shines bright indeed. It has touched and most likely greatly improved every aspect of our lives at an exponential rate. So with what authority do we doubt the technocrat that has the best models for calculating the risks to our lives under a thousand different scenarios. If we are to avoid disaster we should certainly give the reins over to the scientists, lest we be anti science. It is widely accepted that the previous isms failed because they ignored human nature. They tried to impose a rationally designed system on humans which ultimately failed to meet their needs. They wrote down ideals and rules to live by vainly attempting to design the ideal society which they came up with out of their own limited reason. But today the scientist has a new idea. Replace rationalism with empiricism, if only we observe the world enough we will be able to control it and then the snake enters and whispers in our ear that through this we can also perfect it. So here comes the tricky part. I’m sure you detected something of a circularity here. Its no surprise that Chesterton stays that the circle is a symbol of madness. It is at once perfect and self contained but also fatally limiting, it never breaks out beyond itself. Here we get the fatal circularity by believing that by understanding ourselves we will perfect ourselves. If this were written as an equation any science fanatic would immediately reject it as under specified or ill-defined etc. Yet we press on, and so we have all seen how this temptarion is manifesting itself in the real world. Our abity to travel, spend time with loved ones, participate in our communities, protest, earn a living are now subordinated by the cult of technology. If it wasn’t obvious enough, try to disagree with the measure with someone and see how long it takes for you to be called ‘anti science’.

You will see in the video how the outdoor Christmas market has a big lineup at the entrance where people are scanning their health passports. Even if we forget for one moment that transmission is near impossible in outdoor settings, is there not something deeply troubling or at least awkward that a Christmas gathering should require papers to be shown. Of course this also inspired some quick research. I vaguely recalled one of Jesus most well known miracles where as a Jew he violated his own law of isolating lepers (old testament) and went to touch and cure lepers. Again we see the motif of contradiction actually being a solution, that a human system can never perfectly specify itself. So I think the whole idea is that instead of trying to make a cross into a circle we should worship the cross, the contradiction, and see that perfection lies only beyond ourselves. And perhaps that is actually the only way to make our lives as good as possible in the current world. Anyway all that to say that I see a cult rising. And I think it is a cult that took a truth and hyper focused on it. When all of a sudden we became physical dangers to each other (or so we were told) and to our communities at large, we began to hyper focus on the bodily care/harm dimension and of course we recruit scientists to help us navigate that because of course if that is our sole concern their models completely tick all the boxes. Plug in a policy and some numbers and we can definitely try estimating fatality rates and hospital loads, what else has that much power? And if that’s all that we focus on then perhaps they can stick around and help solve other problems in the same manner. And if our fear of admitting our mistakes is strong enough it can very well grow into a cult or a destructive ideology. Until we expand our domain of value we will be stuck in that cult. The crazy thing is though that the answer is not to get rid of cult like thinking, which is really just another word for having faith that the truth exists and we can tap into it. Clearly we haven’t been able to shake that for thousands of years, its our human nature to find a story that promises to save us from ourselves. So I think the best we can do is to hitch our rope the broadest most robust possible story and that’s where religion comes in. Which God or which religion? That is a tough question but it doesn’t mean there is no answer to it. Or because its too hard, for lack of faith, for doubt we devote ourselves on something that is overly simplistic and material, or worse we become nihilistic, give up and say there is no answer. If I may bring Chesterton back.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

In any case, I think we can all do with a bit of meditation next time we see a Christmas tree.

How to get your mind blown and your bike stolen in Berlin

Yesterday we had our first guests visit our apartment. Two girls from our German class came over for tea and cookies. It was an undeniable success. More than anything it as a surprisingly cathartic experience. Of course they had also recently arrived to Switzerland. So for the first time we were able to relate directly with someone else about all of the pleasures and peculiarities of moving here. We exchanged many Switzerland hacks and stories. One in particular although not from Switzerland was very funny. One of our guests told us about a time her friend got his bike stolen in Berlin. When he went to unchain his bike from a street pole of course it was gone and the chain was cut. The funny thing was that when he returned to the scene of the crime the next day he found that his bike was back where it had been taken, tied with a new lock and a note on the seat. The note from the person who took it said that he took it for an emergency and apologized. To thank him he left two tickets for a concert in the evening. So when he got home he told his roommate the story and they went to the concert. After a good time at the show, they went back to their apartment and found that it had been completely ransacked. And of course that is when it hit them that they had been played. So not really a life hack but probably a funny yet useful story. Of course Basel is by no means Berlin. We feel extremely safe here, of course its a very good thing. But we have learned thst one could sometimes feel too safe. At least in the sense that chaos here is a very distant notion. I don’t have to go over the examples of this, but suffice it to say that some stereotypes have some truth to them.