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Sunday, September 20, 2009
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IN THE NAME OF GOD
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When a Catholic tells me “the Pope thinks...” all I want to know is if an imam agrees with him. Because if he doesn't, I am more than willing to dismiss both of them as charlatans. And it is not enough for them to agree on the essentials – God is one, God is our Father, God is love, God is compassionate, We are His children, He owns the Day of Judgment, and so on and so forth – they must also agree on the inessentials and the irrelevant. Because in the past, even Christians have slaughtered Christians on account of a single word. Which may explain why there is a school of thought that believes the Earth is the insane asylum of the galaxy.
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I hope you will agree with me when I say a single wrong word does not justify the murder of a single innocent human being. And if you disagree with me today, you may agree with me tomorrow. Not only disagreements, unlike diamonds, are not forever, but they are also cheaper than a dime a dozen.
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I suggest it is wrong to say “I think...” It is more accurate to say “There is a school of thought...” or even better, “There is a propaganda line...” And as we ought to know by now, for every “school” or “line” there is another that will contradict it. This applies not only to politics, history, ideology, religion, and philosophy, but also to science. According to Popper (the greatest 20th-century philosopher of science) there is no such thing as a scientific theory that is not wrong for the simple reason that progress in science is made by exposing the errors of past theories -- as when Einstein corrected Newton, and as no doubt Einstein himself will be corrected in the future.
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What does the Pope or an imam think?
Rather, why should anyone give a damn?
If a pope were to agree with an imam, one of them would be out of a job.
Which may suggest that most disagreements, the most important ones on which the survival of millions may depend, are direct results of the fact that two charlatans refuse to share power.
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Monday, September 21, 2009
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THE MONKEY ON MY BACK
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Don't get me wrong.
It is not my ambition
to save the nation.
The very best I may succeed in doing
is giving one or at most two charlatans
a little insomnia --
and when I say a little
I mean a fraction of a second.
Save the nation?
That would be megalomania run amok.
Think of Russia:
after Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,
Lenin and Stalin.
After Thomas Mann and Gramsci
Hitler and Mussolini.
And closer to home:
after Baronian and Odian,
deportation, starvation, and massacres.
No one, not even a messiah
can save a nation on its way to the devil.
No one can stopper a volcano
or arrest an avalanche
on its downward path
or appeal to the common sense
of an earthquake
or reason with a tsunami.
No one can edit or amend
the Writing on the Wall.
I write because writing has become
a habit and habits are easier to keep
than to give up.
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Tuesday, September 22, 2009
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CULTURE AND BARBARISM
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Culture is not a single unified and harmonized concept but a collection of contradictory traditions, habits, and values. Culture also means anti-culture. Every culture contains the seeds of its own destruction, in the same way that every tradition and value that does not evolve condemns itself to the dustbin of history.
For one thousand years the Bible was seen as the Word of God and the Pope as God's sole representative on earth; and as such he could do no wrong even when he legitimized the torture and death of heretics or anyone else who dared to think for himself. As a result, all the scientific advances made by the Greeks were destroyed, buried, and forgotten.
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Most of my critics attack me on cultural grounds because they confuse my defense of human rights with contempt for our traditional values as embodied by our bosses, bishops, and benefactors. They define a good Armenian as one who says “Yes, sir!” to authority figures who themselves said “Yes, sir” to the Sultan and to Stalin. A good Armenian is thus one whose Armenianism is a direct offspring of Ottomanism and Sovietism. He is quintessentially anti-democratic, narrow, obscurantist, oppressive, tyrannical and doomed to extinction as surely as medieval papacy, the Ottomanism of sultans, and the Sovietism of commissars.
Don't get me wrong. I am not engaging in prophecy. I am simply describing what I see – namely the high rate of alienation and assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus from the Homeland.
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Moral I: If the popes of Rome could be wrong for a thousand years, so can our bishops for ten thousand years.
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Moral II: What matters is not what others (including myself) tell you, but what you really think.
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Moral III: The only way to discover what you really think is by not allowing anyone's authority to blind your critical judgment.
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Moral IV: The ultimate aim of all authority is to grind you to dust.
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Moral V: There is only one way to assert your freedom and that is by resisting authority.
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Wednesday, September 23, 2009
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THE OPPOSITION
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To wear down the opposition may not be victory
but I like to believe it is not altogether without merit.
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Everything that is worth saying has been said.
What remains to be done is to repeat and emphasize.
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Because we agreed on ninety-nine things
and disagreed on one,
he became my mortal enemy.
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Because I refuse to share their narcissism,
they tell me I hate myself.
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Overheard on the radio:
“There is more money in delivering pizza
than in being a philosopher or writer.”
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My venom, if you want to call it that,
is nothing but concentrated reality.
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Their two favorite ways of solving problems:
to cover them up or to pretend they are not there.
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In the eyes of those who judge people by their income,
I am no better than white trash,
and I'd rather be white trash on financial grounds than
on moral grounds.
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I understand them because once upon a time
I believed them,
I looked up to them,
I wanted to be one of them.
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