Ancient Footsteps

Out with the old! That is our mantra. Out with morality, with structure, consistency and consequence. We have vanquished them all, left them to rust away in a quaint little corner of the canon.

These virtues have become antiquities in the name of a new god. In the name of
Honesty. Nothing else is required, so long as we are honest to our own self.

Well I disagree. I damn honesty. I say that we've taken it too far.

Honesty is a virtue, not the virtue. It is not a deity to be worshipped and practiced without doubt.

Taken alone, honesty is a poor substitute for humanity.

The problem with honesty is this. At a personal level (and let me make it clear that I am speaking of purely of personal honesty) it is mostly meaningless. It is meaningless because it has no consistency. What is honest to us one minute is a damn lie the next.

Of course, that realization is the essence of humanity. To be inconsistent, confused, uncertain; that is human. But amidst such tumult, what is also human is to somehow still accept that life goes on, and that we must go on with it; that we must blaze a path, make decisions, and accept mistakes. Even bound by our flawed inconsistency, we must try our best to do what is right.

But if we worship only our own personal honesty, and give honor to each passing fancy that happens about our head, we will drown in inconsistency.

To say it another way, if we honor each moments whim, we profess a faith to a church that preaches that the past and future as having no meaning. But where there is no meaning, there can be no coherence. And coherence is the asphalt of any path.

Yet personal honesty is our new god. A god; meaning another way to stay unconscious, as opposed to facing up to what our reality is, what I believe is best summed up by Dostoevsky, when he referred to it quite elegantly as ‘our terrible beauty’. When we ignore the beauty of our responsibility in favor of a new faith, even one so seemingly virtuous as honesty, we drop from our heaven to a new god strumming his lullaby below.

No knight-errants here, not even a squire is in sight.

So how does it happen that we can we justify this new religion, this reckless faith to personal honesty?

The problem, of course, is we justify anything. This is just another truism of our human plight.

But if we are to be ‘honest’ in this justification, I think it is correct to at least observe this: that to follow our honesty blindly we must accept no claim to responsibility outside of our self. We must accept none for what our honesty might bring, and none for the other that it will undoubtedly touch. We must be purely cynical, and be content with that.

And hey, if we can do that... well, I guess the world is our oyster, at least until the chaos ensues. Because then we are both Hegel and the Saint, all as one. True to ourselves, we say what we feel in the moment, we act as we wish at the time, and we do so without a care for consistency, nor a worry for compassion.

And most importantly, we can sleep well, comforted that we are faithful to a new god, and that our rightful place in his heaven is secured, so long as we follow his commmandment and be honest to our self.

Well that all may be so. But as I briefly touched on, there is a problem with all this. If we bow to this new god of honesty, and give ourselves to its passing whim, then we will never have coherence in our lives. Because our coherence, or maybe you might prefer to call it our path, is not built upon honesty. Honesty is perhaps the map, but it is certainly not the guide.

Well that all may be dandy. But as I briefly touched on, there is a problem with all this, even beyond the obvious deterioration of society that we can already see the ripples of. As we bow to this new god of honesty, and submit ourselves to the passing whims that it throws upon us, we lose coherence to our lives. Because our personal coherence, it might better be called our path, is not built upon honesty.

Honesty is perhaps the map, but it is certainly not the guide.

Our guide is not so easily conceived. It is something timeless, something that is in us, but only because it is in everything. Bob Dylan said once that he could hear the ancient footsteps. Those footsteps are our guide. We must follow them, even if we realize that there's nothing really there. Real or imagined, they must guide our path. We have no choice, because they are our coherence. They hold us with integrity even as our honest reactions ebb and flow like tides.

I suspect that, on the other hand, a path faithful only to personal honesty will look somewhat akin to the path of an ant. Ants are seemingly busy going somewhere, just so long as you don't look too close. If you do, you realize they are only going back and forth and really going no where at all.

Look around. You don’t have to look down from far above to see all the ants that run around below.

As for myself, I will only say this: The rest of the world can bask in their honest piety. I'll pass this one by and stick to my own coherence.
- posted by Sigurd7/14/2006 08:51:00 PM