living down

Posted on May 7, 2003 by acb

I’m working on a speech for the Oxford Union, one of the most ridiculous events of my life. There is an inherited penguin suit hanging on the door, which must be nearly fifty years old, to judge from my father’s waistline when he bought it. I have reached the stage of a piece when almost all my time is spent throwing away wonderful ideas that just won’t fit. Here’s one of them: people talk as if the moral cost of a religion consisted in the effort required living up to the ideals. But the real cost is the effort involved in living down to reality, in persuading yourself that this bewildered bunch of ineffective bureaucrats is the ultimate reason that the universe exists in the first place. Live up to an ideal, and you get somehting back, if only self-discipline. Living down to reality just wastes your life.

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One Response to living down

  1. Rupert says:
    May 7, 2003 at 10:40 am

    I spent part of the Bank Holiday in the Conway Hall, listening to mutant free-form jazz played by free-form jazz mutants on such delights as the electric fretless bass banjo. It’s not as pleasant as it sounds, although I have evolved the ability to enjoy such an experience — which I duly did. “TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE” ran the writing on the wall above the stage: truly, there could be no other reason for any of us to be there.

    But that phrase struck home. I was musing along the same lines, as I’m constantly aware that there may be a connection between my own chronic lack of self-discipline and my iconoclastic approach to any of this ultimate reason malarky. There is such reason as we choose to invent, but I’ve never been able to believe there’s more than that. Do people choose to feel this way, or is it something less conscious? Would it really be better if I did an Alpha course and came out speaking in tongues?

    There must be different moral costs to living to different ideals — even ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ involves some moral adjustment. By the time you get to the point of “Burn the sinner!”, the karmic transfer is in six figures. The benefits to you and those around usin living as if it were true may be considerable — religion prospers, after all — but maintaining that something you think is not, is, must always have some moral cost.

    That’s if you equate morality with objective truth, of course, which is also replete with paradox and imponderables.

    Gah. Back to writing about Microbloodysoft. Now there’s a waste of a life for you…

    R

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