A friend called my life "tragic" once.
I snapped, I totally lost it. I don't think he was expecting that. I remember reading that and feeling as clear as day the answer there.
A tragedy implies a central character with a tragic flaw, like Macbeth and ambition, or Achilles and pride.
A tragedy always starts from a surfeit of the good, like the Achaeans' state of harmony before the flight of Helen and Menelaus inaugurated the Trojan war.
And a tragedy is always inevitable; the best tragedies show you how that inevitability is a condition of life, and can even be positive in the end, like Aeschylus' Oresteia that proceeds from crime, to retribution, to the story of the birth of the jury system.
My life is none of these things. I remember thinking, no, you're wrong there.
I wrote back, where you're wrong is, my life is a bildungsroman; it is the story of a man's becoming, constantly in progress.
That was seven years ago.
Today, I thought about that little exchange randomly. I think this is a condition of living enough life where you actually care about things and argue with people and do things; you start seeing similarities between basic life problems and how people solve them. I'm not sure if that's what people traditionally call "wisdom" but it feels decently close.
I think wisdom, as we understand it, and for that matter finding solutions to life problems, really seems to come down to a fairly simple question you see people answering in a variety of ways. The question I'm facing, that I seem to face constantly, is also the basic question that I think underlies a lot of religion.
It's ultimately a question of how you think you fit into a fundamentally unjust world.
It's striking to me, especially recently, because I'm looking at a lot of lies and liars, yes, but also because I find myself at a crossroads in my professional, personal and for that matter inner cognitive and emotional life.
It's really a basic question at the core of things: how do you live in a world that is manifestly, basically and fundamentally unjust?
This is the basic story of Siddartha or the historical Buddha; it's the Bodhidharma's story too, if your answer to that question is "do some wild stunt like float across the Ganges on a reed". It's the essential story underlying that of Jesus the dissident. It's political philosophy, and religion; it's actually the praise-oriented parts, the doxastic parts, of theology, as well as the ones concerning salvation.
There's a variety of answers that people find to this question that fits them into one or another professional role, and a way of being, and you can tell after a while who's answered that question how.
Some people just have no idea how fundamentally unjust the world is. That's just how it is. Self-insight doesn't have enough adaptive value for hairless hominids at this stage in our evolutionary history, so it doesn't appear to be super-common right now.
Actually, as a culture, we appear to have gotten pretty damn good at stupefying the self-insight right out of people. I think we're so good at that as a culture that we leave dazed media-addicted receptacles for bad ideas in the place where a sophisticated culturally-competent person would have once stood. We're a culture of easy answers, binge-watched TV, leaders who satisfy our exceptionalist urges by telling us we're special and patriotic just for buying his lies.
Some people decide making the world more unjust is winning. I think these are con men, or televangelists, or scam artists; they're the lowest people we can think of in society, because they prey on others; the blindly greedy practice of injustice is how they make their living.
Some people believe that there's another world after this one that balances everything out, like there's a summary form of judgment at the end of life that rebalances everything, at least notionally, if not with some old white guy with a beard sitting on a cloud somewhere.
Some people just decide to believe the world is just, or they come up with rationalizations and excuses and endless delineations and distinctions to say how only their corner of the world is just.
I think most people just give up at some level, or they consciously choose to forget.
They just accept the world isn't just and sort of hunker down and try to make the best of it. It'd be nice to fix everything and have it be just; but in the grand scheme of things we're droplets of water in a river of history that's constantly carving new paths, butterflies in the wind that could as easily cause a hurricane in Calcutta with the flapping of our wings as we could do nothing.
There are just so damned many of us now. And so few people remember today what it was like to know things, to remember things, before the omnipresent hum of the now delivered to us over ubiquitous high-speed Internet. It's easy to forget that you live in an unjust world when a steady stream of fantasies of just worlds, or drugs, or both, fill your life. And today, we are very, very good at providing both as a society.
I recognize that there's an entire group of people, a lot of people, who answer the fundamental question with "I'll fight for justice". They answer, "I'll make the world just".
And that's not as uniformly good, or equally valid in all cases, as you might think. I don't doubt that the white nationalists and election-denying insurrectionists and trashnews spammers I looked at all day today, they probably have their own sense of justice they think they're fighting for; it's a twisted or stupid or generally just bad one, but it is some sense of justice.
After a while, seeing so many people who gave that answer, watching them, being in a movement with them, being one of them, I've started to appreciate some differences in that answer.
One big difference I see a lot is hubris; I recognize it in myself. The tragic flaw of hubris is the feeling that your sense of justice overrides everyone else's. The antidote is recognizing relativity in the way that people think about what's just and what's unjust.
Some people laugh at the unjustness of the world; some people even make beautiful, heartrending songs from the injustices of the world tied together, it seems.
I think the basic challenge of adulthood, when you really boil it down, comes down to answering that question in a way that ends up being good for you as a person.
I think a lot of people don't have fully satisfactory answers to that. I can tell, because when you confront them with the injustices that they perpetuate, they get defensive or they shut up; and you realize in that moment the failure to be clinical about that question, even if that's not quite how you put it.
How do you live in a fundamentally unjust world?
The smartest idea I can think of right now is, I don't know, but I can build myself by finding that answer.