Strong Openings

DY has always had qualms with chronology. Passage of time is inevitable, and marking it has manifold benefits, but associating passage of a given increment of time with ritual seems arcane.

Birthdays used to be a big deal when life expectancy was far shorter than present levels and infant mortality was quite high. To live past maturity meant something important when day to day survival preoccupied people's behavior. To have lived a full year, 2% of a life even at the start of the 20th century, was truly an accomplishment given the levels of hygiene, preventative medicine, prevalence of disease, and food safety. By no means do longer life expectancies have an inflationary effect and 'cheapen' the value of a year of life, but safer societies make survival easier. 

Perhaps post-modern man derives most of his angst from such a paradox: not only does the pressure to pick a direction from an abundant variety of choices create confusion, but also the evolutionary disconnection resulting from the environment changing at a rate much faster than his own biology compounds it. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, man, like his protagonist Billy Pilgrim, "has become unstuck in time." Where he still has the primordial tendencies of competition, the terms that define even small victories against the elements and others of his species have changed. The struggle takes place in an ambiguous, mental space rather than the physical realm of teeth, nail, and fist twisting flesh, spilling blood. Might still makes right, but the measure of power is very different.

Yet, despite the crisis, man has not lost his appetite, imagination or capacity for brutality. Has all the extra leisure time granted to man from not having to track and to hunt, or to sweat all day in fields to feed himself, allowed him to devise new ways to inflict pain, to protect his status against rivals, to improve his standing within the group? Furthermore, how does this relate to the artificial rituals ascribed to the passage of a span of time?

The New Year somehow has a mystic, implied power of resetting man's situation to a certain extent. Though someone has the will and autonomy, despite cultural or political constraints, to 'reset' the course of one' life without waiting for the calendar to flip, the atavistic instinct to mark time compels people to wait, effectively buying time to continue with an undesirable pattern of behavior. But the shift from physical to mental survival has its own paradox: the exegesis towards reconciling the new evolutionary dilemma blinds man to the instances where survival still matters. On the one hand, man clings to the prospect of a return to a 'natural' state, yet when confronted with one, man is only half equipped to deal or to understand it. Having heard that self-improvement - better diet, daily exercise, - holds the key to 'survival', defined as always as living longer, in the modern world, man in the developed, post-modern world has become dislodged in his own role as well as become out of touch with understanding the lot of the billions for whom quotidian survival is still the preoccupation of life. 

On a philosophical level, this can explain the discord and misunderstanding of developed and developing nations. Though there are over 6.5 billion in the species, the type of struggle varies among the members of the species. 

By the end of this year, when it no longer has the fresh scent, and the strong opening has dissolved into a muddled endspiel, perhaps someone will have squared the circle, but, more likely than not, Gaza will still be inflamed, and DY will find more inane, abstruse topics to keep his narrow readership diverted from their jobs. 

Shop talk about the game of golf will return shortly.

In pace requiescat, Senator Claiborne Pell