A decadent age with invisible hands
That manipulate understanding
Because powerless to control the world
Even merely the phenomenal part of it
That unstoppable unmanageable flux
That part of it which we can see
Who grasp for profit that trickles like water
Who try to capture the bubble reputation
Who seek dominion over earth and sky
And market politics like mousetraps tasty snacks or erectile dysfunction
And know the price of everything and the value of nothing
Battens upon the demagoguery
Of Western values family values party values
Values distributed across identity groups
And by the accident of birth the chance operation of privilege
And defend our values as we defend our tribe
You know like loyalty
Like faith to which we remain dedicated
Despite all evidence to the contrary
Despite manifest truth
As distinct from the revealed variety
Committing to belief without committing to truth
For the baffling variety of objects seems mysterious
And wouldn’t it be great if some omnipotent creator
Some invisible emperor
Lined it up and made it march all one way
Conveniently the way that grants dominion to the humans
Or to a sub-sub-subset of humans
How is it manifestly the case that the fluxuous welter
Should resolve itself topically and temporarily
Into the ephemeral stability of a mailbox post
That vanishes into the vertiginous vortex
Eventually to rot and fall
Or the suspicious regularity of the speed of light
But the seeming mystery is lightened when we realize
That all we see is but a glorious passing show
Albeit comprising certain merciful regularities
The view ahead pitiably limited
And little we see on the periphery however vibrant
And little we see in time of what’s behind
And nothing of what’s ahead
And we can momentarily arrest the ceaseless motion of objects
By exercise of will
To analyze and to integrate into subjectivity
And we can confer and thereby augment our seemingly sole selves
And we can lift the painted veil though law and custom forbid it
And imagine the square root of negative one
And discover a few of the digits of pi
Their transcendent facticity
And discover the one life the one poem
The facticity of love eternal love transcendent
And if we are to understand value
We must simply admit its simplicity
Its irreducible simplicity
That value is the goodness of a thing
Irrespective of anybody’s estimation of it
Irrespective of the subject’s horror of the mosquito’s bite
For the mosquito makes its contribution
When it makes its withdrawal
And thus the word and concept of value
Remain indispensable for understanding moral properties
For there are facts in the world that give us reasons
And we should do what we have strongest reasons to do
Should
Value we can confidently comprehend
And reasons too we can confidently derive from facts
Recognizing that a reason goes only so far
And can be superseded by stronger reasons
As the pain of the larger malady
Supercedes that of the surgical procedure
Thus in theory we respond conveniently to reasons
Decisive action determined by decisive reasons
All things considered
But therein lies the practical difficulty
Daunting and intimidating
For ignorance is infinite for any one of us
And even the knowledge backbreakingly collected
Throughout human history
Handed down from elder to youth
Laid up in brick and stone and databases deep
All too brief all too peremptory
Is as a leaf of grass in a galaxy
Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras
But we must take action
And we must know like or not
Every infant child a Faust
We must strive and in striving thrive
Must
And hence we stumble in darkness
But not alone do we scrabble along the stony path
For human social beings are companions
Helpers meet for one another
Who listen and speak decide and act
We can confer
Can
And if we begin with such facts as we verify together
As for example of the preciousness of a child
If we sincerely express our drives our aspirations
Such as we can discover them
If above all we respect the dignity of each person
The inherent value of our responsiveness to reasons and to ourselves
And much else besides
We find what will suffice
For the world gives us plenty
Plenty and overmuch
Unlike the gods
Those purblind doomsters
Those skinflint managers
Those greedy entrepreneurs
Who dwell beyond the flaming ramparts of the world
Across their royal rainbow bridge that only they may traverse
That invisible bridge of many unseeable colors
Equipped with their plagues and lightning bolts
Theatrical costumes made of pathogen and weather
Whose divine command gives no reason to comply
Ultimata perhaps but never reasons
Suspiciously delivered by the holy fathers
The ordained and tonsured
The definition of hierarchy
Guardians of the holy scriptures
Stewards of the prophecies
Issued by the ancient and the more ancient fathers
Which they alone transmit with glozing gloss
The ugly jargon the flicking tongues
And insincere apologetic
But without check or monitor
Seeking dominion not truth
Custodians of the sacred tablets
In the sanctum sanctorum under lock and key
With their canons and their canons and their canons
The anointed ones with their esoteric formulations
The priestly caste clad in vestment rich
Encrusted with jewels
Surrounded by ecclesiastical plate of purest gold
Who intone through the nose with hieratic gesture and arcane cant
Noses aimed heavenward to look down upon earth and its people
From the high pulpit
And say
Woe ye who embrace chimeric phantasmata
Heresiarchs who prostrate yourselves before foreign idols
Upon the planey earth sealed beneath the unyielding firmament
As learning a language or wearing a haircut or donning unauthorized garb
Watching a movie hearing a play reading a book
Granting an iota’s worth of worth to this worthless world
Concomitant with the flesh and the devil
Descending into carnal pleasure and morose delectation
Thou shalt not neglect to reck the rod and dread the hammer
And if you comply
An eternity of bliss
Of knee worship at the foot of the empyreal throne
Head bowed and hands pressed together
Thus prevented from grasping or holding or lifting or seeing
Behind the big beautiful golden wall
With its pearly gates
Among the gown’d and wingèd servants with their lyres and trumpets
A saint administering the guest list exclusionary with plumy inscription
Atop the happy fluffy clouds
Which to grubby mankind appear transient
While angels insubstantial chamberlains scurry hither and thither
But they’ll dislocate your hip if they get the chance
For men refuse to confess the secret plan divine
And if you err but once
And come the think of it you erred even before your birth
Even before your temporal conception
You are lost forever
You are lost irrevocably
Powerlessly
Impotently
Therefore repent and mortify the flesh
Though good works availeth not
Lest vultures come out and peck at your liver
While imps poke you with forks
Flung about in whirlwind with your salacious lover
And the angry gods dangle you as a spider over flame
And you roast unconsumed forever
In a special place hollowed out for miserable thee
And while on earth that vale of tears that shady holding cell
You await the execution of sentence
The gods may or may not hear your groans
And attend somewhat to your supplications
Probably not
Meanwhile back in the real world
The facts of suffering or bliss
And the infinite states that lie between
And nothing is ever merely a state
But always a process that happens happens happens
In this phenomenal part of the greater world of real things
Give reasons to act or believe or hold an attitude
And in the fluxuous world certain regularities resolve into facts
As of evapotranspiration that builds the clouds
Fluffy streaky gray or absent hugging the spherey planet
But always changing always moving
As of being and situation and event
And some of these facts give reasons
And humans can know facts and thence understand reasons
And humans can control themselves to some extent perhaps pitiably limited
Can
And thus qualify as persons as moral agents
And that persons can know and understand and respond is good
Merely can
Sufficient to validate good
And thus value inheres in every person
Every person is good
Regardless of the degree of their depravity
The value of personhood absolutely free of contingency
As number and circle are free of contingency
Of space time condition act or evaluation of others
Notably free from the evaluations of other humans and indeed of oneself
And we name the inherent value of each person
For we humans see and say and in our saying name
Dignity
And we sing in joy when we encounter the goodness of the world
When we experience the value of beauty in art and nature
The truth of science and of the metaphysics of consciousness
The goodness of moral agency
The antics of the three year-old rascal
The beautiful body of the beloved
The sublime act of putting another before one
Let peace be upon us
For we can respect the dignity of personhood
We can
For we can love one another
We can
For we can reach understanding together
We can
And thus peace is within our grasp
But it’s a smart idea to confer with somebody else
Before you designate yourself a doctrine