ENTROPY AND WHAT YOU SOW SHALL YOU REAP!

ENTROPY AND WHAT YOU SOW SHALL YOU REAP!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 22, 2010

“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.”

James Oppenheim (1882 – 1932), American author and early follower of C. G. Jung

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The beauty of life is that we will all die. The tragedy of life is that few of us find time to live.

Words have become a substitute for life.

We are a society resplendent with words. After all, this is the age of 24/7 media, of everyone talking incessantly on some electronic contraption throughout the day and night, texting and surfing the Internet awash in words.

A prominent swashbuckling historian Tony Judt died this past week of ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. He wanted his final epitaph to read, “I did words.”

Christopher Hitchen, the Brit who became an American citizen, the confessed atheist, and the person of the pungent prose to rival Gore Vidal’s, is dying of esophageal cancer. I have never been a fan of his prose or polemics. Yet, I felt he had a perfect right to author his best selling book “God is not Great,” or more recently “Hitch 22,” a take off on Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22” and his sobriquet, “Hitch.”

These books are easily forgettable reads, yet his persona and celebrity has a kind of staying power. I have no way of proving this because I am in my own golden years, but I doubt seriously if a single one of his books will be read or referred to in fifty years, as no doubt this will be equally true of 99 percent of the printed words today.

My reason for saying so is that words today are not meant to connect, but to exasperate. People are bored, essentially struck dumb by the cacophony of words.

People have too much time on their hands, but regrettably, no time for living. They work not to make a living, but to pursue a fantasy. Consequently, good enough is never enough. There must be better, and more.

This finds people have plenty of time for celebrity watching, texting nonsense to each other, or filling the void with the noise of words. Even music today is essentially noise. The bastardization of words in music has found earthy expletives no longer have punch.

Our whole society is built on achievement – achievement of what? Of influence? Of attention? Of ambition? My question is for what purpose?

We are considered fools if we don’t listen to HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elitists), while hearing such commentators as Charlie Rose speaking of the Untied States having “18 of the 20 best universities in the world.” Institutions built on words!

Words didn’t save us from Katrina, from the BP Oilrig Explosion, but words will give us a Brian Williams special tonight on Katrina, and no doubt several in the future on the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. We like to make like we care. Words.

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Words didn’t save the life of Tony Judt but I hope they gave him comfort. Words are not going to save Christopher Hitchen. I wonder if this has anything to do with his fascination for their toxitity. .

I don’t know about Judt but if Hitchen own words are accurate he willed his condition on himself through his lifestyle and defiance of good sense. He has been so busy living he hasn’t found time to have a life. I say this because a life of attention, influence and ambition is not a life for self-generation but suggests the need for self-adulation.

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In the 1950s while I was a student at the University of Iowa, Bob Hope came to put on a concert in the Iowa Field House. Practically no one showed up. On stage, he was so incensed for the lack of attendance that he took his whole show, kitten and caboodle, to the Iowa City Veterans Administration Hospital where a captive audience had no chance to leave and would appreciate this celebrity radiating his charm in its presence.

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The great minds of the past one hundred years or so, those who carved up the world into its xenophobic structure, those who created the science without attendant consequences, those who educated us to be more not less conscious of color and cultural differences, those who profit most when we are at war or in the business of making war machines, and those who celebrate humanity when societies is falling apart from natural disasters in Haiti, Afghanistan, China and Indonesia, are reaping what they have sowed.

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The true heroes of life are those brave enough to live within family, culture, tradition, belief, community and the dictates of nature. Entropy is all about dying as everything returns to nature. Nothing exists beyond nature. We accelerate entropy when we ignore or defy nature.

Nature has no conscience. It will create tsunamis, earthquakes, mudslides, floods, and hurricanes without a moment’s pause. Man’s intelligence is smaller than the smallest spec of sand in Nature’s Universe. Man’s only recourse is to respect the Laws of Nature from the way he conducts his daily life to the way he treats Nature’s Garden, earth. With our intelligence, we have made it a garbage dump, and then have wondered who is the blame.

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