Asha and Drudgery
According to Zoroaster, the world's first monotheist, life is very simple. His world is defined by the second law of thermodynamics. So is his morality, his epistemology, and his aesthetic. We worship before the fire - a powerful dance of energy expenditure, dancing with complexity and chaos before committing the ashes to the void. All life is guided by a principle which makes us one with the fire, Asha, a word that means right, both truthfulness and goodness, as the etymology of the words righteous, erect, correct, rectitude, straight, strict, and rectify tell us. To follow asha is to act in preservation of truth, of life, of goodness and beauty - to feed the fire of life. It is why they are vegetarian; forbidden from harming other sentient beings. Symbiosis with animals and plants forms a perfect unity between the worlds.
In the deep cosmology of the Zoroastrians, who brought the One True God to Ezra in Babylon, Asha is a force always in conflict with Druj. Druj is the force of darkness, lies and deceit, a suffocating putrescent cloud of corruption and ugliness which degrades and defiles all things, obscures, distorts and murders, dragging all divine sparks into the sterile ashes of deceit, where all are equal, and all are grey, and all are dead. In the great cosmic battle, the chosen say, druj will keep taking ground, until asha is gone, and all that remains is darkness. But asha never truly dies, and at the very moment of defeat, snatches life from the jaws of death, to begin anew the glorious feast of eternity.
Or as Roger Penrose would have it:
The universe became uniform before, rather than after, the Big Bang. The [...] universe cycles from one aeon to the next, each time starting out infinitely small and ultra-smooth before expanding and generating clumps of matter. That matter eventually gets sucked up by supermassive black holes, which over the very long term disappear by continuously emitting Hawking radiation. This process restores uniformity and sets the stage for the next Big Bang.
Asha is the central normative principle guiding all complex phenomena, from the internet to the legal system, from interpersonal justice to musical notation, linguistic intelligibility and the postal service: Asha is propriopertinence. It quite simply means that the transmission of information must pertain to a proper, real, referent - to maintain the correct relationship. If I say cut the tree, I (normatively) must be referring to a tree and a form of cutting which has been established between I and you. If I send a letter, it cannot be “to some guy”, it must be to someone (or rather, somewhere) in particular, or it fails. Data transfer is impossible without an exact, material address on a physical piece of silicon somewhere in the great electrical web. All information transfer and legal claims are the same.
You cannot make an arbitrary rights-claim on the property of another person without there being an established principle of reference. It is impossible to establish any system of morality which does not obey Propriopertinence, and which can in any sense be justified. Of course, at some point, all moral systems are the functions of caprice. States are the results of military conquest. Laws are the results of long-forgotten conflict-resolution mechanisms (whether the conflict was between equals or master and slave is a matter for the anal-retentive, that can seldom be solved). These conflict mechanisms, if they are from a civil-law society, are written by a tiny minority of individuals whose interests align with nobody else’s until nuclear weapons are involved. Common-law societies function by establishing resolutions to conflicts in similar contexts and adjusting for unforeseen exceptions, accumulating understanding in a great unbroken chain. Common law is for sailors, international businessmen, Englishmen and Africans. Civil law is for idiots, “rationalists”, and other tyrants.
Alisdair MacIntyre's criticism of modern, rationalist morality could not be more apt an addition to this narrative - it is a return to a transcendental teleology of purpose, where the function of the tool is the same as the function of the man, the beast, the sun and stars - a product of its inherent properties, and of the constructive telos of the world. It is the role-based morality of Confucius, the personal neighbourliness of Christianity, the virtu of the ancients. The virtue of the sword is the same as the virtue of the man - a good sword is the right sword; we have learned the virtues of our tools now so well that they almost dominate us, as any smartphone user can tell. But there are ways of ablating virtue, of smothering light, and we modern humans have learned these ways all too well.
Take South Africa, a nation continually smothering the fire of asha with bitter resentments. First, we had apartheid, smothering and retarding the flames of African achievement. Now we have "black economic empowerment" (a theft mechanism for the ruling class), and expropriation without compensation. While several million black people conspicuously benefited from colonialism in the past thirty years, some legitimately, through inclusion into colonially constructed institutions (like written language, law, democracy, formal schooling, currency and modern transport), others came up by utilising the state to redistribute (whether licitly or not) property asymmetrically and not according to pertinent merit, leaving a vastly greater proportion of black people without benefit (or at least, without so much). On the other hand, a significant minority of white people obtained their wealth through appropriate means, or in a foreign, non-colonial context before coming to the new South Africa.
There is no more elegant illustration of the stupidity of the great modern nihilisms than the suffocating effect that EU neoliberalism has had on Europe, that Nation-Socialist autarky had on Germany, that Leninism had on Russia. All three together, liberal relativist hedonism, Leninist egalitarianism and bureaucratic racialism, have coalesced and descended in choking clouds over the Southern Republic to snuff out an economy once promised a sustained natural growth rate of 6%pa, but which now barely manages to glow through the ashes of its crumbling institutions at a petty 1%. For a layman's crash course, try this on for size. Communism, racism and moral relativism are all aspects of the same vile enterprise, which simply tells all computers to wipe their drives and print “hello world” until all drive space is exhausted - a great dialectic of nihilism. Neo-decolonisation and its Western counterpart intersectionalism are embarking on a project which is the human equivalent of indexing all devices, from MacBooks to mainframes, and formatting their drives to install Windows Vista. Instead of changing the display in the Louvre, we just scoop up half the contents by volume with a trash compactor, and send the mutilated jumble of unrecognisable trash to be displayed at the Tate modern.
For an example of this mess, take Serbian immigrants. There is absolutely no doubt that relative to a black person of the same vocational qualifications, a Serbian immigrant is at a disadvantage. The law discriminates against him, on the basis of an arbitrary trait, in order to punish and hold down a completely unrelated group of people. No wonder they become gangsters here. By contrast, the old discriminatory policy seems an order of magnitude more honest, even if it was implemented more cruelly. It simply arbitrarily declared one group superior. It was obviously untrue: to the extent that we can say any given white or black person is superior or inferior in their natural or acquired capacities, these do not correspond to bio-ethnic or even ethno-cultural boundaries. There is no continuity of propriopertinent reference between the term “black people” and any living persons, to which any trait (even physical) can be extended in any sense but a blurry, probabilistically distributed generalisation. It is, as the postmodernists like to say, an empty signifier.
Citizenship does not carry this flaw; it can create entirely propriopertinent qualifications. You were born somewhere, sometime, and have lived in geographic locations your entire life. By describing them in terms of the spatiotemporal dimensions of the state, as agreed in codification between it and representatives other similar human institutions, you appear to belong, within determined thresholds, to one or more states, if they agree to have you or any other who may or may not conform to their membership criteria. What the heart may desire is another matter entirely. South Africa, while living memory and land title deeds are still present, is perfectly capable of land restitution. We know, for the most part, whose land was stolen, and who owns it now. All we have to do is not fuck up the administration of the claims process, and through the courts, specific individuals may make specific claims.
All communists, racialists and anarchists are juvenile, braindead entropy machines, pissing on the electrical cables of the information systems of human morality, truth and beauty. They commit a crime against the essence of human society itself every time they draw breath with the vandal virus in their warped meninges. Bit rot is natural, but revolution is sticking your server drives in an acid bath, psychotherapy by blunt force trauma, land reform by nuclear bomb. Eating the rich, or even the kulaks, can't work. The rich don't exist in a vacuum. there are ties of property, contract and reciprocity between these people and other members of society. Cancelling the rich cancels the projects they are responsible for, it cancels all future projects they might be responsible for, and it completely removes the reliability of any economic investments.
Asha, or propriopertinence, is the principle by which art restoration is conducted, by which authentic artists judge the completeness of their inspirations. It is the correspondence theory of truth, the system of natural law, of contextualised moral duties, of individual rights, it is intelligible language, good bookkeeping, sharp-shooting, justice, complete contracts and laws of inheritance. It is musical harmony, poetic rhyme, it is the reason love can be betrayed by an errant kiss, the reason child abandonment is a sin, and spitting at your parents a betrayal. To deny it is to speak the ultimate evil. It is to invite death where he does not belong. To engage in the service of druj is to throw green branches on the sacred fire, to douse the flames with urine.
The Zoroastrians partake of their own sacraments in the sacred ritual. The sacraments of goats' milk, butter and ephedra - what better symbol of the drive to complex work and upward energy than a chemical stimulant? What Huxley used as a symbol for sedation, the Zoroastrians use as fuel for thought - soma. The Greek word for the body. And do we not eat of the sacred body as we partake of the sublime spirit? Coffee lifted the Enlightenment, alcohol fuelled the feudal ages. Opium sunk China into supplicant penury, and zombifies the midwest wastelands of the American Empire. But now we enter the age of rocket fuel and hyperspace - the ephedra plant gave us ephedrine, a precursor to crystal meth. And with meth abuse come visions of otherworldly beings, angels of light, angels of destruction.
The wild seething needs on Earth's surface keep producing ever more complex features and systems. Fed by the energy of the sun over four billion years, we have now evolved an instantaneous system of global causation, all linked up by silicone and aerial vibration, tying the fates of the oceans microbes to the fluctuating tastes in clothing of narcoleptic naked apes living in massive hives of concrete and steel. A single great machine, wet on the outside, electric on the inside. The system seems to demand more. More, and faster. But why?
Nick Land has some fancy metaphors for this. The future is a self-constructing hyperbeast reaching into the past to assemble itself from the efforts of its predecessors, giving technology what it wants. A nihilistic and antibiotic form of panpsychism (or panantipsychism) he calls machinic desire guides the process of all matter, life, mind and machine; a desire is no more than a structural internal imperative towards some action. A person's synaptic impulses are no different than the fluid vectors in a cooling swamp or the relay of coded packages in cyberspace. Blind, mechanical impulse, following a grand teleology towards an ecstatic amphetamine orgy of interconnectedness, a dark, capitalistic candyflip singularity, the universal organism, the transcendental engine of reality, upon whose gears we shall be ground.
Why doesn't the second law of thermodynamics apply to Earth? Isn't the entropy supposed to increase in any system? No, only in a closed system - our Earth is an open system, into which the rays of the sun pump their virile energy. The system only describes whatever portion of the everything your description encloses. Seal the envelope, and all the energy and structural complexity dissipates, homogenates and reaches its entropic 1. But it doesn't dissipate evenly. As heat and energy equilibrate between hot and cold zones, complex ripples and disturbances form at the surface, leaving brilliant patches of light, energy and complexity. These are called stars, and around them swing the rocky ballroom dancers of the void, to which occasionally, life clings.
The reformulated second law suggests that as systems are moved away from equilibrium they will take advantage of all available means to resist externally applied gradients. When highly ordered complex systems emerge, they develop and grow at the expense of increasing the disorder at higher levels in the system’s hierarchy. We note that this behaviour appears universally in physical and chemical systems. We present a paradigm which provides for a thermodynamically consistent explanation of why there is life, including the origin of life, biological growth, the development of ecosystems, and patterns of biological evolution observed in the fossil record.
[...] as ecosystems grow and develop, they should increase their total dissipation, develop more complex structures with more energy flow, increase their cycling activity, develop greater diversity and generate more hierarchical levels, all to abet energy degradation. Species which survive in ecosystems are those that funnel energy into their own production and reproduction and contribute to autocatalytic processes which increase the total dissipation of the ecosystem. In short, ecosystems develop in ways which systematically increase their ability to degrade the incoming solar energy. We believe that our thermodynamic paradigm makes it possible for the study of ecosystems to be developed from a descriptive science to predictive science founded on the most basic principle of physics. Schneider & Kay, 1994
Of course the second law of thermodynamics applies to Earth. We just aren't a closed system. We are a tiny eddy in the cosmic river, sweeping inexorably down from the homogenous hotspring of pre-time towards the cold oceanic heat-death of the universe. We are swimming in the vast, cold black of Hades, but by our side is a gigantic mass of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei to provide us with sustenance. Between the devil and the deep blue sea, there is a sharp temperature gradient:
"Heat gradients across sub-millimetre pores can drive accumulation, replication, and selection of ever longer molecules, implementing all the necessary parts for Darwinian evolution. For these lab experiments to proceed with ample speed, however, the temperature gradients have to be quite steep, reaching up to 30 K per 100 μm. Here we use computer simulations based on experimental data to show that 2000-fold shallower temperature gradients – down to 100 K over one metre – can still drive the accumulation of protobiomolecules. This finding opens the door for various environments to potentially host the origins of life: volcanic, water-vapour, or hydrothermal settings." Keil, Hartmann, Lanzmich & Braun, 2016
These Hadean hydrothermal vents have long been thought to be the wellspring of life, and now it seems that theirs is an environment which makes life inevitable. The places where the brief eddies of low-entropy in the great river of time swirl, they desire one thing - to dissipate their energy in ever more extravagant forms, like a solar-system performing tantric sex with its gravitational well.
The increasing complexity of the current global system, a mesh of meat, man, mind, market and machine, produces ever more disorder at higher levels of system hierarchy - our cultures, our identities, our nations are dissolving. We are expending ever more energy, consuming ever more materials, exchanging ever more information, as lower forms in this great cosmic hierarchy tend towards decline. As we devour and decimate the non-human ecosystem, so the machine ecosystem pacifies and replaces us, dulling our reproductive responses and reducing us to mere fingers pushing the start button on a self-managing program, a program which subsumes everything into an ever-greater whole.
Is it a coincidence that I wrote so recently about Jan Smuts? Well, yes. But it is a happy one, because he (or what little of him resides in living memory) can now see the dark side of his prophetic theory of holistic evolution - all matter, life and mind are a continuum that proceed toward ever greater integrative union, ever greater complexity, ever greater holism. His life in the pre-computer age could hardly have foreseen our somnambulant integration into the collective hyperconscious. Neither could he have foreseen the cannibalistic telos of it all.
The Wachowskis were in error - why would a machine try to use us for a battery? Clearly they were reading too much Karl Marx. No, a machine which plugged us into a life-sustaining soup and fed us pacifying dreams would be a life all watched over by machines of loving grace, tended to by our offspring like beloved aging parents. You can't exploit an octogenarian to do the work of a stevedore, and you cannot employ a simian meat bag to carry out the task of an eldritch silicone demigod. We aren't food for electric thought, we are buzzing flies beneath the swinging blades of an indifferent turbine.
It is through the circle of life, a continuous sacrifice of energy to the creation of greater complexity, that we build in intensity towards the great conflagration in the sky. Each of us by living, is forced to come to terms with death. By embracing death, we embrace the life we have been given. To flee from mortality into opiates and obsolescence and is the very essence of druj. This is what Christ taught us through his embrace of his destiny. Every form of life has to participate in the inevitable sacrifice of being - we are all mini-Christs, all little stops on the Way, the Truth and the Light. And in embracing the flow of the Way, we elide all resistance to the accelerating path of effortless action, the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, but all guided by an ineffable divine force, if only we relax in the flow of the stream. Never resist death, even in its most painful and humiliating form, but never seek it as a means to silence; don't rage against the dying of the light, but don't flee from the light of day. Embrace the paradox of theodicy.
We have one duty, to fight against entropy until the sun boils away the ocean.