Rational Philosophy

Britney Spears accepts the award for Best Pop Video for “Piece of Me” at the MTV Video Music Awards. (Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)

On Sunday evening, my 15-year old daughter, typically guileless, made a bid to watch MTV’s video music awards. “No way,” was the answer, “You have school tomorrow.” (She’s in tenth grade, and supposed to be making a strong start in a new school.) “But we watched it last year,” she replied, “Remember we saw Britney Spears…”

This sent me to the computer because I knew I’d blogged about Britney’s woeful performance at last year’s VMAs. With the help of the blog and my wife’s clam-like mind we recalled that we’d TiVo’d Britney’s debacle instead of watching it live. All of which is to say that my daughter went to bed on time and that this is a blog post about comebacks.

Charles Austin - Atlanta Olympic Gold

I’m back from the time vortex of school vacation. It feels strange to be blogging again. Having been out of the mix for a few weeks, I’m afraid that I’ve lost something or that some essential capacity has become stunted. The “me” of then seems more capable than the “me” of now. I feel a little bit like I imagine Charles Austin feels. Austin won the gold medal for the high jump at the Atlanta Olympics. When we couldn’t watch the VMAs last night (alas, our TiVo attempt this year resulted in two and a half hours of silent gray screen; don’t ask me how that happened) we watched a TiVo’d Austin trying to break the world high jump record for a 40-year old on the David Letterman show. We were all rooting for him as his shirt tipped the bar off its stays. “Tuck your shirt in!” I shouted at the screen.

Britney apparently made a successful return to popstardom on Sunday night, winning three awards. And while I cared momentarily about Austin’s high jump attempt, the objective distance I have about Britney’s success or failure as a pop star (I could care less) allows me to burrow in to the philosophical aspects of success and redemption.

Put simply, in and of itself it ultimately doesn’t matter whether we succeed or fail, whether we make a successful comeback or not. If Austin had broken the high jump record for a 40-year old, someone eventually would have outjumped him, or not. Austin will eventually pass on and those who know him will pass on. Britney will stop making music videos. And this blog post will get archived off to tape, never to be read again.

Ambitions, successes, failures, comebacks are all idealized narratives that we create or consume to accompany events that fill time. They exist in conceptual space, but not as real objects. The most obvious example of a counter-narrative is this: If someone prevails in a competition, others must lose. Letterman asked Austin about his three Olympic bids — gold in one, and what about the other two? “Not so good.” Not so good for Austin, but great for the guys who won golds in those competitions, and not so good for the other competitors the time Austin won.

This perspective can have a very freeing impact. Today I can sit down and write what I want to write because ultimately it won’t matter what I write. And even today right now it doesn’t matter.

Socrates - The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living

But inner and outer narratives often keep us going. More so it seems in modern life we care about the narrative of life and experience life less in itself and more in the abstract. Which brings us back to Socrates, and, for once, it brings me strangely into apparent opposition with Socrates, who said “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

However, onto this I would like to paste the narrative that Socrates had in mind the kind of reflection that brings us deeper into reality rather than further from it…

I just went to CNN.com to check out the leading news stories of the day. CNN’s top story focuses on volunteers who collect the dead in Baghdad. Britney Spears‘ MTV awards performance (specifically, its apparent lousiness) tops the popular story list.

Which story tugged at my deepest human feelings? And which story did I read?

The introductory description of volunteers collecting the dead in Baghdad forced me to dwell on the consequences and aftermath of the violence there in a new and painful way. The thought of the unremitting task of cleaning up dead bodies allowed me to imagine, however palely, how it would feel to live in such terrible circumstances. But I then clicked through to the Britney Spears story…

Upon reflection, the two stories may have more in common than it first seems. The violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, whether we think the US presence there is justified or not, derives from people’s inability to see through their apparent differences, it rests on the ego of believing that we have something up on someone else. And our fascination with Britney Spears’ spiraling decline rests on a similar instinct to separate ourselves from others, to enjoy their calamities because it makes us feel better about ourselves at their expense.

Another reported event at the MTV awards — Kid Rock and Tommy Lee (both Pamela Anderson exes) going at it. And a related story: Popular performers insisting on songwriting credit to boost their perception as artists in the public’s eye, and to boost their bank accounts, even when they have little or no input to the songs they sing.

I am not part of the government administration, nor do I commit acts of sectarian violence. And I haven’t fought fist to face with another person since I was a child. But I realized anew today that I am guilty of separating myself from others, of holding myself out as different or in some way better. Whereas rationally I know that I am not separate. That all of us are part of the collective human swell. Rationally, I know that my ego misleads me because the ego has served us well in surviving as a species. Rationally, I know that I should remain aware of this and prevent myself from acting out of prejudice and pride.