In Which actions have consequences. Sort of.

This weekend, I managed to chip my tooth. Not badly, it was a pretty tiny chip, barely detectable to people whose mouths did not contain my tooth, but still in a way which was pretty obvious to me. Also, not in any exciting sort of way, such as in a brawl with a sabretoothed tiger, or catching a bullet with my teeth, or even just the more traditional but always classic getting-very-drunk-and-falling-down. Actually I just bit a fork on a weird angle at a wedding reception. (Yeah, I know, you'd think that after all these years I'd be passably adept at fork usage, but I'll have you know that forks are considered newfangled and classy and intimidating in the book I'm presently reading, so, uh, so there's that).

Anyway, leaving that aside, it was funny, because although it happened to be a mere tiny chip, it could so easily have been a crazy huge big-deal type of thing (although probably not as a result of poor fork angling. It was a wedding, though, anything could've happened, there was dancing, so I could easily have been spun into a pole and done some much more serious damage). But the point is, I was all "damn, that's a bit of a bugger, I'll have to get that sorted out early next week", not "oh man, this will sure change the way my face looks for the rest of my life, damn". When did this happen? Presumably before I was born. But definitely these things haven't always been fixable.

I mean, back in the day, tooth damage was it. Game over. You will now look like a hillbilly boxer for the rest of your life. I hope you enjoyed the last time you smiled at someone unselfconsciously, because that's it for that activity ever.

And it's not just teeth. Sometimes I catch myself going "dang, I feel like I've messed up my life/health/youth/whatever (not often, for those of you reading with a view to telling me that I'm too self-deprecating, this is a thing everyone does. If you do not ever ever do so, you are either very lucky or possibly a sociopath. I'm looking at you here, Always-Promptly-Friendlily-Critical-And-I-Guess-Conceivably-A-Sociopath James {Backstory for other Readers: James keeps telling me that my last posts have been too self-deprecating. Attempts to explain to him that they've really been more Tutor-Deprecating and Jack-Nicholson-Deprecating have been bizarrely ineffective}) and then going "oh well, I guess it's a write off, I'll do better next time". Like my life or health or whatever is a dress I plan to take back to the store after wearing it out of an evening, hoping they won't notice where I spilled something on it, and exchange for something more flattering, maybe in a nicer colour. (Note, I have never done that. I'm much too acquisitive. I want to keep all the dresses. All the nice dresses in the land. Also it seems Wrong.)

Is this that "Entitlement" we hear so much about, do you think? Do all of us, individually, and as a culture, expect for the consequences of all our actions to be reversible? (Like the Omega Thirteen in Galaxy Quest!) Seems plausible.

I spilled wine into my phone only a couple of weeks ago and had a very similar response, as if I were demanding restitution from the universe. "It was an accident, and therefore it is unfair for me to have to deal with the consequences." I went to get it fixed, because this is something you can just Do in this miraculous and consequenceless day and age, whereupon the dastardly repair guys charged me $90 to get it fixed. And here's the weird thing, even though that's a fortune (for me) to spend on something which isn't even fun, which doesn't add anything to your life except to bring you back to baseline, I handed it over serenely, because it was clearly not my fault (note: actually it clearly was), and therefore I would not be expected to bear the cost. (Obviously this was subconscious. I didn't really expect my parents or someone to magically decide to "pay me back" for the costs incurred. I have no idea what I thought was happening here.) And although the serenity was clearly some kind of unique one-off weirdness, I'm pretty sure that this is sort of how everyone feels.

Apparently this is a serious problem for people who narrowly avoid death. They feel like they've been saved for some higher purpose, and then feel gypped when they get to deathbed time without ever having the chance to dramatically save a small golden-haired child from an oncoming car/train/lion/Nazi. And people who have bad things happen to them feel like they've done their time and deserve things. I'm sure you do this too. Everyone seems to. You have a crappy day and feel all indignant if the next one is bad too, because you already had your bad day for this section of time. I definitely do that. Same thing as the phone and the tooth: I didn't mean for that bad thing to happen, I don't deserve that! (Ridiculous especially given how minor are my troubles in this instance. Oh no! Slight inconvenience and speedy restitution? You poor thing!)

This is weird, because I don't think of myself as someone who thinks of life being inherently or necessarily fair. Still apparently on some level I resent it when my accidental actions have consequences that actually affect me.

The book I am reading at present is called "The Name of The Rose". Reader, I beg you to suppress the urge to say whatever it is which it occurs to you to say when I say this, because it seems that everyone who doesn't respond "I've never heard of that book", has this overwhelming urge to spoil it as soon as you tell them that you're reading it. Apparently I'm leaving it too late to read for the first time, like some kind of literary equivalent of the Sixth Sense. Which I have also never seen. Even when my sister Alex was supposed to read it for a High School English text, but hadn't quite finished it over the holidays, her teacher began the first (first!) class on the text by describing it basically as "the book where Character X did it" or words to that effect. It's meant to be a mystery, but it seems sort of like the Scarlet Pimpernel (although not to that extent yet, mercifully, I'm managing to suspend what knowledge I was unable to avoid). The Scarlet Pimpernel is a wonderful book with a central mystery/twist which is spoiled on the cover of almost any copy of it printed in the last 50 years. It's a great pity, this sort of thing, because it means that we can never really experience classics the way they're meant to be read.

Which kind of sucks, but which is totally not where I was planning to go with that paragraph. What I was trying to say was that the bit I was reading on the bus this afternoon was about heretics and the inquisition and extracting confessions under torture. Back in- the day, it was totally a big deal to say that you thought that maybe Jesus laughed at some point in his life, just not, as it were, on screen. I mean, people would be set of fire for that crap. (Obviously, this would put Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code in serious danger, with all that Scion business. Which leads us to conclude that sometimes progress is a bad thing, because, man, we could have just avoided that entire ridiculous fad if there had been red-hot pincers in the offing.)

The crazy thing is how hard people tried to root out even the more apparently harmless bits of heresy. And obviously that made it all the worse. It's like the whole Middle Ages was like one of those Whack-A-Croc games in Timezone, and the harder the Church whacked the people who said things like "God may not actually be 100% in favour of setting folks on fire because of trifling differences in belief", the more heresies popped up to replace them. People are funny that way.

Anyhow, it's the torturing thing that's obviously the worst bit. Once you use torture to extract confessions, you don't get any new information, all you get is what people think you want to hear. Extensive data (although presumably not double-blind randomised control trials. Stupid ethics committees taking the fun out of Science) exists to show that torture straight up doesn't work. (Dear America, this means you too). So we can probably agree that it's, uh, bad. And that's the difficulty, because the jerks involved in doing it to people, the ruthless, merciless, callous, cruel, etc, dudes who either wound the rack tighter or ordered others to do so, really tend to think that they're doing it for the greater good. Which is something about which they and I will simply have to agree to disagree.

But here's the thing: according to the inquisitors torturing people for very-good-reasons/their-own-good/kicks, they were headed for heaven. Now I'm not only irreligious and vague about my mediaeval dogma but also a bit vindictive, so I find myself hoping that those guys woke up dead one morning to find the devil looking humourously at them over the top of his glasses, shuffling the papers in their file on his desk and saying "Seriously?" in a hurtfully ironic tone before showing them where their rock of Sisyphus was. Because yes, intentions are important, but so are other factors, such as "not hurting people for what eventually becomes the sheer love of power" and "bringing more hurt and suspicion and distress into the world than was strictly necessary".

And this is sort of where the binary afterlife falls down: it's annoying enough to spend all weekend writing an essay which turns out to be pass/fail, then wondering how much of your effort was wasted. It seems ridiculous to have your whole life be pass/fail. This means that as soon as any one factor becomes the sine qua non of eternity, as soon as that becomes "all you need", then why bother with all that unecessary gilding of lilies which you get with being nice to people? Likewise, once you do something really bad, why bother not killing everyone else too? (Incidentally, this is why I am 100% against the death penalty or maximum prison etc. for rapists and suchlike: if someone rapes me, then they're more likely to get caught and punished if I'm alive to testify against them, right? So I want there to be powerful disincentives to stop them doing the logical thing and killing me as well. Like worse punishments if they get caught having done that as well. "In for a penny, in for a pound" is not the philosophy I think we should ideally be instilling in the poeple who do bad-but-ultimately-recoverable-from things to folk).

Of course, this is not a problem you can really solve. Dante had circles of hell for levels of sin, but that's really just varieties of Fail on the pass/fail dichotomy, it's still an absolute thing. It still doesn't seem to solve the ultimate problem: really an eternity of anything seems like an overreaction to any finite amount of either good or bad behaviour.

Even reincarnation, which at first suggests itself as a solution, really seems to sort of just magnify the problem: the thing where you just try again and again, getting scaled upgrades or downgrades on your life until you finally get it right and graduate to Nirvana, as if the afterlife were basically just that Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, sounds good at first. Graded solutions! Possibility of ultimate reward! No unsavoury eternal-damnation per se, mitigating all the good things you did apart from those things that were just bad enough to tip you into the Fail category!

Except, right, you don't necessarily carry the lessons from one lifetime to the next. So say I'm a scumbag in this lifetime; next time it's ant city for me. So I reform, I live a good ant life, and the next time I'm upgraded to 'person' again. But I lack the proper knowledge of the process, so I'm a scumbag again. Education won't actually solve that, we know; folks've been trying it for thousands of years. Some people just enjoy being scumbags.

Conversely, if I'm superfoxyawesomegreat, I eventually graduate to Nirvana, unlike those sucker scumbag types, right? Which means that essentially the good souls are constantly being decanted out of the world and the percentage of the population who are just dyed-in-the-wool jerks, willing to do their ant time if it means they get to spend more of eternity alive and kicking puppies, steadily increases. Plus, eventually, everyone sort of settles to their level, and you have a population of not-quite-good-enough rich people, less-good-humbler people and so on (maybe this whole thing was designed like this deliberately; to support the aristocracy? Surely not) and increasingly, as you get humbler, the animals are more and more inclined to be jerks. This sort of thing can only lead to crap like that scene in the newest Indiana Jones movie where a whole bunch of ants just up and decide to kill a bunch of dudes horribly as a team. I really don't fancy the idea of actually evil insects and animals all over the place. Ugh.

Ultimately what I'm saying here is: my word, I'm glad that if it's anyone's job to sort out this mess, then it's someone presumably omnipotent and omniscient, because this problems looks like a completely unsolvable bugger of a thing to little old me. I'm going to file this squarely in the "I feel pleased and privelaged that this is not, on a grand scale, my problem" file. Gosh.