Sleep Deprivation or Theory?

Originally Posted Thursday, September 11, 2014

I go to bed early, and I wake up early, but I am not sleeping much after three or four o'clock.  I don't worry about it any more the way I used to.  I stay in bed and, perhaps, put on some music.  The music helps.  It doesn't necessarily put me back to sleep, but it helps palliate what could be empty, lonely hours.  I tend to dream/think along with the music, dropping down then coming back in these little waves of half- to un-consciousness.  Then around sunrise, I feel I could go back to sleep for hours, but duty calls.  I wonder what effects this is having on my body and upon my mind?  Is my body/mind doing what it should or is it somehow out of alignment?  But then I go back to the old argument--does nature have a plan?  You hear it all the time, but there is little more evidence that there is "a nature" than there is "a god."  Nature seems clearer because there are things we linguistically associate with it--trees, clouds, the sun and the rain and the moon--but is it only our categorical thinking that makes them so?  I am more convinced all the time that the things I studied while getting a zoology were clever indeed, but no more true than anything else.  It is merely a systematized belief system with plenty of data. 

Believing that, I have even less trouble believing in no "truths" at all.  No truths, only constructs.  Interpretations.  Assumptions and beliefs.  I quarreled yesterday with a "theorist" about--well, I've said I won't talk about those things any more.  But he--theory and all--wants to stand for what is right and just. 

"Where do you come up with your idea of just?" I asked.  "I have a strong moral code.  I work on it all the time.  But it is personal and culturally derived."

"Of course," he said.  "They all are."

"That's my point.  There is no land beyond where you can go find "truths" or anything else.  So what makes one moral idea better than another?" 

Of course this puts me into camp with neo-nazis and crypto-fascists.  Bad company, no doubt.  But I was taught somewhere along the line (grad school in anthropology) that morals and values evolve in cultures, and the ones that are best adapted for environmental success survive.  I want to say that I hold this truth to be self-evident. . . but I can't.  Still. . . it makes sense to me. 

I almost got into the old topics again, the ones that muddy the clear, clean waters.  But President Obama made a speech last night, and once again it is "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb-bomb Iran."  Maybe Syria, too.  Perhaps these will be the values best suited to the environment.  I mean, how else is a culture to stop violent attacks that come from an evil, distorted theory/philosophy/theology? 

Conrad, of course, was a genius.  As Kurtz so famously said. . . .

But truly, I may simply be suffering from a lack of sleep.