Belief and this Blog

I want to lead this post with an abridged excerpt from the final pages of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, one of the most creative, genre-bridging novels I've read in years. In this quote, Adam Ewing, a 19th-century American sea traveler in the Pacific who sheltered a desperate Moriori tribesman from slavery on Chatham Island and then is in turn saved by him from a poisoning schemer, notes in his journal his new resolve:

What precipitates acts? Belief.

Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being & history’s Horroxes, Boerhaaves, and Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?

Why? Because of this:--one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Is this the doom written within our nature?

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw...if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.

A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson (note: his son) to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.

I hear my father-in-law’s response: “Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don’t tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the rednecks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell ‘em their imperial slaves’ rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium’s! Oh, you’ll grow hoarse, poor & gray in caucuses! You’ll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!”

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

This is what I would like this blog to be about: saying what I believe. I have no reason to sugarcoat it for anyone--I'm not running for anything, nor do I have any need to suck up to anyone.

What I ask of you, my reader(s), is to hold me to it. Challenge me if you feel I'm not being honest with myself. I should eschew sarcasm and facetious statements. Scorn is a different matter; I do feel scorn, believe it's justified, and should express it (scornfully) from time to time; however, I do want to keep the focus--as Adam Ewing proposes--on the future world, it's needs, and convincing others whenever I can to consider those. As with Adam, I am not deceived: this is but a blot in the Blogosphere, and unlike the drops in the ocean, all those blotted blogs don't add up to much of a unified whole. In this case, there's no "buts" to add to this blog, except that this one is going to express what I believe, or be blotted out entirely.