Rage.

I'm reading a book called The Metaphysical Club by Lous Menand.  It's fantastic.  Also, quite chewy. The obviously erudite Menand synthesises the history and the philosophies of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James and Charles Sanders Pierce into a deliciously readable tale of the shifting and rather subjective thought process regarding humankind's place in the universe.  Their theories, if you've grown up in a religious tradition, feel bleak.  They remind me of this story:

 A fisherman down on his luck drags up a stoppered bottle in his nets.  When he uncorks it, an enormous, angry genie appears.  The genie glowers at him and tells him to choose how he wants to die.  Shocked, the fisherman asks why, since he freed the genie from his prison, he should be marked for death.  The genie replies:

"During the first thousand years' imprisonment, I swore that if anyone would deliver me before the thousand years expired, I would make him rich, even after his death: but that millenium ran out, and nobody did me the good office. During the second, I made an oath that I would open all the treasures of the earth to anyone that should set me at liberty; but with no better success. In the third, I promised to make my deliverer a potent monarch, to be always near him in spirit, and to grant him every day three requests, of what nature soever they might be: but this millenium ran out as well as the two former, and I continued in prison. At last, being angry, or rather mad, to find myself a prisoner so long, I swore that if afterwards anyone should deliver me, I would kill him without mercy, and grant him no other favour but to choose what kind of death he would die; and, therefore, since you have delivered me to-day, I give you that choice.'

This tale afflicted the poor fisherman extremely: 'I am very unfortunate,' cried he, 'to have done such a piece of good service to one that is so ungrateful. I beg you to consider your injustice and to revoke such an unreasonable oath; pardon me, and heaven will pardon you; if you grant me my life, heaven will protect you from all attempts against yours.'

'No, thy death is resolved on,' said the genie, 'only choose how you will die.'

The fisherman, perceiving the genie to be resolute, was terribly grieved, not so much for himself as for his three children, and the misery they must be reduced to by his death. He endeavoured still to appease the genie, and said, 'Alas! be pleased to take pity on me, in consideration of the good service I have done you.'

'I have told thee already,' replied the genie, 'it is for that very reason I must kill thee.'

'That is very strange,' said the fisherman, 'are you resolved to reward good with evil? The proverb says, "He who does good to one who deserves it not is always ill rewarded." I must confess I thought it was false; for in reality there can be nothing more contrary to reason, or to the laws of society. Nevertheless, I find now by cruel experience that it is but too true.' 

The thinkers in the metaphysical club came to the conclusion, through an amalgamation of the writings of Darwin, Kant, Emerson and others combined with experiences gleaned from the Civil War, the Great Reformation, global markets and world travels, that universal truth is a bet: we bet that we're right but there's no way to actually know.  Humanity, they determined, came about by completely random chance and is infinitely trapped in the fallibility of  the human condition which, the deeper they dug, seemed quite fallible indeed.  Everything that humans consider to be truths are filtered through the lens of subjectiviy, a product of nature, nurture and, it was looking more and more like, statistical probabilities.

This infinite entrapment idea reminded me of the rage the genie experienced, impotent for three thousand years, finally free to express itself.  It didn't matter that the focus of this animosity was completely unrelated to its source - it must be vented, more's the pity on the nearest victim.  

That made me think of the current state of global affairs - really no different from the global state of affairs since man walked upright, lost his family to a sabre-cat, was infuriated by his neighbor's sabre-cat loin cloth and hefted a stone while squinting at the back of his neighbor's head.  The conflagration sweeping through the hearts of humankind might simply be the inevitable backlash of rage against the cage of being a human.  Of feeling powerless.  Of our ballooning egos coming up hard against our mortality. I'm watching Vietnam in HD on Netflix and I see that ego-deflating recognition of powerlessness against random death in the thousand-yard stares of men returning from combat.

When we witness looting in Ferguson, it's the genie finally freed from his prison, lashing out in random directions after feeling futile for so long.  Trying to establish an Islamist caliphate in the Fertile Crescent has less to do with the glories of life under Muhammed 1000 years ago and more to do with rage against the fact that none of us know what we're doing and all of us are going to die and there's nothing meaningful I can do about it, but if I have to suffer, someone else will suffer MORE.  So we come up with inventive excuses to vent our spleens and smash the windows and set fire to things and cut off other human's heads in a desperate attempt to exert some power, any power, over our cell-mates - saying, in effect, "I'm going to die, but at least I out-smashed, out-burned, out-lived you!  Enaging with these vibrating rage-balls with the intention of reformation or repentance rarely fares well for the kindly ambassador.

For me, the story of the Genie and the Fisherman superimposed on the paradigms presented in The Metaphysical Club provides an explanation behind Alfred's sage reply to Bruce Wayne, which perplexed me but rang unsettlingly true: "Some men just want to watch the world burn."  

Humankind's rage against the inevitability of our deaths would be quite rational if we are indeed a random accident: we've simply evolved to hate what we fear and we strike out in a blind frenzy, furious that no one can save us. 

 Now, I'm probably just a product of millions of years of natural selection, my ability to reason simply a trait that slipped through the gene pool.  The history of humanity surely must be a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", right?  Still, I can't help wondering, What if there was someone who could save us....? 

I'm betting there is.