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I read the following sentence in an Economist article titled “How rotten is Russia’s army?”
“Mr. Putin is rational, in that he wants his regime to survive.”
I read that sentence and stopped. Something caught my attention: the reasoning behind the assertion. Writers can say such silly things.
I’m atavistic. A hairless Neanderthal. With regards to survival, I see no need for linking “wanting to survive” to “rationality.”
In propositional logic, the logician would construct the argument, “If and only if he is rational, then he wants to survive.” Or versa vice. But again, I say that survival need not have a thing to do with rationality. Survival is instinctual, brutish, primordial. Unless we can suggest, like Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, that the entire organism (not just the brain) impels the entire living creature as a sort of rationality incarnate towards life.
The philosopher would assail the above proposition by asking three further questions:
First, can one be irrational, and still wish to survive? As I assert, yes, obviously.
Second, can one be irrational and wish to expire? Who would doubt that?
And third, can one be rational and at the same time wish to expire? Ask my late grandfather. Ask my grandmother after he died. I ask myself occasionally. Ask Dostoyevsky (in The Devils, a.k.a. The Demons, or The Possessed). Ask Kurt Donald Cobain. Ask Sydney Carton. Ask Quasimodo.
Fungie is an odd little name. Still, it is an odd little country. He was an odd little creature, too. A bottle-nosed dolphin who had been borne across the ocean on a great stream, the Gulf Stream, along the eastern seaboard of America, and Canada, borne south of Greenland and Iceland, to the grey and green environs of Dingle, Dingle Bay, Dingle Peninsula, County Galway, Republic of Ireland.
There he finally found a home for himself, as good a home as he could without a mate, nor any mates, in the cold waters in the rain and wind and waves that Cuchulainn Himself had fought, there on the Atlantic wall of Eire.
The people who took him in were foreigners, Dinglicans; first the fisherman who plied the coastal waters with him, then the schoolchildren who came down loud and skipping to the docks and quays to feed him herring and biscuits. Then the Dinglicans who braved the cold water to swim with him and stroke his smooth gray skin. Eventually he became famous, and tourists came and brought binoculars to spy him, and they rented new snorkeling gear and wetsuits from entrepreneurial Dinglicans so they too could swim with him while he porpoised and danced, and so they could tell the cute little story of the funny little pigfish orphaned in the rain.
From my vantage sitting on the green grass up the down and beneath the gray rainclouds there were the rocky and grassy islets bulwarking the sea, the old road going down the peninsula to my left, and out to Dingle a mile away on my right, the road being down below me but between the down and littoral, Dingle in the inside curve of the bay with docks and wharfs and so striking in its pastoralness.
The veracity of the moment came from two things. From up the side of the down, I could see no sign of that boyo Fungie, who would’ve been nice to see if not snorkel with. And two, I was returning to Dublin posthaste, by way of a hitchhike and a bus and the train, and another bus and a stroll of two blocks, to check into St. Vincent’s Hospital again. I was leaking black liquid and the only thing I could metabolize was Guinness, which was probably counterproductive.
Oh, too, there was the veracity of the gray rainclouds having turned to black storm clouds and much wetter rain. “Erin go bragh” indeed.
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