karma

speaking of karma
by doctorzamalek
March 13, 2009

Speaking of karma, I believe in it more all the time, and not for any supernatural reasons… The reason it becomes easier to believe in karma as you grow older is because you’ve seen the rise and fall of enough people and institutions to understand how hard it is to cheat reality for any protracted length of time. When you’re young, 7 years of unopposed tyranny by a particular person seems like an unspeakable outrage against divine justice, and those who do not openly oppose it seem like cowardly, calculating sell-outs. But if you’re a bit older, you start to see it differently: “yeah, he may get by with it for 7 or 8 years, but there will be hell to pay in 10 years.”

The overriding exception, of course, is what I have called the “getting away with it” principle– namely, that all of us get away with a few things for which others would get hammered.

However, I’m starting to sense that the repeated vices we “get away with” are of two kinds:

1. The ones that we get away with for a long time, but not forever. This is the sort of example I mean with the 7-year tyrant cited above (I have a specific person in mind, who seemed untouchable for years, but finally got his behind kicked by reality and has never fully recovered).

2. Vices that are not really vices, but only look like them from a distance. In other words, when there are character traits that you truly “get away with,” it’s because they serve some more important virtue in such a way that exceptions are freely made for them.

It’s easier for younger people to confuse #1 and #2, and hence the world can seem absurdly unjust. Aristotle claims that people inevitably grow more embittered as they grow older, but I always find the opposite… My sense of eventual justice is stronger than it’s ever been, and here my strange ally is Schopenhauer. He writes that everyone should try to live to the age of 60, because by that time you can see clearly with whom you’ve been dealing all along. It’s not hard at all to fake your life until age 30, still possible to appear to be things you are not at 40, perhaps even at 50 (which I’m nowhere close to, so here I’m taking Schopenhauer’s word for it), but by 60 you can’t really pretend anymore. Either you’ve backed up your pretensions with actions by then, or you haven’t.

What was always most remarkable to me about graduate school was the vast difference between two different lists: (a) those students most admired by their professors, and (b) those students most admired by their fellow students. The students are almost always better judges, I think.

Q: What are the professors fooled by, given that they are fooled so frequently?

A: Overly polished student work that mirrors the intellectual presuppositions of their professors.

But that won’t get you very far, and a surprising number of these people have drifted away from the life of the mind altogether. Karma might be viewed as the principle that reality does tend to prevail over appearance, just not immediately.