The Plane

As I write, it has just been reported that the debris spotted in the south Indian Ocean, debris which was the best lead thus far in the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, may well have already sunk to the bottom of the ocean. And so we are left with the mystery that has captivated the world since the plane’s disappearance on March 8th. Captivated, of course, is just a polite way of saying obsessed, if I may use myself as a test case (and Courtney Love, who, via Twitter, offered her own possible lead in the search and declared herself “a little obsessive.” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2583143/Courtney-Love-claims-located-missing-MH370.html). I know that my captivation by the missing plane reaches the level of obsession because I have been Googling for updates on the search as frequently as I have been checking Foot’s Forecast for news of the next snowfall. (Another snowstorm is coming on Tuesday, on the heels of this past Monday’s Mid-March six-incher, which featured the eerie combination of snow and daylight savings time and felt like getting a sneak preview of climate change’s Earth 2.0.)

So, then, why are we so obsessed? Russia has invaded Ukraine, an event with far greater potential to upset the geopolitical applecart than a missing plane, and I haven’t heard one single mention of it in my daily rounds. In stark contrast, everywhere I go it’s as if we’re all suddenly Tattoo announcing “The Plane! The Plane!”, except that this time there is no plane.

I happened across the beginnings of an explanation of our obsession during one of my countless Google searches. The article, which, unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark and is now, like the plane, lost, explained that the missing plane was so particularly jarring to our collective consciousness because we live in the age of surveillance, be it in the illicit-external form, i.e. the NSA reading our boring emails, or of the self-imposed variety, e.g. 236 Facebook friends (my current tally) keeping tabs on us.

I think this is the start of an answer, but getting further traction requires that we expand the analysis in a few crucial directions. First, we must define the conditions on the ground in the surveillance state, where Descartes’ famous cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” has been displaced by “I am seen, therefore I am.” In fact, as a good Episcopalian, I would argue that “I am seen, therefore I am,” was our default setting long before Descartes was even a gleam in his mother’s eye, except that up until the well noted “Death of God” and the attendant rise of secularism circa sometime between the Civil War and the War to End All Wars (which, tragically, had to be renamed with a Roman Numeral) the seer guaranteeing existence was God Himself. This isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of folks who still believe in God, but to note that once belief in God became optional (which is likely the best possible definition of secularism), belief in God, while still capable of grounding an individual life in sufficient meaning, could no longer provide a corporate proof of existence; for God to prove our existence, everyone has to believe in Him (in the same way that juries can only prove a defendant’s guilt if everyone on the jury agrees). And because it turned out that the cogito was as ill suited for the role of “ground of all being” as I was for manning the drive thru at McDonald’s (where I had the same effect on traffic, if unintentionally, as Chris Christie did in Fort Lee, New Jersey), we are left looking for a substitute seer in our modified cogito. All of which made the rise of the surveillance state and the explosion of social media perhaps inevitable, and which also helps to explain why no one cares that Big Brother is reading all our email; illicit-external surveillance doesn’t bother us, and, in fact, we secretly embrace it, because it means that at least someone is watching.

The vanishing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, then, is to be understood as an eruption of nothingness. In a world where to exist is to be seen, the plane’s disappearance is a resounding answer of “Yes, definitely!” to the terrifying question always lurking in the tenets of materialism, a question precisely formulated by Charles Tart:

“Am I just a meaningless accident in a meaningless cosmos? The result of zillions of meaningless molecular collisions that just happened to turn this way?” (http://www.academia.edu/2560387/Is_transpersonal_psychology_consistent_with_a_materialist_account_of_consciousness)

Because if the plane can go missing, despite the concentrated efforts of a surveillance state that is, like the Death Star, fully armed and operational, so can the rest of us. In other words, rephrasing the answer to “Am I just a meaningless accident in a meaningless cosmos?”, we can say, re: human beings and self-aware consciousness, “Easy come, easy go.”

Rather than face our terror at the seeming brute contingency of existence, we bury it beneath our fears, wishes and/or fearful wishes: “The plane was hijacked by terrorists who will use it to deliver a nuclear weapon in a major western city,” or “The plane is having an extended, peaceful encounter with extraterrestrials who guided it to a safe destination in their UFOs in order to launch a shift in global consciousness.” (The latter was/is exactly my fantasy.) Every version, there are literally thousands to be found on the internet, is an escape from encroaching nothingness.

Barring the unlikely Re-Birth of God, i.e. the reestablishment of unanimous monotheistic belief as it once existed (in western civilization), the only viable approach to collective therapy for the terrible specter of nothingness personified by Flight MH370 can be found, of all places, in a Grateful Dead tune. The pertinent lyrics, “Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world,” dissolve the materialist nightmare that we are temporarily (until our pending doom) marooned in the universe. Our mutant cogito is reformulated one last, decisive time: “The Divine in me sees, therefore I am.” What joy, as seers, to witness the end of Descartes’ cancerous dualism along with its foremost symptom, modernity’s fear of annihilation.

Would that we all might see, and that, in seeing, we might cease our obsession with Flight MH370, and begin its mourning.