William H. Aile
– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE

On disappointment

One finds a lot of stink being made about the seeming, and seemingly threatening, humanity of AI at present – which looks, frankly, like so many ways to worry, without looking a fact in the face, about what the humanity of the I is. But before bothering about robots, we might ask about their builders, for are we sure we know that billionaires are human? I, for one, am not, and brooding over this uncertainty I venture to say that if we are not willing to apply this predicate to just this subject, it is on account of our inability to find disappointment in their faces, or imagine it in their lives – or else the related fact of our unwillingness to forgive their disappointments. It has been said by a man I fancy my philosopher that there are no criteria for life and humanity – nothing that assures what we call humans are not bots or eidola – but surely, I say, there are conditions without which not, and when I say – as I’m about to – that disappointment is a condition of life, I mean a life is incoherent as a life apart from it. To be, for us, at least, is, inter alia, to be open to disappointment – by the world, ourselves, and by one another in it. For consider, there is a reason beyond catharsis we find the spoiled-man-grows-a-heart plot rather natural, the same reason we find spoiled kids and certain stoics to have something of the inhuman clinging to them: for to live as though disappointment could not supervene ranks one among the angels or demons, but not among the mortals. Nor, apart from Utopia – which, be it remembered, names, not an εὐ- but an οὐ-τόπος – will we live among others without disappointing them. To be is, inter alia, nunc et tunc, to disappoint – to inflict what our philosopher calls the little deaths of everyday life, that is: the all but inevitable failure to acknowledge one another, in a word, to respond, to what’s other – and not in the rote ways we learn to let life go bad – on the vine, as it were – manifest in a question missed, a chuckle too sharp, an averted eye, an inapposite turn, a rather too blunt reply, and innumerable other subtle shades of ways we let and are let down. Hurt people hurt people, and the disappointed disappoint. And it will continue to be a mystery – attested to, but not plumbed, in religion and philosophy – that we turn against what we – even when we – seek. – This existential fact of disappointment, our asynchronous being, is why (is it not?) we admire (and do we not?) the sublime ability to forgive, why this becomes, among such as us, a virtue and precondition for communal life. If the problem of modernity has been to discover a source of legitimate authority – to explain which enlightenment philosophers, huddled (as I like to picture them) around a campfire in Quebec, told stories of a State of Nature – then disappointment, though it does not explain its source, records a surprising authority others have over us, and we over others. As the word itself suggests, if I can disappoint you by, say, saying bye too brusquely, then this is because I, though hardly sovereign, hold some power to appoint expectations – intimations of your reality’s forthcoming – to seats in your very heart, hence my power to disappoint them; and for my part, my regret attests to an obligation unfulfilled – and I’m obliged by whom but you? How came we to be bound to one another by oaths we never uttered though they’re sworn in every utterance? And how come, again, we can’t quite keep them? In the face of such questions, which, unanswered, serve to sound the depth of the obvious, we are led (should you follow) to acknowledge a power, part and parcel of a powerlessness, we each possess (or better: are) in our relation to one another. In the shadow of this fact (as natural as any I, for my part, find) society depends on our management of disappointment, on, in a word, forgiveness – one of another. – What do we, Reader, owe the billionaire? – I read the other day of one of their alien efforts to infuse the blood of a young son in pursuit of eternal youth – a real report and no mere theory! We laugh, I hope, or cry, at the middling efforts to prolong a middling mortality that such ungodly sums of wealth can make seem rational. But if we cannot see the billionaire’s humanity, again it is because we cannot imagine their lives to be disappointing; – but then, what does this show but that we think such hoarding and hankering can in fact solve mortal problems – that we picture satisfaction along the billionaire’s lines: that we are billionaires in our hearts, aliens to others, only thwarted by circumstances? If so, then our failure to recognize them is one more failure to recognize ourselves; if not, then we should straightaway discern the disappointment of a life spent acquiring means. But mark you, Reader, and do not mistake me: I do not suggest the solution to the problem posed by the fact of tumorous wealth is simply our forgiveness. There are fiscal sides to this spiritual fact, which require fiscal at the same time as spiritual solutions. What is our dependence if not indebtedness? And what is forgiveness but the giving of what is owed – not in exchange, but because it’s called for? And what is what’s called for but another name for justice? So lest we take the solemn word “forgiveness” to be the resolution of our reflection and suggest the solution to material disparity is to be had in our own hearts by becoming something of stoics ourselves, let us ask whether we, in consolidating the dollars of billions into the hands of one, have given each what is owed. And if I say – as I’m about to – that it is the same we who has done this and who must in the end forgive it, then let that be my thesis.