Tangentville

Life Of Pi

2012-01-29T03:38:00.000-08:00

It's been too long since I posted here, having been seduced by the demands of my daily life, mynew married life in particular, plus the opportunity to do Facebook status updates and notes. I suppose it gives some insight into how my brain works that I choose to write about "Life Of Pi" on a blog called "Tangentville".

In any event, I'm back, having just finished the novel by Yann Martel. As usual, my main purpose in writing is to find out what I think, so this is neither a book review, nor an account of the novel.

If you haven't read the book, and want some clue what I'm talking about, or if you need a memory refresh and some background information, there's a good Wikipedia article here.

To judge from my last Tangentville post, I'm preoccupied by certainty - it's impossibility or dangers for us humans. "Life Of Pi" fed into this preoccupation as I read it. We don't know what is true; we only think we know what is true. To find ourselves worrying about what is true within a work of fiction is absurd anyway. We may have limits set by what we think is plausible, or too implausible to be tolerated, but everyone's tipping point will be different. For me, my implausibility threshhold is more likely to be triggered by behaviour that I find too unbelievable, rather than by events. I like a "believable" response to circumstances, however extraordinary those circumstances might be.

In the book, the central figure tells another version of his story to 2 Japanese officials, attempting to find the cause of the sinking of a cargo ship in mid Pacific on which Pi and his family were passengers. He retells his story in another form because they don't like the first one, finding it too incredible. Unfortunately, they likehis second version even less, because it's concerned with brutal homicide and cannibalism in a lifeboat, including the murder of Pi's mother. In other words, as it struck me, we go for the version of "truth" that suits us.

Interestingly, extreme adversity strengthens Pi's religious faith rather than destroying it. The worse things get, the more he turns to God. God, for him, is the result of his having been born a Hindu, and studied Christianity and Islam when a serious and studious 14 year old (his ordeal lasts for 227 days, and occurs when he is 16). His Hindu roots give him the good sense to draw strength from the different aspects of God which he finds in these 3 major religions. He is appalled when 3 priests from 3 religions find his multi-theological approach unacceptable to any of them. All three of them think that they are the exclusive repository of religious truth.

Even our deepest convictions are based on assumptions. As a totally blind person, I leap out of bed in the morning, confident in my belief that the floor beside the bed will still be there. Fortunately, so far, I have not been swallowed by an infinite chasm which mysteriously opened during the night, but the existence of the floor in the morning remains an assumption. A necessary assumption of course.

There are all kinds of other tangents sparked in my head by this story. The fact that Pi's name, a self-invented nickname in fact, is also a constantly recurring decimal number, at curious odds with his character, which likes order and neatness. This prompts a non-mathematician like me to wonder how something as precisely measurable as a circle's diameter and circumference can be defined by a constant that can't be precisely defined numerically. Maybe that expresses humanity's inability to see things in their real terms. Maybe we're not defining a constant correctly because of our limited tools. If we can't define Pi, what chance to we have with God, seen through a glass darkly?

As Pi says: "And so it goes with God".

Certainty and expertise

2011-04-23T02:24:00.000-07:00

Once again, Dr McGrath hits the spot with this post.

It really is what draws me to the Quakers' self-reliance when it comes to questions of faith.

We cannot look to the professed certainties of others to compensate for our own lack of conviction.

It is in fact remarkable that Quakers agree about anything. My own faith derives from the existence of core values of "love in action" associated with whatever the individual derives from their own "light". Improbable agreement plucked from the jaws of diversity.

To be able to live with this level of uncertainty may be intolerable to some but, in Addition to what Dr McGrath says about the true expert who knows his/her limitations, versus the certainty conferred by ignorance, any level of vagueness is surely preferrable to a certainty which would have us going forth to reek havoc against Christians, Moslems, or Jews, or anyone else we might identify as a pariah.

"Virtual Light"

2011-04-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

This post is my thoughts on a book I just read, not a blind person's belated April Fool joke.

William Gibson's 1993 book uses a definition of "virtual light" meaning information conveyed to the brain via the eyes and optic nerves, without the use of photons. But like any good novel, the quality derives from the plot and characters rather than from their imaginary technological context. I have never studied literature academically, so my definition of the novel in terms of plot and fictional characters is a personal one. It's relevant here, because I think there can be good Science Fiction which doesn't seek to be judged by the criteria which might impress me when reading John Irving for example. Isac Azimov is an author whose main preoccupations seem to be philosophical, as in the relation between humans and the machines they create, like "Multibank".

William Gibson's main interest seems to be in his extrapolation of an imaginary future, but he does have a gift for plot and character and, although "Virtual light" is essentially a good cop/bad cop story, it's a good thriller, in which a human instinct for justice and kindness is allowed to show itself among the many other less admirable human instincts, and the very powerful and very greedy are shown not to be invulnerable, which is fortunately and manifestly true.

The setting for the book is pure Gibson, and certainly has a ring of truth about it too. In this version of a not too distant future, anything we might call a middle class has vanished, and society seems broadly divided between those with conspicuous wealth, derived from a toxic cocktail of finance and security, and the rest, typified by hustlers trying to make a buck, while the trappings of our service economy have fallen into decay. The euro has "imploded", and the individual states of the USA havebecome more and more separate, while the have nots can no longer afford consumerism, and the great malls stand derelict. Tokyo has been destroyed by a massive earthquake, while San Francisco has been hit by a smaller one, "The Little Grande". this latter quake has destroyed the access tunnels to the Golden Gate bridge, rendering it inaccessible to traffic. Immediately, its massive structure is occupied by those looking for somewhere to live, and a whole community of random individuals grows up in a completely unplanned way, with people making use of whatever comes to hand, plywood, steel, even a stained glass window from a church, all worked into the cables, or lashed to the towers. Something of its spirit reminded me of Christiania in Copenhagen. It's a community whose only unifying factor is the need to protect itself; and the best way of doing that is for people to look out for one another. The best way to insure that someone will watch your back is their need for you to watch theirs.

This De Facto community is born out of individual necessity, and one of its original members is Skinner, who takes in a fever stricken girl, Chevette Washington, and nurses her back to health. The symbiotic relationship of the old man and the young girl embodies the ethos of "the Bridge". Skinner's increasing physical infirmity means that he needs a messenger to take various items which he has scavenged over the years down to the swarms of buyers and sellers on the bridge who will provide them with money to buy food from other sellers. In the process, Chevette gains from Skinner's long and invaluable experience and, because of the respect in which the old man is held, she remains safe while learning. In this version of our future, humanity's talent for adapting and surviving makes the stuff which used to be completely disposable now reusable, collectable, and tradable; the currency of those who have nothing else.

Eventually, Chevette gets a job as a bike messenger "pulling tags", delivering high value packages to the rich. These rich, taking refuge from the dispossessed in their gated communities, need private security companies like Intensecure to guard them. The story's good cop, Berry Riddall, finds himself working for Intensecure, being one of those people to whom things just happen, whose best instincts often run counter to the official line.

The disparate elements in this tale all converge on a pair of "Virtual Light" glasses, which Chevette steals from an obnoxious drunk at a party into which she wanders, being totally ignorant of what it is she has stolen, and how important it is to those who have lost it, believing the theft to have been planned.

These glasses, the latest and greatest model, give the wearer access to any data associated with the object being viewed - the ultimate espionage tool. So, anyone who knows what they're looking at can tell, by looking at the Sunflower Corporation building, that there is a plan to redevelop San Francisco from the ground up, as has already been done with Tokyo, without any view to the wishes or welfare of the current inhabitants. The corporate alliances behind this plan will stop at nothing to stop such sensitive information becoming public; and the gradual realisation of the "little guy" protagonists in the novel of what they have inadvertently got themselves into, and their attempts to survive, and to thwart the unbridled power of concentrated wealth, form the substance of the "thriller" part of this narrative.

Inevitably, some suspension of disbelief is required, but it's a story, and there's probably no more of it involved than there is in thinking that coincidences can happen which make things go "right" as well as "wrong".

I think William Gibson is to be congratulated for managing to make a thought provoking, and excitingly entertaining story from the treatment of themes such as what happens when mass consumerism fails, and wealth becomes concentrated into increasingly few hands. Among those whose principal concern is survival, the way in which the potential "love interest" story between Chevette and Berry is handled is particularly well done. Sexual thoughts are fleeting and tangential. This world is brutal, but not without warmth.

Duty and vows; failure and success

2011-01-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

For better or worse, this post feels like the spirit of Tangentville, whatever that is.

It started with Edward Sturton's excellent interview with Tom Hooper, director of "The King's Speech".

Hooper depicts George V as a man driven by a sense of duty to do a job which he did not want, and by which he was terrified. That legacy has been passed down, and lies at the heart of what our current queen regards as the discharging of her role as head of state. An overwhelming sense of duty can give human beings tunnel vision, and can lead people into dark places. We may succeed in doing what we see as our duty or we may fail. Thus Diana, late Princess Of Wales, found herself caught up in others' sense of duty, the politics of royal marriage and the need for clear succession to the throne, while her husband, having discharged his duty to his family and country, clearly fell short of his obligations to a woman who loved him - obligations he had freely taken on. This is to say nothing more than sometimes we succeed, with good results, and sometimes we fail, with tragic results. Our success or failure may result from conflicting personal priorities, or from some endemic personal weakness.

Being lately married myself, I'm bound to think of the vows I have recently made, and previous vows I had to break in order to make them. All the individual can do is to follow his/her conscience. Every set of circumstances is unique. Past failure doesn't guarantee future failure, as those fond of making blanket judgments might say. And we may find that tendency in ourselves in different areas. For instance, it strikes me that the Roman Catholic church's monumental mishandling of the sexual abuse of children by priests has tended to make me hostile to priests who have done absolutely nothing to deserve hostility. Celibacy may be too risky for the Church hierarchy to insist upon it, but that doesn't mean it can never work for some people. As I say, sometimes we fail, sometimes we succeed, and only we can know the most likely outcome, based on previous experience and self-knowledge. It would seem that charles failed Diana because, God help them both, he did not love her enough. On an individual level, love certainly seems to be a better basis for human action than duty.

Marriage - what's new?

2010-12-07T06:49:00.000-08:00

It's no secret, I've been married before - 3 times. It's also no secret that, last Saturday I got married for a fourth time. I don't look on the first 3 marriages as total failures but, to the extent that they were failures, I'm bound to ask myself why someone with my matrimonial track record finds himself embarking on a fourth marriage, with all those solemn undertakings, some of which I have previously failed to live by.

Previously, I thought I meant those undertakings, particularly in the case of my last marriage. Given that even I wouldn't be stupid enough to knowingly drag someone else or myself through the same gradual realisation that the necessary commitment was absent, What's New"? Last Saturday was the culmination of 2 years, during which Ann and I have wrestled with our differences and the pain we would visit upon others. During that time, love has emerged for me as much less of a balance sheet, concerned with how many planks of the dream platform might be present. Mysteriously, getting in touch with Ann via her blog (see blog roll) marked a rekindling of my interest in religion, and the extent to which my feelings about the reality of a spiritual dimension might amount to something I could call faith. At the same time, and prompted by Ann's lucidly written struggles with her own persistent faith, I've joined my local Quaker meeting, which suits me very well.

And so to what's new. Since we're both currently in the American Mid-West, last Saturday evening, I was prompted to fancifully observe that we had "Hitched our wagon to the power of transformative action". And that's the point this time. "Love In Action" is a big thing for the Quakers, and it seems to me like a major reason for believing in anything. To me, there's no point in professing something if it makes no difference to our aspirations and our lives. So, as I contemplate this fourth marriage to a woman who has already made great changes in my life, neither of us stands alone. If we try to be the best we can be, we believe that help and support is available. I hope and pray I now have a better understanding of what commitment means, and I, perhaps pointlessly, regret the suffering caused by my earlier failure to grasp it. Last Saturday, I made that commitment, not only to Ann and our family and friends, present and absent, but the Divine, "The Light", call it what you will, is now involved. This I believe, and that's "What's New".

Our craving for certainty

2010-10-18T13:25:00.000-07:00

Certainty, and people who are certain, keep coming up. Once again, I'm reminded of one of its side effect by another MOI post.

The face value of certainty is obvious. We all want a simple life, in which X is true and Y is not. How are we ever to get anything done if we're always hedging our bets against the possibility we may be wrong, or to placate others? But these "others" may have their own certainties, opposed to ours. Does this mean I must face passivity and abject surrender? No it does not, because opinions and our view of what is right is much less the problem than is certainty itself.

The best science is the elucidation of uncertainty, by presenting a better approximation of what the truth may be.

A small example might be my personal take on religion. I believe in something which I call God, and very vague, but very marvellous it is. I feel my beliefs to be true but, even in so doing, I have to acknowledge the fact that my sense of god as some kind of distillation of the best of which we are capable, may simply be an externalised version of my conscience on a good day. I have no means of proving this not to be true. This makes a crucial difference to my attitude to my own version of truth.

Certainty is the enemy of humility, and without humility, the various ideological log jams which currently bedevil humanity can never be broken. Even the smartest human being is a creature of finite intelligence. In some measure therefore, we all possess the potential to be wrong. If our disagreements are born of the uncertainty inescapably part of the human condition, can we not take common cause in the preservation of the planet for all its people, and the future welfare of our grandchildren? If we can't be certain of the disease, let's start by treating the symptoms. You never know, we might all get along better in the process.

"The Other Woman"

2010-09-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

To put it briefly, the other woman is routinely cast as the villain in instances of marital break up, and I think this is neither fair nor reasonable.

It has been suggested to me that a woman, especially a self-proclaimed feminist, has a duty of care towards her married sisters, which should oblige her to keep her nose - or anything else - out of their marriages. As a male, it is tempting to be offered a way of avoiding some of the responsibility for one's own actions, but it really won't wash. Even if a man is a stereotypically spineless creep, driven by his own poorly understood sexual urges, nobody except him is compelling him to act in this way. He cannot hide behind Eve like Adam and say "She made me do it".

I am not a student of Feminism, but from my understanding of it, on a point of ideology, feminists believe that men exercise disproportionate patriarchal power. This surely doesn't sit well with a view of women which would ascribe to them the power to act as the guardians of other people's marriages.

No, I'm afraid, men or women, those of us who have been instrumental in breaking up our marriages must take responsibility for having done it. I cannot hide behind the skirts of the other woman.

The impulse to blame a third party is understandable and touching; the refuge of love for those who cannot easily hate us. We are shielded from the full force of our former partner's rage by the luckless third party who gets it, in my view, undeservedly, or certainly disproportionately.

Now nobody would advocate the deliberate undermining of another's marriage. To deliberately disrupt a relationship by stirring things up, or to put pressure on someone to go beyond their own inclinations, would constitute unacceptable interference. Simply to find oneself in a relationship with someone, leaving them to decide what the consequences of that might be, is not interference at all. Undue interference is engaged in by other men as well as other women, and it is an issue completely separate from some imagined female duty to safeguard the sanctity of marriage.

Personal and national responsibility

2010-09-09T04:09:00.000-07:00

Confused as ever, this is triggered by me, us, and Mr Fahrenheit451 Jones in Florida burning Korans.

The confusion in this case is not I think limited to me. If individuals or societies think it right to regulate the behaviour of others, it doesn't follow that they are therefore responsible for behaviour which they might condemn or declare illegal.

Societies which regard themselves as democratic often place limits on free speech. There are both ethical and practical arguments for this. We take action to foster a political discourse not based on ethnic, religious, or sexual hatred on principle; and/or we see the impossibility of living in communities while they burn down around us.

So Pastor Jones Et Al decide to burn some Korans as if every follower of Islam were implicated in the 9/11 attrocities. We can voice our disapproval, or someone can stop it if it's illegal. So far so good. Then I just heard on the news that the Indonesian government are saying that if this act takes place, it will damage relations between Islam and The West. But this is not The West, this is Pastor Jones Et Al doing their bit to exacerbate conflict, hastening the final battle when they get raptured up into heaven, while the rest of us provide them with some divinely approved mayhem and torment to enjoy from their celestial vantage point.

It seems to me that the Indonesian government is being as irrationally hysterical as Mr Jones. I can't be held responsible for the actions of a few loonies burning books just because some Moslims want to feel globally persecuted. Members of all religions have had, and continue to have, enough suffering on a personal and local basis, without others trying to capitalise on it by turning the action of every bigot into a harbinger of global catastrophe.

"There's none so blind as those who won't see"

2010-09-03T03:23:00.000-07:00

Without descending into self pity, it's fair to say that, in spite of technical advances, there are many frustrations in using the Internet for screen reader users like me, particularly in Blog Land.

It is MOI who provided me with the spur to take these on for my own greater good. To illustrate what this means, and to get to the point of this post, she likes this article, as do I, and as I hope will you when you've read it. She also likes "Get Over It" by The Eagles.

The article and the song are both critiques of different kinds of miopia. One seeks to legitimise a sense of superiority and special righteousness, while the other seeks to blame someone else for everything that's wrong with our world.

It staggers me that the proponents of Mr beck's view don't seem to pause for one moment and ask, "isn't this just a bit too convenient for me personally?" I'd love to be one of a chosen people, and to have a special place in the scheme of things.. There's even a form of verse named after the man who wrote:
How odd of God
To choose the Jews".
I don't know if it still exists, but there used to be a group here in the UK called The League Of British Israelites. The idea is that "The English" are descended from the 12 lost tribes and therefore, guess what, we're the chosen people.

Glenn Beck's thesis implies to me that the God of the old testament temporarily chose the Jews while he was waiting for a random bunch of merchant adventurers and religious fugitives to colonise the land mass which later became the USA. And because it later grew to be a rich and powerful nation, the rest of us have good cause to be grateful that many of its original founders were not selfishly miopic, being people of faith and good conscience. If a version of Hitler had come "Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born" with the USA as his power base, who knows what might have become of humanity.

The fact that we'd all like to be special is totally unsurprising. It's the fact that so many seem to forget that in the very act of proclaiming their specialness that astounds me.

We have what we have, and we are born where we're born purely by accident. Everything we have can be taken away by a Hurricane Catrina, a river Indus in flood, or a bunch of Goths coming over the hill, who have finally lost patience with those whom they think have more than their "fair share".

We deserve nothing; certainly nothing we haven't personally earned. If we're tempted to believe that we do, we should "Get Over It", and just be grateful for what (and whom) we have in our lives.

Off and on line shopping and the individual shopper

2010-07-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

People usually have a ready opinion about shopping, and how they feel about doing it, either alone or with others. When asked such a question, most would, I think, assume you were asking about store-based pedestrian shopping, a feature of which is that you can customise your own approach to it.

There are those who go out resolutely to find a particular thing or things and, the task being accomplished, they stop shopping. There's an intermediate category of those who set out with all kinds of good intentions, but are seduced by plenty, and all the stuff they never knew they wanted. They may well get home to find that they never knew they wanted it because they really don't, it just seemd like a good idea at the time. Lastly there is the true stuff junky. They love to buy stuff, individually or in packs, but they also get high on just contemplating stuff, whether they buy it or not.

As we all know, modern consumerist economies rely on our buying more than we need, beyond our ability to pay for it, in order to function. This has required the transformation of debt from a response to emergency into a means of instant wish fulfillment.
"I don't hold with it", says my mother, whose generation saw buying things they couldn't afford as a sign of moral degeneracy.

This transition is highlighted by the on line shopping experience. Naturally, it's set up to exhibit and, hopefully, therefore sell the maximum amount of stuff. So my category1 person, the seeker after particular things, has to negotiate a sea of irrelevance in order to reach their goal. On line shopping is set up for the window shopper. This is an obvious tactic, but it may be a simplistic one, since frustration at wading through the unwanted to reach the wanted may drive away those who just came to get what they knew they were looking for. In fact, it definitely does, in my case at least. I'm frequently bemused and enraged by sites like Amazon, which seem determined to enlighten me about everything my fellow shoppers bought, which apparently means that I might do the same. Now I wish all Amazon customers long and happy lives, but I am not remotely interested in their CD or book collections. With this in mind, I think on line retail sites should seriously think about providing more fast track and targeted links to a particular item for my kind of shopper, sparing me the contents of others' baskets. "This is the range of items within your specific search". Perhaps, "Click here for more choices", but that's all.

I may appear more than averagely (if that's an acceptable adverb) exercised by all this, and that's because I've held off on the blind stuff. Now for the blind stuff.

As a totally blind person, I use screen reading software, which outputs the screen to me as either synthetic speech or Braille. Both speech and Braille offer very welcome access of course, but it probably doesn't strike the sighted reader that both these methods are essentially linear. I can't cast my eye over a page, see what I'm looking for, and stick the mouse on it. I can use on screen "find" commands if I know very precisely the exact words I'm looking for, or there are "place Markers" for previously visited pages if I can be bothered to set them up, ETC. But it's time consuming and, to return to my original point, it's time wasting imposed on me by the retailer to tell me about things I know I don't want. Vast choice feels much less like a cherished human right if you don't want it. Can I choose choice when I want it?

"People of good will"

2010-06-22T06:32:00.000-07:00

That plain and simple phrase struck me when reading a post by Frank Schaeffer, in his crusade against all forms of fundamentalism, including atheism.

This - hopefully short - post is not about religion, but I can't read anything that Mr Schaeffer writes without realising how much I admire the strength of will and basic integrity required by all those who, drawn into fundamentalism by birth or circumstances, have the courage to understand and walk away from its seductive negativity.

But the phrase "people of good will" leapt out at me yesterday as the story of BP, the US President, the devastation visited on animal and plant life, and those just trying to earn a living, began to get its predictably hysterical skates on. We hear the sound of those with a personally fulfilling credo to launch beginning to rub their hands at the prospect of scoring some points against their tribally defined opponents - liberals, conservatives, capitalists socialists ETC.

Now this is all good mental exercise perhaps, and gets those who need it an adrenalin fix, but what does it actually achieve? Does it stop the spill? Does it solve the inherent problems of needing to extract fossil fuels from increasingly difficult locations? Does it rebuild the eco-system, and the lives of the fishermen and tourist industry workers who depend upon it?

Our world is currently set up for this adversarial bullshit of course. Most of our problems are long term problems, and politicians think in 4/5 year cycles, and industrialists think of short term profit for investors. To get elected, you need to make yourself distinct by espousing some "ism" which will save the world and the whale, or which will preserve your freedom from the ravenings of "big government", or save your wages from being consumed by taxes.

This is essentially fiddling while Rome burns, and the more unlikely it seems that "people of good will" will emerge through this fog of polarised rhetoric, the more essential it is that they do.

Narrow self-interest doesn't work in the long run. People can be oppressed and enslaved, but not indefinitely. If we hang onto everything we have, sooner or later, the dispossessed will come and get it.

Enlightened self-interest is co-operation. It involves diverting our considerable brain power away from school yard insults, and into defining and solving the problems we all face.

If I have to choose between what might sound like idealistic claptrap, and the prospect of the progressive disintegration of an ever more divided society and world, I think I'd at least have a go at the claptrap.

The language of love

2010-06-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

It was while reading this post by Aaron Ben-Zeév, that I started thinking about the language of love, and the inevitable gap between what we say and what we may mean.

In making his points, I think Mr Ben-Zeév is being a tad literal, bless his philosopher's heart.

It is true that we need warning against unrealistic expectations, and the potential of unhealthy obsession for sucking the life out of a loving relationship. But, when attempting to apply language to describing how it feels to love someone in the romantic sense, we are grappling with the difficulty, or impossibility, of describing a feeling. This is why we have developed art - music, visual art, or, specifically the heightened language of poetry, non-literal prose ETC.

So, I would suggest, when someone says "you are everything to me", we shouldn't immediately send them off to counselling. They may be, perhaps for the first time, experiencing how it feels to have someone impinge on their world in a way which feels unique. Words best describe the concrete and rational. I think love between two people is more than a by-product of mutually ticked boxes. Now there's nothing wrong with a relationship based on mutually ticked boxes, but if they aren't, or don't remain, mutual, watch out! But such a quasi-contractual relationship isn't love. What love is, however, is very mysterious, hence the need for vague and perhaps hypurbolic language when we try to talk about it.

Aaron Ben-Zeév draws parallels between the experience of romantic love and religious experience, which make a lot of sense to me, since faith doesn't depend on rationality either - it's a conviction we "feel", wonderfully unprovable, and not, in my opinion, amenable to transmission to anyone else.

I would go so far as to say that love, as we may be lucky enough to experience it between us, and religious experience, are aspects of the same thing. Just as we can't be too literal about the language of love, so I think we shouldn't get too hung up on the detail of our individual numinous experiences. They speak to us through the lens of whom we are. Whether we do the processing, or whether the Spirit does it to suit our needs or our best channel of receptivity, I have no idea. For what it's worth, my feeling is that Spirit is external, as something like Tarot is based on our internal response to our consciousness - everything we know of ourselves, like dreams.

So how could so many versions of what feels "true" be true? That's because we all see through a different glass darkly. This is OK because, if there is some kind of absolute truth, and I suspect there might be, I have no expectation of being able to understand it, even if confronted by it. Better to do my best to be the best goldfish I can be, only dimly aware of the possibility of some super being who throws me dried insect eggs and changes the water. (Only spiritually speaking of course. A physically interventionist Divinity makes no sense to me.)

Thought and feeling again - a personal perspective

2010-06-10T05:10:00.000-07:00

I need to write this. Whether anyone else needs to read it remains to be seen. In case anyone who doesn't know me reads this, some personal detail is required if it is to make any sense.

In the last 18 months, I have, increasingly intermittently, visited two different counsellors. The idea was to get help with understanding, and hopefully managing, occasional outbursts of anger. I wasn't aspiring to sainthood, I don't think there's anything wrong with righteous anger, if it turns out to be righteous, and simply repressing anger can make it worse in the long run.

My problem is anger that pre-exists, and is really happy when it finds a target on which to vent spleen and spite, almost always way disproportionate to the perceived misdemeanour of the luckless target. Even worse, this is more likely to happen with someone with whom I feel safe, who deserves it even less, and whom I would do anything not to hurt when in my right mind.

OK, so off to counselling to find the source of this anger. The usual approach is that we're angry with someone whom we don't feel we should be angry with - typically a kind and loving parent. As a 5 year old blind child, I'm sure I was devastated by being shipped off to a special boarding school, even though, I knew my parents acted for what they thought was the best. Anyway, the point is that there's plenty to be angry about, and any counsellor will tell you that. Also, being blind can be frustrating, and I know I get angry about that sometimes. But a sighted counsellor is inevitably putting her/his sighted self in my position, which they have no way of understanding, since blindness is, to them, dark and terrifying, whereas I don't know what darkness is, and my status quo is not particularly terrifying to me (most of the time).

I did get something from examining my relationship with my parents, and the damage that boarding school inevitably did to it. And examining how I feel about blindness is something I hadn't bothered to do much, because it is just how things are.

Finally, I get to the point. This morning it struck me that, for all this searching for specific targets, parents, blindness ETC., what I'm really angry with is things that can't be changed. And the very pointlessness of being angry about what can't be changed is what makes me angry, because there's nothing to be done.

Now when I say "it struck me", I'm sure this idea had previously occurred to me as an idea. But one of my problems with counselling is that I'm definitely someone who says "yes I can see how that might be true". that's a totally non-emotional response of course, and I'm good at those thanks to boarding school, and getting beyond that rationalisation is the hard part. I'm saying that because I may be appearing to state the extremely obvious about the primary source of my anger. But, talking as someone for whom feeling is something of a novelty, I actually felt a very small penny drop.

In my last post, I was musing about thought and feeling, and here's a personal example of what I was talking about. Our reason is crucial to us of course, but its limitations are just as great as the limitations of that part of us which some would dismiss as mere wooly psycho-babble about emotions and spirituality. Wherever our faith, love, or potential self-awareness come from, it feels qualitatively different to me from the chemical stuff. And, unfamiliar territory though it is to me, I'm certainly coming to value it greatly.

"The Ghost In The Machine"

2010-06-06T01:18:00.000-07:00

Hardly an original title, but it sums up my current preoccupation.

Two posts on one of Ann's blogs got me started. And please don't follow that link right now. If you do, as I did a couple of years ago, you might never come back, and I haven't finished yet. Today's prescribed reading list is this post, in which she cites this one, and this post, in which she cites this one.

OK, got all that?
The themes raised by all those posts are interesting in themselves, and very well expressed; so I certainly don't propose to attempt to gild those lillies. But they got me thinking about humans as reasoning machines and as spiritual beings. Do the latter exist? If so, can they be in any way separated from the former, or how do we synthesise these two constituent parts of ourselves in daily practice?

Our powers of reason are brought to bear as soon as we seek to describe anything. We may feel prompted to make a particular ethical choice. Does that prompting come from the same source as our attempt to answer the question "why was I so prompted?" It may do, but I don't feel it does. We should use our eason to scrutinise such feelings as best we may, but as with religious faith or love, we can't deny the reality of a feeling or impulse simply because we can't precisely explain or define it. We yearn for neatness, for tractability, for what Writing Kaye calls "One True Wayism". This is great of course as long as we are the pilgrims on that particular "True Way" (see Ann on the fundamentalist Christian moral position).

Neatness elludes us. To take Ann's 2 posts as examples, we strive for clarity in our ethical choices, perhaps wanting to get closer to scientific standards of discussion, in order to avoid the common confusions, such as someone insisting that you must accept the inerrantcy of scripture simply because they believe it. And yet, when thinking of her creative aspirations, Ann finds herself inexorably drawn into metaphysics again, as Susan Yanos talks about the transformative power of writing, or creativity in general
:
"Although the writing process is not the only place to engage in such transformational dialogue with the Spirit, it is a powerfully effective place because of its concern both for questions of meaning and for questions of technique:
what we know and how we have come to know it."
"The Spirit" refuses to go away. We may simply be the result of brain chemistry and learned experience, but it seems that most of us don't feel as if we are. This may mean nothing of course but, however unscientific in a narrow sense, I think we cannot simply ignore our convictions because we can't prove them to be true.
I should perhaps say that, in taking examples from Ann's posts, I wasn't seeking to expose inconsistency so much as pointing out that the rational and the metaphysical are endemic to the human condition. We try to consider them as if they were completely separate, but they both inhabit the same person, and refuse to be dealt with separately for long. We seem to need both. When wearing our rational or our spiritual hats, we may appear to deny the other. Synthesis is the hard part. Perhaps we should devote our prime attention to living life, and demote tryin to make sense of it to the category of things which are merely very interesting. But that search for synthesis is, persistently, very interesting.

As an after-thought, if the question of whether our brain chemistry gives us access to our spirituality, or whether it simply creates the illusion of spirituality, were not confusing enough, you might take a look, and have a listen to this audio magazine on current research into mystical experience, accessed by hallucinogens or non-chemical techniques. It may surprise you. Let me know.

The alienating power of scientific progress

2010-05-31T01:56:00.000-07:00

I've just been listening to this week's edition of Start The Week . As usual, there was all kinds of discussion, constrained, as it has to be, by the time available.
Here's the synopsis:
"The philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford, who argues that satisfaction comes
from skilled manual labour. Iranian artist Shirin Neshat discusses her new film,
Women Without Men, Sheila Rowbotham muses on the role of women in transforming ideas
about work at the turn of the 20th century and the President of the Royal Society,
Martin Rees, explores scientific horizons and discovers the limits of our understanding."

That got me thinking about the role of science in society, and how we feel about it. It seems to me there's a case for saying that, as science has become ever more crucial to the way we live our lives, our estrangement from it as something exciting and at least generally fathomable has increased. This is dangerous.

How science is taught is obviously very iimportant, and we all know how much a matter of sheer luck it is if we happen to get the kind of experience, and the kind of mentor, who fires us up about an aspect of knowledge.

But progress itself is a stumbling block. for a start, as Martin Rees pointed out this morning, science has enabled us to examine areas far beyond those which our brains have evolved to understand, such as sub-atomic particles, or conditions millions of light years beyond this little planet.

But my main thought this morning took me back to a recent conversation with a friend about how much more exciting electronics, hifi audio, and the wonders of stereo sound were to us growing up. This is not just a consequence of aging I think. When I was growing up, electronic devices were made up of discreet components, and it was not difficult to get at least a general understanding of how it worked if you were interested. If you had the skill, you could take an amplifier to pieces and rebuild it, or go out and buy the bits to build a new one - huge cudos to anyone among your friends who did this.
Now, there are no discreet components. The curious child now stares at a circuit board containing very few items, most of which do multiple tasks, which it would take advanced knowledge and a microscope to understand.

Children are now famous for being able to tell you how the VCR or PC works, but that's "how" it works, not "why" it works. Getting results is now the important thing, because you have no chance of understanding what you're doing. I meet kids who are evidently confused between the difference between hitting the "Demo" button on their home keyboard, and maybe singing or playing something over the top of it, and being able to really play the whole thing. They have no real grasp, technically or musically, on how that demo was put together. They can learn of course, and I hope there are educators out there to help them do that. But being more and more spoon fed by things we don't and, increasingly can't, understand, divorces us from what used to be the electrifying excitement of understandable science, as it divorces us from another aspect of controlling our own lives.

Sex And The Single Thinker

2010-04-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

Too much thought is undoubtedly the enemy of enjoyable sex. Too much introspection, or allowing well-intentioned solicitude to get to the front of the mind can transform the fires of passion into an internally conducted solo seminar in inter-personal etiquette:
"Am I being too rough? Would she tell me if there were something I could be doing that she'd enjoy more? Is she faking it?..."

But after the event, earth-moving or not, there are few human activities more thought about and picked over.Sex also provokes high levels of anxiety, and there's nothing so enimical to clear thought as anxiety. We take refuge in statistics. Sometimes we want to be "normal" (please tell me I'm not weird), and sometimes we look for measures of performance to prove that we're above average, or, if not the best, that there are poor souls below us in the striking rate, orgasm rate, or measurable pleasure stakes.

I have some recommended reading for you.
Try this or this if you have a taste for ratings and classifications, serious or more light-hearted.

Desperately hanging onto those numbers in search of some clarity,
even those trying really hard not to "rate" sex in general, or their own performance in particular, find it a difficult temptation to resist. But it's a temptation worth resisting because it leads to muddle. What other sources of pleasure might sex be "better than" or "worse than"? How does it feel? How do the orgasms of men and women differ? How do we measure those differences? When someone pronounces themselves "aroused" what do they mean? Is an account given after the event reliable? The sex might be mixed up with all kinds of feelings about intimacy and love. "Ay there's the rub". Well if sex is the rub in the mechanical sense, love is one of the many complicating factors which make for a pretty damn good rub in the Shakespearean sense.

However, I'm not taking any kind of serious issue with the number crunchers. It's interesting, analysis can always get more sophisticated and explained to the rest of us, and people like me are not going to pick arguments with statisticians. I'm just saying it's complicated and can't be relied upon to reveal any great absolute truths; not least because there may not be any absolute truths, at least not comprehensible by mere human beings.

However, once we cast our raft adrift in open philosophical waters, with no numbers to steer by, we have to be extra careful, and the most surprising people can become careless (or I think so anyway).

I've read some helpful and wise articles by Aaron Ben-Zeév. But, unless I'm mistaken - always a possibility of course - in this article,
Mr Ben-Zeév seems to have been overcome by the confusion which is always a risk when attempting to wax profound on the subject of sexual morality. He's asking "Are love and sexual desire moral?" I don't think this is a question that could be given house room even in the humble abode of this non-philosopher. Can romantic love or sexual desire be moral or immoral in and of themselves? Surely not. Desire is just a drive, and romantic love may mark the height of human aspiration, but it doesn't seem to me to be codifiable as required by anything I would associate with rules of morality. To give an obvious example, for a theologically correct Christian, love and sexual desire are only moral when practised within a monogamous marriage. But love and desire are notoriously good at destroying such marriages when coming in from outside them. Someone whose morality was more relativistic would start talking about consequences. Again stressing my lack of philosophical credentials, I think that if we ask a question, and our first answering thought begins with "it depends...", then we're not asking a sensible question.

We desire whom we desire. We love whom we love. The morality part is what we choose to do about it. And that morality is our morality. Asking ourselves "should I be having this sex?", when we're already having it is rather late, and will probably result in bad morality and bad sex.

Feelings, Reality and Imagination

2010-04-17T05:55:00.000-07:00

When I say "We" in this post, I mean that (see my final paragraph). I'm telling myself off as much as anything else.

If we have strong negative feelings about other people, if, for example, we feel angry or ill-used, what should we do about it? What should those who love us do about it?

Anger can be quite enjoyable, and we all relish being right, or feeling right. But supposing we have it wrong, or perhaps partially wrong. Does that mean that the relish, or some of the relish, will have to stop? Far better, our demons may say, to obstinately cling to those feelings as our sacred right, without regard to their justification in fact.

If those we love are in the grip of such feelings, whether towards us or others, what is our duty to them? Should we try to point it out if we think they're wrong. Does that depend on whether their feelings are making them suffer or whether they're in some sense glorying in their righteousness? Overall, either way, I think we have to try and reason with them. First, because we don't want those we love to suffer needlessly if we think they are suffering needlessly. And second, because if we think they're nurturing feelings without regard to their basis in fact, because they just need to have that feeling, and don't care against whom it's levelled, or what its consequences might be, then we may think that they've lost their way, spiritually or otherwise, if they put their right to have feelings ahead of everything else.

I speak as someone who has caused pain by relishing disproportionate anger. It can displace love and rationality, and I must resist it if I wish to be capable of either, and I know I am.

Self-marketing

2010-03-12T00:13:00.000-08:00

I am very bad at self-promotion, which is why I'm so gratified by the interest which people who command my respect have expressed in my music. So I'm slowly beginning to get some stuff on Reverbnation. At the moment, there are a couple of demos of 2 of my more recent songs. I'll be adding some more soon, both played and sung by me alone, as are the current offerings, and played by my trio - Blind Black & Breathless. I'll be adding some studio stuff later - tracks we thought were finished at the time.

As you listen, remember that the next song will almost certainly be very different from the last one, so I don't think there's anything about what I write that could be described as "typical" of me. This is why my flirtation with the music business was so unsuccessful, because, however necessary for commercial purposes, I don't seem to be able to package myself.

All feedback welcome as I put new (or new old) stuff up there, and the plot thickens.
This link should allow you to listen.
Thanks so much for the encouragement.

Art and purpose

2010-02-22T14:26:00.000-08:00

""Art doesn't help anyone," Garp said. "People can't really use it: They can't eat it, it won't shelter or clothe them - and if they're sick, it won't make them well." This, Helen knew, was Garp's thesis on the basic uselessness of art; he rejected the idea that art was of any social value whatsoever - that it could be, that it should be."

I'm currently reading "The World According To Garp" by John Irving (that quote comes from chapter9). Irving's central character, Garp, is himself an author. At this point in the book, he's going through a confidence crisis about his writing. Irving portrays him as a character who believes literature, however determined his impulse to write it, is "a luxury item". So, with the addition of the confidence crisis, Mr Garp feels that he can't even do something of no practical account very well - as we might imagine a purveyor of bad truffles might feel for example. His mother is a nurse, entirely matter of fact, straightforward and practical; so, even when he felt at the height of his powers, we might imagine him always trying to out run a sense of uselessness - the shadow cast by his ever vigilant and caring mother, the role model, the quintessence of usefulness.

Enough about Garp (read the book), but he, or rather his creator, got me started.

Recession permitting - although they tell me it's over - I try to earn my living as a musician, and have done so for the last 39 years. I write my own music as well as performing that of others, so I have some pretensions to creativity. My father was however a very practical man, not without an artistic side, but great at making things. And, guess what, however much applause I get, and however gifted someone may tell me I am, somewhere there lurks a sense of uselessness and incompetence, which is why Irving's fictional author made me pay close attention. My blindness gives my sense of limitation an edge, but not crucially, since my father was also blind.

Enough about me, but that was my next thought.

So we have here a fictitious and a real person, both in thrall to the same irrationality. My head knows that I'm not as useless as I sometimes feel, but "feel" is the operative word. Some kind of home made behavioural therapy might perhaps cure this, whereby I would act with all the self belief exhibited by the denizens of reality television. But I don't think, in all conscience, I could inflict this sham version of me upon the human race. We've all met people who are trying to be something which they are not. I was once close to someone who decided it was high time to become empowered and assertive, when they had previously been quite shyand retiring. This eventually worked, but the transition phase was jarring and abrasive. Someone who is unsure about their physical strength may lack the confidence in their ability to subdue an opponent in a fight. This could lead him or her to kill the opponent first, if the opportunity presented itself, driven by fear of what might happen to them if the attack could not be stopped.
An extreme example, and a big digression, but I don't think a personality transplant is an option - less drastic management is the answer. In fact, I already do this, since every gig I do is a potential chance for a reassurance fix. It's clear that a lot of the motive force behind our irrationalities is personality driven. But, just in case it helps, what of the facts? Garp says art is, in a practical sense, useless and, with my father looming in the background, I know how that feels. But to proclaim that as a fact is paradoxically arrogant, because we are in no position to know whether what we do is useful, or of service, or not.

So, finally, what about art? We can discuss what art is, how it relates to the aesthetic sensibilities of those who create it, whether it should involve skill, like the Latin word "ars" from which it derives. the boundary between art and so-called craft is hopelessly blurred, as is the boundary between music written as a work of art, and music written to entertain. On all levels, art strikes me as, superficially and profoundly, "useful". Dumbing down literary and artistic education in this country is having very predictable results. And if you are content for people, who already feel disenfranchised, to live in an environment that looks like a concrete fortification, the outcome is equally predictable. So art of all kinds is as useful as the person on the receiving end of it thinks it is. Music enriches my life enormously, from Pete Johnson to Claude Debussy; from William Byrd to James Taylor. Shakespeare probably thought he was just a jobbing playwright. We cannot judge ourselves, either in terms of value or purpose. We just have to put our sense of what's wrong with the things about us which everyone else says are OK on the back burner and, as the Eagles say "get over it". We'll be rendered much less productive by worry than we ever will be by a suspiciously irrational sense of being useless, or, in contemporary jargon, "not fit for purpose".

The US - how to avoid a sense of despair

2010-01-22T03:18:00.000-08:00

I've been in the US for the last 3 weeks and, although I know what Rufus Wainwright meant in his song "Going to a town" where he says "I'm so tired of America", that's not it for me. I'm far from tired of this country, whether in it, or out of it back home. I happen to have had that song on the brain, and it prompts me to assk, if not "tired of America", then what is my sense of discomfort at the state of things here? Before attempting to answer that, might I add that I don't much relish the state of things back home in the UK either, but that's another story.

Everything about this country is big - most obviously, geographical size, economic power =financial and political influence in the wider world. To the sheer clout created by massive natural resources and industrial might, was added the high moral tone associated with the country's formation - one thinks of William Penn, the constitution, the Civil War, the Marshall Plan ETC. The result is a readily justifiable national sense of self-importance and righteousness - the implication that God is a capitalist, and the United States is his prophet. This opinion should be taken as an assessment not a criticism. I'm sure that, had I been born in the States, certainly in the first half of the last century, there would have been little to discourage me from this conviction if I had chosen not to go looking for it.

Particularly within the warmth and relative security of "The Homeland", there are two marvellous traits in the American character, which make for a chink in what could be the total armour of that self-importance. American hospitality and generosity, particularly on an individual level, is second to none, as we have seen with the relief effort for the recent Haitian earthquake. And, like most of us, Americans want to be appreciated; they want to be loved. Without these traits, US capitalist fundamentalism could simply run riot in the world, with no vestige of conscience. While some may think that it has, there is some unease in the american soul, as shown by their reaction to anti-Americanism exhibited by foreigners. It drives them crazy. Why can't these damn foreigners be as grateful as they sould be? "Why don't they love us?
"I'm just a boy whose intentions are good.
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood."
If they didn't want to be loved, they wouldn't care, and I love them for that. As those of us in personal relationships may know only too well, there's nothing more gut-wrenchingly infuriating than the feeling of having what one believes to be one's most sincere good intentions interpreted as altogether something else. This is where both parties to the relationship need the insight to appreciate that our intentions may indeed be more selfishly motivated than we're prepared to admit, or, on the other hand, to acknowledge that we may be too cynically dismissive of real sincerity in our partner. Both things are possible. So it is, I think, with nations.

So that's the background to my reaction to this country. The sheer scale of it and its actions means that the things I like about it, I like a lot, and the things I dislike about it, I dislike a lot. Notably, in the latter case, financial self-interest thinly disguised as democracy.

The "despair" of my title stems from a feeling that elements in the American system and psyche are in danger of cancelling each other out. The conviction of what americans don't want is counter-acting any ideas about what they do want, so nothing happens. Scott Brown was swept to victory on a traditional anti "Big government" agenda. In the area of health care reform, he talks about getting things that need fixing put right slowly by private enterprise. Given the history of health care reform in this country, how long is that likely to take? and, as long as health care remains primarily about profit, is there any prospect of a universally affordable solution? Meanwhile, everyone who has been uninsured will continue to be uninsured and at risk. Those who pontificate about how private enterprise can fix this have perfectly adequate health insurance of their own, so they can afford to argue until another president comes in, and there's someone else to blame for nothing having happened.

My sense of despair is with the american electorate, which, no doubt for reasons of history, appears to fear government more than anything. Apparently, anyone who can touch this raw nerve doesn't actually have to put forward any workable proposals, they just have to stop anyone else doing anything in case it might be the tip of some terrible bureaucratic iceberg which could fatally hole and sink all personal liberty. Now the invasive bureaucratic State is a problem, as we know only too well in the UK, but, eventually, the electorate has to ask itself the question, given the perils of excessive government, which we wish to avoid, what needs to be done, and how is it to be done? I have little faith in governments, but I have even less in corporate insurance companies. The American people must free themselves from always falling under the spell of these libertarian snake charmers, and espouse politicians who at least are prepared to make a stab at achievable policy. They had a flirtation with change when they voted for President Obama, but, faced with an inexperienced president, whose agenda could only ever have been accomplished through the co-operation of his political opponents, fear in the US seems to have reasserted itself as a much more reliable winner of elections, while its politicians appear to cynically embrace this fact for the sake of gaining power for themselves and their corporate masters.

I think the president's detractors would add much more force to their arguments if they allowed him to fail in action, rather than paralysing the process on which action depends, and then saying "there, we told you it wouldn't work. And this goes for Democrats as well as republicans.

Three religions Meme

2009-12-20T00:38:00.000-08:00

John at The Pageless Book inadvertently exposed my ignorance of many things bloggish by tagging me in this Meme. Having taken advice, I hope I'm observing the conventions correctly. Thank you John for this addition to my education, as the internet comes to rival the radio as my principal source of ideas and interesting people.

So I'm asked to cite 3 religions which are not my own that I find interesting.
1: Judaism
My interest here is spurred by what little I know of the Rabinic tradition. It contains so much wisdom, humour and, in a religion whose practices can be so exacting, a rebellious streak when it comes to questions of doctrine, to the extent that some of these sages are not sure if they even believe in God, and thoughts about any after life are as vague as human ignorance would suggest is quite right and proper.
As if to prove that we humans so often fail to capitalise on our gifts, it is unfortunate then that the Jewish State and many of its people seem able to forget this wise and humane tradition, and their own history, when confronted with the aspirations of others.

2: Islam
I know little of Islam in detail, except that it is as broad a "church" as Christianity, is prone to the same sectarian strife, and shares much in common with the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Those who speak for mainstream Islam, as in this "Prayer For The Day" from Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, are speaking a language with which all people of good will can identify. We do well not to judge any religion by its extremists. As in my third choice below, we should not confuse another's craving for martyrdom with our own need for a scapegoat.

3: Fundamentalism
In his response, John cites Atheism as one of his 3 belief systems, which makes me feel justified in choosing fundamentalism in all its forms as one of my 3.

My interest in fundamentalism is centred around my fear of it, and my fear of it is centred around the dangerous consequences produced by the two groups of people it brings together- those who promulgate fundamentalism, and its adherents. The promulgaters, whether they consciously seek it or not, have power over the adherents, because the adherents are simply responding to our universal human need for some kind of certainty, something we can know beyond any doubt to be true; something to impose order on apparent chaos. The greater our need for this certainty, the more vulnerable we will be to someone else's grand solution, and the more potential power that person will have over us. If that solution happens to lend righteousness to our particular prejudices, so much the better. Who better to endorse our vengeful spite than God?

Atheistic fundamentalism is as absurd as its theistic version, but it is at least spared the worst aspects of this monolithic "divinely inspired" vengeance against #"them".

In parading these hobbyhorses, I tag and warmly recommend:
Annie at Daily Ruminations
Carl McColman at The Website Of Unknowing
And Cat and Peter at Quaker Pagan Reflections.
"God bless us every one".

The limits of consensus

2009-12-01T03:43:00.000-08:00

Recently, I've been preoccupied with the notion of discussion as a means of learning something, or as a means of achieving some consensus on questions of social policy based on mutually desired objectives rather than ideological divisions, or the dubious pleasures of self vindication at someone else's expense. This means that not only must I refrain from casting the first stone, but I must not retalliate in kind if someone else starts throwing rocks (see my last post for the kind of approach I would try to adopt). Not retalliating is really hard for me, but it's the only way to stop a conversation degenerating into that good old polarised point scoring, which becomes an end in itself, while issues like care and concern for our fellow citizens can easily get lost in the noise of battle.

To anyone living in the real world, experiencing rising impatience with my wishful thinking, I would say that I know very well that the conditions for such constructive dialogue are quite rare, but aspiring to them is the only way out of the ideological arm wrestling which is no solution to human problems. The reality of such aspiration can be sensed in the tentative steps towards peace in Northern Ireland, where the people have finally grown sick of violence and gangsterism in the guise of principle, where two mutually exclusive ends were used to justify indiscriminate carnage as the means of their achievement.

If dialogue means that both sides are fully prepared to modify their positions in the face of reason, there are many people with whom such a discussion will be impossible. And I would contend that there are belief systems with which such a dialogue cannot be undertaken.

As an illustration of both these points, I would direct you to this articcle, an exerpt from a book by Frank Schaeffer. Clearly there is no dialogue to be had with this kind of steadfast believer. It would undermine the very certainty which is the basis for their belief. A frail human need for certainty which we all crave and, once found, I can imagine how hard it would be to relinquish, facing the terrible possibility that these very beliefs might turn out to be "the house built upon sand".

Now for the difficult part. Most of us raised on democratic ideas would say that we all have a right to believe what we want. There are exceptions though, and I think that the same "most of us" would say that belief systems which actively promote the hatred and physical harm of others are not acceptable.
Schaeffer describes a novel in which we can read a fictional account of the believer, raptured into glory, able to look down upon God's vengeance on "The left behind". The relish here is palpable, and is clearly a major factor in driving him away from this kind of "end times" Christian Fundamentalism.There is nothing like legitimising our most destructive urges to give a belief system broad appeal. The dismembering of Christians by lions, the public burning of heretics, public executions and mob lynchings, have all been the focus of gleeful public spectacle. These people are "other", just as those "left behind" will be "other". The deliciousness of legitimised hate.

This is something which makes me least inclined to believe in an interventionist God. Once God can intervene, it can be on behalf of you or me. Such a God can make choices. Confusingly, this might lead to you or I being convinced that we were members of "the chosen people", but two different chosen peoples, as in the case of extreme Zionists and Islamists.

In setting out his ideas of some of the features of "The Authoritarian Mind", Mike Labossiere describes how authoritarian leaders and their adherents justify their particular set of absolutes as good. Those they oppose are therefore evil, and anything done to eradicate that is acceptable.

To my mind, it is the use of the Divine in support of this kind of inhumanity which is the true blasphemy, manifest evil; what Paul describes as "The devil appearing as an angel of light".

So how should we respond? As with retalliating to stone throwing, how do we resist evil without resorting to it?
It was at this point when I read this post on Daily Ruminations.
"If we let the Spirit move as it should and not try to stifle it, if we let it rain
down on us freely, taking what nourishes and leave the rest"
On reading this, I had the sense that I was trying to solve an essentially spiritual problem in my head. The complexities of how to confront evil constructively are too much for this brain, beyond knowing that I must not stand mute in the face of evil. At some point a stand has to be taken and a line drawn. But openness to the essence of good is my best hope. If "love one another" is our first commandment, then hatred can have no place. We are only human, and I think we can be angry with those who hate in the name of God, but only angry with those who are still as worthy of love as we are. We can hate the actions of those who abuse their humanity, But not our fellow humans, which is where the evil begins, of which we're all capable given particular circumstances and temptations. In the face of intractable complexity, the source of good is where I look for guidance in how to deal with the evil in myself and others.

Consensus yes, but not at any price.

But what do we agree on?

2009-11-13T11:18:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Ann at Mystery Of Iniquity, who introduced me to the confusing abundance of Word World Blogos, posted a snippet from this piece of heartfelt polemic from The Daily Cos. Apart from heartfelt polemic being in itself bracing, it started me thinking about two issues, writ large within the United States, but with a message for all of us (I live in the UK). These are things which I and thousands of better informed bloggers have touched on before, but these things keep coming up, and cannot conveniently be consigned to the completed tasks tray or the trash.

If our elected representatives are beholden to special interest groups, then democracy ceases to exist. If you require large sums of money to get elected, and accept more money to vote according to the interests of your paymasters, we are simply using the word "democracy" because it sounds nicer than "plutocracy". For someone who would label themselves Democrat to behave in this way would seem to qualify for a lifetime hypocrisy award. And one of the things that most angers Hunter is that these people seem completely oblivious to their indefensible position.

In a BBC radio series on White Collar Crime, a British member of parliament, Jonathan Aitken, was interviewed about his state of mind while he was commiting the fraud of which he was subsequently convicted. He said that he came to believe that he could "walk on water", that his actions were somehow above normal standards of judgment.

So, do we agree that our elected representatives behave in this way and, if so, do we think they should? If not, what should be done about it?

This same Daily Cos piece inevitably got me thinking about the on-going and unseemly wrangle about US health care reform. To this end, it would seem to me that no proposal whichfails to directly address a means of preventing millions of one's fellow citizens from being mmore at risk of illness or death by virtue of their income, should be worthy of any consideration at all. All this prevarication and ideological posturing exposes the American nation to disrepute, and dishonours the fine traditions of those who established it. After World War II, Europe was enormously helped by the generosity and enlightened self-interest of The Marshall Plan, aiming to avoid a recurrence of a nation sliding into fascism fueled by economic collapse as Germany had done. Something of that spirit is alive in the G20's reaction to the current recession. Can't the American government and people exercise similar humanity and common sense within their own borders? Do we think the costs of health care are too high? Are we content that people who cannot possibly afford those costs will die? If not, what is to be done about it?

another thing I heard yesterday was that the Greenland ice cap is melting twice as fast as previously thought. Forgetting for now why this is so, should we just accept that it is irreversible, or do we owe it to our children or grand children to at least try and do something about it? Whatever the causes of climate change may be, hurling vast amounts of polutants into the atmosphere is not going to help, and poluting our atmosphere has to be a bad idea in principal. Surely, even a Creationist would agree that the closer we can get this planet to God's original design, the better for mankind. there is no "Thou shalt belch millions of tons of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide into my atmosphere" commandment of which I'm aware. So, if we have choices, perhaps we should exercise them. Already their are technology consultants beginning to persuade the major energy companies that there is money to be made from renewables. Why spend billions of dollars drilling holes, poluting the oceans and atmosphere, and killing wild life, when there might be renewable =inexhaustible alternatives with less environmental clean up to do, and a much better public relations profile at the end of it? I'm guessing that if the fossil fuel industries had put the money into developing alternatives which they've spent on trying to discredit them, we might already be further along the road to a cleaner and more pleasant planet.

And lastly, to return to a current obsession of mine, is it really beyond our wit to stop producing stuff which nobody needs, paid for by unsustainable plastic debt, when we could be generating jobs, yes even (shock horror) labour intensive jobs, which actually do something useful?

If we really think that the extra car or TV is really more important than someone else's clean water supply, we shouldn't be surprised when they come to get us. Is our economy run on false assumptions? If so, what's to be done about it? An achievable future depends on what we can agree on. Sustained and polarised disagreement can achieve nothing but enmity and a sense of self-righteousness.

And, as a postscript, a quote from Sungold because, in the context of what I'm saying, it makes me feel better.
“I still don’t know what will come next, but this I do know. Freedom is better than oppression. Loving is better than refusing to risk one’s heart. Commitments to principles and people trump opportunism any day. And if we don’t embrace change and vulnerability, we might as well give ourselves up for dead. We might just as well erect our own personal Walls.”

Branding

2009-11-12T07:50:00.000-08:00

For those who have seen the TV series, this should probably be filed under the "Grumpy Old Man" category, but that's too bad.

Manufacturers' obsession with branding, while not as serious as world poverty or health care provided according to income, does point to something rotten in the state of capitalism as we currently have it. It is the triumph of form over content.

This struck me not ten minutes ago when I had a glass of some very pleasant drinking yogurt. While drinking it, I remembered that it is called "Yop", and wondered from the fevered brain of which over-paid branding consultant these three letters had come. This can be excused on the basis of how much cocain is integral to your life, but that he/she managed to convince others that I would be drawn to Yop by virtue of its name, fills me with foreboding for the sanity of our society. In fact, this stuff was on special offer, and I thought I'd try it in spite of its name. Now I'm sure that the relevant marketing department would tell me that all kinds of surveys, consumer panels and focus groups assure them that their particular "demographic" is as irresistibly drawn to this name as is an ant to honey, or a rat to a drainpipe. However much I may suspect that they regard their consumers with the same lofty contempt they would extend to ants or rats, I cannot (or will not) believe it..

Once upon a time, here in the UK, we had a State run UK wide railway service, formerly called "British Railways", and then rebranded to "British Rail". I don't know why, but fair enough, the name still sounds like the commodity being sold - rail transport. Then Margaret Thatcher decided to make some ideologically correct money for the government by selling it off to the private sector. In principal, there is a case for doing that, although none of the world's best rail networks - Switzerland, France, Japan - could survive without substantial State subsidy. However, what Mrs T did was to chop it up into bits. The maintainance of the track was entrusted to a single entity, while the running of trains was split up into regional companies in this extremely small country. In my opinion, this was madness (end of digression).

The point is that one of my local train companies is now called "National Express", which is OK. I'm very grateful to the world of takeover bids for this because, before National Express took it over, I would get on a train, to hear a slightly depressed male voice with an "inclusive" sounding London accent making the automated announcement "Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for travelling with...One". Yes, there was a pause before "One". What could this mean I thought. Was this a posh way, totally at variance with the accent of saying "thank you for travelling with me"? But no. a bunch of executives somewhere had allowed themselves to be convinced that "One" was a really great name for a train company.

Two more brief examples. Until recently, the parent company of my Internet Service Provider was "THUS PLC". I suppose this was intended to conjure up the notion of something of great power being brought forth, like the Ten Commandments. It's the same kind of grandiose nonsense which Monty Python had in mind in their wonderful sketch about "TREADMILL; THE MIGHTY LAGA".

Our national post office used to be known as "The Post Office" or "GPO" (general post office. It ran the telephone system as well as the mail, administering vehicle road tax ETC. When this too was all split up, for which there is definitely a case, the mail service eventually became "Royal Mail", which it is today. Unfortunately, a few years ago, postal executives were seized with an attack of branding madness, and out of nowhere came the name "CONSIGNIA". The process cost several million pounds, and was greeted with nation wide derisive laughter, which prompted the expenditure of several more million on a rather shamefaced return to "Royal Mail".

I think the lifestyle associations of products have gained way too much influence in the minds of manufacturers, when the quality of the product should be what sells it. When you add to that the somewhat dubious individuals who seem to have worked this trick for their own profit, I think we should simply get back to making things that people like because they're good. Layers of flummery do create jobs it's true, but non-productive jobs which only add to the price of the goods we buy.

Branding is a hugely expensive process, which has led to YOP, ONE, THUS PLC, and CONSIGNIA, among many others I'm sure. I rest my case.

Knowing what's good for us and other people.

2009-11-10T11:54:00.000-08:00

Most of us crave security in our lives. If only we could be certain where the boundaries might be - good and bad, right and wrong. I suspect this is the chief attraction towards religious, moral, or ideological fundamentalism.

What of those who disseminate such views?
We all have opinions about how others should behave, ranging from their minor personal foibles which may charm or annoy us to the way in which people choose to live their lives, which we may admire or abhor. If other people's conduct is illegal we can invoke the law. But supposing people just don't do what we say quite enough. Supposing we would really like the world to be better ordered, and, particularly, better ordered in a way which suits our particular ideas. then, if we don't have enough authority of our own, we need to look for some higher solution. In the realm of religion for example, wouldn't it be good if God agreed with us; now there's an ally worth having. If we can find an appropriate biblical text, we can magically convert our petty prejudices into the word and will of God. "You can argue with me, but arguing with God might be dangerous". Eternal torment anyone? Such, I would contend, are the typical mouthpieces of fundamentalism; people who rather enjoy being on the same side as angels who happen to believe what they believe. There may not even be a specific belief agenda; all performers love their adoring fans so, even if, as an atheist, you don't think God can be on your side, there's enormous mileage, equivalent to any sense of righteousness, in feeling that you're not deluded as others are deluded. So a guru of atheism need never be short of equally devoted disciples.

Recently, I was talking about This fine analysis by Eric Reitan of the heavy weight bout between Hitchens & Wilson. In support of my contension that religious fundamentalism can offer divine support for its proponents' prejudices, eric Reitan refers to Pastor
"Wilson who, prior to these debates, was probably best known for his controversial co-authorship of Southern Slavery: As It Was
, which the Southern Poverty Law Center described as a “repulsive apologia for slavery.” Apparently, Wilson’s opposition to homosexuality is so strident that he is prepared to rehabilitate the Bible’s endorsement of slavery just so he can preserve its condemnation of homosexuality."

Fortunately for any of us who fear some kind of so-called Islamic or so-called Christian tyranical theocracy, the tide may be turning.

Just today, in connection with homosexuality, I read Anthony Williams' account of his decision to confront his sexuality as a young gospel performer and preacher, and his church's reaction to it. I'm much less a Christian theologically than he is, but his sense of the private relationship with the divine, and his conviction that "God's love is bigger than his judgment", marks a welcome respite from the hectoring style of prescriptive religion. I know how dangerous an internal conscience driven spiritual life seems to many who look for a testing and difficult regime to help them overcome their sense of sin, but far more potentially dangerous to me are the motivations of god's self-appointed spokespeople here on Earth.

And, saving the best for last, Professor Harvey Cox's article from the Boston Globe offers both hope and rationality, typified by this quote:
"Fundamentalism is defined by its one-way-only exclusivism. But today spiritually inclined people view the once-high walls between religious traditions as porous. They borrow freely. Synagogues and churches incorporate Asian meditation practices into their services. Instead of a single churchly allegiance, people now assemble “repertories” of elements from a number of sources. They may attend Mass, take a yoga class, and keep a Buddhist devotional book on their bedside table. Clerics often denounce this as “cafeteria style” religion, but the current of religious history is flowing against them. Father Thomas Merton, the leading Catholic contemplative writer of the 20th century, died while staying at a Buddhist monastery in Bangkok. Martin Luther King attributed his commitment to non-violence to Gandhi, who in turn said he learned it from Jesus and Tolstoy. The Dalai Lama has written a reverent biography of Jesus. For none of
these profoundly religious men did the appreciation of other faiths weaken their anchoring in their own. In fact each said that it enhanced it."
He points out that such developments can lead to fads and incoherence, but religion must always be the search for truth which will always be unknowable in any entire sense.

A shrinking world is increasingly in need of consensus. It will not find it in the polarised diatribes of the bone-headedly convinced. Such are the posturings of coaches before football games, and of generals addressing their troops before going into battle. Victory leads to oppression and resentment among the defeated. I would suggest that we need a more harmonious solution if it is to be more permanent, a solution which no kind of fundamentalism can provide, because it alienates and rejects all those who don't adhere to it.

Tribalism, nationalism and peaceful co-existence

2009-11-09T08:07:00.000-08:00

I'm not an anthropologist, but it's easy to see what tribalism had going for it. The evolution of unique customs and a way of life gives the members of a tribe the sensation of being special and, given the competitive nature of humanity, this will probably come to translate as a sense of superiority to one's neighbours. This too can be useful, since it gives you an excuse to invade them with impunity and take their stuff.

In these terms, nationalism seems to me to work best the more homogeneous in some clearly identifiable way is the group comprising a nation. If it starts to lose a common religion, ethnicity, culture, values, or whatever is the cement that confers a sense of nationhood, a nation may be in trouble.

Something which may be said in favour of empires is that they can maintain peace and prosperity in tribally disparate areas. An overall structure, civil service, law inforcement, transport ETC, imposed from the centre and ultimately administered by those other than native inhabitants with their own particular allegiances, can create some semblance of national unity. The imperial master can also be the focus for everyone's resentment, creating a common focus, so that the imperialists can replace the neighbouring tribe as the most immediate "them" as opposed to "us". When the empire is defeated or dismantled, it may turn out that your country is just a bunch of lines that someone else drew on a map. At that point, unless you have a charismatic ring master like Martial Tito cracking the whip, all hell may break loose as old tribal/ethnic enmities reassert themselves.

The more successful nation states managed to throw off their internal tribal divisions. Maybe that's why they so recklessly ignored them as a fragmenting force when withdrawing from their former dominions. But even for the more succesful nations, I fear that nationalism, like tribalism, may have passed its sell by date. Within our national frontiers and internationally, I think the major threat is not cultural, but economic. If we value our cultures, we must address the economic failings built into our current system, to avoid catastrophe in the medium to long term.

Internally, those of us who live in more affluent countries live in economies which can only sustain growth by bombarding all our citizens with consumerist goals they cannot possibly attain without running up unsustainable debt. In this way, the internal consensus which makes nations governable is under growing threat. Externally, those denied this consumer paradise, and facing much more basic food and water shortages at home, will be trying to get in. If we don't let them, we should not be surprised by a rising tide of resentment, remembering that hungry people will stop at nothing to feed themselves and their families. Do we want to live in affluent fortresses?

Perhaps simplistically, it seems to me that we have to divert our technological expertise from making consumer goods which nobody really needs into making more of this world habitable and productive for it people. This is not an ideological agenda. Apart from any ethical or moral imperatives which we may embrace as part of our personal belifs, there are imperatives of enlightened self-interest which, if we ignore them, may see any quality of life we have destroyed by the besieging hordes of the dispossessed.

Collision in particle and opinion

2009-11-05T05:42:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure where this is going, but yesterday, I read some arresting thoughts about two kinds of collision; one relating to particle physics, and the other to colliding opinions in the realm of metaphysics.

This rather surprising theory proposes that Super Colliders might be rendered inoperable by some force of retrospective self-preservation within the universe, because a devastatingly harmful particle might be created in one of them.

Importantly, the two physicists who have spawned this theory also propose a test for the point beyond which sheer "luck" becomes statistically something else in the context of one of these particle colliders.

I also read This article, In which Eric Reitan analyses "Collision", a documentary describing the verbal joustings of Hitchens V Wilson ("New Atheist" V "Conservative Evangelical").

I think Reitan's piece is required reading for anyone, like me, who is terminally pissed off by the aridity of polarised discussion. I must read some more of his stuff.

Debating to win is a skill and good mental discipline, and belongs in debating societies, where you may be called upon to defend some preposterous notion, and you do your best to drum up such arguments as you can, hoping your opponent will make a mistake. It can be good fun. I remember a debate from school days:
"This house would rather be a contented pig than a discontented philosopher".But a lot of people are going to run their lives on the basis of their religious convictions, so this latter "collision" should be beyond gamesmanship. Whereas the two physicists are proposing a testable theory in their area of collision, I accept Reitan's analysis that Hitchens and Wilson are not. Firstly, the existence or non-existence of God cannot be proved in the same way that Boyle's Law can be proved, and secondly, I agree with Reitan that the atheist and the evangelical are preaching to their own constituency. they are colliding but colluding. As long as their particular faithful get the approved message from their particular champion, they can shake hands and walk away afterwards like a couple of boxers, but with their prejudices intact.

Scientists at their best advance human knowledge by proposing testable hypothesese. Metaphysicists who defend an already established position, rather than exploring their assumptions or conceding the necessary weaknesses in unprovable positions, are merely massaging the prejudices of their own converts, and massaging their own egos in the process.

Debating to win can be addictive; debating to learn may be less vain glorious for the participants, but might have some merit beyond sound and fury.

The thirst for legitimacy

2009-11-03T13:15:00.000-08:00

I know I haven't written the two posts I said I would, but I still might do it, and surprise you.

Meanwhile the present bee in my present bonnet is very unsurprising, and certainly nothing new. What always astonishes me about our human thirst for legitimacy is how easily we deceive ourselves that what we want is somehow justified by science, God ETC.

I was listening to a BBC program in a series on "Scotland's Black History", in which the notion of eugenics that we might call Scientific Racism was used in support of the legitimacy of the imperial adventures undertaken by various countries in the 19th century. Such ideas postulate that there is some kind of hierarchy of races, and divine sanction is often cited as well. Such a theory renders oppression not just excusable, but a sacred duty for the oppressor - the infamous "white man's burden". It has of course subsequently been used as a pretext for liquidating millions of people in Europe and Africa.

As another example of this, somewhat less destructive, at least overtly, God, or a particular interpretation of God, is wheeled out in order to punnish those whom believers consider to be sinful, while making the believers feel suitably virtuous. If this position is challenged, we definitely have a feeling that the righteous are extremely upset by the possibility of being cheated of the vengeance due to them for foregoing all that pleasure.
Thanks to Annie via Twitter for This article, in which something of the sort seems to be going on.

Now I'm asking myself if I can possibly be that easily self-deceived? Does the possibility of self-deception never occur to those who can make bigotry or zealotry work for them in their lives? Doesn't it strike themhow convenient these beliefs happen to be for their purposes? Has anyone ever proposed a racial hierarchy in which the proposer languished firmly at the bottom? The vast majority of the proponents of damnation seem to believe themselves to be saved from it. How convenient. If I am basing my life and its values on such handy and helpful constructs, made to fit the desired outcome, please somebody tell me.

Reason not to be cheerful

2009-10-31T13:57:00.000-07:00

We all have different ways of coping with life, and we naturally choose those which fit our temperament. I like to take the hopeful view most of the time. Not because I know the best will always happen, but because it suits me better to act as if it will, while knowing it may not.

However, brain chemistry being what it is, there are days when I wake up feeling slightly less optimistic. On days like those, I should sensor my reading a little. I should not, for example read This article

or This article.

Now I know about politics being the art of the possible, and that we're all supposed to be pragmatic realists, but there are limits.

If Senator Franken's amendment is about to be dumped or diluted, are we really saying that a corporation's profit trumps someone's human rights? If we are saying this, how are we justifying it?

In terms of health care policy, are we really saying that it is in any sense OK to countenance the avoidable death of fellow human beings in the midst of conspicuous affluence? How are we justifying this?

To me, this is simply to defend the indefensible.

As for how to proceed with necessary reform, my belief in "gradualism" as the right approach was brought up short the other day when listening to a BBC program on "Scotland's Black History#". A black abolitionist spoke in Glasgow in support of the campaign to abolish slavery in the United States. The motion was that slavery should be abolished "as soon as possible", and the guest speaker announced his opposition to the motion to the consternation of the meeting. He explained that sin could not be walked away from by degrees. If it were sin, it should be renounced completely and at once. I am not myself a Christian, but his position makes a lot of sense to me. And for many of the protagonists in the current debates, his words should surely speak loudly, since they profess themselves to be Christians.

Cam we imagine Christ entering the Temple and, confronted by the money changers,saying, "Now listen guys, I know there are cost issues here for you, but I wonder if we can't sit down and discuss the medium to long term possibility of your vacating these precincts"?

I think not. Any society worth its salt has to have some clear sticking points.

Finally, I would ask the question can political systems which have allowed the power of money in a few hands to over-ride the common humanity of the electorate, any longer call themselves democracies? This is plutocracy isn't it, rendered respectable by elections giving the people choices between 2 versions of the same thing.

If someone needs access to vast amounts of money to get elected to high public office, there's the end of democracy right there.

I have cheered up since I had these thoughts, but the questions remain.

Opinions as identity, and learning

2009-09-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

I have always enjoyed expressing myself, via words or music. The advent of the Internet into my life has proved very liberating, in affording me the opportunity to do both very cheaply. Of course I don't take sufficient advantage of the Internet, either as a resource or as a channel for expression. The sporadic nature of this blog attests to the latter.

I have been on some stimulating email fora (sorry, did some school Latin and have to show off), but blogging is quite new for me, and has accompanied a lot of changes in my life. Those changes, and reading blogs are making me increasingly interested in learning rather than indulging in language as a self advertisement.

As in daily life, you get more out of people by being concilliatory, and I find myself increasingly drawn to a less flamboyant, or at least less confrontational, mode, in an attempt to find out what others are saying, or mean by what they say, rather than the trench warfare which characterises polarised exchanges, which often don't merit being described as discussion.

Things I have to watch out for to keep a constructive focus.

Understanding the difference between testing/exploring someone else's views in order to better understand them, and trying to win the argument. There's more to belearned from the former, and arguing, even as in debating, can be more fraught with danger than I used to think.

By way of explanation, I need to digress, but it's my blog so I'll digress if I want to.
My recent experience of debating online had been via the mailing list of my former school, a boarding school for blind kids which combined selective entry by competitive examination with a non-fee paying environment, since our fees were paid by our local education authorities. I joined this list a very long time after I left that school, during which time I had deliberately avoided all things to do with blindness and related issues. But, in the nature of such things, even after a long gap, I found, and perhaps wanted to find, that the former students' mail list retained something of the ethos of the place as I remembered it. Although, as boys between 11 and 18, we had our share of physical competition and fights, in this blind and partially sighted environment, it's not perhaps surprising that vigorous debate was very much part of the fabric of everyday life, and I dropped back into that very easily.

Then I encountered blogs, and my natural impulse was to assume that Worcester rules would apply, and everyone would understand that, since I'm crap at chess, debating could fill much the same role, even if discussing matters of genuine importance.

So we all make assumptions about what the rules of engagement are. The chemistry of inter-personal dynamics is, to me at least, very mysterious, in that tension communicates itself to us, and suddenly a discussion can begin to feel like our value has become embodied in our views, and we are defending ourselves, rather than simply stating our opinion about something. So, to be clear, the whole focus of a discussion can change, not just for one party to it, but for both, and to both parties' surprise.

This is of course a particular danger for people who care about what the other thinks, and people who have thought their insecurities safely concealed. So this has left me temporarily somewhat tentative about the rules of engagement for online debate, and I'm concentrating on asking questions related to learning and understanding. Being right and winning are, after all, much less important, or should be.

As a final thought, I would add that, in our dialogue, we need to find a way to convince each other of the difference between "this is what I think", and "I know I am right".

This isn't the post i intended to write, but it's the precursor to the next two which, hopefully, will be what I intended to write.

Making the first move - forgiveness

2009-09-17T00:50:00.000-07:00

Ever since yesterday evening, when I played James Taylor's "Belfast to Boston" on my weekly radio show, this recurrent preoccupation of mine has resurfaced. Conscious of the fact that I have nothing new to say, I feel compelled to say something.

James Taylor's song was written before the efforts of UK politicians, the good offices of the Irish government, and particularly the tireless efforts of US Senator Mitchell, with the backing of President Clinton, produced the current level of peace in the north of Ireland (Ulster), and brought an end to the daily horror of "the troubles".The song is a very direct, and therefore quite courageous, message to Taylor's Irish-American countrymen to stop funding this terrorist campaign through organisations such as Noraid. Terrorism doesn't work because it doesn't give people the kind of present in which they can make rational decisions about their future. It is negative and disruptive, practised by people whose chief concern is some kind of self-fulfillment.

This is all well known. Those whom the terrorist claims to represent are urged to lay aside their sense of grievance and go forward through reconciliation and forgiveness. Because there were terrorists on both sides in Northern Ireland, the aftermath of the troubles has been easier to manage. The difficulty comes when one side of a conflict is enjoined to embrace non-violence, while the other side basks in self-righteousness.

This is why Senator Mitchell has a much tougher assignment in the case of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Both sides have shown contempt for the life of civilians, and a version of God is alleged to agree with both of them. Because of their vastly greater might, the Israelis have managed to kill and starve much more effectively, while citing the efforts of their poorer neighbour by way of justification. One is defending its security, while the other is a terrorist. Why? Because Mr Balfour drew a line on a map?Isn't the God of the Jewish people, and therefore its state, a merciful God? Is it not for the mighty to exercise mercy? Besides which, repressed peoples can never be permanently and reliably disabled by repression, and military solutions to political problems never work. By deliberately smashing the Palestinian economy, and reducing the inhabitants of the West Bank to 15 litres of water per day (the U N minimum for "emergency" water supply), do successive Israeli governments really believe that this is somehow going to magically disable every Palestinian with rage in his heart, so that the Israeli citizen can sleep peacefully, as promised by God? With its own particular history, the Jewish nation surely cannot believe that the aspirations of others for some kind of homeland can be persecuted into extinction.

Northern Ireland shows us that some kind of reasonable life expectations are the basis for any kind of rational debate. No-one should be expected to debate the fine distinctions between legitimate national security and terrorism while they're hungry, thirsty, unemployed, and in fear of reprisal missile attacks. I certainly can't imagine myself being very motivated under those conditions.

The fact that all the affluent nations stand by and allow this to continue is completely indefensible. If financial clout ultimately has more value to us than the mercy, magnanimity and forgiveness advocated by the scriptures of all the major world religions, then we shouldn't be surprised if the triumph of power over compassion has consequences for us rather closer to home than TV images from east of the Mediterranean.

Isms and ists

2009-07-26T14:29:00.000-07:00

As human beings, we are attracted to isms. I think there are strong anthropological motivations going on here. In fact, the evolutionary routes of such behaviour may be the same as the rational case which might be made for isms in general. I'm not, of course, talking here about the virtues of any particular ism, any particular bundle of views, which may be sufficiently structured to qualify as an ideology or system of thought. I'm talking about what draws us to want to be part of something bigger than we are.

If we come across a body of thought which vaguely represents our position, we get that coming home feeling. If it's a position that others may attack, we are going to draw comfort from the safety of being among the like minded, and from feeling less vulnerable to being picked off as some crazy loaner. We will have our sacred texts and the thoughts of the wise originators of our chosen ism to which we can refer to bolster our opinions, and add weight to them by quoting those whose scholarship we admire; scholarship which might impress the opposition.

But here's the danger zone in my opinion. Because the ism can easily take on an institutionalised life of its own, and render us less critical of what it says than we might otherwise be. Our luminaries can easily take on almost sacred status, and we may almost imperceptibly start feeling nervous about entertaining thought which doesn't toe the party line. We would somehow be acting disloyally, betraying "the cause". How nuch accommodation are we making to this tendency in us? Are we allowing our instinctive, if rationally defensible, need for solidarity to undermine our capacity for independent thought?

I'm aware that being an anti-ismist is itself an ism in the making. I'm simply suggesting that if we choose to define ourselves as any kind of ist, we might do well to think how far that ism reflects our true views, and how far we any longer permit ourselves to have such views without reference to higher authority.

Politically correct purposes

2009-07-01T14:43:00.000-07:00

For newcomers to Tangentville, what follows is the output of someone who reads less than most denizens of the blogosphere. It's just mulled over thoughts written down.

On the subject of political correctness, its excesses have been lampooned at length by others - others better at lampooning. What struck me just now is a question about what political correctness is for? Do we need it and why?

I assume it had its genesis in a well intentioned wish to help increasingly heterogeneous societies peaceably come to terms with their heterogeneity, in a social context in which commonly accepted codes of "good manners", or "common courtesy" seem to be less generally accepted (discuss).

This impulse was enthusiastically embraced by thosee who think we can't get by without a manual, hopefully and profitably written by them. The implication is that us poor regular folks don't understand the huge anthropological complexities which experts can plumb, allowing them freely to consort with aliens from alien cultures. And that's not so bad: It's just the good old self-help industry we know and love.

What struck me as more worrying was a change of emphasis. The focus seems to have movved towards self-advertising virtue. "Look at me, I use all the right language, therefore I am a mature integrated person".

If we are genuinely concerned about the comfort of others in social situations, as represented in posters or on the screen ETC, what should we do? For what it's worth, my experience of meeting all kinds of people over many years is, if you want to know, for instance, how you should refer to them, you - surprise surprise - ASK THEM, and then they tell you, and then that's what you call them. Is that difficult?

We have laws designed to protect the vulnerable against physical and/or verbal abuse, negative discrimination and hatred. Maybe we need better laws, or maybe a better sense of humanity and community would help us to better inforce those we have.

The fact is that human decency will not be encouraged by means of someone else's lexicon. Political correctness is often a self-agrandising triumph of style over content. If we are serious about treating one another like human beings, we need to look beyond someone else's linguistic prescriptions; labels are not enough.

Politicians talk a lot about "The contest for hearts and minds". Any contest is within our own heart and our own mind. Are we truly interested in demonstrating the respect for others which we expect to be shown to us, or are we using the words of the Political Correctness word factory as a means of convincing ourselves that we're the people we would like to be?

It is how we really feel and how we act which will make a difference.

"Reg's Good Stuff"

2009-06-16T03:38:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, Wednesday 17 June, I'm getting back to Internet broadcasting again, just for non-profit fun, with the encouragement of my good friends at:
http://therideradio.net
The show is dedicated to music in general, plus anything else I think is "good stuff". It airs for 2 hours at:
5 PM here in the UK
Noon US Eastern time
11 AM US Central Time and
9 AM US Pacific time.

You can email me at:
reg@regwebb.com
Follow me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/regsgoodstuff
Or talk to me on Skype during the show via Skype name regsgoodstuff, or call in from the States on:
(217) 806 4321.
My music library is diverse, but not particularly good at mainstream instant requests. So, if you ask me to play something, it might be next week before you hear it, but I'll do my best.

I'm happy to talk live on air about anything, but I do screen people off air of course, and my decision about who gets on is both arbitrary and final.

I look forward to your company if you can make it tomorrow or on future Wednesdays.

Feedback welcome.

LDRs suck

2009-06-09T21:51:00.000-07:00

This is one of those personal outbursts which I may later regret having posted, but I'm in the grip of it right now.

If you Google "LDR" or "long distance relationship", you will come up with mountains of closely reasoned and perceptive stuff about the dangers and difficulties encountered by those who embark on a love-based relationship at long distance.

Does this stuff actually help? Maybe it helps some people, but, if it goes wrong, however much right on self-awareness psycho-babble you may ingest, it just fucking hurts, and that's all there is to be said about it from my point of view.

If you have an Achiles Heel in your temperament, an LDR will find it out, with none of the magic of physical closeness to cement the bonds between you.

We can't help with whom we fall in love of course, but you may just have rather more fun sticking your fingers into a light socket if you find your potential soul mate in someone you can't actually hold or experience physically.

I will feel better soon, but that's currently howit is.

The function of live music

2009-06-02T06:47:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, BBC Radio's "Reith Lectures" were given by the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim.

He has devoted his life to music; both as an end in itself, and as a means of bringing people together who might otherwise be separated by ethnic and/or political conflict.

Predictably then, his position is that the "Muzak" impulse in our culture has devalued it to something which simply comes out of a hole in the wall, saving us from the terrifying prospect of silence. The word "Muzak" of course derives from the Muzak corporation, one of the first organisations to promote the use of pre-recorded background music, now so endemic in our public spaces.

In general, the more of anything we have, the less we appreciate it. When I was in school, an elderly music master could talk to me of a time when most people did not have a phonograph. The first time he heard the symphonies of Beethoven was by playing them himself from versions scored for the piano. So, when he went to his first orchestral concert, it was a very big deal. We might take a reductive position and say that everything is relative, the world is as it is, and everyone will have their own ideas about what has changed for the better or for the worse. But hang on just a moment before we allow ourselves to be swept away in the self-satisfaction of our consumate realism.

Appreciation is a basic human need. Most people don't get it, certainly not enough of it, whether they're looking after their family, collecting our garbage, or, as I witnessed recently, singing their heart out (not referring to me, I was in the audience).

I'm a performing musician, so I have to declare an interest. In my experience, because of Muzak culture, shortening attention span bequeathed to the world by bombardment with rapidly moving images, or just lack of common courtesy, the only way you can get people to shut up in the presence of live music is to get them to buy tickets and sit down in rows in a hall. From the point of view of the performer on stage in a pub or club, it often seems that the function of the music is to make, or enable, the crowd to shout louder., to enhance their feeling that they're having a great time. Now these good people have probably paid to get in, and the club is not a monastery with a vow of silence, and they're not in the presence of some musician who thinks he's the voice of God or something, warranting total attention. But, biased or not, I do think things have got a bit out of wack here. These people may have paid, but they don't own me. I can't quite resign myself to the fact that my music is merely a commodity. My emotional investment in it may matter to nobody else, but it matters to me. Sure, I have the choice not to work in this field, and play exclusively for myself at home. But the fantasy of sharing it with someone who actually gets it dies very hard, and I think audiences often miss a lot by letting music just wash over them as part of a general social experience, (see my previous post).

I think Barenboim was right to the extent that we probably gain more by appreciating other people's efforts than we lose by proving that we can tell a joke audibly over the band. People do respond to appreciation, and I think all of us, whatever we do, deserve it.

May 31 at the Jazz Cafe London

2009-06-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

No ethical floundering today.
Last night my son and I saw/heard two exponents of singing and playing solo piano in their related, but different styles - Charlie Wood and Jon Cleary.

I would have wanted to see Jon Cleary whoever was opening for him, but Charlie Wood was a definite bonus. I know only one of his albums - "South bound", and it features him mainly on organ with a band. The striking thing about this album for me when I first heard it was the way in which he combines a completely credible and authentic urban jazz/blues style with quite cerebral lyrics - E.G. when did you last hear a song of this type allude to "A play by Sophocles"? A song which starts, very much true to it roots, with the lines:
There have been good times,
There have been bad times;
But mostly they've been in between.

Really good voice; good pitch, faultless musical articulation, very important with his highly ornamented singing style. He started and finished with songs not by him - Paul Simon and Professor Longhair respectively. The Simon song was a completely Charlie Wood take on "american Tune", a very apt opener for an American in a foreign land.
His own songs were delivered with great finesse. The only problem for the chattering classes who attend such gigs is that you actually have to listen to what the guy's saying. I mean really! Paying all that money and having to listen as well? Ridiculous!

That prompts a whole other tangent on our relationship with live music; but not right now.

The Professor Longhair song with which Charlie Wood finished was the classic Tipotena. Interestingly, Jon Cleary was to play that later in his set, and it summed up these two performers completely.

Cleary was definitely the main event from the crowd's point of view, and I thoroughly understand why. He's more stylistically definable, classic Neworleans plus funk. He's a better piano player than Charlie Wood, and a better entertainer, in that he's more direct, more in your face boogie, with a good slightly edgy voice, in contrast to Wood's polished urbane smoothness.

Cleary got the crowd rocking, and he deserved to.

I am somewhat envious of this man, in that he has played a lot in Bonnie Raitt's touring band, a gig which I would cheerfully do for nothing.

But, seriously, with Jon Cleary's rapturous reception ringing in my ears, I couldn't help feeling a little sorry that Charlie Wood just didn't have what it took to knock this Jazz Cafe crowd out, although I personally think he's more subtle and interesting. But then if the ancient Roman populous had a choice between a display of votive dancing, and Christians being thrown to ravening lions, there's not too much argument about which would draw the larger audience.

What it is or isn't to call yourself a Christian

2009-05-29T16:03:00.000-07:00

For me, the basis of religious truth is individual, so what we call the conscience has to be the arbitor for all of us of what we feel to be true. We might start from any spiritual experiences we have had, refined by our life experience, plus however much attention we may choose to pay to what others show us, either by word or by example.

When we have formulated some kind of position for ourselves, we may or may not choose to give it a label, based on whether it approximates to any pre-existing body of religious belief.

And this is where the generalisations end because, when it comes to me, the labelling problem is further complicated by all those who have gone before me, and chosen to call themselves, for example, Christians.

By instinct, as I said, the conscience feels paramount to me, but there is something of the pedant in me which says that, if you're going to apply a label to your beliefs, then it has to have clear meaning or it's pointless. While it is instinct which draws me to the Quakers because of their openness, their approach to the individual nature of the "light" (spirituality) in everyone, and their "love in action", the pedant in me won't let me get away with calling myself a Christian, just because it would be so simple if I did.

To give Christianity any meaning as a label, I think there are some core things you have to believe. Maybe you can get away without some of the theological "must haves" of the major christian churches - Trinity, Atonement, or even Resurrection, taking them as metaphors. Many would have already disqualified me if I don't find those things to "feel true" to me. But, surely the key thing to Christianity has to be Christ himself. He has to be part of it, and he has to be an expression of God in human form. And that's the final sticking point for me.

As I said at the outset, it starts from any spiritual experiences we may have had. Many experience Christ in various ways, often as a real presence, maybe only once, but enough to convince them that he is their saviour and redeemer.
The spiritual experiences I have so far had are much more general; a sense of God, not as a person, but as an infinite, unconditionally loving entity. A vast sense of peace and that, ultimately, everything will be worked out for the best.
A monumental piece of wishful thinking? Possibly; but we have to go on what we feel to be true, and this isn't something of which I managed to convince myself, it's something that came to me and has stayed with me ever since.

So, if Christ is revealed to me, there will be no argument from me, just as I don't argue with Christians who have had such experiences, which are equally as valid as my own. But there has to be some clarity about this labelling business, if only in deference to all the men and women who have gone to their deaths professing Christ as the true lord ETC. To call myself a Christian in such company would be a massive insult to their memory in my opinion.

Let me know what you think.

Discovering and stating the obvious.

2009-04-24T06:58:00.000-07:00

I've been preoccupied of late with the uselessness and negative results of polarised discussions.

This morning, I heard a radio feature here in the UK dealing with the US "Human Terrane" program in Iraq and Afghanistan. This recruits social scientists, anthropologists particularly, to advise the military in how best to deal with a civil population with very different cultural perspectives from the coalition forces.

This has generated a good deal of heat, not least within the academic community.

One very simple fact emerged for me. This program is attacked and defended equally genuinely.

I happen to think that it's impossible for governments to exclude their self-interest from any enterprise. If they have the power to impose their will, or seek to impose it, this conduct will be labelled "imperialist", probably with some justification.

Whether we agree with this or not, it does us no good to ignore the fact that many people involved in this are doing so because they "Want to make a bad situation better".

Unless we're prepared to take on a whole range of motivations when embarking on a discussion of issues like foreign involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan, we will be seeking only to advance a narrow prejudiced view of how the world turns.

If people wish to indulge in this as a passtime, either to sharpen up their debating skills, or to get some personal psycho-therapy, then that's fine, as long as they don't think they're going to contribute anything to their own or anyone else's understanding.

I won't be responding to comments until Tuesday week, since I'm going to be away enjoying myself, but please comment if you feel the need, and I'll respond later.

Reg

The End of Barbarism

2009-04-12T18:38:00.000-07:00

I think this article at Progression of Faith is at least one good answer to how Christianity can once again address society in a thoughtful and meaningful way and simultaneously divest itself of the one thing in Christian theology that does not resonate with reasoned and intelligent folk everywhere. If it is true at all, isn't it best to re-work the Gospel toward a higher vision for society, beginning with the doctrine of "atonement," and prevent religion from bringing society down to its lowest common denominator: violence? What do you think?

Welcome new contributor

2009-04-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

The author of at least 3 interesting blogs, including the one which got my interest in spirituality seriously rekindled:
http://mysteryofiniquity.wordpress.com
is now a contributor to this blog.
I don't suppose for a moment she'll have much time to contribute, but since she was gracious enough to make me a contributor on MOI, the least I could do was reciprocate.

Welcome.

Reg

Opinion, Belief, and Truth

2009-04-12T06:30:00.000-07:00

In this article, Roger Scruton investigates "irony and forgiveness" in the context of how the West can confront the terrorist mind set, be it Islamist fundamentalist or otherwise.

I'll almost certainly be coming back to this article in the future, because it was positive, while provoking me to question some of my assumptions, which is why I bother to read this kind of stuff at all.

In the tangential spirit of this blog however, it also provoked in me a few other thoughts. For example, how do we view our own opinions and those of others?

Scruton imbues irony with the attribute of allowing us to perceive ourselves as "other", so that the possessor of that sense can appreciate how he/she appears to others, rather than simply viewing others from his/her own viewpoint.

We all notice very easily that other people's opinions are a result as much of their experience as their accumulated knowledge.

In theory, we know that this must also be true for us, but somehow, we, or certainly I, may find it difficult to view our own opinions as equally subjective when it comes to discussion with others.

I have tended to regard my opinions as central to who I am, when really they are just a projection of the temporary me - how I an today. These are the external trappings of me, as much as are the coping strategies I have adopted in the past to cope with adverse circumstances.

I think Scruton's perception of irony is valuable, in that it shows me that I need to become more detached from these external trappings - opinions which should be ephemeral in the face of new knowledge and experience, or coping strategies which may have passed beyond use if those adverse circumstances change.

Subjective as these things are, we cannot be sure that what we believe is true, we should not need it to be true for questionable emotional reasons, and the need to establish truth, righteousness ETC, can only militate against ire-free discussion, and a constructive exchange of information and varied life experience.

Reg

"Economic growth": Is it me?

2009-03-04T13:33:00.000-08:00

I was just listening to a radio program here in the UK "The moral maze", in which the relationship between national wealth and equality or inequality was discussed.

Naturally, in the course of this, the issue of economic growth as the engine of wealth, and its sustainability, came up.

So far so good. My problem is that people use this term "economic growth" with no apparent reference to what is being produced. It's just "more", never "more what?"

Our current pattern of growth in the affluent industrial societies seems to me to be built on filling demand for something useful, or at least desirable, bringing out ever better versions of it, persuading people they'd be so much happier if they had more than one, and then expanding the pool of potential consumers by lending money to those who wouldn't normally be able to afford this object (good) or service.

For some years now, I've been bleating about how we should surely be able to put all this productive capacity to better and more humane use by manufacturing and growing stuff the rest of the under-provided under-fed world could use, rather than just a small and favoured portion of it, while still providing employment in the industrialised countries.

This could be roundly dismissed as idealistic hogwash in the face of an economic model that did at least work, and was based on tried and tested financial principles.

But, in the light of the catastrohic failure of this much-vaunted financial regime, if my hogwash doesn't work, there seems little doubt in my mind that traditional free market capitalism has also failed. The idea that exponential growth could somehow magically continue to expand was built on an ever growing mountain of debt, and money that didn't really exist. We've even largely given up making things here in the UK, in favour of providing all kinds of mysterious financial services that generate money, apparently out of thin air.
Forgive my limited understanding of all this, but the point is that, if the idealists have a problem, maybe the self-proclaimed realists do as well.

So does this provide us with a rare opportunity to take stock? Should we not be thinking about, not just how to produce more, but thinking about what we actually produce, and what use it actually is beyond just making stuff for the sake of creating a job for someone, profit for a corporation, and using up resources to end up in a land fill somewhere?

Is it really beyond the wit of humanity to restructure our manufacturing base to more useful and humane ends? What if the days of growth for growth's sake are numbered. Addressing the whole world instead of part of it may not make so much money for any of us. Maybe we'll all have to reappraise our attachment to affluence. But perhaps it would at least provide sustainable employment to some purpose, and people of good conscience might feel more connected to creation, and less alienated by vast accretions of pointless stuff.

Reg

Love and the Divine (2)

2009-02-21T11:20:00.000-08:00

I was talking about a sense of "unconditional love" yesterday. In thinking about how I or others might experience this, I must confront the nature of the religious experience, and other similar experience in my life.

I have always set great store by the rational as the only chance we have of any quantifiable assessment of anything. Accordingly, like my father, I have been attracted to belief systems like Spiritualism, precisely because they offered something observable, where others simply offered theoretical constructs which, if you had no "Road To Damascus" episode of your own by way of coroboration, would either ring true or not.
Until the recent resurgence of my own interest in this area, I had put my general God experiences on the back burner, and I would talk of having no religious faith, while rather envying the certainties of those who do, not because they were necessarily true, but because of how good it must feel to be certain about something.
However, thinking about it, it's clear that I do have some certainties of my own, although they are a very long way from the user's manual which some brandish in the face of those who don't share their certainties. My point being?
My point being that these "certainties" of mine are not coming to me via my old friend rationality; they are coming to me via the mysterious input of spirit/emotion, depending on your viewpoint. I now have to face the fact that I am probably more certain of these convictions than I am of my rational conclusions and opinions. These latter are, and I think should be, fairly plastic, depending as they do on my own ability to substantiate them. To me, an opinion is only as good as my ability to justify it. In the rational realm, if I don't know why I believe something to be true, then there's nothing to discuss. So, personally, my opinions are, or should be, subject to change based on the daily accretion of experience and information.
But that Divine stuff is a whole other thing. I know it's true for me simply because it is, I feel it to be so. Many have gone to their death for the sake of a conviction which they could never prove by logical argument. So I have to face the fact that my faith, vague generalised thing that it is, is a new kind of certainty for me. In fact, it's the only kind of certainty for me because the rational world is subject to continuous revision. Tomorrow, some physicist might prove that everything we have believed about mass and energy is plain wrong, or at best a massive over-simplification. But that would do nothing to change my recollection of the real presence of limitless love which hit me in the chest while walking in the Malvern Hills, or during a school church service.

Coming back, eventually, to unconditional love, I find myself viewing it differently when thinking about it via what passes for my rationality, as opposed to feeling it.

In rational mode, unconditional love may make me start worrying about my unworthiness of it; or I might start thinking of the dangers of people believing they are loved as of right, making any conduct acceptable.
But unconditional love as I experience it is a thing of pure joy, which comes with no such worries attached. It simply exists, both as the Divine, and as an echo of that divinity for those of us who are lucky enough to find flashes of it in our lives through our human interactions, both as giver and receiver.

If that's a dichotomy, I just have to live with it, because the world is a place in which, improbable as it sounds, love exists, I am loved, and I am capable of expressing love, however imperfectly. On the occasions when I can do that, I feel most in tune with those numinous episodes; most aware that, whatever the ultimate truth is, it couldn't be better. In the face of that, the rational will simply have to learn to sit at the back and keep quiet occasionally.

Reg

Love and the Divine

2009-02-20T10:26:00.000-08:00

When we compare just about any of our experiences with someone else's, we are confronted by similarity and difference. So what do we feel about the Divine in our lives? Does it have any meaning for you at all? If so, is it personal, or just some kind of spiritual force? If it's personal, does it have a sense of gender as in God or Goddess? And a final question: to what do you attribute any answers you might have to the previous questions - a particular religious experience, a general conviction that this is simply how it is, or just your faith in what you have been taught by people you trust, which seems to have worked out in your life?

My personal view and some explanation of it goes like this.
The only religious experiences I have had are vague in character, but no less convincing for that. I have been given glimpses of something much too vast in scope for me to think of it as a person. However, the whole emanation of it is devastatingly unconditional love, and that's it. No exhortations as to what I should believe or what I should be; just the real presence of unconditional love at the heart of everything, including me. Vague, as I said, because that's where it stops.

It seems to me that our experience of the Divine, if we have one, is tailored to our idividual needs or temperament. Tailored by us or by the divine as an external entity?

Some people view this as a monumental exercise in wishful thinking. We need a deity for various reasons, so we individually create one (him/her/it). Put rather more charitably, the divine is a projection of something within us - at best, our highest aspirations; at worst an inner voice that gives us sanction from on high to indulge our particular psychosis.

I feel a lot more to say coming on: Does the Deity have agency in the universe, or does free will preclude it, and/or is the deity we believe in only allowed to do good things?

If you sense my confusion, you're dead right. But, in back of all this, I know my confusion's OK because of the in some ways huge, but in some ways extremely unspecific, thing I do believe. This may be a mini series, or may be addressed via comments.

Peace

Reg

Perspective, prejudice, and constructive conversation

2009-02-08T04:50:00.000-08:00

Pop Matters recently ran a review of a documentary called "The American Ruling Class".
This started me thinking about where we get such perceptions from, and how best to learn from our differences, rather than being divided by them.

Within a society, whether we choose to use the word "class" or not, we will have perceptions of others based on their power and status compared to our own. Such judgments inevitably colour our relationships, at least in their initial stages, particularly if we're unaware of assumptions we're making, based on upbringing, peer pressure ETC.
I would suggest that the same process goes on between one society and another. This leads us to have attitudes towards, for instance, "The French", "The British", or "The Americans". Many stereotypes contain a useful grain of truth of course, and we can't help generalising based on what is, for most of us, extremely limited experience. But if we rate being constructive more highly than mud slinging, however enjoyable mud slinging certainly can be, there are a few things that occur to me.

On what are we basing these nationalist attitudes?
A lifetime of dedicated research, or the general feeling that:
"I sense you don't like me, so fuck you!"?
A government may have done something of which we profoundly disapprove:
E.G Invading Suez like the British did, invading Panama like the americans did, or invading Czecho-slovakia like the russians did - all highly dubious undertakings in my opinion. Or maybe we just don't like the food.

An individual act, or attribute, real or imaginary, is no basis for a serious "attitude" to another nation. The Germans are not Word War II: They are a bunch of people with more in common with everyone else than not, just trying to get by.

We are usually brought up to take pride in our country of origin. If we're going to be able to talk sensibly to people from other countries, then both sides of the conversation need to understand that national pride is at stake, and might run a deal deeper for some than others. What is the nature of our patriotism? Affection, defensiveness, a sense of superiority? Certainly, in every country I've visited there are things to be admired, but nowhere have I found a monopoly on righteousness, including, of course, my own country of origin. I think we need to be extremely careful in getting our sense of self-worth mixed up with our national pride. If we do that, anyone who chooses, however ill-foundedly, to find fault with our country, is finding fault with us personally, which probably was not their intention.

Something that appeals to me as an idea is to try to understand how it might feel to be a citizen of somewhere else, as a way of enhancing the discourse, rather than getting it bogged down at the first hurdle.
For example, as a Brit, I live on a very small island which once had a disproportionate amount of military and economic power, and has now lost most of it. When talking to a US citizen, I'm talking to someone who lives in a vast continental land mass, which has long embodied the highest political ideals to which humanity can aspire, has often failed by virtue of its sheer human frailty, and now faces the eclipse of its own power, so long unquestioned and unquestionable, by other nations.

Now subjectivist cann legitimately claim that it's hard enough to know how we feel ourselves, without getting into how it feels to be someone else.
However, national boundaries are becoming less and less significant in terms of our ability to communicate with one another. Such boundaries are and always were purely accidents of history and war, and have been maintained for economic and military reasons by governments whom it suits to convince their populations that the nation state is some kind of mystical entity.

I'm preaching against nationalism only insofar as I believe it increasingly does more harm than good, militates against equity in the world, and divides us as individuals. We as individuals are far more important than the nations from which we spring.

Reg

Intro and welcome

2009-02-01T13:59:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Tangentville. This is my space for floating my ideas in hope of constructive feedback.

The tangential nature of this blog is something of a double meaning, since I have something of a grass hopper brain, and I'm totally blind, so the universe in which I live is inevitably a fairly tactile place.

Feel free to join in, and take advantage of the unique opportunity with which the Net provides us for expanding our horizons.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Reg

After Davos: Consumerism and affluence

2009-02-01T07:37:00.000-08:00

In the light of the prognostications of the great and the good in Davos, I wonder if this is just a holding operation, or can we really expect governments, with their horizons ever circumscribed by the date of the next election, to contemplate change?

My feeling that change, and radical change, is necessary, is based on an analysis which is no doubt extremely suspect, based as it is on following international news, and only one year of college economics a very long time ago.

As a general comment on the nature of Tangentville, I should say here that I put my thoughts out there largely to expose them to scrutiny by those with other ideas, and particularly those better informed than I. Please never confuse the way in which I express my opinions in an attempt to be clear, with any pretensions to their authority.

Since the mysterious convergence of circumstances which produced the Industrial Revolution here in the UK around the middle of the 1700s, the means by which international trade is financed have become ever more complex over time. Not even nations with a vast land mass, natural resources, and/or population, such as the USA, Canada, Russia, China or Australia, can be entirely self-sufficient. There will always be something they need to import, and this will have to be paid for. At the same time, the whole thing is predicated on growth, which means producing more than your home market can consume. Thus, you have to create export markets for your manufactured goods or raw materials.

As one nation after another has hit the trail to industrialisation, we have all hitched our wagons to growth as the most obvious source of motive power. Naturally, we have concentrated our output on those who can afford to pay for it. Once the basics have been purchased, you need to start persuading people they need things they didn't know they needed. Ploys such as planned obsolescence and fashion can also be employed to create space for the ever growing expansion of manufactured output.

Even if the target market is drawn from the relatively affluent of the world, there will surely come a time when the third TV required to keep the TV industry going cannot be afforded. That's OK; you don't need to have money, because some kind institution will lend it to you at a rate of interest determined by the market, skewed by intereventions from industry or government.
The system, if so it may be described, would continue to work as long as the amount of stuff people needed was limitless, and the amount of money available to finance consumer debt was equally limitless.

Naturally, neither of these propositions can be true.
The fact that we have all continued to act as if they were true strikes me as extraordinary. Could we all have been guilty of such a monumental feat of wishful thinking? I suspect that those with much better financial brains than mine knew very well that those wagons would hit the buffers eventually. I think they just hoped their terminal bonus would be in the bank before that happened.

So now what? Are we simply hoping for a new and better conjurer to come along and find new ways of helping the affluent to acquire ever more stuff? I think not. My feeling is that this particular party is almost over, and I've heard that said by financial experts who are certainly not hysterical apocalyptics. In its final throws, the whole edifice has been sustained on money which either does not exist, or does not belong to the people spending it.

As I already suggested, industrialisation made globalisation inevitable. Producers of goods and services, raw materials, and consumers are all totally inter-dependent. China and India, the new power houses of this century, could not exist without the markets of the old industrialised world to sell to, and we need them as markets for our technology and expertise. In that sense, any ideas of retrenchment and protectionism are doomed to failure, because they would simply prompt retaliation, and everyone would lose in the end.

So far, globalisation has meant selective selling to those with money or access to it in the illusory form of credit.

Fondly idealistic or not, moving the economic base of the world to include people who really need things seems to me to be the only truly global way forward. Rather than sustaining the unsustainable, we need a way of diverting the world's massive productive power into doing something useful, so that more people can get a decent crack of the whip. This means reallocating resources, which inevitably means less superfluity for those of us who have grown accustomed to it. That's the reason for my pessimism about politicians' preparedness to grasp this particular nettle. Their problem is that I think this is the only real nettle worth grasping when it comes to providing the whole world rather than a portion of it with some kind of future, which allows access to health and opportunity for its citizens, and allows people of good conscience to sleep at night.

Reg