a new covenant with nature…

Tuesday, March 12th, 2013
God gives the spark of life to Adam

Adam and God ©Michaelangelo

It is no surprise that human rights as a formal system, as legislation, should have arisen from the two cataclysms of ‘civil war’ that the Europeans brought upon themselves, and into which they drew so much of the rest of the world. As a way of trying to avoid descent into the horrors of the Rape of Nanking, of the Eastern Front, and of the Holocaust, it is essential, that at the heart of our politics, we should enshrine a reverence for human beings.

No doubt one reason why some regimes resist Western attempts to make them adopt human rights legislation is because they wish to continue abusing, with impunity, the people they have power over. China, for example, has long resisted pressure from the West to ‘improve their human rights record’. Governments in Africa, to whom the West offers loans with human rights conditions attached, are turning for help to China, who is only too happy to provide this aid without such pre-conditions. Of course human rights are not the only strings attached when you deal with the West, there are also economic conditions – such as the opening up of a country to the ‘free market’ – as well as all manner of other political demands. Not that any of this is new: the West now offers what once it imposed, when it had the power to do so. Colonial ‘development’ was explained to the ‘natives’ as being in their best interest. Importantly, those economic and political interventions of the West went hand in glove with a proselytising morality: Christianity and Christian values.

Christianity was at the heart of the European imperial project. It was there with shackles and burning when the Spanish ravaged the Americas; it was there with the missionaries that penetrated various ‘dark continents’. It seems to me that this was not a different project, but an earlier form of the modern one: for it is accepted that ‘human rights’ are a refined and ‘de-god-ed’ evolution of Christian values. As such, it is possible to see Chinese resistance today to American diplomats trying to attach human rights conditions to a trade agreement, as a continuation of the earlier attempts to force China to open herself up to missionaries, as she was forced, by gunboats, to open herself up to trade.

Here we see the problem I believe is inherent in Western human rights: their genesis in Christianity. If human rights occupies the same space in Western hearts that was once occupied by Christianity, is it surprising that people of different faiths, of cultures that did not evolve with Christianity, should resist this imposition? That we in the West do not recognize this link allows us to be as blind in our conviction of the superior morality of our position, as we were when we destroyed and enslaved the Aztecs, while all the time convinced that we were doing them a favour – after all, were we not saving their souls? Thus, the functional goal of attempting to stop holocausts, can be lost in this natural human resistance to our zealotry.

But even this is not my primary concern. Rather it is that I believe that there is a profound error at the very heart of Christianity, one that is so deeply embedded at the very beginning of the Bible that its effects permeate Judaism and Christianity: namely that man is made in God’s image and that His creation was put here for our use. This, it seems to me, is the fatal flip side of human rights: the primacy of humanity and our divinely ordained dominion over all other living things and the planet Earth itself – the Universe even. This flip side is evident in everything the West does – it contaminates our culture on every level – and as our culture has become the global culture, this error seems destined to become the birthright of humanity. The hubris that we see demonstrated all around us, is built into Western culture at its most inner, Christian core. It informed, and informs, the path of history from industrial revolutions, to the colonisation of North America, and the imperialisms of the West. It profoundly determines the way we live now. The whole economic drive that we are using to destroy the planet and to exterminate the wondrous variety of ecosystems and living beings on it, is informed by that central understanding that we are made in the image of god, and that that god has made the world for us to use as we wish. It does not matter that so many of us in the West have lost our faith, for we still hold that covenant between us and creation to be true.

So I say that we need a new covenant with Nature, one that is guided by what science is teaching us about the true nature of the world and our place in it. Once we see that we have no such human right to exert dominion as we do, then perhaps we can stop this wilful destruction, and so save the world and ourselves, from ourselves…

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competition versus brotherhood…

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013
Napoleon crowned with a laurel wreath © Ingres

Napoleon crowned with a laurel wreath © Ingres

A mania for competition so possesses our societies that it is hard to imagine any other way of being, and yet I think it is critical that we free ourselves from its grip.

In the West, the Christian churches, from long habit, had an explanation for everything. Alas, with the rise of science, these churches chose to cling to Old Testament ‘certainties’, with the result that, when the cosmology of ‘Creation’ was overturned, the New Testament began to sink with it.

In Western civilisation, only the peace-making teachings of Jesus Christ were strong enough to stand up against that other hoary tradition: constant conflict. The wolf-eat-dog mentality of the Roman Republic, for example, devoured the western half of the ‘ancient world’, and was only, by the Empire’s adoption of Christianity, moderately tamed. The sporting competitions at Olympia, that were really the internecine warfare between the Greek city states in a ‘gentler’ form, crowned their winners with wreaths; their Roman conquerors wore laurel wreaths as a sign of military victory. This vertical dimension in human affairs, that raises the winner above the loser, is also the basis of hierarchies of power; the ruler sitting enthroned in triumph above the ruled. It was Christ (and the other great prophets) who preached a levelling horizontal dimension: the brotherhood each man should feel for another.

Our tendency towards hierarchy is balanced by another for fairness and equality: though we are individuals, we are also social animals. It was Darwin who administered the deepest wound to Christianity. His ‘survival of the fittest’ dethroned Man from the centre of Creation; as Copernicus had dislodged the Earth from the centre of the Universe. The brotherhood of Man was reduced to individuals struggling against each other – a process of atomisation that culminated in Dawkins ‘selfish gene’. With fateful timing, On the Origin of Species arrived even as the Industrial Revolution was tearing society apart. Evolution ‘proved’ that we were all in desperate competition with each other: man against man – and, by analogy, tribe against tribe, nation against nation. This process of ‘individualisation’ was termed ‘progress’, itself a survival of Christianity’s linear time: creation, salvation, judgement, (as is another survival: the pernicious belief that God gave us the world for our use). Other societies, the Asian East for example, whose achievements of peace and beliefs in cyclical time were dismissed as ‘stagnation’, were shattered by our Western ‘progress’. Our civilisation conquered using the results of our relentless competition: weapons and industrialisation. All these factors coalesced with ever greater fury into the maelstrom of wars that we sucked the rest of the world into. Hitler’s creed, however crooked, was rooted in what had gone before.

So here we are today in a world that is still dominated by our Western ‘progress’. Socialism, the inheritor of Christ’s horizontal, levelling doctrine, is everywhere in retreat. Capitalism, in spite of all its failures, rules triumphant. And what is this ‘capitalism’ if not competition – endless, unrelenting competition? And what is competition but warfare writ small. Even in the modest arena of a football ground is it hard to see the game as being a ‘little war’?

Competition, whatever mask it wears, is the deadly foe of universal brotherhood. It is the vertical dimension in human affairs that sorts people into winners and losers. If we are determined to define our existence along this axis, then we should hardly be surprised that the gap between rich and poor is everywhere widening. We should hardly be surprised that we are all in a race against each other, a race that, when it doesn’t actually spill blood, rips our planet to pieces to feed its insatiable appetite for ‘progress’. We all know that we are on a trajectory to disaster, but even now our politicians are urging us to ‘grow’ our economies at ever greater speed.

For now at least religion’s credibility is spent. When it fights science with explanations of the world a thousand years old, it is going to lose. When it turns to violence, it loses. All the old forms of universal brotherhood have lost their power. We can hope that, through the internet, new forms are rising. But in the meantime, let us at least bear down on ‘competition’ – for in all its guises it is destructive to the world and to ourselves…

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the experimental past…

Sunday, January 27th, 2013
gate carved from a single piece of stone, Tiwanaku ©www.crystalinks.com

gate carved from a single piece of stone, Tiwanaku ©www.crystalinks.com

The study of the history of non-Western societies – especially those that have ‘failed’ – may be one of the most valuable resources that we have to help guide us through the coming ‘time of difficulty’ that we seem to be heading for.

Watching a good BBC documentary about Tiwanaku, I was struck by how pertinent to our present climate change woes was the story of these people, not only surviving, but flourishing in an environment that most of us would consider adverse to human existence. Not only do they provide us possibly with lessons in sustainable living – with their numerous adaptive feats of agriculture, technology and infrastructure design, but, perhaps even more importantly, they are a ‘social experiment’ carried out across diverse cultural groups, and over a span of centuries, of varying landscapes and climactic zones. It can hardly be imagined that any projected environmental ‘study’ that we are capable of – however powerful the computers we might use to produce a simulation – could possibly come close to providing us with the real world information that just this one example can.

The pre-conquest cultures of South America (specifically the Andean regions, with extensions east into the Amazon basin, and west into the narrow strip of land that runs between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean) may seem remote and only of interest to eccentric antiquarians, but the topography of that continent has provided, throughout history, a multitude of incredibly diverse landscapes that challenged the survival of the societies who lived in them. The level of adaptation that these societies made (or were forced to make) to their environments have revealed the remarkable truth that, without fossil fuels, large domestic animals, the wheel, or any use of metals (and alloys) harder than copper, they managed, in many places, to sustain larger populations than we are capable of today, and did so with enough comfort to be able to produce monumental architecture. The very complexity of the topography of South America has created a multiplicity of ‘niches’, often abutting against each other, in which such societies could develop. Empires in this region could thus, even when not spanning vast distances, take in everything from a torrid seacoast niche, to the high Altiplano and everything in between. Of particular interest is that many of these ‘experiments’ ultimately failed when the climate changed.

There are countless other examples from elsewhere. The Maya for one, whose population in the relatively constrained Yucatan, in that relatively constrained space, may have reached the kind of numbers that the early Roman Empire reached in its encircling of the Mediterranean. The reasons given for the ultimate collapse of Mayan civilization are varied, but a favoured explanation is that this occurred as a result of environmental degradation produced by over population. Another example, perhaps the example, is that of Easter Island – a social experiment carried out on an island that, through its extreme isolation, was as closed a system as a petri dish.

Other civilizations experimented with forms of government and of economic organisation. The Achaemenid Persian Empire, for example (that I have been studying as the setting for a novel). The study of these ‘dead’ cultures may seem esoteric (for all their beauty and fascination): at times I have thought such to be a sort of ‘ancestor worship’ – but consider if these studies may not perhaps turn out to be critical to us as our own civilisation edges towards its own possible collapse from climate change, environmental degradation, and competing and failing models of governance?

As the West loses its pre-eminence in human affairs, we seem to be less and less blind to these other histories. Until recently we have been obsessed with ourselves, with tracing the rise of our greatness, so that so many of our historians have lavished their attention on investigating the ‘line of progress’ that has brought us – apparently – from the birth of civilisation in Mesopotamia, through ancient Greece and Israel (with an input from ancient Egypt), through Rome, to Europe and then the period of Western imperialism that has ‘blossomed’ into our current system of global capitalism. On one level, this could be seen as a sort of ‘psychotherapy’ of Western civilization, though on another could it not be seen as a neo-Darwinist project that has been developing a narrative for why our dominance was not only justified, but inevitable? Either way, it seems to me that as we (humanity) realize that our culture seems to be leading us to disaster, we no longer have the luxury of such self-obsession.

So, rather than considering this exploration of non-Western history as some kind of pursuit for ivory tower scholars, I would like to suggest that is in fact a bringing together of all the critical knowledge and wisdom that can be gleaned from the social experiments that humanity has been carrying out on this planet over thousands of years. These experiments, participated in by people like ourselves, pushed frontiers and called on the ingenuity that we are capable of and came up with solutions that it would be wise of us to take heed of. Even more, the failures of these experiments provide us with lessons that were bought with the lives and diminishing opportunites of people for whom their societies were not experiments, but the lives they lived as best they could…

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the human virtuality…

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

structure of the human eye and retina © http://www.sas.upenn.edu

structure of retinal cone and rod © http://www.sas.upenn.edu

The greatest danger facing the human race seems to me to be how our collective ‘idea’ of what the world is is progressively moving away from what the world actually is.

Without wanting to open up the whole can of worms that is the ‘mind-body problem‘, I think it is not too contentious to state: that the impression we have within each of us of the ‘world’ is only an approximation of that world. After all, beings perceive the world through their senses and it is from these perceptions that a model of the world is constructed within that being, a model that it uses to ‘understand’ the world in an attempt to survive. That model – even at its most sophisticated – is not ‘identical’ with the world, and is merely an approximation.

Further, the sensory inputs from which that model is constructed are themselves approximations of what is being perceived. Let us use an ‘eye’ as an example. An eye allows light to enter it. This light will be detected within the eye and send a signal to whatever sort of ‘brain’ it is attached to. Detection is by means of a finite number of discrete detectors, and so the brain will be presented with a ‘grid’ of frequency values. This grid is naturally ‘flat’ – so what is being looked at is projected onto it like a film on to a screen. Any depth present in what is being looked at thus has to be deduced. Having more than one eye will provide the brain visual information from different angles. Movement will produce a succession of images that can provide even more information. But none of this is going to actually provide a direct perception of what is being seen. Some kind of ‘software’ is required to deduce volume, to isolate objects in the field of view. We know that this system can be fooled – consider optical illusions, or the experiment of the ‘invisible gorilla’.

All in all, it seems to me obvious that what each being ‘sees’ is something that stands at the very apex of a pyramid of guesses and half truths, and if two people observing the same scene are seeing different things (because of the different angles they are seeing it from, and their different life experiences that affect ‘what they see’, etc), how much more is the difference between what a human sees as compared to a pigeon, say, who has 5 colour cones in its retinas to our 3 – with each of those 5 being considerably more discerning of frequencies than are our own. And who knows what kind of ‘software’ is operating in the pigeon’s brain. I feel it is safe to say that, whatever it is that it is seeing, this will be considerably different from what a human observing the same scene is seeing. If we then continue our process of aggregation to take in the other senses that a being might possess, then it becomes blindingly obvious that there are as many perceptual views of the world as there are beings – with a wildly varying variety among them.

So our direct perception of the world is unique, but there is more to our awareness of underlying reality; for do we not produce further levels of aggregation collectively? Surely we influence each other’s perceptions, as does our culture, our upbringing, what we read, what we watch on TV etc. If an average person from the West wanders about in the Amazon rainforest, she will see ‘trees’ and creepy crawlies, whereas a native to the area will, presumably, see this kind of tree and that kind of insect, and will, further, have cultural associations with that tree and that insect – stories, understanding of possible uses. (Before I had a garden, I would walk into one and notice that it was colourful, and see the flowers and the foliage forming a ‘pretty picture’ – now I see the individual plants, and notice details I never noticed before, and I’m aware of what is on an ‘upswing’, what on a ‘downswing’. Friends who don’t have gardens, or little interest in them, look at my garden and they simply don’t ‘see’ it – they are ‘blind to it’ in the way I used to be. A little bit of knowledge and some experience have entirely changed what it is I ‘see’.)

So, let me suggest that people getting lost in ‘virtual worlds’ (our current anxiety is those virtual worlds produced by computers and by our technology) is nothing new. Human beings, like all other beings, have always lived in a ‘virtual world’, one that they have created within themselves as the best attempt they can make towards achieving a direct awareness of underlying reality. It is how close those virtualities are to the underlying reality that is always in play. When we began abandoning our old hunter-gathering lifestyle, we set in motion a new process. Life within a human settlement is substantially different from a life outwith it. In a human settlement, for example, geometry begins to dominate – the simple geometry of straight lines, corners and circles – a geometry that is a product of our brains’ desire to simplify the ungraspable fractal complexities of the world. As settlements began increasing in complexity, undulations in the ground were flattened out, slopes were turned into steps, water began running in channels, or off roofs and into gutters. Even in ancient times, it was becoming possible in some places to live one’s life entirely within this human-made space. This process has accelerated for thousands of years so that, gradually we have spent more and more time in environments that are externalizations of the software that evolved to make sense of our perceptions of the world. For many of us this feedback loop has grown tighter and tighter. Always having lived in a virtual reality of our own individual making, we have slowly replaced the inputs from those parts of the underlying reality that were not human-made, with those that are. And since all things human-made are an externalisation of our interior virtualities, we are now increasingly in danger of living within a locked system entirely of our own making: we live not in the world at all, but within a collective ‘human virtuality’.

So, all beings are peering at reality through their own version of a keyhole, however, we humans seem to be intent on blocking up these keyholes. Of course, the reason that beings developed senses at all was because everything that determined their chances of survival was outside them. That need has not changed, but we humans have become so intoxicated with our own power that, showing ultimate hubris, our senses focus increasingly on the human virtuality. But, critically, that collective hallucination is increasingly diverging from reality, and so we motor on into the future driving ever more blindly…

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digital texts: a return to aspects of an oral tradition…?

Monday, November 5th, 2012
storyteller...

storyteller © azmidiske

cuneiform tablet...

cuneiform tablet © designmylife.org

ebook

ebook © ghacks.net

Ebooks are the latest stage of a process that began with the invention of writing. The ability to write thoughts and stories down allowed their distribution across space and time: a storyteller no longer needed to be present for his message to be communicated. These advantages are obvious, but there is also a profound disadvantage: that a text is a fossil of the author’s message, and that, disconnected from its living source, it can no longer adapt.

The printing press made it possible to clone texts that were free from the errors of manual copying, and allowed vastly more examples of a text to exist, thus facilitating wider distribution. The digital text has made it easy to clone a text, and the internet has facilitated the speed and extent of their distribution. Living as we do in a period of transition from paper to digital texts, many of us have qualms about what we may be losing. There is the issue of aesthetics that I address in this post, and there is also an anxiety that comes from the loss of there being a definitive version of a given text.

A digital text compared to that text printed on paper is like a vessel of clay before and after it has been fired; an essential quality of a digital text (of any digital object) is that it remains for ever malleable. This malleability robs us of an important benefit that is conferred by a printing press: that it produces identical and ‘fixed’ versions of a text. It is this aspect of a printed text that has compelled the author to strive for a perfect version of his text; for once it is printed it will have whatever failings he has given it. Apart from the changes that he can make in a new edition – nothing can be added, nothing taken away. That a text cannot be modified once it has been printed has also drawn to the process an entire machinery of publishing: editing to make sure the structure of the text is sound; copyediting to remove any errors. The capital outlay invested in printing a text (at least until recently) further increased the need for a publisher. A natural partnership existed between an author and his publisher because they had a common interest: that the text be as complete as possible.

That a digital text remains malleable after publication, weakens the necessity for this partnership (as instant distribution of digital texts, and the lack of need of capital to print large numbers of texts that then require warehousing, weakens it further). Many authors will still wish that their texts be professionally edited and copyedited – however there is a new option: that this can now occur after the text is published. It is even possible that the readers of the text could be brought in to correct any errors. (I deal with the notion of direct reader correction of digital texts in this post.) On balance, I feel it is likely that an author would wish to retain control of his text. However, he could elect to use some kind of ‘crowd sourcing’ not only to have his text corrected, but perhaps even edited (I discuss my reservations about this latter notion in this post). The limited iterations of a printed text that new editions provide to an author, become limitless with a digital text. An author could choose to change and evolve his text in much the same way that software is now being constantly updated on our computers. Further, whereas some authors have had printed texts supplied with different covers for different markets (and types of readers), the author of a digital text could target any number of different markets with different versions of his text: abridged, simplified, with different endings etc. So, though we may lose the ‘definitive text’ we gain all kinds of other compensations.

There is, it seems to me, a profound consequence to all this. For all the advantages conferred by the invention of writing on the creations of an author, one thing was lost: the ability that the author had to keep his work ‘alive’. When all stories, all arguments, all knowledge had to be conveyed through speech, the only permanence of these lay in the memory of those who had heard them spoken. An oral storyteller could respond to his audience as he was telling them his stories. The next time he told those stories, he could improve them from his experience of how they were received at the previous telling. I am left wondering if, with the advent of digital texts, we have, in a way, come full circle. While still benefitting from most of the advantages conferred by several thousand years of development, every author can also have back something of what was lost from the oral past. Indeed, it may come to be seen that the period during which fixed texts held sway was merely a temporary aberration…

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