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…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
No Comments Yet

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…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
2 Comments »

a bite of the cherry…

Monday, November 26th, 2012
policeman in front of a picture of Mao...

China resurgent © Carlos Barria/Reuters

It seems that those of us who live in the West may need to get used to the fact that our economies are not going to return to constant growth. The belief that things are going to always continue to get better – at least in the sense of a constantly growing GDP – has always been a fantasy: constant growth of the kind we’ve experienced, that consists of consuming the Earth’s resources, presupposes that these are limitless. Since they are not, then it is hard to see how traditional economic growth could continue for ever.

Of course it’s difficult to give something up when you’ve had it there all your life. Nevertheless, I’m not going to cry over the difficulties that are overtaking us because things as they were depended quite a bit on selfishness. While our standards of (material) life have been constantly improving for decades, not everyone else on the planet was so fortunate. Not only were their lives not improving, but often that lack of improvement had something to do with our improving lives – I could make various arguments to support this stance, if such are needed. There are many direct links between us being up, and others being down. How much, for example, has our recent prosperity depended on people working in sweatshops for a pittance? Make as many arguments as you like about how we helped raise these poor people up from poverty – I will maintain that they have done this for themselves, and that we have been content to profit from these people being prepared (or forced) to live and work in conditions that we wouldn’t even contemplate for ourselves. What I don’t imagine can be argued is that we now have any justification in complaining that they’ve ‘taken all our jobs’; or that we have any right to feel aggrieved at what the consequences may be for us now that they are beginning to demand a standard of living closer to our own – whether this will come at the cost of dangerous carbon emissions, of a loss of power on our part, or of a permanent ending of a constant increase in our GDP.

So, I feel that we should accept this change in our prospects with good grace. We are at the end of a half-millennium during which we in the West have greatly enriched ourselves at the cost of just about everyone else on this planet. Western Europeans went to the Far East in search of things the people there had that we wanted some of. When we reached India and China, we found them fabulously sophisticated and wealthy. Through accidents of history too numerous for me to go into here, we had the whip hand on these civilizations more prosperous than we were. Now they are finally recovering, and rising back to somewhere nearer where they were – and had been for centuries – relative to us. Economic projections suggest that this will be achieved in a vastly wealthier world. Personally, I doubt this scenario – for all kinds of reasons; not least that, when it comes to natural resources, we have already picked all the low hanging fruit. What remains is unlikely to be enough to bring everyone up to the standard of living we currently enjoy in the West. More pressing would seem to be the threat of global warming that is likely to change the rules of the game entirely. Still, whatever comes, I for one am going to watch with some satisfaction as the rest of humanity achieves something like the life I have been privileged to live this far…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
No Comments Yet

the divided brain…

Saturday, March 5th, 2011
The Master and the Emissary...

The Master and the Emissary © markswan.net

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is not a self-help book, nor is it one of those books of cod-philosophy that promise amazing (though ultimately ill-founded) insights into the modern condition. It is instead a carefully argued thesis meticulously supported by references to research, as well as by appeals to personal experience.

Its core premise is that we possess a single consciousness, but two wills: one each in the right and left hemispheres of our brains. McGilchrist posits that these hemispheres are profoundly asymmetric – not only physically (they have measurably different widths and lengths, for example), but functionally.

The right hemisphere perceives the world as a whole, is deeply attuned to the particular, the individual, the immediate; and has no problem with ambiguity and paradox, with complexity and unknowability. The left hemisphere, by contrast, is obsessed with abstraction, with wheedling out underlying geometries, with generalities; what it perceives it dissects and analyses. It focuses on what it knows and seeks certainty and single, definitive answers. Critically, the left hemisphere’s field of operation is essentially what the right hemisphere passes to it. McGilchrist suggests that an optimally functioning human brain should gather impressions from the world with its right hemisphere, pass these to the left for analysis and then, crucially, integrate these analyses into its holistic picture.

The first half of the book builds up what appears to be an impressive body of evidence to support this view – evidence not only from neurological studies and practice, but also from art and philosophy. In the second half of the book McGilchrist then applies this theory to Western history in an attempt to explain many of its developments; a venture that he admits is extremely ambitious.

Roughly speaking, he claims that in the West we have, as a consequence of a move into abstraction that began with the ancient Greeks, coupled with our increasingly materialist perspectives, gradually moved into a way of being that favours the left hemisphere – that, finding itself in the man-made world resulting from its manipulations and over which it feels it has complete mastery, it is no longer prepared to relinquish control back to the right hemisphere. This “betrayal”, McGilchrist suggests, is increasingly dangerous for us – for the left hemisphere view is necessarily narrow: the greatest whole it can conceive of is that that it can assemble from the pieces into which it breaks everything down. Thus we cease to see living things, our planet, the universe, as anything more than a machine that is a sum of its parts: a vision of living things as misguided as Dr Frankenstein’s…

McGilchrist’s arguments seemed to me convincing enough, though necessarily I had to take most of the supporting evidence on trust – as in most such books, how can we hope to be able to check it out for ourselves…

However – and this is why I am writing this endorsement – I found that much in the book gels with my own experience. Like many (most? all?) people, I have two sides: one that is intuitive, connected to nature, free flowing; the other analytical, obsessed with orthogonality, analysis, precision and getting to the right answer. These war in me all the time, but never more so than in my work. In the Stone Dance, for example, I would often get lost in ‘research’, exploring every avenue, pursuing every problem until, frequently, I would squeeze every last drop of blood from the visions that had inspired me to write at all. (This ‘deadening’ is, according to McGilchrist, a sure sign that the left hemisphere is hard at work.) But then that other part of me would swoop down and snatch up these dead fragments and absorb them into a vision more vibrant than before.

Thus a constant problem with my creative process is that I feel I have spent altogether too much of my time slicing away at ‘corpses’ and perishingly little in exhilarating ‘flight’. In the struggle to maximize the latter and minimize the former, I have often veered towards attempting ‘flight’ on its own, without any of the preparatory surgery of research and analysis (Icarus not bothering to glue the feathers to his wings?), only to find that it all becomes so airy that it dissipates away to nothing. Imagine my excitement when this process is explained to me; its necessity, its naturalness; to become confident that what is required is to seek a balance between the two.

This book, then, seems to me to provide a description of something that I live with every day and, unless I am weird and crazy, then it seems to me likely this is a description of how your brain works too…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
No Comments Yet

50 in New York…

Sunday, February 13th, 2011
ricardo in Times Square...

me in Times Square...

snowy Manhattan from the Empire State Building...

downtown Manhattan from the Empire State Building...

Something I’ve rabbited on about before is how the world is homogenising – the more I travel, the more it seems to me that everywhere is becoming the same. If this is even true for Sri Lanka, then how much more so is it for travelling between the UK and New York?

But before I go into that (I think this is going to become quite a ramble, but hopefully you will forgive me, now that I am becoming so very aged *grin*), I would like to lay before you a rather brilliant observation made by the peerless historian Arnold Toynbee that seems to explain why globalization naturally leads to cultural homogenisation.

Toynbee points out that this has happened before: in the Neolithic a flint spear point in western Europe would be indistinguishable from one being made on the same day in China. This is because, at that time, whatever innovations in technique these spear points might incorporate, the rate of innovation in technology (and culture) was far slower than the rate at which news of it could be spread. Once this rate of innovation started speeding up to be faster than the rate of spread, then regional cultures started emerging – the innovations piling up locally faster than they could spread to other cultures. Thus China became very different from Europe. However, in the past hundred years or so the rate of spread has dramatically increased – even though the rate of innovation has also sped up. With the internet anything innovated anywhere can quickly become known to everyone everywhere. So, welcome to the New Neolithic! The Cyberlithic where our stone tools now consist of silicon chips *grin*)

New York is of course remarkable – though perhaps as much for its associations as for what it actually is. It has been for so long ‘the’ world city that we all of us think we know it. There are people everywhere who probably have seen more of New York (through Hollywood’s charmed eyes) than they have the capital of their own country.

I had never been there before, and so there was that strange shock of seeing in reality that which I had seen in so many other virtual ways. The relationship of one thing to another, the geography, the relative and absolute scales of things – these were all different from those I had arrived with in my head.

I did all the touristy things – it seems only polite on a first visit. It was particularly cold, more so even than in Scotland! so I’m not entirely sure I saw the city as it is typically. New York is impressive – how could it not be? Wonderfully cosmopolitan – though perhaps not more so than London with which I am familiar. It has the same range of treasure houses – the Metropolitan Museum, for example, and the glorious (and vainglorious) examples of architecture that wealth adorns cities with. For some reason I kept on thinking that this would be how Babylon might have appeared to an ancient visitor – but then Babylon is perhaps much on my mind. Perhaps what most distinguished it for me from a European city is some of its infrastructure: Paris would be embarrassed to have her bowels riddled by the New York subway. Though simply functional it lacks some of the civic care and elegance that would be lavished on it by a European capital. One surprise: I had expected natives to be rude – that’s the cliché – but they weren’t. In fact the New Yorkers I encountered were the friendliest people I have come across in any Western city…

It was my birthday that led me on this winter visit to New York. A 50th should probably be made a fuss of, but I couldn’t bear having anything organized at home. Too much pressure. Besides, I’m really rather shy about attention – not so attention for my work!! *grin* In one way 50 is just an arbitrary number – if we counted in base 12, then the significant birthdays would be 12, 24, 36, 48, 60… and I would still be in my early 40s *grin* Not that I am trying to deny that there is something significant in these time markers. Jung had an image of life as being like a single passage of the sun through the sky. We are born and then, for the first half of our lives, we ascend, growing ever brighter, seeing ever further. When we reach our midday that is as high as we go, as bright. Thereafter, we begin the slow fading to our sunset. No wonder then that so many of us have ‘mid-life’ crises. Clearly, psychically, something profound happens to us as we near the midday of our lives, and once we become aware of our inevitable decline. Jung maintained that the morning of our lives, though filled with struggle, is relatively straightforward. It is the afternoon that it is difficult to deal with. And the secret of a good life is how we handle that. I passed my midday a while back (however much our lifespans are lengthening) but I am still coming to terms with being in the afternoon of my life.

Showering before going to catch my flight home, I began thinking of the life I was returning to. It occurred to me how strange it was that I should be thinking nothing of the crossing of the Atlantic. This vast ocean that for so long kept the Old and New Worlds apart, the crossing of which had profound effects that we still are living through. Images crossed my mind of all the people to whom that crossing was one way – and a vast, frightening and dangerous undertaking. That I had mentally ‘skipped over it’ shows again just how virtual our world has become. In the West we so rarely exit the envelope of human reality that often the ‘actual’ world hardly seems to be there at all. And even as New York seemed to me not very different from London… soon it will not seem so different to Cairo, Nairobi, Shanghai… And yet, even if I rode the virtual teleport of my aeroplane back home (admittedly a rather tedious teleport lasting 6 hours), this did not mean that below me there was not thousands of kilometres of cold heaving ocean.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
10 Comments »

« Older Entries