Thought this picture of common toads mating on 24th March really captured that medaeval netherworld image they used to have.
Monday, 30 March 2009
Bufo Bufo
Thought this picture of common toads mating on 24th March really captured that medaeval netherworld image they used to have.
Sunday, 29 March 2009
Anatta (clarification)
So the argument goes that for each "thing" different people hold different ideas.
A common belief is that people hold the same ideas. And an equally common rebuttal is the evidence that police reports differ enormously. Not only do people mis-perceive or mis-remember (or both) events but they prioritise the narrative differently threading different parts of the parallel events together into a single story which can bear no similarity to other narratives of the same event!
So it is fairly clear that at least peoples stories and mental representation of events ar widely variant. But at least there are objective events upon which to hang these stories on...
Or are there?
We have the reliable opinion of Buddha that actually the stories are all there are.
Last night I was thinking back over my own half baked philosophies and saw that in the maelstrom of confusions certain truths had started to form... more evidently the question what difference is there between a story about something and the thing itself?
To put that more specifically if we form a theory of the brain, then don't we use the brain to form that theory. The thinking is done by the brain we think, so actually there is no "brain" only thoughts and thoughts of a brain.
This is the proto self reference realisiation.
Or, we can turn that around and say that there are no thoughts only brain chemistry and charge.
Or we can have a hibrid position where there is brain and thoughts but they either do, or don't over lap. i.e. Brain IS Thoughts (which is nonsense since brain is a lot more than thoughts) or there are some thoughts without the brain (which is also nonsense because stone's can't think).
Its a jolly mess anyway and it all stems from this belief that in addition to the story there are also "real" "entities" upon which to hang the clothing and learn the lines.
But of course we don't learn the lines - we write the lines and that is the difference. Why does there need to be something behind the thoughts, behind the things to make them "real". Aren't they just what they seem?
Maybe the idea is supported by the policeman doing a thorough enquiry and getting "to" the truth. That behind the mess of appearances there is a solid immutable truth upon which people have hung their stories.
But then we enter Plato territory. What is the relationship between the stories and the truth? Why do people see the Truth in so many ways if it is only Truth? What causes all the variance and confusion in a world that is True? When something corresponds with the "truth" and is true, and something else doesn't correspond with the truth and is "false" how do we know they correspond? And what is the substance of "correspondence"? Does that exist to? Or is a etheral ghostly ether that links the true idea to the true thing? Shurangama Sutra also goes into this a lot.
Yup its a nightmare of confusion all stemming from this idea of there being real things to support that notion that some ideas are true, and to stand against the idea that other ideas are false.
So is a policemans work ever done then? At what point does he realise he has the truth? Can he ever be sure that he has his man? Can he ever be sure that his "certainty" is not just another round of bad evidence and faulty witnessing?
This is why we once knew God. Niestzche take note that the Ubermench could never be his own father, could never be his own judge, could never tell his own story. He needed you, and you needed God.
God is the judge not Man. God may have become a solid "truth", a mythical polytheistic entity comprising the innumerable forms of the universe, simply awaiting discovery by Man like some languid woman asleep in her bed chamber. But this myth is the lowest of the myths, the delusion of a Man at the height of his folly, there is no woman awaiting his tender kiss, the search is in vain for it is not she that is sleeping but Him.
Yet as the Greeks well noted; the process that Man undertakes in his desperate searching for Her, His anguished trials to earn him the prize of unity with His unknown; this itself is Truth - the dialectic - with no end and no object to claim for bounty - the journey is the prize.
So they say in Religion that we walk path and have a destiny and heed the call. This is not the way "to" God but the way "of" God - a simple difference in tense in most languages. Jesus says I Am the Way for there is no Jesus to seek or find or possess or stand near but simply the Dao of Jesus, The Way of Jesus the Christian Way. And, here thank God, my own struggles bring me through the darkest night of delusion - truely the Valley of Death - where around me spoke people who claimed that theirs was the True Way To God - and some turned dark when it was suggested that there are other way to God, and still others have killed in the name of Their Way To God obliterating the infidels who were godless in their eyes, turning the flesh to dust (for some reason). But a great laugh then rose from god who peeled away the mask to show his hideous mocking grin : the Way To God is also called the Devil. The Maya. The greatest illusion, mother of all conflict and evil and suffering, the downfall of all men - for the True God lay by the roadside and the Destination was simply a story told amongst travellers to bring encouragement for the weary.
A common belief is that people hold the same ideas. And an equally common rebuttal is the evidence that police reports differ enormously. Not only do people mis-perceive or mis-remember (or both) events but they prioritise the narrative differently threading different parts of the parallel events together into a single story which can bear no similarity to other narratives of the same event!
So it is fairly clear that at least peoples stories and mental representation of events ar widely variant. But at least there are objective events upon which to hang these stories on...
Or are there?
We have the reliable opinion of Buddha that actually the stories are all there are.
Last night I was thinking back over my own half baked philosophies and saw that in the maelstrom of confusions certain truths had started to form... more evidently the question what difference is there between a story about something and the thing itself?
To put that more specifically if we form a theory of the brain, then don't we use the brain to form that theory. The thinking is done by the brain we think, so actually there is no "brain" only thoughts and thoughts of a brain.
This is the proto self reference realisiation.
Or, we can turn that around and say that there are no thoughts only brain chemistry and charge.
Or we can have a hibrid position where there is brain and thoughts but they either do, or don't over lap. i.e. Brain IS Thoughts (which is nonsense since brain is a lot more than thoughts) or there are some thoughts without the brain (which is also nonsense because stone's can't think).
Its a jolly mess anyway and it all stems from this belief that in addition to the story there are also "real" "entities" upon which to hang the clothing and learn the lines.
But of course we don't learn the lines - we write the lines and that is the difference. Why does there need to be something behind the thoughts, behind the things to make them "real". Aren't they just what they seem?
Maybe the idea is supported by the policeman doing a thorough enquiry and getting "to" the truth. That behind the mess of appearances there is a solid immutable truth upon which people have hung their stories.
But then we enter Plato territory. What is the relationship between the stories and the truth? Why do people see the Truth in so many ways if it is only Truth? What causes all the variance and confusion in a world that is True? When something corresponds with the "truth" and is true, and something else doesn't correspond with the truth and is "false" how do we know they correspond? And what is the substance of "correspondence"? Does that exist to? Or is a etheral ghostly ether that links the true idea to the true thing? Shurangama Sutra also goes into this a lot.
Yup its a nightmare of confusion all stemming from this idea of there being real things to support that notion that some ideas are true, and to stand against the idea that other ideas are false.
So is a policemans work ever done then? At what point does he realise he has the truth? Can he ever be sure that he has his man? Can he ever be sure that his "certainty" is not just another round of bad evidence and faulty witnessing?
This is why we once knew God. Niestzche take note that the Ubermench could never be his own father, could never be his own judge, could never tell his own story. He needed you, and you needed God.
God is the judge not Man. God may have become a solid "truth", a mythical polytheistic entity comprising the innumerable forms of the universe, simply awaiting discovery by Man like some languid woman asleep in her bed chamber. But this myth is the lowest of the myths, the delusion of a Man at the height of his folly, there is no woman awaiting his tender kiss, the search is in vain for it is not she that is sleeping but Him.
Yet as the Greeks well noted; the process that Man undertakes in his desperate searching for Her, His anguished trials to earn him the prize of unity with His unknown; this itself is Truth - the dialectic - with no end and no object to claim for bounty - the journey is the prize.
So they say in Religion that we walk path and have a destiny and heed the call. This is not the way "to" God but the way "of" God - a simple difference in tense in most languages. Jesus says I Am the Way for there is no Jesus to seek or find or possess or stand near but simply the Dao of Jesus, The Way of Jesus the Christian Way. And, here thank God, my own struggles bring me through the darkest night of delusion - truely the Valley of Death - where around me spoke people who claimed that theirs was the True Way To God - and some turned dark when it was suggested that there are other way to God, and still others have killed in the name of Their Way To God obliterating the infidels who were godless in their eyes, turning the flesh to dust (for some reason). But a great laugh then rose from god who peeled away the mask to show his hideous mocking grin : the Way To God is also called the Devil. The Maya. The greatest illusion, mother of all conflict and evil and suffering, the downfall of all men - for the True God lay by the roadside and the Destination was simply a story told amongst travellers to bring encouragement for the weary.
Saturday, 28 March 2009
Clarity
Just watching a doco with Mum on her favourite actor Paul Scofield...
Watching this it awakens me to something I have lost, what was taken by "My Muse", a crystals clear communion with other consciousness... we had that, it was lost, I lost it, we? lost it. Since then I have been unable to look into anyone's eyes in peace, I have been unable to look into my own eyes in peace, the crystal pool of the world has been disturbed, the waters paled, The Winter has come; but between the driving clouds that blow into this valley there are breaks and on that wind I have tasted the hint of fragrance again.
Paul Scofield writes in answer to a request to speak at a seminar on acting:
Watching this it awakens me to something I have lost, what was taken by "My Muse", a crystals clear communion with other consciousness... we had that, it was lost, I lost it, we? lost it. Since then I have been unable to look into anyone's eyes in peace, I have been unable to look into my own eyes in peace, the crystal pool of the world has been disturbed, the waters paled, The Winter has come; but between the driving clouds that blow into this valley there are breaks and on that wind I have tasted the hint of fragrance again.
Paul Scofield writes in answer to a request to speak at a seminar on acting:
I have found that an actor's work has interest only in its execution; it seems to whither away in discussion and becomes emptily theoretical and insubstantial. It has no rules except perhaps audibility. With every play and every playwrite, the actor starts from scratch as if he or she knows nothing and proceeds to learn afresh every time, growing with the relationships of the characters and the insights of the writer. When the play has finished its run the actor is empty until the next time, and it is the emtpiness which is, i find, apparent in any discussion of theatre work.
Aren't we all merely actors and all the world a stage? When each thing is done, we are empty really to be filled with the next. We take nothing. Isn't it that emptiness that many are afraid of, for in that emptiness we think we see Death and we grasp out to secure some solidity and proof that "I Am". Alas it is vain. We are a vessel into which the world is poured, and to hold all we must forgo being held ourselves. To know God, to see YaHWeH, to know "I AM" is to know "I AM NOT". Thus those who wish to find "I AM" within must turn from the "I AM" outside and this way the jug tips out its contents in a futile struggle to pour itself into itself. The dog begins to chase its tail and in the vortex comes the Devil and whispers "You Are", you deserve to Be, It all belongs to you and you can have it all I assue you.
By way of juxtapose have just checked out the new Lily Allen album that been looking forward to for ages: its not just me that has had the waters perturbed, God no longer moves here. I don't know what's right and what's real, any more. And, I don't know how I'm meant to feel, any more. When do you think it will all become clear? I thought they said The Enlightenment was here?
Friday, 27 March 2009
Culture and Niche
This must have been blogged before but rehashing...
A common mistake when thinking about Evolution is to think that Mankind is the "most" evolved and the "best" evolved.
We need only cite his impressive domination of the planet with technology and wizardry to place him at the top of teh evolutionary tree - the pinnacle of Lifes work.
This can be recognised from the Genesis story where God makes Man to be special in his creation.
Yet as Darwin himself noted - remove the earthworms and very quickly there would be no Man. The soil is cultivated not so much by Man as by Earthworms.
Even more dramatic is the contribution of bacteria. In number and mass bacteria dominate all other lifeforms. They evolve the fastest. The are the most evolved, adapted to every condition on earth. If any major catastrophy hits Earth while man is banging out financial agreements to fund research to solve the problem, bacteria will be ahead of the game evolving a solution immediately. Bacteria are so important and integral to life that even our own bodies are filled with bacteria handing everything from defence to digestion in the gut. The mitochondria that create energy in our cells are ancient bacteria that have have symbiotic to our cells. Without bacteria there is no Man.
So how well evolved are we then? We we occupy a niche. Stick us next to a deep sea thermal vent and we are suddenly hopelessly ill evolved. We are adapted to life in water, trees and savannah. Our cities and our environments are modelled around our adaptations. Put a whale in a city and it dies.
This mistake has another head. The idea that Western Society is the most advanced. It is exactly the idea of most evolved. The idea that progress takes a line. Bacteria were the first organisms and remain the first organisms. Life has tried other solutions, man being just one.
Likewise many cultures exist. Hunter-gatherer was the first and arguably still the best. But many other cultures have evolved. Exactly the same arguments apply. Place a Brazilian jungleman in the modern city and he will die. Place a well educated Harvard graduate in the jungle and he will die. Their two cultures and knowledge base are inappropriate to each niche. Thus we need to consider "relevance" when we think about "best"...
And this draws out the key point again taht everything is interconnected. To understand something it is no good looking at its "essence". Essence is empty and is created by what lies around both substantially and conceptually. To see what a bushman is you must put him in teh bush. To see what a American graduate is you must put him in university or the city. Swap them around and you see that a fish dies on the beach and a rabbit dies in the sea. Which is best? without environment it is an impotent question.
So it raises another point. What is a fish? We like to list its physical characterists. But actually this is not an answer. Because to see what a fin is we must see it swimming. Maybe the fin is used for walking. We are long familiar with animals so we have a deep repetoire of physical forms and what they "do" so it is hard to go back and examine this. See a "leg", even in an ancient dinosaur and we think w know what it "is". It is only a leg when we see the dinosaur walking with it. Organisms in the famous Burgess Shales raise many questions about what things "are".
So when we say that a fish is evolved for the sea its a profound issue. Because a "fish" is also that which we find in the sea. Evolution theory goes far behind the normal conceptions of "what is". It operates in a world where to know what the sea is, we need to know what a fish is as well... and vice versa.
Nothing in this universe can be plucked into empty space and time and examined on the slab. Just as there is no nail to hammer into the space-time continuum to call "stationery" there is place to take a thing to call it "pure thing" or "pure essence". All things are relative. The fish in the pickling jar is what it is because we know the fish in the sea. Were there just a "fish" in a pickling jar and no fish in the sea it would stop being a "fish".
The DNA records people need to recognise this. And the idea of preserving "species" by preserving habitat is slightly amiss. The preseving of habitation is the same as preserving "species" - they are equally important - they are the same thing.
This then applies to world cultures. Preserving the rainforest people, is preserving the rainforest, it is preserving Humanity. How dangerous and ignorant this idea of "best" and "progress" now looks! How bad and unprogressive!
A common mistake when thinking about Evolution is to think that Mankind is the "most" evolved and the "best" evolved.
We need only cite his impressive domination of the planet with technology and wizardry to place him at the top of teh evolutionary tree - the pinnacle of Lifes work.
This can be recognised from the Genesis story where God makes Man to be special in his creation.
Yet as Darwin himself noted - remove the earthworms and very quickly there would be no Man. The soil is cultivated not so much by Man as by Earthworms.
Even more dramatic is the contribution of bacteria. In number and mass bacteria dominate all other lifeforms. They evolve the fastest. The are the most evolved, adapted to every condition on earth. If any major catastrophy hits Earth while man is banging out financial agreements to fund research to solve the problem, bacteria will be ahead of the game evolving a solution immediately. Bacteria are so important and integral to life that even our own bodies are filled with bacteria handing everything from defence to digestion in the gut. The mitochondria that create energy in our cells are ancient bacteria that have have symbiotic to our cells. Without bacteria there is no Man.
So how well evolved are we then? We we occupy a niche. Stick us next to a deep sea thermal vent and we are suddenly hopelessly ill evolved. We are adapted to life in water, trees and savannah. Our cities and our environments are modelled around our adaptations. Put a whale in a city and it dies.
This mistake has another head. The idea that Western Society is the most advanced. It is exactly the idea of most evolved. The idea that progress takes a line. Bacteria were the first organisms and remain the first organisms. Life has tried other solutions, man being just one.
Likewise many cultures exist. Hunter-gatherer was the first and arguably still the best. But many other cultures have evolved. Exactly the same arguments apply. Place a Brazilian jungleman in the modern city and he will die. Place a well educated Harvard graduate in the jungle and he will die. Their two cultures and knowledge base are inappropriate to each niche. Thus we need to consider "relevance" when we think about "best"...
And this draws out the key point again taht everything is interconnected. To understand something it is no good looking at its "essence". Essence is empty and is created by what lies around both substantially and conceptually. To see what a bushman is you must put him in teh bush. To see what a American graduate is you must put him in university or the city. Swap them around and you see that a fish dies on the beach and a rabbit dies in the sea. Which is best? without environment it is an impotent question.
So it raises another point. What is a fish? We like to list its physical characterists. But actually this is not an answer. Because to see what a fin is we must see it swimming. Maybe the fin is used for walking. We are long familiar with animals so we have a deep repetoire of physical forms and what they "do" so it is hard to go back and examine this. See a "leg", even in an ancient dinosaur and we think w know what it "is". It is only a leg when we see the dinosaur walking with it. Organisms in the famous Burgess Shales raise many questions about what things "are".
So when we say that a fish is evolved for the sea its a profound issue. Because a "fish" is also that which we find in the sea. Evolution theory goes far behind the normal conceptions of "what is". It operates in a world where to know what the sea is, we need to know what a fish is as well... and vice versa.
Nothing in this universe can be plucked into empty space and time and examined on the slab. Just as there is no nail to hammer into the space-time continuum to call "stationery" there is place to take a thing to call it "pure thing" or "pure essence". All things are relative. The fish in the pickling jar is what it is because we know the fish in the sea. Were there just a "fish" in a pickling jar and no fish in the sea it would stop being a "fish".
The DNA records people need to recognise this. And the idea of preserving "species" by preserving habitat is slightly amiss. The preseving of habitation is the same as preserving "species" - they are equally important - they are the same thing.
This then applies to world cultures. Preserving the rainforest people, is preserving the rainforest, it is preserving Humanity. How dangerous and ignorant this idea of "best" and "progress" now looks! How bad and unprogressive!
The Universe
Great quote on radio last night from Carl Sagan "To make an apple pie from scratch, one first needs to make the universe."
This taps straight into the awareness of the total interconnectness of "things" and the awareness that things are not bounded by "self" or "what they are" but rather "everything else" and "what they are not". An apple pie is both a substantial thing made from an essence which is "apple pie" (the stuff we get out teeth into) and also at the same time the hole made in everything else by the same apple pie (we get our teeth into the hole just the same) i.e. To make an apple pie you can either make the substance or you can make the hole in everything else - both are apple pie shaped and both taste like apple pie! Substance is emptiness!
Carl Sagan misses something though maybe. To make an apple pie from scratch we need the universe. To make the solar system from scratch we need the universe. To make the galaxy we need the universe first. To make the galaxy cluster we need the universe first... where do we stop? Actually to make the universe we first need to make the universe!
This points at something else I've ment to say. A lot of arguments stem from this idea of "universe" or "ultimate" such as ultimate cause (which currently sits at the big bang). And a lot of puzzles exist like what caused the big bang, or time, or what lies outside space-time. Are there other universes? etc etc
At the same time scientists are tantalised by the "ultimate" answer - the understanding from which all other understandings can be derived (except itself?). Unified Field Theory the tantalising plateau that explorers currently seek. Of course from this plateau new high grounds will come into sight...
Compare all this energetic exploration with the attitude of Siddhartha Gotama (aka Buddha) which was to ignore such questions as fruitless. What had he seen?
When asked what caused the universe, or what was the first cause etc Buddha simply remained silent. Such probing he assured everyone would attain nothing but confusion and deeper ignorance.
I heard recently that Montesquieu the french thinker - who was an extremely learned man - realised once watching a goat that actually the goat seemed happy and he wondered what all his learning had achieved which the goat hadn't achieved.
Lao Zi would smile.
The universe came into existence long before Men came to contemplate the event (unless you are an Monist - the sound? of trees falling in the Carboniferous to make the oil today) long before any Man had ever built anything. The Universe seems to work itself.
The "Universe" - what do we mean? Normally we can refer to entities with a boundary. I gave a list already: solarsystem, galaxy, galaxy cluster. But when we come to Universe it is the other way around: everything and anything else you may say. Universe is not an entity like other things just an procedure which means exclude nothing. As such it is an ongoing process, not a discrete enclosed entity. As such - like infinity in maths - we should treat thoughts including it with caution - they are actually undefinied!
When we ask what caused the universe... we mean what?
Schopenhauer is quoted as saying "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world".. not that I rate Schopenhauer whose only claim to fame is Nietzsche who is equally flawed... but it makes the relevant point. In this sense we each occupy different universes and the only way to grasp the concept is to accept that we can't grasp it. That humility brings us a lot closer to the infinite: we as mortals are pitifully finite. It could be argued (as I used to argue) that all such actions of humility or arrogance are really just actions of Mind so Mind is the ultimate... but its just another word for infinite!
This also points to another obvious fact. We can understand the world without understanding its foundations. We don't know how the universe came into existence - yet that doesn't stop people getting off to the shops. What makes teh world go around is not understanding of fundamentals: this is what Buddha meant. What does make the world go around? The scientists are clearly looking in the wrong place.
I'd also like to drag up the self-reference argument here: it is a priori that an entity that is supported by the universe cannot derive anything but a symbolic representation of the universe. The idea that we can gain any actual "understanding" of the ultimate is futile and pointless.
Answers to questions such as these are not "understanding". They are beyond understanding. They are enlightenment (small "e" cos the Europeans stole big "E" for the World's greatest folly in the 1700s - the Enlightenment - the effects of which we are trying to remedy today - as if Man could take control of his own destiny - even the "unEnlightened" ancients realised this leads straight to Tragedy and Hell).
This taps straight into the awareness of the total interconnectness of "things" and the awareness that things are not bounded by "self" or "what they are" but rather "everything else" and "what they are not". An apple pie is both a substantial thing made from an essence which is "apple pie" (the stuff we get out teeth into) and also at the same time the hole made in everything else by the same apple pie (we get our teeth into the hole just the same) i.e. To make an apple pie you can either make the substance or you can make the hole in everything else - both are apple pie shaped and both taste like apple pie! Substance is emptiness!
Carl Sagan misses something though maybe. To make an apple pie from scratch we need the universe. To make the solar system from scratch we need the universe. To make the galaxy we need the universe first. To make the galaxy cluster we need the universe first... where do we stop? Actually to make the universe we first need to make the universe!
This points at something else I've ment to say. A lot of arguments stem from this idea of "universe" or "ultimate" such as ultimate cause (which currently sits at the big bang). And a lot of puzzles exist like what caused the big bang, or time, or what lies outside space-time. Are there other universes? etc etc
At the same time scientists are tantalised by the "ultimate" answer - the understanding from which all other understandings can be derived (except itself?). Unified Field Theory the tantalising plateau that explorers currently seek. Of course from this plateau new high grounds will come into sight...
Compare all this energetic exploration with the attitude of Siddhartha Gotama (aka Buddha) which was to ignore such questions as fruitless. What had he seen?
When asked what caused the universe, or what was the first cause etc Buddha simply remained silent. Such probing he assured everyone would attain nothing but confusion and deeper ignorance.
I heard recently that Montesquieu the french thinker - who was an extremely learned man - realised once watching a goat that actually the goat seemed happy and he wondered what all his learning had achieved which the goat hadn't achieved.
Lao Zi would smile.
The universe came into existence long before Men came to contemplate the event (unless you are an Monist - the sound? of trees falling in the Carboniferous to make the oil today) long before any Man had ever built anything. The Universe seems to work itself.
The "Universe" - what do we mean? Normally we can refer to entities with a boundary. I gave a list already: solarsystem, galaxy, galaxy cluster. But when we come to Universe it is the other way around: everything and anything else you may say. Universe is not an entity like other things just an procedure which means exclude nothing. As such it is an ongoing process, not a discrete enclosed entity. As such - like infinity in maths - we should treat thoughts including it with caution - they are actually undefinied!
When we ask what caused the universe... we mean what?
Schopenhauer is quoted as saying "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world".. not that I rate Schopenhauer whose only claim to fame is Nietzsche who is equally flawed... but it makes the relevant point. In this sense we each occupy different universes and the only way to grasp the concept is to accept that we can't grasp it. That humility brings us a lot closer to the infinite: we as mortals are pitifully finite. It could be argued (as I used to argue) that all such actions of humility or arrogance are really just actions of Mind so Mind is the ultimate... but its just another word for infinite!
This also points to another obvious fact. We can understand the world without understanding its foundations. We don't know how the universe came into existence - yet that doesn't stop people getting off to the shops. What makes teh world go around is not understanding of fundamentals: this is what Buddha meant. What does make the world go around? The scientists are clearly looking in the wrong place.
I'd also like to drag up the self-reference argument here: it is a priori that an entity that is supported by the universe cannot derive anything but a symbolic representation of the universe. The idea that we can gain any actual "understanding" of the ultimate is futile and pointless.
Answers to questions such as these are not "understanding". They are beyond understanding. They are enlightenment (small "e" cos the Europeans stole big "E" for the World's greatest folly in the 1700s - the Enlightenment - the effects of which we are trying to remedy today - as if Man could take control of his own destiny - even the "unEnlightened" ancients realised this leads straight to Tragedy and Hell).
Thursday, 26 March 2009
Its not about me at all !!!
This has got to be the biggest irony of Life of them all.
The key to Life is about the world not the self.
It remains unproven but the self cannot contruct the self.
A set can be created with a reference to itself as the only member. e.g. A = {A} but this presupposes set theory. Thus if A is a set, but it presupposes set theory, then A is not really constructing itself. To truely construct itself it would need to construct set theory using only itself. It is intuitively obvious, but how is this to be proven?
[It is clear here that what was being examined earlier in the blog didn't distinguish between "type" construction and "token" construction. Given set theory one can construct indefinite sets including self-reference. This is "token" construction. "Type" construction however would be the calculus required to define set theory.]
What remains to be proven is that any system e.g. set theory cannot be the complete foundations of itself.
It means that meditating in a room one will not find the self. It means that living Life one will find the self. This is often confused to mean living "my" life... but that is a contradiction. Life belongs to no-one. It is the foundation of self.
As a child I was fascinated by the thought that I am someone else to other people and I began a project to try and see myself "objectively" like other people see me.
What I was wrong about was that everyone sees everyone differently so there is no objective way of looking at oneself. As a child however one may be forgiven for thinking that there is an objective way because we are judged "absolutely" by the authorities of our parents, schools and law. Surely it is argued "they" must see us the same way and truthfully. Taken a long time to realise but no - we have no single or correct "look" : beauty really is only in the eye of the beholder.
Something of a destabalisation then to find that we are like a reflection in a broken mirror - a million things to a million people. What we grasp for is the true me?
Well that question ends when we realise that we are not "object". Indeed nothing is "object". The essence of respect is to see things as "subject". An apple is a million things to a million people - what is a true apple? There is no true apple.
So we have no choice but to Live, to shine outwards into the world because there is no room in here to hide the lamp.
By way of warning this is not a reissuing of the Nike slogan. The irony of the slogan "Just Do It" is that it is correct, but what they really mean is "Buy Nike products and then do it". Actually we don't need Nike products. The slogan is English and has nothing to do with Nike. Just do it means what it says - just do it and forget Nike and every other distraction that pertains to ourselves. Does it matter what we look like to ourselves? It only matters what we look like to other people - and if making them happy involves us wearing Nike then we can do it, but its easier to educate them not to care.
If anything the self is like a mirror reflecting the world. And it is exactly because a mirror doesn't look like anything that it can take on the appearance of the world around it. The mirror becomes hidden in the very act of reflection! This is how Heideggar, Hui Neng and Lao Zi have talked about the self. When death strikes it is like a mirror shattering and the reflections are broken, but in the mirror world nothing actually breaks! Borrowing from Guilbert Ryle there is a category mistake in thinking that the "self" belongs to the world. It is like the mirror trying to reflect itself. It is like the Self-Reference issue in this blog: something being its own foundation. The world taken one way is self (Atman), taken the other it is the world (Brahman). Tat Tvam Asi: they are the same.
Bloody hell is this a long process of self undiscovery or what!
The key to Life is about the world not the self.
It remains unproven but the self cannot contruct the self.
A set can be created with a reference to itself as the only member. e.g. A = {A} but this presupposes set theory. Thus if A is a set, but it presupposes set theory, then A is not really constructing itself. To truely construct itself it would need to construct set theory using only itself. It is intuitively obvious, but how is this to be proven?
[It is clear here that what was being examined earlier in the blog didn't distinguish between "type" construction and "token" construction. Given set theory one can construct indefinite sets including self-reference. This is "token" construction. "Type" construction however would be the calculus required to define set theory.]
What remains to be proven is that any system e.g. set theory cannot be the complete foundations of itself.
It means that meditating in a room one will not find the self. It means that living Life one will find the self. This is often confused to mean living "my" life... but that is a contradiction. Life belongs to no-one. It is the foundation of self.
As a child I was fascinated by the thought that I am someone else to other people and I began a project to try and see myself "objectively" like other people see me.
What I was wrong about was that everyone sees everyone differently so there is no objective way of looking at oneself. As a child however one may be forgiven for thinking that there is an objective way because we are judged "absolutely" by the authorities of our parents, schools and law. Surely it is argued "they" must see us the same way and truthfully. Taken a long time to realise but no - we have no single or correct "look" : beauty really is only in the eye of the beholder.
Something of a destabalisation then to find that we are like a reflection in a broken mirror - a million things to a million people. What we grasp for is the true me?
Well that question ends when we realise that we are not "object". Indeed nothing is "object". The essence of respect is to see things as "subject". An apple is a million things to a million people - what is a true apple? There is no true apple.
So we have no choice but to Live, to shine outwards into the world because there is no room in here to hide the lamp.
By way of warning this is not a reissuing of the Nike slogan. The irony of the slogan "Just Do It" is that it is correct, but what they really mean is "Buy Nike products and then do it". Actually we don't need Nike products. The slogan is English and has nothing to do with Nike. Just do it means what it says - just do it and forget Nike and every other distraction that pertains to ourselves. Does it matter what we look like to ourselves? It only matters what we look like to other people - and if making them happy involves us wearing Nike then we can do it, but its easier to educate them not to care.
If anything the self is like a mirror reflecting the world. And it is exactly because a mirror doesn't look like anything that it can take on the appearance of the world around it. The mirror becomes hidden in the very act of reflection! This is how Heideggar, Hui Neng and Lao Zi have talked about the self. When death strikes it is like a mirror shattering and the reflections are broken, but in the mirror world nothing actually breaks! Borrowing from Guilbert Ryle there is a category mistake in thinking that the "self" belongs to the world. It is like the mirror trying to reflect itself. It is like the Self-Reference issue in this blog: something being its own foundation. The world taken one way is self (Atman), taken the other it is the world (Brahman). Tat Tvam Asi: they are the same.
Bloody hell is this a long process of self undiscovery or what!
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
The defeat of sexuality
An update on a old thread in this blog, that of celebacy. I can link to anyone of a dozen previous posts but this will do:
http://riswey.blogspot.com/2008/05/aretez-ou-allez.html
Since Christmas I've made real progress at last with this issue of arretez. The key has been wisdom and balance.
We will not suddenly be free from sexual desire. But, what we will have is the strength to ignore it.
This takes two forms. The first is the ridding of the multitude of demons who feed on sexual desire: primarily those of 'status' which has been blogged to death recently here. Not having a partner comes with a weight of negativity things like being a failure, being unloved, being forgotten, being sad, being a loser, being lonely etc etc. And the reverse we 'think' must be true. If you have never had a relationship that you can't wait to end then get one just so that you learn that having a relationship and not being a loser can be the worst existence! It would make an interesting statistic but I bet that properly measured relationships account for as much misery as freedom! The data is always biased however because the partnered world has nothing better to do than make it hell for the free world. Social stats on marriage and well-being are as meaningless as stats on employment and well being: in a society which says you should cut your genitals off you
can be sure those people who have conformed will make it hell for those who haven't! Quite what having ones genitals cut off does for your life is a totally different question!
Once we have dealt a killing blow to these demons and freed ourselves from what is just self imposed negativity (it never matters what other people think - they are just our own thoughts) then we can turn to the main point - the addition to sexuality. I can reference this entry:
http://riswey.blogspot.com/2007/03/drugs-n-buddhism.html
Which reminds me as Equinox has just past again on March 20th I'll make a new vow of celebacy March 25th.
When one quits cigarettes or any habit at all one has only 1 thing to do: that is to develop the strength to turn the mind away from the nagging call to do it. At first it is hard, but as time goes on it gets easier. At the same time at first we are strong, but as time goes on we often get lazy and weaker so we relapse. The key is to balance these and be as strong as the demand. It is always good to remember that every failure to keep to a resolution makes the habit stronger, and every time we beat it it gets weaker. If we are getting to weak then it is sensible to agree to a truce while we regain energy, but only with a date set to continue the battle.
So it is odd that against "artificial" addictions like cigarettes I should find that sex is exactly the same. The rush of endorphins, oxytocin, you name it, is actually just drugs which we need to ween ourselves off.
What makes it harder is that while heroine is rejected in most sub-cultures in the UK and cigarettes is becoming rejected, sex is universally accepted.. Worst it is cynically used in advertising so we are kept hooked on sex so we can be controlled.
Some thoughts about sex which I have found very useful in reversing the flow of indoctrination from this sex obsessed culture in UK and America. I'm a man so this is androcentric - but reverse it and its gynocentric.
A woman is made from flesh and blood. She looks beautiful on the surface, but under the bonnet it's a mess. Encourage the mind to see the contents of the body first, and the packaging afterwards. Thus we see faeces and vaginal mucus before we see bright eyes and smooth skin.
A woman has a shelf life. She will age, become immobile, incontinent and will die. Like a car she will be scrapped one day. There is nothing eternal about sex.
A woman is not a free agent. She is driven by very strong animal impulses to breed. For this she requires a lot of resources. She is like a parasite which needs to infect a host so that it can multiply. She will play games and be seductive and lie to secure this outcome. But, this is not 'her' in control but her hormones and drug habit (the very habit we ourselves are trying to kick).
These are not prejudice they are actually true and apply as much to a man as a woman - indeed anyone who remains addicted to sexuality and the body.
It makes people sound disgusting which is exactly what the 'body' is! Yet we must not forget they are only disgusting because we are kicking the habit.. Cigarettes are very desirable when you have the habit. They are disgusting once you have kicked it! So other people when they kick the habit are no longer disgusting - for they see the disgusting and lowly nature of bodily existence.
The self which is no longer is attracted to bodily existence is a very beautiful thing: Light and free, unafraid, unaging and eternal. This is metaphysically called the 'spirit' or 'soul' but this is just another type of bodily attachment - so we need be careful.
So it is not that desire will be eradicated but just that its imperative becomes very weak. we can still have sex, we can still be stimulated by sexual beauty, but the flames are thin and can be put out. I wonder on this road whether it does lead eventually to complete erradication of the flames?
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
Is everything really just Ratio?
This question finds me aged 14 in school registration asking a friend whether "green" really is just green or whether it depends upon red and blue for what it is. A suprisingly profound question in retrospect, and one that I've never satisfactorily answered. My friend Tim (Tefal ;-) correctly decided looking at the rainbow on the white board that they were interdependent! 10/10 to him.
The argument devised to help the process along is this. If everything was green, would we still call it green. Could we even see "green" if it is all we had ever seen? There seems to be something unnerving about this argument. The idea that things can be, yet we can't notice them because they are uniform. What of the uniform sound that pervades the universe? If these things did "exist" then they would show up on instruments because colours and sounds are waves who by there very nature depend upon change, so bad example. It is also a slightly dubious thought experiment anyway because it posits a world of green, and tries to conclude that we then don't know it is a world of green: hence the wierd feeling.
But it points in the right direction. Maths we do know is all about ratios. The number 5 is not a thing in itself. It is 5 apples or 5 bananas. Seeing a single apple and comparing it on the scales to 5 apples gives us the number 5. You can't compare 5 apples and 5 bananas in their "fruitness" only in their "thingness" because we now say there are 5 things and 5 things.
That said Maths does take these ratios and places them in an abstract sequence. This gives us the numbers. So we are used to thinking of 5 as a place in the sequence and as a discrete number. But alone it is nothing - it has to be understood in its ratio to 1 and in its place in the sequence (the number line).
In Physics and Maths ratio is clearer and more visible. By introduction to realtivity was indeed from Physics. The deep revelatory understanding courtesy of a great book that there was no place of absolute rest in the universe. You could not, the book explined, ever hammer a nail into the space-time continuum to act as a fixed reference point to movement. All movement - in its very essence - is measured relative to some other movement. Thus begins the path to General Relativity which takes in the counter intuitive observation that the absolute that does exist is the speed of light which is constant irrespective of the velocity of the reference (the nail)!
In that revelation it occurred that it was reasonable to suppose that this was true of all things not just speed. And began the maxim "All Things are Relative". It didn't take my friends long to come up with Plato's criticism that if its true then it iself must be relative and so it can't be absolutely true. I accepted this in the end as a weakness. But now I don't.
It seems but is hard to grasp that all things really do exist in relation to all other things. That the thing is really the hole left in the universe around it. The Jewel Net of Indra as I read recently. The conditionality that all existences are subject to: only existing by virtue of the fortuitous arising of external events that give birth to each thing.
It is hard to see for the familar things around us. It is even harder to see for ourselves. But I keep trying at the door and it certainly seems looser on its hinges these days.
The argument devised to help the process along is this. If everything was green, would we still call it green. Could we even see "green" if it is all we had ever seen? There seems to be something unnerving about this argument. The idea that things can be, yet we can't notice them because they are uniform. What of the uniform sound that pervades the universe? If these things did "exist" then they would show up on instruments because colours and sounds are waves who by there very nature depend upon change, so bad example. It is also a slightly dubious thought experiment anyway because it posits a world of green, and tries to conclude that we then don't know it is a world of green: hence the wierd feeling.
But it points in the right direction. Maths we do know is all about ratios. The number 5 is not a thing in itself. It is 5 apples or 5 bananas. Seeing a single apple and comparing it on the scales to 5 apples gives us the number 5. You can't compare 5 apples and 5 bananas in their "fruitness" only in their "thingness" because we now say there are 5 things and 5 things.
That said Maths does take these ratios and places them in an abstract sequence. This gives us the numbers. So we are used to thinking of 5 as a place in the sequence and as a discrete number. But alone it is nothing - it has to be understood in its ratio to 1 and in its place in the sequence (the number line).
In Physics and Maths ratio is clearer and more visible. By introduction to realtivity was indeed from Physics. The deep revelatory understanding courtesy of a great book that there was no place of absolute rest in the universe. You could not, the book explined, ever hammer a nail into the space-time continuum to act as a fixed reference point to movement. All movement - in its very essence - is measured relative to some other movement. Thus begins the path to General Relativity which takes in the counter intuitive observation that the absolute that does exist is the speed of light which is constant irrespective of the velocity of the reference (the nail)!
In that revelation it occurred that it was reasonable to suppose that this was true of all things not just speed. And began the maxim "All Things are Relative". It didn't take my friends long to come up with Plato's criticism that if its true then it iself must be relative and so it can't be absolutely true. I accepted this in the end as a weakness. But now I don't.
It seems but is hard to grasp that all things really do exist in relation to all other things. That the thing is really the hole left in the universe around it. The Jewel Net of Indra as I read recently. The conditionality that all existences are subject to: only existing by virtue of the fortuitous arising of external events that give birth to each thing.
It is hard to see for the familar things around us. It is even harder to see for ourselves. But I keep trying at the door and it certainly seems looser on its hinges these days.
Here is the fix for Mankind.
Stumbled upon during the economic gloom but it won't be recognised until the 10,000 year old economic paradigm shifts... which it seems to be as many voices drowned out during the economic frenzy are being heard these days (note to self: check Shumacher). This is the deceptively simple solution to all mankinds woes implimentable by any government instantly cos it uses the same framework that already exists.
Sir Anthony, chairman of the construction equipment manufacturer JCB, said that the Government should subsidise the wages of workers who have been put on reduced hours because of falling demand.
Sir Anthony, chairman of the construction equipment manufacturer JCB, said that the Government should subsidise the wages of workers who have been put on reduced hours because of falling demand.
Each year the western economies become something like 4% more efficient (data from a European Labour review). It is plain that this means 4% more redundancy. Since labour is that the primary channel for wealth distribution in the current paradigm it means that the only solution is to find more work for the redundant. This assumes that there are more products to invent, more things to consume, more markets to exploit and most importantly more raw materials. Yet all four of these remain largely ignored by economics. The doctrine has been so strong that these are assumed rather than seen as the unproven foundations of teh doctrine. Looked at from a position of Realism examining Life as the foundation, these 4 are wholly inappropriate. There is nothing more to invent, there is nothing more to consume, markets (and people) should not be exploited, and raw materials are profoundly limited. This challenges the whole paradigm of life in Western Capitalism. Its has all been argued in the blog at length.
But the solution is refreshingly simple. We can keep the same economic system, but with one small adjustment. Instead of subsidising wages in times of deflation, and then lifting subsidies in times of inflation: wage subsidy becomes the central mode of wealth distribution. Efficiency increases by 4% in 2009. 4% of GDP is thus ear marked for wage subsidy in 2010. It is managed like the tax system where people (or companies) apply for redundancy payments by proving that they have increased efficiency. Thus instead of laying off staff and buying a machine, they apply for the redundancy payments, keep the staff on reduce hours and buy the machine. Then machines can do what we were promised they would do since the times of the industrial revolution: save labour! Taxes are hugely increased it is true. And here is the one stumbling block...
There is an argument that is wearily and tiresomely turned out by the well paid to justify their wages. If we were not paid so much we would simply go somewhere else where we are well paid and the company/country etc would suffer a brain drain.
The argument is clearly written by very intelligent people who are obviously worth a lot of money! Implicit in this argument is the idea that the loss of these well paid people really would impact the welfare of the community.
Yet there are many solutions to a problem and employing a few excellent people at high wages likely has another optimum on the graph where more less skilled people are employed at lower wages. Let the brain drain happen and the economy adapt it makes no actual difference. Stone age man survived without financiers. Actually the only people who would lose are the people with high wages: so it's a rather impotent argument.
Contrary infact I think everyone would gain. We've seen the argument used a lot recently in the financial industry. It is clear that people in the financial industry do not work for the right reasons. They actually work for the money, not the job. When this happens an economy is doomed anyway. Do you really want to spend your money on things made by someone who cares only about getting money out of you? Or would you rather buy from someone who wishes to supply a good product? It is clear those companies who employ people interested in their wage over their job will fail anyway. So again let the brain drain happen. If it had happened in the 80's then it would not be our economy which would be having to bail out all the "brains".
There is a more obvious argument here anyway. Anyone with real intelligence realises that wealth and status are purely relative and of no real value. The real "brains" don't waste their time (and everyone elses) pursuing only symbols of their achievement. They simply gain real achievement - the first such achievement is jettisoning the burden of symbols. So by definition anyway left squabbling over their salary using any argument at all, has already proven themselves unworthy of it... which is also why they will get it because people with high salaries are almost by definition unworthy! A lot of people have complained about the bonuses recently - sadly these people are the least worthy. They clearly consider a high salary a thing worth having, yet they do not have the wit the earn it themselves so they are left berating the successful. They call it unjust: you explain that to the person who made your shirt for 1cents! If you think money means anything then the system is by definition unjust, because aren't we are all equal? If you take part in the game then don't complain if you lose! If you think the game pointless, then don't take part!
So ignore the arguments from the top about salary - that is ignorant and missing the point of the paradigm shift. Tax at the rate that increasing efficiency dictates.
For example the invention of a new range of computers with 2ce the computing power clearly brings with it redundancy. At the moment in America this is accounted as an increase in value of the company. Actually it is an increase in productivity and efficiency but at a huge cost. In the current system that means redundancy (for the many) and higher wages (for the few) i.e. higher wage inequality. Following from the comment given by Anonymous recently using Einsteins analysis of Capitalism: the gradual racheting of wages into the hands of increasingly few reduces the distribution of wealth and slowly contracts the market and the economy. So redundancy must be compensated immanently within the economic model. That seems a priori to me and it amazes me it was not a foundation stone of economics. At the moment economics does not deal with this and it is assumed that inventions and natural resources will come to the rescue of the incomplete system. People the economy cannot accomodate are thrown into the wilderness and here they must make a living: yet there is little wilderness left to put them!
I don't have to rerun further the deep arguments that ensue from this position. But quickly Progress. The big counter argument will be that the Human race will come to a stand still. No medical improvements, no technological marvels since people will no longer be fighting for a place in the market and will be sitting on government subsidy.
Such a position is based upon a misunderstanding of human nature. A simple self-reference argument will suffice. If the exchange system is Man's only motivation then what motivated Him to form the exchange system? It is a priori that people motivate themselves and finding a job, and spending money is just a small part of that. The ancient Greeks pursued knowledge for its own sake, a discipline which still exists. Einstein was never paid for his general theory of Relativity - he was paid to be an patent's clerk. The great discoveries have not been brought about by Exchange, but rather by Leisure. It is the respectfully rich, free from the need to create things who ironically create the greatest things. As if anyone really believes that human discovery is caused by exchange. Exchange is measured in money and a thief achieves the same achievement in the financial world as an honest tradesman. Money and exchange make nothing. The Human Race will "progress" regardless of the institutions: indeed the institutions are part of the directionless "progress" - it is not something that can be (or should be) stimulated but it is a symptom of a profound disquiet in the human mind.
It is the slave nations that have given us "civilsation". The Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, British, Americans: all these are built upon slavery. It is the slavery that brings freedom to the "free" classes. There can be no freedom if there are not slaves! Yet in the last 3 hundred years the slavery has continued but not in human form: in machine form. Fossil fuel driven engines have created the wealth of nations. But unlike in previous slave nations the people do not benefit from the freedom. One would expect leisure to increase. And with the increase in leisure the development of a culture of intelligence, politics, sports and refined art. One would expect the society to become ever more refined. Yet the Capitalism system seems to have achieved the opposite! This is quite remarkable given that societies since antiquiry have achived this simple task. It stems I believe from the need for the "free" to have a "slave" and when machines have become the slaves the rich still look to other humans to be "slaves". The need for status means that out of principle the masses will never have the chance to be "free" even when there is no practical reason for it. The myths of survival will remain simply to enforce the structures of "status" that seem so important to lower humans.
What is even more importantly missed is that things are relative. That is the point that the West misses again and again. The wheel was once the technological marvel of all time, greater than the rocket, greater than electricity. It transformed the world beyond recognition. Yet it no longer counts as an improvement because we are born with the wheel. The process of finding something "new" be it a fashion or a technological innovation is a mindless and futile game that simply seeks to divert us from "reality". Why do we need this excitement of the "new"? What is missing from our lives that we can't face the "present"? This is what will be "new" for mankind: His greatest innovation of all time: the realisation that he does not need to change, for he can live his life just as He is right now.
note: Robert Frank holds the same position that economic work toward status is wasteful. p376 Farewell to Alms: Gregory Clark
Saturday, 21 March 2009
Rules, Law and Lore
More word play but was thinking that maybe the word "lore" should be resurrected.
The point follows from the long running investigation into "law". A "Law" cannot be contravened - by definition. Thus we have the "Laws" of Nature which state that a man cannot fly. We can't get around that. Yet the legal world uses the same word - but it is different. No-one enforces the Natural Law because it is a Law (some argue that God does the enforcing = complex argument) . The legal law, by contrast, must be enforced because it is not a "Law". In this sense the legal-law that murder is wrong is no different from the off-side rule in football - both are rules that must be enforced - and precisiely because they are enforced they are arbitrary and not Laws.
The legal system is thus the lowest point of human existence to date. Before the legal system the world was governed by Laws - which now that people have forgotten them have been replaced by Rules. Murder is Wrong - it is a Law. It is wrong whether there is a legal system to capture perpetrators or not. It is wrong in the jungle as much as in the city. Why it is wrong? because there is a Law that punishes those who murder: but this is very hard to see for those indoctrinated with the concept of "legality".
I chanced upon a copy of the Tao Te Ching yesterday (Book of the Way, of Life) given by a friend a while ago. It occurs to me reading it that this blog is seeking like a man in the dark toward the Dao, which i realise is the same "place" that both Buddha and Jesus spoke. In our core we know the Dao, or at least we recognise it, but we have lost sight of it. We are exactly like the child who perceives that the teacher is asking them to do something, yet as they can't work out what it is, they feel belittled and "out of the loop" and so like that child we egotistically escape the pressure and diminusion by rejecting "whatever it is" as nonsense and unimportant. The Dao is like this. It is unfathomable to the childish mind - even Confuscius is supposed to have been confounded by the Dao. We would rather it wasn't there so we can continue to believe that everything is at it seems and we are in control.
Buddha will remind us this is the illusion. Jesus will remind us to hang on the cross for a few hours and wonder what death says about us. And Lao Zi will simply remain quiet as the Dao is eternal, but hidden in everything.
Yet most of what we call legel law is really just customs that have become accepted. Like driving on the left hand side, paying taxes, accepting the soverignty of the queen and the power of parliament, education, money exchange etc. These things are not God given and differ from culture to culture. Indeed murder is cultural since we accept murder of enemy combatants in time of war, and some cultures accept murder of criminals. Other cultures have famously accepted human sacrifice. They are all murder, but cultures (and hence laws) view them differently. I was asked recently why gold is considered valuable. There are physical reasons, but the "value" has its roots in culture (i.e. law). When the global culture was rewritten (when Bretton Woods was abandoned) gold lost a good deal of its value, altho cultures as deeply engrained as gold take a long time to be forgotten (as the current battle in the markets demonstrates).
So I would go as far as to say that all Legal Law is really culture. And as culture its proper name is thus Lore.
So Three (3) distinctions can be made now.
Law is immutable. They are true in all times and all places for all people. That is the meaning of Law. Law requires no enforcement. For this reason all man-made laws are excluded. The idea that anything man-made could be a law stems from arrogance as discovered by King Knut. Laws are the realm of God, or Nature whichever you prefer. That is they are Spirituality (cf Religion in next paragraph) or Science whichever you prefer.
Lore is historical. Lore is mutable, but society resists change. Anything which is the way it is because "that is the way it is done, or always been done" is Lore. Often Lore immitates Law so that it seems that Lore is immutable. The test always is Law requires no enforcement, while Lore must be socially enforced. The arising of Government, the writing of Lore and the creation of central Power to enforce Lore required a change of language. So there is also "lore" with a small "l" to denote the child of Lore which is enforcement of culture decided by the social subset of "ruling" authority. Lore is actually the largest part of Religion including all the traditions, customs, festivals and values. British lore (Law) is generally accepted to be based upon Christian Lore (which crudely matches the real Law in places).
Rules are arbitrary. Rules are highly mutable. These must be strictly enforced because they are arbitrary. The existence of "Rulers" suggests that actually they enforce "rules". Maybe "lore" with the small "l" is actually just Rules (to be considered). Examples of rules are the change of try value in rugby from 4 to 5 points in 1992. Another example is the change of VAT from 17.5% to 15% this year in UK. Another example was the deprication of capitol punishment in UK in 1969. It is odd to think that people have lost their life just because of arbitrary rules! This is more the attitude we have to cultures that allow sacrifice - yet sacrifice is often Lore and much more deeply engrained and authorised in the minds of the people who accept them than rules. Invading Rulers discover that the closer their rules mirror the native Lore the easier it is to govern. Consider Thatcher challenging ancient UK taxation lores in 1990 - the Lore won, the rules failed even under a strong right wing government. In Tibet however it is different because it is one Lore versus another.
So there is a revised and improved examination of the notion of Law split into 3 quite separate elements.
The reason for the analysis is to examine the only Real one more closely - that of Law. This blog is about Life and its nature and characterists. Life is characterised in essence by Law not Lore or Rules. In UK we may have turkey on Christmas Day (this is Lore) and we may be limited to one wife (that is Lore and Rules) but if we live at this level we will never know what the Real nature of life was. Personally I think that eating turkey violates the Law so I reject the Lore, and I think all murder violates the Law so I reject the Lore and the Rules in places. This is the foundation of conscience and why I am arguing at length that it is not good enough to follow "orders" (rules) or perform one's "earthly duties" (Lore) to be correct. If we ever doubt this we need only remember the Nuremburg trials and the claim by so many Nazis that they were following "orders" - a robot yes, a human with freewill?
Just to attack the other side of the argument we might do well to remember Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) who said that God ordered him to murder. One might argue that he was following his conscience and he rejected the Lore and the Rules. A better example is more famous - Abraham who went onto a mountain side to murder his own child! (see the Bible or Koran). Kierkegaard examines this in depth in "Fear and Trembling". Abrahan is the father of faith precisely because he so blatantly rejected both the Lore and Rules (Ethics) and his own desires as a father (Aesthetics) to perform some higher duty (the Religious) Law in the present analysis.
It is more complex if we consider the Bhagavad Gite where Krishna explains to Arjuna that his duty as a soldier is higher than his duty to his family. This reminds us of Sophocles' Antigone also where she is torn between obeying the King's order not to bury her brother and her family duty to entomb him. She follows family and is killed by the state. Arjuna follows God and wins the battle.
There is much to pick through here and I've run out of time, but 3 types of Law is progress.
The point follows from the long running investigation into "law". A "Law" cannot be contravened - by definition. Thus we have the "Laws" of Nature which state that a man cannot fly. We can't get around that. Yet the legal world uses the same word - but it is different. No-one enforces the Natural Law because it is a Law (some argue that God does the enforcing = complex argument) . The legal law, by contrast, must be enforced because it is not a "Law". In this sense the legal-law that murder is wrong is no different from the off-side rule in football - both are rules that must be enforced - and precisiely because they are enforced they are arbitrary and not Laws.
The legal system is thus the lowest point of human existence to date. Before the legal system the world was governed by Laws - which now that people have forgotten them have been replaced by Rules. Murder is Wrong - it is a Law. It is wrong whether there is a legal system to capture perpetrators or not. It is wrong in the jungle as much as in the city. Why it is wrong? because there is a Law that punishes those who murder: but this is very hard to see for those indoctrinated with the concept of "legality".
I chanced upon a copy of the Tao Te Ching yesterday (Book of the Way, of Life) given by a friend a while ago. It occurs to me reading it that this blog is seeking like a man in the dark toward the Dao, which i realise is the same "place" that both Buddha and Jesus spoke. In our core we know the Dao, or at least we recognise it, but we have lost sight of it. We are exactly like the child who perceives that the teacher is asking them to do something, yet as they can't work out what it is, they feel belittled and "out of the loop" and so like that child we egotistically escape the pressure and diminusion by rejecting "whatever it is" as nonsense and unimportant. The Dao is like this. It is unfathomable to the childish mind - even Confuscius is supposed to have been confounded by the Dao. We would rather it wasn't there so we can continue to believe that everything is at it seems and we are in control.
Buddha will remind us this is the illusion. Jesus will remind us to hang on the cross for a few hours and wonder what death says about us. And Lao Zi will simply remain quiet as the Dao is eternal, but hidden in everything.
Yet most of what we call legel law is really just customs that have become accepted. Like driving on the left hand side, paying taxes, accepting the soverignty of the queen and the power of parliament, education, money exchange etc. These things are not God given and differ from culture to culture. Indeed murder is cultural since we accept murder of enemy combatants in time of war, and some cultures accept murder of criminals. Other cultures have famously accepted human sacrifice. They are all murder, but cultures (and hence laws) view them differently. I was asked recently why gold is considered valuable. There are physical reasons, but the "value" has its roots in culture (i.e. law). When the global culture was rewritten (when Bretton Woods was abandoned) gold lost a good deal of its value, altho cultures as deeply engrained as gold take a long time to be forgotten (as the current battle in the markets demonstrates).
So I would go as far as to say that all Legal Law is really culture. And as culture its proper name is thus Lore.
So Three (3) distinctions can be made now.
Law is immutable. They are true in all times and all places for all people. That is the meaning of Law. Law requires no enforcement. For this reason all man-made laws are excluded. The idea that anything man-made could be a law stems from arrogance as discovered by King Knut. Laws are the realm of God, or Nature whichever you prefer. That is they are Spirituality (cf Religion in next paragraph) or Science whichever you prefer.
Lore is historical. Lore is mutable, but society resists change. Anything which is the way it is because "that is the way it is done, or always been done" is Lore. Often Lore immitates Law so that it seems that Lore is immutable. The test always is Law requires no enforcement, while Lore must be socially enforced. The arising of Government, the writing of Lore and the creation of central Power to enforce Lore required a change of language. So there is also "lore" with a small "l" to denote the child of Lore which is enforcement of culture decided by the social subset of "ruling" authority. Lore is actually the largest part of Religion including all the traditions, customs, festivals and values. British lore (Law) is generally accepted to be based upon Christian Lore (which crudely matches the real Law in places).
Rules are arbitrary. Rules are highly mutable. These must be strictly enforced because they are arbitrary. The existence of "Rulers" suggests that actually they enforce "rules". Maybe "lore" with the small "l" is actually just Rules (to be considered). Examples of rules are the change of try value in rugby from 4 to 5 points in 1992. Another example is the change of VAT from 17.5% to 15% this year in UK. Another example was the deprication of capitol punishment in UK in 1969. It is odd to think that people have lost their life just because of arbitrary rules! This is more the attitude we have to cultures that allow sacrifice - yet sacrifice is often Lore and much more deeply engrained and authorised in the minds of the people who accept them than rules. Invading Rulers discover that the closer their rules mirror the native Lore the easier it is to govern. Consider Thatcher challenging ancient UK taxation lores in 1990 - the Lore won, the rules failed even under a strong right wing government. In Tibet however it is different because it is one Lore versus another.
So there is a revised and improved examination of the notion of Law split into 3 quite separate elements.
The reason for the analysis is to examine the only Real one more closely - that of Law. This blog is about Life and its nature and characterists. Life is characterised in essence by Law not Lore or Rules. In UK we may have turkey on Christmas Day (this is Lore) and we may be limited to one wife (that is Lore and Rules) but if we live at this level we will never know what the Real nature of life was. Personally I think that eating turkey violates the Law so I reject the Lore, and I think all murder violates the Law so I reject the Lore and the Rules in places. This is the foundation of conscience and why I am arguing at length that it is not good enough to follow "orders" (rules) or perform one's "earthly duties" (Lore) to be correct. If we ever doubt this we need only remember the Nuremburg trials and the claim by so many Nazis that they were following "orders" - a robot yes, a human with freewill?
Just to attack the other side of the argument we might do well to remember Peter Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) who said that God ordered him to murder. One might argue that he was following his conscience and he rejected the Lore and the Rules. A better example is more famous - Abraham who went onto a mountain side to murder his own child! (see the Bible or Koran). Kierkegaard examines this in depth in "Fear and Trembling". Abrahan is the father of faith precisely because he so blatantly rejected both the Lore and Rules (Ethics) and his own desires as a father (Aesthetics) to perform some higher duty (the Religious) Law in the present analysis.
It is more complex if we consider the Bhagavad Gite where Krishna explains to Arjuna that his duty as a soldier is higher than his duty to his family. This reminds us of Sophocles' Antigone also where she is torn between obeying the King's order not to bury her brother and her family duty to entomb him. She follows family and is killed by the state. Arjuna follows God and wins the battle.
There is much to pick through here and I've run out of time, but 3 types of Law is progress.
Thursday, 19 March 2009
Walk Shy
Here is a picture of lots of "Walk Shy" people from Miami courtesy of the blog "Traffic in Miami". (Nothing special abt Miami people just the first picture I found).
Nature Diary (continual update)
2009
01.3 - Bumble Bees. Reed Bunting x 1 (Thames Valley Park)
08.3 - Mink x 2. (Twyford GP)
15.3 - Brimstone. 4-6 Grass Snakes mating (TVP)
19.3 - Comma butterfly (TVP)
06.4 - Black Cap x 2, Nut Hatch x 2 (making nest in tree), Chiffchaff x 1, Bee Fly x many! (Reading Uni)
12.4 - Orange tip (7oaks garden), Grass Snakes x2 (7oaks)
01.5 - Peacock laying eggs, fledged robin (Southcote)
05.5 - Cuckoo [heard] (Southcote)
24.05 - After dark saw 1st badger scurrying fast across road (Cycling down Pol Hill)
2010
23.2 Birds seen nesting (Reading)
24.4 Saw Adder, Brimstone, Heard Cuckoo (Frensham)
27.4 Saw first Orange-tip (male)
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
Grass Snakes
Sunday marked a very special day for me. For the first time since 1992 I chanced upon specimens of my favourite Order of animals (some Squamatans) and in particular a group of freshly emerged grass snakes.
Figuring that the warmest day of spring so far would be ideal I had actually gone to the place to see adders. Heading straight for a remote tongue of land between two lakes I hoped the peaceful spot away from walkers and their dogs would be the best chance of seeing anything.
Arriving there I saw, beneath the still skeletal trees, the still beaten down grass of winter and only the minimal undergrowth of nettle sprouts and hardy brambles. This did not trigger my snake hunting instinct honed as a child on heaths and old railway tracks amidst the buzz of summer insects, the dense vegetation and burning July sunshine.
A discarded condom packet caught my eye an unusually rich purple in the dull greens and browns. Softly pacing around the glade looking in the sunlit patches I rapidly decided that there was nothing to be seen - no diamond patterns soaking up the 11 o'clock sunshine. I stopped to listen to the silence broken only by the great-tit calls... the Spotted woodpecker drumming out his territorial call in the distance... and then the unmistakable russle of leaves. It might be the wind. It happened again. It was close. I looked toward where the sound was coming and toward the distinctive loops and coils of a grass snake its bluey green skin patterned with short dark bars and the pale yellow collar flanking its neck.
I could not believe what i was seeing. This was the holy grail of my childhood. In my life I had only seen 4 in the wild before. I thought back to the last sighting. A memory of my last sighting in May 1992 whilest doing dissertation at Silwood Park came to mind, a Platonic imprint escaping from the dusty shadows of my mind looking for reality. A lot had happened in those 17 years.
The snake was glistening in the sunlight - freshly emerged from hibernation and freshly sloughed from its winter coat. A female definitely judging from the size and broadness of the head and body. I stood motionless for what was going to be about 40 minutes in the hope of not disturbing her. Raising my binoculars I realised that in those coils were the coils of a second snake or maybe even a third. Two males, also freshly emerged, one with a vivid pollen coloured neck and one with the paler neck were vying for access to the female. It was the sudden bouts of undulations in the mass of loops that had alerted me. One male was definitely in a more intimate embrace with the female, which sounds like an odd thing to say for a snake. Ripples and undulations along his body carressed hers and sort out the cloaka. Eventually, with omega shaped loops, the male gripped above and below so that he could position his own cloaka and genitals against her. That male turned out to be the one with the vivid collar and his head was never far from the female. Meanwhile the whole process was made more difficult by the other male struggling to gain a mating position too.
I do not know if mating was successful. It was hard to see whether the female was reluctant or she was being choosy between the two males. After about 30 minutes she explosively split from the pair and raced over the bank. The two males were rather dazed by this exit, but the pollen collared one quickly followed her and the other male casually made his way to the nearest sun patch and laid out to sunbathe.
Listening further a few moments later I heard more rustling and moving gradually I saw a second group of three snakes. The female was indistinguishable from the one I had just seen, and the two males were both with brighter yellow collars. I could now see four snakes, but was unsure whether this second group was composed from the first pair. In much quicker order that group broke up and the female raced again over the bank. I didn't see a male pursue her this time and one or both the males casually moved into a sun patch to sunbathe. It was hard to see because they were part obscured by brambles and I didn't want to approach and disturb them. I was also distracted by a sparrow hawk in a nearby tree.
When finally I made my move I was met by a male snake energetically proceeding toward me and clearing the path for an appraching female. This was the previous female, and pollen necked male. Again I was stationery and the male seemed unphased, but the female only came so far before again heading back over the bank.
Throughout I was between 4-6 meters from the snakes, down wind, but with the sun behind me although not casting a shadow. I wonder though what impact I had on proceeding. I made little ground disturbance knowing the hear well. Was downwind as they taste well, and I don't think their eye sight is that good but maybe a 2 meter shadow 4 meters away is rather imposing?
Anyway I'm a little dissappointed that I was unable to keep track of proceedings to find out whether the male-in-tow was the successful male guarding his female from further mating, or whether the female had refused to mate, or whether the males who did not pursue had been successful. I also don't know whether I saw 4 snakes or 6! Writing this I am inclined to think that actually there was 4 (1 female and 3 males) and that the successful male was indeed protecting the famel from further matings. This would suggest that snakes have the same system as birds where the last mating sires the most offspring.
Truly great day anyway... and England when on to hammer France in the rugby too :-)
The Real Core of Life...
The core of life seems to be this issue of "difference". It sounds trivial but the sheer volume of its representation in world philosophy and religion surely says something.
I've met it in many incarnations. In Structuralist philosophy with the likes of Saussure and Derrida on the Continental side and Strawson on the Anglo-American. The words of language gain their meaning from their difference, one from another, so the philosophers argue. Things, that is, gain their meaning not from what they are, but from their difference from other things. Note "things" and "words" cannot be distinguished in Structuralism since any distinction can only be expressed in language and that distinction is exactly what gives the words their use and meaning. Language is an interconnected web in Stawson's imagination.
I met it again in Plato and his puzzling over the relationship between words and things. How, he wondered all those millenia ago, can a word "correctly" or "incorrectly" be applied to a thing? In the Thaeatetus he ponders the seeing of a man approach who at first is too far away to recognise and then gradually becomes the form of a friend. The man approaching never changes as he is who he is, but for Plato a big change occurs as he goes from being a stranger to a friend. There seems to be an insurmountable gap between the word and the thing. Wittgenstein wonders equally at the bizarre correspondence between a red thing before his eyes and this innocuous word "red". What possible relationship do they have? and how can it be correct or incorrect? This is Wittgenstein the proto-Structuralist who understood clearly that "use" and "practical skill" gives meaning and correctness to our language.
Then again in Buddhism where it forms the central theme although well hidden. Our ignorant mind is so called because it sees "difference" everywhere. This is best shown up in the issue of status that I've discussed at length over the past year. We consider some quality important like height, or beauty, or money. We then consider ourselves in relation to another with regards to this quality. We discover that this person is shorter, or more handsome, or poorer. This fact is not what we are seeking however; the fact by itself is irrelevant. What do we make of the fact that star Centaur-alpha is closer than Orion-gamma? Yet if we are comparing we probably have a view on which is "good" or "bad".
So we find that we have more money than someone. This is just a fact, but we use the fact to raise our "status" and we may decide we are "good". We gain "satisfaction".
Yet we know that elsewhere in the world, as is always the case, there will be someone who has the opposite - someone who has in this case more money than us. So we then reduce our "status" and may decide we are "bad". We become dissatisfied.
Looking one way things seem one way, and looking the other they seem the opposite. How can they be both?
Well we are good status one moment, looking one way, and bad status the next, looking the other, because we have not comprehended that in reality we are not one thing, but both. And we are both at the same time because in reality we are neither. This nonsense arises because we seek to think of ourselves as 1 thing and other things as many things and this means that there are innumerable statuses to be found between all these many things. Yet in reality these many things, or not really many things, we need to learn to see them as many things only when we look at them in one way.
Many grains of sand
Become a beach on which to stand,
When we play volleyball.
It is like climbing a mountain - a metaphor which has gained increasing relevance since I walked Ben Macdui in 2003.
We are standing by a rock on the side of a high mountain looking out at the view. We suddenly see people above us so we start to walk up the mountain. Eventually we meet them and find a place in which to stand. Again we are standing by a rock on the side of a high mountain looking out at the view.
Has that effort changed where we stand? If we were to leave the mountain and stand on another mountain then indeed we would see this dance of ants climbing up the mountain. With this in mind we can imagine that after all that work to climb to a "higher" position we are now "higher". The problem is that to maintain this view of being "higher" we must take up a place in our minds other than where we are.
If our minds take up the place where we are then we are neither higher or lower, we are just standing by a rock looking at the view.
It is interesting that this same situation has been played out in the field of astronomy. We now believe that the earth orbits the sun. Yet I am constantly faced by the observation that the sun clearly starts in the East and sets in the West. I've argued this before and it's not a physical mystery but it does sound odd when people stand beneath a sun that is clearly going around them and swear blindly that it is not happening. We can quickly forget what we are seeing when our minds are set in a particular view.
So it is with status and all things relative - they only have meaning in relationship to sometjing else - they have no value of their own.
Now I'm beginning to see something more clearly - but it is very slow coming.
What Buddha, Jesus and just looking at Tao Te Ching again I see Lao Zi also share is that they taught of an absolute way of looking at the world. The Bodhi Mind, Way of Christ and the Dao all refer to the same thing - an Absolute standpoint from where we can achieve Archimedes great goal of moving the Earth. This place to stand is greater than the sun or any place in the Universe - all these are moving in a sheet of space time which we can't put a reference nail in and measure. The Absolute is a nail in the fabric of reality and unreality since it is Absolute to everything.
It is not a real place - since a real place is relative to the Absolute. We talk "from the standpoint of the Absolute" as I learned to say in Kantian philosophy when talking of the Transcendental.
Normally we grasp for real things to act as our standards like money, but our judgements are then insecure and changeable and relative. From the Absolute (the Dao) things look rather different because they are unchanging. The tall is small and the small is tall. This is the true goal of Life.
I've met it in many incarnations. In Structuralist philosophy with the likes of Saussure and Derrida on the Continental side and Strawson on the Anglo-American. The words of language gain their meaning from their difference, one from another, so the philosophers argue. Things, that is, gain their meaning not from what they are, but from their difference from other things. Note "things" and "words" cannot be distinguished in Structuralism since any distinction can only be expressed in language and that distinction is exactly what gives the words their use and meaning. Language is an interconnected web in Stawson's imagination.
I met it again in Plato and his puzzling over the relationship between words and things. How, he wondered all those millenia ago, can a word "correctly" or "incorrectly" be applied to a thing? In the Thaeatetus he ponders the seeing of a man approach who at first is too far away to recognise and then gradually becomes the form of a friend. The man approaching never changes as he is who he is, but for Plato a big change occurs as he goes from being a stranger to a friend. There seems to be an insurmountable gap between the word and the thing. Wittgenstein wonders equally at the bizarre correspondence between a red thing before his eyes and this innocuous word "red". What possible relationship do they have? and how can it be correct or incorrect? This is Wittgenstein the proto-Structuralist who understood clearly that "use" and "practical skill" gives meaning and correctness to our language.
Then again in Buddhism where it forms the central theme although well hidden. Our ignorant mind is so called because it sees "difference" everywhere. This is best shown up in the issue of status that I've discussed at length over the past year. We consider some quality important like height, or beauty, or money. We then consider ourselves in relation to another with regards to this quality. We discover that this person is shorter, or more handsome, or poorer. This fact is not what we are seeking however; the fact by itself is irrelevant. What do we make of the fact that star Centaur-alpha is closer than Orion-gamma? Yet if we are comparing we probably have a view on which is "good" or "bad".
So we find that we have more money than someone. This is just a fact, but we use the fact to raise our "status" and we may decide we are "good". We gain "satisfaction".
Yet we know that elsewhere in the world, as is always the case, there will be someone who has the opposite - someone who has in this case more money than us. So we then reduce our "status" and may decide we are "bad". We become dissatisfied.
Looking one way things seem one way, and looking the other they seem the opposite. How can they be both?
Well we are good status one moment, looking one way, and bad status the next, looking the other, because we have not comprehended that in reality we are not one thing, but both. And we are both at the same time because in reality we are neither. This nonsense arises because we seek to think of ourselves as 1 thing and other things as many things and this means that there are innumerable statuses to be found between all these many things. Yet in reality these many things, or not really many things, we need to learn to see them as many things only when we look at them in one way.
Many grains of sand
Become a beach on which to stand,
When we play volleyball.
It is like climbing a mountain - a metaphor which has gained increasing relevance since I walked Ben Macdui in 2003.
We are standing by a rock on the side of a high mountain looking out at the view. We suddenly see people above us so we start to walk up the mountain. Eventually we meet them and find a place in which to stand. Again we are standing by a rock on the side of a high mountain looking out at the view.
Has that effort changed where we stand? If we were to leave the mountain and stand on another mountain then indeed we would see this dance of ants climbing up the mountain. With this in mind we can imagine that after all that work to climb to a "higher" position we are now "higher". The problem is that to maintain this view of being "higher" we must take up a place in our minds other than where we are.
If our minds take up the place where we are then we are neither higher or lower, we are just standing by a rock looking at the view.
It is interesting that this same situation has been played out in the field of astronomy. We now believe that the earth orbits the sun. Yet I am constantly faced by the observation that the sun clearly starts in the East and sets in the West. I've argued this before and it's not a physical mystery but it does sound odd when people stand beneath a sun that is clearly going around them and swear blindly that it is not happening. We can quickly forget what we are seeing when our minds are set in a particular view.
So it is with status and all things relative - they only have meaning in relationship to sometjing else - they have no value of their own.
Now I'm beginning to see something more clearly - but it is very slow coming.
What Buddha, Jesus and just looking at Tao Te Ching again I see Lao Zi also share is that they taught of an absolute way of looking at the world. The Bodhi Mind, Way of Christ and the Dao all refer to the same thing - an Absolute standpoint from where we can achieve Archimedes great goal of moving the Earth. This place to stand is greater than the sun or any place in the Universe - all these are moving in a sheet of space time which we can't put a reference nail in and measure. The Absolute is a nail in the fabric of reality and unreality since it is Absolute to everything.
It is not a real place - since a real place is relative to the Absolute. We talk "from the standpoint of the Absolute" as I learned to say in Kantian philosophy when talking of the Transcendental.
Normally we grasp for real things to act as our standards like money, but our judgements are then insecure and changeable and relative. From the Absolute (the Dao) things look rather different because they are unchanging. The tall is small and the small is tall. This is the true goal of Life.
Friday, 13 March 2009
Life Expectency
Expanding an entry in this blog...
http://riswey.blogspot.com/2009/03/economicssummary.html
Just been looking around on the internet for data that I found years ago which showed that changes in "life expectency" are really changes in "infant mortality" of which there can be little doubt there has been a change.
What is most striking about the information that is available on this issue of life expectency is how it is used. There seems to be a serious struggle spear headed by the Americans to prove that their way of life and technology has led to the longest life span. For this they are supposed to be happier than those with a shorter life span. But, as I hope I have explained satisfactorily such thinking is nonsense. There will always be people with a longer lifespan than you and shorter life span than you. Thus are you supposed to feel happy and sad at the same time? The key is to accept what you have. In which case it doesn't matter!
To read...
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/08/life-expectancy-and-growth-of.html
Total Number of people ever to have lived is est. 106 billion (From Wikipedia). This means that with 6 billion alive today, about 100 billion people ever have died. Of this 55 million are attributed to the second world war. That means 1 in every 2000 humans who have ever died were killed recently in a 6 year period. The same page quotes a total of 144 million deaths in the 20th Century in wars and at the hands of various regimes: that is 1 in 700 of all the people ever to have died were killed by the state last century.
use exponential integration to calculate total deaths in 20th century to give proportion.
Argument that humans have been directly and intentionally a major cause of death to humans. Hopw ironic that we talk always of "the enemy" be it cancer or poor health, when actually we ourselves are part of the enemy! How the gods must smile when humans make bold statements of intent and purpose - the laugh will always be upon them as they kill the thing they proclaim love! (Good Old Greek tragedy seem to hold a profound truth of the nature of Narrative and personal egotistical narrative. Take the attempts by the West to "help" the "poorer" nations - when on one hand they have and cause the poverty and 2 they are the ones who are really poor!) Irony. to be expanded...
http://riswey.blogspot.com/2009/03/economicssummary.html
Just been looking around on the internet for data that I found years ago which showed that changes in "life expectency" are really changes in "infant mortality" of which there can be little doubt there has been a change.
What is most striking about the information that is available on this issue of life expectency is how it is used. There seems to be a serious struggle spear headed by the Americans to prove that their way of life and technology has led to the longest life span. For this they are supposed to be happier than those with a shorter life span. But, as I hope I have explained satisfactorily such thinking is nonsense. There will always be people with a longer lifespan than you and shorter life span than you. Thus are you supposed to feel happy and sad at the same time? The key is to accept what you have. In which case it doesn't matter!
To read...
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/08/life-expectancy-and-growth-of.html
Total Number of people ever to have lived is est. 106 billion (From Wikipedia). This means that with 6 billion alive today, about 100 billion people ever have died. Of this 55 million are attributed to the second world war. That means 1 in every 2000 humans who have ever died were killed recently in a 6 year period. The same page quotes a total of 144 million deaths in the 20th Century in wars and at the hands of various regimes: that is 1 in 700 of all the people ever to have died were killed by the state last century.
use exponential integration to calculate total deaths in 20th century to give proportion.
Argument that humans have been directly and intentionally a major cause of death to humans. Hopw ironic that we talk always of "the enemy" be it cancer or poor health, when actually we ourselves are part of the enemy! How the gods must smile when humans make bold statements of intent and purpose - the laugh will always be upon them as they kill the thing they proclaim love! (Good Old Greek tragedy seem to hold a profound truth of the nature of Narrative and personal egotistical narrative. Take the attempts by the West to "help" the "poorer" nations - when on one hand they have and cause the poverty and 2 they are the ones who are really poor!) Irony. to be expanded...
Thursday, 12 March 2009
Dead Aid is wrong!
Well according to my own analysis anyway which goes a lot deeper than Moyo who is whilst "African" still a child of the West with an Oxford degree etc. My knowledge of the analysis admittedly is from the Christopher Hart from the Daily Mail who is no expert either... so that makes 3 of us... but then who is qualified to be an expert on a problem that I don't even believe exists! But this analysis seems correct just misapplied...
"Imagine there's an African mosquito-net maker who manufactures 500 nets a week. He employs ten people, and this being Africa, each of those employees supports as many as 15 relatives on his modest but steady salary. Some 150 people therefore depend on this thriving little cottage industry, producing a much-needed, low-cost commodity for local people.
Then, Moyo writes: 'Enter vociferous Hollywood movie star who rallies the masses and goads Western governments to collect and send 100,000 mosquito nets to the afflicted region, at a cost of a million dollars. The nets arrive and a "good" deed is done.'
The result? The local business promptly goes bust. Why buy one when they're handing them out for free? Ten more people are unemployed, and 150 people are without means of support.
Not just a pretty face: Angelina Jolie has visited much of Africa to highlight the poverty faced by its people
Like all such aid hand-outs, it's an idiotically short-sighted way to treat a complex problem.
And that's not all. In a year or so, those nets will have sustained wear and tear, and will need either mending or replacing. But the local net-maker is no longer around.
So now those previously independent and self-sufficient Africans have to go begging the West for more aid. Intervention has actually destroyed a small part of Africa's economy, as well as its spirit of enterprise. Thus aid reduces its recipients to beggary in two easy moves."
"Imagine there's an African mosquito-net maker who manufactures 500 nets a week. He employs ten people, and this being Africa, each of those employees supports as many as 15 relatives on his modest but steady salary. Some 150 people therefore depend on this thriving little cottage industry, producing a much-needed, low-cost commodity for local people.
Then, Moyo writes: 'Enter vociferous Hollywood movie star who rallies the masses and goads Western governments to collect and send 100,000 mosquito nets to the afflicted region, at a cost of a million dollars. The nets arrive and a "good" deed is done.'
The result? The local business promptly goes bust. Why buy one when they're handing them out for free? Ten more people are unemployed, and 150 people are without means of support.
Not just a pretty face: Angelina Jolie has visited much of Africa to highlight the poverty faced by its people
Like all such aid hand-outs, it's an idiotically short-sighted way to treat a complex problem.
And that's not all. In a year or so, those nets will have sustained wear and tear, and will need either mending or replacing. But the local net-maker is no longer around.
So now those previously independent and self-sufficient Africans have to go begging the West for more aid. Intervention has actually destroyed a small part of Africa's economy, as well as its spirit of enterprise. Thus aid reduces its recipients to beggary in two easy moves."
BUT is "economy" what has been destroyed or something far more important? The Africans have lived quite ably and satisfactorily for thousands of years. Suddenly an outside culture views them as being in crisis! Why? There are two reasons. (1) Because the West who has a dark history with Africa, after liberating the slaves into Western society now think they can continue the process and liberate the Africans from Africa, and (2) Because the imposition of "economy" has destroyed African culture. Moyo who probably wears western makeup, western clothes, drives a car, has a pension, a big salary, a western house she knows very little about Africa, she has been liberated from her African roots. Noone knows very much about Africa itself because Africa itself, even in the minds of Africans, is synonymous with poverty and "under development". Even Moyo takes this line by accepting these concepts and definitions of Africa.
Yet as I have argued at length in this blog - where is the "under development" in living in a mud house and dying at 35 years of age? Jade lives in a mansion and is dying at younger than this. What is the meaning of comparison? Why do we compare and for what purpose?
There is no "under development". Poverty lies only in the eye of the beholder. We know this is fact because for thousands of years the Africans lived in perfect happiness in what the Western culture views as poverty.
The whole problem stems from a sickness in the West where we view "material measures" as corresponding to well-being and happiness. Yet as I write the West is slowly discovering that it has got this all wrong and NGOs are having to go around the world to ex-colonial states and reeducate them that actually they had it all right in the beginning and their current woes are due to Western intervention and ideas. My sister is studying International Peace Keeping and these are the "new" ideas.
And I don't need to repeat myself ad nauseam that the whole reason for this smug comparison with "other" cultures and nations is because of the need for status in human beings. A small Polynesian Island who had lived in complete isolation from the outside world for centuries without difficulty or trouble suddenly has a missionary land, learn the language, and then explain to them that the rest of the world thinks they are like animals and they can be shown a better way. Who would not be offended and upset by such "kindness". Apparenty (according to recent reserach) "status" is a concept that whole nations hold and a nation's perception of what other people think of them is one of the most important elements of their thinking. Quite innocently the Islanders become Westernised only to learn that dislike for their culture and to become second class citizens in the Western world - poorly educated, and lacking the skills to compete with westerners. Thus poverty is created and they become the animals that they were previously running from.
The only true answer is to abolish this disease which has achieved its apotheosis in Western society. The disease of self-hatred which stems from comparing ourselves to others - the having of Status. In small societies this seems to be well managed along culturally accepted lines, but when cultures clash them whole populations get alienated as their whole way of life gets attributed a "status". Poor people are simply marginalised people, and they become marginalised because they are not allowed to be who they are - either by way of external influence or internal self-rejection.
Its a simple equation and Moyo like all Africans who want to be African needs to stop thinking through the eyes of a Westerner at a problem that through the eyes of an African simply doesn't exist! Just be African, there is nothing else to do. Live in a mud-hut -or whatever the culture prescribes, eat what the local foods are, marry the partner that is right to marry and die when the age for dying comes - and learn a bit of wisdom in the language of your mother too. What else is there to do in Life? Honestly that is not a glib question!
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
More thoughts on Self...
I have written a very great deal after my inspirational holiday last month. I feel that most has now been written for the while so a rest after this entry. Some notes:
===
It seems to me when we seek something we have only one of two choices. (1) We seek something so unqiue and obscure that no-one else wants it. Then we can enjoy it in peace. OR (2) We seek something that is so abundant and easily obtained that no-one else will trouble us for it: then we can enjoy it in peace. Anything else means that we must live with envy and competition all our lives and will be denied the greatest pleasure which is peace.
===
How much of what we are is due to ourselves? The answer is actually nothing if you trace it back. Given that nothing of ourselves is due to ourselves, it must all have been given if anything, or even it isn't ours. Why do we protect ourselves do dearly then? so much more than others?
What happens to me in a moment is uncertain. It depends upon what I do now, and what happens to me now. However that a moment in the future will come is certain. So I can chose what happens to some extent, but I can't chose that something will or won't happen. Happenings are like the flow of a river. The water that was at this bend, will be pushed down river by the flow, and will be pulled into the spaces opening up by the water below at it moves down. The river both a collection of raindrops all milling around some moving fast and then slow, some being pushed up from a submerged rock, or dropping back down under a backwave, some drifting backwards as they slip into an eddy swirling around a few times before reentering the main flow; and yet at the same time a seamless smooth organic downward flow. Quite how the water will make it down stream is never quite sure but that it will head down stream, is certain.
So it is with ourselves. Our Life is not under the control of ourselves at all. Rather we will have Life whether we seek to rise to the head of business or politics and change the world, or just sit under a tree and watch the sun rise and fall. It is flow, just in different ways. And the difference, is ego. In the first case the self revels in its power to influence the flow of its Life, never quite stopping long enough to realise that it is only changing something that it already had, and which would unfold anyway. Its not like Life stops when you stop trying: happenings have a knack of happening, that is why they are called happenings! We don't ask for them, they happen! That is Life.
While sitting doing nothing:
The Spring comes;
The grass grows all by itself. [Basho]
Now some will argue that this is wrong; that the self does chose Life because it can chose death. So we kill ourselves to prove we are greater than Life. And Death happens to us and we are no more. Did we kill Life or did Life kill the self? Well some people have done very much better than that. Hitler is famous for exterminating millions followed by himself: yet Life shrugged it off as though nothing ever happened. That is why we must remember the war, because nothing else is going to. All that death changed nothing, left hardly a trace. Life still carries on without a care: it just carries on flowing regardless. You can fight it I suppose like Bill Murray in Groundhogs Day but eventually when you realise that Life simply is you will have to accept that this is the way things are.
Life gave us ourselves,
And we have no choice but Life,
For everything is Life.
.
Distribution of Wealth? Downscale
After the mammoth attempt to reduce "economics" the residue includes mainly this issue of distribution of wealth (DoW).
10 farmers working an acre each individually can provide enough food to feed themselves. But with division of labour and economy of scale these 10 acres can provide more food for the same labour. However according to Gregory Clark the increases are very limited and quickly the efficiencies become diminishing returns. The balance is finely tuned and I need to research the exact nature of the relationship further, but some profit is created.
It is not the major profit however. That comes from machines and fossil fuel. A machine can replace many persons and require a fraction of the "running cost". This means that fewer people can produce more, while those that are displaced from the field of labour become unproductive.
Now Adam Smith highlighted labour as the source of wealth. It is through the productive labour of people that wealth is created. It seems then fair that wealth should be distributed based upon the labour that caused it.
Maybe I have misunderstood Smith, but this ignores machines. A machine can do the work of 10 men, but has that machine created wealth? Does a cow eating grass to make milk create wealth? Does a tree growing in a wild field and bearing fruits create wealth? The standard argument is that no it does not, but the person who harvests or invests in these items has. So to pick an apple from a tree and take it to market acrues the seller the full value of the apple. To milk a cow and take that to market likewise. And the person who purchases a machine and supplies it with power owns the products of that machine. By way of contrarity what of a human female who was "milked" and her breast milk sold at market? Would the seller deserve all the wealth? It might be argued that it is up to the woman to form a contract. But if this did not happen a lot of people would consider it exploitation. Yet on what basis? Is a cow exploited, a tree, a machine? Disguised deep in economics is the thinking and prejudices of a bygone age when slavery was considered acceptable and society was profoundly split between workers and elites.
In a society where machines do many times more work than humans, where for example only 1 in 5 have anything at all to do with agriculture and its related industries and so 4 in 5 of us have all our food requirements met by other people and fossil fuels; in such a society the profits of each sector must be astronomical. Yet to gain a stake in these profits we must compete with machines and find a job. It is a strictly inverse relationship: as machines become more advanced and cheaper productivity increases but labour force decreases.
DoW it seems at a logical as well as fundamental ontological level cannot be based on labour. Sorry Smith but labour is not the source of wealth, and it can't be the the currency of exchange.
So what is there to replace it. This is why Smith's ideas have remained: there is no obvious alternative. Marx decided it should be distributed "according to need" but this is completely arbitrary and needs some God to do the accounting - and we know accountants are hardly gods. So recently I decided to be a bit reductionist to look more closely at this problem, and still need to research but here is a start...
Consider our "state of nature": a small island community. From actual evidence these seem to work on a sharing basis. The community works together. There is no management or central leader in tasks - it is an instinctive tradition. In Papua New Guinea the notion of Time I understand to be very similar to Tradition - it is the tradition which flows and drives the day and time. People do not decide what to do a particular time, but rather what they are doing determines the time. Like maybe in India where a different raags is played during the 6 times of day: I don't think originally they looked at a clock to decide when to play a raag (clocks are an import), it is maybe rather you could set your clock by the raags. Under tradition the community provides the productivity of the community and it is shared equally between the families at the end of the day. Someone who is lucky or good at his work is proud to share his labours: after all what is the point of hoarding your fish catch? You just get fat all alone in your hut while the going is good and starve all alone when you get unlucky, and meanwhile everyone else parties on outside. In the "state of nature" sharing is not a moral imperative it is natural - inconceivable that there is anything else.
Now this only works because communities are small and limited in extent. I believe humans can normally keep track of about 200 regular faces (might email Facebook to get the stats). If people from another island joined the hand outs at the end of each day and then retired to their islands to feed, never contributing in the catch and the visitors start to become so numerous that they are unrecognisable then the built in accountancy of a community breaks down. Initially people may continue the trust - never having had to deal with "outsiders" before - but clearly this is impractical and provides a schism in the community web.
So what is the solution? Either attack the foreigners with a view to driving them away, or attack the foreigners with a view to forcing them into exchange. This is the origins of the exchange system.
Blah Blah and now today the islands have shrunk from 200 down to about 20 or so family members with whome it is ok to share but everyone else is forced into exchange. And now in America it is shrinking to 1 as even partners draw up contracts to provide exchange in their relationships. The next stage is truly Freudian when we draw up contracts with ourselves so that if I(a) breaks some contract then I(a) owe money to a trustfund which I(b) can only access in certain conditions. Where I(a) and I(b) are myself but under different legal conditions and restrictions. I suppose personal pension schemes and insurances are already versions of this where we envisage a future self who is not myself, but will maybe be myself. At least its the end of individualism ;-)
I wrote a bit about prisoners dilemma before this again is the problem of an economic system. A midway is actually a reflection of true societies where we have ingroups and outgroups (as mentioned by that neurologist who studies cruelty). We are more likely to share with people from our ingroup than people outside the ingroup. Thus for societies with stable ingroups where people don't mix much outside the ingroup you will have a low GDP as a lot of exchange is actually sharing. In highly mixed societies where people work alot with people outside the ingroup then exchange increases and GDP (for the same material productivity) increases. This is why GDP etc are measures more of social structure than material wealth. The increase in violence, crime and social unrest that accompanies rises in GDP I imagine is because of the social distruption that GDP measures.
A solution then to crime, violence, social unrest and also the need for exchange value is the enhancing of localised social structues. This makes sense from economical and environmental perspectives anyway. The huge amounts of transport that the scaled up society creates are only effective because of the cheapness of fuel. As fuel runs out it will become untenable anyway. It is environmentally damaging too. Centralisation reduces jobs as fewer and fewer regions supply services to larger and larger areas under decentralisation. Analogous to the transport problem, communication becomes increasingly complex and error prone. Centralisation also provides less and less flexible solutions as it tries to meet more and more. Where once a local branch could personally deal with issues sensitively, now a hopelessly overloaded central switch board has to package all enquiries into a handful of database fields and linked-lists meaning that no problem is ever satisfactorily handled and the problems become protracted and exhausting for the system. Maybe as Gregory Clark calculates for the agricultural system, efficiencies in centralisation rapidly become diminishing returns also. And it should be noted the single greatest impact to destabalise society has been that machine called the car which enables people more than the TV or internet to live completely outside the community they acyually live in.
This is a point that I am behind on actually. From ever quarter these days people are calling for decentralisation. Centralisation and Systemisation are already becoming the bane of society. Yet the government in UK at least is even further behind and is still pushing for further centralisations.
Now folding that into the economic debate a localised DoW would also provide a healing to the central problem of economics.
== Addendum
Now like everything is can go to extremes. The counter balance is not capital profit, but efficiency through sharing. How can a private system which depends upon competition, and therefore by definition inefficiency, ever compete with a public system where competition is eliminated and complex machinery like a cancer scanner, for example, can be shared through many counties at once. The demise of Concord is a classic example of the small minded and limiting effect of free market economics - they create poverty. Only under the great centralised governments have the great achievements like space travel, concord, the global rail network, the sewage systems, housing etc been achieved. The private world has offered us only modifications of the great technologies - I can think of nothing that the private world has actually instigated from scratch: it is simply too expensive and risky. No! the driving force for "private" is exactly that: selfish gain. So decentralisation is not the only element in organisation: centralisation is the key to grand achievements also. But, while concord is clearly a central venture since it flies from centralised airports, the post office is clearly a decentralised venture since it serves people in every village.
The law (more correctly 'The Rules' as discussed before) is both a centralised feature since it should be universal across a culture, but also local since it must treat the needs of specific communities, people and situations. The current situation of a tiered system of courts is actually the ideal model! (But note all ye pedants that the Rules only work because of the educated Judgement of Judges. The Rules do not work "by themselves". This has been the argument with the 2 types of people.) In this paragraph lies in my view one of the most fruitful debates in philosophy and Life.
Summarising: Centralisation/Decentralisation is not a Rule, but a balance requiring judgement.
10 farmers working an acre each individually can provide enough food to feed themselves. But with division of labour and economy of scale these 10 acres can provide more food for the same labour. However according to Gregory Clark the increases are very limited and quickly the efficiencies become diminishing returns. The balance is finely tuned and I need to research the exact nature of the relationship further, but some profit is created.
It is not the major profit however. That comes from machines and fossil fuel. A machine can replace many persons and require a fraction of the "running cost". This means that fewer people can produce more, while those that are displaced from the field of labour become unproductive.
Now Adam Smith highlighted labour as the source of wealth. It is through the productive labour of people that wealth is created. It seems then fair that wealth should be distributed based upon the labour that caused it.
Maybe I have misunderstood Smith, but this ignores machines. A machine can do the work of 10 men, but has that machine created wealth? Does a cow eating grass to make milk create wealth? Does a tree growing in a wild field and bearing fruits create wealth? The standard argument is that no it does not, but the person who harvests or invests in these items has. So to pick an apple from a tree and take it to market acrues the seller the full value of the apple. To milk a cow and take that to market likewise. And the person who purchases a machine and supplies it with power owns the products of that machine. By way of contrarity what of a human female who was "milked" and her breast milk sold at market? Would the seller deserve all the wealth? It might be argued that it is up to the woman to form a contract. But if this did not happen a lot of people would consider it exploitation. Yet on what basis? Is a cow exploited, a tree, a machine? Disguised deep in economics is the thinking and prejudices of a bygone age when slavery was considered acceptable and society was profoundly split between workers and elites.
In a society where machines do many times more work than humans, where for example only 1 in 5 have anything at all to do with agriculture and its related industries and so 4 in 5 of us have all our food requirements met by other people and fossil fuels; in such a society the profits of each sector must be astronomical. Yet to gain a stake in these profits we must compete with machines and find a job. It is a strictly inverse relationship: as machines become more advanced and cheaper productivity increases but labour force decreases.
DoW it seems at a logical as well as fundamental ontological level cannot be based on labour. Sorry Smith but labour is not the source of wealth, and it can't be the the currency of exchange.
So what is there to replace it. This is why Smith's ideas have remained: there is no obvious alternative. Marx decided it should be distributed "according to need" but this is completely arbitrary and needs some God to do the accounting - and we know accountants are hardly gods. So recently I decided to be a bit reductionist to look more closely at this problem, and still need to research but here is a start...
Consider our "state of nature": a small island community. From actual evidence these seem to work on a sharing basis. The community works together. There is no management or central leader in tasks - it is an instinctive tradition. In Papua New Guinea the notion of Time I understand to be very similar to Tradition - it is the tradition which flows and drives the day and time. People do not decide what to do a particular time, but rather what they are doing determines the time. Like maybe in India where a different raags is played during the 6 times of day: I don't think originally they looked at a clock to decide when to play a raag (clocks are an import), it is maybe rather you could set your clock by the raags. Under tradition the community provides the productivity of the community and it is shared equally between the families at the end of the day. Someone who is lucky or good at his work is proud to share his labours: after all what is the point of hoarding your fish catch? You just get fat all alone in your hut while the going is good and starve all alone when you get unlucky, and meanwhile everyone else parties on outside. In the "state of nature" sharing is not a moral imperative it is natural - inconceivable that there is anything else.
Now this only works because communities are small and limited in extent. I believe humans can normally keep track of about 200 regular faces (might email Facebook to get the stats). If people from another island joined the hand outs at the end of each day and then retired to their islands to feed, never contributing in the catch and the visitors start to become so numerous that they are unrecognisable then the built in accountancy of a community breaks down. Initially people may continue the trust - never having had to deal with "outsiders" before - but clearly this is impractical and provides a schism in the community web.
So what is the solution? Either attack the foreigners with a view to driving them away, or attack the foreigners with a view to forcing them into exchange. This is the origins of the exchange system.
Blah Blah and now today the islands have shrunk from 200 down to about 20 or so family members with whome it is ok to share but everyone else is forced into exchange. And now in America it is shrinking to 1 as even partners draw up contracts to provide exchange in their relationships. The next stage is truly Freudian when we draw up contracts with ourselves so that if I(a) breaks some contract then I(a) owe money to a trustfund which I(b) can only access in certain conditions. Where I(a) and I(b) are myself but under different legal conditions and restrictions. I suppose personal pension schemes and insurances are already versions of this where we envisage a future self who is not myself, but will maybe be myself. At least its the end of individualism ;-)
I wrote a bit about prisoners dilemma before this again is the problem of an economic system. A midway is actually a reflection of true societies where we have ingroups and outgroups (as mentioned by that neurologist who studies cruelty). We are more likely to share with people from our ingroup than people outside the ingroup. Thus for societies with stable ingroups where people don't mix much outside the ingroup you will have a low GDP as a lot of exchange is actually sharing. In highly mixed societies where people work alot with people outside the ingroup then exchange increases and GDP (for the same material productivity) increases. This is why GDP etc are measures more of social structure than material wealth. The increase in violence, crime and social unrest that accompanies rises in GDP I imagine is because of the social distruption that GDP measures.
A solution then to crime, violence, social unrest and also the need for exchange value is the enhancing of localised social structues. This makes sense from economical and environmental perspectives anyway. The huge amounts of transport that the scaled up society creates are only effective because of the cheapness of fuel. As fuel runs out it will become untenable anyway. It is environmentally damaging too. Centralisation reduces jobs as fewer and fewer regions supply services to larger and larger areas under decentralisation. Analogous to the transport problem, communication becomes increasingly complex and error prone. Centralisation also provides less and less flexible solutions as it tries to meet more and more. Where once a local branch could personally deal with issues sensitively, now a hopelessly overloaded central switch board has to package all enquiries into a handful of database fields and linked-lists meaning that no problem is ever satisfactorily handled and the problems become protracted and exhausting for the system. Maybe as Gregory Clark calculates for the agricultural system, efficiencies in centralisation rapidly become diminishing returns also. And it should be noted the single greatest impact to destabalise society has been that machine called the car which enables people more than the TV or internet to live completely outside the community they acyually live in.
This is a point that I am behind on actually. From ever quarter these days people are calling for decentralisation. Centralisation and Systemisation are already becoming the bane of society. Yet the government in UK at least is even further behind and is still pushing for further centralisations.
Now folding that into the economic debate a localised DoW would also provide a healing to the central problem of economics.
== Addendum
Now like everything is can go to extremes. The counter balance is not capital profit, but efficiency through sharing. How can a private system which depends upon competition, and therefore by definition inefficiency, ever compete with a public system where competition is eliminated and complex machinery like a cancer scanner, for example, can be shared through many counties at once. The demise of Concord is a classic example of the small minded and limiting effect of free market economics - they create poverty. Only under the great centralised governments have the great achievements like space travel, concord, the global rail network, the sewage systems, housing etc been achieved. The private world has offered us only modifications of the great technologies - I can think of nothing that the private world has actually instigated from scratch: it is simply too expensive and risky. No! the driving force for "private" is exactly that: selfish gain. So decentralisation is not the only element in organisation: centralisation is the key to grand achievements also. But, while concord is clearly a central venture since it flies from centralised airports, the post office is clearly a decentralised venture since it serves people in every village.
The law (more correctly 'The Rules' as discussed before) is both a centralised feature since it should be universal across a culture, but also local since it must treat the needs of specific communities, people and situations. The current situation of a tiered system of courts is actually the ideal model! (But note all ye pedants that the Rules only work because of the educated Judgement of Judges. The Rules do not work "by themselves". This has been the argument with the 2 types of people.) In this paragraph lies in my view one of the most fruitful debates in philosophy and Life.
Summarising: Centralisation/Decentralisation is not a Rule, but a balance requiring judgement.
Monday, 9 March 2009
Problem of Meniality
It has taken a long while to get here, but realised this morning that much of my writing of late originates from something much more intuitive than I give credit for.
Almost 15 years ago a friend once threw some litter on a railway platform. I admonished him and he, looking around, gentured to the cleaner and said "oh its a job for him". That was the inception of my economic critique.
Certainly that is true and is the basis of the nonsense of the need for jobs in the economic system. But it hides a darker side which I have analysed as "status". The cleaner of course was African... you work the rest out.
It is a simple fact to me that we are prepared to provide the services that we use. If I produce faeces then I am prepared to work in the sewage industry. How is it possible to need a service, and yet not admit you need it. What occurs in the mind of someone who goes to the toilet but doesn't want to wipe his own arse? Are they unable to accept what they are? Or in the case of King Henry the VIII they are too fat to do it.
So we should all be prepared to work in all the industries that we use. If we don't like the work that this industry creates then we can't expect to have the products of that industry. This seems basic common sense to me.
Yet quite the opposite seems to be the prevalent view. Somehow (that I have failed to garner) there are many people who use a service that they would never dream of providing: jobs that are classified as "menial".
I always have this disagreement with my bosses. The reason for employing someone is to either gain extra expertise in a job, or to lend physical support to the industry. In both cases the industry benefits. You would for example employ a cleaner because (1) They are more experienced and better at cleaning than yourself, or (2) you simply don't have the time to clean anymore. If however you found someone in the market place who could do your job better than you, it makes economic sense to employ them in your place and you become the cleaner. That way the industry prospers and everyone is better off.
Yet this is inexplicably not what happens. A boss will deliberately not employ people who are better than them so that they can retain their position (their status). This lack of competition also means that a boss has no incentive to become better. They will also employ a cleaner not because the cleaner is good at their job, or even that they don't have the time to clean but because cleaning is not a suitable job for a manager. Office cleaning could easily be done by a rota of the office members - there is simply no reason not to do this. But cleaners are employed not for labour saving, nor economic saving but simply because of status. Status must cost our economy trillions in wages to people who fill gaps that only exist because of mental impressions of status.
Returning to the first paragraph: a boss would never become the cleaner however because of the way he treats the cleaner. The cleaner is on low pay, has little autonomy, has little respect, has little job security and job satisfaction and yet it is the cleaness of the foyer which has been remarked on before is the best indication of a companies quality. The same point is more obvious in retail, that the status we attribute to a company is the value we attribute to the sales staff. Thus the status of the Executive Officers is actually not in their salaries, or their names but in the staff they employ. As mentioned before this is the first thing to understand when becoming a king. To fail to understand this means you remain a lowly person.
Sadly people are fooled into thinking they have high status because of independent external symbols like salaries and titles and positions within a company. It is an illusion which they keep to themselves and which becomes manifest if they are ever separated from those external symbols. Recently we have the boss of RBS bank scratching around in the dirt to retain his pension - as if he needs it. His fight is simply to try and maintain the image of status, but in his desperate fight we see the insecurity that comes from holding onto an external symbol of wealth. He has no wealth we discover and must fight desperately for the external proof that he depends upon like a crutch. There is no real wealth, value or status in what he has achieved and what he fights for precisely because he has to fight for it!
His cleaner on the other hand who can live on their meagre wage, has the support of family and friends, maybe dreams of enormous wealth but never expects it nor suffers for it, when they lose their job and their salary it is of little effect just the practical annoyance of finding food to live.
As Jesus once said it is the meek who will inherit the Earth. It is the meek (not the pathetic) who have the real value. It is their value that allows them to be meek. The valueless ones have to fight for it and make a big display of their apparent wealth, the display of status. Like me writing here: it is because I have no wisdom that I need to write.
So how do we improve the society by incorporating the meek more? Well that is impossible because they probably wouldn't want to be "incorporated" (Meek Inc.) as that contradicts their meekenes.
One idea I had to balance society more was the replacement of National Service where people were simply trained to murder other people, with National Service where we actually serve the nation. Menial low paid unskilled jobs that we don't do for fun but never-the-less we all require could be done by a National Service which conscripts all people without exception. Thus school leavers get immediate experience of work. They get money immediately. They are incorporated into society immediately. They get a work ethic. They learn the value of actual work (not the fantasy of high salaries, positions) because they do this work for the community not for their own gain.
A down side is that people of lower mental ability will find their jobs taken away from them by people of higher mental ability. As argued firstly, if you use a service you must be prepared to supply that service - this means that menial tasks do not "belong" to the less able - paradigm shift there. The less-able then can concentrate on developing themselves - it will take longer and take more resources but will enable them to have a life which other people of higher ability take for granted.
On the other hand if the efficiency people come out and say that it is simply not economical to spend these resources on the less able and it is better to employ the more able immediately : then they also take the stand that employment and a better life is not the point of the economy just economic performance. In which case I return them to the argument of status being a vast wealth of income. Managers should do the cleaning. In which case large slices of the menial tasks dissappear anyway. And returning to my friend if it is just a job creation scheme for the less able whose lives will never be that good anyway, then spare them the patronage and free them from the labour market all together with a cleaning machine and a free handout from the goverenment like the disabled people they clearly must be.
Basically there is a Paradigm shift available for the human race when it is ready.
Almost 15 years ago a friend once threw some litter on a railway platform. I admonished him and he, looking around, gentured to the cleaner and said "oh its a job for him". That was the inception of my economic critique.
Certainly that is true and is the basis of the nonsense of the need for jobs in the economic system. But it hides a darker side which I have analysed as "status". The cleaner of course was African... you work the rest out.
It is a simple fact to me that we are prepared to provide the services that we use. If I produce faeces then I am prepared to work in the sewage industry. How is it possible to need a service, and yet not admit you need it. What occurs in the mind of someone who goes to the toilet but doesn't want to wipe his own arse? Are they unable to accept what they are? Or in the case of King Henry the VIII they are too fat to do it.
So we should all be prepared to work in all the industries that we use. If we don't like the work that this industry creates then we can't expect to have the products of that industry. This seems basic common sense to me.
Yet quite the opposite seems to be the prevalent view. Somehow (that I have failed to garner) there are many people who use a service that they would never dream of providing: jobs that are classified as "menial".
I always have this disagreement with my bosses. The reason for employing someone is to either gain extra expertise in a job, or to lend physical support to the industry. In both cases the industry benefits. You would for example employ a cleaner because (1) They are more experienced and better at cleaning than yourself, or (2) you simply don't have the time to clean anymore. If however you found someone in the market place who could do your job better than you, it makes economic sense to employ them in your place and you become the cleaner. That way the industry prospers and everyone is better off.
Yet this is inexplicably not what happens. A boss will deliberately not employ people who are better than them so that they can retain their position (their status). This lack of competition also means that a boss has no incentive to become better. They will also employ a cleaner not because the cleaner is good at their job, or even that they don't have the time to clean but because cleaning is not a suitable job for a manager. Office cleaning could easily be done by a rota of the office members - there is simply no reason not to do this. But cleaners are employed not for labour saving, nor economic saving but simply because of status. Status must cost our economy trillions in wages to people who fill gaps that only exist because of mental impressions of status.
Returning to the first paragraph: a boss would never become the cleaner however because of the way he treats the cleaner. The cleaner is on low pay, has little autonomy, has little respect, has little job security and job satisfaction and yet it is the cleaness of the foyer which has been remarked on before is the best indication of a companies quality. The same point is more obvious in retail, that the status we attribute to a company is the value we attribute to the sales staff. Thus the status of the Executive Officers is actually not in their salaries, or their names but in the staff they employ. As mentioned before this is the first thing to understand when becoming a king. To fail to understand this means you remain a lowly person.
Sadly people are fooled into thinking they have high status because of independent external symbols like salaries and titles and positions within a company. It is an illusion which they keep to themselves and which becomes manifest if they are ever separated from those external symbols. Recently we have the boss of RBS bank scratching around in the dirt to retain his pension - as if he needs it. His fight is simply to try and maintain the image of status, but in his desperate fight we see the insecurity that comes from holding onto an external symbol of wealth. He has no wealth we discover and must fight desperately for the external proof that he depends upon like a crutch. There is no real wealth, value or status in what he has achieved and what he fights for precisely because he has to fight for it!
His cleaner on the other hand who can live on their meagre wage, has the support of family and friends, maybe dreams of enormous wealth but never expects it nor suffers for it, when they lose their job and their salary it is of little effect just the practical annoyance of finding food to live.
As Jesus once said it is the meek who will inherit the Earth. It is the meek (not the pathetic) who have the real value. It is their value that allows them to be meek. The valueless ones have to fight for it and make a big display of their apparent wealth, the display of status. Like me writing here: it is because I have no wisdom that I need to write.
So how do we improve the society by incorporating the meek more? Well that is impossible because they probably wouldn't want to be "incorporated" (Meek Inc.) as that contradicts their meekenes.
One idea I had to balance society more was the replacement of National Service where people were simply trained to murder other people, with National Service where we actually serve the nation. Menial low paid unskilled jobs that we don't do for fun but never-the-less we all require could be done by a National Service which conscripts all people without exception. Thus school leavers get immediate experience of work. They get money immediately. They are incorporated into society immediately. They get a work ethic. They learn the value of actual work (not the fantasy of high salaries, positions) because they do this work for the community not for their own gain.
A down side is that people of lower mental ability will find their jobs taken away from them by people of higher mental ability. As argued firstly, if you use a service you must be prepared to supply that service - this means that menial tasks do not "belong" to the less able - paradigm shift there. The less-able then can concentrate on developing themselves - it will take longer and take more resources but will enable them to have a life which other people of higher ability take for granted.
On the other hand if the efficiency people come out and say that it is simply not economical to spend these resources on the less able and it is better to employ the more able immediately : then they also take the stand that employment and a better life is not the point of the economy just economic performance. In which case I return them to the argument of status being a vast wealth of income. Managers should do the cleaning. In which case large slices of the menial tasks dissappear anyway. And returning to my friend if it is just a job creation scheme for the less able whose lives will never be that good anyway, then spare them the patronage and free them from the labour market all together with a cleaning machine and a free handout from the goverenment like the disabled people they clearly must be.
Basically there is a Paradigm shift available for the human race when it is ready.
Encounter with a Mink
This weekend while walking in the valley adjacent to Reading I settled down on the bank of the river at a bend to have lunch: a spot I thought most likely to reward me with the sight of the electric flash of blue of a passing kingfisher. No sooner had I made myself comfortable than I heard playful squeaks coming from the a group of tree roots on the opposite bank. Looking over I saw a dark furry snout emerge followed by the rest of a long bushy animal that turned to squeak at its assailant before leaping into the water: a black strip of fur, buoyant in the water that swam quickly to the bank, scrambled up and into the undergrowth. A few seconds later it came scrambling under a fallen tree to a look out point right opposite me. It seemed to yawn - and I could see a few sharp and distinctly carnivorous teeth - and to settle down before bounding off into the undergrowth.
I waited conspiculous but not moving for what must have been 10minutes but nothing stirred except for a pair of Red Kites quartering the sky behind. Figuring I was being watched I moved so that I was lying down and hidden. Immediately a length of black fur about 50cm long including tail bounded from the undergrowth, around the tree and dived in shaking its red squirrel like tail. There was plenty more squeeking followed by another exit and an excursion down the river in the other direction.
Now I have been an avid watcher of insects and reptiles all my life, and in the last 3 years birds. And, this is no Attenborough like mountain gorilla experience admittedly, but the contrast between the previous groups of animals and this Mink was unmistakable and immediate. There was a real sense of intelligence in its movements, and the sense of being surveyed and watched. Birds and insects are very simple - they just fly away (unless they are robins). Reptiles the same. Even mice and voles have a very simple strategy of going quiet when there is disturbance, but starting up again after a few minutes of quiet. To be "watched" is an extraordinary experience when it comes from an animal - and one so small.
A truly unique wildlife moment for me, and a new found respect for mammals who I've always found the most boring of animal groups (probably owing to their uniform brown coats).
I waited conspiculous but not moving for what must have been 10minutes but nothing stirred except for a pair of Red Kites quartering the sky behind. Figuring I was being watched I moved so that I was lying down and hidden. Immediately a length of black fur about 50cm long including tail bounded from the undergrowth, around the tree and dived in shaking its red squirrel like tail. There was plenty more squeeking followed by another exit and an excursion down the river in the other direction.
Now I have been an avid watcher of insects and reptiles all my life, and in the last 3 years birds. And, this is no Attenborough like mountain gorilla experience admittedly, but the contrast between the previous groups of animals and this Mink was unmistakable and immediate. There was a real sense of intelligence in its movements, and the sense of being surveyed and watched. Birds and insects are very simple - they just fly away (unless they are robins). Reptiles the same. Even mice and voles have a very simple strategy of going quiet when there is disturbance, but starting up again after a few minutes of quiet. To be "watched" is an extraordinary experience when it comes from an animal - and one so small.
A truly unique wildlife moment for me, and a new found respect for mammals who I've always found the most boring of animal groups (probably owing to their uniform brown coats).
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