Ideas on Life, Change and Identity inspired by Evolution.

Attenborough does it again another spectacular program on the natural world and man's place within it, 'The Tree of Life' on BBC1; just watched it on iPlayer. But something about evolution by natural selection has always puzzled me tho, its a bit of a non-theory - it simply doesn't tell you anything you didn't already know.

Watching the latest offering and its unusual defence (there is nothing to defend since there are things de facto to explain and any explanation will do) of evolution w.r.t. creation makes one thing clear: the importance of Darwin's theory is not in-itself but rather its relevance to a culture that has assimilated some very useless ideas. What is sad about Christianity is that it has absorbed these Western ideas as its own and now wastes its energy supporting them when they are little to do with God and nothing whatever to do with Jesus! All the atheists who use this strawman argument to fire shots at Xianity are wasting their energy especially!

I imagine - and this remains to be tested - that Darwinism has never been news in the Indian subcontinent, for example, because they don't hold ideas of a fixed world.

So what is different between Creationism and Evolution by Natural Selection (ENS)?

Evolution says 2 things: (a) that things change and (2) that the change is the accumulation of hereditary variance in survivability.

It is the first point which has been the most contentious! The reason is that people think that "things" really are themselves. But when I hear people (even Attenborough) say that "species evolve" I cringe a bit because "a reptile" for example is not a "thing" it is simply a "likeness" amongst a branch of living things. "Reptiles" don't become "Mammals" by any process of evolution because "reptiles" and "mammals" don't exist. It is not Attenborough's fault, he knows perfectly well, it is just a limitation of language, but some people really do take this literally! It is as mad as saying the stream becomes a river and believing that a physical thing "stream" magically transforms into a different physical thing called "river". They are just discrete names for what underneath is not "change" between discrete things at all but simply "flow". There are not really "things" in the natural world just "Life" and that is the key issue of this blog - how do we talk about this thing "Life" (which has so many elements from physical to spiritual and transcendent).

Another example which the Creationists somehow miss is the very process of birth, aging and death. If they don't accept evolution then presumably they believe that an embryo, a baby, a child, an adult and a corpse are all the same. It is the most central fact of our lives that we undergo a "continual change". At some points we call it child, at others we call it adult, at others we call it alive and at others we call it dead - but like the river there is no point when it "is" a stream and no point when it "is" a river - these are features of the flow of our langauge and mind not the flow of water. Likewise Life constantly evolves. Sometimes the flow is called "bird" and sometimes it is called "fish" but these do not name static things - even in their own lives they are not static.

I do have to accept that there are levels of change however. While each bird evolves a lot in its lifetime, changing shape and colour, each bird begets its own "type" so that chicken gives birth to chicken and turkey gives birth to turkey. This gives rise to the idea that there is some fixed "type" that links them and is passed between them - similar to the idea of family "blood" that people envisage is passed through the generations of a family. However such a view only arises when we try to view the flow as discrete things and see similarities between the things when actually it is just one flow - a chicken begets a chicken because really they are different forms of the same underlying process. You might think of a year giving birth to a new year, while at the same time seeing it as a continual process with no start and no end (where was the Earth when it "started" orbiting the Sun?).

But ouch! that means that we as "individual" human beings can be seen as really just an evolving originless and endless process ... so what of the self, that separate thing apart from everyone else and the world? That, Buddha says, is just a fiction, like the chicken and the stream, the bubble and the flash of lightening - his idea of anatta.

Science has discovered the mechanism that enables the chicken to evolve through to death yet produce a new chicken with distinct likeness. That which we call "chicken" is not an indivisible form but a superficial result of underlying processes - especially those involving a molecule called DNA. Where once we thought a "chicken" contained chicken-ness now some people think that DNA contains "chicken-ness" - not realising that a stream does not contain anything called a stream! it is just a stage in the flow of water. A chicken does not inject anything "chicken" like into its offspring to make them chickens - any more than rain injects anything into a river. But at the same time a river can't be made from trees. The processes do exist, but existence does not come in the form of discrete "things" - which makes the word "process" here unique is naming nothing discrete and separate from anything else. The argument here is not about the physical world - mankind has indeed learned a great deal about this - it is about how we understand what we learn.

The other point of Evolution is actually the more interesting one... the mechanism. What it seems to say is that those things that are no good at existing won't exist. It explains why you don't get for example 1 legged creatures. But it doesn't actually give us any idea at all what "life" should look like. This has been the great challenge since Darwin to try and find explanations for the actual shape of things that have occurred. How much is chance and how much obeys laws is very hard to decide. Does life "have" to look like this? Would beetles dominate the macrofauna of alien planets too?

All animals have 5 fingers and toes (ignoring thumbs etc). This seems to be a historical feature, surely on other planets they could have any number. Higher animals are bilaterally symmetrical (have a left and right) is this a must or a feature of embryo formation? It seems to be the latter. As Gould argued much of the way things are is chance and historical and the idea that things focus in on optimal adaptations is over played. When we look at the diversity of life then we don't just see free adaption to the environment but rather a chunky historical display with superficial adaptation. Much of what we see is simply left overs from the past that are sufficiently successful and too fundamental to change - deep local minima in the entropy of life forms. But then is there any meaning in fact to saying that something is perfectly adapted without testing an unlimited solution space?

Another feature of Creationism is the "blind watch maker" that: finding such intricate mechanisms as living things we would expect them to have a maker. Problem with the analogy with a clock is that a clock clearly has a "purpose" and that purpose is what causes it to be replicated in human societies. A living thing however has no purpose - it simply replicates as part of its very nature. Thus for a clock purpose, use, creation and making all have relevance which they don't for living things. What is the purpose of life? has been an long standing conundrum something that the Creationists most obviously don't address. If you found a clock you would look for a maker because it can't make itself. You find a pregnant woman and you see you don't need a creator. Thus pagans worship fertility which seems here to be an advance over creationism - the worship of that ability of living things to make themselves - or of life to pass by in countless forms one to another.

It can also be seen that really the clock is the product of evolution (maybe by Natural Selection also). It began with the notion of time in natural cycles like days which would be priordal - even our cells tell the time. As the human mind and culture developed these notions would have been central. The physics of movement of the sun (in a circle) led to the measurement of the sun in circular sundials. Quite how ancient man solved the issue of the tilt of the Earth and the mythology that surrounded this I do not know - and will investigate. Anyway sometime between Stonehenge and renaissance sundials the gnomon became slanted and the dial face became symettrical. Then with the evolution of machines it became possible to provide a wind up simulation of the suns movement and eventually came the clock. What we see as hands and a dial is really a historical development on ancient ideas of the sun going around the Earth. Digital clocks are more abstract by contrast and an interesting question would be to wonder what time instruments might be like in alient civilisations with a different solar system e.g. 2 suns.

Jewish religions seem to place importance on the "Will" of God rather than on natural processes - they do in many ways seem opposed to Nature and very anthropocentric placing importance on God/Human qualities like will, intention, labour, productivity, creation. This clearly have founded the Western world and ENS seems to challenge all of these: important for my book infact - will consider this in more depth. What has Jewish philosophy got against Nature? and more importantly what do they have to gain by this stance.

What is neat about the method of Natural Selection is that the "chicken-ness" of a chicken is created by the same process as its strutting about now as you look into the chicken coup. What I mean is that if that chicken died it does not matter for the type because there are other chickens. But if the death was caused by something general to do with its "chicken-ness" then all chickens would start to experience this culling and the type "chicken" would probably start to go into decline. (Well that is an expected scenario, while for humans that eating of it has caused it to go into massive 'acline' - i.e. de/a-scension).

So the individual life that we see, is connected with the "type" that we see and which it shares across the species. So "what" something is, is a function of "who" it has been so to speak. So each individual human life that has been played out in the history of the human race has gone together to determine what human's are like. "Our" life will contribute to what it is to be human in the future (well aspects of life that effected our children's fitness anyway).

This may look confusing - it is! The whole notion of an "individual chicken" for example becomes very confused in evolution because "chicken" is a type while individual is the particular - but it is the selection on the individual which determines the future characterists of the type. The "tree of life" that is often drawn (in the BBC program being one case) is not a tree with individuals at the end (although they do draw individuals at the end of the branches) it is a make believe tree of types. If we were to put a human at the end of the human branch who shall we chose to picture: you or me? What does a "human" look like? This is Plato's problem - what does the "Form" Human look like? what does this word refer to?

As already argued stream and river don't refer to anything discrete - they are imaginary stages in a process. Another example I neglected to add earlier was experienced as I walked the coast last summer. At one point I have the sea to my right, the next I have a river to my right - but at what point as I turn into the estuary does the water change from sea to river? Maybe there is a transition zone... but where are the boundaries of that? and so on. Things are not discrete and not separted from other things by actual boundaries - it is all in the mind. Likewise if someone asks you to point out "a" human you can do this, but you can't point to actual "human".

The "tree of life" is an imaginery painting that ties together all the imaginery "types" that we see. But as Darwin so profoundly recognised each one of these "types" differs from each other just as Plato recognised millenia before. For Plato this variance made real things inferior to their Ideal, for Darwin these variances created variance in the survival of the things and where those things replicated created a force for progressive change. But if there is no real "type" then where is the variance? A "horse" with longer legs, and a horse with shorter legs only differ because we liken them and imagine that "horse" is something they share. Actually there is no "horse", this is a discrete invention of the mind linked to language. In the great process of Life horses never come about there is only the slow morphing of generations some growing into likeness of "pigmy horses" and some growing into the likeness of "plains horses" at no point do all the animals that exist constitute "horse" or "mammal" or "ape" or "man". This is the true inter-connected view of Life that I have been seeking: Life is both each living thing and every living thing: at the same time. In this it holds an animate version of the general description of God or Buddha which are both each thing and every thing at once.

Pleased I got here. Just to catalogue one last thought. Last year I saw a duck. A few weeks later she was being followed by her ducklings. I imagined now the future where she had died. One animal has literally become a half dozen. It is easier to comprehend after the proceeding outpouring that she was not a discrete entity that somehow transformed into 6 similar entities: but rather flowing through all these forms is an endless flow of "life" akin to the flow of a river which takes the forms of streams and rivers in sequence.

==== Add 28/2/09
I see news that a new interpretation of fossils shows conclusively Pacoderms were viviparous. The argument then - since they are a different evolutionary branch to vertebrates who also show vivparity - is that viviparity is an "adaptation" which has been evolved separately at many different points. At least here Gould it seems that adaptation has been proven. The question now is what environmental conditions favour viviparity and placentality.

Keisha time travelling?

Spot the similarity?

KLF - 3am Eternal (1992): "Here we go" throughout but particularly the girl in the police car.

Sugababes - Round Round (2002): Keisha at 1:07 also gives a very similar rendition of "Here we go"

So is it coincidence, convergent evolution, a common ancestor, copying or time travel?

Attachment to self

Just cycled from Reading to Sevenoaks in the snow yesterday - it was exciting and beautiful and not as cold and miserable as I at first anticipated. Only took 7 hours this time and as the snow fell more deeply the monstrous car creatures were slowed and almost brought to a halt - peaceful parity for a while.

Somewhere along the way I saw more clearly an aspect of anatta.

We are each very concerned about ourselves. We take decisions based upon ourselves and when things go wrong we batten down the hatches and withdraw into ourselves. Faced with danger we protect ourselves.

This means that we withdraw into our bodies and protect those bodies with walls against the outside world. We make decisions to ensure the logevity of our bodies. In a metaphysical sense we envisage a "can't see" version of our "can see" body that hides inside the body called the soul or at least the "self" for meta-materialists. A ghostly homunculus that enacts in hiding the physical protection we seek for our bodies.

All is secure in fortress us until we become infatuated or fall in love. Then a very odd thing happens, where once we sort to protect ourselves we find ourselves wanting to protect a self that lies outside our body! This state can become so extreme that we will even sacrifice this body for that body which we love! A complete change of places of our attachment.

Such an experience teaches us in very definite terms that the attachment we have to "this body" what we call "our body" is arbitrary and we can have the same attachment for anything we chose either here or there, either connected to me or afar from me!

This separates one important aspect of our notion of self: our attachment to it. Irrespective of the metaphysics of self there is no logic as to why we should chose to attach to "our" self rather than another self.

There is no reason then to look out for ourselves more than for other people. The most common justification is that if you don't look out for yourself then who else is, but this is a self fulfilling idea since it is only true when everyone thinks like that. In a society of people who behave rationally to the prisoners dilemma (i.e. not American society) then we can look out for whoever we chose quite rationally.

So forgetting the metaphysics of self for present, we can conclude that whatever they are we still have a choice whether to attach to ourself or other people, neither or both, which is sufficient to debunk the materialist immoral attitude and show the way to true moral liberation.

Distribution of Wealth.

If there is a new economics I realised a few days ago that it rest upon two simple question.

1) How to we distribute labour among the people?
2) How do we distribute wealth among the people?

The current system has the great advantage that the two are linked. Thus to have wealth you must work productively, and when you spend wealth you define what work there is to do. It is a perfect system, and very appealing to apologists for the status quo.

However I realised a few days ago also what the criterion for distribution of wealth and labour are in this society. You might think from the above that the ones who do the most productive work get the highest pay. But this as we see especially at the moment is not true. Nurses who work long hours providing one of the most essential services that exists in society can hardly be described as being at the top of the pay structure. Bank executives who have not only failed to perform productive labour, but have actually been involved in destructive labour are still at the top of the pay structure. This seems to violate completely the simple logic that we believe underpins the economy.

Look again at any company you have worked in. "Promotion" is associated with "pay rise". Yet do you do "more" work? or is your work more valuable? You do a slightly different job, maybe shifting from creating the product directly to managing the creation and this requires new skills... but is it "more" in any way? The justification for "more" pay comes from the idea of "more" responsbility. A manager becomes "responsible" for the several people in his group, while each member of the group is only responsible for "himself". But as I've argued (after Buddha) what is there in a group other than the people in the group? If each person is responsible for himself then where does the extra responsibility come from for the "boss"? the extra responsibility that warrants the increased pay?

For example. In a hospital you have the ward manager and the nurses and doctors on the ward. Each is trained in their particular field and each must take responsibility for their expertise and performance. The ward manager cannot be on hand at every moment of every individuals workday to ensure that they are being responsible: that responsibility must be delegated. So what is the ward manager responsible for? What work do they actually do? It is their job to discipline and enforce work ethics and structures, do the paparwork and be a point of contact ... but that is all they do, they don't actually contribute anything to the ward. And as equal human beings what ensures that they are ghoing to be any more disciplines and responsible than their hard working subordinates? As we often see the managers are justs as faulty as the staff - they are all humans and it is human to err.

What one might expect is that particularly proficient nurses and doctors may get promotion to oversee wards so that where problems arise their expertise is called upon. Then payrises are associated with actual performance of the ward.

Maybe these arguments only work for ignorant mass of working class people who are good for nothing but manning the machines? Yet as all good retail companies know the point of contact with the customer is where the company exists. It is that which determines the attitude of the customer. It is thus even understood in management that it is the lowest staff then who determine the efficacy of a company. Even in production it is the quality of the crafts and skills that determine the quality of the company not the backroom managers.

So whence comes this idea of "promotion" and "payrise" and "manager"? There are two sources. One is "capital"; that the owners of a company require control over "their" assets and this mnecessitates the machinery of control that percolates down onto teh shop floor as "management" and "paperwork".

The other reason is the one that even underpins the notion of capital: it is our old friend discussed at length before this, the hydra of "Status" and "Heirachy". It is a fundamental requirement of humans to need to be in a heirachy, to look down as well as look up to other people in an imaginary league. This can be a football league, it call be a racial league, it can be a management league ... none of these things represent any actual difference between people, it is just a game.

Thus "payrise" is not a feature of how much work we do, but rather a feature of where we are in a heirachy. It also happens that the amount of work we do is equally a function of heirachy.

Thus the absurdities of society suddenly all fall into place. The capitalist who does nothing but own a company takes home a huge salary for doing no work. The people who actually do all the work on the shop floor get the lowest salaries. The son of the owner who is on the board of directors turns up for a meeting twice a week and takes home a huge salary, but does almost no work. A temporary member of staff on the shop floor who is late on even one day loses his contract. A member of staff makes a mistake and loses their job. A banking executive collapses the entire bank's share value and takes home a huge bonus. Doctors take home salaries more than twice that of nurses, when the nurses may even be more expert than the doctor and it is them who actually do all the work - (what doctors do can also be simulated much more easily by electronic systems than what nurses do).

If you look around society understanding that it is status that determines how much work we do, and how much we get paid, then it makes much more sense. It also forms a direct lineage to the previous system where aristocrats deserved huge wealth and luxury and no work, while the working class deserved poor living conditions and the work. Humanity has certain features that never change, but those who enjoy the status for some reason want to hide these facts and pretend that they deserve their status for other reason "God given" in the case of some kings, "expertise" in the case of professionals. Yet offered God or "expertise", both the king and the professional would turn these down for status!

This is a one sided expression of an often hidden aspect of society. Obviously within the cracks left by this system of heirachy exist the more familiar aspects of expertise, quality workmanship, conscientiousness that belong to each person equally irrespective of their status. But we cannot expect these to be reflected in the salary or status as these are quite separate aspects of society.

Economy & Prisoners Dilemma

The most morally upstanding country in the world has done it again ... failed the prisoner's dilemma. The home of game theory and trillions of dollars in military spending on optimal equilibria and they still can't figure out what the rest of the world had normalised before time even began. "You only get what you give". Problem is to understand this you have to be wise, and what America lacks is wisdom. It is the child of the world, the New World, the Immature World. Anyway they voted for protectionism ...

there is a profound sickness that is America which has led to paranoid strikes on Korea, Vietnam, Columbia, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan to name the principal ones and has led to the deaths of 10's of millions of people (both directly and indirectly)... that has led to and endless string of Enemies of America from Communists to Militant Islamists... wars and paranoias that extend through many governments and generations. The sickness cannot be levelled at any one person or regieme but only at America itself. There is only one thing to fear and that is America itself. It is impossible to see any good that is "America". Every act of apparent "generosity" turns out to be a disguise for a more cynical exploitation.

Discussing the Bush administration a friend pointed out how pleased Africa is with Bush because under him aid to Africa increased. Yet I have always had a problem with the notion of "Aid". Why does one country "Aid" another? Is one country a qualified doctor and the other a patient who has come for treatment? What is the sickness in Africa that we keep being reminded of by the governments and aid agencies? If Africa is really so inhospitable how come people have trived there long before "aid", indeed it is the "cradle of mankind". It can't really need "aid" unless the people have forgotten how to live...

Oh yes there is our anwser! The African people have forgotten how to live. Instead they got taught in Missionary school all the useful things like English and Christianity, and Western History and Western Economics and cash crops ... all the things that have helped them to survive the millenia before the arrival of the West. Now the children are models of Western people, except they don't have a Western society to live in. So they starve waiting for the West tries to make Africa like the West. But as Sach's the book "The End to Poverty" has argued Africa is a special case having in particular no natural transport links and having high rates of illness. Two centuries after we decided to make Africa like France or UK we discover that there are fundamental problems with this. So the Africans are dead people ... adapted to a world that doesn't exist... and into this collonial mess up America exploits the Africans for cash crops further eroding any chance of survival and then exploits the situation further by handing back a fraction of the revenue in aid of apparent generous motives. Collonial people were arrogant and ignorant, but the Americans are knowingly cynical and evil. The Christian aid agencies most ironically are also tied into this bundle of agents of the Devil, helping the apparent victim without any humility or respect from which would arise the obvious question already asked, "Why them and not me?". It is the fundamental arrogance that Africa is the primative and West is the Best which blinds people to the very evil that creates the inequality. It would be good to remember that Africa is the birth place of all our ancestors, and the original culture and society that made Man. It would be good for America the realise that the rest of the world is the original birthplace of all its ancestors, and the original culture and society that made America. Then they might be more outward looking and less Protectionist.

Present Moment

It has been very cold of late, but expecting a friend to visit yesterday I did some work on the garage and put in place some nice new systems for comfort. Carpet is laid, things repositioned for easy access and a tarpaulin rigged in place to capture heat. My friend couldn't make it because of the icy roads so I enjoyed it all to myself last night. At -2oC outside I was roasting in +13oC, with all this heat created in just 1 hour by just 3 vegetable oil flames: completely carbon neutral and very satisfying. With 4 flames you can reheat 1Kg of food in the same time, or slow cook for much longer. Its the simplest possible system.

As I lay there watching the flames enjoying this little oasis of forgiveness against the harsh weather that lay only feet away it was one of those rare periods of great satisfaction and peace. I had a similar experience on a mountain years ago with nothing of comfort but a plastic survival bag and freezing cold soaked sleeping bag. But even here at rock bottom, exausted on the side of a freezing mountain in driving rain and sleet and shivering on and off, I pulled the plastic bag over my head to keep the rain out and found complete satisfaction in the small pocket of warm air I exhailed into that space. So miniscule the roots of satisfaction. Yet we struggle to overload and overstimulation in this society like kids looking for 11 on their power amps: when it is already ear splitting you have only deafness and poverty ahead.

So in that peace watching the flames I could see a few things more clearly. I confirmed something realised in meduitation a few weeks ago, that I hate myself. If I was truely to meet myself I would not want to face myself and look myself in the eye for I am ashamed at how I have failed to be what I know I can be. I have given into temptations of laziness, greed, anger, lust, foul mouthedness, unhelpfulness, obstinancy, negativeness, obstructiveness, selfishness, jealousy, envy, revenge, hurtfulness etc etc the list goes on. Not all the time, but I have given in when deep down I know I should not have. So I have myself. And as argued in the last blog when you hate yourself you don't want to be with yourself and you hide in dreams of tomorrow or memories of yesterday. Or if you don't like where you are, you are disgusted by the people around you: you find them ugly, or the cities ugly, or the words that people say ugly, or the life you are expected to live ugly: then you don't want to be here and you dream of tomorrow and you remember yesterday. A whole country springs to mind here! But actually that ugliness you see is a projection of the hatred you feel for yourself.

I found "my muse" beautiful in many, many ways and for a short while I wanted to be here, today. I loved the world for those few years. Each day was the only day in my life, and there was no tomorrow and no yesterday. I imagine that the satisfaction I felt came more than a bit because she was something that I could be positive about, and someone who was positive about myself.

Ironically I have had to be negative about her of late because she "failed" in the most fundamental way. A very natural way, but not the idea of perfection that I had loved. And that leads directly into the 2nd Buddhist Lakshana that i will write about soon - that the enlightened see all "things" as undesirable and imperfect precisely because they will fail like this.

Regardless what happened since, I found that peace with her as I found it again in the candles and warmth of my hide away last night. This is the value then of the "present moment" that they talk about in Buddhism. Yet there are two immediate problems. Firstly is attachment and greed for this "present moment" and the peace. We like it and want it again and this creates a craving and inauthenticity. I felt envy today as I saw people camping down by the lake because I thought they must be having more peace than me!!! This is exactly how we lose the present moment: yet here it is destroying itself! Such are the ironies of the hall of mirrors we call our minds.

The second problem is related which is "looking for it" when we don't have it. If we ever "look for" the present moment then we will not find it because we are looking "in" the present moment. We find things "in" the present moment: it is the stage on which things get found. On what stage would we find the stage itself?

The way to "present moment" is through deep relaxation. Letting go of things, of worries and disturbances, and seeking deep satisfaction within ourselves and with ourselves. This is why we must be "good" to achieve progress. Our deep self knows well what is good and when we are bad we turn away from ourselves and become a non-person. Non-people turn from goodness deliberately and do bad things to hide from themselves. They are therefore always on the run, can never settle, can never be at peace, can never know satisfaction.

This is a difficult process. I am doing it. But to get here I have done some major things. Ending my pointless and negative employment. Disregarded my citizenship of negative Britain. Tried to be positive to the people around me, and removed as much attachment and confusion from my life. Maybe I'll find this was too much: but it is worth anything to find oneself, to be at peace with oneself in the mirror of the present moment.

Got my tutoring now must dash...

The state of Goodness

The Children's Society publish 'A good Childhood' on Thursday: the results of their 2 year research into modern childhood. Listening to a representative on the radio yesterday was like listening to myself in many ways and it was uncanny to find myself agreeing so wholeheartedly with someone. The data seems to have supported the line of reasoning - but I was suspicious of this: can "data" really be such an ally in support of what we know is good by virtue of something quite separate from data: our Morality? The report concludes what is true across all of society not just children, that our happiness is nurtured best by a sense of care for our fellows rather than by a sense of personal achievement.

In passing he mentioned one thing, that I knew economists would criticise, that "there was only so much success to go around". This is the "protectionalism" of the Mercantile economists who viewed value in terms of gold of which there really is only so much to go around. However the Classical school diagreed and after Adam Smith argued that the amount of value is only limited by the amount of labour. I agree to some extend - "value" is not a fixed quantity so arguments of "there is only so much to go around" are falacious. But then often arguments proceed by believing that value can be measured e.g. in GNP. These suffer from the same criticism because value is not quantifiable. Anyway I digress...

Interesting not everything went the way of Morality and common sense. Apparently the data show that child suffering does not correlate with having both parents at work. What seems to cause suffering is poor relationship with the parents and poor relationship betwen the parents - which may be caused by both parents always being at work, but this is not the root. Does this then suggest that nanny's can replace parents? I've always thought that multi-parent creches is the most likely "natural" state.

But, the main thing I disagreed with was that the solution to these deeply felt moral arguments, with apparent data to support them, was education. Somehow if children were educated of the source of happiness and wellbeing then they would live better lives.

I used to argue like this as a child. The moment you perceive something that is wrong you seek for a power base to try and enforce that view on other people. This is self-defeating because you will come up with other people competing for those power bases, and who ever wins will end up enslaving the population to whatever ideology - standard political nonsense. I've argued at length the falasy of people who think like this, and who do jobs that follow this type of thinking.

It occurred to me this morning that the problem with these people is that they have a profound lack of faith in People and in particular Goodness. We don't have political departments to make the sun rise every morning because we have faith that it will. (Ironically we are more faithful than our "primative" ancestors who had exactly this!) Likewise why do we have moral shepherds of "the people"? Do we believe that they are prone to badness? And do we believe that the goodness in them is derived from external forces initiated by the "good shepherds" who by miraculous fortune have been born with a moral compass that "the people" somehow lack? Idiotic and absurd arguments, yet the root of the lives of many "do gooders" and politicians who self-appoint themselves as miraculously superior to "the people".

Buddha and Jesus by contrast, for example, are quite different from this. These great teachers cast the seed, some falls on good soil and some on bad. Where it falls on good the seed grows, where it falls on bad it perishes etc etc. Who keeps throwing seed upon the desert in the hope that it will germinate? If people don't have the moral compass already then they won't ever know goodness. It is not for us as people to bring goodness into the hearts of people: it is a gift if we ever find it in our own. It can only be that good people will recognise the lives, actions and words of good people and rejoice in these things: and bad people won't. There is no education, or enforcement of these things: they are gifts. And when we see a bad person (assuming we know goodness) then it is enough to realise that "there, but for the grace of God, go I".

But do we really believe that there are "bad people"? This is an element of faith that is central to Buddhism at least: that at root all people are good, we simply have differing levels of haziness obscuring that rich core. Christians may believe the same given that, God made Man in his image. And then Islam and Judeism must believe the same. So none of the major faiths East or West believe in Evil at the root, it is only an oscuration of Goodness - a turning from God in Christian words.

So the majority of us already belive in Goodness being at the root of us all. It is the thing that unites all people. And the evils we see are but clouds in this perfect sky. This is what we believe. So where is the need to teach people Goodness? All children know what is right and wrong - talk to them and you will be amazed, even the "hoodies" n "yobs". They just learn to turn away from it and ignore it because it represents weakness, and because Goodness, being their true core self, means that they must face themselves: and this they cannot do because they hate themselves, and everyone else hates them, and they have done bad things that concretes over the grave of themselves. They either commit suicide, or they kill other people because at the heart of childhood in this authoritarian uncaring society of bureaucrats whose job is to be morally superior to others, who take the blood money but offer no heart in return, who return correct paperwork on other peoples' suffering and take the money and run, who document and measure and budget for misery: this society makes enemies of the people who is governs and hates the very blood that flows in its veins. That is the problem, that sadly is the obscuration that hides the Goodness.

So clearly the very last thing we should do in society is to legislate for anything else ever. We have hundreds of years of rules: we need no more. L:ike a good computer program we should be able to recode the laws and make them more efficient, simpler and faster to process. There would be less people in government, and more people in "Life" flowing through the arteries of this society and making it live. But this is a futile last paragraph because am I going to legislate for a reduction in Law :-) No! let Goodness work all by itself.

While sitting doing nothing;
Spring comes!
And the grass grows all by itself.