Gratitude

A man beats his 6-year old daughter until she loses her right eye. After recovering, the girl thanks her father for having spared her left eye. ‘He blessed me with my left eye vision,’ the girl exclaimed happily.

This spring the Red River flooded half a town. On Sunday the river crested and began to subside. The townsfolk gathered at church to thank God for having spared the other half of the town. ‘The Lord blessed us,’ the parishioners exclaimed happily.

Weeks ago, a pastor in Haiti lost his son in the chaos of the earthquake. He later found his son’s remains buried in the rubble of the boy’s school. The pastor thanked God for having returned the boy’s corpse. ‘God blessed me,’ the man exclaimed happily.

The dictator sent half his populace into forced-labor camps, and when they grew too weak from starvation to be much use, he had them all killed. The remaining populace gathered in the capital square and thanked the dictator for sparing them. ‘He blessed us with continued life,’ the crowds exclaimed happily.

Is there a difference? What is the difference?

— asotir

The Once and Future Law

This is the law of human survival. We share this law with all other living things on Earth. Once it was our only law; it has since been supplanted by a host of other laws, manmade, temporary, fragile, and flawed.

The law is:

You are your technology, and your body is your machine.

Standing on a Hill Looking Out to Future

A sketch of a theoretical basis of the new world

Over the past few days, we have looked at the nature of man, of society, of property, and took hold of a new way of considering time.

Now let’s put it all together in a first sketch of what we might think of as a new ordering of the world.

The nature of man, we saw, was interdependent, social – but with an eye to small groups. It is only very recently in our history as a species that we have massed together in groups as large as cities, kingdoms, or nations. Perhaps as a result, we seem to do a much better job of governing ourselves, and even of being able to grasp mentally, a small local group than of a mass of strangers, let alone the world as a whole. (And yet: we will need to consider all men in all the world if we carry on wielding the immense impact we have been on the world’s environment.)

Society, we saw, needs to cooperate and coordinate its activities on a global scale, and yet at the same time it needs to focus on the local more than the wider scale. It seems we need to put our own house in order, and then agree with other ‘households’ to put our ‘town’ in order, and so on – all the way up to the full reach of all mankind’s billions.

Property, we saw, is not either/or: we don’t have to choose between utter familial communal sharing and rugged individual, absolute property rights. Instead, if we see property rights and ownership as covering a spectrum of responsibility and control, from the personal, temporary items that are an individual’s absolute ‘own,’ to the natural resources of air and water and minerals deep in the Earth, over which we all might exercise some degree of control, and from which we might all share some of the bounty.

And last, we saw that we must regard time on a sliding scale as well, and keep in mind the longest of terms even as we watch for the largest of scopes.

There has never been a human society that did not destroy its habitat. In the past, we have been able to walk away from the mess we have made, and find new unspoiled territory; or else we have perished locally – but another community, another culture, somewhere else, has survived to carry on man’s legacy and species.

These possibilities are slipping away from us very quickly. We have run out of room, and this wall has come upon us before we made migration to the stars practical.

Perhaps we have already run out of time. It is certain that we have reached this realization too late to save many millions, perhaps billions.

But we can only do what we can.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday 18 October 2008)

When Are You?

The answers we get also depend upon the time frame in which we look at the questions.

Sometimes it is best, when facing a difficult decision, to step back from it and regard it from a distance. You could look at it in light of your long term goals, or in light of your whole family, community, nation, or even the whole world. You might look at it from the aspect of Eternity, as though you stood at the foot of God's own throne.

It has often been pointed out by critics that American industry sabotaged its own success when companies stopped looking at their long-term prospects and instead concerned themselves only with their stock price for the current and subsequent quarters.

It's the difference between an individual who looks forward to his whole life, and one who expects to die next week.

Chances are, their behavior will be a little bit different.
Now consider it the other way: compare the way you'd behave if you looked forward to your whole life, and if you were considering taking care of yourself, your children, and your grandchildrn to the end of their lives.

(Composed on keyboard Friday 17 October 2008)

Who Are We?

Different levels of identification determine our future success

This is the third in my series of blog posts sketching out a framework or underlying theory behind a mode of living and organizing that I think is better than what we have experienced in the past. (Our past experience does not seem sustainable, and it does not seem that it can last very much longer – therefore some kind of change will be necessary, and these posts are a starting block for us to consider a way forward out of this mess.) In the first post, we looked at social organization and what is most fitting for man. And the second post, we looked at the institution of property, and tried to see how we might consider property in different terms and of different kinds.

Now, let’s look at social organization from a more personal point of view.

Who do you think you are? Most of us have many answers to that question: we might consider ourselves to be an individual first, a member of a gender, a member of a family, a laborer of a certain profession, a member of a certain institution or enterprise, a member of a certain ethnic heritage, a member of a certain religion, a member of a community, state, region, nation. All of these different identities overlap and to some degree conflict with one another. We can sometimes find ourselves being pulled or torn between two or more of these identities, especially if the different groups with which we identify ourselves are themselves in conflict.

Some of us like to think of ourselves as members of a more abstract and more general group than those groups which we find immediately around us. We might consider ourselves to be ’citizens of the world’ and we might actually disdain or look down upon our neighbors or fellow townsfolk.

This will prove to be a grave and costly mistake in the world to come.

Once upon a time, men have no idea of any association broader than that small group among whom they themselves lived and worked and bred. A long time later, after the intervention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, men began to identify themselves with the land upon which they lived. They were born there, raised there, and would in time be buried there. Only a great crisis such as famine or war might break the bond holding them to the land where they lived.

I don’t want to claim that this was any kind of ’Golden Age’ by any means – in fact I’m quite sure I myself would find such a life both alien and depressing. But this way of life has one great benefit over the life most of the developed world has led during the 20th century: it is sustainable.

It is not entirely sustainable – or at least, it does not have to be sustainable, as we can see quite easily from all the cultures that perished in the past. So I guess I really mean that the feedback mechanism of sustainability works a lot faster under a more local economy that is bound and tied and dependent upon the natural resources of the immediate area.

Consider as a hypothetical model, a valley penned in between two mountain ranges. There is only so much fertile land on the bottom of the valley which can be farmed. There is only so much meltwater coming down off the mountain peaks each year. There are only so many minerals to be extracted from the mountain sides. Along one side of the valley there is a forest – and it will quickly be seen that the forest is growing bigger or smaller depending on how much wood is taken out of it, how many trees are cut down each year, and how many might be destroyed by fire. It can also be seen very easily that this forest is not infinite. (Nothing of course on this earth is infinite; sometimes the oceans and the air, the central forests of Europe and the grasslands of Eastern Europe a thousand years ago seemed to be infinite, or even were infinite to all intents and purposes, as far as one man’s mind could conceive of them. The chief advantage of a small valley such as the one we are considering here, is how its finiteness is so readily apparent and measurable.)

Now consider another hypothetical model, a small town surrounded by a few square kilometers of orchards and farmland. In this small town there are perhaps six to ten representatives of any given profession – a half dozen butchers, a half dozen bakers, five greengrocers, seven coopers, and so on. Any potential customer in this town will know all these butchers, bakers, greengrocers etc. by name and family connection (and all sorts of tidbits of local gossip). The average citizen of this town will have a pretty good idea of the relative quality of goods produced by any of these professionals as well as their personal honesty and integrity.

Against the model of the valley now, consider the model of the globe – the model the world’s economy has been laboring under for the past 20 years or so. The world is a mighty big place – too large, in fact, for any one of us to conceive of in our minds. It takes dedicated scientists with sophisticated instruments to be able to measure and judge the health of the world’s forests and oceans and atmosphere. And then they can tell us their conclusions, but these conclusions will be couched in numbers that are hard for us to grasp, so far do they run beyond our limited comprehension in their very vastness. (And that vastness by itself makes it easy for each one of us to justify doing something that will harm the environment. We know it’s not the right thing to do, but against the vastness of the resources involved in the whole globe, how much harm can one man’s small action do, anyway?)

Against the model of the small town now, consider the model of the global economy with all its immense multinational corporations. This is a model so characterized by alienation, that both the workers and the consumers of the goods produced by it must find themselves totally adrift, without any connection to one another. The worker is given no cause to think of the person who will actually be consuming the goods in question – much more likely, the worker will only be concerned with his immediate supervisor and coworkers. To the consumer, the product has at most a recognizable brand which the consumer associates with a company but not with any particular person who is actually touched the product by hand.

(Composed by dictation Thursday 16 October 2008)

Who Owns It?

A new look at property.

(This post represents a departure from the normal domain of this blog. Instead of talking about talesmanship, storytelling, and the arts, I examine a theory of ownership. Just as with my thoughts about talesmanship, however, the following represents some opinions and theories that I would like to share with the wider world.)

To begin with, let us say that there are two broad categories of property: first, private property, and second, public property.

Private property is anything personal that pertains to an individual, is more or less portable, and is impermanent. Examples of this might be clothing, a hair brush, a toothbrush, a book, a bed.

Public property is anything over which an individual has some measure of control, but which will in all likelihood helped lay of the individual, and whose usage and disposal will have an effect upon the community as a whole – and therefore the community has a certain vested interest in how this property is used and disposed of.

We can further divide public property into the following three categories:

1. Property that the individual develops
2. Property that the individual enhances
3. Property that the individual finds

The first of these, any public property that the individual develops, would not exist in its current form without the knowledge, efforts, skills and labor that the individual has put into it. An example here would be a house. Another example would be a field of corn, which the individual has plowed and sown and watered and tended to.

The second, any public property that the individual enhances, also would not exist in its current form without some labor from the individual. In this case however the individual’s labor is of much smaller import than the labor he has put into transforming the first category of public property. An example here might be a mine whose main value is the mineral deposits which the individual has found and made available for extraction.

The third, any public property that the individual finds, would exist pretty much in its current form whether the individual involved did anything or not – all he did was to find something. An example of this kind of property might be a lake or a river.

I make these three distinctions over public property in order to set forth three stages of private prerogative and control over property that, in its essence, was not created by the individual and therefore cannot be said to be entirely his – it is not, in other words, private property. The more the individual is required in both his labor and his skill to create the property as it exists in its current state, the more control the individual ought to have over that property’s use and disposal. To grow a crop is to make of seeds and earth and water something which may be eaten. In some sense, the farmer has ‘created’ the foodstuff. To extract an ore from the earth is not to create it, but rather to make it available to the individual and his fellow men. To find a river only makes available the knowledge of the existence of the river, without transforming or altering the character or attributes of the river.

There are in addition certain properties that no one discovers, enhances, or creates – these are the common properties of the earth itself, and do not properly belong to anyone. Rather, they must belong to everyone (and perhaps to all living inhabitants of the earth). Examples of this kind of property include the air, the seas, and the deep water in the earth.

We might go even farther and say that all crucial components of the global ecosystem belong to this final category of property, which belongs to all of us as a whole and to none of us as individuals. For if any crucial component of the ecosystem could be disposed of by any individual or group, then that individual or group holds the entire ecosystem hostage, and all our lives and future existence depend upon their goodwill.

I’ll have more to say in future posts on the implication of these theories.

(Composed by dictation Monday 13 October 2008)

Who Are We?

Where we stand with one another

Let’s consider mankind as composed of four groups:

1. the individual
2. the clan
3. the community
4. the community’s leaders

Much has been made over the past 200 years or so of the role of the individual; the individual has been contrasted with the society, the group, the masses, the collective. And it is true that each one of us experiences life as an individual, a conscious, feeling, thinking, dreaming, living organism separate from all the other organisms that we call men.

There has sprung up in this time the Romantic notion of the One, the Lone Wolf, the Loner, the free spirit. Much of this has sprung from the Romantic movement in the arts, which in turn sprang from the rising and revolutionary bourgeoisie that supplanted the older land-based ruling classes in Europe.

But the truth is that man has never lived alone; has never thrived alone; has never survived more than a single generation alone, in all the millennia since before man was man.

The other great apes, the chimpanzees, the gorillas, the bonobos, live in groups. They have complex social structures with hierarchies of leaders and followers and rules to determine who makes the decisions for the group, and who gets to affirm those decisions, and who gets to gainsay them.

Man is born unable to feed himself or take care of himself. He cannot protect himself. He cannot go far in search of food. He is utterly dependent upon his elders.

Even before he is born, man is dependent through his mother, as the mother grows less able to fend for herself as her pregnancy advances, and is left in a weakened state in the immediate aftermath of giving birth.

For some years the infant, then toddler, then small child, depends upon the guidance and protection older humans.

Therefore we can only conclude that society is mankind’s ‘natural state’ and that any theoretical ‘social contract’ can only be said to spring up among family- or clan-groups, and not among individual men.

The molecule of human society is the diatom of the mother and child. Around this nucleus orbit the father, sisters, grandparents, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, and more distant relatives, in a loose grouping of the clan or extended family. Several of these clans will occupy a given territory (or follow recognized paths in seasonal migrations) as a tribe or community.

Tribes that share common heredity and culture, including language, make a race, or should we call it a ‘culture’ instead? And a culture that recognizes a common leadership will be known variously as a nation, a city-state, a monarchy.

From the individual to the mother-child diatom to the family to the clan to the tribe, the society grows stronger and more efficient, more able to endure hard times and prosper – up to a certain point. Beyond that point – when the number of individuals has grown so great that no one knows every other member of the group by face and name and relationship, when the organization becomes too complex to be governed by consensus according to the simple, commonly-held beliefs of the group as a whole, and when the territory the group claims is too great for a common economy – the strength and efficiency, the durability, the cohesiveness of the society start to decay and break down.

In the small group, it is possible for everyone to know everybody else, and for each of us to recognize which man is trustworthy and which is not, who is honest and who is not, who is competent and who is not. In the greater group, we must trust strangers, who may not be trustworthy or honest or competent, and who have in any case only the slightest of reasons to care for our welfare, and the greatest of reasons to care for their own in preference to ours – as we will have no reason to care for their welfare, beyond the slight sense that we share the nation, the culture, the language.

All political theory – including those political theories that will actually work for human life over the long term – rely upon these simple rules, and this simple conception of human social organization.

No man is an island. And the longer and wider the island chain grows, the less able it is to endure.

(Composed by keyboard Tuesday 14 October 2008)

Spoke Bespoke

More troubles with reciting dialogue.

Bardelys remained staunchly impressed, nay, in awe, of Karen Savage and her reading of the Baroness Orczy’s The Elusive Pimpernel. And yet he found a problem – not indeed with the performance, but with the writing from 100 years before.

In short, dialogue written for the page presents grave difficulties to the oral reciter.

In person, the oral talesman has several tools with which to substitute for the clever punctuation marks developed over the centuries to represent and mark off dialogue. The oral talesman when he stands before you, can turn to the right when he gives one character’s lines, and to the left when he gives another; he can vary his facial expression; he can alter his poster and bearing; he can play tricks with his voice.

When the oral talesman recites over the radio, or on record, he is left with only his voice. And so it is with voice alone that the redoubtable Ms Savage must represent the distinctions between speakers. In the following passage, reprinted from the fourth chapter of the book, several speakers are discussing the mysterious figure of the Scarlet Pimpernel at the Richmond Gala fair.

Bardelys did have a couple of moments listening to the passage where he wasn’t entirely sure who spoke what. To remove all the punctuation distinctions, he set it all down as it must be spoken:

Say what? commented Johnny Cullen, the apprentice. Who this mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel is. Perhaps he isn't, said old Clutterbuck, who was clerk of the vestry at the church of St. John's the Evangelist. Yes! he added sententiously, for he was fond of his own sayings and usually liked to repeat them before he had quite done with them, that's it, you may be sure. Perhaps he isn't. What do you mean, Master Clutterbuck? asked Ursula Quekett, for she knew the old man liked to explain his wise saws, and as she wanted to marry his son, she indulged him whenever she could. What do you mean? He isn't what? He isn't. That's all, explained Clutterbuck with vague solemnity. Then seeing that he had gained the attention of the little party round him, he condescended to come to more logical phraseology. I mean, that perhaps we must not ask, who IS this mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel? but who WAS that poor and unfortunate gentleman? Then you think, suggested Mistress Polly, who felt unaccountably low-spirited at this oratorical pronouncement. I have it for a fact, said Mr. Clutterbuck solemnly, that he whom they call the Scarlet Pimpernel no longer exists now: that he was collared by the Frenchies, as far back as last fall, and in the language of the poets, has never been heard of no more.

You can see the difficulty. Had the Baroness Orczy written with radio (or podcast or audiobook) in mind, she would have, and should have, interjected a lot more ‘attributions’ to the lines.

Each and every line of dialogue must be clearly marked off, in the text itself, in words, to let the audience know who said it.

The only exception comes when a scene is presented in which there are only two speakers, and the lines are quite short. When each speaker gives no more than one line, in rapid alternation, the result is a lyric, a sort of poetry or song of chant and response, whose rhythm (so long as it remains unbroken) leaves no doubt as to who says what.

It also can help in an interrogation scene: where only one party asks, and only one answers, then the audience can rely upon the form of the sentence to identify the speaker.

Also, as a sort of sub-set of the interrogation scene, Bardelys had to add the scene in which one character knows a good deal more than the other.

Finally, Bardelys was minded of dialogue that was written ‘in dialect’ – a practice much used in 1908 and before, but currently out of favor. But in oral talesmanship, where the lines are to be performed, such dialectical differences can mark off the different speakers. And it is not to be thought of, Bardelys imagined, that an oral talesman, a mountebank performer, should deliver lines of servant and master, townsman and country-man, foreigner and native-born, in one and the same manner for all.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday 2 October 2008)

Soldiers and Warriors

The dangers of a small volunteer army

I must confess to knowing nothing of what I speak today. I have never killed a man, nor donned a uniform, nor endured basic training. I have never taken orders, given orders, served in combat. I have never looted a conquered city, raped its women, burned its palaces. I have never been wounded in battle, nor crippled, nor killed. I have never won a medal, nor ordered men to march into certain death, nor been splattered by a friend’s brains.

Therefore, you may well ask, why do I dare to even broach this topic?

I dare because it is of the greatest importance. To the freedom and liberty of the citizens of a great nation, and the safety of its neighbors and the world.

Everything I have learned, or dared to learn, of combat and soldiering, has come to me through the tales I have read and heard and watched enacted. And it struck me that there is a deep difference between war stories told by men who have gone to war, and those told by men who have not; there is a difference between wars ordered and commanded by men who have not served, and those commanded by men who have served; there is a difference between the attitude of the populace towards its military whether that populace is made up of men who have served, or men who never served.

There is also a difference between the warrior and the soldier.

The warrior has existed since the first conquest. We can liken him to the chimpanzees, the young males who have no females to mount, who dare not fight tooth and nail against the dominant male, and who roam in small punk-bands about the edges of the clan’s territory. The warrior lives for plunder and loot. When he gets it, he calls himself a prince and gets to play dominant male himself, and mount all the females he fancies.

Most sports and athletic games are trials for youths, training to be warriors. In societies where warriors are allowed, they are honored, and boys dream of one day being warriors themselves.

The soldier acts out of duty (or orders) to defend his city’s interests, or advance them. His dream is not to be a soldier, but to be something else – or he takes to soldiering as another man takes to tinkering or tailoring or wood-cutting, as a trade.

In any society where most of the young men are put into the military, they become soldiers. In those societies where only a few of the young men enter the military, they become warriors.

Soldiers think of themselves as common men like any others.

Warriors think of themselves as an elite class, superior to the civilians for whom they feel disdain as weaklings unable to defend themselves, dependent upon the few, the proud, the warrior caste.

In the society where soldiering is the rule, most men out of the military have been in it, and they know it, inside and out. They know its foolishness, its bravado, its insanity, and its glory. They have no great love for the military and have no delusions as to the unsullied perfection of its soldiers; but they have a fondness for it, and some pity for the poor bastards at the bottom rungs of command. For the generals they feel only contempt – the same sarcastic contempt office workers feel for the top levels of management. Like management, generals take all the prizes, do none of the work, suffer none of the risks, and strut about spouting profane boasts in their own arcane lingo.

In the society where soldiering is rare, and hence only warriors fight, civilians know nothing of what goes on during the campaign; they only know what the generals tell them, and thus they believe all the generals’ lies. They worship their warriors, and think they are all moral, unimpeachable, just, right, fearless, unconquerable.

In every warfaring community (by this I mean the community of the military, whether of soldiers or of warriors) all newcomers must undergo a process of hazing. This is something known to fraternal orders of all kinds, at least in masculine society – I will not hazard a guess as to the initiatory procedures among the female societies. Among warrior castes, the hazing tends to be more informal and individual; among soldiers in armies, the hazing is professional, universal, and operates under formal strictures: it is known as basic training or boot camp.

An army of warriors is a collection of individuals, each striving for individual prizes of glory and loot. An army of soldiers is a mass, and must be soldered together into a mass. Basic training is the process whereby the individual citizens are made into that mass.

When the general gives an order to send 500 men into certain death, at issue is the success or failure of the campaign, perhaps the war and the polis itself. Whether any one soldier lives or dies is immaterial – perhaps not entirely immaterial, for the loss of each soldier lessens the total force the army has at its disposal for the next assault or defense – but what matters is the success of the campaign, the assault, the defense. If one out of every three soldiers dies, if the losses must mount so high to reach the hoped-for results of the generals’ plans, then so be it. The price must be paid.

Of course, this is not the outlook of the soldier who will be so immolated. He naturally would rather live. He will live, he will desert, he will flee, rather than get blown to bits.

Only the esprit de corps, the madness of the soldering that basic training has accomplished, will keep him a unit of his command, and not an individual man. Thus it is that the process of basic training is to destroy each recruit’s soul, break him, and remake and rebuild him as the brainwashed soldier, who will obey the order to cast himself into the fire, and who will do anything to preserve the integrity of his platoon.

It is a hallmark of a republic that it musters its armies from its citizens, as soldiers, who take up arms to defend their city, and put them down again when peace is won. It is a hallmark of an empire that it musters its armies from the few, attracting them with promises of loot and glory, exalts them to a false feeling of superiority, and wields these warriors for conquest – the conquest of faroff cities, neighbor cities, and even their fellow-citizens.

When a republic trades in its soldiers for warriors, it cannot stand as a republic for long. It will turn empire, with all the folly and ugliness that term brings.

And we will cheer our warriors, and imagine they are pure, and stalwart; and we will honor our generals, and imagine they know what they are talking about; and we will support our princes when they tell us conquest is defending the homeland.

And we will deserve it richly, when in due course of time, our warriors take up arms against our princes, and put the generals upon thrones, and take their loot from our own treasuries, and rape our sisters and daughters and wives.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, September 15, 2008)

Revolution

Questions on where we go from here

We in the world are facing our greatest challenge ever. Over the next 50 years we will face what Europe faced when Rome fell, and what China faced when the Empires fell – only we will face it all over the globe, and we will face climate change which will feel like the rug pulled out from under our feet. Many of us will die; I’ve seen estimates that world population over this century will shrink from the present 6.5 billion to 1 billion. But maybe ‘only’ three billion people will die…

At the same time, we face a leadership (on just about every level in the United States, and on many levels throughout the world) that is stubbornly refusing to admit that anything needs to change. These are the men who won and wield power under the current state of affairs; they have everything to lose, and it is in their interest to convince themselves, and all the rest of us if we are fools enough to listen to them, that all we need is more of the same actions, behavior, and attitudes that got us into this bind. Yeah, that’s the ticket, all right.

What we need, then, is a revolution.

But when things are this bad, and the people are facing a leadership this powerful, this obstinate, and this ruthless, any challenge to the status quo will be met with guns and brutal repression.

Here’s a question to ponder: Why do revolutionaries think they have to kill anybody?

What’s the purpose of violent revolution?

I suppose that the thinking is that no peaceful change is possible, and since the authorities mean to hold onto power by force, only by force may they be toppled.

But when a violent revolution succeeds, it only places in power a new régime that is based on violence, and therefore only really understands violence. This new régime will therefore maintain itself through violence, and that means it will only be put down, in the event it proves mistaken or corrupt, by more violence … and so it goes, round and round.

Why can’t a revolution refrain from being a revolution at all?

Why can’t a revolution be a movement?

If you intend to build, you can’t start by destroying, however tempting you might find it. Whenever you start out by destroying, you blaze a trail of further destruction, and construction (which is what we really need now) is only that much harder to achieve.

My advice to anybody seriously concerned about the coming catastrophe – as we all ought to be – is to turn your back on your obstinate leaders standing four-square in the way. Just start building your own society, the society as you understand it ought to work now, and through the collapse, and after the collapse.

We need to build a sustainable society in a sustainable world.

If we can manage it, it will be the first time we will have done so – ever.

Forget the ‘noble savage’ mythology.

Think of the future.

Do whatever you can – whatever the obstinate, gun-toting leaders don’t absolutely stop you from doing – do it now with your family, your friends, your neighbors. Study and learn all that you can. Publish what you know and have learned, disseminate it freely and as widely as you can, trade and share with all the others.

We will be small, lonely groups in the great darkness, at first.

This is not a failing, it is the basis of understanding.

Nobody knows what we should do, what is the truly sustainable society. Not yet.

If a million efforts bloom, most will be wrong, all the way. Many will get only a little part of the answer. Others will get a large part of the answer. If we are very lucky, maybe one effort out of the million will understand it all.

Share what you know, and listen to the others with an open heart.

We can all trade up toward that full understanding.

If your leaders block you, think always of being like water against stone. Give way, yield, don’t fight back. Be humble. Be the bending willow, and not the stiff, breaking oak. Leave it to your leaders to be stone and oak. Be you water or willow.

Do whatever you can, be it ever so little. Do whatever is allowed for you to do. Break no laws. Help others who seek the answer. Join in league with them. Raise up the banner.

The violent revolution is the typhoon sweeping over the coast. It smashes, it wrecks, it floods – it passes.

The peaceful, determined movement is the flood rising with the groundwater. It surrounds, envelopes, drowns, engulfs, swallows, devours, rots. It takes its time but there is nothing that can resist it.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, September 13, 2008)

Republicans, Democrats, and Audiences

Insights into talesmanship from a recent study of political psychology

Today online I read an interesting analysis of why people vote the way they do. The particular starting-off point was the question: Why do people vote Republican when it is against their economic interests to do so? And why can’t the Democrats win votes from these people? I recommend the article, which is online, so far, at: http://www.edge.org/discourse/vote_morality.html.

Here in an oversimplified nutshell is the conclusion:

People who prefer the Republican world-view are in need of a simple, black-and-white, good-and-evil reading of the world. The Republican politicians offer such a reading. It is a comfort to be told what to believe, as it spares one the trouble of thinking. Moreover, consideration of subtle distinctions, and the notion that the world is a palette of shades of gray, where there are no ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ can be unsettling, and lead to anxieties. But it is precisely to escape from such anxieties that many people seek shelter in the communal, agreed-upon notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ with simple, easily-understood tools to mete out justice to both.

This conclusion reminded me of something that J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote. I believe it was in his essay, ‘On Fairy-tales’ and the line concerned the frightful deaths, often accompanied by torture, that witches and ogres met at the end of the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Professor Tolkien wrote that whereas parents and other grownups were shocked at the brutality of these endings, the children loved them:

“For children, being innocent, love justice; but we grownups, being sinners, crave mercy.”

Joining these two notions, we derive the general thesis that Republicans are innocent, and seek justice (by which they never mean social or economic justice, but rather the stern and severe punishment of the guilty) – and that Democrats are sinners, and crave mercy (for themselves, and for others as well).

Lay aside any ideas we have of preference for conservative or liberal camps.

Let us go on, then, to explore this as it might pertain to talesmanship and audiences.

We can stretch things and divide ourselves as audiences into two ‘parties’ – the ‘Republican’ and the ‘Democrat’ audiences.

The ‘Republican’ audience seeks justice, assurance that there is good and evil in the world, that good will prevail, and will wreak a frightful punishment upon the evil. This last, I believe is a crucial point: there seems to be (in the political world of today’s America at least) a real desire, even a lust, to relish the pain and suffering of our ‘enemies.’ For this audience, it isn’t enough for the hero and heroine to join together in happiness at tale’s end. But they must see the villain and villainess cast down, tormented, tortured, maimed, and killed – or at least so wholly damaged that there need be never again anything to be feared from such as them.

The ‘Democrat’ audience, on the other hand, is more interested in what we might call soap opera or tales of human drama. The hero and heroine have their flaws, the villain and villainess have their virtues, and in the words of Jean Renoir (I believe it is in Les Regles du Jeu) ‘Everyone has his reasons.’ This audience is, I suspect, less interested in the outcome of the plot, and more interested in the process of moving towards this outcome. Indeed, probably this audience considers any ‘outcome’ as an outdated concept; for them there is no ‘end’ to any tale, merely a finishing-up point dictated by practical considerations.

For the ‘Republican’ audience, the world at tale’s start is in balance and (for the most part) good; then comes a Disturbance, and Evil afflicts the hero; the hero struggles strives and does battle with the Evil that lays behind the Disturbance, until he vanquishes it, casts it down utterly and forever, and resumes the wholesome, healthy balance that prevailed once upon a time – indeed, by tale’s end the hero has won to a greater, higher level of happiness than he had at tale’s start.

But for the ‘Democrat’ audience, the world at tale’s end is fraught with unease, or at least longing. The hero might well be an anti-hero who wants what he ought not have; he might gain what he wanted, and lose what he needed; he might win his heart’s desire only to fine it wasn’t what he wanted after all; the end might be ironic, and will at least be mixed – as mixed as the start. At most, the hero will gain some measure of wisdom, though it may well be bitter-sweet. But the audience will be mostly interested in the state of unbalance, and enjoy the various motives and cross-currents in the events, that subtly shift the balance back and forth.

I offer no praise for either camp here (at least I hope that I don’t). This was more in the nature of an exploration of what these two ‘parties’ of audiences might consist of, if we marry the political psychologists’ ideas with that of Professor Tolkien, and apply the result to a theory of audience and talesmen.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday 9 September 2008)

The Shape of Things to Come

Nothing will save our civilized life except a radical change in how we treat one another and the world

Man’s activities are changing climate across the globe. Global warming will mean more water bound in the air, meaning some areas will be afflicted with wetter, more savage storms, while other areas will go from cornland into grassland; the grassland will turn to scrubland, and scrubland will become desert.

We are entering into the Sixth great Die-Off of species worldwide, scientists tell us. This is the first Die-Off that a single species of Earthbound creatures – man – has caused.

These views are widely known. And yet we do nothing to prevent it as a global society. And many of the most powerful entities – legislators and administrators of the public trust, corporate officers and directors, civic and community leaders – seem committed not only to refusing to prevent catastrophe, but they do whatever they can to block efforts to prevent it. In effect, they are doing what they can to accelerate and worsen the downfall of world civilization.

What can we do?

These are my first thoughts on the problem, basic notions, radical changes. Of course there are many things we can do as individuals and as groups, and these efforts are not in vain. But even the best of these endeavors will only save us from the immediate ruin that looms over us all in the remainder of this century; they do not address the basic problem that got us into the fix. For that, we need deeper and more radical change.

Some 50 years ago, for the first time, scientists put forth the notion that the planet’s natural systems all worked together in a harmonious, interlocked whole. These were the first of the modern environmentalists, the ecologists. James Lovelock in the 1960s came up with the Gaia thesis, the idea that the environment of the planet was a self-healing, self-regulating whole, that worked much like an organism. His fellow scientists at the time mocked Lovelock; in the decades since then, his ideas have become mainstream science, accepted as the basis of the discipline.

In order to work with Gaia (or with Nature, as the 18th century scientists called it) we must treat the Earth as a whole. And we must work with her over time – long periods of time – longer than any other civilization has ever planned or worked before.

To this end, this is what I propose:

• We must govern human society on a global basis wherever any enterprise affects the environment, whether that means land or sea or air.
• We must reverse our former priorities: rather than banning substances and practices that have been proven harmful, we must only allow substances and practices that have been proven to be innocuous.
• We must restore the natural systems that we have destroyed, and learn to live with and within them.
• We must limit human population world wide and within each environmental area.
• We must reduce our contribution of greenhouse gases to zero within a generation – 25 years – and further reduce carbon dioxide concentrations to pre-industrial levels.
• We must restore the oceans and the wetlands.
• We must learn what works and what doesn’t – to this end, we must establish weather monitoring systems worldwide, millions of them, and launch and employ a fleet of satellites to monitor weather and climate on a global, regional, and local levels.
• We must re-order the science of economics and strive not for growing production and ‘wealth,’ but for ‘happiness’ and justice.
• And we must plan ahead in much longer time periods than man has every tried to do before: I would say 1,000 years at a time, with a reappraisal of the thousand-year plan every century.

Achieving all this won’t be easy. Not only will we need to organize our human community on a global basis – which we have never yet managed – but we will also need to organize the community forward in time over great periods, and plan for the entire ecosystem (which we don‘t as yet even understand). Achieving it while preserving the necessary levels of human liberty and individual property and dignity and privacy will be even more difficult.

We can do this.

But I fear that we won’t.

In fact, I expect that we won’t. I expect that anything I write or say will be in vain.

But all the same I must say them and write them – just like everybody else who sees where we are and can step beyond their narrow, traditional viewpoints and see the shape of things to come.

(Composed on keyboard Friday 5 September 2008.)

Idle Thoughts While the Rain Falls

On the Earth but not of it, Bardelys is taken by dreams

Bardelys sat under the dwarf apple tree and watched the cold white raindrops fall. He was pleased to see the mounds of hay and weeds darkening under the trees. He hoped the rain was soaking through the mulch into the earth below and that the worms would rise to the bait.

Bardelys had no faith in his husbandry. Although in Bardelys’ philosophy all men should be farmers just as they should be lovers and citizens and eaters and singers, he knew only too well that all mens’ talents were not equal. And Bardelys celebrated the earth and the things of Earth, and he knew (or felt) far away from her. His own home lay far away in the Lost Land, Eartherea.

Eartherea, Eartherea! How Bardelys longed for Her! He had dreamt of Her again in the Gray Hour that comes with the Gray Wolf in the Night’s last gasp. She had appeared before him in the rich gown of a Renaissance madonna, with strands of pearls in Her pale golden hair. She had smiled and nodded and left him trembling. Cesare Borgia himself would have been shaken at the apparition. Bardelys had sat on the edge of the hammock that served him for a summer bed, his breath rasping in his throat before he could lift his old clay up and draw on his field-work garb. The shirt had been still damp from yesterday’s toil.

The dawn that day had been bright, but before Bardelys had done with his first round of mowing a black-gray cloud crawled across the sky so low Bardelys could have thrown a hard green apple into it. The first of the showers held back at least long enough for him to end the dawn round of his chores.

Now the rain fell hard. The air was cold. White tears of lightning cut the clouds. The old maples showed the gleaming undersides of their leaves, like coy maidens in breathless bawdiness. And Bardelys sighed, and thought on Summer’s end, and wondered how ever could he hope to complete all that he had to do before the Earth died again into sleep.

And he thought, How much easier it all would be, if only the weeds were edible and filling, and maple boughs like potatoes!

On Eartherea they would be. But She only laughed at his foolish dreams. And the tireless Work tapped His foot and waited.

(Composed on pen-top Sunday 27 July 2008)

Willie and Joe vs. Conan

This is about America and how her common man has become a barbarian, and proud of it

Once upon a time, the American soldier was first and foremost a citizen. A private citizen who had his farm and his family or his job or his business to manage, but when his country was threatened, he dutifully, if somewhat reluctantly, took up arms for his government.

He was not a lifer, not a soldier by trade. He took orders from those career soldiers, and he knew that the generals often knew less than the privates, and almost always less than the sergeants. He knew that the army was a model of mess-ups and confusion and bad organization. SNAFU was a term invented for and by the United States military.

And when he got out of the service, when the war was over and he’d done his time, he went back home and took up his farm, his job, his business, and he raised his family again. And he remembered what a cock-up the whole military was. When talk of war arose again, he remembered how wretched it was, ugly and small and demeaning, and he voted to keep out of war unless it was necessary, absolutely necessary, to fight again. He didn’t want to fight again, he hadn’t wanted to fight the first time, and he damn well didn’t want his sons to fight this time, not unless there was no help for it.

Then his government got the fool idea that war was good for business. (Actually, I rather think that it was business that got the idea that war was good for business — these were the businesses that had made a killing on the war, and they had guaranteed profits to be made from their contacts and their insiders in the upper layers of the Purchasing departments of the military, a sure thing, not like the danger and risk of competition in the free and open market.)

That was when the United States of America decided it was the right thing to do, to fight perpetual war eternally, from now until doomsday, against all comers, and if there weren’t any enemies, we’d just have to invent some, and scare the public into voting to make the war industries richer than they already were.

The country started fighting unnecessary wars. Hell, we had to do it, we had to shoot somebody and blow up some bombs and crash some planes, or else how were we going to buy new ammo and bombs and planes from the arms industry? We fought those needless wars far from our own shores, in places most Americans couldn’t even find on a map, with strange names, strange customs and languages, places and cultures we didn’t understand. We were told it was the right thing to do. And we trusted the politicians and the generals who told us these things.

We were rich enough to pay for it, and still have a good life at home, those of us who didn’t have to go over there and die so that the arms industries could boost their quarterly dividends.

But there was a problem with this arrangement, and that was, that the American citizen found he was even more reluctant to go to war and die or get his arm blown off, if the war wasn’t necessary. And none of these wars was necessary. What was worse, the soldiers who were already over there fighting in these wars found out that the people we were ‘fighting for’ didn’t want us to be over there, didn’t want us to be fighting for us, they just wanted us to go home. They wanted peace too.

That was Vietnam, and the draft split the country in two. The old gents who weren’t in any danger of getting their arms blown off, voted to force the young gents, who couldn’t even vote, to go bet their arms blown off. Except for the rich young gents, and the young gents who were connected — they could get out of it by one trick or another.

After Vietnam, and the deserved loss the United States Government won there, the draft was abolished. The draft was abolished, but nobody could call off the Perpetual War, and nobody could tell the various Presidents that they had to obey the law, because by then the President was above the law, unless he decided to abide by it out of the goodness of his heart or some quirk in his nature.

So the American military became ‘all volunteer.’ ‘All volunteer’ means ‘professional,’ and after that there were no more citizen soldiers. They were all professionals. But they were still soldiers.

I have seen news reports from the 1990s, before President George W. Bush declared World War III, the ‘Global War on Terror,’ or in other words ‘USA vs. Everybody Who Won’t Do As We Please.’ In those old reports, there were tales of kids who went to join the military. They did it for college tuition payments, for good pensions, for guaranteed pay. They joined up to get a job, in other words. But when they got back from basic training, in the brief leave they had before getting their first assignments, they found something strange had happened.

They had changed. They weren’t the same any more. They looked on their old pals with new eyes. Their old friends were ‘civilians’ and they, the new recruits, were ‘military.’

They looked down on these ‘civilians.’ ‘Civilians’ were an inferior race, as it were.

And it was with great sadness that these young men spoke. They felt their loss. They grieved that their old friends were shiftless, lazy, undisciplined losers. But they didn’t look down on themselves, these new recruits. Boot camp and their DIs had broken their souls and given them new souls — the souls of warriors.

Recently I saw another report. This was from an Air Force veteran, who went with his son to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. He was appalled at what he found there. The place had changed since he had gone there. For one thing, it was now a religious institution, run by evangelical Christians who had taken over. For another, the recruits at the academy didn’t think of themselves as soldiers anymore. Now they were ‘warriors’ — Christian Warriors.

It broke his heart, but the old veteran took his son home, and was relieved when his son told him he didn’t want to go to the Air Force Academy and follow in his old man’s footsteps any longer.

Something else happened in America in this period. It began at the height of the Vietnam war and grew stronger in the 1970s and 1980s.

It was Robert E. Howard’s chief literary creation, Conan the Barbarian.

Conan was a warrior. No doubt about that! He lived for battle. He was a lover and a drinker and a gamester, but most of all he was a fighter. He captured the hearts of America’s young men. We all wanted to be barbarians. We all wanted to be warriors, big men who swung big … battle-axes.

Robert E. Howard was by most accounts a scrawny kid, whose father terrorized him, who had an unnatural attachment to his mother, who felt he was somehow less than a man, and whose fantasies made Conan come alive as one of the most vivid, remarkable literary creations of the 20th century. Conan was the man that Howard wished he could be.

The warrior was what all us scrawny, lazy, suburban coal-biters wanted to be. The warrior, indeed, is what civilians who have never fought a battle fantasize soldiers are. The warrior’s glorious victories and triumphs is what chicken-hearted hawk civilians fetishize. The warrior is to them a magical, godlike being. The cowards who ‘had other priorities’ (in Vice President Cheney’s words) and evaded by legal tricks the Vietnam war draft, never learned how messed-up the service can be, or how clueless generals can get, or how SNAFU’d the whole damned Army is. And so they glorify ‘the generals’ and ‘our troops’ without even understanding the hell that war is, the hell that the cowards are sending the servicemen and -women into.

Bill Mauldin’s famous creations, Willie and Joe, the typical GIs of World War 2, never thought of themselves as ‘warriors.’ They barely thought of themselves as soldiers, except under duress, for the duration, and let the armistice come sooner rather than later!

If Willie and Joe ever came up against Conan, they’d have rifles, and he’d have a battle-axe and his sword and dagger. It wouldn’t be a fair fight. He’d slaughter them.

Because Willie and Joe wouldn’t try to kill the half-naked guy in a loin cloth, screaming in strange tongues. They’d feel sorry for the lunatic — for just long enough for him to get within arm’s reach, and hack off both their heads.

The young men of 60 years ago sympathized with Willie and Joe. The young men of 20 years ago — and today — dream they are Conan.

We who tell tales of Eartherea, the Other Land where Dreams are Real, where Cimmeria is a place you can sail to in the misty north, we bear some responsibility for the dreams and fantasies and fetishes of young men who read our tales. We deal in dreams, but young men may be forgiven if they in their youth take those dreams for anything approximating reality.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, July 13, 2008)

Sympathy For the Devil

When we deny others their humanity, we run the risk of losing our own

Last night I watched Downfall — a few years ago, there was a documentary interview with a woman who had been a secretary for Hitler for the last 3 years, and was in the bunker with him right to the end. This inspired some filmmakers to make a drama version of it — that is Downfall.

The movie stars Bruno Ganz as Hitler. He was the lead angel in city of angels. Can you imagine him as Hitler? He was good though — astonishingly good. Easily the best Hitler I have ever seen.

I stopped reading the subtitles when he was on screen. I just had to watch him with his movements, his looks — he was great.

But while I was watching it, I became aware of how this war was truly a new stage in war at least in european history (I’m sure it already happened in China thousands of years ago, when everything happened of one kind or another).

In Europe’s past, in war, one nation sees it is going to lose, and it negotiates peace terms with the winner. Maybe money is paid, or territory is lost, or new treaties are signed to the advantage of the winner. The leaders go on ruling their countries.

WW2 was the first ‘total war’ as they call it. Even though in Europe WW2 was fought over economic and territorial disputes, the Nazi leaders saw it as ideological, ‘proof’ that they were superior, when they won. In the end in the bunker (according to Downfall), Hitler couldn’t fathom that he had lost, he kept expecting some miracle to save him from the russians, who were all round berlin and closing in. And Hitler was adamant: No surrender! He killed himself, lots of them killed themselves. The survivors tried to negotiate terms, but (again according to the movie) the Russians insisted on total surrender, even as the US insisted from Japan.

After the war we had the show trials, with new laws invented just to be able to claim it was legitimate to execute or imprison the former leaders.

But what is truly sad is that in the eyes of the US at least, Hitler, the Japanese leaders, all the top Nazis, were no longer human. They were subhuman, monsters, devils.

This way of thinking leads to two results. The first, immediate result, is to remove any scruple in killing the enemy leaders — something that had not been done in European warfare, was indeed equated in Europe with barbarism, something ‘Christians’ were too ‘civilized’ ever to contemplate. Ethically, it was still uncomfortable to simply invent new laws and then hang people because you say they violated laws that didn’t even exist when they did those things; but if those people were inhuman monsters, then there was no ethical objection.

Another immediate result was suspicion of German and Japanese people. What had gone wrong with them, why did they just go along with those monsters, there must be something inhuman about all Germans and Japanese. This, of course is only to repeat the racism that the western powers accused the Nazis and Japanese of.

It would be something else to say, ‘I am so pissed and dismayed that you guys destroyed my country, I am going to go crazy and kill you all!’ That must have been in the hearts of most Russians, after the dreadful losses they had sustained. That is not totally ‘civilized’ but it is human. There is something calculated and hypocritical and wrong about saying, ‘No hard feelings, we are just following the law here, we are all perfectly civilized, and now we will kill you all... Except some we will just put in prison for 20 years... We’ll let you know which is which, soon, just after we go through these circus acts we are calling trials.’

The long-term, second result of calling the Nazis and Japanese militarists ‘monsters’ is that ‘we’ are therefore ‘different’ from ‘them.’ This leaves us in an even worse position: We are unable to imagine that we could ever do anything like that. We are then blind to even the possibility.

So when we get a would-be dictator, and a regime comes into power run by men who have published a manifesto aiming at world domination by us for a century and more, we can’t even see how close this is to our cartoon version of Hitler’s ‘Today Poland, tomorrow, the world!’

We can’t imagine that our troops could commit war crimes like the Japanese and Nazis did.

We can’t imagine that our leaders could commit war crimes like the German and Japanese leaders did.

(And of course we should know all about those war crimes now, since we invented them 60 years ago, and they have been our law ever since! This is totally different from a war victor telling the defeated, ‘Oh by the way, what you did in the war was against these laws that I just made up, so I’m afraid I am going to have to punish you for that.’)

‘We’ are not Nazis. ‘We’ are ‘different.’ ‘We’ would never do any such thing.

This leaves us completely defenseless to guard against it happening to us. So we get our would-be dictator, and we support him just as the Germans supported Hitler.

If only we had acknowledged that the Nazis were human, and that there was nothing so unusual about what they did, and that under the right circumstances we too could follow the very same path... Then we might have wondered, ‘How does anybody end up going down that path, and what keeps one person from going down it when so many others follow it?’

And then we might have been able to teach our children in school, not ‘Germans and Japanese were monsters’ but rather, ‘Beware of thinking you are different, and beware of every leader who would take you into war, and always look on your enemy as a brother-man.’

So when you meet the devil, be on guard against him! — but once you have assured your own safety, look him in the eye, and recognize that he is, after all, your brother. And that in someone else’s eye, you might yourself look a bit satanic…

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, June 25, 2008)

I Me

How leaving commercial publishing changed what I write

In the middle of last year I made up my mind to leave the commercial traditional publishing world behind. This has led me to change what I write. Here’s how.

To start, I must say I was not at the time much in the commercial traditional publishing world. I had sold and published two fantasy novels, years back (actually they were the first parts of one novel, whose end has never been published). Since then I wrote a few more books that were not published, and went on writing other tales that I could never bring myself to finish.

In the meantime I watched what was happening in publishing from afar, and none of it looked healthy or good. And the copyfight began, and the publishing houses were merged and taken over by larger multimedia conglomerates, and the idea of ‘intellectual property’ arose, and the corporations and money-class of financiers moved closer to their goal of dissolving all national governments as viable entities and ruling the world as an interlocking series of corporate masters, with the other 99% of us humans serving as serfs or slaves.

Before the Soviet Union failed, I visited there. I came back by way of Scandinavia. Even after a mere three weeks as a tourist, I felt a great relief in setting foot in Finland and Sweden. It was as though a weight were off my shoulders and I felt free to breathe again.

I feel the same way whenever I move from the world of proprietary, closed software to Gnu and Linux and other free and open computer applications.

I feel the same way whenever I move from those tales now locked up in perpetual copyright, owned not by writers but by corporations, to works in the public domain or under Creative Commons.

I made up my mind to join this movement.

This is why I release all my works under a Creative Commons Share-Alice license. This license gives anyone the go-ahead to adapt, republish, distribute, rework, edit, or translate the tales I tell, so long as they allow others the same freedom with the results.

Oddly, I feel a similar freedom to breathe now that I don’t work with an eye to selling my works to those corporations.

When I wrote with commercial publishing in mind, I strove to keep my tales conventional. I read accounts on how to tell tales the way editors want, and what editors are looking for, and the taboos of modern fiction writing such as ‘show don’t tell.’

Now I write as I please. I work with tales that appeal to me, and I tell them in ways I myself prefer. This has driven me into an odd corner. I have looked to stress my own quirks, and not suppress them.

It has good points and bad.

Among the good, are that I enjoy more what I am doing. My work enriches the world of tales more than if I only aimed at repeating what others said with variations. I used to dislike advertising my tales; this smacked of ‘sales’ and I blushed even to attempt it. But now I can give my works away and this makes all the difference in the world. Now I say, ‘Here’s a story I wrote, you might like it, feel free to try it if you wish.’ Since there is no payment or penalty involved on the reader’s part, this to me feels more like sharing than huckstering. And because the tales I tell reflect me with all my quirks, they approach more what and who I am, and thus have more of an identity.

Among the bad are weaknesses in the tales, that I should stress. The good I need not stress any more than I have already; all I can add to any young talesmen and would-be writers out there is, If you love your freedom, there is no other way to do it.

When I wrote with the fear of Editorial Orthodoxy ever upon me, I felt a keen awareness each time I strayed near the borders of What Was Not Done. Then I had to question myself and argue, I had to justify each such ‘error.’ And I worked to make those passages sound so wonderful in every phrase, that, I prayed, the Editorial High Priests would sigh and let the transgression go by.

This left the work stronger, and better.

I was also aware, even when I kept well within the bounds of What Was To Be Done, of One who would Judge the tale. Be he Agent or Editor, some Professional would squint at my lines, and grumble, and must be satisfied. This gave me a consciousness of an Other whose tastes simply must be met, and this made me see my own lines with other eyes. Even though I had only the vaguest notion of what would please that Other, it still made me redact my words, and go over them again, and catch phrases that were weak, and consider passages that were not strong enough, and I think in many ways the tales got better, and better-told.

Now I don’t have that any more. I have as yet no clear sense of the Audience of Readers, either. I don’t even know if any of my tales, though I spread them widely over all the Earth with more copies than even the largest corporate publishing behemoth would, will even be read.

And thus I am inclined to let things go before, perhaps, they are wholly ripe. I will declare a tale finished complete & done with fewer drafts and less polish. It will be more individual, it may be more enthusiastic, but in some ways it will not be as rounded or as accessible as it would have been had I told it with an eye to please that Professional Other of the Publishing Church.

Therefore I say this too to you, O would-be writer and young talesman: Beware also of your self.

(Composed with pen on paper and on keyboard Friday 28 March 2008)

Art and Cash

The role of the artist today is all about the money

Where We Came From

Over the past 3 days I wrote about how Traditional Society, which man developed over millions of years since before he was what we call man, gave way to a Transitional Society which has been spawning the Modern Society over the past four centuries. Traditional Society formed around kin groups in local areas, and was based on personal relationships. When men created agriculture, these small clans joined (usually along language groups and within a broad geographic region) under a King who served as an over-chief and took taxes to feed his soldiers to guard the kingdom. The King’s palaces drew artisans and gave rise to the first cities. In time the city-men, living by commerce measured in cash money, overthrew and killed the Kings and their landed nobles who were descendants of the King’s war captains.

Thus the Modern World began to grow. It has not yet taken over all of Earth’ some parts of the world are still Traditional Societies, and some parts are still Transitional.

The Artist in the World

In those nations which have become most Modern, men are judged and defined by what they do to make money, and by how much money they make.

This has made a great change for the artists.

In Traditional Society, there were no artists. That is to say, no man defined himself as an artist of any sort — not sculptor nor poet or painter nor talesman. They defined themselves then by their relations — by their parents and grandparents, siblings, children, and extended families. They took part in their clan and household duties of day to day living. The art they made was but a hobby, a bit of adornment to enhance the practical work of their lives.

In Transitional Society, men began to define and judge themselves by classes of the labor they performed: farmers, peasants, warriors, hunters, priests, nobles. Art still was made among the farmers and other peasants as before, for these men lived in social groups much like their traditional ways. But for the first time High Art began to be made by men who called themselves Artists. These artisans worked under the patronage of Kings, priests and other nobles and high officials, and were dependent on these wealthy members of the ruling class for their livelihood.

In Modern Society the artist is a tradesman who freelances or works for hire. The Kings and nobles have been replaced in part by the wealthiest of the ruling money-class acting much like the noble patrons who went before them. But mostly the artist of today works for the true inheritors of the ranks of landed nobles, the ones who run the modern world: the corporations.

Myths of Art Today

Many artists today don’t understand this. They think that the corporations that publish and distribute their art works are mere middle-men. The artists think they are really working for their fans who buy tickets, music, books and the like. But this is not so.

Copyright is often registered in the name of the artist, and the artist looks on this as proof that under the law he owns his art, which makes him superior to the publisher. But this too is not so.

Copyright was created for, and at the behest of, publishers. From time to time in the long history of change in copyright law, as its term has been extended again and yet again, as the punishment for its violation has been made more and more extreme, as it has passed from civil code to criminal code, artists have come forth to speak on behalf of the new extensions of the law. This has given the impression that copyright is a law for the benefit of the artist. But this is not so.

The Artist Today

There are more artists in Modern Society than in Transitional Society. That is, more men are able to earn their bread from their art alone. Almost all of these men are hirelings who work in advertising, and company art departments, and directly for publishing corporations; or else they have formed their own corporations that work on assignment from these larger companies. This is not the sort of life kids think of when they dream of being ‘artists’ as they are growing up. The creativity of these artists is confined (like the talent and skills of all corporate hirelings) to making clever new ways to increase the company’s income — and no more.

What kids (and most adults) think of when they consider the ‘artist’ is a man whose work springs from deep in his heart, that expresses some urge within him, some vision all his own that he longs to share with his fellow men. This is what we think lies at the root of the artist’s soul. Note that ‘money’ does not belong here, and indeed the common view of the ‘artist’ is of a man who scorns money in his search for self-expression, beauty, and truth. And that nothing in our common notion of the artist is fulfilled in the job in the company art department.

There are artists of this idealized kind in Modern Society. There are many of them. The great mass of them, though, do not make their living from their art, but in other ways. Some teach their art, others find jobs as critics of art. Some work in museums or galleries. For many, their art is but a sideline. For many it is but a hobby.

A rare few find fame and fortune and their life stories inspire kids to dream of being artists themselves. This is what they think it is to live as an artist (not to work as one, but to live as one) and in this dream, money does indeed play a starring role. Great wealth is the dream of all of us in Modern Society, for money is the measure of a man today. Wisdom, virtue, excellence in any field — we value them only insofar as they might make us rich. But our day dreams and fantasies all turn on being rich (and famous) and not around being wise, honest, just, or skilled.

And so thoroughly have we come to believe in this ethic of the money-class, that talesmen will write, over and over, that they need copyright laws because they would not, could not write if they were not assured they would be paid. And some seek for copyright to be eternal, not thinking that this would be of benefit only to the publishers; for these artists, it is not enough that their grandchildren should be paid for what their grandparents wrote, but their great-great-great grandchildren should get the money too.

How far we have fallen.

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday-Friday, 20-21 March 2008)

Are We Mutants?

Is the Modern Society fit to live in?

Three Stages of the World

So far we have seen three stages the world of men has passed through.

First was Traditional Society; in this stage men lived together in small groups related by kinship, and had a local point of view. This stage includes all the time of the men-who-came-before modern man. It includes, as far as we can tell, the apes who came before the first of the men-who-came-before modern man, since we find the same social order in the other apes.

The second stage was a Transition to the modern world; in this stage most men lived together still ins mall groups related by blood, but they were ruled by overlords, those who came to be called Kings. The Kings took taxes from the small clans and promised to protect their lands, and most men now thought in terms of the broader territories of the King’s realm. The Kings used their greater wealth to support their armies and also to build palaces, around which true towns and cities grew; these were where larger groups of men lived together who were not related even distantly by blood. Religion likewise grew into hierarchies and larger organizations; a state religion would be endorsed by the King with a High Priest, elaborate temples, under-priests, all supported by the taxes levied on lesser men. This stage was mostly traditional, since almost all men lived yet in the small clans, because many farmers had to work to support their own lives and also pay the taxes that upheld one soldier or priest.

The third stage is Modern Society; in this stage men live as individual consumers and hirelings and bosses of the dominant class. So far the family remains one of the parts of society, but the Corporation or Collective, Consumerism, mass-Religion, and the State undermine the family from all sides. So now the family has mostly shrunk to its basic core: today the family exists, where the Modern Society is most pronounced, only to raise children to young adulthood. Many marriages do not last even long enough to see their children reach nubility; many children are raised by single parents; many children are raised at institution by agencies of the State.

What Next?

I do not think the transitional stage has ended.

I do not think we know as yet what the Modern World will look like once the money-class reduces the local and national governments to merely ceremonial roles, and the interwoven groups of Corporations rule the world openly.

I do not believe the Modern Society to come will be the final stage in the world. Others will no doubt come after it.

Traditional Society grew ‘organically’ if you will. It developed over hundreds of thousands of years, and likely millions of years. It grew by trial and error, blindly, under no master plan or any plan at all. The way each traditional social group is made up is never rigid, it is always fluid, it shifts with the relative strength, will, and wits of its living men.

As a result it seems safe to say that Traditional Society on the whole came to represent the ‘true nature’ of man, if only because those Traditional Societies that tried something ‘un-natural’ failed to survive.

Modern Society began to emerge from the transitional societies only 2,500 years ago, mostly in China as the three great Kingdoms warred with one another, made alliances with the lesser kingdoms, and spawned various Theories of social organization in search of one that would bestow a competitive advantage in warfare. One of the three Kingdoms at last, after centuries of war and rivalry, united most of China and the new Empire came to be.

Most of the world remained Traditional and transitional. Much of the world to this day is Traditional, and in other parts it is transitional. Some states take on the outer mask of Modern Society, but under the mask they remain transitional, and their ‘elected Presidents’ are but Kings with a new title wearing business suits.

Modern Society did not grow out of the trials of many generations of men. To all practical ends, Modern Society as we know it today began less than twenty generations ago. (Only in China is this not true; the layers of government officials in China can trace their start back 100 generations to the founding of the empire of Qin.) Outside China, modern society rests upon new and unproven systems and Theories. In most cases those Theories have been confused with national character, the accidents of history, or the uneven distribution of natural resources, and these chance coincidences have been offered as ‘proof’ that one Theory or another is ‘better’ than the others. (Would for example a Capitalist, money-class, rule-of-law United States of America be as powerful today if its lands were more like Australia?)

Questions

So the first question we must ask ourselves, when we look at the world today and try to forge a path ahead, is this: If traditional society shaped itself to suit the nature of man, then how can the new forms of Modern Society suit the nature of man? They can not.

Are we no longer men?

Are we mutants now?

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday, March 20, 2008)

Common Ground

Some things can’t be owned

(Note: the following is a very brief and rough draft dealing with how we might best manage the common environment and properties we all perfoce must share. The subject is large and would take volumes to cover in any detail. I ask only that you bear with me, and think over the rules and goals I set forth here. See if you think they make sense or not, compared to the way we handle such things today.)

‘Owning’

The notion of private property is on odd one. Today we all accept it as a given and can’t imagine a world without it. Indeed the theory of capitalism and the ‘free market’ has come to dominate the political thinking of governments around the globe ever since the Soviet Union fell in 1989.

Once upon a time, however, the notion of what could be ‘owned’ was very strictly limited. Only the members of the ruling class could be said to properly own anything at all, and they did so largely at their own expense and defense. The members of the lower classes held their own things only at the forbearance and sufferance of the ruling class, whose members might at any time ride up and grab anything a lower class man held as his own — his crops, his animals, his tools, his wife or his child. The lower classes could not even claim to own their own persons, for a member of the ruling class could grab any of them as well, and put them to slavery.

Later the rule of law came, slowly and unevenly, to prevail, and a greater number of citizens gained the right to appeal to higher authorities if something they ‘owned’ was taken, even by the strong and powerful members of the society. And yet even so, if we stood high in the clouds and looked down upon the Earth, we would see only tiny pockets of land that seemed to be ‘owned’ in any sense. There were the cities and towns where surely all the land and buildings were owned, and there were the outlying farm houses and the fields about them, plowed and cleared and sowed with crops and clearly under the sway of some man or other. But these areas were small compared to the great tracts of wilderness, the forests, plains, moors, and high ground, the rivers and lakes, the vast oceans.

What man controlled, and thereby ‘owned’ would seem to be no more than a few scattered islands strewn amid the great tracts of the wild.

The Wild

There in the wild places, any man might go. Since no man claimed it or stood to bar the way, anyone could go into a forest, cut a tree, hunt a stag, gather mushrooms.

Later the strongest of the strong, the kings and emperors whose barons and dukes commanded the warriors and armies so that they could crush all those who fought them, laid claim to all the land, at least in theory. This was not in many cases thought of as ‘ownership’ but rather only that the ruler held sway over all the men and what they could do within vast territories. These territories faded at their ends often enough, into no-man’s land.

But even within the emperor’s lands, there were rights of way. Some kings did claim to ‘own’ all the places of their realms and then they gave these lands to their loyal followers to use, but never to own. But even here there were roads and rights of way on forest paths, packed roads, and waterways, where any man could go.

Kings of Today

Today the emperor and king has fallen to the State, which is said to represent all the citizens of the land. The State has taken over claim to ‘own’ what is held in commons.

But there are some who would be kings within that land, and to own the commons.

The Commons

The ‘commons’ is land that is held by all. Once this referred to common pasturage where any man might graze his cows. But over the past centuries of the rise of capitalism these fields have been taken and claimed to be owned by the strong among us, and those men have made cause with the rulers in the State and had them defend this taking. Under the theory of capitalism and privatization, this taking is held to be in the overall interest of all, since the strong will make more productive use out of the commons they take, and this use, though it profits the strong most of all, will end up profitable to all the citizens as the general standard of wealth rises in the community.

And so now, if we stood in the clouds and looked down on the Earth, what we would see over so much of the lands, is not the tiny islands of ‘owned’ ground in the great sea of common wilderness, but instead we would behold seas of owned and developed land, with only cracks between them like dikes or levees which remain common ground. These last bits of common ground are the roads and alleys that cut between the owned plots and estates.

There are some commons that cannot every be said to be owned without recourse to the old notions of the kings and emperors who simply proclaimed they owned all, and would kill or enslave any man who trespassed upon what the monarchs claimed.

These last commons are:

• the air we all breathe
• the water on and within the ground
• the Earth below the ground itself we walk on
• all that passes inescapably among and between these elements

The Last Shreds of Commons

No man captures and controls the air above his land. The air flows across and around the globe, and every man on Earth shares in this one element. The same can be said of the element of water, as even a small lake or pond seeps into and is fed by the waters under ground, and breathes water into the air even as it drinks rain that falls from the clouds above. Men lay claim to own land, but this ownership cannot be defended to a very great depth, and somewhere far below our feet the ground softens and turns liquid and flows even like the air above and the waters in between. More, water flows through the ground we say we own, and this water connects in aquifers that cannot be shut off from the surrounding lands. And the minerals of the Earth run in seams and veins from one surface plot to another.

As for ‘what passes through’ these elements, I mean in the main the airwaves above, and the groundwater below, as well as other minerals such as oil and gas.

Takings and Eminent Domain

The legal theory of eminent domain goes something like this: for the common good of all citizens, the State may buy land ‘owned’ by individual citizens for a fair price, even though those citizens don’t want to lose their land.

It is important, in the name of justice and to prevent the outright rule of the strong that once prevailed, that these takings be as rare and as limited in scope as possible. And that they only take place for the good of all. To that end, the following conditions must be met:

1. The taking must be a last resort
2. No other good or feasible alternative way should be available that might achieve the proposed common good without recourse to this taking.
3. The land taken must go from private hands only into the hands of the community and never into other private hands
4. The land taken may be managed or run by private persons or corporations, but only under the strict and vigilant oversight of representatives of the community
5. The community must share in the revenues, if any, that these private management companies gain from operating the property.

When land is taken from any citizen, every effort must first be made to avoid it. All other alternatives must be looked into. The state must negotiate with the property owner in all good faith to see if a bargain might be struck so as to avoid the outright forced taking. The land taken must never be handed over to another citizen or private body such as a corporation. It can only go to the state, the representatives of the community who are charged with the general good.

These representatives may choose to operate and maintain the land themselves. But the duty of the state is not to run the society but rather to see that we can run our own affairs justly. We do not elect officials to run waterworks or process sewage. So it seems proper that the representatives should assign or hire private persons or companies to manage the property. There are some rules that must always obtain when this is done.

Simple Rules

The community should always be the legal owner of the land in question and as such should have complete access to all records and decisions by the private persons or companies that are awarded the duty of managing the land. The first choice of the state should be to offer these duties for auction in case anyone thinks they can make a profit in managing the resource in question. Such auctions should have four traits:

1. All bidding should be open and public knowledge
2. There should be a minimum payment in advance to the state
3. The state should share in the revenues of the management of the property, the gross revenues not the profits, and the bidding at auction for these privileges should consist of what percentage of revenues the bidding companies are willing to share with the state
4. The privileges awarded in auction are purchased only for a very limited term, at the end of which a new auction will be held upon revised terms as the representatives of the state learn how better the common good might be served

It is important that the privilege of operating a public good not be held as a private fiefdom, nor even that it be open to the suspicion that this is the case. That’s why the auction should be renewed every three years, or five — certainly fewer than ten. By the same reasoning, the terms of the auction should be reviewed by the representatives of the community when the auction comes up once more to make sure that the resource is being run in the common good, and that the operating entity is upholding the public trust.

When the auction comes up frequently in this way, it can also help the operating company review its own obligations under the terms of the auction. Maybe it bid too much and can’t operate properly under the current terms. But on the whole we should be concerned here in guarding the common good of the community and not the profits of any private company or person.

The Best Way?

I think that the best way to manage these common grounds lies in private hands under the strict oversight of representatives of the public, with all proceedings and dealing being a matter of public record freely available for any citizen to consult and read. The representatives of the state should be in the business of considering in broad terms where the best interests of the citizens lie — not in day to day operation of these properties. It is not the task of the state to operate television networks, radio networks, public sewers or roads or bridges. But the state must make sure that the day to day operation conform to the common good. This means both that the resources serve the common good, and that the citizenry as a whole enjoy the highest practical share of whatever revenues these facilities and privileges afford.

(Composed on keyboard Friday 8 February 2008)

Where the Libertarians Went Wrong

When good ideas go bad … in the extreme

Liberty

Liberty is good. I have always taken that as an axiom, although others have tried to ‘prove’ it by referring to higher values such as Life or God. (The argument by God goes something like this: God gave man free will so that he might choose the good and thus enjoy virtue. Men thus ought to be free to choose good or evil, and urged to choose good. The argument by Life goes something like this: The life of an individual is his highest value, and hat supports life is good, and what kills life is bad. Freedom supports life and slavery of any kind, be it physical, mental, moral, or spiritual, kills life.)

In my own case I guess I liked liberty out of a quirk in my own makeup. Although I can’t prove this, I think many philosophers reach the ‘conclusions’ for their studies based on what their own quirks were from the time they were children. I was always a rebel of a kid. I never liked being told what to do or being forced down any road. When I was a young teen, this quirk ran at its strongest in me, and it happened this was a time of rebirth in the political philosophy of Libertarianism. So I clung to it and worshiped it and came to the conclusion that liberty must be the highest civic good.

Libertarianism

In the late 1960s and early 1970s two social movements came together to underpin the modern libertarian movement. First in the late 1950s Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged. This was a dramatic, Romantic, and hugely popular novel that exalted the individual, and it spoke plainly of the need for the least government possible, a state needed only to guard the liberty of its individual citizens. The novel, and subsequent classes, lectures, and essays put out by Rand and her followers, foremost of them Nathaniel Branden, made for a movement that went far beyond what any novel on its own might make. It was above all strong on college campuses, where the other movement rose up to redeem Libertarianism.

This was a resistance against the Old Guard in society, on many fronts. First was resistance against the Vietnam War and the military draft the war had come to depend on. Young men didn’t like being forced at gunpoint to go around the world to die for something that had nothing to do with their lives or country. Beyond the war, the young defied the racist Old Guard to fight for equality and civil rights, and they rebelled against the moralizing Old Guard to practice freedom of sex and recreational and spiritual drugs, as well as to choose their own fashions and ways of life.

These two movements took in also those of an independent streak, the loners and outcasts who have always stood out in American society, and who had been abandoned by the old men running the Democratic and Republican parties, who between them rule America. The thinkers of the movement looked back to the Enlightenment of the 18th as well as the Anarchists of the 19th century, and sought the best way for all men in the world to be free.

In the end two camps sprang up. There were the minimalists who said that though the State was evil, some level of the State must be maintained, although it ought be the smallest size of State that would uphold order and guard the borders. There were also the anarcho-libertarians, who pointed out that the state is in fact evil, and no state has ever existed that did not seek to enlarge itself in reach and rule. Therefore any State, no matter how small, would end as Leviathan, the totalitarian State. The only path to be free was thus to abolish the State once and for all.

The error that I want to point out in Libertarianism applies as well to both these camps.

One for All or One for Himself?

All the thinkers of the libertarian movement look back to the great minds of the Enlightenment, most of all the English political philosophers.

I want to point out here, by the way, two salient features of those English philosophers: first that they were bourgeois in class and outlook, and second that they were early bourgeois thinkers who took for granted features of their societies that the full onslaught of bourgeois thought and deed would later wipe out. These thinkers also show us how their conclusions match and don’t dispute their own individual quirks, and this includes the quirks of their class.

As bourgeois these men rebelled against the God-granted right of the aristocrat to lie idle and gather rents from fields, and they praised the industrious merchant and proclaimed his right to make goods and trade them. The political-economic child of the rising middle class was capitalism, and the twins of bourgeoisie and capitalism would go on to destroy every facet of traditional thought and life. And this means also traditions that go back in us for millions of years, since long before men were men.

In short, the individual they exalted, and the groups, the collectives, the classes, they dismissed. They did not consider man as a part of a larger social whole. They thought only of the works and lives of individual men. (I can not claim for sure that this is the full thinking of these 18th-century minds. It does represent how their thoughts have been preserved in modern libertarian beliefs.)

But man is not and never has a creature capable of living or thriving as an individual. It takes two adults to create a human child, and once born that child is not for some years able to stand alone. Man has always lived in groups, and if we take our cousins the other apes and primates as a guide, we lived in groups before we became men.

Atoms Molecules & Matter

So we could call the individual the atom of mankind, and the molecule is the mother-child diatom, and the group (call it clan or tribe or village or commune or what have you) is the matter.

The libertarians think only of the atom, the one the individual. They grant him all rights, and few if any to the mother over the child or child over the mother, and none at all to the group.

I will have more to say about all this, but here we can trace the root of where the libertarians went wrong. Their ideas rest on a conception of society that does not reflect reality.

You can see the worst fruit of this mistake in libertarian attitudes toward the commons, most of all the environment.

I will write more on this another day. But for now I leave you with this horrifying outcome of the mistake. Not long ago, on the respected libertarian website http://www.lewrockwell.com I read an essay on the environment by one of the contributors, and in this essay the author defended as proper conduct a man who would dump poison in a river and kill every plant, animal, and person who lived down stream.

(Composed with pen on paper Saturday 02 February 2008)