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.
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)
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)
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)
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:
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)
Where we stand with one another
Let’s consider mankind as composed of four groups:
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)
Looking for peace in troubled times
(from a conversation) –
‘I saw Bon Voyage tonight, a comedy set in 1940 when France fell to Germany. It was very well constructed, one of those scripts where there are a dozen characters all bouncing off one another like pachinko balls. The construction is what’s nice. But it took the side of the resistance, and was against the collaborators. I’m not sure that’s the Tao way.’
‘Why does Tao way matter here? One of the characters is into Taoism? Or are you talking about something else?’
‘Well, there are a couple of famous metaphors in Taoism, I think from Tao Te Ching, but maybe from Chuang-tze. In general Taoists were contrasted to Confucius and his followers. Confucius stressed that every intelligent man should seek to influence the state and join the ruler as advisor, be a local mayor or whatever they called them, join the general administration. Lao-tze, in a famous, and probably apocryphal, story, met with Confucius and derided this approach: The Taoist way was to retreat from the turmoil of the world, tend your own garden and let everyone else tend his.
‘The two famous metaphors are:
These two metaphors exemplify the Taoist social and political courses of action. If your country is conquered, as France was, then the ‘oak tree’ and ‘stone’ types would advocate continued battle, underground resistance, blowing things up, assassinating German officials and French collaborators. The ‘willow’ and ‘water’ types would simply ignore the conquerors as much as possible, as they had ignored their own French leaders. In time, the German Empire would crumble, and the peasants and farmer-philosophers would go on as they always had.
So nothing in the movie mentioned Taoism, but it was holding up the French politicians who formed the Pétain collaborationist government as weak, traitors, double-dealing, spineless and unprincipled; and de gaulle and the French resistance fighters were seen as moral, heroic, doing the right thing, in fighting back.
And I was looking at this from my pacifist Taoist point of view, and questioning both the film’s conventional ideology and my own point of view.
Those French Taoists (if there were any such) would have been standing by as French jews were sent off to be killed. By not fighting, are they not helping the evil?
I don’t know, in other words, just trying to sort out my own philosophy.
I think there is a smart, philosophical Taoist way to withdraw, and a more venal, corrupt politician way of collaborating. The French minister (‘Beaufort’) who stands for the collaborationists is compared to a movie actress, with whom he is sleeping, both spinning all sorts of self-serving lies just to get a piece of the pie and hold onto it, whether it’s from a leftist French government or the German imperialists. Such an approach is very different from, say, the French version of the Taoist, a country priest who advocates non-violence, but who will help any jews hide out from being captured whenever he can.
There is in Chuang-tze a constant note of mockery and laughter at those earnest Confucians who try to change the world. It’s a little cynical, but it might be the wisest course. After all, if everybody just tended his garden, there wouldn’t be any wars.
The problems arise when not everybody tends his gardens, and war does come. What then?
(Composed on keyboard Thursday, September 25, 2008)
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)
Only a false song will ever die
Bardelys wondered what had happened to him.
It was not, he now learned, that the poetry had gone out of life. The moment of stillness that had so frightened him the day before — a stillness that had no parallel in his life, a small death, a hole in the fabric of all — was not, after all, the death of song. It couldn’t be that.
For there was song and poetry all around. You only had to look at the clouds in the sky, or the moon in mist at night, or listen to the crickets humming through the hot darkness, to know that the mysterious something that breathed the breezes out of Eartherea was still there, and would never go away.
But then what had he felt was lost?
It was tales, yes, it was poetry. But it was a different kind of poetry.
The tales we know in our modern world, Bardelys reflected, are a far cry from the tales the first talesmen told. They are far even from the tales of the prophets and myth-makers, the dreamy-eyed singers of Eartherea.
The tales we know are fake.
They have ancestors, and those ancestors have ancestors, and those ancestors have … and if you chase them far enough up their family tree, you will come in the end to true tales, and true song. But the tales we know today are so far removed from that truth that they have lost the threads. Or in more genealogical terms, their bloodline has thinned so, and diluted so, that it is blood only in homeopathic quantities, which is to say it is now all sugar-water and food coloring, and none of blood at all. A few molecules only, perhaps, drift lost in the moles of liquor.
And we who hear those tales, Bardelys realized, do not even know what we have lost. Instead, we have learned the trick of operating in a different key, if you will, of shifting our minds so as to leap with the talesmen into the deep fakery of these seeming-tales. We know the genres, and so we jump right into them without a thought of reality — the kind of reality that the first writer of a mystery, or fantasy, or heroic yarn, had to conjure with mightily.
And now if we today were to take up a tale told in the original vein of the first mystery, the first fantasy, the first tale of adventure or of love, we would find it laughably weak, trite, simple, a tale fit only for children.
Yes, we have grown up, thought Bardelys. We have grown aged and infirm into senility, to the point where we no longer have any idea of how potent it must be, to hear a tale that hooks right into our own lives, that could happen to our neighbor, our child, ourselves.
And it began to gnaw at Bardelys and haunt him:
Was there any way to make and hear a true original tale for him, ever again?
— Or was he lost in his own senility?
(Composed on keyboard Friday, August 15, 2008)
What a hollow thing life is, deprived of magic
Bardelys was afraid.
He could feel it in the pit of his stomach, an ache, a hollow, a sore vacuum that would not dissipate.
It had struck him that day, late in the morning, with the sun shining, the air warm and fresh, and life easy, mild, and benevolent, that he heard no song.
It was a sort of premonition, a vision, an experience of years compressed into a moment.
What would life be like, without a tale to tell or hear?
Life is a grim business. We forget that, we who have lived like princes in our kingdoms of oil and high technology and all the brute strength that our oil-slave did for us, and from which it freed us. But Bardelys knew it was coming, the days without oil, when the ever-willing slave would leave, and the leisure hours would be no more, and in their place toil, and labor, and want. They would come back to haunt us, the taskmasters and grim brutal reality that our grandfathers knew. Our children shall know them, alas. We hoped to leave them a better life, we leave instead a husk of a world from which we have sucked the last of the juice, and squandered it wastefully.
Bardelys too would know those times. Almost all who live will know them.
And without tales to tell and hear, what shelter will we have from that grim and bitter life?
The truth is, that tales will always be there for us. They always have been. Simple tales need no oil, no massive mechanisms of transportation, no high technology.
But for an instant, Bardelys had lost the thread of song that he now realized was always at hand. The thread had snapped, and it felt as though it could never be joined together again. He had lost it and it was gone and he would never hear song again, never know poetry again, never hear another tale. He would lose all vision and echo of Eartherea, and the grim scrabbling after survival, not living but mere survival, would be all that remained to him. It might be all anyone would have.
Ugly, fearful prospect!
And so he knew, at last, that whatever gloss he might put upon it, and whatever higher moral aim he might weld upon his tales to come, the truth of the matter was that tales were for him a shield and shelter from the grim realities of animal existence.
(Composed on keyboard Thursday, August 14, 2008)
Those who make their own reality tell their own lives’ tales
There is a theory of the universe. It has been proposed by physicists but it is more philosophy than science. It is this:
The universe is a hologram that some being or beings has built in order to play in as avatars, like a cosmic videogame.
Let’s explore this notion as a bit of a mind game or thought experiment.
First let’s ask Who might be doing this, and why they would want to do it. The two questions are related, since answering Why gives us insight, and holds implications for the answer to Who.
Whoever could do such a thing, must have powers that far surpass our own. We might say that they must then inhabit a world, a culture, that also goes far beyond our own, except for one thing, the fear that our own culture may be less advanced than other cultures in our past that had less technological prowess. Either way, we can’t presume to understand them and say that their values are our values, their way of thought is our way of thought. But if we say they are utterly alien, we can’t play this mind game very far. So we’ll assume they share some characteristics with us. It is not all that far-fetched to think that even as we create videogame avatars that are more like ourselves than not, these beings would create us ‘in their own image.’ (Though again, that is to reason by analogy.)
Why then do we play such games?
Amusement, for that we are bored.
Education, so that we may learn from other lives.
Punishment, in the form of lessons we wish we didn’t have to take. (This last is theoretical, as I know of no instances of videogames being prescribed as part of a system of punishment.)
But if there is one thing we know about those other selves, that must be true, it is this: that they must be to us like gods.
They are gods, because they have built our world and all the universe that contains it. It may be they modeled this our universe upon their own; it may be they have conjured it up out of some theoretical basis, one of an uncounted number of possible universes and worlds within those universes.
They gave us life, and they work in mysterious ways.
They gave us life, and they mold the patterns of our lives.
They gave us life, and they narrate the tales we live out.
They are, in short, like the talesmen of Earth.
It may be they are One, or Many. It may be that one of them adopts my being, and another adopts yours, through the whole course of our lifetimes. May be your life is only one round or level in their game. Or it may be that we are programmed avatars responding to the constructs and algorithms of the Program of the Machine that has conjured all this up, and the Others visit this our Earth, among countless other worlds, as tourists, and live among us as spirits, unseen, or as though they were flesh and blood as we are, or as though they were the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the insects in the soil. From these vantage-points, whatever they may be, the Others watch us, and take some pleasure and instruction in seeing how we behave in all our little quirks and niceties and meanness.
Now in these guises, the Others are little different from the talesmen of tales we tell, or (if they be but tourists) from the audience of tales we hear. So what if we compare our relationship to the characters in tales, and think ‘up’ to the relationship the Others hold to us?
We would be characters in books, movies, plays, poetry, legends. And the Others would take pleasure in narrating these tales we live in, or they would enjoy observing them.
This then leads us to a moral outlook from the mind game. If you are a character in a tale, what sort of character are you? Are you hero or villain? Do you help to do good or do you oppose the good works of others? And what sort of tale is it you inhabit, is it epic, tragic, humorous, sad, erotic, adventurous? It is High, or is it Low? Is it Noble or is it Mean?
Supposing we have some measure of control over our actions, it then means that we have that much control over ourselves as characters in our tales, and even over what sort of tales our lives exemplify.
But if we look Downward rather than Upward, and consider instead the tales we read (and tell) in this light, and wonder, What if the characters in these tales had some measure of control over their actions? If those characters were like us, or like the avatars we adopt in videogames, what moral responsibility would we owe them? A videogame is confined to its genre, and the rules of the videogames we have built so far have been quite narrow. But there have arisen other games that have much more relaxed rules. Second Life is an example much more analogous to the sort of ‘life is a hologram and videogame’ notion that we are pondering here.
I have never played in Second Life but I understand that those who do will rarely adopt characters like their own. They will change races, sexes, age. And yet in the end, their true hearts tell: they act after all in ways consistent to their characters in real life. (I wonder if that is true? Certainly Second Life is a fantasy, an exploration of Eartherea, and as such offers us all a chance to ace quite otherwise than we normally do. How long, then, could any of us live out a lie that is so thorough — not only to adopt the other sex, but to behave according to an ethos entirely alien to our own? Could we do so throughout the remainder of our life?)
The end of this tale is not for me to tell. It lies rather in each of us to consider this and play it out. The best way would probably to enter into Second Life or some similar game with these thoughts in mind, looking Upward as well as Downward into the game, and thinking that we, as avatars on Earth, have adopted avatars in Second Life.
Go for a year through the game, play it every day for a little while, and act in it as you would wish you could if you were the noblest person on Earth. And then see if you can’t apply some of that nobility to your life here.
And then imagine lending that nobility to the Other that is your True Self, ‘up there.’
Who knows? The Other might himself have an Other whose avatar he is, and that one might be but an avatar himself.
(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, May 27, 2008)
Oral tales will come once more to dominate
For the past 150 years, the middle class in the foremost of the developed nations have seen their lot rise, so that by 1900 they found themselves in a state that only the lower nobility could have enjoyed in pre-industrial times, and by 2000 they lived beyond the means of onetime kings and rajahs. It is true that they had to work, but their work consisted of that which formerly would have been the province of grand viziers, sitting around and making decisions for the rest of the world below them.
This age depended upon science, and the machines science invented and refined. Those machines in turn depended upon abundant and cheap energy. And the lifestyle of these newborn princes and viziers was further enriched by the plunder of the earth.
This age is now reaching its end. The earth’s bounty is near exhaustion, peak oil signals that energy going forward will not be abundant or cheap (unless significant advances are made in alternative forms of energy production — and unless the raw materials needed to manufacture these alternative sources are found and refined on a vast scale).
So we who were born as princes, rajahs and worked as viziers, will see the state of our fortunes recede backward along the same path we saw it rise. We will sink back into the nobility, we will fall farther into the lesser nobility, and then, maybe, we will live like peasants once more.
The peasant does not work for wages. He works for his life, and gets no guarantees. He has no pension, no sick days with pay, no vacation days. There is always something else for him to do.
The peasant has little time for idle amusements such as tales. He has, however, no less a thirst for amusements and tales. For the most part, he cannot find time for them, unless he can enjoy them while doing something else at the same time.
All this occurred to me the other day, as I was repairing a screen door. The task is fairly thoughtless: it involves pressing a flexible spline into a groove along the door frame; the spline holds the screen in place. It was very slow going, partly because I had never done this before, and partly because the replacement screen was a good deal thicker than the screen the door was designed to hold, which meant that there was a lot more work involved in compressing the spline and shoving it down into the channel of the groove.
Seeing this would take some time, I though I would watch a movie in the meanwhile. I soon realized that even though repairing the screen took little enough thought (once I had settled upon a way of working it, and gotten the tools I needed) it still asked that I give it attention both with my hands and my eyes. I couldn’t watch the movie except to look up at it from time to time, which of course slowed down the work on the screen.
Attending a movie’s tale requires both the ears and the eyes. Reading a book requires eyes and hands. Neither of these forms of enjoying a tale will do for a man with a bit of a task on his hands.
There is though one form of tale that a man can attend to while he does work such as peasants must do, and that is the oral tale. So long as the task at hand does not ask him to think deeply or figure things out, a man can do it tolerably quickly (and to his impression a lot faster) even while he hears a tale recounted orally.
Radio trumps television here. Audiobooks trump books that must be read.
The first form tales ever took, in other words, is the form they will take in future.
And so I believe every writer must learn how to tell his tales aloud, ought to compose them with such reading in mind, and ought to give first place to the oral recording of his tales, and let the text fall to second place.
(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, May 6, 2008)
A clue to how the mind works
I have written a few posts on the idea of Free Will and the growing knowledge of what really goes on in the brain when we ‘decide’ to do something. To sum up: there is one part of the brain that signals to another part of the brain to get ready to do something. This second area of the brain is the part that is in charge of organizing the muscles to act: it draws on remembered templates of sequences of muscle actions involved in doing things that we have done before and done often enough so that the pattern has been noted and stored in memory.
When the internal ‘need’ or ‘urge’ or as I like to think of it, ‘pressure’ builds up to a threshold point, the second area of the brain begins to send out the commands to the muscles to start doing the action. Shortly after these commands go out, the part of the brain that we identify with our conscious self, becomes aware that this is going on, and has a very-brief interval of time during which it can block the action. In other words, our ‘free will’ is really only the ability to say ‘no’ to an action urged and initiated in other parts of the brain; it is nothing but a ‘free won’t’ as Ed Yong called it.
All this has been shown by scientific study. There is a great deal more to learn from such studies. Leaps forward in the discipline of mental studies come when instruments are developed that give us views into the brain and what is going on in there while people think and decide and act. As the instruments become more sensitive and more precise, we will gain more knowledge.
There is also another path to learn about all this, which comes from self-study and introspection. This is the path long followed in India and East Asia. The results have been hidden as esoteric lore, for the model of education in those parts has been to withhold knowledge within the tradition of a particular school, and different schools do not share what they know. The results have also been considered poetically, which is not an invalid way to consider the nature of the world (it is the basis of all of what we call philosophy after all) but it uses terms so different from those that science uses in the Western world that it is often difficult to share knowledge between the two camps, even when the schools of the mystics of Asia have been persuaded to open their books and tell what they have learned.
Still, self-study is something each and every one of us can pursue. It is indeed part of being human, part of growing up, and a vital part of moral education.
So in this vein I watch myself at times to see how it is that I decide things. Mostly (out of habit and training, I suppose) I watch myself in the morning, after waking part-way, but before rising. This is a time when my mind is looking inward, and I am more self-aware; my decisions seem to be slowed down, so I can follow them with a bit more ease.
This morning I glimpsed something I never had before. It was a picture of the consequence of not acting. I was feeling a ‘pressure’ to turn over or adjust my position. I have two wisdom teeth that are impacting over the years, on the right side of my jaw. Lying on my right side with my head on the pillow adds pressure to these impacted wisdom teeth, and that hurts a little. More, I have the notion that such pressure increases the impaction (this may or may not be true, but it is the idea that I hold, so it’s valid within my own set of delusions).
So there I was, having turned onto my right side with my head on the pillow. It was resting on my cheek with a slight pressure on those wisdom teeth — not much, just a small pressure. I was aware that I should turn over or rest the upper part of my head on my palm so as to raise my cheek off the pillow, but at the same time I do like to lie on my right side, and the pressure, I deemed (or rather, my rational self, that part of me I identify as ‘me’ deemed) that the pressure was so light that it couldn’t harm me. So I lay there a few moments longer when, all of a sudden, I glimpsed a flash of a picture, or a combination picture and proposed experience, of the me at the dentist’s office having those wisdom teeth pulled, which I fear will be very painful and damaging in other ways, and which I would avoid if I can manage it.
Immediately upon receiving this picture, I rolled over onto my left side. I had to do it; the pressure had passed the threshold point, and I watched myself, and allowed myself, to carry through with the action.
I rolled over onto my left.
What I saw then was that it was the picture that had triggered the action. It was very quick and forceful, very much like flipping a switch or pulling a trigger of a gun.
There is one other aspect to this process that occurred to me as I lay (on my left side) and considered what I had done and how I had decided to do it. It is the notion that the brain works with glucose as its fuel, and when that fuel runs low, the brain has a lowered resistance — a lower ability to say ‘no.’ Saying ‘no’ burns glucose — it works the brain, as a muscle is worked, just as it feels subjectively, and glucose is burned, down, maybe, to a point that we can no longer say ‘no.’ Then we are ‘helpless’ against the urges of those other parts of us, that act on these picture triggers.
If we then carry on with the metaphor of the physical muscle, we should be able to train up our resistance, our ‘will power’ by exercising it. The more we say ‘no’ and the longer we can hold out saying ‘no,’ the stronger our brains will get. Either our ‘will power’ will be trained to work more efficiently using less glucose, or the sources and supplies of glucose will be trained up to greater quantities.
(Here I am using glucose as a sort of shorthand to refer to all those resources we use up in saying ‘no’ — it might be glucose alone, at least glucose is the prime suspect now in the researches I have seen; but it might also be something else entirely, a neurotransmitter for instance, or some electrical activity; it might also be something else working along with glucose. I don’t think we know enough as yet to say with much certainty. But it seems likely, if we accept materialism, that something physical is going on in our brains when we exert ‘will power’ because it feels that way, and we do get ‘tired out’ or intoxicated by liquor, a depressant, so that we have a lower ability to say ‘no.’)
This training should deal both with long term goals to be carried out over many days weeks or months, as well as short term, and immediate actions, such as whether or not to roll over in bed. We should take every opportunity to say ‘no’ or at least to say ‘not yet’ and then lengthen the duration of the period our ‘not yet’ holds true.
The other implication that I gleaned from this experience is the idea that our ‘subconscious selves’ (those parts of ourselves that make decisions and that are not part of the logical, verbal, prefrontal left cortex) do not act illogically, but on another sort of logic, something I’ve long thought of as ‘dream logic.’ The picture of me in the dentist’s chair was proposed as associated with going on lying on my right side — or as the consequence of going on lying on my right side. This is a logical connection.
But it can also work, I imagine, by mere association, for that is the way we train ourselves to so many things. It is the way our base fears spring up, for example, from childhood traumas. We learn that some places or actions immediately gave rise to, or took place alongside, severe pain. The connection might not be logical or even true; it might have been something else in the situation that led to the pain. But we have it in our heads — we have ‘learned’ it — that it was A that led to the pain, and not Aa, that small part of A that was the logical, actual cause.
(Composed on keyboard Saturday, April 26, 2008)
When you list your blessings often enough, you end up happier
There have been several studies done on people in which they were asked to list the things for which they felt grateful. Back in 2003, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough asked students to try this. Each week one group listed five things they were grateful for; a second group listed five things that annoyed them; a third group listed memorable events that had happened to them in the course of the week.
The students who listed things for which they felt grateful in general led ‘better’ lives: they felt more grateful, and more positive about past and future; they were healthier, and exercised more time. But when they filled out standard questionnaires that purport to rate one’s feelings of general happiness, Emmons and McCullough found no different between the three groups.
Emmons and McCullough wondered if maybe ‘once a week’ was not frequent enough. So they put in place another study, in which they had the subjects list the things they felt grateful for, or annoyed them, each day. In this study, sure enough: those who listed the things for which they felt grateful did score ‘happier’ on the test. They also reported getting a good deal more sleep, and feeling more rested when they woke up in the morning.
So the conclusion Emmons and McCullough reach is, that when we remind ourselves of our blessings every day, we can become happier and healthier.
But what then of giving thanks even more often? What if we gave thanks for every good thing as it happened as well as at day’s end? What if we made a practice of looking for those things that are blessings in our lives?
It is an old adage, ‘You get more of what you focus on’ and in this case it ought to bear fruit too.
Look to find those things for which you can give thanks. Give thanks for them whenever you find them, and end your day with a toting-up of the day’s blessings.
(Emmons and McCullough’s study was published as ‘Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life’ in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377-389. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.84.2.377
(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, April 16, 2008)
A new study regarding free will makes it appear the gap between when we choose to do something, and when we think we choose to do it, is even larger than we knew
A new study has been published that explores in a new way, with even greater accuracy, the gap in time between when our brains ‘light up’ to perform an action, and when we actually perform the action, and believe we ‘choose’ to do it.
Previous to this, Benjamin Libet in 1983 conducted experiments that indicated that there is a gap of about half a second between when the ‘supplementary motor area’ of our brains (which is involved in planning physical movements) lights up, and when we first feel the urge to move. But this experiment relied upon people noting the times on a stopwatch and later writing them down; and the difference in time was so short that it was argued, by the many fierce advocates of ‘free will,’ that the experiment could have been in error.
Now a new study has been conducted. John-Dylan Haynes is a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, and the leader of this study, which has been published in Nature Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1038/nn.2112). They looked at when the prefrontal cortex (which is involved in thought and consciousness) lights up, before a person chose to press a button. And they found it ‘lit up’ a full seven seconds before the person pressed the button. They also found that the supplementary motor area lit up five seconds before the person pressed the button. And finally, when they looked at the pattern in which the relevant neurons ‘fired,’ they found they could predict which button would be pressed, with an accuracy of 60%, or somewhat better than random.
Of course the ‘free will diehards’ pushed back against the new study, and again chose to deny it had anything to do with their precious choice. But it seems clear that something else is going on, and it behooves the wise and prudent man to ask what that something is, and look into the matter further.
There is more to tell in this story, but we need better and finer instruments that will let us peer into the brain as it’s working before we can get much farther. Indeed, one of the complaints about this latest study is that the subjects had to be inside fMRI chambers for their brain activity to be seen; ‘maybe being inside the fMRI chamber changes the way their brains work,’ protests one critic, rather foolishly. And yet that is a concern.
Here’s how I take this news, tentatively, with full realisation of all the work that still needs to be done, and all the discoveries yet to come.
At the first impulse, there is a suggestion put forth, somewhere in the brain (maybe in the prefrontal cortex, maybe somewhere else that then feeds into the prefrontal cortex). This suggested action feeds into the prefrontal cortex (or builds up therein) gaining force, or let us say, ‘pressure’ to use a hydraulic metaphor. When this ‘pressure’ has gained enough force, the ‘decision’ is made to go ahead with it (preliminarily) and this is then passed on to the supplementary motor area, where the final ‘plans’ are put in place as to which muscles need to be pulled, in what order, under what force, and so on. Finally, this pattern is fired off and sent to the muscles, where the action is performed.
Now I propose that what is happening is a rising ‘pressure’ to act. The original impetus is beyond me to guess at, and probably varies, but it must have something to do with the environment — in other words, something out there acts as a ‘trigger’ that sets this whole thing in motion. (On the other hand it’s possible that there are interior ‘triggers’ that remain ‘exterior’ to the prefrontal cortex, or whatever it is that we can say is ‘us’ and a direct and needful part of the ‘decision-making process.’ For example, in this latest study, the people were in the fMRI chamber, with the buttons before them, and they were told they could choose to press a button, any button, at any time. Well, this does raise in these people the expectation that they ought to press one of the buttons sometime while they are in there, just to please the experimenters and be good little subjects. So maybe as the moments passed, there was a rising sense of time lapsing during which no button had been pressed. In this case the sense of time is interior to the person who will then ‘choose’ to press one of the buttons.)
As this ‘pressure’ rises, we become aware of it. This is what is crucial to the question of free will as I now see it. Somewhere along the way, we become aware of this ‘choice to act’ although it has been made outside of our conscious awareness; at the point when it does enter our conscious awareness, we can then prevent the action — if we are aware before our muscles carry it out.
Ed Yong coined a clever phrase for this saying-no: free won’t.
Sometimes we act on ‘autopilot’ and are not even aware of what we ‘choose’ to do until after we have done it. Sometimes we are not even aware at all.
I believe we can increase our awareness of what goes on inside us. We can be more aware, earlier, and aware of more subtle patterns and activities. We can also ‘slow down’ our activities, even within the mind or brain, so that we can gain time before we act, to be aware of what our ‘other self’ has chosen, or proposed, to do.
The greater our self-awareness, the earlier we will be aware of the rising ‘pressure’ to act, and the earlier we can say ‘yes, go ahead’ or ‘no I don’t propose to do that.’
‘Deciding in advance’ has another possible benefit: it might make choosing easier. It seems (evidence is there, but still, as all our knowledge of the brain, tentative) that using ‘will-power’ to overcome the natural tendencies we have (or in other words, the ‘pressures’ that build up ‘of themselves’) to act in certain ways, burns glucose in the brain, and as the glucose supplies dwindle, we have less and less ‘will-power’ and consequently, less and less strength to say ‘no’ — and hence our ‘free won’t’ is diminished.
One way to increase self-awareness is to cultivate the practice of being aware. Look at yourself at all times, watch what you do. Try to sense the process that leads to your actions. Grow an awareness of what it feels like. Try to sense the earliest moment when you decide to do something.
I can say from my own experience that I feel ‘impulses to act’ that precede any conscious ‘choice’ to act. These come to me in the form of patterns of action, quite like memories of action. The patterns are like models or templates of sitting down, standing, opening a cabinet to take out a toothbrush, accelerating an automobile from a stop, and so on. I imagine myself doing the series of actions, a moment or so before I do them. This is not conscious in the sense that I think to myself, ‘what would it be like to get up?’ or ‘how will I get up now?’ — instead it just appears ‘out of nowhere’ (that is, beneath and before where I can sense consciously).
Meditation, I think, has increased my sensitivity in this regard quite a bit; but also simply by being aware of this model, I tend to ‘see’ it whenever I look at myself and my actions at the subtlest level. Whenever I look instead at the results I want I lose all sense of this interior process. There are times when we want and need to be looking ‘outward’ more than ‘inward.’
(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, April 15, 2008)
Is the Modern Society fit to live in?
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.
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?)
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)
The birth and growth of modern society
The men who made modern society were the burghers, the bourgeoisie, the merchants, the townsmen, the money-class. When these men killed their kings and emperors and landed noblemen and disowned their priests, they cut off the heads of what remained of traditional society. From that blood the modern world was born.
Traditional society was left to the wild lands, what used to be called the ‘undeveloped world’ but is now called the ‘developing world’ by those whose evident aim is to kill the last traditional societies even in foreign lands these people never visit. Also, traditional society was left at the bottom of the new social order, outside the cities. In the rustic hamlet, the wild, the small town, and the farmers, the last peasants still cling to their traditional life. But this too is threatened; for some reason the money-class seeks to destroy all traditional society everywhere it finds it.
‘For some reason…’ I believe this is not wholly deliberate. Modern society is a sort of virus that blindly seeks growth and expansion at all costs. Where it meets traditional society it must by its own nature infect that traditional society with its own virus, the virus of modern life.
Out of this process a few modern societies come to take over the world, and create the modern world. It is not yet wholly here, but its rise has been steady and has seemed unstoppable.
This is the mechanism to the infection.
Modern society, by overthrowing the established rungs of the ladder of traditional society, struck off the roof above all our heads. Thenceforth all men were king. The stairway to Heaven was (in theory at least, and by common belief) open to all, and each tread was marked with material goods and stacks of money. To climb it, you only had to make and sell more goods, amass more property, and win more money. To make more goods, you need more raw materials, and this means you must venture farther afield away from your City — and into the farm-lands and hunting-grounds and wilderness of traditional society — to get the raw materials. You must set up mining operations, logging operations. To man these operations you must offer enough cash money to lure young workers from their farms and traditional ways of life; these workers then become the core of modern society in the middle of their old traditional society.
The City also swells with growing numbers of mouths to feed, so you can climb the ladder by getting and selling more food. To do this you must introduce ‘modern methods’ to the peasant farmers and get them to grow more crops; again the inducement is cash money and the things money can buy. You must also make the farmers into merchants of the money-class, and this creates another core of modern society in the middle of the old one.
And to sell more of your goods you must expand your market and bring competition to new areas, which include the traditional society. The men in the traditional society do not need your goods, but you have made the goods desirable in order to sell better in the City. The peasants are no better men than the rest of us, and they too will desire these goods, once their desirability is made clear to them.
Finally, the merchant class uses bargaining and contracts to grow their endeavors. It doesn’t know the language of traditional society because it doesn’t share their values except the very basic, fundamental values all men must share as they are men. Therefore the money-class seeks to transform traditional society from the top down so as to be able to deal with it politically as well as economically. The mining operations, the market for goods, the purchase of grain, must all be made sure, and safe from the predation of the local chieftain or tyrant or petty king. ‘The rule of law’ is the rule of Property, a system the money-class depends on in the modern world, a vital feature of modern society, and the merchants seek at all costs to foist this ‘rule of law’ upon all the traditional societies with which they deal. But the very notion of Law as a code written down and adhered to even when it defies justice or fairness, is antithetical to the basis of traditional society, as we have seen.
The money-class began as the tradesmen and craftsmen who supplied the King and his court with luxury goods and needful things made with greater quality than the peasant could afford. Bread is what the peasant eats, but Kings must dine on cake. A peasant gives his love a flower from the field or a pebble from the stream, but a King gives gemstones in rare settings to his wives and whores.
At some point the money-class who made and sold these luxuries to the King felt secure enough in peace that they saw less need for the captains and noble warriors who fought to defend the realm. They also felt strong enough in numbers, that they saw (or thought they saw) that they were themselves the economy, and the King and landed nobles and priests were drags on the growth of the economy when they were not outright leeches upon it. So the merchants rebelled and cut off the Kings’ heads.
Now the money-class had the reins on the economy (which was now based wholly upon money) and the State. Culture would come last to their grip. Indeed it has not wholly come to them even today, even in the most ‘advanced’ or ‘developed’ nations.
The idea of the Nation is itself traditional, an outgrowth of the clan, a sort of super-clan.
The family and bonds of kinship has resisted utter annihilation by the money-class, which prefers that all relations be based on trade and commerce and money.
Religion with its ghosts and demons still rises from time to time, and cries out for a return to the older, traditional ways.
It is ironic that (in America and the United Kingdom at least) the main groups who clamor for the return of traditional values of family, church, and modesty at the same time champion the rights of the money-class. Have they no eyes to see that it is capitalism and the money-class (of which they are themselves members) that have done the most to destroy those traditional values, and that money and tradition are mutual foes?
Politically — having overthrown the kinds and priests who ruled what was left of traditional society — the burghers needed some new system of rule. Because they were revolutionaries and anti-traditionalists, the burghers were not content to let their political establishment grow out of the native soil of the citizens. People in general tend to be conservative and like to go back, after an upheaval, to some semblance of the old ways. So the burghers wanted Theory to supplant natural growth. They sought to Construct, Build, Plan, and Erect in place of nurturing what could rise up organically on its own.
So we see all the theories of Social Contract, Rights of Man, Capitalism, Socialism, Corporatism, Fascism, Communism, Republicanism, Democracy, Racism, Liberalism, and Utopianism, that never were needed before, but now came to win men’s hearts with an almost religious fervor.
We take these things for granted now in the modern world. But they were unheard-of once upon a time, and not very long ago in terms of the lift and growth of Mankind.
The idea that governance needed a Theory from which to refashion it, came first (as far as I can tell) about 2,500 years ago, in the developments in Greece in Europe and China in Asia. The idea was given a new start and great blossoming in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, and it has roared on to new heights since then. It shows no sign of halting. New Theories, and new versions of old Theories, and hybrids of Theories old and new, are raised all the time.
Meanwhile a counter-revolution has risen, a cry to bring back traditional society. This takes two broad forms. The first grows out of religion, and seeks to bring back the priests and the church to power, either complete power and a full retracement to traditional society (or new form of it), or some balance or sharing of power, with the priests given power to block or restrain some of the efforts of members of the money-class.
The second cry against the modern world was born out of Environmentalism (itself as you see yet one more ‘ism’ to join the pack) and idealizes the traditional forms of economy — the small clan-like commune, agriculture, and much of the outer trappings of traditional peasant society — as both a rejection of modern society’s Consumerism and Materialism and an attempt to build a more sustainable way of life before war, pollution, and resource exhaustion combine to form the next great global Die-Off.
(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday, March 19, 2008)
Traditional society described
This begins a series of pieces that will end by looking at the current state of copyright from a historical point of view. The whole argument is a long one, so I have broken it into these posts.
Once upon a time, men lived in traditional society. Many men today still live in traditional society. But when the bourgeoisie of Europe took power from their kings and landed nobles in a series of violent revolutions beginning more than 300 years ago, they began to root out and destroy the last remnants of traditional society wherever they could find it. Capitalism, socialism, communism, and fascism: these are the different forms the money-class has proposed to replace traditional society.
They have all proved ruinous in one way or another.
The question then arises, if man developed traditional society over millions of years to suit his life, and modern society in all its forms is a radical break with traditional society, how can it suit man’s life? Has man changed as much as his society? Are we all now a mutant form of man? Or is modern society doomed to fail?
Traditional society forms itself out of families and clans, not individuals. These clans are bound by kinship extending back no more than a generation or two, and they dwell in a small area of land. They have dwelt in this land for generations. Each child as it grows up never thinks he will ever live anywhere else. The members of the clan have long memories, and they know their land well with all its beasts and plants. They know its weather and its seasons, and they pass down tales that mark the worst of times and how their fathers coped with those crises.
Traditional society has its laws and its justice, and these are not set in rigid, written law-codes that must be obeyed and enforced even when the result of doing so outrages all the living members’ sense of fairness and right. Personality plays a large part of rule and law, because everyone in the clan knows everyone else, and everyone is related to everyone else. Anonymity is impossible.
Traditional society has its religion and superstition and these form a part of its laws and government. The rules the priests ascribe to the spirits have as much legal force as the laws the elders make. Much of the law system springs from the taboos and demands of the spirit world. These dictates of ghosts, demons, and gods are not written down and are understood as broad and general decrees, which are then interpreted by the holy men and women. The ghosts do not speak from eternity but their whims and tempers change in time, as often, maybe, as the weather.
Traditional society lives with Nature in its area, but it is almost as prone to damage and undermine that natural system as we are in modern societies. The old fathers of the past and of today’s traditional societies are yet men, and all men may err from time to time. There are differences, though, between how traditional societies could destroy their habitat and haw modern societies can. First there are fewer men to the square kilometer in traditional society. Second their tools are less powerful, and thus each man can do less damage by himself. Third the traditional society has no sense of human rights, and this means no one man can flout the opinions of his fellow clansmen and hide behind a legal argument that it is his right to poison streams or wells. Fourth there is personal property and local spheres of influence over parts of the land in traditional society, but there is no ‘property’ as we know it in modern society. The land the clan holds and works and guards against other rival clans is held by the clan as a whole, and not by any individual members of the clan. So the leaders of the clan decide what should be done with the land, and as we noted, the leaders can decide what they want, inside only the loose web of their traditions of law and the dictates of ghosts, demons, and gods.
Traditional society has a different sense of time than modern society does. Time for traditional societies does not march on in a line, as we think it does, but instead wheels in a series of loops and circles large and small. The end of all the circles comes back to their beginning. ‘Progress’ is unknown. Man’s life and god’s life are unchanging in the same way that Nature is unchanging. The sin ruses, brightens, wanes and sets, and then it rises once more. Dry seasons follow wet seasons and wet seasons follow dry seasons. There is no thought that the sun will just grow brighter and brighter forever until all the world’s afire. There is no thought that the rains will fall harder and more often until all the world’s aflood. (Contrast that with the bland assertions of political and economic leaders in the modern world that ‘growth’ can continue in exponential curves … forever.) Man in traditional society knows many changes and constant change, but he trusts that the end of all the changes will come back to the beginning. For every rise there is a fall, for every birth there is a death. The way men live today, as the clansman sees it, is the same way men lived a hundred generations ago. This is the sense of time you find in fairy tales — an eternal present with only ‘local’ past and futures that sit atop an unchanging base. (In truth this sense of time is wrong: had traditional societies never changed, the modern world would never have been born. But this sense of time unchanging gives man in traditional society a certain security. ‘All things must pass and go back to whence they came’ is a sentiment that soothes the pain of crises. Man in modern society, beset with constant and escalating change, feels anxious lest he be left behind, and he feels that these changes take place and he has no control over them, no way to shape them or slow them down, let alone stop them.)
In traditional society, the individual man has relations with his kinsmen (in the varying degrees of kinship) and with his friends and fellows (fellow hunters, fellow elders, fellow miners). But he has no relationship to the State as we know it in modern society. (The State, in face, does not exist as something separate from the will of the clan.) He is thus never alone, never separate. He has almost no privacy. He has small choice over his destiny. He knows he is a part of his family, his kin, the wider clan. He has a place there and he can’t even think of what his life might be like if he were ever to lose that place. To be sent in exile and cut off from the clan is about the same thing as to die.
The first change to threaten traditional society was the creation of the City. The City could come to be only when agriculture gave rise to an abundance of food that could be grown by a small number of men in the community, and that could be relied upon from year to year. The warriors who guarded the territory no longer had to fish or hunt or grow food for themselves, and the warriors became captains and kings, and the kings became emperors. The great kings took vast amounts of grain to feed the men to build their palaces, and more grain they gave to metal workers and poets and whores and cooks and armorers and boot-makers and dressmakers and barbers. So cities grew up around the palaces, with tilled fields around the cities, and mountains, grazing range, and forests around the tillage.
Most of the society stayed traditional, but there were tears in the traditional fabric. Young men and girls ran away from home to seek a better life in the City. City life itself put a higher store in men’s trade and commerce than in kinship. The growth of cities where only fields and rivers once had looked up to the sky, broke the old notion of circles in unchanging time. A town became a city, a city grew to a metropolis, a king conquered rival kings and made himself an emperor. Or the king was himself conquered and fell, and his people were enslaved; they lost their king to a foreign overlord, and they did not go back to the life they had before they got the king.
The bourgeoisie was born out of the city. They were themselves craftsmen and related to one another on a cash basis, as money was the measure of commerce. Trade was their way of life and all things they measured by the amount of money the things would fetch. Masters took apprentices, merchants hired employees. Men and women were bought and sold. Poor fathers who in traditional society might have been forced to expose their infants to death in the wild when there lacked enough food to support the family and the infants, now sold their children to rich merchants to live in slavery or learn a trade, one day maybe (if they should prove sharp or ambitious or cunning or unscrupulous enough to manage it) to gain their own freedom and wealth enough to buy slaves and employees of their own.
The City was born soon after the neolithic revolution in agriculture, some ten or twelve thousand years ago. The rise of kingdoms and empires grew slowly after that. In many ways the society remained traditional, but abundant food, money, and the specialization of trades that followed, pushed society down a new path: the path to the modern world.
(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday, March 18, 2008)
Why lazy, do-nothing, busy-body managers are the best kind
On February 4, 2008, I wrote Taste it Next Time about a way to change how you live, and I said I would come back to my own use of it and tell you how it went. The answer to that ties in with other thoughts on the way organizations work, and how to boost the quality of the tales you tell.
The method was simple: just put off, for a brief time, doing what you want to cut back on (or even halt for good). A mere five-minute delay will (in theory) be the first step to mastery over this habit, and a reassertion that you, and not ‘the habit,’ are in control of what you do. When the five minute delay grows easy, you can go on to a delay of half an hour, a full hour, half a day, a week. Sometimes when you pass by that initial impulse and don’t give in, the urge will leave you in the meantime.
One of my habits is that I eat a little bit of food every few minutes. I set the method to cut back on these snacks or drop them.
I did not fare so well.
Indeed, when a few days had gone by, I forgot to put off the satisfaction of the urge. It didn’t even occur to me to try. In short I went back to the habit.
Now from time to time I did remember my resolve, and I began to look at when I snacked, to try to find out when I did it. That might then tell me why I did it. And I found that I would go grab something to eat when one of two things took place:
These two are linked and would come to me both at a time, for when something worried me, I set my brain to try to solve it.
One more thing I found, was that sometimes what worried me lay wholly out of my power to affect. These include global problems outside the reach of any one man. Worrying over such things, I looked for answers to them, and the next day the problems were there in the news once more, and this made me worry, and seek an answer all over again. And so it went.
Now the reason that I ‘forgot’ to put off the snacks was twofold. First, my mind went somewhere else. It went to solve the problem, and was too busy to remember self-mastery. Second, I as a whole was using the snack to cope with the problems, so I had asked myself to go to some trouble when the benefit of doing so would not be right at hand, but the loss of the benefit would come right away.
This put me in mind of the time when I worked as an editor on movies.
The editor has control over the process of how a movie is put together. This means which shots or takes are used out of all those printed, how much of each shot or take to use, and in what order to put the shots or takes for the whole movie. But the editor is not his own boss (unless he wears more hats and is also director and producer). The editor usually works for the director, and the director then must consult with the producers.
As we look higher up this ladder, we find that each higher rung has more say over the final shape of the movie, and does less work to bring that shape into being. The editor cuts the strips of film, marks them, stores them, fetches them, pastes them together (today these are done for the most part with keyboard and mouse on a computer). The director consults with the editor every day, sometimes for the whole day, and views an endless series of different ways each scene could be put together. The producers see the whole movie a dozen or so times and see only these ways the movie could be shaped. The top producers at the distributor might only see the movie in one form at a preview, which then is accepted as the release.
When I was the editor, I used to get annoyed at all the changes my directors wanted, many of them too small to be worth it. ‘Why don’t we try this?’ they’d say, or ‘What about this instead?’ A lot of the time it looked to me like the director was just fishing. He had nothing against the way the scene was working, not really, and only wanted to see a different option.
‘Easy for you to say; you don’t have to do the work,’ I’d grumble, before putting in a few hours to make the change and then show it again.
An odd thing happened.
A lot of the changes were better.
I wouldn’t have made those changes on my own, because the chance a change would make the scene better didn’t seem worth the reality of the time and effort I’d have to spend on it. (Many times changes didn’t work any better, which meant almost as much trouble changing a scene back to the way it was before, though the amount of trouble to make a change at a digital workstation was very small compared to the amount required with rolls of film.) even when a scene nagged me, if it looked as though changes held only a small chance of improving the scene, and the work would surely be onerous, I would tend to settle for ‘good enough’ and accept that the scene was already about as good as it would ever get.
I think as well that this would have been true of the director a lot of the time — if he had been the one who had to spend the time and trouble to effect the change.
This is one of my great lessons from my movie days:
It is good to part the one who calls for change and the one who must carry out the change.
We can apply this principle to most endeavors, to life, and to talesmanship.
In business, the boss should have only the results in mind, and none of the trouble to achieve them.
In life, the coach who governs your actions should have nothing to gain from going easy on you.
In talesmanship, the editor who says at last, ‘It’s done’ should not be the one who does the rewrite, makes the cuts and smoothes them, recasts the order of scenes, renames the characters, or writes the new scenes.
More on this tomorrow.
(Composed with pen on paper Sunday, March 16, 2008)
How to begin to take hold of yourself
Many of us seek to gain the upper hand on ourselves. We find ourselves acting in ways, and doing things we wish we wouldn’t. And yet we don’t seem able to stop it. We come to our senses after the fact and see that we have done it again. And we may not even have known we were doing it at the moment. Or we watch ourselves, helpless to stop it as we do the very thing we swore we wouldn’t.
I am going to give you here a plan to work past this block. This is something I thought up only last night (though I imagine others have dreamed of plans much the same) and I am going to try it myself and will write later on how it goes with me.
Here’s the plan. We are going to start by gaining control over our urges, or yens, or impulses. These things act on us like an itch. The right brain/body wants to scratch the itch. It starts to do so. The left brain, where we seem to think our ‘selves’ live, gives its assent after the fact. (See my earlier post on Unfree Will.) Sometimes our left brain doesn’t even know we are scratching. So let’s say we don’t want to scratch. For whatever reason we think it’s bad to scratch. The heart of the plan, then, is the following sequence:
The word to remember here is ‘TiNT’ or Taste it Next Time. Whatever the urge may be that we wish to stop, we try only to put off the taste of it.
When we succeed in putting off the scratch (or whatever we want to stop doing) we reinforce our success. Praise and congratulate yourself. Feel good in this one small victory. Take note of it, remember it, keep track of every time you win in this way.
But if we fail, and scratch though we try to put it off, we don’t dwell on this but turn a blind eye to it. Victories count for a lot but failures don’t count at all.
What this will do, I hope, is set in our left brain (and through it our right brain/body) that what we do when we itch is — not scratch. If we dwell on our failures without reaching any greater insight into why we fail, all we do is tell ourselves that it’s hopeless and that we can’t do it. When we bear in mind all our successes, and only those successes, we tell ourselves that we surely can do it when we like.
When we choose merely to put off the scratch instead of banning it outright, we reassure our right brain/body, that wants to scratch, that we will let it do so in a little time, or when the next itch comes. This way our right brain/body will not put its back up push back.
This gives us more chance to succeed this one time. And every success feeds our confidence, our assurance, our hope and our belief that we can do it, that we are the masters of ourselves.
Even if you only put off scratching that itch for five minutes — one minute — a few moments — count it as a win, and feel good about it. So far so good, and next time do the same again, and maybe even longer.
The other part of this plan is to begin with small habits only. We don’t try to change a deep-set habit of a lifetime in this way, not at first. But we play with this trick on little things. They may not be obnoxious, they may not be habits we feel we care much about one way or the other. They only need to be habits, things we find ourselves doing all the time.
So we try the method on these small matters, on one habit or two at a time. We focus on these and stick to it. We make it easy on ourselves. We want to get into the game and prove first of all that we can do this. So we give it a few weeks, at least two, but a full month is best. We keep at it until we have re-trained our right brain/bodies, so that our response at the moment when we feel the itch start is rather not to scratch, not yet, than to scratch.
Once we feel wholly at ease, either to scratch or not, we count the whole program for this habit as a win. But for a while I think it’s best if we keep an eye on this itch. The right brain/body can be sly at times. It can seem to yield, and sneak back later.
Each win over one of these small habits should help grow your confidence both in the method and in yourself. When when you feel bolder, more sure of yourself, take on other habits more difficult to break. But climb the ladder slowly.
If you gain mastery over one habit a month, a year from now you will have shed a dozen habits. This is a great deal. Many of us live our whole lives and never do so much; others find help in breaking their habits but they don’t do it on their own. What is more, a year from now you will have a much higher feeling of self-esteem. And that is something no one can grant you but yourself.
Go on from there. Keep it up. So long as you find this method works, use it whenever you want to change the way you act.
(Composed with pen on paper Monday 4 February 2008)