The meaning of life, or soup.

Voltaire said: "If the heavens, despoiled of his august stamp could ever cease to manifest him, if God didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Let the wise proclaim him, and kings fear him."

Well, almost. Today atheists and naturalists proclaim that there is no extrinsic meaning of life: that there is no outside purpose that humans can look to as a guide and explanation for human life. The universe simply does not care.

What many naturalists say seems to be 'we have to find our own meaning in life', or 'we have to create our own sense of purpose', which sounds a bit rubbish. What sounds rubbish is in short the methodological individualism it seems to imply, which is frankly just lazy. Nobody has ever created the meaning for his or her own life, and that's the way it is. It's true that the human body is capable of 'taking the reigns' of life to a certain extent, but what it takes the reigns of is really an issue.

I saw some video by Daniel Dennett quite a while ago where he talks about free will (found it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cSgVgrC-6Y), don't watch it whatever you do it's loooong and rubbish, but basically he takes free will and 'naturalises' moral responsibility to reflect the freedom that we can assume to have as human agents. He examples a brick, which either hits or doesn't hit you based upon your reactions, and your choice of whether to react or to act against your dodging instinct is taken as a choice in the naturalistic sense (i.e. you can choose whether or not to get hit by the brick). Extrapolating this idea allows us to imagine a power of being able to act otherwise which we can then legitimately say permits a sense of moral accountability: a general idea based upon events of social interaction. So even if the universe is determinate, the sphere of control created by the human body and described by language is a real one, and realising this may help us to work with it to increase freedom. Even without the semantics he spends forever drooling over, this seems to work.

Not a terrible argument (and boy does he bore the tits off me - even the audience falls asleep), but what Dennett has achieved in re-casting free will is something many naturalists do – ignore that the nature of moral accountability should be understood as generated by social discourse which does not common-sensically derive from biology. Though I can agree that some relation between people in history can be a genetic cause, the idea that bodies generate moral discourses is such a weird idea that it actually makes the body something incredibly alien, perhaps requiring talk of collective bodies and so on. To think that freedom is straightforward once people clear away the clutter of cosmic thinking is to utterly neglect the fact that human moral instincts are conditioned wrongly and that their common-sense reality is faulty. For sure having a body implies spheres of control, but what are they? What do human beings really do? Is dodging a brick enough for you? Are you now sold on naturalism and baldness?  Maybe you are a brick!

I'd take issue with arguments such as Dennetts by asking: what does taking the reigns of our lives really mean? Here's a video on 'Blue Sky Thinking', which if you live in a cave like me, is a corporate buzz-word:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM0-NeLl-2w

A quote from the woman: “Why is everybody paying attention to: 'is it going to be advertising or is going to be public relations?'. I don't even think that that's the right question to be asking. The question that we have in front of us is – how are we going to build great new exciting programs for our clients that integrate all of these great opportunities, whether its paid media, earned media. And I actually think that that's the question we should be asking. But it's not about 'will the advertisers win, or will the public relations companies win?', it's about 'who at the end of the day is able to integrate all disparate kinds of elements in the most unique and integrated communications programs that also live on in perpetuity that how a stretch of time and look at some long-term measurement balls(!)', it's those kinds of programs that are really going to make the client be glad he spent – he or she spent – so much money on marketing programs.”

I think watching this video demonstrates what I very much needed to say – balls.

The lady in the video is certainly enlarging her spheres of control – or her measurement balls – by offering a genuinely intriguing question in perpetuity that how (no, stop)... well anyway she is certainly having a full-on vision. However, in my view she really isn't.   It is actually a big deal how powerful accepted methods of reasoning seem, and this entirely regardless of whether they are right or wrong, beneficial or harmful, truth telling or deceitful. That fact should not simply pose a challenge, or cause a bit of worry, as if human beings can just 'go with it' and make reasonable adjustments to their lives. It's a harmful, harrowing fact that is worthy of the worst results of superstition, hatred and fear.

You can take for granted that I don't think that the lady in Blue Skies Thinking is advocating a step towards naturalism, even among the colleagues and businesses she made the video for, and even if I take her view to mean advocating creative, intuitive, holistic business models, whilst others are stuck in traditional business values. In fact, check out the delightfulness of the rhetoric in the video description:

“But how do we get to the BIG IDEAS that live in us but aren't necessarily proactively awakened because we are already meeting our goals and it appears we are doing well overall? The tragedy is, those ideas can stay dormant or, even worse, wither and never see the light of day — if we don't pause and allow ourselves to dream.”

Who could disagree with that? Well, perhaps, someone who doesn't think dreaming has very much to do with business, which stifles true dreaming. I commend to you the thought that naturalism is not served by businesswomen becoming adaptable and holistic about their future business strategies. It looks like it is, for sure, but that idea of naturalism is just a reflection of the business image of life, and does not stand in any way meaningfully outside it. You may say 'well, it is a form of life' and I would agree – there is a complete and effective explanation for all aspects of business culture, just as there is for all forms of religious culture and everything else (...perhaps people are so amazed that something is alive that they don't care what it is?). But I would not agree that naturalism has to steer me toward accepted culture by virtue of the fact that describing human life tends to do so. The critical possibilities that Dennett hints at at the end of his lecture, one an image of a fish leaving his bowl to 'make adjustments', leave a lot to be desired, or, rather, everything to be desired. If people are to explain their circumstances naturalistically, without therefore transforming them, what I ask is the point of naturalism? Does an errant brick really testify to the redundancy of the supernatural as an explanation of moral instinct? How has it done that? What has Dennett really done? Nothing!

From what I understand of the 'naturalism is everything you're already thinking' school of naturalists (read: all naturalists you will ever know), the creation of an extrinsic meaning to life doesn't have to be true, it simply has to be effective. And I would say to this that if naturalism simply redescribes the history of social and moral life as the effectiveness and the persistence of power, rather than supernatural commandment (for example), then, well, there's no trick, there's still supernatural commandment. Why is this? Well, there are some ideas and forces that just melt away, that when given a natural explanation simply vanish from human minds and hearts and they are liberated, but what can be treated like this?  And why?  To believe the realists (as I'll call them) is to think that the devil has a name: Rumpelstiltskin! 

But not everything that is terrifying will fly out of the window on a ladle.

Oh and I reckon the meaning of life is a class issue.

Aaaand..... SCENE!

V

An anti-tolstoyan perspective on crime

Tolstoy used to say something to the effect of: 'since the unjust are organised and settled in society, the just must also organise'.  In other words, the networks of the criminal and the corrupt extend through society, and so the good people in society require a similar distribution in order to fight them.  Whether one is talking about organised crime, or the dealings of the political class, the logic is spelled out the same: they are a skilled football team out for their various interests and for the general advancement of evil, and the choice for anyone who cares to stand against them is to grab a vest and face them across the muddy pitch of history.

For reasons philsophical, humanitarian and spiritual, Tolstoy re-enacts an earlier idea.  Martin Luther separated a 'Kingdom of God' off from a 'Kingdom of the World', where God's people are protected and the Devil's people brutalised and marginalised (essentially).  Referring to the establishment's putting down of the peasantry, whose rising up was in large part a result of Luther's own work, Luther was encouraging: 'Kill them as you would a mad dog!'.  The peasants were driven back into submission, but being the master theologian, Luther also asked 'by what authority should this have happened?'.  His solution did not include the political class in his Kingdom of the World, as a potentially corrupt from of power, but rather as the negative enforcers of his Kingdom of God.  While the regional princes weren't pious enough to devote their lives to God, they had enough sense to keep the Devil's minions at bay with a righteous sword.

Tolstoy also treats his two Kingdoms (or football teams, if you will) as a product of Christianity, but they are heavily modified by his individualistic philosophy and his criticisms of the church and the state.  I still equate the two schemes, however, insofar as they apply a salvation-based demarcation between people who are either good or evil.  I'm utterly sure Tolstoy's approach to morality is wrong because of its supernaturalist tendencies, if anything else.  I could also list its anthropocentrism, its need for both God and Man, its primitivism and so on.  So why am I ever talking about Tolstoy?  He ain't a hifalutin' Criminologist or nuffink, anywaay.

In terms of crime, as far as what I want to dribble on about here, it is clear today that there is a 'criminal culture', suggesting a 'criminal world', flopping about out there, it's threatening and ever-present.  The reason I wrote about Tolstoy and Luther is to say that there is an historical and important tendency to treat crime in a certain way.  Is the criminal world a football team?  Well today's learning says 'yes and no', that while there is organised crime and corruption that may require a more radical analysis, the everyday sense of crime is dependent on a number of factors, some of which might be:

1) The definition of crime, legislation describing crimes to be punished, the workings of the criminal justice system, etc.
2) The social condition; unemployment and economic deprivation, real and absolute poverty, housing, education and disenfranchisement of youth, etc.
3) Media glorification of violence and criminal culture, desensitisation to violent acts portrayed or simply shown on TV (there is plenty of the latter).

I might add: 4) The general lack of any future for anyone.  Perhaps this doesn't lead to crime on its own.  In many parts of the 'developing' or 'third' world, there is great poverty and lack of futures but lower crime than you might expect.  The difference may be the premium that western countries put on their social advantages - advantages that have turned out in reality to be considerably less advantageous - and the narrative that crime is an irrational opt-out of these.  Thus lack of any advantageous future leads to a criminally-staged opting-out that satisfies this narrative within westernised countries.  Or something like that.

Sorry.  Digressed.  The three reasons for crime I gave above, that probably everyone's familiar with, is a very mixed bag.  Some are not properly the direct causes of crime, such as TV, whereas some certainly are, such as disenfranchisement.  In fact the Media has often been cited as the cause of the general fear of crime where there shouldn't be any such fear (such as in Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11).  All this notwithstanding, however, I want to say that the tendency to treat crime in a two kingdoms perspective is very much a theme of the three reasons given, in the following ways:

A) The definition of crime and the vacillations of legislation is said by left wing criminologists (can I say crimnogs? sounds a bit racist, but whatever) to be the direct expression of the interests of the ruling elite, that is, if such and such a thing be done, then as a rule their interests will not be met.  Also, the criminal justice system serves ultimately as a punishment, that is, as the physical control and torment of an immoral body separated from good society.

B) A little harder to see, because 'weer all innit togevva int we?', and because not everybody who has a poor or abused background turns to crime (which makes conservatives get all moral about it - as if they needed an excuse - not that they would have believed the idea that there are social causes of crime in the first place), but I'm sure you, dear reader, are on my side in this one (not least because you probably are me) and can perceive a more sinister role for the idea of 'the criminal classes' than mere 'lack of a moral compass' (how I hate that phrase, as if living a good life is anything like orienteering or, more likely and more imperially, privateering).  I'm always reminded of the 'lumpenproletariat', which is a sabotaging section of the working class that acts as mercenaries for the ruling class interest (i.e. that the yobs are lumpens).  Here there's like a domesticated version of Luther; instead of mad dogs we have Pets At Home.  Arf.

C) As for the media, of course newspapers have always been split as to class and political persuasion, and the working class/middle class split in television viewing has never been more apparent (I can only speak for the UK here, however).  Private Eye calls ITV "the yob channel", and has plenty of reason to.  The two kingdoms narrative even plays out in episodes of middle-class tv, which prattles on about new ways to recycle (since the middle class has the good judgment (!) and therefore the interest to do so - very Tolstoy),  or how to reach salvation by building sustainable or environmentally pleasing houses with their spare 2 million (which I never understand how they got it, but I'm supposed to enjoy their decisions regardless).  Naturally the TV of the World cares disproportionately for programming about crime and punishment and petty soap operas ('pettyvision'), whilst the TV of God will bang out political and lifestyle programming to help people to be better citizens (read: ideologically conditioned masses).  And then there's YouTyube.  If I begin by cycling through debates and documentaries, I end up circulating among more of the same, utilising the tabs at the right hand side.  If, for my daughter, I'm looking at a clip of a funny pet, I will eventually end up (once she has left of course) with a list of tabs that quickly degenerates toward Jeremy Kyle and some truly threatening and harrowing clips that I would never open in a million years.  T'internet tends to behave as if there are two buckets, which could be called high and low culture for all but the fact that the subject matter is often acultural (or even anticultural if you see that).  The bucket of God is a bucket preseved and non-degrading, while the bucket of the World is an endless abyss of misery.  There is the future Jerusalem, and there is the arabs.

Ok ok my point is slipping away from me.  Forget the internet.  Here's the real problem, that of the existence and especially the activity of evil.  When the world is weak, the social contract myth seems easy to upset, and the activity of anyone who does otherwise but conform to the conventions and deferments that the social contract demands are in fact evil.  They are the ones that were born in the woods but could never be brought to fit into society, or the mercenary armies that go dangerously without pay or who no longer care to be paid.  That's not to valorise criminals in any way, however, since some crime is the most deviant and repulsive of these, and always some way along the scale leading man to absolute trauma and death.

This evil can be 'boxed out' of variously terrible or brilliant idealised worldviews, such as Luthers or Tolstoy's, but there's a huge flaw.  The flaw consists of the need for a strong will itself, which demands to be even stronger than princes, that wishes to treat the law as a weak man's tool.  The issue that has opened out today is that the two kingdoms view is fine if you're mad - that is, if you have a rigid moral system - but knowledge beyond this, which we have in these postmodern times, makes it impossible, even as it asserts itself as necessary.  The activity of evil is crushing, so the will to fight or to escape needs to be incredibly empowered to meet the challenge.

The best way to affirm the reality of such a will would be to deny the reality of the activity of evil itself, all else is, in one way or another, sooner or later, "evil".

V
 

Fibre and the 99%

Reading through my previous posts, as it has been a while, I find myself wondering about the power plays betwixt New Athiests (NA) and Religious Believers (RB).  Putemtogetherandwotavyougot? NARB, or, anagramatically, BRAN, which sounds wholesome enough, until you read this :

http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/nutrition/healthy-eating/6-health-risks-of-eating-too-much-fiber.html

Yes, atheism has bottom problems.  Although I think Dawkins, for example, is a stalwart and wholesome individual with bags of charm (despite his apparently elitist smarm), he is also a good example of, if you will, intestinal blockage.  Too much of a good education has left Dawkins unable to fully absorb the real force of religion, which is entrely social.

The good professor reminds me again and again that given a basically decent education little humans can grow into basically decent bigger humans capable of making more rational decisions than deciding to believe in an omnipotent and invisible creator that demands that they do what He tells them.  Well, ok, but naive.

As I wrote in an earlier post, there are perennial problems with the extent to which humans can make decisions, when this is conceived as the whimsy of an ahistorical mind.  Now, we can of course accept that the mind is historical and go about making decisions as if it were ahistorical, but that would be wrong.  A more correct way of retaining the idea of a decision would be to heavily and constantly inform it with knowledge about history, about demographics, about cognitive science, and so on.  Would a mind of this type be able to 'unchoose' itself and use its power of decision to assert that it is the incarnation of an immortal soul?  Not credibly.

What I neglected to bang on about was the complete importance of the context in which the decision making mind exists, and how education actually has to struggle and go out of its way to make points against the social dogmas of the status quo.  If you are educated to a high degree in a non-religious school, what are the actual chances that you will choose to relinquish your inadequate ideas if you turned up for your first day as a religious zealot?  There may be a chance, and it does happen that deconversion is a fact of a western sceptical education, but I just wonder how completely rational students, say gifted with GCSEs (yes I'm taking GCSEs as a high standard of education, because anyone who has them in the UK has likely gone through 10 or so years of relentless boredom at school and whatever was meant to be inculcated should have been expected to work within that timeframe), have simply blossomed out of the religious influence of their family and community life because of this now well developed rationality.  (If you still think taking GCSEs as a standard of good education is a cop-out, take whatever you want, college, Uni... I've met zealots at Uni).  I'd wager not as many as might be thought.  Part of my job as an RE teacher is to pander to belief systems and walk on eggshells just in case knowledge upsets some parent.

Some nominal athiests turn to religion.  Fact.  But the amount of children born to religious parents that then become religious themselves of course completely overwhelms this fact.  So it seems even if you grant that a wholesome education occured to an atheist, who was able then to decide not to turn to religion (...), the point still has to be addressed as to how the 99% of religious people keep going and going for generation after generation, granted that you subtract the 1% of atheist conversions that seem to be targeted educationally for letting the side down.  Education just seems to be besides the point, or, better, that the kind of education Prof. Dawkins and others implicitly rely upon for their appeal to reasonableness and the rational appraisal of evidence, just doesn't yet exist.  And it may never.

If I had an intestinal blockage where 99% of the good stuff wasn't being dealt with, I might feel pretty sick.  Metaphorically the question arises - how does one eat a Muslim, or a Christian, or a Jew?  Surely some kind of yoghurt-attitude needs to be developed here to get the atheistic bowels moving, and the world can then finally drop some dung on the dry and hungry Plants of Hope and Adventurousness.

So, for the sake of mixing up some creamy yoghurty goodness and finally getting some human being in your system (what?), lets do:

How to eat Islam

1. Encourage confused young Muslim men to experiment with any homosexual feelings they may have, and provide safe environments for them to do so.

2. Marry a woman from a country where women are terrorized by men and make lots of lovely brown babies that you can lavish with love.  If you have the means, try to set up her whole family with a more progressive lifestyle (i.e. because it's better, and it's loving, to do so.  Don't read tabloids).

3. White Western men to wear Burkhas, to sumbolise suffrage and unity.


Or, of course, we could just have another debate from entrenched positions.  But isn't this more practical, more about actually changing circumstances and mixing things up?  There is a lot that atheism is in fact able to achieve in its own name that could not be achieved otherwise - could someone motivated by a moderate view run around in a Burkha (haven't tried it yet but if I find nothing better to do I might prefer it to a worthy debate)?  Could anyone but an atheist deliberately put the oar in and help out homosexuals, disrespecting the moral culture of one of the world's biggest religions?  There is no secular political will on earth right now that will disregard the balance of power to such an extreme extent as to upset religious communities (read: religious old men), because power is so fragile, and because it depends on the authority of such men even in 'such enlightened times' (*cough*).  Working in the name of atheism sounds good to me.   Atheist weddings please, table 4.

There was an interesting story in Time (I think) which described a group of reform Jews in Israel that run around at night in balaclavas putting up posters of tittilating artworks, to try to discourage the Ultra-Orthodox from moving in and aggressively taking over their community, which apparently is happening a lot there.  Worth a thought or two.

Peace,

V

Charity

"If you watch a TV advert telling you to give food to a starving African child and you actually don't do that, it's not because you're particularly conceited, but because history has granted you little capacity in this area. I'm of the view that the image of the child is actually an extension of the abuse visited on that child - something you're thought to deserve, even though you don't." - Me

Wrote this in my previous post, and perhaps it needed either more explanation or another post.  So here's another post, and its own set of arguments.

In this post I'll try to argue why you shouldn't give to charity.  I don't give to charities.  The rational thing is always of course to see whether your opinion or behaviour is good enough for someone else to accept (you lucky person).  I'll take the third-world-oriented charities as my example.

I'll grant that if I gave money or clothes to a third-world appeal charity that some good would come of it for somebody in need.  That in itself makes it very difficult to disagree with the work of charities.  The logic is simple enough for even me to grasp - put in A, get result B, where A is affordable, and B is good.  You'd think that you'd have to go out of your way as an asshole to find arguments not to follow this simple logic, especially given that we live in a materialistic world in which the only thing you generally stand to lose is the rate of growth of your DVD collection.  So you can either get that Hitchcock DVD that wasn't included in your box set (which you purchased anyway becuase it contained many of the classics you wanted, just not this one), or you can provide fresh water, clothing, or education, to somewhere far away where the people will never enjoy what you take for granted.  And in fact, your materialistic way of life seems to have been responsible for the downfall of third-world countries anyhow - the capitalistic hunger of the post-WWII era furnished you with cheap fuel and technology and a responsibility to the now-starving populations left in its wake.

Yes, I'll stand to go against this.  Fool that I am.  Of course it doesn't matter that I do so here, it's just nice to write stuff down so that next time some Christian do-gooder comes to my door my mind won't go blank while they storm off down the drive bemoaning my self-centred barbarism.  Not that I intend to win any arguments or anything, it just would be nice to see their anger have something to be angry at, because they're not used to resistance.

I'll make a list of presuppositions, or whatever they are, precepts probably:

1 - I am politically unfree

I won't offer any explanation of this - if you can't think like this then, well, what can I say?  Good luck!

2 - I'm not responsible for third-world debt, starvation of resources, lack of food and medicines, infrastructure etc.

This is the same statement that might be made by someone who is right-wing, who says 'I was born in this country with advantages that I will enjoy, and nobody has the right to tell me that I shouldn't have those advantages.  Look, no hands!'.  For me it's a bare fact that I'm not responsible.  I'm also not secondarily resoponsible, through the economical or political system that I live in, due to the last statement - becuase I understand how un-free I am with regard to them.  Of course I can make myself responsible by making all sorts of 'green choices', and there are plenty to tick off, but that's another (but I guess related) issue.  If I want to help someone it's because I understand that they are suffering, and that's really all.

3 - I don't live a blessed existence

Typically, the west sees itself as living in peace and freedom, in which citizens choose careers and live otherwise at leisure.  It sees itself as refined when in fact it is brutish; it sees itself as resourceful when in fact it is wasteful; it sees itself as powerful when in fact we are weak; it sees itself as full of luxury when in fact it is full of tat; it sees itself as happy when in fact it is miserable.  Things is really, really bad, man.  And even in those areas in which I can say that I are living well at the expense of others, I have to know that this makes my life bad also - not because I can't ignore it, but because of its effect on me.  The happy man can never be the oppressor.  What would, for example, an alien species think of my inability to act at the suffering of others?  Surely they will see me as singularly imprisoned within a worthless and a hopeless life, in just a truly miserable condition that may not exist across a million other worlds.  Anything else wouldn't really make sense.  Oh, and privilege?  Shopped in a supermarket recently?  You haven't seen privilege until you've seen the cheap look on that middle-aged hag's face as she finds a broken ready meal in the reduced section, before she ghosts away into the crisps aisle with her underdressed and likely abused daughter.  Certainly you can say that someone who is starving is suffering much more than I am, that's true, but you can't use the image of me on my throne as motivation: it just isn't like that.

And on the subject of crisps, I recall the picture of a woman in the London riots of last year making off with a multipack bag of crisps from her local pound shop.  I mean, if you had unlimited freedom to take whatever you want, what would you take?  Some took TVs and so on, for sure, but she took her crisps.  How bad must you feel spending one measly pound on bland, underfilled junk food, to feel liberated in stealing them?  (it's possible she didn't feel bad buying them ever, but just lacked imagination.  I simply prefer the former, though both serve my argument).

So those three precepts (if that's what they are!) might exasperate you, or leave you wanting more defence of them or whatever, but you can probably see that the usual logic of philanthropic giving may not hold with me here.  First of all, to be a philanthropist you have to be rich, and whilst I might be rich in that I have Pounds and not Roubles in my pockets, I'm not rich in the control and exercise of my faculties, which we all have taken away from us via education and social conditioning (so now, if there was someone reading, I've finally lost you.  Whatever, your mom is fat).  Nobody I know behaves appropriately, nor anyone I've ever heard of outside of books and films.  For example, that Denzil Washington film where he goes nuts trying to get treatment for his ill son, is completely believable and yet doesn't ever happen in real life.  Another example - a nurse killed a man's wife by giving her an epidural incorrectly, and (I think! I hope I'm not pasting together two anecdotes!) he appeared on a news-like programme reading the form letter he got from the hospital and etc.  why didn't he go nuts?  Why don't we go nuts?  If there's a panic about paedophiles (and there should be), just organize and hunt them down!  People sometimes know where a paedo lives - why not off him? For goodness sake.  Are there problems that are less real than they could be because of the media?  Probably, but my point is that for all the times the media is accused of scaremongering or starting a panic, what happens? Nothing!  If only something ever happened, then we could talk.

Secondly, pity is worthless.  When people watch the telly and it's charity night and they go 'oh the poor children' or whatever, they completely misunderstand not only the position of the children, but their own position.  A suffering child deserves respect, not pity, and of course that goes for anyone, and that respect can then give birth to appropriate action (in principle).  But your lack of respect springs from a misunderstanding about your own self - you do not have the power to designate pity, since you suffer the same way I do, you just don't know it.  You need to know that you're not free, that you give to the telly fundraiser as a symptom of unfreedom, not as a hero, nor even as a prelude to more meaningful action (as lifestylers might say).

And this brings me to a larger point.  What you might call a physiological approach to charity - it makes you feel better.  You buy the disease and then you buy the cure.  The disease is guilt and pity and the cure is buying blankets.  Many arguments against charity show how it is a false economy, and others point out that wholesale politico-socio-economic change is necessary to stop untold millions starving to death in the near future.  Both of these arguments are interesting and correct, but need to be utilised somehow rather than simply 'taken note of', which never leads to anything.  They can be useful if I first of all describe how I feel when I spend my extra pounds on 'the poor children' - that basically I feel like I've saved them, or at least as many as is in my power, from further suffering, at least for now.  It's a bit like eating a meal: you feel full for a while, and then when the hunger strikes (or is induced), you have to eat again.  The issue for me is that my stomach is bigger than most people's (physically as well as metaphorically true, I assure you dear reader).  I don't anticipate the good feeling, and it doesn't happen for me, so far as I have knowledge.  And knowledge can't just be un-known: I don't want to feel happy or well about the fact that people are suffering and I can do very little to nothing about it by giving £3 a month or whatever it is.

So the most direct answer I suppose I have for not giving to charity is that I don't want to learn to fool myself into forgetting what a dire situation I'm really in. I feel the urgency of action, and I feel the paralysis that comes from living where and how I do, and something has to give. That tension has to be maintained for the sake of whatever might be posssible. I have to feel terrible about suffering and not swallow the charity pill, because it's something I'm going through, as a suffering person among suffering people, and it's something that has to end.  

The less subjective part of my argument says that as philanthropy is both politically and ethically backward (politically because our economic values create starvation, not what we do with our free cash, and ethically because giving requires the exercise of arbitrary power, which we must not count on), you could say that charity is no solution to the problems of the third-world because it assumes that reasonings that belong in the past (philanthropy is very victorian) can solve problems that require better reasoning in the future. 

So, if that's my argument, very roughly, I'll need to criticise charity.  Usually people are unable to believe in social critique becaue their imagination is only able to conjure up the notion of a barely concealed conspiracy, which they then reject out of hand. In saying that charity isn't a correct view, of course, it's really a world away from conspiracy that I'm speaking of. There is a dedicated, honest and caring photographer, with a caring, honest and dedicated journalist, somewhere out there in the third-world doing a job they believe is about the furthering of human life. They find the suffering, record it, and transmit it to their media bosses, who package it for me to consume, in the hope that I will give. The message, believed in from the source of the transmission to its eventual end, is one of humanitarianism, of damning judgement, and often of desperation.

This notwithstanding, if, when the TV turns itself on (don't they?) and makes me feel afraid for someone's life, there should have to be a very good reason to take that as a positive. By convention we grant this positivity immediately: it's good to show suffering because it's good to give, and the suffering should therefore not be done in silence. I would have it, on the contrary, that for the duration of time in which I'm incapable of acting suitably (that is, acting toward ending poverty etc.), the encounter with immediate suffering is counterproductive - as I've mentioned earlier, it's paralysing, and an extension of violence.

I'll identify therefore the anguish felt at others' suffering not as a motivation for charity but as a symptom of unfreedom.  But given that I am not free to change the situation of third-world countries, what happens to the freedom I believe myself to have when I give charitably? For there isn't a mere logic at work here, but a whole... what you possibly might refer to as a social apparatus or something... that places images of starving and sick children on television. Charity is big business, and my perceived freedom for philanthropic action is a huge part of this machine. That's the real meaning of my charitable giving, and it doesn't line up with ending suffering.

You could interject: perhaps it is the case that I'm not yet free enough, educated enough, to react appropriately to the message. Maybe the right thing to do is to give relief as part of my emotional response to the imagery, to carry on, learn, and someday 'get it'. Even if I'm politically in a cage, as I claim, surely that's something relative, and that there are more of less autonomous, more or less educated and therefore more or less free individuals within society, even if society itself acts to constrain them. On this view, the message of humanitarianism can still fully explain what is going on when starving children shake at the end of my living room.

Yet it isn't that I'm not free enough, like I have 10 beans when really I should have 50, and all I need to do is collect more beans vouchers and send them off before they expire (sorry). If there is a difference between the kind of freedom implied by charitable giving and the kind of freedom constrained to feel bad and capable of ending starvation (as I assert somewhat blankly), then it's not only unhelpful or lacking but simply incorrect to describe the appearance of the emaciated child in the usual way.  'Simply incorrect' probably needs a stronger and longer explication, as it's capable of doing a lot of work. In any case, this difference in kind is probably at the heart of what I'm saying, and why giving to charity isn't just a 'stopgap' measure that should be taken (i.e. to help someone right now) whilst the world sorts itself out (or until I feel capable to sort it out).  The pain of need - pleasure of giving logic detracts from the meaning of suffering, not just from my pocket or my DVD collection.


V

Two versions of atheism

'Being' an atheist is an ambiguous business.   It doesn't literally amount to any philosophy in itself but tends to exclude all philosophy.  Why?  Because the history of the negativity of the atheist still extends itself through the atheists of today.
Everyone knows that an atheist used to mean an immoral person - godless precisely because immoral.  All learning and rationality was unknown to or foolishly ignored by the atheist.  An atheistic 'worldview' would be the worldview of the beast: a mistaken image grounded in bodily hunger, and nothing more.  Not a great start, but the irony is that Christendom made up something impossible - man without God - in order to persecute and ridicule, and it turns out in the end that man without God may be something of a necessity.  'Looks like the foot's on the other hand' etc.  And yes, of course it should be strictly possible to be an atheist in the 16th century or whatever, as it is at least a legitimate worldview, but when I say the 'negativity of the atheist' I'm of course not talking about possible true atheists, I'm talking only about the historical, discursive atheist, the atheist-scapegoat of the past.

Today atheists have two outstanding features (other than feet).  Firstly, they tend to be republican with an emphasis on the development of 'secular society' away from the influence of the power of the traditional churches (in the UK this means decrying the place of the CofE in the House of Lords, for example).  At any rate it is assumed that an atheist is a secularist, and the atheist is held to be a statist - despite such people as, say, communists, anarchists and anarcho-communists,  And yes you can in fact take it for granted, as there are less and less people with alternate political persuasions these days.

A little intersting is the fact that some religious people and some ministers of religion feel that a secular society is the best or most progressive one (!), seemingly despite their instincts for a spiritually united people.  The question of how religions behave amonst others seems important here: whether they wish to gather power for themselves and treat rivals with suspicion, or whether they wish to live alongside other faiths.  They may well also believe that a secular society gives churches more freedom to flourish at their best - in control of the meaning of people's lives rather than control over their administration.  But this doesn't really bear on the argument, or whatever it is I end up writing.

I'll briefly point out the theological basis of the individual assumed to be capable of making fee choices and decisions in the atheists' radical secular democracy.  For a thoroughgoing conception of democracy, all citizens should be informed citizens, and as religion stands in the way of a clear understanding of human action and relationships, it really ought to be educated out.  However social science and philosophy (both of which many people hate because they make points like this one) tell us how the 'decision maker' model of human agency presumes a place for a human mind outside of nature, radically different in kind from the emotions, and a mere spectator to history.  This place is in fact somewhere a 'soul' used to be, and willing an informed citizenry that is able to make positive rational use of its democracy isn't in the end necessarily all that different from a Christian society preoccupying itself with God's will.  Why is this?  Probably because what people think and act like as well as what they're able to or likely to ever learn, is determined by their history, and a rational 'decision maker' belongs to historical lineage just as religious sentiment does, it just seems more likely for historical reasons.  If you watch a TV advert telling you to give food to a starving African child and you actually don't do that, it's not because you're particularly conceited, but because history has granted you little capacity in this area.  I'm of the view that the image of the child is actually an extension of the abuse visited on that child - something you're thought to deserve, even though you don't.  Well, maybe I'll write that one up another time.

If you granted the argument about the historical locality of your  supposedly ahistorical mental faculties, you could perhaps still say that the new democracy would rightly embody the good things about Christians without the bad things (i.e. weird beliefs like the ones that say that there is a God and that God wants us to do stuff).  Even if human beings don't have a mind outside of history or if they're constantly subjected to and compromised by their emotions, they still have to try and behave as if it were true that they made their own decisions.  And you actually have most of educated humanity summarised in that sentence.  Two problems of course - 1) politically, you lose any honest sense of a society freely chosen by the people once you admit that probably most people aren't 'behaving free enough' to effect it (though you could enjoy lots of controls, and that's why there should be suspicion!).  And also, 2) it's ethically demented. 

The second outstanding feature of atheists today (again, despite their feet), which is that you can be sure that they deny the place of God in explaining the universe, given the hard sciences' good form in doing so without reference to miraculous and other unexplainable occurances.  What is somewhat less clear is why the universe needs explaining, other than to get on God's nerves.  Of course, the pursuit of happiness, emancipation from superstition, the growth of the human race toward the stars and away from disease, the 'need' to have knowledge and to enjoy that knowledge (enjoying false knowledge has however been far more popular if you take a quick look at any amount of history), all these could be cited as reasons for explaining the universe, and they're ok, but why do I care?

If you're not a scientist or even particularly good at or knowledgeable about science, why do you care to further scientific understanding?  Given that at some important level you are recognizing that scientific understanding is really for the best, why do you therefore refuse to improve your own understanding (that old paradox - why do you not do good knowing that it is good?)?(?)...?....1+3=?  Now, you could be the kind of monster that watches children starve in Africa and does nothing about it, and therefore the kind of monster that can know that there is understanding and innumerable ways to gain understanding, but chooses to remain ignorant.  My point is that these chains of reasoning are (literally) no basis for your action and not injunctions you should want to entertain.  And of course, with Plato, I'll assert that if you truly knew in what direction lay justice, you'd move toward it in whatever way you could, and you wouldn't be ashamed.

Well, it seems too trivial to mention, since you're all aboard the Good Ship Lollipop and you imagine yourselves to be a part of the moving history of society that will eventually end in perfect democracy (no, really, you do!).  But your hypothetical involvement in understanding the world doesn't really make sense anyway.  You may say that your opinion regarding scientific understanding is a good one and that you're a 'good member of society' in holding to that opinion, and however inept you may be personally to further science yourself, at least you 'support' the idea of furthering science in principle.  Through the magic of democracy, the correct opinion then prevails within the political system itself, and society gradually becomes more science-oriented and less God-oriented.  Arguments against this kind of fantasising could take the form of showing how different it is to be a political subject on a matter such as race, and a supposedly political subject on the matter of science.  If you are a racist, you can vote for 'the racist party' - most countries have at least one, and be politically effective.  But there is no 'science is better than religion' party.  So this argument says that (even if democratic action were effective, which it isn't) unrepresented opinions can have no effect on the status quo.  Similarly, you can simply point out that the reason there isn't a science vs religion politics is that the political class sees this issue as suicidal, and so you can't vote on it.  Erm, so there.

The original issue was why the individual cares about there being scientific explanations for the world, instead of religious ones.  Atheists deny that God is an explanation for important things in their lives.  God doesn't explain what their actions mean and prescribe what they should morally do.  If this isn't a political thesis, then it is a personal one, but what is this personal value that merely denies its opposite?  As I've said, it seems that atheists believe in scientific understanding, and philosophical principles, that they don't further.  Does it not seem that atheists are therefore blind?  It just can't be enough to be an incidental atheist, to truly be an atheist.  On the face of it, anyone is an atheist who denies God, by definition, but in practice it seems that only a small percentage of these 'atheists' carry atheism through to some sort of active dimension (and I mean scientists, as philosophers are shit right now).  The risk, of course, is that an inactive and reactive atheism collapses back into religious practice.

There are problems with republicanism and problems with beliefs about science (not to mention the ignorance at the tenets of the philosophy of science), in these two characteristics of the modern atheist.  Who is to say that the irrational nature of the animalistic atheist of centuries ago doesn't significantly describe today's liberated atheists?

Atheism needs furthering and defending.  Media atheists like the New Atheists are all there is right now, and there needs to be something significantly more in entirely different directions.  The problem with the New Atheists is that they can only inform and entertain, whilst religious people have been willfully ignorant and cruel monsters for as long as human history.

V

Want to live forever? Musings on H+

Transhumanism is an interesting commitment.  If you watch a science documentary on TV or read a popular book on physics, you can feel certain that the knowledge that humanity now possesses places us beyond the medium sized world we live in, both in terms of very large objects like planets and solar systems and in terms of the very small quantum world.  Science has projected us past ourselves in every direction, and the unlimited technological innovation that it promises and the ability to grab and hold the wonders of the universe as a unique and all-encompassing goal is beyond all belief.  This being beyond belief seems an important issue, because we have so many beliefs that cannot possibly follow us into space, if you know what I mean.  And yes, you may point out that God can follow us into space, but firstly I'm not so sure about that and secondly, whatchagonnadowhenthelargestarmsinthewwfgetaholdofyoubrotherwhatchagonnado.

I have noticed that one very interesting consequence of belief in scientific futures is the negating effect those beliefs have on my political beliefs.  In a sense, human politics belongs to the Earth, to its territories and to its distributions of resources and systems of power.  Once I imagine humanity out of orbit, or even radically enhanced here on Earth, it becomes very difficult to conceive of humanity as a struggle in the same ways I think of it today.  Humanity becomes about exploration and space opera endeavours, and not at all about the existence of starving children with preventable diseases.  Does this mean I am fantasising away the political reality that allows for the emergence of hi-tech?

In Star Trek, the military model is wholly preserved to the purpose of exploration.  But what kind of military is that?  It's a colonial military, albeit an ideally purified and detached one (you don't even have to walk through Africa to get to the natives - you just float around amongst some pretty stars and then maybe you'll visit x y z planet.  That's if they're really lucky).  And come to that, why do I, as an engineering technician on a starship, want to work without a break?  Everything on the Enterprise is measured in masses of hours and no-one is ever 'off-shift' except where plots and sub-plots demand it.  They also wear the same boring clothes every day and care a lot about a rigid command structure even though there is absolutely no demand for it.  "I will make Captain one day, but what about all the responsibility, like having to be make the right command decisions at the drop of a hat, and having to be an inspirational influence on all that serve under me?" ...  Why would the future present only this measly short-sighted idea of self-worth?  It's not even good enough for right now here on Earth.  Why should people in the future be so insecure as to require a military hierarchy to regulate a supposedly perfected humanity?  And why does Earl Grey tea make me fascinating if it's ordered hot?  It didn't make me fascinating yesterday when I spilt it on my foot in the kitchen.

The reason noone worries about how holodecks are basically perfected forms of slavery supporting an entirely fascist society is the same reason noone asks themselves mid-documentary why it's hard to think about the tecnologically unlimited future of a Joburg slum-dweller who is likely to die some time this week.  The reason is there are a lot of 'orrible barnacles attached to the idea of science being the social future.  I have hi-tech because I happen to have been born where there is an abundance of hi-tech.  FM2030, in 'Are you a Transhuman', wrote this:
(sorry about the stupid formatting.  It is stupid and I can't seem to change it.  Stupid.)

" Who are the slow-growth poor?

...

The chronically poor in affluent societies. People with obvious talents who remain poor because

of guilt about affluence —deflated self-image—self-denial—pathological dependency on others
—unwillingness to give—or just unintelligent management of personal life.
...

Can one have high values and high-tech on iow [sic] income?

in other words can one be poor and enjoy a progressive life?

Poverty slows down growth: psychological—social—intellectual— economic—political.

Poverty is regressive.

Affluence is progressive."
Typical US attitudes that don't wash.  People aren't poor because they think poor, they're poor because society requires poor people - it requires the unemployed, the endebted, the ones that work like dogs to earn what can never truly support them.  True story - I saw an ad yesterday for 'office junior' and read it because it stated £7000 - £8000 as its salary and suspicion bit into me.  I read the ad and lo and behold the worker is expected to work Monday-Friday 9.00-5.30!  This equates to about £1 an hour, in case you're wondering - a slave's wage.  That ad runs on Reed.co.uk, a mainstream employment website/company.  Power even creates the wasteful and violent for ideological purposes, such as the old industrial working class in the UK now being a violent underclass.  What do you call high value people that rely on creating low value people? You call them the real low value people.

Reading FM2030 on this point reminds me that you don't get a happy-clappy vision of technology only by chance, you can also get it by being a douchebag.  Oh, he also says that being able to be productive anywhere will decrease the pace of our lives and increase our leisure.  How Victorian.  Because technology is the playground of the rich or 'affluent' (that word always sounded to me like a nasal problem), then we all just need to become rich, right?  Because the rich are free?  It seems to me as it seems to many people that the people who can't give up on the old industrial society values are precisely the rich, who require the values and economics of the modern period in order to have their position as a ruling-class.  There is no such thing as the 'self-limiting poor', that's a really very abusive position, not to say that it's plain false too (too).  H+, to be really anything more than an onanism for the would-be ruling-class, has to steer well clear of this kind of stuff.

Leaving politics aside, and because I do want to take transhumanism seriously as a starting set of beliefs, I find there's merely a different hook to the same problem coming from the consideration of science itself.  For H+, being extremely positive about the future, is certainly positivist in its apprehension of the realities of science. True science cannot ignore its environment, it cannot see itself as something above us all purified and powerful and capable of lifting us out of our mess like a saviour.   Faith in science such as H+ demonstrates identifies the potential strengths of technological advancement and ignores the embedded and interconnected natures of those very same technologies.

Crude examples follow.  Sorry.  It's late.

Man landed on the moon at the same time race issues divided the country that sent those astronauts up.  Astronauts report how fragile the Earth looks from space, and how sublimely beautiful and so on, and that's a true, honest, and brutal experience.  The idea of the Earth from space has the power to say to people that some other way is possible in life, but it's not for all that disconnected from their lives, it isn't really sublime.  The Space Program of the US (and I assume the USSR?) came directly out of the rocket science of the Nazis, who shot their rockets at civillian towns and cities.  Nazis exterminated the Jews.  For this they used IBM technology and more besides.  When astronauts look at the Earth from orbit, do they care that the Nazis put them there?

Scientists following pure physics created the atomic bomb, which was then dropped on civillian cities.  I remember reading that Richard Feynman wrote that that other well-known-but-the-name-escapes-me scientist (probably not Oppenheimer) who worked on the Manhattan Project advocated a 'social irresponsibility' for science that Feynman found reasonable.

In all this I'm not saying that science should curtail itself, or see itself as working within the midst of destruction and social chaos and therefore conceptualise its achievements as being less happy.  I'm merely pointing out that a complete conception of the wonders of science would resolve these difficulties as a matter of course, if science is to be seen as legitimately progressive and not crippled. 

I am therefore proposing that it's difficult to think about how society would look in space precisely because even the vast promises of space travel aren't good enough, aren't developed enough in themselves.  In short, if H+ were in fact properly demonstrated it wouldn't be a kooky belief system for short people with wire glasses, it would be an inescapable rewriting our values in the here and now, reshaping society itself by the force of necessity. 

But is there the philosophy to do it?  And is it really an issue for philosophy/philosophy of science?  Is it instead a standard political issue to be decided in standardly political means (that is, without the scientific ideal or the vision of technological progress)?  Is it correct and right that only short people are transhumanists, as an expression of a political category?  Well, I don't like that view given that H+ is really very underdeveloped and probably needs a chance to get going in an honest direction.  Also, I personally cannot afford to be a 'lets get down in the mud' sort of person because it all hurts too much, I think of political positions as fundamentally ignorant or hard-hearted, considering how bad things actually are.  To strive to see life in the midst of the future is to strive to develop what is truly great about humanity right now.

Maybe I'll write again about 'humanity', it's really overused.  In any case, and just to mention one last thing about immortality - yes, H+ cares about extending human life span, perhaps indefinitely.  But this already happens whenever you pick up a stick, or work a machine, you are already part of the great mechanisms of the universe and therefore immortal and irreplaceable.  And that's my two cents.  There's no reason that my body should stop with my organs, or that I simply want to keep my organs alive in spite of the other movements in the universe that I'm a part of.  The death of my personality should be negligible, should I be living within good ethics.   And that's a wibble on death.  For free. Lucky you, feel free to upchuck.

I am a robot.

V

3 reasons you are better than Jesus

A Brethren gave me a leaflet in the street two days ago.  I asked him his denomination (Mormon, Jehova's Witness, are two I recall offering) and was met only with the recurrant phrase "I'm just a simple Christian".  So this 'simple Christian', in his very special suit, got quite a defensive tone and refused to state his denom.  Not a huge deal, and probably more to do with my reply to his opening gambit than anything else ("Do you believe in Jesus?" "What?" "Are you a Christian?" "I'm an RE teacher" "So then you believe in Jesus?" "No").  However a cunning internet search of the publishing house name on the leaflet puts him as an 'Exclusive Brethren'.  From a website I have read I gather that they are possibly a cult.  Their street preaching only exists to maintain their publishing operation as a registered charity, whose main aim is to sell materials to cult members in a compulsory fashion.

Anyway.  I closed my dissatisfying conversation with a loud word to my wife, who was eagerly edging forward away from silly old me and my ways, to the tune of "oh well, we almost had a discussion here".  The splendidly suited simple Christian offered the parting shot "make sure you believe in Jesus".  I laughed at the cringeworthy comment, but the whole thing left me noticing again that religion is still quite a force in people's lives (and I have to try to notice this as I don't have any overtly religious input into my daily life).  So long story short (actually you've just read the long story), I've decided that Jesus wasn't a delightful chap that happened to live in an age that couldn't appreciate him.  I've decided that he was not as delightful as you in fact are, right now!

Here's a hasty list of things I've thunked.

1) Jesus had no internet

Yes, you live in a unique moment in history where human consciousness is sidelining itself in favour of the productive connectedness of the internet. 

The idea of God can be seen to be an empty idea, the most abstract idea, able to ground the ideal qualities of religious moral codes, values and concepts, which we would not be able to positively embody in the practical sense in daily life.  Abraham, for instance, really needed to translate his idea of a monotheistic God into a mark, such as circumcision, for God has to be forced onto a people, they have to be cruelly leashed to Him exclusively for the abstractions of religion to have physical bite.

Jesus invoked the idea of monotheism as the ground of his teachings (i.e. the highest commandments; the three temptations).  Arguably, the meaning of human consciousness for Christianity (and other religions) is one of inculcating spiritual rules and values into the behaviours of the body to produce an appropriately religious life.

You have the opportunity to move life in another direction through the wonders of the intarnat!

The internet is great in that it isn't really abstract in the way a value or a code can be considered ideal.  The connectiveness and productivity of the internet is not only immediately practically productive, and it is so globally without any requirement on your part to discipline your body.  Anyone can utilise the internet for any purpose, and the capacity for practical change and growth is completely extra-human.  Where religion utilises a negative function and seeks to limit behaviours, the internet is wholly positive (well the way we use it it isn't really, but perhaps it is in itself).

The internet gives you an ontological advantage over Jesus!  You exist more than Jesus.  God is not everywhere - you are.

2) Jesus wasn't as interesting as you are

Bit of an open goal here.  I'm fairly sure that Jesus would not understand a movie.  You do, and there are great movies out there.  Such as Twister and Deadly Buddhist Raiders.  If Jesus saw DBR he'd just want to turn the chairs over in the cinema, and he wouldn't be able to do it as they're bolted down in rows.  In short, he'd just look daft with his beard wobbling up and down, spitting religious objections into the popcorn of the person sat behind him.  He'd likely say something like "give to Odeon what belongs to Odeon", and people would say "what? my ticket? my eyes? ... what? ... what?!".

You are able, unlike Jesus, to make friends without having to sleep together in fields.  You wear better clothes, are able to speak lots of languages, you can go to the theatre and learn about the human condition from William Shakespeare.  Jesus never saw or read Shakespeare.  Jesus never went on holiday.  Jesus didn't have a George Foreman grill, nor did he see him fight.

Jesus only really knew what there was to immediately know, everything else was probably just Roman propaganda.  And even though everything you know is propaganda, you might also know something about Physics, and significantly less about camels.

3) you know that the golden rule is false

"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you" is nice and fluffy and all that but you DO IN FACT know that acting correctly often takes specific knowledge, skills, understanding, and the intelligence to acquire and select these appropriately.  You know this because that is your daily life.  And of course, we live in a time of high technology, unlike Jesus, and prize good judgement above all else (well I don't but that's because I live in a cave).  Going back to my first point - how does the golden rule apply to selecting what to search on the internet?  Should I learn about different kinds of ponies or should I check the weather?  What would Jesus do?  Probably not wash, that's what.

Philosophically speaking, the golden rule implies that you can determine what you deserve to happen to you easier than you can determine what deserves to happen to others.  But we don't know ourselves better than we know other people, all our self-knowledge being shared and social.  What's more, we are often wrong about ourselves in vastly exaggerated ways.  Every anecdote puts the lie to the principle of love your neighbour.  Given perfect knowledge then yes, sure, the principle works (and would work automatically actually without having to be said or adhered to).  But unlike Jesus, whose perfect knowledge (vis a vis being God) clearly didn't include the idea that others don't have perfect knowledge, we just simply don't have perfect knowledge.  Or something.

Oh and the only reason Jesus said we have to be nice to each other is because we love God and can deduce this principle from that one.  Not loving God is therefore a bit of a non-starter for trying to adopt this principle, which is really only an appeal to piety, and not actually what you believe it to be at all.  So there.

V

Religion or not, here I blah.

So basically I won't be posting that much here.  Hoped to be pouring my thoughts onto here but it isn't very practical for me, not much time.  Oh well, just every once in a while then!

On the subject of religion, being both an atheist and a teacher of 'religious education' in the UK, I feel that it's easier to get to the bottom of religion than to get to the bottom of religious education, which is a strange beast indeed.  In fact RE is readily understandable in terms of its genesis and dominant interests etc. but it isn't for all that really very possible, which is to say, it's a bit crap.  Now, something in RE is great, and even subversive, but it's also practically exhausting given the countering sway of the subject itself.

Enough of that. 

It is easy to turn into an atheist as long as you possess a critical mind, and as long as you're not caught up within your culture or oppressed by people or circumstances.  You can also be born an atheist, which is good.  But why is being an atheist that much better than being a religous person, or, better, "a person attached to religion"?. This is my own term, which I prefer because you can just be a 'run of the mill' Christian or Muslim or whatever.  If you have no special knowledge or interest in your religion but practice it in a basic way without ever really talking about it, you're attached to religion rather than 'religious', which is more nebulous and includes those odd pious people as well, whom it might be better to think about differently (or not at all?).

So why is it better to cut off your attachment to religion, to your spiritual history and perhaps the deeper part of your thinking (should you ever 'go there' whilst sat on the toilet or sat watching the sea, or going to the toilet in the sea while people sit there watching you)?  Why should you say 'I'm an atheist' like it means something?  Gosh it's even more nebulous than saying 'religious', since the number or religions is finite and atheism doesn't seem to have any conceptual anchor at all!  That said of course the usual way of understanding the phrase 'I'm an atheist' involves platitudes to scientific understanding and the ability of science to explain things without reference to a deity (or an ontology, such as in Buddhism...  Whatever).  But, of course, there are ways of doing and understanding science that are not only not commensurable (yes, that word) with each other but which belong to such different spectra of life (I'm sure aliens must do science) that they can't even come into communication with each other.  Religions really seem to be more narrow than sciences in this regard.  A Catholic and a Buddhist don't seem so far apart when you consider comparing a warehouse of hairdryers and TV sets displaying the intro to 'Catchprase' to the almost interchangably hideous and beautiful machinations of the planet Tarbog VI.

I really quickly go into too much incidental shit.  Does the humour make it better? Who cares.

Erm so you can say 'no' to religion for life-practical reasons.  So you notice how much money your church makes whilst appreciating the way that life ensures that you don't have any other than by endenturing yourself, and you say 'Oh.  What a bunch of fucks'.  Or you use your education to wonder whether miracles can really happen and you say 'Not ever.  Which means not then and certainly not as soon as I'm told'.  You can disbelieve in religion by noticing how your peers think moronic things, driving you either further into theological madness or out of religion entirely, so this can be out of intellectual interest (like, secondary) or out of disgust (primary.  'Wtf, I hope I'm human').  I can be political, so you see how the church opposes something socially progressive and you think 'But that didn't change my mind.  Why not?'. 

Probably all of these and more are legitimate and really fine.  The difficult thing is realising that you're just one person with one life, and that the institutions of religion and those attached to religion perceive advantages for themselves that aren't real, and that puts you in a bit of a quandary.  How are you better off exactly?  Is it just by knowing how to assign money by merit?  How is that 'really important'?  Is it by knowing that the world is too mechanically reliable to rule out the impossible happening?  What is the meaning of that universe? Is it by knowing that at least you're not a moron?  The smart man among morons tries to become King Moron or ... er... no other alternatives?  Is it by riding the tide of history and helping humanity to a future with greater freedom?  I'm (almost) always free to kill myself and I might do it if I have a lot of freedom and an entirely pointless existence.

That annoying pop-philosopher Alain De Botton has written a book recently (if you bothered to read this post you can bother to use google.  I can't do it because I'm writing this stupid thing).  He says, according to an article I read about it (yeah, whatever), that atheists need to look at the advantages that religious people afford themselves and simply not connect these advantages with the core of religion.  So there can be a temple where atheists can gather and share social pleasantries, but they just happen not to pray to God, or kiss the slimy warty hand of the priest that you just happened to get rotated to your community (I hate the word community, still this is a 'community' without a 'commune-ication' with Captain oh so white and hairy i.e. God).

YouTube is seriously better than reading this.  Go there.

I'm reminded by this idea about an atheist temple (and yes, of course, more besides I imagine, but I'm not going to read the stupid book), of that little psychological game you can play where you tell someone to remember words that you call out, or show on flash cards, and you give words associated with 'sweet' but you never say 'sweet', but the person then proceeds to pick it from a list of words at the end.  That's just one way of saying that meanings reinforce each other and one idea calls up another (basic philosophy of mind anyway, I'm sure).  In this way, going to a temple is always religious given that the meaning of a temple is very much settled as a religious building related intimately with the idea of the presence of God and so on.  I wouldn't personally be able to walk into a temple without to some degree being affected by the idea of God.  And that's not great when you want to cut him out of your life.  I actually IRL happened to visited no temples today, so this was a better day without God than De Botton's idea of an atheistic future!  (and it was free too).

So the idea of being an atheist can't be (I'm generalising ridiculously much but who gives a damn) supported by appropriation of religious apparatus, such as churches or chanting or impractical but expressive clothing, just because those are religious things.  In order for a 'change' to occur where temples aren't where God lives, or where chanting doesn't conjure up religious sentiment, or wearing a sequined apron doesn't make you feel like a wizard, requires more than a 'just do it' attitude.  It likely isn't impossible, but it still can't be done, as you would have to change so much as to have already undone religion before giving any fluffy community-minded positive meanings.  Making an atheist cathedral would be pretty funny, but its use would be, well, along those lines, and used for specific things, such as sticking it to the man or whatever.  That's not without its advantages, but it's not of De Botton's logic.

So I've spent too much time writing about baldy and forgotton that I wanted to say what is so great about being an atheist, or rather what could be so great about it from one perspective.  So far I talked about reasons to be an atheist from a kind of set of limited perspectives that rely on a sort of common and limited reasoning.  For me I don't think I'm an atheist for those reasons, as I'm capable of being more of a fantasist than all that and could probably bear most of the incidentally or methodlogically bad things about religion as long as I continued to feel a certain way about the universe and my own existence.  I might well have been able to bear racism should my social awareness have been different, and so on, so that perceived racism wouldn't have been a barrier to faith.  I remember calling the Hindu family at the estate shop the 'pakis' at the 'paki shop' when I was about 7, as other children used that word - my parents didn't but that hardly mattered.  I was taught to hate racism first at school and that was actually a pretty good enlargening of my consciousness.  If I'd continued to be racist into adult life I could have, as so many people do, paid lip service to caring about racial equality whilst harbouring deep suspicion of 'the darkies' or whatever. 

So I could actually be a far, far worse person able to maintain racism (or whatever) and never really attribute the racism amongst my peers to the institutions that are pervaded by that racism, be it church or work or whatever.  I'm not saying that religion makes you racist - swap the example with anything I can't be arsed.  There's certainly an argument that in the UK the seats given to the CofE bishops in the House of Lords represent an overwhelmingly 'white' interest group (and for only religious-historical reasons do these positions exist), but I don't want to bang on about that, I'll just mention it.  If it's ok by you, which of course it is because you don't really exist.  Battleship.

I think the interesting thing for me is the tension between those strange thoughts I'd have as a religious person and the thoughts I allow myself as an atheist.  If atheism is just a brute fact of efficiency, that is, if most atheists are atheists because society just has an amount of secular institutions and reasoning, then I couldn't really give any good argument for atheism.  Atheism therefore seems a bit arbitrary.  I might even, if my life had been slightly different, be religious, and if in such a hypothetical world atheism was to be argued for in this manner I would likely not really bat an eyelid at it.  But atheism needs to be more than incidental, or politically generated, if it is truly better than religion.

And there's a better idea - that atheism be truly better - because although religions bang on about the truth, it can be denied by disbelief in its metaphysics.  I'm talking about the vision of the entire universe as shot through with design, with punishments and rewards that are petty and far-fetched, the idea that humans live forever even though they don't, that there are souls that defy physics, that there are separate realms of existence and unseen heirarchies of beings, that it is possible to create something from nothing, that nothing ever truly makes sense without a completely unlikely story featuring characters that never make any sense in lieu of whatever never made sense in the first place, the miracles, the 'witchcraft', and so on.  All these things can be said to be 'incorrect' in a very everyday sense, in which, perhaps, the amount of power possessed by angels could be suspected to increase when the amount of land possessed by the Greek Orthodox church increases.  But you could then say, theologically of course, that the correct perspective first cares about the world of angels and only then about the world of land and coin.

To reject religion metaphysically first looks like a better choice from my perspective.  And oddly, its not an investigation to cut out 'metaphysical nonsense' - I don't have a problem with nonsense per se - but just an investigation to move horizontally as it were, away from the possibility of religion and into other possibilities.  Of course, if religion is metaphycially true (or consistent) then we've no right to be atheists, if that's the ground on which atheism stands and falls.  Metaphysics.  Wossat.  In part it's the picture of the structure of the universe from the perspective of thought thinking to itself.  'Speculation' in the most formal sense is 'doing metaphysics', if you like.  Suits me.  Anyway, that (largely Christian for no particular reason) picture of the universe I gave a moment ago is a metaphysical picture (as I probably said but can't remember).

What bothers me is really the power of religion, the coersion.  It's a bit of an assertion to say this but that's a pretty good read on how false something is.  'The old bastard is interfering again' we might say to ourselves - that's what it feels like when religion intrudes, limits freedom or oppresses thoughts.  Atheism can possibly define itself in opposition to the metaphysical core of religion.  It can define itself effectively therefore against the supplication, the being-subject-to, and the necessary power that seems to adhere to arbitrary forms of superstition. 

A base speculation - religion corrupts creativity and doesn't allow life to expand and express itself in its diversity (at least according to me and why wouldn't you agree?  If you've read this far you're probably me anyway, perhaps bothering to finally edit this piece of shit).  Therefore atheism can see the metaphysics of the world expressed in terms of the generativity of all the diversity of nature (she-ra! I sound like a 1980s academic!) and eschew all coercive power.

What's the opposite, therefore, just as a starting point, for considering the place of the lowly limited creatures that humans are in terms of an unlimited creative capacity of nature? How about 'a God that desires no love for itself'.  Make a religion out of that.  Can't, can you? No. Good.

Now I'm tired and I apologise to myself should I have violated my rule of not using 'we' and 'as a society' or whatever.  I'm trying but it ain't easy when you don't edit your writing even one bit before publishing it!  How funny.  Maybe if someone reads this post they will actually see a bit of ice lolly dribbled onto it with a bit of fluff attached or something.  That would be pleasing, but beyond my technical abilities I'm afraid, as well as my inclination.  So I'll write it down just to make a long turd even longer.  Oh and the v key doesn't work very well on this computer so if there's vs missing it's only partly my fault. (I've fixed the vs -Ed)  Who's Ed?

V

First prescription for convalescence

*****If you are wondering at any point why my posts are sometimes single spaced and sometimes double spaced, well it is a problem with Blogger, and not my fault.  At least it's free.*****

Let's imagine you have been soldiering away all day avoiding ill people, lest you catch some airborne contaminant that stalks your city, but at night you forgot your struggle and left your bedroom window open - open to the infected air from the restless in the street. In no time at all you join them.

In the quest for better physical health you might make changes to your daily eating and exercise routines, blahblah to people about gym membership.  You might decide to go to the toilet more routinely.  You might not, but you might.  Mental health is a little harder.  Well, actually, you can do pretty well just listening to your body, but this notwithstanding, what kind of prescriptions can be had?  I'm going to discuss opinion a litttle, as opinion is everywhere and therefore what is bad in it is always 'at large'.


Generally it is understood that opinions are slimy beasts, that intellectually they are not enough and we should not be satisfied with them, and that ultimately even very passionately held opinions probably do not matter.  Models for living within one's opinion might be TV talking-heads style programming, radio call-ins concerning topics of the day, personal discussions with others in social situations or on the 'net.  Opinion is usually contrasted with knowledge, but I will not be concerned with making such a distinction.  Instead I am concerned only with avoiding something that is very 'catching' (and which I have caught in the past and likely you have caught it too).

If you look at the way opinions are expressed you can sometimes tell what implied commitments exist, and you can begin to get a feel for unstated ideas.  But there are commitments that are not at all wise, but ones that are almost universally reinforced.  My prescription will be an adjustment in how opinions are expressed.  This should, however, make expressing opinions much more difficult because opinions are usually given freely, in whatever form they happen to roll off of the tongue, and if an expressive problem exists then this is pretty serious for the world of opinion.  There is, therefore, a downside and a cost to this prescription - it's a little like a diet that doesn't quite give you enough energy.  Some may say this is a good thing, allowing the mind to focus on other matters, or to help slow down opinion so that it may be assessed more clearly.  I really don't care to deal with that, however.  Efficiency isn't a problem when it's what you're doing that's in question.

The prescription is really simple; stop saying 'we' when expressing opinions.  It is also to stop using the phrase 'as a society' and 'as a country' (perhaps also 'as a community').  Now, I don't care to criticise the use of 'we' as a polite way of saying 'you', such as in articles or journals ('Working through the message systematically in this way, we come to the conclusion that everybody must be killed'), even when this can amount to a mere opinion.  I care about the use of 'we' to include oneself in the body politic.  Too often people offer opinions by beginning  'I think we as a society...', when it is completely unclear whether society will have them.  Likewise, people helpfully offer political opinions beginning 'what I think we should do is just...', when what has just been done by everyone else was likely the reason they began to speak in the first place!

Jokes aside, I could interrogate a use of 'we' by asking whether the individual is really worthy.  I might ask whether the 'individual' has the kind of voice that a 'society' could possibly listen to.  I might also ask how many individuals, should 'society' be the sum of all these individuals, the speaker imagines could possibly be interested in listening to what is, to others, the fleeting rant of an equally fleeting person.

However, my prescription is not about the limits of communication nor the egotism of the speaker.  Usually the speaker is worthy, but that is, for me at least, for far-flung and unpractical reasons, and which never enter the logic of communication.  Instead, whenever I hear 'as a country we have done well so far by blahblahblah but we need to ensure blahblahblah', I can only insist that the speaker pick their friends more carefully.

Why say this?  Here are some reasons.

In terms of class (why not if it's useful) you could be obeying a general rule to not ally yourself with the ruling classes unnecessarily (and which really means not at all!).  Instead of ruling yourself in, 'just in case', what about ruling yourself out, 'just in case'?  Don't simply fantasize about whether you can have the credit for your lovely opinion from the people from whom you seek validation.  For what if your opinion flowers into something unthinkably good, something radical and earth-shaking, that knocks your bosses out of their boots?  Even if not, you certainly will want your thinking to be easily put in the service of the people, should something traditionally political happen.  I'm sure there's something very characterful about ruling yourself out for no very specific hard reason, however, and is not so much an indicator of dysfunction (as is usually taken by the reactionaries) but (like this blog post and blog generally) a way of committing to convalescence.

Alas, it is hard to think in this way, because people think they are weak.  'Weakness makes me weak!' they bleat! (I've been reading too much Zarathustra.  Time for a lie down).


Using 'we' doesn't guarantee that you speak on behalf of a majority working class either (or 'just in case' you do - that's dangerous!)- it includes you in the 'collective' preeminent sense of identity that is dictated by the ruling class.  It grants only grants your opinion a servile ceiling, a commitment to reconciliation with the status quo.   I guess that's may sound a little strict to take at face value but, meh. You might argue that the media, even if it is skewed by power, still represents real people, and valorises some working class experiences etc etc. so that you're still including the working class tension with 'we', but in my opinion this tension isn't at all biting. The sense of identity that is granted in the body politic is today of a people understood through the lens of the aspirational ideal - a false work ethic that is easy by now even for children to see through. Anyway, that is for another time.


On my side of things it can be said in a quite blase way that the whole world is in political turmoil, with persistant as well as new wars, conflicts and uprisings.  So many examples speak of the ability of the ruling classes to betray us and burn us in our beds.  Now, If I consistently side against the ruling classes habitually, I may be able to break fidelity in some fashion at some point in the future.  I would advise to be as habitually anti-ruling class in as many ways as possible.  It might seem uncomfortable but it's certainly honest come what may, and this prescription is a fairly easy way to start, and not least because once you fall in with the idea you'll begin to see the 'problem' everywhere you hear opinions.  The main problem with living in an ideological world is that you give legitimacy to it automatically, without any special effort.  One way to deal with that is to look for ways to disrupt your everyday doings in this regard, and I think dropping the collective noun in these troubled and complicated times is a decent idea.  After all, you're not really responsible for going to war, are you?  One idea to investigate is whether your democracy is good enough to represent public opinion in foreign policy, through due process and the daily operation of that democracy.  It isn't, so there.

V

Some rough thoughts on class

Today the happy condition is to be middle-class.  What characterises the middle-class?  Likely some or all of these-



1) Money to sustain status-buying (i.e. of cars, houses).
2) Professional or management jobs, but also white-collar work in general.
3) High-brow culture consuption, such as art, theatre, and clever fiction.
4) Other traditional qualities, such as a wide (and arguably unnecessary use of) vocabulary, and saying 'grarse' instead of 'grass'.
5) Generally conservative economic beliefs and behaviour.
6) A sense of ownership of society.
7) Business culture is seen as basically efficient as it is socially progressive.  It is also often held to be directly culturally desirable (in particular by the swooning aspirational working-class)
8) A deep faith in the power of conversation and debate, particularly in the culture of 'meetings' and official phraseologies.  For instance, any 'decision' is almost sacred and worth slobbering over in a meeting, which must always have suggestions that are 'going-forward' (not usually hyphenated) or are at least 'forward-looking'.  presumably shoes are 'walking-solutions', and etc.
9) A background of the same qualities or the money and taste to acquire the continuance of these qualities to their children.  So at least a step in time greater than the term 'working-class rich'.

As is well known, the upper classes depend on the reverance of the middle classes today, and are either propped up or brought down into the middle-classes as the market will allow.

Apparently 70% of British people consider themselves to be middle-class.  I may or may not have seen this figure on a recent Melvyn Bragg documentary for the BBC, which also left me with extra reasons to write some thoughts up.  Bragg had a working-class background as a child, and for decades he has been a cultural commentator with a delicate palate and a contemplative but welcoming demenour.  He has a posh accent, sharp fingernails and a distinguished hair-do, and is pretty much the definitive middle-class male.  He presents radio and television as his occupation, and of course only presentes the most ponderously upper-middle-class material such as fine art and literature.

Bragg ends his three-part series on class saying that the cultural activities of the middle classes is what defines society today, and that the old industrial working class either bought their homes and became middle-class thanks to Thatcher and John Major, or got 'left behind' and became the underclass that is decried today as antisocial and feckless.  And by the way, although Bragg seems to disapprove of these demonisations (he calls it class chauvanism or similar, and also interviews the author of the book 'Chav' for a similar perspective), he never gets around to giving a positive perspective on the working-class, such as a thoughtful definition - he seems happy that people call themselves (or want to call themselves) middle-class, and he leaves it at that.  If you're working class, but get riled up at the misuse of apostrophes, then maybe you're an ok guy.  So if you've acquired some tasteful spending habits (such as Hamlet tickets) and have an aspirational comportment (comportment! middle-class language use anyone?), then you can probably be permitted to wear a red jumpsuit aboard the starship Society.

So what of the working class?  You'll have understood by now that I don't care much for being 'aspirational' and don't agree with the conclusions of Melvyn Bragg's programme.  What are my options for trying to think a working-class?

1) Isn't the cultural lifestyles of the middle-class something produced - an ideology - like the Marxists have alway said?  Bragg doesn't go there, and nor would most people in fact.  The idea that the middle-class isn't a floating island city, such as one might see in a Japanese manga, but a teetering tower of cards, isn't very good for the constant deferring that aspirationalism (that a word?) requires.  And sure, yes, ideology has its own life and its own aims at its own produced level (just as we do as products outselves), and therefore it avoids all harsh reductions to economy (so saying that middle-class culture is basically an ideological illusion is not the end of the discussion), but taking away the eating of the cake from the having of it is still very important. 

On this view the working-class are in touch with reality, and the other classes are not, middle-class ideology being at degrees remove from such a working-in-reality undertaken by the working-class.  This observation can range from saying that what is real is what you can make with your hands (maybe in agricultural life or something like that, say, for the Maoists), to saying that reality is the ability to really feel your (emotional, environmental) situation, which the corrupt conceptualisations of the middle-class, for exampe, will have always already betrayed (and perhaps the existentialists call to 'be authentic' fits somewhere here).  So there's these sorts of things.  There's also the idea that the middle-class has become working-class without noticing, due to the power of the market, and this is really very interesting from a traditional point of view and begins by criticising various delusions - very possible to find that the working-class are now called Rosemary, and etc.


2) I can still ask - Is the new underclass the real working class?  That is certainly possible, but it may take more than a few Lenins to drag anything revolutionary out of them.  Apparently there has been one so far and in very different circumstances.  This notwithstanding, however, the goals of the old industrial working-class families are pretty much up for grabs if you think about it, even if it seems impossible to put into any kind of practice.  There are huge problems, however.  It is said that the violent nature of this underclass is and has been a projection of the higher classes who love terrifying stories about monstrous working-class oiks - since Victorian times and beyond.  Yet this also means there has been a social role to fill, and this has been filled really saddeningly well.  I don't actually understand how the underclass is separable from the middle-class in this regard, they're symbiotic to some important extent.  In the olden days of Communism there was a term, the 'Lumpenproletariat', which is that section of the proletariat that is irredeemable for revolutionary purposes, and who betray their class and become conscripted by the middle-class ideology.  All too eerily familiar if you ask me.

But then, what really characterises this 'underclass' - lumpenproletariat or not?  Is it some or all of:

1) Violence (physical and emotional).  Criminality and disaffection.  'Hooliganism' and 'Yobbishness'.
2) 'Childish sense of entitlement' and 'shamelessness'.
3) Harsh tones and prejudice against all that is high-brow.
4) Low income, usually manual work (not usually lower white collar positions, but struggling to have manual work).
5) Racist, sexist, homophobic.
6) National Lottery; Football; ITV; The Sun newspaper.
7) Lives in council-owned accommodation; bedsits; housing associations.
8) No inheritance; background is the opposite of helpful; incapable of good parenting.

Well, I'll stop there.  You can see if you compare the lists that it doesn't look like much good can come from the second, whilst the first is at least debatable.  Seems like the underclass deserve their monicker.  Of course, the authors of books that demonstrate how the underclass has been culturally created by the middle-class media would probably say 'just stop making them seem like monsters and they'll be better', as if they would suddenly recover from some illness.  If the effects are temporary, yes, sure, but why should they be temporary?  Because they are ideological in nature and not 'really real'?  Well my feeling is that hate is real enough for most and is especially real when the alternative is as underdeveloped as is the case here. 

I seem to be drawn more to the idea of the 'scab', and the betrayer of one's own class, than to the middle-class idea of 'the monster that lurks out of its animalistic nature'.  All the time I've spent in the company of the underclass convinces me that this is an entirely engineered culture (and whoever says the construction of a people has to be for their overall betterment needs something of a lesson on the history of Empire), and that it isn't the 'savage' that needs to worry me but the 'scab' that betrays even my very existence.  The middle-class is, after all, the class of representation, and the underclass serve to offer up former the qualities of the working-class for representation at every turn.  The problem of the scab is that these representations always serve to demonstrate the baseness of the historical working-class and therefore justify the middle-class monopoly of culture.

So there's the possibility of a constructive working-class arising from the depths of the current 'underclass', or even just the completion of violence (aimed at the middle-class rather than their fellow working-class), that could possibly be hoped for.  Otherwise there's the problem of the scab, and the concomitant problem of who on earth it is that is truly working-class that can still oppose the scab class.

3) As the Philosophers say, the working-class is not a people but a movement.

This is likely the most promising and least negative way of characterising the working-class, a way of trying to affirm all the historically positive powers of the industrial working-class people (i.e. the people that embodied the movement for a while) and all the freedoms that they won, whilst maintaining the effectiveness of that power and the efficacy of those freedoms even when the industrial movements were eventually defeated.  Some say this is romanticising pointlessly and takes the working-class away from areas of struggle, which is impossible (and it is therefore contradictory and wrong).  Others say that there is no need for an overwhlemingly positive (i.e. constructive and active) formulation, since negative means can yield positive results, and that today anger and uprising is in order.  I have some sympathy for the latter, but less for the former.  It seems in a way that the mere notion of something 'constructive' and 'creative' is just the appropriation of the idea of a movement by the mere movement of middle-class language.  If I get a job I'm being constructive.  If I languish on the dole I'm lacking any positive contribution.  Positive/negative, and creative/destructive (or creative/unoriginal) as oppositions, therefore, aren't doing any work whatsoever while they remain mired in their unhelpful economical and political conventions.

And then there's another weird shopping list including:

1) The internet.
2) Robots. 

I'll write about those another time, but they're really interesting.

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Oh and why am I writing all this down and making this blog?  It is to identify areas for study or explication, but also so that I can identify presuppositions, principles and maxims that can serve as guides to future thinking, in the aim of just trying to be as consistent as possible and to avoid the problems of poor health!  The right thing to do is just to feel your way and go as far as possible, and that's really the whole premise behind the blog.  I'll therefore be groping through these pages idenifying enemies and whatever weapons can be brought to bear against them.  If this helps you too so be it, but really I don't see why it should at this stage.  Still, nice weather.

Comments if you got 'em.

V