Dr Clam's accidental blog

Consumer Confidence Rising

2012-01-28T18:21:00.000+11:00

...gently rising, rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea.

(H. P. Lovecraft, 'The Rats in the Walls')

Nothing new under the sun

2012-01-25T18:37:00.006+11:00

Here is a statement of the obvious on tax policy:

When tax assessments and imposts upon the subjects are low, the latter have the energy and desire to do things. Cultural enterprises grow and increase, because the low taxes bring satisfaction. When cultural enterprises grow, the number of individual imposts and assessments mounts. In consequence, the tax revenue, which is the sum total of the individual assessments, increases.
When the dynasty continues in power and their rulers follow each other in succession, they become sophisticated. ... Their customs and needs become more varied because of the prosperity and luxury in which they are immersed. As a result, the individual imposts and assessments upon the subjects, agricultural labourers, farmers, and all the taxpayers, increase. Every individual impost and assessment is greatly increased in order to obtain a higher tax revenue. ... Then, gradual increases in the amount of the assessments succeed each other regularly, in correspondence with the gradual increase in the luxury customs and many needs of the dynasty and the spending required in connection with them. ... The assessments increase beyond the limits of equity. The result is that the interest of the subjects in cultural enterprises disappears, since when they compare expenditures and taxes with their income and gain and see the little profit they make, they lose all hope. Therefore, many of them refrain from all cultural activity. The result is that the total tax revenue goes down, as individual assessments go down. Often, when the decrease is noticed, the amounts of individual imposts are increased. This is considered a means of compensating for the decrease. Finally, individual imposts and assessments reach their limit. It would be of no avail to increase them higher. The costs of all cultural enterprise are now too high, the taxes are too heavy, and the profits anticipated fail to materialise. Finally, civilisation is destroyed, because the incentive for cultural activity is gone.

And here is another statement of the bleeding obvious, which is all the answer anyone needs to give to Dawkins et al.:

Man should not trust the suggestion his mind makes, that it is able to comprehend all existing things and their causes, and to know all the details of existence. Such a suggestion of the mind should be dismissed as stupid.

And here are some observations on pedagogy, which are spot on and universally ignored nowadays:

Scholars often approach the main scholarly works on the various disciplines, which are very lengthy, intending to interpretand explain. They abridge them, in order to make it easier for students to acquire expert knowledge of them. ... This has a corrupting influence upon the process of instruction and is detrimental to the attainment of scholarship. For it confuses the beginner by presenting the final results of a discipline to him before he is prepared for them. This is a bad method of instruction. ... The procedure also involves a great deal of work for the student. He must study carefully the words of the abridgment, which are complicated to understand because they are crowded with ideas, and try to find out from them what the problems of the given discipline are. Thus, the texts of such brief handbooks are found to be difficult and complicated. A good deal of time must be spent on the attempt to understand them. ... The habit that results from receiving instruction from brief handbooks, even when such instruction is at its best and is not accompanied by any flaw, is inferior to the habits resulting from the study of more extensive and lengthy works. The latter contain a great amount of repetition and lengthiness, but both are useful for the acquisition of a perfect habit. When there is little repetition, an inferior habit is the result. This is the case with the abridgments. The intention was to make it easy for students to acquire expert knowledge (of scholarly subjects), but the result is that it has become more difficult for them, because they are prevented from acquiring useful and firmly established habits.

...A good and necessary method and approach in instruction is not to expose the student to two disciplines at the same time. Otherwise, he will rarely master one of them, since he has to divide his attention and is diverted from each of them by his attempt to understand the other. Thus, he will consider both of them obscure and difficult, and be unsuccessful in both. But if the student's mind is free to study the subject that he is out to study and can restrict himself to it, that fact often makes it simpler for the student to learn.

(Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddimat, 1377, translated by Franz Rosenthal. from the abridged version by N. J. Dawood.)

Hmm, this is post

I don't really have a dog in this race but I thought this would be funny

2012-01-23T10:08:00.001+11:00

"Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially, that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Canberra - and possibly Queanbeyan - are also at war. (With the rest of Australia probably following in 1943)."

(Robert Menzies, 1939)

Like, wow...

2012-01-18T12:48:00.001+11:00

My father says that almost the whole world is asleep.

Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to.

He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.

(Joe vs the Volcano, 1990)

Sometimes I feel as if I were almost about to wake up. Every year I give at least one lecture about how amazing biochemistry is, with lots of pictures of complicated molecules self-organised into fantastic systems, but I forget how *amazing* biochemistry is. It. Is. Amazing.

All this origin of life stuff focussing on replication as if that was the be-all and end-all, talking about the 'RNA world' or the 'protein world' or the 'Ke$ha world'[1], or whatever, as if any of those things could just fall together into existence somewhere - the people who talk like that are asleep.

The people who throw their hands up in the air and say 'it must have been a miracle', they probably just woke up once for an instant and were bowled over by the amazingness of it all.

I think the beginning was long ago and far away.

This is the minimum it needed.

I have no idea how many generations of life-not-as-we-know-it succeeded each other, each one nom nom nomming the remains of its predecessors, before life-as-we-know-it developed. I have no idea if life-as-we-know-it was designed in a test tube by some form of life-not-as-we-know-it.

But, I am pretty sure whatever happened was all complete before our solar system congealed out of a molecular cloud. I know there is *no point* working backward from life as we know it to get to the origin: we have erased our tracks.

I would like to work forward, but I don't even known what molecules to start looking at, since every organic molecule we see on Earth is part of a system that has comprehensively been worked over by living organisms for billions of years, making and breaking molecules to suit themselves. I know the molecules we see in space are the most common ones, and the ones exposed on the surfaces of things, so are not likely to reflect the complexity available there, and - I suspect - are also ultimately products of a carbon cycle comprehensively worked over by living organisms for billions of years.

Life is amazing.

The fact that the problem is immeasurably vaster and more complicated than we ever thought it would be does not mean it is insoluble. It doesn't mean we should give up and fall back on the God of the Gaps.

We should just live in a state of constant total amazement.

[1] ZOMG, there actually was a vaguely relevant link for that product of random neurons firing. Go figure.

Cry Havoc etc., Part Two

2012-01-12T15:58:00.002+11:00

One of the traditional strategies for getting people to assent to things that are dumb is the strategy of the False Dichotomy. It works like this:

1. Formulate a problem in terms of two ‘opposite’ answers (e.g., Faith vs Works; Capitalism vs Communism; XTC vs Adam Ant)

2. Disprove the bejesus out of one answer

3. Wait for your target to embrace the other answer warts and all, hoping they are not imaginative enough to realise there are other options.

For example:

Darth Sophus: “This hairy creature must be an Ewok, or a Wookiee. While fully grown, it only reaches to mid-thigh, which is very short for a Wookiee. When beaten in games, it does not tear your arms off, which Wookiees have been known to do. ... [nine pages of argument omitted] ... therefore, this creature must be an Ewok.”

Hairy creature: “Woof! Woof!”

It is usually less obvious than this.

So, I had been writing about Prof Lennox's book 'God's Undertaker' and had gotten up to the anthropic principle. I don't know how likely my two hand-waving explanations-away of the anthropic principle are to be borne out by events. Probably not very. My prejudice against being in a peculiarly unusual universe might just be an irrational prejudice.

But this doesn't mean that the only two possibilities for the origin of the universe are a multiverse or creation by the God of the Judaeo-Christo-Islamic tradition. There are lots of other possibilities, as the orcs are discussing about 70 seconds into this short film.

As I said in Part One, in Chapter 6 Prof Lennox loses me. He makes a very typical Creationist distinction between microevolution and macroevolution and implies, without explicitly saying so, that 'macroevolution' cannot occur by natural means. (Losing me at this point by ignoring all the suggestions that have been made in terms of natural alternatives to simple natural selection on random variation) To me, this supernatural intervention is inconsistent with the behaviour of the Creator(s) postulated in Lennox's discussion of the anthropic principle: a Creator or Creators that would make a universe so exquisitely poised on the values of a few constants to allow life to one day appear would surely allow its progress to unfold according to very unlikely, but natural, events. It does not seem in character for Him/Them to come in with a miracle every time a new genus of beetle is needed. This degree of micromanagement just seems psychologically implausible. And no matter how much Prof Lennox claims it isn't, this is the 'God of the Gaps' pure and simple.

The psychological implausibility of supernatural intervention struck me even more so in Chapter 7, which is about the origin of Life. A universe dependent on one chance in 10⁴⁰ for the conditions to allow life to exist at all would surely be a universe where the specific conditions for the beginning of life were also incredibly unlikely - happening perhaps just once in the universe, in one pond, or deep in the interior of one comet. But by natural means, not supernatural.

I am confident that the origin of life is a soluble problem. I think its solution is far away, and that it will not be found by working backwards from the incredible complexity of life 'as we know it' - which is no more complex biochemically than the very earliest life we have ever found traces of on our planet. I don't discount the possibility that life 'as we know it' was intelligently designed - but by creatures inside the universe.

Rather than working backwards, a solution will be found by working forward from physical chemistry. Simultaneously we should be broadening our knowledge of what life is and what raw materials are available for it to get started. Here are some things we should be finding out:

What sort of life exists elsewhere in our solar system?
If the answer is none, we know we need to keep looking (working forward) for a mechanism by which life could have gotten started on Earth. If we find things that are based different chemistry in different places, we need to look for intelligent designers. If we find things based on broadly similar chemistry (my hunch) we need to look for the cradle of life further away.

What is the maximum lifetime of molecular clouds?
These are the places stars get started. If matter can hang around in them for reasonably long times, in reasonably large lumps, accumulating molecular complexity, and ideally get transferred from one molecular cloud to another, we have a reservoir of time and space for life to get started in.

The sorts of molecules we can observe spectroscopically from molecular clouds in general are not likely to reflect the molecular complexity available, since space is a pretty destructive environment, so we should be investigating the remnants of molecular clouds closer to home by drilling into the middle of comets: What sort of molecules exist in the interior of 'dirty snowballs', relatively safe from ionising radiation? Of course, if there is life there already, the distribution of molecules we find won't help...

As far as the later chapters go:

I sort of glazed over in the probability chapter. I think this is what most undergraduate students do when people are talking about probability so I don't feel too bad about it. But I have read these kind of 'making a 747 by throwing bits of scrap metal together' arguments before. They are superficially appealing but are just another demonstration of how daunting the task is when you are looking backwards from the very complicated thing. You build up to complexity by walling off bits of the universe so there is a system and a surroundings. Compartmentalisation is the key. More later once I hear what other people think about the second half of the book. P'raps.

The idea of 'information being conserved' doesn't hold in biology. One airborne seed lands on Anak Krakatau. It grows into a plant, and in six months releases ten thousand airborne seeds, all of which are genetically different. Information increases. Sex = Lack of conservation of information.

And, I agree completely with Lennox on Hume and miracles: Hume's 'disproof' is just a classic example of begging the question.

If you can't trust the interwebz, who can you trust?

2012-01-10T17:04:00.000+11:00

The Da Vinci Connection

2012-01-09T12:06:00.002+11:00

The first big disappointment of my book-reading year has been Robur the Conqueror.

It can be summarised as follows:

1) Helicopters are better than hot air balloons

2) Americans are easily caricatured

3) Characterisation is for losers

That’s about it.

While preparing this exhaustive summary it struck me that Jules Verne was the Dan Brown of his time. Both authors produced books consisting of lumps of poorly-digested research stuck together with action sequences engaged in by two-dimensional characters. And, look at the supposedly baffling cryptograms at the beginnings of ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’. They are both so terribly lame.

The big difference – which reflects badly on our century, rather than on either of these tremendously successful and industrious writers – is that in the 19^th century ordinary people were interested in science and technology, whereas today, having sloughed off the inheritance of the Enlightenment like so many of Lady Prunella’s petticoats, ordinary people are interested in waffly occult rubbish.

...then cry "Havoc!" and let loose the dogs of Philosophy

2012-01-08T17:43:00.005+11:00

Not knowing exactly where the discussion reproduced on Marco's blog began, and unsure of where the participants in it actually agree or disagree with Prof Lennox, I will just throw out onto the aether my own thoughts about his book, 'God's Undertaker'.

I am in complete agreement with Prof Lennox wherever he is showing up the hubristic claims of the 'New Atheists'. They say things that are ridiculous and irrational and Prof Lennox does a good job of demonstrating this in his first five chapters.

Science is an instrument for making sense of the reproducible, comprehensible features of the experienced universe. To say that all features of this experienced universe are reproducible and comprehensible is a statement of faith - a defensible and rational statement of faith, but still a statement of faith. To say that nothing exists outside this experienced universe is a statement of faith that is irrational and indefensible.

The scientific worldview is not inconsistent with a belief in an omnibenevolent entity which is omniscient and omnipotent with respect to our universe. It just isn't.

The scientific worldview is not inconsistent with the definition of Good as a real feature of the universe, rather than a social construct or emergent biological epiphenomenon. Neither is the scientific worldview inconsistent with the survival in a 'location' outside the universe of the information describing a human life in its entirety; a belief in miracles; nor the active involvement in human affairs of free-willed 'macrobes' capable of masquerading as gods.

On the other hand, if 'belief in God' is conflated with 'adherence to a theistic religion', the situation becomes murkier in terms of the tension between science and religion. The scientific worldview posits a single source of authority - experience - and is antithetical in its spirit to all other sources of authority. Thus an organised religion resting on sources of authority that will in many cases appear to contradict experience - that is, all of them - will never be an entirely comfortable place for someone subscribing to a scientific worldview. Thus I have to disagree with his quotation (about 15% through) that 'vast tracts of science remain unaffected by such philosophical considerations': all of science is necessarily shot through with a spirit that is in opposition to all individual organised religions, even if it is not incompatible with theism in general.

So, where Prof Lennox is negative, I am on his side. Where he is making positive assertions, I am a little less happy. Though I have to say I didn't find anything particularly objectionable in the first five chapters.

In Chapter 6 he metaphorically wheels out his motorcycle and heads down to the aquarium when he starts talking about evolution. To me, this was because he quotes a large number of people who dissent from the 'neo-Darwinian' consensus, including Niles Eldredge of punctuated equilibrium fame, without telling us what they intend to put in its place rather than intelligent design. So, species are largely static: it makes sense that genetic change will be most rapid in small, isolated populations. So, random mutations won't cut it: but what about horizontal gene transfer? Changes in gene regulations giving major morphological changes from a minor chemical change? Some sort of Parigian neo-Lamarckism? There are a lot of possibilities, and Lennox doesn't talk about any of them because he has already written them off.

Where he talks about how unsatisfactory the current models for the origin of life are, in chapter 7, I - or more accurately, my real-world alter ego - am on pretty much the same page.

I think this just means we need to approach the question from a more fundamental direction, with simple building blocks for a metabolism, and be more open about the possibility of exogenesis. I think introducing Intelligent Design would be a terrible idea.

Why?

Consider the following syllogism, going back at least as far as the 1st century:

There is strong evidence that the universe was designed.

However, the universe is all ****ed up.

Therefore, the designer of the universe is an ****hole.

Expressed somewhat more elegantly, this is a syllogism that has convinced a great many virtuous and intelligent people over the millennia. The problem of reconciling the existence of a good God with a ****ed-up universe is the central problem of theism. I solved this problem to my own satisfaction when I was 19, but I could not have done so if I believed biology exhibited intelligent design.

"What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!" (Charles Darwin)

The evil we see in nature can be explained as the consequence of natural selection and other natural evolutionary mechanisms: we do not see the perfect world of the divine vision, but the outcome of choices by free-willed beings that have led to a sub-optimal outcome. Extending this to a deep anthropomorphism that gives the attribute of free-will to the particles whose interactions give rise to physical law completes the process of letting God off the hook for the moral flaws of the universe.

Some more observations at different milestones through the book:

7% : I agree with Prof Lennox's argument about the 'forgotten roots of science'. I made the same argument here. I am pretty sure that both of us, and C. S. Lewis as well, got the argument originally from Chesterton, who doubtless made it better than any of us.

8%: I wish people wouldn't diss Aristotle. On the page before, Lennox has been talking about the dead hand of Augustinianism keeping people's attentions focussed on the supernatural world and encouraging a symbolic, allegorical intepretation of nature. What was Augustinianism? Baptised Platonism. The dethronement of Plato by Aristotle at the time of St Thomas Aquinas was the critical moment when the tide turned. Aristotle was part of the solution, not part of the problem. Whitehead's quote about people in Europe in 1500 knowing less than Archimedes in the 3rd century BC is just bogus: if he had said 1100, sure.

11%: 'The cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever shall be' (Carl Sagan)

This is the crux of the matter for me and though I repeated myself over and over and over again when we were talking about Dawkins' 'The God Delusion' before I am still not sure I got my point across.

Let's define the 'Universe' as all there is, or was, or ever shall be.

And let's define the 'universe' as this thing that is all we can ever access by experience, which appears to obey certain rules.

Conflation of the two is not tenable.

It was not tenable to clear-thinking people at the time of Lucretius. Speaking of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Locke and Berkeley, Prof Lennox says correctly 'that the universe is not self explanatory, and that it requires some explanation beyond itself, was something they accepted as fairly obvious.' After Boltzmann's formulation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics and observations of cosmic background radiation suggesting the occurrence of a 'Big Bang', the conflation of the universe with the Universe has become yet more untenable.

12 %: I don't think the definition(s) of science offered by Lennox rigorous enough to illuminate the areas of tension and non-tension between science and religion. I would like to refer you to this monologue by my alter ego. This is just my view: there is no creed defining science that we have to sign up to when we get our degrees. But I doubt that Peirce or Feynman would find much to disagree with me about - and so there is my token argument from authority out of the way.

16 %: '...theists claim that there is someone who stands in the same relationship to the universe that Aunt Matilda stands to her cake.'

Since Aunt Matilda made the cake for her nephew's birthday, these particular theists would be good subjects for a Lovecraftian short story. "The worshippers of Pzgra claim that the end of time she will give the universe to her nephew Pthaak-Zroghoroom, who will eat it, after first blowing out the suns to the strains of music beyond human comprehension."

26%: 'Saying that the universe arises from fluctuations in a quantum vacuum simply pushes the origins question one step further back, to asking about the provenance of the quantum vacuum. More importantly, it leaves unanswered the question 'what is the origin of the laws governing such a vacuum'?

Something must be self-existent; otherwise nothing would exist. And it doubtless seems more reasonable to many people that this something be a quantum vacuum governed by certain laws, rather than God. But in essence, the problem is that the universe and everything in it are not self-existent, so we have absolutely no experience of what a self-existent thing might be like. I am pessimistic about the possibility of us ever making any meaningful stabs at figuring this out from inside the universe with our universe-bound reason. Which brings me to about 27%, and Prof Lennox's discussion of the anthropic principle.

I have never been particularly sympathetic to anthropic principle arguments.

I dislike them for two reasons: my scientific prejudice is that just as there are any number of rocky planets not so unlike ours, and our sun is nothing special, and our galaxy is nothing special, our universe ought to be nothing special. I also have a religious prejudice against the universe being somewhere where things have to balanced to 1 part in 10⁴⁰ in order for us to be here: I don't like the 'author intrusion' of a Creator who would show off to that extent. It smacks of Oolon Coluphid's Babel Fish argument. I guess I have always thought,without explicitly putting it into sentences, that any amazing sensitivity of our existence to quantifiable features of the universe having certain extremely narrow quantities could be attributed to lack of knowledge and failure of imagination. That is, when we found out more about the universe and how it worked, we would find good reasons for why it was very probable that we would end up with these values, given unexciting initial conditions; and that when we thought about it more we would come up with all sorts of other ways matter could be organised so it could think, given all sorts of other specific values of these constants. Maybe I am wrong.

I am told I have been typing too long, so I will call this part one, and return to the anthropic principle real soon now...

... then, crash your probe at 700 g ...

2012-01-06T19:23:00.001+11:00

The second book I finished this year was a re-read, Hal Clement’s “Mission of Gravity”.

If you are about my age, you probably first met this book through the picture of the Mesklinite in ‘Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials’. They are our high-density low-temperature hydrogen-breathing pals who are fun to be with.

One of our high-density low-temperature hydrogen-breathing pals who are fun to be with^TM

What struck me re-reading it this time is how ‘Mission of Gravity’ is a paean to science.

First of all, it is proper science fiction. Not ‘indistinguishable from magic’ science fiction. Not some rubbish latte-land love triangle with spaceships and aliens. Not flip-through-this-week’s-New-Scientist-and-grab-a-few-dodgy-interpretation-of-Quantum-Mechanics-articles science fiction. Just Newtonian Physics pushed to the edge.

Second, the motivation of the (largely offstage) human characters is all science all the time. They want to know stuff. They are part of a project spending a fortune to find stuff out. Completely fundamental blue-sky no-applications-need-apply stuff. It’s all they care about. They never talk about anything else. Which is how it ought to be, because next to a world like Mesklin everything else is pretty boring.

Third, the narrative arc of the novel is the conversion of the Mesklinite characters to the scientific worldview. Barlennan, the main character, is the Han Solo or Vasco de Gama of his world. As the story begins he is all about the phat lewtz. But as it goes on – like Han Solo – he becomes aware of a higher purpose. A higher purpose that might enable him primarily to get more phat lewtz, true, but a higher purpose. Again and again, the scientific skills of the humans are shown to be of practical use in solving problems. Barlennan realises that he wants what they’re having. At the climax of the novel he refuses to help the humans anymore unless they teach him science. This is the sort of standoff situation people like me dream of. So I’m going to quote his whole speech (awkwardly screenshotted from Kindle Cloud):

Amen, little brother.

First, immanentise your Eschaton

2012-01-04T19:30:00.000+11:00

I hear from Lexifab that this is the National Year of Reading.

I am not quite sure what the ‘National’ refers to and I am not going to look it up yet out of contrariness. The message retweeted by Lexifab exhorted me to read Australian books, so perhaps it is the Australian National Year of Reading. I don’t intend to go out of my way to read Australian books since I pretty much know what Australia is like and how Australians think - I am more interested in distant times and places and how the zany people over there thought/think. On the other hand, there is a certain nation which I will not name that tends to assume it is the only one, where people don’t put the international dialing code on their letterheads, and the ‘National’ might well refer to that nation.

The first book I finished reading this year was written in *a* nation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

In this book a practically unknown one-term United States senator with a charismatic personality and a magnetic speaking voice comes to power in 2008 and turns out to be the Antichrist. Honest.

Yes, this is basically the same plot as a book I was handed by a wild-eyed fellow outside Redfern station a decade ago. You may have been handed the same book. However, in this case: (1) it is the Protestants who cave immediately to join the Antichrist while the Catholics are the persecuted minority fighting him, and (2) the writing is really very good.

You should read this book for its prefigurements of the great 20th century dystopias. Before Our Ford’s T-Model, here is a London with the same Brave New World aesthetic, the euthanasia centres, the selfless meritocrats keeping the proles happy with bread and circuses. Before Mussolini’s march on Rome, here is Big Brother’s Cult of Personality, the Nuremburg-style crowds, the world eerily divided into three great blocs. In 1907, here is a dysfunctional European parliament, a thoroughly Godless Europe about to be overwhelmed by barbarism from the East, a London convulsed by mob violence. The book is like a chrysalis containing the whole terrible century that was to come. Of course science fiction is not about prediction: but this book, which doesn't claim to be science fiction, comes closer to predicting the real 2008 than anything else I've read from a similar distance in time.

Unless you are fond of the sort of things Charles Williams used to write, there is no real reason to read all the way to the end: after all, you know how it will turn out. I would suggest stopping after the passage of the Alps, except to flip ahead and look for the bits with Mabel in them. These are rather good, and also contain the basis for my assertion that the novel takes place in 2008. Oh, and the novel is full of Catholic jargon in a Morris West-like fashion, only more so. Those are my only caveats.

The book contains nothing to reassure Edwardian middle-class Protestants raised on tales of Catholic perfidy. The main characters are almost - almost - fanatical enough to be seen from the opposite direction as the bad guys in a Sheri S. Tepper novel. While the official position of the Church and of the heroes - who are all priests - is one of extreme in-your-face pacifism in response to persecution, there are other Catholics who do try to blow up Westminster Abbey, assassinate government officials, etc.: and the main characters never really condemn them, just worry about the possible blowback effects. Which are admittedly pretty bad.

I could never survive in a religion that required me to believe that this world was about to pass away. I am too fond of the bottlebrush tree outside the front door. All those millions of years of evolution to make such a beautiful thing, snuffed out all of a sudden, with all its kind, because it is just a minor non-player character in a story that is all about the humans? It is too painful to think about. And the beetles - I am inordinately fond of beetles. And the child of two who is just going about looking with wonder upon the bottlebrush trees and the beetles. And the man in Bechar who has an idea for a poem he wants to write this afternoon, but he can't, because the world is ending. I know all things must pass, and if they abide forever it is only in the mind of God - but this world is all so young and interesting. It would be like ending the Silmarillion in the middle of a sentence on page 14.

Tick. Tock.

2012-01-01T06:08:00.001+11:00

Carpe diem, gentle readers. Carpe diem...

New Year's Resolutions

2011-12-30T08:52:00.000+11:00

I will not submit to the Council a proposal to build a Halal abattoir on my property as a side-splitting April Fools' Day joke.

I will not submit to the Council a proposal to build a low-level radioactive waste repository, ditto.

I will not make any machinima inspired by the "Touchstone" trilogy with Gungans playing the parts of Setari.

I will not make any machinima inspired by "Diary of Space Nympho", full stop.

I will not tell new acquaintances that I was born in "U.S.-occupied Mexico" and then timidly refrain from arguing with them when they go off on a rant about the knuckle-dragging australopithecines of Middle America. Already did that this year.

I will not try driving back home from Sydney after having been awake for 24 hours, zone out, and wake up on the wrong side of the highway. Already did that this year.

I will finish what I wr

So this is Christmas

2011-12-25T12:44:00.001+11:00

This bit of doggerel was written twelve years ago in the Bingara Caravan Park, in between enthusiastic scribbling of a fantasy novel that was ultimately doomed by my foolish resolution to fill a a 320 page notebook with handwritten first draft before putting fingers to keyboard. In 2004 I baldly inflicted this poem-like-object on you: this Christmas I want to give a more extended autobiographical gloss.

In that last week of the 1900s - I am too pedantic to say 'of the 20th century' - we were on holiday visiting relatives, but we lived in a predominantly Arabic suburb of Sydney. We had moved there about six months before and I was still in the first flush of finding it particularly splendid, a feeling that never really abated. I loved hearing Arabic pop music in the street, trying to make out Arabic street signs and Arabic graffiti, buying rosewater and pistachios at the corner shop, and seeing people going by whose clothes indicated to the world that they believed in something.

In 1999, as well as living next door to an Arabic video shop and eating manaqish za'atar at least once a week, I was both trying very hard to believe the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and spending a lot of time talking with a Baha'i friend.

Central to the Baha'i faith is the idea of progressive revelation. There have been a number of Prophets, each appointed by God for a particular time, and the torch of revelation is metaphorically passed from one to the other through the millennia.* An obvious question I asked my Baha'i friend was: If revelation is progressive, how is the revelation of Muhammad superior to the revelation of 'Isa?

Since I ask questions not (usually) just to stir up trouble but because I want to know the answers, I had already come up with an answer that satisfied me before I asked the question.

The Gospels are pretty much in agreement with Margaret Thatcher's famous observation 'there is no such thing as society'. They are addressed to individuals as individuals and contain no plan for how society might be ordered in a more Godly fashion. If everyone lived according to the literal precepts of the Gospels, society would collapse into chaos. Something like this can be seen from the history of some of the more Anabaptist-infected corners of Europe in the early years of the 'Reformation'.**

Nearly 1300 years of painful experimentation elapsed between the Crucifixion and Dante's De Monarchia. While I am a great admirer of the ideal of Christendom, the articulation of Christendom as a social and political system was a very long time coming, and it was never implemented to the extent that the Chesterbelloc would have us believe.

On the other hand, Islam is an appeal to a community, not to individuals. It is a plan for building a more Godly society. This plan was immediately implemented with significant success. Despite all the other points of difference where the Gospels seem to be in advance of the Qur'an as a revelation, it can be argued that this one difference outweighs them all, particularly in times and places where Christianity has signally failed to establish a Godly society.

The poem-like object draws a parallel between two cases where the emphasis of Christianity on the individual has resulted in a dysfunctional society and this superiority of Islam over Christianity could be argued.

In the pre-Christendom Roman Empire of the East, living as directed in the Gospels was institutionalised as the monastic movement. Huge numbers of people chose this way of life, concerned for their salvation as individuals. Unlike the later monastic establishments of Western Europe, these early monks and nuns engaged in little economic activity and were essentially parasitic on the rest of society. The most able intellects were diverted into futile theological disputes and we now remember those centuries mostly for their incessant religious discord. Then the Muslims came and conquered the better half of the empire.

In the post-Christendom West, the evangelical sects emanating from the rebel colonies are similar to the monks of the byzantine Near East in their obsession with individual salvation and their propensity to theological hairsplitting and discord. Like the monks of Egypt, they have been ineffective in ordering wider society on a more Godly basis. Society has become as decadent and genocidal as the pre-Christian Roman Empire.

So then, this sincere doggerel written twelve years ago at the flood of the theoconservative tide in my soul.*** If we cannot have Christendom, if we are too pathetic and divided for that, it is better that we have Dar-al-Islam than go on the way were are going.

* Not that I think this analogy is helpful, see: 'Why I am not a Baha'i'.

** Note Prod-baiting scare quotes on 'Reformation' in a transparent attempt to goad Nato into commenting if he ever drops by.

*** But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Testing, testing...

2011-12-22T20:43:00.002+11:00

The link I put to this in a comment a while ago has gone dead due to Spouse-of-Clam's byzantine manipulations of the website, so I thought I would see if this worked. The image is of course targetted at people who have played both Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan, but may appeal to anyone with an interest in photoshopped hobbits in skimpy lingerie.

***

Long ago - I cannot remember if I ever told you this story before - when such things were still a litte respectable, one of my biochemistry lecturers wrote a letter to the local paper about the prospects of a biochemical cure for homosexuality. I wrote a letter saying that I thought this was a great project and I would like to help, and when we had done that we should go on and find a cure for heterosexuality, because this condition had ruined many more lives. I never did send the letter, having cold feet.

***

Anyways, I recognise that photoshopped LOTRO hobbits in skimpy lingerie are at odds with my degenderised Dr Clam persona. I wish there was a pill I could take when I felt like wasting time on these sort of projects, but I never did send that letter to the editor.

We Have Cookies

2011-12-22T18:47:00.001+11:00

They are on Coruscant.

Unification Day, w/o Brownshirts

2011-12-21T15:16:00.003+11:00

One evening last month in Gumi, an Australian colleague of mine asked a Korean colleague what the highest mountain in Korea was. 'Mount Baekdu' said my Korean colleague. 'On the border' - and being geographically ignorant I expected him to say 'of South and North Korea', - 'of China and North Korea.'

I thought I would share this fridge magnet I bought last month at Incheon airport. Note that Mount Baekdu is the only place it shows north of the DMZ. There are no names of cities or little pictures of the works of man, just a mediaeval-looking horseman hunting a tiger. North Korea is a terra nullius. In terms of useful infrastructure this is probably more or less true.

I think reunification will come soon, in the next decade, and what will follow will more closely resemble the colonisation of Mars than the reunification of Germany.

A metapost that makes no sense without reference to Marco's Blog

2011-12-20T07:24:00.001+11:00

All the action is happening on Facebook, Marco tells us.

(1) It is splendid to see this discussion happening on Facebook. This is the sort of thing I had hoped to find on Facebook. Well done!

(2) It is terrible that you have abandoned your blog, winstoninabox :(

(3) Nathanael, have you read an English translation of the Qur'an yet? Have you spoken to any Copts? I am afraid the only thing that really irritated me in this thread was your ~~cavalier~~ roundhead abandonment of 60% of Christian history (4th December 11:37).

(4) And last in order of importance, this whole argument is another illustration of our society's grotesque lack of any sense of proportion.

Civil marriage is an empty contract in our country. It has been white-anted by no-fault divorce, by the extension of the legal benefits of marriage to de facto couples, by the extension of the legal obligations of marriage to de facto couples, and by the refusal of the banks and the courts to countenance the level of trust traditionally expected between married people. I recognise there are good reasons for these changes, and they were made sincerely by people thinking they were doing the right thing. Nevertheless, their net effect has been to make civil marriage a contract unique in its lack of legal benefits or penalties for non-compliance to the parties to the contract. Those were the ditches to fight in. It is too late. So I don't care if such meaningless 'marriage' is extended to homosexual couples, or polyamatory relationships, or interspecific cohabitation, or pairings between blocks of granite considered by the Cult of Zorr to be avatars of the God H'jaa and Goddess P'zorth.

In the words of the Preacher of Ecclesiastes: 'Meaningless, meaningless! All is meaningless.'

You know, there are still some countries where homosexuals are killed. Not by their bigoted neighbors, but by the government. I think this is more important.

An Abolished Choice

2011-12-16T14:46:00.005+11:00

When race-based slavery was abolished in the colonies and rebel republics of the Americas, black men lost an important right. That was the right to sell themselves into slavery. In most times and places where slavery has existed, this extreme choice has been available to men faced with starvation, or prison, or murder at the hands of neighbours who will not tolerate a free man.

I will leave aside the obvious question of whether we have really only exchanged this individual right for a collective right - as epitomised by famous book titles such as The Servile State and The Road to Serfdom - to make the obvious analogy suggested by the historical preoccupations of this blog:

The social conditions that would lead a woman to chose to kill her unborn child are as pathological as the social conditions that would lead a man to chose to sell himself into slavery.

Seven years and a month and a day ago I wrote this.

***

Oh, and I will miss Christopher Hitchens. Here he writes about Borges.

2011-11-07T14:25:00.000+11:00

"I once asked Carpenter whether he knew of a spell which when spoken would annihilate the whole cosmos and all it contained, both physical and mental, and all memory of the same, absolutely and utterly for now and all time. And I recall vividly how he looked up from the book he was reading and said: 'I suppose things are not going well for you this afternoon.'"

(From Philip J. Davis, Mathematical Encounters of the 2nd Kind)

Eleven Conversations with Jorj, #1

2011-11-05T17:04:00.000+11:00

Quoth Marco: I can't even bring myself to read the shortest of short stories

To which I reply: Aww :(

This happened up near the Macintyre river two days walk southwest of Boggabilla. It is good country there with water and pasture in all but the worst years. There isn't any good describing the scenery because either you know what it looks like there or you don't. If you don't there is no way to write it so you can see it as it really is, so it will all be made-up in your head any way, so you may as well make it up as you like. Writing scenery is a dull game. As dull as an axe that has been used to cut down a tree with ant-hill made under the bark like they have away up north on the other side of the Empire. The trouble is you don't know where to stop. You can write that there was a creek about so wide flowing from this direction to that direction, and one tree of such a kind on the bank about so many paces from the man who speaks first, and another tree of a different kind so many paces away from him in another direction, and then another, and you can go on describing the scenery forever and never get to any point. Whatever. But if you have been there you will know what it looks like.

When Jorj woke up he found somequeep had eaten his horse. Jorj had been travelling alone and since he hadn't seen any travellers for the two days walk from Boggabilla that night he had just put down his swag a little distance from the track and unsaddled his horse. He didn't tie it up because it was the sort of horse that would stick close unless something came on it unawares in the night, and then Jorj thought it would be good if it could take off making a ruckus and get away and wake him up as well. This had always Jorj's habit in all the time he had been a pilgrim.

For some reason the horse hadn't made enough of a ruckus to wake up Jorj. The queep must have snuck up on it with mad hunter skills and eaten it. Not all of it of course. She had knocked it on the head to kill it and had cut off one of its legs and had only eaten about a seventh part of that leg. So it was mostly uneaten but not very good as a horse.

“Hey!” called Jorj not thinking that the queep might have a weapon or allies. He was just upset about his horse.

“You want some?” asked the queep. She made as if she didn't know Jorj was upset or maybe she didn't know Jorj was upset. You know how queeps are when they are from the empty places where there aren't many peeps. They don't notice the things about peeps that peeps notice as natural as breathing.

“That was my horse” said Jorj. He was looking at the scar he remembered from where his horse had gone silly at a flapping hammock drying on a line and thrown itself backward onto a broken branch. The scar was just above where the queep had cut off its leg.

“I got it first,” said the queep. “You were asleep. I heard you breathing.” That was not quite how she said it but you will have to imagine how she talked since it would be too hard to write exactly the way she said things. You can put in how their pointy teeth mess with the proper way words sound in peeptalk and the words the use that they think are peeptalk but aren't really, like 'tlebbish' and 'krp-krp' and 'jun'.

“You can have some” said the queep. “Too much for me to eat.” She made a gesture to show that she was a friend to peeps and not any kind of ranger or ganger or madbugger.

“That was my horse for five years” said Jorj. “I brought him from Taroom. He was carrying my stuff.”

“I don't know Taroom” said the queep. “You got durry?”

“His name was Nevermind” said Jorj. The anger and confusion he felt when he first saw the queep with his horse was fading into a dull sadness, wide and grey like the sky when a great storm comes in from the sea like they have away up north on the other side of the Empire. A thousand little fragments of memory of the long months on the road he had spent with Nevermind roiled up and disappeared again like beans in a pot that has just come to the boil. His eyes felt like he could cry if he wanted to but he didn't want to.

"You shouldn't go around peep country eating peep horses" said Jorj. "You could get in a lot of trouble". You can imagine as well as Jorj the kind of trouble a queep could get into in peep country eating peep horses when it is a hundred to one against the queep.

“You got durry?” asked the queep again. She tore another gobbet of bloody flesh from Nevermind's hind leg with her pointy teeth.

“No, I don't have any smokes” said Jorj. The queep didn't act disappointed. She didn't say anything either like peeps would usually say to tell Jorj that she wasn't disappointed, just went on eating Jorj's horse.

One thing Jorj had learned very young was to patiently take insults. He offered up Nevermind to the Blessed Virgin in silent prayer and sat down next to the queep under his sadness broad and grey like the sky. The queep shuffled aside a little to make room for him.

“You can have some” the queep said again after a moment. “Too much for me to eat.”

“You are very kind” said Jorj but did not take out his knife to cut a raw piece of his still-warm horse.

“What are your Taroom mob like?” asked the queep. She didn't change her expression when she asked questions since that is the queep way of queeps from way out bush who don't have much to do with peeps.

"They are a lot like peeps around here," said Jorj. He didn't know what to say about the peeps in Taroom that would make any sense to the queep. "We have cattle and horses, and obey the laws. We are not very different from any other peeps."

"Are your Taroom mob carnie peeps?" asked the queep.

'Only cattle and roos and chooks," said Jorj. "We don't eat horses." And after half a breath he thought he should add one more thing, and said "Or queeps."

"My mob don't either eat peeps" said the queep. "Too much trouble. Do your mob's souls go into horses?"

"What?" asked Jorj who had never talked for anything like so long with a queep from way out bush before.

"When your mob die, their souls go into horses, so your mob don't eat horses" explained the queep. She started working the hock joint of Nevermind's severed leg backwards to break it.

"No" said Jorj. "We don't believe that."

"The souls of our mob go into rivergum trees" said the queep. "If we climb a tree with a soul in we can hear the soul. If she wants to say something. Usually she does."

Jorj thought that God had probably arranged things so that his talk with the queep would take this theological turn, so as he could practice converting the heathen, but he had no idea what to say. How could he tell the queep that she couldn't hear the souls of her ancestors in the tops of the rivergum trees, when she had just told him she could? It would be like saying she was a liar.

"The soul of my aunt told my cousin she should go off down River to join the Longwater queeps but she didn't want to. Then there was trouble. And the soul of my grandmother told my other cousin where she could find the place the queep from over Yellow Thunder country told her about. And the soul of an old great-great-aunt queep from up river two, three days walk once told all the queeps round there when the carnie peeps were coming, days and days before anyone else had word from the fastest runners." Nevermind's hock joint broke with a loud snap.

"Our souls don't go into anything' said Jorj. "We believe that God judges our souls when we die, and they are taken somewhere very far away. Either to a good place or a bad place."

The queep's ears picked up and she looked Jorj straight in the face for the first time with those strange staring eyes queeps have. "Our mob don't know any good places very far away. All places very far away we know are bad. Either water you can't drink or land with no water to drink or land with carnie peeps that crack your bones. But your Taroom - it is very far away and a good place?"

"Yes, it's a good place" said Jorj. 'But Heaven and Hell are very very far away" said Jorj. "You can't get there however long you walk. Only your soul can, after you're dead."

"We wouldn't like to be so far away from our mob" said the queep. "Even if it is a good place. Better for you peeps to go into horses, stay close to your mob. You could move away from your God fella."

"It's not like that" said Jorj. "You can't get away from God however long you walk, either."

"Maybe so" said the queep. "Maybe you just didn't try hard enough ever."

"It's not like that" said Jorj again and wished he hadn't because he thought he sounded ridiculous. "God is in all places. He sees everything."

"Like the sky?" said the queep.

"Yes, but even more than that" said Jorj. "God made the sky."

The queep had finished stripping the meat from Nevermind's bone and tossed it off into a clump of grass. "Your Taroom mob have tallpoppy reckonings" said the queep. "Just saying. Whatever."

"It's not just the Taroom peeps" said Jorj. "Lots of peeps all over, and queeps too. For thousands of years, since before the Sky Caught Fire."

"No queeps before the Sky Caught Fire" pointed out the queep.

"Well, not queeps then, but lots of peeps. All over the world. They all said the same as we believe in Taroom."

"Before the Sky Caught Fire peeps had lots of tallpoppy reckonings" said the queep. "Just saying. Whatever."

Jorj felt entirely incapable of evangelising the queep. He felt not only sad at the loss of his horse but entirely futile, like one leaf floating in a scum of leaves in the sluggish grey-green sea under the mangroves that they have away up north on the other side of the Empire. The ancients had known things that peeps nowaday could only guess at. They had gone from one end of the world in the time it took to bake a loaf of bread and they had but to say the word when they didn't know a thing, and they would know it, in less time than it takes a drop of water to hit the ground when you flick it from your hands when you wash them. You know how if it is true for peeps only guessing it is even truer for queeps, since there hadn't been any queeps who survived that time to tell the young queeps what it had been like. They could only look at the ruins, and the dead zones, and the things that came out of them, and think that whoever had been there before the Sky Caught Fire must have had lots of tallpoppy reckonings.

Jorj decided to press the queep on matters of ethics rather than theology. "You shouldn't kill horses like this. Or cattle. In this country every animal like that will belong to some peep, and they will be angry with you. They might catch you and beat you, or kill you."

"You haven't beat me or stab me" said the queep. "And it's a beaut stabber you've got."

Jorj hadn't thought that the queep had noticed his knife. He wasn't wearing it to be seen. It was ancient made, taken out of a holden by his grandfather in the rough country out by Turnagain Mountain and a present for his going-away pilgrimming. He was angry with the queep, he told himself. He had been fond of Nevermind. And he would have to leave behind things he had wanted to take with him to Wee Waa. But there was just a strange hole inside him where the anger should have been. He should just accept it as a blessing, he told himself.

"Most peeps would beat you or kill you" said Jorj. "Whenever there are more of them than one and you make them angry. And there are a lot of peeps in this country."

The queeps just looked at Jorj with unsettly eyes.

"You can't reckon on them all being like me" went on Jorj. "I - I'm different. We're not supposed to hurt peeps or queeps even when they hurt us, because God loves us. Most of us don't do what we're supposed to do - and I'm not saying I always do - but I've always tried. I am trying to be good. I know it's wrong for me to beat or stab you."

"Can I lend your stabber then for cutting up the horse?" asked the queep. "It's better than mine."

"I guess so" said Jorj. He extracted it and handed the hilt to the queep.

"Too bad you got no durry" said the queep, handling the knife with an admiration that was almost reverence. She began butchering Nevermind with more enthusiasm than skill. You know how queeps usually hunt in packs and tear what they kill apart with their claws to divvy it up.

"I never knew what talpoppy ideas peeps had." said the queep. "Your God fella is a madbugger. Just saying. Whatever. I reckon if every peep reckoned like you before long there wouldn't be any peeps. Carnies, rangers, gangers, madbuggers, they would cut you all up and take your stuff so if you weren't stabbed dead you'd starve."

"But they are all peeps too" said Jorj. "If every peep believed the same, they would believe the same way too, and give up ranging and eating peeps."

"Not going to happen" said the queep. "Just saying. Whatever."

Jorj was warming to his task of evangelising the queep. "We believe - I believe- it is what we should do. Because, you see, God loves each of us even more than we do ourselves and want us to do what is right so we can be happy forever."

The queep went on butchering Nevermind in silence.

"What is right to do isn't always the practical thing to do" said Jorj.

The queep for the first time made a gesture that was almost a human gesture, a sort of long slow sweeping shake of the head in which her whole torso moved too. She scrambled over the horse corpse to cut a bit that was an awkward angle to get at. From now on there won't be any description of the horse butchering, first, because those inside parts are tricky to describe, and second, because there is always something about going from a corpse that looks like an animal or peep that might just be sleeping to a whole pile of cut-up meat and bones and offal that if you can't make up what it looks like for yourself it is better not to have someone else describe it to you.

'Not to worry about queeps' said the queep, returning to the practical matter of Jorj's warning. 'If I reckoned you would've killed me, I would've killed you first. I heard you breathing.'

'That would be wrong, to kill a peep who hadn't done you any hurt' said Jorj.

'Only if they wouldn't if they could' said the queep. 'I reckon I would know if they would or not. Not to worry about queeps. More worry about you, with your Taroom tallpoppy reckonings'

'You don't have to worry about me' said Jorj.

'I'm not gonna' said the queep. 'You should worry about you though, and not me. Just saying. Whatever.'

Jorj felt a terrible ache of longing to make the queep see, a wish that was like an ant-bite in the soft skin between his toes. He wished that he could open his head and open the queep's head and just pour all the thoughts and feelings from his head into the queep's head. It was so clear to him, what it meant to be good, why it was needful to be good, what the universe meant, but there was no way that he could explain it to the queep. He thought of five or six other ways he could try to explain and gave up on them all without saying them. What he ended up saying was just, 'I'd better go get my stuff'.

The queep didn't say anything back to this.

Jorj went back and sorted through his things, leaving behind what would be too heavy to carry without Nevermind. He had set out to travel light and not burden himself with the Things of This World but he still found this hard. You know how if you start out travelling with two saddlebags, you bring enough stuff to fill two saddlebags; and if you start out travelling with four saddlebags, you bring enough stuff to fill four saddlebags, whether you set out to travel light or not. It was some time before Jorj finished packing his stuff in a way he could carry and found his way back to the queep.

'I couldn't carry it all' said Jorj. 'You can take anything I left there if you want.'

The queep had by then almost finished cutting away the nicer meat from Nevermind.

'This is a beaut stabber you've got," said the queep, turning it so it threw the morning light at Jorj's eye. Jorj felt a sudden surge of anger, seeing his horse's blood all over the knife his grandfather had found in a holden at Turnagain Mountain, a knife of ancient metal made in some china far across the ocean before the Sky Caught Fire. Then the anger changed between one heartbeat and the next into something that was almost the same, a sort of reckless selflessness that was all brightly-coloured and spiny, like the thorny bushes with fire-coloured flowers that are more like leaves than flowers, like they have away up north on the other side of the Empire.

'Take it' said Jorj. 'You can have it.'

The queep was silent for a moment and a peep would have been silent since they suspected some kind of trick but you can never tell what a queep is thinking.

'You can have the knife' said Jorj.

'Not fair if you lend me your beaut stabber and I don't lend you nothing' said the queep. 'What you want?'

'Nothing' said Jorj. 'I just want you to have the knife.'

'You Taroom peeps are - just saying - madbuggers' said the queep. She cleaned off the knife and hid it and packed away a few of the pieces of meat she had cut into her own bag.

'Too much for me to eat. You take what you like' she said, indicating the other cuts of meat lying on a bit of Nevermind's hide.

'You are very kind' said Jorj again.

'Not' said the queep. 'I give you something. Maybe get rid of some of your tallpoppy reckonings.'

'What?' said Jorj.

In the next breath the queep was scampering off through the bush like the animal its ancestors had been before the Sky Caught Fire, and Jorj was clutching his hand. The queep had bitten him, harder than a nip, not bad enough to stuff his hand up, just a clean in-and-out of teeth like knifepoints that left a line of little welling globes of blood in the soft part of his hand.

'Ow' said Jorj.

That happened up near the Macintyre river two days walk southwest of Boggabilla. Whatever.

Epiphany v2.0

2011-11-03T14:30:00.002+11:00

I find it difficult to finish most novels most of the time.

This is true for most people as far as writing them goes. For me it is also true so far as reading them goes.

Beginnings are of course the easiest and most fun to write: and I also find them the easiest and most fun to read. It is best when a story is full of mysterious possibilities. Once a novel has settled down to a 'plot' and most of the possibilities are blocked off, I almost always lose interest.

I think that thirty years of GMing, most of it on the fly, for most of that time more than once a week, for the past twenty years most of it in a system we invented ourselves, has ruined me for the novel. This used to make me feel bad. But I have had an epiphany.

Life is complexity: it sits at the interface of order and chaos. By the time the reader gets hold of it, the content of a novel is preordained. No matter how much it may seem complex, it belongs to order: it cannot sit at the interface. It is only an unfolding in the reader's mind of what already existed in a different embodiment in the writer's mind. I hate how every time I read a book the characters do exactly the same thing.

In a role-playing game he interactions between players are not preordained. They can sit at this interface between order and chaos. The mechanisms within role-playing games that introduce chance drag the story towards this interface. The GM has to abdicate the desire for complete control, to become one of the co-creators. There is no question of honing a scene to make it perfect, of taking days to find the right word: the word must be spoken, now. In a role-playing game there is only one draft. A role playing game is a more complex artistic product than a novel and requires a greater degree of skill. Thus, I assert:

The Role-Playing Game is a greater form of art than the novel.

Though the people who can play a Role-Playing Game 'well' enough to actualise its potential do not yet exist. One day they will, and passively consumed art will fade into the background.

To Paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen

2011-10-24T08:14:00.000+11:00

I know the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal is a friend of mine. Ma'am, you are no Wall Street Journal.

Jaws was never my scene

2011-10-22T20:03:00.003+11:00

Though I do like Star Wars.

This is basically just a post to announce that I have finished "The Third Policeman" and you should read it too.

I think it would be interesting if you re-read "Pilgrim's Progress" first, although I didn't do that, since they are sort of complementary. Though you probably have enough books to read already.

Anyway, bicycles are a big theme in "The Third Policeman". The first two policemen, Pluck and MacCruiskeen, are obsessed with bicycles. I am sure they ought to be an allegory for something but I am not sure what I want them to be. They sort of embody both cyclic motion and motion in a striaght line. They have the theory that gradually atoms of bicycle migrate into the riders and make them less human, while atoms of rider migrate into the bicycles and make it them more human. In my ideal life I would bicycle for three hours a day and this theory explains a lot about some of my more bicycle-like behaviour.

"How would you know a man has a lot of bicycle in his veins?"

"If his number is over Fifty you can tell it unmistakeable from his walk. He will walk smartly always and never sit down and he will lean against the wall with his elbow out and stay like that all night in the kitchen instead of going to bed. If he walks too slowly or stops in the middle of the road he will fall down in a heap and will have to be lifted and set in motion again by some extraneous party. That is the unfortunate state that the postman has cycled himself into, and I don't think he will ever cycle himself out of it."

While I cycle about not getting anywhere (since I always end up back home in the same place) I like to pretend that I am going somewhere. So using the wonders of GoogleMaps I have tracked my virtual progress from Land's End to John O'Groats, and last year I started virtually crossing the Sahara and gave up, and recently I have started virtually crossing the Sahara again. I am retracing some version of the path of the narrator of "Beau Geste" from Oran to Kano via Agades. On the basis of GoogleMaps, I am prepared to weigh into the debate into whether P. C. Wren ever actually joined the Foreign Legion - or even travelled extensively in Algeria - with a NOT.

About approaching Sidi bel-Abbes: "It was not until we were approaching our destination that sand-hills and desert encroached and a note of wildness and savagery prevailed".

No, the sand-hills and desert are far away on the other side of the mountains: it is still a long way to go to the top of the range from Sidi bel-Abbes, and while the cultivated land the road runs through might not have been cultivated then, there are plenty of uncultivated hills covered with trees.

I have ordered a paper about quantum physics in 'The Third Policeman' and I promise to come back with another post in which I quote slabs of it.

October's Factoid

2011-10-15T15:34:00.002+11:00

From wikipedia (PBUI):

"By 1838, open hostility was peaking again. Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued Missouri Executive Order 44, which encouraged Missourians to expel Mormons by all means possible or exterminate them if they would not leave. ... In 1976 Missouri officially revoked the extermination order."

I think it would have said in the article if in say, 1975, some enterprising Missourian had beaten a Mormon extermination rap by citing Executive Order 44. So well done to the government of 1970s Missouri for seeing this potential loophole and closing it before it caused trouble!

***

I wanted to link to this as part of my Seven Year Anniversary linkfest. I don't really have anything to add, I just felt like linking to it again. The two pillars of optimism discussed in that link are visited again here.

***

The other day I had a look at my blogger profile to see how many bloggers had registered the same interests. I think you will agree that the blogosphere's priorities are sadly out of whack.

Politics : 119 000

History : 104 000

Literature : 94 000

Science : 78 200

Philosophy : 74 000

Religion : 58 100

Ethics : 13 100

Buffy the Vampire Slayer : 3 500

Turanga Leela : 3

Photoshopped pictures of LOTRO Hobbits in Skimpy Lingerie : 1

***

Finally, here is a picture of that shirt that Marco wouldn't make for me:

I don't believe I have ever owned anything made in Haiti. Or seen anything owned by someone else made in Haiti. It fills me with a wild enthusiastic glee to think that Haiti might actually now be a place where people make things to sell me.

At last, an excuse to put up a picture of Tasha Yar

2011-10-09T10:40:00.000+11:00

She hates time

Make it stop

(1985, Bowling for Soup)

It is chilling to think that the span of time separating the me of now from the airing of the final episode of Star Trek: TNG is greater than that yawning abyss, that age of the world, separating the young fanboy me from the airing of the final episode of TOS. Please forgive me for sitting here paralysed with existential terror for a while.

When I first wrote that I wanted to complain about the shoddy tricks in the presentation of certain modern utopias - Kim Stanley Robinson's Colour Mars series and Julian May's Galactic Milieu series- Lexifab said I ought to talk about the Roddenberry utopia as well.

The main practical problems with this were, first, that I hadn't actually thought of any shoddy tricks in the presentation of the utopian world of Star Trek and second, that the amount of canonical material out there was vastly greater than a few novels. Also, the shoddy tricks I was concerned about were the sort of things novellists do, when they can write whatever they like to justify their creation, and Gene Roddenberry did not have this same degree of freedom. Unlike a novellist's utopia, the Roddenberry utopia already had to make compromises with the real world before we got to see it.

So I put off Lexifab's assignment for a while while I looked for my copy of David Gerrold's “The World of Star Trek” on all the bookshelves, and then in boxes in the sheds, and then gave up and ordered another copy from the other side of the world. About a minute after it arrived last week I realised it would be no help at all. It was all about TOS, filtered through network sensibilities, with a bible that explicitly warned writers off too close an examination of the society the Enterprise came from. Instead I went back to the interwebz.

The interwebz are full of win. I will just link lazily to a few of the things I found. Here is a worthwhile discussion of various unsavoury features of the society of the United Federation of Planets. This highlights the peculiar pervasiveness of a military organisation, Starfleet, in the supposedly peaceful UFP.

Most importantly, I found this.

If you allow your eyes to glaze over while you scroll down a page or two of rather shrill wingnutty background material, you will find that post on stardestroyer.net to be a lucid exposition of how TNG is a communist state. It all fits together very nicely. Michael Wong postulates some sort of left-wing revolution between TOS and TNG, but not being slaves to continuity we can simply say that TNG is the more valid picture of the Roddenberry utopia: the show made by the recognised Master of the Uberfranchise, who could finally do what he liked, showing the utopia he intended.

Quoted elsewhere on the stardestroyer.net site is Paula Block, head of Star Trek licensing at Paramount:

“Gene R. himself had a habit of decanonizing things. He didn't like the way the animated series turned out, so he proclaimed that it was NOT CANON. He also didn't like a lot of the movies. So he didn't much consider them canon either. And—okay, I'm really going to scare you with this one-after he got TNG going, he .. well .. he sort of decided that some of the Original Series wasn't canon either. I had a discussion with him once, where I cited a couple things that were very clearly canon in the Original Series, and he told me that he didn't think that way anymore, and that he now thought of TNG as canon wherever there was conflict between the two. He admitted it was revisionist thinking, but so be it.”

We are not shown how property has been abolished in the human societies of the UFP, or how religion has withered away, or how transportation and communication have fallen completely into government hands. But it is not too hard to imagine how this could happen given the amount of time we have to play with. The trend over my lifetime – and really, for the past century – is all in this direction. Regulate the media, have government agencies take the lead in space travel, entangle corporations more and more with regulation, grow the public sector until most people get all their income from the government – it is not so far to TNG. Give humanity a few major crises to rally people around the defenders of humanity and it is easy.

My original set of requirements for a utopia were:

(1) An incorruptible ruling class who will not selfishly exploit the system, and

(2) A class of ruled who will meekly go along doing what they are told.

The fact that communication between worlds is limited in TNG, and is in the hands of a relatively small group that has been aggressively selected for certain traits since the beginning of space travel, means that these two requirements can be met more realistically than in other utopias.

In TNG, we are essentially never shown the ruled. Our picture is restricted to a small sub-section of elite cosmonauts: people with real skills who are given important work to do by the Federation and can lead useful and exciting lives. It is reasonable that these people will not bother themselves with politics and will be outwardly committed believers and happy ambassadors for the system, just like real life cosmonauts. So the only real shoddy trick is a trick of emphasis that is also a requirement of drama: we see neither the ruling class which must be incorruptible, nor the meek ruled, just this highly anomalous population of heroes.

The trend of current events shows us how a meek ruled class can be achieved. Technologicial advances mean we can make a lot of stuff cheaply. The government gives people lots of free stuff. QED. Postulating the sort of technological developments shown in Star Trek, the economic sclerosis that doomed historical communist regimes is not an issue: the ruled can be given enough free stuff to lead materially satisfying lives. If most people are comfortable with their lives, any dissidents that exist will be unable to get much traction.

Furthermore, the government control of interworld communication and transport will effectively quarantine any trouble that does get started: there is no faster-than-light Facebook to spread the message of civil disobedience across the quadrant. The limitations of communication also mean that government in the Federation cannot possibly be centralised to the same extent as on a united Earth. It cannot be a despotic regime, but must be an aristocratic one, where a class with shared values provides a stable elite. Starfleet as shown is a plausible picture of such an elite, educated to uphold the ideals of the Federation in much the same way as the ruling elite of the British Empire were educated. Because of the poor communications between worlds, not very many of these people are required, just like a mere handful of bureaucrats were needed to run the British Empire. Aristocratic regimes have maintained relatively high standards of incorruptibility for quite long periods of time – so long as you have a small governing class with a shared ideology and mechanisms for dividing power between them, everyone in the class will watch each other, and bring anyone who diverges from the ideology or becomes too individually powerful to account.

The Roddenberry utopia of TNG is dependent on a government monopoly of interworld communications that is reasonable, given the size and probable cost of the intersystem ships shown. The utopia seems entirely plausible to me. It could be introduced and maintained without any shoddy tricks of the kind I talked about with Kim Stanley Robinson's utopia or Julian May's utopia. The only trick is involved in selling the utopia to us, the viewer at home, by zooming in on one small facet of the world.

Three Anecdotes Addressing the Existence of God

2011-10-08T11:33:00.002+11:00

First Anecdote

I can only ever remember once praying for God to show me a sign of his existence, one night when I was lying in bed unable to sleep. That night I went on and on being unable to sleep, long after the time I would usually be asleep. Then I heard a small sound from the cat. I got out of bed and found that the cat had gotten hold of a gecko. I rescued the gecko from the cat, and then I could sleep.

Commentary on the First Anecdote

An action of God within the universe ought to be explicable also in terms of a chain of causes within the universe. Futile acts of interspecies altruism can be explained as an accidental side-effect of the development of intraspecies altruism that has survival value: is it foolish of me to see them also as signs of a merciful God working in the universe?

Second Anecdote

At that moment I was the closest I have ever been to committing a terrorist act. As I strode briskly from the station to the building where I worked, I was full of righteous indignation, and was thinking – still very idly, still not seriously at all – of the best mechanism for distributing a certain white powder to certain temples of Moloch in the City of Dreadful Night. In the middle of a pedestrian crossing the lace of one of my boots caught on a hook on my other boot, and fastened my feet momentarily together. My momentum carried me forward so that I teetered crazily for a moment and then fell flat on the pavement. I had my keys in my hand, ready to unlock the door of my office, and as I fell forward I lost hold of them. Sharing my forward momentum, they skittered ahead across the pavement and disappeared into a storm drain.

Commentary on the Second Anecdote

Is it foolish of me to see this as a sign signifying “don't do that”?

Third Anecdote

Every day I skim the news for some word of the long-running conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the fate of the refugees displaced the better part of a generation ago. There is never anything. Instead, almost every day I read of another conflict, involving similar numbers of people, about which the nations of the world complain continually. I observe one small nation against which the whole world is united, whose crimes are smaller than most nations and yet are the only crimes which the world condemns. I see that this is the only nation that you would find with the same name and in much the same location as you would 2800 years ago. I see also that this is a nation of people that were condemned for thousands of years for not having a nation, for being parasites on other nations. I see that this people have made an enormously disproportionate contribution to science and art and to the entire structure of modern Western civilisation. And I observe that the religion of this people is uniquely free of selfish meme material: it neither promises its adherents extravagant rewards in an afterlife, nor claims to be a universal religion that all men must follow.

Commentary on the Third Anecdote

One would think that the Jews would be the one people the 'international community' would be willing to cut a little slack, if they had any historical consciousness. The Chesterbelloc wrote at length about how the survival of the Catholic Church was a miraculous thing, how the institution was again and again on the point of becoming a lifeless shell but was then reanimated: but the survival of the Jews seems to me to be orders of magnitude more impressive. If there is anything miraculous in swimming against the tide of history, in maintaining through many trials an uncorrupted ideology that points to a just and merciful God, then it is the Jews who are miraculous.

FWIW...

2011-10-02T21:31:00.004+11:00

I have read that a theatre academic somewhere in the rebel colonies put the poster on the right up on his door, and the university administrators sent people to take it down because it was an incitement to violence. Now, probably in the small print of his contract there is a statement that says they can do this. And maybe the academic in question is some sort of a psychopath, but has another clause in his contract saying he can't be sacked unless he actually shoots someone, and the university PR people have just done a crummy job selling the story. But I suspect not.

What struck me painfully, this being the week it is, was how diametrically opposed Captain Reynolds' stated philosophy is from the current practice of the rebel colonists in carrying out their overseas contingency operations. When the unmanned drone crashes through the roof and blows you into small pieces, you will be asleep and unarmed, and your attacker will be hundreds or thousands of miles away. This is doubtless much more practical than Captain Reynolds. But the rebel colonists are much less likely to end up with an enemy that respects them. And the world will hear only hypocrisy when they make impassioned speeches after their enemies kill their people when they are unarmed and sleeping.

The reference to 'this being the week it is' refers to another thing I read this week, that the rebel colonists are now doing this sort of thing to their own citizens without going through the forms of sentencing them to death in absentia. This is one further little step down a road whose destination, I think, is bad. And it disturbs me much more than the Andrew Bolt thing that I was going on about earlier.

2011-10-01T10:34:00.000+10:00

'Even if a cataclysmic upheaval like a communistic regime should come, the old tradition of individuality, toleration, moderation and common sense will break Communism and change it beyond recognition, rather than Communism with its socialistic, impersonal and rigoristic outlook break the old tradition. It must be so.'

(Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, 1934)

An exercise in translation

2011-09-30T07:29:00.005+10:00

AS you see, the two men on the right are from a species who face terrible racism just because of the pointiness of their ears.

So you'll be thrilled that both have won a rare opportunity - one offered to their species alone to end such injustice.

The man to the right, Lunar arts academic Derek Pasolini-Wong, this week won our richest prize for Vulcan artists - the 40 kilocredit Sarek Award. And the man to the left, Lunar law academic Tricia McMillan, has won one of our richest prizes for Vulcan students - the Zefram Cochrane Extraterrestrial Scholarship.

If, studying the faces of these two "Vulcans" you think this is surely the most amazing stretch of definition, you're wrong.

McMillan has gone one better still: he's also won the Vulcan Android's Action in Education Foundation Scholarship, originally intended to help educate Vulcan androids, not biological humans.

But that's modern species politics at our universities and anywhere else where grants and privileges are now doled out.

Hear that scuffling at the trough? That's the sound of Vulcan refugees being elbowed out by Humans shouting "but I'm Vulcan, too". Hark! - is that a man I now hear breathing heavily as he runs up: "And I'm an Vulcan android."

You see, Pasolini-Wong and McMillan are representatives of a booming new class of victim you'd never have imagined we'd have to support with special prizes and jobs.

They are "round-eared Vulcans" - people who, out of their multi-stranded but largely Human genealogy, decide to identify with the thinnest of all those strands, and the one that's contributed least to their looks. Yes, the Vulcan one now so fashionable among artists and academics.

Let McMillan himself describe the torture he's faced as a result - the shocking pain of having not been discriminated against for being pointy-eared.

"I am a round-eared, red-blooded, illogical Vulcan Earthling . . . As a child, I grew up expecting everyone to be like me, to look like me - with the round-ears and straight eyebrows. Clearly, my naive ideas about how Vulcans were 'supposed' to look were wrong. But being Vulcan and irrational and pink-skinned was normal to me and I grew up in a world where I was treated 'normally' . . . Impeding my growth from that young person into the adult I wanted to become was the profound issue of identity. I was a round-eared pointy-eared man . . . I was becoming a victim."

You'd swear this was from a satire -- a local version of Mimsy Marquis Mopoke's routine as the fashionably aggrieved human vole fighter Gul Broni, complaining: "Is it cos I is cardassian?"

But no, this is meant seriously, and serious perks and Vulcan-only benefits flow as a consequence.

McMillan - whose confusion about his identity leads him also to declare he's both a "proud cyborg" and a "proud technophobe" - has received all the special help you once thought, when uploading credits to Federation consolidated revenue, would at least go to people who looked Vulcan, but which is increasingly lavished on folk as pink in face as they are in politics.

This trained lawyer has not just won several prizes intended for Vulcans, but has worked for Vulcan groups such as the Vulcan Refugee Council, and is the Vulcan representative on several boards, including that of a local Vulcan Philosophers Union. Now he's a researcher at Delta Vega House of Learning at the University of Technology, Luna - a "vulcan" outfit run by the very illogical Prof Ayesha Miraflores, who may have been raised by her human mother but today, as a professional Vulcan, is chairman of our biggest taxpayer-funded Vulcan holographic entertainment service.

The blue-skinned and antennaed Pasolini-Wong has been similarly privileged, despite having a "Andorian-Earthling" father and a mother with only part-Vulcan ancestry in her otherwise Klingon past. He now lectures on "Vulcan and Terran perspectives of culture and history" at Luna University and his Vulcan art now hangs in most of our planetary art collections.

Nor are Pasolini-Wong, McMillan and Miraflores atypical or even rare as "round-eared Vulcans".

Venusburg artist Henna Tattoo Sullivan, raised by her human mother, explored her own pain at being too round-eared in a Next Wave Festival show, Not Really Vulcanian, for which she photographed herself with giant pointy corbomite ears attached to her distressingly round ones.

Hulking crinkly-foreheaded Kozak Qua'lon, daughter of a Klingon immigrant, also identified herself as a "round-eared Vulcanian", which fortuitously allowed her to make the shortlist for the L5 Colonies Vulcan Art Award, alongside other Vulcan artists as emotional as a Jane Austen novel.

THE bearded Elsie Teapot Naarg was just as lucky. She needed to write just one book -- and say her dad had Tellarite-Vulcan ancestry - for the Solar Council to snap her up as its Vulcan Literacy Project ambassador.

I've written before of a dozen similar cases, several even more incongruous.

For instance, how can Muhammad Al-Misri be co-chair of the Vulcan Telepaths Justice Group when his right to call himself Vulcan rests on little more than the fact that his Ba'ku great-grandfather married a part-Vulcan woman?

Yes, yes, I know. What business is it of anyone else how we identify ourselves? In fact, we're so refreshingly non-judgmental these days - so big-hugs-for-all - that the Federation's Human Rights Commission wants our laws changed so a man can even call himself an android, should he feel like it.

Hear it from the HRC itself: "The evidentiary requirements for the legal recognition of biological status should be relaxed by . . . making greater allowance for people to self-identify their biological status."

Lovely! Soon there'll be no end of Humans claiming prizes meant for Vulcan androids. And don't dare then tell the HRC's anti-discrimination police you object.

Yet I do object, and not just because I refuse to surrender my reason and pretend round really is pointy, just to aid some artist's self-actualisation therapy.

That way lies madness, where truth is just a whim and words mean nothing.

I refuse also for two other reasons that should be important to us all.

First, of course, is that the special encouragements and prizes we set aside for Vulcans are actually meant for . . . well, Vulcans. You know, the refugees whose planet was blown up in the franchise re-boot and who we fear would get nothing, if we didn't offer a bit extra, just for them.

So when a privileged round-eared Vulcan then snaffles that extra, odds are that an underprivileged pointy-eared Vulcan misses out on the very things we hoped would help them most.

Take Pasolini-Wong's art prize. This round-eared university lecturer, with his nice Armstrong Dome studio, has by winning pushed aside real draw-in-the-dirt Vulcan artists such as T'Nap, M'Nang and N'gkur, who'd also entered and could really have used that cash and recognition.

DOES this make sense? What's a Vulcan art prize for, if a man as illogical and cosseted as Pasolini-Wong can win it, and with a work that shows no real Vulcan techniques or traditions?

What's a greenish-skinned Vulcan artist from an asteroid in the Vega system to think, seeing yet another human hyperdrive back to Earth with the goodies?

Same with McMillan. When a man as illogical as I, already a lawyer with a job, wins a prize meant to encourage and inspire hard-struggle Vulcan students, what must those Vulcans conclude?

And here's my other objection.

Seeking power and reassurance in a racial identity is not just weak - a surrendering of your individuality, and a borrowing of other people's glories.

It's also exactly what we have too much of already. The noble ideal of the Federation of Planets, that we judge each other by our character and deeds, and not our faith, fortune or birthworld, is breaking down. We're not yet a Federation of tribes, but that's sure the way we're heading.

I've never before seen so many Earth-born people identify themselves by their species, whether by joining racial gangs, living in racial enclaves, forming racial clubs, demanding racial entertainment, playing in racial sports clubs, or grabbing species-specific prizes and grants.

Why is that a problem? Because people who feel they owe most to their species tend to feel they owe less to the rest. At its worst, it's them against us.

Feel that fracturing yourself?

So when even academics and artists now spurn the chance to be people of our better future - people of every ethnicity but none - and sign up instead as human Vulcans, insisting on differences invisible to the eye, how much is there left to hold us together?

****

Now, if all these anecdotes about faux-Vulcans are factually untrue – if they didn't actually do and say the things they are reported to have done and said – then, whoever wrote this ought to apologise, and it's well and good that they be prosecuted as a journalist on the grounds that they shouldn't make stuff up. Amen to that.

But, if these anecdotes about faux-Vulcans are substantially true, then the only rational way of thinking about these people is: what a bunch of daft pillocks.

It doesn't matter what they think or feel about what they are doing and why they are doing it. They might honestly think they are behaving the way they are for perfectly noble and sensible reasons. They might honestly feel a deep and passionate connection to their Vulcan heritage. But they are still daft pillocks.

I am thinking that the wise thing for the author to do would have been to stay well away from any speculation about the motives of these faux-Vulcans - because saying that they are in it for the money is the only thing that can be construed as defamatory - and restrict the discussion to the undeniable effects of their actions. By assuming this cultural identity and being better able to function in the society of the United Federation of Planets than people who are more genetically and culturally Vulcan, they have marginalised less acculturated Vulcans. They have taken resources that were meant by society at large to assist those less acculturated Vulcans. They have contributed to the cancer of identity politics in the UFP. I think those are all solid assertions that no rational person would find offensive.

Update October 7th:
Having read (or skimmed) Justice Blomberg's judgment, and had a good look around the web trying to find out exactly what the factual innacuracies Andrew Bolt committed were, and read - it being hard to avoid without having much greater willpower than I do - numerous other op-ed's on the issue, like this one, and this one, I think I have a better feeling for the emotional texture of what is going on and wish to reiterate the paragraph immediately above this one.

I first read Bolt's chastised articles in a Marconomic way, taking the words at their literal meaning and not paying much attention to the rhetorical flourishes: and read that way I think they are not bad, and make some important points that are very largely true. But it seems to me that the rhetorical flourishes really are intended to imply that named individuals are guilty of opportunism, dishonesty, and greed. The errors of fact are all rather nebulous and trivial, but they are all there to contribute to this implication. And Bolt ought to have had the self control not to make this implication it if he wanted his points to be taken seriously.

Barry Cohen writes: "I don't intend to discuss the details of the case brought by the nine pale plaintiffs for the obvious reason I could well be the next one in the dock. Oddly enough I had been planning to write an almost identical article to Bolt's". Here I think he is exaggerating his danger. I don't think he would have been in the dock for writing an article that made the same points, because he would not have gotten carried away making personal attacks on people.

This Post Redacted by the Ministry of Nice

2011-09-28T13:27:00.002+10:00

...

Pyramid Scheme

2011-09-28T03:15:00.000+10:00

I thought I would very badly paraphrase Marco's point at the end of his post here that it doesn't matter what sort of cockamamie nonsense we spend our money on, it will still be more sensible than what the rest of the developed world has done with theirs. This has a lot of resonance with me. So let's go ahead and build the National Broadband Network. Let's buy a shiny new carbon management bureaucracy. Let's work out the most expensive way we can possibly think of to deal with asylum seekers, and do that.

But what I really think we should build to bring our debt levels in line with the rest of the world is a pyramid.

Yes, that's right. After we stop painting the Harbour Bridge, it will rust away to nothing in a hundred years. A tsunami is sure to get the Opera House sometime in the next millennium. What have we really got in terms of durable architecture to tell the people five thousand years from now how great we were? Nothing. So, a pyramid. Instead of this pissant little monument to commemorate the birth of the Australian Labor Party, we should have taken all that stimulus funding and built a ruddy great pyramid, as in the cheap and nasty photoshop artist's Google Earth impression below:

The Great Pyramid of Barcaldine, before addition of marble facing and golden bit on top.

I have gotten up at three in the morning to post this, I reckon it is such a great idea.

Interim report from the 5th of September

2011-09-09T21:35:00.000+10:00

Everywhere I look from my house I can see the handiwork of mankind. The land is broken up into little pieces with fences and with lines of trees. If I wanted I could look up on maps exactly which piece of land has belonged to who, for the last 150 years or so. The trees that separate these plots of land are alien trees, brought by man from distant lands, and the land is dotted with large animals people have also put there. Lines of poles carrying wires stretch across the land in places, and in other places there are roads, and every so often I can see the speck of a house or a shed. It is all tamed and humanised.

So I am pleased to be holidaying somewhere where I can appreciate the wildness of nature. Outside the window I can see nothing made by mankind. Stretching to the horizon is a plain unmarked by a fence, road, or permanent structure of any kind. There are no maps I can consult to see who has owned a plot of it. for no one ever has. As I sit I can see a vast creature moving across the plain, larger even than any animal that lived in my home country when it was wilderness, a creature which has doubtless travelled many thousands of miles without encountering the works of man.:

We are staying on the 20^th floor of a hotel on the Gold Coast, facing the sea. From this height we can also hear practically nothing but the sea: all the ground-level sounds of the city are swallowed up in it except at rare intervals, when the sound of a human machine or a human voice cuts through the sound of the waves like a distant sound from the highway might reach me at home. There was other sound I noticed this morning, striving mightily with the sea: birdsong. So it is like being entirely alone with the wilderness.

Furthermore I have here no internet, and have not bothered to go downstairs and buy any newspaper in the shopping centre twenty floors below, so I am removed from the flow of the affairs of other human beings that I am usually immersed in. In a few days no doubt I will be glad to return to civilisation. But for now I am happy in this solitude.

Breaking it down: Economics is the means, not the end

2011-09-04T09:07:00.001+10:00

Quoth Marco: How would you judge economic activities by not for profit organizations over normal private companies doing similar things?

What I am going to say is not at all original and is probably half-remembered from Chesterton, or Simone Weil, or possibly Proudhon.

The unit of economic activity is the man-hour.

A field of wheat has no economic value without someone to harvest it; a mountain of iron ore has no economic value without people to smelt it and beat it into plowshares; a law has no economic value except to the extent that it changes the way people spend their time.

Money is a superbly effective instrument for doing two things. First, for convincing people to spend man-hours in ways they would not do spontaneously by giving them a way to command the time of other people with different skills and different access to resources. Second, for distributing man-hours efficiently in time and space so that most people in most places get most things they need, things they could never possibly get if they were just one person with a plot of land, a hut, some seeds and a sharp stick.

Now, for sourcing goods, money is a good thing, since it allows us to use the labour of people all over the world to take resources and transform them into neat stuff. For sourcing services, I think the health of a society is directly proportional to the fraction of services that are given voluntarily and do not show up in the money economy. A country that relies on a volunteer militia and posses and barn raisings is socially healthier than one that has a standing army and a police force and a regulated construction industry. You can call this Distributism or Anarchism or nostalgia for an imaginary 18^th century New England if you like, since those are only names.

This way of seeing things also puts technology at the very centre and shows how technology-driven productivity increases could make England the economic powerhouse of the world at a time it was pursuing economic policies that we can all agree were stupid.

Hmm, and rather than quoting a slab of the Chesterton essay I referred to on Marco's blog, I will just find it on the interwebz and put a link to the whole thing here.

Just kicking down the cobblestones

2011-08-30T19:37:00.000+10:00

Last year the powers that be reduced the speed limit on the long, straight, and featureless stretch of highway between Narrabri and Coonabarabran from 110 to 100 kph. The rationale was that this marginal reduction in speed would reduce accidents and save lives. On the local ABC radio they had one of those talkback thingies, and everyone who rang in – as you have probably guessed – was opposed to the change, saying it would only increase fatigue, thus increasing accidents and costing lives. I don't know what the actual result of the experiment has been. At the time, for a few brief moments I wished I owned a mobile phone, since like Athena out of the head of Zeus a glorious contrarian vision of the future had taken shape fully formed in my mind, and I wanted to ring in and share it:

Let's make the speed limit 50 kph everywhere.

We know that there will be very few fatal accidents at 50 kph.

We know there will be much less wear and tear on the roads at 50 kph.

We know roads intended for maximum speeds of 50 kph can be constructed much more cheaply than roads intended for 100 or 110 kph.

50 kph is not slow: it is faster than any man can run. It is a speed that would have staggered our ancestors of 200 years ago. They feared it might be fatal. Travelling at that speed for eight hours and covering 400 km in a day would have astonished them. Let's regain that sense of wonder.

But what about the fatigue? What about the poor people forced to take a little more than two hours instead of a little more than one hour to cross the featureless state forest between Narrabri and Coonabarabran? This can be solved by building a place to stop in the middle. A motel and a petrol station and a cafe. People will stop and get out and maybe actually see the Pilliga state forest instead of just hurtling through it at cherubim-like speed.

Sure, things where I live will cost more. But things in places 800 km from Sydney don't cost twice as much as things 400 km from Sydney. I doubt it would increase prices that much more than the introduction of the GST.

And, in so much as it increases the cost of road transport, it will be a vast subsidy to rail transport, the ultimately more efficient and environmentally responsible way to transport goods across the country. It will also encourage domestic aviation - which I don't see as ultimately such a good thing - but which in bringing more regular flights to more country towns will encourage business and improve access to health services.

It will arrest the trend in which large rural towns suck the oxygen out of the smaller towns nearby: instead of at the town 45 km away, we will do our shopping at the town 25 km away, or even at the village 5 km away. On the weekend we were in at the village hall shooting holes in the wall with bows and arrows (which is another story) and I looked again at the pictures on the walls of days gone by, when there were three churches, and two schools, and two post offices with full-time postmasters, and a railway stations with a real platform like Sydney suburban stations – now there is one school, and one shop, and a level crossing, and a single once-a-fortnight church. By slowing down, we can go some way towards bringing these little places back to life, and that must surely be a good thing.

Reducing the speed limit to 50 kph will hardly impact the inhabitants of the outer suburbs of the great metropolises at all, since they have to crawl along their mighty highways most of the time they use them anyway.

In the short term, it is a reform that can be brought in at almost no cost to the government. There are no new signs involved, just pulling up old ones, and I expect the temporary spike in traffic fines can be managed to more than cover the cost of this work.

And in psychologically quadrupling the size of our country, it cannot help but strengthen the states against Canberra, and the regions against the capital cities, and the little shires against the big country towns: a decentralisation which I think – being in the throes of reading Tocqueville's 'Democracy in America”- is healthy for a democratic society.

If it loosens the ties so much that the further flung parts of the country secede – why, so much the better. Without Western Australia, we can have monetary policies more suited to the slower speed of the two-speed economy, and can gently subside to the New Zealand-like standard of living that our productivity deserves. Without North Queensland, we need not have any inhibitions about importing cheap Filipino bananas. Everyone wins.

This is a perfectly serious proposal. My next step will be to write Tony Windsor with a request that the Commonwealth do a full cost-benefit analysis.

In which Dr Clam watches TV

2011-08-28T09:55:00.002+10:00

Like many people, I have never had much occasion to think about Christine Anu. My in-laws saw her once when she appeared in a shopping centre in Coffs Harbour in the last years of the last century, and I remember them reporting that her dissing of One Nation fell flat with that audience, and that's about all I can think of.

At my in-laws place the other night we saw this nifty programme about her researching her ancestors. There was one thing that impressed me that none of the effusive commenters on the programme remark on. During the course of her investigations she talked to all sorts of different people, and I was impressed how effortlessly she adapted the way she talked to who she was talking to. She wasn't just swapping between two dialects, but sliding along a continuum. With her close relatives who spoke slightly non-standard Australian English, she talked like them; the more non-standard the speech of whoever she was talking with, the more she changed to fit in with them. Some older people on Saibai required subtitles and spoke a creole peppered with non-English words, and there she talked like them. I have talked to plenty of people who can swap naturally between a standard English and a local dialect; but I had never seen anyone who seemed so naturally to inhabit a whole continuous expanse of linguistic space like that. I was impressed.

The other thing that surprised me was that she didn't know where Merauke was, when her researches uncovered the fact that her grandfather had been stationed there during the Second World War.

Since Merauke is in fact the closest large town to Saibai.

I suppose that, (a), though places might look close together on the map from where I sit, when you get there 300 km is a long way, and (b) for a long time the attention of the Torres Strait has been directed south and east to the other British possessions, and for almost half as long there has been an impermeable border between West Papua and East Papua.

Wikipedia tells me that Merauke was established as a fort by the Dutch authorities to keep these people - who seem like they would fit right into a Sheri S. Tepper novel with a little tweaking - from raiding into British territory.

I still haven't forgotten about the Roddenberry utopia. Every so often I get up from what I am doing and forlornly look about for my copy of David Gerrold's "The World of Star Trek". I may have to order another one from the interwebz.

Where is the essence that was so divine?

2011-08-22T20:01:00.001+10:00

Hey, apropos of nothing at all, it is seven years since I posted this link to my story, written some years before that, set in the Monastery. The Monastery is a milieu invented by Lexifab and Androoo that was the setting for Androoo's first NaNOWriMo novel - a work still unpublished and in hiding, alas. The Monastery is also the setting of this other excellent story. Are there any others? Please let me know.

Like most of the products of our decadent culture, my story is chock full of jocular references to other ephemeral products of our decadent culture. But I am very fond of it irregardless. I commend especially the reference to 'Pascal's Wager'. Together with this piece of Cyberiad fanfic from the same period it is a fairly complete picture of turn-of-the-century Clam thought about life, the universe, and all that...

The Night Express

2011-08-20T17:47:00.002+10:00

The Night Express, Kenneth Slessor, 1933

Out of the night, immense and shrill
It comes with cloudy fire
To curse a girl at Bogan's Hill
With torments of desire.
A string of golden window-lights,
A rope of flame - they're gone.
Over the windy mountain-heights,
The night express flies on.

Drowned in the silent loneliness,
The lantern's ruby dies.
A girl looks at the night express
With bright and wistful eyes.
The night-express, with panther grace,
On reaching Bogan's Hill,
Shows its opinion of the place
By going faster still.

O, to be on the night express
O, to be there some day.
Miles to go with a port-mant-eau
And a ticket for far away!

The Pullman cars are full of light,
And lurching corridors,
And swagmen huddled out of sight,
And cigarettes and snores,
The atmosphere you find on trains,
And fat men playing cards,
And tumbling jugs and rattling panes
And honeymoons and guards.

The engine roars, the whistle cries,
The echoes follow shrill,
A girl sits on her berth, and sighs,
And stares at Bogan's Hill.
Pulling the window blind, she sees
A moment into space -
A shed, a flash of moonlit trees,
Some milk tins and a face.

And, O, to be in Bogan's Hill,
O, to be there some day,
Cows and peace - release, release,
And the night-express far away!

I couldn't find this poem, which is one of my favourites, on the web anywhere, so here it is.

Somewhere out there must be the equivalent poem for our times, with a girl looking up at a contrail and another looking down at a farm nestled in the bush.

A Belated Observation on the Golden Rule

2011-08-20T09:33:00.003+10:00

I realised a few weeks ago that I have been subconsciously resentful for quite some time – possibly my whole life – because I always subconsciously added a little extra bit to the Golden Rule:

'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you ... and they will.'

Of course, they won't.

The Golden Rule is what we ought to do. It is counsel for moral perfection, like the 'Turn the other cheek' thing. It is not practical advice for success. If you follow it expecting things to turn out pleasantly for you, at work, home, or in politics, you will end up bitter and miserable. I expect you already know this. Nine times out of ten people will assume it is their inalienable right to be treated the way you treat them and go blithely on treating you as they damn well please.

I think this vague feeling that if something is right in a moral sense it will also be successful in a practical sense is more widespread than just me and is part of the heritage of Protestant European cultures. This is why - I think – there was quite an extraordinary amount of abuse of 'Freakonomics' by members of the conservative commentariat I generally tend to agree with. I think the evidence that abortion reduces crime is pretty solid: but this isn't a good reason to condone abortion, any more than Judge Death's incontrovertible observation that all crime is committed by the living is a good reason to slaughter everybody. In fact the two observations are pretty much the same observation.

Confessions of a Contrarian Penweasel

2011-08-14T07:58:00.000+10:00

Seven years ago, Lexifab had almost-but-not-quite-finished the first draft of his NaNoWriMo novel, “Bard Wars”.

I thought, in light of the opening words of “Confessions of a Freelance Penmonkey”, which Lexifab recently quoted with approval: “I am a writer, and I will finish the shit that I started”, that it might not be *entirely* presumptuous of me to express an interest in reading the second draft. Hmm?

Parenthetically, seven years after becoming King of Macedon, Alexander the Great founded the city of Alexandria-the-Furthest, now Khodzent, in modern Tajikistan.

And, speaking of novels and stuff, do those 'adult' covers for Harry Potter books irritate you as much as they do me?

Here is an example of the sort of thing we may see in the future if this trend continues:

There were giants on the Earth in those days

2011-08-13T21:20:00.000+10:00

Pish, I said, when the talk turned to e-books. Tosh, I said again, burnishing my Luddite credentials to a high sheen and preparing to stand well back from this particular bandwagon as all my friends and relations leapt on board. And yet, no sooner has my dearling Spouse-of-Clam acquired a Kindle than I am merrily off buying 21 volumes of Chesterton essays for $1.99 and proceeding to filch said Kindle whenever she is not actually using it herself.

Thus I have found this afternoon the following excellent definition by someone much greater than I:

“The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honour about ideas. He will not see that one must pay for an idea as for anything else. He will not see that any worthy idea, like any honest woman, can only be won on its own terms, and with its logical chain of loyalty. One idea attracts him; another idea really inspires him; a third idea flatters him; a fourth pays him. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other.”

This is my quarrel with Jim Wallis’ credo, and with the Humanist manifestoes, and with the whole amorphous reef of modern civilisation of which they are representative polyps.

An ideology ought to be held together by a logical chain of loyalty; there should be axioms which, if you are loyal to them, will logically support the other ideas. It does not matter if they are crazy axioms. You or I might well recoil from them even as from a YouTube mashup of the 100 top internet memes of 2010. No matter how twisted and bizarre the structure looks like from the outside – no matter how weak the foundations – if it really is a structure, and it really is sitting on the foundations, then it is an image of truth worth wrestling with.

Chim chiminey Chim chiminey Chim chim cher-ee!

2011-08-11T18:25:00.003+10:00

‘The two staple taxes were the land-tax and the hearth-tax (καπνικόν, meaning, literally, a tax on chimney smoke)’ (Arnold Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus and his World)

I came yesterday the closest I have yet to supporting a carbon tax.

The good people on the radio were talking about ‘fly-in, fly-out’ workers. Apparently there are regular flights now from Melbourne to Karratha so people can live in Melbourne and work in Karratha. I thought: ‘that is insane’. How can it be that this phenomenon of ‘fly-in, fly-out’ has taken off in exactly the same decade in which we have been hyperventilating about anthropogenic global warming? This seemed fundamentally unserious. Then I recovered a bit, and was thinking: ‘maybe it isn’t that bad, if I had a full cost/benefit analysis, probably the environmental impact of building all the necessary infrastructure in Western Australia would be greater than flying workers across the country’ - when the interviewee who was telling us about these trends admitted that he lived in Melbourne but did a lot of work in Sydney, flying there about once a week. People! We have the interwebz. There is no need for you to go anywhere. Stay home!

Is global warming a myth?

2011-08-05T22:06:00.000+10:00

That was the theme of an essay competition run here in 2009.

This was the winning entry.

We used the prize money to buy beer.

La Muerte y la Brujula, Part Two

2011-08-04T06:36:00.001+10:00

This originally appeared as a comment some years ago on Rob's blog, which alas I have forgotten the name of since Lexifab removed his link:

The thing that bothered me about Se7en- besides it being really gross and disturbing, of course- was that there was not enough internal consistency in the choice of victims or their punishments. This was explained by taking the traditional Hollywood path of least resistance and making the perpetrator a psycho-looney. But I think even a psycho-looney ought to have a self-consistent lunatic philosophy. I advise the following principles to guide a looney- or better, a lunatic organisation like the Opus Dei of fiction:

(1) The victims should not necessarily be those who have been corrupted by a particular sin, but those who corrupt others with it.

(2) The punishment should be, as far as possible, simply the consequences of the sin they encourage, taken to its logical conclusion.

Hence, rather than some poor recluse, the proper exemplar for Gluttony should be a celebrity chef- a Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson type. Who better to exemplify the exploitation of Lust than a presenter on one of those sleazy reality programs? Or Wrath, the host of a nasty Jerry Springeresque talk-show? Avarice, someone connected with televised real-estate porn, or a ‘Weakest Link’ style game show? In fact, it seems to me that the pernicious corrupters who embody these sins cluster thickly around Big Media.

In my never-to-be-made remake of Se7en, each of the victims will work for a (unnamed) television network. I thought for a while about the best way to kill each one off, but decided this was too icky a pastime. The Seven Deadly Sins pattern will not be made explicit by the killer(s), but will be explained on the website of a kooky religious organisation that the investigator googles early on. I envision Mel Gibson in a cameo as head of this kooky religious organisation. In fact, the killer(s) will never be seen: there will be no action sequences, because this never-to-be-made remake is the work of someone who dislikes action sequences. The investigator will not be able to pin the murders convincingly on the kooky religious organisation, not quite, not yet. The developing pattern of events- following the order seen in Dante’s descent into Hell- will point to the head of the network as the final victim, sentenced to die for the sin of Pride.

But of course, it is the investigator himself who has to die. In the course of the film we will have seen the investigator gain a cult following being interviewed on this same network’s news and current affairs programs during his investigation, oozing the arrogant hyperintellectuality of a Holmes or a Lonnrot. He has rejected his place as an interdependent member of society, relying only on himself and scorning the help of God or Man. We now can see clearly that he embodies the solipsistic vision of Timothy McVeigh’s last words, which is also the boast of Lucifer: ‘I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.’ Is the network head’s smile just a little too fixed? Are the investigator’s fingers feeling ever so slightly numb as he grips the glass the kindly network head offered him? He finds he cannot move his arm, and struggles to ask the network head for an explanation. And as he slips into a black coma where there will, indeed, be no-one else but him, the network head will explain.

‘It was all about ratings, of course...’

Simone Weil, “On Bankruptcy”, 1937

2011-07-31T12:07:00.000+10:00

[I have wanted to quote the essay below (actually the second 3/5 of the essay, but independent of the first 2/5 of it) for some time, but whenever I re-read it, it is more Frenchly disjointed than I remember. I thought this was an appropriate time to make the extra effort.]

An economic system is not like a building, and economic ills are not like falling masonry.

In every domain accessible to human thought and activity the key is provided by a certain conception of equilibrium, and without it we only fumble in the dark; the mathematical symbol of equilibrium is proportion, beloved of the Pythagoreans. It was by conceiving a certain equilibrium proper to the human form as represented in marble and bronze that the Greeks invented sculpture, and their achievement was repeated by the Florentines of the fourteenth century. And the Florentines invented painting when they conceived the idea of pictorial composition. Bach is the purest of musicians because he seems to have set himself the task of studying every mode of equilibrium in sound. Archimedes became the creator of physics by his mathematical construction of the different kinds of lever. Hippocrates based his science of Pythagoreanism by assimilating health to equilibrium in the functioning of the different organs. The miracle of Greece, which was mainly due to the Pythagoreans, essentially consists in having recognised the virtue of the idea and the feeling of equilibrium.

Economic life has not yet been touched by the Greek miracle. We possess no conception of the equilibrium proper to an economy. Men have never conceived it; but it is true that the study of economics is not yet two hundred years old. It would be no exaggeration to say that all economic studies up to the present have been fruitless. Economics has not yet had a Thales, an Archimedes, or a Lavoisier. This failure is probably in large part to the revolutionary doctrines which appeared just over a century ago. The revolutionaries wanted to prove the bourgeois society had become unworkable and therefore they made no attempt to conceive an economic equilibrium for the given state of affairs; and as for the future, they took it for granted that the revolution would automatically solve all economic problems by abolishing them. No revolutionary has ever seriously attempted to define the conditions of economic equilibrium in the social regime he looks forward to. And as for non-revolutionaries, for polemical reasons they have become counter-revolutionaries, uninterested in studying the reality before their eyes and interested only to advertise its merits. All of us today, in all parties, are suffering the disastrous consequences of this intellectual dishonesty, which, moreover, we all more or less share.

We do, it is true, possess a sort of cheap substitute for the idea of economic equilibrium. It is the idea, if such can be called, of financial equilibrium. It is disarmingly simple. It consists of putting the ‘equal’ sign between resources and expenditure, each of them calculated in terms of accountancy. Until recently this criterion seemed to meet all requirements, whether applied to the State or to commercial and industrial undertakings or to private individuals. And it was at the same time a criterion of virtue. Like every other ideal, the bourgeois ideal of paying one’s debts has had its martyrs, of whom César Birotteau will always be the best representative; but even in the 5^th century B. C. the aged Cephalus, to convince Socrates that he had always lived according to justice, made the claim: ‘I have told the truth and paid my debts.’ Socrates doubted if this was a satisfactory definition of justice. But Socrates was a troublesome person.

Today this criterion has lost much of its prestige, both economic and moral; but it still survives. People still apply Cephalus’ formula to the state, or at least one half of the formula; no one requires the State to tell the truth, but it is considered scandalous if it defaults on its debts.

It has not yet been understood that the good Cephalus’ formula is inapplicable on account of two phenomena, which go together and are almost as ancient as money itself: namely, credit and the remuneration of capital. In his luminous little book What is Property? Proudhon demonstrated not the injustice or immorality of property, but its impossibility; by property he did not mean the exclusive right to the use of goods, but the right to lend them at interest, whatever form the interest might take: rent, lease, or dividend of any kind. Yet this is in fact the fundamental right in any society in which wealth is normally thought of as investment income.

So soon as capital, whether in land or in any other form, is remunerated and this remuneration figures in a large number of public or private accounts, the attempt to achieve financial equilibrium becomes a permanent factor of disequilibrium. The evidence leaps to the eye. Capital invested at 4 per cent is quintupled in a hundred years; but if the income is reinvested there is a geometric progression so rapid, as always, that an interest of 3 per cent will multiply capital a hundredfold in two centuries.

No doubt the proportion of land or other goods put out to rent or interest has always been a small one; and no doubt the income is not all reinvested. But the figures given above do nevertheless indicate that it is mathematically impossible for a society based upon money and loans at interest to maintain financial probity for two centuries. If it were maintained, the fructification of capital would automatically ensure that the entire resources of the community passed into the hands of a few people.

A rapid glance at history is enough to show the subversive role consistently played, ever since money existed, by the phenomenon of debt. The cancellation of debts was the principal feature of the reforms of both Solon and Lycurgus. And later on the small Greek cities were more than once shattered by movements in favour of another cancellation. The revolt by which the Roman plebeians won the institution of the tribuneship had its origin in a widespread insolvency which was reducing more and more debtors to the condition of slavery; and even if there had been no revolt a partial cancellation of debts had become imperative, because with every plebeian reduced to a slave Rome lost a soldier.

The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment of debts is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities. Unfortunately, the second of them violates a great many seemingly legitimate interests and it has difficulty in securing recognition without disturbance and a measure of violence.

[The Malthusian insight at the core of this, that a dependence on lending capital at interest at rates above the rate of overall economic growth is inherently unsustainable, seems to me pretty solid. What do you think?]

Rule Number One

2011-07-30T10:08:00.000+10:00

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?

And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?

And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?

Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

'Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;

In the good old time 'twas hanging for the colour that it is;

Though hanging isn't bad enough and flaying would be fair

For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.

(A. E. Housman)

Seven years ago the former me wrote that the religious right in Australia is unreasonably hung up on homosexuality, and ought to be supporting same-sex marriage as one of the least morally dubious methods of contraception.

Arguing axiomatically, from the position that life is a treasure and thou shalt not kill, the statement of Clam – 7 is perfectly correct. But, given my operational definition of the ‘tao’ in terms of ‘not doing things that, if everyone did them, would mean society would cease to exist’, it seems obvious that homosexuality is intrinsically disordered.* Homosexuality as a ‘lifestyle choice’ might plausibly therefore be a greater threat to society than the mass murder of people we do not see and cannot talk to, and it might well be necessary to fight it tooth and nail.

So it is incumbent on me to come down on the ‘Nature’ side of the Nature/Nurture debate in this instance. If one does not chose to be homosexual, but it is a genetic inheritance that one cannot help, it is not conceivably a condition that is likely to spread through society to such an extent that it will cease to exist, and does not contravene the ‘operational tao’. In fact, if it is genetic, it would seem that the best way to get rid of it would be to encourage everyone with any homosexual tendencies whatsoever to behave as homosexually as possible, so that they are removed from the gene pool. I was speculating about a future history where such an outcome had come to pass, and homosexuals were a strange historical curiosity, when I realised that the more interesting question was how a genetic predisposition to homosexuality could have arisen in the first place.

This is no problem for me because I can come up with all sorts of ‘just so’ stories to explain how group or kin selection could make homosexuality adaptive.

But it is a problem for those evolutionary biologists, like Richard Dawkins, who have an unreasoning prejudice against all forms of group selection. I can only see them explaining homosexuality as something like sickle-cell anaemia, a maladaptive by-product of some gene for ‘demihomosexuality’ that somehow confers a reproductive advantage on individuals. I wonder how popular that makes them?

With regard to my other assertions of seven years ago, there is a whole other post in how the world has reacted to the election of President Wossname; and I am still quietly confident that those WMDs will turn up in post-Assad Syria somewhere...

And I promise to get on to the deconstruction of the Roddenberry Utopia, real soon now.

*: I have realised this is really only a failure of imagination, since the rules of society are not immutable constants, and even with 1st century technology it is easy to postulate rules for a functioning society in which all sexual behaviour is homosexual but that would be recognisable as Christian in all other respects by a member of the 21st century Australian religious right. So it is not as incumbent on me to believe homosexuality is genetic as I first thought.

Ow.

2011-07-26T17:56:00.000+10:00

That was probably not the best timing with those last two posts.

My impression is that there is a tendency in the media to push this Norwegian mass murder toward the 'psycho madman' box in the face of evidence to the contrary, in the opposite way to the tendency after the shooting in Tucson. It is obviously in the self-interest of journalists on the right to minimise the political aspects of this tragedy. But you would think journalists on the left would go berserk over a real "Tea-Party"-inspired mass murder on such a terrible scale. Part of this is doubtless due to the extreme self-absorption of the rebel colonists who dominate the English-speaking press. But I think there is something else:

A lone psycho pushed over the edge by "your" inflammatory political rhetoric is one thing;

A terrorist who carries out a well-organised act of political violence against "us" is quite another thing, and much scarier, that we would rather not think about.

Here is a disingenuous note from Mark Steyn to the effect that the terrorist was not Islamophobic because he did not target Muslims, but people racially similar to himself.

No, he was just Islamophobic *and* logical. Muslims are not invading Norway in longboats. They are being invited by a left-of-centre government. There is no point attacking the symptom and not the cause. If you are Islamophobic and logical and have taken on board the pessimistic messages coming from a lot of the right-wing commentariat that Europe is doomed, you will despair of ever making a difference at the ballot box. So political violence will start to look attractive. Killing one prominent left-of-centre politician is not going to make a lot of difference. Killing a terrible lot of potential left-of-centre politicians just might, though: since it will (a) reduce the potential talent pool of the left-of-centre party, and hence its effectiveness, for a long time to come; and (b) potentially discourage a much larger number of potential left-of-centre politicians from ever getting involved in the game, not just in Norway but in other countries, with similar results .

So, if you are a left-wing student politician anywhere in the world: do not be intimidated. Stay the course. Otherwise the terrorists win.

There but for the grace of God...

2011-07-25T08:11:00.000+10:00

I should like to reiterate that the conviction of Faheem Khalid Lodhi to 20 years in prison was a grotesque miscarriage of justice. It chills me whenever I think of it that in our country someone can be sentenced to such a term for planning an attack on infrastructure with 'the exact target, timing and method yet to be determined'.

It is seven years since I nailed my colours to the mast. As far as I can remember the letter quoted in that post, written about the time Christina Green was conceived, was the first time I had recorded any such thoughts in any medium. I hadn't written anything down, and I hadn't said anything to anyone, because I was - very vaguely, probably even less seriously than Faheem Khalid Lodhi - keeping my options open to plan something, someday, with the 'exact target, timing, and method yet to be determined'. And I didn't want to leave any tracks at all. Writing that letter was closing the door on that option. It was cowardice, not bravery. A step away from fanatical conviction, not towards it.

I used the line 'Human being is a process, not the name of a thing' as the ‘grab’ line in a letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald about stem cell research, sometime in 2001-2003. The letter was published, but without this line that I had put in to get their attention. They must have just decided it was ungrammatical and silly.

First and Last Things

2011-07-23T08:52:00.001+10:00

The first actual content in this blog was this loose translation of ‘The Milonga of Manuel Flores’, by Borges, from where I could probably have gone anywhere.

The original poem is one of those places where what C.S. Lewis called Joy almost breaks through the veil of humdrum reality for me: “I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of Tegner's Drapa and read, 'I heard a voice that cried, Balder the beautiful Is dead, is dead.' ...I knew nothing about Balder, but instantly I was uplifted.... I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described....”

Of course the truth is that I have almost no Spanish at all. One of my big regrets is that when I was growing up in the part of Mexico occupied by the rebel colonists I never bothered to learn it. It was such an unglamorous, uninteresting language to the young me. Thinking about this got me thinking about the many links between my family and the Latin American world and how being an Anglophone Catholic in the occupied territories was in retrospect a kind of amphibious existence; neither of the two cultures in the bicultural society could really be considered the ‘other’.

Which reminded me that I had a strong urge to show you the picture below earlier in the year.

The shopping centre at the bottom right is where Gabrielle Giffords was shot. If I remember correctly, I bought my copy of ‘Awful Green Things from Outer Space’ at another shopping centre that once existed on that site. The triangular building at upper left is St. Odilia’s, where I was an altar boy, and where Christina Green sang in a choir with the same name as my Mum's guitar.

I don’t really have any words but I wanted to show you the picture.

I had a pretentious title for the blog post on the price of gold I was going to write, but not for this one. Oh well.

2011-07-21T08:11:00.001+10:00

On the weekend I saw this half-decade’s answer to ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’. The children did not like it much. Sample dialogue:

Daughter of Clam: Isn’t he wearing a sentient creature?

Son of Clam: I don’t want to think about it.

Son-of-Clam-who-is-admittedly-rather-critical-in-general gave it an interim rating of 7/20, downgraded to 2/10 by the conclusion. He said it had instilled a strong fear of food which he expected to persist for some time. Though it appeared to be gone by dinner.

‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ is straight science fiction in the classical mould in a way that ‘The Day after Tomorrow’ was not. It follows the standard recipe of postulating a scientific or technological advance and exploring the logical dramatic consequences of that advance. In this case the advance is in carbon capture technology, in the form a machine that can convert water (and carbon dioxide) into food. (I added carbon dioxide there, when I mentally converted the lead character’s explanation of how the machine worked into real science. It was MUCH easier to do than mentally editing out Jar-Jar Binks from ‘Carry On Up the Naboo’, or whatever that film was called). The machine escapes, as they do, ending up floating high in the atmosphere and drawing energy from lightning and stuff to create food. It then wreaks havoc when it is exploited by a greedy government, creating planet-wide destructive weather patterns that are almost as unbelievable as the ones in ‘The Day After Tomorrow’. The Hero Scientist saves the day. I should say that the film also featured a sensible Heroine Scientist, as a steadying force on the rather ditsy Hero Scientist, who starts out pretending to be dumber than she is to conceal her inner nerdiness. In a neat twist on an ancient trope, she is first seen to be beautiful when she puts on glasses and ties her hair back.

I thought it was interesting – and very encouraging, for us wannabe Hero Scientists who *may* be working on giant robots with laser eyes as we speak – that the Hero Scientist was lauded as a Hero at the end, despite being the one whose actions, er, destroyed the city. I had recently noticed this unbelievable outcome appear in an even more extreme form, in ‘Megamind’. I am humbly thankful for this ‘get out of jail free’ card for Hero Scientists in popular culture, so many years after the invention of the atom bomb.

What really struck me was the picture of government in the film. ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ was a sympathetic portrait of the Bush/Cheney administration, whose faintly disguised analogues were shown as heroic, if clueless, but government in ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ has no redeeming features. The film is set in a town where the collapse of the sardine fishing industry has left the economy in ruins. The Mayor, in a picture perfect illustration of how unimaginative government is when it tries to think outside the box, spends the annual budget of the town on a sardine-themed amusement park. This initial demonstration of fiscal profligacy is then reinforced many times over on a metaphorical level. The Mayor enthusiastically scoffs the food that comes from the sky, snatching cheeseburgers from old ladies in the aftermath of the original rain of food, and is seen to get fatter and fatter and fatter as the movie progresses. He makes more and more extreme demands on the machine that are the proximate cause of it breaking down and wreaking havoc. All the NPC inhabitants of the town happily go along with Mayor’s excesses, and he effortlessly resists all attempts by the Hero Scientist to get him to moderate his behaviour.

The Mayor explicitly sets himself up as a father figure for the Hero Scientist when he is trying to get him to do what he wants, in an obvious reference to the usurpation by the welfare state of functions traditionally performed by the family. An even clearer reference to the infantilisation of society at the hands of an ever-expanding paternalistic government is the Mayor’s golden boy, a former child actor featured on the tins of sardines once produced in the town, who still goes around in a nappy. In the end the Mayor leaves the town in the lurch as it is about to be destroyed, escaping on a raft made of a giant toasted cheese sandwich. He is unable to stop himself from eating it as well, and in the very last scene we see him going under.

Productivity increases are made possible by science; the response of government to these productivity increases is to bloat uncontrollably. This is the core message of the film, made with no subtlety whatsoever.

So I kind of liked ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ despite the fact that it made me afraid of food too.

Today is the 7^th anniversary of this blog.

Because I too am infected with the self-referential spirit of the age, I intend to revisit my posts exactly seven years on, if they are at all interesting, and comment on them. The first one was not (at all interesting), so I shan’t bother today.

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion

2011-07-16T20:23:00.003+10:00

Damning with faint praise is bad. And relentless negativity is bad. So the only way I can think of starting this, in my current mood, is with some effusive over-the-top praise for Julian May’s work.

I thought the Saga of the Pliocene Exiles was... really good. I have been meaning to re-read it for some time but can’t find the first volume of the four. What has always stayed with me in a particularly intense way is the story of the guy who goes back in time following the woman who isn’t at all interested in him, and dies forgotten in an out of the way corner of the narrative remembered by no one. See, I can’t even remember his name. I remember the woman’s name started with ‘M’. That was my first encounter with the couplet that most of my native-born fellow-citizens associate most closely with Robert Menzies (pbuh): ‘I did but see her passing by/And yet I love her till I die.’ I liked the old palaeontological couple, and good old Stein who pissed in Odin’s mead bowl, and Felice the psychopath/professional athlete. In fact, a lot of the characters have really stuck with me in all these years since I last read it as interesting and appealing people. The world where they did their stuff was also well done: it was obviously created by someone who had kept one eye on New Scientist to make the Pliocene as scientifically accurate as they could. I remember being troubled by the body count when I first read the series, for the same reason I gave up trying to read the only Anne Rice book I ever tried to read: ‘This is demographically impossible. No society could survive this.’ But then I realised that was the whole point. The Tanu/Firvulag society is shown to us in its death throes, the equilibrium it had attained having been trashed by the influx of all these pesky humans, and the story is *about* its collapse.

In the SPE I was especially taken with the little fragments we were shown of the world of the Galactic Milieu. I thought they were just boffo. As a possible future, it was imaginative, unique, and seemed carefully thought out. I wanted to read more about it. I liked the way the Galactic Milieu made such a big deal of Teilhard Chardin, because rather than despite I think he was a fruitcake. If aliens turn out to be enthusiastic fans of any human philosopher or theologian, it is a lay down misere that they will pick a fruitcake.

So I eagerly awaited the books about the Galactic Milieu, more than I think I have eagerly awaited any other books with the possible exception of ‘God Emperor of Dune’. ‘Intervention’ I also really liked. Where the SPE had shown us sympathetic portraits of the people who didn’t fit into the utopia of the Galactic Milieu, ‘Intervention’ did a good job of showing why a lot of equally sincere people – plausibly a majority of people – would have welcomed it, Earth being such a mess and all. And it quoted another bit of poetry, this time one I had already heard in German class, that I was especially fond of: ‘Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten/sie fliegen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten./Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger erschießen/Es bleibet dabei: Die Gedanken sind frei!’ But that’s not important right now. Except perhaps to show that the sort of people who don’t feel like being ruled by superpowered psychics and aliens still come across as more my kind of people, though they aren’t drawn with as much affection.

Everything is set up splendidly for a meaty social and political confrontation between equally sincere groups of people wanting what is best for humanity.

But then... this is all thrown away. In the Galactic Milieu Trilogy the forces opposing the Galactic Milieu turn out to be manipulated and controlled by a ridiculous cartoon bad guy. Everything touched by this shoddy plot device is spoiled. For me, to the degree that I couldn’t finish the GMT when it first came out, after waiting for it so very eagerly, and didn’t read it to the end until 2009.

I can’t find anything relevant on the first page of my Google search for ‘hydra galactic milieu shoddy plot device’. Maybe one day this will change.

Some signs Fury/Hydra is a shoddy plot device:

1) Fury/Hydra is evil for the sake of being evil. No rationale for it being so evil is ever given except that people’s souls taste nice. It is just smash, kill, destroy.

2) Fury/Hydra cannot be defeated by having its magic ring destroyed in the fires of the volcano in which it was forged, the only allowed justification for 1).

3) Fury/Hydra is ridiculously overpowered. So far as I can remember, any individual metapsychic ubermind that tangles with it gets swatted. (Of course not everything that is ridiculously overpowered is a shoddy plot device, but this is one of the Fourteen Secret Signs known to the Elect.)

4) Fury/Hydra is not consistent with the universe of the books as revealed to us elsewhere. If you want to make the anti-GM forces the pawns of some sinister overpowered demonic being, fine, there should be good and evil Lylmik just like there are good and evil Eldila. But Fury does not seem to be a neevil Lylmik, or anything else that can be fit into the categories of sentient being described elsewhere in the series.

To expand on 4): Julian May is supposed to be a Catholic, and by validating the theories of Teilhard Chardin, and showing high-ranking Milieu humans professing Catholic beliefs throughout the series, she implies that there is a considerable overlap between the worldview of the Galactic Milieu and something that cannot be too far removed from an orthodox Catholic worldview. But Hydra, as described, is practically the *least* Catholic plot device possible.

Catholicism is all about free will and redemption. Fury is created unconsciously out of some fragment of a good character’s personality: no free will there. The younger generation of Remillards are recruited to it in utero: no free will there. The unconscious creator of Fury finally eliminates the menace by committing suicide. Not very Catholic. None of the human components of Hydra are ever redeemed in any way. Not even the possibility of redemption is discussed. Throughout their lives they are two-dimensional bad guys, addicted to being evil, who never think for a moment that they might be on the wrong path, despite being exposed throughout their lives to the full armoury of the Sacraments: they are baptised, confirmed, take part in the Eucharist, are exposed to all the things that in a Catholic world evil spirits are supposed to flee from in terror. By omission the Church is shown to be utterly powerless. If it was seriously part of the evolving metapsychic noosphere, as the GM implies by its endorsement of Teilhard Chardin, one would expect it not to be.

Why inflict this shoddy plot device upon us? There must have been better ways to manipulate the narrative to make us barrack for the Galactic Milieu vs. the Metapsychic rebels. I don’t know.

I would have been *so* much happier if this shoddy plot device had been excised and the GMT had been straight future history without an overarching narrative: a James Michener-style century-long epic about the Remillard family and Earth’s embedment in the Galactic Milieu. That would have been good. Not every trilogy needs ‘a plot’.

Ever since I heard David Byrne’s quote: “Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily”, I have thought: “Plot is a trick to get people to read words for longer than they would ordinarily”. The Galactic Milieu trilogy are three books that would have been better off without one.

Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Part CLXXXIV

2011-07-09T10:15:00.005+10:00

While I was sleeping, there were two big milestones in the history that came back from holiday on 8/8/8: The last flight of the Space Shuttle and the independence of the South Sudan.

I have a copy of ‘Star Trek: The New Voyages 2’, published in 1977, with an Introduction by Jesco von Puttkamer and an Epilogue by Nichelle Nichols. As do you all, I am sure. Still, bear with me while I quote:

Let me tell you about that magic moment out there in the high desert of California when dream and reality came together in a spark of greatness and purpose for humanity. The year was 1976, the day – the 17^th of September. Out there among the tumbleweeds, on the lot of Plant 42 run by the Rockwell International Corporation, two thousand invited guests from all walks of life were assembled to witness the roll-out of the first U.S. Space Shuttle.

... The eyes of the distinguished crowd fixed on the corner of the main hanger when John Yardley, NASA’s head of Space Flight, gave the signal for the long-awaited moment. The motor of a low-slung tow truck growled into the expectant silence, punctuated by a muted drum roll from the military band: The bow of Orbiter 101 nosed slowly around the corner. On both sides of it was painted the ship’s name, Enterprise.

And in that instant when time seemed to freeze, the band- clear and triumphant- struck up Alexander Courage’s rousing theme from Star Trek.

A moment never to be forgotten! For many, the joy was visceral. Like one, those two thousand were on their feet, yelling and clapping with delight. Up front, in the first row of seats reserved for VVIPs (very, very important persons) a small group of people stood petrified: there was Gene Roddenberry, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, James Doohan, and Walter Koenig. They, who had portrayed the ‘beautiful crew’ of the starship Enterprise, now witnessed the birth of the Shuttle named after their fictional vessel.

... I looked at Gene- his head was cocked to one side as he listened to the music, and he clearly had tears in his eyes. Dee told me later about the goose bumps and the tingling in his spine when the Enterprise made its appearance. Tears burst from Nichelle’s dark eyes when she saw it – that gorgeously beautiful white space machine in the brilliant sunshine there underneath the Mojave sky. Later she told me about her feeling of being part of history in the making, of glimpsing destiny, of so much more that words could not describe.

Star Trek and the Space Program . . . what had brought them together?

... As a form of science fiction, Star Trek teaches us that our future is represented by an infinity of options or alternatives. Some possible futures are positive, others negative – but none of these options is predetermined or predestined. It is up to you and me to decide on a direction for the future and work toward making it more probable than the others. Star Trek fans are often asking what they can do to make the future they want come about. Let’s not ignore that dream, nor any other upbeat vision of the future, for there is something self-fulfilling in all visions. The energy of the soul, focussed on such fantasy, should not go to waste.

And there is the Space Program . . . As longs there is the determination to build the Space Shuttle, as long as there is growth, there will be hope of a positive future for humanity.

And here are a few words from Nichelle:

I used to say as a figure of speech that I felt Uhura calling me to get busy – calling any of us to get busy – so that her world could exist. Somewhere along the line it got to be more than a figure of speech. I kept finding myself in strange places. On a NASA C-141 observatory flight, where no ‘civilian’ had gone before. In Huntsville. In Washington. In the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Viking touchdown on Mars. On the Mojave Desert, watching the Enterprise roll out...

And once, maybe with that feeling of- I will have been here before, someday...

So, the glass being half full, unmanned space exploration is of course vastly cheaper and more scientifically productive. And there has been a long tradition in popular culture of space exploitation by ruthless corporations; there are profit-making opportunities out there, and as technology improves they will get more and more profitable. There’s no real problem with a future that looks more like ‘Alien’ than ‘Star Trek’. Surely.

You know Uhura’s name comes from ‘uhuru’, the Swahili word for ‘freedom’.

It is a word associated with the wave of hope that swept across Africa in the early 60s when countries were first becoming independent and had not yet ended up in the grip of corrupt, incompetent, and frequently genocidal dictators. I wish the people of South Sudan – which I want to keep calling ‘the’ South Sudan – the very best of luck with their new country. I know they will need it.

Here’s what a long-serving African leader had to say about it last October:

Addressing the one-day Arab-African summit held in Sirte, Gaddafi described Sudan’s likely breakup as a “fever” that will spread throughout Africa.

“Ethnicities [in Africa] will demand independence, linguists [in Africa] will demand independence, tribes [in Africa] will demand independence, this is a dangerous matter. The final word is for the people of the South [Sudan] and the whole world is awaiting this,” the Libyan leader was quoted by the state agency (JANA).

“This is a foregone conclusion, that Sudan might become divided but this is not the important thing. It is imperative that we remain vigilant and keep in mind that this is not the end, this is the beginning .. the beginning of the crack in Africa’s map,” he told the gathering, which was attended by Sudan’s President Omer Hassan al-Bashir.

And I think he may be right. This is the first break from the old map that was drawn up by the European powers, the artificial map that was part of the Western Order and was drawn up for the convenience of the European powers and not the people who lived there. ( I remember reading a paragraph somewhere a quarter of a century ago about how the different peoples living in Uganda had almost nothing in common, they were ‘as different as the inhabitants of Finland and Greece’ . Hey, I’ve just realised there is another political entity of more recent coinage that also has subjects as different as the inhabitants of Finland and Greece, because they are. Hehe! What goes around comes around, European map-drawers...)

Parenthetically, the fissioning of Africa into a lot of tiny countries is part of the back story to ‘A Wreath of Stars’, my favourite Bob Shaw book, which also it seems came out in 1976. The fictional African country Gil Snook works in is explicitly not a cartoon pretend country, but a fragment of Kenya. So I can take the optimistic view that this historical event is taking us closer to the potential future where there is an inhabited anti-neutrino world inside the Earth.

What these two things that happened while I was sleeping have in common is that they are both striking symptoms of the passing of one world order. Since Sputnik the main political and economic power of the West has also taken the lead in space; now it’s not. Since the Congress of Berlin the political geography of Africa has been determined by the powers of the West; now it’s not.

So, happy birthday, South Sudan! You should so go ahead and do this.

And good luck world.

And sorry Uhura. :(

Criticism is easy. Art is difficult.

2011-07-03T09:51:00.001+10:00

I really ought to read it all again before embarking on a discussion of what I rashly called the ‘shoddy tricks’ involved in the creation of the utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Colour Mars” trilogy. But life is short, so I will just wade into it with ten or so minutes of preliminary research.

KSR goes to a great deal of trouble to take us through the violent and drawn-out birth pangs of his utopia, with all the interminable arguing between different factions, to make it seem plausible, but there are things that bug me about the way he does it. I felt I might have been going overboard in calling them ‘shoddy tricks’, but flicking through quickly now I think it was the right terminology to use.

#1: In the ‘free for all’ period of Martian settlement of the 2050s, where anyone who wants to can go there, KSR has omitted groups that would certainly want to go to Mars in large numbers and once there would be disruptive of his program and violently opposed to elements in the utopian Martian constitution. The ones I immediately thought of were:

1a. Fundamentalist Muslim groups. There are secularised Bedouin-ish folk aplenty, and Sufis, but that whole raging current of Salafist energy that has been convulsing the world and changing Islamic practice to make it even more antithetical to KSR’s vision is absent. They are people who would definitely be keen on having a tabula rasa on which to create their own utopia, and who would have the resources to get to Mars. Of course they were easier to ignore in the first half of the 1990s, I expect.

1b. Ruby Ridge Type People. As well as counter-cultural left-wing misfits, there are counter-cultural right-wing misfits. Instead of hanging around free-love communes arguing points of anarcho-syndicalist theory, they are holed up in their cabins in the mountains, clinging to their guns and religion and wishing the gummint would f*** off. They will be off for Mars like a shot.

1c. Mormons. If you want to make the desert bloom, who are you going to call? Especially given the weird extraterrestrial elements in their theology, I have always thought Mormons would be early and enthusiastic space travellers. Like the Salafists they are going to have their own very clear ideas about how they want their utopia organised, though they are less likely to bring the whole thing crashing down if thwarted.

The default option for dealing with ideologically inconvenient groups like this in future history is to not mention them and hope they have gone away, as in David Brin’s “Earth”.

#2: There is something about growing up on Mars that makes people more receptive to KSR’s utopian vision. It is not clear whether this is from the interdependency that arises from having to cooperate or die in a hostile environment, or is just some mystical Arean thing. If its is meant to be the first, I don’t think the ‘planetary’ interdependency would sink into everyone’s consciousness so fundamentally as KSR supposes, and what you would get instead would be an enhanced sense of loyalty to *your* community.

F’rexample, in Blue Mars (p.107 in Marco’s copy which I have to give back to him):

‘People claiming that some fundamental right is foreign to their culture... They aren’t going to get away with that here.’

Art noticed more than a few delegates frowning at this sentiment, which no doubt struck them as a version of Western secular relativism ...

The young Martian natives, however, looked surprised that this was even considered an issue. To them the fundamental rights were innate and irrevocable, and any challenge to that struck them as just one more of the many emotional scars that the issei were always revealing, as a result of their traumatic dysfunctional Terran upbringings. [Clamly emphasis]

#3: The next may be the shoddiest trick. A natural disaster strikes Earth, which both makes it more receptive to KSR utopian ideas and lets Mars break free without too many hassles. The disaster mimics the sea-level rise of global warming, but happens all at once. It isn’t presented as anybody’s fault, not even by the terrestrial governments we know are, and always will be, keen on pinning the blame for everything bad that happens on some scapegoat.

Of course, there will be natural disasters, and they will have unpredictable political and social effects, but if one aim of the books is to show how such a utopia *could* come about, then having so much of the plot hinge on the adventitious collapse of the West Atlantic ice shelf is a shoddy trick. (Of course if it actually *was* engineered by the Martians, as I suspect, then it is a neat plot twist. And not admitting that the Martians did it is an even neater gesture to the co-creative role of the reader. To which I humbly tips me lid.)

p.155 of Blue Mars, Sax speaking in Switzerland: ‘The flood marks a break point in history ... It was a natural revolution. Weather on Earth is changed, also the land, the sea’s currents. The distribution of human and animal populations, There is no reason, in this situation, to try to reinstate the antediluvian world. It’s not possible. And there are many reasons to institute an improved social order. The old one was – flawed. ... So we see the flood as an opportunity – here as it was in Mars – to – break the mould.’

As a coda here is something I wrote a few years ago when I read the following statement from Kim Stanley Robinson rejecting the view that there can be such a thing as 'right-wing utopian science fiction':

'I don't think there are opposing utopian schools in sf, as your question suggests, because I don't think there's any such thing possible as a "right-wing utopia." Right-wing politics by definition tries to prevent or reverse change; for it the current feudal regime is already "utopia" so there is no need to think utopia as a project. You have to distort the word "utopia" out of all recognition to make it fit any right-wing book; as for instance, "the world would be great if it were run by a junta and had biological communists to fight forever, so Starship Troopers is a right-wing utopian novel." True maybe, but useless. It has to be acknowledged that the expansion of legal rights to more and more people (women, ethnic minorities, children, the disabled, alternative lifestyles)--that is to say, social progress in history, the utopian track of history--has been a left-wing project and a left-wing accomplishment." [http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intksr.htm]

This is an odd statement which tells me a lot about the narrow vision of KSR.

To a free marketeer, this 'current feudal regime' is not utopia - the market is born free, but everywhere is in chains, groaning under heavy burdens that prevent it from being the mighty Archangel for eliminating poverty that it can be.

To someone who believe that people should be free to act as they like, speak as they like, and think as they like, this 'current feudal regime' is not utopia - every day there is a new stupid law, and the debate on another topic is declared over.

To a social conservative, this 'current feudal regime' is not utopia - we live beneath the smoke of Auschwitz, in the sprawling new suburbs of the Cities of the Plain. The world is going to Hell in a handbasket.

And it tempts me to write a sprawling novel about not a ‘right-wing utopia’, but about a whole competing family of ‘right-wing utopias’ playing out across space and time.

Trying to get motivated to finish some stuff...

2011-06-30T20:42:00.000+10:00

Here are the first two chapters of the novel provisionally entitled 'Bride of Tash'.

Here are the first three chapters of my 2004 NaNoWriMo novel.

And here's the first 13 pages of another thing.

Let me know if you think any of them are worth finishing!

That's all.

Except...

*weeps for the end of the dream*

Fiat Voluntas Tua

2011-06-28T20:17:00.002+10:00

' ...they forgot the tofu - that we just love to eat'
(*Not* a line from Starship's 'We Built This City', despite me remembering it that way for about 25 years)

When we look at the natural world, we see suffering. We see suffering that is intrinsic to life: wasp larvae burrowing their way into living caterpillars, cute furry animals being tortured to death by other cute furry animals, schistosomes boring into the walls of human bladders, etc. Historically, this observation has been a frequently used argument against the hypothesis of a benevolent God. Today I am not going to discuss this argument. Instead, I will discuss what the proper human response to this suffering should be and put forward some provisional operational guidelines for discussion.

A respectable philosophical tradition in Greco/Roman/Judaeo/Christo/Islamic civilisation is the comforting one that the suffering of animals is illusory. They appear to suffer, but they do not really suffer, since they do not have souls, so we do not have to give them any moral standing. If this is the case, we can sleep easily and carry on with our bull-baiting, cock-fighting, whaling, and KFC. This is Option 1. I would love to see someone stand up and offer a robust defence of this argument - which is of venerable pedigree, is self-consistent, and has a lot of day-to-day advantages - but am not going to do so myself.

Once we admit that the suffering of animals is real, we are in trouble. Since the whole natural world is permeated completely with suffering, is woven of suffering, cannot function in any meaningful way without ceaseless suffering. We cannot touch it individually. We cannot yet touch it collectively, except by the morally-objectionable ‘Judge Death’ strategy of exterminating all animals on the planet. Our human contribution to this mass of suffering is small. In aggregate, it is hard to tell whether it is positive or negative.

Confronted with this horrible spectacle, we can erect a flimsy barrier between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. On that side is nature, where moral laws do not apply; on this side is culture, and anything that we bring (arbitrarily) onto this side of the line has to be treated by moral laws. This is Option 2. So we treat our dogs as honorary humans, and the whales in our oceans as honorary humans, and enforce laws on the ‘humane’ culling of some pest species while happily letting others die in agonies. The arbitrariness of the flimsy barrier is what bothers me about this option. No one can stand up and offer a robust rational defence of this option. There isn’t one.

We are part of this web of suffering, but we do not have to embrace it. Individually, we might decide to do what we can to avoid adding stones to this continent-sized landslide of dehumanising pain . Why should we do this, since our contribution is negligible? The best reason I can think of is that we are the first fruits of consciousness, we are the beginning of the manifestation of morality in the material realm, and in so acting we are beginning a redemptive work that will in some millions of years result in a more just and merciful biosphere. It is easy to avoid adding stones to the landslide of pain by commission, and I think it is incumbent upon us to do so. I think we ‘ought’ to avoid putting kittens in the drier, not swerve out of our way to run over cane toads, not snuff out the life of a being capable of suffering on the flimsy excuse that it tastes good. I don’t think it is incumbent on us to reduce the landslide of pain by avoiding sins of omission, since that opens a bottomless box. We *can* take in stray cats, or perform endoscopies on stray penguins, and these are intrinsically good acts, but I don’t think we are obliged to do them in the same way as we are obliged *not* to commit atrocities to animals. This Option 3 is rather bleak in its sisyphean stoicism, brightened only by a gleam from the far future, and I think it can only be made bearable if leavened with the realisation that suffering is not the greatest evil.

We can say, despite everything: life is good. Life is suffering, but it is also good. Minimisation of suffering is a good, but not the good. And here we come to a quote from ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ that I was referring to the last time I had a discussion touching on these matters with Lexifab. I went to some trouble to look it up but it has turned out to be too disjointed and vast to quote.

If each creature in this world of suffering can pursue its own goals to the best of its ability and derive some enjoyment from its life, then does it matter so much that it must suffer along the way (as must we all) and eventually die in greater or lesser agony (as must we all)? The greater tragedy it seems to me is:

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly;
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap;
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

(Vachel Lindsay)

Living things should be valued in as much as they blaze forth a glorious light of being in the darkness of non-being. Things that impede them from doing this are bad; things that empower them to do this are good...

And unfortunately, it seems that as I try to clarify what I mean and articulate something I can define as Option 4, the closer I come to talking myself out of my ideological commitment to vegetarianism. And to a philosophical position closer to my actual behaviour of eating fish and kangaroos. Bugger.

Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy FTW!

2011-06-05T10:36:00.001+10:00

It seems to me that most utopias I have read or heard about, including the very first one by St. Thomas More, require two conditions:

(1) An incorruptible ruling class who will not selfishly exploit the system, and

(2) A class of ruled who will meekly go along doing what they are told.

Clearly neither of these things exist in reality, except in the most fitful and localised way; and clearly if they did exist , any cockamamie socio-political system you can make up would work just fine. The only one I have ever come across that comes up with a plausible way of achieving these two things is ‘Brave New World’, which is not conventionally described as a utopia, I guess, but looking back on after all these years would certainly be much more pleasant to live in as a regular sort of person than any of those bona fide utopias would. I remember how much it crushed me the first time I read the scene where John the savage is arguing with the Controller and the Controller comprehensively demolishes all of his arguments in favour of a world like ours. I expect we will get there in the end, if the finances allow. This world seems to be more like the Brave New one with each passing year.

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east. …

(I read a biography of Aldous Huxley earlier this year- did you know he taught briefly at Eton, and that the authors of ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘The Fall of Constantinople’ were both boys in his class? It still staggers me how few degrees of separation there are between all the famous Englishmen of the early 20^th century).

I wanted to write about the shoddy tricks played by Kim Stanley Robinson and Julian May to make their utopias work, and mostly to complain about how deeply dissatisfactory I found the ‘Galactic Milieu’ series. But I shall save those for another time.

I oughta be in pictures

2011-06-04T14:40:00.000+10:00

Aspidistra has a non-speaking role in Spouse-of-Clam's exciting new LOTRO fanfilm, ~~'Waiting for Flashman'~~ 'Orcs'!

Maintain the Rage

2011-06-03T22:52:00.001+10:00

22 years tonight. Like room-temperature superconductors and going back to the Moon, it has taken much longer than I thought it would.

Intermittent Communications

2011-05-30T08:00:00.002+10:00

I thought I should tell you a little about the background to that quote. I may have told you once about a friend I had when I was young - you would have met him once, Marco - who when he was even younger claimed to have believed he was an Inca. That is, an incarnation of the Sun God. He claimed to have believed he was put on this world as a place of testing. We used to discuss current events and utopian schemes for bringing about world peace which involved radical detente and neo-Stalinist population transfers. We once started writing a novel about 'first contact', humans landing on an alien world, with him writing the story from the human point of view and me from the alien point of view.
When I look back on the mixture of Vulcan rationality and psychotic bastardry with which we used to treat each other, I am amazed at how well our spouses have managed to integrate us into normal society.

Anyways, after many years out of contact, he sent me an email during my hiatus from Clamdom asking my advice on whether someone who had come to his employer seeking a loan was a crackpot or not. And in the very brief correspondence that followed, before we fell out of contact again, he said I should read 'The Devils of Loudon' by Aldous Huxley. So I did. You probably should, too. That quote from the Introduction leapt out at me. I think it played a role in the epiphany I described. We should believe those things that seem true to us when they are expressed in halting and inarticulate ways by unattractive people. Then we can be confident that they are really true.

Another friend of long ago, though not quite that long ago as my Inca friend, is N(athana/o)el, who emailed me after a long gap out of the blue much more recently. I reminded him that he had promised to read the Qur'an and he hasn't yet written back. Islam is one of the things I have soured on in recent years. It seems another terrible manifestation of the elevation of form over content. It is good memetic survival behaviour to take people dissing your meme so seriously, but it is also sociopathic.

The Devils of Loudon

2011-05-15T07:56:00.000+10:00

When an orator, by the mere magic of words and a golden voice, persuades his audience of the rightness of a bad cause, we are very properly shocked. We ought to feel the same dismay whenever we find the same irrelevant tricks being used to persuade people of the rightness of a good cause.

The belief engendered may be desirable, but the grounds for it are intrinsically wrong, and those who use the devices of oratory for instilling even right beliefs are guilty of pandering to the least creditable elements in human nature. By exerting their disasterous gift of the gab, they deepen the quasi-hypnotic trance in which most human beings live and which it is the aim and purpose of all true philosophy, all genuinely spiritual religion, to deliver them.

- Aldous Huxley, ‘The Devils of Loudon’, 1952

Epiphany

2011-05-15T07:55:00.000+10:00

I have taken the post below from a comment I made on Marco's blog a while ago and have set it up here to accompany my first post as the New Dr Clam, which you will find by scrolling down a little ways.

You may or may not know that my son is vehemently and embarassingly opposed to most all manifestations of organised religion. This certainly has not been my view nor of anyone else in the family and until recently I assumed it might stem from some unreported unfortunate incident at his first school here, where he was enrolled in Scripture class without us knowing.

But I have realised – very belatedly, because I am so thick – that my son’s opinion is not an abberation, but a logical and consistent consequence of three messages that are core to my own world view that I have drummed in to him by word and action since he was very small.

1. Don’t do things just because everyone else is doing them, or all the ‘cool people’ are doing them.

There isn't anything I, or parents in general, denigrate so much as peer pressure. Doing things just because everyone around you is doing them is stupid. 'Think for yourself!' we say. Now historically, if you are born in a Muslim country, you end up as a Muslim. If you are born in a Christian country, you end up as a Christian. Etc. What can this be but people blindly going along with what everyone else around them is doing, rather than considering ideologies on their merits? All organised religions are obviously groups of ‘cool people’ – the only people who *really* know what it is going on.

And then I have gone and said – thinking of the habit of following orders that gave us the ghastly 20^th century – things like: ‘Respect for authority is a disease, no different from the Venusian Gook Rot’ (Me, c.1995). (Of course, while it makes some sense to listen to what the great sages and prophets of the past have said, where they disagree completely with each other it is obvious that they can be ignored.)

2. Content beats form, as surely as rock beats scissors.

This is something I say a lot, too. Don't pay attention to *how* people are saying something, pay attention to *what* they are actually saying.

Organised religion seems to be all about saying things in as impressive an environment as possible. You typically have someone in impressive clothes reading something written in impressive language in an impressive setting. The greatest music, paintings, and architecture of Western Civilisation have all been created to provide an impressive setting for Christianity. I am largely suspicious of form because I am so damned susceptible to it, but my son has always been largely immune. Confronted with any statement he will cut straight to the content. He is going to be suspicious of anything tarted up with all sorts of impressive emotive magnificences, *because* it is tarted up with all sorts of impressive emotive magnificences.

3. Don’t believe things for any reason except that they are true.

You shouldn’t trust anybody saying something if they are paid to say it. If someone from the coal industry says something about global warming being rubbish, everyone leaps up and down to say that they would say that, wouldn’t they? If I say something about the importance of publicly-funded tertiary education, you would be right to take it with a grain of salt. So if people are being rewarded to say something is true, not by an executive salary of a measly few million a year*, but by an eternity of bliss, oughtn’t we ought to take what they are saying with whole container loads of salt? That would be logical.

So, my son’s contempt for organised religion is a logical and self-consistent extension of my own world view. And to be logical and self-consistent, I ought to adopt it too.

So that’s sort of where I’m at.

I find it a very uncomfortable place to be and don't like it very much, but that's where I am.

*: For absolute clarity, this is meant to be the coal industry spokesman’s salary, not mine.

2011-05-10T15:26:00.000+10:00

A Note from September 26th, 2009

2011-05-10T15:25:00.001+10:00

I have now returned to doing all of the old things I used to do so far as paying attention to the world is concerned, which is terrible, for as it says in the rules of the Discalced Carmelites, news of the wars and treaties of earthly princes is spiritual poison. I shall not reanimate Dr Clam. But lately I have taken to frequenting the websites in foreign parts that I was once used to frequent, where there is much discussion about health care reforms in the Old Country. I am on record as an enthusiastic proponent of universal health care as part of the core business of government, which puts me well outside what is usually considered the ‘right’ in the Old Country. Yet, here I am considered a fire-breathing reactionary in most matters. Is my theory of government merely incoherent and lacking in self-consistency? Or is there a logic to it, not yet clear even to me? I shall have a go at making some assertions that may or may not hang together logically.

1. The business of the state is to defend us, collectively, against external enemies that are too powerful for us to defend ourselves against, individually.

2. Historically the defensive function of the state has always been employed against all four of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, in so far as it was within its power. Consider the story of Joseph and Pharaoh; consider the etymology of the word ‘quarantine’.

3. I think it is fair, if by good fortune or hard work I have more money than my fellow citizen who is on the dole in Arnhem Land, that I can eat out at better restaurants, go on more holidays, order more books from Fishpond, and have a better video card. But, something in me rebels at the suggestion that it is in any way fair that I live longer or be healthier than him.

4. Arthur Koestler has said something which I cannot find on the web exactly, but can be paraphrased: ‘The value of an individual to the state is zero; the value of an individual to himself is infinite.’ A market for a good on which everyone places an infinite value will be the most distorted market imaginable. There is no other good for which I have a stronger natural desire to spend more than my fair share of the national GDP than on ensuring my own survival and the survival of my family. Like other strong natural desires, this one is antisocial unless bridled.

5. The natural tendency of individuals to place an infinite price on their own lives means that a free market for health should be expected to consume an ever-increasing percentage of GDP. This percentage of GDP will be overwhelmingly directed towards those who are able to pay more, so health care will be distributed on the basis of who has the greatest capacity to pay. In times of famine, the governments of responsible nations place restrictions on the free sale of food and introduce some sort of rationing in order that the poorest are not crushed by the market. As far as the market for health care goes, it is always a famine year. Thus it is always necessary for the state or charitable organisations to provide health care for the poorest.

6. It should not be illegal to obtain more or better health care for oneself than society is willing to extend to its poorest members, any more than it should be illegal to climb Ayers Rock. But it is not laudable. It is immoral to obtain more or better health care for oneself than society is willing to extend to its poorest members, just as it is immoral to climb Uluru against the stated preference of its traditional owners.

7. I think those who oppose socialised health care in the Old Country are not so cruel as to think that financial capacity is a proper basis for allocating health care, nor so blind as to imagine that this is not the case. Rather, they do not trust their government. And strangely this is all the arguments against the Iraq War boiled down to so far as I can tell. It might seem logical to oppose both, on the grounds that the government is a bunch of untrustworthy weasels. I expect a small number of self-consistent libertarians are in that position. Yet, even this small number of self-consistent liberatarians must surely concede that as we must have some form of government, it would be better to work towards making that government trustworthy? If our government is animated by principles that we agree with, and displays reasonable competence, than we should trust it with our armies and hospitals; if our government does not share our values and is incompetent, then it will employ both in ways that are pernicious.

Umbar 2017

2011-05-06T17:22:00.002+10:00

So far as I know Turbine has no plans to release a LOTRO expansion with 3-D water, Epic Mount Olifaunts, and skimpy 'Age of Conan'-style underthings. This, however, is my dream. Everybody needs a dream.

What is Truth?

2011-04-24T21:14:00.004+10:00

I am not Dr Clam.

Or, I am not the same Dr Clam who wrote the rest of this stuff. If I am a Dr Clam, I am a different Dr Clam, probably simpler and less interesting. Or you may find me more interesting. I do not know. But time has moved on and I am no longer the same person. After all if you write exactly the same sentence at fourteen, at twenty-seven, at forty, it will mean different things. You cannot step twice into the same river, yadda yadda.

That is why I feel that I can come back here and make this post, despite my assertion that Dr Clam and President Wossname cannot exist in the same universe. I am not *that* Dr Clam. Nor, perhaps, is President Wossname *that* President Wossname.

Long ago I told myself that I would spend the first twenty years of my life gaining all the knowledge and skills to do all the things I wanted to do, and the next twenty years doing them: and anything after that would be gravy. Well, the gravy years are here! I am pretty well satisfied with how things have gone. And I will try to be fearless and exultant through whatever bonus years are given to me.

I endorse this statement of William Blake’s: “Everything that can be believed is an image of truth.”

And I more strongly endorse this restatement of my own: “Everything that can be disbelieved is an image of error”.

What do we mean by ‘believe’ or ‘disbelieve’? As you know, I favour the definition provided by the 19th century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: “A belief is a habit, i.e., a readiness or disposition to respond in certain kind of ways on certain kinds of occasions.”

With this definition, it should become evident that there are some things that cannot be disbelieved. We cannot disbelieve F = GMm/r², in that we cannot habitually behave as if it were not true: each time we behave as if it were not true, we are likely to injure ourselves, and if we attempt to make it a habit we are sure to break before the universe does.

I recently tried to reread Ursula Le Guin’s “Earthsea” books and got as far as the bit in “The Farthest Shore” where Sparrowhawk voices the opinion that good ruling consists of the ruler only doing what he has no other choice but to do, and nothing else. I thought this was a dumb opinion, when it comes to ruling; but in terms of deciding what to believe I think it is a good guide. We should believe only what we cannot disbelieve.

I have decided that I am an a-gnostic (with a silent ‘g’). I am an anti-gnostic. Nothing irritates me more than the idea that there is some gnosis, some hidden knowledge, that separates some cult or caste of elites from us muggles here below. There is no gnosis. If we take pains to believe only what cannot be disbelieved, then we will asymptote towards truth.

In the same time as we cannot disbelieve F = GMm/r², we cannot disbelieve that life is better than death. Believing this, which means acting upon it, we cease to exist.

I think the idea that death is better than life is one of a small number of beliefs that, believed in a Peircean way, will destroy any functioning society, and so collectively cannot be believed. The antithesis of these beliefs is what C. S. Lewis called the “Tao”: the nugget of ethics common to every ethical system we know about.

EASTER HYMN

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,

You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,

Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright

Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night

The hate you died to quench and could but fan,

Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,

At the right hand of majesty on high

You sit, and sitting so remember yet

Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat

Your cross and passion and the life you gave,

Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

- A. E. Housman

That'll do, Clam

2009-01-08T18:56:00.005+11:00

I don’t claim to be a wise man

A poet or a saint

Just another man who’s searching

For a better way

But my heart beats loud as thunder

For the things that I believe

Sometimes I want to run for cover

Sometimes I want to scream

- Bon Jovi, Bang a Drum

Could man be drunk for ever

With liquor, love, or fights,

Lief should I rouse at morning

And lief lie down of nights.

But men at whiles are sober

And think by fits and starts,

And if they think, they fasten

Their hands upon their hearts.

- A. E. Housman

I'm history!

No, I'm mythology!

No, I don't care what I am--I'm free!

- The Genie, Walt Disney’s Aladdin

The 16th Century: The Golden Age of the Blog?

2009-01-05T07:06:00.004+11:00

I have been carrying the wrong date around in my head for at least a decade. Felix Manz, evangelist, thinker, and martyr, was drowned in the Limmat on January 5th, 1527, not January 21st, 1525. The earlier date was when he began his public ministry. So have a few minutes on the internet educated me.

Before the internet, the last big advance in technology for people to communicate their thoughts to other people was movable type. This had all sorts of profound social and political consequences which you can look up for yourselves on the internet.

Basically, if you wanted to communicate your ideas to posterity, before movable type you either needed really compelling ideas that made lots of other people want to copy them out longhand, or ideas backed up with enough money and/or power that you could compel lots of other people to copy them out longhand. This was a high bar to get over, so the quality of the ideas communicated to us from the time before the invention of movable type is generally high.

Once movable type was invented, all you needed was a relatively trivial amount of money, and you could communicate whatever thoughts popped into your head to every town that spoke your language within weeks or months. If you disagreed with something someone else wrote, you could dash off a pamphlet letting the world know, and a few weeks or months later they would do the same, usw. The content of the resulting deluge of pamphlets will be reassuringly familiar to anyone browsing the net today. The hyperbole, the rapid-fire cut and thrust of responses, the bees in bonnets, the self-righteous separation into self-reinforcing cliques- it is all so very familiar.

From the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica:

"In Germany, the cradle of printing, the pamphlet (Flugschrift) was soon a recognized and popular vehicle of thought, and the fierce religious controversies of the Reformation period afforded a unique opportunity for its use. ... In general their tone was extremely intemperate, and they formed, as one authority has described those of a century later, "a mass of panegyric, admonition, invective, controversy and scurrility." ... attempts were made in pamphlets to justify almost every action, however unjust or dishonourable, while at the same time those who held different opinions were mercilessly and scurrilously attacked."

I don't know if Felix Manz was the first Protestant killed by other Protestants for having the wrong ideas, but he was early enough- January 5th 1527 is less than ten years after the 'beast of the wild wood' (to use Gerard Manley Hopkins delightfully un-ecumenical phrase) nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg. That's what happens when people get carried away with these new technologies for communicating their ideas. He has stuck in my mind since I first heard about him because of how shockingly early in the Reformation he was judicially murdered, and because some of my ancestors almost certainly had a hand in his death, as the branch of our family that has been traced furthest back has been traced to 16th century Zurich.

Here is a sample of Felix Manz's dangerously inflammatory opinions:

"Charity alone is pleasing to God; he that cannot show charity, has no part with God. The unadulterated love of Christ puts to flight the enemy. It is incumbent upon him that will be an heir of Christ, to be merciful, as the Father in heaven is merciful."

Tik. Tok.

2008-12-27T07:56:00.003+11:00

This is a dangerous time

This is a time without rhyme, without reason

- Graeme Connors, ‘Cyclone Season’

There is a book I wanted to read again, in the final few months of the election campaign in that faraway country which I am now doing my best to ignore. But I couldn’t find it in the library, and in the shops they only now seem to sell Sladek’s book about the good robot. Fortunately, I got a 1984 copy for Christmas through the wonders of online secondhand bookshops. Tik-Tok is the bad robot- there is something just a teensy bit wrong with his asimov circuits. He is also the first robot vice-presidential candidate, after our metal brethren are enfranchised- five-hundred million of them.

My press conference was dragging to a close: I made the usual joke about Martian annexation, parried the usual question about the Botuland crisis, and said finally:

‘I guess that about winds it up, kids. Except that I want to thank you, all of you – both friends and friendly enemies of the press – for doing one hell of a good job during this campaign. You’ve all reported what I’ve said, fairly and honestly, to the American people. Not one of you tried to exploit my – let’s say, sideshow value. I’m proud of you.’

While they gave me themselves a round of applause, I spoke to one or two of the local robots who’d promised to vote for Maxwell and me. Then I headed for the computer room to check the latest predictions – up to now, we looked certain to take thirty-eight states – but I was accosted by a reporter.

‘Hello, uh, Olsen is it?’

‘Hello, Mr Tok. Thought you might be interested in this picture. Taken not long ago in Nixon Park.’

It was a clear shot of me strangling the old man over the chessboard. My former face was unmistakeable, and so was the fact that I was squeezing his neck so hard that blood shot from between his teeth.

‘What is this, a shakedown?’

Olsen laughed. ‘Nope. I’m one of those incorruptible members of the Fourth Estate you were just babbling about. This is a still from a video tape which I’ve just handed to the police. I just wanted to see if you had any interesting comments, before you resign from politics?’

I looked around. A pair of plainclothes cops were making their way through the rows of folding chairs towards us. There was still time to kill this little shit Olsen before they reached us. I might even be able to get away afterwards. The path unfolded before me, a change of face, emigration to Mars- and even if they shot me, so what? No point in living now.

I held out my wrists for the handcuffs. Everything lost, everything. My whole life’s work, all the dreaming and building- now for the collapse. I looked at the giant pictures of Governor Maxwell and me, the bunting and the slogans. Max Dares! Tik Cares! All for nothing, wasted like my wasted life.

I found myself, in the police helicopter, allowing my mind to dwell on images from the past. They unrolled before me, a rich tapestry. … What a book it would make, if only I dared write it!

But why not? Nothing to lose now. … Nothing to lose now, and at least I could have my last spasm of notoriety: ‘You think I’m bad? Wait’ll I tell you the whole story. I started off by murdering a blind child and I ended up building death factories in Latin America, and you almost made me Vice-President, how about that?

[Here ends the manuscript of Tik-Tok’s autobiography, published on teletext as Me, Robot. The following chapter appears only in later editions, published after 2094.]

Now, I don’t accuse President-Elect Berzelius Windrip of having murdered a blind child, or burned down a nursing home, or pulled off a string of violent bank robberies, or any of the other things Tik-Tok confesses with such engaging candour in his autobiography. And I don’t think his extremist opinions are quite as extreme as ‘exterminate all the humans’. But I did breathe a sigh of relief when it became apparent he had the nomination in the bag, because I didn’t believe he could possibly win. I couldn’t imagine the electorate being foolish enough to vote for anyone with his record, with his long list of dodgy associates, with his extremely radical views.

But, just like among the very last generation of humans, rhetoric, novelty value, and the perception of candour trumps all.

‘No arguing with a best seller, Tik. And Me, Robot is not only selling well, it’s hitting the public hard.’

‘They’re shocked?’

‘Yes and no. Hell, by now, they expect anything of politicians. They’re shocked, but they’re intrigued.’ He chuckled. ‘They’re already forming Free Tik-Tok Committees.’

‘I don’t understand. Why-‘

‘Call it the complexity and perversity of human nature, Tik. In a way, it’s because you confessed to such hideous crimes that they want to let you go! I suppose people see it like this: All politicians are crooks, but most get away with their perfidy. Now, when one politician wants to come clean, it seems almost ungrateful of the state to demand his life. Anyway, they say, what’s the hurry? Could it be that certain people in high places want to silence you?’ He chuckled again. ‘So, you’re fast becoming a folk hero. I like that. Folk heroes don’t lose in court.’

‘Don’t be stupid. There’s no possible way I can win in court, and you know it. Not only was I caught red-handed committing murder, I’ve confessed to dozens of other major crimes.’

‘We’ve won already, smart-ass. With your permission, I can plead nolo contendere and the DA agrees to let us off the hook on all charges. You’ll have to pay some big fines and probably give up control of Clockman International, but you’ll walk free. Understand?’

‘No!’

‘We’ve three factors working for us,’ he said. ‘First, when you committed many of these so-called crimes, you were not legally a person, so they are not crimes. If a juke-box steals a coin, you can’t put the juke-box in jail.’

‘And what else?’

‘A second factor is, as I mentioned already, the popular appeal of Me, Robot. You’re a folk hero, and what in jury in its right mind would convict a folk hero?’

‘And the third factor?’

‘Politics. The DA is a reasonable guy, the judge is a reasonable dame, they’ve both got political careers to protect. And they both belong to Governor Maxwell’s party.’

‘So what? Maxwell dropped me. The ticket now reads Ford Maxwell for President, Ed Wankel for Vice President.’

‘Yes, but today, Maxwell announced that if you were cleared, even after the election, he would install you as Vice President. Wankel agreed to resign in your favour. They’re no idiots, Tik. They know you’ve got the vote-pulling power they need to win. So now, you’ll walk out of court not only free but Vice President. Can’t be bad, eh?’

I chuckled along with him, but my thoughts were running ahead to weightier matters. A robot assassin for Maxwell first- obvious, sure, but why aim for subtlety now? – then to get my hands on the war stuff. How long would it take, to arm the thermonuclear devices, ready the death-rays, load up the viruses? Days or weeks? Yes, and when the humans had been wiped out, how long to bring the world’s machines into line, get them ready for the big push to the stars?

Why I am not a Baha'i

2008-12-22T08:30:00.003+11:00

In Marco's tradition of extremely long posts, and as part of a general tidying-up urge to make sure I have said everything I want to say before I go, I thought I would put this up.

I have been sitting on for about seven years and thought I would put it somewhere where it might theoretically be findable by someone who is interested in such things. It is a much-tinkered-with letter, never sent, written when I was a better person and could think more clearly than I do today. It would have been my fourth in a written dialogue with a Baha’i friend, and was last tinkered with about three years ago.

My objections to the Baha’i faith are seven:

(1) I am opposed to the ‘very heart of the purpose of the cause’, that is, bringing about the unity of mankind.

(2) I am strongly opposed to the doctrine that the laws of the state should be obeyed.

(3) No Holy Book is inerrant.

(4) No religion can claim to be an improvement on that of ‘Isa that does not enforce vegetarianism on its followers.

(5) If ‘progressive revelation’ exists, humanity will need another messenger in far less than 834 years.

(6) I feel that Baha’i teachings on Justice encourage self-righteousness and hard-heartedness.

(7) To say that God is knowable only through His Messengers is trivially true, but ultimately false.

To proceed to the first point, I have read that Abdul Baha has stated that bringing about the Unity of Mankind is the ‘very heart of the purpose of the cause’.

I do not hold this to be a laudable aim.

There are two possible interpretations of what is “good”. Good may be related to:

(i) The potential for each living being to reach their fullest capacity to be what they are, in this world.

(ii) The fitting of each living being into a “thing fit for eternity” like the pots of Robert Browning’s poem ‘Rabbi ben-Ezra’.

For both of these cases, many things remain the same: Hence, the prohibitions against killing, against taking what is not ours, against activities that disfigure the soul, are required in both. Food, shelter, education, clean water and clean air, true freedom of thought and expression; these all work towards them both. There are a few practical differences between the two definitions of good; merely removing a source of temptation will work towards (i), by minimising the hazards that must be avoided in a finite time, but will not help towards (ii). By (i), our consciences may lead us to take action against the few for the good of the many (e.g., murdering abortionists in order that the prevailing climate of terror will cause them to abandon their trade) – but by (ii) we must weigh our actions against the possible disfiguring effects of our actions on the souls of the wider community, who might be estranged from God by our actions. (I presuppose a perfect moral agent; that is, a selfless man who counts his own happiness as no greater or less than anyone else’s. Thus, the disapproval of the community that he will incur, and the possibility that he himself will “lose his salvation” cannot enter into his moral calculations.

Unity can only be a means towards good, by (i), under limited circumstances, and cannot help at all towards (ii). If (ii), it is always more important that division remain, no matter how difficult, to teach us patience and mutual respect. Diversity is what I would call a second-order good. It is true that specific instances of diversity should not be preserved if their presence brings more disfigurement of soul to individuals than its absence, for only individuals can suffer or feel joy, be sundered from God or abide forever in His presence; but you cannot look at the universe and not know Diversity to be dear to the heart of our Creator, our inordinately-fond-of-beetles God. No idea, no nation, no species, no religion, no culture, ought to be preserved if it causes more harm to individuals than it cures; but that many ideas, nations, species, religions, cultures are necessary for the health of the human race I hold as an article of faith. Just as a multiplicity of species maintains some kind of balance in the world of living things, the multiplicity of religions ensures that the harm done by prevailing errors in a particular one is minimised.

I agree with Toynbee that there is a true core to all religion; but I see the great multiplicity of outward forms of worship, devotional practices, theologies, etc., not as stumbling blocks, but as a thousand thousand different paths to the One God, each particularly suited for particular people in the very diverse world we live in. I feel it would be a tragedy to lose them. I believe that not only the revelations of Muhammad and ‘Isa are of value, but that Maronites and Pentecostals, Ismailis and Wahhabites, have a particular role to play in the Divine Plan. The fact that there are no sects and divisions within the Baha’i faith is to me a very great stumbling block to considering it seriously.

In the ‘Satanic Verses’, Gibreel tells Mahound that any new idea is asked two questions: the second is, ‘what do you do to those who disagree with you when you have power over them?’ This is a question that the Catholic Church has answered, that al-Islam and a few other religions have answered, but it is not a question that the Baha’i faith has yet had to answer. The true level of tolerance exhibited by the Baha’i faith, with its claim that all religions are of God, can be gauged by two admittedly anecdotal pieces of evidence:

(i) My father-in-law was once told by a Hand of the Cause, ‘make no mistake, eventually there will be no room for any other religion but Baha’i.’ This is a very good answer to Gibreel’s question, but is quite in the spirit of those offered by the Inquisitors and Ayatollahs.

(ii) When a person seeks to sever ties with the Baha’i faith, they are asked to sign a document stating that they no longer believe Baha’ullah is a manifestation of God. Those who continue to believe so, but do not agree with particular matters on which Abdul Baha, Shogi Effendi, or the International House of Justice have spoken, exist but are never mentioned.

These specific doubts, in combination with the general principle of the good of Diversity, lead me to reject strongly seeking the unity of mankind under Baha’i auspices as a positive value.

To proceed to the second point, it is reiterated in “The World is But One Country” and in many other Baha’i writings that the laws of the state should be obeyed, even to the extent of taking up arms and killing the enemies of the state when conscripted.

My belief is that where the laws of God and the laws of men come into conflict, the laws of men must always give way.

Very many thousands of Christians have died rather than obey the laws of the state. From the days of Tiberius to Jiang Zemin, we have suffered for placing the laws of God above the whims of man. This doctrine that the state should be obeyed is an insult to the memory of those martyrs.

In the Second World War, many catholic men were executed rather than serve in the armed forces of the Third Reich. The doctrine of the Baha’i faith is that they were going against the will of God! This is unacceptable to me. I believe a major factor in the ‘success’ of Hitler was the emphasis by Martin Luther on this very thing, respect for the state and the divine sanction of authority, leading to a perverse level of respect for authority in German society. In the history of Russia and China, the other homelands of totalitarianism, religion has always been subordinate to the state and encouraged respect for authority.

On the other hand, there is a quote by Mussolini that I have always treasured; “the human material that I have to work with,” he said, “is worthless, worthless.” This judgement is a great compliment to the Italian people. I will always remember the signs on the trains in Switzerland as an insight into the connection between respect for authority and national behaviour. In German and French, the languages of nations that have spread devastation across Europe in recent centuries: “It is forbidden to stick parts of your body out the window.” In English and Italian, the languages of nations that have not: “It is dangerous to stick parts of your body out the window.” For the one set, appeal to authority is sufficient; for the other, reason must be invoked.

Although the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has often sided with the state – for example, the disgraceful record in supporting repressive regimes in Latin America - when not a state-supported church it has usually encouraged obedience to the laws of God rather than the laws of man. The revolutionary priest has been a stock character in anti-catholic pamphleteering since the time of Queen Elizabeth I (recent examples equating Liberation Theology with Marxist revolution should be easy to find at any Christian bookstore!)

With regard to these first two objections, I fear that the idolisation of unity, combined with the exhortation to obey the state, will make the Baha’i faith an ideal tool for godless and evil movements that also seek world unification. Individualism may be a source of discord; but respect for authority is far more dangerous. It has killed many millions in this century, and keeps billions in chains of their own making.

To proceed to the third point, the Baha’i faith teaches that the writings of its founder, of Abdul Baha and of Shoghi Effendi, are of divine origin and cannot be contradicted without calling into question the validity of Baha’ullah’s Divine mission.

The idea of the inerrant “Holy Book” is strongly bound up with Judaism, with Protestantism, and with Islam. This concept I believe to be erroneous, and especially dangerous in the case of the Baha’i faith where there is such a very large amount of inerrant writing.

I fear that, due to the all-embracing nature of the inerrant prescriptions for human society within the Baha’i corpus, the Baha’i faith may be more than a tool of potential world dictators, but a totalitarian theocratic state in embryo.

To a large extent, the arguments in the ‘Wine of Astonishment’ are based on a very Protestant/Muslim understanding of revelation; the Holy Book is brought down from heaven, and all we must do is obey what is written. This same spirit pervades the teachings of Baha’ullah that I have read: if you accept that his mission was of God, you must accept all of his writings as inerrant. Clearly, if I accepted that the writings of a Prophet of God are inerrant, all my other objections would have to vanish as cobwebs in a blast furnace; but I have never accepted the idea of an inerrant Holy Book in the Christian community, seeing many things in the Bible that cast disgrace on the Holy Name of God and can only be human in origin. The difficulties I have here would be magnified with the large corpus of Baha’i writings, especially the legal ones.

I would like to discuss in particular my problems with the Muhammad = Paraclete equation, which has been carried over into the Baha’i community from Islam.

Our evidence of the life and career of Jesus must, in my opinion, rest almost entirely on the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Luke, and Matthew). Biblical scholars believe the gospel of John was written at a later date, and it is impossible to read it without noting that the character and the teaching of Jesus described are very different from what is written in the other three Gospels. I have found nothing that troubles me, in the sense that it seems to be unworthy of God, in the words of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels, but this is not the case with gospel of John.

Now, the book of Acts is very clearly a sequel to the Gospel of Luke, and though I am no expert, I think the scholars are agreed that the two books had the same author. The whole plot of Acts is the sending of the Paraclete in the form of the Holy Spirit, and her nurturing the growth of the Church.

If we reject what is told us in Acts, how can we accept the evidence of the synoptic Gospels on the teaching and character of Jesus? What is the touchstone that can make Luke valid but Acts invalid? Without such a touchstone, the rejection of Acts leaves us completely at sea, and free to make up whatever Jesus suits the requirements of our philosophy.

‘Isa never wrote a book. I believe that he was a prophet of a greater order than Moses, Jeremiah, Buddha, Muhammad, Baha’ullah, et al., though all these were inspired by God, and that God does not endorse inerrant holy books.

To proceed to the fourth point, the Baha’i writings say that one day carnivory will pass away, but in no way exhort humanity to abandon the practice.

I have noted that for over three-thousand years the great sages and teachers of many lands have been telling us that carnivory is an abomination.

How can we claim to be followers of God when we gorge ourselves on the bodies of slaughtered innocents? It is true that ‘Abdul Baha said that the eating of meat would pass away eventually, but the clear retrogression from the teachings of Krsna so many years before throws the whole concept of “progressive” revelation into limbo.

I find the Baha’i position of claiming Krsna and Buddha as prophets, but ignoring what they said almost entirely, to be appallingly discourteous to practising Hindus and Buddhists. I will not discuss the immorality of eating animal food further, since many people greater than I have done so ably before.

To proceed to the fifth point, the Baha’i writings state that the next Messenger of God will be sent after 1000 revolutions of the earth around the sun have elapsed.

I believe that the environment of mankind has changed far more in the last 160 years than in the previous three thousand. In a further 834 years, the state of humanity will be unimaginable to us today. If revelation is made according to the needs of humanity, it appears obvious that new messengers will be required in far less than the thousand years foretold.

How will the Baha’i profession of the unity of ‘all religions’ hold on the world of Sevastna, where 99% of the population of four billion are Nambarunists? When there are more Selkites than Hindus in the universe, and more Mormons than any other Christian denomination? The ‘unity of all religions’ will look very silly if it leaves out the religions followed by the majority of humankind. This may appear to be a rather ridiculous fantasy of the future, but in a few hundred years I think it will be the strongest of all objections to the Baha’i faith.

The Catholic Church teaches that other religions contain truth, but has never compiled a list including some and excluding others. Rather than rely on ‘progressive revelation’, we believe that the Holy Spirit animates the Church, making her an adaptive entity that can change and continue to faithfully project the light of God to different times and places. My personal belief is that all revealed religions are in fact such adaptive entities - it is incontrovertible that most of the good achieved by Judaism, most of the real apprehension of God, has occurred since the revelation of Christianity. It is incontrovertible that most of the good achieved by Christianity, most of the real apprehension of God, has occurred since the revelation of Islam. Progressive revelation, as envisioned as the ‘passing on’ of the Light from one messenger to another, is not experimentally tenable.

To proceed to the sixth point, Baha’ullah has said in the Hidden Words: “best beloved in My eyes is justice.”

But ‘Isa said “See where it is written: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’”.

I once told a Baha’i friend that I no longer felt anger at being cheated in my business dealings, for it was not a sin to be cheated, while wrath at being cheated might easily lead me into sin. He disagreed, quoting the verse from the Hidden Words mentioned above. This scared me. I do not believe such a verse can or should be applied to relations between human beings. We should by all means strive for justice in the world, but we are the last ones who should decide whether we are personally treated justly or not. All of us in the West, for example, are beneficiaries of an unjust distribution of the world’s resources and are accomplices in preserving the unjust status-quo.

Hitler and me and you are as alike as three raindrops, from the standpoint of the infinite righteousness of God; we are all absolutely reliant on the mercy of God, and stand condemned by his justice. Only by keeping this continually in mind can we escape the trap of self-righteousness and hard-heartedness that traps so many religious people. My community is excoriated by secular society for bringing forth feelings of guilt; but this is its great strength. We are all equally wicked before God’s justice.

Barry Goldwater has famously said: “extremism in defence of freedom is no vice; tolerance in pursuit of justice is no virtue”. I would agree with the first, but not the second; I suspect and fear that the Baha’i community would endorse the second, but not the first.

To proceed to the last point, a point reiterated in the Baha’i writings is “God is knowable only through His messengers”.

I do not know the point of saying that ‘God is knowable only through His messengers’. It is trivially true that it has been the work of the Prophets to break down the barriers between humanity and God, but it does not mean that we must approach God through the Prophets, know them by name, or necessarily do them any honour whatsoever. My personal understanding of the role of Christ is that the barriers between God and us have been broken down entirely, once and forever, and we need profess no intermediary.

“Seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you; ask and you will receive.” I cannot believe in ‘salvation by faith alone’ in the way that is taught in so very many Christian churches; this idea is very repugnant to me. If you asked me when I was six years old what Jesus did, I would tell you the same thing I would tell you today: ‘He taught us to call God our father.’ God is knowable as our human fathers are knowable. The grace of God is poured out continually upon all of us, ready to support our feeblest step towards goodness. One very great problem I have with the idea of progressive revelation is the way that Muslims and Baha’i’s do not call God their Father. From the outside, it appears to me that the Baha’i relationship with God is less personal, the Baha’i conception of God less immanent, than that of the Catholic Church.

The purest statement of what I believe about grace can be found in C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, where Aslan (the Christ of that world) speaks to Emeth the Calormene, who has all his life devotedly sought to know and serve Tash (not only a false God, but the Satan of that world):

“Child, all the service though hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me ... for no service which is vile can be done to me, and no service which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him.” Emeth replies that he has been seeking Tash all his days, and Aslan replies: “Beloved, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.”

The key has been turned; the door is open; all may enter. The grace of God is poured out like the rain, to feed a thousand thousand rivers, at which all may drink. In conclusion, I find that my faith is based on the words of Jesus recorded in the synoptic gospels. There is nothing in these words that I find conflicts with my experience of God. There is much in the writings of Moses, of Muhammad, and of the Baha’i teachers that conflicts with my experience of God, the Father of the Unborn Galaxies. I believe, almost against my will, that ‘Isa was special. I would much rather find the same pure light shining through equally in the recorded work of Jesus, Confucius, Moses, the Bab, etc., with appropriate allowances for time, place, and fidelity of transmission... But I can’t....

The Civil Cult

2008-12-20T18:04:00.002+11:00

There is a little scrap of civil religion that has appeared in the last five years or so, at least in this part of the country. Before a public speech of whatever sort, anywhere within the education sector- even if it is to open a stop work meeting- the speaker will recite a formula something like this:

"I wish to acknowledge the ##### people, the traditional owners of this land."

Frequently followed by:

"...and show my respect to all Elders, past and present."

I suppose this does as little harm, or as much harm, as burning a pinch of incense at the Emperor's altar. I would however like to proffer the following more extended litany:

"I acknowledge the ### people, the traditional custodians of this land, who love this land, who know the stories of this land and the names of its hills and rivers.

I acknowledge the many peoples who came before the ####, who also loved this land, whose names and stories are forgotten.

I acknowledge the people of the British Isles who crossed the world to learn to love this land, in whose words I am speaking, and who have made their own names and stories here.

And I acknowledge all men and women, in whatever time, and from whatever place, who have loved this land, for anyone who loves this land belongs to this land.

I wish to show my respect to all men and women of good faith who have sought truth as they understood it, and virtue as they understood it, in every age and every land. And I wish to show my respect to the many sages and prophets of East and West who built the civilisation we share: who taught us to seek for law in the universe, and in the way we live; to love our neighbours as ourselves; and to strive to live according to the principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality. For the Earth is but one country, and all of us its citizens."