A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion

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

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.

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 be 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...

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

' ...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!

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

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

Maintain the Rage

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

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

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

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.