More Motes, more Beams

Some years ago I was riding home on the train back in Devil Bunny City, standing up squashed in among a bunch of other people in the way that can either induce a Whitman-esque enthusiasm for the energy and drive of the denizens of the great metropolis- or claustrophobia. Just to my left a young lady of Middle-Eastern appearance was cheerfully talking to a friend, and she had a little silvery pendant shaped like a dagger on a chain around her neck. It was a kind of misshapen, amateurish-looking dagger, I remember thinking, and then it hit me with a thwack that it was not a dagger at all, but a map of mandatory Palestine, like so:

Now, there was a much less justifiable pre-emptive war fought 161 years ago, rather than 41 years ago, after which the victors embarked on a much more enthusiastic program of settlement building. And they annexed a vastly larger territory. If you wanted to show your support for your ancestral homeland by wearing a pendant showing its historical boundaries, on the same scale you would have to be one of those ganger types given to extravagantly vast medallions, like so:

“Generally, the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation was
consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed
to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the
most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance
of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not
considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”
-Ulysses S Grant

“The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the
arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is a singular fact, that if any one should declare the President sent the
army into the midst of a settlement of Mexican people, who had never submited,
by consent or by force, to the authority of Texas or of the United States, and
that there, and thereby, the first blood of the war was shed, there is not one
word in all the President has said, which would either admit or deny the
declaration. This strange omission, it does seem to me, could not have occurred
but by design.”
-Abraham Lincoln

The American ‘Apartheid Wall’ in Alta California:

An illegal American settlement on the West Bank of the Colorado:

I wonder if there is any statute of limitations on these things? If it was right for the French to get out of Algeria, and for the Russians to get out of Kazakhstan, it can't be right for the United States to continue to enjoy the fruits of a aggressive 19th century war of conquest.

Spero: Question Eight, Extra Bonus Bit

This is that observation of Mark Twain’s from The Innocents Abroad which I was going to get on to:

I state as my simple deduction from the things I have seen and the things I have
heard, that the Holy Personages rank thus in Rome:
First- “The Mother of God” – otherwise the Virgin Mary.
Second- The Deity.
Third- Peter.
Fourth- Some twelve or fifteen canonized popes and martyrs.
Fifth- Jesus Christ the Saviour- (but always as an infant in arms)

My thesis is that this ranking is entirely proper. This ranking is a useful and appropriate order to list the Holy Personages. This is how things ought to be, for any theology which defines ‘Jesus Christ the Saviour’ as ‘God from God, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.’

Let’s say I wanted to take the train from Mombasa to Kampala. Ultimately, and trivially, this is only possible because somebody built a railway line from Mombasa to Kampala. This was a tremendously expensive engineering project. It was technically very impressive. I understand many of the workers were eaten by lions. It was an uneconomic move in the imperialist Great Game, where Britain needed to control Egypt to guard the sea-route to India, and needed to control the sources of the Nile so no one else could use them to put pressure on Egypt, and needed some decent way to get to the sources of the Nile in less than a long time. But do I need to know any of this stuff? No. I just need to know where to buy my ticket, and have enough cash and the appropriate stamps in my passport. It would be a petty and bizarre bureaucracy that forced me to pass a test on the history of the railway before letting me ride on it.

In the same way: let’s say we grant that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ was a vitally important and necessary part of God reaching out to man that has transformed the relation between us and made it possible for us to reach God. Does this mean we have to know the name of Jesus? Or pay any attention to him at all? I think, no. No, in direct proportion to how worthy God is actually worthy of our worship. If He is outside of time and space, if He is omnibenevolent and omniscient with respect to the universe, He will make it possible for us to reach out to Him wherever and whoever we are. God’s reaching out to us is a fait accompli: what matters now is our reaching out to God.

Now, if you accept an orthodox Christology, you cannot possibly use the life of Jesus Christ as a model for your own response to God. Sure, we can listen to what he said, and we can throw ourselves on his mercy, but imitate him? All of our discussion here so far about the nature of God, all of C. S. Lewis’ metaphors about oysters and Mark Twain’s metaphors about microbes, all the careful refinements of the definition of the Incarnation in which any common-sense simplification we try to make invariably dumps us into heresy- and I endorse all of those refinements, I see why they are there, I agree with their purpose- all of these things raise an insurmountable barrier between our understanding of Jesus the man and our understanding of ourselves. I don’t think there is any way to think ourselves through that barrier.

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus may be the ultimate myth and symbol and case study of God reaching out to man, but the people we ought to remember most, the ones that ought to appear to rank highly in any ranking of ‘Holy Personages’, should be those who have responded heroically in reaching out to God. These are people we can be expected to imitate, whose lives will have lessons for us.

The first and greatest exemplar of man reaching out to God in the Christian story is obviously the maid Mary, saying ‘thy will be done’ and casting her whole life on the mercy of a divine messenger only she could see. There were no other Christians for her to imitate. There was no Christ she could see. It was a pure leap of faith. So, why not put her first?

The proper study of man is man, so Mary ought to be first. But it is entirely proper that after this first and greatest example of man reaching out to God, we should fix our attention next on the God revealed to us, who is not only Spinoza’s creator and sustainer of the universe, but a person, described to us as a Father.

Then, we come to other important exemplars of man reaching out to God:

The rash disciple who was the first to recognise Jesus as the Christ, and was crucified upside down.

Those twelve or fifteen Popes and Martyrs who also spent their lives in reaching out to God.


And then, only then, Jesus Christ the Saviour, at an age when his humanity is not overwhelmed and made incomprehensible by his divinity.

Here's that article by celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach that I couldn't find before. The important bit is this bit:

Yishayahu Leibowitz once said that the quintessential symbol of Christianity
is God dying on a cross for the sake of man, thereby making humans the center of
the faith. But the essential symbol of Judaism is Abraham being prepared to sacrifice his son for God, thereby establishing God at the epicenter of human endeavor to which all action must be directed.

Man must be prepared to give up his life for God, not the reverse.

De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da … yet again

Of course, it is also possible to mislead with the absence of words.

Here is a picture from the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald showing some protesters in Israel a few days back at the time of George Bush the Greater’s visit, with placards calling him an accomplice to terrorism. The caption is banal and uninformative, and I am sure that most readers of the paper would have breezily assumed that the protesters were people like themselves, calling the American and Israeli leaders terror-friends from a point of view on the ‘left’ which sees military action in places like Jenin and Fallujah as terrorism. But... I am sure that is not who the protesters are at all. In the pictures Bush and Olmert are wearing Palestinian-style headdresses. They are being called terror-friends from a point of view on the ‘right’ which sees establishing a Hamas-led state that lobs missiles at Sderot as complicity in terrorism.

It is always an interesting exercise, when listening to a report on the radio that mentions Palestinian deaths due to Israeli military action, trying to figure out how many of them were people who were shooting back. There always seems to be an effort to blur the difference between ‘militant’ and ‘civilian’. My estimate is 15 out of 18 were militants for day-before-yesterday’s Israeli incursion into Gaza. The report I heard last night said that Hamas had ‘taken responsibility’ for rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel. Surely part of ‘taking responsibility’ for attacking someone is being prepared to say ‘it’s a fair cop’ when they attack you back?

Spero: Question Eight

There is a Baha’i metaphor of ‘Progressive Revelation’ as a sort of relay race with fire.
The lamp of revelation is passed from one runner to another, as one revealed religion succeeds another in its proper time. So Isa was a true prophet for his time, but passed the lamp on to Muhammad, and likewise Muhammad was a true prophet for his time, but it came to an end when he in turn passed the lamp of revelation on to Baha’ullah, bearer of the proper revelation for his time (which is ours).

Needless to say, when I first encountered this metaphor I recoiled from it strongly.
It is somewhat disingenuous to claim to cleave root and branch to the essential unity of all religions, but have this picture of one ineluctably and properly giving way to the next. Any Jew-slaughtering Crusader in the Rhineland, up to his knees in gore back in 1096, would surely agree. ‘Aye, the revelation of Moses was good enough then, but times have moved on, eh?’ (Hack, slash, pitiful cry for mercy, stomp, splat)

I think most any observer of history would agree that the vast majority of the achievements of Christianity, for good and ill, and the most complete and self-consistent expositions of Christian thought., were after the life of Muhammad. Most observers of history would probably agree with me that the greatest achievements of Judaism, and the most complete and self-consistent expositions of Jewish thought, were after the life of Christ. It did not seem credible that these religions would persist and develop and achieve things, if the light of revelation had ‘moved on’. There’s that bit of Acts I quote all the time: ‘If their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men, you will only find yourselves fighting against God.’

My counter-metaphor was of plants in a garden. Actually, I think my first metaphor was of a glove, but that did not turn out so well. No religion owns the light. It is not passed from one to another. They are all down here, striving toward the light, which is up there. Each revealed religion is not meant to stay the same. Each revealed religion is planted like a seed, and is meant to grow and develop. Each religion is nourished by and grows towards the same sun; each religion is composed of many parts, most of which are useful and necessary, some of which may be diseased or superfluous. They are, all of them, clearly still a long way from the sun. It will be valid to say that some of them are, on average, closer to the source of light; it will be valid to say that parts of each one are closer or further away from the source of light. It will be probable that bits of different plants will actually be closer to one another than they are to different parts of the same plant. These are all bits of the metaphor that are meant to be there.

Does that sound dreadfully relativist and wishy-washy? Maybe it is, a bit. But implicit in it is the idea that there is an objective scale by which we can say one religion is on average better than another, even if we don't have access to that objective scale. And that some bits of each religion are objectively functional and good, and others are dysfunctional and bad.

Only a link. Just a link.

I will get back to you soon, good people.

In the meantime, here is a scary link.

Twenty Years from Fargo

I have been reading ‘Innocents Abroad’.
It is an unabashed celebration of a type of human that has been insufficiently celebrated in fiction. It is about that kind of boorish American who calls every foreign guide 'Ferguson' and every Arab village 'Jacksonville', compares every body of water unfavourably to Lake Tahoe, who sneaks ashore in contravention of quarantine regulation, tries to break into the Acropolis after hours, climbs into people’s gardens to steal grapes, and makes jokes at the expense of the quaint foreigners whenever possible. We have lost the ability to celebrate that sort of behaviour. We just deplore it now. And indeed, it is very irresponsible and naughty.
But gosh, it does sound like a dreadful lot of fun. I only have vague memories of reading ‘Innocents Abroad’ before, but it was two of Mark Twain’s other books about Americans stranded among quaint foreigners, ‘A Tramp Abroad’ and ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ that taught me how I ought to behave when abroad. And I think, though maybe we didn’t quite measure up to Mark Twain’s standard, that we three representatives of the brash New World didn’t do such a bad job on our lark through the Northern Hemisphere twenty years ago.
We didn't compare Lake Como to Lake Tahoe, no sir, but as I recall we did scramble over a six-foot wall into somebody's garden there.

I wanted to segue from this unpromising beginning to some theological observations based on another passage in 'Innocents Abroad', but to do so I needed to link to an article by celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach that I can't find any more. Oh well. I expect it will turn up.

Spero: Question Seven

If the universe was created by an omniscient God, it was created for some reason.
And as we are part of that universe, we were also created for some reason. Are we here to be something? To do something? If so, what?

Maybe, because of the collaborative live-role-playing aspects of how we were created, we are too flawed ever to be or to do what it is we were created for. Maybe it will be our descendants- be they genetically human, giant robots, uplifted gila monsters, or virtual intelligences living in carpets of intelligent polysaccharides- who will be or do this thing.

Whatever it is, being Good is a precondition. Being reasonable is another precondition, or we will never be able to Do anything.

One thing I have often thought of is that maybe our role is to start to untangle the flaws of creation. We should be able to make a natural world where each thing can be fully itself, can seek and participate in truth and beauty, where carnivory and the other appalling horrors of the ‘natural’ world are removed. We can start with humanity, like Lord Ivywood prophesies in The Flying Inn:

‘If we come at last to live on light, as men said of the chameleon, if some
cosmic magic closed to us now, as radium was but recently closed, allows us to
transmute the very metals into flesh without breaking into the bloody house of
life, we shall know these things when we achieve them. It is enough for us now
if we have reached a spiritual station, in which at least the living head we lop
has not eyes to reproach us; and the herbs we gather cannot cry against our
cruelty like the mandrake.’

Then, we can move on to the rest. I have argued before that the individual is more important than the group, so if no individual tigers are harmed, and their genetic material is preserved as part of a thousand new varieties of Neo-tiger, I can see no downside to making them into autotrophs. This sort of endeavour- to remake the natural world as a place of more justice and mercy- would I think be a major goal of many ideologies in a real Greg Egan or Charles Stross future society. Of course it is a goal of incredible hubris, requiring megayears for its realization even in a tiny corner of the universe. And if the point of the universe does not lie inside it, but in the Universe, and we are all here- microbes, curlews, humans, and sentient galaxies- to be made into fit instruments for eternity, then maybe it is a waste of time. Possibly.

But then? Once we have reconstructed the living world, what is the point?
A problem with the popular virtues of our present civilization is that they are essentially negative. ‘Peace’- what does it mean, beyond ‘absence of violence’? ‘Justice’ means ‘equitable distribution of misery’; ‘mercy’ means ‘protection from the bad consequences of one’s actions’. In the Earthly Paradise, none of those virtues will have any meaning. We need some motivating virtues for life in the Earthly Paradise. If not, what can we do but go backwards?

As Paul tells us in Alpha Ralpha Boulevard:

We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Everyone was, especially the
young people. These were the first years of the Rediscovery of Man, when the Instrumentality dug deep in the treasury, reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages, and even the old troubles. The nightmare of perfection had taken our forefathers to the edge of suicide. ...
I myself was the first man to put a postage stamp on a letter, after fourteen thousand years. I took Virginia to see the first piano recital. We watched at the eye-machine when cholera was released in Tasmania, and we saw the Tasmanians dancing in the streets, now that they did not have to be protected anymore. Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.

Of course, we will be very different creatures by that time. We should have a much clearer idea of God and a much clearer idea of the universe. Maybe the way forward will be clear. But maybe, as so often happens, our capabilities will have outstripped our moral sense. We will need strong medicine for that time. I suggest the following:

We should never be satisfied with the ideal we can imagine;
We should strive for the ideal we cannot yet imagine.

The Epigraph from Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons

Goes like this:

Poor communications deter theft;

good communications promote theft;

perfect communications stop theft.

- Van Braam

S is also for Linebarger

Re-reading the Book of Skulls makes me nostalgic for the landscapes of the Old Country.

There are very few of the tremendous vertical cacti here, the saguaros, though I
see a few, fifty or sixty feet tall, some way back from the path. What we have
instead, thousands of them, is a weird thing about six feet high, with a gnarled
grey wooden trunk and a lot of long dangling clusters of spines and green bumpy
things. The chainfruit cholla, Ned calls it, and warns us to keep far away from
it. The spines are sharp. So we avoid it; but there’s another cholla here, the
teddybear cholla, that’s not so easy to avoid. The teddybear is a bummer. Little
stubby plants a foot or two high, covered with thousands of fuzzy straw-coloured
spines: you look the wrong way, and the spines jump up and bite you. I swear
they do. My boots are covered with prickles. The teddybear breaks easily and
chunks come loose and roll away; they lie scattered everywhere, a lot of them
right in the path. Ned says that each chunk will take root eventually and become
a new plant. We have to watch our steps all the time for fear of coming down on
one. You can’t just kick a teddybear chunk aside if it sin your way, either. I
tried that and the cactus stuck to my boot, and I reached down to pull it off,
only to get it stuck to my fingertips next. A hundred needles jabbing me at
once. Like fire. I yelled. Most uncool screams. Ned had to pry it away, using
two twigs as handles. My fingers still burn. Dark, tiny points are buried in the
flesh. I wonder if they’ll get infected. There’s plenty of other cactus here,
too- barrel cactus, prickly pear, six or seven more that not even Ned can put
names to. And leafy trees with thorns, mesquite, acacia. All the plants here are
hostile. Don’t touch me, they say.

This landscape has all the inimical gooshiness of Belzagor, with the added benefit- or liability- of being real. I miss cactus. All the trees here look the same to me.

There should be more meat to this series of transitions, but here goes:

* The characters in Book of Skulls want to live forever, and do desperate things in the attempt. The people in the book who are immortal- if they really are- are strange and mystical and not like other men because they have vastly more life experience.

* The characters in Glasshouse, by Charles Stross, really do live forever. But when everybody is special, nobody is, and they all seem to be the kind of shallow Gen-X perennial adolescents that you can’t heave a rock in Newtown without hitting. When they get too close to gaining some sort of value from their life experience, they have memory enemas.

* One of the nifty things about Glasshouse was how the narrator is a veteran of a military organization called the ‘Linebarger Cats’. I assumed this was probably a tribute to Paul Linebarger, friend of Chiang Kai-Shek, expert in psychological warfare, and author of science fiction under the name Cordwainer Smith. Latter on, the ‘Cordwainer something-or-others’- I can’t remember what exactly, and I’ve taken the book back to the library, mea culpa- is given as another name used by the Linebarger Cats, making the identification obvious.

The science fiction of Cordwainer Smith is rife with cats, but I like to think the ‘Linebarger Cats’ of Glasshouse are echoes of the cats in The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal:

He coded these cats. He coded them with messages just as monstrous as the messages which had made the men-women of Arachosia into monsters. This is what he coded:
Do not breed true.
Invent new chemistry.
You will serve man.
Become civilized.
Learn speech.
You will serve man.
When man calls you will serve man.
Go back, and come forth.
Serve man.
These instructions were no mere verbal instructions. They were imprints on the actual molecular structure of the animals. They were changes in the genetic and biological coding which went with these cats. And then Suzdal committed his offence against the laws of mankind. He had a chronopathic device on board the ship. A time distorter, usually to be used for a moment or a second or two to bring the ship away from utter destruction. …
Suzdal remained calm. He coded the genetic cats. He loaded them into life-bombs. He adjusted the controls of his chronopathic machine illegally, so that instead of reaching one second for a ship of eighty thousand tons, they reached two million years for a load of less than four kilos. He flung the cats into the nameless moon of
Arachosia.
And he flung them back in time. …
The cats came. Their ships glittered in the naked sky above Arachosia. Their little combat craft attacked. The cats who had not existed a moment before, but who had then had two million years in which to follow a destiny printed into their brains, printed down their spinal cords, etched into the chemistry of their bodies and personalities. The cats had turned into people of a kind, with speech, intelligence, hope, and a mission. Their mission was to reach Suzdal, to rescue him, to obey him, and to damage Arachosia.The cat ships screamed their battle warnings.
“This is the day of the year of the promised age. And now come cats!”

I don’t know if it was entirely wise of Stross to remind me of Smith. I still have to read a lot more of Stross’ stuff, but his worlds seem to be geeky Greg Egan-like places inhabited by people who are mentally just like us, worlds drained of mystery and the terror of the dark places between the stars by uber-technology.* The people in Smith’s universe are not quite people like us. They’re people, but you can imagine them being people from a different time. And the Instrumentality tried to make the universe into a place drained of mystery and terror, but gave it away.

I haven’t managed to get to Kingdoms of the Wall yet, it seems.
Nor have I dragged in, as planned, Star Maker, Roadside Picnic, or Orbitsville.

S is just one of those letters.


* Or not.

Eat More Whales

I went out last week to pick up some hens to replace the ones that were taken by some wild beast earlier in the year. An email had gone around at work saying that they had 200 to find homes for. They had been part of an experiment on debeaking methods, trying to figure out the best way to stop them from pecking each other to death when three of them are packed into a cage the size of a hatbox. It was a good experiment- within the system- trying to make chicken culture more humane. Kind of like putting a band-aid on a cancer, as a wise man once said.
But, the experiment was over, and the birds were surplus to requirements, and it was needful to get rid of as many as could be gotten rid of to people who wanted them, before the others were sold to the chicken extract manufacturers.

They seem healthy enough. They all have a lot of feathers missing, so they don’t look so crash hot, and the claws on their feet are dreadfully long since they’ve spent their whole lives walking on wire cage. It was neat to watch them lift their feet really high as they walked upon the ground for the first time, and neat to see them peck at things in the earth for the first time, and discovering dirt baths for the first time, and generally starting to behave like chickens instead of like automaton drones. It was like they had just been born.

Time will pass, and we will doubtless discover the distinctive personalities of each of the five hens, and they will no longer be an undifferentiated mass of ragamuffins. For they are all different when you get to know them, just like rats and cats and elephants.
I will remember, of course, the shed full of hundreds like them packed into hat-box sized wire cages that we didn’t take away, and the nine billion (or is it nineteen billion? Ninety billion?) of their kind that we slaughter every year.

There aren’t many meals on a chicken. There are a lot more on a cow. It is much better to kill the occasional cow and share it around, rather than making continual hecatombs of chickens. I strongly suspect that there is not a lot of difference between what it is like to be a cow and what it is like to be a chicken: both can obviously feel pain, be happy or miserable, and have individual personalities.

Better yet, I thought as I was driving home with my cardboard box full of chickens, we should eat whales. There are many more meals on a whale than there are on a cow. Thousands and thousands and thousands of chickens worth. Sure, they are particularly sensitive and intelligent animals. But we wouldn’t bat an eyelid at letting a particularly sensitive and intelligent human die to save the lives of tens of thousands of epsilon semi-morons. At least, I hope we wouldn’t. Chickens have feelings too. Chickens can suffer. I think if you added up all the suffering and lost potential of the thousands of chickens you’d need to balance one whale, even if they are much dumber and less sensitive than the one whale, it could hardly be a contest. Besides, whales are the ultimate free-range animals. Up until the moment they catch and explosive harpoon in the guts, they live free in the open ocean, pursuing their mysterious cetacean social goals. They aren’t shut up in hatbox-sized cages or debeaked or nothing.

I’ve always been anti-whaling, and I still am, viscerally and sentimentally, but really, I don’t think we have a leg to stand on. We have frivolously and sentimentally promoted a few animals, like dolphins and dogs, to honorary human status, and expecting other cultures to do the same is the worst kind of cultural imperialism. We get understandably upset when them accursed foreigners complain about us eating those cute wittle-icky kangaroos. How can we complain about the cruelty of whaling when we subject innumerable other animals to miserable lives before knocking them off and devouring their corpses? As another wise man once said, first remove the stick from your eye, then go about removing the speck from the other guy’s eye.
When we embrace vegetarianism- which will, by the way, do more to curb global warming than closing down every coal-fired power station in the country*- we can go about pontificating to the Japanese about whaling. But until then? Much better to eat the gigantic happy animals, instead of the itty-bitty miserable ones.

* Statistic just made up by me. But almost certainly true. Research pending…

20/20 Targets

I caught the end of a discussion on the radio the other day about '20/20' targets.

Should Australia commit to a 15% reduction? 20%? 25%?

Now, some may call me fanatic, but I think this kind of response to a serious global crisis is nothing short of pathetic.

I call upon the Federal government to commit to a 100% reduction in this pernicious form of limited-overs 'cricket'.