WITHOUT ATTACHMENT

i have recently been tasked with considering the present without attachment to a future, a stance that is perhaps closer to reality than most people understand, and have found it manageable. i now have left only the much more arduous task of separating the present from the past. in that task i am failing utterly.

UNDERSTANDING DESPERATE ACTIONS

there is a genetic component to tribalism but i think it is indirect — more it seems to be a precursor to a strong group identity that makes young people susceptible to influence in their earliest years. this varies between individuals in every group and the strength of a group identity that overwhelms the individual identity varies also between groups. this is largely dependent on how existential the threat to that group is perceived by its members. if you were growing up white in america in the fifties (as i was) there was no real perceived threat to the identity of your group, since it clearly dominated the surrounding culture. very little pressure was exerted on me to extract an adherence to loyalty to my group — in fact, when i became critical of it quite early on i was treated as a serious young critic and not condemned out of hand, though i think my thoughts along those lines would have continued unabated in any case and might have become more vehement the more external pressure was applied to me to conform to popular views. that was my nature.

this is not the case when a child is not a member of the dominant culture. the perceptions of the individual, family and group of a minority are quite different. that is why there is an inevitable link between the actions of the dominant group and the reactions of the minority. in these days of superpower almost all groups that are excluded will feel an existential threat and coalesce into enemy. the problem of america (or britain, or germany, or any other dominating power throughout history) will always be the same — in the desire to dominate and control others, whether you believe (like the above plus the french and other colonizing imperialists) that it is for the betterment of all and that the lives of all will be improved, or just that somehow you are exceptional (america's current gambit) and deserve to use others for whatever improves your own circumstances, the net result is the same — you will create enemies and enemies will resist you. and enemies under siege will become more extreme as individuals within perceive the threat to their group to be unequal and existential. the middle-eastern states, which were created largely without regard to tribal identities, are and always have been an unuseful construction, territories divvied up by the conquerers to suit their pleasure and their cat, and the present continued involvement by the same offending western nations will never resolve anything and may prove in the end to threaten the entire globe, or what of it is left inhabitable after we are finished degrading much of it for life in human form.

WILD AND FREE

the problem with being wild and free — one of mr thoreau's most famous lines and one i (qualifiedly) love and understand his meaning for — was the same problem for mr thoreau that the libertarians have; they never talk about competing freedoms. in mr thoreau's life he courted one woman ardently, but in the end, unsuccessfully. he wanted nothing more than to share his life with her, wildly and freely. she apparently wanted nothing of the kind. so yes, he felt free to court her, but no, he was not free to love her wildly and freely, and even loving her for the rest of his life — which he probably did — was not the thing he was after and may even have been worse for him than never having loved her at all. she, on the other hand, wanted a life without his love and she got it.

freedoms always compete. in the end, very often that equates with one person having a particular freedom at the expense of another's. we do not act. we interact. we take our chances. and we are sometimes barred from exercising the most poignant freedom there is, the freedom to love another, to share love with another, wildly and freely.

I AM NOT A GROUP

i am not a group. you are not a group. we are persons. individuals. responsible individuals, responsible for our actions, to ourselves and others of our kind, and every kind. i refuse to identify with any group smaller than mankind, even smaller than all life. we don't know what life is but we know it is us and it is important. it matters what we do. it matters what we think, how we view ourselves and how we view others. the only infidelity is to believe it doesn't matter. as a kind, quiet, intelligent friend once said to me, we cannot always control our emotional reactions to things but we can take responsibility for our actions in response to those feelings.

those who commit acts of violence against people viewed merely as others, strangers, symbols, an enemy, are criminals — individual criminals — and it matters not if they wear a uniform or any other symbol of belonging or identifying with a subgroup of humanity. they should be tried individually for their crimes. punishment of any self-identified group as a whole for what amount to individual crimes of some of its members, whether the group as a whole or even to a person approves those actions, is a philosophical, moral and practical error. if the surviving saudis who bombed the trade towers had been tried as criminals instead of triggering a warlike response from the US, if the people who aided and funded the criminals had been also tried as criminals in an international civil court, and no invasion or occupation, military or otherwise, had been carried out in the name of vengeance, the world, and paris in particular, would likely be a different place today.

WHAT DO WE HONOR?

why would i honor any aspect of the military, with its attendant nationalism and fear of others? organizing human society around elements of intimidation destruction and murder, the father the son and the holy ghost of believers, is unsafe at every level, from the individual to the planet itself. until we can find a path to more cooperative and generous principles of organization, earth, or at least its biosphere, will remain in constant jeopardy.

DISPOSABLE ART

underlying every work of art is the original intent that stimulated the production of the work. in ABOUT ALEX the intent of the filmmaker was to make an appealing film for young adults. this intention permeates every decision made along the way to completion, from the storyline, the number of characters, their personalities, the dialogue, the arc, and on to the conclusion; the work is inseparable from its generating concept. in THE TRAIN the underlying intent of the writer was to express to an audience the impact and meaning, in both emotional and intellectual terms, of the death of a parent. the desire to share a powerful, affecting experience with others permeated every decision made along the way to completion. no consideration was given to the effect decisions about the work would have on its audience, or whom that audience might be. the primary, indeed the only concern, was to communicate as effectively as possible a profound experience. it was left to future audiences to decide if the work is appealing. for the writer, it was enough to know it had succeeded on its own terms and satisfied its creator.

the likelihood of something genuinely original being created by the process of the first intention is more problematic and seldom leads to anything more than disposable art.

ORIGINAL MAYBE SOMEDAY

i don't understand the casual enslavement of other species. it seems to me an unnecessary cruelty. and there is enough inescapable cruelty in the world that it is hard for me to imagine why people so thoughtlessly add to their burden and the burden of the ethos of life on earth by indulging in it. i have lived three-quarters of my lengthening life on vegetable foods and non-leather attire and am healthy and fit.

the only kind of enslavement i understand is perhaps the kind participated in by pets; dogs, cats, even horses i understand. still i used to root for the horse to pitch me off and escape to freedom. though i treated them well and cared for them, in me they would have found a silent ally. even the goats i once kept for dairy products and were quite pampered i quietly approved when they found some little flaw in their imprisonment and escaped to the freedom of the woods (though i always chased them down and brought them back). but to kill their male babies, throwing them on the table and holding them down for the throat to be slit, though i am not squeamish, struck me as a pretty primitive barbarity. i learned from hunting to shoot, gut, skin and butcher animals, and from my little fishboat i brained a lot of fish, but it never fooled me into thinking it was necessary or less than cruel. and so i stopped.

the more i have lived with wild creatures and the more i have studied life, especially molecular genetics, the more i understand that we are all really essentially the same, living the same story. we just have different capacities. i can't outrun a horse and he, most times, cannot outthink me. but as far as the emotional life, the things we are genetically programmed to care about, like offspring, safety, food security, comrades, lovers — snails embrace. fish get excited. insects get angry. and ravens share. animals care for each other, not just their offspring, they look out for each other, they signal danger to the group, they cooperate, they learn. they think.

maybe someday we will all be a little more original and a little easier on the planet and the critters we share it with.

MY (SELF-SELECTED) JOB

for me the most important thing to do is to translate life into language and leave it around where you can find it.

GREECE AND THE FUTURE

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/coupland-greece-and-the-curse-of-leisure

hi marg
ya enjoyed it too, liked how long it was. unfortunately, by the end of it he had said enough contradictory things to amount to not saying much. and even a casual glance reveals a lot of sentences that just aren't true. there is a one-percent in greece. there are blue-collar workers, lots of them, and there are an educated managerial/professional class that live differently than the workers or the one-percenters. there are academics and students, lots of them too, there are fishermen, farmers with very small farms who work hard, alot of it hand labor, and yes, a prominent large crowd of civil servants with too-good too-early pensions compared to everyone else (including apparently german bankers) who seem to be a drag on the economy. but there are worse problems. think of the drag in the US on the economy (in the form of taxpayers) from the huge costs of the military and its adventures in search of secure oilfields and economic world dominance, with no actual return you can point to except alot of defense jobs paid for by the taxpayers, which adventures also cost the rest of the world alot of money each year. or the cost and human waste of their prison system of mass incarceration (again, at the expense of the taxpayers).

i am a practitioner of enjoying nothing to do and have always practiced alot. i value an undirected walk, an unplanned day and time to think and do whatever it occurs to me at the time i suddenly feeling like doing (like writing to you). so does mr. coupland. and he has made his own employment basically out of nothing anyone else wanted him to do, which i heartily approve. just like he talks about the greeks doing.

but i don't think the greeks here that i know are any better at that than any other north american. and most americans promised a good pension at an early age for doing a basically pretty slack job, whether growing up in greece or here, would probably leap at it. in the end, the greeks are just humans like all the others, influenced by the place they grow up in and conditions there, which for greece were pretty benign in terms of being protected from invasion and fed from the sea (and land) and housed in some pretty spectacular scenery. not like germany, which is not a hedonistic paradise by any stretch, and has a history of invasion and conflict stretching back a millenium, embedded as it is in a land mass of many small competing countries all pushing the edge of technology ever upward. and it is the german and british and french and US banks that encouraged greece to spend borrowed money both as consumers and as a nation, because they had idle capital wanting to make a return and they got good interest rates for lending to the greeks and also exported to them some of their production that the greeks then bought with the borrowed money. (i've got an old blog about that i will try to find.)

in the end, the european banks are going to have to eat alot of greek debt (which contains no calories) because they can afford it and greece can't and greece will still be in the euro zone and will still be a hedonistic paradise. and part of them will still secretly wish they were greek.

well, that turned out to be a bit of a rant. ;-)
cheers
h

hi encora

just doing lunch dishes and realized that both mr coupland and i missed what i consider the main point to take from the present ongoing euro quarrels, namely that prior to the post-world war two era there might easily have been an invasion or even a war over this much debt. the real news to take away from the whole dragged-out saga is that they are still sitting around a table talking (or not talking) and nobody's babies will be dead in the street, even though germany has all the arms and all the economic muscle. and that is huge. and that speaks more to the future of human life on earth than anybody's currency or debt decisions, whatever they decide. because as europe goes so goes america, china, russia and even the middle east (eventually) though they all would vehemently deny it.

happy face ;-)

SKEPTICISM NOT CYNICISM

certain activities the human indulges in are definitely beyond the pay-grade, like elaborate edifices built on a foundation of not having a clue what death is, or what life is either, within that tangled mess of neurons and associated electrons we are herding around the planet, beyond the realization that life is physical, death is physical and even human thought is physical. maybe it's good practice for something, though i am not sure what, unless it is learning to convince others, while we ourselves remain profoundly unconvinced, of things that advantage us at the expense of those others.

NIGHTHAWKS

the sound of the fireworks surrounds me from all the american islands this fourth of july night 2015, but honestly, it's the sound of the nighthawk behind me that thrills me and warms me. i have waited for them through some silent years and to hear them every night now so abundant is like the resumption of a song one had forgotten was being sung in its too-long pause.

TO YOU

to marg
on sunday i thought i detected a note of criticism or at least surprise when i was talking about my physical health, your words and body language indicating to me you think it is an obsession or a bit neurotic, something quaint and somehow a deviation from common sense or at least the norm. so i want to talk a bit about that in a more organized way, on paper.

life is physical, human life no less than any other expression of life. death is physical too. your moods are physical, involving chemical outputs triggered by other chemicals triggered by events both external and internal that activate gene expression to influence mental as well as physical activity in addition to your feelings, which are thoughts. those thoughts are physical too. they involve electrons in a brain architecture of neural circuitry embedded in a sensing physical body and all their inputs come through that body's sense organs. all life is embedded in a cosmos that is also physical. there is nothing else. as fine as you can cut it, everything is physical all the way down. we are an animal of earth. we have developed uniquely complex neocortical oversight of brain function which has made us what i would call the thoughtful animal. but all animals have thoughts, all animals remember, all animals modify their behavior over time based on experience (otherwise why even have a memory). we are not unique in kind but only by degree.

if you want to have the best life you personally can have (which will not be identical to others for many inherent reasons) it pays most dividends to attend not to your thoughts, which follow, not to your moods, which follow, not even to your ideas, like the ideas i am proposing here, which also follow as an expression of your physical wellbeing. the first requirement of a human who wants to have useful thoughts and feel happy in mood is to be physically fit, strong, with good oxygenation and endurance. i have read a lot of misguided philosophy and a bit of very misguided religion and have found all of it, with the possible exception of george lakoff, to be more or less spastic groping in the dark morass of unsystematic minds. it seems for some reason rather bleak to most people to think of life as "merely" physical. oh, they of little courage! what would they rather it be? the dreams of a wicked god, whatever that is (probably a bit of undigested spinach).

i am having the best life i can muster by paying attention to the one thing i can control in this vast unplanned cosmic manifestation that is self-aware life. i am taking care of my body and it is going to last a lot longer than some others, because death too is entirely physical. even if you don't believe any of this, that would still not be an argument for letting your body decline below its potential for want of simple focus and an uncluttered understanding. most people are victims of themselves, their own worst enemies. i am trying not to be that. and here you can laugh: i think that makes me, even though unusual, the normal one. ;-)

  

PEOPLE AND STUFF

at bottom, capitalist democracy favors stuff over people, social democracy favors people over stuff. dress them up all you like but when you take their clothes off they will still look different.

FINDING LINKS

there is empiriical evidence for the concepts of justice, fairness and individual rights in other species, and for the presence of active empathy. we need to find the genetic links to these traits, to provide clear evidence to the doubters among us that in this as in so much else, we are not unique on this planet, that these behaviors are inherent animal properties that precede philosophy, religion and even homo sapiens.

the most active and useful part of our culture worldwide remains the search for evidence of the truth; and that is what science does.