ROSS LOCKRIDGE/ALBERT CAMUS

i think camus and lockridge were living in very different places with both a different recent history and a different long history. as a young man camus was influenced by the dadaist movement, nihilism and the theater of the absurd after the devastation of world war one, with its utter failure both of the social order and of its intellectual and moral structures, and lockridge, who was living isolated from most of its effects in middle america (an america which had always been and remained quite self-referential), was not. (america lost some men in 1916-18 but it was considered europe's problem and it was europe that was laid waste.) the literary and intellectual influence in america was still rooted in the transcendentalism of the nineteenth century, in emerson, thoreau and especially whitman. lockridge himself seems to have been an extremely confident unstoppable force of nature, with whitman as his model and, though more conventional than whitman, accepted most of the permissions that whitman had conferred upon himself.

in terms of personality lockridge was unashamedly grandiose and considered himself the appropriate archetype of the great american drama. camus was a skeptical intellectual who did not believe in heroes at all, at least in the beginning. that changed  somewhat with The Plague, when he began to believe it made a difference what people did and did abandon the nihilism of his earlier work in favor of what has been termed by others, existentialism. but his approach to ideas and human behavior remained skeptical and critical.

if camus had been an american writer he might have been ignored but in france with its (sometimes problematic) intellectual tradition, his singular, original work found immediate favor with the intelligentsia which mediated french culture, unlike america where commercial interests and positivism dominated cultural expression from the beginning. 

though whitman had been an outsider most of his life, by its end he was revered somewhat in america (more in europe). lockridge seems to have wanted to be both as famous as whitman but in addition, to be successful in commercial terms as well.

so, though contemporary, these are very different men in terms of life experience and personality. camus grew up dirt poor in algiers and achieved surprising results early on because he was singled out in school as very bright and given access to privilege he never would have been granted by his humble birth, either in algeria or france. lockridge had no such deficits to overcome, early on or later in his brief life. he was kept out of the second war by health concerns and continued uninterrupted by its effects on the country in his singular literary ambition.

when it comes to Raintree County and The Plague, the differences in personality, in focus, philosophy (if lockridge can be said to have had any coherent philosophy) are stark. camus' work is philosophical, intellectual, abstract, cool and skeptical. lockridge's work is hot, emotional, unquestioning, accepting and much more stereotypical. he describes characters grandly, visually, as though the look and speech of them told all, but there are elements of stereotype, albeit very colorful stereotypes. camus' characters are unique, their identities are in their depth not on their skin, and they represent philosophical ideas and conflicting world views; one is hard pressed to find stereotypical types in the piece. 

though they are both good examples of their literary type, born of the same time, of the same western world and world view, these two works could not be more different in their purpose, construction, meaning, or as an experience for the reader. they both seem to me to contain much, and much that rewards the reader. in particular, lockridge and his opus i find slightly easier to admire for at least the scope of his ambition, than i did as a young man — camus i have always admired.

PURPOSE — A STRANGE WORD

why would nature want to convert grass into goat? 
what purpose is there in that? 
what purpose is there in me asking? 

i tell you, purpose has nothing to do with any of it. 
there is no nature with a purpose
there is no plan

there is just everything.

ONE OF THEM, YES

they wanting to see themselves as others see them
or, 
more
wanting others to see them as they see themselves.
yes that one 
that last one 
will be the 
sadder
one.

SOMETHING

we have the same issue with the conception of cosmos that we have conceiving life; they are both structured in time, they have a history, and the human mind is incapable of really understanding nothingness and timelessness, though we have invented zero. we cannot truthfully understand nonexistence at any scale. the meaning of our own death may be only too clear to us, as may be the various imagined ends of our universe, but to imagine no life and no cosmos at all — nothing at all — we have no language for that. nothingness is only relative, death is only relative. language is something and nothing cannot be contained in something. we are left with absence, another comparative. lack implies something missing. something is something the human mind cannot escape.

CAPITALISM UNDEMONIZED

capitalism could be saved. it's important not to demonize this method of production because of excesses of greed and hubris and sociopathic behavior, especially in the financial and energy sectors. the real freedom it brought to enterprise has been valuable and it has proved to be a more successful way of organizing production of material goods and services than the centrally planned economic model, which in comparison allowed even more corruption among the powerful.

the problem is that it bears watching, and regulating, when excesses emerge. the role of production and its ownership vs. state control of enterprise that has emerged in europe, especially since the second world war, and has come to be accepted there, is a better indicator of the way to salvage the good and eliminate the bad in so-called democracies around the world than the british and especially the american model. the key is to remove corporate influence from government and prevent it weaseling its way back in. the most important control needed to save the idea and ideals of democracy is to get money and influence, especially but not only corporate money, out of politics altogether and make elected representatives represent another constituency — the citizens of the state. at its core value, so-called capitalist democracy gives power to money, social democracy gives it to people. for this, the people need to be educated into thoughtful citizenhood.

and then — long live the people.

TIME'S ARROW

chaos (implied order) > cosmos > chaos (dispersal)

where one ends (or fades away) is not the same as where one begins. time does have an arrow, but this does not imply that a clock is not always starting somewhere in the physical universe(s).

REASON

our deepest motivations are not reasonable. reason is merely a tool we employ to accomplish what is innately needed. 

BRIDGE

a human is a bridge. by the things he can't let go and the things he adopts, he links the past to the future. 

MURDERERS

i live in a world full of murderers: murderous governments, murderous armed forces, murderous law enforcement agencies, murderous religious fanatics, murderous gangs of criminals, murderous youth gangs, murderous individuals, murderous psychotics, even murderous workplaces, highways, bars, nightclubs. 

sometimes i wonder if there is something wrong with me, that it offends me so. 

behind each murderer is an investor who profits from the crime. there is some general agreement among most public societies that the taking of a life is wrong. what about profiting from murder? about the killing business? about the accretion of wealth and power through supporting murder? is there general agreement about that? or is it considered just another economic activity, a legitimate countable positive addition to the GDP?

sometimes i wonder if there is something wrong with me, that this also offends me so, that people, individual people, allow themselves to profit in this way.

REAL AND NOT REAL

whether a book is fiction or nonfiction is not interesting. what is useful to know is whether the book attempts to get at something real — YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN; CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY; A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN; THE PLAGUE; THE PICKUP — or whether it is not real — HARRY POTTER; STAR WARS; ALL THE LIGHT YOU CANNOT SEE, and many many others. that is what should be categorized and clearly labeled for the reading public, not because real is inherently better — many people gain much from fantasy and other suspensions of reality, much more than i do — but because it is a more useful distinction to make in identifying a work for a potential reader. it is the underlying, original intention of the author from which every aspect and experience of the book in the mind of the reader will derive.

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.

WHERE DOES GOD COME FROM?

you can't find the reasons why people believe in god by looking out at the cosmos because they are not out there. if you want to know why people persist in believing in a god or gods you must look inward to the study of human personality because in there is where the reasons can be found. look at personality genetics and the evolution of life on earth, the history of life and man, if you really want to know.

WRITING LIKE CEZANNE

people have fear. 
animals. 
people are animals. 
animals have fear. 
insects. 
insects are animals. 
fish are animals. 
all animals. 
all animals fear.

BREADTH

i love the night
i love the stars
they aren't just wallpaper

MONEY IS SPEECH VS SPEECH IS MONEY

i took my speech into the walmart the other day to buy some stuff but they wouldnt sell me any. no matter how much i tried to explain to them about the Supreme Court, the final arbiter in the land, and about how their decisions were binding on all the citizens of the country, they just wouldn't listen to reason.

amazing that a bunch of ten dollar employees could think they know better than the highest authority the law allows. talk about the emperor's new clothes — how is he going to talk his way into a new suit in this kind of place? 

maybe somebody ought to mention to the court how thin the robes have got lately.

FISH IN A BARREL

what do you think of a government that shoots fish in a barrel?

what do you think of israel?

PLAIN SPEECH PLAIN TRUTH

i was approached on the ferry going home recently by a petitioner with a document to sign. it was protesting the move by the government to allow pipelines across canada from the tar sands in alberta to the west coast, then in tankers down the coast to american refineries. i said i agreed that was not in our interests and would sign it but that it was futile, a pathetic effort really compared to the forces arrayed against it in favor of the pipelines and tankers. what i wanted to sign, might even be willing to work for, was a move to get the money out of politics. money is not speech. that is only one of a growing list of grievous  errors made by the worst supreme court in american history, a court which also reinforces another grievous error committed in the early days of the twentieth century, by affirming that corporations are people, with all the rights of individual citizens. corporations are not people, not individuals, not citizens. there are more examples in america of the emperor's new clothes than i care to enumerate. 

what ever happened to simple honesty and plain speech? gun-owning americans are not militias, corporations are not persons and money is not speech. get it?

PEACE WITHOUT JUSTICE

there is a great deal of talk lately about peace in israel — actually i have been hearing more or less constantly all my adult life about efforts to bring peace in the region — but still there is no serious talk of justice. 

peace can never be the object of negotiations. that is impossible to attack as a first principle. there is only one route to peace and that is through finding just solutions, blind, disinterested, egalitarian solutions to problems between (self-identified) factions of the population. as long as individual human beings continue to see themselves as different and more deserving of the considerations of life than so-called enemies there is no prospect for justice. 

and no matter what rules to promote order may be imposed on the parties by intimidation, destruction and murder, no matter what historical rationale is advanced, the prospect of peace without justice will remain forever beyond the grasp of all. 

the old end justifies the means argument rests on the assumption that neither one is fictional. in reality the ends never arrive, but are always just one more action away, retreating apace as the troops advance, like the mirage they are, while the means, everpresent and ruefully if not brutally real, are the reality we all endure.

ONE WORLD

found in my desk drawer

chernobyl blew half a world away and they told us 
not to drink the rainwater.
now the wheatgrass and wildflowers are trembling in the breeze
looking nervous
and i wonder how we're going to tell them
not to drink the rainwater.

GOD IS GREED

in north america you vote with your wallet. every time you buy something you increase the demand for it and that yanks the supply chain and more of it gets produced. that is why in the early days of organic food, when they looked invariably like the worst produce for the highest price, i kept stubbornly buying them, one because i felt they were better for me, cosmetics aside, but also for an important second reason, that if i and others did not buy them they would never become more available and of better quality. this is why there is so much oil production in the world, because so many of us buy so much of it. that part of the democratic process i understand and approve (with reservations).

the part i disapprove unqualifiedly is how corporations and wealthy elites have continued another way to vote with their wallets. they buy political influence (notice i politely refrain from saying they buy politicians) and that method of asserting dominance over the majority of society has been reinforced by the worst supreme court majority in memory.

it is past time to get the money out of politics. there will be no improvement for the US or Canada or Mexico in anything, whether it is a fight over pipelines or oil  and gas drilling or keeping large standing armies to defend oil fields and  pipeline routes, which cost a fortune every year, and yes, use a lot of oil, or  over the fight against global warming and the keeping on earth anywhere of nuclear weapons, or the obscene amounts of energy the industrialized world is consuming, over drug wars and stupid private prison systems who refer to inmates as clients, and on and on. all these problems can be traced back to money and the obscene influence it exerts over both public and private decisionmaking. 

the god in america is not in its churches, excepting some private meetings, it is in the board rooms and back rooms — the god is greed.

THE ME I AM

there is something that is me, that stands aside from the tugging and pulling of events and surroundings, the core identity that would have been recognizably me no matter where i were growing up and living my life and no matter who were the significant persons that surrounded me during my days. that is the inherent me. 

even if that me can be modified by events and anecdotal accidents of a lifetime, so that many changes in my behavior and outlook can be traced to influences outside myself, those are still accidents —unplanned and unsought random incursions which were beyond my control and would have been reacted to by me in the unique way my genetically coded personality views the world beyond the self. the anecdotal story that is my life might have been quite different, given a different time or place, but the me that was there, alive and responding every day, would have been the me that was coded in my genes, the me i am.

MINIMUM STANDARDS

there is much talk lately about the Obama administration's efforts to raise minimum wage rates in the US. it takes about a minute to come up with a table of minima for the last 60 years in constant dollars and what it reveals is interesting. the highest level obtained in the US was in 1968 — since then there has been a decline over the decades up to the present (2013 in this case being the last year listed) which is listed at $4.87 in constant dollars ($7.25 in current dollars). in order to just equal the minimum rates enjoyed by the largely middle class workforce of the sixties the rate today in present dollars would have to rise to about $15 just to get even with our less divided and divisive past. states like connecticut offering to raise the rate (gradually over three years) to $10.10 dont seem to shine so bright beside the facts. 

related statistically and morally to this is the fact that since the meltdown in 2008 the US has lost fourteen places in the human development index, when disparity of income is factored in.

what is the matter with governance, politics and the level of information appreciated by the voting public that such a moral and practical decline can go unnoticed by not just the public but the public's common media informants?

EMPATHIES

i thought of something driving down the hill this morning. i think there are two kinds of emotional response to other people's troubles that loosely may be termed empathy:
the first is when you see someone in emotional or physical distress and it stimulates mirror neurons to elicit an emotional response in you. you feel the person's pain and want to help in any way you can to alleviate their distress — it is all about them.
the second is when you see someone in distress and that distresses you and your response is about trying to relieve the pain you are feeling in yourself — it is all about you. 
that second version, to me, seems like a kind of false empathy which makes you unavailable to focus your attention in a way that is useful in helping the other person. your own emotions are overwhelming you and though you buy in to whatever is happening (which may not always be useful if you are a parent) you remain the primary subject of your attention.

HEAT FROM GEORGE MONBIOT

HEAT FROM GEORGE MONBIOT
reprinted from 2007

I have just this moment finished reading HEAT and though it is laudable and well worth reading it does make certain assumptions and overlooks important elephants lurking in important corners. I think it might be useful to review Mr. Monbiot’s ideas from a more North American vantage, even a Saturna Island vantage, if you like, though I hope the following comments will not discourage interested readers from pursuing a subject increasingly vital to us all, wherever we live.

Assumption One: People will abandon their cars.

This may possibly wash in England where Mr. Monbiot is situated and from whose inhabitants’ habits he mines his comments, though I doubt it, but it will never wash in North America, probably not even in cities. The place is just too big, too sparse in humanity even considering the east and west coast corridors, and too rich. He could more properly have devoted his time (and mine) to realistic proposals to limit the size and especially the power of private automobiles. No properly designed and lightened automobile of any size needs more than ninety horsepower from whatever source to power it at legal speed limits up hill and down. Smaller four passenger vehicles need about 60 horsepower and could actually get along on less. If you are driving anything with more power than that you are the problem. These cars are already out there. The (original) Honda Insight has 60 horsepower, the Prius (gas portion) has 75. They are both a hoot to drive. And anyway, it will soon be that or nothing, which makes cars of this power not only the best choice but the only choice. Also, things are happening faster with batteries for all-electric vehicles, much faster, than with fuel cells or hydrogen (a joke). The new lithium manganese batteries are not explosive and are quite light and there are other lithium experiments such as lithium iron phosphate. All-electric is coming.

Assumption Two: Houses don’t have to get smaller.

What ever happened to ‘Think small’ or ‘Small is beautiful’, the reaction to the first serious oil shortages? Mr. Monbiot, who lives in a typical leaky old English house (built when energy was abundant and cheap) with one spouse and one infant daughter, never once mentions the idea that perhaps people don’t need all those thousands of square feet of indoor space. As Warburton Pike was fond of saying, on Saturna you could live under a tree. Go outside, for god’s sake. If you’re not cooking or doing deskwork or washing yourself or watching and reading at night, put a coat on and go do something in nature’s refreshing seasonally heated and cooled environment. And while we are on the subject, buy stock in Stanfield’s. Longjohns would be practical all winter, even on the mild west coast, if people didn’t overheat public buildings so outrageously. Well, at least you don’t have to do that at home. Try 60° F or even less. Many mornings, even in winter, I don’t bother to light a fire (though my woods absorbs more carbon dioxide than a fire would spew into the environment anyway— perhaps I should be selling carbon credits, the new papal dispensation, as Monbiot points out). Of course, I have an electric heater on my north wall which takes the chill off whenever the wind blows long enough to fully charge my batteries. In fact, I’ve even seen the sun do it on a long bright day with only two 64 watt panels. But then again, the cabin is 400 square feet in total, upstairs and down (which is more than roomy enough for one or even two) and I am not a heavy power feeder at the trough. Which brings us to

Assumption Three: People need this much energy.

This is a big elephant in another of Mr. Monbiot’s overlooked corners. He doesn’t really address the fact that radical reduction (he believes it must be 90 per cent) in carbon use can only be achieved by reducing our energy consumption by nearly that same amount. Too much attention is given throughout the book to minor ways to produce energy more efficiently and cleanly without hammering home the point that the amount of energy we use is obscenely more than what is strictly necessary and we could stop it tomorrow without breakthrough technologies. We are all about to find that out; I used to think it would be my grandchildren but now imagine it is my kids or even (gasp) myself!
When we on the hilltop decided to produce our own power, the first fact we had to digest was that certain things just cannot be done. Clothes dryers, electric cooking stoves, room heat, ordinary bulbs, are all taboo. Get used to it: Some things just cannot be done at all. Run a clothesline (rigged inside in winter). At the same time, Mr. Monbiot dismisses both solar and wind as micro-generating sources of local power. He knows not of what he speaks. That’s all we have on the hill and it is more than enough to have a comfortable, carbon-free domicile, as I would be pleased to demonstrate if he would get his head out of the tables graphs and data collected by others and go find out from the people who actually do it. Which leads me to

Assumption Four: People will not fly more slowly.

Once again, he has got his facts wrong. Mr. Monbiot compares jets to airliners of the pre-jet era. Propellors are good in modern form to about 400 knots and consume a fraction of the fuel of jet airliners commonly flying about 500 knots. The air at 25,00 feet is about as good from the perspective of weather avoidance as at 35-40,000 feet and requires less power to climb to. And a straight line (or great circle route) is still the same length. When faced with the choice of not travelling at all or travelling at four-fifths the speed, which would you take? As for small planes, for which I admit to having a fondness, modern streamlined composite aircraft offer the potential of 30 to 40 miles per gallon and the miles are typically one-and-a-half times greater over the ground than point to point. This equates to 58 mpg in US gallons (Dynamic WT9, for example) at 150 mph, although older aircraft (like mine) don’t do nearly that well, I admit in the interest of full disclosure.

So in spite of a commendable intent and a fine sense of urgency, poor assumptions combined with incomplete information and really no practical experience in alternative power in the life of the author have rendered the book and all its effort problematic as a guide to the near future. But I have saved the worst for last.

Assumption Five: You must join a group (or groups).

What about just closing the door on rooms you’re not using, turning down the heat, turning off the lights, wearing longjohns in winter, buying LED or, at least, compact flourescent bulbs, that clothesline? What about fixing up your old bike or getting better footwear? Going to town when there is more than one thing needing doing there, and a myriad of things you could actually do, instead of joining committees and going to meetings in heated buildings (probably in your car). Mr. Monbiot has in fact done some of these things, like bulbs and bicycles, in his own life. But in the last chapter, under Things We Can Do, he just appends a list of organisations. Is that it? Is that the sum total of his collected wisdom? That’s not action, that’s more talk.
Consumption is up to us— not collectively, either. There’s nothing to wait for. It starts now. As for the real things— small houses, small cars, less and slower travel— when they come be ready, it won’t hurt more than a bit. You might even find sailing, hiking and other non-invasive pastimes are actually fun and the reduced guilt will surprise you. The alternative, as Monbiot did clearly get right, is total destruction.

Copyright Hank Schachte all rights reserved 2007

SADNESS AND HAPPINESS

sadness is a global property of mind. it is relativistic. happiness is a singular and atomistic experience. it needs neither a past nor a future to be experienced, neither an expectation nor a memory. it is not burdened by time.

JUSTICE

Justice is the only goal worthy of a human, a nation or a world - disinterested, egalitarian, reciprocal justice.

HOW WILL HUMANS ORGANIZE THEMSELVES IN THE FUTURE?

I have started thinking. there is a lot to think about and read and it is interesting to pursue. 
i can tell you for starters, to start somewhere relatively easy, what they won't be doing: they won't be organizing in corporations, they won't be organizing in armies they won't be organizing along strongly nationalistic lines and they won't be organizing in competing religions. the hard part is envisioning how each of these damaged organizing principles will be either replaced or finally agreed to be considered not necessary in any form. 

AN INNOCENT ABROAD

hiking the ridge among the grasses, sky, birds and animals without a trace of another human presence, I can imagine we are anything i wish, so i imagine us driven fundamentally by concepts of reciprocal justice, something beautiful enough to be worthy of the natural beauty that surrounds me.

EXCERPT FROM WHAT THE MAN IS

by Hank Schachte

To possess another human being.  To be zealous, jealous, in thrall of chemical love, infatuated, passionate — what is that?  Something genetic, an urge, a force of nature to ensure the survival of the species, a package delivered from and by the genes, genes which are nothing but the collected strategies of time.  And it would come to a personal bad end.  It did not serve the individual.  To think of individual life is a philosophical error; in the long run there could never be such a thing; that singular thing exists only briefly, privately, fleetingly, like unstable particles with their rapid decay, rapid like the decay of a life.  To think of chemical love as a form of prejudice and a form of possession, not of the object desired but possession of one’s own will by an independent force — a triumph of species over self.

How delightful she is.  How every part of me enjoys enlisting in the deception.  How I favor her in every way, excuse her transgressions, boast her triumphs, aid her, enable her whenever I can without compromising my own ethics — every thought of her, every belief about her, colored warmly with this overlay of chemical prejudice.  How deeply unfair this necessity called love.

WISDOM, STUPIDITY

this life starts and this life ends. wisdom consists of knowing what is real. stupidity consists of believing your own bullshit — or other people's. it amounts to the same thing.

BIG RED C

okay, listen up guys — i've called this meeting to make some important and very exciting announcements about our company! as you know, we have pretty well dominated the local market here, to the point of saturation, and the books look good! profits are at record levels thanks to your vigorous and unflagging efforts to expand the business into every nook and cranny within delivery distance of our production facility. so we've been doing some planning. bob, here, in new markets, has come up with a whole network of connections that we intend to deploy to cover the entire kingdom — map, please — look at that! we're going everywhere! now what i need from you folks is courage, ambition and absolute belief in the mission. who will be the first to step forward and volunteer to go out and set up these new facilities? we've got the plan, you've got the opportunity. who are the boldest, most dynamic members of my team? who wants to help us make it real? and don't talk to me about risk — there is always risk! look back, remember our early days. how many were defeated? how many gave up? it was tough going. we nearly got wiped out, but a few of us hung on, we dug in our heels and refused to give up. and little by little we prevailed. we won this territory but it was a hard-fought victory, and a lot of us didn't make it. never mind — the thing is, those brave few pioneers paved the way for all the good times we've all enjoyed, all the rewards that follow success.
but wait! there's more! we not only have new network plans, we not only have new corporate branding — did i mention the new logo? — the marketing guys have come up with a whole new name! from now on — now look at this— we are BIG RED C! BIG RED C! don't you love it?! BIG C for commitment, BIG C for control, BIG C for conquest, BIG C for corporation, BIG C for corruption, BIG C for cancer! and don't anybody talk to me about metastasizing, that's a dirty word. we're just doing our job.

INJUSTICE

what animated Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr and many other leaders of social movements around the world in recent times also animated many fine writers of the period, including Albert Camus, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau and others. it was injustice and it is still the main problem humanity has failed to address.

achieving social justice is the only conceivable path to peace within and between nations. capitalism, which has produced much material security in the industrialized world and has improved the lives of many people, is unfortunately based on inequality and it is therefore profoundly unjust and antidemocratic at its root. to speak of capitalist democracy is an oxymoron. the only democracy that could conceivably be entitled to the name is social democracy, which puts people ahead of capital at the centre of the state.

this social definition of democracy excludes communism and all other forms of insular centralized rule not answerable to the entire citizenry it seeks to govern. it excludes military action, invasion and threats of invasion, it excludes intimidation, destruction and murder of any people for any reason anywhere on earth, whether motivated by religious fervour or greed or for control of others who may be perceived as threats, or for any purpose whatever.

the use of intimidation, destruction and murder to achieve political ends is the dictionary definition of terrorism. armies, mostly state armies, have done most of the killing of humans on this planet and continue to do so. they are the large-scale terrorists so often ignored in discussions about terrorism and defence against it.

war is an almost uniquely human activity but it does not define us. war is not the reason there are seven billion humans alive today. cooperation, much more than the too-lauded competition that so often leads to conflict, is the real strength of human society. it is cooperation which has permitted human ascendance on the planet and it needs to be broadened to a final inclusiveness that encompasses all people everywhere. we need to permit the United Nations to evolve into a world-scale government of social democracy as a final highest-level force for cohesion and justice on this isolated and insulated little orb of ours.

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

the NPR is mostly about politics, and that turns out to be, sadly, mostly american politics, which is unfortunately important in the present state of the world, but it is not often interesting. also, it ignores a reality that a great many people in the world, perhaps even the majority of people, observe when they look out their windows — the fact that it is peaceful out there. the danger in the media focus is that if we continue to hear only of strife, privation, power and other imbalances we may wind up living out our lives in a kind of make-believe setting that ignores a great part of the real world, the part which would make us more hopeful for our progeny and more willing to work for improvement ourselves. 

we are learning about ourselves, about animal life and all life, about our planet and the cosmos, at an unprecedented rate which like the cosmic expansion is accelerating. the fact that we will have to drag along in our wake the (genetically programmed) reluctant ultra-conservatives among us should not blind us to the speed we have reached in our species-long quest to satisfy our curiosity about everything we see. the work done and being done now deserves to be savoured and saved and built upon, and someday it may finally become an important focus of our public culture. balance would improve us all — including the NPR.

HOW SIMPLE, HOW IGNORANT

i used to think it was kind of lame for people to take meds to solve personality and emotional disorders, until i came to know well some people who really seemed to thrive only after the right meds were discovered for them. i read much about brain architecture and chemistry then, much that was new, really just learned since the advent of fMRI studies and personality genetics, until it finally dawned on me one day that the only reason i had used to think people shouldn't take meds was because i didn't need them. how simple. how ignorant.

i am afraid that the same kind of ignorance is rife in the political debates of today. the right wing types who think it is bad to help people in need are mostly just the types who — for reasons that may not be to their personal credit, but speak more to their situation — misunderstand why they themselves don't need any help, or fail to see how much help they in fact have already been given, and so strive to deny help to those who truly do need it.

sometimes our own experience can provide us very clear insights and sometimes our own experience is misunderstood by us. and when we project that misunderstood experience onto others whose lives we don't really intimately know, the mistakes we make are not useful, and the consequences of our misunderstanding can be tragic.

WHAT PEOPLE DO

not many people would like to be controlled by intimidation, not many people would like to have their possessions and their homes destroyed, not many people would like to be the victims of assault and murder, in fact when we find people who actually wish for these things to happen to themselves we consider them psychotic and try to help them improve their mental condition. why then do we not consider the people who perpetrate these crimes psychotic as well?

much of this modern world is operating on the basis of intimidation, destruction and murder — that is what armies do — and much excusing is done for it in the quest for global domination by the people who wish to dominate others in order to better secure comfort for themselves. in such a world comfort and security are never actually possible for anyone and it never will be possible until people broaden their interest to include comfort and security for all. 

i remember during the Iraq invasion how the Bush regime loudly proclaimed they were bringing freedom to the Iraqi people, but wouldn't the first freedom any society requires be freedom from invasion?

SPENDING WISELY

i listened to a canadian radio program this saturday morning, amazed. it was just listing ad nauseam all the most successful manufacturers and merchandisers of commodity products, sort of like listing the best hockey scores or football bowl winners of all time. i am still surprised that intelligent people i know listen to this program every week. i don't get it. the most successful manufacturers, retailers, advertisers in terms of sales — what do they have to teach me of any value? 

there is important information being generated every day about the cosmos, about life, animal life, human life, about the material universe, what it consists of and how it works, how we work, how best we can solve our very real and critical problems, problems that prevent us from finding justice and peace and security for now and the future, of how best we can prevent the destruction of the ecosystem of earth, including ourselves, and still provide for our needs in an equitable and sustainable way. and yet people find time to learn instead which clever marketers sell the most beer.

there is barely enough time to get on with it, without wasting most of it in useless production and consumption, not only of products, but of ideas. there are only so many thoughts in an hour, hours in a day and days in a life. time is the currency. it is what you are spending every day, and you will run out.      

i had a motto when i was younger — never wake sleeping people. now i think maybe that was wrong — maybe the most important thing one can do in this life is just exactly that — try to wake people from such trivial diversion. 

the final infidelity is to think it doesn't matter what you do.

EPIGENETICS

the whole notion of the powerful effects of epigenetics over genetics in the development of personality is going to be treated unkindly by history. it is promulgated mostly by people who believe they are self-made successes who will go to heaven when they die. 
of course we change our behaviors as we accumulate experience, otherwise why have a memory? but that is very much a second-level effect, and even the ability to change is limited by our genetic inheritance. when you remove the sentimental free-will bias toward life forms that life forms seem to get trapped in it becomes chemistry, and when you look in there it becomes mechanics, and that is no longer a suitable place for hopes and dreams — but it is a great place to learn something.