steelweaver

The Foxden Project Episode 3

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:42:00 +0000

In which Alex and I struggle with Indian culture, the cult of factuality and substandard audio equipment. Forgive the occasional garbling and enjoy our Indian intellectual adventure! Oh, and also I rant about The Hobbit for about 20 minutes…

The Marriage of Sense and Soul

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 15:36:00 +0000

Knowingly or instinctively, we have long lived in our culture with an assumed philosophical distinction between causal (instrumental, utilitarian) arguments for and against things, and what we might call “physiognomic” arguments - moral, aesthetic, or simply intuitive positions that cannot be reduced to a simple causal proposal.

“Sure, torture might get results”, we might find ourselves saying (though it doesn’t), “but it’s morally wrong”; “Yes, putting scores of 600 foot wind turbines on the central boglands of Eire may be a good way to produce energy in a non-polluting fashion” (it isn’t), “but think of the aesthetic cost.”; “Studies may show that returning to traditional schooling and discipline improve children’s future prospects,” (guess what? - they don’t), “but somehow it feels wrong.”

This distinction is problematic, not merely because we now live in an overly causalistic, instrumentalist age, where moral, aesthetic and intuitive arguments are thrust aside in favour of the measurable, the mechanical and the monetary (though we surely do) - but because we have, quite rightly, reacted to the experiences of the last few centuries by realising that a certain distrust of unjustifiable moral, aesthetic or intuitive certainties is appropriate and necessary. The civic stranglehold of Christian moralism, the cold grip of Classicism on the arts, the appeal to irascible tradition in child-rearing and education - all these needed to be, and were, challenged (and to a certain degree defeated).

But, if we look carefully, we see that these are not two qualititatively different registers of perception (or at least not only that) - rather, both forms of perception are made up of the same networks of real-world linkages, but are apprised at different scales and for different ends.

The causal links in the natural world, for example, which were previously seen as relatively free-standing and individually analysable, have undergone an immense interfusion in our understanding, complexifying to the point that zoology, evolutionary biology, even geology and atmospheric science, must all be treated as subsets of an all-encompassing ecology, tracking how each variable affects each other one in a network of confounding inter-causal complexity.

And what the human mind chooses, as the causal linkages weave themselves into ever-denser webs of relation, is to switch pragmatically from detailed understanding of each causal link to an effective heuristics of the overall system - a gauging of the emergent patterns and tendencies of the ecological whole.

This whole-system pattern-recognition (what some of us think we can still get away with calling “right-brain” thinking) is no new thing, of course. The history of this kind of intuitive gestalt-perception is far longer than that of modern scientistic causal reasoning - we see it in the tribal hunter’s “good instincts” for weather changes or fishing grounds; in the emergent social consensus of a nascent civilisation; in the various ‘vitalist’ heresies of early science, where seemingly autonomous forms and patterns were adduced, albeit later giving way to reductionist explanations.

It is what happens, in short, when a system’s complexity is too great for a human mind to perceive all its details at once - and so the mind pushes awareness of those details down into the subconscious, where an invisible calculus renders the equations with often astonishing accuracy.

When this kind of pattern-recognition re-emerged into the sciences (roughly, from the 1970s onwards), those wishing for the excessively “left-brain” bias of our culture to be rectified quite rightly saw a connection between the new scientific paradigms of ecological or emergent thinking and the various other forms of cultural holism and romanticist revival extant at the time. Those seeking to resist the new cultural paradigm found these parallels equally plausible, and invoked the connection for pejorative ends with equal passion.

But this connection did not make those new scientific paradigms less true, less scientific, or less of an advancement over the simplistically linear causalities that preceded them. Rather, it indicated that our inherited idea of “the rational” - and perhaps our antipathy to causal explanations - were themselves deeply biased by cultural tradition; that a more holistic, organic approach need not indicate a lack of substantive relationship with reality; and that returning to an older way of perceiving could be part of a progression to greater understanding, and not merely a regression to an indistinct and comforting somnolence.

Perhaps it is time that the same realisation be extended to the other areas where ‘right-brain’ understanding is still perceived as the backward country cousin of linear causality. In all too many fields, we are still trapped in a binarity between ‘modern, rational, causal’ understanding and the ‘traditional, non-rational, intuitive’ perspective:

Torture is justified by expediency, because reliance on arguments of ‘morality’ is outdated in this relativistic age; wind-farms are put in the most efficient place (for the owners to make money, if not energy) because objections on aesthetic grounds are the stuff of old women trapped in a heritage industry reverie of a long-forgotten past; children must be exposed early to the chill winds of cruelty and coercion, because ‘intuitive’ arguments in favour of compassionate, humane treatment are just another piece of romantic sentimentality.

But this is just another kind of pre-trans fallacy: just because more holistic ideas once had a stronger place in our thinking, and were overtaken by a more linearly causal approach, does not mean that a non-linear understanding might not yet form part of an even more sophisticated and far-reaching analysis - indeed, as I have already suggested, these seemingly non-causal “physiognomic” explanations are actually replete with causality of immense density and complexity.

I would propose that, when most of us say we feel that torture is morally wrong, we are not simply averring that there is some unearthly higher plane on which things can be wrong, no matter how much good they might do here in the real world.

Rather, we intuit that, whilst torture might be shown to do good in some localised, linear way (the oft-invoked “ticking time-bomb” scenario, perhaps), legitimising torture at the state level would have subtle, non-localised ramifications that would spread out through the innumerable strands of the web of causal interlinkages; accustoming our security services to using violence and coercion against people without judicial oversight; encouraging yet more violent states to use the same tactics against politically inconvenient citizens; brutalising our own society through acquiescence in the act, and thus leading eventually to higher instances of rape, assault, murder and all the more subtle abuses and unkindnesses that slowly eat away at the structure of a society’s civility and solidarity.

So too, when we object to a wind-farm on aesthetic grounds, we are not simply saying that physical well-being (the heating of the homes of the vulnerable, for example) should be sacrificed to assure some kind of pleasurable experience to be had from looking at a particular view - a hedonism of the eyeball, justifying the wealthy aesthete to preserve his landscaped playground amidst the wails of shivering waifs. Rather, we believe that our aesthetic love of the unspoilt landscape has some deeper meaning; we intuit that something greater would be lost than mere picturesqueness if the last remnants of wilderness were to be scarred by man-made objects.

And, again, we can pick out some - but, such is their profusion and complexity, never account for all - of the causal linkages that make up this intuition: the proven psychological benefits of natural landscapes; fear that the building of the turbines will act as a beach-head for the invasion of techno-capitalism into previously protected areas; the desire to take a stand against the logic of technological utopianism that is creating so much peril in so many other ways; the value of wilderness as a reminder that anthropocentric thinking is not the only way to perceive.

Whereas the ‘benefit’ of the turbines in the form of electricity is immediate, localised, identifable and measurable, the costs are subtle, unquantifiable, distributed throughout the system. But they remain real costs and, to my mind, to identify these other, more subtle causal links is not to weaken the ‘argument by aesthetics’, nor to boil down the last vestiges of “right-brain thinking” into just more left-brain reductionism; it is to identify the limitation, the narrowness, the inadequacy of linear causal thinking - its inability to ever see the whole picture and thereby to act appropriately for the genuine good of the people and the planet.

Indeed, in the ecological sciences, we can see how, beyond “left-brain” and “right-brain”, beyond linear and non-linear, there is an additional axis indexing the degree to which a mind can incorporate both kinds of thinking - how much awareness of the details of the causal components can be retained whilst simultaneously grokking the gestalt. This kind of amplitudinal awareness, clearly, is what enables an encompassing understanding, allying the power to manipulate component mechanisms with the wisdom to anticipate the whole-system response.

Would this not be, for example, the kind of education we would prefer for children (assuming we are not such arch-unschoolers that we do not feel they need one at all)? A pedagogical set-up able to make use of new understanding and research from neurology or psychology, exercise science or nutrition, but without ever losing sight of the desired whole-system outcomes of capability, wellbeing, wisdom and happiness? Would we not like our children to be placed in the hands of educators who will never sacrifice their intuitive understanding of the fellow human beings in their care in favour of a mechanistic dogma or technique, but who are also eminently capable of challenging and questioning their own internalised habits and beliefs, the moral and aesthetic imprints they have picked up from their own partial, culturally inflected upbringing?

If this is the kind of education we would like - if this is the kind of society we would like! - then perhaps we need to abandon the false dichotomy between inhuman reductionism and sentimental vitalism, and begin to bring the right and the left, the gestalt and the mechanism, the causal and the physiognomic back together into effective synthesis.

Enter the Syllabarium

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:57:00 +0000

Fascinating article (and discussion in the comments) over on Dmitry’s site: http://cluborlov.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/a-royal-pain-in-ass.html

[Update: His syllabary project is now hosted at http://unspell.blogspot.co.uk/]

We hear a lot about how learning more than one language makes you smarter, but I’ve been wondering for a while about the effects of learning to read more than one script.

This cartoon convinced me that Korean would make an awesome universal script, easily fulfilling Dmitry’s “looks cool written on the side of an alien spacecraft” criterion.

Dotsies is also interesting, primarily for the clever use of progressive substitution to teach you the script. Don’t know how dyslexics would respond to this.

Commenters linked to some other intriguing syllabaries:

Shavian

Tolkein’s Tengwar

Cherokee

Cree

This whole discussion seems to have flagged up a few interesting spectra in script design:

- Between having simpler (and thus inevitably more similar-looking and confusable) letters which are easy to write in longhand, and more complex letters, harder to write but more easily distinguished.

- Between having a script that preserves information about etymology, culture, tradition, and a script that is easy to learn (see this excellent article on “Why Chinese is So Damn Hard” - but note that written Mandarin’s very complexity also allows the retention of a wealth of pictographical texture and a connection to the primordial mythopoeic world view of early Chinese culture).

- Between enabling fine differentiation between different vowel sounds, which runs the risk of misrepresenting dialectical pronunciation, and conflating disparate sounds into broader, more-inclusive phonemes, which reduces the ability to differentiate between similar but slightly differently pronounced words.

The Foxden Project Episode 2

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 23:27:00 +0000

In which me colleague and I talk masculinity, violence, initiation, schooling and sushi.

Liner notes:

Josh Bowman - The Four Types of Men

Co-counselling

Wilhelm Reich - The Mass Psychology of Fascism

Alastair MacIntosh - Soil and Soul

Israel Regardie - The Tree of Life

Matthew B Crawford - Shop Class as Soulcraft

(& Alex’s posts on it)

Incroyable sequence danse! Merlin Nyakam & Bobby McFerrin

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 20:49:00 +0000

Incroyable sequence danse! Merlin Nyakam & Bobby McFerrin

The Eaters & The Eaten

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 15:15:00 +0000

The Eaters & The Eaten:

Audio of my talk at Redrawing the Maps last night, introduced by Lord Dougald of Hine. In which we discuss Baroque architecture, fondue parties, fish dealers and the psychic striations of the spork.

Reality Has Wailed Great

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 11:20:00 +0000

And things go in cycles.

For a while there, it looked like Obama’s tone was going to be critically inadequate. Who wants reality when they can have a reprisal of The American Dream, shiny and good-old as new? Who wants dour phlegmaticism when they can have genial avuncularity? The drift away from reality-based politics – starting, perhaps, when the 1970s’ atmosphere of tough choices and moral culpability gave way to Reagan’s B-movie turn – has always been particularly strong in America, where The Hologram has imposed itself most forcefully, where the truths of colonial exploitation have always been most effectively hid, and where the bounty of a wide continent and a global empire have, until recently, helped to funnel sufficient energy and resources through The Machine to make it seem like The Dream could continue forever, for just a little longer.

In this context, it should not have been surprising that Uncle Mitt suddenly started looking like a serious challenge to the Thin Black Duke. Semiotically, he hits all the right buttons – lantern-jawed without seeming brutish, energetic without being skittish, just the right mix of grey and black in his hair. Romney is, above all else, plausible.

But then came Sandy, a thousand-mile wide anticyclonic storm system which drove the shards and orts of fragmented consensuality together into a jagged pile of contusion. As so often, people reached for movie metaphors to describe the incursion of reality into their Hologrammatic lives (whilst, as if the boundaries had not been blurred enough, faked pictures culled from “The Day After Tomorrow” were circulated on social media as actual shots of the storm).

As ever, of course, the most relevant movie to the situation in America today is the awesome Monsters: “all I want is to get back to America”, safe from the alien, the unknown; only to find that the boundaries that kept the world out of the Dream have fallen, that the disaster has already happened, and that - when the desire for control, for safety, for privilege is finally released - the monsters we feared are somehow also things of sublime and terrible beauty.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this reassertion of reality was peoples’ sudden realisation that they were embedded in geography. The shots of the storm system over New York inverted the dominance of the city as symbol: as the curve of the storm arced above the skyline, the connection with the spiral shape blotting out the Eastern seaboard on computer-generated weather maps was suddenly made; the city, emblem of the power of The Hologram, was placed into context as a collection of brick and wooden buildings perched on an island by the edge of the Atlantic Ocean; people who had previously thought of weather as just something that moved or fell in those awkward open spaces between the buildings realised that they were part of a much bigger system (and, again, the effect was so compelling that some felt the need to concoct or reprise slightly more photogenic versions of the same). The categories and divisions in which the urban populace usually thought were suddenly dissolved, as they became aware that New Jersey or Long Island were not different dimensions of being at all, but rather part of a continuum of buildings and people located along the same coastline – in a moment, animosity converted to solidarity.

Nor were these the only illusions that dissolved. Amongst the good-news stories of Manhattan beginning to get back on its feet, news began to filter in from areas that had not been considered worthy of The Hologram’s focus: neighbourhoods left without power or fuel in Queens and Staten Island, gazing resentfully at the island of light in the distance. And, within neighbourhoods previously considered to have largely escaped unscathed, fresh casualties emerged - the poor and vulnerable; the bedridden and sick; those without family, friends, or other support networks; undocumented immigrants too scared to seek the help of authorities.

It became apparent that our image of urban spaces as homogeneous and knowable was false; that the news media reporting from Times Square could not speak on behalf of the city – that the reality of millions of people living in dense proximity, reliant on collective infrastructure for heat, water and food, was far more complex and problematic than the symbolic ‘City’ we had believed in. We experience the same thing when we say we know our way around a town, but really we only know the main routes, the central shopping precincts, the tourist locations – and then, when we take a couple of side-streets off of the main arteries, we find ourselves in a different, alien environment of innumerable capillaries, unknown and unforgiving in their sheer size and intricacy.

One of the great hidden truths of Progress is that the surplus energy, time and resources industrialised populations have been privy to (where that surplus was not itself an illusion) has not, by and large, been used by individuals to build stronger bonds with others, to have a richer social life, to explore the world, to connect disparate cultures and people together in globalised Modernity – rather, we have used it to wall ourselves away from reality and from each other. The luxury of urban living is that of being free of dependence on (interdependence with!) the people we live near, travel with, pass by every day - at the cost, of course, of total dependence on The System for all our needs. Much of the dissonant effect of an urban disaster is of the intricate enfolded walls of these divisions – of class, race, money, subculture – suddenly dissolving, and the individuals who formed them being left with the bare reality of shared interest, society, landbase and resources.

And so, suddenly, those who have been striving to live in reality, to create genuine consensuality and society, those who have been re-training their instincts away from the partitionism of Modernity, find their commitment to an unfashionable intent is suddenly their greatest asset. So Obama – who seemed so foolish for so long in his invocations of bipartisanship, in his attempts to bridge the divide with the Republicans (“Doesn’t he get it? These people are reality insurgents! They have no interest in maintaining a stable field of debate – they will lie brazenly, and, while he stutters in bemused rebuttal, they will already be telling the next lie!”) – cashes in the accumulated chips of cooperation, calm reason and stern realism. In contrast, Mitt’s feisty “it’s morning in America again, again” schtick started to strike a false note – his whole persona suddenly seemed a little too comfortable and well-groomed in comparison with the grit and splinters of the storm damage.

And so, too – for now, just a hint, a seed of what is to come – the networks built by the Occupy movement begin to demonstrate the strength of being unblinded by The Hologram, of believing in reality rather than realty. Faced with the unmediated spectacle of people helping people, even the most committed servants of The Hologram begin to see what could be done if all of the false partitions were allowed to fall away: “In a truly bizarre moment (especially to observers of the NYPD’s violent suppression of Occupy during its time at Zuccotti), FEMA and NYPD officers joined in chanting ‘We are unstoppable, another world is possible’ with Occupy Sandy volunteers helping at Far Rockaway.”

I have suggested before that the Occupy movement suffered from the disparity between its location in the reality of the urban environment and The Hologram’s contempt for that reality. Those who only observed the spectacle from afar, through the lenses and screen of The Hologram, saw only tiny figures, inept and ineffectual against the larger System, the City of Dreams.

But now that System has itself been contextualised, the sanctity of The Hologram violated by the undeniability of meteorological intervention. “The American Dream is not negotiable – which is true, because when the time comes, reality will not negotiate.” Is there a space here, an opportunity for an awareness to sneak through into wider consciousness, like the brief chinks of light in the roiling stormclouds above us? For a moment, the Hologram was suspended, its mediated gaze exposed as partial and inadequate.

Might the inhabitants of Modernity remember something of this experience, and act on it? Perhaps, in the end, it does not matter so much if this is the moment, if this opportunity is seized or squandered: reality is not going away, and it is a persistent interlocutor. We have been in a period of political, social and environmental denial for several decades now – but nothing lasts for ever.

And things go in cycles.

Sim Carp

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:51:00 +0100

Every now and then the issue of “is the universe just a computer simulation?” rears its head on Ran’s site. So I’ve sent him a link to this article, which is kinda interesting.

But this whole “universe as computer simulation” trope has something quite odd about it: unless there is an identical “really real” universe elsewhere, then this one is not a ‘simulation’ in any meaningful sense. It’s just the universe.

In the case of this experiment, they seem to start with all these kooky assumptions like “time is supposed to be smooth and continuous” and “energy is supposed to propagate in all directions equally at all scales”, and claim that any deviation from this would be proof that this is “just” a simulation. But, again, unless there’s another universe out there that does have those properties, they’re really just saying “this is how the universe actually works”.

“Simulation” in these discussions is usually followed by a vague “on some kind of giant cosmic computer”, as in the above article. But there’s a subtle confusion here - we only reach for the idea of the computer because that’s the most advanced means of information storage and processing we’ve been able to create out of matter so far. People aren’t really thinking of rooms full of plastic-cased servers with blinking lights when they say this, they just mean the universe might be made out of information.

Which we kind of already know it is.

The pilot podcast! Al and me discuss numerology, embryology,...

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 19:52:00 +0100

The pilot podcast! Al and me discuss numerology, embryology, doomed love and Disney movies.

Zac's Back

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:40:00 +0100

Just posting some stuff I said in response to Zac’s comments on Occupy at: uroboros.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/the-next-right-thing/

Some of what Zac said (but do go and read the whole thing):

I could not for the life of me get any of these ‘general assemblies’ to engage in any substantive political dialogue, let alone converge around actual action points with any mass traction. the whole thing devolved into a nightmare of orwellian ‘consensus’, politically correct censorship masquerading as ‘inclusiveness’, explosive outbursts of barely disguised Oedipal rage at the authorities and each other, and a general inability to think coherently about anything besides nebulous affirmations of good feelings and the importance of a utopian commune in the public square.

And my slightly more optimistic take:

To me the Occupy phenomenon was like a mushroom sticking its fruiting body up above the forest floor, to spread more spores about the place for a brief period and then die back; but the rhizomatic network under the soil remained intact, indeed, grew stronger for the broadcasting of its genetic information across a wider space.

Sans the torturous metaphor, this means that Occupy was an eruption of libidinal energy, the major benefit of which was simply to remind people of its own unmediated, unassimilated existence; such that, the moment it had captured worldwide attention, its job was essentially done. Anything else – acting as a testbed for collaborative democratic techniques, building connections between disparate social groups, providing participating individuals with transformative experiences of purposive community – was just a bonus.

This is why, for me, attempts to create a list of demands or to wring a structural program of organisation and intended goals were doomed to failure – not to deny that effective political action requires these things, but just to suggest that Occupy was not synonymous with or well-suited to such political activity. It was as a semiotic instantiation, a situationist refusal of the established frames of thought and debate, that the phenomenon had power.

And it was when the movement itself forgot that, and attempted to outlast its natural lifetime (rather than trusting that its energy and momentum would re-emerge in a new, evolved form in due course) that it fully lost its way. A presumption crept in that such a phenomenon necessarily had to become the totality of social resistance and critique, accompanied by a sense of desperate urgency, as if it all had to happen right now, or fail forever – a presumption that, in my view, derived from precisely the kind of totalising mentality that the movement originally, intuitively, opposed.

Of course, as you say, this kind of phenomenon can only be a beginning – it is after such an eruption that the hard work of marrying passion with reason, energy with intelligence, begins.

Zac, he reply:

I recall an audio talk that dougald and vinay did, where they wondered aloud in slightly despairing tones, whether the egypt uprisings were essentially situationist. we may never know, because islamic thugs and backroom military coups took up the slack for the arab spring. what I think we actually got with occupy was a situationist uprising, except I’m betting upwards of 75% of people in it did not actually know that’s what it was. even here, in spitting distance of kalle lasn and adbusters HQ, the ignorance of what the seed was is pretty absolute.

I find myself in pretty much total agreement with what you say, yet it is ashes in my mouth, because it raises the spectre that all the western activist really wants is an outpouring of libidinal energy, and maybe an inspiring yet incoherent diatribe from zizek on the human megaphone, then go back to commenting on facebook. meanwhile millions of people keep falling through the hourglass because we can’t face up to economic genocide except to sit around and try to ‘hear’ each other and reach some kind of daft consensus which lacks the teeth to do anything about the actual situation. it looks to me like an emerging cleavage between this kind of ‘libidinal’ situationist activism where the actual fucking model of the new society is tents in the park with a sea of garbage and human waste, and people on the ground in the real shit. the difference between the hakim bey Temporary Autonomous Zone and the No-Go zone if you will. people who want to break loose and people who have simply been chucked out the exit hatch of economic triage.

And so I say:

Yer, the paradoxes abound – a generation raised in a milieu of virtualised, postmodernism culture are very likely to make the error of thinking that thoughts, words and images are enough; but, in such a society, thoughts, words and images are indeed where a great deal of power lies, and must be engaged with.

I guess my bottom line is that I prefer the world where Occupy happened to one where it didn’t – nothing about the way it developed really surprised me, and it never fully engaged with the reality of the global situation, but, as a result of it, a lot of people are more aware than they were, so it was a step in the right direction. Maybe we won’t know its true impact until the 11-year olds who saw it on TV are on the streets in a decade’s time.

I guess the main mistake was to forget that squatting a few parks wasn’t actually going to materially change anything on its own – by trying to cling to the physical location and established (lack of) activities through the winter, it went from being a seductive advert for “another world is possible” to an indulgent and semiotically counterproductive energy sink; from representing change, responsiveness and agility to representing staticity, stolidity and stubbornness.

Those "We were wrong about peak oil" rebuttals again:

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 22:39:00 +0100

There was almost a piece here rebutting Mr G. Monbiot’s recent Guardian piece, “We were wrong about peak oil - there’s enough to fry us all”.

It would have started with the usual sort of thing - sarcastic queries as to who this “We” were, given Mr Monbiot’s notoriously ill-informed appearance at Uncivilisation in Llangollen 2 years ago, where he told us that methane clathrates were going to solve it all, then tested Dougald’s stalwart politeness to the limit by making bemusing cracks about fur bikinis; the piece would then have moved on to pointing out that serious peak oil theorists had been explaining for some time how the peaking process and all the concomitant economic and political disruption would likely lead to more CO2 emissions in the medium term, not less.

Then I probably would have mentioned how the problem of peak oil was never about the simplistic question of when conventional crude topped out, but was really about peak EROEI, or rather about the intersection of peak EROEI with a world of growing population, deep-wired expectations of perpetually-increasing energy use amongst the majority of the that population, and a one-way ratcheted global economic system predicated on the assumption of infinite growth and primed to implode during any sustained interruption of that process.

But I didn’t do any of that, because I still had the rest of ‘Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman’ to watch, and I figured someone else would write a less sarcastic and better-informed version instead.

And look! Not one, but 3 great responses, which I have gathered here for your entertainment and edification:

Sam Charles Norton responds directly to Mr M: http://elizaphanian.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/monbiot-wrong-on-peak-oil.html

Dave Summers’ critique of the report that Mr Monbiot found so convincing (seriously, G, the clue was when you typed “A report by the oil executive Leonardo Maugeri”…): http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-07-01/new-energy-report-harvard-makes-unsupportable-assumptions

An overview by the redoubtable Stoneleigh of Automatic Earth on why increasing unconventional oil production was both predicted and predictable, and ultimately looks a lot like just another speculative bubble: http://www.theautomaticearth.com/Energy/unconventional-oil-is-not-a-game-changer.html

And your bonus link, John Michael Greer’s dense but important piece on how a basic grasp of systems theory is necessary to understand why peak oil might produce such counter-intuitive phenomena in the first place - a piece published with eerie timing only a few days before that of Mr Monbiot:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/cussedness-of-whole-systems.html

————————————————————————————————————

UPDATE! 04/07/12

A few more just came through:

Rob Hopkins adds a bit to the debate towards the end of this piece with some interesting thoughts on what we can do now: http://transitionculture.org/2012/07/04/transition-reflections-on-george-monbiots-announcement-that-we-were-wrong-on-peak-oil/

His piece also alerted me to the existence of this Sharon Astyk piece: http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2012/07/03/treehugger-monbiot-and-is-peak-oil-over/

and this crunchy technical response to the Harvard report at the Oil Drum: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9292

You do not have to be good...

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 22:20:00 +0100

Ha, I totally misremembered the Mary Oliver line I used for the title of that last post. Here’s the poem in full, in case you’ve been living ~~in a cave~~ in a city too much and not in caves enough:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Just let the warm animal of your body love what it loves

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:26:00 +0100

So.

David at Edge of Grace put up this great fillet of a thread about how, in comparison to modern humans, non-moderns had vastly superior physical capabilities.

Which spurred Ran to write this:

“And Physical Feats of Past Peoples is loosely related to last week’s subject, because if past humans could do things that seem miraculous to us, then maybe we can do things that would seem miraculous to them. I mean obviously we can do stuff with the aid of technology. I’m thinking of internal adaptations to a technological world. For example, in ancient Rome, Augustine amazed people with his ability to read silently — everyone else could only understand the written word by reading it out loud. Now we can sit all day at a computer screen, switching between written words and videos, taking in information on a hundred different subjects without getting burned out.”

I read through much of the original thread and, whilst there are lots of great stories and much sensible comment there, one thing that stood out for me was that many people were trying to ascertain what the ‘magic ingredient’ was in traditional/East Asian lifestyles that enabled such amazing feats.

This is another instance where a solid grounding in civilisational critique helps out; the question is not “what did they do to have these abilities?” but “what did we do to lose them?”.

I first thought about this subject when I heard that William the Conqueror could vault straight on to his horse in full armour. Admittedly, Norman horses were probably a little shorter, and his armour was ‘only’ chainmail - but I’ve since heard it said of knights involved in C15th battles, who would have been wearing full plate.

It makes sense to me that people back in the day, being closer to “natural, unspoilt” humans, would have had a clearer Qi flow in their bodies, enabling this kind of activity. A number of causes for the change suggest themselves. Consider just a few of them:

- Modern babies: left to lie in cots; spines distorted and core stability compromised by car seats and buggies/strollers (check out how much they scream when you put them into one - they’re trying to tell you something!).
vs.
- Old-school babies: carried in slings next to the mother’s body, responding with muscular resistance to g-forces, movement, changing shape of the mother’ body against theirs.

- Modern children: forced to suppress their natural Qi flow by sitting still in chairs attending to symbolic abstractions from the age of 5, at risk of punishment and verbal assault if they move too much. Eventually the fidgets die off and the energy flow in the body is permanently impaired.
vs.
- Old-school children: walking, running, climbing, swimming, fishing, hunting, and yes, being introduced to purposeful and socially meaningful work from an early age.

Modern adults: Cut off from natural processes, the natural Qi of the earth and sun, forced to subsist in dead-Qi environments of strip-lighting, electronic smog and air-conditioned air; drinking dead-Qi water from industrial recycling systems; sitting 9 hours a day in front of screens bombarding them with more negative electro-magnetic energy; nerves strained to the limit by information and urban noise pollution; overdosing on sugar and caffeine and other legal stimulants; holding back their natural emotional responses to their boss, the people who bump into them in the street, the government employee, the inescapable totality of the system that contains them; suppressing their bodies’ natural desire to operate as a complete system, becoming instead nothing more than a support vehicle for a disembodied consciousness interfacing with a virtual world.
vs.
Old-school adults: not.

As Norbert Elias points out in The Civilising Process, changing social conditions in the Mediaeval Age (or the equivalent stage in other civilisations) began to advantage those who could break the connection between emotional response and immediate physical action.

This is the beginning of the development of civilised consciousness as we know it - though, for the first few centuries, only a select few could turn the naturally outward-flowing libidinal energy back inside themselves to fully develop a world of internal thought and consideration at the cost of physical skill and assertion; monks and scholars were thus a kind of specialised aberration, whose uniquely distorted energetic systems supported the technology of literacy, mathematical calculation etc.

This new form of psychological calibration operates in conjunction with a subtle web of permanent bodily tensions - Reich’s ‘character armour’. This further impedes clear Qi flow and probably uses up a fair bit of energy just through maintaining the chronic tension. Overall, we can say that the interruption of the natural physical capacities of the human is not merely the result of different physical conditions and activities, but also enables and is enabled by the growing split between mind and body and the growing dictatorship of rational consciousness.

Of course, the more this trend develops, and the larger the proportion of society who are altered in this fashion, the more alienated from sensitivity and connection to the body people, and society as a whole, become and the more tolerant they become of further measures, technologies, arrangements that will extend the alienation yet further - and so the civilisational ratchet works its way up to the dizzy heights we see today.

I think, for the last century or so, we have been progressing into an even later stage, where the clear flow of Qi is disrupted not just by the presence of intense internalised consciousness itself, but by the failure of the various justificatory myths and ideologies that had been developed to maintain some connection with the outside world.

We are so used to thinking of these kind of things as ‘purely’ intellectual constructs that the idea that they might have an impact on the physical and energetic self seems quite odd at first glance; it is because there is a continuity - from physis, to energetic self, through emotions, to consciousness and out into the differentiated structures of thought and understanding - that the ideational structure of understanding, and its level of congruence with the experienced world, can impact on the deeper, more material levels of the self (indeed, it is precisely because of the intense mind/body split - around which modern Western consciousness has been structured for half a millennium - that this truth seems so unlikely to us).

The effect of a lack on congruence between a mindbody system’s ideational models of reality and experience - ‘cogitive dissonance’, we might say, except that it is far from merely cognitive - is to condition the mindbody system towards an expectation that outflows of energy will meet with punishment, conflict or failure, and thus to condition the system to suppress such outflows. More and more I see people - at a younger and younger age - give up on the projection of energy out into the world, shorn of any belief that they will ever have effective agency over their environment, and either fall into total depression or re-direct their energy into internal worlds of fantasy, cyberspace or drug use.

But it doesn’t need to be like this. The ‘magic’ of internal martial arts training, re-establishing appropriate body alignment, qi work, yoga etc., is simply testament to how alienated we have become from our own natural capacity - it is a measure of our surprise at what we are capable of when the blocks put in place of our biological effectiveness are removed. People often note how strong animals are; an adult male chimpanzee weighs less than an adult male human, but is said to be at least 3 times stronger. One wonders whether this ratio would still be as high if a feral human - one whose natural Qi flow had never been interrupted by politico-social considerations or the predations of linguistic consciousness - could be found.

Clearly, we don’t need to go that far, though - the stories of Japanese samurai running up near-vertical tree-trunks, or the long-distance athletic feats of the Tarahumara indians in Born to Run suggest that such abilities can co-exist with relatively modern consciousness, and at only a little distance from the living conditions of modern urban humans.

We should also consider the implications of all this for Civilisation itself, and for the critique thereof. Once we begin to understand the feedback loops between physical wellbeing, energetic flow, psychological state, social organisation and the kinds of living conditions human beings will find tolerable, it becomes clear that the work to reform or replace late-industrial Civilisation with something better must operate at multiple levels beyond the merely intellectual: many people are so alienated from their own alienation that they don’t know what they are missing out on, so that normal human functioning begins to look miraculous; indeed, our current psycho-physical condition becomes so impaired that our motivation to change things itself begins to decline.

So (and I think I mostly mean here to remind myself of this): Get outside. Breathe some clean air. Feel the earth beneath your feet. Drink real water. This is not ancillary to the change you want to make. This is, in essence and in fact, a radically political act. Reclaim your birth-right as a human animal. Assume you do not - yet - know what real wellness can feel like.

The Great Escape

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:50:00 +0100

Holiday season being nearly upon us, I thought I would share the story of The Time I Didn’t Make It To Copenhagen. I was hoping to meet up with a dear friend there, but it didn’t quite happen:

I am notorious for not getting to airports as early as they recommend, particularly not when I lived on the Victoria Line close to where the Stansted ‘Express’ (don’t believe it, it lies) goes to the airport in 45 minutes. Or not.

Remarkably, this time round, I actually caught a train at 16.30 for a flight leaving at 18.45! What responsible action! For once I had nothing to worry about as regards catching my flight.

Nothing, that is, except a tree falling on the power lines over the railway track and catching on fire, requiring all trains on the line to terminate at Broxbourne. Note that timing was crucial here - if the tree had fallen earlier, I would have heard before boarding the train and would have had time to get a coach instead. If it had fallen a little later, I would have been first to disembark at Broxbourne rather than fourth.

“There WILL be replacement buses!” announced the tannoy voice on the train. This was technically correct, but misleading. “Four trains have already stopped, Broxbourne station car park is already filled with a sea of angry holiday makers, another train will disgorge its contents every 15 minutes and the buses will not arrive in sufficient number until around 6 o’clock” would have been more informative.

The scene was truly horrific - evidently it is very important to people that they go on holiday, and they will scream, cry, push and contemplate serious violence in order not to miss their flights. Seething hordes of ale-flabbed, lobster-red Britons, ethereally thin Germanic-looking travellers and Spaniardish emo families trailing suitcases on wheels milled around the car park like a hungry swarm of locusts, devouring anything that looked like it might be a taxi or bus. Rumours that taxi-drivers were charging triple rates vectored through the crowd.

At one point the local wildlife park ran its day trippers back to the station. Now, these were clearly minibuses. Already filled with people. With the words “Paradise Wildlife Park” and a huge picture of a leopard on the side. And yet still the vacation-crazed holiday-makers trotted towards them like shark fins converging on chum. Entertainingly for observers, it turns out trying to run whilst trailing your little android luggage behind you requires the adoption a very undignified stiff-legged gait if you want to beat the competition to be the first to say “are you a bus?” to a vehicle that clearly isn’t.

And when a real bus really did turn up, things got really ugly. Dawn of the dead ugly. People blocking busses, fighting to get near the bus entrance, mosh-pit-like oscillations passing through the crowd, pregnant women trampled underfoot (OK, I made that last bit up).

Throughout, I had been Zen-like in my neutrality over whether I would make it to Copenhagen. The whole thing had been a last-minute whim, and the thought of getting angry enough to fight with delay-crazed holiday-makers to get on a bus to catch a flight I felt carbon-guilt over in the first place didn’t quite work for me. By around 18.00 it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to make it, and I had made peace with that, so I was preparing to leave, when suddenly a bit of accidentally cunning positioning got me on a bus.

Still, I remained philsophical - I was probably not going to get to airport on time - but would give it a chance.

I arrived at the airport at 6.45 - the plane was probably gone but I thought I would go inside the airport in case it had been delayed.

It hadn’t, but it was still up on the departures board! Well, by the time I got through security, it would probably have left, but I might as well give it a go now I’m here…

Through security, the final call for the flight is on the departures board!

Ah, but then I realise I am leaving from a distant gate, and have to catch the weird automated train-thing, which leaves every 5 minutes.

But wait! There’s one there! It’s doors are closing! I just get on! For first time I actually allow myself to believe that I might make it!

Out the train! Run up the escalators! Rush to Gate 1 - oh, but no-one is at the gate. Clearly it is closed.

Wait! As I walk the final metres to the gate a uniformed airline gate-keeper emerges into view from behind a pillar! It’s still open! I race to the gate! The plane is still on the tarmac! The connecting corridor is still attached! “Am I in time?”

No. The doors closed Exactly One Minute Ago.

I am left to photograph the plane as it sits there, a few dozen metres away from me, and then to traipse despondently back to the Stanstead Express to ride all the way back to London. Mysteriously, the trains are now working fine.

Photo

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:30:56 +0100

'Meditation'

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:25:18 +0100

I’m currently all about integrating emotion into my practice, so these stuck out like a sore thumb:

“[Top hedge fund manager Ray] Dalio meditates often in his office, to purge his mind of emotion.”

“[Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik] used meditation to numb the full spectrum of human emotion…”

‘What we need is not new stories, but the ability to live...

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 19:31:41 +0100

‘What we need is not new stories, but the ability to live without stories’: at first glance, this could seem opposed to @darkmtn’s call for new stories to navigate the coming times. But there is a difference between stories we live but are not conscious of as stories - lived paradigms, as it were - and deliberate fictions, where we create a subworld of story to reveal a truth. Most spiritual teachers, indeed, make use of the second type of story precisely to wake people up, to help them become more intelligent, to navigate “unknown territories”; I like to think this is the actual subtext of the Dark Mountain project - it does not wish to replace the myths of ‘progress’ and ‘dominion’ with other, more life-friendly, unconscious dogmas; it wants to wake people up to the ubiquity of stories and help them begin to take charge of their own.

At last! Something I am qualified to write about

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:10:00 +0100

That Julian Assange has been at the Leveson inquiry into Press Standards complaining about the Press Complaints Commission’s failure to uphold his complaints. I think.

Assange, he say: “[The PCC] found that although I had not been formally charged it was, nonetheless, perfectly acceptable for newspapers to say that I had been charged with rape as being “charged” with an offence is seen as the same as a mere allegation; this, despite the clear imputation in these newspaper articles that I have been formally charged, and all the other imputations that flow from that about the reasonableness of the case against me.”

On the face of it, Assange’s case seems pretty reasonable. The New Statesman article in question does not casually refer to him having been “charged” with carrying out the actions in question as if by critics unknown; it specifically uses the term in the context of judicial authority, referring to Assange’s statement outside the court “after being granted bail on sexual assault charges in December.”

Whilst no proof of wrongdoing on the NS’ part, it is also worth noting that The Sun published a correction in relation to a similar statement: “On July 14 we reported that Julian Assange was on bail as he appealed against a ruling to have him extradited to Sweden to face two charges of rape. In fact Mr Assange has not so far been charged with any offence, and one allegation is of molestation, not rape.”

The magazine’s defence is an interesting one, though; evidently they argued that readers would not have been “significantly misled” (as per Clause 1 of the PCC Code) by the reference to a charge - with all the implications this would give to a British readership regarding the seriousness and robustness of the allegations against Assange - because of the unique nature of the Swedish criminal system.

The PCC concurred with this, saying that the phrase “charges” would have accurately conveyed the idea that the Swedish prosecuting authorities were seeking to prosecute Assange on the allegations in question.

Key to this view was a ruling by the High Court regarding the question of the European Arrest Warrant, which considered that:

“Under the Swedish system, that decision [to charge the defendant] is taken at a late stage with the trial following quickly after… [in similar circumstances] in England and Wales the defendant would have been charged.”

In this sense, to say Assange has not been charged in Sweden might be seen to be equally misleading to a British readership - by implying the case against him is less robust than it is - as to suggest that he has been charged.

I’m not convinced by this argument. It seems a little perverse to favour a second-guessed assumption about the interpretive faculties of the British readership over the plain legal fact that Assange has not been charged. Moreover (as I believe Assange has himself argued), this unusual aspect of the Swedish system leaves itself open to institutional abuse, whereby the prosecuting authorities could make an unjustified request for the extradition of an individual without charging him (and thus without the pesky requirement of needing to provide robust evidence), on the basis that their system is at an equivalent stage of prosecution.

Clearly, the two systems cannot be simplistically equated like this on the basis of how long the bureaucratic procedure has been running - and as far as the media are concerned, it would at least be prudent to reserve the word “charged” for the formal legal action and refer to “accusations” or “allegations” in the context of the Swedish ‘intent to prosecute’.

However, it is clear that the arguments on both sides are a little more nuanced than they first appear - and Clause 1 is deliberately worded to provide some wiggle room for the PCC in such circumstances. The magazine is obliged to take care to avoid all inaccuracy - but, in the interests of avoiding pedantic complaints about factual minutiae - only significantly inaccurate or misleading statements are required to be corrected. In this case, whilst the NS statement is factually false, it was evidently deemed to not be significantly misleading.

Most people do not react favourably to hearing that this is how the PCC operates (although they would probably have a similar reaction to what actually goes on in courtrooms). The newspapers and magazines are free to learn how to play the system right up to edge of the line of acceptability, and standards of accuracy thus remain lower than many of us would like them.

These declining standards have many causes, though, and a more rigorous regime of regulation could never totally eliminate inaccuracy - it would, however, risk creating an environment where newspapers and magazines fear to publish copy that hasn’t been closely checked by a team of lawyers, where an industry on the rocks becomes even less capable of responding contemporaneously to unfolding stories, and where the front page of every newspaper consists exclusively of corrections of minor inaccuracies.

The argument in favour of the PCC’s style of ‘light-touch’ regulation is, ironically, an argument in favour of the free flow of information - a faith that the network of producers, readers and commenters can collectively establish the truth of the matter without needing information and comment to be filtered and hidden for fear of the consequences of its impact on the world. The parallel with Wikileaks is clear.

Of course, newspapers are dying on their arse because their business model is outdated and unworkable. As I have said before, though, there remains a need for solid, investigatory journalism, and - if the newspapers go under - we will need to reinvent the journalistic wheel in some kind of stable crowd-funded manner in order to keep the other powerful entities that attempt to run our lives in check.

How to think straight

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:56:00 +0000

Brendan O’Neill in The Telegraph <= Tumblr being weird. This is actually a link to Brendan O’Neill’s article in The Telegraph

“Gay marriage”. *Sigh.* Right:

1) First sentence: “A question rarely asked about gay marriage is how it became such a massive flashpoint issue.” That would be because it isn’t one. I will explain below. O’Neill goes on to describe how it isn’t in some detail, so you’d think this would have given him a clue.

2) “everyone from bishops to hacks feeling the need to tell the world where they stand on it.” Ooh, look, O’Neill has put in a hyperlink - presumably this must link to proof of the inescapable ubiquity of this “hot-potato” (yes, really, I’ll get to that too) issue. So where does that bishops link lead? Oh… To one article by a bishop in the same day’s Telegraph. So that’s one bishop; hack-wise, I guess we just have O’Neill himself ‘feeling the need to tell the world’ his thoughts on the issue. Any chance this is a manufactured media controversy?

3) “gay marriage has achieved this hot-potato status without the benefit of a mass movement demanding it.” Ok, first off, a ‘hot potato’ issue is one that people don’t want to answer - they try to palm it off to the next person as soon as possible (just like in the party game, ‘hot potato’. Are you unfamiliar with it? It’s basically the opposite of pass the parcel, if that helps). But O’Neill has just said that everyone wants to weigh in on this issue. Perhaps he was thinking of the phrase ‘hot topic’, and at the same time about eating a potato.

4) “Gay-marriage activists have not had to march for years on end, carry out mass boycotts, face water cannons, get attacked by dogs or run the risk of being thrown in jail for their campaign to achieve almost saintly status.” I’ll let Telegraph commenter ‘unreligious’ take this one: “The Stonewall riots were in 1969. The first Gay Pride marches, were the next year (1970) to commemorate the riots. It is now 2012, that is 42 years of marching. Just how long would gay people have to march before Mr O’Neil felt the time was sufficient to count. He also totally ignores how many of the early marches (and current ones in countries like Russia) were violently opposed. He totally ignores how long gay people worked to gain any acceptance. He only sees the progress that has been made, in some places, in the last decade. He acts like that was the only time it took to get to where we are today. I guess the reality does not jibe with his premise, so he ignores it.”

5) “liberal campaigners frequently claim that gay marriage, unlike every other issue in the world, is a straightforward black-and-white matter on which there is only one right answer – ‘yes’.” To be fair, this is a bold attempt at a pre-emptive strike. The opposition to universal civil marriage makes no sense in logical terms, so many people do, indeed, feel that there is not much of a debate to be had on the matter. Unfortunately for O’Neill, this really just comes across as quite whiny. It’s pretty standard fare, familiar from the world of climate change deniers: “How dare these people point out all the obvious flaws in our arguments. What about my freedom of speech? This is like Stalin’s Russia!” Let us be generous - perhaps there are coherent arguments against universal civil marriage rights. But we have yet to hear them made in public by anyone.

6) “gay marriage has… become the No 1 battle in the modern culture wars.” Right. First: There are no ‘culture wars’. This is a right-wing talking point from America that is only marginally more true there than it is in the UK. It is designed to polarise the debate, because the ‘conservative’ side who invented the term know that their opinions are actually extreme and shared only by a small minority, and that their only hope of winning support is to push the debate away from open, nuanced consideration and into emotive, panic-ridden reaction.

(That said, a number of these people, if the Telegraph comments board is anything to go by, do claim to genuinely believe that there is a Frankfurt-school Liberal-Marxist conspiracy to destroy Western civilisation, and that every proponent of any kind of equality is somehow the puppet of evil Moscow handlers. But, mostly, I think they don’t really believe this, or at least they don’t believe it in the same way that they believe, for example, that buses exist, or that it hurts if a heavy object falls on your head.)

In reality, most people acknowledge a diversity of opinion on many issues, but there is a general consensus towards being even-handed and generally polite and nice to people. In the context of secular civil marriage, people have generally come to the conclusion that these values would be best achieved by having full legal equality for individuals irrespective of gender, although it is not necessarily the most pressing issue on their minds. As another Telegraph commenter said:

“The issue is not that the liberal elite are obsessed with it - they’re introducing something that a minority wants and a majority has no feelings about. The issue is why is it such an extreme touchpoint for the critics of it?”

Indeed. So, secondly: even if there were such a thing as ‘culture wars’ - and even disregarding O’Neill’s confusion regarding incendiary spuds which people are yet mysteriously desperate to hold on to - is gay marriage really the “number one” topic?: Is immigration not a bigger issue for most people (or even most MPs and journalists, if that’s who we’re really talking about)? What about honour killings? Paedophilia? The pay-gap between men and women? Ignorance and mistreatment of the mentally ill?

Ah, but… I anticipate the objection; these are not topics usually associated with the “culture wars” meme. They are too political, too related to economic matters, or they are ‘social issues’, or they are about ‘attitudes’. In fact, the term “culture wars” seems to denote a tiny subset of political issues where a small, extreme minority is trying to control other peoples’ sexual activity. Funny, that.

And it is from this that we can resolve the paradox, can see why the topic is so popular with MPs and journalists when they should be trying to palm off the ‘hot potato’ as soon as possible: it is an easy way to pick up a few progressive brownie points, without actually getting involved in anything that might genuinely bring about any major changes in society. The public is generally on board with the principle of equality in this area [P. Kingsnorth queried this on twitter, but a quick google suggests support in the UK for full legal marriage rights for gay people is around 61%], and marriage is seen as a positive and stabilising force in society, so those of a conservative bent can make a show of liberalism on an issue that is largely uncontentious with the public.

In this sense, O’Neill is right to say “the reason it has been so speedily and heartily embraced by the political and media classes, is because it is so very useful as a litmus test of liberal, cosmopolitan values.” But he is entirely wrong in then surmising that “supporting gay marriage has become a kind of shorthand way of indicating one’s superiority over the hordes” - in fact, its value to the politician is precisely to enable the pretence that they, an individual bearing extreme conservative views in many other areas, are in tune with public consensus on this one particular, ‘safe’, issue.

To summarise:

Clearly, the actual situation is this: After suffering decades of persecution, arduous and committed political activism on the part of gay people and supporters of their rights finally won equality for them in most areas of the law. Social consensus is now largely supportive of this equality.

There remain, however, some areas of law which have not yet been updated to reflect the general principle of equality. Although the need for reform is not as pressing as was the fight for basic civil rights, when these anomalies come into the focus of public attention, it seems generally sensible to most people that they be aligned with the general principle of equality. There is no mass movement, no wild outcry in favour of gay marriage, because most people agree on the matter and find it fairly uncontentious.

This places the religious opponents of reform in a difficult position. There are scant grounds for rational objection to the extension of secular civil marriage to all people without discrimination on the grounds of gender, and the objectors are thus forced into awkward contortions - spurious arguments about marriage being solely for the purpose of the procreation of children (“Oh, so you think infertile couples should be banned from marrying, do you? No? Oh…”) or fundamentally religious in nature (“Sorry, I must have missed your principled stand against the ungodly institution of secular civil marriage between men and women. Presumably you have spent the last five decades picketing register offices. No? Oh, right, so that was just more bullshit, then, was it?”).

No, this is not really about the institution of secular civil marriage - of course it isn’t. Why would the religious care about a civil contract between individuals and the state? This is about the fact that they - right-wing/religious/bigoted folk in general, I suppose - object to homosexuality per se, and see the issue of gay marriage as another skirmish in an ongoing “culture war”.

But the notion of a culture war exists only in their own heads! The logic of considering it a ‘war’, in fact, favours their position, and to concede the point is to lose sight of the reality - that most people agree on this issue, find it largely unthreatening, uncontentious, and a logical extrapolation of the basic principles of human equality and decency. Yet again, we are faced with an asymmetric situation where only one side is arguing in good faith…

Warrior Queens and the Western Culture

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:52:00 +0000

[Yet again, I have been too lazy to come up with my own idea for a topic, but have just reponded to someone else; in this case, Vinay on gender: http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/tantra-race-and-feminism-3016/comment-page-1#comment-10701]

“I thought I might weigh in on Cultures, because we are in danger of failing to compare like with like here.

First: Most cultures will have some deep lineage of higher-grade philosophy/lifeway, which will be to some degree divergent from the practices of the culture at large: Chinese culture in general is surprisingly divergent from Daoism; Hindu culture, as you partially acknowledge, is not as precision-crafted as an intact Tantric lineage; even the extreme-patriarchal Levantine civilisations, which tested the cultural subjugation of women to the absolute limit and turned a fertile swathe of land across the Middle East and North Africa into a barren desert, carried esoteric component traditions that possessed completely converse views on the correct attitude towards women and nature.

It is also safe to assume that Cultures generally diverge further with age from any seed of positive spiritual/shamanic/integrated vision they may have had. In addition, other Cultural influences will be overlaid, potentially pushing the values and practices of the exoteric Culture yet further from the origin.

So we can begin to break down seemingly monolithic Cultures into their various strata and temporal phases: in the case of the Indian Culture (which is not quite the same as ‘Hinduism’), we have a Dravidian/Harrapan Cultural base (possibly one or two prior Civilisations having lived their course in the South &/or the Indus valley) with a Persian/Aryan overlay, followed by a thousand years of Mughal (i.e. Arabian) influence, largely limited to the North-West of the subcontinent but distributing influence through the networks of royal power.

By the time the British arrived, there was already a miasma of competing value-systems and cultural perspectives, and yes, it is surprising how well certain functional social models had survived, but it was basically a mess. The British certainly did their share of damage (installing a puritanical anti-sex culture, plus the usual inherited psychic trauma from violence and social disruption), but they also did things like trying to ban the practice of enforced suttee, which suggests to me that the Indian culture had already diverged somewhat from any genuine commitment to protecting womens’ quality of life it might have had in the past (unless you wish, at this stage, to play the pseudo-spiritual “it’s really good for them, it helps them reincarnate as men” card, which I strongly suspect you do not!).

The West-European Culture has a similar complexity: a pagan base with a Judeo-Christian overlay (mutated through a thousand years of Roman and post-Roman experience), an inheritance of Classical philosophy and jurisprudence (inherited via the Islamic civlisation), and a few recent centuries of deciding the whole mess was too much trouble to be going on with and maybe it would be better to drop the religion thing altogether.

What’s most notable about the way in which Christianity changed when it was adopted by the West-European Culture is the profound transformation of the status of the feminine: the figure of Mary goes from narrative bit-part to primary Goddess of the Church (we see remnants of this in modern Catholicism, but her centrality to Mediaeval thought is largely unknown now); the primary festival of the Resurrection is renamed after the pagan fertility Goddess Eostre; female mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen possess respect, power and influence. (to be fair, this is only a divergence from the Civilisation-Christianity of the Romans, not necessarily of the original Christian practices of the pre-60AD Church).

The overall picture appears to be this: the West-European Culture has patriarchal Levantine Civilisation-tech overlaid on an essentially matriarchal deep-culture. When the patriarchal logic of the aging culture can no longer withstand the existence of a powerful female icon, the Mary-figure is split into the Madonna/Whore binary: the reified image of the woman was thus necessarily refigured towards ‘the angel in the home’ of Victorian times; delicate, spiritual, unworldly. This is a move seemingly unique to the W-EC; other cultures, when diminishing female power, have emphasised the woman as lustful, earthy, unenlightened; as materia, as hylic residue.

To say that “your culture hates women and always has,” is to ignore the continued existence of these deeper layers of culture and experience. Even the proviso “at least since it went Christian” downplays the extent to which the Judeo-Christian inheritance was re-modelled to fit the deep cultural topology.

And this is before we even get onto possible physiological differences of peoples.

Tales of powerful female warriors abound in Nordic and Celtic literature – take the mythic figure Scathach, who taught martial arts to the culture-hero Cuchulain; or consider how Boudica and her daughters terrorized the troops of the Roman Empire and burnt Londinium to the ground; an anonymous Roman observed that:

“A whole troop of foreigners would not withstand a single Celt if he called his wife to his assistance. She is stronger than he by far and with flashing eyes; least of all when she swells her neck and gnashes her teeth, and poising her huge white arms, begins to rain blows mingled with kicks, like shots discharged by the twisted cords of a catapult. The voices of these women are formidable and threatening, even when they’re being friendly.”

Another said: “A Celtic woman is often the equal of any Roman man in hand-to-hand combat. She is as beautiful as she is strong. Her body is comely but fierce. The physiques of our Roman women pale in comparison.”

In sum, I do not disagree that the Judeo-Christian overlay led to some deeply embedded anti-woman attitudes in the West-European Culture - but I do not agree that it is “bred into our bones”; there are deeper layers of profoundly matriarchal paradigm to be uncovered, and - mutandis mutatis - the Hindu approach to gender relations might be as inappropriate to a liberated Western-European Culture as you claim Western Feminism is in a Hindu context. Indeed, it is possible that the ongoing erosion of the outer edifice of patriarchy in the WEC will not simply lead to open gender-neutral territory – rather, as the deeper layers achieve predominance, it will result in a phase-shift into a neo-matriarchal format; which would, no doubt, lead to a whole different set of problematic imbalances…

And, of course, the understanding of this complexity is yet further muddied by the two main versions of collusion between Orientalism and feminism extant in contemporary Western discourse: the rationalist/progressive (“these Eastern cultures are regressive, irrational, patriarchal and abusive”; despite, as you argue, the many ways in which the lived reality of women can actually possess a higher quality of life than that provided by abstract legislative ‘equality’), and the NewAge/myopic (“Eastern cultures are more in touch with the feminine, Nature, the unconscious”; ignoring the obvious patriarchal privileges and the abuses & repressions of women, nature and feeling). And both these flavours of Orientalism mistake older Cultures that have a slower rate of memetic and historical change (having already lived out the active period of their lifespans) for eternal & immutable ornaments, outside the aegis of history. In reality, all this is in ferment; all this is in constant change!”