steelweaver
Depth Politics and the Flatland Fallacy
In the summer of 2014, Dougald Hine invited me to talk about a few ideas I’d had knocking about for a while as part of the Västerås Conversations series he was running in the Swedish city of that name.
The ambition to edit it down into a slickly produced audio experience has been extant since then. But, given recent political developments, I thought it would be good to get it up warts and all, with the usual provisos that my thinking may have moved on in the past 2 years.
Dark Mountain at Fire in the Mountain
“Just Sayin“
- There is a refugee issue in the EU.
- Most countries have rejected Germany’s proposed EU refugee quota system.
- The Schengen zone consists of 24 countries with contiguous land borders*, plus Greece (and Malta). The refugee issue has put the principle of free movement into question throughout the entire zone.
- Most of the refugees are coming from Turkey, through Greece.
- The shortest maritime distance between Greece and Turkey is 4000 metres.
- The shortest distance between Greece and Italy, the nearest Schengen country, is 85 miles.
- Greece has a total coastline of more than 13,000 kilometres. Most EU governments acknowledge that this kind of porous ‘border’ can’t be meaningfully ‘closed’.
- Greece owes more than £250bn, or around 200% of GDP.
- Germany, France and Italy together own 1/3 of Greece’s debt.
- The austerity measures imposed upon Greece have pushed its economy into a ‘death-spiral’, making it unlikely the debt will ever be paid back on those terms.
- Many EU governments privately acknowledge this, but believe it would be politically unpopular in their own countries to simply write the debt off.
- If there were an excuse to ‘compensate’ Greece over and above the cost of any measures taken (like, say, suspending them from the Schengen zone), that would be a politically convenient opportunity to pay down some of Greece’s debt.
- If other governments were pay the Greeks to diversify into a new form
of ‘hospitality industry’, that would be a useful Keynesian intervention
in their economy.
- Most EU governments would rather pay to support the refugees in the camps in Turkey and the Lebanon than have them come to their own countries.
- Conditions in the camps are very poor, however, Turkey and Lebanon are not keen to keep the refugees, and most of them would rather come to Europe.
- The Greek tourism industry (20% of GDP) remains below its pre-crash levels. There are many resorts, hotels and villas standing empty.
- Just saying.
*yeah, whatever.
There Now Follows An Election Broadcast:
A farmer had only one horse, and one day the horse ran away. The neighbours came to comfort him over his terrible loss. The farmer replied, “Maybe, maybe not.” A month later, the horse came home bringing with her two beautiful wild horses. The neighbors came to congratulate him for his good fortune. “Such lovely strong horses!” The farmer replied, “Maybe. Maybe not.” The farmer’s son was thrown from a horse and broke his leg. All the neighbors came to console. Such bad luck! The farmer replied, “Maybe. Maybe not.” A war broke out and every able-bodied young man was recruited except the farmer’s son because of his broken leg. The neighbours came to congratulate the farmer. “Maybe. Maybe not.” he replied.
Acupuncture as Permaculture
A process as described is not the process as it exists;
The terms used to describe it are not the things they describe.
That which evades description is the wholeness of the system;
The act of description is merely a listing of its parts.
Without intentionality, you can experience the whole system;
With intentionality, you can comprehend its effects.
These two approach the same reality in different ways,
And the result appears confusing;
But accepting the apparent confusion
Gives access to the whole system.
Dao De Jing, Chapter 1, trans. John Michael Greer
The term “permaculture”, a contraction of “permanent agriculture”, was coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren to describe the ecological design philosophy they began developing in the 1970s. Permaculture has since grown to become a worldwide movement, with many thousands training in and applying its design principles.
Informed though it is by modern ecology and systems theory, Mollison has also specifically noted the influence of Daoism on its core philosophy; faced with the converging crises of ecological destruction, topsoil erosion, fossil fuel depletion and the unsustainable growth of population and industry on the planet, he sought to develop a form of resilient agriculture that would work “with rather than against nature,” one of “protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action; of looking at systems and people in all their functions, rather than asking only one yield of them; and of allowing systems to demonstrate their own evolutions.”
Like the permaculturist, the traditional acupuncturist works with a complex ecological system – the human body. And, like the permaculturist, the acupuncturist tries to interact with that ecosystem in a way that is more holistic, more responsive and less crudely forceful than is common practice in the industrial world.
Indeed, many of the insights of systems theory – the interdependence of multiple functions and elements, for example, or the importance of recognising emergent whole-system patterns – are already embedded in traditional medical practices, and are second nature to the acupuncturist versed in zang-fu theory and the five phases. Given the shared core of Daoist philosophy at the heart of the two systems, it is not surprising that a comparison of the philosophy and practice of permaculture with that of Traditional East Asian Medicine reveals both familiar patterns and unexpected insights:
Genetic Hedonics
News is coming through that MPs have voted to authorise the creation of 3-person embryos.
You might be expecting me to comment on the science - how our knowledge of genetics is partial at best, how we can never fully predict the consequences of a move such as this, and how, once such genetic relations are present in the populace, they can never be recalled.
But plenty of people have pointed all that out already. Something else interests me:
There have been a number of people pushing for legalisation of these techniques on the basis that it would “stop the needless suffering of many children” (Polly Toynbee has already weighed in, claiming “this isn’t about three-parent babies; it’s about saving families needless misery” while this Rachel Kean person seemed ubiquitous on BBC news making similar claims). They often cite examples of families who have had children with mitochondrial disease and the stress and suffering it has caused.
But this is completely disingenuous. This technique will not help anyone already living - it applies only to newly created individuals. And no-one will be using the technique unless they already know that their child is likely (certain?) to suffer mitochondrial disease.
So what this is actually about is whether carriers of mitochondrial disease should be enabled, through artificial means, to have healthy (or presumptively healthy) children, rather than abstaining from having any because they know they will suffer.
Some Saltire pun? Something about thistles? I don’t know.
Couple of quick thoughts on the Scotland thing. Looking over them, they mostly seem to be to do with canards and Failures of Think of the (media-reported) pro-independencers, but as the Yes campaign is actually doing a reasonable job of pointing out the equivalent idiocies on the other side, I’m sure it all balances out in the end:
Exposure Levels
I really tried to ignore the whole thing. I did, honestly. But it’s just the plain weirdness of the phenomenon that got to me.
Let’s start from the beginning. As you may have heard, purported photos of lots of (female) ‘celebrities’ without their clothes on were posted on the controversial online community 4chan. Some of the individuals have denied the photos’ authenticity, some confirmed it but stated that they were private pictures that could not have been leaked, and that some form of active hacking must therefore have taken place.
So far, so tawdry, sleazy and immoral. Human beings like seeing pictures other human beings without their clothes on, particularly if they are human beings they have previously found attractive with some or all of their clothes on. But it’s good manners not to steal such pictures and share them indiscriminately against the individual’s wishes. On this much we can agree.
And then someone opened a new pack of gender-cards to play with. Step forward The Guardian:
Faith Fool
Many people are allergic to the word ‘faith’; in skeptic circles it tends to be used in the sense of “believing in something in the absence of any evidence or rational basis for believing in it.” When non-skeptics say “ah, but everyone has a faith of some kind – yours is just in 'skepticism’ and 'rationality’,” they often respond with anger, vitriol and Richard Dawkins quotes.
I think there is a more useful definition, however:
We all accrue various fragmentary models of reality in relation to aspects of our lives as we go along. We may well think that we have good reasons for using these models, such that they become the default interpretive frameworks in their appropriate contexts – in which case, they can fairly be called 'beliefs’: I believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun (because I find the scientific reasoning behind that supposition convincing), and that societies work better when people better understand one another’s perspective (because many people have observed this throughout history, and because I’m a big old hippy), and that the best remedy for having put too much lemon in a dish is soy sauce (I worked that one out myself); but none of these beliefs impacts greatly on the others - they are, essentially, fragmentary and isolated.
Faith occurs when enough of these fragments of experience, perception and belief coalesce that they form an integrated ontology, a stable and unified way of relating to the world.* Such gestalt perspectives can still be examined and analysed using the same tools of reason, experimentation and contemplation that we often use to determine the validity of our fragmentary beliefs. However, the experience of developing such a gestalt feels very different to the individual – it is an experience of being immersed in a pool, rather than gauging the amount of water left in the kettle, or of being carried along by a strong tidal current, rather than judging the strength of flow from a showerhead.
The defining characteristic of a faith, then, is the sense of surrendering oneself to it; of accepting it not as just an owned fragment of knowledge but as a context that is fundamentally constitutive of one’s being and personality. This is, in essence, to say 'I do not intend to spend much more time questioning the validity of this overall approach – it has come to seem self-evident to me that it is helpful, meaningful and profound, such that I wish to live my whole life, and to engage the world, on the basis of it’.
Such a description can be applied to religious faiths of course (and I believe the above is a more accurate description of the way in which most people come to religious faith than the skeptics’ common assumption that people have somehow been tricked or brainwashed into accepting every dogmatic proposition of the religion in question) – but it is also an appropriate description of the place ideas such as 'rationality’ and 'skepticism’ can play in the lives of the non-religious.
*As we point out in the comments, we actually start out with this kind of integrated ontology, also known as 'just being’, before we start to develop conscious thoughts (and awareness of those thoughts). But we don’t really think of it as an integrated ontology, because we’re too busy sleeping and crying and stuffing our faces with rusks. Some people retain a sense of unified being into adulthood, which forms the basis of their religious faith. But for those of us who discover the joys of existential angst, it’s only after we’ve lost this kind of integration - and then rediscovered it - that we are consciously aware of the presence and significance of it, and are thus drawn to try to rehabilitate the term 'faith’ as something meaningful and valid.
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