the new ussr [illustrated]

an important message

2010-03-14T08:27:00.002+10:30

Please go here for a continuation of this blog.

an individual struggle

2010-03-04T18:29:00.003+10:30

'Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle' [Plato, apparently]

We all suffer from lethargy from time to time, or they may be mood swings, depression. We’re all, I imagine, bipolar to a more or less pathological degree. And we’re driven, not just to keep going, but to improve, to progress, to get smarter and wiser, to experience and learn more. And then we fall into a bit of a funk and feel ashamed, disappointed, overwhelmed by our ignorance, our uselessness, our vanity, our vaunting ambition.

It’s a particular problem, perhaps, of individualism, the myth of the auto-didact, the Nietzschean Ubermensch. I’ve said we, but I have no right to generalize from myself. I wish I was a team player. I wish I had a family of my own. A daughter in which I could recognize something of myself. Myself but more confident, more sociable. More of a team player.

In recent times I’ve been trying to get my head around science, in my dilettantish way. Science, I suppose that reveals the amateurishness of my quest. Not astronomy, not genetics, not oceanography or neurophysiology. Just science. This might seem to suggest ambition, and maybe in my youngers days that might’ve been so, but I’m no longer young, though not old.

It seems to be a search for somewhere to belong. Even a mental place in which to belong. A way of thinking that is mine, and also shared, appreciated, understood, warmly welcomed. Science, or philosophy, something analytical, speculative. A place in which to get lost, safely, delightfully.

Here I am, an unprepossessing member of the species Homo sapiens – I’ve also heard it designated Homo sapiens sapiens, I don’t know why – one of over six billion currently inhabiting the biosphere of this small planet. My essential purpose is to reproduce, like every other member of the species, and like every member of the species Semibalanus balanoides [one of some 1220 species of barnacles], the species Aedes aegypti [one of some 3500 species of mosquito] and the species Nocardia opaca [one of a number of bacterial species, the number being so great, and so much in flux, as to be meaningless]. I haven’t managed to fulfil this purpose, but I’m reliably assured that, given the nature of our highly social existence, there are other ways to contribute to the success of our species. Knowledge, artistic excellence, possibly even a smile displayed at the right time and place. So I need not despair.

I have my heroes, as we all do. Let’s take some big splash-makers – Darwin, Shakespeare, Einstein. All rather remote, I admit. From my life, I mean. My next door neighbour might have led a heroic and admirable life, after all, but those great, instantly recognisable splash-makers at least provide fine examples of success beyond mere reproduction. I know Darwin produced ten kids but they weren’t his most successful productions. It makes me wonder about the meaning of the word offspring. That’s what civilization does to you, it complicates simple meanings with all these metaphorical overlays, confusing the purpose of life.

What is Christian morality? Part 11

2010-03-02T07:37:00.003+10:30

roadsign for the soul - words words words

5:44-48 ....I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors. You’ll then become children of your Father in the heavens. [God] causes the sun to rise on both the bad and the good, and sends rain on both the just and the unjust. Tell me, if you love those who love you, why should you be commended for that? Even the toll collectors do as much, don’t they? And if you greet only your friends, what have you done that is exceptional? Even the pagans do as much, don’t they? To sum up, you are to be unstinting in your generosity in the way your heavenly Father’s generosity is unstinting [see also Luke 6:27-28, Luke 6:34-35].

I’ve always liked the maxim that we should be judged not on how we treat our friends but on how we treat our enemies, but I never associated it with Jesus, I thought it was La Rochefoucauld or someone. The point being that it’s common sense – of course we treat our friends well, of course it’s therefore a good idea to work on our treatment of our enemies, or strangers. To work on your generosity is always good advice, and many ‘sages’ throughout history have given it.

Of course there’s a paradox here. If you really managed to love your enemies they wouldn’t be your enemies – or would they? The renowned antitheist Christopher Hitchens has a real go at the ‘love your enemies’ injunction, calling it suicidal, amongst other choice epithets, and he certainly has a point, but, looking at the phrase in context, we can find a more sympathetic interpretation. Jesus really does seem to be trying to get people to extend the range of their generosity, to consider whether there are good, or good enough reasons to consider certain people our enemies. Often when we make a decision that person x is our enemy, or is a ‘bad’ person, we shut down on them, refusing to listen, referring to our earlier decision. Jesus is arguably saying nothing more than this, that we shouldn’t be too hasty in our judgements, and that we shouldn’t revile people for being different.

On the other hand, if we look at the actual language used, Jesus does seem pretty decisive himself about good people and evil people. This heightens the paradox. Should we really love evil people?

The phrase ‘love your enemies’ has a somewhat similar logical form to the paradoxical phrase coined by the French anarchist Proudhon, ‘Property is theft’. Such phrases have a momentary cleverness, but are soon shown to chase their own tails or to disappear up their own arseholes. To say that property is theft is to legitimise theft and to illegitimise property – both sides of the equation are diminished to the point of meaninglessness. There’s a similar problem with ‘love your enemies’, for if you love your enemies equally with your friends – if you love everyone equally, then the term ‘love’ ceases to have any real meaning, not to mention the terms ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. So why would Jesus have said this? Well, why did Proudhon say property is theft? My favoured response is a rather boring one. They were both only human, they sometimes preferred the flashy to the deep, they didn’t think things through.

Returning to Hitchens’ comment that this philosophy is ‘suicidal’ – this is based on an entrenched attitude about enemies. Our enemies will always be our enemies, they cannot be otherwise. It reflects a kind of evolutionary perspective, where the word ‘enemy’ is synonymous with ‘predator’, someone who threatens our very existence, someone we must either avoid or overcome. It doesn’t seem very useful to love your predator. Indeed it seems suicidal, as Hitchens claims. Better to know your predators, to work out their weaknesses, and to build on your own strengths in combating them.

We humans are inordinately good at that of course, to the point that we have no predators, outside of our own species, to be afraid of. We ourselves have become the most deadly and efficient predators on the planet. Our realisation of this is causing us to rethink notions of predator and prey, and even enemies and friends. A subtle Christian might try to convince us that Jesus anticipated all this with ‘love your enemies’. He was a god, after all. But this would just be another example of seeking other-worldly sources for our own ever-changing and increasingly nuanced view of ourselves. We invest ancient moral statements with all the subtleties that we have gleaned from the intervening years. We do this all the time.

6:3-4 ...when you give to charity, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so your acts of charity may remain hidden. And your Father, who has an eye for the hidden, will applaud you.

Of course it’s impossible to keep your charitable or any other acts hidden from yourself, but the Jesus Seminar has a collective view that Jesus loved such paradoxical remarks. The idea, clearly, is that you shouldn’t do good works for the applause of others, but this is completely undermined by the claim that God will applaud you – thus assuming we still need applause to be charitable. Perhaps, though this is the moral message of Christianity in a nutshell. God will reward you for your good works. Is this the moral foundation of western civilization?

This sort of advice – don’t pray in public but in private, where God, who sees all that’s hidden, will applaud you, and forgive the failings of others because then God will forgive your failings – continues for several more verses. It of course captures the essence of all religious morality, that there are spirits or deities who are consumingly interested in human moral activities, who see clearly the good and bad in everyone and are able to dispense a proper and absolute justice at the end of things. It’s what you might call the ‘constant surveillance’ approach to morality. God’s cctv cameras are everywhere, get used to it and act accordingly.

What is Christian morality? Part 10

2010-03-02T00:28:00.003+10:30

Obama disobeys Jesus

5:21-22 As you know, our ancestors were told, ‘You must not kill’ and ‘Whoever kills will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you: those who are angry with a companion will be brought before a tribunal. And those who say to a companion, ‘You moron,’ will be subject to the sentence of the court. And whoever says, ‘You idiot,’ deserves the fires of Gehenna.

Considering that Jesus himself got a bit shirty with his companion-disciples at times, especially in Mark’s version of events, this condemnation of ill-temper sounds a bit rough. I mean, if you can’t call your mate a moron, where’s the fun in life?

By the way, the term ‘Gehenna’, so much more evocative than ‘hell’, refers to a spot outside Jerusalem where the town’s rubbish was routinely burnt, along with the bodies of crims and the carcases of animals. Some of course dispute such a lowly truth, but they would, wouldn’t they?

5:23-24 So, even if you happen to be offering your gift at the altar and recall that your friend has some claim against you, leave your gift there at the altar. First go and be reconciled with your friend, and only then return and offer your gift.

For those who value friendship, this is a ‘nice’ piece of advice. It also seems typical of Jesus to value substance over form [unless I’m simply creating the Jesus I prefer], and to cock a snook at rigorous and traditional religious practice. Anyway, it’s one of the few of Jesus’s adjurations with which I would wholeheartedly concur.

5:27-28 As you know, we once were told, ‘You are not to commit adultery.’ But I tell you: Those who leer at a woman and desire her have already committed adultery with her in their hearts.

This is a tough one, but we can always rationalize our way out of it. In fact, it’s quite easy. Committing any crime in your heart is vastly removed from actually doing it. Murder is an obvious example. And we don’t punish anyone by law for anything they do ‘in their heart’, for very good reason. I wouldn’t like to guess how many women I’ve ‘committed adultery with’ [I prefer to think of it in fruitier terms] in my heart. Far more than in my bed, sadly. This whole business of thought-criminality is one that should be wholly rejected in my view – and generally it has been. Whether this remark has impacted on western morality, I can’t say. The thing is that lusting after someone who ‘belongs’ to someone, or who is happily devoted to someone else, or who doesn’t know you from a bar of soap, or who actively dislikes you, brings with it a sense of guilt as a matter of course, you feel you are imposing, though since you can convince yourself you’re not imposing that much, the guilt is minimalized and even lends a certain piquancy to the thoughts. Anyway, better a lustful thought than a murderous one. And of course the world of advertising and celebrity culture relies on lust and desire rather heavily – and a surer thing to rely on can hardly be found. I know of at least one female acquaintance who lusts after Barak Obama. Good luck to them I say. Anyway, Jesus just points out that lusting after someone is ‘adultery of the heart’, but he doesn’t call it a sin. Just don’t look at the tenth commandment.

5 33-37 Again, as you know, our ancestors were told, ‘You must not break an oath,’ and ‘Oaths sworn in the name of God must be kept.’ But I tell you: Don’t swear at all. Don’t invoke heaven, because it is the throne of God, and don’t invoke earth, because it is God’s footstool, and don’t invoke Jerusalem, because it is the city of the great king .You shouldn’t swear by your head either, since you aren’t able to turn a single hair either white or black. Rather, your responses should be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Anything that goes beyond this is inspired by the evil one.

Here’s another example of remarks attributed to Jesus that have been ignored by cherry-picking sermonizers down through the ages – though there have been Christians sects, modelled on a return to ‘the true word of Christ’, who have refused to take oaths for religious reasons [e.g. the Waldensians]. And how could any Christian argue with them? In fact, considering the last line here, there’s not much wiggle room for true believers – if you take an oath on the holy book, or on anything, you’re infected by Satan. How could the vast majority of Christians have gotten it so wrong for so many centuries? More positively, Jesus’s message here is that you should just tell the truth and make no fuss about it. Another example of his preference for substance over ritualistic form. Again, not very Catholic.

5: 38-42 As you know, we once were told, ‘An eye for an eye’ and ‘A tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you: Don’t react violently against the one who is evil: when someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other as well. When someone wants to sue you for you shirt, let that person have your coat along with it. Further, when anyone conscripts you for one mile, go an extra mile. Give to the one who begs from you; and don’t turn away the one who tries to borrow from you [see also Luke 6:29-30, Luke 6:34-35].

The scholars of the Jesus Seminar were pretty well unanimous in their conviction that these words about turning the other cheek, offering your coat as well as your shirt, and walking the extra mile, were the authentic words of Jesus. This is quite unusual, they’re generally an admirably sceptical lot. They usually reach such consensus when the words are very striking and paradoxical, when they contain no elements that could be attributed to the struggling, persecuted and sometimes paranoid early Christian community, when they make no exaggerated claims for Jesus himself, when they don’t go on about the Last Days, etc. Of course, I’m a little sceptical myself about whether a ‘real’ Jesus can ever be revealed by the careful removal of what are calculated to be the gospel writers’ innumerable additions and modifications, but the argument for their version of Jesus as a framer of paradoxes and phrases that stick in the mind, creating an oral tradition before the gospel writers got to them and half-mangled them, seems plausible enough. As to the ethical significance of these teachings, certainly they’ve been much sermonised, but few have actually followed Jesus’s advice here. They are much honoured and much ignored ideals. Is that what Christian morality is all about?

Perhaps more importantly, there’s an unhelpful vagueness and lack of detail and context about this advice, which is typical of all Jesus’s pronouncements. What’s meant by ‘the one who is evil’? Someone who annoys us? Someone who steals all our money and murders our children? No distinctions are made. We all know that sometimes turning the other cheek or going the extra mile is precisely the most effective response to mean-spirited or cruel behaviour, but not always, as some people are far less easily shamed than others. Of course, sermonisers often provide the detail and context the gospels lack, but they pull it from their own experience, not from Christ.

What is Christian morality? Part 9

2009-12-29T00:16:00.004+10:30

the good irenic stuff

Matthew

4:1-4 Then Jesus was guided into the wilderness by the spirit to be put to the test by the devil. And after he had fasted ‘forty days and forty nights,’ he was famished. And the tester confronted him and said, ‘To prove you’re God’s son, order these stones to turn to bread.’ He responded, ‘It is written, “Human beings are not to live on bread alone, but on every word that comes out of God’s mouth.’ [see also Mark 1:12-13, Luke 4:1-4]

This testing is very briefly referred to in Mark, but Jesus’s response here doesn’t help us that much. The first part is a commonplace, but the second part is the real issue. God doesn’t talk to us much, though some Christians might disagree. In any case, priests talk to us a lot more. Interesting to find that God has a mouth – Jesus should know. Of course he originally said it in Aramaic, but I notice that the word is used in all translations, so it’s the beginning of a picture. We also have ‘the eyes of the lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth’ [2 Chronicles 16:9], so the guy’s starting to look almost human. I’d be willing to bet though that his mouth is much bigger than any of ours.

5:3-10 Congratulations to the poor in spirit! Heaven’s domain belongs to them. Congratulations to those who grieve! They will be consoled. Congratulations to the gentle! They will inherit the earth. Congratulations to those who hunger and thirst for justice! They will have a feast. Congratulations to the merciful! They will have mercy. Congratulations to those with undefiled hearts! They will see God. Congratulations to those who work for peace! They will be known as God’s children. Congratulations to those who have suffered persecution for the sake of justice! Heaven’s domain belongs to them [see also Luke 6:20-21, Luke 6:24-25].

These are the first words of the sermon on the mount, the good oil. There’s little here to be objected to, except perhaps that it seems to offer rewards only in the next world, or some future world. The term ‘poor in spirit’ might suggest ‘mean-spirited’ or even ‘not very bright’ to a modern reader, but I’m assured that it simply means ‘poor’, which again suggests that Jesus just didn’t like the rich much. For the rest Jesus puts himself squarely on the side of those who suffer or are likely to suffer – the gentle, the merciful, the peacemakers. Of course you could argue that these are the people most easily exploited by false prophets. Why would someone like Jesus go around offering a bright future to those already satisfied with their lot? I’m quite mystified myself as to what he’s up to.

Of course, being poor is not a sign of morality, nor is being in a state of grief. The best spin we can put on it is that he’s setting an example. We all should love the poor, and the grieving, and the gentle and so forth. Is this the foundation of Christian morality, the moral underpinning of Western civilization? If it weren’t for a lot of people becoming convinced that Jesus was a god, I doubt if these words would’ve rung down through the ages. Many similar sentiments have been expressed before and since – for example, scholars have pointed out that Matthew 5:5 [on the gentle] is a reworking of Psalms 37:11.

5:11-12 Congratulations to you when they denounce you and persecute you and spread malicious gossip about you because of me. Rejoice and be glad! Your compensation is great in heaven. Recall that this is how they persecuted the prophets who preceded you [see also Luke 6:22-23, Luke6:26].

Most scholars of the Jesus Seminar would argue that when persecution is the subject, it’s the early Christian community speaking, not Jesus himself. This seems fair enough, but there are obvious problems with always attributing the less palatable, or simply less memorable and striking remarks to the gospel writers rather than to Jesus, as it involves working from a pre-conceived notion of Jesus’s brilliance, or consistency, or particular orientation. If we accept, however, as Christians are expected to do, that every word attributed to Jesus in the gospels was actually spoken by him, then we must accept a contradictory and often confusing ‘teacher’, one more concerned with the political events of his time than with providing an ideal of human behaviour for all time, as well as one subject to moods and variations. The more human, the less ideal and worthy of imitation.

5:13-16 You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its zing, how will it be made salty? It then has no further use than to be thrown out and stomped on. You are the light of the world. A city sitting on top of a mountain can’t be concealed. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a bushel basket but on a lampstand, where it sheds light for everyone in the house. That’s how your light is to shine in the presence of others, so they can see your good deeds and acclaim your Father in the heavens [see also Mark 4:21, Mark 9:50, Luke 8:16, Luke 11:33, Luke 14:34-35].

We continue the sermon on the mountain, which isn’t just about morality but, as in the above passage, also about ‘rallying the troops’. Passages such as this tend to be slated home to Jesus rather than the gospel writers [by the scholars of the Jesus Seminar] because they contain memorable imagery, but unless you think being a member of some elite [or being told you are] makes you a morally better person, I can’t think how such exhortations might contribute to right conduct.

5:20 Let me tell you: unless your religion goes beyond that of the scholars and Pharisees, you won’t set foot in Heaven’s domain.

Here, the term ‘religion’ is virtually synonymous with ‘morality’. In the verses preceding this sentence, Jesus exhorts his hearers to follow Judaic law and the wisdom of the prophets – a ‘back to basics’ approach which is always popular. Jesus would surely have turned Protestant had he lived long enough.

What is Christian morality? Part 8

2009-12-27T13:45:00.003+10:30

12:28-31 And one of the scholars approached when he heard them arguing, and because he saw how skilfully Jesus answered them, he asked him, ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’ Jesus answered: ‘The first is, “Hear, Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord, and you are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul [and all your mind] and with all your energy.” The second is this: “You are to love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ [see also Matt 22:34-40, Luke 10:25-29]

Both of these ‘most important commandments’ can be found in the Old Testament [Deut 6:4-5, Lev 19:18]. The first reiterates what is evident throughout the earlier scriptures, that God is a jealous god, who demands lots of attention and lots of worship. The second is something of a commonplace. Some scholars have suggested that Jesus, or ‘Mark’, was merely echoing the teaching of the famous Rabbi Hillel, an exact contemporary of Jesus. Challenged by some wag to teach him the whole of the Torah while he [the wag] stood on one foot, Hillel provided a version of the golden rule: ‘What you find hateful do not do to another. This is the whole of the law. Everything else is commentary. Now go learn that.’

Some have argued that ‘neighbour’ here means only Jewish neighbours [certainly it does seem to mean this in Leviticus]. That’s to say, it was a call to Jewish solidarity. I don’t think so. To give him his due, Jesus seems genuinely to have reached out beyond his own community. This, I think, is brought out more clearly in the famous sermon in Matthew, as well as some important passages in Luke.

12:38-40 During the course of his teaching he would say: ‘Look out for the scholars who like to parade around in long robes, and insist on being addressed properly in the marketplaces, and prefer important seats in the synagogues and the best couches at banquets. They are the ones who prey on widows and their families, and recite long prayers just to put on airs. These people will get a stiff sentence!’ [see also Matt 23:5-7, Luke 11:43, Luke 20:45-47].

These remarks may have been directed at the Pharisees or other Jewish functionaries, who might’ve been compensating for their lack of any real power under the Romans by doing dress-ups and bumping up the pomp and circumstance, much as the Catholic Church does these days. The final comment about divine justice sounds more like retribution [and wishful thinking] to me.

12:43-44 ‘I swear to you, this poor widow has contributed more than all those who dropped something into the collection box! After all, they were all donating out of their surplus, whereas she, out of her poverty, was contributing all she had, her entire livelihood! [see also Luke 21:3-4].

This observation by Jesus is of course pleasing, but hardly original. As scholars have pointed out, they can be found in rabbinical, Buddhist and ancient Greek texts, and people make the same observations every day, for example on the disproportionate burden upon the poor of a flat tax, without needing to invoke Jesus or Christianity.

That’s about it for Mark, moral-wise. What follows is a passage known as ‘the little apocalypse’, in which Jesus, or ‘Mark’, gives his account of the last days. This is followed by an account of Jesus’s arrest, trial, execution and resurrection. Of course many Christians have drawn sustenance from a description of Jesus’s stoicism through these events, but it’s hard to see how his behaviour provides us with any specific moral guidelines. The stoicism of heroic figures in adversity was of course a commonplace long before Jesus came along, and it’s hard to see how the gospel writers would’ve gotten away with depicting him in any other way. Also, if we take the view that the gospel writers were inheritors of the eyewitness accounts of the disciples, it’s worth noting that the disciples dispersed after Jesus’s arrest, and they certainly weren’t eyewitnesses to his demeanour and remarks during his trial, supposing there was one. That part of the story is as mythical as the accounts of his birth.

Before going on to Matthew I should say that the scholars of the Jesus Seminar, though often divided among themselves, generally take only a fraction of the above [and following] sayings of Jesus to be authentic. Most of the sayings they believe to be the creation of the early Christian community, given a twist by the particular preoccupations and character of the particular gospel writer. For example, Mark seems to emphasise the weakness and obtuseness of the disciples, and often has Jesus castigating them for not listening, for not ‘getting it’, and for being concerned for their own status [eg Mark 10:35-41]. Matthew has a near-obsessive tendency to tie Jesus’s sayings and doings to Old Testament prophecies, for obvious reasons. Luke, generally assumed to be a non-Jewish author, emphasises good works and broader sympathies, as in the Good Samaritan and Prodigal Son parables, whereas John, or the Christian community writing under John’s name, is primarily concerned with Jesus’s status as ‘saviour’. All the gospel writers are, of course, concerned to make claims for the significance of Jesus that he is unlikely to have made for himself. I haven’t been so concerned myself to separate an ‘authentic’ Jesus from a constructed one, partly because I’m sceptical about this being possible, but mainly because I’m looking at the impact upon Western moral praxis of every remark and action attributed to Jesus in the canonical gospels, regardless of their authenticity. In other words, I’m assuming that throughout the history of Christendom, until very recently, everything attributed to Jesus in the New Testament was taken as gospel.

What is Christian morality - part 7

2009-12-25T13:08:00.005+10:30

lashings of Jesus

11:15-19 They come to Jerusalem. And he went into the temple and began chasing the vendors and shoppers out of the temple area, and he turned the bankers’ tables upside down, along with the chairs of the pigeon merchants, and he wouldn’t even let anyone carry a container through the temple area. Then he started teaching and would say to them: ‘Don’t the scriptures say, ‘My house is to be regarded as a house of prayer for all peoples’? – but you have turned it into a ‘hideout for crooks’!’ [see also Matt 21:12-13, Luke 19:45-46, John 2:13-17].

This passage is indicative of Jesus’s adopted role as an unorthodox, reforming rabbi. Clearly, he’s committed to the Judaic religion and wishes to purify it of these course elements. The dark mutterings of the scholars after this event are enough to reveal the danger Jesus was getting into with his uncompromising stance.

Of course there’s an issue around the violence of this episode. It’s dealt with perfunctorily by the gospel writers, but in John an interesting detail is mentioned – he made a whip out of rope and drove them all out of the temple area... [John 2:15]. The pre-meditated decision to fashion a whip suggests more than just a sudden fit of pique. We will never know of course, but there’s surely a hint here of a deliberately confrontational nature. And how does this apparent defence of the orthodox use of the temple fit with Jesus’s unorthodoxy as regards the Sabbath and handwashing? It’s a mystery.

I’m sorry that none of this specifically relates to any unique Christian morality, but I’m afraid there just isn’t that much meat to pick at.

12:1-8 The parable of the leased vineyard [see also Matt 21:33-39, Luke 20:9-15]

This is an interesting and tragic story, repeated in Matthew and Luke, but it’s hard to draw any clear moral from it, other than ‘watch who you lease your vineyard to’.

A farmer leases his vineyard to some other farmers before going abroad. Later he sends a slave to collect his share of the harvest. They beat him up and send him away with nothing. So he sends another, and the same thing happens. Next time he sends someone the person is killed. He sends more slaves, and they’re all either beaten or killed. Finally he sends his beloved son, thinking this time some respect will be shown, but they kill him, hoping that, with the heir out of the way, they will inherit the vineyard.

Of course the story almost begs for an allegorical interpretation, with Jesus as the beloved son, in which case the moral might be that we humans are ungrateful sods, never satisfied with what the good lord gives us, ready to kill for more. It would also have prophetic implications, and you know how these gospellers love a prophecy. Of course, there’s also the possibility that Jesus was simply telling a hard luck story about a guy he knew.

The parable is immediately followed by a question and answer from Jesus: What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come in person, and do away with those farmers, and give the vineyard to someone else. Here we seem to be moving very much into allegorical territory, with the vineyard representing ‘God’s imperial domain’. Moral: if you do bad, no domain for you. Jesus follows this up with a verse [22] from psalm 118: A stone that the builders rejected has ended up as the keystone. It was the Lord’s doing and is something you admire. Presumably this means that God is full of surprises, he moves in mysterious ways, but always ends up making the right decisions. So just follow God. I’m not sure if this helps much for human decision-making.

12:13-17 And they send some of the Pharisees and the Herodians to him to trap him with a riddle. They come and say to him, ‘Teacher, we know that you are honest and impartial, because you pay no attention to appearances, but instead you teach God’s way forthrightly. Is it permissible to pay the poll tax to the Roman emperor or not? Should we pay or should we not pay?’ But he saw through their trap, and said to them, “Why do you provoke me like this? Let me have a look at a coin.’ They handed him a silver coin, and he says to them, ‘Whose picture is this? Whose name is on it?’ They replied, ‘The emperor’s.’ Jesus said to them: ‘Pay the emperor what belongs to the emperor, and God what belongs to God!’ And they were dumbfounded at him [see also Matt 22:15-22, Luke 20:19-26].

Let me give some background to this famous episode. The Romans imposed a special tax on the Jews, which no other colonized peoples had to pay. This might seem discriminatory, but what the Jews received in return was the right to worship their own god. Generally, the Romans expected, as a matter of course, that defeated peoples would adopt the Roman gods as their own, as a symbol of their subjection. No doubt they turned a blind eye to what these people did in the privacy of their homes, as long as they displayed fealty to the Roman gods in public. But the Romans met surprising resistance from the Jews. Not that they were in any way a military threat, but they simply refused to betray their own god, who, as we know, was particularly jealous of other gods, inveighing against them as false idols. The Jews’ attitude was – kill us all if you like, but no way are we going to bow down to those gods. The Romans had no desire to inflict a massacre; it would cause bad blood among other subject nations, and might cost more than a few Roman lives. So they hit upon the idea of a special tax – a win-win situation.

Of course, as is the way with these things, not all Jews were satisfied with this solution. The more radical Jews urged defiance of the Roman authorities and their tax-collecting Jewish proxies [hence the low esteem in which tax collectors are held in the gospels]. Among these radicals were the Essenes, of Dead Sea Scroll fame. They’ve been described as the Taliban of the period [replete with their own cave hideouts], and it’s even been argued that Jesus was one of them, but that he turned his back on them to take a more populist, but also more idiosyncratic, middle line, as represented by this particular story. The Pharisees and Herodians, essentially collaborators, were spying on Jesus and testing him to see where he stood politically. Jesus’s response has been hailed as a prime example of wily evasiveness, while also, of course, carrying an anti-materialist message. Some have also interpreted the message as anti-political, or at least apolitical. It’s an important issue, as the separation of church and state is often defended by the citing of this passage, though I would argue that this separation doctrine, which is only a couple of centuries old, arose out of bitter experience in Europe – for example, the incredibly brutal Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century, as well as the English Revolution, in which the insistence upon the divine right of kings meant that a questioning of the ruler’s authority entailed a disobedience to God. Jesus becomes a useful ally in the development of such a doctrine, but the fact remains that his words are ambiguous.

What is Christian morality - part 6

2009-11-05T12:38:00.003+10:30

essential life lessons: Jesus teaches his mates how to curse a tree with a fish-bowl on your head

10:17-27 someone ran up, knelt before him, and started questioning him: ‘Good teacher, what do I have to do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good except for God alone. You know the commandments: You must not murder, you are not to commit adultery, you are not to steal, you are not to give false testimony, you are not to defraud, and you are to honour your father and mother.’ He said to him, ‘Teacher, I have observed all these things since I was a child!’ Jesus loved him at first sight and said to him, ‘You are missing one thing: make your move, sell whatever you have and give [the proceeds] to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. And then come, follow me!’ But stunned by this advice, he went away dejected, since he possessed a fortune. After looking around, Jesus says to his disciples, ‘How difficult it is for those who have money to enter God’s domain!’ The disciples were amazed at his words. In response Jesus repeats what he had said, ‘Children, how difficult it is to enter God’s domain! It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through a needle’s eye than for a wealthy person to get into God’s domain!’ And they were very perplexed, wondering to themselves, ‘Well then, who can be saved?’ Jesus looks them in the eye and says, ‘For mortals it’s impossible, but not for God; after all, everything’s possible for God.’ [see also Matt 19:16-26, Luke 18:18-27].

This passage has always struck me as one of the most uncompromising in the gospels, and the most embarrassing, because least followed, for any modern Christian. Luckily, Jesus gives everyone an ‘out’ by readily admitting, in the last lines, that it’s impossible for mortals to be saved, given such conditions, so presumably there’s no point in trying. The last line is ambiguous, to say the least – is he saying that it’s easily possible for God to save himself [which is surely absurd], or is he saying that it’s possible for God to save others, even though they can’t save themselves? Perhaps he’s just pointing out that God is ‘powerful as’, which seems a bit beside the point.

One might argue that the whole Christian monastic tradition sprang from these lines, though there are a number of other ‘inspirational’ passages in the Old and New Testaments [for example, the lifestyle of John the Baptist, described in Matthew 3], and there are people even today who abandon all their wordlies for a life ‘devoted to Christ’, but it’s by no means a popular tradition. It seems that the most popular Pentecostal-type churches of today tend to wallow in their own opulence. Who of all these people can be saved?

The problem here of course is that the wealth/poverty distinction is surely no guarantee of moral worth/worthlessness, however much we might assume that the rich are more ‘corrupt’. Elsewhere Jesus congratulates the ‘poor in spirit’, for they’ll surely inherit God’s domain. Why? No explanation is given. So not only are we offered no moral guidance, but the issue seems to be deliberately confused by introducing anti-materialism as a ‘good’ without providing any grounding for this attitude.

10:42-45 ‘You know how those who supposedly rule over foreigners lord it over them, and how their strong men tyrannize them. It’s not going to be like that with you! With you, whoever wants to become great must be your servant, and whoever among you wants to be ‘number one’ must be everybody’s slave. After all, the son of Adam didn’t come to be served, but to serve, even to give his life as a ransom for many.’ [see also Matt 20:24-28, Luke 22:24-27]

These words are spoken in the context of a couple of disciples bugging Jesus about which of them would be sitting at his right hand ‘in his glory’, that’s to say, in the glory days of God’s imperial domain. The squabbling and dim-witted nature of the disciples is something of a theme in Mark. It’s also quite obviously spoken in the context of Judaea’s colonisation by the Romans. Jesus inverts the expected order, the greatest being the most effective servant, or the lowliest, just as ‘Many of the first will be last, and of the last many will be first’ [Mark 10:31]. Jesus shrewdly promises that the domain of the guy who might be his Dad will be a different kettle of roses altogether, though no bed of fish [just in case you were falling asleep]. There’s also of course the observation that it’s Good to serve, which again isn’t particularly original.

11:12-14 On the next day, as they were leaving Bethany, he got hungry. So when he spotted a fig tree in the distance with some leaves on it, he went up to it expecting to find something on it. But when he got right up to it, he found nothing on it except some leaves. [You see, it wasn’t ‘time’ for figs.] And he reacted by saying: ‘May no one so much as taste your fruit again!’ And his disciples were listening.

11:20-25 As they were walking along early one morning, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots up. And Peter remembered and says to him: ‘Rabbi, look, the fig tree you cursed has withered up!’ In response Jesus says to them: ‘Have trust in God. I swear to you, those who say to this mountain, ‘Up with you and into the sea!’ and do not waver in their conviction, but trust that what they say will happen, that’s the way it will be. This is why I keep telling you, trust that you will receive everything you pray and ask for, and that’s the way it will turn out. And when you stand up to pray, if you are holding anything against anyone, forgive them, so your father in heaven may forgive your misdeeds.’ [see also Matt 6:14-15, Matt 17:20, Matt 21:18-22, Luke 6:37, Luke 17:6, John 14:13-14, John 15:7, John 15:16, John 16:23-26].

The best New Testament scholars, who are always on the lookout for the authentic words and deeds of Jesus, supposing there are any, and disentangling them from the propaganda and aspirations of the early Christian community and the gospels writers who were part of that community, are naturally drawn to stories such as this of the fig tree. The story, or at least some of it, has an authentic ring to it. It’s even quite funny in a Pythonesque way. I particularly like the sentence ‘And the disciples were listening.’ Poor old Jesus, caught without his make-up on. I like to wonder what words he used when he cursed the tree. Maybe it was nothing more than ‘you unpleasant, thoughtless little tree’, but then that wouldn’t be much of a curse would it? Of course, the gospel writer wouldn’t have had much trouble transforming this story into a very minor miracle. The tree was probably half dead anyway, but I prefer to imagine it was Jesus whodunit, by shaking and throttling and kicking the tree in his temper [naturally played down in the story]. He’s bad.

I also like the way Jesus ‘recovers’ in the second part of the story, by diverting attention from his embarrassing outburst as well as utilizing it: faith can move mountains [and wither fig trees, but let’s not dwell on that], and uhhh... forgiveness, yes forgiveness, when you ask for things, always remember to forgive everyone a lot, because then God’ll look kindly on you...

But that fig tree, Jesus...

Look, forget the bloody fig tree... think of mountains and... and forgiveness and all that...

But you...

What is Christian morality - part 5

2009-11-04T08:35:00.005+10:30

The Jesus industry - a $100 book presumably based on a few words in Mark

The book of Mark, continued

7:14-15 Listen to me, all of you, and try to understand! It’s not what goes into a person from the outside that can defile; rather it’s what comes out of the person that defiles [see also Matt 15:10-11].

Again this is more a jibe at orthodox Judaism, with its obsessions about oral defilement and food prohibitions, than a moral truth, though of course it does have moral implications – what we say and what we do, whatever springs from us, is what we should be judged by. In case we don’t get the idea, Jesus elaborates it at some length [Mark 7:18-23], but you could hardly describe it as insightful stuff.

9:42-48 ‘And those who mislead one of these little trusting souls would be better off if they were to have a millstone hung around their necks and were thrown into the sea! And if your hand gets you into trouble, cut it off! It is better for you to enter life maimed than to wind up in Gehenna, in the unquenchable fire, with both hands! And if your foot gets you into trouble, cut it off! It is better for you to enter life lame than to be thrown into Gehenna with both feet! And if your eye gets you into trouble, rip it out! It is better for you to enter God’s domain one-eyed than to be thrown into Gehenna with both eyes, where the worm never dies and the fire never goes out!’ [see also Matt 5:29-30, Matt 18:6-9, Luke 17:2]

What are we to make of this famous but strange passage? The last words, about eternal fire, are cribbed from Isaiah 66:24. Richard Dawkins, of course, would applaud the first sentence about misleading children, but the passage generally is just a striking way of saying that we must reform ourselves even if it means deforming ourselves. It would have been particularly striking in Jesus’s day, when deformities were considered abhorrent. Yet, apart from its striking formulation, and the notion of Gehenna or Hell, which is thankfully foreign to most modern sensibilities, the idea is familiar enough. I recall in my younger days that my eyes so troubled me, so guilty did I feel about the ‘male gaze’ so castigated by feminists of the time, that I made conscious efforts, when out and about, to stare at the pavement, or to focus specifically on elements of architecture or interior design, to make myself ‘blind’ to attractive passersby or party guests. Here we have the same idea, rendered apocalyptically. I doubt that my response to my troubles was inspired by this passage. These are issues around desire, temptation and control that humans have wrestled with since long before Jesus’s advent.

10:3-12 ‘What did Moses command you?’ They replied, ‘Moses allowed one to prepare a writ of abandonment and thus to divorce the other party.’ Jesus said to them, ‘He gave you this injunction because you are obstinate. However, in the beginning, at the creation, ‘God made [them] male and female. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother [and be united with his wife], and the two will become one person,’ so they are no longer two individuals but ‘one person’. Therefore those God has coupled together, no one else should separate.’ And once again, as usual, the disciples questioned him about this. And he says to them, ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery’ [see also Matt 5:31-32, Matt 19:3-9, Luke 16:18].

This passage, some of which is still used today in Christian marriage ceremonies, has no doubt been influential. Jesus here shows himself to be stricter than ‘Moses’ [i.e. Judaic tradition] on the permanence of marriage – though an exception is made in the case of the wife’s infidelity in Matt 5:32, another example of inconsistency in the reported ‘message’. This may well have led to a tightening of marriage laws once Christianity became the ruling religion in the west. Whether this would have been better or worse for society is of course a huge question – but essentially an empirical one, and thus answerable. Regardless of the answer, though, I’m prepared to concede that the Christian concept of marriage – particularly the heavy notion that these two people have been joined for all their lives by God, has profoundly affected and reinforced notions of commitment and family. This is not, of course, a statement of approval or disapproval, but it’s an acknowledgement that Jesus, or the gospel writers, came out strongly on this matter, with little room for interpretation. Nevertheless, different Christian denominations, and before that different Popes, have chopped and changed on the sanctity or indissolubility of marriage.

10:14-16 ‘Let the children come up to me, don’t try to stop them. After all, God’s domain is peopled with such as these. I swear to you, whoever doesn’t accept God’s imperial rule the way a child would, certainly won’t ever set foot in [his domain]!’ And he would put his arms around them and bless them, and lay his hands on them [see also Matt 18:3, Matt 19:14-15, Luke 18:16-17].

This is one of a few examples of Jesus’s kindness towards children. I don’t think too much should be made of this, as we’re all drawn to innocence, not always for innocent reasons. It will no doubt seem grossly offensive to some that I’m reminded in this context of footage of Adolf Hitler laying his hands on and smiling affectionately at children. I saw this as a child, and it left an indelible impression. It made me aware that these moments of tenderness and affection, which might be quite frequent, are not what we should judge, it’s the totality of a person’s life and actions.

Of course, the call to accept religion like a child, unquestioningly, is not quite as acceptable as it once may have been.

what is Christian morality? Part 4

2009-10-23T08:59:00.003+10:30

Jesus and the mythology of family

3:31-35 Then his mother and his brothers arrive. While still outside, they send in and ask for him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they say to him, ‘Look, your mother and your brothers [and sisters] are outside looking for you.’ In response he says to them: ‘My mother and brothers – who ever are they?’ And looking right at those seated around him in a circle, he says, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does God’s will, that’s my brother and sister and mother!’ [see also Matt 12:46-50, Luke 8:19-21; for other negative remarks about family, see Matt 10:35-37, Luke 12:52-53, Luke 14:26]

This story seems to reveal some family tensions, but the message is clear enough. Of course, it’s not one we associate with modern Christianity. Rather, we associate it with new cults, which Christianity once was – in fact we’ve got a snapshot here of the cult before it became Christianity. The cult becomes the new Family – if others in your family don’t want to join the cult, abandon them and join your new brothers and sisters under God, or the new Messiah, or whoever. Many new cult leaders don’t get on with their own families. Jesus’s family thought he was mad [Mark 3:21], and he very likely felt the need to be clear of them in order to be taken seriously. One can sympathise, but it does raise doubts about the traditional family values theme of conservative Christianity. Such values may or may not be Christian, but they weren’t affirmed by Jesus in this passage. One has always to remember that Jesus himself was never a Christian, though Christianity may have derived from him.

This is a good place to reflect on all Jesus’s remarks about family. Of these, probably the most shocking is the one in Luke 14:26: If any come to me and do not hate their own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters – yes, even their own life – they cannot be my disciples. Seems fairly clear-cut. In order to be a follower of Jesus – what was later called a Christian -you have to hate every member of your family, as well as yourself. I wonder why this passage isn’t more well-known? On the basis of this passage alone, one would surely have to conclude that Jesus was completely opposed to ‘traditional family values’. Or was he just having a little joke?

In Matthew 10:35-37 [and similarly in Luke 12:52-53] Jesus claims that he has come to bring conflict rather than peace, and especially conflict within families: I have come to pit a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A person’s enemies are members of the same household. Jesus is by no means a family man. It’s unlikely that even the most ingenious sermonisers could spin that one around. For example, you won’t find much in the way of off-setting positive remarks about family to cherry-pick [but see Mark 7:9-13 below]. Clearly, ‘family values’ conservatism does not derive from the teachings of Jesus, it just thinks it does.

4:3-8 The parable of the sower.

This is the first recorded parable of the canonical gospels, repeated in Matthew 13:3-8 and Luke 8:5-8. I won’t quote it in full here, nor will I comment on the lengthy explanation of it that follows [Mark 4:13-21]. The story, well-known enough, is about a farmer’s seed falling in four different places; by the path [eaten by birds], on rocky ground [it sprouted quickly but couldn’t take deep root and was burned off by the sun], among thorns [where it couldn’t compete and bore no fruit] and in good deep soil [where it thrived and bore fruit]. Jesus’s explanation reveals, or strongly suggests, that he’s talking about his message – i.e. God’s imperial rule. In some people it will take root, in some not. In the broadest sense it’s about receptivity to ideas, but I don’t think there’s any great ethical dimension to this.

4:24-25 And he went on to say to them: ‘Pay attention to what you hear! The standard you apply will be the standard applied to you, and then some. In fact, to those who have, more will be given, and from those who don’t have, even what they do have will be taken away!’ [see also Matt 7:2, Matt 13:12, Matt 25:29, Luke 6:38, Luke 8:18, Luke 19:26]

This is another troubling passage, oft-repeated, which would require some sermonising work, to make it ‘obvious’ that Jesus isn’t talking of material possessions here, he’s probably talking of, say, holy spirit. If you have lots of holy spirit inside you, you’ll be given more, come God’s imperial rule. If you haven’t enough, what you do have will be taken away – perhaps to render you fit for eternal damnation. Clearly, those with lots of the holy stuff inside them are morally superior to those with little, but this doesn’t offer us much in the way of moral guidance.

7:5-13 the Pharisees and the scholars start questioning him: ‘Why don’t your disciples live up to the tradition of the elders, instead of eating bread with defiled hands?’ And he answered them, ‘How accurately Isaiah depicted you phonies when he wrote: This people honors me with their lips, but their heart stays far away from me. Their worship is empty, because they insist on teachings that are human commandments. You have set aside God’s commandment and hold fast to human tradition!’ Or he would say to them, ‘How expert you’ve become at putting aside God’s commandment to establish your own tradition. For instance Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’ and ‘Those who curse their father or mother will surely die.’ ‘But you say, If people say to their father or mother, “Whatever I might have spent to support you is korban”’ [which means ‘consecrated to God’], you no longer let those persons do anything for their father or mother. So you end up invalidating God’s word with your own tradition, which you then perpetuate. And you do all kinds of other things like that!’ [see also Matt 15:1-9]

This passage provides an interesting example of Jesus as unorthodox rabbi. Certainly Jesus in this gospel spends far more time arguing with the traditionalists over ritual matters [as well as exorcising demons and performing miracles] than he does pontificating on real moral issues.

It’s worth noting though that, in this dispute with the Pharisees, Jesus picks out the ‘honour your parents’ commandment as being defiled by them. The basic idea is that the Pharisaic notion of ‘korban’, consecrating certain goods to God, allows those goods to be subtracted from whatever is owed to the devotee’s parents. Whether or not Jesus’s accusation is correct, he seems to have forgotten that he himself has refused to even recognize his own mother. I’m sure Socrates would never have been so glaringly inconsistent.

What is Christian morality? Part 3

2009-10-17T09:38:00.005+10:30

Mark

1:15 The time is up: God’s imperial rule is closing in. Change your ways, and put your trust in the good news! [see also Matt 3:2, Matt 4:17, Matt: 10:7, Luke 10:9-11]

This is Mark’s summary of the message of Jesus, placed before he actually starts telling Jesus’s story. It morally exhorts people to change their ways – pretty vague - and provides a rationale. That is, if you don’t change you’ll miss out, because with the new rule will come God’s judgement, presumably. It’s the old story of year zero, renewal, the blank state – one of the oldest tricks in the book, and not original to the gospels or the Bible. Matthew [3:2] puts more or less the same words in the mouth of John the Baptist.

1:17 Become my followers and I’ll have you fishing for people! [see also Matt 4:19, Luke 5:10]

This is the first, and probably most well-known, of a number of calls to possible recruits, made much of in subsequent sermons. To be a good Christian you have to spread the word. Hard put to find anything ethical in this, though it might require bravery and self-sacrifice.

2:5 Child, your sins are forgiven [see also Matt 9:2, Luke 5:20, John 5:14].

This isn’t so much about right conduct, but I think it’s crucial. The remark, directed at a paralysed child, whom Jesus also cures, is soon followed by outraged comments from some scholars listening in. They question, not surprisingly, the moral authority of Jesus. It also, of course, suggests a connection commonly made in this era, but rejected by the modern world; a connection between ‘sin’ and sickness or injury.
When we’re young, the moral authority generally comes from our parents. They have a near-absolute power to punish us or forgive us. Who hasn’t experienced the fear and anxiety of waiting for their judgement? When, say, you’ve broken something precious in the family home. They might just forgive you if you have a good explanation or show sufficient remorse. And their response will have some effect, however slight, on how you behave, and how you justify your behaviour in future. Of course, your parents are unlikely to say, we forgive you for everything bad you’ve done in the past, and you probably wouldn’t know how to take it if they did. You may well even lose respect for them, for this undiscriminating forgiveness. Does this mean they’ll forgive you for all the bad things you do in the future too?
The point is that forgiveness isn’t really what we want, or need. What we need is justice and consistency, together with an understanding of and sympathy for our human frailties.

2:17 I did not come to enlist religious folks but sinners! [see also Matt 9:13, Luke 5:32, Luke 19:10]

This remark emphasises the Christian appeal to outsiders – the sinners, the lost, the marginalised. Also the sceptics, and those who were dissatisfied with the current Judaic orthodoxy. As a recruiting slogan, it’s probably quite effective, and I’m sure missionaries use it still. But even if we choose not to treat this openness cynically, it tells us little about the moral behaviour expected of those recruited.

2:22 And nobody pours young wine into old wineskins, otherwise the wine will burst the skins, and destroy both the wine and the skins. Instead, young wine is for new wineskins [see also Matt 9:17, Luke 5:37-39].

This ‘common wisdom’ remark is made in the context of a dispute with the Pharisees and the disciples of John the Baptist regarding religious traditions, especially fasting. Assuming Jesus was a real person, his fame or notoriety during his lifetime would’ve sprung from his religious heterodoxy. The Messianic and deistic claims would’ve come later, largely. Jesus here is comparing himself to a young wine, which needs a new container or framework to be fully appreciated. Again, this is about renewal and year zero. However, in Luke 5:39 Jesus adds this assertion: Besides, nobody wants young wine after drinking aged wine. As they say, ‘Aged wine is just fine’. This is of course generally true of wines, but how does it relate to Jesus’s ‘new’ teaching and the traditional teaching of the Pharisees? It’s completely confusing, and has no doubt been ignored by sermonisers, but these are the anomalies that the sceptic has to highlight. No doubt it can be explained by the gospel writers’ own confusions as to what they’re trying to say, or get Jesus to say.

2:27-28 The sabbath day was created for Adam and Eve, not Adam and Eve for the sabbath day. So, the son of Adam lords it even over the sabbath day [see also Matt 12:8, Luke 6:5].

3:4 On the sabbath day is it permitted to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it? [see also Matt 12:10-12, Luke 6:9]

Probably Jesus’s most interesting remarks so far, again made in the context of a dispute with the Pharisees, this time over the sabbath. Essentially it’s a liberal v conservative dispute, with the conservatives emphasising tradition and the liberal Jesus emphasising freedom and the priority of people over tradition. We should be in charge of tradition, tradition shouldn’t be in charge of us. I’m not sure if this is an example of Christian morality, but it’s worth reflecting on in the light of the Catholic Church, for example.

3:28 I swear to you, all offenses and whatever blasphemies humankind might blaspheme will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit is never ever forgiven, but is guilty of eternal sin [see also Luke 12:10].

This is the first nasty pronouncement. To a modern reader, it might seem almost meaningless. What is the holy spirit anyway? Have I just blasphemed against it by wondering what it is? Why are other blasphemies forgivable? A blasphemy by definition involves using the name of a god in a non-religious way, or in a way disapproved of by religious authority. Of course by this definition, god’s name is used blasphemously far more often than in any other way these days, at least in this part of the world. Jesus seems to be saying that a blasphemy against a god is forgivable, but one against the god in its manifestation as the holy spirit is not. It might be argued that he’s distinguishing between the letter of god and the spirit, it being much worse to blaspheme against the spirit, or the very idea of god. That, however, would surely be an unacceptably modern take on Jesus’s actual words. Such passages seem to me to indicate the obvious; that Jesus, however constructed, was a creature of his time, and all too human.
Perhaps more interesting is the distinction here between eternal sin and the ordinary garden variety. Eternal, unforgivable sin presumably dooms you to the forever fires of hell. So you’d better brush up on your holy spirit, brethren. We’re very far here from the gentle, forgiving Jesus of Christian spin.

What is Christian morality? Part 2

2009-09-15T07:41:00.007+09:30

I'm having some blog troubles, but here at last is part 2 of my longest essay [12,000 words and still incomplete].

Still I intend to stumble on. I’ve decided to base my exploration of Christian morality on the first, tightest definition above, and as my source and guide, I am relying on the collaborative work The Five Gospels: What did Jesus really say? The search for the authentic words of Jesus, published by a group of New Testament scholars collectively known as The Jesus Seminar. However, I’ve chosen to ignore the fifth gospel, Thomas, because, however authentic it may be as a representation of Jesus, it has remained ‘buried’ for almost all the Christian era, only coming to light in the twentieth century. My aim here is not to uncover the ‘real’ Jesus, but to answer the question in the essay’s title, with an eye to the influence of Christian morality on our society.
There’s a question as to whether Christian morality is really Christian, in the sense that what we call the west has been dominated by Roman Catholicism, and the Protestant reactions to it. The central figure in Catholicism was Paul of Tarsus, not Jesus. Paul knew virtually nothing of the life and teachings of Jesus, and it certainly shows in his writings. Though Paul often extolled Jesus as the son of God, something never claimed by the gospel writers [though John came as close as may be] he was notoriously vague on the details. However, he was the first to commit to writing what seems to have been an oral tradition [albeit only twenty or thirty years old] which underpinned the fledgling religion.

That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised up on the third day according to the scriptures. [1 Cor 15:3-5 – New International Version]

This idea that Jesus [but now, importantly, identified as Christ] died for our sins is arguably more important for Christian morality than any of the parables and pronouncements, so it’s worth dwelling on. It’s not particularly easy to get your head around the concept. Much has been made, usually in very negative terms, of the relationship between this idea and the idea of the scapegoat, an animal ritually slaughtered to wash away the crimes of the community with its blood. This idea, that you can do what you like, individually or communally, as long as you perform the requisite sacrifice afterwards, is of course anathema to most modern sensibilities, even though it still exists, in modified form, in the Catholic confession, in which you’re encouraged to ‘come clean’. Ideas around purification and cleanliness are of course integral to all religions, but, to be fair, the idea of the scapegoat or the Christ-figure, permitting believers to get away with anything because some other person or animal has ‘taken on’ their sins, seems inadequate. Whatever the idea means, it has rarely been used as a recipe for anarchy or moral licence. There is surely a sense in which Christ’s death, and the idea that he had to die for our sins, is an attempt to focus on sin itself, on its enormity. The wages of sin is death – that seems, at least partly, to be the message.
But if Christ’s dying for our sins doesn’t mean that we can sin with impunity, what does it mean, and what difference does his dying for such a purpose make? There’s an elaboration in the first book of Peter:

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed [1 Peter 2:24 – New International Version].

We carry our sins about like injuries or scars – if we could be magically absolved of them we’d be healed, and this would be like a rebirth, encouraging us to go off and sin no more. It can be a powerful idea, especially as a tool to convert non-Christians - though you’d first have to convince them of the whole concept of sin and its associated burden of guilt – but it is only indirectly a moral idea. It’s the idea that you’ll be a better person if all of the bad things you’ve done in the past could be wiped away – the ever-attractive myth of the blank slate and the new leaf. The trouble is that the convert or the born-again can’t keep on wiping clean the slate or turning over the leaf – they have to learn to settle down with the same old same old sinning self.
More importantly, none of this gives us half a clue as to what sins are, and how to ‘live righteously’. So what did Jesus himself –real or constructed – teach us about right conduct?
So let’s look closely at the canonical gospels [there are some thirty or so different gospel texts or fragments, and many were destroyed during the early Christian era] to see if anything coherent and foundational can be derived from Jesus’s moralising pronouncements and stories, and exemplary acts, described therein. In doing so, I’ll follow the order of the gospels in The Five Gospels. While there is endless contestation in this field, the majority of New Testament scholars agree that Mark is the oldest of the extant gospel writings, dating from around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE. I should also point out that, due to the repetition of stories and remarks, particularly in the synoptic gospels, most of the analytical work will be done in looking at the first gospels in this order. In any case the gospel of John contains no parables at all, and it concerns itself much more with the status of Jesus than with moral issues.

What is Christian morality? Part 1

2009-08-17T13:56:00.002+09:30

Here is the first 1000 words or so of my essay on this subject [unfinished as yet].

You hear it endlessly, and not just from Christians. Christianity provides the ethical bedrock of western civilization. I’ve never been convinced, but how can it be proven or disproven?

Well, the first thing to do is to define terms. So what exactly is Christian morality?

I can think of three definitions, each one more expansive than the last.

1. It is any morality that can be derived from the teachings of Jesus - the Sermon on the Mount, the parables and other incidental remarks, found in the gospels.
2. It’s any morality that can be derived from the Bible in general – the Decalogue, the proverbs and psalms – but particularly the New Testament [the teachings of Paul and the other epistle writers as well as Jesus].
3. It’s all of the above plus any morality that can be derived from any teacher, from Augustine of Hippo to Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Simone Weil, whose thinking is inspired by Christianity - including all the sermons of all the parish priests throughout Christendom and beyond throughout the last two millennia.

The trouble with this nest of definitions is that each one’s not only more expansive, but also more diffuse and, arguably, more untenable. For example, as many observers have mentioned, and as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Christian sermons and commentaries tend to track changes in our moral outlook. The fire and brimstone sermons, so common in the nineteenth century, and so powerfully rendered in James Joyce’s goodbye-to-all-that novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are long gone, and we now have ‘eco-Christianity’, as well as a Christianity celebrating multiculturalism and diversity and inter-faith dialogue, and we have female and gay clerics in some denominations. These are developments that secularists would argue, pretty convincingly, are driven by forces external to Christianity, but many Christians argue, also pretty convincingly to some people, that it’s a return to ‘real’ Christianity, that Christianity has always been about environmentalism [who urged us to consider the lilies?], embracing all cultures [like the good Samaritan] and ways of life [fisher folk, beggars, tax collectors, laundresses].

I’ve known Christians who ‘shop around’ for priests who give sermons they approve of. In fact, I’m sure this is commonplace. If you’re a liberal, you’ll just be annoyed by a conservative anti-gay sermon. The priest just hasn’t absorbed the message of Jesus correctly, so then you’ll find a parish where the message is right. Sometimes the message will be so liberal that the priest will be in trouble with the higher church authorities, and, if he’s Catholic, excommunication might be in the air, and heresy, and heroism, and martyrdom. The embattled priest will collect a loyal flock of followers, he will take his stand for true Christianity, he might even hint that this is where Jesus Christ himself stood against the Pharisees, and what could possibly be more Christian than that?

It does seem, on the face of it, that the life and teaching of Jesus, with his emphasis on the meek, on children, on the poor, his generally positive attitude to women, and his emphasis on faith over strict ritual observance and tradition, offers more to the left side of politics than the right, so it might seem strange that, especially in the US, it’s the other side that’s making the most fuss about Christian values. What the Christian right seems to be emphasising is ‘traditional family values’, including a puritanical attitude towards sex, regular church attendance, hard work, clean living, and a spreading of the gospel message [the message being no sex outside marriage, regular church attendance, hard work and clean living, etc]. I just wonder if this was what Jesus, or the gospel writers who put the words into his mouth, were really on about.

I think it’s undoubtedly true that, since the rise to power of Christianity, a huge volume of ethical claims and pronouncements have been made in its name. Indeed, until a couple of centuries ago, just about every ethical pronouncement – with the notable exception of those made by a handful of secular philosophers like Spinoza and Hume – was made in the name of the Judaeo-Christian god and his son, the other and same Judaeo-Christian god.

However, this doesn’t mean that Christianity forms the bedrock of our ethics, because I strongly suspect that, had Christianity never risen to power, the volume of ethical pronouncements made over the past millennium or two would’ve been about the same, and their quality would’ve been about the same too, only they would’ve been made in the name of other gods and other religions, or maybe they would’ve been made in the ethicists’ own name, as with the ethics of Aristotle or the moral letters of Seneca or the essays of Montaigne. What Christianity did, through Catholicism, and the later Protestant sects who largely kept the Catholic model, was to provide a structure and a building program which encouraged people to congregate at particular designated sites to listen to sermons and homilies from more or less wise and charismatic characters. This provided them with an ethical education and a sense of community and solidarity – not to mention a focus for networking, deals and gossip.

What I’m suggesting is that Christianity was always a vague, catch-all term, allowing people to come together and celebrate and reinforce their conservative or liberal views, pat each other on the back, and selectively quote scriptural stuff to each other. It’s this vagueness that is the key to its success. Jesus, insofar as his teachings have been paid any mind at all, was a man for all seasons, but above all he has become a symbol of positivity – kindness, charity, forgiveness, love. Who can turn their backs on such grand themes? Only evil people, surely. And we can all work out the details for ourselves.

In this essay I was hoping to try to separate the accretions – the sermons, the infinite commentaries and elaborations, and the myth-making – from the actual words and deeds attributed to Jesus in the gospels. Sounds simple, and no doubt it has been attempted many times before, but immediately difficulties arise. For a start, the four canonical gospels were written in Koine Greek [though even this has been contested – some argue for a missing ur-text, perhaps written in Hebrew]. The first, and perhaps only, language of Jesus was probably Aramaic – though some disagree. So how much has been lost or distorted in translation? Jesus may [or may not] have died in the mid thirties CE, while the first extant gospel was [probably] that of Mark, written about 70CE [a date which is the centre of a great storm of contestation].

Each of the gospel texts is stylistically unique, and there are contradictions amongst them, as well as different emphases. Further, there are other gospel texts to be considered, most notably Thomas. How reliable is this text? Why was it excluded from the canon? Should it simply be ignored because, not having been included in the canon, it has had little impact on the subsequent development of Christianity?

Opening the chinks of reason

2009-06-02T18:11:00.001+09:30

This evening, in a news report about Jewish settlements in the occupied territories – the new US administration is trying to pressure the Israeli government into halting the spread of these settlements – a Jewish settler was interviewed. Her remarks, as presented, were brief.

'People say we shouldn't be building here because it's Arab land, but that's not accurate. This is Jewish land, given to us by God.'

Such arrogant claims aren't likely to endear themselves to a secular audience, and yet, on reflection, there was one word in this small stream that shone out like a glimmer of hope. That word was 'accurate'. While not exactly a scientific word, it's a word science is fond of. Accuracy in measurement, accuracy of results, accurate experiments, accurate targeting. It's a word much associated with reason, and it tends to draw attention to itself as such. So when somebody says, 'uhh, excuse me, but that's not accurate', it alerts you. You eagerly await the details of this inaccuracy.

So the second sentence above seems a grotesque anti-climax, both hilarious and tragic, like much religious belief.

The hope lies in the choice of the word 'accurate', the appeal to reason of some kind, some claim to objectivity. The person using that word wishes to invoke an objective truth-claim, offering some hope that she can be reasoned with.

Since my youth I've always fantasised that people could be swayed, their certitudes undermined, via the Socratic method. Get as many people to talk like Socrates as possible and the world would be a much more sociable and reasonable place. My growing awareness that I was too hot-headed, emotional and impatient to hold down the Socratic role for more than thirty seconds in 'real life' only served to make the fantasy more enticing. I talked rationally enough to myself – at least from time to time.

Socrates: Good afternoon, Hannah, how is the building going?

Hannah: Slowly Socrates, slowly, but God willing it will be complete before my sister gives birth in August.

Socrates: And are you feeling any pressure, Hannah? I couldn't help but overhear what you said to that journalist just now.

Hannah: Ah, I should've known you would bring that up, you can always be counted on to sniff out a dispute. No, I feel no pressure Socrates, God is on my side.

Socrates: No doubt, Hannah, but I was interested in the precise words you used. You said, did you not, that it is not accurate to say this is Arab land?

Hannah: That's right.

Socrates: It's more accurate to say that God gave you and your people this land. Correct?

Hannah: Correct.

Socrates: A little more accurate or a lot more accurate?

Hannah: Socrates, I know you're trying to trip me, but it's completely accurate. It's the truth.

Socrates: Right, completely true then. And the claim that this is Arab land is completely false, even though the Arabs vehemently say it's true.

Hannah: We have God's word on it.

Socrates: And do you think that you've convinced the journalist, and the global audience he reports to, of the accuracy of your claim?

Hannah: The world can think what it wants, Socrates, the truth is the truth.

Socrates: But Hannah, surely you are concerned with what the world thinks, otherwise why would you talk to the journalist and point out the inaccuracy of one group's claims to this land, and the accuracy of another's? You recognise that there are standards of accuracy, measures of accuracy, do you not?

Hannah: Yes of course.

Socrates: Universal standards of accuracy, recognised by everyone we can imagine this journalist's report reaching – the Russans of the Steppes, the Australians of the Outback, the Americans of the Prairie, the Chinese of the Provinces, the Italians of the Alps, the Indians in their crowded cities. You accept that all these people will have standards of accuracy, and that they may agree with each other on these standards, as they apply to different measurable entities?

Hannah: Well, no, I'm not so sure about that. I think there would be a lot of disagreement.

Socrates: Well maybe there would be some entities that people will agree can be measured accurately – the height of a mountain, say, whereas others are not so easy to agree on, as for example your case.

Hannah: There is no measuring in the case I put forward Socrates. Who can measure God?

Socrates: The God who gave you this land?

Hannah: There is no other God.

Socrates: So you say, Hannah, but where I came from people believed in many gods, a squabbling nest of gods. Out in the wider world, the world this reporter reports to, there are also many gods, with strange names, gods you and I have little inkling of, just as some of the people out there have little inkling of your god. You are claiming, I presume, that their gods are all false, even though these people believe in their gods as fervently as you believe in your god, and would if asked, presumably say that it is your god who is false. Do you agree that they would most likely say that?

Hannah: Most likely.

Socrates: Most likely indeed, for these are the matters upon which people most fervently disagree, is that not so?

Hannah: Yes, history shows this. Let me assure you I'm not a fool Socrates.

Socrates: I've never thought so, for I recognise and admire your great concern for accuracy, in this and in all matters. But here we have reached an impasse. You say there is one god, your god, the Jewish god, and that this land was given to you by that god. The Arabs in this neighbourhood say it is their land and, though I haven't spoken to them, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they claimed this land in accordance with their own god. How can this situation be resolved?

Hannah: For me it is already resolved. We are on this land and we will remain on it.

Socrates: You would be prepared to die for the sake of this land?

Hannah: I don't think it will come to that, but if need be, yes.

Socrates: And does that make your claim more accurate?

Hannah: That's a very clever question Socrates. I know your tricks. I think I need to be getting on with my work now.

Socrates: But I can assure you Hannah, I ask this question only because I want to know what makes your claim to this land an accurate one, or more accurate than the claim of the Arabs. Do I understand from your response that you don't consider the preparedness to die for this land of you and your people a proper measure of the accuracy of your claim to it?

Hannah: No I don't. You're right about that.

Socrates: So we return to our impasse. You claim this land according to your god. The Arabs claim this land according to their god. We need a way of measuring the objective accuracy of these competing claims, do you agree?

Hannah: Yes, but that will never be achieved.

Socrates: That's a terribly pessimistic response Hannah, but at least you agree that an objective standard is needed, even if it's impossible to arrive at such a standard? You will concede that much?

Hannah: I concede no such thing. I'm not prepared to concede anything, Socrates, least of all my own God-given land. This conversation is futile, and I really have work to do. Good day to you.

Socrates: Well I'm sorry you feel that way. For me it's been most absorbing. You've recognised the need for objective standards of judgment, and that's very wise, though there's so much more to discuss and hammer out. Hopefully we'll both continue to think about these matters, and get further on in some future discussions.

Hannah: Yes, yes, goodbye Socrates. You're a good man.

Socrates: Well thank you Hannah, you're a good woman to say that, whether it's true or not! Good day to you.

God may be great, but is he good? Plato's Euthyphro

2009-05-31T19:44:00.007+09:30

I'm well under way with these essays. Only another month's work should see them ready. Here's a finished one.

One of the problems with a god who is transcendant and also personal, a problem felt heavily not only by Christian theologians but also the Islamic faylasufs, is the problem of free will and its essential opposite, predestination. Interestingly, this is a problem not only for humans, but for the god or gods. So Christians might ask, is God making me sin or am I sinning against God's wishes? If God is making me, then I have no reason to feel any shame [but nor should I feel pride in doing good things, as this also is God's responsibility, not mine]. On the other hand, if I'm free to do what I want, how do I know that what I'm doing is something God approves of? I feel pride in my actions, I'm winning the praise of others, but what about God? Are God and the good one and the same? We often hear that God is good, but is this an equation of precise identity? And if not, which is more important, God or the good? Is God constrained by the good, or is the good constrained by God?

The problem's a very old one, dating to well before the advent of Christianity, and it was addressed head on in an early Platonic dialogue, the justly famous Euthyphro.

In this dialogue Socrates encounters Euthyphro outside the court-house, where Socrates is facing a charge of impiety [he is later to be found guilty and sentenced to death]. Euthyphro, an expert in religious law and lore, is there, we discover, to prosecute his own father on a charge of murder.

Socrates is keen, or at least pretends to be, to probe Euthyphro on this life and death issue of piety and impiety:

Soc. And what is piety, and what is impiety? 
Euth. Piety is doing as I am doing; that is to say, prosecuting any one who is guilty of
murder, sacrilege, or of any similar crime-whether he be your father or mother, or whoever
he may be-that makes no difference; and not to prosecute them is impiety. And please to
consider, Socrates, what a notable proof I will give you of the truth of my words, a proof
which I have already given to others:-of the principle, I mean, that the impious, whoever he
may be, ought not to go unpunished. For do not men regard Zeus as the best and most
righteous of the gods?-and yet they admit that he bound his father (Cronos) because he
wickedly devoured his sons, and that he too had punished his own father (Uranus)
for a similar reason, in a nameless manner. And yet when I proceed against my father, they
are angry with me. So inconsistent are they in their way of talking when the gods are
concerned, and when I am concerned.

It should be noted that the murder Euthyphro accuses his father of is a murky affair. The victim was a farm labourer, a dependent of Euthyphro's family. He had slain one of the family's domestic servants in an argument. Euthyphro's father had tied him up, thrown him in a ditch, and then sent to Athens for advice as to the next step to be taken. The messenger was delayed, and by the time he got back, the bound and neglected labourer was dead. Certainly there is blame to be attached, but Socrates is taken aback at Euthyphro's certitude about how the gods view his father's act – that is, as an act of impiety.

Euthyphro's response above, that he is following the example of the gods, prompts Socrates to express doubts about these tales of the gods, a scepticism which, he speculates, might be the reason for his being accused of impiety. Euthyphro assures him that all the stories of the gods are true, whereupon Socrates returns to the general category of piety. He wants a more catch-all definition than 'doing as I do', or 'doing as the gods do'. The next definition Euthyphro comes up with is that piety is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety that which is not dear to them.

However, as both interlocutors agree, the gods are often in discord, and when they argue, it's always about Big Issues; right and wrong, justice and injustice. And the same goes for humans. So, as Socrates points out, the gods appear to be on both sides, arguing for 'right' one minute, and 'wrong' the next. So it's impossible to tell whether piety or impiety is dear to the gods – which way they will go on any particular Big Issue.

Socrates next gets Euthyphro to agree that the gods don't argue about whether just actions should be rewarded or unjust actions punished; they accept that's how it should be, as do mortals. Instead they argue the particulars of cases, whether such-and-such an action was right or wrong. So Socrates amends Euthyphro's definition to say that piety is that which is dear to all the gods, impiety that which is hateful to them all, and any action or thing about which they're in dispute is neither pious nor impious. He then asks a question which greatly perplexes Euthyphro. He asks – but are these acts loved by the gods because they are pious, or are they pious because they are loved by the gods?

The question here, of course, is one of priority. Which came first, piety [roughly equivalent to our morality] or the gods? Do we do what is right because it is right [and the gods too are subordinate to right and wrong], or do we do what is right because the god – when they're in agreement - will it as right [in which case we must be constantly trying to determine the will of the gods]? The crucial nature of this question, for all religions and for all believers, cannot be underestimated. To put things monotheistically, if God simply determines the good, or if goodness is an attribute or defining characteristic of God, then it would be as pointless to praise God as it would be to praise [or blame] a cat for having fur, or a fly for producing maggots. If, on the other hand, the good is something antecedent to God, something which God strives to achieve along with the rest of us, then this puts something of a dent in God's omnipotence and all-round Supremacy.

This issue has indeed proved a headache for all three major monotheistic religions. Different positions have been taken on it, and many lives have been taken as one side or another has gained power. The position of Plato is clear enough, both in the Euthyphro and the Timaeus. He gives priority to piety, justice and all the general 'forms' of virtue. Interestingly, the writer or writers of Genesis also seem to give the good a prior existence to God. In the very first chapter the phrase 'God saw that it was good' is written several times. The chapter begins with a satisfying crescendo, 'And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good'. I wonder who he was trying to please?

To return to the Euthyphro, Socrates continuing treatment of the relationship of piety to the gods, and to justice in general, of which he sees piety as a subset, only succeeds in bewildering Euthyphro all the more, until he's reduced to agreeing with whatever Socrates suggests to him - a familiar pattern in Plato's dialogues. When he finally gets Euthphyro to assert himself once more, Euthyphro can only come up with an elaboration on a previous statement of the nature of piety:

Euth. I have told you already, Socrates, that to learn all these things accurately will be very
tiresome. Let me simply say that piety or holiness is learning, how to please the gods in
word and deed, by prayers and sacrifices. Such piety, is the salvation of families and states,
just as the impious, which is unpleasing to the gods, is their ruin and destruction.

Socrates is very disappointed with this answer. Why would prayers and sacrifices be pleasing to the gods, who have no need of them? Or if they need them, how could they be omnipotent? Are offerings and supplications good in themselves? We appear to be back at the starting point, and Socrates prepares to begin the exploration from scratch. Euthyphro is having none of this, and begs off; he has a court case to attend to. Whether his confidence in his cause has been affected by the dialogue is anyone's guess.

The implications of Socrates' central question, though, should be clear to all believers. If morality is just the will of God or the gods, that doesn't help us much, as nobody seems quite to know what that will is. There are interpreters, mediators between the god or gods and ourselves, who try to teach us this will, but they notoriously contradict each other, just as the sacred writings of the deities are full of apparent contradictions. If morality is separate from the gods then we have to work it out for ourselves, just as, presumably, the gods do. Either way we appear to be on our own, morality-wise, no matter how fervently we believe.

the end of the journey: chez nous

2009-05-11T00:09:00.005+09:30

I've continued reading Journey of the Magi, and sure enough it has only irritated me the more. In this passage he gets more blatant, and ridiculous.

Freedom without divine laws results in, to paraphrase Shakespeare, humanity preying on itself like monsters of the deep; and progress has brought us to the brink of doing to the world what God promised he would never do to it again himself.

First, to exonerate Shakespeare. The beauty, and to some the frustration, of the reflections expressed in Shakespeare's plays is that none of them can be pinned on the bard himself. The words belong to Albany, in King Lear, who mordantly asserts that, without the 'visible spirits' sent down from the heavens to tame us 'humanity must perforce prey on itself, like monsters of the deep' - and yes, he uses the plural, just as Gloucester does when he famously says, 'as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport' - which gives an idea of what he thinks of divine law, a view not dissimilar to that of Mark Twain. King Lear is a pagan play, so what is asserted here about 'divine law' is hard to ascertain, suffice to say that humanity needs taming - something we can perhaps all agree on.
As to progress, that long-suffering whipping-boy, if we define it, uncapitalized, as positive change, or improvement, it reflects a thoroughly human and indispensable striving. The notion that we're on the eve of destruction, going to hell in a handcart etc, is as old as civilization itself, and hardly needs any effort expended on it here.
It might be pointed out, though, that divine laws, whatever they are, are inimical to the notion of progress, because of course they're eternal, as divine stuff tends to be. How can anything which is eternal change? This is, of course, a big problem, bigger than is recognised, for all proponents of 'divine law'. If you think biblical injunctions, or sharia laws, really are divine, then you're stuck with them for ever and ever. Hardly any wonder then that so many experts on divine law, imams and rabbis and so forth, have sprung up over the centuries to 're-interpret' the laws for changing times. Not that they've done a particularly impressive job - sharia law, in particular, continues to be a gross insult to anyone who has any respect for human rights [that construction of miserable, despised human beings].
Of course, there are no divine laws. Roberts should have written 'freedom without laws leads to humanity preying on itself', as, basically, Hobbes asserted. But that would've been way too prosaic, I suppose.

I feel almost guilty about getting stuck into Roberts like this, searching for 'gotcha' moments, or passages. I remember Glenn Gould, the pianist, saying that he gave up concert performances because he felt that the audience was only there to hear him fail, to wait for that 'gotcha' moment when the whole performance might collapse on a bum note. Roberts' book, which he sees as an entertainment, is contradictory, muddled, funny, angry and occasionally inspired. He has apparently written acclaimed reportage on both gulf wars, and he has some of the footloose, rambling quality of a Hunter S Thompson. Also, I read on his website that he has gone blind in both eyes, a fate I don't even want to begin to imagine. Yet I also feel something like a duty to challenge sentences such as the one quoted above. To not let people get away with hazy-lazy religious talk, to show up the emptiness at its heart. Human laws are imperfect, but they're all we have, and if we accept they're always going to be only human, we'll accept the challenge of constantly modifying them. Unlike the mysteriously misplaced ones given to Moses, they're not written in stone.

Twitter - winning the war against eloquence

2009-05-10T07:44:00.006+09:30

Having had a lot of time off from blogging, I'm even more out of date than usual. Some months ago, after listening to a radio segment about Twitter, I wrote the following, and since then Twitter seems to have taken over the world. Of course, it seems to be essentially a networking vehicle, and I'm the world's worst networker, and a completely isolated, pathetic soul. Anyway, here's my piece, for my own amusement.

Being a dweller in the most pathetic Beckettian solitude, I'd never heard of Twitter before this morning, when I listened to a Radio National program called Future Tense - more moderne than moderne.
According to the program's hype, Twitter is rapidly replacing Facebook etc as the latest thing in networking - not exactly my forte.
A very brightly speaking young gent was interviewed, and he enthused about the level playing field that Twitter is - largely because all communications are limited to 140 characters. The advantage of this, according to our interviewee, is that eloquent people - this is the term he used - don't have an unfair advantage. You begin to get a sense of why it's called Twitter. He also pointed out that [presumably articulate] people don't get a chance to hijack the space and 'debate politics' or some such subject.
So, lpf or lcd? What do they actually talk about on such sites? I'm sure that, at a pinch, you can say something substantial with 140 characters, but why do I get the impression that the push is against substantiality? That Twitter is a dumbing down of Facebook which is a dumbing down of Blogging which is a....
I know it's nowhere near as linear as this, and that imposing restraints can sometimes lead to greater creativity, but really the move is not towards greater creativity but towards more bums on seats. A democratisation which has its downside. I can well imagine that the next great networking service might be Twitch, in which those who can't read or write will also be included [it could even be used to bridge the language barrier by simply eliminating language, or creating a new universal one, in which each touch of the keyboard represents a gesture or emotion. We can all Twitch, and someone will be Twitching all the way to the bank. Good luck to them.

I return - to a religious mishmash

2009-05-07T23:44:00.003+09:30

Jesus the cutely meditating Essene Nazarean

Thought I'd lost my blog there.

I've been awol for a while, trying to write essays for The Faith Hope, The Book.

This leads me to read all sorts of stuff I wouldn't usually read. Journey of the Magi by Paul William Roberts, has some good humorous bits in it, but it's an odd and unconvincing mixture, part travel novel, part speculative thingy [about inter alia the influence of Zoroastrianism on Judeaism and so Christianity], part satori, part mockery of Marco Polo, part spruik for Zoroastrianism and eastern-style Christianity as opposed to the nasty materialist Roman Catholics, and I'm becoming less and less interested in the evidence-free dogmatism - for example, on Zoroaster, he writes:

It is... worth repeating the traditional account of the prophet's life - since there is no doubt that he lived one, and lived it under very human conditions, too.

He then goes on to point out that nobody knows when and where the guy lived, and that claims about the dates of his life vary by a millenium or so! In fact nothing is known about his life, and he seems to be as shadowy a figure as Homer. The 'no doubt' claim is simply absurd. What's more, Roberts also has no doubt that Jesus was a 'pure Essene rabbi' - having read three quarters of the book now, I'm still waiting for a skerrick of evidence to support this. Many of Roberts' conjectures are interesting and even ingenious, and certainly he knows far more about Judaic and early Christian history than I do, but I detect a clear bias. Organised religion generally repels him, but he's drawn to the unorthodox, idiosyncratic religions, or dimensions of religion, such as Sufism, Zoroastrianism, Eastern Christianity and Essene Judaism. He depicts Christianity as being hijacked in the west by an orthodox, power-hungry clique who divested of its real essence. He writes of Eastern Christianity as the Truth and Western Christianity as the Lie. Naturally this doesn't convince me, as I don't find anything 'true' about religion, though it might be sometimes appropriate to talk about authenticity versus cynicism or disingenuousness. Clearly though it's the authoritarianism of established religion that gets my goat, while I find individual mystics merely quaint, or sad - and sometimes, admittedly, impressive, For example, I'm not sure if Leonard Cohen would want to call himself a mystic but he has that aura of calm and strength about him which is just what you need from a guru, and it clearly engenders great respect and love. And does no harm that I can think of, which is far more than you can say about organised religion.

So I've been reading the passages in Roberts' book which deal with the histories of these religious movements with increasing skepticism, and boredom. And when I got to this infuriating passage I really wondered whether it was worth continuing. He is writing about his differences with Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Barbara Thiering:

As brilliant as many of her interpretations are, Thiering's major shortcoming is her inability to realize that the "Eastern" gnostic, or Magian, or Nazarean Essenes were not superstitious fools: they opposed Pauline Judaeo-Christianity for the very reason that, by removing doctrines and practices regarding the subjective experience of "Truth", it would end up as little more than the secular humanism Thiering herself seems to have arrived at - besides creating a society governed increasingly by political or personal expediency rather than eternal spiritual values and truths.

Now this really is a load of tosh. What are these 'eternal spiritual values and truths'? Apparently they're arrived at through doctrines and practices dealing with the subjective experience of truth. Basically he's lost himself in a mire of theological claptrap - amazing how you can do that in one short paragraph - and the onus is on him, as it is upon any theological spruiker, to let us know what these eternal spiritual values are. As for the political and personal expediency that, he intimates, flows from secular humanism, we've all heard that one before. It conveniently ignores the fact that all our laws are secular, and those that haven't been, historically, have generally been bad laws. Even if you look at the decalogue, the commandments that are most convincing and 'eternal'-seeming are the least 'spiritual' - thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal. That's because they're based on a common-sense understanding of how we are to best survive and thrive as social beings.
I've been reading Geoffrey Robertson's important book Crimes Against Humanity, and in it he traces the history of human rights since the Universal Declaration, that monument to secular humanism, came out in 1948. As he points out, many nations with poor human rights records signed up to the document cynically believing it to be a paper tiger, but the tiger is beginning to grow some baby teeth. I think it has largely defeated claims about western bias and 'Asian values' and it still stands, in fact more so than ever, as a model to aim for, and to measure performance against. Enforcement is of course the primary problem, but the human rights model, it seems to me, has a solid basis in our practical understanding of what it is to lead a life of value. Whether they embody 'spiritual values', I don't know, as I've never understood what that word means, but they do embody 'eternal' values, at least for as long as human beings go on being human.

a familiar refrain

2009-02-19T10:33:00.002+10:30

It's pretty well impossible to get round the fact that the god who stars in the Old Testament is not a nice guy. There are numerous instances of gobsmacking cruelty and barbarity throughout, but I'll just focus on one event: the Flood.

Kids tend to like this story, with the animals tramping into the ark two by two, joined, we can imagine, by love and loyalty, eager to face a new beginning. But outside the ark? Apparently we needn't worry about the people outside the ark, not to mention the other living things. We're assured that they all deserved to die:

5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” [Genesis 6: 5-7 – ESV Bible]

Of course the god's judgement is infallible, so if he says [or somebody says that he says] every person's thoughts were continually evil we aren't really in a position to demur. As for all the other creeping and flying things, the fact that the god is sorry that he made them should be enough for us.

But of course it isn't, not for any thinking feeling person. It was this part of the story - of drowning, desperate people, of toddlers and six year olds swimming and struggling desperately for disappearing higher ground, seeing their siblings and parents washed away, seeing dead babies and animals floating by – that haunted me. It didn't get much of a mention in the sermons.

Yet the sermonisers and interpreters can't quite wash their hands of this crime. On About.com's page about the Flood, under 'Points of interest from the story', the interpreter kindly informs us that God's purpose in the flood was not to destroy people, but to destroy wickedness and sin. So the god really wanted to get rid of unspecified 'wickedness and sin', and the only way he could think to do that, in spite of being all-powerful, was to destroy every living person, not to mention, again, all the other living things. I should've paid attention to this explanation when I was younger, but somehow it slipped by me. All I kept in my head were hundreds of drowned babies, and screaming, gurgling children. And later, in association, the bowed, cowed children following their wicked parents into gas chambers. After all, the Reich's purpose wasn't to destroy people, but to make everything cleaner and brighter for the chosen ones of the earth.

religion and moi

2009-02-17T21:34:00.003+10:30

Here is my introduction to the book, first draft.

Religion has always been a troubling phenomenon for me. I can't recall it ever holding any attraction, or any sense of reality, though that is probably a false memory, as many researchers are now saying that religion and childhood go together like fish and chips. If not official religion, then its general territory - magic, monsters and coming alive again after being snuffed out by cops, Indians, assorted bad guys or the afore-mentioned monsters. Of course I marvellled at Superman and fantasised flying faster than bullets on errands for attractive schoolmates, but the god I heard about at Sunday School was nothing but a source of irritation. I felt ashamed of the gullibility and self-deception of my elders, and the questions I posed, without ever vocalising, were much the same as those of the young Christopher Hitchens; why would a perfect being want to be worshipped and praised by his creations? Wouldn't he be as squirmily embarrassed as I was by all this fawning? Okay, that was making the mistake of thinking the god was just like me only more super, but surely by worshipping him and singing to him and dedicating buildings and babies to him, they too were making assumptions about his nature, or at least how he preferred to be treated, and these assumptions actually made him all the less attractive, as someone totally insatiable, never entirely appeased, never satisfied, like the most nightmarish of parents. He was far more remote and less believable than Superman, who, like us, had gone through childhood and survived his parents and looked sexy even in his ridiculous outfit [well, okay, unlike most of us] – in fact he was the most reassuringly human of extra-terrestrials

It seemed so patently made-up and yet, as I glanced about at the adults during the Sunday service, they all seemed to believe so fervently. It seemed to make such a difference to them. I didn't get it at all. Even if their god existed, which I could never concede, what would be the point of sitting around, swaying and chanting and smiling and fervently believing?

I wondered what they believed when they were in the throes of believing. Or what they were thinking at least. Were they thinking, He exists, wow he really exists, wow, I mean I just can't get over it, and he created us all, and me especially, I mean I know i'm nothing special but to me I am, and it's all because of him, I can just never thank him enough, or praise him or... I just wonder if he notices how impressed I am with him, because I really really am, but maybe I'm not showing it enough, though he sees everything, but maybe he wants me to smile more, to sing louder, to spread the word, I'm not spreading the word enough, I'm keeping it to myself, that's selfish, that's a sin, PRAISE THE LORD!...

It worried me. I felt rather contemptuous of these swaying, smiling chanting elders, even as a young boy, but I also felt intimidated. I didn't know how to deal with such conviction, and of course I still don't. The sense of intimidation is heightened of course when there's a congregation of them. I've never attended personally to feel the love, but I'm thinking of masses of shining-faced believers in massive modern evangelical churches, chanting and stomping and halelujaing, presumably in gratitude for believing, and also masses of bobbing madrassa students and streetloads of breast-beating Iraqi men chanting something about Allah. I don't wonder so much then about what they might be thinking, as the whole impetus appears to be about unthinking, submitting to some kind of chain of basic believing being.

So, in the following, I want to put some pressure on all this believing, and to consider the alternatives. I want to look here and there at the history of religious belief and unbelief, and to wonder about the future. I doubt if I'll come to any earth-shattering conclusions, but I feel it's one of the most important issues to try to get our heads around, as the gap between believers and unbelievers widens, and exasperations grow.

Not that this will necessarily be a bridge-building exercise! Partly it will be my attempt to come to terms with the intimidating nature of relentless religious belief. I've no idea, honestly, as I write this, what the outcome will be.

the soul of the white ant

2009-02-14T11:45:00.002+10:30

I remember a dog-eared paperback on the shelves of my first bohemian inner-city residence, shared with a book-collecting bowerbird of an art student. It was called The Soul of the White Ant, by one Eugene Marais. I never read it, or even looked into it, though its title somehow encapsulated for me something of the new life I was entering, mad and unexpected, surrealistic and romantic. It would probably have been better for me to have read the book.
For its South African author was a strange and tortured genius, a bewitching story-teller who loved and was beloved of children, a drug addict and a suicide. Above all though, he had transformed himself, for a time, into a painstaking, patient and insightful observer and recorder of the lives of termites and baboons. Mr Darwin, I feel sure, would've been proud to make his acquaintance.
All of this I've only recently discovered, and it's not the subject of this piece, more's the pity. The book's title has long symbolized for me the weirdness of the religious, and particularly Christian, notion of the soul. I've heard that some Buddhists claim that every living thing, prokaryotic or eukaryotic, has a soul, which transmigrates in the process of reincarnation. If you've led an exemplary life as a bug or a germ, you will migrate to a higher form next time, maybe a booby or a red panda. It sounds pleasant, as anything does if you put it the right way. I've probably got this Buddhist teaching quite wrong, but in any case it seems problematic to me to impose morality on the life of a bacterium. Then again, how much more problematic must it be to impose morality on the life of a human being.
Be that as it may, Christians are supposed to believe in the soul as a specifically human apparatus. As such, it has taken something of a battering since the theory of evolution by natural selection has gained wide acceptance [among the intelligentsia]. Those Buddhists and others who believe in a soul for every organism have at least the advantage of consistency.
The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church has generally been quite woolly in its response to evolution, while all the time insisting that its god, formally known as Yahweh, now called God, created everything. If you don't accept this, you're anathema. Now of course this doesn't necessarily pit the HRCAC against evolution, even though it's highly unlikely, and possibly impossible, that the Darwin-Wallace theory would ever have been developed by a Christian. The HRCAC can simply say that God created evolution, and let's see you prove otherwise.
Unfortunately for Christians, though, they have to have to believe what they believe through a set of sacred texts called the Bible, written by God apparently through various scribes.* We find there no hint of evolution or natural selection, not to mention fossils, dinosaurs, plate tectonics, other galaxies, black holes or anti-matter. What it does say is that God created humans in his image.

*Why god chose this method, rather than just writing the stuff himself, is one of those mysteries that form the backbone of religion. After all, he wrote the ten commandments in his own hand, on two stone tablets, now lost to posterity, and I can't help but feel that to lose one such tablet was unfortunate, but to lose two was downright carelessness. To think how much the divine handwriting might've fetched at Sotheby's is surely to bring the spiritual and material world together in the most delightful way.

the problem of compatibilism 1

2009-02-08T09:32:00.006+10:30

see him?

Religious thinking is hard to encapsulate in a single simple definition, though we generally know it when we encounter it. Rather than trying to capture the whole of religion, from Australian Aboriginal Dreaming to ancestor worship in China or Africa, to the deistic hierarchies of the Vikings or the Greeks, I'll focus on the inter-related monotheistic religions we in 'the west' are most impacted by. These religions require belief in a creator god, and in some notion of the soul and another world.

The biblical god created humans in his own image [Genesis 1: 27, Genesis 5:1], but no such claim is made in the Koran, which seems rather to emphasise the otherness of god - there is no god but god is chanted some 2700 times throughout the book, and more specifically, There is nothing comparable to him [112: 4] and vision cannot grasp him, but his grasp is all over vision [6: 103]. Clearly, the biblical references help to cement a special relationship between humans and their god, very much like producing a 'chip off the old block'. We're all god's children, which is more than can be said for rats, bats and mosquitoes. Yet it's notable that despite this biblical assurance that our god is like us, this god is almost never depicted in Christian iconography [in fact there were intense arguments in the early centuries of Christianity on just this issue]. Many would have considered such depictions as blasphemous, as all Moslems did vis-a-vis their god [arguably the same god], but the real issue around whether or not to forbid images of god was that there must be a gap between human and god, and to depict would mean somehow to depict the gap, and how could this be done? The safest approach would simply be to forbid.

This gap is of course a major problem not only for iconographers, but for the compatibility of religion and science. It's the gap that must be crossed in a leap of faith. Nevertheless, in many people's understanding of their personal god, there isn't much of a gap; their god answers their prayers, soothes them, reassures them, watches over them and so forth, or so they claim. He also offers them a life after death, though again, as with the shifting nature of the Christian god, from raging biblical tyrant to omnipotent omniscient effulgence, the nature of the afterlife has shifted, as the literal concepts of heaven and hell have become a growing embarrassment to thinking believers. Not that such concepts were ever particularly fixed. Hell isn't mentioned in the Old Testament, but it was one of Jesus's favourite subjects - or perhaps rather a favourite subject of the 'gospel' authors. When it's described, it's usually in terms of fire, but also darkness, and everlastingness. The most fulsome descriptions are in Revelations, not surprisingly, but they aren't very fulsome either. The really imaginative work on the subject was done in later centuries, culminating in Dante's dazzling but idiosyncratic vision of nine circles, and the more populist representations of the mystery plays.

Anita Bryant lives, but fades

2009-02-05T22:58:00.004+10:30

The real Harvey milk

After watching the film Milk recently, an inspiring and tragic story which will hopefully reach a lot of young people and affect their thinking about the rights and treatment of homosexuals, I wondered about the arch-enemy of the tale, Anita Bryant, a former small-time singer driven, presumably by conscience, to campaign against the horrors of homosexuality.
The fact is that Bryant's campaign turned out to be a rather less than successful career move. Initial successes in the late sixties led to a galvanization and mobilization of the opposition. A campaign to boycott Florida orange juice, because Bryant featured in commercials for the drink, led to her losing the contract, and her singing career stalled because of the polarization of opinion around her. Later she came to regret the extremity of some of her anti-homosexual remarks, though one wonders if this was simply an acknowledgment of tactical errors, for in spite of her many setbacks, she still lends her name to churchy arguments against the so-called gay agenda.
It seems that, in spite of the noisiness of religious conservatives, especially during the Bush years, homosexuals continue to make more gains than losses, in spite of the passing of proposition eight, outlawing gay marriage, in California recently. Many of Bryant's legal victories have since been overturned, and I'm confident that as people learn more about the realities of human behaviour, and the dead hand of religion is gradually loosened, homosexual relations, of every formal and informal type imaginable, will be accepted and enjoyed as enriching the tapestry of social life.

the compatibility issue

2009-02-05T22:09:00.004+10:30

Is science compatible with religion? It's a very popular question currently, not only directly but in an indirect way, with so many believers of an intellectual persuasion employing scientific techniques, or at least the language associated with them, to render their beliefs more persuasive to themselves and others. It's surely a great compliment to science that so many modern believers feel the need to invoke it in the interest of their beliefs - though it should be noted that this tendency hasn't spread to Islam to any significant degree. Though there are obviously only two possible answers to my initial question, there are two opposed perspective from which each of these two answers can be given. The two answers are of course yes and no, and the two perspectives are the religious and the scientific. From these we arrive at four possible positions:

[1] religious compatibilism - this is the official position of most of the established Christian churches, though whether it is tenable is another matter. There's also the question of whether this compatibilism is sincere, or an alliance of convenience with an untamable adversary.
[2] religious incompatibilism - the least interesting position intellectually, but also by far the most popular, given that the vast majority of the human population know nothing or very little about science, and of that majority almost all of them are religious and take their religion very seriously.
[3] scientific compatibilism - a position taken by some scientists, who claim that science and religion operate in mutually exclusive spheres, so that they can do their stuff harmoniously, presumably by completely ignoring each other. [Most, and perhaps by definition all, religious scientists are compatibilists, due to the primacy of their religious beliefs].
[4] scientific incompatibilism - to my mind, the only coherent position.

processing to irrelevance

2009-02-04T20:03:00.005+10:30

In normal circumstances, in decent, civilized society throughout the West, a person who expressed the view that the Harry Potter novels, with their incantations and magical games and mythical beasties, posed serious dangers to our kids, and that hurricane Katrina could well have been a god's retribution upon the residents of New Orleans for such iniquitous activities as homosexuality and prostitution - such a person would be politely shunned or perhaps referred to authorities as a suitable case for treatment. Certainly such claims would, and should, cast serious doubts on that person's fitness to hold any responsible political or community position.
However, the values of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church are not those of society at large. It doesn't bend to mere public opinion, because it believes its values are eternal, given to it by its god - who is our god too, even if we know nothing about the fellow. Besides, the claim about Katrina is quite plausible, as this god has committed such mass murders before when he has been displeased by members of his specially created species. Indeed he once murdered the whole species apart from one small family, apparently for disloyalty - something dictators rather relish doing, or would relish if only they had the supernatural powers of a deity.
So it's not surprising that a person who would be rightly reviled by most reflective secularists should be promoted within the Catholic Church. Yet there are some good signs to note here. The promoted ultra-conservative pastor is Austrian, and his appointment to a bishopric in Linz will undoubtedly turn ever more people away from a rigid, backward, bigoted church hierarchy. The Catholic Church is completely on the nose in Austria, apparently, and the numbers of its followers have dwindled dramatically. It can only be hoped that Herr Ratzinger continues on this track.
The Catholic Church hierarchy's response to Ms Rowling's massively popular magical adventure series is in fact highly diverting, offering light relief from consideration of its campaign of intimidation, repression, misinformation and outright murder in many African countries in recent years. There seems more than a touch of jealousy in their critique of the books' effects on the young innocent minds who flock to them. Take these remarks by none other than the Vatican's chief exorcist:

"You start off with Harry Potter, who comes across as a likeable wizard, but you end up with the Devil. There is no doubt that the signature of the Prince of Darkness is clearly within these books."

We may well laugh, both at the primitive manichaeism of these remarks, and at the title of chief exorcist, but we would do well to remember that this gentleman, Gabriele Amorth by name, is the inheritor of a long line of murderers, rapists and torturers doing their all for the glory of their god and church. It should never be forgotten that this church has never never willingly given up an inch of its power to destroy any rival superstition. It has been dragged kicking and screaming to its current state of relative impotence. It lives and breathes solely for a return to its old medieval powers.
Herr Ratzinger is very much at the centre of these dangerous puerilities. In a letter written before he was 'elevated' to the popehood, he wrote to a conservative critic:

It is good that you shed light and inform us on the Harry Potter matter, for these are subtle seductions that are barely noticeable and precisely because of that deeply affect (children) and corrupt the Christian faith in souls even before it (the Faith) could properly grow

I can only commend the Harry Potter author for corrupting the Christian faith by means of a fun rival, and I'd urge other authors of imagination and verve to continue the process. The human imagination, and especially the deliciously bottomless imagination of childhood, surely deserves much better than the murderous bigotry of Catholicism.

getting the message through

2009-02-01T10:27:00.002+10:30

one of John the Baptist's hangouts, yawn yawn

Societies change, and rapidly, and we’re reluctant to acknowledge this. A child wants her parents to stay together, to be happy with each other, as they have been. She wants to go on attending the same school and not to have to deal with different routines, different teachers, the loss of established and loved playmates. If a particular religion and its congregation and rituals are regular routines for her and woven though her family and social life, she’ll be most reluctant to deny that religion. Has it not sustained the family and community that has sustained her? The word denial is vital here, for it carries so much more weight than any intellectual skepticism can convey. Questioning the truth of a faith can come at an incalculable cost to our social being. It’s hardly surprising that many people would never even consider such a questioning, for they would see no meaningful existence at all without that faith.

Of course I’m convinced that they’re wrong to think that way, but it often seems a useless conviction. It can also be a dangerous one, I’m sure. If ever invited to Kandahar to spread the message of secularism, I’m sure I’d decline.

However, unlike regions deep-dyed in Islam, most regions that have adopted Christianity, particularly European nations, are no longer as deep-dyed as they were. They are the nations of course, most affected by the enlightenment and the scientific methods that have so rapidly transformed human life. And it’s funny how cultures can be like siblings. If one sibling strides out on a particular path, the next sibling will consider, almost as a matter of course, that that pathway has been eternally blocked for her. Many have argued that Islam needs an enlightenment like that sparked by the likes of Galileo and Newton in Western Europe, but it seems that sibling rivalry might prevent this, perhaps indefinitely. Of course, that is to be too monolithic as regards both religious cultures, but there’s no doubt that jealousy, competitiveness and resentment are part of the package of tensions between these cultures. It’s not surprising that the gradual abandonment of mystical explanations and prophecies by one might result in their more fervent appeal to the other. And of course the same goes for the tensions within one culture, such as that most heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian mythos.

The point being that the refusal to adopt the scientific method, and the related urge to see sacred texts as rich in historical and cultural truth beyond enquiry, have many strong forces behind them, including resentment, stubbornness and a need to forge or maintain a distinct identity. These forces aren’t rational – few human impulses are. Ultimately they’re instinctive, as sibling rivalry is instinctive, and they’re about survival and thriving. Ultimately the battle must be along those lines – survival and thriving. We need to present the argument convincingly that the scientific approach provides our best hope in that quest. Not everyone is impervious to the argument, clearly. Science would never have gotten off the ground if that were so. It’s a matter of continuously plugging away, doing fruitful scientific work and advertising and distributing its benefits.

dostoyevski’s tears

2009-02-01T07:12:00.004+10:30

perfect and European

I’ve mentioned in these pages Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury under William the Conqueror and, after the council of Winchester in 1072, first primate of England, and without wishing to make primate jokes, Lanfranc’s surviving writings are something of a disappointment for such a reputed intellect. Fast forward near a thousand years to the current incumbent, Rowan Williams, much more circumscribed in terms of political power, but certainly a lover of writing and ideas, even if in the rather tendentious way of religious types. Having recently published a book on the faith of Dostoyevsky, an old favourite of mine, Williams spoke in a radio interview of how Dostoyevsky’s eyes welled up with tears every time Jesus’s name was mentioned.

This is very very likely to be bullshit. It’s quite possible that it happened once. Dos was capable of much sentimentality, as revealed towards the end of Crime and Punishment. It’s also quite possible that the old stager managed a repeat performance, but it’s unlikely to have occurred every time. Who were the eyewitnesses from whom Williams got this information? This is how romantic legends are created, with monotonous regularity. Even were it true, we must remember that Dostoyevsky was writing at a time – a very long period indeed – when the legend of Jesus as both deity and real man of unparalleled goodness wasn’t allowed to be questioned. The application of scientific methods to religious questions and entities dates from the early twentieth century in the main, with, I think, significant negative impact on religious belief in those regions where scientific methods are respected. Works such as Lewis’s Mere Christianity were written in reaction to attempts to more thoroughly examine JC’s claims to fame. Dostoyevsky’s tears over Jesus, however many or few, were tears over a well-guarded mythical figure of practical goodness who hardly bore any relationship to the man of the ‘gospel’ writings, who in turn seems little more than confection. Tears in other words, for the mythical idealism that we humans are so eminently capable of, tears for the reality in which we let people down and let ourselves down on a daily if not hourly basis, unlike that perfectly courageous and knowing and good and simple person so many of us carry around within ourselves, and who some call Jesus.

This entry is for the final miscellaneous section of the book.

Shakespeare's catholic connection

2009-01-30T21:22:00.004+10:30

Edmond Campion, honourable, but ultimately just another victim of the age of faith

For something completely different, I've been watching a DVD, In Search of Shakespeare, being the first two episodes of a series by that name. The second episode deals among other things with the lost years, now found, according to some scholars. It really is intriguing and highly plausible. It all seems to have started with a book written by E A J Honigmann, The Lost Years. He takes a fresh look at some intriguing old evidence from Lancashire, a town called Lea [which I've possibly tracked down as a part of Preston]. There, a gentleman named Alexander Hoghton mentions one William Shakeshaft in his will, written in August 1581 when Shakespeare would've been about seventeen. The will intriguingly speaks of play clothes and players, and the mention of Shakeshaft fits well with what we know of Shakespeare at the time:

And I most heartily require the said Sir Thomas to be friendly unto Fulk Gyllome and William Shakeshafte now dwelling with me and either to take them unto his service or else to help them to some good master, as my trust is he will

Hoghton was a Catholic, and in those difficult times, Catholics helped their own - for it's likely that John Shakespeare was a Catholic [evidence in fact having been found of this in the form of a Catholic tract secreted in the walls of his home.

Difficult times - the country having switched from Catholic to Protestant under Henry VIII and Edward VI, then back to Catholicism with a vengeance under Mary, and back to Protestantism under Elizabeth. Many Catholics naturally hoped that the tide would swing their way again. Meanwhile the Queen was demanding religious fealty, while the likes of Edmund Campion were demanding that Catholics declare themselves as those of the true faith. It was a tragic period, poisoned by religion.

The story goes that young Shakespeare was a brilliant pupil, probably at Stratford's best school, King Edward VI Grammar, and destined to go on to university, like his precise contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, but for reasons unclear his father, who had been a prosperous glover and mayor of Stratford, suffered a collapse of fortune, which rather dampened Will's prospects. The theory has it that one of Will's schoolmasters, John Cottam, was an associate of Hoghton who returned to Tarnacre, only a few miles from Lea, probably in 1582 [Tarnacre seems also to be incorporated into Preston]. He is also mentioned in Hoghton's will. Cottam appears to have recommended Will as a tutor with impeccable Catholic credentials, one who could be trusted. Not that this is meant to suggest that William Shakespeare was then or at any time a strict Catholic. He was young and a survivor, and would've been happy to grab this opportunity, for the time being.

It's an intriguing story, which fills out some of Shakespeare's life, to set against the Earl of Oxford legends etc. I'm vaguely wondering how the religious intrigues can be used by me in VersusReligion. Essentially these are political squabbles, but the religious passions make it all cut so much deeper, as in Northern Ireland. The beauty of Shakespeare's work and his gift, is that he seems so effortlessly to rise above it all.

we three kings

2009-01-28T09:23:00.004+10:30

billy the conk's dominions at his death

And what of the politics of the time, and its nexus with religion? If we focus only on England, and the eleventh century, we find, at the top of the political hierarchy, a succession of Saxon, Dane and Norman kings, all professing Christianity. The three most effective of these monarchs; Canute, Edward [the Confessor] and William [of Normandy] treated Christianity in quite different ways. Canute, a second-generation Christian who pilgrimed himself off to Rome halfway though his reign [he was rarely in England anyway due to his extra duties as King of Denmark and Norway], was, though a renowned warrior, quite possibly sincere in his belief. The famous story told of his humbling of himself before the waves has him saying something like

Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings. For there is none worthy of the name but God, whom heaven, earth and sea obey.

The scribe who captured these words for posterity hasn’t been identified. In any case poor old empty and worthless Canute didn’t show any sign of giving up his collection of earthly thrones. Yet he was generous to the English church, repairing and rebuilding churches and monasteries [many of them damaged by his own men] and building new ones. In alliance with Wulfstan, archbishop of York, he supported the popular monastic reforms of the time, begun by the celebrated Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, in the previous century. Once they’d won the patronage of the monarch, these ecclesiastical figures acted as virtual prime ministers at the time. Of course, their downfalls could be as swift as the sudden death or change of mood of their patron.

Edward the Confessor was of mixed background and mixed allegiances. He was the son of the Saxon king Ethelred, but his mother Emma was a Norman, sister to Duke Richard 11 of Normandy and great-aunt of William the Conqueror. After the death of Ethelred, Emma married Canute, through him giving birth to another son who would be king, Edward’s half-brother Harthacanute.

While still a young lad, Edward was taken to Normandy out of harm’s way by his mother. The Danes were making life hot for royalty in England. When Canute finally secured the English throne, he chose to marry Emma, but Edward stayed in Normandy until after Canute’s death, when he apparently returned to participate in an attempt upon the life of Canute’s son and successor, Harold Harefoot. This scheme failed, and Edward returned to exile, but was called back to the English court after Harold’s death, and was designated the successor to his half-brother Harthacanute, the new king. He succeeded to throne two years later, in 1042.

He didn’t have an easy time of it. The English nobility was at this time very powerful, and the most powerful noble was Godwin, whose daughter Edward married in 1045. Godwin had come to power largely through the patronage of Canute, and he represented the main oppositional force to the Normans Edward had installed at his court. There was also bad blood between Edward and Godwin because of the role Godwin played in having Edward’s brother tortured and killed. At one point Edward managed to have Godwin exiled but he returned soon afterwards and forced Edward to reinstate him as Earl of Wessex.

As to Edward’s celebrated piety, little is known for sure and it may well have been exaggerated. He’s famous for having contributed a famous religious monument, Westminster Abbey, to posterity, though it in fact existed before his time and was much rebuilt and remodelled afterwards.

William of Normandy, the conqueror of England in 1066, has less connection with religion than the other two, his reforms being more or less entirely secular. They included the introduction of a European feudal system, the increased administrative regulation of a political system that was already one of the most regulated and efficient in Europe, and the transformation of the aristocracy, as Saxon nobles were dispossessed and exiled in favour of William’s Norman cronies. However his connection with the Italian religious figure Lanfranc, with whom he had dealings in Normandy, helped him in the conquest of England. Lanfranc was an associate of Pope Alexander 11, and secured his blessing for the undertaking. Lanfranc later became William’s archbishop of Canterbury, and was an influential figure at court.

this being entry 2 of part 2

religion's no joke either

2009-01-27T00:40:00.002+10:30

your typical Talmud scholar

There are many religions, extant or extinct, all with their supernatural beings and occurrences, their creation stories, their rituals and prohibitions. The most popular one in my part of the world is Christianity. Christians take the male god from the Judaic religion and believe that he had a son who he sent down [or up or across, but it apparently doesn’t matter] to the world [which we might now call the planet Earth] in order to have him killed for our sins. To wash away the sins of every human on our planet, I think. I may not have the story quite right, I don’t really understand the concepts involved, though I’ve read the New Testament a couple of times in different versions. In order to be a Christian you have to accept this son, Jesus, into your life, whether as a friend, a kind of guardian angel or a figure of adoration I’m not quite sure. If you do so you’ll have eternal life, apparently through the release, upon death, of a non-material [or perhaps meta-material] part or aspect of yourself, called the soul, which goes then to a better place, usually called Heaven.

Christians try to live by the teachings of the New Testament, the Gospels in particular. They believe – and I’m generalizing here – that the books of the New Testament, and the whole of the Bible, came from their god, who guided the hands of the scribes who actually physically wrote them. So these books are, in essence, an instruction manual for life presented to all humans by the god who created all life, and who, therefore, must know what he’s talking about.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,[2 Timothy 3:16 NIV]

There are some immediate problems with this belief, especially to those of us brought up with some familiarity with the scientific method, which has been applied not only to such physical phenomena as rocks and bones, but also to historical documents, myths and legends, sites of ancient civilizations and the like. For example, the claim that a god guided the writing of all the books of the Bible is very hard to test scientifically. Further, the writings that we find in the Bible don’t include all the writings referring to the god, who is usually called Yahweh, written in the period. It took a long time for the Bible to come together in the form in which we now know it, and there are still disputes and different versions. The process has been called the canonization of scripture. Just leaving aside the New Testament, the exclusively Christian collection of books [which are nevertheless meaningless without the Old Testament texts and the god depicted therein], the other books, which were canonized by the time Jesus allegedly made his appearance some 2000 years ago, have been divided into three sections, the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings. The Jews call the Old Testament texts, collectively, the Tanakh. They order the texts differently from the Christians, but they’re the same texts. The Torah [Hebrew for instruction or teaching], the first five books of the Tanakh [Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – books known collectively by Christians as the Pentateuch], are regarded as the most sacred texts of the Jewish religion. This is already a problem, for me at least, for if all these texts are god-breathed how can some be more sacred than others? Perhaps sacred simply means important; but I doubt it. Jewish teachers and religious leaders [rabbis] have explained this by claiming that the Torah contains all that’s essential; the other Tanakh texts are really just god’s warnings and fulminations brought about by the failure of his people to keep to the Torah.

The scientific method, as mentioned, has been very effectively applied to ancient texts, to determine when they were written, and whether evidence can be found on the ground to support the actuality of the events they describe. It had been claimed for centuries by rabbis that the Torah was written by Moses, one of the principal characters in the texts – even though Moses’s death is described in Deuteronomy. Somewhat in contradiction to this, it’s claimed in the Talmud [a collection of writings on rabbinical law and Jewish custom written long after the Torah] that the Torah was written some two hundred years before the creation of the world, constituting a blueprint for that creation. This seems somehow unlikely. Although the scientific method has been around for quite some time, there has been a great deal of reluctance to allow it to be applied to texts regarded by some as sacred. This was, however, simply a matter of delaying the inevitable. It’s now generally accepted, contra the earlier rabbis, that the Torah and its companion texts were completed during the time of Persian occupation of the holy lands, between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, though some of the writings are thought to date back as far as the tenth century BCE. They certainly were not written by one person. Furthermore, none of the events described in these writings have been backed up by any archeological or other historical findings. Yet despite this complete rout of any historical truth-claims in the Torah, the Jewish religion still persists, as does its highly idiosyncratic outgrowth, Christianity. The apparent imperviousness of Judeo-Christianity – and I would contend of other religions too - to the scientific method is no joke.

Is it really impervious though?

This is section 2 of part one. It needs a bit of editing down, but I'm happy to keep things moving

science is no joke

2009-01-26T17:24:00.001+10:30

The term science is not actually easy to define. Is it a method, an orientation, a set of tools, a body of knowledge or, as some people of faith describe it, just another faith? Some advocates would describe it as a form of inquiry for inquiry’s sake, free from ideological baggage or assumptions, getting up a head of steam as it burrows into things, developing strategies and tools as it goes along, modifying and adapting the tools and strategies of previous inquirers, often within other fields of enquiry, constantly diversifying and yet finding a loose unity in approach, a unity based on what works and bears fruit, which they’ve labeled the scientific method. Critics might respond that there’s no such thing as disinterested inquiry, that all observations are theory laden, that results are already determined by the methods used, methods based on assumptions about findings.

The arguments here can get very abstruse. Scientists, working now within a long-established tradition, just tend to get on with it. The result of their getting on with it is that, in the twenty-first century, we have a fair amount of scientific agreement on a spectacularly rich harvest of data with respect to the universe in which we live, the place of our planet in that universe, the nature of life on that planet, and the nature of our species within the frame of all life forms. It’s hard for us to imagine that, only a few hundred years ago, none of this data existed. Nor did air-conditioners, anesthesia, bicycles, blood transfusions, cars, computers, condoms, electric light, microscopes, movies, planes, refrigeration, robots, skin grafts, solar panels, submarines, vaccination or washing machines for that matter. The scientific method, and the technology derived from it, are so much a part of our everyday lives that we would be utterly bereft without them, a fact which so many of us take for granted it isn’t funny.

This is the first entry in part one, Science

no great shakes

2009-01-26T16:57:00.003+10:30

in the early middle ages women practiced medicine as often as men, but with the growth of guilds and academies, women were sidelined

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the region loosely described as the West, religion has lost much of the political sway that it had 100, 200 or 400 years ago. Amongst other things, this has a lot to do with comfort levels. If you look around today, and you look back into history, you’ll find that by and large, religion is more vital and necessary to people whose lives are tough and thankless. If we could visit western countries or regions even further back – 1000 years ago say – we’d surely find it hard to connect the discovered lifestyles with anything we experience in 2009, and even bearing in mind the enormous condescension of posterity we would surely think the people of back then to be a scarily benighted lot. No flushing toilets [first known to have been used in the Indus valley civilization in the third millennium BCE, but the technology was lost when the classical era gave way to early Christendom], no books [not even Bibles, thankfully, though at around this time ‘libraries’ existed among Islamic sects in North Africa and the Middle East, with – extremely restricted - lending rights], no hospitals [unless you were well-heeled, and those places, run almost entirely by monasteries, were fine for rest and recuperation, and some communal chanting, but not for too much else] and no nightclubs [well, probably not – we don’t know terribly much about medieval dance joints; in any case we’re still a few centuries early for the first big craze, the danse macabre]. Life, especially for the poor, was a bitch, and then you died, the life expectancy in Britain at the time being somewhere between twenty and thirty years. If the Vikings didn’t get you, the next famine would.

The above constitutes an entry, probably the first entry, in part two of a new book I'm trying to write. It has the working title Versus Religion. Part one is called Science, as in Science versus Religion. Part two will be called Politics, or maybe Secularism. I'll be focussing on this project instead of my blogs, since nobody reads my blogs anyway. Time to go for publication again. I'll post much of the stuff on my blog anyway, just in case I get a nibble.

I like the idea of writing in bite-size pieces like this.

Darwin's struggle

2009-01-12T17:00:00.003+10:30

periplus: from Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore. He likes throwing in these bits of arcana. He's discussing a painting, what else, of Joseph Banks by Benjamin West; around him are the trophies oh his periplus, collected from around the Pacific. It comes from the ancient Greek, and is a description, generally in writing, of a shoreline itinerary.

I've been reading, inter alia, the biographies of Wallace and of Darwin, switching from one to the other, like channel hopping, and both men are putting jottings in their journals, Darwin in the late 1830s and early 1840s, Wallace in the mid to late 1850s, tantalising themselves with clues to the great mystery of species variation and connection.

Now I've read the Darwin book - The Kiwi's Egg. The title refers to the flightless bird whose egg is almost monstrous in proportion to its body, so that the gestation period is long and presumably arduous. It's a metaphor for Darwin's dangerous idea, natural selection.

One of the most interesting chapters deals with the doldrum period of natural selection - essentially between the publication of The Origin and the rediscovery of Mendel's work. This was touched on too in one of Gould's essays in Eight Little Piggies. Scientists weren't too happy about the toughness of natural selection, its wastefulness and brutality, and some of them didn't want to relinquish the creator, who must be benevolent. Darwin's insistence that there was no deterministic or goal-oriented element in evolution was very much out of step with his time. All sorts of problems were raised - that the planet was too young to have allowed for all that slow evolution [Lord Kelvin's point of attack, since refuted with the advent of radiometric/isochron dating], that blending inheritance [much touted at the time] would dilute the selected traits over time [since refuted by Mendelian genetics], that soft inheritance [neo-Lamarckism] was more prevalent than inheritance by natural selection, that orthogenesis [an evolutionary approach based on linearity but which could not reveal its mechanisms] was the thing, and so on. Yet the theory of evolution by natural selection has managed to emerge more or less triumphant.

Interesting reflections on Darwin and Wallace. Darwin the procrastinator, nervous about the implications of his views, finally pushed into action by the emergence of Wallace’s work. Wallace the man in a hurry as he called himself, talking about his theory before he had well worked out the detailed mechanism. Imagine if their positions were reversed – if Wallace had been the older man, travelling on the Beagle, and Darwin the later impoverished Amazonian adventurer. Something like the theory of natural selection, perhaps under a different name, would have emerged as early as 1840, and Darwin would hardly be known at all. But such hypothetical reversals are of course impossible.

on to meta-Lamarckism?

2009-01-11T11:27:00.004+10:30

Ted Steele at the launch of his book lamarck's signature

Anchsluss: Generally the term used for the merging of Austria into greater Germany in 1938, which was a stepping stone for other incorporations or annexations [the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, the Memelland in Lithuania] prior to WW2.

Neo-Lamarckism, etc continued

Arguably this is a minor error – Weismann certainly did propose that the germ cells alone [the gametes] were the carriers of inheritance [he wouldn’t have called it genetic inheritance], influencing the formation of all the somatic cells to follow, but unable to be influenced by them. Lamarckian evolution must require changes in somatic cells to be transmitted to the germline. The Weismann barrier, if it exists, specifically rules out such transmission, thus ruling out the possibility of Lamarckian evolution.

Dawkins doesn’t explicitly mention the Weismann barrier in his attempted refutation of Lamarckism. He takes a different tack, referring to two ways of looking at the relationship between the germline and the fully fledged organism, preformationism and epigenesis, which he in turn describes as the blueprint model versus the recipe model - and basically he characterizes the preformationist/blueprint model as wrong.

The idea is that the blueprint model argues that the germline cells somehow contain a blueprint or one to one correspondence for the differentiated somatic cells that are generated from them, whereas the correct model sees those cells as containing a recipe for that differentiation.

Epigenesis dates back, in most rudimentary form, to Aristotle, but fell out of favour with the dominance of Christian creationism, and the different ways of understanding the problem are still infected by metaphysical/religious biases:

where preformation stated that the germ cells of each organism contain preformed miniature adults that unfold during development, epigenesis held that the embryo forms by successive gradual exchanges in an amorphous zygote. Although both traditions tried to explain developmental organization, religious and metaphysical arguments on the conception of embryonic matter as either active or passive determined the scope of their respective explanations. It is shown that these very arguments still underlie the use of gene-centric metaphors in the molecular revolution of the 20th century.

Dawkins's argument is that Lamarck's theory relies on a preformationist version of embryological development. As he puts it,

Embryonic development is a process, in which all working genes participates; a process which, if correctly followed in the forward direction, will result in an adult body; but it is a process that is inherently, by its very nature, irreversible. the inheritance of acquired characteristics not only doesn't happen: it couldn't happen in any life-form whose embryonic development is epigenetic rather than preformationistic.

Dawkins is clearly relying here on the Weismann barrier, which Ted Steele is claiming, at the very least, isn't as absolute as once thought. He's claiming that a new meta-Lamarckism, incorporating both Lamarckian and Darwinian principles, will provide our best understanding of more rapid evolutionary development. Steele's theory of reverse transcription from the somatic cells to the germline, which has of course proved very controversial and has stifled his career as a molecular immunologist through the eighties and nineties, has received some research support in recent years, with Drs Corrado Spadafora and Patrick Fogarty both independently verifying the inheritance of non-germline genetic information - in mice in Fogarty's case, and in 30 diverse species according to Spadafora. Obviously, I'm no scientist and it would be better to follow the research data yourself [anyone who ever reads this], but I may write again about this intriguing issue in order to master it to some limited degree.

neo-Lamarckism and neo-Darwinism, mainly

2009-01-05T18:01:00.007+10:30

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, sittin and thinkin in front of the jardin des plantes, Paris

Oikumene: As used in Karen Armstrong's A History of God, the Oikumene is the Greco-Roman world or civilisation, blended with Christianity. Within the Greco-Roman tradition it refers to the 'whole world', as opposed to the barbarian fringes which were regarded as not really of this world. The derived term ecumenical takes a more modern meaning of the world; creating a religion for all the world and all ages.

Axial age: a term coined by Karl Jaspers, referring roughly to the period immediately preceding the Oikumene, the era that according to him, gave birth to philosophy, but also many of the 'great' religious writings.

I've wanted for a while to write about Lamarckism as a subject in the history of evolution, a faulty precursor to the theory of natural selection, and my recent reading of The Blind Watchmaker and especially its final chapter, 'Doomed rivals', has spurred me on, but I've been thrown into a bit of a tizz by listening to Radio National's 'Okham's Razor' the other day. The speaker, Ross Honeywell, wasn’t a scientist, and when he started going on about neo-Darwinian dogmatists and the unchallengeable orthodoxy I was ready to switch off after just having tuned in [I didn’t even know it was Okham’s Razor at first, I thought it was one of those summer season new-age crank shows].

Then the name Lamarck came up. As Honeywell pointed out, all too rightly, Lamarck has received a raw deal from history. An outstanding pioneering biologist [and apparently the first user of the term ‘biology’], founder of invertebrate zoology – the term ‘invertebrate’ was also his coinage – he came up with a theory of evolution via the inheritance of acquired characteristics that seemed plausible, and even self-evident on reflection, to most nineteenth century naturalists, including Darwin himself.

But Honeywell was saying far more than that Lamarck was not just a failed theorist. He was saying that recent evidence showed that some characteristics, acquired during a lifetime, could be passed on to the next generation. Further, he seemed to be saying that the neo-Darwinists were out to suppress and belittle this evidence. Naturally I was sceptical. Dawkins’s treatment of Lamarckism was pretty damning, or seemed so to a layman like myself. Was it too damning, though? Was there a dogmatism I hadn’t noticed within the careful argumentation?

So I thought I would look again at what Dawkins had to say about Lamarckism in the light of Honeywell’s claims. Dawkins isolates two related elements of Lamarck’s theory adopted by his modern followers; the theory of acquired characteristics and the principle of use and disuse. I’m essentially focussing on the former. One example Dawkins gives is that of the soles of the feet becoming tough and horny after a lifetime of walking on hard stony ground. It was thought that the offspring would acquire tougher soles as a result. Dawkins’ response is that no proof has ever been given that such characteristics are inherited. Presumably the soles of babies born to tough-soled parents are no tougher that those born to soft-soled sedentary parents. In fact, according to Dawkins, no evidence of the inheritance of any acquired characteristic has ever been provided, though he is quick to point out that it may be provided in the future, and Lamarck will then regain his prestige and stand up there with Darwin, for the two theories are quite compatible.

But Dawkins seeks to refute Lamarckism more thoroughly by means of embryology. Honeywell also speaks of embryology, without using the term, when he introduces a concept known as the Weismann barrier. Unfortunately, Honeywell’s description of the concept is clearly flawed and brings out my sceptical antennae.

For neo-Darwinists, hereditary information comes only from DNA in our sex cells: our germline. Our body cells, the building blocks of our entire being, have no say in the matter whatsoever. It's a one-way street with a brick wall at one end. This is known as the Weismann Barrier, named after the 19th century biologist August Weismann, who proposed that DNA in those very few sex cells, sperm and eggs, remains unchanged as a repository of the instructions that determine the next generation.

The flaw being that Weismann, who died in 1914, proposed nothing about DNA because nothing was then known about the properties of DNA [called nuclein when it was first discovered in the nineteenth century], and little was known about genes in general.

To be continued.

exercising body and mind, largely in vain

2009-01-02T22:28:00.005+10:30

willi hennig

I've managed to do 15 kms on the exercise bike for three days in a row now, and my daily steps aren't bad, but my weight keeps increasing. Probably better to measure it weekly rather than daily. Starting to obsess over this, but I really look terrible. Some recent photos have shocked me to the core.

Monroe doctrine. Propounded in 1823 by the USA's 5th President, it was designed to impede any further encroachments on New World territory by European colonial powers - especially Spain. It was audacious for the time, as the USA was hardly then in a position to back up its hand off policy. Niall Ferguson mentions it in the context of Japan's Chinese adventurism of the thirties, in which there might've been a whiff of their proclaiming some sort of Asian Monroe doctrine against Western powers - but with much less likelihood of success.

2009 is a big year science-wise. It's a big Darwin year of course [I think I've already mentioned that here] and I hope to continue to educate myself [and my many readers] on evolutionary matters throughout the year. Also, 2009 is the year of astronomy. Four hundred years ago, in 1609, Galileo reflected that a new invention, the telescope, could be refined and developed and pointed at the night sky. In so doing he explored for the first time the surface of the moon, observed that the so-called milky way was made of stars, and discovered those moons of Jupiter now called the Galilean moons. Modern astronomy was born.

So to today's topic in evolution: cladistics.

This is a massively complex topic in fact, so I'll just deal with it skimmingly. Cladistics is a taxonomic system based on evolutionary relationships between species. In recent years it has become the predominant taxonomic system. The term clade was first used by Julian Huxley in 1958, but the real 'architect' of the system was Willi Hennig, who began developing the system, which he called phylogenetic systematics, while a POW of the British at the end of WW2.

The recent success of cladistics owes much to developments in biochemical analysis. The term clade is ancient Greek for branch, and cladograms are trees of connection between species and their common ancestor. The major difference between cladistics and the Linnaean [or neo-Linnaean] taxonomic approaches are that cladistics is strictly about phylogeny, rather than simply observed similarities between species. Cladistic branching can be enormously complex, so much so that the old classifications [family, order, phylum, etc], which suggest that a few fixed levels can be sufficient, has been rendered obsolete. Cladistics presents a more open classification, which can be filled out as more knowledge comes to light. This knowledge can be gleaned from the fossil record, but DNA/RNA sequencing has increased our knowledge of the relations between existing species considerably.

A clade is also known as a monophyletic group. Other more inclusive groups are discouraged in cladistic classifications.

Finally, taxonomy is something of a ding-dong battleground, a bit like some branches of linguistics, so there are plenty of critics of cladistics out there. Also, there's a question about whether it will ever fully replace the Linnaean system on the popular, lay level.

various weighty matters

2008-12-30T21:46:00.004+10:30

zebras and their hooves

I hadn't visited the bonobo handshake blog for a while, and was happy to find it still going strong, and moved as always by those fascinating beasties. I'd heard that the fierce fighting in the Congo was wreaking havoc, as if bonobos didn't have enough to contend with, but at least the principal bonobo habitat, in the central region, is away from most of the fighting. Still there are scads of hungry desperate soldiers hunting throughout the whole country.

Wish I had the money for a t-shirt or two.

Pronunciamento: when the army, in those countries where the army stands pretty big in its boots, illegally proclaims a lack of confidence in the prevailing government, setting the stage for a military coup. In expansionist Japan in the thirties there was a pronunciamento mood against the more cautious governments of the day, but more in the junior ranks of the army than among the top brass.

Yesterday we visited the airport in an attempt to farewell my favourite six year old, who was taking her broken arm with her back to Mount Gambier. I was armed with a video camera, and carried too a little talking zebra she got from MacDonalds [not the farm] and left at my house, after painting its white hooves black [because that was the colour they should be, according to Her Certitude]. I have a funny relationship with airports. Because I've never flown in my adult life, never having the money for a ticket, they're like places where the other half live, though the other half looks more and more like myself.

We kept telling ourselves we had plenty of time, which meant that we were running terribly late. We stopped at a post office for some reason, and then when we got there, we got into a confusion as always, finding ourselves precious minutes away from where we wanted to be. Then tried to find the Rex airlines departure area. We found the arrival area, and nobody to direct us, so we walked thousands more steps until we found the departure area, which seemed to be immediately above the arrival area. By this time we were realizing it was going to be too late, and she was very apologetic, and I was cursing the awfulness of airports that I didn't belong to.

I love that girl so much. I'll ring her today.

From tomorrow plastic bags will be banned in South Australia. I'm not sure if the general public is ready for it, I have plenty of carry bags here but I keep forgetting to keep them in my car. I'll put them in right now.

My weight, precisely measured at the right time of day, is 81.1 kgs. Today I'm restarting with CSIRO, volume 2. I did 5 kms on the exercise bike before 7.30, followed by a brief walk. If only I could keep it up, but do I ever? The boy is away for a few days over new year, and that's much relief.

on christmas, shopping, books, poverty and being alone

2008-12-29T23:15:00.005+10:30

I get less Chrissie presents each year, as the number of people who like me, or even acknowledge that they know me, continues to dwindle. So I only managed one book, but it does look like being v interesting. It's called The Kiwi's Egg, by David Quammen, and it's all about Darwin and natural selection. Now that we're almost into the big Darwin celebration [2009 is the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The origin of species] I feel a spate of evolution blogging coming on.

There's a fine Darwin quote on the back cover of my new book. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars. Such a typically polite, and fastidious, demurral. Wonder why he chose to capitalize caterpillars along with god.

It might be a while before I get started on that book, I'm reading a half-dozen of em at present, including two on the natural selection theme, the Wallace bio and The blind watchmaker.

When Vestiges of Natural Creation, a speculative, anonymous work which claimed an evolutionary link between monkeys and humans, was published in 1845 it caused a sensation and made this kind of speculation quite the popular thing. Price Alfred read it aloud to Victoria, and two other interested readers were Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. Darwin, whose ideas on the mechanism of evolution would have been quite advanced by this time, called it 'that strange, unphilosophical, but capitally written book', and wrote to a friend that the author's 'geology strikes me as bad, and his zoology far worse' [the book failed completely to provide an explanation for the evolutionary process it promoted]. Wallace was only 22 at this time, and without any field experience as yet, and his response was not surprisingly, more enthusiastic:

I do not consider it a hasty generalization, but rather as an ingenious speculation strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies but which remains to be proved by more facts & the additional light which future researches may throw up on the subject - It at all events furnishes a subject for every observer of nature to turn his attention to; every fact he observes must make either for or against it, and it thus furnishes both an incitement to the collection of facts & an object to which to apply them when collected -

I would observe that many eminent writers give great support to their theory of the progressive development of species in animals & plants.

It would seem that the time for developing a detailed and fruitful theory of the evolutionary process was just about ripe.

Ikea effect: You picture your home as an experimental laboratory, full of new-fangled desks, utensil racks, ergonomic and elegant chairs, trim bookshelves. You will entertain like never before. You feel part of a just-so material world, appreciative and ready to be appreciated. You go home full of the future, having bought a $2 lint remover.

a basic matter

2008-12-26T00:14:00.005+10:30

While watching the pleasant movie Ever After, featuring a younger Drew Barrymore as a Cinderella figure in cahoots with Leonardo da Vinci, we heard a joke about cleaning some queen-like figure's throne, which led us to speculate about toilets in the time of da Vinci, and also about how the Romans did it.

The Romans improved greatly on the Greeks re sewerage. Some of their sewers are still being used. They had public toilets which housed many people at once, as shown. The picture is from Ostia, Rome's harbour city. They seem not to have been partitioned off, and I don't know if they segregated men and women. It isn't clear whether the Romans squatted or sat at these toilets, but they were probably raised from the ground more for sanitary reasons than for ease of sitting. The sewerage, washed away into rivers by aqueducts, wasn’t treated of course, Romans had no such technology nor would they have seen the reason for it, not knowing anything about bacteria. No toilet paper, instead citizens used a communal sponge, washed after each use.

One authority has claimed or calculated that Rome had some 144 public lavs in the later empire. They were generally connected to public baths, and would have been utilized by most of the population, except for the poor who couldn’t afford the public baths. The poor relieved themselves in chamber pots, which were emptied into vats under the stairs, which in turn were emptied into cesspools located around the city. Lead pipes connected to the aqueducts provided running water for wealthy homes.

The excavations at Pompeii have provided invaluable info on Roman plumbing. They found that most houses were fitted with taps, and waste was piped away into sewers and trenches. I’d be very interested to see a picture of a Roman tap, or a surviving example to compare to modern types. Lead piping was used in the Roman area and the Western Mediterranean, and ceramic piping [developed by the Greeks] in the east.

The public lavs, which seemed to be popular hangouts, used buckets or containers, calleddolia curta. These were collected by fullers, who used the urine to clean laundry [because of the ammonia]. Clothes washing wasn’t a regular thing though. They seemed to be more tolerant of smelly clothing than smelly bodies.

The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World looks like a great place to start [and finish] as regards this sort of thing, but what about the da Vinci era?

Leonardo da Vinci lived from 1452 to 1519. We know that the collapse of the Roman Empire led to a degeneration of sanitation in subsequent centuries. For example flush toilets were, amazingly enough, first used in the Indus Valley civilization as long ago as the third millenium BCE, and the Romans also used them, but the technology was lost for centuries. The flush toilet was rediscovered or redesigned by John Harrington in the 1590s for the use of Elizabeth I [she didn't like it, it made too much noise]. It didn't take off in England but was adapted by the French, for limited use. From the eighteenth century, a number of modifications and design features led to the development of a recognisably modern toilet. The plumber Thomas Crapper is often associated with the flush toilet, but he was more of a promoter and manufacturer, flourishing in the late nineteenth century. Our crap doesn't come from the name, instead it's a delightful case of nominative determinism. So to get back to da Vinci, the thrones of those times wouldn't have flushed, and presumably the contents of these thrones would've been dealt with by the servants [in the case of the rich]. The nightsoil man doesn't seem to have been a feature of towns until the eighteenth century.

So there you go. A very patchy history.

what's the point

2008-12-21T00:09:00.003+10:30

a lily, unfestered

It's midnight and today's a new day, early, and I'm contemplating again my embonpoint. I weighed myself earlier, not at the right time, which as we all know is morning, naked or close to, post ablutions and pre breakfasting, and it was about 81.2, about ten kilos, or maybe even twelve, more than I'd like to be, but I realize I can't do it alone, because I haven't, and right now I'm writing this instead of going on a rolling midnight ramble or hopping on the exercise bike; maybe later. Yet I'm reaching a stage of really wanting to get myself under management which at least is a good sign. A certain feebleness of spirit led me to spend money on dinner out, with S and the boy, always with the very good excuse that within two or three weeks he'll be out of my care, so it's time to celebrate and be generous. Before this dinner [I ate chicken breast stuffed with camembert and other goodies, with chips and salad, great for the weight] I spent more time on my arse watching an eighties Clint Eastwood movie, The Pink Cadillac, all as part of the boy's quest to see every bit of Jim Carry footage ever captured on what passes for celluloid these days. And guess what, after dinner, at a nearby pub, we all retired to the home of S for yet another arse-flattening film, the considerably more uplifting Big Fish, a Tim Burton epic about fantasy and family and tensions between. I always feel awkward though with films about family, having let my own down so badly, having estranged myself so completely from them.

Not going to do a film review here though. Felt a stab of romantic devotion to just one, so easy when she comes so perfectly packaged as the young Snow-White Sandra [Alison Lohman], as if this image of youth and beauty represented love and not simply a perfect specimen within which to spurt seed and start out on a new eugenics, a specimen doomed to withering but perfect at spurting time. But I must return to my embonpoint, the point after all. I'm struggling with my pedo steps, preferring fantasy myself to the hard stepping cycling work of reality. Did get a rare dose of reality the other night though in the form of a truly beautiful young woman, friendly as all get out to all and sundry, and lusted after no doubt by all and sundry in the bar where she works, a bar I visit regularly only because of her, because she is so soothing on the eye and a fillip for fantasy, and last night she tried to engage me in friendly chit-chat as she has before, and I've always been awkward and monosyllabic, trying so hard to seem self-contained and un-needy, but this time when she asked how I'd been I tossed off a remark about the difficulties of foster-caring, and she enthusiastically revealed that she had been in foster care as a teen and had been very difficult herself. Followed a brief enthusiastic exchange about the tough teen years, the selfishness and stubbornness, and it was of course a breakthrough of sorts, though i was unable to make anything more of it, yet what a subject to have in common, quite exciting really. Ah to be simply in the company of beautiful women always, watching them and pleasing them with conversation or whatever else I might have to offer, which admittedly isn't much in this competitive world.

But again getting back to my embonpoint...

reason science faith

2008-12-17T08:02:00.003+10:30

all god's critters

I watched some of last weekend's repeat of Qanda with some interest and amusement, formulating my own responses as I watched, but only after talking to a friend who was outraged at Angela Shanahan's contribution did I think of putting down some of my responses here, because they were probably mostly responses to Shanahan. I didn't bother before because it has all been said, time and time again, and Shanahan offers such a soft and limp target as to be hardly worth typing over.

One of the questions was something along the line of do you think faith is compatible with reason/science?, to which Shanahan responded with the feeble response that a lot of scientists are believers, ergo... My response to that would be that this is an example of compartmentalisation, which we all engage in. The real question isn't whether a person can hold incompatible beliefs - they can, they always have and probably always will. The question is whether scientific explanation is compatible with religious explanation. There have been various attempts to argue for compatibility, from the scientific perspective and from the religious perspective. Stephen Jay Gould tried to argue that science and religion dealt with separate and non-overlapping spheres of thought and being, but you don't have to read chapter 2 of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion to recognise the inadequacy, indeed the absurdity, of that argument. If Gould's argument for non-overlapping magisteria [the high-falutin terminology here should make us wary straight away] is correct, then the established churches were simply wrong to harrass Galileo and to object to the idea that we're closely related to chimps. They didn't realize, apparently, that the heliocentric theory and the theory of evolution by natural selection had not the slightest relation to their religious views about God as the creator of the universe, and about humanity as central to his divine plan.

This is absurd, of course. The church knew exactly what was at stake when it went after Galileo. It knew that it was directly in competition with the emergent sciences, that these two 'spheres of influence' offered clearly alternative, and incompatible, explanations of our place in the universe and on earth.

Science is a product of rigorous reason harnessed to technique, to put things simplistically. As such, it has been the most spectacularly successful human phenomenon by any measure over the past few centuries. Established churches have, in the west, been rather blown away by this success. One of the main reasons for this, I think, is that churches, in becoming established, have had to enshrine rules and statutes, organising principles and the like. The establishment of churches requires this kind of order and reason, which by its nature invites scrutiny. When you start issuing decrees about the nature of the soul, or the trinity, or the relationship of the priesthood to the laity [and the deity], you are trying to transform something essentially metaphysical, and perhaps non-existent, into something practical and measurable and agreed-upon, but unfortunately religious matters don't fit very well into that regimen, unlike scientific matters. This is why the religious authority of established churches tends to be punitive, because the authority they derogate to themselves is so weak, when tested by reason. Science, on the other hand, has passed the test of rigorous reason with flying colours, and has therefore been one of the chief generators of cultural evolution in the west.

warily approaching doctor trim

2008-12-13T09:50:00.004+10:30

As part of my penance lately I'm forced to watch every Jim Carry movie ever made, as fellow-traveller along my foster-boy's journey. Recently unearthed were two early ventures, a weird, tinny Club Med promo about skiing and country music and chasing girls, and a mildly amusing vampire spoof. Last night, a "dirty Harry'' movie in which Carry has a brief frenetic role as a junky - the boy refused to go on watching after the character's early demise, though I was almost getting into it. Instead he put on Earth Girls are Easy, a mildly amusing spoof largely saved by the bodacious Geena Davis. Carry's usual character is under-utilized in this, another plus.

My weight remains over 80k. Everything I eat seems to bloat me, though my appetite hasn't exactly faded. I might be eating for compensation, and I'm not keeping to disciplines I try to set myself, eg no eating after 7pm, or 8pm. I need support in this. The problem is probably associated with a general letting go, a lack of concern for my appearance and so forth. My walking isn't going too badly, it's increasing, but having no real effect on my weight. I've taken to a bit of exercise biking, but not regularly enough. I need a plan and outside discipline and enforcement. The walker tracker site's great, but I've not communicated with anyone through it.

This interview with Gutbusters founder Gary Egger is instructive. He points out something that's very true in my case, that men don't worry too much about what can't be seen - the heart or liver for example, unless they're obviously playing up. So the gut's the thing to focus on. He also notes that one of the first things that happen when men fatten up is sleep apnoia - snoring. Again, my case is typical, though nobody has slept with me in a long time, so it's easy to ignore the problem.

Egger also notes that it's an environmental problem in the west, caused by abundance and a general ease of life - personal cars for transportation and the like. It's true again in my case. My neighbours here in this group of four co-op homes ride bikes more than I do. One walks his dog regularly. I drive everywhere - remembering that I didn't get my licence until my mid-thirties.

Egger has moved onto a new improved version of his gutbusters program, which appears to emphasise the science a bit more, and maybe focuses less exclusively on the waist. Professor Trim's weight loss program is specifically designed just for me. The web site is here, and I've just subscribed, or almost, to the newsletter. Actually it looks like I can't do it just now because my accounts aren't working. Anyway, the prices of everything are quite reasonable. There's a quick start program booklet for $9.95, and though the full program is a pricey $495, it can be paid in instalments. Still, I think I'll try the booklet first. My finances are a mess.

wee escapades and intimations of mortality

2008-12-08T19:30:00.003+10:30

I'm somewhat exiled from my second family these days, so I heard with horror yesterday that my fave girl, six-year-old Courtney, has been in the wars again, having broken her arm during a family party. I was at Sarah's for a co-op bbq, and she told me that the day before, the intrepid girleen had been jumping off a wardrobe into a portacot, showing off to some younger kids, when the greenstick fracture occurred. Her screams were impressive, apparently, and they no doubt scuppered the party.

About eighteen months ago, Courtney was playing with a friend in a field near Mount Gambier. There had been a campfire, and the ashes were still smouldering. Courtney tripped and fell, landing with her forearms in the hot cinders.

Courtney now has her arm in a cast, which she's enthusiastically getting everyone to sign. I will see her in a day or two, I hope. Unless something thoroughly unforeseen happens, she'll make a full recovery. When she was burned before, people weren't quite so sanguine about it, burns being much more iffy injuries. There was talk of skin grafts, permanent disfigurement. She was flown from Mount Gambier to Adelaide, I think with the Flying Doctor Service, charming the socks off the medical staff along the way. She received excellent treatment, and again made a full recovery, not a trace, or barely a trace, remaining.

Naturally there has been much talk of the resilience of children, and there's plenty of truth in that, but Courtney is also a child of good fortune being an Australian, twenty-first century girl.

The other day, I read an intriguing article in Cosmos magazine. Its theme was that human evolution may have come to a halt, because we have reached the stage of a 'grand averaging'. As part of the argument, geneticist Steve Jones points out that

In Shakespeare's time, two out of three babies were dead before they were 21. In Darwin's day, just half of them were dead. Today, that's down to just one percent. That's a great achievement in the developed world, but for evolution it means that there are no differences in mortality to the age of reproduction, and therefore no material for natural selection.

This is just a hint of Jones's elaborate and really quite compelling argument, and I hope to reflect further on this stuff in a later piece, but for now I want to focus on the accident-prone and fortunate Courtney.

In those earlier times of high child mortality, it was not unusual for women's pregnancies to reach into double figures, to try to ensure the survival of the one, two or three children that women choose to limit themselves to today, with the expectation that all will be bouncy happy and healthy. And that situation would've pertained not only in Shakespeare's time, but for centuries and millenia before that, leaving aside the odd enlightened ancient civilisation. In fact, Courtney's campfire accident prompts me to imagine the earliest days of homo sapiens, when campfires were de rigueur, and the risk of getting burnt in the family or tribal fire might well have been the most serious and frequent one faced by toddlers. How would an accident like Courtney's be treated then? Maybe they kept a few tried and tested balms in the cave. Maybe they licked their wounds a lot. Maybe, after a few hours of moaning and groaning, they'd get sick of the child and cuff her out of the way. Certainly there would be largely unconscious calculations as to how much time and effort they'd spend on the hurt child, what with all the other mouths to feed and survival tasks to undertake. Quite possibly, if the wounds began to fester, they'd dispose of her over a cliff or with a heavy rock. More likely, they'd simply abandon her when it came time to move hunting grounds.

Broken limbs, the result of climbing accidents or tribal or familial infighting, would have been commonplace of course. Courtney's greenstick fracture might've been treated with a splint of sorts, and she would've survived, misshapen but not horribly so, especially considering that few of her fellows would've escaped intact from various tumbles and spearings and bludgeonings. That was life, but not as we know it. Today we expect miracles, and get them every day. If not, there'll be hell to pay.

So I look forward to signing that cast and hearing her tell of her latest little escapade.

The Life

2008-12-03T09:34:00.004+10:30

Sex has always been a major theme of my writing, though I've generally hived it off to other spaces, such as here and here. Yet I'm not comfortable with erotic writing. Much of it is boring to read, and as a purely theoretical libertine, I've not had much experience to write about. I'd be a bit worried, imagining anyone ever read my stuff, about ending up in the bad sex writing columns. The real point is, though, that I'm interested in real sex, from a scientific/anthropological/psychological perspective, rather than fantasy, though I fantasise often enough. From this perspective, In My Skin, Kate Holden's honest and very informative memoir of her experience as a prostitute in Melbourne, is a real find.

Holden's story is one of slipping into heroin addiction with alarming ease, and then gradually moving into the seedy world of sex in parked cars to pay for her habit, before moving up into safer and generally healthier brothel environments. I haven't finished the book, but presumably she has traded on her writing skills to finally kick the heroin habit and to generally 'go legit'. I don't know that I'm looking forward to the last part of the book, which inevitably will be about the pain of withdrawal from a drug she uses, at the point I'm at in the book, twice a day, sending more than a small fortune, by my standards, through her veins. And a very hard-earned fortune too.

Needless to say, the drugs side of this story interests me much less than the prostitution side, yet they're tightly related, and though I can't quite identify with being in that space myself, I've certainly known and lived with drug addicts [and struggled to tolerate them], and Holden's account is very matter-of-fact on the guilt, the desperation, the euphoria and the tedium of that lifestyle. Maybe it's all been said before, but in fact every situation is different, and Holden always come across as honest and likeable, and somehow a survivor. Her account is tight, completely unromantic and without self-pity, and very absorbing.

In the past I've tried to write about being a prostitute, the ultimate in cheek really for a male who's had little experience of sex of any kind, let alone as a woman paid to have her body invaded by strangers young and old, drunk and sober, beautiful and ugly, fat and skinny, smart and stupid, kind and brutal, bold and timid, smelly and sweet. La putain, c'était moi, and I imagined myself a very attractive woman, witty and realistic, out to make a solid living to set herself up, and finding herself in various awkward, amusing and scary positions. I hadn't really thought it through more than that, but I've always been strong on charcter and weak on plot. What always weighed heavily on me with this project was that this was essentially a male fantasy, of the woman who gets into prostitution by choice rather than necessity. At the same time I didn't want my character to get into the life as the stereotypical junky - stereotypical because so sadly common. I could have made such a character sympathetic, but I didn't think I could make her interesting enough to myself to keep me at it. I wanted her, of course, to be a version of myself, a dilettante who was at a loss as to how to make a living. So she decides to trade on her looks, going in with eyes wide open, knowing there's going to be many awful moments and awful people, and resolved to be professional on all occasions and to savour the occasional sweet-faced boy or seasoned lady's man.

I abandoned the project after a few attempts, though not without contemplating a job in the industry. I discussed with someone I knew the possibility of working as a driver for her - taking girls to assignations. I didn't have a very reliable car at the time, so I didn't pursue it...

Anyway, Holden's book will feed into my Confessions of a theoretical libertine somehow, I'm sure. I'd love to meet her... What stories she could tell, what laughs we could have...

from globigerina ooze to megafauna

2008-12-01T17:57:00.003+10:30

I learn something new every day, at least that's something.

From my reading today I learned about the globigerina ooze which at first I thought was a science fiction construct, but no it's what much of the ocean floor is covered with. The globigerina are a genera of globigerinida, a group of forams, as the experts call them. They're plankton, essentially, and their shells form this ooze. one of many titbits from The Blind Watchmaker. More important, though, is convergent evolution, the observation that, on isolated land masses, organisms will develop to suit certain trades, as they're called, though the variety within trades is considerable. For instance, the principal grass-eating herbivores in Africa are the hoofed animals such as zebra and antelope, gallopers, ungulates. In Australia, the kangaroo fills this niche, though it has developed so very differently. Differences and similarities would be worth pursuing. Herbivores tend to have complicated, bacteria-infested guts, to break down cellulose. The development of this evolutionary pathway would obviously be different in the Australian and African mammals [and among, say, Australian herbivorous mammals], each one finding unique solutions to the problems raised. Their place in the food chain, too would make speed a priority. Herbivores are rarely at the top of the food chain - presumably the kangaroo was prey for some other mammal until recently? Their speed was an important attribute in escaping predators, and they must have developed this speed in response, not to dingoes, who were a relatively newly introduced animals, but maybe thylacines - who knows how plentiful the thylacines were? Certainly, as a marsupial, they will have evolved along with the kangaroo. But the Wikipedia article claims that it wasn't so much predation that brought about the highly developed mobility, but the need to travel long distances in reasonably quick time in a land in which water was scarce. I'm sure they know what they're talking about, but consider that herbivorous ungulate, the camel, Camelus dromedarius [actually camels can probably run quite fast]. They evolved another way of surviving in dry conditions, why such vastly different solutions?

Certainly there would have been predators of the kangaroos before the introduced species. The marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex, not of course a lion but a carniverous diprotodont marsupial, which seems to have been wiped out by the advent of humans 40 to 50 thousand years ago, was one. Diprotodonts, extant or extinct, are almost all herbivores, and they are restricted to Australasia. The Thylacoleo is distinct inter alia for its retractable claws. It is thought to have been a slow animal, catching its prey by stealth and perhaps also falling on it from above like the proverbial drop bear. In those days there were also various giant herbivorous marsupials including giant kangaroos, though I suppose the Thylacoleo would've preferred smaller prey. It also probably shared its range with another species of megafauna, the goanna Megalania prisca. Though there's much debate about its actual dimensions, Megalania is regarded as the largest terrestrial lizard known. However, fossil remains are rarer than those of Thylacoleo, and its habits are a matter of speculation.

Anyway, all of this opens up a whole new world of Australian paleontology never visited before by me. Fascinating.

Americana

2008-11-27T10:42:00.006+10:30

the smoking bogey

American movies. No no, no such thing. Individual sensibilities. And yet and yet. Movies watched over three days, half bullied or fully bullied by the foster kid, also an easy way to assuage guilt, for not going bowling gokarting arcade gaming paintballing macdonaldsing laser skirmishing. Movies made in America. Movies featuring Americans at least. Four over three days, Kill Bill One, Kill Bill Two, Very Bad Things and Thank You For Smoking. All full of death and flippancy but at least no blood in the last.

They bleed into each other in my mind. Kill Bill's silly manga. Know nothing about though. David Carradine's Kung Fu face looking more like his old man. Trailers and Mexico and the Japanese mafia, what they call them, Yakuza. Jacussi. Steamy stuff. Long Uma Thurman's face, changeable as Cath's in its way. Two long films, too long, superheroes, fight scenes, uninteresting superinflated characters, but I liked the trailer guy. Long tradition of multiple heaps of dead baddies, especially in cartoons. The buried alive scene, always a consciousness raiser, killed by the silly fist trick. How would you feel? Might've made the effort to surface, when a young bud. Now no longer. Relax, don't panic, slowly use up the oxygen, slip away. But really who gives a, with the unbeatable sword, the old master, the squished eye, the cardboard baddies, the unreal realism. Getting jaded perhaps. Still, always prefer good old fashioned character development. Always been weak on plot myself. Those dance fights, heads popping like corks, fountains of blood jizz, startling at first then diminished returns, slipping down in the chair, consciousness fading.

And before or ofter that, who cares, Very Bad Things, men behaving badly, Jews and Gentiles, all boorish noisy, unlike my charming mens cooking group. Obnoxious then jawdroppingly horrible, but my boy insists its a black comedy, stay with it, don't give up, improves after the first couple of deaths. Black comedy, a new concept for a teenager, he had to explain and explain. Accept the early deaths of innocents, a balloon boobed pro, a black security hotelman, as foreground to more self-destructive shenanigans led by whatisname, well-known actor, the prime nasty. Whatisname featured in that movie whatsitsname, Heathers perhaps, with weird Winona, my old flame. The Very Bad Things chopped up the bodies, disposed of them in kosher fashion and proceeded inevitably to fall apart at the seams, so with whatisnames help they dwindled in number until Cameron Diaz disposed of whatisname because she wanted everything to go right for her wedding. It was a satire. I laughed twice.

Thank You for Smoking was a satire too about an advertising exec or maybe a lawyer, anyway an apologist for Big Tobacco, Nick Naylor, I only recall that name because the foster boy mentioned it after, and the theme was, is it really a good thing to pursue a job because you're good at it without really reflecting on wider implications? Peter Singer would not approve. Nick's young son adores his wiliness and wants to be just like him which puts us into a very very slightly tense and worried state, and that's what the film's about, why are we laughing, but we do, which is probably healthy. He has regular pub confabs with a very sexy woman representing Big Booze and a fat fuzzball representing Big Guns and they compare notes on who is responsible for most deaths. An unlikely theme for a movie, almost makes it admirable. Asked to recall what happened in the end, I couldn't. Not as unfathomable as the last batman movie, indeed not unfathomable at all, but not too memorable either, apart from that sexy alcohol woman. Oh that reminds me of Katie Holmes, a journalist who fucked Nick for a story, for the mortgage because everyone has a mortgage, they say but I don't. Anyway again I gave the movie ticks for audacity, and for Nick being more or less unrepentent in the end, but of course Big Tobacco finally lost Big Time but not as much as Yul Brynner or Humphrey Bogart.

why anti-semitism?

2008-11-22T09:45:00.006+10:30

In his book on ancient Rome and Jerusalem, Martin Goodman suggests that it was the Romans who first became 'anti-semitic', demonising the Jews in order to justify their their overly harsh response to Jewish rebelliousness in 66CE. Their campaign to put down the rebellion ended with the complete destruction of the Jewish city four years later, and a subsequent diaspora that hasn't been matched, in terms of impact, by any other.

Jewish restiveness was apparently not the result of a general hostility to Roman overlordship, it was more 'reaction to maladministration by a low-grade governor'. The destruction of Jerusalem by Titus seems to have been completely unplanned, a spur of the moment decision by a general fed up with the toll taken by a stubborn, do-or-die phalanx of Jewish fighters.

Yet there's likely to have been another important factor in the decision to raze Jerusalem. Titus was the son of Vespasian, who, after the tumultuous year 69CE in Rome [which saw three caesars come and go], was in the running to become emperor himself. A glorious defeat, even an annihilation of the Jews [who had humiliated Rome by destroying the equivalent of a whole legion, an even without precedent in Jewish history], would clearly improve Vespasian's chances of gaining the laurel crown.

Before this rebellion, Jews were tolerated and even respected at Rome. Herod the Great managed to gain the patronage first of Mark Antony, then of Octavian, and his great building projects in Jerusalem matched the scale of those of Augustus in Rome. Later, Herod's grandson, Agrippa, gained the affections of Tiberius, as well as two later caesars, Gaius [Caligula] and Claudius. Due to their patronage, he was able to rule over even more territory than his grandfather. All this changed after 70CE, and the new Christian sect, keen to distance itself from the Jews and to gain the favour of the all-powerful Romans, found it highly politic to ratchet up their own anti-Jewish attitudes, blaming the Jews for not sufficiently supporting their Man in Heaven, and even for conniving at his death.

Could anti-semitism, that monumental Western negative force, really have sprung from such arbitrary beginnings? Well, yes and no. More no than yes, I'd say. Or rather, its beginnings were believable enough, but its burgeoning growth would have to be sustained by other factors.

One factor was the burgeoning growth of Christianity itself. At the time of Christianity's acceptance as the official religion of the empire, Augustine, that charming intellectual and sensitive soul, a truly worthy Church Father, argued that the Jews shouldn't be converted to the True Faith, but kept in their parlous state of subjection as an example to all of the wrong path taken. Such sentiments testify to the fall of Jewish stocks in society under the Romans in the centuries following the fall of Jerusalem.

The Jews themselves were much more tolerant of Christians than vice versa. They were accustomed to break-away versions of their faith, and the gospels, if any of them are to be trusted, provide proof of the more or less good grace with which Jesus' apostate preachings were tolerated.

This is a sketchy account of the origins of anti-semitism, but its growth as a force in the west would require much further analysis, some of which is given in Niall Ferguson's The War of the World, though his book really only covers the matter in detail from the nineteenth century. Why were all Jews officially expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1322, from Spain in 1492, and so on and on? Clearly they were the victims of their own success to some extent. Ferguson gives the figures for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Jews were vastly over-represented not only in business and banking, for which they have been traditionally reviled, but in the arts and the sciences, in academia and politics, in every area of endeavour that demands a bit of brainpower. It's likely that this over-representation reaches centuries back. Expelling the Jews [and confiscating all their worldlies] was always a good ploy for cash-strapped monarchies needing to shore up the support of their subjects, but this only partially explains the phenomenon of anti-semitism, which is wrapped up in notions of ethnicity, in-groups and out-groups and, later, toxic concepts about race.

I might go into this in more detail in another post, but then again I might not.

drifting and gospel dating

2008-11-20T21:54:00.005+10:30

P52

Currently suffering a touch of emotional and intellectual drift and sadness, which often happens.

Via Pharyngula, I've been listening to a talk by the atheist biblical scholar Hector Avalos. In it he showed a papyrus fragment of New Testament MS, the earliest dated fragment, called P52, which he mentions as dating from around 125CE. The purpose of showing this evidence was to underline the fact that we have nothing whatsoever from the time of Jesus to prove his actual existence. It interested me, though, in terms of addressing again the dates of the gospels. This fragment is from John, which I seem to recall is generally agreed to be the last-written gospel. In fact, according to this site, the fragment's dates are estimated as between 125 and 150CE. It has not been carbon dated, according to Avalos, it has only been dated through paleography [hand-writing]. However, though there are no other extant manuscripts dating before the third century, the gospels are dated according to the events recorded within them [eg the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE, apparently prophesied in Mark, possibly because it had already happened], and according to their political treatment of the Romans and the Jews [there were obviously great tensions between them both before and after Jerusalem's destruction], as well as the use of Latinisms and other possible markers. Scholars are generally agreed that the writing of Mark, the earliest gospel, falls between 65 and 75CE.

Avalos is keen to cast doubt on the very existence of Jesus, which is very easy to do. He says in his talk that the name Jesus isn't mentioned in fragment P52 - though he doesn't deny that it's a genuine fragment of John. The above-mentioned site gives a translation [the MS is in Greek] which, through reconstruction of the missing words, mentions Jesus and Pilate a number of times [both sides of the papyrus are written on]. It was discovered in Egypt, which suggests, well, nothing much more than the gospel had spread to Egypt by that time.

Another, smaller and older fragment, 7Q5, from the Qumran caves, is purported to be from Mark, but the evidence is very doubtful.

I happen to have been reading a bit on anti-semitism lately - first, only sketchily, in Rebecca West's book, in which she merely points out William Joyce's anti-semitism, but more powerfully in Niall Ferguson's The War of the World, which looks at all the cultural, economic, imperial and other forces swirling around in the first half of the twentieth century. Amongst all that is European [and American] anti-semitism and its role in WW2. And I'm also reading Rome and Jerusalem: the clash of civilisations, by Martin Goodman, which focuses primarily on the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, its causes and consequences. The book has a brief epilogue entitled 'the origins of anti-semitism', which I read this morning [though I've only read a fraction of the book itself].

So there's always material to write about, to keep depression at bay.

impudicitia

2008-11-19T08:11:00.004+10:30

Fiona Patten, Sex party convenor

The birth of the Australian Sex Party is something to celebrate, though I'm not expecting it to sweep the scene. I think though that we've reached the stage, even if it's only due to an increase in diversity, that we can seriously, if not too seriously, use the sex word in the title of a political party. Its stated aim, or one of them, is to counter what it sees as the growing influence of religious groups as lobbyists, and of Family First as an essentially Christian conservative party. The influx of Moslem immigrant groups, and other religious immigrants, might also be a concern regarding the maintenance of a truly secular polity. I'm hoping that secularism and the promotion of a sexually healthy and more open society can find common ground to work within.

I note that sex education, for example, is on the ASP agenda, and having noted the appalling response to a more inclusive attitude to homosexuality from the arch-conservative religious school of one of my previous foster-kids [who just happened to be a confused young homosexual], I feel strongly about defending a secularised, inclusive sex education system.

There are many focus issues, even if they're not so high on the agenda now that the economic crisis is carrying all before it. Sex education, abortion, gay marriage, the puritanical [and killing] conditions attached to overseas aid, censorship, the funding of religious schools and institutions, issues around prostitution and pornography, sex discrimination, sexual health issues, drug laws and other civil liberties issues, to name just a few broad areas. The whole idea of this party - the only sex party I'd ever have the chance of being invited to, I suspect [as an overweight, middle-aged single male] - is quite rejuvenating, and I'd quite like to get involved as more than just a member. I've bookmarked the site and I'll pay a membership fee and I'll email them re volunteering. I have writing skills to offer, at least. Of course I might have to tread carefully as a foster carer who receives, in that role, considerable support from a religious charity, though they've never mentioned religion to me and I doubt that all their workers are True Believers. Still, combining foster care with libertine causes might make for a tough juggle.

I've already spoken of this stuff to my current foster kid [who's seventeen and about to fly the coop] and we discussed a couple of the issues, namely gay marriage and abortion. On abortion, he thinks it shouldn't be freely available, but only under certain conditions, such as not having the funds to care for a child, or being too young, or too old... and he also thinks the father of the child should have a say. Like most teens, he puts his finger well on the general dilemmas but hasn't thought through the details, the implications for each particular case ... but then he finished with the view that each individual case should be taken on its merits, which is fine but it doesn't take us too far. The whole discussion made me aware how little I know about what happens when a woman presents for an abortion. Presumably she has counselling choices but may not take those options. Presumably the father doesn't rate a mention? There are quite a few ethical issues kicking around just there.

The lad also argues that gays shouldn't be allowed to be married, because marriage is a Christian ceremony and the Bible's dead against homosexuality. He's dead against the Bible himself, but he somehow seems to feel that if you're gay you wouldn't want to be married, or a Christian, because of Biblical injunctions against homosexuality. I pointed out of course that there were many homosexual Christians and that marriage isn't just a Christian tradition, and of course he said he knew all that... and he modified his view to allow at least civil gay marriages, which are presumably outlawed still by the current Federal government. Again I felt that I should bone up on the issues. Earlier this year, Federal Labor worked on reforming all they could reform re discriminatory legislation around gender and sexual orientation, but they stopped short of giving gay marriage the go-ahead. Why? What was their rationale? How instrumental was the Christian Rudd in this decision? And as to the reforms, have they now passed through both houses and become law?

There are plenty of other issues to investigate and monitor. There is apparently a strong will within this Federal government to overturn the Harradine-inspired policy which ties overseas aid funding to an anti-abortion message, but it hasn't happened yet. And then there's this proposed internet filter...

This article on the Harradine policy is an online version of one I read yesterday in a doctor's surgery. Possibly a bit sensationalist, but not bad for a fashion rag, I thought.

Hopefully I can make a real connection with this party, but I'll have to change my shy ways. Apparently they're launching the new party at Melbourne's Sexpo, and I've never been able to dig up the courage to go to one of them....

recessional

2008-11-17T23:27:00.003+10:30

Historian Niall Ferguson describes it as Kipling's finest poem, and of course its still-puncturing refrain still lives on. The god message doesn't move me, but something does, in this remembering, collapsing time

God of our fathers, known of old--
Lord of our far-flung battle line--
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine--
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies--
The Captains and the Kings depart--
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away--
On dune and headland sinks the fire--
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe--
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law--
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard--
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Amen.

the treason problem

2008-11-10T23:20:00.007+10:30

Klaus Fuchs - a bit naive, a bit arrogant

Rebecca West's collection of essays, The Meaning of Treason, is both reportage and meditation. The edition I've been reading was published in 1952 and it deals with the treason of Nazi collaborators such as William Joyce [Lord Haw-Haw] and John Amery, the more or less incompetent founder of the British Free Corps, an organisation mired in haplessness. The later essays, however, treat of scientists who sold secrets to Soviet Russia, including Allen Nun May and the controversial physicist Klaus Fuchs. It's worth noting that these trials were conducted in, and contributed to, an atmosphere of anti-communist paranoia that came to a head with McCarthyism in the USA.

In spite of the title, I'm not sure that West has come to terms with the concept of treason. Then again, I'm not sure if it's possible to come to terms with it or wholly capture it - it's a slippery and ever-contested concept. West's book is naturally of its time, a time buffeted by the most damaging war, perhaps, in human history. Considering this, West's judgment and those of her contemporaries seem measured and humane enough. Compare the response to September 11 [not an act of treason but yet somehow seen as a betrayal "of our freedoms''], when the tragic and senseless murder of 3000 people was seen as sufficient reason for invading two nations, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, imprisoning countless numbers of their inhabitants, suspending habeas corpus, dispensing with the Geneva conventions, encouraging the use of torture, creating secret prisons and so much more besides. At times like this, when a nation sinks so low, the line between treason and whistle-blowing becomes hard to draw.

Rebecca West was faced with no such problems when she wrote her book. The defeat of fascism had laid bare all its murderous and nihilistic horror. Communism under Stalin had revealed itself as equally bereft of value. Still, treason isn't really about different systems of governance, it's about your country versus everyone else's. It's about the meaning of ''my country''. It's about patriotism, the flip side of treason.

In her epilogue to the essay collection, West returned to the central concept, perhaps feeling she needed to sharpen the focus. She began by anticipating Peter Singer's notion of the expanding circle; the self, the immediate family, the larger community of interests... and then country.

Born and bred in England, he will find it easier to understand the English than the rest of men, not for any mystical reason, but because their language is his, because he is fully acquainted with their customs, and because he is the product of their common history. So also each continent enjoys a vague unity of self-comprehension, and is divided from the others by a sharp disunity...

We can all sense what is being gotten at here, and it raises interesting questions, because it suggests that treason [and patriotism], isn't necessarily about nationhood, but perhaps more about [the betrayal or upholding of] a shared heritage, which may or may not be tied to a nation state. One can imagine being accused of treason against Athens in ancient times, for example, or even of being a traitor to the Aboriginal cause, but to claim someone as a traitor to the European Union seems way too fraught, the ''unity of self-comprehension'' being altogether too vague and too riven with competing allegiances to carry conviction.

West goes on to say - but I'm oversimplifying, I know - that this simple pleasure in shared heritage has been 'lately' muddied by rationalism, by which

the ardours of patriotism were to be abandoned, and replaced by a cool resolution to place one's country on a level with all others in one's affections and to hand it over without concern to the dominion of any other power which could offer it greater material benefits

I would suggest though, that at all times there have been characters, and more than we might like to admit, who have switched national allegiences as frequently, and often for much the same reasons, as pro footballers have switched clubs. Think of Alcibiades, who worked just as hard for Sparta against Athens as he ever did for his birth state, and then again for the Persians against the Peloponnesians, or Josephus, the controversial adviser to Rome on all things Jewish. In troubled times, the self, the centre of that circle of affections, often becomes paramount.

To us now, Nazi or Stalinist sympathisers seem beyond the pale for reasons having little to do with treason, unless we use the term in the sense of betraying the whole species. Still, we are able to make concessions – for the Brits of German background caught between two sides, for the hapless, uneducated POWs who joined the British Free Corps in exchange for kinder treatment from their captors, and even, though to a lesser degree, for those leftists who genuinely believed that communism would provide us all with something somehow better.

In an odd passage [she can certainly be obscure at times] West seems to mock and dismiss the internationalism which many would nowadays claim as a basis for shaking off or transcending the quasi-primitive charms of nationalism:

So the evil moment of fascism came and was clear: not surpassed in evil since the days of the barbarian invasions. The devil of nationalism had been driven out of man, but he had not become the headquarters of the dove. Instead there had entered into him the seven devils of internationalism, and he was torn by their frenzies.

This is more sensationalist than illuminating, but West seemed to believe that this internationalist spirit was a product of a rationalism more dangerous even than the misguided nationalisms that had so recently damaged Europe, and the sphere of Japanese adventurism. It was defeated, she claimed, by the simple reassertion of ordinary folks' claims to their own heritage in the aftermath of the war. I think the term ideology should replace rationalism here, and her remarks are clearly better suited to socialist/communist 'blank slate' ideology, internationalist in spirit, than to fascism, with its focus on nationalist/cultural bloodlines. West's critique is both eloquent and at times hopelessly muddy. In the end it's about cherishing your own - not too much, for ... All men should have a drop or two of treason in their veins, if the nations are not to go soft like so many pears. Of course she’s right that we have to appreciate the small values, the small virtues, those that Nietszche sneered at in Zarathustra. That we shouldn’t aim so high that we lose sight of our foiblesome neighbours and their strivings. The question is, whether people should be punished for giving their all to an idea or a set of ideas rather than to their neighbours, as a matter of principle. It will depend, of course, on the idea, and on the neighbours. The problem with communism was never its international appeal, it was an appeal to a vague utopian concept of equality and social engineering. To sell your neighbours into danger for something so vague and dubious was both naive and arrogant. Was it treason? Probably, yes, but perhaps not quite as commonly understood. The meaning of treason remains unresolved, indeed never more so in an age of increasing global co-operation. In fact, with treason not having much of a profile in the courts these days, the question, both of treason and of patriotism has clearly become increasingly vexed. May it continue to be so - it might just be a sign of maturity.

and you get more

2008-11-10T18:25:00.004+10:30

ain't drugs

These words affront me every time.

Drugs are not recreational

Drugs are drugs

And cars are cars and brains are brains and

stupidity is stupidity and imagination is precisely and

pins are not ever needles and love

cannot possibly be pain, and sex is,

and a smile is nothing but a smile, please be

clear

a word is only a word but always a word

and that is the word that it is

a dictionary is another word for a liar

and that is a lie

by definition

We live in narrow times that are always coming to an end

- at least to this little ego

on hubristic claims to custodianship

we must save the planet, I hear

parroted by kids and such

and the Anzacs died to save us

except they didn't

they just beastly died

and our planet isn't dying

but so many of our prey are

and so it goes, and will go

until maybe we all go

to nothing

and the planet will spin on

throbbing and thickening

with life, but not as we know it

three wee poems

2008-11-09T09:36:00.006+10:30

the bush

This morning I woke up to rare spring rain.

the thyme had been thinning greying

in the desert front

midst of cobwebs and drooping straps

carelessly dealt with.

With rain it shines and enlivens.

No watering can can compare.

It's all it should be

all of a sudden.

By afternoon dull thiness is back, almost,

for hope's colour just remains

and a tiny trace of body, or mind.

life long learning

Treason, strange word nowadays

in a world of sharing

your secret's with me

your face my book

William Joyce was hanged.

He hated Jews.

That wasn't nice.

his poor parents died before him

which was a good thing

and if he were alive today

ever in his prime

to witness his death and aftermath

and ever after

wouldn't he feel the fool

Time wounds all heels

and heals all wounds

thank you

Your music somehow does it

the mood

for spare stark words

I feel precise and languid

warmly human and sans nonsense

a kind of love

disembodied unfortunately

but that has its place

a place that saves

trying to keep calm

2008-11-08T21:00:00.003+10:30

but my tail is wagging

Much of today, a Saturday, was spent volunteering for the city council, overseeing kiddies frolics in Rundle Mall on Christmas pageant day. November 8 seems way to early for all that stuff, but they do it the same time every year. It was fun enough and got me some much-needed exercise. Afterwards I hung around Borders and bought two books I could ill afford, The Blind Watchmaker and another history book, but one I sense I'm going to argue with a bit, The War of the World by Niall Ferguson. My life has crumbled so much that really reading is the major solace and focus now, I've become largely invisible in the real world, but I did at least have some pleasant conversation with the lovely Huey, a fellow volunteer who talked me into the gig. I work with her at a city community centre on Mondays, and she's applied for a job and wanted encouragement from me. I thought she had a good chance of getting it, and she suddenly said, I'm sure quite innocently - I tell you what, if I get the job, we'll go out to dinner, is that a deal?

My immediate thought was - am I hearing this arright? Is she talking about just us two, or maybe the whole staff of the community centre? She's a very attractive woman, and of course much younger than myself. A couple of months ago, she confided in me quite unexpectedly regarding the sudden break-up of her marriage, and then I felt a spark, though I dismissed it as the usual desperation on my part. In any case, it gives me a fillip - my body might start getting the attention it needs from me again. I'll have to check through her application to make sure she gets the job - English isn't her first language.

Must change the subject.

With all the poo the USA's in at the moment, the election of Obama shows things haven't changed, the black guys still get the worst jobs. Still, it's pretty exciting, and I was unexpectedly tearful when the victory was announced, it's kind of miraculous, even though I've supported him since before he started moving ahead of Clinton in the fight for the Democratic nomination, and it restores my faith in the American public somewhat, though the claim that now the possibility of becoming US President is open to anyone with sufficient merit is clearly bogus, and will be so for as long as Presidents and wannabe Presidents have to utter those puerile words ''God bless America" after every speech. Those founding fathers must be spewing in their gravies.

But there are plenty of reasons not too get too excited about Obama as a pacifying diplomat. In the first Presidential debate, I think it was, he just happened to slip in the claim that Venezuela - a democratically elected government that just happens to be a bit antagonistic to US foreign policy - was a rogue state. More US arrogance, pure and simple [and chilling too - let's not forget the CIA's murderous intervention in Iran in the fifties and Chile in the seventies, democracy my arse]. Today he had a go at Iran. I'm not so much annoyed that he claims Iran supports terrorist organisations. Presumably he has proof and I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt [though evidence must be produced, and we'd expect something a darn sight better than the shite served up as evidence against Iraq]. What I am concerned about is that a state bristling with nuclear weapons somehow imagines that it has the right to prevent any other nation from developing similar weapons. Hypocrisy, pure and simple. Motes and beams in eyes. Of course I don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons. I don't want any country to have them. I certainly don't trust the US with them, not after eight years of Bush and his Cheney gang.

So I'm with P Z Myers on this. No reason to get too carried away.

keeping occupied

2008-11-04T21:57:00.003+10:30

As everyone worries about the economistupid, except all the poor people I know, and I don't know any rich ones, and as others anticipate an extraordinary moment in US political history, as do I very much, I struggle with life and death issues in my own sad meagre life but am buoyed and cheered as always by investigations outside myself. Homo floresiensis returned to my consciousness via an intriguing SBS doco. When last it left it the sceptics seemed to be gaining the upper hand, describing insisting the hobbit was a case of pathology, or hobbits were a case of pathology, microcephaly probably. I an amateur though well they might or must be right, floresiensis upsets too many applecarts, you can't have such a small and small-brained humanoid dating to only 13000 years ago without pathology, there's no possible fit otherwise, but now I hear apparently well-credentialled and richly experienced specialists, on teeth and bones and brains, arguing no way, this isn't pathology, this is genuine hominid enigma, and one of them makes connections between australopithecine bones, dating near two million years ago and never known to have come out of Africa, and the islandic floresiensis just north of Australia.

Islands, they say, always throw up anomalies, and this is a whopper, it can hardly be underestimated, with a brain around 400 cubic centimetres, less than half that of homo erectus, the human ancestor thought to have brought us out of Africa. How can this much more recent, much smaller-brained species or subspecies, with wrist bones like those of chimpanzees, have survived almost to the present day [it seems to have been a tool-maker on the level of homo erectus]? The generally or previously acknowledged thinking about human evolution has been that of progressively increasing brain size, though the neanderthals who survived to 30000 years ago were an uncomfortable anomaly, but now all is up for grabs and people are wondering about Orang Pendek and there have been discoveries written up from Dmanisi, Georgia about a smaller-brained version of homo erectus in Asia, dating back 1.8 million years, and experts point out that there is so tiny fragmented a fossil record regarding human ancestry, hardly enough to build any coherent theory, and cherished theories can be smashed by so little a floresiensis, it's no wonder scientists are so passionately pro and con.

So that was engrossing and I wished for a while I Coodabeen a paleontologist and maybe I Coodabeen if I hadn't been such a wastrel or dreamer, a paleontologist chatting with same, exciting each other and arguing with each other, stimulating each other to take home our ideas together and apart and think on them and work on them and examine and write further, modifying theories, creating revolutions.

Meanwhile I sit sometimes with no light and sound wondering what to do, getting fat and old as the external exciting world recedes, and I think, then I think no, avoid that, and soon the US election results will be out and that'll be fun, I'll be able to talk to someone about that maybe.

Rebecca West and William Joyce

2008-10-30T14:29:00.006+10:30

Rebecca West is a name I've occasionally conjured with. I've been reading her for the first time recently, and before that I knew her by reputation as a sometime lover of H G Wells and a prolific writer/journalist, a fairly formidable figure in English letters in the first half of the twentieth century. When, a few years ago, I was reading up on Serbia and the Balkans, I came across her hefty tome, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, in a second-hand bookshop, but finally decided against buying it. Now, having almost finished her fascinating book-length essay on William Joyce [aka Lord Haw-Haw] in a collection entitled The Meaning of Treason, I can't wait to write about her and to read more.

As Wikipedia tells us, West had a very long as well as productive life, dying in 1983 at the age of ninety, and always participating energetically in the issues of the day. Her writing on Joyce shows her to be a shrewd psychologist and a political pragmatist, wryly realistic and nobody's fool. It's a fascinating account of the polical tensions before and after WW2, with communists switching to fascism then switching back to communism, with anti-democratic political ideals holding far greater sway in the west than they do today, and with so many people caught up in the vagaries of family ideology, competing nationalisms and generally divided sympathies.

William Joyce, for example, was born in the USA to Irish Unionist parents - which, since they were also Catholic, immediately rendered them anomalous. He returned to Ireland with his family as a young boy, where he received a good Jesuit education, proving himself industrious and disciplined. He moved to England as a teenager, and made various attempts to join the military. From an early age he seems to have been drawn to conflict and controversy. He was a rabid anti-semite and when he became prominent in the British fascist movement he emphasised that element in his oratory, polarising opinion on the BUF [British Union of Fascists] and possibly creating tensions with its leader, Mosley.

Bigotry is an intriguing phenomenon. We know that it's all around us - anti-semitism, racism, homophobia - and we associate it with ignorance, and we find people who espouse such thinking boring as well as dangerous, but its very familiarity masks its essential mystery - why do people engage in wholesale hatreds based on such flimsy pretexts? How did this way of thinking become so popular as to convulse the whole of Europe for a decade? Why did it attract so many reasonably well-educated types as well as the usual misfits and crazies?

West is ultimately no more able to provide answers to these questions than I could. In any case, anti-semitism was much more fashionable then than it is now, at least in Western Europe. Well, no, not just there, think of the USA, think of the highly respectable Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, and the backdrop that made their views respectable. Think too of the emphasis on race and eugenics in those pre-war days.

Joyce’s hatred of communists was also something of a fashion, but it should also be noted that then as now, the people most consumed with the activities and the danger to society of the extreme left were those of the extreme right, and vice versa. It’s a kind of co-dependence in which each side must necessarily over-value the negative impact of the other. When Joyce was a young man he was slashed by an assailant at a conservative party meeting he was convening. It left him badly scarred. He always claimed the culprit to be a communist Jew. Of course if that were true it might be cause for resentment, but it’s much more likely to have been a convenient fabrication.

West makes much of the issue of class in Joyce’s ambitious make-up. He wasn’t a gentleman – West uses the term with only partial irony – in spite of his educated airs, and Mosley would never have considered him his equal. This seemed to make him more determined than ever to make his mark, and we get a strong sense of someone who feels himself worthy of better things than others are willing to concede to him. He wanted to become a British officer but was somehow blocked in that ambition. As a fascist organizer he was probably more successful than Mosley but was given little credit by him. When he finally left for Germany just as war was about to break out, the Nazis treated him with suspicion and disdain, to such a degree that he almost turned tail for England and incarceration for the duration. When, with great reluctance, he was given his head over more ‘gentlemanly’ broadcasters [the name Lord Haw Haw was transferred to him from earlier, more plummy announcers], he proved to be their most reliable propagandist.

Of course it was a very circumscribed success. Fascism, by its very nature, was always bound for failure, and its spectacular failure and spectacular destructiveness in the thirties and forties has discredited anything like it for a long time to come. Joyce’s broadcasts in any case probably did more good than harm to the British cause. He became a figure of fun but also a rallying point. People tuned into him both for amusement and to try to get a handle on how the enemy saw them, and how they were coping with the war.

West's reportage of the case, her description of the trial process and Joyce's response to it, is wholly absorbing. Her general remarks about treason are more open to question, though. However, my response comes from a time when Western Europe has known decades of peace and stability, and has even formed a union of sorts, with a common currency. Globalism has also played its part in rendering the concept of treason quaint, to some. It's worth having a closer look at West's reasoning in the light of the twenty-first century, and i'll do that next time.

Thoughts on a passing administration

2008-10-30T14:13:00.001+10:30

As the USA stumbles and crashes to the end of their first administration of the twenty-first century, I feel the need to provide a semi-educated dilettantish outsider’s perspective.

I’m neither an economist nor an American, so I’m not going to dwell so much on that nation’s current economic woes, its causes and effects. I’m more interested in the foreign policy of this administration, which has surely been disastrous for the USA’s global image.

Obviously the events of September 11 have dominated their foreign policy. I witnessed the unfolding events of that day with amazement and horror and sympathy, like almost everyone else, but it wasn’t long after realizing that the world wasn’t coming to an end that my thinking was dominated by one simple question – what will the reaction be?

As one wiseacre once put it, we ought to be judged not by how we treat our friends but by how we treat our enemies – or words to that effect. So many of us must have felt that the way the USA responded to this attack would be of enormous significance for the whole future of the west, and few of us would’ve felt too sanguine about it, given the new administration, and the returnees from the previous Bush administration.

Nevertheless, the invasion of Afghanistan didn’t raise too many eyebrows. Most of us felt a real disgust at the brutal, primitive ways of the Taliban, and sympathized with the push towards freedom of hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees. We watched the despicable destruction of the Buddhist statues, the beating of women in their absurd tent clothing in the streets, and we heard, many of us for the first time, all about Osama Bin Laden and al-Queda, and their training grounds in the south of the country. It seemed reasonable to make a strike against this sort of thing, perhaps.

Always perhaps. My concern, always, is with the suffering of civilians and innocents when the crude instruments of war are brought to bear. Those clean clinical strikes we all remember from the first gulf war, the demonstrations of strikepower, something like demonstrations of a new more effective washing machine or garbage disposal. Where were the human beings down there? Were there none? Does anybody really believe advertising?

The argument that the September 11 attacks were first and foremost criminal, and therefore a police matter, an argument that seemed perfectly coherent to me, that argument was soon drowned out as the invasion of Afghanistan progressed and rumours surfaced that Iraq would be next. My own initial response was to discount the rumours and to reflect, from my safe and faraway computer desk, that Afghanistan was already ravaged by war and turmoil, the American invasion could hardly make it worse and might eventually bring about a happier outcome for the less benighted. An ignorant liberal fantasy.

News trickled out about Camp X-ray, and then Camp Delta, and the war of words against Saddam Hussein began, and my sense of anger and disgust grew. I was no fan of Saddam, but I could see no obvious connection between his regime and al-Quaeda and the September 11 attacks. Everything, on the contrary, pointed to a disconnection, an antagonism, since, al-Quaeda, like the Taliban, seemed to have grown out of a primitivist movement [primitivism being a term I use in preference to fundamentalism] which would be as hostile to Saddam’s quasi-secular dictatorship as it was to Christian infidel nations.

I tried to look at the other side. All of the Bush administration’s arguments for ‘’taking out’’ Saddam were clearly bogus, but Saddam was just as clearly a criminal and a murderer, and the Iraqis would be better off without him. Presumably most Iraqis would agree. However, perhaps an even greater majority of Iraqis were antagonistic to the US and profoundly suspicious of its interest in the region. These people would be prepared to take up arms against any invading force. Better the devil you know. Given the ‘’if you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists’’ rhetoric of Bush, these people, who if they had been Americans defending their land, would be honoured as patriots, would be in danger of being branded as terrorists, and given the moves by the Bush administration to dispense with the Geneva conventions in order to more ‘’efficiently’’ prosecute their unilaterally declared ‘’war on terror’’, they would be treated abominably for their patriotism. All of which would rebound on the USA itself.

A little investigation showed me that, though Saddam had behaved abominably in the aftermath of the first gulf war, to shore up his battered status, his regime in the years leading up to the renewing of hostilities by the US had been relatively peaceful. Saddam, it seemed to me, was brutal but not stupid. A prolonged rein of terror would not have done his cause any good, and nor would he have helped his cause by antagonizing the US unnecessarily. These fairly obvious reflections made me very suspicious about US claims regarding WMD. First, the Bush administration seemed bent on regime change in Iraq, no matter what, and WMD appeared to be a mere pretext. Second, there were massive contradictions between US claims and those of the UN weapons inspectors, and it was only reasonable, from a bystander’s perspective, to trust the UN, who had no particular barrow to push, over the US.

In any case, we watched helplessly as the US moved towards war, disgusted and deeply ashamed that little Australia, under little Johnnie Howard, was backing the planned invasion to the hilt. Howard’s adherence to Bush didn’t surprise me though – what did surprise me was the support of Tony Blair. My understanding is that Blair was keen to remove Saddam but backed a more multilateral, UN-based approach. It seems that the Bush administration secured a promise from Blair that, if the US went through the motions of getting support from the UN security council, Blair would back the invasion. They did go through those motions, in the most bullying and belligerent manner possible, and Blair, as a man of his word, felt compelled to make the best of an unsatisfactory situation. Which raises the question of whether keeping a promise is more important than saving lives. Blair shouldn’t have made such a promise in the first place, though, considering the nature of the Bush administration, which should’ve been clear enough to him. His own head of intelligence, Sir Richard Dearlove, reported to him in July 2002, well before the UN maneuverings, the real situation:

Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Given this evidence of pig-headedness in the Bush administration’s intentions, and a cavalier callousness in regard to the fate of the Iraqi people, Blair’s support strikes me as unconscionable. Maybe he felt British troops could be a tempering influence in the invading force – as indeed they seem to have been, by and large – but the fact remains that the Americans were largely calling the shots, and their approach was a matter of the gravest concern.

The invasion of Iraq, and the mess it has created of that country for years, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, the shameless exploitation of the country’s resources, and the obvious strengthening of al-Queda and anti-American sentiment that has resulted, will be seen as one of the enduring legacies of the Bush administration. It took a long time for the administration to realize that the most important battle in Iraq was the battle for hearts and minds, but it does seem that, particularly under the leadership of David Petraeus, things have improved greatly in recent times.

The most disturbing development, it seems to me, that has occurred under the George W Bush presidency, is the expansion of Presidential power to unprecedented proportions. This is a situation that should be reversed by the next administration as a matter of urgency. Of course, it’s unlikely that a President will act to curtail his own power, but it would be a measure of that President’s stature that he should so act. The abuse that has occurred under the soi-disant war on terror is flagrant and chilling, and a crime against humanity. Joseph Marguilies’ book Guantanamo and the abuse of presidential power provides much evidence on this matter, but it’s not far to find much other evidence on the brutality that this administration has unleashed and encouraged in its treatment of alleged enemy combatants – a huge number of them completely innocent and since released without charge – since the events of September 11 2001.

Another probably vain hope for the future is for the USA to recognize its international obligations and to accept international jurisdiction with regard to crimes against humanity.

This may all read like an anti-American screed, but I’m a sometime student of history and I know that, through the ages, every nation or state that has come to a position of dominance in its neighbourhood or the world has used that position for the purposes of exploitation. The ancient Aztecs built a magnificent nation on the exploitation and enslavement of its neighbours. The Athenians dominated the Delian League and ruthlessly exploited it to its own advantage. The Roman Empire was more or less archetypical in this regard, and the British Empire was all about expansion of its own power at the expense of others, no matter how civilized a spin you put on it. So it’s ridiculous to allow the US, or any other power that attains the position the US has done, to imagine itself the world’s police officer, as well as judge, jury and executioner. We must have stronger international courts, subscribed to by all.

I once used a schoolyard story to illustrate the US war on Iraq, and I will repeat and elaborate on it here as I think it still holds good. The USA can be compared to the strongest, toughest kid in the playground. Of course, in the past he has demonstrated this toughness in various ways, intimidating many kids who deserved it, some who didn’t, and accepting sycophancy as his due. Others in the school-yard have tried to steer an independent course, but have recognized that they need to keep on good terms with big Sam. One day, Sam gets tripped up and falls flat on his face. He feels humiliated, and he can’t get on his feet fast enough to catch the culprit, though he know well enough who he is. He spends a bit of time hunting around for him, then he beats up another boy he knows to be a good mate of his. However, this doesn’t satisfy Sam, because the mate was easy pickings and Sam still feels humiliated. He feels he has lost face, so he decides to get stuck into another boy with whom he’s been on bad terms for years. He makes up excuses for his bullying, saying that the boy has been hatching plots against him and that he’s secretly in league with the lad who’s tripped him up. He knows that the two boys have always hated each other, but so what? The kid deserves it anyway…

The sad thing about this story is that it really is spot on – there is nothing more to the invasion of Iraq than this – the restoration of big Sam’s pride and reputation. Of course there is one important sense in which this is an odious comparison, and that is that the September 11 attacks claimed thousands of innocent lives, and the attack on Iraq has claimed hundreds of thousands more. The USA has wrought some revenge on some of the September 11 attackers. To say they have been brought to justice would be going too far, since this administration has, in this sphere, dispensed with justice in the universally understood meaning of the term after declaring their ‘war on terror’. That the perpetrators of the Iraq invasion and occupation will never be brought to justice goes without saying. Yet still we can hope.

Gymnorhina tibicen

2008-10-15T08:54:00.003+10:30

At this time of year, Homo australis often experiences, of a morning, one of the simple pleasures of a complicated life, when he awakes to the call of the magpie, Gymnorhina tibicen. Here in beautiful Bowden, around my mud-brick cluster, there’s a pleasant pack of them. Magpies tend to form groups of about ten in my part of the world, though the numbers can be quite a bit larger in less built-up areas. I’ve been meaning to write about them for a while, as they’ve always given me a bit of a thrill, but after going for a local ramble the other day, and watching a magpie hop and warble nearby as a sat reading in the park, I’ve decided today’s the day.

I was reading about how the universe is likely to end [not with a bang but a whimper], so it was pleasant to focus on something else for a while. I noticed this magpie on a picnic table a few metres away, being hassled by two hovering and semi-swooping magpie larks. It’s chick-raising season, maybe that’s the problem. The magpie larks were making these single, simple squealing sounds, while the magpie, when it was ready, came out with its distinctive quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle, to quote from the popular poem by New Zealander Denis Glover.

The magpie’s call is one of the most elaborate of all bird calls. I once heard that this was because the bird is double-throated. I don’t know what that means or if it’s true. I also heard that each individual’s call is slightly different, and I don’t know about that either. As I often do, I’m writing this piece as a process of self-education.

It’s interesting, and perhaps not coincidental, that magpies and magpie larks are often found in the same areas. It’s hardly surprising that people confuse them. Names, too, are confusing, what with the magpie, the magpie lark, the murray magpie, the piping shrike, the butcher bird and the currawong. So let’s sort things out.

The magpie lark, Grallina cyanoleuca, is neither a magpie nor a lark. That makes sense, especially when you consider that the magpie isn’t really a magpie either. That’s to say, the Australian magpie was named after the European magpie, a completely different bird from the Corvidae family, allied to crows and ravens.

In South Australia the magpie-lark is also called the murray magpie. In Victoria and Western Australia it’s known as the mudlark, and the peewee in New South Wales and Queensland. The more I look into it, the more complicated it gets. These birds are fiercely territorial and not afraid to have a go at larger encroaching birds like my magpie.

The piping shrike, emblematic bird of South Australia, turns out to be just another Australian magpie, a subspecies also known as the white-backed magpie, Gymnorhina tibicen leuconata, common to southern and western Australia. Four subspecies have been identified, the others being the black-backed magpie, Gymnorhina tibicen tibicen, the Tasmanian magpie, G tibicen hypoleuca, and the western magpie, G tibicen dorsalis, found in a specific region in the south-west of Western Australia.

Neither the butcher bird nor the currawong are found in these parts, but they cause confusion elsewhere. Butcherbirds come in many colours, and it’s the pied butcherbird, Cracticus nigrogularis, which in fact inhabits most of Australia apart from our region and Tasmania, that I'm really talking about. The picture tells the best story.

The solid and crow-like pied currawong, Strepera graculina, is very much an eastern seaboard bird. And they’re plentiful over there as we all know. I’ve heard them referred to as magpies too [probably by South Australians or other invasive species].

So that’s the run-down of Aussie magpie-like birds. Now what about the magpie itself and its call? Is it double-throated and what does this mean? My net ramblings took me to the deadly double-throated cassowary [no explanation as to why it might be more deadly than a single-throated type], and double-throated fykes [a type of trap], but nothing much at all about what being double-throated entails [maybe the term is too obviously self-explanatory?]. Maybe I’ll return to the subject later – what I’m really looking for is something of the science of birdsong. Meanwhile I’ll enjoy the communications.

Dear enemy

2008-10-12T19:20:00.002+10:30

completely irrelevant pic, perhaps

This is the first of a series of ongoing pieces – for such issues never end – with an obviously related theme. Hopefully I won’t dwell on them too much, and will intersperse them with far more interesting material.

I obviously look upon the ruins of my connection with you, and its impact on many other parts of my life, in a very conflicted way. Bewilderment, bemusement, anger, and above all pain, these are the predominant descriptors. Should I add guilt? That wouldn’t be honest, for I don’t feel any great guilt over anything that I’ve said, done or written to you. Obviously I need to be re-educated, because I honestly don’t get it.

Let me start with a quick, blunt appraisal of you, to my mind. You have energized me and drained me of energy, in turns. I’ve rarely met a more sensual and sexual person, and that is highly energizing. To describe a person as sexy, is to say something both complex and highly subjective. Dull people, for example, aren’t sexy no matter how symmetrical their features or how svelte their figures. To describe someone as sexy is to say how you in particular respond to and are invigorated by their smile, their movements, their voice, their turn of phrase, their hunger and so on. It’s almost always a response to something quite unconscious in the other, and I won’t take it any further than that.

The trouble is, whether I dwell on the positives or the negatives, I’m bound to get your back up! So I’ll just try to proceed in all honesty.

Counterbalancing this energizing – indeed endlessly energizing – quality is something about you that leaves me flat. It’s a kind of strident, and I think fake-confident opinionatedness about everything. Now, of course, I feel myself the victim of that opinionated closure, and I suppose that was inevitable.

Opinions are conclusions. They come at the end. They close discussion. If someone says ‘I hate that writer’ or ‘that building’s a piece of shit’, or ‘that guy’s an arsehole’, there doesn’t seem much more to say. The implication seems to be that the person has thought all there is to think about the subject, has come to a considered and definite conclusion, and is now merely delivering it for the edification of others. To respond with, ‘well, I’m not sure I agree with you’, just seems a deliberate act of provocation. It’s draining to even think about coming out with such a response – you can already sense the defensiveness, the brick wall that you’re about to hit. Perhaps a better response is to ask why? – and maybe get a dialogue started that way.

This is an important point. In all the years I’ve known you, I can’t recall having too many stimulating conversations with you, and this is, I think, because you’re one of the most judgmental persons I’ve met. It’s true that this judgmentalism is like a red rag to a bull for me, and that I’m tempted to goad you when confronted with it, but in the past I’ve restrained myself far more often than giving into this impulse.

This would be almost acceptable if you were a deeply informed person, steeped in the culture of whatever you happen to be dismissing, but clearly you’re not, and you’ve admitted this yourself often enough. Some years ago you were talking with pride about having read only about ‘three books in the last ten years’, and you’ve rarely evinced any interest in science, or history, or anything particularly cultural apart from rock music, comedy shows and home decorating. One would think this would engender some humility in your view of things, but it seems to me you prefer to try to humble the world to your simplifying views than to seem to appear weak by expressing uncertainty and wonder and amazement at the inordinate complexity around you.

Having said this, I’m absolutely delighted that you’ve started work this year as a political/cultural journalist with Radio Adelaide. I’ve always had a high regard for your intelligence, and I hope this job will continue to motivate you to move out of your comfort zone, leave your numerology and horoscopes behind, and explore cultural areas left barely touched in the past. I’m very envious. One day, if you ever rescind your decision to hate me, I might amuse you with my own feeble efforts, more than twenty years ago, to join the staff of Radio Adelaide – 5UV as it was then – as a volunteer.

I’ll wind up this first piece on the subject – there is so much more to say – by summarising the above a little. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed being a witness to your life – which has changed greatly in that time. From time to time, I’ve allowed myself a little commentary, and this has obviously incensed you to an extraordinary degree. Why this is so is essentially a psychological question. I’ve never wanted to spend lots of time with you, I’ve never angled for that. Your rigidity of thought, and your boredom with any ideas that can’t be grasped in less than five minutes, makes you more interesting to observe from a certain distance, and with a certain wry humour. You don’t really deserve to be taken too seriously. Which raises the question of why your treatment of me has hurt me so much. And it really really has. I might explore that next time.

Moonstuff

2008-10-12T09:51:00.003+10:30

ravaged beauty

The moon, I suspect, is a touchstone to every feeling person. As to me, its sicklied o’er pallor has made it an ideal companion on many an evening ramble given over to the inconcinnities of unrequited ardour. But though I often gazed, I never really observed. I didn’t notice, for example, that its path across the sky was erratic, shifting from quadrant to quadrant. I didn’t know what a quadrant was.

I remember certain facts and figures from childhood – those numbers that get stuck in your head and that no new data can quite replace [there’s a strange sense, for example, that China will always have 700 million inhabitants for me]. The moon is 283,000 miles away, compared to the sun’s 93 million. I’ve just written that without looking up references. A quick squiz informs me that the figure is closer to 238, 000 miles [an average distance between perigee, the closest, and apogee, the furthest]. Interestingly, this distance isn’t constant. The moon is edging away from us at a rate of just under 4cms per year.

I’m a late bloomer in most things. I didn’t get to closer quarters with the moon until my early twenties, when a friend encouraged me to look through his telescope. He told me that, if you looked closely, you could see some of the moons of Jupiter. Maybe it was my eyesight, or my laziness, but I could see nothing of that, and only had eyes for our scarred and potent satellite. This was a dozen years or so after the first moon walk, and certainly that was memorable, but there’s something about visual contemplation and intimacy. A woman’s face, for example. Really looking at it. It can also confer a dangerous fantasy of possession. Possession, at least, of some secret knowledge.

Where did the moon come from? I recall reading of that too in childhood. There were competing theories. When the earth was young and molten, a protrusion somehow formed, and the earth’s spin finally thrust it out of the main body to form its own orbit around us. Or there was a massive collision in the earth’s early life, which somehow caused a large chunk of matter to splinter off, while other matter was absorbed. This second theory, much elaborated of course, still persists, and is the most accepted theory in the discourse.

There’s a lot of debate though currently, and much exciting activity around the moon’s origin, as revealed in a recent issue of Cosmos [issue 22]. Some maths-physicists, for example, have posited the existence of two other moonlets, which may have formed as part of the putative collision some 4.4 billion years ago. In the early days, when the moon was much closer to us, these Trojan satellites, as they’re called, would have remained more or less stable in their orbits, a situation that may have persisted for a billion years, until our gravitational pull became too weak, and they were lost to space.

Other researchers have come up with a radical alternative to the top-dog theory. They suggest that in the period before the earth coalesced into its current more or less stable state, a gigantic bubble of very hot gas forced its way up through the mantle, massively impacting upon it and upon the earth’s crust, and forming our moon in the process. Their theory, they claim, solves a number of issues left unresolved by the more accepted alternative. I won’t try to go into too much detail – read Cosmos for that – but it seems that the existence of georeactors [sites within the earth of natural fission reactions] in the layer of the earth’s upper mantle are being postulated as evidence for the researchers’ claims. The moon’s density is much less than that of the earth, with the core taking up only 4% of its mass. The earth’s core constitutes 30% of its mass. How they’ve ascertained this is a mystery to me, but it’s generally considered that the reason for the difference is iron. The earth has lots of it at its centre, the moon doesn’t. Yet the similarity of oxygen isotope ratios in earthrock and moonrock prove that the two bodies were formed equidistant from the sun, and tend to suggest that they were once parts of the same body. Such differences and similarities have led, naturally, to some confusion and uncertainty.

In any case the new theory has some super-smart backers, though the impact theory is still very much top dog. It will be a field to keep an eye on in the future.

An interesting side-issue. The fission hypothesis, a brief version of which I gave at the start of this piece, with a molten, or rather volatile, portion of the earth being ripped off by centrifugal force, was originally proposed by George Darwin, son of Charles, in 1880. It is now discounted.

la petite mort

2008-10-10T22:25:00.004+10:30

Here's a site to delight if ever there was one. A pity I can't actually watch these videos at present, my internet is on go-slow.

just quickly

2008-09-23T22:09:00.002+09:30

I’ve looked up Poe’s law, provenance unknown – the idea being that no parody of a primitivist/fundamentalist/creationist is ever as good a parody as the real thing, and there’s nothing you can think of writing that is so asinine that nobody will believe it for a moment, in fact it’s likely that many will believe it, for a long time, e.g. Dianetics.

Heard today of the suicide of David Foster Wallace, a terrible shame. Suffered from depression all his life apparently. I read his essay collection A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again and raved about it some years ago, then I read The broom of the system and wasn’t so sure, wasn’t so entertained and provoked. I don’t read fiction so much these days I’m afraid. Don’t know if I’ll tackle Infinite Jest. Would probably prefer to take on some more of his essays. What I loved was the freshness and intensity, the energy his work gave me. That sort of thing has a visceral effect. Some have mentioned Rabelais, and believe it or not I thought Shakespeare, who was the dabbest of hands at opening out and freshening up a cliché… it’s so shocking that such a talent can end up in such a space, yet it’s also not uncommon.

On the theme of depression, I know it well, though it has never quite managed to drag me to such deeps. On today’s radio, a visually impaired visual artist spoke of his half dozen simple tasks a day to ward it off, and of his sex life void. At least he has an excuse of sorts, though I’ve found an excuse too, in attachment theory – I have a fearful attachment style, masked by a dismissive attachment style, or vice versa.

On Wallace, incidentally, read this honest if unspectacular obit – and then read the truly dipshitted comments. What roisterous larry-kins these Americans be.

Plugging in

2008-09-14T11:50:00.004+09:30

google - written in the clouds

So much to keep track of outide of our teensy-weensy circle of life. Google is raising concerns and excitement with its cloudy new super-browser, Chrome. The Beta version of this open source browser was launched a few days ago, that’s September 2 I think. I don’t know much about what a Beta version is, or if a Beta version or a non-Beta version is more suitable for me, but I’m interested in the whole idea. I’ll explore it more fully later. That’s to say, I’ll wade just a tiny bit deeper into the shallows.

The Large Hadron Collider is also naturally making news, and highlighting the ignorance of many of us re physics and its significance in our lives. Not that all of those warning of the dangers of the LHC are ignorant. There’s apparently a genuine concern among some theorists that the LHC could generate tiny black holes which will eventually expand and gobble up the earth – or something like that. Michio Kaku provides us with plenty of reassurance here.

The role of the US in the extermination of some half a million soi-disant communists in Indonesia in the mid sixties has come under the spotlight with the recent release of damning documents. There’s a useful background to the horror here. Meanwhile, Spring’s freshening things up, and I’m hoping for a bit of rejuvenation meself.

Selective Maughamisms

2008-09-07T11:34:00.002+09:30

A couple of strange ones from the Maugham short story ‘the Human Element’:

He wore a dinner jacket and a boiled shirt – I think of boiled lollies, which had stripes through them, but no. Here’s a pretty comprehensive description. Shirts that needed to be kept white before washing machines were often boiled in starch, which made them very stiff and no doubt none too comfy. Anyway, sounds as if this one isn’t too strange, and I was surprised that Sarah, my usual consultant on such matter, hadn’t heard of them.

A couple of footmen in the fustanellas of their country – the country being Greece or the Greek island of Rhodes. A fustanella, or foustanelle, is described as a white kilt worn by Greek and Albanian men. Wikipedia has a much more complex description of it history and usage here.

slopes

2008-09-01T23:44:00.004+09:30

About seven weeks ago I sprained my ankle very badly. This happened a few days after I crashed my car on the way to Victor Harbour [it was the other guy’s fault], so it was a bit of a bad run.

I was walking across the parklands on my way to court, and I was running late. The court case was about my having driven my now totally wrecked car without registration and without ownership being properly transferred. It was a fairly recently purchased vehicle, and I really was quite vague about the paperwork.

I’d just crossed a railway line and was walking along beside a low wire fence looking for a break so that I could get through it without having to climb over, but there was no break in sight. The place was littered with railway bits and pieces, and I came across a small concrete platform abutting the fence. It had a gentle slope to the top, and I thought I might walk up it and jump down over the fence to the other side.

The top line of the wire was just above the floor of the platform so I had to jump up a little to make sure I cleared it. Because I was a little nervous of getting my foot caught in the wire, I jumped up quite high. I had no thought that this jump would cause me any damage, so I was completely taken by surprise by the excruciating pain when I landed on the graveled area on the other side of the fence. The pain and surprise sent me sprawling, my glasses flying off… I sat up and thought hopefully that the pain would subside in a few moments. A month later it was still painful to the touch, and I was still limping.

I made a valiant effort to get up and hobble on my way, but I soon realized that, though clearly nothing was broken, the damage was greater than first hoped. I had to abandon all ideas of getting to the court, and, to cut a long story short, managed to arrange a rescue.

For a week I could barely walk at all, and was very impatient to be healed, noting each daily improvement, trying to calculate how long it would be before things were entirely back to normal. I needed to get to shops, to replenish my supplies and so forth.

I could definitely feel daily improvements, but the foot would throb intensely at the end of each day, because every step I took on it during the day was more painful than the previous step. A night’s rest and I would imagine the foot had recovered – until I put my weight on it. I borrowed my foster-kid’s old crutches, which he kindly adjusted to my size [he towers over me]. It was his only act of kindness, mind you. To get him to help me out with cleaning and cooking during my period of greatest incapacity was impossible. Later, I borrowed Sarah’s walking-stick [a birthday gift from a waggish friend of her son], which was helpful in taking the pressure off my foot, though I refused to use it outside.

About two weeks after the accident [I was of course carless at this time] I made the effort to go shopping, which entailed a walk to the bus stop, and then back with the shopping. However, after a long and tiring struggle to the bus stop, I realized this wasn’t going to work. I was totally exhausted and in considerable discomfort, and the idea of walking back the same way, heavy laden, after traipsing about the shops, rather horrified me.

But it was probably this trip [I’d tried one or two testing ventures outside] that brought me the valuable insight about slopes. I’d already assumed it was a slope that caused my injury. I hadn’t really landed awkwardly, but clearly my left foot had touched the ground before my right, and bore the brunt of my weight when I landed, causing the ankle to squish. The ground had been uneven – possibly even a stone or rock had obtruded. I didn’t examine the ground afterward, but it obviously makes sense.

I’d gone to a local café a day or two before, and noticed that I wasn’t in so much pain walking back as I was walking there. I didn’t work out why until two days afterwards, when walking across a driveway. I felt the pain in my ankle increase, and it suddenly occurred to me that it was because of the slope. My left foot, the damaged one, was on the high side of the sloping driveway, and was bearing more of the weight, suddenly, than my right foot. When we walk, of course, we remain upright, perpendicular to the surface of the earth, regardless of local variations in slope. So when we’re walking on a slope [I mean across one not up or down one], the weight will be more on the foot on the upper side of the slope, and the ratio of that differential load will depend on the angle of the slope.

So when you have an injured ankle, take note of slopes. It’s a bit like bike-riding – anyone who rides a bike regularly will be aware that few roads are completely flat for any great portion of their length. Cyclists know all about slopes. For the injured walker, what you will soon realize is that most footpaths slope down towards the road. Best to walk on that side of the road where the high side favours your strong foot.

Another interesting point is that we walk unconsciously always as if we’re walking on the flat, decelerating quickly our forward-leading foot just before it hits the ground. It’s a bit like the sweet spot when we engage the clutch changing gears. When we’re on a slope, though, we don’t quite adjust that deceleration – that’s to say, we might still be in the process of deceleration when our foot hits the ground. We might even be in the early stage of deceleration, and so we jar our foot slightly. This is barely noticeable when your feet are in mint condition, but when you have a badly sprained ankle you really feel it.

So, God, You gave me a sprained ankle for a reason. How devious and inscrutable is Your wisdom?