The Temporal Parade

"But the future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present."

Yes and no.  If you are here, you are not there - but there still exists, doesn't it?  

To be less abstract; if you're leaving home for work, your workspace still exists whether you are there nor not.  When you're between locations, both home and work exist simultaneously, but you're not at either one of them.

To use another analogy, let's say you're in a crowd, watching a parade.  As the middle of the parade goes by you, the beginning of the parade still exists - it's just moved beyond you.  Exactly what the floats and performers are doing down the road may differ from what you saw in the fine detail, but essentially it's the same thing.  

This holds true for the end of the parade you've yet to witness; it exists and is being experienced by another group of people in much the same way you'll experience it, with some variances.  What exists in front of you at any one moment is different than what came before or after, but the whole parade exists simultaneously.

From a physics perspective, time is like that parade; it's a fourth dimension which lies beyond our ability to perceive, but it's there, like dark matter, whether we perceive it or not.

The moment you drop a ball, it has not touched the ground - but you can safely predict that it will hit eventually.  Unless, that is, it's intercepted by something, like a baseball bat.  The speed and trajectory with which the ball is thrown will premeditate the outcome, as will the perceptiveness of the person holding the baseball bat.  These are all factors that need to be calculated to successfully predict the outcome of when and how the ball will touch the ground.

In sports, war, love, business - every human endeavour, really - we are constantly trying to wrap our heads around the factors that will impact events.  What will a competitor do?  What will the market support?  What "play" is the opposition going for?  Which tactics will the enemy employ?

What will the next float look like?  

This brings us back to time. 

 

It's possible the speed at which the parade moves will vary; it's likely that the exact performance you get will be different from what someone who saw it before might suggest.  You can argue that unexpected circumstances, like a terrorist bombing, can throw the parade off entirely, but so far as time is concerned, bombers are just performers in the line, same as any other.

There was a time when humans turned to omens and myth to forecast the future; rituals and sacrifices to gods became tools to shape the future.  As we progress, science has begun to replace such magic, helping us better predict (and plan for) weather, emergencies, health and security events.  We know the next ice storm, epidemic or political election is coming; the more we work at it, the better we get at knowing when and ensuring we're prepared for it.

After all, you can't put your life on hold or skip the parade just because it may rain; not if you truly want to life.  Instead of waiting out the storm, plan ahead.    

The Naming of Things: Owning Free Speech

We can hope that, in time, a generation that has grown up online will outgrow the cowardly shadows of namelessness.  Still, faceless hatred will endure - as long as we let it.  Until then, nothing less than our own collective decency will hang in the balance.

Criticism is important; without it, poor ideas go unchecked and new opportunities are missed.  If people like Galileo and Newton had never bothered to question accepted wisdom; if inquisitive minds like Sigmund Freud or Alfred Kinsey had not thought to explore taboo topics, we'd all be lesser for it.

There is a huge chasm, however, between criticism and opposition for opposition's sake.

One seeks to move the conversation and with it, understanding forward; the other simply seeks to stop conversation dead in its tracks.  It's why in Politics, the goal of Opposition Parties is to grind government to a halt; it's why violence is the weapon of choice for those who've run out of ideas.

Goldenberg makes some excellent points; online anonymity is a refuge for cowards, though not the last one - merely the latest.  This can be a good thing and a bad thing; whistleblowers fearing for their careers and, in some cases, their life may want to do the right thing but not be prepared for martyrdom.  

At the same time, there are the trolls; these are the people who will say online under pseudonyms what they would never say in person.  These are also the folk who will break a window in a riot because they feel they won't get caught, or will join in a lynching when there's already a crowd with noose in hand.

But these people aren't an isolated demographic, one group that can be singled out - they are people, just as we are.  Therein lies the great irony and the deepest lesson.

We dehumanize people when we take away their names - by calling someone an  infidel, a Jew, a faggot, a bleeding-heart, red-neck, latte-sipping urban elitist, monster or any number of variations, we are removing their individuality to better fit a simple, emotionally satisfying narrative.

It's why, over time, we've feared and loathed the Inscrutable Oriental, the Arab menace, the 1% or the unwashed masses.  It's why the bad guys we dreaded most, be they the zombie apocalypse, the hive-minded aliens, partisans or The Other can always be understood as one homogeneous collective.

When trolls hide behind anonymity, they are equally stripping away their own individuality.  Perhaps the unaccountable attack makes them feel powerful, as does being part of a mob, but the very act of slipping into a pseudonym turns a person into a caricature, interchangeable with any other troll.   When we can and do act without consequence or attack without consideration, we dehumanize ourselves as well.  We trip away the thin veneer of civilization and revert to nothing more than animals.

It's beyond tragic that those who will raise their voices the loudest in defence of individual liberty and free speech as often as not are seeking freedom from everything that makes humanity special.

It's never been freedom and anonymity that has made us distinct, nor isolation or stagnancy; it's ownership, individuality and the ability to become more than what we are.  The flip side of I may disagree with what you say but will defend your right to say it is think before you speak.  

Thinking is not innate.

Which is why this is where I part ways with Adam Goldenberg.  After much study, thought and conversation, I've come to the conclusion that we are all-too often hung up on romantic notions of the superhuman ancestor, the idea that in simpler times we were better people.  I don't see much support for this in history.

As such I don't feel that, with the Internet, our collective decency is at risk.  I don't think there has ever been a collective decency.  In fact, I'd argue that stigma is an evolutionary development that was intended to keep small kinship groups safe from predators, competitors and illness.

The idea of collective decency isn't something we're straying from, but moving towards.  

It's a slow, tedious, painful process with almost as many steps backwards as there are forwards, but such is always the nature of progress.  

We began with the naming of things - ascribing unto them labels and identity born of our own perception.  This is language.

Where we're moving to is understanding the names others give themselves.  By understanding how others view themselves and us, we better understand who we are, as individuals.  Call it an introspective property inspection as well as an exploration of society's holdings.  It's also known as mindfulness or consciousness.

Conscience may make cowards of us all, but consciousness is all about ownership.  And light.

In Good Conscience (Updated)

Thus it is that people who see themselves as the soul of enlightenment can in good conscience support a proposal to, in effect, cleanse the public sector of much of its existing representation of religious (and, not coincidentally, ethnic) minorities.  It is human nature: where the self-image and the facts conflict, the facts must be made to fit the self-image.

 - Andrew Coyne


Sweet irony.

History is full of it.

We say to these Brazilians we can supply you with cotton goods cheaper than you can buy them elsewhere.  Will you buy them?  By all means, say the Brazilians, and we will pay you with our sugar and coffee.  No, say we, your sugar and coffee are produced by slave labour; we are men of principle and our consciences will not allow us to consume the product of slave labour.  

Well, anyone would imagine that the matter ended there, and we left the Brazilians to consume their own sugar and coffee.  No such thing.

We are men of principle, but we are also men of business, and we try to help the Brazilians out of their difficulty.

We say to them: Close to us and near at hand live some 40,000,000 industrious and thriving Germans, who are not as conscientious as we are; take your sugar to them; they will buy it from you, and you can pay us for our cottons with the money you thus receive.  

But the Brazilians represent that there will be some difficulty with this.  The Germans live on the other side of the Atlantic; we must send them our sugar in ships; now our ships are few and ill-fitted to cope with the waters of the great ocean.  

Our reply is ready.  We have plenty of ships and they are at your service.  It is true that slave-labour sugar would contaminate our warehouses, but ships are different things.

But the Brazilians have another difficulty.  They say the Germans are particular and have a fancy for refined sugar.  It is not easy to refine sugar in Brazil, and these Germans do not like the trouble of refining it themselves.  

Again we step in with an expedient.  We will not only carry your sugar but we will refine it for you too.  It is sinful to consume slave-grown sugar, but there can be no harm in refining it, which in fact is to cleanse it from part of its original impurity.  

The Brazilians are at us again.  Say they, we produce a great deal of sugar more than the Germans will buy.  

Our goodness is infinite; we ourselves will buy your surpus.  It cannot be consumed at home, because the people of this country are men of conscience, but we will send it to the West Indies and Australia.  The people who live there are only negroes and colonists, and what right have they to consciences?  And now that you may plauge us no more about these matters, we tell you at once, that, if the price of our own sugar should rise above a certain value, we will buy more of your slave-grown sugar and we will eat it ourselves.

- The Viscount Palmerston

It's surprising what people can do, in good conscience, when they create a bit of distance between themselves and the results of their choices, isn't it?

UPDATE: Again, courtesy of the ever-illuminating Andrew Coyne:

So: nobody did anything wrong, and everybody is covering it up.  Except it's not quite exonerating, is it?  Duffy's defence on the housing allowance issue is that, yes, he declared as his principal residence a house he barely set foot in, and yes, he claimed expenses for "stays" in Ottawa that, having lived there for decades, he did not incur, but it was all right because several senior Tories told him he could, the rules did not not say he couldn't, and other senators had done the same.

They keep using that word, "conscience," but I don't think it means what they think it means.

UPDATE SEPT 7, 2014:

They are also happy to announce sanctions against Moscow - as long as those sanctions don't harm their own businesses too much.

All in good conscience, I'm sure.



A king may move a man, a father may claim a son, but that man can also move himself, and only then does that man truly begin his own game.  Remember that howsoever you are played or by whom, your soul is in your keeping alone, even though those who presume to play you be kings or men of power.  When you stand before God, you cannot say "But I was told by others to do thus," or that virtue was not convenient at the time.  This will not suffice.

Remember that.

The Centre Always Holds

Started my day listening to a little Jesus Christ Superstar; it has struck me of late that, with so much focus on drought, political turmoil, war, etc, there are more than a few folk with a little Armageddon on their minds. Blame it on the Tzolkin.  This, naturally, got me thinking about Yeats' The Second Coming:

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Of course, we Western folk tend to be a bit on the selfish side.  We look at time through our own lens, "like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives" kind of thing.  Not everyone looks at the world through such linear terms; in fact, even when you look at systems theory in the West, there's a recognition of boom and bust cycles.  After all, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

Days, seasons, the rise and fall of empires, the boom and bust of economies, the spiral outwards to political extremes and the oppositional contraction to the political middle - these aren't linear things; they're turns of the wheel.

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

The closer we collectively get to the middle, the more stability we have.  This is what Lao Tzu meant when he said "hold on to the centre."

In the mean time, the wheel keeps turning - we're just along for the ride.

The Sanity of Truth

What is funny, sort of, is that it may be insanity that finally saves us. The whole planet is getting very unwieldy, and not only because of toxic fumes. Still, you can look at the world’s craziness as the death of what does not work, making way for new growth (hopefully according to life’s principles).

Life is not about right and wrong. Nor is it about perfection; who wants to live in Pleasantville? When its principles are adhered to, life thrives. When those patterns are disrupted, life withers. In that sense, we are all alike, two-legged, four-legged, multi-legged, winged, slithery, scaled, and rooted.

For people to mentally and emotionally heal and mature, they have to be honest with themselves. Maybe that is the bee in the bonnet here. If we want to live insanely, let us be honest. Though we do not have power over death, we do know what sustains life yet live as if ignorant.

There is nothing complicated about the truth.

And, as they say - the truth will set you free.

Religion - the Catalyst for Civilization?

If God is a delusion, then perhaps it's a purpuseful one:

The evidence from Turkey suggests that the pilgrimage impulse, the collective worship impulse, the sacred space impulse, are all supra-natural, if not super-natural. There is something within us, not necessarily from outside us, which compels the building of Gobekli Tepe and places like it. That "something" is not simply accounted for by the usual explanations which seek to explain, or, too often, explain away, people's attachment to religious expression.

 

That conclusion, if correct, means that religion needs to be taken a whole lot more seriously by many of the people who read this section, especially those among them who constantly insult the religious impulse. It also means that those who assume that religion belongs to one group, one understanding of God or Gods or one particular scripture, would do well to practice more modesty about such claims.

The evidence from Gobekli Tepe suggests that religion is both more real, and more human, than is often admitted. The ultra-orthodox in both camps in the ongoing debate about what religion "really is," where it came from and what purposes it serves may find this difficult to accept.

Taking a Bite Out of Original Sin

For some Christians, evolution would, if true, completely shatter the doctrine of Original Sin. After all, if humans evolved, then there wasn’t an Adam, there wasn’t a Garden of Eden, and there wasn’t a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. If that’s the case, these Christians believe, then there wasn’t a Fall and there wasn’t a reason for Christ to be crucified. Thus, in their minds, evolution is completely incompatible with Christian teachings.

For me, “original sin” is a way of offering a pre-neurological explanation for selfish, reactive behaviour.  I therefore think that the most ardent religious extramists (of any religion, or any ideology for that matter) are actually the embodiment of that which they purport to stand against.  This isn’t reason to fight or ostracize them, though, but an opportunity to share the spark of understanding.  Sin, the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and the expulsion from Eden are all metaphors for the development of individual and social consciousness.

Does that make you feel uncomfortable?  Then you see my point exactly.  Answers are challenging, they force us to re-evaluate and to grow.  The truth was never handed to us – it’s up to us to discover it.

The truth will set you free – when you’re conscious of it.

Alchemy, Wealth and Eternal Life

“I look to heaven and I see
there's a silver dollar
in the sky shining down on me.”

-       Sitting In the Sun, Louis Armstrong

"Was it not because man had a fixed, determined form that he cannot possess eternal life?  Does not true life begin only when tangible form has been lost?"

- Musashi, Eiji Yoshikawa


 

Reading “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho, many thoughts cross my mind.  Each stems back to the same place – the nature of perception. Or, as we refer to it in more concrete, rational, scientific terms – cognition.

I’m an anthropologist by training, a traveler by nature and a linguist by inclination.  I’m also hard-wired to be pro-social, which is why I have always been fascinated in that which connects people and that which cleaves us apart.  The pursuit of this understanding has taken me around the world, from small communities in Ecuador to hot spots in Bosnia to the Pink Palace in Ontario.  A little story cuts to the root of what I have learned so far:

When I was living in Italy, a key Other identified by many of my Italian friends were the Maroccini – the Moroccans. The epithets used against foreign Moroccan workers were the same as has been used against any Other in history, whether it be the Gauls, the Irish, the Chinese or First Nations:

- They don’t think like you and I;
- They are corrupt, immoral, dangerous;
- They are intentionally out to get us;
- They are not to be trusted, therefore:
- We must defend against them, through offense if necessary.

It’s a deep-rooted fear of the unknown which quivers beneath the surface of many a mind to this day.

During a trip from Italy to Morocco with a busload of Moroccans and over weeks spent in various parts of Morocco proper, I heard the exact same prejudice raised.  This time, it was about the Italians on the part of Moroccans. South of the Atlas, I frequently heard the same words spoken by small-towners and Tuareg, but in reference to the big-city folk from Casa.

Of all the wonderful riches of diversity that separate ethnicities, linguistic groups, religious groups and political groups, people fundamentally have one key thing in common – a mistrust of each other. That mistrust is instinctual, limbic-based and fortified by a deficit of understanding.  That lack of awareness helps leave one with the feeling of being unempowered, of not having control.

Why, though? Why does surface or anecdotal knowledge lead us to focus on differences between people, when the similarities are so pronounced?  In my experience, language is the key. We codify everything – nature, people, positions – by giving them names.  Trouble is, the naming of things applies levels of value that are not intrinsic to the subject in question. Codification allows for more complex communication, certainly, but it equally imbues whatever's being defined with significance beyond its internal fabric.  We automatically mistrust what we don't understand, because it is different.  That mistrust wedges itself into our definitions.  That cognition-level stigma restricts us from knowing a subject on its own terms; instead, we know things in terms of what they mean to us.

The Other provides a clear example of this.  When you define a person as different than you, they become foreign, unknowable, threatening. Conversely, if we used the elements we have in common to form the base of understanding, diversity becomes an opportunity for growth, difference becomes a positive, the unknown becomes a teacher.

That variance in perspective leads to the great irony of alchemy, the mystical search for immortality and immediate wealth that played a role in fostering the development of modern science and Western thought in general.  The perspective that developed alchemy has left us with individual-focused definitions of wealth and life - a perspective which leaves us searching for answers to problems that exist in our perceptions alone.

This framework and the quest for the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher’s Stone is core to Western thought; therefore, it has informed the institutions and infrastructure that form the skeleton and nervous system of Western civilization. Our health care system is designed to help us individually live longer.  We want to live longer to enjoy wealth.  At the same time, we try to get rich as quickly as possible to be able to enjoy our wealth for greater parts of our lifespans (hence the inevitability of get-rich-quick schemes). Or, we tackle the problem from a slightly different angle and seek immortality and wealth through legend. It’s the same choice Achilles grappled with – glory or immortality, only now we define this by saying it’s better to burn out than to fade away.

When you define riches as that which are rare and difficult to obtain, you automatically set yourself on a competitive trajectory. Precious metals are rare, so it’s those at the top of the food chain who get them. Money doesn’t come easy, so it is seen as important. Unless you’ve got access to financial wealth – in that case, it’s some other rare commodity you seek, with your money, that helps define you as rich. This can be an artist’s work (which gains much value once it’s clear that their output is irrevocably limited) or a pet or pelt of a nearly-extinct animal. The pursuit of wealth is a perpetually isolating one, intrinsically twinned with the fear of losing something – something you have already, or perhaps the next opportunity if you don’t move quickly enough.

WEALTH

The big secret of the Philosopher’s Stone is this – you cannot turn common stones into gold, but there’s no particular reason why gold must be exclusively valuable. In fact, you can choose to value that which is all around you, if value is not prescribed as something you can have to the exclusion of others. Hence the Satchmo quote that kicked this article off – the glory of a sunset is a wealth everyone can attain when wealth is seen not as an individual end but as a personal, connective beginning.

What of the other quest of alchemy, the Elixir of Life, which is essentially the same conceit as the Fountain of Youth? The same principle of codification applies here. When you identify things in terms of possession, you either have something or someone else does.  If there's something someone else has and you don’t, you must’re probably missing out. There’s a reason why anxiety and depression are connected to consumption. Equally, when you view life on the individual level, it is short, your time is limited, the stress is on to get what you can with the time that you have.

This is what we do – we start inward, then expand slowly outward. We worry about our own lives, then the lives of our families, our self-identified groups, our communities and somewhere way down the line, our species and the general ecosystem. Yes, we in the West understand the circle of life, ashes to ashes, etc, but we don’t really believe it. Life is a trajectory, not a cycle; when we’re done, we’re done. This is all there is.

Of course, we could dig deeper, if we wanted to - cells within our body die and are replaced all the time. The fabric of who we are changes over the course of our lives - we're literally not the same people at our deaths as we were at our births. That same perspective can be applied to society; the death of an individual does not mean the end of society, just as the end of a society doesn't imply the end of the species.  Individual deaths actually facilitate the adaptability of the whole – as true for cells as it is for political parties or business ventures.  These days, in social contexts, we refer to this adaptive process by a new name – creative destruction.

It is widely recognized that the business which proves itself incapable of innovation is destined to fail, just as the body or society that does not adapt cannot last.  Of course, that which is successful will invariably incorporate elements of that which came before, as is the nature of evolution.  Existence IS a cycle of regeneration, not a trajectory; death is a starting place, as much as an end.

Yet our society is built of individuals seeking their own survival and benefit; that is the perspective that informs everything from the way we plan cities or conduct ourselves in traffic to the way we fund health care programs (again, designed to keep us ticking for as long as possible). Going inwards, we don't see the loss of a limb as the loss of self; so long as the self is intact, the limb can be compensated for (when it comes to impacts on our cognitive abilities, however, there is a sense that with neurological challenges, a measure of the man is lost).  At the outer (governance, corporate) level, individuals are often viewed the same way, though the emergence of the knowledge-based economy is changing this.

Systems are built with focus on how to support the individual, then expanded to groups and models. Institutions - public, Not-For-Profit, Private - worry about achieving their own interests and mandates first, frequently at the expense of others in their field. This is why we are being weighed down by the burdens of duplication, gaps and overlaps; repetition and inefficiency results when you look from the ground-up, rather than from the crowd inwards.

It is no surprise that the more densely integrated global society becomes, that trend is starting to change.  It’s also no coincidence that this change is being accompanied by a deeper understanding of cognitive function and how individual perception informs crowd behaviour.

LIFE

Have we strayed from the quest for the Elixir of Life?  No – we’ve just given it some background.  The nature of existence is cyclical, but the nature of cognition is linear.  The major religions touch on the circle of life – ashes to ashes, dust to dust, etc – but they do so from a linear fashion.

Consider: Hindus believe in reincarnation. There’s comfort in knowing that, in some way, your individual existence will go on. Buddhists, on the other hand, are focused on Nirvana – the ending of one’s individual existence. Samurai in feudal Japan looked at life from a completely different perspective – they focused on death. In the Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo tell us "The way of the warrior is death." This doesn’t mean Samurai were suicidal; what it meant was, the individual acceptance of death took away the fear of ending.  By accepting an end was inevitable, they had no resistance to living life fully.  Lao-tzu put it thusly:

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

When you perceive wealth as personal, it is fleeting.  When you view life as individual, it, too, is fleeting.

Alchemy is the pursuit of the eternal through the lens of the individual.  The eternal, though, is beyond the grasp of the individual – it is not achieved through chemistry or industry, but by shifting one’s perspective beyond the self.  Don Tapscott calls this “networked intelligence.”  That expansion of self is a proven generator of wealth.

The real magic, then, happens when we sublimate the self and allow ourselves to connect with the matrix of the eternal.  Wealth is not isolating, but shared.  Life is not personal, it is systematic.  We move forward, as they say, together.