How Close Is The Future?

This blogpiece is a little more personal than most of those on this page. It is personal with respect to my musing on how much time I have left on this Earth and my relationship with that time.

Let me start with a personal observation.

As I get closer and closer to my death, I find that my thinking about the future becomes more acute, and more fearful. Let me explain.

I do not mean fearful for my own death, nor do I mean fearful for what any afterlife (or non-afterlife) may hold. None of that do I find fearful.

But, I do discover that as I have less and less existential future, the more concern I have for the future per se. Yet, when I had plenty of future ahead of me (say, in my 20s, 30s and even into my late 50s) I had little to concern me about the future. How is it, I ask myself, that as I get closer to my death, the more I feel a distress and unease about the future that is to occur after my death?

Partly, I suspect, the answer to this paradox can be found in the book Future Shock,¹ written by husband and wife team, Alvin Toffler and Adelaide Farrell (often unattributed), published in 1970.

The basic thesis of Future Shock is that too much change in a short period of time leads to psychological stress and anxiety. Toffler and Farrell noted that previous generations of humans had dealt with major change about once (or less) in their lifetimes. Yet, by the time of their writing, each generation was now experiencing significant change twice, or even thrice, during their lifetime.

We are now 55 years on from the publication of Future Shock. The pace of change has accelerated in that time, so that now the amount of change in a person’s lifetime is much greater. We are now facing an ‘abrupt collision with the future’ as Toffler and Farrell predicted in the book.

Is this what I am facing and noticing in my unease? Have I collided with the future?

Yes, but it is only a partial answer. A further aspect is my own involvement with the environmental movement. This is a movement that has shifted and morphed into various identities since the early 1970s when I first became involved.

When I first became involved with the environmental movement the environment was viewed (by me at least, and I suspect most others in the movement) exactly as the words etymology suggests: the environment is what surrounds me, it is outside of me and is the medium through which I pass.

However, as the years and decades passed by my understanding of environment and the nature of the world has shifted. Indeed, the word environment is no longer useful, as my perception now does not recognise a difference between me and not-me. This shift passed through a stage of “I am part of nature” to “I am nature.” That is a long way from the understanding of my youth.

Alongside this spatial shift I also experienced a temporal shift. My part in nature is not confined to my lifetime. I am part of the entire cosmos. The atoms that make up me today have been part of the universe for millennia, they have been part of humankind since the stone-age and before, they have been ingested by wolves, beavers, and many other animals, they have been spewed out of volcanoes 13 billion years ago. These atoms in my body will exist somewhere in the universe in another 13 billion years.

We have learnt a lot about the world since the 1970s. We have learnt a lot more about how intricately entangled it is. We have learnt a lot about how the feedback loops that have kept the Earth in homeostasis are breaking down and the system as a whole is collapsing.

None of this was I able to see, or foretell, in the 1970s when I was much younger. Then I had no sense of a collision with the future.

But now I do.

The collapsing future will not only impact humanity. It will, and already is, impacting the more-than-human life upon this planet. Extinction rates are presently anywhere from 100 times to 1,000 times the normal background rate.

So it is that, although I can appreciate my spatial and temporal entanglement with the cosmos, the closer come to my death, and the less future I have personally, the more unease I have for the future of those to come (human and other-than-human.)

Do any other readers of my cohort notice anything similar?

Note:

1. Alvin Toffler (and Adelaide Farrell) Future Shock, Bantam Books, New York, 1970

Miracle Of A Smile

Spike Millagan penned a delightful poem titled Smile. In the first line of this poem Spike declares that ‘smiling is infectious.’ (The first stanza of the poem is quoted at the end of this blogpiece.)

Infectious – yes. Miraculous also. How so? You may ask.

It is miraculous through language. The words smile and miracle are etymologically linked.

Both words derive from the Latin mirari meaning “to wonder at, to marvel, to be astonished.” From this verb comes the noun, miraculum, meaning “an object of wonder.”

Prior to the Latin, the Proto-Indo-European word smey (or smei) can be translated as smile, or laugh. It can also be translated as wonder.

Looking at these etymologies the connections between the words smile and miracle can easily be seen. Other common English words that share this etymology include; admire, mirror, mirage, and marvel.

Often the word miracle gets attached to events associated with divine intervention. However, the word miracle simply means an inexplicable event, an even that cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws. However, attributing (or explaining) the event to a supernatural, or divine, cause does not follow. That is a logical fallacy. A miracle is simply something to wonder at, to marvel at. Explanation is not required.

A more common use of the word miracle is that of a statistically unlikely event occurring. Instances of this use are such things as; someone surviving an air disaster, or emerging from a blazing building hardly scathed. A statistician may describe such an occurrence as “falling outside the third standard deviation from the mean.” In common parlance, it is much easier to say, “a miracle.”

Miracles, and so-called miracle-workers, have been with us for millennia. The Roman god Hercules, and the Egyptian goddess Isis, were both believed to have been able to perform miracles. The Greek philosopher, Pythagoras (in the 6^th century BCE) is said to have been able to accomplish miracles.

Of course, in western culture, and specifically within Christianity, Jesus is attributed with having the ability to perform miracles. Within other religions too, miracle-workers are proclaimed. Muhammad and Gautama Buddha are both said to have performed miracles.

But, let us return to smiling.

Science can describe how our facial muscles work to shape a smile upon our face. Science can also describe the neuronal messages in the brain of someone else perceiving the smile of the other person.

But, science cannot explain a smile and it cannot explain how it becomes infectious.

A smile is a miracle.

Smile (Poem by Spike Milligan - first stanza)

A smile is infectious

You catch it like the flu

When someone smiled at me today

I started smiling too.

Are You Sick Of The Rain Yet?

We have had a lot of rain recently where I live. One day, after about a week’s worth of rainy days I was walking with my umbrella up and encountered a neighbour. After greeting one another, my neighbour asked, “Are you sick of the rain yet?”

Under the circumstances this may seem a logical and innocuous question to ask. It is also rhetorical; it seeks to find a common sense of experience, and a shared desire for sunshine and fine weather.

As I continued walking I pondered the question, and found that below the question lay some potentially troubling human psychology. I was reminded of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.

Before continuing, a quick note about the word noble. We may often think of noble as pertaining to someone of the aristocracy, such as a Baron, Duke, Duchess, or Baroness. The Pali word ariya (translated as noble), however, suggests notions of valuable, precious, and not ordinary. With this sense in mind, it is possible to recognise something in the Four Noble Truths that is not normally considered and is a precious insight.

Back to the rain and the question.

The Buddha’s First Noble Truth tells us that suffering exists. It is a simple statement of how something is, a bit like a doctor making a diagnosis. Again, we must be careful with translations. The Pali word dukkha is often translated as suffering. However, the fuller meaning of the word encompasses such feelings as, dissatisfaction, un-ease, discomfort, disquiet. With this in mind it is possible to recognise that dukkha is not the same as pain. Pain is unavoidable, it is an aspect of life. Suffering (or discomfort, dissatisfaction etc) is our response to that pain.

The First Noble Truth was implicit in my neighbour’s question. A feeling of discomfort was embedded within the question, and a desire for that discomfort to be alleviated.

It is this desire for alleviation where the Buddha’s next three Noble Truths attain their preciousness. Many of us get no further than the First Noble Truth – viz. expressing discomfort, dissatisfaction, or un-ease. Then, once expressed, we might try to wish the discomfort away, or maybe want someone else to fix the problem, or pray for a miracle. Very rarely do any of these approaches work.

The next three Noble Truths, however, tell us that there are causes of our dukkha, that there is a remedy, and that there is a path (or medication if you like) we can take to relieve ourselves of the dukkha. I do not intend going into a complete explanation of these Noble Truths. I will simply make the following observation.

When we recognise that our suffering (not our pain) is a state of mind then we can see that suffering is caused by one of two prime states – aversion towards something, or grasping for something. Both cause us to suffer. And this suffering, declares the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield is ‘like a rope burn. We need to let go.’¹

Easy said, much harder to do. It is a practice that takes time to learn. We westerners, attuned to wanting quick results, find this difficult.

The Buddha was aware of this also and prescribed a path (the Fourth Noble Truth) that, if one travelled upon it, would allow us to let go. But, let us not delude ourselves. Letting go does not mean that the pain will go away, nor does it mean there is an end to suffering.

It does mean, however, that suffering no longer has a power over us.

Back to the rain again. The rain might have meant I got wet (a minor irritation of pain) resulting in my feeling discomfort. Yet, once I let go my aversion to getting wet then discomfort has no power over me.

I am reminded of a lovely story that illustrates this concept well.

Two people are going down the road in the rain. One is skipping along with a smile upon their face. The other is slouched over looking grumpy. The lesson here is that no matter which of these two approaches is taken, both get wet!

Notes:

1. Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart, Rider, London, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg, 2008

Scarcity, Plenty, Enough

Medieval grain store

Have you had a conversation with someone about inequality in the world and the unfairness of economic systems that privilege the rich and punish the poor? I have, and sometimes the other person responds by telling me that I am deluded because of my “scarcity belief.”

According to this person a “scarcity belief” is one in which no matter how much, or how little, there is, it is never enough. The corollary to this is that the scarcity belief is an error. Scarcity, according to this person, does not exist.

A quick aside: Have you also noticed that sometimes those who reject the “scarcity belief” idea are often also those who are praying for, seeking to manifest, or wishing for more abundance, more money, or more riches. It is odd.

Rejecting, denying, or attempting to overcome scarcity does not mean that there is, or must be, plenty. We live in a finite world, and no matter how much praying, manifesting, or wishing we do, that is not going to change.

Scarcity Origins

We might ask though, where the concept of scarcity originated?

I have not been able to track down any authoritative answer to this. However, it is likely that the concept arose some 10,000 – 12,000 years ago with the Agricultural Revolution. Prior to then, it most likely did not exist in our minds, except as a temporary sense of shortage or lack. Most likely, the response in this case would be to move, as hunter/gatherers, and other nomads did.

But, the Agricultural Revolution brought with it a lessening of the variety of food (via specialisation of crop growing and/or animal raising) and hence, a reliance on a much-reduced diversity of food sources. Regrettably, this reliance meant that food sources became prone to drought, floods, pestilence, and other ways in which the food supply could be reduced, or wiped out, very quickly.

In short, natural processes could spell scarcity for early agriculturalists and farmers.

The solution to this possibility was to hoard up supplies in expectation of lean times. But this too had consequences. Hoarding led to a stratification of society into those who hoarded and those who didn’t and may have resulted in a stratification of society into the owners of grain stores and those who worked for owners. (I know I am surmising here, but you may agree, that something like this is likely to have gone on all those millennia ago.)

Now, what might have happened in lean times? The hoarders may have felt protected by their stored grain (or wheat, or barley, or whatever) whereas others now became vulnerable to a scarcity. No longer able to move (as had their ancestors living a nomadic lifestyle) the non-hoarders most likely thought to themselves, ‘we cannot provide for ourselves, we’ll have to steal from the hoarders.’

How likely is this scenario, you and I may ask? My hunch is that it was highly probable.

Sketching out this possible scenario indicates where and when the concept of scarcity may have first arisen.

Scarcity Today

Today, scarcity is not a belief, nor is it a myth. Scarcity is real and has been for a number of decades. Ironically, it is the Agricultural Revolution, and the worldviews and paradigms that arose as a consequence of that revolution, which have left us in a world of scarcity.

By scarcity here, I am referring to what might better be thought of as limitation. Globally we began to overshoot the world’s carrying capacity around 50 years ago. The concept was neatly captured in the seminal report and book – Limits to Growth. We live on a finite world, which means that there are limits to how much we can exploit and extract from the world, and how much the earth can cope with our waste and pollution. Continuous growth brings us slap back up against limits. In short, growth brings us close to scarcity.

The antidote to scarcity is not its opposite – plenty.

It appears that there are only two means by which we can break out of the scarcity cycle. One, is a programme of degrowth, the other is to establish a mentality of enough.

One who knew the concept of enough was the author, Joseph Heller. I have written of this exchange between Heller and his friend Kurt Vonnegut before. It bears repeating.

When Joseph Heller died, his good friend and fellow author, Kurt Vonnegut (author of Slaughterhouse-Five,) wrote in his obituary of a party that the two of them attended. The party host was a millionaire. As the two of them talked, Vonnegut opined to his friend that the millionaire made more money in one day than Heller’s book (Catch 22) had since it had been published.

Joseph Heller looked at his friend and said, ‘Yes, but I have something he will never have.’

Vonnegut naturally asked, ‘What is that?’

To which Heller replied, ‘Enough!’

Heller knew the antidote to scarcity.

Domesticated Adults

Last week’s blogpiece asked whether our quality of life had improved as our quantity of life had increased. The answer suggested that it had not.

So, let us ask ourselves – why not?

The answer to that is not simply (as last weeks blog seemed to imply) that we now work longer than our hunter/gatherer days.

For years, psychology and the self-development movement were focussed on the human as an autonomous person responsible almost completely and solely for their thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. The human place in nature was largely missing from these endeavours.

Fortunately, this is changing. First, let us return to asking what happened that shifted us away from a greater quality of life.

For more than 95% of our (Homo sapiens) existence upon the Earth we lived in a manner intimately connected with and part of the natural world. Then, around 12,000 years ago, beginning in the Levant, Mesopotamia, and western Asia something began to dislodge us from that intimacy.

Many point to the Agricultural Revolution as that “something.” Although the advent, over many centuries, of agriculture was a significant factor, it wasn’t the only one. Whatever were the combination of factors, the outcomes of the disruption could be identified within the first few millennia. Today, 10,000 years later, the consequences are readily apparent, unless we have forgotten what happened and what went before.

Daniel Quinn calls this “The Great Forgetting.” Quinn claims that not only have we forgotten how our ancestors lived more than 12,000 years ago, but that we have also forgotten that we have forgotten. Hardly surprising, he notes, as it was not until a few thousand more years had passed before stories and memories got written down, and history was invented.

Unless we are willing to delve into this forgotten time, via archaeology, palaeontology, and pre-history, then we may be inclined to consider normality to be no different than it has been throughout recorded history, i.e. only the last 5,000 years or so.

But what is now “normal” is anything but “normal” when looked at over the course of 200,000 – 300,000 years. Even though the dislocation from nature took place over thousands of years, when viewed against our evolutionary journey the disruption was “sudden.”

As with many “sudden” disruptions the effects can be traumatic. “Traumatic” is how eco-psychologist. Chellis Glendinning, refers to the break from nature. ‘What could be more “distressing” than finding ourselves, out of short-term needs, locked into a cycle of abuse that insists we slash, dig, and burn the very Earth we have always respected and known ourselves to be made up of?’ she asks.¹

Drawing upon her work with post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers, Glendinning notes that culturally we suffer from PTSD collectively. And, as do individual sufferers, we collectively deny any trauma, and attempt to cover it up with addictions and justifications. In our westernised cultures we deny and cover up through addictions to technology, and the myth of progress. As with the individual, these addictions and myths only exacerbate the underlying problems.

The title of Glendinning’s book alludes to the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) introductory remarks in seeking recovery from addiction – My name is Chellis, and I’m in recovery from western civilization.

A person attending an AA programme will be offered a “sponsor” (or mentor) to assist them through the process and the recovery.

Who are the sponsors for those wishing to recover from western civilization? Who are the guides to facilitate the journey from childhood into healthy, nature-based adulthood and beyond?

Sadly, within westernised societies they are few and far between. Again, it is not surprising that there are so few guides. Our dislocation from nature had the flow on effect of also disrupting our “natural” succession from childhood, to adulthood, to elderhood. The deep ecologist and author, Paul Shepard, asserts that by ‘…spatially isolating the individual from the nonhumanized world, agriculture made it difficult for the developing person to approach the issues around which the crucial passages into fully mature adult life had been structured in the course of human existence.’²

The eco-psychologist and wilderness guide, Bill Plotkin, concurs. He declares that, ‘With the development of agriculture a new form of adolescent pathology became possible (in fact, inevitable), a pathology that begins with greed and eventuates in hoarding, domination, and violence.’  Furthermore, Plotkin claims that in modern societies ‘many people of adult age suffer from a variety of adolescent psychopathologies…’³

He then goes on to list examples of these psychopathologies: social insecurity, identity confusion, low self-esteem, few or no social skills, narcissism, relentless greed, arrested moral development, recurrent physical violence, materialistic obsessions, little or no capacity for intimacy or empathy, substance addictions, and emotional numbness. That’s quite a bit isn’t it?

What’s more, Plotkin notes that, ‘We see these psychopathologies most glaringly in leaders and celebrities of the Western world.’

It is a damning indictment, is it not?

Where are the guides and mentors then?

Just as humans have domesticated plants and animals, so agriculture has domesticated our adults.

Tame adults are never going to provide the necessary guidance for raising healthy humans in a healthy planet.

Notes:

1. Chellis Glendinning, My Name Is Chellis & I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization, Shambhala Publications, Boston, 1994

2. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 1982

3. Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, New World Library, Novato, California, 2008

Quality of Quality of Life

One of the social indicators that many wish to extol about modern life is that life expectancy has increased. Indeed it has. By about 20 – 25 years since the Industrial Revolution.

If we consider an even longer timeframe, say back to Palaeolithic times then there has been a significant increase in the quantity of life that we now live. Although estimates vary, the consensus of archaeologists tends towards recognising that once a hunter/gatherer reached about 15 years of age then he/she could expect to live a further 35 to 40 years. That is, an adult living in the Palaeolithic would be likely to reach an age of 50 – 55 years.

So, yes indeed, the quantity of years that has been added to human life has increased markedly.

But – has the quality of life increased?

During the 1970s, I recall, there was much discussion about quality of life and how that should be the goal of personal life and that governments could play a role in facilitating that. However, in recent years I find that I rarely hear the phrase. It is as though something else has grabbed our attention and we have forgotten that quality of life may be a worthwhile goal.

Or, is it that we have conflated quality of life with quantity of life?

Let’s find out.

First though, how is quality of life defined? Philosophers, sociologists, poets, politicians, and spiritual leaders have all proposed definitions over many centuries. Herein, I am using a simple metric as a proxy for quality of life. That metric is the amount of leisure time we have, once we have accounted for work hours, sleep, and education. None of this is rigorous, and the arithmetic involved is very much back of a napkin computation.

The next thing that must be considered is how much leisure time do we have today compared to previous times. There are 8,766 hours in a year. Sleep (at 8 hours per night) takes up 2,922 of those hours. In the OECD (the richer nations of the world) the average working year consists of 1,900 hours. That leaves 3,944 hours for eating, commuting, and human activities that contribute towards quality of life.

We can factor in education. In the OECD most children go to school between the ages of 5 – 15 years, for 40 weeks per year. That is about 670 hours per year.

If all these numbers are crunched (I won’t bore you with the arithmetic details) then leisure time (quality of life) for people living today to the age of 75 is around 227,000 – 230,000 hours over the course of their lifetime.

Now, let us consider the quality of life enjoyed by our ancestors, both those who lived prior to the Industrial Revolution and those living much earlier as hunter/gatherers in Palaeolithic times.

These next figures may surprise you, yet they are the considered opinion of experts in the field. A peasant working before the Industrial Revolution is likely to have worked only some 1,440 hours per year – less than half the OECD average of today.¹

In 1968 Marshall Sahlins (an American cultural anthropologist) wrote an influential essay titled The Original Affluent Society, in which he claimed that hunter/gatherers “worked” far fewer hour per week than we tend to think. He termed this approach to life/work balance as ‘the Zen road to affluence.’ Sahlin’s essay has been much quoted, verified, and expanded upon by many researchers since then.² Sahlins and others show that for many modern-day nomadic tribespeople and hunter/gatherers of yore, work took up between 2 and 4 hours per day.

Now, for the interesting bit.

If we calculate leisure time per year with the lifespan of hunter/gatherers and modern-day nomadic people, then the total hours of leisure (quality of life) equates to around 202,000 to 205,000 hours over their lifetime.

That is not much less than the 227,000 hours of leisure that modern-day humans in rich societies obtain. Further calculation shows that the difference is only 2.5 – 3.2 years!

Is that all? Three years or less? Just that for all our vaunted increase in quantity of life.

And, what have we done with this extra three years of leisure time?

Wasted it!

Modern humans spend much of leisure time sitting watching television, or glued to the mini-screen of an iPhone, or playing computer games, or other mindless, and ultimately self-comatosing, pastimes. Statistics from both Australia and the USA show that well over 60% of leisure time is spent in front of the TV or a computer. Not much quality in this quantity of life.

Contrast this with the use of leisure time by hunter/gatherers and pre-Industrial Revolution peasants. Their time was taken up with dancing, storytelling, humour, music making, communal gatherings, feasts, arts, crafts, playing, ritual, and similar activities.

Let us then ask: Who has/had the greater quality of life?

Notes:

1. See for example, Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Basic Books, New York, 1992

2. Glendinning, Chellis, My Name Is Chellis & I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization, Shambhala Publications, Boston & London, 1994. Graeber, David & Wengrow, David, The Dawn of Everything, Penguin Books, UK, 2021. Lent, Jeremy, The Patterning Instinct, Prometheus Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2017.

Observations of The Little Prince

First translated into English in 1943 The Little Prince¹ has been a firm favourite for all ages of reader. With more than 300 translations into other languages (including that of Klingon – the fictional Star Trek language) this small book is the most translated non-religious boo in the world.

The Little Prince tells of a meeting between an airman who has landed in the Sahara Desert with a damaged engine. The author of the book, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is himself an airman, serving with the French during WW2. Whilst attempting to repair his plane the airman meets an extraordinary young traveller known only as the Little Prince.

The Little Prince comes from another planet (de Saint-Exupéry calls it asteroid B-612) on which there are three tiny volcanoes, a flower, and baobab bushes. The Little Prince must continuously uproot the baobabs for fear that they will take over his entire planet.

During his interplanetary travels and his time on Earth the Little Prince meets a number of characters. What he observes about each of them tells us something of the mindsets of grown-ups (as the Little Prince refers to them.)

After meeting each of these characters the Little Prince is left concluding that, ‘Grown-ups are very odd/strange’.

How does the Little Prince come to this conclusion? Let us look at some of his meetings and we might understand.

On one planet the Little Prince meets a king and notes that ‘to them, all men/women are subjects.’ In this encounter the Little Prince observes the need to reign supreme and without question so often displayed by rulers and leaders of countries.

On another he meets a conceited man and observes that this man never hears anything but praise. The conceited man shows the hallmarks of narcissism and listens only to those willing to heap admiration upon him.

Travelling further, the Little Prince meets a businessman for whom riches and ownership are all that matters. When the Little Prince asks the businessman, What good does it do to own so much?’ the businessman answers that ‘it makes me rich.’  The Little Prince pursues this with, ‘What good does it do you to be rich?’ A fair question you may agree. The businessman though, has an answer, ‘It makes it possible for me to buy more.’  In this encounter the Little Prince exposes the greed, and the circular arguments made for ever increasing wealth and riches.

One of the planets the Little Prince lands upon is so small that there is only room upon it for a single streetlamp and a lamplighter. The lamplighter’s job is to light and extinguish the lamp. When the Little Prince asks him why he is doing this, the lamplighter replies, ‘Orders are orders.’ Indeed, how often do we follow orders simply because they are orders?

Landing upon one planet the Little Prince meets a man who is poring over a book. The Little Prince queries him and is told that this man is a geographer. When asked to tell the Little Prince about his planet, the geographer says that he cannot do that, because I am not an explorer.’  Furthermore, when the Little Prince mentions the flower that exists upon his planet, the geographer informs him that ‘we do not record flowers.’ The Little Prince his aghast at this reply. But ‘the flower is the most beautiful thing on my planet!’ he exclaims. Beauty, to the geographer, is dismissed as ‘ephemeral.’ Welcome to a world where beauty is of little worth Little Prince.

Just one more example.

On one of the planets the Little Prince visits is a railway switchman. During the conversation between the Little Prince and the switchman we discover that the switchman has the job of shifting trains from one line to another, and then back again. When asked about this coming and going the switchman answers that ‘No one is ever satisfied with where he is.’ He further reveals that all the adults are asleep in the railway carriages and that ‘only the children are flattening their noses against the window-panes.’

With this observation the Little Prince then declares that ‘Only the children know what they are looking for.’ The switchman agrees. ‘They are lucky’ he states.

This small, allegorical tale is worth reading over and over and taking note of the Little Prince’s observations.

Certainly, the grown-ups are very odd and strange.

Note:

1. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, Pan Books Ltd., London, 1974

Questions Science Cannot Answer (and Nor Can Religion)

For science to progress it must first ask questions. Many times the answer can be found, albeit sometimes after years, perhaps decades or even centuries, of searching.

Gravity is a good example. The Greek philosophers pondered why it was that things fall naturally. Aristotle, for example, postulated that the reason for this was that the Earth was the centre of the Universe and that therefore all objects fell towards it. Plutarch, on the other hand, claimed that gravity was not unique to the Earth.

In the 7^th century CE, an Indian mathematician and astronomer suggested that gravity was a force. One thousand years later, in 1687 Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in which he described what we now know as the Laws of Gravity. It took more than 2,000 years to answer the question. Even so, science did manage to answer it.

But, what of those questions that science cannot answer? How do we answer them? Indeed, do we even want answers to them?

These are the sort of questions that occur to us when we smell a flower, look up at the night sky, or kiss another human being. Why is this flower so beautiful? How big is the Universe? What is this feeling inside?

We answer these questions with words and expressions of awe, magnificence, wonder, love, and mystery.

And, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry answered in The Little Prince¹ what is important and what is of consequence is invisible.

It is not knowing, not having an answer, which speaks to our heart, soul, and humanity most exquisitely.

Science cannot answer such questions. Nor should we expect science to do so.

We should not expect religion to do so either. That science cannot answer some questions does not mean that God (or some other deity) must be enlisted to fill the gap.

Gaps in knowledge do not need to be filled. Indeed, it is in the gaps that we find ourselves face-to-face with our insignificance and our magnificence at the same time.

Gaps allow us to notice the beauty of a flower. Gaps allow us to contemplate, yet never fully appreciate, the sheer immensity of the cosmos.

Gaps allow us to feel the love in a kiss.

Addendum: Nothing in the above should be read as a refutation of either science or religion. Simply, that we need not look for answers where we do not need answers – we simply need to seek the wonder in the mystery.

Note:

1. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, Pan Books Ltd., London, 1974. First published 1945

One Second

When you are counting down to a catastrophe, or collapse, or a nuclear explosion, there is little difference between the second that separates 9 seconds and 10 seconds to go from the second that separates 89 seconds and 90 seconds to go. The ticking continues. The countdown goes on.

Anyone hearing that another second has ticked down towards doomsday should be concerned.

And that is what happened this week when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists¹ revealed how close to midnight the Doomsday Clock now is. (Midnight is the metaphorical time at which doomsday occurs.)

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been using the Doomsday Clock as a graphical way to illustrate how close the world is to doomsday since 1945. That is eighty years’ worth of watching the state of the world and how perilous it is, or isn’t.

This year (2025) they moved the clock from 90 seconds (one and a half minutes) before midnight to 89 seconds before midnight. A shift of just one second.

But, that one second is significant.

89 seconds is the closest the Doomsday Clock has ever been to midnight. The closest in eighty years!

In 2023 the hands of the clock were moved to 90 seconds before midnight; then, the closest ever to midnight. In 2024 the time remained at 90 seconds to midnight. Then this year, in a move of just one second, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have shown just how concerned they are.

Amongst the reasons for the shift of that one second are:

·       Continued failure by national leaders and countries to address the issues raised by scientists over the past year.

·       The war in Ukraine

·       Conflict in the Middle East

·       Increasing size of nuclear arsenals

·       Rise in global temperature leading to increased climate impacts

·       Climate change given low priority by world leaders

·       Rapid advances in AI increasing the risk of terrorism

Any one of these threats is reason for concern. Lumped together we should be greatly concerned, for the threats do not function in isolation from each other. They interact and mutually enhance the dangers of each other.

One second may not sound like much. But when we are running out of time each second counts.

Notes:

1. https://thebulletin.org/

Machiavelli’s Legacy: Deserved or Not?

Niccolò Machiavelli

What other personal name could be more associated with many of the nasty sides of human behaviour than that of Niccolò Machiavelli. His name is synonymous with traits such as ruthlessness, cruelty, manipulation, deceit, despotism, and fear. Indeed, the word machiavellian has now become a synonym for these traits.

A diplomat, philosopher, author, and historian, Machiavelli lived during the Italian Renaissance and is best known as the author of The Prince.¹

In that book, Machiavelli enunciated his ideas about what it takes to be a ruler and/or leader in those times. He has been called the ‘Father of political philosophy.’ His writings, especially The Prince, became foundation stones of politics from his time onwards. We still see his ideas played out in the actions of rulers all around the world today.

Male leaders in particular aim to be seen as tough, uncompromising, and decisive. All qualities that Machiavelli would have admired. Of course, female leaders have also attempted to rule in likewise manners. The UK’s Margaret Thatcher comes to mind; she wasn’t nicknamed the Iron Lady for nothing.

When Machiavelli was writing The Prince sometime around 1513 (although not published until 1532 – 5 years after his death) Italy was divided into a number of kingdoms, duchies, republics, and states – notably the Kingdom of Naples, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Florence, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Sicily. These various regions were constantly forming and unforming alliances and attacking one another.

Machiavelli’s attempts then to summarise and define the qualities of a leader under those circumstances becomes obvious. His intention was to provide leaders with means by which they could maintain their position of authority.

When viewed at from this distance, five centuries later, Machiavelli may not deserve his legacy,

However, as with so much, context is everything.

Let us consider a few of Machiavelli’s statements. The best-known Machiavellian maxim is the end justifies the means. For centuries this statement has enjoyed an almost self-obvious truthfulness about it. Yet, it is unhelpful and flawed. A whole systems understanding of the world and how it works recognises that ends and means are not discrete events but, rather, describe portions of the same continuous whole. Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, asserts that ‘means are ends in the making.’

In today’s highly connected, and increasingly polarised, this Machiavellian axiom is extremely unhelpful.

Some lesser-known statements from The Prince include: 1. ‘A leader mustn’t worry about being labelled cruel when it is a question of keeping his subjects loyal and united.’ 2. ‘It is a natural and ordinary desire to acquire.’ 3. ‘Is it better to be loved rather than feared?... since they don’t go together easily, if you have to choose, it’s much safer to be feared than loved.’ 4. ‘…fortune is female and if you want to stay on top of her you have to slap and thrust.’

Each of these statements, when applied in today’s world, tend only to exacerbate polarisation, violence, and hatred. The fourth of these statements, although Machiavelli was using it metaphorically (applying his comment to fortune) it does display the manner in which women were treated at that time. Today this would be outright misogyny.

Within our cultural psyche we tend to pay more attention to negative thoughts than towards positive ones. This negativity bias is an evolutionary adaptation. Our survival once was more guaranteed if we paid greater attention to perceived threats than if we ignored them (and even more so if we paid attention to the juicy fruit hanging from the tree instead!)

Thus it is with Machiavelli’s writings. We pay more attention to his negative expressions, even though circumstances have changed.

Consequently, with Machiavelli’s writing being still quoted and applied to positions of leadership today, we must view Machiavelli’s negative legacy as deserving.

In other words, the word machiavellian remains a synonym for cruelty, misogyny, deceit, manipulation, despotism, violence, and fear.

Sadly, leaders and rulers of today keep listening to the advice of Machiavelli.

Notes:

1. Quotations taken from the Penguin Classics edition of Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, UK, 2014.

Castles, Forts, and Walled Cities

Imagine you were set down in a region of the world where you had no idea where you were, no idea of which country or indeed even which continent. As you wander about you notice that there are many castles, forts, and walled cities dotted throughout the countryside.

What would you deduce from this about the occupants of this region?

One thing that you might infer is that warfare is a recurrent activity.

Such a situation is the reality for one specific part of the world.

A plot of the world’s castles, forts, and walled cities is a graphic illustration. Around 98% of all the castles, forts, and walled cities of the world are located in the region of the world to the west of the two big rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates, and to the north of the Mediterranean Sea. Many of the remaining 2%, although located in other parts of the world, were built following European/western colonisation of these areas. For example, USA has more than 300 castles, all of them built since the first European colonisers arrived.

This is the region of the world in which warfare took hold in a significant and meaningful manner.

It is often claimed that warfare is an innate human trait. Humanity has been engaged in warfare since time began it is said. If not that long ago, then at least over the past 15,000 to 20,000 years.

Yet, such an assertion is a Eurocentric one. There remains an assumption that because something has been experienced by, and applied by, those of European descent then it must relate to the whole of humanity.

But, as the example above shows, this is clearly not the case. Indeed, Europe is atypical in the building of castles, forts, and walled cities. Europe is also atypically warlike.

So, what was going on in the hearts and minds of Europeans – especially the males of that region?

Native Americans have an answer. They call it wetiko¹ which Jack Forbes² defines as the disease of cannibalism without any sacredness and no respect for the cycle of life and death.

Paul Levy, in his book simply titled Wetiko³, describes wetiko as, ‘A contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind… (that) covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests.’

Locating the emergence of warfare within western culture does not mean that violence did not occur in other parts of the world. However, as Jack Forbes points out, ‘Non-wetikos may, at times, be cruel, but their cruelty is individual and sporadic, not part of a system of cruelty.’⁴ Furthermore, Jack Forbes recognises that not all Europeans show wetiko tendencies, but that European culture is the major carrier of the wetiko disease.

That wetiko is a systematic psycho-spiritual disease and is unconsciously carried by one identifiable culture is what makes it so pernicious. It seeps and creeps into the psyche and belief systems of individuals and societies within that culture. Wetiko manifests, as Paul Levy notes, ‘as a cannibalising force driven by insatiable greed, appetite without satisfaction, consumption as an end in itself, and war for its own sake, against other tribes, species, and nature, and even against the individual’s own humanity.’

Wetiko, as Forbes and Levy describe it, is a major contributor to warfare.

And, castles, forts, and walled cities illustrate graphically where it originated.

Notes:

1. The word appears in many native North American languages, for example: wendigo, windego, windago, windiga, wentiko, wijigo, windagoo, and many others, indicating that the concept was widely known throughout the continent.

2. Jack Forbes was a prominent author, activist, and historian. Although identifying as of Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape descent he did not enrol in any native American nation.

3. Paul Levy, Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus that Plagues Our World, Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2021

4. Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism, Seven Stories Press, New York, London, Melbourne, Toronto, Revised Edition, 2008. First published 1992.

Fragments and Parts

David Bohm

In May 1984 a group of forty people of varying age, nationality, and professions met with Professor David Bohm to converse with him about his theories of the implicate and explicate order of the universe. Over the course of a weekend, this ground-breaking conversation was recorded, then transcribed, and published as the book Unfolding Meaning.¹

David Bohm (1917 – 1992) is one of many distinguished theoretical physicists that emerged between the late 19^th century and the middle of the 20^th century. Along with such well-known physicists as Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Pauli, and others, Bohm helped pioneer concepts in quantum physics, relativity, and the wave-particle duality.

Together these theoretical physicists also began to recognise, and explain, that things were not always as they seem. Bohm, as with others, also recognised that attempting to discover the workings of the cosmos (and the human mind in Bohm’s case) could not be done by looking at the world piece by piece. Things were much more intricately linked, and entangled, than a mechanistic worldview could explain.

Early in the dialogues Bohm noted that too often the world was viewed through a mechanistic lens. In expanding upon this he stated that there was a ‘…far reaching and pervasive fragmentation that arises out of the mechanistic world view.’ He went on to distinguish between a fragment and a part.

He used a metaphor to do so. ‘To hit a watch with a hammer would not produce parts, but fragments that are separated in ways that are not significantly related to the structure of the watch.’²

Indeed, as Bohm noted, the words fragment and part both come to us from Latin. The Latin word fragmentum means a piece broken off. The Latin word partum, however, means a portion of a whole. Quite different meanings and consequences.

After many centuries of breaking up phenomena and trying to explain the resultant mess, at least some sectors of the scientific world are realising that phenomena cannot be broken; a holistic, systems view, must be adopted.

The next step must be for other fields of human endeavour (e.g. economics, politics, business, education, and health) to recognise this as well.

The step after that is to remove the splitting of human endeavours into fragments and realise that humanity is part of this wonderful body called nature.

Notes:

1. David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm, Ark Paperbacks, London & New York, 1987

2. p.23