A View From Here
blageur2000@yahoo.com
The Emperor tells it as he sees it. No foolery here.
Under the Demon expect trickery, fibs & fabrications. Anything goes.
Photographic and editorial contents of this site Copyright 2000 by its owner, nickname "KGJ." All rights reserved
As I've said previously, kindness is a deceptively simple idea. Its implementation depends on context and many other considerations. Maybe it would be more to the point to ask, when attempting to define the "advancement" of a culture, whether it concerns itself centrally with alleviating suffering. This is a central tenet of Buddhism, and other religions as well. Certainly Jesus was an advocate of kindness in the best sense of the word. However it does not appear that cultures which consider themselves to be practitioners of these religions have manifested much external evidence of their practice. Most of them, including ours, are rife with cruelty and suffering.
If, in theory, our culture's philosophy, ostensibly Christian, centers on kindness and reverence, why do we see so little manifestation of kindness or reverence in daily life? Much lip service is paid to both, of course, But in practice our culture is hostile to most of what human beings need for a contented existence. It encourages separation of families, individual isolation, and works most of us to death in order that we may maintain a minimal and continually falling standard of living. All this despite being a society on average far more physically comfortable than the rest of the world. We neglect the old, the young, the unbeautiful. We destroy the countryside, pollute the air, poison the food, build abominably ugly architecture. We're addicted to consumption, substances, canned entertainment. We've been deprived of our skills, our communities, our self-respect.
Some large percentage of our population professes to believe in God. More than half profess to be Christian. Yet the conditions of which I've spoken prevail and have become increasingly severe since the end of World War II, and coincidentally the advent of television. Why is it that we can't quite seem to get our act together? Why are philosophical, ethical ideals so difficult to put into practice?
A rebellious part of myself answers this question by asserting its freedom and independence, asking, Why should I force myself into a mold derived from somebody else's fossilized theory? This rebellious entity lives within all of us, particularly strongly in Americans, nurtured on the ideal of independence. It's not altogether a negative character trait. In fact it's at the root of much of our creative energy. It's a stubborn, rebellious child, which damn well wants to discover the truth for itself. Long before the advent of America, the same spirit lived in the hearts of medieval scientists who rebelled against the pronouncements of priests by setting out to discover the truths of the universe by direct observation. Unfortunately, we've never learned to restrain the destructive aspects of this rebellious entity. Its handmaidens, modern science and technology, have directed their attention solely to the physical world, claiming immunity to the "subjective" realities of emotion and spirit. In doing so, they have become a monsters, admitting no responsibility for the ways in which their discoveries and creations are applied and ultimately affect the lives of human beings.
One characteristic of a brain which is able to think in terms of abstract symbols, namely words, is that it's also able to twist the meanings of those symbols in order to meet its own ends. If one mind devotes a lifetime to discovering how to live joyfully, and formulates certain rules, communicated via words, which may be practiced in rote form by other minds in order to attain the same joyful ends, there's still an inherent problem in communication. The mind receiving the information probably does not attribute exactly the same meanings to the verbal message as the sender wished to communicate, because it is a mind which evolved in a different context. To compound the problem, the receiving mind, not having lived the experience of the transmitting mind, is expected to take the communication on faith: "Look here, if you do what I say, you'll be happy." It's easy for a receiving mind to misunderstand rules taken on faith which seem to stand in the way of its own quest for comfort and pleasure. Misunderstanding is further imperiled by the aforementioned rebellious entity which wants to do its own discovering. Against such odds, unless the receiving mind has had considerable life experience, and has the ability to make projections into the future about the consequences of its behavior, the wisdom being received via words has little chance of being applied in the ways its formulator intended.
To put this in more concrete terms, yes, we have a Bible, chock full of all sorts of wisdom. But even after centuries of biblical study, how many scholars agree on the specifics of how the Bible is telling us to live? I personally suspect Jesus is spinning in his grave in horror, knowing how his words are interpreted and what activities are being perpetrated in his name. Ironically, it's those who attempt to interpret the Bible most literally who seem the biggest defilers of its spirit. The mind which has no ability to encompass the beauty of poetic language slogs through the mud of literalism and behaves accordingly.
Where are we left? We live in a culture which has lost its ethical roots, whose poetic imagination is being destroyed by the toxicity or commercialism run amok. I'm no Biblical scholar, but didn't Jesus react severely against the money changers of the market place? Didn't He give them hell, throw them out? The most literal interpretation of the Bible can't miss the truth of that one. What would Jesus say about the monopolistic practices of mult-national corporations and the whole idea of putting blind profit before the public good?
What I've written here seems to scatter in several directions. My inquiry started in wondering whether any culture has done better than ours in practicing kindness and reverence. It's not clear to me whether we're actually any worse off than other great cultures of history. All human beings communicate using the symbolism of language, which is not a perfect mode of communication. It can be misunderstood, sometimes willfully, depending on the motivations and experience of the listener. It's clear to me that for human beings to benefit from wisdom received from outside, they must already have somewhere encountered that wisdom in practice. No amount of teaching, preaching, or moralizing can have any effect on those who presently live in a state of ethical and moral limbo. They have no equipment with which to receive the message, and no fulcrum upon which to act. In the case of USA in the year 2000, we seem to have thrown all the rules out the window and to have been lead down a path largely determined by the rationale of the marketplace. By what unimaginable means will we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps? Will salvation somehow coalesce out of chaos, or will archetypal entities impose themselves in the form of apocalypse? All great civilizations have fallen eventually. We are not immune.
posted by KGJ 6:30 PM
Sunday, February 04, 2001
Last night TK sprang for K's birthday dinner down at the Cafe. A crowd of about ten present, mostly younger people, not my usual bunch, which was refreshing. M. has gone to Seattle to play, so I felt myself to be in an entirely different social venue. I like that because when I socialize in bachelor mode it brings out entirely different aspects of myself than I usually experience.
Sometime during dessert we were talking about characters on the Island and B. said that she thought someone should be writing a book about it this place. I let slip that I'd written a few things about the Island on my website and a couple people copied down the URL. Hi, Y'all! If you've read through any of the archives, I hope you don't try to find yourself or anyone else in the fabrications section, because it's all invented. Bits and pieces of various personalities find their way in, but probably better to interpret them like you'd interpret dreams- all the characters are aspects of my own personality. Didn't know I was such a versatile guy, did you?
Too bad about the Blogger company going down. Mercifully, the site still works. I wrote a note to Ev, the CEO who remains playing Blogger solo and suggested that he should consider charging a small subscription fee, $24 to $36 per year for the service. Surely anyone who takes Blogging seriously could muster that. Why should someone bust ass so a zillion people can have easy access to their web pages? It's a nice gesture, but lousy business. I'd far rather pay and know I can depend on the service than have it for free and not for long. I can't quite believe I'm saying this after having been reading various books over the last few weeks which lament the commodification of everything. But some things should be commodities and some not. Blogger is a useful tool and I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable fee to use it.
For once, I'm going to feed myself breakfast before 10am. It's so easy to get sidetracked into computery stuff, email, and the like and sit here until noon before eating anything. After all, they say that one thing long-lived people all have in common is that they eat breakfast regularly.
Bye for now. Maybe I'll get around to posting more often in the future. Or maybe I won't.
posted by KGJ 9:59 AM
Sunday, December 31, 2000
Anything else to report? Rain. Rain, rain, rain. I thought this winter had returned to the general pattern of the winters of 20 years ago, where rain and clouds are interspersed with days of sun and blue sky. But if the last couple weeks are any to judge from, gray rules. This is despite the fact that the rainfall record shows us 7" below normal for the date. Well, there have been a lot of dry clouds hanging about then. By the way, if you have any interest in moving to the Northwest, don't. You'll hate it.
Talked to D. for a few minutes this morning, giving him a capsule review of the film. I paraphrase his response thus: What do you expect from Hollywood? To change the subject, he told me that he read a prediction by a psychic that Georgie W. wouldn't finish office. I've had intimations to that effect myself. My sense is that the man's incompetence will catch up with him. He'll find himself in way over his head and will take up the bottle again, or worse. D. also mentioned that many presidents elected on an even decade have met with misfortune. Wouldn't want to wish anyone misfortune, but the sooner George disappears into posterity, the better. No president at all would be an improvement over him.
Also read in article in December 2000 Harper's Magazine, entitled Miraculous Fishing- Lost In the Swamps of Columbia's Drug War. This is about our billion-dollar anti-drug initiative which started in September of 2000. We've sent or are sending in up to 500 military trainers and 60 helicopters which we plan to use to help the Columbians murder guerrillas and peasants. A new Vietnam startup, in other words
In Rachel Environmental Weekly #713, you can read about accompanying plans to douse the Colombian countryside with herbicides, such as Glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in Roundup, commencing in January of 2001. Another article in Bellingham, Washington's Every other Weekly mentions another herbicidal agent called Fusarium oxysporum. This is a mutagenic fungal agent which can live in the soil for up to 20 years. For more information, see this article. On researching this fungus a bit, I discover it has been used for weed control in Africa, but it mutates easily into forms which attack other plants than the one it was designed to. All-in-all it sounds like bad stuff to spray around indiscrimately. According to the last article cited above, the Colombians don't want to use it either. But from past experience, we know the US Government can be trusted to do as it damn well pleases, no matter what it promises or what the cost.
Where do we get off at, dumping this stuff on another country with no regard to the fact that it drifts uncontrollably in the winds, and that we have no idea of what the side-effects might be, particularly of fungal agents. Once you've infected the environment with a fungus, it's there and it stays there, unlike other agents which degrade in time (With luck). If we want to control drugs, we should be (a) helping the Columbians with education, training, and health care so that farmers who must now grow drugs to survive have other options, and (b) drug treatment programs in our own country, which not only help people kick their habits but supply them with job training so that they also have other options. Unfortunately, programs such as these don't benefit the manufacturers of chemicals and munitions who carry the US Government around in their pockets.
Write your Congress person and bitch.
Speaking of environment and environmentalists, do you ever get sick of having the world "environmentalist" bandied about as if it were the moral equivalent of child molestation, and as if "environmentalists" were out to deprive us of all the benefits and comforts we now enjoy? The truth is, environmentalists are crusading in order that we may KEEP many of the comforts we now possess, and hopefully be able to enjoy them without fear of slowly strangling in the miasma of our own wastes, and of depriving other inhabitants of the world of their right to perhaps share some of the same comforts and freedoms that we do.
And, on the subject "corporate greed," corporations are fearfully short-sighted when they pay CEOs and other higher-ups huge compensation at the expense of less exalted workers. The more that employees are laid off and made to suffer with inadequate compensation, the less income they have available spend on the products of the very companies in question. Generally speaking, keeping the world in poverty and deprivation does not provide happy customers for successful corporations.
Bye for now.
posted by KGJ 12:11 PM
Saturday, December 23, 2000
Two essential qualities which admit culture to the status of true advancement are kindness and reverence. Kindness implies the ability to empathize with other beings, not just of our own species, and to treat them in ways which we would want to be treated ourselves. Reverence is that quality of character which respects and finds wonder in our own existence and the existence of all other forms, both living and non-living, that creation takes.
The unfortunate truth is that any belief system, such as our present scientific paradigm, which places so-called "objective truths" above subjective ones can never be truly kind. For example, if we assume that certain human traits, such as competitiveness, are simply "there" because they evolved that way, and we use "survival of the fittest" as an argument for canceling social services and letting unfortunate people fall by the wayside, then we have committed an unkindness in the name of a "scientific" hypothesis which is open to interpretation according to the beliefs of the person doing the interpreting.
On the other hand, if we observe someone sleeping on the street with snow collecting about his unsheltered head, and we check internally to discover how we'd feel about being in that situation ourselves, the action to take becomes intuitively clear. We set about finding shelter for that person. No need to refer to "scientific" "objective" hypothesis about the survival of the fittest and whether we're just witnessing the ultimate application of that supposedly natural law. We simply attempt to help other beings who are suffering.
Now "kindness" is a concept which is deceptive in its apparent simplicity. Cruelty can be easily buried in what appear to be kindness. The application of true kindness to a situation requires years of experience and wisdom. It's faintly possible that our sleeper on the street has chosen to be there for reasons of his own and rescuing him would, in that case, not be doing him a kindness. In this situation, reverence must come into play- the habit of respecting what is and the willingness to allow it to go on about its way without interference from us. Ram Dass and Paul Gorman wrote a book entitled How Can I Help which addresses the title question in its complexity. Part of the quality of reverence and of kindness inheres in the willingness to devote considerable attention to discovering one's personal answer to it.
In fact, the question "How can I Help" is probably the biggest and most important question which any of us faces in our lives. Answering it requires thought, education, dialog, communication; all qualities which abound in a truly "advanced" civilization. Any civilization which values math and science above these cannot be an advanced one. We are as human as we believe ourselves to be. When our culture embraces reductive belief systems that argue that suffering is "nothing but" an artifact of some "natural process" and therefore we have no obligation to address it, we are not advanced, no matter how sophisticated our technological ability to move information. Compassion is not information and cannot be communicated by bits and bytes.
Issue #115 of Netfuture carries a piece by Landon Winner entitled Confronting the Culture of Disrespect. Winner notes children's tendency to abuse each other verbally and how this has recently lead to deadly assaults such as that at Columbine High School in Colorado. He finds a connection between this abusive tendency in some children and a general attitude which Winner terms "aggressive disrespect" prevailing widely in our culture. Winner cites its presence "in movies, television programs, radio talk shows, sports, journalism, and politics."
Winner goes on to invoke a term coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter, "creative destruction," which he uses to describe the predominant paradigm of today's dot.com economy, which is to find any "object, activity or institution [which] has flourished for decades and embodies deeply felt values," then destroy and capitalize it by means of some electronic or technological innovation process (my paraphrase). Winner supplies other examples of this all-too-prevalent process, including the cloning of animals, genetically engineering "improved" creatures, replacing ourselves with robotic devices and so-on. In short, he calls attention to our general willingness to thoughtlessly "improve" or replace anything if it seems possible to make a buck off it.
The attitude of "aggressive disrespect" which Langdon Winner describes is precisely what I refer to when I refuse to characterize our culture as an advanced one. When institutionalized disrespect drives a whole economy, we are in the process of self destruction. When nothing is sacred and everything is open for exploitation, leaving no solid foundation upon which to rest our lives we doom ourselves. By replacing human skills, and institutions with technological artifacts, solely for the purpose of personal gain, we demonstrate our thoughtlessness, ignorance, and lack of reverence for those institutions, for ourselves and for our true potential as human beings.
With the forgone in mind, if we wish to make projections about the number of civilizations in the universe that might communicate by technological means, we should not conclude that a civilization's possession of technology, as we know it, is indicative of an advanced one, or that once civilizations discover technology they go on to "advanced" status. It's likely that civilizations that come to rely on technology in the style that we do inevitably destroy themselves in a relatively short time, because the belief system which leads to this sort of technological innovation is not one which is ultimately friendly to the continuing survival of living organisms. It may be, in fact, a symptom of pathology. This would imply that our odds of discovering other civilizations by their radio emissions is relatively slight, since these civilizations would necessarily cease to exist in a instant of geological time after they started broadcasting. Besides, as some comedian pointed out, a truly advanced civilization would be smart enough to avoid us like the plague.
posted by KGJ 1:54 PM
Sunday, December 17, 2000
Scientists have discovered recently that that women who have received breast implants have unusually high IQs. Research indicates that the silicon in the implants is functioning as random-acces- mammary (RAM). The discovery has prompted many corporate CEOs, including Bill Gates, to be fitted with the implants in order to improve their ability to compete with rival CEOs, and often to supplement inadequate hard drives. Sometimes one breast is dedicated as read-only-mammary (ROM), for the storage of stubbornly ingrained habits.(This leaves more brain cells and hard drive capacity available for normal processing.) The stocks of companies such as Playtex, Hanes, and Olga are skyrocketing and bras of astonishing size are appearing. In fact a type of lycra upper-body apparel, known as a "stuffed shirt" has been developed, and the corporate landscape is taking on a whole new aspect. As a side benefit, corporations are becoming more honest as the CEOs feel compelled to make a "clean breast of it" in their dealings with each other and the public. In addition, the companies are finding it more difficult to "breast the tide" of adverse public opinion. The death rate from accidentally inflated air bags in corporate cars has decreased. The bags are being removed since they are no longer necessary. By the way, it's hoped that none of those who circulate this release in corparate email systems get their tits in the wringer. The results of such a massive simultaneous dump of both ROM and RAM can be devastating, sometimes even necessitating hard-drive replacement.
posted by KGJ 11:19 AM
Tuesday, December 12, 2000
More news! The West Coast faces acute shortages of electrical power. Remember back before Reagan was president, when the government was giving tax credit to anyone who installed solar collectors on their roof? Republican Reagan ended all that. Since then we've thrown conservation out the window, gone back to gas-eating hogs on the highway, and now people are whining because they can't turn on their Christmas tree lights. Well, sweetheart, the reason you can't plug in the lights is because that monster SUV sitting in the driveway, the one that gets 12 mpg, burned up whatever energy might have gone toward frills like Christmas cheer. If you'd been able to get a tax credit for installing solar hot water, you might have done it instead of heating your hot water with gas, electricity, or oil. Remember that, when Georgie starts passing laws to favor his oil-drilling pals rather than doing something to promote alternative energy sources. Reindeer? Forget reindeer. They're going to be drowning in the oil spilled across the now melting tundra of Alaska. Santa will be living in his beaver den and making his deliveries via raft.
To change the subject slightly. I was talking to someone down at the store about the fact that the Weather forecasters (around here, anyway) keep coming up with these horrifying predictions of hurricane force winds and minus 60 wind chill, which so far haven't materialized. It suddenly occurred to me- the forecasters like to forecast weather which will keep people tuning in to their TVs so they can be pelted with commercials. If there was no exciting weather in the offing, why would anyone bother to watch the forecast? So, are the corporations not only manufacturing the news for their own benefit, but the weather as well? Stay tuned to find out!
Oh, and read Neil Postman and Steve Powers' book, *How to watch TV News*. To summarize their conclusions, if you have no source of news outside of TV, don't bother to watch at all.
G'nite folks.
posted by KGJ 9:56 PM
Saturday, December 09, 2000
Jack says, A collection for what?
A quarter each will do it.
What for?
Poor Georgie. He's sobbing to the court that counting the votes will do him irreparable harm. I thought we should send him a hankie so he can wipe his eyes and blow his nose.
posted by KGJ 10:46 AM