©
It’s Monday morning and I’m already jangling a bit from the coffee and the early morning news. We just got back from a short road trip.
After unpacking the van, we answered our voice mail only to find that our storage unit had been broken into over the weekend. I drove over to take a look, but the owner had already put on a new lock on the door so we still don’t know how much we’ve lost. It may not be a big deal to anyone else, but it speaks to community trust.
Community exists on all sorts of levels. On the immediate level, community is family and close neighbours. Then it’s work, maybe the kids’ school and the town where you live and shop. We’ve had varying levels of connection to local communities. Prior to coming here, we lived in the city where both Sharon and I were born. We knew the neighbourhoods to avoid, the better places to hang out. In larger cities like Toronto, these areas are well-known, such as the troubled Jane and Finch neighbourhood.
I can remember when I first encountered the idea of crime. I was about nine. My uncle had borrowed his dad’s (my grandfather’s) car and stopped at a corner store to get a pack of cigarettes. Everybody smoked back then. He left the keys in the car, and came out to find it gone. Days later they found the burned out shell in a gravel pit. That car is one of my earliest memories and I have a photo of myself standing up on the seat tugging on the huge steering wheel. So I still feel the loss of that car.
This is our second break-in since arriving here. Someone broke into our garage before we’d even moved in, and we lost a small TV set along with some kids’ videos. Again, nothing serious but troubling. There’s rarely anything the police can do, or will do. It takes a lot of time and money to bring out Ident Unit, dust for fingerprints, run the checks, etc. So unless the theft is major, there’s little hope for recovery.
Then there’s our larger community—and the trust issues that seep into our living rooms on the evening news. Some days it’s like a toxic waste dump. This morning, for example, we heard about a student sex slaying in Italy involving an American girl. On another channel it was the murder of two people in Arkansas, the disappearance of a young wife and the interview of her suspicious husband. On Canadian TV it was the apartment fire in Vancouver which is thought to be a cover-up of the murder of the young woman who lived there, and yesterday morning it was fatal street shootings in Toronto and Calgary. Just your average news days. It almost makes you grateful for living with garage thieves.
Of course theft and corruption floats always floats to the top, where the guilty parties are usually rewarded, not punished. Occasionally, a few obnoxious ones are sacrificed, like those bad Enron boys or Martha Stewart or Conrad Black. I expect nobody at the top really liked them anyway.
It’s not that much bit different when the crimes are international. Take George W. Bush’s little war in Iraq. It’s unlikely that George (or his accomplices Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld) will ever be punished for their Middle Eastern oil grab. But we will. The US will stagger under the weight of the $3 trillion (and counting) pricetag of the war for decades. The cost of war has tipped the American economy into crisis. And now the whole world is sliding into recession.
Not many folks in the US media seem to be blaming the war for the ailing economy. It’s those greedy Wall Street investment bankers, the sub-prime mortgage lenders and those spendthrift American consumers and house-flippers who should take the blame.
But a few of the wiser voices are pointing to the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. In the midst of an ill-conceived and expensive war in Iraq, and another in Afghanistan draining the public purse, Greenspan kept tinkering with lower interest rates to keep over-stretched American consumers shopping till they dropped. Which they finally did this summer, after some of the highest gas prices of the century finally put a nail in their spending. Who could afford that big new house in the ’burbs (at much higher interest rate when the sub-prime mortgage came due)—plus $4 a gallon gasoline for two 3-hour commutes, one for each income-earner? The world community was banking on those over-stretched American consumers. As the American economy pooped out, Canada’s resource sector took a dump, and the Chinese double-digit growth flushed down into the single digits with the prospect of growing unemployment looming in both countries.
A destabilized world community is not a pleasant prospect. Neither China nor India, with a third of the world’s population between them, have any fossil fuel resources. Both are nuclear powers located in near proximity to the largest reserves of remaining oil on the planet—exactly where the US just happens to be having its little wars. And across a few small “Stans” to the north, Russia is sitting on the largest natural gas reserves on the planet and testing its new power. Their recent invasion of Georgia was a message to the US: “Your military is over-stretched. Watch your back.”
History repeats itself. The stockmarket Panic of 1907 preceded the First World War by seven years. The Crash of 1929 preceded the Second World War by ten years. Could the Meltdown of 2008 precede another war in 2012 or 2015? I for one do not want to find out.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that CBC ran a documentary last evening on global nuclear weapons proliferation. We’re running out of oil and the sabres are starting to rattle. Loudly.
On crimes of greed on a much smaller scale, avoid Oliver Stone’s new movie “W.” like the plague. Don’t give him your hard-earned money like we did this weekend. This trivialization of serious subject matter makes the prospect of real George W. Bush seem almost appealing.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
World of wonders, saints and sinners
©
It’s church day again. When the alarm went off at 7:00 a.m. and—wonder of wonders—I decided to get up instead of drifting back to sleep. I got dressed in the dark, grabbed a book, went outside and scraped the frost off the windshield and drove over to Tim Horton’s.
There aren’t too many people at Tim’s on a Sunday morning. Just a few weary old guys in ball hats and the bleary-eyed wait staff behind the counter. I ordered a two-and-one and sat down with my book. It’s one that I’m re-reading for the third or fourth time. It’s not that the book is that good, it’s just that I can’t quite absorb it all in one reading.
And it’s funny how synchronous life is. There I was on a Sunday morning, a non-church-goer, reading a book about religious belief. The particular page I was on had to do with Mayhayana Buddhism, which originated at exactly the same time in history as Christianity, but at opposite ends of a 1500-mile Persian military highway. This road stretched from the Mediterranean all the way to India, and was traveled by both Buddhist teachers and the early Christian saints. Maybe it’s no accident that there are fundamental similarities between the two religions.
This got me to thinking about the karma of place names. I live in St. Stephen. So who was our patron saint? Well, in Greek the name Stephen means “crown.” From what I read on the Web, Stephen was one of seven Jewish dudes who were chosen to distribute aid to elderly widows living within the early Christian community. Stephen was also a highly gifted Christian evangelist and preacher, which was probably the main reason he ended up being stoned to death and becoming the first Christian martyr. As an aside, it turns out that one of the leading stone throwers was Saul, who, on the road to Damascus, had a historic religious epiphany. He changed both his name and his life—and all our lives by reinventing Christianity. We know him as St. Paul. For his part, the “protomartyr” Stephen became the patron saint of bricklayers, stonemasons and deacons. Today, December 26 is recognized as the Feast of St. Stephen.
But I still haven’t answered my own question. What is this town’s karma? Maybe it means St. Stephen is a great place to get stoned. Or maybe it’s a good place to get born again. Who knows? But there is some karmic energy here, an energy that’s just a little different than anywhere else.
Take the neighbouring town of St. Andrews, for example. Their patron saint, Andrew, was one of Christ’s apostles and St. Peter’s younger brother. After Christ’s death, Andrew traveled east and north—along that same Persian military highway—from Palestine to Asia Minor as up far as the Volga River region, which is now known as the Ukraine. He founded the See of Byzantium, which later became the city of Constantinople. And finally he was crucified in Patras, a Greek town located 200 kilometers north of Athens. Folk legend has it (incorrectly) that he was crucified on an X-shaped cross, which shows up as the white “X” on the navy blue flag of St. Andrews. After his death he became the patron saint of Russia, Romania, Constantiople and Scotland. His Christian feast day is November 30.
So what karma might he lay on the town of St. Andrews? Well, he seems to have been more of a world traveler than St. Stephen, so that could explain the appeal of tourism in St. Andrews. He also seems to have been more popular than Stephen, and that, to some, might explain the difference between the two towns. However, the last time I checked the Romanians have been moving into St. Stephen and not St. Andrews (the town named after their patron saint). So go figure.
Wow, how the mind can wander over a coffee at Horton’s. It actually might have been easier to dress up and go to church to meditate.
When I got home I picked up the most recent copy of Scientific American. Once again I was confronted by the history of the cosmos, this time from a decidedly non-religious point of view. The cover story featured the end of the Big Bang theory and the creation of the Bouncing Ball theory to explain the beginning of the universe. According to cosmologists, our universe has been collapsing into a super-dense pinpoint and re-expanding into infinite space with predictable regularity. Or at least I think that’s how it goes. Once the chatter got too deeply into quantum theory I knew I was lost.
At the galactic scale it’s hard to separate the actions of the sinners from the saints. Really, did it matter whether Saul-Paul was a bad man or a good man? Or even a perennially conflicted man, as some theological historians speculate. Despite notions of good or evil, the world in which we live is a marvellous place. And that was one of the points being made in this book I’ve been re-reading.
The ancients knew it, too. They saw it in nature, and in their own inventions. Even before the time of Christ they had a list of the Seven Wonders of the World. In case you don’t remember them all, they were: the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. I know, common knowledge to any tourist, right?
Well, nearly 2500 years later only one of the original wonders remains. It’s the Great Pyramid, of course. Which goes to illustrate just how transient we are. Everything is a temporal illusion. Which, I suppose, brings us back to religion. Or more accurately, spiritual refection.
I remember sitting outside in the backyard last summer with the kids. An iridescent-blue-green dragonfly caught our attention. It seemed to be a newborn, perched on a twig, stretching out its wings to dry in the sun. Then, in a quicksilver flash, it was aloft. It did a slow buzzing circle, then landed on the same spot. Not expecting to see it again, we looked closer. We discovered that one of its four wings had broken off. On a personal level we felt the deep tragedy of its injury.
But in a world of wonders, even such imperfection is a work of absolute perfection.
It’s church day again. When the alarm went off at 7:00 a.m. and—wonder of wonders—I decided to get up instead of drifting back to sleep. I got dressed in the dark, grabbed a book, went outside and scraped the frost off the windshield and drove over to Tim Horton’s.
There aren’t too many people at Tim’s on a Sunday morning. Just a few weary old guys in ball hats and the bleary-eyed wait staff behind the counter. I ordered a two-and-one and sat down with my book. It’s one that I’m re-reading for the third or fourth time. It’s not that the book is that good, it’s just that I can’t quite absorb it all in one reading.
And it’s funny how synchronous life is. There I was on a Sunday morning, a non-church-goer, reading a book about religious belief. The particular page I was on had to do with Mayhayana Buddhism, which originated at exactly the same time in history as Christianity, but at opposite ends of a 1500-mile Persian military highway. This road stretched from the Mediterranean all the way to India, and was traveled by both Buddhist teachers and the early Christian saints. Maybe it’s no accident that there are fundamental similarities between the two religions.
This got me to thinking about the karma of place names. I live in St. Stephen. So who was our patron saint? Well, in Greek the name Stephen means “crown.” From what I read on the Web, Stephen was one of seven Jewish dudes who were chosen to distribute aid to elderly widows living within the early Christian community. Stephen was also a highly gifted Christian evangelist and preacher, which was probably the main reason he ended up being stoned to death and becoming the first Christian martyr. As an aside, it turns out that one of the leading stone throwers was Saul, who, on the road to Damascus, had a historic religious epiphany. He changed both his name and his life—and all our lives by reinventing Christianity. We know him as St. Paul. For his part, the “protomartyr” Stephen became the patron saint of bricklayers, stonemasons and deacons. Today, December 26 is recognized as the Feast of St. Stephen.
But I still haven’t answered my own question. What is this town’s karma? Maybe it means St. Stephen is a great place to get stoned. Or maybe it’s a good place to get born again. Who knows? But there is some karmic energy here, an energy that’s just a little different than anywhere else.
Take the neighbouring town of St. Andrews, for example. Their patron saint, Andrew, was one of Christ’s apostles and St. Peter’s younger brother. After Christ’s death, Andrew traveled east and north—along that same Persian military highway—from Palestine to Asia Minor as up far as the Volga River region, which is now known as the Ukraine. He founded the See of Byzantium, which later became the city of Constantinople. And finally he was crucified in Patras, a Greek town located 200 kilometers north of Athens. Folk legend has it (incorrectly) that he was crucified on an X-shaped cross, which shows up as the white “X” on the navy blue flag of St. Andrews. After his death he became the patron saint of Russia, Romania, Constantiople and Scotland. His Christian feast day is November 30.
So what karma might he lay on the town of St. Andrews? Well, he seems to have been more of a world traveler than St. Stephen, so that could explain the appeal of tourism in St. Andrews. He also seems to have been more popular than Stephen, and that, to some, might explain the difference between the two towns. However, the last time I checked the Romanians have been moving into St. Stephen and not St. Andrews (the town named after their patron saint). So go figure.
Wow, how the mind can wander over a coffee at Horton’s. It actually might have been easier to dress up and go to church to meditate.
When I got home I picked up the most recent copy of Scientific American. Once again I was confronted by the history of the cosmos, this time from a decidedly non-religious point of view. The cover story featured the end of the Big Bang theory and the creation of the Bouncing Ball theory to explain the beginning of the universe. According to cosmologists, our universe has been collapsing into a super-dense pinpoint and re-expanding into infinite space with predictable regularity. Or at least I think that’s how it goes. Once the chatter got too deeply into quantum theory I knew I was lost.
At the galactic scale it’s hard to separate the actions of the sinners from the saints. Really, did it matter whether Saul-Paul was a bad man or a good man? Or even a perennially conflicted man, as some theological historians speculate. Despite notions of good or evil, the world in which we live is a marvellous place. And that was one of the points being made in this book I’ve been re-reading.
The ancients knew it, too. They saw it in nature, and in their own inventions. Even before the time of Christ they had a list of the Seven Wonders of the World. In case you don’t remember them all, they were: the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. I know, common knowledge to any tourist, right?
Well, nearly 2500 years later only one of the original wonders remains. It’s the Great Pyramid, of course. Which goes to illustrate just how transient we are. Everything is a temporal illusion. Which, I suppose, brings us back to religion. Or more accurately, spiritual refection.
I remember sitting outside in the backyard last summer with the kids. An iridescent-blue-green dragonfly caught our attention. It seemed to be a newborn, perched on a twig, stretching out its wings to dry in the sun. Then, in a quicksilver flash, it was aloft. It did a slow buzzing circle, then landed on the same spot. Not expecting to see it again, we looked closer. We discovered that one of its four wings had broken off. On a personal level we felt the deep tragedy of its injury.
But in a world of wonders, even such imperfection is a work of absolute perfection.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Total eclipse of an election
©
It’s astonishing to see how out of touch our politicians actually are. Here we are, in the middle of a total economic eclipse—and in the middle of two major North American elections—and not one of the leaders has a real solution to the problem. They’re not even pretending to have a solution.
And it shows. Last week CBC’s Peter Mansbridge asked his political panelists whether this election was resonating with Canadian voters. Only one of them said it was—the others strongly disagreed. They know what we know, that this as another lame election. Not that it matters, because by the time you read this we’ll all be living with the results.
Nevertheless, the question caught me. I mean, an interesting Canadian election? Here we are in the final throes of the US presidential election that has overshadowed every other political story during the past year. First we had the struggle between Obama and Clinton with the outright dismissal of Hillary as a Vice Presidential candidate, and on the other side the choice of Palin and her unlikely resurrection of the McCain campaign. It was great media theatre—until the financial crisis eclipsed the elections on both sides of the border.
The effects were immediate. In the States Obama’s ratings began to rise as did Stéphane Dion’s here in Canada, which is no surprise as both leaders are seen as more in touch with domestic issues. The media got into the show. Commentator Rex Murphy identified Prime Minister Harper as a brilliant tactician but not a particularly a visionary leader. Which is true.
Murphy’s underlying point is clear, the times are crying out for vision, which seems to be in short supply. This recent turn of economic events and lack of real leadership means we now have the possibility of another minority government in Canada. Or stranger yet, having a new coalition government on the left with the Liberals, NDP, Bloc and Greens sharing a common agenda, which would most certainly revolve around the ailing economy.
Meanwhile the economy remains in darkness. The credit crunch has broken the trust between institutions and brought inter-bank lending to a standstill. As a result business loans are drying up around the world. Consumer confidence is falling like a stone as they watch housing prices fall and their savings evaporate in stock market mutual fund meltdowns. We’re seeing oil prices drop and commodity prices fall, which directly impacts the Canadian resource-based economy. The demand for our resources to feed the manufacturing engine aimed at the US consumer has gone south. And now the Canadian dollar is starting to plummet. In spite of what our prime minister has been saying, we’re not exactly in good shape.
We’re feeling the effects close to home too. The Icelandic banks like Glitner are a key part of the financial backbone of the East Coast fishery. As a result of the global commercial credit crisis these banks are now in ruins. That does not bode well for us. John Risley, the head of Clearwater Foods in Nova Scotia, said in an interview last week that, without a secure source of operating funds, companies like his are facing a serious threat to their survival.
How many of our other businesses depend on secure lines of credit for their operating loans? Probably all of them. No loans, no paycheques for workers. And we shouldn’t overlook the fact that most of our businesses are resource-based. For example Flakeboard makes panels for the construction industry and furniture market. Paturel exports lobsters to the upscale restaurant trade. Even our tourism industry is based on consumers having the confidence to spend their money.
When national and foreign banks abandon fundamental Canadian industries, we may need our government to get creative. One option may be to have our government step in to provide backstop guarantees for bank loans, or in certain cases to become the banker to keep the machinery moving. This is time for governments to lead us out of crisis, not simply to “manage” the crisis as usual.
Of course the actual global financial situation is a lot more complex, and I don’t pretend to understand it all. But all that complexity is the main part of the problem. I listened to the head of a very successful Spanish bank on the radio the other day. His take on the crisis? There were just too many complex financial instruments, and too little real financial accountability—which boils down to a simple premise: don’t lend money to people who can’t afford to pay it back. How complicated is that?
All that said, we seem to be collectively unable to deal with the other eclipse, call it the eclipse of the moon, which is the global environmental crisis. The irony here is profound. As we’re making human processes ever more complex, we’re reducing the diversity in our environment at an incredible rate. We’re genetically engineered mono-cultural agricultural practices, wiping out other species in the exchange, and strip mining our natural resources. We’re still expanding urban sprawl based on a wildly fuel-inefficient and polluting transportation system, which is now clogging the atmosphere. Seen from the outside, we’re entirely out of control.
So how do we readjust? Do we hit the “reset” button and force ourselves back into another Great Depression or worse? It all comes down to a single question? How do we rein in over-consumption?
Because this is an unpopular and perhaps impossible question, no leader has made a visionary case for Canada’s future. But it’s time we all faced facts. It’s not the environment. It’s not energy. It’s not the economy. It’s all three together. That this is not fully recognized and communicated to the Canadian public is the real total eclipse—of leadership.
Everything we have done in the past and in the future depends on the environment. Food, shelter, transportation and manufacturing all depend on the environment. During the last 100 years we’ve seen the most dramatic acceleration of human development in history—entirely fuelled by gasoline and fossil fuels. With oil production peaking and about to decline, the end of that acceleration is now in sight.
Unless we get moving in a new direction quickly, only darkness lies ahead.
It’s astonishing to see how out of touch our politicians actually are. Here we are, in the middle of a total economic eclipse—and in the middle of two major North American elections—and not one of the leaders has a real solution to the problem. They’re not even pretending to have a solution.
And it shows. Last week CBC’s Peter Mansbridge asked his political panelists whether this election was resonating with Canadian voters. Only one of them said it was—the others strongly disagreed. They know what we know, that this as another lame election. Not that it matters, because by the time you read this we’ll all be living with the results.
Nevertheless, the question caught me. I mean, an interesting Canadian election? Here we are in the final throes of the US presidential election that has overshadowed every other political story during the past year. First we had the struggle between Obama and Clinton with the outright dismissal of Hillary as a Vice Presidential candidate, and on the other side the choice of Palin and her unlikely resurrection of the McCain campaign. It was great media theatre—until the financial crisis eclipsed the elections on both sides of the border.
The effects were immediate. In the States Obama’s ratings began to rise as did Stéphane Dion’s here in Canada, which is no surprise as both leaders are seen as more in touch with domestic issues. The media got into the show. Commentator Rex Murphy identified Prime Minister Harper as a brilliant tactician but not a particularly a visionary leader. Which is true.
Murphy’s underlying point is clear, the times are crying out for vision, which seems to be in short supply. This recent turn of economic events and lack of real leadership means we now have the possibility of another minority government in Canada. Or stranger yet, having a new coalition government on the left with the Liberals, NDP, Bloc and Greens sharing a common agenda, which would most certainly revolve around the ailing economy.
Meanwhile the economy remains in darkness. The credit crunch has broken the trust between institutions and brought inter-bank lending to a standstill. As a result business loans are drying up around the world. Consumer confidence is falling like a stone as they watch housing prices fall and their savings evaporate in stock market mutual fund meltdowns. We’re seeing oil prices drop and commodity prices fall, which directly impacts the Canadian resource-based economy. The demand for our resources to feed the manufacturing engine aimed at the US consumer has gone south. And now the Canadian dollar is starting to plummet. In spite of what our prime minister has been saying, we’re not exactly in good shape.
We’re feeling the effects close to home too. The Icelandic banks like Glitner are a key part of the financial backbone of the East Coast fishery. As a result of the global commercial credit crisis these banks are now in ruins. That does not bode well for us. John Risley, the head of Clearwater Foods in Nova Scotia, said in an interview last week that, without a secure source of operating funds, companies like his are facing a serious threat to their survival.
How many of our other businesses depend on secure lines of credit for their operating loans? Probably all of them. No loans, no paycheques for workers. And we shouldn’t overlook the fact that most of our businesses are resource-based. For example Flakeboard makes panels for the construction industry and furniture market. Paturel exports lobsters to the upscale restaurant trade. Even our tourism industry is based on consumers having the confidence to spend their money.
When national and foreign banks abandon fundamental Canadian industries, we may need our government to get creative. One option may be to have our government step in to provide backstop guarantees for bank loans, or in certain cases to become the banker to keep the machinery moving. This is time for governments to lead us out of crisis, not simply to “manage” the crisis as usual.
Of course the actual global financial situation is a lot more complex, and I don’t pretend to understand it all. But all that complexity is the main part of the problem. I listened to the head of a very successful Spanish bank on the radio the other day. His take on the crisis? There were just too many complex financial instruments, and too little real financial accountability—which boils down to a simple premise: don’t lend money to people who can’t afford to pay it back. How complicated is that?
All that said, we seem to be collectively unable to deal with the other eclipse, call it the eclipse of the moon, which is the global environmental crisis. The irony here is profound. As we’re making human processes ever more complex, we’re reducing the diversity in our environment at an incredible rate. We’re genetically engineered mono-cultural agricultural practices, wiping out other species in the exchange, and strip mining our natural resources. We’re still expanding urban sprawl based on a wildly fuel-inefficient and polluting transportation system, which is now clogging the atmosphere. Seen from the outside, we’re entirely out of control.
So how do we readjust? Do we hit the “reset” button and force ourselves back into another Great Depression or worse? It all comes down to a single question? How do we rein in over-consumption?
Because this is an unpopular and perhaps impossible question, no leader has made a visionary case for Canada’s future. But it’s time we all faced facts. It’s not the environment. It’s not energy. It’s not the economy. It’s all three together. That this is not fully recognized and communicated to the Canadian public is the real total eclipse—of leadership.
Everything we have done in the past and in the future depends on the environment. Food, shelter, transportation and manufacturing all depend on the environment. During the last 100 years we’ve seen the most dramatic acceleration of human development in history—entirely fuelled by gasoline and fossil fuels. With oil production peaking and about to decline, the end of that acceleration is now in sight.
Unless we get moving in a new direction quickly, only darkness lies ahead.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Crossing the wasteland
©
It was the look in this woman’s eyes. It was sheer, flat out joy, something you don’t normally see on television. Her name is Andrea Ghez, and she was talking about discovering the black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
Professor Ghez is an astrophysicist and computer imaging expert at UCLA, and her role on the discovery team was to use computers to clean up the interference from Earth’s atmosphere, which was distorting the images of the Keck II telescope in Hawaii.
Andrea Ghez was filled with childlike enthusiasm, and why not? She and her team were the first humans to actually see the stars at the heart of the galaxy, plot their movements and actually prove the existence of the massive black hole that holds the Milky Way together.
You have to wonder why people do things like this. There’s no money in it. There’s no business case. They’re simply in it for the pleasure of inventing a new cosmology—which is a fancy way of saying they’re reinventing the universe just for fun. And it was written all over her face.
While I haven’t crossed the galaxy this week, I did travel to visit the stars. I flew to Los Angeles for a meeting. On the return flight this morning we crossed over the vast wasteland of the Mohave Desert. Looking down in the morning sun there wasn’t a patch of green in sight. Just rock and dry, brown dirt and the deep twisting fissures caused by once-in-a lifetime flash floods. It looked more like Mars than Earth. Then on over the parched Sierra Nevadas and through the snow-capped Rockies or whatever they’re called down there, and finally over the patchwork quilt farms of the US Great Plains.
It took four hours to fly to Toronto. Like LA, it’s a different kind of wasteland. Cars, glass and steel, and thousands of empty-faced people sprawling across painfully uncomfortable airport seats or marching through the endless airport corridors dragging heavy bags with clattering wheels. Above the fray hang the ubiquitous flat screens, some displaying departure times and gates, others the news.
To those sitting closest to the sets, the news was a wake-up call. The stock market was going through its second Black Monday in as many weeks. At one point the TSX was down over 1200 points and the Dow fell below 10,000 for the first time in five years. It figures, I thought. We’re heading into a financial wasteland, too.
Coincidentally, I’ve been reading some more of Joseph Campbell’s stuff on mythology. In his book, Pathways to Bliss, he talks about the modern wasteland, and how we’ve traded off our ancient shaping mythologies in the wake of rational scientific thought. Our religions have lost their relevance, and we have nothing with which to replace them. We’re cast adrift in a world of endless consumption in pursuit of happiness.
He writes about Maslow’s hierarchy, which is the human impulse to move from survival issues to self-development. Campbell suggests, correctly I think, that there’s more to human culture than merely working on oneself. We crave deeper meaning.
Modern life is too easy, and we’re too soft. For the last five decades, we’ve been able to pretty much buy what we want, have what we want, give our kids what they want, and still have plenty of time left to distract ourselves with TV, computers, games, books, cars, hobbies, sports, vacations, food and drugs. We’ve built a wasteland of excess; we’re drowning in a sea of choices.
On a personal level, I think we’re bored stupid. I mean, how much shopping can one man or woman take? And when we connect the dots, we feel guilty. Just flipping through the uber-consumer inflight magazine, EnRoute, the reader is smothered with visions of opulent excess from around the world. We’re transported to chi-chi Las Vegas restaurants, where we’re told we can drop up to $185 for a designer steak from the likes of Emeril Lagasse or Wolfgang Puck, and even feel good about dropping a few hundred bucks a night on the tables. We get to preview the fabulous architectural feats in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. We get the picture of a family visiting the tropical paradise of Costa Rica.
And just to add the right bit of environmental correctness, perhaps cynically, we’re told that even though Costa Rica is one of the most naturally complex places on the planet, we’d better be careful, we’ve lost more than a quarter of the world’s biodiversity in the last 35 years. That is, after we’re told about the writer’s son hurling a ground anole (a small lizard) into the water and watching it sink, and pulling the tail off a gecko.
When it comes to this kind of dulling of the senses, Joseph Campbell could look past the effects on individuals, and see the effects on whole societies. He writes about one of his heroes, Carl Jung, who not only coined the term “individuation,” that is, the process of transcending the mere physicality of life, but also invented the idea of the “collective unconscious.”
There’s a story Jung tells in one of his essays about traveling through Switzerland and on into Germany in the late 1930s. While he was gazing out the train window at the pastoral scene flashing by, he had a vision: in his mind’s eye he saw the landscape blackened and devastated. Less than two years later, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he remembered the vision, and attributed it to a kind of subconscious image that came to him from the unconscious minds of a great many people feeling the same kind of thing at the same moment in time. Ergo, the collective unconscious.
I think it’s possible that we’re at another one of those moments in time. We’re tired of the wretched excess without having to work too hard to get it. We’ve lost a sense of deeper meaning in our lives, and perhaps, as we’re seeing in this financial crash, we have a subconscious desire to reset the whole system as a way to actually feel something real again.
But, as Campbell teaches, there may be better ways to cross the wasteland. And you can see it in Andrea’s eyes.
It was the look in this woman’s eyes. It was sheer, flat out joy, something you don’t normally see on television. Her name is Andrea Ghez, and she was talking about discovering the black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
Professor Ghez is an astrophysicist and computer imaging expert at UCLA, and her role on the discovery team was to use computers to clean up the interference from Earth’s atmosphere, which was distorting the images of the Keck II telescope in Hawaii.
Andrea Ghez was filled with childlike enthusiasm, and why not? She and her team were the first humans to actually see the stars at the heart of the galaxy, plot their movements and actually prove the existence of the massive black hole that holds the Milky Way together.
You have to wonder why people do things like this. There’s no money in it. There’s no business case. They’re simply in it for the pleasure of inventing a new cosmology—which is a fancy way of saying they’re reinventing the universe just for fun. And it was written all over her face.
While I haven’t crossed the galaxy this week, I did travel to visit the stars. I flew to Los Angeles for a meeting. On the return flight this morning we crossed over the vast wasteland of the Mohave Desert. Looking down in the morning sun there wasn’t a patch of green in sight. Just rock and dry, brown dirt and the deep twisting fissures caused by once-in-a lifetime flash floods. It looked more like Mars than Earth. Then on over the parched Sierra Nevadas and through the snow-capped Rockies or whatever they’re called down there, and finally over the patchwork quilt farms of the US Great Plains.
It took four hours to fly to Toronto. Like LA, it’s a different kind of wasteland. Cars, glass and steel, and thousands of empty-faced people sprawling across painfully uncomfortable airport seats or marching through the endless airport corridors dragging heavy bags with clattering wheels. Above the fray hang the ubiquitous flat screens, some displaying departure times and gates, others the news.
To those sitting closest to the sets, the news was a wake-up call. The stock market was going through its second Black Monday in as many weeks. At one point the TSX was down over 1200 points and the Dow fell below 10,000 for the first time in five years. It figures, I thought. We’re heading into a financial wasteland, too.
Coincidentally, I’ve been reading some more of Joseph Campbell’s stuff on mythology. In his book, Pathways to Bliss, he talks about the modern wasteland, and how we’ve traded off our ancient shaping mythologies in the wake of rational scientific thought. Our religions have lost their relevance, and we have nothing with which to replace them. We’re cast adrift in a world of endless consumption in pursuit of happiness.
He writes about Maslow’s hierarchy, which is the human impulse to move from survival issues to self-development. Campbell suggests, correctly I think, that there’s more to human culture than merely working on oneself. We crave deeper meaning.
Modern life is too easy, and we’re too soft. For the last five decades, we’ve been able to pretty much buy what we want, have what we want, give our kids what they want, and still have plenty of time left to distract ourselves with TV, computers, games, books, cars, hobbies, sports, vacations, food and drugs. We’ve built a wasteland of excess; we’re drowning in a sea of choices.
On a personal level, I think we’re bored stupid. I mean, how much shopping can one man or woman take? And when we connect the dots, we feel guilty. Just flipping through the uber-consumer inflight magazine, EnRoute, the reader is smothered with visions of opulent excess from around the world. We’re transported to chi-chi Las Vegas restaurants, where we’re told we can drop up to $185 for a designer steak from the likes of Emeril Lagasse or Wolfgang Puck, and even feel good about dropping a few hundred bucks a night on the tables. We get to preview the fabulous architectural feats in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. We get the picture of a family visiting the tropical paradise of Costa Rica.
And just to add the right bit of environmental correctness, perhaps cynically, we’re told that even though Costa Rica is one of the most naturally complex places on the planet, we’d better be careful, we’ve lost more than a quarter of the world’s biodiversity in the last 35 years. That is, after we’re told about the writer’s son hurling a ground anole (a small lizard) into the water and watching it sink, and pulling the tail off a gecko.
When it comes to this kind of dulling of the senses, Joseph Campbell could look past the effects on individuals, and see the effects on whole societies. He writes about one of his heroes, Carl Jung, who not only coined the term “individuation,” that is, the process of transcending the mere physicality of life, but also invented the idea of the “collective unconscious.”
There’s a story Jung tells in one of his essays about traveling through Switzerland and on into Germany in the late 1930s. While he was gazing out the train window at the pastoral scene flashing by, he had a vision: in his mind’s eye he saw the landscape blackened and devastated. Less than two years later, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he remembered the vision, and attributed it to a kind of subconscious image that came to him from the unconscious minds of a great many people feeling the same kind of thing at the same moment in time. Ergo, the collective unconscious.
I think it’s possible that we’re at another one of those moments in time. We’re tired of the wretched excess without having to work too hard to get it. We’ve lost a sense of deeper meaning in our lives, and perhaps, as we’re seeing in this financial crash, we have a subconscious desire to reset the whole system as a way to actually feel something real again.
But, as Campbell teaches, there may be better ways to cross the wasteland. And you can see it in Andrea’s eyes.
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