©
It was still there, I could see it clearly from 2000 feet. I flew down lower to 200 feet, and there was the parking lot right beside the luxury condo up on the hill facing Zurich Sea. A couple of decades have passed since I saw my aunt’s modest penthouse in Switzerland, and it was fun to see it again.
The first time I visited I was with an old girlfriend. We drove across England and took the ferry across to France in my clapped-out little sports car with the leaky roof. The thing broke down halfway across northern France in Reims, where a teenage biker gang took us home for a couple of days and got our car fixed. Back on the road, it took another day or so to get to Zurich, very early in the morning as the sun was coming up. And we were lost. We pulled into a parking lot and started arguing, when a window opened in the building beside us. My then-young aunt leaned out the window and called us inside.
There was an open window again as I flew over the place last night, but that window was an open Google Maps window on my browser. Sharon and I first discovered Google Maps when we were shopping for some real estate a while ago. We discovered that you can actually “drive” by the house you’re interested in buying, and check out the neighbourhood, just as you would looking out your car window.
Now, every so often when I’m bored, I take a trip somewhere. I’ve been to Capetown, South Africa, and the Gold Coast and the beaches near Zihuatanejo, Mexico searching for the ultimate “geographic solution”.
After flying over Zurich I decided to check out my aunt’s current residence. She and my uncle had a custom-built retirement home up on the Great Lakes, miles from anywhere. The thing is vast and very Euro-modern, and was actually designed by an architect friend of mine, who I’d tipped off about their interest in building a unique home. And it is unique, even from the air; it kind of looks like a scorpion.
The funny thing, well perhaps more sad than funny, is that I don’t think my aunt is any happier for all of that. Sure, she’s not unhappy, I guess. But she’s no happier for having spent the last 10 years fine-tuning a personal heaven on Earth than someone who hasn’t.
Her husband, my uncle, flew 747s for years before retiring so he had a pretty good idea of the heavens available. I think he chose northern Ontario because he wanted an unpopulated heaven with a water-view, and there are precious few of those left these days. Of course his financial security seemed to me to come at quite some considerable environmental cost, given the engine exhaust output of 747s and the millions of miles he flew over his career, though that’s not his fault. It’s really nobody’s fault, is it?
Of course, some places make no pretense of being heaven on Earth. The town where we currently live is one of these. It’s not exactly a hell on Earth, either. But one has to turn a blind eye to the winter dirt that’s rarely cleaned off the roads and sidewalks, and learn to memorize the potholes to avoid serious mechanical injury in day-to-day traveling around town. For example, I know the two big ones to veer around on King Street, the giant growing one on Queen Street just past Horton’s, the badly engineered manhole covers on the S-curves on Milltown Boulevard, and so on. In fact a have an entire pothole map in my head. I don’t think that’s something a “heaven-on-Earth” town would require of its citizens.
The neighbouring town wants to be a heaven on Earth, and the lack of potholes over there certainly promotes its case. But it has its problems too. A big rock quarry up the road is causing them grief, and it’s not just due to visual pollution. Minute amounts of arsenic in the mining tailing dust get carried up in the wind, depositing far and wide, and can enter the water table when the tailings are buried. Sometimes Mother Nature does not like to be disturbed. Of course, some of the citizens of “my” town think that a quarry is a-okay. After all, what’s a little dirt?
The odd thing I suppose is how much I don’t seem to care about finding heaven on Earth any more. And when I do, I suspect that the people who have it have made their mess somewhere else, and now want something much better. A good example of this abandoned mess is the Redhead Beach next to Saint John. This environmentally sensitive area, with a fabulous red sand beach and great view, has been strangled by industry for more than half a century, and is now bracketed by a paper mill and an oil refinery-LNG terminal and an industrial park in behind it. Now I don’t see a lot of extravagant homes along that great stretch of beach. Funny thing, that.
Ultimately, heaven—or hell—on Earth is what you do while you’re here. Some of us have great intentions and fall well short. Some of us don’t do anything at all. And some of us try like crazy and make at least some headway. It isn’t easy.
For example, the house we’re now in came with the former owner’s lifetime collection of perennial gardens that got ruined when we had the basement weeping tiles redone. Now our basement is drier, but so is our garden. It’s going to take a lot of work this spring to recreate the bit of heaven we had before the work crews arrived.
So after all this musing, should we bother trying to create heaven on Earth? I guess I’d have to say yes, and that they’re already here—in places cherished and venerated over generations. There are areas of southern England that really stand out for me, and farms along the St. Lawrence River in Quebec that are sublime, especially so in the evening light. And you can find that feeling of harmony in some parts of great cities, too.
But even if heaven building is a multi-generational cooperative process, I wonder why we’re so compelled to “improve” Earth at all. Do we really think we’re improving on the original model?
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Slipping points and no answers
©
We disconnected the TV a few months ago, just as the news started ramping up on the financial crisis, and just after Obama got himself elected. I occasionally buy the newspaper, or pick up a free copy of the Globe and Mail in a restaurant. The news I get arrives accidentally, so a mouse click on Yahoo might catch my attention once a week or so.
For example, I accidentally read yesterday that there’s a glut of oil on the market. Apparently OPEC or some of the oil boys (I didn’t read it that carefully) were trying to decide if they should start withholding oil from the market. Let me get this straight. The unbiased oil experts tell us that we’ve just crossed “peak oil” and that we’re now sliding down the backside of the slope, perhaps running out of oil in less than 50 years, and the mainstream media in the US is crowing about having too much? What a load of crap.
But that’s the way instant news goes. It picks up on whatever silliness is “breaking” at the moment. Two days later it’s forgotten. Writer Gore Vidal got it right in a documentary I bought last year. When addressing the situation in the US, he calls it the “United States of Amnesia”. Whatever history the place does carry forward is simply patriotic mythology for the most part, having no bearing on reality at all.
The reason for this is very simple. The US is driven by capitalism, not democracy. American-style democracy over the past century and a half has been the business of enabling business, not creating an egalitarian and democratic citizenry. While most of the developed world—Britain, the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Scandinavia and hell even Russia—have publicly-funded health care, the US continues to run a user-pay system with a shabby welfare component for the poor. While other wealthy countries such as Canada have redistributed wealth across their societies, the divide between the rich and the poor in the US have been widening for a quarter of a century. Dreadful poverty exists side-by-side with extreme wealth, especially in the big cities, although some of the craftier city politicians such as those in New York City closed welfare loopholes and changed legislation to encourage the poor to leave, which they did. They moved to places like Hartford and New London, Connecticut, which now have sections that look a lot like New York used to.
If the US is not deeply democratic (as the G.W. Bush election hijack clearly showed the world in 2000), it is very capitalistic. Now, we should note here that capitalism is not a political strategy. Capitalism is simply a collection of tactics, and the tactics are levers that business people push and shove to make money. Not that it’s a bad thing. It’s just not driven by any social morality. It’s driven by profits. But there are definite consequences. It’s no coincidence that, as the lower middle class has lost its factory jobs and gone broke, a new middle class has rapidly risen up in Asia.
One of the hallmarks of global capitalism is speed. Speed of the news is just a symptom. Speed is everywhere we look. Once upon a time one went in to a gas station to pay for a fill-up. Now we swipe a card. Even before we went inside to pay, we used to wait in our cars for an attendant to come out and pump our gas for us, take our money, go inside to make change and bring it back to us, while a second attendant checked our oil and cleaned our windshield. Things go faster now, but something has been lost in the translation.
And that something is our connection to other human beings. Instead of building and maintaining community relationships, our lives have been compressed into a rapid series of events—shopping, getting gas, renewing licences, driving kids to school—or compressed entirely out of the real world and into the virtual world.
All this compression of time has two effects. First, we can do far more in any given period of time than our forebearers could ever imagine; our lives are flying by in a blur of mindless events. The second thing that happens with all this speed is that we stop reflecting about our world—all we really see is that blur through the side window. But that blur is monotonous, as everything flattens into a race to the horizon, toward the next purchase.
A purchase is also an exchange, a transaction. As the most modern human beings, we’ve become hyper-transactional. But with every transaction there’s the possibility of loss or gain. A transaction of any kind is a “slippage point”. Therefore, in our highly transactional society, we are living in a very slippery world, in which rapidly shifting economic forces can alter our physical reality.
As to our physical reality, according to some recent science, compression is a natural stage in the growth cycle. As knowledge accumulates, for example, more is known and less is unknown. Freedom to explore vast new horizons narrows with each new discovery. The discoveries become less significant, as we compress down the tunnel of diminishing returns.
We are, in fact, the first society in history with no new physical, geographic frontiers available to us. We are now faced with the prospect of diminishing returns in every activity we pursue, especially as the world population grows from 6.5 billion to 9+ billion over the next 60 or so years—and our natural resources become increasingly scarce. Loss of our physical frontier is why we are now compressing ourselves into virtual “reality”.
But there is still reality. In my Internet travels I ran into an item from MI-5, the British spy agency. Their analysis of information concludes that humanity is just 4 meals away from anarchy. The reason, I suppose, is that we’re now so interdependent, so connected by world trade that we’re no longer self-sufficient. Now there’s a lack of frontier.
It gets one thinking. What does it take to feed a small town, of say 1800 people? Well, at 2000 calories a day, that requires 3.2 million calories of food. Given that we use 10 calories of fossil fuel to raise just one calorie of food, how much fuel to we need? And how could we manage without it?
Troubling questions. Maybe we’ll just defer answering and leave it to our kids to figure out.
We disconnected the TV a few months ago, just as the news started ramping up on the financial crisis, and just after Obama got himself elected. I occasionally buy the newspaper, or pick up a free copy of the Globe and Mail in a restaurant. The news I get arrives accidentally, so a mouse click on Yahoo might catch my attention once a week or so.
For example, I accidentally read yesterday that there’s a glut of oil on the market. Apparently OPEC or some of the oil boys (I didn’t read it that carefully) were trying to decide if they should start withholding oil from the market. Let me get this straight. The unbiased oil experts tell us that we’ve just crossed “peak oil” and that we’re now sliding down the backside of the slope, perhaps running out of oil in less than 50 years, and the mainstream media in the US is crowing about having too much? What a load of crap.
But that’s the way instant news goes. It picks up on whatever silliness is “breaking” at the moment. Two days later it’s forgotten. Writer Gore Vidal got it right in a documentary I bought last year. When addressing the situation in the US, he calls it the “United States of Amnesia”. Whatever history the place does carry forward is simply patriotic mythology for the most part, having no bearing on reality at all.
The reason for this is very simple. The US is driven by capitalism, not democracy. American-style democracy over the past century and a half has been the business of enabling business, not creating an egalitarian and democratic citizenry. While most of the developed world—Britain, the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Scandinavia and hell even Russia—have publicly-funded health care, the US continues to run a user-pay system with a shabby welfare component for the poor. While other wealthy countries such as Canada have redistributed wealth across their societies, the divide between the rich and the poor in the US have been widening for a quarter of a century. Dreadful poverty exists side-by-side with extreme wealth, especially in the big cities, although some of the craftier city politicians such as those in New York City closed welfare loopholes and changed legislation to encourage the poor to leave, which they did. They moved to places like Hartford and New London, Connecticut, which now have sections that look a lot like New York used to.
If the US is not deeply democratic (as the G.W. Bush election hijack clearly showed the world in 2000), it is very capitalistic. Now, we should note here that capitalism is not a political strategy. Capitalism is simply a collection of tactics, and the tactics are levers that business people push and shove to make money. Not that it’s a bad thing. It’s just not driven by any social morality. It’s driven by profits. But there are definite consequences. It’s no coincidence that, as the lower middle class has lost its factory jobs and gone broke, a new middle class has rapidly risen up in Asia.
One of the hallmarks of global capitalism is speed. Speed of the news is just a symptom. Speed is everywhere we look. Once upon a time one went in to a gas station to pay for a fill-up. Now we swipe a card. Even before we went inside to pay, we used to wait in our cars for an attendant to come out and pump our gas for us, take our money, go inside to make change and bring it back to us, while a second attendant checked our oil and cleaned our windshield. Things go faster now, but something has been lost in the translation.
And that something is our connection to other human beings. Instead of building and maintaining community relationships, our lives have been compressed into a rapid series of events—shopping, getting gas, renewing licences, driving kids to school—or compressed entirely out of the real world and into the virtual world.
All this compression of time has two effects. First, we can do far more in any given period of time than our forebearers could ever imagine; our lives are flying by in a blur of mindless events. The second thing that happens with all this speed is that we stop reflecting about our world—all we really see is that blur through the side window. But that blur is monotonous, as everything flattens into a race to the horizon, toward the next purchase.
A purchase is also an exchange, a transaction. As the most modern human beings, we’ve become hyper-transactional. But with every transaction there’s the possibility of loss or gain. A transaction of any kind is a “slippage point”. Therefore, in our highly transactional society, we are living in a very slippery world, in which rapidly shifting economic forces can alter our physical reality.
As to our physical reality, according to some recent science, compression is a natural stage in the growth cycle. As knowledge accumulates, for example, more is known and less is unknown. Freedom to explore vast new horizons narrows with each new discovery. The discoveries become less significant, as we compress down the tunnel of diminishing returns.
We are, in fact, the first society in history with no new physical, geographic frontiers available to us. We are now faced with the prospect of diminishing returns in every activity we pursue, especially as the world population grows from 6.5 billion to 9+ billion over the next 60 or so years—and our natural resources become increasingly scarce. Loss of our physical frontier is why we are now compressing ourselves into virtual “reality”.
But there is still reality. In my Internet travels I ran into an item from MI-5, the British spy agency. Their analysis of information concludes that humanity is just 4 meals away from anarchy. The reason, I suppose, is that we’re now so interdependent, so connected by world trade that we’re no longer self-sufficient. Now there’s a lack of frontier.
It gets one thinking. What does it take to feed a small town, of say 1800 people? Well, at 2000 calories a day, that requires 3.2 million calories of food. Given that we use 10 calories of fossil fuel to raise just one calorie of food, how much fuel to we need? And how could we manage without it?
Troubling questions. Maybe we’ll just defer answering and leave it to our kids to figure out.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Depression 2.0 is over
©
One of my young relatives living on the Left Coast is into body art, much to her parents’ chagrin. It all started out innocently enough with a tiny tattoo on her ankle, I think. That led to a couple of extra piercings in her ears. Now in her mid-20s, about a third of her body is covered in ink.
I’d like to say that I’m completely neutral about this. But I’m not. Even though I very much like art I’ve never been attracted to body art, at least for myself. I admit to having a natural aversion to it—not to mention the pain.
A lot of my reaction has to do with my upbringing. My parents weren’t much on tattoos, even though a couple of my uncles had small ones on their arms, remnants of their war experiences. My mother, especially, hated tattoos; she thought they were dirty. But she hated comic books too, and as a kid I loved them. So I can’t blame her. Ultimately, my real problem with body art is the fact that I don’t care for self-inflicted pain that much. If I want pain I can go outside and shovel the snow off the driveway.
So what is it about people who are willing to suffer the pain for body art? What motivates them? Is it fashion, or peer pressure or what?
I personally think the pain is part of the attraction. In a culture in which everything comes so easily, having to endure pain to achieve a result can be appealing. Pain makes us alive, just as much or even more than pleasure. We can all remember painful experiences from childhood very clearly; these experiences can last to the deathbed. Of course the most obvious reason for the attraction is to stand out. In a world with 6.5 billion people and average cities topping a million residents, and everyone publishing their lives on the Internet at the same time, it’s easy to get lost. So a pair of angel’s wings tattooed to one’s back kind of sets one apart.
Of course there are other ways to stand out. Having lots of children is one way. Angelina Jolie, for example, has both—tattoos and lots of kids. Both of these personal expressions represent rebellion against the unwritten rules of living in an overcrowded world.
All kinds of things happen in an overcrowded world. If we’re living in a Global Village, as Marshall McLuhan suggested, then we’re also subject to the kind of gossipy intrusion that village life brings, especially when we’re all hardwired to the media—and especially the Internet. We’ve all become neural extensions of the net, creating a vast collective human organism.
No where can this be seen more clearly than in the current financial crisis. It began, if you can remember that far back, in the winter of 2007 some folks in the media were suggesting that the housing bubble might burst. But no one was even talking about recession at that point, even though the current 20-20 hindsight media is now saying that the “depression” started then. But back in late 2007, no one in mainstream media was actually saying that. Somehow, since early in 2008, we’ve all started believing that the economy is going in the tank—and sure enough, so it is.
Of course it’s too easy to blame the financial meltdown on the media. They’re just reporting the facts, aren’t they? Sure. In the same way they didn’t report the unpleasant facts about the rush to war in Iraq (incidentals such as the fact that Iraq wasn’t involved in ramming the twin towers, or that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction), and have just recently come to excoriate themselves for that little failing. So there are two things that we can conclude here.
The first is that the media is completely influenced by the political leadership of the day. The second is that the media is a colluding partner in inflating the news—as supplied by the leadership. In other words, the bigger the story the bigger the ratings or viewings. And the more important the story to the leadership, the more that story is propagated and inflated.
What that really means is this. No one in the media is actually motivated to stop inflating this current story about the second coming of the Great Depression. Because, damn, everyone is paying attention. This story makes everyone sit up and take notice.
Now the self-fulfilling prophecy is coming true. Over 8% of the US workforce is unemployed. Consumer confidence is at a 25-year low. Housing sales have slumped. Runaway, bottomless deflation is the new feared economic enemy.
But the underlying fact is clear. We were just bored. With just a few speedbumps we’ve had 40 years of endless shopping in endless malls, and now we’re tired. It’s not as if anyone consciously said, “Gee, let’s have a Great Depression. That’ll wake everyone up.”
The global economy is simply the greatest trust–confidence game we humans have ever invented. Since it’s all based on trust and confidence—our currency, the stock markets, the value of our homes and cars—it’s all based on belief. What we believe now shapes the course of economics—and current events.
Since it all comes down to what we believe, it comes down to the information with which we feed our beliefs. So it does all come down to the media. Nothing else has changed.
We still need to keep the lights on in our houses, and food on the table, and teachers instructing our kids, and nurses working in hospitals, and people collecting our garbage, and you know, all that goes on in life. As I said, nothing else has changed.
What we haven’t learned yet, as a collective organism, is how to curb our over-consumption and engage in more reflective activities. Instead, we go from flat-out boom to complete bust. Well, I want off that cycle. I’d rather take my pain in smaller doses, voluntarily.
So, I for one am declaring an end to this Great Depression. Any joiners?
One of my young relatives living on the Left Coast is into body art, much to her parents’ chagrin. It all started out innocently enough with a tiny tattoo on her ankle, I think. That led to a couple of extra piercings in her ears. Now in her mid-20s, about a third of her body is covered in ink.
I’d like to say that I’m completely neutral about this. But I’m not. Even though I very much like art I’ve never been attracted to body art, at least for myself. I admit to having a natural aversion to it—not to mention the pain.
A lot of my reaction has to do with my upbringing. My parents weren’t much on tattoos, even though a couple of my uncles had small ones on their arms, remnants of their war experiences. My mother, especially, hated tattoos; she thought they were dirty. But she hated comic books too, and as a kid I loved them. So I can’t blame her. Ultimately, my real problem with body art is the fact that I don’t care for self-inflicted pain that much. If I want pain I can go outside and shovel the snow off the driveway.
So what is it about people who are willing to suffer the pain for body art? What motivates them? Is it fashion, or peer pressure or what?
I personally think the pain is part of the attraction. In a culture in which everything comes so easily, having to endure pain to achieve a result can be appealing. Pain makes us alive, just as much or even more than pleasure. We can all remember painful experiences from childhood very clearly; these experiences can last to the deathbed. Of course the most obvious reason for the attraction is to stand out. In a world with 6.5 billion people and average cities topping a million residents, and everyone publishing their lives on the Internet at the same time, it’s easy to get lost. So a pair of angel’s wings tattooed to one’s back kind of sets one apart.
Of course there are other ways to stand out. Having lots of children is one way. Angelina Jolie, for example, has both—tattoos and lots of kids. Both of these personal expressions represent rebellion against the unwritten rules of living in an overcrowded world.
All kinds of things happen in an overcrowded world. If we’re living in a Global Village, as Marshall McLuhan suggested, then we’re also subject to the kind of gossipy intrusion that village life brings, especially when we’re all hardwired to the media—and especially the Internet. We’ve all become neural extensions of the net, creating a vast collective human organism.
No where can this be seen more clearly than in the current financial crisis. It began, if you can remember that far back, in the winter of 2007 some folks in the media were suggesting that the housing bubble might burst. But no one was even talking about recession at that point, even though the current 20-20 hindsight media is now saying that the “depression” started then. But back in late 2007, no one in mainstream media was actually saying that. Somehow, since early in 2008, we’ve all started believing that the economy is going in the tank—and sure enough, so it is.
Of course it’s too easy to blame the financial meltdown on the media. They’re just reporting the facts, aren’t they? Sure. In the same way they didn’t report the unpleasant facts about the rush to war in Iraq (incidentals such as the fact that Iraq wasn’t involved in ramming the twin towers, or that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction), and have just recently come to excoriate themselves for that little failing. So there are two things that we can conclude here.
The first is that the media is completely influenced by the political leadership of the day. The second is that the media is a colluding partner in inflating the news—as supplied by the leadership. In other words, the bigger the story the bigger the ratings or viewings. And the more important the story to the leadership, the more that story is propagated and inflated.
What that really means is this. No one in the media is actually motivated to stop inflating this current story about the second coming of the Great Depression. Because, damn, everyone is paying attention. This story makes everyone sit up and take notice.
Now the self-fulfilling prophecy is coming true. Over 8% of the US workforce is unemployed. Consumer confidence is at a 25-year low. Housing sales have slumped. Runaway, bottomless deflation is the new feared economic enemy.
But the underlying fact is clear. We were just bored. With just a few speedbumps we’ve had 40 years of endless shopping in endless malls, and now we’re tired. It’s not as if anyone consciously said, “Gee, let’s have a Great Depression. That’ll wake everyone up.”
The global economy is simply the greatest trust–confidence game we humans have ever invented. Since it’s all based on trust and confidence—our currency, the stock markets, the value of our homes and cars—it’s all based on belief. What we believe now shapes the course of economics—and current events.
Since it all comes down to what we believe, it comes down to the information with which we feed our beliefs. So it does all come down to the media. Nothing else has changed.
We still need to keep the lights on in our houses, and food on the table, and teachers instructing our kids, and nurses working in hospitals, and people collecting our garbage, and you know, all that goes on in life. As I said, nothing else has changed.
What we haven’t learned yet, as a collective organism, is how to curb our over-consumption and engage in more reflective activities. Instead, we go from flat-out boom to complete bust. Well, I want off that cycle. I’d rather take my pain in smaller doses, voluntarily.
So, I for one am declaring an end to this Great Depression. Any joiners?
Sunday, March 8, 2009
A unifying theory of the Universe
©
Is alcoholism a disease or is it the result of poor choices and a weak character? That was the question my partner was trying to answer last week in an online Harvard discussion forum on abnormal psychology. She asked me what I thought. It’s an interesting question, and I’m not sure that I had a good answer.
The online debate was split more or less evenly between the ‘weak character’ advocates and the ‘disease’ proponents. After reading their opinions and talking to Sharon something hit me. The best answer to the question is not a “yes–no” kind of response. The real answer has to do with human behaviour. Sure, we make a conscious choice to take that first drink. Some of us may have a bad reaction and choose to never take another drink. Others may like the effects of alcohol. And a percentage of these people may choose to drink frequently.
But at a certain point, alcohol consumption, like drug consumption, ceases to involve choice. It becomes a physical dependency—and it is at that point that alcoholism becomes a disease.
The path to disease is not a linear process. Some people can take relatively few drinks and become alcoholics. Others can drink much more before crossing the threshold into alcoholism. There is no absolute threshold marker that’s common to all people. And that lack of linearity makes it difficult to answer the question.
But if we switch modes of thought, say visualizing instead of verbalizing, we might see the answer more quickly. For example, we might visualize alcoholism as a funnel. The wide end of the funnel is the entry point, the point at which we can choose to take a drink. As the funnel narrows, our risk for physical dependency on alcohol grows. And at some point (which varies from person to person), a threshold is crossed, and we’re hooked. We’ve just dropped down into alcoholism, the disease.
This kind of visualization is exactly what Einstein used to picture how the Universe works. His genius was his ability to “see” beyond the linear reasoning. And that genius is remarkable.
I’m currently reading the newest edition of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and Hawking devotes considerable time to Einstein and post-Einsteinian physics. Our Universe is a place with four dimensions, where time-space and mass are interconnected, and in which high-mass objects such as the sun, stars and black holes bend the fabric of space-time. Planets don’t orbit suns. They actually travel in straight lines around the suns, caught inside the cylinders of bent space—much like the way circus motorcycles race around the walls of big wooden tanks.
Our Universe is also a place where subatomic particles don’t actually stay in one place. They wink in and out of our reality—their counterparts existing perhaps millions of light-years away. You’d have to read Hawking’s book to get a true sense of the wonder of it. But perhaps a greater wonder is how we humans could have possibly envisioned what is going on. A great part of the wonder is in our own consciousness.
And this is where physics and philosophy begin to merge. We might ask, “What is the meaning of the Universe?” and now scientifically answer it with something like, “consciousness”. In the science community it is now widely accepted that the observer shapes the observed. The mere existence of consciousness influences the Universe. Science and religion are becoming one.
Okay. So the Universe is a pretty big and weird place. And in the grand scheme my little corner of Canada is a pretty insignificant notion. But in some way we can link the workings of the Universe into my everyday existence. I’m sure I’m not alone in pursuing this innate human need to find order.
I was thinking about this when I went out for a drive—and a coffee—early Sunday morning. I decided to drive over to the next town, St. Andrews. It's a tiny resort town on the East Coast, and a nice place to visit. It was early, before 7:00 a.m., and the place was deserted except for my friend Joan who was bundled up against the cold and walking her dog.
St. Andrews has a wonderful sense of order in the morning. The rising sun splashes in golden ribbons along all those clapboard walls lining the main street. Rows of tidy shop fronts give way to rows of tidy houses as the streets climb up the hill toward the big hotel. And in its order, there’s a sense of hierarchy, too. Finally the most imposing grand homes oversee everything from the top of the hill. It’s a conscious expression of human order—and power.
Not coincidently, the other book I’m reading is David Rothkoff’s “Superclass”. It’s aptly subtitled, “The Global Elite and the World They are Making”. I was thinking about the book as I drove through the town. St. Andrews was, and still is, a summer getaway for the Canadian elite. But the world is changing, and so too are the elites. The relevance of St. Andrews as a centre of power has faded considerably. And if, in the realm of human activity, access to power is everything, the local access to power has been much reduced, and is likely to reduce even further as the current generation of summer-residents dies out.
Perhaps that’s no big deal. But like large celestial objects in space, persons of influence tend to bend the fabric of space-time around them. Whether we like them or not, their presence often attracts benefits to those of us who live near them.
And there’s a comfort in the predictability of order, too, even if it’s a vertical social order. We prefer order to social chaos. It’s one of the reasons we credentialize our kids. With good credentials, they too can join the social ranking at an acceptable level. Credentialization, like many other social organizing devices, is comforting—like ordering a Big Mac when in Paris, or buying a Mercedes Benz for your driveway.
Yet given the evidence of history, however much we love imposing our own version of order, we’ll always be overwhelmed by the vastly more complicated—and interesting—natural order of the Universe. The point being that we’re not above nature, we’re merely a part of it. And that’s as unified a theory as we might get.
Is alcoholism a disease or is it the result of poor choices and a weak character? That was the question my partner was trying to answer last week in an online Harvard discussion forum on abnormal psychology. She asked me what I thought. It’s an interesting question, and I’m not sure that I had a good answer.
The online debate was split more or less evenly between the ‘weak character’ advocates and the ‘disease’ proponents. After reading their opinions and talking to Sharon something hit me. The best answer to the question is not a “yes–no” kind of response. The real answer has to do with human behaviour. Sure, we make a conscious choice to take that first drink. Some of us may have a bad reaction and choose to never take another drink. Others may like the effects of alcohol. And a percentage of these people may choose to drink frequently.
But at a certain point, alcohol consumption, like drug consumption, ceases to involve choice. It becomes a physical dependency—and it is at that point that alcoholism becomes a disease.
The path to disease is not a linear process. Some people can take relatively few drinks and become alcoholics. Others can drink much more before crossing the threshold into alcoholism. There is no absolute threshold marker that’s common to all people. And that lack of linearity makes it difficult to answer the question.
But if we switch modes of thought, say visualizing instead of verbalizing, we might see the answer more quickly. For example, we might visualize alcoholism as a funnel. The wide end of the funnel is the entry point, the point at which we can choose to take a drink. As the funnel narrows, our risk for physical dependency on alcohol grows. And at some point (which varies from person to person), a threshold is crossed, and we’re hooked. We’ve just dropped down into alcoholism, the disease.
This kind of visualization is exactly what Einstein used to picture how the Universe works. His genius was his ability to “see” beyond the linear reasoning. And that genius is remarkable.
I’m currently reading the newest edition of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and Hawking devotes considerable time to Einstein and post-Einsteinian physics. Our Universe is a place with four dimensions, where time-space and mass are interconnected, and in which high-mass objects such as the sun, stars and black holes bend the fabric of space-time. Planets don’t orbit suns. They actually travel in straight lines around the suns, caught inside the cylinders of bent space—much like the way circus motorcycles race around the walls of big wooden tanks.
Our Universe is also a place where subatomic particles don’t actually stay in one place. They wink in and out of our reality—their counterparts existing perhaps millions of light-years away. You’d have to read Hawking’s book to get a true sense of the wonder of it. But perhaps a greater wonder is how we humans could have possibly envisioned what is going on. A great part of the wonder is in our own consciousness.
And this is where physics and philosophy begin to merge. We might ask, “What is the meaning of the Universe?” and now scientifically answer it with something like, “consciousness”. In the science community it is now widely accepted that the observer shapes the observed. The mere existence of consciousness influences the Universe. Science and religion are becoming one.
Okay. So the Universe is a pretty big and weird place. And in the grand scheme my little corner of Canada is a pretty insignificant notion. But in some way we can link the workings of the Universe into my everyday existence. I’m sure I’m not alone in pursuing this innate human need to find order.
I was thinking about this when I went out for a drive—and a coffee—early Sunday morning. I decided to drive over to the next town, St. Andrews. It's a tiny resort town on the East Coast, and a nice place to visit. It was early, before 7:00 a.m., and the place was deserted except for my friend Joan who was bundled up against the cold and walking her dog.
St. Andrews has a wonderful sense of order in the morning. The rising sun splashes in golden ribbons along all those clapboard walls lining the main street. Rows of tidy shop fronts give way to rows of tidy houses as the streets climb up the hill toward the big hotel. And in its order, there’s a sense of hierarchy, too. Finally the most imposing grand homes oversee everything from the top of the hill. It’s a conscious expression of human order—and power.
Not coincidently, the other book I’m reading is David Rothkoff’s “Superclass”. It’s aptly subtitled, “The Global Elite and the World They are Making”. I was thinking about the book as I drove through the town. St. Andrews was, and still is, a summer getaway for the Canadian elite. But the world is changing, and so too are the elites. The relevance of St. Andrews as a centre of power has faded considerably. And if, in the realm of human activity, access to power is everything, the local access to power has been much reduced, and is likely to reduce even further as the current generation of summer-residents dies out.
Perhaps that’s no big deal. But like large celestial objects in space, persons of influence tend to bend the fabric of space-time around them. Whether we like them or not, their presence often attracts benefits to those of us who live near them.
And there’s a comfort in the predictability of order, too, even if it’s a vertical social order. We prefer order to social chaos. It’s one of the reasons we credentialize our kids. With good credentials, they too can join the social ranking at an acceptable level. Credentialization, like many other social organizing devices, is comforting—like ordering a Big Mac when in Paris, or buying a Mercedes Benz for your driveway.
Yet given the evidence of history, however much we love imposing our own version of order, we’ll always be overwhelmed by the vastly more complicated—and interesting—natural order of the Universe. The point being that we’re not above nature, we’re merely a part of it. And that’s as unified a theory as we might get.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Trouble with rights and poverty
©
It’s snowing outside, a blizzard. As I watch the snow swirling I try to imagine what it would be like to live outside on a night like this without shelter. What would an Inuit do?
By modern standards the Inuit were among the most impoverished people on the planet. They had no agriculture, no trees and had one of the harshest possible environments in which to survive. Yet despite all this deprivation, the Inuit did not live in poverty. They enjoyed a rich social life filled with sharing, art and a strong technological tradition. The Inuit also had one of the more egalitarian social systems on earth. This was due, no doubt, to the scarcity of resources and the need for cooperation.
I have to say, I’ve been thinking about the human condition a lot more lately what with Sharon taking a course on human rights and poverty. I’m learning by association, so bear with me.
What I’ve learned is there are 50,000 preventable deaths a day every day. Much of this is due to the unimaginable squalor and disease around the world, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere. If world poverty is seen as a violation of human rights accepted by the international community of nations—which it has—then poverty on the such as scale is a shameful blight on humanity.
This seems particularly unseemly when considering the exponential accumulation of wealth at the top .001% of society. This, not surprisingly, is the moral dilemma.
But what about the legal dilemma? The international answer is protecting the rights of the poor. But, in my opinion, if one of the goals of human rights is to eliminate poverty, it won’t be found in legislating protection for the poor. We, through our politicians, can say all the right things and enact all the politically correct legislation in the world but that doesn’t mean things will change. Because the answer isn’t found at the bottom. Unlike the Inuit, the modern poor have been disenfranchised. But by whom?
This mass violation of human rights is being prolonged by the very people advancing human rights legislation and indulging in philanthropy—the wealthy and the powerful. Legislation and largesse may ease their guilt, but does little to end the suffering of the poor. But is it a crime are to amass extreme wealth and power? Of course not. Legally, there is no crime in distorting the resource equilibrium of humanity. And this is not a new phenomenon. History is the story of economic inequality and the violence that ensues.
The better legal solution, of course, would be to limit the amassing of great wealth and power. Human nature being what it is, that will never happen. And this is what Francis Fukuyama was talking about in The End of History. Communism was to be the end-state of economic evolution. But since human nature, being as pernicious as it is won’t allow true communism, democratic–capitalism (the second-last stage) was as good as we are going to get, according to Fukuyama. Thus, we’re at the end of history. So, instead of solving the problem of world poverty, we’ll continue to tinker with the machinery.
And then there’s the subject of including the “right to development” as a basic human right, another noble objective. But again, development, with its dependence on capital, is controlled by the wealthy. But in this case it’s not wealthy individuals, but wealthy regions. As President George W. quipped at a roast, there are “the haves and the have mores!” So how, as Prof. Marks at Harvard asks, does one force large economic systems to deliver the balance between nations? In the past the U.S. has shown a reluctance to sign on to such sweeping legislation, but its politicians make great hay in promoting such empty altruism. And they can get away with it because such legislation when enacted is virtually unenforceable.
But there are examples of the freeing up of human rights for development. For example, the opening of the American West allowed immigrants from around the world an equal opportunity for development in the new frontier in Oklahoma and other western states. Indeed, the history of the Americas is the repopulating of two continents after the near extinction of the indigenous peoples.
Another example is equally instructive. The illegal immigration issue along the U.S.–Mexican border is a fine case of unbridled development on the individual level. Illegal migrants are now a major export industry, sending billions of U.S. dollars back home, while providing much needed menial labour in the American agricultural and serve sectors.
So how would one apply these “solutions” to the problem of development as a human right? First, one needs to recognize that the barriers to free access to development are real and physical. These barriers are our national borders with customs checkpoints and armed guards. The British, while occupying India, took this one step further and bisected that country with an impenetrable 30-foot wide 2500-mile-long hedge complete with customs gates and 12,000 guards to collect the Salt Tax. Since Gandhi, the repeal of the Salt Tax and Indian independence, nothing remains of the Great Hedge, not even its memory.
If one were serious about allowing development, the solution would be the abolition of all international boundaries. In a borderless world, development opportunity would be equal. That already happens within nations. Rural residents have the freedom to relocate to cities, where huge slums spring up. And as bad as these slums may seem, they invariably often offer greater access to income, education and health care than rural villages.
Again, given human nature, wealthy nations will never allow this to happen. So our diplomats will continue to tinker with the machinery of international legislation.
Yet, international trade and corporate globalization have followed the same models, crossing borders more freely, resulting in improved health, longevity, population reduction and higher levels of education. This was made possible—because those who control and rig the game, the wealthy, were motivated to make the changes.
Now, what could possibly motivate them to tear down national borders and to cap their personal net worth? Answer that, and we can eliminate world poverty and add development to our list of achievable goals.
If we find the answer perhaps we should try it in Maine and New Brunswick first, to see how it works.
It’s snowing outside, a blizzard. As I watch the snow swirling I try to imagine what it would be like to live outside on a night like this without shelter. What would an Inuit do?
By modern standards the Inuit were among the most impoverished people on the planet. They had no agriculture, no trees and had one of the harshest possible environments in which to survive. Yet despite all this deprivation, the Inuit did not live in poverty. They enjoyed a rich social life filled with sharing, art and a strong technological tradition. The Inuit also had one of the more egalitarian social systems on earth. This was due, no doubt, to the scarcity of resources and the need for cooperation.
I have to say, I’ve been thinking about the human condition a lot more lately what with Sharon taking a course on human rights and poverty. I’m learning by association, so bear with me.
What I’ve learned is there are 50,000 preventable deaths a day every day. Much of this is due to the unimaginable squalor and disease around the world, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere. If world poverty is seen as a violation of human rights accepted by the international community of nations—which it has—then poverty on the such as scale is a shameful blight on humanity.
This seems particularly unseemly when considering the exponential accumulation of wealth at the top .001% of society. This, not surprisingly, is the moral dilemma.
But what about the legal dilemma? The international answer is protecting the rights of the poor. But, in my opinion, if one of the goals of human rights is to eliminate poverty, it won’t be found in legislating protection for the poor. We, through our politicians, can say all the right things and enact all the politically correct legislation in the world but that doesn’t mean things will change. Because the answer isn’t found at the bottom. Unlike the Inuit, the modern poor have been disenfranchised. But by whom?
This mass violation of human rights is being prolonged by the very people advancing human rights legislation and indulging in philanthropy—the wealthy and the powerful. Legislation and largesse may ease their guilt, but does little to end the suffering of the poor. But is it a crime are to amass extreme wealth and power? Of course not. Legally, there is no crime in distorting the resource equilibrium of humanity. And this is not a new phenomenon. History is the story of economic inequality and the violence that ensues.
The better legal solution, of course, would be to limit the amassing of great wealth and power. Human nature being what it is, that will never happen. And this is what Francis Fukuyama was talking about in The End of History. Communism was to be the end-state of economic evolution. But since human nature, being as pernicious as it is won’t allow true communism, democratic–capitalism (the second-last stage) was as good as we are going to get, according to Fukuyama. Thus, we’re at the end of history. So, instead of solving the problem of world poverty, we’ll continue to tinker with the machinery.
And then there’s the subject of including the “right to development” as a basic human right, another noble objective. But again, development, with its dependence on capital, is controlled by the wealthy. But in this case it’s not wealthy individuals, but wealthy regions. As President George W. quipped at a roast, there are “the haves and the have mores!” So how, as Prof. Marks at Harvard asks, does one force large economic systems to deliver the balance between nations? In the past the U.S. has shown a reluctance to sign on to such sweeping legislation, but its politicians make great hay in promoting such empty altruism. And they can get away with it because such legislation when enacted is virtually unenforceable.
But there are examples of the freeing up of human rights for development. For example, the opening of the American West allowed immigrants from around the world an equal opportunity for development in the new frontier in Oklahoma and other western states. Indeed, the history of the Americas is the repopulating of two continents after the near extinction of the indigenous peoples.
Another example is equally instructive. The illegal immigration issue along the U.S.–Mexican border is a fine case of unbridled development on the individual level. Illegal migrants are now a major export industry, sending billions of U.S. dollars back home, while providing much needed menial labour in the American agricultural and serve sectors.
So how would one apply these “solutions” to the problem of development as a human right? First, one needs to recognize that the barriers to free access to development are real and physical. These barriers are our national borders with customs checkpoints and armed guards. The British, while occupying India, took this one step further and bisected that country with an impenetrable 30-foot wide 2500-mile-long hedge complete with customs gates and 12,000 guards to collect the Salt Tax. Since Gandhi, the repeal of the Salt Tax and Indian independence, nothing remains of the Great Hedge, not even its memory.
If one were serious about allowing development, the solution would be the abolition of all international boundaries. In a borderless world, development opportunity would be equal. That already happens within nations. Rural residents have the freedom to relocate to cities, where huge slums spring up. And as bad as these slums may seem, they invariably often offer greater access to income, education and health care than rural villages.
Again, given human nature, wealthy nations will never allow this to happen. So our diplomats will continue to tinker with the machinery of international legislation.
Yet, international trade and corporate globalization have followed the same models, crossing borders more freely, resulting in improved health, longevity, population reduction and higher levels of education. This was made possible—because those who control and rig the game, the wealthy, were motivated to make the changes.
Now, what could possibly motivate them to tear down national borders and to cap their personal net worth? Answer that, and we can eliminate world poverty and add development to our list of achievable goals.
If we find the answer perhaps we should try it in Maine and New Brunswick first, to see how it works.
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