Children of Light, But With Limits

We are literally all the children of light. The protons, neutrons and electrons that make up all matter in the universe came into existence a small fraction of  second into the Big Bang a bit more than 13.7 billion years ago. That’s right, the components of every atom in your body, and indeed the atoms themselves came into existence In the Big Bang.  In the first moments of this event, the Bang that produced our universe,  huge amounts of high energy photons, that is to say, light came into existence. The collision of these photons produced all the protons, neutrons and electrons that exist today, including the atomic particles that comprise you and me.

This isn’t theory, but a fact that has been reproduced at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), at their high energy particle accelerator on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, and other high energy particle accelerators around the world.  Of course, it’s not all good news. The other name for the light composed of such high energy photons is gamma radiation, a form of light that is inimical to life. It’s just another of the wry gestures intrinsic to the universe after the Big Bang. Of course, people, especially those of a fundamentalist disposition, often ask “What was here before the Big Bang?” Expecting that the answer will be their notion of the author of the Bang, but such speculations are nonsensical, as time itself came into being in the Big Bang. There is no “before,” only after. But we are wired to seek causality, and as such, this answer is deeply dissatisfying, regardless of its truth.

Without knowing it, people asking that are posing a question that runs directly into Zeno’s paradox: Zeno, a Greek philosopher from 2500 years ago put it something like this.

Achilles [The great athlete mentioned by Homer in the Iliad as having been at the siege of Troy] races a tortoise, and as a generous hero type gives the tortoise a ten metre head start for their 100 metre race. As the race starts, the tortoise hurries along at 1/10th of a metre per second, while Achilles, not wanting the poor tortoise to be embarrassed, moves off at a stately 1 meter per second. Five seconds later Achilles reaches the halfway point to the tortoise’s starting position, but it is no longer halfway to the tortoise. As slow as he is, the tortoise has moved on. Achilles reaches the new halfway point, but again the tortoise has moved on, repeat ad nauseam. At some point poor Achilles must have realised that there are an infinite series of halfway points, thrown down his laurel ring sun shade and gone off for a nice bottle of Corcyraean Asyrtiko.

Mathematically, it actually makes sense that Achilles must reach each of an ever changing series of half way points. It’s a question whose logic is such as to have  an intrinsic appeal, even though we understand intuitively that this is not the way things work in the real world. So too, when we ask about events “before” the Big Bang we are asking a question that seems legitimate on its face, and by the standards of rhetorical logic can be asked, but which modern physics demonstrates is illegitimate.

We, as beings in time, cannot imagine timelessness, and thanks to the form of our evolved brain, and the limits of our sensory abilities can neither directly  perceive or understand. It’s not that we don’t try.  We speak of moments or events that are “timeless. The religious sometimes claim that their ecstatic experiences take them to an unmediated otherness “beyond time.” For all our poetic utterances of time flowing as a river,  when we make such  claims we speak metaphorically. Our perception of time may change, occasionally seeming to slow as our attention s either focussed or lost, but time exists whether we perceive it or not. It is an empirical phenomenon tied to the physical nature of space and the mass of stellar objects..

The difference between our perceptions and remembrances of time and time’s reality points to flaws in our ability to perceive and process the nature of the universe’s reality. We think and remember in moments, frozen images of events, or at best brief “film strip” like remembrances, while time is unforgivingly a continuum, whose expression is not tied to our interests, but to relations of the physics mass and distance we are incapable of directly perceiving or capturing as memories.

What is genuinely remarkable is that some of us can, through the language of mathematics understand the structure of time, in spite of the handicaps of the mammalian brain as evolved as Homo sapiens. But the physicist remembers the everyday experiences of time, not as it is or as she or he understands it, but just like the rest of us, as captured by memory and all the limitations that implies. Children of light we may well be, but we are neither gods nor, divorced from our animality, but creatures evolved to see and understand the universe as is needful. We evolved to see threat and opportunity in our environment, with a memory meant to capture patterns of threat and opportunity. We are built with the ability to form memories that represent time more as flash cards than films, and without the sensory capacity to directly perceive time in its physical reality.

D.H.H.


A Small Addendum on CERN.

The Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire is a European collaboration begun almost immediately after World War II ended. It was a response to the terrible bright nuclear flashes above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where two bombs developed by the immense Anglo-American* Manhattan Project together killed or severely wounded more than 225,000 human lives, overwhelmingly civilians. CERN's avowed purpose was to increase the knowledge of physics for peace, a promise that has been kept in programs like the Large Hadron Collider, where immense energies are used to further humanity's understanding of the Cosmos.

A cutaway showing the packed magnets surrounding the slender red and clear tube where particles are accelerated.
Courtesy of CERN © 2014

The magnet structure in the photo -- the metal plates stacked horizontally in a U shape around the reddish central tube -- functions best at low superconductor temperatures of 455.8 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit), just under 4 degrees above absolute zero. At absolute zero the vibrations of atoms we understand as heat are at their theoretical minimum.

This incredibly cold temperature has to be maintained along the entire 17 mile length of the collider’s precisely circular track, enabling the magnets to carry up to a 12,000 ampere current. To put this in perspective, a typical home electrical circuit is rates at 10 or 15 amperes. At 10 amperes, it would take 1200 home circuits to feed the collider's magnetic field without "blowing the breakers." All this power produces a field capable of constraining and directing particles with a momentum of up to 14 TeV (trillion electronvolts), or 14,000,000,000,000 electronvolts. Including the energy required for cooling, instrumentation, computers, et alia, the CERN facility's power requirements are more than 200 megawatts, or roughly the same as that of the neighbouring city of Geneva.

A significant portion of this power bill is to supply CERN's computers. Every year for the last several, various projects at CERN have produced a combined total of more the 14 Petabytes of raw data. Even at a time when new personal computers often have a storage capacity of a terabyte or two, this is a remarkable volume of data. My somewhat complicated studio set up is still unusual for having 14 terabytes of internal and external storage, which at the moment is about 65% used. A Petabyte is 1015 bytes or 1000 terabytes, so this number looks like 14,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Another way of thinking it is that they annually produce raw data 975 times that of accumulated works in the entire Library of Congress.  Now you know why CERN scientists (not a certain former Vice President) invented the internet. It was to share and shed data.


___________________

*British participation in the Manhattan Project is often forgotten or underestimated. British scientists, mathematicians  and engineers working both in the U.K. and the U.S. provided vital expertise to the project, though the U.S. provided virtually all the funding, and retained exclusive control over the weapons developed during the war. Fractious post-war politics initially undermined this cooperation, with the U.S. reneging on promises to share data and technology. Some information sharing was eventually restored, but only after it became clear that the U.K's native nuclear weapons endeavour was moving forward regardless of U.S. desires otherwise, and could be traded as part payment for American airforce basing rights on what American's sometimes referred to as the "aircraft carrier U.S.S. Britain."

The Death of Buddha

Today, across Japan, The Americas and Europe many temples will ceremonially display large images like this one in memory of the death of sage of the Shakyas, Siddhārtha Gautama, the man most of us know by the title Buddha, which means "Awakened One."*  He was 80 years old when he died. If you click on the image to expand it, you'll see images of life - plants blooming out of season, animals bearing gifts of flowers, Buddhist monastics and saints bearing bowls filled with lotus blooms --symbols of eternity --and  look on with equanimity, while bodhisattva's, kings, queens, Japanese demigods, and even heaven itself with gods all are weeping.

15th Century Japanese painting on silk The Death of Buddha
(74 x 43 5/16 in.)  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

But in his death, Zen Buddhists celebrate and remember him not as a god, not as a being touched by some mysterious divinity or sainthood, but as a man who reached through the complexities of self -- memory, desire and fear -- to find a way forward out of the irreality we construct and construe as truth. This is actually how Buddhists traditionally call their practice: "The Way."

Siddhārtha Gautama was born a son of the ruling class of the Shakyas, a people living in the North East of the Indian Subcontinent in the 5th century B.C.E.. After a pampered and protected early life, he confronted the sorrows of his world at age 29. He then gave up his princely title to pursue wisdom rather than power. After a six year trek through the competing mystical and ascetic practices of the Vedic world, which then as today saw many spiritual teachers rise and fall, he found an alternative, what Buddhist's call "the middle way," that neither rejects life and experience, nor indulges transient pleasures and fears in an attempt to flee from suffering. This way is called the Eightfold Path:

1. Right seeing  - viewing as things are rather than as we wish them to be.
   
   
2. Right thought - understanding freed of the passions, desires and possessiveness that influences everyday thinking,
   
   
3. Right speech- communication freed from self-deception (passion, aggression, and stupidity)
   
   
4. Right activity - action freed from self deception (passion, aggression, and stupidity) which mean not only not killing, avoiding self indulgence, and sexual misconduct, but the just relations with the world around us: action as compassion and generosity.
   
   
5. Right livelihood - ways of living in the world that are not founded on increased distortions of reality, deception and theft of either goods or life.
   
   
6. Right effort - When we perceive clearly, think completely, talk, act and live in a way that recognises the world (and ourselves) for what it is, rather than what we desire or fear it to be, we are ready to make a leap, not of faith as Kierkegaard, the Christian theologian taught, but of our own effort and will to stay with the real, rather than within the piteous graspings born of desire or fear.
   
   
7. Right mindfulness - making the leap, having the will to stay in the world as it is, rather than the falsity of our own passion, needs, wants, and foolishness is to sense the world and our selves as it is - and having grasped this this, to remain there is right mindfulness, the way of awakening to real freedom.
   
   
8. Right practice - the methods, that strand of Buddhist teaching called Zen says are the surest path to genuine freedom from our passions, aggression, and foolishness or stupidity is through the practice of zazen and a cluster of related disciplines like koan study, and that these are not just tools to get to some other place or understanding, but are themselves liberation. 

Awakening or enlightenment doesn't remove us from the world. Like Siddhārtha Gautama, when we experience awakening we will continue to live, and will someday die. But in life and death alike we know the world and our lives with a beautiful and terrible clarity, that brings with it genuine benevolence, care, and love.

There are Zen monasteries, communities and sitting groups across North America, and I'd encourage all my readers to find and join one. There are, regrettably, a number of "fake" teachers, especially on the internet. If you're looking for a group or teacher and are unsure of how to distinguish the real from the fake, feel free to email or comment here, and I'll try to be of help.

You can find a series of brief lectures on the Eightfold Path here, given by Anzan Hoshin Roshi of the White Wind Zen Community in Canada.
___________

* Japan, whose Zen practice laid the groundwork for much of the growth of Buddhism in North America and Europe adopted the Western calendar in the late 19th Century, fixing religious and secular remembrances to dates in a 365 day calendar. Much of the rest of Buddhism ties these dates to a lunar calendar, so the date seems to wander in the eyes of the West.

Jefferson and America's Lost Liberties

Portrait of Jefferson by  

Charles Wilson Peale, 1791

I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

- Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison,  30 January 1787

For all his failings, not least his slave holding and his views of the First Nations peoples whose lands he coveted for the American Republic, Thomas Jefferson was nonetheless the architect of America's now lost conception of liberty. Deeply formed by both the philosophers of an earlier generation called Humanists, and even more by his European philosophical contemporaries, the early advocates of the Enlightenment, Jefferson taught without hesitation that the rights of humankind to liberty, to strive for happiness, to speak freely without fear of reprisal, to believe or not believe in divinity, and to equal justice before the law are all apparent as the natural product of reason. He taught that the moral obligation of a fearless conscience is the defence of these rights. The famous quote that appears above is part of a larger argument, that it is the nature of government to seek power, to gather power and to exert power at the expense of natural human liberty. 

Rebellions, said Jefferson, are the people’s way of putting governments in their place as servants to the people, not their masters. In the generations since the Second World War we have seen rebellions in America: both the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement were precisely the kinds of correctives Jefferson envisioned. But at the same time and since, aided by changes in technology and communications, as well as a spirit of fear fostered by our government -- first the 1950’s Red Scares, secondly the fear of annihilation that pervaded the Cold War with the USSR, and today, the government’s drumbeat of fear and economic loss that blend the image of terror with the faces of ethnic and religious difference.

American government has become a tyranny all but unrestrained by the freedoms Jefferson saw as unalienable rights, our rights to free speech, to unfettered communication and thought, to travel where and how we please, to champion the causes that appeal to our hearts, and to command equal protection under the law, all have been scoured away by technologies of surveillance, by legal acts that deprive of an unfettered right to habeas corpus, that permit secret courts, secret warrants and secret trials, even secret detention and torture, all in the name of “Homeland Security.” 

Never has tyranny had a better friend than the tiny minorities of religious fanatics, both Muslim and Christian that have engaged in acts of terror, save one, those who have taken advantage of terror to establish their own power by trampling ours. Today we suffer under an administration that trades on fear, that asks us to hate that we might fear all the more. What should our response to such tyrants be? I know the answer Jefferson offered. I’m not sure that Americans have the stomach for liberty today. I know what Jefferson the revolutionary taught, but it’s so much easier to live behind walls of hate, to trade the depth of conscience liberty demands for these superficial protections from our fears. 

DHH

Here is the complete text of Jefferson’s letter, written 232 years ago:

Dear Sir,

My last to you was of the 16th of December; since which, I have received yours of November 25 and December 4, which afforded me, as your letters always do, a treat on matters public, individual, and economical. I am impatient to learn your sentiments on the late troubles in the Eastern states. So far as I have yet seen, they do not appear to threaten serious consequences. Those states have suffered by the stoppage of the channels of their commerce, which have not yet found other issues. This must render money scarce and make the people uneasy. This uneasiness has produced acts absolutely unjustifiable; but I hope they will provoke no severities from their governments. A consciousness of those in power that their administration of the public affairs has been honest may, perhaps, produce too great a degree of indignation; and those characters, wherein fear predominates over hope, may apprehend too much from these instances of irregularity. They may conclude too hastily that nature has formed man insusceptible of any other government than that of force, a conclusion not founded in truth or experience. Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable: (1) without government, as among our Indians; (2) under governments, wherein the will of everyone has a just influence, as is the case in England, in a slight degree, and in our states, in a great one; (3) under governments of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics.

To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that the first condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has its evils, too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing.  [loosely Better the evils of liberty than the quiescence of servitude -- Jefferson is quoting from Rousseau's Social Contract of 1762 - ed.]. Even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. If these transactions give me no uneasiness, I feel very differently at another piece of intelligence, to wit, the possibility that the navigation of the Mississippi may be abandoned to Spain. I never had any interest westward of the Allegheny; and I will never have any. But I have had great opportunities of knowing the character of the people who inhabit that country; and I will venture to say that the act which abandons the navigation of the Mississippi is an act of separation between the Eastern and Western country. It is a relinquishment of five parts out of eight of the territory of the United States; an abandonment of the fairest subject for the payment of our public debts, and the chaining those debts on our own necks, in perpetuum. I have the utmost confidence in the honest intentions of those who concur in this measure; but I lament their want of acquaintance with the character and physical advantages of the people, who, right or wrong, will suppose their interests sacrificed on this occasion to the contrary interests of that part of the confederacy in possession of present power. If they declare themselves a separate people, we are incapable of a single effort to retain them. Our citizens can never be induced, either as militia or as soldiers, to go there to cut the throats of their own brothers and sons, or rather, to be themselves the subjects instead of the perpetrators of the parricide. Nor would that country quit the cost of being retained against the will of its inhabitants, could it be done. But it cannot be done. They are able already to rescue the navigation of the Mississippi out of the hands of Spain, and to add New Orleans to their own territory. They will be joined by the inhabitants of Louisiana. This will bring on a war between them and Spain; and that will produce the question with us, whether it will not be worth our while to become parties with them in the war in order to reunite them with us and thus correct our error. And were I to permit my forebodings to go one step further, I should predict that the inhabitants of the United States would force their rulers to take the affirmative of that question. I wish I may be mistaken in all these opinions.

Yours affectionately, Th. Jefferson

Religion of Peace

Since George Bush declared a war on terror, we Americans have been fighting among ourselves over who’s really got a religion of peace. Christians (especially those of a fundamentalist ilk,) have been making much of the Muslim terminology of jihad (Arabic for 'struggle'), while Muslims (mostly of the fundamentalist ilk) make much of the Christian language of "crusade." I'm not willing to talk about the nuances of either of these words, but I'll argue strenuously that anyone claiming Christianity is a religion of peace is not paying much attention to history.

In the 4th Century when the famous warrior emperor Constantine “got God” while butchering barbarians under a cross, the Jesus movement became the goto religion of the Roman Empire. Since then Christians have pretty much given up on their founder’s “turn the other cheek.” The Emperor wanted to link his rule to a religion with good rules, not start a slumber party for pacifists.

Faith based opposition to Imperial needs faded quickly. Helping out with slaughtering barbarians brought Imperial aid in snuffing out heretics and pagans, as well as Imperial support for church buildings and even some travel money for bishops, setting a pattern for a bright new church of the future: There would be crusades to fight, reformation wars to battle, slaves to be caught or bought, witches to burn, pogroms against Jews, scientists to imprison, physicians to murder, colonial peoples to proselytise, socialists to arrest, homosexuals to stone, etc. But for the average Joe & Mary it’s a religion of peace, right? Christianity is all about living with your neighbours sans violence, right? Well, maybe not.

What do you do if your neighbour’s a brute, or the king’s taxes are so high your kids will starve, or the local baron makes whoopee with your daughter or son, or the 1% send your job to and offers you retraining for an exciting career in fast food? Maybe it’s a small thing over and over — the dog that lets loose on your roses every morning. There’s got to be some justice, right? Are the Buddhists the only ones that can talk about bad karma?

The church has always made a lot of the idea of justice. Historically when the church speaks of justice, it's meant order. Just as Constantine wanted the Church to line up behind imperial policy, the local  warlords who emerged as kings and princes out of the ashes of the empire liked it when the church gave them backing. Soon enough those kings and princes were divinely authorised in their tyrannies. From the days of the empire through to today, dissident groups within the church found themselves suppressed by men carrying swords, divinely authorised swords. Even now the church turns its back on rabid injustices in parts of Latin America, favouring tyrants over the poor.

But if people are sometimes unhappy with justice as obedience to tyrants, the church had an answer for that: God will take care of it. If you think your tyrant is unjust, it'll all be taken care of, in purgatory, or even hell.

A  Christian Happy Dance circa 1670

At the dawn of the modern era there was a wildly popular book called Man - Microcosm. By 1670 it was entering its 3rd edition. The author offered a few verses, applied a cartoon and a sermon. This image is from a section called God’s swift punishments and the verse is from the Vulgate Bible: Luke 18, verse 7. It translates Will not God avenge his elect, who cry out to him day and night, though long he bears with them?

So what this odd picture shows is a Christian Happy Dance tapped to the tune of divine retribution. It’s not that Christians don’t believe in vengeance, it’s just that they’ve been told God will do it for them. Vengeance is mine, says the Christian God, holding the carrot of heaven and the big stick of a permanent sulphur flesh-eating hell. Oh yeah, that’s a religion of peace. You can understand how kings and robber barons want nice Christian subjects.

There are Jesus people who don’t buy into this, but they’re all too rare. God & country is just too cozy for all involved.

The Anniversary of Gautama Buddha’s Enlightenment 禅

A statue from a museum in Shanghai

 Today, December 8th is Rohatsu, celebrated in Zen Buddhism as the anniversary of Buddha’s enlightenment. In Zen monasteries all over the world, an octave of intense meditation ends today, completed with chanted ceremonies honouring the Buddha’s birth.

The historical Buddha, a man from northern India, was born in 563 BCE to a wealthy family. His name was Gautama, but he’s often called by the title Sakyamuni [sage of the Sakyas] or Tathāgata [thus-gone]. Sometimes one hears the name Siddhartha, but scholars suggest that’s not really a name, but another title,meaning “goal accomplisher.”

The stories told of his early life are varied but all offer one theme. As the child of a privileged family, he was shielded from the harsher aspects of life, but as a young man Gautama came to face the reality of suffering and strove to understand its meaning. Why is it that we exist, that we experience pain, that we die?

For years he tried finding answers in the already ancient Vedic religion and philosophies, in meditations under the tutelage of sages, and even in extreme asceticism, literally starving himself to the edge of death, but in the end Gautama realised his efforts were useless. So he sat beneath a great tree in silence. After 49 days in silence he came upon enlightenment, the shocking realisation that suffering (the Sanskrit word is dukkha) was not pain or death, but rather the struggle of consciousness grappling with pain and death, holding to the impermanent and conditional, grasping for a happiness that is always passing.

In his enlightenment, Gautama became known as a buddha, which simply means “awakened one.” His teachings are called the dharma and are thought to represent the actual structure of consciousness in the universe. Soon after his awakening great numbers of men and women began to follow his path. This community is called the sangha. In Zen, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha together are called the “Three Jewels,” and represent a kind of summary of both the method and purpose of Buddhism. To formally become a Buddhist, one simply says:

I take refuge in the Buddha.
I take refuge in the Dharma.

I take refuge in the Sangha.

Gautama lived to be 80 years old. His death is thought to be a finalisation or completion of his awakening. But from his experience in silence under the tree till his death, the sangha grew rapidly. Thousands learned the Dharma, and the community of practice spread from region to region — west to the edges of Europe and east through China to Japan.

There are many paths within Buddhism, many interpretations of the Dharma, and many versions of the Sangha. Contrary to what many Westerners believe, there are also many Buddhas. Gautama was not the first to achieve enlightenment, nor the last.  Zen is in fact part of a larger movement within Buddhism where every member of the Sangha vows to defer final enlightenment until every other living being is freed from suffering.

One thing can be said with complete certainty about Gautama: He is not a god. Because Buddhism is (erroneously) referred to as a “religion,” many Westerners assume it must be about God. It is not.

The metaphysical god of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, in reply to the philosophical questions of late antiquity was defined as immortal, all knowing, all seeing, etc.  It is widely assumed in the West that this kind of monotheism represents 000a more mature and sophisticated kind of belief than polytheism. This of course is patently self-serving nonsense. The idea that religions evolve out of primitive polytheism into a more complex and sophisticated monotheism is rooted in the unspoken dogma of European empires and colonialism where religious superiority functioned as a justification for racial and political bigotry. The missionary came hand in hand with a colonial administrator. The loving Gospel served as an inexpensive adjunct in service to the rapacious demand for resources needed by European and American factories.

In Zen Buddhism, gods are optional.  Japan, where American Zen has its roots, is a land of complex polytheisms. Gods (most are called Kami) are seen in places of beauty or starkness and in all sorts of events from the growth of a flower to great wind storms. Some kami are scary, some sublime. Japan’s major religion, Shinto, codifies these to a degree, but it’s a loose system that allows communities, families and individuals a great latitude in responding to perceptions of holiness. Buddhism in Japan isn’t allergic to these ideas, but its core teachings suggest that gods, if they exist at all, are caught up in the same suffering as the rest of us. The best that a god can do is offer a temporary shelter from suffering. In Japan, that’s a reasonable definition of heaven.

But for all the tomes written about the Buddha, here’s a single line from a 12th Century monk that captures the essence of Zen Buddhism’s message"

Within nothingness there’s a road out of the dust.
                        The monk Yuanwu Keqin (1063 - 1135 CE) The Blue Cliff Record 

Hope and Revolution

An Anarchist comrade from Brazil, a visual artist, recently wrote in a long essay concerning elections:

I have a philosophy, I like to learn from whatever life brings me. What did I learn from all this? That independent of all this is just a scare, or not, 4 years from now, we’ll be right here, exactly in this place of fear, despair, disagreement, people drooling hate on both sides and people ignoring everything we’re talking about.

Note, the names change, the captions change, the scenario looks different, but deep down, the essence is exactly the same! There’s a pattern here! Can I just see that? And it’s about that pattern that I’ve been trying to talk about, whether it’s in the videos that I made, or the cartoons I drew.

My despair does not have to do with the current scenario (that is, in itself desperate), it has to do with the fact that we are so immersed in the scenario (just as we were in so many others), that we lost sight that the thing will repeat, again, and again and again… Just like those nightmares when we wake up to find ourselves inside another nightmare to wake up in another and another and never have peace…

The system is making us a people without peace, without soul… it is not Bolsonaro, or Lula, or the cup, or fear… the system has been my nightmare. Civilisation has been my nightmare. And I don’t want it anymore, I think we deserve freedom.
—————

Here's my reply:

Please forgive me that I lack the skills to respond in Portuguese. I am writing in response to your last four paragraphs, for they touched me deeply.

I think you are very much right to say that the problem is greater than any particular crisis, any single election or crisis. The problem we face is that of a mouse in the field of wheat as a great machine comes to harvest. Does the mouse hide behind this stalk or that? Does the mouse run for a shallow burrow? The mouse might miss the cutters yet still be crushed by the weight of the machine.

The advent of neo-liberalism has changed the world situation in ways that the great writers and organisers of socialism and anarchism’s past could hardly imagine. I think that even the language of “capital vs. labour” only faintly captures the world situation today. Nor does the notion of the USA as a “great capitalist power” cover the restructuring of nations and peoples that has occurred since World War II.

It is not a handful of capitalists that we must overcome, but the conception of the social universe that neo-liberalism imposes, where peoples, nations, and individual societies are simply replaceable commodities.

I’ve spent most of my adult life organising and working among the poorest communities in my country, only to realise after more than 40 years, that the structures of life among the poor simply replicate the larger system in which we all live.

Among the urban poor in America, in a neighbourhood filled with wretched housing, where unemployment is universal, where the accents of language, the clothes worn, and even the food we eat marks us as permanently poor, we watch in fear as one group of drug profiteers seizes power from the previous group of profiteers, using tactics of violence and intimidation. If the police disrupt such a group by raids and mass arrests, another takes their place within hours or days.

The children on the streets admire the men with guns and fancy cars, the women with nice clothes and who with their men, sit in the back corner of the club, drinking “the good stuff” and eating meals no one else can afford.

It is not this profiteer or that whom we need to be overcome, but a system that leads people to fear real change, the change that would make the role of the profiteer an ethical outrage, an unthinkable monster that no child would admire.

On a national level we have the same dilemma: politicians like Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi are passing infatuations, representing only further ensnarements into a system that inverts the human ability to love into the admiration of greed and power seeking. Some are more dangerous than others, as Trump is more dangerous than Pelosi, but they are both only aspects of this ugly, dark mirror, a mirror that show us only our worst.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, show me what I can be?
And the mirror says, You can be rich and powerful.
Or perhaps it says You can change things if you are strong enough or rich enough.

Both answers are false.

Until we can break the mirror, realising that the power for change comes not from you or me, but from a greater more loving and caring “us,” then there is no battle to be won. We will just watch as one gang of profiteers takes power from another.

What I hope to see, is that someday soon we begin to take power apart, raising up genuinely different structures. They will perhaps be tiny at first, but they will grow to replace the tumorous growth of neo-liberalism that has stricken us all. What will come will be the healthy tissues of cooperation, trustworthiness and what the religious call “mutual regard,” that important change that comes when we look at a stranger and see not the face of an enemy or rival, but another mind and body that can be involved in the work of creating.

The revolutionaries of France, in the 1790’s called it “Fraternité.” By creating, I do not mean replicating the system of entitled greed which enslaves us, but the reply to that system: a loving creativity, that will to address the real issues that faces us all, and threaten us all: climate change, our poisoned environment, resource deficits, rampant population growth, etc. etc.

More than armed revolutionaries, running in the hills, or hiding in cities, we need to create the very language of revolution and begin injecting it into our communities. Today in America this is still just barely possible. The vast weight of government, the media, and nearly every social institution fights us, but it is still possible to encourage and cajole, and provide a framework for revolutionary speech and thought.

When I speak to young, self-proclaimed “anarchists” here, I ask “What have you built? How have you made your revolutionary impulses into something concrete? How have you shown friends and neighbours that revolution is not just possible, but above all desirable, a fact that must be revealed, a truth more important than greed?

I do not presume to give advice to a comrade who has faced such fear and danger as you. The USA, for all its oppressions has, until recently, served neo-liberalism at home with a velvet fist. We are surveilled and catalogued by the alphabet of Government agencies, the FBI, NSA, DHS, ICE, etc., and then largely ignored. But when they throw a few dozen in prison, thousands cower. When they throw hundreds of thousands in prison, it’s defined as a nebulous, impenetrable social problem: “racism,” or “drugs” or “poverty.”

 Yet here we are, with by far the greatest proportion of our people in prison of any nation in the world. Among them, we are told, there are “no political prisoners.” You may draw your own conclusions.

Comrade, I share many of your hesitancies, fears and concerns. I have a son in his early twenties, and I am sure that the future he faces is much, much darker and more threatening than I can even imagine. Yet for his sake, and the sake of others like him, I think we must continue. We must build the very possibility of change.

Extinctions, The Economy and American Politics - Part 1

PART 1

Extinctions are happening at an accelerated rate because of human activity. We are altering the biosphere so quickly that many species have neither the ability to flourish nor adapt. Examples range from deforestation by burning so that we can plant palm oil plantations across formerly virgin rainforest in Indonesia, to the burning of dirty coal in the U.S., Russia and China which leads to acid rain which in turn has killed off freshwater fish. In America, even where we have brought back the fish, as in the 25,667 km²  Lake Erie, the waters and bottom sediments remain so contaminated that governments suggest it's fish not be eaten, or if ingested, only in severely limited amounts. The single factor that distinguishes humans from the rest of life on earth is our ability to collectively alter the environment on a vast scale. Fish can’t change the acidity of lakes, and orangutans can’t burn forests to replant the land as a mono-culture, No other species alters the environment on such a scale or so capriciously.

It's up to all of us to both recognise the gravity of the issues we face and press our governments to cooperate and move forward to address these concerns, for they ultimately affect us all. The potential for catastrophe is growing year by year, such that an increasing number of reputable climatologists believe that we may be too late to avert mass extinctions. They call the present time the anthropocene, an era when the Earth's biosphere came to be dominated by a wildly reproducing species that so fouled its environment, that survival became impossible for most life. This crazy self-destructive species is us. The boldest of these scientists suggest that the anthropocene is ending, and that our end as the dominant species will be its closing act.

Since the advent of the modern era, humans again and again have developed technologies that enhanced our ability to survive. We are living longer and have much lower infant and child mortality than ever in history. As a result, our populations has exploded. Beneath the advances in food production, sanitation, medicine and housing that have led to this population bomb, is a vast infrastructure of finance, commerce, and governments. Of these governments, which once ruled, have become agents of finance and commerce with the militaries and policing functioning to direct, control and defend these structures and their raw materials.

All three of these areas are currently contributing to rapid climate change, and to date are resistant to solutions to the problems that population growth and associated infrastructures are creating. Finance benefits from agile and rapid distribution of money, and identifies as a "good" a continuous increase in consumption (a growing market), commerce identify increases in productivity  and adaptation to the needs and desires of a growing population as a primary “good.” Governments, by and large, identify the security of each of these elements, and a peaceable, growing population, steady growth in both finance and commerce, as well as the survival of its own institutions as primary “goods.”

To date, all three of these stakeholder of modern life have been resistant to change in response to ecological and climatological concerns. In the U.S., for example, the last wide ranging ecology protection legislation were passed in the 1970’s. Over time, the three most important acts, concerning clean air, clean water and toxic substances have come under continuous attack by finance and commerce, and have all suffered at the hands of de-regulators, especially after the propagandistic association of these laws and regulations with a set of false economic claims put forward during the Reagan administration (1981-1989).

Some pressure or force needs to develop for this slowly growing troika of forces to change, but barring a large scale catastrophe that will force the issue, it's likely that change will occur too late  to avoid large scale collapses of the biosphere. The only alternative agent of change is us, the citizens of the nation to act in defense of the biosphere.  But for this to happen, a decades long process of pacification needs to be upended, and a swift, decisive new definition of individual prerogatives and responsibilities needs to be quickly developed. Part of the issue preventing effective change  is that so many of us have been effectively disenfranchised, becoming consumers, rather than a responsible citizenry. A decades long decline in voting, the repeal of equal time regulations for broadcast media, journalistic acceptance of patently false and misleading electioneering claims, the programmatic diminution of news gathering abilities and resources by corporate owners,  has been coupled to legal and propaganda attacks on the Fourth Estate as a whole, just as its vulnerability to digital media was coming to the fore.

Cont. in Pt II.

Extinctions, The Economy and American Politics - Part II

Part II


So how do we accelerate change, not in the global environment, but within the human community?
Here's how we might begin:

First: In democracies there should be an absolute litmus test in electoral politics. Politicians in the hands of commerce or finance be driven from office, regardless of the stance on other issues. Commerce and finance should lose the growing franchise they have been granted in most Western democracies. Corporations must lose the the legal fiction that defines them as persons, with rights to engage in politics and debate, and which, to the ultimate detriment of all, allows them to sway, influence or even buy our democracy.

Second: Individuals citizens need education in the basics of the sciences, as well as logic, in order to understand the gravity of the situation, and perhaps more importantly, to be secure in participating in a meaningful debate as to the best paths forward. It also means a thorough revaluation of the right of ownership.

Third: We need to thoroughly reevaluate the right of ownership. In Western democracies the right of ownership has never been been absolute. We are limited from ownership of many dangerous materials, ranging from weapons to chemicals. There are plants we're not allowed to grow in our gardens, some being deemed dangerous, others because they are understood to play a role in the spread of disease to important crops or forests. Likewise, one may not construct a bomb, even though one might have a right to own all the components needed, nor are ownership right allowed which trump many dangers to the larger community. This can range from restrictions on mining and minimum height requirements and scrubbers on industrial chimneys to safety requirements for public accommodations. Thus in most western nations limits have been placed the use and ownership of real property, such that common actions which are likely damaging to others are constrained. Limitations are often placed on the types of buildings permitted, or indeed if building is allowed at all. Requirements exist as to materials and design with safety as a principle justification, though zoning laws often factor potential impact on the value of nearby properties and even community standards of decorum or aesthetics into potential uses, tied to code requirements for setbacks, exterior materials and the design of access. In recent decades large segments of construction have codes requiring consideration of the disabled in design and construction.

The pseudo-populist movements concerned with land rights, whether in the form of anti-eminent domain groups, anti-zoning groups or Western grazing rights groups have been quietly applauded and underwritten by commerce and finance, which has manipulated politics to link such concerns with their own privileges to sell and manufacture "as they like, when and how they like." The propaganda buzzword beloved of finance and commerce is “deregulation.” Its proponents ignore the fundamental fact that regulation designed to protect the populace from harm is the only means to to avert harm on massive, perhaps life denying scales.

What's missing from many of these fronts for the interests of commerce and finance is an ancient notion of the "common good."  One way to express this attitude is to redevelop a language of common ownership.  Public land is not "government land," but land which is held by all for the good of all. Vast swathes of western America currently owned by the "government," are held legally held as as if no more than trusts for the commerce. So-called "national forests" are designed to guarantee access by commerce to cheap wood supplies. Preservation of these great forests, and their integrity as complex living ecologies stands a distant second place to the interests of finance and commerce.

For several generations the American people have been force fed a paradigm that services commerce, but not the people: the notion that private home ownership is the best and most economically beneficial approach to housing for most people, when the facts, freed from the interest of commerce and finance simply do not support this proposition. The single best form of housing most people in urban and suburban areas is collective ownership. This means cooperatives, not condominiums or public housing. Condos are rapidly and often justly developing a reputation as shoddily constructed "entry level" housing that often rapidly lose value after initial sale. Co-ops, while relatively rare in American markets, offer, when reasonably regulated against abuses, a form of common ownership that inculcates both personal and collective responsibility. While condo fees are often seen as little more than taxation, co-op membership can be structured to inform and develop community. In urban areas co-ops have been developed for visual artists, dance communities, musicians and their families, and many other natural affinity groups. It takes careful regulation to prevent some co-ops from becoming bastions of the antisocial, with existing members seeking to exclude "undesirables." but this can be easily prevented by substantial transparency requirements.

More Soon...

Extinctions, The Economy and American Politics - A Reading List

These are short works that can form a basis for discussion of real change. Remember, time is
running out.  Theory is Practice:


Anti-Systemic Movements
by Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein 1989/2011

This is a thoughtful, thought provoking and action inciting analysis of how our world works. "Peerless examination of the rise of social movements against the global capitalist system, conducted by the leading exponents of the “world systems” perspective."  


Twenty years of La Fabrique
- A free reading.

Since 1998 the editor Eric Hazan has published radical-left political works including masterstrokes like the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection and controversial titles like Houria Bouteldja’s Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous. In his two decades running La Fabrique, he has maintained an undimmed ambition for editorial independence, and his subversive power. 


This Is Not a Program
By Tiqqun 


Historical conflict no longer opposes two massive molar heaps, two classes—the exploited and the exploiters, the dominant and dominated, managers and workers—between which, in each individual case, it would be possible to differentiate. The front line no longer cuts through the middle of society; it now runs through each one of us... "
—from This Is Not a Program


Now
The Invisible Committee 2017

Now is the phantom chapter to the Invisible Committee's previous book, To Our Friends: a new critique from the anonymous collective that establishes their opposition to the world of capital and its law of labor, addresses current anti-terrorist rhetoric and the ferocious repression that comes with it, and clarifies the end of social democracy and the growing rumors of the need for a coming “civil war.” 


To Our Friends
The Invisible Committee 2015

A reflection on, and an extension of, the ideas laid out seven years ago in "The Coming Insurrection."

The Coming Insurrection
The Invisible Committee   2009


A call to arms by a group of French intellectuals that rejects leftist reform and aligns itself with younger, less formal means of resistance.  Perhaps the most widely read and seminal writing of resistance to appear in the last 30 years.

When they Came for Me: A Story of Too Little, Too Late.

In a recent online discussion about the 1946 film The True Glory, a joint U.S. / U.K. account of the Second World War in Europe, the conversation was frequently interrupted by a small groups of disruptive writers. One was Russian, one American, One Spanish and one from the U.K.. What was interesting, and frightening is that they were all outright fascists, though some preferred the term Nazi.. Though they frequently sidetracked into debates between themselves concerning national or ethnic honour, reminding me most of the few recorded comments between Mussolini and Hitler -- that is to say, guarded pleasantries followed by chest thumping self aggrandisement -- these online fascists actually had a united purpose in disrupting the conversation. They each believed that historians are liars or misled propagandists, and that the Western Liberal tradition whose highest expressions are to be found in the principles of individual liberty, freedom of speech, and constitutional democracy, are by nature a kind of delusional misrepresentation of what people really want and need. To these writers the phrase "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," the triumphal, hopeful maxim of the French Revolution, "belongs on the trash heap of history."

Reading hundreds, perhaps thousands of words of contra-factual nonsense was difficult, and the exchanges often descended into acrimony and obscenities, but it was illuminating nonetheless, with an awful luciferian light shining brightly into the dark recesses of that aspect of humanity we would oft as not favour remain hidden.

Some Themes:

A Russian telling us, in almost mystical language of the manner in which the strengths of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Stalin are today incarnate in Vladimir Putin, a man he wrote, that would "again lead his nation across the world for glory and  greatness."

A Spaniard who decried the leadership lacking in his king, whom he described as a puppet in the hands of weak willed democrats and communists. His day would come.

The man from the UK who talked of anti-Shariah patrols in London, Liverpool and Manchester, aimed at enforcing a "proper English dress code". Their method was to tear scarves off Muslim women. He took great pride in a kind of foul inventiveness, for example, throwing rendered pork fat on shops doors frequented by Muslims, and then spray painting "Kosher" on the window. Some religious confusion there.

One of the American fascists, after first decrying the people's failure to rise up after the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing, declared that "We finally have a man we can vote for in Donald Trump." I'll admit, after taking a predictable amount of heat from this gang of public enemies, I was greatly relieved when another discussant came back with this wonderful adaptation:

"When the Trump crowd insulted the Mexicans,
I remained silent;
I was not a Mexican.

When they 'punched the protesters' in the face,
I remained silent;
I was not a protester.

When they came for the socialists and "freeloaders,
I did not speak out;
I was not a "freeloader."

When they wanted badges for the Muslims,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Muslim.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out."

I am no lover of war. I grew up during America's "war on communism" in Vietnam, listening to the daily toll of American dead on the nightly news - but never the names or even numbers of the Vietnamese dead. I have lived through an unending succession of pointless military engagements. I am deeply cognisant that we have now been continuously at war in the Middle East since 1991. I have actively organised and protested against many of America's wars, police actions and interventions, but nonetheless there are moments when there is no choice. 

There are times when nations, whether pure in their intention or not, must act. While I believe it is true that WW II set America on a reckless course of intrigues and misuse of state power - what some call "endless war and debt"  I also believe that WW II was fought for a purpose far larger than the profits of bankers and munitions manufacturers. The film's images of people in Paris and Brussels filling the streets, dancing and handing flowers to Allied troops as they marched are real, as were the pictures of concentration camps filled with the dead and dying.

Yes, we need to be critical and careful of our government's intentions. We should by all means not succumb to jingoism and the meaningless, deceitful rhetoric that dominates American political discourse. But borders cannot define the limits of our concern, nor our actions when authority falls into insanity and murderous barbarism, as it did in Germany and Italy in the decades between the two world wars.. The words of Martin Niemöller, offered in a 1936 talk, stand as a stark witness against those who would say "Stay at home. Mind your own business. Avoid entanglements."

"When the Nazis came for the communists,

I remained silent;

I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,

I remained silent;

I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,

I did not speak out;

I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,

I remained silent;

I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,

there was no one left to speak out."

"Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,

habe ich geschwiegen;

ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,

habe ich geschwiegen;

ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,

habe ich nicht protestiert;

ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Juden holten,

habe ich geschwiegen;

ich war ja kein Jude.

Als sie mich holten,

gab es keinen mehr,

der protestieren konnte."

For those who do not know this work, its author, Pastor Niemöller, a conservative Lutheran pastor and supporter of the Nazi regime publicly denied to support a single paragraph of the Nazi orders on "racial purity:" the Arierparagraph, or in English "Aryan Paragraph," which refused membership to various organisations, including his Church to so-called "non-Aryans," in other words, Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and other the Nazis believed inferior.

In April of 1937 he was arrested for his protests against this paragraph. Though released by a court 8 months later, he was re-arrested on the day of his release and sent without trial to a concentration camp. He was freed eight years later from Dachau in May of 1945. Of the 2720 Christian clergy confined at that camp, Paul Berben ["Dachau, 1933-45"] reports that 1034 died while under confinement. That's a far better rate of survival than Jews and many other categories of the innocent sent to the camps, but those who died, no matter their faith and race, were not martyrs. We should not, and must not take that false comfort from their murders.

The camp victims did chose to die for their god. They died because people who were able to stand up against tyranny chose to live in blindness rather than see the truth. They died because friends and neighbors preferred to be deaf rather than hear what was being said in the rallies and over the radio, and they died because as a nation, the German people were struck dumb, choosing to silence their own beating hearts, rather than speak the truth.

The victims did not die for their religion or their convictions. They died because their friends and neighbors failed them.  The German people could have said no in 1929 when President von Hindenburg allowed Hitler's predecessor to gut their parliament and by rule by decree. They could have said "no,' in 1933 when Von Hindenburg named Hitler as chancellor. They again could have said no to the Nazis a year later when Hitler seized the presidency from the hands of the then dead President Paul von Hindenburg, without the pretext of legal authority, combining both the presidency and chancellorship. There were dozens of moments when the German people could have stopped the Nazi Party, and did not.  By late 1934 it was too late. Even had one of the dozens of assassination attempts succeeded, another Nazi would have taken Hitler's place. Why did every remedy fail? Apathy, fear, distrust of democracy, etc., etc. Tens of thousands of pages have been written on the subject, but all the conjecture leads to a single answer. When they still had sufficient power, the German people chose not to act.

Pastor Niemöller, after the war, renounced not only his earlier support for the Nazi party, but also his own anti--semitism. He spent most of the remaining days of his long life helping Germany and the world remember. I just hope that in 50 or 75 years, no one is writing about the ways in which Americans were blind, deaf and dumb in the face of the political catastrophe that has fallen on us in these early, yet terribly dark and frightening days.

DHH

Profiles in Fundamentalism: Pastor Steven L. Anderson

According to Pastor Stephen L. Anderson, an independent Baptist pastor of the extremist sort, the ISIS attacks in France occurred because of  Humanism, the Enlightenment,  French abortion rights, gay rights, the former gay Mayor of  Paris,  and wicked fashions called down the Judgement of God.  During his recent 50 minute rant, proudly posted on Youtube, he said to the people of France “God allowed these heathen hordes to invade you because you are a heathen nation… France’s problem is not my problem.  Because I’m not the one who said adultery is fine, I’m not living in the gay capital of Europe,… If God want to judge them, that’s between them and God… But you know what, we’re next.“

The Colorado Murders

The violence tonight in Colorado Springs, where at last report three have died and nine have been wounded in the attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic by a man equipped with an assault rifle are only the latest round in attacks by Christian Fundamentalist extremists in the United States.