Seeing isn’t believing, after all ...

 

We say that ‘seeing is believing’, but it isn’t. In a long tradition, many films and dramas use the theme of different witnesses’ interpretations of the same event, sometimes called the ‘Rashomon effect’ after Kurosawa’s film of that name. Vantage Point (2008) directed by Pete Travis, is a good example. Here the assassination of a US president is seen from seven different perspectives, progressively unravelling the real nature of the event. The film literally winds back the action again and again for each witness account to be shown, all restarting from the same departure point.

I found myself thinking about such ‘subjectivity of perception’ this week as a number of articles and reports came together to demonstrate the paucity of digital experience compared with written and read media. The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, in an interview with The Telegraph, warns that: ‘Children struggle to read emotions and are less empathetic than a generation ago because they spend too much time using tablets and smartphones.’ He went on, ‘Children spend more time engaging with machines and with virtual reality than they used to in the past where they don’t have to face the consequences of real life. In virtual environments they don’t have to interpret the subtle cues of real-life environments …’

This is a convincing angle on the limited quality of virtual experience as opposed to ‘real’ experience. Such limited and limiting perception is becoming an increasingly common feature of social activities almost universally. It’s all too common nowadays to see tourists arrive in some monumental and significant place and, instead of using their eyes to see, immediately lift their cameras or iPads to record what is before them. The true visual experience is lost. Here again, as McGilchrist puts it ‘the subtle cues of real-life environments ….’ are left out of the act of perception.

But, as we see all around us, the unthinking (unseeing?) activities of tourists pale beside the daily obsession with smartphones that we find in groups of youngsters. Connected as they are digitally, they barely need to look up and absorb the presence of their friends around them.

 In a related comment from another angle, the writer MarioVargas Llosa, in an interview with Antonio Caño, the director of the Spanish newspaper El País, goes so far as to say that ‘if the world continues the process which leads to the written word being replaced by the image and the audiovisual, we run the risk that freedom, the capacity to reflect and imagine will disappear along with other institutions like democracy.’

“Si el mundo sigue el proceso en el que la palabra escrita es reemplazada por la imagen y lo audiovisual, se corre el riesgo de que desaparezca la libertad, la capacidad de reflexionar e imaginar y otras instituciones como la democracia”, advirtió ayer Mario Vargas Llosa en conversación con Antonio Caño, director de EL PAÍS.

He considers that ‘the word that is read, language that is communicated through print, has an effect in the brain which complements and completes what is read.’ He goes on, ‘images don’t produce the same mechanism of transformation. In reading, there is a creative and intellectual effort which is barely present in the visual.’

La advertencia la hace al considerar que la palabra leída, el lenguaje comunicado de manera impresa, tiene un efecto en el cerebro que completa y complementa lo leído. En cambio, el autor de Conversación en La Catedral, afirmó que “las imágenes no producen el mismo mecanismo de transformación. En la lectura hay un esfuerzo creativo e intelectual que casi se elimina con lo visual”.

This statement may seem to deny the great visual arts their power, but clearly this isn’t what Vargas Llosa is referring to. Along with the poverty of the smartphone event, often goes low quality of the visual or audio material, inviting no creative effort at all.

We come back to the quality of true perception as opposed to vision, remembering William Blake. ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.’ The poet sees with an eye that captures multidimensional layers of experience, just as a gifted visual artist does. Such direct forms of knowledge, for that is what it is, namely ‘knowing’ the object, are irreproducible except through the channels that allow them to come alive again in the perception of another person. As T S Eliot summed it up, there is the event of seeing, the event of writing the poem about what is seen, and the event of the reader recreating what was seen in their own mind.

In such a refined event of reading and recreating come together the ‘creative and intellectual effort’ of which Vargas Llosa speaks, and ‘the subtle cues of real-life environments’ held up by McGilchrist.

Young people need the full range of such experiences to allow their emotional and intellectual lives to flourish. In which case they will become more and more sensitive to the profound difference between seeing and believing.

CJM 4/2015

Richard Dawkins -- wizard or ogre?

 How does one enter into the mindset of Professor Richard Dawkins? His recent sally against all that is "supernatural", speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, would have us believe that children must be raised as sceptics, trained in scientific rigour, and that childish things such as fairy tales with their dose of improbability, must be "put away". He himself successfully achieved this rigour at an early age, he tells us.

Scientists, of course, have always believed in their own brand of magic, and not just because of its older roots in alchemy. Innumerable wizards populate the world of modern IT and we can be sure that the mood at NASA or at CERN when hitting the target can be described as nothing less than magical.

Here Dawkins misses the point, surely. All these highly successful scientists were children once. Where and how did they learn to open their imaginations to visions and dreams soaring high above daily routines, if not in that wondrous hour of storytelling which leads them into sleep?

A prince turning into a frog is too improbable, says the wise professor. Just as improbable as oxygen and hydrogen turning into water? Or iron filings arranging themselves in sonar fields? Plants and organisms tracking the lunar cycle? Surely what matters to the growing child is to learn to open the imagination so that the mind can fly across boundaries, whether on magic carpets or in school laboratories.

To impose what is "correct" for the imagination to play with, and deny what is "incorrect", is a tyranny that serves no purpose. The expansive dimension of the creative, imaginative mind, proclaims that there are no boundaries. And yes, magic carpets will still get you there.

CJM June 2014

The absurdity of modern football

 I just bought a Ming vase for a few million. It's a beautiful thing and a delight to watch. But I want it to make money for me, so I'm going to throw it into an arena and allow a bunch of (usually eleven) less than beautiful ruffians to hack it about, kick it to the ground, stand on it, and treat it with unspeakable violence. There will be a lot of vociferous protesting, hands raised in indignation, claims of innocence from the most guilty, but basically, it seems, this is what people will pay to see.

Don't get me wrong ... I enjoy watching football, I marvel at the skill of players at FC Barcelona, for instance, and love the drama of a cliffhanger as much as anyone. Even without Barca, Messi and Iniesta,  the Lisbon UEFA cup final had its moments ... But the run up to the final matches of the cup spoke for itself. The number of highly paid players on the doubtful list, potentially unfit to play, was an illustration of the absurdity of the modern game.

What I find senseless is, on the one hand, the huge sums of  money invested in the best players, and on the other the general permissiveness towards dirty play, the shirt-grabbing, the pushing over from behind, the hacking down of the superskilled by the less skilled. Is that really an acceptable way to treat expensively acquired and wonderfully crafted Ming vases?

Wouldn't we prefer to see these artists playing in better regulated games, and at less risk to themselves? A thought for the World Cup games about to open in Brazil. May there be less violence both inside and outside the stadiums.

CJM
May 2014

Footballers: Spit without polish

I've been intrigued by a couple of recent reports of footballers being investigated for spitting at other players. My concern is that the output of spit in professional football is so copious that it must be hard for investigators to distinguish between spitting at others and, well, just spitting.

No other sport that I can think of has this peculiar non-stop habit,  though Nadal briefly added spitting on clay one year to his Tourette-like gestures before serving .. I guess he was dissuaded from continuing by Uncle Tony. "No es bonito, hijo ..."

So where do footballers get this special licence from? The occasional trainer has been seen to spit on the touchline, for no obvious reason other than solidarity, though in the majority of their cases it must be hard to spit and chew gum at the same time.

Adding spit to your boot polish has been a long established tradition in the army, and boy scouts indulged in spitting competitions with cherry stones a century ago, even while campaigning for the general public to use spittoons and not the floor. But purely gratuitous spitting is against hygiene and good manners. Sadly, boys today must be all too keen to spit efficiently as they learn the streetwise tricks of the sport. After all, their heroes are expert at it.

CJM

Time for a Ministry of Emotional Management?

In a perceptive article this week in the Basque newspaper Deia, José Ramón Blazquez observes that most of our decisions are based on unconscious feelings, as consumer studies suggest. If this is the case, then surely our political and economic decisions follow the same pattern. So, he asks, why has no government ever set up a Ministry for Emotional Management? Isn't it vital for our governing institutions to understand popular sentiment and know how to respond to it?

He suggests, sensibly enough, that where heightened public emotions are concerned  there are better ways for a government to react than chasing people through the streets and hitting them with nightsticks. Such responses, which the ruling Popular Party in Spain seems to take for granted, can only make things worse. Similarly, legislation which imposes severer limits on public demonstrations, as we have seen during the last year not only in Spain but also in Russia, can only increase public feelings of frustration and discontent.

Well, in practice I daresay that public feelings only really come into the democratic equation at election times and that what we call Campaign Management is no more nor less than Emotional Management in disguise. In between elections, naturally, the need for such analysis appears to fade away.

In my fantasy novel King Abba the ruling Rational and Scientific Party has established that there can be only one rational and scientific answer to all problems, and therefore the basis for alternative viewpoints no longer exists. As here, where politics and science get together, I am afraid the danger is immense. Feelings and emotions have no part to play in this scenario. And I fear we are already well along this road at the level of European administration.

 With what emotional consequences? Blazquez warns that feelings of frustration and injustice that are unattended to do not disappear, they only fester and turn to  hatred. This is a warning that all governments, both east and west, need to hear. Recent events in Boston show the baffling path down which we must travel when there is emotional ignorance in government.

CJM
May 2013

Mrs T and her T-party

I remember a lawyer friend recalling the extraordinary changes that came about through Mrs Thatcher's demolition of traditional practices and restrictions throughout the professional and financial world.

"She told us to go out and make money," he said, "and by golly, we did."

 Only now do we see the terrible and inevitable outcome of so much liberalisation as market-led forces took us over the cliff, and continue to do so today. And equally now, we see the second and third generation effects of chopping down the nationalised industries with their malpractices and utter disregard for careful economic and financial management. Could she have brought about those changes without the cruel ruthlessness she showed towards the mining and steel communities? That is still the real debate. Could she have sought gentler programmes of gradual reform?

I remember a colleague who had worked at British Steel before privatisation, telling me about the theft and pilfering, the corrupt and domineering union bosses, the intimidation when strikes were called at a moment's notice. "I'm all right, Jack" was the reality of the day, and were the unions going to allow their own destructive and almost absolute powers to be taken away from them lightly? I don't think so.

And yet, and yet... was there really" no such thing as society" as Mrs T was oft quoted as saying? In fact, in the original context, this was followed by "There are individual men and women, and there are families."

So yes, there were individuals, and we were all told to get out and make money. And many did. But for those families with no jobs, breadwinners and support services, the harsh reality was all too different. What became of all the grocers that had to shut in the impoverished mining towns? Did she ever wonder about that, given her Grantham grocery childhood?

What happened was that Mrs T took what really was, in its fashion, a society, one where a policeman was still your friend, kind of, not someone who bashed you on the head from behind a riot shield, and many institutions, though fossilised and out of touch, still represented values of an earlier age that all looked up to -- and she created a land of everyone for himself.

I personally believe this has caused Britain lasting harm and we will have to work hard to repair or replace the iconic institutions that have been progressively devalued over the last forty years.The NHS was the last of them. The other poor shells of governmental and financial bodies have long ago given up all claim to respect.

CJM
April 11, 2013

Spanish practices 2: What never? Well, hardly ever!

This delightful chorus from HMS Pinafore sums up the pressure you're under when your crew don't quite believe you...

Captain.
I am never known to quail
At the fury of a gale,
And I'm never, never sick at sea!

Chorus.
What, never?

Captain.
No, never!

Chorus.
What, never?

Captain.
Hardly ever!

Compare this to the situation this week that the Spanish caption Mariano Rajoy found himself in, on having to stand up beside Angela Merkel and answer journalists' questions in Berlin, 'visibly nervous' according to at least one present. Only a few days before in Spain, at an emergency meeting of his party's senior managers, he had denied categorically being involved with any dubious payments in the Bárcenas affair, announcing his "Es falso" denial. With the severe maternal figure of Merkel at his side, how can he do anything but tell the truth? Put on the defensive, he prevaricates:

"Todo lo que se refiere a mí y que figura allí y a algunos compañeros míos de partido que figuran allí, no es cierto, salvo alguna cosa que es lo que han publicado los medios de comunicación".

 So now, instead of 'Es falso,' we have 'it's not certain, except for a thing or two published in the press.' (My italics)

Interestingly the word 'prevaricate' in English means to be evasive. In Spanish, 'prevaricar' means 'to pervert the course of justice', exactly what Britain's ex-ministerChris Huhne has admitted to this week after long denials.

Assertions, accusations, denials, counter-denials: it seems this culebrón has a long way to go. And Mr Rajoy is losing fast the little credibility that was remaining to him.

CJM

Bilbao, February 2013

Below: A Spanish view of Chris Huhne's downfall as a consequence of lying over a traffic offence. The laughing faces shown are all well known figures in public life, from the monarchy downwards. Nearly all of them have been touched by recent scandals.

‘Signs of rot’, or just Spanish practices?

 Guilty or not guilty? Months of denial, then at the last moment, as all the doors of escape close one by one, a change of plea and an admission of guilt. This has often been the pattern of events in British political life, the latest example being ex-cabinet minister, Chris Huhne, admitting finally that he lied over a driving offence and “perverted the course of justice”. It seems even his own son had been telling him from the very start to own up.

In Britain, at least, political careers rarely survive the revelation of a lie: John Profumo had no future after lying to the House of Commons over his relationship with Christine Keeler. Jonathan Aitken’s famous “sword of truth” with which he proclaimed his innocence over allegations of shady arms deals, turned into what one TV headline called “The Dagger of Deceit” after his eventual conviction for perjury.

 Now the credibility of politicians across Europe seems to be in serious doubt, as accusations and suspicions stack up in France, Greece, Italy and Spain. With Chris Huhne awaiting a likely judicial sentence this week in London, his lie exposed, we may cast a thought towards the head of the Spanish government, Mariano Rajoy, and his “Es falso” declaration of the last week. This forthright denial came in response to allegations that he, along with many other senior members of his Partido Popular, received undeclared payments from a secret fund administered by an ex-treasurer of the party, Luís Bárcenas, who himself is accused of having secreted millions of euros in a Swiss bank account.

 As the Financial Times puts it bluntly, ‘This bombshell could hardly have detonated at a worse time, with a population facing record unemployment and unprecedented austerity, and already infuriated by a string of corruption scandals … ” The most damning statement of the paper’s editorial is to declare that the country is fighting its way through a major economic crisis “at a time when nearly all its institutions, from the monarchy to the judiciary, exhibit signs of rot.” (FT, February 3, 2013)

Looking through a recent Sunday edition of El País ‒ the newspaper leading the way in exposing the Bárcenas affair ‒ you could see pages 8 to 20 of the domestic coverage dedicated entirely to reporting on one financial scandal after another. Soon afterwards, the supposedly incriminating ‘Bárcenas papers’ filled an entire Sunday supplement which sold out rapidly. It seems that political journalism in Spain has been reduced to uncovering corruption after corruption, all ongoing for months, if not years, and all referred to in shorthand: el caso X, el caso Y, el caso Z … One gets the impression that the abuse of public position in order to line one’s pockets has for a very long time been an accepted perk of the job.

Institutionalised abuse of a similar kind, in the union-dominated newspaper print world of Fleet Street, used to be called “Spanish practices” for no obvious reason at the time. But such abuse became so engrained and customary that it led to the total collapse of the system. The abuse rendered the institutions unworkable and unsustainable.

This indeed seems to be where Spain has got to with its own Spanish practices. Writing in the same edition, political consultant José Ignacio Torreblanca says: “The political pact between elected and electors which sustains our democracy, has broken, and as a result, is unworkable.” And he calls for a major overhaul of public thinking, mindset and customs in order for the country to face up collectively to the challenge.

            It does seem that public perception in Spain of their elected representatives has reached an all time low in the democratic period since the 1960s. Rajoy and his government currently enjoy only a 23 percent approval rating. A recent survey from Metroscopia suggests that 73 percent of the general public think the country is on the verge of breakdown through unemployment and poverty. 97 percent say that they have no confidence in the political institutions.

After six years of economic hardship, tens of thousands of young people are desperate to leave the country and find employment elsewhere in Europe, dozens of local town halls are bankrupt and unable to pay their employees, and banks are repossessing thousands of homes in a general collapse of the housing market.

This seems to be economics, and politics, gone mad. Austerity at work? No, austerity that doesn’t work. The social cost is enormous and will last for a generation or more. One can only hope that out of the impending seismic shift will come a new order and a new pact of trust and understanding between government and people.

CJM

Bilbao, February, 2013

The caption below announces: 'A British ex-minister resigns after lying over a traffic fine.' The laughing faces are a broad selection of Spanish politicians, bankers and other prominent people in public life, including the royal family. Nearly all of those shown here have been touched in some way by various recent scandals.

 

Schism in the Church?

Every town and community in Spain has its Belén, its Christmas crib, whether grand or modest. These are often works of art and ingenuity, with their moving figures, waterwheels turning, water streaming, and every clever device you can imagine. The best of them are shown every year in exhibitions throughout the peninsula. Many places, like Pezuela de las Torres in the Community of Madrid, are famous for offering a richly colourful live crib scene with local people as the essential figures.

The essence of the Belén is to capture the life of the village, or pueblo, the simple working background into which the child Jesus was born. The shepherds, the farmworkers, the harvesters, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the baker, are all a part of this charming and detailed display, including the domestic animals which are so central to the village way of life. Along with the arrival of the Tres Reyes, the three kings, this simple representation of the event of Christmas, is probably what most survives of the original meaning of the festival in the popular culture.

Now Pope Benedict, in a moment of bizarre intellectual hair-splitting, has announced in his new book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, that the homely myth of the stable, with the donkey or mule, and the ox, those emblematic presences which give colour and life to our carols, is without historical foundation. There was no donkey, he says, there were no oxen standing by.

At least, this one detail is what has reached the general public, arguably through media misrepresentation of the Pope's thesis, while it is clear that his text acknowledges the presence of the animals in the crib tradition.

Still, the grassroots protest in Spain against the reporting of the Pope's words, which figured prominently in the national news, had to be heard to be believed. For days, the topic dominated conversation in the street. Every bar, restaurant or public place with a tradition of mounting the crib, insisted with fervour that they would not change their ways in spite of the papal view. The universal response, with typical Spanish forthrightness, was, "Well, I'm blowed if  I'm taking the donkey away ..."

 The point of real interest here is the popular response to what might, in another age, have been shown more respect. On such minor disputes do great schisms feed. And I truly wonder where this will all end....

CJM, Spain, December 23, 2012

How to start a revolution

A favourite song of mine is “Papa, cuéntame otra vez,” by the Spanish singer Ismael Serrano. “Dad, tell me again,” goes the lyric, about the heady days of 1968 in Paris, when youth poured on to the streets in widespread protest against cultural tyranny and inspired others to resist the power of what Isma colourfully terms “dictadores oxidados”, rusted dictators such as Franco.

But the note of the song is pessimistic. Where are the gains now? One kind of tyranny has been replaced by another and it seems as if all the promise of that Paris spring has blown away like dust. I was in Paris myself for “le petit mai” of 1970, and it was all too plainly already a subdued echo of the original student-worker uprising two years before.

Yet we are in a long-term game here, and the truth is that we are still living in revolutionary times. Some have compared the present shaking of the branches right down to the roots of our political, economic and social inheritance, to the upheaval throughout Europe in 1848.

Of more promise is that now we see emerging a new dynamic of resistance, looking back not to the bloody clashes of the past, but promoting a radically different and nonviolent manifestation of people-power. The special interest of these new principles is that they arise from the thinking of two men who, in themselves, could hardly be seen as revolutionaries.

Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy and Stéphane Hessel’s Indignez-vous, between them have provided manifestos for change without violence on an international scale, and they are already producing widespread results. The focus of each is different, but their combined appeal to a universal sense of "enough is enough" has  fuelled and inspired movements and strategists around the globe.

Both have said, in different ways, that the end-game is not the destructive overthrow of regimes or rulers. Such results, like the downfall of Ben Ali in Tunisia or Mubarak in Egypt, deliver great joy to the oppressed, but leave a potentially dangerous vacuum after them which can simply fill up with more of the same under a different name.

No, the real aim of this approach is not to overthrow rulers, but to change how rulers behave. And in Hessel's view, not only blindly short-term rulers, but the entire culture of politics and big business in an unholy alliance of self-interest.

I thoroughly recommend Ruaridh Arrow's recent documentary about the work and ideas of Gene Sharp, which is inspirational. Here is a link to the trailer, but try to see the complete film, shown this week on the channel current.com.

So Ismael Serrano need not feel so disappointed now. Los indignados of the 15-M movement and of Democracia Real YA, are back on the streets in Spain, fillling the squares of dozens of cities, and if they follow Gene Sharp's advice, they will not give up.

Doing God’s work – or playing dice? The Wisdom of Einstein

Albert Einstein, it is said, was asked on one occasion whether he carried a notebook to write down his ideas. “Why?” he remarked. “I’ve only ever had one idea.”

However, he did have a lot more pithy and wise things to say, the kind of utterances that stay in your mind. One that I’ve always felt kinship with was the comment that the human mind was far too important to fill up with facts. “I use a library for that.”

Another – and here I come to my point – was his famous proposition that: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it” (often glossed as, “from the same thinking that created it”).

We daily watch a capitalist world in unfolding crisis, where Einstein’s kind of visionary clarity is sorely missing. While the phrase “Think the unthinkable” seems to be much on economists’ and financial advisors’ lips, their “unthinkable” comes down to the hedging of outcomes in a world full of nightmare uncertainties. But their vision simply doesn’t go far enough. As Einstein, again, succinctly observed: “Logic will get you from A to B. But imagination will take you everywhere.”

We need imagination, not logic, in our present crisis. As is now all too obvious, the financial events of 2008 never brought about imaginative solutions, only the insertion of buoyancy tanks filled with the same kind of thinking as created the problems.  The true “unthinkable”, of course, isn’t that the euro will collapse, or the Middle East fall into the hands of assertive Islamic governments on the back of the so-called Arab Spring, or Russia or China become the springboard of new conflicts over global resources. No, as Einstein suggests, the unthinkable unthinkable is the thinking that your present thinking can’t and doesn’t even think of. We don’t see much of that brand of novel and imaginative vision, except possibly in the manifestos of the Indignant Ones occupying the centres of financial and political power around the globe.

Without “thinking the truly unthinkable”, how are we to get out of this mess? And what exactly is the nature of the mess? It seems that Einstein had a view on that, too, as while trying to locate the source of the famous phrase quoted above, I came across the following, written by him sixty years ago:

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labour encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organised political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. (from “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review, 1949) [my emphasis]

           

Compare this damning analysis with Robert Fisk’s diatribe this week against the international bankers and financial institutions, and it is hard to insert a credit card between them. Fisk, as usual not sparing his punches, declares: “Bankers are the dictators of the west.” Isn’t that going a bit far? No, it seems, not if you subscribe to recent revelations about the tentacles of the notorious Vampire Squid, aka Goldman Sachs, reaching into every nook and cranny of the political and economic establishment. As JamesDelingpole blogged recently:  “ ‘The governments don't rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world,’ claimed a shockingly outspoken trader, Alessio Rastani, on the BBC two months ago.”

        Others have explored further among the squid’s tentacles with even more disturbing insights.

        In a recent interview with the Sunday Times (November 6, 2011) Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein made the appalling joke that GS was doing “God’s work”.  Perhaps this gives one a glimpse into the cynical, value-less landscape in which leading financial institutions now operate, and in which they reward themselves handsomely for failing in the one task for which their “mission statement” (allowing that they have any) might inspire them: namely, to be the unassailable pillars of security and honesty in a troubled and often criminal world.

            I used to say to each of my children, as they grew up and got entangled in the debt society, “Always remember, my child, the bank is your enemy.” I was only half-joking. I believe they now know what I was talking about.

            But even I was not ready for the amoral irresponsibility that currently seems endemic in the Olympian heights of the financial sectors, where doing God’s work reflects the worst human tendencies of the classical Greek divinities: lust, greed, bribery and revenge.

            On God, too, Einstein had a phrase: “God doesn’t play dice”. No, he doesn’t. Gambling is an all too human addiction, played daily, as we now know, by bankers and traders, and paid for by our elected (or unelected) governments.

CJM

           

Watching water

We all love to do it. Watching water in flow captivates us with its infinite variety of movement. We go miles to see a waterfall. We picnic by a mountain stream. Something deeply instinctual lies at the heart of our relationship with water, above all in its natural environment.

Yet, as a direct result of our own criminal carelessness, humanity, over the next fifty years, will almost certainly experience an acute shortage of fresh water for consumption and irrigation. And this, together with a surfeit of sea water, as ocean levels rise. Both of these problems arise from squandering, mismanaging and generally abusing the one vital resource without which life on Earth is impossible.

While the problem of water shortage will be huge for countries already facing progressive desertification, by 2050 it will be problematic even for countries such as Switzerland where shrinking glaciers are reducing the storage and replenishment required for a steady water supply. In their turn, Greece, southern Spain, and wide tracts of Australia and south America are threatened by falling river levels and rising salinity in groundwater resulting from poor land and river management.

A deeper understanding of water is essential for our survival, and not just water as a chemical compound (which in itself is mysterious), but in its cycles and behaviour in relation with the rest of nature. We also need to recognise water as a carrier of life and memory. Sensitive studies show that it bears the imprint of what it travels over and through, and “remembers” the influences that are brought to bear on it. Here I am thinking of the studies of researchers like the Japanese Masaru Emoto, Andreas Schulz in Tübingen, Germany, the Herrischried Institute in the Black Forest, and others.

What is at stake here, where the boundaries of current science and technology fade into more subtle realms, is the issue of water quality. The “organics” of the future will have to pay close attention to the intimate link between water quality, food quality and human health, as the fertility of our productive lands deteriorates even further. Anecdotal evidence sugggests that irrigation water proceeding from hydroelectric and desalination plants lacks the generative power of water that has passed through a natural cycle.

Pioneers in water quality research include the Austrian forester Viktor Schauberger, the flow expert Theodor Schwenk and the inventor of the Flowform John Wilkes, who died in March this year. In each case, their wisdom – and warnings of future disaster – arose from closely observing water and its behaviour in the style of research which the eighteenth century poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called “delicate empiricism”.

Goethe also referred to water as “the blood of the earth”, a phrase picked up by the title of Allerd Stikker’s book on water resources, an account which ends with the poetic declaration, "Seeing water, being water, I feel part of Creation. I am not alone."

In the same spirit of “seeing”, I will continue to drop into this blog my own occasional close observations on water, in haiku form, as homage to water.

CJM

No Other Gods Before Me

‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ (Exodus 20) Such was the admonition of the God of the Old Testament, a god who, Nietzsche confidently told us, is now dead. But as we know, natura abhorrat vacuum, and there is strong evidence throughout human history that worship is wired into our genes. What then, has come to replace God as the object of our veneration and sacrifice? Why, ‘It’s the Economy, stupid!’ as Bill Clinton was reputed to have pinned up on the wall of the Oval Office.

Once you look closely, the similarities between religious belief and economic belief are frighteningly similar – in the same way that some ingenious commentator found striking parallels between George W. Bush and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

To begin with, the actual practice of economics relies on unquestioned dogma which is founded on the pattern: A (advisor to the present government) learnt it from B who is now safely in a zimmer frame, who learnt it from C, who has long been dead.

This sequence of transmission, ensuring that current economic policy will always be out of date and ineffective, was pointed out to me when I was a young journalist covering summits in Paris. It was satisfying later to find the same theory applied to scientific revolutions in general by Thomas Kuhn. The crux of his thinking was that a couple of generations of academics had to die off before there could be any significant change in the current ‘paradigms’ (for which read ‘dogmas’). In the case of religious institutions (of whatever stripe), we are talking of rather more generations, of course.

A further similarity with religion exists in that fundamental economic concepts (while purporting to be scientific) have no basis in reason. Take, for instance, a key tenet of economic policy: ‘sustainable growth’. Already back in the late 1970’s Albert A. Bartlett, professor at Boulder, Colorado, argued cogently that those who believed in indefinite growth were the modern-day equivalent of Flat-Earthers. Even earlier, Kenneth Boulding, JFK’s environmental adviser is quoted (New Statesman) as saying: ‘Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad – or an economist.’ And has anything changed since then?

What we see around us, as practised by our leaders internationally, is a version of the Emperor’s New Clothes so far removed from sanity that it makes one roll one’s eyes. The barometers of GNP, the measure of the output we generate as a nation, and thus supposedly of our wellbeing, have in practice no bearing on the quality of our lives. As has often been pointed out, the commercial activity stimulated by a major disaster shows up as a positive in economic statistics. The levelling of the Amazonian rainforest for the production and export of soya adds a huge plus to Brazil’s balance of payments. Short-term exploitation and consumption rule because these are what, on the current model, the Economy demands so as to 'thrive'.

So this is the new religion. Our god Economy will be lord over all. He/she must never be upset and to this end must be kept 'stable' and 'sound'.  A depressed Economy will be unhappy, and so every effort must be made to stimulate him/her if this is the case. But beware, equally, of overheating, this makes the god very uncomfortable and even menacing. If this arises, all of us have to tighten our belts in an act of propitiation. Sacrifices must then be made.

But at what human cost? Here our leaders seem to take Inca kings as their role models, in terms of the human victims needed for the appeasement of the god Economy. We have it straight from the lips of the great Labour reformer, Anthony Giddens, who was adviser to Tony Blair at that crucial moment when we still believed in a Third Way and may even have voted for a theoretical kind of socialism with a human face. Years later, Giddens, writing in The Independent in 2007, expressed the article of faith beyond doubt: ‘Ensure the economy is strong. Securing greater social justice depends upon a robust economy, not the other way around.’

Ah, so bring on the Five Year Plan, move the peasants into the factories, house the ignorant b--s in thirty-storey tower blocks. Social justice will follow, inevitably.

No, there was no Third Way; there never was. Even Giddens admits he had stopped using the phrase because it was 'so widely misconstrued'. Ironically, the financial institutions were already on the road to their almighty crash (and our ruin) even as Giddens wrote that piece in praise of chancellor Brown and his 'sound' economic management. We were lured into the temple of progress, only to find ourselves worshipping and grovelling to the same old god, Economy. The priesthood, which is to say, the bankers, continue to stand in their pious protected circle, and intone the same old anthems.

CJM

The evidence of blood

¡Que no quiero verla!

“I don’t want to see it!”

This was the anguished and repeated cry of the Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca, in his famous lament on the death in the bullring of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías in 1935.

Dile a la luna que venga,
que no quiero ver la sangre
de Ignacio sobre la arena.

Tell the moon to come,

I don’t want to see

Ignacio’s blood on the sand.

This last week, whether we wanted to or not, we’ve been forced to witness blood in two major events, two contexts, very different yet perhaps redolent of each other in forcing the question: Has anything much changed in human nature in the last thousand years?

The first event I’m thinking of was the parading of John Paul II’s blood through St Peter’s basilica in Rome on the occasion of his beatification. The other was the parading (as one might see it) of pictures of Osama Bin Laden’s blood (and maybe that of his wife) staining the floor where he was killed by US special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Some may find it inappropriate to bring these two images together, but  I’m struck by their synchronicity. I’m equally gobsmacked, in the famous Chris Patten phrase,  by the awesome incongruity of both.

What on earth does the Catholic Church think it is doing, in this century, in taking a glass phial of a man’s blood extracted during his final illness, treating it so that it will not coagulate, mounting it in an elaborate silver monstrance, then processing around with it held high in the air like some precious relic. Ah, I see, it is a precious relic. So precious, indeed, that there are three more just like it preserved in safe places just in case this one should go astray.

I do realise that this kind of thing didn’t disappear with the Enlightenment, but I'm amazed that the Church authorities think it still appropriate for the modern world to engage in such shows. Didn’t it occur to them that the blood of the intended saint, tucked away quietly, might have been left to coagulate and liquefy miraculously through its own inner power? Then there could indeed have been something unusual and worth parading around with, like the blood of San Gennaro in Naples.

Blood is emblematic, yes, and powerful, the spilling of blood even more so. The poet Lorca could not bear even the sight of his friend’s blood on the sand. So one wonders at the reasoning in the US administration which allowed video of Bin Laden’s bloodstained bedroom to be circulated, while not releasing pictures of his dead body -- too gruesome to show, says President Obama.

We will see whether this sleight of hand persuades anyone who thinks otherwise that Bin Laden was just a gangster to be shot down, Dirty Harry style. The sheer ugliness, bloodiness, destruction and confusion of the death scene, captured on camera, will seem to sympathisers to speak more of a crime than of legitimate, official justice. To them, the blood shed here will indeed be seen as the blood of a martyr.

The reality in both events, of course, is that over the centuries we have not progressed much in how we do things. Stage-managed piety rules in Rome, dressed up to the nines. Elsewhere ugly violence is still the answer to ugly violence.  Superior weaponry and terrifying machines of obliteration, as in the future world of Terminator, are what the West contributes to the art of conflict. But with all their space age technology, the ultra-élite SEALs apparently still have found no bloodless way to victory.

So will the official US images of Bin Laden’s blood on the carpet achieve the desired effect of “proving” his death? I think not, any more than the elevated phial of the dead Pope’s blood will convince any sceptic of his sanctity.

And, with Lorca, I can frankly say, in both instances, “¡Que no quiero verla!”

CJM

Turbulence (2)

Sure enough, it wasn't long after the Japan earthquake and tsunami that voices started coming out of the woodwork declaring that the hand of God had dealt us this timely reminder of our wicked ways. The end of the world is nigh, therefore repent and be saved ...

What relief it must be for many, then, that mathematical evidence in at least nine (presumably the most civilised and educated) nations, strongly indicates that religion is hurtling towards extinction. These findings were reported to the Physics and Society Forum of the American Physical Society.  'Physics', as we know, in spite of having an Uncertainty Principle at its very heart, is commonly seen as the sole dispenser of truth in the modern materialist world. 'Dynamical systems theory' doesn't have quite the same ring to it -- as an eminent Oxford scholar once pointed out, to say you are a mathematician or statistician at a dinner party is a real conversation killer.

But leaving aside the question of nature as the mirror of divine wrath, there is a long tradition of belief -- and not only esoteric -- in humanity as participant in the work of creation. Creation is a troublesome word, though, and along with scaremongering notions such as 'design' and 'purpose' can drive happily logical and well balanced followers of Richard Dawkins into seizures of anxiety. So let's leave these provocative terms aside and turn to the idea of 'intention' which surely will not upset anyone. After all, we get up every morning with intentions, wait on the platform intending to catch the train with its driver who intends to stop for us today, as he or she did yesterday and the day before, and equally will tomorrow -- we hope.

Yes, hope and intention are inseparably bound up together. It's hope that gives meaning to our intentions. Our very hope for a better world prompts us to act with the intention of working towards a better world. As Gary Lachman points out in his new book, the Hermetic tradition, as opposed to the Gnostic tradition, sought to bring higher knowledge into the world as creative work. In this  tradition, as also in the Christian notion of 'stewardship', both our personal and our collective actions are carried out in a spirit of optimism that such a 'better world' can exist and that we can somehow participate in making it a reality.

This is the true message of the chaos and devastation in Japan: that we can still, in Kipling's words, though surrounded by a world in ruins, 'stoop and build it up with outworn tools'.

CJM

Turbulence (1)

Those prophets of great change around the potentially awesome date of 2012 -- see, for example, Daniel Pinchbeck's troubled account -- must be quietly reflecting that it's all shaping up as expected. Not only are entire societies and regions in turmoil, the planet itself seems to have stored up all those millennial events that never happened in 2000 and is dishing them out with ever greater intensity. If ever there was a time in history for humankind to pause and consider deeply how it goes about its business, surely that time is upon us.

Two extremes of image have impressed themselves on our consciousness through the upheavals of the last month. On the one hand, the sheer scale and fervour of protest in Cairo's Tahrir Square, following on from events in Tunisia and subsequently throughout the Arab world. At the other extreme, heart-rending pictures of the devastation inflicted on Japan's north-east by a truly millennial earthquake and tsunami, the total wreckage of homes and livelihood, the displacement of half a million people, the shock of loss made even more unbearable with the grim uncertainty of a possible nuclear disaster still hanging over Fukushima.

Something unites these two extremes, namely the ennobling quality of humans to join together in creative endeavour to, as Arthur Koestler used to say, lift themselves up "by their own bootstraps". We saw this self-organising potential in Cairo as the thousands gathered there in protest built up, as it were, a microcosm of the society they yearned for, without rancour, oppression, intolerance. All worked together regardless of race, religion or tribal loyalty, to make their tented city a well-run community. The Egyptians themselves were proud of this achievement, and drew attention to it as proof of the depth and sophistication of their society.

The Japanese, too, have displayed an impressive dignity in their response to immeasurable destruction and loss. Those less affected by the disaster have come together to help those most in need. We have seen no hysteria, no ranting, no searching for blame. Sadness and composure reign in the land of the dispossessed, a land which, from their current perspective, must seem lost for good.

CJM