The Farce Awakens

So far, I have seen The Force Awakens twice but by the time you read this it may already be three times. This blog is going to be about this film so if you don't want to stumble across plot points its probably best for you to stop reading now. For those who stay, may the farce be with you.

My thesis in this blog is very simple: The Force Awakens is a terrible, ridiculously badly written film that, as a story, is just pure farce. Secondly, it is also tremendous fun and I can see why people like it. But what about that rubbish storyline?!!

After all these years we finally get back to where we were (those of us old enough, at any rate) at the end of Return of the Jedi (that's the one with the teddy bears). Its now thirty years later and JJ Abrams has been tasked with making episode four all over again to make lots of money from people who just want the same thing rehashed bringing a new episode to the screen. But what's this I see before me? We have a funny, bleepy droid who is carrying vital information, a bad guy in black robes with a red lightsabre who wears a mask, a crazy pilot guy, a callow youth on a backwater planet who goes about her business but seems called to higher things. And what's this? There are a lot of bad guys in big star destroyers who also control a large planetoid that's capable of blowing up whole planets? Don't tell me, they have to penetrate its shields and blow it up at the climax of the film, right? What? They do? I've seen this film before in 1977. It was called Star Wars.

But its not enough that Abrams' "thinly disguised remake of Episode 4" (to quote Irvine Welsh) basically steals at will from the three Star Wars films people actually like (there are some echoes of The Empire Strikes Back too in the forest scenes between Rey and Kylo Ren). No, Abrams thinks he is up to the job of adding something new. That new is called Finn. And I truly feel so sorry for John Boyega who plays this character. Finn is the worst stormtrooper in the world. We see him in the opening scene as a division of stormtroopers lands on a planet to capture some information on the missing Luke Skywalker. Finn doesn't do much and despite being a stormtrooper barely seems able to fire his blaster. His buddy dies and then he decides he doesn't want to be a stormtrooper anymore. His boss notices he isn't as on it as the rest of his stormtrooper buddies and so asks him to report for assessment. 

At this point the worst stormtrooper in the world decides to run away and he kidnaps an important prisoner (the aforementioned crazy pilot guy) and they make a highly implausible escape from a star destroyer. (No force field at the exit? Even the star destroyers of 1977 had that!) Thereafter the worst stormtrooper in the world, who just wants to run away from the First Order, manages to spend the rest of the film being rubbish at everything... including running away. I genuinely do not know why this character is in the film or what it is those who wrote him into it thinks he adds. I think they just wanted to add a new guy and this was the best they could do. Unless there is to be some huge revelation in following episodes (which would be increasingly implausible the more pointless Finn gets) it seems to me that the character is just a joke, a bad joke without depth or purpose. He is Jar Jar Binks. Who cares if Finn lives or dies? He's just a bad stormtrooper who ran away.

This brings us to Rey, our callow youth of choice with a higher purpose in this installment. There is not much character development here. We are told that not Luke was left on the planet of Jakku (but not who with or how she is even still alive at this point) and she keeps mentioning how she has to wait there for someone to come back but, nevertheless, she decides to embark on a reckless adventure across the galaxy with the worst stormtrooper in the world and not R2D2 (actually called BB8) in a handily parked Millennium Falcon which, although it seems to have been left standing for years, here works perfectly. It seems pretty clear that in one of the next episodes Rey will be revealed to be a Jedi. Indeed, so desperate to tell us this is this film that it has Rey breaking out of jail on a star destroyer by telling the guard to let her go free. Abrams does not seem able to wait for the money shot here as George Lucas did all those years ago. Rey is a Jedi so let's not monkey about pretending we don't know, right? Never mind that she goes from somebody waiting for something whilst collecting scrap to someone using Jedi mind tricks in very short order and without ANY training. Even Luke had to do all that running and balancing stuff.

Oh, did I mention that Han Solo and Chewbacca are in the film? Han tries to play it like the old days but he's over 70 and broke his leg in filming so he doesn't so much run anymore as shuffle. Chewie looks about 30 years younger. Someone must have given his shagpile a good wash and brush up. He looks like a new Wookiee. (What Leia looks like we cannot say because people are being nasty to Carrie Fisher about it on the Internet. All I'll say is the filmmakers clearly didn't want her in the film much so she gets a few meaningless scenes where she looks suitably sombre.) Han seems to be in this film for three reasons: so old fans can cheer at his ridiculously stage managed entry into the film, so he can confirm to our new characters that, yep, all that Jedi shit is really real and so that he can die. The last one, so some say, was at the insistence of Harrison Ford himself. Even so, the way that Han Solo dies is very un-Han Solo. This is the guy who shot Greedo and lived the life of a smuggler and yet he confronts his killer (and son) who has use of The Force on a high platform with no weapons drawn? Has Han gone senile? Ok, Han has to die but this was basically a suicide.

And what of this son, Kylo Ren? We are told that he went berserker on Luke Skywalker and all his other trainees during Jedi training and we see some of this berserker in a couple of scenes of the film when things don't go according to plan. Kylo Ren is a very strange character. At the beginning of the film he can stop blaster shots in mid flight. We also see him manipulate matter and minds. And yet when ikkle Rey comes along she can block his mind control and beat him in a lightsabre battle. Kylo Ren has had some Jedi training with Luke Skywalker and some training (although not completed training) with the mysterious Snoke (who is the Emperor character of this film). And he gets beaten so easily by the girl from the scrapyard? We are meant to swallow the idea that Kylo Ren is haunted by the lightside so that he cannot go completely dark and this all seems set up for the character to go full Darth Vader at some point, return to the light, and all is well. Time will tell on that. As far as this film is concerned though Kylo Ren is a completely unconvincing character that must bend and twist to the whims of an incoherent plot.

What more is there to say? As I already intimated, the film is, despite all this, really good fun. This is despite the fact that Luke Skywalker's lightsabre is fortuitously found in a trunk beneath a bar very like the one in Mos Eisley. Good job they found it or Kylo Ren would have killed both Finn and Rey at the end. The bar owner, who seems to know everything, apparently due to the fact she is a bar owner because no other reason is given, says that the lightsabre is calling out to Rey. Well, of course it is. The threadbare plot demands it is so. Rey is given a vision of both the past and the future. She seems not to remember this when the future part, a lightsabre fight with Kylo Ren, occurs. Some say that Rey is going to turn out to be daughter of Skywalker. Isn't that just very unimaginative? These are but small points as is the fact that when our heroes have escaped and the not Death Star has been destroyed (very very easily) much as the Death Star was before it our droid heroes BB8 and R2D2 come together to show us the map to Luke which is what this flimsy film was supposed to be all about. Yeah, I forgot too but don't worry, the script didn't care much either. The film ends with Luke Skywalker on a diet turning to camera as Rey, the girl formerly known as the person who needed to be waiting on Jakku, hands him his lightsabre which she found on a planet she might never have gone to.

What a load of absurd nonsense with little genuine sense of peril or dread. In this case, though, incoherent absurdity is not at odds with enjoyable fun. Lucky for Disney. The farce seems to be with them.

Science, Consciousness, Argument and Materialism

Are you conscious? Do you have a consciousness? You instinctively want to answer "Yes" and maybe you think its rather dumb of me to even ask the question, so common-sensical does the answer "Yes" seem to you. But a number of scientists and philosophers, extremely materialist ones, would say that you aren't. And neither are they. They think your sense of consciousness is a very powerful illusion and that it is a function of your brain to generate this illusion. Of course, they think this partly, maybe even mostly, because they have a dogmatic view of reality as a whole. They think that everything is explainable in physical terms, in terms of physics and chemistry. So you can't really have a consciousness because that does not admit of a physical explanation. Therefore, they say, your sense of consciousness must be something the brain is doing. These people do not so much explain consciousness as explain it away.

It was with some enthusiasm that in a post-Christmas lull of activity I dived into texts and online video about varying views on human consciousness. Forty eight hours later that enthusiasm had been severely tempered if not completely extinguished. I had been following my thoughts where they led me, from this text to that, from one video to similar suggested ones. New thoughts and thinkers came up on my radar. I learnt that consciousness is very much a shibboleth for many, a stumbling block. Very soon I was into debates and forums and that is when things started to get too much. My head started to bulge and ache. Too much information, too much arguing, too much partisanship. I reflected on this. Why is so much modern debate cheap, adversarial and sarcastic with an undertone of nastiness on the side? Why are people so self-invested in their intellectual choices? Why is every thought laid down as a personal Waterloo?  

I'm mixing my discussions here in this blog. On the one hand, I'm wanting to research and discuss varying human views on consciousness but, on the other, I find myself discouraged by how my own species, human beings, seem to behave and go about that. In any debate these days, most carried out in the febrile melting pot / echo chamber / outrage arena that is the Internet, it will take very few steps indeed to go from discussing a subject to insulting the person raising the subject of the discussion to insulting many of the other participants in it as well. The next stage is getting your army of followers to descend from Valhalla and unleash hell on those holding views you cannot believe yourself. Battle lines are quickly drawn and thereafter all anyone does is defend the position they are entrenched in. More heat than light results and anyone who was there to try and learn from others and their points of view is quickly and thoroughly made cynical. Debate today, I conclude, is often conducted in the gutter and the aim of it is to score points, get hits on your opponent and employ as much ridicule as possible. Its UFC over points of view and beliefs. Am I naive for wanting to share and learn and thinking this might even be possible? Am I naive to want merely a lucid detachment, a humble enquiry?

I came across the work of a scientist called Rupert Sheldrake. He started out very mainstream and was educated in orthodoxy at the heart of all things thought right and good about science. As a biologist, he got a PhD from Cambridge, UK, had fellowships at the Royal Society and at Harvard and even made discoveries which were lauded in all the right journals, including Nature. But then he published a book in which he discussed "morphic fields" and spoke about "resonance" and "formative causation". As far as I can tell, Sheldrake was started down this path by asking himself why plants take the form they have. We might think this is to do with genes and DNA (in other words, a materialist answer) but this turns out not to be the case and this information supplies only a fraction of what is needed. (Sheldrake describes the Human Genome Project as a bit of a failure because the secrets people hoped to unlock by it have not come to pass.) We don't know how plants know to grow and look a certain way or why they look the same as the others like them. 

Sheldrake proposed what I understand as some kind of memory field. Basically, plants know how to grow because they know how other plants like them grew in the past. This holds true for animals too. For example, teach an animal to do something somewhere in the world and then other animals like it will learn the same thing much faster next time because they now somehow have the knowledge the other animal like them gained. The blurb for Sheldrake's book says

"the past forms and behaviors of organisms..... influence organisms in the present through direct connections across time and space".

Yes, I know it sounds a bit incredible but then if I'd told you the Earth went around the sun at some point in time you would have thought that silly too. (Also please note I'm not saying that this theory convinces me. To be honest, I haven't read the literature on it thoroughly enough to come to any conclusion at this point. I can say I have described it with far too little explanation here and maybe not too well so go read Sheldrake's books for a fuller and more adequate description of it. His experimental results that I read about, however, did make me think and sit up and take some notice.)

The book Sheldrake published, A New Science of Life, was denounced as heresy (yes, literally) against a materialist view of the world, the standard scientific view of the world that is put forward today and, thereafter, Sheldrake was viewed by the defenders of the mainstream and of this view of the world with a snigger and a sneer. The editor of Nature asked in an open review of the book if it should not, in fact, be burned. This is unfortunate because Sheldrake appears himself to be quite a reserved, quietly spoken and profoundly scientific man. Its important to note here that this is the case whether you happen to think there is something in his scientific hypotheses or not. To my mind Sheldrake is merely a very curious and scientific man who happens to want to investigate things other people don't. This is something to be praised, is it not? If you follow where evidence leads you should not stop if you start saying things that might threaten your career, your standing or your status within a professional field. Evidence leads where it must. But for many it doesn't. Some things are ruled kooky, off limits and things you don't talk about in polite society by those more concerned with careers than ideas.

Sheldrake thereafter started to follow his nose regarding his ideas and developed theories about consciousness (which is why he comes into my blog today) and things such as telepathy, things which a materialist would look upon as magic and impossible. He devised and carried out a number of methodologically scientific trials to test for things such as telepathy. For example, he ran trials in dogs to see if they knew when people might be coming home and on the sense people have of being stared at. He also ran trials to do with people thinking of someone who then, seemingly by coincidence, phones them. He was involved with trials on rats, teaching them tricks and then observing if other rats elsewhere could learn the same tricks faster as a result. In all these areas Sheldrake was trying to establish, on the basis of the scientific method, if there was more to things like this than blind luck or random chance. He determined that there was and laid out his results in the standard scientific fashion. He debated the results with skeptics (even challenging them to replicate his experiments) who seemed to disagree more with his conclusions and his implicit criticisms of their materialist boundaries than his methods and even though they themselves had no possible other solution to the issues he was raising and the results he presented. There was no substantial refutation of his experiments, their methodology or results. More so there was simply a refusal to accept or discuss them as there is to this day.

Today Sheldrake has moved on to a meta-discussion about science itself, a thing he sees as being held in the grip of a destructive materialism. The issue is that for those of a materialist persuasion non-materialist answers to questions are declared impossible from the off. Sheldrake finds this self-defeating and not very scientific in itself. His latest book, known as Science Set Free in the USA and as The Science Delusion in the UK, is an attempt to name 10 current "dogmas" of the scientific worldview (which Sheldrake would say has largely coalesced with the materialist position)  which are holding it back. He diagnoses that science itself has largely become a creed to be defended rather than that spirit of disinterested curiosity that maybe it should be. There are many prominent defenders of this scientific faith who are, moreover, extremely militant atheists (people like Richard Dawkins, P Z Myers and Daniel Dennett, to name but three) who actively look to police science and the public debate about it to the detriment, so Sheldrake would submit, of scientific endeavour as a whole. For sake of completeness I'll list Sheldrake's 10 "dogmas" of materialistic science below which he describes as "the 10 core beliefs that most scientists take for granted." (I have put some text in bold to highlight the main points.)

1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, “lumbering robots,” in Richard Dawkins' vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.

3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).

4. The laws of nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same forever.

5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not “out there,” where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

9. Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory. 

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

We can see here that Sheldrake's concern is to emphasize how much the materialistic creed is one which rules out certain areas of study or explanation as a matter of dogmatic concern. He himself wishes to refute them all. So materialism is essentially a faith that dare not speak its name. As I have said on my blog before, those like Richard Dawkins who hold this view are not the opposite of a religious believer: they are a religious believer and their religion is materialism. For example, to take the final of Sheldrake's points, materialists, so Sheldrake submits, would rule out any kind of healing or medicine that was not on the basis of the body being thought of mechanistically. So drugs are fine (since they treat the body as a big chemistry set that needs all the chemicals in balance) but holistic, alternative or other therapies are regarded as New Age and hokey folk magic. 

Sheldrake would also argue that the so-called "placebo effect" (where someone gets an inert pill thinking its actual medicine but gets better anyway) or the power of prayer or simply willing yourself to get better are also problematic for those of a mechanistic, materialist persuasion because such a point of view rules such things off limits as possibilities and, by definition, can have no explanation for them. If people could think themselves or be thought better that would present an insurmountable challenge to the materialist worldview which demands physical causes for physical things. Sheldrake is saying "Why not investigate this?" whilst others laugh and snigger at the very idea. Which seems more scientific to you?

So what to think of all this? Immediately one must admit that to accept Sheldrake's criticism of a science held in the grip of materialist dogma is not to accept his own positive contributions or theories regarding alternatives or additions to it. These are separate things and one is not committed to both by accepting one. Interestingly, in many of the forums and blogs I read about Sheldrake's criticisms of science the most common refutation was that "real scientists don't really think the way Sheldrake says they do". Sheldrake was accused of building a handy straw man it was easy to hack down. But I'm not so sure this is true. I see plenty of evidence at hand that science and scientific worldviews are held in the grip of a mechanistic materialism, one falling apart in the modern physical world of processes, energy and waves. I also take Sheldrake's point that all too many prominent scientists today are virulent atheists against anything that could be regarded as spiritual, mysterious or unexplainable from within a mechanistic materialist paradigm. Sheldrake correctly asserts that this position is held as a dogma. How else to explain those like Richard Dawkins who speaks of "wonder" on the one hand but "blind watchmakers" on the other? The watch image gives Dawkins away: the universe is like clockwork. Sheldrake is correct: there are those out to expunge beliefs in immaterial things or explanations and to make them, in a way quite Orwellian, unthinkable thoughts.

I am against this not because I believe in ghosts and ghouls, in gods and monsters, but because it is to artificially close off areas of enquiry for no other reason than that you personally don't believe in them. This seems a very dumb and thoroughly unscientific thing to do for me. You may regard Sheldrake's own theories as foolish and that is OK. It would be scientific to demonstrate that though if science is your game. The trouble is the most regular response to Sheldrake's own experiments is to ignore them. Some skeptics, he reports, have replicated his experiments and largely replicated his results too. But they are shy of doing this. In one debate Sheldrake reports that Richard Dawkins, another biologist, flat refused to debate his evidence preferring to criticize Sheldrake's refusal to take up the materialist position instead. Often this is done from a supposed position of power as the utility of science is lauded and, indeed, this cannot be denied. But it is surely relevant that those who endlessly chirp on and on about their passion for truth (as Dawkins does ad infinitum) should be criticized for their dogmatic assertion that truth will only be found in one place and not in others. Sheldrake is right to say that enquiry should go where it leads in a spirit of disinterested curiosity. Dawkins and his like are notable only for their remarkable lack of such curiosity where some things are concerned. This is a dogma, a boundary of faith.

And this is the point where the partisanship of modern day debate kicks in. By now you've made your choice and chosen a side I wouldn't be surprised to find out. But is it really about taking sides? My blog here is presented as the rambling thoughts of a man going through life just trying to understand the things that go on around him and sometimes impinge upon his own life and existence. That is what it is. I hope to do this in a spirit of somewhat lucid detachment. I don't need to defend my thoughts or my position because they are mine. I'm not saying everyone or even anyone else has to believe them. Its simply about me having a very naive honesty as much as I can. I'm well aware that my experience is narrow and that I know very, very little about anything. That is why the fact that you can read and communicate with others is a very good thing because you can take what they share and add it to your own data for analysis. But that doesn't happen as much as it should because confessional boundaries come into play and defensive walls get built by those more interested in defending what they think they've got than exploring together in a spirit of mutual curiosity. This is a source of great frustration. We live in a very public world where it is easy to belittle others and many can't resist the temptation for an easy "win" as they see it, often based merely on a numbers game.

Often in my thinking I find something interesting to read and, underneath, there is now the seemingly mandatory "comments" section. Often this is just hell. People of dubious qualifications (although this doesn't matter and is really an ad hominem approach) launch straight into personal attacks on those who think one thing or another. It doesn't really matter what they believe. What's important is that someone else doesn't believe it and that makes those who do stupid beyond belief. I find the whole exercise stupid beyond belief and I wish there were more places where debate could be to the point and not to the person (which is by far the biggest problem in any kind of discussion, that the subject switches from what is believed to who it is that believes it). Many times in comments sections about Sheldrake's books or work there are just insults tossed casually Sheldrake's way because he is that crazy guy who thinks dogs know telepathically when their masters are coming home. In a world of public forums you get a reputation and that reputation usurps the place that should have been reserved for consideration of the arguments. People get lazy and where formerly they needed to think now they just take "the word on the street" under advisement. There is a nihilistic schadenfreude at play that loves to tear down rather than build up.

There seems, not for the first time in one of my blogs, a lack of humility in many, if not most, people who debate these things. Sheldrake diagnoses this problem too when he says the problem is that some people these days think that science has resolved all the issues and now all we need to do is fill out the details. He gives examples from the ends of both the 19th and 20th centuries of people who have written that science will from now on discover less and less because we have already found out about most things. Its a matter of time not possibility. If we go on long enough we will answer all our questions and understand everything there is to understand. This belief strikes me as both arrogant and egotistical (as well as philosophically naive that there would be one answer to any question in the first place). Why, as Thomas Nagel writes in another recent book criticizing the materialist dogma, Mind and Cosmos, should any of the questions about the universe be within our power to answer? Doesn't that seem just a little bit egotistical to you, that human beings automatically must have the ability to understand? Why would all the answers of the universe be, as it were, human-shaped in their resolution, much less human-shaped and materialist? Is this a post-experimental conclusion or a pre-reflective condition? For the materialistic dogmatists this can only be because they have willed it so, forming a clockwork universe that can be measured and reproduced. But what happens when, finally, they are forced to accept that the clockwork was merely their illusion, a function of their indefatigable will to believe, another phase in human history?

It was the American philosopher and psychologist William James who said "We have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will" (italics mine). He said this in the context of explaining why he thought people had a right, if not a duty, to hold religious beliefs which they found themselves genuinely unable to escape the force of. He did it by expounding a general theory of human belief across the board and did not make any special exceptions for religious beliefs, something some would want to do today in these more polemical times. Of course, believing something does not make it a scientific belief nor one that attains the recommendation of that credit but this is another matter involving the tenets of scientific peer review and debate. Beliefs are things which, for most people most of the time, function as true, even where they are contradictory from one person to the next. It is, when you think about it, common-sensically true that this is the case and the world keeps on turning nevertheless. Indeed, our world of sense and sensibility is the one which allows this state of affairs. For some this will be irrationalism but is it really? I sense I may need further blogs on this and I hope to provide them but, for now, it is enough for me to say that one person's shibboleth is another's possibility. Where our world allows us to hold such a belief others should not be so dogmatic as to dismiss another's opportunity to explore it or so authoritarian as to disallow it. This is not to take sides in the debate or nail one's colors to the mast. There is a time and place for that. It is to say that for all genuine people holding their beliefs is not a choice but a necessity.

All this puts me in mind of something Nietzsche pointed to when he said that "Truth" was but the history of Man's "irrefutable errors". This thought puts in question if we ever really know anything in an absolute sense, the sense that a "law" of the universe would rightly have. I would argue that Nietzsche's insight tends to suggest that we may not. But the good news is that we may not need to in any case. We have happily got by on our habits of belief and our practical observations of the universe until now and there is no suggestion from anywhere that we will ever need anything else to do so. We don't need to make of the universe a mechanism nor say that everything that is must, as a dogma, be physical. Indeed, the vast majority of our species has got on with life just fine without ever concerning themselves with such specialized technicalities. We can be be sure that even the world's most dogmatic scientist would have to agree that we do not know everything, nor even how much there is to know and how much we know of it. But it doesn't matter. We get on fine anyway. I would humbly suggest that the best way forward is to let people explore where their beliefs take them in a spirit of disinterested curiosity and let us see where that takes us. 

The Gospel of Existence

In the beginning was the absurdity and the futility filled the void and the nihilism was forever. Everything that was in the beginning was emptiness. That which came to be was meaningless and the meaninglessness was everywhere. Nothing came to be that was not without meaning. In this meaninglessness was life and this life was the futile absurdity of Men.The meaninglessness fills the void and the void is nihilistic without end.

There came billions of beings out of the void. They came as witnesses to the futility of life, to testify to the nihilism so that all might comprehend there was no meaning to be found. They came and were not always well received as Men tried to avoid their experience and pretend otherwise. But those who did receive this testimony got no benefit whatsoever from the knowledge. They learnt only of the absurd, futile nihilism of their existence and of their fate: to come from the void and return to it.

Our futility became flesh and dwelt in the void and we saw its emptiness, emptiness that could only be an empty eternity in the void. Many testified to its purposelessness and empty promise. Nietzsche testified about it saying "God is dead and we have killed him!" Of its emptiness and futility we have all received, time after time. For hope was given through the naive beliefs of Men but the futile absurdity of life was given through the nihilism of the existence we all share. No one has ever seen eternal meaning and the void reveals the futility of it all.

Point A to Point B

And so we reach the eve of Christmas (or the first day of Christmas in some countries such as Germany where I used to live) and my last blog of this Advent. At times I've found it hard to write another blog and there was a wobble in the middle of that time where I thought I might run out of things to say. But I got through that and the topics kept suggesting themselves and then inevitably feeding into new ones. I only say something about things that I have something to say about. Where something holds no interest for me I leave it alone as not worth commenting on. Life is short and time is in limited supply, a supply that is always running out, so use it wisely is my thinking. Twenty four blogs in a row is quite a task to set oneself but I have enjoyed the challenge which took up quite a bit of my time. I took to the task seriously and when I write I always try to get what I want to say just right and to check that any facts I might relate at least have a source. My blogs may come across as just someone's thoughts but they are usually produced in interaction with other things, especially books.

My subject in this final blog of this series is intended to be a bit of a "what have I learned?" type of thing given that I have written twenty three blogs before this one. As I sit here now, writing, I wonder if anyone does learn anything from what I have written. This is not a vanity thing. As I've grown older I've become much happier to be in the background, which I kind of always was in life anyway. Popularity or even being known I treat very warily. Better a few dedicated readers than hundreds or thousands of false friends. My ego would, of course, loved to be stroked by the notion that some people have had an insight or two from things I have written. Why would anyone share their thoughts with others or in public unless they hoped to communicate something to someone else? We are social beings and that social element is always within us as a potentiality even if we become private people.

The over-riding idea that sticks with me from the series of blogs I am now completing with this one is the idea of a human existence as a matter of something that goes from Point A, birth, to Point B, death. Writing things down and having to explain them, as I have been doing, can often clarify things in a person's mind and such has been the case here with me and this idea. I have found it interesting to muse, as I've written the various blogs that interacted directly with this idea, how people's views might change depending on where they are along that continuum - or where they perceive themselves to be. Of course, the two might not necessarily marry up since we never know how near to Point B we actually are until its too late. And then, in my mind, we don't know anything at else anymore. For me this points up yet another factor regarding being beings in time, as we are. It is that your perception of time, and your perception of your place in it, affects your views on many things, not least, in the context of these blogs of mine, of yourself, your life and your existence.

It is a truism that many people have what are commonly called "death bed conversions" to some religious faith or other. As they see the doorway out of life opening and the fabled tunnel of light before them suddenly all that has gone before takes on a new context. This, to me at least, is very understandable and, indeed, practical as a general approach. I very much think that we should assess things from our current point of view taking into account our assessment of our current circumstances. For me, there is no necessary consistency in or through life and most of the consistencies we seek or value are usually faked in any case. Life is a very false business. Even the very idea of a consistent character or personality or identity is merely a convenient idea we dignify with our assent, a fiction we believe for its utility alone. I am who I am but every attempt to say what I am is a falsehood for the truth is I am everything you say I am and everything you don't say I am. Maybe it is better to say I am a collection of possibilities and opportunities?

Point A to Point B is, of course, a brief description of the road we are all given to travel, a way to describe how we come from nowhere and go back to it again, briefly passing through a world of sense and sensibility, struggle, chance and change where, suddenly, everything seems so important to us. But is it? Really? The challenges of things like the absurdity or nihilism of the existences we briefly have possession of (if it is true to say we have possession of them at all) produce, at times, a very real sense in me that life is just a performance without any real stakes. To some this will seem an immoral thought because they will be so wrapped up in the imagined seriousness and consequence of life. But I ask myself constantly if anything real is ever really at stake in life. We come, we go. Stuff happens in the middle, but so what? And this "So what?" has real force to me. You do need to explain to me why what you think matters actually does. The world is full of pain, injustice and struggle. Real people do hurt. People die. But every being that has a Point A gets to Point B. And at Point B what went before is rendered irrelevant. All pain ends. All suffering ceases. All punishments stop. You can be sure this thought has comforted many suffering people.

So, for me, I come around to a view that some before me have seen. For Martin Heidegger, a serious German thinker of great depth and detail, it was our "Being-toward-death" that sets the stage for our whole lives. We are beings who know from the formation of our first thoughts that we are finite. We are immediately and definitively set within a terminal boundary. And that cannot but change everything for us. Even though we can think and dream of various forms of eternity and, sometimes, in ecstatic moments, feel as if we can almost touch them (as I have looking at a clear blue sky on a sunny day), it is a dream forever out of reach. And yet (this is the paradox) we are and were always part of the story of that eternity for it is all around us and flows through us. That eternity is a void of nothingness, the on-going history of the energy that makes up the universe (thought of as physical not spiritual energy). The universe is a story that no one will ever tell for no being will ever be bigger than the universe to tell it. But it is a story we are a tiny part of. Our problem is that we want to hold eternity in our hands and we cannot.  

We are reaching that point of the year where most of us experience that feeling of an end and a new beginning. This is always an emotional time for me as I get caught up in the collective thought. As I get older its increasingly a recognition that, even though whilst young we think so, we are not immortals. And I don't think we should be immortals. We are physical beings and the physical things must pass away. As Nietzsche highlights, decay is as much a part of the physical world as growth. Birth and death are both alike physically natural processes. I am skeptical of those who want human beings to "technologize" their way out of life's physical downsides. This is not because I think people should suffer or die in pain. Its because physicality is a foundation of the human. Humans are those who suffer, who struggle, who need to make sense of it all in a universe that doesn't allow them to. To some, this will sound perverse, an inappropriate masochism. But I think the Transhumanists and Futurists with their shiny, trouble-free futures are the ones who need to re-examine what it is to be human and ask if what it is they are trying to create is not a new being entirely. Humans are born, humans suffer and struggle, and humans die. Change too many of the conditions of their existence and what you've got isn't human anymore. And humans are, fundamentally, mortal, vulnerable.

Professor Richard Rorty, now much missed after his death in 2007, had a saying that the agenda of the technologists, it seems to me, is very much following. It is, as Rorty said, just "another human project aiming to escape the time and chance" to which human beings, supremely, are fated. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to relieve suffering or stop pain or cure disease. We should do all these things because to be somewhere between Point A and Point B is not to be at Point B where things cease to have consequences. And those perspectives can be very different. But I think a focus on this, a focus on escaping our fate, is to focus on trying to not be human anymore as opposed to understanding what is at the heart of humanity itself: we are not gods. Of course, we want to be. As I said above, we want to hold eternity in our hands. But consider the rest of our fellow inhabitants on this tiny rock in space, the animals. They suffer and die as we do but they do not have the consciousness and mental abilities that we do. You may say that we have evolved an extra burden but, in many respects, we are as they are. And they are, in their ignorance, happy simply to live and die, to have been. I think that we should be too. Its the old adage about it being the journey and not the destination back again.

For what is at the heart of this human struggle to live and die? It is that everything essential we have has been fated. We chose nothing about the fact that we exist. We were, as some say, "thrown" into existence and are then expected to make the best of it. An essential aspect of the human experience is that so much of it was (and still is!) out of our hands and I think that is something to come to terms with. The trouble is that we are, in so many ways, determined to either narcotize ourselves against these disturbing facts in a "go with the flow" life of bad faith or, in a show of hubris, to imagine that we can engineer our way out of them. (As I write now my song Existenzkrise - "Existential Crisis" plays. I chuckle.) Things will of course change in our future. But we are still humans and its my view that we have barely begun to understand what that even means yet. I have spent all year on this subject (quite by accident) and yet even though I have thought and written much it seems that I'm still in the starting blocks.

I guess that the struggle to be human and to understand what that means is a journey we all take that one day just gets snuffed out, a process to which we are fated that comes from the void and goes back with us to it.

C'est La Vie!


PS: Of course, it does not escape me either that all this trying to escape our fate is very human too. In that case, perhaps the primary human trait is that we are fated to futility. What better example of The Absurd do we need? Nevertheless...

Christmas Poem

Christmas is bullshit.
Yes, its true.
Its all made up,
A load of poo.
There is no Santa.
Jesus is dead.
Put away your tinsel
And go to the Med.


Christmas is bullshit.
Its never some fun.
Sit next to Granddad 
and your farting Mum.
You eat too much dinner
and get shit you don't want.
Its like being invited
to bed with Donald Trump.


Christmas is bullshit.
They say its a laugh
Full of joy and peace
but I think its quite naff.
The tree is all plastic
and the mince pies are stodgy
and that X BOX you got
is off the back of a lorry and quite dodgy.


Christmas is bullshit.
I know you agree.
I could tell when you left table
to go for a wee.
The look on your face
really gave it away
that you think this is such
a god awful day.


Christmas is bullshit.
Its all so not a jape
and the presents have been wrapped
in industrial strength tape.
You pull this way and that 
and look like a twerp
and you can't get inside them
you flippin great berk!


Christmas is bullshit.
I won't tell you again.
Its like finding out you must climb
to the top of Big Ben.
So no peace on the Earth
and good will to all Men.
Get stuffed the lot of you!
I want to keep to mi' sen!*



* "Mi' sen" is Nottingham dialect for "myself".

Everything is Futile!

Its just like old times today on my blog. Not old times for the blog, but for me. Today I'm going to be reading something from the Bible and talking about it. In the 1990s and early 2000s you would have found me doing this normally because it was my academic education. I learnt Hebrew and Greek, studied history and literature and learnt about things such as "textual criticism" (which is the history of the reception and modification of ancient texts). But it all came to a couple of abrupt halts and now I barely do it at all. That is not to say that today is to be all about God. The book of the Bible I'm going to talk about, Ecclesiastes, barely has any interest in God at all. He is barely mentioned and more simply assumed. Were this not a book in the Bible you might not have much cause to think that the speaker in the book even thought that much about God himself. And, as we shall see, the God he talks about doesn't seem to do much anyway. This isn't a God who parts the Red Sea, feeds the 5,000 or sends down lightning from heaven. Maybe that's why he's not very interested in him?

"Everything is futile!" is the testimony of the speaker in the book of Ecclesiastes and from now on I'm going to call this person Qoheleth. This is the Hebrew name for the speaker in the book. It just means the speaker at a gathering and its not his real name. The book is headed with the name of Solomon, son of King David, him who was supposed to be full of wisdom, but that's likely just to get the book some attention. It doesn't matter anyway. I'm here for the content not the fame of the writer or speaker. And the content is about filling out the theme of the book which is announced in the very second verse: "Everything is futile!" A book that claims “Everything is futile!” as its opening gambit is a book that I want to read, think and write about. I want to know what it means by that and I want to know how it stands it up as a genuine assessment of anything. Hopefully in the next 10 minutes we will find out.

The book of Ecclesiastes opens like this according to the New Jerusalem Bible:

Sheer futility, Qoheleth says. Sheer futility: everything is futile! What profit can we show for all our toil, toiling under the sun? A generation goes, a generation comes, yet the earth stands firm forever. The sun rises, the sun sets; then to its place it speeds and there it rises. Southward goes the wind, then turns to the north; it turns and turns again; then back to its circling goes the wind. Into the sea go all the rivers, and yet the sea is never filled, and still to their goal the rivers go.

All things are wearisome. No one can say that eyes have not had enough of seeing, ears their fill of hearing.

What was, will be again, what has been done, will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun.

Take anything which people acclaim as being new; it existed in the centuries preceding us. No memory remains of the past, and so it will be for the centuries to come - they will not be remembered by their ancestors.

Sounds quite modern, doesn't it? Life is a bag of shit, right? No god to be seen. Life is just drudgery. Recurring drudgery. What's it all for? ("What does it profit?" is a recurring theme of the book as is futility and "chasing after wind".) It seems like 2,500 years ago, somewhere in the Middle East, things weren't so different after all. And back then they couldn't pass the time by tweeting cat pics either. Quite often in life "futility" is taken as the thought of naive and depressed teenage boys - and thus thoroughly (and all too simply) dismissed. But this statement is here being made in a major book of a world religion (or two if you also include Christianity which would controversially come to claim all things Judaism as related to itself). So this is not something that we can brush aside if we wish to take the considered thoughts of our fellow human beings seriously. I find it intriguing in the extreme that such a statement should be found in such a place. Ecclesiastes is one of those Jewish books regarded in its traditions as a part of the gathered earthly wisdom. So what is the wisdom in saying "everything is futile?"

A translation of the word here rendered “futile” is sometimes the word “absurd”. This is not absurd in the sense of funny. Its absurd in the sense of “inscrutable without end” - something which literally makes no sense - and so becomes a futile pursuit. The idea here is of things ungraspable - no matter how much you try or how strong your grip is. The Hebrew word at the root of all this is “Hebel” in English transliteration, a word which suggests an insubstantial fog. Life is fog. Everything is fog. And you can’t grasp fog because it will always slip through your fingers. Its insubstantial. There never was anything to grasp.

The thought is unpacked further beyond the bold statement. The reader is asked directly “What profit can we show for all our toil, toiling under the sun?” The book is thus addressed to everyone and is asking about life generally. This is not some dusty tome for a few clerics or academics. The book addresses you and asks you for your answer to the question. It seems to me that this is very important. Everyone needs his or her own answer to this question. What are you working for? What do you get from it? What of ultimate value and worth remains? Qoheleth or I or some treasured mind or someone else cannot answer for you. You need your own answer to this question. And, in the end, having your own answer that you feel resonating in your heart is the only one that will satisfy anyway. Psychologists, existentialists and philosophers have said the same thing in previous blogs of mine.

After this we get a series of examples which, to my mind, basically concentrate on an appreciation of time. Time goes on and on forever in its inscrutable, absurd, futile and foggy way. We cannot discern or divine its meaning or purpose. We make no sense of it. All things pass as it rolls along on its way and we become tiny and insignificant and forgotten. Suns rise and fall, rivers run, winds turn. Chapter 3 will tell us, patiently, that there is a time for everything. Life is variety and change. But then a slap in the face: all things are wearisome! Our writer has seen and heard enough, overcome by the deluge of time he, and us with him, have become lost in. Time is a void and in it we are as nothing, lost as the universe goes about its interminable business. These days we have much more time and space as our increased vision has revealed the enormity of it all. But even in his small, Earth-bound world Qoheleth felt insignificant.

This is a great context for us human beings, creatures who constantly need to be snapped out of our self-regarding, egoistic and exceptionalist focus on ourselves. I am sure that each succeeding generation of human beings sees itself as reaching out into the universe, attempting to be gods. Certainly, for some this is true today. We are fallible and trapped in futility, as Qoheleth claims, and yet we have visions of eternity. There are those of us who want to extend human life indefinitely. Others want to reach out to the stars and colonise other worlds. This, for me, is a case of Qoheleth’s “nothing new under the sun”. For it is not new that human beings, in their hubris, seek to grasp the ungraspable. Of course, it may not be that those so minded agree with Qoheleth and his assessment of everything. But then this is meant to be a piece of wisdom and its not always the case that the most knowledgeable are the most wise. We each take from the store of human wisdom as we are able to.

So am I saying that our technological advances and the associated knowledge and learning that come with these things are futile too? From the context of this section of Ecclesiastes, yes I am. The view espoused here is that everything together as a whole in the end makes no sense. This is surely true. And no amount of gizmos, gadgets and technological achievement can or will change that. Living an interminably long time, far beyond what’s currently possible, would not remove the question “What’s the point of life?” anymore than living for the 70 or 80 years we hope to live now. Unless your shallow answer is that the point of life is to live as much of it as you can - calculated in terms of number of years. One day the universe itself will die from heat death - and there will be no escaping that - and so the shallow desire for  extra years gives no satisfying answer to me. Its just one more grasp which grabs only at more fog.

There is a final focus in this opening gambit of the book which lays out its main concerns. This is the issue of memory. Qoheleth is concerned to describe a world in which nothing changes, nothing is new. This, in a way, is a very modern view of the world and of the universe. The universe, it can be said at a fundamental level, is merely the history of differing forms of energy. (This is a level far beyond most humans who see “the world” as being a story of human beings. Arrogant, stupid and wrong.) All that is is because of energy, because of energy in its varying forms. So nothing is new. The universe is just energy doing its thing until it gets so cold that all meaningful activity ceases.

Qoheleth sees this as a problem. And its a problem of meaning as most things in this book are. This is why clever people with their science and technology or their philosophies based on knowing things are somewhat impotent here. For meaning is not a subject which requires a PhD or science degrees. The question of meaning is a human question that addresses each one of us regardless of earthly status or egotistical qualifications. I myself regard the question of meaning as the fundamental human question of life. Put simply, we are thrown into the world and from that point on each one of us has to wrestle with questions of what things mean - and what everything means. These questions, and our ability or inability to find satisfying answers, will shape our lives. It is clear that they have occurred to Qoheleth too and his survey in this book indicates they seem to be generally occurring.

In this situation it is somewhat grievous for Qoheleth that nothing is remembered. Things are forgotten. Even today with our vastly increased archiving capabilities all the fine details fall through the holes in the sieve that is our ability to collect and preserve things. We may be able to save some things and a few facts. But we no longer know what things felt like. Memory is more than being able to reconstruct an event or tell a story just as understanding things is more than being able to measure or re-create them - which is what science basically does. Its to know what it was like to be there, how things felt. And that will not be remembered. As people pass away so their ability to explain and express dies with them. We are just left with relics, a very incomplete and insufficient record of past times. We fall inevitably into time’s void, unable to escape its irresistible magnetic pull. This is the way it is, Qoheleth plainly states. All things must pass. Time is a treadmill and we must take our allotted steps along it before being shot off the back to be forgotten.

In chapter two of the book Qoheleth decides to try pleasure and see if that can bring relief in a world of futility. "And this was futile too." So no joy there. He muses on the fact that the wise and the foolish have the same end. And so what really is the difference between them? This reminds me of something I blogged about before, thinking of life as a matter of moving from Point A, birth, to Point B, death. For Qoheleth it is grievous that this path is the same for all people. There is no benefit to being wise in terms of an outcome. Both the wise (which can also mean the morally good) and the foolish (which can mean the sinful) have the same end. At the time this book was written there was no conception of Hell as a place for the wicked. All alike went to Sheol, the place under the Earth which was just for the undifferentiated dead. Later Hell would be developed to make the choice of wisdom on Earth a more consequential one. But Qoheleth knows nothing of this when he writes and concludes that all one can do is get the happiness one can get from eating and drinking and enjoying such achievements as life grants. And that's it.

Chapter three is a musing on time and an interesting distinction is drawn between Men, who must simply take what fleeting pleasure they can get, and God, whose ways are eternal and inscrutable. Men are likened even to animals, since they both draw the same breath, and we are no better off than our fellow beasts. The Bible, as a collection of books and as a handed down tradition, of course knows that human beings were created and especially chosen by God and are the pinnacle of his creation. But that thought is not reflected so much here and we are far away from the thought of the book of Genesis. Here human beings are much like animals. They know as little about eternal truths as a sheep or a pig. God seems as far away from them as he does from the rabbit or the horse. Qoheleth even muses if human beings and animals go to the same place after death, so entwined does he see their positions relative to God. "The way God acts inspires dread," says Qoheleth, struggling under the weight of the eternal, something so very different from the life he sees around him.

Chapter four lapses into a familiar literary style, that of the Jewish wise man, and there are some snappy sayings such as "A threefold cord is not quickly broken" which praises the strength of togetherness. The section as a whole is loosely labeled as being about "society". Here, too, there is futility. It is futile how much injustice takes place and how people are robbed and cheated with no one to help them. Qoheleth is shocked at the amount of "power their oppressors wield". Again, this is all very modern and its easy to think of current situations that this description fits. Qoheleth congratulates the dead that they are beyond the injustices of life and even more so the unborn that have never had to see them. Life is full of jealousy and ego for Qoheleth and it poisons life. How true. How very true! Everything is futile and a chasing after wind. Life is not fair, it doesn't add up. Today we would be cynical about this as if it was a given. Qoheleth is not. He is trying to do the arithmetic on life and make it add up to something sensible. But he can't. There follows in chapters five and six various truisms about life. They add up only to more futility. But Qoheleth can contradict himself. Later on he will say "Better a live dog than a dead lion" and we can surely see the sense of that.

The rest of the book is a catalogue of observations about life and more traditional Jewish wisdom concerning it. People still have to live and so still need to know how to go about that, to judge between better and worse courses of action and, all things considered, cultivate a little practical wisdom for living. The big statements and overarching viewpoints thus recede as these more every day matters are concentrated on. Here we see that Qoheleth views life as something we are supposed to get on with and take responsibility for. Yes, he thinks that God is in his heaven but he does not think that God does everything for you. He knows that life is struggle and you must do what you must do to survive and that this is your responsibility. Its just that, in the context of the bigger thesis I have outlined, he wonders what it was all for. Qoheleth is a man who is honest and realistic about life. He does not turn away the difficult questions and neither does he fall back on unquestioning orthodoxies. All being said and done, he agrees with most other Jewish wisdom of the time that it is better to be wise than foolish and better to be alive than dead but its just that, even so, these things never amount to anything in the end and we humans remain terminally blind as to the point of any of it.

So this book of futility and frustration, that has expressed the absurdity of life as much as any book from a theistic tradition could do, could be summed up in some words from near the end of the book in chapter eleven:

However many years you live, enjoy them all,

but remember, the days of darkness will be many:

futility awaits you at the end.

The book itself ends as it began:

Sheer futility, says Qoheleth, everything is futile.

And so it is that even in a world of gods the absurdity of a world of foggy uncertainty and blindness, of an emptiness waiting to engulf us all, breaks in and infects every area of life. For Qoheleth the eternal is inscrutable and completely other. It is not for human beings to understand even if they can contemplate it. Indeed, we share more in common with all the other creatures of the Earth than with anything that could. We are weak and limited beings. Life adds up to zero for us whichever way we slice it and from whatever angle we approach it. What else can you do, then, but eat and drink and enjoy it while you can, if you can? But it will not be fair and judicious and there's nothing to be gained at the end. It is empty struggle. Is this a pessimistic message? I don't think so. It seems fairly honest to me. This can be summed up in the fact that, as far as I can see, for Qoheleth even believing in his god has got him nowhere in the end. Qoheleth does not live in a world where if you believe in the right god you are saved. Of course, he would still choose to believe in his for he thinks his is true. But, still, life is empty and pointless, in the grand scheme of things, for everyone equally. And surely he was right about that.

Being for Others

When I set out to write a blog back on December 1st I had, at that time, no inclination that 3 weeks later I would still be writing and that I would end up writing one blog every day throughout Advent. But so it is turning out to be. If you had told me back then that I would write a blog about "being for others" I would have thought you vaguely strange. I would have thought you were merely showing your ignorance of me, my thoughts and my attitudes. But in the process of writing the blogs that I have written between then and now I have come to the point where I need to write exactly that blog. And here it is. "Being for others" can be taken in two ways; it can be read through the prism of a background knowledge of existential literature or it can just be regarded as our attitude towards other people. It must be said that if you have been reading my blog regularly of late then much that is gathered together below will have been hinted at in much that has gone before. 

I am not the world's most sociable person. I am not going to win a "Humanitarian of the Year" award. At various times people may have regarded me as grumpy, misanthropic, unfriendly, unsociable and rude. And often I may have been happy to encourage these beliefs about me. For reasons that are not all clear to me, I have chosen to be private and closed off for much of my adult life. The rare times I have strayed from this path have often turned out to be reasons for embracing it more fully once again. But human experience is more than the things that happen to us. There is also the matter of what we do with the things that have happened to us, how we process them and where we file them in the biography of our lives that we carry around with us. Human reason and understanding are not slaves to their environment. We have freedom to think about things, weigh them and consider different ideas and come to differing conclusions. A person subject to cruelty is not fated to be cruel in return. Those subject to kindness may not always themselves turn out to be kind.

And so what of being for others? As I understand this it is through the prism of existentialist texts although I also have a background in religious texts that stress love for your neighbor and notions like that. In religious texts the care you show others is often a reflection of the character of the god the religion is supposed to be about. If not a theistic religion then it may be about honoring some spiritual notion or belief in the togetherness of things. From an existentialist perspective being for others is a matter of being responsible for yourself as a moral being and actualizing yourself as an individual by using what measure of existential freedom you have to broaden your horizons. In all cases being for others is seen as ultimately bouncing back on you and being good for you too. To extend another's peace, health or freedom is to extend yours too.

It is not my job here to appear as some kind of "do-gooder" saying that we all need to help everyone because we are all one and things like that. If anyone knew me well enough it would be easy for them to point out my own hypocrisy there anyway. The world is a complicated place and many competing thoughts fight in our minds for headspace. I have my thoughts and ideas and you have yours. And besides, once you get into the nitty gritty thats when the general principles that every one can agree on (such as "love your neighbor as yourself", the so-called "Golden Rule") start to break down under the harsh, unforgiving glare of partisanship. Some think, for example, that Capitalism is the best way to care for most people. Others say its Socialism. Some say we need a creed of brotherly (and sisterly) love. Others say we are all children of Gaia. But my concern with "being for others" does not go that way. 

Wishing to bypass all those types of arguments I really just want to give some kind of testimony to the insights that the kind of blogs I have been writing recently have opened up. One is the old insight, that we can never tire of having, that helping others takes you outside yourself and gives you a purpose beyond yourself. This has been demonstrated many times to be psychologically and existentially beneficial to human beings. Life, egotistical and individual as it is, cannot be all about you. This risks a detrimental solipsism. In the same way, it is quite paradoxical how being for others helps strengthen you yourself as a person. It might be thought, pre-reflectively and pre-actively, that if you want to be strong you should concentrate on yourself. But this, so psychologists have shown and philosophers have argued, turns out not to be the case. Whilst many of us would be critical of theistic aspects of religions and their regular claimed sources of authority which can too easily lead to notions of kingdom and dominion, the moral ideas of many religions would be more widely accepted here with their ideas of treating everyone with respect and living in peace, even going so far as to help the poor, the sick and the troubled.

I'm strangely conscious at this point that I may be preaching to the converted. After all, every one helps someone in trouble, don't they? Well, some do and some don't. (Today I saw a news headline "McDonald's customers step over man collapsed on the floor".) And some put themselves out of the way of other people so that the question doesn't often arise and seems strange. But I find myself forced to ask what other consequences being for others might have beyond those that first come to mind. Does this, for example, entail having an eye for issues of social justice and political responsibility? It may well do and philosophers and religionists have both played active roles in these fields throughout human history because of their felt need or other felt imperatives to act. But it is often people who are neither of these things who felt themselves, or their friends, family and neighbors, to be being treated unjustly or unfairly and so rose up and started movements to bring about social and political change. I'm reminded at this point of the thought "How you can you be happy whilst outside there are those who are not?" and the old school hymn "When I needed a neighbor were you there?" comes to mind too.

At this point some would say that you cannot bring all the troubles of the world onto yourself. All you will do is crush yourself under their weight and be of no help to anyone else. This is true. But those citing this belief do themselves a disservice if they stop there with the thought as if that settles the argument and they can go back to caring about themselves to the detriment of others. Admitting you cannot help with all the world's problems is not to admit that you cannot help with any of them. Indeed, it is very likely that there are very simple things that everyone can do to help someone and, all these little steps adding up, it may be seen that we, together, get a very long way. The problem comes when the idea I began this paragraph with is harnessed to the belief that this world is really every man for himself. It can be. But it doesn't have to be. Its a choice. If you think it is then that is the choice you make. Something I read 2 days ago comes to my mind. Someone wrote as a newspaper comment somewhere that from a cosmic perspective we are all irrelevant. We just need to realize that from that same perspective we are all equally irrelevant. Ego gets in the way.

The problem comes when people don't take views like that seriously, views from way outside of themselves. It is easy to live life with blinkers. I know. I am a specialist at it. Most of you reading this will live in towns or cities and so its very likely that within a mile or two there are people with no homes and struggling for food. I can't speak for you, but that troubles me. This doesn't mean that I can do anything about it but its arguable that it might mean I should or we should. People are wrapped up in themselves and their own survival. Or is it they are wrapped up in their own comfort and leisure, in spending whatever time the Bank of the Universe has deposited into their cosmic account on themselves? Again, people make their own choices. But when I stop to think I have to say it makes me uneasy how many people have nothing when we, as a race of beings, have so much. No one in this world needs to be hungry or homeless. If they are its because of choices other people made. People like us. This all seems to pass a comment on us and not a positive one. What's our responsibility?

Ultimately, we are the only ones who have to live with and justify ourselves to our own consciences. Many people do indeed live in bad faith, a hollow version of the values they know they hold and the people that somewhere inside they wish they could be. They get caught between their ideals and their perceived realities and between the poverty of looking after number one and the riches of deploying their resources beyond themselves. Contrary to the prevailing ideology in our world, life is not about how much stuff you've got and making the bottom line of your bank account the biggest number you can make it. It would be a hell if it was about doing those things and ignoring the starving of the hungry, the injustice of the oppressed and the pain of the suffering.

There is an old philosophical debate that is sometimes had between notions of quality and quantity. It is often applied to life thus: would you rather have ten years of absolute top quality life or 100 years quantity of life where no quality whatsoever is guaranteed? To my mind choosing the quantity option is what most people do and that, to me, is the life dominated by things, by ego and by hubris. You go for the amount without any reflection on what things mean or are worth. This is thinking dominated by amounts of stuff and I regard it as shallow. Thinking like this gives you something in common with Donald Trump or the Koch Brothers who love to tell you how rich they are whilst you can see quite clearly how shallow they are. I've always instinctively gone for the quality option. Because quality, depth of experience, actualizing this life with some kind of meaning thats not just about you, is what counts. Do you remember the warm feeling you get when you do something good or help someone you don't have to? That's what quality feels like and it feels like that because you gave something of yourself away. And money and things can't buy you that, no matter how much you've got. Its when you get that feeling again that you start to realize the wisdom behind our mutual irrelevance in the universe and our mutual need for each other because of it.