Thirteen Keys to A New Vision of Life

Cultivate your cosmic lack of importance.
All is relationship, everything is interconnected.
Be content with what you have, the way things are.
Love your neighbour as yourself, do not do what you hate.
If you want to be rich do nothing for money.
Blessed are the poor. Do not distinguish between people.
Thoughts are fictions, thoughts are choices.
Nothing remains, everything must be let go.
Flow as the river, without thought; act non-action.
When you see the ordinary as sacred everything is in its place.
Peace is the highest good. The middle way leads to peace.
Now is the time, there is no other.
Know nothing.

These are all actions, how to live life, states of becoming. They are called ‘keys’ because I think each helps unlock something if we take them seriously.


Cultivate your cosmic lack of importance


It all begins with humility. But the first key is not “be humble”. Instead, I speak of a cultivation, a tending to, a concentration on, an ongoing process, something also relevant to every key here. I also speak of a context rather than an abstract. That context is the cosmos, the universe, everything we can imagine existing. In the context of that, what are we? To cultivate your cosmic lack of importance is to groom yourself into a non-egotistical state so that when various people tell you that you matter or that you are important you take it in a context in which it should be more properly set. So cultivating your cosmic lack of importance is not regarding yourself as the lowest of the low or the dregs of existence. Instead, it is an “everything in its place-ness” where that is just to co-exist with all things. It is an inability to concern yourself with status or rank or importance. It is a living, active humility, a non-egotistical becoming.


All is relationship, everything is interconnected


That all is relationship and everything is connected is to recognise and actively embrace that you are not the only thing that exists. Once that is realised, you begin to see things in the context of other things or as a set of interlocking relationships. It becomes the viewpoint of actions and consequences or non-actions and consequences, for, whether we act or don’t act, things must follow. This, then, becomes an existence which is about consequences, relation and interconnection. Since you are not all that exists and since things must inevitably affect other things, a more rounded view than “just me” becomes necessary. So this realisation is also a further example of a non-egotistical existence and a contextualisation of ourselves as a link in a chain or as a set of interlocking relationships. We surely cannot abstract ourselves from everything else for it is everything else, in its possibility, that gave us birth and enabled us to exist but, more than that, that enables existence at all. So such a view is the end of the abstraction or instrumentalisation of both people and things. Instead we think of their linkages, relationships and interconnections in non-egotistical ways.


Be content with what you have, the way things are


At first flush, this might sound cruel or harsh. We imagine any number of oppressive situations or contexts and we ask how the people in those situations could be “content” with them and so accepting of “the way things are”. Indeed, many in our society today preach the exact opposite to this third key that I am here putting forward. They speak of not being content with your lot and the way things are. But this key needs to be approached in the right way to understand what it means. It does not mean to be accepting of oppression or to explain away pain caused by others or the domination of one person over another. Instead, it means to cultivate (there is a lot of cultivation involved in these keys for it is not imagined these are qualities we necessarily have already) a principled indifference to circumstances, to see through the narratives humans impose upon life. It is also to accept that no one person, or group of people, control the way things are or what happens, both things far beyond the capabilities of either. In fact, it is a refusing to rush to settled conclusions about this time, this place, our life and its context. It can also be seen as a seeing things at their best possibility at all times and an acceptance that change is always going on. In fact, this key very much interacts with key seven in this respect. Yet there is also a sense of flexibility here, a privileging of flexibility over possession of something thought ideal which can easily lead to greed for more or an obsession with possession. Indeed, this key seems not to accept that an ideal ever exists to be possessed. Instead, we cultivate contentment in ongoing situations, a training of ourselves, a discipline, a meditation, regarding a process. We treat all circumstances as imposters just the same.


Love your neighbour as yourself, do not do what you hate


These two commandments compounded can be seen as a summary of the entirety of social morality and, indeed, the key to achieving it. The first is famously taken by Jesus as a summary of the Jewish law and exampled by the parable of the Good Samaritan in which he suggests that even your enemy in danger is your neighbour. He thus answers the obvious follow up question to “love your neighbour as yourself” which is ‘Who is my neighbour?’ Yet this is also a third key which focuses on the dissipation of ego. For in taking yourself as the measure and acting to others as you would hope you yourself receive there can be no ego. For here is recommended both an active “love” of neighbour rather than a mandated passive attitude if a neighbour should, by chance, come your way, and an active not acting towards others in ways you would hate, the negative form of “the golden rule” known in human societies since antiquity. In both cases activity, an active mentality, is envisaged. It is a way we are imagined to actively pursue, a path we choose to go down. If growing numbers of us acted this way human societies would be transformed.


If you want to be rich do nothing for money


No one ever suggested that these keys would leave the world as it is with just a little decoration around the edges, as if all that is needed is a few cosmetic changes to a world that is basically sound. On the contrary, that’s not my view at all. Instead of basically sound I see it as fundamentally flawed and one way it is fundamentally flawed is economically. This is far from simply a case of redistribution of wealth, however. Indeed, I seek to abolish wealth, eradicate money, and obliterate commerce. My fifth key takes this from the individual point of view by totally devaluing money and by asking each one of us to find wealth in other things. For the fact is that money is not the inherent way to wealth. Instead, money is a communal agreement to accord value to it from which imagined wealth springs measured by how much of it you have. But, that being the case, we can change our minds. We can choose to find wealth elsewhere. We can forget the dogmas of economics, devalue them and infuse other things with value instead… such as human life and dignity. Money is basically a system of valuations but, as can be clearly seen, it is not one without negative effects. An economic system requires losers and so creates them and holds them up as examples to the rest of what might happen to them if they aren’t careful.


So why do we live in a world where people starve because they cannot pay for food? Is an economic mantra more important than human life? Why do we live in a world where someone might die of a treatable medical condition because they can’t afford to pay for the treatment? Is an economic mantra more important than alleviation of human suffering? And the important thing here is this isn’t a given, an unavoidable fact of nature: its a human choice to value money and economy over living beings. I find that inhuman and I revolt accordingly from any kind of economic system which judges people according to ability to pay or financial means, something our current world does as a matter of course as it credit rates them and judges their current and future earnings ability. In my view, we need to free ourselves of this terrible burden and imagine a world without money, without finance and without commerce and it starts with each one of us forgetting the monetary motive in our daily lives. We could make money valueless and make caring for each other the supreme value if we wanted to. Its in our gift to decide how society should run. We should dare to dream of better rather than settle for worse or imagine that our course is set. For that, of course, is what the haves in an economic system will always want the have nots to think. But how about we remove such structural inequalities whole and entire? If you really want to be rich do nothing for money.


Blessed are the poor. Do not distinguish between people.


I would describe this as a reversal of the current world order, a bottom up rather than top down ethic. “The poor” I regard as the ordinary mass of people, unassuming, perhaps existing from day to day, week to week, month to month, which is most of us. They are those you would not raise above others. They are not famous, they have no status, they are those who must be active to maintain their circumstances. But this ethic goes further than that. It is not just about treating these people, these ordinary, every day, regular people as blessed, and blessing them by your actions towards them everyday in friendship and community, but it is a refusal to admit notions of status, rank or standing to our social ethics and morality at all. People should not be compared and judged better or worse based on judgments about things like race, creed, colour, gender, physical and mental ability or sexuality. There should be no method or idea which splits people up along ideological lines in order to have “the better” and “the worse” or “my side” and “the other side”. Not distinguishing between people entails the abandonment of any and all partisanship. Instead, the prevalent creed here is one of common humanity, even common life if we see ourselves as living things like so many other things that are alive. And so this can also broaden to encompass an ecological dimension as well. But it is important we begin with those in the worst circumstances and work up rather than the other way around. In caring for the worst off we care for ourselves, for we are all the same. To add value to another’s life is to add value to our own. What you do to another, you do to yourself.


Thoughts are fictions, thoughts are choices


Everything you think is wrong. Everything you think is an imposition of thought, that is always related to the thinker, imposed on things outside that thinking. Thoughts are interpretations and interpretations are not inherent to things as essentials of the things. Instead, they are rhetoric about things, ways to explain things, possible descriptions, meaningful understandings. But in each case they could be different. Our thoughts about a thing or situation are not the thought or situation or even equivalent to the thought or situation. They are just one possible set of thoughts about it. So everything you think is wrong. But only because there is no right. So thoughts are both fictions, sometimes useful and sometimes not, and thoughts are choices, in the sense of things that didn’t have to be and in the sense of other options (redescriptions, reinterpretations) are available.


The consequences of this are huge. For example, if some thought is giving you a problem then rethink it in a different way for the first way was neither the only way nor the essential way. There is also the thought that we need not think at all, at least not in the way we have formerly been taught, as if life and truth and knowledge are about having the right thoughts and, having collected up all the right thoughts, thought itself then ceasing to be necessary. Taoism speaks of non-mind and non-thought and these are important concepts for this particular key. In thinking we are not seeking a thing called knowledge or truth which we can possess and thought itself is not about possession. Indeed, here we do not seek to wall ourselves in by the artificial boundaries of thought which lead to knowledge at all. We seek only an emptiness which is an openness. That which we “know” is accorded no status. It is not ranked in a hierarchy. Our minds should not hold onto things but, instead, let them go. This encourages becoming and avoids the ossifying lack of flexibility that “knowledge” or “truth” promote. In thinking, it should not be imagined we gather the essence of anything for our thoughts are merely temporary and ephemeral, impressions as we pass by. High understanding comes from not understanding at all.


Instead of knowledge as facts that can be possessed and may be accorded the supposed honour of “truth” this ethic valorises knowledge that is experience. It is an experience in the moment that we each can have. It is not based on academic learning or a canonical narrative. It is not about building up a collection of right thoughts you distinguish from the wrong thoughts. Here possession is loss, not gain. Here every moment has its own integrity simply because it became and it is about its own natural authenticity. Reality, imagined by scientists or philosophers, does not exist. It is artificial. What is real is what you experience as you experience it rather than how some commentary, any commentary, may describe it. Commentary is interpretation and interpretation is never foundational in any intrinsic sense. Commentary is boundary rather than openness to reality. There is no reason why reality need be, or could be, reflected in words. So there is no need to seek truth. Simply cease to cherish your own opinions, a further anti-egotistical move.


All you know is wrong. All you know is fiction. All you know is choice. Thinking can only ever imprison you in a room of your own creating. Freedom, and, ultimately, peace, is not-thinking not-thoughts with a not-mind. Here I promote mindfulness, the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience. Epistemology is abandoned in favour of possibility in which there is nothing to gain and nothing to know. Thoughts aren’t fixed realities but simply movements of a mind that is thinking and so we see thoughts for what they are: the passionate attachment to unreal and non-substantial things, the creation of fictional identities that fade so that only the energy remains. We must realise that nothing is as it seems, that what we think is not the same as what is.


Nothing remains, everything must be let go


This key is an observation, a context, one it is imagined the reader should take note of. This is that everything is moving, changing, passing away, in every moment of our lives. Of course, we are doing these things too and none of this has anything to do with how we feel about it, whether we believe it or whether we have knowledge of it. For this constant change is not something constrained by us or our thoughts. Rather, it is the other way around. The mountain range we observe may seem solid and eternal but over millennia it wears away to dust. It doesn’t just happen one day; it is always happening until it doesn’t exist as a mountain range anymore. So nothing remains and everything embodies change. But, that being the case, it is sensible to adjust ourselves to this situation by having minds appropriate to it. The things we hold in our heads, both as objects and ideas, must also be let go. For, just as we cannot stop the mountain range wearing away, so too these ideas and objects pass away as thought and language changes over time. Here we combat the conservative notion to freeze things in time and give them an eternity and a fixity which is strictly inappropriate to them. All conservation in the end is a wanting to have things forever as they are now or in some other imagined better state and this is always a fight against an unstoppable force, the force that is change. The issue is, however, that our nature, nature itself, is change and we must accept and internalise that fact if we do not wish to lead constantly dissonant lives. We must learn that nothing remains, all things must pass and so all things must be let go.


Flow as the river, without thought; act non-action


Here is a metaphor and a concept. The metaphor is the river. The river just flows. It goes wherever the water will go and adapts to circumstances as they are come upon. It has no purpose and does not want anything. It just flows, never holding on to the ground it flows over, always continuing on the way. The concept is non-action, wu wei in the original Chinese. This non-action, so I understand, is an active quality. It is not a doing nothing. That is why the second half of this key is to act non-action. In a way, the river is itself a good metaphor for this too. For the river acts, it flows. But none of this is deliberate. Flowing is what rivers do even as the flowing that is living is what human beings do. Yet do we live as the river flows, with non-action, an unintentioned lack of concern with where and how and why and what for? Non-action is lack of intention, lack of care or worried concern, but, more than that, an indifference to such things, a cultivated lack of intention. Should the river care if it flows this way or that, here or there? So within this key is also a hidden warning: beware the dangers of care, of desire and of intention which can lead us astray and disrupt our lives. Be as the river.


When you see the ordinary as sacred everything is in its place


The key here is to see every moment as a special moment, to fully inhabit and experience each of those moments. It is also not merely to see the ordinary as the sacred but to see the sacred as the ordinary, to not section off bits of life as special but to allow the special, the meaningful, the valuable, to infuse the whole of life. This then becomes a recontextualisation and reconstitution of life itself. Some bits aren’t more important than other bits; each bit just happens as it will in an ongoing process and each is indebted to what came before as will that be which comes after it. Sacred and ordinary therefore become synonyms rather than opposites.


Peace is the highest good. The middle way leads to peace.


This is a key that I have thought long and hard about. In fact, its not an exaggeration to say that my whole life has been spent thinking about it. The issue is “What is the highest good?” and my answer, after almost one half century, is that, in the end, it has to be peace, personal, social, planetary, cosmic. There are other values or qualities we might wish to take that place instead (like love or compassion) but, ultimately, these are things which lead to peace in themselves by their existence and their being in evidence. So, finally, it is peace I take as the goal and this goal is the unspoken goal when I speak about all of the other keys.


But if peace is the goal how is it achieved? The answer seems to be that it is by avoiding extremes and hence the preference for the middle way devoid of intention, desire, care, concern, worry. In ancient Greek thought there was sometimes a dichotomy presented between reason and passion, logic and feeling. But I reject this bifurcation as inaccurate and misleading. There is no such thing as a passionless reason or as a reasonless passion. When operating by logic, so it is imagined, we have not then turned off our feeling, as if it was something we could ever turn off in the first place. What we are is organisms, holisms, that include both reason and passion, feeling and forms of logic, at all times. There is no turning these off. They are always there. So the peace that we seek must always appeal to both or neither equally for there can be no one without the other. Here too we must follow a middle way rather than appeal to one thing at the expense of another.


No doubt this involves appealing to more than yourself for even a person who has isolated themselves still has surroundings. So there is an element of co-existence to this, a sense in which peace is about more than simply your own, settled state. Can one be at peace if elsewhere others are not? This is an important ethical question that we should be concerned with. For myself, I imagine that the more people who are at peace, the more they will be able to share that peace with others - and so increase their own. Peace, then, involves fraternity, co-existence, holistic thinking, a “middle way”, that is in the midst of everyone and all things.


Now is the time, there is no other


Existence is always in the now, this present moment. We never exist in the past we imagine or the future we expect or hope for. We live in an ever present that rolls on. When we die and our identity fades our matter will still exist (some think our consciousness will as well) in that ever present but we will not. This key is really nothing more than a fresh realisation and emphasis of this, that now is the only time we ever exist in, the only time we can ever influence or experience. So we should enjoy and experience each moment of now for there will never be another time. Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it now.


Know nothing


It is a long held insight of philosophy that wisdom is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom. The keys I offer here, especially this thirteenth and last, are broadly anti-epistemic but not anti-wisdom. They take a dim view of knowledge as it has been valorised and rhetoricized in the Western tradition, they see through its puffed up, egotistical claims of insight and importance. This key challenges us to take the same attitude and do the same thing, to throw off canonical narratives and fictions imposed by personal and organisational authorities, to see that life is not something we need a set of hard and fixed rules for. Understanding, might I suggest, is not something that anybody needs to have. Bean-counting up the universe and writing the complete set of facts in a book that we can call “The Book of Knowledge” is literally an unachievable aim. One can be happy, or at peace, without reason. As the Buddha once claimed, “There is nothing to stick to.” (He said this because “Everything changes”, by the way.) “If you understand,” runs the proverb, “things are just as they are. And if you do not understand, things are just as they are.” So what is the difference?


The issue is that knowledge as a general category is very prone to being used egotistically. This key, by the way, is nothing to do with knowing how to do things. When I say “know nothing” I do not mean “do not know how to do anything”. On the contrary, this key is about how we view knowing and knowledge philosophically, what place we give to them, what stature we imagine they have. Enlightenment here is regarded as knowing what you do not know rather than counting up all the things you suppose you do. Knowledge, under this rubric, is never a cause for pride. Indeed, often knowledge is regarded as a trap or a blind or a stumbling block. So sure are we of what we know that this knowledge becomes a bind and a stumbling block that has been self-imposed. Better than knowing, then, is an empty openness to all things. Here the ethic is that if you change how you see you will be able to see how you change. Knowledge, on the contrary, is not about change at all. It is about setting in stone. But in a world of change can that ever lead to peace… or only to ever increasing dissonance? So this key is to see knowledge more as experience than collected facts and to see this insight itself as a piece of wisdom. What you possess, you lose.


Note

These thirteen keys should not be read separately as if they were distinct items. Instead they should be read interactively and in relationship with one another, holistically. Then one can, hopefully, see the consequences of one for another. It is the thirteen keys together which unlock a new vision of life, the world and existence.

Rich Hall, Stewart Lee, Louis CK, Diogenes and Two Jesuses

The American comedian, Rich Hall, had a show in 2009 called “Hell No, I Ain’t Happy”. I mention it because, hell no, I ain’t happy. In fact, I find it hard to believe I’ll ever be happy and, up until this point at which, as I write, I am approaching the age of one half century old, I never have been happy as a settled state. I’ve been concentrating on trying to stay sane although I’m not sure why as being insane would at least relieve me of the burden of being concerned about it either way. In fact, were it not for brief moments of happiness that had strayed way off course and found themselves populating my hellhole of an existence, I would easily be able to believe that happiness is a myth told to to keep us compliant and hopeful.

The British comedian, Stewart Lee, likes to play a character on stage that he refers to in mock interviews and real ones as “the comedian Stewart Lee” and this character is a version of Stewart Lee himself yet, in Lee’s mind, at least, a rhetorically distinguishable version. This version of Lee does comedy exclusively for “an insular cadre of socially challenged, middle aged men” although, as Lee notes as part of his act, to laughter, not as exclusively as he’d like. Indeed, in a more recent show than the one from which this anecdote is taken, the comedian Stewart Lee goes on to say that his ideal room is a completely sold out empty room. He’s got the money, because people have bought the tickets, but he doesn’t have to do the work of bringing them round or appealing to their comedy sensitivities.

I wonder how the American comedian, Louis CK, feels about this. CK is now most famous for deciding it would be a good idea to masturbate in front of women, sometimes asking permission and sometimes not. It seems it never occurred to him to say that it was “the comedian Louis CK” doing these things. As I write, he recently made what is being reported as a come back appearance at a New York comedy venue only for lots of women to complain in public on the Internet that the disgraced Mexican-American should actually have just disappeared forever. These women, it seems, do not believe that CK has yet suffered enough for the crime of exposing a few inches of flesh in the wrong circumstances. The thought begins to dawn on me that, perhaps, they wish he would just go and hide in a corner and, to all intents and purposes, cease to exist as a public individual.

One wonders how the fourth century BCE Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, would feel about this. Diogenes, so we learn from historical anecdotes, would masturbate openly in public and then remark that he wished it was so easy to fulfill l the desire of hunger as it was to fulfill the sexual desire. A little rub and its gone away until next time. Yet Diogenes would be in jail if he were here today, a pariah and a target of outraged feminist critique, and all because he was dealing as simply as possible with the sexual urge where someone else might see it. But what else could he do, masturbate furiously in his barrel? Diogenes, of course, might have replied to the effect that it is no big deal. Sex is natural and not shameful. Seeing an animal ejaculate is nothing to be frightened of or outraged about just like when your dog licks its embarrassing erection yet, strangely, does not appear remotely embarrassed. At best, it is perhaps something to laugh at, dismissively. Diogenes was a Cynic which means that he thought nothing natural could be a source of shame. His enemy was culture, the artificiality of human beings who codify and make rules for things that take human society away from living “according to nature” in general.

And now, in my fifth paragraph, I come to my fifth man. That man is Jesus, alternatively known as Christ, Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Lord, Jesus of Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus H Christ and Jesus, the carpenter’s son. There is no record of the King of Kings ever having masturbated in public, although it seems he did get heckled from time to time, and there is that one saying about chopping your balls off if you are up to it. Yet he did not speak about “the religious figure, Jesus Christ” and neither did he ever say he was happy. But this, it turns out, is not something he could have done anyway because Jesus was not a writer. He did not write and perhaps, most likely, could not have written if he had wanted to anyway. Jesus was almost certainly illiterate. When we bring together the notions of Jesus and writing it is always someone else’s writing about Jesus and never Jesus’ writing about Jesus. Jesus, most likely, did not have the ability or the will to present himself in writing and so it was left up to others, often people Jesus didn’t even know, to write about him instead. Which of us would be happy with that? The religious figure, Jesus Christ, might be happy with that. He has gone on to have the biggest career of all time. But what about Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean?

I strikes me that Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean might be mortified by the career that the religious figure, Jesus Christ, is having. He would, it seems to me, more than likely be banging his head against the wall of his carpenter’s shop shouting “Make it stop!” if it weren’t for the unfortunate fact that he is dead. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean, did not ask to be brought into the White House, the seat of American presidential power, and used as a totem or a proxy for policies of any kind of modern partisanship. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean, did not share some bread and fish with some people so that guys wearing pillow cases on their heads could express their hatred for Jews. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean was a Jew, unlike the religious figure, Jesus Christ, who was a white European-looking fellow and so obviously not a Jew. The religious figure, Jesus Christ, was more the Jesus who would be happy to be at a right wing rally where the supremacy of the white race could be reasonably discussed. As the whitest person in history, the religious figure, Jesus Christ, fits right in there. But not Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean. Stupid Jew. Literally.

Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean was not a modern, white, evangelical businessman. He did not have family values. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean said, “The person who does not hate father and mother cannot become a disciple of mine.” He also said, “If you have money, do not give it at interest. Instead, give it to someone from whom you won’t get it back.” He said that people have nowhere to lay their heads and that people should “Become passersby”. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean was fucking insane. He would not have been accepted into your cosy, well-funded church on Sunday. He would have been chased from the door had he even showed up. He had literally nothing to say about homosexuality, abortion clinics or making America great, either again or at all. He would wonder why there were bishops who had thrones in cathedrals and lived in palaces. But not the religious figure, Jesus Christ. He gets that. In fact, he wants you to hang his portrait up in the palace and have a statue of him in the cathedral. And please use his name as much as possible to justify whatever it is you want to do today.

At this point I should apologise to any female readers because even though Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean may have recommended chopping off your balls for the kingdom of God he was still a man. Very much a man. You don’t see any female carpenters now do you? And the religious figure, Jesus Christ, is basically a huge, shiny penis being waved in your face, Louis CK stylee. The religious figure, Jesus Christ, is the very appendage of life. He wants you to eat him. He insists. So this is a very man-centred essay about a very manly subject. God is not a woman, Ok? That’s just a fact you’ll have to get used to down at the Women’s Rights Centre as you discuss the tax on tampons and misogyny in the computer games industry. So, ladies, if you please, the men are talking about men here. It would serve you well to watch, listen, learn and, fundamentally, know your place. Oh, I know that some churches have female priests and even bishops now but, come on, all the proper churches don’t, the ones that actually have eaten the big, shiny dick of the religious figure, Jesus Christ.

Now Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean, was a poor man. I mean really poor. Destitute, in fact. And he really disliked people who weren’t poor. He would have hated rich men in suits crowdfunding their campaigns to be congressmen and senators whilst greedily snuffling at the trough of corporate endorsement. (You may wonder why I keep referring this essay to American things when I am British but this is obviously because America is the most important country in the world in every respect…. For those reading this who are unaware of the British comedian, Stewart Lee, I don’t think that. I think the opposite of that.) He would have despised CEOs of multi-national companies outsourcing their work to some third world cesspool where people work knee deep in their own excrement for 22 hours a day, not allowed to even go and relieve themselves elsewhere because it might slow down production and reduce the profit margin by 0.0000000000001%. So, this being true, isn’t it somewhat perverse that the religious figure, Jesus Christ, is exactly a friend of all the slimy sons of bitches that Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean never would be? How the hell did that happen?

It turns out that this is what happens when Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean does not write his own PR material. Then what happens is that bozos turn up later who don’t particularly see the advantages of Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean, who likes the poor and encourages everyone else to become it by giving all their money away, but do see the advantages of someone called the religious figure, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, as British motoring buffoon, Jeremy Clarkson, likes to call himself (shouldn’t that be “JC”?) is many times more preferable because, since he never actually ever existed, much like “the comedian, Stewart Lee,” you can actually say pretty much anything you like about him. He is what feminists like to call “a rhetorical construct” and so is very much like “toxic masculinity”. The best thing about being a rhetorical construct is that you can get away with saying anything because you will always be able to fall back on the notion that what you are talking about never really existed. Of course, you should never actually say that because the whole point of the religious figure, Jesus Christ, is that you maintain to the utmost of your ability that he does exist. But, of course, he doesn't really. Just never say that out loud.

All this would have flown over the head of Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean though. He was not up on feminist discourse. He wasn’t interested in corporate endorsements. He couldn’t even write his name. And he didn’t want to. He just got his hammer and chisel and chopped at bits of wood. Sometimes he wandered about and ate food with people. Like a mug. He talked about the kingdom of God and said it was like a weed that infests your garden and draws in birds who will eat all your seed. Then he said it was like mould you put in bread that infects all the bread and makes it rise. Was he off his nut? What is this gibberish? No wonder you never find his picture in palaces or his statue in cathedrals. The religious figure, Jesus Christ, is much more suitable to the task of being our cultural battering ram for all the things that we think but that we can say that he really stood for. Rhetorical construct, remember that.

The religious figure, Jesus Christ, does not mind this because he gets a throne at God’s right hand and he appreciates that kinda thing. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean, said he had nowhere to lay his head and, apparently, wandered about the countryside like some kind of tramp. That message will not play well with the upwardly mobile demographic that we are aiming for as they try to not default on their mortgages and upgrade to the next model of car whilst saving for the newest iPhone. We do not want people to find nobility and blessing in their pathetic lives, much less meaning. We want them to imagine that they can have something better… but not right now. After death. Right now you have to give us all of your money and suffer. Suffering is good. Look, the religious figure, Jesus Christ, suffered. He was crucified, for God’s sake. (Yes, literally.) But he has a throne now. Geddit? Suffer now, throne later. Right now you have to hate homos, baby killers, people who vote left and anyone who hasn’t got a gun. Its what the religious figure, Jesus Christ, would have wanted. You know he’s in charge upstairs, right? How do you think things will work out for you if you get there and you have all the wrong views? “No one comes to the Father except through me,” Ok?

So forget this dope Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean. Forget the poor. Forget giving all your money away, hating mom and dad, loving your enemies, being merciful, not judging, taking the log out of your own eye, and that parable where the king invites everyone to the banquet, “both good and bad alike”. As if! That is all terrible stuff, literally the opposite of the good life in today’s world. If you want a good life then you need the religious figure, Jesus Christ. He hates immoral people and is going to burn them all… and you need never look in the mirror with him. He only cares about the bad people and not us good ones. And remember, Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean was a vagrant and can you trust vagrants? No, you can’t. We arrest vagrants. Just for being vagrants! Vagrants are morally culpable simply for their vagrancy which is a kind of social marker for immorality. Any decent person has their own home. Diogenes was a vagrant and he masturbated in public. Like Louis CK. But the religious figure, Jesus Christ, never once so much as touched his own penis. In fact, he was asexual. Never had a single sexual thought. His mind was pure. He never even had an erection because he was too busy thinking about being good and burning the immoral who have far too many erections. And that’s just the feminist lesbians! So would you really choose Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean over the religious figure, Jesus Christ? Its your ass on the line here.

You never realised all this was at stake really, did you? But there is a reason that God speaks through the religious figure, Jesus Christ, and not the leftist conspiracy fabrication that is Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean. That reason is that God has moral values. God, who is white, knows the value and righteousness of good, white values, of making money, looking after yourself, your family and friends to the detriment of all others whilst bearing arms as a God-given right. That’s why we know that the Jews who killed Jesus are not going to heaven, because the religious figure, Jesus Christ, says so. Remember, the religious figure, Jesus Christ, is alive. He rose from the dead on the third day just like the four holy gospels (who were written by four trustworthy white men) say. But this Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean, he died. He died like a dog on a cross and no one knows what they did to him. Probably eaten by dogs or dumped in a pile of bodies with his face in someone’s ass. Do you want to be associated with that? Do you want to follow assface and wonder around like a tramp spouting parables about seeds or do you want a throne in heaven whilst all the bad people get the hellfire they deserve?

Hell no, you ain’t happy now, are you? Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean isn’t looking so good now. He’s almost a masturbator, that vagrant bastard. You can’t trust anyone who hasn’t got a home, right. They are dangerous. Their vagrancy might be catching. Do you know, he even advised his followers to go knocking on doors so that they might get food? This is why the religious figure, Jesus Christ, asks us to live in gated communities so that we can keep scum like that out. You never know where the hand that knocks on your door might have been. Best to see them stopped at the gate. By the security guard. Let them wipe the dust from their feet. See if I care. We don’t need your fake news kingdom of God communist Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean. The religious figure, Jesus Christ, who is white unlike you, has our thrones ready for us in heaven. Which is also white. What’s that? “Everyone who glorifies himself will be humiliated, and the one who humbles himself will be praised?” Listen, Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean. I am white, the religious figure, Jesus Christ, is white and God is white. If you think I’m living like a tramp in the dirt, relying on whatever I can find to eat and mixing with those who can, at best, be described as immoral undesirables, then you are much mistaken.

Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean made a mistake. He left his PR to other people and now other people prefer the religious figure, Jesus Christ. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean is now fake news, a commie Christ, a socialist masturbator’s wet dream. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean wishes now that he had learnt to write as he lies, mouldering, in an unmarked grave with his denuded face in someone’s bony ass. He cannot believe that he left the job to the four white guys, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They seemed trustworthy at the time but instead of repeating what he said they made up stories and sexed it up until they had the religious figure, Jesus Christ, instead. Weren’t they listening? Which bit of “blessed are the poor” did they not get? Instead, they went with the whole “son of God” angle as if Jesus was a white guy. They went chasing after Roman approval as if pleasing those in charge was what mattered most. Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean never said that big organisations should be created with people living in palaces. He never endorsed telethons to fund churches or expected the pastor to live in a mansion. Which bit of “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant and whoever wishes to be first among you must become slave of all” did they not get? Jesus of Nazareth, the destitute, illiterate Galilean hunkered down in his unmarked grave, depressed. He wished he had learnt to write.

Partisanship, Collectivism and Individuality

This blog is to be about thoughts arising for me personally from the Avital Ronell affair. The what? you may be asking. Who is Avital Ronell? This, it turns out, is a point well made for those  of us (overwhelmingly most of us) who are not academics and who, much less, are denizens of that very niche location "comparative literature studies".  Ronell is a Professor of German and Comparative Literature at NYU (New York University) who was this year accused of a campaign of sexual harassment of a male postgraduate student under her supervision. This becomes stranger when we learn that Ronell, who is 66, identifies herself as queer whilst her accuser, Nimrod Reitman, thirty years her junior, identifies as gay.  Yet it is not my point here to trawl through the accusations in detail and those who want to do that will surely find several reports detailing this by searching accordingly. Instead, my point here is to raise fairly broad questions about our society that arise from this example for in its juxtaposition of the imagined "usual" roles in cases of sexual harassment a number of rather ugly things crawl from under the rocks.

One aspect of this case that immediately strikes me is that before the case was even made public (by leak from what is meant to be a confidential process) a number of colleagues and supporters of Ronell (from across US academia) had written to her university employers pleading her case. It has subsequently been revealed that they did not have the full facts of the case  at their disposal when they did so. These supporters included Judith Butler, one of the better known feminist academics in the world, who has since had to back pedal on the content of the letter in support of Ronell, not least because the content of the letter intimated that Ronell's status and the quality of her academic work should be held in her favour and also because the letter in part attempted to discredit the male complainant.  One can only imagine  how such arguments and tactics might have played with the co-signees of this letter had the accused been a heterosexual man and the complainant a female of any description. Arguing that status should speak for an accused and attempting to discredit accusers has been excoriated loud and long by many commentators (and rightly so) when the roles are reversed.

This raises the spectre of partisanship and jumping the gun where the individuals in such matters are identified as allies or enemies of the cause. Clearly, those writing to NYU in support of Ronell did so as those supporting someone they identified very much as an ally. Their belief was that an ally should be defended even as many of them no doubt believed her incapable of the acts she was accused of. Some, I'd have no problem believing, no doubt imagined it was all part of some greater conspiracy to bring down feminists like Ronell. But what strikes me is how many on the Ronell side of the fence are those who often write about power, or the operations of power, yet in this case seem totally blind to the fact that, in this situation, Avital Ronell was the one with the power and, according to others, she had been observed to abuse it before. Yet the point here for me is not what Ronell did or didn't do, grievous as that may be in its own right, but that those studying power and its effects become totally blind to their own studies when its an ally in the firing line.  Some, such as Queer Studies scholar, Lisa Duggan, would much rather we focus on "the structural issues". This seems to me like a smoke screen. It is not structures which make people do bad things. There is and always will be bad people responsible for bad things when they are done. Obsessing with structures does not, and should not, let the guilty off the hook. Indeed, if everyone acted appropriately the ideological and idealist structures would be shown up as the excuses they often are. Personal responsibility does not stop because "the system made me do it".

But there is a further unprobed assumption of the Ronell supporters here and its evident more widely in various other debates. This is that, somehow, being gay or queer or feminist is somehow special and that being one or any of these things somehow makes you immune to doing wrong. To be gay or queer or feminist somehow is imagined to make you one of the good guys, ineluctably on the side of right and constitutionally incapable of doing wrong. This belief is casually sown across social media by any number of sympathetic accounts such that the problem in society becomes maleness or heterosexuality or, more archetypally, male heterosexuality, the combo that should not dare to speak its name. At this point Harvey Weinstein might be thrust in our faces to hammer the hackneyed point home that heterosexual men + power = the subjection of all women and the corruption of a hoped for equal society. This attitude, where it raises its ugly head, is nothing other than a crock, a simple shitty belief. But it is instructive of one flavour of feminist agenda.

The problem, however, is that Feminism is not one thing and the word itself has become of doubtful use, in my opinion. For what does "feminism" actually mean? Often, its suggested it means equality but I would reject such a naive equation out of hand. Whilst some feminists, and some feminist agendas, approach and pursue the quite sensible and humanist desire for equality, often trying to avoid confrontation in the process, others are much more blatantly little other than anti-menist in which, according to their anti-menism they dub "Feminism", men are always the problem and removing power and influence from men is always the solution.  Thus, in cases of sexual assault or rape where women are the victim some such people say we should simply believe the woman's account regardless of evidence or any kind of thorough legal investigation.  Check out past Guardian columns of Jessica Valenti for lots of that.  Whether you think this is right or wrong it doesn't look much like equality and you can bet that Valenti doesn't think we should ever just believe men for whom a gender they did not choose has made them constitutionally unreliable in her eyes.

This itself belies an incipient and seemingly thorough-going collectivism in much discourse today as I pondered during my daily walk. Why is it that today no one is seen as an individual anymore, a person with their own story to tell and their own life to lead, a person who makes their own decisions and is their own set of beliefs, desires, hopes and fears? Instead, in much discourse today, academic or otherwise, everybody is designated as a set of labels and descriptors, they are ciphers for a category of human beings. I, for example, become not the name on my birth certificate which designates a person who has led an individual life but am, instead, a British white male heterosexual. And you better believe that there are some people out there who have lots of things to say about British white male heterosexuals and it doesn't matter whether or how much any of these things apply to me personally because if I am a British white male heterosexual then they are both true of me regardless and good enough to pass muster in some conversations. Does this dissection of society have any credibility at all? Because I wonder. What this becomes is lots of people in ideological bubbles talking about their thoroughly rhetorical and ideological creations AS IF THEY WERE FACT which are then applied to real world people as if the rhetoric just slides out of the conversations into reality without a join, a map that naively is the territory it rhetorically claimed to map.  Having watched several George Carlin shows online recently I have found myself becoming more persuaded of his position, which he came to in the 1990s, which is that individuals are fine. How you get on with a person you meet is real world stuff. But groups of people, collectivisims, that is a crock of shit. It is easy to see in much modern discourse, where all that is talked about is ideologically conjured groups that are as idealist as they are ideological, how this has proliferated to our mutual disbenefit if not destruction.

In fact, truth be told, I hate all the partisanship. I hate the social media rhetoric of team this and team that, I hate the idea that we are all allotted our groupings and then we are set free to battle against each other to the death, a real world game of thrones that never stops. Is this the best our greatest academic minds can conjure up? Is this what billions in currency buys us from our educational establishments? Must academics and others set themselves up in fiefdoms from which they direct cultural battle operations? This last item was also evident earlier in the year in the UK when a campaign was started by some female academics who felt disrespected for their imagined achievements and so began pointing out that they had a PhD. They changed their social media accounts to reflect their titles, Dr this and Dr that. What struck me about this was that there were some female academics opposed to this move and who wanted to challenge the notion of status, societal as well as academic, that this might insidiously also communicate.  I wonder if you feel that someone with a PhD has a status which demands some form of special acknowledged respect? For myself, I think being a human being is what demands respect. Titles and social denominations much less so for if we give the first the second becomes unnecessary.

I've gone on long enough for what is just a personal blog. Yes, of course I acknowledge that there is a world out there and that the struggles are often real.  There is pain, unfairness, inequality. I agree we should lessen pain where we can, decrease unfairness and increase equality. But I don't think you have to sign on Feminism's dotted line to do it. In fact, I don't equate Feminism and equality at all. Equality is a humanist value in my understanding and the ethical goal is to respect a human being for being a human being in all their particularity. I simply don't go along with all the sectarian collectivisms that we have conjured up. That is what leads to people writing letters of support for an ally before they even know the facts. It is what leads to Nationalism. It is what leads to the notion that we, but not they, should be "great again". Collectivisms make life about those like me and those not like me and that, in blunt language, is partisan bullshit. I, like Diogenes before me, am a citizen of the world. I am not to be reduced to a British white heterosexual male. I'm another person, a human being. We all are. So you can keep your categories and collectivisms. I'm not interested. I will continue to treat people as individuals with their own integrity and regard them accordingly.  I would suggest you do the same, for all our sakes. But in the end that's up to you.

So Who Do You Want To Be?

I am writing a book about ethics. Below is the prologue to that book.

It is with courage and hopefulness that I set out to write this book. This is not because of my own situation nor because of the situation I regard the world as being in which, in my estimation, is perilous on both counts and largely ignored for fear of perhaps having to do something about them. No, this courage and hopefulness come from the task I have set myself which is no less than to think about this world of our existence ethically, to muse upon figures of ethical interest from its past and to apply ethical thinking to problems of its present. Why might this task encourage “courage and hopefulness” you might wonder? It is, I think, because in performing such a task one realises that we humans can do better, it engenders hope and possibility. Of course, some have remarked that hope is, of all our failings, by far the worst because it keeps us hanging on to a possible but as yet non-existent future when we should let go and deal with the consequential present. This may often be true but this does not make hope any less a human quality and we are all, in the end, human. This perhaps obvious yet, for me, also deeply profound truth, that we are human beings, is something that has fascinated me for many years along with the obvious question it inspires: what does it mean to be human? One answer might be “to be ethical”.

But this is not to predict or prejudge the outcomes of this book of which I, its writer, remain at this point unaware. In thinking about writing this book I have not decided on conclusions I want to arrive at nor, I think, do I know what they will be. Of course, this is not to suggest that I am currently a blank slate onto which will be written my ethical conclusions. Indeed, as I set out I am not even sure that I will come to any ethical conclusions nor that I should want to. We live today in times much more conducive to libertarian strands of thought in which being told what to do by others, much less by others with a presumed authority, is found unwelcome. In this situation one more person telling us what to do will be unlikely to be happily received. Its also true to say that my predisposition is not one of rules and regulations, of precepts and prohibitions, for, having a spiritual sense and background, I long ago learned the wisdom that for something to be true it must come from inside a person rather than being imposed from without. And so I set out with the view that ethics is not fundamentally about rules people should follow but about what kinds of people human beings should want to be.

I chose to divide the book into two unequal parts. The first is to deal with ethics historically through certain individuals or schools of thought. This is not because I hold to any notion of inspired individuals and, in pretty much every case I will make use of, the people more directly referred to are each set in their own social contexts. Diogenes came from a particular time in Greek thought, Jesus was a member of occupied Jewish society before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Richard Rorty had a socialist and democratic upbringing (in the political not party political sense) and so on. I do not regard any individuals I will refer to as islands nor do I think of people as islands in general which is probably important to recognise as I begin my journey. As to the reasons I have chosen Diogenes, Qoheleth (the writer of the Jewish book of the Tanakh of the same name), Jesus, the schools of Zen and Taoism, Friedrich Nietzsche, the musician, artist and writer John Cage, those we may refer to in a discussion of existentialism and the pragmatist philosopher and public intellectual Richard Rorty, these are threefold. First, they are all people or schools of thought I’ve had a prior interest in and so are not completely unknown to me. Second, they all have an ethical interest, both from the outside looking in and within themselves. Third, there is no third point. Rules are made to be broken.

Having engaged with historical figures and forms of thought I will then address four areas of contemporary cultural concern. These are sex (encompassing sexuality generally and its expression in pornography and sexwork specifically), migration and race (the two, in today’s world, seem very linked), gender (which is separate from sexuality for my purposes here and more to do with identity) and what I’ve termed “politics, utopia and direction” which is to be a discussing of politics but set within the context of what it is nominally for which is to take society as a whole to an imagined better future, if that doesn’t now seem hopelessly naive of me. In turning to discuss contemporary issues I will hope to provide some clarity on the issues involved, including setting out any relevant ethical questions and what is regarded as being ethically at stake in the issues concerned. It is hoped, as I set out to write my book and do the necessary research to enable me to write it, that the historical aspect of my study will lead to me having tools to be able to address the issues concerned in the second part. All of my historical examples do express opinions on how one should live and that is partly why they have been chosen. What that will amount to in the writing is, as yet, excitingly unknown.

One point to note here, as I try to be as self aware and as aware of my environment as possible, is that in contemporary ethical debate one common observation today is that people are very cognisant of who they are speaking to and what they are (and are not). This is to say, not with much favour, that today people often argue the person and not the argument. This is regrettable. However, the truth is that today “identity politics” is a strand of contemporary debate one must take note of. I regard it as concomitant with a very strong partiality that pervades contemporary discourse, one which is not interested in evidence, investigation or debate but merely in supporting a pre-chosen side or party or identity. Whilst this may be understandable, I do not regard it as very helpful or as very fertile ground for useful debate and I am myself, by disposition, not so inclined. One point that I imagine will come out through this book (for I hold it as true from the outset) is that any future ethical world will surely not be a matter of people just like you, whoever “you” happens to be. Thus, the fact that I am a white, male, (almost but not quite entirely) heterosexual, middle-aged Englishman might mean that, for some, these things that I am but cannot change are obstacles because I do not fit into their predetermined idea of what someone worth listening to looks like. All I can say in response is that any ethical insights I might have are made both because and in spite of who I am. And that if the future is thought to be “sticking to your own kind” then perhaps we are worse off than I thought.

Before I finish the prologue it is required that I share a word or two on why this book is called “An Anti-Conventional Ethics”. Here I can only admit that I betray some familiarity with what will be my historical reference points for they all, in their own ways, redefined the current debates of their times. It is a presupposition as I enter this ethical arena that human beings have too often over-complicated, denaturalized and falsified their lives which have, consequently, become ossified artifacts that have lost touch with the world around them, making of human life something false, illusory, artificial and nihilistic. So besides being “anti-conventional”, something which I hope, but cannot certainly predict, will be more naturalized at the end of the book, this is also to be an anti-anthropocentric ethics. You would surely have to be blind, either physically or intellectually, not to recognize that we are not the only things alive on this planet. As I write now I do not hold the view that, of all things, the humans are most special, holy, set apart. I am, at least for now, unashamedly a holist in many ways and so I will be looking for an ethical whole rather than for bits of ethics here and there, much less for the ethics of one isolated species. I hold to the view that no one should be happy whilst other living things are in pain and nor should your existence impinge on another’s… as far as this is possible.

To many religionists the point of religion is some kind of salvation. Religion, in its turn, can take many forms and I have mused before on how certain kinds of atheist or transhumanist seem very religious people to me. But what then is the ethicist, the one who seeks an ethically-infused future? Is this but a transformation of a salvatory scheme into something very of this world, perhaps even an abandoning of heaven in the belief that we can make our world paradise? I must admit that I am now not so naive that I can believe in human salvation anymore… in any sense. We deal with variations of imperfect and perfect isn’t, wasn’t and will never be in view. It is too much for human beings, and might even be immoral, to think of paradise when all around are people who needlessly suffer and die on a daily basis. It is rightly said that we get the world we allow but, in that case, we need to look in the mirror, collectively and individually, of the world we do allow. I began by saying that setting out upon this task had awoken me to the idea that we humans can do better. That is certainly true. But it will only happen if we want to be better people, to treat people in certain ways, to show who we are by being the people we can be and not the ones we settle for. We live in a world of action and its consequences and so, however we act and according to whatever law, there will never be anybody to blame but ourselves.

So who do you want to be?

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.

There is Nothing Necessary About The Human Being

Earlier this week I wrote a blog about what I called "human exceptionalism". I could also have referred to "speciesism", it later occurred to me. The term would have done equally well for the phenomenon I was talking about. But it occurs to me that I can go further in my thinking than I did in that earlier blog, a blog which asked why we find it relatively easy to denominate some beings as lesser beings than ourselves and then commit atrocities upon them. The direction that we can go further in is that one which asks us to address human beings as a species in themselves. We can do this whilst at the same       time recognizing that our species, the human being, is just one of millions that this planet has produced, the vast majority of which have been and gone again, vanished from the planet that once gave them birth. Indeed, a wide spectrum view of life on Earth, if not elsewhere in the universe, seems to suggest that life forms in general have their time and then they vanish, a cosmic version of Andy Warhol's "famous for fifteen minutes".

Outside of the pride and ego of the human consciousness there is no reason to think that we, the humans, will be any different. But due to the way we have developed, and the higher brain functions that have come along with it, we can imagine other futures, ones in which the humans survive. Indeed, some imagine futures in which the humans become the first creatures to leave this planet and colonise others, heading out into the vastness of space. As time passes by there will certainly be an increasing urgency to do that and a scenario somewhat like the plot for the film Interstellar may arise. This is because space, that still, quiet, unchanging void, is actually none of these things. Things are changing in space all the time, constantly. Its moving. Its just that this change occurs over such unimaginably long periods of time that our tiny species, that lives for a few decades, never really lives long enough to notice the difference. One of the changes that will have occurred in what we would call the far future is that our sun will have grown in luminosity to such an extent that the heat it gives off will terminally threaten our existence. 

And this is what the universe is like. Its a dangerous, changing, chaotic place. From a universal perspective what are human beings but just another form of life? What are you and I but just individual examples of this "just another form of life"? You and I are as an individual ant is to us. Or a worm. Or a slug. There is, from this perspective, nothing special or remarkable about us. There's no reason to want to treat the humans differently to the worms or the slugs. We can be sure that the rest of the universe, in all its physical processes, will not spare us over them either. It would also be quite easy to imagine that other forms of life on other planets would not share our high regard for ourselves as well. Indeed, from an alien perspective we might not even be the dominant form of life on our own planet because who knows what they might see with their eyes? Perhaps, for them, the insects are king. Or the rats. My point is that our vision is uniquely human-shaped. We are prepped and primed by our human form of life to value and prefer human things and to weigh things to human advantage. But no other form of life is.

Imagine, for a moment, that humans had never come to pass. This is a live scenario because the fact that humans did come to pass is not to say that they had to. Evolution is a blind process and has no purpose. Neither is any divine figure guiding it. So our species did not have to be. It is contingent. It just happened because it could, because earlier versions of us survived that became us. And, who knows, some contingent event may yet wipe us out in one fell swoop. If that happened who in this universe of ours would miss us? No one would. Our planet wouldn't. The universe wouldn't. Both would just carry on. We are not necessary to everything else that exists in order to give it some meaning and purpose. Indeed, as far as we know, meaning and purpose are things unique to our species. When a dog sees a ball we do not imagine it asks itself what a ball means even though the dog may link the ball with play through memory. We do not think that the cat that sits purring in front of the fire is asking itself about its purpose in life as it purrs. We as humans have a tendency to think about things by analogy to ourselves. This is perhaps understandable. But it can also be somewhat arrogant and its certainly wrong-headed.

There are those among us who like to accentuate the progress our species makes. Five hundred years ago, however, there were very powerful bodies who thought that our planet was the centre of the universe, then thought of as God's creation, a place he made for human beings, his finest achievement and pinnacle of his creation. But our growing capabilities shattered such notions and now we know we are but a pinprick in a vast void. We are not in the centre of anything. Indeed, there is nothing special or remarkable about us or our solar system. We just are, one of billions like us, lost in the anonymity of it all. And yet the notion that we are somehow different, special, persists. Perhaps we may regard this as but the ego necessary to survive. It can be imagined that if you thought of yourself as nothing special and had a kind of species-based lack of self-esteem that this would be to the detriment of our primary evolutionary purpose which is to exist long enough to multiply. And maybe this is so. But does this mandate the ideas of some who see us as future lords of the universe and, worse, lords of our planet right now? On what basis is a human being lord of anything? 

So what I have a problem with here is a speciesist egocentrism that we humans possess. I want to see we humans as but another animal, something as contingent as bees, sharks and those horrible crawly things that come out from under rocks. We had as much to do with our existence as they did. We are largely as powerless in the face of an uncaring universe as they are. We live and die (so far) as they do. In short, we share very much in common with all other living things on planet Earth. But I don't think we have the required humility that that should entail. And that becomes a problem when you start to regard the planet that birthed you as your own species' bank of resources such as we clearly do. Of course, there is little, at this point, to stop us. "Nature is red in tooth and claw", "survival of the fittest", "might is right" and all other such vulgar notions spring to mind and do so because there is a grain of truth in them. But we can, perhaps, turn the argument of those who think humans are special and different back on them. For if this is so then maybe, just maybe, we have a responsibility to use our specialness, our special powers over and above those the rest of this planet's inhabitants have, for good.

It is not impossible to imagine that our increasing technological knowledge will bequeath us ways to extend our lives. We even have members of our species, the Transhumanists and Futurists of which I have spoken earlier in the year on this blog, who are actively looking at how technology may both extend and transform our lives. But, if this is so, then surely some of these technologies will be useful for the rest of our world. It would be a very solipsistic vision of the future if it did not. We, as humans, have always, up until now, been biological beings that lived in a biological world. This presents problems to be sure (disease and decay being just two pressing ones) but it also constitutes the only situation of life we have ever known. We appreciate the fact of sun and rain on our skin, the feel of the wind, walking across a grassy field, interaction with other animal species, and these sensations engender feelings and emotions and constitute part of what it feels like to be a human being. Any future iteration of the human consciousness, whether that be as some kind of robot or even as a computer program, must account for this if we are to retain any link to our past human development. So I would argue that the human future is not just about preserving a personal human identity, or even a collection of personal human identities. It is about preserving our world in all its biological variety. 

Another way to say this is that as we destroy our world we destroy ourselves, piece by piece, tree by tree, hedgerow by hedgerow, field by field, river by river, sea by sea. Of course, things change over time. But changes have consequences and there is all the difference in the world between things that happen and things you cause, perhaps by not thinking it through or even not thinking at all. We recognize the difference in human thought between an accident, something unforeseen and something done as a deliberate act of vandalism. My argument here is that we, as a species, have some humility, recognize our contingency and how bound up we are with the planet that gave us life and even now sustains us, and use the advantage our evolution has given us to make the world better for everything that lives here. Because, in the end, helping others is really just helping yourself. Its a recognition that you are truly not an island, you're part of a bio-system, a circle of life, a community of life. A life without everything else this planet holds would not be a human life at all because we do not and have never existed in isolation. 

We may think we can throw off such notions and that our ingenuity can prosper us even whilst everything else is sacrificed or fails to survive. Should that happen then it may yet be, as some say, that the "human beings" were only a phase and the post-humans, beings who once were us, take our place instead. If that did happen it would be yet another demonstration that the universe doesn't need us and that all things must pass.