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?

Racism and Electronics

Like many, I suspect I have sat out the last week in disbelief. I am not American and so, unlike those who are, I will not be directly affected by the recent election. However, it is true to say that its effects ripple around the world. This is literally true on a subject like climate change, a thing Trump and many of his closest allies have disavowed as a scam or made up. My Twitter feed since last Tuesday night has resembled some fictional dystopia. I read that people generally follow those who mirror their own views, the so-called echo chamber, and so people who more or less represent views I would go along with have related with varying degrees of explanatory power and personal involvement just what the American electoral choice means for them. And then there is the nexus of media interests and journalists reporting to their taste. The New York Daily News's Shaun King has been detailing racist incident after racist incident since last Wednesday AM, a sickening and terrifying list of bigotry, hatred and stupidity. I'm sure many would tell me this is their reality, one that as a white European I'm privileged to be able to avoid. They are right, of course, but its no more my fault I was born white than someone else's that they were born something else. But it may be my responsibility to see past my whiteness. If I can.

This whole area of race and nationality annoys, confuses and frustrates me. There are obviously people prepared to use it their advantage, people who see in skin tones or in passports differences, fundamental, unbridgeable differences. I don't see that and I certainly don't WANT to see that. But this is where it gets confusing because there are certainly people of many nationalities, races or creeds who DO want to view themselves as different or set apart based on these things and these are not just malignant, racist people. So it becomes hard to think clearly about such issues and not step on someone else's toes. I'm quite aware that by even writing about this particular hot potato of a subject I may be inadvertently offending someone. And offending anyone is not my aim here. If anything this blog is being written just to address my own person frustrations about and problems with the subject. This is a personal blog not an authoritative article.

As it became clear that racists had captured the White House, something brought home even more now since Trump appointed Steve Bannon of Breitbart infamy as his senior counselor and policy advisor, I wondered what I could do to signal, in my own puny way, some measure of dissent. I am not a political animal. I am not even a social animal. I live my life withdrawn from society. Occasionally, however, I look out of the window from behind my curtains (which are always closed) and am assaulted by the things that for many others are normal, everyday events. Seeing all the hatred, unfairness and egotism of society often makes me feel ill. I have felt ill this past few days too. Its one reason I've deliberately withdrawn from it. Maybe you want to blame me for that. Its true that I can imagine many who are politically engaged who might want to. For such people its a person's duty to fight injustice. And yet, as I see it, so many people's lives are torn up and thrown away as they are totally consumed by politics. I'm aware that if everyone just shut themselves away then opposing forces would win without so much as a fight and that certainly is a concern. But is the alternative that every person opposed must lay down their life on the altar of political differences? That sounds like a recipe for constant conflict and war.

I was about to write that clearly no one wants that but that wouldn't be true, would it? Some do want war. Some do want conflict. Some do want to provoke trouble. The world is full of such damaged humans. And these damaged people damage even more, a repeating tragedy. But must I spend my life fighting them? I ask this question of myself openly like I hope others do too. But I don't think I can tell others what they should do or how they should react. Some people do think they can do that. In my mind this all seems very reminiscent of how it must have felt to be a German in the 1930s. Although Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, his NSDAP party never won an outright majority at an election. The best they got was 43.91% of the vote in the March 1933 election during which their thugs had engaged in much voter intimidation. But even with this intimidation they'd failed to achieve a majority. Hitler had to manipulate the German head of state and outlaw other parties after this win to finally achieve an effective one party state so he could push through laws which made him Germany's dictator. I've been reading about this in the last few days, spurred on to do it having once lived in Germany for a number of years and looking for parallels to other things. I've also always wondered how Nazism could ever have happened. I ask myself what an "ordinary German" must have been thinking. I ask myself what an "ordinary German" was to do about it. I ask that because I've been fortunate to know many good "ordinary Germans".

These aren't simple questions to ask because we know that even at this early stage of the official Nazi regime the first concentration camps were being built and people, especially the communists Hitler despised along with other political opponents, were being disappeared, some never to be seen again. If you were just an ordinary citizen could you afford to show dissent? Would you be prepared to potentially end your life for a point of view? Now for all the modern parallels we may see or want to make (Steve Bannon seems very much like Trump's Goebbels to me) we have to acknowledge that the USA is not (yet) Nazi Germany. But we also need to be aware that there is a very specific racial history to the country we now call America. And this is not just about slavery or black and white as the the recent Dakota Pipeline protests show us. Although no American white racist is apparently aware of this fact, America was not originally white. If this land ever was or is a "white land" then it is only because it was forcibly stolen from indigenous peoples, peoples that were neither black nor white. In many ways these are the forgotten people of what is now known as America. And these people are not "Native Americans" either for they are pre-Americans! America is, as I have heard some of them say, nothing to do with them. America is what came and destroyed and stole where they once lived.

I already feel like I'm getting into deep waters and it would be easy to drown myself in them. Racial difference and racial divides run deep and their currents can easily drag us under. And its not just about the Nazis or American history either. My own country of the UK has experienced racial problems too and racial incidents rose after the Brexit vote much as they have seemingly done in the USA in the last few days. This was inevitable as political victories embolden those who formerly judged the public mood as intolerant of their antediluvian views. But in other countries, too, race and nationality divide. The whole of Europe has been rocked in the last 18 months as Arab and African refugees struggle across a body of water in ramshackle boats or across land from one country to another seeking better conditions to live their lives. Thousands die in the attempt and many make it only to find that the press and media of the countries they land in are hostile to the foreigner or outsider, whipping up resentment and hatred quite openly. Politically, many European countries have parties dedicated to a politics of race. One need only think of Marine Le Pen's Front Nationale in France, Geert Wilders' PVV in the Netherlands or Frauke Petry and the AfD in Germany. And that is before we get to Trump's best British friend, the utterly opportunistic Nigel Farage, a man who once said in public that he would not like Romanians living next door to him.

Its all a terrible, life-affecting mess and I appreciate only too well that many people's lives are materially affected by this reality in a way that mine is not. I wrestle with my conscience over this daily because I cannot help but care about it. I fundamentally do not see differences between people based on nationality or even race (albeit that I leave people to define for themselves who or what they are) and despair that others do. It bothers me that a person's status in this world is based on a passport, something that was really only invented in the recent past anyway. I have spoken before in these blogs about some of my intellectual influences and one of them was the great pragmatist, liberal philosopher, Richard Rorty. Rorty saw justice, racial as well as any other kind, as a matter of an ever increasing "larger loyalty". He saw the task of the human being as to increase the number of people to whom it felt allegiance so that, ultimately, you would feel the same loyalty to one person as you would to any other. You can see that this is a program that is the opposite of difference and division based on something like race or nationality. Such differences, so Rorty thought, had to be negotiated away so that, eventually, the words foreigner or stranger would completely lose their meaning and emotional force. Now clearly this is a white, liberal, American philosophy professor's way of expressing these ideals but such was the way they came to me. I heartily agree with this idea.

And so it was in this spirit that, as I was looking back over my podcast series, The Electronic Oddities Podcast, it struck me that the people in it were almost totally white. I have often tried to focus on "pure electronics" within the series and maybe that just is a white domain. I even wrote an article about this for this blog and, in the writing of it, managed not to notice that the famous electronic musician, Richard Devine, is apparently of Asian origin even though he was born in the USA. I had always considered him to be white and it never occurred to me to think anything else. I was embarrassed to have this pointed out to me in various Facebook comments where I had posted the article. However, rather fewer (one, in fact) pointed out that the female synthesist, Bana Haffar, wasn't white either. It may be that she is not as well known, of course, but I admit I had mis-identified her knowingly to see if anyone picked up on it. As I say, just one pointed out to me she is of Lebanese heritage. However, as I now look back on my podcast series it does look like a catalog of white guys in the main and, yes, this does bother me. In the article I had previously written I had asked for examples of non-white synthesists and whilst I got some names back it wasn't lots and lots. So it must either be that they don't exist or, more likely, that the white clubs that are the electronic music discussion groups online are all white people talking about other white people.

This bothers me because in the abstract electronic music I have come to favour I do not see difference and division. I see in the swirling, noisy movements of an oscillator a lack of definition, a refusal to be anything other than a continual becoming. I see the politics of difference and division as, once again, human hubris, a knowing too much which is, in reality, the mere assertion of ignorance. My vision of electronic music, a music of electronics, does not square with a racist worldview but with Rorty's "larger loyalty" instead. And so I do not want to present a podcast which is a "white man's music". It should not matter who did it, where they are from or what gender they are. Whilst recognizing that people do come from differing cultures and inform their identities by such things, in some sense I think electronic music should be colour blind. I look back on my own music history and how I came to be aware of music itself and it is often dominated by black musicians. My mother played The Supremes when I was a child on an old radiogram. I lived next door to a Jamaican family growing up and they played reggae and ska music. The latter was the first kind of music I took as "my own" when I started to like music for myself. In my teenage years, as I discovered the synthesizer which was played by white men, I simultaneously learnt about black disco, soul and funk and this has always been a musical grounding for my appreciation of sound. I would be missing a huge musical education without it.

I have yet to find huge hidden reserves of non-white electronic music for my podcast. (Of a "pure electronics" kind, at least. If we open out the definition then "electronic music of colour" is everywhere.) I have begun to search. I am intrigued to find if there are some hidden forms somewhere that can broaden and enrich the music that I have heard so far. And this is what it would be: an enrichment. I know, for example, that there is a large, and to me largely unknown, Japanese electronic culture. I think it needs to be remembered that there is no loss involved in finding something different. It only adds more variety to the whole. This week's podcast will be music entirely from non-Caucasian artists and, yes, this is a deliberate choice. I've been listening to the music chosen for it as I wrote this blog and it is a beautiful edition full of diverse styles and moods. Apart from the few known artists I've included, the music itself, which is largely instrumental, gives no clues as to its origin and that is how it should be. It is just music made by humans that anyone should be able to enjoy. I unashamedly say, as I've said before in these blogs, that I strive not to see artificial differences but just people of one race, the human race. To some that will make me a "globalist", something in opposition to their narrow nationalism. They are right because it is. No nation is going to survive that sees itself in isolation from the rest of the planet it is but a tiny part of. All of humanity's problems will be solved together. OR NOT AT ALL. It is my tiny and probably unnoticed gesture to try and curate a podcast series that includes electronic music made by all kinds of people as an expression of this. To be honest, it troubles me how white so much of a more electronic kind of music seems to be. One thing I can do is give a little light to that which isn't.

The Electronic Oddities Podcast is at https://www.mixcloud.com/DrExistenz/

A Mentality I Just Don't Understand

I've been agitated recently and in more ways than one. You may have noticed this if you follow my tweets which often give a clue as to what is currently animating me. But now it seems to me like several different thoughts actually turn out to be related. 

First of all, being from the UK, there is the current debate over if the UK should leave the EU or not. Like a number of notable cultural commentators on this (random picks: writer Irvine Welsh and comedian Frankie Boyle) I take the view that this is not necessary about those in charge of both the EU or the UK. These people are clearly equally as bad and equally as unpalatable. This is like asking yourself if you want a bad person from another country in charge or a bad person from your own country. Of course, you'd rather have a good person. But good people don't seem to go into politics and they certainly don't rise to the top. Yes, I'm a cynic but with good reason to be cynical.

I have steered clear of the public farago around this event with its stage-managed addresses and bullshit arguments. We have the spectre of leading government politicians, who are routinely impoverishing people and taking sides with the "haves" as opposed to the "have nots", people who think nothing of claiming thousands on their own expense accounts but will snatch a few pounds from the disabled that they need to survive in something that can barely be described as comfort, suddenly saying they are on your side and that the "elites" (a useful bogey term for whoever the bad guys are meant to be this week) are on the other side. You don't want to be siding with the elites now do you? By the way, these now apparent men of the people were all very well and privately educated and are all millionaires. But, hey, they still care about the little guy, they say. Sweet.

As many people have observed, the EU debate in the UK has been a lot of shouting about increasingly ridiculous and unsupportable claims and very little facts or genuine information. I doubt you could find 10 good British people who could even explain what is at stake. The OUT people don't seem to have any clue as to what they would do if and when they were out. They just know they don't want some foreigner making the decisions. The IN people don't necessarily even believe we should be in but they think they might be richer if we were. Compromises abound.

Yesterday, like many in Europe, I woke up to the news of Muhammad Ali's death. Ali was a star when I was but a boy. I was only born at the end of the 1960s and, until yesterday, was blissfully unaware that at the time I was being born Ali was actually banned from boxing altogether because he had refused to be drafted in the Vietnam War. I learned about this only yesterday as I delved into his life story and found out that Ali wasn't just a prodigious boxer with a knack for amusing witticisms but a man with beliefs who was prepared to act upon them to his own personal cost. The best years of his career taken from him by his refusal to be drafted, he spent time making speeches and became a civil rights figure. I saw many gushing tributes to Ali yesterday but not many of them pointed out that Ali was three things that some of these gushing tributers don't normally seem to be too fond of. Because let's tell it straight: Ali was BLACK. Ali was a MUSLIM. Ali was against war. As a number of black and Muslim tributes to Ali pointed out yesterday, don't let them sell you anything else.

Now the question is should we forgive someone like presidential nominee, Donald Trump, when he tweets about how Ali was a great champion and a great man? This is the same Trump who, a year before this tweet, had called out President Obama for talking about great Muslim sports stars. He seemingly thought there were none. Trump has had a lot to say about Muslims in the last year and most of it can be summed up as "Go away!" Is Trump aware that Ali was a proud Muslim, one who, so I read, regarded Islam as a faith of peace? What does Trump think about that? What do all these anti-Islam people in America who think Muhammad Ali (an arab name) was "a great man" think about that? What do they think about the Ali who said he refused to fight the Vietcong because they had never called him nigger (implicitly, unlike the many white men he regarded the war as being fought for)? What do the muslim haters and the black haters think about the Ali who refused to be defined by other people and who seemingly ignore the fact he was proudly black and proudly Muslim? I saw one Fox Sports reporter yesterday who actually tried to completely gloss over the fact that Ali was these things. But how can you do that when Ali himself did not? It seems to me that if whitewashing is anything then this is exactly what it is. Ali was not some generic human being. He, like everyone else, was a set of very specific things. And you can't ignore or brush over those things without attempting to erase or deny them. These are POLITICAL moves. I don't know if Ali ever spoke about the Black Lives Matter campaign but even a brief study of his life shows that he certainly believed it and he was far from ignorant or uninvolved in racial and religious matters. So if you discriminate against blacks and think Muslims are heathen killers trying to destroy your way of life do you get to call Muhammad Ali a "great man"? 

There are other things I could talk about here but I don't what this blog to get too long or complicated. Save it to say that it all seems to come back to something that I tried to compose as a tweet a day or two ago. This is to do with the mentality of some people that I just don't get. There seems to be an idea abroad with some people that the only people you have common cause with are what we might term "people like you". This can be defined in many ways and its not always obvious. Feminists have this mentality just as much as do rabid racists, for example. In the UK's EU debate we see this attitude manifested in that some people genuinely seem to think that only people who were born on the same piece of land as you are, in this sense, "like you". We shouldn't be ruled over by people from over there because we are from over here. Is it only me that finds this kind of thinking completely absurd? Does everything come down to a factor which, let's face it, none of us could ever have influenced anyway? No one decides where they get born but on this basis it is decided that my interests and Jean's from France or Jörg's from Germany or Michal's from Poland are different? This is baloney.

Those who think this way seem to have a very warped sense of reality for as I look out I can see very many people just like me in a political sense even whilst being different socially and culturally. But all too many people get these things mixed up. Yes, people from different places have different cultural traditions and different social understandings. But politically they might have exactly the same needs and politically they might be very much the same as each other. In fact, the differences politically may be more between themselves and the elites above them than between each other. Lines on a map do not stop people have common interests or aligned needs. Far from it. They don't even need to be from Europe. All the nasty foreigners (as some would see it) who are grabbing on to anything that floats and trying to reach our Promised Land have political needs the same as the rest of us who, through no fault of our own, were already born here. They need stability and security so that they can have a means to survive. Should anyone begrudge them trying to achieve it? The ultimate answer may not be that everyone lives in the same space. Indeed, it certainly won't be. But while the lights are on and fires burn to cook food in one place do not look down on those who have none of these things and head towards those who do. It was through no credit of our's who have that we are where we are. No god decided to bless us and curse the suspicious foreigner.

And so for this and other reasons I find the "pull up the drawbridge" mentality confusing. It all comes back to this "people like us" mentality and this is always the heart of most political issues. Our identity is focused too narrowly whether what we care about is the rights of women, a particular race, an ethnic grouping, a religious body or anything else. The focus always seems to be on the differences and not the similarities. These differences divide and determine who is to be heard and privileged and who is to be ignored and who deserves nothing.

So allow me to be radical enough to say that this is all bullshit. Its the differences that kill us, start wars, empower enmity and generally add to the shitty pile of miseries that we have to endure in life. Like the American philosopher, Richard Rorty, I see human betterment as a matter of every human being, not a few. I see the direction of human travel to be in forever WIDENING the category "people like us" so that whoever is in trouble or has a problem is a matter for us, so that everyone ends up being "like us". I see that if one person is in trouble then that is a problem for all of us. I say that no one should go to bed perfectly peaceful while anyone else cannot. I say that my good is bound up with everyone else's good. And theirs is with mine. I say imagine what it would be like if everyone actually believed this. I say that human beings need to get beyond tribalism, need to get beyond thinking that the good of me or those like me is at the expense of the them or those like them. So, sorry Mr Trump, the future is not in walls to keep all the good stuff for ourselves and to keep out the filthy foreigners. The truth is that building worthwhile lives everywhere for people so that lines on a map become irrelevant, so that life in not a lottery of where you were born or who you know, is what we should do. And, sorry UK people who want to leave the EU, the future is not in thinking that where your birth certificate says you were born says anything genuinely important about you or your politics. We are all citizens of the world. We are all cast adrift on the same planetary lifeboat.

So, sorry, I don't understand the mentality that says differences count and similarities, the most profound similarities of all, we are all human, don't matter. I say what are you thinking if you think this? I say that life does not have to be cast as a battle or a competition for resources. I say think differently, change your mind, wake up. I say that the fact we are different is one of the things that makes us who we are but it is NOT a reason to draw lines. I say that we can be different within an understanding that recognizes we are all basically the same. I say that we need to stop being lazy and simplistic.

Is anybody listening?

PS Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, is a useful guide here. In Star Trek the world has no countries and, incidentally, no money. Both innovations would solve a lot of Earth's current problems and be for our common good, common meaning everyone and not just the next privileged group. If we are to advance, Roddenberry seems to sense, we must end the tribalism and come together as one. People in many walks of life need to hear this message and take it to their hearts.

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...

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.

Individual or Community?

I am working on a new project for about the next 2 months and that project is called INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS. It is an overtly political project with things political, cultural and social to say about our world and our species. It has been borne in on me this year more than ever that we humans are all human beings together on this planet. We are the same but we devise bureaucratic, cultural and social ways to divide us one from another. This, to me, seems like self-defeating craziness. Others will say that it is only the state of nature and will then go on to delineate some "nature red in tooth and claw" ideas about how all life progresses only by antagonism and by setting one being against another. But all of these ideas, whichever side of the notional divides we invent you find yourself on, are just ideas. And ideas are not compulsory. We can swap the ideas we have now for other ones. We can change the way we live now and live other ways. It would be a very foolish person who said there is only one way to live and this is it. 

Today, as part of a series of articles that will build up to the release of INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS, I want to showcase and somewhat discuss two ways of looking at people, human beings, our species. These I have called "individual" and "community" in an attempt to not use partisan language of any kind. For some the use of partisan terms will be a stumbling block to actually reading what I say, so locked up in various kinds of rhetoric will they be. Political partisanship is a great problem today as many people only ever hear the viewpoints they approve of and feel to be right. There is a general lack of willingness to see that every way of doing things is in some sense a compromise and that other ways are always possible. People get caught up in their own fantasies of personal identity and put this before the actual lives of people with disastrous results. I, however, hope that I am aware enough to recognize the fallibility of all human thinking and the need to have an appropriate humility in all things.

But there is a further point to be made here. Society, that thing which Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s said does not exist, does not operate with equal benefit to all. Structures of power do not favour everyone equally either. There will be winners and losers. And there will be ideology in operation. For some, their ideology will be that there should be winners and losers and this will have consequences for other people. The point I'm trying to make here is that in political, social and cultural contexts we are required to take a stand here and take a stance towards all the other people that are around us. This is what newspaper owners do when they brand unemployed people "scroungers". This is what politicians do when they describe refugees as a "swarm". This is what presidential candidates do when they say they want to build walls along their borders. They are making their personal position in regard to everyone else known.

The two attitudes I want to showcase today, then, are that way of looking at us which regards us as individuals all responsible for ourselves as men and women alone in the world and another way which regards us all as people, members of the same species with far more in common than will ever divide us. For avoidance of doubt and to make clear where I'm coming from I choose the second one. Of course, I do have to choose because in life we all have to choose. And we all do choose, if not in a ballot box then in the regular decisions of our daily lives and in our habitual practice. You cannot be politically neutral. If you refuse to share your beliefs then you act them out every day anyway in every choice that you make. To take part in society is to make choices that affect the lives of others. To go along with a system is to give it the support of your practice.

It was Ayn Rand who said "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask for another man to live for mine". Rand is a poster girl for a politically right of centre individualism which lauds the individual as the basic unit of life itself. You should rely only on yourself and to rely on others is an abdication of this responsibility. You are nothing more than a lazy burden if you need things from other people. This creed is quite powerful and thorough-going in today's world, not least in political circles. There is also a very common political rhetoric which really springs from this kind of original thought. This is the rhetoric which lambasts those without a job, immigrants, the poor, the sick and generally anyone who is, for reasons of their own making or not, economically unproductive. For this mentality if you cannot look after yourself then there is something wrong with you. You fall into a kind of sub-human category and need to reclaim your dignity by looking after yourself. 

Of course, this ideology has problems. Have you ever noticed how all these private individuals with their Ayn Rand beliefs who run companies are more than happy to take government money to help their business or subsidies to provide this and that service? They don't believe in society, especially when it is giving money to other people, but they will happily take any benefits that come their way and use facilities built with public money. But I thought life was all about looking after yourself and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps? Not so, it seems, if the money is being put into THEIR pockets! Of course, in business it was always this way. Business, as we now know, and especially in terms of manufacturing things, began when wealthy people needed the mass of common people to move into towns and cities and work in their factories. This social upheaval from about 1750 onwards changed the way of the world. From the beginning, workers were always exploited and had to fight for their rights. 

Now I don't mean to deny it is very true to say that those on each side of the divide see things their own way. In researching my project yesterday, for example, I came across the following meme:

The first thing I noted about this meme is that it uses a certain rhetoric. The bad guys here are "socialists" and the good guys are "capitalists". Those familiar with political argument will be well aware of these terms. This argument is reduced to a discussion about nice houses. I picked this meme out because I am familiar with pretty much the same point being restated in almost the opposite way. There was a famous football manager in England called Brain Clough (manager of my home town team, incidentally) who was also famously a socialist. He once stated that the difference between the two parties this meme addresses was that the capitalists wanted something nice to keep it for themselves and that the socialist was the one who believed that everyone should be able to have nice things equally. Remarkable how the two positions can be swapped around, isn't it? My own view here is that the meme writer has swallowed his own rhetoric a little bit too much. I've never met a "socialist" who thinks no one should be allowed to live in a nice house. (Clough himself had a very nice house.) But I have seen many who do actually live in nice houses and get criticized for doing so! Often this is by very rich individualists who have a confused understanding of what it is their opponents are meant to believe. But it  is also true that I don't know of many "capitalists" who think that everyone should have a nice, big house. Of course, they believe in this theoretically and they sell things like the so-called "American Dream" as a support of the idea that one day they might. But, as has been said, "Its called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Opposed to the individualist view is the community view. This is that view which looks at people all together as the same, members of a common species, having a common dignity and worthy of equal treatment. For people who hold this view a person's worth is not measured in Pounds Sterling, Dollars or Euros. It is measured in a simple human dignity it is believed we all have just by being here. Rather than imagining that any station in life is achieved by you and you alone, this mentality accepts that we are all in some sense related and stand or fall together. Such people would tend to believe that "An injury to one is an injury to all" which is a far cry from the ethics and philosophies of Ayn Rand. Such people might smile to themselves approvingly when hearing the French motto "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" - Liberty, equality, fraternity.

Of course, the main difference between the two views I'm talking about here would be, from my point of view, that the first takes a "devil take the hindmost" view of life whereas the second thinks that since we are all linked together as inhabitants of the same planet then, in some sense, our fates are linked too. Therefore, we should help our neighbour because, in doing so, we are helping ourselves. The individualist seems in some way scared that by helping others he somehow lessens his own position or disadvantages himself. The community person I describe does not. The individualist sits in his home oblivious to the world outside his front door, hoping that it will not invade his peace. The community person recognizes that for the world inside his house to be ok then the world outside it needs to be somewhat ok as well. The individualist thinks about his advantage, the community person everyone's advantage.

You can see where I am going with this and maybe extrapolate in different ways what this might mean. Where you stand changes the game and each position leads to consequences. I write this blog only to point up this basic difference in outlook. Of course, I'd be the first to admit that its much more complicated than this. No doubt people on many political sides are already calling me all names under the sun and thinking that I have misunderstood them. Well, I wasn't trying to understand them. I was putting forward my view. If you have Twitter you will be finding more of my views on this as I tweet under the hashtag #IndustrialSoundsForThe WorkingClass as part of my current creative project.

We live in a world of the extremely rich who live in gated mansions and the extremely poor who live in boxes or under bridges. This did not happen because it is nature's way or because some principle decreed it must be so. Neither is it the case that things must be this way. It is also true that fairness and equality are not principles that operate all by themselves. They only operate by the actions of human beings, human beings who can also choose to act neither fairly or equally. Similarly, what we value - money, principles, wealth, power or people - are also our choices. And choices always have consequences - and never just for us. The last word here goes to Dr Martin Luther King who criticizes individualist thinking:

The project INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS will be published in January 2016. Further blogs will follow this one in the lead up to its release.

Intoxication

In the recent past I made an album of instrumental electronic music called Forces of Nature. You can read about what's behind that album elsewhere on this blog. The album Intoxication that I have just completed is a companion piece to this.

Sadly, for those second guessing the subject of this album, it is not about alcohol. The "intoxication" at issue here is metaphorical but no less real or powerful in its effects. The intoxication under discussion here is intoxication as discussed in the written works of German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche discusses intoxication from his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from The Spirit of Music right up until books in his final year of sanity in 1888. For example, in his Twilight of the Idols. "Intoxication" is what Nietzsche thinks the greatest, most creative, artistic spirits must have. He writes in that latter book:

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

But what is this Nietzschean intoxication? Nietzsche recognizes many forms of it - sexual, feasting, agitation, victory, cruelty. The list goes on. "The essence of intoxication is the feeling of plenitude and increased energy.... In this condition one enriches everything out of one's abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, overladen with energy."

In short, Nietzsche envisages that the artist is full, and overfull, with inspiration as we might put it today. From their own fullness the creation comes to be. And surely there is something to this. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, was writing in the context of Dionysian feasts and so it is not hard to understand where the idea of intoxication might have come from since at these feasts many were often quite literally intoxicated. Nietzsche expands on this idea metaphorically in the course of describing the conditions of culture and art as he saw it.

My album Intoxication is a hybrid project, however, in that it conflates two at first seemingly unrelated subjects that find their point of common interest in this idea of "intoxication". It is not the first time that I have done this this year. My first album projects of the year were Jedem Das Seine and Arbeit Macht Frei, two albums which united twin themes. In this case it was the horror of the Nazi concentration camps and the film Under The Skin which I conceived these two albums as an alternative soundtrack for. Here in Intoxication one side of the work reflects an interest in this Nietzschean notion of "intoxication" but the second is an altogether more serious subject - as before where I combined matters cultural and historical.

The second sense in which I use the term "intoxicated" here is in reference to current world events: specifically I use the term with reference to refugees - what some others may call "migrants". These are people I conceive of as being "intoxicated with life". That is to say that they find themselves in the direst of straights and they have that all consuming will to survive that only those who have looked death in the face really know. I can say from my own personal experience that someone never wants to stay alive so much as in that moment when their continued existence might be terminally in doubt.

So I find it easy to describe the many refugees we see across the world, many fleeing from war-ravaged areas, many others merely from living in poverty and squalor, as "intoxicated with life". They want to live and this desire fills them and overflows within them, pushing them across land and across seas and oceans in the hope that they might find the circumstances for it. I do not blame a single one of them. Indeed, I find it strange that in the 21st century, in 2015, the idea that we might let people die or go hungry because they happen to come from a different country to us is still prevalent. I ask myself if border regulations and our notions of civilization really count for much in such circumstances. In 2015 have we not progressed to the point where a human life can expect to find food, clothing and shelter as a matter of course? The answer, I'm afraid, is no. Our Western societies are very much infected with the idea that in order to have food and shelter you have to earn it. Thus, those who are not seen to be earning it are regarded as "scroungers" who are receiving "hand outs".

I don't see things this way. I say a plague on all your polite notions of society, of progress, of humanism, of needing to "earn" the right to live. Life will find a way and those intoxicated with life will naturally be pulled, as a magnet pulls iron, to those places where food and shelter and safety seem evident. Do not be surprised. Do not say "Go back where you came from". You would not go back where they came from. Do not say "They belong back in their land" when the history of this planet is the history of the people upon it moving around to places that supported them best. It is the significant characteristic of life that it wants to survive! Expect life, wherever it shows itself, to want to do exactly that!

So this album of mine called Intoxication unites an interest in the refugees of the world with the Nietzschean notion of a creative superabundance of energy. It is in this sense that it is a companion piece to Forces of Nature. I see it as a personal version of those forces. The force to create, the force to live and survive. Don't be surprised these things exist. Every organism that comes to be only wants to grow and make more of itself. Its genetic. It is the mystery of why there is anything at all instead of nothing.

You can listen to Intoxication on my Bandcamp HERE!