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.

The Age of Stupid

"What has happened to critical thinking," mused my Twitter friend. Another wondered if people just believe any old shit now. A third daily retweets articles about our "post-fact, post-rationality" world. These are all thoughts and fears that I recognize because for the past few weeks I have been musing on similar ideas myself. I wanted to write about them instinctively but I couldn't bring myself to do it. For these are ideas so depressing, so undermining of the point and purpose of our societies, that to think the thoughts is to have to suffer the consequences of it. But here I am, finally ready to take that step.

We have been in the midst of a number of election campaigns recently on both sides of the Atlantic. The campaigns for the US Presidency roll on. In the UK, the referendum on the UK's membership of the EU has taken place and narrowly been won by the "Leave" campaign. The referendum campaigns, which I am more familiar with, revealed a lot of ugliness about society. I have spoken before about it as a turning over of a stone with all the horrors that live underneath the rock allowed to crawl out. And they have. Racist incidents have reportedly increased since the Leave Campaign won the vote. People have had graffiti daubed on their buildings, notes pushed through their letterboxes.  On a bus a 16 year old and his 18 year old friend felt empowered to tell someone not from the UK to get off the bus. People have been interviewed who apparently thought they were voting to expel all foreigners from the country. They weren't doing this and even the leaders of the Leave Campaign weren't proposing something so extreme. But those who think such thoughts have felt emboldened by what they have chosen to take as a validation of their position.

The referendum campaign itself was most notable for being a fact-free zone. Blatant lies (which have since been deleted and denied by all concerned) were used to convince people that the EU is a body which takes all the money and, in return, sends back lots of unwelcome foreign people to take their jobs, homes and schools. The honest amongst us might call it simple xenophobia but the Leave campaigners insist this is a cheap jibe and that they all really love "our European friends" (a phrase they use a lot). Of course, there was also rhetoric of "taking our country back" and "taking control". What better way to scare people into the polling booth than to tell them that somebody not like them is in charge of things? This campaign, which became overtly political during the referendum period, had been going on in various media outlets and newspapers for years. One well-known media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, was open about why he wanted the UK to leave the EU: it never listens to him and so he cannot influence it. Murdoch is a regular guest at the parties of various UK Prime Ministers (regardless of party) so it seems he feels he has more pull in the UK domestically.

All that is as maybe. The heart of this blog is what has happened to public discourse. During the referendum, and seemingly during the US presidential election race too, there is a palpable sense that facts don't matter anymore. No one is using any reasoning. There are no commonly agreed items about which people discuss their various approaches. Instead what we have is a series of extremely ignorant, dull-witted, partisan, unexplained GUT FEELINGS which have now taken the place of reason and fact and assumed a position as the most important things of all. (Trump is the figurehead and cheerleader of this state of mind.) This bothers me on a number of levels. It bothers me that no one seems concerned to explain their working out about things anymore. We've gone post-reasoning. It bothers me that there aren't anymore facts just assertions. "I believe this so it must be true" has never been a more common belief. We've gone post-fact. It bothers me that people who think about things or who pose questions or expect some detail, such as the "why" and "for what reason" people think things, are regarded as effete nuisances. 

We have recently in the UK revisited the Iraq War which Tony Blair seemingly was convinced to fight because of a personal belief of his own and desire to support George W. Bush regardless of the outcome. There was a government employee called Dr David Kelly, a weapons expert and weapons inspector, who questioned some of the dubious claims the British government were making at the time. He was found dead in mysterious circumstances. At the time the government was fervently insisting that Iraq could launch weapons in 45 minutes. Kelly said they didn't even have such weapons. The press loyally trumpeted the government claims in the rush to war. Journalist Peter Oborne has since reported that at least one newspaper, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, was in cohoots with the government as part of the government's own media strategy, to present a certain case which would lead to the outcomes the government sought.

Its long been doubted by a number of people that governments are trustworthy. Revelations brought to light by those such as Wikileaks and Edward Snowden have undermined trust and led to an erosion in the value of truth claims generally. In addition, as we have seen, media organisations have formed alliances with governments to stage manage the news and present a desired picture to the general public. In short, we are being played from numerous angles. Those in positions of power in government or media, and they are not as separate at it might first seem, set up elaborate campaigns to lead the mass of the people by the nose. They sloganize (Make America Great Again, Take Back Control) and concentrate on stirring up sentiment. Its all very "4 legs good, 2 legs bad" to quote George Orwell from his book Animal Farm. And we can see that it works. No one really expected the Leave campaign to win the UK referendum. When they did even its most vocal supporters were a little surprised. But that campaign inspired one person to kill an MP and lots of others to racially abuse foreigners, seemingly empowered and emboldened by a result they thought validated their backward points of view. No one really thinks that Trump has detailed plans for all the areas he may soon, in theory, get a chance to be in charge of. But in this society we now live in it doesn't matter. "The British don't like experts" was a recent claim of prominent Leave campaigner, Michael Gove. And he's right in a lot of ways. But its not just the British. Many American industrialists don't like climate scientists because they say things the industrialists don't want to hear. They don't refute the science. They can't. They just refuse to believe it and blow a raspberry in their direction. They don't want to believe it and that, for them, is good enough.

But this is the point at which things become most frustrating. Ignorant slogans take the place of knowledge that was earned on the back of reasoned thought and debate. "What I feel or think" becomes as valuable as something that may have taken much academic effort. And once that move has been made then thought doesn't matter anymore much less why I think something. Anything goes, quite literally. And people become dumb animals to be pushed this way and that on tides of sentiment. Who is the new bogey man? He is! Let's get him. Booo! We see a lot of this in certain reactions to various nominally muslim terrorist organisations. The slogan here is "Radical Islam". "Radical Islam" is something all right-thinking people should hate, we are told. But don't expect those obsessed with "Radical Islam" to tell you what it is. They wouldn't have a clue. The idea has no content. Its empty. Its just another bogey man to be used, abused and twisted out of all reasonable meaning as part of a PR campaign. "Radical Islam" is a hollow and rhetorical enemy.

All this, of course, has been noted and lambasted before. Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butthead, did a live action film a few years ago called "Idiocracy" which pretty much lays out a comic vision of the future compatible with my thoughts here. We are in the Age of Stupid where its in the interests of the powerful and the dispossessed alike to ignore facts, belittle knowledge and, most of all, sidetrack those who want us to provide thought and reasoning for things. Let's just corral people with a slogan and a campaign, something no right thinking person could disagree with. So what if a few people get a bit carried away and some get hurt? We live in a world where the most powerful nation on Earth willingly allows thousands of its residents to shoot each other every year and does nothing about it to stop it. We live in a world where you can watch refugees drowning on TV 24/7. We live in a very disjointed world which is not at all benign. For there are always consequences to actions, and inactions, and there are always winners and losers in any outcome of events. Its naive to believe stuff will always just work out or that some aren't working for their benefit alone to the detriment of others. We in the developed countries of the world are trapped in a media/political nexus of competing forces. Our assent is sought for things and the methods used to get it are often far from honest or even true. We want a soundbite or a slogan we can get behind and that's good enough. Its about surfaces and not depth.

All this has been theorized much better than I write it here, primarily by French theorist, Jean Baudrillard. Even in educated circles Baudrillard was often read with a little credulity with his theories of simulacra and simulation and notions such as that "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place". But now some are coming to see his point. Baudrillard highlights many things in his work but not least that life is much more than what you see with your own eyes on TV or what people tell you or want you to believe. Baudrillard's work is primarily an encouragement to look deeper and see beyond the surface level thinking which is all a postmodern age wants to present. Baudrillard says that understanding is about thinking and not merely having your feelings (prejudices) stimulated. Its not about enjoying the show and going along with it because "the show" is often there to fool you. Baudrillard writes a lot about history and meaning and, not least, the death of these things in modern society under the influence of just such things as I have already described. In his work mass communication, reality, meaning and history all become interconnected and interdependent. This is an important insight in itself in a world where people want to pretend that they can be independent of others. I see Baudrillard's work on a timeline that started with Nietzsche and his emphasis on how human beings falsify things for their own purposes. (For Nietzsche this started and ended with "reality" itself!) We, in this sense and according to Baudrillard, falsify the news to ends and purposes too. Nothing is naively done anymore. There's always a reason but its always unspoken. And something about which you should never speak.

I shall stop writing before this goes off on too many tangents. I'm sure you get the idea. Its fair to say that I see us as in something of a hole. We are all of us held in the grip of larger forces, political, media, industrial, and they will not let us go. Ignorance is promoted because ignorance is more easily controllable. Thinking is outlawed because it raises pesky questions and frustrates the hollow beliefs of others. The dumb and moronic are everywhere given latitude and encouraged because they are easily led and serve as a bulwark against those who would oppose with thought and reason. It is not that one side is right and one wrong here. Its more about power and how to wield it more easily. Control is what's wanted and its much harder to control a thinker.

Hmm.

I Am An Atheist: So Why Do I Despise So Many Atheists?

"There is nothing more fundamentalist than those who say they know. And it doesn't really matter what they say they know either."

For many years now I have been a very unassuming kind of atheist. I do not believe in the existence of a god, of any god. I can claim to have given much thought to this subject and show you the books I have read, both historical and theological, that have explained how various people from the past have approached this question. I have theological certificates covering studies I have done in various theological schools of thought and I have assessed varying different ideas of what it might mean to believe in a god (for not all ideas of what a god is are the same). Not all atheists can say remotely the same thing that I can here. Many, especially the more vocal ones that have entered the public square in the last 25 years, would probably dismissively regard these studies as worthless nonsense. But I would beg to differ with them because even if one doesn't agree with a certain idea or set of ideas this is not to say that one cannot learn something from them or in studying why others take a different point of view. I may not believe in a god but it would be an extremely arrogant and self-regarding person who judged that, therefore, the whole subject area was pointless nonsense and its adherents all moronic fools. Sadly, many of my fellow atheists are just such arrogant and self-regarding people.

Whenever I come across a religious debate these days, most often in some serious newspaper, I turn my eyes to the now compulsory comments section. This is where the great unwashed of the public under the cloak of anonymity get to fling whatever shit the newspaper's moderators will allow at each other. Of course, in the vast majority of cases all you see are entrenched positions lined up against each other. A genuine discussion or the remarks of reflective or thoughtful people never seem to make it here. I find that a great shame. Everything becomes either agitated polemic or enraged apologetic. It is a battle of the convinced fundamentalisms. There are those who like to think (in their self-deceptive ways) that only a religionist can be a fundamentalist. But this absolutely is not so. The prominent face of public atheism is no less fundamentalist. I say this with no pride since I think it gives my side of the argument a bad name. Fundamentalism is an ugly thing wherever it is found. It is representative of that truth that 10% of conflicts are started by disagreements and 90% by tone of voice. The public tone of voice of atheism is condescending, aggressive and arrogant.

Arrogance and aggression are not promoters of understanding and this is that thing which all participants in a debate should hope to promote. People do not really learn much from shouting or even from telling people what they are certain they know. What matters about a belief, any belief, is what might recommend it to me as something I should hold as trustworthy and true. Surely those on either side of this debate would hope to convince people of their truth and thus share it? I am afraid my hope here is somewhat naive. But the truth remains that if you are too busy pounding your debating opponent with what you are utterly convinced of the truth of then you are not very likely to be very persuasive or to flick on any switches elsewhere that might lead to fruitful paths of thought. I today read a book review by a former Archbishop of Canterbury which was of a book which was trying to explain the Christian god in a more sophisticated and less simplistic way. The atheistic hordes below basically ignored his entire argument in their comments below and reacted to notions of god that neither the reviewer nor the author had expressed, choosing instead to destroy the beliefs of relative simpletons who also happened to be Christian believers. Yet, as I remarked in my own comment to this review, anyone can defeat the arguments of a moron. But only a bully would choose a moron for an opponent in the first place.

And this is what I think many modern atheists are: bullies. I'm also not entirely sure that so many of them have a right to be. Can they claim to have given the matter much thought or done any research? Have they struggled over the hard yards? It seems that for some it is just self-reflectively obvious that no god exists. Such people would throw up their hands and go "Duh!" at the very question or the notion that you might have to do any kind of work to come to such a conclusion. "Stop being dumb," they would say "of course no god exists!" However, as Rowan Williams (the aforementioned Archbishop) points out in his book review, its not really as simple as that. What a god even is or might be conceived as (the subject of the book Williams reviews) is not a simple matter nor a simplistic matter. Many atheists in the comments below the review pointed out that your bog standard religious person does not hold the high falutin views of a professor of theology or of philosophy. This is true. But in choosing the dumbest and simplest understandings of a view they do not ascribe to is it not the case that they are just rigging the debate to make sure that they win? It would be like a 100 meter runner choosing a kid to race against rather than Usain Bolt. But Usain Bolt is a 100 meter runner too. Pit yourself against him and see how you do. That, to my mind, is much more intellectually honest.

One commenter, who took umbrage at the suggestion of Williams that there was a phenomenon called "New Atheism" (this is broadly attested and refers to a marriage of the modern, materialist, scientific mind with anti-religious sentiment) wanted to know what this was. He received replies from his fellow atheists that were a mixture of snarky comments towards Christians and the promoting of a scientific agenda (people who believe in "evidence", etc.). I chipped in with my own definition though. I said that new atheists are those who "have a simplistic understanding of Being but pretend to have a complex one because they say they know". This, I think, articulated a number of things about how I see these new atheists who, in one matter, I agree with but with whom I disagree about many others. Indeed, under the article concerned I have salted about 10 comments of my own all of which start arguments with atheists and, in some measure, defend a theist position. I think this is because it articulates my belief that it is not good enough to think you are right. After all, everyone does and its the easiest thing in the world to do. For me, you have to be able to say why you are right and show your working out - just as your Mathematics teacher taught you in school. You also have to be able to account for new problems or issues arising. Belief, in this sense, is about your story and how you come to be where you are now and orientating yourself to everyone else who lives in the same world as you do, but differently. That is as important for me as what your actual conclusion is. Knowing an answer is one thing. Explaining your system and how you get to your answer is entirely another.

Of course, in order to do that you have to do the work of being able to explain yourself in the first place and many atheists, especially the kind who write in newspaper comments sections, don't appear to have done much work in this area. To hear many of them talk you would imagine that atheists with an interest in science are the only people who ever think in the first place. The rest of us are not capable of rational thought it seems. They combine an unseemly scientism with a dismissive tone and this, for my taste, is not an attractive combination. Even putting relatively straightforward questions to such people asking them to lay out their position for you is met with a snarl rather than an open and welcoming exposition of their truth. Such people regard any who do not fall in line, not just with their beliefs but their stance, as enemies. 

The other side, those who might believe in or be open to the divine, to spirits or to an unseen realm, are regarded as uniformly stupid as, for example, the person who commented below the review I have referred to above by stating that in church schools people are taught the birth narrative of Jesus Christ "as a fact". Since he, and those he thought like him, all regard this story to be a fiction and those who believe in it as dummies he found reason here to lump all Christian believers together as equal to the dumbest and most literal of believers. But this isn't true. I was myself taught at a church school where, rather than teaching the story as fact, it was in reality dissected as the biblical sources were shown to be both different and multiple. This then went into a quite mature discussion (for 14 year olds) of how religious texts come to be formed from earlier stories. What was taught was thinking not dogma. But the dogmatic atheist making his comments in a newspaper simply imagined that his intellectual foe was as dogmatic as he was. He reduced all opponents to a lowest common denominator.

My point here is that it is easy to entrench yourself and consider yourself on a side. Isn't this what the Internet is for, after all? But I find this intellectually dangerous, not least for yourself. It makes you lazy and you settle into cliched arguments. You stop thinking and start defending a position. But you should never stop thinking because you never know everything and there are always loose ends. Its also for this reason why you shouldn't merely test your beliefs against the weakest opponent you can find. I posted a reply to one commenter questioning his atheistic beliefs. He had argued that there was simply no "evidence" for a god. But I asked him what would count as evidence and I pointed out that "evidence" is a category that we decide for ourselves. It is we who even decide what counts as evidence. "Evidence" is a universally accepted category for pretty much everything but is it not also a little self-deceptive if we ourselves get to make the rules of the game? How can we know we are not finding what, somewhere deep inside, we want to find? I asked my atheist colleague more questions. I asked him how he would know what to look for when looking for a god or how he would decide if he had found it or not. I asked him if not finding any evidence meant anything other than that he had himself just not found it. I told him (and I tell you) that these are all reasonable questions to ask an atheist.

In the end, of course, I agree with even the most disreputable atheist that there are no gods. But I feel uncomfortable about this just as the Christian must do who is compared to some crusader or the conquistadors, each brutal killers and imperialists for their deity of choice. This must be how many moderate Muslims feel today being compared to violent thugs who chant slogans and wave flags. But we can ourselves not be defined by those who agree with us on some things but with whom we differ on many others. We must simply be able to articulate to ourselves and for ourselves why we believe what we believe. For me it is intellectually honest not only to question your opponents but also yourself, believing that the foundations of even the strongest house can be undermined. I also think that you can learn from anyone and often even those you never imagined you could learn anything from. If we can do that learning in a spirit of mutual humility, so much the better. For few if any learn from fundamentalists and bigots of any persuasion.

What is the Meaning of This?

Today's blog is about the subject of meaning and its a fairly "stream of consciousness" type of a blog. As I write I am just back from my daily exercise which is my chance to blow some cobwebs out of my mind and loosen up my gradually aging body. It happens quite often in these times that thoughts come to mind and coalesce in ways that are fruitful and many of the blogs you see here are a result of such times. This is going to be another one like that.

So if you have been reading this blog at any time during this year you will know that my grand subject has been human being. I have been asking myself what it means to be human, where humans might be going and what the difference might be between a human being and the possible technological beings that we might become in the future. There has also been a strand of that which concentrated on consciousness. I have found it all greatly stimulating and it has brought me forward in my own thinking and inspired much new music from me that led me down new paths.

It was a couple of weeks ago, however, that it finally dawned on me what this was all about though. It was then that I realized that the great question here, perhaps the greatest question of all, was the question of meaning. Read back through some of my earlier blogs if you like and confirm this for yourself. It further dawned on me at that time that the question of meaning had really been the question that has animated me from my earliest days as a thinker back when I was 8, 9 and 10 reading biblical stories or The Odyssey which I read aged 10 at school. There was always a sense of wonder with me (a naive sense of wonder, I might add) and that has probably not served me very well in the long run but it has meant that I wanted to try and get answers to the questions that have animated my life.

Fast forward to a middle-aged man with 35 years more reading and experience under his belt. Meaning, why things mean, how things mean, what things mean, have come to be the central questions of my existence. Perhaps they are, in various forms, for everyone. Not everyone confronts these questions of course. Some try to hide from them or run away from them, scared of the possible answers. But I take a more prosaic and present view of things. Life would be hell if I didn't try to work out some answers. My thinking and reading this year have brought some progress for me it seems. At least, it feels that way. And as those writing about consciousness know very well, how things feel is very important to we humans. This, too, is something else caught up in all the "meaning" questions.

So what of "meaning"? Why do things mean? This, it seems to me, is a problem of consciousness. Neuroscientist Christof Koch sees consciousness as a feature of complex enough systems, systems, for example, such as the human brain. Koch himself does not limit the possibility of such consciousness to the human brain alone. He conceives it is possible that machine networks, if complex enough, could also become conscious. He also suggests that other animals with brains not so different from ours could be conscious - if in not quite the same way or to the same extent. For my purposes here the relevance of this is that with a developed enough consciousness comes the problem of meaning.

For with a consciousness such as ours, one that is self-aware, aware of its surroundings, able to extrapolate and problem solve, able to refer back to previous events and project forward into future ones, meaning floods in. Why is this? It is because meaning-making is a matter of relating things one to another, a matter of contextualizing things with other things, a matter of giving things a situation, a matter of relating and relationships, of networks. It just so happens that the universe bequeathed to us consciousness, quite blindly, and, in so doing, meaning flooded into our lives and all the problems that go with it. Meaning is what happens when conscious minds start going about their business. It is what happens when you take one object or idea, something that means nothing at all in itself or in isolation, and then relate it to something else. Or anything else. It is in the interactions of things and ideas that meaning is produced. As beings with a developed consciousness this was something we just couldn't help doing - the making of meaning.

In recent centuries our great thinkers have had problems with meaning though. Some wanted to try and fix meaning, believing that in so doing they could get things "right". Time and time again that project has failed but there are still those who believe that there is "a way things are" that could fix meanings. I am not one of those. Others have seen a problem with "nihilism" which is the lack of meaning. This issue is tied to the first inasmuch as by their constant failure to fix meaning it seemed to some that there was no fixed meaning to be found. I don't think that there is but I also don't think this should be cause for despair. Coming from a different angle, there were others who said that the problem wasn't that there was no meaning but that, instead, there was too much! These "poststructuralists" argued that the issue wasn't a lack of meaning but that there was so much it could never be fixed. Meaning was a matter of the "play" of many different meanings.

It seems to me that if you follow my basic ideas above of how meaning arises at all then it is no surprise that meanings are not fixed. It seems to me that if I am anywhere close then it would be impossible to fix meaning in the first place. For if meaning is simply a matter of relating things to other things then there are as many meanings as there are things to be related and in as many ways as you can relate them. In that, context may sometimes guide but it can never be determinative. We would still end up with as many meanings as it would be possible for people to have in any given scenario. It would seem that the poststructuralists were on to something with their ideas of a superfluity of meaning.

This, of course, brings its own issues. How is such a superfluity to be controlled? After all, we all need meaning and meanings for things but we all also need to live. In this I find something that the recently departed neuroscientist Oliver Sachs said deeply relevant. He wrote that "Each of us … constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ and is defined by this narrative." I find this to be intuitively and reflectively true. Sachs is here saying that we all build a story of our lives as we grow up and develop, one that gets added to every day with each event, thought, idea, that happens. This comes to be the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, about our circumstances, our possibilities, our past, our future. This forms a major context for all the meaning-making that we will do in life. It becomes the borders of what things can mean and acts as a stabilizing, if also sometimes an imprisoning, force. It is the boundaries of our thought. But these are not to be thought of as hard and impervious boundaries. The boundary can sometimes move and new meanings become possible. It is a movable border but a border nevertheless.

One corollary of this is that things will not mean the same thing for everyone. Nor, if this is right, should they. Difference is in-built into this understanding of things and is something to be negotiated rather than denied or avoided. We will tell completely different stories about ourselves and live individual lives and this will add to the list of possible meanings that can be made. This in turn speaks to an amazing plurality of lives and of meaning-making that often scares those who want to fix things or find a "way things are". There is no "way things are". And this is why there can also be no gods. Gods are used to try and fix meaning. They are there as guarantors of "the way things are" and act as a kind of über-context for everything. But there is no über-context. The universe did not come with meanings attached. It merely blindly created beings for whom things must mean.

This is what is bequeathed to us: to make things mean something useful to us, something that we can understand and live with. That may be a struggle but we cannot avoid it unless we die or go mad. I hope to study meaning and its making further over the coming days and weeks. There are those, such as Nietzsche or Foucault, who studied how things mean in more detail, for example, by using "genealogical" or "archaeological" techniques - but upon knowledge and its meaning itself. Nietzsche did great studies into the history of morality, something he saw as a problem, whilst Foucault, amongst other things, studied the history of prisons, sexuality, the treatment of mental illness and even scientific knowledge itself. None of these things, or their meanings, are givens. The idea of the "given" is one that those who want to fix things one way (and its always their way!) would like us to have. But following the path I have that seems crazy and to be rejected. What intellectual studies such of those of Nietzsche and Foucault have shown us is that no knowledge and no meaning is a given, Rather, it is all created and with a very specific history that was necessary for its formation. We would do well to remember this.

So we are in a world of play, the play of meanings. We are free to make ours to the extent that our lives, and the stories we tell about them, allow us. Meanings do not come with things so the idea of an "in-itself" with a meaning attached is silly. The meaning comes in the relating of one thing to another, in the activity of our conscious minds.

Commentary (Part 3)

This week I am publishing a series of blogs simply entitled "Commentary" which is a selection of thoughts on life in general and other thoughts as they occur to me. The format is somewhat open and how these thoughts might be relevant or link one to another, or to other subjects, is left open for the reader to decide. It is hoped that these thoughts of mine may lead to thinking of your own.

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41.

The stream of consciousness.  Isn’t everyone an accident? Isn’t everything? Isn’t the idea of causal relations just another mirage? As Nietzsche showed, it’s a concentrating on some things and not others.

42.

They say that time heals all wounds. Is it not rather that it just causes you to forget, to lose the detail and be left with a vaguer outline?

43.

What’s the difference between willed ignorance and willed innocence? And what are their relative merits? Fine margins.

44.

See comment 31 (Commentary, Part 2).

45.

The problem, as I see it, is many-fold but, at bottom, arrives at a basic lack of the necessary tools and insights to be able to account for our Being, for meaning in an empty Universe, for giving any thoroughgoing purpose to anything. “Change and transitoriness” is all around after the metanarratives and metaphysics die, after all the false gods of knowledge, reason and rationality are exposed as insubstantial, after the crisis of (lack of) meaning has become apparent. We are nihilists in a world of nihilism.

The caveat to this is that this is not wholly true. There is still your situation, culture, society, options, opportunities, personality and motivations - even at bare minimum. Nihilism is the non-existence of universals and not the non-existence of anything at all. You are, in that sense, fated to the perilous path of freedom and creation. Seek only not after universals.

As a result it is not clear to me immediately why the response to Nihilism should be despair - although it often is. Might it not be seen as an opportunity, a place for creation and re-creation, a place where you can cut your cloth accordingly? This is not to say that the life of our lived experience is a playground where anything goes. Anything that can be made to go, goes (as Stanley Fish said). But if things can be made then they can be re-made.

46.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a beguiling enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. That, in retrospect, is probably the fatal mistake, to think there is a truth, reason, rationality or a necessary amount of knowledge to find. We need to stop up our ears to the siren songs.

47.

Life is the process whereby infinity constantly slips through our fingers.

48.

Life is a fate you can escape. Living is the price you pay for it.

49.

Can it be doubted that people are their own worst enemies? If you were creating a species you wouldn’t create a human being. What mixtures of wonder and madness we are!

50.

It’s been hell ever since.

51.

It’s not that I am frustrated and defeated; it’s that my own thinking, choices and actions are what must bring it about. The world is so (dis)ordered and (dis)arranged that every good turns out to be a seed of destruction. Here are perfect grounds for becoming an absurdist - for all is absurd.

52.

The stealing of innocence is the saddest thing of all. I’m always brought to tears when I see examples of it.

53.

Memories to me are often like wounds. Pain is so close to pleasure.

54.

The effort required in life is often more than I am prepared to give. The lazy die as surely as the motivated. In all things there is an internal cost/benefit analysis.

55.

Silence. It cleanses the soul.

56.

Your story is the story of your imperfections. Imperfection has the benefit of authenticity and authenticity, it turns out, is more valuable than an unattainable perfection could ever be.

57.

It is good that lived experience is a constraint and limiting. It is foolish and deliberate misunderstanding from those who would have us believe that anything goes. The very idea makes no sense. There is a world and it impinges upon us. It is good that we don’t control it. Many times the world has brushed up against me, often harshly, but it has made me think and examine. We should welcome such occasions, though they be painful, as aids to our progress along the way.

58.

I have no doubt that every single human being maintains themselves by use of illusions with which they are wont to delude themselves. Not every statement or thought need be perspicuous to some imagined reality. It would be an illusion to think it did need to be.

59.

In a world become mechanism, we are all aliens.

60.

Everybody’s different.

61.

In the practice of understanding your illusions you emancipate yourself from yourself. That is, rightly done, you engage in a constant practice of surmounting your own limitations. And it must certainly be assumed from the very beginning that you are a mass of limitations.

62.

All those who would try to codify and, formally and logically, delineate the world need to remember one thing: the Universe abhors predictability but it loves the unexpected. It might also help to have an entirely appropriate humility. Do we ever really KNOW what’s coming next?

63.

Mine has been an often solitary walk down the path of life. I’m not sorry for that and, reflecting, I don’t have any real feeling that I would want to change it. In any life there will be pluses and minuses for there is no perfect way to live and mistakes will always be part of the game.

64.

People who learn habits of self-reliance (learn to) need other people less. But they should continue to remember the benefits of another point of view, something they will never be able to supply for themselves.

65.

Innocence is something I value so very highly. I wonder now about it’s relationship to naivety, speaking as a man who has written music titled “I’m Naive” about himself.

66.

Sometimes I wonder if I have not just been numb since I was pulled, screaming, into this world. I lie at night and worry that I will be pulled, screaming, out of it too.

67.

Can people be blamed for who they are? It would seem an oversimplification.

68.

I once knew someone who felt beguiled by going astray. I actually am astray and the thought terrified her. Maybe it should terrify me too but I just think “What’s the worst that can happen?”

69.

Why don’t more people revolt from their lives of minimum-waged servitude? Is a diet of X Factor and Premier League really that worthwhile?

70.

The end is not always known from the beginning. Warning for fools.

Commentary (Part 2)

This week I'm running a series of blogs entitled "commentary". They take the form of a series of personal reflections on life - a bit like if someone were looking in the mirror and reflecting. Each acts as a self-contained thought but some may be linked together. It is for the reader, of course, to decide if any of the comments offer insight of any sort.

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21.

I don’t understand the sense of ungratefulness some people feel (or accuse you of) when you say that you wish you had never been born. Life, for these people, is regarded as some kind of sacred gift and you are meant to feel, first of all, profoundly thankful for it. Is this the overflow of some religious sentimentality? I honestly don’t understand it at all. Life is random, an accident. It might never have happened, as I mused in one of my musical pieces called “Point Zero”. Point Zero, I considered, was that moment at which you were conceived. But what if it had never happened? What if mum had been washing her hair that night? What if dad had been tired and turned over and went to sleep? It’s not as if any of us are fated to exist, much less willed by a higher power. Nothing chose you. We just are, a cosmic accident, the work of a moment that might never have been and yet, right in one moment, was.

22.

Life is a large pool of clear, refreshing water. But it only takes a little piss (or one conspicuous turd) to contaminate the whole pool.

23.

We all have drives and sometimes the desire to satiate them can be overwhelming. Experience is one means by which to counter them. Providing we can learn from it!

24.

I suppose I do not really regret the things that have happened to me. It’s natural to wish things had turned out differently but, then again, each situation is an opportunity for many things and not just one. There is always the opportunity to learn, whatever happens. Things are never uniformly good or bad.

25.

“Travel broadens the mind” is a truism. And true. It should be compulsory. Isolation breeds only mistrust and easy lack of empathy.

26.

I have an inkling that the most important of philosophical subjects is our human relationship with time. Temporality is a subject that towers over us, much as space puts us in our true place in the physical realm. Even thinking that all our sense perceptions, intuitions and thought processes are time-bound and time affected is a huge subject. We are defined as beings and as Being by our relationship to time. It makes sense why Heidegger would write a book called “Being and Time” and why it would be a pre-eminent philosophical topic of discussion. And yet…… it’s all relative. What is the meaning of time in the context of infinity? (Irony: my song “Stream of Consciousness” plays as I write this.)

27.

I still have great moments of ego. I should keep working on it. The Ego is nature’s gift to us for survival but the way it operates is most strange and completely selfish. It’s literally there to ensure your survival…. and that’s it. I would like to think, in my more cerebral moments, that I am learning to countermand and control it. But maybe this is yet more self-deception. I would like to think I can rise above it but then I ask myself why I would even want to do this. Is conscious thought somehow more pure or noble than the unconscious prods of Ego? What version of me is it trying to save? In every sense "I" is a fiction.

28.

The human being is a random beast. In public they prefer order, considered thought and coherence of thought with action. In reality, they are vain creatures of habit, drive and inconsistency.  It’s a consistent phenomena we see through the history of human thought to find an ideal of their own making which human beings do not live up to.

29.

“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

30.

Humans have a will to meaning that mere beasts, perhaps, do not have. This throws them into a game they have no choice about - to make things mean something. Where meaning gaps or deficits appear this can only manifest itself as a crisis.

31.

Beware the lures of knowing

Imagine, if you will, 100 country mansions. In these country mansions are 100 libraries.

Every room in these country mansions is a library and each one of the mansions has 100 of them. In this great space you spend your life storing up all the things you learn, all your knowledge collected together. But what you don't have, in this fable, is any inkling as to what any of it means. What, then, I ask you, is the point of all this collected knowledge? Have you not simply spent your life collecting useless facts? Is it not just so much jumble? Is knowing an end in itself?

We switch focus. Consider the biblical tale of Eden, a place of innocence and freedom from the burden of knowing. But its carefree inhabitants lose their innocence and become burdened with knowledge. And now, as knowers, they are burdened with what to do about what they know. Their crime, if crime there was, was in wanting to know too much and our intrepid gatherers of knowledge and eaters of fruit did not realize the consequences of knowing. Human beings have a need to act when they know. And this knowing will lead to acting and, if they do not have other necessary qualities, their knowing will lead to bad and negatively consequential actions. Perhaps now we understand why the biblical innocence was to be preferred?

There is a traditional dichotomy between knowledge and wisdom. Some people (and, indeed, communities) prefer one over the other - and there are various intellectual and/or religious shrines to both in various places. Some people venerate knowing, and the need to know, above all else. (Examples could be those who wear scientism heavy on their brow or certain essentialist and foundationalist philosophers.) And I take issue with this. For knowing is not, and cannot, be an end in itself.

There is, of course, no end to knowing. We cannot imagine that there would ever be an end to all the facts. But the situation is more dire than simply letting a drive to know have its head. (I ask myself here what the outcome of letting a drive to eat have its head would result in - by way of analogy.) There is what we may call a crisis of knowledge - and a crisis of knowing - in that knowing is simply not enough. Knowing, of course, does not realize this itself because in its knowing it does not have the wisdom to know that knowing is not enough. (In the same way, Reason often doesn't realize that reason is not very reasonable, rationality doesn’t realize that it is not very rational, etc., ad infinitum.) And it’s not a case of the amount of knowing but of what simply knowing is able to achieve. A collection of facts, as I hope my parables illustrate, is actually a pretty useless (but also burdensome) thing. Knowing, by itself, is in the end both impotent and potentially dangerous. Other things, perhaps we may describe them collectively as wisdom, are needed to enable us to appropriately deal with the things we know. I can immediately think of 3 strands here:

1. You need to know what knowledge means (the question of meaning).

2. You need to know how to appropriately use the knowledge (experience).

3. You need to know how things fit together, or can fit together (understanding).

An issue with knowledge will always be that the knowing and the collecting of knowledge will never be enough. Knowledge leads inevitably to action and people almost always feel the need to do something about the things they know. And it’s precisely here where knowing, by itself, is impotent because knowledge does not tell you what to do with it. Its not part of the package but, instead, a separate skill and not one anyone is forced to have - regardless of how many of their 100 houses with 100 libraries is full of knowledge. The second issue is that that need to do something about the knowing is experienced as a burden for, in reality, people do not simply store what they know in libraries. This leads to the spectre of doing the wrong thing or using the knowledge badly. Knowledge is dynamite, it’s a dangerous thing with consequences.

In the light of these twin issues (and the at least three other separate requirements I mentioned above) it seems to me that wisdom dictates we can know too much. The drive to knowledge, if given its head, is a bad thing with a negative impact. It produces more data than a person (or community) can handle. The appropriate response is to curb the drive to know and, instead, have a sober and reflective innocence. Without the extra tools that wisdom provides knowledge becomes but a blunt instrument of possible self-harm. What those who wrote the story of Eden saw was the dangers of an inappropriate lust for knowledge, a lust which raised up knowledge and knowing above its station and made it the god at whose temple we all now had to worship. In those circumstances, knowledge and knowing were always going to be capricious gods who abused their power and destroyed us by virtue of attenuating our all too corruptible egos. In the end, the moral of the story of Eden is both that you can know too much and that knowing is not without burdensome consequences. It's a message we need to hear again and again.

32.

PS Who amongst us knows things they wish they didn't know?

33.

“What is the point of my life?” update! There is not, nor can there be, any antecedent point, of course. I’m currently drawing breath on the basis it is at least an opportunity to try and understand something, anything. Maybe myself or the world of my experience? Once all the metanarratives and metaphysics have been burned away by an innocent honesty what’s left is an empty space to fill. So rock on as much as the world of experience allows. You may end up trapped within a bubble of your own making (and without really knowing it) but what’s the alternative? Or the harm?

34.

Two people share the same belief but have completely different behaviour as a result. Would this not show that beliefs do not determine behaviour? Would it further show that beliefs and behaviour, theory and practice, are simply different and not necessarily related things? If you cannot determine someone’s practice from their beliefs then, with that, the idea of a one-to-one correlation is put in doubt. Where that leaves the idea of a coherence of beliefs with behaviour is then also a matter for discussion.

35.

I have mellowed (in my own way). I have grown more appreciative and reflective with age. Maybe this is natural and what happens to all human beings as they get older. I wouldn’t know about that though as I’ve never done it before.

36.

I am reminded on just how few crumbs a dream can actually feed. There is something to be said for the human spirit. Or is it a (sometimes necessary) blind stupidity?

 
37.

“Philosophy as music” is my motto for my musical output. It’s thought in sounds. Alternatively, think of my music as my opening a conduit to my insides and what is there flows out in chunks. “Its not necessarily good but it’s honest” is another way I have described it. Such naivety is my authentic signature. I’m like some dumb, fluffy creature unaware there are so many bad things that can happen to me in the world.

38.

Contradiction corner. - Is my musical practice a result of my anti-foundational, anti-essentialist beliefs? Is my focus on its directness and honesty, at the cost of professionalism or “doing it right” according to antecedent standards, because of what I value and what I don’t? Have I created an existential form of music or, as my friend on Twitter says, a “toe-tapping nihilism”?

39.

Suffer is what human beings do. Its the downside of feeling and thinking. Anyone who thinks for long enough will meet a crisis. Evolutionary fate has dealt us the cards and we must play our hand and suffer the consequences.

40.

Enough said.