Walking and War

Yesterday I went for a walk as I often do. Normally I have in my head the route I will take, this being chosen as I put on my shoes and go through the various several routes I have taken over the previous few years. This was also the case yesterday and as I set out I had pre-selected one of the shorter routes. But about 15 minutes into the walk, as I was walking through my local park, a thought suddenly occurred to me. This thought was that my next hour had been planned out in my head ahead of time by my decision. By pre-selecting the route I knew where I would be going, probably what I'd see, etc. I thought about this as I kept walking and compared it to what would be case if I'd not pre-selected my route and just set off at random, not deciding ahead of time which direction I would take at junctions and, therefore, not knowing where I'd be going. The second option seemed suddenly more attractive, especially the not knowing and the consequent unfolding surprise such a walk would be. 

I was coming to the path at the bottom of the park where I would be forced to turn either left (as I'd preselected) or right and suddenly in my head there was a jeopardy for, suddenly, I imagined not knowing which way I would go. I thought to myself that I would go left anyway, as I wasn't feeling particularly energetic and this way was the shortest. I settled into this idea for a minute. But then the possibility of turning right and going the longer, unprepared for, way began to reassert itself as a possibility. I vacillated back and forth, not knowing what option I would take. Then, annoyed with myself, I determined to stop this nonsense, enjoy the moment of my walk and let a momentary decision decide when I actually got to the point a few hundred meters ahead of me when I would have to make a choice. I did notice, however, that the rest of the walk then became better as a result of this choice, this not knowing what would happen, this living in the moment rather than having my immediate future pre-planned and decided.

The last book of the Christian bible and so, logically, the culmination of the bible's story, is a vision of a cosmic war. One of the things this book describes itself as is a prophecy by which, in common parlance, we take it to mean a foretelling of the future. It is a fact you may become aware of in the unlikely scenario that you ever take a course in biblical studies that "prophecy" is not usually regarded as "foretelling"; its more a case of "forth telling" but I digress. In any case, should you be one of those who thinks of prophecy as foretelling the future then Revelation presents itself as the story of the end of the world, the way God wraps up the whole story of this creation he has, according to the script of the bible, made. It is not a pleasant scene. Here God sends his champion, that Jesus fella who was formerly in the bible saying "Blessed are the poor," healing sick people and telling people to turn the other cheek, on a big white horse to slaughter all the unrepentant people who don't believe in God. Basically, what we have is the notion that, at the end of all this "God is love" business you might have heard of, God is actually just going to kill all the people who haven't done what he wanted. Its divinely sanctioned violence. That is the story of the world, that is our future foretold.

Now as with my walk, I'm not too happy about this when I realise that someone has written a story in which "the end" is apparently foretold. (Put aside the question of if its true or not. Its not, but that doesn't matter.) In my new, post-realisation mind set, not knowing things gives a better opportunity for a fresh look at and appreciation of life than one that is planned out. And then there is all this violence business. Its bad enough that actual people will be violent to each other without the gods joining in. But do I have this the right way round? I wonder how many Christians over two millennia have read Revelation, seen that the way the story ends is by God killing all the bad guys, and then thought, "Well if that's what's going to happen in the end anyway then what's the problem with dusting off a few unbelievers right now?" 

Since Revelation was written we have had Crusades and an Inquisition and I sense a latent desire from some good old white Christian boys across the water (and not just across the water) to kill the unbelieving Muslims because they are on the wrong side of this pre-decided history. Preachers of hate such as Britain First, a ragtag band of self-aggrandizing troublemakers made more famous when Trump retweeted their error-strewn material, have expressly used "Christian" imagery in their ideological war against immigrants as, apparently, it is their lack of "Christian values" that marks them out as not like us the most. Which "Christian values" are these, I wonder, the ones from Revelation where all the ones not on our Christian side will be slaughtered for making the wrong choice?

So there is a problem with divine violence in Revelation and its not a Muslim problem or a problem of any other religion (although I won't deny their problems with a similar thing either): its a Christian problem. Revelation, so at least two New Testament scholars I respect have said, is "the most violent book in religious history." The problem is that by telling us the violent end of the story this book has apparently mandated violence in the name of its God and religious violence is probably the most insidious form of violence for how do you stop someone convinced that a divine being has authorised their activities? As I intimated before, its only bumping up the schedule if we good Christians dust off a few bad guys now, its not fundamentally changing the script. And what's worse, God is actually shown to be approving of violence in Revelation. Revelation acts as a divine endorsement of divine violence. Jesus, that nice fella from the gospels who was, in the time-worn phrase, "meek and mild" is not very meek and mild in Revelation. He is a Terminator or a Predator hunting down all the people who don't follow a certain religious path. And chopping their heads off. No more "King of Kings," he is now "Warlord of Warlords". In fact, as someone who has worked on "the historical Jesus" at university for PhD studies and written a couple of books about it, I don't recognise this guy. Whoever wrote Revelation has a massive hard-on for killing and death for Revelation is a major revenge fantasy. They've taken Mr Meek and Mild and turned him into a violent killer and called it "good news"!

I mentioned earlier that, of course, Revelation is not true. I also said it didn't matter because, as with any literature, what matters is what it disseminates and motivates and not whether its true or not. Things don't need to be true, they just need to be believed. Have we not learned this lesson by now? Does it matter if Revelation is true if Christians across the centuries see in it a warrant to kill the enemies of God? I imagine the writer of Revelation never figured as he wrote his revenge fantasy of the Christians beating their persecutors that before too long the Christians would actually be running the show and could begin the timetable of Revelation a bit early. Oops. But there we are, what's done is done. I do wish, however, that the writer had not decided to tell us the end before we got there because, in a way, he has ruined everything and there's blood on his hands. In retrospect, isn't it just better not knowing and trying to enjoy each moment we get without worrying about ultimate destinations? Do we need to exist in our own version of the Final Destination films where we know there will be a grisly death and its shadow blights everything we do? Ends can always cast mighty long shadows and not really for any good. At least, that's how it seems to me. 

So, there are some stories we human beings probably shouldn't tell for, in the end, we cannot blame gods for them. Revelation, on the face of it a tale about how God subdues and takes over everything, making it wholly divine, is actually a story about how God just becomes a man, a man like us, a man who, when things haven't gone his way, resorts to killing to resolve his problems. Revelation is a book which shows God as very manly, aggressive and violent. Go on son (of God), knock him out! We here on planet Earth still have our own violence problems, of course, and many still envisage themselves or their countries as in a violent struggle for resources as, apparently, that people from one country prosper and survive is more important than that people from another one do. I wonder where such people see their story ending and what destination they have pre-selected? Is it in Orwell's perpetual war of 1984? On the other hand, don't tell me. I don't want to know.

PS I turned right.

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/