Terrorism: Know Your Enemy

It is either a brave or a stupid person who, in the current climate, would choose to write a blog about terrorism. And yet I find that I must, primarily because I see so much comment about it and so much of it seems, to me, to be either misguided, incendiary, ignorant, understandable but naive, or, often, all of these things. You may take it as read before continuing to read this blog that I am not in favor of random killings of any human beings by any other set of human beings. You may equally take it as read that I am not here to take sides as much of the media-led public would like people to do. I do not see killers and murderers of any persuasion as anything but representatives of themselves and their own beliefs. People do what they choose to do for the motivations and justifications that they themselves devise. So I am here to resist the notion that some belief system or foreign deity makes anyone do anything or that any text has mandated the deaths of innocent people. There is an ancient man who was quoted as saying "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone". If we follow that thinking then there should be no one around picking up any rocks.

The recent attacks in Brussels are, of course, horrible. Anyone with human empathy would feel that way I imagine. But, to me, watching the reactions coming in on social media yesterday, I couldn't help but think that many of the reactions I saw from western Europeans, who are largely those I would see the responses of, were somewhat naive. Yes, the bombings yesterday were horrible. But my mind wandered across the globe a little to the east and settled in the arab region. Some people, fueled by the incendiary and barely disguised racist thinking of those who would consider themselves nominally Christian (and almost always white), would like you to believe that an area from roughly Istanbul to Afghanistan is full of foaming at the mouth Muslim killers. This is what we see on the news, right? But, of course, this is not so. The vast majority of people here are just as normal, and as peaceful, as you or I would consider ourselves to be. They are mothers and brothers and sons and daughters. They want to feed and clothe themselves, work, get some money, build something of whatever kind of life can be made out there. In other words, no, not everyone out there is a foaming at the mouth religious extremist pledged to kill the infidels. And, what's worse, they actually get bombed and killed a whole lot more then we in the West do. I find this map instructive:

What this map shows is that in the last 15 months there have been horrific attacks in Europe and America. But relatively few (this does not lessen their horror, by the way). What this map further shows is that if you happen to be an ordinary person going about your business in northern Africa or what we may loosely term "Arabic Asia" then you are much more likely to be shot or bombed by terrorists. Indeed, there are some places in that area where I imagine this is a regular occurrence. Yesterday I read that certain politicians are saying we are "at war" with something. (I'm not sure what we are supposed to be at war with - an idea? a religion? certain individuals?) But it occurred to me that for people who just happened to be born in Sanaa or Gaza or Mogadishu or Homs - through no fault of their own - that their daily experience of life is war. They do not have the luxury of declaring themselves to be at war with anything. They are just there right slap bang in bombing central. They didn't ask for this anymore than Parisians, Londoners, Brusselaars or New Yorkers. They, too, are victims. And so this situation can never be the cartoon version that Fox News will present you, a thinly disguised version of white Christian protestants versus the filthy Arab hordes. The only fight this can ever be is between those who want to live in peace without blowing people up and those who are prepared to use violence and death to bring their ideas about. And if we use that definition it muddies up the waters considerably.

Yesterday the loudmouth troll, Katie Hopkins, a Z list celebrity from the UK famous only for the fact she is outrageously right wing for money, tweeted the following:

I don't dignify Hopkins by seeking to argue here that she stands for a certain point of view. She doesn't. She stands merely for padding out her ego with the most attention-getting thing she can think of to say. She is, if we must credit her with anything at all, merely taking sides. Of course, her notion is absurd and suggests that "refugees" and "terrorists who blow people up" are the same group of people. Yet, as I have already shown, there are many, many places in north Africa and arabian Asia where people are being even more terrorized than we are. Here a terrorist is not "someone who looks like an Arab" because there they all do. Because they all are. Hopkins, of course, does not have an argument. She is, like many, a mere sloganizer. It is remarkably easy, and remarkably simple, to see people who are not like you and who come from somewhere else and to regard them as all the same, the dangerous foreigner. In polite society we would call judging people by how they look racism but nevertheless. It takes a particular kind of mind held by particular beliefs to equate refugees fleeing their own death and destruction with people who might do the same thing to you. Has it escaped the mind of Hopkins and those who would think so shallowly about this that the really bad people, the ones who do want to kill people, might be taking advantage of their countrymen? There is a certain kind of person, and Hopkins is one, who seeks no answer to the problems of violence and also has none. They merely want to cynically prosper themselves by talking about it in bigoted terms, blissfully unaware of the disharmony and enmities that they sow or, worse, very much aware and joyfully stoking the fires of division.

(NOTE: So far, the Paris and Brussels bombers have almost entirely been EU citizens. NONE are refugees. So Hopkins is wrong as a matter of fact. If we had to label the perpetrators at all "criminals known to the police" would be the best description, not a faith or state-based description.)

So one point I want to get across here is that the terrorism we are currently enduring today is not a matter of a struggle of beliefs or of faiths or of Arabs against people with other skin colors. These are all PR agendas pushed by people with their own beliefs. If we think we are ourselves on some crusade on the side of right then we are no better than those who think they are on the other side. The thinking of both is equally flawed and in the same way. So there is no Islam versus Christianity here for neither those regarding themselves as true Muslims or those regarding themselves as true Christians can stand in for the whole of those belief systems. People do things in the name of other things. But it is all rhetorical. It is their retrospective justification for things. The Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik claims to be a Christian of sorts but do we judge all Christians by his measure? No. Should we? No. But in the West we find it very easy to judge an entire faith, one we don't personally happen to hold (quite coincidentally!), based on the actions of a minuscule percentage of people who claim adherence to it. This is a double standard. Instead, we should be saying that there are people who want to kill for their own reasons, criminal, violent people, and that they are our enemy. In fact, such killers are probably everyone's enemy.

Of course, it is not the case that only Muslims have ever wanted to kill people. The historian Ned Richardson-Little, who specializes in the area of human rights and has an extensive knowledge of German history from the past century, wrote a blog recently about the Deutsche Christen which was a Nazi protestant Christian denomination in Hitler's Germany. Richardson-Little makes many salient points in his blog and also gives the example of one Ernst Biberstein, a theology student and one time pastor (just like your local priest in other words) who went on to become an Obersturmbannführer in the SS and was later charged with the responsibility for over 2,000 deaths, at least 50 of which he personally oversaw during a mass shooting in which the bodies were then pushed into a mass grave. This example serves to show only that it is not only adherents to various exotic religious beliefs who can become killers. Your common or garden Christian can too when the local village priest becomes a vicious killer. The narrative of "them and us" in which they are nothing like us is both insidious and deceptive. But what makes a terrorist a terrorist is not so easy to pin down. It is not to be equated with a faith or a race. That is simplistic in the extreme, flawed and simply wrong. Should all white Americans be judged as Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma terrorist? Probably not. It was not his whiteness or Americanness that was the issue.

So what unites those who want to use violence? It is often thought that religion is the answer. The trouble with this answer is that religions are followed by many hundreds of millions of people, the vast majority of which are no more violent than the granny who goes to church and serves the coffee at the end of the service. For me what unites these people is not some generalized creed but the desire to use violence. Using violence is the creed that should be being attacked and not other, more easy targets which, in the final analysis, cannot be blamed. Neither Christianity nor Islam nor any other major world belief system that I have become aware of call for mass killings. It does not say in the Bible or the Koran "Blow people up with bombs". These are the actions of individual people with their own reasons and justifications. They may seek to hide themselves under a more generalized rationale but we should not fall for their rhetoric and make it something it isn't. Terrorism is a matter of making things seem other than they really are and pulling you into some huge struggle when really it isn't. The number of actual terrorists is a small number, relatively speaking, but they wish to embroil everyone in their death fantasy and we should not let them.

It is, of course, at times like these that you have to decide who you are. You need to ask yourself what you stand for. The men of violence (on all sides) want you to sign up to their fantasies and become a fantasy warrior on the side of this or that, thinking of yourself as good or bad. I think we should not do this. We should be clear-headed and think sanely. We should realize that our enemy is not anyone who looks a certain way or comes from a certain place. We should recognize that we ourselves are not mere ciphers for a state, country, land or faith. We are all individual people with individual responsibilities. Terrorists cannot palm off responsibility for what they do to a faith or a belief system or a state or an aim. And neither can we. 

We each live the lives we do and make the choices we make and are held responsible for them as individuals. That is the way it should be. Set apart and alone, each one of us wants the same things in life. But we don't all kill someone else to get it. If we are going to live together as societies without reverting to the law of the jungle (there is a whole other discussion here about whether "the law of the jungle" ever really went away but that's not for today) then those who want to live in peace need to come together to make that so. Life is ugly and we should not imagine that everyone can survive. Frankly, some will only be stopped by killing them because they are determined to live the life of violent criminals. But that harsh reality does not mandate indiscriminate killing by anyone else. American drones aimed at terrorists that kill innumerable anonymous bystanders are not defensible in my eyes anymore than suicide bombers in airports. It will simply require serious, patient work by those in our societies tasked with protecting our peace to establish who the murderers and the people of violence are so that they can be captured or, if necessary, killed. If we can do that without perpetrating our own violent stealth war for power and resources so much the better.

None of this is easy to deal with or to discuss. World geo-politics is a complicated business. There is much more that could be said here. Perhaps, in the end, it comes down to your vision of the world. When innocents die we feel many things - numbness, rage, disorientation, bemusement - and this is normal. It is hard to see other points of view but we must unless we are ourselves simply determined to destroy anyone who thinks differently to us. Revenge or a creed of killing is no better a way of living than that of the terrorist who thinks he can get what he wants by killing a few innocents. Violence is our enemy here and those who would use it. Those who think deaths are a legitimate means to a goal are those we should be against whatever they say they believe and wherever they come from.



Ned Richardson-Little's blog on the Deutsche Christen can be referenced at:
https://historynedblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/18/whos-to-blame-for-aryan-jesus-some-thoughts-on-religion-atrocities-and-the-fallacy-of-collective-guilt/

Musical Conundrums and Annoyances

I recently returned to Facebook after about 5 years not using it. Before you rush to add me though please don't bother. I'm not using it as the friend adding exercise that many do. The fact is there are a number of interest groups on there which are useful to be a member of and its where other people have decided to congregate. Sometimes Mohammed has to go to the mountain. However, the problem with the mountain is that it draws all and sundry to it. The breaking news is that there are other people in the world and they don't think the same as you. Now I am, as you may have discerned from reading previous blogs here, a person who appreciates a certain measure of independent thought. However, if anywhere is going to demonstrate that there are lots of people happy to go along with "what everyone else thinks" then that place is Facebook. Nowhere is this more true than with the subject of music.

Everyone, I imagine, thinks they know what music is. Music is all around us and probably most of us hear some of it every single day. But let me ask you a question: can you define as precisely as possible exactly what music is? Have a go now. I will wait.......

Got a definition that you think works and applies to every single thing that could be called music? OK, on we go.

More than once this past week in casually reading posts in synthesizer groups on Facebook I have come across people who say "music" when what they actually mean is "melody". They speak as if "melody" and "music" are interchangeable synonyms and the issue here is that they just aren't! "Melody" is something that may or may not be present within music you are listening to. It is not equivalent with music. So when someone makes a synthesizer poll asking what people do with their modular synth and the first option is "use it musically" I start to wonder what they mean by "musically". It turns out that what they mean is "does not use it abstractly or to make random noises". Because for the poll writer this seems in his mind to be a non-musical use. For him music is equated with being a matter of melody and something all about pitch. Music, for him, is what you do when you take pitches and put them together in a deliberate and pleasing way. Is it just me that finds this both a huge misstep and an incredibly narrow definition of music? 

John Cage defined music as "the arrangement of sounds and silence" (I paraphrase) and this seems to me a much better and much fuller definition of what music is. I have taken it as my own and I hope the now dead Cage will not mind if I do so. Even that very brief definition I find to be staggeringly deep and profound. This is not just because Cage includes absence of sound in his mind-blowingly simple definition of what music is. Its also because he doesn't necessarily infer that this arrangement be deliberate and the result of the actions of a person. Music is not necessarily, within that definition, something someone writes. It could be something someone sets up the conditions for, like building an experiment and seeing what happens when you do, or the arbitrary juxtaposing of sounds, the making of a collage. (Cage did both and I have unashamedly copied him in doing so.) Imagine someone who takes a paint brush, dips it in some paint and then flicks the paint on the canvas. Now imagine a musician doing the same thing with sounds. For Cage, that is music (just as for Jackson Pollock with paint it was art.) For Cage the disinterested, fart noise making noodling of the modular synthesist unconcerned with pitch and the blowing of the wind are "music". For they are both an arrangement of sounds and silences.

This very simple and, for me, profound point seems lost on most people. I'm amazed how many people don't get it even when it is explained to them. They are stuck in a world where "music" is a tune. But its not, not simply so. Some music is tunes. Other music is textures, atmospheres, noises, noise, sounds. Cage himself once stood inside a chamber at a university which was designed to block out all sound. It was meant to be a completely silent place devoid of any noise at all. He discovered that even here he could hear the sound of his own bodily processes, his nervous system, his heart beat. Nowhere on Earth is completely silent. Sound is always with us, a symphony that never leaves us while we are awake. Cage had what I would describe as a fascination with sound and it is one of the things that I hope I have learned from him. Sound is fascinating. I am drawn to musicians who seem similarly fascinated with sound and not just, narrowly, with pitch and tunes. Another great musical area, one often overlooked, is timbre, the kind of sound that is being made. Pieces of music that focus on timbre as opposed to pitch are very interesting to me as are instruments which focus on an ability to change the timbre of a sound. This is why I like synthesizers which are in many respects made to be able to do this by design. Its why in the 40's, 50's and 60's there were people fascinated with magnetic tape. They found they could take one sound and make other, new sounds by manipulating it. Such a focus on timbre strikes me as both thoughtful and intimate. It speaks to me in ways that a tune could never do.

Whatever music is about I think that one major thing about music is its ability to convey two things: meaning and emotion. Each of us dislikes a lot of music. I think that we do that primarily because the music we dislike does not speak to us either in a way that makes any sense to us or in a way that communicates to us. We would say that it does not speak our language. Each of us approaches music differently of course. Some of us do it cerebrally and with much thought. Some of us will have technical insights into the making of music or have specific knowledge about things used to make it. But most of us are just listeners. We don't care who made it or how or with what. We just know if we like what we hear. We are all in the same position there, equals with tastes and preferences.

But have you ever thought what determines why you like what you hear? You like this piece of music but not that. Why? Doesn't it all seem a bit unexplainable and arbitrary? Isn't it the case that in the end even if you can say why you like something its not really an explanation for why you liked it in the first place? Its a retrospective justification for a decision you made somewhat instinctively. I find this both strange and fascinating. To me it seems something to do with things deep within us that sense emotion and ascribe meaning to things. For example, I like the dance track "Hideaway" by Delacy. You may know it. I don't know why I like it though. I can describe its pulsing beat and its lush pad sounds that swell but is that really an explanation? It doesn't tell you how it makes me feel. And that's the really powerful thing about it. It hits some pleasure center somewhere inside me I can't put my finger on. What I'm saying is liking music is not necessarily a rational decision. And it doesn't need to be. We humans are not rationality machines. We are bio-chemical organisms fed as much by emotion as reason. We are fed and informed as much by environment as logic. This is just one reason why it is monumentally stupid to think that you can logically depict good and bad music. Music does not admit of logical description or categorization. How you feel isn't logical and may not even be reasonable.

Thanks to the Internet I am fortunate to have some interesting conversation partners along the pathways of life. Often within passing conversations something is said which starts off a chain of thought. As someone interested in music, noise and sound I know of a few other people similarly interested and its interesting for me to observe their views on what they are doing. Recently in one conversation someone said to me that they thought most dance music was shallow, for example. Now I agree with this and I think that, for the most part, its meant to be. That is the point of dance music. (Surely the banality of what is now called "EDM" is its reason to be?) But then I went past the initial thought (something that's not always done!) and thought again. Surely the best dance music tracks actually break through that barrier? Surely the best dance music tracks are those which encompass and enshrine the meaning of a whole special moment that happened? Every time you hear this kind of dance track it in some way re-enacts that special moment and reincarnates it again for as long as it plays. The best dance music tracks, I thought, are those with that ability to bring some moment, feeling, emotion, sentiment, to life and fill it with meaning - just as the ambient, pioneering 70s electronic music it came from did. But that, to me, seems to encompass a number of things and not merely just a sugary pleasant repeating line of pitches. What makes a dance song great might well be who you heard it with and where you were as well.

In the same conversation the person concerned did not want to produce "shallow" music. Shallow, I guess, was regarded as a negative in this context but it need not be. Good musicians, musicians who think, will have purposes to what they do and will be trying to inscribe feelings and meanings into their work. Perhaps what the musician meant was that they want to feel like what they made means something. This is certainly what I have ineptly tried to do. I imagine that my music only really means what it means for me to me though. What it means for others will be up to them, who they are and where they are, literally and figuratively speaking.  The strangest songs mean the strangest things to the strangest people exactly because its a nexus of things that provide that spark of meaning in the first place. But, coming back to Cage, this is why sound itself is so interesting to me. As I write now I hear the tapping of my finger on the keys but also the faint whirr of the fan inside my computer. Outside somewhere in the distance I hear the sound of something I imagine to be a cement mixer. A car is now coming towards me and will go away again producing the Doppler Effect which is the effect produced by the change in the frequency of a sound wave relative to your own position. This is the background music to this blog. I hear it as a background symphony because I have that framework of understanding. But you may just hear it as noises or not even notice the sounds at all. What sounds are there with you now that you hadn't noticed until you actually listened?

In the last 3 months I have inadvertently made two separate projects of music. One was 4 albums long and one was 3 albums long. One concentrated on the sound of a particular synthesizer and was aiming to showcase a kind of grungy, metallic, distorted synth sound. The other was willfully and deliberately abstract, an exercise in a bricolage of textures. Both of them were focused on timbres. Pitches were irrelevant to me and I barely even paid attention to them. (Cage's statement that "disharmony is only a kind of harmony that you haven't got used to yet" ends the conversation regarding talk of "dissonance" in music as far as I'm concerned.) There are a few melodies and some tunefulness but if you listen for that you will largely be disappointed. It is my feeling that the timbre of a sound can communicate something that the pitch of a sound cannot. Does an F sharp make you feel happy whereas a B flat does not? Perhaps not. But sounds themselves, their timbres, can. You hear the sound of running water, it means something to you. People talking in a bar? It conveys a message. One of my recent tracks is a whole load of recordings of trains and the sounds they make put together as a track. This isn't an original idea but it is, I think, a powerful one. The end result sounds to me like music. It feels like an experience of sound and a journey. This, to me, is what music is. This is why I am so interested in it and why my only criterion as a musician myself is to make something that is interesting to me. Music should be interesting.

I have this crazy idea. The idea is that music should not be something that you graze, something that is entirely bent to the user's will and taste. I have the crazy idea that music should challenge, educate and inform the listener. This idea holds the hope that listeners are not just cows who want to unthinkingly chew grass for their whole lives. This idea has the hope that listeners are people who want to learn, be informed, and maybe even change. This idea is the hope that people can still be curious, can still be open to new experiences, can still be so vulnerable as to allow themselves to be challenged. It is the hope that music can be a means to communicating things, maybe even things that you don't want to be communicated. Its a crazy idea, I know. But its why the music I make is what it is. That music is my communication.

Is anybody listening? Can anybody hear?

My music is at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/ 

Something to Believe In?

I've been writing this incarnation of my blog for something over a year now. And where I used to get a handful of readers I now get about 300% more, on average. That is to say that I get three times more readers than I did at the start. Thank you very much for reading. One thing I very rarely get, though, is any comments. That's a bit of a shame but I understand and its certainly not compulsory. But occasionally I do get a comment and this blog is going to be about a comment I got to a recent blog. Since the comment was made publicly (and its still there to see in full anyway) I will quote the relevant sentences (the highlights in italics are mine) so that we are all on the same page before I begin:

We all have faith in something. Some have faith in God, some have faith in their spouse, their government, their employer, their children, their income. Without faith, what is the point of living? If I don't even have enough faith to think I will see tomorrow, why should I put any effort forth living today?

I read this comment again the other day. Of course, I was very thankful that the person concerned had made it. It is part of my understanding of the world that no person is omniscient. No person has all the answers or all the insight. Some would be extremely skeptical and say that none of us have any at all. I'm not one of those people but in my appreciation of all things human there is room for the view that we human beings are bundles of beliefs and those beliefs are situated and self-interested. One corollary of this situation is that other points of view can be informative and open our eyes to things we cannot currently see. This, indeed, is how beliefs ever change at all. Someone or something happens which opens a chink of light in an area there was no light before. And a pathway to a new belief is formed. So I was very glad of the comment. It made me think about the subject of faith and especially the two sentences I highlighted in italics, above. In many ways these three sentences get to the very heart of my own worldview. First of all, I asked myself if its really true that "We all have faith in something".

I must be honest and say that for 48 hours I've racked my brains on this one. I've been asking myself if my correspondent is right. Do I have faith in something? The correspondent gave examples - God, spouse, government, employer, children, income. I don't have most of these. I think that I have faith in none of them. But, still, there could be something that I do have faith in. My correspondent, who I respect, seems quite sure that this is the case and I want to do them the courtesy and give them the respect of thinking it through to see if they are right. My conclusion is that I don't have faith in anything but I want to be as bullet proof as I can be in saying it. If you have read any amount of my blogs, particularly the more philosophical ones, then you know that I have an affinity to existentialism, to absurdism, to some extent to nihilism. You know that I have had a great deal of thought about "the void" and the essential and fundamental problem of meaning that afflicts our species. Meaning is a problem because it is open-ended and it cannot be fixed. It is always only rhetorical. No one can force you to accept a certain meaning and it can always be re-made. Things can always be seen another way.

So what place is there for "faith" in a world that is seen like that? Faith implies both belief and trust, at least in the understanding of faith I have. I have had considerable input to my thinking from Christian sources in the past and I am well used to Christian scholarship. "Faith" is, accordingly, quite a strong word in that tradition. "Faith", for the biblical Christian, should be something to do with believing in things that cannot be seen with the eyes. It is, in some respects, believing in the impossible (that God exists, that he has acted to save creation) and trusting that, even though from some angles it seems silly and ridiculous, it is true. I do not think that every human belief comes under the category "faith". It is very trivially true that every person alive holds beliefs. It is part of our human make up to take stances and hold beliefs about the world around is. Quite simply, we cannot function as a human being without doing so. But is this "faith"? I don't think so. Its simply part of the mechanics of being a human being. I think that some people do have faith in the strong, positive, "believing and trusting" sense I use here but I don't think that I am one of them. And so my correspondent's sentence is explicitly challenged. To challenge it is to say that we don't all have faith in something. It might be worth asking yourself if you have faith in anything. And then ask yourself why and if it deserves it.

So what I'm saying here is that, yes, everybody believes things but that isn't quite faith. Some surprising people do have faith, I'm sure. I've argued many times that the seemingly anti-faith person Dr Richard Dawkins is, in fact, very much a person who does have faith. He doesn't believe in God but he is more than happy to believe in Truth (the capitalized "T" is important for it denotes a divinized concept) and in what he regards as our human truth-finding abilities. Dawkins is very much a strong anti-skeptic. He thinks that we can truly know the way things are unconditioned by our context, our humanity or anything else. I'd call that a faith and I'm sure he wouldn't like the fact. Which is a bonus as far as I'm concerned. So I think that people can have faith. But I don't think everyone does. I don't think I do. I don't even have faith in myself or in the void as some kind of "nothingness that resolves all things". Some try to make of the nothingness a mystery and it takes on God-like properties. Its either a re-imagining of God or a god by the back door. I think that needs to be resisted too. The natural processes of the physical universe and their apparent lack of meaning are not a savior nor can they be turned into one. The meaninglessness and emptiness is real and thorough-going. It can't be sugar-coated.

Now in the context of my correspondent's comment my belief that I don't have faith in anything (and since I think I don't I must assume that others have this possibility too) is important. My correspondent has gone on to say that "Without faith, what is the point of living?" So, naturally, this question addresses me directly now that I have taken up a position towards the first proposition. I can only think of one answer: there is no point to living. I think its a very great assumption, one which we then work on filling in retrospectively, to think that there is a point to living. Why would there be a point? Why should there be a point, antecedently? Why could or can it not be the case that an uncaring universe birthed things and there they are, just milling about in a physical universe of decay? I don't have faith in this because why would you? To describe things as you see them is not, for me, to have faith. But I believe it for now until or unless something comes along which opens up an alternative chink of light, another pathway to follow. To say that something has a point is to ascribe it a meaning. To create a creation myth, for example, is to put things in some order and say what they mean and how they mean it. It is simply to relate things one to another which is all giving meaning to things is. We humans, and this is the really interesting thing about the universe, are self-aware, sentient beings. We need to make meaning. But we have no knowledge that anything else does. We don't know that sharks or elephants or rabbits need meaning. We don't know that stars or moons or space dust does. We don't know that the universe itself does - even though some would put up vague arguments for its sentience. We only know that we do. But how valid is it to go forcing our own necessary meanings on everything else? This is the very absurd problem of human meaning re-stated once again, part of the riddle of what it means to be human.

So I need to admit to my correspondent that I don't "have enough faith" for I don't think that I have any. And I don't see any "point" to life, save that I might give it myself. I see a universe of actions and consequences and I keep it that simple. Things happen and this makes other things happen within the possibilities of what can happen in any given situation at all. When things happen there are consequences to the actions. That's about it. I like to keep things simple and this is a guiding idea behind some approaches towards logic: the simpler answer is to be preferred. I think this is based on the observation that life is rarely needlessly complicated for its own sake. Whilst its not true to say that I think we humans can, given enough time, figure everything out for ourselves (such people do exist and some of them give this as a reason for not needing any gods), I do think that things largely are "up to us" to make of what we can. We are each given a mind and being human we have certain needs and requirements. You could say that each of us is given the riddle of figuring out who we are and why we are here and what we are supposed to do with it. This, to me, is a more meaningful suggestion than saying we all must have faith in something. I don't think that life is a matter of faith. Faith is the illusion of meaningfulness and, strictly speaking, life is not a matter of very much at all. You don't need to care, think, love or even really feel in any rigorous or meaningful sense to get through life. You are just going to live the years you are allotted anyway. No one says you have to take life seriously and there's no punishment for not doing so outside of the circumstances of the life you live (actions and consequences, remember?). Lives both good and bad end up in the same dowdy funeral parlor with a few people there, some of whom you didn't like, to see off your physical remains.

So "what is the point of living"? There isn't one if by that you mean something antecedent and overarching. But such a thing, should it exist, sounds very permanent and meaningful. But where is it to be found and why wasn't it signposted very well? If everyone's life has a point I would have expected it to be more firmly recommended to us human beings rather than being something we can totally bypass. I notice merely several, sometimes connected, alternative versions of what life might mean. But, like some flavors of ice cream, I'm not sure I like the taste. All we have left are any meanings that we ourselves ascribe to things and I guess that we all, in some way, however loosely, do something like that. But, for me, life is about getting from point A, birth, to point B, death, across the arid wastelands of the world we live in. It doesn't really matter very much which path through the brush you take. Everyone gets to point B in the end anyway. And then which path you took seems just a little bit beside the point. (Its worth saying, though, that of course this answer is different while you are still alive in the world of actions and consequences. For whilst you are still alive what you think and say and do takes part in that continuum, it has consequences for you. But dead people don't have any actions and suffer no consequences. That's the difference.)

This leaves me one question left to answer for my correspondent says "Why should I put forth any effort living today?" Of course, we need to see what is being said here as all joined up together. This thought flows from the suggestion that everyone needs faith in something. For the writer of the comment a life without faith would be meaningless and empty, I assume. I once, almost, used to think this way myself. Instead, now, I am a living, breathing example of the fact that you don't need to worry about this. A life without faith need not be empty even though to those who think you do need faith it will seem that way. But how could a person who thinks you must have faith see any other way anyway? Honest beliefs honestly held do color how people see things. That is the point of them. Beliefs denote what can even be seen. That's why we have them. They are the rails on which we run the trains of our lives. Sometimes we get pushed off into a siding. Sometimes we are full steam ahead. Sometimes we are held at a red light. But we are always on the rails of our beliefs. 

But to the question. Is life a matter of "effort"? Would a person not putting any effort into their life be committing a sin? I don't believe in any gods so I literally have no deity to sin against. But let's push this further to the boundary. What's so darned special about life and living anyway? There are trillions of things that have lived and will live. Most of them you wouldn't care less about. But, in our human way, as things get bigger or fluffier, we start to care. We want to save the fluffy or cuddly things but the ugly things, the unseen or unremarkable things, well, not so much. Life is prodigious. Its breaking out all over the place. Many would want to say it is special. This is somewhat sentimental and being sentimental isn't necessarily that smart. 150,000 people die every day and 99.999% of them you never knew. The point of living is to die. When you are dead how you lived is irrelevant. How you lived only matters while you or anyone else is alive. No, I'm not sure that life is about "effort". In fact, even reading the sentence makes me want to be lazy, to put in no effort. To just exist. I see the idea of effort as some egotistical notion, some notion that somehow I'm letting the side down because I didn't try. The idea of effort suggests there is some authority I need to impress with the sweat of my brow. But I don't see myself as being on any side. I have no one to impress or disappoint. I'm just me. I have been born, I'm living and I'm going to die. In one sense these three simple facts are entirely trivial. That's the sense I would bring to bear on this question. Life, in general, is not about effort. There is no one to impress and no standard to meet. In the same way it doesn't make any abstract sense to say it makes a difference if I live 15,000 or 25,000 days either. Life is in general. Life is not anything else in particular.

I'm listening to my album "The Gospel of Existence" as I write (quite by coincidence, I might add). This is appropriate for it expresses musically the thoughts I am writing about here. The track "Joining the Dots" is playing. The idea behind this track, and the album, was of a vast chaos that has dots in it. You can really join these dots up any way you like and make whatever picture you want - just as you can with the books you can buy with join the dots puzzles in them. Of course, in the books you are meant to join them in a certain way for there some god-like figure has determined what picture your dots shall make at the end. But is life really the same as that? I stand with those who say it isn't. Join the dots any way you like. All that is is really just a "Chaos without Consequence" in the end - to quote another title from the album. 

And in the end, of course, I see things very differently to my correspondent. I don't think that is a bad thing. I think it is a wonderful, marvelous thing. My correspondent, in caring enough to write me a reply, made me question and think about what I believed and helped me to sharpen it up. We all need this and it bothers me that very many of us don't see it. We sit there always being informed by the same views or those who we know will explicitly reinforce them. This is intellectual and personal suicide. Beliefs thrive on being questioned or opposed. They need to live and breathe and do work to be healthy. Any fool can sit in a cave and believe something unchallenged. So spare a thought for those who think differently from you. It turns out you need them, their beliefs and even their faith too.

Music as Identity

In my last blog I mentioned noise and noise in that blog was a kind of music. You may be one of those people who doesn't consider that noise is music but I would disagree with you. John Cage defined music as the arrangement of sound and silence so it seems to me that if you accept that noise is sound then any arrangement of it must also be music. This seems reasonable to me and those who make the kind of music I would call "noise" vary wildly in any case. Noise, for me, would extend from the abstract sound collages native to early 1970s "Kosmische" music to the glitchy "IDM" beats of Autechre to the ingrained, experimental, industrial randomness of Throbbing Gristle (and much else besides). Noise, for me, encompasses the abstract, the random, the non-standard, the unpredictable, the incoherent, the absurd. It is not merely shouting into a microphone whilst strumming your guitar with the volume on full - although it could be. Noise, in my estimation, is made by those who are very artistically involved and invested in the music they make. There is usually some overt point or purpose behind it. I would also argue that noise makers have a fascination with sounds and do not merely want to create unending variations of the same ones.

The recent history of my music-making goes something like this. In the Autumn of 2013 I returned to the UK from living in Berlin, Germany. I was at a low point and the music I made then was uninspiring and formulaic. About six months later, in the Spring of 2014, I began to emerge from this malaise by experimenting with metallic sounds. In this period I was still thinking kind of melodically and I made poignant tunes that were, perhaps, a hangover from the low point I had been at. It was in the Autumn of 2014 that my musical philosophy received a fresh influx of inspiration when I discovered two now constant and abiding influences. These were John Cage and Kosmische music. It was not so much the case that I liked this music (such a thing as musical taste is largely irrelevant) but more the case that these people had ideas about what music is at all in the first place. I was struck by the fact, in the case of the Kosmische musicians, that they expressly wanted to make a new music, a music that could be theirs, something that wasn't beholden either to a tradition or to totem figures of the past. This showed that music is part of a culture and that you place yourself inside a tradition when you make it. Music becomes about identity. It says who you are. With Cage it was very much his compositional attitude, approach and ideas that were key. Music is organizing sounds and silence, nothing more and nothing less. Isn't that just a refreshingly simple definition, something that sets you free as a musical creator?

The track Discipline by Throbbing Gristle is, for some, not the easiest thing to listen to. Feel free to listen to it on You Tube if you've never heard it before. It is charitably described as a vocalist shouting over sounds. I'm not going to tell you its the greatest song ever made but that's not the point anyway. The point for someone with an inquiring mind like me is why would someone make a song like that in the first place? This leads into another question which is why does anyone make a song the way they do? Everyone who makes music has forbears and knows of other music and so its true to say that everyone has influences. But it might not always be thought that musical writers have ideas or identity behind their music when they make it. I think they do. I think the music you make says something about you, who you see yourself as, where you think you fit in, what you want to be and how you see the world. I could at this point furnish lots of examples that I think make this point but I'll leave it to you to think about my suggestion for yourself instead. 

My point in mentioning this is because I want to encourage people to think both more widely and deeply about music in the first place. At one level music can just be taken as another composition that you either like or don't like. I increasingly find this shallow and you have my influences to thank for me thinking this way. Music has long been used to influence people however and not just at political rallies for mainstream candidates trying to hook you in with a catchy tune. Even if one thinks back to more primitive times music was used, for example in cultic rituals, to engender an atmosphere and create  a mood conducive to the activity concerned. One thinks of the Dionysian feasts in ancient Greek culture where revelers would whip themselves up into intoxicated frenzy. Music there helped to achieve this and had a purpose. I think that more often than we might like to admit music does have a purpose. Its incredibly narrow thinking to regard music as merely "entertainment". Its much more complicated than that. For example, did John Lennon write "Imagine" (which I think is the worst song ever made) to entertain or to make a point? At the very least it is a bit of both.

For me music is a lot of the things I've mentioned above. It is certainly something which says something about you. The kind of music you choose to make is a choice as are the conditions that you choose to make it under. This can demonstrate if you intend to be a person who wants to "fit in" or if you see yourself as an outsider. It can show that you want to be seen as part of one culture but not another. It can indicate if you regard yourself as traditional or avant garde. It can also show if you are content to use standard tropes or want to take a non-standard approach. My recent albums have very much been trying to fit into non-standard tropes, being abstract collages of sounds, often dissonant, that require the effort of listening to them as a whole to appreciate what I was trying to do. Here we do not talk about "good" and "bad" for these are superficial judgments of likes and dislikes and these things are of no importance. There is more to be said and to be heard about music than if you personally happen to like it or not in the moment you hear it. I wonder, for example, if you ever purposely listen to forms of music that you don't like to think about why you don't like them? This is something I have done and its helped me to formulate what I think music is and what its for by doing it. I think that music is something that can be learned about and in listening to it you learn about yourself, others, and the world. The thought here, again, is that music is about much more than either entertainment or your likes and dislikes.

This, I think, is why my own music has inevitably become more random, non-standard, abstract and self-conscious about use of sounds right up to today with my last two albums, Texture and Adrift, being first and foremost sound collages. They invite you to a world outside of pop music, rock music, mainstream tropes, standard sounds, things that would sound nice on the radio or something that you would listen to at a family gathering. They are albums which demand attention on their own terms and for many that might be too big of an ask, something too jarring to contemplate. Of course, having said what I've said above, you would imagine they also say plenty about me and how I see the world. That's very true. But I'd turn that back on my readers and ask what does the music you make and/or listen to say about you and how you see the world? Listening back to my album Texture, as I am as I write this blog, I'm struck how very much like Kosmische music it really sounds. If you told me it was from 1971 by someone with a German sounding name I'd believe you. I say this not to take pride in the fact but to note how much my recent influences have insidiously taken me over. I didn't set out thinking "My album must sound like Kosmische music". And yet it does and it makes me jump to realize it. I then note that I do identify with the purposes and use of sounds that those people had who made that kind of music did. I see myself being influenced by my appreciation of the world and then writing blogs that try to influence it back.

A question occurs to me at this point: does any of this matter? Does it matter what music you make, what music you like? On the one hand, no, it doesn't. But people act as if it does. More than once I've stupidly got involved in arguments about what music is good and what music is bad. But this is absurd. No music is inherently good and no music is inherently bad. Its all a matter of taste and taste is a matter of identity. People get heated about whether you like this or that because they have invested some of themselves in the judgments they have made about things. To say this song I cherish is rubbish is, in a way, to say that you think I am. And vice versa. Music is sometimes portrayed as this trivial thing that is commercial, disposable and throwaway. These days there are stories almost every day of how it is now a valueless commodity that many people won't even pay for, either as consumers or as those who want music for their projects but won't pay musicians to provide it. Something is certainly going on there but, argument after trivial argument on the Internet shows, people are still very much invested in music and particularly in what they consider as their music. Music is a matter of identity, it is a personal and cultural marker.

So, since this is my personal blog, what of me? Well, I'm happy to keep on being the non-standard, dissonant, abstract, non-conventional person I seem eager to be. I've stopped chasing likes, follows and downloads. Believe it or not I did once try to be a person who made music people would like! Thank the non-existent gods I saw the light on that one! The music I made then was lame, insipid shit. Making music to please an audience is a hateful business. You must be yourself. Authenticity is key. Now I just think that my music is there. Listen or don't. My music is and always has been a musical statement of something more than pitches and scales and as I write I think its getting more interesting as time passes by. "Being interesting" is my musical threshold in making an album and since I make it for me then if it interests me that is the standard. All I can hope after that is that it maybe interests one or two others as well. I make music that is a journey and an experience. It is for listeners to decide if its a journey they want to take and an experience they want to have. Even if its not I hope my blog today encourages my readers to think a bit more about any music they make or listen to and that they ask themselves wider questions because of it.

My music is available at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/ 

Politics, Noise and Citizens of the World

One of the benefits of being on Twitter is that, occasionally and usually out of the blue, a reasonable and interesting conversation might break out. I had two such conversations last night about what might, at first glance, appear to be unrelated subjects. However, on further reflection it seems to me that perhaps they aren't so different at all. The first subject is politics in general although the context in which I discussed this was the American political system and, of course, the presidential campaigns which are currently in full swing over there. The second subject was that brand of electronic music known as "noise". This can be anything from abstract sound washes or creepy atmospheres and textures to maniacal ranting into a microphone over a background of insane amounts of electronic feedback. The question is "How do these disparate subjects come to be seen as similar?" Let me try and explain.

The now sadly deceased philosopher, Richard Rorty, was an American liberal. Besides being a philosopher in the pragmatist tradition he was also that most interesting of things, the "public intellectual". He had a lifelong interest in politics which seemingly stemmed from childhood and his parents had been politically active too. He wrote both papers and books about America as a political entity explaining what he regarded that the American political hope was. When I have read him I am always struck by his notion that America is the greatest political experiment that the world has ever undertaken, a bold and audacious attempt to build the best kind of society we humans can conceive of. Rorty has much to say about this. Of course, not being American myself I see in this a deal of what us non-Americans would sniggeringly regard as American big-headedness too. And yet for Rorty there is in the historical vicissitudes of the creation of America, with its Constitution and various Amendments, something worth having and preserving, something good, hopeful and beneficial to human kind. America, seen in this positive light, becomes a beacon of hope for all of us.

Of course, such positive and hopeful talk is always likely to be blasted away by the realities. I'm not a fan of television news or mainstream media but if I look at any of it I see in America a country that seems anything but "a beacon of hope for all of us". America seems set (if I may be so bold) to soon host an election between a racist clown called Donald Trump and a dishonest corporate stooge called Hillary Clinton. But its more than that. America seems a country riven from top to toe by deep-seated and thorough-going division and partisanship. It proclaims itself as the "Land of the Free" but I don't see very much freedom there unless you happen to be a billionaire. America is a land of many powerful myths - and that you are free seems to be one of them. There are those there who venerate the written articles of its inception as if they were commandments handed down by God himself. Yet these are just the historical formulations of certain men at a certain time and place which some have taken as holy writ. Look to many kinds of political strife today and America leads the way on it (besides killing many of its own citizens as a matter of course). Is it the case that black lives matter, blue lives matter or all lives matter, for example? For many, they have a cartoonish political stance ready for any possible happening in the world and this politically-motivated identity informs their whole existence and their view of the world and everybody in it. This is a vision of hell not of hope.

In my discussion last night I talked about this in the context of forms of government. It was suggested that I was taking umbrage at all forms of government when I said during that conversation that the American Constitution is a fable based only on the willingness of people to enforce it, that is, by force. My point there was what I regard as the obvious one: all political power is ultimately achieved and enforced by force of arms. During the conversation I said that the only interesting political question is "What happens to me if I disagree with what you say?" This question was posed to highlight the fact that somewhere down the line force comes into play and it was meant to open a chink of light for those who wanted to think it through and see where such a question leads. The world we have today is over 200 political fiefdoms many of which are nominally "democratic" in formulation but I wonder at the sense and force of the word "democratic" there. It is probably true that any kind of democracy is worse than none at all so please don't take me to be anti-democratic. What I am, in a King Canute kind of a way (he's the guy who couldn't hold back the waves by his command for those not up on their old English history), is probably anti-political. I avoid party politics since the very stench of it repulses me. The very idea of party politics is to represent, stand up for and defend a political position. I cannot think of anything worse.

How this has worked out, at least in our Western societies that are being notionally democratic, is to enshrine all kinds of conventional notions and truths. These conventionalities serve purposes and the people who have those purposes. Political parties have and serve ideologies and these ideologies serve certain, but not all, people. I would agree with both French and American revolutionaries that the citizen should be the most important person in any democracy but it seems naive to believe this or that it could ever be so.  My political question still remains for me front and center: "What happens to me if I disagree with you?" This question highlights, I think, that no one is politically free and that the sanction of "might is right" will always be against you. The truth is we hope to be left alone in the world to go about our peaceful business. But we cannot guarantee this. We live in a world where political powers take things into their own hands as judge, jury and often executioner. Many are those who have found themselves plucked out of life never to be seen again. Its important to note here that, basically, we are relying on other people being honest or playing fair. We don't have much more than this to rely on. Rules are made to be broken, remember?

Electronic noise can be harsh and unforgiving, even unlistenable. There is a documentary film called PEOPLE WHO DO NOISE that you can find on You Tube about people who make Noise in Portland, Oregon. Underneath it are a bunch of interesting comments, many of which point to a social function in the making of noise music. Its noted by one commenter that Punk was a form of music that was, overtly, a "kick against the rules". I think, too, of the industrial music of the mid to late 1970s in Great Britain which was explicitly non-conventional (and overtly political), an attempt to completely disregard any mainstream thought on what music even was and to mark new territory as musical and, more importantly, as theirs. A similar phenomenon occurred in early 1970s Germany with various electronic noisemakers, many lumped together by a disrespectful English-speaking press as "Krautrock" but often known as "kosmische" in Germany itself. These people, too, wanted to throw off the received musical conventions and mark out their own territory. This territorial aspect is important for it is one way we can link political ambitions to musical ones. 

Most interesting to me are the reactions of those commenting on the People Who Do Noise video who completely take against it. These are those who would answer my question "What happens if I disagree with what you say?" likely in a very negative and possibly confrontational way. One commenter describes a lot of the noisemakers featured as "delusional", regarding them as nihilistic attention-seekers. To the suggestion of some of those interviewed that their noisemaking has a political purpose - to free them from capitalism and society - he replies by pillorying them. Another commenter suggests that the noise enthusiasts are "trying to out suck each other" and he refers to their "limited imagination". He refers to the many "interesting noises" that could be made and yet that word "interesting", it seems to me, is what trips this particular commenter up. "Interesting" is not an objective category. People, individuals, citizens, get to decide for themselves what's "interesting". Nothing is or isn't inherently interesting. We decide for ourselves. This is another clue to where noise and politics meet. For the politically motivated will tell you that some political polities just are the case. But there, too, it seems to me that we get to decide for ourselves.

A further commenter on this video appreciates that people can make electronic noise and that this is a valid activity - but somehow it isn't enough. Instead, you have to be like (his example) Trent Reznor who uses noise but has formed it into something more musically conventional. He has made a tune out of it and not just left it in its raw, basic state as chaotic and visceral. This is, to me, an example of those people who are trying to be reasonable but, actually, they are just more of the conventional people. The challenge in listening to noise is to hear it as music at all and most people fail in this task. That is a change that needs to take place in you. You need, in modern parlance, to "get it". This commenter again believes in some kind of real music as if noise isn't really that but if only we will use some conventional artifice then it could be. We can't allow use of sounds to fall back into the chaotic and unordered dark ages. We need to step out into the light that human action has revealed.

I see this attitude prevalent in both musical and political spheres. Where, for some, the chaos and harshness of noise is not within the boundaries of music, for others it is any number of political ideas which are not genuine and true. But, in the end, it all comes down to power and who has the might to bring their visions to be. This is what creates the mainstream and all the accepted conventions of life. This is why so many of the noisier forms of music (at least the ones not co-opted by capitalists such as the bizarre spectacle of heavy metal as done by Metallica) regard themselves as overtly political. This is why they see themselves as leaving the common ground that is claimed and ruled by the predominant ideology and heading out to make new ground. Metallica are a noisy band but they are conventional and capitalist through and through. Its a money-making exercise. Contrast this with the people in People Who Do Noise or bands such as Cluster (particularly their first two albums which are abstract noise), Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire. The latter have their art guided by their political ideas. They are free spirits not societal clones. The former are to all intents and purposes apolitical but, of course, end up being political exactly because of that. "Get rich and live the rich man's lifestyle" is their creed. 

Of course, it will come as a shock to some that music is regarded as political at all. But it absolutely is. By some this is deliberate and they make it plain and spell out what the political message of their music is. Others don't but it can be divined from how they position themselves musically. Do they fit in or do they stand at odds with prevailing trends? Music has long been known to lend itself to propaganda or to certain ideas of lifestyle or philosophy. As the early German electronic pioneers knew, the blues-based rock of the 1960s spoke of American values that they did not share or want and the native pop music of Germany, called Schlager, was tame and conventional, speaking of a different political orthodoxy. It enshrined within it ideas of being a good, conventional German. Goebbels loved it in a way that he did not love what he regarded as the debased music called jazz, particularly free jazz. People like Edgar Froese, who founded Tangerine Dream in the late 1960s, wanted to create a new music that had none of these political associations. They wanted a different canvas that they could give their own meanings to. For bands like this and others like Popol Vuh and Cluster this would start off with abstract, electronic noise. The message was clear: we are not like that.

"Politics" comes from the Greek language. The polis was the Greek city and politics is, accordingly, the business of the city. Cities are where groups of people congregate to live together because, this is the thinking, doing so will benefit everyone. It gives advantages of security and defense and being able to live in relative peace. But from this simple idea things become more complicated. It would be alright if everyone was happy with this. But the truth is some people aren't. People seem to have a need to seek their own advantage and this is often at the expense of other people. This creates difference, division and partisanship. Some try to broach this issue with rules or statements of principle. This, I believe, is what the American Constitution (as just one example) tries to do. But it cannot work because even those pledged to uphold such things will betray them for personal gain. Words don't mean much by themselves and they require people to make them speak. People, it may be noted, will often speak from their own interest and words, even words written in a Constitution, are powerless to resist. And there is always the question of "the spirit of the law" and what such things were always meant to achieve. We all know how easy it is to make weasel words regarding what is written yet trample all over the ideas those words were meant to represent. Politics, it seems to me, is, at bottom, just a dog fight for survival. Those engaged in it will use any means necessary, not least rhetorical, to achieve their goals. And that includes duping any and every body else as to what is really at stake. People will talk of "concepts" and "ideas" but this is just a political powerplay. It is saying "I want the world to be like this".

Most people who make noise, particularly those making abstract noise, are often political too. Their vision is non-standard just as their means of expressing it is. I see such artists as these as those who are explicitly putting my question to society. They are saying, in the feedback and random, tuneless chaos, "What happens if I disagree with what you say?". They are doing this by overtly making music that many others won't even recognize as music. They are causing all kinds of otherwise regular people to regard them as "delusional" or strange or offbeat. Of course, to be offbeat is simply not to be in time with the main flow of something. But who says anyone has to be in time with it? If you believe that life itself, not just in its political dimension, is not a game then we have a duty to ask all the pertinent questions and to take them to their logical conclusions, to go all the way, as it were. Am I free? Will you and the rest of society allow me to be truly free? Or is it the case that "freedom" is a sham word? Am I really bound in by freedom which becomes the freedom to live as the rest of society has decided I should be allowed to live? And, if so, is that really freedom at all? What is the truth of the thought that one person's freedom becomes another person's lack of it? Just as politicians try to take power to themselves and exercise its dominion over us so noise musicians take musical territory to themselves in an attempt to establish their own kingdoms. At bottom, both see the world a certain way and try to bring it about. Both have a vision. And a vision can be a powerful thing.

What is my dog in this particular hunt? I am a non-conventional person. It seems to me more and more that my only purpose in life is to battle all the dumb, mainstream, conventional thoughts that hold people in a trance. I have philosophical precursors in this task, not least Diogenes, the man who lived in a barrel (so we are told) and who, when asked, called himself a "citizen of the world". But the question is will the world let people like him, and now like me, break the rules and be non-conventional? Are we allowed to be free spirits or will the might of conventionality crush us and call us "delusional"? Certainly the non-conventional risk being misunderstood in a world in which the very language is given its meaning with all the might of political force (gender studies is a powerful example of that!). And the problem for the misunderstood, the non-conventional, the outsiders, is that people in general find it easier to be nasty to those they consider "not like them". So, in the end, its this I see as the real human challenge. That challenge is to see us all as just citizens of the world, equal citizens of the world. Richard Rorty, in his ever hopeful way, saw America at its best as a step on the road to this, a step on the road to identifying with ever larger groups of people, extending the circle of our commitment and togetherness, the group of people we would regard as "like us".

"But don't hold your breath just yet," I say, pessimistically. My question still stands: 

WHAT HAPPENS IF I DISAGREE WITH WHAT YOU SAY?

The Gospel of Existence (Redux): The Problem with Spirituality

It so happens that when you read and write about things sometimes someone might send you an article with the note "You might like this" attached to it. Such happened to me yesterday. Whilst the precise motivations of the sender are unclear (but it was gratefully received anyway), I did get to read an article from the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. "The Tricycle Foundation", so I read, "is dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available". And so its fair to say that what I was about to read is written from an insider point of view. But I am not a Buddhist neither do I particularly wish to be persuaded of Buddhist truths. Truths that seem true to me will do. Nevertheless, I took the article that was offered to me in good faith, not least out of respect for the person who did me the favor of offering it to me to read. Reading what I say about it below, he may or may not recant of the fact that he ever did so. At this point let me say that for those who want to read the original article they can do so HERE and let me reassure any readers that what comes next isn't just about either Buddhism or religion. 

The article is entitled "We Are Not One" and concentrates on a Buddhist explanation of its doctrine of interdependence, something I touched upon in my last blog when mentioning The Heart Sutra and its seeming notion of a flux of interdependent becoming. Here the writer, who is a Buddhist abbot from California called Thanissaro Bhikkhu, writes concerned to show why this does not mean everything is "one". Of course, as you might expect, he has reasons for wanting to do this and, it seemed to me when reading, these seemed to be Buddhist religious reasons that, if you are not a Buddhist (as I am not), you simply would not share. As I began to read the article I was set out on the path of regarding the writer as untrustworthy immediately in an "argument" he supposed was against the idea of there being a god. This argument boiled down to "If there was a god he would have done a better job than this". Well he might have and he might not have but I doubt the creature would get to decide what the creator did or did not do in any case. Such a viewpoint would also overlook theist explanations for the world we live in, such as Christianity's suggestion of its fallen nature and its need to be saved. Our writer glosses all this with his simplistic assertions and this gave me what I suspect was a fatal first impression. (You should know that, as with the Buddhist writer, I don't believe in any god either.)

It didn't help me in reading his article that the major concept the writer was trying to discuss, "Oneness", was never defined. I don't know if this was because it was assumed the presumably Buddhist readers would know what he was talking about (although in a subheading to the piece it was suggested the subject is something many Buddhists get wrong) or simply because he didn't bother to define it. In any case, this lack of definition was fatal as far as the piece was concerned and his lack of definition regularly had him arguing against a shadow foe all the way through it. This didn't endear me to what he was saying because half the time I didn't have a clue what he was arguing against. Instead we got what were to me silly arguments that were perhaps of concern to intra-Buddhist debate but of no use to those outside the fold. Bhikkhu is especially fond of suggesting that the interdependence we biological beings endure is one of "inter-eating" (i.e. living creatures eat each other to survive) and this somehow shows that everything is not one but simultaneously that this inter-eating is no cause for celebration. I must admit that I found this point lacked force and I'll come to why shortly. 

Bhikkhu used what were, to me, a number of non-sequiturs and his argument came across to me very much as a discussion amongst Buddhists where I imagine he would of thought he could have assumed the readers shared certain basic beliefs. Besides talk of casting off "ignorance" in order to progress to something called "clear knowing" he made what I thought were a number of mistakes. He argued against those who identify us with the cosmos but I thought he made a mistake there because the cosmos is not an identity or an entity in the first place. We are. So its a comparison of like with not like. The writer seemed to me to not have thought through what he was saying but, instead, to be locked in his train of Buddhist thought concerned, as he demonstrated again and again, to vindicate the words of his holy man of choice, The Buddha (which means "enlightened one"). I thought that he did his cause no good in making arguments for things that seemed manifestly false to begin with. Let me give you an example.

Bhikkhu writes:

"The first distinction is between the notions of Oneness and interconnectedness. That we live in an interconnected system, dependent on one another, doesn’t mean that we’re One. To be One, in a positive sense, the whole system would have to be working toward the good of every member in the system. But in nature’s grand ecosystem, one member survives only by feeding—physically and mentally—on other members. It’s hard, even heartless, to say that nature works for the common good of all."

Bhikkhu's use of "in a positive sense" is his only get out clause in this paragraph for I find myself asking "Why does the system have to be for good or bad at all?" It doesn't. What Bhikkhu imputes into his piece here is a moral impetus given from a human being. The cosmos as a system is not moral and knows absolutely nothing of morality. It is without sentience. It is neither an entity or an identity as Bhikkhu has assumed before already in his piece. Thus, it need not and, indeed, cannot work for good or bad at all, either for the one, the many or the all. It just operates - beyond good and evil. And so here interconnectedness and interdependence, the relatedness of all things, can indeed be seen, casually, as a Oneness (contrary to Bhikkhu's desires) - although I don't think it means much to say it. It is, to me, benignly obvious that all things are related, interconnected, and, thus, One. Only if one has a doctrine to protect would one even bother to question this casual notion. So we must note that morality is human and not of a universe invested with an identity it doesn't possess. If a fox eats a rabbit in the woods and no one is there to hear it… it doesn't matter a fig. We do not live on the front cover of The Watchtower magazine and have no need to dream up lurid moral imperatives concerning all the creatures living happily together for all of being and time. Bhikkhu, in his desire to escape the carnivorous nature of life on Earth, seems to want such a thing and to say that the carnivorousness means we are not One at the same time.

And here is really the first problem I had with this in a more general sense. It is a point against all religions and forms of organized spirituality (which I regard as the same). The problem here is that all these notions involve ideas of right and wrong and often in a "one size fits all" kind of a way. I do not really believe in this at all and see no reason why one size should fit all. It may be that you could persuade me that there are contingent versions of these things that will do service for us for the here and now. But, then again, I might also be persuaded that morality is a man-made irrelevance that always services some power base first and foremost and that, in the end, all paths lead to the same place anyway: the grave, the dark recycling bin of life. What no religion or spirituality ever convinces me of is that its moral truth is the moral truth and this is because I find it highly coincidental that this group of religious people just happen to have got all the truths together where others somehow managed not to. Hence the regular spiritual concentration on special insight or knowledge. Without it such religious groupings would have no basis for their teachings. What can be said, as Nietzsche prophetically saw, is that religion and spirituality can basically be boiled down to morality, a way of living, judgments based in designations of good and evil. This, in turn, gives birth to what every spiritual person wants in the end: some kind of salvation.

Of course, one problem for the moral, as Bhikkhu very much wants to be here, is freedom of choice. Its hard to preach for morality if people don't have the freedom to choose the good over the bad. So a belief in morality necessitates a belief in freedom of choice. Bhikkhu duly notes this and tries to provide one but it seems to me to be a hodge-podge idea that is utterly unconvincing. Bhikkhu says:

"If we were really all parts of a larger organic Oneness, how could any of us determine what role we would play within that Oneness? It would be like a stomach suddenly deciding to switch jobs with the liver or to go on strike: The organism would die. At most, the stomach is free simply to act in line with its inner drives as a stomach. But even then, given the constant back and forth among all parts of an organic Oneness, no part of a larger whole can lay independent claim even to its drives. When a stomach starts secreting digestive juices, the signal comes from somewhere else. So it’s not really free."

Note the adjective "organic" there which Bhikkhu has sneaked in (for he doesn't always use it). His analogy is clearly ridiculous. But who says we have "freedom of choice" anyway? There is much literature and comment to the effect that "freedom of choice" is often illusory and always within set parameters.  You have the freedom to be who you are much like Bhikkhu's stomach. Freedom's not free (not least from within pragmatist or existentialist readings of existence) and this dents the argument here for it is assumed and not argued for noting objections. Any system can have a set of choices within it for various parts of the system that operate along a sliding scale of "freedom". But, actually, it is better here to talk of possibilities rather than freedoms not least because the latter term is frequently misleading and taken to mean "without condition". An example is Bhikkhu's ridiculous stomach/liver analogy. Freedom, if we must use the term at all here, is always a matter of possibilities and opportunities otherwise we must recant our knowledge of the universe and wonder why ducks don't decide to become mountains or windows decide to talk. They don't because they can't. In a physical universe all things are defined by their possibilities not their "freedom". The speaker would have been better to explore his realization that things aren't really free. Indeed. But that would lead to more system-friendly conclusions pertinent to Oneness that our writer here certainly does not want to find much less explicate.  His morality mandates freedom.

And here's the jump: "For the Buddha, any teaching that denies the possibility of freedom of choice contradicts itself and negates the possibility of an end to suffering. If people aren’t free to choose their actions, to develop skillful actions and abandon unskillful ones, then why teach them?.... How could they choose to follow a path to the end of suffering?" Are we starting to get the writer's angle on things now? Now we find out why freedom of choice must be preserved. Its a doctrine. The Buddha said it therefore we good Buddhists must defend it. The Buddha apparently sees freedom of choice as a path to the end of suffering which is surely salvation.

Bhikkhu has argued that Oneness condemns you to no freedom of choice (freedom of choice being something he has assumed or needed due to his moral stance in the first place) and to being a part of the carnivorous system of inter-eating. But what if you or I, his readers, see no problem with inter-eating or if, as I, see no problem with death, decay or even fighting over resources (which all living things do in their various ways) in this universe of our's, a physical, finite universe? Surely these are just ways the universe works? Sure, they can be seen as problems. We can wish it was another way. We could hope, in the Christian phrase, that the lion would lie down with the lamb. But that doesn't make it so. Physical things are always limited things and an abundance of life will always fight over those things - because it must. Life generally tends to want to live and does not always have scruples about how. The issue here seems to be that as a Buddhist the writer wants to escape from the universe he finds himself in to some other one. It is this spiritual impulse (common to many spiritual and religious people) which creates the dilemma. It becomes a moral issue so, again, the problem here is that the spiritual/moral human impulse interjects. (The math is "suffering is bad so suffering must be escaped". But compare that critic of Christianity, Nietzsche, who says "that which does not kill me makes me stronger".) Again, I must retort that the universe is not moral and knows no moral imperative. So where Bhikkhu sees that "each of us is trapped in the system of interconnectedness by our own actions" I just see the conditions of life and existence. He sees something to escape from. I say there is no escape possible, let us make our surroundings as fair and equitable as we can as we have opportunity since we must all, somehow, get along.

The issue then is that Bhikkhu's spiritual/moral impulse keeps interjecting, finding problems and seeking (doctrinally acceptable) solutions. Yet the universe isn't moral: we are. The problem is ours, is existential, not its. But if the universe isn't moral then suffering cannot be either good or bad except as we say so for the reasons we give. Morality becomes rhetorical. It changes from a problem of all Being in general to a local one to do with our form of life or existence. It becomes not a universal problem but one that we must deal with as the people we are. It is, as far as I can see, not about enlightenment and escape to something more real and less illusory but more about recognition and acceptance of what human being is. This is why I have said before in something I wrote that the problem for humans is not to cure cancer, it is to be a human being whether you have cancer or not. Whilst the human being labours under a moral impulse, one which designates goods and bads and seeks escape from the bads to a world constructed only of goods, then we as a species condemn ourselves to never find the very things we seek in any ultimate sense. And we will always be running. This is true whether you are a Christian seeking cleansing in Christ, a Buddhist seeking to flee illusion and find enlightenment or a Transhumanist wanting to escape biology (which must ultimately be the wish to escape the physical world of decay).

We are back to a theme I've had before. We want to become gods or touch divinity. This is nothing more than escaping time and chance. Bhikkhu's Buddhism becomes about salvation (awakening) without a savior. And this is why any language of essentialism is always wrong and talk of "illusion" and "real" worlds is misguided. It trades on the idea there is something better waiting for us if only we could reach it. And that is nothing more or less than the religious false promise that all religious and spiritual people have offered since human beings could first look at themselves and wish that things were different, better. It is nothing more than the human wish to transcend itself, our impulse to dream. We are never more fully human than when we do this but never less the gods we wish we were in needing to do it. This is why Bhikkhu seems to have got it all wrong for me. He has been seduced by Buddhism's narrative of salvation and I have not. He seeks to overcome all things and register some kind of win on the cosmic scoreboard whereas I am happy merely to have been if I must be at all.

I, in contrast, offer no way of salvation or "positive" message (where "positive" is, once again, a moral denomination). I, in contrast to the mainstream of humanity under the influence of religion and spirituality, say there is no win for us humans to have whilst simultaneously recognizing that this is what such thinking is really always about. Humans want some kind of win out of life. I say that existence is pointless and mundane and this does not sound like a win at all. It isn't. It turns its back on the very idea of one. This idea of winning, somehow, is what motivates all the escapes and salvations human beings seek. It can surely be a reasonable explanation for them. Being human creates the desire to create a win. Human desire, something identical with us, is the motivating factor here. But, as Buddhism teaches about other things, this too must be viewed dispassionately and given up. We must be emptied of it or forever run after it, seduced by its Siren song. Put away childish desires, become who you are, creatures of the void in an amoral universe, rhetorical beings responsible for yourself and your environment. You do not need some moral/spiritual win out of life and any you did find would be hollow anyway.

Here endeth today's lesson according to Dr Existenz.