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.

Explaining The Void

Another day has passed and here I am having worked through another musical project. It has often occurred to me in previous times that my music is philosophical in its basis but these days I actually think it is philosophical commentary and expression regarding the subjects that I am thinking about. A case in point is my newly completed projected which, to myself at least, is known as The Emptiness Suite. This comprises my latest four albums, Absence of Presence, Engineers of A Meaningless Universe, Anthropocentric and We Are The Void. Of course, to make music as philosophy is not a straightforward business. When one philosophizes with words one utilizes language which, it might be argued, is much more precise in delineating terms and communicating ideas. But is it? I have read much philosophy written in books that was dense, stodgy and often incomprehensible so it is not as if, in using words, clarity is assured. 

But when philosophizing with music one faces a different task. A primary factor here is that the experience of listening to the music should engender feelings and ideas to do with the subject matter. This is the case here with The Emptiness Suite in that listeners should experience the ideas the sounds are about. One should experience or imagine an absence of presence when listening to Absence of Presence and feel themselves actually in a meaningless universe when listening to Engineers of A Meaningless Universe. When listening to We Are The Void I want you to feel in The Void. I have tried, by the use and manipulation of sounds, to make this a possibility but, of course, I cannot guarantee it anymore than someone who writes philosophy in books can guarantee that you get the point. Crucially though, it is relevant to note here that the music I have made in this suite (and more generally) is not an object, some piece of music that you subjectively appreciate as an entity. My music is an interactive and interdependent experience. How you feel in listening to it, what it makes you think and feel, is exactly the point of it. My ideal listener cannot distinguish between themselves and what they are hearing because it is all taken up in one holistic activity.

All that said, what is The Emptiness Suite about? I think that its a voyage of discovery, a voyage into emptiness, a voyage away from familiarity, a voyage away from much of the thinking that we in The West are immersed in, dominated, as it is, by all kinds of deceptive dualisms. The suite tells a kind of loose story. In Absence of Presence a malady is diagnosed. This malady is that the substance and presence we want to give to things is lacking. It is noticed that things never stand by or for themselves. They always need rhetorical backup. Things are always challengeable or even ignorable and this is worrying. We seem to want something beyond what we have got, something more firm and unarguable. But it is not to be found. This is experienced deep within us as a lack.

The focus then shifts from an implicit view from within a thinking subject to a macro view of the mass of humanity. The second album sets out to view us human beings as the engineers of a meaningless universe. This album is a comment on our activity, meaning and worth on planet Earth. As I see it, we go about building and doing and working, always only having enough to go on and do the same again tomorrow (if we are lucky) but we never build or work on anything that means something by and for itself. In the end it seems as if we are just doing all these things to fight off the nagging fear that if we didn't do something the horror of everything's meaninglessness would sink in. Everything passes away and all that's left is the fact we did a few things. We seek to increase our knowledge and our understanding of the universe through science but what meaning do these things give us? They seem unable to provide any because what does knowledge of particles mean to any of us? Its useless knowledge. We seem impotent to provide the meaning we need and so we build meaningless empires of knowledge instead to give ourselves a purpose that we cannot find in nature. The lack is there again.

And so, in album three, we become anthropocentric. In the famous statement that summarizes the Enlightenment, Man is the measure. When Man is the measure rationality is praised. This album focuses on human beings as they have become today, beings who see themselves as in some sense special or different in the universe. They regard themselves as tasked with a purpose and regard their knowledge and science as ways to objectively improve the situation of both themselves and other things with which they have to do. This is built on the belief that humans beings can have real knowledge of things and objectively understand the universe in which they are set. Thus, human ways of thinking and acting are accorded the status necessary to believe that such goals are possible. It is believed that the universe has a fixed, objective reality and that, as perspicuous beings, we have the possibility to learn what this is. Having this knowledge will, we think, make us the masters of it. I see all this as a kind of God complex within human beings who always either want divinity for themselves or to be put in touch with something more permanent or eternal than they are. It is, for me, another expression of the lack expressed in parts one and two. Human beings are never happy to settle for being just more meaningless matter in an uncaring universe. They always want to build up their part. 

My conclusion is reached in album four, We Are The Void. This is a musical expression of the idea from my last blog "Eureka!" but reinforced by some recent reading of Buddhist texts, notably the so-called "Heart Sutra". Talk of Buddhism may scare some of my readers and I admit that I myself hesitate to read the texts I have done because I am, these days, very wary regarding religious or spiritual doctrines and dogmas. I am looking for neither thing but am open to philosophical insights. And the problem with a lot of religions is that they find themselves unable to resist the urge to make doctrines and dogmas out of things. Surely thousands of years of human history has taught us, however, that ways of understanding change and that if you want to make yourself look a fool write up some document and then say that it is forever eternally true. You will look as silly as those Americans who blather on about the right to bear arms because some guys 200+ years ago wrote the 2nd Amendment. The past cannot bind the future. The future must take care of itself.

So I read The Heart Sutra not as any doctrine or dogma and not to be told "the world is really like this" (which would be a massive mistake, not least in the context of what it says) but in order to stimulate my own thinking about my own place in the world and how I see this vale of tears we call life. Much that I found there is readily compatible with the sorts of pragmatist and existentialist philosophical things I have talked about in numerous blogs. The key idea is that of Śūnyatā (emptiness). This emptiness is not one of nothingness. Rather it is the idea that nothing is one thing. It is a way of expressing the idea that everything is, in fact, a flux of interdependent becoming. (Nietzsche said much the same thing.) This is said because it is recognized that nothing is able to bring itself into being. There is always some other cause outside of itself. Everything is always related to other things and, in this sense, a subject/object duality seems beside the point. (Hence why my ideal listener can't distinguish themselves from the music: its all one holistic event.) I see this idea as readily compatible with something such as Richard Rorty's idea that all meaning and understanding is a matter of panrelationalism, the relating of all things to other things in order to make sense of them. In turn, this is a holistic vision. Everything is one. This insight is for Buddhists a way to enlightenment. It also works well with the existentialist mantra "existence precedes essence". The flux of your experience is paramount, not some magical essence that is supposedly the real you.

I think, in the terms of a centuries old Buddhism, this is a similar thought to my own about we humans being The Void that we diagnose in our life and experience. The lack we feel is at times unavoidable even though we can try to work and build and ignore the voice always waiting to be heard in our heads, the voice that tells us something is missing. It is my idea that we being the very creatures we are creates the void, the lack, that we experience. It is part of the human condition. This Buddhist idea of emptiness, of the radical interdependent flux of being, of all things, ("things" becomes a problematic designation because the Buddhist idea wants to experience a holistic flux and not see an atomistic set of objects) augments this by providing a philosophical background in which my idea can find a home. In this flux we, in our form of being, partake of it. It is, if you will, and without wanting to sound too much like a Swami or a huckster, a way of experiencing reality as a unity without objects and feeling at one with everything else. We are supposed to feel The Void. Experiencing this lack is the good faith of recognizing that there are no gods or eternal divinities for us to get in touch with (whilst simultaneously experiencing the existential rift over which we must leap if we will live). There is just the forever relatability of all things. 

I cannot but admit that this has a therapeutic effect for me. But if you find that out of bounds ask yourself why anyone at all ever asks themselves what their place in the universe is. This is a basic human question and I can't believe that anybody, whatever their answer, does it for any other reason than to provide themselves with some kind of stability, peace or comfort. So if you find it illegitimate of me here - back atcha! The important thing, I feel, is that it is done as honestly as you can. There is no cheating the person you see in the mirror.

So my story is one of people who experience lack, who can never find the permanence and stability they seek. There is always an existential lack, a not quite full enough, not quite stable enough. We try to build empires but they are built on the equivalent of sand. Each gets washed away and superceded. This, I am saying, is because we are the void. We can never fill it because our make up includes this emptiness. It is basic to us and our form of being. This, in turn, is an expression of our link to all other things in a great emptiness, the emptiness that is all things, all things that are interdependently related, forever linked in a flux of becoming.

So that was the text explaining my latest project but, ideally, it should be experienced musically. Maybe it will make more (or less) or different sense when done that way. It is basic to my understanding of life that things which are experienced are those which are, at heart, understood. Book learning, facts, knowledge, only takes you so far. The lesson of emptiness is that all is a matter of relationships and it is only by being in relationship with people and things that we can truly have any understanding of them.

You can hear The Emptiness Suite of albums at my Bandcamp which is at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com

Eureka!

The human mind is an enigma. You can think about an issue for years, decades, and make little progress forward. But then, one day, seemingly for no reason, something clicks. At that point the mental thorn in your side, the niggle that wouldn't go away, the itch you couldn't scratch, becomes resolved. 

Such, for me, has been the issue of the apparent meaninglessness and purposelessness of the universe. Throughout the course of my life I've tried out various solutions to this question but none satisfied. There was still, appropriately enough, a hole at the center of my thinking about this. This hole is a meaningful symbol for what, more generally, might be described as The Void. The Void is where our existence is located and where we have our being. Its best expression is space itself, vast and inscrutable, a vast nothingness which reduces everything within it to just some more inconsequential detritus. It is impossible to place yourself in the context of the mass of space and imagine you are anything important or necessary at all. You just are. Remember that next time you imagine your views matter so much or that things around you must take notice of you. You are literally nothing special.

People, for as long as they could think, have wanted to ascribe some meaning to this vastness. Often they have wanted to ascribe some overarching purpose to it or give some reasoning which explains why everything is and how its all of a piece, a oneness, and to give it some reasonable basis for being. But people have always failed in this and this is why other thinkers have explored its emptiness and what that means for us as thinking people. But this is a clue to where we should be looking for answers. The Void is often conceived as everything out there and, in a spatial sense, it is. But this void of meaning, this void of understanding, is not out there. This particular void is inside each one of us. My "Eureka!" moment is realizing that, actually, we are the void. We have an absence of presence, a presence and substance we try to give things with our descriptive schemes in our role as engineers of a meaningless universe.

For what is it that creates this void of meaning and sets up the questions to which we can find no satisfying long-term answers? What is it that means that all we can ever do is relate things one to another, both giving them context and allowing them to fit into a map of our understandings and beliefs? It is us, us as the universe has given us life. This form of life of ours which must make meaning, must understand, must hold beliefs, it is this which creates the void that we cannot fill. It condemns us to relate things one to another in some great mental act of dexterity so that we can even survive. We must believe things. We must hold what we regard as understandings. Things must mean. Without these operations we would die. They animate us and give us purpose. And so its not some void out there that needs to speak to us and explain itself (and that's good because it never will). The void is in us. The Void is us. We are the ones who create the problem we then cannot solve. Just by being the beings we are. With this form of life we condemn ourselves to explanations but never to an explanation much less the explanation.

And so I ask myself "What is our form of Being?" and I reply "Chaos giving expression to itself." And then I ask "What is my existence?" and the reply comes back "A partaking in my form of Being." All our questions find an answer not out there, not from some God figure, whether personal or metaphorical, but in us, in our form of life, who we are. This form of life offers us up meanings but never the meaning. It gives us beliefs but never the truth. It proffers knowledge but never that thing beyond knowledge in which all talking and thinking would cease because, finally, we have found something that could speak for itself. If there was something (and it would be divine in the truest sense) that could speak for itself then we would have found what human beings have always searched for: something beyond their creative self-understandings with which they could get in touch and about which there would finally be no words, the thing that was not just another thing to relate to something else. But we don't have that. We never will. There are no divinities and, much as we would like it, no God substitutes either. All we have is a void we cannot fill but must, nevertheless, keep trying to.

Given this background, my mind wanders. I think about the Transhumanist agenda I've been interacting with for a year now. Transhumanists want to "improve" the human form of life and they think of this primarily in physicalist terms. So this means they want to stop bad physical outcomes like disease and illness and, eventually, even death itself. Obviously, overcoming death, that decay until life becomes impossible for an organism, is no small task. After all, the laws of the physical universe seem to be that all things decay and die on a long enough timeline. So Transhumanists are happy to go with extending life significantly as a starting point. But I have a huge problem with this and its there in a play by a French existentialist called Jean-Paul Sartre. The play is called No Exit. In this play there are but three characters and they have died. They are in a room and they, so the play seems to suggest, must spend their eternity together. The play focuses on their relationships (which in life were complicated) in this scenario and ends with the comment "Hell is other people".

This comment needs unpacking. Sartre is not saying there, at the climax of his play examining the idea that you would be in the public gaze for all eternity, that everyone else is a shit. That may or may not be the case from your point of view. Sartre's point is more that a life in the gaze of others that does not end is not a life in which people can be themselves. Its like this: imagine you yourself in your public life. You are constantly aware of other people in these types of situations and your behavior is molded to this scenario. You wouldn't do some things in public that you would do when you are home alone in your own place and you imagine no one is watching you. The point there is that the gaze of others changes your behavior and your consciousness of yourself. You often hear a related complaint made about social media where some people act like asses and are then told that they wouldn't act like that if we knew who they were. Exactly! The gaze of other people affects your behavior. Public CCTV cameras (of which the UK has amongst the most in the world) work on the same basis. You are being watched and its affects you. And so you become a socialized version of you and not the you you are by yourself. So why is Hell "other people"? Because it would be to act out that socialized, bad faith version of yourself that is a performance for public consumption forever.

And so how does this relate to Transhumanist dreams of radically extending life and to my "Eureka!" moment? I think its because the Transhumanist understanding of the human being, by which I mean the human form of being, is not adequate to the task. Primarily thinking of us as biological organisms in need of a pep up is not, I think, good enough. Its like thinking of us as a car and saying that if we had a more powerful engine we'd be a better car. Well, we might be. Or you might just ruin the car you had in the first place. Crucially, to my mind, such understandings do not take into account who we are and how we live in terms of our life and existence. And it needs to. Instead, it focuses quite narrowly on the perceived downsides of being physical, that we can be hurt, that we die, and says that if we could solve these things then, somehow (and this point is largely assumed and not explained) things would be better. One thousand years of you is better than eighty years of you, right? Really? Is that what being you is about? Are you just meat that needs to avoid hurt? I think that Transhumanists, either wittingly or unwittingly (and some seem more tuned into this consequence of their thinking than others, to be fair) want to actually supercede a human form of being for a post-human form of being. They want, I think, to head off into the "we are become gods" direction. They want the end of human being.

And this is the problem when, as I see it, we are The Void. Wanting to live forever and cure all diseases is just another way of trying to escape what fate has given us. (And being fated beings is yet another aspect of our being.) This is not to say that we shouldn't try to escape. Its not to say that we shouldn't do any of the things that Futurists or Transhumanists want to do. Its merely to contextualize it. It is, as Richard Rorty said, just one more way to try and escape "time and chance". Its another effort in the on-going plan to escape being human with all its flaws and failures, its pains and struggles. It doesn't, I think, understand or even examine what human being and human existence is at all. I don't think it is to glory in the physical flaws like some masochist to say this. But I see this as the real essence of humanity (in a descriptive and not an actual sense). The human being is the suffering animal, the animal that is aware but never sure of what it is aware. It is the animal that always lacks something. And knows it. It is the finite animal who can see death from almost the beginning of its days. It is the animal that wants and needs and desires. And knows it. Behold, it is become The Void.

I don't think that we will ever become gods. Far too much in this chaotic universe is out of our control. It seems that Dr Stephen Hawking is convinced we will kill ourselves and that some man-made disaster is inevitable at some point. There are many foreseeable future scenarios for this but its just as likely that an unseeable one gets us too. We don't have eyes in the back of our heads. But even if this didn't happen there is too much going on out there for us to control it all. Even the most arrogant of people wouldn't think we could account for everything (another human failing, incidentally). So I do not think that a divine life will ever be something we can approach. Indeed, I think that the urge for divinity is internally generated and part of this form of life that we have now. It is a way to fill The Void with meaning, as we must, as we are impelled by our existence as an expression of our form of being. We are more than biological organisms. Even if you do not think we are in any sense "consciousness" you can at least admit that we have a consciousness. This, too, is part of our being, part of who we are. And its who we are that concerns me when I read philosophers telling me that to become who you are is to find the most meaning that we can in life. 

But when you look into the mirror what do you see? 

Death of A Genius

I woke up this morning to the same news as many will: 

David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18 month battle with cancer. While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family’s privacy during their time of grief.

Instinctively, I knew that this would affect me deeply even though I would not really call myself a David Bowie fan. I'm too old and too long in the tooth to call myself a fan of musicians anymore anyway. When I was younger, during my teens in the 1980s, I wasn't a Bowie fan either. But as I grew up and matured into a man, and particularly as middle age grasped ahold of me, I grew to have a deep appreciation for Bowie's music and, more, Bowie the artist. For an artist is exactly what David Bowie was. I'm listening to "Life on Mars" as I write this and if ever there was a song which encapsulated a world and emotion within a few brief minutes then that is it. 

I think what it was was that I needed to get some kind of handle on what David Bowie was about. His career was idiosyncratic and almost certainly deliberately so. My first memory of anything by him was seeing the video for "Ashes to Ashes" on Top of the Pops, the weekly chart show that used to air in the UK. Thereafter followed the album "Let's Dance" which turned him into the stadium rock star he apparently did not want to be and grew to hate. But before that there was the whole of his music from the 1970s which, for me at least, is what I enjoy the most. As someone who makes music himself, I appreciate this great body of work for its genius, its invention, its craft, its musicianship and its ability to reinvent itself. Listen to the work of Bowie in its vast range and marvel at how all this can come from the same man. 

When, recently, his new album "Blackstar" had been announced I had, like millions of others, gone to You Tube to take a listen to the video. I was, frankly, very impressed by the track and the effort that seemed to have been put into both the music and the video. Bowie, at 68 and with cancer, was still at the top of his creative game, still envisioning worlds and bringing them to life in his art. Bowie was a pop star, yes, but to me he will always be an artist, one who created and crafted, one who struggled to bring dreams to life. Not all of them worked. But, to me at least, that's the point. Bowie never followed trends. He never tried to appeal to the masses. He never wanted to be, in that terrible term, "mainstream". Bowie was a man of vision. He wanted to share some of his with us.

And of his abundance we have all received. 

                                                           RIP David Bowie. You made your mark.

Rationality Doesn't Exist

Reason versus Passion: its a conflict as old as when the question first occurred to someone "What is a good life?" The Greeks discussed it. The religious have discussed it. We discuss it today. Its linked into a lot of other discussions too about the nature of the world and existence itself. And people take sides. Our society, as many others have done, values rationality. Some within it will believe in a capitalized form of it: Rationality. This will probably go along with their belief in capitalized forms of other things like Morality or Goodness or Truth. For these people, to be rational is the highest good. It is a goal and an end. They will judge people on what they consider to be a rationality scale. The more rational you are, the better a person you are. The flipside of this is the less rational you are, the more emotional you are - for to be emotional is thought by these people to be the opposite of being rational - then the worse of a person you are. 

Let's offer the case in defense of rationality. Rationality is that ability to think logically and to be able to offer reasons for things. These reasons should be based in what can be regarded as reality. To be rational is to be reasonable but also to be speaking truthfully about the world. Scientists think of themselves as rational and that model is a good example of what rationality can do. Rationality has a very high yield where measuring and judging things is concerned which is a lot of what scientists do. Rationality does not involve itself in flights of fancy or speculation. Rationality is about lucid detachment and not letting personal involvements get in the way. Some would offer rationality as the way we humans gain real knowledge of things and set truths about the world in order. It is a true and good thing to have which gives humanity the progress it desires.

But let's compare this view of reality, and its bias in favour of the rational over the emotional, with the world as it occurs to us to be. Survey the world you actually live in with this view. Does it seem to you that the world as a whole is rational? Does it seem to you that the people who inhabit it are rational? I put it to you that it doesn't, certainly not simply so. You might consider that this is because rationality is available but people, for some reason, choose not to use it. Their rationality seems to have been hijacked by that bad alter ego, emotion. People become passionate, willful, controlled by their own interests and agendas, and any rationality that might be available to them gets lost. And where does the capitalized form, Rationality, stand in all this. If there is a deified form of Reason how can it be that so many people can so easily turn their back on it and ignore it, becoming self-interested agenda pushers in thrall to their emotions?

Once upon a time there was a mustachioed philosopher and his name was Friedrich. He proclaimed in one of his books "GOD IS DEAD AND WE HAVE KILLED HIM". He meant to refer directly to the Christian god but his proclamation had much more thorough-going consequences than that. For those who believe in this God, something that is harder to do these days than when Friedrich made his pronouncement, God is the underwriter of all the capitalized things like Rationality and Morality and Truth. But if God is dead then Rationality is dead. Truth is dead. Goodness is dead. These things cannot stand if the guarantor of them all is dead. They must pass away. Friedrich thought this was true, even if you aren't a believer in this God, because he thought that, socio-culturallly, we all live in societies in which this Christian-Platonic view of the world is accepted anyway. So even if we tried to cut God adrift and carry on with divinised concepts like Rationality or Truth it is just a bad faith form of Christianity in disguise. Rationality or Truth become substitute gods and, as Friedrich has already said, God is dead.

To my mind, the interesting part of what Friedrich Nietzsche said is not that God is dead. That, to me at least, seems self-evident. My observations of life lead me to this conclusion. "We have killed him" is the interesting part. Nietzsche seems to be saying that our human ways have laid waste to a deity, to all deities, to all things that we might want to hoist over and above us. The gods crumble before the follies of human beings. He was not alone in that thought. Many other philosophers after him, some referred to as existentialists and some referred to as pragmatists, have made similar points. These types of people would tend to come down more on the side of a human being not conceived as something made for the purposes of being merely rational. These types of people would want to balance rationality and emotion out in the human being. But this subtly changes the picture we then form of the human being. For me, the human beings we all are are not rationality machines networked into a divine arbiter of The Rational. We are complex and holistically configured emotion-rationality organisms. You can't chop the emotion out of a human being anymore than you can stop them making up reasons for things, the activity of the rational.

You are reading this blog on the Internet. The Internet in many minds has gained a certain reputation for outrage. It is a very immediate form of media and people these days complain if anything takes more than a couple of seconds to happen anyway. We are the now generation. This is no less so of human judgments. We are, after all, beings in an environment and this engenders a two-way process of influence. We can influence our environment but our environment also influences back. So we tend to get things served up to us in very superficial and bitesize form. It strikes me as amusing that these days if any debate goes on for more than 10 minutes it is regarded as some kind of long form exposition of a subject. "I haven't got time for this" isn't the least common expression in human language. We want fast facts and fast answers. So we have no end of media outlets dishing up these compact facts and dealing with whole issues in the matter of a couple of minutes by reading a top ten list. Its my suggestion that none of this encourages real thinking, the kind that takes time and involves, get this, more than one side of the story. Indeed, you can go to a lot of places today, maybe even most, and you will get served up to you a partisan description of a problem written from one point of view.

A comment came into my Twitter timeline about a day ago. It was complaining about the overuse of the word "outrage" as a cover all description of any questioning of someone's position on something. I took the point. It is true, I agree, that not all points to the contrary of yours, not all criticism or comment, is about "outrage". But the commenter went further and suggested that saying such people were outraged was some kind of attempt to paint them as "irrational" and the clear inference was that being irrational was a bad thing to be. The commenter clearly valued rationality and wanted to be seen as such, even if also wanting to criticize other people's points of view. The sense was that you can disagree with someone about something but still be seen as rational. I agree with this. You can. But you can't do it if you think there is a thing called Rationality. Because that kind of rational only admits of one thought process, the one that is right and over above everything in an arbitrating way, the one that brooks no challenge or divergence from it. Lucky for us that Friedrich has reminded us: God is dead. 

But what follows from this? Well, it follows that if you criticize a point of view and someone accuses you of "outrage" (which may or may not be true and could be argued without resolution forever) and you take this to mean they are accusing you of being "irrational" then, from their perspective, you might very well be. Since there is now no Rationality there is only partial, situated, local rationality, the rationality some particular person or group is possessed by. And from that point of view your criticism might be irrational. They do not need your agreement to make this claim. They do not need to appeal to some higher court of Reason (which, as we now know, doesn't exist). They just need to use their own personalized form of rationality, do the math, and come up with the answer. That answer can easily be "Your criticism of me is irrational. It is vocalized outrage". Whether you agree or not is, as it would be if things were reversed, irrelevant to that. We all know quite commonsensically that people have their own point of view on things. But when it comes to rationality we get a bit fuzzy about it. We don't like the idea that people might have their own personalized form of what is rational and what is not. But they do.

And, the truth is, its not even really all that difficult to see this and acknowledge it. Every one takes sides in this world. Everyone finds themselves situated inside points of view, attitudes towards things and beliefs about the way the world is. What needs to be seen is that these same things are generative of our rationality. It is these things that will inform us what we regard as rational, when someone is displaying outrage and what counts as these things. There is no outside way or overarching way to triangulate these things. We are already fully equipped as sentient human beings to make these calculations. The problem is that this often results in lots of incommensurability. My rationality may not work always in accordance with yours or your neighbor's, your friend's or your partner's. The traditional way out of this is conversational. We talk and come to some agreement or point about which we can all feel our dignity respected. Rationality is educable, after all. But in the instant world of the Internet that is not going to happen very often. Our feelings (emotion!) get hurt very easily and its often easier for us (in lots of ways too complicated to get into now) to just regard the other person as irrational or outraged as we see it. We have our notions vindicated and the other guy is a loser who thinks differently.

I would hope that none of this comes across as very revolutionary. It seems to me to be common sense. But then that is a function of my own rationality. Within that rationality people are partial and sectarian. They take sides. They are well able to make their own judgments and provide their own reasons for things they say, do and think. They do this without any recourse to a divinised form of the rational because such a thing doesn't exist. They are partiality machines. It is because this is how I see things that I find agreement to be a wonderful thing. Such a view of the human being could go the other way and become a solipsistic world of incommensurable views. Sometimes when you look at the Internet it can seem like things are going down this dark path. But the light is still available to us as long as we can talk to one another, try to understand things as people with their own human dignity express them, and explore each other's views on what being human is all about. That, in fact, is our only hope. Human life, in other words, is all about talking to the irrational and the outraged. 

Smooth Radio?

Smooth Radio is the name of one of the few radio stations available in my local area. The UK has never had a lot of radio stations. The airwaves have really always been tightly controlled and the authorities have always been scared of sanctioning the broadcasting ambitions of the people at large. Britain likes control. Radio is a quite conservative area of UK media on the whole where "the same old thing" is likely to be broadcast no matter what station you turn to. You have your oldies stations which are stuck in the 60s-80s, more modern stations which have a "better music mix" (a slogan, not a fact) which are the same as the oldies stations but with more recent chart music, classical stations (very few) and then talk radio which is very staid and middle of the road in the main. There is no UK version of Howard Stern because in the UK you are polite and well behaved and you stick to the mainstream script. The UK has no constitution proclaiming freedom of speech.

Smooth Radio falls into the category "oldies station". I mention this because today I had need to cook myself some dinner and so I decided, quite out of character, to put the radio on whilst I made my shepherd's pie. I couldn't listen to the station it was tuned into because this was the local BBC station which is a constant mix of talk radio for the conservative over 50s. I am neither conservative nor over 50. I have no interest in flower shows, jumble sales or the traffic jam on the A612. So I needed to find a station playing music. I couldn't listen to the local modern station because it would play modern chart music. I don't even know what modern chart music sounds like but I know that I don't like it. The national stations were out because so much BBC. This left Smooth Radio. Little did I know what I was getting into.

In the course of my browsing Twitter recently a few tweets had gone through jokingly referring to the fact that this is, apparently, a time of year when people cast off their old, unused or no longer interesting partners and go looking for new ones. As I listened to the songs that Smooth Radio was playing one after another (which they kept telling me was part of the chilled, relaxed Monday afternoon music mix) I began to wonder whether I was being embroiled in some sort of deliberately planned conspiracy. Every song was about lost love, or missing someone or about how the singer needed someone else or that they should please not go, etc, etc. ABBA's SOS played - "the love you gave me, nothing less can save me". Elkie Brooks played - "Fool if you think its over". The Real Thing's "You to me are Everything" played. On it went. Carly Simon with "Comin' Around Again" - "I know nothin' stays the same but if you're willing to play the game we'll be comin' around again". The Walker Brothers played with "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore".... WHEN YOU'RE WITHOUT LOVE!!!

It was by the 6th or 7th song that I realized they must be doing this on purpose. After all, who plays maudlin love song after maudlin love song by accident? Bob Marley played... "I don't want to wait in vain for your love"!! The thought occurred to me that the programmers at this station must be playing on the fact that couples split up and people go looking for others at this time. They were hooking into this social phenomenon, I surmised, and milking it for all it was worth in terms of listeners. After all, those bathroom tiles that got advertised every 15 minutes weren't going to buy themselves. I decided that it must only be a matter of time before Harry Nilsson told me that he couldn't live if living was without me and KC and his Sunshine Band told me to please not go.

I had been aware when switching to this station that they had a playlist. It has killed radio as a creative force in the UK that nearly all stations pick the same 50 songs and then play them ad infinitum for a whole week. And then they pick another 50. But I didn't expect to be co-opted into the romantic traumas of a nation. And then I started to think how this one radio station, which surely doesn't exist in isolation, fits into the society it is a part of. This station was basically broadcasting the idea that being in a couple is the aim of adult life all afternoon. Life, for the programmers at this station, is about finding a partner, going to work, paying your taxes... and buying bathroom tiles at your local Wickes (a UK home improvement store). I considered for a moment how this might strike someone who was single by choice. It would seem at odds with their view of the world. I considered how someone unhappily single might feel (they would be reaching for the bread knife and making sure it was sharp). 

Smooth Radio is unthinkingly and uncritically middle of the road in every sense you can think of. It is Radio Inoffensive, Radio Bland. You may consider that your local oldies radio station does not have the job of critiquing society or providing biting social analysis in its choice of music. And you'd have a point. But that doesn't thereby mean that its broadcasts are inert or neutral or unpersuasive. Smooth Radio acts as a relatively unseen broadcaster of propaganda for the status quo. Listen to it for even an hour to find out what is considered, in that horrible term, "normal". And then ask yourself if you fit within it. I don't. Smooth Radio is the marker of what is inoffensively OK (saying that without someone to love there is something wrong with you) and, consequently, what is odd and strange (that you feel fine and aren't missing anyone at all). That's why making my shepherd's pie today was quite a disturbing experience. I learned just how far from what is considered normal I have drifted in my single, non-conformist ways. In this world of social media and connected devices these days you can choose what comes into your life by tailoring the feed of everything you are connected to to your own taste. But when you put on the regular old radio station you still get what someone else thinks is "normal". You get the big wooden spoon of socio-politcal normality rammed down your throat. Does it taste nice?

And so today I had a dose of how media shapes society, how it broadcasts not just dodgy love songs from the 1970s but the values implicit and explicit within them. When knitted together, one after another, this becomes a pervasive narrative of normality, a boundary delineating who is normal on the inside (those who share our views) and those who are abnormal on the outside (those who think something else). Media is a way of inscribing values, of saying what is expected and what is frowned upon. Media is not outside the fray of everyday life, it is part of the fabric of it, unseen, unsuspected. The dangerous thing is that you don't have to watch Fox News to see this happening, although it may seem more obvious to you if you do (unless you are one of their target audience already in which case try National Public Radio). Every media is like this. Every media is broadcasting values in everything it does. They are writing the script of what is expected of someone in society. They are doing this most especially when they imagine that's the last thing they are doing which I would guess is the position Smooth Radio would take. (The ones doing it on purpose are very easy to spot but only serve as cover for the ones you'd never think were doing it.) 

At the end of the day, I'm glad I cooked my dinner and could turn the radio off. I can go back to being fed the values that I'm happy with in my tailored feeds. The scary thing is, what am I being fed that I might agree with but that, exactly because of that, I don't see? We need to develop a critical self-consciousness and stay aware. There are no neutral media or broadcasters who do not have a view of the world. There aren't any people who have no values. What are the values the broadcasters you watch, listen to and read are pushing? Do you even know?