Confusion

How are you going to make sense of the world?  I would offer to you three alternatives.  

1) Assume no prior knowledge or fiduciary framework within which to base understanding.  Attempt to come to some Cartesian method of deriving meaning by challenging assumption, discovering personal truth, and incorporating the whole into a unified framework of understanding into which everything must fit.  The universe is assumed to ba able to provide all the answers to anybody willing to search for them through the medium of science and deduction.

2) Take on somebody else’s beliefs and assume them for yourself.  Be it your parents, your friends, your colleagues or a religious figure you choose to follow, make the decision to defend their beliefs and take them on by proxy, even if you do not understand them.  Such a stance is that of children who would denounce smoking because their parents tell them it is ‘bad.’

3) Admit that there are certain things we will never understand.  

The first option seems to be the most logical, but in fact it requires a certain degree of faith.  To set out on a reductionistic exploration of the world, sure of the fact that everything is able to be explained eventually requires a considerable degree of trust in the linearity of the universe around us, and of the fact that every law or relationship discovered here holds true for the rest of the universe.  Given as this has already been proven to be false, and that in addition there may possibly be infinite universes even if we work this one out, there really is no way we can ever know for sure whether the way we understand our reality is actually right or not.  We can only know how often it seems to hold true in our immediate experience.  In addition, no one person can ever understand comprehensively the entire picture.  The understanding of modern science is shared collectively between all the minds currently undertaking research, and as such no one person is ever going to have the experience of understanding the whole of the scientific view of the world.  At some point we have to trust that fellow scientists are correct in their practice and their findings.  The problems in using this method to make sense of the world become obvious.

The second option seems like something we should leave behind at childhood, but in fact most of us will do it to some degree for the rest of our lives.  There is a sliding scale of trust in others’ opions, from trusting that the doctor knows more than you do about your body, to dying in a war because somebody in government tells you it is the right thing to do.  Within science, researchers cannot each undertake all the work needed to understand a principle so they must trust each other to the extent that they can base the next level of reseach on a base of research that other people have done.  We must ‘stand on the shoulders of giants,’ scientists do not redo all of the experiements ever performed in the canon of science to satisfy themselves before progressing.  At every point that we interact in society we must decide how much we trust the opinions of those around us, but there is no reason why we should take those opinions as our own unless they happen to be so convincing that for us they constitute the most irresistable truth available to us at that moment.  People who spout second-hand opinions on matters that they do not well understand rightfully end up embarrasing themselves; there can be no shortcut to wisdom.

The third option is of the hardest of all to hold, though it contains elements of the other two paths.  It admits that there is some determinable truth in the world, without believing that everything is necessarily understandable.  It recognises that other people have greater insights into some areas of life than we do, but without blindly accepting their conclusions as our own.  It does not seek to build understanding into the gaps where none is obvious.  It does not have to come to an opinion where one does not naturally present itself.  The third path is one which commits to having integrity through holding no belief for the sake of it, as though there must be a truth or an answer or an opinion somewhere.  It is only possible to truly believe anything is if you come at it without desperately striving, in the same way that you are unlikely to find a meaningful relationship if you are constantly searching for the perfect partner.  Archimedes only solved the problem of the king’s crown, discovering the principle of displacement, when he stopped searching and took a bath, allowing truth and insight to take him by surprise.  Some things are too complex to have an obvious handle for understanding.  We belittle ourselves and the magnitude of the world when we try to pretend we can fit everything into our comparatively tiny minds.

Memory and the Value of Experience

As every experience is converted to memory by leaving the present, and retreats away from you on the conveyor belt of time, time experience folds inwards on itself, so that when you look back at what has gone before, the gravity and magnitude of your experience seems comically belittled.  The time spent abroad, the painful marriage, the student years, they all shrink down in the memory to become mere snapshots, pictures simply painted in the colour of yearning or regret.  Occasionally a smell or other sense will break open the impermeable layer that lies between you and such experiences, and allow you a more visceral remembrance of the time gone by, but for the most part our experience, once confined to memory, fades to a shadow, to the facts.  The tumultuous experiences of the early years become childhood, the present and intense joy of a new relationship becomes an ex, and so the formative experiences of our lives become points on the checklist of memory, littered with lifeless snapshots and brief records of conversation.  The point then becomes what the point of any experience is, if not to enhance the meaningfulness of future experience, because experience, once converted to memory, most often breeds yearning, wistfulness, anger, and regret. 

In the eyes of many, the value of experience is primarily to allow develoment of self image, and to give a wealth of memories which can be relied on when circumstances are different; consider as an example the infirm, elderly man sitting in his chair all day reminiscing on the past.  I would suggest that since our memory of experiences are always belittled and insufficient copies of what actually happened, then to hope that a sufficient wealth of experience will allow us to lay back and enjoy the recollection what we did in earlier days is misguided.  Life can only be enjoyed in its fullness, for better or worse, in the present, and as such any experience we have should primarily be so that the future present can be experienced with more breadth and fullness.  To travel, undertake a new activity, or meet with friends should not be seen as an opportunity for accumulation of memories, or of photos, which are essentially the same thing, but as an opportunity to change the perception to allow future experience to be more full and vivid.  It is a misconception that the drive for success in sports is to do with achieving the highest accolade, ensuring that it need never be reached again since the memory, and the knowledge of the achievement provide vicariously for this need.  In actuality it is the sensation of success which provides the joy, and as such sportsmen, businessmen, and adventurers who attain feats far beyond the dreams of the average individual must continue to drive in the direction that feeds their sensation of being alive.  Think of Ranulph Fiennes still breaking adventuring records in his late 60’s.  One of the biggest lies you can feed yourself about the nature of memory is that any one experience can justify a period of boredom or inactivity.  In a period of doing nothing, the memory of the previous present will more often than not only make the current present seem that much more bitter.

This is not to say that there is no value to memory.  Memory performs many important functions, but most of these relate to teaching us lessons from the past which we can use to make our future present better.  Memory as pure nostalgia is largely useless in that it gives us any benefits in the present.  Reminiscing about shared memories with a friend is very different to sitting alone thinking about the past.  The first case falls under the category of an experience which is enhanced by those memories having been laid down in a previous present shared with another individual.  Reminiscing on your own is rarely an enjoyable pastime, as the memory serves to create or catalyse any new experience save for either a yearning for an unrepeatable past or a regret for mistakes or hurt in times gone by.  With nobody to share these things with, like Christopher McCandless found, the value of them is diminished, with somebody with which to share them, the memories become aids to better new experiences.  That is the difference.  Your experience in the present and the memories it creates should be the stimulus for new and more fulfilling experience down the line, since the memories on their own are bound to disappoint. 

Your Personal Fetish

Look at your photo albums.  What do such annals of experience represent.  Each photograph is a snapshot of a time and a place that you have personally been a part of, in a way which is so much more vivid and real than any photograph can portray, and yet we all snap shutters and confine swathes of our visual life to a proxy memory.  Is there a sense in which we feel we were never really there if we don’t have a photograph, hard evidence that we were?  

Whan an individual dies, they carry all their memory of place, time, and people with them.  If they chose to record nothing, tell nobody anything of their lives, and take no photographs, then to all intents and purposes, they never really existed.  “If a tree falls in a wood and nobody hears it, does it make a sound.”  Time carries on, birds sing, plants sprout, and everything is the same as it ever was.  But even if we do record our lives, take photographs, perhaps attain fame and become the star of films, magazines, and the collective culture, our story is still destined to die out somewhere along the passage of time, when the last photograph has crumbled, the last people who remember you die out, and society finds new icons to raise up.  Why then are we so insistent on making a record of our own lives; of fetishising our own existence?  Even if people do remember us after our deaths, we will not be there to experience our posthumous fame, and as such we might as well look to the span of our lives and forget how we are remembered after it.  The Roman emperors, in a bid for historical immortality, had their faces put on currency, their figures frozen in marble, and painted into frescoes, and yet most of us have far more images of ourselves in circulation than any emperor was able to muster.  None of this will matter when we die, the knowledge that we will be remembered after we die is only of any value to us whilst we are still living, when we could find many more positive ways to gain gratification.  Christopher McCandless, the American who went on a personal pilgramage into Alaska in the attempt to find peace and happiness, scawled out as a last message before he died of hunger, “Happiness is nothing if not shared.”  His personal realisation that in many ways his life had no meaning when not thrust into the fire of society is common to all of us who feel the need to ensure other people experience our humanity, either through our personal contact, or through spreading our image in the medium of photographs, writing or music.  

Photographs represent for us the need to be cemented into society, to prove we exist, to prove to ourselves as well as to others that we have experiences, that we love, we hate, we feel.  We are incapable of trusting our own memory, or of accepting how hugely insignificant our lives are to the world at large, and to the passage of history, and as such we fetishise our own experience.  Part of our frustration at society is that it does not realise  quite how important we all are, that the grand story of your life that you live out and annotate with photographs will never be as important to me as it is to you.  That’s just the way it is.

Chasing the Cool

There's a Lupe Fiasco song called The Cool.  The second half of the chorus runs:

You're breaking the rules, making your moves, paying your dues

Chasing the cool.

We've all chased the cool.  Most of us couldn't describe what the cool is, but we know it when we see it, and most of us want it.  There's an entire industry based around the idea of the cool, entire social groups are divided, run, and driven according to the unwritten rule of the cool.  The cool is everywhere; schools, bars, offices, high streets.  And yet it's hardly what we could call meritocratic, the cool defies lines of race, genre and wealth.  Some people work full time to attain it and end up with nothing, others have it without even trying.  But how are our attitudes to the cool formed?  How astute are we at recognising it ourselves, and how much of our appreciation of it is to do with what we are told.  

To put it simply, I'm suspicious about the genuineness of the tastes of my fellow men.

I'm suspicious that there are multi-million selling artists who produce music which is far inferior to many deal-less artists.  (I appreciate taste is a personal matter, but seriously)

I'm suspicious that fashions rise out of nowhere, and suddenly people wear things they'd never have dreamt of wearing a few months previously.

I'm suspicious that in blind taste tests, budget brands so often topple luxury food brands, and yet droves of middle-class consumers still flock to the expensive options.

The question.  Have we lost the ability to decide for ourselves what we like?  Are we really so suggestible as to base all or most of our tastes upon what others like, rather than our own naked inclinations?

You'll say 'Come on, that's f**king obvious,'  but knowing this doesn't exactly stop us does it.  

There's an excellent illustration of how fickle we are, provided by an article which ran in the Washington Post.  The article was based around an experiment whereby a busker in the Washington Metro was filmed over a 45 minute period as he played the violin for passers by at rush hour.  Only 6 people stopped to listen, 20 gave him money.  In all he made $32.

This would hardly be extraordinary were it not for the fact that the violinist was world-famous concert soloist Joshua Bell, on a violin worth $3.5 million, playing one of the most challenging pieces ever composed for his instrument.  He regularly sells out concert halls, where tickets retail in excess of $100.

The experiment seems to confirm that taken outside of a frame of reference where we expect it, we fail to recognise beauty.  The music, taken outside of the concert hall, fell upon deaf ears.  The same would almost certainly happen if great works of impressionist art were placed alongside amateur art on the wall of a resturant.  Very few people would recognise in that environment what in one of the great galleries would be revered as genius.  There's a pub near me with a print of a work of art on the wall of the toilet, a pastel piece of a badly proportioned dog sitting on a beach.  A few of us were divided on whether it was a child's painting, or a work by a known artist, and eventually decided it was almost certainly done by an amateur. 

 I opened a magazine recently to find the same picture in an article on art.  Turns out the picture was Dawn after the Wreck, one of J.M.W Turner's most famous works.

Take this principle back to the cool.  If we are really that suggestible, how much of what we see as cool is only viewed that way because we've been told it's cool.  Either by the television, the magazines, or even people themselves.  If people around me tell me somebody is cool enough times, will I start to believe it?  I hope not, but who am I to think I'm not as suggestible as the rest of them, the same people who passed Joshua Bell playing Bach on the metro and thought he was just a bum.

Words from Moby: 

"I had an epiphany a few years ago when I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends."

You know how when you stop fretting about how to make it with the opposite sex and just relax, you suddenly find they're attracted to you?  Maybe if we stopped letting other people decide for us what was good, what music was worth listening to, which people were worth knowing, what clothes were worth buying, we'd turn round and find ourselves having arrived at a genuine cool.

Last Rites

Question 1)  What's the greatest certainty of life.

Question 2) What's the most taboo subject in Western society?

Doesn't that seem strange?

How many people have even seen a dead body?  The answer is very few, unless you happen to be an undertaker or a doctor.  Do you think about death?  Of course you don't.  Death won't happen to you, it happens to them.  We do, as a society, have a remarkable aversion towards any consideration of the one thing we all know is certain for us, despite the fact we prepare endlessly for many eventualities which are very unlikely to occur.  There are still many people in this country with garages full of canned food to tide them over in the event of nuclear apocalypse, and yet when it comes to big D, it's three monkey syndrome; hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. 

 A brief look at Western funeral rites confirms this condition.  When somebody dies, the coroner sees the body, a close family member may go and see the body, but there is almost certainly no lying in state.  The body goes into an ornate box carried in the back of a morose black car.  At the crematorium, the ornate box sits on a little conveyor belt, and moves behind a curtain, where somehow it magically disappears.  Even our vernacular regarding death dodges the reality.  People don't die, they 'pass,' 'go to a better place' or we 'lose' them.  Some people would regard this entire process as respectful, but in reality I suspect that it is symptomatic of deeply unhealthy attitudes regarding death.

In Eastern cultures we find a very different story when it comes to last rites.  In the Hindu tradition, the dead body is placed on the floor of a room in the house, having been washed and dressed.  The body is carried on an open stretcher to a cremation site, preferably by a river, where it is lain on top of a pyre and cremated in full view of the associated mourners.  Following this the ashes are swept into the river.  They even cremate tigers for goodness sake.

In Tibetan Buddhism, where wood for pyres is scarce, the practice of sky burial is more common than cremation, whereby the dead body is dismembered and laid out on a hilltop for vultures to eat.  Far from being something out of a B-line slasher film, this is viewed as a last act of generosity to the natural world by the deceased.

So why the differences?

In Eastern cultures, far more so than in the West, death is viewed as a certainty.  Buddhist funeral traditions focus on, and act as a focus for meditation upon, the impermanence of life.  Life is something to be celebrated, and yet its impermanence is something to be grasped and realised.  In Britain, and most of the West, funerals are more likely an unfortunate blip on our consciously or unconsciously held beliefs that we and those we love will last forever.  Western funeral traditions seek to sanitise death, keep realities behind mortuary doors, under coffin lids, six feet beneath the earth.

Why the problem?

Refusing to confront the natural realities of death most likely leads to one of two conclusions.  Either you successfully ignore the fact that it is inevitable, in which case you or those around you will suddenly face death, and be entirely unprepared for it.  Alternatively you will be so worried about the abstract concept that you might die that you will never risk anything.  On this subject Tony Campolo aptly wrote that 'the majority of us tiptoe through life so as to arrive safely at death.'  Both these scenarios result from a refusal to thoroughly consider what death means, and more importantly its complete certainty.  Our funeral traditions help maintain this taboo regarding the only great certainty, and ensure that most of us cause ourselves far more pain and regret than if we had grown up with mature and realistic understanding of life and death. 

Steve Jobs, better known for founding Apple Computer had the following to say after forced confrontation of his own mortality through cancer.

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.  Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.  Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose.  You are already naked, there is no reason not to follow your heart."

We could all be a lot happier, ironically, if we accepted the inevitable, and lived in the light of a certainty, rather than pretending that death is in some way a terrible, macabre event which happens to an unlucky few.  

They may not have the Ipods, the Primarks, the comfortable detatched houses, but in this way, the East has a lot to teach us.

Dog Cult

Does anyone know what's going on here?

I don't.  But I do know that if I could train dogs to do this, I'd never need to learn any other skills.

Nazi Wallpaper

I found this.  Nazi Wallpaper.

Begs the question, who would ever have this on their desktop.  

Probably Nazis I guess.

It's hard to figure out what exactly constitutes a Nazi is these days.  Hitler and Goebbels are hardly sitting in their houses, downloading their Nazi wallpapers and sending each other the latest updates on the BNP over Twitter, and yet the Nazi moniker, along with all its paraphenalia is alive and well.  In the merchandise section of resistance.com, a record label for "pro-white" music, you can buy these delightful swastika-soled jackboots, (http://tinyurl.com/lt6b83) presumably intended for stamping the emblem of the Third Reich into the faces of your non-white foes.  There's a very good article by Tanya Gold, (over at the reassuringly non-Nazi Guardian), on what she calls "Hitler Porn," or not to name-drop, obsession with Nazism, both in the sphere of comedy, as well as in much darker circles.  (Article is here http://tinyurl.com/cs6e7x)

Many far right groups indulge in some level of Nazi-fetishism; even Nick Griffin, whose party represents one of the more moderate forms of right-wing racial supremacism, has been known to throw a few Nazi salutes when he thinks nobody's watching, as well as forming links with parties harbouring openly 'Nazi' sympathies.  It's difficult to understand a viewpoint which supports the violent suppression of people on grounds of race, (although it is depressingly easy to understand the small-mindedness which leads to such views), but where exactly is the Nazi connection? What, for example, are skinhead gangs in Russia thinking; whose grandparents fought off the Nazis only 65 years ago, and yet who openly identify themselves as 'Neo-Nazis.'

The issue of Chechenya has obviously led some people in Russia, particularly among the poor, to take up some deeply unsavoury racist views, but Nazism?  Is it not possible to hold racist views without constantly name-dropping Hitler and getting inked up with storm-trooper tattoos, particularly when within living memory, your countrymen fought those same Nazis in the bitter killing-fields of Stalingrad for your freedom?  Why do racist views need what seems to be the legitimacy of carrying the Nazi cachet.  In all likelihood, Hitler himself would refute any connection between his own terrifyingly efficient realisation of supremacist principles, and the rag-tag bunch of angry, shaven-headed young men around the world who claim to continue his legacy.  It would seem that the only purpose that continuous reference to Nazism serves is to make such groups as unpalatable as possible.  Members of such groups and gangs see to provoke, to shock, and to appall.

Having a huge Nazi eagle tattooed across your throat is certainly one way of doing this.

But this is all counter productive.  Advertising works because it subtly influences our decisions.  The best advertising is so powerful that we buy products without ever realising we've been duped, (Addiction to Kinder Bueno being an obvious example).  If far-right groups really cared about making their deeply distasteful doctrine become any sort of reality (as Hitler did) then entire communities and nations need to be cleverly duped into believing gradually greater amounts of racist, far-right hype.  To do this the trust of these people must be slowly earned, their viewpoints carefully manipulated, and their anger gradually stoked.  Essentially far-right groups need to be people we feel we can trust, people we feel are like us.  Walking around in swastika jackboots with 'Aryan Honour' tattooed across your face is not going to do this, it is going to make people run away, and it is going to make many non-white people want to kill you.

And this I think is the answer.

The Nazi cachet is not about wanting to influence anything on any large scale, it is about standing out, about wanting to be an underdog.  It gives angry young men an opportunity to feel part of a brotherhood, to have an enemy, to fight, and to die.  A championship boxer is an intimidating proposition to look at, but his sphere of influence extends only to the man in front of him in the ring.  It is the CEOs and the Presidents who have the real influence.  It's the same with the skinheads.  If they really wanted to see the end of all other races except the 'Aryans,' they'd become CEOs, not boxers.

Fortunately, they haven't got the vision to see it.