Friday Book Review: "Spell of the Sensuous" By David Abrams

David Abrams first book, Spell of the Sensuous is a meandering book on a mission. Looking at connections between language and culture and what domesticated humans consider the natural world.

Abrams examines in detail, how the connection between the incarnate world and the language of a culture effects how that culture interacts with the world. The abstractness of modern English is examined, with its letters derived from Greek letters adapted from Hebrew letters- so disconnected as to be abstract. Abrams argues that this allows domesticated humans to abstract themselves away from the rest of the world, and then argues his case by pointing to the close connections that traditional languages have to place, from sound to methods of using the language amongst Native American languages.

Although not conclusive, this is Abrams at his thought provoking, unsettling best.

Verdict: Recommended Read

Thursday Revisited Classic: Burning us out for fun and profit

I have a theory that we are burning ourselves out to help us cope with our culture.

I look at several things in our culture when I say this. I know that the examples that I give here will be gross simplifications. So I ask that people who read this go and seek to expand upon my very simple argument here to draw their own conclusions.

Entertainment is seeking to divert rather than engage people. Instead of dancing- we watch "Dancing with the Stars". Instead of singing we watch "American Idol". Instead of playing sports, we watch sports. Instead of going on adventures in our youth, we play video games that seem to simulate the effect. Our past times now exist to divert our needs and keep us from feeling the need to engage to strongly.

Entertainment further seeks to isolate rather than engage. We vote with a massive and anonymous television audience on shows like "So you think you can Dance" and "Britain's got Talent". We watch televised political debates, rather than question candidates in person. We sit alone in our living room and watch television. We sit alone in our den and play or talk anonymously online. Marketing specialists call this phenomenon 'cocooning' and see it as one of the current big marketing trends.

How does this relate to burning ourselves out as a method of coping with our culture?

Look at our culture.

We go to school longer and more intensively than any period in history. We are expected to assimilate and regurgitate more abstract information that any generation in history. Much of this information is irrelevant to our lives, save to rewrite on a test paper or in an essay.

We absorb more advertising than any generation ever created. We absorb more information regarding current events than any generation. We absorb more information about so many abstract subjects that have no bearing on our lives.

Why?

What does it do?

Who benefits from it?

The majority of us do mind numbing jobs. We do repetitive jobs. We jobs that offer little chance for expression or individuality.

I believe that we would rebel against this, if we were not already overloaded, and burnt out by our environment. I believe that we need this isolating diverting entertainment to allow us to deal with the overloading burnout damage and the numbing effect of mind numbing jobs that not even the burn out can completely manage.

I believe that we are broken and must brake ourselves further in order to get through each day without falling apart.

But we are falling apart. Isolated and without out a substantial inner life, we have nothing to provide support us through rough patches. And the rough patches come hard and heavy. We are overwhelmed by school and advertising. We are numbed by pointless jobs. We lack proper exercise and proper nutrition- unless we take excess time from our already overloaded lives to attend to such matters.

Our daily activities are disconnected from the land, from our past, from anything that we have evolved connected to throughout out evolutionary history. We must navigate a system that removes power from the individual and supplies that power to the bureaucrat who manages us like the human resources we have become- homo sapiens domesticus.

We do we go from here? We turn to religion for answers. We turn to vicarious achievement in sports, or celebrity watching, or televised entertainment to attempt to fill the void.

But the void gets bigger. We are addicts, but nothing will fill the hole in our guts.

But burning us out will keep us with our noses to the collective grindstone, and numbing us will keep us there until we burn out, and the emptiness will keep us seeking quick thrills which generates an another generation to take our place when we finally succumb.

"To know enough is enough, is enough to know"
Lao-Tzu from the "Tao Te Ching"

Tuesday Word of the Day: Sustainable Growth

To sustain means to maintain, to reach equilibrium, to create an environment whereby an activity can continue into the future indefinitely. To grow means to expand, to push boundaries, and to break equilibrium by surpassing old standards.

Within a closed system, which earth currently is at a practical level for human life, the two terms are contradictory. One cannot continue growth within our little backwater planet indefinitely into the future without running into the limitations imposed by the earth itself. The planet is only so big. The planet can only maintain so much biomass.

After a certain point, if we which to continue sustaining our growth, we must begin (and have begun) transforming other species' biomass into our biomass. The problem with turning other species biomass into our biomass, is that we need the other species to generate breathable air, and soil that we can grow our food in, and to inhale our carbon dioxide, and to run the water cycle and the nitrogen cycle and so forth.

To sustain growth means to be at the bottom of a very large hole with no apparent way out and continue digging.

On Debt and Dependence

As animals we move through three periods during the course of our lives. We begin as dependent beings and we slowly grow into independence and then flower and become interdependent beings.

Unless you are a domesticated being. Domesticated beings- such as most dogs, most house cats, most humans and most farm animals to a greater or lesser extent- never leave the dependent stage. This outcome is not the result of any accident.

Those people who domesticated these beings, dog, cat, cow, or human; did so with the intent of making them dependent. Dependence is part of the definition of domestication, a being that does not not depend upon the good nature of another to survive is not domesticated. Such beings may remain potentially capable of throwing off their domestication and becoming wild again, and becoming free again, but they are dependent as long as they do not break this chain.

There are many forms of dependence that a would be master may attempt to force upon their intended livestock.

The means of violence is denied. Cats are de-clawed, dogs are muzzled, bulls de-horned, chickens are de-beaked, peasants are forbidden to use swords and so on. The first method of enforcing dependence is to remove the means to assert oneself through violence or the threat of violence.

The means of education is denied. Horses are fitted with blinders, dogs are not allowed to hunt, mothers are separated from their babies moments after birth. Books are burned, scholars are executed, literacy is curtailed, topics are rendered taboo. Without the ability to learn and, as importantly, the ability to choose what we will learn- the domesticated being will not be able to see their captivity.

Docility is bred for and trained into the animals. Obedient animals are rewarded with food, or attention, oat bags and gold stars, a scratch behind the ears and a place on the Dean's list. Disobedient animals are used as object lessons, shock collars and canings, public humiliations and forcible confinement in a kennel. Such tactics make it rational for any single animal to stay obedient.

Obligations are created. Student loans, mortgages on houses and cars, credit card debt and on and on. Now the domesticated being is trapped within the system, until it untangles or ignores these obligations.

Saturday Thoughts: Predictions

Predictions are a tricky thing, they have a tendency to make one look foolish. I will risk looking foolish.

I expect this to be the last great empire of the False King. I expect that other empires may follow this one, but they will be lesser- because less will be left to work with after this empire falls. I do expect this empire to fall.

I do not know how it will fall. If the earth is lucky, it will fall quickly and quietly- like a puppet with cut strings. This last greatest empire of the False King is fragile. goods travel thousands of miles with very little margin for error. And these are not luxuries, these are basic needs such as food, natural gas to heat homes, gasoline to run cars and make fertilizer and pesticides, minerals and timber and other raw manufacturing materials, clean water to drink (or more likely waste) and electricity to power everything else. It is possible that if the systems are threatened by large enough systemic pressures, that all supply lines will break at once or nearly so, and the empire will fall like a broken puppet to floor of the stage.

If the earth is less lucky, the fall will be fast and violent. Resource wars will break out, people will starve and panic and run. There will be vast devastation, but nothing that life cannot recover from- just nothing human beings can survive.

If humans are lucky, and the earth is even less lucky, the end will arrive like a battered wife falling down a long flight of stairs. There will be jarring blow after jarring blow as the first crisis- whatever it is- ignites the next and so on down through a fragile web of systems. Some humans may survive this in a humbler manner than the last two or three centuries have allowed us to get used to. There may again be empires, but they will resemble Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great- large but drawing only upon the renewable resources of the planet and thus not a danger to it.

The apocalypse may not thunder in at all. The end could creep in by degrees like the dusk at midsummer. So the when the end arrives, it will not be noticed, but will be the 'way things are.'

The earth is- as far as human civilization is currently concerned, a closed system. We are using up limited non-renewable energy to power unchecked growth in population and consumption. This will not end well under any circumstances. The only hope for continuing the current empire's preferred method of existence is to find a cheap, high return renewable energy source that rivals the energy density of fossil fuels. This is the current strategy that the empire is betting on.

I don't expect this work. I think it is probably possible, but I don't think we have allowed ourselves enough time or resources to achieve that goal.

I don't know when things will fall. I have some ideas, but I am not certain. I am planning with the assumption that I will live to see the end. But many prophets expecting to do so were proven wrong, so I am also planning for other contingencies.

But I expect to see an empire fall in my lifetime that will dwarf the fall of Rome and leave its citizens feeling as though the world has ended.

Thursday Revisited Classic: Coming at life from the Wrong direction

"We have only one thing to give up. 

Our dominion. 

We don't own the world. 

We're not kings yet. 

Not gods. 

Can we give that up? 

Too precious, all that control? 

Too tempting, being a god?" 

--Anthony Hopkins, Instinct, 1999

Should we solve world hunger?

If so, how should we do this?

The growth rate of any population seems- based on a wealth of evidence from all species (humans most definitely included)- to be irrevocably tied to available food. Take a population of any species and give them access to enough food to support a higher population than currently exists and the population will (barring mitigating factors) grow at least until it reaches that higher population.

The population may overshoot of course and then crash as a result. Likewise, limiting factors such as available space or other factors may slow or stop population growth. But barring this, populations of anything will grow to the capacity dictated by the available food.

How then do we address world hunger? As soon as we hit the carrying capacity of the current food supply, those people on the margins will start to fall off into the less than gentle arms of natural selection. It happens this way in every population of every species we have ever found.

Are we looking at this the wrong way?

We see human life as sacred- or so I have been repeatedly told. But does that mean that the loss of any human life should be prevented? Obviously I do not wish to see anyone I care about die. But that wish does not change the biological imperative.

I have heard serious scientists who are actually attempting to eradicate aging, speak of old age as though it were a disease. Aging is one of the few things that keeps our near geometric population growth in check. I do not wish to see people die, but I understand that this is how life works.

It starts, it travels a certain distance and then it stops- consumed to fuel the next starting life.

If we seek to prevent the final stage, we remove one quarter of the wagon wheel upon which life turns. A world where nobody died would crush with a human population that would strip the Earth bare like locusts. A world without hunger would devour the Earth in a single day as population exploded like a nuclear bomb across the globe. Lining the oceans with cities would not prevent our very speedy demise in such as case.

Perhaps in our obsession with abstract ideals, we have forgotten that nothing is abstract and we are not special. Our time, as a species, as a culture and as individuals is finite.

We may strive to prolong our stay, but to do so in a manner which ends the whole experiment of life on Earth is bad form.

We are not worthy of special attention as species go. We were not made special on the sixth day. We do not have special dispensation to ignore biological law.

Hunger is a feature of life, not a problem. It will persist as long as life persists. The problem is that we fancy ourselves as gods- and think that we have the right to say "No, this shall not be!"

One day soon we may wake up to find that our Godhood was a delusion that lead us off a cliff and into a free fall towards a canyon floor with which we cannot survive colliding.

Tuesday Word of the Day: Heresy

Heresy is a strong word with strong associations. In modern popular usage the word connotes crimes against the church-normally the Catholic Church- and smells strongly of witch trials and the Spanish Inquisition.

But where did the word come from and what meaning lies at the core of this word's family history?

Heresy comes from the Greek verb meaning: to choose.

Church and state were inseparable for centuries in Europe and are still inseparable in many countries, and there are strong elements in many first world countries that would love church and state to once again merge. The idea that choice is a crime, and indeed the highest crime imaginable in such governments, says a great about how modern domestic culture works and where said culture's fear can be found.