I must keep up the pace. That is of writing. I have not heard from Susan for sometime. Why? Nor come to think of it my daughter. I wonder what is going on over there in the UK. It is interesting how one adapts. We are special. Yet we are not. We are human.
China or at least this little bit of England in its vastness, Nottingham University, is simply great. My students are the best I have ever had. They absorb knowledge and understanding like it is food and drink. Maybe to the Chinese consciousness come to think of it , it is.
These little pension funds, my students, are without doubt seem now to be a lot better investment than those pension funds insurance companies and blue chip public companies to which those in the West had confined their hopes. These are taking a hammering. Knowledge can never depreciate even if the value we choose to allocate to it does. In this its value is no different to that of the financial instruments apparently loosing their value at the moment.
It will be interesting to see a year from now whither the global downturn in confidence seeps into this market. It may. Times are hard but only in our minds. This must be remembered.
Money and finance are a social illusion that depend entirely on belief not reality. Things have more or less value simply because we believe them to be. The McKinsey Quarterly has just published a paper that tells us this although that was not its intent.
The paper to which I refer demonstrates that the distribution of companies in an industry follows a power curve not a normal distribution. The big get bigger and more successful and then there are the rest clustered way down the power curve. Success breeds success. To me this is unsurprising.
In THIS POST MODERN WORLD value is determined as much by belief as by objective reality. Modern banks from the dawn of their existence worked on a lie and a deception. They were where the gold was. People "knew" One could alway ask them for our money and get it provided everyone else did not at the same time and they never did as long as we believed it was there which it was not.
Certificates of gold deposit were for our convenience treated as if they were gold because this served the human social purpose. This was so and is so even more today when they do not have gold at all. In the past they never held much more than 10% of the gold their bits of paper said they had. Their certificates of deposit were money. Such was money such is money and such will be money. An illusion born out of convience. Despite the recent crisis this remains so. The houses on which the so called subprime mortages were raised still exist unlike the gold that formed the base from which banks were constucted. People still need to live in them and pay their rents. The crisis(?) what crisis.
Value is a convenient lucrative illusion we human beings create for our convenience. We believe in the illusion and it works for us. We cease to believe in the illusion and it will not.
The solution to the current crisis is for us to rekindle our belief in value. Things will be valuable if we believe they are. waht is the value of the gold that started all this other than belief its utilitarian purposes are almost non-existent other than as a foil to our capacity to believe.
We do not really need a bunch of politicians to convince us that everything is OK. It is OK if we choose to believe it is. I suppose to give them their due our politician's job is to help as re-find our belief in what we have to believe in ourselves. If we want to we can just do it with out their assistance ourselves. What people, us, choose to consider valuable, do-able and worthwhile is valuable, will be done and is worthwhile. We only have to believe.
In this we are God. What we conceive was, is and will be.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Letter from America
Dear Ern,
I would love to hear your views, especially given the result in your state of Virginia.
I have blogged about it but what do you think is more important to me working here in China ?
The new President if he makes it to office has a Democratic Congress and an opposition to which he owes little in that the Republican successes seem to be in the Bible Belt and redneck country to which he owes no allegiance.
Could he be as close to absolute power as a US President can get ? He has a strongly Democrat Congress but not the Supreme Court.
What's your call on it all ? Is there not future real mileage in the result for Moderate GOP.com given that the fundamentalists have so clearly lost out ?
Brian
Hello Brian!
Great to hear from you. I do not offer good news. Even ignoring what you are breathing, you are in peril.
I'll proceed from your last question first. The religious fundamentalists you refer to were deeply convinced in 2000 that the Christian God had His hand on George W. Bush's shoulder. But eight years later either that hand has not helped, or else it was disdainfully removed if it was ever there at all. I trow this as a believing Christian.
Moderate Republicans, few as we presently are, have the best chance of anyone to bring the GOP and the country back out of the wilderness and into pragmatic reality once more.
I'm enclosing my draft article submitted to a law review appraising in cybernetic terms the G. W. Bush Administration's radical adventures in Constitutional interpretation. The Constitution and laws flowing from it are supposed to govern without regard to religious tenets. The Supreme Court has as yet exercised but little constraint upon the outgoing regime, though not as little as is attributed to the Supreme Being. There is more litigation in the pipeline which will not be concluded in the Supreme Court until Bush is well out of office.
Democrats currently have a numeric majority in both houses. Those people will have an impact between the November General Election and January 4th. More economic legislation is due and expected before then. Those majorities will swell after January 4th. Yet those legislative majorities can be relied upon to exercise a braking influence upon President-elect Obama before and after his taking over January 20th, even though they share his party affiliation.
Here is why Obama can't even get close to absolute power. There are several constraining reasons, due to the nature of Congress and the expectations of his prevailing voters.
For example, Black people comprise 16% of this country's entire population. They are extra-dependent upon government. The very best thing they could do for their champion is make no special demands upon him. But they are Hell-bent to gain more preferential changes in their distinct favor. It was Booker T. Washington in the early 20th Century who wrote that any capable Black man must carry this most trouble-prone segment of our citizenry upon his back.
Democrats in Congress have a severe propensity to overreach whenever given the chance. That dubious opportunity is now at hand. Furthermore they never perform as a group in as disciplined a manner as Republicans do. Restraint seems to be absent from Democrats' DNA; they are datable but not marriageable. It is ironic that their "man on a white horse" who has run away with their spirits is Black.
Even the Caucasian Democrats have sky-high expectations. This comes at a time, before Obama is even sworn in, where economic and military conditions are in a trough. Any improvements sure to come will be attributed to Obama even before he is sworn in. This effect will extend, amplify and swell widespread expectations even further.
In his most gracious and mature concession speech John McCain made clear that all of us really need Obama to succeed in a big way. It is critical that voter support be translated into imparting what sanity we can to the Democrats in Congress. In their euphoria and tumult they are institutionally deaf, and that artificial inebriation can be expected to persist for months and perhaps years.
Saying that Obama seems personally more sensible than most of his fellow Democrats is not saying very much. On principle they all are keen to violate every tenet of cybernetics.
Democrats' inherent baked-in problem (their original sin) becomes glaringly evident at the Why stage. Their bred-in-the-bone tendency to overreach limits and compromises the likelihood of getting the three transitions from one level of logic to another anywhere close to right.
By the way, Republicans' baked-in problem (our original sin) occurs further along, at the tactical levels, where we are too cautious about going far enough. Possessing a deeper respect for history, realism and the constraints of human nature than do Democrats, we Republicans are potentially better cyberneticians.
These cybernetic insights operate much like engineering solutions. The engineer must rearrange the structure and sequence sufficient to allow the calculus when deployed through the nested rearrangement to fully do its work.
I just stated the algorithm and heuristic for what the incoming President must do. The inflated expectations of his own Majority Party are his greatest obstacle to achievement. What is needed most is competence, not inspiration. To paraphrase his amateur would-be genito-urinary surgeon Jesse Jackson, "keep hope alive" with deeds instead of words.
It is competence that is most needed to silence his critics in the Bible Belt and redneck country. They already see through him (and his wife Michelle) as clearly as if they were panes of glass. The anodyne liberal nostrums the recent winners have so fetchingly spoken and published are about to collide with reality and human nature. VP-elect Biden offers no more realistic a prospect than does Obama. Both Biden and Obama offered few specifics when campaigning, just remarkably resonant rhetoric.
For example, Obama and his Democrats carried Virginia for the first time Presidentially in 44 years. A repeat in 2012 or even the 2009 gubernatorial contest is unlikely. The Virginia Democrats managed to raise voter registration to 5 million from 4.5 million, and to achieve the zenith of voter turnout here, especially among young people 18-29. This feat has been a thoroughly good thing for little-d democracy.
But until competence overcomes and surpasses mere rhetoric, a disabling letdown from current bloated expectations is inevitable, and shortly to arrive. It's analogous to but not the same as the predictable result of excessive hubris. Having overpromised we can fully expect under-delivery. Disillusionment will set in sooner rather than later. When it arrives and the hot air balloon loses altitude with a crashing finality, the picture will not be pretty.
Projecting from Virginia's parochial example to the international scene in which you are embedded, here's what I think is more important to you. Keep a close eye on what the Obama-Biden Administration does at levels A and B. Because things are going to get rough and unattractive at levels C and D for those of you inside China. You are very vulnerable where you are to any lack of competence emerging from the political leadership here in the United States.
The further away from Washington one gets the more obvious will be C and D level inadequacies. It reminds me of the children's game Crack the Whip. You are living at the extremity where the forces accelerate. Obama and his Democrats-in-Majority simply do not grasp the Conant-Ashby Theorem (revealing that any competent regulator of a system must contain a model of the thing to be regulated). Their own version of lacking technical variety occurs at levels A and B.
Here in Virginia, L. Douglas Wilder became the nation's first elected Black Governor, and in this Southern state and ex-Capitol of the Confederacy. He served from 1990-94, but no person of his race has managed a statewide nomination to any office ever since. The high point of his career (which later included a barely remembered Presidential run) was simply winning the Governor's office, not what he accomplished there.
Given Obama's indecisiveness in the Illinois State Senate I am not hopeful about his leadership. He was so afraid to fail that he voted present 129 times in eight years. Obama's constituents got the same result 129 times as if he had been absent. We know his Presidential election has been the high point of his accomplishments to date. Let's hope that he can achieve more than Doug Wilder.
Obama
I would love to hear your views, especially given the result in your state of Virginia.
I have blogged about it but what do you think is more important to me working here in China ?
The new President if he makes it to office has a Democratic Congress and an opposition to which he owes little in that the Republican successes seem to be in the Bible Belt and redneck country to which he owes no allegiance.
Could he be as close to absolute power as a US President can get ? He has a strongly Democrat Congress but not the Supreme Court.
What's your call on it all ? Is there not future real mileage in the result for Moderate GOP.com given that the fundamentalists have so clearly lost out ?
Brian
Hello Brian!
Great to hear from you. I do not offer good news. Even ignoring what you are breathing, you are in peril.
I'll proceed from your last question first. The religious fundamentalists you refer to were deeply convinced in 2000 that the Christian God had His hand on George W. Bush's shoulder. But eight years later either that hand has not helped, or else it was disdainfully removed if it was ever there at all. I trow this as a believing Christian.
Moderate Republicans, few as we presently are, have the best chance of anyone to bring the GOP and the country back out of the wilderness and into pragmatic reality once more.
I'm enclosing my draft article submitted to a law review appraising in cybernetic terms the G. W. Bush Administration's radical adventures in Constitutional interpretation. The Constitution and laws flowing from it are supposed to govern without regard to religious tenets. The Supreme Court has as yet exercised but little constraint upon the outgoing regime, though not as little as is attributed to the Supreme Being. There is more litigation in the pipeline which will not be concluded in the Supreme Court until Bush is well out of office.
Democrats currently have a numeric majority in both houses. Those people will have an impact between the November General Election and January 4th. More economic legislation is due and expected before then. Those majorities will swell after January 4th. Yet those legislative majorities can be relied upon to exercise a braking influence upon President-elect Obama before and after his taking over January 20th, even though they share his party affiliation.
Here is why Obama can't even get close to absolute power. There are several constraining reasons, due to the nature of Congress and the expectations of his prevailing voters.
For example, Black people comprise 16% of this country's entire population. They are extra-dependent upon government. The very best thing they could do for their champion is make no special demands upon him. But they are Hell-bent to gain more preferential changes in their distinct favor. It was Booker T. Washington in the early 20th Century who wrote that any capable Black man must carry this most trouble-prone segment of our citizenry upon his back.
Democrats in Congress have a severe propensity to overreach whenever given the chance. That dubious opportunity is now at hand. Furthermore they never perform as a group in as disciplined a manner as Republicans do. Restraint seems to be absent from Democrats' DNA; they are datable but not marriageable. It is ironic that their "man on a white horse" who has run away with their spirits is Black.
Even the Caucasian Democrats have sky-high expectations. This comes at a time, before Obama is even sworn in, where economic and military conditions are in a trough. Any improvements sure to come will be attributed to Obama even before he is sworn in. This effect will extend, amplify and swell widespread expectations even further.
In his most gracious and mature concession speech John McCain made clear that all of us really need Obama to succeed in a big way. It is critical that voter support be translated into imparting what sanity we can to the Democrats in Congress. In their euphoria and tumult they are institutionally deaf, and that artificial inebriation can be expected to persist for months and perhaps years.
Saying that Obama seems personally more sensible than most of his fellow Democrats is not saying very much. On principle they all are keen to violate every tenet of cybernetics.
Democrats' inherent baked-in problem (their original sin) becomes glaringly evident at the Why stage. Their bred-in-the-bone tendency to overreach limits and compromises the likelihood of getting the three transitions from one level of logic to another anywhere close to right.
By the way, Republicans' baked-in problem (our original sin) occurs further along, at the tactical levels, where we are too cautious about going far enough. Possessing a deeper respect for history, realism and the constraints of human nature than do Democrats, we Republicans are potentially better cyberneticians.
These cybernetic insights operate much like engineering solutions. The engineer must rearrange the structure and sequence sufficient to allow the calculus when deployed through the nested rearrangement to fully do its work.
I just stated the algorithm and heuristic for what the incoming President must do. The inflated expectations of his own Majority Party are his greatest obstacle to achievement. What is needed most is competence, not inspiration. To paraphrase his amateur would-be genito-urinary surgeon Jesse Jackson, "keep hope alive" with deeds instead of words.
It is competence that is most needed to silence his critics in the Bible Belt and redneck country. They already see through him (and his wife Michelle) as clearly as if they were panes of glass. The anodyne liberal nostrums the recent winners have so fetchingly spoken and published are about to collide with reality and human nature. VP-elect Biden offers no more realistic a prospect than does Obama. Both Biden and Obama offered few specifics when campaigning, just remarkably resonant rhetoric.
For example, Obama and his Democrats carried Virginia for the first time Presidentially in 44 years. A repeat in 2012 or even the 2009 gubernatorial contest is unlikely. The Virginia Democrats managed to raise voter registration to 5 million from 4.5 million, and to achieve the zenith of voter turnout here, especially among young people 18-29. This feat has been a thoroughly good thing for little-d democracy.
But until competence overcomes and surpasses mere rhetoric, a disabling letdown from current bloated expectations is inevitable, and shortly to arrive. It's analogous to but not the same as the predictable result of excessive hubris. Having overpromised we can fully expect under-delivery. Disillusionment will set in sooner rather than later. When it arrives and the hot air balloon loses altitude with a crashing finality, the picture will not be pretty.
Projecting from Virginia's parochial example to the international scene in which you are embedded, here's what I think is more important to you. Keep a close eye on what the Obama-Biden Administration does at levels A and B. Because things are going to get rough and unattractive at levels C and D for those of you inside China. You are very vulnerable where you are to any lack of competence emerging from the political leadership here in the United States.
The further away from Washington one gets the more obvious will be C and D level inadequacies. It reminds me of the children's game Crack the Whip. You are living at the extremity where the forces accelerate. Obama and his Democrats-in-Majority simply do not grasp the Conant-Ashby Theorem (revealing that any competent regulator of a system must contain a model of the thing to be regulated). Their own version of lacking technical variety occurs at levels A and B.
Here in Virginia, L. Douglas Wilder became the nation's first elected Black Governor, and in this Southern state and ex-Capitol of the Confederacy. He served from 1990-94, but no person of his race has managed a statewide nomination to any office ever since. The high point of his career (which later included a barely remembered Presidential run) was simply winning the Governor's office, not what he accomplished there.
Given Obama's indecisiveness in the Illinois State Senate I am not hopeful about his leadership. He was so afraid to fail that he voted present 129 times in eight years. Obama's constituents got the same result 129 times as if he had been absent. We know his Presidential election has been the high point of his accomplishments to date. Let's hope that he can achieve more than Doug Wilder.
Obama
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
A Victory for Hope
Well Obama has won and we can maybe now become one.
God bless America and its people. When my friends, US and others, criticized GW and the US I always said he was excellent news. He could only do 2 terms. In 8 years of rule one cannot change the course of social evolutionary development accept for the good. American democracy limits the potency of presidential tyranny and power. It always sets an end point to it on a tolerable horizon. If a presidential style is particularly unacceptable then all it does is immunize the American body politic against possible future invasive attacks by the same, or similar, political viruses. So it has turned out.
However the reaction has gone far further on this occasion than it general does and the US electorate has given Obama a democratic congress. This is a relatively rare combination. However Obama is not the political leader of the Democratic Party and even then the party is not like parties elsewhere with strong internal discipline. Congress men can be and often are very much their own men, as in fact was the gracious John McKane.
It should be remembered that Obama was not the Democratic Party's evidentially preferred candidate. That was Hilary Clinton. Obama cannot expect blind obedience to his chosen line by congress. He will have to compromise his own position if he wishes to act. His actions to be effective must show respect for the position of all of his fellow democrats on the Hill and he knows it.
On the other hand the Republicans remaining strength is in the South and the bible belt. This should bring good cheer to African Americans and those truly committed to lieberty. The newly elected congress and the president have to owe no allegiance to this band of scary fundamentalist who are only equaled in their vehement wish to destroy the modern world by the Wahabi followers of Bin Laden and a few, nevertheless powerful, Zionists all of whom should be far more concerned than they seemed to be with the likely consequences of their commonality in hatred. The possibility, devoutly sought by many of them, for the Day of Judgement to come sooner rather than later with a predicted nuclear like event. What the Book of Revelation suggests would occur somewhere in Palestine/Israel, Armageddan. Is such an event truly to be visited on the poor suffering people of this region? I hope not.
The day of atonement one hopes does not have to manifest itself in such a manner. If it is I am sure its only consequence would be precisely the opposite to what its fundamentalist catalysers imagine. It would be the at-one-ment of the rest of humanity in seeking to root out the fundamentalist virus from our planet's body so we could unite in the joy that it offers to the planet's current generation of children. This would allow the continued growth of our intellectual creativity and its unfettered distribution to all who can use it to the advantage of the evolutionary development of our universe, the Way of Lao Tze. Let us hope we can achieve this without the pain of such a dreadful battle.
The America's founding father's envisaged such evolution to be possible without revolution, war and the naked use of the violence of power. The American people have just taken that tool, their and our Planet's inheritance and shown that everything is possible if one starts from the acceptance of the right of others to pursue the liberty they seek in their own lives unfettered by the views others seek to impose on them. Such freedom Americans have always ways been willing in the end to fight and die for. The Liberty Bell has been struck again by Obama's election. One hopes the Planet hears it in time to prevent yet more sacrifice in the name of what can come by other means, human at-one-ment. This is clearly being brought about by the evolutionary development we call globalization and it is on the Way. Nothing can stop it now and even the blackest of events of which the USA hs demonstrated some of its citizens are capable of perpetrating can stop it now. Such would only accelerate the process it perpetrator sought to achieve Martin Luther King's spirit in Obama bares stark testimony to this truth.
God bless America and its people. When my friends, US and others, criticized GW and the US I always said he was excellent news. He could only do 2 terms. In 8 years of rule one cannot change the course of social evolutionary development accept for the good. American democracy limits the potency of presidential tyranny and power. It always sets an end point to it on a tolerable horizon. If a presidential style is particularly unacceptable then all it does is immunize the American body politic against possible future invasive attacks by the same, or similar, political viruses. So it has turned out.
However the reaction has gone far further on this occasion than it general does and the US electorate has given Obama a democratic congress. This is a relatively rare combination. However Obama is not the political leader of the Democratic Party and even then the party is not like parties elsewhere with strong internal discipline. Congress men can be and often are very much their own men, as in fact was the gracious John McKane.
It should be remembered that Obama was not the Democratic Party's evidentially preferred candidate. That was Hilary Clinton. Obama cannot expect blind obedience to his chosen line by congress. He will have to compromise his own position if he wishes to act. His actions to be effective must show respect for the position of all of his fellow democrats on the Hill and he knows it.
On the other hand the Republicans remaining strength is in the South and the bible belt. This should bring good cheer to African Americans and those truly committed to lieberty. The newly elected congress and the president have to owe no allegiance to this band of scary fundamentalist who are only equaled in their vehement wish to destroy the modern world by the Wahabi followers of Bin Laden and a few, nevertheless powerful, Zionists all of whom should be far more concerned than they seemed to be with the likely consequences of their commonality in hatred. The possibility, devoutly sought by many of them, for the Day of Judgement to come sooner rather than later with a predicted nuclear like event. What the Book of Revelation suggests would occur somewhere in Palestine/Israel, Armageddan. Is such an event truly to be visited on the poor suffering people of this region? I hope not.
The day of atonement one hopes does not have to manifest itself in such a manner. If it is I am sure its only consequence would be precisely the opposite to what its fundamentalist catalysers imagine. It would be the at-one-ment of the rest of humanity in seeking to root out the fundamentalist virus from our planet's body so we could unite in the joy that it offers to the planet's current generation of children. This would allow the continued growth of our intellectual creativity and its unfettered distribution to all who can use it to the advantage of the evolutionary development of our universe, the Way of Lao Tze. Let us hope we can achieve this without the pain of such a dreadful battle.
The America's founding father's envisaged such evolution to be possible without revolution, war and the naked use of the violence of power. The American people have just taken that tool, their and our Planet's inheritance and shown that everything is possible if one starts from the acceptance of the right of others to pursue the liberty they seek in their own lives unfettered by the views others seek to impose on them. Such freedom Americans have always ways been willing in the end to fight and die for. The Liberty Bell has been struck again by Obama's election. One hopes the Planet hears it in time to prevent yet more sacrifice in the name of what can come by other means, human at-one-ment. This is clearly being brought about by the evolutionary development we call globalization and it is on the Way. Nothing can stop it now and even the blackest of events of which the USA hs demonstrated some of its citizens are capable of perpetrating can stop it now. Such would only accelerate the process it perpetrator sought to achieve Martin Luther King's spirit in Obama bares stark testimony to this truth.
Saturday, November 01, 2008
A New Era in american Politics or a False Dawn?
Technorati Tags: Globalization USA China Evolution "Evolutionary Development" History
I am still working on the mass of material I got from the First EvoDevoUniverse Conference in Paris a few weeks ago. it was truly wonderful to see such hard work being done on the processes underlying evolution seen at its most general. Nottale's work on relativity and quantum dynamics was truly awe inspiring.
However that is theory. The current election in the USA is social evolution in practice. Clearly the US population as i myself predicted would not suffer long term from GW's reign. All good things come to an end. The population is now clearly well inoculated against that particular version of the virus of naked economic power.
It looks however if they may be about to elect the first black American president but if they are foreigners with hopes in the consequences for as no doubt voting Americans of a particular colour no only too well a congress is being elected in part as well. If change is truly possible in the USA one needs a democratic president and a democratic congress that trusts him. Carter and Clinton found out to their cost that what one can do in america as an American president is very little indeed without the backing of congress. There is every chance now that US voters will hedge their bets and vote in a black president and disempower him with a Republican never mind an unsympahtetic Democratic Congress.
Foreigners never understand US politics properly. the president on his own without the peoples representives behind him has VERY LITTLE domestic power. In practice these cosntraints apply to foreign policy as well but as foreigners manqué US citizens take little interest in the rest of the world accept to see it as the dreadful place they or their ancestors escaped to freedom from, that now kills their soldiers and abuses them despite their generosity and to which their governement must surely be taking the gift of democracy when it uses force of arms against them. Congress is elected by the people and their are few votes in being decent to foreigners. In this the US is no different to China Foreign Devils Guizi are not to be trusted and our government when it deals with them MUST be doing the right thing.
Do not hold your breath black Americans or the worlds oppressed. The US voter can easily elect a Black libertarian President and a White Anglo Saxon Liberal Neo-conservative Congress. Watch this space and do not FOCUS solely on the presidential campaign
I am still working on the mass of material I got from the First EvoDevoUniverse Conference in Paris a few weeks ago. it was truly wonderful to see such hard work being done on the processes underlying evolution seen at its most general. Nottale's work on relativity and quantum dynamics was truly awe inspiring.
However that is theory. The current election in the USA is social evolution in practice. Clearly the US population as i myself predicted would not suffer long term from GW's reign. All good things come to an end. The population is now clearly well inoculated against that particular version of the virus of naked economic power.
It looks however if they may be about to elect the first black American president but if they are foreigners with hopes in the consequences for as no doubt voting Americans of a particular colour no only too well a congress is being elected in part as well. If change is truly possible in the USA one needs a democratic president and a democratic congress that trusts him. Carter and Clinton found out to their cost that what one can do in america as an American president is very little indeed without the backing of congress. There is every chance now that US voters will hedge their bets and vote in a black president and disempower him with a Republican never mind an unsympahtetic Democratic Congress.
Foreigners never understand US politics properly. the president on his own without the peoples representives behind him has VERY LITTLE domestic power. In practice these cosntraints apply to foreign policy as well but as foreigners manqué US citizens take little interest in the rest of the world accept to see it as the dreadful place they or their ancestors escaped to freedom from, that now kills their soldiers and abuses them despite their generosity and to which their governement must surely be taking the gift of democracy when it uses force of arms against them. Congress is elected by the people and their are few votes in being decent to foreigners. In this the US is no different to China Foreign Devils Guizi are not to be trusted and our government when it deals with them MUST be doing the right thing.
Do not hold your breath black Americans or the worlds oppressed. The US voter can easily elect a Black libertarian President and a White Anglo Saxon Liberal Neo-conservative Congress. Watch this space and do not FOCUS solely on the presidential campaign
The Coming Together
Chapter 11
Dénouement
Dénouement
Our comments at the end of the last chapter raise the vastness of the canvas on which we have chosen to paint. To return to us and our place in an emergent sentient Gaia, a few more speculative points can be made about the process by which Gaia as a sentient entity may come to be. Because these ideas are in “our” mind, we cannot but put them out there.
We have argued that we are on the cusp of great change on our planet. We should be in no doubt that the outcome of this is by no means certain. The very conceiver of Gaia, James Lovelock, has suggested that the outcome is probably dire.
Evolutionary processes are not deterministic, and so there is no predictive guarantee of what the outcome of what we have described will be.
We have already chosen to argue that the forms that emerge from the evolutionary acceleration of positive feedback are hugely diverse. This is to be expected. The starting points are very different and things unfold at varying speeds. Positive feedback turns such small variations into huge differences in final form.
This is true, but it is also true that success breeds success. A successful form in a new environment is likely to be replicated at an impressively fast rate. In the hunter-gatherer societies of early man, this form was probably tribes based on kinship, in feudal society it was the growth of a bureaucratised state or even empire, and under capitalism it has been the democratic nation states inter-penetrating each other, largely by trade but also by war.
Each of these forms were replicated time and again in their own era with huge local variations, depending on when and where positive feedback occurred. Nature builds from what exists. It does not destroy. All of the above forms exist to this day, scattered between and within the bounds of the nation states that currently dominate the world. We can still find hunter-gatherer societies, feudal societies, and so on. No doubt the democratic nation state will survive into the New Age.
However, the biological analogy can perhaps provide some useful conjectural fruit. It has been very difficult for biologists and others to give us a proper explanation of two processes in nature. We believe a version of each of these may be imminent in the context we now find ourselves.
Most living things initially grow by cell division. This produces 2 then 4 then 8 then 16 then 32, and so on, identical versions of the initial cell/egg. However, in higher organisms differentiation occurs at some point. How do millions of identical human cells stop dividing as such, and start dividing as hand leg, arm, heart and brain cells etc.?
This process begins to occur after what biologists call gastrolation. This is a process by which what had been rapidly replicating cells reorganise themselves in relationship to each other, and begin instead to divide and grow as the differentiated cell types that form our digestive, cardiovascular, skeletal and nervous systems.
We suggest that replication within the coordinated ambit of one living thing has an upper limit to size. It becomes impossible for the coordinating signals to pass rapidly enough from cells that are ever further from each other in space. To ensure their coordinated at-oneness, they need to find a new way to achieve this, if they are to remain one entity.
At this point, we speculate that it becomes necessary, for those parts of cell activity that need to be coordinated as one, to come together in one place to assume that role for the developing entity of which each forms a part.
We conjecture that we are probably at a similar point in the development of Gaia’s brain. The replication that has occurred so far is into families, communities, villages, towns, cities and states, nearly all defined by their geo-political context. The Internet allows us to interpenetrate all of these and form relationships based as much on function as on kinship, social trust or patriotism.
The speed at which we can now communicate globally does not necessarily mean that those sharing a common functionality must come together in one place.
However, there is some evidence that there is a tendency for this to be so, as Silicon Valley illustrates.
Our experience with technology so far suggests that, while cultural melting pots seem to be very creative places, this is not universally the case. In any case, the Internet makes them unnecessary. If universities are a model for creative production, we note that some of the most successful and ancient ones once organised themselves socially on a different basis from that on which they now organise themselves functionally.
Before the Internet, creative activity could only be conducted by the proximity of scholars to each other. This may no longer be necessary. People can now choose to live wherever they find life most conducive to their being, yet carry on a functional working relationship in their area of expertise at a virtual place created on the Internet for that very purpose. Such places already exist.
The other process in biology that we think merits consideration, at this point in human evolution, is that people have found it hard to understand the specifics of how symbiosis between separate organisms evolved into a separation of functions within one organism that encapsulates the processes provided by the symbiosis.
Again, it could be that we are reaching that point in the evolution of Gaia. The loose connectivity between the geosphere, protosphere, biosphere and humanity needs to become more strongly coupled for the sake of Gaia’s survival, and our own. In fact, many feel, including Lovelock, that they must either come together, or else this evolutionary experiment will fail, for the time being. I hope not, but we do not live in a deterministic world where guarantees to the contrary hold good. However, given the billions of years it has taken to reach this point, it seems unlikely that the Way would bring such an investment to an abrupt end.
We have the physical, intellectual, and spiritual tools to tackle the problems that face us and our planet. It would be difficult to wipe us out entirely and, for that matter, to wipe out all our accumulated knowledge. As a result of the Internet, our knowledge is now so widely distributed around the planet that, for all this knowledge to be lost, the planet itself would have to be destroyed in its entirety.
However, we could precipitate geo-physical or meteorological activity that might set the whole experiment back many years.
Our brains operate with around 10 million neurons, and at some time in the coming century mankind will reach this number. However, many believe we cannot sustain such numbers, given our current lifestyles. We are altering our lifestyles, and it should be remembered that the products of the new age are helping us to consume less and less as we maintain the same level of output.
The worst kind of event that we have as yet imagined, under the heading of global warming, is unlikely to be dire enough to reduce us hugely, but it would cause a hiccup in the working-out of the plan, if a population of 10 million is necessary for sentience.
Our tale contains much hope, and much of that comes from my wish to see the cup as half-full, not half-empty. Perception always has a major part to play in life. Without judgement, with forgiveness and “letting go and letting God”, life is a truly joyous thing. This is especially so if one sees that the freedom implied can be applied in any manner one sees fit in a universe so full of things to do, and of things that we need. We only have to perceive how to access them and they can be ours.
It is possible to see the world and the Way as depressing things, full of darkness and negativity. It is our belief that such darkness is entirely dependent on the perspective we take. We choose to let in the light, and the sun shines forth.
Our recipe from all this is neither indolent non-striving or competitive strife. Living off nature’s bounty as discovered by others, and fatalistically accepting whatever befalls us in our allotted role, is not on the Way. Nor is competitively pushing our fellows aside to obtain all we can for ourselves.
To act without acting, by finding the ways in which water permeates our and our planet’s lives is to be where we are, and to feel what we are becoming
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)