Reflections from a Day in Beijing

Today was and will remain significant to me. It was a wake-up call to arms in my own war to develop intellectually stimulating relevant ideas.

I hope the price of my learning was not excessively high.

I was confronted in Beijing with a pessimistic if realistic world view. This was important to me. It underlines my view that most human activity is driven by belief not reality. The current world crisis like all crisis of a similar "financial" nature is one of human beings confidence in their own beliefs. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any underlying change in human needs, wants and capabilities. The real economy today is no different now than it was a year ago though our confidence in it has been significantly undermined. The consequence is that without belief in it, it does not work.

The recent G20 suggests we humanity are learning how to organize collectively to constructively prevent our lack of confidence in our self belief being undermined for an inconveniently long period. Hopefully this will work on this occasion. It can perhaps, as did Bretton Woods, provide a means of sustaining significant self belief over time without resort to religion.

China's current strength, as was Britain's in the 19th Century, an irrational but sustained confidence in its capacity and will to prevail over all tribulations put in its path. You just have to see the "irrational" public buildings put up in the 19th Century in Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds etc to see this and compare them with the irrational "unrealistic" building going on in Beijing yesterday. The Beijing Olympics personified this as does the fact that over 25% of the residential property constructed here remains empty on completion - I have a researcher working on this phenomena as I write.

The Chinese have now built the longest bridge in the world, plan the tallest building, and the longest high altitude railway etc, the superlatives go on. They do this for similar reasons to those prevailing in 19th Century Britain. These beliefs were so powerful that they even managed to echo downwards into my education and lifetime in Great Britain in terms of us Brits being able to "punch above our weight". Of course this conceptually sells the pass. It does did however keep us in a game despite the "reality" that we are now largely irrelevant players.

It is in feelings of irrelevance, perceived or potentially perceivable, that danger lies. If one's life has no prospect of meaning except through belief then in death for that belief your life has meaning. Persecution for such beliefs heightens the value of such a death. Aggressive police action to suppress the holders of such beliefs is thus perversely the best way to spread their power.

Action providing hope of personal redemption through another route to meaning can succeed. My own take on Northern Ireland is that by finding a way of helping provide such belief for the growing Catholic majority we the Brits succeeded in assisting peace to begin to evolve there. Peace did not proceed out of the 1st World War. It ended with the victors depriving the Germans of all hope of economic or social redemption. World War IIs aftermath was different. Marshall Aid, Bretton Woods and the generosity of the US to its two main defeated enemies changed the game fundamentally.

I believe we need to give Islam and Israel a route to such redemption. I believe this is possible but as it is not yet in place. It cannot be constructed quickly. In the meantime we can at best deploy the kind of life skills you personally have developed to a work to meliorate the consequences. Unfortunately as you know, as did Pontecorvo, most people involved in the “engranage”, that can be your business, in Israel, the US, China, Iran and China do not see it that way. They can and do act in a manner that spreads, rather than dissipates, the consequences of the anomie that leads onto “engranage”. Your personal approach I know and see acts to attenuate the consequences of some people's lack of confidence in their own capacity to provide meaning for their lives except through death, their own and that of others.

Some seem heavily engaged at the tactical level in this battle. They like Shang and the other Chinese legalists are for destroying the enemy as they present. This is their way to meaning and social harmony – it worked in Japan and for a time in China under the Chin.
Others are deeply engaged at the operational level. They arguably have had lives with no mean level of success, with a number of key parts of the game, in Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Grenada and the Balkans.

On the other hand I have chosen to stand on the sidelines of our planet’s part in this great universal game. I choose to think and write about it.

Hopefully, in the end this may assist, the "evolutionary development" of a strategy humanity might use to continue to survive in it. My meaning is found in a small hope that this might be so and humanity can thus survive to continue to play a constructive part in the resolution of our segment of the great universal game existence presents to us. We of course are playing an unbelievably irrelevant small part but we humanity have the capacity to maintain a huge "hubritic" perception of our significance to the process.

Belief is in the end is everything. This can be good.

The Garden of Eden

10000 years ago we were hunter gatherers. We were closely integrated with the processes of the planet that evolved us. Its bounty was free. We were both of it and from it. We knew and understood that we lived within the same frame of time as most of what sustained us.

We ate what we found meat, fruit, vegetables and grains. Their form depended on where we lived and the seasons. Most of these our bodies cannot convert to fat and store. Most natural food cannot be stored. It goes “bad” (for us) quickly. It putrefies. Some natural foodstuffs, carbohydrates, grain, sugars, etc. are storable. They do not putrefy. Our bodies can convert them to fat. Thus our bodies can store their energy. Because it does not go bad it also can be stocked in grain stores etc.

Our modern, only recently understood view of nutrition, tells us that a diet so composed is healthy. It has great variety. This made us very flexible creatures in terms of our food needs. We did not occupy a food niche that could be vulnerable. We did not need to compete directly with others for our food. If we found another creature occupying a particular niche we could comfortable avoid competing with it and use another sources of food.

Many of the foods we ate contained anti-oxidants These, we now believe, protect us from diseases such as cancer that result from the internal cellular damage that can occur as a result of oxidation. The variety utilised meant we acquired a need for many trace elements. The hunter gatherers varied diet provided these. It was a very difficult diet to become obese on. Very little of what we ate could be converted and stored as fat by our bodies. Carbohydrates are relatively rare in nature.

To survive we therefore had to eat regularly during the day because we could not store energy easily from our diet. However many of our foods were highly nutritious and available in large quantity so this was not a problem. Unlike other creatures we did not have to spend the whole day foraging and eating. We had time for art thought and enterprise. Much of this time was spent teaching our young and learning as young. Humans do not reach sexual maturity till after more than ten years of life and intellectual maturity till our late teens or early twenties

Our diet then based as it was on fruit and vegetables thus helped avoid the diseases attributable to cellular age such as cancer and made obesity a rare pathological event. A diet of protein, fat and fruit and very little starchy food convertible into fat ensures this. We were slim and destined to remain so. To keep up our energy level we eat regularly throughout the day. Obesity was a rarity.

Some of our food could be stored but such food was not produced naturally in a form or quantity sufficient to sustain our survival. It needs to be cultivated to be used thus. Enough was available to store a small amount as body fat. We could thus use this small store for energy when other food was scarce. Hunter gatherers did find enough of this to create stores of energy both within and without their bodies. The Garden of Eden's bounty thus had a sufficiency that could sustain us even when other sustenance was scarce.

We did use some of our planet's plenty created within a very different frame of reference to our own, timber and stone for example. The former is renewed on a time scale of many hundreds of years and the latter on time scales of millions. However given the small number of humans that could survive as hunter gatherers the exploitation rate of such forms was so low as compared to the processes creating them that they were being replaced faster than they were being used up.

In such a world the concept of property had little meaning. Everything was a free gift of nature. In the Garden of Eden nothing exists in a sensible form except fleetingly. Each was a short term by-product of the process of being whither they were animals, trees or rocks. All that found sufficient to exist did so for its allotted time and was then passed on as feedstock to the other processes of which they were but a part of what is one whole.

Without storable property communal investment in protective security was not needed. There are no stocks of food worth acquiring that could sustain one beyond a few days. There is no incentive to try to acquire an unknown foraging area. It is of doubtful use without the local knowledge and understanding its indigenous peoples required to exploit it. This is generally peculiar to those humans who have adapted through learning to exploit the place they are born into. In this man evolved in a manner unusual in the evolution of the Way. We evolved to understand our environment. This enables us peculiarly to adapt either ourselves or alternatively our environment to survive within it. However before modern technology this knowledge and understanding took some time, perhaps several generations, for a group in a territory to acquire.

Without modern technology could any of us, other than Eskimos and Bushmen, live in the Arctic or the Kalahari Desert? The understanding “know how”, required to survive as a hunter gatherer in such a context is in the communal experience of the people of that place, a place of which they are an integral inclusive part.

It should be noted also that survival in such contexts is a communal not an individual affair. Local humanity is then clearly the unity not the individual people or lifetimes of which it is composed. Eskimo men could probably learn to make their own clothes and rear children. Eskimo women could probably learn to find food animals and hunt. However the cost of acquiring such “know how” in the extremis they face as a community is the difference between life and death. In hunter gatherer societies the community with its local knowledge of its environment is clearly the viable entity not the individuals composing it. In extreme circumstances, such as that of the Artic or Kalahari Desert individuals are very clearly organelles not organisms.

Unique local understanding, “know how” and knowledge learned and stored in the community is the community’s intellectual property. Possible usurpers simply do not have access to it. In such a context acquisitively inspired violence, war, has little purpose. It is to be observed that generally other living things do not do war. Modern man did. A main issue in this work will be to explore why this might be.

In hunter gather group's, internal security, policing of property physical or intellectual is unnecessary. Viability is an attribute of the community not an individual characteristic. Those with the physical strength or intellectual guile could take what they want by force or subterfuge but to do so is to seed their own destruction. If they did so act and were discovered they could be excluded from the nurture, support and security the group offers. In the harsh environment in which they live, without the support and protection of others, death is then certain. A hunter on his own who cannot hunt through injury and all are injured at sometime, will starve to death. In this socio-economic context individuals are not viable without the group except for very short periods of time. What individuals have is not heritable what the community has is.

In such a context to be injured or ill, and on your own, is synonymous with death, i.e. exclusion from the process of being. Even now when symbolically excluded from his group by having a bone pointed at them Australian aboriginal simply die. For such people exclusion is far more of a fear than physical violence. The emotional violence wrought by withdrawing support, the withdrawal of love, is what is feared above all else. To this day the fear of rejection is so very very powerful that is is still a deep rooted characteristic of all humanity. It is an extremely powerful, much feared, tool in the hands of those who effect to use it.

With this tool, in environments of the type described, men and women are truly equal. Brutish violent behaviour as a means to an end, including indulgence in perverted procreative urges such as rape, are simply not viable strategies. Those using them can very easily be excluded from the succour of the community and so find themselves consigned to death.

All this suggests an idyll. A time in which the universe, nature and human groups were all in perfect balance one with another. This is a false perception.

It ignores the Universe's, nature's Way, as an ever changing unfolding evolutionary process. Humanities uniqueness is in its capacity to gain a perspective from which to understand the flows, this process stimulates. These are always distinct from the forms momentarily created by them we sense and know. We have the ability to understand what creates what we sense and thus have the potential to access the Way of the universe in a manner different from that available to other manifestations of its processes.

In considering our understanding of the “Way” every moment should be seen in proportion to its cosmic context. On this our planet' existence is a fleeting event. The form we call life upon it is of even less significance. Within that a distinct human life form is barely noticeable. Within humanity's ambience modern civilization is a trivially short un-noteworthy experience. Yet here we are choosing to comment upon it.

This is written by a Britain from Reading, a city 40 miles West of London who now lives in Suzhou a Chinese city, 40 miles West of Shanghai. London could claim a history of nearly 2000 years Reading perhaps 1000. In human terms these two cities have been of socio-economic significance for only 500 and 200 years respectively. Suzhou is referred to by Confucius 2500 years ago as the capital of the Kingdom of Wu. It remains socially and economically significant today.

Americans are overwhelmed by European historical perspectives. They will be blown by China's when its 2500 year old history bursts into global focus during the 2008 Olympiad. This event has origin in a European civilisation with roots are as old as China's. Unlike China the civilisation they supported no longer exists except as ruins but its ideas are stored to permeate our lives.

Like Reading Suzhou is close to a great modern metropolis, Shanghai.was an insignificant fishing village when the British created it 200 years ago. It is now a globally significant city. From a Chinese perspective it is a recent Western intrusion of short term significance to their way of being..

In planetary terms these historical perspectives distort reality. Global warming could drown three of these cities this century. In cosmic terms this is not worth comment. To see things from these three points of view, human, planetary and cosmic, matters. Understanding the significance to humanity of our capacity to learn how to store actively can only be seen in its true depth when viewed simultaneously from all three. Our capacity consciously to plan to store the surpluses thrown up by the “Way” is highly relevant to our species perception of its integration with it.

Humans noted that seeds carelessly scattered when gathering a natural crop gave a renewed resource a year on. From this we grew to understand we had the capacity to nurture such occurrences through the process of cultivation,. Cultivating, farming, storable carbohydrates, freed us from a day to day perspective based on seasonal local availability. Crops grow on an annual, solar, cycle. Our perspective became, solar and celestial rather than lunar and seasonal..