Socialists

The conventional political world is terrified that “socialists” have won some recent American elections. It might be useful to understand that these economic and political labels belong to a bygone ignorant age.

Before 1850, when most of these terms came into vogue, the conceptual environment of the modern world was just beginning. Chemistry, physics, biology, geology, psychology, electricity, all were in chaotic transition from classical imagining to modern theory and experimentation .

Labels are useful. An eye is not a hand. Stopping at labels is, however, medieval. The eye is functionally and inherently different than the hand, but related in infinitely complicated ways. A politician who stops at a label like “socialism” without going into complications is a lot like a physician who claims he doesn’t believe in all those newfangled ideas about cells, germs, hormones, evolution, and genetics .

We need to understand the uselessness of political name-calling, where puerile unique identification is the be-all and end-all of knowledge. “Socialism” means almost nothing, beyond a system that believes that wider wealth distribution is important to civilization. Details are not provided – but the details are what’s important .

In culture and politics, in civilization and human society in general, we are still at the stage of medieval physicians. We recognize problems but are clueless as to how, why, and what to do .

If we survive the current crises, our descendants will doubtless look back on our ignorance with the same stunned amusement as we do those Venetian doctors warding off plague with beaked masks .

For all I know, computer technology may actually prove helpful in our awakening .

Locally Infinite

I’ve always admired William Blake’s poem “To see the world in a grain of sand”. Although it has helped guide me through life, I find it more and more useful right now. How heaven, I discover, really is in that dandelion brilliant yellow in my lawn .

Our consumer culture has few advocates for common local miracles. No money in that! You must buy some exotic bloom, visit some distant garden, watch a feature on TV. The farther you travel, the more you spend, the more rare something is, the more the universe will smile on you.

But that grain of sand is composed of star stuff, the end result of billions of years and massive forces, just as much as any mountain, however high. In the proper frame of mind, just as inspiring. With proper regard, just as beautiful and meaningful .

And importantly for elders – more confined than we were in youth – that dandelion and that grain of sand are right here, right now. I need go nowhere. Simply open my mind and appreciate existence. The best things in life may not be free, but the definitions of both are flexible .

I’ve gradually become able to focus on the local. To be grateful for anything I can sense or think about. To truly appreciate “eternity in an hour” .

Bartleby

Melville’s office clerk began to increasingly tell his employer “I would prefer not to”. Eventually he became unemployable. I find myself in a similar frame of mind. Although the “employer” side of my brain is equally horrified .

There are an awful lot of “terrible things” trying to gain our attention each moment. As massive as a dinosaur asteroid, as ultimate as a bioengineered plague. As tiny as residue cellular pesticides. As improbable as effects by electromagnetic environments. Partisans keep screaming I must know about these things! “We must do something !”

“I would prefer not to”. I don’t mind so much learning of people’s fears. They can be entertaining. Perhaps some are true, perhaps fewer have any importance. But I am convinced there is little I can affect. So I let them slide by without impact on my emotions or daily happiness .

It’s an old philosophy, encountered at all times and everywhere. Stoic acceptance and withdrawal. Religious mystics from ancient India to Catholic monks. Sit quietly as the world turns and burns.

And yet – life is magnificent and precious, and what we do can matter locally. Each moment counts in our universe. Not caring or moving at all is death, and early rejection of the gift of life.

That’s my employer mind talking, of course. It is right.

Sometimes.

Bugs and Features

When I was writing software and something unexpected would result, we’d laughingly claim “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” I’ve often applied the same logic to my own life, rather than complaining about things that usually cannot be fixed.

For example, I’ve always been nearsighted. I actually enjoy taking my glasses off to view the world in a different way. Lines and shapes may be blurred, but other things such as colors are richer and I often notice different focal points .

Being short is hardly fun in this culture, but it did keep me out of trouble since I knew I would lose any fight I was in. My genes fit my size well to keep me mostly healthy, and lately it’s been a blessing to be small in cramped spaces like airplane seats. And, often, it is useful to be unnoticed and non-threatening .

The various degradations and pains of advancing age are never any fun, but if they are minor and temporary they do remind me to appreciate whatever remains. Nothing makes one appreciate normal teeth more than a toothache .

Admittedly it is a shallow, pollyannish or Panglossian view of “the best of all possible worlds” But like many philosophies, when it fits it works very well. Why waste time cursing fate, or gnawing outlook with envy? Some ambition is useful, some anger cathartic, some pain unbearable. But for the rest – well I prefer to try to change perspective .

Features, not bugs!

Equilibrium

Balance and equilibrium are often regarded as synonymous, but I regard balance as more static, equilibrium as dynamic. A rock perched on a pinnacle is balanced. A healthy pond is in equilibrium.

That boulder will not move until something disturbs it. A tightrope walker, on the other hand, maintains equilibrium with constant adjustments or plummets off the wire.

So when we are told to balance our lives, it’s not very useful. Maintaining dynamic social and personal equilibrium is what’s essential. Work, friends, wealth, health, and so – all the usual suspects in constant movement, tension, countertension, and adjustment .

I realize that I’ve exaggerated somewhat. But my point is that whatever one labels it, the condition is fragile and when lost hard to regain. Once that boulder rolls into the valley it would take stupendous and often impossible effort to put it back. As far as a tightrope walker …

We live in a crowded world of homeostasis where we usually take equilibrium for granted. Sometimes that causes us to do rash things with consequences far beyond what we intend with one relatively minor effort. Once equilibrium is destroyed it may never return in the same form. Just review any ongoing ecological or social disaster .

I’m grateful for the massive, seemingly effortless, equilibriums in my own life, and try to be conscious of how fragile they are .

Looney Geniuses

Overwired brains often descend into what seems madness to others. Brilliance can be associated with insanity. Isaac Newton pored over mysticism, medieval alchemists tried to turn lead to gold, Chinese emperors ate crazy stuff to become immortal, many religious fanatics pondered the ineffable reasons for the universe even as they admitted humans cannot know .

Most of our current batch of lunatic geniuses concentrate on science fiction. They want to move humans to other worlds, live forever young, turn the next stage of evolution over to silicon machines, vanish into a “singularity” which, if it existed, would exactly resemble the current universe .

But in one or two areas (when financed with other gullible people’s money) they are indeed brilliant. Some actually build things, many simply manipulate gambling spreadsheets. Their narrow focus on whatever they succeed at makes them less than stable and realistic in other areas of their lives .

I truly enjoy reading of their adventures in immortality. Instead of ingesting gold or jade, hiring magicians to enchant them, or bathing in virgins’ blood, they simply do weird self-denying rituals. Living in oxygen tents, starving, precise foods. All to extend lives which _ examined from a wider human experience _ hardly seem worth living .

I wander outside to smell the roses and laugh in the moonlight . In my own world, forever, eternally young

Why

Responses to the simple question “why” are traditionally “why not” and “because”. A more useful answer would be “irrelevant”.

Our intellects have allowed us to expand instincts into learning. We remember the past and project visions into the future. This is quite useful, it lets us know, for example, that if we drop a rock it will fall. Using language, we can become quite clever about everything .

So we become almost instinctual about cause and effect, and the logic that ties them together. Everything, we start to believe, must have a cause. In our egocentric anthropomorphic conceptual universe, we then project that every cause requires a reason.

We think that we also must have a reason beyond simply being. That seems wrong at a metaphysical level. It’s purely selfish egoism with delusions of grandeur.

Cause and effect logic is useful. It doesn’t necessarily underlie a mystic reality of the universe. We don’t even have much perspective on the nature of time itself – and time is essential for cause and effect .

Oh, “why” can be fun. Like any other dream. And “why not” may be a decent answer. But mostly at high abstract levels it is simply an entertaining and useless waste of time (whatever time may be).

Security

Ask folks what they want, and there are varied standard answers. Fame, fortune, health top the list for most. Friends, family, purpose fit in there somewhere. I suggest the most subconscious thing most of us crave is basic security. We like to know what we know, we hope what worked for us yesterday will still work for us tomorrow .

“Oh that’s silly” you will say. If things are bad we want a change. True, but only a change we can anticipate or accept. We always fear change for the worse. Sometimes we would rather realize a pattern than escape it. As Dylan Thomas wrote “there must, be praised, some certainty, if not of loving well, then not, …”

Gamblers seek excitement, but they not only think they know the odds, but securely believe they can always gamble again. Adventurers plan to return from their expeditions. These are bumps in the general security of their times .

Examine all social systems. The most stable tend to be exactly those where people are secure about what they do. Even if what they do is to start something new and different or to take a risk. Nobody wants to wake up in a jumbled inscrutable environment each day .

To some extent, that seems to be this society which is developing around us. It’s often scary. And no, I do not feel any more secure in simply recognizing that fact .

Paving the Road to Evil .

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. Although the concept of hell has become somewhat obscured in these enlightened times, we all agree that there is such a thing as evil. Creators of horror media feast on it. Nobody denies that evil exists in the world, but an awful lot of it seems a result of somebody’s good intentions .

For example, we all might easily agree that a psychopath kidnapping a 4-year-old and torturing her to death is an act of pure evil. Yet the same outcome, on a massive scale, might happen as “collateral damage” in what many regard as a just war. In such cases, I suppose, we could say that the event was evil, but the people who caused it were acting with justifiable intentions in a good cause .

It is all very well to dilute the idea of evil to the “intent of those causing it”. That goes right back to the old monotheistic question of why an omnipotent God allows evil to happen. And it helps us build a bearable framework around an unbearable tragedy .

The problem with that – and it always has been – is that we degrade our moral sense and treat evil in a rather cavalier attitude. Fortified by a contradictory certainty that we can clearly determine intent, and can easily assign relative weight (“how evil”) to what should be a uniquely absolute moral judgment .

Anyway, I surely see a lot of earnest paving going on all around me these days .

Joy

In my same moments, I simply rejoice in being conscious and aware. A perfect enchanted unity. I reject the artificial division of body and mind, and the still more degraded notion of defining mind as logic. Down that useless path wanders the progress of AI .

We need not celebrate life itself so much as awareness. True awareness, of course, is built on life. An organism that is aware in any sense possesses consciousness. Without running off to deeper metaphysics, I find my own consciousness the ultimate glory of all I am .

Logic, after all, is a barren brittle construct. The joy in solving a puzzle has nothing inherently logical about it. The joy is an awareness of having achieved a solution .

My heresy is to claim that awareness – enabling that joy – requires life, requires a body. Whatever we’ve constructed without life will lack that. No joy. No awareness. No consciousness. Logic will exist, but never the actual exuberance of being .

I have a short “objective” window of existence as measured in years, although my subjective time feels infinite. During that opportunity, I joyfully seize the world and myself in the universe .

I pity those unaware of their own precious gift.

Science has value, as does logic, but that value is hardly logical. Without resort to dry ancient or futuristic metaphysics, I am free to expand into infinity.