A Stranger In The House : the website of Alan Hubbard
THE WEB'S MOST PESSIMISTIC PAGE
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Dawkin's (particular) Hubris ignores that:
Science is a long series of impeccably evidenced deductions from an unsubstantiable first premis.
Hubris is global!
The problem with the (genuinely) brilliant popularisers of science like Dawkins and Pinker is their inability (so right they probably are compared with the straw but still dangerous men they overthrow) to see that they too (being like the rest of us evolved humans) must be small people staring into the permanight! Unless they are to join the 'believers', they can never do more than assert the significance of anything, science included. And then, of course, the shoals of minnows follow them... and we all know that the absurdities of minnows always seize the day, whether they be the minnows of E Psych or the minnows of Theory!
‘One Day More’ 2002
(An Opto-pessimistic Essay)
“ he not busy being born is busy dying " - Bob Dylan
For millenia - we will never know how long, for it is unwritten in the fossil or the archeological record - homo sapiens imbued frightening, superior, enchanting Nature with the gods. And then - with increasing hubris; fire, pottery, metals behind him - with one God. A God made in his (not yet ‘her’) image, in Whose image he was made. The God of His chosen species, a species privileged above all other ‘creations’.
In the dark of present fundamentalisms, it may not seem that God is now dead. But he is. The hubris of our superiority was grounded in knowledge, the extension of self-consciousness to an examinable universe. That is in science, or what in the separation of epistemological unity into ‘disciplines’ became science. But that same procession of knowledge, through a conscious competition mounted on the back of its not-then-appreciated evolutionary host, led to Capitalism - ‘inevitable’ Capitalism, the heretical distorters of Natural Selection now claim. Initially riding on the back of God, capitalism now rides on the back of Darwin - making its claims, through a distortion of his discovery, as ‘human nature’. It provokes and justifies our consumption by ignorant reference to the survival of the fittest. Yet in its attempt to take over science, it destroys itself - or at least society. For there is no doubt about its triumph. Bin Laden is a gesture of ultimate despair. Jahweh and Allah are a long way behind. The arab boys who ride the planes still drink coca-cola.1. Briefly maybe, but one day the world will be global - the technology made possible by science will not be stopped. Neutral in potential, in reality it is in capital’s hands.
But if technology is neutral, science isn’t. Not only does it allow us to know the universe, but in doing so it confirms that we can’t. All species die. We shall. What is lost to consciousness, never has been. When there is nothing to know there cannot be anything known. As we become too brilliant to accept the anodyne of faith, it also becomes apparent that nothing else will do. In the face of the increasing meaning of phenomena through discovery we are confronted with our meaninglessness.
We are born to die. And we know it. What lies between birth and death can only be an attempt at rationalisation of that otherwise unbearable fact. Through art, through discovery, through laughter, through golf, through serial killing, through paedophilia, through the climbing of peaks, the breaking of records, through lust, through love, through whatever we choose, we are equals in our absurdity and meaninglessness. If there is success it can only be measured by our failure to commit suicide. Those who do may have succeeded in seeing clearly, but have failed to see life out. So we are absurd, and most absurd in our denials of our absurdity.
Living on this artificial plain - ‘created’ by natural selection - of the meaningful beneath the mountain of the meaningless, evolution has led us to the contradictions of Capitalism. It is not that there has never been such a thing as society - it is on nostalgia for society that much fundamentalism honorably rests - but that the egg of technology has turned putrid beneath the chicken of Capitalism. If there is no one and nothing outside ourselves that we can ever know - and scientific knowledge has to deny faith as knowledge - and a market determined technology offers us only shopping - what better rationalisation is there? The fittest had better go into Harvey Nicks and the unfittest into the slime of urban exile, into the boarded-up estates, the shanty-towns. There is only me. Isn’t that who the ads are addressing? Leaning heavily on our computers, we have triumphed over the need for mutual support. Our children? The disasters they might inherit? That’s old hat. We can’t do anything about it.
Except, if we have money enough, bloat them with the products of our own greed.
The best rationalisation to carry us through the dark is the intoxication of possession. Consumption becomes success. Shopping is laid in the manger. The original necessary commodities of our evolutionary past, food, clothing, now extend to everything. Everything being commodity nothing is anything else. Art - even science - is splintered into factional meanings within the denied meaninglessness. Love becomes measurable, saleable, buyable sex - and how good at it we are, or need to be; so we'd better buy the next book, a bigger vibrator, and wonder at the dissolution of honorable post-coital tristesse into performance anxiety.
Would it help to acknowledge that intelligence is an evolutionary blind alley? Even the biologists baulk at this! “Darwin liberated us from asking too much of nature, thus leaving us free to comprehend whatever fearful fascination may reside ‘out there’, in full confidence that our quest for decency and meaning cannot be threatened thereby, and can emerge only from our moral consciousness.” 2. Yet it is only by making overt the impossibility of a knowledge that would offer meaning, extend our hubris beyond 'out there' to All and Ever, that we can enclose ourselves in the equality of our mutual absurdity. Only perhaps - it is no more than perhaps - in this recognition can we learn to love one another again - for the first time? - and retrieve society, not for the continuing millennia of Startrek, but until our certain extinction.
At last we have evolved to the point where we have a reason to gather together. Against the darkness and the time when there will be no time and we will not have been. Let us be absurd, but at last, at the last, loving because we have no reason to love, magnificent.
1.The Falseness of Anti-Americanism Fouad Ajami
"If only the crowd in Tehran offering its tired rhythmic chant "marg bar amrika" ("death to America") really meant it! It is of visas and green cards and houses with lawns and of the glamorous world of Los Angeles, far away from the mullahs and their cultural tyranny, that the crowd really dreams. The frenzy with which radical Islamists battle against deportation orders from U.S. soil— dreading the prospect of returning to Amman and Beirut and Cairo— reveals the lie of anti-Americanism that blows through Muslim lands."
and...
“Islam is much more pro-capitalist and pro-material wealth than Christianity ever was. Jesus was walking around telling people that rich people are evil and that they’ll have a tough time getting to heaven. Muhammad, in contrast, was a trader. He was a capitalist himself, and he praises trade in many passages of the Koran. But it’s also much more difficult because Muhammad was also a state builder. He saw religion and state as one and the same. The big challenge in the Arab Muslim countries is to bypass the injunction to theocracy and to confine Islam to private life.” Johan Norberg (Interview in Reason On Line : Free Minds & Free Markets)
2. Stephen Jay Gould - Introduction to Evolution : The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer
Gene patenting. Just suppose Newton had patented the laws of motion. How expensive everything would be.
*
The whole point about sex
Is that it cannot be politically correx.
*
Welles freed the imagination from capitalist technology, now capitalist technology has recaptured the imagination.
*
‘It is certainly true that the war in Iraq has been mishandled; it may have been misguided in the first place. It is, regrettably, true that the cavalier attitude toward prisoner abuse has undermined our moral authority in the war on terror. But acknowledging our mistakes and misdeeds should not undercut moral clarity when it comes to terrorism. The jihadists are driven primarily by hatred of Western civilization and its freedom;* their primary targets are innocent civilians; and they cannot be defeated except by force.’ Cathy Young Reason.
* Many, most of them may be, yes. But the enormously increased support which provides them with a world-wide infrastructure is a direct result of western callousness, one-sided indifference to palestine humiliation and suffering - callousness, that is, if you wish to deny the term ‘murder’ to ‘collateral’ civilian casualties. We may see it as irrational, but the hatred of the west is not limited to those practicing extreme forms of the the muslim religion, it is a function of the misery in which a great many increasingly knowledgeable people are living at the expense of western corporate profit and - though we hate to consider this - an irrationally greedy western standard of living. And so it is surely unlikely that the jihadists can ever ‘be defeated by force’ alone.
*
4.7.05 AFRICA!
Exchange began as an exchange of surplus, of local excess after self-sufficiency, that self-sufficiency defined by the local availability of staple foods and other products to satisfy basic needs. Of course, exchange led to greater wealth because the ‘natural’ products of particular locations could be exchanged to increase the possibilities of all. BUT, and here is the big But; this spontaneous development led to its systematisation eventually as Capitalism. The lubricant of money was too powerful for the descendant of the Savanna to control, even with his potential escape from Natural Selection via his naturally selected self and other-conscious intelligence. Money and eventually Capital Accumulation became the structural rationalisations of Coercive Power and Greed. Capitalism became seen as Natural rather than Historic, and Exchange was seen as a rational excuse for the loss of fundamental self-sufficiency. Indeed, the fundamental self-sufficiency of societies whose lack of technological development made it essential, were value-judged as ‘backward’. Quality of Life had to be measured by Possession. Life without ever seeing a human corpse, without ever following the growth of food crops sensorily, without ever knowing the Nature from which History had led us, life picked from the air-conditioned supermarket shelf, its odours chemically recreated and enhanced, became unquestionably valued as both inevitable and ideal. The answer to African poverty would be the injection of a democratic market by the ‘best US President ever’ (Who said that?) and investment, investment , investment. The historic myth grown on the natural roots of Exchange was here exemplified. Free them to compete - then the investors will have cheap labour, a few africans - for a time - will have higher living standards, though not as high as the original producers now protesting about their disappeared protection; who must eventually accept lower wages or conditions or something... at this point the Capitalist ‘myth’ becomes vague*; just as it has no answer to what happens when the curve of growth hits near-infinity!
Yes I’m afraid I am one of the mean and cantankerous. I do think Sir Bob is a pawn of THEIRS. I do think the Concerts and even the marches are - despite that Dunkirkian glow of people getting together for a cause - a smoke screen to cover the fact that since socialism - which had never been tried - was condemned as at worst evil and at best utopian, Capitulism has been careering undisputedly on like a rabid dog whose owner thinks its frothing mouth is offering him a kiss.
Protectionism need not be aggressive, but could be limited to the essential. A concept that would need working out certainly. Whereas the concept of aggressive corporate ‘free’ trade doesn’t have to be worked out; it is inherent; it is not a historic invention, but ‘natural’, you see, including the contradictions of monopoly and choice.
*The apologists claim that in order to continue to compete, the losers of high-tech manufactiuring to cheaper labour abroad must become even more high-tech - as if they alone had that possibility. The ludicrous assumption of infinte growth is echoed once again.
and...
“Blair's Africa agenda is yet another expression of what Professor John Lonsdale, the Cambridge historian of Africa, described in a lecture last week as "the self-righteously civilising mission of the past two centuries" of Europe towards its neighbour. He concluded that "it is a construction that infantilises not only Africans, unable to fend for themselves, but us too, like babies demanding the instant gratification of self-importance".
What the past few weeks have reinforced in popular perception is the absurd simplification of an entire continent so that it is explicable in terms of just four adjectives: picturesque, pitiful, psychopathic and, above all, passive. This is the formula used by such interlocutors as Bob Geldof and Rolf Harris (the BBC seems to think we won't watch Africa without a white face to show us around). In the Geldof episodes I forced myself to watch, I heard only two Africans speak - a few whispers from a frightened child, a few words from a wizened elder - and none in Harris. Sumptuous maybe, but these programmes were riddled with stereotypes - setting suns, crowds of smiling children, inexplicable crazed violence - and had little new to say. This kind of TV reflects a profound lack of curiosity in Africa; a sharp contrast to the early 20th century, when Africa revolutionised western art, or the 60s, when a wave of new African leaders drew nervous respect across Europe.” Madeleine Bunting. Gdn 4.7.05
*
10.6.05
TWO VARIATIONS ON A WEARY RANT
OR, HOW’s THIS?...
The only objection to the triumph of the New Synthesis, the inevitable outcome of the illumination and modified verification of original Darwinism by the rise of micro-biology, and its - in a sense - reconciliation with Lamarckism - and by the extension of archeology via techniques made possible by discoveries in Physics and Chemistry - is to the optimism of so many of its advocates; an optimism in itself explicable as a result of Natural Selection!
For, of course, the heritage of the savanna as it expresses itself in modern society is... Capitalism!
Marx did for History what Darwin did for biology - his only mistake was to precede what he should have come after. Once consciousness had been selected - and by consciousness one means self-consciousness: the gateway to the further extension of consciousness up and down the scales of size, distance, etc - once that had happened, the heritage of the savanna made Capitalism inevitable as the ultimate enshrinement of the privilege of the ‘fittest’ males and females to enhance the number and chances of their genetic descendants. You do not fertilize the maximum number of females today by wielding a club at your rivals, nor does the female ensure the protection and privilege of her progeny by - surrendering to, or capturing: take your choice - the pecs of Baywatch. No, he must accumulate - directly or indirectly - money, and she must share it, or increasingly, seek it for herself. (Then she can have her Baywatch babies if she likes - indeed that, as on the Savanna, offers her the best of both worlds.) So how do they accumulate money? By investment of course. The accumulation of Capital is the road to dominance. Of course, there are exceptions, disparities. Evolution is never the naively smooth road its - generally - opponents presume. The progeny of the rich are often inadequate... But then, are we not - under Bush, Blair, the re(New)ed Conservatism, moving towards meritocracy? So that’s sealed that little gap. And so on. Examine Capitalism and you shall find the hunter gatherers of the Savanna on their fatal road - a road necessarily twisted by consciousness - to extinction.
But then, why shouldn’t they be? All individuals and species die. Since WoMan looks unlikely to adapt to the environment the creative originality of consciousness has superficially imposed on instinct, an environment of necessarily - that is the Capitalist shibboleth for its own ‘necessity’ - infinite growth (How else increase the surplus value to make the profit?) the death of the species is - probably in the shorter than the longer term - most likely.
After all, only Jesus Christ - who only the those who choose ‘belief’ as the rationalisation of their mortality think was not a man - seems capable of socialism. And he was not one of the ‘fittest’, of course. Didn’t leave any genes behind at all.
Ave atque vale, my friends.
*
“...(then there was) Dan Bell writing on "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism" as early as Fall 1970, in the PI's special issue on "Capitalism Today": ‘The deeper and more lasting crisis is the cultural one. Changes in moral temper and culture-the fusion of imagination and life-styles- are not amenable to 'social engineering' or political control. They derive from the value and moral traditions of the society, and these cannot be 'designed' by precept. The ultimate sources are the religious conceptions which undergird a society....’ ”
This is a quote from an article on the origination and now demise of the neo-con journal The Public Interest, edited by Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol. The article is by Nathan Glazer, a friend of and sympathiser with the editors.
___
Well, well, it took them time to realise that? But those religious conceptions are not confined to the fundamentalist interpretations of the Christian Right. With socialism disappeared the alternative, the loving interpretation of the jehovan heritage. That was the religious conception that communism embodied. When socialism disappeared it did not only take its evil, unsuccessful stalinist interpretation with it. It took away the single belief that opposed the capitalist hegemony of fatalistic selfishness which we have seen sweep to power throughout the west, and which looks highly likely to sweep through the east as well, despite the pragmatism of China and the human practicality of Islam and the fatalism of the Buddha.
Today is election day. In an atmosphere of sulking apathy the talk shows present to us the ignorant - yes ignorant; for ignorance is what capitulist Capitalist ‘education, education, education’ not only breeds, but encourages - opinions of their adored majority: “I Don’t believe any of them,” - Well under the circumstantial inability of them to be any more wise than their detractors, that’s fine by me. But then those detractors go on - “They should... increase my salary, cut my hours, increase somebody else’s hours, send my children to the best school,” - a manifest example of the crazed illogic implanted by the Market’s anonymous hegemony - “Fund this. fund that. But do not tax me more.” Yes, simply give me and mine the best, as if life had no values, no problems beyond the simple donation to me of what I want, no tragedy, no fortitude, no hope or hopelessness, no Shakespeare, no Marx, no Jesus. This is the ‘religious conception’ which undergirds our unideological society at what it would believe was the end of History if it had been taught, or rather mistaught, History.
Even as they wring their hands like the best of Pharisee’s, this is what the ethos of our neo-con and new labour Marketeers comes down to.
Give me!
Promoted of course by those who already have.
Contemptuosly screened between the last close up of a dying african child and the next programme about a whooping 4x4 family on a competition holiday in the ‘car of their dreams’.
Take a look at Leni Riefestahl’s masterpiece Triumph of the Will. If our present universal capitulism to Capitalism (See Gramschi about that) doesn’t destroy us, this is the sort of backlash that will.
Amen, brothers and sisters.
*
Marxism & the Working Class
What we will not understand is that the working class and every other class can be and has been completely seduced by Capitalism,* because to accept this is to accept that human nature itself has been fulfilled/seduced by Capitalism, and only psychobiologic catastrophe can lead to ‘fitness’** being seen as something contrary to the dominance of that seen as ‘fitness’ in the previous environment - the new environment being, of course, one in which the species may no longer be able to survive at all.
* Capitulism is the term for it. ** In a Darwinian sense.
*
After seeing the 8.1.05 C4 programme on Climate Change, with its (brilliantly obvious) conclusions, I am converted.
Summary of programme’s argument
1)It is agreed that renewable sources of energy cannot provide more than a fraction of the energy we consume. Those who advocate their use as our salvation assume that human behaviour can rapidly change to encompass a lower consuming 'green' lifestyle, but however ‘spiritually’ and even materially superior a green lifestyle may/might be, there is no possibility of changing to it from the consumerist complacency of Capitalist or (arguably) Human nature in time to prevent catastrophic global warming.
2)Within the prescriptive boundaries of Capitalist/Human nature only a rapid swing to nuclear energy (and by corollary, exclusively electric sources of power for traction, production and everything else, as well as heat and light) is achievable in the time we have.
3) Even though Nuclear energy is dangerous and will exact a price in human lives its price will be less than the price of continuing with fossil fuels. Nuclear energy is to fossil energy as the recent Tsunami is to the accumulated daily deaths in the third world from starvation and poverty. Just as the Tsunami is dramatically highlighted, so is Chernobil highlighted against the daily, much greater, damage from fossil fuels, both directly (accidents, pollution, illness) and potentially (irreversible climate change). Ten or even a hundred Chernobils would be in no way as disastrous as failing to limit climate change to the minimum.
4) The attitude of Greenpeace etc (and prior to this, me) to Nuclear Power as a necessary energy source is socially simplistic and equivilates - though infinitely more dangerously for the future of homo sapiens - the well-meaning hostility of the luddites to steam industrialisation when they were without a realistic and socially acceptable alternative.
Additionally I think:
For those of us who would like to, or those who believe it is possible to envisage a society beyond capitalist consumerism: There is no possibility of such a society coming about in time to deny future devastation from uncontrolled and assisted climate change, even if such a society could and would mean a general acceptance of conservation and a much lower total use of fossil fuel energy.
Of course, if Nuclear Energy is to be championed there will be a competitive struggle between Nuclear and Fossil fuel commercial interests - but they will often be within the same corporation and under the same finance control. A shift in energy source and use does not threaten universal profit. It is a shift within profitability, the only essential corporate objective - analogous to the tobacco advertisers happy claim that they do not wish to increase tobacco consumption per se. but only to increase the sales of ‘their’ brand. It is not the same as a Greenpeace demand for less consumption (less profit) all round, which remains anathema to the Market and to the vast majority of consumers alive at present, and is impossible to achieve socially (ever, many would say, under capitalism) in the time available.
Oil companies are already backing the outside horse of renewable energy as an insurance. If national government policies ruthlessly substituted Nuclear Energy (and of course the use of renewables as well, where they can be developed) for Fossil Fuels they would happily follow. As for the car industry, the fully electric car would be developed overnight. Shell’s current chairman admits the urgency of the need!
I don’t think so, but maybe this programme was secretly sponsored, welcomed by the Nuclear Industry. In that case, so what? The scientific and sociological evidence it culled and presented seems to me overwhelming. Its reasoned conclusion seems to me inescapable:
There has to be a rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels to mitigate the problem of future climate change. There can be no such reduction without the rapid expansion of the use of nuclear fuel. To deny this is to accept the inevitable devastation of human life within the next century.
*
Capitulism : The US Election 2004.
In the lemming-like rush of late capitalism towards its inevitable end the paradox of Democracy is that both Autocracy and Democracy make Democracy impossible.
The ultimate cotradiction of democracy is that in its most refined embrace everyone votes exclusively for their own interests - or supposed interests, which democracy must assert are the same thing - without any thought of anyone else’s interests. So the power of majority opinion (as within an autocracy) subverts both freedom and equality. From the Greeks - who excluded slaves - to the Neo Cons - who delude the poor into false views of their own interests by media control and subversion - the rhetorical assertion of Democracy as a universal benefactor has equivilated autocracy in its assurance of inequality.
Individual bumps and falls in the graph of freedom have depended not on either autocracy or democracy but on the quality of particular instances of either.
Darwin described the survival of the fittest - but also the death of everything. People die. Species die. When they are dead their existence in self-consciousness ceases and they will never have been. This is the only and sufficient fact on which to base a politics of equality. It is unlikely. Neither leaders of autocracies or democracies, nor the peoples of either, appear to have the humility to live as if living was all there was. The hysterical hedonism of the secular, and the hysterical puritanism of the fundamentalists of all religions are the desperations of self-denying fear. Burdened by the temporarily evolved fitness of self-consciousness we do not know how to live because we do not want to die. So we kill or abuse one another as, for some, a satisfactory rationalisation of mortality.
Ave atque vale.
*
The great weakness of polemic (Monbiot, Klein, etc - I write this in the week of Paul Foot’s death, who was an honourable if deluded exception) is the absence of any indication of how the ‘required changes’ may be brought about. Marxist Communism predicated a classical limited Capitalism and offered Working Class revolution as the instrument of its overthrow. Since that proved false, or its attainment unachievable, the ultimate hegemonisation of the world by post-modern capitalism (Capitulism) has appeared unstoppable until/or unless it suffers collapse from within.
To wait for such a collapse, if you can believe in it, means waiting at the best for social chaos and an unknown outcome, or at the worst for the destruction of the human species (among others) due to disastrous environmental change.
Most of our present preoccupations are irrelevant beside our failure (Natural Selection’s “failure”!) to develop our social wisdom to the same extent as our scientific intelligence. Al Quaida is clearly a desperate stroke of fundamentalism, as over the world muslim youth accede - and the majority will - enthusiastically to (or are corrupted by?) coca cola and all it symbolizes. For Capitulism is not concerned with “terrorism”, “Democracy”, “tyranny,” “Religion”, “secularism” etc, except when, momentarily and tangentally, the action caused by an idea or ideology interferes with the Market. The Market is as all containing and as nebulous as the World Wide Web. Both carry one another to the last interstices of the human world. Both are amoral. Both depend on, live in and sell the Present. Now we shake our heads dismissively over even our children’s future.
You turn to a God who is unbelievable. Or you don’t believe in anything, so you choose your own rationalisation of mortality - hedonism, service to your fellows, serial killing, chess, football fandom, football hooliganism, art, obssessive sex, physical achievement, etcetera etcera,etcetera. If you looked up from that you would have to admit that in the end there is nothing other than the return to oblivion for you and your species, which will mean that you and your species have never existed. Darwin is not a benevolent god. If you choose to think so that’s just your rationalisation. Don’t believe you can prove it. Or that proof means anything. Take courage - this text is as absurd as all contraries to it.
*
Darwin has rid us of first order hubris (a belief in our unique ‘specific’ immortality - originally under the protection of God and subsequently under the protection of Reason) but Natural Selection has left us with second order hubris - a ‘necessary’ blindness to the consequences of our evolved self-consciousness.
*
Darwin has disproved non omnis moriar.
*
28.4.04 That a religion, or some equally ‘binding’ secular moral code, coheres society, doesn’t mean that it is objectively ‘true’, only that it is a socially successful rationalisation.
*
18.3.04. Subversion is now impossible. In any form it can be absorbed and so negated. This is the ultimate achievement and disaster of Capitalism. That it can only be destroyed by itself. And will be.
*
From an old Gdn 8.12.03 “Presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich. Matthew Wells meets a social democrat floundering in free-market America. At the age of 31, he was mayor of Cleveland, when he rejected the demand of local big banks to privatise the city's electricity system. In retaliation, the banks refused any more credit, and the city's finances collapsed...” (my emphasis)
This sort of thing is happening all the time, every minute, every day, at all levels, with less or greater overt pressure, at one extreme a word in the ear, at the other destructive physical violence. Perhaps one percent of it appears in the media and is made public. But generally we live in Gramschian denial, unbelieving, overwhelmed and finally apathetic.
*
20.1.04 Reading Straw Dogs by John Gray. (Now cult? Self, Ballard, etc, myriad approved)
1) It’s cult status arises from its offer to the confused ex-left, progressive, whatever you will, homeless, an alternative to the present hegemony of ‘free market thought’ - even though that alternative is uncomfortable, and leaves them no place to go other than into themselves. (A mirror image of the direction in which Market Capitalism drives the individual anyway. Onanism is very like selflessness!)
2) Brilliant as the book is, it is not uncomfortable enough! Uncertain, uneasy passages of near optimism occur in its otherwise incisive dismissal of our illusions. In the end - as anyone travelling in its direction, including this site, must - it wrestles with silence, the inescapably superior position to any human assertion. There is no point in the absurd pointing to its absurdity! But most - all? - of us want something to do. It passes our - limited - time.
Natural selection has determined that we give it significance.
Of course, this is an assertion.
*
Marx and Gramschi together still explain our world (outside the biological and to an extent within it) better than anyone. It was his failure to see hegemony which accounted for Marx’s optimism. For Gramschi it had come down to today: to all we can have (if we can sustain it) - ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. But it is observation of the hegemonic blanket over our world which isolates, which makes one a stranger in the house. At the muddled banquet of life under late capitalism, among the hypocrisies and self-justifying denials of the need for or possibility of society heirarchically above and more important than the illusory ‘free individual’, to see hegemony is to be the one who puts the damper on, draws attention to, etc. The hegemonised do not want to be reminded, and by definition cannot believe that they could be deeply ‘unhappy, or ‘unfulfilled’, or that care for others is - Jesus Christ!... Jesus Christ said it! - the ultimate recognition of and care for the Self. The hegemonised not only read the Sun but write it. It is the disembodied ‘cunning’ of late capitalism to be so visible that it becomes invisible.
*
The Empire of the Senseless. (After Kathy Acker) It is not that the U.S of A is evil! It’s that Capitalism has got hold of the U.S. of A, as it has of us, has or will have of the Muslim world, has of course of Bin Laden himself, despite any protestation to the contrary. Nobody, not Saddam, not the Chinese, no leader, no goverment, opposes or refuses the deep structure of the Capitalist state. And such a structure certainly doesn’t have to be - isn’t, can’t truly be - democratic. Democracy - like any ideological prop of Capitalism - is only ever convenience deep.
*
“How often it happens, that, when a catastrophe occurs, if we inquire into the cause, we find it originated through the obstinacy of one with little ability, but having full faith in his own powers.” Claude Gueux, King of Thieves Victor Hugo ..........on TB perhaps?
*
Love is both this side and the other side of absurdity.
*
Capitalism is dependent on competition but the aim of every Capitalist is to eradicate competition. The success of the individual is the failure of the system.
*
The Hubris of ‘deification’ of arrival at the point at which one has arrived.
(From the History of Evolution @ Principia Cybernetica web.)
“1. Prebiotic: the developments taking place before the origin of the life, i.e. the emergence of physico-chemical complexity: the Big Bang, space and time, energy and particles, atoms and the different elements, molecules up to organic polymers, simple dissipative structures.
2. Biological: the origin of life and the further development of the specifically biological aspects of it: DNA, reproduction, autopoiesis, prokaryotes vs. eukaryotes, multicellularity, sexual reproduction, the species.
3. Cognitive: the origin of mind, i.e. the basic cybernetic, cognitive organization, going from simple reflexes to complex nervous systems, learning, and thought.
4. Social: the development of social systems and culture: communication, cooperation, moral systems, memes.”
But the development of complexity is NOT (as would seem to be claimed here) indicative of evolutionary ‘progress’ - it is simply a required adaption to fill specific environments; ‘achieved’ by being (arriving at being) fit to survive in them. Previous ‘simplicities’ continue to survive - is not the bacteria as fit as or fitter, even in ‘his’ world, than man? - and the simplest will survive ‘the longest’. In so far as we make the assumption that we know anything, when we can’t other than that something exists to be known, we know that matter/energy arose before, from, out of the Big Bang and has not yet become extinct. Man has about as much chance as the ’best adapted’ of the dinosaurs of surviving one or other event in the species’ future! Complexity works against him! And when he is extinguished his vaunted knowledge will never have existed - for his consciousness will no longer be there for it to exist in. Complexity is not the aimed for good of evolution - evolution does not have an aim other than to fulfil the constraints of ‘need’.
and ibid
“fitness: intuitively, a system, configuration or "state-of-affairs" is fit if it is likely that that configuration will still be around in the future. The more likely we are to encounter that system, the more fit it is. Though there are many ways to be fit, depending on the exact situation, we may say that fit systems tend to be intrinsically stable, adapted and adapting to their surroundings, capable of further growth and development, and/or capable of being (re)produced in great quantities.” (My italics)
By this definition, man, mammals, life on earth (or anywhere else?) are not particularly fit, are they? Earth-matter, bacteria might get away - as certainly as anything we ‘know’, Kirk won’t make it!
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Bureaucracy is not a function specifically of Public or specifically of Private enterprise; it is a function of hierarchy.
11.11.03 Re the revelations about Iraqui offers to the US/UK prior to the attack: Hitler used the Reichstag fire; Bush and Blair the two towers’ fall!
Marx's error was utopia. He didn't recognise that naturally selected self-consciousness offers us the mirages of imagination. Man sees beyond his own biological possibility. It has led him to the hubris of seeing himself, and his survival, as 'important'. But NS, like MS, is implacable. It enforces adaption to what the environment offers - not to what the the subject/species (if it is endowed with consciousness) thinks it would like.
"All I am is an assertion that dies."
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"In the 2,500-year-old canon of Western moral philosophy, I am hard pressed to find a single thinker who accepts the taking of innocent life to further political aims." Are Suicide Bombings Morally Defensible? RICHARD WOLIN in The Chronicle of Higher Education... In the 2,500-year-old history of the West, I am hard pressed to find a single leader who hasn't accepted the loss of innocent life to further political aims!
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A Complete Description of Human Experience
They tried
and in the end they died
(Also a summation of Kafka's life and ideas?)
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“The problem all those who want a fairer deal face is that there has seldom, if ever, been a trade treaty struck between rich and poor which does not amount to legalised theft.” George Monbiot. Gdn. 9.9.03 The problem all those who want a fairer deal face is that as long as there are rich and poor the rich will keep and increase their wealth at the expense of the poor - at first with condescending smiles, and then with frowns and manipulation, and finally, if necessary, with class and/or racial genocide. There is no possibility of or credibility for violent revolution. And therefore there is no solution. (The misguided believe this is not true because they believe that God - if they so choose - or Evolution is 'progressive'!) Still - that most pregnant of pauses! - one has to be a radical despite humanity. And despite the scepticism induced by reason about Reason. A vast hypocrisy called debate is raging, distinguishing economic migrants from asylum seekers, as if both were not seeking asylum. If you do not export wealth you will have to import people. Or imprison them. Or resort to genocide. Another great hypocrisy is scuttering through the pages and over the ether. Protests at, abhorrence of Corporate Fraud... anxiety about its broader existence... etc. But if Capitalism is supposed to have ended History, it has done so by subsuming it. Capital has a continuing internal history of its own. And its present state - Late Capitalism, Post-Capitalism? - is far from the hypocritical but ideologically constrained capitalisms of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Puritan Ethic has gone, or is now so hypocritical as to have ceased to be so. Post-modern Capitalism no longer depends upon the rule of a believed in law. Its proponents now actually believe, not in the market’s pragmatic provision of the greatest good to the greatest number, but in its service to themselves. The creed is greed. Of course there will be more revelations. Of course there will be no meaningful regulation. Greed is not now a minority failure, a price that has to be paid for the ‘free market’. It is the market. It is the unrestricted aim, sans conscience, beneath a derisory and accepted disguise of hypocrisy, of corporate finance capital in the 21st century. Beggars (and most other of the despised - asylum seekers, refugees) are condemned if they are entrepreneurs and condemned if they are not. Here's a paradox, my masters... Hubbard's books are presently available as paperbacks or PDF downloads from www.lulu.com/alanhubbard
What wouldn't Welles have done with steadicam?!
Thank God Welles didn't have steadicam.