Friday, February 29, 2008
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings
Anyone who was anyone reading about anyone in the early seventies will have come across Janov and primal scream therapy. Apart from giving a name to a good rock band, primal scream experience involves getting to the emotional core of your being by having a good yell or two. Well, probably a lot more than that, but it has sufficed to bring me to my theme for this blog. Janov has adults regressing through their emotions to the birth and foetal state but I’m going to offer two vignettes regarding what is possible with your own children – in a safe and often wonderfully enriching way.
The first time I tried this was with a close friend’s two and a half year old. The key, I think, is that the child has just begun to conquer basic language and can conceptualise the temporal states of yesterday, today and tomorrow, So it’s quite early in language acquisition. Then, gently ask them to remember the first thing that they can remember. You might have to coax a little and say, “..before that..?”, etc. What comes out can be astonishing.
Back to my first story. Lucy thought for a while and looked at me as though I should know without her telling me. Then she said that she had been at the top of an apple tree with stars all round and she dropped, well, slowly, on a rope through the branches of the tree until she landed on a green carpet. A man with a beard came with a big knife and wrapped her up. In turned out that the doctor who delivered her did have a beard and there was only a green towel available!
The second story took place last week. I had told a close friend who has a two and a half year old about Lucy and encouraged her to try it. Her child thought for a moment and said something like, “..do you mean when I was born?” Gulp, thought her Mum, “Yes”. Well…said the little one, “ My head fell into my heart.”
My reading of this is that she woke from the pure emotional sea of her mother’s womb and came into consciousness. The first articulation of reason.
Try it if you can or get your close friend with a child that age to try it. It would be good if you tell me what happens – and I’ll print every story on the blog.
Labels: babies, childbirth, first memories
Monday, February 25, 2008
Shorn (of respect) Connery
Currently, one of the television channels in the UK is running a top one hundred of the most embarrassing/obnoxious/gets-on-your-tits individuals of this past year. I have no idea if SIR Sean Connery is one of these but he should be. This tartan Bahamian (The King of Scotland should have been about him not Idi Amin) has let it be known that he will only return to Scotland when it becomes independent. He is also an avid (and financial) supporter of Alex Salmand and the break-away Scots. Meanwhile, from his crofter’s cottage in the western isles of the Bahamas, Sir Sean pontificates on politics in the way only those who believe the grandiose hype about themselves can.
Having accepted a Knighthood and the lickspittling that that entails (read my blog on Dame Helen Mirren) he rides forever on the assumption that a man who once played James Bond, is, somehow, really some kind of James Bond, forgetting that James Bond represents probably the ultimate bounder among the English establishment’s cavalier, amoral-patrician heroes. Connery’s Scottishness is as ersatz as Japanese Scotch, a spin, a deluded self-construction that sells his image.
Maybe what he is and represents is what Scotland will become with independence; a kind of MacDisneyland full of quaint fables, funny accents, insularly self-satisfied and bedecked in tartan. A bit likely Eire, in fact! Isn’t it time that we forgot all this nationalistic nonsense and got down to being European, anti-chauvinist and egalitarian? Be proud of our histories, maybe, but prouder of what might be achieved if our cultures were allowed to enrich each other, freely.
Labels: Alex Salmand, Scottish Independence, Sir Sean Connery
Friday, February 22, 2008
Is there anyone out there?
I’ve written a few essayettes on the question of reality and identity posed by the artificial worlds developed by arcade and internet programmers. If we enter these worlds in avatar form (constructed selves built to our individual specifications of desire and need) are we experiencing and learning (or not) in the same way that would happen if we physically existed in such worlds? Many influential gamers think so. Their very insistence on this central tenet resonates, inversely, with the Hindu notion of Maya or Plato’s shadows on the cave wall. Through time, religious and secular philosophy has pondered reality and illusion. For any thinking individual, human existence is fraught with this problem. Is this stuff I see around me, people, objects, events – everything! – really there? Does it disappear when I die? Do I die? Was I ever alive? Am I part of the Matrix programme? What the fuck is it all about?
The projections that are emanating from IT geeks today suggest that within 25 years we may have computing power which is a billion times the power of today’s machines and A THOUSAND TIMES SMALLER! So small, in fact, that it will be possible to insert computers in the brain, vastly amplifying neural processes in all their forms, affecting the senses, the emotions and rationality. Interactions could occur which don’t so much blur further the differences between illusion and reality, but completely eradicate it. The gamers, Plato, Maya et al will all be finally proved right. There will be nothing out there. It will all be in here, snugly fitting on the top of the cortex.
25 years. I could still be alive – physically speaking. Will the insertion of this magic brain bullet of vastly superior intelligence allow me a wondrous vista of possibility as my ageing neurons are supercharged for their last great hurrah, so that the dissolution of my body becomes a mere lightning storm beyond some distant ridge? Will death become something I fear no longer because its symptoms are subsumed in a fantastic last epiphany?
I’ve written a few essayettes on the question of reality and identity posed by the artificial worlds developed by arcade and internet programmers. If we enter these worlds in avatar form (constructed selves built to our individual specifications of desire and need) are we experiencing and learning (or not) in the same way that would happen if we physically existed in such worlds? Many influential gamers think so. Their very insistence on this central tenet resonates, inversely, with the Hindu notion of Maya or Plato’s shadows on the cave wall. Through time, religious and secular philosophy has pondered reality and illusion. For any thinking individual, human existence is fraught with this problem. Is this stuff I see around me, people, objects, events – everything! – really there? Does it disappear when I die? Do I die? Was I ever alive? Am I part of the Matrix programme? What the fuck is it all about?
The projections that are emanating from IT geeks today suggest that within 25 years we may have computing power which is a billion times the power of today’s machines and A THOUSAND TIMES SMALLER! So small, in fact, that it will be possible to insert computers in the brain, vastly amplifying neural processes in all their forms, affecting the senses, the emotions and rationality. Interactions could occur which don’t so much blur further the differences between illusion and reality, but completely eradicate it. The gamers, Plato, Maya et al will all be finally proved right. There will be nothing out there. It will all be in here, snugly fitting on the top of the cortex.
25 years. I could still be alive – physically speaking. Will the insertion of this magic brain bullet of vastly superior intelligence allow me a wondrous vista of possibility as my ageing neurons are supercharged for their last great hurrah, so that the dissolution of my body becomes a mere lightning storm beyond some distant ridge? Will death become something I fear no longer because its symptoms are subsumed in a fantastic last epiphany?
Labels: computing, illusion., Virtual reality
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Facebook: Now you see us now you don't
We’re apparently nearer to a CCTV camera than we are to a rat in the sense that CCTV watches us more of the time than rats do – and make no mistake, those rodent eyes bore into you wherever you go. And as if this surveillance was not enough, some huge proportion of us gladly exchange the one way mirror of personal freedom and private citizenship to expose ourselves to as many people as possible on the web. We facebook ourselves, to coin a new verb.
The name has the ambiguity of high literary coinage, it could have flowed from the pen of Orwell or Zamayatin (whose brilliant book, We, influenced Orwell’s 1984). Face – book. It is as though we want people to be able to read us like a book. We want to figure as the central characters in our novels. We want to stare out from monitors all over the world as though, solipsistically, the world is ours and ours alone, daily, hourly, second by second. We want anyone out there from the most perverted to the most holy to share in the thrill of studying our narratives, placing the face within it and finding us as interesting as we are to ourselves.
There was a time, within my lifetime, when to be enigmatic, aphoristic, private and sphynx-like were elements of what was thought to be an interesting personality. If photographs were about to steal our souls, then we’d throw up a defending arm and run for cover. The world used to love the mystery of who we might be and we’d go through life cupping the solution in tight fingers. Or so we deceived ourselves.
Now, we buy into the total publicity of the self, put billions into the coffers of American neo-cons, and reveal that we are..er…without much interest. We are thinner than cardboard cut-outs in our autobiographies, so thin that it’s hard to discern whether there is anyone there at all behind the photos, the videos, the logs.
Where once we had to fight a deep, introspective and painful battle to self-discovery, now we think we have ourselves taped via the trappings of technology. The Pharaohs’ bodies were heaped with symbols of what was felt to be significant to their status as they took the last journey.
We can’t wait that long. We undertake the process of mummifiction from the moment we virtualise ourselves.
We’re apparently nearer to a CCTV camera than we are to a rat in the sense that CCTV watches us more of the time than rats do – and make no mistake, those rodent eyes bore into you wherever you go. And as if this surveillance was not enough, some huge proportion of us gladly exchange the one way mirror of personal freedom and private citizenship to expose ourselves to as many people as possible on the web. We facebook ourselves, to coin a new verb.
The name has the ambiguity of high literary coinage, it could have flowed from the pen of Orwell or Zamayatin (whose brilliant book, We, influenced Orwell’s 1984). Face – book. It is as though we want people to be able to read us like a book. We want to figure as the central characters in our novels. We want to stare out from monitors all over the world as though, solipsistically, the world is ours and ours alone, daily, hourly, second by second. We want anyone out there from the most perverted to the most holy to share in the thrill of studying our narratives, placing the face within it and finding us as interesting as we are to ourselves.
There was a time, within my lifetime, when to be enigmatic, aphoristic, private and sphynx-like were elements of what was thought to be an interesting personality. If photographs were about to steal our souls, then we’d throw up a defending arm and run for cover. The world used to love the mystery of who we might be and we’d go through life cupping the solution in tight fingers. Or so we deceived ourselves.
Now, we buy into the total publicity of the self, put billions into the coffers of American neo-cons, and reveal that we are..er…without much interest. We are thinner than cardboard cut-outs in our autobiographies, so thin that it’s hard to discern whether there is anyone there at all behind the photos, the videos, the logs.
Where once we had to fight a deep, introspective and painful battle to self-discovery, now we think we have ourselves taped via the trappings of technology. The Pharaohs’ bodies were heaped with symbols of what was felt to be significant to their status as they took the last journey.
We can’t wait that long. We undertake the process of mummifiction from the moment we virtualise ourselves.
Friday, February 08, 2008
Sharia, no fear, not here – or anywhere
As I wrote, probably longwindedly, in an earlier blog, there should be no blurring of state affairs and religious dogma. It doesn’t matter whether it’s American fundamentalist Christians or Mormons, Islamists from wherever, the Vatican’s long nose in South America, Zionism or any as yet unknown future attempt to pervert the course of justice through shaky beliefs in the Divine, religion should be confined to the home and the place of worship. It may be a matter for hot debate in bars, restaurants and Speakers Corner but we must not provide even the slightest foothold for the politics of the spiritual on the rock face of state-determined justice. This does not infer that the morals that underpin different religions can’t bring a richness to the debate about how a society might govern itself, humanely. Morals are merely distilled ideas about what constitutes good and bad and we must debate them constantly, whatever their source.
The Archbishop’s arch remarks about Sharia law and its acceptance, even in part, bespeaks a loony laxness of thought. As though we can take bits and pieces of different religions and amalgamate them into a legal edifice within which we can all be coexist. There are aspects of most religions which can bring out a cold sweat in any peaceable individual and we are not just talking stoning women, cutting thieving hands off or supporting a basic inequality between sexes. Male and female circumcision, polygamy, the quaint taxonomies of what can and can’t be eaten, the refusal to have blood transfusions to save your child, the caste systems and so on are all mad and often bad. Whatever the various prophets said and did, virtuous or no, those that have followed have long since twisted their thoughts into filigrees of self-serving desecration of the original ideals.
Why should the laws of the state be premised in the minutest way upon a belief in God? We must stop it becoming mandatory to be superstitious, primitive of thought, ill-educated in the matter of evolution or to be suffering from simple blind faith, as a prerequisite to being a member of society. Let’s just be humanitarians and socially responsible citizens, all of us. Leave the rest to the fireplace and the place of worship.
Labels: Sharia and the State
Friday, February 01, 2008
Better the Government We Deserve than the Government We Get
It is an anomaly as painful as it is real. Political leaders do not represent the cream of generations. They are rarely credible enough for their nations to feel even minimal respect. In most cases they would not rise to the top of a multinational company or professions such as medicine or philosophy or astro-physics. Instead, they stump along the avenues of power with their ill-developed intellects, scantily clad in designer sound-bites. They learn to live in the self-serving villages inhabited by all political elites, insulated from the fields and streets, the pain and pleasures of their disenfranchised, cynical or alienated voters. They look happiest when they are meeting politicians from other countries who share their sense of importance and who suffer the same delusions of grandeur. It has been thus since opposing kings and princes shared tents and watched as their armies fought each other.
Our politicians shuffle around cabinet posts as though they are supremely capable of handling any brief from law to media and science, from the military to health. They only really connect with the public when events go drastically wrong and they knee-jerk their way to formulating policies that result from dramatic or traumatic singular cases and prove utterly unsuitable to meet the general need. They live, neurotically, in the now of their own lives, not even able to plan for their children’s futures, unable to develop true global strategies that might offer hope to the starving millions or those that suffer the tyranny of weaponry.
We watch the superficial razzmatazz of the American elections and see how this drawn-out show business, hyped event makes no demands upon presidential candidates to display intellectual quality and true social concern while furthering the careers of elite groups around them who will benefit substantially should they achieve power. It is the same whether you are in China, Africa, Pakistan, Britain or Eastern Europe. Everywhere. Always there is the constant disgrace of inequality and distress that politicians bring to the livelihoods and welfare of a substantial element of their peoples. A never-ending cycle of economic and social abuse.
How do we deal with this? Perhaps in a Brave New World we make it mandatory for the brightest of our population to undergo community service, to be trained and developed in social science, philosophy, politics and economics and from thence to running the country. Perhaps it would be better if we impose leadership upon the capable, than fester under the random yoke of the incapable. As with the Dalai Lama, our leaders might find they have become distinguished by their range of qualities and have a consequent duty to serve their people. And this would not have been as a result of blood, class or vested interest.
Labels: Members of Parliament, politicians