I've never really wanted a blog. On the other hand, there are things I have to say that don't fit well into the formality of a traditional webpage, either. So I'm trying an experiment ...
March 30, 2008
People who specialize in digging up human fossils tell us that until about 15-20 thousand years ago, we all looked very much alike. Back then, everyone on the planet apparently resembled present-day Australian aborigines, with wide faces and strongly pronounced features.
But after that, we started changing rapidly -- at least on the surface. So-called racial distinctions appeared, distinctions that are usually decried because they made us look different from one another. What is far less often noted is that those changes also made us prettier. All of us. Though each group adapted according to its own unique standards of beauty, in every region our facial contours became smoother and more delicate, our hair more appealing in form or color, our bodies sleeker and sexier.
There's an easy explanation for that -- the old Darwinian standby of sexual selection. In a simple tribal society, success at producing offspring is largely determined by basic physical and mental fitness. But once society becomes just a bit more complex and distinctions of wealth and power appear, the game changes radically. The most dynamic and charismatic men take on leadership roles, which gives them the opportunity to father more children by more women. The most attractive and charming women appeal to the top-ranked men, and that offers their own children a better chance to survive, become leaders in turn, and have first choice of mates.
As formal aristocracies developed -- and adopted practices such as polygamy -- this principal of survival of the prettiest became even more firmly engrained, until a certain delicacy and elegance of features came to be taken as a natural hallmark of aristocratic birth. In addition, somewhere along the way the very nature of our basic stories also changed, so that the heroes all were brave and handsome and the women all beautiful. Romantic themes of love and competition for the hand of a desirable mate became woven into epics and fairy-tales alike.
There are disquieting aspects to this. It may be disillusioning to our inner five-year-olds to be told that a story like Cinderella is just a gussied-up narrative of an experiment in selective breeding. It may be even harder for our inner revolutionaries to accept that there was once some actual point to aristocratic exceptionalism -- though by now any fruits of that five or ten thousand year old experiment must have largely filtered through the population as a whole.
It is more sobering yet to consider that our present twin catastrophes of environmental degradation and ceaseless war could be the outcome of so many millenia during which it was essential to over-achieve and out-perform all rivals in order to be assured of leaving descendents at all.
But perhaps most disconcerting is the idea that all of us may have been no more than lab rats in an age-long breeding project whose basic guidelines are so firmly engrained into us through story, song, and art that we never think to question them. We have to ask -- what is our true role in this project? Are we the active sculptors in the workshop -- or the passive clay? The unwitting pawns of our remote ancestors -- or the superhuman beings they could only dream of becoming?
Lacking clear answers, we can only wonder who we really are, where we came from, and how we got here. But more important, if that particular experiment is coming to an end -- as the general rejection of aristocratic norms and imperatives over the last two centuries would suggest -- then an even more urgent question presents itself. Where do we mean to go next?
Tags: Magical Earth,
Piercing the veil
February 13, 2008
In one way or another, all the great philosophies offer us the same message: The reality we inhabit is no more than a thin skin stretched over the substance of true reality -- like the thin film of atmosphere and water that sustains life on the surface of our planet. Everywhere above our heads and everywhere beneath our feet lies a vast, unknown domain.
There are many ways of conceiving this larger domain, all of them useful to a degree, all of them ludicrously inadequate. We are creatures of the surface and can never experience the depths of reality directly. Instead, we infer their existence and nature through the effects they have on our mundane world, and we devise metaphors, drawn from the things we do know, to express our inferences.
At this present moment, many of the older metaphors we have been accustomed to use -- such as "God" or "spirit" -- are becoming decidedly creaky and starting to show their age. They were made for a world in which the social relationships and state of scientific knowledge were very different from our own, and they have grown less and less effective in helping us attune ourselves to the workings of a greater reality.
Rather than serving to point towards higher dimensions of existence, as they formerly did, those words have been coopted by the mundane world of power and greed and used to justify self-promoting agendas. Their continued use can only have an increasingly negative effects on our public discourse.
What we need instead are new metaphors with the intrinsic power to challenge these once dynamic but now degraded words and images. And while I personally would not want to see any single metaphor dominate discourse the way the God-metaphor did for so many centuries, I would like to offer an alternative set of images that I have at times found useful:
I imagine the depths of reality as a great sea of transformative energy, straining to break through into our mundane world at any point where the veil between them grows sufficiently thin. Non-living matter is dense and not easily influenced, but life represents a thinning of the veil, fertile ground for the forces of change and growth and evolution. Consciousness provides a greater receptiveness yet.
As conscious beings, we are never more than a whisper away from something intensely profound and powerful. Every one of us is a point of potential access for creative forces from beyond the world we know -- and wherever those forces burst out, novel and beautiful things happen. New art, new science, new political arrangements, new understandings of the universe and our place in it.
However, although every human has the potential to serve as a vehicle for creative transformation, some open themselves to it more fully than others. Where most of us are satisifed to tend our own gardens, others transform the world. The visible record of these greater transformations is the stuff of our history books, our museums, our soaring cities and engineering marvels, our most enduring stories and poems.
But even these visible accomplishments barely hint at the full creative reality that lies beyond them. All the achievements handed down to us from the past, even the greatest, are in one sense merely imperfect and fossilized imprints of the unknown and unknowable well of creative energy which bubbled up to form them. To focus on them alone is to become lost in a mirror-maze and miss the original, the single source of all the many partial and broken images.
And yet there is a special quality to our most profound myths, our most inspiring monuments, and the essential founding documents of our societies that makes them more than mere fossils. It is as if these things still retain a small but crucial spark of the creative flame which originally inspired them, a spark which remains available to be blown back into full life.
Let me vary the metaphor slightly. Geologists tell us that the rocky shell which forms the inhabitable surface of our Earth is marked by certain long-term thin spots -- places where the deep magma repeatedly punches through to form volcanoes and volcanic islands. Some of these have existed for millions of years. The Hawaiian Islands have been formed successively as the Earth's crust moved over one such hot spot.
In the same way, there are long-lasting thin spots in the veil between this world and the reality beyond, points of contact through which the transformative energy of that further reality most readily finds access to the world we know.
The initial manifestations of these points of access coincide with the lives of great teachers and prophets -- though whether they are created by them or create them by their own internal alchemy is unclear. What is important is that these thin spots remain active for many lifetimes after the passing of their founders and can continue to be accessed by those who come after. They serve as lasting weak places in the prison of things-as-they are, central hubs around which creative transformations continue to appear.
If there is enduring value in the great myths and monuments of the past, it has nothing to do with whether we believe literally in the fairy tales that may be incorporated in them. It lies rather in their ability to return us to the original source of their power and to enable us to identify with that source and maintain its activity.
What's more, although ultimate creative power may be beyond comprehension, these doorways to that power are not. They present themselves to us with a profoundly human presence, informed by the personalities and wisdom of those who originally opened them. They are the closest we can ever get to ultimate reality -- but always ultimate reality with a human face.
Or say, rather, with many human faces -- for these portals are all distinct, each one bearing the personal mark of the generally unknown prophet or artist who first brought it into being. They are as varied as the members of the human family, and the energy that pours through them is formed and channelled into many streams by the diversity of their visions.
Tags: Philosophy
On Conspiracy Theory
December 13, 2007
Of course conspiracies exist. Human beings just *love* to conspire together. It comes as naturally to us as breathing and is as instinctive as two six-year-olds cooking up a secret plan and agreeing not to share it with the five-year-old next door.
I'm more than half convinced that language was invented to make it easier for proto-humans to keep secrets -- which is something you can't do nearly as well when everybody communicates by yelling "oonk, oonk, oonk" across the clearing. Even such basic items as clothing and houses may have originally been devised to enhance the game of "what am I hiding" long before they were put to any more practical purposes. Conspiracy has been a great driver of cultural evolution.
On the other hand, there's one major problem with conspiracies -- and that is gossip. Human beings love to be let in on secrets, but they aren't all that good at actually keeping them concealed, especially not in the long run. Secrets are a form of social currency, and the rewards to be gained by spreading them around are almost always greater than the rewards for keeping them buried.
So even though I accept the notion that conspiracies happen on a regular basis, I'm pretty skeptical of the stories about vast, complicated, multi-generational conspiracies that are peddled by many conspiracy theorists. Those scenarios just don't seem to reflect human nature.
There's also an overwhelming element of wish-fulfillment in the image of the conspirator as someone endowed with a superhuman ability to plan impeccably, foresee all contingencies, and keep the whole thing under wraps indefinitely. I simply can't buy that. Not in the real world.
Face it -- real world humans are basically fuck-ups. It often amazes me that the human race is even able to get out of bed in the morning and tie its own shoelaces. And Murphy's Law -- the dictum that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong, and generally at the worst moment -- surely applies to conspiracies if it applies anywhere at all.
So if we accept that conspiracies do exist -- but also admit that any plot beyond the ability of your average six-year-old to plan and carry out is unavoidably going to turn into seven different kinds of cock-up -- then how do we explain the really big and successful ones? The Kennedy Assassination. 9/11. Stuff like that.
I don't have a good answer to that question, but I do have a couple of guesses. The one I'm most inclined to go with is that in cases like those, there has been an effective after-the-fact strategy of muddying the waters -- of camouflaging the unavoidable leakage of genuine answers with a haze of false answers, partial answers, counterexamples invented to discredit real answers, general mud-slinging against anyone who gets close to the truth, and the occasional timely application of blackmail or murder.
That's the sort of thing humans truly are good at.
There's a further problem, however -- though it emerges as an issue only on a far more philosophical level. Once we accept that the true facts of a situation such as the Kennedy Assassination are forever unknowable, we are left with no way of proving that there actually is any ultimate truth out there at all. We may want to believe that there is a single factual answer to every question, which we might yet learn if we could only find the right person and beat it out of them. But we can't prove that there is.
For all practical purposes, the answer to "Who shot Kennedy?" has become as metaphysical as, say, the luminiferous ether. And once we acknowledge that, it can begin to seem as though our entire sense of living in a hard, crisp material reality, where solid scientific truth exists independent of fallible human knowledge, has been supported all along by nothing more solid than faith.
Faith can be an admirable thing. Faith in the new and untried is necessary for all progress and invention. But faith in the old and shopworn quickly becomes an intellectual dead weight -- one we're far better off leaving behind by ridding ourselves of whatever conceptual baggage is weighing us down. It may be time to stop clinging to the idea of a single, fully determinate reality and explore instead the notion that we exist in a quantum realm of multiple potential realities that is never going to collapse into a single, definitive truth.
Put it this way: Here in 2007, we find ourselves inhabiting a present that could have been reached from any one of a number of different pasts -- say, for example, alternate histories in which Kennedy was killed by the Mob, by the CIA, pro- or anti-Castro Cubans, Texas oilmen, the John Birch Society, the Soviets, the Corsican Mafia, or any of a number of other unlikely suspects. But it no longer makes any difference. We are where we are, we have to deal with the conditions what prevails, and how we got here isn't all that relevant. What matters is getting on with business.
I'm not sure how I feel about that as an answer. Deep down, I'm probably as fond of certainty as any other refugee from the late 20th century. But I suppose I can live with it.
And at the very least, suggesting that everything that could have happened actually did happen -- all at the same time and in overlapping layers of reality -- is one way of freeing ourselves from the trap of historical inexorability.
Tags: Secret History, Philosophy
Border courtesy of Kelly's Web
