Writings on the wall

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact,–very momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. – Thomas Carlyle 1840

The democracies of the west and the great human project of freedom and respect for life, which began with the enlightenment, depend upon individuals having access to good information about the actions of their governments. If information is curtailed by censorship and manipulated by propaganda then no one can vote in your their own best interest and democracy becomes a sham. Governments can exercise power unchecked by either the prospect of losing a future election or even the ability of the people to march and protest and demand change.

Every illegitimate government understands this and is frightened of its own people. In Burma the generals closed down six of the seven newspapers which existed before their coup and heavily censor the remaining one. During the recent protests they repeatedly severed internet connection to that country. More importantly SLORC conducts a campaign of misinformation and propaganda, and plants spies and agent provocateurs in what has become a land of Orwellian doublespeak.

Such cautionary tales highlight the importance of something we take for granted – that the mainstream media (MSM) accurately reflects the truth about our government and about the world. Or rather, that it at least gives us enough information that with a bit of reading between the lines an intelligent person has a clear picture of what is going on.

So is this confidence justified in the case of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire?

Fox News is a contentious example, of course, but I’m not interested in bias. (By the way I’ve also not seen Outfoxed) That’s not to say that the editorial slant a news organisation takes is not important, but there’s a difference between that and failing to report certain information which might reflect badly on government policy, or even worse lying about events or reporting false information. In this article I want to see whether there is systematic censorship, misinformation, or propaganda. I take that last to mean reporting things which may or may not be true for the purpose of engendering a particular action or psychological response in the public. Because if influential parts of the MSM engage in these practises then we do not have the fourth estate we need so as to allow a functioning democracy.

Murdoch is a big target, and there have been quite a few questions raised, big and small.

• Chris Patton, former governor of Hong Kong, had his book East and West dropped by publisher HarperCollins because the content offended Beijing. Murdoch, who has business interests in China, suspended the editor in charge of the manuscript (Stuart Proffitt) when he refused requests to end the project. HarperCollins was later forced to pay compensation and issue an apology.
• MySpace began automatically deleting links and even discussion about YouTube in 2006, but was forced to end this policy when a revolt began amongst users.
• A popular blogger, Tim Dunlop, writing for one Murdoch paper in Australia, had columns critical of another Murdoch owned paper deleted from the site. This has happened to other respected journalists employed by Murdoch papers including Margo Kingston. It’s hard to get clear examples from the newspapers or the television news because editors act as gatekeepers to publication.
• Mr Gay, a United Church Minister employed as a religious columnist for the Times in London, resigned after a dispute with his editor over an opinion piece he wrote critical of Murdoch’s monopolistic practices.

There’s little doubt that Murdoch is a ‘hands on’ media owner. Harold Evans, the outgoing editor of The Times in London had this to say:

[Murdoch guaranteed that] “the editors would have control of the political policy of their newspapers” [and] “not be subject to instruction from either the proprietor or management on the selection and balance of news and opinion.” [however] “In my year as editor of the Times, Murdoch broke all these guarantees”

It’s telling that Evans mentions selection as well as balance of news. Other editors have been more charitable. This may be because Murdoch is one of the major employers in the industry, but it’s more likely because he chooses editors who share his politics unprompted and are respectful of his business interests. Andrew Neil puts it this way:

He is quite interventionist but he gives more latitude to his quality newspapers than his tabloids. He realises for quality newspapers you can’t just hire people you boss around. To survive, you have to be on the same planet as Rupert but you don’t have to be on the same continent.

So let’s take this more limited view of Murdoch’s direct influence. It’s effects are nevertheless far reaching, for reasons which become obvious when the psychology of the editor’s job is considered. Murdoch will clearly pick up the phone when his personal or business interests are threatened by a story. He expects these interests to be put ahead of the newsworthiness of the story, as is shown by the Patton case, and ahead of the sales implications for any particular business, as is shown by both the Patton and Dunlop examples. So without ever having to lean on an editor Murdoch’s shadow looms large over each of his publications. How much does anyone want to offend their employer? How much less when your contract is up for renewal in a year or two and that same employer owns a lot of the other media in town?

This relates to editorial slant and choice of story. Here is Margo Kingston again, talking about Australia’s media culture, and Fairfax, one of it’s biggest newspaper groups:

In my twenty years in journalism, I have witnessed the decay and near annihilation of a strong, confident journalistic culture in Fairfax based on scepticism of the powerful and sustained scrutiny of the actions of the powerful and the underlying reasons for those actions whatever their political colour business type. I have seen public debate degenerate into endless name calling by scream, and a systematic play by neo-liberals and their henchmen paid to win the ideological battle to dismember any sense of shared values or common cause in shaping our future. It is in the interests of those who would control us for their profit and power to do so. I have seen the disintegration of the concept of “public interest” in the big issues of our time – political, economic, social and personal. Instead, fear and ‘us and them’ rules, deliberately designed, it seems to me, to compel people to serve only their individual, short term interests because no one else will give a damn if they fall over.

Margo is biased, of course. She’s a long standing and well respected journalist but she’s left-of-centre in a country moving rapidly to the right. She addresses the question of whether the media properly performs its role as the Fourth Estate, but not whether it becomes a tool of oppression. Does the situation ever reach the level of outright censorship, misinformation, or propaganda?

A leaked document showing that British MI6 believed the Bush administration manipulated intelligence in support of the case for war against Iraq surfaced in 2005. Mediamatters looked at coverage of the story:

In the five weeks following its disclosure, both newspapers and the broadcast media in the United States largely ignored the Downing Street memo, a secret British intelligence document indicating that British intelligence officials believed the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to support its case for war in Iraq.

News coverage of the memo exploded after Bush and Blair were asked about it during their June 7 joint press conference. Numerous stories reported Bush’s and Blair’s denials of the memo’s central allegations — that the United States had decided to go to war as early as July 2002 and that the “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” — but only one included new reporting about the content of the memo and the events surrounding its creation in July 2002.

Of the papers covering the Downing Street memo following the Sunday Times and the Knight Ridder stories, Media Matters identified only three — the May 12 Los Angeles Times, the May 13 Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the June 12 Philadelphia Inquirer — that provided new information concerning the memo’s content, authenticity, or events surrounding its creation. Of these, only the Los Angeles Times’ story reflected any effort to consult with British sources — with Michael Smith, the Sunday Times reporter who broke the original story.

Because it’s not usually censorship. That would be impossible without taking Burma’s approach and “accidentally” cutting off internet access. Once an important story gets into the news, it does get reported. It rarely gets investigated and until it’s “out there” it may be either ignored or relegated to the back pages. Paul Krugman points out that in the first quarter of 2007 Fox News devoted only 6% of their time to the Iraq war compared with around 20% at MSNBC and CNN. In contrast 17% of the Fox’s bulletins in that period were about a large-busted actress who died of a drug overdose. As for misinformation, he puts it like this:

Now, Mr. Murdoch’s people rarely make flatly false claims. Instead, they usually convey misinformation through innuendo. During the early months of the Iraq occupation, for example, Fox gave breathless coverage to each report of possible W.M.D.’s, with little or no coverage of the subsequent discovery that it was a false alarm. No wonder, then, that many Fox viewers got the impression that W.M.D.’s had been found.

That’s the thing about democracies. You don’t have to fool all the people all the time, you only have to fool most of the people around election time. There are dissenting voices out there. So long as they are sidelined by the media as unimportant, and so long as they remain a few voices here and there, they will never shape policy or public discourse. When more people get the truth from the internet than the television, then the MSM will change or simply be sidelined. Until then it will represent the views of its owners rather than serving the needs of its readers. Not quite propaganda, but close.

And perhaps a bit closer than you’d think. Robert Parry:

[In the] 1980s when the Reagan-Bush administration began collaborating secretly with conservative media tycoons to promote propaganda strategies aimed at the American people. In 1983, a plan, hatched by CIA Director William J. Casey, called for raising private money to sell the administration’s Central American policies to the American public through an outreach program designed to look independent but which was secretly managed by Reagan-Bush officials.

The project was implemented by a CIA propaganda veteran, Walter Raymond Jr., who had been moved to the National Security Council staff and put in charge of a “perception management” campaign that had both international and domestic objectives. In one initiative, Raymond arranged to have Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch chip in money for ostensibly private groups that would back Reagan-Bush policies. [...]

At the time, a Reagan-Bush National Security Council official told me that the administration’s domestic propaganda campaign was modelled after CIA psychological operations abroad where information is manipulated to bring a population into line with a desired political position. “They were trying to manipulate [U.S.] public opinion – using the tools of Walt Raymond’s tradecraft which he learned from his career in the CIA covert operations shop,” the official said.

The question is, are we being set up for another round of the same? Here is the New Yorker Magazine from August 31 this year.

They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained.

Honestly, I don’t know if this is possible. I wish I could sincerely believe that it was impossible, however, and it clearly is not.

 

This article is written in part to address the Ideas for Peace group’s topic on “Transparency and truth in politics”.

I love the word authentic. When you walk into an Outback Steakhouse its meaning hits you right in the face.

1. Genuineness: Why is an actual canvas painted by Van Gogh worth so much more than a perfect reproduction? Why is a piece of paper worth something because it’s signed by Albert Einstein? After all it was his ideas which transformed the world rather than the paper on which they were written down.
2. Existential Truth: Pick up a hammer. If it’s well made and balanced it’s perfect in a way few things are. It fits into your hand. It’s the right length. It wonderfully expresses the nature of it’s function. You hit something with it, and the force of your arm is applied exactly. The nail is driven into the wood. If there’s one other thing on the hammer it is a tool – the claw – for removing a badly driven nail. Now that’s not to say that some other tool couldn’t be better at nailing. The nailgun exists, after all. But the nailgun, unlike the hammer, does not embody a utilitarian, existential truth.

A confession: I’ve never actually been to an Outback Steakhouse. I’ve seen them and I’ve been to the Italian version, run by the same country. So I’m imagining it’s lack of authenticity, and from such shaky ground I want to make a quick segue to the days when I was renovating a vegetarian restaurant. In the way that you do, I constructed an elaborate and detailed plan for a restaurant called “The Cafeteria”. It would serve sausages and lumpy mashed potatoes with overcooked vegetables, from bain maries. It would be staffed by bored middle aged women in plastic aprons with half smoked cigarettes dangling from their lips. They would call all the customers “luv”.

It would be as inauthentic as the Steakhouse. But where that serves food that people presumably like, and the faux-outback decor exists as a marketing tool, the food at The Cafeteria would not be a drawcard: people would go there only because of their fond memories of actual, authentic cafeterias in the past. You see I think people crave authenticity at the same time as it’s being crushed out of the existence. Instead we sit in front of our gas fires made with plastic logs to look like open fireplaces, and watch “60 Minutes” reenact a crime scene with actors while we drink Bud-lites and eat “can’t believe it’s not Butter” on our Wonderbread. [NB: Thank you Celestina for that concept, it prompted me to try and crystalize something which had been floating half formed in the back of my mind - this article.]

I’m arguing that a thing is authentic if it is what it pretends to be. If it’s sincere and direct. And I’m not the first apply this to create the idea of the authentic life.

People crave it desperately, but subconsciously. That’s why the Van Gogh and Einstein’s autograph are worth so much – rich people hope this authenticity will rub off on them. But it’s scary because it’s about being yourself, naked and unadorned. So instead we live fake lives. We have fashion rather than style. We have shock-jocks rather than revolution. We play World of Warcraft rather than being adventurous. We become obsessed with sex rather than allowing ourselves to love.

To what extent do you live according to society’s expectations for what is good and right? To what extent are your choices your own? Now no one exists in a vacuum, and a person’s history and environment shapes their attitudes and perspective. But some people accept this without question, and some people examine and think through and try to pull from amongst it their own truth and their own understanding. Likewise again some people just are, from the beginning, themselves, in the same way that a hammer is a hammer.

It doesn’t mean that being unconventional gives a life integrity. Some of the most genuine people I’ve ever met, most true to themselves, are also the most ordinary. But I do think that authentic people are passionate. They care. They love, although not always in the “Hallmark Cards” sort of way. Like a hammer, such a person is what he or she is. There’s no mistaking the genuine article.

The streets of Burma are quiet at the moment. Only a few days ago SLORC’s soldiers were firing into the crowd, and hundreds of people were killed. The army surrounded monastaries, preventing monks joining the protests. Four thousand monks have been arrested and 15 monastaries in Rangoon “cleared”, their inhabitants trucked north after being held at a disused racetrack and technical college overnight. The UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari met Aung San Suu Kyi – the detained opposition leader – for a second time after speaking to junta leader General Than Shwe. He has now left the country, but no one seriously expects the UN to be able to effect change within Burma.

The UN Human Rights council heard a call from the EU for the condemnation of the junta. Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour said that Myanmar’s leaders should not be allowed to escape international scrutiny.

“The shocking response … is only the most recent manifestation of the repression of fundamental rights and freedoms that has taken place for nearly 20 years in Myanmar,” she said.

George Orwell lived in the country in the 1920s, and it is said to be an influence on his work 1984. In 2007 it seems the very embodiment of his distopia. Alan Clements, a western Burmese monk, says doublespeak and spies are everywhere. The BBC’s reporter in Rangoon describes the mood yesterday:

When I walked down some of the little streets in the downtown area, a series of eyes followed my every movement, quickly averting their gaze the second I looked in their direction.

The people of Rangoon – and no doubt throughout the country – are frightened.

“I’m really scared,” said one woman when she was sure no-one else could hear.

“I don’t want to be the next one to get a knock on the door from the soldiers in the middle of the night,” another man said.

References

• BBC: tense waiting game
• BBC: Monks sent away
• AFP: UN Human Rights Council on Myanmar
• ABC Aus: Envoy meets Suu Kyi
• ABC Aus: A special insight into Burma

Every year something strange happens in southern Australia. A significant proportion of it’s population get involved in a celebration of tribalism. It’s not about ethnicity – the population of Melbourne, the centre of this cult, is pluralist and ethnically diverse. But until recently each suburb of Melbourne was represented by a gang of tough skillful men who went out each weekend and beat one another up.

Nowdays the demands of marketing have spread the teams around the country, but the principle is the same. Normal citizens who are devotees of this cult adorn themselves with the colours of their gang, and watch on the television or at the stadium, each weekend, as their representatives spend several hours in physical combat with the representatives of another tribe.

This has a long history with Celtic peoples. The Battle of Moytura in 1272BC was fought after a particularly bloody hurling match between the Fir Bolg and the Tuatha de Danaan. All that same energy is present today – a friend of mine had his ashes scattered on the team’s home field by his tearful and equally footy-obsessed mates – and it all culminates on one weekend each year.

This weekend. Today.

Geelong is an industrial town about an hour from Melbourne. Port Adelaide is the working class centre of the capital of South Australia. Teams from these two places are staging the final battle of the year, just this afternoon at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of 120000 screaming atavists.

It’s a simple, violently physical game involving 36 players kicking and punching an oval ball up and down a large green field. Or rather this is the catalyst for the real game, which requires that half the population of Australia drink beer and scream and cry as they get in touch with their inner caveman.

The other half steer clear of the whole messy business.

Recently there were 100 thousand Burmese marching against the military junta in control of their country. They were led by Buddhist monks, and marched in defiance of the pronouncements of Brigadier General Thura Myint Maung:

People are not to follow, encourage or take part in these marches. Action will be taken against those who violate this order

In 1988 the action taken was to shoot as many as 3000 protesters, primarily students and monks, so it’s clear to everyone that these were no idle threats. Reports are coming in as I write this of tear gas, baton charges, and arrests.

These people deserve our respect and support. They are risking their lives to try to recover their freedom and their democracy.

In contrast, we in the west have given up a number of important civil rights in order to – possibly – increase our personal safety. Or perhaps more accurately we have given up these freedoms for the illusion of improved protection against terrorist attack.

Amnesty International documents the following concerns in relation to the USA Patriot Act:

• Creates a broad definition of “domestic terrorism” that may have a chilling effect on the U.S. and international rights to free expression and association.
• Allows non-citizens to be detained without charge and held indefinitely once charged.
• Infringes on the right to privacy and removes many types of judicial review over intelligence activities.

In the United States in particular, the use of signing statements have been an extreme example of a trend throughout the west for concentration of power in the hands of the executive, and a weakening of the ability of parliaments to moderate the actions of Presidents and Prime Ministers. The people of the west have acquiesced as warrantless domestic wiretapping measures were introduced, Habeus corpus put under threat:

“It allows the government to seize individuals on American soil and detain them indefinitely with no opportunity to challenge their detention in court,” Feingold said. “And the new law would permit an individual to be convicted on the basis of coerced testimony and even allow someone convicted under these rules to be put to death.”

Elsewhere sedition has been revived as an offence, and police given powers to stop and question without the need for reasonable grounds.

There are many more examples, but the climate is even more important. Police, secret police, and even private security companies act as if they have the right to push people around – act as if they are operating in a police state in which civil liberties do not exist. The public still has the right to protest, within limits, but there is no great upswelling of dissent.

We have become complacent. We care more about prosperity than freedom, and we care more about security than democracy.

I want to know if we would have anything like the courage of those brave Burmese who are facing the guns and batons of SLORC’s soldiers. Do we deserve the rights our ancestors fought so hard for?

Avast, me hearties!

I’ve always had a thing for pirates. How could you not? They come from the absolute bottom of society, the vagabonds and street kids pressganged or forced by desperate poverty into slavery on the merchantmen and ships of the line. But then they escaped or mutinied and took their fate into their own hands. They condemned themselves to scurvy, isolation, and a life of violence outside the law just – not for the small chance of wealth but for the certainty of freedom or death on their own terms.

Here is Anne Bonny, a famous female pirate. Rackham, her lover, who had been captured with her, was admitted to see her on the day he was to be hanged. All the comfort she would give him was she was sorry to see him there, but if he had fought more like a man he need not have been hanged like a dog

No distinction was allowed. There are rumours of “Pirate Kings” but the bands were run in simple collegial anarchy. Spoils divided and decisions made by vote. A captain was elected for his battle prowess, and he and the quartermaster might have an extra share. The articles of association were sworn to by all on board.

They were so closely and warmly engaged, the lieutenant and twelve men against Black-beard and fourteen, till the sea was tinctured with blood round the vessel. Black-beard received a shot in his body from the pistol that Lieutenant Maynard discharged, yet he stood his ground, and fought with great fury till he received five and twenty wounds, and five of them by shot. At length, as he was cocking another pistol, having fired several before, he fell down dead.

Leaving aside the romance there’s nothing – in reality – attractive about a life of murder and privation. But pirates represent something we’ve lost. A willingness to throw society and convention aside and engage directly with life. Seize it by the balls and insist on our own terms, no matter what. To leap into the abyss and scream with joy all the way down.

Look ye, Captain Atkinson, it is not that we care a turd for your company, G–d d–n ye; G–d d–n my soul, not a turd by G–d, and that’s fair; but G–d d–n ye and G–d’s b–d and w–ds if you don’t act like and honest man G–d d–n ye, and offer to play us any rogues’ tricks by G–d, and G–d sink me, but I’ll blow your brains out. G–d d–n me, if I don’t. Now Capt. Atkinson, you may do as you please, you may be a son of a whore and pilot us wrong, which G–d d–n ye, would ba a rascally trick by G–d, because you would betray men who trust you, but by the eternal J–s, you shan’t live to see us hanged. I don’t love many words, G–d d–n ye, but if you will be a villain and betray your trust, may G–d strike me dead, and may I drink a bowl of brimstone and fire with the d–l, if I don’t send you headlong into H–l, G–d d–n me, and so there needs be no more arguments by G–d, for I’ve told you my mind and here’s all the crew for witnesses, that if I do blow your brains out you may blame no body but yourself G–d d–n ye.

Quotes in this are from “The General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates”, written in 1724 and attributed to Captain Charles Johnson.

You said true love is the most powerful force in the universe
makes the human transcendant, divine;
Shines like sunshine and illuminates the world.

Your magical heart transformed me
brought me to life
and yet I disagree

True love is not invincible, the lover is not divine;
that we are flawed is our greatest gift.

You strive, with all your being
to express perfect love.
Failing
Trying
Is what makes you so beautiful
Is your transcendance

Breaks my heart

I’ve been puzzling for a long time over something I read in Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. He tells the story of Easter Island, in the centuries before Europeans’ occasional visits, and of an ecological disaster caused by deforestation. If that is correct it represents a very interesting, and very poignant, problem.

Here’s my picture of what happened. The island was heavily forested around 1000AD when settlers arrived in ocean-going outrigger canoes. The few tens or hundreds of colonists built farms and fishing boats. The island was isolated but had fertile volcanic soils and was home to flocks of nesting birds. The humans flourished. By the sixteenth century the remaining forest was at high altitude, the remaining birds nested on inaccessible offshore rocks, and there were between ten and twenty thousand people living well on intensive farming and fishing.

This the tipping point. I saw an illuminating nature documentary about a wolf-pack which lived on a remote peninsula in Canada which described the same thing. The wolves grew fat and numerous hunting plentiful deer and moose. When their numbers were large enough they caused a crash in the population of prey animals, and the result was starvation. After a few bad winters the wolves were nearly (but not quite) wiped out and the deer and moose recovered to once again be numerous. The cruel exigency of selection leaves only the physically and mentally most capable wolves alive. Their progeny begin the cycle again.

Humans cannot escape this fate by intelligence. That quality by itself only makes for a better wolf. When the resources were exhausted and the population crashed it was the smartest, most resilient, and strongest islanders who lived. The ones who found ways to live on limited food. The ones who formed and maintained co-operative war bands were able to exploit the only remaining food source – other humans. Wisdom, on the other hand, redefines the problem. It may take intelligence to survive a collapse but it takes wisdom, on a community-wide level, to avoid one.

I don’t think the Easter Islanders were unaware of what was coming. People who can navigate over thousands of miles of uncharted ocean by stars and currents and wind are going to know how to see long term changes in the ecosystem. I think the old people saw that the trees were running out and knew that the landslips and erosion was due to deforestation. But a person’s first loyalty is to their own tribe or clan, so you have a tragedy of the commons.

Take the village green. All the villagers have a right to run sheep on it, but if it is overgrazed then the land will become useless. Farmer Fred can run 5 sheep there or 10, let’s say. If he chooses the higher number he gets a short term advantage, which goes directly to him. If he runs less sheep the green will be in better condition next year, so the whole village will benefit, but Fred has meanwhile forgone his own profit. What’s more someone else may run five extra sheep and Fred will gain nothing while the village will still lose. The intelligent thing to do is to run as many sheep as you can before someone else lets theirs eat the grass. It’s not, however, wise.

The Easter Islanders cut down every tree which could be used to build a boat. Huge expenditures of manpower built stone faces to proclaim the power of the chiefs when the society could least afford it. A warrior cult competed (by swimming the shark infested waters to retrieve bird eggs from the outlying rocky spires) for yearly control of the resources. Whichever clan won this contest used their power to pillaged what they could. Starvation, cannibalism, and warfare reduced the population to a few thousand by the time European explorers visited the Island towards the end of the Eighteenth century.

This is why, when I hear people say that the Kyoto Accord is flawed because it gives China the right to pollute it makes me want to scream. (The United States will currently not agree to binding carbon limits because it wants to retain the right to produce six times as much carbon per capita than an inhabitant of China.) It means if I don’t run my sheep on this commons someone else will. It means that the smartest creatures on the planet have still not learnt wisdom.

The Easter Islanders cut down their last tree knowing doing so condemned every islander and every one of their descendants to isolation on the island. It meant they would never again catch ocean fish. It meant landslips and denuded soil on which their children would be condemned to scratch a mean living. The islander who cut it down did so because it gained himself and his clan a short term benefit, and because not doing so would leave that benefit for whichever other islander and clan was sufficiently intemperate and greedy to sacrifice the whole island’s future. When there were 5000 trees long term cost of this tree seemed small. By the time there was a single tree the situation seemed so desperate that hope was gone.

The Islanders apparently believed that their gods would save them – the bird-man cult was in the end a propitiatory rite. The expenditure of precious wood to transport statues was an attempt to use extravagant effort within the context of the existing power structures to bring about a coup-de-main solution, whether by political or divine fiat. Twenty first century analogies abound. We believe that science will save us if we keep the economy (and levels of resource exploitation) running faster and faster. We are beginning to fight more and more expensive wars for political control and control of the remaining energy resources. The space program is our bird-man cult: sending a single human on a mission hopelessly reminiscent, only, of the full scale space colonisation which might in fact save us but which is yet far beyond our reach.

What the people of Easter Island could not do is what we, somehow, must. We must learn the wisdom to co-operate. Those who have the largest stake in the existing power structures must choose the good of us all over hanging on to wealth and power. We must all, in the west, accept a lower standard of living in exchange for a sustainable lifestyle and we must do this in a way which is fair to everyone. We must do it before we stand in front of that final tree.

Governments and the lobbyists who advise them have a problem. Many of the things done by large corporations are good ways to make money but bad for voters. In a democratic country, with a well informed population, it would be simple: people would insist that their elected representatives pass rules preventing corporations from doing these things.

Now it’s a little naïve to assume that politicians are in the job of doing what’s best for their constituents. By and large they get elected by means of large amounts of money, so their first priority is to keep their donors happy. That’s not to say they can afford to ignore the people altogether – voters who feel they’re being ignored can turn nasty. It’s not as if they have a real choice (Tweedledee is probably just as ‘bought’ as Tweedledum) but an angry mob can stir up a lot of trouble, and no one wants it to become obvious just how cosy the corporate-government relationship really is.

Luckily there are a number of effective solutions. One of these has proved particularly useful lately for distracting attention from the environmental damage corporate capitalism is doing to the world.

The technique is to turn a macro issue into a question of personal morality. It reverses the sensible perspective on an issue – dealing with the biggest problem first – by making each individual who might complain seem personally guilty because of their own, tiny, contribution to the problem.

• There is a world-wide water crisis. Some of it is caused by climate change and a lot of it is caused by deforestation. It’s made from a problem into a crisis because of the amounts of water used in irrigation. In Australia, which has been hit each recent decade by serious drought, there are rice and cotton farmers who use hundreds or even thousands of litres of water for each dollar value of crop they produce. Industry and agriculture combined use ten times the water of all households in the country. Just the same the media and the government focus on how long my shower is and whether I have a dual flush toilet.
• Greenhouse is the big one for this, of course. Unlike water it’s actually got an element of truth to work with. It does matter whether I drive a big car with one passenger on my daily commute. So many other things matter a lot more, though. Like clearfelling rainforest in the Amazon and Borneo; soil degradation due to increased use of oil-based fertilisers (soil microbes are a big carbon-sink); the lack of effective co-generation and power efficiencies in industry; transport inefficiencies in our food system. There’s a big list like that and it all might – just might – affect the profitability of some corporations so it’s in the too hard basket. Meanwhile we’re worrying about whether I have low-wattage bulbs installed or whether Al Gore offsets his air kilometres. Get real!

This technique has been used from pollution to oil-usage to recycling. Anything where blame can be laid at the feet of the concerned citizen and let industry off the hook. It should be a transparent scam but people have a natural tendency to fall for it – perhaps becuase religion has taught them guilt, but also because the media is very bad at keeping things in perspective. Something personal, like the number of light bulbs turned on in Al Gore’s mansion, is easier to talk about than something impersonal like co-generation or food transport.

The mantra on K-Street must be “keep it local, never think global”. We need to look past this and see that we tackle the big causes without getting tied down by the unimportant ones. Sure – sponsor a child or buy a Prius. It will help. But don’t lose track of the fact that real issues (of trade with the developing world and the pricing and availability of public transport and renewable energies) are in the end the core of the solution. Don’t let moral arguments about what individuals do or do not do allow industry and government off the hook from the big solutions which are required.

There’s a dog living across the road from me. It’s a young golden retriever, sweet tempered and extremely friendly. I regularly see it taking its owners for a walk. I’m not exaggerating. The dog strains on the leash and Deborah or Micheal struggle not to be pulled over. Bonnie chooses where to go, and how fast. Watch out if something exciting happens at the park! Nor is it neglect, Deborah and Micheal are hard working, kind, and well meaning owners who have taken Bonnie to classes and done their best to train her.

But that dog is nothing to a lot of teenage boys I know. Far too many are arrogant, oafish, and brainless. Far too many are entirely concerned with macho bravado and entirely unable to care about the people around them. They rule the household and their parents try and placate them or buy them off long enough to get a little peace. It’s a tragedy.

I should say that although I don’t share Rousseau’s belief in the inherent goodness of the unspoilt human, I think each person is potentially compassionate, thoughtful, brave and in every other way virtuous. But where Rouseau would have children largely undirected and untaught until adolescence, I think the reason many children fall short of that wonderful potential is a failure of direction in their upbringing.

Children are naturally selfish. They’re also naturally kind. Whether the outcome is Yahoo or Houyhnhnm depends, to my mind, on two things: role models and expectations. Children look up to, and model their behaviour on, adults and older children close to them who are accorded status in the social environment. They also may rebel against the expectations set on their behaviour, but these expectations provide the context – they set what behaviour has meaning and what goes unrecognised.

Koori culture in Australia is fifty thousand years old. Kids are traditionally taught

Lessons of respect, compassion, sharing, responsibility, love and the importance of wisdom and the law.

each of which also emphasizes the connection with tribe and country. The basis of this knowlege is parable and what we would call “myth”. Archetypical, transcendant truth might be a more accurate understanding of dreaming stories. But apart from knowlege and story, these ideas are transmitted through a careful and conscious practice of modelling compassionate and responsible behaviour. Children from a young age watch as adults show, with explanation and almost exaggerated emotional response, how wise action is performed and why.

In the west we seem to get by with the idea that boys will be boys, and role models like the terminator – macho guys without the ability to express their own feelings or understand anyone elses. Even the President bases some degree of his popularity on his appearance as an inarticulate tough guy. He deliberately dumbs down his speech, is photographed down on the ranch pulling up brush or on a flight deck doing blokey things with the other men of action. His image is of someone who knows simple truths and doesn’t think too hard about them. Who prefers doing to reflecting. Who doesn’t spend too much time with his emotions.

Of course the reason this works is that he appeals to the desire of a lot of middle America to just not go there. Mr and to an extent Mrs Suburbia from any western nation have a pretty comfortable life. The television is sufficiently entertaining, their work hours are long but not especially arduous, schools raise the children, and life is punctuated by the occasional shiny toy like the new Lexus or the skiing holiday. No one wants to have to make a real emotional connection with anyone else – because that’s all about vulnerability and honesty and it might bring to the surface all the stuff that’s been pushed under since 1985 when your own parents were giving you the keys to a Corolla or sending you to college but weren’t there to listen and care and cry with you when the dog died or your teenage crush didn’t know you existed.

Girls cope better. They’re far more socially oriented and socially skilled, and they create their own support networks which serve at least in loco parentis. They have their own problems, more to do with the techniques they use to get and manipulate attention and emotional energy, but they’re much less likely to shut down that side of their personality.

So it’s not hard to see where I’m going with this. We can’t afford another generation of shallow, angry, perpetually childish men who have substituted pleasure for love in their lives. Changing things begins with not accepting that it’s ok, either in the boys or in their fathers. Then it’s up to me and the other males of my generation to behave and engage in the way we want our boys to grow up being -

Respectful, compassionate, sharing, responsible, wise, and especially loving.

It’s a truism, or even a cliché, to say that fear and desire – self absorption, in other words – prevent people expressing and accepting love. However commonplace, this idea is deeply important to human existence. Over and over again the wisest and most compassionate minds have attempted to find ways into the problem. The solution is also well known: by being kind to others, the ego is dissolved. Fear and selfish desire have less power over one’s actions. Cracks appear in the dam walls, and the nourishing waters of forgiveness make the heart come back to life. Values change, and suddenly whole new vistas open up. The person remembers how to care rather than want. How to give instead of take. Existence becomes real and present where it had been lived second hand in possessions, schemes, and regrets.

Those first steps are the hardest. Many people are trapped in desperate, addictive cycles of wanting. Meanwhile they fear losing the various bandages they strap down tight over the pain involved. There’s the pain of the harm done to others, and the harm done to themselves. Most of all there’s the pain of the loneliness and pointlessness of their existence. Love is as important a nourishment as oxygen, as the song says, and without the capacity to give love a person does not have the ability to receive it. Somehow a start is made. Perhaps the kindness of a friend or a stranger elicits a sympathetic response rather than one of clinging or anger. Somehow, without expecting return, the person does something for the benefit of another. Some memory of childhood or some instinct for survival allows the first drop or two of rain to reach the parched heartland of the soul, and green things begin to sprout.

The barriers are fear and anger. Resentment at past hurts. A wish for revenge. Sometimes the pain strapped down under those bandages is so devastating and acute that all a person’s energy is tied up in keeping the layers held close. Workaholics, gamblers, gluttons, and drug addicts, and just ordinary tense controlling people can fear their own pain so much they must struggle constantly to keep the lid on, by occupying every moment’s thought or seeking, in between, the respite of oblivion. The risk of stopping for a moment and having to feel is too frightening to countenance.

It’s always painful to begin with. It always costs, and it always starts with giving without expecting return. Real giving, simply out of kindness. That is saying: I’m hurting, I need love, I haven’t enough… but I will ignore that and do something for another.

Now think about politics. I would argue that very much the same thing applies. We are usually too greedy and selfish to step outside our own wants and needs, as nations and interest groups within nations. But cooperation, peace, and brother/sisterhood can give us so much more than the momentary advantage of self-interest. We even make an exception to our usual morality when we talk about the policy of our own nation. The basis of morality can be expressed as “Do unto others…” In other words: Act according to principles such that if everyone were to follow those principles the result would be good. The very first choice which a rational person would universalise under this approach is the right to personal autonomy, because without assuming the right to choose, a moral existence is impossible. There is a clear analogy in politics, in that we as citizens would choose to live in a democracy under the rule of laws which treat people equally. On the international stage we would be outraged should control of our nation’s government be taken by foreign powers, or if our country was targeted in a discriminatory way. That is to say we expect the right to autonomy and to fair treatment.

But this is the exception we excuse as “patriotism” or acceptable national self interest. When it comes to our country we are parochial and we think that this bias is not only normal but correct. If our country gains a trade advantage over a poorer neighbour we don’t feel guilty but commend our leaders for their skill in negotiation or their ability to use power to our advantage. By and large it is not the morality of a foreign war which makes it unpopular but the casualties. Our casualties, not the euphemised civilian horrors of the people in that other land. When the world as a whole faces the prospect of environmental catastrophe because of the industrialisation of our nation, and others like us, then just the same it seems acceptable to argue that we cannot risk even a fraction of the wealth gained by that industrialisation to mitigate the environmental harm. This national selfishness and greed has distorted international relations, as if a too-small playpen were inhabited by cruel and violent children squabbling and harming one another for possession of toys and cakes.

Where human failings are most horribly writ large is in the case of long running wars and tribal conflict. Resentment, anger, and the desire for revenge harden our hearts against the suffering or the “enemy” and block compassion. Spirals of violence and hatred last for generations. For illustration think of the meaning of the following incident, as a simple example.

I had been helping organise a rally protesting the genocide in Darfur. This ongoing horror involves several million (Muslim) people who are slowly being starved to death as a result of a campaign of violence orchestrated by the government of Sudan (themselves Muslims too). A singer, a Christian refugee from southern Sudan, was to perform at the rally. At the last moment she pulled out. Her family, she explained, had been killed by Muslims and she could not sing in support of Muslims in Darfur.

We harm ourselves by being greedy and selfish, both as an individual and as a nation. We close our hearts. We live in a sterile land, both metaphorically and in reality. Our values are distorted and we are crazy and ill. By contrast, if we act with true generosity we are richer in every way that matters. We understand true satisfaction and contentment rather than being lost in the sugar-high cycle of possession and loss.

A few less shiny toys, a slightly simpler life, a lot less fear and real security and brotherhood. Love and respect with our neighbours. On the macro and the micro scale it begins with the courage to take a unilateral risk, put aside past hurts and immediate gain, and find forgiveness, generosity and kindness even when it seems we don’t have enough for ourselves.

Take that risk. Let the love in. Insist that our government does the same.

Unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in the US have been exported to sweatshops in the third world. Many of the jobs which are left are being performed by underpaid non-citizens. Unemployment levels in the developed world are near historic lows, and GDP has been rising steadily, but in addition to the effect of globalization, the gap between rich and poor has widened steadily as a result of rising property values, urbanization, and especially the prevalence of neo-liberal economic policies. Low minimum wages and expensive healthcare and education combine to produce a situation in which there is a significant underclass with little chance of social mobility.

So why is there a persistent belief that the poor are poor because of some moral failing – laziness or addiction, or sexual promiscuity leading to unsupportably large families? Take everyone’s favourite right wing pundit Bill O’Reilly:

… you gotta look people in the eye and tell ‘em they’re irresponsible and lazy. And who’s gonna wanna do that? Because that’s what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen. In this country, you can succeed if you get educated and work hard. Period. Period.

Or the idea that poor women have large numbers of children either because they are sexually out of control or for the purpose of obtaining or supplementing a welfare check. Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote the book “Nickel and Dimed” about minimum wage employment and the working poor in the US, summed up the attitude like this:

Ever since the idea of a “culture of poverty” arose in the 1960s, many affluent people have subscribed to the convenient and self-flattering myth that poverty represents some kind of characterological disorder involving laziness, promiscuity, “inability to defer gratification,” and so forth.

In this context it’s interesting the enormous and destructive effort that has been put into enforcing the idea of even soft drugs as a criminal (ie: moral) issue rather than a medical problem or a personal choice.

But this attitude has a long history in the Protestant tradition. Wealth is a sign of God’s grace. Illness and misfortune may be signs of sin, but poverty surely indicates moral degeneration. It’s a natural outgrowth of industrialization and colonization. New methods of farming displaced large numbers of serfs to become itinerant labourers and later urban day labourers. These workers did not find the transition to the factory an easy one: industry demanded that they turn up at a certain time and work with concentration in difficult conditions for long hours at extremely repetitive jobs. Such unrewarding employment and low pay did not encourage loyalty or enthusiasm, but the pulpit emphasised the spiritual value of the suffering of toil. This combined with religiously based movements for temperance and asceticism especially directed at the lower classes, who were presumed to be tempted to sin by their physicality. Money wasted on alchohol drugs and other pleasures of the flesh, and any time spent in activity other than the mortification of the flesh through hard work or religious observance, was money and time wasted. God’s punishment for this ranged from disease to poverty. It’s worth remembering that in its original Protestant conception grace was a mysterious quality bestowed if not at random then outside human understanding. Those who had it would be saved, and those without it, damned. Therefore those born into poverty, especially those who were prevented by ill fate or lack of the drive or ability to surmount such a heritage, were born outside God’s blessing. By contrast those born to wealth and privilege deserved the benefits of this because this fortune was God’s wish and betrayed not only God’s favour but the special qualities of virtue which went along with it. So the rich were presumed good and the poor presumed sinful. The especially hard working and abstemious who were in the process of working their way out of poverty provided an exception, but if they failed it was a moral failure – an indication that they had succumbed to temptation. The other exception were the deserving poor. These widows, war veterans, and orphans exist for a particular and important reason – to be the subject of the pity, alms, and good works of the great and the good.

This moral lesson was and is written large in the form of the differences between the colonial powers and the benighted world, the colonies. The white man’s burden, blessed by the Christian religion and the wealth and power by which this grace was manifest, was to lift up the ignorant, lazy, sinful and poor. To give them the chance, by hard work abstinence and gratitude for the efforts of their betters, to demonstrate that God’s good will extended even to the furthest and most ill-favoured corner of the globe, and could save the blackest sinner – usually not in this world but in the next.

The same twisted logic was used to justify slavery:

If, also, by [the slaves'] own confession, which has been made in manifold instances, their condition, when they have come into the hands of humane masters here, has been greatly bettered by the change; if it is, ordinarily, really better, as many assert, than that of thousands of the poorer classes in countries reputed civilized and free; and, if, in addition to all other considerations, the translation from their native country to this has been the means of their mental and religious improvement, and so of obtaining salvation, as many of themselves have joyfully and thankfully confessed — then may the just and humane master, who rules his slaves and provides for them, according to Christian principles, rest satisfied, that he is nor, in holding them, chargeable with moral evil, nor with acting, in this respect, contrary to the genius of Christianity.

It’s not fair to fault an argument just because it has been taken to evil extremes, and it could be said – leaving out the moral/religious overtones – that the poor would indeed be better off if they worked hard and did not waste money on addiction and entertainment. But the right to personal autonomy is paramount in the United States, except in this case when it is apparently trumped by paternalistic moral notions allied with an economic advantage to the powerful. What’s more the moralising distorts public policy and obscures the reality of unequal opportunity.

But the basis of this point of view is not logic, and certainly not compassion. Rather it is a way for the middle classes to justify being selfish and hard hearted. Gypsies, Irish casualties of English rule (ie: early economic refugees), war veterans, and the itinerant workers forced from tenant farms — in England in the 16th and 17th Centuries these fell outside the village based welfare system of the time. The parish collection plate provided for widows, orphans, and the disabled in an informal system based on community coherence and compassion. But outcasts, foreigners, itinerants, and so on were not connected by history or kinship to the group. These people were often desperately needy, however. If the burghers and farmers did not want to help them, then their instinct was instead to despise them and mistrust them.

Here is an analysis of the situation in the eyes of William Harrison from 1577:

There is no commonwealth at this day in Europe wherein there is not great store of poor people, and those necessarily to be relieved by the wealthier sort, which otherwise would starve and come to utter confusion. With us the poor is commonly divided into thr e sorts, so that some are poor by impotence, as the fatherless child, the aged, blind, and lame, and the diseased person that is judged to be incurable; the second are poor by casualty, as the wounded soldier, the decayed householder, and the sick person visited with grievous and painful diseases; the third consisteth of thriftless poor, as the rioter that hath consumed all, the vagabond that will abide nowhere, but runneth up and down from place to place (as it were seeking work and finding none), and finally the rogue and the strumpet, which are not possible to be divided in sunder, but run to and fro over all the realm, chiefly keeping the champaign soils in summer to avoid the scorching heat, and the woodland grounds in winter to eschew the blustering winds.

[...] The several disorders and degrees amongst our idle vagabonds.

1. Rufflers. 2. Uprightmen. 3. Hookers or anglers. 4. Rogues. 5. Wild rogues. 6. Priggers or pransers. 7. Palliards. 8. Fraters. 9. Abrams. 10. Freshwater mariners or whipiacks. 11. Drummerers. 12. Drunken tinkers. 13. Swadders or pedlers. 14. Jarkemen or patricoes.

Of the women kind.

1. Demanders for glimmar or 2. Bawdy-baskets. [fire. 3. Mortes. 4. Autem mortem. 5. Walking mortes. 6. Doxies. 7. Dells. 8. Kinching mortes. 9. Kinching cooes.

The punishment that is ordained for this kind of people is very sharp, and yet it cannot restrain them from their gadding: wherefore the end must needs be martial law, 2 to be exercised upon them, as upon thieves, robbers, despisers of all laws, and enemies to the commonwealth and welfare of the land. What notable robberies, pilferies, murders, rapes, and stealings of young children, burning, breaking, and disfiguring their limbs to make them pitiful in the sight of the people, I need not to rehearse; but for their idle rogueing about the country, the law ordaineth this manner of correction. The rogue being apprehended, committed to prison, and tried in the next assizes (whether they be of gaol delivery or sessions of the peace), if he happen to be convicted for a vagabond, either by inquest of office or the testimony of two honest and credible witnesses upon their oaths, he is then immediately adjudged to be grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron of the compass of an inch about, as a manifestation of his wicked life, and due punishment received for the same.

This, to my mind, is how and why the meme came into being. We have seen how it was propagated by the churches, and how it suits the wealthy and the conservatives that it be part of the world-view of voters in the west. It’s why Reagan misinformation about Welfare Queens allowed him to cut benefits and hand the money to the rich. It’s why Bush could do the same. It’s part of Bush’s push to blame the Iraqi people for the anarchy in that country. It has a lot to do with the fact that the US has the most costly and most ineffective health care in the OECD, and the sort of poor and desperate underclass which Katrina revealed.

Solutions

Any change in this attitude is not going to begin in the big end of town. Honestly I think it’s one of those things in western society which suit those with power and influence and so will only change when the intelligentsia get a bit of intellectual honesty and stop allowing themselves to be bought by the corporations and the media. I have high hopes for the web leading the charge in this, especially because it enfranchises a group of people exemplified by some of the fine writers here on Newsvine — who have the intelligence and idealism to look for a better world and yet have experienced life on the margins, so their vision is of a better world for all, not just a more comfortable world for the privileged.

To my mind the issue is that the group who are targeted by this slander should not buy into the viewpoint themselves. Doing so puts the problem in terms of whether or not the poor are entitled to state help. I would like to see things reframed in terms of what people need and want out of life and how they can get it. This approach is proactive, self sufficient, and ends up involving education, community building, and grassroots politics rather than perpetuating a system of dependency and patronising, begrudged “welfare” which encourages a childlike and dependent response.

“Just as in the embrace of his beloved, a man forgets the entire world, all that exists within himself and without, so in union with the Being of knowledge, he no longer knows anything, either within or without” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 4.3.21).

The riverbank

A campfire on the riverbank. The night is mild and the travellers do not need the flames for comfort, unless it is the comfort of security against imagined wolves. More likely they gather to share those things most sought on long journeys: the company of one’s fellows and the stories they can tell.

These travellers have arrived at the ferry too late to cross, and must wait on this bank until morning. They have the courtesy and caution of strangers thrust together. An unlikely family: the middle aged, portly, well dressed man; the woman, a little older, with a careworn look and well patched clothes; and the ragged starved looking urchin. They turn together as a fourth figure joins them. It is a holy man, or perhaps woman, with dark skin, dreadlocks, and the brightly coloured silk pants of an entertainer.

The man is suspicious and stands to face the newcomer, but the woman stops him.

We are all strangers here. Be welcome at our fire, Sadhu.

The holy one sits down.

“I’m a temple dancer, sister. I’ll dance for you tonight but you must tell me your stories as payment.”

The dancer leapt and twirled, pounding the hard earth with brown feet, leaping and slapping silk swathed thighs. The rhythm made a counterpoint and a pattern to speech, wove around it and directed or compelled it. In between times, in between places, the fire burned and stories were told.

The businessman

I love to get the deal, said the man. I love to win, to find the weakness of my enemy and drag him through the mud.

My first job was delivering papers. I could keep some and sell them to the street vendors. When the customers complained my boss believed me, so I saved money to buy his contract as his customers went elsewhere.

Do you remember his face?

No! I have forgotten it long ago.

How about the crisp bright dawns in those deserted streets?

Ha. I knew I would not have to work like that for long. Once I bought that contract I never went back. I worked the delivery boys hard, too, for I knew all their tricks!

Tell me about victory, then.

I went to his funeral you know. His wife was there – I helped her! She’d never get a better deal on furniture. I was moving up in the world, and my household needed to look the part.

Was it sweet?

Ah! It thrilled me! It’s a dog eat dog world and I was the fiercest dog of them all! I never felt so alive!

It’s joyous! The first of many conquests!

Yes. I bought and sold, I could see what people would buy and how to make them. I could see where my competitors were strong and how to make them weak! I used lawyers and bought officials. Nothing could stop me!

You had plenty of money.

I didn’t care for clothes or food or wealth. I needed these things to show the others that I had won!

You enjoyed their envy?

They hated me. I wanted them to hate me because it proved my strength.

And your wife?

She was a famous beauty. They envied me for that! I used to see their faces at official dinners – oh! They smiled but they looked sick with wanting to be me.

Was she good to you, this beauty?

Why would I need her to be good to me? I have servants for that!

What is it that you want, then?

Peace. Oh I want it all to stop. I don’t care to fight another battle, it’s begun to bore me. I’ve won! There’s no more to life than this, but I dream of quiet. I want to rest.

Already there’s so much you don’t remember, and so much you never wanted to see! But my feet pound all to dust. You’ll have your peace. Look to your sister, she has seen me!

The householder

Oh, Lord Shiva! the woman said. She leant her face down to the earth and stretched her arms out wide.

The gaps between the notes are what create the rhythm, sister! An ending and a forgetting are each person’s lot. How could you face the dance without it?

I’ve seen endings, Lord. I cannot forget!

What do you remember, sister?

I remember cutting firewood, Lord. Each day we burned for charcoal. I remember the smoke rising grey-blue in the green forest. I remember the sounds of my children’s laughter.

Beauty, sister, and joy?

That, Lord, and sadness and pain too. I remember the hacking cough that killed my youngest. I remember the cold in my bones each rain-chilled day we stacked the wood-piles. The desperation when the carter wouldn’t pay us and when the corn-store was spoilt.

You remember a lot, sister. Do you remember love?

Yes Lord. He was beautiful and strong and good to me. We worked together and he was my comfort and my friend. But he died hard, Lord! I cannot think of it!

Would you give it up? So full a life, of so many hard and wonderful things?

Not the memory of my loves.

Rest, then. We will listen to the smallest.

The urchin

It’s not fair! the child said. They’ve had choices — all I’ve had is pain!

No, there’s nothing fair about it replied Shiva. Tell me what you’ve seen.

Suffering said the child and cruelty. Beatings and abuse.

Love?

So little love. And what I got I clung to and returned a hundredfold. I wanted to be good!

You were wonderful! Did you hide?

It never worked. I did my best. I saw and wanted. I cared. I was terribly frightened. I had no one!

It’s true. Your struggle gained you something though — you have won from me a choice.

The dancer had been twirling, clapping his hands in a quiet pattern. Now he leapt over the flames and landed beside the urchin, to whisper, softly Sweet love, you can choose peace, or you can choose to return to the dance. Will you suffer, love, lose, live? Will you find more cruelty, more beauty, more that is real? You can do that: you are not broken. Or you can rest, and stop, and be at peace.

Shiva bowed and stamped, and sparks flew up. The ground shook and the wind joined in the dance.

And in the morning two went down to meet the ferry.

My theory about achieving one’s goals begins with knowing exactly what you want and why. The thing is that you’re not effective unless you’re wholehearted. This requires engaging ever level of your being simultaneously, so start with meditation.

Humans have a lot of layers. I tend to think of this in terms of chakras. Is your goal important to your very existence? That’s the first chakra. To your reproduction? To your status? How about to your heart? This is the most important, because it begins the focus outwards. Does what you want benefit the ones you love, so that your goal is compassionate rather than selfish. For chakras five through seven the questions are: does achieving this goal open or close communications? Does it fit with your understanding of the world? And finally and most importantly, does it aid the harmony of the world?

I also find that a lot of people want things after the fashion of spoilt children. They will desire the shiny toy or the sweet. It’s doomed to failure because it’s about making others provide. Noise and tantrums rather than personal responsibility. That’s, to my mind, trivial and boring. If you want something for yourself, do you want it because it makes you a better person or because you believe it will make you happy? If you want something for others is it truly to make life better for them or is it so they will be grateful to you? These are not shallow questions!

What you’re after doesn’t have to benefit each one of these areas of the psyche, but it has to be compatible with each of them. For example you may be attempting to take up a career which will be unpopular and decrease one’s status. The power chakra may not gain from this but it must be on side. You must fully accept and take on board the fact that people will think less of you for taking such a job. So this takes a lot of thinking through, meditation, and time. At the end of such a process I find that I’m energised and well focussed.

The eponymous hero of Hesse’s novel Siddhartha spoke of this level of engagement with a goal as being like a stone falling through water. Nothing can prevent it because the whole being has a single purpose. This is the first metaphor – how to achieve intrinsic focus.

The second idea relates to distractions. All sorts of things in the world can deflect you from your purpose. Some of these are fears, conditioning, and desire. But there is also the opinions of other people, especially loved ones, and cultural dispositions and tabus. Of course the most important protection from these is embodied in truly wholehearted focus. That doesn’t mean ignoring other people’s opinions, if only because doing so will enable them to sneak in under the radar. Instead listen and carefully consider any views you haven’t already taken into account. From this standpoint of open thoughtfulness it’s easier to keep all elements of the psyche aligned on the goal – or if changes need to be made then be properly aligned on a modified goal. Think carefully about changes though. Are they genuinely necessary or are they a matter of succumbing to fear or desire? I’m a firm believer in letting sleep and the unconscious help with decision making. Take the time to be sure.

When confronted by doubts, there is something worth considering which I was taught during motorbike rider training.

Focus on the way through the corner, not on the side of the road.

From time to time you need to flick your eyes away from the apex of the curve ahead. Set aside the time to meditate and consider objections. Examine why you don’t feel good about some aspect of your goal and either modify the goal or understand why sacrifices are necessary. Think about who it is that benefits from what you’re trying to achieve and who loses, and double-check that what you are trying to do is loving, harmonious, and wise. But those second thoughts take place in their allotted time; what’s most important is that at all other times you remain focussed on the goal rather than the problems. Difficulties are part of the path to the outcome. The solution to problems should in each case take you nearer to what you wish to achieve.

To strain the motorcycle analogy a little further think of the wholehearted attitude as being akin to leaning the motorbike into the corner. You use your whole mind body and soul to do this. But if you look too hard at the rock on the side of the road you will end up splattered all over it. Keep your eye on the place you’re going.

Stand in the place where you live
Now face North
Think about direction

In fact I would suggest that if you live in the Northern Hemisphere you face south. Go somewhere outdoors and quiet, face south, and plant your feet squarely on the ground. The bones of the earth are beneath you, and the soil, vegetation, air, and sunlight are all around. Stand still and feel them for a moment.

Think about the Earth, a great sphere turning in space. It spins to your left hand, and far away a shadow is travelling toward you as the earth carries you east. That’s night approaching, and you, the rocks and soil and air and all are moving inexorably on gravity’s carousel to face beyond the sun and into the depths of the universe.

With the sun gone from your eyes you can look out at infinity from your tiny blue pebble. In a truly dark sky, and you’ll need to go a way from city lights and choose a moonless night to see it, the milky way is revealed edge-on as a disk of dust and suns. Huge beyond belief but still tiny in the vastness of space and a million billion similar galaxies.

What’s that speck you’re standing on? There are 6 billion like you, eating, breathing, living thanks to a thin film of gas and soil and other struggling mewling suffering organisms on the surface of this fortunate lump of impure iron. It’s wet and warm in just about the right proportion. Most of all it has a history with each one of us. We’re each the result of untold billions of attempts, building success upon success, to find a genetic code which will express an organism which can find a niche amongst all the other organisms and all the other attempts to live and breed and re-attempt the trick of living and breathing in just this blue speck in the vasty darkness.

So stand, in the place where you live. Now face south. Think about where you came from and where you’re going. Think about direction. Think about what you find important in the great big scheme of things. You’re going to stuggle and breathe and live and die in a microsecond of cosmic time. The universe will go on around you, with you, and without you and meaning is something you make as you choose.

No one sees more than a tiny fraction of the whole, but each thing big or small is beautiful. Each other insignificant struggle is beautiful too. I believe we make meaning by appreciating this beauty in the world and lives around us. Stop and look. Breathe. Appreciate.

Love.

You may know that I live in Hobart, Tasmania. What you may not know is that Hobart was, in the 1890′s, a thriving whaling port. At that time there was one pub for every 11 citizens, because of the large number of visiting sailors. Most of these “hotels” were in fact brothels, and today I walked past one which has retained its original name if not its original function.

I’ve always been fascinated by the beautifully painted sign, depicting a mermaid, of the Ocean Child Hotel [recently replaced! Drat!] The name arises because “mermaid” was sailor’s slang for “prostitute”. Clearly the Ocean Child was rather up front about things, a century ago.

But today I was wondering about the “Little Mermaid”. Mermaids are both promiscuous and virginal. The prostitute can give birth to children but not to people with a name and place in society. Her children are nobodies. The Hans Christian Andersen character gives up her tail, and gains legs (and one supposes, female sexual organs) in return for her voice. Is that because she had power and her own autonomy as a prostitute which she lost as a “proper” woman and a wife? What she gained by giving it up was status as the prince’s wife – at once a voiceless cipher and a bearer of future people-with-names.

“Ocean Child” isn’t code for pedophilia, by the way. She’s a child because she can’t bear children – the defining characteristic of a woman in our atavistic past. But longer ago than that the sea was an aspect of the mother goddess. “Mer” (sea) and “Mere” (mother) are related words, after all. That female power (and sailors have always known the sea is female, Neptune notwithstanding) has been trivialised and denigrated to the point where the goddess is depicted as a fish/prostitute. Just the same the mystery and fear of an empowered woman lies just under the surface. Neither sea nor mermaid could ever be a wife! A related myth has Oddyseus meet the sirens, whose song can lure sailors to their death. What’s fascinating about that is that Homer has their lure not be lust but knowlege. They sing of what is and what will be.

Sailors battle elemental forces and they know a thing or two, deep in their bones. They know the sea is a woman, secure in her wisdom and her sexuality, and immune from domination by our culture and our technology. They know that water runs deep in every female, and that in the end that wild magic cannot be named or tamed or made a part of our society. Sailors battle with it, respect it, and understand it a little. But in the end they are afraid of it.

I want to tell a story about a guy I knew from high school. But I have to be careful, because if I make it possible for someone who knows him to identify who it is I’m talking about I could be accused of libel, and Australia has some of the strictest laws in the world in that area. So the details will be a bit sketchy.

Let’s call him T. Several years after school I met him again through my work, and discovered that he had become close friends with a nasty local crime boss. I was on speaking terms with him at that time, but not close. Then, a girl came back to the state who been away for a few years. While she was away she had acquired a heroin addiction and taken up prostitution, but she was coming back to be with her family and try to get clean. The trouble was that she met T. when she was out one night and he’s far too smart not to see her weakness straight away – he offered her drugs in return for sex, and within a couple of days she’d left the state to go back to her addiction and her life of desperation.

I held T. at least partly responsible. Later I discovered some of the things T. and the crime boss used to get up to and it made me realise that there were quite a few other people who were complicit. Gideon repeats it like a mantra here on Newsvine and he’s exactly right:

Silence is complicity.

The crime boss had drugged and raped a number of girls over a period of time, and T. had either participated in or known about these horrors. What’s more, many of T’s close friends had a good idea of what was going on and while they didn’t approve they had done nothing to prevent him. Probably there was nothing active they could have done. I doubt there would have been evidence that could be presented to the police, for example.

But they continued to associate with T.

T. is probably the only person who was in a position to get the crime boss locked up, or at least prevent him continuing. Meanwhile those people close to T allowed him to continue to live a largely normal life while supporting the crime boss’s behavior. … and perhaps more than just supporting, I have no way of knowing. I’m angry with T for being a piece of slime, but I’m also angry with the people I knew, who were close to T and knew about all this.

They kept T’s secrets. They hung out with him. They still do, and although the crime boss is now behind bars T and all those like him feel safe, feel normal, feel like members of the community and regular worthwhile human beings. People like T get away with being evil because they are allowed to by those close to them. And people like the crime boss get away with all the terrible harm they do because of the complicity of people like T. But there’s no point in appealing to the conscience of T because he hasn’t got one.

So if you know someone who is harming others call them on it. Don’t avoid the topic and don’t think you might spoil your friendship by trying to force them to change. Your implicit support, your continued friendship, this is the air they breathe. Your silence is complicity.

I’ve often heard the idea that humanity’s survival depends upon finding a way to leave this planet. Most recently it was Stephen Hawking, who said after a visit to zero gravity that:

I think life on Earth is at an increased risk of being wiped out by disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war or a genetically engineered virus or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space.

To my mind this is not only wrong but terribly dangerous.

In the long term it is trivially correct. At some point in the future the earth will be hit by an asteroid large enough to make it uninhabitable. Mankind can build defenses against such things – to me these most simply involve predicting potential collisions very accurately and applying a small amount of propulsion to those which present a threat so that their orbit is changed. Even so, as Hawkins says, there are other dangers and we have all our eggs in one basket. If nothing else gets us the sun will go nova in a few billion years.

But when people talk about colonising other planets they are thinking of the next few hundred years. It’s a seductive thought. We’ve messed up the earth with pollution, climate change, and so on. We’re running out of oil, there are too many people to sustain the population growth we are genetically programmed to seek, and it’s a great big universe out there. Why not replay the last couple of hundred years of western history on a truly grand scale. Set those space-wagons rolling and carve out a presence on the universal stage!

I grew up on science fiction and I love astronomy, but this attitude makes me cringe because it just hasn’t been thought through properly. First of all there is the technological challenge of getting some people into space in an environment which can support them for the many years or even generations it will take to reach a nearby earth-like planet in another solar system. Let’s assume they take a mini-environment with them plus a bunch of microbes and seeds so as to set up a pared-down version of an earth eco-system on the new planet. Let’s assume that the new planet is so like our own in climate that it doesn’t need “terraforming” as the old sci-fi stories called it. Let’s assume that planet doesn’t have its own life. [And just to be clear, Fred Holye aside, any life it does have will not be "the same" or "compatible" with ours, that's simply impossibly unlikely. So we're not going to a planet with alien trees and grasses that we can eat, we need to bring our ecology with us.]

In this best reasonable scenario we send a small expedition of a few tens of people and a proto-environment along, and they introduce microbes and flora to the bare bones of a planet. After a while they drop down out of orbit in person and, if all has gone well, they can live there. That means they can grow food and start to rebuild a technological base. After many decades one might expect that if the introduction of a new environment has been wildly successful there would be a place that other humans could travel to from earth and live upon. They too would be travelling very slowly in super-recycling mini-environments.

The Apollo program and the International Space Station have shown how expensive it is to get a few men and women into space. This to me is the second big difficulty. Assuming we can overcome the technological challenge, the biggest part of which is biology, it simply takes an enormous amount of energy even to get humans out of our gravity well (*). So the question becomes: who will get to go?

Because if we don’t solve our problems here on earth before we try to leave, we’re going to be selling very few tickets on very few life rafts from a ship which is sinking.

This is why I call the “escape pods” idea dangerous. There are a number of challenges which the human race must solve, right now, to ensure that 99.9999% of us survive. These include global warming, world peace, hunger, pandemic, and so on. To devote our efforts instead to getting 0.0001% of us off the planet, into an uncertain future in space, seems like madness unless there is no other option whatsoever.

So by all means let’s pursue a space program. I’m in favour of extending our knowlege and our reach. But we have a responsibility to our planet and our children to take our time and put our house in order before we think about leaving. If we were to rush to get even a few hundred humans set up in a viable extrasolar colony we would probably fail and we would certainly be leaving behind a smoking wreckage and untold human misery. Just to get all mystical on you for a moment, I also think we have a responsibility to export what we could be, rather than the “ugly human” we mostly are now. Once we are willing to fix what we have broken and learn to get on with one another, we will be the sort of aliens we would like to meet.

 

* If you believe that we can mine fusion materials on the moon and get essentially free energy from that, you’re entitled to your opinion. I don’t share it and I refuse to debate the idea until there is better evidence, sorry. I don’t think your idea is ridiculous, I’m just not willing to bet the planet on the idea until it is shown to be far more likely.

I found myself explaining my thoughts about this in detail to a friend recently. The trouble is, there’s a lot of explaining. And in the end, although I bring up some ideas which are based in reason, it’s a personal choice located in my particular view of the world. It’s not a religion and apart from animal cruelty issues I’m not seeking to convert anyone.

Sustainable farming

It seems to me that well designed sustainable farming techniques almost always involve animals. Two incredibly effective systems spring to mind as examples: Southern China and Grenoble area France.

The first is based on wet field rice, getting two or more harvests per year. But it’s far more complex than that. The population of China tripled in the period from the beginning of the Ming to the middle of the Qing dynasties (1368 to 1750), and it did so without major violence or famine in part because every single calorie was extracted from the available land. It was said that when a family had 11 acres of land they were rich, because they could lease it to two other families and live off the rents.

Our modern system, which I call broad acre monoculture farming, relies on in excess of 1 calorie of inputs (in the form of oil) for every calorie of food produced. Worse, it effectively reduces the soil to a simple hydroponic carrier medium, rather than a biologically and physically complex structure. The result is actually less total food output per acre than the zero input sustainable methods. 11 acres of kansas wheatfield would not come close to supporting the food needs of three families. But there is a reason modern techniques have florished and it has to do with economics. A single farmer can raise crops or animals on many acres using fertilizers, pesticides, and tractors. It takes the daily work of at least two whole families to farm even 11 acres by traditional methods, so it’s just not a viable way of earning a living.

Personally I think we should be learning from sustainable farmers, and trying to integrate their approach with the advantages we can gain from technology. The French high farms practised crop rotation, they raised seeds under cloches early in spring, they made effective use of every idea and every resource to get more and more varied production from their land. We have found out a lot about biology, mechanics, and even chemistry which can help us, but we have had the arrogance to forget a great deal too. By the way one of the main things we’ve forgotten is that the health of a farm is the health of the soil.

Anyway I’m getting way off track here – the point I wanted to make is that there is no way to get the most out of a sustainable farming environment without domesticated animals. Every pond should have fish. Pigs plow and manure as they clean up roots and scraps which would otherwise be wasted. Cows and goats turn fallow or marginal grasses into essential protein, both from milk and flesh. Then there are chickens, ducks, bees, silkworms, and more.

Ecology and Symbiosis

Humanity has a death grip on the throat of the world’s environment. Our waste, or energy use, or agriculture, our habitation is the dominant factor in every ecosystem excepting the few wilderness areas we have either not yet exploited or have chosen to keep apart. So animals don’t exist, at least in the longer term, except under the conditions we allow. For that reason it is quite possible to say “we will not kill animals for food”, but only if we also say “few or no animals will live.”

I don’t think this is necessary or desirable. There is a model of inter-species cooperation which we can use to think about this: symbiosis. Ants may farm aphids. Sharks get along with pilot-fish. We have such a symbiosis with our domesticated animals right now: sheep, cows, chickens and so on could not live without us and while we might find alternative foods we have chosen to live with and on them.

The question is then whether it is better for cows, say, to exist as only a few specimens in zoos or as a large population of domesticated animals. I think the answer depends very much on how they are treated. In the west, by and large, the answer for all our domesticated food animals is: abominably. Throughout their lives feedlot and battery animals suffer, and then they suffer worse on their way to and at the abbatoirs. Our farming methods for livestock are incredibly inefficient, unsustainable, unhealthy, and cruel.

Living with rather than living on

So these two ideas, sustainable farming and symbiosis, clearly go together. We need to create an environment which is rich, sustainable, and productive. I think this will involve domesticated animals, but not the feed lots of today. I think it can be done without much cruelty. We and our symbiotic species partners, and the ecology we create, are one whole and worthwhile part of the world.

By the way we need, desperately, to have access to wilderness. I think we need this for our psyche as much as for the depth of species diversity it retains. In the end we will have to limit our population growth and I hope we do so while there is still somewhere to be alone and to allow nature to be without our influence.

Agribusiness

When I first stopped eating meat I continued to eat fish. It was 25 years ago and wild fish stocks seemed in need of management and cooperation rather than being in danger of complete collapse. I was conscious of the cruelty of battery chickens, and believed that the west lived on an untenable diet of corn-fed beef. United Fruit had proven that agribusiness disregarded people as much as it did animals. Organic and cruelty free meat production was unknown.

Since that time I have kept pigs and goats, and I have seen that when kept humanely they have a great deal more personality and intelligence than is generally understood. Meat eaters who are horrified that dogs are kept for food are guilty of a double standard, I think, or at least a convenient blindness. Chickens really are pretty stupid, though!

But the rich eat so much meat. Doing this is like our carbon footprint – it insists that others exercise a restraint that we will not. In most people’s western diet meat consumption could be cut by three quarters with benefits to both health and taste. Say for example, that half main meals had little or no meat component and that in the other half had half as much meat as at present. Because there’s no doubt that food grown ethically would be more expensive. We live in an entirely unreal food chain, supported only by the availability of plentiful cheap oil. Growing food in a mixed, sustainable, small scale, integrated, and organic farming environment would once again make food a significant cost of life, especially in terms of labour.

The thing is that we really have no choice. Current farming techniques really are unsustainable, simply from their energy and environmental costs. On a world scale, we must as a species find a stable population and a sustainable agriculture. If this cannot be achieved the population will one way or another contract to a point the environment and farming methods can support.

Ethical consumption

So here is a checklist of what I believe is wrong or unsustainable:

• Broadacre monoculture of cereals, with high fertiliser and pesticide input. Increasingly this is being exacerbated by the use of GMO varieties.
• Cruelty in feed lot farming and the abattoir system.
• Energy cost of grain fed beef, and health implications of required antibiotic and hormone regime this method entails.
• Energy, environment, and production inefficiency implications of western diet.
• Overfishing of most wild fish populations.

In my view we should be heading toward the creation of a sustainable and rich human ecosystem which has mixed organic farming, including animals, at its heart. Humans and animals are symbiotes in such a system. By the way the abattoir system needs a major overhaul. I don’t see any reason that it should be undesirable to kill and process animals on-farm in a healthy way.

We have tried to section away important parts of life, in the west. This ends with “commuters” living and working in glass boxes protected from birth, death, food, waste, and nature. When we can integrate the whole of our lives in an organic way we will be far more at peace with ourselves, I think.

So how to get there? Vegetarianism is a tactic for raising consciousness about food and consumption, to my mind. It’s not especially desirable as an aim in itself because it implies either blindness to the reality of human influence in the world or else an animal-free future. But it is a way to break free of the unwise, cruel, big-agribusiness model of growing food.

Other important ideas include buying organic, avoiding GMOs, buying locally grown produce, cooking at home, and buying unprocessed food in place of prepared and packaged.

Again: your mileage may vary. I’ve been on grass-fed cattle farms, and in commercial apple orchards, and they are industrial scale chemical factories which seem extremely unhealthy to the people who work there. But I have no expertise or special research in this area.

I was walking to the bus the other day when an old man stopped me. He had been replacing a Rotary Club sign, and he was grumpy because the sign he was replacing had been damaged by vandals. We were in the grounds of a local Matric college (the last two years of high school, here in Australia) and he was convinced that those students were his problem.

As our conversation progressed it became clear that his problem was a lot broader than that. He was 89 years old and had left school at 13, fought in New Guinea in the second world war, and was bitter about a lot of things. In particular he hated children (he mimed the blows their parents should have given them) and the Japanese (who had shot him in the ankle and were in his opinion cannibals). On the other hand he did have warm feelings towards his wife, now dead two years. He mentioned rather wistfully that although they had been married for 34 years he hadn’t really appreciated her until she was gone.

The old man represents a vanishing side of Australia. He’s been working since he was 11. He’s generally been poor and without opportunities for education. He grew up at a time when Australia was the white colony of a global British Empire, in a monoculture of simple unquestioned values. I admire many of those values – they’re about shared hardship, care for friends, and straightforward sincerity. But it was also a racist, anti-intellectual, close-minded culture which denigrated achievement and did not reach beyond its narrow aspirations. Since then the working class intellectuals and the artists and most of all the migrants have transformed Australia, bringing a forward thinking, compassionate, rich and vibrant culture to the cities.

People like the old man had been left behind. They feel excluded, too, and resentful of a society which cares about things in which they have no interest and envisions a future they can’t imagine. But the old man is not by any means alone. He is allied, for sure, with my brother.

It took me a while to notice because the specifics were different, but my brother has very much the same general feeling about our culture. If you can put an engine in it, or a beer in it, or a bet on it, then there’s a point to it. It’s a simple enough philosophy and it seems to give my brother a great deal of satisfaction. Where I get uncomfortable is that anything else is seen as a threat. Foreigners, intellectuals, art, science, philosophy – that’s somehow snobbish, belittling, and suspect. My brother and I maintain a sufficiently warm relationship by simply never going there, and at the same time his attitudes bother me and he considers me vaguely condescending.

I think of all this as a sad loss. You see my brother is right, to a certain extent, about progressive culture in Australia. It is condescending and it’s lost those really essential heart values that the old man grew up amongst. It has replaced compassion with obligation, exercised through the state. It values show ahead of shared achievement. It values words over sincerity.

But he and the old man have been conned by the neo-cons. Their innate conservatism and narrow mindedness have been used to make fear and greed preeminent in society. The best of the traditional values are simply empty clichés, and Australia has been taken back to all the bad parts of 1950. Muslims are mistrusted. Intellectuals are mistrusted. Even the unions are mistrusted. Society is less equal and less fair than ever. It’s wedge politics and it’s been spectacularly successful. I think Australia has lost its conscience and its heart. The old man and my brother feel disenfranchised, and the cultural, intellectual, and progressive are becoming isolated and irrelevant. But they, not the media bosses and the politicians, are natural allies.

So it’s time that we remembered the day when learning and ideas belonged to us all. It’s time we remembered that mateship is not a slogan but a way of life. Prejudices have driven wedges between us, but each old man was a child once and we have more in common than religion or ethnicity or education or social outlook. We really are all in this together.

The old man showed me just how much we have been taught to hate, but we have always known how to love and it’s very infectious. Time we each practised that instead.