The Seditionist

Now that Obama has ‘confirmed’ the link to the ‘Yemen branch of Al-Quaida” of the recent pants-bomber, we should presumably go bomb the shit out of some rocks and peasants somewhere for a couple of months. I’m sure there are some developing countries where people still aren’t afraid to throw a wedding party.

In Germany, we had an eager bunch of terrorist young guns in the day. The Red Army blew up plenty of people, kidnapped people including important figures in industry and politics, were involved in the successful abduction of a Lufthansa flight, all the while being hunted by the best intelligence services in the world.

The IRA in Ireland have a history that at least equals the RAF in capacity and exceeds it in active terror time.

Now here comes ‘Al-Quaeda’. The pants bomber made his pants catch on fire. The shoe bomber made his shoes catch on fire. The guy who tried to blow up the airport in Scotland made himself catch on fire. The ‘Islamic assassin’ who was ’sent’ (by a little voice in his head, presumably) to kill the cartoonist who drew that infamous Muhammad cartoon is in hospital after getting shot while trying to carry the deed out by… axe. Really, axe? Not poison umbrella dart? Not even grenade or sub-machine gun? Axe?

I’m not saying that there aren’t people in the world today who are capable and willing to carry out terror acts in the name of Islam. 9/11 was clearly a well-organised event (though in the end far less sophisticated than many cold-war terror actions); the Spain and London bombings were also well thought out. Indonesia’s terrorists have a history of pulling off successful attacks.

But the fact that these skills obviously possessed by a small number of terrorists are not at all being passed on to any larger group seems to indicate a marked lack of organisation. It seems to indicate that these individuals have little in common aside from their ideological bent. The fact is a well-organised and trained terrorist group can pull off a successful attack pretty much every time unless they’re actively prevented from doing so, while many of our current enemies seem to be a greater danger to themselves than to us.

I don’t think many if any of these groups or individuals rely on ‘Al-Quaeda’ for training or inspiration. What that means in the long run is that we have to quit trying to destroy terror networks by explosive force and have to start getting serious about listening to worried fathers dobbing in their sons.

A long-standing argument of absolutist-minded folks has been that moral goodness requires absolute and unquestionable laws that are founded not on any earthly principles but on cosmic conspiracies of one sort or another.

The argument in a nutshell has two prongs:

-people are selfish, therefore people cannot make moral choices when they involve altruism, therefore an absolute law is needed to provide morality which is apart from self-interested self-preservation.

-relative moral laws are subject to change, therefore they are not really moral laws at all and could be stood on their heads tomorrow. We need absolute laws not subject to change to create a lasting moral framework.

On the one hand there are several issues that can be raised with this reasoning, and on the other there are people who believe both tenants and still do not believe in absolute moral law, which leads them to reject all moral reasoning as merely pragmatic evolutionary thinking.

I don’t want to go into a lengthly discussion on either of those points, so I’ll just throw out there that a careful distinction must be made between self-directed and selfish actions when discussing the first point (of course we *want* to do the things we do, unless we’re suffering from some form of possession, but that does *not* automatically make our actions selfish) and that I believe that morality has evolutionary origins since it almost certainly preceeds moral reasoning (unless we assume vampire bats, for example, exhibit moral reasoning on an intellectual level) but that does not mean that we cannot also find rational foundations to underlie our moral reasoning.

I do think there is a rational basis for rationality, and it is the magical gift of empathy (courtesy of evolution, yes) that makes it possible. Sociopaths out there, you’re going to have trouble following.

1) Through experiencing our own emotions, we know that we enjoy pleasure and dislike suffering.

2) Through empathy and science, we know that many other beings also enjoy pleasure and dislike suffering.

3) On a scientific and empirical basis, we know that we are not in any way special above and beyond all other living beings. We are in fact quite ordinary all round.

4) Given that we want to give ourselves happiness and prevent suffering, and given that we understand other living beings that have no inherently greater or lesser worth than ourselves have the same desires, we should seek to bring happiness and prevent suffering to other living beings. Given that we also have an understanding of many of the mechanisms that make people happy or make them suffer, we also have the tools to bring happiness and prevent suffering.

5) If we demand happiness for ourselves and do things to bring it about, yet we accept suffering for others and do not prevent it, we are hypocrites. We are not being consequent in our reasoning by preferring ourselves simply because we happen to be the one looking out of this body’s eyes.

There are many possible retorts to this argument. Many will go along the lines of “Other people don’t care about me, I don’t owe them anything” or “I don’t expect anyone to help me, so sod those losers. Let them pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”. I believe this kind of argument to be dishonest; of course we strongly desire help when we are needy, even if pride or fear sometimes prevents us from asking.

And of course there are people who really have very little time to worry about us and help us, but if those people happen to be unable to do so because of their own terrible situation while we are living lives of relative wealth we are still being hypocritical. Would we really be happy being born into a dire situation, brought up poorly and forced to do idiotic or unsavory things for our daily bread? If not, then let us not be hypocrites and pretend we owe them nothing because they owe us nothing.

There is one important offshoot from this argument, however. If we desire happiness for ourselves and happiness for others, and desire the abolition of suffering for us both, then we have little responsibility if we are in the situation of being far less happy and far more suffering than the person. Conversely, if we are in the superior position, we have a great responsibility.  Note that it is not good enough to pick out someone better off to be able to free ourselves of our burden; we may not have to give to Bill Gates (though who knows, I’m sure everyone can use a hug or a kind word) but merely having the time and tools to think about moral reasoning probably means there are countless people out there who we owe our help to.

The truth is that hypocrisy is with us all; none of us will yield our comforts easily to help someone in need. This is not a call for poverty and renunciation leading to disillusionment or depression, but rather a request to consider on a case-by-case basis whether this is an opportunity to be a little less hypocritical on the question of human happiness.

Credit goes to: This argument is not one of my own construction, of course. Thanks go out to the Golden Rule as espoused by the ancient Greeks, Buddha and Jesus among others, and to Utilitarianism as proposed by Bentham and expanded upon by philosophers like Peter Singer.

I watched Avatar in 3d the other day. I went in thinking it was based on Avatar the Air Bender (a show I know precious little about), and I went in under force of arms. The blurb sounded strange and transcendental, and the trailer wasn’t exactly inspiring.

I really did enjoy the first ten minutes. The production values were brilliant, and it amped the atmosphere right up. It got a bit slow and explainey. That was for the next ten minutes or so. I loved the next two hours of the movie. Not in the way that I love a good movie, mind. I loved it beyond that by a bit. I appreciated it. I went with it. Part faerie tale, part history lesson, part current events. It worked on me. It wasn’t preachy and it wasn’t just for the sake of bringing on the moral lesson. It was a very good piece of cinema, and at the same time a very good teacher. So say I, at least.

A teacher? New lessons for the simple-minded? No, it didn’t tell me anything I did not know before I went to see the movie. I understand the last few hundred years of history fairly well, if I may say so myself. It brought it (and me) down to earth though, much like a good book might. There it was, the contrast between modern man and the brave savage, reduced to the teaching of a simpler way of life.

Watch it and see whether it does the trick for you. It very well may not. We all have different issues at our core, different things that concern us to the point of distraction. And who am I to claim they are invalid, when I live an uncomplicated life?

I did enjoy the movie, and I think it’s worth watching in two dimensions or three. Never go to see a movie with high expectations, of course, or you’ll be disappointed, but it should be worth your fifteen bucks.

I never thought much of the idea of original sin, even when I was Christian. It’s a silly concept, being born with someone else’s misdeeds on your back. If I have Roman blood in me, does that mean I should be sorry for the holocaust of Carthage or many Germanic tribes? If I have Germanic blood, does that cancel out the Roman guilt?

Such algebra is nonsensical and pointless. So, being blameless for the transgressions of our ancestors, are we free of our heritage? No, because as we are not guilty of our forebearer’s sins we are not entitled to their gains, well or ill-gotten. We have done nothing to deserve punishment or reward.

Being a white male born into a middle-class existence, I have much. I am privileged beyond the hopes and dreams of most fellow human beings. It is an accident of birth that I am in this position. Also, it is not an accident that my ancestors were able to provide for me thus. I am part of a great Western machine of conquest and domination stretching back thousands of years (probably best dated as starting with emperor Constantine I who was crowned in 306 AD). In the course of history, the bloodshed and misery brought forth in the name of Christianity, Civilisation and lately Globalisation is beyond measure. Since the beginning it has been a more or less constant holocaust, consuming men, tribes and nations at an ever greater pace.

Today there are many who baulk at the notion of aiding the developing world, of surrendering that which we have supposedly earned for ourselves. To them I suggest a closer study of history. Relations between peoples were not always as violent, and though it is true that the onset of ‘civilisation’ has brought ever more organised, ever more bloody conflict throughout the world, not just originating from the West, it was the West that mastered the art most thoroughly at every level.

When it was the sword and the gun that was needed to annihilate resistance, that was (and is) what is resorted to. Today we increasingly use the perverse weapons of political and economical propaganda to abuse the simplest human drives to create bankrupt and failing societies that mirror our own.

I am glad that I refuse to be held to the sins of my ancestors, for then I should surely be enslaved and impoverished, abused and killed when my utility waned. I would be treated as part object, part rodent; my culture would be taken from me, I would be a species apart, a sub-human thing. Were I to take the blame of my heritage, I would condemn myself to a life of utter despair and death like that which has been brought upon my fathers and my mothers who were born in one of those places or as one of those races consigned an unclean status.

I do not take that burden; I could not bear it and I do not deserve it. I do however realise the full weight of responsibility that comes with the injustice of my position. My burden is to understand it, and so I have to stand for change. I need to demand justice at last, for every crime that still affects people today, that still keeps them impoverished and undereducated, stuck in war-torn countries to see their children die young and their parents die violently.

I want justice for every fellow human being, and I want it today. I want the excuses to end.

The problem with the killing of a person is that there is usually no true killer. What I mean is that to kill is a simple, almost trivial act. Pulling a trigger, launching a missile, are acts so simple a child could perform them, and on occasion does.

Imagine a world where every killer was first to emphasise with the victim, to understand their life story, to relate it to their own. Killing would be incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible in all but the most dire situations. The person who terminates another’s life is spared that experience. Because we are all isolated beings, existing in a world of our own, we can do these terrible things. With enough training or mental malfunction we can do them without a second thought.

It’s the best nature could do, I suppose, to give us the facilities with which we can, with effort, walk in another’s shoes. Survival dictated ignorance on certain occasions, when an enemy outside the tribe crossed our path. Unfortunately the mechanisms which prevented inter-tribal violence thousands of years ago are utterly insufficient now.

It’s a problem beyond easy solutions. How shall we bring understanding to those who end someone’s world? How much training, how much effort will it take?

In the end we can only do our best. We can try to understand those who make it a point not to understand their victims. We can see the dysfunction that underlies their behaviour. It’s never good enough, of course. Nazi victims, gang victims, victims of empire… their blood flows freely and there is naught to give us hope except the feeling that most of humanity is with us.

As an Atheist I cannot pray for the souls of the victims, and as someone who does not believe in evil I cannot condemn the killers as demons.

I just wish I could stop it all, make every bullet a dud and every missile a misfire and every hand wrapped around a fellow human being signal love instead of hate. I think one day it’ll all get sorted, should we manage that long. It’s just that I won’t be here to see it… I’ll just have to live with the dream.

Francis Fukyama declared the end of history ten years ago. This implies there is such a thing, a goal to be reached at which we can declare the human project to have been a thorough success. We can then toast each other and lean back on our laurels. Fukyama had one definition of victory, namely free-market neo-conservative capitalism. The West reached the climax of his brave new world in 2004 with Bush’s re-election but nobody seems to have realised we’ve crossed the finish line. Instead everyone’s a-complainin’.

The goal-oriented approach is part of modern life. We have targets, life goals, success indicators, milestones and school league tables. So there are guidelines. More factories, more hospitals, more GDP, less CO(2), more H2O and by 2020 two percent of GDP to aid developing nations. But what are the goals? The goal, it seems, is progress. Progress to where nobody knows.

Another position is that of repeating history. History repeats itself. We had people having wars 2000 years ago, we have wars now, we will have wars in 2000 years. People 2000 years ago went hungry, they do now, they will in 4009. We have maltreated minorities as there were when Christ was doing his rounds, and we will still have them when Judgement Day comes.

So are we almost done with history or are we just going round and round again? A little of both, and a lot of neither. Sure, there are great parallels throughout human history. Given our shared humanity and our unfortunate lack of inherited memory and knowledge, it would be surprising if we learned all the lessons first time round. Sure, there are things we’re (hopefully) done with. We’ve hopefully concluded and abolished physical slavery in the developed nations, barring the downfall of civilisation (and excepting wage slavery that affects 95% of the population). It’s looking up for women. Racism is unlikely to be taken up as a banner by the masses.

And that’s the gist. We do learn lessons. It takes a while. It takes a lot of human misery sometimes. But we are a little less likely to commit a certain error or follow down a dead end every time we fail. At the same time, there is no end. There is no W-I-N. We’ll pass those goals and find the world still does not make every living being perfectly happy, and we will sigh and get to work again. I think it’s very important we realise that.

We should stop looking for the check-mate AND we should stop procrastinating and whining about how “history repeats itself”, about how “it’s just human nature”, how “that’s just utopian”. Because it’s the same kind of people that plant both these extremes in our heads. The people that love the status quo and want everyone to keep playing along, to go round and round without demanding to get off the ride while still working ourselves silly believing victory’s just three moves ahead.

Viva La Evolution!

In his much heralded speech on Afghanistan, Obama told the world that if the American people weren’t at risk from an unstable Afghanistan, he would withdraw troops immediately. This once again makes clear the U.S has no interest in the Afghan people and their long-term welfare.

I’m not a pacifist. I believe that protection of innocents may sometimes require the force of arms to prevent an active attacker from doing harm. But the U.S has done much harm to the people of Afghanistan, with little done to improve lives there and no long-term strategy to maintain any gains that’ve been made.

The U.S does not deserve to be in Afghanistan. The U.S does not deserve to be the world’s policeman. The U.S has failed and continues to fail by the moral standards that govern internal matters in the U.S and other developed countries.

Nobody expected it. The money was on the No vote. But the Swiss confounded the world and embarrassed Europe, of which they are occasionally considered a part. They voted to ban the construction of minarets, the towers that adorn Mosques. The usual PC reasoning is given by proponents: the minarets don’t fit into the classical Swiss skylines. The truth is more plain. The Swiss want to keep Switzerland Swiss, whatever that means.

As a moderately hard-line Atheist, I’m split on the issue. Right? At least it stops the spread of a religion which, it can be argued, is practised in a more regressive form by many of its adherents than is Christianity.

No, I have absolutely no divided loyalties. The ban is quasi-racist, it’s idiotic, and it’s counter-productive.  Not to mention the hypocrisy. First off, whatever anti-Islamic campaigners may say, it’s not just Islam that’s the target of their fury.

It’s a culture. A culture associated with people from the Middle East. It some cases, it’s a culture with values more primitive than those found in western cultures. Attitudes towards women or religious tolerance are undoubtedly prime examples of areas in which even developed Middle-eastern nations have failed to catch up with the West. In fact, there hasn’t even been any serious effort in places like Saudi Arabia.

Yet we’ve made the error of suppressing cultures we’ve deemed inferior before. We’ve done it to the indigenous peoples of almost every land on earth. The fact is it’s our responsibility to prove the superiority of our values. And that may be a painful process, because not all of our values may turn out to be superior. I’m confident open-mindedness, healthy scepticism and equal rights across the board will all do magnificently in any culture-competition. I’m not so sure about our possesionism, our greed, our indulgence and self-indulgence, or our culturally ingrained complacency towards the powers that be.

By banning minarets, we’re trying desperately to stifle that debate because our belief in our values is so shallow and insecure. We change nothing, because the demographics are still against us, Muslism populations will continue to grow (though in nothing like the numbers frenzied anti-immigration folks trumpet) and migrants will continue to desire a fair values debate. Meanwhile, we’re only undermining the basic pillars of our society by encouraging injustice, close-mindedness and constrained speech for those we consider alien.

Though an Atheist, I certainly appreciate the beauty of religious architecture. I think a minaret or two to spice up skylines would not go astray at all. And they’re unlikely to turn the children of the West Muslim overnight either.

In the States, the dichotomy is often boiled down to “conservatives” and “progressives”. Why anyone would accept being called a conservative I cannot understand.

Throughout history, when would the term be a compliment? Certainly not when women were emancipated, or slavery abolished, or equal rights granted to all people regardless of their skin colour. Certainly not when kings were dethroned. Or when empires were abandoned to their native peoples.

It is a historical point of almost shining clarity: in time, conservatives are always shown to be wrong. Sometimes they act as a useful handbrake when navigating ethically tricky topics such as genetic engineering, but in the end there too humanity shall venture far farther than even the technocrats of today expect.

When I don’t have money, I’m miserable. I feel insecure, vulnerable, at the mercy of the world.

When I have money, I have the urge to buy things. Things I don’t need. Most of the time after buying them I put them aside. Then I feel bad for having squandered my money.

If I save my money, it accumulates. I then have money in the bank, but I know how many others have nothing. I feel guilty. I know I should give to them, but if I do I won’t have money, and
when I don’t have money, I’m miserable…