SOYLENT GREENBACKS

A blog out of the blue. I just chanced on the linked video, and thought you – all of us – really ought to take a thoughtful look at it.

This is like a door in a horror movie that an innocent passer-by inadvertently opens onto a charnel house. Except this door opens onto the real world. Our real world. The real world that sustains us. The horror is reality.

Do you recall the 1972 movie “Soylent Green”? It was set in a future in which the human population has far outstripped natural resources, humanity is crammed into megacities, farms are under armed guard, the living wonders of nature only exist on celluloid, played to pacify the sick and dying, there is no room left to bury the dead, and food consists of government-processed pellets of soy and lentils – a different color for each day of the week. Tuesday is Soylent Green day. But Charlton Heston discovers the real source of Soylent Green – the bodies of the dead, ostensibly sent for cremation, but secretly converted into urgently-needed food! At the end of the film, dragged away by the police from yet another food riot, he raises a bloodied hand, shouting above the din “You gotta tell them! Soylent Green is people! Soylent Green is people!”

The movie explores no further. Perhaps we are to assume that the truth will out, and moral indignation will put a stop to this outrage. But if the truth were known what would we, could we, in fact do? Starve on Tuesdays? Would we not, rather, turn a judiciously blind eye?

Well, that moral lapse seems somewhat tame seen from the perspective of 2011...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPGWc0eNfpE&feature=player_embedded

Pablo

OBL is dead - Again

The CNN and the BBC both concur that Osama bin Laden was a figure of historical importance. Wherever possible the dates of birth and death of personalities deemed of historical importance are recorded. The implication is that these dates are themselves of historical importance. For one thing, they establish beyond reasonable doubt the non-involvement of the concerned party with events which occurred before they were born, or after the date of their demise.

David Ray Griffin is an indefatigable and skilled researcher* who has spent the last decade revealing truths and exposing falsehoods (to anyone disposed to listen) in connection with 9/11, on which subject he has written many books. One of them concerns the likely date of death of Osama bin Laden - on or around 13 December, 2001. OBL was an extremely shadowy figure. Not only his whereabouts, but even events in which he was allegedly involved (such as 9/11) have largely been the subject of conjecture (OBL twice denied involvement in 9/11, and the FBI admits it has no evidence to arrest him for this crime). Consequently, that mystery, or at least contention, should surround the date of his death is perhaps not to be wondered at.

All second-hand information passes through a social filter before being accepted as the truth by any given society. Lacking direct experience of an event, the quality of a fact depends on the quality of the authority. The higher the authority the less evidence needs to be produced, and the fewer questions can be asked. One in absolute authority would be under no obligation to produce any evidence whatever, or to respond to any questions.

The information supplied in the attached essay is in every way better grounded in objective evidence and believable testimony than the reporting of OBL's alleged death in the mainstream media over the last few days. Its only defect is that it lacks the latter's claim to being an accepted social authority. (CNN's claim that genetic identification has been obtained raises more questions than it answers, and OBL's remains have been, we are told, irrecoverably disposed of). The authority we have invested in our mainstream media is, it would seem, close to absolute.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15601

Paul

* (There are actually 2 minor errors in the attached. "Pakistan" is mentioned twice in one sentence - the second mention should read "Afghanistan". There is also a date error, where the report of OBL's kidney failure apparently occurred prior to the event itself. I think neither mistake detracts from the overall soundness of the writer's conclusions.)

BEAUTY

I was moved to write this blog entry by the title to the Notes, to Lecture 59 in the Philosophy series of The Teaching Company, 2004. The title read

"AESTHETICS - Beauty Without Observers."

How could beauty exist without someone to see it? Why would anyone deem such a philosophical position necessary?

So, first (to please Gerry), a definition –

Aesthetics – a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty. That branch of philosophy which deals with questions of beauty and artistic taste. (The New Oxford English Dictionary)

Beauty, it seems, is a little hard to define, hence the need for a discipline - aesthetics - to do the job for us. Is beauty then even real, or is it some figment of our imagination? It cannot be touched, tasted, or smelled. It has no mass, extension, or velocity. By these measures, says science, it has no objective existence. However, according to the philosophy of realism a thing exists if the world cannot function normally without it. So, what might our world be like without beauty? Well, I thought at first it might look like a cross between Manila and the industrial north of England in 1900 on a rainy day – you know, colorless, disjointed, dispiriting and grimy, with flaking paint and broken windows. But actually that’s not so much an absence of beauty as a description of its opposite, ugliness, caused by overcrowding, poverty and neglect – the other end of the aesthetic scale, but still part of it.

A world without any aesthetic scale would be something slightly different. Such a world would, I imagine, be entirely utilitarian, a sort of Communist or maybe Fascist utopia dedicated to the efficiency of production, and to nothing else. It would be run by dull-suited bureaucrats who never smiled. All buildings would be rectangular, all city layouts rectilinear, and everything would be painted an institutional grey. All would dress identically, with just two hairstyles – one for men and one for women. Makeup – an unnecessary adornment - would be unknown, as would jewelry and indeed any kind of fashion, or fashion accessory. There would be no art, no music, and no pageantry. Sculpture would exist, but only in the form of grey monuments to leadership, conquest, and production. What festivals there were would be military in nature and precision, completely lacking in color or variety, consisting rather of interminable marches with rhythmic percussion as accompaniment – the only form of music and “dancing” deemed sensible. Food would be nutritious, but bland, the diet rotating on a fixed schedule, and invariably served in rectangular, polystyrene containers with recyclable plastic cutlery, plastic being the most ubiquitous material next to concrete. People would be ciphers, identified by numbers (their Maximum Leader would, I suspect, secretly refer to them as “digits”) and work nine to five without exception in grey cubicles in featureless, grey, office tower blocks. Private cars would come in three models – Small, Medium, and Large. All would be painted black. Efficiencies of scale would be maximized. All domestic animals would be confined to factory farms, and farming, like industry, would be in the control of massive machines. The countryside would be covered with large, rectangular fields for growing staple grains. Mountaintops would be flattened, and valleys filled, to regularize the flow of water, the planting of crops, and the straightness of roads. Forests would all be of the plantation type, with trees planted equidistantly, in rows. Gardens would be devoted exclusively to the growing of vegetables.

Yes, I think that’s more like it. Whew! Sounds a lot more like grim reality than I had expected. Still, man cannot live by bread alone, and perhaps I have made my point; if it ever needed making, that beauty is real enough.

But what is it? Because the troublesome point is, if beauty is undefined, or undefinable, merely whatever you personally happen to like, then it lacks that essential element of objective agreement that science needs to pronounce something real; something we can all point our finger at and say “that is what we mean by beauty”; i.e. something that exists independently of the observer; something that’s out there. If an assertion – “That vase is beautiful.” – is to be rationally justifiable to the logical positivists among us, it must be scientifically verifiable, or amenable to logical or mathematical proof. Failing that, beauty is held to be a mere figment of each person’s disconnected fancy.

Thus, to preserve beauty, whose existence none of us doubts, Plato insisted its essence must not depend on any percipient, but on a higher, disembodied ideal (Diotima, in the Symposium), and 2300 years later G. E. Moore found it necessary to make the similar claim that if “the beautiful world is in itself better than the ugly” (and he too agreed it is) then beauty must be at least to some degree independent of human existence (Principia Ethica, 1903 - both quoted in those Notes).

The principles of aesthetics, then, aim to rescue beauty – undeniable as it is – from the illusory world of the merely mental and subjective by putting it on a firm, objective footing, by making it measurable, and thereby accessible to science, which, by its own estimate, is the study of what is real. Beauty then becomes a property of certain two-dimensional surfaces (e.g. paintings), three-dimensional objects (e.g. sculptures), and wavelengths and forms (e.g. music and light shows) and everybody can breathe freely again.

On one thing I think we all agree: beauty, like truth, is unequivocally a species of good (“the beautiful world is better than the ugly”), while in the medieval conception of things there is beauty in goodness. Either way, beauty is on a scale, or hierarchy of value.

But hang on a moment! Our subject-object metaphysics - the dualistic cornerstone of Western thought - holds firmly to a scientific tradition of value neutrality. Values, being indefinable, are quite explicitly illegal in the hallowed halls of science. So, having safely installed the essence of beauty in the domain of the really real, the question then becomes, can any hierarchy of values, of quality – of goodness or badness, beauty or ugliness – be inferred from a purely objective world, a world without observers, a world which science unequivocally declares is “value free”? What does it mean, from within a strictly subject-object metaphysics, to say that the universe, or even part of it, is intrinsically beautiful?

I would submit that it means, literally, nothing whatever. If we accept a primary division of the world into subjects and objects, value cannot be thereafter derived from a disinterested observation of “facts”. Facts are always selected on the basis of some preexisting hierarchy of values supplied by us, and never the other way around. Facts cannot be appreciated – i.e. noticed - without the imposition of these preconceived qualities. Beauty is value through and through, and value cannot be defined without killing it.

Put another way, “value” and “object” are contradictory terms. The latter is definable, and therefore scientific, the former is neither. If beauty is objective it disappears into the flatland of value-neutral science, which can’t tell the difference between babies and bathwater. If beauty is subjective it retains its value – but thereby ceases scientifically to exist.

We are forced into this paradox by the demands of our dualistic reason, which insists that only that is real which can be measured. If beauty doesn’t inhere in objects, then it doesn’t exist outside our minds, which is to say, according to science, it doesn’t exist period. To be considered real, our mythos says, truth must be independent of what anyone thinks about it. And this must apply to beauty, or beauty is a chimera.

But is it not the case that a world shorn of observers (subjects) is, by definition, a world without quality? What do terms like “better” and “worse” mean apart from our needs and desires? What might an objective world look like? Could one even conceive of such a world?

Well, I suppose it might look a bit like the second description I wrote at the top. Sort of colorless and flat. To drive home the impossibility, or at least the insanity of such a world I want to quote from Robert Pirsig. He begins by making the point that at any given moment there is an infinity of data, like a whole beachful of sand, impinging on our senses, …

From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it… We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.

The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it the more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two are alike. Some are similar in one way, some are similar in another way, and we can form the sand into separate piles on the basis of this similarity and dissimilarity. Shades of color in different piles – sizes in different piles – grain shapes in different piles – subtypes of grain shapes in different piles – grades of opacity in different piles – and so on, and on, and on.

…it’s necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing the figure is not to see the landscape at all. [Last italics mine – PH]

(Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, pp 75-76. Corgi 1976)

Pirsig is saying that objects cannot exist without subjects. What this means for aesthetics, the philosophy of beauty, is that – contrary to what Plato and Moore assert – beauty cannot exist apart from the one who appreciates it. The two are indivisible. (To make this earth-shaking point clear Pirsig goes a great deal further than I have space for here.)

One thing that emerges from our review of the history of the aesthetic is the unsurprising discovery that the standard of what constitutes beauty varies from culture to culture, and evolves over time. The aesthetics of ancient Greece reflect their preoccupation with all things classical and intellectual, their need to analyze and categorize according to form and proportion, while those of medieval Europe (as yet ignorant of ancient Greece) reflect their preoccupation with morality, their need to conform to rigorous standards of ethical behavior. In other times and places standards of beauty have varied to a similar or even greater degree – viz the piercing and plugging of the lower lip of the women of certain African tribes, originally to make them unattractive to the slave traders, but eventually as a sign of beauty. I also recall Jacob Bronovski scoffing at the “passionless painting” of the East, in his The Ascent of Man. William Blake, the mystic, wrote that “Exuberance is Beauty”. All this points in a very different direction from that of an immutable standard of the beautiful, namely, that, au contrair, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.

There is, then, a large social component to the appreciation of beauty which the Greeks seem to have missed, and we along with them, and we don’t have to venture far to learn why.

They said that Athena was the daughter of Zeus not from intercourse, but when the god had in mind the making of a world through a word (logos) his first thought was Athena.

(Justin Martyr, 2^nd century)

Not so. The Greek logos - reason - evolved out of the Greek mythos. It did not spring, fully formed, from the brow of Zeus. What the Greeks (and we) accept as hard, objective reality is actually a hierarchy of values built on eons of shared cultural experience, and this includes science (Quiet please. Screams of dissention noted). The world we see is not objective. Never was. Never will be. We select what to believe in based on the values we already hold, and call that the real world, and indeed that world is real. It’s just not the only real world.

No man is an island. We are social beings. That’s part of our reality. It’s language that makes thought possible, and language is a product of social interaction. Social values are hard-wired into the world as we perceive it. Reality must be shared, or it’s counted insanity. Are you still with me? A very convenient science fiction though it may be, there is no objective world; no world “out there” that’s the same for everyone. There is only value, most of which is shared, giving the illusion of objectivity because everyone we trust agrees with us about it. It’s the social agreement on what is real – and what is beautiful – that gives the illusion of objectivity, an illusion outside of which lies infinity in every direction. The absolutes we assign to the experiences we deem important are in fact everywhere, in everything.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

(The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake)

To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.

(Auguries of Innocence, William Blake)

But of course we can’t handle that. We have to narrow it down, as Pirsig notes. And so we create a mythos, a world view that unites our group – a tiny fragment of all that’s possible, all that’s going on - and we call it reality, and defend it tooth and nail against all who question it.

Beauty, first, is about perceived value. Aesthetics cannot be reduced to a science. It's appreciation. It is simply meaningless to talk (as Moore does) about something beautiful but as yet unappreciated, and possibly never to be appreciated. Beauty, precisely, must have an audience, a beholder, or it is mere nothingness.

Oh dear, here come the protests: “but what of the girl, shielded from society by her parents until presented to the world at the age of eighteen and pronounced a stunner? What of the long-lost Renaissance painting? What of Yosemite before Lewis and Clark? Did they only become beautiful when human eyes beheld them?

Of course they did! Hello? Man is the measure of all things. We have to be! Beauty is neither to be found in the object alone, nor in the subject alone. Beauty is a relationship between the subject and the object. It occurs between the subject and the object, at the point at which they meet. Beauty is not a thing. It is an event.

Maybe it’s infinity that we have intimations of in the “danger and power” of the sublime remarked on by Edmund Burke. Great beauty is transcendent. It takes us out of ourselves, makes us forget who we are. But all that is not to say that great beauty is objective. It is we who appreciate it, depending on our capacity, transcending ourselves in ever more widely-encompassing embrace (to use one of Ken Wilber’s favorite words), enfolding and augmenting all that has gone before in our culture to experience wider and wider vistas of aesthetic awareness. In this interpretation we are not mere observers, cut off from the beauty we encounter; rather, we’re participants in its expression, lighting rods for the value which illuminates our world.

Pablo

___________________

With humble apologies to Robert Pirsig, whose philosophy – the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ) – inspired this blog (and most of the preceding). It’s a radically different way of seeing which yet leaves the world as it finds it. Nothing changes, and yet everything changes. Subjects and objects still exist, but as different levels of value. It clears up a lot of paradoxes (which perhaps we can take up another time) that the subject-object dichotomy generates and can never resolve.

Rereading his two books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Lila, to prepare this blog, as well as his notes to Lila’s Child, I jotted down many quotes which in the end I didn’t use. Here are a few of them –

Scientifically speaking, in the real world nothing is better than anything else.

Scientific laws without people to write them are a scientific impossibility.

All scientific knowledge, including knowledge of objects, is subjective knowledge. This knowledge is confirmed by experience in such a way as to allow the scientist to generate a supremely high quality intellectual belief that external objects exist. But that belief itself is still subjective.

The observation itself creates the intellectual patterns called “observed” and “observer” (object and subject). How could subjects and objects exist in a world where there was no observation?

There seems to be a materialist assumption… that there’s a huge world out there that has nothing to do with people. This is a high quality assumption – but it needs people to make it! We have never heard of, nor will we ever hear of anything that is not human specific.

The idea that something existed before we became sentient did not exist before we became sentient. Thus, although “common sense” dictates that inorganic nature preceded ideas, this “common sense” conclusion is itself a set of ideas. This “common sense” is arrived at through a huge web of evaluations of various alternatives. To evaluate is to prioritize values. The fundamental reality is not the common sense or the objects and laws approved of by common sense, but the approval itself and the quality that leads to it.

Subjects and objects are different levels of value, not expressions of independent scientific reality.

Quality can be recognized, but never defined.

Quality is apprehended by direct experience only, and not by reasoning of any kind.

MYTHS

I want to start this blog post with a declaration: nations are built on a sense of pride, or they are not built at all.

I shall shortly be participating in an interesting play by Floy Quintos - ‘Fake’ -which explores three quite recent attempts to create – that is, to manufacture - Philippine history. One of these was the fabrication, by one Jose Marco, of a supposed ‘Code of Kalantiao’, in Aklan province, allegedly dating from 1433. Another involved the creation of a ‘lost Stone Age tribe’ in Mindanao, the Tasaday, by Manuel Elizalde, while the third was the conjuring up of the Marcos medals for alleged World War II exploits in Luzon. All three attempts were later exposed as fakes.

It’s easy to dismiss these inventions as the products of insecure individuals anxious to create hollow monuments to themselves, but this is a shallow criticism: an insecure ego in search of admiration does not hitch its wagon to a national star that has not even risen! There is at least some nobility in the attempt to raise national self-esteem, however that may be accomplished.

The really damning criticism, from the Western viewpoint, was that each involved the manufacture of false evidence for the purpose of deceiving the public. This, in Western eyes, brought more shame on this young nation than its supposed insufficiently glorious past. No sane person, we would say, creates historical events out of thin air, pretending that facts are whatever you want them to be!

In Fake, American historian William Henry Scott relentlessly grinds down each of Jose Marco’s fabricated ‘facts’ until he reaches this culminating climax –

SCOTT There is no evidence! There is no Code of Kalantiao, Mr. Marco! There is no code because he never existed!

Characteristic of one less wedded to objectivity than his guest, Marco’s first defense is not to marshal more facts, but to appeal to Scott’s sense of propriety –

MARCO You are challenging me in my own home!

When this argument is brushed aside his next defense is to summon supporting authority –

MARCO The historians believe me!

To which comes Scott’s swift, academic rebuttal –

SCOTT They haven’t done their homework!

And then Scott voices possibly the core reason for his revulsion at what he considers Marco’s unconscionable perversion of the truth –

SCOTT …Think of all the fine young Filipinos you have fooled! The students of this country believing in a lie.

But to this comes a most unexpected riposte –

MARCO Not a lie, sir… The truth.

SCOTT Define truth, Mr. Marco, because you and me… well, We’ve got different definitions of that word.

MARCO … The truth is a flicker of light we ourselves make in the dark night of our souls. We grope in the dark, wanting light so badly that this… this flicker will just have to do. We will it to become the truth.

SCOTT Blinding you.

MARCO No sir, not blinding. Illuminating our way… We needed to be proud, sir… A proud nation of free men, with codes of law, with heroes… What would you know about not having a past to cling to, a past to tell us who we are and why we should be proud…

SCOTT But it is not the truth, Mr. Marco.

MARCO Then, sir, it should be.

              [Excerpted from ‘Fake’, a play by Floy Quintos.]

Pride, like charity, begins at home. I am inextricably committed to my own existence, of which my sense of nationhood is an extension. What I value is what is best for me. “I and mine are best” is a value hard-wired into all of us, and thus national pride, in a nutshell, means “My nation is best”. This sense of intrinsic worth is as essential to the creation and preservation of the nation state as it is to the daily affirmation of our own existence. Nations, like people, must assert themselves, or perish.

Scott berates Marco for teaching historical falsehood to the future leaders of his country – its students – as if objective facts alone would suffice to perform the essential job of nation-building. But to what external reality can national pride be anchored? We should be very careful of where we stand before we start hurling missiles at the patriotic flag wavers of other countries. A senior Bush aide, generally believed to be Karl Rove, told author Ron Suskind weeks before the 2004 elections "We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality." Both Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal defended the demonstrable lies they told about events in the Second World War – events which led up to the creation of Israel - in exactly the same terms as Jose Marco in the above-quoted fictional account. Said Wiesel 

"…some events do take place but are not true; others are [true] - although they never occurred." [LEGENDS OF OUR TIME (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968)]

Does anyone seriously claim that the history taught in schools – or for that matter anywhere in the world - is the unvarnished truth? What might the unvarnished truth consist of? There is an infinite number of facts from which to select what is to go into the history books, or onto DVDs, but a very limited amount of time available to absorb it all. To have an unbiased historical understanding we would need to know everything. This is not just impossible, it’s literally meaningless. Perspective – viewpoint – is essential to meaning. Where shall we start? What shall we include? What omit?

There has to be a narrative. Historical events are not chosen at random. What, then, will be the guiding principle behind the narrative that we choose? What, in fact, is the purpose of writing history in the first place? Jose Marco, Karl Rove, and Elie Wiesel know the answer, and it isn’t what our scientific upbringing tells us to expect. It is that history is there to make us feel good about ourselves as part of a larger cultural grouping. There is absolutely no point in teaching a national history that makes us ashamed, unless our purpose is to destroy the culture upon which that history is based. And to claim to teach a history that’s “objective” – that is, one that is based on facts – is disingenuous, or at best naïve.

A plague has descended upon us in the West, and its name is objectivity. Value cannot be derived from a study of objective “facts”. Facts are selected – are you paying attention? – on the basis of their value to us. Facts do not generate values; we have the entire train of events backwards! If, as it is said, history is written by the victors it is because they must feel good about what they have done. They select and interpret historical events so as to generate this result. 

Subsequent historical revisionism does not present a “more objective” picture, since it must face the same infinite mountain of possible facts as did those whose interpretation it seeks to supplant. It, too, must select. It, too, must develop a narrative. The meaning that allows it to do this comes from the value system behind the writing, and the resonance that the result finds with its audience depends on their receptivity to the writer’s theories. None of this – none of it – is deducible from the material world, from the world as object.

Jose Marco would readily have grasped this point. We, with our scientific upbringing, not only have the greatest difficulty in doing so, but – using the very same in-built credo that I and mine are best – scoff at his Third World lack of grounding in reality, feeling, as we do so, the swelling of that very same pride that we would deny him. Why? Because we claim to be objective! We claim thereby to have direct access to the truth!

Not for as long as our egos, our desires, are involved, we don’t. And it is precisely our egos – our needs and desires - that cause us to select one set of facts over another, even as we falsely (or merely blindly) claim objectivity in making precisely this selection.

“But,” I hear you say, “Marco – and Elizalde, and Marcos – fabricated history! They didn’t just select and interpret facts, they created events and histories out of whole cloth!”

And what, I counter, have we done? Our national histories are nothing if not exercises in self-aggrandizement. Note, I did not say “nothing but”. We should not belittle this effort. This exercise is an evolutionarily necessary boot-strapping operation as we laboriously build our way towards the understanding that we all are brothers. But you can’t miss out any of the steps. To transcend national pride you must first believe in it. To get a foot on the first rung of that ladder was the mission of Marco, Elizalde, and Marcos. To undercut that effort with well-meaning appeals to objectivity is to misunderstand the primary purpose of historical interpretation, which is first and foremost a matter of the heart. (To be sure, we may rise above this to study history as academics, but this is merely to enter a new battlefield, where egos clash over theories, rather than over territory.) As Karl Rove said, “We create our own reality.”

This activity is universal, and is how we build our historical ”myth” *. But in case you think we’re above all that, I invite you to listen to the linked video (below) for a small sample of history-currently-in-the-making among some of our Western democracies. As you watch the video, ask yourself what is fact and what is fiction. According to William Henry Scott you should have no difficulty distinguishing between the two, yet what comes across clearest of all in this video is the robust way in which all appeals to evidence – to facts – are resisted by our political leaders and opinion makers as we chart our course into the future. History – our history - is quite clearly being manufactured, right now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UntixeRiEK8

Pablo
___________________________________________

* Where I use the word “myth”, in the video clip Anthony Lawson uses the word “legend”.

CARE DIVAS

.
If the West thinks it knows anything at all about the Philippines it’s, firstly, that Filipinos make great house helps, hospital staff, and care givers generally, and secondly that they are among the happiest people on the planet. These two traits are not generally seen as either logical, or connected, nor as reflecting deeper values; they’re simply the way things are – just as Germans and Scots make good engineers, the English are administrators, and Jews run the banks, the newspapers, Hollywood, and Congress.

And so it is that I find myself – after 30 years on and off (ok, mostly off) the stage in Manila – in my first Philippine musical, and also my first acting endeavor with the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA), and I am once again, rather forcefully, being brought into close contact with these two traits, both in the title of our musical - Care Divas - and its subject: Filipino care givers in Israel, who moonlight as nightclub entertainers, i.e. stubbornly engage even while overseas in their two national pastimes: looking after people and being relentlessly happy.

“It has been suggested that the Philippines be understood less as a single nation than as a collection of South Sea islands.”

“ Gore Vidal once remarked that South Sea islanders exhibit just two emotional states; happy, or puzzled.”

Putting these two statements together I feel a thrill of recognition.

Thirty-six performances are scheduled, which is a long run by Philippine theater standards, and in fact the longest stage run I’ve ever participated in, and as the production unfolds I have plenty of opportunity to ponder anew these two traits in particular, and the Filipino character in general.

Let me begin, then, by declaring that the Filipino aptitude for care giving is part and parcel with their considerable diplomatic skills and indeed skill in human relations generally, such as their phenomenal ability to recall names (something which puts Westerners such as me at a distinct social disadvantage). All this, in turn, comes from a tendency to put people before things (as opposed to the not uncommon Western tendency to do the opposite). To be sure, many Filipinos are venal to a high degree, but whatever materialism they display is not philosophical. The world of objects is not as important, or real, to them as the world of feelings. Worldly wealth, like life itself, is here today, gone tomorrow, so why not enjoy it? To hoard money – in fact, to hoard anything - fatally hinders the flow of life. Spend it! This is nothing if not a sharing culture.

Ricci has just given me a makeup kit, something which every self-respecting gay possesses, and no self-respecting hetero does. I gratefully accept it, along with a pair of white shoes from Ku. Vince is going to burn me the tracks from his musical score of our movie of a few years back, La Visa Loca. A despedida is being held for a group of PETA balikbayans, and I find myself invited. A few days later there’s a birthday party. Ah, the social whirl! “We’re not always like this, you know,” warns Maribel Legarda, the director who never sleeps. But they are.

I find displayed in Care Divas not just a different language (it’s 90% Tagalog), but a different ethos - what you might call the ‘center of gravity’ of the culture. This is predominantly romantic, as opposed to classical; skipping effortlessly over the surface of life, rather than sinking teeth into it to determine its underlying structure (as we tend to in the West). Filipinos do not dwell. There is a distinct refusal to remain serious for more than a few seconds, or to ponder current affairs if they pose a hindrance to present happiness.

I attempt on several occasions to engage a backstage audience with my views on 9/11. Boni moves away. CB declares that she tries not to think about such things. The others listen politely. No-one attempts to advance the conversation.

Romanticism does not analyze. Its preoccupation with surface appeal manifests in the arts - beauty, dance, music, singing, painting (sculpture also, but not where it analyzes underlying form). Its caricature would be wide-eyed innocence, or perpetual credulity. It is, perhaps above all else, uncritical, and hence unselfconscious.

The costume parade, in which John’s extravagant costumes are gleefully tried on by the cast and photographed for the program, takes seven hours! They all revel in it, oblivious to the spectacle they are making of themselves. No! Delighted by it! I watch the chunky Jason, calves broad as shovel heads below his sequined gown, clump heavily up the spiral staircase to the dressing room in 4-inch heels. Dudz, in contrast, is tall and slender – too slender, as it happens, but a bit of padding at the hips fixes that little defect almost alarmingly well. He alone looks, frankly, ravishing. Then there’s Phil, the authentic female executive power dresser - with the rich, baritone voice. Ricci, his abundant flesh bulging through every opening offered by his too-tight dress, is resplendent in ostrich feathers. His lips are encrusted with blue glitter, his eyelashes as big and bright as a butterfly’s wings. He looks like a pregnant peacock. “This is shameless vanity!” I chide. “I know!” he agrees happily.

Talented or not, no Filipino can resist a karaoke microphone. They’re not showing off. How could they be? They mostly sound terrible! No, they’re unselfconsciously expressing themselves, as every creature has a right to do. Hens cackle and frogs croak, and no-one laughs at them or jeers them off the stage.

But this cast is talented! Ricci’s voice is incredible. During the lapel mike check he playfully reaches for a high C at a decibel level that would blow the speakers if the technician wasn’t ready. And Vince’s music! It fluently captures, all of it, the mood of each scene for which it was set. “And he works so fast!” CB tells me. Melvin, the lead, cries night after night exactly on cue, singing the poignant final song through his tears in a miracle of breath control. None of this talent is flaunted to the slightest degree off stage. They’re just regular guys, or rather, gays.

Another aspect of romanticism - this love affair with surfaces - is a preoccupation with celebrity, in marked contrast to the cynicism prevalent in the West (cynicism is all but unknown in the Philippines outside the ruling class, and maybe not even there).

After each show we line up in the foyer to thank our audience, and they return the favor, mobbing us with their digital and cell phone cameras, girls tripping across with little, mock-shy steps, to be photographed with these celebs by their friends, for Facebook. My fellow actors of course take it all in their professional stride, but I with one of the humbler roles feel like a star!

The romantic outlook also expresses itself in the use of language. In contrast to Western classicism, where the play script is sacrosanct, there’s a huge amount of ad libbing in Philippine theater. Initially approaching this phenomenon from a Western perspective I manage to convey my apprehension to Maribel that the musical is going to get out of hand and degenerate into twittering, meaningless repartee, with ad libs building on ad libs until the original meaning and thrust of the play are lost. She politely notes my concern.

Two weeks into the production the ad libs have indeed proliferated. But so have the laughs. A Filipino friend buys 11 tickets. Afterwards he tells me the show was absolutely terrific, wants more tickets, and asks to see the script. I confide that most of what they’ve laughed at isn’t in the script. “Ah! That explains it!” he declares. “It came across as so wonderfully spontaneous and alive.”

Later I admit to Mikou, one of our backstage crew, that I still don’t understand many of the Filipino jokes in the show, and we agree that the humor of another culture is usually the last barrier to fall in the understanding of a foreign language.

“In the Philippines,” she explains, “the humor often lies in the telling of the joke – in the way it’s told; the pauses; the emphasis. While in the West –”

“A joke can often be read as effectively as listened to,” I finish for her. Structure again; the pale cast of thought. Cerebration vs spontaneity. Of course the distinction is only valid up to a point, but…

Catholicism, as we all know, dominates the country. On opening night I listen to an undercurrent of criticism of the tendency of the born-agains over at Trumpets to interpret every twist of fate as God’s intervention, which leads me to wonder if PETA, long regarded as a hotbed of socialism, also coddles a cadre of avant guard atheists. But no, the tradition at every acting company with whom I have performed that there be a short prayer before each show is followed here as religiously as everywhere else. Accordingly, as the chimes sound to call the audience to their seats, our merry band stands in a circle, holding hands, and one of the group is called upon to voice a suitable impromptu prayer. The format invariably involves a request for the success of the show, and an enumeration of those areas of the production that the one praying feels need the Almighty’s particular help and guidance, with requests that He assist in their successful execution.

Can they really believe they’re talking to someone “up there”? My concrete world view cannot admit to this. What it really is, I finally tell myself, is an exercise in unselfconscious mindfulness – reflecting on the needs of the show, rather than on selfish concerns. Yes, that makes sense. That at least I can live with. But with each passing show I sense my own turn approaching! This is not a role in which I shall be comfortable, yet it’s one which my fellow actors all assume with ease. What shall I say when my turn comes? Oh dear! I cannot in honesty say that I have “a relationship” with God, and my Western upbringing has made me profoundly uncomfortable with publicly talking to a God I cannot see or hear. How am I to address the group in a way that will both remain true to such convictions as I have and satisfy the participatory instincts of my fellow actors?

They are going with the flow and I am not, I remind myself. They are at one with the group, rather than separate egos vying for attention. Thus, they have no difficulty tapping into the group psyche and speaking frankly from the heart. I, on the other hand, will have to screw myself up and think and think about what to say well ahead of time, so as not to be caught flat-footed and tongue-tied when the dreaded moment comes. The result is going to be rehearsed and false – the very opposite of what the prayer and the whole spirit of the occasion is all about. Arrgh!

But I am mercifully distracted from my self-concern by two sights –

Good grief! There’s Jerald, possibly the most convincing in his gay role, being collected by - his girlfriend? And all this while I thought… I mean, the high heels, the mincing steps, the…? The guy’s an absolute genius!

Oh, and for heaven’s sake will you look at Ricci! He’s painted large nipples on his rubber falsies. Priceless!

Someone's throat is cleared.

“Paul, would you care to lead the prayer today?”

THE TOWER OF BABEL

I quite often hear it said that, to reach the truth, what we need is a skeptical mind, or, as Dr. Judy Wood puts it (in relation to the 9/11 event), to "question everything and everyone." 

On the face of it this might seem a sensible way of arriving at the truth, but on closer inspection I fear it's just as divorced from reality as that other pithy little apothegm, “‘Assume’ makes an ass out of you and me” (because everything, when you come right down to it, is an assumption). Paul Craig Roberts seems to have a better handle on things when he writes

The notion that "we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead" is an extremely romantic and idealistic notion. I have seldom experienced open minds even in academic discourse or in the highest levels of government. Among the public at large, the ability to follow the truth wherever it may lead is almost non-existent. (“Why Propaganda Trumps Truth”, Sep 15, 2009, Information Clearing House)

Nevertheless – and with apologies to Paul Craig Roberts, whom I greatly respect and admire – I suspect that even this statement contains within it the belief that following the truth “wherever it may lead” is at least possible.

If you, dear reader, are also a member of the public at large, then it should come as a relief to you to learn that it is not, actually, possible either to question everything, or to follow the truth wherever it may lead. Reality simply isn’t set up like that. We can certainly expand our store of knowledge by (somehow) expanding our sphere of interest, but interest is the necessary starting point of all inquiry, and interest always implies selection. Selection, of course, means narrowing our field of inquiry. If we were to question everything then we’d have to be interested in everything, and we’d settle on nothing. Our field of inquiry must on the one hand begin with some premises – some foundational assumptions which guide our search for “truth” - and on the other hand be limited to what we consider interesting. It’s interest that drives the whole thing. Without interest we’re not going to look at anything at all. 

Another scientist, Stephen Jones, (also referring to 9/11) says,

"it is an 'unscientific method' when one starts with a conclusion and then finds just those facts that support that conclusion while ignoring everything else."

Yes, we’ve all heard about “cherry picking” the data, but again, he can’t mean everything else, because that would imply that there was no selection process needed in a study of the “facts” – they would all, supposedly, be equally relevant. But data is always cherry-picked! All we mean by that term is that the other guy has selected data by a different set of biases from ours! 

I suspect that the cause of this general misapprehension – that to reach the truth all we have to do is to “keep an open mind” and “look at everything” - is an excessive faith in the power of these wretched, so-called “facts”. Almost everyone these days seems to think that “facts” are in some concrete sense “out there”, like fruit waiting to be plucked, and that all you’ve got to do is step outside your front door, reach up and there they are, ready for the taking. Nice, round, plump, juicy facts.

Oh, you thought that too, did you? Well, not to wake you too rudely from your slumbers, but no, it ain’t like that. It ain’t like that at all.

The quality of a fact, any fact, depends on what you believe. You are the arbiter of your truth. And therein lies both our difficulty and the source of our belief that the facts are “out there”. The tapestry of experience is infinite. No two people share exactly the same interests, stand in exactly the same position at the same moment, have exactly the same background, age, education, training, susceptibilities, phobias, allergies, hobbies, talents, skills, tastes, physical strength, weight, height, EQ, IQ, prejudices… I could go on and on. All these differences add up to – surprise, surprise - an often radically different selection of “facts” from the infinite ground of all being. To see all the “facts” is not only impossible, it’s meaningless. Meaning involves selection and ordering of mental contents on the basis of pre-established values. Our beliefs tell us what “facts” to look for. We then see what we believe. If you like, we tell the “facts” what to say. They do not “speak for themselves”.

In The Voyage of the Beagle Charles Darwin describes how the Tierra del Fuegians, naked savages who had never before set eyes on either white men or sailing ships, swarmed over the Beagle, consumed with curiosity over any object small enough to hold in their hands, but apparently oblivious to the ship itself, which was altogether beyond their comprehension. Robert Hughes describes something very similar in The Fatal Shore, his epic tale of the founding of Australia. Of the first encounter between white men and Australian aboriginals on April 29,1770, he writes that the crew aboard the Endeavour

… saw bark canoes, and in them blacks were fishing. The ship floated past these frail coracles. It was the largest artifact ever seen on the east coast of Australia, an object so huge, complex and unfamiliar as to defy the natives’ understanding… the Australians took no notice. They displayed neither fear nor interest and went on fishing. (The Fatal Shore, p. 53. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1987)

Do we ourselves comprehend the significance of this? An entire sailing ship, 106 feet long, escapes the notice of fishermen past whom it sails at very close range. They do not see it.

What holds a society together is the values that its members share. Without this “conspiracy” to agree on what’s out there, no communication whatever would be possible. Only through the agency of those values we agree to share can we enjoy a mutually coherent world. There is, then, an intimate connection between “the truth” and the group. Similarly, what we call the objectivity of science is embedded in a matrix of such shared values, apart from which its constructs could not exist. Facts, my friends, are agreements about what constitutes reality. And isolation in science is as fatal as isolation in society. To prosper an idea must be communicated – that is to say, agreed on. Without such agreements communication between the members of the group would be utterly and completely impossible. There would be no group; no society.

But to get from what I believe to what we believe requires a tremendous, indeed an incessant, often bloody struggle. Somehow – by hook or by crook – people have to be persuaded, seduced, cajoled, bullied, tortured, coerced, and generally made to believe the same thing, if a society is to prosper. In its most benign form this process is called “education”. Obviously the resulting world view can only be a myth. Yet the myth is taken for reality, and the true source of reality – the individual, in whom all experience resides – is only considered sane to the extent that he conforms to this myth which he has by hook or by crook been persuaded to agree to.

No man is an island. We are deeply and irrevocably communal, but there is a more-or-less constant tension between what I think and what the group thinks – the reality of the individual versus the agreed fiction of the group. Failure to communicate our beliefs is extremely frustrating. Failure to agree (agreement being what communication is) leads us immediately to anger, then rage. And rage leads to name-calling, and blows. Other people are "crazy", “wingnuts", "retarded" when they refuse to see the world as we see it – whether we're wearing our religious hat, our social hat, or our scientific hat. If ours is the majority view then we feel the strength of the herd behind us, and our righteous indignation can be very insistent indeed. When two such groups clash – oh boy! The clash between the 9/11 Truth Movement and the debunkers is little different in this respect to that between Sunnis and Shiites, or Israelis and Palestinians. Indeed, the feeling of personal righteousness on both sides is identical. Each side claims “objectivity”, each side claims to be in possession of “the facts”. Each side sees the other as stupid, or willfully ignorant, or in league with evil, for failing to agree with their myth. And this state of affairs is what we call “spreading the truth”.

“Authority” is the term we use to describe any agency that creates and maintains agreement. I shall attempt another blog post on that, but for now let’s just say that authority takes as many forms as are required to perform this function, and that in most societies authority – that which ensures that our behavior, where necessary, conforms with that of others – is pretty much all-pervasive. Consequently the activity of thinking for ourselves and questioning “everything” is a highly circumscribed endeavor. We are, like it or not, creatures of our culture.

Lacking the unifying influence of authority (in whatever form) there would be as many interpretations of reality – of “facts” – as there are people on the planet. If each of us, independently and always, in complete defiance of our social nature, questioned everything, we would be perpetually alone. If, as seekers after “the truth”, everyone went his own way and had his own theories about the world without reference to anyone else, nothing that we now share would ever have been built, or, being already built, now remain standing. We would be completely dissociated; without language; without thought. No-one could communicate with anyone else (or deem it worthwhile to attempt to do so). Instead we would have built ourselves, in effect, a Tower of Babel.

FACT and FAITH

It’s our particular cultural prejudice to believe in the permanence of ‘facts’. Facts, we say, are what is real. Facts, we aver, are ‘out there’, concrete, dependable.

But facts are not quite the hard and fast things we think they are. No-one, surely, disputes that we all see ‘the facts’ at least slightly differently. What we do dispute – constantly - is other people’s right to do so.

For societies to function there has to be agreement on what the facts are, or at least those facts that hold us together, and that’s where we exchange one problem (that we all tend to see the world differently) for another: to communicate at all, we have to agree – so whose facts are we to adopt?

Until very recently that question was answered by the received wisdom of ritual and the twin authorities of tradition and religion, all imposed by parents, teachers, officers of the law, and the priesthood. These authorities, however, have seen a steady erosion of their cohesive power with the advance of science, which, with its insistence on ‘objectivity’, has declared such sources of knowledge and forces of social control ‘irrational’. Science deals with facts. Scientific facts are objective, dependable. Traditional authority is not science-based, but belief-based, and subjective, hence unreliable.

But here’s the problem, and it’s a huge one: if we allow that the objective world of science is what is real, then the subjective realm becomes subordinate to the objective, and belief becomes merely a matter of taste. Science is then presumed to govern ‘rational’ behavior, and, with the rug pulled from under all our beliefs, we are reduced to the dictates of what is merely efficient. Such a transformation of society is happening right now, and even as we are rapidly losing our birthright we have the feeling that we no longer have a moral leg to stand on. To the extent that we now believe ourselves to inhabit an objective world we are relegating ourselves to moral paralysis.

The fact – in the sense of the logic of the situation – is this: you cannot derive morality from the objective world. Morality is values, and values, categorically, are outside the province of science. Without morality – values – no meaning can be extracted from sense data. The meaning of the term ‘the President of the United States of America’ is not objectively determinable. Pure science cannot even discriminate between the respective values of babies and bathwater. These determinations reside in us, and in us alone.

There is, then, no objective way to choose, from among different ways of seeing the world, the one that is ‘real’, since what is real cannot be separated from who is experiencing it, and where. In fact, objectively speaking, there’s no way to choose between one thing and another, ever. Different cultures are not just fanciful ways of seeing what is supposedly a ‘flat’, value-free, objective world. No, they constitute different, agreed realities that have been painfully hammered out over generations, eons, to explain and handle the world we live in.

Each cultural reality is valid on its own terms. Each is good – a word about which science has nothing to say whatever. And so it is that we all claim our own and our group’s view is the best, and hence the most real, not because it’s objective but, on the contrary, because that is exactly how it feels. In the past we simply justified this feeling of rightness by declaring that ‘God is on our side’. Today we justify that same sense of superiority by saying ‘science is on our side’ – without realizing that our precious doctrine of objectivity undercuts everything, including us.

But if we abandon this dangerous doctrine aren’t we then saying that there isn’t anything ‘out there’; that we’re simply making it all up?

Not in the sense of imagining it, no. There is an encounter with data, but the data cannot be distinguished apart from our experience of them – the two are one. We infer the existence of a world, and of ourselves, from this ever present stream of experience – a continuous process of creation occurring in us, forever in the present moment. Out of this we build up theories to explain our experience. Some of these theories stand the test of time. These are what come to be known as ‘facts’. Nevertheless, they remain theories, and about what is the real nature of the world apart from these theories we all of us must remain, forever, in the dark. Belief in ‘objective facts’ helps us in this scientific age to dispel the discomfort of this unknowing, as belief in the fact of the Devil, God and an afterlife did for previous generations.

Facts, then, are not to be considered permanent, objective structures. They are more or less fluid theories which evolve as necessity dictates. A Congolese Pygmy does not have to be a physicist to respond appropriately to gravity. He has a name for the bend in the river on which he lives, but he has no name for the river, nor needs one. He has (let’s say) a dozen necessary words for rain, but no word for snow, which lies outside his experience. For him, even more literally than for Mr. Thomas Friedman, the world is flat.

Note, what lies outside the Pygmy’s (and Mr. Friedman’s) experience has no value for him, and what has no value for him does not exist. This is extremely important for us to grasp, hypnotized as we are by the doctrine of factual objectivity (grin).

We may, from our perspective, think him (the Pygmy that is – but also perhaps Mr. Friedman) an ignorant savage, but his knowledge is sufficient to his life. You or I would perish in his situation, whereas the Pygmy thrives – as does Mr. Friedman. His interpretation of the world – the ‘facts’ which have value for him – his values, in fact – are all-of-a-piece with his environment. To that extent he is free. To that extent his interpretation of his world is truthful; and, for him, utterly factual.

But as soon as he comes into contact with people who can fly – or even just have guns - then he had better start evolving some workable theories about the larger world, or, as sure as battery chickens live in coops, he will become their slave.

Unnecessary knowledge is pedantry, but appropriate knowledge is power. Conversely, ignorance of what is appropriate is slavery – the opposite of freedom.

We in the West pride ourselves, as I say, on our ‘objectivity’. Since each of us can only believe that our own view is best, this leads us to believe that our doctrine of objectivity is the proper, the correct, the universal world view. But the cultural realities that hold Western societies together are as value-based and resistant to interference as those of Congolese Pygmies. Our command of ‘facts’ in the past mostly evolved, like that of Pygmies, through trial and error in response to our particular physical and biological circumstances. But we now and increasingly appoint specialists, duly certified by our trusted academia, to act as intermediaries between us and our environment, in every important field. Why? Because, unlike the Pygmies, our societies have grown so complicated that no-one can comprehend more than a small fraction of everything needed to run them. In the past people turned to the authority of the Church to eradicate uncertainty. Today we live in secular societies, and have put our faith in science, so we employ scientific authorities instead. But the level of faith required by us is precisely the same. We trust, implicitly, all the key figures in whom we have invested authority. We have, in a word, faith in the system, and the ‘facts’ which it supplies. We have to! We couldn’t survive without it!

And it is through these authorities, wedged between us and direct experience, that we claim objectivity! Through the mediation of experts we claim we have command of the ‘facts’ as never before! Such faith!

As of old, our faith in our system amounts, almost, to a religion. To go against established authority in any culture is to act treasonously. To go radically against the Establishment used to be called heresy, but of course this term is not psychologically respectable today, so to ‘objectify’ our rejection of deviant belief we would nowadays call it ‘delusional’. Our immediate – and extremely common - reaction to ideas which differ from our own is to pronounce those who hold them ‘mad’, where previously we would simply have branded them as ‘heretics’. The methods are as identical as the results: the erasure of other people's troublesome theories.

If an authority in a given field says that such-and-such is the case, then – unless we’re prepared to do an enormous amount of research, and then face tremendous opposition from all we try to persuade – we will accept that as the truth. And in just this way our store of ‘facts’ – the knowledge of the world we share with our group – is enlarged.

In a traditional society, knowledge (not to be confused with gossip) comes mostly from direct experience, and from our parents. In a modern society knowledge increasingly comes from mediating agencies – schools, the government, the media. We are led, even encouraged to believe that the little direct, personal experience we have is of no real value. What has value is what we are told by our authorities, who have a proper grasp of the objective world. It is, increasingly, our authorities who are in command of ‘the facts’.

Whoever controls academia, the government, and the media, therefore, controls in a very literal and complete sense our thoughts, our decisions, and our lives. It thus behooves us to know who those people are, and whether they in fact have our best interests at heart. In the immortal, though oxymoronic words of George Bush Sr., ‘Trust – but verify.’ Well, easier said than done, but to the extent that we are aware of who our authorities are we are free. To the extent that we are not aware of it, we may be becoming their unwitting slaves.