For my unborn child - a list

1 - Woody Allen, the introduction to Manhattan in particular. Your Dad has always felt connected to this neurotic...Mummy is slowly coming round...
2 - Following that, Gershwyn generally, Rhapsody in Blue in particular. See above.
3 - The novels of Aldous Huxley generally, Point Counter Point in particular. Your Dad has a pretentious literary streak.
4 - The Three Colours trilogy of movies, Blue, then White then Red, watching Red several times over a three year period. If running short on time, skip White. Your Dad has a pretentious filmic streak.
5 -  The drunk scene from Dumbo. Your Dad likes beer and elephants, preferably in that order.
6 - Whithnail and I. See above, sans elephants.
7 - Holst generally, Mars in particular. Your Dad has a militaristic streak? Not really, see points 3 and 4 applied to music.
8 - The Manifold Series by Steven Baxter. Your Dad understands if you don't enjoy hard SF. Not many people do.  Including Mummy...though I reckon I can bring her around...
9 - Beethoven's Seventh. See point 7.
10 - The usual: Catcher in the Rye, Catch 22, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1984. Steven King. Jane Austen. John Irving. John Updike. Lessons in these.
11 -  The final scene of Animal Farm. Your Dad dislikes pigs.
12 - Atlas Shrugged, skipping the interminably boring bit when John Galt extols the virtues of "Objectivism". Your Dad is fascinated, repulsed and confused by Ayn Rand. As are many others. Don't worry if you feel the same.
13 - Plato generally, Socrates Apology and Phaedo in particular. Lessons on how to live and how to die.
14 - Pointilism generally, Seurat's Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte in particular. See point....you get it. Read his bio.
15 - Renoir, particularly toward the end of his life. See above.
16 - Not bothering with Steven Hawking's Brief History of Time. Seriously. No one gets it, so don't worry when you don't either. Or maybe you will. Little genius...

Pooteeweet?

pooteeweet?

Freedom in chaos. Unstuck in meaning and free of frames of moral reference.

These old greeks and romans, terrified their short glimpse of the rational would be torn away by plague, warfare, a mad king. What comfort can be found other than in something great? A creator.

Seneca begins his treatise by arguing that there must, inevitably, unarguably, inescapably, simply must be a god.  Socrates goes happily into death, in his knowledge of a comforting eternity and just rewards. Render unto ceasar and all will be well.

Bravery is seeing the bleak and not looking away.

Why is the term disillusionment layered with negative connotation? Freedom from illusion, otherwise expressed, is clarity. Liberty from delusion.

Eyes open you see the immensity of space, and our infinite irrelevance. Nameless, you are born into whatever name you choose. Freedom, unstuck in space and time.

pooteeweet?

A few options

The stalemate: we are in need of a revolution, yet revolution is horror.

The progressive bound in paradox. Educated in economics and politics, aware of the fundamental flaws of current economic and political structures and the need for revolutionary change. Educated in history and politics, aware of the inescapable progression of revolution from ideological overthrow to death camp.

Option: alternative modes of social being exist beyond our limited politics and economics. Technology is the birthmother of some, others organic. Some borrowed. Some created.

·       Relativistic: Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space, proposes interstellar humanity, segregated into the planet bound and those who live on “lighthuggers”, ships that travel at a fraction below C. No FTL. Humanity temporally segregated, strung out between the stars, dependent on the merchantment of the void.

·       Extrapolated Relativistic: Again Reynolds, House of Suns, humanity vastly more segregated, by space and by evolutionary multi-bifurcation. The star dwellers now spend thousands of years in their ships, at C, distended through time. Ageless as the human ages pass around them, adrift as around them galactic civilisations furiously boil away from birth to culture death. Alone, amongst the songs of spaceborne humanity.

·       Quantum simulated: Addressing the question of social cohesion, direction, use of resources. How to decide as a society? Quantum computers allow multiple simulations of intricate complexity to be run, considering all potential futures, modelled and examined. The simulations are of sufficient systematic and mathematical complexity that they are considered alive. Their creators observe, using the modelled outcomes to inform their decisions, acting as custodians of this quantum simulated life. Symbiosis. But there need be no end to a sufficiently complex simulation, nested realities being fractal in nature.

·       Anarchistic: Ian M. Banks, the Culture, post scarcity anarchistic. Economic production of the social corpus is focused, lased, directed and overseen. Humans being the purpose of this humanoid pan galactica, but are also the vassals of transcendent AI Minds. A materialistic heaven, the end of war and suffering. But the vestigial carbonaceous, watched over, managed, manipulated. The playthings of the silaceous. The creators who created their own custodian.

·       Embedded: The cyborg reality, a mycelia of quantum computing material exists through all humanity, symbiotic and inextricable. Sufficient systemic complexity, a species mind emerges. The I in I, within and without us = there is no need for AI as we birth our own species being. God is in the system. We school, a swarm of mind, a torrent of life.

·       Observed: Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter, The light of other days.  A new technology = wormhole cameras, allows all humanity to be observed, by anyone, at any time. The end of privacy and revolutionary change. The end of shame = fucking in the streets, why bother closing the blinds? An extrapolation = resistance arises = those who use the wormhole tech to connect mind directly to mind. Again, emergence, the hive, species mind.

·       Fermi: We are alone. The first. The terror and freedom. The colours out of space. Again, alone among the stars. Or just unaware, mewling and blind, surrounded by grinning jackals.

More…

Oma

My grandmother died a few months ago. It’s taken a while to get used to the concept of her absence. The fact of that patient voice now silent remains difficult to comprehend.

One of the things she always said was that everything happens for a reason. I don’t know if I believed her then and I don’t know if I believe her now. She was a deeply religious person and had a strong faith in God. Not the dull Catholic / Anglican God or the handclapping God of the Evangelicals. Rather, her view of God was of an all encompassing, wise and ultimately interventionist being.

Everything happens for a reason. Towards the end, when she had to move into a home, I sat opposite her and we talked about causality and purpose. In her patient way, she explained that there was purpose but that it wasn’t always obvious to see how the connections were made. In her mild accent, eyes still clear despite the ravages of entropy, she insisted that God had a plan and that it was not always possible for us to see that plan. She said this full in the knowledge of her own limited time, which several strokes and illnesses had made increasingly apparent.

She smiled at me and said “I know you don’t believe me now, but you will” (That sounds paraphrased and sentimental, but it’s nevertheless the way the conversation went.)

I don’t understand and I dont think I believe, yet. Perhaps one day it becomes apparent.

Right now, however, I suspect it may just be chaos, barely constrained by probability.

Maybe that’s a kind of freedom. If there is no purpose, no meaning beyond a temporary inversion of entropy, then we are free to do what we please without fear of retribution. We make our own purpose, and are also wholly responsible for the causal effects of our actions.

The challenge would be to maintain that view in the face of death.

According to Plato, Socrates faced his mortality with an exposition on the nature of the soul. Socrates posited that if nature is a circular process of constant flux and change, and the alive inevitably one day become the dead, then it follows that the dead must one day become the alive. Given this circular continuation of the alive to the dead to the alive, after death the soul must transition to a different plane, a realm of clarity where it waits before transitioning back again to the muddy complexity of the real.

This concept of circularity is comforting. The concept of purpose is comforting. What I can’t quite make myself believe is that any of it is true. I miss her calm confidence in that purpose and the reassurance that it provided, even if I didn’t believe it.

Most of all, I miss that wise voice on the other end of the crackling phone line. Regardless of any greater concepts, that voice, the complexity and beauty and extent of that voice, is gone.

Why Russel Brand is not Jesus Christ

So everywhere I look amongst the good progressive netizenry, everyone seems to be reposting or commenting or flaming about that Brand interview with Jeremy "old Beardy" Paxman. The interview is worth it for the humour alone - in between railing against the failings of modern capitalist democracy, Brand manages to make doe eyes at an unresponsive Paxman and compliment the great man on the luxurious nature of his beard.

Needless to say, the interview had aroused a great deal of division. Of course, from the so called conservatives (more on that later), there are the hysterical accusations of an irresponsible advocacy of "slacker" culture, apparently especially reprehensible as it comes from a man of great personal wealth - enter accusations of hypocrisy and "he should know better".

But far more interesting is the division Brand's interview has stirred up on the progressive side of the great cultural divide.

On the one hand, strenuous calls for revolution will never fail to excite lefties - I suppose its part of the cringeworthy Marxist inheritance from which we will never quite escape. Brand's revolutionary enthusiasm must also appeal to that leftover Uni idealism that still festers somewhere beneath the professional facade, appealing like an ex girlfriend on Facebook to former passions.

On the other, there are many who reckon that his advocacy of dropping out, of refusing to take part in a compromised democracy, is a dangerous invitaton for further concetration power amongst those unscrupulous individuals who remain "in the system", providing said individuals with even less opposition as they bring their nefarious plans to fruition. Alternatively, Brand is being castigated for being unable to articulate a solution to the problems he so angrily defines.

Personally, Brand has reminded me of why, at heart, I consider myself a centrist conservative (told you). Dont get me wrong, I love a good wind farm and firmly believe that Keynesianism (both old and new) has at least some merit. I'm all for gay marriage and don't think that markets hold all the solutions. But what I am increasingly coming to believe in is that change, when it happens, wont be instigated by great and illustrious leaders. As interesting and amusing as Brand can be, he's a Baptist, not a Christ. In fact, the more I think about it, I dont think there ever will be a Christ, so to speak - no great leader un who we can pin all our hopes for much need social, political and ecomomic change.

The mark of the true conservative is a belief in the concept of change as an organic function, a process that has its roots in the simultaneous realisaton of multiple individuals at once. I'm fairly sure there are political economics/science nerds out there who can name the specific theory I am trying to articulate, but in a nutshell, its this: "You are the system, fucknuts".

Look, perhaps I'm wrong. Brand certainly has an uncanny resemblance to Aryan fantasy Buddy Christ. Still, I reckon people should stop focusing on the hypocrisies and failings of one long haired funnyman and start looking at their own compromises and allowances.

Or maybe we should just blame the banker wankers.

The involved

I watched Lions for Lambs the other day, a neat little political discussion directed by Robert Redford. Aside from the painful process of watching Tom Cruise delude himself that the repeated use of his oversize grin is somehow synonymous with talent, the film itself raised some good points.

Basically, the film follows three arcs: an interview between a young neo-con Republican (Cruise) and a liberal journalist (Meryl Streep) about a new military “strategy” in Afghanistan; a discussion between a political science professor (Robert Redford) and a disillusioned student about the merits and pitfalls of social and political engagement; and two young soldiers, injured and waiting capture by advancing Taliban forces, somewhere in the Afghan mountains.

For me, a central theme of the film was the role of the individual within the context of a corrupted body politic. A key question related to the motivations of individuals who withdraw from a social and political system which they view to be inherently corrupt and irredeemable. That is, whether laziness / selfishness / nihilism is disguised with the hyperbole of a generalised disgust at society, in order to warrant disengagement.

As a specific example, the film held that politicians are amongst some of the most hated individuals within our society, being viewed as opportunistic, amoral individuals who will do anything, say anything, if it furthers their quest for power. Assuming that these individuals are irredeemable, does this actually provide an excuse for the disengagement of those who aren’t so irredeemably corrupted? Taken further, the argument goes that those who sit back and simply say “they are all bunch of deadshits and I don’t want anything to do with them” may actually be as contemptible as the deadshits themselves.

This is all based on the assumption is that the body politic (whether you take this to be “the nation”, “western civilisation”, “capitalism”) is actually worth saving. The alternative is to suggest that the whole system is so inherently corrupt that any involvement in it is merely propping up a structure which should be allowed to collapse. Our mates with the red and black flags tend to espouse this view.

Also, there are many forms of involvement. I’d argue that the Occupy protesters are just as involved as anyone else. Protest is a vital part of social change, and some of these people are just as committed and tenacious as any political campaigner. I think the qualifier is that it’s important that the social change being advocated isn’t simply change into yet another, equally corrupt hierarchy.

Anyway, I have an obvious bias here – being fairly involved in the “system” (in one way or another), I’m likely to view it as something worth saving. It also means that I’m likely to see my own role within the system as being one that is worthwhile – the deadshit is always the guy in the next cubicle, right? Perhaps it’s also a delusion to think that it’s possible for one person to actually withstand the tension of the temptations and cynicism of “involvement” in one hand, against remaining committed to social/environmental goals in the other.

And every time I watch an episode of the River Cottage, or every time I’m lucky enough to spend some time at my wife’s family’s property in the Lower Hunter, I feel the familiar pull to build myself a hut on Walden and withdraw from the whole filthy game.

PS – don’t mean to offend those of you who are involved in politics. Or who have chosen to withdraw (though I don’t think I know anyone who has truly decided to do so). I’m just repeating the central idea of the film and, more importantly, having a general discussion about the most important topic in the world – ie, ME. Fuck yeah.

Theres probably a word for it in German

There’s probably a word for it in German – that surprising circumstance when you realise that someone whose political opinions are diametrically opposed to your own has had a political reaction which is a mirror reflection of your own.  Gegenubereinstellungpolitikspektrumbegreifen = fun with compound nouns!!

It happened to me the other week, when a mate of mine, a former young liberal and general  conservative all star, expressed a sense of disgust with the current political situation in Australia. His opposition to the current government was actually leading him to consider a move away from this country.

This was exactly the reaction I had in 2005, when working for the Democrats, after we had lost the 2004 election and Howard was voted in for another 3 years. I can still remember the sense of disgust, of alienation from my own country, of wanting nothing more than to leave for a while. Which is exactly what I did, heading off to Europe for 2 years before returning just in time to observe the whirlwind of spin, naiveté and silver hair that was Kevin Rudd’s 07 victory.

I remember watching Howard’s 04 victory speech on the ABC. I remember dropping my dacks and mooning him along with all the other pissed staffers in the room, most of whom were dealing with the confirmed reality of political demise. I remember waking up the next morning, hungover, accompanied by the horrid feeling that everything we had worked toward had been thoroughly rejected by the Australian public.

And thinking “well fuck youse all, I’m leaving”.

So now the shoe is on the other foot and the side who I am generally more sympathetic to are in power. In 2007 the sense of alienation went away and I felt like I was again moving in step with the rest of the country. But I can recognise how my colleagues on the other side are feeling, and, believe it or not, can actually sympathise.

Personally, I hope my mate sticks around. Being surrounded by people who always agree with you gets boring after a while.