Scholarly work, Easy as Pi

Good scholarly work is one of humankind’s greatest achievements but also one of the most fragile and hard to attain. It takes a vibrant society with stable and ameliorate natural conditions within which it can thrive. Beyond that basic and fairly self-evident point other things must also be considered. These things are of the human world; how we relate to one another and the physical world in which we live. The Zeitgeist of, and general level of authoritarianism of the society plays a large role. In medieval Europe for example, you could hardly talk about atheism freely and openly.

So a viable civilisation thriving in a healthy biosphere gives potential for scholarly work to arise. Though it helps inordinately if the society is open to new ideas and has a culture of debate and systematic enquiry at least amongst its elites. The zeitgeist of a society is crucial as to whether this is achievable. Also, whether it is authoritarian and whether racial, sexual and cultural diversity are accepted in turn are crucial. On a more personal level, providing you are fortunate enough to be living in such a society, you need to be privileged enough to get the education, be skilled enough, have enough time and be healthy enough to invest the energies required for good scholarly work. Even then you need to be motivated, have a routine, and be disciplined. Once you have achieved these mere trifles a healthy academic disposition is required.

Talking about the complex in a real, meaningful and constructive way requires a number of things. One definite one is to, at least for a time, suppress ego, the craving for certainty and nice clear final answers to problems. Karl Popper’s line of ‘ something that tries explain everything explains nothing’ holds true. As does that of Voltaire; ‘Uncertainty is an unpleasant condition, but certainty is absurd’. So once you’re in the position where you can do scholarly work and you are motivated and skilled enough there are still some nasty intellectual potholes waiting to catch you out. Some main ones I would highlight are that it is easy to get:

· Confused

· Lost up your own pontificatory rectum

· Be too generalising or reductionist about issues

· Make too many assumptions (unacknowledged)

· Lose your point in trying to sound clever

· Over theorise beyond what is required

· Not be clear enough in your argumentation to get your point across

I would not advocate that it is so much a case of exorcising these foibles from yourself as if they were demons, more that they are things you need to be aware of so that you can contain and restrain them, and prevent them from overcoming your work.

There, creating good scholarly work, easy as remembering Pi to 1000 decimal places.

Sustainability, the solutions...

So in my last entry I gave a nice general, rather vague aim, to connect up people’s thinking so that they can see the resources that they use and in turn use them in a sustainable way, the question is now, how on earth do you go about it?

Well, that’s a tricky one but I think that there are a lot of tips out there already and without scaremongering I really doubt we have time to be complacent. I’m generally not one to be a pessimist and we have come well rather close to Armageddon more often than we like to imagine.

Each generation has its challenges and we stand on the shoulders of giants. We have the inherited wisdom of thousands of years of what really often looks like trial and error. It is thought that 70,000 years ago we came close to extinction due to a supervolcano when our numbers came down to a few thousand. We’ve survived the Cuban Missile Crisis that was nearly world war three and I don’t think that we’re unable to deal with the next set of challenges. Though, the only reason we’re still here is due to the bravery, foresight, blood, sweat and tears of people in every generation. The threats we face now are not insurmountable but it looks like we’re in for a rough ride. You may well be wandering what on earth I’m getting at. There are of course rogue states, terrorists of various descriptions and natural disasters though there have always been dissidents and continental plates have always moved.

However, there is a new level of threat we now need to deal with. The world is now more connected than ever before and for the first time we have the case where highly complex societies, with tens of millions of people within them and the prospect of significant and permanent environmental change and degradation. We are currently in the middle of a mass extinction event and it appears very likely that the climate is going to change more drastically than it has for the past 2 million years never mind the past 10,000 years of stability we have enjoyed whilst our civilisations have flourished. We know face the prospect of the achievements of human civilisation being undone across the globe and we may only have 20 or so years of climatic stability left before this starts to occur. We can adapt to it but we need to start acting now and make very significant changes to the way we live and the very constructs of our societies to make them more adaptable and in turn more sustainable. I've had some ideas along these lines on what can be done which I'l detail in anotehr post. If you have any please do comment on my blog. For a detailed, more scientific description of what I'm getting at please take a look at the Reeth Lectures by Geoffrey Sachs.

Sustainability

The key thing for humanity in the 21st century is the notion of sustainability. Though in geological time, we, as a species have been here a very short time, what we have achieved and the sacrifices we have made are significant. By we, I mean us, Homo Sapiens, we are animals like any other but at the same time animals like no other.
We have come up with many innovations, from agriculture, to deodorant to space hoppers, some innovations being more useful than others. We have built up great empires only for them to fall and ways of life have disappeared and new ones emerge from the ashes of the old.

For most of our history, to the best of our knowledge, things have changed significantly but generally over long periods of time. Each new innovation we come up with seems to reduce the amount of time it takes us to come up with the next. For example, our ancestors, Homo Erectus used the same stone tools for a million years, it was a very long time before they had the need or the desire to come up with anything else. However, once they had the innovations kept coming and they still do.

Though by no means would I advocate that our cultural and technological evolution had some sort of plan behind it or was a straight forward process; from a chimpanzee digging for termites with a twig to a human planting crops, the rate at which we come up with new innovations seems to increase.

This in itself is not necessarily a significant thing, it after all makes sense that when you have more expertise behind you and tools at your disposal it is much easier to innovate. However, it is the way in which we use our technology which is more problematic. Though a certain amount of it is purely practical, such as the mechanisation of agriculture to feed a growing population we are also creative. We use much of our innovation for non-practical things that have other cultural purposes such as status within a society etc.

Though we are complex social beings that spend much of our time in Machiavellian power play this in terms of sustainability hasn’t mattered for most of our history. This is because we have been in direct contact with the natural world and in turn our reality is connected to it. In turn, we generally use things in a sustainable way, whatever it’s purpose because it’s right there in front of us.

The problem of unsustainability starts when we become detached. In ancient Rome for example, the desire for animals for amphitheatres led to the decimation of stocks of north African wildlife. Those in the cities wanting the animals were not linked to the animals, they were outside of their reality.
In our current society the same rules apply though with some significant differences, for example, there are many more of us and we exploit a much greater range of resources far more intensively with more advanced technology.

I seek to make no grandiose philosophical points about the nature of man, the human condition or anything like that. I take the practical line of wanting our descendants to be able to see and enjoy the diversity of animal life and human cultural diversity that we currently have. What I think is key to that is interconnectedness.

If we can make others aware of the natural world and that they are however indirectly associated with it and that they’re actions affect others then I think we can get somewhere.
I’m obviously not the first person to make such a point though I hope to be able to continue it’s message of a holistic outlook.

Gobblers!

Here is a song written on the same holiday by the whole group of volunteers on the John Muir Trust Cae Mabon Trip July 2006


Gobblers!


We are consumers, we follow every trend
Driving to the shopping mall to spend and spend and spend
We are consumers, we boost economies
Filling all our leisure hours with endless shopping sprees!
We are the gobblers! We never have enough…
We’re addicted to shopping for stuff, stuff, stuff!

WHOAH….Bin it, toss it, chuck it in the bucket!
Find my flexi-friend so I’ve got lots of cash.
Wear it, tear it – oops! I’ll need a new one!
Just a few more outfits…hoard them in the stash.

Throw away your VCR, get some DVD’s
Buy yourself an iPod, toss the MP3’s.
Rwanda, Uganda, mountain gorilla homes
Are plundered every single day to run our mobile phones.
Children work for endless hours to give us plasma screens
But don’t spill your Nestle coffee on your Gucci jeans!

WHOAH….Bin it, toss it, chuck it in the bucket!
Find my flexi-friend so I’ve got lots of cash.
Wear it, tear it – oops! I’ll need a new one!
Just a few more outfits…hoard them in the stash.

Now the desert’s spreading, the seas are on the rise
Yet governments refuse to act, they dupe us with their lies
They know that we don’t want to live without our precious cars
Or give up foreign holidays, or plans to go to Mars
Cos we are the gobblers, who never have enough
We’re addicted to shopping so that we can strut our stuff!

WHOAH….Bin it, toss it, chuck it in the bucket!
Find my flexi-friend so I’ve got lots of cash.
Wear it, tear it – oops! I’ll need a new one!
Just a few more outfits…hoard them in the stash.

So let’s just sail away on an endless garbage sea
A tidal wave of adverts – seductive fallacies
We’ll go to River Island, jump on Waterstones
Our Oasis from the Monsoon and MacDonald’s Monotone!
Cos we are the Gobblers, we never have enough
Fried by our mobile phones, our brains are full of fluff!

WHOAH….Bin it, toss it, chuck it in the bucket!
Find my flexi-friend so I’ve got lots of cash.
Wear it, tear it – oops! I’ll need a new one!
Just a few more outfits…hoard them in the stash.

If we keep dumping rubbish and don’t stop wasting soon
Our planet will descend into apocalyptic doom
If we keep being gobblers and never have enough
Pretty soon we’ll find that things get really tough
And on the day that Earth implodes – goodbye, the Human Race!
There’ll just be a faint ring tone, drifting out in space….

(Nokia tone) Duddle-er-der, Duddle-er-der, Duddle-er-der, Duhh!
(Small voice) It’s God on the phone….

(Booming voice) WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY EARTH?!!! I LEAVE YOU ALONE FOR 5 MINUTES…..(then muttering)… I just go off for a piss….(fades away)

Climate

Here is a poem I wrote on an eco-holiday a couple of years ago, I wrote it looking over an ancient woodland in a valley in Snowdonia, hopefully it illustrates what could happen if we do not act.


Climate

I stand alone in lonely lands,
Clasping a crag with crooked hands,
Perched on a rock for all to see,
With flies abuzzing by my knee.

From this rock the world I can see,
Though the world cannot see me,
Past by me flow oaks,
From sky to sea,
Past my rock, from which I see.

Up on this rock , in this land,
It strikes me the beauty I that I see,
From Scraggy mountain top to azure sea.

From this rock upon which I dwell,
I cast my eyes to the oaks that surround me,
Their wise, firm trunks bursting from the earth,
Their hand like branches reaching to the sky.

And if these wise old trees,
Stretching from sky to sea,
Could speak to me,
They may sing a requiem not a eulogy.

For in times to come,
Man, with his crooked hands,
May have turned this Eden into a hell.

Knowledge speaks but wisdom listens

What makes a human human cannot be defined in set of black and white characteristics. The concept, definition and parameters of what constitutes a species is hard to define. Nature is messy and we seek to categorise it to make sense of it.

There are a number species in addition to ourselves that are probably self-aware e.g. elephants, great apes and dolphins.
Another step down the sentiency ladder animals such as crows, wolves, monkeys, parrots, whales etc. have the same traits to a lesser extent, they may not be fully conscious and aware of others in the same way but aren't far off.

We have emerged from the messy chemistry lab of life and are the only animal on this planet that at least have the potential to be fully in control of our lives, understand the laws of the universe and use them to our advantage.

Humans are observers, like all animals we are a bag of chemicals, our personalities are a mix of environment and genetics. We observe to learn and hold together our societies and at the same time are very suggestible. Though the saying, "A certain level of hypocrisy is necessary to civilised life" (Anne Whitehead) rings true it is because it is so easy for us in our complex modern societies to become disjointed from the natural world and our human rationality in turn not necessarily coinciding with reality, i.e. chopping down tropical rainforests for short term profit.

We are now entering what has been labelled the ‘anthropocene’, where for the first time one species dominates the face of the earth and has the ability to fundamentally change life on earth. Our problem is that we’re remarkably knowledgeable these days but not very wise with the use of that knowledge. We seem to spend the bulk of our time using it to gain power over one another.

We have the ability to fundamentally change this planet and to wipe ourselves out, our future is in our hands. The key thing we need to concede is humility, it would appear to me that the greatest human flaw is pride. Pride prevents us from acknowledging our mistakes, from reconciliation and in turn increases our propensity to war and war is the enemy of nature and of man.

Will all we have died for, fought for and accomplished be destroyed by our flaws or will it be saved and grown so that one day we can truly touch the face of god? Will this day come, can we do this? We got rid of slavery, we brought down Rome, hell we built the roman empire, we have split atoms, understood the language of life, can harness the natural world to our own ends....

The one thing we can all agree on is caring for the environment; it is unlikely that the whole of humanity will ever be in total agreement about everything and it would make life less interesting if we did.
All it takes is a little humility personally and that step to understand the other.

"Faith is not certainty, it is the courage to live with uncertainty" - Jonathan Sachs

Evolution

In typing you enter a certain melodic rhythm like the one I heard earlier when listening to the birds singing and hearing people shouting in the background. Human language has far more in common with birdsong than other primate’s communication. When hearing the people shouting and the birds singing it all merged. Even though they sounded disparate there was similarity and connection. Beauty was found in the seemingly raucous verbal chaos.

Much can be said for life in general being like that, it does to an extent make sense.
It would seem that organisms in the natural world perform a function within naturally occurring systems and as those systems change so do the inhabitants of the ecosystem. Those not best suited to carrying out their functions die out, in a word, evolution.
Humanity evolved from other forms of life following these rules, however on top of our biological evolution we have developed sophisticated cultural evolution, the pace at which we culturally evolve speeding up all the time as new innovations, firstly language, then the written word and now modern mass communications increase the speed at which our cultural evolution takes place.
Humans are generally rational beings, within their worldview, the problem is that this does not necessarily coincide with reality. Humanity’s cultural evolution in addition to our genetic evolution has created problems for us.

As we humans have our creative spark, in addition to what makes us an animal it means that we have the capacity to be more inventive than we might otherwise be, however, this creativity partly caused by our complex cultural evolution could also be our undoing.
We have the capacity to create complex societies and separate ourselves off from the natural world; we can live out our whole lives and have no link to it.

When we live in tribal or indigenous societies we tend not to have this problem, as the societies are too small scale to lose touch with the natural world. Now that we have come up with large complex societies where our natural urges to compete with one another are extenuated/exaggerated far beyond what they would be in a natural setting, combined with people’s loss of perception of sustainability mean that our risk of self destruction is far higher than it might otherwise be.
Basically without our imagination we would never have developed large complex civilizations, yet ironically it is this very imagination that could be our undoing.
It does make one wander if we’ve been rather wasting our time, we might have been happier just staying in the trees.

When people talk about the natural world as if it were as far away as Neptune, I think they are barking up the wrong tree. There is only one world, this one, we live on it and are part of a natural system, if we cut ourselves off from it we in turn live in an unsustainable way. We must not look at nature on sentimental grounds for reasoning for protecting it, it is our very life support system. If anything can be said about the human race being unique it is that we may be the only species in history to wipe itself out.