READ MY WORK

Ideas Above Our Station
new collection of shorts, one of which was written by me,
http://www.route-online.com/routev7/page.asp?idno=292

Nine Stop Trip
even newer collection of shorts, all of which were written by me,
http://chipmunkapublishing.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=65

I am pretty fucking miserable today. Not in the grandiose, suicidal manner of earlier in the week, seemed to have got a bit more of a handle on that now, (thanks in no small part to many people's kind words of support for which I thank you all ;) ) no I'm just fed up.

My chest is really hurting again today for no good reason and being stuck in the house all the time is really starting to get on my tits. Something v cool did happen yesterday though that picked me up a bit. Received an email out of the blue from a mate I'd thought I'd lost contact with about ten years ago!

Turns out my mentalist Californian cyber chick as was is now a Californian wife and mother of two, still pretty mental though by the sounds of it! (hello there if you're reading this ;) ) So that was pretty cool, well timed too.

Anyway I was tempted to write a post about Bliar finally fucking off but after watching about ten minutes I decided that I was already sick of people banging on about him and that I didn't want to add to the melee that is no doubt making his head swell even further as you read this.

Let's just say this, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out Tony you utter shit and hopefully we'll see you in the Hague one day soon to answer for all that blood on your hands.

Instead I thought I'd distract myself by writing up a post I've had planned for ages, nice and abstract about the effects of technological 'progress'. And so here are you three:

homo urbanus

According to a recent article in the Economist(1) at some point over the coming months humanity will finally reach the tipping point wherein for the first time in our history more than 50% of the human race will live in an urban rather than rural environment.

For the first time the majority of us will live in man made environments rather than our 'original' natural habitats. Now many would take this as a positive sign of progress, of the advancement of the race and I have to concede, city dweller that I am, that it is not necessarily a bad thing in of itself.

What concerns me however is the inherent assumption that underlies this opinion, namely that technology is always better than nature. It's worth bearing in mind that when the urban environments we're talking about here are not, for the most part, the great shining cities we like to get all misty eyed about when thinking of human progress.

What's tipping the balance are the vast and increasing numbers of people living in abject poverty amidst gargantuan megaslums as it is no longer safe, viable for them to live in more rural areas. This move has less to do with dragging us all into a golden age of silver towers and more to do with industry and warfare displacing whole populations of people.

Be it by choice or compulsion, more and more of us are insulating ourselves from nature, from the 'real' world and wrapping ourselves in a pretence of our own design. I've written in the past that a fundamental floor in democracy, (and most other social systems,) is that people are detached from the consequences of their actions.

It's a limitation of humanity that we cannot feel the same about something by hearing about it as we would by experiencing it. Now apply that to our relationship with this planet which, as much as people may like to scoff at hippies such as myself, is in fact the only tiny fragile bubble within which we can exist in the entire known universe

Is it any wonder that we fail utterly to recognise the damage we are doing or, more importantly, the potential we are wasting when we have so removed ourselves from nature? It's worth remembering that this shift in social circumstance has happened in the relative blink of an eye.

For the vast, vast majority of our existence mankind has had no choice but to be unavoidably connected to the natural world around us. A deep and detailed understanding of where our food comes from and how everything fits together and impacts on one another has been, until recently, an essential survival trait.

Hiding behind our technology however, ignorance has now become possible. And this is the point, we like to think of ourselves, and of our 'progress', as being a gradual accumulation of knowledge.

Day after day, millennia after millennia, we're gradually adding to a vast stockpile of information and building from it. Is this actually the case however? How long would you survive without modern amenities? What would you do if you fell and broke your arm without doctors and hospitals?

The argument would be, I suppose, that this knowledge is now superfluous, free to be replaced by more important things, like how to text and order things from the internet. Again though there is a disturbing assumption behind this seemingly acceptable answer.

The assumption is of course that our technology and societies are indestructible, that they will be here forever. This is an understandable assumption of course, given that it has been effectively true of our original environment for most of our existence.

Anyway, next time you're cursing the weather as an alien enemy invading the smooth running order of our society maybe it'd be worth questioning which was here first and which, let's face it, will be here longest.

drugs glorious drugs

Now I've written at length before about how great I think drugs are. While I do have deep and detailed arguments(2) to back this up I like to express this opinion in a more flippant and controversial manner simply to drive back against the anti-drugs rhetoric and propaganda that swamp modern society.

Basically as I've researched and written in the past, drug use is an inherent part of human culture and was, I believe, the catalyst through which we evolved from animals to people.

Drug use was one of the most fundamental ways in which we connected with our environment and with ourselves. Before the written word, (see my last post for details of the 'mirror of the self' properties of writing,) the only way to gain anything approaching an external perspective on ourselves was to change our perceptions.

Besides just enjoying getting fucked up, drug use played an essential role in shaping and our maintaining our society. Hand in hand with our withdrawal from nature has been our rejection of drug use.

Vast sums of knowledge and experience regarding drug use have been brutally exterminated moving us back to a level of understanding probably lesser than that of prehistoric man.

Instead we have replaced this direct connection with ourselves and the planet with systems of social control based on the imaginations of individuals.

which brings us nicely onto....

sun worship

Now few things are seen as more primitive than worshipping the sun as a god. The idea conjures up images of people with flint spears in animal skin loin cloths and rough stone monoliths. A dim and distant age, utterly alien and removed from our civilisation so noble and advanced.

Looking at it objectively however it's not quite as ignorant as it first appears.

Personally my own 'religious' or 'spiritual' faith lies in humanity. I don't believe in gods or souls or spirits, I believe in people, here and now, and what they choose to do to one another.

If you are going to project your faith onto some external body however i think you could do a lot worse than the sun.

I've written many times that I believe that religion is responsible for more pain, death and suffering than pretty much anything else there has ever been, and that the damage it does infinitely outweighs any positive benefits it may well have.

The main problem with religion, it seems it me, is that there is simply no room for manoeuvre. It's the ultimate get out of jail free card for any argument. The response of 'because god says so' cannot be rationally argued with.

Of course everyone's god is different and says different things, yet because they are god they are infallible and so cannot be wrong. So much conflict in the world today comes down to this fundamental disagreement about who god is.

Now when you look at how people's ideas of god have formed you generally find that they have been shaped by cultural and geographical history.

Now it seems to me that one benefit of worshipping the sun is that it is one of very few things that is universal to all humans. It's real, it's right there for everyone to see and share.

Also, again taking a footing in solid reality, the sun actually is the source of all life. Even those rare sea creatures don't directly take life from the sun take it instead from super deep ocean floor geysers fuelled by the molten core of our planet.

That molten core was formed as a by product of the formation of the sun. It really is top of the tree for absolutely everything that is, ever has been or ever will be.

Finally, one thing that we get very excited about with our technological advancement is the shrinking of the world. The fact the people anywhere on the planet can read my words here is cited as a sign that we are conquering our world, gaining a global view and thereby stepping up.

The thing is that within that we dismiss the sun as a ball of burning gas and so don't really recognise it.

In fact, by recognising and valuing our relationship with our star our ancestors, knowingly or not, were taking their place not in the global scheme of things, but in the solar system!

Would it really be any crazier to worship the most physically significant and universally recognised physical object in the know universe than to worship some unseen magical being who appears differently in the imaginations of each believer?

It would certainly make for a more peaceful world I'm sure.

Anyway, in conclusion, and for the benefit of those of you still locked into the whole polarisation game, I am not for a moment suggesting that we should cast off all our comforts and achievements and go back to living in caves.

I'm simply suggesting that there are many things we could make great use of and many problems that could be solved by repairing and maintaining the relationship with our planet that we've so recently turned our backs on.

Technology is great, I write online and have science masters so I'm certainly no technophobe, I just feel that it should be a tool rather than an end in itself and that we have a machine all around us that has been through so many hundreds of millions of years of 'beta testing' and refinement that we would be abject fools to ignore it's potential.

footnote

(1) 'The World Goes to Town' The Economist 03/05/07

(2) Find my article 'Prohibitive Costs' in the tags list for a full breakdown of my position here.