The World of Nature in Man

I have never met a person who is displeased by green spaces. As a species, we take great pleasure in making gardens and parks. An extreme example is Los Angeles, a city hundreds of miles from a major clean source of water. To make the city, water was stolen from the Colorado river and transported all the way to the coast. Yet gardens abound in millions of backyards.

            Ethically, too, mankind has long recognised the care we must take of nature, and the care we feel from nature. In the monotheistic religions, the story of Jonah and the tree is instructive. Jonah, abject and abandoned on the shore, is left to suffer fierce heat. This lasts. Then God makes a tree grow near to him. Jonah feels the shade of the tree and develops a keen love for the tree and its protection. The tree dies; and Jonah complains to God for his cruelty in killing the lovely tree. Thus nature is a pivotal sustaining force in man’s life, ever present as a source of self-renewal during hardship. All that we eat and breathe ultimately comes from organic sources.

            Yet as my cousin Ewan adroitly observed, “If outside was so good, why do we make indoors?” If nature were purely a source of pleasure, man-made structures would be a bane on our existence. Of equal importance to our continued wellbeing is security. We need to be secure from the ravages of nature – extremes of heat and cold (right now, feet of snow fall outside the NYC window); disease, human and agricultural; natural disaster; and our own waste. Each culture sustains its own vision of the relation between nature and security.

            In many parts of the world, security is winning out. In China, millions have moved from centuries-old rural serfdom, suffering the most appalling deprivations, to the city. In the past 25 years, worldwide poverty has reduced by half – a substantial portion of which was in China. At the same time, more concrete has been produced in China in the last 3 years than in the USA in the 20th century. As a consequence the pollution in major Chinese cities is legendary. A more destructive impact on nature cannot be imagined – and yet at such benefit to humanity. Of similar significance is the Electrify Africa Act 2014 – the very title promises such a massive improvement in the conditions of a billion human beings.

            Discussion in the energy industry centres around resolving the energy trilemma – how to achieve sustainability, security and affordability. For example, I suspect that most eco-warriors little consider that, by prioritizing sustainability and blocking energy projects, they deprive millions of energy affordability and reduce energy security (of course the energy companies are to blame, in their view). Of those who do consider this, they may argue that the current pleasure of millions is nothing to the preservation of nature for billions in future generations. I have much sympathy with this argument, though do not find it fully convincing.

As a geographer friend at Oxford pointed out, by making more energy and providing opportunities to more of humanity, we increase the chance of developing a technology that will solve the energy trilemma. In particular, where energy is scarce, human ingenuity comes up with new ways of providing it – given sufficient support. See this video - http://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_on_building_a_windmill?language=en. Moreover, if we are to solve the problems of man-made climate change, we need the reasoned consent of all world citizens, not just of the privileged few. This needs energy investment now.

            On the other hand, many uses of energy are just plain stupid. In the height of summer in Houston, air-conditioning is so strong that you have to wear an extra layer or two. This is a ridiculous waste. You could hardly put nature at a greater distance than making wintery conditions in summer.

The ethics of using energy in other instances is more complex. Consider Wang Jianling who began his career installing toilets in Chinese apartments – a major benefit to the health of the Chinese. He thus extracted our own undesirable natures from our dwelling places. Now he is a multi-billionaire who profits from building dozens of Dalian Wanda plazas and shopping malls. Having gone through the unpleasant business of relieving human necessities, he now seeks ever more diverse ways to supply consumer wants. This consumes a vast quantity of earthly resources. But who am I to deny to the Chinese what I have benefitted from my entire life?

My attention to the Chinese has a point. The Chinese vision of nature is very different from our own and it will play at least as decisive a role in the future of our planet as the USA, and certainly more than the UK. Many (if not all) societies are having an internal discussion, often a mixture of rationality and feeling, about what world of nature we would like to see in the Anthropocene age. And undoubtedly the world of nature in each of us will play a role in the world of nature we see outside us.

I have to admit to not knowing any truly native Chinese people. My closest encounter to a proper discussion was with my room-neighbours in my first year at St Catherine’s, Oxford (‘Catz’). On both sides I had Chinese neighbours. They were third years and not very interested in talking with non-Chinese, in integrating. I felt it jarred with the communal spirit of Catz. St Catherine’s itself is beautifully integrated with nature. The floor-to-ceiling windows look out on lawns, moats, fields and trees where swans, moorhens and ducks take their leisure. The back leads out to Mesopotamia, a splendid natural area.

But my brief discussion with them about what was weird about Oxford revealed a very different perspective. They had grown up in southern China surrounded by millions of human beings. The emptiness of Oxford was to them extremely unnatural. Their vision of nature was shaped by the norm that being immersed in innumerable other human beings is natural. Of course the Chinese revere nature as much as any other society; but their perspective on how we are as beings in nature is very different from our individualistic, Wordsworth-like sense of the self alone in the universe.

Given our current stupid uses of energy, I have little doubt that each society needs to cultivate a more favorable attitude towards the environment. Some progress is underway. But a key element to progressing in this direction is to generate better visions of nature in man and man in nature. We need better rationality in discussing the tradeoffs of the energy trilemma. We need artists and writers, marketers and advertisers, in every medium to create myths that will persuade us emotionally as well as rationally of the sustenance that comes from the world outside our homes.

Family History 6: Market day in Stryi

One hundred years ago my Jewish grandmother and her many siblings lived with their parents (the Kerners) in Stryi, Galicia. From 1772-1914, this Galicia was a semi-independent province on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, encompassing Krakov and Lviv. Many peoples lived there – Stryi’s mixture of ‘Hebrews’ (35-40%), Poles (35-40%), ‘Ruthenians’ (later called ‘Ukrainians’) and a few Germans was not unusual in this ethnically diverse region.  Galicia was very poor, but people got along side by side.

In the late 19th century, Galicia’s population expanded rapidly. Stryi’s population almost doubled between 1880 (12,600) and 1900 (23,210). Galician oil was discovered in the 1870s – the richest European reserves west of Russia - but the oil was exploited too quickly, running down fast in the mid-00’s. In eastern Galicia fear of Russian annexation was a more important driver of peoples. Between 1888 and 1910 there were 260% more Polish people in Stryj, 180% more Ukrainians, and 100% more Jews.

My grandmother had bad memories of the Polish and Ruthenian nationalists who came there, many of whom had fascist inclinations. While in 1889 the Jews had about 63.8% (55,969 hectares) of land in Stryj, in 1902 they had only 20.3%, or 16,278 hectares. The numbers tell the story. Then, between 1914-1918 Russia seized Stryi twice, inflicting famine. Post-war, Stryi was briefly controlled by Ukrainians with whom the Jewish leaders sided; then part of Poland whose people reacted against the Jews. Driven by these political-economic forces, her siblings began emigrating to New York City in the 00’s and she followed as soon as she was of a suitable age (16) in 1922. Nationalism, scarcity and warfare drove my people to the ‘nation of immigrants’, the United States, and to the most diverse major city in the world.

(Two siblings remained – his fate unknown. In all likelihood he perished by Nazi or Ukrainian hands.)

Last week, Emily and I saw a wall size photo of Stryi at Ellis Island. What a surprise! It shows a lively day at the market in 1905.

We can see men and women, Jews and Poles trading together. They are selling hats and coats in the foreground, and many foodstuffs in stalls at the junction. The tradesmen have come far by horse and cart (back-right) to exchange goods at the market. This, for me, is one of the greatest strengths of capitalism – that it encourages people of very different cultures and instincts to work together to get the way of life they want.

Thus capitalism depends on identity, which shapes the form of our wants. Imagine how sad the world would be if all we wanted was x food, y clothing and z housing - a fundamental error inherent to communism. Identity also shapes what we are able and willing to supply – hence historical attacks on Jews for ‘usury’; on women for conducting unsuitable work; on all persons of alternative identity for not playing servant to the majority identity.

Alas majority identities can warp into the mask of aggressive nationalism, especially when people are driven by fear and anger at the lacerations of events beyond their control. Scapegoating and bigotism are popular nationalist pastimes. No nation is immune. This nationalism is what ripped the Jews from Eastern Europe and sent them to the USA. (This anger is driving anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK today – hence the rise of UKIP.)

I mention this in prelude to discussing the caption on the photo at Ellis Island:

Market day is Stryi, Galicia, 1905. Over 800,000 Poles from Galicia emigrated to the United States between  1880 and 1924. Large numbers of Galician Jews also left for America.

Note that the caption was written in 1990, shortly after Polish elections dramatically ejected the Communists from power in June and September 1989. It was a key time to affirm the unitary American narrative of all persecuted peoples being welcome in the US. But another interesting point is that while there were more Poles in Galicia than any other group, this was not the case in Stryi. Stryi, at that point, belonged to the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic; it only became Ukraine a year later in December 1991. It was thus politically expedient to emphasise the Polish and Jewish characteristics of the region, all streaming towards the ethnically diverse and affluent USA. (Never mind that USA imposed highly restrictive quotas on immigrants from 1924 – 1940s,) The US inspires liberty throughout the world! Just look: the Polish, like the Jews in 1948, seemed to be fulfilling Woodrow Wilson’s old project of national self-determination.

Yet while this project ensured loyalty from nationalist forces within these states, it was also a factor in Europe becoming far more ethnically segregated by country from 1945 onwards than at any time in the past. The rearrangement of European peoples by the major Allied powers post-war was an even more important factor. In a strange way, Hitler achieved his objective of a more ethnically homogenous Europe by driving nationalism to such an extreme that it was thought that moving people was the best way to silo nationalistic violence.

Apart from the Balkans, the Galicias of the past were no more. The Nazis killed almost all Jews who remained in Galicia – including probably the aforementioned siblings. The post-war settlement drove all the Poles westwards into modern day Poland. Stryi became a heartland for nationalists in the Ukrainian republic – people who my grandmother loathed. The Soviet Union only intensified the deprivation of the region – such that it will take a long time for western Ukraine to recover, if ever, from the corruption and self-limiting aspirations of the Soviet regime. And without dynamic businesspeople, the rule of law and well-regulated transactions it will never do so.

An Appetite for Masks

Masks appear in our lives in many ways.

For some, the mask is associated with the Carnival. By putting on a mask, the carnival-goer sheds his inhibitions and comes into greater unity with his tribal or animal side. For example in Walcott's 'Mass Man', a clerk becomes a great lion; within a "gold-wired peacock", a man; Boysie with mangoes on his chest is Cleopatra! The mask thus serves to transform and reveal an alternative side of our being. Halloween, with its emphasis on witchery and supernatural beings, is perhaps the most recognised white/Western version of this.

For others of a more saturnine character, a mask is a means of social control, of displaying authority in new forms. The fun playful side is the Venetian style masked-ball, which is contiguous with the previous version of masks. But the darker side is the mask of authority, of officialdom: - the teacher who disciplines his students; the policeman who kettles the protestor;  the lawyer who stops illegal downloading; the neighbour who, needing a good night's sleep, asks for the party to be shut down. Maybe each of these figures has some empathy with the forces of revelry and freedom; none wants to attract resentment; but each recognises the greater loss that comes with encroachments on civility and order in the public domain. Suppressing their fun-loving side, they impose restraint.

 I've recently become fascinated by the theme of masks. I am currently acting with a drama club - something new to me. Unlike my fellow English students at Catz, many of whom were somehow involved in drama, I was never drawn to the stage at Oxford - it didn't chime with my sense of self. This self always sought authenticity in people. It is this same reverence for truth and accuracy that has drawn me to the profession of the law. But in my role as tutor I have come to see that professionalism entails wearing a mask. Sometimes to act in the best interests of my tutees I cannot show them my honest feelings - of anger and disappointment - or must do so only by flashes of lightning that wake them up - and then control those emotions so as to steer them towards a successful course of action. And in applying to become a solicitor, promoting myself as a solicitor, I always found it difficult walking that line between being myself and selling myself as an accomplished professional with whom clients will want to work. I have found participating in the  club useful for welding together these sides of my persona.

In the process I have come to realise that any person of ambitions must try on numerous masks before they succeed in life.  It is part of growing up. Infants play at fort-da - will mummy pick up my bottle if I push it off? In doing so they take authority of their needs over their carers, and initiate that great process of command-control that ripples throughout our lives in a range of situations where the hierarchy or horizontal relationship between two people is being established. The teenager muses on their future - and plays at being a lover, a public-speaker, a writer, a party animal, a sportsman - each with their own narratives and rules of command-control. The profit-motive instantiates a relationship of procurer and provider: the procurer says I want this and the provider says - of course your wish is my command; the provider must forbear and suppress any rebellious feelings they may have to satisfy the needs of the procurer and obtain their money. In an ideal employment environment, people would move into those jobs which cause them most pleasure and least suppression into a mask; but numerous discussions with friends and familiars shows that this is not always possible, and many end up in jobs they despise and careers they hate. I have made the utmost endeavours to avoid this situation for myself but it has come at some cost to other aspects of my life.

Indeed throughout my life I have tried on masks. My oldest brother made it a habit of his in my pre-teens to make up a seemingly infinite and inescapable variety of names for me (he mellowed as he got older, and I later saw that this obsession of his was a strange sort of brotherly love). Each corresponded with a different aspect of my being; the moment I transcended one flawed vision of myself, he would make up an account for another. It was carnival for him, but somewhere between a strange dream and a nightmare for me. It drove me to excel intellectually, to outmanoeuver others with the quickness and variety of my thoughts, to escape entrapment in a narrow form of thinking. But it came at some cost to my self esteem in other areas of my life. With such bewildering belittlement it could be hard to see myself as having a singular authority. Rather the forms of authority within me existed on a contingent basis in conversations with friends, family, and other familiars, and in my academic achievement.

In my literary, musical and cinematic tastes, I have always had a taste for personae. My brother also introduced me to the joys of underground hiphop. Having been hooked on Eminem, I came to see that there was a whole tradition of adopting personae within hiphop that led to an extraordinary imaginative richness. In film I loved Bergman's Persona, and never fully understood those who dismissed the film with - it's so obvious the nurse and the actress are becoming the same; that's not the point; it's about how relationships change and mould us so that we form new rigidities of character with new people, and form identities shaped within that relationship such that two people can almost become symmetrical. And in teen years in poetry, I loved Browning's dramatic personae and Donne's satirical and romantic masks as urbane parasite or meta-physician to a dawning relationship - their musings on desire and being desired.

I also have a strong taste for satire - this year I have been reading and re-reading the major works of Swift, some poems of Gay and the Musil's The Man without Qualities ('TMWQ'). Each takes it as given that the singular authority of the self does not exist in a fixed state, but rather various drives towards power and greatness, or love and desire, shape the outward forms of ourselves.

In  TMWQ, there is Moosbrugger, the serial killer who may lack the neccessary mens rea to have murdered so often; he in turn raises questions about the persistence of intentionality in man; for instance about the philosopher-businessman Arnheim who is by turns lover, industrialist, intellectual, hidden oil-man, military propagandist and peacemaker. The incompleteness of these personalities raises larger questions about history - about how the first world war could have come about when noone anticipated it, and noone intended destruction on that scale.

Thus the masked dimension of our personality calls into question the very stability of society and civilisation; that the humanist mask of authority we all present is not just a fashion and a phase that will eventually go the way of the Roman empire. After all, post-Renaissance European-style civilisation has only been around for what 600-700 years, and the Romans managed a similar slice of time.

For now I am content to develop my long-held dream of being a solicitor. An ancient profession - acting to structure people's relationships and  dealings in a way that will ensure long term stability - in a way it is the craft of making acceptable terms on which people of different wants can continue, hopefully maintaining peaceful masks all the way through their relationship. 

The conflict between human rights and environmental rights

In short:

Without decent economic conditions, it is too difficult to incentivise people to uphold the institutions that enforce human rights. Therefore, in order to have the same human rights as us, other cultures must have our economic conditions and technology. Yet the modern liberal human is dependent on a technology that is anti-environmental. Moreover, even to get to the slightly cleaner technologies of the developed world, it is hard not to go through a period of much dirtier technology. Look at the environmental protests of China, and see the irony of the growth-environment dilemma.

Human rights are preferable during my lifetime. Should I overcome my myopia?

Long version coming soon.

What good is guilt?

You might say you feel guilty because you feel you wronged others. Guilt encourages you not to wrong again or even to rectify that wrong. So guilt serves to punish, to rehabilitate and to restore. It is your internal penal system.

Also, guilt deepens our sense of belonging to others by forcing us to consider others’ perspectives.  Paradoxically, guilt bonds us together by forcing us to confront the bitter loneliness of our own singular conduct.

But what if you were wrong to feel guilty?

Then you are inflicting pain on yourself unnecessarily. You are a masochist. What’s worse, the sadistic pain-inflictor is also you, yourself. Moreover, rather than binding you to others, your guilt is driving a psychological wedge between you and them that need not exist.

So the questions remain:

Should I feel guilty?

Must I feel guilty?

The questions guilt asks of us are difficult to confront directly. Consequently many view others’ ethics as perverse. If we err too much towards guilt, we never take risks, or indulge in ultimately positive behaviours. If we err too much away from guilt, we exonerate ourselves from behaviour the reasonable man considers blameworthy.

From the banker to the mother, this dilemma faces us all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4b0HYxOSvI

Under Earth - the source materials of civilised life

The Russian Orthodox Church used to spread a superstition among the peasants. They would say -

Never dig down into the earth. The more you dig the closer you are to hell!

It was probably just a superstition. By making them afraid of the ground underneath them, the church reinforced peasant's sense of the cosmic order. God in the heavens, the devil below.

But a subtler thinker might realise that this injunction is anti-technological. The majority of materials of cities and modern living are made from materials extracted from under the earth's surface. If we had never been a digging species, there would have been no bronze age, no iron age, no industrialisation; no concrete, oil, plastic or computer chips.

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Like a modern pilgrim I had an interesting conversation on the road to Jerusalem. My mind was already impressed by the sun's heat which beamed with the intensity that another age or person might consider divine; I was also impressed with the modern Hebrew in the airport, finally seeing the language of my religious upbringing come to life.

But this Englishman sitting next to me on the bus impressed me in a different way. He was an engineer who had come to analyse the ancient water systems under the Old City and elsewhere in Israel. He and his team believed they could be study the ancient technology and develop applications for modern supply. After all, water security is still an issue even in England (hose pipe bans, etc).

My researches reveal that these ancient tunnels are approximately three thousand years old. Back then another culture dug down and tapped a key source of life - water.

In a mutable universe, a reflexive, self-aware species would look to secure control over all the resources upon which its survival depends. Even less intelligent species, such as the beaver, control their environment to increase security. The beaver builds its dams; this creates a water barrier about their home and wetlands for a new ecology; the barrier prevents predators and thus secures the beavers. Yet whereas the beaver builds the dam instinctively, man digs with a purpose.

The earth promises water. With purposeful work, the earth yields water.

Our species takes dominion over all the things of the earth. This extends God's promise in the first chapter of the Torah "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth."

Whether one believes in gods/God or not, one must acknowledge that gods'/God's presence reassures believers about the promise of things (and this could also be said of non-monotheistic religions); it reminds us that our attitudes towards materials is deeply infused with a sense of purpose. I believe that none of us can entirely get behind or beyond this underlying power to attribute our purposes to outside matter. Without it, we would not be able to survive in the way we do.

(We have stories about this. Moses in the desert striking the rock with anger and it yields water. And God is angry with his anger, at Moses's skepticism towards God's instructions and never allows Moses to enter Israel the promised land.)

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Anthropologically, our digging is also significant. I learnt in Israel that studying burial rituals - are the bones carefully placed? - tells us a lot about the symbolic value attributed to death by cultures. In fact it is an early marker of culture.

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Nowadays our digging is much more complex. Water is relatively cheap; we devote our most highly engineered digging for more expensive substances, such as oil.

I remember at one law firm an Australian associate showing this picture of a massive oil rig (a comparable image would be http://bit.ly/12hfuSC) and saying "Isn't that a thing of beauty?" And my initial reaction was, well, not my idea of beauty - kind of monstrous gargantuan construction. But then I thought about it some more - the amount of effort and ingenuity that went it that. The sheer human willpower and work and careful execution and planning; the astute advice necessary to put together such an intricate vast construction. What an impressive mass of material! How daring - to venture into the ocean and build this extracting machine upon which man can live. It was one of those duck/rabbit moments.

Family History 4: My Last Visit to Susan Church, My Granny.

Entering the room at Walburton, I knew there would not be many chances left to visit her.

It is always strange to think how a life shrinks in the 'tract of time': - one day a woman is the wife of a blind man, an energetic mother of four, a co-owner of a relatively large estate with a vegetable patch, chickens, fields, woods, owls, wildlife, a world in a world; a later day, the same woman is sitting in bed, can hardly leave it; people visit her and then disappear from her recent memory, even if one hopes, somehow, your presence was remembered. And then, at last, shrinks altogether, becomes less than a full human being. The trace of her spirit lingers in the memory of the living, in the expression of her personality inherited by her descendants, in whatever way she is recorded in the life of objects, and possibly no more than that.

It was with this prospect in mind that I wanted to hear from granny about her life, what she could remember of it.

We began by discussing her success at vegetable and gardening contests. How it was unfair on her competitors really; because granny always had the garden space and the resources to outgrow their vegetables. She showed a benevolent look of glee, because she had won; and because life was an uneven playing field in which to win.

Thoughts of the vegetable patch couldn't help take me back to my childhood when I had enjoyed Southwood Lodge (my grandparents' place). Grimmard, an odd job man who helped out, built a treehouse with a swing in the woods [above ordinary ground]; where my brothers used to play and I used to watch and observe, for I was a little bit afraid of thrusting myself into the world.

So I spoke to her about the treehouse and the swing. And she said she remembered ..

"and wasn't there a stream, and sometimes you'd make it across and sometimes you wouldn't. And if you didn't make it across, well you'd take a splash and just get completely soaked through.

But that was half the fun of it! If you didn't sometimes fall in, it wouldn't have been nearly so exciting. Oooh yes my brothers and I used to swing across the stream....

Of course, It was a great advantage being a girl in a family of boys. It made you tough."

This is not a wholly accurate memory. There was more dialogue perhaps, and the conversation certainly continued (discussing how 'wet' she found the other girls at school, going forward to the her schooling in Switzerland, to being a nurse, not much beyond because that was too close to remembering my grandfather).

But that was the most significant part of the conversation to me. It seemed to me that swing was a very physical metaphor for something that enters every part of our experience as agents in the world. In order to take an action, we must have ordinary faith that we have the capacity to do what we are at that moment doing. A loss of faith in our ability to act is a loss of will altogether. And it may be that we are going to make it. It's the risk that makes it worthwhile. Without the risk, the act would be pointless.

So it makes me think - I must build my ordinary faith;
even if, for me, faith in the divine seems likely to be untrue to the actual state of affairs in this world.