looking at evil

I've sat here for several minutes now, staring at the screen, wondering what to write.

It's not that there's nothing to write about. It's that there seems to be too much to write about. Any topic I might begin with feels like the beginning of a whole journey, a commitment. Everything is interconnected, and to raise one topic feels like it must be related to everything else in order to make sense, or to seem other than merely an isolated, irrelevant interest of mine.

Yesterday I received a new book in the mail--a favorite event for me. This was a small paperback entitled Monarchy, Aristocracy and the State in Europe 1300-1800 by Hillay Zmora. Why this? you might ask.

I was led to it by a particular stream of thought. Following the stream backwards, or, I suppose, upstream: I had arrived at an interest in the idea of aristocracy or a ruling class. The notion of a ruling class seemed to have arisen from the distinction between warriors and producers or farmers. This in turn seemed to have arisen from the emergence of distinct ways of life on two different kinds of landscape: the fertile ground of riverbanks for farmers, and the arid land of the steppes for warriors, who were nomadic pastoralists. Farming and pastoralism in turn seemed to be the evolved extensions of plant-gathering on the one hand and hunting on the other. These different economic activities were respectively engaged in by women and by men, and arose in their turn from more primitive foraging and scavenging. Our early and pre-human ancestors made their living by finding plants and meat to eat where they could.

Why was I interested in all this in the first place? I was investigating the question of evil: what is it, where did it come from? Is its origin in the brutality and hard-heartedness of pastoralism, in which herdsmen round up animals and slaughter them? Exploiting the weak and dumb in order to survive--and then transferring that attitude to one's fellow creatures, and developing an ethos of superiority based on physical prowess and violence? The ruling class.

Cats prey on mice, and mice don't like it. Does that make cats evil? Do they not deserve to live too? Nature seems not to have taken an opinion on good and evil. Does that mean they don't exist?

I'm concerned about the evils of our own time, and of the past century. The rise of mechanized weapons and mechanized bureaucracy seems to have created fertile fields for evil inflicted on a mass scale. Was this inevitable? If so, why? If not, why did it happen? Why is it still happening?

Hillay Zmora, in his book, starts out by saying that the modern European state, founded on human rights and the rule of law, was born from the violence of relentless warfare that had to be financed. Raising money for war was the basis of the modern state.

Yes, I'm curious about these things--they trouble me, and I'm going to keep looking.

morphing

Something within me has changed in the last few months. It's hard to pinpoint what it is. It shows up in my attitude to various things.

One is my novel and would-be novel series. I feel a deeper sense of seriousness and uniqueness in what I'm doing, along with a reduced feeling of confidence about how to execute it. Maybe this is, in my own field, an instance of what Joseph Campbell felt to be the spiritual story of the modern Western person, the image of which was given in the Grail romances: the questing knight, plunging into the forest right where it was thickest, away from any existing track. The idea was that one's adventure would be unique, unprecedented, and entirely one's own.

Every created work is a combination of the familiar and the new. The proportion of the two is one way in which its uniqueness is expressed. But then there is the mark of quality in all artistic creation, which can be summarized as "making the familiar seem strange, and the strange seem familiar." If the artist can do this, then the whole work, in every detail, will have the feeling of freshness and originality.

I think I'm becoming uncomfortably aware of how, in the past, or up until now, I have consciously or unconsciously borrowed methods and ideas from other works, maybe in the hope of "fitting in" or being accepted. I'm feeling an increased desire to get away from that--and also a certain anxiety about how to do so.

In this blog too I feel a new uncertainty. Maybe this is like being in the Arctic, when, if you get far enough north, your compass is no good, pointing more west, say, than north--or maybe even just wavering ambiguously here and there. With your compass out of commission, which way do you go? What guides you?

Whatever it is, you're not taking responsibility for it--you can't blame your compass. So with the blog, I'm just typing what comes to mind. I feel a lack of direction, and that sense of waiting or nervousness before a new direction shows itself.

In my worldly outlook, I find myself becoming politically radicalized. I don't mean a turn to communism or anarchy or anything like that. Rather, a sense that the world situation, particularly with regard to climate and the environment, is in crisis, and in crisis a merely incremental approach is not appropriate. Vision and boldness are needed: deep, confident change. If ever there was a time for political radicalism on a worldwide scale, it is now. Nationalism, the Black Plague of the 20th century, may finish us off in the 21st.

So there you have it: a serious set of thoughts. The writer is morphing...but into what? Into himself.

one book leads to another

In my life, one book leads to another. Occasionally I might stroll through a bookstore and pick up a book that happens to catch my fancy, or find a book through some other more or less serendipitous means (I recently got the Maus comics after seeing their author-artist, Art Spiegelman, interviewed on TV), but that is increasingly unusual.

More often I acquire books as part of following a line of thought or investigation. Take Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs, a book that I recently took down from my shelf to read again. I first bought and read it in March 1997 (I inscribe the purchase date inside each book). The book, written (unusually for Jacobs) in the form of a Socratic dialogue between modern characters in New York, is, as its subtitle says, A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

I was led back to it as part of my investigation into good and evil. What's good and what's bad--and why? What exactly is evil?

In the ancient world there were natural evils--that is, natural events that were regarded as evil, such as famines or floods. To me these are more what I would call misfortunes or disasters. Painful and unwanted, yes--but not evil in the same sense as the deliberate and unjust infliction of harm by one person on another. The cruel treatment of the helpless and innocent seems especially evil. Where does it come from? Why does it happen?

Following the thread of this line of thinking back, I recall reading in John Keegan's A History of Warfare that the phenomenon of the mounted warrior arose in the steppes of Central Eurasia sometime around 3000 BC. These people were nomadic pastoralists who gained most of their living from herding and hunting animals. To round up and slaughter defenseless animals requires a certain hardening of the heart, and Keegan observes that the techniques of wrangling herds were exactly the same techniques used by these nomadic warriors in combat: driving and encircling foot soldiers, and then slaughtering them. The feeling of superiority that the mounted warrior felt over his livestock was transferred to his similarly unmounted enemies. They were weak, passive creatures to be controlled and killed for his benefit.

Then I recalled reading in Mary Boyce's book Zoroastrians that it's possible that Zarathustra, the great Indo-Iranian prophet of (possibly) 1500 BC, received his revelation of the cosmic warfare of good and evil in response to his experience of these same mounted (or in his period, chariot-driving) warriors, who mercilessly pillaged peaceful farmers on the steppes.

Another input: in Vintage: The Story of Wine, by Hugh Johnson, I read that the ancient practice of dining while reclining on couches--the eating style of the nobility throughout the Mediterranean world--was acquired from the nomadic tribes of the steppes and deserts. It struck me that the mounted warrior, that creature of the steppes of Central Eurasia, who eventually morphed into the medieval knight, was the basis of what we call the aristocracy or the ruling class. By virtue of their mental toughness and superior prowess, they have the ability and the right to rule over those who are not of their class. Farmers produce wealth, warriors take it.

These thoughts led me to reading up on the steppe cultures of Central Eurasia, but then I also remembered Jane Jacobs's book on morality. She discovered that there are two different and mutually exclusive moral "syndromes" in the public world: one which she called the Commercial Moral Syndrome, which governs the affairs of people in industry and trade; and one called the Guardian Moral Syndrome, which governs the affairs of those in government, politics, and the military.

These two syndromes are mutually dependent in a functioning, thriving society, but what is "good" in one part of the system is "bad" in the other part. Jacobs lists 15 "precepts" that make up each of the syndromes, and the first precept of the Commercial Syndrome is "Shun force". The first precept of the Guardian Syndrome is "Shun trading". Merchants trade, and it's wrong for them to engage in the coercion of force; guardians (that is, police, soldiers, etc.) use force to achieve their aims, and it's wrong for them to engage in trade. When a merchant uses force, or a cop sells things, you have wrongs such as extortion and corruption.

This is the merest outline. My point is that one book leads to another for me, a flow, like one neuron lighting up the next in a train of thought in the brain.

don't read this

Back to the grind. It's a wintry day out there: rain falls from a dark-gray sky. I lay awake for a couple of hours before the alarm went off at 5:30, so am feeling a bit unfresh.

Nonetheless it's a new week, and our health is improving. I'm almost back to normal after the heavy-duty cold that passed through our household. Kimmie lags behind me in her journey back to wellness.

Although I've been following the story of the creation of my old TV show The Odyssey, I think I will leave off that for awhile. There's more to tell, but I'm finding that I want to talk about other things again. For those of you who have been following it, thanks for reading, and check in from time to time to see when I pick up the thread.

Last night, on the CBC weekly current-affairs magazine show Sunday Night, there was an interview with American comics artist Art Spiegelman, famous as the author of Maus I and Maus II, a telling of the Holocaust story with the Nazis portrayed as cats and the Jews as mice. I've long wanted to read it (have just ordered these book on Amazon.com). I've always liked comics, and have been a cartoonist myself.

The main topic of the interview was censorship. Spiegelman, as a sometime underground or alternative comics artist, has been censored. He described an instance of censorship to do with a cover painting he did for an issue of Harper's magazine. The cover featured familiar caricatures of various ethnic groups, such as a big-nosed Jew, an angry Arab, a minstrel-show black, and others. There was also a drawing of the naked torso of a woman. The Canadian editor of Harper's asked whether Spiegelman would put black bars over the nipples and genitals of the female body, since these couldn't be shown on a magazine cover in Canada.

Spiegelman, a chain-smoker of cigarettes, laughed. He thought that the naked woman was the least objectionable thing he had drawn on the cover. He thought that the censorship bars over the nipples and genitals was a funny image, and used them for the American edition as well.

Spiegelman is articulate and, to me, inspiring on the subject of censorship. He's opposed to it in just about any form (as am I). He talked about the furor over the publication of editorial cartoons featuring Mohammed in Denmark in 2005. He, like many other people, had to find the images on the Internet since they were widely censored, not just in Muslim countries, but also in Western countries with presses that are supposedly free.

Indeed, the CBC censored itself during the furor, and even during last night's interview used a distorted graphic to "show" the Danish cartoons. Three words sprang to my mind: craven, cowardly, cringing.

I was unpleasantly surprised to hear from Spiegelman that the Canadian big-box bookstore Chapters-Indigo refused to carry that issue of Harper's (even with its decorously censored female torso). As Spiegelman pointed out, that put him in the same category as Adolf Hitler, since Chapters-Indigo also refuses to stock Mein Kampf. Luckily, independent booksellers were there to provide the information people wanted, and that issue of Harper's apparently enjoyed better than usual sales.

Evan Solomon, Sunday Night's cohost, invited feedback on the piece, and I felt moved to provide some. I wrote this comment:

Censorship is the hallmark of an unfree society. Self-censorship is the hallmark of a society that doesn't even want to be free.

Art Spiegelman was an inspiring breath of fresh air--cigarettes and all. He is a self-responsible adult speaking to other self-responsible adults. Let him speak, I say--and let everyone else speak too.

This is a topic about which I feel actual passion. The institutionalized, coercive hypocrisy that goes by the name political correctness is a symptom of a society that, as I said in my comment, doesn't even want to be free. If you can control people's thoughts, their minds, you have automatically controlled their bodies as well.

So I'm against it. The issue with the Mohammed cartoons was fear of backlash. To keep the peace, to stay safe, the cartoons were suppressed in many countries. But I hold with Benjamin Franklin:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

I'm afraid we're going to get what we deserve.

from the moon to earth

Last night Kimmie and I watched episode 4 of the 1998 docu-drama series From the Earth to the Moon--about the flight of Apollo 8 in 1968. The series, a high-budget HBO offering produced by Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer--the forces behind the 1995 movie Apollo 13--is well made and does capture some of the flavor of the 1960s as I remember it. It was a time of war, rioting, social unrest, assassinations--society in convulsions. I watched it on black-and-white TV at the time: state funerals, soldiers clubbing protesting students, endless machine-gunning and explosions in remote tropical forests--a backdrop of violence and killing against which politicians made stirring, idealistic speeches.

The series shows clips of all that, plus scenes of intense, nerdish men in rooms fogged with cigarette smoke talking earnestly about how to put astronauts on the moon before the Soviets beat them to it. At age nine, it was obvious and natural to me why "we" should be going all-out to fly to the moon: it was neat! What did it matter to me how many billions it cost? I made 25 cents a week in allowance; I had no notion of money. I loved space and its technology maybe even more than other nine-year-old boys.

I see things differently now. I'm still fascinated by space and space science, and I'm sure I'll always be interested in spacecraft. But instead of John F. Kennedy's famous speech of 25 May 1961, in which he committed the United States to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, I think of another speech, given four months earlier, by his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower, which contained these words:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence--economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

The makers of the spacecraft that got America to the moon were all leading military contractors: General Dynamics, Rockwell, Boeing. The total cost of the Apollo program was about $20-25 billion, or the equivalent of around $120 billion today. It was ostensibly a peacetime initiative, but we can't ignore that it was done in direct, stated competition with the USSR--the West's Cold War enemy--and that the technologies developed were no doubt helpful for future military applications. Plus the money-stream helped those military contractors keep meeting their very large payrolls.

I remember that Christmas of 1968, hearing the radio broadcast of the astronauts Borman, Anders, and Lovell, in orbit around the moon, reading the opening verses of Genesis. Harvey Burt, our host for that Christmas dinner, said that Mara and I would be able to think back to that day and remember where we were.

Looking back on the Apollo program and on the show last night, I think the most important and memorable thing was the awe of the astronauts when they watched the Earth rise from over the horizon of the moon. As far as I know, all astronauts have felt this awe: the feeling of preciousness of Earth, our island home in the vast, dark, frigid sea of space. What are we doing to the only home we've got?

I felt anxiety and sadness as I watched the show. Looking at the world around me, from the news on TV to the street outside my house, I find it hard to be optimistic. We take our planet for granted, and I think there will be a terrible, terrible price to pay.

helping Earth to quit

The air has turned suddenly colder. Rain started to fall just now as I lugged our recycling out to the back lane in the morning dark.

I again lay awake for long stretches this morning after 3:00. Pushing its way to the top of my list of nighttime worries is global warming, fueled by my reading of Six Degrees by Mark Lynas. Based on his survey of all the scientific literature, he reckons that in order to have a 75% chance of keeping the average heating of Earth below 2° C, net carbon emissions have to peak by 2015, after which they must continuously and quickly decline. If we fail to hold the average heating below 2°, there is a strong likelihood that positive-feedback mechanisms will kick in, causing a cascade of further upward surges in temperature to 6° and beyond, rendering planet Earth unrecognizable--and mostly uninhabitable--to those now living on it. Much of it will be arid, baking waste: like the Sahara Desert or Death Valley, or the naked rock of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. The shrunken circumpolar temperate zone will be buffeted by ferocious storms, as well as unpredictable droughts and heatwaves.

Those are just the openers; the real problems are much worse.

When I was a boy, I, like many others of my age, loved dinosaurs. I had a set of plastic dinosaurs to play with. I knew their names (triceratops, ankylosaurus, etc.), and soon I knew which geological period each came from, whether Jurassic or Cretaceous (with the odd Triassic specimen thrown in). I knew that these were different times in Earth's ancient prehistory, but I didn't know what they signified, why the periods were separated and given different names. I assumed that time was continuous, and that things just gradually changed so that one set of creatures turned slowly into another. The names were just arbitrary labels for sections of time, like the hours of the clock.

I was wrong. I didn't know that the different geological periods were separated from each other by distinct and obvious transitions. They're called geological because they show up as layers in underground rock. A thick, homogeneous layer represents a long period of time when things were more or less the same. A thin, very different layer shows a time of sudden transition. This gives way again to another thick, homogeneous (though different) layer.

Those transitions are not smooth and continuous; they are more like changing television channels: an quick disruption, followed by something completely different. The disruptions--those thin layers--are relatively sudden, catastrophic geological and climatic events that shake the Earth (figuratively and often literally) and everything living on it or in it. In the past they have been due to asteroid collisions with Earth, or massive outpourings of magma from the interior--or sometimes more than one event happening at nearly the same time. This is what is believed to have happened at the boundary between the Permian and Triassic periods, 251 million years ago. The catastrophes of that time destroyed 95% of the species living on Earth, from the depths of the sea to the highest mountaintop. The survivors were very few.

Imagine what it would take to have such a result, what kinds of cataclysm could produce such vast and total die-offs. Even if we detonated every existing nuclear warhead right now we could not produce such devastation, even after allowing for all the radioactive fallout. Indeed, if humanity were wiped out, plant and animal life might recover in the radioactive world. This is what has happened at Chernobyl in Ukraine, now a place of thriving forest and animal life, precisely because it is still a no-go zone for humans.

Greenhouse gases are a much more powerful and pervasive force than nuclear weapons for stressing the globe. For my part, I need no further convincing that we are already well on the way to the next major die-off and geological-climatic change on planet Earth. The current droughts in Atlanta, California, Portugal, Turkey, Greece, and Australia are some of the early symptoms of a regime-change that will continue to get much stronger even if we stop carbonating the atmosphere today.

And of course we won't stop today. The question is whether we can start cutting down by 2015. Due to human agency, Earth has become a smoker. Hydrocarbons are her nicotine. The voices in the halls of power have been saying that smoking is not hazardous to our health. Now, with increasing evidence that it is hazardous, they're saying that we can't quit--maybe can't even cut down. The habit is too strong. We'll keep puffing and hope for the best.

I have about seven years in which I can choose to help my species and my planet. How should I spend them?

That's what kept me awake this morning.

the sleeping dunes

More rain after a rainy weekend. Today is the last day of Kimmie's vacation. She's cheerful about it, although admits forthrightly, "I'd rather it weren't the last day."

Yesterday afternoon we spent doing errands, driving our 2001 Toyota Corolla on the wet, overcrowded streets, experiencing the selfishness and aggression that increasingly characterize our roads, and our civilization as it sinks, led by deep ruts of habit, into the tar-pit of its doom.

Strong words? I believe them.

Yesterday, on the errand mission, while Kimmie was struggling to get 5 meters of fabric at half-price in the primitive retail environment of Fabricland at Park Royal, I strayed to the Chapters-Indigo bookstore, and, browsing, actually found four books I wanted to buy. I bought two: Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (a key inspiration to my mother as she wrestles with writing a memoir of her own), and Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, a British science writer. At reading-time I started both, and enjoyed them both very much--although my enjoyment of Six Degrees was of a different sort. The subtitle of this book is Our Future on a Hotter Planet, and in it Lynas has prepared a forecast of Earth's climate in the coming century, arranged in six chapters that explain likely events as the average global temperature notches up 1 Celsius degree at a time. I'm only in chapter 1--1° C warmer--and it's already, well, I was going to say chilling.

He chose six degrees as his range because this is the range forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as probable over the next century. His method was to survey the scientific literature over the past few years on both climatology and paleoclimatology, in which researchers have made forecasts based on computer models about future climatic events, or have described ancient climatic events from warmer periods in Earth's prehistory from study of fossils and other evidence. Lynas sorted thousands of articles according to whether their scenarios represented a warming of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 degrees. He then synthesized the scenarios and drafted his book.

As he emphasizes in his introduction, Lynas based his scenarios only on peer-reviewed scientific papers, not on the works of journalists, popularizers, or advocacy groups. It's not Hollywood, it's sober, level-headed science.

And it's pretty darned frightening. Even at 1-degree warming there is a substantial likelihood that the Western U.S. may return to conditions that have existed during great droughts of prehistory. The terrain from New Mexico to Saskatchewan consists largely of a great dune-field overlain by a thin layer of soil held in place by plants. When conditions get too dry, the plants die and the soil blows away. On a small scale, this is what happened during the Dust Bowl years of 1934-40. Yes: I said on a small scale. At that time, 85% of Oklahoma's entire population vacated the state in desperation. If warming and drying cause the topsoil east of the Rockies to lose its plant cover, a mighty sea of sand-dunes will reemerge, turning the Great West into something resembling today's Sahara Desert.

This area is not densely populated--but it is populated. Like the Okies of the 1930s, those people would likely have to migrate. Where? And that area is also now a key food-producing region for the U.S. and for planet Earth. There goes one breadbasket. Who's to pick up the slack?

In the introduction Lynas talks about giving a presentation in Britain, and overhearing one of the attendees apologizing to another one for bringing him to such a "depressing" event. Lynas was shocked, because although he too finds these images alarming, he does not see them as inevitable--it is at least partly or mostly still avoidable, he thinks. If we act now.

At this moment, I feel more like his depressed attendee. As Clive Ponting describes in his A Green History of the World, Easter Island was covered with forest and populated with wildlife when humans first made landfall there in the 5th century AD. When the Dutch Admiral Roggeveen arrived there on Easter Sunday, 1722, he found a treeless rock with "about 3,000 people living in squalid reed huts or caves, engaged in almost perpetual warfare and resorting to cannibalism in a desperate attempt to supplement the meagre food supplies available on the island." Time and again, human beings have passed environmental points of no return, felling the last tree, killing the last animal.

Heading off such a course requires vision and leadership. Where are these today? The world's most powerful people seem preoccupied with thoughts like, when it comes time to fell that last tree, they want to be the ones felling it--not someone else.

I hear the dunes waking.

politics and the artist

One point I wanted to reach yesterday was to raise the question of what the artist's relationship should be to politics.

It's a complex question. My first instinct is that an artist should not really come out as supporting any particular political view or party. For one thing, as well put by my late brother-in-law the artist Fred Douglas, "I don't see why other people should be interested in my opinions." (Although Freddie was not shy about spouting his opinions at length if you actually happened to be in his company--but still.)

To me, a liberal or a conservative, or a communist or a fascist, artist, seems like a limited thing--sort of the way I feel about, say, Christian rockers. In a sense, you're selling someone else's message, and to that extent are bankrupt as an artist.

At the same time, an artist may have, as anyone may have, political views. Should one then conceal them? Isn't this just mystification--the self-conscious attempt to generate a mystique around oneself, to keep people guessing?

On the other hand, the artist is also an economic entity, someone trying to earn a living. Should one risk alienating potential buyers by exposing one's political views? I think about the Dixie Chicks, and how they landed in hot water with many erstwhile fans when Natalie Maines made critical remarks about George Bush. At the time I thought this was foolish, since the Dixie Chicks' work has nothing to do with politics; the outburst was a taking advantage of the fame of the Dixie Chicks, and the fact that the opinions would get a lot of publicity. Natalie Maines found herself with a soapbox, so she used it. But what, if anything, was the benefit to anyone?

Then again, one doesn't want to be too much of a slut. I recall Michael Jordan's infamous comment that "Republicans buy sneakers too"--invoking his role as shoe salesman to beg off helping a Democrat in North Carolina defeat the notorious Republican incumbent Jesse Helms in 1990. Of course, Michael Jordan is not an artist--but you get the idea.

Then there's the question of what is meant by the very term politics. I remember my late friend and mentor Harvey Burt distinguishing between politics in general and partisan politics--the politics of specific parties. Politics in general has to do with relationships of power between people, and therefore, one would think, is naturally open for comment by artists. And one might naturally incline toward one political or social philosophy over another. Harvey also told me, for example, that Malcolm Lowry, his friend and neighbor in the squatters' camp at Dollarton, was very idealistic about the squatter's life, and romanticized it as being a kind of Thoreau-esque statement by the Common Man against the evil and dehumanizing forces of Civilization. The squatters were the oppressed, decent, principled proletarians up against the faceless State.

As for me, I have for many years now seen partisan politics as being inherently puerile, even as I see the necessity, or anyway the inevitability, of political parties. The public statements of most politicians are embarrassing, flatulent banalities, when they are not outright prevarications or lies. If this behavior wins votes, then that fact reflects on us, the electorate: as a group we are credulous sheep, and therefore must expect to be treated as such. It's depressing to think that a candid, honest politician would be punished at the ballot box. In general, I am suspicious of artists who take partisan politics too seriously.

Can I draw any conclusions? In the last analysis, one should not sacrifice one's integrity for any reason. If you have strong political beliefs, then so be it. But I think artists should tread carefully. Natalie Maines's exclamation that she was ashamed that George Bush was from Texas was, in my view, a pointless gesture. Sincere, no doubt--but empty of content. In effect, she was using her personal stardom as a vehicle for selling dislike of the president. I support her freedom to do so, but I believe that she did no good for herself as an artist, or for society.

That said, I hold musicians and actors to a lower standard in this respect than I do writers. Mostly they're performing other people's work--other people's writing. When the performer is also a songwriter, as the Dixie Chicks are, this still doesn't make too much difference unless they deal with political material in their created work--which they usually don't. Musicians like Billy Bragg, who pump out paeans to social activism and such, I tend to lump in with Christian rockers. They're marketers of ideas conceived by others.

I suppose my advice to myself is: if you have a political statement to make, be sure it's calm, cogent, well supported, objective, mature, and wise.

Is that asking so much?

the same old dream

I've been sitting here for some minutes now, trying to decide what to write.

One of my strongest interests at the moment is the subject-matter of The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson, the book that currently attracts me most in my reading-stack, and holds me longest. It is that unusual thing for me: a book that I find hard to put down.

The book's subtitle sketches out its agenda: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. When I first got the book I flipped it open and found, at the head of chapter 2, "The Roots of American Militarism", the following epigraph:

Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican liberty.

Do you know who said this? It was George Washington, in his presidential farewell address delivered on 17 September 1796. That epigraph is followed by one from another famous presidential farewell address, given by Dwight D. Eisenhower on 17 January 1961:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

I remember seeing a film-clip of Eisenhower's speech, and being shocked that a sitting president of the United States could have such a dark and critical viewpoint of the system in which he functioned--the system which he was supposed, in fact, to be running.

With great authority, and bringing to bear a wealth of telling detail, Chalmers Johnson develops the case that since World War 2 the U.S. has been in transition from a republic to an empire. It's important to understand that he uses the word empire not metaphorically but literally. He means it.

In the U.S. itself the idea has become somewhat mainstream and acceptable since the end of the Cold War in 1991 and especially since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, especially among conservatives and so-called neoconservatives. And on the face of it, if America is a virtuous democracy, what's the harm in letting them run the world? Why not let them take on the Johnny Appleseed role of sowing justice and decency everywhere?

Alas, as Johnson documents, as nations go, the U.S. is not especially virtuous, and, increasingly, is not even really a democracy. In his own words:

In my opinion, the growth of militarism, official secrecy, and a belief that the U.S. is no longer bound, as the Declaration of Independence so famously puts it, by "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" is probably irreversible.

After a brief flirtation with international law in the 20th century, following the bloodbaths of World Wars 1 and 2, we're back to Thomas Hobbes's "state of nature": survival of the fittest, and may the devil take the hindmost. Or, as the elephant says in the chicken coop: "Every man for himself!"

The elephant in the chicken coop might seem to have the run of the place, but even chickens, when their backs are pressed to the wall, might prove to be a serious nuisance. And what's the elephant going to live on? Large standing armies are hugely expensive (the average U.S. "defense" budget has been just under $400 billion a year since 1950, measured in 2002 dollars), and eventually bankrupt even the richest nations. This is what happened to Spain in the late-16th century, the world's mightiest nation at the time. The urbanologist and economist Jane Jacobs pointed to standing armies as one of the three major "transactions of decline" that lead a society from prosperity to poverty. A large army is too expensive to finance through peacetime operations; they must earn their keep through plunder, or, as in China, being large industrial operations in their own right, with productive assets like factories and farmland.

Where is Spain today? When I visited the country in 1982, few Spaniards traveled because their employment was too low and their currency too depressed. The rest of the world--even next-door France--was too expensive for them. They're doing much better now, but they are still just one country among many, still, as far as I know, net recipients of transfers from the common kitty of the European Union.

The search for power and prestige, the mirage of security through violence--where do these things come from? Another brilliant epigraph from Johnson's book sums it up, this one to chapter 3, from Ian Fleming's 1958 James Bond novel, Doctor No:

It's the same old dream--world domination.

credit history

In my inventory yesterday of the research books I read the previous day, I left out one: A History of Interest Rates by Sidney Homer.

I think I forgot it because I have been reading (and typing) it down here at the PC, instead of in the living-room as part of my daily reading period. I got my hardback copy of Homer's classic last February through Abebooks; it is marked (discreetly) with the stamps of a former owner, the Ambassador College Library in Pasadena, California.

I first learned about this book in 1994, when it was referenced by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg in their hefty jeremiad The Great Reckoning, a bold set of forecasts based on their theory of history. This theory was centered around the concept they called megapolitics: that the ultimate driver of historical change is and always has been the technology of weapons. In the last analysis, those who make things happen have always been those who held the greatest ability to project violence. In the view of these authors, the history of civilization has been essentially the story of how governments have controlled the freelance violence of individuals and small groups by being able to overpower them. But a continuing trend, from the beginning of history, has been the "democratization" of violence: the development of ever more powerful weapons that placed ever more violent power in the hands of individuals. We have gone from spears to muskets to handguns to machine guns to high-yield explosives to "tactical" nuclear weapons. In the long run, in their view, the question is whether governments, including legitimate, accountable ones, can hold the balance of power against violent individuals and splinter-groups.

The authors acknowledge that these thoughts are not cheerful. However, when you boil away all the ideology and talk, you arrive, basically, at Hobbes's "state of nature": what we now call the law of the jungle, or, in more sanitized Darwinian terms, survival of the fittest. Hobbes saw the rule of law as what separates us from that miserable condition in which men's lives are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". But Davidson and Rees-Mogg are saying that the rule of law itself is only as good as the weapons that back it up. If the police are less well armed than the miscreants they are trying to control, then the state is lost just as surely as if its army is outmanned and outgunned by an invading force. The final backstop of the rule of law is violence.

I found their book fascinating, and in fact have read it twice. It even formed a key inspiration for another TV project that Warren and I created in the 1990s, a drama about a degenerated society in the near future (a project which has not got off the pad). For the record, I'm a nonviolent person myself, and believe firmly in the principle of negotiation rather than violence in achieving results. No matter how long it takes, agreement is a much more powerful force, as well as more humane, than simply imposing your will through violence. At the same time, we all know what happens when we operate by an "honor system" that has no one policing it. Even in a monastery, frictions and grievances arise.

The authors of The Great Reckoning were investors and investment advisers, and the book was addressed mainly to fellow capitalists. How do you make a buck in Hobbes's state of nature? One of their favorite authorities was Sidney Homer, and his monograph on the history of interest rates. When I first saw the title, A History of Interest Rates, I laughed. It sounds like a satire of dullness--a text that might be carried around by an ultra-nerdy sitcom character. Because I have long been interested in finance and capitalism, I actually felt some nerdish attraction for the book--although not enough to actually seek it out and buy it.

However, now that my own story of the ancient world is developing more of a financial component, I felt I had to get it. I've still read only the first 60 pages or so, but I find that it is even more interesting than I'd hoped. As Homer, a bond trader and partner of Salomon Brothers in New York, observes, interest rates are like a fever chart of society: peace, calm, and stability are reflected in low interest rates; and disorder, uncertainty, and fear are reflected in high interest rates.

Homer also observes that every major legal code, at least of the ancient world, from that of Hammurabi on, was brought in largely to regulate credit. From ancient times, Jews (and other compact societies) were forbidden to lend to each other at interest; loans were expected to be interest-free. Only loans to strangers or outsiders could bear interest. Eventually such rules created large financial and social problems, which were addressed in various ways.

The very word credit is related to words like credo and credible, relating to belief. To extend credit is to have faith. Faith in someone, faith in the future. Faith is the basis of religion.

My intuition tells me that this is an important theme, both for my story and for all of us.

the big lie

I'll try to get in a quick post before heading up for tea. It's already 4:00 p.m.

I've been a good lad, working diligently on my copywriting assignment. In the morning over coffee I keyed some notes from the book Uriel's Machine by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, authors of The Hiram Key. This is genuine research for The Mission, so I'm getting my mind back to that. Indeed, I worked fairly hard on it yesterday, Sunday. Kimmie and Robin had headed off, with emergency rain-ponchos, to watch the Santa Parade in Vancouver, leaving me to my quiet suburban devices. I dove back into my research, feeling just in the mood.

But I've wanted since last week to touch in on something else that came to me. On Saturday I had to return the library copy of Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks. I only made it to page 100; I'll have to put another hold on it and wait for the eight people in front of me to have a go first. But it was already absorbing reading as far as I got.

Ricks makes this point:

The Iraq fiasco occurred not just because the Bush administration engaged in sustained self-deception over the threat presented by Iraq and the difficulty of occupying the country, but also because of other major lapses in major American institutions, from the military establishment and the intelligence community to the media.

One thought that came to me was the recollection of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962 during the Kennedy administration. It is now given as a textbook example of groupthink--the psychological phenomenon of a group's subtle or not so subtle tendency to smother dissent and manufacture consensus. It seems clear that this was strongly operating in the U.S. administration--as well as its legislative branch--in the runup to the war.

But another thought was a vague memory of the phrase, "the big lie." I couldn't remember quite where I'd heard it or what it referred to, so I went to Wikipedia and was intrigued to find that the phrase is due to Adolf Hitler. They have an extract there from Mein Kampf:

[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

Ricks's book makes clear that in the runup to the war, the U.S. administration persistently and willfully overrode its own intelligence community in the matter of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The emphaticness with which they did so, arguably culminating in Colin Powell's February 2003 speech to the UN, strongly suggests a reliance on Hitler's technique. It was a big lie.

Also, on Remembrance Day I found another quote, this time from Hermann Goering:

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Again, I was struck by the resemblance to the political behavior I've seen in the last few years. Apparently, until recently anyway, it was working in the U.S.

Enough--teatime!

blood and oil

Yesterday, for me, a small cause for feeling accomplished: I finished reading a book. Usually the books in my stack of 10-15 on the coffee-table get rotated out without being finished. I realize that I haven't read a book for two months or so, pull out the paper slip I use as a bookmark (with words and definitions written on it), and shelve the book.

But sometimes I do finish books. Either they are short enough for me to make it through before the wind of my interest shifts direction, or they are of particularly hot interest so I read them straight through, or they are unfinished books that I have pulled from a shelf, my interest in them rekindled, and have picked up where I left off and read them through to the end.

This book was Blood and Oil by Michael T. Klare, director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, Amherst. I bought it last month from Amazon.com, along with an earlier book of his, Resource Wars.

Blood and Oil, while it has its flaws--Klare's writing style is flat and prosaic; it reads like a corporate report or a briefing document--is very good and deserves to be read by a wide audience. Indeed, his dry factuality helps his case in the sense that, although he is strongly critical of the American administration and its energy policies, he does not waste time denouncing them; instead he assembles facts, presents them in a neutral tone, and lets them do the talking. (In the afterword, written a year after the book's initial publication in 2004, he lets fly with more stinging direct criticism of Bush administration's dogged insistence on maintaining an attitude of dependency on foreign oil.)

The thesis of the book can be summed up simply. Since 1945, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt met secretly with King Ibn Saud of Arabia aboard a U.S. warship in the Suez Canal and, it is thought, promised security for the king's new and still poor country from outside attackers, plus protection for the king's regime from internal assault, the U.S. has pursued a policy of increasing reliance on foreign oil, and has been paying for this by arming and protecting autocratic and repressive regimes. This has resulted in an ever-escalating conflict with the people at odds with these regimes, such as many of their own citizens, and an ever-increasing flow of American blood on foreign soil.

This morning when I opened up Google News one of the lead stories was about a missile-test by Iran in the Persian Gulf, apparently in response to U.S. military "exercises" in the area. This eventuality--that Iran may disrupt the flow of oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, through which 43% of the world's petroleum exports pass--is raised by Klare in his book. One of the top priorities of Centcom, the U.S. Central Command established on 1 January 1983 with the Middle East as its area of operation, is to maintain the flow of Gulf oil. It was (and is) Centcom forces that have fought the two Iraq wars and the Afghan war. Its mission was set out in the Carter Doctrine, enunciated by President Carter in January 1980, designating the flow of Persian Gulf oil as a "vital interest" of the United States.

One big problem is that more and more countries are gulping more and more oil, and oil is not being found fast enough to slake this thirst. There will be an ever-increasing competition for an ever-shrinking supply. As this goes on, Klare maintains, persistent and escalating violence is inevitable. There is only one solution: stop relying on foreign oil. To do this will mean to drastically reduce oil consumption, which will require vast efforts at improving efficiency and finding alternative sources of energy.

Yes, environmentalists (such as me) have been saying this for decades. Now, roused by impending disaster (such as global warming), more people are growing alarmed. Still, there is a remarkable complacency in the halls of power, and a weird fixation on continuing with the same policy that was sketched out by Roosevelt: keep that foreign oil coming at any price.

I think of a quote I read in The Great Reckoning by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, about the collapse of Spain as the world's leading power 300 years ago. Finding themselves sinking in debt while spending on costly military ventures, some in government urged that cost-cutting measures be taken. But those with the most power overruled these promptings, causing one despairing Spaniard to write, "those who can will not and those who will cannot."

It sounds awfully familiar.

on dissing other people's prophets

It used to be that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel; now religion has taken its place.

This was my thought as the news stories first unfolded about the reaction of "Muslims" to the publication of cartoons in Denmark and other countries. Not many news stories provoke an emotional reaction in me; this was one. For as an artist and, more than that, as a person I have strong feelings about freedom of expression. I believe we (that is, free societies) should think very, very hard before making it any kind of crime, or sanctioning people in any way, for the way they have arranged ink on paper.

I was disappointed too at how apologetic everyone was, from the Danish government to many other Western representatives. Perhaps it was inevitable that the editor of the French newspaper that reran the cartoons should be sacked by his Egyptian-French boss, but I felt that that editor's heart was in the right place.

Of course I feel that people should be free too to protest, peacefully, over their grievances. But the appearance of masked thugs setting fire to buildings and threatening people with death and beheading and so on--well, what has this to do with offended religious values? All I could think was, "The more violence in the name of 'Islam' there is, the more telling the cartoon was."

Mohammed was a historical figure who, although revered by Muslims, is not owned by them. His thoughts, words, and deeds have had tremendous consequences for the world--all parts of it, including the non-Islamic parts--and not merely religious but political as well. If people burn down Western embassies in his name, then he has certainly become fair game for Western comment, whether reverent, satirical, or otherwise.

For me, one of the most disturbing images was from a protest march in London. The march appeared to be orderly and peaceful, but one of the marchers carried a placard that read, "To hell with free speech!" I thought, London is the wrong place for you, friend. There are a lot of regimes out there who share that sentiment; that's where you need to be.

The whole affair triggered a memory from my recent readings. This is from Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty by Roy F. Baumeister:

When people believe that their rights and their group pride have been injured by someone from another group, they are all too often ready to respond in a violent fashion that goes beyond any practical or instrumental use. Groups reflect a built-in predisposition toward a certain pattern of antagonism.

That, of course, is what we have here. The terms "cartoon" and "Muslim" become mere tokens in a conflict between groups. It is a manifestation of identity politics. "Muslims" can feel a sense of solidarity with those who share that identity and feel outrage against the Others: those who slander the Prophet.

For my part, I'm willing to identify with those who support free speech and freedom of the press.

identity, infinity, etc.

Dang. I just lost this post after writing about three paragraphs. I zipped over to look something up on Wikipedia, and got the dreaded "fatal error" message box: Firefox had made a fatal error. I was forced to close Firefox and lose my post. I had not copied each paragraph and pasted it in Word, as I used to with Netscape because of its proneness to crashing in this way. So I am disappointed with my new browser.

I was saying something like this. I woke up with a desire to resume the chase for the meaning of identity. I believe in following my mind where it wants to go: it's good to follow your passion, moment to moment, if possible. I started by keying some material from Communitarianism and Individualism, the fourth essay entitled "Membership" by Michael Walzer (excellent, as were the previous three; the book so far is first-rate). Countries, like clubs, have admission policies: rules for admitting new members. These rules reflect the members' idea of who they are, their identity.

This got me thinking about the mathematics of set theory. I prowled the livingroom bookshelf to find Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker, a worn mass-market paperback that I bought in 1984. In it he quotes a definition of set made by the main inventor of set theory, Georg Cantor:

A set is a Many which allows itself to be thought of as a One.

Hm, I thought, what is this but a description of Arthur Koestler's holon from The Ghost in the Machine? Here is an extract:

A "part" generally means something fragmentary and incomplete, which by itself would have no legitimate existence. On the other hand, a "whole" is considered as complete in itself. But "wholes" and "parts" in this absolute sense just do not exist anywhere. What we find are intermediary structures on a series of levels in an ascending order of complexity: subwholes which display, according to the way you look at them, some of the characteristics commonly attributed to wholes and some of the characteristics commonly attributed to parts.

The term I propose is "holon," from the Greek holos = whole, with the suffix on which, as in proton or neutron, suggests a particle or part.

I had fetched down The Ghost in the Machine from the coffeetable to set up a document for it in Word.

Rucker started his discussion of sets with a reference to the ancient problem of the One and the Many: Is the world fundamentally One, or Many? Is it made out of one basic thing or substance, or a plurality of these? Plato spent much of his career pondering this topic, without a conclusive result. His final writing on it was a wry observation that the topic was one that young thinkers liked to believe they had understood, and liked furthermore to talk endlessly about. Rucker himself admits he does not have the answer--only his own (very penetrating and persuasive) ideas on the topic.

I'm intrigued by set theory and what is called transfinite mathematics--the mathematics of infinity (for which set theory is the strongest mathematical toolkit). I suspect that transfinite mathematics is the mathematical branch of theology, for if the Absolute Infinite (symbolized in mathematics by uppercase omega) is in any way existent, it would have to be what we refer to as God. The study of the lesser infinities below the Absolute Infinite (and there are, well, infinitely many of those) would be a kind of theological undertaking.

But the Many and the One flagged something else: de Santillana's The Origins of Scientific Thought, in which he examines how early Greek thinking led toward what we now call science. The problem of the Many and the One was a scientific question, with responses that included the atomism of Democritus--the atomism with which we "moderns" still view the world today. For the idea of little indivisible bits of blind matter flying through the vacuum of space, interacting, was due to Democritus, hundreds of years before Christ.

This merely sketches some of my thoughts from this morning. Kimmie and I went downtown to buy fabric at the store Dressew on Hastings--a lovely old-time store, crammed with excellent things. A good time. I'm late for tea!