Shortz Subject

Posted on August 3, 2019 by Dave Pollard

If you’ve ever done crosswords, you probably enjoy the wordplay (and new knowledge) in some of the clues (often denoted by an appended “?”) as much as solving the puzzle. So, for some recent examples from NYT/New Yorker puzzles:

• Small trunks? — SPEEDOS
• It doesn’t help much when it’s cold? — COMFORT
• Post codes? — ETIQUETTE
• Refrain from eating pasta? — UHOHSPAGHETTIOS (Too young to get it?)
• One way to get through a wall? — OSMOSIS
• Words said when one’s hand is shaky? — IMOUT
• Art class? — GENRE
• Begin, say? — ISRAELI
• Information for the record? — LINERNOTES
• Self-guided tour? — EGOTRIP
• Having digital display? — OPENTOED
• Remains to be seen? — RUIN
• Where you might get a word in edgewise? — SCRABBLE
• Things picked up and kicked? — HABITS
• A shoe presses against it? — BRAKEDRUM
• They’re acquired in some unions? — STEPSONS
• Efficiency option? — MURPHYBED
• Things usually held while facing backwards? — OARS

Soon enough, though, the puzzle is done. Will Shortz, the long-time NYT puzzle editor, says that, even in late-in-the-week puzzles (that are harder), there’s generally a limit to how many such ‘clever’ clues are considered reasonable in any one puzzle (the usual limit in 15×15 puzzles seems to be seven).

But you aren’t constrained by any such limit! What I’ve started to do, to supplement my puzzle enjoyment, is to pick five prosaic words with straightforward clues from each puzzle I do, and come up with clever (well, cleverer) or more interesting clues that could have been used instead. I pick the most ordinary words because you’re really limited in wordplay options with more obscure and lengthy words. I avoid words that already have wordplay clues (Mr Shortz’s work is hard to top). And I don’t shy away from people and place names, since there can often be a great clue that draws on some little-known but fascinating fact about that person or place.

Here are some examples from recent puzzles: First, the straightforward clue, then the ANSWER, and then my Alternative Clue:

  1. Foyer feature — COATRACK — Outerwearware?
  2. Warhol’s “Campbells’ Tomato Juice Box” eg — POPART — Paintings only a father could love?
  3. Asia’s ____ Sea — ARAL — Former great sea extinguished by botched attempt to create cotton fields 
  4. Continuing story — SERIAL — Kind of killer or monogamy
  5. Anti-Communist fervor — REDSCARE — Slogan for compassionate conservatives?
  6. Stolas:Women : ___:Men — TOGAS — Wool clothes once forbidden to women
  7. Its capital is Whitehorse — YUKON — River with 2nd largest drainage area in North America
  8. Jump to conclusions — ASSUME — Take on, or for granted
  9. Lover boy — ROMEO — Alfa male?
  10. Leg presses work them — QUADS — Great muscles, courtyards or poker hands, for short

You get the idea. If you’re a cruciverbalist, it can increase the enjoyment of your daily puzzle time, and exercise some different mental muscles as well. Experts on Alzheimers are now suggesting that pastimes that engender new ideas and knowledge are better for keeping your brain from atrophying than those that merely test your powers of recall.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off on Shortz Subject

Aphorisms

Posted on August 2, 2019 by Dave Pollard


photo by Allen Ishibashi, from Twitter
In this week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik muses on the value, appeal and history of aphorisms. He differentiates the aphorism (wise) from its cousin, the epigram (witty). He touches on Twitter, the latest vehicle for brief passages, but doesn’t note that the principal home of the aphorism in social media is Facebook, where stolen words, embedded in a coloured frame with an appropriate image, and frequently unattributed (or misattributed), cannot easily be recopied, and often seem a vicarious plea for the kind of appreciation that the poster could never hope to obtain from his or her own thoughts.

Adam, whose invented phrase “the intercession of a thousand small sanities”, to describe his prescription for coping with a bewildering and out-of-control modern world, is no stranger to an uplifting and enlightening turn of phrase. He suggests that to qualify as an aphorism a brief passage must bring some new insight, perspective, recognition or motivation, and must be unarguably true, even self-evident, but never obvious. It differs from a learning (which requires more support/background/set-up, eg Pollard’s Laws), a mantra (which is debatable), or a maxim (a rule or suggestion on how to conduct oneself — “Trust your instincts.” “Show, don’t tell.”).

Here are a few examples that he provides that I quite like:

Amazing that the chess clock never found a more general application. A more enlightened society would have made it as indispensable to conversation as shoes to walking. (Scottish poet Don Paterson)

Almost everything in the room will survive you. To the room, you are already a ghost. (Don Paterson again)

In the misfortune of even our best friends, there is something that does not displease us. (François Duc de La Rochefoucald)

What I find intriguing about aphorisms is that, while most will agree that a selected passage may qualify by the above definition, the delight each of us gets from our favourite aphorisms is highly personal — there seems little consensus on what the best aphorisms are. Perhaps their resonance is contextual, and hence their pleasure for each of us depends on our personal history. And I’d guess that aphorisms appeal very differently to each of us similarly to the way comedy does. To each their own.

I’ve included many quotations on my blog over the years, some of which qualify as aphorisms. Some of them, I’m sad to say, have at some point been afflicted by the suck fairy, and I’m embarrassed to have once held them up as noble or clever truths. But most of them have legs, and here are a few that I still hold dear:

The job of the media is to make what is important, interesting. (Bill Maher)

Polemic is a lucrative form of entertainment, as the media can employ unpaid and fiercely motivated actors. (Nassim Taleb)

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it is expressed is unsympathetic to us. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Be patient with all that is unresolved within your heart, and try to love the questions. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Your silence gives consent. (Plato)
There comes a time when silence is betrayal. In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. (Martin Luther King)

Every truth is, at first, ridiculed, then violently opposed, and finally accepted as self-evident. (Arthur Schopenhauer)

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. (Gloria Steinem)

Change in attitudes and beliefs occurs not from people being persuaded to change their minds based on new knowledge, argument or insight, but rather as generations with old attitudes and beliefs they were unable to inculcate in their children, die off. (Max Planck)

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. (Variously cited.)

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. (EE Cummings)

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own… What is called knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer’s own weaknesses reflected back from others. (Georg C Lichtenberg, 18th century!)

I think what a lot of fiction is, is the imagining of the worst so as to prepare ourselves. (Paul Bloom)

Community is born of necessity. (Joe Bageant)

People will listen when they’re ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren’t ready to listen to an idea that now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Don’t waste time with people who want to argue. They’ll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new. (Daniel Quinn)

If you are looking for the love of your life, stop. They will be waiting for you when you start doing things you love. (Anonymous)

You can learn a lot about someone by listening to a song that means a lot to them. (Anonymous)

People learn more from stories than from even the most brilliant analytical discourse. (Anonymous)

Rereading these, I realize that some of them are things I want to be true, and which might actually not be so. That’s one of the problems with brevity: Einstein purportedly said, aphoristically, that “a theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler”. There is something clearly aspirational, more than reflective, in some of these. Of course “small is beautiful” and “less is more”, but perhaps not always, and perhaps with a cost — the risk of oversimplification and wishful thinking.

Most discouragingly, almost all lists of aphorisms (including mine above) contain quotes almost exclusively from men. Is this because brevity, wit and precision of thought are not recognized as positive qualities in women writers and speakers, or because women know better than to trust dangerously simple statements of truth? Or because readers and listeners are unaware or indifferent to women of great insight?

I omitted the famous Margaret Mead (“Never doubt…”) quote from my list above, for the same reason I omitted the famous Bucky Fuller (“You never change things by fighting…”) quote — because I no longer believe they are true.

But I owe it to myself to reread some of the most inspiring books and articles written by women — Elizabeth Warren, Janine Benyus, Janelle Orsi, Donella Meadows, Melissa Pierson, Rebecca Solnit, Jill Lepore, Leslie Jamison, Helen Macdonald, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Alice Walker, Arundhati Roy, Laura Kipnis.

My guess is that the aphorisms in their work will be of a somewhat different style — subtler, more observant, less categorical, more nuanced, more poetic and allegorical. We’ll see.

 

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Conservatism as Trauma Response

Posted on July 30, 2019 by Dave Pollard


comic by Reza Farazmand

“It’s entirely up to us. If we fail — if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us — nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.”      — Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

I’ve spent a fair amount of time of late with conservatives. This is a rather rare occurrence for me, since the circles I am part of are almost all far-left of centre, progressive groups.

I’ve never been conservative, so it’s always been hard for me to figure out what makes conservatives tick. There are of course many different flavours of conservative, but at this juncture, since they are a minority numbers-wise in most of the world’s anglophone countries, yet firmly in control of political power throughout the anglophone world, it’s the commonalities of anglophone political conservatives I’m most interested in.

What has emerged from hours of conversations is a portrait of a hard-edged (at once sensitive and desensitized) group of people from diverse economic, educational and ethnic backgrounds that seem to have two things in common — they are overwhelmingly older males, and they all seem to be struggling with severe trauma (with a wide variety of origins) that they are emotionally unable to cope with (perhaps because they seem emotionally un-self-aware).

That’s not to say a lot of my fellow lefties aren’t traumatized too. It’s just that they (we) seem a little better at figuring out how to recognize, self-manage and cope with our trauma, and hence tend to be somewhat less reactive to stressful news and situations, and less prone to be triggered by opportunists who exploit reactivity. So, where liberals tend to just not want to hear about 45’s latest inarticulate nonsense, conservatives seem powerfully (and angrily) energized by the mere mention of words like Hillary, Ocasio, Pelosi, immigrants or socialism.

Racism and sexism seem to underlie this almost autonomic, unthinking reactivity (often accompanied by the rote reciting of cliché right-wing “talking points”), but, as I’ve mentioned before in these pages, the real root of it is, I’m coming to realize, anger and fear, underneath which, in most cases, seems to lie unmanageable, often-unconscious trauma. These people are seriously hurting, angry and terrified, and in denial of it (or, worse, quietly ashamed or completely oblivious to it).

Perhaps because I am a reactive, older male who spent most of my life in an un-self-conscious reactive state, I can kind of relate to this. Although I am becoming more equanimous with age and practice and wise counsel from sensitive, intelligent friends, when I was at my most reactive my rage was directed at what I saw as dangerous right-wingers — Reagan, Cheney, Thatcher, Mulroney, environmentally ruinous billionaire corporatists and inflammatory, fear-mongering mass media.

Some of my conservative acquaintances are very intelligent, and to me their support for people and ideas that are clearly destructive, divisive, dangerous and deluded makes no sense. This is of course what George Lakoff has been writing about for years.

What the hate- and fear-mongering politicians, media pundits and business mouthpieces are saying (to themselves and their audiences) is: You’re right to be afraid, lost, and angry. Conservatives react to the above trigger-words (Hillary, immigrants etc) in a very similar, conditioned way to the way the victims of abuse react to descriptions and depictions of the kind of violence they have suffered from.

The people who have done the conditioning have almost certainly been traumatized themselves by what is, to them, a frightening, bewildering, dangerous, out-of-control and infuriating world. In such a traumatized world, fear is infectious, especially so thanks to mass media and social media outlets that present an oversimplified, focused, blame-y, twisted perspective of reality that amplifies, supports and sustains such fear.

The conservative echo chamber of fear reinforces conservatives’ innate fear that the safe, unchanging, god-fearing, hierarchical, everyone-knows-their-place world they thought they were growing up in, and want to live in and leave for their children, is constantly under threat from forces they don’t trust or understand, forces that make them feel intimidated, undermined, blind-sided, ill-equipped and even helpless to deal with. All it takes is one of those trigger-words to set them off.

This of course is precisely what happened in countries demoralized by brutal poverty, economic collapse, military disgrace, social disintegration and hopelessness in the last century in Germany, Russia, China, Rwanda, Yugoslavia and a host of other places, leading to wars, genocides, and racial, economic and political atrocities that resulted in the murder of nearly a quarter of a billion people.

So what are we to do now to prevent yet another slide into the kind of massive reactionary hysteria that made the last century our civilization’s bloodiest?

My regular readers won’t be surprised to hear that I don’t think there is anything we can do. Although it is our nature to try to reason out our emotional reactions, this has nothing to do with reason, and reasoning with conservatives (as Lakoff has said) won’t solve anything. Progressives are mistaken to think that this is just a blip before we resume the inevitable humanist trajectory towards endless betterment. Conservatives are right to see progress as a myth, and the current system that hold us in thrall as hopelessly broken. They are wrong in thinking that their religions and their patriarchal, fear-based moral values offer anything better.

What we are seeing in the shift of racism, sexism, self-deluded lying, and scapegoating (of immigrants, liberals, modern urban life and “others’ of all stripes) from the whispered margins to the political mainstream, is a mass collective expression of endless, hopeless, unbearable trauma. It is the self-loathing death throes of our failed industrial civilization.

Our reaction to constant stresses with no end, no solution in sight, is, as it has always been, an unmanaged and uncontrollable outpouring of feelings of anger, hatred, shame, fear, helplessness, hopelessness, powerlessness and grief, that finds an outlet in blaming others (racism, sexism, anti-immigrant hysteria), in war and other acts of violence, in denial and lies, and in self-justification for the monstrous emotional derangement that consumes us and makes us crazy enough to commit abuses and atrocities (to others, and to ourselves) in unbearable situations and times.

This is who we are under chronic stress.

But we are also, when not overwhelmed by stress, a generous, loving, altruistic, peaceful species instilled with biophilia, creativity, curiosity, and a love of beauty. When our self-domesticated, imprisoning, desolating global industrial culture collapses (and that collapse is already in full swing) the remnants of our species will, instinctively and naturally, exhibit these positive, evolutionarily-healthy qualities. Evolution’s response to extreme stress is radical change — collapse and then rest and heal; its response to ecosystems in joyful balance is to let everything be as it is. There is nothing moral in this.

We are by nature neither conservative nor progressive. The conservative is an emotionally wracked, traumatized human unable to cope with a seemingly hopeless reality, longing for a (usually imagined or invented) better time. The progressive is a lost, bewildered idealist driven by a constantly-disappointing faith in the inevitability of humanity’s collective advancement through collaborative effort. Both worldviews are deluded.

The fact that extreme conservatives have ascended to power and are consolidating it further should neither dismay or surprise us. Their ascendancy will make collapse more difficult, but their failure to create anything enduring is as inevitable as ours. We will make the best of it, and in so doing conservatives and progressives alike will show much of our better stuff as collapse intensifies — as we see living and working together as best we can through the dark times ahead as, ultimately, the only way forward. We will rediscover our humanity just as we seemingly are losing it.

And millennia from now, as our planet once again flourishes, civilization-free, the foolish experiment with apes running the laboratory will be long forgotten.

Posted in Collapse Watch, Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

Playing Apart

Posted on July 21, 2019 by Dave Pollard


image from the collection of Nick Smith, “possibly by John Wareham”

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.                              — William Shakespeare, As You Like It

The etymology of words that relate to personhood and identity is fascinating: Person, personality and persona, from the Latin meaning a mask; role, from the Old French meaning the roll of paper on which an actor’s lines are written; and, strangely, identity and character, both from the Latin, meaning, respectively, sameness and uniqueness.

The word self was originally not a noun, not a word that described anything substantial, but rather a reflexive modifier, se, a pointing back to the subject, used to ‘complete’ a description of an action that has no object; so in French elle se souvient = she (herself) remembers, which doesn’t refer at all to any such ‘thing’ as a ‘self’ but rather refers to who is doing the remembering.

I’m not suggesting that early Indo-European cultures had no sense of themselves. Rather, this absence of concrete terms that describe the self, the person, would, I think, most likely mean that the language of the time had no need for a term apart from the name or pronoun that describes a person. They were themselves, so why would they need a term for ‘themselves’, or for ‘persons’ or ‘identities’? It was only in play, in acting as someone other than themselves, that they would have to evolve a term for the role they were not playing, the mask beneath the mask they were wearing, for a while, separate from ‘themselves’.

We can of course not know whether prehistoric or preliterate cultures “played many parts”, and if so whether they were aware they were doing so. It’s likely they were as aware, and unaware, of the many roles they took on, their personas in different contexts of action and relationship, as we are today. Which is to say, only vaguely aware. We take on different personas, “play different parts”, in our roles as parents, lovers, workers, friends and colleagues, and we slide from one to another as automatically as a a voice-over actor playing multiple parts.

We “act (and think) differently” when we speak other languages, and when we’re intoxicated, not “ourselves”. In different relationships we may take on and take off whole sets of beliefs, worldviews, mindsets, and behaviours, based on completely different “stories of self”, in order to achieve comprehension, appreciation, and useful communication with others. And some of these different belief-laden personas can be completely incongruous with others, which can both alleviate and create enormous internal cognitive dissonance.

So for example, I had a long talk the other day (details to come soon) about collapse, and how we might best deal with it, based on my recent post Being Adaptable: A Reminder List. Just before the call, I had sent an email to someone else on the matter of free will, and I was aware that, to handle this new conversation competently, I had to “flick a switch” from the third to the second of three personas, each of which (these days) gets a regular turn at bat. I suppose I could label them as follows:

  1. Compassionate Humanist Dave: Open to the possibility that there are things that can and should/must be done to mitigate and forestall the effects of the profound economic and ecological crises facing us and cascading over us, even if they don’t achieve clear or lasting results. “We can’t just do nothing.”
  2. Collapsnik Dave: Resigned to the impossibility of preventing the slow unraveling and final collapse of our global industrial civilization in this century, ushering in (probably) several millennia of instability, terrifying and exhilarating precarity, great migration, radical relearning, and plummeting human numbers (mostly due to our almost completely ceasing to procreate during the chaos, rather than due to homicide, starvation or disease), before (maybe, if we’re lucky) many thousands of new, local, astonishingly diverse, joyful and sustainable human cultures emerge in an unrecognizable post-collapse world. “There is nothing we can do.”
  3. Radical Non-Duality Dave: Convinced that there is no real ‘you’ or ‘me’, nothing real or separate, no space or time, only the wondrous appearance of everything out of nothing, and no need for there to be anyone or anything separate, no purpose or meaning, nothing really happening, and that this illusion of separate individuals with free will and choice and control over the bodies they presume to inhabit was an unfortunate evolutionary accident, but one that the illusory self, hopelessly, cannot escape — there is no path. “There is no ‘we’ to do anything.”

I think this second persona played its part relatively well today, with no inadvertent slips into switch positions 1 or 3, with all the confusion, annoyance and cognitive dissonance that could have produced.

What makes this subconscious role-playing even more complicated is that all three of these ‘voices of me’ have beliefs at the (mostly radical) end of different spectra: The compassionate humanist thinks anything short of direct action is a waste of time and energy, to the chagrin of many other humanists. I am at odds with many under the collapsnik umbrella, who I see as lacking a historically-based, nuanced and equanimous perspective about what collapse will bring and how we might approach it. And my radical non-dualist beliefs understandably infuriate those who have invested years on “spiritual paths”.

And at another level, these three personas are only a subset of the complex set of roles I play. They are, all three, amalgams of who I think other people want me to be (mainly, useful to them in some way — clarifying or creatively challenging or reassuring or attentive or appreciative), and who I imagine (or would like to imagine) myself to be (usually some combination of sensitive, sympathetic, and brilliantly and engagingly ahead of my time). And humble!

Each of these personas has its own ‘story of me’, a general script that smooths over the improvisational gaps between the lines that ‘I’ have been conditioned to deliver (or at least that’s how persona 3 sees it). Each defends a position, completely incompatible with the view of the other two personas, and each tries its best to help others with similar worldviews. None of the personas is interested, any more, in trying to change anyone’s mind.

Invite me to a meeting of young female entrepreneurs and persona 1 will show up, eager and supportive and full of experienced and heartfelt advice. On the way home I will text a fellow collapsnik about XR in persona 2, oblivious to the fact that what I told the young women is utterly incongruous with what I have just texted. And when I get home I will write a blog post in persona 3 about the illusion of separation, that belies what I just said at the meeting and what I just texted.

Perhaps my personas are a bit more schizophrenic than most people’s, but my sense is we all do this. In our zeal to assume each role, we ignore its cognitive dissonance with the last one we played, and in the process the alleged real ‘us’ gets more and more buried under the conditioned (and self-conditioned) gunk that we must, to be true to the role, hide behind.

Occasionally I think I see, underlying all of these personas, another ‘story of me’ that seems, somehow, more raw and honest (or maybe, to be ‘really’ honest, more self-indulgent, disingenuous and falsely self-deprecating) — the ‘me’ that is lost, scared and bewildered, and trying to figure out whether it’s alone in that, or if all the people it meets, who once seemed to it so certain and ‘together’ and competent and self-directed, are just lying to themselves, and the world. Just like ‘me’.

And then there’s this (hyper-)reactive ‘me’ who I’m quite ashamed of, who comes off quite badly in all three personas but still rears his angry, fearful, unhappy head way too often. And there’s the always-aching-to-fall-in-love ‘me’, who keeps forgetting both how wonderful that feels and how utterly self-invented and unsustainable that chemical state, and its absurd beliefs, are. But don’t remind me that when I’m in love, because that me won’t hear you.

None of these personas is real. They are all just parts, masks. In a world where there is [flicking the switch to position 3 again] nothing separate, no thing apart, we are all just acting a part — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say we are acting apart. Pretending. (Pretend and temporal are from the same root word, meaning — of course — something that doesn’t last. Only a lifetime! And oh! what might be beneath that mask, what is being ‘mask-ed’? no!…)

I remember as a child watching adults and asking myself if they were all just acting, and if so for whose benefit, because somehow I knew that everyone was just as lost, scared and bewildered as I was. But hear or see something (apparently) often enough, and you’ll come to believe it’s real. The war between your remembrance and intuitive ‘knowing’ of there being nothing separate, just perfectly everything, on one side, and your self and every other self working furiously to convince you otherwise, on the other, is an endless war of attrition. ‘You’ cannot win.

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

Conversations That Matter: What It Takes to Have Them

Posted on July 6, 2019 by Dave Pollard

mindful wandering
photo by Maren Yumi on flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Ironically, despite the fact that I engage in fewer conversations than I used to (maybe because since I’m retired I don’t have to, and because I find few conversations valuable anyway), I’ve started writing more about conversation on this blog. In a recent article, I suggested:

  • Real conversation serves one or more of these five purposes: to impart new information, to surface insights, to see different perspectives, to achieve consensus on decisions, and to resolve conflicts.
  • Prerequisite to good conversation are participants who have these seven skills: capacity to be open to other and difficult ideas and perspectives, capacity to articulate, social fluency (emotional engagement and sensitivity), critical thinking skills, curiosity, creative/imaginative skills, and attention skills.

The widespread lack of any such purpose, and of these essential skills, means that most conversations are, in my experience, at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. Most conversations (like substantially everything posted on social media) are attention-, appreciation- and reassurance-seeking, and are just vexatious for those seeking a real meaningful exchange.

At a recent lunch with my friend Don Marshall, I confess my conversational skills were not up to par (I blame sleeplessness the previous night, but perhaps I’m just out of practice). I learned what he is trying to do with a volunteer project to improve people’s conversational skills around the predicament of climate collapse, through exercises (practice) focused on appreciating others’ perspectives, attentive listening, and conflict resolution. As there are so few people around capable of modelling such behaviours, and because people are so busy with the urgent demands on their time, and because most of us, I think, are in denial about the degree to which our conversational skills have atrophied, I wasn’t surprised to hear that he’s having a bit of trouble getting traction with this project. I had no suggestions for him to improve the process.

It occurred to me that (perhaps like many writers) I write, now, mostly to make sense of my own thinking. On this blog I have ‘conversations with myself’ because it is so hard and so rare to find others with whom I can have intelligent conversations on subjects both or all participants care about. No one is to blame for this — ‘talking with oneself’ is always the last resort for trying to make sense of things that seemingly don’t make sense. Such clarity can come from conversation, but it is a side-benefit when striving for one of the objectives above, and it’s rather narcissistic and a bit desperate (though, sadly, not uncommon) when it’s the principal reason for having a conversation.

Conversations about the predicament of climate collapse are particularly prone, I think, to such somewhat self-indulgent and often-fruitless “help me make sense of this” and “what should I do about this?” exchanges. The challenge with such pleading requests is that climate collapse is a predicament not a problem. Chris Martenson explains the difference (in his “Crash Course”):

The distinction between predicaments and problems boils down to this: problems have solutions; predicaments have outcomes. A solution to a problem fixes it, returning all to its original condition. Once a suitable solution can be found and made to work, a problem can be solved. A predicament, by contrast, has no solution. Faced with a predicament, people can develop responses, but not solutions. Those responses may succeed, they may fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but no response can erase a predicament. Predicaments have outcomes that can be managed, but circumstances cannot be returned to their original state.

Terms like sustainability, resilience and regeneration suggest that one is dealing with a problem that can be ‘worked’, ‘worked around’, ‘bounced back from’ or ‘fixed with a reboot’. (The prefix re- means ‘back’, and there is no going back.) A predicament like climate collapse lends itself to no ‘solutions’, so striving for any of these is misguided and doomed to fail.

Those coming to grips with climate collapse (a much more honest term than mere climate change or even climate crisis) are now more often using the term adaptation to suggest what can or might or should be done, to, as Chris puts it “manage the outcomes”. But as any language scholar will tell you, the verb adapt is a reflexive verb — it does not take an object, and refers back to your self (in French, it is s’adapter — to adapt oneself). So adaptation doesn’t mean changing one’s community or environment, it means changing oneself.

It is not in our nature to want to change ourselves. It has been a lifelong and exhausting struggle to get our selves to the precarious but seemingly-optimal state we are currently in, and the thought of more gut-wrenching change does not sit well with most of us. We would much sooner change stuff outside — our government, our social and economic and political and educational and technological processes and systems. The problem with that, however, is that none of these systems will survive climate collapse, no matter how we tinker with or ‘regenerate’ them. These systems are collapsing, in fits and starts, just as our climate is. We cannot predict when and how they will collapse, and hence we cannot adapt them (or reinvent them) in order to delay, avert or lessen the impact of their collapse.

The only thing we can adapt is the one thing we don’t want to adapt — our hard-won selves.

Remarkably, those selves are at the core of all our suffering, anxiety, dread, shame, grief, anger and fear about climate collapse. If we were really able to (self-)adapt, we would let go of our selves and all our judgements, self-recriminations, unhelpful anxieties and other feelings that are causing us such anguish (and in the process, immobilizing us and turning us on ourselves and against each other in an endless blame game), and just be, in the moment, ready for whatever comes. Not ‘prepared’ (for we cannot prepare for what we cannot know), but ready — open, alert, grounded, present, competent (the etymology of competent is ‘striving together’.

And if we’re going to strive together we’re going to have to communicate with each other, and to do that we’re going to have to relearn the art of conversation (whose etymology is turning with, the step before striving together).

In our crazily individualistic modern western version of civilization culture, we are still fixated on s’adapter — changing ourselves, self-improvement, personal growth, spiritual growth, becoming present in the ‘now’, finding the path to awakening, enlightenment, or whatever other flavour-of-the-month navel gazing practice has currently caught our attention. Perfectly understandable.

And also (and here’s where I part company with most of my ‘progressive’ colleagues) perfectly impossible. As I have argued endlessly elsewhere ad nauseam and will not argue again here now, we cannot change who we are. We are the product of our conditioning, devoid of free will and self-control, and in fact our self is just a mental construct conjured up by the brain to make sense of what we perceive, and it isn’t real at all. When ‘we’ seemingly change, it is our conditioning that has changed; ‘we’ have nothing to do with it.

If we were not too smart for our own good, we would look to another reflexive verb instead of s’adapter — s’accepter. To accept ourselves as we are — scared, lost, impotent, and desperate. Not as a prelude to changing any of that; just accepting that that is who ‘we’ are. Of course, such humble self-acceptance will also only happen if our conditioning allows and mandates it. We have no free will to choose who we are or what we believe or do. Now that is a predicament.

If you are in the large majority who think you can change yourself, who think you have personal volition, I won’t argue, and I wish you well. I’m more interested in learning about conversation — turning together — and competence — striving together.

There is some compelling evidence that most wild creatures (and perhaps even prehistoric, wild humans) have no sense of themselves as separate from everything else in the universe. They intuitively act in ways that have evolved to sustain and enhance the collective well-being of all-life-on-earth — of what is called Gaia, the self-aware, self-optimizing force of everything, life-forms and environments, that make up our world. For Gaia, turning together and striving together is the only option, the law by which it has evolved. Nature always bats last, and our species’ current predilection for so flagrantly breaking this law will not be allowed to continue much longer.

If you have watched wild creatures, you know we have a lot to learn from how they seemingly ‘converse’, communicate, and collaborate, and how they become ‘competent’ — how they strive together.

Think about a time in your life when you were so caught up in some collective action, some striving together, that ‘you’ momentarily disappeared. When you ceased thinking of what ‘you’ could add to the conversation, of what ‘you’ thought about what was being said by others, and all thought was on the collective goal or benefit. At that moment, if you’ve been lucky enough to have one, the individual mind was replaced by the collective mind. This is what some teams striving for very difficult, urgent or important goals seem to experience. It’s what improv groups (actors or musicians) seemingly experience when they’re ‘in the groove’.

That’s what we want. We want to emulate those who are able, when the moment calls for it, to overcome their preoccupation with their individual selves and just become part of a collective mind. Presuming we have one of the five purposes for our collective conversation listed at the top of this article, and our participants have an adequate un-atrophied amount of the seven essential competencies, what might be the trigger, the catalyst that then shifts the conversation into this collective mind state, and precipitates the resultant striving together?

The usual method of provoking a group is to use either rhetoric (talk radio, tweets, Ted talks or blogs) or a story (often fictionalized, simplified or exaggerated) to whip the participants into a frenzy of action — this seems to work particularly well on people who are simplistic, blame-y and lacking in self-awareness. My concern with such manipulative methods (and I’ve used them myself) is that their impact doesn’t last. Sooner or later the lie will be seen for what it is, and humans’ focus of attention is notoriously fickle.

Pollard’s Law of Human Behaviour is:

Humans have apparently evolved to do what they must (the personal, unavoidable imperatives of the moment), then do what’s easy, and then do what’s fun. There is never time left for things that are seen as merely important. Social, political and economic change happens only when the old generation dies and a new generation with different entrained beliefs and imperatives fills the power vacuum. We have evolved to be a collaborative and caring species, and we are all doing our best — we cannot do otherwise.

If that’s how we’re conditioned, how might we use Pollard’s Law to get people to that collective mind-state in their conversations? I would suggest that it will eventually become urgent (an imperative of the moment) as collapse hits home in our day-to-day lives, but in the meantime, we’d be better off finding ways to make conversations more fun than trying to make them easier. I think for example the collective altruistic conversations and actions of Occupy were, and those of XR are, (somewhat) fun. Why? There’s a sense of shared energy, risk, momentum and liberation in them. There’s lots of shared laughter, revelry and (sometimes) celebration. Same goes for improv activities.

So how might we introduce an element of fun, celebration, laughter and revelry into something as serious as conversations, especially when the topic is climate (or other system) collapse?

I have no idea. But I think it’s worth exploring. If fun can be the catalyst for conversations that move us beyond our paralyzed individual thinking towards a sense of collective presence, collective will, collective insight, and collective accomplishment, they might actually wrench us out of the entrained, default mode of thoughts and beliefs so many of us are stuck in. This “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” activity might actually change our conditioning, something we (arguably) cannot do all by ourselves or in the normal conversations that merely reinforce what we already think.

If we can catalyze such conversations, we’ll need to stay clear of the misguided thinking that drives us to then agree upon an “action plan”, which normally takes the form of a “who will do what by when” list and which notoriously deflates that collective energy. Indigenous cultures know that when collective action or consensus has emerged from a group conversation, no one has the authority to tell others what to do about it. It is always left up to each participant, her/his mind expanded and shocked out of its default way of thinking, to know, intuitively, what then must be done, by each of us, both individually and collectively. We have to trust that to happen.

So, in order for conversations to be (for lack of a better term) transformative, producing much more than any group of individuals could come up with alone, they need to: (1) “be on purpose” (have one of the five purposes listed above), (2) have sufficiently skilled and competent participants (with the seven skills above), and (3) have some quality (urgency, or fun) that propels people into a collective mind-state and gets them out of their personal, “self”-ish, default thinking mode. And, of course, (4) they need to have a topic, theme or focus that’s important to the participants, something they all really care about.

Derrick Jensen, who has been coming to grips with climate collapse a lot longer than most of us, might have some advice on what the topic of your next conversation on climate collapse might be. He writes:

Stand still and listen to the land, and in time you will know just what to do…  Find what or whom you love — whether it’s salmon, sturgeon, a patch of forest, survivors of domestic violence, your own indigenous tradition, migratory songbirds, coral reefs, or Appalachian mountaintops — [that you’re willing] to dig in and defend with your life… Ask yourself what are the largest, most pressing problems you can help to solve using the gifts that are unique to you in all the universe.

Imagine: You’re with a group of “conversationally skilled” people, convened purposefully about something profoundly important to all of you, in a setting with either a sense of great urgency or great fun/joy, and you’re talking about what you love so much you’d give your life for it, and what you can do exceedingly well, together, using each participant’s unique capacities.

How could such a conversation not be brilliant? How could it possibly not lead to a turning together, and a striving together, beyond what you could have believed was possible?

And if your conversations don’t meet these criteria — aren’t on purpose, aren’t skilful, aren’t urgent or joyful, and aren’t about subjects you can help with and which you care about enough to die for — why, when our planet is burning, are you wasting your time on them?

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Being Adaptable: A Reminder List

Posted on June 28, 2019 by Dave Pollard


image from PXHERE, CC0

It’s been about four years since I produced an updated version of my rather complicated Community-Based Resilience Framework. The revisions I made then had already begun to acknowledge how little we can actually do to prepare ourselves and our communities for the ongoing collapse of our global industrial economy and our stable climate, ie for global civilizational collapse. No one controls this massively overextended, rapacious and immiserating economy which has critically and irrevocably disrupted and destabilized our climate, and no human endeavour can hope to understand, let alone re-stabilize, anything as staggeringly complex as our billion-year-old, ever-evolving, and astonishingly fragile climate ecology.

The Framework I produced in 2015 tried to have it both ways — it acknowledged our lack of free will, yet prescribed what we might somehow be able to (will ourselves to) do to prepare for collapse. So I thought it might be time to produce a more modest and less conflicted version of the Framework.

This time, I decided, I needed to start with an honest assessment of what is actually happening when informed, curious, intelligent people stand back and assess where we stand (personally, in our particular communities, and globally), and what is the trajectory we are anticipating. We can’t of course know what the future holds, but a study of history (our climate’s history, not just the history of our recently-arrived species), of cultures, and of economics might give us some scenarios and some inevitabilities.

So without trying to defend them (which would require a much longer article than this), here’s what I think is almost indisputably in the cards:

  1. The greatest impacts of economic collapse are almost sure to precede the greatest impacts of climate collapse, at least on a global scale. Both collapses are well underway and gathering momentum but are still in the early stages of visible acceleration. A complete and (for all intents and purposes) permanent global economic collapse means, ‘gradually’ over the next 2-3 decades, the end of affordable energy (ie the end of electricity, motorized vehicles, and reliable forms of heating and cooling), the end of markets, currencies, capital, savings, credit, corporations, and trade beyond the local area, and the end of all technologies that depend on affordable energy (including telecommunications, mass media, and the internet). This will occur in fits and starts, in some areas faster and more deeply than others, but it will in the end be global and total. We will have to re-learn to live locally without almost every technology on which we now depend. We’ll have time to do that, though not nearly enough time for our liking.
  2. The first large-scale climate collapse impacts will be related to heat, drought and soil exhaustion. These alone will likely create, with no functioning prosthetic technologies left to cool or irrigate vast areas of the planet, two billion or more ‘climate refugees’, mostly moving north, exacerbating the struggles of those already there trying to re-learn how to live locally without significant technologies. This situation will be compounding by devastating storms of many kinds and perhaps an order of magnitude more powerful, frequent and extensive than what we have ever experienced. These will render many parts of the planet, including many large cities, permanently uninhabitable. On top of that, many other parts of the world that are dependent on expensive or scarce technologies for heat, transportation, flood protection, or imported food will have to be abandoned.

So, given that we can’t really (and it’s not our nature to) prepare for such eventualities until they are imminent, what might it be possible to do now that would be of any value? And if we indeed have no free will (and I won’t argue that again here), perhaps we should instead ask what those with a proclivity to be curious, to learn new things, to be subsistent, and to live and work collaboratively with others in real community (the way all un-industrial, ‘un-civilized’ people have seemingly always lived and thrived), will likely be doing that will make them uniquely able to adapt to what is to come?

I’m going to start with the list of 25 things to do from my 2015 Framework, and cross off or amend those that I now think, hubris aside, are impracticable or unrealistic, at least in the immediate future:

Know Ourselves:

  1. know your personal capacities, limitations, blind spots, wants and needs, joys, fears, triggers and sorrows
  2. learn and practice self-awareness (why you’re acting/reacting as you are)
  3. discover where we belong and what we’re meant to do

Heal and Love Ourselves and Others:

  1. self-assess and self-manage your physical and emotional health (good diet, exercise, sleep, avoid unnecessary stresses)
  2. learn and practice compassion, appreciation, curiosity, critical thinking, connection, gratitude, generosity, forgiveness, facilitation, mentoring, and how to ask for help, and model these behaviours for others
  3. spend time outdoors in natural places (learn, move, smile and pay attention) | appreciate our true nature | insist on joy in spite of everything
  4. learn new ways to heal and help others heal
  5. love unreservedly, even those we don’t like

Liberate Ourselves from Dependence on Centralized Industrial Systems:

  1. need less, share and give more, and learn continuously
  2. strive to realize the illusion of self, ego, control, separateness & time
  3. self-assess and increase personal independence from centralized systems
  4. help liberate others by modelling equanimity, presence etc.
  5. engage with the fearful and with deniers

Rethink, Shift and Experiment:

  1. Find community: rethink how, where and with whom you live and make a living
  2. learn how our complex world really works
  3. find people who share your passions and purpose
  4. instead of a job, find and fill real local needs
  5. shift to the sharing/gift economy

Prepare Collectively:

  1. discover what those in your community already know, have, can do, need and can’t do (if you’re lucky enough to live in a real community)
  2. study how other cultures have coped with crisis and collapse*
  3. fight small, winnable local battles to make your community healthier for all its creatures
  4. learn what you need and don’t need to live full, joyful lives
  5. assess and build your community’s self-sufficiency, resilience and mobility
  6. source locally | build collective community capacity
  7. rehearse crisis response in your community

This leaves us with just ten things to do instead of 25, and they’re practical things we can do even while the existing industrial systems still work (and our dependence on them, for perfectly human reasons, remains). We can’t jump the gun; we have to continue to work mostly within the existing systems that we and all around us continue to support and depend on, until they crumble, which will likely be sooner than you’d think.

With just ten items on this Being Adaptable list (I’m no longer going to use the word “preparing”, since we can’t know what to “prepare” for; we have to be prepared for anything), we can now dispense with the categories, so the list, in order from most inward-facing and personal to most outward-facing and communitarian, looks like this (click on the image to download a larger version if you want to print it):

My guess is that you’re probably already doing most or all of these things, or at least they would not be a big stretch for you. To me that’s the hallmark of a good, practical list. Even if I did believe we have free will, I would still believe we are, mostly, doing what we’re doing for a perfectly valid reason. And I believe we’re all doing our best (even if some of us are ignorant and misguided). So this is now more a list of reminders than a “to do” list. And when you do these things, naturally, others will see and learn from you, and reciprocate. That’s our nature too.

* hint: mostly they just walked away and found others with whom to live more simply; violent ‘Mad Max’ type scenarios have been uncommon

Posted in Collapse Watch | 2 Comments

Did Early Humans Have Selves?

Posted on June 22, 2019 by Dave Pollard


image by Neil Howard on flickr CC-BY-NC2.0

Ontology is “a gathering of or speaking (-logy) about ‘what is, what exists’ (onto-)”. The suffix -logy has come to mean a study or science, but originally it just referred to something said (the word monologue has the same root). So an ontology is a statement about what is.

The radical non-duality “message” is, essentially, an ontology, though a very unorthodox one. It is not a theory — its messengers assert that it is absolutely true, undebatable and obvious, and that it is only our illusory selves that cannot see this truth. The message is simply this:

There is no you. The sense of a separate person with free will and choice inhabiting a body is an illusion, an evolutionary misstep, a psychosomatic misunderstanding that arises in creatures with large brains. The brain and body have no need of a ‘self’ in order for the apparent human they are seemingly a part of to function perfectly well. Since there is no you, there is nothing you can do or learn or become to dispel or see through this illusion. It’s hopeless.

Nothing is real. Nothing is separate. There is no thing. There is only this (or everything, or whatever word you want to use), appearing as things and actions in (apparent) time and space. These appearances are not illusions like the self, and they’re not real, or unreal; they are just appearances. Inexplicably. For no reason or purpose.

That’s it. That’s the message. Everything else that radical non-dualists talk about is just an elaboration, an illumination, of the essence and consequences of this simple, hopeless message.

So we might inquire how and why this useless, annoying, suffering-causing illusory sense of separate self arose in this seemingly perfect-just-as-it-is “one-ness” appearing as everything (although if this message is true there is actually no “how” or “why” for anything).

There are possible evolutionary explanations, as I’ve described before — perhaps when large brains evolved the capacity to ‘model’ everything they perceived in order to make sense of it for survival purposes, that ‘model’ turned out to include a ‘self’, and when that ‘self’ was conjured up it began to use the brain’s power to perceive of itself (and everything else) as real and separate. There is growing evidence (from physics) that time and space aren’t ‘real’ (in the sense of being scientifically objectively verifiable) either — they’re just mental constructs used by the brain to organize and make sense of sensory perceptions. So why couldn’t the same be true of the self, itself?

If that’s true, then it implies that we, the supposedly super-intelligent, knowledgeable and super-conscious species, are actually the only species that cannot see through the illusion of its self, ie the only species that can’t see everything as it truly is — as a wondrous appearance of everything out of nothing, outside of space and time, without meaning or purpose or intention or anything separate.

If the message of radical non-duality is true (and over the last several years I’ve come to believe it is), then it is the most profound, and the most humbling, discovery in the history of our species. It means that our species is the only one hopelessly afflicted and debilitated by a hallucination that causes its victims untold suffering for no reason, and renders us uniquely unable to see what actually is. And who are its victims? Not the naked bipedal creatures ‘we’ presume to inhabit. These creatures are just appearances out of nothing, so they can’t be victims.

The victims of our selves’ psychosomatic misunderstanding are our selves. If this sounds recursive, it is. It would appear that our brains conjured up an illusory, imagined self so convincingly that it made that illusion ‘self-conscious’ and capable of believing itself real.

How can something invented become ‘self-conscious’? Well, what does it mean to be ‘self-conscious’? It means to believe itself to be real and separate and aware of something other than itself. AI fans are intrigued with the idea that robots could eventually do just that.

But if nothing is real, how could a self come to believe itself to be real? Because that’s what it perceives, how its conceptions makes sense of its perceptions. How can something that isn’t real have perceptions and conceptions? Anything is possible. Why not? If the sleeping brain can have a dream or nightmare that seems astonishingly real (perhaps enough to cause the body of the dreamer a heart attack), when it isn’t real at all, why should it be impossible that the (unreal) self can dream it is real and its experiences are real, when it is just an illusion, something conjured up by a pattern-making brain?

Let’s take a step back. The radical non-dual ontology says there are no ‘real’ creatures, brains, dreamers, heart attacks, lives, deaths, places, times, or things of any kind; there are only appearances of these things. What does it mean for something to be an appearance? (This is not the same as something being an illusion — a psychosomatic misunderstanding).

This is where the self’s understanding falters, and runs into the constraints of self-invented languages. The (illusory) self, which perceives itself to live in a dualistic world, where everything is either real (ie fits within its conceptions of what is real) or unreal (ie fits within its conceptions of what can be imagined) cannot conceive of or imagine what an ‘appearance’ is. An appearance is neither real nor unreal. It is not a conception, it is not a perception, it is not something that is or can be imagined, conceived or perceived by the self. How can it then possibly be true? Because it appears that when the self drops away (and it is seen that it never actually was) everything that is, is suddenly, wondrously, seen, as an appearance — by no one.

How do we know? We don’t — but (apparent) messengers of the radical non-duality ontology who claim ‘they’ don’t exist and do not ‘any longer’ have selves say this truth is now seen. Why should we believe them? Because their ontology is air-tight; it has no flaws, no loose ends, no ‘dark matter’ still unexplained, no contradictory arguments, no inconsistencies; no one could invent and ‘argue’ an ontology this brilliantly, and continue to do so for decades, as Tony Parsons has done for example.

And as perplexing as this ontology is, to some extent it is intuitive, even obvious to everyone. Whenever there is a ‘glimpse‘ it is seen to be true. When it’s accepted it is actually profoundly satisfying, since everything suddenly makes sense, including all the unhappiness and frustration the self feels, hopelessly and needlessly, life-long.

But it makes no sense to the self. It seems utterly preposterous. And even when science is able to eliminate all other possible ontologies (and I’d guess that will happen by the end of this century, if our civilization lasts that long), it probably won’t be accepted by most people as other than a useless scientific curiosity, like black holes.

It’s been suggested that belief in radical non-duality is just another dogmatic ‘self-denying’ religion — something that someone desperate enough for an easy answer to life’s apparent suffering will glom on to as a last resort, a coping mechanism during their ‘dark night of the soul‘. This is probably the hardest argument to address, since radical non-duality does partly meet the broader definitions of religion as a “system of faith and worship” or as a “system of beliefs, symbols and practices that addresses the nature of existence, and … is lived as if it both takes in and spiritually transcends socially-grounded ontologies of time, space, embodiment and knowing.”

But I don’t think it qualifies as a religion because:

  • it has nothing to do with spirituality or belief in a higher power or the supernatural
  • it has no object of worship (not even Gaia)
  • it is built on skepticism about other ontologies, rather than on faith (ie an unsupported or unsupportable belief) in an ontology
  • rather than being in conflict with, or dealing only with areas outside of science, it seems to have considerable scientific support (in neuroscience, quantum physics, astrophysics and cosmology)
  • it entails no practices and offers no pathways to or ideas about better ways to live
  • it offers no solace, salvation, redemption, comfort or any of the other apparent benefits of religious belief

So, back to the sheer preposterousness of this ontology. If it’s so “obvious”, why does almost no one subscribe to it?

The history of the human species is replete with belief systems that lasted millennia because they were simply the best that available scientific and other empirical evidence could come up with. And humans want to believe, and will accept almost any belief system that isn’t obviously wrong, dangerous or useless. We have believed (and some still believe) in magical and evil spirits, in reincarnation, in a geocentric universe, in a flat earth, that the earth was created by a superhuman in six days, that babies and non-humans cannot feel pain, that diseases are caused by humours or miasmas and can be cured by faith-healers, etc.

We generally believe (a) what we’re conditioned by parents, peers and other trusted people to believe, (b) what we learn that isn’t inconsistent with what we already believe, and (c) what we want to believe (because it’s easy, safe, or for other personal reasons). It is likely that billions of people still don’t believe in evolution. Many believe in outmoded ideas like the “big bang” or string theory simply because others have persuaded them that these theories seem to be consistent with scientific knowledge, and no better theory has been presented and explained to them.

So the fact that there is not even a small consensus on the validity of the ontology of radical non-duality is probably not surprising. It is very new (though in some ways very ancient — there is after all no such thing as “progress” of ideas and belief systems). It flies in the face of centuries of scientific thought. It is hopeless (there is no path to realize its veracity), useless (it offers no guidance on any subject), and it creates a host of moral dilemmas (it denies the existence of purpose, meaning, free will, self-control, or responsibility). In fact the only thing that it seems to have going for it is that it’s perhaps the only ontology that explains everything and isn’t directly contradicted by very compelling evidence. It is, perhaps, the ontology of last resort.

Suppose this ontology is correct. What would happen if it became largely accepted? Nothing would change. Because if it’s correct, and selves and separation don’t exist, then acknowledging that truth isn’t going to change anything. Those whose selves have apparently fallen away seem to behave almost exactly as they did before, confirming that the self, being an illusion, doesn’t actually influence anything — the apparent character (body+behaviours) ‘left behind’ continues to do what it’s been biologically and culturally conditioned to do. What seemed to be ‘decisions’ made by selves were discovered to be merely ‘rationalizations’ for what the character was going to do anyway.

So when I wrote earlier that humans are the only species that can’t see everything as it truly is, that’s kind of unfair to the billions of apparent human bodies on the planet that, unbeknown to our ‘selves’ are not actually separate or unable to see what truly is. What “can’t see everything as it truly is” are the selves that presume to inhabit those bodies, and which are disconnected from ‘everything that is’, including our remarkably competent (without any self telling them what to do) bodies.

So there is nothing to lose, or to gain, if this ontology becomes widely accepted. What will continue to (apparently) happen is the only thing that could have happened.

Our languages are utterly ‘self-ish’. They consist primarily of nouns (things that don’t actually exist), pronouns (references to self and others, which are illusory), and adjectives (conceptual, perceptual and judgemental descriptors of these non-existent things). Every sentence, by its grammatical form, is a story fragment — a fiction. Thoughts and feelings and personal sensations and perceptions, in the absence of language, are ephemeral — they have no substance, import or reality. They can’t be ‘made sense of’ without the context of a story, ie without language.

It is only when the self takes ownership of these ephemera that it ‘makes’ them real. Then, using language, the self weaves them into a story (about seemingly ‘real’ things existing and happening in ‘real’ time and space, and full of ‘real’ causality). And then these “psychosomatic misunderstandings” (as Jim Newman calls them) begin to wreak havoc on us — setting up the vicious cycle of what Eckhart Tolle calls the “egoic mind’s” often-terrible (and always invented) conceptions, perceptions, ideas, judgements, stories, expectations and beliefs, and the “pain-body’s” reactive negative emotions. Egoic mind sees loved one hugging stranger, invents a story about its meaning, and reacts with jealousy. And that jealousy then feeds more imagined aspects of the story, which fuels more reactive pain etc.

Language thus entrenches and reinforces the self’s sense of separation. Without it, could there even be a sense of self? Have humans always been afflicted with this sense of self?

There is (hotly debated) evidence that the first settlements, agriculture and abstract languages (the three hallmarks of ‘civilized’ society) all began about 10-20k ago (by contrast, human art dates back at least 100k years). These civilizations likely emerged independently in widely dispersed areas on five continents.

It is plausible that abstract language only evolved because it was needed to function in complex agricultural settlements, but it’s probably safe to assume all three hallmarks co-evolved and that all three are essential to a functioning civilization culture. There’s also some (equally-debatable) evidence that civilizations arose either (1) because exceptionally-comfortable post-ice-age climate conditions (since ~10k years ago) allowed massive increases in populations in suddenly-lush areas that had been largely lifeless when they were under mile-thick ice, or (2) because exceptionally-grim late-ice-age climate conditions (~20k years ago) forced humans to evolve civilizations in order to survive.

Whichever theory holds, it is interesting to speculate whether, prior to ‘civilization’, when we lived in relatively tiny numbers in tropical forests (and, later, as many vast forests burned due to more climate change, savannas), humans actually had selves. There is a credible argument that our first expansion (perhaps expulsion is a better word) from the once-all-providing forest to the unfamiliar and more perilous seashore enabled us to start to consume large amounts of amino-acid-rich (and plentiful) fish and seafood, which led to the major increase in the size and capacity of our brains, perhaps beyond the tipping point that would allow the idea of the ‘self’ to arise. Indeed, most early civilizations were in coastal areas.

This argument, then, would hold not only that climate change both provoked the emergence of human civilizations, and is now causing the termination of our global human civilization, but that illusory human ‘selves’ are concurrent with both stable climate and civilization culture. That would mean that pre-civilized humans were not conscious of themselves as separate and not afflicted by the illusion of selves with their commensurate, useless, body-mind trauma. It would also hold that when our global civilization culture fizzles out with the end of stable climate later this century, the (relatively small number of human) survivors millennia hence will not be afflicted with selves, and will not have civilizations, (catastrophic) agriculture, settlements or languages. Lucky them! What an amazing time that will be! But for no one, since the apparent human bodies will have no sense of being separate and apart from everything that (apparently) is.

Why wouldn’t these post-global-civ humans just reinvent language, settlement, agriculture, and civilization? Because they wouldn’t need any of these things to thrive, as humans apparently did for most of a million years before the ice ages. Even if selves emerged in certain large-brained post-civ humans, there would be no cultural conditioning to reinforce the illusion that the self was real, and hence it would be ignored, and not evolutionarily selected for.

How can any creature function without any sense of itself? When we study tiny wild creatures with minuscule brains (like silverfish or aphids), we see an amazing and clever instinct for survival, honed over millions of years to know just when and where to flee or freeze. When we study wild creatures that have no brains at all, like jellyfish, we likewise see amazing intelligence, but if there can be said to be a self in such creatures, it would have to be plural, since they have no centre, no place for a ‘self’ to reside.

When we study large-brained wild animals, like whales and elephants and ravens, we insist they must have a sense of self, and other, to explain many of their apparently clever, self-absorbed or altruistic activities. Yet none of these creatures has (to our knowledge) invented abstract language, catastrophic agricultural processes, complex settlements, or large-scale complex civilizations. Why not? Because they don’t need them. Whales have lots of the stuff of complex brains, so it’s clear they could evolve these things if it served an evolutionary purpose to do so, but it doesn’t. Does that mean they don’t have selves?

I would argue that they don’t have selves because they don’t need them, either. A self needs nurturing, conditioning, reinforcement. I would say that without abstract language it is impossible to ‘teach’ infants of any species to acknowledge and accept their selves as real. Without language there can be no stories, no sense of individuality or purpose or apart-ness — no sense of self. So even though a baby whale surely has the brain capacity to create a model of itself, even if it did so, would it take it seriously? Without language reinforcement from other whales, why would it consider the model of the self as any more than it is — a mental construct of no evident use or import?

There have been studies that indicate these complex creatures live most of their lives in a perpetual “now time”, unaware of the existence of “clock time”, of their separateness, or of anything apart. And then in moments of existential threat (eg a looming predator) they briefly enter an ‘altered state’ that causes them to fight, flight or freeze, and to use everything in their power (including their considerable wits) to protect themselves or their tribe-mates. And then it is physically ‘shaken off’ — like a bad dream — after which they return to “now time”. This makes enormous evolutionary sense.

Unfortunately, in humans, in crowded, precarious, agricultural settlements and massively overpopulated, crowded, unfathomably-complex civilized cultures, the stress that brings about this ‘altered state’ is chronic — it never goes away. So how do we cope? Enter the self, valiantly trying to make sense of this unnatural and traumatic state that you never seem to wake up from. And the self decides it is real, that everything else outside it is real (especially those threats), that it is in control (someone has to be in this awful chaos!), that it has free will and choice, and that it is responsible for the survival and well-being of the body it now presumes to inhabit. It invents language to communicate its trauma, and what might be done about it, to similarly afflicted selves, in the hope that selves working together will accomplish more than a lone self. And it never wakes up.

The tragedy of course is that this well-meaning self doesn’t actually do anything. It is the dream (or rather the nightmare, the prison it has caught itself in) it is trying to solve, to make better. Just as with every other creature, the human body knows, from a million years, a billion years of evolutionary learning stored in its DNA, just what to do. Not only does the self not do anything, it doesn’t even get in the way. It is a self-created illusion.

The question is not how we could or would function without selves, but rather how we are able to function perfectly well without selves. In part, that is the wonder of evolution — no ‘self-conscious’ self is needed (which is a good thing, because the self is pretty poor at what it does, in case you haven’t noticed).

Hidden beyond the veil of your self, that body that you’ve come to think of as yours is an amazing evolutionary ‘machine’ that doesn’t recognize or see ‘you’ at all, and it knows exactly what to do. No help from ‘you’ or ‘me’ required.

Beyond this dream-veil of the self the wondrous oneness of everything — not real or unreal, just everything appearing to happen, beyond time or space — is seen as it truly is. Not seen by a body, not seen by any one, just seen for what it, astonishingly, is. If you know (kind of) what I mean by a glimpse, you’ll understand. But you’ll still be trapped in the prison of your self.

If this makes no sense to ‘you’, it doesn’t matter. Everything will go on appearing, perfectly, wondrously, outside of ‘you’ and ‘me’, eternally and everywhere. Except when and where ‘you’ and ‘I’ are, hopelessly, looking.

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 7 Comments

Links of the Quarter: June 2019

Posted on June 11, 2019 by Dave Pollard


image of the Maldives by David Mark from Pixabay, CC0; the islands will likely be completely submerged due to sea level rise from glacial melt by mid-century

I’ve recently updated the (highly subjective) list of my ‘best’ 94 posts. That’s out of nearly 3000 posts since this blog began in February 2003 (I started posting “links of the week/ month/ quarter” soon after), up through May 21st of this year. The list is shown in the right sidebar (sorted by category, newest first in each category), and several of my most recent posts are on the list. That includes my latest writings on collapse, on direct action, on human nature, on radical nonduality and the cognitive dissonance that belief in it produces, and some new creative works.

Writing about these subjects, some of which I’ve been touching on since this blog started, still seems to be what’s worth doing now.

On to the links:

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END


in a NYT piece by Claire Cain Miller (ironically behind paywall); thanks to Tree Bressen for the link; via Corporate Rebels

No Happy Ending: Roy Scranton, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene has just written a lovely and scathing review of two new ‘dire but still hopeful’ books on collapse, in the LA Review of Books this week. It is actually a broad summation of the current state of writing about collapse and of some of its leading lights. Well worth a read. Teaser:

Unluckily for us, climate change is not a moral fable, a point [David] Wallace-Wells [author of the much-debated essay The Uninhabitable Earth] makes but then seems to forget. “There is nothing to learn from global warming,” he writes early on, “because we do not have the time, or the distance, to contemplate its lessons; we are after all not merely telling the story but living it.” And therein lies the problem with both books. The story we’re living is one of failure, catastrophe, suffering, and tragedy: an out-of-control car careening off a dark road. The story Wallace-Wells and [Bill] McKibben wind up telling, however, is that we’re in control and the skid is manageable, if only we choose to take the wheel. It’s a story I’ve heard before…

The challenge these two capable, intelligent writers struggle with so powerfully, and which they so disappointingly fail to meet, is a challenge that anyone who thinks seriously about climate change confronts: the danger we face is utterly unlike anything humanity has ever faced before. Their moral fables don’t really fit our situation, but neither does the traditional narrative of apocalypse, nor the story of wartime mobilization, nor the story of innovation and progress, nor narratives of heroic overcoming.

Climate change is bigger than any individual moral choice. It’s bigger than the New Deal, bigger than the Marshall Plan, bigger than World War II, bigger than racism, sexism, inequality, slavery, the Holocaust, the end of nature, the Sixth Extinction, famine, war, and plague all put together. The chaos it’s bringing is going to supercharge every other problem. Successfully meeting this crisis would require an abrupt, traumatic revolution in global human society; failing to meet it will be even worse. This is the truth we struggle to comprehend in narrative, the reality our stories must make sense of. The all-too-real possibility we must confront — and which David Wallace-Wells and Bill McKibben notably refuse — is that the story we’re living is a tragedy that ends in disaster, no matter what.

Grim Scenarios: David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, who bring deep credentials in scenario planning and thinking to the task of painting a realistic picture of coming climate change, have dared to illustrate what Roy and David have hinted at, and it’s enough to scare the reader shitless. Their scenario of Earth in 2050 — that’s just three decades from now — refers to “reaching the Endgame”, as many as 2 billion humans displaced by heat, drought and flooding, and utter social breakdown in the face of massive and relentless economic and social disruption caused by extreme climate events, and the report concludes: “In high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end.”

Talking With Your Children About Collapse: Despite the sobering reality outlined above, counsellors continue to tell parents to ‘accentuate the positive’ and to help their children to be ‘hopeful’ in light of what we now face. I guess that’s the best they have to offer. What could we do with them that would be more useful, and more honest? Or, perhaps even better, should we just shut up and listen to them?

Michael Dowd’s Collapse Collection: Michael has put together audio recordings of nearly 50 articles and interviews with leading writers about collapse.

LIVING BETTER


image from an innovative ad for a Newfoundland inn; thanks to Jae Mather for the link

How Extinction Rebellion Operates: Roger Hallam explains the theory that lies behind this powerful movement. Radical activist groups, usually quick to criticize new movements as naive, seem to be begrudgingly supportive.

Palestine’s Sisyphus: A review of the remarkable work of Palestinian writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh.

The Art of the Green New Deal: Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis (yes, they’re Canadians) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have teamed up to produce a video portraying what a successful Green New Deal might look like. It’s about time we leveraged the power of the arts to create a better vision than the terrible ones currently on offer. Thanks to Tree Bressen for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


cartoon by the great Australian cartoonist Costa A; thanks to Ben Pennings for the link

The Most Incompetent Businessperson of All Time: The NYT has analyzed 10 years of 45’s old tax returns and they reveal an absolutely staggering level of business incompetence, unparalleled in history, with billions upon billions of dollars lost through poor investments. No wonder he doesn’t want the world to see his recent returns. Although it’s almost inconceivable that the liar-in-chief files honest returns, even what he has disclosed is mind-blowing. Sadly, this is important investigative journalism now buried behind the NYT paywall, much to 45’s benefit. (On the other hand, the NYT has recently come down against universal healthcare for Americans, saying “there is no precedent in American history” for anything so radical, and this strangely regressive position is also locked behind their paywall, for which I am grateful.)

Canada’s Pathetic Political Leaders: Investigative journalist Michael Harris summarizes the endless blundering and poor decision-making of the Trudeau government, and the reasons why his arch-Conservative counterpart is much, much worse. But given the waffling and stupidity of recently-elected provincial NDP governments, that once-great party may be relegated to the history books with this fall’s election, and the Greens’ befuddled backing of environmental atrocities in BC in a hapless attempt to secure proportionate representation, and their cowardly backpedaling on an anti-Israeli-apartheid BDS platform, pretty much assures they will remain a backwater party. There’s basically no ethical progressive party to vote for in Canada.

Canadian Government Yields to Bank Pressure on New Regulations: After the CBC revealed many bank-insider whistle-blowers’ concerns about high-pressure sales tactics used by bank managers on hapless consumers, new regulations were proposed to prohibit them, but the banks were given a copy in advance, and when they didn’t like the new regulations, the government relented and weakened the regulations.

The Oil Industry Has Been Lying About Tar Sands Emissions: Who’d’a guessed?

The UK Brexit Morass: Jonathan Pie brilliantly castigates the UK government for its unbelievable mishandling of Brexit. Not as funny as he is usually, but more important. He’s also at the top of his game with his recent ‘report’ on British citizens’ lack of ‘social mobility’.

Uber’s Master Plan to Take Over Public Transit: Tim Redmond points out an aspect of Uber’s strategy that most people have failed to notice: replacing not only taxis and private automobiles, but municipal buses and trains as well. Thanks to Ben Collver for the link.

Manufacturing Dissent: Danah Boyd, a fellow pioneer in the field dubiously known as ‘knowledge management’, has written an important an insightful address to a digital library group about agnotology (the deliberate manufacture of ignorance in the populace) and epistemological fragmentation (sowing division and doubt through the provocative use and propagation of misinformation). Social media, she says, play perfectly into the hands of perpetrators of both. The article explains how and why this is happening, and the consequences if it continues unabated. Thanks to John Kellden for the link.

FUN AND INSPIRATION


screen cap from a segment on Santorini island, Greece in a 4k video by 4k Urban Life (click on image to see full size); more amazing 4k videos take you to Paris or London at night, or La Habana Cuba. You don’t even need 4k capacity on your laptop to be blown away at how immersive this technology has become.

Handpan Music from a Sicily Mountaintop: Giolì and Assia perform a long set of EDM with handpan accompaniment from a breathtaking location.

How Different Generations Would Invest $10,000: If you got a tax-free gift of $10,000, how would you spend it? This chart shows the generational differences, and they’re telling. Thanks to Jae Mather for the link.

The Art of Colourizing Old Photos: See how the experts do it, step-by-step instructions to DIY, and how colourizing can fool you.

How the Other 90% Live: Al Jazeera takes you to Lagos, Nigeria, soon to be the world’s largest city (growing by about a million people a year, most of them refugees and many of them uncounted), and the story of two young teachers from Benin struggling to survive in the big city.

How to Sabotage Your Workplace: Corporate Rebels republish a fascinating (recently declassified) CIA report written in 1944 to help allied sympathizers in axis-controlled and -occupied nations disrupt work productivity in their homelands, which contains some mighty powerful ideas for doing the same thing today. What’s even more interesting is how these tactics overlap with many of the behaviours seen in many corporate executives and management of large organizations (hopefully unwittingly). Makes for fascinating and sometimes hilarious reading. Thanks to Tree Bressen for the link.

Did the Last Climate Emergency Create Bipedal Humans?: A new study of waves of massive electron storms lasting five million years and ending just over two million years ago (caused by cosmic radiation from supernovae 160 light years away) may have burned up much of the tropical rainforest that was then home to early hominids, in megafires, especially in East Africa, forcing them to migrate and adapt to savanna conditions better suited to standing on two legs, and other radical behaviour changes. So climate change may have been responsible for causing civilization to arise in the first place, just as it is now responsible for causing its end.

A Brilliant New Piano Talent: Young Georgian (the country, not the state) pianist Khatia Buniatishvili (there’s a cedilla under the s but my keyboard can’t show it) is creating a sensation in the classical music world. Alas, too many old male music critics are so distracted by her appearance that they discount what she is doing to revolutionize the art. There has been a recent trend to play piano works (especially slow movements) more slowly to infuse more emotion into the playing. The adagio from Rachmaninoff’s 2nd piano concerto, for example, was played by the composer in about 10 minutes, and more recently by the great Lang Lang in 14 minutes. Khatia ratchets it back to 10 without losing a trace of the nuance and emotional power of the music. She and her sister Gvantsa likewise partner in Bach’s concerto for two pianos and orchestra, sprinting through it deftly and passionately in a breathtaking 13:40. Everything Khatia performs sounds new, especially when she pairs up with the remarkable Orchestra Un Violon Sur le Sable, which is also reinventing the performance of many classical standards. And on top of that Khatia is remarkably astute as a political analyst (in at least four languages) as this interview in her adopted France demonstrates.

THOUGHTS FOR THE QUARTER


cartoon by Keith J. Taylor; thanks to Ron Woodall for the link

From Scott Budman (thanks to Hildy Gottlieb for the link): “Went to synagogue yesterday for my friend’s daughter’s bat mitzvah. Arrived and saw five people holding signs by the door. I thought, protestors? No. Muslims. The signs said ‘We’re better together. We’ll keep watch while you pray.'”

From Nick Humphrey, geoscientist and meteorologist, in a recent interview with xRay Mike:

I do not think it is possible [as XR is demanding] to transition to a net-zero carbon emission civilization within a decade. The idea itself is simply absurd because it would require basically returning to a pre-industrial society with none of the benefits which came from building the society provided by fossil fuels…  Meanwhile, none of this stops climate change because there is already so much damage in the pipeline. At 500 parts per million of equivalent carbon dioxide concentration, enough greenhouse gases are currently in the atmosphere to ultimately warm the planet 4-5 degrees C/7-9 F above 1700s temperatures, raise the sea level by 220 feet/67 meters (assuming 1 ppm CO2 equivalent = 1 ft sea level rise, based on past longer-term paleoclimate change response), and remove significant amounts of soil moisture, leading to the destruction of agriculture. And this is without any other carbon releases or feedbacks…

We are entering a range of weather conditions not supportive of agriculture. And not simply monoculture. All agriculture. Even other ways of doing Ag require stable weather conditions, seasonality, soils and ability to conduct economic activity between peoples. None of this will be possible in these conditions. And that assumes the ecosystems which support agriculture also remain stable and available and that is not likely given the ongoing global extinction of insects.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Things I Do While Waiting, Hopelessly, for the Dawn

Posted on June 8, 2019 by Dave Pollard


photo by Vahap Kìlüken from pxhere, cc0

The expression the dark night of the soul seems to resonate with a lot of people. It’s used as a metaphor for times of extreme personal, often existential, doubt, angst, hopelessness, depression, meaninglessness, purposelessness, aimlessness, sorrow, emotional and spiritual emptiness, and a host of other haunting, relentless feelings that, it is always hoped, will fall away and give rise to a new ‘dawn’, offering revelation, calm, inspiration, insight, joy, redemption and fullness of heart.

The expression is usually credited to a medieval Spanish mystic named St John who actually never used the phrase, but who wrote a poem (later turned into mostly-brooding songs by at least a dozen composers and artists) about his journey (on foot) into the night and his discovery of God/nature/oneness in that dark place. Most non-dualists from Eckhart Tolle to Adyashanti have written and talked about how this was for them, and most self-professed spiritual ‘teachers’ tell you what to ‘do’ about it, and promise deliverance, liberation, or ‘enlightenment’ on the other side of it. Gratefully, radical non-dualists like Tony Parsons and Jim Newman offer absolutely no guidance on dealing with it if and when it happens to you.

My guess is that, for most people, the ‘dark night’ is the romanticizing of depression, despair and/or grief. It’s indulging in the heroic myth that through suffering comes true realization and achievement, that “the darkest hour is always before the dawn”. In other words, the myth of progress, made personal. Hope is really important to most people (sadly).

I have no problems with that — whatever works for people is fine with me — but it’s very different from what I sense St John was referring to. At the end of St John’s night, I sense, is emptiness. Not an enlightened St John, but one who’s no longer there, but vanished into oneness with the night.

And the “night” is always, I think, actually much longer than one night.

For me, I think, this period of existential crisis has lasted at least a few years now, and while it could euphemistically be called ‘dark’ it has actually been the happiest period of my life. The realization, first, that whatever I may do with the rest of my life will make no enduring difference to the world after I’ve gone, and, second, that I have no free will, control, choice or indeed responsibility for what ‘I’ apparently do with the rest of my life or what happens to ‘me’, has actually been liberating in its own right.

The further realization that this long-suffering ‘self’ is just a concocted illusion, a spandrel, an evolutionary accident that believes itself within and in charge of this mind and body, helps ‘me’ to see this existential crisis (and to some extent this existential crisis is ‘me’) for what it is. And what it is is a psychosomatic misunderstanding of a model of what seems real, dreamt up by a furiously patterning brain and conveyed to an impressionable, reactive body, and then, tragically, mistaken for reality. Evolutionarily, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

So this night is not so dark, not for me anyway. What is left, in lieu of a slew of ghastly and debilitating negative feelings is (a) annoyance and impatience that this ‘me’ is suffering needlessly, and a sense it would be best (for me and the world) if my ‘self’ somehow quietly just fell away, and (b) a complete lack of any sense of what (as I put it in my last post) seems worth doing now.

There have been many times, especially late at night when, perhaps like St John, I’ve felt a desire to walk out into the forest (I am so blessed to live where I do) and/or down to the ocean, and then just sit or lie there until something that somehow seems more likely to happen there than in this safe shelter where I spend too much time, happens.

But I don’t actually do that. Too uncomfortable, and actually kinda silly. It’s a strong romantic fantasy, though. Could make a great next chapter for the ‘story of me’. But damn that story is boring.

I have less romantic types of fantasies, too, usually around excessive hedonistic activities that bring pure pleasure and (in my fantasies) endless fun into this ‘dark night’. Not going to happen of course, except in my dreams-within-this-dream. Passes the time to think about it though. Something to do while waiting, in the Eliotesque sense of the word.

And then there is play — most of it solo, these days — crosswords, games, jamming to good instrumental music with my keyboard and Garage Band, listening to new ‘recommended’ music, my creative writing (sometimes), rare conversations with very bright, curious and creative people, rarer bouts of painting, the occasional brief flirtation, looking at beautiful things and places (much safer than actually engaging with them personally, and 4K sure beats Kodachrome), a very few books and fewer films. There is no time, no life, no death, not really, so what harm is there in a little innocent play?

And sometimes there is a glimpse. But it never lasts.

Seems pretty ‘self’-indulgent, no? I have, it’s true, been too much myself of late. After many years of trying to be more present, I’m coming to think it would be better for everyone, including this creature ‘I’ presume to inhabit, if ‘I’ were instead more absent. This creature does just fine without ‘me’, and always has.

Of course ‘I’ have no say in any of this. So I guess I will just stick around, waiting, and occasionally doing other pretentious things, like writing in this blog. Sorry if you were expecting more.

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

The Work That Seems Worth Doing Now

Posted on May 26, 2019 by Dave Pollard

conversation by pam o'connell
painting “In Deep Conversation” by Irish artist Pam O’Connell

“It’s about negotiating the surrender of our whole way of living,” writes Dougald Hine. Dougald was the co-founder ten years ago of the Dark Mountain project he is now leaving behind, and he’s just written a poignant and thoughtful essay titled After We Stop Pretending, his Dark Mountain swan song. “Negotiating the surrender of our whole way of living” is his current answer to the question: What is the work that seems worth doing now?

I had the pleasure of meeting Dougald and Paul a few years ago in Totnes, and then fell out of touch with both of them. I sensed they were being sucked back into useless debates about collapse (what was being said about it; what could or should be ‘done’ about it), and I was disappointed that what I’d read of the contents of their writing anthologies never approached the brilliance of their original Manifesto. But I still agree with the original Dark Mountain mandate: to simply chronicle civilization’s collapse, through whatever our media of choice may be, without prescribing what to do about it, since nothing can, or need, be done. It is enough to witness it, articulately and compassionately.

It is enough to point out what is so obvious few can see it, as Dougald does again in this essay, writing from Sweden about his co-venture called Home, which is “a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of re-growing a living culture”, and reminding us of Vinay Gupta’s observation that “What you people call collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee”.

Still, all collapsniks keep getting asked the same question What do we do now?, so I thought it was interesting that Dougald has seemingly learned to sidestep that answerless question by instead addressing the more sensible question What is the work that seems worth doing now?

Dougald, like me, has become intrigued by the Extinction Rebellion movement, which seems a much younger, more radical, more intent and less idealistic movement than the Occupy movement, somewhat more akin to the Idle No More movement. He admires their energy, their doggedness, their Direct Action work that dares to say no to a culture that no longer serves us, and predicts “there will be other movements along soon, other kinds of rupture and other kinds of work to be done”.

I’m not so sure. Dougald’s new venture of “re-growing a living culture” resonates with the mandate of Extinction Rebellion to co-create a “regenerative culture”, and that of the latest generation of food system activists to promote “regenerative agriculture”. Sustainability and resilience are dead, apparently; long live “regeneration”!

I find reading about these ‘new’ terms depressing: it’s all about “improvement”, “design”, and (etymologically) “making things over”. Whereas permaculture and complexity science teach us about observing and learning humbly from nature and adapting accordingly, “regeneration” (literally “being born again”) is about humans once again front and centre doing things a better way (than nature?) When will we ever learn?

I think part of the problem with sussing out the work that seems worth doing now is that anyone’s answer will be contingent upon their personal story of what has been, of where ‘we’ are now, and of what the future will hold. As I have argued before, stories are convenient fictions. They are what we want to believe, not what is true — no story can convey what’s really true. 45, who is now certain to be remembered in history as the most incompetent businessperson in the history of the planet, is a master story-teller, spinning tales that so many desperately want to believe to be true that it is now quite conceivable that this incoherent, clueless sociopath will actually be re-elected. How can we persuade ourselves, after looking at his example, that changing our world is as absurdly simple as “changing our story”? Damn stories.

Dougald’s answer of “negotiating the surrender of our whole way of living” is likewise laden with his story, one that many affluent progressives obviously sympathize with and relate to. It’s a poetic and lovely statement, one I wish I’d come up with. But what does it mean? To what or whom are we surrendering exactly? What does it mean to surrender when you only do it when you have no other choice?

And given the chasm between ‘our’ way of living and our coffee grower’s, is it just us, the mostly northern and western beneficiaries of this obscene and destructive culture, who should be surrendering our way of living? Most of the world’s people would love to surrender their way of living, if there only were one on offer that was easier to cope with than the precarious way they’re living now.

So, I sense that, while the new question What is the work that seems worth doing now? is at least more honest and useful than the old question What do we do now?, my answer to both questions remains the same: There is nothing to be done. What we do each moment, in the deluded belief we have some personal choice about it, is the consequence of our conditioning and the circumstances of the moment, and it’s beyond our control.

I could spend hours talking with Dougald — he’s a brilliant, imaginative, and unusually articulate guy. But I wouldn’t be interested in talking about regeneration, or about surrender, even if we could agree on what those hubris-laden terms actually mean.

What I’d rather talk about, I think, is how we might hone our capacity for paying attention, which I think underlies all great art, as unbearable as paying attention in a world in collapse can often be. I’d rather talk about how we might foster an attitude of “contemplative gratitude” — reflection, acceptance, compassion, kindness and equanimity — that might enable us to be of more use to others in these challenging times, and might allow the great ‘works’ of art that are waiting for us to get out of the way so they can be expressed through us, to emerge.

And I’d rather talk about what JA Baker in The Peregrine might have been getting at when he said, after spending a lifetime trying to see the world as a falcon saw it, “The hardest thing of all is to see what is really there.”

There would be no plan of action, no ‘work plan’. Just a conversation. Fun, actually. Play, not work at all. Play, perhaps, that seems worth doing now.

Posted in Collapse Watch | 5 Comments