Week 9 - You Think Plugging Your Ponytail into an Animal is Cool?

This is where we should start feeling at home...

..NOT here.

I watched James Cameron's Avatar- full of big blue nobly savage aliens fighting the greedy little pinkskins who killed their own mother, and are now coming after the blue folks' mater deitas. So I had three major thoughts as the credits rolled, other than how much cooler Stephen Lang was in Terra Nova. And what a better job that show did of getting the basic message across; yes, Terra Nova was still mightily base and clichéd, but it wasn’t downright stupid about it like Avatar was.

Firstly, that plugging their hair into animals was so tangible.

Second, why? There are several possibilities and they're all disturbing and annoying. Did they do that to re-inforce the impotence and disavowal of humanity? Since we have nothing so tangible in our own attitudes and relationship with ecology? What are people going to think about why we don't, and can't do it? How is this kind of symbolism and throwing a tangible middle finger in people's faces going to encourage them *not* to 'kill our mother...' and for that matter we are not even killing the Earth. We're ruining our ability to live on it, sure, but she was here long before we came, and will recover and endure long after we go.

Third, humans are indeed less valuable than animals/other life, because we are irresponsible and unworthy beings. If we flourish another 50 years, all other life may go extinct. If we went extinct today, in 50 years all other life will flourish. We're 1% of earth's biomass but we consume over 25% of earth's photosynthesis (Rifkin 2009; Ponting 2007). But since we're here, we better figure out how to keep on being here.

You think plugging a ponytail into an animal is cool? No, it's not. What is cool is that we can achieve far more, in a far less outlandish and dream-like way, in our own home. Sadly, though, ecology is the new opium of the masses (Zizek 2008). What we expect from religion is some kind of unquestionable, absolute authority. It’s true because God says it is, end of discussion. Today, ecology is taking over this role. Whenever there is a new economic paradigm or scientific breakthrough, the voice that warns us not to cross *that* line belongs to ecology (ibid). “Don’t mess with DNA, don’t open that mine.” It’s a terrible transmogrification of old ideas into new times.

Another popular myth is that the western world’s technological, artificial environments are alienated from the natural environment. We are not abstract veneers, but rather, nature is our unfathomable home (Zizek 2008). Consider what I call the climate change crusade. Anyone with a clue knows what danger we are in, so what are we doing about it? Obfuscating the issue with ideological crusades (Moore 2011). It is an example of psychoanalytical disavowal. “I know that very well, BUT, I act as if I don’t know.” So you know about climate change, maybe you watched a documentary, but when get in your car to drive round the block to McDonalds, you don’t see any of this. So even if you know rationally what’s going on, what do you do? Go to the site of a real ecological and human horror, such as Chernobyl, and see what you take home. How capable are we to change the way we live?

What we should do to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is not some new age druidism, back to nature roots-and-all, but on the contrary to cut off those roots even more; more alienation from our spontaneous idealistic nature. We should develop a much more abstract and terrifying sensibility, where we see the world for what it is, finding our poetry and spirituality in that. If not to create beauty in that, then an aesthetic truth in things like rubbish, catastrophe, science, religion, and pain, because that is how to truly love our world (Zizek 2008).

What is love? It is not idealisation. Everyone who has truly loved anybody knows that you don’t idealise them. Love means you accept them and all their failures, stupidities, ugliness; nonetheless the person is the world to you, and makes your life worth living. You see perfection in imperfection itself, and that’s how we should learn to love the world. We should stop talking about science vs. religion, and talk about how we can stop ideas like this dichotomy, and ideological disavowal, from infiltrating our love for our world. Now is our last chance to get the future right (Wright 2005). True ecology loves all of this.

References

Cameron, J. (Director). (2009). Avatar [DVD Film]. 20th Century Fox.

Moore, P. (2011). Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist. Beatty Street Publishing Inc.

Ponting, C. (2007). A New Green History of the World. Penguin Group, New York.

Rifkin, J. (2009). The Empathic Civilisation: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Penguin Group, New York.

Zizek, S. (2008). In Taylor, A. (Director & Writer). Examined Life. [DVD Documentary Film]. Zeitgeist film.

Pictures obtained from:
http://www.classicrockmagazine.com/news/does-avatar-steal-from-roger-dean/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/cardiff/2011/apr/11/roath-rec-rubbish-sunny-weather
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/10/21/2719237.htm

http://deathofdurban.blogspot.com.au/2008/09/rubbish-rubbish-endless-piles-of-stinky.html

http://www.backfills.com/rubbish-art.php

Week 8 - Ideology: STILL the Opiate of the Masses...

PICTURES

This is where we should start feeling at home. The way religion has conditioned people to think for centuries is ideological thought, and is the main problem facing humanity, and the source of the conflict between science and religion. Why? It is dangerous. Ideology addresses very real problems by mystifying them (Zizek 2008). Then we are unhinged from our responsibility and vulnerable to be told to scapegoat all our problems on saviours and sin. What, then, can you do to redeem yourself from the sickness

Ideology's elementary mechanism is the ‘temptation of meaning.’ When something horrible happens, our first reaction is to search for meaning (Frankl 1946). Take AIDS for example. It is a horrible trauma. The religions decided that it is punishment for sin. When we interpret a catastrophe as divine punishment, it makes it easier, because then we “know” that it is not just some terrifying unknown force...it has a meaning. When you are in the middle of such force, it is better to feel that God punished you than to feel that it just happened. If God punished you, then it is still a universe of meaning (Zizek 2008).

Science today is focused largely in two spheres: atheism and ecology. Atheism will be the topic of this post. The final one will cover ecology.


The battle between science and religion has raged for millenia, since religion first appeared in human consciousness in the hydro-agricultural revolution (Rifkin 2009). Religion has lost much of its power and control in recent years, for several reasons. The works of Dan Brown, the books-become-movies The DaVinci Code, that struck a chord with a massive audience who had been hurt by religion; and Angels and Demons which cuts right to the heart of the debate of science vs. religion.

 

In the real world, a man who did this better than anybody else was Christopher Hitchens. In a debate that he and teammate Stephen Fry won by a landslide, he said the following:


"I refer to Bishop Marini and the Pope's speeches directly: 'Given the number of sins we've committed in the course of 20 centuries, reference to them must necessarily be summary...he begged for forgiveness for the Crusades, the Inquisition, the persecution of the Jewish people, the injustice towards women - half the human race, right there - the forced conversion of indigenous peoples, especially in South America."


Then he went on to speak of 94 recognitions made by the previous Pope John Paul II, including the African slave trade, the admission that Galileo was...right, institutionalised and sanctioned torture, silence during Hitler's reign, the burning alive of Jan Hus, the Great Sack of Constantinople, and the rape of boys.

US President Richard Nixon was asked by his Economic Advisor what shold be done about the environment, and Nixon replied "I don't think the Lord will tarry (in his Second Coming) long enough for us to have to worry about the environment."
 
Religion puts that which should be organic and divine and uncaged into a cage in their control, for the purpose of controlling souls for profit (Condon 1983). Science seeks to understand what's going on. Unfortunately for humans we are still steeped in ideological disavowal and irresponsible ignorance.  This is where the vehemence in the conflict, and indeed the conflict itself, comes from. People not realising that we're all in the same boat, and deep down saying the exact same thing in different words.


It's not about being a Catholic, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Heathen, Wiccan, Atheist, or Agnostic. It's about being human. Humanism, and empathy, for the sake of being a part of the human race is all we need. Regrettably it's easier said than done, especially when people have been conditioned to believe otherwise with a confusion that runs deep. It's almost as if we've been asleep and now things are about to begin. The real trick will be to figure out how to never find the end that we're still hurtling towards. That will require a lot more than the lucky breaks that gave us life in the first place (Bryson 2003).

True Humanism loves all of this.

References 


Bryson, B. (2003). A Short History of Nearly Everything. Transworld Publishers, London.


Condon, R. (1983). A Trembling Upon Rome. Random House, London.

Greville, F. (1609). Mustapha [Theatrical Play]. Act V, sc. 4.


Rifkin, J. (2009). The Empathic Civilisation: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Penguin Group, New York.

Zizek, S. (2008). In Taylor, A. (Director & Writer). Examined Life. [DVD Documentary Film]. Zeitgeist film.

Pictures obtained from:
http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2009/04/22/ron_howard_defends_angels_aamp_demons_ag

http://jootix.com/view/1561/The-Planet-Earth-planet-earth-blue-space-1920x1080.html

http://www.fashion-dress-pictures.com/can-science-and-religion-work-together/ 

http://glossynews.com/top-stories/serious-commentary/201105180011/science-and-religion-cannot-coexist-together/

http://jesus-needs-money.blogspot.com.au/2010_08_01_archive.html 

http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=1662 

Week 6 - Choice: Destiny, Fate or Damnation?

"I think, therefore I am." - Rene Descartes.

Destiny is a rubbish idea, and so is free will, and so is setting up a dichotomy between the two.

All the information in the world and nobody knows how to use it. In Joan of Arcadia (2003), Ryan Hunter, played sensationally by Wentworth Miller, newcomer to the town towards the end of series two, explains to Joan that he, too, has conversations with God. As a child, he created an imaginary friend after his parents divorced. Then the friend was suddenly real. Unlike Joan, he’s not impressed with God’s creation. If God were God, Ryan contends, he would have scrapped the free will idea, making us all intelligent and capable, but not free. Destiny, perhaps?

“We don’t have to be bossed around by some love-starved deity. My life is a gift? Uhh, ok, thanks. You can’t ask for it back.”

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) doctrine teaches that Lucifer fell from heaven because his plan for humanity involved us having no free will. So free will is a good thing, but they – along with most every religion – demand that you exercise your free will in making the choices that they, on behalf of their deity and doctrine, tell you to make. I've made the choice to risk damnation by rejecting this.

Christopher Hitchens (2001) famously finds vicarious redemption repugnant. Lines from Baron Fulke Greville's play Mustapha (1609) elucidate it thus:

                   Oh wearisome condition of Humanity!
                   Born under one law, to another bound,
                   Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,
                   Created sick, commanded to be sound:
                   What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?
                   Passion and reason self-division cause.
                   Is it the mask or majesty of Power
                   To make offences that it may forgive?

Destiny is garbage. Religious thought makes an obscene middle ground between destiny and free will, by setting humanity up to fail: with one hand it says we have free will, but on the other we must use it to obey them or burn in hell. Choice has power - it's always decisions that matter. The beautiful part of loving someone, be they friend, family, or lover, is that you choose to do it. You choose that person to be everything that makes your life worth living, despite all their flaws. You don’t idealise them; as William Blake (1793) says “he who has suffer’d you to impose on him, knows you.’ 

As much as I hate (as I have discussed elsewhere) the scapegoat for disavowal and irresponsibility that The Matrix’s Neo is, he at least had it right in one thing: The problem, the solution, and everything in between, is choice. John Connor at any stage in the Terminator saga could have chosen to take the mantle offered him; Jesus could have handed off the cup of his crucifixion to someone else. Choice goes hand in hand with a sense of self, one's beliefs, and capacity for empathic responsibility (Rifkin 2009), because there are always consequences; we live in a causal universe.

I disagree with Plato in that we are imprisoned by the shadows on the cave wall that are our senses and experience – rather, this is all we have, and so we should use and celebrate them. We create our reality just because we are in it, much like Ryan Hunter created God. Believing is seeing, not the other way around. Circumstances don’t matter, only state of being matters. The use of the word matter is a double entendre: circumstances don’t create reality (‘matter’), state of being does. Everything is beautiful if you make it so. Everything is pain if you make that so. We’ve got to be the ones to craft and choose our dream. Believing and state of being create the matter that we see. Rational, empirical thought can be as divorced from these truths as can the machinations of religious dogma.

In the end, there’s an old maxim that is eminently and critically relevant – “Don’t think, but do – in other words, do, so you don’t have to think.”

References.

Blake, W. (1793).  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Retrieved from <http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/prose/Blake_-_Proverbs_of_Hell.html>

Greville, F. (1609). Mustapha [Theatrical Play]. Act V, sc. 4.

Hall, B. (Creator). (2003). Joan of Arcadia [T.V. Series]. Season II, episode 22. Barbara Hall Productions.

Hitchens, C. (2001). Letters to a Young Contrarian. Basic Books, New York.

Rifkin, J. (2009). The Empathic Civilisation: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Penguin Group, New York.

Wachowski, L. & Wachowski, A. (Writers & Directors). (1999). The Matrix [DVD Film]. Warner Brothers. 

Pictures obtained from:

http://sharetv.org/shows/joan_of_arcadia/episodes/258162
http://www.divine-inspiration.org.uk/holy-histories/4-fulke-greville-man-of-mystery 
http://www.youthblog.org/2006/10/