Will the 21st Century be a turning point in human history?

 The short answer, I believe, is Yes, but whether it will be positive or negative is up for conjecture. If history is any guide, I’d have to say things don’t look particularly promising. There have been a number of things I’ve read recently, and viewed on TV, from various sources that have made me reflect on this, and it’s hard to know where to start. 

Maybe I’ll start with something I wrote on Facebook recently, which was the seed for this rumination.

 

Humanity has always had both the capacity and inclination for self-destruction. It is our Achilles heel. One can't help but think that the 21st Century is our turning point, one way or the other.

 

There are lots of examples, the Roman Empire being one of the most cited, but also the ancient Egyptians and the Mayans, not to mention Easter Island. Curiously, I’ve just started watching Foundation, on Apple TV, based on Isaac Asimov’s famous books, which is premised on the fall of a future galactic empire founded and run by humanity.

 

But there is another TV series by the BBC called Capital, very contemporary, which I’ve also just started watching, and seems to encapsulate our current situation. I’ve only watched one episode, which centres on a single street in England, but is rendered as a microcosm of global politics and social dilemmas. 

There is the corporate middle manager whose ambition and greed is only outdone by his wife, who mentally spends his money before he’s even earned it. There is the refugee from Zimbabwe who is working illegally, therefore exploited by an ‘agent’, while she faces imminent deportation even though she fears death on arrival. Something that refugees in Australia can readily identify with. There is the Pakistani corner shopkeeper, who is a diligent neighbour, with 2 sons, one who has become religiously conservative and the other who has started, but not completed, 3 university degrees (I can identify with that). He’s the target of a stalker, covertly photographing him and his family. Like everyone else in the street, he’s receiving postcards with the ominous warning, We Want What You Have. In other words, there is an undercurrent of class envy which could fester into something more sinister. Another of the recipients is an elderly woman, whose son and daughter have all but abandoned her, and who is facing terminal illness, but she’s inherited the sin of living in a capitally inflated home.

 

Also, on TV recently, I watched a programme on (Australia’s) ABC 4 Corners, called The Pandora Papers, which is about tax havens for the ultra wealthy and powerful, and really identified an ‘alternative universe’, as one commentator described it, that the rest of us are largely unaware of. The programme showed how, in Australia, unidentified foreign investors are driving the price of homes beyond the reach of ordinary citizens who live here. There have been other programmes about corruption in the food industry in Europe, which goes beyond the borders of Europe.

 

I’ve read other stories in newspapers, and what they all have in common is inequality. Curiously, Philosophy Now (Issue 145 Aug/Sep 2021) had as its theme, existentialism, but included an article called The Stoic’s Lacuna by Alex Richardson, a History teacher at Croydon, UK. Its relevance to this topic was a reference to the Greek stoic, Epictetus, who said, “Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.” In other words, accept one’s lot in life and stop whinging.

 

Richardson’s essay extends into the modern day by referencing Katherine Birbalsingh (given the sobriquet, Britain’s strictest headmistress), Dr Michael Sugrue and Jordan Peterson as ‘modern day stoics’, who all advocate in varying degrees, that inequality is the natural order of things. Birbalsingh may be the most liberal of them, when she says, “Of course the world is run by an old boys’ network, and of course it’s not fair.” I admit I know nothing about her outside Richardson’s essay, but he puts her in the same sentence, therefore category, as former Navy SEAL, Jocko Willink, who effectively argues that a person’s day-to-day struggle with paying off a mortgage and generally making ends meet is completely disconnected from ‘political management of the economy’. 

 

Peterson is someone I’m more familiar with, who effectively argues that inequality is an evolutionary consequence of the survival of the fittest, not only in the natural world but in human affairs. People, especially males, get to the top of the heap, where they are especially attractive to females, who copulate and subsequently procreate with them to ensure the survival of both parties’ genes. As it happens, this exact scenario is played out by one of the families represented in the aforementioned TV show, Capital.

 

Richardson believes that Peterson is a ‘follower’ of the ‘Pareto Principle’, expressed in the Bible (both Mark and Matthew): “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” In other words, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Or as Richardson puts it, “wealth and power naturally accumulate in the hands of a few exceptional individuals at the top” (my emphasis).

 

But, according to Richardson, Dr Michael Sugrue is the most blunt and dispassionate, when he said in a popular lecture on Aurelius that ‘Stoicism teaches us that the social structure is “not our problem” and that, “if God, or nature, or whatever is controlling the world makes you a slave then be a good slave.”'

 

The common thread in all these admonitions, is that they are made by people who see themselves among the privileged elite, who would never contemplate that what they advocate for others could befall them.

 

I think inequality drives injustice, corruption and an upside down economy. To give an example, Italy. It’s well known that there is both social and wealth disparity between the north of Italy, which is the capital of supercars and high fashion, and the south of Italy, which is the home of agriculture and the country’s food bowl. But this dichotomy is worldwide. The production of food, which is essential, is one of the lowest paid occupations in the world.

 

Now, let’s add another factor, called climate change. I don’t find it altogether anomalous that climate change has a dichotomous effect on humanity. It’s the consequence of all the ‘progress’ we’ve made since the industrial revolution, and it’s a juggernaut that can’t be stopped. Yet it will affect the poorer nations first. As the Prime Minister of Samoa, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, recently said, ‘Pacific Islanders don’t want to be the canary in the coalmine for climate change’. If one looks at Italy again, one could argue that supercars have contributed to climate change and the agriculture sector will bear the consequences.

 

I recently did an online course provided by New Scientist, called Greener Living, which was ostensibly about climate change, its causes and its effects on future generations. According to the people running the course, it will require enormous changes to the way we live, including what we eat.

 

In the 25-26 September issue of the Weekend Australian Magazine (a Murdoch publication, btw) there was an interview with 33 year old Anika Molesworth, a scientist who also runs a farm near Broken Hill in NSW. She says that modelling for 2050 (based on nothing changing) would see 30% decrease in rainfall and 2 months of days above 40C, which would make the property effectively inoperable. But she also claims we have the means at our disposal to change this outcome, and she’s a founding director of Farmers for Climate Action. She’s frustrated by the missed opportunities in our country for renewable energy; we have a government that is stubbornly resistant to changes to the status quo.

 

I made an allusion before to the well known meme of evolution as the survival of the fittest, but much of evolution has occurred through symbiosis. Your body is an entire ecosystem to organisms that thrive in order for you to live, largely without your cognisance. I know from a working lifetime in engineering that successful projects are the result of people collaborating and working together. Environments, including our political environments, where people are antagonistic and work against each other, achieve little except blame and finger-pointing. A perfect example of that is the current political climate in America.

 

If we don’t want to self-destruct, we need to work together, punish corruption that erodes the wealth and agency of ordinary people, adopt sustainable economic models, not dependent on infinite consumerism and keeping people in debt for their entire productive lives. If we stick to the mantra that inequality is the ‘natural order’, we will fail and it will ultimately be catastrophic, worse than the Roman Empire, the Egyptian empire or the Mayan empire, because it will be global.

Hannah Arendt

 I watched a movie titled, Hannah Arendt (made in 2012), which was a joint European, Israel production, and is classified as ‘biography’ on SBS (where I saw it). It’s a dramatised biography, though it contains archival footage of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel. The story centres on her coverage of the trial for The New Yorker and the controversy that followed. But there are also flashbacks to a younger Hannah, when she was Martin Heidegger’s favourite student and subsequent lover.

It so happens, Philosophy Now (Issue 143, April/May 2021) also had a reasonably in-depth article on her (pp. 50-3) by Hilarius Bogbinder, a Danish born writer and translator, who studied politics and theology at Oxford and now lives in London (according to a footnote).  I re-read the article after seeing the film, and they cover much the same territory.

 

In the movie, she’s portrayed by Barbara Sukowa (who appears equally fluent in German and English) as a feisty woman, capable of holding her own with any intellectual or authority figure. Given she spent time in German occupied France helping Jews escape, before escaping to America herself, one could imagine that she would not be easily intimidated or bullied. Bogbinder describes the young Hannah:

 

Bright and precocious, Hannah [originally Johanna, but always called Hanna] was a bit of a handful. A chain-smoking, self-confident young woman, in the 1920s, she stood out from the mostly male crowd at the University of Marburg.

 

In the movie, she has a sharp mind and a sharper tongue if pushed into a corner, which happened more than once, by various forces, following her coverage of Eichmann’s trial: including Mossad, Princeton University department heads, a particularly vicious journalist from The New York Times, American Rabbis and a large proportion of the New York Jewish community. However, her students loved her.

 

According to Bogbinder, she said in a TV interview in 1964, “I am sorry, but I have to object. I don’t belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if you can call it that, is that of political theory.” Yet she was the first woman to teach philosophy at Princeton University. The impression one gets in the movie is that she cared very much about thinking and what I’d call ‘authentic thinking’. To me, philosophy is about argument going back to Socrates and Plato (she references that lineage at one critical point in the movie) as a bulwark against dogma and political ideology. I’ve never read any of her works, but apparently one of her most influential works was The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) where she wrote:

 

While people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob will always shout for the ‘strong man’, the ‘great leader’. For the mob hates society from which it is excluded... Plebiscites, therefore, with which modern mob leaders have obtained such excellent results, are an old concept of politicians who rely upon the mob.

 

Amazingly prescient, if one looks at recent American politics. Bogbinder makes the following observation: “Yet it is not difficult to see how many of her acute observations transcend her times, and apply to the 2020s, when demagogues denounce ‘experts’ and the ‘elites’.” This is also particularly relevant to modern-day Australian politics (for the past decade at least).

 

In this context, one can see why she might have seen herself as a ‘political theorist’, as opposed to ‘belonging to a circle of philosophers’. In one dramatic scene (in the movie), in response to a jibe from a fellow professor in a classroom full of students, she says, ‘That’s not an argument; that’s character assassination’. Maybe the experience at Princeton, following her treatment by her colleagues, made her denounce philosophy as a discipline. She also severed intellectual links with Heidegger after he became a Nazi, which would have disillusioned her.

 

A.C. Grayling, in his ambitiously titled tome, The History of Philosophy, gives her one paragraph, where he says:

 

She is an exemplar of intellect that is both penetrating and courageous. Her chief concern was to argue for the importance of political engagement as a civic responsibility, in order to defeat totalitarianism.

 

According to Grayling, she forgave Heidegger after the war. I won’t try to get into her head on that issue, after all they were once intimate.

 

Even people who have never studied philosophy or who are only vaguely aware of the horrors of the holocaust, know the name of Hannah Arendt because of the term, ‘The Banality of Evil’, which was the subtitle of her book on Eichmann, a publication of the reportage she had submitted to The New Yorker in serial form. The movie provides context for this famous utterance, especially when archival footage shows us firsthand what Eichmann said in his defence. In effect, he was a bureaucrat who was following orders, and ‘obeying the law’ of his government. Hannah Arendt’s most damning indictment against Eichmann was that he didn’t think, in fact, refused to think. The point is that she refused to paint him as a demonic monster because he wasn’t: he was an ordinary person; in effect, a ‘non-person’.

 

But, not only was she accused of ‘defending Eichmann’, which is ridiculous, but of being a ‘self-hating Jewess’, because she reported that some Jewish leaders had been complicit in the transport of Jews. When questioned on this, she simply said that it came out in the trial, so she was obliged to report it. Many in the Jewish community never forgave her for this, and her works didn’t appear in Israel until 1999, when her report, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), was finally published in that language.

 

Very early in the history of this blog, I wrote a post titled Evil, in response to a book written by TIME Magazine essayist, Lance Morrow. What struck me was that Morrow seemed to believe that evil required a specific personality type. I’ve never believed this. History, including recent history, is full of stories of ordinary people turning against their ‘neighbours’ based on an ingroup-outgroup dynamic. We think that people who commit atrocities in these circumstances are the exception, but the exception is the person who refuses, and in fact, saves people who have been demonised.

I think the one thing we can take from Hannah Arendt’s insight - remember she witnessed this firsthand, and was one of the ones who helped – is that evil happens when people do nothing.

 

There is relevance here to the current situation in Australia where we’ve had people in offshore detention for up to 8 years. This is inhumane, to say the least, and most of us do absolutely nothing.

What’s the most fundamental value?

 This is a Question of the Month in Philosophy Now (Issue 143, April/May 2021). I wrote it very quickly, almost on impulse in less than ½ hr, but I spent a lot of time polishing it.

The word ‘fundamental’ is key here: it infers the cornerstone or foundation upon which all other values are built. Carlo Rovelli, who is better known as a physicist than a philosopher, said in an online video that “we are not entities, we are relations”. And I believe this aphorism goes to the heart of what it means to be human. From our earliest cognitive moments to the very end of our days, the quality of our lives is largely dependent on our relationships with others. And, in that context, I would contend that the most important and fundamental value is trust. Without trust, honesty does not have a foothold, and arguably honesty is the glue in any relationship, be it familial, contractual or even between governments and the general public. 

 

Psychologists will tell you that fear and trust cannot co-exist. If someone, either as a child, or a spouse, is caught in a relationship governed by fear, yet completely dependent, the consequence will inevitably result in an inability to find intimacy outside that relationship, because trust will be corroded if not destroyed. 

 

Societies can’t function without trust: traffic would be chaos; projects wouldn’t be executed collaboratively. We all undertake financial transactions every day and there is a strong element of trust involved in all of these that most of us take for granted. Cynics will argue that trust allows others to take advantage of you, which means trust only works if it is reciprocated. If enough people take advantage of those who trust, then it would evaporate and everyone would suddenly dissemble and obfuscate. Relationships would be restricted to one’s closest family and wider interactions would be fraught with hidden agendas, even paranoia. But this is exactly what happens when governments mandate their citizenry to ‘out’ people who don’t toe the party line. 

 

Everything that we value in our relationships and friendships, be it love, integrity, honesty, loyalty or respect, is forfeit without trust. As Carlo Rovelli intimated in his aphoristic declaration, it is through relationships that we are defined by others and how we define ourselves. It is through these relationships that we find love, happiness, security and a sense of belonging. We ultimately judge our lives by the relationships we form over time, both in our professional lives and our social lives. Without trust, they simply don’t exist, except as fake.

                                                --------------------------

I once wrote on this topic before, in 2008. I deliberately avoided reading that post while I wrote this one. To be honest, I’m glad I did as it’s a much better post. However, this is a response to a specific question with a limit of 400 words. Choosing the answer was the easy part – it took seconds – arguing a case was more organic. I’ll add an addendum if it’s published.

Interestingly, 'trust' crops up in my fiction more than once. In the last story I wrote, it took centre stage.

Social norms determine morality

 The latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 140, Oct/Nov 2020) has Hegel as its theme. I confess that really the only thing I knew about Hegel was his ‘dialectic’ and that he influenced Marx, though, from memory, Marx claimed to have turned Hegel’s dialectic ‘on its head’. Hegel’s dialectic has relevance to politics and history, because, basically, he claimed that if someone proposes a ‘thesis’ someone else will propose its ‘antithesis’ and we end up with a ‘synthesis’ of the two. Some people claim that this is how history has progressed, but I’m not so sure. 

 

However, I do agree that if someone promotes an ideology or a social agenda, you will invariably get opposition to it, and the stronger the promotion, the stronger the opposition. We see this in politics a lot, but a good example is religion. Militant atheism only tends to occur in societies where you have militant fundamentalist religion, which is usually Christian, but could be Muslim. In societies where no one really cares about religion, no one cares too much about atheism either. 

 

I know this, because I live in a culture where no one cares and I’ve visited one where people do, which is America (at the dawn of the 21^st Century). Mind you, I grew up in 1950s Australia when there was a division between Catholic and protestant that even affected the small rural town where I lived and was educated in. That division evaporated in the 1960s pretty much, with a zeitgeist that swept the Western world. It was largely driven by post war liberalism, the introduction of the contraceptive pill and a cultural phenomenon called rock and roll. But what I remember growing up in the 60’s, leaving school, going to university and entering the workforce in a major city, was that we males grew our hair long and everyone, including women, questioned everything. We were rebellious: there were marches against our involvement in the Vietnam war and an Australian academic by the name of Germaine Greer published a book called The Female Eunuch.

 

And all of this is relevant to the theme of my thesis, which is that morality is really about social norms, which is why morality evolves, and whether it evolves for the better or worse is dependent on a lot of factors, not least political forces and individuals’ perceptions of their own worth and sense of security within a social context.

 

But getting back to Hegel, many saw the rebellious attitude in the 1960s as a backlash against conservative forces, especially religious based ones, that had arisen in the 1950s. And this in turn, was a reaction to the forces of fascism that had ignited the most widespread and devastating conflict in the whole of human history. There was almost no one who had not been affected by that in Europe or Asia or North America. Even, in far-flung Australia and New Zealand, it seemed that every family had a member or knew someone who had been directly involved in that war. My family was no exception, as I’ve written about elsewhere.

 

In the same issue of Philosophy Now, there is an article by Terrence Thomson (a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy in Kingston University, London) titled, Kant, Conflict & Universal History. I’ve written about Kant elsewhere, but not in this context. He’s more famously known for his epistemology, discussed in some detail in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which was the subject of my essay. But, according to Thomson, 3 years later (1784), he published an article in a ‘prominent intellectual newspaper, titled: Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective.’ Without going into too much detail, Kant coined a term, ‘unsociable sociability’, which he contended is ‘a feature of human social interaction’, and which he defined as the human “tendency to enter into society, a tendency that continually threatens to break up this society”. Quoting Thomson (interpreting Kant): ‘...it is a natural human inclination to connect with people and to be part of a larger whole; yet it is also part of our natural inclination to destroy these social bonds through isolationism and divisiveness.’ One has to look no further than the just-held, US presidential election and its immediate aftermath to see this in action. But one could also see this as an example of Hegel’s ‘dialectic’ in action.

 

As I explained in my introduction, Hegel argued that a ‘synthesis’ arises out of an opposition between a ‘thesis’ and its ‘antithesis’, but then the synthesis becomes a new ‘thesis’, which creates a new ‘antithesis’, and so the dialectic never stops. This could also be seen as similar to, if not the same as, the dynamic that Thomson attributes to Kant: the human inclination to ‘belong’ followed by an opposing inclination to ‘break those social bonds’.

 

I take a much simpler view, which is that humans are inherently tribal. And tribalism is a double-edged sword. It creates the division that Kant alludes to in his ‘unsociable sociability’, and it creates the antithesis of Hegel’s dialectic. We see this in the division created by religion throughout history, and not just the petty example I witnessed in my childhood. And now, in the current age, we have a new tribalism in the form of political parties, exemplified by the deep divisions in the US, even before Donald Trump exploited them to the full in his recently eclipsed, 4 year term.

 

And this brings me back, by a very convoluted route, to the subject of this essay: morality and social norms. Trump did his best to change social norms, and, by so doing, change his society’s moral landscape, whether intentionally or not. He made it socially acceptable to be disrespectful to ‘others’, which included women, ‘grab them by the pussy’, immigrants, Muslims, the former President, anyone in the Democratic party, anyone in the GOP who didn’t support him and his own Intelligence community and Defence personnel. He also made white supremacy and fringe conspiracy theorist groups feel legitimised. But, most significantly, beyond everything else, he propagated a social norm whereby you could dismiss any report by any authority whatsoever that didn’t fit in with your worldview – you could simply create your own ‘facts’.

 

In most societies, especially Western democratic societies, we expect social norms to evolve that make people feel more inclusive and that constructively build collaborative relationships, because we know from experience, that that is how we get things done. As a retired naval admiral and self-ascribed conservative (in a TV interview prior to the election) pointed out, Trump did the exact opposite, both at home and abroad: he broke off relations and fomented division wherever and whenever he could. I’ve argued in previous posts that leaders bring out the best in the people they lead, which is how they are ultimately judged; contrarily, Trump brought out the worst in people.

 

In one of my better posts, I discussed at length how a young woman, raped and fatally tortured on a bus in India, exposed the generational divide in social norms in that country at that time, and how it directly affected one’s perception of the morality of that specific incident. 

 

From a Western perspective, especially given the recent ‘me-too’ movement, this is perverse. However, in the late 60s, early 70s, when I was entering adulthood, there was a double-standard when it came to sexual behaviour. It was okay for men to have sex with as many partners as they could find, but it was not alright for women to indulge in the same activity. This led to men behaving more predatory and it was considered normal for women to be ‘seduced’, even if it was against their better-intentions. The double-standard of the day really didn’t encourage much alternative. The introduction of the contraceptive pill, I believe, was the game-changer. Because, theoretically, women could have the same sexual freedom as men without the constant fear of becoming pregnant, which was still a stigma at that time. Now, some of my generation may have a different rear-vision view of this, but I give it as an example of changing social norms occurring concordantly with changing moral perceptions.

 

I write science fiction, as a hobby or pastime, rather than professionally. But what attracted me to sci-fi as a genre, was not so much the futuristic technologies one could conjure up, but the what-if societies that might exist on worlds isolated by astronomical distances. In a recent work, I explored a society that included clones (genetically engineered humans, so not copies per se). In this society, female clones are exploited because they have no family. Instead, they have guardianships that can be sold onto someone else, and this becomes a social norm that’s tacitly accepted. Logically, this leads to sexual exploitation. I admit to being influenced by Blade Runner 2049, though I go in a completely different direction, and my story is more of a psychological thriller than an action thriller. There is sexual exploitation on both sides: I have a man in authority having a sexual relationship with a character by blackmail; and I have a woman sexually exploiting a character so she can manipulate him into committing a crime. Neither of these scenarios were part of my original plot; they evolved in the way that stories do, and became core elements. In fact, it could be argued that the woman is even more evil than the man.

 

Both characters come undone in the end, but, more importantly to me was that the characters should be realistic and not paper cut-outs. I asked someone who’d read it what they thought of the man in power, and they said, ‘Oh, people like him exist, even now.’ 

How do we understand each other?

This is the latest Question of the Month from Philosophy Now (Issue 137 April/May 2020), so answers will appear in Issue 139 (Aug/Sep 2020). It just occurred to me that I may have misread the question and the question I've answered is: How CAN we understand each other? Whatever, it's still worthy of a post, and below is what I wrote: definitely philosophical with psychological underpinnings and political overtones. There’s a thinly veiled reference to my not-so-recent post on Plato, and the conclusion was unexpected.

This is possibly the most difficult question I’ve encountered on Question of the Month, and I’m not sure I have the answer. If there is one characteristic that defines humans, it’s that we are tribal to the extent that it can define us. In almost every facet of our lives we create ingroups and outgroups, and it starts in childhood. If one watches the so-called debates that occur in parliament (at least in Australia) it can remind one of their childhood experiences at school. In current political discourse, if someone proposes an action or a policy, it is reflexively countered by the opposition, irrespective of its merit.

But I’ve also observed this is in the workplace, working on complex engineering projects, where contractual relationships can create similar divisions; where differences of opinion and perspective can escalate to irrational opposition that invariably leads to paralysis.

We’ve observed worldwide (at least in the West) divisions becoming stronger, reinforced by social media that is increasingly being used as a political weapon. We have situations where groups holding extreme yet strongly opposing views will both resist and subvert a compromise position proposed by the middle, which logically results in stalemate.

Staying with Australia (where I’ve lived since birth), we observed this stalemate in energy policy for over a decade. Every time a compromise was about to be reached, either someone from the left side or someone from the right side would scuttle it, because they would not accept a compromise on principle.

But recently, two events occurred in Australia that changed the physical, social and political landscape. In the summer of 2019/2020, we witnessed the worst bushfire season, not only in my lifetime, but in recorded history since European settlement. And although there was some political sniping and blame-calling, all the governments, both Federal and States, deferred to the experts in wildfire and forestry management. What’s more, the whole community came together and helped out irrespective of political and cultural differences. And then, the same thing happened with the COVID-19 crisis. There was broad bipartisan agreement on formulating a response, and the medical experts were not only allowed to do their job but to dictate policy.

Plato was critical of democracies and argued for a ‘philosopher-king’. We don’t have philosopher-kings, but we have non-ideological institutions with diverse scientific and technical expertise. I would contend that ‘understanding each other’ starts with acknowledging one’s own ignorance. 

Philosophy in politics

I wrote a letter to Philosophy Now (April last year) in response to an article about whether philosophy is still relevant in the modern, economically and technologically, driven world. (Yes, they published it.)

Basically, I said that philosophy is not considered of any economic value, either to governments or corporations, and that is the measure of everything these days, from education to infrastructure to charities. Yes, even charities are being privatised in my part of the world, where you can legitimately make a profit without paying taxes; why else would an overseas corporation want to ‘own’ a charity in Australia?

No, the reason I’m writing this is purely political. But, first, I need to give some context and backstory. You need to understand where this is being written in history, because that’s relevant. Donald Trump is facing an election for a second term as President of the United States (POTUS) in November this year. In his first term, he faced down an investigation into Russian meddling in his inaugural election (Nov. 2016), which saw a number of his colleagues and close associates face gaol time. And more recently, he survived an impeachment trial that centred around his alleged attempt to coerce a foreign power into investigating a political rival in exchange for military aid, which had already been approved by Congress. In my lifetime, only Richard Nixon sat at the centre of a more damaging constitutional storm whilst President. Trump has successfully weathered his storm and even come out stronger, I’d suggest.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the UK has just left the EU, after 3 years of anguish and political infighting, but with a lot of details still to be sorted (as I understand it). However, both countries show a determination to insulate themselves from the travails of the wider world. It’s called isolationism. Trump has methodically sought to exit all treaties, on the premise that they are of no benefit to the US, only its rivals. He’s yet to exit the nuclear arms treaty, but one expects he’ll seek to do that if he wins a second term.

I need to point out that I’ve come to philosophy via science and that’s relevant as well. In science, you learn how to analyse, not just data but the theories themselves, and to value evidence over everything else. There is also an historical relationship between science and philosophy (in Western culture) that goes back to the Ancient Greeks.

Politics has become increasingly partisan in recent decades and that is evident, not only in America and the UK, but also Australia. Our conservative party, called, confusingly, the Liberal party (we say ‘large L Liberal’ and ‘small l liberal’ to signify the difference), has been effectively hijacked by its most conservative adherents in the last decade, and that has deepened the political divide in this country, as it has in other parts of the world.

All over the world, you can divide political groups into so-called ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, which corresponds to liberal and conservative agendas. ‘Conservative’ means exactly what it says: to maintain the status quo and keep to traditional norms, values and customs. ‘Liberal’ generally means open to change and expanding people’s freedoms. Historical examples include the abolition of slavery and women’s right to vote. Gay marriage will one day be viewed in the exact same light. Hindsight would suggest that conservatives have found themselves on the wrong side of history.

But the Left are not immune to intransigence, nor the temptation to censor voices they disagree with. As I’ve said before, intolerance begets intolerance against itself. The partisanship we are witnessing everywhere is a direct consequence of this. Militance in religion, for example, creates militance in its opposite, which is atheism. The same is true for politics.

You’re probably asking, what has any of this to do with philosophy? Well, the split in politics is arguably symptomatic of a deeper philosophical divide. You can view everyone as a potential competitor or you can view them as a potential collaborator. I know from personal experience that people achieve a lot more when they stop working against each other. It’s common sense, but it’s the exception and not the rule in politics.

The relationship between philosophy and politics has a long history. Socrates died as a consequence of a political motion. He supposedly said, ‘I was too honest to be a politician and live.’ We don’t know the details, but we know that Socrates had proven himself courageous in battle. He’s probably one of the very few people in history who literally died for his principles.

If you go on social media, virtually everything is being perceived through a political lens. An obvious example is climate change. I keep asking myself: how did a thoroughly scientific issue become a political one? On top of which, it became one of the most divisive and partisan of our time. The answer is that it requires substantial change to address, and conservatives resist change by definition.

But here’s the thing: the strongest and most virulent argument against climate change is that it’s a ‘hoax’ – the whole thing is a conspiracy. I would put this in the same category as other conspiracy theories, like astronauts never went to the moon, the Earth is flat and the Universe is 6,000 years old. Something else they all have in common is that they are all anti-science, even though their proponents claim otherwise. I don’t find it surprising that Trump’s campaign promoted a lot of conspiracy theories, and his Presidency has been rife with purported conspiracies and hoaxes.

I have a working definition of philosophy: it’s argument augmented by analysis. Philosophy requires argument – that’s its method – and is what distinguishes it from dogma. Analysis is another method intrinsic to science. 

The issue with conspiracy theories is that they entail a wider body of people than you might expect. For example, the moon landing footage was received by a radio telescope in Australia, so they would have had to be part of the conspiracy. With climate change, you have data from organisations like NASA in the northern hemisphere and CSIRO in the southern hemisphere, not to mention Europe, South America and elsewhere. The extent of the conspiracy is mindboggling in its complexity.

But there is a deeper philosophical issue here than just trying to maintain a rational perspective in the face of conspiracy theories. We are on a path of mass extinction as a consequence of a philosophy that infinite economic growth is the only criterion for political success. The issue I have with the modern world is that we are totally dependent on science and technology to the extent that we are paradoxically unaware of that dependency; yet we ignore what science is telling us about the future of our planet.

Our long-term future is dependent on a philosophical choice. We can choose that humans are separate to nature, or that we are part of nature. And science plays a role in this, because science can’t be ignored, whichever path we choose to take.

Addendum: I’ve changed the title so it matches the content.

The confessions of a self-styled traveller in the world of ideas

Every now and then, on very rare occasions, you have a memory or a feeling that was so long ago that it feels almost foreign, like it was experienced by someone else. And, possibly it was, as I’m no longer the same person, either physically or in personality.

This particular memory was when I was a teenager and I was aflame with an idealism. It came to me, just today, while I was walking alongside a creek bed, so I’m not sure I can get it back now. It was when I believed I could pursue a career in science, and, in particular, physics. It was completely at odds with every other aspect of my life. At that time, I had very poor social skills and zero self-esteem. Looking back, it seems arrogant, but when you’re young you’re entitled to dream beyond your horizons, otherwise you don’t try.

This blog effectively demonstrates both the extent of my knowledge and the limits of my knowledge, in the half century since. I’ve been most fortunate to work with some very clever people. In fact, I’ve spent my whole working life with people cleverer than me, so I have no delusions.

I consider myself lucky to have lived a mediocre life. What do I mean by mediocre? Well, I’ve never been homeless, and I’ve never gone hungry and I’ve never been unable to pay my bills. I’m not one to take all that for granted; I think there is a good deal of luck involved in avoiding all of those pitfalls. Likewise, I believe I’m lucky not to be famous; I wouldn’t want my life under a microscope, whereby the smallest infraction of society’s rules could have me blamed and shamed on the world stage.

I’ve said previously that the people we admire most are those who seem to be able to live without a facade. I’m not one of those. My facade is that I’m clever: ever since my early childhood, I liked to spruik my knowledge in an effort to impress people, especially adults, and largely succeeded. I haven’t stopped, and this blog is arguably an extension of that impetus. But I will admit to a curiosity which was manifest from a very young age (pre high school), and that’s what keeps me engaged in the world of ideas. The internet has been most efficacious in this endeavour, though I’m also an avid reader of books and magazines, in the sciences, in particular.

But I also have a secret life in the world of fiction. And fiction is the best place to have a secret life. ELVENE is no secret, but it was written almost 2 decades ago. It was unusual in that it was ‘popular’. By popular, I don’t mean it was read by a multitude (it unequivocally wasn’t), but it was universally liked, like a ‘popular’ song. It had a dichotomous world: indigenous and futuristic. This was years before James Cameron’s Avatar, and a completely different storyline. I received accolades like, ‘I enjoyed every page’ and ‘I didn’t want it to end’ and ‘it practically played out like a movie in my head’.

ELVENE was an aberration – a one-off – but I don’t mind, seriously. My fiction has become increasingly dystopian. The advantage of sci-fi (I call mine, science-fantasy) is that you can create what-if worlds. In fact, an Australian literary scholar, Peter Nicholls, created The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and a TV doco was made of him called The What If Man.

Anyway, you can imagine isolated worlds, which evolve their own culture and government, not unlike what our world was like before sea and air travel compressed it. So one can imagine something akin to frontier territories where democracy is replaced by autocracy that can either be beneficiary or oppressive or something in between. So I have an autocracy, where the dictator limits travel both on and off his world. Where clones are exploited to become sex workers and people who live there become accustomed to this culture. In other words, it’s not that different to cultures in our past (and some might say, present). The dictator is less Adolf Hitler and more Donald Trump, though that wasn’t deliberate. Like all my characters, he takes on a life of his own and evolves in ways I don’t always anticipate. He’s not evil per se, but he knows how to manipulate people and he demands absolute loyalty, which is yet to be tested.

The thing is that you go where the story and the characters take you, and sometimes they take you into dark territory. But in the dark you look for light. “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in” (Leonard Cohen). I confess I like moral dilemmas and I feel, I’ve not only created a cognitive dissonance for one of my characters, but, possibly, for myself as a writer. (Graham Greene was the master of the moral dilemma, but he’s in another class.)

Last year I saw a play put on by my good friend, Elizabeth Bradley, The Woman in the Window, for Canberra REP. It includes a dystopian future that features sex workers as an integral part of the society. It was a surprise to see someone else addressing a similar scenario. The writer was Kiwi, Alma De Groen, and she juxtaposed history (the dissident poet, Anna Akhmatova in Stalin’s Russia) with a dystopian future Australia.

I take a risk by having female protagonists prominent in all my fiction. It’s a risk because there is a lot of controversy about so-called ‘culture appropriation’. I increase that risk by portraying relationships from my female protagonists’ perspectives. However, there is always a sense that they all exist independently of me, which one can only appreciate if you willingly enter a secret world of fiction.

Our heritage; our responsibility

I was going to post this on FaceBook, as it's especially relevant to current events happening right across Australia: unprecedented bush fire season; like hell on Earth in some places. FB is not really a forum for philosophical discourse, but I might yet post it.

There is an overriding sensibility (not just in the West either) that Man has a special place in the scheme of things. Now, I’m going to be an existential heretic and assume that we do. We are unique in that we can intellectually grasp the very scale of the Universe and even speculate about its origins to the extent that we have a very good estimate of its age. To quote no one less than Einstein: “The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it’s comprehensible.” And the point is that it’s comprehensible because of ‘Us’.

As Jeremy Lent points out in his book, The Patterning Instinct; A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, the belief that we are made in God’s image has created a misguided notion that the Universe (and Earth, in particular) was made especially for us.

As I said in my introduction, I’m willing to go along with this, because, if we take it seriously, it has even more serious ramifications. Assuming that there is a creator God, who made ‘Man’ in ‘His’ image, then ‘He’ has bequeathed us a very special responsibility: we are the Earth’s caretakers. And, quite frankly, we’re doing a terrible job.

The irony of this situation is that it would appear that atheists take this responsibility more seriously than theists, though I’m happy to be proven wrong.

The answer to this is also in my introduction, because we have the intellectual ability to not only read the past, but predict the future. It’s our special cognitive skills in ‘comprehensibility’ that give us the ‘edge’. In other words, it is science that provides us with the means to protect our heritage. We are currently doing the exact opposite.

Unlike a lot of people, I don't claim that atheism is superior to theism or vice versa. This is just an argument to demonstrate that either position can lead to the same conclusion.

Religion and politics in secular society

This is a letter I wrote to The Weekend Australian, Christmas 2017, so 18 months ago. There was a side-debate at the time, during the same sex marriage debate about ‘religious freedom’. It seemed to me that ‘religious freedom’ was ‘code’ for freedom to discriminate against gays and lesbians, and it’s not over. From what I’ve read and seen, the only arguments against same sex marriage came from conservative religious figures (some being politicians) even if they claimed it was about ‘the sanctity of marriage’.

The letter below alludes to that debate, even though the topic is much broader. It’s really about a perceived conflict between secularism and Christianity in Western societies, including Australia. There is a recurring argument that our Christian heritage provides the moral fabric of our society with the inference that, without it, we’d lose our moral compass. If that was true, and we really followed Christ’s calling, we wouldn’t treat refugees the way we do. In fact, our 2 most conservative Christian leaders, in recent times, have been the most ruthless advocates for persecuting refugees, and of fomenting xenophobic sentiment in the electorate.

The names referenced in the letter below, are journalists or commentators. The Australian is a Murdoch publication, so it has conservative political leanings.



Both Paul Kelly and John Carroll in separate articles (Weekend Australian, Enquirer, 23-24 Dec.2017) seem concerned that the modern secular world that dominates Western societies, and therefore Australia, has forgotten, even ‘turned its back’ on our Christian heritage. I’m officially retiring age, so I grew up in post-war Australia when going to Sunday School and scripture classes (in public schools) was still considered part of a child’s education (neither of my parents were religious; they just thought it was the cultural norm). Strangely, I don’t lament the loss, for want of a better word, the Church’s role in political and secular life, epitomised by the divide between Catholics and Protestants that dominated even the small country town where I grew up.

I found the greater part of Paul Kelly’s lengthy editorial a stimulating read, even when I might proffer alternative views, but his commentary on High Court judge Dyson Heydon’s concerns about the future of Christianity in this country, I found alarmist to say the least:  “The question for the West is how it retains its civilisational heritage if it abandons beliefs in its Christian ethic or, indeed, if its political culture begins to assault that ethic.” Without referencing them specifically, he’s obviously referring to the passing of the recent same-sex-marriage bill in Federal Parliament and the euthanasia bill in the Victorian State Parliament. Both of these have provoked ‘concerns’ from the Catholic church, in particular, who are effectively under siege for the sins they committed in the previous generation.

Personally, I think it’s a landmark moment that gays and lesbians now have the same rights as heterosexual couples. A law that has symbolic and pragmatic importance for the people it affects, and absolutely no effect on the people who oppose it. No one is being forced to have same-sex marriage – it’s a choice. Kelly and his fellow detractors will talk about religious freedom, but it’s only an issue for the people who, for whatever reason, think that homosexuals and lesbians should stay in the closet, or at least, stay out of our churches. If it comes to a choice – and it shouldn’t – between gay and lesbian rights and religious freedom, then it’s a no brainer for most Australians, including the ones like myself, who are heterosexual.

To give credit to The Australian, on the same page as John Carroll’s very lengthy piece on Christmas and the declining relevance of Jesus’ story to most Australians, there is a piece by Helen Dale, who explains, at some length, the pagan roots of Christmas that most Australians are either unaware of or blissfully apathetic about. This created a counter-perspective that was running through my head even while I was reading Carroll’s thesis.

Don Cupitt, a theologian, turned philosopher and author, is a bit of an iconoclast when it comes to religion and Christianity in particular. He’s made the salient point that humanist morality really started with the novel, where moral dilemmas and issues concerning good and evil were resolved without invoking a Deity or scripture. Carroll, to his credit, makes a similar point about the role of literature and popular culture in stimulating our psyche in this regard, without resort to prescriptive Christian ethics. He then goes on to say: “Further, we have now had 150 years of gloomy prediction that the death of God would lead to political anarchy and the moral collapse of the West. That has simply not eventuated.”

For Carroll, the Jesus story is all about imbibing us with meaning, and that is what we are losing. The point is that the Jesus story is mythology and when I was a child, undergoing the religious education I mentioned in my introductory paragraph, I really believed the stories were true, because at that age we believe whatever adults tell us. Like many of my generation, I grew up disillusioned in my mid teens, when I realised the stories were not only mythologised but defied rational analysis. And that is the real reason that Christianity has lost its meaning for most people with a Western education.

In the Review section of the same issue of the Weekend Australian, John Carey reviews a book by Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, where he charters the literary history of the book of Genesis, from its origins in The Epic of Gilgamesh to Augustine’s seminal re-interpretation as signifying the ‘Fall of Man’. I’m not sure if it’s Carey’s or Greenblatt’s insight, but one of them points out the logical inconsistency in the morality tale: “For if God was all-knowing, why did he forbid Adam and Eve to eat the fruit, knowing they would disobey? Why did he create them at all, since he intended to kill them?”

Both Carroll and Kelly refer to the heritage or legacy that Christian ethics has provided to Western cultures. Well, historically, so-called Christian ethics has created a lot of bigotry, wars, genocide and inquisitional torture. Many contemporary commentators point to the current issues surrounding Islam, claiming that the religion itself is flawed. Well, if Islam is flawed then so is Christianity.

Hugh Mackay, in his book, Right & Wrong; How to Decide for Yourself, warns of the dangers of believing that God is on your side, because then anything can be justified, which is what we’ve witnessed both historically and contemporarily.


Addendum: The same day I posted this, I read an article in the Australian Weekend Magazine (July 20-21, 2019) about Israel Folau and the issue of religious freedom. Folau is a star rugby player with the Australian Rugby Union team and famously posted a piece on Facebook that all homosexuals, adulterers, liars and various other sinners would go to Hell. What created a furor wasn’t so much what he said but that he was sacked from the team (his contract was terminated). I agree with former Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs, that the Australian Rugby Union went outside their remit.

The incident has brought out the worst on both sides of the debate, and demonstrates what happens when you try to enforce what people are allowed to say in public. Peter Singer is another unexpected supporter of Folau's right to free speech. My attitude is that everyone should be allowed to make complete fools of themselves, whether they be sports stars, TV celebrities, politicians or even the President of the United States.

Evolution of culture; a uniquely human adaption

I finally got around to reading Sapiens; A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, after someone lent me a copy. I’d already read and reviewed his follow-up book, Homo Deus, so I’m reading them in the reverse order. I have to say he makes bleak reading, yet you feel there’s a lot of truth in his words. Having said that, I still feel I can challenge him on some issues to provide a more optimistic outlook. He is both provocative and thought-provoking, which are not necessarily one and the same thing.

He makes the point, which I’ve long known, that what separates us from all other species is that we have undertaken a cultural evolution that has long overtaken our biological evolution. This was accelerated by the invention of script, which allowed memories to be recorded and maintained over generations, some of which have lasted millennia. Of course, we already had this advantage even before we invented script, but script allowed an accumulation of knowledge that eventually led to the scientific revolution, which we’ve all benefited from since the enlightenment and has accelerated in the last 2 centuries particularly.

One of Harari’s recurring themes is that much of our lives are dependent on fictions and myths, and these have changed as part of our cultural evolution in a way that we don’t appreciate. Jeremy Lent makes similar observations in his excellent book, The Patterning Instinct, though he has a subtly different emphasis to Harari. Harari gives the impression that we are trapped in our social norms and gives examples to make his case. He points out that past societies were very hierarchical and everyone literally knew their place and lived within that paradigm. In fact, the consequences of trying to live outside one’s social constraints could be dire, even fatal. The current paradigm, at least in Western societies, is one of ‘individualism’, which he also explored in his follow-up book, with the warning that it could be eroded, if not eliminated, by the rise of AI, but I won’t discuss that here.

He effectively argues that these ‘fictions’, that we live by, rule out the commonly held belief that we can change our circumstances or that there is an objective morality that we can live by. In other words, he claims our lives are ruled by myths that we accept without question, and the only thing that changes are the myths themselves.

I take his point, but throughout history - at least from around 500BC - there have been iconoclasts who have challenged the reigning paradigm of their time. I will mention four: Socrates, Jesus, Buddha and Confucius. The curious point is that none of these wrote anything down (we only have their ‘sayings’) yet they are still iconic figures more than 2,000 years after their time. What they have in common is that they all challenged the prevailing ‘myth’ (to use Harari’s term) that there was a ‘natural order’ whereby those who ruled were ordained by gods, compared to those who served.

They all suffered for their subversions: Jesus and Socrates were executed, Confucius was exiled into poverty and the Buddha was threatened but not killed. Jesus challenged the church of his day, and that was the logical cause of his execution, not the blasphemy that he claimed to be ‘the son of god’. A lot of words were put in Jesus’ mouth, especially in the Bible. Jesus stood up for the disenfranchised and was critical of the church and the way it exploited the poor. He wouldn’t have been the only rabble-rouser of his time in Roman occupied Palestine but he was one of the most charismatic.

Buddha challenged the caste system in India as unjust, which made him logically critical of the religious-based norms of his time. He challenged the ‘myth’ that Harari claims everyone would have accepted without question.

Confucius was critical of appointments based on birth rather than merit and argued that good rulers truly served their people, rather than the other way round. Not surprisingly, his views didn’t go down very well with the autocracy of his time. He allegedly proposed the dictum of reciprocity:  ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself’. An aphorism also attributed to Jesus, which has more pertinence if one considers that it crosses class boundaries.

As for Socrates, I think he was the original existentialist in that he made a special plea to authenticity: ‘To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be.’ Socrates got into trouble for supposedly poisoning the minds of the young, but what he really did was to make people challenge the pervading paradigm of his time, including the dominion of gods. He challenged people to think for themselves through argument, which is the essence of philosophy to this day.

To be fair to Harari, he gives specific attention to the feminist paradigm (my term, not his, as I don’t see it as a fiction or a myth). But I do agree that money, which determines so much in our societies, is based on a very convenient fiction and a great deal of trust. Actually, some level of trust is fundamental to a functioning society. In fact, I’ve argued elsewhere that, without trust: truth, justice and freedom all become forfeit.

The feminist paradigm is very recent, yet essential to our future. I recently saw an interview with Melinda Gates (currently in Australia) who made the salient point that it’s contraception that allows women to follow a destiny independent of men. Not surprisingly, it’s the ‘independent of men’ bit that has created, and continues to create, the greatest obstacle to their emancipation.

One of the more interesting discussions, I found, was Harari’s argument that political ideologies are really religions. I guess it depends on how you define religion. This is how Harari defines it, simultaneously giving a rationale to his thesis:

If religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.

I’m not convinced that political ideologies are dependent on a belief in a ‘superhuman order’, but they are premised on abstract ideas of uncontested ‘truth’, and, in that sense, they are like religions.

Contrary to what many people think, political thinking of ‘right’ and ‘left’ are largely determined by one’s genes, although environment also plays a role. Basically, personality traits like conscientiousness and goal-oriented leadership over people-based leadership are what are considered right-leaning traits; and agreeableness and openness (to new ideas) are considered left-leaning traits. Neuroticism would probably also be considered a left-leaning trait. Notice that all the left-leaning traits are predominant in artistic or creative people and this is generally reflected in their politics.

Curiously, twin studies have shown that a belief in God is also, at least partly, a genetically inherited trait. But I don’t believe there is any correlation between these two belief systems: God and politics. I know of people on the political right who are atheists and I know people on the political left who are theists.

I know that in America there seems to be a correlation between the political right and Christian fundamentalism, but I think that’s an Americanism. In Australia, it has little impact. We’ve very recently elected a Pentecostal as PM (Prime Minister) but I don’t believe that had any bearing on his election. We’ve had two atheist PMs in my lifetime (one of whom was very popular indeed), which would be unthinkable in America. The truth is that in some cultures religion is bound irretrievably with politics, and it can be hard for anyone who’s lived their entire lives in that culture to imagine there are political regimes where religion is a non-issue.

And this brings me to Harari’s next contentious point:

Even though liberal humanism sanctifies humans, it does not deny the existence of God, and is, in fact, founded on monotheistic beliefs.

Again, I think this is a particular American perspective. I would argue that liberal humanism has arisen from an existentialist philosophy, even though most people, who advocate and follow it, have probably never studied existential philosophy. There was a cultural revolution in Western societies in the generation following World War 2, and I was a part of it. Basically, we rejected the Christian institutions we were raised in, and embraced the existentialist paradigm that the individual was responsible for their own morality and their own destiny. No where was this more evident than in the rise of feminism, aided ineluctably by on-demand contraception.

So contrary to Harari’s argument, I think the humanist individualism that defines our age (in the West) was inextricably linked to the rejection of the Church. None of us knew what existentialism was, but, when I encountered it academically later in life, I recognised it as the symptomatic paradigm of my generation. We had become existentialists without being ideologically indoctrinated.

I feel Harari is on firmer ground when he discusses the relationship between the scientific revolution and European colonial expansion. I’ve argued previously, when discussing Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct, that Western European philosophy begat the scientific revolution because, under Galileo, Kepler and Newton, they discovered the relationship between mathematics and the movements of stellar objects – the music of the spheres, to paraphrase the ancient Greeks. The Platonic world of mathematics held the key to understanding the heavens. Subsequent centuries progressed this mathematical paradigm even further with the discovery of electromagnetic waves, then quantum mechanics and general relativity, leading to current theories of elementary nuclear particles and QED (quantum electrodynamics).

But Harari makes the case that exploration of foreign lands and peoples went hand-in-hand with scientific exploration of flora, fauna and archaeological digs. He argues that only Europeans acknowledged that we were ignorant of the wider world, which led to a desire for knowledge, rather than an acceptance that what our myths didn’t tell us was not worth knowing or exploring. Science had the same philosophy: that our ignorance would lead us to always search for new theories and new explanations, rather than accept the religious dogma that knowledge outside the Bible was not worthy of consideration.

So I would agree there was a synergy here, that was both destructive and empowering, depending on whether you were the European conqueror or the people being subjugated and ruthlessly exploited for the expansion of empire.

Probably the best part of the book is Harari’s description of capitalism and how it has shaped history in the last 400 years. He explains how and why it works, and why it’s been so successful. He also points out its flaws and its dark side. The book is worth reading for this section alone. He also explains how the free market, if left to its own devices, would lead to slavery. Instead, we have the exploitation of labour in third world countries, which is the next best thing, or the next worse thing, depending on your point of view.

This logically leads to a discussion on the consumerism paradigm that drives almost everything we do in modern society. Economic growth is totally dependent on it, but, ecologically, it’s a catastrophe in progress.

One of his more thought-provoking insights is in regard to how communal care-taking in law enforcement, health, education, even family dynamics, has been taken over by state bureaucracies. If one reads the neo-Confucian text, the I Ching, one finds constant analogies between family relationships and relationships in the Court (which means government officialdom). It should be pointed out that the I Ching predates Confucius, but contemporary texts (Richard Willem’s translation) have a strong Confucian flavour.

I can’t help but wonder if this facilitated China’s adoption of Communism almost as a state religion. Family relationships and loyalties still hold considerable sway in Asian politics and businesses. Nepotism is much more prevalent in Asian countries than in the West, I would suggest.

One of my bones of contention with Harari in Homo Deus was his ideas on happiness and how it’s basically a consequence of biochemistry. As someone who has lived for more than half a century in the modern post-war world, I feel I’m in a position to challenge his simplistic view that people’s ‘happiness setting’ doesn’t change as a consequence of external factors. To quote from Sapiens:

Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can change it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.

Well, it works for me. Nothing has given me greater long term happiness than writing a novel and getting it into the public arena – the fact that it’s been a total financial failure is, quite frankly, irrelevant. I really can’t explain that, but it’s probably been the single most important, self-satisfying event of my life. I can die happy. Also I enjoy driving possibly more than any other activity, so owning a car means more to me than just having personal transport. I used to ride motorcycles, so maybe that explains it.

I grew up in a volatile household, which I’ve delineated elsewhere, and when I left home, the first 6 years were very depressing indeed. Over decades I turned all that around, so I think Harari’s ‘happiness setting’ is total bullshit.

But my biggest disagreement with Harari, which I alluded to before, is my advocacy for existentialist philosophy which he replaces with ‘the religion of liberal individualism’. Even though I can see similarities with Buddhism, I wouldn’t call existentialism a religion. Harari pre-empts this objection by claiming all ideologies, be they political or cultural, are no different to any religion. However, I have another objection of my own, which is that when Harari talks about religion, he is really talking about dogma.

In an issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 127, Aug/Sep 2018), Sandy Grant, who is a philosopher at University of Cambridge, defines dogma as an ‘appeal to authority without critical thinking’. I’ve previously defined philosophy as ‘argument augmented by analysis’, which is the antithesis of dogma. In fact, I would go so far as to say that philosophy has been historically an antidote to religion, going all the way back to Socrates.

Existentialism is a humanist philosophy (paraphrasing Sartre) but it requires self-examination and a fundamental honesty to oneself, which is the opposite of the narcissism implied in Harari’s religion of self-obsession, which he euphemistically calls ‘liberal individualism’.

Harari is cynical, if not dismissive, about the need for purpose in life, yet I would argue that it’s fundamental. I would recommend Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a holocaust survivor and psychologist, who argued that we find meaning in relationships, projects and adversity. In fact, I would contend that the whole meaning of life is about dealing with adversity, which is why it is the theme of every work of fiction ever recorded.

If I go back to the title of this post, which I think is what Harari’s book is all about, there is a hierarchy of ‘needs’ (not Maslow’s) that a society must provide to ensure what Harari calls ‘happiness’, which is not so much economical as psychological. Back in July 2015, I wrote one of my 400 word mini-essays in response to a Question of the Month in Philosophy Now. The only relevant part is my conclusion, which effectively says that a functioning society is based on trust.

You can’t have truth without trust; you can’t have justice without truth; you can’t have freedom without justice; and you can’t have happiness without freedom.

I think that succinctly answers Harari’s thesis on happiness. Biochemistry may play a role, but people won’t find happiness if all those prerequisites aren’t met, unless, of course, said people are part of a dictatorship’s oligarchy.

A utopian society would allow everyone to achieve their potential – that’s the ideal. The most important consequence of an existentialist approach is that you don’t forfeit your aspirations for the sake of family or nation or church or some other abstract ideal that Harari calls religion.

While on this subject, I will quote from another contributor to Philosophy Now (Issue 110, Oct/Nov 2015), Simon Clarke, who is talking about John Stuart Mill, but who expresses my point of view better than I can.

An objectively good life, on Mill’s (Aristotelian) view, is one where a person has reached her potential, realizing the powers and abilities she possesses. According to Mill, the chief essential requirement for personal well-being is the development of individuality. By this he meant the development of a person’s unique powers, abilities, and talents, to their fullest potential.

What is the third way?

This is the latest Question of the Month from Philosophy Now. I should point out that my last entry didn’t get published. After a run of something like 5 in a row, that was a bit of a perspective-changer. I had been getting cocksure. So I have 7 out of 9 published and now aiming for 8 out of 10. But 7 out of 10 is still a good result over a period of around 10 years. I should point out that I don’t enter every single one of them. I pick and choose, which skews my chances of success.

The ‘third way’ referenced in the question is basically a reference to an alternative societal paradigm to capitalism and communism. I expect that most, if not all responses will be variations on a 'middle way'. But if there is a completely out-of-the-box answer, I’ll be curious to read it. So, maybe the way the question is addressed will be just as important, if not more important, than the proposed resolution.



I think this is the most difficult question Philosophy Now has thrown at us in the decade or two I’ve been reading it. I think there definitely will be a third way by the end of this century, but I’m not entirely sure what it will be. Is that a copout? No, I’m going to attempt to forecast the future by looking at the past.

If one goes back before the industrial revolution, no one would have predicted that feudalism would not continue forever. But the industrial revolution unintentionally spawned two social experiments: communism and capitalism that spanned the 20th Century. I think one can fairly say that capitalism ultimately prevailed, because all communist inspired revolutions became State-run oligarchies that led to the worst excesses in totalitarianism.

What’s more, we saw more societal and technological change in the 20th Century than all previous history. There is no reason to believe that the 21st Century won’t be even more transformative. We are currently going through a technological revolution in every way analogous to the industrial revolution of the 19th Century, and it will be just as socially disruptive and economically challenging.

Capitalism has become so successful globally, especially in the high-tech industries, that corporations are starting to eclipse governments in their influence and power, and, to some extent, now embody the feudal system we thought we’d left behind. I’m referring to third world countries providing exploited labour and resources for the affluent elite, which includes me.

There is an increasing need to stop the wasteful production of goods on the altar of economic growth. It’s not only damaging the environment, it increases the gap between those who consume and those who produce. So a global economy would give the wealth to those who produce and not just those who are their puppet masters. This would require equitable wealth distribution on a global scale, not just nationally.

Future technologies will become more advanced to the point that there will be a symbiosis between humans and machines, and this will have a dramatic impact on economic drivers. A universal basic income, which is unthinkable now, will become a necessity because so many jobs will be AI executed.

People and their ideas are only considered progressive in hindsight. But what was radical in the past often becomes the status quo in the present; and voila: no one can imagine it any other way.


Addendum: I changed the last sentence of the third-last paragraph before I sent it off.

3 rules for humans

A very odd post. I joined a Science Fiction group on Facebook, which has its moments. I sometimes comment, even have conversations, and most of the time manage to avoid conflicts. I’ve been a participator on the internet long enough to know when to shut up, or let something through to the keeper, as we say in Oz. In other words, avoid being baited. Most of the time I succeed, considering how opinionated I can be.

Someone asked the question: what would the equivalent 3 laws for humans be, analogous to Asimov’s 3 laws for robotics?

The 3 laws of robotics (without looking them up) are about avoiding harm to humans within certain constraints and then avoiding harm to robots or itself. It’s hierarchical with humans' safety being at the top, or the first law (from memory).

So I submitted an answer, which I can no longer find, so maybe someone took the post down. But it got me thinking, and I found that what I came up with was more like a manifesto than laws per se; so they're nothing like Asimov’s 3 laws for robotics.

In the end, my so-called laws aren't exactly what I submitted but they are succinct and logically consistent, with enough substance to elaborate upon.

                        1.    Don’t try or pretend to be something you’re not

This is a direct attempt at what existentialists call ‘authenticity’, but it’s as plain as one can make it. I originally thought of something Socrates apparently said:

   To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to seem to be.

And my Rule No1 (preferable to law) is really another way of saying the same thing, only it’s more direct, and it has a cultural origin as well. As a child, growing up, ‘having tickets on yourself’, or ‘being up yourself’, to use some local colloquialisms, was considered the greatest sin. So I grew up with a disdain for pretentiousness that became ingrained. But there is more to it than that. I don’t believe in false modesty either.

There is a particular profession where being someone you’re not is an essential skill. I’m talking about acting. Spying also comes to mind, but the secret there I believe is to become invisible, which is the opposite to what James Bond does. That’s why John Le Carre’s George Smiley seems more like the real thing than 007 does. Going undercover, by the way, is extremely stressful and potentially detrimental to your health – just ask anyone who’s done it.

But actors routinely become someone they’re not. Many years ago, I used to watch a TV programme called The Actor’s Studio, where well known actors were interviewed, and I have to say that many of them struck me with their authenticity, which seems like a contradiction. But an Australian actress, Kerry Armstrong, once pointed out that acting requires leaving your ego behind. It struck me that actors know better than anyone else what the difference is between being yourself and being someone else.

I’m not an actor but I create characters in fiction, and I’ve always believed the process is mentally the same. Someone once said that ‘acting requires you to say something as if you’ve just thought of it, and not everyone can do that.’ So it’s spontaneity that matters. Someone else once said that acting requires you to always be in the moment. Writing fiction, I would contend, requires the same attributes. Writing, at least for me, requires you to inhabit the character, and that’s why the dialogue feels spontaneous, because it is. But paradoxically, it also requires authenticity. The secret is to leave yourself out of it.

The Chinese hold modesty in high regard. The I Ching has a lot to say about modesty, but basically we all like and admire people who are what they appear to be, as Socrates himself said.

We all wear masks, but I think those rare people who seem most comfortable without a mask are those we intrinsically admire the most.

                                   2.    Honesty starts with honesty to yourself

It’s not hard to see that this is directly related to Rule 1. The truth is that we can’t be honest to others if we are not honest to ourselves. It should be no surprise that sociopathic narcissists are also serial liars. Narcissists, from my experience, and from what I’ve read, create a ‘reality distortion field’ that is often at odds with everyone else except for their most loyal followers.

There is an argument that this should be Rule 1. They are obviously interdependent. But Rule 1 seems to be the logical starting point for me. Rule 2 is a consequence of Rule 1 rather than the other way round.

Hugh Mackay made the observation in his book, Right & Wrong: How to Decide for Yourself, that ‘The most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves’. From this, neurosis is born and many of the ills that beleaguer us. Self-honesty can be much harder than we think. Obviously, if we are deceiving ourselves, then, by definition, we are unaware of it. But the real objective of self-honesty is so we can have social intercourse with others and all that entails.

So you can see there is a hierarchy in my rules. It goes from how we perceive ourselves to how others perceive us, and logically to how we interact with them.

But before leaving Rule 2, I would like to mention a movie I saw a few years back called Ali’s Wedding, which was an Australian Muslim rom-com. Yes, it sounds like an oxymoron but it was a really good film, partly because it was based on real events experienced by the filmmaker. The music by Nigel Weslake was so good, I bought the soundtrack. It’s relevance to this discussion is that the movie opens with a quote from the Quran about lying. It effectively says that lies have a habit of snowballing; so you dig yourself deeper the further you go. It’s the premise upon which the entire film is based.

                              3.    Assume all humans have the same rights as you

This is so fundamental, it could be Rule 1, but I would argue that you can’t put this into practice without Rules 1 and 2. It’s the opposite to narcissism, which is what Rules 1 and 2 are attempting to counter.

One can see that a direct consequence is Confucius’s dictum: ‘Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to yourself’; better known in the West as the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’; and attributed to Jesus of course.

It’s also the premise behind the United Nations Bill of Human Rights. All these rules are actually hard to live by, and I include myself in that broad statement.

A couple of years back when I wrote a post in response to the question: Is morality objective? I effectively argued that Rule No3 is the only objective morality.