Looking Backward, Looking Forward

by Allister Marran

Who here thinks that life today will be what life is like in 20 years, or 50 or 100?

I mean, when I was born in 1976 there was no such thing as television in South Africa. That came later that year, with a measly one channel and a broadcast time of a couple of hours a day. And it was introduced as another propaganda arm of the apartheid government, carefully orchestrated to feed misinformation to those fortunate enough to afford one, which coincidentally was their target market.

Nobody came home from work or school back then and parked off in front of a 75 inch box with 1000 streaming channels at the ready. Life was vastly, fundamentally different.

Board games, visiting friends for coffee, swimming, clubs, dinner parties, cricket and soccer and four square in the road, reading and collecting and creating. People did stuff.

In 1982 I got my first computer for Christmas, a ZX Spectrum with 48k ram. It was mind blowing what it could do. My life irrevocably changed, the future had arrived and I was a part of it. And it was good.

I sat I front of that computer and learned the ins and outs of basic programming, and I played games. Boy did I play a lot of games. I was hooked.

As processing power increased exponentially so did graphics and game logic, and soon the game worlds were massively immersive, 2D became 3D, polygons became textured and colour pallettes went from 8 colour to 16 million colours in a matter of a few short years. It was glorious.

In the mid 90s I got my first mobile phone, an Ericsson 628 with a single line of display text. It was like a mini PDA like those Tricorder things they carry on Star Trek, or so it felt to me. 

A year or so later the internet came into our homes. Email, webpages and rudimentary forms of social media like bulletin boards, IRC and later instant chat hubs and comment sections on web based message boards.

The world was connected in every way. You no longer had to get out the house, you had a phone in your pocket, you could chat to your mates while.sitting in your study on your PC, you could download episodes of your favorite shows and watch them. And a new thing was on the horizon, you could even shop online for books and later groceries too. Soon you would never have to go out ever again.

The last puzzle piece was the smart phone in 2008 or so. A single device that drew it all together, your PC and tablet and gaming and television and phone and social media and alarm clock and watch and camera and video recorder and file server and banking and weather forecast and news source and calendar and email and GPS all in one place, on one device.

We can marvel at how in 45 years we have progressed from the first TV shows to a super computer in your pocket. And indeed, it's an engineering feat of incredible proportions. 

But is the world better for it?

In a world where people would visit friends and neighbors instead of turn on the telly, in a world where people would go for a run with a mate instead of spending an hour or two on Fortnite, in a world where people were not constantly bombarded with anxiety causing social media hysteria and toxic crazies yelling about the end times because of government over-reach and scaring the crap out of you every day, maybe the simple times without technology were indeed the good old days.

People certainly seemed happier back then.

The world will continue to change, it has to. It's called progress. More new things will come to be in the next 45 years, and your kids who are young today will lament their lot in life and yearn for the simpler times of 2021 when things were easier, when they only had to deal with an iPhone screen and a bit of harmless social media pressure.

Never lose sight of what is truly important in this world, things that have stayed constant throughout the ages, regardless of technological advances and social upheaval.

Treasure friends and family. Seek out and promote honesty and righteousness. Gravitate towards love and caring. Never lose site of your morals, your values and your God. Fight the good fight.

Don't let them grind you down.

We live in 2021. It's a scary place, full of screens and bots and AI's and algorithms.
But our souls can still hark back to that day before it all changed back in 1976, before that test pattern brought the future into our homes.

Change will always affect your life, but don't let it define who you are.

Understanding Culture Helps Explain Why It Matters

André Malraux once wrote: “Culture is both the
heritage and the noblest possession of the world.”

Posted by Keith Tidman

What is culture? The answer is that culture is many things. ‘Culture is the sum of all forms of art, of love, and of thought’, as the French writer, André Malraux, defined the term. However, a little burrowing reveals that culture is even more than that. Culture expresses our way of life — from our heritage to our values and traditions. It defines us. It makes sense of the world. 

 

Culture measures the quality of life that society affords us, across sundry dimensions. It’s intended, through learning, experience, and discovery, to foster development and growth. Fundamentally, culture provides the means for members of a society to relate to and empathize with one another, and thereby to form a collective memory and, as importantly, to imagine a collective future to strive for.

 

Those ‘means’ promote an understanding of society’s rich assembly of norms and values: both shared and individual values, which provide the grist for our standards, beliefs, behaviours, and sense of belonging. Culture affords us a guide to socialisation. Culture is a living, anthropologic enterprise, meaning a story of human development and expression over the ages, which chronicles our mores, myths, stories, and narratives. And whatever culture chooses to value — intelligence, wisdom, creativity, relationships, valour, or other — gets rewarded.

 

Although ideas are at the core of culture, the most-visible and equally striking underpinning is physical constructs: cityscapes, statues, museums, monuments, places of worship, seats of government, boulevards, relics, artifacts, theatres, schools, archeological collections.

 

This durable, physical presence in our lives is every bit as key to self-identity, self-esteem, and representation of place as are the ideas-based standards we ascribe to everyday life. In the embodiment and vibrancy of those constructs we see us; in their design and purpose, they are mirrors on our humanity: a humanity that cuts across racial, ethnic, religious, social, and other demographic groups.

 

The culture that lives within us consists of the many core beliefs and customs that people hold close, remaining unchanged across generations. There’s a standard, values-based thread here that the group holds in high enough esteem to resist the corrosive effects of time. The result is a societal master plan for behavioural strategies. Such threads may be based in highly prized religious, historical, or moral traditions. 

 

Still other dogmas, however, don’t retain constancy; they become subject to critical reevaluation and negotiation, resulting in even deeply rooted ancestral practices being upended. Essentially, people contest and reassess what matters, especially as issues relate to values (abstract and concrete) and self-identity. The resulting changes in traditions and habits stem from discovery and learning, and take place either in sudden lurches or as part of a gentle progression. Either way, adaptation to this change is important to survival.

 

This inevitability and unpredictability of cultural change are underscored by the powerful influences of globalisation. Many factors combine to push global change: those that are economic, such as trade and business; those that are geopolitical, such as pacts and security and human rights; and those that accelerate change in technology, travel, and communications. These influences across porous national contours do not threaten cultural sameness per se, which is an occasional refrain, but do quicken the need for societies to adjust. 

As part of this global dynamic, culture’s instinct is to stabilise and routinise people’s lives, which reassures. Opinions, loyalties, apprehensions, ambitions, relationships, creeds, sense of self in time and place, and forms of idolatry become tested in the face of time, but they also comfort the mind. These amount to the collective social capital: the bedrock of what can rightly be called a community.

 

Language, too, is peculiarly adaptive to culture, a tool for varied expression: the reassuring yet unremarkable (everyday); the soaring and imaginative (creatively artistic); and the rigorously, demandingly precise (scientific and philosophic). In these regards, language is simultaneously adaptive to culture and adaptive of culture: a crucible on which the structure and usage of language remain pliant, to serve society’s bidding.

 

Accordingly, language is basic to framing our staple beliefs, values, and rituals — much of what matters to us, and helps to explain how culture enriches life. What we eat, what we wear, whom we marry, what music we listen to, what plays we attend, what locations we travel to, what we find humorous, what recreation we enjoy, what commemorations we observe — these and other ordinary lived experiences are the building blocks of cultural diversification.

 

Culture allows society to define its nature and ultimately prolong its wellbeing. Culture fills in the details of a larger shared reality about the world. We revere the multifaceted features of culture, all the while recognising that we must be prepared to reimagine and reform culture with the passage of time, as conditions shift. 

This evolutionary process brings vigour. To this extent, culture serves as the lifeblood of society.

 

Poem: The Answer to the Riddle of Needs

by Chengde Chen*

Photo credit: Chuck Kuhn. Night Moods: Red Moon Over the World's Fair 1964.

People have always believed that
it is a human need to develop technology
But this is a confusion of two kinds of needs –
needs for survival and needs of a value system
The former comes from nature
while the latter is created by man
If we choose a different value system
we would ‘need’ different things

Developing technology was originally a need to survive
From drilling wood for fire, to farming and weaving
man had to claim his fill, warmth and security from nature
In the great struggle for survival
we formed a utilitarian value system –
pursuing wealth and encouraging competition
with the market and technology as its two engines
This system drove the economy successfully
and then the economy meant survival

It is because this system has been successful
that it has become the soul guiding our thinking
What else do we need after meeting the needs for survival?
No one knows, as the answer is what to be created
The utilitarian values, however, are the creators –
Technology tells us what we ‘can’ need
The market tells us what we ‘do’ need

Originally we did not need the car
but since the car was invented and on the market
we came to need it, and need it so much
that we would feel imprisoned without it
Originally we did not need the television

but since the television was invented and on the market
we came to need it, and need it so much
that we would feel our day incomplete without it
Modern society is a technology-addicted society
Technology for us is like spirits or nicotine for the addicts
It creates the blood and nerves that need it, as well as
the greed for consumption and the desire for competition

Do we need air travel?
Do we need flying at the speed of a bullet?
Why is travelling to a remote and strange continent
more enjoyable than meeting neighbours or friends nearby?

Do we need to go to the Moon?
Do we need to be a hero to destroy its beautiful fairy-tales?
Why is a lunar crater dead for a million years more interesting
than the green hills and flowing rivers of our homeland?
Do we need all those life prolonging medicines,
or to live in the electric current of a life-support machine?
Why is letting a withered leaf struggle on a winter’s branch
more moral or prudent than allowing it to go naturally?

We do not really ‘need’ them, but we think we do!
It is because of nothing but competition
We believe that we need to do what others can
as well as what others cannot
If you can fly into space, I must touch the Moon
If you have reached Venus first, I must land on Mars first
regardless of millions of hungry children crying on Earth!

It is believed that life needs competition
In fact, it is competition that makes competition a need
The strong swagger around, the weak refuse to be outdone
Those in the middle have to struggle against both ends
Every one compels others to be opponents
Every nation forces other nations to be arrivals
Oh, is this all necessary?
Once escaping from the net of utilitarianism
you will find the world war an uncalled-for game
As an old Chinese saying reads:
‘If no side wants to win a war, they win the peace together!’

Many of our needs are in fact not ‘our’ needs
but the needs of our values
The answer to the riddle of needs lies in our value system
Utilitarianism is only one of the possible systems
It championed civilization before, but isn’t an eternal law
nor is it the unique basis settled by Heaven and Earth
If the risk of self-destruction means a new need for survival
mankind has to choose a new system!

---

* Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde@sipgroup.com

Advantages of Ecological Socialism

Image courtesy of Clariant. 
Today, companies like the speciality chemicals company
Clariant say that they are working to reposition
themselves as sustainable solutions providers

Posted by Andrew Porter*

Today, there is much greater awareness of the threat of Climate Change. Yet species loss, disruption of planetary systems, and widespread environmental degradation are allowed to continue. Over millennia, we have been very good at developing ways to respond to the environment; now the imperative is to develop the sharpness and capacity to respond to ourselves.

Surely it is apparent now that modern industrial overreach needs to be scaled back significantly. A number of systems might be devised for remedy, but the only ones that have any real chance of success revolve around human ecology and sustainability. Can large swathes of society rally around a call to protect ecologies and promote sustainability? Because underlining such a solution is the question ‘What's in it for us?’ I think that this question itself must be transformed by a new ecological attitude, what we might call an 'inner ecology.'

One ‘system’ that might guide a large set of cultural and societal factors toward a much better relationship between humankind and the Earth is what I call ‘ecological socialism’. It would require a re-orientation of society towards an integration of human needs and what is necessary to afford the natural world its sustainability. The ‘socialism’ of the idea means equal possession of the opportunities and limitations inherent in living within the governance of natural principles. It is both ethical and ecological to distribute limitations and opportunities equally: who could argue otherwise?

An integration of the planet’s health (preservation of biodiversity and habitat, clean water and air, soil conservation, and respect for the earth's climate mechanisms) and people’s lives maximises care of one for the other. Nature has its goals and man has his; unless they are integrated, sustainability will remain out of reach. Two primary principles that we might work into to guide and animate environmental preservation are:

1) Streams, trees, bays, animals, mountains, oceans, and so on, should have standing as holders of legal rights because they have moral rights in our mind. We are in this together, nature and man, and if we are a lame and destructive partner, this joint venture remains unviable.

2) Natural systems maintain health and balance as a core feature, and should become a core feature of our lives. This involves development and implementation of human ecology models. The process as well as the result is – rather than a frittering away of human capacity – a kind of wholeness.

Surely the present is the crucial time to address this. George Monbiot makes the point well in a March 15, 2019 article in The Guardian newspaper entitled ‘Capitalism is Destroying the Earth. We Need a New Human Right for Future Generations’.

‘At the heart of capitalism is a vast and scarcely examined assumption: you are entitled to as great a share of the world’s resources as your money can buy. You can purchase as much land, as much atmospheric space, as many minerals, as much meat and fish as you can afford, regardless of who might be deprived. If you can pay for them, you can own entire mountain ranges and fertile plains. You can burn as much fuel as you like. Every pound or dollar secures a certain right over the world’s natural wealth.’

Ecological socialism—moving away from current assumptions and forms of exploitation—seeks the sustainability of the natural world and also aims to sustain man, in some form, within this. A principal standard of ecological socialism is that human burdens on the planet are kept well below the Earth's carrying capacity for them.

Ecological socialism attempts to genuinely represent all life forms and natural systems as equals in its sphere of obligation, caring, and set of rights. Ecological socialism models human governance and society on the appreciation of ecological balance and advantages. It seeks to make organic goodness human as well as natural. Ecological socialism recognises that humans must be integral with natural ways for both humans and the Earth to thrive.

Some specific choices are clear. Industrial society must be phased out. Strategies must be found to bring human numbers down and encourage small-scale simplicity. I believe that ecology-centred education, with good assistance from the humanities, helps pave the way. The belief that the individual and society are supported best by harmony with and not antagonism with nature is the vital one.

The exploitive way of life, denying costs, is over. Ecological socialism integrates man and ecologies, making the human path forward one of integrity itself. This is a value worth crafting human life around. Currently, culture and societies seem not to mind demise. But ecological socialism aims to help people understand that a citizen is not a citizen unless responsible to oneself and to the Earth.

Citizenship is best defined as this dual responsibility—to help oneself and one’s circle thrive, and also to bolster the optimal flourishing of the ecosystems and planetary systems of Earth through non-interference. Ecological socialism is the best way to ensure this.

---

Andrew Porter is a philosopher and educator who lives near Boston in the United States

What Are ‘Facts’?

On the trail of the Higgs Boson

Posted by Keith Tidman

What are 'facts'? The ages-long history of deception and sleights of hand and mind — including propaganda and political and psychological legerdemain — demonstrates just one of the many applications of false facts. But similar presentations of falsities meant to deceive, sow discord, or distract have been even more rife today, via the handiness and global ubiquity of the Internet. An enabler is the too-frequent lack of judicious curation and vetting of facts. And, in the process of democratizing access to facts, self-serving individuals may take advantage of those consumers of information who are ill-equipped or disinclined (unmotivated) to discern whether or not content is true. Spurious facts dot the Internet landscape, steering beliefs, driving confirmation bias, and conjuring tangible outcomes such as voting decisions. Interpretations of facts become all the more confounding in political arenas, where interpretations (the understanding) of facts among differently minded politicians becomes muddled, and ‘what’s actually the case’ remains opaque.

And yet surely it is the total anthology of facts — meaning things (their properties), concepts, and their interrelationships — that composes reality. Facts have multiple dimensions, including what one knows (epistemological aspects), how one semantically describes what’s known (linguistic aspects), and what meaning and purpose one attributes to what’s known (metaphysical aspects).

Facts are known on a sliding scale of certainty. An example that seems compelling to me comes from just a few years ago, when scientists announced that they had confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, whose field generates mass through its interaction with other particles. The Higgs’s existence had been postulated earlier in mathematical terms, but empirical evidence was tantalizingly sought over a few decades. The ultimate confirmation was given a certainty of ‘five sigma’: that there was less than 1 chance in 3.5 million that what was detected was instead a random fluctuation. Impressive enough from an empirical standpoint to conclude discovery (a fact), yet still short of absolute certainty. With resort to empiricism, there is no case where some measure of doubt (of a counterfactual), no matter how infinitesimally small, is excluded.

Mathematics, meantime, provides an even higher level of certainty (rigor of method and of results) in applying facts to describe reality: Newtonian, Einsteinian, quantum theoretical, and other models of scientific realism. Indeed, mathematics, in its precise syntax, universal vocabulary, and singular purpose, is sometimes referred to as the language of reality. Indeed, as opposed to the world’s many natural languages (whose known shortcomings limit understanding), mathematics is the best, and sometimes the only, language for describing select facts of science (mathematical Platonism) — whereby mathematics is less invented than it is discovered as a special case of realism.

Facts are also contingent. Consider another example from science: Immediately following the singularity of the Big Bang, an inflationary period occurred (lasting a tiny fraction of a second). During that inflationary period, the universe — that is, the edges of space-time (not the things within space-time) — expanded faster than the speed of light, resulting in the first step toward the cosmos’s eventual lumpiness, in the form of galaxies, stars, planets. The laws — that is, the facts — of physics were different during the inflation than what scientists are familiar with today — today’s laws of physics breaking down as one looks back closer and closer to the singularity. In this cosmological paradigm, facts are contingent on the peculiar circumstances of the inflationary epoch. This realization points broadly to something capable of being a fact even if we don’t fully understand it.

The sliding scale of certainty and facts’ contingency apply all the more acutely when venturing into other fields. Specifically, the recording of historical events, personages, and ideas, no matter the scholarly intent, often contain biases — judgments, symbols, interpretations — brought to the page by those historians whose contemporaneous accounts may be tailored to self-serving purposes, tilting facts and analyses. In natural course, follow-on historians inadvertently adopt those original biases while not uncommonly folding in their own. Add to this mix the dynamic, complex, and unpredictable (chaotic) nature of human affairs, and the result is all the more shambolic. The accretion of biases over the decades, centuries, and millennia doesn’t of course change reality as such— what happened historically has an underlying matter-of-factness, even if it lingers between hard and impossible to tease out. But the accretion does distort (and on occasion even falsify) what’s understood.

This latter point suggests that what’s a fact and what’s true might either intersect or diverge; nothing excludes either possibility. That is, facts may be true (describe reality) or false (don’t describe reality), depending on their content. (Fairies don’t exist in physical form — in that sense, are false — but do exist nonetheless, legendarily woven into elaborate cultural lore — and in that sense, are true.) What’s true or false will always necessitate the presence of facts, to aid determinations about truth-values. Whereas facts simply stand out there: entirely indifferent to what’s true or false, or what’s believed or known, or what’s formally proven, or what’s wanted and sought after, or what’s observable. That is, absent litmus tests of verifiability. In this sense, given that facts don’t necessarily have to be about something that exists, ‘facts’ and ‘statements’ serve interchangeably.

Facts’ contingency also hinges in some measured, relativistic way on culture. Not as a universally  normative standard for all facts or for all that’s true, of course, but in ways that matter and give shared purpose to citizens of a particular society. Acknowledged facts as to core values — good versus evil, spirituality, integrity, humanitarianism, honesty, trustworthiness, love, environmental stewardship, fairness, justice, and so forth — often become rooted in society. Accordingly, not everyone’s facts are everyone else’s: facts are shaped and shaded both by society and by the individual. The result is the culture-specific normalising of values — what one ‘ought’ to do, ideally. As such, there is no fact-value dilemma. In this vein, values don’t have to be objective to be factual — foundational beliefs, for example, suffice. Facts related to moral realism, unlike scientific and mathematical realism, have to be invented; they’re not discoverable as already-existing phenomena.

Facts are indispensable to describing reality, in both its idealistic (abstract) and realistic (physical) forms. There is no single, exclusive way to define facts; rationalism, empiricism, and idealism all pertain. Yet subsets of facts, and their multifaceted relationships that intricately bear on each other’s truth or falsity, enable knowledge and meaning (purpose) to emerge — an understanding, however imperfect, of slices of abstract and physical reality that our minds piece together as a mosaic. 

In short, the complete anthology of facts relates to all possible forms of reality, ranging the breadth of possibilities, from figments to suppositions to the verifiable phenomenal world.