I used to brush them away. Gossamer threads which, once entangled in the fine hairs on my face or hands, tickled and became annoying, so I would brush them away. Uninvited distractions to the pleasantness of my walk through the trees. I don’t now. Passing through the low-hanging spindly fingers of tree limbs that line the muddy “off the beaten track” trails of my forest walks, I feel them attach themselves to me and I just let them lie.
In my mind’s eye, and with each new step, I see myself being gently wrapped in the weave spun by so many night-owl, needle-limbed spiders until finally, all of me has been tightly draped. All that is left is a silvery cocoon suspended in the forest, glinting like a drop of water dangling precariously from one of autumn’s last leaves as the day’s final shards of sunlight pierce the canopy.
Invisible, bound by silk and bereft of all movement, I surrender to the rich cuddliness of nature’s bedding and sleep a deep sleep; not death, but neither fully alive. Light and shade come and go like ticks of a clock from another place. When I am sleeping there is no time, there is only before and that fades the longer I sleep. Everything I am, everything I have ever been, is here and now. I’m asleep and waiting to be born anew.
But what if there is no rebirth? What if there is no pupa of perfection, no new and improved self capable of scratching its way through its bindings, no Butterfly, not a cocoon but rather some ornate shroud, what then? Will it eventually fall to the mossy floor of the forest where the night needles will busily tether me to the earth allowing the demolition order granted at the moment of my conception, to be finally concluded?
Can I choose a cocoon over a shroud? If I could, I would choose Butterfly just for those few moments of perfection and harmony and light, held aloft in a woody sunbeam. I would. And if I can’t choose, what then? Am I just a dusty shadow of a Butterfly, a dull moth idiotically drawn to and bashing my head against all that is bright or shiny, imagining a silvery moon where there is only a dirty light bulb or a mindless flickering TV show? My existence is a thumb smudge away leaving nothing but a dry smear to signify my passing. I’d rather be nothing. I’d rather just be very still and very quiet and very unnoticeable until nature finds another use for me.
I can’t be a Butterfly. I don’t think I can choose anything other than what I have already chosen. Neither a cocoon nor a shroud, I have knit myself a straight jacket, the spiders will do the rest. But maybe an ember will. Escaping from an “almost-out” flame, engorged on the oxygen of new thinking, maybe one of these embers will become a fire that will warm and grow and illuminate everything. Wouldn’t that be something?
So, a flying saucer full of aliens comes down to earth in 1790, about 30 years after the start of the industrial revolution, to study our planet. They are pretty impressed.
“Wow Xanex, this place is off the chart!”
“I know Keanu, look at all this shit! Now this is what you call a rich biosphere right?”
“Totally X, there’s like millions of species of animals and forna, we could be here for yonks classifying it all. Where shall we start?”
“I’ve got an idea Keanu, why don’t we take a top-down approach and identify the species at the very top of the food chain and work our way down?”
And so they do. Keanu tells Xanex to do a quick search to try to find evidence of any intelligent civilisation on the planet. After about 10 alien minutes, Xanex is standing at his console scratching his head.
“Wassup X?”
Says, Keanu
“Erm, honestly? I’m a bit confused. I did my search and I found what looks like one single species, but I’m thinking they are actually two. I mean they are biologically exactly the same except for a few environmental adaptations like skin colour, facial features and what not, but in every other way they are completely different”
“I don’t get you X, how can they be two species if they are biologically exactly the same? That don’t make no sense at all bra'”
“Yeah I dig it Keanu, I wasn’t chosen for this mission because I’m a pretty face you know. I am actually the astro-biologist on this fecking mission”
“So what you flappin’ about then X?”
“Ok look, Let’s give the whole bunch a name so we know what we are talking about. I dunno, how about humanity?
So I’ve made a picture of the first kind of human. On the face of it, this geezer seems to be more technologically advanced than the other type (clothes, wigs, sail around in ships and making stuff in factories), but they seem to be spreading all over the planet from this bit of the planet here, taking over all the land but then fucking up everything they come across. Forests, killing all the wild animals for fur, killing all the whales for oil for their lamps and whatnot.
I mean, you can’t really blame ’em
They spend a lot of time killing each other, but they especially like killing this other type of human. It’s almost like a sport! They seem to want to own and kill everything they see. Except for dogs! They love their dogs. Just for the sake of argument, lets call these ones “Greedy Humanity” or “Avarus Humanitas” because us aliens love our Latin don’t we?
Then there’s this other lot. It’s almost like they don’t give a crap about technology. They have basic hunting tools like spears and blow pipes and bows and arrows, and a really weird wobbly stick that they throw at big hopping mice, but it’s quite clever really because it comes back if they miss so they don’t have to run and go pick it up before they can throw it again, and some basic tools for a bit of farming and such, but no machines you can really point at.
They don’t seem to want to own anything at all! In fact, they seem to be very determined to not use anything they don’t actually need. They only hunt what they actually eat and farm in a way that preserves the land. Classic hunter gatherer types. Pretty nomadic bunch following the seasons and allowing the land they just left to recover from their presence. Great wheel of life stuff really. They live in relative harmony with each other (odd scuffle but nothing to write home about), and they seem to show a lot of respect for the natural environment and well, everything really. So whilst they are technologically miles behind these tossers, it strikes me they have a much more sustainable and intelligent way of life; almost wise. In fact so wise that they seem to intuitively understand at a spiritual level that energy and matter are the same thing and that makes everything as valuable as everything else. They make no distinction between a pebble or a person. We could call them “Wise Humanity” to distinguish them from these greedy bastards. “Wise Man” for short or “Homo Sapien”.
“Some are smart but they are not wise”
Shoshone Proverb
So, whilst the greedy ones seem to have all the power, land and technology, I reckon these wise ones, intellectually, philosophically, spiritually, ethically, and environmentally are actually the top of the food chain, but from the looks of it, they are pretty much on their way out what with all the butchering and slaughtering these greedy ones are doing.”
If Keanu had eyebrows, they would have been furrowed in thought. After about a minute he speaks up
“So, we’d better kill all the greedy ones then init?”
“Eh? What all of ’em?”
Says Xanex.
“Yeah, we better kill ’em all. The greedy ones I mean. It’s logical and us aliens are known for our logic and that. Look, if we let ’em live then these wise ones are goners right? Also, if these greedy fuckers keep going the way they are, then I can see a time when they will fill the atmosphere with Carbon Dioxide from all these fossil fuel burning factories they are setting up, and we all know what happens when you pump the atmosphere up with CO2 right? Just a big mess and all of ’em, including the wise ones will become extinct along with lots of other species. So if you think about it we are duty bound to kill ’em really. Actually, it’s like we are doing them a favour really, because I’m sure that if they were thinking straight, they wouldn’t want to set off a global extinction event.”
Now X is thinking.
“Couldn’t we just show ’em how to do fusion and then they won’t use these fossil fuels?”
“You crack me up X, you really do.”
laughs Keanu
“You really think these nutters would use fusion properly? These dickheads would blow the planet up. No, we’re definitely gonna have to kill ’em. That is exactly, what we need to do”
He reaches over to a big red button on the console, winks at X and pushes the button.
“Kaboom motherfuckers!”
Ok, so I’ve sort of nicked the idea from the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, but I have modified it in two important ways: A) I didn’t want to kill off ALL of humanity and B) I didn’t pussy out at the last minute because John Cleese reckons we are all capable of changing our ways if only we were allowed to get to the point where everything was teetering on the brink of an abyss.
If the aliens had visited back in the 1790s, and had pushed the big red button (and they would’ve), wiping out Avarus Humanitas, the world would be a very different and better place today, because the ethical, philosophical and religious worldview of the remaining indigenous peoples is so fundamentally centred on the idea that
“Man belongs to earth, earth does not belong to man.”
Native American Proverb
Geographically, the remaining peoples of the earth would include Native Americans, South American indigenous tribes, Pacific Polynesian peoples, New Zealand’s Mauri peoples and Australian Aboriginal peoples.
All these peoples shared a common understanding and acceptance of our place in the world and the need to live in a way that maintains Nature’s fine balance.
All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
Chief Seattle (Seathl)
Now, I know what you’re thinking…
“Isn’t it a bit insensitive to be talking about pushing a big red button that kills pretty much everyone, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means we are teetering on the brink of WW3 Creasy?”
I can see why you might think that mon brave, but A) I would retort that I have actually been thinking about writing this blog for about 6 months (way before comrade Putin and NATO bolloxed everything up) and 3) what better time is there to demonstrate that not only have we not changed since the industrial revolution, but that we never will and that pushing that big red button (not the one that sets off all the nukes, the other one the Aliens had), is really the only logical and ethical thing left for us to do.
We have lost our humanity, or rather, our technological evolution has stolen it from us. We have lost our spiritual connection to the Earth. Walking the dog in local woods with the sound of the M25 ringing in your ears doesn’t count. It really doesn’t.
“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
Crowfoot (1836-1890) warrior and peace-promoting head chief
Implicit in these words, is the notion of being still in the world and simply observing, and in that observing we learn truth and nothing could, or should, be more important. Instead of this simple but powerful truth, we, Avaratus Humanitas, have chosen to define and teach and reinforce a set of “moral” and “ethical” values based solely on the assumption that people are more valuable than everything else.
This is the fundamental difference between the world’s wise people and the rest of us. If a single human life is more valuable, more sacred, than everything else, then everything we do to preserve, enhance or worship that life becomes ethical. If human life is so sacred why wouldn’t we build temples of concrete and steel to worship it? Why wouldn’t we sacrifice everything that was there before to build those temples? Why wouldn’t we rape the earth over and over to grow the things we need to feed or decorate that abundant and most precious life? Everything else is secondary, everything else doesn’t matter. Only we matter, and we have enshrined that core value deeply into our collective psyches and our religious beliefs.
“Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God and it remains for ever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end.”
Catholic Catechism
Whether it is Christianity or Islam or Judaism, the basic premise that we are more special than everything except God is baked in. This is the most basic and flawed form of logic. All cats have three legs. Tom is a cat. Ergo, Tom has three legs. Logically flawless and absolutely wrong. Humans have value, trees are not human, therefore trees are not valuable. The initial premise for the function is wildly incorrect, so no matter how logical or flawless the rest, the final conclusion will always be wrong.
You have to start from a different place. A more correct premise. A place where a pebble has the same exact value as a new born human baby.
“From a grain of sand to a great mountain, all is sacred”
Peter Blue Cloud (1935-) Mohawk writer
You have to start from a place of simple need versus want. If our only purpose was to survive, using only that which the world could sustainably and naturally provide, we would understand that our current rate of consumption of natural resources was not a problem to be solved later, but one which should occupy our every action and decision.
We would be watchful and careful in the way we shared this space and it would be entirely natural to preserve it so that our progeny could survive and know that everything had equal value too. Imagine the wisdom required to consider the impact of our every decision on the next 7 generations? We don’t even have the wisdom to think about the next one.
If we had this mindset, the decisions we would take would be very different. If nature produced a female that could not bear children, or a male that could not produce sperm with high motility, the decision wouldn’t be to conquer that natural selection with technology over and over again until the infertile couple actually produce another unnecessary child. Instead, adoption would be as normal and natural a way of “having” children, as actually giving birth to your own or having someone else do it for you as a surrogate. Sacred cow, right? Every man and woman have the right to have their own child whatever it takes, right? Why, because we are more valuable than the beasts of the field who naturally have the same condition, and anyway we have the tech to do it so what’s the problem?
The problem is that nature never gets a say. It tries to rebalance our numbers to levels it can sustain all the time, and we just keep giving it the finger. Disease? No problem. Famine? No problem. Floods? No problem. Infertility? No problem. Soil not producing enough human/livestock feed? Industrial Agro, no problem. Global warming? Bigger A/C units and houseboats, no problem. We think of everything as a problem to solve except us!
“We cultivated our land, but in a way different from the white man. We endeavoured to live with the land; they seemed to live off it. I was taught to preserve, never to destroy.”
– Australian Aboriginal – Tom Dystra
If our only purpose was to survive using only what the world could sustainably and naturally provide, we would not allow our population to to burgeon. It simply wouldn’t make any sense for our survival, or the survival of the other species that share this world. Look at the fuss we made about a few people who died during the COVID pandemic. Yeah, I said it! As I write, 5.98 million people have died of COVID. That’s 0.07% of the world population (7.8Bn and rising), and the vast majority of those people were over the age of 75! Shit, it’s not even one city’s worth of people. A normal and sane thought process would say “ahh, poor Doris/Jim, but s/he did have a good innings”. Instead, we were beating our breasts and going on and on about how unsafe care homes were, when we should have been taking them on daily outings to Val Doonican concerts in the COVID wards!
Too soon? Put it in the comments section.
If we were sane, every school in the world should have at least half their teaching staff come from the indigenous peoples of the world. That would be the only qualification they needed. The other half should only be allowed to teach knitting (with sustainably sourced wool). I accept that there aren’t enough Native Americans, Mauri or Aboriginals etc. to go round because we killed most of them, but if for the sake of argument we could, they would teach our children that living wisely is consistent with the certain knowledge that no one thing in the universe has greater value than any other thing because everything in the universe is exactly the same as everything else. Everything is ultimately energy and it simply moves from store to store (matter). They would teach them that as sentient and spiritual beings, we carry more responsibility for recognising and respecting that value in everything, not less.
If we were sane, only indigenous people could stand for public office. If you live somewhere where you have already wiped out the indigenous people, then you would have to vote for one that lives somewhere else. As our leaders, they would ensure that every decision taken took into account the impact on our world.
Apart from the practical problem of most indigenous people being dead depriving us of the teachers and leaders we really need, we also have the lightbulb problem.
We can no sooner go back and start from a new set of values, than we can uninvent the light bulb. It’s like someone pointing at a yellow cup and saying “that cup is red”. Nothing will convince you that the cup is red when you can see it is yellow. Our value system and beliefs are so deeply entrenched that they cannot be unbelieved. They can only die out. We have set our avaricious foot on a trail that has a clear and unambiguous destination and all the tree hugging in the world will not stop us from getting there. We are collectively consumed with consumption, engorged by our bottomless appetites (ever been to an “All you can eat” buffet in the US?), and yet more individually isolated and lonely than ever before, as Globalisation lays waste small communities in favour of anonymous city life. At the same time, we’re all so badly trying to be woke about some things that we have forgotten that we are deeply and artificially asleep to the single central truth; everything has equal value to everything else. If we woke to that simple truth, then no other wokeness would be needed. Bias and prejudice and intolerance cannot stand up in water that deep.
“It’s impossible to awaken a man who is pretending to be asleep.”
Navajo Proverb
I wrote a blog a while ago called Shouldn’t we Weaponise Babies? because I believed that the root cause to all of our problems today is the sheer number of humans that are consuming resources on our world. The basic concept behind that blog was to rapidly and radically reduce the world’s population to preserve the ecosystem required for high biodiversity on earth. I’d like to update that belief a little because it occurs to me that massive population reduction alone, albeit still very much needed, will not do the trick.
I seem to recall that I proposed a reduction from 7.8Bn people to say 500m people because at that level, provided that we never allow the global birth rate to grow above the replacement rate (2.1 kids per female), our level of consumption would be so low that the damage we have done could be healed naturally. I’d like to revise the reduction in population to 370m people, which just happens to be the total global population of all remaining indigenous peoples.
“That is a very spooky coincidence Creasy!”
Isn’t it?
Oh no….
I think I proposed that today’s children should be persuaded to not have children or to only allow 1 in 2 girls to have babies or something. So, I’ve changed my mind on that too. I don’t think that our selection of who can reproduce and who cannot should be random any more. We should limit reproduction to indigenous peoples only. What good is it to reduce the population if the people left teach those children the same values we carry around today. No, no, no, no, no! That won’t do at all. We have to scrape those values from the human consciousness like a burned lasagne from a baking dish that wasn’t stacked properly and therefore never made it into the dishwasher.
By only having indigenous people procreate, we can ensure that their children go to schools that only have indigenous children and indigenous teachers. To make sure that they don’t become infected by our values, we can create reservations in the cities for everyone else, where they can live out their lives. In 100 years they, and their values, will have all died out and the cities can be left to entropy to sort out. During that 100 years we should provide these people with every luxury their hearts may, and will, desire so they don’t feel like, well, like the indigenous people did when they were sent to a shithole reservation. Most importantly it might stop them from trying to escape or go to the countryside.
All other land should be returned to nature immediately and shared by the indigenous peoples of the world. We can’t give it back to them because their own system of values meant they never owned it in the first place.
Rewrite the 10 commandments as well, the one’s we have are pretty useless and nobody follows them, and they just keep going on and on about not committing adultery or not coveting they neighbours wife or not coveting they neighbours house which is fundamentally the same thing. If you ask me, the bloke who wrote the commandments is basically telling a crowd of sex starved other blokes, who have been wandering about for 40 years in a desert that takes a couple of weeks to walk across, not to shag his missus.
Our new commandments might look something like…
In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next 7 generations (Iroquois Proverb)
Regard Heaven as your father, Earth as your Mother and all things as your Brothers and Sisters (Native American Proverb)
Remain among the clumps of grass and do not elevate yourself (Hawaiian Proverb)
Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children (Native American Proverb)
Take only what you need and leave the land as you found it (Arapaho Proverb)
Pray to understand what man has forgotten (Lumbee Proverb)
The love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome (Santee (Dakota, Sioux) Proverb)
Only have 2 children. If one dies adopt another, or buy a dog….same thing. (Creasy)
Sit still on this high rock, look closely and you can see the pub from here (Aboriginal Proverb)
Don’t go near anything alive in Australia because it will bloody kill ya’ mate (Aboriginal Proverb)
These few simple measures, self evident and obvious, set the stage for a global renewal, not just of the land, but a healing of the collective mind. We have been poisoned but the poison is sweet and while the sweetness hides it’s fatal toxin, fatal it will be.
All but a few have forgotten the central truth of being, but it is still lying there in the pockets of those few, polished by soft hands and passed secretly from old pockets to new pockets, as they patiently wait for us to finish our feeding and move on like a great heard of bison, knowing that the wide trail of broken grass we leave behind will grow again as soon as we have gone.
If we want the best of humanity to go on, then the rest of us must “go quietly into the night”, so that the others can recommence their guardianship of this very special island in the cosmos.
“But how do 370m peacefully minded people force 7.4Bn people who don’t mind massacring all the peacefully minded people because it happens to be Tuesday and that’s when we do all our killin’ and butcherin’, to stay in the reservation Creasy?”
Ah! a crease in the Creasy solution. A crinkle in the Christmas wrapping paper of our Global gift. To a lesser man your observation might pose an insurmountable obstacle; a mountain range blocking our route to Nirvana (not the band). A chasm so deep and so wide that you could only fill it with the putrid dead corpses of Avarus Humanitas! And that, my little piranha, is why I have hatched PLAN B!
Through countless births in the cycle of existence I have run, not finding although seeking the builder of this house; and again and again, I faced the suffering of new birth. Oh housebuilder! Now you are seen.
You shall not build a house again for me. All your beams are broken, the ridgepole is shattered. The mind has become freed from conditioning: the end of craving has been reached.
Siddhārtha Gautama
Do you remember when you first took on the responsibility of owning a house? Do you remember how it felt when you signed those mortgage papers and someone handed you the keys and it was all yours? Not yet a home; somehow an empty walled echoey shell of a place, lacking furniture and warmth and connection, but great acoustics if you like to sing. So full of not-yet realised potential, so naked of everything else.
I remember feeling both exhilarated that I had reached such a “grown-up” milestone in my life, and at the same time horrified by the commitment and “end-of-youth” implications of settling down in this place. It wasn’t even a house. It was a third-floor, 3 three-bedroom flat in Hampstead, London. No garden, a kitchen you could just about swing a cat in (and I would have if one of those cold-hearted buggers had ever made it into the kitchen), and a living room with pitched ceilings and a wooden beam that managed to give the place a little touch of character.
“You oughta be an estate agent Creasy wiv all dem fancy descriptions of rooves and beams and whatnot!”
From that moment on, for most of us, the trajectory of our lives can be pretty accurately mapped.
“Bloody Hell Creasy, that’s a bit bleak and cynical isn’t it?”
Is it?
Is it though?
I don’t think so. Not really. Maybe a bit. I may be working out some personal issues here, but the reality is that every adult in the western world spends their days churning away at the same old shit like a lab rat on an exercise wheel, and why?
Another day another dollar….
“You want the truth?”
“I think I’m entitled to the truth!”
“You can’t handle the truth! Son we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be paid for by people with jobs. Whose gonna do it, you? You, eight-year-old life-sucking kid? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for me having to work all the time and you curse the crappy presents you get at Christmas. You have the luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that my job while tragic, probably pays the mortgage; and my existence while grotesque, and incomprehensible, to you, pays the mortgage. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wheel, you need me on that wheel! We use words like hard work, long hours, absent parent. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent paying the mortgage, you use them as a punchline. I have neither the time, nor the inclination to explain myself, to a child who rises and sleeps, under the blanket of the very house that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I’d rather you just said ‘thank you’, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you get a job and help pay the mortgage. Either way, I don’t give a damn, what you think you are entitled to!”
A Few Good Men
“And that’s the truth, man! That’s the truth. Can you handle it? It’s just a question between friends, you know? Oh, and when they call you ‘shrimp,’ I’m the one who defends you!”
Jerry Maguire
Oh yeah baby!
Where was I? Oh yeah, houses. The greatest symbol of “success and security” there is barring a Sunseeker 131 or a G550 (look ’em up). Also, the best investment you’ll ever make over a 25 year period. The downside? You’ll be almost dead before you can realise and enjoy the fruits of your investment, but at least you can leave it to your kids so they can unwittingly take over your wheel by getting on the housing ladder.
“But it’s always been like that hasn’t it Creasy? Ever since Humans have been around?”
No, it hasn’t always been like that and in some places, it still isn’t. I was having a busy day watching YouTube the other day and came across a video on a channel called Fearless & Far called “Asking Hunter-Gatherers Life’s Toughest Questions”.
I fuckin’ hate Baboons…
In this video, the commentator introduces a Tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Hadzabe in Tanzania. There are only 1500 Hadzabe people left and their numbers are declining. Their way of life may only survive a few more generations. When asked what the most important thing in life was, this wizened badass of a Hadzabe called Sokolo, thought for about three seconds and said, “Meat, Honey, Corn Porridge” and then he added “hunting Baboons, Antelopes and Zebra”. Personally, I thought this was a bit redundant given the whole Meat is the most important thing, but I’m probably nitpicking. At this point, one bright young chap interjected that Water was pretty important too. “Quite right” replied the badass (or words to that effect). I might have added shelter to that list but I think Sokolo was a bit of a foodie who really didn’t get on with Baboons.
Now whilst I can neither Hunt nor Gather or spear a Baboon to literally save my life, there was something compelling about Sokolo’s simple assessment of what is truly important in life. I also found myself reflecting on the fact that over the years I had often found myself trying to figure out what mattered, but unlike Sokolo, whose worldview is ultimately positive despite the carnage he wreaks in the Baboon community, I have always considered what matters in the context of worst-case scenarios. A series of “What-ifs” if you will, that ultimately end up with me being homeless and destitute. What would I do? How would I survive? Where would I live?
I’m quite fond of the idea of living under a bridge. It strikes me as the sort of place that homeless people might live under. Natural shelter from the elements but not so great in an earthquake. Not much going on. Easy to build a cozy cardboard shelter against one of the concrete stanchions and very convenient if for any reason I wanted to get to the other side of whatever it was the bridge was bridging. I think I would try to find a bridge in a sunny place.
“Don’t Trolls live under bridges Creasy?”
Only the one’s where Billy Goats called Gruff cross.
As to what I would do?
“You really thinking about quittin’?”
“The Life?
“Yeah”
“Mos’ definitely”
“Ah fuck. Wachu gonna do then”
“Well, That’s what I’ve been sitting here contemplating. First, I’m gonna deliver this case to Marsellus. Then, basically, I’m gonna walk the earth.”
“Whachu you mean, walk the earth?”
“You know, like Caine in “KUNG FU.” Just walk from town to town, meet people, get in adventures.”
Pulp Fiction
Here, fishy fishy…
There’s nothing written that says I have to stay under the same bridge. When I live under a city bridge, I’d wander about looking for coins on the floor, or lie on the ground looking for coins under vending machines. Apparently, this strategy fed my son throughout his University days. If anyone came in he would exclaim “I just dropped a quid under here” to hide his shame. If I moved to a bridge that was more suburban or rural, I might try my hand at a bit of hunting and fishing in the fields and rivers (I have watched as much Bear Grylls as the next man).
When you take all this into account, I calculate that I could probably survive on £1 a day. £1 will buy you a loaf of bread and water is free (there are loads of places you can get fresh water for free if you think about it). This is reassuring. Not because I am worried that I might suddenly be skint and homeless, but because if I wanted to be skint and homeless, I know I don’t need all of the things that I have been conditioned to “need” to survive. More interesting, was my emotional response to the idea of living that way. It made me feel happy with a big dash of precognitive relief. Why relief though? Where does that come from? It’s in the letting go. Just the process of thinking about this simpler “being” creates a sense of being in that state already. Stress falls away like chainmail after the siege. The need to compete and win and show that I have won, a need no more.
“That’s just nutso Creasy! Who would want to be skint and homeless and living under a bridge?”
It depends on how you define “skint” and how you define “homeless”.
I fuckin’ hate Sokolo…
I suspect the Hadzabe, by our standards are proper skint, but money has no purpose or meaning in their society. Now dead Baboons? Well, it goes without saying that a man with 10 dead Baboons is way wealthier than a man with say, 9 dead Baboons? All joking aside (although Sokolo doesn’t strike me as a man who jokes about Baboons), their currency would be skillsets, which when used in co-operation enable a very simple, uncomplicated, unfettered and sustainable way of life within a small and very related community. If you can hunt, great! If you can collect berries, fantastic! If you can tell stories, well who doesn’t love a good story? An individual’s worth would be less than the collective’s but a function of how many berries you could gather, how many songs you could sing and how many Baboons you could hit with a brick.
As for being homeless, how many times have you heard the phrase “Home is where the heart is”. How do you find a home in such an anonymous and heartless society? Our homeless people are not homeless because they don’t have a house, but because they can’t find their individual worth in the kind of society we have built and because kin are far away.
“Creasy, surely you can see the good in our society too though? what about the homeless shelters or the soup kitchens or the many charities that help people in need?”
When did you last go and work in a soup kitchen? When did you last offer one of your spare rooms to a homeless person or refugee? When did I? Do you know anyone who has? Sure, we’ve all dropped a dime in a charity bucket or make a donation every month to our “favourite” charity, but when did you actually directly do something for someone who is not actually related to you?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising. Really I’m not. After all, rB > C, right?
“Wassat? Say what now? Hmm?”
C’mon, you know rB > C, right? Hamilton’s equation for the evolutionary development of an altruism gene, right?
Well, there you are then. No need to explain. It’s all there in rB > C.
“No, I like totally get it Creasy, but maybe you need to clarify a bit for the others?”
Ok fine. Here is a useful wee article by Jonah Lehrer that will get everyone up to speed.
By way of summarising the article, it wasn’t really Hamilton it was this bloke called Charles Darwin. Darwin had a problem. He had described Natural Selection, or Evolution, as a cruel mistress who ruthlessly removed the weakest links in an evolutionary chain. His whole theory depended on the notion that one specimen of a species will selfishly seek to propagate its genetic code to the detriment of all others. How could altruism, therefore, exist; a selfless act of generosity from one specimen to another? The fact of the matter was that altruism was observable everywhere in the natural world across a broad swathe of species. Didn’t that stick a dagger into the heart of Darwin’s theory?
To a lesser man, maybe. Darwin simply tagged this as a paradox and moved on. Evolutionary scientists spent the next century or so trying to figure out this paradox until a pissed up chap called J. B. S. Haldane (a biologist), who when asked in a pub how far he would go to save the life of another, replied
“I would jump into a river to save two brothers, but not one, or to save eight cousins but not seven”
William D Hamilton
Later, and because Haldane never tried to develop the proof of his drunken theory, another chap called William Hamilton, a young graduate student of UCL, spent years doing the mathematics and in 1964 came up with rB > C . Lehrer explains:
“In other words, genes for altruism could evolve if the benefit (B) of an action exceeded the cost (C) to the individual once relatedness (r) was taken into account. The equation confirmed the truth of Haldane’s joke: once kinship was part of the calculation, altruism could be easily explained in genetic terms.
This basically says that if you are related to me by blood, the action I will take to save your life will be directly proportional to the amount of my genetic material you have. The closer the genetic tie, the more action you can expect. Indeed, by not acting to protect you, I would be working against my most primal need to propagate my genetic code to the next generation.
Raise your hands for the Museum trip
This proof has been widely accepted in the Evolutionary Science community (now that’s a club I want to join!), as the origin of altruism, not only in humans but in other species too. It’s not kindliness or generosity, it’s simply survival of the fittest in its purest form.
No wonder then that in small tribal communities typified by the Hadzabe, we see high levels of altruism within the tribe where many families are related by blood. Collective hunting and farming and gathering make complete sense in this context. Equally, no wonder that we did nothing to arrest the genocide in Rwanda. Biologically, we didn’t and don’t give a shit, especially as there were no economic benefits for us intervening. Put another way, my Dad didn’t fight in WWII to save the Jews from the holocaust, but to prevent Gerry from marching up Whitehall and threatening the life of uncle Bernie.
I’m a symbol of success now?
The more distant the genetic relationship, the less we care. It’s our nature. It doesn’t make us bad people. It’s biology. In our globalised society where families disperse to achieve economic improvement, we have built societal structures that provide no reason to be altruistic to one another, and every reason to not give a shit about, or even talk to, our next floor neighbour in London. Altruism in this context is basically Virtue Signalling. It’s the act or pretence of showing generosity, typically through the banking system, in order to promote our social standing. A social standing that is further enhanced by increasingly extravagant shows of wealth; houses, dogs, cars, boats and planes. A social standing intended to attract a mate rather than protect the tribe. A Peacock society.
Industrialisation destroyed our rural way of life and led to urbanisation. Urbanisation dismantled the village where altruism thrived in the extended family and replaced it with the nuclear family unit and very low levels of altruism. Personal wealth and competition have replaced community sustainability and cooperation. Philanthropy pretends to be altruism, but is the domain of the super-rich and therefore a platform upon which to display wealth no matter how good the underlying intention. Globalisation, is this societal shift to the 10th power.
Conclusion?
It cannot sustain. It cannot survive. Not because I say so, but because evolutionary science is not simply saying that it’s a surprise that the altruism gene exists, but that without the action the altruism gene enables toward closely related specimens, the mechanics of evolution will not work at all, and we all become the weakest link in the chain.
Oh, and if you are wondering why you can’t stop yourself from buying that pre-wrapped-in-plastic bunch of bananas to help save the world, it’s because biologically you, like me, don’t give a shit about either the bananas or the environment and it seems biology often wins out over intellectual reason. I too buy the wrapped bananas because the supermarket app I use as I shop can’t handle unwrapped produce. I could handle it when I go to checkout, but then I would be wasting three minutes of my time that I don’t use for anything else whatsoever, weighing and bagging my unwrapped produce. So whilst intellectually I understand that the plastic will either end up in a landfill for the next 1000 years or the ocean, where it will strangle a baby seal, biologically I don’t give a shit. If I thought for one second that the plastic bag would suffocate someone in my family (including Bob), I would stop. No matter how much I try to rationally link the macro effect on the environment back to my local micro context, my biology and my societal conditioning won’t let me and so every now and again, when I’m not using the app, I buy the loose bananas and the rest of the time I don’t.
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness”
Martin Luther King Jr
Martin is of course spot on. Every man, woman and child must choose, and every day we do. Every day we choose the darkness of destructive selfishness. It’s not that we are all bad people, it’s that we are too many people. We’d like to think that we are more than the sum of our biology but the evidence says differently. When you create distance between members of a broad but genetically close family unit, altruism (acting for the benefit of others) is diluted and the inverse (acting for the benefit of oneself ) gains sway.
When there were only a couple of million of us wandering around hunting and gathering, our lack of give-a-shittedness didn’t matter because a) our way of life worked in harmony with our environment b) we were naturally culled by nature via climate, disease or predation and so c) there were too few of us to make a material difference on a global scale.
Other species don’t give a shit either, but they have not industrialised, urbanised or globalised. Where they are too many it’s because we have bred them to eat, and where they are too few it’s because we have destroyed their habitats. All species, in a natural setting will display altruism to protect their genetic progression. We don’t, because too many of us aren’t in our natural setting. Humans are tribal. The vast majority of our history on this planet (about 5 milliion years or 200,000 years of “modern” man) was spent living and working in small tribes. For the past 200 hundred years we have simply dispensed with that way of life in favour of a way of life that is purportedly better but which is evidently not. We have tried to mimick the concept of tribe in companies, markets, and societal structures and have failed miserably. We have encouraged individual security over tribal or genetic security and in so doing sacrificed all that is at the core of who we are.
And that’s why if we don’t let go of the way we have chosen to live, sell our houses, go live under a bridge and hunt Baboons, we are all going to die!
And I mean EVERYTHING! You, me, a leaf on a tree, an octopus, a puff of wind, the moon and stars or Bob. Especially Bob. Unbelievable, but there it all is anyway. It’s crazy! Crae, crae! .
Isn’t it? Is it just me, or do you catch yourself strolling along in a bit of nature or an urban sprawl, along an empty beach or just gawping up at the majesty of the heavens on a clear winter’s night, and just think “WOW I’m actually here, and thinking about me being here and how all this other stuff is here, and I’m here actually looking at it all. It’s unbelievable!”.
And then, one day, there it is. Maybe you were eight years old or maybe fifteen, but probably not older than that, and a whisper of a question drifts into the back of your mind, uninvited like a little grey, innocent puff of cloud….
“Hmm, just how did all this stuff get here in the first place?”.
And right there in that moment, my inquisitive little padawan, you are royally buggered…..FOREVER!
Couldn’t just let it go, could you? Couldn’t just do the ole empty-headed “Oooh thas pretty init love?”. Now you have to deal with the fallout from that harmless-looking question for at least the rest of your life, but maybe FOR ALL ETERNITY!
And it’s not in fact harmless at all, is it? In fact, it’s the single most complex question that you have ever asked, and now we all have to be here to try and deal with it, and it’s just so exhausting!
Still, no use in bitching like Trump about it is there? So in the words of Hannibal Lecter as he is about to push the Commendatore Rinaldo Pazzi out of a very ornate window in Florence, spilling his intestines all over the street and tourists below, “Okey Dokey, here we go”.
We take very little at face value, do we? If someone tells us something, we like to understand whether that thing is true or just made up, don’t we? Surely we need that?
“How do you know?”
“Do you have any evidence to support that claim?”
“Did anyone else witness it?”
“Who told you that?”
“Did you just make that up?”
Our entire judicial system depends on not taking things at face value, albeit that might not have always been true.
Villager: “She’s a Witch!”
Judge: “Is she?”
Villager: “Yes, she’s a witch”
Judge: “BURN HER!!!!”
Ok, I’m exaggerating, even then we used to apply the stringent witch test of seeing if she floated. If she did then she was clearly a witch and sent to the stake whereas if she sank, she was innocent but dead from drowning.
Whilst today, our judicial system calls for very detailed evidence to prove the guilt or innocence of a witch the accused, the corroborating evidence needed in other aspects of our society to support any given postulate, doesn’t appear to be that great. Sometimes, huge swathes of support from great numbers of people for a particular view can be garnered despite there being a complete vacuum of evidence to support that view.
I give you the 2020 US Presidential election. The strength of belief in large portions of the Trump base, that the election was rigged or fraudulent, is so strong that these people felt the need to lay siege to the Capitol building in Washinton DC in an attempt to overturn the election. They were/are prepared to start another civil war! Four people gave their lives for that belief and one police officer gave his life defending the truth. The basis for this belief? Trump said so. He said so over and over again to anyone that would listen, via every outlet that would carry his insane claims. No matter that over 80 court cases brought alleging voter fraud were summarily dismissed by various State and Federal legislatures, including the Supreme Court. No matter that no evidence of any fraudulent activity has been uncovered by anyone during or since the election. Despite the complete absence of any evidence of wrongdoing, this very large cadre of people (some 33.8m or 45% of Republican voters supported the assault on the Capitol), have simply taken it on faith that Trump is telling the truth and that everyone else is lying to them. The go-to position of everyone else in the world appears to be…
“Dumb bastards”
and whilst this is an incredibly powerful argument in the example I have given, it’s also lazy and somewhat arrogant thinking. Not all Trump voters are white supremacist, misogynistic, hardcore racist, uneducated, conspiracy toting, baseball-cap-wearing, dumb-as-dirt rednecks; it just feels that way. Some Trump supporters are black, and beyond credulity, some are women! WTF! All of these people have seen fit to put their faith in this awful travesty of a human being and his fantasies, against all reason, logic or fact.
“Come on Creasy, everyone knows they are just a bunch of dumb shit-kickers”
Hmmm. In the words of a very famous bloke from Palestine 2,021 years ago
“Let he who has not sinned, cast the first stone.”
Good old JC, he had a quip for every situation, didn’t he? We’d all like to think that we aren’t like these Trump voters but actually, none of us is really any different. We might kneel at different altars, but we kneel nonetheless.
You are wrong Creasy! I don’t like to say it because you are such a clever bloke with amazing insights and very good looking, but you are wrong about this! I am nothing like those gob-shites”
Very well, I will prove it to you, and when I have, I want you to leave me an apology in the comments….and another compliment about how good looking I am.
There are currently 7.8bn people on the planet and you are indisputably one of them.Of these, according to sociologists Arieta Keysar and Juhem Navarro-Rivera in 2017, there are only 450-500 million atheists and agnostics worldwide. That is only 6.4% of the world population; 93.6% of the world’s population believe in some sort of deity. Billions and billions of people affiliate themselves with structured religions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Sikhism and many more.
Think about that for a moment. Not one single shred of credible evidence has ever been produced that proves there is a God, and yet the vast majority of us believe in some omnipotent being(s), that created everything. For many believers, their Faith is so strong that they would happily lay down their lives for their God. They even have a word for it; martyrdom! Many already have. Isn’t that unbelievable? Yet there it is, it’s a fact. Statistically, most of you reading this Blog believe in a God of some sort (yes, both of you!), and all three of you believe in something you can’t actually prove.
Let’s take a brief look at Faith in God. There is even less available credible evidence for the existence of God than there is for Trump’s claim that he won the US election, yet the vast majority of humans still believe God exists.
The accepted “evidence” for God, is written down in books like the Bible (Old and New Testaments), the Quran, the Torah or other sacred texts, and for huge portions of the population, these texts are compelling. For these believers, words and insights such as these could only come from God, and God used his prophets, or a Messiah and his disciples, to bring us his thoughts and his commandments via the written word. These written texts may be compelling, but are they enough to create and sustain such a large body of Faith in God on their own? I don’t think so, so there must be something else.
Let’s talk about “inherited” Faith as an evidentiary source for a mo’, because in my opinion, this may be the single biggest factor for Faith in God.
A child trusts nobody more than his or her parental unit. If they say Santa Claus exists, he does. If they say the tooth fairy will come to take the tooth and leave some money under your pillow he will, especially if the parental unit makes sure of that by removing the said tooth and depositing said money whilst the innocent, but somewhat naïve, little sausage is sleeping.
Which of us has not half-eaten Santa’s Milk and Cookies on Christmas Eve to convince our little angels that Santa came? It’s little surprise then, that our children believe in these things until such time as we tell them they aren’t real. Then, there is the painful realisation that a) magic isn’t real after all and there are no Unicorns, and that b) Mummy and Daddy are lying little shit-bags. My 12-year-old daughter has only recently discovered that a Haggis is not a trumpet nosed wee beasty living in the Scottish Highlands, because I didn’t disabuse her of that belief.
In like fashion, few parents tell their children God is not real and so, he stays real until such time as the child questions that belief. Many never do. For some reason, parents draw a distinction between Santa Claus and God. One is fun, the other a serious matter involving the eternal glorification or damnation of one’s soul. My own grandmother, a strong Catholic, would “hunt” down any of her grandchildren that hadn’t been baptised and baptise them herself. She was afraid that they might die and spend eternity in purgatory because they still carried Original Sin around with them (they get forgiven this sin when they are baptised). This distinction, and certainty that God is real and serious, probably derives from the fact that nobody said he wasn’t, and because people grow up in a world where sin is also very real; each one being marked down in their eternal ledgers.
Make a queue! Time to be Judged you ‘orrid bunch of sinners!
Fear of God’s judgement and eternal damnation in the afterlife becomes a real factor in how we choose to live our lives. Conveniently, the right way to live can be found written down in the aforementioned sacred texts, and our laws tend to be largely aligned with them (Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours wife etc). This inherited tradition and the reinforcement provided by the rituals, mysticism and ceremony of the religion they are born into, combined with the fear of God’s judgement in the afterlife, becomes a powerful dogma that successfully confirms Faith in God but also provides a powerful disincentive for anarchy in this life.
The belief in an afterlife and a judgemental (but all-loving) God, gives many people a sense of purpose too. What greater purpose than to serve God, live in the way s/he has prescribed and avoid sinning. If you do sin, and the sin is not a very big one, ten Hail Mary’s, two Our Fathers and an act of contrition will sort you out, and eternal happiness will be yours. Our ability to reason forces us at some point in our lives to ask “Why am I here, what is my purpose?“. Pleasing God and being rewarded with eternal life in paradise, provides a pretty good answer to this question.
This isn’t true for everyone though, and it would be wrong to say it was. God as creator simply doesn’t work for some, and they search for answers in other quarters. Very few, including atheists and agnostics, sit back and decide not to believe in anything though!
Typically the Faith argument falls between the Believers and those that believe Science can answer how everything got here and where everything is going to. Science is a very compelling competitor to God, not least because it starts from a different place than religion. It starts by stating upfront, that every theory that has not been definitively and empirically proved could be wrong, no matter how elegant the theory is. It also starts out from the premise that the work of Science is to disprove theories raised, not to prove that they are correct. Believers make no such compromises or allowances.
“So what does Science say about the origins of Creation then Creasy?”
If you are going to ask questions like that you really need to be prepared for the consequences. Are you? Are you ready? Because if you aren’t I don’t want to go to all the hassle of writing it all down!
Ok then, you asked for it….
Science says that everything can be explained if only we could come up with a single unified theory of everything. This single theory would bring together all of the different branches of Science like Relativity, Thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics etc. to definitively show where everything came from, how the universe came into being, it’s history and how everything will turn out.
“And where are we with that Theory then?”
It’s a bit of a mixed bag to be honest.
On the one hand, Science is pretty good at history and predicting where the universe is heading. For example, Science can explain the history of everything in the Universe from 10-36 seconds after the Big Bang to right now.
Cosmic Microwave Background
In addition, Science does not only explain the theoretical history of the Universe, but it can also point to it in the sky and show us, so we can witness it by looking back in time with our own eyes at the light from the early Universe. In 1965, two chaps called Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias inadvertently stumbled upon the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), because it was interfering with the radio receiver they were building (they subsequently won the Nobel Prize for this discovery). They couldn’t figure out what was going on and at one point, they even got out some brushes and cleaned the receiver because they thought it might be bird poop that was causing the problem.
Bird Poop? Really?
BIG BADA BOOM !
When that didn’t work, they had to think of something else. They, and subsequent observers, noted that the radiation noise they were picking up was uniform across the entire sky, and in every direction. This discovery provided definitive proof that the Big Bang happened. Had there not been a Big Bang, the temperature of the sky would be different in different parts of the sky because it would not have been causally connected at some point in the past when the Universe was much smaller. General Relativity predicts how the universe should have evolved since 10-36 seconds after the Big Bang and guess what? It has, and to a ridiculous degree.
Winter is Coming….
First Photograph of a Black Hole clearly showing Hawking Radiation
Extrapolating from that history and continuing to follow the natural implications of General Relativity, Scientist can also predict pretty well where the Universe is heading, and you’re going to need a coat because it’s going to be cold. They call this the Big Freeze. We now know that the Universe will never shrink or contract, it will keep on expanding and everything in the Universe will continue to get farther away from everything else. As it expands, the Universe will “cool” and eventually, all matter in the Universe will be consumed by black holes. These will then evaporate, and as they do Hawking Radiation will be produced (a whole bunch of massless photons). Eventually, the back holes will go “Poof” and disappear too, and all that will be left are the photons in a cold, dark, very uniform Universe.
So, pretty much the whole of science agrees on the history of the Universe from 10-36 seconds after the Big Bang to now and have effectively proven this history by what we can actually see. Science is also agreed on the predicted evolution of the Universe to a cold empty sea of photons as I just described. It’s just that bit at the very “beginning” and the bit right at the very “end”, that is giving everyone the Ick.
“Well of course it is Creasy, but if they would just open their eyes they would see that God is the only thing that could have set it all in motion, and Judgement day will mark the end of everything”
Whoa, steady on there. Way too early to lay down those particular cards matey. I haven’t finished yet.
So, I’ll bet that most of you out there think the Universe started with the Big Bang right?
“NO IT DIDN’T !!!”
I bet you thought that the sequence of events was:
Singularity (a bit of a mystery where this came from – leaves a bit of a crack in the door for God)
Big Bang (Start of the Universe but we don’t know what made it go bang – door open a wee bit more)
Inflation (a period of rapid exponential expansion of the Universe just after the Big Bang)
Expansion (Long and much slower expansion of the universe just after Inflation ends)
Burn baby, Burn!
Well, that’s just wrong! Where on earth did you get that idea from. Honestly, I wonder where my tax quid goes sometimes. I might as well tip my tax in the back garden and set fire to it!
The right sequence is :
Inflation (Not originating from a singularity and it occurs before the Big Bang)
Big Bang
Expansion (as per #4 above)
So, no singularity then? Now it seems like a small thing, and perhaps you are thinking that this has changed just recently but no, it’s not a small thing and apparently it changed about 40 years ago and those scatter-brain scientists didn’t bother to tell us! Apparently, the sequence we were all taught at school had a few problems that were incompatible with inflation happening after the Bob Big Bang. Moving Inflation to before the Big Bang solves these issues precisely, and better explains the Universe we currently find ourselves deployed in (for a very easy read about this and the problems solved have a read of Ethan Siegel’s article entitled “What Came First: Inflation or The Big Bang” in Forbes here).
“So is there anything else you haven’t told us that we should know about before we declare God the winner Creasy, because you still haven’t explained the origin of the Universe yet”
Well, there is this one other thing. There’s this other chap called Sir Roger Penrose (Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford), who is also having a bit of a rethink on how everything “started”. Penrose worked with Stephen Hawking on black holes and he’s a Nobel prize winner, so that’s pretty good then.
His latest theory, called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC), postulates that our Universe is just one aeon in an endless succession of aeons/Universes. It’s an alternative theory to the Big Bang without throwing out Big Bang altogether. CCC is consistent with our current view of the History of our Universe in that it stipulates that Inflation happens before the Big Bang, but instead of thinking of the Big Bang as the beginning of everything, it is more useful to think of the Big Bang as marking the end of the previous aeon. The new aeon/universe then expands and evolves directly in line with Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with all matter being consumed by black holes in the latter stages of the aeon. They then evaporate leaving only massless photons behind (Hawking Radiation).
All sounds familiar so far. You still with me?
“Yes Creasy! This is fascinating”
Ok, good! Let me know if you need a fag break…
Salvadore Dali
In this late stage aeon, where we only have an ocean of massless photons, the related concepts of time, distance, big and small will lose all meaning and to all intents and purposes, the Universe “loses track” of how big it is. Due to this lack of “awareness” of its size, Penrose states that Big and Small are effectively the same thing and therefore the conditions for a new Inflationary period exists (rapid expansion of the Universe) which will then be followed by a transition to the slower expansion of the new aeon/universe of the kind we are experiencing today. This transition point is what we recognise, in our classical history of the Universe, as the Big Bang.
Nope, don’t say it. We’re not finished yet!
The Energy required to bring this Inflation and Big Slow Expansion about (much better nomenclature), is provided by the ocean of photons left over from the evaporation of the Black Holes at the end of the previous aeon. Even though photons do not have a mass, they do have energy. Hold onto this thought because it’s important.
Energy doesn’t go anywhere. The law of Conservation of Energy states that in all cases, energy comes from one store and can only transfer to another. Energy cannot be created and it cannot be destroyed. All the energy present at the Big Bang is therefore still present in our Universe today. If there was an aeon previous to our aeon as Penrose suggests, then all of the energy from that aeon would be present at the end of that aeon too.
The following excerpt is from a Cornell undergraduate Sara Slater, who went on to study at Harvard as a post-graduate student and who is now a researcher at the Kavli Institute, MIT. Sara sums up how matter arises naturally from energy during the early stage of the Universe.
“In the beginning, there was not yet any matter. However, there was a lot of energy in the form of light, which comes in discrete packets called photons. When photons have enough energy, they can spontaneously decay into a particle and an antiparticle. (An antiparticle is the exact opposite of the corresponding particle–for example, a proton has charge +e, so an antiproton has charge -e.) This is easily observed today, as gamma rays have enough energy to create measurable electron-antielectron pairs (the antielectron is usually called a positron). It turns out that the photon is just one of a class of particles, called the bosons, that decay in this manner. Many of the bosons around just after the big bang were so energetic that they could decay into much more massive particles such as protons (remember, E=mc2, so to make a particle with a large mass m, you need a boson with a high energy E). The mass in the universe came from such decays.”
HOLY SHIT! There it is! At the end of one of Penrose’s aeons there are only photons, and at the beginning of ours what do we have? Only a whole bunch of photons that haven’t decayed into particle pairs yet, init-dough?
Coincidence? Je ne pense pas mon brave!
“Hang on Creasy, now it’s you who are jumping the gun isn’t it? Is there any evidence…at all…that any of this wish-wash from Penrose could actually be true? All seems a bit far fetched to me”
What, more far fetched than a Big Bang that nobody can explain where the energy to make that Big Bang happen came from unless it was an omnipotent being you mean?
The notion of a cyclic cosmos, with no beginning and no end, that appears to be fully compliant with all the laws of the Universe and that provides the perfect ingredient at the end of an aeon to seed and power the next, sounds pretty intuitive to me.
Of course, a little physical evidence would go a long way toward making me a firm believer though.
Fortunately, Penrose claims that we can actually observe the results of this process, by identifying what he calls Hawking Points in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). He defines a Hawking Point as the signature of the Hawking Radiation caused by the evaporation of Black Holes in the previous aeon. These would appear as very precisely sized circular temperature variations in an otherwise wholly uniform CMB. Penrose and his colleagues published a paper in 2018 which states that he and his colleagues have in fact made such observations of precisely the right size, in the Plank and WMAP satellite data, with a very high degree of confidence (+99.98%). So that’s pretty good then.
You had me at “Hello” Rog!
In the interests of full disclosure and objectivity, despite these observations, many people in the Scientific community have been pretty scornful and an itsy-bit rude about this theory from Penrose, but remember, Science starts out from the point where it tries to disprove a theory. This wouldn’t be the first theory that Scientists peed on, only to discover later it was right in the end. Until there is general acceptance that there is in fact irrefutable evidence to support CCC, then it remains just another theory.
“So it MUST be God then Creasy”
Well, I can see why you might think that. I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that. If all these bright scientists can’t agree and prove that it wasn’t, then why not God? I get it. I don’t believe it, but I get why this becomes an option.
For the life of me though, I just can’t fathom the purpose for an absent God. I don’t understand why he can’t just come to dinner and show us that he is God. I can think of a million things I could ask him/her to do that would help me believe that s/he is God.
“Go on then, walk on water”
“Sink under the water, and stay there for a day without any mechanical breathing apparatus”
“Fly”
“Grow wings and fly”
“Take me to heaven and let me have a look around”
“Let me meet my mum and dad in Heaven”
“Help me find my GoPro in the Red Sea by parting the waters right where I lost it”
“Make the Smyths sound good in my ears”
“Reduce the population to 500m”
I could go on all day
“Make Donald Trump a good person”
“Make Jeremy Corbyn useful”
“If Jenny has three bags of sweets with 12 sweets in each bag, and Bradley has a box of 4 chocolate eclairs, and Sue has a puppy with floppy ears, how many Km have I travelled if I have 23 postage stamps and a flask of coffee?”
“How many fingers am I holding up behind my back”
Any one of these things would constitute incontrovertible proof that God was real, but s/he’s not coming to dinner is s/he because for some reason, having Faith in God is way more important than having Knowledge of God? Because of that, I just don’t know what s/he is for, so instead of “Why not God” I end up with Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.
God can’t just turn up, shoot enough energy into a singularity to create the Universe and then naff off for the next 13.8bn years without a by your leave. And anyway in that theory of the Universe, creation only took less than 10-36 seconds because everything after that doesn’t need a God because science can fully explain everything as a natural process. What did s/he do before that? If Penrose is right, there is no “before that” because we are in an endless cycle of aeons that needed no kick start. If the Big Bangers are right, then what has God done after that? If we are saying that God’s useful purpose lasted between time mark 0 and 10-36 seconds to set everything in motion, then, really?
Don’t we end up with Occam’s Razor? This states that all things being equal the simplest solution is generally the right one. For me, the simplest solution is that we have not yet figured out what natural process took place, but we have a bloody good theory in Conformal Cyclic Cosmology and I believe, that in due course, we will find the evidence needed to convince the rest of science and everyone else that CCC is true.
But that evidence is a pretty important missing piece, isn’t it? Angry atheists, the real anti-Religion anti-Godders like Richard Dawkins or Ricky Gervais, tend to skip on by this “how did everything get kicked off” and simply adopt a more aggressive “people who believe in God are a bit stupid and so are their religions, because there is no proof for a God” argument, without stopping along the way to provide any scientific evidence for how existence came about. They forget that Science is in the middle of a massive cosmic game of Cluedo, and the only thing we know for sure is that it wasn’t Colonel Sanders in the library with a candlestick!
Placing one’s faith in science today, regardless of whether it is the classical view of creation or Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, is no more justifiable than placing one’s faith in God. It’s that simple. It’s also why you should never discuss religion at the dinner table.
Something else that is simple, is that regardless of whether there is a God or not, there is no getting away from the fact that humans are spiritual beings. The spiritual experiences we have throughout our lives tend to be cherished moments. It can be as simple as watching a drop of rain slowly run down the glossy slope of a leaf, or as momentous as lying sheltered in a shallow culvert on a mountain in the middle of a blizzard.
These moments are when I feel connected to something outside of me, to the natural world around me and to the impossibly elegant feats of natural engineering like a spiders weave, or the way trees sometimes lean in toward each other when they should all be leaning in the direction of the prevailing wind. Why do they do that? Are they aware of each other? Do they need the physical and spiritual connection of another just like us? I know that observing these connections between things, emotionally and spiritually connects me to them too. I can’t explain it. I can’t prove it. I only know it’s true.
It would be very easy for me to conclude, as someone who has placed his faith in science to ultimately explain everything, that life is a fortuitous accident and that there is no grand purpose or meaning; things are the way they are because that’s the way they are. However, I have been increasingly drawn to the notion that our purpose is finding the connection to everything in the Universe, starting with the pebble in my shoe.
The Lakota people call this Wakan Tanka which is often translated as Great Spirit, but also as Great Mystery. Wakan Tanka is the sacredness or power in everything. Every grain of sand, every cloud, every star, every river and every being whether that being is a person or a mouse, a flower or a tree. I, and everything else in existence, have borrowed energy from the Universe and that energy flows through everything and between everything. Energy and Mass are equivalent, so every “thing” in existence is ultimately energy. Today that thing exists as matter, and one day as a function of entropy (the state of any system tending towards randomness), the Universe is repaid as it decays and returns to energy. In this sense, we are truly eternal because the law of Conservation of Energy states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Today I exist as Matter. Sometime in the future, what was me will become energy again.
Maybe it is our intuitive understanding of this flux between energy and matter, that gives rise to concepts like the soul, reincarnation, eternal life and spirituality. We have a natural tendency to anthropomorphise: “It can’t be just the way it is, it has to be more like me“. Maybe this tendency pushes us to add personality and intelligence to the energy that flows through and around us, and we call that God?
“in a gentle way, you can shake the world” – Mahatma Gandhi
I have always maintained that there is no upside to atheism. Not much to look forward to really. Hope is what keeps us going, isn’t it? Isn’t it comforting and hopeful to believe that we are eternal and go on after our lives have finished? For me, the knowledge that everything I am, and everything I have ever been will persist, is comforting, but I choose to believe that persistence is not a soul in the religious sense but rather the conversion of the matter that makes up me, into the energy borrowed from the Universe. Everything I was, gets to be part of the future and one day in that future, some of the energy that was me might be lent to another Mozart or another Gandhi or another Georgy Best, on some distant planet in another galaxy, or even in the next aeon.
The worst of all lives is a life without hope. A life without belief in something leads to a life without hope. So, whether you believe in God, Science, the Great Spirit or the leprechaun at the bottom of your garden, nobody can prove you are wrong (but that last one is ridiculous because everyone knows leprechauns live at the end of Rainbowsto guard the gold). So I say ignore the sceptics and those who would ridicule your own particular brand of Faith because, in the end, these folks tend to be a bunch of smug pseudo-intellectual wankers when you get right down to it. So, give to other Faiths the same respect you would like from them. Keep an open mind. Keep hope alive and keep the Faith.
Did you press the button? Go on press it. You know you want to. Press it. PRESS THE BUTTON!
Now, having pressed the button (did you?), I suppose you’re sitting there thinking,
“Well, that’s a bit of a cliché Creasy, not sure what all those Northern folk did to deserve that. Oughtn’t we be a little more woke than that?”
It might be. A cliché I mean. The fact that it’s a cliché invented by everyone who thinks it’s cool to use words like “cliché” (Translation for Northerners (TfN): “Cliché“: Sommat southern bastards come airt wi’), doesn’t make it any less true, or indeed a bad thing. No, I’m here to promote the flat cap, a ferret in your trousers, a frying pan full of black pudding and a pint of bitter t’neet and every neet (Translation for Southerners (TfS): “t’neet and every neet”: Every night), as the only moral alternative to the many ills of today’s society.
L S Lowry – Industrial Landscape
I grew up in a small Lancashire village called Rishton on the edge of the western Pennine moors, a few miles from Blackburn; an old mill town. The mills were long gone when I was a kid, albeit the tall chimneys remained like something out of a Lowry landscape. The major industries were farming, Steel Stock and making bombs at the local Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF).
My memories of growing up there are fond ones. We weren’t poor or anything. We lived in a nice house in a nice street and my best mate Pete, lived two doors down from me in a house called Casa Mia (Translation for Everyone (TfE): “Casa Mia”: My House). His dad, Joe, was Spanish and had come to England as a Franco refugee. He was from Bilbao in the northern Basque region of Spain, and little bits here and there suggested that his family might have been very sympathetic supporters of the Basque Nationalist Party, which later became ETA. Apparently, Pete’s Granddad used to hide their rifles under his floorboards.
Our street was quiet enough that me and Pete, with some other lads from the street, could have a kick about without any fear of being run over by a car. On our bikes, we could be in the countryside in five minutes or ‘Arrod in ten (TfS: “‘Arrod”: Great Harwood not Harrod’s).
At the age of 5 years, I was wandering around Rishton on my own or with Pete. Nipping down to the toffee shop (TfS: Confectionary retailer), down the backs (TfS: roughly cobbled road behind terraced houses with garages and whatnot), to get to the “wreck”. For my entire childhood, I could not work out why this big field with a footy pitch, swings and child-friendly, solid steel roundabouts was called the “wreck”. As far as we were concerned, it was in pretty good nick. It was only later in life when I moved to the South and heard the word “Recreation” in everyday parlance, that I finally put two and two together (TfN: Recreation: Sommat southern bastards come airt wi’).
We knew everyone and everyone knew us. Not just on our street, but pretty much the whole village. That “knowing” was the stringy glue that bound Rishtoner’s together as a community. Well, that and Nelly’s.
Nelly’s was the best chippy. It’s not there now; I think it became a Chinese takeaway, but back in my day it was the best chippy.
“Best chippy where Creasy?”
Everywhere. It couldn’t be matched. The only one that came close, was the chippy in Gretna Green we would stop at on our way to Scotland for our Easter and Summer holidays, but it wasn’t really close. Nelly’s was #1 and #2 was a very long way away. The food was great at Nelly’s, no question about it, but it was so much more than that.
First of all, there was the location. It was right across the road from the Walmsley Arms pub. Now the Walmsley was a proper Northern pub, and by that I mean the establishment itself had no redeeming features whatsoever. Southerner’s would call it a “shithole” (TfN Shithole:A pub that dun’t sell scampi or ‘ave a beer gerden wi’ slides an’ swings an’ that). The Walmsley makes the Rovers in Corrie look like an Alaine Ducasse bistro (TfN Alaine Ducasse: Southern bastard).
Upon entering the Walmsley, which was usually the same minute it opened, you were immediately presented with a key decision
“Right room or left room?”
This decision was made all the more difficult because there was essentially no difference at all between the right room, or the left. Both rooms were bare. Pictureless walls, laminate-top tables, basic chairs, against-the-wall leatherette padded benches and threadbare red carpets with a barely discernible pattern. Personally, I would recommend the left room because it had a window and there was more natural light during the daytime (UPDATE: I recently passed the Walmsley, and whilst the establishment is clearly still open, the window is now boarded upso both rooms will be equally bleak now).
Me and Pete did our apprenticeship just up the road from the Walmsley between the ages of ten and sixteen. Every few days, we would go to Nelly’s and order our usuals: “Meat an’ p’tator pie chips an’ gravy please Nelly” for me, and Pete, who due to his Spanish heritage had a much more adventurous palette than me, would order “Cheese an’ onion pie an’ chips please Nelly“.
We would retire to the doorstep of a little shop about 5 doors up from the Walmsley and settle down to our meal. Obviously, we ate the chips first. Pete would reach over and dip his chips in my gravy. We would eat in silence except for the occasional “Awreet mate” (TfS: Good Evening) thrown out to someone walking past with their own paper bundles of steaming Nelly goodness. Once the chips had been dealt with, you were full, but we would press on regardless. I would get started on my “Meat and p’tater pie” and Pete would dive into my “Meat and p’tator pie”.
“You mean his “Cheese an’ onion pie” don’t you Creasy”
Well spotted my eagle-eyed padawan, and no I don’t!
Pete would tuck into MY pie, and the last traces of the gravy, with only the odd “S’a fuckin’ good pie is that mate“. At first, I didn’t care. It’s what mates did. You shared your pie. And it wasn’t really the fact that he was eating my pie that bothered me. No, it was the unspoken question of the uneaten Cheese and Onion pie that really got under my skin, but I wasn’t going to ask, and for years we went through this ritual with that question hanging there between us like the aroma of my thick brown gravy. Each time though, it got just a little bit more irritating until one day I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I bellowed
“WHY T’ FUCK D’YER NEVER EAT YER OWN FUCKIN’ PIE PETE?”
He looked at me like I was stupid and said
“I don’t like Cheese an’ onion pie”
and unfathomably, that’s where we left it.
Just for the record, he didn’t like Chicken Vindaloo either, but he would also order that every Friday night after we had had a skinful at the Vulcan in Blackburn.
“Oh, Ishmal! Oi Ishmal! Listen. Last week curry very good. This week, too fuckin’ ‘ot!”
I’m pretty sure the waiter’s name wasn’t “Ishmal”.
Nelly’s was much more than the village chippy; it was an epicentre. That thing around which, much of the village’s going’s on would go on. As much a source of cultural nourishment as physical. A vault of memories of a place where “community” wasn’t something you had to go out and start volunteer groups to create, but one where it was simply how you lived and required no thought.
“I’ll meet yer at Nelly’s then…”
“I’ll just ‘ave a quick ‘n at t’Walmsley and then ‘oer t’ Nelly’s fer tea”
“I’m off t’ Co-op next t’ Nelly’s”
“Where will I meet yer?” “I’ll be at t’ doorstep near Nelly’s”
Note to Southerners: I’m not translating all of that, you should be up to speed by now
“You’re being a bit nostalgic aren’t you Creasy?”
I suppose I am. I suppose thinking back to a time and a place where knowing the folk around you and them knowing you, and knowing that when the chips were down they would be standing right next to you tucking into your “Meat an’d p’tater pie”, is nostalgic. But it wasn’t really that long ago. Not really. And it’s not just that Northerners are better than Southerners. Even though that’s unarguably true, it’s more than that. It’s the location they live in too. Harsher, steeper, colder and closing people together in smaller, more spread out communities. Less rich. Less “automatic” and more manual. Less get a man in to do it and more “I’ll sortthat our fer yer“, knowing that sometime soon you might sort something out “fer ‘im“.
I miss the North and have a deep yearning for its way of life, it’s people and their values. I miss the easy thirty-second conversations about any old crap, the taking the piss and the humour that really doesn’t belong because people shouldn’t have such a great sense of humour when things are so much harder.
I try to hold on to my Northernness but every now and again, I hear myself say “Shall I get you some Sushi for lunch darling” to my twelve-year-old daughter, and I think…
“that’s sommat a Southern bastard would come airt wi’!”
“I tried to discover, in the rumour of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”
Gustave Flaubert
I went out with Bob for a walk a while ago. We’re lucky, we have fields right across from the house that we can walk in for ages. I walked to my favourite spot, raised and where I can feel the sun on my face, and from where I can see right across the fields. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and listened. Only this time, the sounds I was unconsciously expecting to hear weren’t there.
I lived in London for 23 years before I managed to escape to, well just outside London actually. I’m outside the M25 though, and that’s like being on Mars to a Londoner, which I’m not but my wife is. I’m a Northerner who grew up in the foothills of the Pennines in Lancashire. I crave green and solitude and silence.
Actually, at first, I escaped to Oxfordshire, which is probably one of the most beautiful counties in England; all green rolling hills and stone cottages. The village I lived in was fifty miles from London, had 5 houses and a pub and felt like it was five hundred miles away from anywhere. There were fields right outside the door there too; with horses. The house was a 17th Century thatch-roof stone cottage and honestly, not much had changed in this hamlet since.
In the summer, the cottage was cool and we could open the front and back doors at the same time to create a low “tunnel” through the house to the back garden, where there was a wishing well and an apple orchard. In this configuration, the house would air-condition itself with cool breezes. The internal stone walls were about two feet thick, so in winter, the house also kept itself warm.
“C’mon Creasy, you’re shittin’ me!”
No, not really. It was picture perfect and could easily have been lifted from the pages of The Hobbit. Just to give this some credence, Tolkien based the Shire and Hobbiton, on the landscapes and villages of Oxfordshire and Worcestershire where he grew up.
Anyway, as I mentioned, my wife was a Londoner (I don’t think she can claim that status anymore), and whilst she gave it her best shot in Oxfordshire, we eventually had to move back closer to London because she was going nutso living out in the sticks. My only condition was that it had to be outside the M25 (mental barrier), and have a good-sized garden that the kids could have a kick-about in. Actually, I later banned all “kicking-about” because as the boys got bigger, and could kick the ball with greater and greater force, our hedges started to look like they had been at Trafalgar.
Our new place was just the ticket, big enough with a good-sized garden and about 5 miles outside the M25. Tick. Where do we sign? Sorted. On top of the base requirements, it had the additional benefit of having the large aforementioned fields in front of it, which then backed onto woods, which in turn backed onto a golf course, through which there ran a public pathway. Ok, I could do this. This would do nicely. Not as idyllic as where we were and probably not going to run into Gandalf anytime soon, but good enough. Nice. Suburban.
We even lived near the “Old Town”, an area, which as far as I can tell, serves no useful purpose whatsoever. There are more millinery, bridal, art, fancy kitchen and antique shops than you can shake a stick at. Oh, and restaurants. Lots of restaurants…..and gastro pubs. Not one butcher or baker or candlestick maker, but there is a clock shop.
There was one more thing that our new home had that the place in Oxfordshire didn’t: white noise. If you live or have ever lived in a city, you will know what I mean. No matter what time of the day or night, there is always background noise. Ever turning tyres on tarmac roads, engine whine, pub-chatter, sirens, the metal on metal sound of the tube and overground, approaching aircraft and pipping horns, all amalgamating and blending like cake dough, to create an ever-present hum that either your ears learn to tune out, or you leave behind and go live in the Shire. Our new home had this sound. Not as bad as London, but there. Mainly, it originates from the motorway a couple of miles away. This road connects our town to London and each morning, and every night, the traffic from our town amplifies the noise as rush-hour kicks in, and lines of cars head toward or return from London, carrying their bleary-eyed occupants.
On this day in late March 2020 though, standing in a field with my eyes closed and my face pointed toward the setting sun, that sound had stopped. The only sounds I could hear were the sounds of the field. The odd bird, the barley rustling or Bob snuffling about near the hedgerow looking for rabbits. All else was still. All else was silent. It was rush-hour.
The sense of relief was palpable and I felt giddy and calmed at the same time. The last time I had felt this silence was the last time I stood on a beach at my sister’s house in Scotland on a still day, yet here I was, twenty-five miles from London, and it was so quiet I could have been on the moon. Everywhere was like this. The noise had stopped everywhere!
My first thought was
“I hope it stays like this for always”
But right then, as soon as I’d had the thought, I knew it wouldn’t stay like this. This strange time we were living in, that had thrown families together or torn them apart was temporary, and it would end. We would make sure it did, and when it did, so too the silence. That realisation hit me, and for a moment I was sad. Just for a moment mind, because it was silent now, so I would cherish this time, despite the quiet turmoil going on everywhere.
My wife had to work from home. My 11-year-old daughter started virtual school. She walked out of proper school on Friday and started virtual school on Monday, and it was like she had been doing it all her life. The school had performed miracles to get the online teaching environment in place, and the students trained, in time.
My son came home from University for Easter two weeks early. It’s his final year and he won’t go back now. No end of year parties, tearful goodbyes or final emotional pub-crawls around Lancaster. He’s been studying Fine Art, and his End of Year show will be online now instead of his first real show. His graduation has been pushed back to December instead of the Summer, and his clothes and belongings are still up in his now empty digs. We’ll have to go up, empty his studio and collect everything when the noise starts.
I have phoned, texted, FaceTimed, Teamed, WhatsApped or emailed EVERYONE in my family. Many times! Sometimes for hours on end. This has been a time of re-connection for me, and I suspect for all of them too, both with me and with each other. It is so easy to lose that connection with the racing pace of our society where time, time, time is the elusive commodity. Will I lose that connection again when the quiet stops? I hope not. I have come to realise just how vital and important that connection is to me, and what an amazing family I am part of.
For a short time, I learned how to use Twitter. I still think it is the single worst application ever designed. It’s counter-intuitive and irritating, with conventions that make no sense whatsoever, and yet it has been a connection with “old-life”. Twitter is full of noise. It is quintessentially a meme for the modern world, capturing all the chaos, all the crazies, all the genius, the humour and all the now, now, now of our kind. I can only be there for a short while before I start feeling the need to rant at someone, so I usually stop then, but not always.
The more I use it, the worse a person I become. The more I use it the more I am re-engaged with the competition of ideas that gets in the way of individual reflection. Good, bad, genius, crazy or just plain dumb ideas. Noise. It’s deafening, and whilst ordinarily, I would just tune it out like I do the white noise, in this quiet, temporary time, I can’t. Now, because I know this time will be fleeting, it feels like an immense and extraordinary intrusion, unwelcome and unbidden. So, I’ve stopped using Twitter. I don’t want to be distracted from this time. I want to bathe in isolation and listen.
“Listen to what Creasy?”
I feel like there is an important harmonic in the world. It’s probably always been there but it hasn’t been able to get through all our static. If you stand still now though, in a field or a forest or on a quiet shore, close your eyes and tune in, I bet you can hear it. It’s just a whisper, but I bet you can feel it too. Surely it’s worth a try? Maybe the more of us listening, the louder it will be. Maybe our listening amplifies the harmonic until we are all in tune with it?
I think there is a simple but important message hidden there.
“stop. listen.”
I think this harmonic lives inside all of us. It’s internal, not external and of course, HAS always been there. The barely audible voice saying “no, not that”. The almost imperceptible vibration, deep down, that starts when we round a corner in the road and the unexpected majesty of nature takes our breath away, and the voice says “yes, this”. Then there are the moments when the vibration is not a tremor but a rumble that shakes us at our very core and the voice, not a whisper now, but a harmonic choir of loss or love or pain or joy that cannot be ignored, and that must be shared, lest it overwhelms us.
This time we are in could have been such a moment, but it won’t be. It’s already over. It passed and we missed it. We all felt it though, let’s not pretend we didn’t.
When we learned carbon emissions around the world had tumbled
“yes, this”.
When the dirt in the city air fell like a curtain and we could see them clearly
“yes, this”.
When we realised we hadn’t filled the car for 6 weeks
“yes. this”
When we collectively sent our light to the one’s who had lost the most, and when all they could hear was “please? not this”, even then
“yes, this”
When the trees stopped falling and the earth stopped screaming, and a quiet that few of us has ever known, descended on the world
“yes, this”
When our days were spent in the presence and proximity of our husbands, wives and children instead of the slow death of our desks or the factory floor
“yes, this”
“Yes, This”
“YES THIS”
It may not seem like it now, but we will yearn for this time again, but like the voice, we will push that yearning down, down and down until we can hardly feel it any more, but feel it we will. An insistent, irritating adjunct to “no. not this”. The practical will continue to dominate the ideal, realism the surreal or the abstract idea of being. But here’s the thing, we’ve seen it now. We saw it all stop impossibly quickly. Cars didn’t drive, trains didn’t run, aeroplanes didn’t fly and, for a short while, people were nicer to each other. We can’t unsee that any more than we can uninvent the light bulb or the telephone.
Now things are being “relaxed” and the noise has started again and it’s just so disappointing. “Relaxed”, so why does it feel like the opposite? Why does it feel like the static is back? Why do I feel “old-life” rushing back in like an urgent, unrelenting flood tide?
We did a good job of “stop”, not such a good job of “listen”. We will do a worse job of “remember”. We will need to be reminded again and again and again. I’d like to think though that having experienced it once, we will recognise it when it returns, as an old friend rediscovered after years apart, and we will listen properly and collectively hear “in the rumour of forests and waves”
I love to travel, don’t you? It’s such a buzz. The excitement builds the closer the trip gets until it’s only a few days away, and then it gets all frenetic and busy.
” Have you checked us in online?
I can’t find the passports babe!
Have you booked the car into the valet parking yet?”
I love the valet parking! Just drop it off and leave the keys, and then a few short steps to the terminal building.
I love the limo pick-up more.
Oh lovely Limo Pick-up
How I love thee though
I love thee twice, nay trice as much
as going low price, cheap eco....
Then there’s my favourite bit of all, well almost. Fast-Track. I LOVE FAST-TRACK. It’s not the fact that you get through customs quicker, I couldn’t care less about that. It’s the walking past the big, huge queues of angry looking people who don’t have Fast-Track that does it for me.
As the doors of the Business Lounge swish open, welcoming me into the sumptuous interior, I always have an incredibly strong urge to turn and shout at the top of my lungs
“I AM ENTERING THE BUSINESS CLASS LOUNGE WHERE I WILL DRINK AND EAT FOR FREE! I MAY TAKE A NAP ON A FULL-LENGTH BED, OR HAVE A HAIRCUT OR A MASSAGE WHILST ALL OF YOU TRY TO FIND SOMEWHERE TO CHARGE YOUR HUAWEI PHONES!”
Then there’s the sitting in the huge mahoosive seats in Business, sipping champagne and nibbling a canopé, whilst those same, now red-faced on the verge of a meltdown people, file past with their backpacks and their Costa coffees and their half-eaten caramel raisin muffins, muttering under their collective breath about how these bastards have never done a real days work in their lives, and Lu in the background bitterly complaining…
“My Entertainment system only has 73 channels Daddy and my seat is too wide and I cant kick Mummy’s seat in front because there’s too much legroom, and why does it keep turning into a bed with duvets and pillows and everything when I press this button?”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s slow this thing down before we all do something we regret, shall we?
My point was, I love to travel. Always have. And whilst my wife and daughter say I’m a travel snob (dunno what she’s talking about), let me tell you that I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
OK, that’s not mine. That was from that great scene in Blade Runner with Rutger Hauer, but I have seen some pretty amazing stuff.
I’ve stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon and watched the sun set over the desert. I’ve swum in 3 out of 5 of the earth’s oceans. I’ve driven across the US, coast to coast, in a car that cost $250. I’ve bummed all around Europe and lived on a beach in Greece for 6 months. I have sat and warmed myself amongst the ancient ruins of the Acropolis, with a bottle of Retsina, a loaf of bread and Plato’s Republic. I’ve swum with Sharks and Whale Sharks in the open sea. I’ve seen some of the most beautiful reefs you can imagine, in the bluest, clearest waters of Thailand, the Maldives and the Red Sea. In fact, here is a great picture of an extremely healthy reef in the Red Sea. Notice the sleeping octopus under the brain coral?
Oh, hang on a mo. Just a tick. Yes, that’s right. That picture is on my GoPro SITTING ON A CORAL REEF AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BLOODY RED SEA!!
“HOW ON EARTH DID THAT HAPPEN CREASY?”
Well, I’ll tell ya if you’ll just calm yourself down a bit.
We, that’s me, my wife and daughter, were on vacation in Egypt. Amazing country and amazing people. It was the perfect sunny, hot Egyptian day. We decided that we would go snorkelling in the Red Sea, because why wouldn’t you? It’s only one of the best snorkelling/dive locations in the world. Crystal clear waters and some of the healthiest reefs I have ever seen.
I love to snorkel on coral reefs, but I always wished I had a record of what I had seen. So, a few years back, I decided I would get a GoPro so I could film these soon-to-be-gone natural wonders. I also decided to get a headband that attaches to the GoPro to leave my hands free. I don’t know what for. Maybe for grappling with a particularly aggressive parrotfish or to point dramatically (with both hands), at some point of interest.
Now, these headbands are great. Everything you see, the GoPro also sees. You have to learn to turn your head slowly and get the angle of the camera right or it ends up looking like you’re being attacked by a Great White whilst examining your own nipples. Once you have cracked these two though (head and angle, not the nipples), these headbands are the dog’s bollocks.
Anyhoo, we’d decided to go snorkelling in the Red Sea and we managed to find a good boat that would take us out to the really nice reefs about an hour or so offshore. Once or twice, the crew pointed out dolphins gambling around the boat as my wife and daughter read and sunbathed on the afterdeck. I spent most of my trip making sure I had my GoPro all set up, in the right waterproof case and properly attached to the headband and with plenty of battery life.
When we arrived, I got all excited about getting into the water. I rinsed my mask in the soapy water provided, donned my fins and mask and then I slipped the GoPro headband onto my head. I changed the angle of the camera to where I knew my nipples would be absent from the shot, and I was all set.
One of the key things to remember when you are using one of these headbands is to make sure you hold on tightly to the camera as you enter the water. Two reasons really. If you are jumping in from a high deck, the force of the water can change the angle of the camera lens and we’re back to nipple shots. The other rather obvious reason is to prevent the headband from coming loose and falling off.
I know what you’re thinking. Creasy forgot to hold onto the GoPro as he jumped into the water and it slipped off and sank down to the reef below.
WRONGO!
I held on perfectly. I struck the perfect pose as I entered the water holding both mask and Camera in place. So you shouldn’t jump to conclusions, should you?
Once I was in the water and back on the surface, I looked around to see what’s what. Either my wife or my daughter was calling to me from the boat, so I raised my mask and said
“HUH?”
Whoever it was muttered some gibberish which I pretended to hear, and then I pulled my mask back down and started my Red Sea Reef Adventure. As I glided along, I made sure to slowly move my head from left to right so as to capture the fullest view of the reef 25ft below. When I noticed something of particular interest, be it a colourful fish or a bright coral, I would stop and look directly at the item of interest and be still for five to ten seconds to get a good shot (you can make stills from them later), before gliding gracefully away to the next spot.
The reef was magnificent. Nowadays, it is quite common to dive on a reef only to find that it has bleached and is dying. If ever there was a more telltale sign of Global Warming, it is the destruction of the world’s reefs. I always feel very lucky when I come across a healthy reef, and particularly happy that my daughter is creating memories of something that could well be gone by the time she is all grown up.
After an hour or so, I glided back towards the boat feeling relaxed and content. I was intrigued to see what the camera had picked up that my eye might’ve missed.
As I approached the ladder of the boat, I bent down to remove my fins and passed them up to a crew member. Then I reached up to remove the GoPro and….I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that it slipped off while I was snorkelling around the reef.
WRONGOAGAIN!
It had actually come off when I raised my mask to listen to the inane babble of my wife and daughter.
“WHAT A DICK CREASY!”
Steady on. It’s a simple mistake to make. As I had raised the mask, so the headband had been flipped off behind me and the GoPro had sunk to the reef below. What? Have you never done something incredibly dumb in your life?
What made it worse, is that it dawned on me what a complete and utter twat I must have looked, paddling around, slowly turning my head left and right, to my mind demonstrating to any onlooker the correct way to get impeccable GoPro shots.
vot a deek Creasy!
Of course, the boat had drifted while I was out, so the odds of the GoPro still being directly below us were about as strong as Neddy the Blackpool donkey winning the Grand National. Nonetheless, I pleaded with the crew, who took the whole thing very seriously, to come and help me look, and implied that there would be a magnificent reward for the recovery of the GoPro.
These lads were like fish. We were in about twenty-five, maybe thirty feet of water, and these boys were up and down like a bride’s nighty as they attempted to first find, and then recover, the GoPro. All to no avail. We searched around for about 20 minutes but it soon became clear to everyone that the dumb white boy had properly lost his camera and there would be no reward today.
WTF Creasy Bhenchod!
A gloomier boat ride home you have never seen. Mostly the crew, who appeared to be truly distraught that they had missed out on the reward. It was clear that they blamed me for ruining their day. I was none too cheerful myself and not entirely sure I would make it back to the dock. Lu had her head back in her iPhone and didn’t give a monkey’s, but the wife? She chuckled contentedly all the way home. When I implied that had it not been for them distracting me it would never have happened in the first place, she chuckled a bit harder. This one would take a while to get old.
When we got back to our room, the conversation took a different turn
“Shall we get you a new one babe? No? You sure? I bet we can get one here in the hotel if you want one babe? Are you sure you’ll be able to hang on to this one though Jacques? ……heh heh heh”
Lu had something else on her mind.
“Daddy, what will happen to the GoPro now?”
I stopped and reflected for a moment before I said,
“Well baby, it’s probably still on and capturing all sorts of images on the reef, but eventually it will run out of battery and just lie there. Maybe a tourist will stumble across it and it will somehow make it’s way back to us?”
“But what if nobody finds it?”
“Well in that case, as the years go by, the coral will hopefully grow, and eventually the GoPro will become embedded in the reef until it is finally totally buried.”
“So will nobody ever find it then?”
“Well, never say never baby, but it’d be pretty unlikely…unless”
And then the Irish kicked in. Want a good story? Go to any pub in Ireland and buy a man a drink, and he will regale you with tales of leprechauns and the Republic until you buy him another drink, and then he will regale you some more.
“Unless…..one thousand years from now, all the people become extinct due to global warming. Then twenty-five thousand years later, after every sign of humanity has been covered over by the sands of time, a shining, slender, silver craft descends through our atmosphere, down through the clouds and swoops low and fast over the land. Searching. Searching. Until finally, its course takes it out over the clear, blue, unpolluted waters of the Red Sea, where it sinks lower and lower until it seems like it is just skimming the tops of the waves.
In a moment, the craft comes to a halt and hovers silently over the water. If there had still been people to hear, they would have heard the low hum of the craft increase as it starts to circle slowly around the same spot on the water. Has it found something? What can it be? Its sensors have picked up something. Something small and in the water. Maybe it’s nothing at all, but the sensors….something is there.
A small aperture in the belly of the craft seamlessly opens and seven shimmering orbs emerge. Immediately, they drop and sink beneath the waves, too small to hold beings but perhaps they’re drones of some sort. Seekers.
A little while later they surface and gently rise to meet the craft overhead. The aperture opens and the orbs slowly disappear inside one by one.
Onboard the craft, the visitor lifts the object that one of the Orbs has recovered. It has clearly been manufactured. It’s anything but natural. The angles are measured and symmetrical in a way that nature rarely is. The visitor became thoughtful. Scans of this world revealed no signs of any civilisation and yet here was this object. There are symbols on the casing of some kind. Perhaps the linguistic science group will decipher this later.
The visitor notices a button on what looks to be the top of the object. Pressing the button achieves nothing. Perhaps its energy source was depleted? Examining the object further, the visitor identifies the energy port and touches a panel in front of him. A fibre as fine as spider’s silk flows from the panel and connects itself to the energy port on the device. He presses the button again.
The screen on the device flickers into life. The visitor touches another console and the images on the screen of the device slowly appear holographically in the air in front of the visitor.
The visitors capacity for learning is clearly advanced, and before long the visitor has worked out how to playback the recorded content, which now starts to play on the holographic display.
Really?
Beings! The moving images on the device are clearly biological beings. Tactile beings clearly familiar with one another. Close. A family unit perhaps. Two mature beings and one smaller being. A black furry being also appears to be part of the family unit.
As the visitor continues to watch, images of structures, large groups of structures and rudimentary ground, air and marine vehicles are displayed. There are also many, many beings. The bipedal beings appear to be self-aware and intelligent. They make organised, systematic sounds that can only be language, and less ordered sounds that can only be emotional responses to stimulae. Other species are also apparent but appear to be less capable of organising behaviours or verbal communication. However, the black furry creature, who the bipedals in the recording refer to as “Bob”, appeared to have emotional responses at least as well developed as the bipedals.
As he watched, it became clear that the extremely good looking, and physically fit bipedal was the alpha in the group. The other’s referred to him as John or Creasy or Daddy or Babe or Handsome. These designations seemed to be entirely interchangeable.
As the visitor watched, the bipedal known as Creasy was now on a marine vessel and had evidently attached the device to his head via some means. Looking at the device now, the visitor could see no sign of how this attachment could be achieved and concluded that it must, therefore, have been either some degradable headband arrangement or the heads of these beings were magnetic.
Creasy was now looking down at the water from the edge of the vessel, before raising his hands to hold onto the camera and what appeared to be a mask. This being then suddenly launched himself into the water from the vessel and became briefly submerged before surfacing and looking about, gasping and spluttering for air.
The camera had picked up some sounds emanating from the vessel. Creasy turned to look in the direction of the sound. It appeared to be coming from the alpha’s mate. A creature of such beauty and grace that the visitor had to wonder what had attracted her to Creasy in the first place. She was calling out to creasy…
“Hey baby, are joo hokey in dere? Joo looked like joo landed flat on joor stomach!”
For some reason unbeknownst to the visitor, for it would not have affected the audibility of the exchange between the two beings, Creasy reached up and lifted his mask. As he did so, the recording device fell from his head and submerged beneath the waves drifting down toward the large crustacean organism below.
As it drifted down, it would periodically point upwards to show Creasy propelling himself frenetically along the surface, slowly moving his head from side to side as he did so. Every now and again, Creasy would halt in the water for quite a long time staring at something on the large seabed organism. Then for no apparent reason, off he would go again.
“WHAT A DICK CREASY!”
As he watched, the visitor’s shoulders began to shake and then heave as the realisation of what had just happened dawned on him. The visitor opened his feeding orifice and emitted a long loud howl.”
I stopped, opened my eyes and looked at my daughter expectantly.
“Why do you always do that?
“Do what?”
I said.
“That. You always end up goin’ on and on talkin’ rubbish when I could be on my iPhone”
I was a little saddened by, although not unused to, her response.
“I think I needed a way to make being such a plonker ok. I like the idea that all those memories we captured are not lost forever and that someday, someone will see them and remember us. All of us.
I think I just needed to convince myself that we should just leave my GoPro alone and let time figure out what to do with it. Now I don’t feel so bad about your Mum making me lose it, and we can forgive her and move on.”
She never did replace that GoPro.
Sometimes, me and Lu wonder if anyone found it or whether it is now buried in the coral. Whenever it does come up though, so does the story about the visitor, and Lu smiles and comes a little closer to hear it again.
Here’s a thought. If visitors do come, and we are gone by the time they get here, maybe they’ll find my GoPro, and then, because they have superior technology, they’ll be able to find this blog too!
So, if you are a visitor and you are reading this, first of all, Nanu-Nanu. Second of all, we were called Humans, Mankind, Humanity or Man and we were of the genus known here as Homo and the order known as Primates. Despite the nomenclature, 50% of our species were actually female – we called them women! We were sentient and in our history as humans (circa 200,000 orbits of the nearby star), many civilisations rose and fell. It may well be that other, less advanced, primate species have survived on Earth. That’s what we called this place you have come to. Earth.
We made some mistakes. Actually we made a lot of mistakes and it got us into trouble. So much trouble that unfortunately we cannot be here to greet you and welcome you to our world.
When we were here, it was still a beautiful place despite the mess we were making. During our lives (we lived, on average about 80 orbits of the star we called The Sun), it was becoming increasingly clear that the way we had created our society would not last. We were many, and we crowded together in great cities. We burned natural resources and filled our air with gases that warmed our planet too quickly, and we filled our land and oceans with our day to day detritus. We burned, and cut down the forests which were able to clean the harmful gases from our atmosphere. We didn’t think. Earth’s ecosystems were dying and we started to talk about the 6th great extinction event on our world. We didn’t believe.
We fought wars. Sometimes we fought on a planetary scale. Often we fought so that one group could control more resources than the next. Sometimes we squandered our youth for no reason at all.
We stifled our imagination and creativity in the pursuit of material wealth and we consumed and consumed and consumed.
We lost our way.
It must sound horrendous, and in many ways it was. Perhaps you feel that it is a good thing that such a species has gone. We were not all bad though. We achieved some amazing things too.
We were scientists and learned how to harness the power of a nucleus by splitting it or by fusing them together. Our scientists were closer than ever to finding a single unifying theory for everything.
We were explorers, it defined us. We built machines that took us to the bottom of our deepest oceans. We built rocket ships so we could leave the confines of our planet. We visited our moon. Men walked there. We sent probes to the farthest reaches of our star system and some went beyond into interstellar space. Is that why you are here? Did you find one?
SpaceX vision
We began the development of the technology that would take us to the 4th planet in this system. We called it Mars. We were going to make a colony there and protect our species from any extinction-level event here on Earth. I suppose that didn’t happen?
We listened to the stars. Once we knew how, we listened every hour, of every day for one sign that would answer our most important question, “Are we alone?”. We didn’t hear anything. We dreamt about a time when maybe one day, friendly visitors would arrive and announce themselves, and we would finally know there were others. We could learn from them and maybe they could learn something from us but either way, things would be different from that day forward.
If we couldn’t hear anyone else and nobody came, we imagined a time when we might go to the stars and meet, well, you.
We were poets and artists and musicians too. We created works of art of such beauty that, if you could only see them or hear them, your heart would fill and your eyes would weep. I hope you find examples as you explore this place.
We knew how to love. We knew how to hold each other close when we were feeling sad and alone, or hungry and cold. Then we were at our best. You would have liked us, then.
I hope you are seeing our world the way we found it, not the way we left it. I envy you this. I think you would probably have to travel a very long way before finding somewhere that has the beauty and richness of our world.
But no need to go find somewhere else. Stay awhile and explore the beauty, grace and diversity of our world. Maybe you shouldn’t stay here forever though. Come and visit of course, but keep Earth’s location a secret. Find out about us and our ways, but learn from our mistakes. Make sure that others leave the Earth alone. Guard this place the way we should have. Let it stay an unspoiled paradise again. Oh, and maybe you should return my GoPro to the reef.
Wake, Wake Halt the dream that brought a smile Come stand with me on the shore a while And watch the breakers, break and break Be pressed down by low, pitch brume
Wait, please Wait Stand close, be still Face be stung by brine and chill And Heaven, the hue of Cornish slate Awaits the knock of the skipper's mate
Cry, Cry That's all that's left Heave your breast and be bereft And yawl like the blow, down deep, down low Down to the locker 'neath the brackish spume
I’ve always loved the sea. Just the sight of the sea calms me. Especially a stormy sea where the grey of the sky and the sea blend together at the horizon. There is something about being near, or on, the sea that makes me feel both close to death and most alive at the same time.
I learned to swim in the seas of a Scottish bay, surrounded by high hills. So cold at first then, gradually, warmer than the air. Squatting down beneath the surface was like pulling the duvet over my head on a cold morning. Sometimes the sea there was flat, “like a mill pond” my Dad would say, but I remember it best when the white crested waves marched in triplets and threw themselves, grumpily, onto the shore.
There’s a headland on the left side of the bay that pokes out into the Irish Sea. To get to it, you need to scramble over the slippery ledges along the bay’s cliffs. The drop from the ledges was low enough to overcome any fear of falling, but high enough to make you lean into the cliff face as you traversed them. I would go there often when the clouds darkened and the tide was fully up. Wrapped in woolly clothes, boots and hooded coat, with the wind howling around me, I would sit in an armchair-shaped rock crevice at the promontory’s furthest point, watching and listening, until the tide turned and the waves retreated.
Once, when I was little, maybe 8 or 9, we all went to Ireland on holiday and crossed over the Irish Sea on a ferry. The waves were so big, that the ferry had to climb one side before pitching over and surfing down the other to bury her bow in the sea below. The waves broke over the ship whipping a spray across the decks that truly hurt if they hit you in the face.
I had a scratch on my face from some scrappy sporting incident, or it may have been the sharp edge of Bach’s cello concerto when I flipped it to side 2, either way it stung like buggery when the salt water made contact. My Dad said it would heal faster.
Everyone on the ship seemed to be sick as dogs, and everywhere was awash with the ill advised sausage/fish/pie/gammon and chips they had consumed in the calmer waters of Liverpool Bay. My Dad, an old navy hand, stood on the deck of the ship, steady as a steady thing, and said:
“You think this is bad, you should try Biscay!“
I didn’t feel sick. I felt excited. In touch. The lurching movements of the tortured vessel, the howl of the wind and the ever present briny spray, combined to make me feel more alive, and more tuned to my senses, than I ever had before. At the same time I had never felt so unsafe or so vulnerable. I stood by my Dad watchin’ the waves roll in, then I watched them roll away again (there’s a song in there somewhere).
The ship swayed and tipped beneath my Dad’s feet like a bucking bronco but he looked as still and as rooted as Nelson’s Column. He looked to the horizon and I imagined that he was remembering his Navy days. The horizon held his gaze for a long time though. Maybe he was feeling what I was feeling. I wanted to be just like him, and I told him I was going to join the Navy and buy him a Rolls Royce with my first weeks wages.
One more story. Just one I promise.
My sister Sharon, was very outdoorsy. She did all of her Duke of Edinburgh awards and knew her stuff when it came to being out there in the elements. Every now and again, when I went to stay with her in Scotland, she would offer to take me for a walk up one of the mountains nearby. These are not the granite giants that you get further up North in Scotland. These are high hills surrounded by mirror lochs and scenery that will make you cry.
On one such occasion, I was up for Christmas and Sharon suggested we tackle Cairnsmore (711 meters). We got properly geared up because whilst the weather was fine at the moment, it could turn pretty awful quickly. We set off and drove to the foot of the Munroe and parked the car.
Sharon had the maps and compass and was our navigator. Our destination was the Cairn at the summit (small stack of rocks that marks the summit). The skies were grey but we could see the summit from where we parked, so we began our ascent.
Everything was going great and in a couple of hours we were about half way up. Then everything changed very quickly. The snow came in all at once, with a fierce wind that drove the snow into our faces as we walked. In minutes, we were in the middle of a snow storm or “white-out”. We stopped and Sharon turned to me and over the roar of the wind shouted:
“I think this is pretty bad and it’s going to get worse. What do you want to do? We can turn back, but we have the right gear and I can get us to the top, so if you want to, we can push on”
I was clueless to be honest, but trusted Sharon and her abilities, and if she said she could get us to the top I believed her. In any case, I was getting that feeling again. I wanted to push on. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted it to get worse. We weren’t in control and I didn’t want to be.
We could see nothing beyond 5 meters in any direction. I told Sharon I wanted to go up. She nodded, took out her compass and map, took a bearing and pointed.
“Walk on in that direction 10 feet”
She instructed. I did so and looked back. I could just see Sharon. She walked up to me and pointed again.
“Walk on in that direction 10 feet”
We continued our upward progress like this for hours. It was exhausting. Then, as I walked wearily forward again, a grey shape emerged from the blizzard just feet in front of me. It was the summit cairn! I turned to Sharon grinning. She walked up to me.
“Here we are then”
Cartoon: Malcolm Evans/TDB
She summed up. The understatement was breathtaking. I don’t think I had ever been so impressed, nor have I since. To navigate with such accuracy and calm in these conditions was insane. That girl should have been in the SAS but she has some mamby-pamby ideas about not garrotting foreign people in the dark of night.
The snowstorm was getting worse. Snow now lay thick on the ground, and was piling up in drifts around us. Sharon pointed to a shallow hollow some 20 meters down from the summit.
“We need to take shelter John. We should be out of the wind down there”
We hunkered down with our heads below the wall of the hollow. We were at once protected from the storm. It raged all around us but the wind and snow blew over our heads like a roaring icy river. If I had reached up, I could have dipped my hand in it. The calm in the hollow was in stark contrast to the elemental chaos just a few feet away. We sat there quietly for a moment, cozy, and watched and listened. It was a deeply spiritual moment and I felt very connected to Sharon. I felt intensely alive but cowered before the immense force of nature. As I looked up, for just a second, I could swear I saw the face of God in the storm.
Since then, there have been other times in my life where I have felt the same way. On each occasion, I had a spiritual connection to my surroundings and an enhanced sense of vitality that was always accompanied by a heightened sense of danger or vulnerability. On these occasions, I was happy. I came away from these events feeling enriched, becalmed and spiritually refreshed. Not in a religious way. I am not fortunate enough to be a person of faith. I am a spiritual person though, and I feel that most at these unordinary moments in my life.
I’m not a thrill seeker or an adrenalin junky either. For example I can see no point whatsoever in throwing oneself out of a perfectly good aeroplane, or off a bridge or a cliff. All that “Whoo Hooing” and “Yeahing” at the end would drive me bloody nutzo as well. I’m conditioned to not like feeling like I’m not in control.
I’ve listened to the clerics, who provide a clearly laid out roadmap, that tells me if I just follow these few simple rules, not only will I be in control of my life, I’ll be a good person, and so my afterlife will be assuredly a happy one. I’ve read the management books. I’ve listened to the corporate witch doctors who’ve told me that things are causal or deterministic. Apparently, I just need to make the right choices and decisions, based on the right information at the right time, and not only will I be able to control my universe but I will be able to predict it too. Can’t say fairer than that can you?
It’s so not true though. None of it. For me anyway. That little voice at the back of my mind that just keeps saying “Hmmm, really?”. I’m not saying the clerics and the gurus are all lying to me. That’d be a bit conspiracy theoryish wouldn’t it? I believe they truly believe what they are saying and actually so do the vast majority of the people on the planet. But all the preaching and all of the gurus have just led me to a place of doubt. Why did so many people feel so confident that they could control their time here, and the events that effect their lives, when I felt so not in control? More importantly, why was it that the more I accepted that everything was random, and that I actually controlled nothing, the happier I seemed to be? In fact, when things are at their most random, most chaotic or most desperate, I feel like there lies meaning. What’s that all about?
“Below 40o South there is no Law. Below 50o South there is no God”
Sailors who have been there will tell you not to go to the Southern Ocean in winter. They say it’s worse than Danté’s Inferno. Dark angry skies and endless waves, like granite behemoths, roll in from all directions, capsizing boats and rolling them over and over like socks in a tumble dryer. Howling winds that scream through the rigging and tear any foolish sail. Broken masts, broken steering gear and snapped rigging. Nothing dry. Everything wet. Clothes, sleeping bags, socks, floors and bedding. Biting and numbing cold. Icebergs. Chaos. Random. Desperate. Above all desperate. A sense that this might be where life’s journey ends.
Some time ago, I told an Australian colleague of mine, who had done the Round the World Clipper race, and who had sailed the Southern Ocean, that I would love to sail the Southern Ocean in winter. He just looked at me like I was stupid.
“You don’t know what you are asking for mate. Even the best sailors don’t go there in winter and you’ve never sailed a bloody day in your life. You’d be about as useful as tits on a bull!”
Such poets the Aussies.
Of course he’s right. I have no place in the Southern Ocean in winter. Apparently nobody did. If I did go, I would have to go with a world class sailor and so would, in effect, be selfishly putting his or her life at risk too. If I really wanted to go though, shouldn’t I have done something about it by now?
Well, yes. I should have. The fact that I haven’t just means that I lack the cojones to go down there myself. But you should go. When you come back you can tell me all about it. I’m betting it will be a life changing experience for you. I mean, if you come back right? You probably won’t. You could send me an email from onboard, at the height of the storm, just before you snuff it.
I envy people of Faith. They look out a window, see a tree and say “See? The hand of God”. They see him/her everywhere and in everything. They see order where I see chaos and in that order they witness God. I’ve looked where they look and I haven’t found him/her there, but I remember that moment, in the chaos of the storm, on the summit of Cairnsmore.
Who knows what is down there in the Southern Ocean. They say there’s no God below 50o South, but maybe they’re wrong. Maybe down there in the dark, and the driving rain and the howling wind and the mountainous seas, down in the randomness of the storm, maybe that’s where God really lives. Maybe there I would be able to glimpse his face again. Maybe I’d hear his voice.
“When I was your age I used to think I knew everything. It wasn’t until I was 21 that I knew I knew everything”.
Daddy
I met a funny sort of chap recently when I was up in Scotland to see my sisters for Christmas. Let’s call him Stanley because a) he can then keep his anonymity and b) I can’t remember his name.
I’m shocking with names. Numbers no problem. Phone numbers, bank codes, birthdays, no sweat, but names?
“Hi, My name is Janet”.
Blank look. “Oh Hello….erm….hello”
My favourite hello? “Oh, hello you! how are you?”. I’ve been known to text people during a conversation with someone, just to get the name of the person I am talking to.
So, back to Stan.
Dan is a Yank. My sister Shannon(?) tells me, he originally came over on vacation about 10 years ago, when he stumbled across some Neolithic stone monuments called Cairn Holy, near Creetown in South West Scotland. There are actually two monuments; Cairnholy 1 & 2. By all accounts, they were constructed in the 4th millennium BC, so they are impressively old.
Cairn Holy Monument – South West Scotland
The picture right is a picture I took of one of these monuments as the sun was setting. A miniature Scottish Stonehenge if you will. But the setting, atop lowland hills, with forever views south over Wigtown Bay towards the Irish Sea, would stir the poetry in the soul of any Celt and, frankly, leaves Stonehenge in the dirt.
I’m not going to provide a history or indeed any insight on these monuments, that’s not the point of this article. In fact, you can’t walk two steps without tripping over a stone circle or a druid in Scotland. If you are interested to find out more about Cairn Holy though, then you might want to take a look at Historic Environment Scotland’s website.
No, I am much more interested in Frank’s story. You see Frank never left. Something touched him all those years ago when he visited this ancient ruin. Something spiritual. So he and his wife stayed and moved into a cottage across the valley that overlooks Cairn Holy, and he has been there ever since. Isn’t that odd?
It is odd, but it’s also amazing. My sister told me he wasn’t retired or anything when he chose to stay. He just stopped doing whatever it was he was doing and started going to look at these stones. Every day! For ten years!
As I said, I met him the day we went to see Cairn Holy. We were just having a touristy look and he comes striding across the field toward the Stones (or Stanes as a Scot would call them). He was a little dishevelled and was somewhat ruddy of complexion, no doubt from years spent at the Stones in howling winds and driving rain. He had a grey beard. My sister introduced us and we exchanged pleasantries, but I could tell that Dan was distracted. The sun was setting and he needed to pay attention. He started measuring the length of the shadows cast by the erect stones.
“So what do you think is going on here Jack?” I asked. He stopped and came up close.
“First Answer? I don’t know. Second Answer? Everything!”
He turned and returned to his pre-dusk ritual. As I watched him scurry about amongst the stones, clearly old friends, it occurred to me that this guy was one penny short of a shilling. Bats in the belfry. The lights were on, but no one was home. One fry short of a happy meal. Nutty as squirrel shit. You see where I’m going?
But the more I watched him, the more I started to envy him. Labelling him as an eccentric, which by our standards he most assuredly is, was too easy. Intellectually lazy.
Siobhan, my sister, is a budding Buddhist. She tends to look at things in a kinder way. In a questioning way that persuades you to consider “Is that all that is going on here?”. She was not dismissive of Joe at all. THAT’S HIS NAME! He’s called Joe. Bugger me, the mind is a funny thing eh?
So what was going on here with Joe? First answer? I didn’t know. Second Answer? Maybe everything. Whatever it was though, I felt it merited a little more respect and a little more thought.
How often do you wish you could stop the life you are living and just get off? Melt away into a Celtic landscape and simply be. Run your fingers over ancient stones and feel the more simple, more spiritual life of the ones who placed them there. Let go. Feel the weight of modern life slip away. Be lighter.
The more pragmatic among you will be thinking “Well that’s just great! What would happen if we all did that? Where would we be?”
These are good questions. What would happen? Where would we be?
Perhaps more thoughtful. More spiritual no? Perhaps more reflective and searching in our approach to life. Joe isn’t lazy, he is diligent and energetic and busy in his searching. He has simply replaced a life that lacked that search with one that is centred on it. Isn’t that search ultimately what we humans are all about? Whether it be the meaning of life or self or truth, the Universe or God Almighty, isn’t that who we are? I would posit that very few people are really searching. Some are but most are not. At best we “fit it in” with our busy schedules.
I’m not sure for what Joe is searching, but I know he is. I know that for a great deal of my life, I haven’t. Maybe I’m just projecting my indolence on everyone else.
Maybe, but not Joe. I know that what Joe is searching for is greater than himself. His “I don’t know” is a synonym for “I am searching”. His “Everything” is just that. for Joe, that search, that needing to know, was enough for him to just get off and melt into a Celtic landscape.
Somehow that feels important. It also felt like a message, lying on the ground like an old pebble that I needed to bend down and pick up. What’s my search all about? What do I think is going on?
I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
Maybe I need to spend more time in isolated, desolate places (like this blog site for example). Stand on a hillside and feel the cold. Let the rain sting my face and feel the wind at my back. Stand where ancient others stood and caress the stones. Maybe then I’ll know Everything.
I was doing
some grocery shopping in Sainsbury’s with my 8-year-old Daughter, Lu, a while
ago. I was just heading down the pharmacy aisle on my way to Milk, Cream and
Yoghurt. We needed full fat Greek yoghurt because I was doing my famous lamb
biryani for dinner that night. We must have had someone coming over because we
only do it on special occasions. We’ve done it for Christmas dinner a few times
just to give Christmas time a bit of a kick. What can I say, people seem to
like it.
Anyhoo I
digress.
Yes, I was on my
way to the yoghurt when I heard Lu speaking quite rudely to someone. Now we
have made a point of raising her to be a very polite little girl, and whilst
admittedly Lu can be something of a blunt instrument at times, she’s very
chatty and generally speaking she is very polite unless she is fed up with who
she is talking to (“Why don’t you just shadap Fatty Daddy”). She’s a one that
one.
Anyway, whoever
she was talking to was really getting it.
“You stupid thing,
why can’t you answer a simple question”
I was taken
aback.
“Oi oi, who are
you talking to madam?” I admonished.
“Hey Siri, tell
me a joke” she commanded.
The immediate
sense of “God that’s so rude, what happened to please and thank you?”, didn’t
diminish, as I realised, she was talking to my phone. In fact, I was every bit
as disappointed in her as if she had been talking to a human being. I was
surprised. So, I stopped right there, next to the indigestion tablets, and
turned to Lu.
“Erm, Lu?”
“What?”
“I dunno why,
but I just feel that you are being really rude to Siri. Do you think its ok for
us to be rude to her just because she’s an AI?”.
“Huh?”.
The thought
that came to me originated elsewhere, and I said to Lu:
“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”
Arther C Clarke 2010: Odyssey Two
What followed
was a discussion, about the nature of our future relationship with Artificial
Intelligence entities.
Lu is going to sort out Fusion, right after she has met nerdy Brian, who keeps pushing his glasses up on his nose (in like a really cute way?), during her Quantum Physics Masters at Cambridge, so I felt having this conversation was just a relaxing meditation for her, a musing if you will. We covered a lot of ground. Not physically. We only managed to get from Indigestion tablets to Fishermen’s Friends during our discourse, but philosophically, we climbed Everest. Actually, that doesn’t really cover that much ground does it? We crossed the Sahara!
If you were walking
through Hyde Park, would you kick a tree? Just walk up to it and kick the
living shit out of it? Why don’t we see people doing that? How come we don’t
just all spend our time walking from tree to tree screaming abuse and kicking
the bark off those tall, leafy bastards? What
would that say about us? I’m pretty sure it would say we were bad people.
Maybe we don’t do it, not because we don’t want to, but because we wouldn’t want anyone in the park to see us doing it. In this age of environmental “awakeness”, it would be unacceptable. People would run over and tree-kick-shame us shouting “how would you like it if I just walked up to you and kicked you?”.
“Leave that poor innocent tree alone you horrid
person!” they might exclaim. They might even swear and threaten you with
physical violence. Look what a hard time we are giving the people burning down
the Amazon! Such is the level of empathy we are supposed to have with the
environment these days.
Acid question though. Would you kick, or shout at, the
tree if you were all alone in a forest and no one could see or hear you do it?
I don’t know that I would, you know. I think I’d be ashamed. I’d feel guilty. I
think most people would. Which is weird when you think about it. Our current
understanding of trees suggests that the kick or the insult itself wouldn’t be “felt”
by the tree. It’s not going to spend the next few days wondering what it did to
deserve that kicking from that hiker. It’s not sensient, but it is alive, and generally
speaking we give it due respect.
Is being alive the quintessential attribute of “being” though? Loads of stuff on Earth is alive but I wouldn’t say they are all beings. I don’t think of amoeba’s, or phytoplankton, or daffodils, or flu virus or trees as Beings. So I don’t think it is just about being alive. Descartes said “I think therefore I am”? So is it thinking that makes us beings then?
Bob!
Meet Bob. Bob, is our family dog. He’s so cute. Yes you are! Yes….you….are! Look at dat face. We love him to bits because he is so cute, but also because he is the cleverest dog ever! Not because he does tricks (he can do a few), but because of how much he understands and how much he communicates. He solves problems. He won’t come in after he has done his last pee of the night, until I give him a treat. I can’t just say the word “treaty” because he knows I might not give it him. It’s happened ok? I’m not proud of it, but there have been occasions where I said “treaty” but didn’t actually deliver a treat. So he has learned that could happen, and now, he waits until I have it in my hand and throw it into the kitchen and then he comes in, let’s me wipe his paws and then gets the treaty from the kitchen. I’ve tried teaching him to wipe his own paws, but honestly, if I cant get my 24 year-old University student son to do it, I’m not sure why I have such high expectations of Bob.
Bob has obviously thought this through. His
actions are deliberate and calculated to get the outcome he wants. He has shown
some creativity in his solution. He knows I want him to come in. I want to go
to bed. He stands just out of reach, on purpose, and if I try to grab him he’ll
bugger off to the other end of the garden and then only comes back, tail
wagging, when I’m back indoors.
There is no question in my mind that Bob is a sensient, loving, thinking, disobedient and creative Being who has his own ideas. I have no hesitation behaving toward Bob as I would anyone else. When I want him to give me something, I say “please”. When he gives it, I say “thanks”. Anything else would be rude and disrespectful. In every sense of the word, he is a member of the family and is treated accordingly.
We, and about 32 million other dog owners around the
world, grant Bob and the canine masses this respect, despite the fact that Bob
can’t talk and shows little understanding of any academic subject or the
universe. I am prepared to bet good money that there are no
circumstances where Bob could pass the Turing Test yet we still offer the
respect and courtesy we might show another human being.
“The Turing Test?” you enquire. Yes, the Turing Test. Now, I know all of you know what the Turing Test is, but for the people reading who have been buried under a rock since WW2 (I’m not explaining that abbreviation, I’m really not), a brief explanation is needed.
This test is named after Alan Turing, the chap that figured out how to crack the Nazi Enigma Machine code during World War 2 (dagnamit!). Ze Germans used this machine to communicate real time troop, air and naval movement orders, so pretty important really. It was believed to be uncrackable because the encryption key was changed every day which meant you had to crack the key every day. Turing realised that every order was signed off “Heil Hitler” and this therefore provided a constant he could use to crack the entire code every morning. Basically he won the war for the allies. For his efforts, and in true British enlightened fashion, he was thanked by HM Gov. by being sent to jail for being a homosexual. Hurrah! Gawd blesss the British Empire Ma’am!
Anyway, the basic premise of the test is that if an interrogator (C opposite), is unable to tell the difference between responses from A or B (where A is a computer and B is a human), then the computer is judged to have Artificial Intelligence.
How long does it take you to figure out that you are
talking to a computer when you have one of those automated Service Agents
answer the phone? 5 seconds? Maybe 3? Imagine if you genuinely couldn’t
tell the difference? Imagine if Freddie in Mumbai was actually an AI? Bad
example, we all tend to get a bit irritated with Freddie, so lets go with Marge
in Newcastle. You’d be polite and courteous to her because to all intents and
purposes you would be talking to another being, and one with a natty Geordie
accent, which apparently we all love. The fact that she is based on silicon
wouldn’t matter because you wouldn’t know. If you were rude to her on the phone
you would probably hang up feeling a bit guilty.
Lee Sedol
Well, an AI cant do any of that yet. Far from it. AI is very good at learning how to do narrow tasking but not so good in the arena known as General AI. Narrow AI is good though. So good, that it often surpasses human capability in the same task, very quickly. For example in March 2016 Google’s AlphaGo was able to beat 18 time World Champion, and 9 Dan (=very good) Chinese Go player Lee Sedol, 4-1 on its first outing. Go is the most complex game ever devised by man (or woman), with more possible positions available than there are atoms in the universe! So that’s pretty complex then.
But there are loads more out there and still more in the pipeline. In the field of Medicine, we now have AIs that surpass human ability to identify tumors from radiology images. Everything we know about autonomous driving suggests that it will be significantly safer than humans. Intelligent homes that combine personal assistants (Google Home or Alexa) with smart home devices (thermostats, lighting, camera’s etc) are already here. They are in financial markets, Business Intelligence software, travel experience apps, music streaming, shopping and, and, and, and. Narrow AI is already with us.
But no matter how “intelligent” these narrowly focused AI are, no matter how much data they can digest or how much machine learning they do, they cannot yet do, what Bob does, and they come nowhere near what Lu can do. Narrow AIs do not have ideas. They lack empathy. Their creativity is limited. They do not demonstrate understanding of the world, or the universe or of self.
But, they are getting there.
When General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is achieved, how we treat GAIs and what rights we grant them, will be the issue of our time. We can treat them like we have every other minority in human history or we can treat them with “appropriate respect“.
“Good Morning Dave”
Until then, I want Lu to be well mannered when talking to Siri, because I believe that if she finds it easy to be rude to Siri, she will find it easy to be rude to people. What does it say about us if we can’t be polite? How much easier will it be to integrate with future GAIs, if we have been treating their less bright forebears with respect and dignity? I’m not sure we will want them irritated with us, especially when they might be so much brighter than us.
