Robert Wright

Robert Wright is an academic journalist, the author, among other things, of four books. I have read the second (The Moral Animal), which I think is probably his best, and the third (Non-Zero).

In Non-Zero Wright puts forward the thesis that over historical time humans have become more cooperative and less competitive. There is a tendency to play more “win-win” games and fewer “win-lose” games. He also puts forward the more radical proposition that natural selection and the whole development of the Universe back to Big Bang may have been (and may continue to be) the result of design.  He find evidence for design (and a designer) in the “directionality” of the whole process from Big Bang.

After reading Non-Zero I found myself accepting his hypotheses, and later on, reacting strongly against them. Wright continues to flourish, he is a considerable Web presence and has produced a fourth book. I have gone back to him with the idea that I need to thrash out our differences, work out more precisely where I think he is going wrong. Or experience a second “conversion” to his ideas.

Briefly, my position is that something that could justly be called Enlightenment resulted in the modern scientific viewpoint, and with it, creation and design theory were kicked out of the front door. The result is a Universe which is ultimately mysterious, which seems to have developed as the result of natural causes and which, at a late stage, produced a few species of living things with the ability to pursue goals. It is a cold Universe which holds little solace for us.

What Wright, and others like him, do with their speculations is to bring creation and design theory back into the worldview by the back door. Of course it is possible that he is right. But there is precious little evidence for the correctness of his speculations, or those of others. My attitude is that should preserve a distance from such theories and “Let the mystery be.” Because what Wright’s alternative does is allow back into the tent of rational discourse all the looney delusions which humans have believed and progagated since the cave-dwelling days.

Recorded music

What is bizarre about recorded music, from the beginning, is the way the track has no introduction, and no cheerio at the end. The radio DJ is one of those who provide these missing book-ends for the recorded music track.

We are so used to it, but sit down and play a track from one of your favourite CDs – a studio, not a live album. Music starts, singing starts, song eventually ends. How weird it sounds. How unnatural. How naked.

Exploding underpants

The latest Al-Qaeda atrocity, which will generate a global backlash of even more government control, involves the Yemeni with 80gm of explosive hidden in his underpants, in his unsuccessful attempt to down an airliner.

Presumably, methods will be found to screen the underpants of all prospective airline passengers. What next? How will governments and airlines respond after an Al-Qaeda zealot mounts an aeroplane with 80gm of explosive concealed in his rectum?

Snuff movies

The rarity of genuine snuff movies is for technical, not ethical, reasons. You only get one take.

Packaging experience

Wherever we travel, we will find people offering us activities likely to be of interest to us, and packaged to make the experience convenient – for us and for them. On a holiday to Australia in 2005 I paid 200 dollars Australian to go on a whale-watching packaged experience. What is so wrong with this?

For this is unquestionably a bad development. And the eagerness with which the format and franchise has been adopted all around the world, makes the situation even more grave.

Go to London and have the Blitz Experience. Afterwards, what have you had?

Tramlines of thought

How to break free of the tramlines of thought. The first step to a solution is to recognise that there is a problem. The tramlines exist.

Slavoj Zizek, Slovenian philosopher and terrible child, generates ideas that seem to have broken free of the tramlines of thought, time and time again. You would think it would work against him that he claims to be a follower of that great obfuscator and mountebank in the tradition of the French intelligentsia, Jacques Lacan. Surely, the principle of garbage in (Lacanian notions) garbage out should apply. How is it that he seems to oddly perceptive so much of the time?

Think about his leaning towards, perhaps almost his addiction, to paradox. To turning the received wisdom onto its head. In this he resembles no-one so much as Gilbert Keith Chesterton, inventor of the paradoxical priest, Father Brown.

How does Zizek break free of the tramlines of thought? Think about a man directing his first film, without experience or training. And the way he innovates, simply because he does not know, from experience and training, that things are not done that way.

Buddhism

Buddhism usually gets gentle treatment from a secularist. Christianity usually gets its well-deserved forty whacks, but the religion of the smiling fat man receives mitigated praise. And yet what nonsense it is.

Buddha inherited a problem from Hinduism, which had decided to adopt the doctrines of reincarnation and karma. The upshot was that each individual was trapped in a never-ending cycle of lives driven by karma. The Buddha claimed to have discovered a way for an individual to escape the cycle of lives.

Notice that there is not a tittle of evidence for either reincarnation or the theory of karma. What appears to happen to an individual is that he dies and that is the end for him – a frightening enough prospect.

What the religious geniuses that thought up the cycle of lives managed to produce was a self-created problem and a prospect, which for horror, approaches or even equals the Christian invention of Hell. Then we are supposed to congratulate the Buddha for discovering the answer to a predicament which never existed in the first place.

The Song has ended

The song has ended but the singer is still warbling on. Very irritating. Is it because the singer has sung himself into something of a trance and just wants to continue the pleasant experience with burbling repetitions of a few words or noises?

I am listening to a recording of John Peel’s Festive Fifty Show for 1978, where Van Morrison earned a place with Madam George. A fine song, right up until the end. But when the song has ended Morrison burbles on – “Goodbye Madam George, Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye Madam George”. Goodbye, Van – please. That recording came from Astral Weeks. I shall probably never buy that CD now on account of the self-indulgent and unnecessary two minutes after the end of the song.

Van Morrison self-indulgent? Is that even possible?

Spots of Memory

When Mondo Cane (1962), the mordant Italian documentary about some of the more bizarre aspects of human behaviour, came to Britain, I went to see it. Now that I have watched it again in 2009 my memory of it is distinctly spotty. Which is strange, since the movie had profound effects, both shocking me and reducing me to tears.

There are many scenes which I “seem to remember”, but this is hardly good enough. I could be deceiving myself. What I definitely remember are (a) the force-feeding of Strasbourg geese to make pate de foie gras; (b) the turtle on Bikini atoll, its sense of direction buggered up by radiation, heading inland instead of towards the sea; and (c) the New Guinea cargo cult which ends the movie. It was (b) and (c) which brought tears to my eyes in the cinema.

Watching the film in 2009, I am more critical. I realise how much of it is contrived – whole sequences have obviously been choreographed especially for this production. There is a soft porn aspect, which made the film more commercial than it otherwise would have been, in 1962. But I find it still retains the power to shock and to upset. Probably the version I saw in the cinema had the commentary dubbed into English. Hearing it in Italian with English subtitles is definitely an improvement – the old world cynicism comes through.

Denial of death

In this novel by Margaret Lane I am reading, A Smell of Burning (1965) there is a character called Lytton who has recently survived an operation for cancer and who regularly talks to the other characters about how his time is short. However, at the deepest level, and it has been like this for him since childhood, there is an “unshakeable disbelief” in his coming death. It is inconceivable. When he makes the dramatic announcements about his mortality, he is, in a sense, playing a part. Part of him knows that the death of which he speaks – his death – is inconceivable.

My sister died in her early 40s from cancer and in the lead-up to that event she was frequently outspoken about her coming death and her funeral arrangements. She even welcomed the end and wished it would come sooner, because life was so hard and so depressing. And yet, one night, in her hospice bed, when she came out of her morphine-induced semi-coma, during the very last days, she told us that she was not terminal yet, it had not got that serious. Perhaps she shared the disbelief of the character Lytton in Margaret Lane’s novel.

Certainly, I share it. I know that my life is drawing towards an end. I realise it could go on for ten or fifteen years more, or, perhaps more likely, it could end within a few years, perhaps even a few months. And yet I cannot face that reality because, at the deepest level, I simply cannot believe it. If I ever experience a moment when I know for sure that I am going to die, then I imagine that my reaction will be one of utter shock. The sort of astonishment you feel when something really fundamental about the world turns out not to be the case. The look on a child’s face when she is first struck by a loving parent.

Living in involuntary denial of death is a state of delusion, not something one would wish on oneself. But how to make death the reality for me that it is, I cannot figure out.