The Semiotics of the Cross pt 2
1. Of course the Cross as a symbol was itself a deliberate repurposing by the Early Church, an ironic giving of a completely opposite meaning to a symbol of ruthless Imperial Roman torture and death.
Or ruthless Imperial Roman lawgiving, sacrificing the well-being of a few rebels for the creation of a safer world.
Do you think Jesus believes that his death was worthwhile because the execution and torture of violent rebels helped create a safer Roman world - a high-technology, slave-owning Pax Romana?
Or was he looking forward to a Pax Judaica, when the Jewish Sanhedrins would take their rightful place as lawgivers, handing down Sharia-type judgements against adulterers and blasphemers?
Or a Pax Christiana, millennia in waiting, when finally he'd be the one to violently execute rebels who refused to take His name?
Or was he thinking of a different kind of Pax entirely?
2. Would you attend religious services in a cult centre that had as its symbol a noose and gallows?
Or an electric chair?
Or a guillotine?
Or a Taser?
Or an image of a dismembered human body, dying in pain, from the Vietnam war, or Iraq today?
Or a boot standing on a human face?
Or the 'Death' card from Tarot?
3. But that is what the Cross is.
Why do you use that symbol?
What do you *think* it means?
Do you think everyone who sees it will react the same way?
What do you think they will think you are saying, when you thrust a symbol of slow, gruesome, death before their faces and say 'believe in this and be saved'?
4. Saved from what?
What could possibly be worse than slow gruesome death?
5. Saved by what?
By slow gruesome death?
Or something else?
But the process as a whole involves slow gruesome death, yes?
6. Saved for what?
For making other people die slowly and gruesomely?
Why not, if it is how they are saved?
7. Do not think that you already know those three answers, for evidently the world is not already saved.
a. If you had really known, you would have conveyed the message clearly to everyone.
b. If you had conveyed the message clearly to everyone, everyone would have heard and understood the message clearly.
c. If everyone had heard and understood clearly a message that is the most wonderfully good news ever since the founding of the Earth, they would have had no choice but to answer 'yes'.
d. If everyone on Earth had answered 'yes' to the most wonderfully good news ever since the founding of the Earth, the Earth would by now be transformed, and there would be no war, crime, sickness, or death.
e. But perhaps all those people, and there are billions of them, who have heard the message of the Christian Gospel and not responded 'yes' are so absolutely evil and depraved that they would answer 'no' to the most wonderfully good news on the planet anyway, just out of spite, on principle, knowing full well that it would damn them to Hell eternally, forever. Because they're just that nasty. Bad, rotten, no-good folks who'd eat kittens for breakfast and spit out the bones.
f. Look me in the eyes and say that you really think your neighbours are that nasty, and that you think Jesus is okay with you thinking that.
Is there something wrong with my logic?
Or is the Earth already saved and transformed and healed?
How would you know?
Would anything be different?
What would be different?
Is it different?
8. Did God the Father create us?
Does he love us absolutely?
Does he love everyone the same?
Does he already love us entirely, more than we can imagine, as much as we can possibly ever be loved in the entire universe?
Does he love us absolutely and entirely and forever, BUT, only so long as we perform a certain ritual in space and time expressing belief in a certain person born some 2,008 years ago (modulo calendar conversions) called Jesus?
Does he love only those who believe in Jesus?
Does he hate the rest?
Does the infinite God get *better* if he decides to love us, after all, rather than hate us and abandon us to hell forever?
Does he love everyone and desire their company intensely and wish absolutely no harm to come to them, yet consign the unbelievers to eternal torment without end, forever - thus causing Himself eternal, unending grief and incompleteness?
What manner of expression must we use to dedicate our lives to Jesus, and what power must it have such that it changes the very eternal nature of the Father God Himself - He who cannot be changed and from whom we receive our being?
If this ritual of salvation is so very, very powerful that it changes the nature of God Himself, must we also be very, very careful about how we perform it, lest it go horribly wrong - and the Father God (who knows the track of every atom and the whisper of our every thought) misunderstand us entirely?
9. Does God perhaps love *everybody*, even those who have not performed whichever mysterious and awesome ritual it is that expresses saving faith in Jesus and puts sinners on the path to salvation?
Did perhaps God love everybody equally and infinitely *before* Jesus was born?
Does the notion of 'before' and 'after' have any meaning to a God Who lives outside time and creates it?
Did sinners pray 'the prayer of salvation' before Jesus was born?
What words or symbols did they use to do this?
Did they use words or symbols at all?
Do sinners pray 'the prayer of salvation' in words and symbols that do not directly reference Jesus - or something entirely other than words or symbols - after Jesus was born?
10. If God the Father already loves everybody more than they can possibly be loved, and His love cannot be diverted away from its course by anything we could ever say, think or do, and His love creates and populates the infinite heavens and the most intimate secrets of our as yet unspoken hearts:
Why did Jesus die?
The Semiotics of the Cross, pt 1
1. In the newly redeveloped Sol Square / Lichfield Lanes entertainment complex in inner Christchurch City stands a puzzling sight. A new bar has been built named only The Yellow Cross. Its signpost, the huge illuminated yellow cross itself, was taken from the decommissioned Assemblies of God church hall in Lichfield Street, now a derelict shell, which itself was formerly a cinema.
The Yellow Cross Bar is homely inside, branded and with Macs Beer (or Monteiths? one of the new trendy niche brands) and decorated in faux farming chic: old peeling wallpaper, bare brick walls, rough and ready sawhorse tables. The urinals in the men's room are fashioned from old washtubs and there is a pull-cord to flush. It exudes a welcoming, good-on-ya-mate, down-home Kiwi aesthetic - a thin skin of branding over a state-of-the-art, purpose-built, hospitality and merchandising operation. It is a machine designed to sell yuppie drinks and fake ideals of camaraderie, but it does so superbly, and provides a warm, safe and functional shelter out of the rain to listen to live music and meet strangers. There are worse things to sell, after all.
But. The question nags at my mind: what does the Cross mean in this context?
What were they thinking, when they built this bar? What was the intention behind salvaging the AoG's old fluorescent cross and hanging it up there - making it the centre and feature of a bar? What is the message that this Cross sends? What is the gospel it preaches?
a: "New Zealand is a Christian nation, we are all Christians here, and we wish to remind everyone in this shopping precinct forcibly of this. Jesus is your Lord, you will bow. Now. Buy our beer as a symbol of your belief."
b: "This is an outspokenly Christian bar in a nation where Christianity was once the dominant faith but has come under increasing criticism recently; come here to hear about Jesus while you drink, you might be surprised. The beer's not really important, but buy it if you want."
c: "Heck no, we're not Christians, in fact we're being deliberately in your face against you, repurposing the symbol of your failed faith in an ironic manner verging on blasphemy. We mount this cross here as a trophy: you lost, and religion-free capitalism won. Buy our beer, sucker."
d: "We're not Christians, this is just a bar, we don't do religion here, but we are aware that Christianity has been a big part of the cultural landscape in New Zealand and many people still have warm associations with it, as they do with farming. Neither are really important to us, it's just a kind of kitschy symbol, representing everything good in life, you know? It's all fake anyway, and you know that and we know that. But the beer's real. Buy our beer."
e: "It's obvious that Christianity (like all religion) is waning in an increasingly secular society, and frankly the sooner the better (those suicide bombers, honestly! and George Bush! Bombs and Texas and God are so bad for the planet!) and we want to make an ironic statement about bars being the new churches: hanging out and being buddies is the new religion, you come here for salvation. It's kind of edgy, but cute. Like Hell Pizza. Maybe some oldies will hate us, but the hip young folks will get it. Buy our beer."
f: "Religion is kinda in the news at the moment, mostly in a bad way, but there's no such thing as bad press, and now that New Zealand is a comfortably secular country where religion doesn't really mean much, it's safe to put up this symbol in a non-religious context. Also, it's kind of cool when you think about it. Christianity was one of those strange ideas from the past that sort of failed, like zeppelins and Communism, but is still fun to look at (from a safe distance) because it's so weird. Buy our beer."
g: "We're not really Christians, but actually when you think about it, New Zealand is or was a Christian nation, and at this point in history, it's sort of interesting to think about how nations have identities, and maybe it's not a bad thing to be associated with a religion after all, it certainly holds people together, so perhaps it's worth reinvestigating this whole religion thing. Shared values, cultural anchor, etc. Not that we're really serious about it, just want to sort of salvage something interesting and unique from our history that might be worth preserving. Oh, and buy our beer."
h: "Dude, it's just a symbol. The Yellow Cross. Absolutely meaningless. No semiotic content whatever. It's just a bunch of atoms aligned in a formation. We saw this thing, it looked pretty, we stuck it up there. Buy our beer and chill out and stop thinking so hard."
Is it some of these, any of these, none of these?
2. What does preaching the Gospel actually mean? Is the Gospel we preach in our churches any more clear than the Yellow Cross?
3. What did the Yellow Cross mean for the people who converted a movie theatre into the Assemblies of God church?
What did they mean by turning a theatre into a church? Did they see it as the power of God saving the lost? Was it just a convenient building? Did they bless the building when they commissioned it as a church? Did they picture demons of unrighteousness fleeing and angels standing guard? Did they picture smiling spirits from the glory of cinema filling their church with warm feelings, and welcome them in the name of Jesus?
What did other churches think of them for making a fluorescent cross? Did they see it as bringing the light of God to the inner city? Did they see it as cheapening a sacred historic symbol by making it a lurid illuminated sign?
What did the Assemblies of God people feel when the church had to close?
What did they feel when their cross was taken away and mounted on a bar? Was it a defeat and a blasphemy? Or was it a quiet victory, their symbol surviving after their building was condemned?
4. If you are a Christian reading this, and you have a dream of a glorious Christian urban revival of the future, do you wish for more movie theatres converted into churches, or more Yellow Cross Bars?
If you are a non-Christian reading this, do you have a nightmare of a glorious Christian urban revival crushing your soul under its God-blessed self-righteous jackbooted feet?
5. Can we summon spiritual forces by making signs, positioning symbols, or speaking words?
When the Gospel is preached or the Bible is read, is God present in the preaching or the reading?
When the Cross is displayed on a church, is God present in the Cross?
When the Yellow Cross is displayed on a bar, is God present in the Cross?
If you have an Ouija board or Tarot cards in your home, are you attracting dark spiritual forces?
If you have a Cross or Bible in your home, are you attracting light spiritual forces?
If I say the word 'Jesus', is Jesus present in this word, or in the speaking or the hearing of it?
If I say your name, are you present in any way in the speaking or the hearing of it?
Is a religious symbol at all different from a non-religious symbol?
Is there a spirit or absolute meaning of any kind present in or attached to the dollar sign? The Golden Arches? The flag of a country?
Is the meaning of any symbol absolutely determined only by the person who writes, performs, or displays it?
Is the meaning of any symbol absolutely determined only by the person who reads, views, or observes it?
Is the meaning of any symbol determined at all by a third party (such as our ancestors, or our children, or Jesus, or angels, or God) not involved directly in this act of communication, but who might somehow have an emotional investment?
If all these different people attach different meanings to the same symbol, can those meanings ever touch?
6. Can any symbol, or any act, actually touch my true being, unless I give it permission to?
Does wearing a symbol on a T-shirt in an ironic manner make that symbol actually mean something different to what everyone else assumes it means?
If I say to a stranger, "you are an idiot", and then I punch him, and then I laugh and say "by 'idiot' of course I mean 'wonderful person', and that was an ironic punch", will he accept my unique meaning?
If I do the same thing to my brother, and he does it back to me, does it mean something different?
7. What is the Gospel that we are to preach? Has it in fact been preached everywhere the symbols of the Cross and the Bible have been prominently displayed and ordinances of public religion have been enacted? Or has something else been preached which is not quite the actual Gospel in the same way that the surface of the Earth is not quite the sky? Or have both been preached together, intertwined?
8. What does the death and resurrection of Jesus mean to you?
Does it mean the same thing to Jesus?
Darkness, pt 2: Above the Starry Canopy
Yes! Questions... Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates?
-- Batty, Blade Runner (1982)
Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!
Brueder - ueber'm Sternenzelt
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Be embraced, millions!
This kiss to the entire world!
Brothers - above the starry canopy
A loving father must dwell.
-- An de Freude / Ode to Joy (Schiller, 1785)
1. I am angry almost all the time now.
Angry at the brokenness of the world.
Angry at the darkness, at the petty lies, the deliberate deceptions, the subtle Escher-like distortions that lead the wide and obvious path smoothly into its opposite without seeming to shift at all.
Angry at the necessary deaths, the unnecessary deaths, the futility of it all, how good and bad alike fall apart into nothingness.
Angry at the emptiness and shadow.
Angry at the Standard Model and its hammer-blow shout of THERE IS NOTHING BEYOND.
It is not good to be angry. It is neither right nor healthy.
Nevertheless, the anger remains. It has been building for a long time.
2. The Standard Model is a poor dumb thing to be angry at.
It is like being angry at television, at the stupidity of synchronous broadcast media, for missing a show you waited a month to watch, when it is neither the show nor the media that really annoys you but the temporality and finitude of life. It is like not crying at your mother's funeral and then bursting into tears a month later when you realise you missed Babylon 5 and, DVD or no DVD, the clock has ticked past a moment that may never come again.
But television *is* like a little death each time you miss a show. A permanent memento mori beamed direct from satellite into your living room.
Or perhaps it's the other way around, and life is like a little television?
Is a signal still out there, making its way to Vega?
Well of course there is.
3. What is my soul?
What is there about me that will survive the final meltdown?
It is easy to reject the idea of the crudely physical being all there is (even the Standard Model with its permanent lightspeed barrier claims that what we call 'physical' is a whole lattice of virtual waveforms and interactions that do not, at least in quite the ordinary way we think of the idea, exist) - but that's the easy part.
What about my thoughts? My skills? My memories? Are they the essential me, or are they merely distractions, shadow-plays thrown by an unseen core within?
Are my friendships me?
Is the 'soul' that I should guard and protect and dedicate my life to, the sum total of my interactions with all the people I have known? Is that who I am? Or is there something more beyond even that?
What is left of me when all that I know, all that I do, all that I touch, all that I look on, all that I feel, are taken away?
Are there any things - small things, ordinary things, perhaps - which will not fade into that dark at the end of life's highway?
Or must I let it take everything I know and leave my soul - whatever it might be - naked with the Unknown?
4. When I look at the world I see darkness and shadow, insubstantial mist peopled with grey ghosts, dashed with tiny specks of reality, joy, and truth. I live for the rare moments when things click and I recognise a face, or I achieve some worthwhile task. In between is a dull blur of futility, pointlessness, contradiction. Petty crimes and tiny shrugs of defeat. The darkness.
But when God looks at the world, He sees only light.
How do I grow eyes like those?
How do I see the truth in everything?
How do I see Christ's face in everyone?
How do I stop being angry?
How do I stop being afraid?
5. To fear is first to believe that there can be a place or a thought or an action which can exist outside of an infinite and loving God's mind.
This is common sense which we learn as children. Touch this, do not touch that. Go here, do not go there. If you touch that or go there you will be shocked by electricity or burned by fire or run over by a car or eaten by a dog. There are choices to be made and many of those choices are irreversible, or appear so. The best will in the world cannot heal the scars of bad choices made accidentally, or accidents endured without any choice at all.
This is the first and hardest lesson of childhood: that there is no way back from some mistakes. No savegame, no DVD, no rewind.
That sometimes, when the show's over and the lights go out and you stumble back from the supermarket an hour too late with an eco-friendly bag full of Foolish Virgin Olive Oil and no TV dinner, that's it, you missed the big reveal, it's gone and now you'll never find out.
To live as an ordinary sane human is to be almost constantly afraid. It's what keeps us alive. It's also what kills us.
Can one learn not to be afraid - can one remember a child's lost belief in that infinite and loving God outside whose mind we can never for a moment step - without becoming completely and utterly mad?
6. What about Hitler, anyway? Surely even God hates *someone*? He'd be evil not to!
It is hard to imagine a Father of infinite forgiveness. That is, it is easy to imagine, because every child dreams that, but hard to picture. As we grow (in religion as in anything else) we learn to put away childish things, among them being kindness and mercy and love.
What's love got to do with faith, after all? You have faith in something solid you can kick, that doesn't give under you. Love... is something brittle, easily damaged, self-destructive even. It bleeds. It dies. Its rotting corpse stinks up the closet under the sink and eventually you have to hold your nose and throw it out.
It is easy to picture a God of infinite and efficient mechanical purity, who quietly and without remorse strips all trace of taint from His heaven. A kind of cosmic Terminator, taking out the garbage. Holy above all. Unvisited by sorrow.
It's easy because we already have a picture of that Father. The grave.
7. The Nazis sang Schiller's Ode to Joy on Hitler's birthday.
Sometimes you cannot judge a person, or a poem, by the company they keep.
Sometimes you cannot judge the company one keeps by the company that company keeps.
If you go on like that, soon you will judge nothing at all.
And then where would we be?
8. I have a choice.
I can believe that all hope of an acceptable world is forever lost, that all things are dust and quarks, a short journey from darkness to darkness through pain.
I can believe that all hope is forever present, here and now, that all things are forgiven and reconciled on this very earth, and that life and mind have never been and cannot ever be lost.
I can try to believe that hope is conditional: that eternal life is achievable by some adept juggling of perishable, self-contradictory short-term meanings.
That last is the only ordinary, sane option.
I do not think I can bring myself to believe it.
Darkness, pt 1: Standard Model Blues
If then the light that is in you is darkness,
how great is the darkness!
-- Jesus, Gospel of Matthew
I'm no Jedi.
I'm just a guy with a lightsaber and a few questions.
-- Kyle Katarn, Jedi Outcast videogame (Raven/Lucasarts, 2002)
If you accept the reality of psychic (or any kind of fringe) phenomena - and there's more than enough evidence for me to make it apparent that something very interesting is going on with channelling, near death experiences and remote viewing / anomalous cognition -- then it becomes obvious that the fundamental physical models on which our best mainstream science is currently based are wrong.
At least, they're wrong to the extent to which they consider whole classes of demonstrated phenomena (such as those involving faster-than-lightspeed transmission of information) to be 'impossible'. And that seems a pretty hard thing to accept. Aren't general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model of Particle Physics all hugely well-attested theories with terabytes of data in their support? Wouldn't accepting that 'thoughts can influence matter' or 'some people can see the future' or 'life can exist beyond physical death' require completely abandoning all science, because science is based on the discrimination between 'what can exist' and 'what can't possibly exist'? Isn't, therefore, belief in psychic phenomena, UFOs, antigravity, God, Bigfoot, etc, all just part of a public rejection of Knowledge, and if Knowledge is the ultimate good, then isn't belief in the paranormal or supernatural actually wilful rejection of reality for insanity - in other words, a form of ultimate evil?
That's the approach that the CSICOP/CSI people - and the likes of Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins - take. It's probably valid, from a certain point of view that doesn't accept data points that I do.
Thing is, though, if you look at the data - and not even the fun fringe stuff, just the mainstream history of science and physics in the 20th century - the layperson might well start to wonder just what the point of high-energy physics research has been since WW2. The crude form of the question is so where the heck are my flying antigravity cars?, but even put more subtly it seems confusing at best. I am not a particle physicist, but as far as I can piece together the story goes roughly like this:
1. There appear to currently be two fundamental physical paradigms: General Relativity (Einstein, 1916) describing gravity, and Quantum Mechanics (various dates, but let's say 1928, when Paul Dirac described the electron).
2. Since then lots of particle-smashing at ever higher energies has led to a whole rather dishearteningly hairy particle zoo, captured in a formal theory called the Standard Model of Particle Physics (kicked off say from 1964 when quarks were proposed by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, and pretty much assembled by 1974 when it was described in a single report by John Iliopoulos), but still being tinkered with by researchers; the Top Quark wasn't found until 1995 (but its mass was way bigger than predicted) and the Tau Neutrino until 2000, and when the Large Hadron Collider fires up this May this year (2008) it hopes to find the elusive Higgs Boson, the last predicted particle. Or not. Not finding the Higgs would be interesting indeed, since the Higgs basically mediates mass itself and without it - perhaps - the whole Model falls apart. Or not. The Standard Model looks so ugly that by all rights it should have fallen apart decades ago, but still there it is.
3. The Standard Model is particle-centric and based on experimental evidence: it incorporates Quantum Mechanics and is compatible with General Relativity as far as it goes, but it doesn't really 'do' gravity. It describes all fields as being carried by particles except gravity - the so-called 'graviton' isn't part of the Standard Model.
Whoops. That's kinda a big hole to leave out. Of course, gravity is actually a weak, long-range force, so though it's a big deal to us macro-sized creatures, at the kind of high energies and tiny scales flung around inside a particle accelerator, gravity doesn't really affect the outcome much.
But still. No gravity in the real world of macroscopic distances == YOU FAIL IT. So we have to augment the Standard Model with good ol' Mark II General Relativity, unchanged from 1916.
Think about that. It's 2008, we've had a century of stunning advances in uber-tiny-scale physics, quarks and gluons and pi-mesons and stuff sprawling all over the place, and we're still using a model of gravity nearly a century old. From practically before there was widespread electrical lighting. A theory of fundamental physics from the middle of World War I, when there was still an Ottoman Empire and a Prussia and Russia was a monarchy with serfs.
Isn't that kinda weird, when you stop and look at it? Why did gravity get frozen in time while the whole subatomic world got invented, overthrown, and consolidated into a whole new dogma?
General Relativity has outlasted both the rise and fall of Soviet Communism. But when you look at that, is that a good thing?
What's so special about gravity, that it gets a free ride while everything else burns?
5. Because the Standard Model doesn't do gravity, and gravity lives off in its own secluded micro-theory, a general assumption has grown up that there can't possibly be any linkage between gravity and the other forces (except through astronomical-scale masses and energies), and that anyone who suggests any kind of theory allowing for 'room temperature antigravity' is by definition an insane crank.
This isn't said out loud, though, not as such. What's actually said (when the mainstream science journals have to actually respond to such a distasteful obviously-insane subject as antigravity, thankfully a rare occurrence) is something along the lines of 'Sorry, that's not replicable (ahem, and never will be). Also, the Standard Model, and Einstein... We'd like to not have to say outright that you're a fraud, so please withdraw your claims quietly. Remember Cold Fusion. Irrational exuberance, and all that.' And then a bit of public-spirited hand-wringing about how poor the state of science education is that such outlandish ideas are even imaginable, and How to Fix That.
5. But there's not actually a conspiracy of mainstream physicists against new science. Nobody actually *likes* the Standard Model. It's ugly and inelegant and from a mathematical point of view, quite obviously wrong (or at best woefully incomplete).
The problem is that it fits the data, and all the other theories so far are worse.
6. It's now fashionable to hate on string theory (the previous best rival for the Standard Model's crown) for not making any useful predictions.
But for all its data-fitting, the Standard Model hasn't actually done much worthwhile to justify itself in over thirty years. Except provide reasons to build ever-larger particle accelerators, which are justified purely because they provide opportunities to tune the Model.
The Large Hadron Collider is twenty-six kilometers long and spans the border of France and Switzerland.
Where are the actual spin-offs? The technologies?
What are quarks for?
Stand back, look at the long view of the bare data with a layman's eye, and think.
If quarks were proposed in 1964 and the Standard Model was formulated in 1974:
The United States built fission bombs in the 1940s and fusion bombs in the 1950s without the Standard Model.
The United States put people on the Moon in 1969 without the Standard Model. They didn't even need nuclear to do that: chemistry, astronomy and electronics.
The Internet doesn't use the Standard Model (unless there are very exotic transistors out there.)
The Global Positioning System, started in 1978 and finished in 1995, needs relativity (or at least Lorentz transformations) to do its maths, but it doesn't need the Standard Model.
We have electron-based technologies. We have atom-based technologies. We have a whole shed full of photon-based technologies.
What quark-based technologies have even been proposed in a lab?
What does learning this new stuff let us actually do, rather than fill in blanks on a bingo card?
Spintronics, maybe? Quantum computing? Something with Bose-Einstein condensates? Those seem cool. But the general vibe one gets from mainstream physics right now is a cautious 'Don't get your hopes up, there are fundamental limits and we long since reached them. No faster-than-light for you. No teleportation. Quantum encryption, maybe, but no FTL communication. No gravity control. No cosmic radiant energy. No time travel. Tiny black holes, hardly likely. Fusion, still twenty years to ignition (the world will melt first). The best we can do is make silicon chips smaller and atomic fission slightly less toxic (but not really).'
So far the most interesting thing for the everyday person that CERN has created has been the World Wide Web: a spinoff, yes, but not of particle research.
So why are we firing up the LHC? In the hopes that this time, the dry well will finally spring a gusher?
Is it a wonder that the best minds of the 1980s went into banking, and in the 1990s and 2000s into Google and Facebook? At least in computing there's still actual frontiers.
Or: you could opt for the increasingly-popular paranoid layman's view that 'of course they found all sorts of cool applications for quarks and gluons: but the US government classified it for military uses'. Hyperdrive, aliens, mind-control deathrays, secret bases on the Moon: it's all there for the dreaming, if you can bring yourself to believe that evil is triumphant, that reality is a disposable farce, and that nothing the common person can do is worthwhile.
I'm not quite ready to go there yet. I think our history is mostly true, as far as it goes. But I think there are some huge blind spots.
7. This huge lack of imagination in physics is coming to a head in the Mundane Science Fiction movement: the problem (from the artistic side) is described quite well in this article The Science Fiction Event Horizon (found via the intriguing blog Spooky Paradigm).
In a nutshell: science fiction used to be a mix of fantasy and scientific extrapolation. Now it's just fantasy, because we've run out of imagination. In direct contrast to the early years of the 20th century, the best science available now tells us that the universe is vastly less full of wonders than we imagine, on any scale accessible to us. The most interesting thing we'll ever know is Earth's biosphere, and we're killing that as fast as we can, in fact it's half gone already: we're well into in the Sixth Extinction and it seems even money that it will be our own.
The best hard science available tells us that our time here is up, we're pretty much doomed as a species, and there's really nothing more to find and nowhere else to go. No God, no Heaven. No fairies, no Klingons. Just some dead particles, dead moons, dead stars, and lots and lots and lots of hard vacuum. And then oblivion.
That's not a story we want to hear, it doesn't make a good movie so we don't publicise it often, it's a story that if you take it into your bones will drive you stark staring mad, but it's the Higgs Boson's honest truth.
If you believe the Standard Model (plus Einstein) is all there is.
8. This is the darkness we live in.
This is the darkness we struggle against, even as we accept it.
This is the best science available to us, the light of truth as we know it, and it is toxic to our souls, radioactive ash in our mouth.
It kills us to believe it, but we feel we have no choice. The data has spoken. There is no there there. There never was a living Spirit in anything but our imagination. We must bow to harsh reality. To dream is but to dream; to wake, desolation.
We are in the greatest Age of Light the world has ever seen, and how great is the darkness.
Dreamlog: Trail by Arcade
I am in a courtroom in a foreign country with a group of friends. A male friend of mine is defending himself against Sharia law charges. A female friend is having an angina-type attack and we need to give her medication. She can't speak but is aware of her situation and communicates to us with hand signals where to find her pills and the number she needs - I assume it would be one but am surprised when she says she needs eight.
Meanwhile, at the same time and somehow part of the trial, we are playing a retro, single-player videogame reminiscent of Rally-X and Qix. A stylised race car drives around a two-dimensional playing field marking out square areas of territory which are then claimed as winnings. There are hazards on the track, including whole missing tiles which the car falls through.
Astrospies
More on the semi-secret history of the USAF's acknowledged MOL and Blue Gemini programs: a PBS documentary airing this week, Astrospies.
Edit: More commentary on Slashdot.
Edit: It also wasn't an X-20 DynaSoar in Marooned, it was an 'XRV lifting body' based on the X-24A. So many ships that never were.
Monad, Process, Hologram
Reading the Monadology of Gottfried Liebniz, a name that has come up linked contexts with Holographic Universe theories, and it resonates with me. Some interesting passages:
56. Now this connexion or adaptation of all created things to each and of each to all, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and, consequently, that it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe. (Theod. 130, 360.)
57. And as the same town, looked at from various sides, appears quite different and becomes as it were numerous in aspects [perspectivement]; even so, as a result of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were so many different universes, which, nevertheless are nothing but aspects [perspectives] of a single universe, according to the special point of view of each Monad. (Theod. 147.)
58. And by this means there is obtained as great variety as possible, along with the greatest possible order; that is to say, it is the way to get as much perfection as possible. (Theod. 120, 124, 241 sqq., 214, 243, 275.)
which has strong echoes for me of computational graph knowledge-representation theories such as the Semantic Web.
There's also a huge lot of stuff here that links with the recurring philosophical worldview described by people with near-death and afterlife experiences: that God is intimately involved with the tiniest details of our lives, and is in fact somehow 'wired in' to the very fabric of the universe - a fabric which is not necessarily primarily physical but mental. It's a beautiful piece of writing and I have to fight the temptation to quote the entire thing, because I think Leibniz here came pretty close to cracking some fundamental ideas about cybernetics, biomechanics, complexity theory and spirituality which we still struggle with today:
63. The body belonging to a Monad (which is its entelechy or its soul) constitutes along with the entelechy what may be called a living being, and along with the soul what is called an animal. Now this body of living being or of an animal is always organic; for, as every Monad is, in its own way, a mirror of the universe, and as the universe is ruled according to a perfect order, there must also be order in that which represents it, i.e. in the perceptions of the soul, and consequently there must be order in the body, through which the universe is represented in the soul. (Theod. 403.)
64. Thus the organic body of each living being is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton, which infinitely surpasses all artificial automata. For a machine made by the skill of man is not a machine in each of its parts. For instance, the tooth of a brass wheel has parts or fragments which for us are not artificial products, and which do not have the special characteristics of the machine, for they give no indication of the use for which the wheel was intended. But the machines of nature, namely, living bodies, are still machines in their smallest parts ad infinitum. It is this that constitutes the difference between nature and art, that is to say, between the divine art and ours. (Theod. 134, 146, 194, 403.)
65. And the Author of nature has been able to employ this divine and infinitely wonderful power of art, because each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, as the ancients observed, but is also actually subdivided without end, each part into further parts, of which each has some motion of its own; otherwise it would be impossible for each portion of matter to express the whole universe. (Theod. Prelim., Disc. de la Conform. 70, and 195.)
This is basically the Holographic Paradigm in a nutshell, or a variant of it. And he's right, it's the fractal recursive cellular structure of organic things that gives them their 'living' quality - this is also the line of thought that Christopher Alexander has been following up in his Nature of Order.
The idea of nested souls is also the Powers Theology of Walter Wink, Arthur Koestler's Holons, Dee Hock's 'Chaords', Alexander's 'Centers', Napoleon Hill's 'Master Minds' (I think), and a whole bunch more.
What stuns me about Leibniz is how much his theory revolves around God being a part of the picture:
83. Among other differences which exist between ordinary souls and minds [esprits], some of which differences I have already noted, there is also this: that souls in general are living mirrors or images of the universe of created things, but that minds are also images of the Deity or Author of nature Himself, capable of knowing the system of the universe, and to some extent of imitating it through architectonic ensamples [echantillons], each mind being like a small divinity in its own sphere. (Theod. 147.)
84. It is this that enables spirits [or minds- esprits] to enter into a kind of fellowship with God, and brings it about that in relation to them He is not only what an inventor is to his machine (which is the relation of God to other created things), but also what a prince is to his subjects, and, indeed, what a father is to his children.
85. Whence it is easy to conclude that the totality [assemblage] of all spirits [esprits] must compose the City of God, that is to say, the most perfect State that is possible, under the most perfect of Monarchs. (Theod. 146; Abrege, Object. 2.)
86. This City of God, this truly universal monarchy, is a moral world in the natural world, and is the most exalted and most divine among the works of God; and it is in it that the glory of God really consists, for He would have no glory were not His greatness and His goodness known and admired by spirits [esprits]. It is also in relation to this divine City that God specially has goodness, while His wisdom and His power are manifested everywhere. (Theod. 146; Abrege, Object. 2.)
The word 'glory' here jumps out at me, because I'm pretty sure Leibniz is using it in its original meaning: something like 'radiance' or 'outshining', IIRC. The idea being conveyed is that the glory of an object is not what we might today use the word to mean, 'social status' -- rather it means what is transmitted out from it -- 'glow' or 'aura' or 'field' or 'corona'.
This doesn't mean that God 'gets some kind of ego boost' out of having an audience (and therefore is some kind of needy emotional cripple dependent on praise) but that we, technically speaking, are God's corona: the aura shining out from Him, the energy field that is transmitted. God's nature being to replicate, we are that wave of replication.
(There is a page on Computational Monadology which is intriguing.)
The other philosopher/theologian I am interested in right now is Alfred North Whitehead, also with a computational science sort of background -- worked with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematical -- and his ideas on 'process philosophy'. The same connections show through, this time with the body of work known generally as 'systems theory' -- to which I personally would add Korzybski's General Semantics as part of the same broad stream -- but Whitehead is one of the more consciously religious of the modern systems theorists, and like Leibniz, also seems to have an immensely strong vision of the immanence of God as 'kubernetes' or steersman of the vast cybernetic system that is the universe (physical and mental) in which we find ourselves.
There is a whole lot of related work here that I want to try to cluster together somehow; one of the main ideas that seems to link this material is a kind of East-West philosophical bridging centering around bringing (back) into Western philosophical and religious awareness the notions of flow and ecology: that all (created) things are part of a linked whole system, within which limited borders or subsets can only be drawn from the perspective of an observer. Walter Russell also seems to me to be very important as an early 20th century promoter of this link, from an overtly Christian-mystical perspective (and also with computing links, being a friend in late life of IBM's Thomas J Watson) - also with a strong vision of the immanence and constant involvement of God in the unfolding life of the world.
I suppose the central idea here to me is that there is a sort of process of 'reenchantment' going on, here in the early 21st century: a 'reweaving' of the idea of God as not a 'cosmic absentee landlord', a caricature which has been rightly rebelled against and discarded, but as something even more startling: a living source of creative intelligence energy active at the very core of our being. A 'Vast Active Living Intelligent System', as Philip K Dick struggled to describe his glimpse of the Infinite. And yet, is not a new image of God so much as it is one that has been lost or forgotten during the years of industrialisation.
23 48′47.70″ S 133 44′16.86″ E
Flat chat Pine Gap in every home a Big Mac
And no-one goes outback that's that.
-- Midnight Oil
The Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap, Australia has always had significance in the UFO urban mythology. What is publically acknowledged and uncontested about the US-led base is that it, like its much smaller New Zealand cousin Waihopai, does signals intelligence for the UKUSA intelligence community and the so-called ECHELON program, and that (among many other supply lines) it is serviced on the New Zealand end by military cargo 'channel flights' routed through the Operation Deep Freeze Antarctic science base in my hometown, Christchurch.
(Interestingly, my father worked with Deep Freeze as an engineer for many years and although I don't believe he ever lied to me, I was surprised to discover that the Harewood base is considered sovereign US soil - the subject somehow never came up, or if it did it didn't stick. Dad, like I guess a lot of civilian air people of the generation old enough to remember WW2, was generally a supporter of the USA, and the assumption was that you got out of the way of the military and let them do their thing, and antiwar protesters were annoying people who might have a point but took it too far. After all, who else would save us from the USSR?)
But I also grew up with an assortment of UFO lore from sources like Stan Deyo's Cosmic Conspiracy, in which Pine gap featured prominently in a much wilder, science-fictional role as 'the Australian Area 51'.
Every now and then I check up on the UFO mythos potboiler websites to see if any actual gems of truth (or what passes for it) have surfaced out of the glop. The problem, you see, is that once you've been exposed to one source of mind-blowing information (and growing up religious meets that criteria), it's harder to dismiss outright even the most incredible claims, because well, who's to say? And of course it's always hard to tell a well-stage-managed hoax from mind-melting truth, especially when you look back at the history of the 20th century and go 'whoa, we landed on the freaking moon!' In comparison to Tranquility Base, not much is weirder.
Note to conspiracy buffs: my personal list of conspiracies does NOT include 'Apollo never happened', and it disheartens me immensely to see how popular such an outright lie has become. But what fascinates me, in retrospect, is looking back at the Cold War, the Space Race and the curious gaps in history; the politics, the media spin, the popular culture, the artful not-quite-outright-deception that painted a picture of Space as the New Frontier, Kirk and Klingons and all, when in reality it wasn't a frontier for anything much except communications satellites and city-killer ICBMs. And after touching the moon once, we never went back at all! Doesn't that seem strange? It does to me - but only if you believed the public not-quite-lies as to why the Space Race happened, if you bought the spin that NASA was 'civilian' and 'we come in peace for all mankind' - while all the Apollo astronauts were military men and the same rockets were cross-purposed for weapons of mass destruction and the lead scientists were ex-Nazis - but they were now 'good' rockets because they did SCIENCE.
The problem with wars is that they breed secrecy. The problem with total wars is that they breed total secrecy. The problem with total secrets is that they need to be defended with total lies: blank-faced outright denials, and an ecosystem of 'disinformation', cover stories, and psychological manipulation.
The problem with building public democracy on a security-first policy enshrouded in total lies is that, eventually, people stop believing anything their elected representatives say. And that's a very dangerous place for a democracy to head - aliens or no aliens.
Pine Gap is one of those holes. On the surface, it's just a bunch of satellite dishes. There's a mythology of course about a whole underground base there. Which seemed pretty bizarre to me, but then you stop and think: this was the Cold War. Pine Gap is a hugely critical bit of infrastructure. It's right in the middle of Australia, one of the safest places to be in a nuke war, as far away from the continental USA as you can get, but it's got the biggest bullseye ever painted right on it - it'll be about the first target to get melted when the ICBMs start flying.
So. If you were in the 1950s or 1960s, and you had the military money, the military motivation, and the military secrecy needed to, say, excavate large underground bases for continuity of government and similar Cold War functions (the 'mineshaft gap' as Stanley Kubrick satirised it) -- would you miss the chance to put a hardened facility in Australia?
If there were some kind of bunker there, more than just a listening post - what else might be in it? In the absence of truth, speculation runs riot. And besides, it's just plain fun to think about secret military bases fighting UFOs, like a Gerry Anderson show.
That's one hole. Then you get the curious fact of the parallel USAF manned space program, not often talked about and supposedly shut down in 1989 (itself a curious year of global realignments)... and that's another hole.
The 1960s parallelism of USAF and NASA, and a guest appearance by the X-20 Dyna-Soar, are both apparent in the underappreciated 1969s space disaster movie Marooned. Watch this movie, which was playing (or at least fresh in the public's minds) at the time of Apollo 13, and you might get a sense of both how jumpy NASA was about the PR risks of manned spaceflight (which might explain why Apollo was so abruptly discontinued by Nixon) -- but also about what the future of the Apollo program was expected to look like. Not the lumbering Shuttle, but Dyna-Soar and MOL.
(Whatever did happen to MOL? Was it *really* cancelled in 1963? The bumbling US performance on ISS compared to the Russians suggests yes, and I guess a Saturn launch from the West Coast would be hard to hide, but... well, it's fun to speculate on what might have been, and might still be in some parallel universe, anyway.)
So: it's against a framework of such reasonably hard-science possibilities and intriguing lacunae in the public record, and the known paranoia and 'Team B' double-handling and compartmentalism of those Cold War years... and the awareness that many of the same people who ran with Nixon and Reagan are still movers and shakers... that you overhear some strange conversations on the Web.
Yes, it's most likely just another hoaxer. A lot of what he says sounds too plausible to be true, for those with a preconditioned science-fiction, UFO-lore mindset. That rings alarm bells. But...
Well, it's those holes that interest me. And 23 48'47.70" S 133 44'16.86" E is a lot of fun to look at in Google Earth, especially if you turn terrain elevation on (I maxed mine up to 3x) and just take a wander around. I didn't realise there were so many conveniently diggable-into hills there; flat satellite maps don't do it justice.
What *is* under there? Not that I necessarily want to know, if it's just bombs. I want the truth to be cooler than that. I want there to have been a Stargate program running from inside Cheyenne Mountain. I want us to have been out there exploring the galaxy, not just fretting about Islam and China. I want all that money to have been spent at least on some good special effects. Even if the story is a lie. I want to believe the truth is out there. I really do.
But one day, Pine Gap and all the places like it will be either opened up to the light of truth, or torn down by the violence they're stacking up, and it's going to happen sooner rather than later.
And then peace will come.
Dreamlog: Exploit
A tiny fragment at the end of a far more interesting dream that I lost on waking:
A new Internet security exploit is being reported on the news. Apparently it is a slightly more intelligent variant of the Nigerian 419 scam. A website has been advertised up claiming to be a hacking target, either a bank with low security or some kind of deliberate paid challenge, and that the first hackers to successfully break in will win a sum of money.
The sting, however, is that the site is merely a honeypot: as hackers attempt to break its defences, it is responding with its own sophisticated attack techniques to break into *their* machines. (The term used in the dream-news bulletin was 'drawbridges', which is of course a nonsense term in real world computer security, but would make a nice alt-cyberpunk phrase.) So it is sort of a meta-hack, an exploit particularly aiming to rip off black-hat hackers.
The dream ends before I find out whether this is some kind of government sting or an inter-botnet gang turf war, but apparently China was behind it.
Teshuvah, Metanoia
A friend of mine said recently 'I'd like to go to churches, but they're always talking about sin'.
One of the fundamental theological concepts in Christianity is 'repentance'. There are at least two words translated as this English word: the Hebrew 'teshuvah' (returning), and the Greek 'metanoia' (change of mind, or more literally, thinking beyond, or thinking about thought).
Both of these words, looked at as words, seem to carry a very different resonance than what the word repent! conjures up for English speakers: dark suits, forbidding expressions, angry scowling faces, crazy people waving placards, endless guilt and inner torment. But the idea also constantly recurs in spiritual writings that seem on the face of it far more gentle. Some even go so far as to say that the entire purpose of life on Earth is to learn to repent. So what does it mean?
Returning suggests that there is something to return to: something more fundamental, more healthy, more integrated, more real than what what we consider 'human nature' to be. 'Metanoia' is almost the inverse of this idea, but parallels it: it looks to the future, considers the human mind considering itself, and suggests that everything is open to reevaluation, meta-judgement; that all our decisions can be reevaluated in a different light.
At the moment the idea resonates strongly in several books I am reading:
J W Dunne's The Serial Universe, from 1938, argues that time is a construct of mind which allows us to easily experience the self observing the self in a recursive progression. In other words, at least as I parse it, the reason we live in time is so that we have the luxury of changing our mind, of observing and learning from our mistakes: metanoia, mind-thinking-about-mind.
Dunne is a mystic, but also a logical thinker, and I find him fascinating; he argues as would a professor of computer science, but the wisps of a wider world wind around his thinking.
In 1982's The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes edited by Ken Wilber, David Bohm and others (but most interestingly Bohm) discuss a very similar worldview friendly to both mysticism and science, in which things and minds are aspects of an interpenetrating whole, which itself is the merest aspect of an intelligence beyond which cannot be contained in human thought.
Bohm talks about the problem of the world, as he sees it, in terms which though inspired by the philosophy of Krishnamurti, seem to me to map very closely onto the Jewish-Christian idea of sin and repentance:
We could call that the corruption of mankind, that the brain and the consciousness and the deeper levels, not only in the manifest levels of the brain but also in the nonmanifest, that there has been left this pollution, which is this whole view which leads to all this violence, corruption, disorder, self-deception. See, you could say that almost all of mankind's thought is aimed at self-deception, which momentarily relieves pressures arising from this way of thinking, of being separate, and it produces pressures. When a person is under pressure, any thought that comes in to relieve that pressure will be accepted as true. But immediately that leads to more pressure because it's wrong and then you take another thought to relieve that thought....
...And that whole corruption of the nonmanifest - that pollution which has accumulated over the ages - we could call the sorrow of mankind. It is not just in an individual. It is in the nonmanifest consciousness of mankind.
The view Bohm is talking about here is very much like that of A Course In Miracles (and Mary Baker Eddy): that mind and matter are linked (in fact that matter is sort of a final product of mind; we can see that this is obviously true in, for example, built human structures like cities and machines, less obvious but still present in ecology and mind-body diseases, and startling to contemplate when looking at 'purely physical', apparently nonliving, noncreated systems). Like them, he also goes further: he believes all human minds are also ultimately linked, in fact, ultimately one.
This sort of philosophy maps very nicely onto Jesus' teachings about 'doing unto others' and 'loving our neighbour as ourself', and onto the reports of near-death experiencers and afterlife communications that describe the world as seen from the realms of spirit as composed primarily of intentions and being interlinked, interpenetrating and ultimately one. There can be no 'individual salvation' (though there is an individual saving work to do, as we personally confront our own view of the darkness and lighten it, starting from the inside) - any more than there can be 'self-righteousness', because none of us stand apart from the whole of humanity, judging it, separating from it. We all share in the sin, and we all share in the redemption.
Sin, war, disease and all forms of badness are in this worldview all corruptions of humanity's shared consciousness - from which (or perhaps more strictly, through which, since the creative Intelligence which makes the world doesn't seem to originate in us as much as it acts in us) all that we see as 'physical' and 'real' ultimately appears.
This is a very strong view of the reality and power of 'mind' compared to 'matter', but I think Bohm (alongside Eddy, and Dunne, and the writer of ACIM, and any number of mystics) makes a very strong argument that it is in fact the case: and that coming to terms with this apparently bizarre idea will lead to a huge simplification in basic physics as well as an apparently new (though in fact very old) approach to human relations: love your neighbour because at some level we don't understand but which is literally and really true, we are all parts of each other.
Alfred Korzybski's General semantics, from the 1930s like Dunne, makes a very similar argument to Bohr about the ultimate oneness and non-describability in symbols of reality, and I think it comes from similar roots. There seems to have been a huge explosion in serious academic understanding of mystical experience and its relation to philosophy and physics around the turn of the century to World War II, feeding into and out of the new ideas of physics, the quantum and relativity revolutions -- but the generation that followed seems to have lost ground, or at least, those ideas were laughed out the academy and took to the street in the form of the New Age movement and a scattering of new religious groups and cults, where they continue to have huge popular appeal but are laughed and scorned (and deeply feared) in the halls of learning.
And interesting enough, with the abandonment of the mystics, our fundamental physics also seems to have struggled: General Relativity was in 1916, quantum mechanics seems to have been mostly complete by 1932, and the two are fundamentally incompatible; the Trinity explosion in 1945 marks the high-water mark of radically new physics; everything else since then, with the billions of dollars of research spent on nuclear weaponry and high energy particle physics, has been just tweaking the parameters of the Standard Model, and a deep skepticism about the mere existence of any other ways of conceptualising physics seems to have replaced the playful experimentation of those early decades. The leading contender for an integration of the whole system, String Theory, appears to have spectacularly lost its way. We've innovated hugely in engineering and in materials science, but practicing physicists, though they may watch Star Trek in private and long for hyperspace, tend to pour venomous outrage onto concepts like antigravity and cold fusion, with the anger Scientific American normally reserves for religion and the paranormal. Why is this? Why aren't mainstream physicists jumping all over Lifters and low energy nuclear reaction? Surely even the merest hint of a shadow of a possible new physical effect should attract hordes of well-funded researchers desperate for a scoop - but it doesn't. Yet.
But is the tide turning, and are we at least seeing a way to integrate seriously thought out mystical concepts both with practical, lived commonsense science, and with traditional religion? For my part, discovering all these documents feels like a literal answer to prayer: ideas which bridge the gap between religion and science without compromising either.
The more I think about this though the sadder I get when I look at my life and see how little I actually practice anything like teshuvah, metanoia, and living forgiveness. To take something like oneness seriously would entail, as Jesus said, forgiving 'seventy times seven': and what does that do to my relationship to order, justice, law, orthodoxy, economics, and all the social apparatus of judgement, scarcity and punishment which keeps our world running?
