Momentary

Today Sir Wolff sat with me. He had been put in mind of an old rhyme:

One for the money
Two for the show
Three to get ready
And four to go!

This was in connection with several events, all held a few hours ago, at which Sir Wolff's former Lords Inquisitorial of the Magisterium had been spread thinly throughout — trapped in gold laurels, or with gold ingots, or dealing with the gold of youth, and so forth.

I asked him, "Wolff, were you always inclined to be so irreverent of your superiors?"

He chuckled. "No, rather say that I was never more reverent than usual of the banal or mundane; the quotidian, secular or ephemeral. What is there to revere especially of those who breathe the air we breathe and use the same conveniences that we do? I respected their rank, and avoided their authority."

I tsked at him. "Avoidance of authority shows some disrespect, surely."

Soberly, he replied, "But this was sometimes the only way to serve the higher calling and the grand endeavour. At the end of my days, I often felt nothing more than a mercenary."

And that was our cue for the wine and cheese.

Privacy

Privacy has always been an illusion, but a necessary one. The word comes from Latin privus, which means "one's own". The idea that we can own something that nobody else can touch is what makes us persons; if everything we had was shared to some extent, then the only unique thing about us would be the specific configuration of things we shared.

But this age of free information flow is beginning to deprive (to separate, to alienate) us of privacy's illusion. The logical consequence of everything about you being shared to some extent by others is that you may no longer be a unique identity; your information can be duplicated and the sum of what you are may be shared.

Hold on, though. Most people would agree that a person is more than just a state of being, but a time-bound entity filled with memories and experiences. That, unfortunately, is more accurately described as 'an entity with the perception of being time-bound, filled with edited information purporting to be a record of past events, bearing the marks of experiences which are ill-defined and sometimes imaginary.'

The problem, as we have learnt over the last 20 years, is that our brains are always shifting. The curse of humanity, we have come to know, is not that our brains don't regenerate, but that they do, and they also shift configurations and modify memories and change the nuances of what we think, even before we know anything is there to be thought. We are the sum of mental processes we can't control, if we are the sum of such things at all.

In fact, some people have come to realise that the more people share a person, the more that person lives on in more dimensions. A person who is 'larger than life' is simply one whose total impact on others is much more than the usual. My grandparents, all deceased, live on in some legendary sense — people who were taught by them, who had experiences with them, tell me stories that seem true to me (and probably are true as far as those people know) about them. When we say that memories live on, that is true; but like living things, they change and mutate before reproducing again.

This is a problem of cultural anthropology and ethnography. You grow up in an environment. You tacitly learn its rules. You learn what you can say, what you should do, and so on. But if you don't commit all these things meticulously to another medium, it remains tacit knowledge, shifty and ill-defined. It becomes private knowledge, set apart only for you, and perhaps applicable only to you; in the extreme, there's something schizoid about it.

But all cultures thrive on shared experiences and shared rules, no matter how untrue or unreal they are. That is how myths and legends define societies — in this day and age, none more so than the myths and legends of science and information technology. 'Privacy' used to mean 'deprivation' — it may yet come full cycle in this age.

Cultural Mandate

I was musing on the term 'Cultural Mandate' recently. Like the phrase 'Cultural Revolution', it has a completely different sense from its normal semantic burden when placed in context. In the context to which I am referring, it is the idea that there is an explicit religious directive or 'permission' to engage the world of secular culture from the viewpoint of a specific religion.

I think that this particular idea is relatively meaningless except when contrasted against another idea. This would be the idea that religion is a private thing to be kept out of the mainstream and out of other people's faces as much as possible.

The point I'd make is that no interpretation of religion should assert a 'Cultural Mandate'. Religion is a social phenomenon, and automatically engages culture. It should automatically engage present-day issues and current affairs. This is not to say that it should have the dominant say, but that it will always have some say. Let me show you why I say this.

(I will use the term 'Church' to represent any organised religion in the following points.) Societies that demand the separation of spiritual and secular tend to fall into four logical areas:

1. You can have the 'Church vs State' model in which you do not let churchmen into the state or statesmen into the church. This makes the country effectively a bipartite state. Historically, this idea could be seen in countries like Andorra, which was ruled by a French duke and a Spanish bishop.
2. You can have the 'Church above State' model in which the churchmen are statesmen but first churchmen (often called a theocracy). In such cases, since the Church makes almost everything its business, the secular state is very small in scope.
3. You can have the 'Church below State' model in which the State has all the powers and the Church is tolerated but is not allowed to express itself in all ways, since some of these ways might be detrimental to public order. This is the case for modern France, for example, which protects religious practice as long as it doesn't interfere with public order.
4. You can have the 'neither Church nor State, or whichever is more advantageous' model in which the State professes to also have an official Church. Historically, England and many other European states were like this; you will still find that the ruler of England has the title Fidei Defensor ('Defender of the Faith').

What I am saying with these four cases is that there is no case in which you can take the Church out of the State completely, and there will always be scope for the religious to place their views on offer in the marketplace of ideas.

But hold on, you say, what about those states which actively suppress religious activity?

Well, that is not the separation of spiritual and secular, but the separation of spiritual from secular, with the intent of abolishing the former entirely. In such states, even secular culture suffers and takes on near-religious mythological significance.

My point is that the only reason one might claim to have a 'Cultural Mandate' is that there is actually some force (possibly even from within, such as religious conservatism) that says that people of a certain religion should not act as cultural agents in the secular world. The acts of such a cultural agent would possibly include singing in a nightclub, posting sensual (but not obscene, speaking with cultural relativity) music videos, writing philosophy textbooks, teaching history, or running a wine shop (or coffee house) without posting the relevant scriptural justifications all over the place.

If these activities are seen as inappropriate for practising religionists, I'd probably add being a lawyer (in some religions, it is said that 'the strength of sin is the law'), being a banker or working in many financial organisations (in some religions, it is a sin to charge usurious rates), or trading in any tainted (by religious definition) goods — such as images, foodstuffs, books, or education (depending on what religion it is, and with specifics different for each).

Does a religionist need a 'Commercial Mandate' too? Apparently, it is not so popular a topic, and in fact I've noticed that movements who make noise about cultural sinfulness tend to be very happy and make big justifications for commercial sinfulness (although the reverse is not normally so true).

Well, these are some of my thoughts. There's no solid, meaty, whack-on-the-head conclusion here, except that I don't think a cultural phenomenon needs a cultural mandate.

The English Opening

I've been playing chess again. Of late, my studies have led me into something called the English Opening. It's a deceptively quiet-looking opening, in which the White player plays an odd flank move and the Black player is then faced with a multitude of choices, each of which spawns its own alternate world of manoeuvre, threat and counter-threat.

There are historical analogies here, I suppose. English history is full of these quiet moves in the Great Game, in which the other player suddenly finds himself with too many alternatives, all of which seem alternately promising and dangerous.

The other day, I saw a book by former World Chess Champion Anatoly Karpov on the English Opening. In that book, he more or less says, "Here are a bunch of games. Play through them with my comments as your guide. It's the only way you will ever begin to understand the English Opening."

To some extent, that's true. Unless you spend what seems to be a lifetime playing through such games with an experienced guide, it is hard to understand the English. The whole matter is too rich, too multifarious and transpositional, to understand in a short time.

After a lot of thought, I've decided that being English is about as complicated as being Chinese. About the only thing the two have in common, though, is the sense of imperial privilege that occasionally peeks out after a bit of manoeuvring around on the board.

Subcompetence and Splinter Cultures

The last few days have been days in which I've managed to catch up with old friends as well as young friends. I've also managed to make ends meet by sitting around at the local Starbucks and dispensing advice for a fee. This has not been easy, since I am normally pretty serious about the advice I dispense, and I try my best to give useful material.

But in between sessions of advice-dispensing and consequent fee-taking, I found myself musing on two tangentially related themes. Subcompetence is one; the Dicksonian idea of 'splinter cultures' is the other.

Subcompetence is an interesting word; it is related to both 'competition' and 'competence' through the common Latin origin competere, which means 'to strive together (towards a common goal)'. When one says a person is 'competent', we mean that his faculties are coherently focussed when he undertakes a specific task. Nowadays, it also implies that he is able to carry out that task, whatever it is. The odd thing of course is that modern competition is far from a common striving; perhaps it is antagonistic striving towards the same prize, which only one competitor can win.

But what is subcompetence? It is the state of being just about unable to complete or excel in one's chosen task, or the task one has been given. I was thinking about it because there are a whole bunch of people out there who have seemingly been dragooned into teaching a subject that none of them is fit to teach (as far as the evidence seems to show). They all come from one discipline, in which it is possible to believe they are competent, and inflict themselves (or are inflicted) upon innocent students who find that they have not learnt very much from the experience.

How do I know this? I know this because whenever I ask the students why they don't seem to have learnt the right stuff, they keep referring to the same people. And these people all have at least one thing in common.

It put me in mind of the Splinter Cultures first described by Gordon Dickson in his Childe Cycle, beginning with 'The Tactics of Mistake'. In that sequence, humanity forms highly specialised cultures which farm out their skills with varying degrees of success. Since specialists are paid so much more than general 'baseline' humans, the market drives ever more specialised culturalisation. Eventually, the cycle shows that this results in peculiar dysfunctions, as the specialists prove incapable of holistic synthesis (or anything remotely similar).

When faced with a subject like 'Theory of Knowledge', which by its nature requires the ability to roam back and forth comfortably across the world of all the disciplines and areas of knowledge, people with a highly specialised training tend to fail. They can only see things from their specialist perspective, which makes their ability to educate others somewhat lacking.

The whole thing leads to one thought. If you claim you are going to try to provide (or worse, that you DO provide) an holistic education, you cannot afford to dispense with a) skilled generalists, b) structures that bring specialists together in common endeavours of cross-disciplinary learning. If you make such an error, you might possibly still claim multidisciplinarity, but you certainly will not be able to provide an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary education. And once you go there, there is no way you can even claim an holistic perspective or pretensions to providing an holistic education.

The Power of Number

I came home yesterday and promptly fell asleep. It's been a gruelling three days or so, at the Temple of the Red Queen's Race. Let me digress a bit before I continue.

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I don't know why people give such awful names to places. I have in mind two specific names: 'Cineleisure' and 'Leisuredrome'. I shall now enlarge on this digression etymologically.

'Cineleisure' is a sort of reverse-portmanteau-abomination-construct. It is a contraction, I think, of 'cinema' + 'leisure'. 'Cinema' comes from the Greek kinema ('movement') and hence 'cine' comes from Greek kinein ('to move'), while 'leisure' is related to 'lease', 'license', and other words which imply a relaxation of control. 'Cineleisure' means something like 'a loss of control over one's movement', and even in modern English, it should mean something like 'moving while not really bothering to move'.

'Leisuredrome' is just as bad. The Greek dromos means 'a running track' or 'a race course'. This of course is something like a reversed version of 'Cineleisure'. It probably means 'a place to run around recklessly'. I seem to remember that it had a skating rink in it, so I suppose that might have been part of the idea.

The Red Queen's Race is, of course, a concept taken from Lewis Carroll. The Red Queen had to keep running just to stay in the same place; it's somewhat related to the concept of Red Tape, which is created to keep people in the same place despite running around a lot.

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Digression over, let me just say why I was so sleepy when I got home. I've had to use my brain a lot, and the food supplied was simple and extremely good. I had a sublime pastrami-on-onion-rye sandwich, a wonderfully thin apple tart with fresh vanilla ice-cream, and a host of other treats, all washed down with delicious caffeine sources. All this makes one sleepy in a pleasant sort of way.

The upshot of the whole experience was that I am now a certified provider of 'digital literacy' and 'technology infused learning'. This amuses me a lot, although I am happy to have obtained the certification; I've always felt that 'digital literacy' should mean 'the ability to talk by using one's fingers'.

But what really hit me in the head this afternoon was the thought that if not for an accident (or incident) of number, we would be ten years faster in adopting many good practices. What I'm referring to is the phenomenon known as 'Y2K' or 'the year 2000'.

The year 2000 AD was the last year of the second millennium (which ran from 1001 to 2000, just as the first one ran from 1 to 1000). A lot of people had invested into the memetic package known as 'the 21st century', in which all things were supposed to be different and the future was supposed to have arrived.

Simply because of this cultural illusion fostered by the calendar, people waited till the year 2000 (when the first digit of the year designation changed) or 2001 (especially after Clarke and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey) to do new stuff. A lot of the new stuff came out in the late 1980s or the 1990s, but many people didn't bother with it, because they were subconsciously awaiting the new millennium. That is why a former superior of mine claimed Apple was dead and refused to do anything useful with IT until 2001, for example.

Because of the power of number (or at least, the terrible illusion this calendar case engendered), we wasted a decade or more.

The Cultural Capital of the World

In the conversations of the week that is passing, I have been forced to confront a specific truth that I have always shied away from. It's the fact that in some ways I possess (through little fault of my own) a whole lot of cultural capital of a certain kind. As various chthonians have suggested, this capital is something to be envied by others, and is possibly a source of provocation and inflammation.

In the last few months, I've had people come up to me and tell me why they remembered my work and my teaching. Quite often (where the memories are positive), their memories centre around the appropriate deployment of cultural capital, and/or the investment of that capital in young people so that they will gain interest from it. They mention the choice of words, the kind of language, the perspectives, the presentation of content, the devotionals, the ideas of the sacred and profane, and the way in which I seemed to see things differently from some people.

I am deeply grateful. Yet, as I mentioned before, I have always shied away from the fact of cultural capital. Somehow, it seems like an unfair advantage, and I have always favoured fair and open exchanges of ideas. The problem has sometimes been that cultural capital gives a person the power to speak as if from the seat of authority in a particular cultural environment, even if he does not intend to do so. For example, a person who has been identified with a certain cause (such as the advancement of African-American rights) might not be descended from African-Americans, and yet speak with such authority that people will listen to and take to heart whatever is said on the topic.

If you are envious of such capital, then three solutions are most obvious.

1. Eliminate the person. If you can dispose of the holder of the cultural capital, this renders the effect of such capital moot.
2. Eliminate the culture. If you can somehow dispose of the tangible and intangible structures that give this capital its value, then the capital is devalued.
3. Gain cultural capital of your own. For various reasons, this is very difficult. As Bourdieu says, you have to inherit it, buy artifacts that represent it, or gain certification or institutional approval that symbolises it. Sometimes, you may have negative cultural capital (such as having been a disciple of Hitler) that disqualifies you no matter what you do.

Obviously, these solutions are very risky. Failure to succeed will lead to successful failure. There is, however, one option that is not so obvious. You can borrow cultural capital by close positive association with those who have it. You can attempt to understand where it's coming from, and why you haven't been to that place. You can be culturally humble; if you feel humiliated, then this course of action is not for you. Eventually, assiduous devotion to the source of capital will gain you some.

This last option is seldom embarked upon. Anyone powerful enough to want to resist or channel cultural capital is unlikely to be a humble person. But in the end, as Kipling wrote in Recessional, 'an humble and a contrite heart' may be the source of our salvation. Such thoughts have ever been close to my own heart.

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Note: Kipling's line is of course not his own; some will recall its origin in the Book — for example in Isaiah 57 and in Psalm 51.

This Island Race

Yes, I've been reading a lot of Churchill these days. A quintessential leader for dark times, his caustic wit and declamatory style burn through the fog like a beacon on a hill. It was he who appropriated the phrase 'this island race' for the British, he who said, "Do your worst, and we shall do our best."

I am a man of two parts, geographically and literarily; born on one island and living on another, I find the poetry of the first almost sufficient for all things and the poetry of the second infuriatingly sparse in resonant metaphor. Which island is it that goes with 'race'? It might seem a trivial issue. But listen to this, taken from Shakespeare's Richard II, II(1):

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands, –
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Who could read this, born upon the 'sceptred isle', and not wish that it were true in every detail? Then again, my second island too has poets. One of them wrote these lines:

Peoples settled here,
Brought to this island
The bounty of these seas,
Built towers topless as Ilium's.

They make, they serve,
They buy, they sell.

Despite unequal ways,
Together they mutate,
Explore the edges of harmony,
Search for a centre;
Have changed their gods,
Kept some memory of their race
In prayer, laughter, the way
Their women dress and greet.
They hold the bright, the beautiful,
Good ancestral dreams
Within new visions,
So shining, urgent,
Full of what is now.

It is hard to choose between one island race and another, at times. One has a surfeit of history, a long and tangled tale told in dark rooms; the other has an earnest of history to come, but the shadow of doom upon it, that it might fade before that earnest comes to pass. It is hard; it is hard. Sometimes, though, it is worse.

Year Of The Flaming Swine

Oh yes, it certainly is. A quick look at the Chinese Lunar Calendar will tell you that from 17 Feb 2007 onwards, the Dog gives way to the Pig. Not much of an improvement, some might say - but the pig is apparently a more cultured animal, and one that is particularly easy-going, happy and honest.

(Note: Though I'm not one for supernatural explanations of individual human conduct when couched in such errrm... agricultural terms, I suppose that if one can believe in the supernatural at all, one ought to spare a second thought for the myriad other kinds of supernatural structure that one's fellow humans might believe in.)

That said, the same almanac structure tells me that I am a Fire Goat! I shall present the traits attributed to such a creature and those who know me can tell me if they are appropriate or not. The element of Fire is related to the cardinal South, the season of Summer, the planet Mars, the colour Red, the circulatory system & heart; Fire persons are supposed to be dynamic, energetic, passionate, enterprising, adventurous, restless, competitive leaders, who are strong and single-minded. Not all these traits seem compatible with the goat-character though, which is said to be domestic, cultured, sympathetic, artistic, and hankering after love and attention.

One almanac says this:

Deep inside the Fire Goat banked furnaces are slumbering. The addition of Fire does nothing to ruffle the placid Goat, at least on the surface. You maintain a shy, retiring exterior, but inside you’re a time-bomb ticking. You use your disarming tactics to take your opponents off their guard, and then move in for the kill. You have a capacious selection of weaponry to bring into play — brains, brawn, patience, luck, skill and a private fury that can be absolutely deadly if released. Take care how, where and when you fly off the handle, unless you prefer waking up in jail every morning.

I suppose I must be somewhere in between; certainly, I hope not to be of the lawless goatiness just described. Personally, I think that to make a system this complex simply creates so many possible combinations that you can't tell how accurate the system is - if at all.