So Who Is The Author of Position Reserved?

[It occurred to the Author that regular readers had no frame of reference for the personality behind the postings. This is a slightly edited version of the Facebook Profile I use and may act as a sort of reference point.]

Existentialist, Anti-Trancendentalist Mysterian Supermaterialist and Politically Non-Euclidean with Chaotic, Possibilian, (cautiously) Trans-Humanist, Gothick, Nietzschean, Antinomian, Discordian/Erisian, Zen & Tantric Tendencies. Believer in Wu Wei and Wyrd and not much else. Looks on the species as work-in-progress likely to take another 30,000 years to become basically secure and so decent.

Politically into personal liberty (all things being equal, especially in cognitive and sexual matters), anti-bureaucratism (above all, that of the European Union which is the 'monstre sacre de nos jours'), good order mixed with compassion and common sense (the 'way of the decent copper'), sustainability for future generations and maintenance of the natural environment (which is not to be confused with any support for the Greens who are as mad as hatters or professional environmentalism which is little more than a job-creating racket), the primacy of the young over the old who usually are responsible for screwing things up in the first place, national self-determination (though never ethnicist which means that Israel worries me), against German-led Europeanism (as opposed to liking Europeans) and American-led Atlanticism (as opposed to liking Americans even though I go into hiding when they 'get God'), secularism (big time! anyone who believes in fairies and is in politics is a threat to me and mine), evidence-based policymaking, respect for difference (it is the outliers who ensure the progress and survival of the species), kindness to people who believe in fairies except in politics, anti-feminist, anti-identity politics (you are a person not an hysterical attribute) and anti-Frankfort School ideology which precisely means that I support the rights of women to make their own choices and that I support socio-economic and political equality, above all against the matriarchal top-down busybodies of the Academy.

All in all, a classic pre-1970s rational, pragmatic liberal socialist who still believes in the democratic nation state (not that the UK is really one any more) - very much an endangered species amidst the hysterics, posturers, hypocritical moralists, opportunists and downright liars of modern media-driven democracy. Not currently party-affiliated: the Labour Party is so appallingly decadent that the Tories now look relatively competent. How did that happen? Oh, and past contributor to Tribune, The Chartist and Lobster and founder of www.exaronews.com over which I have no editorial control or influence whatsoever.
 
Instinctively polyamorous like most men if they were honest but married to a remarkably interesting woman with two very bright and likable kids ... I really like women a lot and my sympathies are wholly with Emma Goldman on 'feminism'. I do not like sport or engines. I rather like fashion and art.

However, my aversion to ideology, identity politics (which has destroyed and fragmented the intelligent distributionist Left) and post-Frankfort School idiocy suggests that if you are a dim-witted femi-nazi who denies men their fulfilment as anything other than pale imitations of themselves, an ethnicist or traditionalist or a happy-clappy rights liberal or activist, you might be a helluva lot happier not entering into my circle..

Philosophy

My philosophy in life is existentialist (as if regular readers had not guessed). Life is a path that leads to death and no other end. There is no point in believing that you will be pulled from the pit by some great God. You climb out yourself.

The only meanings are those you make for yourself. But, actually, life is good, very good, if you feel the fear and make it work for you. I am passionately anti-anti-natalist and all philosophies of death and the death instinct. I prefer Catholicism for all its evils and mistakes to a Buddhism which negates.

Sometimes, things will go very wrong but these can be good times in retrospect, though you may regret that you had to learn the hard way.

But no regrets is part of the rule-book. Just live with it and move on ...

Philosophers who are admired include Heraclitus, Socrates, Kierkegaard (without the God bit), Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein and Foucault. I respect Wilhelm Reich and Jack Parsons not for their thought but for their good will. I find the philosophers of the Far Right challenging, fascinating and instructive - their critiques of contemporary liberalism resonate even though I oppose them. There are dangers in these thinkers and they require contesting with respect.

Philosophers who are despised include Plato, anyone deluded enough to think that meaning subsists outside ourselves, Hegel and all Hegelians (though with a sneaking respect for Marx's use of Hegel to create a dynamic political movement which, though it went wrong, still gave hope to the hopeless and still has things to say today) and guilt-ridden post-Nazi 'liberals' like followers of Kojeve and Habermas. Zizek drives me up the wall - did he and others not see that Tsipras was engaged in a doomed enterprise. I have no time for German Idealism more generally, analytics who dance on the head of a pin or who invent elaborate ethics in order to avoid personal despair or ensure tenure. My current bug bear is the fashion for extreme scientific speculation which is taken too seriously - it is an enjoyable stopping off place between real philosophy and science fiction.

Matters of the Spirit

I was never interested in the idea of some ghostly spirit, internal or external, animating us and then merging with some abstract Great Beyond. The mind is materially embedded in the body and the mind-body in society and all is fundamentally matter. We are emergent from matter but we cannot say we understand precisely what we mean by matter in this context. Functionalist materialism is simply an interpretation of materialism and there may be more here yet to be uncovered - or never recoverable.

There remain great mysteries in the functioning of society, about the nature of ourselves and about the workings of minds which may as well be regarded magically as undiscovered, and possibly undiscoverable, science.  If there have to be gods, then I choose Dionysos and Aphrodite, Odin and Freyja ...

But you cannot escape the drag of matter, of others or of your own carcase. A Luciferian rebellion, in the end, makes it all worthwhile because it asserts the working of your own deeper matter against the matter worked on you by the laws of physics and by the burden of social organisation. The imagination, a creative irrationality, is what makes us able to move beyond being mere walking stones, shuttled around by blind necessity and previous chance.

If I could rebel against matter I would but I cannot, so, instead, I reserve the right to rebel against social convention and the dead weight of history to free the mind-body for new experiences and pleasures, for individual psychological transcendence (not to be confused with claims about the universal) and for the benefit of those I love.

God certainly need not be involved. Past texts, especially those 'revealed' in the Iron Age, are useless. As are all socially constructed abstracts ... I very much prefer the realist Foucault to the delusional Habermas.

Politics

I used to be involved in politics a great deal. I wasted much of my life and time on the 'official' Left. It achieved little and all I learnt was that the few will always command the agenda of the many, not because they are strong but because we, the many, are weak. Recent events surrounding Jeremy Corbyn's candidature for leadership has exposed to the gaze of all what I learned in the struggles of the 1990s - the main Party of the British Left is deeply dysfunctional, staffed by second and third rate minds with no strategy beyond the 'next election'. The British Labour Party is little more than the defensive manouevre of conservative special interest groups terrified by the onward march of history. I may join it again if Corbyn wins even though his politics are not mine (though I know and respect the person)

On the other hand, anarchism tends to the naive, riddled with the naturalistic fallacy, deviant forms of religion and hidden communitarian terrors. One sinks back into a soft sort of left-libertarianism, a social liberalism or libertarian socialism created out of justifiable pessimism tempered by good will. I would prefer even Baathist order to the killing fields created by enthusiastic and naive armchair liberal outrage, at least when push comes to shove on taking the AK47 out of the broom cupboard.

I have certainly come to dislike the self-regarding political class and the lies of the 'international community' (aka professional fixers) but equally those who afford them loyalty out of an ignorant tribalism, corporatist cowardice or a refusal to think about the nature of power and how the power of the few depends on the willing servitude of the many at home and their disregard abroad ... evil lies so often in obeying orders provided by those same second rate people who naturally rise to the top of political institutions.

The foot soldiers of domestic left-wing politics have been continually digging while in a hole. Solidarity, once it has served its initial purpose, tends to become slavery. The networks of people determined to collaborate to get the cattle trucks from place to place without asking about the destination, combined with the awful truths of social psychological experimentation by our elites, suggested to me that evil was well embedded in the human species by its very socialisation strategies long before we were born.

And so I am a peculiar form of pessimist of the anarcho-Left, owing more to Rabelais, De Sade (the philosopher), Nietzsche (again), Paine, Shelley, William Morris and the incomparable Oscar Wilde than the current degenerate crew of rascals serving special interests, overseas and domestic, who have passed by the moniker of 'New Labour' and who owe more to Lloyd George than Keir Hardie.

These became mere statist war-mongers who have run the economy into the ground for the sake of power, and whose supporters are a rump of dangerous post-Marxist ideologues. In the end, they rise like scum to the surface to get their well-paid jobs in an international system that they created. In that context, it is billionaire wealth creators who deploy capital well to create jobs and build economies that impress me more than the Atlanticist and European clowns who do the opposite. The real talent is at the front end of capitalism nowadays and the leaders of the people should be ashamed of themselves for letting this happen.

The problem may be with Parliamentary Democracy itself, with the prerogatives of the Crown, with the dominance of Party and with institutional special interests that stand in the way of the people's own ability to develop their capabilities in collaboration with others. The way that the priestly class of public intellectuals and third-rate journalists dictates the terms of politics in the Atlantic system and the way modern graduates lap up the nonsense is a lot of the problem ... closed cosmopolitan (a classic contradiction) elites believing their own lies about the nature of the world and existence.

I stand against the bureaucratic State, the Crown as State (though I quite like the Windsors out of sentiment), foreign wars, federalism of all types, the corporate mentality (while appreciating the innovations supplied by genuinely free Jeffersonian markets and even intelligent State infrastructural investment), managerialism as cult, neuroscientific manipulation and tenured technocracy.

Science, technology and innovation are mostly very very good indeed but have to be kept out of the hands of the fruits and the nuts. The market and the State do inspire great works of progress as well as great evils.

Malatesta,Tucker, Rocker, Kollontai, the Kronstadt Mutineers, Zapata, Makhno and, of course, Goldman all had a point and the naive Jack Parsons makes that point likeable: freedom and personal autonomy within a society of free individuals is our highest aspiration ... but I would still trust a weak democratic State over any number of self-righteous activist enthusiasts who weedle their way into the bureaucratic corporatism of social democracy under self-righteous liberal cover.

Reflections on Personal Identity

The common Western idea of personal identity has depended on continuity of memory since John Locke and is a central element in English individualism. This was contrasted with ‘mere’ bodily continuity, with mind and body firmly separated, which was assisted by another notion – that mind was associated with a ‘soul’ which had some being or continuity beyond the body after it had died (or even outside the body, while the latter was still functioning separately, in some schools of thought).

This idea of a continuity beyond death, based on a separation of body and mind, is still held by many people as a matter of faith. It gives psychological comfort to some but it has not been demonstrated as ‘true’ (scientifically probable). It is a possibilian concept. Continuity of memory, however, is a different kettle of fish. Since Locke’s day, we have seen ‘scientific’, certainly suggestive theoretical, evidence that conscious memory, accumulated in layers of perception and constantly constructing the ‘self’, is only a small part of the story.

We have Freud’s postulate of the unconscious to contend with but also growing evidence that the historic genetically constructed structures of the brain construct both our perceptions and the selection and holding of those perceptions in such a way that memory becomes a very slippery matter in its relation to what actually happened even in the moments before it is formed. Memory is not just the accumulation of perceptions into a form of identity but the unwitting selection of perceptions, one that relies on discontinuities, redrafts and revisions that are built-in to the ‘person’ by their genetic and experiential history.

There may be an inability to perceive some things or a determination to forget in the context of trauma or some other need. If personal identity is memory then that personal identity is not smoothly constructed in many cases but is a partly wilful and partly unconscious creation which involves as much forgetting as remembering. This is not incompatible with, say, the metaphysics of Nietzsche to the effect that we can be nothing other than we are and that we are doomed to repeat ourselves eternally.

The ‘will to power’ (in his sense) of an organism that integrates body and mind into a being that is also integrated into raw existence can easily accommodate the idea that we are not conscious of the discontinuities as well as conscious of the apparent continuities in our identity. Indeed, the mix of conscious and wilful (or apparently so) change in ourselves with part-conscious (or illusory) and with unconscious (or biological or environmental) changes to the forms by which our perception is structured is in greater accord with Nietzsche’s existentialism than with Locke’s gentlemanly English liberalism.

Modern psychologists are only the professional end of a truth universally recognised by most of us who can see the world in a critical way – that memory is as often false as not and so, by extension, that our personal identities are ‘false’ constructions that: a) depend on our body’s and earlier mind’s determination of what should be perceived and then held for future use; and b) are what that same mind should unconsciously choose to forget or bury deep in the process of creating the present which we can then call our ‘self’ at any one time.

Memory, in short, is not all that personal identity is but is only its expression to our consciousness. Placing the possibility of existence beyond the body to one side, our personal identity may be a memory at each point in our life but that memory is possibly false and our personal identity is probably false if we believe it to be true without further questioning. By a paradox, if we know and believe our memory and identity to be ‘false’, it becomes more ‘true’ (yes, truth can be relative here) because the entry of the thought of a false memory as possibility, even probability under certain conditions, gives us the opportunity to choose to be ‘critical’, that is either to accept our personal identity as ‘true’ for us in its falsity as an act of will and freedom (insofar as we can ever be free) or to investigate, critically, what may be false in order to make ourselves more ‘true’.

We are not valuing the ‘true’ here as the ‘good’ – being ‘true’ is merely defined as according with objective or at least scientifically validated reality. Being in accord with objective reality has no necessary relationship in itself with the value of ‘good’ but that is another debate.  Personal identity, in fact, is never anything other than ‘true’ in value terms because it is ‘true’ to the person that has that identity. The ‘falsity’ arises only when the person perceives a ‘falsity’ themselves in what they had held to be true, hence the argument in this note – that realisation of ‘falsity’ requires a new ‘truth’ or new identity formulation even if this is a reaffirmation of the ‘falsity’ as ‘truth’. In this way, once we understand that Locke’s assertion that personal identity is memory is to be taken as a truism of sorts, but one without much relationship to the objective truth of our condition in the world – that is, that ‘false memory’ means ‘false identity’ in any terms that are not totally subjective to the person and so represents more or less of a disconnect between persons and their world – then we can rethink that position in the world

This must generally result in one of three responses – denial, conscious reaffirmation of the given or critical investigation of the self.  Let us pause here and say that no value judgement can be ascribed to any of these responses. The denial that a person is anything other than memory, even if the memory (say) includes the assertion that the person was once Emperor of France when all the external evidence points to this not being case, is a legitimate human response to their condition in the world.

The assertion that the historic world leader and this person who believes themselves to be (wrongly) that past world leader are different in personal identity terms just because one accords with objective reality and one does not is merely a matter of the degree by which the identity is practically adaptive to the world. All those unaware of their ‘falsity’ have more in common, mad or not, than any of them do with those who are aware of it. Madness and 'inauthenticity' (to use an older and rather value-ridden existentialist term) are far from identical however. 'Inauthenticity' may be a necessary condition for personal survival in the world as it is constructed. Madness is a poor way of physically surviving in the world outside the most caring of welfare states, communities, tribes or families.

Each personal identity in its particular case of unawareness has been constructed to function for that person but both cases, madness and 'inauthenticity', have in common the fact that neither is aware of their condition or, until having become or made aware of it, are able to treat that condition critically. The thought experiment here is of the man who chooses madness in response to conditions and becomes mad - is this possible?  Did Nietzsche do this? Was this his genius? Human society, on the other hand, could probably not function easily without the vast majority of persons not questioning their condition for most of the time. Unquestioning is a necessary element in the construction of the social.

Left critics of the workings of society have been fully aware of this for some time, hence their frustrated assertion of the need to act to raise consciousness in order to effect change because, left to themselves, most people would accept existing conditions as true and construct their personal identities precisely to fit their environment. These people become their world – cogs perhaps but also able to survive where those who question might end up in camps or penury. It is the source of the instinctive conservatism of the mass of the population and the difficulty behind attempts to effect change even when all logic points to it.

But being or becoming aware of the fact that our personal identities are ‘false’ to the degree that our memories are false because we are our memories (albeit embedded first in a body with its memory and a society with its collective memory) creates only persons who are different not better and the uncovering of this truth about identity does not necessarily result in more than marginal change. The conservatism of society is often very logical – just as are the narratives of the great movements that challenge this conservatism.

Our bodies, meanwhile, are repositories of unconscious material memory. Their genetic component (without going down the route of the collective unconscious) means that a proportion of that memory exists from before the actual creation of that body. Societies too are repositories of collective memory. The habits and instincts of persons are easy to transfer from one community to another (certainly under conditions of modernisation) but also respond (without further self-questioning thought) to the ‘norms’ of a particular time and place which then impact on the formation of memory and so identity. Memory is constructed out of continuous socialisation and the relationship between memory and social identity is at the heart of 'tradition'.

To challenge one’s own personal identity may often involve challenging one’s own body image and capabilities, the ‘norms’ of society and the representation of oneself in society – it might even suggest radical action: gender change, migration, abandonment of tribe or faith (or acquisition of one).  The point is that knowing that one’s personal identity as a construct of false memory does not necessarily predispose someone to radical rather than conservative actions.

It enables radical choice, that is true, but radical choices, if based on unconscious reaction to the tension between society and material circumstances and ‘true will’ can be far from conscious. They may derive from a reaction to memory that makes them no more authentic than those of the conservative mind set who determines on full acceptance of his or her condition without further thought. Awareness that memory and so identity can be explored and reconfigured is a-political and even a-social.

The only virtue of awareness is that it does not rely on an unconscious balancing of mind, body and society (which clearly creates contentment for some but not others) but recognises that, where the mind is not in accord with body or society and where personal identity is not in line with something approaching ‘true will’, the person, in that moment of recognition, can make choices and that those choices involve the management of perceptions and the investigation of memory (or the abandonment of acceptance of memories as valid in the rejection of beliefs) in order to realign a person and the conditions of their existence.

In the case of beliefs, memory is certainly slippery. To believe something is a core element in personal identity and the shift of a belief from a present state to a memory of what was once believed represents a major shift of identity in itself. Chaos Magicians exploit this in order to play with their own identities in a way that strikes the vast majority of humanity as wasteful and absurd but these are not idle thought experiments in coming to a view on the stability of identity in our species.

So Locke is, of course, correct that our identity does rely on memory but we must recognise now that memory is constructed and false more often than not so that our personal identities are as much constructs of our bodies and society as of our conscious will and actual experience. Although this is true, this is not an excuse for a valuation of some minds as better than others just because of their awareness of this falseness of identity because no identity can ever be anything but false in an absolute sense. Nor can we necessarily draw the extreme conclusion that we have no selves (which is an entirely different argument, if currently fashionable one, to criticise another day).

Having an identity that is true to itself is still having an identity that is constructed or that has been constructed out of perceptions that can never tell the whole story about external reality (not to mention our ignorance of other minds and the workings of a society where so little can be observed directly by the subject).  An identity expresses the needs at any one time of a person who is made up of a mind set in a body constrained by social and technological reality. Thus, there is never any absolute freedom but nor is there any requirement for total determination of circumstances.

Liberation is merely a cast of mind, a calibration of society, body and mind and so a calibration of perception, of memory and of identity. The constant struggle between the psychological and physical continuity theories of identity thus rather misses the point. What might be better considered is a theory of constant discontinuities in which a body (and a society) and a mind with only apparent continuity are both required but in which the ‘normal’ integration of the two can be discontinued without either mind or body ceasing to have some ‘memory’ of itself.

A body without a mind is still the body of the person and can be reactivated as such under certain conditions (as after a coma) and that body would influence a new mind that entered it through its biology and brain structure. Perceptions and capabilities would change identity – we only have to consider the male/female difference and the effects on a mind with memories of another gender in a body swap to know how identity would adjust with biology. Continuity perhaps but also a recasting of memory to fit biology would be likely.

A mind might be reloaded or transferred or duplicated in a machine or another body but, from that point, the new material conditions would create new ways of perceiving and thought that would create a separate identity from any identical mental clone in another body, whilst still showing continuities with the past through inherited shared memory. In the memory clone case, each ‘person’ has a separate identity based on possibly small changes in material circumstance despite shared memories – reproducing the ‘I’m Sharon but a different Sharon’ problem of Battlestar Galactica.

Identity is not fixed but changes and shifts in relation to the environment. It is fraught with discontinuities even when simplified down to one mind in one body. The recognition of this complexity should make the psychological-physical debate redundant. It should also help us to be suspicious of the truth-claims made about ourselves by ourselves and by all other persons of themselves and create a scepticism about claims that any single mind can have the answer to any social problem without the help of other minds or that any person can have the ultimate solution, if there is one, to one’s own problems except oneself.

What Is This Thing Called 'Spirit'?

Trying to define ‘spirit’ comes down to an interpretation of Existence itself – does it even exist or is it an invention and, if it exists, is it based within matter or does it arise from consciousness? These are probably non-questions if we start from the existentialist position of accepting Existence’s ultimate un-knowability and then make the nature of spirit a matter of choice and so of belief.

That would be easier all round. If it is a choice made without any associated ability to know the truth of the matter (full knowledge that is), this must suggest an attitude of tolerance to those who make another choice than ours. We cannot know. They cannot know. And so we each choose in our own way. Where do we go from here?

The Investigative Project

If we choose the primacy of matter, then we choose either a creator of matter as (at the least) implicit (against which spirit is to be judged and by whom spirit is judged) or we choose no creator at all but just pure eternal and boundless materiality. If we choose the principle of consciousness, we choose an implicit immanent consciousness within Existence (even if it is ultimately unknowable) or we choose our own integration into an unknowable Existence as its own creator through our belief and action.

In simplistic terms, we have the theocratic systems, scientific materialist systems, systems of immanence or systems of existential or magical engagement. The choice for exploration in this text is the last of these. A belief that might sustain us here is that we create ourselves and our world even if we know that there are material limits to that creation, ones that ultimately derive from the very unknowability of Being.

That we can describe and even utilise matter does not mean that we can know matter and in perceiving, ordering, filtering and manipulating matter, we and not some outside party are the creators of its use-value, even when and as we use the creations of similar others for our own purposes. So, those who believe in a God, those who believe only in scientific materialism and those who believe that consciousness exists outside ourselves in Being need not read on - except out of curiosity as to how other minds than theirs might think.

What we offer is a concept of Being grounded in the expansion of our own day-to-day consciousness to encompass itself and what it can grasp through itself – and through the mystery of its engagement with other consciousnesses that strive in similar ways to live and thrive. Human, alien, machine, animal, plant or, in the spirit of open-mindedness to possibility, brute matter without apparent life or source of creation (whether from procreation or invention), the unknowability but potential equality of other components of existence remains a nagging constraint on us.

This expansion of our own consciousness is a constant revelation based on a permanent struggle with Being in all its manifestations. Liberation is existential yet acquired through perception and cognition. Whether fully achievable or not within actually experienced social reality, an individual reality can be developed in which, even if momentary, an irrational and profound altered state of consciousness can express a true will of sorts.

This, in turn, may point to an existentially constructed nature that may become, for a moment, apparently all consciousness, boundless and without object. These moments may be less interesting (certainly no cause for the abnegation implicit in such searching within systems of immanence) than the transformation that takes place within the person from before to after a moment of heightened experience. The moment is, in this sense, far less interesting than the state of 'being' afterwards and its contrast with that state of 'being' that existed before. The project may thus be four-fold:-

• To explore how subjectivity (the sense of self) can expand to levels that can encompass a perception of the non-self of existence;
• To explore how external representations and archetypes outside both mind and body can be brought into the self in order to create a willed internal order that unites body and mind in a wholeness in its relation to the world;
• To explore how the body itself can represent the self (the mind) in its journey to existential wilfulness;
• To explore the role of ecstasy in particular (any form of ecstatic state) in engaging the body and mind as one whole in the non-self of existence.

As we noted above, the issue is not the subjective state or the reality or otherwise of the objects or persons used or engaged with to change mental states but the transformed individual after such states. Ecstasy (the Dionysiac impulse), for example, is a tool towards a subsequent state of being. Concentration on the ecstasy itself to the exclusion of the transformation is mere sensory play, a pleasure and an entertainment or even a therapy of sorts but not an enhancement of one’s life in the face of raw existence.

Some Notes on Method

A central issue in the history of exploring consciousness has been the recognition that some personalities (without disrespect to others) have a powerful internal drive towards engagement with these questions. A second has been the attempt, often for apparently noble reasons, by some who have followed this searching path to keep their findings secret, to be transmitted only in a certain form to certain people as a ‘tradition’.

The first is a fact of nature, applicable only to some and not all, and in itself certainly argues against religious universalism. The attempt to create a way of relating consciousness to reality that all can understand not only requires excessive simplification but it demands institutionalization and, in the end, the oppression of the minority of those who could continue their exploration beyond tradition.

This has been the way of the great institutionalized religions of the West, especially Christianity, Judaism and Islam, where the necessity of a universal or ethnic message has perforce ‘dumbed down’ the spiritual. The searching mind is only permitted to explore within the ethical and intellectual framework permitted it by priests and elders. Mystical traditions - whether Sufi or Qabbalistic or that of, say, Boehme - have got around this but in a very unsatisfactory way, spirit operating at half-cock so to speak.

Today, the clash of institutional norms with genuine personal engagement in moral questions has never been clearer than in the mishandling of recent child abuse scandals within the Catholic Church. On the other hand, the secret society or the romantic belief in Hidden Masters might charitably be regarded as a response to the institutionalization of spirituality but this is being far too generous about what is a process of exclusion rather than inclusion of the searching mentality. It suggests that a few give themselves the right to the resources to explore their individual spirituality without any recognition of all those searchers who they leave behind.

Here is the Scylla of spiritual conformity where the search is curtailed by custom (with perhaps various mystics or Swedenborg representing the limits of what might be achieved by someone under such circumstances).  There is the Charybdis of introverted tradition where the search is limited by the very forms required to build a system that can maintain a few adherents over many generations. The answer lies only in part in the tolerance and respect for others outlined at the beginning of this introduction.

For example, we might accept that sincere Catholicism is greater than the monstrous and sclerotic clericalism of the Vatican while the need for ritual and secrecy is a legitimate one for those seeking immanence, even if it may be a block to a direct relationship with Being. The recognition that ‘searchers’ are a substantial (rather than a small) minority but still a minority suggests that the searcher paradigm does not seek to create an institutional structure that will compete with or universalise its discoveries.

The process of 'searching' is also driven ineluctably towards a free and open society (though not necessarily in its current kleptocratic form) in which the rights of other types of minds are respected so long as they permit the full freedom to search – in other words that tolerance and respect are reciprocal throughout society. The freedom to search is also implicitly a total freedom of thought and expression, to transgress without harming others … in other words, it is, necessarily and both despite and because of its minority status, a liberal or rather libertarian attitude to life and to the lives of others.

At the same time, the search is private so that the right to micro-institutionalise the search into social forms, whether secret or not, must be recognized wherever other like minds are found, especially where such like minds may feel that they will face prejudice and social or economic disadvantage. But the position that the search must be constructed and passed on in forms that are necessarily secret is untenable.

This position represents the triumph of form over content, the error that because something has been authorised then it is true – indeed, this in itself expresses the essential spiritual failure of institutionalized structures of religion. Authority is never truth because the truth shifts with new facts. Moreover, there comes a point where the safety of searchers will require radical public expression as a defence against attack especially if the search involves transgressions that harm no-one and that require that ‘norms’ be questioned. Secrecy isolates and the isolated person is the most vulnerable to destruction - as trades unions have showen us, there is strength in collaboration.

The path of self exploration and of calculated transgression can learn from other spiritual approaches in both method and content but each search will be personal and individual. Social engagement in spiritual matters will be precisely linked to the degree to which a person, without value judgement from others, can find their path alone or not. For some, indeed, there may be a return to an institutionalized religious structure in the long run because, in fact, this best fits their spiritual needs. Imagine Catholicism (for example) thus invigorated!

So, to conclude, searching must start as anti-traditional and eclectic even if it leads back to paths that are ultimately existentially chosen as a tradition. The only tragedy in this would be if the searcher, having discovered a traditional or very particular destiny, pulled up the ladder behind them, as that intellectual monster Augustine did, and deny others the free right of search in subsequent generations. Such institutional sclerosis must always push us back to that form of spiritual liberalism in which all are free to follow their True Will in relation to Being.

The Starting Point – Structures of Reality

For the search to begin, it must be made axiomatic that material reality exists as something that can be analysed and made useful for the individual and social will. We extend our mind-bodies outwards to make Matter work for us. Interconnected in society over time, there is a continuum between our social and historical selves, our extended bodies, our dependence on and constraints from other selves (as social reality) and the utile Matter in which selves are embedded. To deny Matter as real is to complicate things unnecessarily.

Where the zone of doubt lies is at the extremes that are to be found in the vortex of this reality – both at the smallest and broadest (in space and time) limits of what our minds can comprehend and in the mystery of our inner Being which we intuitively understand to be interconnected with Matter. This inner sense of Being, in reality, cannot be understood in analytical terms, neither by us as thinking selves nor by society at large.

The reason for this profound ignorance is two-fold: the limits of perception (even extended through technology and through mathematics); and our inability to fix the movement of matter in the mind. We see a complex self awareness, uncommunicable to others and played out in a real time that is not always the same as perceived time.

Even if we could match brain states to mind states with considerable accuracy, any attempt to reduce the mind to assumptions based on pure materialism would be as presumptuous and absurd as assuming that the limits of our perception in the wider universe must necessarily relate to some omniscient God.

Thus, we have expressions of faith at both ends of the spectrum – from one party in believing that what cannot be known necessarily leads to deity because of ‘intelligent design’ and from the other that what cannot be known in the brain must be purely material in nature and structure. Theists and materialists merely direct their faith in different directions but with the same arrogant purpose of claiming more knowledge that the evidence permits, one filling the vacuum at the macro-level and the other at the micro-level.

Why should it not be equally true that there is nothing beyond our perception or that there is a soul within existence or that an inner soul is embedded in the body or that soul is embedded within social as well as material reality? Whatever is true, the functioning of whatever truth we choose operates beyond any possible human knowledge.

Perhaps (as much a matter of faith as that offered by the materialists for the non-existence of spirit and soul or the deists for the existence of God) we can take what we can experience of Being within ourselves as the spiritual starting point (especially since we cannot cognitively manage the universe!) We can then explore non-rational and non-materialist models for entering into a relationship with Being or at least with that unknowable reality that lies beyond perception and beyond mathematics.

Cultural Perspectives

Engagement with these issues may well reshape reality as we humans experience it (which is partly social and partly perceptual as well as objectively malleable) in a way that is precisely magical, that is concerning the use of the Will (which has to be defined further) to effect change in the world. Drawing down a very imperfect but transcendental perception of inner non-material reality might well recast both man and society in ways that we cannot yet predict - and which might cause fear as well as awe and joy.

We might reasonably postulate that, in the brain, is material energy (the electrical operations of the brain) but, beyond that, a transcendent scarcely knowable energy (the consequent connections and awarenesses). We (as ‘searchers’) in both worlds, ‘scientific’ and ‘spiritual’, draw down from the last to the first as ‘searchers’ and, through technological innovation, from the first to the last as ‘users’ – just as we might if we created an AI that could tap into that same transcendent energy on its own terms.

This changes our perspective on what it means to be conscious with some potentially frightening conclusions that require caution and compassion, given that each person lies somewhere different on the flow of experience between matter and spirit. The double danger is that moral value is given to those higher in the cosmic evolutionary scale over those who prefer to live in a world that is given and that we fail to recognize as equal those new consciousnesses, machine or alien or evolved, that come to match our position on the scale.

The first creates the danger of elitism, the weakness of many followers of both Eastern and new traditions. The second creates dangers of species-ism and the limitation of the good only to the human species under circumstances where much human behavior is vile - to its own type let alone to others. These are serious moral issues but they cannot be swept under the table as they are by the great universal religions, which include socialism and liberalism in this respect.

Other than compassion, the guard against elitism is that no person can know the spiritual nature of another. No outward forms or right conduct or right language can state that this person or that person to be ‘better’ than another, certainly not the observer over any observed. In this sense, Christ was right that all persons might enter his Kingdom of Heaven. No-one could say that they were ‘without sin’ and could judge another.

The point here is that the lowliest Indian peasant might be more advanced in this respect than a top cosmologist at an American University or the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. None can know. All must be regarded as equal in potential for lack of any possible evidence to the contrary. Equality is the default position so long as other minds are unknowable. Fortunately, sensible public policy in the modern world militates against the arrogance of superiority amongst those who believe themselves to be uniquely blessed.

The second drives us in the other direction. It must be a fear to many that some may transcend the human condition through evolution, that machines may transcend humans or that we may find aliens who do so. This may be hypothetical and not require too much practical concern today. However, this may arise, in some far distant future, and we must then embrace such change and understand that the ‘rights’ accruing to the less conscious (like animals) stand under the twin rules of compassion and equity precisely because we may be in that place ourselves some day.

Further Lines of Research

We have laid out the four-fold project but the pathway to understanding the new consciousness are very similar to those of traditional philosophy but with this one difference, that the analytical takes us only so far. The analytical and the experimental limits us by suggesting what cannot be so in the present but it cannot tell us what might not be so in the future. These are some of the central questions for us:-

• What language is best suited to describing the moments of transformation which might involve both a perception of personal transcendence in a context of immanence?
• What precisely is our True Will when actions based on cause and effect appear buried in our history and in instinct? How do we exist as actors in a drama in which the playwright is history and we may wish to get off the stage at any time to make our own life choices?
• How can we know anything when all knowledge is based on sensory inputs that are biologically determined? What is behind our perception of Being that would permit us to experience a relationship to it without recourse to the abstractions of mathematics?
• What is our relationship as conscious beings not merely to the reality ‘out there’ but to the many varieties of consciousness, semi-consciousness, altered states and non-consciousness (including death) and to time?
• How do we regard the biological drives within our body and their relationship to mind? (Religions have been afraid of the flow of chemicals that shift and change our perception and cause deep distress as well as great pleasure: will engaging with these material aspects of the self be far more fruitful in their potential for our True Will than seeking to crush or deny our animal natures?)
• What is the relationship between analytical thinking, the management of the body and the use of images, sounds and other sensory inputs from the outer world in constructing our own True Will?
• How do we connect with the unconscious mind and body, our autonomic system, so that we can learn to see things as our body sees them and not just as our mind collates sensory information into a simulacrum of reality?
• Can we have a concept of evil even as we consciously seek new states of consciousness and alterations of reality? Can we take responsibility for consequences without avoiding necessary and creative risks?

Conclusions

Even that philosophy of the East that has (arguably) the most positive attitude to the world and is most tolerant of difference, Kashmiri Shaivism, still holds to the illusion that an individual can ‘rise’ from individuality to ‘universality’ through knowing their innermost Self. The illusion lies not only in the error that absolute knowledge of the innermost Self is possible but in the equal error that such a Self could ever be like other Selves and some Higher Consciousness i.e. be part of something universal. If the Self was known, it would not be universal and if it became universal, then it ceases to be the Self. However, once the illusion is removed, there are insights to be had from three of the four theories of Trika –

• There is the attempt to understand the totality of the universe (or our relation to the absolute nature of Existence) which is not to be confused with understanding the universe;
• There is the realisation of the individual but as individual (interpreted in Western terms as True Will);
• There is the recognition that all Existence depends on vibration (which might recast as the recognition that all Existence is a matter of waves and particles that we may never understand in full but which offer theories of reality that we can seize upon to build a theory of our relationship to Existence).

If we break this down further as tools for the four-fold project, with the illusion stripped out, then we have:

• The tool of perceptual transcendence by which we alter our consciousness periodically to bring massivity and scale to our thinking, placing immediate and sensory concerns in their proper proportion as units to be shuffled in alignment with our True Will;
• The tool of constant self-questioning as to our own inner true nature, notably the correct balance between our body, our history, our environment and that powerful residual core of True Will, a personality that rises beyond socially constructed reality;
• The tool of science, directed both to the material base of mind and universe, insufficient to tell us how things are in the absolute but able to improve our own ability to align who we are with the structures of matter into which we are embedded.

In this context, the aims of many religions may be illusory but their methods, as technical operations (body manipulation, breath manipulation, meditation, ecstatic practice, advanced visualization linking body and mind), may be of value ... and the exploration of these ideas is one of the reasons why this blog exists.

Frontiers 2 - The Exo-Planets

In our last Frontiers posting, it became very clear that space exploration is back on the agenda but that, in the near to medium term, it is a case of manned flight no further than Mars and that unmanned flights will be preoccupied with the solar system and, above all, investigating what can be done about asteroids which present a potentially existential threat to our species. Beyond this, there is a remarkable programme of work that is astronomical, observations from earth and space, which are most excellently reviewed by Cambridge Professor Carolin Crawford in her last in a long series of impressive Gresham Lectures on astronomy:

The 'big' coming event will be the launch of the James Webb Telescope in 2018, successor to the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity from long-wavelength visible to the mid-infrared. The discoveries are just going to keep coming but none of them are going to change the fundamental problem that, as biological creatures of this planet, the anti-biological conditions of space and the vast distances involved are going to see physical exploration beyond our solar system as something for the very far distant future.

So why be interested in exo-planets other than scientific curiosity for its own sake. First, because the very far distant future is still possibly an era when humans or more differently evolved humans may have mastered both conditions and distance, even if it is only to send non-biological surrogates or machinery capable of seeding planets with our biology. Second, though we can tell very little about exoplanets now, it is more than intriguing and would have enormous effects on our culture if we found one that was sending out signals, whether deliberately or not, that showed that something conscious like ourselves had evolved as we have evolved (or differently).

We would be faced with some interesting challenges that would precede our decision to invest in further exploration - are these less or more developed, can we communicate, would they be friends or enemies, opportunities or threats? Anything beyond philosophical thought experiments (which should be handled by philosophers and not scientists) though is speculation, 'hard' science fiction. It is useful to explore philosophically the many various possible scenarios for the future: this is not a waste of time but it is, in practical terms, futile in the twenty first century. The real issues to consider arise from our own nature and perceptual and conceptual abilities to deal with radical discoveries. By the time that we think we know that there is something out there with which we are going to have contact, we will probably have evolved ourselves or, at least, have advanced our powers in the area of thought if only because of the practical use of artificial intelligence. So, let's stick to the facts here and not try to be a second division Arthur C. Clarke.

At the moment, exoplanets can be indexed according to their similarity to earth. These are known as Earth Analogs. You might equally see terms like Twin Earth, Earth Twin, Second Earth, Alien Earth, Earth 2 or Earth-like Planet. Whether these planets are more or less likely is still a philosophical debate about what deduction from science can tell us. As of about two years ago, the majority opinion of astronomers was something along the lines of their being as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of sun-like stars (11 billion of these, depending on the source) and red dwarf stars within the Milky Way Galaxy. This was a calculation based on Kepler space mission data. The nearest is around 12 light-years away which sets us the standard of hitting the speed of light safely for well over a decade of travelling before we can even observe one at close quarters with the human eye.

This, however, is not a calculation from observation but a 'could' based on the so-called 'mediocrity principle' which assumes that if we are as we are within a giant system then we are probably pretty average or mediocre and not so very special, so we should expect to find other things like us around. Philosophers can be highly critical of the assumptions behind the mediocrity principle (which we won't go into here) so it is probably best to say that the 'jury is out' and the case is, as in Scottish law 'not proven' but that it is a decent working assumption on which to base continued investigation until the data changes.

It is equally reasonable to suppose that we are accidental or exceptional and there are no planets like us that could bear life, let alone develop evolved consciousness with culture. This latter is the Rare Earth Hypothesis which starts by stating just how improbable it was that conditions would be right for multicellular life, let alone evolved consciousness. The debate can be studied from the Rare Earth Hypothesis entry in Wikipedia and from there you can check out the extensive references to Extraterrestrial Life The bottom line is that it is largely hypothesis and speculation. Nobody knows very much. It is just theory.

In the same realm of hypothesis and theory is the debate about terraforming in which engineers join scientists in positing that planets that do not currently bear life could be transformed by planetary scale projects into habitable homes for humans. This, of course, is more immediately interesting if it can be applied to a near neighbour like Mars but we are far from having the resources or knowledge to consider a project that would take aeons to complete. Even more theoretical work would posit alternative earths in multiverses or parallel universes. None of this is currently of any functional value although it is all very entertaining and stimulating. At a certain point, science fiction may become a distraction more than it becomes an aid to creativity.

However, there is practical work to be done - other than exploring space for data that might confirm the many earths or the rare earths model as more likely (or something inbetween). First, there is the search not only for habitable planets but also for signals that might come from habitable (or non-habitable) planets or deep space. Second, there is the science of astrobiology which is essentially about the conditions that may be possible or necessary for any form of life whatsoever to exist outside the Earth and where we might expect to find it. Third, there is the science of planetary habitability itself which is about comparing what has happened on earth with conditions on planets and hypothesising the relationships between planets and the creation of life forms.

What has emerged is an Earth Similarity Index, developed by NASA and SETI, which scales exo-planets as similar to Earth (the understandable model for habitability in an anthropocentric mind-set) on a range from zero to one where the Earth is one. The details are in the Wikipedia link but an ESI of 0.8 to 1.0 would cover any rocky terrestrial planet. The index is not to be taken as implying habitability at all - it is simply what it says on the tin, the similarity of a body (including large satellites) to the Earth in terms of mass, radius and temperature. Currently, the closest confirmed planet to the Earth is Gliese 667 Cc only 22.7 light years away. This rather 'cool' artist's impression of the planet should, of course, be taken with a pinch of salt in terms of detail but it gets across something of what such a planet may look like, the closest yet to us of the sort of planet which might be targeted for colonisation that we know of at this level of detail ...

(Source - Wikipedia - Attribution:"Gliese 667 Cc sunset" by ESO/L. Calçada - http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1214a/. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gliese_667_Cc_sunset.jpg#/media/File:Gliese_667_Cc_sunset.jpg )

This shows a sunset. The brightest star is the red dwarf Gliese 667 C, part of a triple star system. Two more distant stars, Gliese 667 A and B appear in the sky also to the right. There may be tens of billions of rocky worlds like this orbiting faint red dwarf stars in the Milky Way.

The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog is held at University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo.  Gliese 667Cc has an ESI of 0.84 but there are two other confirmed exoplanets with higher ESIs - Kepler 438b (0.88) and KOI-1686.01 (0.89). Kepler-438b is 470 light-years from Earth. The Kepler reference refers to NASA’s Kepler telescope which was launched in March 2009, costing $600m and with a mirror about 60% the size of Hubble's, precisely to search for habitable zone Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way using just one instrument, a photometer which continuously records the brightness of stars, monitoring 1,500 stars simultaneously in a targeted block of the sky. When a planet crosses a star, its blockage of light permits it to be identified but the measurements are miniscule. Kepler merely identifies candidates. Ground-based observers and scientists then take over to confirm with about 10% of sightings proving to be false alarms. Kepler 438b received most media attention at the beginning of the year as the 'most earth-like planet'- only 12% larger and 40% more illuminated although its star is smaller than ours.

However, this information is probably already out of date. Exoplanets frequently have their data revised as new information comes in or is analysed. Some 'habitable planets' turn out not to be so habitable at all. It is hard for any non-specialist to get reliable information. The truth is that while many habitable (not the same as earth-sized planets so that reduces the Milky Way number from 11bn to 8.8bn) exoplanets are posited, only 1,000 confirmed exoplanets have actually been found (although this is a remarkable scientific achievement with over another 2,000 under investigation through Kepler, backed up by confirmatory ground observation). Of this, perhaps just over a dozen are confirmed as within the so-called habitable zone albeit with around 54 candidates to be confirmed. A habitable zone is a definable region around a star where a planet with sufficient atmospheric pressure can maintain liquid water on its surface, hence the water in the artist's impression of Glise 667Cc.

Ben Solomon has suggested that life sustaining planets be named zoetons on the principle that a spacefaring civilisation ought to start defining its terms in advance along the lines of what is going to be useful for that new emergent culture. The idea strikes me as premature. We are way off being spacefarers to the extent of requiring a new cultural paradigm. While the effort to think in these ways may be interesting, they ultimately fall into the category of speculative science. Nevertheless, science fiction may find the following paragraph from Solomon's blog posting in Lifeboat News useful in regulating its universes ...

Taking a different turn, to complete the space faring vocabulary, one can redefine transportation by their order of magnitudes. Atmospheric transportation, whether for combustion intake or winged flight can be termed, “atmosmax” from “atmosphere”, and Greek “amaxi” for car or vehicle. Any vehicle that is bound by the distances of the solar system but does not require an atmosphere would be a “solarmax”. Any vehicle that is capable of interstellar travel would be a “starship”. And one capable of intergalactic travel would be a “galactica”.

Speculation almost has to be rife in this area because travelling into space and finding new homes is the stuff of the dreams that turned many youngsters into scientists. There is more grounded speculation that there may be planets out there (super-earths) that are 'even more habitable' than Earth.  This speculation suggests that we are, not unreasonably, privileging Earth as the most habitable simply because we grew up there and that there may be planets that are more amenable to life than ours. This leads, in turn, to the call by a minority for some redirection of the search to include planets of some types outside the classic habitable zones around sun-like stars and red dwarves.

The debate is useful because it acts as check and balance on automatic assumptions about what, in the search for life (as opposed to just habitability for humans), we should be looking for - for example, underground oceans on planets well outside the 'zone' may be as likely to be where life is to be found as a rocky planet inside the zone. However, according to Ravi Kopparapu, a Penn State University physicist (according to the National Geographic article cited in the paragraph above):

"there is a very good reason why the binary habitable zone concept is important and relevant" ... Currently, when astronomers discover a planet, all they can learn about it is its mass and radius, how much light it receives from its star, and occasionally the composition of its upper atmosphere. Until scientists develop the techniques to study a planet's surface features, tectonic activity, and geological composition, the habitable zone concept remains the best guess of its habitability, says Kopparapu."

The James Webb Space Telescope should radically extend the range of our knowledge about these and related factors. It will be a step up but this is not a vehicle for fly-bys and close observation. The planet-finding programme will be extended significantly in the coming years with new space telescopes. NASA is launching Tess (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) and the ESA will launch Cheops (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite) in 2017. ESA will follow up with a larger planet finder, Plato, by 2024. The specific mission (despite the critique of those who think the search is too limited in scope) is to find Earth Analogs within the nearest (to us) habitable zones of sun-like star systems in as many locations as possible. The European E-ELT telescope which being built in Chile, is being designed to analyse the atmospheric composition of these planets and a better judgment made of habitability and even whether life is probably there already.

So, it is not impossible that the world will be stunned to find that a planet with all the atmospheric characteristics of life is proven probable rather than possible within a decade or two. How to get there, if we want to get there, is another matter entirely.

Note: There are a large number of entries on exoplanetology available from the relevant Wikipedia Template There is also an amusing if outdated Popular Science infographic of all the known exoplanets at the beginning of 2014.

A Disquisition on Time

Augustine went about things the wrong way in dealing with the problem of time but he was only following the way of most men. The tripartite division of time (past, present and future) is a social and individual convenience but any attempt to investigate it more truthfully within those terms is going to fail. Why? Because there is no present that can be a part of consciousness if it can exist at all. Scientists have measured, it would seem, time to 250 billionths of a billionth of a second. There is no reason to believe that this is the end of the matter. Time is already past when the much slower processing power of the human mind has done its job and called it 'the present'.

There is only a functional and useful illusion of present-ness, made up of two processes that relate to one another and which create this illusion of the present where they interface - that which has happened and that which is to happen. It is this interface that is interesting because, constantly moving attosecond by attosecond, it is simply a perceptual set of instant choices between memory and habit on the one hand and modelling and anticipation on the other. This is 'us' - the object of perception that has been created facing events that create the subject perceiving its own past.

This is why all philosophies of 'present-ness' or fixity are absurd and only philosophies of change and adaptation can make sense of what we are. Time can be dealt with conservatively - as an attempt to control the future through fixing events in a pre-set model of the future - or progressively - as a flowing into the future without fixity. Neither approach is wise in itself - one is a noble lie that leads to a sclerosis that cannot cope with new events outside the control of the person while the other is an impossibility, leading to self-destruction based on a lack of respect for the role of experience in managing events. Each type of mind wars on the other because there is no point of agreement.

One must choose one's balance of models for the conquest of time - traditionalist (the day, month and year like every previous unit), social (measured time and socialised time designed to construct collaboration between persons) or creative (following the rhythms of the body and desire in which the modelling mind constructs its time). Sun and moon are 'facts on the ground' (or in the 'ether'), planetary motions can be constructed into a magical socialisation of time and clocks from a scientific one, but, with all due regard to the facts of nature and of culture, the most interesting time is the personal one.

Personal time is a constant coming-to-be as it-ceases-to-be horizon of events - we are vehicles moving in a straight line with no stopping off point except our own extinction. Our most essential clock is the inner one, a clock made up of living tissue, honed by evolution, connected to both the natural and the social but driven by will. Our experience of time is neurological. Our use of time is social. We cannot command the process but we can command our choices - of what things in the past to use for the future (perhaps this is a definition of fearless intelligence in itself) and what things in the future that we wish to attain (the desire).

Intelligence and desire in forward flow are what we are at our best. Philosophies of stasis operate against both desire and intelligence - worse, since the flow is what is, they are the path to a death-in-life, an attempt to reach the goal by stopping the train long before it comes to its final station.

For and Against Situationist Thought

Situationist thought might seem like a mere historical foot-note from Cold War history but it is worth some reconsideration now that we have seen ‘capitalism’ go through one of its periodic bouts of creative destruction. It depended intellectually on yet another attempt by mid-twentieth century Marxists to weasel out of the tough fact that their Idealist origins meant that they could never actually relate to the human condition as most people lived it – life for Marxists is an expression of theory. On the other hand, shorn of its ridiculous and patronising Marxist rhetoric, it has been 'detourned' into every avenue of commercial art, that is where it has not become the hobby of marginalised contemporary anarchists operating on the fringe of political reality - and sometimes of reality itself.

Where Situationist Thought Sits

Yet it would be foolish to under-estimate its importance. Although derived from an untenable Hegelianism, still being played out by the buffoons in the European Commission, it had one big thing to offer. What the situationists wanted to do was to make individuals, especially individuals at the very base of society, critically observe and analyse their daily conditions of life, calculate their own intrinsic desires and act on them.

Forget the Young Hegelian padding, this was potentially pre-Socratic in form, a half-way house to a proper existentialist political ethic. Perhaps they needed to claw their way out of the very ideology in which they had set themselves and just failed and perhaps we should honour them simply for trying. Their contribution to Western culture is precisely to expose the impossibility of one’s own desire being encompassed by any theory.

Debord recognized this to a degree by opposing any attempt to turn the situationist impulse into 'situationism', an ideology. Unfortunately, he failed to escape the dominant intellectual ideology of his time. One can imagine a group of Christian radicals (anti-trinitarians perhaps) playing with similar ideas, yet getting trapped into a necessary but ultimately fruitless faith in God.

The Situationist and the Left

Debord understood Sartre’s insight into one aspect of our condition – that the will to the universal, embedded in ‘official’ left-wing thought, is deeply absurd. He saw ideology as legitimated in modern society ‘by universal abstraction and by the effective dictatorship of illusion’. What the Situationists expressed was a peculiar form of revolt that has resonance today. Within the Left, it was a revolt against the bureaucratic impulse of contemporary socialism and the repulsive dictatorship of Stalin’s nomenlatura. That particular argument was won in any case by history. From the Left, however, it was a revolt at the process of having one’s reality, desires and needs dictated by machineries that were no less bureaucratic than those of sclerotic communism but which were hidden within the operations of capitalism.

Later, the great left-wing weasel himself, Gramsci, managed to perform a trick whereby the official Left simply abandoned overt bureaucratism and adopted the manipulative techniques of capitalist enterprises for social engineering purposes. The Situationist impulse is thus important because the problems they identified have not gone away but have merely transformed themselves. Mow, the manipulation of reality comes not only from advertising agencies but from liberal-left infiltration of our culture.

Anti-Capitalism and Neo-Bureaucratic Socialism

What we have now is a culture of self-righteous and manipulative activists, all talking their book and using their minority power to force universalist regulation and legislation on a powerless population. From a Cold War situation of communist bureaucratic tyranny and ‘free world’ corporate drabness, we have transformed into a world of government by liberal-left elites amidst an economic chaos which they are incapable of managing.

The Situationist International was anti-capitalist (whatever that can mean today) but their revolutionary impulse embraced what they saw as the positive elements within capitalist development. Despite the bleatings of Marxist-Leninists, there are positive aspects. Capitalism, by lurches and starts, eventually provides for needs and desires far better than any other system, better than political traditionalism and provenly better than communism.

At a certain level of development, people began to have the opportunity for personal choice. This was certainly not the case in the industrial factory culture of mid-twentieth century France and it is not the case across most of the world for most of the time but, where the market (let us drop the loaded term capitalism) operates well, persons do have more choices although this does not mean that the choices are the ones we always want ... better is not to be taken here to mean good, just not-so-bad.

Puritan Reactions

There is a current attempt at a back-lash against choice from the sourer elements of the liberal-left but this neo-puritanism, which can descend to complaints about the complexity of mobile phone tariffs in a world of stupid and lazy people, deliberately ignores that late capitalism gives us other more critical choices of real value.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century in the developed west, we have been given remarkable choices over our sexual identity, who we associate with, where and how we live, what we take into our bodies and what we can say (despite liberal-left attempts to control this last). These freedoms derive entirely from our relative prosperity and so from late capitalism. The tragedy of the current economic crisis is that many people have not found a way to extend their freedoms independent of prosperity and regardless of the cynical interest of the ‘capitalists’.

This is where the situationist impulse comes in because the situationists were ahead of their time by half a century in asserting the primacy of the ordinary person’s ability to assert his or her right to choose his or her condition of life according to his or her desires - against centuries of social control. What we can continue to do is bring desire as a reality to the forefront of the population’s minds so that these desires can be recognized as good in themselves and, if transgressive against some dictated norm, inspirational towards changing the norm itself.

Sanguinetti

Instead of the liberal-left activist transforming a norm to meet abstract universalist principles over the heads of the population, the population might be liberated to assess its own condition and then demand that ‘norms’ be transformed away from the universal and back to the particular. What they can also do is what Sanguinetti and Debord did in their hoax pamphlet of 1975 where they ‘tricked’ major figures into showing their true thoughts and feelings on the murderous fascist interventions in Italy at that time.

This was unforgivable to elites – Sanguinetti had to flee Italy and was denied entry to France. Yet all he had done was to get the elite to show its true sentiments to the ruled. This should have been the task of journalism but journalists were and are fully embedded in the elite. As we have seen in the outpourings of garbage over the Ukrainian and Greater Syrian situations, the 'free Press' is little more than the 'father of lies' (on all sides).

Marxism & Value

Let us turn to what is wrong with Situationist Thought. Almost everything that is wrong with it can be put down to its Marxist origins and its easy acceptance of Marx’s labour theory of value. Everything in Marxism depends on this theory – and on its elaborations such as commodification, reification and alienation – so that any theory that did not accept it could not be called Marxist. The Situationists had to see themselves as Marxist if they were to be credibly ‘of the Left’.

In fact, value is not created by work but by perception, in a very different way from Marx’s simple view of all production being simply economic and ‘scientific’. How we perceive value arises from considerations that relate to our desires as much as our needs. The Marxist impulse is not merely to diminish these desires but to start creating concepts such as 'false consciousness' that will be the basis of the totalitarian manipulation of desire. Above all, the Marxist will not investigate and respect (and socialise) the animal core of desire and the 'divine' aspiration within it. While not going so far, the Situationists made the revolutionary step of interpreting Marxist theory in terms of experience and perception but laid claim to this being a stage in capitalism, ‘advanced’ capitalism.

Today, the capitalist seeks out and enables a creativity which would not be expressed at all if it was not for the capitalist who permits both efficient and wasteful organisation of resources. The Situationists, however, were hobbled by their need to fit in with ‘progressive’ historicism. Their profound insight was vitiated by the fact that they failed to understand that all value is based on experience and desire once very basic needs are met and that even those needs are contingent on experience and desire. In short, experience and desire (if only to continue living) are far more intrinsic to value than some gobbledy-gook that inserts the capitalist between the worker and his product. Even the form of basic needs can be dictated by perceptions and experience as in those situations where markets are perverted by taboo.

The Age of Spectacle

The Situationists assumed that we lived in an age of Spectacle that was different from all other ages. The latest adaptation of this is the current interest in the hyper-real, best exemplified by the work of Baudrillard. But they were entrapped within Marxist historical thought here as well. In fact, all ages are ages of spectacle and of simulacra because that is the central fact of the human condition. The only difference today is the sheer extent of the technological enhancement of the real that is available to us.

The human condition is always one of interpreting too much data from too many sources through perceptual apparatus that are not only limited by genetics but by history, habit and other people. Our species is constantly creating a version of reality that is pragmatically designed for survival.
Our reality at any one time is not the only possible reality. If it is true that it is constructed (as Marxists claim) from a particular relationship to the means of production, it is also true that it is constantly being recreated by the minds of millions of persons with instinctive wants and desires that are independent of those means.

This spectacle, this unified and always growing ‘thing’, made up of objects perceived and turned into value by the perceiving (detached from any underlying reality and certainly from the analysed reality of the intellectual) is a Heraclitean flux that can never be made solid or fully understood (despite the fantasies of the AI and Big Data enthusiasts).  The Marxist theory of alienation may be true analytically but it also contains an intrinsic problem that it derives from the Judaeo-Christian cultural tradition – that is, it does not want it to be true. Implicitly the Communist society is supposed, if not to abolish it, to reduce alienation of this type and yet this alienation is precisely what makes us evolve and be creative.

Why Alienation May Be A Good Thing

It may be far more sensible to embrace the flux, identify one’s own desires and then pragmatically seek fulfillment without collapsing into madness, in other words to be functionally happy within the flux by creating islands of vital personal rather than of sclerotic collective stability. Marxism is deeply conservative, terrified of change (unless a revolutionary blood-letting to end change), and nervous of emotion, desire and instinct.

Many Leftists would stand aghast at my comment and immediately suggest that such an acceptance of these things must be intrinsically ‘fascist’. So be it ... they misunderstand because they are wired to misunderstand these things. The Situationists embraced radical change in the short term, but their grand narrative still assumed that somewhere further down the line ‘revolution’ would bring some concordance between real reality and imagined reality. In this, they were wrong.

Though we may develop as a species in a robotic or purely intellectual direction over tens of thousands of years, we are defined now by having an individual reality (embracing our desires) that is disconnected from social reality ('norms’) which, in turn, is often out of kilter with the facts of the matter in the world. To seek to align our own situation with the ‘pseudo-reality’ of society by transforming the social into something that is in accordance with our own reality is absurd, utopianism of the worst sort, the basis of Hitlerism to name but one manifestation.

Utopian Absurdity

Why? Because there are millions of such realities, all competing and without any clear common class, race, sexual or other identity that is not created by the very society that we recognize as un-real. Faced with the flux of our desires and situation in a world where imbalances of power dictate the social norms which are imposed on us, where these same norms might be counter-productive to the effective management of scientific reality (as in some faith-based cultures), the Situationists have something to tell us but not precisely what they thought they wanted to tell us.

The Spectacle is not just a matter of contemplation but one of action where we, as individuals, have considerable opportunity to transform our and other lives if we only understood the degree of our freedom within our material and power constraints (so much, so Sartre).

What is not going to happen is any lasting transformation of society that is simply derived from a manipulative cadre – the sort of activist element we noted above – where a few individuals impose their phantasy on the majority without their own participation or informed consent. In practice only education (the art of questioning) and the market (the art of choosing) can liberate enslaved minds. Situationist events and cadres, in that context, are useful only insofar as they jolt us into questioning and into considering the value of our choices to ourselves.

Ideology as False God

From this perspective and as an example, AdBusters, which ‘detournes’ commercial advertising, is extremely valuable not because it will overthrow capitalism (it won’t) but because it raises questions outside of formal schooling institutions and it allows us to ask questions about our own values. However, if AdBusters simply replaces one world-view (slavery to the market) with another (slavery to an anti-capitalist rhetoric) nothing has been achieved.

The choice must include a value-driven choice for the product or service by the individual where that choice is informed and functionally useful to them. When an ideology like feminism raises questions for a woman (or man) about their relationship and offers a choice (to accept or not accept it) as well as a means of action (to act to make it a positive and effective choice), it is doing good.

But when it dictates an agenda that precludes questioning (‘all men are predators’) or forces a choice (‘sisterhood requires such-and-such an action'), then it is as oppressive as their invented Aunt Sally ‘patriarchy’. All ideologies need to be questioned in the same way. Debord’s ‘pseudo world’ of the spectacle is thus seen as a problem whereas in fact it is also a solution. There is no possible world that cannot be a pseudo world, in effect an imaginative construct limited by material reality, because the human species is defined positively by its own intrinsic alienation.

Taking Hold of the Spectacle

Once this is understood, we can abandon our puritanical moral panic about the lack of stability within existence and see the spectacle as something that we can create incrementally in our own image to the degree that we can ensure its and our functionality. What Debord is right to point out is the dangers of a liar lying to himself but, even here, we should not go too far.

A phantasy that is functional for the person is a tolerable madness. The issue is whether it is functional and not whether it is a phantasy. There is nothing wrong with phantasy at all. The liberatory element lies in an assertion (the only concession to the universal abstract) that the rights of persons to their phantasies are all equal and that the conditions of life should not include the acceptance of an unwilling submission of (or dominance over) one of another.

The lie that the liar may be telling himself is that he is happy or content when he has repressed and suppressed his true nature. An effective situationist response would be a socialized psychotherapeutic one, a revolutionary act of multiple enablings of self-assertions against the ‘given’. The current late capitalist spectacle works quite well at this critical level – the power of the consumer (which offsets the disempowered position of the employee or family member) permits an assertion of personal desire against the desire of capitalism to desire more resources.

The Hidden Moralism of Debord

A situationist economics might even emphasise the power of withdrawal of desire or the deferral of desire as a tactical act to get more of what is desired – not unlike the sexual politics within many relationships. The Spectacle is thus not the ‘concrete inversion of life’ (the Situationist view) but life itself, or rather what happens to life once individuals (who are truly alive) start to deal with one another in a constant process of gaming and trading.

Debord would have had much fun with our current obsession with zombies. This fascination is largely a construction of commercial interests but it is almost certainly hitting a sense in the population that the ‘system’ does treat them like zombies, units of production and consumption. But this does not mean that we are zombies, only that we are aware that we might become zombies. Zombies do not know that they are zombies.

Debord also argued that ‘things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy’ but he exaggerates, sounding like a Christian moralist of the late pagan era. He has no proof for his statement because he was not 'there'. The literary evidence for the claim can be shown to be flawed and suppositious. He says that ‘once an experience is taken out of the real world, it becomes a commodity … the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience’. But there is no harm in anything becoming a commodity if the trade is still good for the desiring subject. There is certainly no reason why the spectacle should not be regarded as being as real as the ‘real’ if it is felt as real by the person.

The Real

There is no real to be had in the sense that Debord is implying. Commodified experience is not only real to all intents and purposes but ‘more real’ insofar as it is the purchased expression of the fulfillment of a desire (albeit usually partially) that would otherwise not be experienced if it was not purchased. Marxism is riddled with pseudo-Judaeo-Christian moralizing about authenticity of experience and Debord cannot escape it. Here he is again: ‘our psychic functions are altered, we get a degradation of mind and also a degradation of knowledge’. He puts this down to capitalism. I put it down to socialisation under any system.

As soon as we relate to a single other person, we are beginning to see our psychic functioning altered, our mind is ‘degraded’ (meaning limited in its imaginative options) and our knowledge ‘degraded’ (made functionally useful to the system rather than ourselves). This altering and degradation increases to the degree that we are embedded in bigger and bigger institutions.

Intellectual Arrogance

We have to recognize that this ‘degradation’ applies to all human systems (not just capitalism) and that many people actively choose such ‘degradation’ as enhancing to them (our bureaucrats, corporate men and women, the military, the churches). But it is the height of intellectual arrogance to assume that such people are somehow inferior in their choice to libertarians like Debord and myself – all we can ask is that they do not force us into their mould.

Where he has an important point to make is where he says that ‘knowledge is not used [any more] to question, analyze or resolve contradictions but to assuage reality’. The ‘any more’ is highly questionable but the statement is a true representation of most people for most of the time but whether this state of affairs can ever be changed by revolutionary action is to be doubted. What the 68-ers and most Leftists of that and earlier periods did not and could not ‘get’ (because of the scientific knowledge of the period) is that this is the human species – mostly uninterested intrinsically in questioning, analysis and resolving contradictions. It is the creature that lives rather than 'thinks through' its contradictions.

Contradictions

In fact, the last thing most people want to do is resolve contradictions. Contradictions are the only way they can cope with life. No revolutionary operation is going to remove the reality of and necessity for contradiction. There is no evidence that the allegedly ‘real’ experience was, in fact, ever more interesting or pleasurable or life-changing than any acquired experience through the market. To think otherwise is a moralistic myth, an ‘ought’ from a traditionalist perspective rather than an ‘is’. It is what we think that we ought to think – no more.

Contemporary technology has made this clearer. Most desires cannot be fulfilled and will never be fulfilled wholly. The reality was always that experiences of value were few and often turned sour – think of the romp in the hay that led to a lifetime being shackled to a podgy harridan. New technologies create a culture of life-enhancing vicarious pleasure that, far from making persons less able to cope with ‘reality’, lance the boil of desire and create the language for getting some simulacra of desire into private life.

These technologies allow desires to be identified and then managed. The commodification of sexuality has included Ann Summers whose very existence has permitted sex-positive discussion between couples and has created an atmosphere of desire that counters the inability to speak of pleasure – as was the case in the past.

The Spectacle as Process

How does Debord see authority in this Society of the Spectacle? As always, he follows the Marxist pattern of making authority a thing rather than a process. There is some intention in someone somewhere apparently to maintain social control and handle threats. This is absurd.

There is no controlling mind at the centre of capitalism inventing processes for social control. It is a process in itself. Social controls are intrinsic but also subject to our own engagement in personal and so social liberation. The process includes ‘recuperation’ (the interception of radical ideas, their commodification and safe incorporation) but this is not sinister or willful. It is just natural evolution. It should be regarded as a good thing.

Even attenuated once-radical ideas (like, say, the scientific reality of human racial equality) become included within the ‘spectacle’ and the whole moves forward on the basis of its functionality and facts on the ground. Intellectuals want perfection where there is no perfection to be had. Capitalism is not degrading the life of the people. The people degrade their own lives as victims of circumstances they fail to will to change. As all intellectuals (especially Marxist intellectuals) do, Debord treats the mass of the population as fools, to be enlightened by types like himself.

What We Need

The ‘people’ (that is actual persons in the world) are embedded in a process which is ‘given’ to them but which they change each and every day of their waking lives through their actions. We do not need grumpy Marxist theory. We only need a commitment to a questioning education and the freedom to make choices for ourselves – and intervention, the legitimate role of the community as collective, to ensure that no person is hobbled from making informed choices.

Under this more moderated form of the Situation, questioning and assertive persons can create ‘situations’, reconstruct their localities, choose their relationships, engage with their environments and merge playfulness, free choice and critical thought. There will be no help from a revolutionary proletariat while any ‘art’ that thinks it will transform the conditions of humanity is living in a phantasy all of its own. It is the other way around. The transformation of society will enable an art that can exist for its own sake and is not burdened by theory or politics. Rather Wilde than Marx …

The aim of the Situationist International was much the same as mine – a world of luxury, happiness and freedom but allowing education and the market (a proper market and not socialism for corporations) to thrive is almost certainly more likely to produce these goods over the long term than reliance on a revolutionary proletariat and a bunch of artists.