Super League Self Defeat

Posted by Allister Marran

Picture credit: Dan Leydon, The Beautiful Game.

The current Super League debacle is simply a good example of how modern capitalism destroys humanity and innovation in exchange for pure greed.

There is an investor in Japan who owns one share of Nintendo stocks, and every year he goes to the shareholder meeting and asks the dumbest of questions, always relating to something like, "Why don't Nintendo start making and selling X?” (replace X with dog food, or electric cars, or anything that is selling well) which will make the company more profits.

The Japanese, as courteous and likeable fellows that they are, always answer the same way, "We are a games company at heart. We make games that make people happy. It's about the fans, not the shareholders."

Many games and technology companies have come and gone, because they followed the Western model of profits and return on investment over customer experience. Atari, Sega, Intellevision, Colecovision, Sinclair, Commodore, IBM, Amstrad, the list is endless.

A small business owner exists to service the needs of a customer base. He puts his name and face to a product, and his personal integrity attracts new clients. 

A large listed corporate company insulates its investors from any liability, responsibility, personal association or any other kind of accountability. As a result, many people don't even know what companies they invested in when they modified their share portfolio. For all they know, they could have shares in a company that dumps nuclear waste into the water of an orphanage for needy children. They don't need to know or care, as long as they make money.

Manchester United were the richest sports club in the world until a takeover by the Americans a few years ago. Those investors did not use much of their own money, but took out loans and investment money and leveraged it back to the team. 

Overnight the club went from kings to paupers, owing hundreds of millions to banks and struggling to make loan and interest repayments, whilst disbursing any profits in the form of dividends and cash payouts to the shareholders who invested little in the first place.

Football is the game of the people. It is owned by the people. FIFA represents their interests, as small, poor local clubs vote for committees that vote for regional representatives that vote for national representatives who sit on the body of FIFA. They have their own issues, but they represent the small boy without shoes in a small township in Brazil who owns an old ball and a dream of playing for his country and winning a world cup.

The Super League is the very worst of corporate greed, return on investment and unaccountable capitalism ruining another important business sector. It removes the fans from the game, and funnels profits from FIFA who are supporting grass roots efforts to find the next Pele or Messi or Bale or Mane, and redirects them to the disinterested ultra rich in the USA or Dubai or the Far East. People who don't care about soccer, who don't watch the game on Saturday or Sunday, who don't buy the merchandise, or know the words to the team song.

It could be argued that Nintendo, the Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company, are still around because they continue to tell that one shareholder that the fans are more important than the profits. It's a bad strategy for annual ROI and dividends, but clearly great for long term sustainability and output. It allows them to plan for the bad times, when game machines start their cycle of decline before new technology renews it. 

I hope the fans of the English Big Six are ready to demand the same of their fat cat owners. 

Atari, Mattel, Intellevision, Commodore, IBM and many others were the big players in the games industry in the 80s, and for all intents and purposes they are gone today. Nobody believed they could fail, but they did not listen to the demands of the market and fell to smaller, nimbler, more attuned competition.

There is a chance that the same will happen to the Liverpools, Manchester Uniteds, and Chelseas of the world. No company is too big to fail. It is a lesson history has taught us over and over again. The philosophical theologian Paul Tillich put it radically: “The fundamental virtues in the ethics of a capitalist society are economic efficiency, developed to the utmost degree of ruthless activity.” But ruthlessness eats its own.

“You Will Never Walk Alone" are the words any Liverpool fan lives by. But trust is a two way street. Football is more than a business. Let us hope we are not left deserted on the roadside on our journey.  

Picture Post #63: The Audience

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be 

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen

Girl Dancing In Front Of Her Teddy Bear. Paris, 1961

I like this image. Obviously, it's gentle, charming, and fun too. But beyond that, there is a touch of magic, in that the little girl is dancing, yes, but the bear is watching and waving. The bear becomes the active element in the composition, the girl a mere puppet, seemingly held up by invisible strings.

Not that it matters, I think it is a still from the film Gigot, that was set in Paris, so that's where this dance takes place and it was directed by Gene Kelly. However, the little girl – Nicole, in the film – is played by Diane Gardner. I believe this was her starring role!

The Problem of Inauthenticity

Harry, Meghan and Oprah having a chat (Photocredit-HarpoProductions-JoePugliese)

What was the ‘intention’ of  Mister and Missus Harry Mountbatten–Windsor with THAT  interview? You know, the one with Oprah Winfrey in which they spilled the beans on life in the British Royal Family.

As one gushing website put it:

“The dust is still settling from Oprah Winfrey’s explosive two-hour interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on Sunday, and the revelations are devastating. Markle, pregnant with the couple’s second child, described the racist treatment she endured from social media, the British press and the royal family itself.”

Was the intention then to lift the lid on racism in the Royal Family? Certainly it seemed so when Harry revealed about their baby: 

“There were ‘concerns and conversations’ about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.”

The British Royals are a venerable institution, and the Queen’s husband in particular, aka Harry’s grandfather, had a well-grounded reputation for off-colour remarks, including references to “slitty eyes” while visiting China and saying of a messy fuse box in a factory that it looked like it had been put together “by an Indian”.

Was the intention of the interview then to give Harry’s grandad (who would die only a few weeks later) a really bad day? Apparently not, although, of course, neither Meghan nor Harry would actually stoop to naming names. However, Oprah herself did clarify on CBS the next morning that Harry wanted it be known that “it was not his grandmother, nor his grandfather that were part of those conversations.”

Looking at the allegation and subsequent clumsy refinement, it looks to me like the intention was not so much to throw mud at the Royal Family, which after all, for Harry would be rather like throwing mud at yourself, as at some particular individual within it with whom there had been a disagreement. Also called settling scores in public. Is that, however, a worthwhile thing to be doing on Oprah’s highly moral show? I ask because Ms Winfrey has publicly set a very high standard for her interviews. Ever since the occasion in 1988, when she interviewed white supremacists in order to “gain insight into the source of their hatred”. 

To be honest, so venomous was the interview with Harry and Meghan, Oprah could almost have offered a similar motivation here. Alas though, truth is more prosaic, and it seems only that the two wealthy celebrities were being interviewed by the third wealthy celebrity merely as a way to promote themselves. Is self-promotion a worthy, moral endeavour? I suppose we should be careful not to be too puritanical about such things. After all, a celebrity is someone who gives the public some kind of pleasure. But there's a point where celebrities celebrating themselves, and attacking lesser figures, becomes rather dodgy. 

After Winfrey interviewed the racists on that long-ago show, she publicly regretted it and vowed that from then on the watchword would be “intention”. What’s that all about then? Well, the term, signifying the search for spiritual values, is central to the new age philosophy of Gary Zukav set out in his book, The Seat of the Soul. In the book, Zukav, who was already famous for his new-age investigations of personal psychology and quantum physics (including one of my own favourite reads, The Dancing Wu Li Masters), offers a grand cosmological theory: 

“Each soul enters into a sacred agreement with the Universe to accomplish specific goals, or take on a particular task. All of your experiences of your life serve to awaken within you the memory of that contract, and to prepare you to fulfill it.” 

For individuals this means one thing. Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and “that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect.”

This is part of a broader theory set out in the book that humanity is evolving from a species that pursues external power into a species that pursues spiritual values. Zukav argues (rather predictably) that the pursuit of external power generates conflict—between individuals and lovers, within communities, and between nations – while “authentic power” infuses the activities of life with reverence, compassion, and trust. 

“Reach for your soul. Reach even further, the impulse of creation and power authentic, the hourglass point between energy and matter, that is the seat of the soul.” 

Huston Smith, professor of philosophy at MIT, praised the book as “remarkable” and complimented Zukav, calling him “one of our finest interpreters of frontier science”, able to explain and understand the human spirit.  

Anyway, the principle became a guiding light for Winfrey. “The number one principle that rules my life is intention,” Winfrey has said adding that  after reading Zukav’s book, she called a meeting with the TV show’s producers and announced a new strategy: “We are going to be a force for good, and that is going to be our intention.” 

Winfrey has also revealed that there had been plenty of times where she’d heard ideas for the show that had no positive intention, and so from now on she would turn these down. Nor, she said, would she accept ideas where she felt people were manufacturing an intention that they themselves didn’t believe in. She’d no longer accept this sort of inauthenticity.

But looking at the sight of a wealthy princeling, who once dressed up as a Nazi at a rave, and a model who in her brief visit to England was accused of bullying and humiliating staff, using her show as a vehicle to cast aspersions against friends and family alike, I can’t help but feel that either Zukav’s philosophy is worthless, or Winfrey’s adoption of it is, well, inauthentic. Or maybe both, of course!

The Simplicity of Power

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

One of the more important 'philosophies of ...' is political philosophy, which is the philosophical study of government.

The first and most important subject that this deals with is political order: whether we should choose, say, a republican government, or a constitutional monarchy, a gerontocracy, or an autocracy, and so on.

Next to this, perhaps the one major aspect of political philosophy is the issue of the powers of political agents and institutions: how these powers are granted, how they are circumscribed, what relationships exist between them, and so on. 

Today we have developed a distribution or balance of powers, which is crucial to the maintenance of the political order.  In some cases, this is overt--for instance, in the USA.  In other cases, it may be more subtle--as in the UK.  Whatever the case may be, there will be few countries where there is no balance at all.

Now in our common thinking, the balance of powers refers to the three great powers of state: the legislative, judicial, and executive branches, called the trias politica. Each has separate, independent powers, and each keeps the others in check.

Now when one asks what these powers really are, our thoughts often turn to stereotypes: the houses or parliament or halls of congress, stately courts of law and robed judges, rows of smartly dressed riot police, typically holding cudgels, and many other things which seem characteristic of these powers.

I propose, however, that in the tumult of our daily lives, and in the function of these powers from week to week, it comes down to something far simpler than this--namely, scraps of information which we deal with from day to day: receipts and signatures, sheets of paper, or words exchanged in telephone calls and side rooms.

Assume, by way of example, that a local regulator has refused to entertain a complaint against one of its members.  Say, a local Law Society has received a complaint against a solicitor--an esteemed solicitor--and suppressed it.  This is quite common in fact, throughout the world. We call it regulatory capture.

By way of analysis, an executive function (the regulator) has failed.  The matter is therefore handed to a judicial body (say, the Public Protector) to set the case to rights.  It is, in fact, just one of many ordinary instances of the separation of powers--and with that, of checks and balances.

In the process, the Public Protector produces certain rules--say, numbered from 1 to 10, and explains how these rules apply in this case. All things considered, the Protector then makes a judgement, and states how the situation should be remedied.

Power has checked power--and here we see the system of the separation of powers working at a more basic level.  In order to understand what is really happening here, we may say that it all works at the level of information.

Each step of our example rests on the disclosure of information. A citizen shares information about a problem. The Public Protector's rules represent information, too. The application of these rules demands information, and so, too, does remedial action.

In fact it goes further back than this, to the regulator itself. The Law Society, like the Public Protector, has certain rules, say again numbered from 1 to 10. But rule 11, they say (which does not exist) precludes the citizen's complaint. Or the complaint, they say, changed in an interview (which did not take place).

Again it comes down to information--often enough, simple information, too. And so the information which is required, in order to know that the crucial separation of the powers of state is working, may often be undermined or suppressed in quite ordinary ways.

The significance of this is that if citizens do not know the importance of each small item of information, and if this is multiplied hundreds, even thousands of times across the nation, the abuse of power creeps into the system while citizens mistakenly believe that the separation of powers is about the usual stereotypes.

In fact the separation of powers is about many things which may easily escape one’s attention: the denial of a receipt, the omission of a signature, a few lost pages, or the misrepresentation of a conversation. Such things may conceal a world of trouble, and are often critical to the system as a whole.

Wherever information is concealed or distorted, power may go unchecked—which is to say, people may be able to gain unfair personal and political advantage. Regulators are captured, crimes are swept under the carpet, the poor are exploited, foodstuffs are unsafe—and a thousand, ten thousand ills besides.

What Is Wisdom?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Wisdom is often offered as a person’s most-valuable quality, yet even ardent admirers might struggle to define or explain it. Some of philosophy’s giants, whether Confucius, Buddha, Plato, or Socrates, have concluded that wisdom is rooted not so much in what we do know, but in acknowledging what we don’t know — that is, in realising the extent of our own ignorance.

This humbleness about the limits of our knowledge and, further, ability to know — sometimes referred to by academics as ‘epistemic humility’ — seems a just metric as far as it goes. The term ‘epistemic’ referring to matters of knowledge: what we believe we know, and in the particular case of epistemic humility, the limitations of that knowledge. An important thread begins to appear here, which is the role of judgment in explaining the totality of wisdom.

To repudiate boundaries on our knowledge, or just as importantly on the ability to know, would amount to intellectual hubris. But, epistemic humility, while arguably one among other qualities of a person we might characterise as wise in some limited capacity, is not anywhere nearly enough to explain all that wisdom is.

Consider, for illustration, those people who might assume they know things they do not, despite the supposed knowledge existing outside their proficiency. What I’d call ‘epistemic conceit’ — and again, a key matter of judgment. A case in point might be a neuroscientist, with intimate knowledge of the human brain’s physiology and functions, and maybe of consciousness, concluding that his deep understanding of neuroscience endows him with the critical-thinking skills to invest his money wisely. Or to offer cogent solutions to the mathematical challenges of the physics of ‘string theory’.

Similarly, what about those things falling within the scope of a person’s expertise, theories claimed at the time to be known with a degree of confidence, until the knowledge suddenly proved false. Take the case of the geocentric (Earth-centered) model of the universe, and secondly of optical illusions leading to belief in the existence of so-called ‘Martian canals’. These are occasions of what we might call ‘epistemic unawareness’, to which we are humanly disposed no matter how wise.

Yet, while humbleness about the limits of our knowledge may provide a narrow window on wisdom, it is not definitive. Notably, there seems to be an inverse association between the number of factors claimed vital to fully explain wisdom, and how successfully the definition of wisdom may hold up as holes are poked into the many variables of the explanation under close scrutiny.

The breadth and depth of knowledge and experience are similarly insufficient to define wisdom in totality, despite people earnest chronicling such claims through the course of history. After all, we can have little knowledge and experience and still be decidedly wise; and we can have vast knowledge and experience and still be decidedly unwise. To understand the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and to make life’s decisions accordingly, calls on judgment.

Indeed, even exceptionally wise people — regardless of their field of expertise — can and do on occasion harbour false beliefs and knowledge, which one might call ‘epistemic inaccuracy’. History’s equivalents of such intellectual giants as Plato, Sun Tzu, Da Vinci, Beethoven, Goethe, Shakespeare, Fermat, and Einstein are no exception to this encompassing rule. Einstein, for example, proposed that the universe is static, of which he was later disabused by evidence that the universe is actually expanding and accelerating.

In the same vein, Plato was seemingly wrong about the imperative to define something as an ‘ideal’ before we attempt to achieve it, potentially hobbling efforts to reach practical, real-world goals like implementing remedies for inequitable systems of justice. Meanwhile, Shakespeare made both significant historical and geographical mistakes. And Goethe, wearing his polymath hat, erroneously refuted the Newtonian theory of the decomposition of white light, suggesting instead that colours appeared from mixing light and darkness.

More generally, how might we assess the wisdom of deep thinkers who lived centuries or even millennia ago, a large number of whose presumed knowledge had long been disproved and displaced by new paradigms? I doubt those thinkers’ cogency, insightfulness, prescience, and persuasiveness at the time they lived are any less impressive because of what turned out to be the demonstrated shelf half-life of their knowledge and insights.

Meanwhile, all this assumes we consider such exceptional intellects as not just exquisitely erudite, but also mindful of their own fallibility. As well as mindful of the uncertainty and contingency of what’s real and true in the world. Both assumptions about the conditions and requirement for critical mindfulness call for judgment, too.

Even a vast store of knowledge and experience, however, does not get us all the way to explaining the first principles of wisdom writ large as opposed to singular instances of acting wisely. A wise person’s knowledge and beliefs ought to match up with her behaviour and ways of living. Yet, that ingredient in what, say, minimally describes ‘a wise person’ likewise falls short of explaining full-on wisdom. Even highly knowledgeable people, if impulsive or incorrigibly immoral or amoral, may act unwisely; as in so many other ways, their putative lack of judgment here matters.

One fallback strategy that some philosophers, psychologists, and others resort to has been to lard explanation of wisdom with an exhausting catalog of qualities and descriptors in hope of deflecting criticism of their definition of wisdom. What I’d call the ‘potpourri theory of wisdom’. Somehow, as the thinking misguidedly goes, the more descriptors or factors they shoehorn into the definition, supposedly the more sound the argument.

Alternatively, wisdom might be captured in just one word: judgment. Judgment in what one thinks, decides, opines, says, and does. By which is meant that wisdom entails discerning the presence of patterns, including correspondences and dissimilarities, which may challenge customary canons of reality. Then turning those patterns into understanding, and in step turning understanding into execution (behaviours) — with each fork in this process warranting judgment.

Apart from judgment, notably all other elements that we might imagine to partially explain wisdom — amount and accuracy of knowledge, humility of what one knows and can know, amount and nature of experience — are firmly contingent on each other. Co-dependence is inescapable. Judgment, on the other hand, is the only element that is dependent on no others, in a category of one. I propose that judgment is both enough and necessary to define wisdom.

Picture Post #63: Paradise Lost

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be 

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Italy 1960's .  Picture credit: Antonio Borrani

A nude man seems to sprout out of the earth, just like the vegetation. And in a way there is not much to say, except that most often people focus on people, and more so when these people are naked. 

The spectator’s interpretation depends on how they consider the naked body. Even when the nude figure has inspired general acceptance in the Western world, especially in forms of art, we might think it a bit strange if we would see an undressed person walking on the street. The quintessence of humankind certainly is undressed, although we are used to seeing the body covered up. 

Turning to the decade of the sixties when some of the younger generation longed for freedom from the conservatism at that time, the exaltation of the uncovered body symbolised that quest for freedom. No wonder the pureness of nudity is similar to taking off a mask. To live without pretence is nevertheless not an easy goal to set. 

Indeed, almost sixty years ahead, particularly at the beach and also on the streets, bodies are surely covered up less than they were. Although that progress of freedom seems to have translated itself rather into an imposed fashion these days, than the acquisition of a free spirit, as some were looking for when this picture was taken. 

In the West, nudity belongs to private atmospheres to this day, and the naked body, most often, is conflated with sexuality. To exploit nakedness is an optional which does not withstand the fact that we are all born naked. Yet somehow we seem to have trouble owning that nakedness, in which we become unspoiled by structures, and can accept ourselves not as objects or art-forms, but simply for what we are. To put it a bit crudely: for one of those standing upright animals. 

Poem: The Answer to the Riddle of Needs

by Chengde Chen*

Photo credit: Chuck Kuhn. Night Moods: Red Moon Over the World's Fair 1964.

People have always believed that
it is a human need to develop technology
But this is a confusion of two kinds of needs –
needs for survival and needs of a value system
The former comes from nature
while the latter is created by man
If we choose a different value system
we would ‘need’ different things

Developing technology was originally a need to survive
From drilling wood for fire, to farming and weaving
man had to claim his fill, warmth and security from nature
In the great struggle for survival
we formed a utilitarian value system –
pursuing wealth and encouraging competition
with the market and technology as its two engines
This system drove the economy successfully
and then the economy meant survival

It is because this system has been successful
that it has become the soul guiding our thinking
What else do we need after meeting the needs for survival?
No one knows, as the answer is what to be created
The utilitarian values, however, are the creators –
Technology tells us what we ‘can’ need
The market tells us what we ‘do’ need

Originally we did not need the car
but since the car was invented and on the market
we came to need it, and need it so much
that we would feel imprisoned without it
Originally we did not need the television

but since the television was invented and on the market
we came to need it, and need it so much
that we would feel our day incomplete without it
Modern society is a technology-addicted society
Technology for us is like spirits or nicotine for the addicts
It creates the blood and nerves that need it, as well as
the greed for consumption and the desire for competition

Do we need air travel?
Do we need flying at the speed of a bullet?
Why is travelling to a remote and strange continent
more enjoyable than meeting neighbours or friends nearby?

Do we need to go to the Moon?
Do we need to be a hero to destroy its beautiful fairy-tales?
Why is a lunar crater dead for a million years more interesting
than the green hills and flowing rivers of our homeland?
Do we need all those life prolonging medicines,
or to live in the electric current of a life-support machine?
Why is letting a withered leaf struggle on a winter’s branch
more moral or prudent than allowing it to go naturally?

We do not really ‘need’ them, but we think we do!
It is because of nothing but competition
We believe that we need to do what others can
as well as what others cannot
If you can fly into space, I must touch the Moon
If you have reached Venus first, I must land on Mars first
regardless of millions of hungry children crying on Earth!

It is believed that life needs competition
In fact, it is competition that makes competition a need
The strong swagger around, the weak refuse to be outdone
Those in the middle have to struggle against both ends
Every one compels others to be opponents
Every nation forces other nations to be arrivals
Oh, is this all necessary?
Once escaping from the net of utilitarianism
you will find the world war an uncalled-for game
As an old Chinese saying reads:
‘If no side wants to win a war, they win the peace together!’

Many of our needs are in fact not ‘our’ needs
but the needs of our values
The answer to the riddle of needs lies in our value system
Utilitarianism is only one of the possible systems
It championed civilization before, but isn’t an eternal law
nor is it the unique basis settled by Heaven and Earth
If the risk of self-destruction means a new need for survival
mankind has to choose a new system!

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* Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde@sipgroup.com

Will Deep Space Be Our Destiny?

‘Earthrise’, from 50 years ago, is one of the most influential images from the Apollo space program 

Posted by Keith Tidman

 

Humankind’s curiosity about the universe, and yearning to explore its vastness, has been insatiable … 

• Early hominids staring inquisitively at patterns in the dotted night sky
• Copernicus contemplating the heavens through his telescope, and our place in space
• The iconic landing of humans on the craggy moon surface
• Twin Viking vehicles sending back vast troves of information as they traverse interplanetary and interstellar space
• The Hubble space-based telescope capturing images of the farthest reaches of the universe, revealing the early moments of creation
• The detection of habitable planets outside our solar system, inspiring what-ifs as to life there
• The International Space Station-cum-science lab perched in geostationary space
• A hive of international satellites performing jobs essential to modern society’s thriving
• The Perseverance rover alighting on Mars to search for signs of ancient extraterrestrial life 

Our minds — the font of our imagination, inquisitiveness, dreams, and seductive desire for knowledge and understanding — have been enthusiastic spacefarers. Machines, tasked as our proxies, have had their turn to perform these missions; on other occasions, human pioneers have intrepidly taken to space. Paradoxically, these endeavours have not shrunk the universe, but have made it seem all the bigger. They have allowed us to marvel at a universe both harmonious and violent at the same time.

 

Might the kinds of human-centric and machine-centric endeavours listed above continue to define our longer-range destiny, in still grander and unforeseen ways? Should they?

 

The hazards posed by some of these missions have been presented as reasons not to engage in them. Space is a hostile place for humans. Yet, with pioneers’ minds open to the reality of inevitable unknowns, there have always been unanticipated risks associated with human exploratory enterprises over the millennia, whether navigating vast roiling oceans or trekking across unfamiliar, harsh landmasses. The current and future probing of space will be no exception to this historical course.

 

The fatal explosion of two space shuttles, one upon launch and the other upon reentry, with astronauts aboard accentuated the potential perils. Cosmonauts have faced similar fates. The poignancy of the price in human lives and health is not lost on us: The motivation of space exploration, discovery, and learning has always entailed a linking of emotion and reason, with acceptance of the possible consequences like these sobering mishaps.

 

One of the more menacing hazards during human missions beyond the Earth’s protective magnet field is radiation, with its deleterious effects on the central nervous system, as well as on cognitive and motor functions. Also, experiments with one twin on Earth and the other on a lengthy stay in space have revealed the problematic alteration of cells and genes. And astronauts’ transition from one gravity field to another has raised a need to examine re-adaptation by the body’s systems. We’re vulnerable, to be sure.

 

Yet, these and other hazards won’t hamper humanity’s spirit; these perils, too, will be overcome with time and ingenuity and determination. For the foreseeable future, there will remain an interdependent relationship between the best of machine learning, automation, and resilience and the best of human original thinking, hypothesising, interpretation, extrapolation, and dexterity in pivoting to respond to the unexpected.

 

Robots and human should be regarded as complementary allies in space exploration, not an either-or proposition. Neither will fully replace the other; nor ought they.

 

Meanwhile, taking to space for field studies has resulted in a growing cache of scientific and technological spin-offs on Earth. On a practical front, there are myriad and diverse scientific and technological derivatives that enter our everyday lives as consumers, as well as farther-reaching breakthroughs.

 

These breakthroughs include advances across broad domains: medicine, transportation, communication, food production, water purification, robotics, computing, human physiology, safety, recycling, energy, meteorology, engineering, materials science, and the environment. To those exhaustive extents, among others, investments in space exploration support homebound developments on sundry levels.

 

As for the budgetary politics of space exploration, and whether they ought to out-place competitive needs at home, one might wonder whether the monumental sums spent on bristling arsenals to fight wars evermore lethally are, in fact, a wiser commitment of capital than is exploring space. Not lost in this particular illustration is the arresting irony in more and more nations believing it an imperative to competitively militarise space.

 

All that said, when it comes to our spacefaring ambitions, there are, I propose, variables of a more intrinsic nature: like enlightening our thinking about humanity, community, and our deepest values and ideals. 

 

To these points, theoretical science and pure research have indispensable roles. History brims with examples of what humankind learned — where knowledge and understanding had inherent value in their own right — even if tangible offshoots were years, if ever, in the making and years, if ever, in the full-fledged adoption. An intrinsic value that derives from the persistent evolution of basic science, as well as the riches in new knowledge drawn from irresistibly ploughing untilled ground.

 

Theoretical science and pure research, even though where they might eventually lead is uncertain, commonly sharpen the cutting edge of human imagination, vision, and inspiration. That’s progress, of a critical sort. Being consumed by short-term thinking, with its emphasis on immediate payback, deprives us of our intellectual seed stock: the foundation for converting hypotheses into interesting and revealing models of our reality, both scientific and philosophical.

 

Space, then, is not the ‘final frontier’, but rather is only the ‘next frontier’.

Earth is more than the ‘mote of dust’ of Carl Sagan’s imagination. Humanity, I anticipate, will tirelessly play out these spacefaring beginnings, to make its destiny reality.

 

Imagining Freedom

 Posted by Emile Wolfaardt

Image: UNESCO. Vandal-ism, a tribute to Édouard Manet 

by the Spanish artist Pejac, 2014.

The human spirit is born yearning innately and continually for freedom. It seems that from the day we are dragged reluctantly out of the womb to our final rasping breath, we find the imposition of limitations an injury to our sensibilities.

We seek instinctively the dismissal of all censorship. Similarly, we feel we are our own source and standard for truth. Any burden of constraint or requirement that is not consistent with our opinion, we tend to naturally devalue and disqualify. Nature itself seems somehow complicit in denying us our freedoms as we look to the birds and cry, ‘Oh that I had wings like a dove.’

It was while seeking to throw off the restraint of British shackles in 1775 that the revolutionary lawyer and governor Patrick Henry stood in front of the Virginia legislature and implored, ‘I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!’

Yet the truth is that neither the bird, nor Patrick Henry, nor the human spirit is actually free, nor can they be! The bird cannot rise to altitudes where there is no oxygen. Mr. Henry could not derail the adoption of US Constitution despite his commitment to do so, and you and I, no matter who we are, live with a myriad of restrictions that we reasonably cannot defy.

What does it mean to be really free? Should Colin Kaepernick be free to ‘take the knee’, or Edward Snowden to publish classified information? Should the South African government be free to deport foreigners, or local sub-culture groups be free to articulate their prejudices? Should pastors, florists and bakers be forced to provide their services for same-sex weddings and celebrations that violate their religious beliefs? What if we flip the question? Should a homosexual graphic designers or printers be forced to create flyers for a rally opposing same-sex marriages?

Here is why the discussion may be more complex than simply shouting ‘freedom’ as loudly as one can, then giving one’s life to make that statement somehow more meaningful.

• Freedom is Both Relative and Subjective

It is relative because we tend to evaluate freedom by comparing it to the freedom of others, or the freedom we enjoyed in previous situation. When Martin Luther King declared “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” he was still part of a system of opression that had not yet changed.

It is subjective because it depends on your one’s mindset. The same group of militia may be called ‘freedom fighters’ or ‘terrorists’ depending on what side of the table they sit on. The psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl faced the incredible horrors of Auschwitz. With 6 million others, he was stripped of everything, including his dignity. But in the depth of his suffering, Frankl decided that there was a part of him the Nazis could never touch – and that was his choice to be positive, to have and optimistic outlook. That was his choice for freedom.

• Freedom is Both Negative and Positive

The concept of negative and positive freedom was popularized in an essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin published in 1958, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’.

Negative freedom centres on freedom from interference by others. It focuses on my freedom to act according to the dictates of my conscience without others preventing me from doing so. It asks, ‘In what areas am I master?’

Positive freedom is a little more tricky – it is about my right to do something rather than limiting the interference I may encounter from others. It is about my freedom to do, say, associate, worship, and express as I choose to.

However we define it – at the end of the day, we are as free as we choose to be – because freedom is more a state of mind than of circumstances. Circumstantially, we will never be free. There will always be limitations imposed by nature, governments, others, and even our own minds and bodies. That is not where true freedom is found.

The battle for freedom is fought and won in the mind. When we empower the actions of others to determine our state of mind, we empower them to determine our freedom. Freedom is available to all. The wisdom principle of freedom is simply this:

Where the freedom of one infringes on the freedoms of another, the net result is less freedom for all. As a matter of fact, the entire judicial system is purposed on this principle.

Nelson Mandela wrote, ‘To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.’ His autobiography, ‘Long Walk to Freedom’, was not primarily about political or physical freedom, although that was both the context and the occasion of his writing. It was about the choice to be free in his inner being, in his mind, and to afford others with the same respect and opportunity.

So, perhaps we should all take that long walk – and find the freedom in our minds. Mind chains are a terrible task-master to serve – and freedom is simply a choice away.

What is Grammar?

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Grammar, say some, is about a grammar gene—or we use grammar, say others, to hold sentences together—or, its purpose is to improve our clarity of communication—or any of the many things which have been suggested in the course of time. 

I propose that grammar is, fundamentally, about two basic categories which we find in philosophy, namely things and relations. Or rather, it is about the way that we repeat these things and relations, as we communicate.

Things which are oft repeated are best automated for efficiency. We may think of the manufacturing process. One may punch a hole by hand, and another, and another—yet as soon as one needs thousands of holes, one creates a mechanism by which one can repeat the action more efficiently. One transfers individual acts to a machine. 

In language, we do much the same. A most basic example is the noun and the verb. John Herschel included among the laws of nature correlations of properties on the one hand, and sequences of events on the other. More recently, Albert Einstein described our world as a space-time continuum: space in three dimensions, and time in a fourth. We may expect, therefore, that this distinction will be much repeated in language—so much so, that we automate its use, as it were. 

This is indeed what we find, with nouns typically referring to things in space, and verbs typically tracing relations through time. A garden is a thing in space, while to garden is a process in time. Instead of spelling out the difference every time—say, speaking of a garden-thing and a garden-action (and so on)—we incorporate the distinction in grammar. While it would be an over-simplification to suggest that we may apply such a scheme in every case, we may broadly understand our parts of speech in such terms.

Now within the two categories of noun and verb, some relations are oft repeated. For instance, nouns frequently have to do with possession (the genitive case), while verbs frequently refer to the past (the past tense), to give but two examples among many. Such conceptual emphases, amplified through heavy use, are automated for convenience—we may say they are compressed—into tables we call declensions and conjugations and, one may add, inflections and derivations. 

Different cultures repeat different kinds of things and relations more frequently in their speech. Therefore grammars will differ from culture to culture, because different grammars reflect different cultural traits. In English, for example, one finds the future tense, where in Japanese one does not. In Japanese, one finds the honorific case, where in English one does not. Such emphases typically correlate with features one finds in the culture.

Further, because we are dealing with compressive techniques, one finds inconsistencies of compression in language—for instance, irregular nouns and verbs, and unproductive patterns. In fact, such inconsistencies may aid compression—as we know well from computer programming.

This further has a bearing on the long-standing question whether a common structure lies beneath all grammars—so puzzling in their diversity. The philosopher Max Black noted, ‘There is extreme variability between grammars.’ In fact, ‘Grammar has no essence.’ This should in fact be the case where grammars are not embedded in our DNA, but are manifestations of how we trace relations between things in this world.

Such a view of grammar suggests that the structure of grammar will indeed vary—insofar as the relations which we trace between things—again, the things and relations which we often repeat—vary. By and large, therefore, we shall not find a common underlying structure. Grammar is not ingrained in us or in our language. It is about tracing relations between things—fairly arbitrarily, we might add.

What then is grammar?  Grammar is completely a manifestation of—an expression of—things and the relations between them. More than that, it is about the various emphases which we place on things and the relations between them—as we see it in this moment in time, in this place, in this culture, in this atmosphere in which we live today.