Justastory

This last month I have been reading Henry Thoreau’s work “Walden” which is all about jacking in the materialist rat race and going off to live next to the land in a small shack out in the woods. When I found this article in the Guardian it was almost identical – but here and now rather than 1845 (Thoreau was way ahead of his time) so here it is for an alternative Christmas story…..as I am so heartily sick of the mainstream ones!

In six years of studying economics, not once did I hear the word “ecology”. So if it hadn’t have been for the chance purchase of a video called Gandhi in the final term of my degree, I’d probably have ended up earning a fine living in a very respectable job persuading Indian farmers to go GM, or something useful like that. The little chap in the loincloth taught me one huge lesson – to be the change I wanted to see in the world. Trouble was, I had no idea back then what that change was.

After managing a couple of organic food companies made me realise that even “ethical business” would never be quite enough, an afternoon’s philosophising with a mate changed everything. We were looking at the world’s issues – environmental destruction, sweatshops, factory farms, wars over resources – and wondering which of them we should dedicate our lives to. But I realised that I was looking at the world in the same way a western medical practitioner looks at a patient, seeing symptoms and wondering how to firefight them, without any thought for their root cause. So I decided instead to become a social homeopath, a pro-activist, and to investigate the root cause of these symptoms.

One of the critical causes of those symptoms is the fact we no longer have to see the direct repercussions our purchases have on the people, environment and animals they affect. The degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed have increased so much that we’re completely unaware of the levels of destruction and suffering embodied in the stuff we buy. The tool that has enabled this separation is money.

If we grew our own food, we wouldn’t waste a third of it as we do today. If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn’t throw them out the moment we changed the interior decor. If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn’t contaminate it.

So to be the change I wanted to see in the world, it unfortunately meant I was going to have to give up cash, which I initially decided to do for a year. I got myself a caravan, parked it up on an organic farm where I was volunteering and kitted it out to be off-grid. Cooking would now be outside – rain or shine – on a rocket stove; mobile and laptop would be run off solar; I’d use wood I either coppiced or scavenged to heat my humble abode, and a compost loo for humanure.

Food was the next essential. There are four legs to the food-for-free table: foraging wild food, growing your own, bartering, and using waste grub, of which there is loads. On my first day, I fed 150 people a three-course meal with waste and foraged food. Most of the year, though, I ate my own crops.

To get around, I had a bike and trailer, and the 34-mile commute to the city doubled up as my gym subscription. For loo roll I’d relieve the local newsagents of its papers (I once wiped my arse with a story about myself); it’s not double-quilted, but I quickly got used to it. For toothpaste I used washed-up cuttlefish bone with wild fennel seeds, an oddity for a vegan.

What have I learned? That friendship, not money, is real security. That most western poverty is of the spiritual kind. That independence is really interdependence. And that if you don’t own a plasma screen TV, people think you’re an extremist.

People often ask me what I miss about my old world of lucre and business. Stress. Traffic jams. Bank statements. Utility bills.

Well, there was the odd pint of organic ale with my mates down the local.

• Mark Boyle is the founder of The Freeconomy Community. In a subsequent blog he responds to the comments below.

Today is World Philosophy Day. I haven’t been posting many stories on justastory this month because the news has all been dark, dark, dark…..to quote T.S. Eliot as indeed David Bain, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow, does at the end of this lovely article which appeared on the BBC website today. I think we all need to consider some philosophical questions right now. When my oldest son was eight I put half a glass of water in front of him and asked him if it was half full or half empty. He considered this carefully for some time, looked at me and said “both.” David Bain asked some questions equally worthy of serious consideration…..

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?
Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he’ll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you’re in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?
Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you’re an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement – this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush’s brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.

But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it’s actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn’t implant your brain in Bush’s skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush’s pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.

But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush’s and Gordon Brown’s? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There’s nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.

In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.

3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?
What reason do you have to believe there’s a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.
Are things always as they seem? The Muller-Lyer illusion indicates not

But this, you might reply, doesn’t show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it’s about to rain.

Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, its readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.

Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they’re generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you.”

4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?
Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.

And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one’s denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.

Now, of course, Fred didn’t really exist, so he didn’t really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred’s predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly.”

IN CONCLUSION
Let me be clear: the point is absolutely not that you or I must bite these bullets. Some philosophers have a taste for bullets; but few would accept all the conclusions above and many would accept none. But the point, when you reject a conclusion, is to diagnose where the argument for it goes wrong.

Doing this in philosophy goes hand-in-hand with the constructive side of our subject, with providing sane, rigorous, and illuminating accounts of central aspects of our existence: freewill, morality, justice, beauty, consciousness, knowledge, truth, meaning, and so on.

Rarely does this allow us to put everything back where we found it. There are some surprises, some bullets that have to be bitten; sometimes it’s a matter simply of deciding which. But even when our commonsense conceptions survive more or less intact, understanding is deepened. As TS Eliot once wrote:

“…the end of our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time.”

David Bain is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow

I found this great article in The New York Times which ran at the start of the week. In Utah’s Pleasant Grove City Park, there’s a monument which bears the Ten Commandments on public display. So….. why shouldn’t other religions – under the American Constitution – also have the right to put up their own monuments in public places, bearing their own key aphorisms or sayings? Good question. So thinks the Summum church anyway – with an interesting set of religious beliefs rather like a Gnostic/Egyptian hybrid.  Personally I’m a fan of Gnostic thinking but then again….ah…um….perhaps best for me to stick to reading the suppressed gospels of St Thomas. Known as the doubter for good reasons. Adam Liptak in his well written article is a little less kind – but undeniably amusing.
I couldn’t find a list of all the Summum aphorisms – any contributions from readers would be welcome – but I do have a list of Seven Summum Principles: Psychokinesis, Correspondence, Vibration, Opposition, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender. The Summums believe that “knowledge does not come from things such as the intellect or obedience or faith, but from revelatory experience.” Could be. I could buy that. The photo shows Summum leaders, Bernie Aua, Su Menu and Ron Temu, at their headquarters in Salt Lake City.

PLEASANT GROVE CITY, Utah — Across the street from City Hall here sits a small park with about a dozen donated buildings and objects — a wishing well, a millstone from the city’s first flour mill and an imposing red granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments.

Thirty miles to the north, in Salt Lake City, adherents of a religion called Summum gather in a wood and metal pyramid hard by Interstate 15 to meditate on their Seven Aphorisms, fortified by an alcoholic sacramental nectar they produce and surrounded by mummified animals.

In 2003, the president of the Summum church wrote to the mayor here with a proposal: the church wanted to erect a monument inscribed with the Seven Aphorisms in the city park, “similar in size and nature” to the one devoted to the Ten Commandments.

The city declined, a lawsuit followed and a federal appeals court ruled that the First Amendment required the city to display the Summum monument. The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear arguments in the case, which could produce the most important free speech decision of the term.

The justices will consider whether a public park open to some donations must accept others as well. In cases involving speeches and leaflets, the courts have generally said that public parks are public forums where the government cannot discriminate among speakers on the basis of what they propose to say. The question of how donated objects should be treated is, however, an open one.

Inside the pyramid, sitting on a comfortable white couch near a mummified Doberman named Butch, Ron Temu, a Summum counselor, said the two monuments would complement each other.

“They’ve put a basically Judeo-Christian religious text in the park, which we think is great, because people should be exposed to it,” Mr. Temu said. “But our principles should be exposed as well.”

Su Menu, the church’s president, agreed. “If you look at them side by side,” Ms. Menu said of the two monuments, “they really are saying similar things.”

The Third Commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”

The Third Aphorism: “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”

Michael W. Daniels, the mayor here, is not the vibrating sort.

Sitting with the city attorney in a conference room in City Hall, Mr. Daniels deftly drew several fine lines in explaining why the city could treat the two monuments differently.

Only donations concerning the city’s history are eligible for display in the park as a matter of longstanding policy, he said, and only when donated by groups with a long association with the city. The Fraternal Order of Eagles, a national civic organization, donated the Ten Commandments monument in 1971.

The donations, Mr. Daniels went on, are transformed when the city accepts them. “Monuments on government property become government speech,” he said.

Under the First Amendment, the government can generally say what it likes without giving equal time to opposing views; it has much less latitude to choose among private speakers.

Asked what the government is saying when it displays the Ten Commandments, Mr. Daniels talked about law and history. He did not mention religion.

Pressed a little, he retreated.

“The fact that we own the monument doesn’t mean that what is on the monument is something we are espousing, promoting, establishing, embracing,” Mr. Daniels said. “We’re looking at, Does it fit with the heritage of the people of this area?”

Brian M. Barnard, a lawyer for the Summum church, said the city’s distinctions were cooked up after the fact as a way to reject his client’s monument. The local chapter of the Eagles, Mr. Barnard added, had only been in town two years when it donated the Ten Commandments monument.

“We have a city that will allow one organization to put up its religious ideals and principles,” Mr. Barnard said. “When the next group comes along, they won’t allow it to put up its religious ideals and principles.”

Last year, the federal appeals court in Denver sided with the Summum church and ordered Pleasant Grove City to erect its monument.

Although the case appears to present questions under the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion, the appeals court said the case was properly analyzed under the amendment’s free-speech protections. That distinguishes it from most cases concerning the display of nativity scenes and the like on government property.

The city, supported by more than 20 cities and states, along with the federal government, has told the Supreme Court that the upshot of affirming the appeals court decision would be to clutter public parks across the nation with offensive nonsense.

A town accepting a Sept. 11 memorial would also have to display a donated tribute to Al Qaeda, the briefs said. “Accepting a Statue of Liberty,” the city’s brief said, should not “compel a government to accept a Statue of Tyranny.”

The brief for the Summum church said the relevant dispute was much narrower. “The government,” it said, “may not take sides in a theological debate.”

Governments seeking to avoid accepting donations they do not want have several options, the Summum brief contended. They can choose to display nothing. They can speak in their own voice by creating or commissioning their own monuments. And they can adopt the messages conveyed by donated monuments as their own, but only if they do so expressly and unequivocally.

The Ten Commandments monument here stands in Pioneer Park, which pays tribute to the city’s frontier heritage, one that is mostly Mormon. The two sides differ about how best to honor that heritage.

Mayor Daniels said the monument broadly reflected local history. Mr. Barnard, the Summum lawyer, said the Ten Commandments did not play a central role in the Mormon faith. “If they wanted to quote from the Book of Mormon,” he said, “that would, at least, relate to the pioneers.”

“Mormons came to Utah because of religious persecution,” Mr. Barnard added. “The pioneer heritage in Utah has to be escape from persecution.”

The Summum church was founded in 1975, and it contains elements of Egyptian faiths and Gnostic Christianity. “Summum,” derived from the Latin, refers to the sum of all creation.

Followers of Summum believe that Moses received two sets of tablets on Mount Sinai and that the Ten Commandments were on the second set. The aphorisms were on the first one.

“When Moses came down from the mountain the first time, he brought the principles of creation,” Mr. Temu said. “But he saw the people weren’t ready for them, so he threw them on the ground and destroyed them.”

Summum’s founder, Corky Ra, says he learned the aphorisms during a series of telepathic encounters with divine beings he called Summa Individuals.

Mr. Barnard has represented the Summum church for many years. “They’re odd,” he said of his clients, with an affectionate smile. “They’re strange. They’re different.”

Bernie Aua, the church’s vice president, said the court case should not turn on how his religion was viewed.

“We have this thing called the Constitution,” Mr. Aua said. “The fact is, it’s a public park. And public parks are public.”

Of course we all know that antidisestablishmentarianism means
a political philosophy opposed to the separation of a religious group (”church”) and a government (”state”), especially with regard to the belief held by those in 19th century England opposed to separating the Anglican church from the civil government.At times like this when the head of the Church of England starts to pontificate (sic) about shariah law in England (today’s Sun headline : What a burkah), the issue of homogeneity of church and state is brought to the fore. Especially when you read this very clearly written piece about the subject from a specialist blog from Denis J. Wiechman, Jerry D. Kendall, and Mohammad K. Azarian who I believe study at the University of Illinois:

The most difficult part of Islamic Law for most westerners to grasp is that there is no separation of church and state. The religion of Islam and the government are one. Islamic Law is controlled, ruled and regulated by the Islamic religion. The theocracy controls all public and private matters. Government, law and religion are one. There are varying degrees of this concept in many nations, but all law, government and civil authority rests upon it and it is a part of Islamic religion. There are civil laws in Muslim nations for Muslim and non-Muslim people. Shar’iah is only applicable to Muslims. Most Americans and others schooled in Common Law have great difficulty with that concept.The U.S. Constitution (Bill of Rights) prohibits the government from “establishing a religion.” The U.S. Supreme Court has concluded in numerous cases that the U.S. Government can’t favour one religion over another. That concept is implicit for most U.S. legal scholars and many U.S. academicians believe that any mixture of “church and state” is inherently evil and filled with many problems. They reject all notions of a mixture of religion and government.

The blog that comes from is here.

I invite you to contrast the lucid and clear quality of that with the liberal intellectual tones of “our own” church spokesperson, as published in the guardian where you can read the text in full if you so please.

The first objection to a higher level of public legal regard being paid to communal identity is that it leaves legal process (including ordinary disciplinary process within organisations) at the mercy of what might be called vexatious appeals to religious scruple. A recent example might be the reported refusal of a Muslim woman employed by Marks and Spencer to handle a book of Bible stories. Or we might think of the rather more serious cluster of questions around forced marriages, where again it is crucial to distinguish between cultural and strictly religious dimensions. While Bradney rightly cautions against the simple dismissal of alleged scruple by judicial authorities who have made no attempt to understand its workings in the construction of people’s social identities, it should be clear also that any recognition of the need for such sensitivity must also have a recognised means of deciding the relative seriousness of conscience-related claims, a way of distinguishing purely cultural habits from seriously-rooted matters of faith and discipline, and distinguishing uninformed prejudice from religious prescription. There needs to be access to recognised authority acting for a religious group: there is already, of course, an Islamic Shari’a Council, much in demand for rulings on marital questions in the UK; and if we were to see more latitude given in law to rights and scruples rooted in religious identity, we should need a much enhanced and quite sophisticated version of such a body, with increased resource and a high degree of community recognition, so that ‘vexatious’ claims could be summarily dealt with. The secular lawyer needs to know where the potential conflict is real, legally and religiously serious, and where it is grounded in either nuisance or ignorance. There can be no blank cheques given to unexamined scruples.

The second issue, a very serious one, is that recognition of ’supplementary jurisdiction’ in some areas, especially family law, could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women. The ‘forced marriage’ question is the one most often referred to here, and it is at the moment undoubtedly a very serious and scandalous one; but precisely because it has to do with custom and culture rather than directly binding enactments by religious authority, I shall refer to another issue. It is argued that the provision for the inheritance of widows under a strict application of sharia has the effect of disadvantaging them in what the majority community might regard as unacceptable ways. A legal (in fact Qur’anic) provision which in its time served very clearly to secure a widow’s position at a time when this was practically unknown in the culture becomes, if taken absolutely literally, a generator of relative insecurity in a new context (see, for example, Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights. Tradition and Politics, 1999, p.111). The problem here is that recognising the authority of a communal religious court to decide finally and authoritatively about such a question would in effect not merely allow an additional layer of legal routes for resolving conflicts and ordering behaviour but would actually deprive members of the minority community of rights and liberties that they were entitled to enjoy as citizens; and while a legal system might properly admit structures or protocols that embody the diversity of moral reasoning in a plural society by allowing scope for a minority group to administer its affairs according to its own convictions, it can hardly admit or ‘license’ protocols that effectively take away the rights it acknowledges as generally valid.

You might find him a wishy washy liberal, but IMHO he is well read and at least he had the balls to raise the issue in the first place – whilst others are only keen to bluster in his wake.

Never done an obit on justastory before but this one in the Telegraph caught my eye today. Of course, the Beatles were giant in my young imagination – and their fascination with Oriental themes came out big time in Sergeant Pepper, which I listened to endlessly whilst growing my hair. It proved to be the spur for much further reading and thinking. Bit enlightening to hear that the Maharishi heavily disapproved of the Beatles behaviour whilst in his ashram, but then again, one feels he could have been wiser in some respects……

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru to the Beatles and millions of meditators, has died at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, a spokesman said.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles who introduced the West to transcendental meditation, has died at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi parlayed his interpretations of ancient scripture into a multimillion-dollar global empire

“He died peacefully at about 7 p.m.,” said Bob Roth, a spokesman for the Transcendental Meditation movement which the Maharishi founded and which introduced the West to a Hindu practice of mind control, once dismissed as hippie mysticism but which gradually gained medical respectability.

Mr Roth said the cause of death was yet to be established but it appeared to be “natural causes, his age.” The Maharishi was believed to be 91.

The most celebrated and famous of the 1960s spiritual gurus, the Maharishi drew in many high profile celebrities to his Transcendental Meditation movement. These included the Beach Boys, singer-songwriter Donovan, Clint Eastwood and avant-garde film maker, David Lynch.

But the most high profile followers were the Beatles, who spent time on a retreat in India in the late 1960s.
However the relationship soured and, with the exception of the late George Harrison, the group became disillusioned with the Maharishi and following a widely-publicised spat, left. Only Harrison maintained an interest in meditation.

The spiritualist and author Deepak Chopra, a former maharishi disciple and a friend of Harrison, has said that contrary to popular myth, the row was nothing to do with claims that the maharishi made sexual advances on Mia Farrow, the actress and friend of the band.

Instead, he said, the maharishi had objected to the group taking drugs at his home in Rishikesh, northern India.

Dr Chopra told the Sunday Telegraph: “What isn’t generally known is that the maharishi had got fed up with the Beatles taking drugs while they were at his ashram [spiritual home].

“They were smoking ganja [cannabis] and taking LSD. He hadn’t come across anything like that before and he took a strong view.”

Born between 1911 and 1919, the maharishi, whose real name was Mahesh Prasad Varma, was a physics graduate from Allahabad University before rejecting materiality and becoming a devotee of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati or “Guru Dev”.

In 1955 the maharishi began publicly teaching a traditional meditation technique which he later renamed Transcendental Meditation.

Within three years, the maharishi had begun the first of a number of worldwide tours which lead to his fame and global recognition.

It is estimated that there are some 5 million practitioners of Transcendental Meditation worldwide.

I found this book_smarts entry today, recommended by someone else. It’s a quick story in a neat information delivery package and I liked it for that. I wasn’t keen on the rest of the book_smarts inclusions, but this one hit a note for me, reminding me of the core sentiments in Viktor Frankl’s work.

Frankl suggests this scenario: you go to the doctor one day and he tells you that you are terminally ill, there is no cure, you have six weeks to live.

How would you change your life in order to fully live through your last weeks?

Once you have considered that, he bowls one more curving ball.

You’re going to die anyway. All that’s different is that someone has told you when the deadline is.

Now ask yourself the question again, what are you going to do to make things different? How are you going to change?

This is a route to some of Frankl’s key works and ideas if you are interested in reading more. Frankl’s thinking was given to me by a lady called Christiana. Thanks again for that Christiana. If you read this, I hope you are well.