BACKLANDER PROJECTS

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Every person sees the world from a unique vantage point generated by his or her genetics and experience. As well, these vantage points are constantly changing as they rise out of largely unfathomable events.

This does not mean that we need to feel isolated or lonely.  After all, we share an important problem. The world that seems so vivid and real is nothing more than an imaginary rendering of events that occurred a little or a long while ago.  These intervals depend upon how ‘far away’ the events underwriting imagined objects were.  The sun you and I see as presently existing occurred more than 8 minutes ago.  The event with your name, that just hove into sight, occurred more recently – but still not simultaneously with my awareness of you!

Just in case this is not enough excitement, I cannot know how this belated world is for you; nor you how it is for me.

We can, however, compare notes.

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In 1729, two years after Gulliver’s Travels was published, Irish writer Jonathan Swift published A Modest Proposal. The essay featured a suggestion for Irish families seeking to improve their prospect: “a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled …”.

In the 18th century, Ireland’s terrible poverty made the idea of selling children as delicacies for wealthy tables satirically plausible. After all, such children would be well fed for a year or more, rather than doomed to starve upon birth.  Even so,  Swift’s suggestion was so outrageous that he  did not anticipate attacks for being in earnest.  He was attacked however – which must have both delighted and horrified him.  Delight would have been understandable and horror not misplaced. Swift’s send up continues to be an excellent description of the way human beings treat one another.

• The wealthy have always been prepared  to exploit other human beings; so long as they could be identified as other, alien or inferior.
• More often than not the rest of us are willing to sell our souls – and anything else we can get our hands on – in attempts to join them on at the top.

Of course, some things have changed.  Three hundred years of  progress and development since Mr. Swift ruffled aristocratic feathers means that today’s movers and shakers can reach out and touch people on the other side of the world. Indeed, they have extended their embrace to include generations to come, for whom they have even less regard.

Fortunately, there is  a  way to avoid this bleak prospect.  Unfortunately, the solution will not be easy.  We must rid ourselves of our favourite fantasy: the notion  that human beings become persons automatically, a few months or  years after birth.  This conceit has been  nursing the greed and arrogance driving human affairs on one hand, and the  apathy and despair providing cannon fodder and fuel on the other.

How could this be accomplished?   All we have to do is recognize that we are not little Gods wandering the  world in bodies we possess and control. All we have to do is recognize that human beings are events within overarching events. Like thunderstorms, cats, trees and stones … we sometimes remain identifiable for years and even for centuries.  Shakespeare, Darwin, Christ, Newton, Einstein … continue to influence events though they are no longer  identifiably eventful or alive.

The point is that events sometimes have centres that warrant naming but they always lack defined edges. All that can be said is that they emerge out of, and eventually collapse into, whatever is going on.

The immediate issue is that talk about emerging and collapsing, birth and death …  requires communities of self-conscious and mutually-aware human beings.  Squirrels and earthworms do not have such conversations. When such communities emerge – as far as we know they have always been human communities -  some events will be understood as persons and creatures.  When electrons, stones, houses, Higgs Bosons … are in view, generative events will be referred to as objects, substances, materials and sometimes as  atoms. Understandings such as quantum theory, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, spooky  ‘action at a distance’ … are of little  interest to cultures and communities that have distilled enough local events into imaginary objects, entities and relationships to get by.

Even so, it is worth noticing that being and existing, view and mind are interchangeable notions. In the so-called ‘Kingdom of Life’, organic beings are complex arrangements of sub-events. Their apparent animation – including the spontaneous nature of conscious experiences – flows from the  lively nature of constituent events.

There are no guarantees however. No matter how many worlds exist, no matter how many conscious beings inhabit these worlds, ideas about entities, objects and the world will only occur if awarenesses are communicated in beneficial ways. If I shout: “Watch out for the car!”  and this prevents you from being run over, you are likely to conclude that you and I share an actual world.

This fiction drives how we understand ourselves and what is going on.  In other words, if we do not live in robust communities, we cannot really care about what we have been referring to as The World.  We cannot really imagine one another in deep ways.

If this is even partially true, the  inequities now writhing into existence should give us pause.  After thousands of years of slowly emerging awareness, ‘progress and development’ seems to be setting the stage for moral and rational oblivion.

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My name is Vernon Molloy.

Occasionally I am aware not only of being alive but of myself being alive.

When this happens I like to think of myself as a person enjoying magisterial relationships with the events responsible for these episodes.  The most obvious are the tightly knit events constituting my body, but the list often includes events understood as my house, car, job, family, religion and nation.

I am told that the person having these experiences and claiming these assets became identifiable August 22, 1942.

This is usually referred to as being born.

My fortune is that I was judiciously encouraged.  My family and community (comprised of similarly named events) had enough resources that they could afford children, but not so much that children were prevented from prospering.

Armed with images of foetuses floating in amniotic sacs, pro-lifers insist that human beings commence nine months earlier than birthdays suggest.

This is an excellent observation but pro-lifers give up too soon.  The question they fail to ask is: why stop at conception?  Why is every person not foreshadowed when their parents met?  … or were  imagined and conceived a generation earlier?  … and so on, ad infinitum?

The point is, conversations about ‘conception days’, ‘birthdays’, ‘death days’ …  attempt to parcel up proceedings that have neither beginnings nor endings.

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After a few decades of immortality fantasies, I started  ‘doing stuff’ to retain my  ‘entity status’: bicycle, run, eat well, drink more than I should, bicycle, do push ups ….  So far, so good … although the equilibrium between catabolism and  anabolism - between building up and tearing down - feels increasingly precarious.

When not muttering to myself or importuning strangers, I operate a tree farm near Belleville, Ontario.   This has something to do with having  been raised on the same farm when the principal crop involved children; and with having read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays  and Henry Thoreau’s Walden in high school.

(For an audio rendering of Walden chapter 1: http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/gutenberg/2/6/2/8/26289/ogg/26289-01.ogg.

If this whets your interest: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26289/26289-index.html )

For such reasons, and an apparently inexhaustible curiosity about what is going on, my life has been seized with philosophical issues.  As well, the need to survive and perhaps prosper has led me to question the often axiomatic claims underpinning political and economic proceedings.

I eventually realized that the most dangerous of these is the idea that human beings possess free will as a birthright – that we are souls or persons inhabiting bodies.

Ironically,  the secular version of this claim is equally worrisome. The idea that human beings represent an extraordinary evolutionary achievement appears to sanction equally facile claims of entitlement. In other words, whether ‘ Divinely Ordained’ or ‘ordained divinely’, the arrogant notion that human beings are  special goes a long way towards explaining why we are now convening the biggest destruction of life since a comet eliminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Ironically again, there being no safe places on sinking ships, these conceits also threaten human well-being.  Global warming, environmental contamination, resource-depletion issues … are already causing misery and turmoil.  In popular mythology, these issues are traced to population growth, industrialization or moral decay.  The truth is:

1. Modern economies require endless growth to avoid collapse.
2. Endless growth is impossible in a small world.
3. If a wholesome proportion of human beings lived in self-reliant communities, spontaneous efficiencies would reduce environmental burdens.
4. In such communities ‘progress and development’ would focus upon preserving rather than exploiting resources.
5. The resulting devices and systems would assist  ‘emerging populations’ far better than the antics of multinationals and the  politics of globalization.

In the meantime, the only ‘good news’ we hear about is certain to be bad news for most of us.  Increasingly intelligent machines and systems mean that wealth flows to fewer and fewer owners,  to military and corporate adventures, and to entertainments designed to distract the rest of us from our predicament.

Every new technology, every improvement in institutional and manufacturing efficiency, means products and services can be produced with fewer people earning a living wage.

The resulting collapse of the supply:demand equation is already destabilizing economies.

This only makes sense if  the wealthy are moving to a different economic model. (See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/9382745.stm)

This should not come as a surprise.  Since the world’s wealthy already own everything, they have no need to organize more production and consumption activities to make more money to buy more stuff. Instead, common sense and self-interest requires expanding the proportion of human beings on $2.00 a day lifestyles from fifty per cent to something like eighty per cent.

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To glimpse an alternative to this bleak future, we need to think about themselves in a new way.  We need to recognize that  persons do not exist because Divine Creation, evolution – or, a recent hypothesis, harnessing fire to cook food – yielded creatures with big brains.

In The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral mind, (1976,2000: Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books) Julian Jaynes proposed that self-awareness occurs if and only if genetic endowments combine with cultural resources – something he thinks first occurred roughly 3000 years ago, between the times the Greek poet Homer penned The Iliad and The Odyssey.

However and whenever it happened, an important threshold  was crossed.  Although beings just like you and I  have existed for at least 250,000 years,  self-aware persons only recently became reliable possibilities.

We need to figure out what brought this about. We need to keep on doing it.

Backlander projects are my contribution.  They are based on a way of thinking   introduced by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (circa 500 B.C.) and developed in Alfred North Whitehead’s 1927 Gifford Lectures.

Briefly, the world is an event, not a container stuffed with things undergoing change. Within this context, consciousness ebbs and flows within ‘local events’ sometimes known as persons.

Linking rich consciousness with a fragile balance of cultural activities, community life and self-sufficiency underscores the importance of getting ‘things’ right.

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