And The Tiny...

Houses with rooms and shops
in the tourist hub of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Architectural oddities abound in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, a term still widely used, officially as well as unofficially. The skinny building is an extreme form of what are called "tunnel" houses. They often have no windows at the sides, and can have an impressive depth. Though dark, the houses of this kind are cool, so very suitable for the region's tropical climate. However, there is one more feature of interest beyond the thick skein of phone, Internet, cable TV and electricity wires that mar the street scenery around the city, and that is that the price of the skinny house would probably exceed the cost of a reasonable apartment in most big cities in the US or Europe. Property owners can get huge prices, such is the demand - and the ability to pay big money -  given the rapid growth of the  economy at about 6 per cent a year.

The Meaning of Christmas

Those who greet Jesus at Christmas shall be called 'The Holy People' (1). Why 'holy'? Surely only God is holy? Perhaps it's that, with Christmas, in the first and ever since,

Light shines forth for the just
and joy for the upright of heart.
Rejoice, you just, in the Lord;
give glory to his holy name.(2)

Those who are holy, whether human or divine, are just, upright or full of integrity. It is that fullness of integrity that enables one to be  'holy', and a definition of holy is 'being separated, apart from, beyond what anything less than what dignity demands as right and true'. When there is no impurity in the mix the outcome is  a perfect state.

A king rules by integrity
and princes rule by law;
each is like a shelter from the wind
a refuge from the storm,
like streams of water in dry places.(3)

And Christmas is a time when we get an inkling of the perfect state that should be:

Once more there [is] poured on us
the spirit from above;
then shall the wilderness be fertile land;
integrity will bring peace,
justice give lasting security.
Happy will you be, sowing by every stream,
letting ox and donkey roam free.(4)

We also get some insight into the goodness of God,  who, by becoming human,  is prepared to do what is incomprehensible by any measure other than love. This is the summation of the 'good news' of  Jesus, at once true man and true God, that Paul makes in his letter to his young colleague Titus, when he writes (in this edited form):

When the kindness and love of God for mankind was revealed...it was for no reason except his own compassion that he saved us. He did this so that we should become heirs looking forward to inheriting eternal life.

That relationship with God who loves us demands that we be focused on fulfilling God's wish that each person follow a way of life that has integrity at its heart.

(1) Isaiah 62:11-12
(2) Psalm 96:11-12
(3) Isaiah 32:1-2
(4) Isaiah 32:15-17, 19-20

Human engineering

One of the biggest challenges humans have ever faced is beginning to confront us. More and more often it is demanded of us, in one country or another, to decide whether there is an ultimate value to the human person. The decision that we will need to make repeatedly during the next 100 years is whether humans ought to allow themselves to be transformed to an extent where a being's humanity is in doubt - though that transformation is promoted as a way of making a person better able to block disease and illness, to perhaps be more intellectually able, to reduce stress. The possibility is that some humans become of the manbearpig kind and will be exploited as deserving less respect. Thereon in there will be classes of humans, with vicious exploitation of "lower" classes being the norm.

Genetically engineered creatures are much on the mind of artist Patricia Piccinini. The Young Family, above,  is from 2003. A later work has a half-human, half-ape wet nurse, one of several works where a "woman" is a controllable artifact.

"Why not make a half a dozen while we at it?" Two forms of human engineering, the cloned and the genetically manipulated.

The media have looked at the implications of cloning for society, but genetic engineering is less often speculated about. It's easier to go down the cyborg path in portraying the human future. But Michel Houellebecq's Atomised (*) does explore an existence of a new human race without individuality - as everyone shares the same engineered genetic code. The French novelist, poet, and provocateur, to use John Updike's description, portrays a new solely rational species, and one that no longer relies on sexuality for reproduction.

The most terrifying element of this future is that the people would accept the transformation because they believed the solution to every problem was a technical one - science would deliver a world where there was no egotism, cruelty or anger. On that account, in search of an easy life, the people capitulate, allowing the loss of personal freedom, dignity, and the desire for truth and beauty. People become disposable so that one "neohuman" can annihilate a lesser creature with “the sensation of accomplishing a necessary and legitimate act”, as Houellebecq puts it in a later novel that Updike discusses.

Updike concludes by questioning the quality of the "neohuman" future, "a world [...]  that excludes the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity, and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last".

The ease with which a "neohuman" future could entrap humankind was shown in the push for universal availability of abortion, just when humanity took pride in sweeping away the legalized racism of the United States and South Africa. Another round of confusion is over the "right to die", which Updike refers to, and euthanasia, the path to final victimization. Humans are apt to take the easy option, and World War II especially  shows disappointingly how moral development does have its reversals.

Also, unwary humans could find ourselves where we did not set out to go. If we look at the travails of Monsanto in 2009-2010 we find it has big problems as weeds "learn" to cope with its herbicides and its genetically modified soybeans have not performed as well as expected. So things don't always go to plan in the world of genetic engineering. Likewise there are dangers in scientists creating human embryos to harvest stems cells, all for a good cause, but in the process treating the living human being as just something to be used and discarded, despite all the oversight committees.

Scientists don't want to accept limits even though there are other avenues to proceed along to get stem cells. That widespread, though not universal, refusal to accept limits is in contrast with the soul-searching that went on among the Manhattan Project team developing the atom bomb. American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was not afraid to air his doubts as to the morality of the assignment, and after the war, on the risk of an arms race, which, of course, eventuated. 

In brief, there is an urgent need for humans to be humble, and to learn from the evidence from all around us, of the mistakes we make. The evidence proves we are not masters, but stewards of our world, and that includes of our own destiny. 

(*)Vintage 2001, translated from Les Particules élémentaires

Woody Allen's latest

I'm looking forward to seeing Woody Allen's latest film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, where a fortune-teller is central to the story. In a New York Times interview Allen, 74, says “To me, there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.” So why that theme for the film?

“I was interested in the concept of faith in something. This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can’t. I’ve known people who have put their faith in religion and in fortune tellers. So it occurred to me that that was a good character for a movie: a woman who everything had failed for her, and all of a sudden, it turned out that a woman telling her fortune was helping her. The problem is, eventually, she’s in for a rude awakening.”

Interviewer: "What seems more plausible to you, that we’ve existed in past lives, or that there is a God?" Allen: "Neither seems plausible to me. I have a grim, scientific assessment of it. I just feel, what you see is what you get." The interviewer alluded to his Jewish heritage, and he replied: “I don’t follow it. I wish I could get with it. It would be a big help on those dark nights.”

The riches of that heritage abandoned! What a loss! A loss that goes deeper than the functional atheism that the psalms and the prophets expose in condemning those who exploit their fellows. This is of a metaphysical kind. However, the "cosmic insignificance" that Allen "champions" is one of the elements that make the Bible such a living text, reflecting what is universal in the ebb and flow of history.  This is expressed in Psalm 39:

Each man that stands on earth is only a puff of wind,

every man that walks, only a shadow, 

and the wealth he amasses is only a puff of wind - 

he does not know who will take it next.

So Allen, the "nomad like [his] ancestors" is one of the mass today who, having lost a sense of each person being in a relationship with a personal God, struggles to find a centre in their person, to stay in balance with the world. 

In contrast to Biblical history, today we see a "receding tide of faith" that leaves many people caught on an unmapped island, in unknown territory. The forces of consumerism and its concomitant pleasure-seeking, of individualism, and of utter skepticism, all have a role in diminishing faith, despite it being a vital component  in human ecology. Above all, however, the impact of modern technology has handicapped our thinking:

"Techniques of applied science, and the attitudes behind them, appear to locate society wholly in the purview of human [author's emphasis] authority and disposal.... We tend to put our trust in the processes: the skills of the engineer, the surgeon, the expert. The changes induced in daily living by speed, mobility, invention, drugs, amenities and facilities, as furnished by technology, are  - it would seem - humanly contrived.

These, however, "off-load their results - managerial, organisational, sexual, cultural - without reference to human meaning and significance. Indeed, they may end in questioning whether there is a dependable, constant human significance at all".

"Clearly it is the technicians who call the tune, who assign society to the behests, the vagaries, even the potential enslavements, of expertise. The present and the future are wards of technology operating as an end in itself. Effective means supplant verified ends."(*)

Belief in God, then, is a factor of investing in a counter-culture, the giving of space to, at first,  the possibility of belief; also to the cultivating of a climate of mind within which the human spirit can once again be free from the material, the humanly "wise", and soar. The effort is to identify the territorial markers of what it is to be human. This is why I am interested in Allen's film.

(*)Cragg, Kenneth  1988, Readings in the Qur'an, London, Collins

Gary Snyder Poet

For The Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
The steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

From Turtle Island, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1974.

The Present Moment

                                                      

This present moment:

That lives on,

To become

Long ago

From The Gary Snyder Reader, Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999.

The Common Good

A concept useful in setting the bearings for our personal lives and for the goals of political life is that of "the common good".

This is "the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to [the means of] their own fulfillment". That is, "every social group must take account of the needs and legitimate aspirations of other groups...".*

The need for a general focus on the common good  has been cited with reference to the explosion of practices in  banking where success is acclaimed by a few despite the consequential loss of the homes of millions of Americans and the entrenching of poverty in what was once a confident and proud nation, a pride based on the fact that wealth was shared throughout the society.**
The foolhardiness of having consumerism as the guiding principle for the American economy has been made clear in the latest economic crisis. And it isn't the poor who are to blame for the unsustainable credit that was pushed by bankers. It was not "the banks" that caused the recession, it was those who headed the cohorts of bankers, and those who still snatch incredible wealth from families even in their own community.
*The Church Today (Gaudium et Spes) para 26 in Abbott WM (ed), The Documents of Vatican II, London, Geoffrey Chapman 1966.

**http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11332635
See also http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/daly.html 

Marriage for ever

The concept “Biology is not destiny” holds true in many ways in our life as individuals and how all humans should live in the most fulfilling way. The concept has relevance to the discussion (here and here) that rippled around the world accompanying the publication of  the book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality that aimed to prove that marriage and lifelong partners are absolutely wrong notions to apply in  guiding our sexual behavior.

   “Funny, witty and light” [my emphasis] is how a Newsweek reviewer described the book by self-proclaimed “renegade researchers”. Light in tone it may be, but the book does carry an extensive list of references. One is to a work by Heinz Dieter Heinen, one of the great authorities of the Warao of the Orinoco Delta between Venezuela and Guyana. The Warao, of whom about 30,000 still adhere to the traditional lifestyle, are among the tribal groups often highlighted as having a free and easy attitude to sexual relationships. 

  But a little research (I admit) into what Heinen can tell us shows that the sexual behavior of the Warao is not all light and joy. He says: “Not all sources are unequivocal, but the basic idea depict [sic] women as a vessel.” Another reference to how women have been in an inferior position is this: “[In] the ritual wife-lending [my emphasis] during the habi sanuka ritual … a man would spend the night dancing (and in former times co-habiting) with a woman he calls mamuse”. The next day the man gives a gift to the woman’s husband, often fostering ties, including care of children, important because of the society’s “short life-spans and high morbidity”. So from Heinen’s account of the ritual, the woman is not necessarily a willing partner, but a token to be used in safeguarding a man's descendants.
  On “Eskimo” sexual behavior, a quick read  here once again shows that “wife-lending” in the frozen north was a more complex matter than the popular imagination might have had it.
  As to what is best in human behavior beyond the biological, we know we have to struggle each day against some urges and desires because they are ultimately destructive. We know each culture has to struggle to create an environment that supports lasting relationships, along with other forms of intelligent behavior.
  Our successes in promoting human rights, for example, make clear the moral development that is possible among human society as a whole, even though the acceptance of  what can be identified as "human ecology" is uneven among world societies.
  The conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that, with mutual help, we can learn to control the behavior that lies behind much of the marital disharmony that harms our society so seriously. We can learn to shape our society in ways that supports, not destroys, families.