To hell with good intentions...

"It's the thought that counts."

"He/she meant well."

"He/she only wanted what's best for you/us/him."

I can't quite recall how many times I've heard these words uttered after someone or other has caused someone else some terrible grievance of some sort. In the past before I turned nigh completely to ruthless empiricism, I'd nod sagely in agreement. Now these words spark a twinge of irritation, mostly because of certain questions that did spring forth from a more liberated mind than before. Questions like:

So what? Hitler had good intentions, that is, he really thought he was doing the "right thing"...

or

Oh, so that makes it better, then?

or

So you're saying her intentions make her a good person, a saint, in fact, despite her contributing directly to the unnecessary suffering of untold thousands of hardcore poor Indians?

If you haven't guessed, that last one has to do with "Blessed" Theresa of Calcutta. If you're not aware why Bill Gates does more good for the world than Mother Theresa, I strongly recommend reading that link before carrying on.

So why? Why do people take comfort in mouthing these utterly inane words? Are they in denial and trying to justify the great wrong that has been done? Are they trying to see good where there is none? Do they identify with the perpetrator and see an awful mistake which they could just as easily have made, and thus are trying to scooch a little further up to the moral high ground in their own little minds?

A great many people live in the naive delusion that people are, by nature, good. That they want to do good. That deep down inside is a good person, who is kind and gentle and wants everyone to be happy. That overrated wordsmith who was too dense to be atheist, C S Lewis, called it Universal Morality. The ancient Chinese immortalised it in the opening lines of the 三字经 thusly:

人之初 (rén zhī chū) People at birth,
性本善 (xìng běn shàn) Are naturally good.
性相近 (xìng xiāng jìn) Their natures are similar,
習相遠 (xí xiāng yuǎn) Their habits make them different.

Like any popular delusion, it is seductive. Of course we want to believe we're good people surrounded by other good people! The especially thick-skinned may just keep telling themselves that "maybe somewhere deep down he had a good soul" as the judge passes sentence on some acquaintance who made a hobby of fashioning household objects out of human body parts.

We are not very far off from animals. Animals in the wild live by rules imposed upon them by nature and the vagaries of Fate. We built upon the rules of Nature and call it culture, law, social mores and norms, whatever floats your boat. They are fictions that, for the most part, bind us together into cohesive communities and generally help us get things done without worrying too much about getting stabbed in the back*. But, as Heath Ledger's Joker pointed out, they are fictions and they are so very fragile.

My readings into human nature have told me many things I wish I never knew, not least of which is what can be achieved in Rwanda with a mixture of overpopulation, in-group mentality and a lot of machetes. 800,000 people in 100 days. To try to imagine the scale of what happened there, to put yourself in their shoes, it just ruins the mind. But it happened. As did any number of atrocities inflicted by humans on humans in history that were simply too ugly and too numerous to mention in history textbooks in school. Where was the good soul then? Who turned around and said "No, I will not kill these people, because it's wrong"? How many died needlessly as men in suits and plastic smiles prattled over the distinction between "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide"?

In the face of such horrors, those who would speak of an innate goodness in the hearts of men look ridiculous, like a traffic policeman trying to give out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. But this is not to say we are all monsters waiting to be given the oppurtunity to inflict great suffering. What we are is what circumstances make of us. Our every action is the product of the confluence of disposition and situation. In all of us resides the capacity to be monsters or heroes. Most of us will be bemused bystanders. Or victims.

It is unconstructive to comfort oneself with foolish and naive assumptions of human nature. And yet, it takes a measure of strength and courage to cast aside our hubris and gaze unflinchingly at the animal inside, acknowledge it and conquer it. It takes intellectual honesty to question oneself constantly, guarding against hypocrisy, to doubt one's own righteousness and to remain vigilant against the insidious spectre of dehumanization. This is may not necessarily be pleasant or easy, but it has become important.

Why?

I think I'll save that for a later post. A furry friend of mine is hinting that he needs feeding by attempting to devour my ankle...

* Unless, of course, you happen to work in a merchant bank.

Eat meat?

Sometime last year, I posted a question on Yahoo! Answers, re: Would you kill for your own meat? The occasional (and with Yahoo! Answers, inevitable) drooling, slack-jawed idiot answer aside, quite a few answered no, mostly because they were too squeamish to deal the killing blow with a boltgun or whatever. I ask this question a lot (not to vegetarians, obviously) in person, too, and usually meet with a negative response.

Not to mince words about it, I think that's terribly hypocritical. That having been said, I also think it's a very easy trap to fall into, given how far removed the fresh, clean, happy little packets and cans of meat we see in the supermarket are from the bloody horror of the abbatoir. When you eat meat, you take life. There's no two ways about it. Life is a valuable thing (particularly to the entity from whom you are taking it), and I do think it's important for people to realize just what they're buying into when they bite into a ham sandwich or fried chicken or some such. Most will easily understand the price tag one puts on a brattwurst, but far too few really think to draw the connections between calf to cow to lowing, screaming, wide-eyed, twitching, dying beast drowning in its own blood to hamburger.

But, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to go up to an animal and kill it themselves. One of these days, I do hope to go to a farm and really understand with these two hands what it really means to kill to eat, but I'm not so sure how feasible it is to demand this of every meat-eating city-dweller. So I was quite pleased to stumble into Earthlings*. More details on Wikipedia. If you're not vegetarian, I very strongly recommend watching this. In fact, I insist. And don't avert your eyes - you don't have that right.

There were, I felt, a couple of blatantly cheap attempts at yanking on the heart strings. I suppose it would be kinder to say that it was a bit melodramatic at times, but appeals to emotion on matters of any importance strike me as annoying more than anything else. Still, the actual video footage was more than a bit harrowing, and a sharp reminder of how, in the name of profit, humans will sink to such depths. And though I disagreed and doubted (particularly on the veracity of the numbers and the reliability of their sources), the Earthlings experience did have me thinking.

Naturally, while watching Earthlings, I automatically looked at how I live my life in relation to how I impact animals. So here's my thoughts on Earthlings, subject-by-subject:

Pets- My 2 cats are adopted, spayed/neutered and from all outward appearances, have bamboozled me into being their butler, these very words being typed as Haruka slinks across the table, running her stubby little tail under my nose.

Truth be told, I do not consider strays to be an actual, looming, economic threat in and of itself, but a symptom of a deeper, more insidious malaise in modern urban society, namely how little each of us gives a shit about the world around us.

Food- I'm Malaysian Chinese and have therefore consumed an absurd amount of chicken and pork, though I generally loathe having steak of any kind. Nevertheless, I felt a bit guilty having always been aware about battery farms, though not quite so aware about the horrors of pig farming. Just knowing this, the movie Babe seems like a sick joke. As such, I shall endeavour to cut down on meat. And continue to discourage those I know from the consumption of shark's fin soup.

What I was left wondering, however, is this: What kind of person would I become if I was the one handling the boltgun/knife every day? It's very easy to look at these butchers and think ill of them, completely ignoring the situational forces that shape human personalities. So I think it's worth wondering what it would be like to be in their blood-soaked wellies, slitting throats, sidestepping fountains of blood, ears filled with the screams of the dying, nostrils clogged with the stench of death and fear, day in, day out...

My readings into the ideals of Bushido tell me, time and again, that to take life is a very serious matter indeed. Such high ideals seem to ring so very hollow in the face of the gory realities of the modern abbatoir. If animals are to die to feed us, I want it to happen with the least suffering possible. I want them to have a life of blithe contentment before death takes them, swiftly and without warning, with surgical precision. And as we see in Earthlings, what I want is very far removed from the realities forced upon the modern farm by simple economics. To produce more meat at the lowest prices, this is what it has come to. Would you be the one to buy meat at, say, triple the price, knowing it came from a happier cow? And even if you did, what stops corruption from setting in and having you pay higher prices for the same old meat with a different label? What a hole we have managed to dig for ourselves...

Clothing- I have 1 Fossil wallet, which has served me since December 1999. And some of the bits which hold my bamboo blades together are thick leather. Oh, and belt and shoes. Other than that, I've never considered wearing bits of animal about my person, other than woolly sweaters, which saved my hide in the bitter winters of China and Germany.

While the footing was quite shocking (particularly the Chinese fur farm) one is left wondering about the scale of the problem, that is, what I want to know is whether this activity is causing large-scale damage to ecosystems.

Entertainment- I totally consider bullfighting to be unnecessarily barbaric, and do confess to feeling a little glow of schadenfreude** on seeing the bull put one over the men in tights.

Research- Now on this part, I think Earthlings drifts into the realm of the naive. For instance, if, say, I wanted to test a facial soap for whether its irritating to the eye, is not the quickest way to determine whether this is so to squirt some into a living eye? Now, I really don't think all that many research labs have the benefit of enlisting the services of Johnny Knoxville or Steve O and gang, so when there's no way round testing on living tissue, what do you do? Make full use of criminals on death row? Are there not guidelines regarding the use of animals in research? Research grants are not provided to abuse animals on a whim!

In any case, I think the whole business of attacking animal testing is mixing up cause and effect. The long and short of it is, this section of the documentary did not have any impact on me whatsoever because it failed to cite any relevant numbers thus obfuscating the actual scale of the problem.

Now, the reason scale is particularly important with research is because use of animals in food, clothing and as pets is so ubiquitous that it's quite obvious that even small changes in attitudes will have tremendous effects on society in general. Entertainment isn't quite as common but reflective of base, ugly barbarity in the human animal, i.e. deep, dark desires to watch terrible violence inflicted on others or to lord our supremacy over others, whatever form it may take.

Research, on the other hand, is a cold, calculating affair. It is not carried out to satisfy any desires other than the desire for knowledge. Even if it was, rare indeed is the scientist who can afford to ask for grants to dismantle animals simply because he likes the noises they make when their heads explode. It seems to me that the focus would be better placed on the market forces driving the research, i.e. what is the research for? Cosmetics? Weapons? Genetics? Psychology? Neuroscience? Furthermore, to say that research on animals "tells us about animals, not humans" is a painfully ignorant statement worthy of that tiresome Word Salad-monger, Sarah Palin, who famously pooh-poohed research on fruit flies. Suffice to say, this knocked the credibility of this documentary down a few notches.

In sum, Earthlings struck me as a sharp and harsh and absolutely necessary reminder of one aspect of what it is we build the comforts of modern living on. I say one aspect, because, really, there are many, many other ways we exploit our environment or even other nations (human, of course) to feed the machine of capitalism. To what extent the issues raised in Earthlings are a problem to humanity is left fuzzy, thanks to a near total lack of numbers and statistics to bring things into perspective. However, even with the purely qualitative treament given by Earthlings, it is clear that humans as a species are trotting obliviously towards their own destruction. The manner in which we ravage the planet and the natives makes it blatantly obvious that we are a very, very long way indeed from achieving a stable equilibrium with Earth.

* 95 minutes long. I really don't recommend eating while watching this. Have a cup of tea.

** I fucking love that word. I shouldn't. But I do.

A story of a line

Well, I'm not the one telling it. But it's a good story and one worth thinking about. Go check it out. It's a hell of a lot better than those saccharine forwarded e-mails that pollute the Net.

Remember what Ghandi said about eye for an eye?

I just watched Waltz with Bashir* and, as any decent movie should do, it had me thinking. For those who haven't watched, it's about the Lebanese War and the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. The story was told in the form of an Israeli film director who served with the Israeli armed forces at the time and, 20 years later, is trying to recall where he was on the day of the massacre. In the course of the movie, he goes to speak with various friends who also served with the Israeli army at the time of the massacre, and finds that many of them, too, have lost much of their memories of that day.

What struck me most about the movie was perhaps the humanity of it. The question it had me asking most was: What is a soldier? I've dabbled in martial arts long enough to understand and appreciate one-on-one combat, but watching Waltz with Bashir, it feels light years away from the chaos and horror of being a soldier in wartime. What I have trouble grasping is what it means to be one of many standing against another enemy to fight and die, but for what? As an empiricist, I find it tremendously absurd to die or, worse yet, to kill for one's beliefs, for precisely the same reason as Bertrand Russell: What if I'm wrong?

Having grown up on many mindless 80s Hollywood movies, I, for a very long time, had a pretty distorted view of what a soldier should be. For most of my childhood I was under the impression that a good soldier had to be unwaveringly patriotic and have no real skill other than being able to pull a trigger and shout, maybe pose a bit, at the same time, and just how good you were was easily quantified by one's body count. Nowadays I look at Rambo and just shake my head at the mind-numbing absurdity of it, knowing that that kind of soldiering only happens in silly videogames.

I have very little doubt in my mind that the Israel-Palestine conflict is not really based on religion. I don't think I can even begin to understand who or what started it - everytime I try it seems the chain of grudges stretches further and further back, so now we're left with a situation where it doesn't matter who struck first, that first transgression is but a miniscule speck compared with the mountains of atrocities each side has accumulated against the other. Each sides' justification for continued aggression is simply reciprocation. Sadly, it still doesn't look like either side is just going to go: "Right, sod this. We'll stop if you stop, alright? And screw the flags, we'll ditch both of them and make up a new one for both of us, deal?" But I digress.

It was interesting to see the various perspectives on the war, to see what it made of the people who touched it, to see what bearing weapons and being pushed to face an elusive and devious enemy made of men. Some, like the narrator, were still their plain old selves behind the flak jacket and carbine. They fired their guns not to kill, but because they didn't want to die. They thought not to destroy an enemy, but simply to go home as soon as possible. Faced with the chaos and horror of it, they found themselves lost and stumbling, their own sense of reason crumbling in the face of the madness around them.

Others, like the Phalangites, fell oh, so far. As depicted in the movie, the Phalangites were a textbook example of situational forces making monsters of men. The Us and Them mentality. The mentality of dehumanizing the infidel enemy. The anonymity of being men with uniforms, instruments of the state. The empowering influence of having a gun in hand. And, perhaps most deadly of all, the paranoia of knowing that guerillas or suicide bombers may be hiding among any one of the luckless people of Sabra and Shatila.

As the Phalangites went into the refugee camps to do their dire deeds, the Israeli army simply watched. At that point in the movie the words of Edmund Burke did pop into my head:

"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

And when you see the videoclips of the aftermath, that's when you understand why the incident simply dropped out of the heads of the narrator and his brothers-in-arms. Who wants to be the one with that on their heads? To be the ones who stood by, weapons in hand and did nothing while unforgivable atrocities were committed right in front of their faces? I doubt very much I'd be strong enough to still be me, having witnessed something like that firsthand.

It brought to mind all those videos on Youtube, CCTV footage of people in, say, the queue at McD's, where some guy beats the everloving shit out of another, while perhaps a dozen or so people stand by and watch.

Who knows what other, similar tales have unfolded, on that scrap of land, fought over for as long as recorded history? I really wonder sometimes if, as I saw posted on Yahoo! Answers once, the only solution is to nuke the entire region off the map and leave it so irradiated it can't support any human life at all. Like an angry mother separating squabbling children: "I don't care who started it, if you don't stop, I'm going to end it."

Well, hell, that's my tuppence on the matter. I've no solutions, but Waltz with Bashir is a visually stunning movie that's well worth a watch. Of course, seeing as it tells the story from an Israeli perspective, that most certainly means it will never be shown in Malaysia, no thanks to certain irrational anti-Semites. But hey, that doesn't stop the pirates! Go watch. Think. Know. Now if you'll excuse me, my cats need a bath...

* Rotten Tomatoes gives it 95%. You MUST watch this, if you haven't already.

Tit for tat

Something came up in a very interesting conversation I had recently which had me thinking. We was discussing the increasing importance of a small dose of philosophy in today's education systems, particularly the significance of the ethic of reciprocity. You know, "do unto others as you would hae others do unto you", or words to similar effect as articulated (and often conveniently ignored) in all the major spiritual traditions on Earth. The interesting bit was this:

How does one reconcile the ethic of reciprocity with the unhappy reality that there are some cultural traditions that other cultures find repulsive?

For instance, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has pointed out in her brilliant book, Infidel, that female circumcision* is still practiced in parts of Somalia. To some, particularly the conservative older generation, such practices are age old traditions, not to be questioned. To the rest of us, it's just plain barbarism.

At the time, no answer was forthcoming, and it seemed to me that the ethic of reciprocity had its limits, that it was not a hard and fast rule. "I can have my traditions, but you can't have yours if they offend the sensibilities of the greater part of society," it seemed. So, female circumcision is wrong because the majority says it's wrong? This is not a basis for truth. As great revolutions in science has proven, time and again, belief does not create truth. It may create the illusion of truth, i.e. lies. It may, through sufficient insight, agree with or come close to the truth, i.e. empirically derived truth.

But, after fermenting in my head for a bit, I did hit upon a solution so simple it seemed odd that it didn't occur to me before: Strip away the veneer of tradition and what are you left with? A minority of people in the world, who engage in a practise that brings unnecessary pain and permanent scarring to half their population. Behind the absurd mask of tradition, that is all this so-called "coming of age ritual" is. Tradition masks the ugly truth of this barbaric ritual: It exists simply to perpetuate male dominance. Because of the childish insecurities of one half of the population, the other half must suffer needlessly their whole lives. Perversely enough, many of the women actually buy into the delusion that this tradition is sacred and protects the purity of virgin girls in some way.

And here we come to realize a truth of society: Tradition is a mask, and as society evolves, tradition must be questioned. One must see past the face of it and understand truly what purpose it serves in society. To make progress possible, everything must be subject to the same standards of truth - nothing may be held as sacred.

In this light, such practices as female circumcision (or indeed any form of circumcision, for that matter) serve no constructive purpose in society and have no justification for their continued practice, leading us to the conclusion that they simply shouldn't be carried out. And of course, this says something about the level of ethical and intellectual maturity of the societies that do engage in such meaningless mutilations of their own children. They're arrogant savages, so caught up in misplaced pride for their own traditions, however inane or barbaric, that they cannot see the harsh reality of what their doing.

Perhaps they might argue that such practices are what brings them closer together as a community. Such an argument is nonsensical in light of the fact that there are many, far more agreeable ways to achieve such ends. Exchange of gifts is a good start. As was pointed out by Jared Diamond (in Collapse, I think), there's an old Inuit saying: "The best place to keep a spare fish is in another man's stomach." And so that happy game around which societies are really built, reciprocal altruism, is initiated.

So remember, comrades: Tradition is NOT a valid justification. It's just a pretty word to keep simple minds from asking questions.

* That's the polite term. A more accurate phrase would be female genital mutilation. This link is not for the faint of heart.

Fun from Yahoo! Answers

The question:

Ethics of having non-reproductive intercourse with my brother?

I am 17 years old and my brother is 18. We are both above the age of consent in our state. We are very close, and our love is very strong. Recently we started making love; we both thought it would be interesting and fun, and it certainly was. Neither of us has any regrets or feelings of guilt.

I was already on birth control, but my brother used a condom just in case. We absolutely do not want to have kids, we just like the feeling of having sex. Making love with him always blows my mind, and it feels like a passionate, pure extension of our love. We told our parents, and they were supportive, so long as we continued to use contraceptives.

In this age of contraception, can the simple act of sex between siblings still be fairly labeled as ethically wrong?

Is it fair to assume that all cases of non-reproductive incest are abusive and not just an expression of love?

If the sex is consensual, and contraceptives are employed, how could anyone term our behavior as wrong?


No comments of a religious nature or concerning "god" please. We are both rational atheists, so that morality is irrelevant to us.

Look familiar? If you've visited yourmorals.org then maybe it should, being one of the questions Jonathan Haidt looks at in his exploration of the human sense of morality. I was rather chuffed when my answer was chosen as best:

You're not Jonathan Haidt are you? He's asked this exact same question before. On the off chance that you're not Haidt or connected with Haidt's research in any way, I'd say:

There is no logical reason why what you're doing is wrong. Society's taboos on incest are in place for a reason, i.e. the prevention of producing genetically inferior children. In this day and age, rational consenting humans with access to proper contraception can enjoy sex with absolutely no risk of having children and, as such, the taboo on incest in this context is meaningless.

Nevertheless, as the other answers you find here have shown, many people will express great disgust at your suggestion, yet are incapable of justifying their disapproval, indicating that a great majority of people develop a sense of morality largely independent of their capacity for reason, falling back instead on copying the norm of the societies in which they live.

There is, however, one little thing that leads me to oppose this unorthodox relationship with your brother and it is this, crass though it may sound: Love makes fools of us all. Really, it does. It takes one mistake on the part of either you or your brother for you to concieve and that will open up a truly hideous can of worms for you and your brother. As such, though love is nice, and orgasms are nice, I really must recommend you and your brother quit while you're ahead and seek sexual relationships elsewhere.

It only occured to me later that there's another reason not to continue a relationship like this: It's simply not worth the trouble. The reward is a source of orgasms. The price is the social stigma one has to bear, surrounded as we are by shallow, stupid sheeple or, worse yet, fundies. Not quite worth it, I reckon, though perhaps in the long run, it may well give society the jolt it needs every so often to rethink some of the values we hold dear.

God very bad bloke...

... as if we didn't already know.

In any case, I've quite a few agnostic friends and as such, this post is written for their benefit. Comrades, know well that an agnostic is simply an atheist who hasn't thought religion through properly.

I was browsing the tellingly titled Internet Infidels Discussion Board when this charming article came to my attention. This led to an odd little train of thought...

Take your pick of any diabolical mass murdering nutter. Hitler, if you like, he seems popular. Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Papa Doc, Suharto, Pinochet, Bush Jr, maybe Mother Teresa, whoever. The long and short of it is, these very few people were responsible for the death and suffering of vast numbers of other people, easily in the order of millions, mebbe hundreds of millions. Basically, if you stand in opposition to them, if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, you will suffer and die.

Now take the Abrahamic God. If you stand in oppostion to Him, assuming, for the sake of argument, that He exists, together with all the other infantile psychobabble as per the Nicene Creed*, you will suffer an infinity of torments until the End of Time. And what with Him being omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, you are always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

At the time of writing, over 10 billion Homo sapiens have lived and died, presumably not all that many of them subscribing to belief in Yahweh. Given the Homo sapiens has been stomping around this happy little planet for the past 130,000-ish years, we can perhaps assume about 80% of that 10 billion expired never having known the glory of God, and as such, the poor buggers are all doomed to, at best, Purgatory or, at worst, Hell.

Simply put, God inflicts infinite suffering on a number of souls several orders of magnitude greater than that of all the world's worst despots in human history put together. So... God is supposed to be good?

Hell, NO.

Sorry, I've encountered far too many believers, moderate and fundie alike who happily perform the singularly obscene mental gymnastics necessary to reconcile God's utterly abhorrent behaviour with tripe about "all-loving". If THAT is what passes for "all-loving", then by the same logic, all those tyrants mentioned earlier are saints, having sent untold millions into an early afterlife. And the suffering inflicted? Testing faith, of course!

That having been said, I've been reading Russell's History of Western Philosophy and am quite frankly appalled by the intellectual (and sometimes literal) mass murder carried out by the Catholic Church over its long and diabolical history. Pope Innocent III. Now there's a misnomer and a half...

Anyhoo, that's it from me for now. I'm-a go teach me some Japanese verbs...

* I note that the Nicene Creed's definition of "truly human" does not include the fairly human attribute of staying dead.

Gluttony??? ME???

Saw this happy quiz on NotKieran's blog and figured it might be good for a laugh. The results surprised me somewhat:

Greed:	Very Low
Gluttony:	Medium
Wrath:	Low
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Medium
Pride:	Very Low

I'm-a call bullshit on this one. But hey, it's fun bullshit.

There are times when it rocks to be Chinese...

... and this isn't one of them.

What, you thought this was about Olympics? Go away and check out IHT or Reuters or something! This post is about something I found on the end of my chopsticks, possibly at one of several dozen wedding dinners I've attended this year:

Yeah, I just stared at it for about half a minute, too. No, I didn't eat it. And no, I've no idea what it is, nor did the people sitting in the immediate vicinity. The waiters were mostly Malay and Burmese, so they had no idea what it was, either. And having been raised kinda* Chinese, I knew better than to ask my mother what it was.

Here's a big tip to all you sons and daughters of the dragon/Yellow Emperor out there: Never ask your mother what's on your plate. Even if she does in fact know what it is, she will lie to you. And then she will tell you that it's good for you. Odds are she'll tell you it's good for you even if she doesn't know what it is.

But, gazing at that little lump of yuk as it quivered invitingly at the tips of my chopsticks, I couldn't help but feel I'd seen it somewhere before... Ah, now I remember. Ugh...

Truth be told, Chinese culinary arts are something of a mystery to me. Yes, we do eat pretty much anything. "Everything with legs except furniture. Everything that flies except kites." That's more or less how the old saying went. Needs a little updating these days, but you get the picture. In the glorious People's Republic, cats and dogs are most certainly on the menu if you know where to look**. Quan Ju De, the most famous restaurant chain for Beijing Roast Duck has a great big restaurant in Wang Fu Jing, I think, and as I recall, they had a ridiculously exotic menu involving all the bits and pieces of animals you'd never think of. Well, I remembered there being bear, ostrich and camel. Just looking at it, I suspected they've got some sort of deal going with the Beijing Zoo.

I think this business of eating damn near anything you can get in your mouth has its origins in Chinese medical theory. Don't get me wrong, I've every reason to believe that some Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is in fact quite efficacious. But somehow, I've yet to see compelling evidence for the benefits of consuming, say, cockroaches, locusts***, deer genitals, rhino horn and tiger testicles. I don't know, it just seems to me that there is a LOT of completely useless bullshit caught up in TCM, no doubt introduced by some scruffy snake oil salesmen looking to make a quick buck. As such, TCM is in dire need of some spring cleaning to cut out the bullshit and pick out the useful bits that actually help people without having to cut bits off some hapless animals.

I suppose I'm being a little inconsistent here regarding animal cruelty. It's not something I've thought about much, being speciesist as I am, that is, I don't actually care about animals (except cats) unless their welfare is closely linked to that of humans. But that having been said, I'm very much against causing unnecessary suffering. And yet... I have this terrible urge to get me a cat, so I may stroke it and laugh diabolically whilst sat behind a reasonably large desk. Ahem.

* Chinese culture minus the language. More common than you'd think, in Malaysia. Go figure. I blame the Ministry of "Education".

** I had dog once in a Korean restaurant in Beijing. It tasted GOOD.

*** Not kidding. Powdered and used to make a broth, together with about a dozen other assorted herbs and athropods. Smelt vile. Tasted worse.

Red Pixels revisited: Manhunt

I know I'm a little behind the times here, but I just became aware of the Manhunt series yesterday, after hearing about a ruling banning Manhunt 2 from sale in the UK. So how nasty does a game have to be for a game to get banned in the UK? Admittedly, Britain's morality is a little odd in the sense that it's so tolerant, it's managed to shoot itself in the foot, slowly politically correcting itself to death.

This was made particularly clear to me when I found out that my wee nephew isn't allowed so say the word "bad" or "naughty" at his daycare centre. In fact, no one is. They say "sad choice" instead, e.g "So-and-so made a sad choice." Sapir-Whorf being put to work?

Anyway, back to Manhunt. As I mentioned, I was curious, so I did the obvious thing and checked the usual suspects, Wiki and Youtube. And what I have to say about Manhunt is... whoa:



I'm not sure if this is a game anymore or an SAS guide to assassination with improvised weapons. I for one find it highly disturbing that this game manages to do more horrible things with plastic bags*, hammers, sickles and knives than UT3 manages with miniguns, plasma guns and tactical nukes.

I suppose the twinge of revulsion from watching the Manhunt executions comes from the fact that it shows a dark side to human nature that's in all of us. The line between gameworld and IRL has been made a little thinner by the fact that Manhunt's violence is so readily accessible to us IRL. I for one am not at all comfortable with the thinning of that line. The fact that Manhunt 2 is on Wii seems particularly worrying.



N.B: That was a parody, just so we're clear on that.

There's something terribly disturbing about Manhunt. Perhaps a decade ago, I'd have looked at it and just gone "Wow! Cool!" and not have given it a second thought. It would have been just a game, and it would never even have occured to me to look at it as more than that. Now I'm not so sure.

* A thought just hit me: Wouldn't it take some seriously mad skillz to sneak up on somebody while carrying a plastic bag? I mean, assuming relatively low levels of ambient noise?

The Seduction of Red Pixels

Violence is fascinating. This is not merely an opinion, but an empirical truth, based on how much we as a species seem to enjoy visiting it upon others. Or watching it. Or, as the title of this post suggests, simulating it.

I for one am not afraid to admit that I love it. I derive great satisfaction out of walking into a room filled with balaclavaed bad guys as Max Payne, an Ingram in each hand and filling it with lead and red mist. I get a wonderful rush from engulfing US bases with nuclear fire in C&C Generals. In Master of Orion 2, I will happily engage in genocide if a species isn't productive enough, is particularly belligerent or is just plain ugly. Blowing up populated planets is like biting into a particularly classy brand of dark chocolate. Utterly sinful. Absolutely delicious.

Computer graphics being what they are these days, there's really not much left to the imagination. Really, what board game or CCG can give you that moment of bullet-time joy from a beautifully executed headshot? The sharp bark of the sniper rifle, the puff of red mist, the glaring red stain on the wall, all modelled in pixel-perfect detail...

It feels GOOD. We LIKE that feeling! Simulated life and death with the click of a mouse is one of the great inventions of our era! Relish it! Revel in it! To hell with lining up falling blocks and jumping on turtles! We want guns and bombs! Spear and sword! Mechs and death rays! But... do please remember where we draw the line.

I've been a gamer for quite a long time. Not very hardcore. A bit of a n00b, really. But I daresay I've been at it long enough to know well enough the mind of the gamer. Well, long enough to know what a n00b is, at any rate. And I know enough about gamers to say that almost all gamers draw a very sharp, dark line indeed between the game world and the real world.

Well, take Doom 3. What sticks in the mind of the gamer are things like the fact that it's an FPS, fairly old school, beautifully rendered and that Mars is really, really dark and in need of some duct tape. What we don't dwell on are the gribbly bits. No, really we don't. Mostly because the gribbly bits are really, really gribbly. Let me describe the opening minutes of one of the later levels...

The elevator stops and the doors hiss open, as sci-fi doors are wont to do. The elevator was pretty dim, but you're greeted with near-pitch black darkness, punctuated with the sharp flicker of semi-functional lights. What you can make out through the strobing and the thin smoke of dying fires are walls and floors of steel. Well, the floor's probably steel, judging from the sound your boots make as you pick your way through the gloom. You can't really see the floor because it's completely covered with blood. And fellow marines, mostly in smallish chunks. Judging from the splatter patterns on the walls, the corridor you're walking in was subject to a lot of very messy, very wet violence. Pleas for help are written in great red smears on the wall. Somehow the shotgun in your hands isn't quite so comforting anymore, so you pull out a bigger gun...

Now, if this were IRL*, it would be some seriously twisted stuff. Hell, I think I'd have to be treated for PTSD if I saw a marine in several pieces on the floor around me. But hey, it's all in happy little pixels on your screen so it's all good, right? Because, really, if you're thinking too much about what's all over the floor, you'll end up there pretty quickly yourself, coz Doom 3's that kinda game.

But the fact of the matter is that the line between gameworld and IRL is fiercely reinforced by the interface. No matter how perfectly modelled the graphics are or how high the quality of the speakers, the gamer is physically separated from gameworld, projecting only a small part of himself into it with mouse and keyboard. I've never fired a gun in my life, but I'm guessing the kick of an AK-47 is pretty far removed from the click of a mouse.

When I think about this, I can't help but feel a little afraid. As things are now, the interface is what stands between me as I am now and the angel of death I become in gameworld. The distinction is clear as day, if not clearer. Out here, I am me. In gameworld, I'm someone else. It's that simple. But what if the interface becomes more advanced, moving on towards a more immersive gaming experience?

Any dyed-in-the-wool gamer would want that. To feel with his own hands the heft of gun and sword. To know the exhilaration of battle without the consequences. Without the consequences. That's the issue isn't it?

I've been on the net long enough to know that the upper limits of human endeavour are always being pushed back. At the same time, I am often harshly reminded that the lower limits of human depravity are being pushed back just as hard, if not harder. Anyone familiar with 2 girls 1 cup would know that. Especially if they saw the responses and attempts to out-do 2 girls 1 cup**.

I'm not sure I want greater immersion. As a gamer, I want there to always be something between me and the monster I become in gameworld. I want to dismember a battalion of stormtroopers, knowing that if I close my eyes, I will feel a mouse under my hand, not a lightsaber. And when I open them again, I want to know I'm looking at a screen, not the blank eyes staring out of the severed head of my latest victim. I don't want the feeling of having taken lives without all of my senses firmly reminding me: This is not real.

But what is it I'm afraid of? Well, I wouldn't call this a fear of the unknown, exactly. What I'm afraid of is the blurring of the line. There's something truly abhorrent about people learning to take a human life without remorse. It's a phenomenon that I've read into a bit, dehumanization. Dehumanizing the victim, thinking of them as faceless bad guys or subhuman. Dehumanizing yourself, losing your sense of empathy or diverting responsibility to someone else.

With that in mind, I approve of video game violence as it is now. I think it throws reality into sharp relief. I like to get up after a session of meaningless carnage, and be reminded of the world around me and know, I am human. I want to be firm in the knowledge that I could not bring myself to bear a weapon in anger against another human IRL.

But that's just me.


*In Real Life.

** If you haven't seen 2 girls 1 cup, I will tell you now, you don't want to. Trust me on this. This isn't a reverse psychology thing. Just... don't.

Things you shouldn't read while eating

I was quite surprised to find Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel selling in Malaysian bookstores. I'd have figured a book like this would never have made it onto the shelves in a country where Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses is still haram*. But there you have it, I spotted Infidel in an MPH, grabbed it, and now I take every oppurtunity I can to read it in public.

Infidel is a singularly remarkable book, telling the story of a singularly remarkable woman. My respect for her knows no bounds, and hers is a story of a world far removed from what many of us know, surrounded as we are by the comforts of glass, steel and concrete. That having been said, I had the misfortune of reading this passage, telling of an episode in a refugee camp on the Somalia-Kenya border during Somalia's civil war, while having lunch in 1U:

One morning when I went to get water with all the throngs of other women I heard that a woman had been attacked in the night. She had been arrived alone, and she was from a small subclan; she had no men to protect her. Kenyan soldiers had taken her out of her hut in the night and raped her.

I went to see her in the tiny rag hut she had made for herself. She was one big wound. Her face was swollen and covered in dried blood, her clothes were torn, there were marks all over her legs. She was shaking uncontrollably. I touched her hand and asked if I could help her but she couldn't talk. All she could say was Ya'Allah, Ya'Allah, "Allah have mercy on me."

I went to get her more water, and all the people nearby told me, "You shouldn't be seen with that woman. She is impure. People will say you're the same." All I could see was a human being who was abused, who was on the verge of death, but to them, she was an outcast.

I knew she would die soon. I walked all the way to the UNHCR tent and found a Sri Lankan woman and told her, in English, that there was a woman alone who had been raped. I explained that Somalis would leave this woman to die. She came to the tent with some guards and took her away. I told Mahamed and the others about it and they said, "Of course it is not the woman's fault, but you know, there are so many problems. You can't save everyone here." I did know that, but we could have taken care of each other. Two days later, again there was another story of a woman who had been raped. It began happening all the time. Kenyan soldiers came at night to rape Somali woman who were alone and without protectors. And then all these women would be shunned and left to die.

This is what my grandmother had meant when she warned me: if you are a Somali woman alone, you are like a piece of sheep fat in the sun. Ants and insects crawl all over you, and you cannot move or hide; you will be eaten and melted until nothing is left but a thin smear of grease. And she also warned us that if this happened, it would be our fault.

It was horrible. Everyone in that camp called themselves Muslims and yet nobody helped these women in the name of Allah. Everyone was praying - even the woman in that hut had been praying - but no-one showed compassion.

I lost my appetite for quite a while after reading that, not least because the paragraphs before and after the above extract told, in ghastly detail, the horrors of a Somali refugee camp.

Anyway, I must recommend this book. To anyone, really. Doesn't matter if you're atheist or not, hers is a tale well worth hearing and her life is a powerful and moving testimonial against ideological dogmatism.

*which really just further reinforces the image the local religious authorities have of being illiterate, delusional, anal-retentive, Quran-waving hypocrites.

Universality and PDA

Outside of linguistics, most would know Chomsky as a ferocious critic of US foreign policy, and with good reason. What I find is highlighted most in his criticisms is the matter of the singularly astounding hypocrisy of which various US administrations have been guilty, of which I personally think the most dire effect is the complete disintegration of US credibility in the eyes of the international community.

In passing moral judgements, though morality itself is nebulous and debatable*, the bare minimum standard required should be that of universality, i.e. One should never impose moral standards upon others that you wouldn't adhere to yourself. In this respect, at least, the gang of inbred delusional psychotics known as the Westboro Baptist Church have something over the US government.

So what I was thinking about, with respect to universality, was this silly little comic by Scott Adams, from Dogbert's Clues for the Clueless:


Going by Chomsky's view on universality, everyone, even the mingers, should have the right to PDA to the same level of intimacy without fear of reprisals from little old ladies with big sticks. But Adams does make a very pertinent observation here: Our morality is skewed somewhat by our aesthetic sense.

We gravitate towards things that are pleasing to the eye and ear. Natural enough, I suppose, but this also creates a habit of ignoring or stifling things that aren't quite so pleasant. I have only to walk in one of the countless gargantuan shopping malls that dominate the KL landscape to observe this utterly deplorable side of human nature.

"The beautiful people" strutting about in fine clothes, planning the next party, gossiping over the latest celebrity wedding/divorce. People who travel all around the world but whose minds remain trapped on the barren little island of their prejudices. "Living for the moment" they call it, without the slightest inkling of a thought for what it takes for society to sustain this hedonistic lifestyle. Being beautiful is everything, because when you're beautiful, you're right. That's the message the idiot box and the mass media sends us. Well, at least until someone like Miss South Carolina** shows up to give us a sharp dose of reality.

Of course, those of you who've been following the movements of the WWF would know this. It's MUCH easier to champion the cause of an endangered species if it's cute and furry. Endangered warthogs? Molluscs? Insects? Fuck 'em, not interested.

The fact of the matter is that aesthetics should not be a basis for making moral/ethical judgements of any kind. Aesthetics, like intuition, can still have a place in the empirical sciences as a source of inspiration, but should never be considered a criterion of truth. Any scientist worth a damn knows this.

But alas, consumerist society is not particularly known for it's intellectual rigour. And so the hordes of the gullible shape the world with their unbridled whims and fancies, sacrificing their mental potential in favour of the pretty lights and worthless baubles the market economy promises. The masses, trapped in a mental prison of their own making, are kept shallow and stupid, and intellectuals the world over lament for the fate of Man.

Well, if nothing else, it will be interesting to see how exactly we get out of this hole we're digging for ourselves...

* At least among those of us who actually think...

** Honestly, I really feel for her. It can't be nice knowing you turn up as a result when you search for "stupid" on Youtube.

I hate Ragnar Redbeard...

Seeing as it's Mother's Day, I figured I'd have an entry more or less in the mood of it. That having been said, it's not going to be a pretty one. There, you've been warned.

I was peeping in a newspaper lying around my aunt's place and I saw an article about some guy in a village on the other side of the country having trouble supporting his wife and 8 kids. Nothing unusual about that around here, but here's the stinger: 3 of the kids are paralysed and incapable of communication.

2 of those children are in fact in their 20s. Apparently, due to some neurological disorder, they are vegetables, can't speak, and the scope of their daily activities comprises eat, sleep, shit and piss. Judging from the pic in the paper, they couldn't even sit up.

And it was while looking at that picture that a question popped into my head. And it's a fucking ugly question so I'll just spit it out:

Is there such a thing as mercykilling?

That those 2 men/veggies survived as long as they did is a true testament to a mother's love. We are genetically predisposed to protect our kin. Most of us will come from cultures that program us from an early age to believe that a mother's love is unconditional, that it's the most powerful of human emotions.

But looking at those 2 skeletal figures in their T-shirts and diapers, staring blankly at whatever direction their heads happened to loll, knowing full well that that was IT for them... That was all this life could offer them. From cradle to the grave, eat, sleep, shit and piss. Genetically and memetically, they are already dead.

So what do you think is the right thing to do? And most importantly, why?

Never stand between a utilitarian and a train

I was reading an article in an older issue of Sci Am and came across some interesting responses to the Trolley Problem. For those not familiar or who can't be bothered to click the generously provided link, the Trolley Problem is:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?

That's the basic version. Do nothing, 5 die. Flip the switch, 1 dies. Easiest thing in the world. The version being discussed in the article was a little more close and personal. Only a little. Instead of flipping a switch, this one places you behind a really fat dude at a platform next to the track. Pushing him onto the track would stop the trolley. According to Judith J Thompson, a philosopher who has extensively analysed the Trolley Problem, many people willing to flip the switch wouldn't go so far as to push the fat dude.

The utilitarian approach is simple enough: 5 is more than 1. 1 must die. I must confess, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me. The response I was reading that interested me was as follows:

"No, I would not push a bulky person in front of a train in attempt to stop it to save five. Why? (1) Physics: there is no way in God's green earth that a 200- or 300- pound person is going to stop several thousand tons going even 30 miles an hour. Children should be raised with that understanding, and anyone who does not understand that should go back to grade school..."

The reader went on in that vein for a bit longer, then explained her anal retentiveness on the physics of it with the following:

"Yes, I am not in the "spirit" of the question. Yet the moral dilemma was presented to me to THINK about, to evaluate and respond. So I did."

To which I have to say: I think I know exactly who I'd push in front of the train/trolley. Spoken in the most neutral terms, her decision means that in the choice between allowing 1 or 5 to live, she would choose 1. And she covers her self-righteous hide with appeals to laws of physics in a hypothetical question. AND she even goes on to play the "think of the children" card! Pathetic!

Anyway, no more time to waste on idiots... The Trolley Problem has a few other versions worth thinking about. Here's one that gave me pause:

A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor.

I know my answer, and I'm fucking glad I'm not a doctor. There's also the matter of who those people are on the track. e.g. What if the one person was:

- Your mother?
- The President of the US? (ahahaha... trick question...)
- The Pope? (Atheists! Ssh!)
- Richard Dawkins?

And what if the 5 people were:

- convicts?
- children?
- [insert ethnic minority here]?
- cancer patients?
- Ann Coulter, Shirley Phelps-Roper*, Deepak Chopra, Donald Rumsfeld and George W Bush? (Ah, now I'm just fantasizing... :-D)

And lastly, what if YOU were on the trolley with a whopping huge bomb which you could trigger and would annihilate you AND the trolley, saving the 5 on the track?

But hey, it's just a thought experiment. There's only ONE way to know for sure what you'd do in that situation. May none of us ever have to find out...

Oh, and on a side note, you've probably realised by now that the Greater Good I follow most certainly means a very utilitarian outlook on life. As such, I'd really like to hear solid justification why somebody should NOT flip the switch in the basic version of the Trolley Problem. I try to keep an open mind, but I honestly cannot see any reason not to flip the switch. As such, comments are really, really welcome for this particular entry.

*or anybody else from godhatesfags.com, really.

Why? Why? Why?...

"Because mummy said so."

And that's how a lot of conversations between my wee nephews and my sister end. Personally, I'm thrilled that they're showing such curiousity from such an early age. I'm even more thrilled that, as the uncle from far, far away, I don't have to deal with it :-D

In this jungle/shopping mall that I call home, there is a subject taught in secondary school called Moral Studies. Basically, it's what you have to endure if you're lucky enough not to have been born having the shahadah forced into your ears.

What it is (and I kid you not) is basically a teacher too young, too old or too inept to teach anything else reading a book at you. The contents of said book, is simply a list of 16 "Major Virtues" and 64 "Minor Virtues", to use a fairly loose translation. Essentially, all this book is is a collection of nice words, together with a parable or two in case the meaning of said words didn't sink in. An extract of a dictionary, basically.

I have lasting memories of a senile, doddery old fool droning on and on with that wretched book laid out on the table in front of him. Sometimes, for variety, one of the class would have to read it aloud, while the others slept soundly on. If not the senile old fool, then the brain-dead young History teacher (yet another subject taught using the time-tested Malaysian method of reading a book aloud at some children) would come in and apply the same technique.

On a side note, let me tell you something about the monumental stupidity of those in the teaching profession here. Once upon a time, my English teacher was ill, so a sub came in to give us a spelling test. My lasting memory of it was that girl, probably in her mid-20s, loudly saying "Fatty-gew! Fatty-gew! Icy-cless! Icy-cless" I mean, zomgwtf? It turned out she was trying to pronounce "fatigue" and "icicles" in a way "to make it easier" for the students. *facepalm...

For years and years, this has been the case. An education system bent on filling hundreds, thousands of bright young minds with empty words. What I'd like to discuss here is a hypothetical situation:

WHAT IF, one of those kids was actually listening? And WHAT IF, that kid should ask that surprisingly obvious yet elusive question: "Why should I be a good person?"
In fact, let's take that question a bit further:

- "What is it that I am basing my morality on?"

- "Why shouldn't I live for my own selfish gain?"

Simple questions, with complicated answers. But I believe I'm quite right in saying that these are questions that NEED to have answers, REAL answers, firmly embedded in future minds as early as possible.

More often than not, those who would claim to be our teachers in this country would fall back on religion. Fortunately, our education system makes sure the great majority of the population are kept too simple-minded to probe further than so-called "God-given" authority.

I'll admit that this sordid state of affairs has served the purpose of the nation thus far. Malaysia did not need geniuses, innovators, visionaries, moralists and artists to establish its market economy, and believe me, it shows. It needed money, and it has produced a generation of people who lust for material wealth like nothing else and who sometimes have the skill to acquire it. But how long can this continue?

I want to believe in serving the Greater Good. I'm human, you're human. That's all the excuse we need to help each other out. I want to believe in rule of law. But I live in a nation where the difference between a criminal and a policeman is merely that you can bribe one of them. And don't even get me started on what our politicians are like...

So put yourself in the Moral teacher's shoes... What would you tell the kid who asks you: "Why should I be a good person?"

Cui bono?

This is something I'm going to come back to, probably quite a few times, in the future but I'd just like to record a few thoughts I've had today and, hopefully, see what people think. The question I was thinking about was this:

Is there a positive direction to human progress?

Part of why I've been thinking about this comes down to my atheism. The religious will for the most part fall back on religion as justification for their behaviour. The fact that their scripture is so ludicrously dated and self-contradictory that it can justify pretty much anything is part of the reason atheists become atheists, but that's another story for another time. As such, one must ask: If atheists are not kept in line by threats of Hell and promises of Heaven, what is it that regulates an atheist's morality?

Looking around the forums, it's tempting to say "buggerall", but if we're a little more selective with our samples and weed out the angsty teenagers, Goths and plain old idiots, we find that atheists gravitate ever so slighty to a very loosely defined concept of The Greater Good. It is this Greater Good that is of interest to me.

I latch on to my own personal interpretation of Greater Good, contrary to my readings in Zen, because I believe there is a direction that Humanity can take that can be considered progress.

We began billions of years ago as pure energy. Then, our atoms were forged in the fires of dying stars. Then came the spark of life. A relatively short period of chemistry and natural selection later, along comes a clever monkey. A lot of scrapping later, here we are, in all our incredible diversity.

Now look at us, at the level of the individual. We're born and, if we're lucky, we go to school, get a job, find a partner, have kids, retire and expire. If we're not so lucky, we'll probably have to skip a few steps. Look back at this life, scrutinize it unflinchingly, and ask yourself: What was it about?

If you're religious, the answer's easy! Do "good", live "well" and get your raggedy ass into Heaven.

But when you're atheist, well, this is where that vigilance and discipline I spoke of earlier comes in. These are questions every atheist must ask and answer for himself:

- What is your life about?
- What is the Greater Good that you serve?
- What would you sacrifice for the Greater Good?

The concept of a Greater Good is a deep and powerful one. To formulate a Greater Good that can actually be agreed upon could well form a rallying point for atheists and theists alike. Of course, it's agreeing upon one that proves to be difficult...

There's something very odd about the fact that pretty much ALL the spiritual traditions on the planet have come up with the Golden Rule (a.k.a. the Ethic of Reciprocity), yet many manage to muster great hatred for anyone outside their particular denomination.

No shortage of intellectuals have put forward excellent ideas, not least the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I'm quite partial to Bertrand Russell's idea that there should only be one army on Earth which does not answer to any single government. But these are just the dreams of intellectuals. As things are now, too many people have a vested interest in keeping the bulk of the populace ignorant, shallow and most importantly obedient.

Be that as it may, I allow myself the belief that there is a Greater Good, that Humanity can conquer itself and become something greater, and that we each have a part to play in making that brighter future beyond our own lives happen. Otherwise, what's the point?

A Word on Religious Conflict

I just came across this charming quote on http://www.machineslikeus.com/:

"You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend." - Richard Jeni

When I think about religious conflicts such as one finds in Sudan, Israel-Palestine and Iraq, I have great difficulty understanding what is the right course of action. I mean, which would you choose:

1) Intervene, and force both parties to worship their imaginary friend in peace? (Iraq - This doesn't seem to be working. They hate each other and they hate you, too.)

2) Back one side and see if it ends quicker? (Israel-Palestine - They've been at it for a long time haven't they? Still going strong...)

3) Ignore them and pretend they're not there. (Sudan - Don't even ask about Darfur.)

4) Nuke them right off the face of the Earth. (Hasn't been tried yet, but the upshot to this is:- a) no more conflict; and b) all parties involved have gotten much closer to their respective imaginary friends.)

Given the proven efficacy of 1, 2 and 3, I'm kind of partial to 4, but who am I to say, eh?

The Devil Inside

I was checking out Edge.org this morning when I found that, as usual, Jared Diamond has come up with yet another deeply insightful yet horribly disturbing article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_diamond

For those who can't be bothered to read the whole article, I attempt to summarise it below:

Diamond tells of his friend, Daniel Wemp, a tribesman from Papua New Guinea who engaged in a 3-year quest for vengeance against a man who killed his uncle. Over a series of battles that would cost another 29 lives, Daniel's machinations finally bore fruit, and his uncle's murderer, Isum, was crippled for life. I say his machinations, because some of Daniel's clan had married into Isum's clan and as such, Isum was related to Daniel and so Daniel was not permitted to kill Isum by his own hand.

Diamond later goes on to elaborate on how "nearly all human societies today have given up the personal pursuit of justice in favor of impersonal systems operated by state gorverments - at least, on paper" and how New Guineans are coming to accept state-sanctioned justice over tribal revenge killings. This paragraph in particular stood out:

I asked Daniel why, on learning of Soll's [Daniel's uncle] death, he hadn't saved himself all the effort and expense, and just asked the police to arrest Isum. "If I had let the police do it, I wouldn't have felt satisfaction," he replied. "I wanted to obtain vengeance myself, even if it were to cost me my own life. I had to ask myself, how could I live through anger over Soll's death for the rest of my life? The answer was that the best way to deal with my anger was to exact the vengeance myself."

These words struck me fairly deeply, as they no doubt did Diamond, for he went on to tell of his father-in-law, Jozef's, experience with thirst for vengeance. For a moment, he stood, gun in hand, faced with the man who killed his mother, sister and niece. Jozef was an army officer, so he had comrades-in-arms with him who'd happily pull the trigger even if he could not. I tried to put myself in his shoes, and I doubt very much I'd have had the phenomenal courage that he showed that day. The murderer was taken to the police, imprisoned and investigated.

A year later he was released.

In Daniel's world, vengeance permeates all aspects of life. For lack of a powerful state-run authority, tribes and clans continue to play out their cycles of revenge killing. Even after exacting his vengeance, he would be a target of reprisals from Isum's clan for the rest of his life.

In Jozef's world, justice was denied by a failure of the system, and he died wishing he'd pulled the trigger that fateful day.

My own readings outside of this article, on how situational forces can bring out the Devil lurking inside all of us and how people of a certain disposition can continuously perpetrate crimes against their fellow man, lead me to the conclusion, together with this article, that peaceful coexistence (in fact, the very existence of man in general) boils down to Dehumanisation, which I'll save for a later post, and the System that is in place.

I believe it is the duty of our best and brightest to wield the lessons of history to engineer such a System that guarantees justice and fair opportunity to an acceptable quality of life to all. I think we have, to some small degree, achieved stable states that more or less move towards this standard. Of course, they are flawed, like anything else, but such flaws can be identified and slowly weeded out. More flaws will make themselves known, but that's all well and good, else the lawmakers would be terribly bored otherwise.

What worries me is how to achieve a stable world-state. Throughout world history, as Diamond points out in his article, never before has a state been established spontaneously out of a realisation that it would best serve the interests of all. There are only 2 ways in which a state has arisen in history:

1) In the face of a greater external threat, disparate groups merge to form a state to better fight the external threat; and

2) One group dominates the others through the adoption of proto-state institutions.

1 doesn't look likely to happen anytime soon, much as the nihilist in me wants to see continents incinerated by aliens. 2? The way the world is now, do you honestly see one group gaining absolute dominance over the planet? Are we really so different from the tribes of New Guinea?