Battleship Reason

Seeing how the internet is buzzing with Obama’s latest prize, I thought it would be appropriate to express one of my worries regarding his Majesty the First Ethnically Diverse President of the Predominantly White United States of Amexica. The reason for such a pompous title is simple – it seems that nearly everyone has erected some kind of a mental pedestal upon which they have subsequently placed the president. Whether this is closing down Guantanamo bay, allowing gays to openly serve in the military, bringing about the long awaited social healthcare, or world peace (at least in the Middle East), the President has appeared to promise something to nearly any interest group, no matter how big or how small. Is it then surprising that the clever fellows over at the Nobel institute thought they ought to get in on the action? Probably not.

However, let us back up for a second – who is actually to blame for all of these promises? Certainly, Obama has indeed made many, but the public itself was more than willing to tackle on extra challenges for the good president. Obama has a heavy cross to bear indeed – not only is he the first president of any shade other than pasty white, he is also the second youngest president of the United States. The first one? Kennedy of course. Let’s hope that youth doesn’t turn out to be a lethal condition. It is Obama’s youth (and a multi million dollar campaign) that has perhaps made him appear this shining beacon of hope for the vast majority of Americans, as well as a significant portion of the world’s population. I personally think that we have too high hopes of Obama. Certainly, he is extremely talented, charming, and resourceful, but he is after all only human. How many presidents have attempted to solve the Middle Eastern dispute? How many have failed (at least in the long term)? Every single one.

The world doesn’t change because of one man, but it changes because that one man inspires hundreds to think and to act differently. Instead of waiting (a bit like loyal hounds) for Obama to sort out the world, maybe we should be the ones to support him and to give him help. Would it truly take that much for us to gather and do our bit for the world? Well, the answer is sadly – yes. We are, after all, lazy creatures who cherish comfort and convenience above all. That’s why people like Obama represent (to us) the best way to fix the world. We think that where we as a collective fail, individuals with vim and vigour can succeed. We know that singular people cannot fix the world, yet we still persist in believing that they can. Is it because we are lazy? Probably.

Therefore, don’t blame Obama for this cult of personality. Blame us, everyday people who want to change things, but without putting in the effort needed to do so.

So, as you can surmise, I have not been posting much in the last few… uh… months. The reason for that? Well, it’s a bit complicated, but the best way in which I can describe it is that I’ve just been figuring out a bit who I am.

You see, this isn’t one of those soul-searching journeys that well-to-do young people go on – traipsing around the globe and generally having a blast. This is neither some hard fought journey through the mountains of Tibet in order to discover some deeper meaning of life. What this IS however is a simple stop in my life where I took a deep breath and took a good look around myself.

For the vast majority of university graduates in the world today, the prospect of graduating is both terrifying and exhillirating. You are finally done with years and years of education, chugging your way through it all slowly – and you are finally ready to begin the life proper. The problem is – education is fairly simple – all the steps that you need to take in order to advance are pretty well covered, and you always know what to expect. Real life, of course, is nothing like that. There are no simple ways to define what success is, nor is there a clear path for you to take. In fact, you are the one who identifies these things. What makes it even more confusing is that there is no ‘right’ answer to it. Some people might prioritise their families above their work, while others might do the reverse. Even within a similar field of priorities, the approaches are tackled differently. Some people consider the well being of the family to be of utmost priority, whereas others consider just the well being of the children to be the most important thing. Choices, choices, yet very few points of guidance, when all is said and done.

Certainly, your family and friends will attempt to influence you in one way or another – pass on their own teachings and hope that you make the best of them. Of course, that doesn’t mean that their paths are your paths, or indeed that you agree with their definitions of basic concepts in this world such as happiness, love, dedication, worth, etc.

So, I thought to myself that it might be a good idea to actually sit down and think about what I was doing. I’ve spent about a year after finishing my MSc just working in small, part-time positions, sorting out my visa, as well as generally trudging along and thinking about what I wanted to do. I will be the FIRST to admit that perhaps I could have arrived at a solution much sooner, had I really thought about it hard. As it was, it was easy to sort of get lost in the choices and not really dedicate myself to one of them. The strangest thing of course is that it didn’t take hard thinking in the end, just a particular (fairly short) trip.

The Croatian coastline has for me always been a special place – lots of rustic charms, good food, even better wine, and infinitely pleasant company. I spent about six days at the seaside with two of my friends, and if I were to tell you that my eyes were opened, I would not be lying. This wasn’t an eye-opening experience preceded by thunder and dramatic drums, just a sudden clarification. I’d like you to imagine a painting on the wall, in front of which is a rope barrier that you cannot cross. The painting is too far away for you to see the details, and you keep going round and round the barrier hoping to get closer. Naturally, the barrier is equidistant to the painting from all its parts. You keep getting more and more frustrated until you figure out one day that all it takes, really, is just to remove the barrier and approach the painting closer. So you do so – and the painting you see is quite interesting. It’s full of colour, full of shape, but very indistinct. That doesn’t matter though – the paints and brushes are right in front of it, and with a sweet grin on your face, you set to work.

Poetic? No, I don’t think so. Perhaps pompous – but there you have it!

I don’t know whether it’s just my biased perception – but it seems to me that as of recently we have seen an increase in freedom-related issues. Whether it’s illegal downloading, or the usual clamouring for freedom of expression – the issue has burst onto the main stage yet again. What worries me however is that many people don’t quite understand what freedom actually means.

In my humble opinion, freedom is the ability to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions. If we look back in history, spoken and written words meant a great deal. Honour, although in certain cases a truly flawed concept, curbed people into minding what they said. You didn’t go around insulting people unless you truly wanted to be skewered with a rapier or shot in the chest. People understood that although you were free to do whatever you wished, others might not react kindly to your actions.

It seems to me that we have lost the appreciation of true freedom here in the west. For the past fifty or so years, most humans in the west have lived more or less comfortably – with the majority of their basic needs taken care of. Our governments are largely liberal – we may speak of them in any manner that we wish to, provided we do not cause harm to others in doing so. Contrast this with China, where information of the Tiananmen Square Massacre is still tightly controlled, and most people are happy to be in any kind of employment. Fighting for freedom in China means that people would get to know the truth of the events and would have the liberty to pursue any career they chose to, instead of being pigeonholed into positions in China’s developing industry. Fighting for freedom in Europe, however, largely revolves around justifying the latest piece of macabre theatre where sheep-clothed actors vomit over a baby seal. When you compare it like that, it puts things into perspective, does it not?

I am all in favour of freedom, in particular freedom of expression. I wish that we had true freedom of expression here in the west. Next time a quasi-artist starves a dog to death for his ‘art’ – a group of animal rights activists could get together and perhaps strip the man naked and leave him in the middle of a city chained to Nelson’s column – their own little ‘art’ project. Or if a “journalist” digs through politicians’ bins in order to uncover more about their private lives, why not publish an official governmental pamphlet describing the private life of that particular journalist – focusing in particular on his or her infidelity to their spouse? We seem to forget that freedom is a two-way street. That is, why, I truly dislike some of the freedom activists – people who nominally fight for freedom, but in truth are just using this to justify their actions to the society. On the other hand, I’m an active member of Amnesty International, and I support activities which increase the awareness of the importance of freedom in countries where freedom is most curtailed.

We should all take heed from the good old Independence War in America. The thirteen colonies had the freedom to chart their own destiny. They chose to do so – and paid the price in blood. That is true freedom.

P.S. For those of you who want to understand more about freedom, here’s two links that will highlight what I mean.
Google UK search for Tiananmen.
Google China search for Tiananmen.

[edit]
Furthermore, a nice comparison of maps.google and ditu.google – in particular highlighting cases of map censorship.

Let us start by talking about one Taro Aso. For those of you who don’t know, this sprightly 68 year old is the current prime minister of Japan. What sets him apart from some of his predecessors is that he appears to be more popular with Japan’s younger generations. The reason for this is twofold – firstly, he is seen to be quite a simple and straightforward person, as well as endlessly entertaining as he engages in sacrastic word duels with reporters during press conferences. Secondly, he is a borderline otaku.

Otaku? Allow me to explain. Otaku is an all encompassing word that usually describes a die-hard fan of a particular activity or entertainment. The fields most often associated with otaku are those of manga (Japanese comics), anime, and video games, but other fields have their otakus as well – train watching, umbrella collecting, model cars, historical recreation, etc. On the surface, being described as an otaku does not seem as a terribly negative thing – but – in the unbelievably complex system of Japanese social interactions, it CAN be. Imagine, if you will, a man just into thirties, or perhaps well into his forties, who lives on his own, has no family, and collects little figurines of lolita-like girls. Scary? Yes, well – that’s also what an otaku is. These are men (women otaku are very, very rare) who spend thousands, sometimes millions, of Yen in order to purchase hand-crafted miniatures, get full-body pillows with prints of their favourite anime characters on them, and in general seem to be a little bit out of touch with reality. The reasons for this phenomenon are many, but in Japan’s somewhat strict social culture, being excluded from mainstream society is not a difficult task. Again, an otaku can be someone who’s just a dedicated fan, or it can mean a slightly creepy person who is best avoided.

Going back to Taro Aso – while anime and manga are staple of everyday life in Japan (many companies use anime-like design to market their products) – there is a fine limit where enjoyment of the genre can turn a little bit obsessive. Mr. Aso reads approximately ten volumes (about the size of a small pocket book) in about a week. This is why he is borderline otaku. Yet, he was seen, and still is, as a large patron of manga and anime arts. If you think back to reneissance Florence or Genoa, where rich patrons would sponsor works of art – you wouldn’t be too far off the mark. The important thing is that he’s been quite public about his love for this somewhat curious entertainment. He is certainly the first prime minister to openly admit such strong affection for the field.

This is – in my opinion – the crux of the issue of successful governance in the 21st century. Taro Aso is basically an honest man. He realizes that his fascination with Japan’s semi-sub-culture can be viewed negatively, but instead of attempting to hide it, he admits it openly and for that he is rewarded. Obama capitalized on a similar concept many a time – he often admitted that mistakes were made and would do his best to correct them as such. Honesty is the way to go, really. It’s time to chuck out those scenes where a blank-faced politician refuses to give comment while his speech-writers furiously comb dictionaries for more confusing words to throw at the unsuspecting masses. Why is it so difficult for politicians to just be honest people? We don’t expect them to tell us everything that goes on in their lives – but just giving us a hint or a flavour of their human randomness and imperfection will make them more likeable men. Instead of presenting suits and cold faces that are meant to radiate severity and seriousness of purpose, why not display some of the warmth and diversity of character? Would it truly be such a terrible thing to admit that – on ocassion, and when appropriate – the president gets a little bit tipsy, and then sings his favourite songs at the top of his voice?

I would also make a case that the somewhat information-spoiled generations of the 21st century demand such treatment. We’ve travelled the globe, even if only online, and we’ve seen that people indeed do come in all shapes and sizes. Everyone has strong points, and everyone has weak points. We think ourselves superiour in intelligence than previous generations – that might be right, or it might be wrong – but the point is – old-fashioned political schemes won’t work as well on us. So, a plea to our politicians – we DO care that you are human, and sometimes we would like to hear how you accidentally sneezed while shaking the hand of Boris Yeltsin. It’s funny, we’d chuckle, but more importantly, it would mean that you shared something with us, something that is embarassing to you. It means you trust us. It also means that we’d trust you more. After all, you’re human as well – no one can be perfect all the time.

Honesty is simple.

Iain M. Banks’ novel Matter has a small interview with the writer published on the back of it. Amongst the many interesting things he touches on, the one that truly stuck to my mind was his fear of losing his inventiveness. I will not quote much of what he said, but in short – he had at one point (before writing the Algebraist) thought of retiring from writing Science Fiction and sticking with mainstream novels. The reason for this, he said, was simple – in order to remain a good Sci-Fi author, you have to always invent new worlds, new ideas, new thoughts – and he was afraid that he had exhausted his supply. Suffice to say, Banks’ personal struggle was overcome when he wrote the Algebraist, proving he could still conjure up new ideas.

That’s however where my curiosity began. Let us put aside the individual for a second and focus on the human society as a whole. Let us consider a similar situation occurring on the global scale. Is there a limit to how inventive humans can be?

I’m not quite sure I have an answer to that yet, but I’m working on it. Theoretically, we assume that human inventiveness is unlimited because it is a product of our minds. We assume our minds to be unlimited in their capacity to think and develop – and we assume so because we only truly understand very little about our own minds. Let us be pessimistic for a second (this is highly unusual coming from me), and suppose that the rest of the mind that we do not understand yet is in fact nothing but housekeeping and support functions for the roughly five percent of our brains we do understand. That would, theoretically, mean that we have already reached our developmental potential, and only evolution could advance us further. However – evolution is a very, very slow process, and we are fleeting creatures at best. Compare perhaps the four thousand years of what I will choose to call technological invention faced with the tens of thousands of years of human evolution. In those four thousand years we have been quite busy developing and uncovering new things – wheels, alphabets, trade, sailing, manufactory processes, physics, political and societal regimes, etc. The past fifty years, the advent of the internet, and other measures, have arguably made creativity and inventiveness much easier. Publishing your findings, your thoughts, is easier than ever. What this of course means is that in the next few decades, we can expect to see more and more development of the human potential and of our surroundings.

However, this is where the true problem of the finite amount of human invention begins. If you compare inventions such as warfare or trade to – say – the development of a more socialist mode of capitalism (Fairtrade, social corporate responsibility), the difference is quite strong. One is a complete re-imagining of how humans ought to live, the other one a refinement of the existing system. Does this mean that all the ‘big’ inventions have already been uncovered? It is possible, but unlikely. What is probably one of the many explanations for this phenomenon is that we now accept already developed concepts as the basis of our existence instead of looking at alternatives. It would be difficult to argue that there is a better model for humans to interact than through an ordered society, but the point is that no one is really looking for one in the first place. What we are doing, however, is fine-tuning the existing system so that it fits us best. If we look at things in that sense, then there has been very little genuine world-changing invention in the last one hundred years. Certainly, the death of colonialism, the rise of capitalism, the advent of mass media and computers – all very important changes, but in essence, they change the basis of human life very little. Boundaries have changed, the speed of our communication increased, productiveness enlarged – but really, humans a hundred years ago were doing the exact same things, it just took them longer.

So where does this leave us? Currently, there is very little to worry about really – there are still so many things that humankind needs to tackle. We need to develop artificial intelligences, create nanotechnology that will assure everyone’s well-being and livelihood, span the stars, and eventually meet those who live among them. These are big inventions, all which will change the way that we live – maybe warfare, disease and death will be eliminated – maybe they won’t. But – what afterwards? Will there be other boundaries we will have to cross? Will we be presented with new challenges to our existence? Furthermore, even if we are presented with such challenges, will we find necessary to overcome them. Say if we consider (this is stolen from Banks by the way) leaving this material existence for some form of god-hood. Will humans find it necessary to push our efforts to invent a way for us to become something other than human?