The Human Condition IV
“When she was freed of the fear of her enemy and her rival in empire was out of the way, the path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption, not gradually, but in a headlong course. The older discipline was discarded to give place to the new”.
You may have 2 guesses about whom this quote is concerned.
If your first answer was “the Roman Republic after 146 BC”, when Carthage was finally nothing more than a field of ploughed furrows full of salt, you would be absolutely spot on, although there is another answer as well.
Velleius Paterculus, who authored the sentences quoted above at the time of emperor Tiberius as part of his historic account of the death throes of the Roman Republic, was close enough to the Republic’s last 100 years BC. This was a period full of personal greed, infighting, self aggrandizing, proscriptions, state expansion and individual megalomania. After the civil war of 88 BC and the presence of an exceptional number of personalities larger than life (Sulla, Marius, Pompeius, Cicero, Caesar, Antonius and a vile range of provincial governors like Gaius Verres and Catilina, there was no system in place to restrain neither the state nor the incumbents, who tried to make the best out of a time of confusion.
The rather unique Roman characteristic of individual- and state hubris created a range of extraordinary situations, which are well described in e.g. Cicero’s letters: Being a Roman citizen would be a better argument for being right than any legally convincing argument provided by someone from the provinces, colonia or socii.
There were Romans and there was the miserable rest of the petty world.
The humanitarian protagonists were few and far between, although Cicero perhaps could be mentioned, provided we realise that he was a lawyer – and a good one at that. He would, as all super-lawyers, win cases where the accused was guilty beyond doubt. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were probably more genuine humanists in their attempt to create land reforms, but this, typically for the period, cost them their lives.
In short: The Roman Republic and its key players were in it for the money, the power and the ‘auctoritas’, i.e. the authority with which they could express an opinion and have the people follow. This created more power and money. The only object of becoming quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul and senator was to improve wealth and 'auctoritas'. It became a competition with not only other Romans, but with one self. There was only one way ahead: more wanted more.
Velleius could in my opinion easily have been suspected for having had a glimpse into a far distant future.
So, if your other guess was “the USA after 1991”, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed – wouldn’t that be a correct answer as well?
I am not the first person to compare the Roman state of affairs of 2000 years ago with the scenario of ‘deja vu’ of today.
With the Soviet Union well out of the way for some 20 years now, an un-opposed drive to expand the state, using the devices of today, was to be expected: money and one-way political influence, peppered with a good portion of righteous religion.
The economic criminality and the Iraq wars are perfect, but sad illustrations.
The country that produced the Declaration of Independence (i.e. human freedom) in 1776 and who keeps bragging about “we liberated you guys twice from the “Huns” (see my previous blog on the Human Condition) has started a headlong, not gradually, course of corruption while abandoning the path of virtue.
Consider Enron, Ponzi, Madoff, greedy bankers, credit fraud and pyramid schemes.
And then there are the Oil-wars with all their lame excuses of WMD, and the hypocrisy around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Not to speak of ‘justified torture’ such as water-boarding, a self-created terrorism plague and the incredible Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison scandals.
A country that faces no serious external threats or imperial competitors and which possesses a huge surplus of assets and energy will inevitably begin to mortgage its resources and start to compete inwards – just like the Roman Republic. With no need to defend itself and no opponent with the capacity to whip it back to the path of virtue, the ‘capital’ can be used to augment its own interest, in competition only with one self, while continuing to use the arguments from the ‘virtue’ days to build power. It takes some naivety not to see how arrogant this is - but an excess number of blind spots is always the hallmark of such states, whether the Roman Republic or a modern super-power without competition.
Hubris again.
As the world has become global this attitude spills over on the ‘partners’ – the UK being the primary one.
UK MPs soon realised that the world was one big jam pot and started sucking it empty. After the intense scrutiny in 2009 more than 200 have chosen to leave parliament, taking the golden handshake while they can.
Oone of the worst offenders is the Home Office Secretary, who managed to get away with an illegal £100K mortgage. Had unemployed Mr. Smith managed illegally to squeeze 80 Pounds out of Job Centre Plus, the might of the state would have hit him with a ton of bricks.
So, what’s the difference from the Roman Governors looting Corinth, Africa and Sicily and keeping their loot?
Gordon Brown glues himself to the stool with mistake after mistake, leaving a bankrupt country in his wake and the UK’s ex-PM, Tony Blair, who accepted a cream-job as a mid-east envoy in which he has done absolutely nothing for his excessive fee, abandons all decency and goes for the talks-circuit with his gained ‘auctoritas’, lining his pocket with millions of pounds. At the same time the tax-payers have to fund a security operation for him costing £6mill pr. year with Blair contributing nothing.
Is there any hope with the Conservatives, then?
I doubt it - they are as elusive on actual change-plans as everyone else and obviously as fiddling with both promises and funds as every other politician.
The Romans in the time of the Republic had the 3 remaining books of the Sybil, which they could consult in order to find a way out of trouble.
We are left with the mediocrity and continued greed from our politicians - and no clear way out.
They can't even agree to help save the planet through better husbandry of our energy resources, proving the point, that if you are rich, all you want is more.
How Roman.
It is not difficult to conclude that the world may have changed considerably in 2000 years, but the human species has not.
Monday, 4 January 2010
Saturday, 19 December 2009
The Human Condition-III
Everyone uses the term “the Human Condition” without thought of what it actually means. Normally it seems to describe the misery of our daily survival attempts, but it goes a bit deeper than that.
The ideal ‘anthropogenic’ society prescribes characteristics such as being cooperative, loving and selfless.
However, more often than not we are judgemental, competitive, aggressive and selfish.
Kammerat Napoleon (1984), Oligarchs, war-mongering, Business Competition, Party Politics, neighbour-gossip, ordinary human interaction and the prevailing promotion of self-interest (UK MPs come to mind) illustrate what I mean quite well.
We seem to be able of limitless love and sensitivity, but unfortunately it doesn’t eliminate our capability of greed, hatred, brutality, rape, murder and war.
Words are too poor to describe this contradiction.
It seems to be something we just have to live with.
That’s why we call it the “Human Condition”.
In my opinion nothing describes the Human Condition better than the art presented by this marvellous young Ukrainian woman:
http://pelapapas.com.mx/htmls/animacion-arena-2.html
Compare this to the trash produced by the YBA or for the Turner Prize.
That is also "a human condition" - - -
Everyone uses the term “the Human Condition” without thought of what it actually means. Normally it seems to describe the misery of our daily survival attempts, but it goes a bit deeper than that.
The ideal ‘anthropogenic’ society prescribes characteristics such as being cooperative, loving and selfless.
However, more often than not we are judgemental, competitive, aggressive and selfish.
Kammerat Napoleon (1984), Oligarchs, war-mongering, Business Competition, Party Politics, neighbour-gossip, ordinary human interaction and the prevailing promotion of self-interest (UK MPs come to mind) illustrate what I mean quite well.
We seem to be able of limitless love and sensitivity, but unfortunately it doesn’t eliminate our capability of greed, hatred, brutality, rape, murder and war.
Words are too poor to describe this contradiction.
It seems to be something we just have to live with.
That’s why we call it the “Human Condition”.
In my opinion nothing describes the Human Condition better than the art presented by this marvellous young Ukrainian woman:
http://pelapapas.com.mx/htmls/animacion-arena-2.html
Compare this to the trash produced by the YBA or for the Turner Prize.
That is also "a human condition" - - -
Monday, 14 December 2009
Saturday, 5 December 2009
The great Climate scam – or AGW nonsense.
The revelations from East Anglia University in Nov. 2009 are terrifying in many ways. Slowly a lot of us begin to realise that the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) theories may be a load of poppycock. The focus on the impact of man-made CO2 is turning our minds away from the real problems.
And that is why signing of the proposed treaty in Copenhagen in December may not only be a red herring but outright dangerous, as it will address the wrong reasons with the wrong measures, investing the wrong money in the wrong causes.
The world has become warmer in the last 50 years. This is beyond dispute.
Just look at the rising sea levels, most significantly apparent in the Island states of the Pacific Ocean, and the slow, but certain disappearance of glaciers across the globe.
Anyone with a 50-60 year memory can remember the icy winters in the 1950s with intermittent re-occurrence in 1970s and 1980s, but what have we seen after that? Temperatures have stabilised since 1998, despite increased “anthropogenic” pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere, ostensibly close to 10 % more now than in the 90s.
If the Earth's atmosphere were 1 km deep, 781 m would be Nitrogene, 209 m Oxygene, 9 m Argon, 18 cm Neon (Ne) - and only 38 cm CO2, the remaining few cm made up of small amounts of other gasses, one being Methane (1cm), apparently the most dangerous of all.
Most of the 38cm CO2 is nature's own and has always been so.
The question is: how large a percentage of the 38cm is man-made?
Even if we assume that 10 cm is the product of our industrial activities (indications from ice-cores and sea-bottom point in that direction) is it then realistic to expect a few cm to have the claimed impact? And couldn't it be something else, e.g. wholesale burning of the rainforrest?
Right now everyone is looking for hard evidence of a correlation between the CO2-emission and rising temperatures, but having great difficulty finding one.
If there were one, the last 10 years would have provided dramatic evidence and these are the 10 years, where we don't see any warming.
Sorry folks: we can’t find it and the Hockey-Stick model is wrong.
Research, deep into the ice-sheets of Greenland, Antarctica and elsewhere, has proved that CO2 emission and global warming is uncorrelated the AGW-way. Temperature rises appear to have come before CO2 levels increased, and often with a time-lapse of 50-100 years, so perhaps it is the other way around: the world warms up and then either the oceans or jungles or something else release more CO2.
Scientific research shows that it is much more likely to find the reason behind the climate swings amongst the many possible parameters totally outside of human control, e.g variations in solar activity and radiation, the Earth’s elliptic path around the sun, the tilt of the Earth’s axis (which seems to ‘wobble’ a couple of degrees around a 23 degree norm for some reason), volcanic activity, ocean currents and, sometimes, an unlucky combination of these. Once started like in the last ice age, which everyone can agree was not initiated by human activity, the process may become self-amplifying.
This could happen if a massive release of icebergs from Greenland suddenly changed the Gulf Stream (the Atlantic conveyor). In that case a northern hemisphere ice-age could be induced in just a couple of months.
A lot of scare-mongering has taken place around ice and sea-levels, in particular the melting away of Antarctica.
At present ca. 50 Bill tonnes of ice is supposedly breaking off, causing a millimetre rise in the level of the oceans pr. year. For comparison, Antarctica holds more than 3.000.000 Bill tonnes of ice. Greenland’s ice and the world’s glaciers are also on retreat, contributing to a small rise in sea-levels, a fact we can measure. However, nature seems to have a built-in breaking effect on the melting process, causing the melt-down to stop.
But something else could happen. At present the Atlantic conveyor and the impact of a high volume of ice-bergs is closely monitored. We now understand that an ice age could happen within a few months, if the Gulf stream is stopped, as it happened 12.000 years ago during the Younger Dryas period, when fresh water from huge American lakes broke into the ocean. A 3 km thick sheet of ice above our heads and 40m lover sea-levels are quite unbearable to consider.
Around 1100 CE we had a globally warmer period than today, allowing the Vikings to settle in Greenland and harvest a crop, while in 16-1700 there was a so-called mini ice age that caused failed harvest and much misery.
None of this was impacted by human activity, only by Mother Nature’s mood.
And then there are the computer models.
We can hardly predict the weather a day before, so how much faith should we put into the AGW Computer models? When you hear that
- the programmed sensitivity to CO2 has been adjusted to be many times greater than
actually measured
- the solar activity has been downgraded despite measurements and better knowledge
- the models predict a warming of the troposphere (6 miles above the tropics) that we have
not been able to verify despite countless weather balloons and
- the models so far have failed to “predict” the climatic weather we can verify, namely by
inputting the data from the past and correlate them with actual observations
then it seems to me that we have a responsibility to ring the alarm bells.
Why is this information suppressed? 1984?
The UN climate models apparently predicted a 20th Century temperature increase of 2-3°.
Actually measured was 0.7°, 3-4 times wrong!
The conclusion is scary.
If we cannot do anything about the change in climate and if the AGW is a false assumption, then we are about to embark on a series of investment programmes that will make the bank bail-out in 2009 look like pocket money. We will fail to have resources left to invest where they should have been invested in the first place, namely in alleviation of the unavoidable effects of Mother Nature’s little games. We could have prevented deforestation, planted trees in the whole of Sahara, ensured evaporation-free irrigation systems world wide to help feed a growing population, generated cleaner energy for all, etc.
The list is endless.
The conference in Copenhagen may represent one of the biggest decision-disasters in our recent history, if the suggested declaration is signed. There will be no way back and the already vested business interests will, for a while, see even greater profits. Politicians will pat each other on the back, in particular the UK politicians, who have now decided that they will “lead the way”.
Ehh? Lead from the back seat? A country that has no double glazing, that produces much more pollution than the agreed limits and that flows over with professors, who state that renewable energy production is useless while the politicians maintain they are doing everything they can? (The UK has 2% green energy production against e.g. Denmark’s 30%).
Just wait until the permafrost, unavoidably, sneaks through the Watford Gap. Perhaps we should look differently, and more friendly, at Afghanistan?
The revelations from East Anglia University in Nov. 2009 are terrifying in many ways. Slowly a lot of us begin to realise that the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) theories may be a load of poppycock. The focus on the impact of man-made CO2 is turning our minds away from the real problems.
And that is why signing of the proposed treaty in Copenhagen in December may not only be a red herring but outright dangerous, as it will address the wrong reasons with the wrong measures, investing the wrong money in the wrong causes.
The world has become warmer in the last 50 years. This is beyond dispute.
Just look at the rising sea levels, most significantly apparent in the Island states of the Pacific Ocean, and the slow, but certain disappearance of glaciers across the globe.
Anyone with a 50-60 year memory can remember the icy winters in the 1950s with intermittent re-occurrence in 1970s and 1980s, but what have we seen after that? Temperatures have stabilised since 1998, despite increased “anthropogenic” pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere, ostensibly close to 10 % more now than in the 90s.
If the Earth's atmosphere were 1 km deep, 781 m would be Nitrogene, 209 m Oxygene, 9 m Argon, 18 cm Neon (Ne) - and only 38 cm CO2, the remaining few cm made up of small amounts of other gasses, one being Methane (1cm), apparently the most dangerous of all.
Most of the 38cm CO2 is nature's own and has always been so.
The question is: how large a percentage of the 38cm is man-made?
Even if we assume that 10 cm is the product of our industrial activities (indications from ice-cores and sea-bottom point in that direction) is it then realistic to expect a few cm to have the claimed impact? And couldn't it be something else, e.g. wholesale burning of the rainforrest?
Right now everyone is looking for hard evidence of a correlation between the CO2-emission and rising temperatures, but having great difficulty finding one.
If there were one, the last 10 years would have provided dramatic evidence and these are the 10 years, where we don't see any warming.
Sorry folks: we can’t find it and the Hockey-Stick model is wrong.
Research, deep into the ice-sheets of Greenland, Antarctica and elsewhere, has proved that CO2 emission and global warming is uncorrelated the AGW-way. Temperature rises appear to have come before CO2 levels increased, and often with a time-lapse of 50-100 years, so perhaps it is the other way around: the world warms up and then either the oceans or jungles or something else release more CO2.
Scientific research shows that it is much more likely to find the reason behind the climate swings amongst the many possible parameters totally outside of human control, e.g variations in solar activity and radiation, the Earth’s elliptic path around the sun, the tilt of the Earth’s axis (which seems to ‘wobble’ a couple of degrees around a 23 degree norm for some reason), volcanic activity, ocean currents and, sometimes, an unlucky combination of these. Once started like in the last ice age, which everyone can agree was not initiated by human activity, the process may become self-amplifying.
This could happen if a massive release of icebergs from Greenland suddenly changed the Gulf Stream (the Atlantic conveyor). In that case a northern hemisphere ice-age could be induced in just a couple of months.
A lot of scare-mongering has taken place around ice and sea-levels, in particular the melting away of Antarctica.
At present ca. 50 Bill tonnes of ice is supposedly breaking off, causing a millimetre rise in the level of the oceans pr. year. For comparison, Antarctica holds more than 3.000.000 Bill tonnes of ice. Greenland’s ice and the world’s glaciers are also on retreat, contributing to a small rise in sea-levels, a fact we can measure. However, nature seems to have a built-in breaking effect on the melting process, causing the melt-down to stop.
But something else could happen. At present the Atlantic conveyor and the impact of a high volume of ice-bergs is closely monitored. We now understand that an ice age could happen within a few months, if the Gulf stream is stopped, as it happened 12.000 years ago during the Younger Dryas period, when fresh water from huge American lakes broke into the ocean. A 3 km thick sheet of ice above our heads and 40m lover sea-levels are quite unbearable to consider.
Around 1100 CE we had a globally warmer period than today, allowing the Vikings to settle in Greenland and harvest a crop, while in 16-1700 there was a so-called mini ice age that caused failed harvest and much misery.
None of this was impacted by human activity, only by Mother Nature’s mood.
And then there are the computer models.
We can hardly predict the weather a day before, so how much faith should we put into the AGW Computer models? When you hear that
- the programmed sensitivity to CO2 has been adjusted to be many times greater than
actually measured
- the solar activity has been downgraded despite measurements and better knowledge
- the models predict a warming of the troposphere (6 miles above the tropics) that we have
not been able to verify despite countless weather balloons and
- the models so far have failed to “predict” the climatic weather we can verify, namely by
inputting the data from the past and correlate them with actual observations
then it seems to me that we have a responsibility to ring the alarm bells.
Why is this information suppressed? 1984?
The UN climate models apparently predicted a 20th Century temperature increase of 2-3°.
Actually measured was 0.7°, 3-4 times wrong!
The conclusion is scary.
If we cannot do anything about the change in climate and if the AGW is a false assumption, then we are about to embark on a series of investment programmes that will make the bank bail-out in 2009 look like pocket money. We will fail to have resources left to invest where they should have been invested in the first place, namely in alleviation of the unavoidable effects of Mother Nature’s little games. We could have prevented deforestation, planted trees in the whole of Sahara, ensured evaporation-free irrigation systems world wide to help feed a growing population, generated cleaner energy for all, etc.
The list is endless.
The conference in Copenhagen may represent one of the biggest decision-disasters in our recent history, if the suggested declaration is signed. There will be no way back and the already vested business interests will, for a while, see even greater profits. Politicians will pat each other on the back, in particular the UK politicians, who have now decided that they will “lead the way”.
Ehh? Lead from the back seat? A country that has no double glazing, that produces much more pollution than the agreed limits and that flows over with professors, who state that renewable energy production is useless while the politicians maintain they are doing everything they can? (The UK has 2% green energy production against e.g. Denmark’s 30%).
Just wait until the permafrost, unavoidably, sneaks through the Watford Gap. Perhaps we should look differently, and more friendly, at Afghanistan?
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
Art in the doldrums – anno 2009.
Channel 4 TV showed a feature in November 2010 about the 10 most promising modern British art students, who competed for the attention – and funding support – of Charles Saatchi. 6 out of the 10 would receive massive help in terms of money and logistics for the whole year.
Saatchi has made his impact on the British art scene felt for several years, but he is a shy benefactor, who’d rather let his gallery-curator Rebecca do all the hard work up front and only step in, when the final selections have been made.
True to form, this is exactly what he did in respect of the Channel 4 feature.
I don’t blame him.
At least, if these artists fail, it is not his fault.
The art scene in the UK has become a money-chasing marketing machine that does its utmost to push art into becoming synonymous with “never seen before”. Preferably it must leave the observer confused and certainly it must not reveal even a modicum of beauty in the punters’ mind. The moment an artist dares slipping into ordinary traditional boots, he/she will be cut down to the socks. Expressionism may still be accepted, as the definition of expressionism is rather loose, but only if it possesses a level of daring that makes it novel and slightly crazy – e.g. the German expressionist George Baselitz’ figures that all have been turned upside down.
What a novelty.
Beauty as an object has no place – it is passē.
Tracy Emin's unmade bed with strewn condoms, prized by Saatchi at £50,000, and her summer exhibition photos of a menstruating woman are in. If you buy her book, “The art of Tracey Emin”, you will know exactly what I mean.
Anish Kapoor’s red-sh*t canon, actually wax, shown at the RA in November 2009 and a towel handle from which a whistle was suspended, constructed by one of the winning artists in Channel 4’s feature and here copied after memory, are in.
I can assure you, it was not difficult to remember the details – here rendered publicly in all its glory!
However, praise is due, where praise is required!
One of the artists, who tried to make it above the parapet to Saatchi’s attention, had arranged 15 canteen-chairs, lying sideways in a circle on the floor. Even Tracy Emin, who was on the panel of 5 judges (a paradox in its own right), could see, that this was bull sh*t – which was exactly what she said on TV during the show.
I agree.
But I fail to see the difference between this chair-circle and most of the other ‘products’ shown. Perhaps the problem was that the ‘artist’ had great difficulty expressing, in a clear language, what was the concept behind his contraption.
The acid test came, when the budding Saatchi winners had to prove their ability to draw a simple model drawing. A faultless female beauty had draped herself on a couch in Manet’s Olympia-style. All what the artists had to do, was to show that they mastered some basic drawing technique – in my opinion the least one can demand of potential celebrities worth Saatchi’s millions.
You guessed it.
Not one of them had any idea about what it means to draw.
In one of the scribbles you’d be hard pressed to see that a naked woman was part of the object at all. Typically that was the only drawing, the judges thought was worth mentioning. Was it because no one else would be able to see the object and hence have an opinion contrary to the judges? Was it because the other drawings were just bad drawings, too obvious to everyone else?
Even worse, none of the ‘artists’ mastered a minimum of ability to express the concept in their creations, perhaps with one exception: the only one of them, who had never attended art school. The judging panel had great difficulty coming to terms with the fact that his art was both exciting and creative, but they didn’t hide their misgivings that ‘he was not cued in to the accepted art-lingo’.
In fact he spoke clearly and comprehensibly about his work.
The art world has forgotten that art must have an outward orientation and Channel 4’s feature showed this deficiency in abundance.
Art has become a totally self-centred celebrity machine: the object is the artist, not the observer; the language has to contain a high percentage of multi-syllable words that to ordinary humans mean nothing; the more ‘unaccepted’ or ‘new’, the better – anything that smacks of something that has been done before is unacceptable. This means that ultimately anything is art, even if it is a slowly dancing, clumsy bear (the Turner prize 2007), a video of someone sleeping on a sofa (the entry of one of the budding Saatchi artists) or something that preferably upsets the philistines .
At art school no one learns basic painting or drawing any more. Why waste time, when you can become a celebrity pouring a bucket of paint over the canvass and “see what happens”.
A stick in a pot of soil, on a chair, is art.
As are 500 diamonds glued onto a scull (Damien Hirst).
Or a 2m tall poo, another of Saatchi’s accepted creations, seen here – not too different from celebrity artist Anish Kapoor’s piles of concrete intestines.
Balance that with an artist like Kandinsky’s technical ability, his personal and artistic development over a 50 year career (here illustrated through his early picture of Odessa Harbour and the much later "All Saints II") and a statement made in the 1930s: "I am really happy that my early research into high quality paints has been successful, judged from the longevity of the colours."
Will we one day accept the Saatchi-protegees as the bee’s knees of what the 21st Century could produce?
Your guess is as good as mine.
The impressionists were once savagely vilified and here’s what Kurt Kuerchler, a German art-critic, said about Kandinsky in 1913:
“There is a certain satisfaction in knowing that this sort of art has finally reached the point where it reveals itself as the ‘-ism’ upon whose shores it must run aground, that is to say: cretinism.”
How wrong can one be? Does it remind you of the manager, who said to the Beatles: "There's no need for yet another guitar group".
Nevertheless, I will dare a judgement of the 2009-art seen from the year 2110:
“A good 80% of the 2009-production was mere junk, as no technique, no deep learning, no differentiation was required before it was called art. It was the result of an intensive marketing drive by money-hungry people, who couldn’t produce anything unique themselves. The objective was all about celebrity creation and it illustrated an empty, materialistic, spiritless society that had become obsessed with fast money, at any price, me-me-me and meaningless new forms of expression that didn’
t segregate ‘art’ from anything else that surrounded us. Marcel Duchamp’s urinoir, first exhibited in 1917, is a good example, and as we now know, it never made it to become a ‘piece de salon’ in the following 200 years, proving my point.
Only, very few people in the art world took the step to say: bullocks.
Of course they forgave Malevich for his black cross on a white canvass, and Matisse’s 10-sec charcoal-drawn women, as they had other, and more serious, stories to tell. And they had the ability!
But make no mistake: like in 2009 you still often pay for the signature, not for the painting.”
Back to 2009.
Saatchi has become a ‘God’-maker (Obs.: not an art promoter), an art-world’s Simon Cowell, who, like in the X-Factor, is able to push art in a celebrity direction with a heavy focus on the artist, not on art itself, simply because he has the money to do so and not because of the artist’s talent. It worked for Damien Hirst, whose latest skull-obsessions, in oil on a blue background exhibited at the Wallace Gallery in London, have been cut to the socks with the conclusion: he can’t paint! That could have been a shot under the waterline to the marketing machine, but he seems to have survived.
Nevertheless, he's the richest living artist in 2009 – again proving my point.
The emperor’s new clothes are still very new indeed.
Channel 4 TV showed a feature in November 2010 about the 10 most promising modern British art students, who competed for the attention – and funding support – of Charles Saatchi. 6 out of the 10 would receive massive help in terms of money and logistics for the whole year.
Saatchi has made his impact on the British art scene felt for several years, but he is a shy benefactor, who’d rather let his gallery-curator Rebecca do all the hard work up front and only step in, when the final selections have been made.
True to form, this is exactly what he did in respect of the Channel 4 feature.
I don’t blame him.
At least, if these artists fail, it is not his fault.
The art scene in the UK has become a money-chasing marketing machine that does its utmost to push art into becoming synonymous with “never seen before”. Preferably it must leave the observer confused and certainly it must not reveal even a modicum of beauty in the punters’ mind. The moment an artist dares slipping into ordinary traditional boots, he/she will be cut down to the socks. Expressionism may still be accepted, as the definition of expressionism is rather loose, but only if it possesses a level of daring that makes it novel and slightly crazy – e.g. the German expressionist George Baselitz’ figures that all have been turned upside down.
What a novelty.
Beauty as an object has no place – it is passē.
Tracy Emin's unmade bed with strewn condoms, prized by Saatchi at £50,000, and her summer exhibition photos of a menstruating woman are in. If you buy her book, “The art of Tracey Emin”, you will know exactly what I mean.
Anish Kapoor’s red-sh*t canon, actually wax, shown at the RA in November 2009 and a towel handle from which a whistle was suspended, constructed by one of the winning artists in Channel 4’s feature and here copied after memory, are in.
I can assure you, it was not difficult to remember the details – here rendered publicly in all its glory!
However, praise is due, where praise is required!
One of the artists, who tried to make it above the parapet to Saatchi’s attention, had arranged 15 canteen-chairs, lying sideways in a circle on the floor. Even Tracy Emin, who was on the panel of 5 judges (a paradox in its own right), could see, that this was bull sh*t – which was exactly what she said on TV during the show.
I agree.
But I fail to see the difference between this chair-circle and most of the other ‘products’ shown. Perhaps the problem was that the ‘artist’ had great difficulty expressing, in a clear language, what was the concept behind his contraption.
The acid test came, when the budding Saatchi winners had to prove their ability to draw a simple model drawing. A faultless female beauty had draped herself on a couch in Manet’s Olympia-style. All what the artists had to do, was to show that they mastered some basic drawing technique – in my opinion the least one can demand of potential celebrities worth Saatchi’s millions.
You guessed it.
Not one of them had any idea about what it means to draw.
In one of the scribbles you’d be hard pressed to see that a naked woman was part of the object at all. Typically that was the only drawing, the judges thought was worth mentioning. Was it because no one else would be able to see the object and hence have an opinion contrary to the judges? Was it because the other drawings were just bad drawings, too obvious to everyone else?
Even worse, none of the ‘artists’ mastered a minimum of ability to express the concept in their creations, perhaps with one exception: the only one of them, who had never attended art school. The judging panel had great difficulty coming to terms with the fact that his art was both exciting and creative, but they didn’t hide their misgivings that ‘he was not cued in to the accepted art-lingo’.
In fact he spoke clearly and comprehensibly about his work.
The art world has forgotten that art must have an outward orientation and Channel 4’s feature showed this deficiency in abundance.
Art has become a totally self-centred celebrity machine: the object is the artist, not the observer; the language has to contain a high percentage of multi-syllable words that to ordinary humans mean nothing; the more ‘unaccepted’ or ‘new’, the better – anything that smacks of something that has been done before is unacceptable. This means that ultimately anything is art, even if it is a slowly dancing, clumsy bear (the Turner prize 2007), a video of someone sleeping on a sofa (the entry of one of the budding Saatchi artists) or something that preferably upsets the philistines .
At art school no one learns basic painting or drawing any more. Why waste time, when you can become a celebrity pouring a bucket of paint over the canvass and “see what happens”.
A stick in a pot of soil, on a chair, is art.
As are 500 diamonds glued onto a scull (Damien Hirst).
Or a 2m tall poo, another of Saatchi’s accepted creations, seen here – not too different from celebrity artist Anish Kapoor’s piles of concrete intestines.
Balance that with an artist like Kandinsky’s technical ability, his personal and artistic development over a 50 year career (here illustrated through his early picture of Odessa Harbour and the much later "All Saints II") and a statement made in the 1930s: "I am really happy that my early research into high quality paints has been successful, judged from the longevity of the colours."
Will we one day accept the Saatchi-protegees as the bee’s knees of what the 21st Century could produce?
Your guess is as good as mine.
The impressionists were once savagely vilified and here’s what Kurt Kuerchler, a German art-critic, said about Kandinsky in 1913:
“There is a certain satisfaction in knowing that this sort of art has finally reached the point where it reveals itself as the ‘-ism’ upon whose shores it must run aground, that is to say: cretinism.”
How wrong can one be? Does it remind you of the manager, who said to the Beatles: "There's no need for yet another guitar group".
Nevertheless, I will dare a judgement of the 2009-art seen from the year 2110:
“A good 80% of the 2009-production was mere junk, as no technique, no deep learning, no differentiation was required before it was called art. It was the result of an intensive marketing drive by money-hungry people, who couldn’t produce anything unique themselves. The objective was all about celebrity creation and it illustrated an empty, materialistic, spiritless society that had become obsessed with fast money, at any price, me-me-me and meaningless new forms of expression that didn’
t segregate ‘art’ from anything else that surrounded us. Marcel Duchamp’s urinoir, first exhibited in 1917, is a good example, and as we now know, it never made it to become a ‘piece de salon’ in the following 200 years, proving my point.Only, very few people in the art world took the step to say: bullocks.
Of course they forgave Malevich for his black cross on a white canvass, and Matisse’s 10-sec charcoal-drawn women, as they had other, and more serious, stories to tell. And they had the ability!
But make no mistake: like in 2009 you still often pay for the signature, not for the painting.”
Back to 2009.
Saatchi has become a ‘God’-maker (Obs.: not an art promoter), an art-world’s Simon Cowell, who, like in the X-Factor, is able to push art in a celebrity direction with a heavy focus on the artist, not on art itself, simply because he has the money to do so and not because of the artist’s talent. It worked for Damien Hirst, whose latest skull-obsessions, in oil on a blue background exhibited at the Wallace Gallery in London, have been cut to the socks with the conclusion: he can’t paint! That could have been a shot under the waterline to the marketing machine, but he seems to have survived.
Nevertheless, he's the richest living artist in 2009 – again proving my point.
The emperor’s new clothes are still very new indeed.
Sunday, 4 October 2009
The HUMAN CONDITION – 2
Hubris and religion are closely related issues.
Just because there's something we don't understand, we immediately make it the creation of a supernatural power and start genuflecting, or even killing, if other people don't agree with us.
“We are right, you are not, and it is our duty either to save your soul or to make sure your beliefs are not propagated, whilst ours prevail. And by the way: out of the 100s of choices it is OUR definition of the deity that’s the correct one.
Convert or go to the sword.”
This is a pretty serious statement with wide ranging consequences and a strong threat that will determine the destiny of our fellow human beings and sometimes animals. It is an attitude that for millennia has caused war and unrest and still does, from the crusades to Northern Ireland, from Kabul to Washington.
If that is not hubris, then I don’t know what hubris is.
What we don’t understand is continuously wrapped around a set of artificial core truisms belonging to whatever god, we happen to believe in at the time the concept was created. Layer upon layer of mysticism envelope these humanly created dogma. As time passes, they become mystic in their own right. The origin becomes part of the cult, creating yet another impenetrable layer, which, after 1000 or 2000 years of religious Chinese whispers, results in common amnesia and a firm belief that a ‘God created them’.
Smart people were quick to discover that there was power in this onion of commands. It could be used to control others, to become rich. The early popes are as good examples as is the march of the Caliphate in the 7-8th C.
As long as the great, believing masses were kept in ignorance, it was a money- and power-spinning machine (well, that’s the same). An artificial enemy, namely those believing differently, was conveniently held up in front of our own believers to provide a focus for our righteousness, or eliminated, so we could expand our power.
If you think this is a description of a distant past, you have been sleeping most of your life.
But something has been happening quite recently in historic terms.
When Richard Owen, in 1881 in London, created the Natural History Museum, he could not imagine that he was cutting off the branch he sat on. Owen vehemently opposed Darwin’s theories about the evolution being a long string of natural selections, interrupted by cataclysmic events, only to continue with whatever was left. According to Owen, species were planted, feet first, firmly on the ground, finished as a sculpture, by a creator.
But now there was an institution, which with scientific means began to ask too many questions for comfort, at least the comfort of the contemporary religious people. Humility and sensibility had finally entered the brain of a few human beings. When Crick and Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, nothing would ever be the same again and layer upon layer of the belief-onion was peeled off.
It had started before, but progress was slow. Magnetism and lightning once belonged to the onion, actually for thousands of years. But people like H.C. Oersted had removed electromagnetism from the celestial sphere in 1820 and Franklins kite and key made lightning more earthbound - literally.
Knowledge and progress had begun a slow march that would accelerate dramatically in the 20th C. Ignorance was on the way out, although not totally.
Even the National History Museum has now exchanged the statue of Owen, its creator, with one of Darwin at the honour spot on top of the first flight of stairs when you enter the museum hall.
What has happened is a major change in our minds, or at least some of our minds: we are not completely above nature, as we have thought during 2000 years of Christianity. We are just another little speck in the picture that nature is busy painting around us and we have no intrinsic, select value. We are part of nature and just another element in its meaningless evolution and natural selection.
It would be too naïve and beautiful a thought, however, to believe that enlightenment and humility would have a free reign from now on.
Action creates reaction – and so it happens.
With very little left of the religious onion, some other arguments must enter the scene in the camp of those, who for a number of reasons still close their eyes.
It can be extremely difficult to give up a belief, an idea, that has been the well trodden path for the whole of your life. In most cases it would have started when you were a child. The child’s mind is like plasticine, but once we grow older, it hardens and becomes titanium steel. Once a concept is in, it’s next to impossible to get it out.
Try to convince an old communist, or better: a member of Jehova’s Witnesses, or a scientology convict. Try to argue with a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim. Such a conversation does not follow the normal rules of debate. Once you have professed your belonging to a dead idea, how easy do you think it is to lose face and abandon it?
Exactly: too hard.
So, what argument is left?
A very powerful one indeed!
It is called: I don’t just believe, I KNOW.
This is where every discussion with a fundamentally convinced person starts or ends and it is very difficult to circumvent. In fact, you can’t.
It becomes even worse if you talk to a creationist or an end-timer, both the result of brainwashing and deliberate dumbing down. The first lot simply ignore facts in all their naïvety and orchestrated stupidity, the second are downright dangerous in their belief that the world is forecast a dramatic and imminent end as stated in the bible. This means that whatever they do, it is bound to happen. Therefore it is better to ensure you fight on the side of the God (in which they believe) and help send the rest of us to a very warm place. George Bush belongs to this dangerous clan, which may go a long way to explain American foreign politics in the past 10 years.
The general danger is buried in fundamentalism, both Christian and Muslim. Neither can be contained behind a personal, private set of walls any more, as some of us with tolerant attitudes have thought for a lifetime. 9/11 and Tony Blair’s conversation with his god before going to war in Iraq are frightening examples on how religion can go astray and the message of ‘love thy neighbour’ be trampled under foot.
You would expect such people, as heads of state, to possess a little brain, but again: once the child’s mind has been boxed in, it is almost impossible to modify its confusion.
Now consider the bible and its 25 gospels. Why were 21 of them eliminated, in particular the one created by a woman, Mary Magdalena? Why were most of the dogma, to which present day Christians adhere, created by the church at the synod of Nicaea in 325 AD? Or the hereditary sin in Cluny, 410 AD? And why, oh why, do we find virtually every statement in the Egyptian ‘Book of the Dead’ repeated in the Bible, word for word? Did God not do his/her school homework in time, so that he/she had to copy the class’ smart kid before the teacher arrived? That is, if the Bible was written by God and not by a whole army of clerics, as is the accepted knowledge.
The same can be said about the Quran, although there is one major difference between the two: the New testament flows over with good ethical advice, while the Quran is completely devoid of same, concentrating on all the bad things that might happen, if you don’t believe in their version of the almighty.
But in both cases the deity appears to be a vengeful, warmonger – something humans have been fast to copy when it suited them, but slow to accept when it was angry.
All in all: it is very difficult to consolidate the angry god in both religions with the message of love. Consequently human beings have continued to be confused beyond any rational reason. The Norwegian philosopher, Peter Wessel Zapffe, expresses it in this way:
Humans are born with an overdeveloped skill of awareness, understanding and self-knowledge – (what I call "ability to think in abstract ways") which does not fit into nature's design. The human craving for justification on matters such as life and death cannot be satisfied, hence humanity has a need that nature cannot provide satisfaction for. The tragedy, following this theory, is that humans spend all their time trying not to be human. The human being, therefore, is a paradox.
In our quest to determine, factually, whether there is a ‘god’ or not, we often refer to our ‘god’s inclination for disaster management. Apparently the preacher Billy Grahams’ daughter had a comment about the hurricane Katarina and the destruction of New Orleans. Ben Stein from CNN found it very profound. It goes like this:
'I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman he is, I believe he has calmly backed out.
Gentleman?
Phh.
I think this potential 'God' has had the same attitude always, even when everyone in the world was genuflecting ad nauseam.
Pest, volcano disasters, untold tsunamis, landslides, climate change and hunger as for example the 10 years in 536-546 AD, you name it, anything not humanly created, are good examples of ‘God’ walking quietly away. Or never being there.
But of course we didn't all know ‘God’ then.
If the disasters were of human origin, it was easily explained as ‘God's revenge.
Like war, torture, etc, where he commands this species, that he loves so much, to fall upon each other.
Revenge? Punishment? What a miserable kind of love!
In my view we must begin seriously to understand that the universe, of which our world is a microscopic part, is a naturally evolving environment that unavoidably and constantly turns into a killing field. Land is created through tectonic action and volcanic eruptions and animals constantly develop - not because of their strength, but because they adapt (big difference, that Hitler didn't understand), protecting them from being eaten.
This gives rise to new environments and species, a fact we can verify scientifically.
A lot of this we call "Nature's beauty".
A lot of the beauty shown is actually the consequence of erosion and breakdown. When the beauty turns violent it suddenly becomes God's wrath, because we have misbehaved. How convenient: always an explanation.
Try staying a night alone and unarmed in a Kenyan jungle and you’ll know what I mean.
With a bit of technical savvy, we could now put another You-tube video together, preferably accompanied by the very same song, showing
- the cruelty of nature (eat or get eaten) - beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, e.g. an antilope just downed by a lion or one of the early human remains found in Tanzania with a hole in the scull from a leopard's tooth
- the Indian and Samoan tsunamis
- slaughter in Rwanda, Uganda and Indonesia
- clips from "the Mission", a very powerful film showing the true face of religion as a political device
- immense poverty and suffering across the world, even amongst those who believe, from Calcutta to Timbuktou
- pollution (including natures own like the volcano in Cameroon that killed 80.000 people through spewing CO2)
- and many other examples.
Nature’s own forces have a free reign and always had, while constantly - on its own - changing the operational conditions without the tiniest sign of benign, or malign, interference.
I find the pictures beautiful - but the message disgustingly devoid of the message: be responsible for your own actions, with unconditional love and respect for your habitat and fellow beings.
Look at it again and consider how much of these sugar sweet pictures we may not be able to see in 100 years from now.
The song ends with "believe as a child" - of course; children can be impregnated with the desire to kill each other, Americans in particular as it happens in some countries - and feel good about it.
So why not twist their minds with religion from the start?
Now you only have to choose which religion of the 50 major ones on the menu, all claiming to be the only one.
We must begin to understand that we should use our powers, not our non-existing uniqueness, to protect a nature that would have absolutely no problem with 'getting on with it', i.e. evolving and killing, both animals and mountains, if you will, without our presence or interference.
Unfortunately humans have greater power to destroy than to build.
It is very sad that we have learnt so little in our miserable 1 million years of slowly evolving existence.
So the dinosaurs disappeared. According to the Creationists this happened well into the period (or after) where stone age man roamed the earth. Right!!
Well, seriously I believe that humanity will self-destruct one day.
We will take a good chunk of nature with us when it happens. Deserts, apocalyptic flooding, nuclear winters, etc. come to mind.
It could, of course, also be because of a comparable reason to why the dinosaurs disappeared: Hyper volcanoes such as Yosemite, asteroid impacts, etc.
But some sort of 'nature' will emerge again - whether a new and prolific nature such as the one that emerged after the 90% destruction of all life after the Permian period, or a silent, ice-filled quiet as on Europa (one of Jupiter's moons).
It doesn't matter. Mother nature will make up her mind when the time comes.
If you want to believe there is a God behind this, be my guest. I respect people’s freedom to choose, but I do not respect the content of the prevailing religious beliefs. Religion had its time and reason in the ages of ignorance. Not any more.
So far humanity has created 100s of gods if not 1000s.
A lot of them continue to live on in our present ‘God’(s) and their characteristics can be traced a couple of thousand years back.
Even present day Christianity (Catholicism) has over 5000 ‘Gods’.
They call them 'Saints'. People pray to them and they have godly powers.
That's polytheism in my view.
I think it is our conditioned upbringing over 1000s of years that makes us inherently religious. We needed religion when we came down from the trees in the East African jungle a million years ago. There was nothing else to help.
It is a calming thought that when we can't explain nature, then someone must have created it. It couldn’t possibly be by accident.
Well? Why not?
Hubris!
Stone age man finds a Swiss watch, lost by a missionary in the jungle or sees an airplane - and a ‘God’ is born.
The Cargo-Cult in New Guinea is a good example.
‘God’ even gave them presents (cargo).
It is even more calming to believe that when we are in trouble and no one is there to help, we can pray to someone or something.
What else is there? The weak would go under, as they would have nothing else.
And if you firmly BELIEVE it, it is better than a shrink.
The more we can enlarge our scope of wonder and learn to respect nature in all its self-generated enormity, the more we will enrich our lives, without succumbing to our tendency to explain everything through the unexplainable.
Wouldn’t it be nice, if religion were a private matter and not an excuse for righteousness, war, dominance and a need for converting 'the others'??
Hubris and religion are closely related issues.
Just because there's something we don't understand, we immediately make it the creation of a supernatural power and start genuflecting, or even killing, if other people don't agree with us.
“We are right, you are not, and it is our duty either to save your soul or to make sure your beliefs are not propagated, whilst ours prevail. And by the way: out of the 100s of choices it is OUR definition of the deity that’s the correct one.
Convert or go to the sword.”
This is a pretty serious statement with wide ranging consequences and a strong threat that will determine the destiny of our fellow human beings and sometimes animals. It is an attitude that for millennia has caused war and unrest and still does, from the crusades to Northern Ireland, from Kabul to Washington.
If that is not hubris, then I don’t know what hubris is.
What we don’t understand is continuously wrapped around a set of artificial core truisms belonging to whatever god, we happen to believe in at the time the concept was created. Layer upon layer of mysticism envelope these humanly created dogma. As time passes, they become mystic in their own right. The origin becomes part of the cult, creating yet another impenetrable layer, which, after 1000 or 2000 years of religious Chinese whispers, results in common amnesia and a firm belief that a ‘God created them’.
Smart people were quick to discover that there was power in this onion of commands. It could be used to control others, to become rich. The early popes are as good examples as is the march of the Caliphate in the 7-8th C.
As long as the great, believing masses were kept in ignorance, it was a money- and power-spinning machine (well, that’s the same). An artificial enemy, namely those believing differently, was conveniently held up in front of our own believers to provide a focus for our righteousness, or eliminated, so we could expand our power.
If you think this is a description of a distant past, you have been sleeping most of your life.
But something has been happening quite recently in historic terms.
When Richard Owen, in 1881 in London, created the Natural History Museum, he could not imagine that he was cutting off the branch he sat on. Owen vehemently opposed Darwin’s theories about the evolution being a long string of natural selections, interrupted by cataclysmic events, only to continue with whatever was left. According to Owen, species were planted, feet first, firmly on the ground, finished as a sculpture, by a creator.
But now there was an institution, which with scientific means began to ask too many questions for comfort, at least the comfort of the contemporary religious people. Humility and sensibility had finally entered the brain of a few human beings. When Crick and Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, nothing would ever be the same again and layer upon layer of the belief-onion was peeled off.
It had started before, but progress was slow. Magnetism and lightning once belonged to the onion, actually for thousands of years. But people like H.C. Oersted had removed electromagnetism from the celestial sphere in 1820 and Franklins kite and key made lightning more earthbound - literally.
Knowledge and progress had begun a slow march that would accelerate dramatically in the 20th C. Ignorance was on the way out, although not totally.
Even the National History Museum has now exchanged the statue of Owen, its creator, with one of Darwin at the honour spot on top of the first flight of stairs when you enter the museum hall.
What has happened is a major change in our minds, or at least some of our minds: we are not completely above nature, as we have thought during 2000 years of Christianity. We are just another little speck in the picture that nature is busy painting around us and we have no intrinsic, select value. We are part of nature and just another element in its meaningless evolution and natural selection.
It would be too naïve and beautiful a thought, however, to believe that enlightenment and humility would have a free reign from now on.
Action creates reaction – and so it happens.
With very little left of the religious onion, some other arguments must enter the scene in the camp of those, who for a number of reasons still close their eyes.
It can be extremely difficult to give up a belief, an idea, that has been the well trodden path for the whole of your life. In most cases it would have started when you were a child. The child’s mind is like plasticine, but once we grow older, it hardens and becomes titanium steel. Once a concept is in, it’s next to impossible to get it out.
Try to convince an old communist, or better: a member of Jehova’s Witnesses, or a scientology convict. Try to argue with a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim. Such a conversation does not follow the normal rules of debate. Once you have professed your belonging to a dead idea, how easy do you think it is to lose face and abandon it?
Exactly: too hard.
So, what argument is left?
A very powerful one indeed!
It is called: I don’t just believe, I KNOW.
This is where every discussion with a fundamentally convinced person starts or ends and it is very difficult to circumvent. In fact, you can’t.
It becomes even worse if you talk to a creationist or an end-timer, both the result of brainwashing and deliberate dumbing down. The first lot simply ignore facts in all their naïvety and orchestrated stupidity, the second are downright dangerous in their belief that the world is forecast a dramatic and imminent end as stated in the bible. This means that whatever they do, it is bound to happen. Therefore it is better to ensure you fight on the side of the God (in which they believe) and help send the rest of us to a very warm place. George Bush belongs to this dangerous clan, which may go a long way to explain American foreign politics in the past 10 years.
The general danger is buried in fundamentalism, both Christian and Muslim. Neither can be contained behind a personal, private set of walls any more, as some of us with tolerant attitudes have thought for a lifetime. 9/11 and Tony Blair’s conversation with his god before going to war in Iraq are frightening examples on how religion can go astray and the message of ‘love thy neighbour’ be trampled under foot.
You would expect such people, as heads of state, to possess a little brain, but again: once the child’s mind has been boxed in, it is almost impossible to modify its confusion.
Now consider the bible and its 25 gospels. Why were 21 of them eliminated, in particular the one created by a woman, Mary Magdalena? Why were most of the dogma, to which present day Christians adhere, created by the church at the synod of Nicaea in 325 AD? Or the hereditary sin in Cluny, 410 AD? And why, oh why, do we find virtually every statement in the Egyptian ‘Book of the Dead’ repeated in the Bible, word for word? Did God not do his/her school homework in time, so that he/she had to copy the class’ smart kid before the teacher arrived? That is, if the Bible was written by God and not by a whole army of clerics, as is the accepted knowledge.
The same can be said about the Quran, although there is one major difference between the two: the New testament flows over with good ethical advice, while the Quran is completely devoid of same, concentrating on all the bad things that might happen, if you don’t believe in their version of the almighty.
But in both cases the deity appears to be a vengeful, warmonger – something humans have been fast to copy when it suited them, but slow to accept when it was angry.
All in all: it is very difficult to consolidate the angry god in both religions with the message of love. Consequently human beings have continued to be confused beyond any rational reason. The Norwegian philosopher, Peter Wessel Zapffe, expresses it in this way:
Humans are born with an overdeveloped skill of awareness, understanding and self-knowledge – (what I call "ability to think in abstract ways") which does not fit into nature's design. The human craving for justification on matters such as life and death cannot be satisfied, hence humanity has a need that nature cannot provide satisfaction for. The tragedy, following this theory, is that humans spend all their time trying not to be human. The human being, therefore, is a paradox.
In our quest to determine, factually, whether there is a ‘god’ or not, we often refer to our ‘god’s inclination for disaster management. Apparently the preacher Billy Grahams’ daughter had a comment about the hurricane Katarina and the destruction of New Orleans. Ben Stein from CNN found it very profound. It goes like this:
'I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman he is, I believe he has calmly backed out.
Gentleman?
Phh.
I think this potential 'God' has had the same attitude always, even when everyone in the world was genuflecting ad nauseam.
Pest, volcano disasters, untold tsunamis, landslides, climate change and hunger as for example the 10 years in 536-546 AD, you name it, anything not humanly created, are good examples of ‘God’ walking quietly away. Or never being there.
But of course we didn't all know ‘God’ then.
If the disasters were of human origin, it was easily explained as ‘God's revenge.
Like war, torture, etc, where he commands this species, that he loves so much, to fall upon each other.
Revenge? Punishment? What a miserable kind of love!
In my view we must begin seriously to understand that the universe, of which our world is a microscopic part, is a naturally evolving environment that unavoidably and constantly turns into a killing field. Land is created through tectonic action and volcanic eruptions and animals constantly develop - not because of their strength, but because they adapt (big difference, that Hitler didn't understand), protecting them from being eaten.
This gives rise to new environments and species, a fact we can verify scientifically.
A lot of this we call "Nature's beauty".
A lot of the beauty shown is actually the consequence of erosion and breakdown. When the beauty turns violent it suddenly becomes God's wrath, because we have misbehaved. How convenient: always an explanation.
Try staying a night alone and unarmed in a Kenyan jungle and you’ll know what I mean.
With a bit of technical savvy, we could now put another You-tube video together, preferably accompanied by the very same song, showing
- the cruelty of nature (eat or get eaten) - beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, e.g. an antilope just downed by a lion or one of the early human remains found in Tanzania with a hole in the scull from a leopard's tooth
- the Indian and Samoan tsunamis
- slaughter in Rwanda, Uganda and Indonesia
- clips from "the Mission", a very powerful film showing the true face of religion as a political device
- immense poverty and suffering across the world, even amongst those who believe, from Calcutta to Timbuktou
- pollution (including natures own like the volcano in Cameroon that killed 80.000 people through spewing CO2)
- and many other examples.
Nature’s own forces have a free reign and always had, while constantly - on its own - changing the operational conditions without the tiniest sign of benign, or malign, interference.
I find the pictures beautiful - but the message disgustingly devoid of the message: be responsible for your own actions, with unconditional love and respect for your habitat and fellow beings.
Look at it again and consider how much of these sugar sweet pictures we may not be able to see in 100 years from now.
The song ends with "believe as a child" - of course; children can be impregnated with the desire to kill each other, Americans in particular as it happens in some countries - and feel good about it.
So why not twist their minds with religion from the start?
Now you only have to choose which religion of the 50 major ones on the menu, all claiming to be the only one.
We must begin to understand that we should use our powers, not our non-existing uniqueness, to protect a nature that would have absolutely no problem with 'getting on with it', i.e. evolving and killing, both animals and mountains, if you will, without our presence or interference.
Unfortunately humans have greater power to destroy than to build.
It is very sad that we have learnt so little in our miserable 1 million years of slowly evolving existence.
So the dinosaurs disappeared. According to the Creationists this happened well into the period (or after) where stone age man roamed the earth. Right!!
Well, seriously I believe that humanity will self-destruct one day.
We will take a good chunk of nature with us when it happens. Deserts, apocalyptic flooding, nuclear winters, etc. come to mind.
It could, of course, also be because of a comparable reason to why the dinosaurs disappeared: Hyper volcanoes such as Yosemite, asteroid impacts, etc.
But some sort of 'nature' will emerge again - whether a new and prolific nature such as the one that emerged after the 90% destruction of all life after the Permian period, or a silent, ice-filled quiet as on Europa (one of Jupiter's moons).
It doesn't matter. Mother nature will make up her mind when the time comes.
If you want to believe there is a God behind this, be my guest. I respect people’s freedom to choose, but I do not respect the content of the prevailing religious beliefs. Religion had its time and reason in the ages of ignorance. Not any more.
So far humanity has created 100s of gods if not 1000s.
A lot of them continue to live on in our present ‘God’(s) and their characteristics can be traced a couple of thousand years back.
Even present day Christianity (Catholicism) has over 5000 ‘Gods’.
They call them 'Saints'. People pray to them and they have godly powers.
That's polytheism in my view.
I think it is our conditioned upbringing over 1000s of years that makes us inherently religious. We needed religion when we came down from the trees in the East African jungle a million years ago. There was nothing else to help.
It is a calming thought that when we can't explain nature, then someone must have created it. It couldn’t possibly be by accident.
Well? Why not?
Hubris!
Stone age man finds a Swiss watch, lost by a missionary in the jungle or sees an airplane - and a ‘God’ is born.
The Cargo-Cult in New Guinea is a good example.
‘God’ even gave them presents (cargo).
It is even more calming to believe that when we are in trouble and no one is there to help, we can pray to someone or something.
What else is there? The weak would go under, as they would have nothing else.
And if you firmly BELIEVE it, it is better than a shrink.
The more we can enlarge our scope of wonder and learn to respect nature in all its self-generated enormity, the more we will enrich our lives, without succumbing to our tendency to explain everything through the unexplainable.
Wouldn’t it be nice, if religion were a private matter and not an excuse for righteousness, war, dominance and a need for converting 'the others'??
Sunday, 30 August 2009
From Fermentation Vat to Demijohns today
What a mess - but now we know: 7 1/2 litres pure must bubbling away in the 2 demijohns.The Triomphe d'Alsace grapes were really too small this year, but proper spur-pruning in December should prepare the vine for a bumper crop in 2010.
And now: The lively bubbling away of the fresh must is a sound for the Gods! And me.
I have learnt two things recently:
a) It is necessary to add more sugar than indicated in the ordinary tables for Brix vs % alcohol. This acts as a conservation agent during initial fermentation and also brings the wine up to a more modern 12.5-13% alcohol, rather than the previously accepted 10-11%. The rule-of-thumb is 250g/Gallon for sweet grapes; 400g for sour.
b) Triomphe d'Alsace was first created in 1911 as a cross between Vitis Ripara and Vitis Rupestris and Goldriesling in Colmar (Alsace), but didn't appear commercially before 1921-22. The grape is relatively small (Black Currant size) with large pips, which may account for the fact that it is nowhere to be found in commercial vineyards! However, the quality of the wine and its resistance to disease surely make up for these drawbacks in a patio-vineyard!
Jim Page-Roberts' 75m (length of the stem) of vine this year produced 5 Gallons!
There are about 50 bunches of Cascade (?) grapes ripening, ready to be vinified in ca. 2 weeks, depending on a little indian summer. They look marvellous, but the problem with Cascade is clearly that it ripens unevenly and rather late. Some grapes are dark blue, others Chardonnay-green.
I shall leave them until most of them are blue.
The result will be added to the half full demijohn, providing my first mix.
Clos St. Pierre Reserve Speciale 2009 !
....
There is one problem, though: I am not sure any more that it is a Cascade. Comparing leaves it looks more like Brant - more on that later.
If the mix-taste is fine I shall leave it, otherwise it will be replaced by another Triomphe d'Alsace, which I shall plant anyway this autumn!
The most handsome bloke on the block!
- and on 12 Sept. I found out: It is Brant. Picked and vinified 12 Sept. It produced 3 Litres of pulp. Brix achievement was slightly less than the 18% reached by the Triomphe d'Alsace: 16.5%, but for this I compensated with a "chaptalisation" of 170g sugar. After 3 days in my antique French jam glass which holds exactly 3 Litres, on 15 Sept., I filled it into the demijohn that had only become half full by Triomphe d'Alsace three weeks before. It is now bubbling away, promising a delightful mix of a lighter must, as Brant's juice is white.
If the Brant is to survive my critical ambitions, I shall endeavour to harvest all grapes by mid September next year.
Also - a good dollop of extra sugar to get the process going, beef up alcohol content and create a more protective atmosphere during initial fermentation, is one of the lessons I have learnt.
Wednesday, 26 August 2009
Les Vendanges 2009
Les vendanges sont fini. Here’s the result on display.
The grape bunches ready to be stripped; the green and unripe grapes and stalks to be thrown onto the compost heap; the voluptuous, juicy blue grapes bursting with expectation (or is that me?) ready to be crushed in the cocotte and poured into the fermenting vat.
Two Gallons – not a great result, but fine considering the youth of the vine. Next year no doubt will produce a more consistent crop. And next year. And next year - - - -
The bottle of red-wine is for the crusher.
That’s me too.
Deserved, as picking and crushing actually took 4 hours and gave me a blister on the index finger.
The mix of grapes from two Triomphe d’Alsace vines achieved a Brix reading of 18, with some grapes reaching 20, but weather conditions and ripeness dictated 25 Aug. as the day of picking. I added a minimum of sugar (ca 120g) in an attempt to obtain between 11 and 12% alcohol. Let’s hope for 8-10 bottles!
The Cascade vine will have to wait another two weeks and I shall have to consider how to blend the two varietals, as there only are 35 bunches on the vine.However, the grapes are considerably larger than the Triomphe d’Alsace.
The grape bunches ready to be stripped; the green and unripe grapes and stalks to be thrown onto the compost heap; the voluptuous, juicy blue grapes bursting with expectation (or is that me?) ready to be crushed in the cocotte and poured into the fermenting vat.
Two Gallons – not a great result, but fine considering the youth of the vine. Next year no doubt will produce a more consistent crop. And next year. And next year - - - -
The bottle of red-wine is for the crusher.
That’s me too.
Deserved, as picking and crushing actually took 4 hours and gave me a blister on the index finger.
The mix of grapes from two Triomphe d’Alsace vines achieved a Brix reading of 18, with some grapes reaching 20, but weather conditions and ripeness dictated 25 Aug. as the day of picking. I added a minimum of sugar (ca 120g) in an attempt to obtain between 11 and 12% alcohol. Let’s hope for 8-10 bottles!
The Cascade vine will have to wait another two weeks and I shall have to consider how to blend the two varietals, as there only are 35 bunches on the vine.However, the grapes are considerably larger than the Triomphe d’Alsace.
Monday, 24 August 2009
Gorm Danebod - Not Thyra Danebod
(See my blog entries about Gorm and Thyra from June 2009, where the following has been entered in both English and Danish)
Det ser for mig ud som om forklaringen paa tilnavnet ‘bót’ er fundet!
Problemet med ordet ‘bót’ er, at man er blevet taget ved næsen af både Saxo og Aggesen. Det er et typisk eksempel paa et ‘ledende udsagn’, da begge d’herrer tillagde Thyra denne betegnelse, og man identificerede ordet ‘bót’ med betydningen af en glose, ‘but’, der først kendes 300 år senere, i stedet for at læse glosen som ‘bøt’. Man har forgæves ledt efter ‘bót’ på andre runesten, men i betragtning af det begrænsede kildemateriale og indskrifternes knaphed er det vel ikke mærkeligt, at søgningen har været resultatløs. Smigeren er åbenbar, men er det ikke lidt tamt at oversætte ‘bót’ med at forbedre, bøde, hjælpe?
Det mener Johan Lange i Kuml 1982-83, p.213-17 i hvert fald.
Et af problemerne er runen 'U'
Den kan læses som både U, Y, Ø, O.
Hvis man derfor sammenligner med de normale vokalændringer som f. eks. ‘thusi’ til ‘thausi’, der er kendt i runesproget og som videre overgår til ø (laukar bliver til løg paa Dansk), så er parallellen ‘baut’ til ‘bøt’ nærliggende.
‘Bauta’ betyder ‘at slå’ på Old Nordisk, jvfr. Bautasten, med den opr. betydning ‘slagsten’.
I al korthed: Tilnavnet ‘bøt’ bør oversættes til ‘den der slår’, eller ‘en særdeles stærk mand’ – jvfr. andre slående navne som Karl Martel (hammer), Erik Thexla (økse) og Sigmundr Spærr (spyd).
Tilføjelsen 'il' angiver i ON instrumentalis formen, altsaa 'bautil', hvilket saa ændres til 'bøtil' og derefter med blødgørelsen af 'd' til 'bødel' - - en meget 'stærk' mand; et ord alle kender i dag!
Et andet problem er hvor meget Aggesen og Saxo TROEDE de vidste.
Oprindeligt har man i 940’erne udmærket forstået hvem der var den ‘stærkt slående’ – men i de følgende 250 år ændrede sprogbrugen og overleveringen sig, nok til at ‘bøt’ blev til ‘but’ og hægtet på Thyra.
Der er efter min mening ingen tvivl mere:
Det er Gorm der er ‘Tanmarkar bøt’
Kulturelle, sproglige og logiske og overvejelser vedr. indskriftsformerne på runesten peger alle i same retning.
Det ser for mig ud som om forklaringen paa tilnavnet ‘bót’ er fundet!
Problemet med ordet ‘bót’ er, at man er blevet taget ved næsen af både Saxo og Aggesen. Det er et typisk eksempel paa et ‘ledende udsagn’, da begge d’herrer tillagde Thyra denne betegnelse, og man identificerede ordet ‘bót’ med betydningen af en glose, ‘but’, der først kendes 300 år senere, i stedet for at læse glosen som ‘bøt’. Man har forgæves ledt efter ‘bót’ på andre runesten, men i betragtning af det begrænsede kildemateriale og indskrifternes knaphed er det vel ikke mærkeligt, at søgningen har været resultatløs. Smigeren er åbenbar, men er det ikke lidt tamt at oversætte ‘bót’ med at forbedre, bøde, hjælpe?
Det mener Johan Lange i Kuml 1982-83, p.213-17 i hvert fald.
Et af problemerne er runen 'U'
Den kan læses som både U, Y, Ø, O.
Hvis man derfor sammenligner med de normale vokalændringer som f. eks. ‘thusi’ til ‘thausi’, der er kendt i runesproget og som videre overgår til ø (laukar bliver til løg paa Dansk), så er parallellen ‘baut’ til ‘bøt’ nærliggende.
‘Bauta’ betyder ‘at slå’ på Old Nordisk, jvfr. Bautasten, med den opr. betydning ‘slagsten’.
I al korthed: Tilnavnet ‘bøt’ bør oversættes til ‘den der slår’, eller ‘en særdeles stærk mand’ – jvfr. andre slående navne som Karl Martel (hammer), Erik Thexla (økse) og Sigmundr Spærr (spyd).
Tilføjelsen 'il' angiver i ON instrumentalis formen, altsaa 'bautil', hvilket saa ændres til 'bøtil' og derefter med blødgørelsen af 'd' til 'bødel' - - en meget 'stærk' mand; et ord alle kender i dag!
Et andet problem er hvor meget Aggesen og Saxo TROEDE de vidste.
Oprindeligt har man i 940’erne udmærket forstået hvem der var den ‘stærkt slående’ – men i de følgende 250 år ændrede sprogbrugen og overleveringen sig, nok til at ‘bøt’ blev til ‘but’ og hægtet på Thyra.
Der er efter min mening ingen tvivl mere:
Det er Gorm der er ‘Tanmarkar bøt’
Kulturelle, sproglige og logiske og overvejelser vedr. indskriftsformerne på runesten peger alle i same retning.
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