There but for the grace of God ...

The events of the last week or so have brought out many folks' true nature. One of the (dis)advantages of being involved in modern, social media is that you get a glimpse of everyone's foundation of life. Oh, I know, this is not what most people think, but it is nevertheless what is. Even if I don't place a lot of faith in what people "say", since I'm much more concerned with what the actually "do", social media is one of those "places" where the "the truth will out" and what you post says more about you than you may like to acknowledge.

Most of my social-media "friends" are American, but not by much. The vast majority, of course, find their roots in the "West"; that is, western, post-Enlightenment, Judeo-Christian, ever-increasing secular culture. In short, they're "Westerners". This is not bad, in and of itself; indeed it is merely an observation of fact. What most of my friends don't know, or are not aware of, is that belonging to this particular group brings with it a number of significant advantages, and at the same time, a number of disadvantage as well. How could it be otherwise? After all, this is life that we are talking about.

Before we examine what these advantages and disadvantages might be, it would do us well to reflect upon how it is that we ended up here in the first place. I don't know about you, but I just "woke up here" one day. I mean, there came a time when I became conscious of the world around me, and, lo and behold, I was the first son of a striving-to-be middle-class family in the so-called richest (not to mention, freest and bravest) country in the world, at a time when striving to be middle-class meant something. To the best of my knowledge, I was not involved in that particular decision. It just happened. It was a purely random event. I had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Like I said, though, I was "lucky" by our Western standards. The family I grew up in wasn't rich, but we weren't poor. We always had enough to eat and my life was as good as free from crime and violence. I had lots of opportunities and I was able to take advantage of them. I believe, as well, that most of you reading this ... most of you ... had a similar experience, but not everyone, and certainly not everyone else on the planet. The vast majority of humanity doesn't have it nearly as good as I did. The vast majority. Their lives more likely resemble Hume's struggle of each against all, a struggle for survival, more often than not.

Why? Because they're ignorant, uncivilized savages? Because they are violent by nature and love fighting and killing? Hardly. Regardless of where I have been in this world, I have found that just about everyone I meet wants pretty much the same basic things as me: enough to eat, some family, a roof over their heads, some time to spend with others, a feeling of security and to live their lives in peace.

What we fail to remember, what we love to repress is the simple fact that we were born where we were by the luck of the draw. Some lives have been easier than others, and most of you reading this, for all the pains and travails have had, by comparison, easier lives. I certainly don't begrudge what you have, but I do have a problem with you thinking that in some way you "earned" what you have, that you somehow "deserve" what you have. You were lucky. That's it. Damn lucky. For, there but for the grace of God ...

The day the sun stands still

Tomorrow, at 16:39 UTC (or 4:39pm Universal Coordinated Time for those of you not yet in the 21st century) the sun will stop (which is what the word "solstice" actually means). In the Northern Hemisphere it marks the longest day and shortest night of the year, astronomically the real beginning of summer, but for those with other modes of time reckoning, mid-summer. Especially in places that are dark a lot, it is a day of merriment and celebration.

Solstices occur when the sun is at its zenith; that is, at its highest point, in relation to the earth's equator. Humankind has known about them for almost as long as there have been humans on this planet, and in our earliest civilizations they played a special and significant role. It was nature that determined how we calculated and counted our notions of time, not according to the averaging of the frequencies of certain isotopes of uranium selected for this particular purpose (which is how our most precise time is established.

Still, Mother Nature, the Cosmos, doesn't really care how sophisticated we humans think we are. On 30 June this year 23:59:60 UTC (midnight, in common terms), a leap second will be added to UTC in order to synchronize atomic clocks with astronomical time to within 0.9 seconds. Oh, how proud we must be. OK, I'm enough of a geek to find this kind of stuff cool, but what really fascinates me about it is what it says about us as a species. We humans have the privilege and benefit of being able to reflect upon such things, even if the vast majority of us (a) don't know that such things even exist and (b) when we do, we simply fail to take advantage of it.

The summer solstice, of course, is the counterpart to the other yearly solstice, the one in winter. That one is much more well known (though barely) because it occurs near to Christmas and the winter festivities have stuck with us longer. Occurring exactly half a year apart, they have different meanings, primarily because of the physical differences that we denizens of this planet experience at these particular times. The festivals of the winter solstice, throughout history, have been spiritual ones; the summer ones, physical: lots of drinking, dancing, cavorting, merry-making ... like in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. We should remember, however, that things are exactly opposite in the Southern Hemisphere. There it is winter that starts and they should be celebrating their spiritual festivals, but they aren't going to be doing so for the most part because Northern Hemisphereans colonized the Southern Hemisphere and decided that everyone needed to be just like us.

It's really sad when you stop to think about it: one half of the earth was moving from the spiritual to the physical while at the same time the other half was moving in the opposite direction. The earth, as it were, was really a giant, living Ying-Yang. But we found a way to change it and work against the flow of time and nature that had served the planet for billions of years. And look at us now. Now wonder the movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still" only became a cult classic. That was a film about know-it-alls who were making life miserable for others. And that's what we do best.

Perhaps, in part, because we started ignoring the days the sun stops.

The arrogance of ignorance

Those of us alive today and in a position to be reading a blog, like this one, are, on the whole, a rather arrogant lot. Just look at what we're capable of: the best of technology, the vastness of knowledge, the widespread access to information, the high level of our standard of living, our overall rate of literacy and general level of education. We are witness to wonders only dreamt of by our forebears.

This tends to make us arrogant, you know? Who else has accomplished so much? Who else has made as many advances as us in the last, oh, just say, half-a-century? We've deposed monarchies, de-mythologized religion, discovered some of the deepest secrets of matter, send quasi-intelligent probes to distant planets. We've globalized trade, spread democracy around like fertilizer, and are literally capable -- even if not so inclined ... at the moment -- of destroying the planet. Who has ever done what we have done? No one, ever. We're the best that's been here yet, or so we like to think. Yes, arrogance is as simple as thinking you're better than someone else.

But, for all we can do, what do we really know? Do we really understand nature? Can we explain the phenomenon of consciousness? If we're so smart and powerful, why can't we ensure that every person on the planet has clean water and enough to eat, a roof over their heads, or that we all can live free of fear? Who knows what money really is, or how it works, or how our finance systems function, or what ideologies are and which ones we're individually and personally susceptible to? Why can't we recognize injustice when it stares us in the face? Why can't we do what is right, even if we know that to do so would perhaps reduce our own power? Who knows the difference between data, information, knowledge and wisdom? When did data become more valued and important than wisdom, in fact? Who understands the difference between a society, a culture, and political system? Who of you can even describe the difference between wave and particle theories of physics, or even know that there are different theories? Why is it that in the most informed, allegedly enlightened, knowledgeable, and supposedly advanced ages the world has ever known, we have so many who don't know the sun revolves around the sun and the sun around the center of our galaxy and our galaxy ... well, you get the idea.

There is so much we just don't know, either individually or collectively, but it doesn't stop us from looking down upon those who came before us: be it just a couple hundred years (that silly Descartes still believed in a soul) or a couple of millennium (the Ancient Greeks couldn't calculate their way out of a wet paper bag) and other than piling up rocks, what do the Ancient Egyptians have to show for themselves? Yeah, nobody has ever had their stuff together like we do, eh?

We look down on those who came before us for two primary reasons: (1) we consider them less developed, rather childlike and, OK, I'll say it, primitive, and (2) we can't begin to understand them; that is, meet them on their terms. Arrogance, you should know, is simply a form of blindness, no more and no less. If you think you know it all, what can you possibly learn from someone else? Truth be told, we're neither informed nor as smart as we like to think we are, and so we're blind to what we might be able to learn from those who came before us.

No, for the observant reader of the past few posts, it should be clear that yesterday still has a lot to tell ... if we had but the ears to hear, and the eyes to see.