Who's Hamlet?

The last couple of weeks have been rougher than usual. Oh, it's not that I'm taking one for the team or anything, but there have been a number of smaller incidents that just all seemed to be related to the same theme. Life's like that sometimes. There are stretches when it seems you're confronted with the same ideas, the same issues, the same problems even though you're in different environments and situations. That's what it's been like lately.

The theme? Oh yes ... having and being. Yeah, I know: "Not that again!" But yes, that again. It has struck me that I'm not going to be able to move on until more people "get it".

Why has this been so prevalent? I don't know, but I do know that I had an interview for a new business course and it all centered around what I thought about business and having. OK, it wasn't that direct, but how should I understand that not adhering to the mantra that the purpose of business is the maximization of profits places me squarely in the minority? Or, what am I to make of the recent and hefty Greece discussion ... in or out of the euro, who pays and who saves? Or, what about the recent Republican presidential debates about taxes and saving and just letting people without health insurance die? Or, wondering why my daughter's job is at risk because higher education doesn't have the funding it needs to fulfill its mandate? Or, why if productivity has increased by over 90% in the last 50 years do I still have to wage-slave for 40 hours a week? Or ... well, I think you get the idea.

Though I hate to say it, we've been screwed (again). It's all about what you have, and who and what you are just doesn't matter any more. Being a good person doesn't matter if you have to slave away at more than one minimum-wage job in order to make ends meet ... if that's even possible. Being a caring person and mother doesn't matter if you're single and have to give your child to someone else to raise while you figure how to make the rent. Being optimistic is almost a waste of time if you know that you're kids are never going to have it as good as you had it, even though what you had was really nothing to brag about. For all we have to brag about is how well our (football/baseball/hockey) team does, how high-paid our star players are, how much our company grew last year ... or our new ride, or the fancy, all-inclusive package tour we were able to take, or an upgrade on the house.

No, it's no longer who you are, it's what you have. The little tent community in New York will soon be disparaged as rebels, do-nothings who want something for nothing, but in reality they are just unfortunate people, like you and me, who ended up on the wrong side of a mortgage. They have come together, formed a community, established their common rules and we only now have to wait till the media brands them as communists, socialists, or worse. How dare they rub our faces in the fact that the top 0.1% abscond with all the goodies while the rest of us just dream about the birds in the bush.

A recent article in the New Scientist made clear that there is a growing body of sound evidence that cooperation trumps competition in evolution. In other words, while competition may bring short-term benefits to individuals, in the long run, these are secondary to the benefits that the group acquires through cooperation. Having traded our society for a mere economy, we've lost sight of who we are as a group. And moving a step away from society, we have lost sight of our own biological roots. Homo sapiens has become Homo voratens.

Hamlet was a troubled soul, and that's why we remember him. He had everything: he was Prince of Denmark, he had money, wealth, power. Yet, he still found the time to ask the question that haunts us still: To be or not to be/That is the question. Too bad most of us don't believe in ghosts anymore.

The myth of the individual

Human beings are odd creatures. We have the longest post-natal dependency of any primate, maybe of any mammal. After all, we are carried internally by our mothers for nine months; it's nine more months till we can even walk (if we're doing well), and if things are going according to plan, we can eat most of what the adults are eating, if it is prepared properly. Some of us never learn to obtain and make food for ourselves (fast food doesn't count ... it may not even be "food"). We can't construct our own dwellings ... well, we really have to ask ourselves what we are capable of doing on our own at all.

On the other hand, we were given supposedly large brains. That is, we ended up with brains that are allegedly capable of more intellectual processing power than any of our mammalian relatives, that provide us with some sort of evolutionary advantage, that make us just "smarter". Anyone who stops to look out into the world quickly realizes that this must be a generalized statement, for there are just too many individual instances in which this apparently does not apply. Nevertheless, some maintain that we compensate for physical and hence environmental disadvantages by compensating with intelligence.

Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that this is the case. What does it mean in the grand scheme of things? Why is it that we human beings have been able to subjugate nature, as we have (whether the way in which we have done it was good or not is a different issue altogether), and rise to the top of the "food chain" when we are really so apparently unsuited for life in the natural world?

If we stop and reflect for a moment instead of just repeating the platitudes we're so often fed, it slowly becomes apparent that humans have been evolutionarily so successful because they don't have to rely on themselves in any way. Let's go back. We aren't mobile on our own for nine months, we can still easily get lost in strange surroundings at nine years. We can't do anything really and don't know anything till we are taught -- by others, either in the family, community, or, in the West, in school. We can't fend for ourselves, we don't grow our own food, we can't build our own dwellings, we don't make our own clothes. We just buy it, if possible, whenever we need it.

We can do this, of course, because we, as a species, are smart enough to utilize the division of labor relatively effectively and because we have the ability to cooperate with others. There is a growing body of evidence (see David Sloan Wilson, My New Scientist [online], Magazine Issue 2824, August 3, 2011) that group selection, for example, predominates over individual selection in evolution. In other words, the very idea that cooperation is in all probability a more powerful evolutionary factor than competition should give us pause to think about the role we ascribe to the individual in our modern society.

Modern western society, in particular industrialized society, places an inordinate amount of emphasis on the individual. Capitalism itself is the new religion of the individual. It is the CEO who makes or breaks the company, hence the need to reward him or her appropriately. It is the individual investor who makes or breaks his own success. It is the quarterback (alone) who leads the team to victory; it is the coach (alone) who causes the team to fail. It is the individual gold medalist who receives more praise at the championships than the relay team. It is the individual who makes or breaks himself in the competition of life. I grew up having this pounded into my own head, from John Wayne to Ronald Reagan, but it never quite made sense to me.

No, the idea of the lone individual meeting and overcoming the odds is as illusory as the ancient myths in which gods on Olympus (or wherever) intervened in the affairs of humans. The individual is just him or herself. No more, no less. This individual is worth respect and admiration as long as whatever s/he does benefits the group that allows that person to stand forth and shine, but no more. The individual who aggrandizes him or herself at the expense of others, though, deserves simply to be ostracized. If you really believe you can do it all on your own, then go out on your own and show us you can do it. If we want to stop a good portion of the insanity that we seem to be overwhelmed with these days, then maybe we only need to put things back into their proper perspective: WE is and always will be more important than ME.

Absurdity

Many years ago while taking my MA at a German university, I took a course in modern literature dealing with theater of the absurd. We talked a lot about absurdity that semester, and oddly enough, that in itself seemed absurd to me. After all, the world made sense, we were all going about our lives, there was tomorrow, what was the problem? In one way or another, I've been asking myself the same questions ever since ... but from the other side? When will the absurdity end?

The absurdest idea that I have to deal with is "terrorism". I mean, just look at the word: the root is "terror": abject, unwarranted fear. It doesn't matter what you are afraid of; what matters is that you are afraid. It's legitimized by the "-ism" on the end, like a system, a philosophy, a way of life. And, I suppose it is, for some ... for too many. What is it that we have to fear?

Some will say everything. Maybe they're right, but I don't think so. If you are afraid, two different groups of people have an advantage over you: those who are causing the fear, and those who know you're afraid. They are sometimes, but not always, the same groups. And, just what is it that they use to extort that fear? Property (if you don't secure it, someone will steal it), security (if you don't protect it, someone will take it away from you), or your physical well-being (we can always kill you). Well, I just don't get it. Going in the reverse direction: we're all going to die, we don't know when, so if it is as the result of some "terrorist act", what difference does it make? My security is gone the moment that someone claiming to look out for my well-being invades my privacy. Am I more secure, the more you know about me? Not really. The opposite is true. And, to any materialist, to anyone who defines himself by his possessions (which are more often than not not his or hers at all, but the lender's) ... well, what can I say?

So, in far-away Norway, in one of the most peaceful, social, balanced, low-profile places you can imagine, a right-leaning, Christian fundamentalist eliminates nearly one hundred innocent victims. Is this an act of terror? Not in the least. It is pure and simple absurdity. But ... and I think this is particularly important to note ... it's an absurdity we created. It didn't come out of the dark unknown, the secret chambers of reality to stalk and hunt us down. It came from us, from the meek who hope for all the wrong reasons that we'll inherit anything, maybe even the earth. The perpetrator wasn't some strange, other, dark-skinned, false-believing, foreign, depraved, mind-twisted, extremist. He was, in all probability, the guy next door. How absurd is that?

The point is in the end, that absurdity has become the norm. What Pynchon, Beckett, and others were telling us was as ignored as anything we've been told up until now. The sheer absurdity of our interaction with others, with those around us, with those with whom we can no longer relate because we know only what we know, with anyone who isn't me, with ... well with everyone ... is what should shock us even more than the violence this one single individual may have perpetrated.

We abhor the violence that we see, but we welcome the violence that is hidden. We put ourselves first, we envy our co-workers, covet their possessions and accomplishments, desire what they have, ignore all in need, find weakness in compassion, believe Spencer's spin on Darwinism is the way to go, reject anything greater than ourselves and firmly and doggedly believe that money can solve our problems. That all sounds like absurdity to me.

No, terrorism isn't our greatest threat. It's a red herring. What we need fear more than anything else (if we need fear anything at all) is absurdity. When do we simply say that enough is enough, just a little bit of sense couldn't hurt? We can't as long as we're afraid, but what we're afraid of is simply ourselves. How absurd is that?

The Alphabet that Changed the World

Stan Tenen: The Alphabet that Changed the World: How Genesis Preserves a Science of Consciousness in Geometry and Gesture (Edited by Charles Stein. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2011; 364+xvii pp., with 223 illustrations, Editor's Preface, Author's Preface, Author's Note, 14 Appendices, Glossary, Bibliography, and Index)

This may be one of the most insightful, if not profound, books you ever read ... if you are willing to engage it honestly and openly. Tenen has taken his time bringing his findings to the public, primarily because he wanted to be sure that what he was saying has substance. Some things are simply easy to misunderstand or misinterpret, but what he has to say in this book deserves serious consideration. By his own admission his (and all of the already identified, related) research is far from complete, there is enough certainty that he is on to something, something of great significance. At any rate, now that this first, book-length, introductory text is available, it can be hoped that a continuing discussion will ensure that will shed new light on a very old subject.

The premise of the book is rather simple: the Jews have long claimed that their alphabet is sacred, and it appears that this may in fact be the case. Though simply stated, it is difficult to understand, on many levels. What is sacred? What makes something sacred? What does it mean for other things if something is sacred? The list of questions goes on and on.

The fundamental statement of the book is rather simple as well: there is a letter-level, self-referential coding in the text  of the Torah that by all appearances has been placed there deliberately. How it got there and why it was put there are questions that the book cannot and does not attempt to answer, but the fact that it is there substantiates and provides support for a number of claims about the Hebrew alphabet and the most famous text it has generated. It is here that the flood of hey-wait-a-minutes starts flowing.

Tenen takes the time to move the reader step-by-step through his process of discovery and the conclusions that he has drawn so that one can follow precisely the development of the thoughts. Everything that is stated has been checked, verified, and examined by any number of relevant subject-matter experts who agree that what he is saying is well supported. The support does not come from anyone who might have a vested interest in what he is saying being true, rather scientific, mathematic, geometric experts who would often no doubt prefer that what he is saying weren't being said.

It is, nevertheless, not a light read, by any stretch of the imagination. It takes both time and effort to grasp what is being said, and to avoid the temptation to lose oneself in where the consequences of those statements may lead. If what Tenen is saying is correct, there may be a good number of textbooks that need to be rewritten, and this in a number of fields, not the least of which are linguistics, physics, psychology, philosophy, and theology. But, much more work has to be done before we get there. This is not a story of someone trying to say, "Hey, look at me and what I found!", but rather "Hey, I found this, what do you think of it?"  For that very reason, it is well worth every minute you might spend struggling with it.