The stuff of legends... and Bible stories

So where was the Garden of Eden? Probably nowhere, since it was home not only to the sources of the Tigris, Euphrates and Araxes – the latter on the eastern borders of Turkey and Iran – but also was home to the source of the Blue Nile, or at least a river in Ethiopia. But maybe such things were possible in the time before the Flood!

Well, I think there was a place which lay between the Tigris and the Araxes, which is the best candidate, and the archaeologist David M. Rohl also holds this view, though not uncontroversially. This is Lake Oremiyeh. And the fourth river would not be the Blue Nile, but the variously named Uizhun or Serid Rud, just south of Lake Oremiyeh. As far as I am concerned, this is quite a neat solution for a biblical puzzle.

But Lake Oremiyeh is in fact a self-contained Lake, and has no outlets to the sea. Consequently, like the Dead Sea, it is a salt lake. It is nevertheless fertile, but clearly such a self-contained system cannot be over-exploited.

Well, with the arrival of an apple which can be cultivated to have an edible taste, that is indeed knowledge, and leaves open the way for over-exploitation. In early days, if a community had no problems of poverty, it doubled, so in the end, a community that suffers from over-population cannot remain in a self-contained Utopia.

So a Utopia requires knowledge, but knowledge precludes Utopia. :,[

THE BIG APPLE?

So what does it mean to say one is trying to locate the Garden of Eden? Does it make any difference if you are a believer, atheist or agnostic?Probably a lot.

Speaking as an agnostic, I would say that I wouldn’t know until I have found it.

If it is something real, like the Flood, recounted in Australian Aboriginal tales, or Troy, recounted in Homer. You can make these symbolic, even if they do exist. Maybe Oremiye is not the Garden of Eden, but one can still make it symbolic: look at the way it is being horribly polluted in modern Iran.

But if such places are purely symbolic, you will never know, will you?

Martin Prior

Utopia : a useless dream or the construction of a future? - By Alice S. Dransfield

Utopia : a useless dream or the construction of a future?

The word "utopia" was first used by Thomas More to describe an imaginary island that had an ideal social and political system. He formed the word "utopia" from the greek word "topos" (place) and the negative "ou", so we could translate the word "utopia" into: a non-place, or a place that doesn't exist.

Since then, the word "utopia" has been used to describe fictitious political and social models imagined by various thinkers. It has also taken a connotation, an utopia is somehow like a dream, nice but unreal...

Has utopia a place in today's society ?

The major criticism made towards all the different utopias imagined throughout the centuries is that they don't take into account reality, "nice ideal, but totally disconnected from the real world" many would say. Or that these social and political systems are so different from the ones we live in that it would be impossible to change society so much in one go.

So if these utopias can't be realised, what is the point in writing them down? No more than any other novel, a nice thing to read and to dream about.

But is that really the only contribution utopias can bring to today's society? For even though it is true that it is very difficult to install radical changes into a social and political system, does that mean it is useless to try?

History has proven to us that social and political systems are not static, and that radical changes can occur (not necessarily for good). And here is, I think where utopias take an important dimension because they are, in my opinion, an obstacle to conservatism. They can become the physical support to new and revolutionary ideas, those ideas that have trouble being expressed via other medias. Presented as dreams, they show to humans that human nature isn't static, that changes, even drastic ones, can at least be produced mentally. And what humans conceive can eventually be achieved.

So utopias, far from being merely useless fictions, participated in the construction of possible futures by offering to our minds new perspectives, free from the bounds of our conservative societies. Opening our minds is not an utopic idea!

Alice S. Dransfield 

The Philosophy Takeaway Issue 49 'Open Topic'

Art - By Harry Wareham

 This weeks artist was Harry Wareham:
http://subpots.wordpress.com/

The Philosopher's City - Selim 'Selim' Talat

The Philosopher's City

 

The last fortress of indoctrination had been torn down. The last palace of authority had been turned into a museum. The last watering hole of greed and stupidity had been abandoned to the foxes. This was now the philosophers city. It looked much as it always had. The rows of marble streets and Greek columns imagined in the heads of idealists was always just a romance. Only the people inside the city were any different. The invisible web of law and hierarchy called 'order' had changed with them.

 

Homelessness and poverty were impossible here. The doors to every house were left open (only the individual rooms had locks). Entering without knocking would earn a dozen disdainful looks from the current occupants. This was the law. If someone stole from another persons complex who would they sell it to in a place where currency was impossible? Material greed had also been knocked on the head.

 

Starvation was also physically impossible. Not only had the houses been combined into massive complexes, with numerous open kitchens spread throughout them, but the public cafés and tea houses were always staffed, inviting passers-by indoors. They wanted to feed people. The granaries were always looking to get rid of their overflowing stores, and the greenhouses were free to roam; the tomatoes to pluck, or mint-leaves to pick.

 

Boredom was impossible here. If a philosopher did not have a question on their mind, then the city would provide it for them.  And without a shadow of a doubt, everyone had the capacity to be a philosopher. Anyone looking for a new challenge could find it quite easily. Debates raged on street corners, a group of friends huddled in a park and discussed their ideas, packed lecture halls filled with excitement as grand new ideas were discussed by the more learned ones. And if the citizen was tired of the talk and needed grittier work, there were a thousand and one unskilled tasks that needed doing.

 

A workshop could easily be booked and materials acquired, the labs were looking for geniuses and technicians alike, the larger farms and factories outside the city were run by people looking for a break from it all. New skills were always waiting to be learnt, and it was not hard to find the confidence to acquire them in such an encouraging environment.

 

This was the philosophers city, and nothing was banned, for there was no authority to ban it. Life's urges were channelled, like bubbling water through careful canals. In the Beirut quarter dancers would fling and eroticism would flower, honey-wine flowed by the gallon and pigs dripping in fat spun on their flaming spits. Shamelessly they explored their perversions and their pleasures.

 

Naturally this repulsed those in the Epicurean quarter (known as the garden of the city), who removed themselves from the more visceral aspects of life. Not because they found the rampant desire-chasing immoral, but they considered such desires to be harmful to their state of happiness. Here the plainer epicureans could live in contentment amongst the like-minded, conducting experiments of both thought and science in their quest for knowledge, and flowering in gentle creativity and self-exploration.

 

In the Warriors quarter, leaders and authoritarians were hunkered over chess boards and wargames, commanding illusory armies across bloodless battlefields. Tournaments were rife, alliances and rivalries bloomed, tribes and clans forged and fell apart. The soldiers sparred with foam weapons and armour, each striving to become a master of their art. When the moon was high and the (digital) wolves howled, they would take to the field beneath their home-made banners and play at war. Violence was moved to an unreal plane, and violence outside it became impossible.

 

Then there were the 'wilds', dominating the least populated quarter of the city. You did not tread too deep into this forestland without your enthusiastic guides, for bears lurked among the overgrown brush and scrub-land, and the howls of a fox by moonlight could scare a city-lubber out of their wits. To make fire here required skill, to make shelter a different form of intelligence, to eat a patience for berries and seeds. Harder still was the discovery of meaning, here in the forest where the sky was obscured and the perceivable world shrunk down to the inside of a wooden nut.

 

And that was it. Was there a single essential thing the philosophers city was built upon? I would not dare to say. Yet if I had to guess, it would be this realization: that everything around us today is the result of an idea. This means it is changeable. We are already living in someone else's utopia (and it is usually the utopia of someone rich and powerful, shaped to fulfil their own sense of self-importance). This order is not inevitable, and not built on anything natural.  For there is no utopia in our nature, only the way of the hunter, which for so long was nestled in the gaian bosom, doing what it could to survive. We can neither call our nature good nor evil, for these moral values come much later. Nor can we paint the natural state of mankind with the utopian brush of nostalgia.

 

It is culture that is the true creator of our world. The values surrounding us, that have become invisible through their absorption into our routines, are just that - artificially created values. Physical processes of the body we think manifest themselves in inevitable 'evil' ways, can actually be channelled, and the darker side of our nature can be controlled, once and for all.

 

Selim 'Selim' Talat

 
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Utopia' Issue 44

Utopia: the route of all evil? - By the one and only Samuel Mack-Poole

Utopia: the route of all evil?

 

“The lack of money is the root of all evil.”   George Bernard Shaw.

 

“But no perfection is so absolute, that some impurity doth not pollute.”   William Shakespeare.

 

Utopia is commonly defined as: “An imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. The word was first used in the book Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More.” For me, this is such a redundant definition. I would go so far as to say that I intellectually loathe it. I cannot fathom how a society can be perfect by any objective criteria. My contention -- or beef – with utopia is that it is, by its very nature, subjective.  As a consequence, utopia, even as an ideal, cannot exist in an objective sense. I have used this phrase many times, but it really applies: the only utopia that can exist is one which is determined by mass shared subjectivity. As a consequence, only a utilitarian utopia can exist as an ideal, let alone in reality.

 

If we think about it, one man’s utopia is another’s hell. An Islamist would love to see a one-world government with sharia law implemented. A neo-Nazi would detest such a world, and would want a racial divide instead.  I could go on ad nauseam, but I won’t. The point is abundantly clear, isn’t it? As humans are diverse, their conflicting utopias can only result, ultimately, in an extreme. That extreme is war.

 

Many people are willing to fight, and to die for their utopia. Marxists, Nazis, Christians, Hindus, Jews and many other groups have done so, all too gladly. “War,” as Trotsky said, “is the locomotive of history.”  As a result, utopia is probably only going to self-actualise through mass bloodshed, as revolutions are seldom peaceful. That said, Ghandi’s strategy of passive resistance obviously contradicts this, but this is very much the exception to the rule. 

 

Consequently, we have to ask ourselves: is utopia is the route of all evil? I think that is for you to think about, rather than for me to say.

I would prefer it if Ghandi’s strategy would allow my utopia to become a reality, but I doubt the world’s nations will destroy fiat currency, and throw away their nuclear arsenals any time soon. But, Samuel, I hear you cry, what is your utopia?

 

As depressed as I am with the current situation -- perhaps I have been staring into Nietzsche’s abyss for too long -- I still have hope.  My hope for humanity is that it embraces the ideas of Jacques Fresco. Personally, I think philosophy is at its best when it actively tries to change the world, rather than merely analysing it. I am quite aware that I have paraphrased a Marxist quote, but in this case the quote serves the purpose of going beyond Marxism. I’m referring to The Venus Project, which has been criticised as utopian.

 

It is easy to see how sick mainstream society is when utopia is now a pejorative term. Surely, we should think of utopia as something to strive towards, rather than an ideal to mock and scoff at?

 

The Venus Project is extremely provocative to any philosopher, as it is filled with egalitarian and revolutionary values.  The reason The Venus Project is so revolutionary is due to the fact that it wishes to replace the current situation with an economic system in which goods, services, and information are free. But, Samuel, isn’t that communism? No, it’s not. Communist countries still employ state capitalism. In a RBE (resource based economy) there are no nuclear weapons, no banks, no money, no military, no suppression of technology, and no ‘charismatic’ personality cults. It’s also supremely technological, utilising bleeding edge technology that would make fossil fuels redundant, and advertising wouldn’t occur as there wouldn’t be any competing products. It’s rather odd, I concede. However, it’s only odd because we’ve been indoctrinated to believe no society can function without money, and that greed and ‘competition’ are the only true motivators.

 

I can’t do The Venus Project justice in a mere couple of pages. All I can say is that according to my thought processes, it is worthy of merit, and, therefore, further investigation. If you value life more widely than the paradigm of money, working 9-5, and package holiday deals, then have a genuine look at what a RBE can offer you. For me, its tenets are altruistic, and nothing can be more profound than the love you bear your fellow man or woman.

 

If you whole-heartedly reject the ideas of Nietzsche’s (not so) Ubermensch, Ayn Rand’s love of selfishness, the basic corrupt global lottery of quality of life,  and think that capitalism is inherently evil, I suggest you get acquainted with Jacques Fresco.

 

What can you conclude, if anything, from reading this article? I would say the lessons which can be learnt are threefold; utopia doesn’t exist in an objective sense; competing utopias may lead to misery; my utopia, based on Fresco’s ideas, is extremely meritorious.  I do feel, however, that this article shouldn’t end with my words. We started with Shaw, so we should end with Wilde, who was a philosopher, amongst other things.

 

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism.

 

By the one and only Samuel Mack-Poole

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Utopia' Issue 44

Utopia - Rudy McNair

Utopia

The word “utopia” was coined by Thomas More by combining Greek words for “no” and “place”. More also pointed out the close relation between utopia and eutopia which means the “good place”. Commonly, utopia refers to either something imaginary or someplace ideal. The utopian notion begins with fables and myths of the Garden of Eden or some benign state of nature, when harmony was allegedly the normal condition of life. Natural environment, however, is seldom the same for any two different people who participate in it.

Some believe that the natural order of things will inevitably lead to an utopian end of harmony (wherein the livelihood, happiness and legal status of anyone is interwoven with the happiness and rights of all) and where good life is secured and actualised. Others (as Malthus explains) insist that, left to itself, the world is not inevitably good or bad (except to the extent that we make it so), and society might just as easily proceed to an end that is both unjust and miserable.

Reformers answer that, if the latter is the case, they will put their efforts to fighting against the malevolent and menacing ‘natural’ tendencies of society -- and so the utopian socialists broke away from the comforting trust in the essential rightness of the world as it was.

The author of the Wealth of Nations described an environment in which there was good reason to believe that everyone could share in the benefits of a benign providence. But, to the same man about 50 years later, society seemed irrevocably torn into warring groups.

“Regardless of the country, creed or social status of the person I approach (one philosopher writes), provided the same flame of expectation burns in us both, there is a profound, definitive and total contact instantly established between us. We feel that we are of the same kind, and we find that our very differences are a common armour, as though there were a dimension of life in which all striving makes for nearness, not only within a corporate body but heart to heart.”.

Whether or not, as Teilhard de Chardin stated above, we can have tremendous hope in the future of life and of person-kind as improving (finding greater cohesion or “love); the notion of utopia has always fascinated us. On one hand, there are those who simply wish to make the world a comfortable dwelling-place; on the other hand, there are those who conceive of it as a machine for progress, so the philosopher tells us. On the one hand, we find the ‘bourgeois spirit’ in its essence and on the other the true ‘toilers of the earth’ (who would make it a ‘better’ place).

Paul Tillich insists that, through each of us, “the universe continues the creative process which first produced one as the aim and center of the creation. In us nature comes to its fulfillment, it is taken into knowledge and transformed”.

What I want is a place in things where I can exercise practical reason and follow my course/prospects, but have no greater advantage there than others are granted, and therefore have no reason for lowered expectations over my lifetime than might be wanted for anyone else. The concept of ‘right’ is involved here in what I call Utopia.

Obviously, not all reformists, political and religious groups have sought to remake society completely in conformity with a utopian aim (such as ‘harmony’). Nevertheless, many have not been satisfied merely to speculate about the ideal society but have sought, rather, to realise it either by persuasion or force. Where the utopian writer may do nothing to improve society, he may still deem it worthwhile to preserve the concept of the ‘ideal’ state or life. This may be thought desirable, even in comparatively decent societies, and can have a chastening influence on those who govern as well as on those who go along.

The utopian thinker mostly promotes dissatisfaction and self-criticism – which are useful in light of the grave deficiencies of the real world, and the urge to replace them by better conditions. The principal mission of utopianism I want to encourage is the hope that human nature is malleable beyond the limits assigned by worldly pessimism or theological despair. Utopian writers confine their imagination to the realm of the greatest happiness, but within that realm, they say much is possible if only the world, or a part of it, can be transformed or made more permissive.

Utopia; when love’s first thrum’s just thunk aloud and hope plays one last longing round,

Purposes aire rings rich, truth full in timbre, and familiar feelings snapped in blissful trill,

‘ticement, joy and regret babble lost refrains, then imagination gives the brane a bang.

There’s someone waiting there, listening for me to sing.

Rudy McNair

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Utopia' Issue 44

Utopia gets nowhere if they don’t know what they don’t know - Martin Prior

Utopia gets nowhere if they don’t know what they don’t know

Such a sentiment would strongly accord with the views of Marx, Engels and other communists who put stress on scientific socialism.  At least if they ‘don’t know what they don’t know’ in the sense of not knowing the nature of their ignorance or lack of knowledge.

In fact Marxists saw their approach as an advance over those they described as utopian socialists, such as Wilfred Owen: rather than say what your ideal society should look like, when you can’t possibly know, try advancing through the scientific analysis of existing society.

The problem about possible utopian societies is how long can they survive?  The Australian aborigines lived for millennia in a society which appeared stable and indeed worked an amazingly short week, I believe 14 hours or so, but collapsed the moment the Europeans arrived.  But now we know that the southern clans gradually expanded north leaving only the north of Northern Territory and Western Australia to other groups.  The Moriori of the Chatham Islands to the east of New Zealand (hence balancing Australia!) now number 300 or so, none full-blooded, who ‘lived by a code of non-violence and passive resistance’ (wiki).  Fortunately their language is well documented, and they are gradually rediscovering their identity after the arrival of the Maori on their island.

Could my model of socialism – see above - be the basis of a Utopia?    Embedded in it are skills, and perhaps scientific socialism.  This is precisely the domain of knowledge of what one does and doesn’t know.

Well, I for one like to think I know what I don’t know – a very ambiguous phrase – so tomorrow I’m off to a conference on Logic, Knowledge and Language (in memory of the Belgian logician Paul Gochet), and so this brief contribution.  I have only intermittently studied the philosophy and logic of knowledge, so maybe I shall learn something.

Martin Prior

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Utopia' Issue 44

HUMANITY WITHOUT HOPE - By Patrick Ainley

HUMANITY WITHOUT HOPE

Most people would say that it is impossible to live without hope. And yet this is just what most people are expected to do nowadays.

This is not just because of recession. There is a vague hope that recession will end and eventually there will be economic upturn – ‘something will turn up’, so meanwhile we can sit it out.

Perhaps it will turn up sooner if different policies are followed to ‘kick start’ the economy so ‘normal’ growth will resume. Except growth under capitalism is as normal as bust. It was only an illusion that deregulation and privatization in the 1980s to allow banks and big corporations to speculate freely would end this inevitable cycle.

In any case, endless growth to produce more and more commodities, while it may help some people to secure the necessities of life, does not make those who already have more than enough any happier or less insecure. Worse, growth is unsustainable; on the 23^rd August it was calculated that humanity began to take from the earth more than nature produced in 2012. For the rest of the year we live in debt to the planet and every year this day moves forward as we take even more from the earth than it can give back.

Again, as the hopes for our species’ survival diminish, we hope that something will turn up. ‘It’s happened before,’ we say, hoping for technical solutions so that humanity can invent its way out of impending climate and other catastrophe. But each of these temporary fixes have perverse consequences that threaten disaster in their turn; the worst of which would probably be the attempts at geo-engineering that are now being talked about as ways to slow global warming.

More far-sighted Utopians used to insist that social change was necessary instead of trying to patch things up technically so that we could go on as we were. This revolutionary transformation would happen more or less gradually and democratically but if necessarily violently to bring about a rational ordering of human affairs in the interest of the vast majority.

This old Utopianism has been trumped by the new Utopianism of free-market capitalism, to which all the mainstream political parties, dominant media and, of course, the global corporations and banks that profit from it are committed. If only the wealth-creating entrepreneurs are given the freedom to invest their capital to gain as much profit as possible for themselves and their shareholders, we will all benefit – so they all say. But this is the deregulated free-market capitalism whose boom ended in bust in the first place.

So, it is not surprising that many people place their hopes in dreams of wealth – winning a lottery, becoming a celebrity, or marrying one! Or they strive to live fully in the moment: ‘driven from distraction by distraction’, looking for the next high to become a legend. Hopes of such instant gratifications are easily manipulated by the advertisers of fashion. They are not so different from physically addictive behaviors and as easily controlled.

There are myriad other ways to adjust to an insupportable reality – from therapy to meditation, but religions offer the most desperate hopes of all. Their elaborate visions of other worlds that render lived experience illusory are tributes to the power of the human imagination, even if the reassuring feeling of being looked after by a benevolent deity derives from infant psychology, just as it is understandable that hopes of an afterlife comfort the dying and the bereaved.

Most people of course keep their heads down and don’t think about such things. We fill our lives with family and friends, following football or other sports and enjoying moments of relaxation from routine work. But even these modest hopes of a good life are removed from the younger generations by prospects of employment to sustain independent living that have become increasingly remote.

We are encouraged therefore to invest our hopes in education which has been substituted for employment and which is so tediously and interminably discussed instead of it. Conservatives typically advance the notion that education amounts to the preservation of culture – handing down unchanged the best that was ever thought and achieved. And of course, we have to learn from the past accumulated experience of humanity that constitutes culture but we have to learn critically to apply that knowledge to nurture new hopes of changing the self-destructive behavior of society in the present.

Instead, academic cramming on the one hand and vocational training for jobs that no longer exist on the other, only serves as an induction into the existing social divisions of knowledge and labour. These are changing with the relentless applications of new technology to deskill and outsource production, requiring a ‘flexible workforce’ to move from one mindless, short-term, low-paid and often part-time contract to another – if you’re lucky enough to find work.

Professional and managerial jobs are also being reduced in number and towards the conditions of waged labour, ending the hopes of a career entertained by so many overqualified but underemployed graduates. Hopes of escape through education leading to upward social mobility are dashed as the only mobility nowadays is down.

Philosophy – the love of knowledge – enables us ‘to confront with sober senses the real conditions of our existence’. So, as another Jewish philosopher wrote, ‘Do not laugh, do not cry but understand’. If the situation really is hopeless, we will then at least know how it happened that we threw away the heritage of humanity and we will still struggle to bring about the vast changes in our lives and in our societies that are needed so we ‘Do not’ – as a Welsh poet said – ‘go gently into that good night’ [but] ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

By Patrick Ainley with thanks in the last paragraph to Karl Marx, Baruch Spinoza and Dylan Thomas; T.S.Eliot in the middle – for we stand on the shoulders of giants, so let’s not crap on their heads!

 

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30