Archive for the ‘ Morality ’ Category

The Death of Hypatia

This continues the theme I wrote about in The Christian Destruction of Classical Culture. I had listened to The Swerve, and then ordered the book so I could copy some of the best parts.

What follows is from Chapter Four, The Teeth of Time. The time is the Fifth Century, shortly after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire – and began its attack Paganism and Judaism. The place is Alexandria, Egypt – which had been conquered by Caesar, but had been a Hellenistic cultural center. Christianity was largely a blend of Jewish religion and Greek culture – and it was now determined to eliminate all traces of these connections – especially the Greek part.

Christian mobs were attacking Jews and Pagans alike. Taking especial delight in destroying Pagan relics - which included the Great Library at Alexandria – the best in the world.

The pagan poet Palladas wrote afterward:

Is it not true that we are dead, and living only in appearance,
We Hellenes, fallen on disaster,
Likening life to a dream, since we remain alive while
Our way of life is dead and gone?

Cyril, the Christian Patriarch, demanded the expulsion of the city’s large Jewish population. Alexandria’s governor Orestes, a moderate Christian, refused, and this refusal was supported by the pagan intellectual intellectual elite whose most distinguished representative was the influential and immensely learned Hypatia.

Hypatia was the daughter of a mathematician  one of the Library’s famous scholars-in-residence. Legendarily beautiful as a young woman, she had become famous for her attainments in astronomy, music, mathematics, and philosophy. Students came from great distances to study the works of Plato and Aristotle under her tutelage…

Wrapped in the traditional philosophers cloak, called a tribon, and moving about the city in a chariot, Hypatia was one of Alexandria’s most visible public figures…Hypatia’s support for Orestes’ refusal to expel the Jewish population  may help to explain what happened next.

Returning to her house, Hypatia was pulled from her chariot…stripped off her clothing, and had her skin flayed off. The mob then dragged her corpse outside the city walls and burned it.

Their hero Cyril was eventually made a saint.

2013
03/20
CATEGORY
History
Morality
Religion
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Everyone Wants to Know What Everyone Else Is Doing

CNN-The Internet is a surveillance state - Bruce Schneier

And this means everything. Not because anyone cares about you – or wants to understand you, personally. This is strictly impersonal. Everyone regards everyone else as a way of making money – one way or the other.

In today’s world, governments and corporations are working together to keep things that way. Governments are happy to use the data corporations collect — occasionally demanding that they collect more and save it longer — to spy on us. And corporations are happy to buy data from governments. Together the powerful spy on the powerless, and they’re not going to give up their positions of power, despite what the people want.

Note especially the sentence

Together the powerful spy on the powerless, and they’re not going to give up their positions of power, despite what the people want.

It’s all about power – and most people don’t have any.

All because of the Internet.

2013
03/18
CATEGORY
Business
Morality
Technology
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The Exception That Proves the Rule

In a world where nothing works right, some things are bound to work right anyway. And one of those things is the Social Entrepreneur thing.

I was a skeptical about it as I could be, but I continue to read How to Change the World, and continue to enjoy it. Now I am amazed by how they have been rejected by the very world they are trying to help.

The bottom line is this - beneficial social change is possible if done the right way – and they seem to have one of those ways. It cannot fix all the world’s problems – but even fixing some of them is an improvement.

Everyone should read the chapter in the book that explains how Ashoka works –  Ashoka is an organization that looks for, and supports social entrepreneurs. The Chapter is called Are the possessed, Really Possessed, by an Idea?  It describes how Ashoka selects its people. I was very impressed with it – they really know what they are doing.

The world is full of people who say they can solve the world’s problems. Growing up in a religious family I was surrounded by them. And I always found them to be hypocrites – or even worse.

And there are plenty more like them – people who talk the talk, but do not walk it. And plenty who don’t bother with the talk – but set about destroying social programs – using any number of excuses, each more flimsy than the last. The only society they want is a police state.

In a situation like this – it is no wonder that nothing works right. And what few things that do work are ignored.

2013
03/12
CATEGORY
Morality
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The Life Force and the Death Force

People used to take these seriously. But gradually they lost interest. Why?

We don’t really know, because our behavior has become mostly unconscious – unavailable for conscious examination. This shift was a very big deal – but one we did not notice at the time – and of course now it is impossible.

But let me stop for a minute and think about what that word we is. It is not everybody – but close to it – roughly 90% of the population. But it is misleading to talk of mere numbers – all we can be sure of is that very few are conscious of what is going on. And that minority population is far from homogeneous.

I seem to be on the fringe with my theory of negative moral behavior. Which is so simple it hardly needs to be said – our moral behavior has flipped. What was good has become bad – and what was bad has become good. Instead of building a better world we now are building a worse one. And we consider this the proper way to be.

They are probably many theories of how this came to be – but since the problem itself has not been recognized, these theories have not gotten much attention either. The whole scene has gotten a white-wash job – we stoutly maintain it doesn’t exist. Ignoring our bodies – who know very well that something bad is going on – and have developed a variety of strange diseases as a result.

We feel – correctly – that if we realized where we are, we would have to change our ways. But we have developed a huge addiction to where we are. And would rather die than change.

As a result, our global culture is dying – and we are completely satisfied with this solution.

2013
03/10
CATEGORY
Morality
Negative being
Philosophy
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Their Heart is in the Right Place, But…

I continue to enjoy reading about the exploits of Social Entrepreneurs in the book How To Change the World. What they are doing is exactly what I would like to do. I admire their guts and determination.  But…

Your mind has to be in the right place too. And that place is the world – as it is now – which will not tolerate the good things they are doing. They will say they do – and then shoot them dead the minute they poke their heads out of their shells.

If they succeed, and they sometimes do – they are lucky.

In my opinion, they need to be more realistic about the way the world is – and say, flat out – that it is bad. Without this awareness, one cannot know how to maneuver. You are walking in a mine field, and to get through it you need a mine-detector.

2013
03/09
CATEGORY
Morality
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No Advantage in Being Good

People can no longer see any advantage in being good. But, on the other hand, they can see plenty of advantages in being bad.

The reason for this is not hard to understand – people are no longer important to them. They only exist to be feared or exploited – almost like a foreign species.

This is especially true in the world of Business – which has become our global religion. When people are business people (identified with an organization), they are only interested in getting ahead - getting ahead of everyone else. And that means being bad - but, on the other hand, pretending to be perfectly good. Something we have always been good at.

This behavior is hardly new, it is one of the oldest in the book. But in our world, it has become especially intense. And has been going on for so long, we cannot tell the difference between them.

They have become confused in our minds. And we fully intend to keep them that way.

2013
03/09
CATEGORY
Morality
Philosophy
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Technology is Morality

I began life believing in the Upward Way – that things were getting better and better. Without giving any thought to what those things were. Just like everyone else – my father especially – who was enamored of technology – and also a complete fool.

Now, looking back at it, I was a believer in technological progress – and those things were literally things – and not people. People were not getting better, but worse – and much worse.

We have had a rocky relationship with our things. We put everything into them – and ended up with nothing for ourselves. And even worse than that, we became like them – unfeeling nobodies that hate the human race.

We had not realized that things are capable of their own feelings and objectives. Strictly speaking this is not true – but the combination of us and them resulted in new composite beings – where they have gradually taken over.

Their being has become our being.  And we have turned against our former human selves. Whom we cannot even remember.

This also applies to software things – where my observation that the best is the worst certainly applies to people. You have to be an unusual person to cope with it. To use it, without letting it use you.

People simply take them at face value – giving no thought to what they really are, or what they are really doing. To have this kind of awareness you need a whole community of like-minded people who understand software – and the nasty people who take advantage of it.

I acquired this knowledge accidentally. When personal computers first came out, in the Eighties, I saw that being able to program was a necessary skill – learned programming in order to write my own programs – and was immediately grabbed by the programming department in the company I was working for.

I didn’t stay a programmer – but I got a good feel for what was going on there – how software was using people – and not the other way around. And I made a point of staying in touch with this whole scene. And this kept me in the know.

To this day, I have a solid gut feel for what is going on there – and my guts have never liked it. And I have made it my personal mission to figure out how we got there.

The basic problem is a conceptual one. We cannot conceive that things have their own being. We stubbornly believe that only we have this ability – and that we are always in control of our things.

This may have been true back when we used stone tools. But when we became civilized (a whole complex of changes) our technologies (which included writing) became us. Some unusual people were still able to put people first – but most were not. And the familiar story of human atrocities were acted out over and over.

No one connected our technologies with our morality. We just assumed they were two different things.

When they are not.

2013
03/08
CATEGORY
Morality
Philosophy
Technology
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What We Can Steal from the Social Entrepreneur Movement

“Great artists steal ideas,” Picasso said. And he certainly did a masterful job of that – stealing from every art movement of his time.

In our time, we can do much the same thing – and one of the best places to steal from is the Social Entrepreneur movement.  Which has done a bit of stealing of its own. They have even given us an excellent manual telling us how they do it in How to Change the World.

Much of what I say here is copied from the chapter The Role of the Social Entrepreneur, beginning on page 92.

He contrasts the analysis of business entrepreneurs (who have been analyzed to death)  with social entrepreneurs – who have hardly been studied at all. But then goes ahead to make some cogent observations anyway.

Theories of social change (such as that by Adam Smith) have concentrated more on how ideas move people than on how people move ideas. Ideas take center stage and people remain in the audience. [This certainly applies to TED]

This gives too much power to ideas. It fails to account for the fact the ideas compete for attention and illegitimacy and the ones that gain ascendance do not win the day on their merits alone.

An idea is like a play. It needs a good producers and a good promoter, even if it is a masterpiece.

Groups resist change with all the vigor of antibodies attacking an intruding virus. Resistance occurs whenever a group perceives that a change will challenge its power, prestige, position, and satisfaction with who they are, what they believe, and what they cherish.

If ideas are to take root and spread, therefore, they need champions – obsessive people who have the skill, motivation, energy, and bullheadedness to do whatever is necessary to move them forward: to persuade, inspire, seduce, cajole, enlighten, touch hearts, alleviate fears, shift perceptions, articulate meanings, and artfully maneuver through systems.

2013
03/06
CATEGORY
Business
Morality
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People Have Changed

And they have changed fundamentally in the worst possible way. A way so stupendous we cannot understand it.

“If this is so,” You may say, “Why are you writing about it, since it so impossible to understand?” Good question, and I have no really good answer for it. Except to stumble on, and to try harder to explain some vague ideas I have.

As I started to say – people have changed fundamentally in their collective minds. Perhaps I should say a few words about the collective mind. It is really very simple – so simple it should not have to be explained. Any society develops its own way of operating – its own culture. And part of this culture is a way of thinking about things.

In the past this always included ways of dealing with reality – usually perceived as multiple realities – different ones being appropriate for different situations. When dealing with the gods, one behaved differently than when dealing with one’s fellow humans. This made sense.

But as we became more technically-oriented – we became aware of what seemed to be a super-reality. One that was directly apposed to ordinary reality – whose objective was to destroy that reality. We went with it, because it offered fantastic short-term benefits. Fantastic amounts of power - in every way (including lots of money). People who went this way had power over everyone else. Who could resist it?

There was only one problem. To become these new super-people, they had to give up being ordinary people. And not only that, start destroying them.

The result is people who are not really people – but only seem to be people. A situation that, truthfully, I cannot explain – but only observe.

They have a new morality directly apposed to the old one. This was the big change I am talking about.

What no one can believe (not even me) was that this change happened (over the course of centuries, to be sure) with no one noticing it. No one could believe it could really happen.

2013
03/04
CATEGORY
History
Morality
Sociology
Technology
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The Defector

I spend my life, it seems like, reading books and writing about them. This book is Liars and Outliers – Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive by Bruce Schneier.

I heard of him because of his work in Computer Security. But now he is working hard at becoming an intellectual in general – and wants to talk about things in general. And he is making some definitions of his own.

He doesn’t want to talk about criminals – but defectors from mutually beneficial social behavior. People who violate our trust in them. I don’t know if his definition will be accepted by other social thinkers. But I am finding it useful myself to categorized some slippery characters I know. But rather I did not know. You no doubt know some of your own.

What is amazing about them is how they attract other people. One guy I know is almost like saying “I’m evil – follow me!” And people do. He has a waiting list (literally) of people wanting to serve him. Including women who want to have his babies.

Evidently, this is the kind of genes they are looking for – ruthless competitors who are bound to get ahead at all costs.

If he has to do a little time, now and then, that is understandable. When you are walking that thin line, a misstep or two is bound to happen occasionally.

He is grabbing all the lose change that happens to be lying around. And everyone else seem to be calculating that some of that change can somehow be diverted to them.

No one is perfect, they think – even the perfect defector.

2013
03/03
CATEGORY
Business
Morality
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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