@Manuel JF has a new post, for which I needed to make a machine translation in order to understand it.

It seems to be based on the ideas of Hannah Arendt, and since I haven’t read her books and am lazy, I checked the Wikipedia article on The Human Condition. There, in the article, it mentions and quotes a Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han who has some criticism of her ideas that sounds very much in tune with what Manuel is saying.

In accordance with the philosophy expressed in Alexander Douglas’s Against Identity, and my own intuition, I don’t think it is appropriate to subjectify ourselves in terms of an individual identity at all, because the flip side is that we objectify the world – and we know where that leads.  But of all the identities that I would like to reject, profession is high up on the list. This may well be because I’m so unqualified that I never know what to write in the box that is usually labeled "Occupation".  

If I could live life over again, maybe I would choose something like the lifestyle of the Aran Islanders, who, in escaping persecution from the English, took upon themselves a life of self-sufficiency, where no one could be defined in terms of a single profession:

The islands were first populated in larger numbers, probably at the time of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the mid-17th century, when the Catholic population of Ireland had the choice of going "to hell or to Connacht". Many fled to the numerous islands off the west coast, where they adapted to the raw climatic conditions, developing a survival system of total self-sufficiency. Their methods included mixing layers of sand and seaweed on top of rocks to create fertile soil, a technique used to grow potatoes and other vegetables.[18] The same seaweed method also provided grazing grass within stone-wall enclosures for cattle and sheep which in turn provided leather, wool, and yarn to make hide shoes, handwoven trousers, skirts and jackets, hand-knitted jumpers, shawls, and caps. The islanders also constructed unique boats called currachs for fishing, building their thatched cottages from the materials available, or trading with the mainland.

Many traditional small rural communities are similarly self-sufficient, and probably a generic title like "farmer" hides many concurrent occupations that people forget to mention, such as part-time carpenter, tinkerer, tailor, house-builder, fixer, parent, cook, nursery teacher, community worker and general doer of whatever-needs-to-be-done, plus lover / musician and sometimes poet or philosopher by night.  Or, nowadays, maybe computer programmer or web developer.  I think we have a few people on Hubzilla like this.

If we are worked off our feet, by night and by day, or approach all of these occupations as simply chores, then life becomes dreary and boring.  When, on the other hand, we still have enough leeway and family- or community-fellowship to engage in them with a spirit of play, then our lives are made happier by the diversity and anti-monotony of rediscovering ourselves in various unexpected roles.  

The capitalist society in which we live, combined with the influence of our peers, tends to push us into narrowly defined roles, and then expects us to fulfill these with single-minded devotion.  Across a wide range of professions and income levels, from academics to tech workers to sales associates in department stores, people feel that they are unwilling hostages in an exploitative system.

In as far as this system is beyond our control,  we may need to focus on where we still have a degree of choice.  I am not sure that the answer is simply to balance time spent in boring bullshit jobs with recreational pastimes like weekend cycling or hang-gliding.  

I live in an area to which many people commute on weekends for sports like these and many seem to approach their "recreation" with military discipline, barking out instructions to each other, bouncing their bikes over rocks, competing on climbs.  It doesn’t look like they are having a great time, but only pumping their bodies with adrenaline and swapping the tyranny of one set of difficult circumstances with another.

While they can find time to enjoy "leisure" activities, many do not manage to find time to cook a proper meal for themselves, clean their own homes, spend time with their children, let alone engage in community tasks that could enrich their lives.  

There are always professionals available who can do things better and faster than we can, so why not outsource everything?

I think that the answer is that by handing over responsibility for things that we are not necessarily innately good at, we deprive ourselves of developing new abilities and challenging our too rigid sense of self, thereby restricting our conceived identity to one that seems pre-ordained by a narrow set of circumstances within an uncompromising social structure.  

The capitalist system is ultimately a hall of mirrors, less substantial or imposing than it appears to be.  It’s going to fall eventually and take many of us with it, but there is no reason to be crushed under its bulk prematurely.

Source: https://hub.vikshepa.com/item/05cf3c60-b493-4611-8def-167e93f00349

I’m not at all a prolific reader / audio listener, but all of my recent non-fiction purchases have been intended to help understand a little more about how, as a species, we have ended up where we are today, and what we might do to extricate ourselves from the really dire situation we are in.  

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and want to obtain a clearer picture of where we stand, but also because I still feel some responsibility.  

In my blog, I wrote some years ago that the problems we face are the result of the relationship we have formed with our world, and that this relationship is based on wrong perceptions. We view ourselves as subjects in a world that we objectify as separate from ourselves.  With such a sense of alienation, is it any wonder that we humans are perpetrating the 6th great extinction and ecociding our own biosphere?

Everything I’ve been reading has confirmed or reinforced this hypothesis, and also shown that our situation is not inevitable.  That’s the most important take-away.

These are the books I’ve found helpful so far:

– The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, by Jeremy Lent
– Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self, by Alexander Douglas
– Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp
– Notes on Complexity "The Theory of Life, Consciousness, and Meaning in a Self-Organizing Universe" by Neil Thiese
– The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
– The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions, edited by Greta Thunberg

Source: https://hub.vikshepa.com/item/fdfae0e2-fbd1-4aa3-a4c3-a27c8ee03739

Checked my Books wiki (which I badly need to update) for a new audio book to listen to, and chose The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent.  I first learned about this book in an essay, Stepping back from the Brink by George Monbiot (2018). Monbiot calls it "the most profound and far-reaching book I have ever read".  It looks promising.

I listened to the forward, by Fritjof Capra and the introduction, on my morning walk.

Source: https://hub.vikshepa.com/item/521adf77-c841-4172-b072-3211fdc1fba4

I read in The Guardian that Interstellar (2014) is currently “the internet’s favourite film” and has become the most-loved film of Christopher Nolan.  So I decided to watch it again.

Today, I also listened to a long interview with Kip Thorne, the Nobel prize-winning theoretical physicist who advised Nolan on the making of the film, and even wrote a book, The Science of Interstellar.

In the years since the film was made, the idea that our best hope of saving humanity is to escape to a planet B has become associated with obnoxious billionaires and is parodied in the film Don’t Look Up.

The first question Tyson asks Kip Thorne is if it wouldn’t have been easier just to fix the environmental problems like blight-induced multi-crop failures, than to seek a solution involving space travel?  Thorne’s answer requires the resort to one of the film’s many unexplained back-stories, and the same is true of most of his other responses to the difficult questions posed by Tyson.  The science in Interstellar turns out to be theoretically interesting and conceivable, but it all adds up to a set of unconvincing implausibilities, to my mind.

I don’t think that audiences invest much attention to the matter of credibility in sci-fi films, though. They come for the wow-appeal, action and adventure.  Indeed, what science fiction often lacks is emotional depth, which turns quite a lot of people away from the genre.  But in Interstellar, the film’s fair storytelling, competent acting and emotional drama apparently work well enough to hold viewers through the film’s 2 hours and 50 minutes.

Ultimately, that this is the internet’s favourite film at the moment, says something about the mediocrity of our contemporary culture. Most popular never equals anything like best, of course, but still you could hope that the two apices would draw a little closer.

Source: https://hub.vikshepa.com/item/1dab7286-6688-472a-a508-a41409e90a32

The Guardian has a section called “Making sense of it”, and in it an opinion piece “Spirituality isn’t rigid dogma. It’s a living, breathing practice that helps make sense of an incomprehensible world”  The writer finds comfort in various “quiet rituals” which he says have stayed with him more than strictly religious practices.

Drawing on my own encounters, I’ve come to see how these seemingly small gestures – the fragrant smoke of esfand to lift heaviness, the rhythmic pull of qawwali, the quiet assurance of a taweez tied around a wrist – hold more than superstition. They carry virtues: grounding, comfort and a deep sense of protection. None of these things were in any book of religion. No one ever sat down and taught them. They were just picked up, like pebbles from the ground, passed from women to girls, from grandmothers to mothers to daughters – and sometimes to sons who were paying attention.

This writer is a Muslim from Pakistan, and the specific rituals he mentions would be foreign for most of us.  But my grandmother had other, no less inexplicable beliefs and rituals: throwing a pinch of salt over the shoulder if salt had been spilled, not opening an umbrella inside the home, and, of course, not walking under a ladder.

Sometimes the beliefs of one people contradict those of another: for example, the number 13, unlucky for Christians, is lucky for Jews.  At other times, they correspond: the Hamsa is a popular amulet all across the Middle East and North Africa.  The use of Henna designs at weddings and marriages goes all the way from Morocco to Malaysia, and it hardly matters whether the brides are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Sikh.

India has a huge and daunting collection of beliefs that govern people’s lives, and sometimes they seem to cut across religions.  I know that in the renovation of a neighbouring house in South India, there were specific rules, based on the Hindu Vastu Shastra, governing the position of every room in the house – particularly the direction of kitchen and bathroom appliances.  There is no way the Muslim plumber would agree to do it differently.  And the local people – I think, Hindu or Muslim alike, would never, as we do, re-use clothes as rags.

I vaguely recall that the 19th century tome, The Golden Bough, purports to explain many folk customs and beliefs, such as the practice of covering our mouth when we yawn (I think this is to prevent the soul from escaping).

Really, I do not think that any of these folk beliefs, customs and rituals, have much to do with spirituality. Some of these are quaint, colourful or harmless, but often, just as people may find comfort, they are, in equal measure, constrained by these nonsensicalities.

Source: https://hub.vikshepa.com/item/13228e2b-0696-4b00-aa84-3d0eb1246f78