29 August 2020

Listened to another YouTube video of Yuval Noah Harari, This one was a lecture at Google in 2015 and is about “new religions of the 21st century.” I have read only the first of his books, and listened to various interviews. He lives not far from here, practices vipassana meditation, is strictly vegan, firmly on the left, anti-nationalist, and deeply influenced by Buddhism. The video is chiefly about the increasing power of the algorithm in undermining our currently dominant religion, which, as he says, is humanistic liberalism.

I was thinking his talk about the “new religions of the 21st” century would be about the discovery of our interdependence with nature and of the impossibility that the human race will survive the coming centuries while maintaining its existing speciesism.. At a point in the talk he asks a rhetorical question about the main scientific discovery of the 20th century? (the response: there are so many of them that it is hard to say), and then what was the main discovery in the same period from the faith religions (“the religions that believe in God”). The response he gives is that it is hard to decide, because we can’t think of any. But I don’t think that’s strictly true. There is a discovery or re-discovery, of one of them core teachings of all religions, of altruism and the need to overcome our inherent egoism for the good of the whole. It isn’t exclusively the domain of religion, and the dominant religions have themselves contradicted this message to disastrous effect. Yet the belief, or understanding, that there is a deep connection, or even a fundamental unity, between our own existence and consciousness and that of the universe, is both at the heart of religion, and is the key message of our times. “Key” because it is key to our survival as a species. Like the power of the algorithm, this understanding challenges humanistic liberalism and individualism, as Harari defines it. But unlike our new faith in algorithms to address the issues of our times, the earlier message that we can, and need to, transcend our egoism is at the heart of the human condition. It predates humanistic liberalism by tens of thousands of years and can be felt when viewing the art of the first humans on cave walls. And it will supersede our present stage of evolution, if we are to survive at all. It’s a truth with which we have grappled from the beginning, but which rises to paramount importance in an era when we have the power to destroy both our species and the delicate symmetries that make all of life on earth possible. Eventually logic may lead us to the same conclusion. Indeed, we may already have enough scientific knowledge to emphatically confirm it. But if we don’t grasp, at a deep level, and quickly, that in order to survive we must stop destroying the biosphere for selfish reasons, it won’t be very helpful if this understanding remains confined to the rational level. Understanding has always been a matter more for the heart than for the intellect.

28 August 2020

Listened to one of Yuval Noah Harari’s interviews again. This one was about the likelihood that careers and professions would likely be changing every few years, and that we would constantly need to reinvent ourselves. As a result, he suggested that the most important things to learn now are mental and emotional stability and flexibility.

In the 1970s Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, probably inhabited a similar space. The themes about which they talk are similar, though Toffler was politically more on the right.

I’m not scared about the future, because after the age of around 50, as Haruki Murakami says somewhere in one of his books, we are all living on borrowed time. Most people were traditionally dead by that age. Even today, in many large countries, the average lifespan is less than 70. And, on the other hand, we are never really born and don’t actually die. The pandemic is the most significant and least predicted event that has shaken us recently. I was a bit sorry to have to come home from India earlier than expected, but even if I don’t manage to take much advantage of my new five year visa, it won’t matter to me that much, as I’m also happy to stay home. Lately, it’s been fun working on my home server and setting up Hubzilla. A pleasant distraction.

More of a worry is whether my children and grand children will be ready for the huge changes ahead of them. Why do people still risk bringing children into the world, while simultaneously undermining their future? We’re a strange species. My advice to everyone is to be as self-sufficient as possible and far away from the mainstream; not to believe the pernicious myths and existential fears that nations try to instill in us, or the lies and false promises of ideologies, religions and big corporations. It is better to live the model we would like to see for the world than to spend our time campaigning for things that may never happen. And of course, we need to be open to tweaking that model, according to the constantly changing conditions.

26 August, 2020

Z. came in the morning to do some work around the house. We have known him for 38 years, when he and we were in our 20s. He comes from the nearby Palestinian village of Beit Sira, about 10 minutes from here – or used to be, before they put up the separation barrier. It used to be much easier to visit him. Now, rather than taking him home, we have to drop him at the village gate, along apartheid road 443, under the army watchtower. Many workers used to come in from Beit Sira; including Z’s brothers and sons; but now I think it’s only Z. There are a few building laborers from nearby Beit Liqya. Right now, due to the virus, there’s kind of a reverse closure. Palestinian workers who come in have to stay, rather than go home every day. On the other hand, there are holes in the fence. According to Z, the places are well known by the Israeli army, who do not intervene, and sometimes whole busloads of people come through. The rules regarding the occupation have never been set in stone – a lot depends on who is the soldier on duty, or the mood of the times.

The virus is affecting some parts of the West Bank more seriously than others. It started in the south, but worked its way north. Z. says that two people died of it recently in Beit Liqya; a 45 year old woman with pre-existing health conditions, and a 72 year old man who was also not so well. He knew both of them.

Anyway, Z. replaced 3 new sewage pipe covers with cheap but good ones from El Bireh. He fixed the cobble-stone exterior wall facings that he originally built for us, about twenty five years, ago. He fixed an electrical problem under our new patio pergola, and closed off some unused vents for the A/C. (We used to have a central A/C but nowadays room units are preferred for energy saving.) he can do more or less anything, and I’ve always been a poor and lazy handyman.

SPIP

I ‘m deciding between two projects that I need to give attention to: our Civi-CRM site and a couple of things I need to do for our website on SPIP. Civi-CRM is set up on our WordPress site, but I neglected it for a year or so, so something broke. It then required re installation and a PHP update. That too didn’t go smoothly on hostgator, and need their support crew’s intervention. Now I have to try to fix a bunch of things in order not to lose the data that is already in. I didn’t manage to get any of the staff to actually use Civi-CRM, but now they are asking for it.

The other work I need to do is in SPIP. That’s a French CMS. When I began with it, somewhere in the early 2000s, it seemed to be the best CMS for multilingual content, including Right-to-Left languages. So I adopted SPIP. Now it would be very difficult to move thousands of articles to an easier CMS.. So I continue to use SPIP. It does have some advantages. I find it easier than WordPress for adding posts/ pages., and SPIP imposes a hierarchical structure that is great for our usage. The main drawback is the difficulty in when it comes to design changes. In WordPress you can just drop in a new theme (I know it isn’t always quite so simple). In SPIP, you need to re-create all the templates by hand, and also know SPIP’s unique adaptations of PHP. And of course, SPIP cannot compete with WordPress on the number of available plugins.

Hubzilla again; this time from a home server

That’s it; after a huge effort, I’ve got Hubzilla working from home. Not everything works properly yet, and I will have to try to iron out the bugs. I spent the largest amount of time trying to set up msmtp; because otherwise it was impossible to send an email verification and create a channel. But nothing budged. Eventually I saw that in the configuration files it is possible to disable email verification.

As a result of the account registration mix up, I ended up creating a first account that was not my admin account.

UPDATE: I now see from the help files that this can be updated manually by going into the database; it’s the only way to correct that problem. Not having an admin user is probably the cause of several other problems that I may be able to fix once I am the administrator.

UPDATE: Sorted