My Father and Godfather committed suicide. That was their privilege, they were Doctors. They knew they were terminally ill and they had access to the relevant drugs, and so did not need to involve a third party, which would be currently illegal. They assisted their own dying. In fact, my Father failed the first time, which shows just how difficult it can be. Don’t forget providing information, advice, support or assistance to anyone intending to take their own life is against the law. Until 1961 attempted suicide was itself a crime, leading to prison and loss of all goods.
Unfortunately, my Mother, who had made it clear through several documents such as a Living Will and DNR (do not resuscitate instructions) that she did not wish her life to be prolonged, lived through 6 months of Hell. She also had a sympathetic local doctor and had already refused further chemotherapy for breast cancer. All of this appeared to make no difference. At her lovely hospice, I was told by a tearful doctor my Mother would die within 2 weeks. Sadly my Mother survived too long and was ejected from the hospice, and had to be placed in a retirement home, which turned to be a very unpleasant experience for us all. She fervently wished for assisted dying for that 6 months. Despite trying not to eat, she lived too long for a happy ending. I blame our outdated legal system.
Thus to say I support assisted dying would be an understatement. Of course at my age I’m already worrying about my own lack of choices. Assisted Dying is a right which should belong to us all. Thank you Jonathan Dimbleby, Julian Barnes, Patrick Stewart, Jo Brand, Prue Leith and Esther Rantzen for raising the profile of Dignity in Dying.
As Prue Leith says “While I am healthy at the moment, I’d very much like to have a little lethal concoction sitting in a safe waiting for the right moment. And I’d rather it was legal.”
I read the book above in 1976, after I had taken LSD aka acid for the first time. It was a profound, yet relatively short lived experience. The book itself is an entertaining, if over the top read. Let’s not forget Timothy Leary was a well educated university lecturer with a Ph.D, he knew how to write, lecture and entertain. The Politics of Ecstasy was first published in 1966 in the USA and would become the foundational story of the late 60s hippie drug culture. It was first published in England in 1970, and I read it with a pinch of American salt, I already knew exaggeration when I saw it, yet it had an authority and intellectual chutzpah which was invigorating. I was already well aware of the profoundly spiritual and dangerous properties of this drug, having quizzed the few people I knew who had taken it, they had my admiration at the time. I had done my my homework, but nothing could prepare me for the reality. I believe it was on this first trip that I discovered how disorientating it could be, since I was at a concert in Pathfoot, Stirling University. Feeling spaced out, I realised I should be lying down and relaxing, so I departed early. As I was leaving through a long, large corridor I discovered I could rotate the whole corridor until I was walking on the ceiling. This was a great feeling until I start thinking too much about it and realised that this might not be a good idea since the corridor was not under my full control, it seemed to to have a mind of its own and I did not wish to fall to the floor – hey where is the floor, what is a floor, I thought gravity was supposed to exist, apparently now it does not… Most of Leary’s musings are based on The Tibetan Book of The Dead, and that should tell you before venturing any further that we are in dangerous territory. This territory was politely called a “bad trip”, yet it could destroy lives. We all knew what had happened to Syd Barrett, the former lead singer of Pink Floyd. For a good example of the foggy synaesthesia brought on by LSD, listen to his 1969 album The Madcap Laughs.
The “shit hit the fan” on my second trip a few years later, when I was back at Stirling. That night I kept notes of this profound experience, which do not make much sense now, but do provide a few pointers which I will attempt to interpret and explain:
No.1 : Everything was melancholy and industrial because we were probably listening to Escalator over the Hill by Carla Bley, not the best choice in the circumstances, but I liked it. It is also possible we were listening to Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin, in particularly the tracks In The Light and Kashmir. These notes begin when we had retreated to my little room and I was choosing the music. There was a lot of chaos in the next door flat (of which more later) and I had determined to have a spiritual experience by listening to cool music lying on my bed.
No.2 & 3 : These were my flatmates, also tripping – everyone was, and no doubt we were arranging ourselves in my tiny bedroom, with most people lying on the floor, finding cushions and trying to get comfortable.
No.4 : Any minor interruption seemed freighted with meaning back then.
No.5 : No doubt this was me playing the album Big Fun by Miles Davis, released in 1974, an electronic jazz album with an Eastern drone vibe, and probably the track Great Expectations which goes on for 27 minutes.
No.6 : Fweejum is a made up word that has stayed with me. I was attempting to express the noise a a large vehicle or other object makes sweeping past you, think of it as the imaginary noise that time makes when it is moving very fast, with a doppler effect. Pronounce it without enunciating the letters and you might be getting close to the sense of dropping through the floor, through time and space at great velocity.
No.7 : My flatmates were probably getting fed up with the music and had decided to use the experience to make some unconsciously inspirational art. I have no idea really, it could easily be an imagined drawing in the great dome of starscape enveloping us. Pretty sure I wasn’t physically drawing.
No.8 : Here we are in proper meaningless drug addled territory, there seem to be an infinity or maybe just 166 rabbit holes, blind alleyways or dark caves to plunge into. They multiply as you examine them and it is easy to get confused, you might choose the wrong one. At least it wasn’t 666.
No.9 : By this time I am probably listening to Go Ahead John, the third side of Big Fun and featuring the jazz rock guitarist John McLaughlin. On acid anything visualised tends to mutate and expand, yet seem real.
That was the sensible part of the evening. Beforehand an older and I thought wiser friend, also on drugs, had been violently sick. I looked on dispassionately at the fabulous technicolour mess, containing a wonderful mass of imaginary writhing creatures, just grateful I hadn’t experienced the nausea of feeling the soft organs of my body decide to leave home. Never mix drink and serious drugs I thought selfishly to myself. Meanwhile next door my fellow students were in full on LSD party drinking mode, which soon turned sour. Among our number was a garrulous French student, who spoke perfectly good English. As the evening progressed she was picked on and her every utterance became a source of great hilarity, purely due to her French accent. At an early point I had tried to intervene, to no avail, which was probably when I sloped off to my bedroom to listen to music. At dawn, many hours later, I returned, and she had been reduced to a gibbering wreck, who could no longer speak in any language, completely incoherent. She was truly in a state, yet the barbs continued and I felt powerless by this time to intervene. The behaviour of my fellow students, despite being on drugs, had been appalling. After several days she did recover the power of speech, but I believe she left Stirling and went back to France.
By this time I was trying to look after myself, sleep seemed impossible, life extended emptily, all desire had gone leaving yawning emptiness. That next day I attempted to behave normally and attended a lecture. I was beyond caring, nothing went in and it appeared nothing ever would. I had heard about flashbacks, when you regress to a drug induced stupor, and I was in fear of a slowly repeating chaos. Had I ruined my life? Would this go on forever? Of course not, after 36 hours with no sleep I was simply at my wits end and exhausted. Still it would take a good few days before I re-assembled my life, and determined to slowly clear up my mental state.
The fact that drugs were everywhere at Stirling can be clearly seen in the covers of The Student Handbook for the years 1975-1977. In addition drugs were openly traded in the Students Union, Alangrange, while the University itself hit the headlines in 1976 when a student broke his leg while “attempting to fly” from a third floor window. The young man broke his leg, and in court claimed he was high on LSD. A few months later, to my horror, there he was in our kitchen high on LSD. I did not think this was a good idea as we were on the top floor. I also vividly remember talking down a minor member of the Royal Family who had taken too many mushrooms. I was a bit annoyed since I had to buy him lunch and midday seemed to be the wrong time to take drugs. He had probably been up all night, I guess. Closer to home my flatmate, who was a big burly motor-biker from Dundee, decided to decorate his room with black bin-bags, which covered every surface – walls, floor and ceiling, and I nicknamed his room the black hole of Calcutta. What started off as a bit of fun soon descended into something more serious, he refused to leave this room and I presume he was taking lots of drugs. A form of psychosis crept in, he didn’t listen to any of us and stopped attending lectures. Suddenly he became obsessed with saving frogs. It was spring and the frogs were migrating across a road from the large lake at the centre of the University. There were literally thousands of frogs and it seemed inevitable a few would be killed on this quiet road. I was concerned enough to try and help my flatmate save some of these frogs, but I soon realised it was a pointless exercise, and that this formerly robust human being was being brought low by a serious mental illness. He disappeared at the end of term, never to return.
After promising myself that my LSD days were over, I believe I did take it once again, but it was a much milder experience, I am glad to say, and have little memory of it. I was lucky, and never did experience a bad trip, but I could easily see how that could happen if taken in the wrong circumstances and without due respect to the dangers. Later in life I did try ecstasy and MDMA briefly at festivals, pleasant but nothing compared to the mind curdling power of the acid trips mentioned above. I had lost the desire to lose control in this way, although I still knew a few people who ended up in hospital due to imbibing so called soft drugs. I certainly do not regret taking LSD, it was a remarkable lesson in the powers of the mind and how sanity can be paper thin. However, much to my disappointment, this experience was no spiritual shortcut. I did not arrive in Nirvana, but maybe discovered there are other ways to get there.
If you want to hear the real atmosphere of these times and the liturgical, obsessive nature of the promotion of LSD listen to Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out by Dr. Timothy Leary, a motion picture soundtrack album made by Mercury in 1967. Here is a taster from a track called The Trip: Root Chakra: “…Drift single celled in soft tissue swamp, sink gently into dark fertile marsh, drift beyond the body, float to the centre (I’m Drowning!) float beyond life and death, down soft ladders of memory.”
In 2001 I went to Gaza, as a fledgling panorama news photographer. This was not yet a valid passport to success, but with the help of Gary Knight of Newsweek, and after queuing up for many hours at a nameless bureaucratic office in Jerusalem, at the last moment I was granted permission to enter Gaza. Despite some controversy over my tripod bag, which apparently resembled a rifle holster, I walked the walk into this hell-hole at the only entry point, the Erez Crossing. Way back in 2001 this place was a war zone, as can be seen from my photographs and panoramas, I was both appalled and excited. At the time Gaza was still occupied by the Israelis, who lived in sequestered areas and bunkers, with a very heavy, but hidden military presence. Despite the fact you cannot see them, many Israeli guns will have been pointed at my head. The level of destruction throughout Gaza was staggering, even at that time. Sadly, this forlorn area has been a disaster waiting to happen for many decades. We went straight to a hotspot in Southern Gaza at Khan Yunis, a site of recent Israeli shelling and a refugee camp. Since there were still Israeli factories and residences in Gaza, the level of military intimidation was still very high. Bizarrely I saw advertisements at the time in the Israeli Press for holidays in Gaza, it certainly would not have been my first choice holiday destination, despite the long beaches.
for a larger panorama click fullscreen, or on a phone go here
After photographing the checkpoint outside Khan Yunis at Gush Qateef (which protected an Israeli enclave), which you can see in the panoramas, we went the following day to the funeral of two young boys in Rafah (see above), killed by the bombing. Emotions ran high and as an outsider it was a genuinely scary experience on the way to the cemetery and many guns were fired into the air. A sense of this can be seen in the video below. Following this striking experience we waited around in the hot sun to meet the Fatah Hawks. Eventually we were taken to their apartment, filled with more guns, to negotiate an interview. It was a scary situation to me, but nothing much happened, everyone was polite and we had some tea. However this was not the end of the story, since a few days later these Hawks would kidnap my photographer friend Gary and the Newsweek bureau chief, as detailed in this CNN article. No doubt these gunmen were to become members of what now would be called Hamas, who were already making a deadly play against Fatah, the Palestinian Authority who controlled Gaza. Luckily my friends were released after only one day, while if I had gone back to Gaza with Gary I am sure I would been on the kidnap list as well. This brief event made worldwide news. After the the Israelis left Gaza in 2005, Hamas became the democratically elected rulers of Gaza in 2006. There have been no elections since.
Man pleads his case at Israeli Checkpoint, Gaza 2001
We headed back to Gaza City, via a new housing development that had been shelled. On the way we were stopped by the Israeli army at the Kfar Darom Checkpoint, since I had illegally been taking pictures from the back of the car. Because we had good accreditation Gary managed to talk our way out of a sticky situation involving large machine guns. After these full-on days and sleepless nights we relaxed in Gaza City, I believe at the Al Deira Hotel. Wow, now I felt like a proper Newsweek journalist (it was a luxury hotel), and we even managed to wangle a bottle of wine. Of course we did have to drink it a 100 yards away from any other guests, so as not to upset them, but that was down by the beach so it was fine. I got out safely with a real sense of relief, but as mentioned above Gary had to go back a few days later for the ill-fated interview with the Hawks. For a few moments I feared the worst. Still it was a successful trip and my panoramas were published on the foto8 photojournalism website. I was nicknamed Mr. Bean by our excellent local fixer, due to my insouciance. Taking the hint, I did eventually make the decision that artistic photography was probably a better direction for me than preying on other peoples misfortunes, there was to be no more war photojournalism. It had been an interesting experience, but was not to be repeated.
Since I left Gaza, it has been prey to a series of deadly bombings in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021 by Israel, while in 2007 Human Rights Watch described the Gaza Strip as an “open-air prison”. When I was there in 2001 I could already have told them that, since even then there appeared little hope for this beleaguered and isolated strip of land, home to two million people. The international community has allowed this unbearable situation to fester and should bear responsibility. Gaza, totally reliant on foreign aid, and with no control over it’s own water supply, electricity, airspace, coastline, imports and infrastructure has been made into a tinderbox waiting to explode. Nevertheless that does not excuse the appalling and self-serving actions of Hamas on the 7th of October 2023. I fear more death.
A good sense of my feelings was expressed in this 2006 Panoramic Music Video, using the photographs taken in Gaza :
Update 31/0/08/24 Associated Press August 15, 2024 – Reported Total deaths: Palestinians killed in Gaza: at least 40,005 People killed in Israel: about 1,200 Palestinians killed in the West Bank: 623 People killed in Lebanon: around 530
I don’t think the word “belief” means anything. It’s a hovering wobbly, jelly phrase meaning something like: “I’ve decided to think something’s true because I wish it were true.” Different Every Time, 2014 – Robert Wyatt
My problems with belief started when I was 8 or 9 at Junior school. We had an excellent form teacher, Miss Laister, whom I trusted and understood. However, one sunny day we had a discussion about Christianity, and we were asked if we believed in Jesus Christ. I wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be popular, kind and interesting, so I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. I felt a bit too young to give a definitive answer and maybe expressed some reservations. It was then that the bombshell in my mind exploded, since Miss Laister kindly told us that it wasn’t a question of supposition, logic, science, history or anything else, simply one of faith. You just had to believe, all your problems and worries would be solved, it was that simple. That was it, there was no other choice. This immediately appeared antithetical to everything I had been taught. Even then, to make this exception for Jesus and no-one else seemed unfair, I would have to investigate further. I was already aware other religions existed, and that for instance Jewish people did not have to attend religious assembly or recite The Lord’s Prayer, so what happened to them at the pearly gates?
Like many of my peers I attended Sunday School, basically biblical study, and engaged with the many fascinating stories. I got hold of a St. James Bible and determined to read it cover to cover, but failed to get much past Genesis, it was not an easy read. Later I was awarded a beautiful red leather bound version of the New Testament, this was bit easier, and I proudly took it along to my Sunday School. From my limited studies I was already not prepared to accept the Bible as the infallible word of God, since I was aware of the many inconsistencies, plain cruelty, changes of tone and competing gospels. Later, aged 11, I had a Christian fundamentalist classmate from Bahrain, who I used to tease with choice quotes from the Bible, asking if he believed in the contradictory and confusing verses I selected. I also vividly remember having an attack of the giggles, if not hysterics, when told the Fishers of Men story from the Gospel of Matthew. This did not go down well at Sunday School, but I would guess by this time I had already decided I would not be confirmed. That is I would not ask God’s Holy Spirit to give me the strength and commitment to live God’s way for the rest of my life. Most certainly I would not be living as a disciple of Christ in the Church of England. I have never regretted that decision. My position at the age of 14 or 15 is demonstrated by the moment when I called Jesus a bastard, not that I wanted to. My good Roman Catholic friend had somehow bet me that I wouldn’t say it before a graven image, yet I felt mentally obliged to follow through on my convictions and did so. I was of course being quite accurate (Joseph was not the father), but my friend believed I was going to hell in a handcart. Such is the power of indoctrination.
Well it was a long journey, via an interest in Western Buddhism during my 20’s, to finally arrive at my own version of agnosticism. Quit simply I agree with this statement: “I cannot know whether a deity exists or not, and neither can you”. Getting to this point may have taken some time, but it was certainly encouraged by one of the bravest books ever written, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, published 2006. It was as if I had waited nearly my whole life for someone to take on the exceptionalism granted to religion, this medieval way of thinking, and the lip service paid to plainly outdated ideas.
The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’. The God Delusion, 2006 – Richard Dawkins
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. God Is Not Great, 2007 – Christopher Hitchens
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. New York Times, 1999 – Steven Weinberg
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Questions sur les miracles, 1765 – Voltaire
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1788 – Edward Gibbon (from a quote by Lucius Seneca, 50AD)
The idea that any religious document is the “Holy Word of God”, as is claimed, can now be fully put to bed. Here is a brief resumé of what we now know regarding the great religious texts. The Bible as we know it was formulated in c.367AD during the councils of Hippo and Carthage, and excluded the Apocrypha. The Gospels were written forty to eighty years after the death of Jesus in Rome, they are pseudepigrapha, the claimed author is not the true author. This is the case for the majority of the Bible. None of the authors of the New Testament actually met Jesus. The Old Testament is part folklore and part mythologised Jewish history, formulated in 1400BC, centuries after the events portrayed. For example, there is no historical record of Israelis (Moses and the Exodus) in Egypt. Watch out for Pseudoarchaeology! The Koran has an even more confusing history since Mohammed was allegedly illiterate and it was dictated to him by the Angel Gabriel, this oral tradition only being written down many decades later. The Hadith, “the backbone” of Islamic civilization, was cobbled together from many contradictory oral sources, generations after Muhammad’s death. Strangely Islam posits that God is an Arab, as the Koran is always recited in Arabic, and hence a translation cannot be the “Word of God”. These are the western patriarchal religions for the last 2000 years: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They come form the same Abrahamic root, use the same basic stories and, given their authorship, cannot possibly be the word of God. We should remember that these religions represent just a moment in our evolution, whose time has now passed. In the Eastern world it is somewhat more complicated since there is no specific word of God, but rather a series of myths, stories and philosophies of life. That is fine, but I was under the impression that myths are not meant to be factually true, so I don’t believe any of that either. The Bhagavad Gita may be a great book, but no-one claims it was written by God, thank heavens.
When you end up not believing in anything (don’t follow leaders…) life can take a strange, slightly dystopian angle, which was encouraged by science fiction in general and the band Joy Division in particular. Like John Lennon (cf. his song God) my I don’t believe list is long, including fairies, ghosts and UFO’s, although they can all make interesting stories. I am a believer in the French principle of laïcité, which separates church and state since the 1789 revolution (confirmed in 1905), and includes the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This principle does include a right to the free exercise of religion. Still, we all need somewhere to place our own spiritual needs, and obviously the Church no longer managed to fulfil this role for me. I did manage to read a religious book, recommended by my Mother, written by our local C of E vicar. However I could only manage to do this by replacing the word God with the word Gaia (thank you James Lovelock), which seemed to work quite well. I took refuge in the work of Alan Watts, a former Anglican priest who became a Buddhist hippy, and the classic series Zen and Zen Classics (1960) by R.H. Blyth. Later still I spent 4 years doing Tai-chi, which fulfilled many of my spiritual needs, but it’s not a religion. We live in a spiritual desert, where can we put these feelings?
Science appears to hold the answers since it is an open system, constantly being revised. It is empirical, open to scrutiny and genuinely man-made, but is that enough? Certainly the classical religions no longer answer the fundamental questions that led to their creation, science has filled that vacuum. There are many wonders of evolution and nature, yet do they really fulfil our hidden desires for a transcendent belief system? Humans appear to have a millenarian death wish desire, we need to dream and confront an apocalypse, however illogical that may be. Every generation searches for a New Messiah, we all self-dramatise and seem to think we live in the end times, as if history never happened. No-one wants to die, feel their life is pointless, and traditional religion came along to solve that problem. Such is the power of wishful thinking – believe this (or that) and you can live forever in heaven! For a long time we were all a member of an eternity cult. In reality the hope, promise and drama of traditional religion is over, and we await the replacement with some agitation and trepidation. At least there are fewer pointless religious wars, there is no heaven and hell, blasphemy is over, while the churches are empty. And lo, let there be no more self-appointed divine agents, defenders of the faith, no more confession, transubstantiation or apostolic succession. In the meantime, we should all become Secular Buddhists, that is the best I can say.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing, does not go away. Introduction, 1972 – Philip K. Dick / published 1985
Update 30/08/23 The day after I published this article, this was the headline in The Times newspaper, saying only 24% of clergy would describe Britain as a Christian country today.
Update 08/10/24 Just read Rationality by Steven Pinker and I was glad to see he uses the Philip K. Dick quote about reality, referred to above. He makes a strong point about the difference between the mythology mindset and reason, and why we humans are both tempted and fascinated by the myth makers. The book is humorous and pointed, although sometimes repetitious, and there is a bit too much algebra for me. Still it is highly recommended and here is my favourite quote, of many:
Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated. Rationality, 2021 – Steven Pinker
Every generation believes it is at the cutting edge, that we know everything we need to. It appears the society we live in could be made no other way, that progress has been made to get us to this apogee of civilisation. Both the Greeks and the Aztecs appear to have believed they had found the answers, as do most “civilised” societies, wherever they may be. No doubt Christians in the middle ages were glad to have resolved the mysteries of creation and to have a book of God’s laws they could believe in. Pity the poor pagans making pointless sacrifices, or the barely civilised natives of South America, they would not be going to Heaven. For in that moment God had given us all the answers. Come the industrial revolution and modern science, huge progress was made and the daily grind became steadily more distant. There were sewers, machines that milled and a better form of transport than the horse. We finally knew the shape of the world and could communicate across it, what more did we need? All we could eat was in a shop nearby.
Now we are in a new era of instant communication, we have atomic power and have visited the moon. We understand our own recipe, DNA, and can scan our own brains. The Universe started with the Big Bang and has been mapped. We even have the power to destroy our own planet. What more do we need to know?
That is the hubris of the human condition. We only see what we know and look back in pity and despair on our deluded forebears. Yet the world moves on dynamically outside our ken, at it’s own glacial speed, in ways we have yet to fathom. While we are proud to have split the atom and discovered the Higgs boson, we already sense this this is just the tip of the quantum iceberg. When we discovered the power of splitting the atom we thought we had solved our energy needs and in the rush of that discovery huge mistakes were made. Many lives were lost. Controlling nuclear fission turned out to be much more complicated than we had ever dreamed, while the cost of nuclear waste disposal turns out to be higher than the cost of nuclear reactor construction.
There is a universe of quantum effects which defeats our senses and understanding. Our logical and classical consciousness cannot comprehend matter which has properties of both waves and particles. Put simply, the quantum world is invisible, antithetical and incomprehensible to us. Einstein himself, a founder of quantum physics, had a great deal of difficulty with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, believing that “He (god) does not play dice”, and this conundrum has yet to be fully resolved. Nevertheless the existence of quantum entanglement or as Einstein called it ”spooky action at a distance” has not been disproven. Thus instead of becoming more comprehensible our sense of the world is slipping away into multiverses, live or dead cats and the flapping of a butterflies wing which can change everything. There are no longer truths, only possibilities. Maybe space itself has an atomic structure, currently unknown to us. We are moving into a world we cannot see, our senses blind to the machinations of the quantum world. Until recently we did not need to know this information to survive, the evolution of our senses has failed to keep up with our theoretical knowledge. In this situation mistakes are easily made.
Now we are aware of it, the effects of Quantum Mechanics, discovered in 1900 by Max Planck, appear all around us. Your USB stick uses quantum tunnelling, as does in effect the light switch, never mind the laser, transistor and LED bulb. That all seems quite sensible, but a new field is opening up called Quantum Biology, telling us that quantum effects are an integral part of living phenomena. So we think we know everything, but cannot explain the sense of smell. There are quantum effects at work here, and the harder you look, the more they start cropping up everywhere. It is a matter of asking the right questions. The tennis player can hit a ball that theoretically he has not had time to react to. A dog can smell things that aren’t there. A human eye can detect a single photon. Animals can navigate using the inclination of the magnetic field of the earth. These phenomena are believed to be caused by quantum effects. Indeed, quantum wave function collapse might be the root of our consciousness. Most vitally of all photosynthesis (used by all plants) appears to use quantum coherence. In other words, we really know nothing about how the world really works down at the atomic level. We may have an inkling, but there is a whole new science here to be discovered, which will in turn make what we believe now into a vaguely ridiculous approximation. Yes our descendants will laugh at our naivety, and so it will continue.
Update 09/05/21
Our profound lack of self-knowledge is explained in the book The Idea of the Brain by Matthew Cobb (2020). We have no idea how the panoply of medicinal drugs (Librium, Vallium, SSRi’s) actually work. We do know the mind invents what we perceive, just one example being the invisible blind spot where the optic nerve enters the eye. Put simply, if we do not know how the brain works, how can we really know anything. Despite a solid bedrock of understanding, we have no clear comprehension about how billions, or millions, or thousands, or even tens of neutrons work together to produce the brain’s activity. Or as Olaf Sporns has put it: Neuroscience still largely lacks organising principles or a theoretical framework for converting brain data into fundamental knowledge and understanding.
Matthew Cobb finishes his Introduction with this sentence: The four most important words in science are “We do not know”.
Without countries, the whole question of nationality dissolves. Nearly all countries have been invented in the last few hundred years. Germany and Italy only became nation states in 1871. The Act of Union creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was passed by Parliament in 1800. The United States of America was named in 1776, but only became the country we know today in the mid 19th century. If you look at France it is even stranger. From a series of completely separate fiefdoms with different languages, after the revolution of 1789 they gradually became a unified country, with one language mandated by 1880. This unification and language normalisation all took a long time. In the 1940s, more than one million people in France still spoke Breton as their first language. Until you all speak the same language, you really shouldn’t really be called a country. So France was hardly what we would now call a country until maybe the 1950s. The same goes for many other countries, excluding Belgium of course, which has three official languages in various dialects. Canada also has two official languages, French and English, yet it has managed to remain a unified country. This is a complicated subject.
Does a language define a country? Well maybe it should, for how else can you do it? Obviously where someone is born no longer defines nationality. It is a matter of chance, we could be born anywhere, and often are. Place of birth does have a bearing on our cultural beliefs and behaviour, but not in a readily definable way – it all depends on our personal history. The fact is that language is a primary factor, since the structure of language already contains a hidden and unconscious stack of social rules and behaviours. You only have to look at the structure of a particular language to see it echoed in actual social behaviour – 84% of Dutch people do not believe you are Dutch unless you speak Dutch. Language has become the defining cultural factor of what we call nationality.
Following this reasoning, in a world where English is now the first or second language for most people, the so called English aka American language is about to take over. Soon we will all be “English”. Mandarin Chinese may be spoken by more people, but it is not a numbers game, it is an influence game. Many African countries are now adopting English as their first language, for economic reasons. In the light of this information the United Kingdom’s departure from any influence over the European Community seems like a betrayal of historic partnerships. We have already won the battle of language, now we retreat? However, slowly, with many bumps in the road, we are all coming together, becoming one, like it or not. News, sport, music and cinema are already global concerns.
The evident craziness of the country concept becomes obvious at the level of sport. Now the passport of the sportsman is up for grabs, following rules which can change, and are different for each sport. Many English sport-stars were born in another country, became naturalised here, and became English. I’m referring to Johanna Konta from Australia, Mo Farah from Somalia, Linford Christie from Jamaica, for example. My mother was born in Indonesia and my uncle in Peking; they both represented Scotland at university level athletics. But of course now they could represent China, Scotland, Indonesia, United Kingdom, Borneo, England or nearly any other country in the world, depending on their residency history. Neither ancestors nor place of birth define your sporting nationality, there are choices to be made. So in the recent European Championships, Israel is represented by Lonah Chemtai Salpeter, a Kenyan runner who has lived in Israel for eight years, Turkey is represented by Jak Ali Harvey from Jamaica, who previously had run for Jamaica at high school level. Of course in football, with so much money running around, the rules are even more byzantine. That is presuming a footballer worth £10 million can get a visa.
Of course if you are rich enough, the world is your oyster. Indeed for the super rich there are still no countries, nationality is just another commodity. Citizenship can be bought in over 20 countries round the world. Even in the USA, so mindful of immigration, residence is awarded to foreign nationals who invest $1m in the economy and create 10 full-time jobs for US citizens within two years of arrival. If you want to live in Europe you can buy an EU passport in Malta for only 650,000 euros. In the UK may I suggest joining the Tier 1 Investor Programme with £2,000,000 in your pocket. Come on down, join our country!
The entire concept of nationality is built on a colonialist concept of the world. Borders were invented by Victorians drawing lines on a map, now we have to live with these arbitrary lines as if they were god-given. Of course they slice through many tribes and communities, which the Victorian map-makers often had no notion of. Only 70 years ago a line was drawn partitioning India into two countries, along religious lines, and over 14 million people were displaced. The most nefarious effects have been in Africa, leading to ongoing conflicts, most recently in Sudan, but their blight can also be vividly seen in the Middle East.
We have to get over the idea of nationalism, it is meaningless. The recent DNA investigations of our genetic origins make a joke out of our petty racist behaviour. Apparently most English people came from first Northern Portugal, then Middle Europe, Germany and Denmark. We have only been here for 6000 years and the Welsh have more right to be called English, if you follow the law of the soil argument, than most people in Kent, who arrived from Europe more recently. Genetically speaking, Israelis and Palestinians cannot be separated, so why build a wall? We should look at nationality like supporting a football team, a completely arbitrary decision based on random cultural associations and proximity to the ground where the football is played.
It might seem as if I’m saying where you come from does not matter. It absolutely does, it defines our cultural and social identity – you might rise above it, so to speak, but you will never escape it. We are who we are, our identity cannot be subsumed. In our new modern world, our global village, the possibilities seem endless, but they are a chimera. We can’t all just go and live where we want, in our rapid transit world that is a recipe for chaos. Realistically, residency has to be a managed process, however hard that might be. We have yet to come to terms with this new reality, now that you can cross continents in a few hours. The situation where the best educated Asians and Africans came to live in the UK, to work in our National Health Service for example, should be coming to an end. They are needed in their own countries, where they can accomplish so much more. We should no longer be encouraging them to emigrate, but training them so they can return home and improve their own societies. We should all be encouraged to visit, just don’t miss the last bus home.
World government already exists, it’s called the UN, for better or worse. Since 1948 it subscribes to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is a cool document in over five hundred languages and it should be taught in all of our schools. The United Nations might still be structured in terms of countries, but the decisions they make are world decisions. That is the only way forward.
Originally stardust
Then bilateral
Now I am Human
I live on Earth, I am an Earthling
I came from Africa
I am a member of the United Nations
I am a European
I am at present a member of the European Union
I am a member of the currently privileged Western Elite
I am a Scotsman
I am a UK citizen
I have the right of abode in the United Kingdom
I was born in Romford, Essex
I may be Scenglish
I do not identify as English, except when England play football
My father was born in Dunfermline, Fife
My mother was born in Sumatra, Indonesia
My brother is a Kiwi
My sons are Jewish UK citizens, soon to become Germans
I am roughly 4% Neanderthal
Some Asians are a bit Denisovan
We are the sole survivors of the genus Homo
We are all Homo Sapiens
97-year-old Sgt Benjamin Ferencz, originally from a Jewish family in Transylvania, helped liberate the death camps in Europe, became a chief US prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials and was instrumental in establishing the International Criminal Court. He is the last surviving prosecutor from the 1947 Nazi Nuremberg Trials.
Following a chance encounter with this inspiring man on the BBC World Service radio programme Hardtalk I have assembled these quotations. He spoke with self effacing honesty, his direct words often laced with a bitter humour.
As he says think about it and act on it.
I served for three years in the United States Army, in every battle from the Battle of the Bulge to the beaches of Normandy, and I tell you there will never be a war without crimes – never – because warfare itself is the biggest crime of all.
We were trying to show people how horrible it is if you take a leader who’s very charismatic, and unquestionably follow him, even to murdering little children. These were educated people; one was a father of five children. They were not all wild beasts with horns.
These were patriots trying to do their duty to protect either their religion, their nationality or their economic security.
They wanted to brag about how many they killed.
War makes mass murderers out of otherwise decent people.
Hell would be paradise, compared to what I saw.
I never tried to do justice in the broad sense of holding every criminal accountable, it would have been a practical impossibility.
Vengeance is not our goal.
We have not learnt the lessons of Nuremberg.
The most powerful nations of the world are not yet ready to surrender what they perceive as a sovereign right to use whatever means they perceive to be necessary in order to protect their own interests as they see them.
No politician appears without his flags flying.
For centuries we have glorified warmaking.
We have not learnt that you cannot kill an ideology with a gun.
Use of armed force to obtain a political goal should be condemned as an international and a national crime.
The world has changed, we’re not throwing rocks anymore, we’re gonna kill everybody.
Think of all the money we are wasting on preserving the outdated nuclear weapons, which nobody knows what to do with and which are obsolete.
My general reasoning is that the world is a small planet. We must share the resources on this planet, so that everyone can live in peace and human dignity, and it can be done. The recognition that we have to move as a unit gave us the EU, it gave us the US, 50 states with very differing opinions. Most wars are fought against another group, the ‘other’. When you are a part of the other, you’re less inclined to attack it.
Law is always better than war.
Law must apply equally to everyone.
The re-education of the human spirit on a worldwide basis is the task before us, and we are doing it.
Fundamental things such as colonialism and slavery, the rights of women, the emancipation of sex, landing on the moon, these were inconceivable not long ago. But miracles can be performed.
“God is always with us even through the storms.. “
Finally here we are at the end of 20 Centuries alone, our greatest fear realised. We are shivering in our new found isolation as the reality dawns that there really is no one out there. For eons human beings have found comfort in a cornucopia of gods who have slowly become more distant and evanescent, until now when they have finally slowly evaporated into the myths of former ages.
Surely no-one really believes that, for example, the Bible is the actual word of god, since we now know who wrote it – the Gospels were written not by disciples or eyewitnesses but by Romans a century after the death of Jesus. As initially the Age of Enlightenment, followed by the observational and predictive nature of science engulfed us, we lost our pagan belief in the supernatural. The initial reasons for our pagan beliefs were swept away piece by piece: the world is round, there is an invisible force called gravity, we are all related, invisible germs do exist, we are a speck on the edge of the universe and amazingly E = mc2. Just as our notion of the universe has expanded, so the gods have inevitably been placed further away. We may not find them for sometime. In my lifetime god was initially living behind a cloud just up there, then perhaps in another dimension or time immemorial, now he is way out beyond the big bang. This is so far away as to be meaningless and certainly not the nearby bearded grandfather figure we initially invented to help soothe our troubled souls.
God Creates Adam, Sistine Chapel 1508 by Michelangelo
Yet the nebulous desire for some sort of supernatural relationship is buried deep in our psyche, as evidenced by our positing of external spiritual influences in nearly all historical societies. Recent times have seen the supplanting of supernatural forces, whether they be ghosts, spirits or gods, with a fresh look to the heavens for salvation. There must be something out there, and we attempt to will it into existence through science fiction. The near universal popularity of Star Wars ($27 billion income) and Star Trek (by 1972 it was being syndicated in 60 countries) demonstrates the contemporary desire to meet an alien, to have a family, to not be alone.
By doing away with our gods and their self-appointed agents we have lost some comfort and certainty in our lives, yet the benefits of freedom from the savagery of the Old Testament and hell-fire damnation are myriad. In the harsh light of our modern scientific reality, there has been a more realistic look at our own behaviour and the mutual responsibilities to our isolated planet, which should eventually have a positive outcome.
Science currently tells us there must, by the law of probability, be more life in the universe. An example of this is the Drake equation, which gives an estimate of the number of civilisations in our galaxy. Since we have yet to find extraterrestrial life we are confronting a new universal existential anxiety: Fear Of No Aliens or FONA. This is not a new idea, but a contemporary restatement of the eternal conundrum “Why are we here?”, which our historical myths and religions have claimed to answer for many centuries. Now if we can’t find those pesky aliens, we will invent them, we are used to doing that. Perhaps it may be better to “unask” the question as some eastern philosophies do.
NASA Mars Spirit Rover Photograph 2008
Once recognised FONA can be seen coursing through our culture in many different guises, from the medieval fear of a godless world to our adoption of the Gaia hypothesis, which posits that Earth is a self-regulating system. With the decline of violence (cf. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker) and the cultural opposition to xenophobia, we can finally embrace the so called alien and hence make our discovery of it more realistic.
FONA is simply the latest development in a seemingly never ending quest, a more mature yet still perplexing reaction to our perceived place in the universe. Is there anyone out there? We fervently hope so, to the point that we have already invented a panoply of anthropomorphic aliens, just as we once did with our gods. The difference is now that we recognise our own creations for what they are: science fiction. Nevertheless the emotional desire to find the alien/god/creator/teacher remains strongly within our human psyche. It looks like FONA will be with us for some time to come, maybe it always has been.
WMAP image of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, shaped by Quantum Effects
Perhaps we are here with our unique self-awareness just to strive to explore…and one day find those aliens.
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
Stephen Hawking Der Spiegel (17 October 1988)
For further information see The Fermi Paradox
Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) saw the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, such as in the Drake equation, and the lack of evidence for such civilizations.
aka: Where is everybody? • Where are they? • The Great Silence • silentium universi
