simply live simply

1. There is no alternative to the project of enlightenment, to a sound scientific approach. If anything has become clear over the last year, then it is surely this. The more we know about the beginning of life, the universe, how life on earth functions, indeed how human life and our body and mind work, the more it transpires that we can place no confidence whatsoever in tradition, religions, culture, ‘everyday knowledge’, social conventions, social media and all the other forms of un-reflected, un-tested, not-thought-through forms of human (self-) oppression we have invented. The project of human (self-) liberation within the means of nature is thus far from accomplished.

2. Out of point 1 flow a number of insights and issues which are clearly understood, but not acted upon since we - taken as one humanity - are still overwhelmingly stuck in medieval mindsets when it comes to values and convictions we hold and the acts we commit when living our lives.

All forms of religion, ideology, magic world-views (such as believing in what we have personally experienced as a reliable guide to truth; or believing in what authorities of any kind - leaders, gurus, teachers,.... - tell us) are the most damaging obstacles to an understanding of who we are, how life works, how power and societies are constructed and kept functioning. Only a scientific approach allows us the necessary distancing from our own ideological bubble, double-checking through other means and instruments, triangulating what initially can only be a hypothesis. Yet the fact that most people on earth still cling to belief systems of one form or another is a clear sign of how far we still have to go. There is literally no hope for humankind until we all accept to base our lives and decisions on facts and established, corroborated scientific insights rather than beliefs. This also goes for so-called values, because most ‘values’ which guide our lives are nothing more than uncritically accepted cultural assumptions cemented into socially prescribed and transmitted norms - very often a far cry from anything we could know from a careful study of the issues at stake.

Since the willingness of humankind to ‘think outside the box’, to ‘un-learn’ deeply-held and widely accepted ‘truths’ - which have long been proven to be false - is very limited, one of the most important tools we have is to further these capacities and competences for self-critical, systemic, complex, radical (starting at the root) thinking and understanding, without which coherent, consistent and sustainable action is impossible. Some of the most important insights which will guides us in these learning endeavours are:

In my earlier life I virtually fed on books, on so-called literature. In my high-brow arrogance I thought that literature or fiction was the real stuff that could teach us a thing or two about life.

Now, with hindsight and realising how much I was brainwashed into this postmodern fog, I have understood indeed a thing or two about life, but not from literature. Now, trying to navigate a way through the complexities of modern life without reducing them to sound-bites, I realise that most often I cannot read fictional texts with pleasure anymore because every character, every scene, every underlying claim to human nature and how the world works is so badly out of tune with what we know by now, so badly or not at all researched that it looses its credibility almost instantly.

Today I have just finished another shocking example. I cannot tell you how much I looked forward to reading this new book of Arundhati Roy, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”. I had so much enjoyed, twenty years back, “The God of Small Things”, and re-read and re-enjoyed some years later.

I also had much enjoyed Roy’s political writing in the meantime. So I thought this political fiction might just be up my street. How bitterly was I disappointed! I am baffled and speechless after reading it. How is this possible? How can Roy write like this, knowing so much about power, democracy and knowledge? How can you take sides in such a black-and-white manner in conflicts - here Kashmir & Maoist uprisings in India - and present these struggles as freedom fights without pointing out the well established historical fact that no humans will ever be free under the yoke of religion or ideology (such as Maoism)? How can you pretend to forget the lessons of so many revolutions that fighting a war without building the fair and democratic future as you go along leads to horrible dictatorship?

In times when it seems that the folly of irrational, populist, greedy and destructive power politics returns to the world stage, most prominently with Trump and Putin, we are well advised not to be too sure of our own convictions and ideas. They might, more than we might like, be part of the problem, rather than the solution.

I have written about this in a little more depth elsewhere: 'Freedom, Justice and Sustainability: Do We Really Know What We Are Doing?', in: Eco-Justice. Essays on Theory and Practice in 2016, ed. by David Diethelm (Eugene, OR: Eco-Justice Press, 2016), pp. 23-42. ISBN 978-1-945432-02-6; http://ecojusticepress.com/eco-justice-essays-on-theory-and-practice-2016.html). But let me just draw together the most important thoughts here:

I have just finished reading this wonderful, insightful book and I would like to share with you what seems to me to be most important (and not just because one of his chapters uses the affirmative of the title question of my last book: Do We Know What We Are Doing?):

I was struck yet again at the beauty and liberating force of scientific understanding, as opposed to believing in metaphysical Überbau: you don't believe what appears to be the case, you go, check, triangulate and peak behind the obvious and find ways to measure things you thought immeasurable. And, suddenly, it is there and makes sense: no need for absurd and difficult theories (such as dualism between brain and mind, physical and mental world).

Of course we are physical beings and everything we do, think, feel etc. is mediated and created by the brain, but not on its own but in interdependent, systemic interaction with the outside world, other brains and experience. We don't like this fact very much that we are far from being autonomous, independent selfs, “I's”, apart from the world. So the brain creates this illusion of us as independent agents, but we can show today that this is a creation of the brain on the basis of an unending interchange with the world via our senses, via our communication with others. We are always modelled and modified by this interaction, even if we believe to be independent. What we are and who we are, we are through our learning from and interaction with the world and others, not through some inner entity which doesn't exist.

Yet Frith shows convincingly that these illusions created by the brain in no way mean that there is no outside world and no way of knowing. On the contrary, these abstracted models of the world our brains create are necessary for us to live and survive, since they allow as to do what every good scientist does all the time: using the model of the world we have we interpret our sensory input, what others say and constantly check whether the models predict what we see and hear and feel correctly, or if we need to adjust our models, refine them, make them better.

So, understanding our brains and how they create our minds better might help us not just to fight back our illusion of the autonomous self in order to understand the interdependence of being alive with others, but it might also give us a good model of how we should try to approach understanding and knowledge: not that we believe in any fixed system of explanations or in any master or in any holy book, but that we continually recheck, refine, and debunk: what seems difficult to understand, what seems way beyond rational explanation – this is what history and progress of scientific understanding teaches us – sooner or later turns out to be explicable. It was not some more-than-human entity with which explanation resides. It was simply and humbly that we had not be careful or ingenious enough to find the right explanation.

So, as I said many times before: scientific understanding is the only game in town. Fearlesss enlightenment rather than fearful belief. Or, to quote Frith and Horace:

"A real scientist wants to make her own, independent check on the measurements reported by someone else: "Nullius in verba" is the motto of the Royal Society of London: "Don't believe what people tell you, however authoritative they may be."

Or: Nullius addictus iurarae in verba magistri: "I am not bound to swear allegiance to the word of any master." Horace, Epistulae. (Frith, 2007, 6)

Almost everyday I am flabbergasted about the level of ignorance or ‘arrogance of ignorance’ we still display when trying to make sense of the world. One example is that we still trust ‘common sense’ or ‘intuition’ when we should have learnt, historically and scientifically, that these are the things least likely to make us understand what is really going on. For example the notion of ‘I’, as Francisco Varela explains (1999): "There are the different functions and components that combine and together produce a transient, nonlocalizable, relationally formed self, which nevertheless manifest itself as a perceivable entity ... we will never discover a neuron, a soul, or some core essence that constitutes the emergent self of Francisoc Varela or some other person."" (Capra/Luisi, 2014, 181)

Another one is this absurd idea that there are these ‘good’ emotions vice versa the ‘bad’ mind, particularly popular in so-called Eastern philosophy and religions like Buddhism. In yoga and meditation the mind is constantly vilified as the great distractor, yet in fact we are nothing, literally and simply not alive without our brain/mind. There is no emotion, not gut-feeling, no nothing without our brain processing the sensory information and actually producing an emotion. Or as Kristen A. Lindquist put it: “It goes without saying that the brain produces emotions—in this day and age, you’d have to be a pretty staunch dualist to argue otherwise. The big question that remains concerns how the brain creates emotions.“

These days we need clarity and radical honesty. Albert Einstein and Salman Rushdie provide what is needed:

“Still, without Brouwer's suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition." (Einstein, 3.1.1954, http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/word-god-is-product-of-human-weakness.html)

I have in a recent post claimed that in our societies it is taboo to talk about overpopulation, about the fact that we have no automatic right to kids, about the scientific reality that there are way too many people on this planet and that a plethora of issues actually stem from this overpopulation. Others, such as Bello (2013: 173–180) have written about why population growth is indeed a massive problem, despite the fact that most people in the West prefer to ignore it for fear of being politically incorrect. Bateson had already quite a while ago stated that “the population explosion is the single most important problem facing the world today” and “that the very first requirement for ecological stability is a balance between the rates of birth and death.” (Bateson 2000: 500) According to calculations from many different positions planet Earth cannot sustain more than 3 billion people (high estimate) in the long run (see discussion in Latouche 2011: 150–157). So it is not a new debate or one without answers, but it is certainly a sidelined one.

One of the reasons for this is that it is very difficult, as Jean-Paul Besset has put it, to “not be progressive (as in ‘uncritical progress believer’) any more without becoming reactionary”. The discourse of ‘too many (foreign) people’ is one that is emanating from the right and there is no way I want to have anything to do with this xenophobic approach. Yet, there ARE way too many people. So what to do?

I think the solution is that we have to arrive at a new contrat social. We need to agree as a community, region, nation on a new set of values and first principles which are exclusively guided by sustainability (see for such a set my article in JESD 5 (2011) 39-60). And the deal then would be that those who are prepared to accept, live by and support those sustainability values which enable a future worth living, are welcome to live in the neighbourhood, region, city or nation, irrespective of whether they are grey, green, yellow, black, pink or white, gay, straight or bi, blind, deaf or queer. To suggest this, is actually not such a big deal: it is simply the process on which democratic nations have been built: they call it constitution. And the deal usually, sensibly is: if you do not accept this constitution you cannot be part of that nation.

What can I know?

What ought I to do?

What can I hope? (Immanuel Kant, 1781)

I haven’t written in a while, and it freaks me to write now. Because it seems pretty clear to me that writing is no good at all. All I have to say is known, there is nothing new. It is just that all what we cumulatively know as humanity is like sitting underneath an ice surface: it is there, but it is as if not there. We totally ignore it in our daily lives.

I have written a book about all this (Do We Know What We Are Doing? Reflections on Learning, Knowledge, Economics, Community and Sustainability), so I keep it short sweet & simple here.

I am just really flabbergasted that a lot of the stuff we have learnt since the Enlightenment - when humankind for the first time tore away the fog of ignorance and belief - is not at all on the table, in our conscience self-awareness, in our discussions, guiding our actions. I name but a few:

A friend of mine sent me these awesome cartoons / illustrations which I would like to share with you.

Recently, I saw in the space of a couple of days two series of images which caught my attention, since they were so similar. They both tell a tale of - for most of us - unimaginable destruction, oppression, misuse of power, denigration, disrespect, abuse - you see I struggle to find words.

I am particularly fascinated by the two (hi)stories which I have followed now over many years, since they are like two sides of a coin.  On the one hand we have the case of the Palestinians who have been driven from their homeland by a strange combination of bad conscience by the Allied Powers after the holocaust and colonial supremacy, allowing the powers that be to sit in front of a map and just draw new countries into existence, irrespective of the native population - a fact well known by indigenous peoples around the world, from Aborigines in Australia to Native Americans.

(Source: The Catastrophe: Al Nakba. How Palestine Became Israel)

Just look at it: it is absolutely brutal, whichever way you look at it!

And then the other case. For quite some time, I have followed the life of the Swiss activist Bruno Manser, who lived with the Penan people in Sarawak for some years, adopting their subsistence way of life, finding it way more sustainable than anything the West has on offer and documenting this time in his beautiful Tagebücher aus dem Regenwald (Diaries from the Jungle). Recently, I read a fascinating account by Lukas Straumann, called Raubzug auf den Regenwald - Auf den Spuren der malaysischen Holzmafia (soon to be published in English: ) which details the incredible brutality and short-term greed and lust for power which drove Sarawak's Chief Minister Taib Mahmud to literally destroy the rain forest which was the Penan's livelihood and source of survival. Now look at this, the destruction of the Sarawak rain forest over time:

(Source: New forest map for Sarawak reveals large-scale deforestation)

Just compare the primary forest landcover in 1960 and in 2010 (light green). Isn't this uncanny? That some peoples' imagined superiority over another people, and other people's assumed superiority over nature has the same force of destruction, literally clearing the map of life?