How Things Stand

The current thinking is that at the center of stars, the primordial stuff is squeezed so tightly that it fuses; becoming stuff that’s slightly less primordial and that weighs an infinitesimal bit less than the original primordial stuff. This tiny difference in mass is released as radiant energy. We sense the heat. We see the light. We feel the beat.

         Among the people who think about these things, most seem to believe that the universe will continue to expand forever. That is to say, no big crunch; that the possible future or futures stretch much farther ahead than the fourteen billion or so years of the past that have so far accumulated, notwithstanding the idea that there might be no theoretical limit to the size of a hydrogen bomb, or a reactor meltdown, these being fuelled by the most plentiful element in the universe.

We can even go as far as to say that hydrogen has a single proton with one electron orbiting it.

No. But wait. We shouldn't say orbiting anymore. That would be seeing things through the frame of the outdated and discredited Rutherford model. It seems we would be much closer to the truth if we said, more or less hovering around it, or associated with it, in a fuzzy and indistinct sort of way. But even so, we can still feel an exhilarating certainty that hydrogen has one proton with an electron more or less hanging around with it.

Things were once much simpler. The trees of Eden bore both fruits and flowers in the same season. The first realization of Adam and Eve, after eating the forbidden fruit, was that they were naked. They found themselves harvesting the fig tree, for its leaves, not for the figs.

Genesis tells us that their eyes were opened, not that their consciousness was dimmed. They fell into an awareness of the physical body and hid from God, who cursed them with mortality and pain and work and child-bearing and drove them out of Paradise.

Snakes would henceforth go about on their bellies. Bread would be purchased with brow sweat. Until a wholly new kind of civilization emerged in the West, based on a constant reinvestment of capital and continuous technical improvement, all cultures, all civilizations, were economically dependent on a sustainable agricultural surplus.

Plants turn starlight into food, you see. They just sit there synthesising, drawing in water and nutrients through their roots and carbon dioxide from the air. All other living things eat plants, or plant eaters.

Only one kind of fish emerged from the primal sea. All the frogs and snakes and bluebirds and monkeys and even us came from that in a random tumbling, accidental, out-of-control kind of way. As a result, our air passages cross our food ways, so that we sometimes choke to death on our food. Our reproductive and excretory systems are dangerously close to one another.

Yahweh works the lump of clay. A conch blares, mingling with insistent infant wailing. Miniature arms flail. Tiny legs kick. The midwife’s fingers clasp a generous reward. Horoscopes are cast, or not. Cigars are handed around perhaps. A baptism follows, or a circumcision, or both, or neither. Either stem cells are harvested from the umbilical cord, or it is simply thrown away. In some places, the date initiates some tax advantages. The demographic textures twist and shift, constantly, inevitably, inexorably, to the headlong march of nucleotide chains, pairs of them, twisted together in elegant spirals.

It astonishes, really, how we got from the Palaeolithic to the nuclear so quickly. Apes became people who hunted and gathered. Hunters became farmers, then farmers manufacturers, and manufacturers drifted into doing something vaguely post-industrial in the service sector.

For a time it seemed that the universe and all its components, both living and inert, had a fundamental order built on the mechanically logical foundation of Newtonian physics and the dazzling insight of Darwinism. A conviction of absolute objectivity, that from the moment the heavenly spheres were set in motion, everything that was to happen had already been determined, always entirely rational and with no erratic intervention in human history, no subversion of the laws of nature by working bizarre miracles, no dictating obscure laws on mountain tops. Existence was a pre-recorded tape playing itself out the only way it could, despite the Christian insistence on the reality of free will and that Hindu-Buddhist recycle stuff.

But actually, mass and energy change unceasingly into one another all the time. Everything is only accidental after all. Whereas once man was created in God’s image and placed upon the earth to have dominion over it, it turns out that we are simply an elaborate animal that talks. Moreover, the latest molecular neurology research seems to indicate that consciousness might be only the illusion of control and that there’s perhaps no such thing as free will after all.

Now bearded young men sit in tea houses, under ranting, blazing televisions, sucking on cigarettes and staring at an image of the West characterized by tyranny, hypocrisy, greed, and spiritual bankruptcy. Democracy leads to chaos and mob rule. Capitalism fosters class war and subjects us to a clique of bankers. Communism stifles human initiative.

Distraught by the malaise, they fight the regime with half-baked ideas. They dream the absence of individuality; a total community, a society wholly unanimous in its beliefs and wholly free from inner conflicts. They speak with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe that the banishment of feeling renders them wise, and more important, and more credible to other men.

Attempting to make their faith whole, they emphasize the virtues of plain common sense, embracing a sober, narrow literalism that discredits imagination and fantasy, organizing the world into air-tight compartments in which right is utterly and obviously and completely opposite to and distinct from wrong, fleeing an unsettling profusion in which there are no boundaries, no certainties, and no clearly or easily defined identities.

Moses died without entering the Promised Land. Christ was crucified. Even Arafat would only ever get Jericho and the slums of Gaza, and even then, still under Israeli occupation. Muhammad triumphed during his lifetime, and died both a sovereign and a conqueror. His realm once stretched from the Spice Islands to al Andalus. The Verses of the Sword that arose in response to the particular circumstances of seventh century Medina were applied verbatim in New York City at the beginning of the twenty-first. Even as I write, some people are preparing to blow themselves up in our midst.

Displaced by mergers and acquisitions and corporate fraud, and stung by the unfulfilled promises of sex and drugs and rock and roll, other young men, under the influence of amphetamines or ecstasy or not, confront a dispiriting world view that is 600 pixels by 800 pixels, no more. They seek, and some find, their emotional satisfaction in toggle switches and dials, joysticks and gauges, buzzers, icons on screens and light-emitting diodes.

The system dispenses both wisdom and foolishness in random equal measure, without distinction. They quest through triplet W’s, not for a grail, but for the latest version of the software, downloaded for free, through the kind offices of those affectionately or disparagingly known as pirates. Through symbols and formulas, crafted to enhance speed or condense thought, a cascade of images appears; ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, antisocial, while their computer screens exhort them to disclose their credit card numbers as a route to the goal of enlarging the size of their penises. In the video game Mortal Kombat, players triumph over their opponents through martial arts, usually by kicking them to death.

Despite the reports of bottoming out, and of dawn sightings and lights in tunnels; notwithstanding the flickering rallies and the micro up-ticks in the indices of despair, the crisis trudges on. This is no cyclical once-again-we-are-faced-with, akin to an el Niño or an organized labour disruption, or even the bureaucratic tedium we suffer replacing identity and credit cards after each armed robbery. Let’s leave aside for now the environment and climate change and globalization. Let’s not mention genetic engineering, or even pre-emptive war. But still we’re left with culture wars, identity politics, a million new and conflicting paradigms, deconstructive postmodernism, nihilism, narcissism, pluralistic relativism, religious fundamentalism, mutating micro-organisms and the politics of self, as well as the jihadis and the geeks and the blessed and the damned.

No, this is clearly not a repair-it-while-you-wait disruption. This will take some time. Nothing less than an epochal change is taking place. To explain things we are likely to have to call on that branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behaviour is highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, so that small alterations can give rise to strikingly great consequences, as when butterfly wing-flapping spawns typhoons and hurricanes. There might be some inconvenience and perhaps some discomfort for certain individuals and groups, and certainly no guarantees for anyone.

Almost everywhere amid the carnage, bits of determined good news are being proffered, glinting like a clutched hand-full of small change. Scientists have discovered a gene for happiness. A newly-improved laundry detergent makes clothes cleaner, whiter, brighter. A tide of democracy and freedom is sweeping the Middle East. Hydrogen will free us from our dependence on fossil fuel.

Meanwhile, the vocabulary shifts from “moderating deterioration” to “halt in decline” and then, ominously, to “double dip”. The news channel gives the death toll in the Intifadah, in Baghdad, in Mogadishu, in Freetown, in Kathmandu and Benghazi, then the soccer scores. Interest rates tick down, then up, then down again and share prices collapse and rebound like waves on a beach.

The latest oil spill story sits right next to the latest Israeli outrage in Gaza. This makes perfect sense. Support and endorsement for the terrible expedients to which some of the Israelis feel driven in order to create a state for themselves in Arab Palestine, had been premised on a stable supply of oil. The Suez War, so long ago, so many dead, so forgotten, led to the building of larger and larger oil tankers, based on a flawed design.

In many places around the world, people who have been apprehended by security forces, and then subsequently handed over to and processed by the judiciary, the two very often being one and the same thing, are punished by flogging, by having limbs amputated, by being stoned to death, by firing squad, by lethal injection or by being electrocuted. Some are bored to death, despite living in Cuba and wearing bright orange clothing.

When these matters are discussed by practical people, many hairs are split. In the face of what they construe to be authority, most will do what they are told. They realize that the standard of justice depends on the ability of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to get away with and the weak put up with what they have to accept.

The most frequent causes of death are gun-shot wounds and shrapnel from land mines and unexploded ordinance, followed by heart disease linked to smoking and obesity, says WHO.

The rules of the game are not that complicated and most of us agree on them. To kill innocent people as a means to an end is always murder. The state has a right to order killing in war fought either to protect its own people or to protect others who are treated unjustly. There is no right to intentionally kill innocent people, those who are neither waging war nor supplying its needs. Attacking military targets as carefully as possible may result in unintended but foreseen civilian deaths, and this is not murder.

Eggs are few, and sperm are many. This is the root of war. From elephant seals to brine shrimp to the Taliban, males are driven to control female fertility to ensure their own paternity. Monogamy can only arise in special circumstances in which male and female interests are perfectly aligned and where stable couples leave more offspring than cheaters.

When, after a violent and bloody struggle of claws and teeth and dust, a new male takes over a pride of lions, he systematically kills all the cubs. Succession to the Sublime Porte was only decided after one brother had had his male siblings strangled with a silken bow string. After John was assassinated, Jacqueline chose Onassis because he was a man of many ships.

To be valid is to be taken to be valid. Spin doctors calculate the shelf-life of the truth. Art’s chief predicate is its auction value. Reverence for those raw, neurotic yellow globs squashed onto those still-wet blue globs, is not because they speak profoundly and eloquently and subtly about sunflowers or angst or penury, but because some Japanese bank paid a gazillion dollars for them.

Under the weight of the burden of the whole past, the crisis in the avant-garde is terminal. All the masterpieces, great and small, exert a pressure of paralyzing effect. Everything has been done. Both substance and technique are exhausted. No one can think of anything more to do. The paintings in the Altamira caves are as accomplished, as brilliant, as compelling, as any that have been produced since.

There is no contemporary equivalent to the Rosetta, nothing even remotely similar. Or if there once was, it has been looted, along with everything else from the museum. No point in wasting any time trying to decipher the fragments of text or piece together the broken bits of images. Shards are all they are.

Those festivals, once so quaint and ethnic, now so potent, Yom Kippur and Tet, for example, can’t help triggering the associations “war” and “offensive”; and Valentine’s Day automatically elicits the word “massacre”.

History and the past are two distinctly different things. The past really happened, while history is simply narrative, constructed in the circle around the campfire, as much to spellbind and entertain and to coerce conformity and to direct attention at those who are to blame, and to those who will put things right, as to explain, while all behaviour is ultimately driven by the quest for reproductive advantage.

The paradigm has shifted. Modernity has run its course. We look back on it now as the Moderns once looked back on the Victorians. There’s been a discontinuity. Time shoots like an arrow into the genuinely unknown, leaving the past immutably behind. New forms of social organization with a transforming influence on many aspects of existence have emerged.

Central to this was the development of information networks on a global scale. Capital, ideas, information and images slosh freely around the globe like erratic ocean tides, eroding national boundaries and profoundly changing the ways in which we experience the world. We are no longer governed by the so-called grand or master narratives, the underpinning framework of ideas by means of which we formerly made sense.

There has been a major shift in the nature of identity. We live in a world in which the appearance of things has been separated from authentic originals. Actual histories, geographies and human experiences are not only obscured, they are irrelevant. The twentieth century has suddenly come to seem like the distant past, a compost of ideas and time lines, epic blind violent convulsions and ideological visualizations, melting into the ambiguity of antiquity.

The dilemma for art is this: To take past and present and make fun of everything in it by parody, pastiche, ridicule and desecration to signify rejection, or to return to the bare technical elements of art and, excluding ideas and ulterior purpose, play variations on these elements simply to show their sensuous power and the pleasure afforded by bare technique, or to remain serious but find ways to get rid of the past by destroying the very idea of art itself.

There is no dividing line between human and animal intelligence. Even honey bees have a world view in which they can distinguish the conceptual from the geographical. Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive. Sub-atomic particles can be in more than one place at the same time. A conscious mind is not computable. If quantum effects are fundamental to conscious thought, then this might go some way toward explaining some of the implications of aspects of our thinking and behaviour.

But the world has become far too crazy and science is as yet a patchwork, not a unified system. And science, after all, is about finding the simplest explanation consistent with the evidence, about parsimony, not really about proof. The explanatory chain of logic that links an emergent property, like the mind, to its reductionist cause, the brain, can be imagined to exist. It is just far too intricate for anyone to comprehend. Nature, running trillions of causes-and-effects in parallel makes the connection with ease, seamlessly from micro to macrocosm. It is we who get bogged and mired in the complexity of the forest and the trees. And anyway, even some of the scientists are saying that scientific rationalism can’t answer certain questions.

One thing is clear. The nature and objectives of both contemporary particle physics and cosmology, and of poetry and music, fit into an ethos in which everyone but the most naive, believes that the whole globe could easily sink into lethal barbarism, as Europe did in the fifth century, after the collapse of Rome; leaving rubble, broken arches, monuments crumbling to dust, roofs open to the sky, the cast statues of famous men melted down for the bronze, the empty plinths inscribed with their forgotten names like artefacts of conceptual art.

And the women, so many fantasy figures, Eve and Pandora, Athena and Liberty, the White Goddess, Mary and the other virgins, Our Lady of Wisdom, and the Naked Truth, Faith, Hope, Charity, and Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude, with Poverty, Chastity, Obedience, and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the heavenly beatitudes, the five senses, the seven liberal arts, and the Muses… but for the Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.