Faith

There's a reason for faith commonly under-appreciated:

We humans can't function without faith. We know nothing without faith. When we bark our shins we're showing faith in our sensory system: faith that the pain in our leg represents contact with a physical universe. We don't know anything without faith.

Faith can be overdone. Witness St. Paul.

Which brings me to my point: humans use faith to displace whatever they want displaced: experience, reason, logic ... Faith can substitute for any of them. Schools, churches, media ... dispense faith.

A gallimaufry of examples may be the least misleading (just a couple to start):
We drop bombs on people. Common logic would indicate that that's bad, but no: with faith, we can see that that's how Americans help people. Americans are helpful. Isn't that what the papers say?

We murder Christ, drink his blood, eat his flesh. You'd think we're murderers, deicides, vampires, cannibals; no, with faith it proves that we're saved, God's Chosen.

We just lost nine bets in a row at the track. You might think that that means that gambling is for fools. No, with faith, it proves that we'll hit the jackpot next time.

Some, More, Too Many

We're a social species. Groupness was chosen for us as a survival strategy by our species/environment ecology long before any of us as individuals could have been considered intelligent. The ploy that made us money yesterday can put us in the red tomorrow. I'm for groupness: never mind that I had no more choice in the matter than you did. But for the last few decades I've been dragging my feet about super-groupness. I've love mankind in ones, and occasionally by the dozen: but I dread all groups larger than what I believe was the correct size for a human group: maximizing around two hundred, two-hundred and fifty.

Group a um

I love Jesus, however rickety the sources of our stories about him. I love his twelve disciples. I love how Leonardo grouped them into sub-groups: three, three; six, six: seven: thirteen, with an odd extra, a female confusing everything.




I love the early church: a few hundred Christians, hiding from the Romans: like Jews hiding from Hitler. But I hate the Church.

I love Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill ... but I hate nations. I hate two hundred million Americans become three hundred. I hate a world population of a billion become four billion, five billion ...

There are lots of good things that are good, good, good: but then become toxic. Human groups cooperate as well as compete, they love as well as hate, they help as well as sabotage. If Roosevelt opens the door for Stalin, that's nice; but when Mussolini cooperates with Hitler's murdering Poles, something's gone wrong. Even cooperation can turn toxic.

Watch out for human groupness turning super-toxic. I sometimes with we were back on the savanna, lucky to find a dead bug.

Plant Succession, Human Recession

I just posted news at another blog on Jan's slash pine falling in yesterday's winds. That post was about Jan and her beautiful home and grounds (and lake) ... This post will continue hints begun there on Florida ecology: specifically on human disruption of Florida ecology, focusing on pine flat woods, and detailing recent history of Lake Charlotte, here in Sebring, Highlands Country, Florida.

Plant Succession
Pine flat woods had been the dominant environment in pre-civilized Florida. Florida has been above sea level for at least ten million years. Gradually the sea receded, creating dry land around the Highland Ridge than runs from what is today Lake Wales south to today's Lake Placid. Florida plant succession would have begun with scrub land. Pine flatwoods and other environments such as bogs and cypress swamp would have followed. The original Florida would have been scrub, followed by scrub with pine flatwoods taking over more and more territory. In the last couple of million years hammocks developed: islands of hardwood trees, some deciduous, and palm trees, taking over moist low lying but not swampy ground.

The common pine of Florida is the slash pine. Slash pine, when Morgan and Flagler developed Florida (once the US army had cleared inconvenient humans aside for them) covered 60% or more of the territory. Hammocks range from just a few trees to a forest as large as Highlands Hammock, here on the west side of Sebring. The health and continuing identity of a pine flatwoods depended on natural fire. Periodic natural fire kills off the oak trees growing up as "weeds" amid the pines, burns off ground fuel, permits light to penetrate to the under-story. Slash pine seeds cannot germinate without light. (Scrub pine seeds cannot germinate till fire has opened the cones!)

Human Recession
Humans have lived in Florida for some time, but not in large numbers prior to Morgan and Flagler. Once Florida was developed, pine flatwoods was the common environment, so pine flatwoods was the environment to be superceded by human settlement. Humans at first employed fire for slash and burn farming, but post-Flagler humans repressed fire. Oaks persevered. Pine seeds got shaded into sterility. Ground fuel accumulated: so when fire did come there was danger of it building a momentum that the slash pine had insufficient resistance to. Thus sea bed gives way to scrub, scrub gives way to pine flatwoods, pine flatwoods shares borders with hammock, with swamp, with bog, with bay head, and then to human settlement, and then ... to catastrophe: potential catastrophe anyway.

Jan has lived on her lake in Sebring for a decade or so. A number of slash pine that made the property seem like something out of James Fennimore Cooper fell in that time. Today there are a half dozen magnificent pines, 75 to 85 or 90 feet tall, but only a half dozen. Today there is one fewer than yesterday. Note: there are no new pines growing up!

Plant life grows toward light. Dig a canal, clear a road, trees lean into the clearing. In Florida the soil is young, thin, poor in nutrients. When there's wind, and in Florida there's wind a plenty, and at more than one time of the year, the trees slip their moorings, fall into the road, into the canal. In 1990 I gave the history and ecology tours at Highlands Hammock State Park. I'd drive the tram along the canal built by the CCC in the 1930s at what was then the south border of the park. The south canal is bordered by hammock, by bog, by bay head, by pine flatwoods. Every day trees would have fallen into the canal, across the road: mostly red maples. Everyday the rangers would Vroom out to the south canal in their trucks with chain saws, and RRRR, RRRR cut the trees into logs and shove them to the side of the berm. Everyday, when I could, I would go out to the south canal, with a community service slave (or two) (when I could get them), and throw the logs off into the bay head so that the public, on the tour, would see an illusion of naturalness. Weekends, with a slave or three, I'd drag limbs and boles out of the canal and haul them off into the bay head, out of sight of "my" tour: cosmetics pretending to be natural. If I hadn't, the chances of the public spotting an alligator, or a cooter, let alone an otter, were negligible (despite the canal being way over-populated with alligators: once stretch sometimes had three dozen baby alligators visible in a compound "nursery": big mama also commonly visible. (The males, ten, sometimes fourteen feet, were visible to me when I ventured on foot into the side canals: we saw few big males along the south canal.))

At Jan's lake side a couple of grand pines lean westward, out over the lake. I hope their roots on the landward side are well anchored, because they visibly don't have much buttressing on their "weak" side. This set of facts in this case casts no blame on human behavior: the lake was there before the railroad blossomed Sebring's population, and before a widened Highway 27 exploded it, especially on the west side of 27, west of Lake Jackson. Certainly no blame can be laid at Jan's door: or at mine: I, who pick up the fallen pine cones for her, so that her "lawn" is unobstructed, imitating an English lawn, where the squire didn't contend with slash pine, "English" "landscape" having been concocted by human development over centuries, not just decades. (Isn't it amazing that humans mistake fingerprints of our activities as "nature"! schools doing nothing to correct us!) (There's been little nature in England for a long time: except insofar as everything is nature: including our interference.) But: everything else is evidence of the interference of development. The pine population isn't just waning; it's disappearing. A dozen pines become six, become four, become one, become none.

Ah, but we "gain." Everything is covered with potato-vines! The sky is blackout out by a superabundance of Spanish moss: indigenous to Florida but not common in unmolested pine flatwoods. That is, Jan's grounds were covered with vines and moss until I yanked most of it down and burned it on the beach.

I also clear ground fuel from her borders: and beyond her borders. Jan's property is beautiful in itself, both deep and wide, lush with growth, and on the lake. See some of my posts on her home at the PaulKnatz blog, 2010 September: a dozen and a half such posts, with views of the beach, and so forth. Southward, her property is bordered by a right of way the neighbors can use to access the lake. Further south the land is "jungle": unmaintained by the widow in residence. To the north Jan's lot is bordered by a lot wholly undeveloped. There the pines completely disappeared under the potato-vines: or had, till I cleared ten or twenty feet inward, improved Jan's view: and protecting Jan's home from fire, reducing the ground fuel.

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Please allow for my preference for the possibility of a mankind governed by restraint, by good sense and good manners; while I am an enemy of unbridled human id. (I unbridle my own id, but that's just me; 6 billion of us are another matter. And if I thought it would help, I'd bridle my own!) I'm not for forest and against human settlement: until human settlement proves incompatible with forest: then I'm for forest and against human settlement. Humans in groups could have lived on earth for millions of years into the future (barring an unknown, perhaps unknowable, calamity). As it is I think I future is truncated, foreshortened.

details and exposition will be added over time

Sovereignty

A current (current/ancient) squabble between the Irish and the Church goads me:

I don't accept King George III's sovereignty in the Americas in the 18th Century, I don't accept it in the British Isles either.
We "white" "Americans" threw George and his redcoats out. Good, I approve. Except we didn't throw him out so people could be free of his sovereignty, we threw him out so our own King George, and his cronies, could be sovereign in his place. Take Palm Beach, Florida, for example: a nice stretch of Atlantic coastline. Natives lived there, and who wouldn't, given a choice? So we sovereign white people, sent our army, at the combined suggestion of JP Morgan and Henry Morrison Flagler: who wanted to develop and sell the other people's turf.

Gee, if I like Donald Trump's real estate, and if I were a sovereignty like George's England, or the other George's US (or like the Pope's Vatican!), could I send an army to chase Donald Trump off of 57^th Street, so I could develop it?

If I had an army, the answer is, Yes: I could try. And if Trump yielded, I could claim sovereignty.

(But would it be true?)

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My attitude toward sovereignty as divulged above is not new, not recent. It's acuity is chronic: across time. But here's a related change of pk attitude: once upon a time, for most of my life, since childhood, I would have conceded sovereignty to God. More recently I would have conceded sovereignty to god. Now I'm not sure I concede sovereignty to any entity.

I'm afraid that needs a lot of explanation: in this culture. I was raised to believe that the universe belonged to God. That he made it, that he hadn't sold it, or given it. Or, if he gave it (or sold it), the way he gave Israel to the Jews — "Israel" being occupied by Phoenicians the Jews called Canaanites — it still really belonged to him: so God could give, and God could take back: an Indian giver! (Of all the insults and injuries we visited upon natives — short of murder, genocide, etc. _ is any worse than still calling them by Columbus's mistake: "Indians"? Yes: maybe calling giving-with-strings-attached "Indian giving"!)

Let's concede that God owns the earth and the sky and the Jews ... and Israel. Let's concede that he owns you and me ... and every wog: every poor bastard born in the ghetto, every poor bastard born in Bangladesh, every poor bastard born in the New Guinean highlands, people who till recently had never heard of Africa let alone Europe let alone the US. Do we really concede that God has a right to torture the souls of those people for eternity if they don't get baptised? If God is sovereign, then he does. Just as if the US is sovereign, then we have the right to drop napalm on little girls, and bombs any damn where the President pleases! And the Vatican doesn't have to cooperate with charges brought against its priests! Sovereign!

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It's been a long time since I've accepted the beliefs I was taught as a child: that the universe was magical, that it needed a creator to exist, that magic, not physics, determines things ... that the big magician owns everything, that he can give things to his special creature, man. Today I don't believe that humans are competent to have opinions probable of truth on any of these matters. Individuals are capable of learning, I see that, but I've become unconvinced that human society is capable of learning: short of a catastrophe so catastrophic that any shred of the species that came through the catastrophe would no longer be the same species: oh, please, I hope.

See? That last little reservation? Whom am I praying to? To a good god, to a progressive god, to a potential evolution, to something ... better.

But not to a god who owns anything!

Trying

Trying

drawing by bydlr

I'll be adding text here shortly

Flotsam Causes

Eight-ball into the side pocket! It's so easy, or it is with a little practice. You line up the 8-ball with the side pocket, you fix the line in your mind, you line up your cue ball with the spot on the 8-ball intersected by your imaginary line to the pocket, now you line up your cue stick, decide whether to roll the ball straight, whether to impact the cue ball low or in the middle, depending on where you want the cue ball to go after it impacts the 8-ball, decide if you want any English on the ball, and make your stroke. If your stroke is true, the 8-ball will fall into the side pocket: far more often than not. If it doesn't, then you didn't stroke it right, or, you didn't see your lines correctly, didn't make the right decision about where your balls impacted. In any case, unless there was an outside disturbance, an earthquake, the table disintegrated, the 8-ball went where you made if go regardless of where you intended to make it go. That's physics, that's the physical universe, the universe Gregory Bateson calls Pleroma. The trouble with our thinking is we think, and we are trained to think, by not very bright or original thinkers, that we live in the physical universe. Well, indirectly we do: the physical universe as modeled by our symbolic universe. But it's that later universe, or combination of universes, Creatura, Sentiens, that we directly live in: and in these universes of life, of symbols, of intelligence, of awareness, of false awareness, things are not simple.

I repeat a favorite illustration of my son's: Black Crayon. The school system learned that children who attempted suicide had used more black crayon in their drawings than normal: so they took all the children's black crayons away. The morons in charge of schools and children confused symptom and disease: they thought that by preventing the symptom, use of black crayons, they could prevent the disease. (Their action was irrelevant: except as a betrayal of liberty.)

Now here's an illustration that's long been a favorite of mine. The kid acts up in school, he's over-active, they say. They give the kid a med, you learn that the med is classified as a "stimulant," you go whoa! You're trying to calm the kid down, a stimulant is the last thing you should give him. Wrong: the stimulant tried by the staff stimulates the kid's activity repressor: it's the kid's natural depressive system that stimulated. Paradox? Only superficially. The logic is complex, but not illogical. That's Creatura, Sentiens: the universe of life.

But, I repeat: we think we live in Pleroma. We think that causes are as simple as lining up the 8-ball. We all do it. I do it.

Ferinstance, if you've read around pk enough surely you've seen his iterations of his identification with Jesus, the martyred god, with Galileo, the martyred genius .... The more so since my arrest in 2006. Still, it was not new thinking. I've identified with Jesus since childhood, and so do all Christians, even if not to the extent I do (or with the manifest justification!)

But dig this: in pk thinking, Christianity itself, Jesus himself, is subject to the same simplifications, the same vanities. God made man in God's image, a vain, self-maximizing fragment of consciousness.

I offered the world Illichian social networking in 1970 when I joined Illich's deschooling ideas to found the Free Learning Exchange. Cybernetic data basing, digital record keeping, in a public institution Not Controlled by Government! might allow humans to realize some of the social implications of Christianity, help us live together convivially, without the arrogance and interference of imperial kleptocracy. There, see? I think of myself as a cause! Well, of course I am a cause, and so are we all. But what is being caused is very complex: maybe there's an 8-ball involved and a cue ball, and maybe also an earthquake, and the table disintegrating.

When I invented the internet I was very much aware, and have routinely said, that "my" ideas had been floating around me for a decade at least, 1960ish: so much flotsam and jetsam. Now here's me, flotsam floating around amid jetsam. I encounter Illich, himself a jetsam floating around amid flotsam. He refers to Jesus in a way I resonate with, though I see Jesus as also so much flotsam floating around amid so much jetsam: in a world where Augustus Caesar, himself a Sargasso sea of flotsam and jetsam, was deluding himself that he could take 8-ball-in-the-side-pocket control of the world! Augustus influenced the world. So did Jesus. So do I, and you. So does the catatonic institutionalized in a box hosed out every other day by someone without a green card who the moment before stole the hearing aid from some old lady in the same facility.

Now here's the United States, stealing everything that is or isn't nailed down, paying royalties to those perceived as powerful and stomping extra hard on those perceived to be defenseless, deaf, and not accidentally, to my claims that it's my ideas that were stolen.

This is familiar. This is the universe of life, subset Sentiens, complicated by politics: the state of people organized for leverage, bossing people down-tide of them. I don't claim to understand it all: what I claim is that the Augustus Caesars, the Hitlers, the Nixons, don't understand it, understand if far less well than I do, but lack the humility to admit it, as well as the intelligence to understand it half as well as I do: and too stupid to see that it's they who are helping to disintegrate the table!

The majority is always smarter than some minority, but also less smart, far less, than some other minority.

I like to trust that god is smart, but fear that he too, at least the capitalized one, God, is so much flotsam. So instead, these days, I just trust that the 8-ball is going where we actually sent it, never mind where we meant to send it.

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Bateson's cosmology of Pleroma and Creatura I report on and developed further (Sentiens ...) at Macroinformation.org. That domain got destroyed, is still down, but some material is being restored (and further explored) at my Macroinformation blog. (Same host as IonaArc.)