The Age of Unjustifiable Triviality Due to Excess

Could it be better that we are impoverished? This appears to be a daft question that need not be treated seriously. But it does now. Our age is that of unreason, all right. This is no harm anyhow, for there has always been a bunch of people, at any given point in time, who behaved in an unreason manner, and who were unreasoned men. This phenomenum, Darwinian or otherwise, can be explained a posteriori, by means of simple observation of the human history as well as a priori, through some deductive logical reasoning of the humanity structure. Since the Age of Enlightenment, those unreasoned bunch (I shall call them the reprobates) imitated in great stupidity the enlightening supposedly given to those enlightened people. Reprobates took advantage of this era, the loophole of enlightened people, and themselves began getting excessivly conceited, for they knew (they were stupid still they possessed such level of cognitive ability so as to still be called a human) this well that they were given the golden opportunity to act stupidly without ever worrying about being penalised for such stupid acts. This became excess. The excessivness emerged since the time when those Washington, Jefferson or Adams proclaimed so vigorously and cogently such unjustifiable standard that all humans are born equal andGeorge Orwell was yet to be born to remind them some of us are more equal than the others that we all were wrongly led into believing that the reprobates were actually born equal with the enligthened group. Reprobates were divided into a few categories. The worse ones were even worse than any parasites that lived on a wrong host that caused the host to die fast.
This age, I call it that of Unjustifiable Triviality Due to Excess, has a deeper element, which is the lack of reasoning and judgement but only essentially making oneself overly important but in fact no importance at all.

John Mortimer

Sir John Mortimer, barrister and freedom-fighter, died on 16th January 2009, aged 85

As usual, reading The Economist's obituary is a literal enjoyment, which is so unique that I can't think of an adjective that quite resembles one with which I could have come up for any food I tasted. Every week I read a life of brilliance, humbleness, controversy, you name only a few.

Every true-born Englishman knows that the law is an ass. Rules are better honoured in the breach than the observance. Judges are best represented in a chorus line at the D'Oyly Carte. The English constitution is a vague formulation in someone's head, and that foundation of English liberties, Magna Carta, is best known for banning eel-traps in the Thames. The firm clip of the law is for the other fellow. Behind the furled umbrellas and decorum, Englishmen are anarchists. Or, as John Mortimer liked to think of them, votaries of 'my darling' Prince Kropotkin.

How nicely a paragraph could be phrased and how much excitment such a paragraph could be read with!

The Age of Unreason

A lot of us talk about the absurdity of our era, about people of these days being unreasonable, and probably about our society being anti-rational (in which the term rational is used in a general sense). Regardless of what our world looks like, it is apparent that people seem to be unable to reason. In a radical sense, this means human stops being homo sapiens. Betrand Russell said, in his essay The Ancestry of Fascism, that the revolt against reason begins with the revolt of reasoning. Russell has his own reasoning. I am not here to repeat how Hume destroyed causation which in turn destroyed the foundation of science. All I want to do is to describe these people being unreasonable, our society being anti-rational and our era being absurd. It is only a description and leaves rationale behind later. This description, without rationale, seems to some the equivalent of those unreasonable, anti-rational and absurd people I am attacking. No, not true. When something we sense is by reason accepted to be so, which is to say, we have no reason to refute what we see, then it is likely that it is true - or at least it is not absolutely wrong or illogical that it cannot exist. It exists. More importantly, I am a rational person, and I am reasonable. I live in a world that is far from absurd, albeit that I know of such a world which I attempt to avoid with all my efforts but regrettably - admittedly - with which I must interact.

Russell was right in pointing out that when the political ecology becomes more heterogeneous, it would be hard to attribute issues to reason, for the diversity in values makes it impossible to argue from a common assumption. If the value of judgement is not the same among each others, then it will not be possible that reasonableness takes place in the argument. Each party comes to his own conclusion from his own starting point. The gap is unbridgeable as a result. The only way is to subject the opposition to force; otherwise, both sides continue to argue and keep on arguing to the point when both lose their temper and at the end defer to force for resolution. We shall be glad to know that at this point in time, politics only just reach the point when both side are arguing. In many parts of the world, the so-called matured democracies come to the point of keeping on arguing. When economically the society can sustain such wasteful behaviour, the arguing continues. One day will come to a point where people cannot find their subsistence and by then they no longer believe argument per se is the effecutal means to acheive what they think to be an end of their own good. Then we jump to force and violence for a final and quick solution. This sounds less probably but possible.

Those immature democracies, pseudo-democracies, democratic totalitarian states and failed states (of different degrees) can come to the final point much easier. However, in the city where I regrettably reside, there is less of a concern to come to the violent resolution, for one particular reason I assure you of the safety - the intellectually castrated citizens are enormous in number. No other how these castrated dogs cannot act violently, as they lack the organ that secrets the hormone to make them violent. They are violent to the extent that they shout at each other in the subway train or yell to some anonymous parties on an internet forum. But when they are given a gun, they have their shit scared out of them and shake and break. Such useless, castrated animals, jumping and joking, hysterically grinning and shouting, fully occupy this place. They know, perhaps, by heart, that in a decade of two, they would turn inferior to the group of humans, whom they once abhored and derided but who have become their masters, and turn totally of no use to them. As a consequence their castration becomes a blessing, for they do not need to reproduce and no more castrated animals to come to this world. The reproduction rate of this city is the lowest in the world. The Age of Unreason tells us that when reason goes away, the barbarism comes to fill its vacuum, which seals the people's fate. The unfortunate thing is when we live in a world which is rational, reasonable and beautiful, we have to tolerate an anti-world that is spreading and no too soon devouring ours.

To the Land of the Covenant

'Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they cannot understand one another's language.' Genesis 11:7

I have asked myself in another web log why the 1980's matters. There should be sociological theories to explain it but all I should like to say is in Japan, the 1980's truly was the golden age not only of scientific and humanity progress but also in music and movies. The animation, or anime, as this form of expression is called, is one of the best developed form of art, if you will. The efforts the Japanese anime artists put into an animated movie is unthinkable unless you have seen one. In 1989-1990, when Japan's asset bubble was almost blown up, a movie called Patlabor the movie, which was an extension of the eponymous TV anime series, was carefully produced. Patlabor is the team of police, equipped with robots, Patlabors, established by the police department to tackle crimes and situations created by robots which are widely used in Tokyo. This first movie version of Patlabor is shocking in images and reality. The delineation of a post-buble Tokyo realistically reflects what Japan is going to face - in a bleak future some people endeavour to protect the things that decent people hold dear. The whole movie defies anything you want from an anime, from the pace to the speech. It is a movie, a dramatic scientific fiction which subtlety covers the dramaticity that could be mistaken as boring and pointless.

The title song, To the Land of the Covenant, is to me the best anime song I have ever come across (the second best is Megazone 23 Part 2 - Please.give.me.the.secret). The title sounds biblical, which in a sense reflects the rationale behind the story of the Patlabor movie that people have become corrupted in the financial bubble and lost their own self - but retained a vacuous ego; so some cleansing work must be done and the remaining good ones are promised a place where God and the good make a covenant. The 'God' is never disclosed in the movie however in the middle, an investigator concludes him to be evil, for he was (he was dead) not truly God as we all know in the conventional sense, but he was the unfathomable one who had some idea that he believed to be right. The song creates a sense of sin which people, the reprobates, have committed and for which they must accept penalty - but the brightness in the rhythm conveys message that the Land of the Covenant is there in store for all of us, but we have to endeavour to fight for it, to fight because of it. The team of Patlabor is among the good; because of whom the world is worth fighting for. How can I forget when confronting a bleak future.

Postscript: The quotation of the Book of Genesis is not from the Catholic edition. I just followed that in the movie.

Celebrating Darwin

The Economist writes of Darwin in the latest edition, saying, correctly, that the evolutionary theory perhaps is the only scientific theory that is not widely accepted. No normal person, regardless of how much science knowledge he bears, would be proud to say that he does not believe in Einstein's theory of relativity; probably all he would say is he has no idea of what Einstein's theory is all about. However, Darwin's theory, which has obviously satisfied all parameters as a valid scientific theory, sounds somewhat controversial 150 years after the Origin of Species was published. In fact the evolving nature of living organism, as the newspaper points out, was not first raised by Darwin. Thinkers far older than Darwin such as the Greek philosopher Empedocles, who was born in 490 bca, are known to have suggested that nature selection might explain why living organisms were adapted to their surroundings. The idea of struggle for existence could be traced back to a Muslim theologian al-Jahiz born in 776 ca. But why, after man has lived through ages of ignorance and begun to enjoy an enlightened life, is he in doubt of Darwin's theory? There are plenty of reasons. I can think of one here: man is too proud to come to the cruel reality that he is no better than other living organisms that share the Earth with him, after thousands of years of theocratic hypnosis. Theocratic hypnosis. Yes, and ironically, the substance this term is supposed to refer to is, in fact, a result of evolutionary force that makes man adaptable to the environment he once lived in. Is there a reason to awaken a man who is still in a Dark Ages slumber, a consequence of theocratic hypnosis. I am not entirely sure of this, despite the fact that I abhor ignorance and barbarism; but I am not sure if the slumber we are in should be utmost interrupted. However, some waking moments are worth pursuing.
To me, the evolution theory is easy to grasp and nice to follow, for, as I said, it has all the attributes of a scientific theory, and so it is falsifiable. Unlike some other arguments such as Intelligent Design which I am not particularly convinced to accept, evolutionary theory has a firm ground to base on and the ground is increasingly strengthened as we find more fossil record and have progress on genetics and molecular biology. Some people who obviously possess a brain which is inferior, in a Darwinian term, do not like to accept they themselves and chimpanzees (probably) share the same ancestor. While I do not like this (because chimpanzees obviously live a much fuller life than those people and it would not be fair if they share the same ancestor as these human beings), I do not deny this likelihood if such likelihood is high enough.

A Bookish Life on the Verandah

I have no right to complain of my life so far as the substance I have been given is concerned. The title of this weblog is all about my life on the verandah of my humble but resourceful apartment. I must qualify that humble is a gentlemanly modesty expected of any educated person. Despite having no right to complain, I preserve my right to be concerned. I am concerned about the doom of civilisation and unlike the trampling of Rome by the barbarians when civilisation survived by the skin of its teeth. We are now at risk of oblivion without much to rely on if civilisation is to be saved. One characteristics of this life on the verandah is its bookishness, if you will. There I may have a cigar, a cup of coffee or a dram of single malt, but it is not complete without a book. There is a profound difference between a life of gastronomy and a life of letters. The former is likely to be infesting among the affluent whereas the latter is more likely now than ever to be at the risk of extinction among them. This is a shame when in the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance, those rich people performed their oblige noblesse. They were rich but entirely passionate about art. The rich nouveau become parvenu simply because they lack the organ to appreciate art which, in my opinion, formulates the skeleton of a civilisation, and without which I am doubtful if a society can be classified among the civilised societies. The reason why I am concerned, as I just explained, is because these days the worst is deemed the best, the golden rule to follow, the silver bullet. Quite the contrary, I am afraid the worst, as these attributes were classified in civilised intelligence but muddled through in today's idiots who control the media, would dominate our world such that the once best and good are swamped and die out. Humanity is submerging into barbarism; one which is different from 2,000 years ago in that the latter was barbaric, but with less ingrained detrimental effects than the former. Modern barbarism was created by those good intentions for high quality people. But they are now abused by the worse kind who is given to live a diligent life but who cannot because of their bad genes.

Why should one tell the truth if it's is to one's advantage to tell a lie

This is the question lingering in Wittgenstein's mind, when the 20th century's greatest philosopher was only eight. He probably believed it has no harm to lie, quite a shock to many who rightly believed that Wittgenstein was a truthful person. Wittgenstein always had his own reason. For a layman such as myself, I think of this question, capably, only from the perspective of the advantageousness of telling a lie. The reason why I seldomly tell a lie is entirely due to the fact that I know I cannot gain any advantage by telling a lie with a long view. Wittgenstein is right that it is nothing wrong to tell a lie in such circumstances, that is to say, when it is to your advantage. The only part that is missing, deliberately or otherwise, is for how long. I may tell a lie and get away with a felony I did at a certain point in time; for which it is to my advantage to lie. However, if I have to lie continually thereafter and those lies become inconsistent among each others, which I say consciously or unconsciously and as a result of the utterance of such words and such inconsistency arising therefrom, I put myself in a situation far more difficult than when I did my felony. And more importantly, if I am frank about the felony from the outset, I am forgiven; then obviously telling a lie in this context is truly not to my advantage.

The question remains, how could I know whether, at a certain point in time, it is to my advantage to lie or to be honest? The answer is not straightforward and easy. But I think it is answerable, with certain disentangling of the world's fundamental values. What are the fundamental values? First of all, it is the complexity of the lie. If the lie you have to make up is complicated, the chance of its being spotted as a lie is higher. Secondly, the time frame you have to maintain the lie. The longer the time frame, the more likely you will slip some truth out of the lying process. Thirdly, the seriousness of the consequence if the lie is revealed. Normally this follows the fourth point. If level of seriousness is high, you may probably avoid lying from the outset. However, having said that, one may avoid the seriousness of the consequence if the truth is told and therefore lie, which is the fourth point I wish to make. We need to weigh on the two - whether the seriousness of the consequence if the lie is revealed is higher than that if the truth is told from the beginning.