Rant

Having had some down time tonight, I meant to write a blog on the danger of left-wing and right-wing extremism, and on the idea of an innate moderation in humanity, and some other profoundly meaningful topics that would doubtless radically impact the 2.4 people who read my blog on average weekly. But, I got half way into it and realized it was a stupid waste of my time, and depressing, so I opted for the easier option: a brief self-indulgent rant.

This will come as a big shock, but I often waste time when I should be writing by surfing YouTube (notice another selfish pronoun). For those of you who don't know, YouTube is highly regarded for the rigorous standards it imposes on the accuracy, quality, and copyright restrictions of its videos. It is further noted for the intelligent and thoughtful comments of its users. Visiting one of my subscriptions tonight, I had the privilege of reading several individuals' feedback, and I was soon assured that they had a promising career as rap artists and/ or rapists.

I was going to include some edited versions of these comments—just so that you could get a sense of the 'thought-provoking' comments being left on serious political, religious, and social issues—but such editing would really have done extensive damage to the creative imagination needed to appreciate the verbal richness of the comments, and on a serious note, the hate would simply be too depressing.

Anyway, moving on in my early morning rant, the point of bringing up YouTube was to emphasize that with anything you come across, you have to take it with a grain of salt, scrutinize it, and dig up more information, because if there is one thing that I can venture to suggest, it is that we are at all times and in all places surrounded by lies. Everything we try to assert, on some level, contains lies in the sense that we can never know all the information, all the facts, everything that we would need to make a truly informed decision, and so we are in a sense unable to communicate truth or comprehend it perfectly, and therefore must always approach these things with fear and trembling, knowing that our biological existence is in a sense detrimental to living with full truth.

On a less abstract level, people are freaking insane. It scares me. With the political commentaries on YouTube and in the media more generally, forget the grain of salt—take them with a bucket or two, or just get a salt block. People don't weigh anything. They react on visceral, emotional levels and REALLY BELIEVE the stuff posted, and everything devolves into a good dog / bad dog type of extremism. I have seen this from the liberals who like to compare the US to Nazi Germany, to Holocaust deniers, to, of course, the endless debates about the middle-east conflicts. And that is where I really wanted to go with my rant. It seems increasingly clear to me that the emotional and mental states of a significant (as in an enormous ) percentage of individuals are zealously invested in winning some sort of battle to vindicate some equally vague personal crusade, rather than trying to actually fix the problems we (human beings) are facing globally.

In very simple terms, there are people who do horrible things to other people out of cruelty or selfishness, or both. Likewise, there are forces which people get caught up in, forces which lead them to do equally horrible things to other people, either directly or by causality. As far as I can see, if trying to relieve human suffering is any goal, we have a responsibility to do the best, although knowing it will always be flawed, to actually remedy the situation—not to spew forth fundamentalist / extremist left /right wing propaganda (and you better believe I have oodles of examples coming to mind right now). But so many people seem to surrender with no resistance to the waves of extremism and propaganda, perhaps because it makes truth seem clear and accessible, because it discounts the fact that you have to work and wrestle to sort out empirical evidence from fiction; and perhaps, for entirely deeper reasons that because I am extremely tired, I can't answer. Seriously, take this blog,too, with a grain of salt, because I'm very tired and can't vouch for the coherency, although is a rant supposed to be coherent?

The Greater Good

Over a drink with some friends yesterday, we started talking about the very controversial protests by the animal rights organization SPEAK against the Oxford animal labs. The Oxford animal lab has become a very emotive debate in part due to the graphic photos of experiments on animals leaked by some of the students and evidence which suggested that the vast majority of experiments conducted were used entirely to get grant money. The opposition insists that these experiments save human lives, while the animal rights group bring in their own scientists to claim that drug companies use animals to keep low overhead, ultimately harming the human population when the pharmaceuticals are released. Of course, speaking of low overhead, the same principle is at work when we buy clothes and products made in far away places like Bangledash, Indonesia...but won't get into that now.

Anyway, one of my friends was talking about being forced to kill a hamster when she was a first year biochemistry student at Oxford, a test designed to illicit that she was able to emotionally cope with the effects of experimenting on animals. In anger over this event, and bear in the mind that she is German and has a very emphatic German accent, she begin to heatedly explain that medicine and science has increased the human life span and brought rapid technology to the world, but has not done anything to make the world happier. The horrible infant morality rate has now ended in the West (although almost 16,000 children die per day in non western countries, mainly Africa). Disease is by and large controlled, our standard of living is quite high, and by all accounts and purposes we have far fewer concerns than our ancestors. Yet, people are miserable, and now obesity and depression (resulting in a population severely medicated) are labeled the great diseases afflicting North American, and, increasingly, Europe. Not to mention, our lifestyles are bringing about global warming and increasing carbon in the atmosphere.

But of course, in many ways, it is difficult to blame science. Happiness quotients are very hard to measure in society, and perhaps even the idea that happiness is a plausible goal, or a desirable goal, is mistaken. After all, I suppose the implicit idea is that extending humans' lives, increasing the quality of living, will make them happier. That equally unmeasurable concept—suffering—is believed to be the barrier to happiness.

Yet, does happiness, by default, result when suffering ends or vice versa? Many seek to find some sort of happiness in suffering, in the feeling of expiation that results from their abjection and degradation. Saying the world just needs Jesus is not a very sufficient answer either, although many will object on this point. A system of beliefs motivated by guilt and expiation operates on the same principles and falls into the same trap. Thus, there is traditionally the belief that there will be no remembrance in heaven of all those who didn't make it, and are, um, damned to hell, since that might rain on the parade a bit, and present the idea of suffering creeping back into the celestial realms. If this is the case, then how can a believer ever be happy here on earth?

But this is not a bash on any religion, but a bridge into my final idea, which is that we have mistakenly assumed that individuals are happy as individuals. Elie Wiesel once wrote a book on Job, and in the book, he made the point that while a society and a person may believe that suffering is individual, it is in fact always already collective. Unlike eastern religions, in Judaism, entering into the collective "cosmic anguish" of the universe does not bring relief to individual misery, but actually intensifies it. In other words, the catch 22 is that, for example, if we have to see some other creature suffer, even an animal, it does have an impact on human happiness, no matter how impervious, completely immune, or even sadistic many people may seem when someone else dies, suffers etc. Hence, in Wiesel's reading, Job's friends actually try to "justify" why Job's suffering is deserved, trying to distance themselves from it a much as possible and rationalize it away.

The great moral failure of Job's friends was that they were unable to realize that his suffering was their suffering. Yeah, it is a moralizing reading of Job perhaps, but the point stands, which is that I am personally just not sure that whether in the name of science, or religion, or whatever else, sacrificing for the greater good can ever do anything but scar our brains. We have brought many greater goods in the name of progress, but cannot bring happiness if happiness is indeed tied to suffering, and suffering is collective. If this is true, I don't know how it can be remedied. I cannot even hypothetically think of a way in which, at some point in time, any group of people, society, or religion can function without making sacrifices for the "greater good."

Hotel Oxford

Yeah, I guess I should be the first to admit that I have been blogging a lot lately sheerly as an outlet for restless frustration (I am both autistic and hyper). Well, wait, let me explain and try to avoid just going of on some gibberish, technical blog. I am in a complete state of suspension, stuck waiting for two very important exam results which don't come back until next week, not to mention a series of approvals for my dissertation. I can't work on what I want to work on, and it starts to drive you a bit crazy, like sitting in a waiting room endlessly.

I have now been done with the second thesis draft since Monday and am still waiting, and I have been waiting on exam results since first week of March. Yeah, how can it take months to get exam results back to students? The answer as to why it takes them so long when we know everything has been graded since about seven weeks ago is too dark to iterate—either they take incompetence to an all new low or they are simply sadists, or both. I tend to lean to the sadists myself, but I'm going to resist the strong urge to share specific instances of such sadism at work. So, anyway, yeah, it is hard to concentrate in these sort of waiting-room weeks. The worst is the final day and hours before you get your exam results. You have to go to your convener's office and wait outside in a que, and, of course, you can hear everything through the door, so you know what everyone before you is getting, and then people start coming out of the office crying (because bombing the papers pretty much means that is it; you'll never get the career position you want because you won't get the D.Phil—I know the tragic dimensions are lost on all those who don't relish the chance to live in penury and humiliation for five years and then compete in a tight job market ).

I might do well though since last term I tried taking fish capsules. It is supposed to increase your IQ, and I hoped it would therefore improve my performance (other things tried have been wishing wells, black magic, white magic, various incantations, bribery, sleeping with professors, death threats—kidding).

So why am I sharing this? No idea. Anyway, yep, I've got nothing. I don't even think all this Oxford related stuff matters too terribly much. Seriously, so you are going to write this extremely boring book on the development of the reading public in seventeenth-century England, or Jane Austen's punctuation, or the history of the natural language movement, or, in my case, protein molecules etc. and it will sell about five copies and waste nine years of your life. But, hey, at least you have goals.

Let's see, what else is going on...we've had a lot of weather, yep. Um, I know, how about some interpretive art:

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And now for something really different:

One of Those Nights

There are these strange moments in life, where you suddenly feel a strong and far too early midlife crisis in the making.

Remind me again. Why we do what we do? For what ultimate end? Seriously, I was a tad depressed when I realised that I was 21 years old and spending the majority of my time doing very dry research, with nothing in the future but more of the same until I retire. Yet, what must it be like for people who lack an all-consuming goal? It strikes me that this is at least in part the great appeal religion has for people. It gives them some sense of obsessive and singular purpose.

Perhaps we have yet to understand the psychological and neurological needs that religion stems from? It makes me think that religious energies simply need to be channeled in the correct direction. For example, no matter how depressed I get sometimes, I know my research has an ultimate end goal that is feasible and real, and grounded in something more than wish-fulfillment. This is not to say that I escape the same types of neurological impulses that inspire religion. It simply means these energies are perhaps in keeping with my evolutionary development, not a misfiring or a by-product of something else. I don't see how religion could ever be as fulfilling when it lacks any sort of tangible ultimacy.

weird art

Amsterdam was great as usual, but waiting here at the airport, this never-ending confusion sets over me. Every time I am at Schiphol, I find myself nonplussed and intrigued as to what the hell this guy is supposed to be? The fat man sitting there is identical on both sides. Thus, there are two identical images with their backs to each other.

It must just be me, but something about this piece of 'art' just leaves me at a loss...I've seen weirder works of art by far. It is not just the weirdness per se that gets me. It is just....something.