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Archive for the ‘life’ Category

Bird warnings and bird life indicators of world health

Posted in from the reading room, life, perception, science on July 19, 2009| Leave a Comment »

You’ll be familiar with the idea the “canary down the mine” where a canary in a cage was carried down into the mine by the miners to give them early warning that the air conditions were deteriorating. Well, I just read an interesting variation on that tale in a French magazine called “Nouvelles cles”. The article was about Christophe Perret-Gentil, a biologist who became a herboriste. It began by telling an amazing story of a group walking in the woods in the Luberon very early one morning. They were learning how to recognise the different birds from their songs and to measure the quality of the environment through those sounds, when suddenly all the birds went quiet. Their expert leader, Christophe Perret-Gentil, commented that it was totally unprecedented for this to happen and stated that something serious, some “great event” must have occured somewhere on the planet. The following day, the group were amazed to read about the terrible earthquake in China which had killed many thousands. It had occured at precisely the time the birds fell silent.

Now I don’t know what to make of a story like that. It does remind me of the tales of the animals reacting to the approach of the tsunami before people became aware of it. Fascinating.

However, what actually interested me more was why this man was out counting bird songs in the first place. When he became a “herboriste” he thought about how to identify the plants which were of the highest quality and he knew that it couldn’t be done by measuring levels of anything in a lab. He thought about the indicators of a healthy environment and came up with an idea about birds. It’s quite a simple idea but he’s elaborated it into a detailed scoring system.

He goes to an area where a producer is growing plants which he might want to buy and from early in the morning he notes the range and variety of bird species living there. He has a whole classification system developed, with various levels of significance, from the common, indigent birds, through to the presence of endangered species. The more rare, or more endangered species scoring higher. This gives him an overall assessment of the health of the local ecology. He says it is difficult to actually see a lot of birds, but that it was easy to learn their songs so he charts the health of the environment by identifying the population of birds present as he hears them sing.

There’s something beautifully poetic about this method, and something entirely rational too. At a scientific level it draws together biology, ecology, ornithology, and botany, and at a human level it draws together music, observation, that brilliant human capacity to spot patterns and relate them to each other. Christophe then takes these threads and weaves them into a story which gives him a knowledge about quality, not mere quantity.

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Prince Charles gets it right – The Richard Dimbleby Lecture

Posted in from the reading room, life on July 9, 2009| 6 Comments »

Completely by chance I stumbled on the Prince of Wales’ lecture on BBC1 last night. You can read the transcript of his speech on his own website.

I liked what I heard. I thought it was an interesting and an intelligent speech. I know a lot of people criticise him for his views but I didn’t find anything significant to disagree with in this speech. Here’s a couple of paragraphs which will give you the gist of his argument……

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, we may well be told that we live in a “post-Modernist” age, but we are still conditioned by Modernism’s central tenets. Our outlook is dominated by mechanistic thinking which has led to our disconnection from the complexity of Nature, which is, or should be, equally reflected in the complexity of human communities. But in many ways we have also succeeded in abstracting our very humanity to the mere expression of individualism and moral relativism, and to the point where so many communities are threatened with extinction. Facing the future, therefore, requires a shift from a reductive, mechanistic approach to one that is more balanced and integrated with Nature’s complexity – one that recognizes not just the build up of financial capital, but the equal importance of what we already have – environmental capital and, crucially, what I might best call “community capital.” That is, the networks of people and organizations, the post offices and pubs, the churches and village halls, the mosques, temples and bazaars – the wealth that holds our communities together; that enriches people’s lives through mutual support, love, loyalty and identity. Just as we have no way of accounting for the loss of the natural world, contemporary economics has no way of accounting for the loss of this community capital.

The idea that we need to re-think our relationship to Nature by accepting we are an integral part of it, rather than separate and apart from it is, I believe, crucially important. The failure to grasp the complexity of life, reducing it to something simplistic, is harming us. We need to be aware of the dangers of radical materialism and simplistic egocentricism.  The mechanistic and consumerist model is failing us, as the economic and environmental crises are revealing.

He is right to emphasise the need for sustainability and diversity rather than consumption and uniformity.

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Drugs for the healthy?

Posted in from the reading room, health, life on July 3, 2009| 3 Comments »

In this week’s BMJ there is vociferous criticism of a recent article which advocated treating everyone, yes everyone, over 55 with antihypertensives irrespective of their actual blood pressure. The authors claimed that this would be a good way to reduce heart attacks and strokes. There were a number of excellent criticisms of this suggestion and in their right to reply the authors rebuffed the claim that this would medicalise everyone over 55 with this statement –

Offering treatment to all above a specified age regardless of blood pressure does not “medicalise” people because they do not become “patients” with a medical diagnosis, but telling people they have “hypertension” does medicalise them.

Pardon? A person doesn’t become a patient unless they are given a medical diagnosis, but if they are treated with a drug they are just a person?? I’m sorry, but I don’t follow that logic.

Imagine my surprise when after putting down my BMJ I came across this quote in one of Montaigne’s essays –

…among all my acquaintance, I see no people so soon sick, and so long before they are well, as those who take much physic [drugs] their very health is altered and corrupted by their frequent prescriptions. Physicians are not content to deal only with the sick, but they will moreover corrupt health itself, for fear men should at any time escape their authority.

That’s from Montaigne’s Essais written in 1580!

I’m with Montaigne…..a medicated life is not something to aspire to! (I’m also pretty fed up with so called experts telling me they know what’s best for ME!)

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Seeing the world completely differently

Posted in from the reading room, life, tagged , , on June 29, 2009| Leave a Comment »

In the Aymara language (a high Andean Indian language) the future and the past are in exactly the opposite positions from where they are to English speakers. You and I say that the future lies before us, and the past somewhere behind us. In Aymara, it’s the exact opposite.

But the Aymara call the future qhipa pacha/timpu, meaning back or behind time, and the past nayra pacha/timpu, meaning front time. And they gesture ahead of them when remembering things past, and backward when talking about the future.

…….the Aymara speakers see the difference between what is known and not known as paramount, and what is known is what you see in front of you, with your own eyes. The past is known, so it lies ahead of you. (Nayra, or “past,” literally means eye and sight, as well as front.) The future is unknown, so it lies behind you, where you can’t see.

(this according to research published in “Cognitive Science”)

Just pause for a moment and wonder what difference that would make to the way you understand life, or, at least, how you understand how to move through the flow of time.

Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University gives us even more food for thought on this subject in an article in the Edge. Look at this example she gives –

Suppose you want to say, “Bush read Chomsky’s latest book.” Let’s focus on just the verb, “read.” To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like “red” and not like “reed.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you’d use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you’d also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you’d use a different form of the verb than if he’d diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you’d have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you’d use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you’d use a different verb form.

She asks if this means that the speakers of these different languages end up remembering their experiences differently from each other, and if so, does that mean they actually see and understand the world differently?

How does this relate to the fact that we all live on different planets?

She gives us quite a mind boggling example of how we orientate ourselves physically in the world through our use of language by telling us about an Aboriginal tribe from northern Australia, the Kuuk Thaayorre.

Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like ” Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities.

This is not just an amazing skill but it’s a skill English speakers just don’t have. There is a complete synthesis of language and physical orientation that makes a huge practical difference to the skills needed to find their way around. These are fascinating pieces of evidence that supports Lakoff and Johnson’s theories about the basic conceptual metaphors we use being related to how we experience our physical existence. But she goes on to give other examples, such as how Mandarin speakers talk of time vertically where English speakers talk of it horizontally (“Point to a spot which represents tomorrow” leads English speakers to point in front of them, and Mandarin speakers to point vertically upwards)

What does this mean for someone who learns another language? In Lera Boroditsky’s work, she investigated this –

In our lab, we’ve taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think. In practical terms, it means that when you’re learning a new language, you’re not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking.

That confirms what you probably suspected already….that learning a new language doesn’t just let you communicate with people who speak that language, but it provokes you to see and understand the world differently.

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How extroversion improves the body’s defences

Posted in from the reading room, life, personal growth, psychology on June 18, 2009| 2 Comments »

Here’s an interesting study published in the journal, “Brain, Behaviour and Immunity”. In a nutshell, they’ve found a relationship between personality traits of extraversion and the levels of an inflammatory chemical in the blood (Interleukin-6). The more extraverted, the lower the levels of this chemical. Why’s that a good thing? Well, the higher levels are indicative of increased inflammatory activity (in aging women the difference between high and low levels can result in a two fold increase in mortality over five years). Many serious chronic conditions are thought to result from increased inflammatory activity.

There’s a reassuring increase in studies of this type (in PNI – “Psychoneuroimmunology”) and they’re beginning to give us a better scientific understanding of the interconnectedness of all our body systems, and to break down the rather naive idea that the body and the mind are separate.

This particular study has hooked my attention because of its focus on extraversion. I suppose neither extraversion, nor intraversion, seem, on the face of it, to be healthy characteristics, so I was keen to understand exactly what the psychologists were interpreting as extraversion. Apparently Karl Jung described extraverts as focused on the world around them and happiest in the presence of others. Psychological models of character have come a long way since his day and this particular group of researchers worked with a model known as the “Five Factor Model” of personality. The five factors are –

  1. Extraversion
  2. Emotional Stability
  3. Agreeableness
  4. Conscientiousness
  5. Openness to Experience

Here’s one definition of extraversion

Extraversion is marked by pronounced engagement with the external world. Extraverts enjoy being with people, are full of energy, and often experience positive emotions. They tend to be enthusiastic, action-oriented, individuals who are likely to say “Yes!” or “Let’s go!” to opportunities for excitement. In groups they like to talk, assert themselves, and draw attention to themselves.

The particular element of extraversion associated with the lower inflammatory markers is “dispositional activity” – which the researchers are also dubbing “life force” (its the extent to which you wholeheartedly engage with life really)

I think that’s fascinating. As you know, my three key characteristics of health are adaptability, creativity and ENGAGEMENT, and my palette of factors for a good life includes a sense of wonder in the everyday (“emerviellement” in the “quotidien”)

I was intruiged to learn more about the Five Factor model. Wikipedia, as usual, has a good entry. But if you want to find out what the five factor analysis says about your own personality, try here where they have an excellent, free online, instrument.


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Storytelling, the basis of understanding

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, personal growth, tagged , on June 16, 2009| 2 Comments »

This blog is called heroes not zombies because I believe we all tend to sleepwalk through life (in a kind of zombie way), but that we have the opportunity to wake up and be the heroes of our own stories. So, I was especially struck by the following passage in “Metaphors we live by” –

Self-understanding requires unending negotiation and renegotiation of the meaning of your experiences to yourself……It involves the constant construction of new coherences in your life, coherences that give new meaning to old experiences. The process of self-understanding is the continual development of new life stories for yourself.

I think this is SO on the button. It grasps the dynamic, creative, ever-changing, ever-growing process of understanding which comes about through telling, editing, revising and re-telling our life stories. These stories are not fantasy of course. Rather they are the process of creating meaning from our experiences. They do this by developing coherences. We continuously strive to make sense of our experiences, and making sense means building on the existing coherent stories we tell about ourselves to make them more coherent in the light of our newest experiences. Additionally, this passage hits the nail on the head by pointing out that the new coherences cast a new light on older experiences. This is the healing potential of understanding.

Myths are the key stories which create our lifeworlds. Myths are not false stories. They are our most fundamental ones.  As Lakoff and Johnson say

Myths provide ways of comprehending experience; they give order to our lives. Like metaphors, myths are necessary for making sense of what goes on around us. All cultures have myths, and people cannot function without myth any more than they can function without metaphor.

Are you aware of the metaphors, the myths, the stories which you use to comprehend your experience?

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The significance of metaphors

Posted in from the reading room, life, philosophy, science, tagged , , on June 15, 2009| 7 Comments »

“Metaphors we live by” written by Lakoff and Johnson. (ISBN 0-226-46801-1) ……..
I often muse about what makes a human being, human? Or what makes a human being fully human? Consciousness is clearly one of the characteristics. Language is another. And imagination is a third. Perhaps it’s because I’m interested in these phenomena that some time back I bought “Metaphors we live by”. Our ability to handle metaphors and symbols intrigues me, and I wanted to understand better how we use metaphors so the title caught my eye. However, when I flicked through it, it struck me as a bit technical and even dry. I thought it was a book about linguistics, an area of study which does interest me, but one which I find can be difficult to grasp. So I put the book aside in my giant collection of “interesting books to get round to reading one day”. I’m not quite sure I pulled it off the shelf recently. Oh, yes, actually I do remember why, but the explanation is going to have to wait till another post. (cryptic, huh?) I guess that old adage of there being a right time for everything must apply to books, because this time, I started into it and couldn’t stop. I’ve marked it up. I read and re-read chapters. I’ve skipped to the back, delved into the middle, read it from cover to cover. I find it compelling and convincing. And I can’t figure out why I didn’t take to it first time round.
It’s actually an incredibly difficult book to summarise. Usually when I write a review like this I paste in a few passages from the book to illustrate what it’s like. But I’ve collected so many passages I find it hard to pick only a few!
Here’s the gist of their argument. By studying human communication they claim to have discovered that metaphors are not simply a word or language game, but much more fundamentally, they are conceptual. By that they mean we think in metaphors, we understand using metaphors, and, indeed we understand the world and our place in it through metaphors. I didn’t need convinced about that. I already thought that metaphors were the basis of thought. However, they take the whole project to an entirely different level by studying the types of metaphors which are most prevalent in our thinking and communicating. With way too many examples to share here, they illustrate clearly and convincingly that the basic, fundamental metaphors we use haven’t appeared randomly, but are developed out of our interactions with the physical and the cultural worlds in which we exist. In other words, they are develop from our interactions with time and space, and our interactions with other people and creatures. This, I think, is the key. It allows them to develop an argument they call “the experientialist myth”, proposing it as a better way to understand life than the opposing myths of “objectivism” and “subjectivism”. (Time for a quote or two from the book)

The myth of objectivism reflects the human need to understand the external world in order to be able to function successfully in it. The myth of subjectivism is focused on internal aspects of understanding – what the individual finds meaningful and what makes his life worth living. The experientialist myth suggests that these are not opposing concerns.

Within the myth of objectivism, the concern for truth grows out of a concern for successful functioning. Given a view of man as separate from his environment, successful functioning is conceived of as mastery over the environment. Hence the objectivist metaphors KNOWLEDGE IS POWER and SCIENCE PROVIDES CONTROL OVER NATURE.

The principal theme of the myth of subjectivism is the attempt to overcome the alienation that results from viewing man as separate from his environment and from other men. This involves an embracing of the self – of individuality and reliance upon personal feelings, intuition, and values. The Romanticist version involves reveling in the senses and feelings and attempting to gain union with nature through passive appreciation of it.

The old myths share a common perspective: man as separate from his environment.

The experientialist myth takes the perspective of man as part of his environment, not as separate from it. It focuses on constant interaction with the physical environment and with other people. It views this interaction with the environment as involving mutual change. You cannot function within the environment without changing it or being changed by it.

Do you get the idea? It’s a kind of division between the rationalists and the Romantics, with the claim that metaphor builds a bridge between reason and the imagination and gives us a third way. One which neither denies objective reality, not gets lost in subjective relativism. In the process, this “experientialist” way, shows how there are no Absolute truths out there discoverable without an understanding based on cultural systems, but keeps the project of the imagination and feelings grounded in our interactions with the world.

Objectivism takes as its allies scientific truth, rationality, precision, fairness, and impartiality. Subjectivism takes as its allies the emotions, intuitive insight, imagination, humaneness, art, and a “higher” truth.
The proportions of our lives governed by objectivism and subjectivism vary greatly from person to person and culture and culture. Some of us even attempt to live our entire lives totally by one myth of the other.

How do you think it is for you? Are you more drawn to objectivism’s allies, or subjectivism’s?

I find both main strands of their case very convincing. The more you look for it, the more you become aware of the pervasiveness of metaphor, and the more you study it, the clearer it becomes that conceptual metaphors are grounded in our experiences and interactions. Their experientialist myth appeals to me much more than either of the other two older myths. It strikes me as more true. I also think it allows a much more robust defence against scientism than romanticism ever did.

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Hunter gatherers and farmers

Posted in from the reading room, life, science on June 6, 2009| 5 Comments »

Human history, as best we know, dates back around 200,000 years. For 190,ooo of those years we were hunter-gatherers and for the last 10,000 we’ve had agriculture.

I suppose I’d read about the hunter-gatherer phase long since but the significance of it never really struck me, and certainly the fact that so much of human history was in that phase was something that really didn’t register. For some reason, I’ve stumbled upon a number of different references to this in recent reading. I was musing about what characteristics have been to the fore in the two phases, and I wondered if the hunter-gatherer phase demanded a greater focus on co-operation, whilst the agriculture phase led to ownership and competition. But maybe that’s too simplistic. These thoughts have been around for me during these crises of recent times – the economic, environmental and political ones. There’s a feeling just now that we could be witnessing the crumbling of whole global system, and it leaves us wondering what might emerge to take its place. Which characteristics are we going to need to deal with these current, and future challenges?

I don’t have the answers in place, but here’s a couple of interesting articles to throw into the mix. First off, I read a post on Deric Bownd’s blog. He titled the post “Civilisation has caused the decline of human health“. Well, that caught my eye! He was referring to a presentation by Ann Gibbons at an Americal Assoc. of Physical Anthropologists meeting. 72 researchers studied the data on the remains of 11,000 individuals who lived from 3,000 to 200 years ago in Europe. Here’s the conclusion –

…the health of many Europeans began to worsen markedly about 3000 years ago, after agriculture became widely adopted in Europe and during the rise of the Greek and Roman civilizations. They document shrinking stature and growing numbers of skeletal lesions from leprosy and tuberculosis, caused by living close to livestock and other humans in settlements where waste accumulated. The numbers of dental hypoplasias and cavities also increased as people switched to a grain-based diet with fewer nutrients and more sugars…After a long, slow decline through the Middle Ages, health began to improve in the mid-19th century. Stature increased, probably because of several factors: The little Ice Age ended and food production rose, and better trade networks, sanitation, and medicine developed… But take heed: Overall health and stature in the United States has been declining slightly since the 1950s, possibly because obese Americans eat a poor-quality diet, not unlike early farmers whose diet was less diverse and nutritious than that of hunter-gatherers.

So a bit of a mixed picture but an interesting analysis of the impact of agriculture on our species.

Then I read an article in the Independent on Friday. The article was subtitled “Scientists explain how altruism evolved over 200,000 years of conflict”. This piece described the work of Samuel Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico who is challenging the common “Darwinian” theory that altruism is not a characteristic which would be selected for (the “selfish gene” theory) Bowles argues that during the time of hunter-gatherer tribes –

Warfare was sufficiently common and lethal among our ancestors to favour the evolution of what I call parochial altruism, a predisposition to be co-operative towards group members and hostile towards outsiders.

He argues that selection worked on groups, not just individuals and the groups which developed this “parochial altruism” did best. He does admit this is not the only possible explanation for altruism –

[The] willingness to take mortal risks as a fighter is not the only form of altruism… more altruistic and hence more co-operative groups may be more productive and sustain healthier, stronger, or more numerous members, for example, or make more effective use of information

Other scientists are supporting this challenge to the selfish gene theory, arguing that selection effects on groups may be more apparent in a species like humans because our species is a “cultural” one.

It’s interesting to take this longer view of human history. Such a change of perspective can help you see the wood for the trees I think. In particular I find this stimulates my thought about the relative merits of co-operation vs competition (as well as stimulating my thought about how we feed ourselves!)

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Time to reflect

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography, tagged on May 20, 2009| 4 Comments »

I am a great fan of Japanese gardens. They have a design aesthetic which is quite different from the one which is the basis of most UK gardens. One of the elements I especially enjoy is their use of water. There is something amazingly calming about reflecting on the reflections……

Heian Jingu Shrine reflections Kyoto

Heian Jingu Shrine reflections Kyoto

Heian Jingu Shrine reflections Kyoto

Heian Jingu Shrine reflections Kyoto

Heian Jingu Shrine reflections Kyoto

Heian Jingu Shrine reflections Kyoto

Heian Jingu Shrine reflections Kyoto

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The End of Control

Posted in from the living room, life, writing, tagged on May 12, 2009| 7 Comments »

One of the most amazing capabilities of the human mind is the imagination. However, this great ability brings certain difficulties, not least of which is being able to imagine our own mortality. It’s this existential fear which underlies most, if not all, other specific fears. Whilst very few people actually believe it’s possible to escape death, most of us find it difficult to face the reality of our own mortality. We seem to have no control over such significant events as our own birth or death. The apparent randomness and chaos of the universe has driven human beings to pursue ways of living which enable them to cope with all the daily uncertainties which arise. Over the course of several hundred years we have moved from strategies based on beliefs in supernatural forces which are in control of everything to ones based on beliefs that human beings can be in control of everything. In effect, we’ve seen the decline of religion’s power to give a sense of things being in control and a rise in the belief that science endows humans with such power.
In many cultures the supernatural forces in control of everything are not necessarily benevolent, and even when they are considered to be benevolent their actions are still not predictable. In attempts to assuage the feelings of fear and uncertainty rituals and sacrifices were created to try to influence the actions of the gods. Even with the emergence of monotheistic religions based on a belief in a loving Creator God, human beings were still not able to predict His actions. At best, a Christian, Jew or Muslim, finds peace of mind by letting go of the pursuit of predictability and certainty by trusting that God is benevolent and all will not only be well, but all that happens is, as God wishes, the best for us. Fundamentalists of all flavours, however, do not seem comfortable to leave Life and the World to God, but instead feel driven to impose strict behaviours and even thought patterns on believers and non-believers alike.
With the Renaissance and the developments of rationalism and the “scientific method”, human beings began to believe they could develop deep understandings of life and the universe. We began to use observations, logic and experiment to create “laws” based on highly predictable patterns. We have pursued this path relentlessly for the last 400 years. This shift in focus from the supernatural to the natural has, however, been focused on the same goal – the minimisation of uncertainty, and the parallel maximisation of feelings of control. Physicists still pursue the “theory of everything” in an attempt to use that understanding to control everything.
But control is still beyond our grasp. We are still mortal. None of us can know the exact span of our lives in advance and we find we can neither control ourselves nor others. We can neither predict nor determine the future, at any level – individual, communal or global. At an individual level we drive away the fear of chaos and unpredictability by settling into routines and rituals. One of my favourite novels of all time is “Rituals”, by Cees Nooteboom, (ISBN 1-86046-048-8), a story of a father and son who each have their powerful (and constraining) ways of imposing their personal power on their own lives through ritual, in the father’s case, through a strict set of time set routines which establish the value of punctuality as the highest of all his values, and in the son, through his fascination with Japanese pottery, and the tea ceremony. We all need routines and rhythms to our lives but when the need for control dominates these routines can become obsessions and compulsions, limiting our lives instead of stimulating growth.
At the communal level we seem to be moving fast towards George Orwell’s nightmare “1984” vision of increasing surveillance and attempts to control “unhealthy behaviours” whilst experiencing increasing levels of chronic disease and crime. A day or two after I started to write this post I read a review of Jim Jarmusch’s new movie “Limits of Control” where the author cited an essay by William Burroughs as the source of the movie’s title.  (see “how to make a zombie” )
In recent years governments have acted as if they have the power to control global phenomena when all they have is actually the power to make an impact. The consequences of each action, of each impact, turn out to be both unpredictable and uncontrollable. We see this in War (Iraq, Afghanistan etc); we see it in the economy (credit crunch, “boom and bust” cycles, the fall of the “Masters of the Universe”); we see it in climate change; we see it in rising levels of crime, drug abuse, and chronic disease.
Control is a delusion.
It was a delusion when human beings thought they could influence supernatural forces and it remains a delusion when human beings think they can control individual, social or global phenomena.
It’s frightening to be “out of control”. Yet, the relentless pursuit of more control just creates more and more anxiety as at our deepest levels we realise control continuously escapes our grasp. A greater risk from this control agenda is that we create ever more zombies, and lose our chance to become ever more human.
It’s time for a new direction. We have to replace the pursuit of control with something else. Something more real, and, therefore, something more to likely support human life, and to encourage development.
What might the new direction be?  A shift from increasing control to increasing resilience. Letting go of the pursuit of certainty and relishing the experience of the present, the wonder of life and the excitement of creation. Moving towards an agenda of adaptability and sustainability, of quality over quantity. Pursuing diversity instead of standardisation and valuing continual, dynamic experience over goals and outcomes.

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