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Welcome Back – to the Middle Ages

“Honoured and esteemed Sir, may the Lord protect and preserve your eminence, we humbly ….” etc.

There was a time when even academic treatises would start in such terms. Why? Because the authors knew their endeavours had no hope of acceptance unless received and sponsored by someone of power and influence. A time when a recipient would first look to the authors’ names and positions before even considering looking into the content. And if those authors were not similarly endowed, the chance that some eminence might even read, far less consider the contents, was also doubtful.

This was when medical ‘knowledge’ was believed to be perfectly embodied in the works of Galen, millennia dead.

Then came the Enlightenment and the rise of the modern world, with all its material and intellectual riches. One single, non-fungible asset underpinned everything that followed: the idea of the supremacy of merit over social position, leading rapidly (on the historical timescale) to the day when a lowly Jewish patent office clerk would upend our understanding of the universe.

The primacy of merit is the most precious asset we have. It is sublimely simple: the sense to ask ‘What?’ instead of ‘Who?’ It has delivered us such riches that we now believe ourselves so secure in our prosperity that we can pat it on the back, say ‘Well done, and goodbye.’ Now we return to the mediaeval notion that people and their ideas (or lack of them) can be advanced or held back because of who they are, not what their abilities may be. We are, quite simply, reverting to the mediaeval state. Once, what mattered was to be a landed noble, a king’s bastard, or a bishop’s. Now, the sinecures and leaderships go to those who meet the right metrics of equality, diversity and inclusion. Don’t believe me? Stroll along Molesworth St in Wellington at lunchtime and mingle with those who guide our future; hang around the lobby of a university or two, or perhaps the spacious halls of the TVNZ building on Hobson St in Auckland. Look at who, ever-increasingly, holds the power in New Zealand. Sorry – Aotearoa. We now live in a funding environment when the first criterion many applications must meet is that they will somehow benefit Maori. Nor is this some covert agenda. It is often declared in the funding guide. Conducting research into some aspect of medical biology? Better get at least one EDI-friendly face on the team if you want your research funded. I’m not making this up.

Pale, stale and male? Begone. We don’t care what you may have to offer, don’t care that you have the talent and training to stand pre-eminent in your field. We now believe our society to be so wealthy that we can afford to place lesser but more worthy, more diverse and supposedly less privileged candidates in the vanguard of society, let such deserving souls determine our future together.

How is this working out? Plagued by low productivity, NZ’s economy remains one of the developed world’s worst performers. Next door, Australia has resisted the fad for the return to mediaevalism and not only remains well ahead of us on virtually every performance metric, it is hoovering out our unwanted talent at a rate that should be, but is not, a national scandal. Of course many who flee across the Tasman will say it is for the money, the sunshine. But if you get them alone and ask for the truth, I guarantee many will tell you that it is also because they are sick of seeing the opportunities going to those who are the right gender, sexual orientation or, God help us, ancestry, just like in the Middle Ages. To the more ‘diverse’ cohort. They know they won’t be battling that over there.

And so back we go, to conditions where an ever-shrinking pie is divided up ever less fairly to favour the whos over the whats.

Time to buy an ox, perhaps.

Or to stop the rot.

Hello there ..

The stats tell me this blog gets more than a hundred views a month. Since I do nothing to promote it, I’m mystified. I keep it as a personal thought silo which people are welcome to browse. That’s all it is.

Who are you? I would love it if you would leave a comment or just say hi. I promise I won’t try to sell you anything.

What I Believe — It Gets Stranger

It’s a process, this business of trying to understand the deeper dimensions of human life. At the time I wrote What I Believe I was not in possession of information that has since come to hand. Although I have nothing to renounce in that earlier essay, new discoveries take it further – much further.

Two very peculiar and unforgettable events have continued to puzzle and challenge me for decades. In 1969 I had the experience described in my post Another Force of Nature, where my mother 1,200 miles across an ocean absolutely knew that I was in serious trouble in Sydney and, thank goodness, acted on that knowledge. Two years later, in Bangkok, I had a vivid dream in which I was terrified by two Americans who, in a few hours, would walk into a room, identify themselves as FBI agents and do me serious harm. I saw into the future. I have always felt greatly blessed by those two events because they allowed me to know with a great deal of certainty that the Newtonian/Einsteinian view of space and time did not describe the limits of what we consider reality. Thanks to In My Time of Dying, an extraordinary book by Sebastian Junger, I just might now understand the true state of things. At least insofar as they can be understood because as Junger points out the comprehension of matters involving quantum mechanics may exceed the design parameters of the human brain.

We now know that neither physical reality nor the flow of time are anything like how our perceptions construct them. It started with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, moved on to quantum entanglement and has now arrived at the point where it has been experimentally proven that consciousness influences reality. Subatomic particles subsist in many places at once, each place being no more than a probability that that particle is in that position. But when we observe a particle it instantly coalesces into a single point. What’s more we can know that particle’s location or its momentum, but never both. Observing the particle blinds us to one or the other, always, as a law of nature.

That’s right. Just looking at something changes it in a provable, measurable way. This flies in the face of everything we consider rational and real. It is so alien to the way we think that many great minds have suggested that we may never understand it because our minds are intrinsically incapable of doing so. As Nobel physicist Richard Feynman observed, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” There is a temptation to regard the incomprehensible but real outcomes of quantum experiments as interesting but to us irrelevant events taking place only in laboratories. That is an error – quantum mechanics are at work in every atom of our bodies and the world around us, all the time. Recent computer modelling suggests that quantum entanglement plays an important role in our neural network. And what we observe, how we observe, is in all likelihood shaping external events and processes. We must learn to live with astonishment and incomprehension.

Which raises the question of what is meant by that ‘we’. Great meditators and many experimenters with hallucinogenic drugs share the experience of the non-separateness of living beings. Now that we know that consciousness changes objective reality there is every reason to suspect they may be right. We know of many instances of ‘hive mind’ in the natural world. What if all consciousness is one great hive mind, something our primordial antecedents may have experienced? We know that our senses are filters developed by evolution to process information in ways that enhance our chances of survival. Most importantly for the purposes of this discussion the senses remove data; that is what filters do. Our senses shape our experience of reality by making us ignorant of much that is there to be observed. That approaching sabretooth tiger was so important to our survival that we learned to filter out birdsong, weather, and the falling of leaves to see only the tiger. Importantly, our senses and our minds limit our observations to what our individual biological organisms can perceive. But that may not reflect the true state of consciousness. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in his essay “Experience”: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subjectlenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.” An impressive observation for someone writing in the early 19th century.

I have come to the hypothesis that at some point way back in the evolutionary chain we broke our hive mind into apparently individual, separate instances of consciousness because that enhanced our chances of survival. Each separate biological pre-human organism then had its own, specialised instance of consciousness highly focused on taking care of itself. But perhaps the hive mind persists below our level of perception, breaking through under great pressure. Hence in 1969 my mother in Auckland knew with certainty that I was in serious trouble in Sydney. Is this universal consciousness what we call God? Why is there not a single human society that did not, historically, subscribe to some version of divinity? The belief that there is something conscious, with agency, that is greater than us and inhabits a universal realm is uncannily persistent across all humankind.

The ancient Hindus said that there is Brahman, the material world, and Atman, spirit or universal consciousness, and that they are the same thing. I’m starting to think they were right.

While we are at it, nor is time the linear absolute we perceive it to be. In the early 2000s scientists in the Canary Islands performed two sequential versions of the famous two-hole experiment with two entangled photons in which the second experiment caused the results of the first experiment, in the past, to change. Maybe under great stress we can also break the flow of time. It would explain how in Bangkok, in extreme danger, I was able to see in a dream the two men who in a few hours would turn up in my ‘real’ life and consign me to a hellish prison.

Astonishment, but perhaps some comprehension.

My thanks to Greg McGee for tipping me off about Junger’s wonderful book and to Robert Lanza for his thinking about biocentrism. See https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-theory-of-the-universe/

From the Autobiography: Weirdness in NZ Public Life

In 1995 I was hired as the Communications Manager for the new office of the Health & Disability Commissioner. I was now a highly-paid civil servant. It was a not entirely agreeable and often bizarre experience.

The office politics could become toxic, perhaps inevitably with a CEO with an out-of-control ego. Further stress arose out of the politically correct environment, with far too much time wasted on Maori ceremonies that were meaningless to most of us. We had a kaiwhakahere, or Maori affairs manager, in the form of Moe Milne. That made good sense as the health status of Maori in New Zealand is well below that of the general population. I liked Moe, a thoroughly good sort who taught me a great deal about the iwi (tribes) and hapu (subtribes) of the areas we visited. At the time and to some degree even today I could point at any location on a map of New Zealand and tell you which iwi held tangata whenua status (hegemony) there. I learned a lot of te Reo, necessary because both Robyn and Moe were women so on marae I was the one who had to respond to the mihi (greeting). We also learned a number of Maori songs which I enjoyed because I love singing and Maori is a beautiful language for song.

Not so agreeable was the fact that Robyn had arranged for a Commissioner’s kaumatua (elder), an elderly Maori of no particular distinction whom, when special occasions called for it, we would fly to Auckland or Wellington and put up in a hotel so he could deliver a speech which only Moe could understand. He showed no interest in us as people and happily toddled off after getting his cheque. Whenever we hired someone new, a frequent event in the first year, they would be presented with (or subjected to) a powhiri (welcoming ceremony). Both I and Tina, the investigations manager, were particularly vocal behind the scenes about the absurdity of welcoming a new non-Maori staff member with a powhiri attended by over-whelmingly non-Maori employees when the traditional Kiwi cake and cup of tea would have been much more welcome. What rankled most was the hypocrisy entailed in the karakia. Tina and I and various other staff members objected bitterly to having to bow our heads in prayer as civil servants in a supposedly secular state. This was enforced religious observance in an office that had been set up to define and protect people’s rights, an odious farce.

Then there was the Treaty of Waitangi workshop, conducted in the Wellington office by a milquetoast with a huge bone carving dangling from his scrawny neck. Tina, myself and others curled our toes and gritted our teeth through a day openly designed to underscore the irredeemable inferiority entailed in not being a Maori, garnished with a liberal serving of imposed guilt. Of course it achieved the exact opposite effect. Tina was a middle-aged woman with a lifetime of experience in the health service who suffered fools not at all. I admired her courage in saying exactly what she thought of the so-called workshop when the ‘facilitator’ outlined a map of New Zealand on the floor and told everyone to stand where they had been born. Those who had been born outside the country were supposed to stand some distance from the map, driving an egregious point home with a sledgehammer. Tina flat-out refused to participate. I took part reluctantly but my patience was almost gone.

Next we were instructed to take our positions on the spot where we or our ashes would be buried. I returned to my seat. Challenged, I simply declared that I would not be buried anywhere because I would certainly not tolerate such a thing while alive and had no intention of dying.

“But you have to die someday,” came the predictable objection.

“Sorry, but to indicate where I supposedly wish to be buried when I have no such wish is absurd. Besides, in my culture such matters are personal and private.”

Tina and a couple of the braver souls actually applauded. By the time the farrago of misinformation and brow-beating ground to a close no-one was happy. Moe, Robyn and the milquetoast could see that no hearts had been won and the usual feedback session that closes most workshops was silently dropped.

Working closely with the Department of Health and to a lesser degree with Te Puni Kokiri and the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs brought home the disturbing realisation that New Zealand is losing its status as a secular state. It is no exaggeration to say that the Treaty of Waitangi has become an object of worship in the offices of the bureaucracy. It was quite common to enter an office and see a huge framed image of the Treaty draped with flags, flowers and Maori symbols. Certain self-evident truths, for instance the fact that New Zealand has no indigenous people, that every single one of us is descended from immigrants, could cost you your job if spoken aloud. A peculiar version of Maori traditional culture was being enshrined as the official religion, that version being the state of Maori culture and beliefs as it stood in, say, the year 1890. Christian prayers, obviously not an historic component of the original culture of the Maori, played a big part. Our being forced to sing a Christian hymn such as How Great Thou Art at an office event would have rightly provoked an outcry. But translate it into Maori and suddenly we were obliged to join in.

Such a slant celebrates colonialism as much as Maori culture. If you give it a moment’s thought you must acknowledge that if this country were to truly honour the authentic culture of the Maori we would hold annual tribal wars – with real weapons. We would allow utu (payback)as a defence for murder. In fact there actually are quite sizeable and significant organisations living out the true culture of the Maori: the Mongrel Mob, Black Power and the Filthy Few, among others. They not only embody the drawbacks to society resulting from gang activity, they also hold fast to the values of family, of tribal loyalty, of territory. No wonder they attract so many young Maori.

Don’t get me wrong – I personally enjoy participating in Maori cultural events. I loved returning the mihi in the Maori that Moe taught me. My family has a multi-generational association with Ngati Whatua o Orakei, a treasured privilege. But enforced submission to any culture under the threat of losing one’s job and the abandonment of the strict secularity of the state are evils that must be called out.

At this point I could very easily launch into a diversion on the appalling erosion of personal freedom in this country. We have more laws and regulations allowing various officials to enter our homes than any comparable democracy. We allow the police to stop us from going about our business to perform any check they please, be it a breath test or to check that we have paid our road tax. No other first-world country I have lived in would tolerate such a thing. I believe I understand the reason for this national lack of spine: it is because we have never had to defend ourselves, never had a revolution. We remain only loosely attached to a freedom that we have never had to defend.

Der Schweiz

Writing the second book of my autobiography, I have just covered the year 1975 that I spent in Switzerland. Visiting in 2017 I found it changed, much for the better, but back then it was grimly conventional, horribly judgemental of any deviation from their iron-bound social norms. I remembered a poem I wrote at the time and had long forgotten.

Komm mit mir und mit mir schlafen
Im ein alt hotel am Freidrichshafen.
We’ll drink stolen wine from stolen glasses
And laugh at the füdeliburghers’ arses.
I will bring you traffic signs,
We’ll rip up the tickets, won’t pay the fines.
We’ll sit in church in our dirty jeans
Reading pornographic magazines.
And then we’ll walk for miles and miles
Past military tulips, synthetic smiles.