A Christmas Shadow

transformation over 'time' as distinct from 'space'

Is there not a ‘dark side’ to the ‘cleansing of Ebenezer Scrooge’ in Charles Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol’?  Scrooge, the ‘bad boss’ transforms into Scrooge the ‘good boss’, persuading us that ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ are absolutes that fountain forth from the interior of individuals understood as ‘sovereign powers’ or ‘things-in-themselves’.  Surely the ‘good action’ of the individual is, as Nietzsche says, a ‘mediocre truth’ that conceals a ‘shadow’ aspect. 

The ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ of the players in the continually warring communities of Europe could not be determined from their acts, which erupted from a sea of not-directly visible, non-material, relational tensions in the manner that earthquakes and avalanches ‘erupt’, … the action-inducing tensions being the shadow-force that predominates over the visibly manifest acts of ‘goodness’ or ‘evil’ of the individual person or state.  The visible acts of the individual play out in ‘time’ while the tensions they emerge from are spatial-relational and invisible.  The boss who is the epitome of goodness in his manifest actions would not still be the boss without retaining his controlling influence over the living space via spatial-relational alliances that keep his workers ‘corralled’.   The boss that transforms his overtly abusive/manipulative behaviour into overtly benevolent behaviour without relinquishing his ‘living space control’ deepens the covert or ‘shadow’ aspect of his manipulation.   The truth in the visible acts of people is a ‘mediocre truth’ as Nietzsche points out.

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Just to elaborate a bit on the above ‘introduction’ before delving into the ‘shadow aspect of Christmas’, I should say that I have difficulty with everything that is based in ‘belief’, … that has its roots in the past, in someone else’s placement of values that purportedly should be ‘mine’ too.   Belief in a ‘boss’ is merely one instance of the general case of imputing ‘reality’ to a ‘subject animated dynamic’.   A boss that is appointed by a team as a device of convenience, of relational synthesis/coordination, makes sense, but the boss whose power is pronounced to be ‘incarnate’ in him is, in my view, not merely nonsense, it is superstition. 

I believe that the ‘dummy dimension we call ‘time’’ is the enabler of the ‘mediocre truth’ that imputes ‘power’ to ‘beings’ and ‘their acts’.  Scientific thinking aka ‘rational thinking’ rests dependently on the dummy dimension of time.  Science assumes that the present depends only on the immediate past so that when a good or bad action ‘erupts’, we can always identify the ‘causal agent’, the ‘subject that animates the dynamic’.  When Germany invades Poland, the scientific thinker applies his science which is based on ‘time’ and time-based differentials.  Yesterday Europe was ‘at peace’ and today there is conflict.  What is the cause of this outbreak of conflict?  We search for the causal agency within this short past-to-present time interval and we identify it as the German Wehrmacht directed by Adolph Hitler.  We are asked to believe that Hitler is the cause of the conflict.  But what about the cartoons in the newspapers that came out with the 1919 finalizing of the Treaty of Versailles, suggesting that Germans born into the harsh conditions of the treaty would, by the time they reached the age of maturity (21 yrs) be waging the next European war.  What about Churchill’s hardliner support for the harsh conditions of that treaty [abusive and unjust to the innocent generation arising], and his alleged dislike for the Germans?  What spatial relational tensions did Churchill contribute to with testimony such as;

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.” — Churchill’s testimony to the Peel Commission (1937) on a Jewish Homeland in Palestine

As the introduction suggests, the truth we impute to the visible actions of individuals, that we associate with events arising from one moment to the next, is mediocre truth.  It is the truth that science has ‘settled for’; e.g;

Origin of Mathematical Physics.—Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset that the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.

First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.”  – Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’

There is a thus a deeper truth that resides not in visible, material actions that transpire in time, but in non-visible, non-material transformative relations that reside in space.  In other words, we are included in a web of spatial relations that is deeper source of dynamic behaviour.  Insofar as we deny our connection to what we see transpire in front of us, we build ‘shadow’.

“It is the face of our own shadow that glowers at us from Nazi Germany.” as Carl Jung might have said

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Although I am loathe to accept ‘time-scheduled events’, I understand events like the ‘winter solstice’ where a few days ago, our planet earth completed another dos à dos with its/our celestial dance partners.  This is something that I feel ‘included in’, and for me, it underscores the fact that ‘we are all in this together’.  I can celebrate this one ‘naturally’.  Down on the rocks by the beach I paint-sprayed a line from the setting sun to a marker on the bank, where, a few years ago, I had paint-sprayed a line from the setting sun of the summer solstice.  It occurred to me that now that I was looking at the angle between them, I could measure that angle and, knowing my latitude, I would ‘know’ how much the earth ‘tilts’ relative to the plane of its orbit around the sun.

 This thought brought back into mind Poincaré’s warning that it is non-sense to say ‘the earth rotates’ [or ‘the earth tilts’], because ‘the earth is not doing it’.   The earth is included within a larger celestial dynamic and it has no ‘local’ behaviour of its own, only as a participant in a larger dynamic; i.e. as a participant in the transforming space it shares inclusion in.  It is only ‘language’ that imputes to the earth ‘its own behaviour’.  The same goes for ourselves since we are bound up in the transforming earth which is bound up in the transforming universe.

 At Christmas time, this ‘shadow’ seems to speak from out of the darkness of my deeper consciousness, the usually silent ‘back-benches’ of my self.  It doesn’t speak ‘words’, only music, … kind of like the music from the film ‘Jaws’.  It is telling me that ‘now ist venn vee dahnce’, in a creepy, commanding way, like Dieter in SNL.   It is a different sort of signal to action, radically unlike the orchestrating action of the sun breaking through the clouds on a warm summer’s day that draws thousands to the beach, inducing them to act together, to strip off most of their clothes and prostrate themselves as if before a God.

 Don’t get me wrong.  As a child, I was eager for Christmas to come; it was like a warm and rising tide that I could let myself float away in.  It could have been from anything, from the winter solstice or from the arrival of a ‘new year’ or whatever, why look a gift horse in the mouth?  It was ‘party time’ and who needs to search for and understand the rationale for people getting together and having a good time.

 Still, those lines from the setting sun at summer and winter solstice that I painted on the rocks formed a large angle that I haven’t ‘checked out’, but I’m pretty sure it would be 309° – 234° = 75° as the tables for my latitude show.

 In fact, I needn’t have waited several years for a clear, non-cloud-covered view of the winter solstice, I could have calculated the two azimuth angles, built a stainless steel protractor pointing to the two extremes of the setting sun, and set it in concrete down by the beach.  Then I could have used it to predict when the sun was going to reach its southernmost and northernmost sunset azimuths; i.e. I could have done all of this work using a calculator and a compass without even having to look at the sun; i.e. working the problem backwards and so avoiding ever having to experience the feeling of being included in the celestial dynamic.  My knowledge, recorded on the calendar, would then inform my behaviour and my actions would be inside-outward asserting, playing out ‘in time’ rather than being outside-inwardly orchestrated by the dynamics of space, the dynamic spatial relations I am included in.

 This reducing of experience of being included in something that is continually, unknowably unfolding, to ‘knowledge’ that henceforth tells us what is going to happen as a function of ‘time’, is part of this ‘shadow’ that is bothering me about Christmas.  Everything gets inverted to its natural order.  Instead of our actions being orchestrated from the outside-inward influence of our experience of inclusion in a transforming web of spatial relations, our knowledge furnishes an inside-outward assertive driver for our actions that then play out in a kind of clockworks fashion.

 Knowledge seems to be a neutered version of experience which inverts the direction of our behavioural sourcing.  Christmas is coming.  When is it coming?  Someone [some ‘authority’ like Dieter] has calculated that it comes on December 25^th, a number/date on the Christian calendar aka Gregorian calendar.  This is the date when Dieter or someone has said “now ist venn vee dahnce”.

 The authorities will recalculate it as necessary so we must keep listening for the signal of when to start the partying; e.g.

“The motivation for the Gregorian reform was that the Julian calendar assumes that the time between vernal equinoxes is 365.25 days, when in fact it is presently almost exactly 11 minutes shorter. The error between these values accumulated at the rate of about three days every four centuries, resulting in the equinox occurring on March 11 (an accumulated error of about 10 days) and moving steadily earlier in the Julian calendar at the time of the Gregorian reform. Since the Spring equinox was tied to the celebration of Easter, the Roman Catholic Church considered that this steady movement in the date of the equinox was undesirable.  … The Gregorian calendar therefore began by skipping 10 calendar days, to restore March 21 as the date of the vernal equinox.” – Wikipedia

Knowledge drives behaviour like clockworks.

 Is knowledge not a dangerous thing then?  Does it not take us out of our attunement with the unfolding habitat dynamic, the transforming web of spatial-relations in which we all share inclusion?

 I’m not being facetious here, I think we are in trouble.  I think ‘knowledge’ is running away with us, … ‘the tool is running away with the workman’ as Ralph Waldo Emerson said in ‘The Method of Nature’.

 The more we become ‘enlightened’ by knowledge, the larger and deeper the shadow grows.  This is the ‘jaws music’ I hear as Christmas is approaching and ‘the number of calendar days left’ is read off to us like an omen by the shop-keepers.

 Everybody knows when Christmas is, it is when Dieter or Pope Gregory or whoever is in charge of calendars and dates says “now ist venn vee dahnce”.

 We have been getting smarter and smarter, meaning that we ‘know more and more’ about the way the world works, the way that people work.

 Does this not mean that we are moving more things from the darkness of the unknown into the light of the known?

 Carl Jung said something about this that, today, rings bells for me as if I were trapped in a cathedral belfy during Angelus;

“The world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman Objects: it was projected, as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At most it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another: already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals. Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, rumours, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is.” – Carl Jung, ‘Psychology and Religion’.”

Have you noticed the ‘shadow growing’?

Have you noticed how people are coming out of their silence on issues such as sexual harassment and paedophilia and seeking retribution for decades old events?

Have you noticed how people want to give schizophrenics full punishment for offences they committed while in a hallucinatory state.

Have you noticed how people want to punish people whose unintended mistakes led to tragedy, on the basis of the magnitude of the tragedy, as in the case of the man who accidently dropped his cigarette into a deep layer of dry pine needles while installing a satellite antenna, which started a fire he couldn’t put out, which started the forest on fire and burned down his entire town?

Have you noticed how the media gets onto these cases and/or actually stirs them up through ‘investigative journalism’?

Have you noticed how the media and society demonize not just sexual harassers, but also fallen dictators such as Saddam Hussein and/or colonel Qaddafi of Libya.

As someone who lived and worked in Libya over the transition when the revolution led by Qaddafi interrupted the play of the colonizing powers which had been kicking Libya about like a football on their global pitch, I am amazed at how the media now isolates Qaddafi from the turbulence of colonization (which continues on in a more subtle-than-before political-economic dynamic) in which we are all participants.  As Jung said in an earlier era; we are not independent of these actions we see ‘out there’ in front of us;

“It is the face of our own shadow that glowers at us across the Iron Curtain.” – Carl Jung

And so it is, in my view, with the ‘evil’ faces of Saddam Hussein and Muamar Qaddafi selected for our viewing by the popular media.

Does it seem to you, as I say this, that I am trying to ‘make excuses for paedophiles and evil-monster-dictators’?

What I am getting at is this increasingly ‘surgical separating’ of the ‘perpetrator of immoral acts’ from the overall ‘moral’ mainstream of society; i.e. the projecting of our own ‘shadow’ on our fellow participants in a common living place dynamic.

What I am getting at is our growing sense that individual behaviour is driven inside-outwardly by ‘knowledge’ rather than by our experienced participation in the larger living space dynamic in which we are situationally included.

Was Qaddafi’s behaviour coming from his internal knowledge or from his experienced participation in the world dynamic?

To what degree is the individual’s behaviour ‘coming from his own internal knowledge-based direction’ and to what degree is it ‘coming from his experience of participation in the societal dynamic?’

There is evidently a rapid shift going on here as to how the media sees this; how mainstream society sees this, and it is decidedly moving towards the view that the individual’s behaviour is fully and solely internally driven, particularly if ‘immorality’ is involved.

For example, nine years ago, on the first anniversary of 9/11, CBC interviewer Peter Mansbridge asked then Prime Minister (Canada) Jean Chrétien:

“By the end of the day [9/11], what were you thinking about in terms of how the world had changed?”, and Chrétien replied:

“… it is a division in the world that is building up. And I knew that it was the inspiration of it.  For me, I think that the rest of the world a bit too selfish, and that there is a lot of resentment…. You know, the poor, relatively, get poorer all the time. And the rich are getting richer all the time. … You know, you cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others.  And that is what the Western world, not only the Americans, the Western world has to realize, because they are human beings too, and there are long-term consequences if you don’t look hard at the reality in 10 or 20 or 30 years from now.”

Although an Ipso-Reid poll found that 84 percent of Canadians believed the United States was at least partly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, and although Senator Douglas Roche commented;

“This was a very perceptive comment [Jean Chrétien’s]. It was waiting to be said–needed to be said. It was something that many of us have been saying for a long time. Any anti-terrorism policy has to be seen within the totality of economic and social conditions that are the obvious spawning ground of this desperate activity.”

There was an uproar, particular in the United States where people accused Chrétien of ‘making excuses for terrorists’ and in Canada, …

“Canadian Alliance leader Stephen Harper called on Chrétien to apologize to the U.S. and to the families of Canadians killed in the attacks. “(His) comments, particularly coming on the anniversary of Sept. 11, blaming the victim are shameful,” Harper charged. “What was behind the events of Sept. 11 are the forces of evil and hatred…. These must be resisted by free and democratic societies and their leaders.”

This ‘division’ in peoples’ views based on (a) whether behaviour is ‘situation animated’, making it impossible to ‘cleanly isolate’ behaviour and attribute it to internal sourcing within the individual, entirely out of the context of the social dynamic [the transforming web of spatial relations] we are all participants in and helping to ‘condition’, or (b) whether behaviour is ‘subject animated’ so that we can ‘blame individuals’ for their ‘immoral acts’, … appears to be heading somewhere; i.e. to the overwhelming predominance of (b)].

The case of the firing of Joe Paterno, the famed Penn State football coach over sexual misbehaviour of a staff member he was informed of but failed to report to the police is another such event, riots over austerity in Britain are another;

“Prime Minister David Cameron blamed the worst riots in Britain for decades on street gang members and opportunistic looters and denied government austerity measures or poverty caused the violence in London and other major English cities.”

The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and other ‘Occupy’ protests around the globe are eliciting similar divisions of view as to the basic ‘origins of behaviour’,  in governments and in the social collective, the choice being between seeing the action of protesters as (a) deriving from the overall community dynamic, or (b) deriving internally from the rational knowledge and intellection of the dissenting individuals.

I will tell you what all of my inquiry into such conflicting views of dynamics points to, which fits what Nietzsche has written into his works, that ‘mediocre truths’ as in (b) are increasingly on the rise.   The media and the mainstream view is increasingly re-rendering the world dynamic in terms of subject-predicate, doer-deed, cause-effect, as is the mode of mainstream science.

“Our judgement has us conclude that] every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

Is lightning responsible for the flashes in the sky?  Is the corn producer responsible for the corn harvest, does the looter loot, the sexual harasser harass, or are these views of dynamic behaviour simply a ‘language game’ we are playing, a ‘mediocre truth’ as Nietzsche says, which fails to capture the deeper physical origin of these phenomena which lies within a transforming web of spatial relations?  Is there both a ‘breeding ground’ for ‘terrorism’ that we are all helping to condition as Chrétien argues and which Harper wants us to ignore, so that the blame can be focused fully and solely on the ‘terrorist acts’ of the individual, as if they originated locally, in the individual’s internal knowledge, intellection and purpose?  If one sees things as Chrétien does, then the truth in the statement ‘the terrorist terrorizes’ is a ‘mediocre truth’.

Still, as we grow our knowledge of ‘how things work’ we become more confident in explaining all manner of phenomena in terms of ‘how things work’ as if behaviour originates, in a ‘first cause’ fashion [God-like creationist fashion] from within things.

The more we psychologically isolate the source of behaviour to ‘the inner workings of the thing’, the more we deny our own involvement, the more our ‘shadow’ grows.  It is a Pinocchio’s nose sort of thing except that we cannot see the ‘shadow’.

Why am I talking about ‘the shadow’?   It is because it is evident to me that the ‘real’ sourcing of physical phenomena is spatial-relational and that individual behaviour is ‘idealization’ that is concretized by language and grammar [by ‘language games’] that conceals the ‘real’ source.   I am not talking about ‘the shadow’ because Carl Jung wrote about it, but his words are certainly of interest in this regard, in my view;

“How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious? Primitive man’s perception of objects is conditioned only partly by the objective behaviour of the things themselves, whereas a much greater part is often played by intrapsychic facts which are not related to the external objects except by way of projection. This is due to the simple fact that the primitive has not yet experienced that ascetic discipline of mind known to us as the critique of knowledge. To him the world is a more or less fluid phenomenon within the stream of his own fantasy, where subject and object are undifferentiated and in a state of mutual interpenetration.” – Carl Jung

Yes, this captures the sense that the space we experience life in, “‘our world’ … is a fluid phenomenon… where subject and object are undifferentiated and in a state of mutual interpenetration.”  That is what relativity and Mach’s principle say it is.  That is what quantum physics says it is.  That is what my experience informs me it is, as in the case of WWII and other examples above.  A world that is firstly a transforming web of spatial-relations in which we all share inclusion ‘is’ a fluid phenomenon where subject and object are not mutually excluding, where habitat and inhabitant are conjugate relations within a common fluid dynamic in the manner of the convection cells [inhabitants] in the flowing medium [habitat].

And just to interject, before continuing, a ‘personal note’ on why I have called this essay ‘A Christmas Shadow’.   I have called it this because of how I feel about Christmas and for the information of those who feel nothing of the sort, I am not saying that anyone else should feel as I do.  My feeling is that ‘Christmas’ is kind of a ‘command performance’ that comes out of nowhere, out of pure ‘knowledge’, down through the individual, as if everyone is supposed to listen to the voice of some faceless high priests who design calendars marked with days deemed important for all of us, to cue the correct behaviours in us.  As mentioned, if the celebrations were coming from the outside inwards, from our real current experience, as in harvest festivals, solstices, the arrival of spring, the warmth of summer days, these unfoldings that naturally orchestrate individual and collective behaviours, I feel good about them.

When the first sunny snow-cover-dissipating day of spring arrives after a long winter, it brings out a happy celebratory mood in everyone, and sharing that good mood seems to come naturally through us, through our experiencing of the world dynamic.  There are no media announcements giving us the calendar count on the number of days till the ‘happy day’ arrives where it is written and so that we ‘know’, …  ‘now ist venn vee dahnce’.   It is not just to the fixing of Christ’s birthday celebration that my spirit rebels, it rebels at the fixing of birthday celebrations and other time-cued celebratory schedules in general.   This is my ‘eccentricity’ if you like, … my feelings, … that I have no desire to impose on anyone.  I share it here to provide some background perspective as to how I am coming to conclude that ‘the shadow is growing’ in lockstep with ‘the growth of knowledge’, scientific knowledge and ‘rational knowing’, in particular.

Are we headed for an ‘Omega’ as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggests, … a global awakening event?

Yes, I believe we are headed there and it seems that we are moving swiftly, although I don’t see ‘Omega’ in the same terms as Teilhard does.

The remainder of this essay describes ‘the findings’ of my inquiry which largely parallel and are conformant with those of Nietzsche, Poincaré, Mach, Bohm, Schroedinger, all of whom suggest that our scientific knowledge based on matter and material dynamics [‘what things do’], is Fiktion, ‘a house of cards’, ‘appearances’, ‘maya’ (illusion), or perhaps most aptly, ‘mediocre truth’.

Materialist science and its technological applications along with rational thinking [scientific thinking] have been taking us deeper into that ‘illusion’ wherein we understand the world dynamic in the ‘mediocre truth’ terms of ‘what things do’ [subject animated dynamics rather than situation animated dynamics] and the deeper we have been ‘buying into’ that illusion, the deeper the ‘shadow’ becomes, and the more predominant our projection of that shadow onto others becomes.

This is my view, as a ‘scientist’ who ‘thinks scientifically’ and who uses scientific thinking as a tool, but who in no way accepts ‘science’ as anything more than a tool in support of understanding our far more complex life experience; … as a scientist who, as well, reflects on how science transforms our relations with one another and the dynamics of our shared living space and thus contributes to a complexity that is beyond its own explanatory reach.  All of my researches and experience affirm my view on this deepening of the illusion that would have us understand the world dynamic in the ‘time-enabled’ [clockworks] terms of ‘what things do’, and with the deepening of the illusion, the deepening of denial of our involvement and deepening of the shadow.

The primary charge here is not the declared falsity of rational knowledge, subject-predicate, cause-effect, ‘what things do’.  It is instead that such a view of dynamics is, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘mediocre truth’ aka ‘useful Fiktion and perhaps necessary Fiktion’.  What he means by that is that while we live within a continually transforming space [in a flow of ‘becoming’], in order to ‘talk about it’, we must reduce it to ‘being’ and in the process split apart the observing subject from the observed object.  It is this talk in terms of ‘beings’, ‘things-in-themselves’ that is ‘Fiktion’, ‘useful Fiktion’ and ‘perhaps necessary Fiktion’.  That is, it is an orienting to visible, material acts; i.e. to ‘subject animated dynamics’ that seem to tell a complete story thanks to ‘power of words’ [thanks to our ‘language games’] so that while these acts we describe are experimentally validated truths, they are mediocre truths.  The establishing as ‘the truth’ that a particular ‘terrorist act’ was ‘caused by’ particular ‘terrorist agents’ does not speak to the issue of whether the condition of our global society vis a vis the tensions that reside in its web of spatial relations, in which we are all participants, is not providing a fertile breeding ground for such ‘eruptions’.   This is why it is a ‘mediocre truth’.

All of the ‘type (b)’ knowledge that is mentioned above, that understands people’s behaviours in ‘subject-predicate’ form, as if their behaviour is fully and solely coming from the ‘doer’ [person, nation, corporation], from their internal knowledge, intellection and purpose, is what could be called ‘mediocre truth’.   This knowledge is what ‘science is all about’, and this is where the great growth in scientific knowledge is coming from.

The ‘type (a)’ understanding recognizes situational experience within the ‘continual becoming’ as the primary orchestrator of behaviour, while acknowledging that we can short cut our description of behaviour by imputing it to assert itself inside-outwardly from the interior of the individual [person, nation, corporation etc.].  Chrétien’s observation that, within the continually transforming global web of relations that constitute the world dynamic, some of us may experience ‘humiliation’ does not imply that the humiliation has to be ‘intentional’ to be ‘real’ and ‘experienced’.  As Chrétien said

“Power cannot be exercised to the point that it humiliates others, … History is full of stories of power that was not curbed” … and at a talk in New York to an audience of the powerful in business and politics, he said; “When you’re powerful like you are, you guys, this is the time to be nice.’ That’s one of the problems. You cannot exercise your power to the point of humiliation for the others, … The Western world, not only the Americans, but the Western world has to realize because they are human beings, too. .. There are long-term consequences if you don’t look hard at the reality, in 10 or 20 or 30 years from now.”

There is no room in mainstream/popular science or in scientific thinking (rational thinking) that allows for behaviour to be outside-inward orchestrated from the relational dynamics in a shared living space.  Yet, that is all that is allowed in ‘relativity’ and ‘quantum physics’.  Mach’s principle says that; “The dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”   This is the view of the world dynamic as a ‘continual becoming’, as a ‘transformation of spatial relations’ wherein visible local material beings are ‘appearances’ (‘schaumkommen’), ‘ripples in the energy-charged fluid medium of space’ [Bohm, Schroedinger].

Bohm and Schroedinger are presenting a view of the real physical phenomenal world and along with it they are implying that ‘type (b)’ knowledge is ‘mediocre truth’ that ‘subjectizes’ on the basis of visual appearances, that takes visible material forms, ‘things that we consider in themselves’ and synthetically endows them with ‘subjecthood’ as ‘things-in-themselves’.  It is from this point of having subjectized visible forms within the continual becoming, that we then impute to them ‘their own behaviour’.   We do this with ‘language’ and ‘grammar’, as Nietzsche says;

“Our judgement has us conclude that] every change must have an author”;–but this conclusion is already mythology: it separates that which effects from the effecting. If I say “lightning flashes,” I have posited the flash once as an activity and a second time as a subject, and thus added to the event a being that is not one with the event but is rather fixed, “is” and does not “become.”–To regard an event as an “effecting,” and this as being, that is the double error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’, 531

This is the general psychological-linguistic process by which we impute behaviour to ‘beings’.   We can substitute all manner of ‘subjects’ into Nietzsche’s above statement and make the same point about the circular reasoning; e.g. ‘the terrorist terrorizes’.  The dictionary tells us that ‘the terrorist is a person who employs terror or terrorism.’  Those who claim to fight against what they feel is oppression and humiliation by their more powerful brothers, who call themselves ‘freedom fighters’, are labelled ‘terrorists’ by their more powerful brothers.  Meanwhile, ‘Just War Theory’ says that to qualify as being a legitimate conflict, “only duly constituted public authorities may wage war”, making just war a deliberate ‘rational act’ on the part of the warring parties.

War was not formally based on moral judgements.  Wars ‘happened’ like avalanches and earthquakes happen, when tensions grow beyond the threshold limits where the parties to the conflict can sustain a troubled balance.   Over the last two centuries, wars have been ‘rationalized’ on the basis that “violence is an evil that can in certain situations be condoned as the lesser of evils”.

Thus, instead of war erupting from long-standing relational tensions in Europe, war was instead seen as a rational necessity to defend against the evil actions of Hitler-led Nazi Germany; i.e. as the lesser of evils, the alternative being to be subjugated by an evil ‘colonizer’ empire [Nazi Germany].  Colonization was not justified except in the case where one race was truly superior to another, as Churchill said;

“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.” — Churchill’s testimony to the Peel Commission (1937) on a Jewish Homeland in Palestine

The notion that ‘lightning flashes’ and/or ‘the warrior wars’ is circular reasoning, type (b) knowledge, ‘mediocre truth’ that surgically extracts the individual or group from their experience of inclusion within a social dynamic, a web of spatial relations that may well be oppressive and serve to orchestrate, from the outside-inward, individual and collective behaviours of those situationally included within the web of relations.

Instead of ‘situation-animated dynamics’ as in (a), we may [and increasingly often do] substitute the ‘mediocre truth’ of ‘subject-animated dynamics’ as in (b).

Am I ‘making excuses for terrorists’?

This discussion is not about judging the merits of different sides to a conflict, it is about different modes of understanding the same dynamics.  The colonizers of America were bothered for a long time with terrorist activities perpetrated by ‘the Indians’, the indigenous peoples who the colonizing culture has for several centuries continued to oppress and humiliate.

We are getting closer, here, to the nub of how; “as we are growing our knowledge, so are we growing our ‘shadow’”

Howard Zinn points out in ‘A People’s History of the United States’, the historical narrative of the colonizer [whom he, following Camus, refers to as ‘executioner’] is the absolute opposite of the historical narrative of the colonized indigenous peoples [‘the victims’].  The former’s view is that they are the creators of a wonderful new world in the Americas while the latter’s view is that the colonizers are the destroyers of a wonderful established world on Turtle Island.   These views are value-laden perspectives that are not reconcilable.  They are ‘mediocre truths’ based on ‘what people do’.   For the more comprehensive truth, one must recall that the world dynamic is a continual becoming, a transforming web of spatial-relations.  The overall world dynamic is characterized by continual transformation of spatial-relations.  The colonizers and the colonized experienced inclusion, together, in a common transforming living space.   Their difference in view comes in terms of a time-based narrative in terms of ‘what things do’ [what the respective players are doing and whether it is ‘constructive’ or ‘destructive’].

Genesis and degeneration are dual aspects of the one dynamic of ‘in-place’ transformation.  The biosphere undergoes in-place transformation.  Growth of population is ‘apparent’, it is not ‘real’.  Growth as in development of material structures [houses, buildings, roads] is ‘apparent’, it is not ‘real’.  How could the ‘constructive’ side of things be ‘real’ since what is already ‘in-place’ must be destroyed in the process of ‘constructing’ something new?   The current indigenous peoples of the Gulf Islands are committed to preserving and protecting the natural ecosystems and the ‘rural character’ of the islands.  The developers are eager to create a new presence.  It is impossible to construct something new without destroying something already established.  Only in a psychological modeling of new construction, as if in an absolute fixed, empty and infinite Euclidian space operating theatre, could ‘construction’ proceed without its conjugate twin ‘destruction’.

In other words, there is only ‘in-place transformation’ where what has been established is destroyed in the act of new construction.  Thousand of human life-cycle generations of ‘production’ and ‘growth’ will not ‘add up’ because they are not ‘real’ [as Schroedinger observes, ‘matter’ is not real, it is energy in transformation, a ripple in the energy-charged spatial-plenum.  Just because it is convenient for us to subjectize and concretize it in language does not ‘make it real’].  Transformation of spatial relations is real and it is what both the colonizer and colonized actually experience in spite of the one claiming that ‘construction’ is ‘taking place’ and the other arguing that ‘destruction’ is what is ‘taking place’.  Historical narratives are in terms of ‘mediocre truths’; i.e. in terms of notional ‘time-sequence’ accounts of ‘what things do’, ‘subject-predicate’ action where ‘producers produce’ in the circular reasoning that underlies ‘mediocre truth’.

As Nietzsche observes, our living space, e.g. the biosphere, does not grow bigger or smaller, it only transforms ‘in place’;

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income … This world is the will to power–and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power–and nothing besides!” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

Economic theory, meanwhile, is based on ‘mediocre truth’ that treats ‘production’ and ‘growth’ as if they were ‘real’.

This ‘mediocre truth’ is presently in a state of collapse, and this is ‘the writing on the wall’ that suggests the coming of some sort of nexus or ‘awakening’.

But the proponents of the reality of (b), ‘subject animated dynamics’ wherein ‘the producer produces’ are not accepting the collapse of this ‘illusion’ without a fight.  The lines are hardening.

On the (a) side, economists such as Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize in Economics, 2003) are noting that what is happening to the space that the producer draws resources and labour and other inputs from and discharges products and outputs into, is the more comprehensive suprasystem dynamic, a dynamic [relational] ‘fluid medium’ in which a particular producer is a participating ‘ripple’ or ‘convection cell’.  This is euphemistically described in terms of ‘externalities’ that associate with production; i.e. that are ‘fallout’ that is not taken into account in the book-keeping, but that nevertheless conditions the living space we all share inclusion in, and thus affect us all.

Marshall McLuhan pointed this out before Stiglitz in ‘Understanding Media’ (1964), where he observes that even as we focus on ‘what things do’,

“it matters little whether the machinery we put in place constructs Cadillacs or Cornflakes, what [predominantly] matters is how our relations with one another and the living space in which we share inclusion are transformed.”

And Frédéric Neyrat similarly expresses this same point in ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’;

“In extending his living space in a manner that destroys the space of others, he destroys his own space. Not initially his inside space, his ‘self’, but his outside space, this real outside-of-self which nourishes his ‘inside-of-self’. The protection of this outside space now becomes the condition without which he is unable to pursue the growth of his own powers of being.”

Because the space of the earth’s biosphere persists in its sphericity and volume even as ‘production’ and ‘growth’ appear to go on within it, we cannot claim that ‘something grows’ in that space; i.e. the notion that ‘something grows’ is a ‘mediocre truth’ since the dynamics of the space of the biosphere are constituted by the transformation of spatial relations.   Growth/genesis and decline/degeneration are dual simultaneous aspects of the single dynamic; i.e. ‘transformation of spatial relations’.

As discussed above, it is the ‘power of words’ that allows us to psychologically isolate the ‘producer’ by circular reasoning as in ‘the producer produces’, or ‘the grower grows’, making it appear as if the subject is the doer of the deed when both subject and object are bound up in the continuing transformation of spatial relations, in the same sort of manner as storm-cells in the atmospheric flow-space [or as ‘ripples in the spatial-plenum’, in Bohm’s words].

Science has been in charge of developing our ‘production technology’ and our rate of accruing knowledge of ‘how things work’ and how we can ‘make things happen’ has been rapidly escalating.  Thanks to science, we are not only gaining technological proficiencies on the macro level, we are extending our ‘make things happen’ technologies into the micro and nano levels.

But the more that we orient to ‘making things happen’ [i.e. the more we ‘understand’ dynamics in these terms] the more we blind ourselves to ‘what is really happening’ (the transformation of our living space).  We are like the colonizers who focused on constructing a wonderful new world.  And then, when we look upon the evil face of the dead Indian that we have just killed, that had been terrorizing us, just as when we look upon the evil face of a Saddam Hussein and a Muamar Qaddafi that had been terrorizing us, and/or the rioters and protestors in the streets; “It is the face of our own shadow that glowers at us” as Jung says.

The concept of ‘the producer that produces’ is fiction that ignores the reality that the producer is more realistically seen as a convection cell within the fluid medium of the biosphere, but we have built a global economy upon ‘the mediocre truth’ of ‘appearances’, and this ‘growth-based economy’ is imploding, as is inevitable.

Within a relational space, outside-inward ‘nurturance-affording’ [destructive] influence and inside-outward asserting [constructive] influence are dual aspects of one dynamic [relational transformation].  At some point the outside-inward ‘reciprocal compression’ that inevitably and always associates with inside-outward asserting action becomes manifest.  For example, the inside-outward asserting ‘growth’ of a cluster of warming bubbles generates outside-inward reciprocal compression that transforms the spherical bubbles into hexagonal cells.  The faster the bubbles grow, the more intense the reciprocal compression and the more radical the transformation of spatial relations.  Only if space ‘really were’ an absolute fixed empty and infinite operating theatre would we avoid the simultaneous reciprocal compression, … the outside-inward accommodating influence that is simultaneously conjugate to any/all inside-outward asserting influence.  How it manifests will not be obvious, as Mach’s principle suggests [“the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat”]; i.e. the transformation of spherical cells to hexagonal cells, and the ‘V’ flying formation of the wildgeese are exceptional cases where the ever-present outside-inward orchestrating influence that is conjugate to inside-outward asserting influence becomes visibly manifest.

The imploding economy is the result of confusing ‘appearances’ for ‘reality’, for mistaking ‘growth’ as something ‘real’, and in the process ignoring the shadow, the ‘externalities’ we are infusing into the common living space dynamic.

The ‘intellectual economy’ is headed in the same direction; i.e. it is headed for ‘implosion’.  We have been attributing ‘constructive acts’ to constructive people and ‘destructive acts’ to ‘destructive people’ and allocating rewards and punishments on the basis of these notional ‘subject animated dynamics’, these ‘mediocre truths’.  The heroes of our ‘production’ and ‘growth’ industries, that are being termed “the 1%”, are becoming seen as the evil, manipulative ‘executioners’ of we ‘the innocent victims’, that are being termed “the 99%”.

Churchill rallied the bulk of the global collective behind him when he interpreted Germany’s invasion of Poland in the ‘mediocre truth’ terms of ‘their evil act’, thus opening the door to a rational ‘just’ war based on the morals of individual [person, nation] behaviour wherein “violence is an evil that can in certain situations be condoned as the lesser of evils”.

The ‘error’, of course, is in the psychological disassociation of ourselves, participants in the transforming web of spatial relations, the situation-animated dynamics that constitutes the world dynamic, from the ‘apparent subject animated dynamics’ that we impute to be going on ‘out there’ in front of us.

Stephen Harper and George W. Bush, thanks to the appeal of their ‘moralist’ message, left Jean Chrétien speaking to empty seats with his premise that we must acknowledge that we participate in a conditioning of the common living space in such a manner as to cultivate imbalances, disharmonies [humiliations] and in general ‘relational tensions’ that make our living space a ‘breeding ground’ for eruptions of violence.  In other words, the ‘winning’ [by popular acceptance] combination of moral judgement and ‘mediocre truth’ [subject animated dynamics conditioned in our minds by ‘scientific thinking’] puts us into a state of denial fertile to the growth of our ‘shadow’; i.e.

“It is the face of our own shadow that glowers at us from the terrorist camps and from the pictures of sexual predators.”

We are at the point where the continuing shift to a belief in ‘subject animated dynamic’ is making it a ‘moral imperative’ for ‘all good men’ to take it upon themselves to root out ‘the evil ones’ in the world, not only the Saddam Hussein’s and the Muamar Qaddafi’s and the Osama bin Ladin’s, but the sexual predators and looters and rioters that poison our streets.  By our very act of seizing the initiative to root out evil in the world, we purify ourselves, and confirm our disconnection from those out there who are only themselves responsible for their inside-outward asserting evil actions, whose hateful ugly evil faces we can and must spit upon and stone.

Our ethic of ‘keeping it simple’ means that it is not necessary to go to the trouble of recalling how our web of spatial relations evolves and connects us all together when we, as colonizers/executioners see the ugly evil face of a colonized-indigenous/victim-turned terrorist pop up, and duly plug a few bullets through his ugly head.  Like Churchill, it is sufficient to apply rational, scientific thinking to such matters; i.e.

Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.”  – Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’

Time, therefore, plays a very important part in ‘colonizer justice’.  It is the basic enabler of ‘mediocre truth’.  Calendars and clocks can help us  escape from the primitive world described by Carl Jung where subject and object are in a state of mutual interpenetration, in the manner of the convection cell in the flowing medium;

“How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious? Primitive man’s perception of objects is conditioned only partly by the objective behaviour of the things themselves, whereas a much greater part is often played by intrapsychic facts which are not related to the external objects except by way of projection. This is due to the simple fact that the primitive has not yet experienced that ascetic discipline of mind known to us as the critique of knowledge. To him the world is a more or less fluid phenomenon within the stream of his own fantasy, where subject and object are undifferentiated and in a state of mutual interpenetration.” – Carl Jung

Scientific knowledge can drive and direct our behaviour in the same sort of time-triggered manner as an important date marked on the calendar; i.e. it can start up our behaviour, inside-outwardly, from scratch, informing us in the manner of an invisible commander; …  ‘now ist venn vee dahnce’.  Such knowledge can tell me when I must run down to the beach and spray a paint-line on the rocks to denote the winter solstice, without ever having to see the sunset and to contemplate how the outside-inward orchestrating influence of the celestial habitat-dynamic conditions our inhabitant-behaviours, as we, somehow, are at the same time conditioning the dynamics of the habitat we are included in.

In Dickens’ ‘ A Christmas Carol’, clocks and chimes abound, announcing to Scrooge and to us that this is a story rendered in terms of ‘what things do’ where change is seen as transpiring ‘in time’.  We can clearly see the message that Scrooge ‘must change his behaviour’ before ‘it is too late’.  His ‘time is running out’ and his material actions, ‘what he does’, his ‘subject animated dynamic’ is portrayed as of first order importance.  Yes, it is a ‘popular classic’ in the ‘moralizing story’ category, even though it sees ‘transformation’ in the ‘mediocre truth’ terms of the ‘transformation of the individual’ and ‘what he does’.

“ A Christmas Carol has been deemed a biting piece of social commentary by some. Critics have underscored the scathing criticism of 1840s London, an economically and socially stratified city that Dickens believed imprisoned its poor and oppressed its lower classes. The prevailing socio-economic theory of that time held that anyone who was in debt should be put in a poorhouse. In his story, Dickens contended that the reformation of such a materialistic, shallow society can be achieved gradually through the spiritual transformation of each individual … Scrooge’s metanoia has also been placed within its historical and literary context, and critics have related it to the religious revival then fervent in nineteenth-century England”

No doubt, part of the appeal of the story comes from an awareness of the ‘power’ that Scrooge holds by virtue of his ‘productive achievements’ as a sort of Plantation Owner.  The conversion of ‘worker-abusing plantation owners’ to ‘benevolent plantation owners’ parallels the evolutionary path of our global society.  Scrooge, meanwhile, remains the ‘plantation owner’ and thus the story is cast in terms of ‘moral behaviour’ based on the ‘mediocre truth’ of ‘subject animated behaviour’, what a person is ‘seen to do’.

Scrooge is radically unlike a Mohammed Bouazizi, the humble Tunisian who lacked the power of wealth to perpetrate ‘good’ in an inside-outward asserting manner, but whose self-immolation ‘induced’ massive transformation of spatial relations in the living space he shared inclusion in.  Scrooge is a model for how to deploy the power that we feel arises within us, to ‘good purpose’.  It is a model that likely invites welcome embrace by a George W. Bush, a Winston Churchill and a Stephen Harper and by all of us who believe in being the author of good works during our brief ‘time’ on earth.  What I am saying is that ‘A Christmas Carol’ begins and ends in the realm of (b), subject animated behaviour or ‘mediocre truth’.

The present day ‘colonized’ aboriginal appreciates the fact that his ‘colonizer’ has transformed ‘over time’ from being an ‘abusive’ colonizer to becoming a ‘benevolent colonizer’, but the ‘colonized’ indigenous person is not looking for such time-based transformation that is in terms of ‘what things do’, he is looking for transformation in spatial relations that have been holding him captive and subjecting him to ‘domestication’.  His understanding of the world dynamic goes beyond the ‘mediocre truth’ terms of ‘what people do’ and whether it is morally good or bad.  His understanding is in terms of how our ‘inhabitant dynamics’ are conditioning the ‘habitat dynamic’ at the same time as the ‘habitat dynamic’ is conditioning our ‘inhabitant dynamics’.   He understands that the tensions in Europe were the breeding ground for the actions that became visible eruptions in the form of ‘what evil Hitler/Nazi Germany’ did, and/or what benevolent, heroic Churchill/Britain did.   Is it even meaningful to make the ‘moral assessment’ of the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of the ‘individual nation’ when it comes to war?  Are we not all bound together within a continually transforming web of spatial relations?  Are not ‘all wars civil wars’?  Is Mitakuye Oyasin, ‘we are all related’ not the transcending truth that trumps the ‘mediocre truth’ of ‘individual behaviour’?

In the eyes of the world, Churchill/Britain is a hero and Hitler/Germany is a villain, and to argue otherwise is to make oneself very unpopular.  Few people are going to listen to complex arguments that seek a more ‘comprehensive truth’ than the ‘mediocre truth’ that is embodied in such moral assessments.

By the same token, few people are going to accept that action that originates by ‘time-cues’ such as calendar dates can lead to ‘mediocre behaviours’, the sort of scientific, clockworks behaviours of the –  ‘now ist venn vee dahnce’ – genre, the sort of behaviours that derive inside-outwardly from ‘knowledge’ without the conjugate twin of ‘outside-inward orchestrating’ influence.  I am certainly not claiming that this is the full story on time-cued, subject animated dynamics.  Once the celebration starts, a more resonant outside-inward orchestration is ‘enabled’ in conjugation with inside-outward asserting, so – ‘let the dahncing and celebrations begin’-, by all means.

The happy and loving face we are looking into is ‘the face of our own shadow that is glowing back at us’.

When the mirroring is simultaneous in both directions, ‘time’ is removed from the ‘equation’ and only the relations of space persist.

Who said that a ‘Christmas Shadow’ could not have dual faces?

With the elimination of ‘time’ the observer/receiver becomes one with observed/transmitted in timeless ‘holey communion’.

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