Rant

expression unencumbered by word-based language

My feeling is that a ‘true rant’ should spontaneously emerge, like the howling of coyotes orchestrated by the rising of a full moon.

But I have lost my coyote voice and coyote ways so I feel as if I am stuck with language.

Language is a poor vehicle for my rant because it divides everything up into subject and object and then has to set everything in motion using verbs.  My experience of the world is nothing like the way it is served up in language.  The world of my experience is an innovatively unfolding spatial-relational continuum, a ‘flow of becoming’ that includes me.

What the world ‘is’ is 100% ‘becoming’.  There is no such thing as ‘being’.  ‘Being’ and ‘beings’ are fictions.  As Nietzsche says, they may be ‘useful fictions’ but they are nevertheless ‘total fictions’.

My heart feels gladdened by the global protests of the ordinary people.  It signals to me the possibility of ridding ourselves of our belief in ‘being’ and in ‘the way things are supposed to be’ as if ‘the universe were governed by laws’.   Our invention of law-based social order is a great insanity that we shall hopefully overcome, even though it has taken over the world (we have imposed it globally, by way of ‘belief’ in it).

For me, Defoe’s pirate Bellamy sees through it, as he encourages a hostage to leave the law-based world behind;

“I am sorry they won’t let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?

When the captain replied that his conscience would not let him break the laws of God and man, the pirate Bellamy continued:

You are a devilish conscience rascal, I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world, as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea, and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and this my conscience tells me: but there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure. “

Law based society continues to cultivate ‘crafty rascals’ and to cultivate the notion that some are better than others, so that we are encouraged to be submissive to ‘our betters’ as we try to work our way up the ladder, out of the filthy gutter of the ordinary to the pure heights of the ivory tower where, as lord and lady untouchables (someone has to be judging class in a law-based society) we can feast on those degeneracies that the little people must do penance for.

Thomas Mann, in Mario and the Magician, captured the inherent fascism in hierarchical social systems;

“The capacity for self-surrender, he said, for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side of that other power to will and to command.  Commanding and obeying formed together one single principle, one indissoluble unity; he who knew how to obey knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another.”

The law based social scheme generates ‘pirates’, for if there were no laws, there would be no ‘out-laws’.  As Defoe also wrote;

“Wherever God erects a house of prayer
the Devil always builds a chapel there;
And ‘t will be found, upon examination,
the latter has the largest congregation.”

But we have dispersed the law-based social ordering schema over and around the sphere of the earth, dividing up ‘control’ over our common living space into 195 ‘sovereign states’.   This undertaking was a ‘religious’ undertaking since ‘sovereigntism’ is a secularized theology concept, which notionally (to the believers in it) installs supreme authority in its own centre, over all of the lands and people INSIDE the state.  The believers in sovereign statism, or ‘nationalists’ (as Einstein said, ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease.  It is the measles of the world’), unlike the rivers and winds, the birds, insects and creatures of the forest, believe that the ‘inside’ of the state is mutually exclusive of the ‘outside’ of the state and that the state ‘exists independently’ from the outside so that ‘it makes sense’ to manage the state as an independent local system with its own locally originating, internal process-driven behaviour.   If states were built on a flat plane of infinite extent, that might make sense, but such ‘sense’ could only exist for men that can grab infinity in their hand and hold on to it.   As it is, we all live together in a thin blue band of atmosphere that clings to the surface of the sphere of the earth and ‘what goes around comes around’.   The past as represented by the garbage we dump off the stern of our earth circumnavigating boats, immediately becomes our future as we head towards what we are leaving behind.  Belief in the ‘independence’ of the sovereign state is ‘insanity’.   This insanity in now a global pandemic.

How did we get here?  We called it colonization, a highly successful initiative to convert the entire world to ‘sovereign states’, built upon the notion that ‘some people are better than others’ and must play the role of law-makers; i.e. must sit as intermediaries between the supreme power of God on high and the nasty little savages on the bottom.  As the Papal Bull, Romanus Pontifex of January 8, 1455 put it;

“[W]e bestow suitable favors and special graces on those Catholic kings and princes, … athletes and intrepid champions of the Christian faith … to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and … to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate … possessions, and goods, and to convert them to … their use and profit …”

Whether this was ‘softened’ over time or not, the top-down administrator-administratee structure built into the concept of the ‘sovereign state’ has never changed.

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic structure.” – Bartelson, Jens. A Genealogy of Sovereignty

As we have seen … western political thinking itself is grounded in theological concepts of “Christian nationalism.” The notion of “absolute, unlimited power held permanently in a single person or source, inalienable, indivisible, and original” is a definition of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. This “God died around the time of Machiavelli…. Sovereignty was … His earthly replacement.” -Walker, R. B. J. and Mendlovitz, Saul H. Interrogating State Sovereignty

The formula propagated in sovereign statism and law-based social organizing has thus been;

1. The behaviour of the universe is governed by laws.

2. God is the Supreme Being whose behaviour is ultimate goodness (beyond the imperfections of the material world)

3. The behaviour of human beings can range from God-like (good) to the extreme opposite, Satanic (evil)

4. The priesthood/Church are the interpreters of God’s laws of good/moral behaviour

5. Secular authority presides over the temporal/material realm while religious authority presides over the spiritual realm and the former must be informed by the latter.

All of this thinking, of course, rests on the foundational assumption that ‘humans’ are ‘beings’ (local independently existing organisms) with their own locally originating, internal process-driven and purpose-directed behaviours, so that we can assume that if a human behaves in such-and-such a manner, that behaviour originates fully and solely within the individual (as if the individual were enveloped by empty insulating space).   From this ‘corollary’, there follows further understandings;

(a) Some people’s behaviours are more God-like than others.  These should rise to the top of the secular authority and be given respect and the power to apply moral law, judging and administering corrective actions so that imperfect behaviours can be continually purged that all might eventually rise up into the ranks of the good.  (Law-based social organizing inevitably involves the forming of both ‘administrator classes’ and ‘administered classes’.  How much inter-class mobility there is, is secondary.)

(b) As Descartes observed, “a state is much better ruled when it has only a very few laws which are very strictly observed”.  The strict observance of the law, is of course, the strict observance of laws that key to the behaviour of individuals, assuming that such behaviour originates locally within the interior of the local human being, driven and directed from his internal processes and purpose.

The imputed desirability of social organization in terms of a state-law-ruled people, whose members are assumed to be ‘local systems with their own locally originating, internal process and purpose driven behaviours, is transparently flaw-filled.

Classics have been written as to how the ‘upper classes’ charged with interpreting and administering the moral law have somehow accumulated, within the law, so much wealth and privilege, as to set up huge tensions with those in the lower classes ‘being administered’, tensions that spawn angry ‘criminal’ behaviours (Jean Valjean in Les Miserables) so that the assumption that behaviour starts inside of the local, independent, human being, and which is foundational to the law-ruled state, is total fiction.

What does history show about ‘stateless’ people-nations who were their own interpreters of harmonious behaving?

“To Engels, Morgan’s description of the Iroquois [in Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society and The League of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois] was important because “it gives us the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no state.” Jefferson had also been interested in the Iroquois’ ability to maintain social consensus without a large state apparatus, as had Franklin. Engels described the Iroquoian state in much the same way that American revolutionaries had a century earlier: “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households — still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal — including the women.” — Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders

The ‘state’ that organizes by way of law-based rule has been ‘tried out’ many times over the course of history (it appeals to those who can claim membership in the ‘ruling classes’, hasn’t had all that great reviews’ e.g the following reviews by Lao Tzu (ca. 500 BC) and Chuang Tzu (369-286 BC);

The more laws and restrictions there are,

the poorer people become.

The sharper men’s weapons,

the more trouble in the land.

The more ingenious and clever men are,

the more strange things happen.

The more rules and regulations,

the more thieves and robbers.

—Lao Tzu

Chuang Tzu, put it like this:

The invention of weights and measures

makes robbery easier.

signing contracts, setting seals,

makes robbery more sure.

Teaching love and duty

provides a fitting language

with which to prove that robbery

is really for the general good.

A poor man must swing,

for stealing a belt buckle,

But if a rich man steals a whole state

He is acclaimed as statesman of the year.

Hence, if you want to hear the very best speeches

on love, duty, justice, etc.,

listen to statesmen…

and when the statesmen and lawyers

and preachers of duty disappear

There are no more robberies either

And the world is at peace.

Moral:  the more you pile up ethical principles

and duties and obligations

To bring everyone in line,

The more you gather loot

For a thief like Khang.

By ethical argument

and moral principle

The greatest crimes are eventually shown

To have been necessary, and, in fact,

A signal benefit to mankind.

(The way of Chuang Tzu, transl. Thomas Merton.)

Who says we need to organize by way of ‘sovereign states’ with their ‘law-based’ regulation?  Most people in the ‘administered classes’ are going to relate the message of the pirates, Robin Hoods, and to these remarks by Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, while those in the ‘administrating classes’ will pretend not to see this.   On top of this, those in the administered classes who feel that the system will never change in their lifetimes, tend to adopt a ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join’ em’, attitude and take a strong drag on that open pipe described by Thomas Mann;

“The capacity for self-surrender, he said, for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side of that other power to will and to command.  Commanding and obeying formed together one single principle, one indissoluble unity; he who knew how to obey knew also how to command, and conversely; the one idea was comprehended in the other, as people and leader were comprehended in one another.”

Dividing ourselves up into ‘sovereign states’ that are headed up by self-anointed ‘moral authorities’ who rule by law, is a perverse act we are inflicting on ourselves.  It has got to go!

Part II

Who are we?  Who am ‘I’?  How come some of us (e.g. aboriginal cultures) don’t celebrate birthdays?

This rant, as I said, should be in my coyote-howling-at-the-new-moon voice, but I have lost that and now all I have is this stupid language that starts off by dividing the unbounded flow of life up into ‘beings’; i.e. into ‘subject’ and ‘object’ and then trying to reconstruct what it split apart into local objects and organisms, by adding ‘verbs’.  Then we construct scenarios in which these notion local objects (thanks to our language based definitions and word-labels that we create them with) are seen to move around and interact within an absolute fixed, empty and infinite operating space.   We call scenario ‘reality’, at least ‘science’ calls it reality, even though it has taken the observer outside of it so he can get an ‘objective look’ at it, as if it were ‘out there in front of him’.  That what the ‘administering class’ judge does when he looks at the evidence of one Jean Valjean, accused of the crime of stealing a loaf of bread.  What goes on out there in front of him has nothing to do with him, the judge, because it is ‘out there’ and because the behaviour of a person originates from the inside of him and that’s where our inquiry into ‘criminal behaviour’ must therefore stop.

What the fact that my larder is full to overflowing got to do with ‘me’, the administrator of the rules?  Like a good scientific observer, I exclude myself from the dynamics I am observing ‘out there in front of me’.  That is my job.  That is the responsibility of my ‘class’, the ‘administrating class’.  I don’t care if Goedel’s theorem of incompleteness says that there is hole in all finite systems of logic as given in the Russell’s paradox formulation; “The administrator who administrates all those administrees who cannot administrate themselves cannot administrate himself.”

My larder is full and that’s why I got appointed to the ‘administrating class’ and that’s why I deserve the respect of the rest and that’s why mothers of hungry children come stealing into my bedroom at night, and quietly pay me their respects, giving me that which they can give, because they know that I will share my larder with those who give respect where it is due, to the superior providers in the community such as myself.

The excluded observer view is the greatest of inventions.  As an administrator, I would hate to have to think in terms of living in the same space as those poor devils that I administrate. I am above that!

I understand the powers of scientific thought.  I can see through the eyes of the satellite, watching the sun warm the surface of the earth differentially so that the equatorial regions bask in an over-abundance of thermal energy while the polar regions suffer from a deficiency of thermal energy and as this develops so does the convecting movement of the storm-cells emerging and developing under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence, all in the Robin Hood game of restoring energy balance and harmony in the spatial flow plenum of the atmosphere/ocean.  No matter that these cells are in a coevolving ecological relationship, … because as a scientists, I have the tool of language, the tool that ‘bewitches our understanding’ and holds us captive, as Wittgenstein says, to simplify this complexity that strains my understanding, and by the clever use of a few definitions and word labels.  In such a manner I can observe the contemporaneous, coevolutional emergence of ripples in the spatial plenum, and break it apart into notional ‘local systems’ that I call Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne, imputing to each of them, their own behaviour, their own trajectory [relative to an absolute space reference grid] and their own ‘life-cycle’, … removing entirely their ecosystemic, coevolutional nature.

Modern physics would say that the universe is an energy-charged spatial plenum and that material structures are ‘ripples in the plenum’, but ‘science’ as we know it, proceeds by giving us that ‘excluded observer’ view (scientific observers, like the law-administrating judge, cannot include themselves in the ceaselessly, innovatively unfolding spatial plenum, that would neither be ‘scientific’ nor ‘objective’).

What has the power to exclude itself from the ceaselessly, innovatively unfolding spatial plenum?

As Lee Smolin says;

“If we’re going to apply quantum theory to the whole universe, then there’s no room for observers or clocks outside the system, because there’s no “outside.”,

The only thing that has the power to exclude itself from the plenum is ‘the God-like observing mind’ of the ‘scientist’ (and then, again, this power is something that, while he can impose it on his mind, is not imposed on nature or his [inclusional] experiencing of nature)

We know what this kind of observation does.  It happens with the history of the sovereign state (or administrator thereof) as in the ‘Official History of the United States’.  A ‘believer’ in the existence of the sovereign state (sovereign states are ‘secularized theological concepts’ which have no ‘physical existence’.  Amerindians do not ‘believe’ in the existence of ‘Canada’ and the ‘United States’ and neither do birds, bears rivers or winds because they exist only thanks to people committing to ‘believe in them’) has a certain kind of memory/mind that recounts what ‘the state has been doing’, ‘is presently doing’ and what it is ‘going to do’.   So, one comes at this business of ‘history’ from the memory/mind of who one ‘believes one is’.   Howard Zinn authored ‘A People’s History of the United States’ to point out that others that get in the path of the ‘sovereign state’ see history from another ‘memory/mind’ and the two versions do not reconcile.  In other words, the memory of the ‘administrators’ and the memory of the administrated do not reconcile.    There is no ‘royal we’ in the historical recounting of the ‘administrated’.  As Zinn says;

“My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis of history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the stand point of slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokee, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican War as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s Army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on the Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the post war American Empire as seen by peons in Latin America”

Who are we?  Who am ‘I’?  How come some of us (aboriginal cultures) don’t celebrate birthdays?

Evidently, we have some ambiguities to address here, with respect to how the observer and recounter of ‘reality’ relates to what he is ‘looking out at’; i.e. what sort of ‘memory/mind’ he is using to do the ‘recounting’ of ‘what [he BELIEVES] is going on’.  ‘Believes’ is an important qualifier here since an Amerindian cannot write a ‘History of Canada’ or a ‘History of the United States’ if he has never accepted the existence of same.  His accounting of history will something like;

“And then these insane people arrived from Europe, claiming that ‘the earth belonged to man’ (them, in particular) rather than ‘man belonged to the earth’.  And they drew a map on which the put some imaginary-line boundaries, claiming that what was inside of the imaginary boundary lines was a ‘sovereign state’, and by defining and word-labelling it as they do with storm-cells, notionally splitting them out of the coevolving spatial plenum of nature, they imputed that it was a real local, independently-existing system with its own locally originating, internal process-driven and purpose-directed behaviour’.

“State sovereignty “is a ‘religion’ and a faith. …  The skillfully drawn borders that cartographers have provided for us are … spiritual and philosophical abstractions representative of a form of quasi-belief. They are … not detached maps of reality as proponents would have us believe. These geographies reflect an ardent desire to make (or impose) sovereignty a physical reality as natural as the mountains, rivers and lakes…. ” -Lombardi, Mark Owen. “Third-World Problem-Solving and the ‘Religion’ of Sovereignty: Trends and Prospects

In spite of the lunacy that this represents, many of the settlers coming over subsequently swore an oath to say that they believed this, too, and furthermore they swore to uphold belief in the notional ‘existence’ of the state by bearing arms and giving their lives, if necessary.  So now we have the bizarre spectre where these ‘believers’ are now roaming Turtle Island, armed to the teeth and ready to ‘make believers’ out of anyone who ‘calls them’ on the ‘reality’ of the ‘existence’ of their imaginary-line defined ‘state’.

It would be nice to think that aboriginals around the world could band together to restore some sanity here, but this ‘sovereigntism’ has been propagated by the colonizers, all around the world and our ‘sane brothers’ are all imprisoned in 195 of these imaginary belief-based ‘local existences’, most of which are heavily armed and policed by ‘believers’.  But there are signs that these sovereigntist belief systems are beginning to break because the ‘administratees’ are getting restless and many are no longer buying into this ‘administrator’-driven law-based scheme, wherein the administrator classes continue to exploit the adminstrated classes, using them almost as slaves in a master-slave relation, in some cases.”

So, we have at least three different memories/minds that can be used to recount what has been going on; (a) the memory of the administrators of belief based systems, (b) the memory of those administered by the belief-based systems, and (c) the memories of those who don’t believe in putting ‘belief-based systems’ into an unnatural primacy over the real experiencing of the natural world.

Our natural experience is of being included in the ceaselessly, innovatively unfolding spatial plenum.  When we wake up in the morning (our behaviour being firstly orchestrated by the sunlight cycle and only secondly being seen as driven from within by internal processes) we are ‘hungry’ which means that we want some of the nourishing stuff that is out there to move ‘in here’.  That doesn’t mean that we are ‘machines’ that have ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ that moves about an interacts with other such ‘machines’ as science defines ‘organisms’, it means that we are like the ripples in the spatial plenum, the coevolving convection cells that characterize the energy-charged spatial flow-plenum.  Our coevolution, as Nietzsche says in his anti-Darwinist writings, is like “a process of diffusion, in which endosmosis predominates over exosmosis”.

Many amongst the administrated classes are questioning this globally infected ‘being-based’ view of inhabitants and habitat, because they can see the nasty impact it is having on ourselves.  For example, it ignores our inclusion within a mutually influencing, spatial-relational ecosystem (the spatial plenum of our experience prior to our scientific fragmentation into notional ‘local beings’).  This ‘anthropocentrism’, otherwise known as ‘humanism’ is ‘killing us’.  As Frédéric Neyrat observes in ‘Biopolitics of Catastrophe’, the anthropocentrist dynamic of the past four centuries, in extending human influence into the space of others outside of itself, has in the process been destroying its own space (‘humanism is killing us’);

“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.”

Clearly, these different choices for the ‘memory/mind’ with which we recount ‘what has been going on’, ‘what is going on’ and what ‘we will be doing’, is tied up in this question.  The belief system that puts our ‘self’ or ‘sovereign state’ at the centre as ‘the doer of deeds’ is that sort of memory/mind that denies that we are secondary to the ceaselessly, innovatively unfolding spatial-plenum, the ‘ecological, coevolution’ in which we are included.  Neyrat’s view recalls Nietzsche’s view of our coevolving selfhood as “a process of diffusion, in which endosmosis predominates over exosmosis”.

The ‘self’ and the ‘memory/mind’ that does the recounting of ‘what has been going in’ is in this case radically different from the notional ‘local being’ with its own ‘locally originating, internal process driven behaviour’, the likeness of the Supreme Being whose behaviour is ‘ultimate goodness’ that transcends the imperfections of the material world.

Once we let go of the notion of behaviour originating internally, in the notional centre of our ‘local-being-self’, we go ‘beyond good-and-evil’; i.e. we go beyond the notion that any behaviour can originate locally, therefore we go beyond the notion that ‘good behaviour’ or ‘evil behaviour’ can be locally originating.  Our memory/mind that recounts ‘what has been going on’ then goes into the mode of understanding of Mach’s principle; “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 memory/mind puts ‘space’ back into its natural primacy, as modern physics (but not popular, mainstream ‘scientific thinking’) would have it.

Does this jibe with our ‘experience’?  Can we relate to this ‘memory/mind’ recounting of ‘what has been going on’?

If I am the mother, do I not make a nest, fill the cupboards, and otherwise condition the living space so as to make it nurturing for the children and family that live within it?   We can describe this in terms of the ‘good behaviour’ of the ‘local organism with her own locally originating, internal process-driven and purpose-directed behaviour’, but this would ‘miss’ the ‘spatial’ aspect, that she creates a spatial halo that is nurturing to all those who are inclusionally situated within it.  Where there is love, there is a warm, happy and harmonious space and those who enter into it are nurtured by it.  The nurturance of the radiant smile or the good humour is available to all who share the space, scientific thought (the memory/mind of the excluded observer) may synthetically constrain it to a ‘transactional’ or ‘interactional’ behaviour, but our felt experience informs us by way of spatial relations.  We know what it feels like to experience inclusion in an oppressive living space.  We know that the dynamics of a crowd orchestrates the behaviour of the included members, and we know that the observer-excluding scientific view cannot handle this.  In such cases, science cites the mathematically intractable ‘three body problem’, throws its hand up, and opts out of that level of inquiry. Newton acknowledged this in both the Author’s prologue and the summarizing Scholium in his ‘Philosophaiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica’.  As Newton wrote when he tried to go beyond explaining the motion of two bodies relative to one another and to a fixed Euclidian frame; “An exact solution to the problem of three bodies exceeds, if I am not mistaken, the force of any human mind.”

Newton pointed out [‘implicitly’ since he did not have the concept in mind that space is an energy-charged plenum with material structures being ‘ripple structures’ within in] that while we can describe the celestial objects and their interactions in terms of laws of motion, there is nothing in these laws that captures their coevolutional ‘becoming’, their overall spatial-relational unity;

“… and the planets and comets will constantly pursue their revolutions in orbits given in kind and position, according to the laws above explained ; but though these bodies may, indeed, persevere in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws.  . . .  This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”  — Newton, Scholium in the ‘Principia’

“I wish we could derive the rest of the phaenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from physical principles; for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they all may depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain; but I hope the principles laid down will afford some light either to this or some truer method of philosophy.”  Newton, Author’s Preface in the ‘Principia’.

Modern physics insists that space ‘comes first’, as in Nietzsche’s ‘endosmosis predominates’, so that the ‘things in space’, the relative centres of exosmosis, are given endosmotic nurturance by the space they are situationally included in.

This point is important because it gives us a place to go with our ‘memory/mind that recounts what has been going on’, that is not in the likeness of a solitary locally existing (Supreme) ‘being’ notionally equipped with its own locally originating internal-process-drive and purposeful direction.  This description may ‘fit’ and it may allow us to ‘strip out’ the ripple-structures from the spatial plenum and reconstitute our experience of ‘what has been going on out there’ by way of this sort of ‘memory of what has been going on out there’, but such reconstitution drops out all of the harmonies and resonances of spatial-relations as they arise in the energy-charged plenum.

In spite of our starting from our understanding of the multiple storm-cells (hurricanes) as coevolving ripple-structures within the energy-charged spatial-plenum we ‘gear down’ to recounting such dynamics from the memory/mind of an excluded observer who sees multiple centres that for him define multiple ‘local systems with their own locally originating, internal process driven behaviours’; i.e. he drops the coevolutional/ecological understanding and sees the emergence and development of their individual forms as pushing forth out of themselves; i.e. as if they have their own internal powers of genesis of form, as if they have their own behaviour and trajectory, and their own ‘life-cycle’, in the same manner as the Aristotelian acorn-to-oak-tree archetype.

‘Local being’- based statements such as ‘hurricane Katrina is strengthening, moving to the northwest, wreaking destruction, dissipating, etc. deny the spatial-relational coevolutional origins of form, organization and behaviour.

We focus on Katrina as we would focus on ourselves, bring to bear the God-figure of ‘local system with its own locally originating, internal process-driven, internal purpose-directed behaviour’, a figure with God-like absolute local origination of form and behaviour that is fully and solely responsible for her own behaviour.  The God-figure archetype that we have built into the concept of the sovereign state, as well as into our sense of ‘who we are’ which in turn becomes the memory/mind that recounts ‘what has been going on’ in the world.

If we suspend our habit of reducing our ‘self’ this way.  If we suspend denying our experience of participating in a coevolutional spatial-relational becoming, this equates to our suspending of imposing an absolute space and time reference frame over our ‘self’ because it is thanks to this notional absolute fixed, empty and infinite space frame that we are able to absolutize the genesis of our form and claim that it originates within us, and to absolutize our behaviour and claim that it originates within us.  And it is thanks to this notion of ‘absolute time’ that we impose together with the absolute space frame, that allows us to strip Katrina or ourselves out of our participation in coevolutional spatial-relational becoming, the stuff of our real-life experience, so as to furnish an absolute reference to arrange our snapshots of our changing form and our changing location, in one-after-the-other sequence, to leave the impression that is ‘us’ as ‘a local thing’ that is changing, rather than ‘we’ as a coevolutional collective.

The calibrating of life-cycles of the notional local, independently-existing material organism, the reduced to ‘local beings’ view of ‘self’ that our culture encourages us to ‘believe in’, uses identical increments of time as calibration marks since the spatial-relations that are the true reference in a coevolutional system are discarded and no longer available once the ripple-structures in the plenum are strip-mined for notional ‘local centre-based beings’.   The Amerindian culture celebrates the unfolding events in our habitat-inhabitant relations; when we emerge into the habitat, when we first walk, when we able to come together with others and reproduce, when we are able to hunt, when we are infolded and regathered into new forms within the ceaselessly, innovatively unfolding/infolding spatial plenum, a celebration that acknowledges that ‘man belongs to the earth’ rather than ‘the earth belongs to man’.  But in the culture that now dominates, the culture that sees things in absolute terms of God-like ‘local, independently existing systems with their own absolute locally originating sources of form, organization and behaviour’, we track their development relative to themselves, in the manner of ‘their life-cycle’ and thus ‘their progress’ within their own life-cycle as measured by time-based calibration, by ‘their birthdays’.

The celebration of ‘birthdays’ leads to the memory of what has been going on in the (a) and (b) type discussed earlier, like (a) that of the sovereign state or ‘the administrator’, in the fictional terms of a doer-of-deeds and his ‘personal achievements’, and alternatively, like (b) as in Zinn’s ‘A People’s History..’, as the ‘administratee’ whom life has dealt some low blows to.  These opposite view, as associate with master/slave, administrator/administree are too narrow a view of the world.  They are irreconcilable opposites like ‘good/evil’, ‘is/is-not’.  They are the views that come from reducing the world of becoming (ripples in the unfolding plenum) to the world of  ‘being’ where something either exists or does not, where space is either occupied by matter or it is otherwise void.   Not going beyond these views into the realm of ‘beyond good and evil’ condemns us to an eternal Sisyphusian struggle wherein the ‘administrator classes’ strive to keep their hold on power while the ‘administered classes’ strive to overthrow the ‘administrator classes’ or, if one ‘can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’.

Both of these memories of how we account for ‘what has been going on’ are based on the narrow ‘being’-based view of self.  The (c) memory, the ‘beyond-good-and-evil’ memory where we understand ourselves as participants in coevolutional unfolding, the memory of the Amerindian traditionalist, is an ever-present option.  If we adopt this (c) memory, then we understand that we are included in something larger than ourselves, like the storm-cell ‘understands’ that it is born to restore balance and harmony to the energy-charged spatial plenum it shares inclusion in.  The job of the storm-cell, like the job of the musician, is to let itself become the transformer of the differences it is included in.  It’s morality is the beyond-good-and-evil morality of a Nelson Mandela, not the purificationist morality of the Supreme ‘administrator’ that interprets and judges and enforces the law.  Such beyond-good-and-evil morality restores our memory of inclusion within a coevolving collective that is not limited to ‘humans’.  This memory involves no splitting into ‘administrator classes’ and ‘administered classes’, and it does away with the notion that ‘one’s life is ticking away’.

The memorable events in Mandela’s life were ‘inner-outer’; i.e.  his rejoining the people after his 28 year imprisonment, which happened to be at ‘age 72’, and his forgiving of his captors and prosecutors.  These ‘inner-outer’, ‘habitat-inhabitant’ relational dynamics cannot be seen through memory that accounts for ‘what has been going on’ in the being-based doer-deed terms of progressive growth and achievement that ratchets along with one’s personal life-cycle.  They are seen through memory that understands inner-outer relational dynamics, the fields of tension that can build that beg for relief and reconciliation.  The memory that recounts the bolts of lightning and the storm-cell activity that ‘has been going on’ must go beyond understanding these phenomena in simple being-based ‘doer-deed’ terms of how the bolts split trees and started fires and the storm-cells blew the roofs off houses and sunk ships, and bring to the fore the relief of spatial-relational tensions.  Mandela’s achievement was not in becoming president of South Africa in 1994, as written into a time-line resumé of ‘personal development’.  A lot of men have been able to put that on their time-line tracked resumé of personal development.  Few have had the tension-relieving, balance and harmony restoring transformation of the spatial plenum that Mandela has had.

The writing is on the wall.  It is time for law-based sovereign statism to go, and for a return to a world view (a memory for accounting for ‘what has been going on’) that is beyond-good-and-evil.

If this ‘sounds scary’, one only has to remember ‘who we are’ as a ‘people’.  The invariants in such transitions, across religious beliefs, racial customs, are humour and love, laughter and smiles, mutual support, acts of kindness, music, art and dance.   These have been present amongst people under communism and capitalism, under Islam and Buddhism, Christianity and Judaism.   They don’t disappear in a society that suspends social organizing by way of the ‘rule of law’ that in turn engenders ‘administrator classes’ and ‘administered classes’.  By all accounts these natural virtures were there in;

“…the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no state.” [where] “Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households — still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal — including the women.”

And my last word on this rant is …

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