History Repeats Itself

Eighty years ago, I was barely a gleam in my father’s eye.  Then he was in the middle of a world war brought on by a European dictator. His choice was to be a non-combatant, a conscientious objector. The role he accepted was that of a fire fighter.

Now eighty years later we are faced with the potential of a third world war brought on by another European dictator. My choice would be the same — to be a conscientious objector. I can see no merit in planning, attempting or succeeding in killing another human being. Nor in planning, then targeting and destroying the structures of civil society. 

For my lifetime thanks to the efforts of my father, and countless others, we have had a remarkably peaceful period of history. At least for me where I have chosen to live, in Western Europe and Canada.  Not so for many others. In Northern Ireland, Syria, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, the Baltics, Iraq, Somalia, to name some. 

But my sympathies are unquestionably with the Ukrainians. It is not an easy decision to have to defend one’s freedoms. I would struggle enormously with it perhaps to my eternal shame. I am not pushed, I have never been pushed to fight for my rights. I have faced commercial competition and lost. My business survival may have been the issue but not my personal survival. 

This is a fight between the two great social philosophies, dictatorship against democracy. Do we allow one person the right to tell all of us what to do, or do we give all of us the right to choose who governs? 

As such it requires us to defend our freedoms.  But does that mean denying others their freedom by killing them?  No, the greater courage lies in meeting face-to-face and in discussing our situations to our full mutual benefit.

For me the far greater cowardice, lies not in refusing to fight, but in fighting from a distance.  The bomber who would fly at 20,000 feet and drop explosives on an unseen target, is a far greater coward than the grandmother we saw last week offering sunflower seeds to a Russian soldier.  The gunner who would sit in a tank 10 miles from his target.  The drone operator who sits in a deep bunker, and rains terror on an unsuspecting human, man woman or child.  Those are our world’s terrorists.  It takes remarkable courage to stand in front of an armed soldier, far more than shown by our much-respected militaries.

It takes guts to face a perceived enemy with no arms.  It takes far more courage to insist on dialogue rather than combat.  Combat is the act of a coward who has failed at face-to-face resolution of a disagreement.

None of which is to belittle the fight of the Ukrainians.  Nor does it excuse the actions of the Russians.  Both are to be deplored, the latter more so because they are the aggressors. The fact that they (well, he, Putin) interprets history as requiring him to stand up for the long-lost power of the Rus, ironically originating in Kyiv, cannot be allowed to justify his actions.  Bullies cannot be tolerated.  

Some say there are other forces at work.  Maybe NATO and the EU have had a negative impact on the situation.  But this is ultimately a resource war like many before.  Ukraine is Europe’s (and Russia’s as well) breadbasket.  In a world of increasing climate conflict, access to productive farmland will inevitably lead to greater political stress.  Russia is a significant supplier of oil and gas to the world, not least to Europe.  Civil society, civilized nations, require us to find amicable solutions to these issues.  Blasting each other to smithereens, is not a civilized response.

We need leaders of courage yet again.  Leaders who will see the benefits that arise from negotiation and diplomatic discussions that will resolve this conflict before the wastage of another six years of global warfare.  Please.

Cognitive Dissonance

I used to know who I was.  Well, I thought I did, but now I’m not so sure.  The values that I thought were mine have been called into question, and I don’t know how to respond.  (Well, I do, that’s what I’m trying to do in this essay.)  I’m suffering from what is known as cognitive dissonance—there is serious disagreement between what I thought I was, and what it appears now I may be.

I read the Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King recently, and it has disturbed my understanding of not just Canada but the world as well.  That’s not all I’ve read but it is a turning point, in my understanding of our, collective, treatment of the land and peoples of this world.  

I was raised as a middle-class Brit, with no pretensions to any kind of social position.  We lived in a homogeneous white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian neighbourhood, and for all reasonable purposes, country.  I have no recollection of any black or brown faces in my school.  There was one Jewish family and no Muslims.  

But I was brought up to make judgments.  Some things were better than others.  Not just different, but better.  You cut your hair in a particular way, you always wore clean clothes, you didn’t swear, you tried to treat everybody fairly and equally.  You looked after your property and land, you didn’t litter, you stood to attention for the national anthem, which you sang.

I became, I thought, an honest, English-speaking citizen of Canada.  I got my news and views from solid reliable sources.  I still prefer the BBC to the CBC, the Guardian to the Globe.  Throughout my 50 years here, I have lived and moved in the same circles of predominantly white Anglo-Saxon communities.  I have not been required to face racial inequalities on a daily basis.  I have not been required to meet people of different racial and social backgrounds, except peripherally.  I have not been required to adjust to a multi-ethnic society, because my society has been essentially singly ethnic.  It has not been evident that the land that I have used has been unceded aboriginal territory.

The challenge for a white Anglo-Saxon Brit is now that so many of the ills in the world are laid at our feet.  There was a time it was called the white man’s burden.  We collectively left our homelands, often under the direction of our kings and popes, to find resources to feed the increasingly voracious capitalist society of that homeland.  We brought that capitalist culture to our new homeland, that has now shaped the lives of all around us.  Capitalism and colonialism are responsible for the plight we find ourselves in.  

(As a Welshman, or one of Welsh descent, it is small comfort today to allow that we were driven into the hills by other migrants, the Angles and the Jutes, Norse and Saxons.  We all eventually got along and melded into the country that then migrated to the rest of the world.)

Can we put some of this into perspective?  Every single one of us, is a migrant or is descended from a migrant.  I’m a migrant; I’m a settler.  I left my family to explore the world.  Every single inhabitant of Canada is or is descended from other migrants.  All our aboriginal peoples are descended from migrants.  Just because some are more recent than others, does not alter that logic: we are all migrants and settlers.  The fact that today, there are 38 million Canadians, of which only about two million are Aboriginals, maybe tough to take as an aboriginal, but they have been just as destructive of the North American land as their more recent neighbours.

Long before Europeans colonized North America (and the other continents) Aboriginals had arrived.  As we did later, they proceeded to shape the land to their convenience.  The continents (north and south) lost their megafauna.  They became settlers and custodians of this land.  Their reluctance to share is understandable; their insistence today that they have been seriously wronged is understandable.  They’re right; they were grievously wronged.  The treatment they received at our hands is appalling.  If not over the last 2–3 hundred years, certainly the failures of the residential school system of the last century are unforgivable.  But reconciliation does not mean redressing those wrongs today.  We need to recognize that wrongs were done, and then move on to the more pressing issues of today: how to find a way to cooperate in fixing the challenges of a mutual society in which all have a role to play.

Let’s keep our ethnicities to ourselves and work with respect for our humanity to build a better world.

I see no particular merit in aboriginal philosophies.  They are based on myths every bit as archaic as the myths brought over from Europe.  Turtle island is a lovely fanciful story, that does not explain our existence or propose an ethic for our survival.  Nor do the religious myths offer any greater prospect for future sanity in this world.

At the same time that the Aboriginals of North America were developing their philosophy, so were the settlers of the Middle East developing theirs.  We graduated to adopt and accept the merits of the ancient Persian, Greek, Roman and Jewish philosophers.  Theirs has proven to be a philosophy of far greater reach than that of the aboriginal traditions.  The fact that it has led in part to the evils of colonialism and capitalism is unfortunate, but nevertheless accords it better survivability as a scientific endeavour, one to adopt as the better interpretation of reality.

I used to think that historical personages were appropriately revered for the good they had done.  Nelson was respected for the battles he had won.  Columbus for the discoveries he had made.  Captain Cook too for the voyages he had made.  Cecil Rhodes for his journey into Africa.  Churchill for his success in ensuring Hitler was defeated.

But nearly all of these heroes were also responsible for the killing or murder of hundreds if not thousands of people.  Churchill took part in battles in South Africa against the Zulus, as did another hero of mine, Baden-Powell.  Churchill was responsible also for the killing of Welsh miners in the strikes of 1912.  And here in Canada we cherish the memory of Sir John A.

Our problem is we are being held hostage by a small minority of our population who feel they have been mistreated.  Their ancestors may have been, but not they themselves.  This is asking us to redress a wrong done by our ancestors.  We cannot be held accountable for the sins of others, despite the sense of some arcane texts.

What we can do is attempt to integrate into society as a whole; we can attempt to adopt appropriate traditional approaches of others.  We should not accept without question the traditional beliefs of others that have no relevance or truth to offer today’s society.  Turtle island and the consideration of therapeutic benefits of dream catchers are as relevant and meaningful as the traditional beliefs brought across the ocean from Europe.  It is way past time that we should reject gods and myths of any nation.  They have no relevance to the reality of today.

Well, I’m still a white Anglo-Saxon, but maybe I’m a little more sympathetic to others’ existence and points of view.  I’m not prepared to ignore my philosophical background because someone else thinks I have been disrespectful of theirs.

 

Is this racist?  I’m not denying you the right to believe whatever you want.  I don’t want your beliefs to govern how we run our society, any more than my beliefs should.   We need to develop a shared sense of reality that enables us to cooperate in the management of our civilization that enables us all to survive.

But even in that shared reality, we need to understand that we live in a pluralistic society, that depends on reaching consensus.  And if we cannot reach consensus, then our democratic norms, as much traditional indigenous as European, dictate that the majority will rule.  Once the majority have then decided, then we live with that decision.  We did with the pandemic decisions; we did with the GST.  So too with our attempts to address climate change.

The enlightenment that I am claiming began for me with Thomas King, may not have shown through in this essay.  The view of North America of it having been stolen from our indigenous neighbours was not quite how history was presented to me.  But it has become for me a more valid way of looking at the history of the Americas, and indeed of the world.  It continues to this day with the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, to name but one calamity.

We live in a society that was founded on, and continues to thrive on, extracting natural resources from stolen land.  Colonialism and its companion capitalism have a lot to answer for.  Both need to be addressed by all of us, if our planet is to survive its rape by us.

The answer is testing!

Imagine that you aren’t allowed entry to your favourite activity without passing a rapid Covid-19 test.  Passing, of course, means failing, meaning you are negative for Covid-19.  But if all who are allowed entry have failed the test, then no one engaged in the activity is an active spreader of the disease.

 

If this were to be done, then we could allow cruise ships, we could allow parliament to sit, we could allow all our commercial activities to resume.  We could return to life in some form of normal.

 

Why do we not allow this?  Because we want all testing to meet the gold standard.  The consequence, however, is that our economy and society are grinding to a stop.

 

Any testing has false positives and false negatives.  Provided the rate of the false results is the same in one form of testing compared to another, we can have the same confidence that we have limited the spread of the disease.

 

This is the case of the rapid tests that are available.  They are as reliable as the PCR tests, yet cheaper.  They can be administered by anybody, and do not require a professional specialist.  They can be done at home.  They are rapid, the results are known in a matter of minutes not days.  They test for a different product of the virus.  Instead of looking for the active agent itself, the RNA of the virus, they look for the product of the virus, a protein.  The detection of the protein ensures we look for the contagious members of our community.   By removing them from further contact, we are isolating the source of contagion.

 

The logistics of doing the testing are different.  For a cruise ship, for example, no one would be allowed on board without passing the test.  Special units would be set up on shore.  A triage room would be required, where crew, passengers and visitors, wait for the test to mature, suitably masked and distanced.  Once cleared, then boarding can happen, and masks can be dispensed with!  Periodic onboard testing and other measures will still be required, as well as different procedures at ports of call.  Life can return to normal, since no one on board is a carrier.  The same for getting access to parliament.  The triage is done on entry.  A delay of perhaps 15 minutes is added to the day.  But once inside, no worries about transmissibility can exist.

 

Save for the false negatives.  But that’s the case anyway!  So that worrying about them doesn’t make you any safer.  The same triage would happen every time you re-enter the facility.  If you fail the triage, then access would have to be denied.  But so you should be anyway.  But there’s no need to complain about the process.  Get on with what you have to do.

The question is how to get out of the Covid-19 pandemic quickly.  The answer has to include massive rapid testing.  Let’s do it.  Let’s introduce a massive program of instant rapid testing wherever we need people to gather, wherever we want life to return to normal.  Let’s do the testing.

The Name of the Devil is Sub-Optimization

The name of the devil is sub-optimization, somebody famous once said. Through sub-optimization we are failing to solve the crisis of the corona virus pandemic. We are more worried about the effectiveness of the masks we use, than about contact tracing; more worried about flattening the curve, than squashing it; more worried about the effectiveness of testing rather than just getting testing done. Some are more worried about paying a fine than in limiting the spread of the virus. 

Covid19 is unprecedented. The way we are going it is potentially civilization ending. 

 

Covid19 is without doubt an extreme challenge. We have no cure, or even a simple treatment other than oxygen. It transmits very easily. It is killing close to 3% of those who contract it. We have no vaccine, or at least till recently did not. In Canada it has infected close to 2% of the population—750,000 cases in a population of some 37 million, killing about 18 thousand. It is stretching our medical services to the limit.

 

So, we need to get to general immunity as fast as we can. We need to do that with minimal loss of life and minimal economic disruption. We are doing neither.

 

We have had enormous disruption in our daily lives. A year of everybody’s lives lost because assemblies are denied. How absurd to deny usage of outdoor activities when that is exactly what is required for healthy development, physical as well as mental. These constraints are basically out of proportion to the threat we are facing. We have optimized the response without clear regard to the consequences.

 

What I want to understand is why we are confined when open exposure is required to develop immunity in the absence of a vaccine. Without that immunity, natural or inoculated, we are not going to escape this pandemic. The history of other corona viruses is that they stick around for a very long time. Many common colds are caused by corona viruses. We live with them and accept the consequences of their existence in our societies. Covid19 will similarly be around for a long time. I doubt very much we will be able to eradicate it as we have done with smallpox, but are failing with measles.

 

What I want to understand is why we are denying use of simpler testing which is widely available but sitting idle in government warehouses. We can do the full PCR test and have a very high degree of confidence in the results. Or we can do testing for other than the RNA targeted by the PCR tests. We can test for the antibodies the body produces in reaction to the virus, and we can test for the proteins produced by the virus. It is these latter tests, simpler but less accurate than the PCR tests, that we are not applying, because we insist on the gold standard of testing.

 

But just a minute, our goal is to reduce the penetration of the virus in the community. A testing regime would identify those in the population who are infected or who have been infected by the virus. We are not going to eliminate it by testing but we do make progress. This is where sub-optimization is hurting us most. We should be using these other viral protein tests, and not sitting on them.

 

My concern is the statistics here. If a percentage of simple tests is positive, those positives are then directed through a more rigorous test. If a higher proportion of the rigorous tests is positive, then we can rely on the simpler tests and we have reduced the incidence of the virus in the population.

 

The point is that the simpler tests work as a triage to limit the number of people we need to take more seriously, we reduce the costs of the more rigorous tests. This is another example of going for perfection when good is every bit as effective.

 

If we had a way of requiring people to carry proof of a successful recent negative Covid test, then we would have no qualms about allowing large gatherings. About allowing access to our stores and shopping centres, exercise and entertainment facilities. We would police people on entry, but not deny them entry otherwise. Without the proof, they would have to be turned away, and encouraged to take a test, perhaps even on the spot. There will be some inconvenience, but our businesses could resume and we could enjoy gathering crowds.  

 

Contact tracing is required of any person showing the symptoms of Covid19. But we are not doing it. There have been too many cases and the staff handling the tracing are swamped by the demand. Not only that, but our freedom loving populations are not responding to the calls from our contact tracers.  

 

We need a massive program of testing. We need a massive implementation of contact tracing. We need to control gatherings subject to successful testing. If a test is positive we need confirmation of the presence of the virus, and then enforced isolation for 14 days. A fine for breaking isolation, but not for a gathering of Covid tested negatives.

 

So let’s make sure we wear masks, get vaccinated, introduce both a mandatory testing regime, and an effective contact tracing scheme. Sub-optimal, but better than perfection. And we can get back to some kind of a normal life.

So what did you do before social media?

It seems that I spend a lot of time sitting, reading and typing.  Most of it is reading, scanning material delivered automatically to me by Twitter, Facebook and email.  I suppose I could also include things like Instagram, and LinkedIn, and TikTok.

What did we do before social media?  Did we have a life?  Because certainly spending one’s time face to face with a screen hardly counts as a life, does it?  And we spend many, many hours in this activity.  Watch people on the bus and in restaurants, and there they are, concentrating on a little screen in their hands.  We’ve seen, and I’m sure you have, otherwise engaged couples just staring at their hands rather than themselves.

Is this communication?  Is this social?

Course, if I succeed with this essay, you may well “consume” it in the same way.  Who am I fooling: we have become dependent on our silicon screens.  We can’t now do without them.  Just try it for a day and see if you can.  There is withdrawal that you cannot overcome.  I know that if I do not get my email first thing in the morning, to see who of my correspondents is active at 1 in their morning, I feel the day has not begun properly.  And again at mid-morning, lunch time, on the bus, and last thing at night as well!

This all takes precious time.  How do the tweeters of our age find the time?  Does Trump do anything else in his day but compose his tirades?

So, what did we do before?  It’s hard to think back over 20 or 30 years.  I was already then, in 1989, using email.  It solved so many temporal problems.  I could prepare material at my schedule and communicate without interrupting your schedule.  You could reply similarly.

But it lost the face-to-face real time component of effective communication.  Typing and interpretation issues meant that misunderstandings occurred, as they have always done with written communication.  It meant that communication became a solitary, rather selfish way of communicating.

Back in the day, without email, I was constantly on the phone.  One depended on the little pink or yellow slips of paper letting us know that someone or other had called, trying to reach one.  Course this was also the day when we had secretarial support.  Rather than spending hours on the phone trying to reach someone, at least now the time can be spent otherwise.  You know, scanning your Facebook feeds, etc.  So maybe that’s progress.

I suspect that social media have taken over our time.  Whereas we may have spent time on the phone, or even in person, actually talking, and maybe doing more reading of books and newspapers, and exercising – wow, being active not permanently on our backsides, we now rely on our social media feeds for the substance of life.  Just more noise, not of our choosing.  We need stronger discipline to ensure we still have time for our quality lives.

The Future of Green

The Future of Green

I have been a member of the green party for over 20 years.  I joined because of the party platforms, only the green party platform offered a sustainable plan for the future.

The party is again at a crossroads.  We have had a strong period of growth under a dynamic leader.  We will now be choosing a new leader for the next few years.  We will be choosing the future of the party.

The canard that “it is the economy, stupid,” is self-evident.  No-one who runs for public office has succeeded, nor will they, ignoring the economy, our economy, the way we live and want to continue living.

But ignoring the environment is a recipe for suicide.  The economy cannot operate, does not operate outside the environment.  Rather it is the other way around, the economy operates, can only operate, within the environment.  Without a healthy environment, and the services it provides, our economy cannot exist, we cannot exist.

Yet this is what all the other parties offer: the economy takes precedence over the environment.

Collectively, we have seen this time and time again over recent history.  We added lead tetraethyl to petroleum to reduce a “knocking” problem with internal combustion engines.  The poison spread everywhere, and is found in Arctic and Antarctic snows.  We used methyl and ethyl halides as refrigerants and found that they destroyed our protective ozone shield.  We applied chemicals to our fields and swamps to reduce the inconvenience caused to us by insects, and nearly obliterated peregrine falcons.  We have spread neonics in a further attempt to manage insects that reduce the productivity of our field crops, and in the process may have eliminated not only those insects and our essential bees, but the birds that depend on them.

We have spread unnatural fertilizers on our fields to encourage the productivity of our crops, without realizing the loss of natural fertilizers it has caused and without realizing the effect of runoff on our rivers, lakes and oceans.  We continue to burn fossil fuels with little apparent regard for the growing warmth of the planet.  We have installed sanitary sewage systems that have resulted in the discharge of hormones used in the treatment of our diseases that are causing havoc to the reproductive success of the fish in our rivers.  We have released tons and tons of other “new” chemicals because we knew no better.

We have introduced chemicals into the environment without regard to their spread.  We are seeing loss of male sperm; we are seeing people with extreme environmental sensitivities and do not know what is causing their symptoms.  We have no idea what the long-term effect of the countless particles of rubber worn from our tires will be, nor of other maybe better known micro-plastics.  We are planning further introduction of wireless networks without understanding the nature of their impact on the natural world.

I expect we will continue to see this unless we discover and promote ways to sustain ourselves without destroying the environment, without adversely affecting it as well as our own health.

The way we live is central to our survival on this planet.  We all want to continue to enjoy a satisfying and stimulating life.  We want to be able to travel great distances.  We want to be able to go shopping at the drop of a pin.  We want to be able to go to the theatre or a movie or a hockey game.  We want to be able to take our children to exercise classes or horse back riding.  We want to run and manage the companies that enable our lifestyles.

But we cannot do these things sustainably if we continue to poison our environment by everything that we do.

This is a key message of the green party, one that we need to turn into a recipe and program for our survival.

But this message has not become mainstream.  We do not have a platform, nor a presentation that resonates with Canadians, other than the hard core 6% environmental fringe.  We have not had the breakthrough into contention as a provincial or national government.  The green message is still in left field.  We did well in 2019, but as a percentage of the popular vote we did better in 2008.  

In choosing a new leader, we need to be fully aware of the consequences of choosing a successor to Elizabeth.  We need someone with her political and media savvy.  We need someone who is fluently bilingual to ensure continuing to hold on to this country.  We need someone who has an environmental track record equal to that of Elizabeth.

We also need someone who is cooperative and able to hold a disparate and at times dysfunctional green party together.  I also suspect we need a leader who is independently wealthy since you cannot forego a career to sustain the life-changing peregrinations of the leader of a national political party, particularly one with limited resources.

We need a leader who can make our platform palatable with Canadians.  Without it the Green Party of Canada will continue to be an also-ran.  And our existence on this planet will be seriously in question.

Signs in a secular state

As an atheist I am deeply offended by the idea of respect for people who believe in nonsense.  The whole argument for and against religious symbols in public, hinges on the idea of respect for people’s views, whether sensible, imaginary, or just plain nonsense.

I was raised a Christian.  The values of Christianity, as basically with any religion, are founded on respect for all individuals.  However, this does not mean that the basic ideas of a religion need to be respected. We can respect people for their humanity, and their decency, but we do not have to respect them for their ideas.

I was also raised to believe in Father Christmas.  As a child I would greatly anticipate what was going to happen on Christmas morning.  Less the idea of the birth of a mythically born child, as with the arrival of gifts. There is after all, an enormous amount of real evidence of the existence of Santa Claus.  He is present in every shopping centre, and NORAD follows his progress across the northern skies.  But in comparison, there is no such evidence for the existence of a God or any God.  Plenty of evidence of faith in a God, but none whatsoever for the God him, her or itself.

I agree with Saint Paul:  Now that I am a man, I shall give up my childish things.  Father Christmas I now know is a myth promoted by loving parents to give delights to their children.  God too is a myth, invented to easily satisfy inquisitive young minds, that should be given up by an adult.

Sadly, nearly all religions are intolerant.  They begin by claiming tolerance, but if you are not with us, then you must be against us, by definition a statement of intolerance. If you don’t believe in my god, then you must be wrong, and in many religions, treated as a complete pariah, subject to the extreme sanctions that man has devised.

I will be tolerant of many things, but intolerance I will not tolerate.  In a secular state, it is essential that we expressly show tolerance for different ideas, but we cannot show toleration for intolerance.  Thus since all religions show intolerance, their symbols, reflecting their ideas, cannot be tolerated, in situations where the state itself is acting for the good of all. Otherwise in private at least you are free to show your insanity.

As an atheist I need neither a God or a church.  After all, as an atheist, I do not need to have my faith confirmed by a weekly service.  My beliefs do not need to be constantly refreshed.  I do not think the world is based on nonsense.

Everything is not what it seems to be

(This has been submitted to the student science journal, Catalyst, of the University of Ottawa.)
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I always thought the world was a solid place.  Objects existed and I was aware of them.  If a snowball hits you in the face, it hurts.  The experience of life teaches that things are there and they get in your way.

This was what I thought chemistry, physics and biology was about: the study of an objective reality.

But now that I am a first year biochemistry student, granted longer in the tooth than most first-year students, the idea of an objective reality is becoming confusing.  Not that what I am writing about is in the syllabus, but the syllabus has got me thinking.

It's almost as though the Plato-Aristotle argument has never been resolved.  Plato thought that the imagination created the objects we saw around us; Aristotle taught that our perceptions tell us about the objects we see.  Democritus taught that atoms were indivisible and that everything was made up of such tiny things.  Newton thought that all matter was solid.

Quantum theory gives us the idea that matter has both mass and a wave form.  Only when you are looking at an elementary particle does it presume one or the other form, either matter or energy.  It takes an observer.

Biocentrism takes the revolution a little further.  Nothing exists without an observer.  Not just that the measurement is dependent on the observer, but that the item being observed does not exist without an observer.  Moreover, that observer has to have a conscience to be able to observe.  Without consciousness there is no observer, without an observer, nothing exists.

I see this as an attempt to rationalize quantum mechanics with macro physics.  At the quantum level all is probability.  There is a finite probability that an electron will be at one instant an electron, and the next a wave function.  There is a finite probability of particles springing into existence out of nothing.  There is a finite probability, admittedly infinitesimal, of a snowball vanishing into electromagnetic waves before it hits you.

In some sense what happens at the micro and nano level of existence, influences everything else.  This is the idea of reductionism.  Then comes the idea of emergent function, function that is nevertheless determined by functionality at an underlying level.  Thus the behaviour of DNA in a cell determines the externally observed behaviour and function of the cell, whether it is a heart cell or a brain cell, which in turn determines the performance of an individual.  You can’t describe the behaviour of an individual directly in terms of his or her DNA, but there is a deep relationship.

But the idea that without an observer nothing exists, I find hard to accept.  There is in my experience, albeit governed by my own observations and consciousness, a physical solid reality, independent of my existence.  If a tree falls in a forest on a distant planet, there may be no one to hear it, but it still causes a disturbance in its environment.  I like the old physics.

Whither the world

(This was published in the Cantley Echo, Quebec, December 2017.  Bilingue.)

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Ever since I was knee high to a fairy, the world has been going to the dogs.  My grandparents said so; my parents and parents-in-law said so, and now that I am a grandparent myself, so do I.

There are stories every day of progress and of disaster.

There is progress in the rising stock market averages.  There is progress in increasing life expectancy.  There is progress in medical advances of all kinds.  There is progress in the ease with which we live our lives.

And there is disaster in plastic pollution.  Coral reefs are dying.  Vast dead areas exist in our oceans and our lakes.  There is disaster in climate change.  We are in the middle of another extinction event.

The disasters are the result of our progress.  We are rapidly reaching the point where our economic systems are incompatible with our continued existence on this planet. 

We may already have reached the tipping point.  This year, Earth Overshoot Day as it is called, was on August 2nd.  By that date we had consumed the regeneration capacity of an entire year, and thus we are now burning our future.

Global climate records suggest that we are approaching a tipping point that will lead to irreversible changes in atmospheric and oceanic behaviours.  2016 was the warmest year on record; the Greenland ice cap is melting faster than ever before; the Antarctic ice shelves are rapidly disintegrating; and the North Pole may see an ice-free summer in the very near future.

This is an existential crisis that is basically ignored by both our media and our politicians.  They all want this issue to go away.

But unless we really are suicidal, we cannot let it go away.

The dilemma is that continued growth and our existence on this planet are incompatible. We can have continued existence, but we cannot have it and continued economic growth.

And nor can we have continued economic growth based on the consumption of fossil fuels.  Our current economy is in fact highly dependent on fossil fuels.  It is accordingly very difficult if not impossible to meet our Paris climate goals.

We like to think that an annual growth of a small percentage year over year, is a good thing, that if we can continue a small annual growth then our future will be assured.

But what does that mean?  One per cent a year sounds reasonable.  Not too small, not too big.  We can handle that.  At one per cent our economy will double in 70 years, your and my lifetimes.  At 2% it will double in 35 years, as it has in my adult life. 

Cantley in particular, has been growing at a remarkable pace. In the 2011 census figures, we grew by about 5% a year.  This implies a doubling in 14 years.  Before our babies have got to high school, the number of cars on Cantley roads, the amount of garbage we throw out, the cost of our fire and police services, the number of residents and homes in the city will all have doubled.  We do not have the capacity for this.

This is not a solution for the future of our children and grandchildren.

I love to see the glass half-full.  But I also think we have to be realistic about the predicament we have collectively put ourselves into.  The world is not just going to the dogs, it is going to hell in a hand basket.  We need to find a way of doing something about it.

Thoughts for my grandchild

I wrote the following some 7 years ago before the birth of my grandchild, and since forgot about it.  At the time I wrote it, I didn't know her name.  It is meant for her to read when she is ready, perhaps when she approaches her teen years.  It is in the hands of her parents to give it to her when they think she is ready, though they do not yet know its contents.

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25th July 2010

Dear Granddaughter:

I don’t know your name, because at the time I’m writing this, you have not been named.  In a week's time or so you may have a name, but your parents haven’t given you one yet.  In fact you have only just been born.

My mother your great-grandmother, was born in 1909.  That may seem like a very long time ago.  But as your life moves on, it will come to seem not so long ago.  Only a hundred years!  By the time you are my age, around 2080, you should be able to think back and realise that you have known people who have had direct connections back to the start of the 20^th century, and you will have grandchildren – most likely, who can look forward to their own children living well into the 22^nd century.  Time is neat and inexorable. Make the most of what little you have!

The idea here is to record for you a little of what life is like early in the 21^st century, at the time of your birth.  Maybe you will reflect on the changes you have witnessed, and think of the changes you will see in the course of the rest of your life.

Whether you and I will ever meet and talk remains to be seen; whether we will talk, as in Alice in Wonderland, about sealing wax and things, who knows.  I’d like to think that reflecting on the state of the world and our experience of it is something you will do.  Who knows?  Maybe it is only something us old farts do, and therefore something you will only do long after your children have flown the coop.

Love they say is what makes the world go round.  I disagree: I think it is sex.

We build so many taboos around the subject that it never ceases to amaze me.  From a biological point of view, our only “purpose” is to reproduce; there is no other, despite what those of a religious bent would have us think.  (This bent comes from our fear of sex.)  Given that as a purpose, then no wonder we are constantly desirous.  It is what has made the species so successful.  Everything else, or nearly everything else, stems from the sex drive.  Our need to attract a mate, drives us to explore, to paint ourselves, to dress ourselves, to sing for others, to entertain, and yes to work.  Through work we attain status and money that enables us, again, to attract a mate, or mates.

Of course, the goals of a woman differ from that of a man.  A man would like to father as many children as he can; a woman is limited because of the time it takes per conception.  Thus the ageless battle of the sexes.

And so we call it love.  Because without it, there would be no commitment to the care of our young.  The bond of love that ensures that our offspring, who need 15 to 20 years of care before they are ready to reproduce, will receive that care.

I have no idea how many siblings you now have (at the time you read this) or will have.  I know that your parents will have dedicated a fair chunk of their lives to your nurture.  Will have shown you care and love and concern.

And then you’ll leave for your search for a mate or mates.  If it goes according to my experience, no matter what you will have been taught, you will still have to discover for yourself how to control your urges, how to manage your affairs, and how to fall deeply in love at the right time.

I wish I could be around at the time to help you, but it is very unlikely – I will be (or would have been!) 88 by the time you are 20: you won't appreciate my advice then!  All I can do is wish you the best of luck.  Enjoy the sex, and strive for a long deep love.

I am writing to you on my Apple MacBook Pro, a fine piece of electronic engineering, that I am particularly proud of.  Whether when you read this, there will still be Macintosh computers or not, I may never know.

When my father would have written to me, though he didn’t, he would have had to write with pen and paper.  He might have typed, but I don’t think he ever learnt.

Maybe you’ll never even type!  It could be that any “written” word, will be created via voice recognition.  Such tools are available today, but suffer from limited application.  There are cars and phones that respond to voice commands, but not much else.  There are applications (Kurtzweil for instance) that will transcribe spoken text into a Word document.  But considerable intelligence is still required to get the spelling and grammar right.  Context is everything and that cannot be presumed.

Maybe this will all have changed, but I doubt it.  Considerable advances have been made in artificial intelligence; the power of computers has increased dramatically over the last 40 years.  Enough to make full and correct sense of the spoken word?  No, I think there will still be the need for “transcription” of words to text, there will still be the need for translators of text between languages.

I use software translators on occasion today, I did just yesterday.  But once translated – which certainly saves time, there is still a significant amount of work required to correct both grammar and sense.  Even if I had my own personal robot translator – which perhaps you will have, it would still fail in many contexts.  For example, the word for a tax return in English is a “return,” but in French it is “déclaration,” not “retour” which would be the obvious translation.  Context is everything.

I started on an IBM computer, the 1401.  This is the machine that made IBM the computing powerhouse it was back in the 60s and 70s.  It enabled IBM to design and build the 360, the machines I then grew up with through my 20s and 30s.  But the 1401 began with 1.4Kb of memory.  On this machine we did stock control for the Queen’s navy in England!  Punch cards by the thousand that were fed in through a machine that read the holes in the cards, and then under program control, punched other cards out, or printed from them.

1400 bytes of memory.  Today the computer I’m using on my desktop has 2 Gb of memory, 2 thousand million, 2 billion bytes of memory!  For you this may be peanuts.  Perhaps the machine you are using, or will shortly, will have several terabytes of memory.

Or perhaps not.  There is a trend today to use what is called “cloud computing.”  In this computing model the power of the computer is no longer on the desk of the user, but somewhere else in the world, in the cloud of the internet.  So maybe the device you use will only have a small amount of memory, the rest all being who knows where.

But I somehow find this hard to believe.  There is something very personal and private about one own’s data being with one.  If we allow our data and processing to be held somewhere else, we are delegating authority and responsibility for our own selves to others.  That takes an enormous amount of trust that I am not prepared to give.

One of the things that is really amazing is the gullibility of people.  It is said that there is one born every minute, and that no one failed by underestimating the intelligence of the masses.  The real thing perhaps is the power of our imaginations.

We have been gifted, or rather we have evolved to have quite remarkable powers of imagination.  We need it, and we needed it, as hunter-gatherers, to survive in the competitive natural world of “eat or be eaten.”  But we fool ourselves if we imagine that there are things beyond those that we can experience directly ourselves.

Imagination enables us to see significance in patterns.  We need to see significance to distinguish the threat from the harmless, such as the patterns of a Tiger in the grass to enable us to escape the danger.

But then we see a man in the moon where there is clearly none.  We see canals on Mars where clearly there are none.  And we see the invisible hand of God in things we otherwise have no explanation for.

Don’t fall into this trap!  It is perfectly acceptable not to have an explanation for something.  You do not have to invent a god to explain such things.

(Interesting that even as an atheist, I have difficulty seeing the word god spelled with a lower case g.  The only use of the upper case G is to show a mark of respect for the idea, an idea that I reject.)

It seems to me very unlikely that religion will fade.  There are too many zealots in the world to let that happen.  It is one of my greatest fears that of all human characteristics, the one most likely to be taken to the stars is our religious faiths.  Religion has been a tremendous power for the good and for the growth of our civilization.  We would probably not have our civilization were it not for the organizing power of religion and religious ideas.

However, since they are all predicated on the existence of a nonexistent entity, god, they are all based on nonsense, based on childish ideas, that as St Paul said, “Now that I am grown up I will give up childish things.”  Only if that had happened!

There is a particularly pernicious form of religion called fundamental.  Fundamentalists appear to have no tolerance for those of other beliefs.  They are clearly so right that not only must all the others be wrong, they are forever permanently damned.

Fundamentalists exist on all sides of the spectrum.  There are fundamental Christians, fundamental Muslims, fundamental Jews.  Many wars of the last thousand years can be called religious wars: The crusades, the Holy wars, the war on terror.  Others are wars of resource control – the Second World War, the Great War as the Russians call it.  I suspect we will continue to have religious wars for the next thousand.  Education and tolerance do not always go hand in hand.

So god will be around for millennia to come.  And will continue to be a source of both sainthood, martyrdom and bloodshed.

I don’t know how or when you will get this.  I will suggest to your parents that the envelope that contains it be kept for perhaps your sixteenth birthday.  Or maybe earlier.  You may show interest in the things your granddad did or not, who knows.  Perhaps it will be consigned to some dusty box that only your grandchildren will find!

If you get the chance read some or all of the following:

The Omivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan

The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins

The Black Swan, Nicolas Taleb

Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin

Anything by Elmore Leonard

I am going to end by welcoming you to a world that has no room for you.  No, that’s too harsh.  Your world has plenty of room for you.  Your parents – and your grandparents will treat you as the jewel you are.  No matter how you turn out, no matter what befalls you, whether good or bad, you will be loved.

No, my concern is for the whole world we live in.  As John Donne said “No man is an island,” and we share this planet with a burgeoning population.  When I was at school in 1950, there were 3 billion people.  Now as I write this, there are over 6 billion inhabitants, and when you read this maybe in excess of 8 billion, and by the middle of this century perhaps as many as 11 or 12 billion.

There are many of us who believe that the planet cannot take it.  There is not enough land nor resources to allow all of us to live a decent life.  Some authors (eg David Suzuki) have suggested that if we in North America continue to lead our lives the way we do, requiring about 4.5 acres per person, and if all the world’s population were to consume the same way, that we would need 4 earths to give everybody the same way of living.

Some have gone as far as to suggest that the carrying capacity of the planet is as low as 500 million people.

Clearly that is not possible.  But equally clearly, no one today seems to get it.  All our political leaders, national and international, continue to champion growth, growth, growth.  As though that will solve all our problems, and allow us to feed and clothe every day another 10,000 people.  Even the Green Party, which alone stands for a truly sustainable future doesn’t get it: “limits on population” is a dirty phrase.

But growth will only result in the consumption of more resources.  And there is a limit to the availability of those resources.  If you run out of resources there is nothing that can be done to replace them.  Well, mine the asteroids I suppose, or the moon.  And if you run out of resources, then growth will stop.  And if growth stops, there will be intense competition for the limited resources then available.  And by intense, I mean armed and nasty competition.

So the solution from my understanding has to involve population control, a concept that few want to grapple with because of the intense feelings it generates.  But without it, life into the 22nd century will be nasty for all of us.  The fighting in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, will be as nothing compared to what you may see and hear of.  The human species along with everything else on this jewel of a planet could be lost.

None of which reduces my delight in knowing of your arrival, nor my wishes to you for a long and healthy and happy and enjoyable life.  Be positive, be a friend, welcome new ideas, love and be loved.

I look forward to talking to you about the things that excite you, and those that have excited me.

You have my love.

Your Granddad