The Cosmic Perspective

I have a reproduction of this painting pinned up in my room. It shows a peaceful English country scene at night. The glowing candlelit windows of a church and a distant house betray the presence of human life. Above the idyll the star-lit sky is illuminated by the brilliant streak of the Great Meteor of October 1868, a meteor as bright as the moon and, it is said, with a trail which hung around for several minutes. If you have ever seen a bright meteor you may at first be a little taken aback by the noiselessness of this celestial firework. Intrinsically, of course, meteor strikes are very violent affairs as are most events in the heavens. But for the distant and detached ground observer they are as ethereal and silent as a passing wraith.

The painting of the Great Meteor of 1868 will always remind me of Jonathan's Benison's learned commentary in my copy of H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine" where Benison writes:

"Wells' time traveler .... has to learn to accept his limitations as a human being and to become perceptive to the cosmic perspective, the view of human reality that an impartial external judge might have" 

Benison is commenting on the fact that in spite of the dire straights in which the Time Traveller found himself 800,000 years into the future he is not so distracted that he is unable wonder at the procession of the equinoxes and the changed star configurations of the constellations. The Traveller also notices a fossil megatharium he finds falling into decay in an abandoned museum. Both the stars and the fossil speak of the vastness of space and depths of time far greater than even the 800,000 years through which the Time Machine has taken the Traveller. It is reflections like this which Benison refers to as being perceptive to the the cosmic perspective.

The painting, which is by an unknown artist, juxtaposes the glow-worm like evidence of human life with the spectacular display of the 1868 meteor. In those Victorian days (The same days in which Wells was writing) people had started to understand the very physical nature of heavens; it no longer seemed to (wo)men to be a sacred stage specially prepared for the centrality of the Earth. As the Victorian Wells wrote:

"Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that this light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands lit and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated - darkness still."



Of course as a Christian that is not how I read science. Something of my reaction is recorded here and here, although I endeavour to understand the atheist's position: The incongruity of a tranquil and introverted English village scene set against a cosmic event with its potential for catastrophe may have appealed to the artist: I'm sure it would have appealed to Wells.

The primeval object shown entering the Earth's atmosphere was likely ending its long journey in space, a journey far longer in duration than the time traversed by HG Wells' Traveller. Here was an object which, after travelling for perhaps billions of Earth years and many light years, had just noiselessly dissolved into an ephemeral streak of light. Did the people behind those apparently safe cosily glowing windows care or even know?

Holland and The Light of Experience

A Dutch river scene as painted by a 17th century Dutch artist

At the end of July the wife and I went to the reunion of the Dutch side of the family (The wife is half Dutch). This reunion was held in the historic town of Weesp, not far from Amsterdam. A highlight of the day was a trip down the wide River Vecht in a flotilla of boats transporting the extended family. The weather was perfect; it was sunny and neither too hot nor too cold. 

As we travelled I was very much reminded of the Dutch artists of the 17th Century and in particular episode VIII of Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation series which was entitled The Light of Experience. At the start of this episode the camera pans across the flats of Holland in the light of early morning. Clarke then goes on to explore the new ethos that had started to surface in 17th century Holland. By the 1600s something in human thinking had clearly changed since the medieval period: This was now post-reformation Europe and no longer the world of Catholic Christendom. In the 17th century Holland had turned into a thoroughgoing capitalist nation and in that respect was even further ahead than England. Quoting Kenneth Clarke on the ethos we find in 17th century Holland (My emphases):

[There was] a revolutionary change in thought: The revolution in which divine authority is replaced by experience experiment and observation……when one begins to ask the question “Does it work?” or even “Does it pay?” instead of asking “Is it God’s will?” one gets a new set of answers…..to try and suppress opinions one doesn’t share is much less profitable than to tolerate them. This conclusion should have been reached during the Reformation, it permeated the writings of Erasmus,…alas a belief in the divine authority of our own opinions afflicted the protestants just as much as the Catholics……

...too right! ....as I can testify from first hand experience of protestants! Instead of having to face down one Pope one is confronted by hundreds of little popes, each one quite sure they are God's mouth piece! Protestantism's factiousness was a consequence of the new individualism promoted by the reformation: The individual was no longer part of a collective Catholic kingdom which ensured salvation to all its members as matter of course (provided they were obedient to the church!). Instead under the reformation the individual was alone before God with the responsibility of  interpreting the Word correctly and working out his own salvation. Putatively, salvation was by grace alone and yet many protestants somehow made, and continue to make, heavy weather of just how one is to rightly appropriate that grace; they have a tendency to insist that all sorts of proprietary conditions of belief and practice must be observed before one has the right to make claim to that grace! That is, "grace" has to be "earned"!*  This is the paradox of Protestantism. As Clarke points out Protestants could be just as bigoted as those that went before them! But there was one big, big difference: In the West God, it seems, was no longer keeping His eggs all in one basket. The day of the open Gospel had come.

The idea that one's eternal destiny is not the collective responsibility of the church but in large part one's own responsibility is easily carried over into to the world of commercial concerns and the individual's seeking of worldly wealth. Hence commercialism, which turns out to be a very effective catalyst for production and economic growth, was encouraged.  Holland in the 17th century was a microcosm of what was to come. But the pathologies of capitalism also became apparent. The free market encourages people to just follow their noses without regard to the long term & macro-scale effects of what they are doing. In free market economies this has a tendency to result in power-law inequalities in wealth and chaotic fluctuations in production.  (See here)

***

I was asked by one of our Dutch relatives if I would like to collect people's photos and put a selection of them in an album. This I did and I compiled a pdf. As I found the visit very instructive as well as enjoyable I decided to risk slipping in a short appendix at the end of the album praising Holland's contribution to the world's industrial civilisation. I have put this appendix on the end of this post. In this appendix I dared to venture the theory that the Dutch may have influenced the thinking of some of the self-imposed protestant exiles from England who wanted to escape the persecution of the official English protestant establishment. On second thoughts, however, I must bear in mind that although I still think this thesis is possible, non-conforming protestants, tolerated after the toleration act of 1689, could only participate in government after the repeal of the test act in 1828. 

The River Vecht as we saw it at the end of July. 

APPENDIX III
A personal reflection: The Dutch Golden Age.

For me, as an amateur historian, the setting of the 2018 reunion in typically Dutch environs was of special interest.  According to Wikipedia (My emphases):

Many economic historians regard the Netherlands as the first thoroughly capitalist country in the world.  In early modern Europe it had the wealthiest trading city (Amsterdam) and the first full-time stock exchange. The inventiveness of the traders led to insurance and retirement funds as well as phenomena such as the boom-bust cycle, the world's first asset-inflation bubble, the tulip mania of 1636–1637, and the world's first bear raider, Isaac le Maire, who forced prices down by dumping stock and then buying it back at a discount. In 1672 – known in Dutch history as the Rampjaar (Disaster Year) – the Dutch Republic was at war with France, England and three German Bishoprics simultaneously. At sea it could successfully prevent the English and French navy entering the western shores. On land, however, it was almost taken over internally by the advancing French and German armies coming from the east. It managed to turn the tide by inundating parts of Holland, but could never recover to its former glory again and went into a state of general decline in the 18th century, with economic competition from England and long-standing rivalries between the two main factions in Dutch society, the republican Staatsgezinden and the supporters of the stadtholder the Prinsgezinden, as main political factions.

As we can see from the above passage, in the Netherlands water could be both ally and enemy; it could defend as well as attack. Old Weesp, as we saw at the reunion, was surrounded by defensive channels punctuated by fortifications.

The 17^th century was the Dutch Golden age,  a period when Holland ranked as one of the most advanced economies among Europe’s nations.  It is, I believe, significant that during that century English non-conformist Protestants had found refuge from the persecution of the English state by settling in Rotterdam. It is my conjecture that when these Protestants eventually returned to England they brought back important lessons about the running of a modern state and also on how to do business. Many of these Protestants were at the forefront of the 18^th century industrial revolution in England, a revolution that depended on a thoroughgoing commercialisation of the kind they had seen in Holland. We can perhaps conclude, then, that without the Dutch Golden Age there would not have been a modern world!

Sir Kenneth Clarke’s acclaimed series of programs on Western Civilisation includes an episode on the Dutch Golden Age. Clarke gives credit to the important place of Dutch culture in the formation of the modern world. As we travelled on the River Vecht on that warm June day in 2018 the content of this episode was on my mind.    

Footnote:
* Take for example the discussion I had with fundamentalist Nigel Wright who would be unlikely to accept me as a saved Christian until I fulfilled his conditions on belief and practice: See here

British Isles Cruise Part II: Neolithic Houses & Stone Circles

Coming back to Columbus after a day on St Mary's, Scilly Isles. 
A floating moving city that the Neolithics wouldn't even be able to imagine!

See here for part 1

Several weeks after our circumnavigation of the British Isles in CMV's luxury ship Columbus, it dawned on me how difficult it was in Europe to get away from the history of Christianity. Perhaps the reason why I didn't immediately notice the pervasive historical presence of Christianity is because it is still part of the furniture of our surroundings and therefore never being alien enough to alert one to its presence. The pervasive tends to merge into the backdrop; if this mental selecting-out effect didn't happen then the act of noticing the always-present would consume too much cognitive resource! But when I decided to give it my attention the Christian theme cropped up in all the places we visited.

There was the wooden cathedral in Honflure, the cathedral in Bayeux and the Christian spin implicit in the Bayeux tapestry justifying the battle of Hastings. There was the small quaint church on the Scilly island of St Mary's where UK ex-prime-minister Harold Wilson is buried. There was the cathedral in Dublin. In Northern Ireland's Belfast the Christian sectarian "troubles" are still fresh in many people's memory,  also bringing to mind the 500 year struggle between Catholic and Protestant. There was the small church on the front at Tobermory on the Isle of Mull where we attended a Sunday Service and not far away was Iona, home of Celtic Christianity. And then finally at our last port of call we visited the cathedral of Kirkwall, Orkney, with its warm red stone walls and the story of St Magnus, the founding Saint of Christianity on this Viking Island.

If there was any other theme to our cruise then it was probably that of war, violence and strive: Viz: The battle of Hastings, the German war time naval signals bunker in Guernsey^*1, the struggle the Irish had with British rule, Northern Ireland's sectarian violence and the martyrdom of St Magnus, the Viking saint.  All these struggles had their Christian dimension.  

On Columbus' itinerary some site-seeing tours were offered that for us were a must-do; in particular the Bayeux tapestry, Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland and on Orkney, the Ring of Brodgar & Skara Brae. Both Giant's causeway and Skara Brae take the would-be time traveller way beyond the relatively well documented history of Judaeo-Christianity into far more ancient times. Giant's causeway speaks for itself of huge tracts of time: The causeway started its history when magma intruded into chalk beds, beds themselves an even more ancient phenomenon involving the gradual deposition of countless minute calcite shells. The magma intrusion was followed by a gentle uniform cooling that in itself would, in the most probable scenario, require millennia. This cooling caused hexagonal cracks to develop as the basalt contracted. Following this, there was the slow erosion of the ancient upper chalk & marble (metamorphosized chalk) beds and then the  erosion of the fine grained basalt of the causeway leaving it as we it see today. The causeway basalt is dated to the early Cenozoic era.

In geological time scales Skara Brae, as a Neolithic village, was effectively only abandoned yesterday. But even so a 5000  year old prehistoric neolithic site in many ways holds far greater secrets than a much older geological site like Giant's Causeway. For in human prehistoric archaeology we are always faced with the conundrum of the human meaning and purpose of what we are looking at. Mystery in general arouses curiosity and in many ways I find this kind of site even more interesting than well known historic sites of which historians may already know an awful lot.

Unfortunately our visit to Orkney was marred by high winds and rain. Unlike the peaceful ambiance at Duddo Stone Circle in Northumberland my survey of the ring of Brodgar was therefore all too brief  (The wife refused to get out of the coach!). The blasting rain hampered my concentration as I tried to do what archaeologists tell us we should do; that is, to use our imaginations to get into the minds of the ancient people who made and frequented these stone circles. I did manage to take a video of the circle which I can play back in the comfort of my study. But it is not the same as being there, needless to say:

The Ring of Brodgar on a  windy wet day

Apart from being fairly sure that these stone circles are what archaeologists vaguely refer to as "ritual enclosures" with apparent alignments to their contexts (both celestial and terrestrial), little is known about their original purpose. There has been much speculation as to what these structures meant to the cultures that created and used them. I don't suppose I'll make any new progress on that score myself but I always welcome a walk round a stone circle in the remote chance that some new thought as to their meaning might come to me as I savor the atmosphere and attempt to connect with those people of long ago; after all, they weren't alien life forms and we share a common humanity with them. In the absence of an historical record this shared humanity is the only key we have to understanding these enigmatic constructions.

Although the bad weather prevented me walking round the site, as it turned out the concepts of  "weather" and "round", which were for obvious reasons upper most in my mind, eventually gave me a new lateral-thinking slant on the subject.  In fact "circles" and "weather" were to become the themes of that inclement day.

Neolithic farmers were governed by both the weather and the cycles of the seasons. These cycles were echoed in the circular motions of the lights in the celestial vault; sun. moon, planets and stars. Naturally enough the neolithic architects of Brodgar may well have imbued  these motions, which so strongly correlate with the seasons, with life giving and life destroying powers. Moreover, there was the repeated terrestrial pattern of birth and death and beyond their houses the landscape surrounded these neolithic people with a 360 degree aspect. Circles and cycles were every where to be seen, not least the farming cycles which were so obviously a matter of life and death for these people. Of course, this cycle is a matter of life and death for us too but modern farming is a little more resilient than neolithic farming and the superstructure of industrial society is now so high that few of us are conscious of the cyclic agricultural base on which it all rests. In contrast Neolithic people who were close to the land were no doubt all too aware of the life sustaining nature of cyclic agriculture and knew the consequences of its cycles faltering; they knew that nature (if indeed they had the concept of "nature") was at once both providential and yet capricious. The green man carvings found in medieval churches may be evidence that medieval people too were very conscious of their dependence on cycles that weren't entirely reliable.

For neolithic people the cosmos was only what they could directly eyeball. In one sense their "science" of circles & cycles, if such it can be called, was at the cosmological level complete in so far as it described all they could see and all they needed to know for farming; unlike us they had no awkward data being returned from sophisticated high-powered instruments to try and make sense of. My guess is that for them religion and science were of a piece, inseparable in that their religion was thoroughly cosmological and bound up with the motions in the heavens. Therefore my "imaginative" archaeological contribution is that these stone circles symbolised and crystallised in the minds of the people who built them the natural circles & cycles they observed and depended on. Although in the absence of an historical record we can have no idea of the details of their associated religion or of the ceremonies they hosted these stone monuments, I guess, were a celebration of the concepts that were the key to their survival; namely, the circle and the cycle.^*3

If we look back to the Ptolemaic universe of the scholastic middle ages we may have an historical parallel which helps us understand something of neolithic man's obsession with circles and what a cosmological religion looks like; although it's true to say that the scholastics, as Christians, regarded the divine to reside beyond these circles, whereas it is possible that early pagan cultures regarded the heavens as the place of the divine with, perhaps, the heavenly lights actually being the gods themselves; such a conclusion is natural enough given that ostensibly the motions in the heavens had such an important relation with the agricultural cycle (This pagan error is compelling attacked by Genesis 1).

Some modern people, especially new agers, like to think that ancient peoples had a mystical harmony with their environment, something we have lost today. But, I suggest, that's only true because they knew so little about their ultimate cosmological setting and their undeveloped technology had little impact on the environment. About that environment they knew a lot less than ourselves and therefore had less to explain and what they did know was bound up with their agricultural survival. Today, of course, we know a lot more but we lack an emotional connection with what we cannot now unlearn; namely, that the cosmos no longer has the ostensive appearance of being anthropocentric. But we have lost no secret wisdom from the past; rather it's exactly the opposite: There has been a loss of ignorance and innocence as we have reaped the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Skara Brae

I was really looking forward to our visit to Skara Brae, presumably contemporaneous with the circle of Brodgar. The rain had stopped temporarily when we visited it but it was very windy and again this spoilt my attempts to recreate the site in my imagination. However, near the interpretation centre was a modern reconstruction of one of the houses. This house is entered by a meandering tunnel and it is thought that tunnels like this served as "streets" linking the houses. These "streets weren't a planned addition but haphazardly evolved over time as a way of keeping out the cold and the weather. On entering this complex, and especially as I entered the house itself with its very thick dry stone walls, I was

Inside a neolithic house

struck by how successfully it insulated its inhabitants from the noise of the howling wind. The interior was still and quiet and potentially cosy. But with no windows except a small hole in the roof to allow the exit of smoke, the space would have been relatively dark, lit only dimly with burning wicks. However, the house was a very effective stable environmental bubble isolating the villagers from the vagaries of the weather, vagaries we were experiencing ourselves on the day we visited. I have wondered why, especially at Christmas time I like to turn down the lights and enjoy the dim ambiance of sidelights and a log fire. Is this a result of some kind of residual "memory" that seeks comfort and security in a dimly lit warm atmosphere?

Inside my house on a winter's night

Today we are less aware of the buffeting of the capricious agricultural cycles of nature, if only indirectly feeling them when prices go up. Our technological environmental bubble is far more sophisticated than the cosy interior of a dry stone house and this has further distanced us from the environment. And yet we know orders of magnitude more about that environment than those Neolithic farmers ever could know. But this knowledge has come at an emotional price: We are far less confident about imbuing what we now know with anthropocentric meaning in the way that, I guess, these relatively ignorant Neolithic people did or even the medieval scholastics whose man-centred Ptolemaic universe was pregnant with divine meanings. The depths of time and space revealed by modern science is tricky to reconcile with an anthropic perspective and anthropically oriented beliefs like Christianity.  I'm not saying it can't be done, it's just a little more challenging than it was 5000 years ago of even 500 years ago. It is no surprise, therefore, that even in the West some have abdicated their epistemic responsibilities by cutting the cosmos down to size as they return to young earthism, geocentrism and even flat earthism. The emotional driving force behind these anti-science world views is likely to be, I guess, the desire for a universe where man is restored to his overtly central place^*2 in a Kincadian universe that is much more cosy and with less enigmatic indifference. We can find these throw-back worldviews not just among Christian fundamentalists but also among new agers who are thoroughly disillusioned with today's established scientific priesthood who they regard as not offering the spiritual guidance people are looking for. Instead the new-age gurus are offering all-sorts of mystical remedies  for a wide range of human-ills. For those who don't have the energy to get into the technicalities of toy-town cosmologies, the spiritual angst and existential crises of the disaffected modern citizen can perhaps be fixed with gnosto-fideism; that is, the seeking of inner revelations, epiphanies, encounters and "higher levels of consciousness". The answers are no longer thought to be in the profane world "out there", but "in here", in the warmth of the inner life of the believer where esoteric experiences & enlightenment are said to be found. The emphasis here is on the irrational and what cannot and should not be articulated. As one aficionado of the bizarre Toronto Blessing opined: "Do not analyse it!".

But Christianity in its non-elaborated form is much less about cosmology, cosmogony and esoteric experience than it is about saving human community from its disease of human selfishness and epistemic arrogance. i.e "Sin", the word with the "I" in middle. Genesis 1 & 2 are much less a blue print of detailed cosmology and cosmogony than they are a mythical attack on the idea that the heavenly bodies and the earth itself have the status of gods; rather Genesis 1 & 2 are compelling myths which put the objects of the cosmos in their rightful created place; not as gods, that is. Other than that little is said in Genesis about the details of how God created. Christianity is strong on the subject of community but weak on detailed cosmogony and even weaker on cosmology, but no weaker than they need be: The details of creation are the job of modern science, a providence of God. After all, even in the Christian middle ages the scholastics had to turn to Greek science to get their detailed cosmology. With our scientific loss of innocence came the loss of naivety, but in turn we have exposed ourselves to the Riddle of the Sphinx. and the spiritual dangers of nihilism. Perhaps God regards us as having come of age.


 Footnotes

*1 It is quite possible that some of the encoded signals sent out from this bunker were decoded on my mother's  decoding machine which she operated at Bletchley park during the war: See here.

*2 This spiritual conceit is also apparent in the fundamentalist doctrine of  the fall which aggrandises humanity by positing man's fall to be the sole source of cosmic chaos and tends to ignore the meaning of the highly symbolic story of the serpent in Genesis 3. This compelling mythical account provides us with evidence of the existence of sin and its concomitant of chaos prior to the fall of man. We remember that in human culture the figure of the image of the serpent has strong connotations of cosmic chaos .

*3 It's worth asking the question why these prehistoric temples with circular symmetry gave way to more asymmetric temple designs housing an effigy of a god, usually placed opposite to the temple entrance. As far as I'm aware large statues of gods have not been found in stone circles. My first shot at answering this question is as follows: The conventional temple design is usually associated with literate & farming efficient societies where writing was the means by which a bureaucracy could maintain the organisation of large cities. Thus, the invention of writing (along with an efficient agricultural base) was one factor allowing a large section of the population to become removed from the agricultural cycle and run the city. In this context autocratic rule headed by a monarch was the usual means of government. It may well be, then, that the concept of the king in his palace was then used as the model to understand the divine.  This linear temple model was even present in Judaeo-Christianity albeit without a focusing effigy at the business end of the structure; witness the temple in Jerusalem and the linear design of medieval churches.

Musical Interlude

Looking forward to spring, historic halls and large sunny arboreal estates:

British Isles Cruise Part 1: The Aristocrats.

The Columbus at anchor dominates St Peter Port bay.

At the beginning of September the wife and I took a cruise round the British Isles with Cruise and Maritime Voyages (CMV). The ship was the Columbus, pictured above  dominating the Bay of St Peter Port in Guernsey (Channel Islands) after it had anchored. The ship was big by my standards, quite a bit bigger in fact than the Irish ferries' Ulysses which brought us back across the Irish sea after our holiday in Ireland.  Columbus statistics are as follows:

Gross Tonnage: 63,786grt

Registry: Bahamas, British Commonwealth

Passenger Capacity: 775 cabins (1400 passengers)

Re-built: 1997, 2003, 2010, 2015 & April 2017

Cruising Speed: 16.50 knots (Max 21.50kts)

Passenger Decks: 11

Lifts: 9

Electric Current:  220v

Stabilised & Air Conditioned: Yes

Officers & Crew: International

Cruise Staff & Entertainers: British & International

Dimensions:     

Length: 247m (811ft)

Beam: 32m (105ft)

Columbus' service and 
shopping mall

With Ulysses at a gross tonnage of 50,938 both ships are bigger than the Titanic's 46,328 grt which at the time was the largest moving object created by man (So I was told by a Belfast guide). Although Columbus is only middling by today's standards it seemed breathtakingly large to me. Looking down the well of the grand staircase induces vertigo. The cinema and reception mall wouldn't disgrace a small city. In fact the Columbus is exactly that, a small city. The realization of this starts to dawn when you think about all the infra structure, systems and personnel the ship needs to function: Electrical systems, sewers, hot and cold water, water distilleries, kitchens, refrigeration, air conditioning, laundries, restaurants, stores, shops, pubs, a theatre cum cinema, swimming pools, games rooms, gymnasiums, computers, communications, radar, library, rest rooms; the list probably goes on and on. As well as the crew involved in actually sailing the vessel there must be cruise directors, entertainments staff, cooks, waiters, bartenders, doctors and nurses, security people, cinema staff, maintenance staff, systems engineers, stewards, cleaners etc. And the whole caboodle moves in one direction. But since motion is relative and barely detectable even in a fairly rough sea, one may as well consider the ship to be a stationary frame of reference.

Cruising on a big ship must be the most comfortable form of travel ever devised: Our cabin on deck 10 was like a hotel room. During our trip there was little sense of motion and the feeling of being on a ship was at a minimum even when the swell was 3 to 4 metres at one point. For me the whole experience had a very unreal feel to it: The comfort, plus the relativity I've already alluded to, gives the feeling that the ports-of-call are actually travelling to you rather than the other way round. Moreover, for first time cruisers like ourselves the unreality of it all is compounded by the pervasive ship-board culture which is nothing like we've experienced before. The ship began to feel less like a small city than a small planet in some dimension we were temporarily visiting; the culture was alien in many respects. Add this to the sense of being in a strange vehicle that somehow, Tardis like, brings exotic venues to one's doors without actually having to travel, then the feeling of being in another dimension is only reinforced. No instincts told me that I was inside an earthly vehicle. 

The theatre/cinema

I have to admit that from the outset I felt rather dubious about the whole cruise adventure; not only am I not a good sea traveler but I wasn't at all sure that the cruising culture with its wining, formal dinning, gaming, and social chit chatting was something we would fit in with. In fact we didn't. We were travelers and not cruisers and we avoided the formal restaurant in favour of the well served bistro on deck 12 with its excellent views. The on-board variety entertainments weren't ever going to be our cup of tea either, although on the last day we not only enjoyed, but also came back down to earth with a bump when we watched Alan Bennett's film "The Lady in the Van".  Also, my wife enjoyed a lecture by - knock me over with a feather - an academic on the Vikings - very appropriate as we sailed down the east of the British Isles on the last day. I had refused to go to this lecture quite convinced that it would turn out to be some stand up comic cracking jokes about horny helmeted Vikings doing rape and pillage - well I was wrong and regretted it. I've got to hand it to CMV they do their best to cater for a broad spectrum of taste. Of course they aren't going to please all of the people all of the time, so you can't blame them.  

One of the swimming pools

For many cruising on the high seas is an end itself and may not even need the diversions of sailing into ports to break the monotony. Stage entertainment, games rooms, socializing, films, interesting port excursions etc are well defined pastimes which can be singled out as distinct categories and pointed to as something to be enjoyed. But I think there is a much more subtle form of enjoyment going on at sea which is less easily identified;  this is the gentle massaging of the ego that is all part of the ambiance of life on board a luxury ship. The formal bow tie dinners, the proactively courteous ship's staff who wait on the passengers hand and foot always leaving the impression they are there at one's beck and call,  all have the effect of quietly conveying to the passengers that they are some kind of high born aristocracy, born to be served. Also silently encouraging this flattering illusion there was a slight colonial air about it all, at least on the Columbus: The passengers were almost exclusively white, probably comfortably off senior Westerners, whereas the service staff were by and large relatively young and in the main came from the less rich ethnic regions around the world. For a week or two the passengers were in an immersive virtual reality that served a fantasy about being aristocrats waited on hand and foot by servants who relied on the generosity of their patrons to supplement their meager pay in tips. I personally find tips degrading: It reminds me of the rewards one gives to animals when they perform correctly. But then what choice do some people have.

Further reinforcing the immersive game play of being an aristocrat for a week or two was the stratification among the passengers themselves: The cabins tended to get more expensive with the deck number. We felt we were doing well on deck 10 with only passenger deck 11 above us where some of the "high class" guests had balconies. This stratification played a similar role I guess as once did the medieval aristocratic career structure provided by the linear stratification of titles which marks one's status. So instead of us having the titles of knights, baronets, barons, viscounts, earls, marquis and dukes, our titles were Deck 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. On Deck 11 we had Columbus' equivalent of dukes, but there were no kings among the passengers; that role was played by the captain and we were his worthy aristocratic guests invited to his mobile realm. In the restaurant there was even a captain's high table where specially  invited guests could dine with him.... all very reminiscent of the high tables in the castles and halls of the medieval  period. It is very difficult to resist the strong sense of flattery if one is invited to the captain's table. It is a fact that humans so often need some kind of social ladder, however that might be signaled, in order to fuel the aspirations and ambitions needed to motivate them.

Unlike the French the English never really did do away with their aristocracy in a revolution; instead the quirky history of England meant that all English people started to think of themselves as potential aristocrats. The constitutional monarchy hammered out during the seventeenth century, plus a trace of guilt that the population had committed regicide in beheading Charles I, gave the English aristocracy a reprieve and it was here to stay. Subsequently an increasingly commercialized Britannia got underway as rich yeomans (often of peasant stock) invested in business, moved into the cities, became rich, then moved out of the cities and purchased estates in the country, sometimes real castles, as they tried to ape the aristocracy. They even learnt the classics, purchased titles and invented heraldry for their families. Thus, every Englishmen was a potential aristocrat in the making; servants and slaves were largely a colonial thing. I have often wondered if one reason why the UK hasn't done as well in engineering as it clearly could have done was because it was thought of as a form of work not fit for aristocrats; after all, engineers are supposed to get greasy and dirty in engine rooms and aspiring aristocrats don't do that. There is a parallel here with classical Greek culture, a culture which the English upper classes studied avidly: The Greeks didn't excel as well in the sciences as one might have thought because in their slave society the masters weren't expected to do the kind of manual hands-on-work needed to do experiments.  But aristocrats can become, and often do, theoreticians and philosophers, because that kind of detached mental activity doesn't suffer the indignity of dirt and grime.

But the idea that there is such a thing as a contented feudal social stratification is an illusion as it always has been. On the Columbus some of the make believe aristocrats could be down right awkward: We heard of one case where a lady sent back her fried eggs three times because they weren't cooked correctly leaving the waiter nonplussed as to what was wrong. One night the restaurant opened late because, rumor had it, the waiters went on strike. We never found out why, but I can see it now.: On the one hand they had to interface with some demanding "aristocrats" playing the power game too hard; the fact that few of these passengers were real aristocratics may have meant they worked the fantasy for all it was worth. On the other hand the staff have their employers and managers over them; if these employers and managers don't give their staff all due respect and compensation in recognition that they too are very status conscious human beings, defection is no surprise. However, I have a suspicion that there is an assumption of privilege associated with the securing of these ship-board jobs and consequently staff are expected to be thankful for being offered a job whatever the conditions of employment.  The whole thing reeks of the feudal where the peasant was supposed to be thankful that his lord allowed him to work a strip of the lord's land. 

As I've already said the majority of the passengers were senior white people (So senior that even at 70 and 65 my wife and I felt like sprightly youngsters as we used the stairs rather than the lift) many of whom had probably done quite well for themselves. This fact upped the chance of coming across a phenomenon I have observed before; namely, the talkative opinionated male. Now, women are often accused of being too talkative but a talkative male is a lot worse. Males, especially if they've been in management, are far more dominating as they continue to habitually fill the role of an alpha male. Among the males on the cruise I also saw some sad sights: Men, who had no doubt had successful careers, now unmanned by the ravages of old age, but who were lovingly attended to by their wives. I saw one poor guy who had to otherwise use a frame to walk with no choice but to slowly climb, without the help of his frame, the very long gangplank needed to enter the ship. We were in Orkney at the time and a cold wind laden with rain blasted the old gentleman. As he had probably just come out of a coach he had no rain coat on and he became soaked all down one side. Surely there must be a more dignified way for "aristocrats" to enter a boat! In the warm luxurious belly of the ship I watched his wife attend to him as he recovered dribbling from his ordeal. Yes, I thought, that's what I may look like in a few years! (if I get there). I looked up and realised that one of the staff, a girl who was advertising some cosmetic service, had been looking at me looking at this old couple. She smiled but I was still engrossed in my grave thoughts so I'm not sure I smiled back.

As I turned my attention to this young lady my thoughts moved on. Like many of the young staff here she was offering a fairly basic trade. But what made all the difference was the environment in which she plied this trade. You might be a cleaner, a room attendant, a cook, a waiter or a manicurist. These occupations aren't particularly high up the status ladder, but in this case it is where you carry out your work which makes all the difference. I imagine that many young people, perhaps with not the best set of qualifications in the world, apply for work on a cruise ship because potentially it's a lot more than just employment; it promises the romance and excitement of an adventure on the high seas, exotic ports of call and a chance to meet a wide spectrum of interesting people you wouldn't otherwise meet. I suspect, however, that this exciting sounding life does, nevertheless, have its downsides as well; there are limited opportunities to get away from the ship's intimate social hot-house which you may well want to do if the naturally expectant relationships between young people become intense and/or awkward or if your employer is as authoritarian and demanding as a baron, not to mention the attitude of some of the pseudo aristocrats on board ship. Hopes and aspirations have no doubt been badly bruised on some of these cruise ships.

But for the wife and I there was plenty of opportunity to detach from the cruising social hot-house. We could look out to sea during meals and drinks and for us the ports of call the were the main rationale for the cruise; strange fascinating places that we wouldn't otherwise have visited. I'll hand it to CMV: They do bend over backwards to make the whole cruise experience as enjoyable as possible for as many people as possible, but they are only human and naturally they face the constraints and limitations of being human. And human limitations were to be plainly witnessed in the stories we found waiting for us at each port of call. People may wonder why I ever opted for Christianity, especially in view of some of its own grotty, tacky cultural aspects. But if there's a single answer to that it is this: It is because Christianity is (or is supposed to be) strong on self examination and self awareness of our human limitations, especially those that go under the archaic appellation of "sin"; although I must concede that looking at some Christian sects, you wouldn't know it. As we were to find out Christianity figured prominently in the history of all the ports and places we visited;  unless one is intellectually apathetic this encourages one to have some kind of engagement with Christian history.

The voyage was tracked and conveyed to our cabin

Steam Punk Pump: Temple or Church?

The crisp brick contoured facade of Papplewick pumping station

Papplewick pumping station just outside Nottingham was for me a fascinating visit; it piqued my interest in both mechanism and configuration: The mechanism was the dynamics of the two huge beam engines and the configuration was the architecture of the building in which the engines are housed. Today such highly functional machinery is likely to be housed in a plain utility-looking weather covering, but the Victorians of 1884 glorified their engineering endeavors with romantic decorative styling. They had immense pride in what they were doing and no expense was spared on what to us may seem unnecessary filigree; one may as well decorate a vacuum cleaner. The Victorians were, or so it seems, more at ease with progress than we are today. Lack of confidence in civilization and where it was going was not one of their faults.

The architecture of the pumping station is Romanesque with a classical entablature running round the outside of the building. The external effect is of it being either a church or a temple. However, the information boards at the station refer to it as a temple of water which is probably nearer the mark than a church. The early church builders used not the model of the temples all around them but the basilica design which in Roman times was neither sacred nor housed a god. The basilicas had civic connotations; they were not built to house gods but to act as public meeting places where news would be shared. In the new religion of Christianity God was everywhere but he was especially where Christians met; the gathering and congregation of believers was sufficient condition for communion with the divine; in fact given Bible references to the human body being the temple of the Holy Spirit the Christian condition for divine communion is even broader than that.

But Papplewick was not a meeting place, in fact far from it: The Papplewick brochure marvels that the elegant and stylish hosing was never intended to be seen by the general public. Papplewick, then, is far more a temple than a church, a temple of power where only a "priesthood" of engineers administered to the needs of this very local "god".  But this 'god', in the final analysis, was no service demanding god, for this god really served the people: Papplewick lifted naturally filtered water from the sandstone bed rock and this clean water was piped down to the people of Nottingham.  The public did not give obeisance and offerings to this god; it was quite the reverse; this god served the people with pure water. Right from its introduction the new technology was sending out mixed signals as to how it should be regarded.

(See my Facebook album here for more pics and video of Papplewick)

The Papplewick Pistons of Power 

The pistons jostle with decorative pillars

Northumberland: Myth and Imagination - Part 3

(See here and here for parts 1 and 2)

The people who built Duddo stone circle (above) were probably working to some worldview but we have only vague ideas about what that perspective was. Humanity has always been challenged with the task of making comprehensive worldview level sense of its environment; but epistemic problems have impeded success and gaps have been filled with intolerance and dogma. But as we see below the error of fundamentalist scripturallism is not the answer to those epistemic difficulties - far from it!

Some solutions ameliorate one problem only to introduce another. An example is sickle cell hemoglobin which helps suppress the symptoms of malaria but increases the risk of sickle cell anemia. In circumstances like this there is tension between the advantages and disadvantages of alternative outcomes as they are weighed against one another and some trade-off settled for. There is, I believe, a tension of this type in the epistemic heuristic inherent in the mental make up of human beings.

Human beings, it hardly need be said, are in the main social animals and this confronts them with one of their greatest epistemic challenges; that is, attempting to interpret the output of the most complex object known to man, namely the human mind. But the task of trying to read other minds is carried out routinely on the hoof and is a highly informal process. No doubt we have large packages of both soft and firm cognitive neural-ware which address this problem, particularly in the realm of reading the meaning of language. Human beings offer few observational clues as to what they are thinking even when they use language to express themselves. Hence, in this connection  human epistemic techniques have to join a paucity of evidential data-dots in order to arrive at highly complex conclusions about fellow humans. The epistemic process of predicting the otherwise hidden complexities of the human mind is likely to be very seat-of-the-pants. It is a miracle, however, that the process of mutual understanding works as well as it does, but there is a likely trade-off: The gains of getting it right outweigh the losses of making occasional (perhaps even frequent) mistakes. So it is likely that our neural-ware interpreter is balanced between the huge advantages of correctly understanding fellow human beings and an inevitable background noise of error. This human epistemic system is tuned on a knife edge and it's no surprise that in some individuals the inter-human neural package seems to malfunction badly: Autistics tend to under-interpret incoming data and paranoiacs over interpret it.

It is something akin to this very high risk neural-ware package which, I propose, is in operation during worldview synthesis. Unlike formal science which proceeds at a snails pace starting with basic and relatively simple systems and tries to build from the bottom up (see Brian Cox's comments here), worldview synthesis much more resembles the task of attempting to see behind the scenes into the human mind; this comprehensive epistemic process takes in a huge sweep of life experience as it tries to affirm very broad conclusions using methods that are informal and themselves often nigh on inscrutable. Highly ambitions conclusions, sometimes bordering on pretension and audacity, are arrived at. Worldview synthesis leaps well-ahead of formal science in ambition and vision, but the trade-off is that the risks of error, error often exacerbated by hubris, vested interest and tribal factors to name but a few perturbing influences, are balanced against the promise of an epistemic gold-mine. But let me point out the irony I've noted before; it is in fact an empirically based process in as much as it attempts to join the dots of experiential data, albeit rather creatively (See links below). In short  the whole system of worldview synthesis isn't a robust process!

However, we can but try. I'm the last person to condemn attempts at sweeping worldview synthesis; if we are looking for comprehensive understandings of the world we may have little choice but to engage in this activity along with its risks; it might produce high gains in the long run. The trick, I believe, is not to do away with the mythological imagination but to be aware of its operation and above all to use it with a good measure of cautious epistemic humility in order to avoid the pitfalls of misplaced hubris and arrogant certainty. But in spite of worldview synthesis being so seat-of-the-pants it is ironic that the mythological imagination is inclined to invest in its highly attenuated constructions far more certainty than they warrant; in fact it is almost as if these constructions become more real than the basic perceptions on which they are built. Pathological examples are easy to find: the Flat Earth conspiracy, David Ike's lizard conspiracy, Alex Jones' conspiracy theories, numerous Christian fundamentalist world views, Jones Town, and fascism. It is the certainty and blinkered single mindedness with which world-views may be held that gives them the potential to be highly dangerous; much more dangerous might I add than even the problems introduced by the unbridled ambitions of status-seeking. The latter is unlikely to be so sweeping as to attempt to assimilate the whole cosmic coboodle into one seamless narrative: The realpolitik of self-centred status seeking has a limited horizon and a limited agenda in its striving for hegemony, whereas mythological fundamentalism seeks a much more thoroughgoing world take-over; one that includes the very hearts and minds of those it seeks to dominate.

In modern times scriptural fundamentalism (a subject which concerns me deeply) believes it can eliminate epistemic risk with a simple formula; Viz: God's Word says so & so, therefore so & so is absolutely certain to be true.  But this epistemic has a very serious flaw: It fails to take into account that the natural language in which scripture is couched is far from being a direct revelation of truth. (See here, and here). As I have repeatedly made the case, natural language works by connotation and as such its interpretation taps into to a bottomless reservoir of facts taken from of human social history and the human context in general. Scripture can not be read like a mathematical text book where formality strives to obviate ambiguity and limit terms of reference; reading scripture is far more akin to the process of interpreting the natural linguistic output of other minds. Scriptural fundamentalists seek the security of certainty and authority; they cannot accept that there is a huge fallible human link in the chain when it comes to interpreting scripture. This fallible link is evidenced by the many contradictory forms that fundamentalism can take. See here, here and here.

Selfish human ambitions which seek after high status without regard to the welfare of society as a whole are potentially toxic, but things can be worse. The empires of status seekers are not quite so comprehensive as the ambitions of fundamentalist idealists who seek a mental empire of believers which they wish to draw in and submit to the narrative constructed in fundamentalist minds. So, on balance I fear the dogmatic worldview builders more than those with plain and simple social status ambitions and whose scope of operation is likely to only go as far as realpolitik. 

Human beings have an incredible ability to read imaginatively behind the scenes; we only have think of theoretical geniuses like Newton and Einstein who have scored big in this area. But against that we must set the many whose theories have failed and been forgotten (which probably includes my own!).
The theoretical imagination, especially when extended to vagaries of worldview synthesis, comes with risks.  This is not to say we should avoid braving the deep waters of worldview synthesis - far from it - we just need to proceed with a little cautious epistemic humility - that and a little faith. We work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

Epistemology links: 
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/epistemic-notes_14.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-great-epistemic-tradeoff.html

More pictures from Northumberland

The rain shrouded and ancient Cheviot hills convey a mood apposite to the mysteries of the meaning of creation.

To the uninitiated the highly asymmetrical ruins of Lindisfarne priory would present a mystery as deep as Duddo stone circle.

Weathering of the stones of the priory has created forms just as fantastic as the stones at Duddo.

The view from Ford church; It conjures up thoughts of ancient origins, beauty, light, colour and the truncation of death. These thoughts mingle prompting the  feeling it must all mean something, thereby fueling the mythological imagination. 

To the unknown god: A flower offering (?)  found in one of the erosion channels of the Duddo stones. The offering instinct goes deep. 

This isn't Northumberland but the Chinese "shrine" at Kew Gardens, where the floor has become covered in coin "offerings". Ornamental ponds often attract the same behavior. What's at the bottom of these token "offerings"?  Is it carried out instinctively or is it done with the conscious intention of  hedging bets and attempting a communion with unknown spiritual forces?