Grace...

This is a BIG word for us. All of us in our Western culture. Protestants and Catholics, scientists, and unbelievers even cannot escape the effects of this word.

A few introductory words : I am not... Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, Christian, atheist... I do not fit into any of those labels, so what you are going to hear here is not proselytizing in any classical meaning of the word.

This word TIES IN DIRECTLY to Econosophy, even if the link may escape you at first.

ANY economy, in order for it to work FOR US, and not AGAINST us, MUST come to terms with this word. Because, grace, for our ancestors, for centuries was really... the SUPREME VALUE of life.

So, let's get going. Obviously I'm not going to finish what I start here. At the end there will still be lots to say about this subject, which I will come back to regularly...

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During my last spiritual crisis I finally realized that I desperately needed something to get out of bed in the morning for. Something that would enable me to go through the repetitive, unexciting daily routine, fixing meals twice a day, doing housework, all that stuff that NOBODY ever gets a medal for, or even recognition, but that STILL has to be done... (and you don't get paid for THAT, do you, now ?)

I needed something to believe in.

(Look at that word... and now look at the word... FIAT (money)... Do you see any resemblance ?) (Fiat means trust, faith...)

I discovered that only IF and WHEN I could believe in something that I could devote myself to COMPLETELY (hmm... think a minute now about that young American of Pakistani origin who planted the bomb at JFK airport. Think about what his act said about HIS need to believe.), I would be able to FREELY get out of bed every morning and go through the routine.

The ability to engage our belief liberates GRACE for us. Grace and faith are NOT the same thing, but they are related. I'm not sure exactly how, yet, I am still discovering this.

Some people call it the grace of God. i call it the grace of God, for many extremely complicated reasons that would encumber this post right now, and that can be set aside temporarily.

Grace is the lubricant that gets the ball rolling. It is the grease in the economy that works... a hell of a lot better than oil, you know, whose disastrous effects are evident in the Gulf of Mexico right now.

Grace is the lubricant that makes investment work, and it is responsible for producing the exponential effects involved. (I will come back to this in later posts.)

Oil is NOT grace, even if it translates into ENERGY that has kept us carburating, as we say in France. It has kept us.. RUNNING, this oil, for too long now.

But... it really is NO substitute for grace. And these days, as it RUNS OUT (as all material energy MUST, in the long run), it has got us scrambling for another substitute.

Next very important question... WHO is grace for, and how do you get it ?

Our Catholic ancestors believed that you could... BUY grace. Not really with money, of course. But by DOING good works. By being a good, Christian person. By spending good.. CHRISTIAN money too. Like a... transaction. It works like this.. "you DO this, and... you GET grace.. IN EXCHANGE".

Our Protestant ancestors said... no way. Grace couldn't be BOUGHT. It isn't FOR SALE (for money or anything else..).

But then they went on to say that GOD had decided WHO got grace and who didn't. He decided it once and for all. Grace was predestined. You either had it or you didn't, and more importantly, the only PROOF that existed as to the existence of grace was material success, wealth, status, etc. All extremely WORLDLY things, you will grant me.

Whence the expression... "there but for the grace of God go I", in my book a really disgusting formulation that is designed to make SOME people feel really good about themselves AT THE EXPENSE (!!!!) of others. This belief is still with us ; it is all around us, in fact, even though most of us are woefully ignorant about where it came from.

But.. the really good news is that... grace is free.

Now.... it's not free like the samples that you get at the supermarket. Even though... the samples you get at the supermarket are, deep down, a rather DESPERATE ATTEMPT to get reconnected with grace, and what it means. They are a PERVERTED attempt. Perversion means, to turn upside down. That's right. All the "free" junk/stuff you get right now is a way of clutching at grace like a straw.

Grace is SOMETHING that you can't BUY, you can't SELL, you can't EARN, you can't WIN. (And for obvious reasons, you can't STEAL it either...)

What could it be ?

It is something that you RECEIVE.

It is given to you without your having to DO or BE anything or anyone.

And... it is for EVERYONE. (It is truly... democratic.)

The poor. The rich. The fine upstanding citizens. The junkies. The prostitutes. The... torturers. The... pedophiles.

You heard me. Grace is for... EVERYONE.

Everyone who... wants it, or asks for it, sincerely.

And when YOU ask for it, the ball gets rolling.

There is NOTHING YOU CAN DO OR BE to get it.

But it is there for you.

Can you see how this issue is really important for our understanding the economy ?

If grace gets the ball rolling, then WITHOUT it... the ball DOES NOT ROLL.

And that is where we are right now.

We are trying desperately to push the ball around through our own INDIVIDUAL efforts.

Logically. Rationally. Methodically.

And... it's NOT WORKING.

It will NOT work this way. (And moreover, we are despairing in our recognition that it WILL NOT work this way...)

Time to.. go back in time and take a look at where we took a wrong turn.

We CAN find the meaning of grace again.

But... we gotta start looking.

I, for one, am lucky. I got curious, and went looking in my Christian heritage to discover how our ancestors have framed this problem.. And.. I have asked for grace. It's hard to put oneself on the receiving end in our culture, but it CAN be done.

I think I will conclude this way : money can ONLY mean something to us when there is SOMETHING out there that can't be bought with it.

Something like.. GRACE, you know ?

Grace is truly... PRICELESS...

"Reality" Check Time.... : HOW are you reading ?

About a month ago, I was killing some time on the Internet, on amazon.com (no, that's not an ad for amazon...) and looked up a book that I still have downstairs, a book that I hauled over to the Old World on purpose many years ago, to see what people are saying about it NOW.

The book ? Adler and ?'s "How to Read a Book", which dates from the 1940's.

I am NOT going to waste your time and mine by reviewing this book here, you can check out amazon for the reviews if you like.

In the course of trawling the reviews, I came upon a "help" message floating in interstellar computer space, a young man asking for suggestions for how to read ever faster, and dig out all that content in two seconds flat, in between the rings on his cell phone.

And I answered him, and it's my answer that I want to share with you here (among other musings....)

Um... what GIVES with this constant obsession to race through books (and life...) ?

WHY do we feel we need to run everywhere ?

Haven't all of us figured out by now that when you're in the train, with your nose pressed to the glass, and it's going FAST, EVERYTHING OUTSIDE rushes past in an enormous BLUR ?

It's one thing TO HAVE YOUR EMPLOYER shouting at you all the time to pick up the pace.

BUT... to come home, and then shout at yourself to pick up the pace in all of your, uh, extracurricular activities, why be your own EXECUTIONER, chez vous, moreover ? (Actually, I didn't go into as much detail with HIM as I am with you.) Why willingly participate in your own alienation ?

For me, speed reading is an enormous joke, and as biblical as the Adler and ? book remains as a reference, I am not reading at the four levels that it preaches any more either...

Here is my breakdown of the different levels you CAN read at (this means comprehension, obviously) :

1) you are able to repeat what the author says, in his words.

2) you are able to repeat what the author says, in YOUR words.

3) you are able to pick out points in which you agree and disagree with the author, and justify your arguments.

4) you are able to do all the above AND relate what you have read to several other books, and historical points of view.

5)... you are able to do ALL the above, and you can tie what you have read into the experience of your daily life, integrating it with your past experience too, and SEEING where the book's ideas play out around you in your world.

....

Now, obviously you are not always going to take the time to do that.

Because you have figured out by the list above that there is NO WAY IN HELL that you are going to go through all those five levels by speed reading.

And you SHOULD have concluded by now that speed reading is ONLY going to give you an extremely superficial view of any book.

Which brings me to the next point. How long have books been available to the general public ?

Let me see... They started coming around at about the time of the Reformation. So that, in our culture alone, reams, and reams of paper have been printed with lots of interesting thoughts on them.

No way in your and my limited, finite life are we going to find the time to wade through everything that's been printed. We're going to have to... gracefully renounce that hubristic project.

Which means... that you gotta learn how to pick and choose what's worth reading all through those five stages of reading, and that's not necessarily an easy task.

But... you CAN learn to do a LOT of thinking, and learn a lot by only reading a handful of really good books WELL.

Now... this is exactly what our culture has decided to... NOT DO, these days.

And I assure you, it is bringing us down, and dumbing us down considerably.

That's too bad. Because I think that we need all the neurons, and all the intelligence we can muster at this stage of the game.

The Internet sound byte game has encouraged us to read superficially, and continues to shorten our attention spans, and capacity for critical thought. And we are not even particularly.. ashamed at our woeful ignorance and lack of general culture these days, either. We USED to be ashamed. No longer...

For info, I am currently reading Jacques Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life", 900 or so pages.

I am crossing my fingers that I will manage to finish it, because.. I too feel the dumbing down pressure working on ME. Inexorably...

While I do not agree with Jacques everywhere, we are having a marvelous... conversation, as I scribble comments to him in the margin as I read.

I love talking to authors, even when they are not there to answer me... Some of my best friends STILL are people who died long before I took my first breath. That never stopped me from loving them, (almost) as much as my flesh and blood kin. (WHAT AM I SAYING ?? MORE in certain cases..)

And Jacques is a great read. A breathtakingly educated, 113 year old French expatriate living in the U.S. (the opposite of me, as a matter of fact, except that no, I'm not 113. Whew. Thank God.). A historian of ideas.

Check it out. His writing style is impeccable. As good as an excellent bottle of vintage Bordeaux wine. For connaisseurs and lovers of books. Enjoy.

Evolutionary Musings

Good thing that Toby has "musings" in the title of this blog, cause that is what I am going to proceed to do : muse...

One of my psychological/sociological maxims is : IT all hangs together.

By that, I mean that our society is constructed like our languages, and you can be sure that THEY hang together in a sophisticated manner, each tiny part hooking into another tiny part that combines to make larger and larger components, as our language itself CONSTRUCTS our social order, which in turn inflects our language.

Very complex.

So, my hypothesis, if you like, is that you can really see our ideas, our social IDEOLOGY at work in our daily lives, in the smallest details, IF you are looking for it, and have an idea how/where to find it.

Is this search governed by the scientific method ? Depends on what you call the scientific method. What I'm doing is based on personal observation. So, my advice to YOU, reader, is... don't take ME for granted. See if what I say works for YOU, on the basis of YOUR personal experience... But... take the time to observe, ask questions and THINK before making up your mind, please...

Observation number 1 : More than ten years ago my small daughter informed us that she wanted to become a string instrument maker... During the time she was growing up she (and I) regularly invested HANDICRAFT activities, beading, knitting, for example. Two weeks ago, I was chatting with a Mommy friend whom I have known since my children were little who told me that a short while ago she had become dissatisfied with her extremely intellectual, abstract scientific research job, and wanted to change to a new profession, kinesiology, which involves... massaging people, and modifying their corporal/spiritual energy WITH HER HANDS. And to get back to me, now I spend between one and three hours a day practicing my still new piano.

I'm going to make a big generalization here, so... be patient with me.

I HAVE THIS THEORY... that as a species, particularly in our Western culture, we have collectively moved farther and farther away from activities that demand intricate hand/eye coordination, and that this... EVOLUTION is NOT GOOD for us as a species.

We should remember that our enormous frontal cortex evolved in great part as a result OF this coordination, and that our HANDS represent our IMPRINT on the physical world around us. Or should we say, particularly, they represent the imprint of our thinking, WILLING minds.

They translate what we think and desire into action. And they materialize our intelligence, which i consider to be our capacity to inflect our physical world, to ACT UPON it.

I'm going to skip the part about the fact that an enormous surface of our hands is represented on the surface of our frontal cortex, and if I'm wrong, I call upon a reader to correct me.

Observation number 2 : our ancestors, when they knew how to write, took time to do it ; their handwriting was DISTINCTIVE and INDIVIDUAL, and books were written to teach people how to write BEAUTIFULLY... Calligraphy is high art with writing words. High art which demands great concentration, skill, and fine hand/eye coordination.

And... MAYBE you can do it with a machine, BUT... if you do it with a machine, YOUR PHYSICAL HAND WILL NOT BE TRACING THE MOVEMENT WHICH WILL NOT BE IMPRINTED ON YOUR BRAIN... And the individual differences (present in YOU, the individual) which enrich our world will disappear too.

Just how much of a loss is this ?

A great one, in my book.

While it may save us time, I conclude that... it WILL sap our intelligence IN THE LONG RUN.

Because... just WHO or WHAT ARE WE OUTSIDE OF OUR BODIES ?? WITHOUT OUR HANDS ?

Some people may say that.... typing on the keyboard of a computer is putting our hands to use.

I say.. NIET. Compare typing on that keyboard for a minute with handwriting. Every time you press a key, you are performing THE SAME GESTURE.

Just how.. enriching is it to your mind to be performing... THE SAME GESTURE ?

Hell, I think that doing my housework COULD represent more variety in its monotony and drudgery than pressing down the keys of a computer.

So... how much STIMULATION are you getting from typing ? Not much.

Certainly not lots next to using your hands for handwriting.

Observation number 3 : three years ago now, I traversed a major melancholic episode, a spiritual crisis, as I like to say, for personal and professional reasons. In my scramble to make myself better, (and since I'm an old hand at melancholic episodes, and now have some ideas about taking care of myself in them...), I started volunteer work in a small library with NO COMPUTER card system. In other words, I had to manually fill out paper cards with the name of the borrower, the author of the book, the book title.

You may be surprised but.... the simple activity of manually filling out those cards WAS A GREAT FACTOR in improving my intellectual capacities, which were reduced to zero at the time. Tracing the letters and words on those cards RECONSTRUCTED my mind (not JUST filling out those cards, of course...).

Conclusion : we NEED to be WORKING in a way that develops our hand/eye coordination.

We need to be working in ways that INDIVIDUALIZE our movements, our gestures, in order for us to develop and maintain our intelligence, our capacity to solve problems.

So.... the next big question is... WHY has THIS society developed TO SUCH A HIGH DEGREE, situations and activities that DESTROY meaningful work ?

WHY are we doing this to ourselves ?

Even... the plutocrats and the intelligentsia suffer from the destruction of work in the way I'm talking about it, (cf the scientist above) so it is NOT a class war...

The computer keyboard represents a massive attempt at... uniformization.

It represents a.. gain of time, a "value" that we have idolized in our current society.

If you look around you, you will see evidence of our attempts at uniformization EVERYWHERE around you.

A dangerous activity, uniformization.

In the long run, I think that its disadvantages will CERTAINLY outweigh its immediately apparent advantages...

The good news is that WE are dimly aware of this, many of us. And we are making confused attempts to remedy this situation, many of us. My daughter, for instance, in her noble choice of work...

New Energy and the Profit Problem

This has been an aspect of transitioning away from fossil fuels that has interested me for some time. The problem is a civilization's worth of infrastructure, both cultural and physical -- that is socioeconomic and technical -- that have been built on fossil fuels, and oil in particular. For a variety of reasons (which I prefer to sum up with the dictum "change is the only constant") we are progressing away from oil, but the existing infrastructure is having a hard time coping with this. And because we have a global oil-based infrastructure, we have a global resistance.

The first quote is from an old (2005) Washington Post article, in which Jeffrey Immelt and Jonathan Lash analyse the challenge:

"Fundamental change will require three things: the brainpower to develop new technology, a market that makes clean technologies profitable and a strong dose of American will. Right now we have two out of three."

What pops out at me of course is the second condition. The alternative to fossil fuel has to return a decent profit. So if there are viable alternatives that don't, should we let civilization perish? Is monetary profit and protecting the existing vested interests really that important? Apparently. Perhaps the authors' jobs highlight a possible reason why Immelt and Lash might hold this view:

"Jeffrey Immelt is chairman and chief executive of General Electric Co. Jonathan Lash is president of the World Resources Institute."

More recently noises are emerging that wind powered energy might be too cheap, and is therefore the reason for resistance from those energy utility companies who stand to lose out as it becomes more prevalent and effective. From The Oil Drum:

"The key thing here is that we are beginning to unveil what I've labelled the dirty secret of wind: utilities don't like wind not because it's not competitive, but because it brings prices down for their existing assets, thus lowering their revenues and their profits. Thus the permanent propaganda campaign against wind. But now that this "secret" is out in the open, it's hopefully going to make one of the traditional arguments against wind (the one about its supposed need subsidies) much more difficult to use..."

Meanwhile other alternatives to fossil fuels are popping up like daisies. Some will wither, some will bloom, and of them this from Bloom Energy seems particularly exciting:

"the company boasts that their systems could literally replace the electricity grid with dispersed, clean, and easy to maintain fuel cell boxes running on a variety of fuels, water, and oxygen, with no combustion at all."

There are many others of course, new ways of harnessing wind, space-based solar energy collectors, nets of tiny-beads to hang in windows or coat buildings also for collecting solar energy, and others besides. What we are seeing is a combined and multi-fronted attack on an existing order, and the existing order doesn't like it. How could they? What it all adds up to is a paradigm-altering challenge on the way humanity has done business these last few centuries, including the nature of money, and the nature of waged-labour too. Almost everything is back on the table. Because the implications are global, this change is painful and is being met with huge resistance, which is only natural.

Interesting times folks. And we're living in them.