Dharmavidya

Delighted that EU has received Nobel Peace Prize

The EU has received the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe. I am delighted. On so many basic criteria, Europe in the early 21st century must figure as one of the, if not the, most advanced attempts at civilization over an extended area in human history, present economic difficutlies notwithstanding.

Reflections on Being where the Atomic Bomb fell

I visited the Peace Park and Peace Memorial Museum which is really, of course, the bomb memorial. It is superfluous to say that this is an indelibly moving experience. The bomb was dropped on 6th August 1945, completely destroyed the city, killed well over 100,000 people straight away and many more in a more lingering fashion later, and brought the war to a sudden end with the unconditional surrender of Japan to America.

The bomb itself had been developed at huge expense and was delivered by a single airplane. It flew in on a bright summer's day. There was no resistance or anti-aircraft defense. The bomb exploded about half a kilometre above a hospital in the middle of town and generated a temperature of well over 3000 degrees centigrade. The resulting fire storm and shock waves flattened and incinerated everything as far as the eye could have seen, had an eye survived.

America decided to use the bomb rather than invade because it would mean that Japan would surrender before Russia had a chance to get involved, thus bringing Japan into the American sphere of influence in the next, cold war, phase of global struggle. It chose Hiroshima as a military-industrial city in which there was no prisoner of war camp so there would be no American casualties.

Many of the comments in the visitors books use words like "incomprehensible" and "must never happen again" and even "the reasons do not matter", but it seems to me that if it is never to happen again the reasons must be understood. To regard human evil as a kind of super-natural visitation or irrational abberation is just blindness. The dropping of this bomb was the result of sustained planning by a large number of people over a long period of time and it had taken a huge expenditure of time, money and rational effort to bring about. Unless we understand this we remain simply victims of our own nature.

It does seem to me that the ideal of Buddhism is, in a real sense, that we find a way to transcend or go beyond our nature. It is not essentially about becoming more natural in the simple sense of the term. A cultivated, enlightened person may have what we could call a "natural manner" in the sense of being relaxed and at ease, but such a person has become so because they have gone beyond the greed, hate and delusion that are our more native condition. The people who planned and executed the bomb were ordinary people with families and regular jobs. They included some of the more intelligent members of society. What they did made sense by the logic of the situation as they saw it.

Now, of course, we have a world in which a larger number of countries have nuclear weapons and the modern ones are much more destructive than the one that hit Hiroshima. In this respect the world is in greater danger than ever before. On the other hand we do now live in a world in which it is inconceivable that there could be a full scale war between Russia, the USA and Europe. Even little North Korea has been spared what has befallen Iraq. No wonder Iran wants to join the nuclear club. Until the mid-twentieth century there was no doubt that the ultimate manner of settling disputes was war. Now, at last, we are perhaps beginning to find other ways. However, we are not doing so particularly consciously or rationally. They are coming about because we are too frightened of the alternative. Such is human nature. We call ourselves homo sapiens, but we are a great deal less sapiential than we like to think and often our advances are forced upon us by our folly. Now we not only face the prospect of incineration we face the possibility of ecological breakdown too. This is also forcing us to change our ways, but whether we can do so soon enough or drastically enough is an open question.

I came away carrying the horror of the terrible images, the facts and statistics, and many thoughts. There is a good deal said about living in the here and now, but everybody should study history and from such study we should try to know ourselves a little better, not in our wisdom and virtue, but in our weakness; then, perhaps, we shall find enough fellow-feeling for one another not to think that people in a far off place are suitable subjects for treatment like this.

Human and Silvan Survivors of the A-Bomb

At Hiroshima, I was able to speak with Mr Atsuharu Maki who is a survivor of the bomb. Now 82, he was 14 when the bomb fell severely burning himself and killing almost everybody else in his school. He survived. What can I do with my life now, he asked himself. He resolved that at every opportunity he would talk to people about his experience. This would be his contribution to trying to avert any repetition. Thus he talked to me. The tree in the background is the descendent of the living thing most close to the centre of the blast that survived. After the event it appeared, like everything else, to be completely dead, but in subsequent seasons put out new shoots. Vegetation can be more robust than humans none of whom survived anywhere this close. 

Jewish Anti-Semite

Interesting item in today's BBC news: "A leading figure in Hungary's far right Jobbik Party has been forced to resign after being exposed as Jewish. Csanad Szegedi's grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor and his grandfather a veteran of forced labour camps." What interesting things humans are! This man is from a family that has been savagely persecuted and, guess what, he becomes a leading light in a party that wants to persecute people - gypsies mostly. And, guess what, people vote for such parties. We can guess that at least some of the people who vote for them are people who feel persecuted themselves. And so it goes on.

Hatred does not cease with hating, hating only ceases with love - this is the eternal law, so say the wise.

beyond the occupation of Wall Street, what?

The Occupy Wall Street movement is a result of the confluence of two powerful influences. Firstly, there is a deep disquiet about the credibility of the Western model. Public money has been used in vast quantities to bail our commercial organisations, mostly banks, in a manner that undermines the whole rationale of the model. In theory, people take risks and if they fail they reap the consequences just as when they succeed. There is a kind of perceivable fairness in this and it goes someway to justifying the fact that some people do reap huge rewards. The fact that they do so is rationalised by our being able to say to ourselves that they are the people who took the risks and if they had failed they would have faced the consequences. However, now, it seems, that it is, for some at least, a one way game. This cuts away the rationale of the whole system. The "American Dream" has mutated into a racket.

Secondly, there has been the phenomenon of the Middle Eastern "spring", the over-throwing of rich dictators by popular up-risings. Western leaders initially regarded these Middle Eastern movements with great suspicion. The fact is that they preferred doing business with the old dictators - and still do in many cases. However, when it became apparent that, in some cases at least, the rebels were going to win, there was a shift of attitude. If you can't beat tham, join them. Western leaders rolled out a string of much used rhetoric about freedom and democrasy. The demonstrations in far away countries were praised and those who suppressed them vilified. This, however, led many to ask - why not here?

So now we have a growing popular movement demanding "real democracy" and the overthrow of the power of corporations. But what does real democracy look like and is it any good? Could it run the economy and deliver the goods? There are many reasons to doubt it, but the status quo is looking in creasingly fragile.

The trouble is that nobody has any idea what could really replace the current system. Until about 1990 the world seemed to have a choice of systems. There was communism and there was capitalism. Then communism fell, consummed by its internal contradictions. Capitalists gloated believing that this meant that they had won the argument. However, there are now many signs that capitalism may be about to go the same way, consummed by contradictions that are every bit as crazy as those that afflicted the other system. So where now?

Is there any system other than these two that can feed, house, and clothe the vast population of planet earth, let alone deliver all the superfluous luxury that humans like to indulge in and play with? 

How would it be for instance if corporations did not have limited liability and were actually allowed to fail when they fail? There would then be a much more severe break upon the growth of the kinds of bubbles that we have seen. There would also be a lot more people who went bankrupt. The pain would be spread around more and the accumulations would not get so enormous. This direction of development would take the morality of risk more seriously. Thinking about such ideas makes one realise that a more honest system would not necessarily be a kinder one. Dilemma.

Or, what about localism? How would it be if communities ran their own affairs, including their economic affairs, to a much greater extent than they now do. In Italy, for instance, in many areas, you cannot own a business there unless you live there - so no chains. What if real estate were not freehold, but leased from a locally elected body? This would impede labout migration and lead to communities that were internally more homogenious, but, perhaps, more different from one another. Power would devolve from central government to localities. There might be just as much conflict and corruption, but it would be differently distributed and the whole system might be more stable.

How about if one went the other way and created powerful international institutions. The European Union is currently in the thick of fighting out this possibility. What will those institutions be? Ironically, the primary candidates in Europe at the moment are the Central European Bank and the Stabilization Fund. Is the future a super-bank? Perhaps. What will happen if a sizeable number of countries do actually go bankrupt? Already many business corporations are wealthier than many countries. Are corporations going to run the world? Some say they do already, but we have not yet reached the point where governments completely cease to function. Perhaps the first world government will be a bank.

The fact is that we are getting into uncharted territory in which we do not even have much in the way of speculative ideology to go on. We are not going to go back to feudalism nor to anciant Athens. A paradigm shift may be forcing itself upon us and we have no idea what it is going to look like. The people occupying Wall Street know something is wrong - the system is sick - but they do not know where we are going. Nor do the people in government, nor those in board rooms. All are like corks floating in a torrent that is close to breaking its banks. The present system is sick because it has, in perfectly understandable ways, led ordinary people into increasingly compromised positions. We live in houses we do not really own, on loans taken from organisations that do not really have the money they loaned us, who pretend to be risk taking enterprises, regulated by government organisations that are not really independent of those they supposedly regulate, overseen by bodies, the members of whom are elected by supposedly democratic processes in which only those with access to vast amounts of money can contemplate participation, and who, once elected, find themselves enmeshed in a situation in which so many compromises of fact and principle have already been made that it would be super-human not to succomb to cynicism and manipulation.

This has all the hallmarks of civilisation in decay. History has seen this before: the decline and fall of.... (fill in the blank with any number of former systems). Something new will emerge, but there may well be quite a heap of ashes before it does so.

 

Riot as carnival

Reflecting on the meaning of the riots in England and trying to see the larger picture, which is to say, taking a historical and sociological rather than a psychological perspective, it seems to me that they can be seen as a species of carnival. Carnival is that time when people temporarily let off the constrictions that they live by the rest of the time. As such carnival is a kind of pressure valve. The Roman Saturnalia was an instance of carnival in institutionalised form and in many Latin American countries somethingt of the same is known. Mardi Gras in New Orleans no doubt started the same way.

Looked at it this way we can perhaps see the riots as a sign that control in English society - it is notable that there were no riots in Scotland or Wales - has been becoming tighter and has perhaps, for the moment, gone as far as it safely can. If this is correct, then the current government, while talking tough about repression and so on for public consumption, might be best advised in practice to concentrate on those aspects of conservatism that are to do with loosening rather than tightening social control overall.

We have had a substantial increase in public surveillance. When we go out of our houses we are filmed. On the roads, speed control has become tighter. Crime rates have reduced. Our mobile phones are tracked. The supposedly democratic state now knows where we are and what we are doing more presicely than the rulers of soviet Russia ever achieved. 

This is, however, not just true of England. Internationally control is increasing in many ways. The human species is becoming more and more inter-connected and humans are attempting a higher level of organisation than has ever previously been achieved. It is not surprising that there are outbreaks of "indignants" from Madrid to Tel Aviv.

Propably this move toward a higher level of organisation will be successful in the end, but it is not easy of achievement and, of course, with every gain, something is also lost. Furthermore, any major advance in human civilization constitutes a move into the unknown, which means that it is not something that can be rationally or consciously planned. Although I can see what is happening, I cannot know where it is going or what the higher organisation will look like when it is achieved. This means that it is something that will happen more in spite of than with the aid of democratic politics. All rational decision making is based on the past. It is, therefore, inedequate to the needs of the future. We are always fighting the last war, not the next one.  This means that even if a prescient politician were to arise, he or she could not tell the population what is happening because they would not believe it and would certainly not vote for it. This is what is happening at the moment: the populace do not know what they are part of and would not support it even if they knew, yet it will happen anyway and they will be part of it in spite of themselves.

Europe is already in many respects the highest form of organisation that humankind has so far achieved. Never before have so many people, and so diverse a collection of peoples, been so organised with so low a rate of homicide, infant mortality, or disappearance, and with such efficiency of food distribution, adequate shelter, healthy care and sophisticated communications. It is remarkable. Yet this is not an end point: the forward pressure remains unrelenting. A higher level of organisation is forming. This involves a certain centralisation of power - something that virtually nobody would currently vote for, yet which will inexorably take place. The corresponding waves of disturbance in Paris, in London, and elsewhere, are surface manifestations of the tension under the surface. Nor is this disturbance only within Europe itself, but all along its periphery in North Africa and the Middle East. Millions of people want to come to Europe or to bring their own part of the world up to a similar level of organisation. 

This process of trying to make a quantum jump into the society of the 22nd century is not a planned process, nor can it be. In most respects it is a product of the "collective mind" and remains unconscious to virtually all of the individual participants, many of whom live in a general vague supposition that "things are getting worse" just as people have always done. Yet, while we worry about ecological collapse, debt crises and far away wars, the real big story is of a steady edging forward toward a degree of social control and integration undreampt of before. That there be occasional outbreaks of carnival and pillage is not surprising. It is a sign that the engine is over-heating, but even if the throttle is lowered a little, the forward velocity will only be slightly slowed, certainly not reversed. 

In my opinion... Europe is rising.

Europe has had a shock and it needed it. The sovereign debt crisis coming at a time of global slowdown has created a storm of anxiety and brought home as nothing else could the fact that economic fundamentals cannot be ignored. Does this storm mean that the euro will collapse? No. Does it mean that Europe will decline? No, quite the opposite. Because of this shock, Europe will reach a point of greater internal fiscal discipline and economic  efficiency.

Europe, taken as a whole, is already the largest economy in the world and its dominance will increase. The current headlines are deceptive. Everybody is currently worried about debt. Europe is in debt to the tune of 80% of one year's GDP. That is not good. Many economists think that 40% is healthy and Brussels rules call for 30%. However, the USA is 100% and Japan is much higher. In terms of debt, Europe is healthier than its main rivals.

People are worried about the possibility that a member state might default on its sovereign debt. They should be worried, but it is not going to happen. These worries will enable the imposition of more central control. Nobody will like it, but bit by bit it is now inevitable because the alternative is unthinkably worse. This will make Europe more centralised and more efficient. Britain will pretend to stand aloof from all this but it will conform - in fact it already has done and has been one of the first to do so. As William Haigh said while he was running the government a week ago while the PM was on holiday, Britain has taken the necessary steps and now looks to other countries (Italy, Spain, Greece, Ireland) to do likewise, and they will.

Europe is still a confederacy rather than a federation and with this comes distinctive characteristics. Because it is a herd with no acknowledged leader, it behaves the way that herds do. It is prone to bunch together and even stampede when danger is around, as now. When the sun shines and the grass is rich, it loses cohesion and individuals wander off, sometimes into dangerous territory, which is what happened before the sub-prime crisis hit the world economy. However, herds have been one of nature's most successful inventions. A herd of buffalo is match for any number of solitary big cats.

It is still a confederacy because it is difficult to get individual countries to give up elements of sovereignty. Populist politicians can always gain ground by opposing such moves. However, the logic of the situation is that centralisation will happen inevitably whether it is publically recognised or not. The political institutions will lag behind the reality. Other means will be found. There has been recent concern that the European Central Bank has been adopting a role that goes well beyond its original remit. Well, yes, it would, wouldn't it? It is one of the powerful central institutions. There will be central power and if politicians will not pick it up, bankers and others will. Later people will wake up to what is happening and then there may be some democratization. In fact, already, the European parliament is starting to become more assertive.

The thing that makes all this difficult to read is that there are few personalities. Chancellor Merkel is the nearest thing to a leader and Jean-Claude Trichet has played a key role in many of the recent moves, but these figures do not have the prominence in the public eye that a president of the United States has. Europe is wonderfully Byzantine and while those who like simplicity may lament this, it is really one of its strengths. The coming budget round in Europe will be hard fought, complicated, involve innumerable deals and temporary alliances and will be easy for newspapers to poke fun at. Nonetheless, things will happen. All this complexity distracts attention from what is happening at a more fundamental level and that may well be a good thing. 

Europe is growing in strength, is becoming more cohesive and more integrated. More and more European citizens spend substantial amounts of their lives in European countries they were not born in. I do. Economies are becoming more interdependent. Large amounts are being invested in infrastructure binding the continent together with high speed roads, rail links and airports. Europe's home market is much bigger than that of the USA or Japan. Furthermore, Europe has untold riches of historically accumulated cultural riches. The diversity of the continent is now generating creativity rather than war and that has been the great - truly great - achievement of the past few decades.

The political institutions are evolving more slowly than the reality on the ground but this is not bad. It is natural. Application of purist principles at a political level is not necessarily so wonderful. America's democracy is currently gtridlocked by its own checks and balances. Europe muddles through and a certain amount of clouding of the waters enables the economic fundamentals to operate. Europe is stronger then you think and will emerge as the leading superpower in due course.  

Mr Cameron, culture starts at the top

Prime Minister Cameron's formula for addressing the roots of the problem that manifested in three days of burning, looting and rioting is to teach right from wrong more clearly in schools, discipline children, reinforce the criminal justice system and deal with gangs. This last point was the one to which he gave greatest attention in his speech. He also said that what has happened is criminality not protest, which is true strictly speaking but is a misleading statement because the roots surely do not, in fact, lie in a failure of the control mechanisms in society, they lie in social conditions and, as he did rightly say, in culture. Of course, what politicians say is a function of what they think will affect their audience in the way they want and does not necessarily reflect what they really think or what they will actually do at the end of the day. He is right to stress culture, but the factors that have undermined our culture are moral ones. The most obvious ones are:
1. the lies told to the public about Iraq
2. the MP's expenses scandal

3. the bailing out of banks with taxpayer's money and the growing awareness by ordinary people of the size of bonuses paid to rich people;
4. the revelation that phone tapping has been going on for years with the connivance of all sorts of important people;
5. a widespread sense that politicians internationally are losing control of the economic situation because of a lack of courage

These are the factors that create a situation ripe for anarchy. They are cultural; they are moral; but they are first and foremost about leadership and example - or the lack thereof. If the political class want to create a better culture, they need to put their own house in order. A relatively new government does have some opportunity to establish such leadership but the PM will have to do more than he has hinted at today if he is to win this battle. The "big society" and the restoration of community are excellent ideals - but where is the action?

confronting the social realities of South Korea

I've had quite a bit of conversation with students today about the social problems of South Korea and of Korea as a whole. The division of the country is a kind of madness and in many ways the north and south are like mirror images of each other. Soon all the kids will be in the north and all the old folk in the south. South Korea is a more disciplined country than Britain and this has, no doubt, contributed to its economic success over recdent decades, though many of the people I spoke to see this regimentation as dysfunctional - "sick" one said. There are, for instance, different grades of university and depending which grade you go to you are then set in a particular social strata for life. This can cause a lot of trouble in families when siblings end up in different level schools. People are concerned that the society has become overly materialistic and only concerned with superficialities. There is more plastic surgery here and more suicides pro rata than anywhere else on Earth. There is also a strong gender divide. Boys are favoured. This is partly a function of a long history of Confucianism and partly, no doubt, a function of having been at war on and off for fifty years. In the actual counselling class it is apparent that some of this does show through in the areas that students find difficult. There are some strong social taboos in this kind of tight society and for counsellors to overcome them in themselves, let alone make it safe enough for their clients to do so, is quite a challenge. Having said all this, my own experience of Korean people so far is of a delightful, cheerful people with a wonderful mix of modernism and traditionalism. 

the economic strength of Europe

I have written piece at

http://www.facebook.com/groups/132066556872260/doc/?id=150763971669185