TheGlobalSilkRoad全球性丝绸之路

The Anniversary

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:57:00 +0000

Russian people under socialism encapsulated their position with.

"They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work"

A Chinese under post Mao "socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics". might say

"They direct a play, "The Market", we pretend to act within it"

Mao spawned great things. One is the New China. Can it evolve without revolution.

The more I know China the more I love and understand Mao Tse Tung thought and the mistakes he was drawn into in its practice. Mao was a truly great thinker. He had a gargantuan task, to overthrow the restrictive excesses of 5000+ years of a Chinese way of being.

"A Dream of Red Mansions" chart the terminal throws of its cycle we call it in the UK "clogs to clogs in three generation". This is the essence of Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth". This charts a family's decline, an other's rise in this cycle lasting 5000+ years.

Mao, with Chou, struggled to end it. The forces driving it run very very deep in the Chinese psyche. New age Gong Zhang Dang's inherit this. Mao's Autumn being their Spring.

Ba Jin (巴金) in "Family (家)", "Spring(春)", and "Autumn (秋)" charted the process that led to China's long hard Winter on the way to the New China. Mao ended this winter in 1949. His inheritors with the one child policy can exorcise the crushing influence of family on Chinese development.

Hope exists. A generation can be born in an unending summer freed by Maoist thought and "market socialism with Chinese characteristics" from the forces of frozen familial futures.

Let tomorrows children be players not actors in the global game unfolding on The Way(道)

A Letter to the Phillippines

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:44:00 +0000

Joseph
Princess Venture Enterprises
Manila

Together you and I are on the Way(道). In the current era this can bring an end to conflict, revolution and hegemony. It is this end we symbolize. My life was in NATO working against enemies, now gone, yours on the Pacific Rim struggling to end a hegemony now gone. Where now is the Way(道)?

We in the end game of our lives seek evolutionary harmony, he (和), in now uncontested spheres of influence of West on East and East on West, discarded segments of what is one sphere, our planet. In this conscious systemic evolutionary harmony, he (和), is now the essence of mans survival on the Way(道). Not the irony (同一个世界同一个梦想) of one world one dream (vain hope) of the Chinese Olympics but 同一个世界同一个做梦 but one world having one dream of the Martin Luther King variety as manifest in Obama.

There is a category error in human reasoning. Categories are helpful. They aid understanding but danger lurks in seeing “yin” (阴) and “yang” (阳) as alternatives systems instead of distinct part of ONE process. Profound Chinese philosophy sees this, people see structure not the processes their mind’s eye can create.

With this error ones talks of sub-systems un-systemically as systems when there is only one. Lao Tse called it "the way"(道). Newton called it the heavens. Einstein called it the universe. A correct understanding of its processes leads as Mao rightly conceived, to a need for continuous revolution. Evolutionary harmony requires these to be many and small.

The USA attempts this dominance of yang(阳) over yin(阴) and fails. Fecund errors propagate easily in such free environments producing systemic crisis, 1926, 2009. Flow in any undefined uniformity, a river delta, creates a need for a continuous flow of new flexible channels to guide it.

Such understanding leads to, the “Yi Ching” (易经), focused on the process, “evolution”, not the forms, local to time and place, it creates to enable it to stay on “the way” (道) it cannot leave.

Yin (阴) and yang(阳) are not alternatives but part of the one Way(道) Smooth Evolution requires balance between them. Without this sudden change, revolution, is inevitable to repair “the way” (道) This will happen with or without conscious human intervention. Chinese philosophy recognizes that socially true “he” (和) can avoid such revolution but the neo-Confucian thought of Zu Chi (朱熹) as captured by emperors and farmers was used to sustain their way at the expense of the way competitive technology can modulate business. This domination of yin(阴) over yang(阳) made Ci Xi (慈禧) and the Chinese revolutions that followed inevitable. For balance “The Way” (道) required Western yang(阳) to dominate for a time.

Our job is to find true he (和) as a balance between the processes of the East, with 阳dominant, and West with 阴dominant. Victory of one over the other as seen above is disastrous. Creative dynamic harmony between man and nature requires inclusivity not just of East and West but of Islam and the Spanish speaking world the Philippines encapsulates. For “one world to have one dream” the Philippines must flourish in more than its people.

A truly global University, as we at Nottingham aspires to be, can perhaps assist this.

Dr Brian Hilton, 岵屯来恩(博士)
Associate Professor of International Business,
Nottingham University Business School, NINGBO, China

I am BACK

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 03:41:00 +0000

just a signal that i have not given up and am on the search for new material. i will blog properly again within the week and maybe even later today

岵屯来恩

岵(hu)屯(tun)来 (lai)恩(en

in Chinese "hu" is a wooded hill and "tun" is a place where soldiers are stationed, a very small administrative unit of living perhaps like a village maybe a small town and lai means "comes" and en means "kindness" a name I share with Chou En Lai a man and a sentiment that was his life and i hope is now mine.

Brian Hilton

Reflections from a Day in Beijing

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Sat, 02 May 2009 08:26:00 +0000

Today was and will remain significant to me. It was a wake-up call to arms in my own war to develop intellectually stimulating relevant ideas.

I hope the price of my learning was not excessively high.

I was confronted in Beijing with a pessimistic if realistic world view. This was important to me. It underlines my view that most human activity is driven by belief not reality. The current world crisis like all crisis of a similar "financial" nature is one of human beings confidence in their own beliefs. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any underlying change in human needs, wants and capabilities. The real economy today is no different now than it was a year ago though our confidence in it has been significantly undermined. The consequence is that without belief in it, it does not work.

The recent G20 suggests we humanity are learning how to organize collectively to constructively prevent our lack of confidence in our self belief being undermined for an inconveniently long period. Hopefully this will work on this occasion. It can perhaps, as did Bretton Woods, provide a means of sustaining significant self belief over time without resort to religion.

China's current strength, as was Britain's in the 19th Century, an irrational but sustained confidence in its capacity and will to prevail over all tribulations put in its path. You just have to see the "irrational" public buildings put up in the 19th Century in Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds etc to see this and compare them with the irrational "unrealistic" building going on in Beijing yesterday. The Beijing Olympics personified this as does the fact that over 25% of the residential property constructed here remains empty on completion - I have a researcher working on this phenomena as I write.

The Chinese have now built the longest bridge in the world, plan the tallest building, and the longest high altitude railway etc, the superlatives go on. They do this for similar reasons to those prevailing in 19th Century Britain. These beliefs were so powerful that they even managed to echo downwards into my education and lifetime in Great Britain in terms of us Brits being able to "punch above our weight". Of course this conceptually sells the pass. It does did however keep us in a game despite the "reality" that we are now largely irrelevant players.

It is in feelings of irrelevance, perceived or potentially perceivable, that danger lies. If one's life has no prospect of meaning except through belief then in death for that belief your life has meaning. Persecution for such beliefs heightens the value of such a death. Aggressive police action to suppress the holders of such beliefs is thus perversely the best way to spread their power.

Action providing hope of personal redemption through another route to meaning can succeed. My own take on Northern Ireland is that by finding a way of helping provide such belief for the growing Catholic majority we the Brits succeeded in assisting peace to begin to evolve there. Peace did not proceed out of the 1st World War. It ended with the victors depriving the Germans of all hope of economic or social redemption. World War IIs aftermath was different. Marshall Aid, Bretton Woods and the generosity of the US to its two main defeated enemies changed the game fundamentally.

I believe we need to give Islam and Israel a route to such redemption. I believe this is possible but as it is not yet in place. It cannot be constructed quickly. In the meantime we can at best deploy the kind of life skills you personally have developed to a work to meliorate the consequences. Unfortunately as you know, as did Pontecorvo, most people involved in the “engranage”, that can be your business, in Israel, the US, China, Iran and China do not see it that way. They can and do act in a manner that spreads, rather than dissipates, the consequences of the anomie that leads onto “engranage”. Your personal approach I know and see acts to attenuate the consequences of some people's lack of confidence in their own capacity to provide meaning for their lives except through death, their own and that of others.

Some seem heavily engaged at the tactical level in this battle. They like Shang and the other Chinese legalists are for destroying the enemy as they present. This is their way to meaning and social harmony – it worked in Japan and for a time in China under the Chin.
Others are deeply engaged at the operational level. They arguably have had lives with no mean level of success, with a number of key parts of the game, in Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Grenada and the Balkans.

On the other hand I have chosen to stand on the sidelines of our planet’s part in this great universal game. I choose to think and write about it.

Hopefully, in the end this may assist, the "evolutionary development" of a strategy humanity might use to continue to survive in it. My meaning is found in a small hope that this might be so and humanity can thus survive to continue to play a constructive part in the resolution of our segment of the great universal game existence presents to us. We of course are playing an unbelievably irrelevant small part but we humanity have the capacity to maintain a huge "hubritic" perception of our significance to the process.

Belief is in the end is everything. This can be good.

Neo-classicists and the Neocons are not Economists but Phsyicist and Mathematicians Lost in the Maze of the Real Economy

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:51:00 +0000

I am an economist and a mathematician turned business studies lecturer because my subject was invaded by failed physicists and mathematicians who new and understood nothing about the economy, economics or its traditions. For a well crafted detailed indictment of what they have done and why they were always wrong and why they have all failed now read Mirkowski's "More Heat than Light".

All these so called economist from Debreu on, Nobel for his 'The Theory of Value', knew nothing whatsoever about the economy or economics. Debreu himself said on many occasions that he was not an economist. His Nobel prize winning work is a well crafted piece of differential topology, an existence theorem, to prove a solution exists to Walras' hypothesis, of a hundred years previously that prices could adjust by a process of trial and error, 'tattonement', to converge to a General Equilibrium - a set of prices such that that all markets cleared, i.e. supply equaled demand in every market.

His work is a beautiful demonstration of the wrongness not the rightness of General Equilibrium Theory and the Neo-Classical Economics that has now so catastrophically failed us. It is in fact a proof of what utter nonsense this perspective is. He shows that for General Equilibrium to be possible. There needs to be a set of markets defined over a complete, differentiable measure space defined over all time from the day of Genesis, the Big Bang, to the Present for all goods each of which must exist at all points of continuous time and between all points of time for this result to hold. His mathematics is beautiful but what arrant nonsense as economics.

For General Equilibrium to Exist even as an aspiration the universe has to be in stasis for eternity. Beautiful math that proves that economics based on the idea of tattonement leading in the limit to General Equilibrium is complete and utter nonsense. Instead his success with his Nobel acclamation charted a route that other followed in the Journal of Economic Theory, etc.

Marshal, the First Professor of Economics at Cambridge and Lord Keynes a successor were both excellent mathematicians, Keynes wrote a well respected treatise on probability theory but math never ever appeared in their published works in economics although it is clear they used it to discipline their thinking about the real economy, that especially Keynes practically knew so well. Keynes became very rich as did his College from his understanding of the stock market. Note that David Ricardo the second great economist, after Adam Smith, became very rich too from playing the markets in the early 19th Century - his father threw him out at 26 because he married a gentile. He retired to write around ten years later on what he made trading bonds on the London market.

Keynes summed it up in his General Theory to paraphrase "it is impossible to keep all necessary partial differentials you are holding constant at the back of your head when solving an economics problem" The relatively stable environment it is possible to create in physics both as a thought experiment and in the laboratory is simply non-existent in economics. Politics, society, human psychology and the natural environment co-evolve in a complex way with economic change such that it is impossible to truly keep track of where we are using mathematical formalism. The tradition of economics was to except the impossibility of uselessly formalizing the formalism you might choose to discipline your thinking in the background but which Debreu proves and Keynes recently vindicated "General Theory" demonstrates tend to obfuscate the economics.

Economics was a great discipline but we have now got to accept it has been wrong headed in its driving mentality for the last half century and seek other ways to pursue the study of the economy consonant with the traditions that died with Hicks Pigou and Schumpter and has not yet died in the person of Paul Samuelson whose beautifully crafted piece on Economic Analysis makes two things very clear. One if you cannot explain it to a wife uneducated in economics it is definitely bad economics and if anyway comparative static analysis which the General Equilibrium people revel in is only a tiny tiny part of the economics discipline which needs to embrace dynamics,in smooth, stochastic and historic spaces where completeness, differentiability and ceteris parabus writs do not run.

The Evolutionary Development of Mutuality in Hubris of Fundamentalist Christian Creationist & Naive Darwinian Evolutionary Dice Players

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:14:00 +0000

I feel obliged to write. I have already blogged about the consistency of evolutionary theory and intelligent design. In my view they are totally compatible with each other despite the rabid positions taken on this debate by both sides.

That the universe was created complete in "six days" can hardly be a reason for dispute. The "big bang" people probably think that 6 days is too long but as a day had no meaning before their was an earth to go round the sun and spin on its axis that is hardly a big issue.

It was indeed seen as "Good". All the evidence is that the system that came into being in this very short space of time came with the complete blueprint for stars, galaxies, the milkyway, the solar system and all "goods" creatures including the, rose, horse and man as well as that slowly manifesting being Gaia of which we are a small but integral part. As Teilhard du Chardin, the great Belgium priest and scholar of divinity and philosophy maintained we are manifested in this universe as part of the goods "global consciousness"

Those who say the PROCESS that came into being at the creation of the universe as entirely random are mathematically and scientifically wrong headed, no evidence supporting their view is sustainable on the evidence. The very short timescales observable for speciation are far too short for their theories of randomness to be sustainable. Anyway it is well documented that randomness is a manifestation of our perceptual ignorance not some universal truth about reality. It is true we are unable to identify the patterns in the 'good'. Generallywe try to see it on time scales where the unfolding blueprint of the 'good' is not immediately manifest in observable outcomes.

Those who take the design position choose at one level to ignore the 'good's' PROCESS and see it as complete at its point of manifestation. In doing so they inconsistently chose to ignore the history of the ongoing PROCESS so integral to their beliefs.

Christ they argue was born and died to help us right the wrong of "original sin" and our casting out from access to the bounty naturally provided complete to us by the"good's" PROCESS on this planet - "look at the lilies of the field" etc.

The process of evolutionary development as set out in the Old Testament illustrate the dangers of humanity's huge capacity to indulge in hubris. We not only left the Garden of Eden we set out to systematically and ruthlessly destroy every manifestation of it with the ultimate hubris of the "peaceful" farmers who with their tools and weapons turned most of the "goods" plants into weeds to be eradicated, its creatures into vermin to be destroyed and our own kind into enemies to be killed. The Old Testament makes manifest the consequences of all this.

Christ in the New Testament provided a means for us to begin to undo "original" sin, seek the 'goods' forgiveness and forgive others their perceived transgressions against us, "judge not that ye be judged" Of course Christ did not dispel hubris he only gave as a means to seek the "goods" forgiveness for our wanton destruction of its bounty. In doing so our hubris took this as a license to start a new period of human evolution which is only to end with a Day of Judgment to be meted out by the good.

In this modern period our hubris knew no evident bounds. manifest to its worse degree in the deep, black and evil hypocrisy of so called 'believers' in the Good and Christ. They choose to use the Good and Christ's New Testament as grounds to destroy and or kill others sure in their belief that their actions will be forgiven by the Good at the Day of the Good's Judgement which we acknowledge will surely come but will it end in tears or joy and for whom?

Such unbound hubris produced the enlightenment and the modern age. In this we have not just been content to eliminate the good's living plants and creatures but in this modern age to systematically exhume the dead of the goods PROCESS and burn and consume its dead in such huge and unsustainable quantities that this is accelerating our approach to the Good's Day of Judgment.

We are just beginning to be able to see this reality. Some are truly preparing for that day. The only danger remaining comes from the hypocritical hubris of farmers and modernists, i. e. creationist believers and evolutionary dice playing non-believers. One can only hope that the good, with Christ's help, may still save us from the dangerous hubris of both. Their self indulgent sustained efforts at maintaining there respective manifest ignorance of the 'good's' creation may unfortunately result in us becoming redundant to the achievement of the evolutionary ends it created. Instead of being forgiven at the Day of Judgment we may instead be confined in Toto to the pit. Lets hope and pray not.

The Falicy of Organizational Heirarchy: the Evolution of Self Organization

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:31:00 +0000

I think there is a fatal flaw in the argument that some make that organizational heirarchy is needed or that it even exists.

These arguments often start with a presumption that the human corpus is centrally controlled. This is simply inaccurate. Stafford Beer many years ago in “The Brain of the Firm” used the human brain as an analogy appropriate in considering the “managerial cybernetics”, the organization, of enterprise.

The whole point of his credo and his analysis is that the human or nay brain is very very far from being a centralized directive and controlling system. In a very real and practical sense 70% plus of its operations are entirely decentralized to autonomous systems that keep our heart beating, our lungs working, our food being digested or rejected and our bodies repaired with no reference whatsoever to any central authority.

Even at the level of the cerebral cortex and the other “higher levels” of our central nervous system’s behaviour decision making is NEVER centrally directed or controlled. It emerges as a consequence of a self organizing process. In it “good and evil” in a myriad shades of gray fight for dominance over every minute outcome we seek or need to achieve. Most of the activity involved is sublimible. It is located in our unconscious not our conscious mind - we are lazy, energetic, sexually aroused or positive about things not as a result of rationale logical decisive cetnrally directeed thought but as a result of stuff welling up from a heaving morass of unconscious neural activity guided by past experience and fearful of irrational expectatios as to possible outcomes unrelated to the immediate stimuluses we have constructed a belief that we are reacting to - behaviour is the result of learning and is not not enacted inthe moment.

To top all of this our central nervous system is emmersed in a chemical bath, our body and the things it senses which have a continuous but unseen impact on what we like to call our state of mind. This chemical matrix has a huge impact on our choices. Hormones determine huge ammounts of our behaviour as do other less evident factors such as the amount of oxygen and many other chemicals in our blood.

This is an organization it is true and organization that is necessary but it is anything but centrally directed or even really heiracrchical. It is a self organizing network of semi-autonomous but interconnected systems that embraces external social institutions and societies as wella s our bodies and none of which has any truly evident part in directing the actions of the whole.

Lao Tze in the Tao de Ching saw the best leaders as those we were not aware of because they empower as so effectively that we believe in our own capacity to act and decided effectively using our mind and the institutions and societies we can effect. The search for the myth of leadership and or the necessity for central direction is surely that a myth an other philosopher's stone.

The Money Illusion and Hubris

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:43:00 +0000

I must keep up the pace. That is of writing. I have not heard from Susan for sometime. Why? Nor come to think of it my daughter. I wonder what is going on over there in the UK. It is interesting how one adapts. We are special. Yet we are not. We are human.

China or at least this little bit of England in its vastness, Nottingham University, is simply great. My students are the best I have ever had. They absorb knowledge and understanding like it is food and drink. Maybe to the Chinese consciousness come to think of it , it is.

These little pension funds, my students, are without doubt seem now to be a lot better investment than those pension funds insurance companies and blue chip public companies to which those in the West had confined their hopes. These are taking a hammering. Knowledge can never depreciate even if the value we choose to allocate to it does. In this its value is no different to that of the financial instruments apparently loosing their value at the moment.

It will be interesting to see a year from now whither the global downturn in confidence seeps into this market. It may. Times are hard but only in our minds. This must be remembered.

Money and finance are a social illusion that depend entirely on belief not reality. Things have more or less value simply because we believe them to be. The McKinsey Quarterly has just published a paper that tells us this although that was not its intent.

The paper to which I refer demonstrates that the distribution of companies in an industry follows a power curve not a normal distribution. The big get bigger and more successful and then there are the rest clustered way down the power curve. Success breeds success. To me this is unsurprising.

In THIS POST MODERN WORLD value is determined as much by belief as by objective reality. Modern banks from the dawn of their existence worked on a lie and a deception. They were where the gold was. People "knew" One could alway ask them for our money and get it provided everyone else did not at the same time and they never did as long as we believed it was there which it was not.

Certificates of gold deposit were for our convenience treated as if they were gold because this served the human social purpose. This was so and is so even more today when they do not have gold at all. In the past they never held much more than 10% of the gold their bits of paper said they had. Their certificates of deposit were money. Such was money such is money and such will be money. An illusion born out of convience. Despite the recent crisis this remains so. The houses on which the so called subprime mortages were raised still exist unlike the gold that formed the base from which banks were constucted. People still need to live in them and pay their rents. The crisis(?) what crisis.

Value is a convenient lucrative illusion we human beings create for our convenience. We believe in the illusion and it works for us. We cease to believe in the illusion and it will not.

The solution to the current crisis is for us to rekindle our belief in value. Things will be valuable if we believe they are. waht is the value of the gold that started all this other than belief its utilitarian purposes are almost non-existent other than as a foil to our capacity to believe.

We do not really need a bunch of politicians to convince us that everything is OK. It is OK if we choose to believe it is. I suppose to give them their due our politician's job is to help as re-find our belief in what we have to believe in ourselves. If we want to we can just do it with out their assistance ourselves. What people, us, choose to consider valuable, do-able and worthwhile is valuable, will be done and is worthwhile. We only have to believe.

In this we are God. What we conceive was, is and will be.

Letter from America

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:41:00 +0000

Dear Ern,

I would love to hear your views, especially given the result in your state of Virginia.

I have blogged about it but what do you think is more important to me working here in China ?

The new President if he makes it to office has a Democratic Congress and an opposition to which he owes little in that the Republican successes seem to be in the Bible Belt and redneck country to which he owes no allegiance.

Could he be as close to absolute power as a US President can get ? He has a strongly Democrat Congress but not the Supreme Court.

What's your call on it all ? Is there not future real mileage in the result for Moderate GOP.com given that the fundamentalists have so clearly lost out ?

Brian

Hello Brian!

Great to hear from you. I do not offer good news. Even ignoring what you are breathing, you are in peril.

I'll proceed from your last question first. The religious fundamentalists you refer to were deeply convinced in 2000 that the Christian God had His hand on George W. Bush's shoulder. But eight years later either that hand has not helped, or else it was disdainfully removed if it was ever there at all. I trow this as a believing Christian.

Moderate Republicans, few as we presently are, have the best chance of anyone to bring the GOP and the country back out of the wilderness and into pragmatic reality once more.

I'm enclosing my draft article submitted to a law review appraising in cybernetic terms the G. W. Bush Administration's radical adventures in Constitutional interpretation. The Constitution and laws flowing from it are supposed to govern without regard to religious tenets. The Supreme Court has as yet exercised but little constraint upon the outgoing regime, though not as little as is attributed to the Supreme Being. There is more litigation in the pipeline which will not be concluded in the Supreme Court until Bush is well out of office.

Democrats currently have a numeric majority in both houses. Those people will have an impact between the November General Election and January 4th. More economic legislation is due and expected before then. Those majorities will swell after January 4th. Yet those legislative majorities can be relied upon to exercise a braking influence upon President-elect Obama before and after his taking over January 20th, even though they share his party affiliation.

Here is why Obama can't even get close to absolute power. There are several constraining reasons, due to the nature of Congress and the expectations of his prevailing voters.

For example, Black people comprise 16% of this country's entire population. They are extra-dependent upon government. The very best thing they could do for their champion is make no special demands upon him. But they are Hell-bent to gain more preferential changes in their distinct favor. It was Booker T. Washington in the early 20th Century who wrote that any capable Black man must carry this most trouble-prone segment of our citizenry upon his back.

Democrats in Congress have a severe propensity to overreach whenever given the chance. That dubious opportunity is now at hand. Furthermore they never perform as a group in as disciplined a manner as Republicans do. Restraint seems to be absent from Democrats' DNA; they are datable but not marriageable. It is ironic that their "man on a white horse" who has run away with their spirits is Black.

Even the Caucasian Democrats have sky-high expectations. This comes at a time, before Obama is even sworn in, where economic and military conditions are in a trough. Any improvements sure to come will be attributed to Obama even before he is sworn in. This effect will extend, amplify and swell widespread expectations even further.

In his most gracious and mature concession speech John McCain made clear that all of us really need Obama to succeed in a big way. It is critical that voter support be translated into imparting what sanity we can to the Democrats in Congress. In their euphoria and tumult they are institutionally deaf, and that artificial inebriation can be expected to persist for months and perhaps years.

Saying that Obama seems personally more sensible than most of his fellow Democrats is not saying very much. On principle they all are keen to violate every tenet of cybernetics.

Democrats' inherent baked-in problem (their original sin) becomes glaringly evident at the Why stage. Their bred-in-the-bone tendency to overreach limits and compromises the likelihood of getting the three transitions from one level of logic to another anywhere close to right.

By the way, Republicans' baked-in problem (our original sin) occurs further along, at the tactical levels, where we are too cautious about going far enough. Possessing a deeper respect for history, realism and the constraints of human nature than do Democrats, we Republicans are potentially better cyberneticians.

These cybernetic insights operate much like engineering solutions. The engineer must rearrange the structure and sequence sufficient to allow the calculus when deployed through the nested rearrangement to fully do its work.

I just stated the algorithm and heuristic for what the incoming President must do. The inflated expectations of his own Majority Party are his greatest obstacle to achievement. What is needed most is competence, not inspiration. To paraphrase his amateur would-be genito-urinary surgeon Jesse Jackson, "keep hope alive" with deeds instead of words.

It is competence that is most needed to silence his critics in the Bible Belt and redneck country. They already see through him (and his wife Michelle) as clearly as if they were panes of glass. The anodyne liberal nostrums the recent winners have so fetchingly spoken and published are about to collide with reality and human nature. VP-elect Biden offers no more realistic a prospect than does Obama. Both Biden and Obama offered few specifics when campaigning, just remarkably resonant rhetoric.

For example, Obama and his Democrats carried Virginia for the first time Presidentially in 44 years. A repeat in 2012 or even the 2009 gubernatorial contest is unlikely. The Virginia Democrats managed to raise voter registration to 5 million from 4.5 million, and to achieve the zenith of voter turnout here, especially among young people 18-29. This feat has been a thoroughly good thing for little-d democracy.

But until competence overcomes and surpasses mere rhetoric, a disabling letdown from current bloated expectations is inevitable, and shortly to arrive. It's analogous to but not the same as the predictable result of excessive hubris. Having overpromised we can fully expect under-delivery. Disillusionment will set in sooner rather than later. When it arrives and the hot air balloon loses altitude with a crashing finality, the picture will not be pretty.

Projecting from Virginia's parochial example to the international scene in which you are embedded, here's what I think is more important to you. Keep a close eye on what the Obama-Biden Administration does at levels A and B. Because things are going to get rough and unattractive at levels C and D for those of you inside China. You are very vulnerable where you are to any lack of competence emerging from the political leadership here in the United States.

The further away from Washington one gets the more obvious will be C and D level inadequacies. It reminds me of the children's game Crack the Whip. You are living at the extremity where the forces accelerate. Obama and his Democrats-in-Majority simply do not grasp the Conant-Ashby Theorem (revealing that any competent regulator of a system must contain a model of the thing to be regulated). Their own version of lacking technical variety occurs at levels A and B.

Here in Virginia, L. Douglas Wilder became the nation's first elected Black Governor, and in this Southern state and ex-Capitol of the Confederacy. He served from 1990-94, but no person of his race has managed a statewide nomination to any office ever since. The high point of his career (which later included a barely remembered Presidential run) was simply winning the Governor's office, not what he accomplished there.

Given Obama's indecisiveness in the Illinois State Senate I am not hopeful about his leadership. He was so afraid to fail that he voted present 129 times in eight years. Obama's constituents got the same result 129 times as if he had been absent. We know his Presidential election has been the high point of his accomplishments to date. Let's hope that he can achieve more than Doug Wilder.

Obama

A Victory for Hope

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:08:00 +0000

Well Obama has won and we can maybe now become one.

God bless America and its people. When my friends, US and others, criticized GW and the US I always said he was excellent news. He could only do 2 terms. In 8 years of rule one cannot change the course of social evolutionary development accept for the good. American democracy limits the potency of presidential tyranny and power. It always sets an end point to it on a tolerable horizon. If a presidential style is particularly unacceptable then all it does is immunize the American body politic against possible future invasive attacks by the same, or similar, political viruses. So it has turned out.

However the reaction has gone far further on this occasion than it general does and the US electorate has given Obama a democratic congress. This is a relatively rare combination. However Obama is not the political leader of the Democratic Party and even then the party is not like parties elsewhere with strong internal discipline. Congress men can be and often are very much their own men, as in fact was the gracious John McKane.

It should be remembered that Obama was not the Democratic Party's evidentially preferred candidate. That was Hilary Clinton. Obama cannot expect blind obedience to his chosen line by congress. He will have to compromise his own position if he wishes to act. His actions to be effective must show respect for the position of all of his fellow democrats on the Hill and he knows it.

On the other hand the Republicans remaining strength is in the South and the bible belt. This should bring good cheer to African Americans and those truly committed to lieberty. The newly elected congress and the president have to owe no allegiance to this band of scary fundamentalist who are only equaled in their vehement wish to destroy the modern world by the Wahabi followers of Bin Laden and a few, nevertheless powerful, Zionists all of whom should be far more concerned than they seemed to be with the likely consequences of their commonality in hatred. The possibility, devoutly sought by many of them, for the Day of Judgement to come sooner rather than later with a predicted nuclear like event. What the Book of Revelation suggests would occur somewhere in Palestine/Israel, Armageddan. Is such an event truly to be visited on the poor suffering people of this region? I hope not.

The day of atonement one hopes does not have to manifest itself in such a manner. If it is I am sure its only consequence would be precisely the opposite to what its fundamentalist catalysers imagine. It would be the at-one-ment of the rest of humanity in seeking to root out the fundamentalist virus from our planet's body so we could unite in the joy that it offers to the planet's current generation of children. This would allow the continued growth of our intellectual creativity and its unfettered distribution to all who can use it to the advantage of the evolutionary development of our universe, the Way of Lao Tze. Let us hope we can achieve this without the pain of such a dreadful battle.

The America's founding father's envisaged such evolution to be possible without revolution, war and the naked use of the violence of power. The American people have just taken that tool, their and our Planet's inheritance and shown that everything is possible if one starts from the acceptance of the right of others to pursue the liberty they seek in their own lives unfettered by the views others seek to impose on them. Such freedom Americans have always ways been willing in the end to fight and die for. The Liberty Bell has been struck again by Obama's election. One hopes the Planet hears it in time to prevent yet more sacrifice in the name of what can come by other means, human at-one-ment. This is clearly being brought about by the evolutionary development we call globalization and it is on the Way. Nothing can stop it now and even the blackest of events of which the USA hs demonstrated some of its citizens are capable of perpetrating can stop it now. Such would only accelerate the process it perpetrator sought to achieve Martin Luther King's spirit in Obama bares stark testimony to this truth.

A New Era in american Politics or a False Dawn?

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 02:13:00 +0000

Technorati Tags: Globalization USA China Evolution "Evolutionary Development" History

I am still working on the mass of material I got from the First EvoDevoUniverse Conference in Paris a few weeks ago. it was truly wonderful to see such hard work being done on the processes underlying evolution seen at its most general. Nottale's work on relativity and quantum dynamics was truly awe inspiring.

However that is theory. The current election in the USA is social evolution in practice. Clearly the US population as i myself predicted would not suffer long term from GW's reign. All good things come to an end. The population is now clearly well inoculated against that particular version of the virus of naked economic power.

It looks however if they may be about to elect the first black American president but if they are foreigners with hopes in the consequences for as no doubt voting Americans of a particular colour no only too well a congress is being elected in part as well. If change is truly possible in the USA one needs a democratic president and a democratic congress that trusts him. Carter and Clinton found out to their cost that what one can do in america as an American president is very little indeed without the backing of congress. There is every chance now that US voters will hedge their bets and vote in a black president and disempower him with a Republican never mind an unsympahtetic Democratic Congress.

Foreigners never understand US politics properly. the president on his own without the peoples representives behind him has VERY LITTLE domestic power. In practice these cosntraints apply to foreign policy as well but as foreigners manqué US citizens take little interest in the rest of the world accept to see it as the dreadful place they or their ancestors escaped to freedom from, that now kills their soldiers and abuses them despite their generosity and to which their governement must surely be taking the gift of democracy when it uses force of arms against them. Congress is elected by the people and their are few votes in being decent to foreigners. In this the US is no different to China Foreign Devils Guizi are not to be trusted and our government when it deals with them MUST be doing the right thing.

Do not hold your breath black Americans or the worlds oppressed. The US voter can easily elect a Black libertarian President and a White Anglo Saxon Liberal Neo-conservative Congress. Watch this space and do not FOCUS solely on the presidential campaign

The Coming Together

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:04:00 +0000

Chapter 11

Dénouement

Our comments at the end of the last chapter raise the vastness of the canvas on which we have chosen to paint. To return to us and our place in an emergent sentient Gaia, a few more speculative points can be made about the process by which Gaia as a sentient entity may come to be. Because these ideas are in “our” mind, we cannot but put them out there.

We have argued that we are on the cusp of great change on our planet. We should be in no doubt that the outcome of this is by no means certain. The very conceiver of Gaia, James Lovelock, has suggested that the outcome is probably dire.

Evolutionary processes are not deterministic, and so there is no predictive guarantee of what the outcome of what we have described will be.

We have already chosen to argue that the forms that emerge from the evolutionary acceleration of positive feedback are hugely diverse. This is to be expected. The starting points are very different and things unfold at varying speeds. Positive feedback turns such small variations into huge differences in final form.

This is true, but it is also true that success breeds success. A successful form in a new environment is likely to be replicated at an impressively fast rate. In the hunter-gatherer societies of early man, this form was probably tribes based on kinship, in feudal society it was the growth of a bureaucratised state or even empire, and under capitalism it has been the democratic nation states inter-penetrating each other, largely by trade but also by war.

Each of these forms were replicated time and again in their own era with huge local variations, depending on when and where positive feedback occurred. Nature builds from what exists. It does not destroy. All of the above forms exist to this day, scattered between and within the bounds of the nation states that currently dominate the world. We can still find hunter-gatherer societies, feudal societies, and so on. No doubt the democratic nation state will survive into the New Age.

However, the biological analogy can perhaps provide some useful conjectural fruit. It has been very difficult for biologists and others to give us a proper explanation of two processes in nature. We believe a version of each of these may be imminent in the context we now find ourselves.

Most living things initially grow by cell division. This produces 2 then 4 then 8 then 16 then 32, and so on, identical versions of the initial cell/egg. However, in higher organisms differentiation occurs at some point. How do millions of identical human cells stop dividing as such, and start dividing as hand leg, arm, heart and brain cells etc.?

This process begins to occur after what biologists call gastrolation. This is a process by which what had been rapidly replicating cells reorganise themselves in relationship to each other, and begin instead to divide and grow as the differentiated cell types that form our digestive, cardiovascular, skeletal and nervous systems.

We suggest that replication within the coordinated ambit of one living thing has an upper limit to size. It becomes impossible for the coordinating signals to pass rapidly enough from cells that are ever further from each other in space. To ensure their coordinated at-oneness, they need to find a new way to achieve this, if they are to remain one entity.

At this point, we speculate that it becomes necessary, for those parts of cell activity that need to be coordinated as one, to come together in one place to assume that role for the developing entity of which each forms a part.

We conjecture that we are probably at a similar point in the development of Gaia’s brain. The replication that has occurred so far is into families, communities, villages, towns, cities and states, nearly all defined by their geo-political context. The Internet allows us to interpenetrate all of these and form relationships based as much on function as on kinship, social trust or patriotism.

The speed at which we can now communicate globally does not necessarily mean that those sharing a common functionality must come together in one place.

However, there is some evidence that there is a tendency for this to be so, as Silicon Valley illustrates.

Our experience with technology so far suggests that, while cultural melting pots seem to be very creative places, this is not universally the case. In any case, the Internet makes them unnecessary. If universities are a model for creative production, we note that some of the most successful and ancient ones once organised themselves socially on a different basis from that on which they now organise themselves functionally.

Before the Internet, creative activity could only be conducted by the proximity of scholars to each other. This may no longer be necessary. People can now choose to live wherever they find life most conducive to their being, yet carry on a functional working relationship in their area of expertise at a virtual place created on the Internet for that very purpose. Such places already exist.

The other process in biology that we think merits consideration, at this point in human evolution, is that people have found it hard to understand the specifics of how symbiosis between separate organisms evolved into a separation of functions within one organism that encapsulates the processes provided by the symbiosis.

Again, it could be that we are reaching that point in the evolution of Gaia. The loose connectivity between the geosphere, protosphere, biosphere and humanity needs to become more strongly coupled for the sake of Gaia’s survival, and our own. In fact, many feel, including Lovelock, that they must either come together, or else this evolutionary experiment will fail, for the time being. I hope not, but we do not live in a deterministic world where guarantees to the contrary hold good. However, given the billions of years it has taken to reach this point, it seems unlikely that the Way would bring such an investment to an abrupt end.

We have the physical, intellectual, and spiritual tools to tackle the problems that face us and our planet. It would be difficult to wipe us out entirely and, for that matter, to wipe out all our accumulated knowledge. As a result of the Internet, our knowledge is now so widely distributed around the planet that, for all this knowledge to be lost, the planet itself would have to be destroyed in its entirety.
However, we could precipitate geo-physical or meteorological activity that might set the whole experiment back many years.

Our brains operate with around 10 million neurons, and at some time in the coming century mankind will reach this number. However, many believe we cannot sustain such numbers, given our current lifestyles. We are altering our lifestyles, and it should be remembered that the products of the new age are helping us to consume less and less as we maintain the same level of output.

The worst kind of event that we have as yet imagined, under the heading of global warming, is unlikely to be dire enough to reduce us hugely, but it would cause a hiccup in the working-out of the plan, if a population of 10 million is necessary for sentience.

Our tale contains much hope, and much of that comes from my wish to see the cup as half-full, not half-empty. Perception always has a major part to play in life. Without judgement, with forgiveness and “letting go and letting God”, life is a truly joyous thing. This is especially so if one sees that the freedom implied can be applied in any manner one sees fit in a universe so full of things to do, and of things that we need. We only have to perceive how to access them and they can be ours.

It is possible to see the world and the Way as depressing things, full of darkness and negativity. It is our belief that such darkness is entirely dependent on the perspective we take. We choose to let in the light, and the sun shines forth.

Our recipe from all this is neither indolent non-striving or competitive strife. Living off nature’s bounty as discovered by others, and fatalistically accepting whatever befalls us in our allotted role, is not on the Way. Nor is competitively pushing our fellows aside to obtain all we can for ourselves.

To act without acting, by finding the ways in which water permeates our and our planet’s lives is to be where we are, and to feel what we are becoming

The Global Way and Evolutionary Development

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:52:00 +0000

Below is Chapter 3 of my latest published book:

"The Global Way: the Integral Economics of the Post-Modern World".

I publish this here now as it neatly sets out my position on the process of human evolutionary development which many of my colleagues especially especially

Social Evolution

To sail beyond the sunset till the day I die

To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield

Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson

In his original state of being, somewhere in Africa, man was a hunter-gatherer, who collected from the earth’s bounty at will. It is likely that, at that time, man behaved like other animals. Territory would be defined. If one found others assertively occupying a space, then one simply accommodated to them and moved elsewhere.

Some humans still live in this way: the Kalahari Bushmen, some Australian aboriginals, etc. They achieve this by being in sustainable balance with their environment in places where others do not wish to go. Elsewhere, as man became better at using his environment, he accommodated to others by dispersing across the planet’s surface.

Two processes are at work here. One yields the food of life locally, on a daily basis. This is limited by the ability of the planet locally to support it. A second social process is then required to limit the local population to what is sustainable. Population growth beyond this is resolved by dispersal.

Thus local sustainability requires the evolution of social forces that constrain population growth to a size that maintains any increased local need for more energy to survive, day by day, in balance with the planet’s local capacity to produce it.

The dispersal strategy breaks these bounds. Eventually the whole land mass became occupied. All were then constrained to locally available sustenance. Thus social strategies evolved to restrict population to what the planet could support locally, and pressure built up to find new ways to sustain a larger population locally.

The earth’s bounty at one spot at any time is not the same as that at another, so a little trade across territorial boundaries allowed the excess of one place to be traded for that of another. This improved efficiency but, given the limited transportation available, it could not support significantly larger populations.

On the other hand, the slow discovery that one could farm one’s bounty, grow crops, breed animals, etc., changed that. Farming was new knowledge. It enabled man to satisfy his needs by using the planet’s potential more effectively. More recently, as we have exhausted the sea, we have started to farm seafood.

Hunter-gatherers do not store food. There is no payoff from stealing what they have. It has to be gathered again the next day. For farmers, the economics of theft are different. Farmers work to the rhythm of the planet, which is annual. There is a time for growing and a time for harvest. A harvest has to support farmers throughout the year. A theft of produce at harvest will thus support its thief for a year.

However, farmers learn that it pays to store even more than this. Weather, and so harvests, vary from year to year. Farmers therefore store more in the good years to support them in the bad years. This makes farmers an even more attractive target for thieves.

To protect this stored bounty from avaricious neighbours, and to guarantee a return from the work put into land improvement, e.g., irrigation, the annual farming enterprise evolved a long-term social structure to protect it: a state.

States aggressively defend territory and police any tendency of citizens to prey on each other. As we have seen, such exclusivity is aggressive to others. War is then likely, unless gifts or trade are proffered as alternatives to rape and pillage.

The Vandals, the Huns, the Vikings, the Mongols, etc., all raped and pillaged as adjuncts to their stable nomadic lifestyle. However, in the end they became part of the communities they penetrated. If one is to survive, one’s prey must also do so. For example, the Mongols became part of developing Han Chinese culture, and they did so while maintaining a separate identity as locally sustainable nomads in Central Asia.

In Asia, and especially North East Asia, the rich soil and the communal governance system adopted to support agriculture were so successful that the richest states in the world were found there until the 19^th century.

In the West, a feudal system evolved, based on individual rights and obligations. This proved less stable. War became perennial. Wealth and power moved from empire to empire, state to state, locale to locale, over a long period of time.

Stability and civilisation wandered like nomads in this desert of social chaos. It had strong beginnings in the autonomous city states of Greece, but it was then captured by the Roman Empire, which eventually split in two: its Eastern part was absorbed by the Islamic world and dominated the Central Asian trade routes, the Silk Road, that connected East and West for five centuries.

It stayed thus until the religious authorities and the Islamic states closed the Gates of Ishtehad in the 15^th Century. Ishtehad permits freedom of action, thought, ideas and expression for everything not explicitly prohibited by the Koran, or by the sayings (Haddith) of God’s last Prophet, Mohammed. Everything new was thus free of regulation. This provided a powerful incentive for creative inventiveness. However, this may be destabilising. The Caliphates governing Islam grew wary of this and began to suppress such creativity. They closed the Gates of Ishtehad and spawned Islamic fundamentalism.

At this point, civilisation moved back to the West, at a time when intra-European trade was beginning to flourish. In Italy, the basis of the old Roman Empire, there occurred the Renaissance.

The disturbances in Islam made the land bridge to the East, the Silk Route, more problematic. It was operated by Muslim traders. This led those seeking wealth and power in an increasingly commercial West to seek new connections to the East.

A Genovese Italian, Christopher Columbus, convinced the Spanish government to explore a Westerly route to China. Columbus discovered the Americas. Portuguese traders found routes around Africa into the Indian Ocean. These Spanish and Portuguese navigators were soon replaced by the French, Dutch and British. In the end, the latter dominated the trade connection to the East.

The intellectual and commercial seed of the West, as described earlier, depended for its success on self-seeking expression, and the huge returns that could be earned from trade, especially in the exotic products of the Far East: spices, tea, silk, etc.

Those seeking to learn new ways of using the planet’s potential to greater advantage thus thrust aside the bounds that existing knowledge and social control placed on social evolution.

These new systems of enterprise required expensive equipment, e.g., ships, machinery and factories, the costs of which only significant international trade could cover. Such trade has huge inbuilt gains in efficiency because it evens out the local variations in agricultural return that result from local variations in weather. It also enabled the solar energy stored in the body of the planet to be used to advantage, in the form first of coal, then oil.

The protection of a right of access to foreign markets, and of the ability to provide domestic stability for industrial production, based on machinery—capital—led to an evolution in the nature of the state and of people’s social roles. This required people to move from the country to cities, where they relied on a cash economy to sustain them, rather than direct access to food, clothing and shelter.

In the course of this industrialisation, agriculture as a value generator became relatively, but not absolutely, less significant. Humans still need the food, clothing and shelter that agriculture provides. In the First Industrial Nation, the UK, agriculture fell from 95% of GDP around 1800 to less than 3% now.

However, the feudal state had not evolved in a way that supported commerce. In fact, its vigour in defending local and international borders inhibited trade. However, artisan artefacts and their manufacture require a monetary economy in which to survive. This requires the protection of private property in sellable manufactured objects that can be moved around the planet. Feudalism was designed to protect immovable land.

The role of the state had thus to evolve to provide law for the enforcement of contracts, to protect international trade and to guarantee the value of currency in trade. All this requires a political order based on commerce as its source of power, not agriculture.

One interesting new feature of this world of industry and commerce is that it is driven by the continuous generation of knowledge and learning: learning how to manufacture ever more useful things, learning of the existence of new places to sell, learning how to extract ever more energy and materials from the planet, etc.

This system is thus continuously challenging itself. The existing order has to give way to the new on a continuing basis: old manufacturing techniques have to be replaced by the new, new sources of material have to be exploited in new places, etc. Those with existing wealth and power need to be replaced on a regular basis by those representing the new. The social order must thus be able to change at a rate consistent with the needs of enterprise.

The main consequence of this was the growth of states, based on leaderships that must regularly seek a new mandate, to ensure that they are well adapted to current needs. A constitution protects the longer-term stability required for commerce and industrialism. To survive, however, the international dimension of such capitalistic commerce creates a renewed need for war. Exclusivity of trading rights was a threat to the survival of this system, and rights to access and attempts to limit them tended to be vigorously opposed by capitalist states. This led to war.

One again we observe a short-term process aimed, in this case, at the self-interested exploitation of global resources, made conceivable by the actions of states, which were intended to produce longer-term social stability, and access to the planet as a market for a state’s products. The principal communication systems underlying this were set by the speed at which ships and trains could traverse the seas and land, respectively.

Under capitalism, we moved from the protection of an immovable asset, land, to that of a movable asset, machinery. To be cost-effective, machinery had to produce large volumes of products, and thus achieve low unit prices. For this to work successfully, one needed an accumulation of capital sufficient to fund the living of those needed to create it: it might take two years to build a ship before it could earn a return, and three or four years to construct a large factory. In the meantime, those involved in the project needed to survive and be protected. There thus sprang into existence capital-based enterprises protected by states based on professional armies and police forces, and funded out of general taxation.

We now stand on the threshold of a new social evolutionary era. Value is now created, not by the freely available bounty of the planet, nor by the cultivation of such bounty, nor by the exploitation of its accumulated reserves of energy and other physical resources, but by humanity’s ability to organise all of these using Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and thus implement them all at high and ever-increasing levels of productivity.

The new manufacturing and distribution technology that the ICT industry makes possible is now having a profound effect on how things are done. The knowledge and know-how required to effect these changes are now driving value to a far greater extent than the ownership of capital. JITs and ERP systems, and increasingly what we like to call Global Resource Planning (GRP), are now becoming the norm. These systems are inter-penetrating the boundaries set by traditional states and enterprise, in both agriculture and industry.

This requires the evolution of new longer-term processes to provide the stability within which this new form of enterprise can operate. As yet, it is unclear what will evolve to achieve this. It is clear, however, that people are using the Internet to coordinate, on a global basis, with others who share their view of the world. Greenpeace and Amnesty International are pacific examples of such means of organising, and Al Quaeda is an example of aggressive coordination to achieve shared ends. Such organisations are in many way indicative of humanity’s increasing wish to bypass organisations set up to achieve international coordination by traditional states—for example, the UN, the EU, NATO and the WTO—by creating organisations that express a shared global vision, as opposed to an international one that endorses the current socio-political hierarchy.

These new NGOs have very clear and specific long-term aims, to which both existing states and enterprises must pay attention when pursing their short-term commercial interest. They may therefore be indicative of the nature of a self-organising world order operating in the planet’s long-term interest, rather than in that of human beings’ individual, commercial or national view of what might serve them best.

We have foreshortened our story of social evolution into four eras, each of them presaged by new opportunities for the enterprising, as human knowledge and understanding of itself and the universe it inhabited moved forward. It is clear that this broad-brush approach ignores huge amounts of the detail of similar processes of social evolution that occurred in a shorter time scale in each successive locale.

However, it seems true to say that, in each age of social evolution, the more successful parts of the planet seem to have become stuck in the past while other parts have moved on. The impact of the artistic, scientific and social creativity that drove Western development was almost totally missing in the East, until they were rudely confronted by it in the late 19^th century, and most of the 20^th. This region of the world has now used its communal cohesion to catch up with a vengeance. It is fast becoming the industrial powerhouse of the planet, but it has yet to emerge as a centre of true creativity. This position is still held by North America and Europe.

The key thing to be observed from these stories, as we have told them, is that the observable result comes from the emergence of a human understanding of a potential in the planet that has yet to be exploited. This leads to a pushing aside of the current social order, and to explosive growth that, from within itself, generates the need for a new social order supportive of a longer-term stable social context, in which enterprising activity can realistically be sustained in exploiting available resources more effectively.

Most current global social activity now seems directed at finding a means to come to terms with stable sustainability in the information age, where value is now driven as much by human knowledge and “know-how” as it is by natural, farmed or industrially produced resources. In this New Age, there now exist serious challenges to traditional means of generating and distributing wealth. To these we now turn.

17 Questions by Giles Pickford Starts me Off Again blogging

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 03:08:00 +0000

I have to write again. I have not written for some time. This is in part because I am enjoying my job at UNNC in Nottingham University Business School, NINGBO in the Peoples Republic of China. I almost enjoy this as much as I do my marriage to Gong Hui Hua. However the primary reason i have not blogged was that until the Olympic Games I could not see my own blog here in China. I now can. Things get better here ever second so here I am back again. The immediate probable cause was that my Australian friend Giles Pickford sent me the following poem. I just had to post it

17 Questions without Answers

Who allows those two addicts to have

that bright-eyed unwanted child? Who permits

the child's teacher to abuse a position

of trust? Did both create the arsonist?

And was his hangman duly licenced?

Who licences Scrooge to grind the faces of

the poor? By what right does the Warder

curtail the liberty of the oppressed?

Who authorises the purblind torturer?

What principle permits the just war?

By what authority does the polyp

make a reef? What guides the rambling vine?

What force informs unravelling history?

What anvil forges the incandescent Tiger?

Is blind nature licenced or unlicenced?

Who licences Poets, who are "the mirrors

of the gigantic shadows which futurity

casts upon the present"? Was it Shelley?

Who licences the giver of licences?

All poets are licenced; but, are some

more licentiously licenced than others?

Giles Pickford

January 2008

I also write because I have just become an Evolutionary. This is thanks to an other Aussie my new chum John Stewart whose closeness in view to me almost makes us twins.

http://www.evolutionarymanifesto.com/

I met him at the first conference on the Evolutionary Development of the Universe in Paris two weeks ago. It was awesome. I wish Len Troncale could have been there. Len the periodic table of evolution, the ultimate system of systems processes (SoSPs), is on its way thanks to the pioneering work of Gerard Jagers

http://hypercycle.nl/about_me.php

By the way I do not think that Gerard realised when he coined the term out of the dreaded Dawkins work on Memes that the Momons really exist and for this site in a very prohpetic way. they are a muslim sect of converted Hindus

http://richpaki.tripod.com/memons.htm

Any way that is enough. We are back on line and expect some exciting stuff

Gaia’s Mind

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:06:00 +0000

For a brain to work, patterns of thought and memory must exist. We now examine what some of these look like on the planet, although we will not explore in detail how or why they came into being.

Such patterns exist where there is an interconnected group of human beings working to some common view or purpose. Such interconnectivity has always existed locally: in a family, in a village, in a culture, in a society and in enterprise, in either bureaucracy or commerce. All these work precisely because they form patterns that are based on shared interests and understandings of how the thoughts and actions of others mesh with one’s own.

That is how they function. This is why, through speech and writing, humanity has a mechanism able to construct communal visions of the world, in a way unavailable to most other animals. Of course, we share with other animals a huge capacity for non-verbal communication. The significance of that for engagement in some forms of coordinated activity should not be forgotten. When an impala or a wildebeest senses danger and runs, all follow its action.

It is also true that, even with the old physical limitations on inter-human communication, global thoughts did arise. They formed very slowly and imperfectly over many years, decades or centuries. Their formation was restricted to the speed at which people could walk, and by the extent to which they could learn and understand another language. However, planet-wide thinking did occur. Most importantly, it occurred along the great data bus of medieval times: the Silk Road that connected China to the West.

Along this route, merchants transported goods: silk, tea, spices, gold, silver, etc. All these were used in exchange that was motivated by the surplus that could be earned, which was sufficient to justify the efforts and resources merchants put into creating this connection. As a bi-product of this trade information, knowledge and know-how permeated from East to West, albeit slowly and imperfectly. The knowledge of how to make gunpowder followed this route.

Most of the activity our brains engage in modulates processes that enable us to exist and survive, i.e., acquiring, transforming and excreting the substances we use to generate the energy that sustains us as living beings. We need to acquire oxygen, and distribute it around our bodies. The cardiovascular system does this by breathing in air and separating out oxygen, which is then passed into the blood and pumped round our bodies by the heart. The brain keeps this process functioning throughout our lives. This process ends in our breathing out carbon dioxide and the unused nitrogen remnant. The carbon dioxide is then inspired by plants and converted into the oxygen we breathe. From Gaia’s perspective, this completes the cycle.

Similarly, our brain acts out a process that enables us to acquire food. We then ingest this food, and the brain helps the body to automatically convert it into materials that we can use, together with oxygen, to create the energy needed for our muscles to function. The unused ingested material is excreted into the environment, where it is recycled as water and nitrogenous material, and used as food by plants.

Without the cardiovascular and digestive systems, we could not survive at all. Much of our spinal cord and lower brain is engaged in supporting the processes required to keep these in operation and coordinate them. However, humans have additional capacities. We have the ability to move in coordination with others to acquire the food we need to survive. Without the speech, memory and planning we use to be very effective at this, we would not be human.

Different parts of our brain have distinct roles in each of these activities. They represent successive needs in the evolution of living beings and, to an extent, they exist in all animals. In reptiles speech memory and planning are only slightly developed, while in mammals the sensing and coordination function is developed, although not necessarily its planning and thinking parts. The latter are only really well developed in man, although apes and some whales have similar large areas of brain.

Our brain, like that of other living things, has evolved over eons. As evolution adapts to what exists, the old is not destroyed or replaced. It is accommodated. In consequence, the human nervous system shares some features with the nervous systems of all other animals. One might then expect the planet’s brain to evolve similarly, with ancient parts driving basic functions: eating, procreating, moving. Later parts then evolved to improve sensing and coordination, and modern parts evolved to think and plan.

If we bear these considerations in mind, it becomes relatively easy to identify the distinct parts of Gaia’s emergent brain. The most ancient continuing systems of organised coherent thoughts are those of the Han Chinese. These are deeply rooted.

These thoughts are reflected in both major philosophies of the region: Taoism and Confucianism. They are strongly conservative and communal. They accept that the “Way” (Tao) of the universe simply is. It understands that stability comes from the acceptance of this, the suppression of self-interest and the acting out of one’s duty to siblings, parents, family, community and state.

In the West, a more chaotic form has evolved. Its origins are equally ancient but not so coherent in form, although equally so in process. They come from the free-thinking analytical rationality that epitomised ancient Greece. These thoughts are fragmented and incoherent, in the sense that they are not based on a persistent vision of proper form, but on a continuing dialogue between thesis and antithesis, from which emerges a view dominant for a time but never achieving a final truth.

In the Western system, such diverse thoughts are maintained by groups that are often international and inter-cultural. The most ancient holder of these still extant is the Roman Catholic Church. Of course, in modern times alongside its world view we also find those of the protestant reformation.

Some great commercial enterprises also span the planet, or parts of it, and sustain a system of thought and culture that is pertinent to their purpose: e.g., Unilever, Shell. More recently, there have arisen some viable organisations with moralistic purposes, such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and the World Wild Life Fund.

These project a view of proper human behaviour: the acceptability of imprisonment and the treatment of prisoners, and the care of the environment and the protection of species, respectively. Such organisations may be seen as the developing embryonic conscience of the planet.

In the interests of their citizens, or of their own power, nation states project a particular world view, and win others over to it by propaganda, diplomatic missions, etc. Free Trade is one such idea. It has been extensively promoted and advocated by such means. This has resulted in states acting together to promote, set up and implement the World Trade Organisation.

All the above can be seen as thought patterns in the evolving mind of the planet. To qualify, they need only interconnect human beings together for a common purpose, and generate the resources to support them in pursuing it. However, disparate fragments of thought do not constitute a brain.

For example, we have described a role for the West and North East Asia in the planet’s brain. So far, however, there is no place in it for the 1.5 billion people in Islam, or the 1 billion who live in and about the Indian subcontinent; nor for those in Africa, South America or the Pacific. Our work must encompass these, if what is developing is to be seen as truly global.

In ancient times, Islam provided the data bus needed to connect the principal parts of the medieval planetary mind. It translated each major part of the evolving planetary mind to the other, and in the process, until the 15^th century, it added hugely to human understanding of art, science and commerce.

The Indian subcontinent is home to the greatest number of Muslims on the planet, and is also the place of origin of three of the world’s great religious perspectives: Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. India thus has the potential to make a huge contribution to the soul of the planet. However, even more clearly, having been ruled by the British for three centuries, it is now imbued with English culture to the extent that, in its higher education system, it makes more effective use of English as a language than anywhere else on the planet. As English is now the language of international commerce and business, India thus has a significant advantage as a place for doing any business requiring communication and analysis in English.

For a global brain to be meaningful for our current purpose, we need a truly dynamic process. As the need arises, new thoughts must be created on a planet-wide basis, to be pursued as they prove useful, and otherwise abandoned. The Internet and modern Information and Communication Technology (ICT) make this possible on a global scale.

The educated skills of India and their development via English, the universal language of business, give India huge advantages in the modern world. Arguably, at one time Islam had a similar advantage, given its shared understanding of Arabic.

If those within the Umah could revert to the attitudes with which Islam was imbued until the closing of the Gates of Ishtehad, Islam would be of considerable utility to the modern world. It developed important insights into how best to interrelate the stable communal cultures of Asia with the more chaotic free enterprise of the West. In so doing, it made a huge constructive contribution to the global development of the arts, scholarship and science.

At present, it is difficult to see what global contribution the Spanish and Portuguese speakers will make. In the past, they yielded huge wealth for Spain and Portugal. There is no doubt whatsoever that, with current rates of Spanish-speaking immigration into North America, they are bound to have a huge impact on the future of what is now the richest country on the planet, the USA. Perhaps this migration will prove the means by which the Spanish-speaking world becomes truly integral to Gaia’s brain.

Africa and the Pacific remain untapped territory. Poverty and violence have created a huge African diaspora. This is replicating humanity’s past, by dispersal out of Africa across the planet. This diaspora will ensure that Africa is well wired into the developing global mind, and will influence it in subtle and not always obvious ways. We will discuss these as this work unfolds.

We thus argue that, by using ICT technology, humanity is creating planet-wide connectivity that has the appearance of a brain. But how does it work? Does it work effectively? What features will it have? This process is the “Way” of the universe. It is thus inevitable. To talk of what it should be or could be or ought to be, or what is right and wrong in it, is to misunderstand the “Way”. It merely is.

We can choose to be conscious of its existence. Given our capacity for insight, and our understanding of human

behaviour, we can choose to act to assist its maturation. It is to our advantage for it to be well-adjusted, content

and happy, and without psychosis. If it proves dysfunctional, that may be fatal to its survival, and to ours.

The Mobius Field Theory of Love the Universe and Everything

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 07:20:00 +0000

I have had a significant response from Luke Luke.W.Friendshuh@seagate.com about my response to Lynne's lynnras@maui.net very important issue about the need to address failure. The point I made and which is not yet truly challenged is that failure is ubiquitous and if far more in need of explanation than what i would call evolutionary success. WE should therefore not therefore try to infer things from the VERY particular cases of successes but must deal with the conditions that permit of many failures but in a context where given the interaction between a newly emergent source of a fast process we generally call "energy" and a slower process we call "material" we get an emergent unfolding in the general dynamic of evolution which we call a structure and generally allocate a name to its result which we generically call a form. In this universe there is however only process (dynamics) there is no form in any permanent sense whatsoever everything is always flowing including that which we have chosen to call inanimate, and what we sense is always the interactions between two processes one a fast and one slow.

As we have seen this term the universe has infinite variety because every element of it can be described by the connection between a function which is best described on the set of complex numbers which are observationally two series of interconnecting real numbers "fractals" which are stable and so the form of a genus or species if their modulus is less than 2. To be the totality that analytical sciences, the arts and social sciences deal with we only have to accept the McIntyre janet.mcintyre@flinders.edu.au conjecture that the universe in total is derivative of one process only which has to flow (have a rate of change with respect to time) continuously in three dimension. this object is by definition a mobius strip. It is the only thing that is one sided, with one edge but can only exist in three dimensions.

The physics high and low energy are beautifully simple. If space time was a circle flow, a circular field, the outer surface of the filed would have to travel faster than the inner surface - the circumference of a bigger circle being longer than the circumference of the inner one if the field of force is to stay cohesive therefore the infinity of its "substance" would have to move faster on the outside of the curve than it did on the inside. This is disruptive and such a process would quickly separate out and continue to separate out until it was a sequence of zero depth circles all embedded within each other with no sensual form other than the fact that each successive one was traveling slightly faster or slower than those it was adjacent two. However such a universe would be not be fractal and can easily be constructed in two dimension not three.

However if the field of flow is a mobius strip the above does not happen as described. The circular structure is still there but because it is only one surface with one edge the forces acting within it do not manifest in a separation our of its structure just in terms of its depth, though that occurs, and is what we call "procreation" at what we have chosen to call the biological level, but what is more important because the filed in three dimensional that the disruptive dynamics i have described due to the centrifugal forces inevitable in circular motion also occur within the length, the direction of the flow itself. This is on the curve inevitable in the mobius strip. The same edge on opposite "sides" (what can that mean) of the strip has to move faster than the other for it to stay cohesive but they are the same thing separated in relative time by the flow but so must flow at the same speed but they cannot because one is on the outside of the "circle" and the other is on the "inside". the only way out of this conundrum is the one described for the circle but here it ia absolutely imperative the flow must split in two along its direction of flow. In a mobius field this can only provide temporary relief because then the process has created a one sided field three space with two twists in it not one so the process of "construction" I have described must continue and the "double twisted mobius" strip must split again along its line of flow but this time this rupture will not produce one "quadruple twisted mobius strips" but two single twisted ones intertwined with each other. This is what i believe we call a "structure" a "form" and it always has two parts one flowing faster than the other to create the local basin of attraction we call form but which mathematically is a Mandelbrot set (highly fractal) defined by a function defined over a complex field that that from a particular perspective in time could be described as temporally stable.

I think one of these intertwined mobius strips we may chose to label as energy that always has the potential to disrupt the "form" and the other we might chose to call "information" which provides the apparent organisation that creates the autopeosis we attribute to a particular form that in biology we would perhaps describe as a species - please note that the entity is the species not the structural dichotomy we often introduce here between "male" and "female" or the dynamic dichotomy we chose to introduce by distinguishing between parent and child. this species will replicate itself like the concentric circles do ad infinitum as long as it energy keeps on being energised and its information keeps acting to retain its structure which it will.

However the process is continuous and never stops. We now call it evolution. New species and an occasional genus keep spinning out of the process but it is ONE process in three dimension where nothing every becomes disconnected from anything else but each element, "structure", within it MUST contain all the elements of all the previous processes in the unfolding hierarchy that is the way of the universe we inhabit.

The first two interconnected mobius strips are that between the universe we occupy and the anti-universe we cannot sense but that is its dual. Our universe then splits along its lateral axis into "strings" (the stuff of high energy physics) that then split again into matter and energy (nuclear physics) from which are formed elements which in turn form molecules which accrete out into the structures of our astrophysical universe, which produce within its field suns working on the basis of fast "electromagnetic style" energy and planets working on slow gravitational organising style energy that produces "solar" systems linking slow and fast energy to produce at one end of the spectrum suns pushing out huge volumes of fast energy from the interaction in their core between fast electromagnetic energy and slow gravitational energy and at the other planets with an insufficiency in size to become energy producing sources so act as a sink for their suns energy and the dissipation of their own residual electromagnetic energy held in abeyance to their sun to receive greater or lesser amount of electromagnetic energy from it determined by their distance from it.

The forces acting on the planets turn them into a huge mixing machine for all the elements and the molecules and their are billions upon billions of these and in some this mixing pot must inevitable produce yet another lateral rift in the fabric of the ever unfolding set of mobius strips that are our universe to produce what we call life which again is an interconnection between a fast "energy" source with a slower organising "information" source to produce a new form, a species. This entity this singleton, can then divide ad infinitum presenting as it dynamic structure parents and children and its formatting structure males and females but actually always being one thing.

I can go onto describe the process evolving to create the emergent processes we call societies etc but I will not.

On this model we have a system of systems processes (SSPs) which with no equivocation whatsoever everything is always connected to everything else but a huge variety of structures and forms (genus) are manifest within this ONE very very very simple process and within each of the elements the variety of species in form is equally massive and within all of these there is prior and posterior parents and children and conjunctive male and female for want of better labels – one has one process continuously generating isomorphies of itself consisting of the two linked local parts of the common singular flow, one fast and one slow we call a “structure” a term probably best attached to the singularity and so two “form” we could chose to call “male” and “female” or阴 ying and 阳 yang {by the way日is the character for the sun the giver of electromagnetic energy and月the character for the inert moon symbolic of gravitational organisational energy working alone while阝(fù yì) is simply singular for a place}

Now the structural mathematics of all this has all been worked out and proved mathematically in Rene Thom’s great but impenetrable book to the non-mathematician “Structural Stability and Morphogenesis”. This work is still VERY highly regarded by all the mathematicians in his peer group and has never been discredited for or by itself. It has been discredited by the use that has been made of it by uncomprehending non-mathematicians.

The key thing to know is that his mathematics is defined over a measure not a metric space. It can therefore never produce any quantifiable predictions that could be statistically tested. It only seeks to explain how ordered, fast and slow, smooth dynamic process can interact to produces the discontinuities (catastrophes) that create the huge variety of structures we sense and our brains construct out of what they believe, find useful to our survival, about the universe we occupy.

The Garden of Eden

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:15:00 +0000

10000 years ago we were hunter gatherers. We were closely integrated with the processes of the planet that evolved us. Its bounty was free. We were both of it and from it. We knew and understood that we lived within the same frame of time as most of what sustained us.

We ate what we found meat, fruit, vegetables and grains. Their form depended on where we lived and the seasons. Most of these our bodies cannot convert to fat and store. Most natural food cannot be stored. It goes “bad” (for us) quickly. It putrefies. Some natural foodstuffs, carbohydrates, grain, sugars, etc. are storable. They do not putrefy. Our bodies can convert them to fat. Thus our bodies can store their energy. Because it does not go bad it also can be stocked in grain stores etc.

Our modern, only recently understood view of nutrition, tells us that a diet so composed is healthy. It has great variety. This made us very flexible creatures in terms of our food needs. We did not occupy a food niche that could be vulnerable. We did not need to compete directly with others for our food. If we found another creature occupying a particular niche we could comfortable avoid competing with it and use another sources of food.

Many of the foods we ate contained anti-oxidants These, we now believe, protect us from diseases such as cancer that result from the internal cellular damage that can occur as a result of oxidation. The variety utilised meant we acquired a need for many trace elements. The hunter gatherers varied diet provided these. It was a very difficult diet to become obese on. Very little of what we ate could be converted and stored as fat by our bodies. Carbohydrates are relatively rare in nature.

To survive we therefore had to eat regularly during the day because we could not store energy easily from our diet. However many of our foods were highly nutritious and available in large quantity so this was not a problem. Unlike other creatures we did not have to spend the whole day foraging and eating. We had time for art thought and enterprise. Much of this time was spent teaching our young and learning as young. Humans do not reach sexual maturity till after more than ten years of life and intellectual maturity till our late teens or early twenties

Our diet then based as it was on fruit and vegetables thus helped avoid the diseases attributable to cellular age such as cancer and made obesity a rare pathological event. A diet of protein, fat and fruit and very little starchy food convertible into fat ensures this. We were slim and destined to remain so. To keep up our energy level we eat regularly throughout the day. Obesity was a rarity.

Some of our food could be stored but such food was not produced naturally in a form or quantity sufficient to sustain our survival. It needs to be cultivated to be used thus. Enough was available to store a small amount as body fat. We could thus use this small store for energy when other food was scarce. Hunter gatherers did find enough of this to create stores of energy both within and without their bodies. The Garden of Eden's bounty thus had a sufficiency that could sustain us even when other sustenance was scarce.

We did use some of our planet's plenty created within a very different frame of reference to our own, timber and stone for example. The former is renewed on a time scale of many hundreds of years and the latter on time scales of millions. However given the small number of humans that could survive as hunter gatherers the exploitation rate of such forms was so low as compared to the processes creating them that they were being replaced faster than they were being used up.

In such a world the concept of property had little meaning. Everything was a free gift of nature. In the Garden of Eden nothing exists in a sensible form except fleetingly. Each was a short term by-product of the process of being whither they were animals, trees or rocks. All that found sufficient to exist did so for its allotted time and was then passed on as feedstock to the other processes of which they were but a part of what is one whole.

Without storable property communal investment in protective security was not needed. There are no stocks of food worth acquiring that could sustain one beyond a few days. There is no incentive to try to acquire an unknown foraging area. It is of doubtful use without the local knowledge and understanding its indigenous peoples required to exploit it. This is generally peculiar to those humans who have adapted through learning to exploit the place they are born into. In this man evolved in a manner unusual in the evolution of the Way. We evolved to understand our environment. This enables us peculiarly to adapt either ourselves or alternatively our environment to survive within it. However before modern technology this knowledge and understanding took some time, perhaps several generations, for a group in a territory to acquire.

Without modern technology could any of us, other than Eskimos and Bushmen, live in the Arctic or the Kalahari Desert? The understanding “know how”, required to survive as a hunter gatherer in such a context is in the communal experience of the people of that place, a place of which they are an integral inclusive part.

It should be noted also that survival in such contexts is a communal not an individual affair. Local humanity is then clearly the unity not the individual people or lifetimes of which it is composed. Eskimo men could probably learn to make their own clothes and rear children. Eskimo women could probably learn to find food animals and hunt. However the cost of acquiring such “know how” in the extremis they face as a community is the difference between life and death. In hunter gatherer societies the community with its local knowledge of its environment is clearly the viable entity not the individuals composing it. In extreme circumstances, such as that of the Artic or Kalahari Desert individuals are very clearly organelles not organisms.

Unique local understanding, “know how” and knowledge learned and stored in the community is the community’s intellectual property. Possible usurpers simply do not have access to it. In such a context acquisitively inspired violence, war, has little purpose. It is to be observed that generally other living things do not do war. Modern man did. A main issue in this work will be to explore why this might be.

In hunter gather group's, internal security, policing of property physical or intellectual is unnecessary. Viability is an attribute of the community not an individual characteristic. Those with the physical strength or intellectual guile could take what they want by force or subterfuge but to do so is to seed their own destruction. If they did so act and were discovered they could be excluded from the nurture, support and security the group offers. In the harsh environment in which they live, without the support and protection of others, death is then certain. A hunter on his own who cannot hunt through injury and all are injured at sometime, will starve to death. In this socio-economic context individuals are not viable without the group except for very short periods of time. What individuals have is not heritable what the community has is.

In such a context to be injured or ill, and on your own, is synonymous with death, i.e. exclusion from the process of being. Even now when symbolically excluded from his group by having a bone pointed at them Australian aboriginal simply die. For such people exclusion is far more of a fear than physical violence. The emotional violence wrought by withdrawing support, the withdrawal of love, is what is feared above all else. To this day the fear of rejection is so very very powerful that is is still a deep rooted characteristic of all humanity. It is an extremely powerful, much feared, tool in the hands of those who effect to use it.

With this tool, in environments of the type described, men and women are truly equal. Brutish violent behaviour as a means to an end, including indulgence in perverted procreative urges such as rape, are simply not viable strategies. Those using them can very easily be excluded from the succour of the community and so find themselves consigned to death.

All this suggests an idyll. A time in which the universe, nature and human groups were all in perfect balance one with another. This is a false perception.

It ignores the Universe's, nature's Way, as an ever changing unfolding evolutionary process. Humanities uniqueness is in its capacity to gain a perspective from which to understand the flows, this process stimulates. These are always distinct from the forms momentarily created by them we sense and know. We have the ability to understand what creates what we sense and thus have the potential to access the Way of the universe in a manner different from that available to other manifestations of its processes.

In considering our understanding of the “Way” every moment should be seen in proportion to its cosmic context. On this our planet' existence is a fleeting event. The form we call life upon it is of even less significance. Within that a distinct human life form is barely noticeable. Within humanity's ambience modern civilization is a trivially short un-noteworthy experience. Yet here we are choosing to comment upon it.

This is written by a Britain from Reading, a city 40 miles West of London who now lives in Suzhou a Chinese city, 40 miles West of Shanghai. London could claim a history of nearly 2000 years Reading perhaps 1000. In human terms these two cities have been of socio-economic significance for only 500 and 200 years respectively. Suzhou is referred to by Confucius 2500 years ago as the capital of the Kingdom of Wu. It remains socially and economically significant today.

Americans are overwhelmed by European historical perspectives. They will be blown by China's when its 2500 year old history bursts into global focus during the 2008 Olympiad. This event has origin in a European civilisation with roots are as old as China's. Unlike China the civilisation they supported no longer exists except as ruins but its ideas are stored to permeate our lives.

Like Reading Suzhou is close to a great modern metropolis, Shanghai.was an insignificant fishing village when the British created it 200 years ago. It is now a globally significant city. From a Chinese perspective it is a recent Western intrusion of short term significance to their way of being..

In planetary terms these historical perspectives distort reality. Global warming could drown three of these cities this century. In cosmic terms this is not worth comment. To see things from these three points of view, human, planetary and cosmic, matters. Understanding the significance to humanity of our capacity to learn how to store actively can only be seen in its true depth when viewed simultaneously from all three. Our capacity consciously to plan to store the surpluses thrown up by the “Way” is highly relevant to our species perception of its integration with it.

Humans noted that seeds carelessly scattered when gathering a natural crop gave a renewed resource a year on. From this we grew to understand we had the capacity to nurture such occurrences through the process of cultivation,. Cultivating, farming, storable carbohydrates, freed us from a day to day perspective based on seasonal local availability. Crops grow on an annual, solar, cycle. Our perspective became, solar and celestial rather than lunar and seasonal..

The Evolution of War and Violence

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 04:41:00 +0000

The Evolution of War and Violence

Crops can be grown in quantity and stored. Long, now extinct civilisations, depended on this. Moses demonstrated its truths to the Egyptians in the story of the seven years of plenty followed by the seven lean years. The Assyrian's accounting tablets and the Incas knot records testify to the social significance of such know how. Recording and accounting were created to assist storing it and then became means of wider communication. Only one civilisation based on this form has lasted hardly touched and intact into the present time, China.

This approach to being requires sustainable propriety in land. This demands social institution to evolve to protect it and its produce. Wealth invested in farming, irrigation, seed grain, fertilizer, and storing its products grain silos etc. need protecting from nature and people

The wealth created and stored does violence to natural order. It exclude people and nature from its bounty. Uncultivated plants become weeds. Creatures feeding on cultivated plants, crops, become pests. People inside society seeking to acquire them other than through a market become criminals, those from outside enemies to be eliminated with the weeds and vermin.

A state with access to significant lethal force is required to protect such investment in stock and other stored accumulated value, wealth. Access by others other than those granted the privilege is thus prevented. Plants, animals and people seeking “unauthorised” access need to be ruthlessly neutered or eliminated for such a system to be successful. Authority and associated power over others is thus institutionalised. Plants become weeds, animals vermin and other peoples enemies to be eliminated ruthlessly in the survival interest of this vegetarian civilisation. So much for the pacific ideal of the arable farmer. The one thing that is simply not true is that vegetarianism and its associated activity of farming is in its substance pacific. It is instead in its essence aggressively martial. Agrarian societies do violence to the natural order and are only sustainable by doing continuous violence to the rest of nature including their own species. Cultivators both create enemies and are enemies to be feared

Societies based on cultivation differ hugely from hunter gatherer and modern societies inthis. They are based on propriety and the power over nature’s provision it seemingly provides. Violent exclusion is the means to their ends. Violence has to be practiced to sustain them.

Propriety excludes other humans from access to stored value in developed land and stores of crops. Violent acquisition is then a viable strategy. It leaves a usurper in possession of immediately usable wealth. Knowledge (intellectual property) on farming is publicly available. The written or recorded language such societies acquire for accounting purposes ensures this knowledge is stored. Such knowledge is not exclusive to those with particular local knowledge. The usurper of an agricultural developed community acquires immediately usable stored sustenance and a resource, developed land that can be exploited to future benefit.

In this system socially organised violence is thus necessary to protect what one has. For similar reasons socially managed violence, war, is a viable means of obtaining sustenance and procreating new societies based upon one’s own. The basic social entity has changed from globally diverse locally cohesive communal groups to societies, states. These are based on the use of violent ruthless exclusion. This is required to protect what they have from the understandably self righteous violence of the disposed or similarly acquisitive. There is thus a direct correlation between vegetarianism and violence. Farmers may not be violent to other humans but the institutions they require to operate are just ask the few American Plains Indians that are left about the non-violence of farmers.

In such a world war is the tool societies naturally use to penetrate others to procreate their way of being and develop new sustainable approach to wealth creation and accumulation. In such a world women move from being equal partners in power to being property to be possessed or taken.

To be sustainable such societies needed to be larger than other similar ones so they can overwhelm potential usurpers by force of arms. To be large requires an exceedingly stable and effective system of administration sustainable over time.

The West failed to discovered such a system and as a consequence was plagued by wars, rape and pillage. China found the Confucian and Taoist “Way” of providing a sustainable social stable base supporting effective agricultural. This extolled family stability and obedience. This was to be echoed in and modelled in the impartial behaviour of state officials appointed on the basis of merit not influence. It worked. China became and remained for centuries the sole continuing success story of the agricultural system. Family stability and its associated imperial administrative system dissipated disruptive social behaviour and provided a stable foundation of institutionalised authority in which agricultural could flourish to generate the wealth to support the institutional power required to sustain it.

Universal Globalization

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:56:00 +0000

I am working on a program of study with colleagues in the US including 2 in Hawaii, NZ, Australia, Europe and myself in China, Asia on the Theory of Systems. Len Troncale our leader from the Ploytechnic university of California in Pomona is an inspirational genius andi never pick up anything he writes or says without gaining massively huge new insights. Last Friday afternoon WSA time we got talking on networks fractals and networks and the nature of what a general theory of systems might be. Len himself has begun constructing what he sees as the Periodic Table of Systems. I agree with him. That is what it is. A two dimensional structure for all the isomorphies from one system to an other.

One of our colleagues in the seminar, Janet McIntyre, is very insistent on the value of the mobius strip as a model for what systems may be about it is truly interesting for it is a two dimensional surface that can only have reality in three dimensions but if split in two forms two interlinked circles i.e. the two dimensions fall out but as two identical copies of the same thing. they can both appear in Len's Periodic Table and theri is a clear linkage between them.

An other key idea is that there are no structures only flows and that structure is an emergent perceptual artefact created by us to explain the discontinuities in the flows.

This all leads me without having quite yet been able to connect up all the dots together to Giles Pickfords beautifully succinct poem below which I published on this blog last year and to a new book:

Universal Globalization

The Global Silk Road

Sedition is Curved by Giles Pickford

The universe is curved and so is endless time.
The Earth’s road is curved and all creatures walk this way.
There is something in it which hates a dead straight line.
So nature’s lovely, curly, random shapes hold sway.

But there is one deadly straight unnatural force
Which shows its hatred for the universal curve.
Tyranny drives with great speed in a linear course,
Piercing the rib cage of freedom. It does not swerve.

Sedition bows humbly to unnatural power.
Appearing bent, recalcitrant, with curled lip; it would
Resist tyranny at every turn, hour by hour
Until the universal arc of all that’s good

Bends arrow, spear, sword, cannon, each linear thing
Into a rounder shape. Thus the great circle of time
Completes its perennial quest, eradicating
Cruelest tyranny, the most unnatural crime.

Gilles Pickford wrote that sedition is curved. I concur. Everything flows on the surface, the mobius band that is the universe. This has three dimensions for an object that has two

Fast and slow flows create what we choose to call structure but is in fact simply an eddy in the flow of indeterminable but short duration.

I just had to put this incoherence out their because wrapped up in it are some truly profound ideas about the nature of the universe and our apparent understanding of it that just MUST be explored and will the Way give me the time ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

A Nobel Prize for Al Gore: Will American's Get It?

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 16:38:00 +0000

Over the last few years I have had lots of discussion with US friends about the rights or wrongs of the USA's system of democracy. It elected George Bush as president in preference to Al Gore.

My view has been that this could be a good thing for America and the world. It would inoculate Americans against the disease of carelessness with respect to their democracy and constitution. They would be motivated to avoid future errors if this was one. This could be effected in two ways. First by Americans being truly democratic and atually voting - hardly half the potential voting population voted in the Bush Gore election. Second those that did vote would perhaps learn to use their vote more advisedly.

Americans should forgive foreigners. We take the Presidency far more seriously than they do. It matters to us more. It protects America but not foreigners from America The constitution is constructed to produce a Head of State with little power to harm the people. This is symbolised by the built edifices in the centre of Washington DC. The Presidents residence is the smallest. It is not only dwarfed by the capitol building, owned by the legislature, but more significantly by the Jefferson memorial on the other side of the Park from the Oval office. This serves to remind Presidents of their unimportance relative to the people. The constitution Jefferson's helped to draft was designed to ensure that the American Presidency was and would remain relatively weak relative to the power of the people. To these designed ends it works beautifully. Americans comes close to electing a constitutional monarch with little in fact no effective domestic power independent of the legislature and a short term of office unrelated to their own longevity. Electoral mistakes with presidents time out.

Unfortunately for foreigners the Constitution works too well to achieve one if its other ends. It is designed to ensure that in times of threat to the American people's freedom their leader the President can mount an effective well focused defense. The President is constitutionally commander and Chief of their armed forces and determine the higher level strategy for their use and the constitution provides a clear chain of command leading back to a President with all the executive authority required to achieve any desired end. So while the American presidency enhance the freedom of the citizen it also produces a very authorative and powerfully effective presidency to defend American's freedom if it is ever necessary to do so. The American Presidency is thus highly focused and constitutionally and politically very powerful when it comes to dealing with foreigners. Foreign affairs do not powerfully engage most Americans and when they do they generally have little truck with those their President deems as their enemies.

This is America's and the worlds Achilles heal. The USA citizen is indeed free and the constitution caps this with a President able to act as the “defender of the free”. Unfortunately this is the free within the USA and has not always meant Presidents have been "defender of freedom". Often they have been. Western Europe and North East Asia have every reason to be grateful for this at least twice in the 20th Century. However an unattended unconsidered consequence of this asymetry in power between the domestic and foreign arenas is the temptation for presidents to indulge in operations that are very little to do with defending freedom but everything to do with defending American commercial interests at its expense. The USA has established and supported more dictators, human rights abusers and terrorist groups than one would ever like to enumerate. Presidents have done this with little interest shown in their actions by the majority of American people for whom foreign affairs lie right at the edge of their peripheral vision.

This lack of interest by American voters has allowed some presidents to use their responsibilities for dealing with foreigners and as head of the nation's armed forces to do so in a very VERY powerful way. This has sometimes meant that the US nation has dealt very aggressively with those foreigners the executive deems as threatening what ever the American President chooses to define as the freedom of the American people. It was intended that the President could be effective to defending American's freedom at a time when the USA was a relatively very small, though well off, country protected by its geography from any real threat from others. However the power that flows from the freedom of US citizens to think and act as they will is unprecedented in history and highly effective and creating and sustaining wealth. Us business is well guaranteed against interference from within continental United States and has a presidency that very often be willing to stretch the definition of American freedom and its interests outwith anything I am sure was intended by the founding fathers.

The release of the American people into the highly resilient social, political and commercial freedom the described system has created has produced the most creative concentration of human intellectual and commercial effort in history. It has successfully used ideas knowledge and insight to make the USA the richest nation on the planet by far. This puts the US President powerfully in charge of awesome resources which he can deploy as he will outside the United States for good or ill with little expectation of great domestic censure outside the political informed elite in Washington.

Most Americans are Americans because they themselves, and or foreigners, mainly but not always foreign governments, have rejected them or their parents or their grandparent or great grandparents. Dealing roughly with such foreigners especially those they are told might threaten their freedom is thus unsurprisingly not something the average American voter see as a problem but it has often become a huge inexplicable problem for people elsewhere in the world who perhaps thought that this powerfully free and rich people would defend what little freedom they might have.

“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” and the wealth and freedom generated by the US system has created American presidents who outside their own country are demigods wielding as close as one can get to absolute power. Some American presidents have without doubt been corrupted by it.

Gore was a man who if elected might not have been. However to be fair to all he has never actually been tested in the office. He was not given it and so was denied access to the absolute power that may have been able to corrupt him. However in being so deprived he then chose to act in a very powerfully way indeed in the interests of mankind.

Our planet has now recognized this in the support given to him in being nominated to the Swedish, no I should say Norwegian Academia of Sciences, for the Nobel Peace Prize. This might justly be described as a decision as well crafted in its potential impact as Jefferrson et als constitution. It give out all the right message hopefully in time to the planet's people about what needs to be done. One hopes that the message gets through to the people with the most power to make it effective in the VERY necessary short to medium term, the American citizen with the capacity to vote. Let us hope they choose to act appropriately.

British humour is full of irony and self deprecation. These are qualities not so evident in Americans.

The event of November the 11th made it clear to the world and America that despite its past geographic invulnerability this no longer holds good. The USA cannot avoid being part of the global village. The isolationism of the Munro Doctrine is no longer an option. A very powerful, internationally protective, Presidency may have been redundant it is no longer.

The US executive' s response to these pressures has been interesting. It has concentrated power in the hand of the executive not just for dealing with dangerous foreigners in a manner much against the spirit of the US Constitution but also done so with respect to the rights of its own citizens. It has enhanced the power of the state against people. In doing so it denies the whole purpose, thrust and conception of the USA as a separate distinct and rightly proud nation.

Habeas corpus was thrown to the winds and arrest and detention without trial has been thrust aside not only at Guantanimo Bay but also through the Patriot Act. This can now deny protection even to US citizens against false arrest and detention. This effectively undermines everything that Americans have fought and died to establish. In addition, and most insidiously in terms of the long term freedom of American citizen's, it has used its administrative authority to centralize under Presidential authority the machinery of government dealing with what is now called homeland security.

This is in direct contradiction to the all important constitutional concept of the separation of powers. And it is a separation maintained by most states,commercial corporations and the American constitution not just to protect others but to protect the leadership of their own central authority. Such separation ensures power can never be accumulated locally within government for it to be pursued for its own ends maybe against the will of the President himself.

Two organization that one should both rightly admire and fear have disappeared in this process the FBI and the CIA. They have been amalgamated with others into the Directorate of Homeland Security. This is hardly the American Way. As we said above irony is not one of the greater dimensions of American humour but it is throughout the British Commonwealth being shared by the Australians Brits and Canadians. It seems it is now intelligently shared with that great American institution of the cold war the former CIA.

I got lost in Virginia trying to get to Georgetown. I ended up very wrongly on the Georgetown Turnpike. I was going entirely in the wrong direction. I did however arrive at Langely at the entrance to what was previously the HQ of the CIA. I found it was now adverted as “The George Bush Intelligence Center”.

How could an executive headed by his son object to such a name and now the world has given Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize. Lets hope American's get it. The planet needs Americans to stand up for what their forefathers fought and died for, the individual against the power of the state and each citizens duty to fight to support the commons that Al Gore and the Nobel Committee have so clearly defined for us.

Archeology Physical and Historical: Islam's Role in the World

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 01:06:00 +0000

About the Silk Road

by
Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis (http://yisou123.wblogs.org/2007/10/10/about-the-silk-road/)

Although people, ideas, and goods had been traveling across Eurasia for millennia, the historical Silk Road is considered to have been established in the 2nd century B.C.E. when a Chinese envoy journeyed into Central Asia in search of horses and allies to fight marauders on the borders of China. Soon afterward, Buddhism began to spread from India north along Silk Road land routes to Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan and south by sea routes to Southeast Asia. Buddhist art and architecture, of course, were transmitted along with the religious doctrines. One of the major architectural monuments of Buddhism is the stupa, in India a solid hemispherical mound signifying the death and final great enlightenment of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni who lived and taught ca. 450 B.C.E. Influenced by the shape of Chinese watchtowers, the stupa was transformed into a multistoried pagoda in China, Korea, and Japan, but it retained its original symbolism.

Until about the beginning of the Common Era, the Buddha was represented by signs such as the Bodhi Tree under which he experienced enlightenment and the Wheel of the Law, a term given to Buddhist teachings. By the time Buddhism was spreading to the rest of Asia, in the 1st-2nd centuries C.E., worship was aided by anthropomorphic images. The human image of the Buddha first developed in two places on the Indian subcontinent — in Gandhara (present-day northwest Pakistan) and in north-central India. The Gandharan figures were partly inspired by provincial Roman images, such as grave portraits produced in Palmyra on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, a trading terminus of the Silk Road. These Gandharan figures wear heavy, toga-like robes and have wavy hair. The figures from north-central India (particularly the city of Mathura) were partly modeled on indigenous Indian male fertility deities and wear cool, lightweight garments.

With the development of the tradition of Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) Buddhism from the beginning of the Common Era onward, the number of sacred Buddhist figures greatly increased. Devotion was focused not only on the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, but also on a growing number of celestial Buddhas and bodhisattvas. (Bodhisattvas are agents of salvation who attend the Buddhas, postponing their own complete emancipation from the world of suffering until they can save all sentient beings.) The celestial Buddhas did not have historical biographies like Shakyamuni but, like Shakyamuni, were embodiments of the wisdom and compassion of the faith. The hierarchy of Buddhism includes many other angelic and guardian figures, all of whom were represented in painting and sculpture throughout South, Central, East, and Southeast Asia. Cave-temples were often carved out of rock escarpments to house these images in India, on the Central Asian Silk Road routes, and inChina. Bamiyan, in Afghanistan, with its (now destroyed) colossal Buddhas was one such site. Another well-known site, comprising almost 500 cave-temples filled with some 45,000 wall-paintings and thousands of sculptures, is found near the town of Dunhuang in northwest Gansu province. Dunhuang was the first Silk Road oasis trading center within the borders of China proper, and merchants grown wealthy from Silk Road trade were among the patrons of the cave-temples.

Another visual form associated with Buddhism is the mandala, a representation of an enlightened realm where union between the human and the sacred occurs. Most often for example in Tibetan Buddhist art or in Japanese Esoteric Buddhist art, the mandala is a circular or square configuration, with a center that radiates outward into compartmentalized areas. The deity at the center of the configuration, who signifies absolute truth, engages in reciprocal interactions with figures in the outer precincts, who signify manifested aspects of that truth. The practitioner unites the outer manifestations in the center of the mandala and then internally absorbs the mandala as a whole.

During and after the 8th century C.E., mandalas were drawn on paper or cloth through all of
Asia. These two-dimensional mandalas were hung on temple walls as focal points for veneration, for contemplation, and for rituals, or they were spread out on altar tops for specific ceremonies. A two-dimensional mandala, however, is meant to be transformed into a three-dimensional realm, usually a palatial structure, by means of contemplation and ritual. In their two-dimensional forms, these mandalas often look like architectural ground plans, seen from an aerial viewpoint.

Buddhism was well established in India, Central, East, and Southeast Asia by the 7th century C.E. when another religion, Islam, and its visual images began to spread across Eurasia on Silk Road routes. By the 8th century, just one century after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632 C.E., Islam had spread from its homeland in Arabia west across Egypt and North Africa to Spain and east to Sasanian Persia. Early Islamic art showed a mixture of Roman, Coptic, Byzantine, and Sasanian styles. Although the holy text of Islam, the Koran (Qur’an), does not prohibit figural images, the non-figural character of Islamic decoration began early, based on traditional theological prohibitions against imitating God’s creation. The earliest extant Islamic structure is the Qubbat al-Sakhra (often called the Dome of the Rock by Westerners) in
Jerusalem. Built in 691-92 to commemorate the place from which Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven, this shrine with its golden dome displays vivid mosaics of scrolling vines, flowers, crowns, and jewel forms in greens, blues, and silkroad gold. Sacred calligraphy — writing from the Koran — also adorns this shrine, reflecting the importance of the Word of God in the Islamic tradition. The Koran was sometimes written in gold script on parchment decorated with floral interlaces. An interesting parallel to this form of sacred writing is found in East Asia where Buddhist scriptures were often written in gold characters on bluish-purple paper. The Buddhist tradition of sacred writing developed independently but reflected a similar yearning on the part of devotees to sanctify holy utterances with the color silkroad gold.

Many other religions were practiced in Silk Road lands — Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Assyrian Christianity, Manichaeism, Confucianism, Daoism, shamanism — but Buddhism and Islam spread most pervasively throughout this region, leaving the greatest imprint on Silk Road culture. The Silk Road was at its height during the 7th through 9th centuries, when Muslims ruled in West Asia and the Tang dynasty presided over a cosmopolitan culture in China. Various land and sea routes stretched from the shores of the Mediterranean to Japan, the easternmost terminus of Silk Road culture.

Ceremonies that took place in the year 752 at the Buddhist monastery of Todaiji in present-day Nara, Japan, provide a vivid testament to the internationalism of Silk Road culture. The occasion was the consecration of an enormous gilt bronze Buddha about 50 feet tall, weighing some 250 tons. Those in attendance included monks from India, Central Asia, and China. Among the many rituals and performances that took place was a ribald dance-drama performed by masked and costumed dancers. A Chinese lion-dog led the dancing procession. He was followed by a handsome prince from South China and a beautiful Chinese maiden. An ugly, fanged lecher tried to seduce the Chinese lady but was restrained by two fierce, muscular Buddhist guardian deities. Then appeared Garuda, from Indian Hindu and Buddhist mythology, a mythical bird who obtains the elixir of immortality and devours his enemy, the dragon. Garuda was followed by an old Brahmin priest-sage from India and by another elderly figure wearing a Turkish hat. The dancing procession ended with a group of intoxicated, red-faced barbarians and their Persian king. Occasionally the Persian king and his drunken entourage are identified as the Greek god of wine Dionysus and his companions. Most scholars seem to feel, however, that this was really a group of Persians. Probably, for 8th-century Japanese, the distinction between Persians and Greeks was nebulous. They were all “barbarians” from the Western Lands.

Chinese Tang dynasty objects also attest to the cosmopolitanism of the era. Many textiles show Persian motifs, most notably the pearl-encircled roundel with figurative designs such as men on rearing horses facing backward to shoot rampant lions or two animals in ritual confrontation with one another. Another West Asian specialty, silk road gold and silver metalwork, was also imported into Tang China. Metal bowls, plates, and cups, decorated with such West Asian motifs as griffins, mouflons, and deer, are found in the graves of the upper classes. These tombs also contain ceramic figures of foreign musicians and dancers. Other figures on horseback — both men and women — seem to be playing polo, a game that may be derived from a 6th-century B.C.E. Persian sport.

In 750, just before that festive consecration of the Great Buddha in Nara, the Muslim Abbasid dynasty established its capital in Baghdad, which became a fabled city of learning. The 9th century saw the building of the Great Mosque of Samarra and the Great Mosque of Cairo. It was during this period that lustre, an opalescent metallic glaze used on ceramics, was developed. The shimmering square lustre tiles set in lozenge patterns on the Great Mosque of Al Qayrawan (ca. 862) are a splendid example.

The 8th century saw the Muslim advance into Central Asia. One of the material results of this conquest was the Muslim adoption of paper, a substance that had been developed much earlier in China. Muslims began to transcribe onto paper the knowledge that they had gained from many people — including Greeks, Central Asians, and Indians — and made these pages into books. Paper helped link the Islamic Empire across three continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe), and paper itself, the process of making it, and the knowledge written on it were eventually transmitted to Europe, helping to inspire the European Renaissance.

Another great period for cross-cultural interaction along Silk Road lands was the age of the Mongol Khanate (13th and 14th centuries), when the Polo family traveled from Venice to China and back. In the 13th century the Mongols (Turkic-Mongolian nomads) conquered China and pressed as far west as the Ukraine. They entered Islamic Iran and conquered Baghdad in 1258. Although the Mongols massacred tens of thousands of Muslims, soon many Mongols converted to Islam. Within ten years of their conquests Mongol Muslims were building great mosques and stimulating arts and letters by their patronage. One way they encouraged and transformed the arts in West Asia was by importing Chinese artifacts, artisans, and styles. A group of Chinese workmen directed a paper-making establishment in Samarkand under Mongol patronage in the 13th and 14th centuries.

Blue-and-white ceramics are a good example of East-West interchange along Silk Road lands during this period. Islamic potters had decorated tin-glazed vessels with cobalt from about the 9th century onward. Muslim merchants in South Chinese coastal cities introduced this ware to China where, in the late 13th century, it was copied by Chinese potters creating high-fired porcelain ware. The white porcelain vessels decorated with cobalt blue designs were then exported to West Asia and to Southeast Asia where they became enormously popular and were copied, although not in high-fired porcelain. A good example of cobalt-decorated ware inspired by the Chinese examples is Turkish stoneware from the Iznik kilns, dating from the late 15th century onward. In the 15th century the Chinese court finally began to patronize blue-and-white porcelain, encouraging domestic production and use of the wares, not just their export.

The importance of the historical Silk Road, with its emphasis on overland routes, declined after the 15th century, when Europeans began to dominate the sea routes connecting Europe, the New World, and Asia. These sea routes increased the ease of travel and the availability of goods. Objects and ideas continued to influence East and West as Westerners adopted Asian fashions and collected Asian objects, and, in turn, Asians developed a taste for Western fashions, food, and technologies. The exchange of objects continues today in the global marketplace at an accelerated rate, with camel caravans and clipper ships replaced by e-commerce and overnight air delivery.

Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis, an associate in research at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, is Associate Professor of Asian and Japanese art history at Boston

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About the Silk Road the Historical Archeology a View

I really love the coherence and well documented archaeological evidence of this piece. I am sitting here reading the above and am now writing this while in the middle of reading excerpts from the Cambridge Medieval History, on the early history of the Abbasid Empire.

I am interested in these topics. When my own work in International Business set out to describe the importance to the modern world of really effective communication between North East Asia (China, Japan and Korea) and the West (The USA and EU) I could not help but note that such communication was not new. There are similarity in topic and issues dealt with between Confucius and Plato writing roughly at the same time that can hardly been ignored.

As this article rightly notes there is much in the Renaissance Reformation and the Revolution in Scientific thought, art and aritisanship we call The Enlightenment that lead to the Industrial Revolution whose origins can be best traced to Islamic culture, both Arab and Central Asian. Of particular interest are the origins of the search for a route to the East by and to the West caused by the blocking of the Central Asia "Silk Road Route by turmoil and the growth in the Caliphates of Islamic fundamentalism around the 1400s.

It is also pertinent to note the huge similarities that exist between the practices of protestant churches and those of Islam - the election by each autonomous congregation of its own minister, the importance of each professor of the faith of their direct relationship with God without an intervening priesthood or hierarchy and the importance of living your life in Gods image all of which are fundamental to the structure of Islamic practices and beliefs.

My work on the "The Global Silk Road has to rely mainly on such historical archaeology. An implicit correlation, and or association, between ideas in these distinct cultures rather than the "hard" facts of the traditional archaeological record used in this piece. It is so pleasing to find this independent enumeration of the connectivity I have surmised in the above observations on possible causality.

I believe these connections are of significance to the modern world as there was something about the way Islamic culture developed up until the 1400 that made it peculiarly useful as a means to link East to West. The most important of these being its capacity to enable human being to be accountable individually but yet feeling and knowing themselves to be part of a global movement that interpreted political structures - only the Mongol s united the routes from the Pacific almost to the Mediterranean most of this time it was political fragmented with the only unifying theme being Islam.

A positive constructivist role for Islam in the Post Modern World is only too evidently necessary. Global well being depends on it as recent, current and expected terrorist events make clear. It is to be hoped that humanity can unite as an entity without expecting any of us to abandon our own answer to what Victor Frankl saw as the strongest driver of human behaviour "Mans Search for Meaning". Fundamental to Islam and the flower of the Enlightenment the Constitution of the United States of America is tolerance of all others who seek there way to the one God. Thomas Jefferson and his drafting colleagues may not have cited there indebtedness to the Koran and the Prophet but historical archaeology suggests that they might have to do so.

Brian Hilton

http://www.theglobalsilkroad.com

The Time Tree

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 13:52:00 +0000

Chapter 1
First Time Chengdu

I first became aware of the Time Tree in Chengdu. Chengdu does not grow evident beauty. It does grow time.

I was walking to work at 07.30am on a May morning. My first time, a full working day, Chengdu. I heard a huge blast of birdsong. It emanated from where? This was not easily ascertained. I sought to explore its source. I looked down this alley then that. There suddenly it was, a tea-house. Lots of mature man sat around drinking tea under lime trees. On every table, and hanging from every accessible tree branch, was a cage. The bird in each, maybe a hundred, were singing their hearts out.

I went in. I was amazed. Early morning on a work day. So many men uncommunicatively sitting around while little birds blasted the air with song. What was this?

Without Chinese I was unable to ask . I watched, listened and thought. How could so many working men on a working day have the time for this.

I made my way onward. My interest in Han Wen, written Chinese, made me stop in front of a huge advertising hoarding. It adverted, I discovered with the aid of my electronic dictionary, “Chengdu The 24 Hour a Day City”. I pondered.

Over the next few months I was to learn that Chengdu did indeed grow time. Sleep for this city is a redundancy. Everything expands here to accommodate its inhabitants need to be and be with. At all times of day or night whole streets lined with tea houses, bars or restaurants have people sitting, talking, playing majiang, having there ears cleaned, their shoes polished, newspapers delivered, etc. Everything is geared up to maximising the time people have to be or be with each other. Parts of Europe approach this in Chengdu it the art of its soul.

Chapter 2
Time in a Bottle

A thing rare in China but becoming less so is truly decent wine at a decent price.

Alcohol is easy. Enough white spirit to get very drunk on costs less than 25 cents.

This does not buy time it spends it in befuddled thoughts and a sore head.

Fine wine gains time, cool white Orvieto in a dusty Tuscan, Italian town, deep red Chateauneuf du Pape on a hot day in Orange in France, Cuvee Mumm on a sunny afternoon in the Napa in California or Shiraz on a dusky afternoon at Chat's Cafe in the heart of the fine Arts Faculty at the Austalian National University in Canberra with Colin, Murray, Peter, David and Jill. All wines and places where time grows if only for a while. In Chengdu it grows all the time out of such bottles not least at The Bookworm with a bottle of Chilean Campo Largo, white or red, to hand and good friends all around. Its ambience nurtures time. Chengdu procreates it and further nurtures what it helps grow. Thus The Bookworm provides a cultural palette, in the right place, Chengdu, for humanity to stand and sit around being as one Chinese, American, Australian, Argentinian, British, Brazilian, Canadian, French and Irish a delight of all the colours of mind and feeling generating more hope for a human future.

You can take a little of this a lot of that and time flows out onto the canvas of life. The pleasure of humanity on a small global scale. This Western enclave on the far Western Plain of the massive dynamic canvas of humanity of modern China. Hopes, expectations, realisations and growth. They, with love, are all around. Our species future?

Chapter 3

一年成池 “The first year a moat
二年成市 The second a city
三年成都 The third, Chendu

The third time West is to the Time Tree. You may be free but you never leave. The movement to the West is one way. Years speak centuries. In 19th Century America young men went West. In the 20th Century they took the Pacific and in the 21st the West beckons from the East.

What is this place. The West ends. The Silk Road starts to God, Islam and oil.

The Time Tree flourishes. Days are not centuries they are millennia.

With these thoughts Cheng looked at the emptiness that lay ahead and started out on the road to the mountains. He reckoned the bus would get to Song Pan and Emma's Kitchen by night fall.

He was looking forward to the Journey. It was going to be long. Could her get there ever, he wondered, thinking of the route he had chosen. Would they let him get there? He did not know. Fear tinged his thoughts. He knew from experience these would fade and Andreis would know the answer when he met him for dinner at Emma's. Andreis knew the way through the mountains. He would know, he mused. His darkness lifted to the light of the day and he settled into writing. It was to be a long journey on the road to the WAY..

Human Atonement through The Internet

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 02:53:00 +0000

A recent post http://babupaul.keral.com/?p=66 deserves comment.

I feel that this post is too pessimistic about the impact of the technology described on religosity. I think its pessimism for all traditionally organised religion is well placed not least Catholicism. All thought that is happening is in fact highly catholic.

Many of us would observe that the connectivity described provides an excellent vehicle for what many perceive of as God's ultimate aim, humanities atonement, or more correctly at-one-ment, not just among itself but with God's universe and God himself. This is difficult if not impossible to approach from within the defensive boundaries set up by existing religious institutions.

In consequence people are finding their own particular ways to relate together and participate with others in what Frankl called, "Mans Search for Meaning". The organized religions are understandably not generally willing to indulge this process for they can wrongly see it as a destructive threat to their own authority and power. This maybe but to deny it may defeat God's purpose. Maybe they should be seeking to be inclusive rather than exclusive in their approach to what I sense to be a growing not declining number of believers.

Super connected humanity supported by post modern electronic distribution and storage systems has many of the attributes of a brain. It has an active conscience and values - Greenpeace, the World Wild Life Fund, Cathaid, Oxfam, the Red Cross Amnesty International, etc. Much of its activity, maybe even most, is commercial enterprise which like our own brain's functionality is devoted to providing the resources required to support its own sustainment. A brain requires a body with good access to sustenance - incomes, products, services etc. I addition a lot of it's activities are like our own brains related to reproduction (dating sites and chat rooms)or its perversions (sex sites of all kinds). Fortunately much is also devoted to creating a global consciousness encompassing not only only all human processes on our planet but to an extent those of God's wider universe. The latter making concrete the abstract conception of global consciousness of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

It is even conceivable possible that some time soon the larger sentience that seems to be so created could reach a point where it autonomously from individual human consciousness say, "I think therefore I am". In such a circumstance their would appear in God's universe a new sentient being of which we individually would only be a minute part. Such a being like our own conciousness can have within it many different contradictory views of what may be right or wrong or what it feels is clearly wrong but nevertheless allows to be. No central authority exists in such a brain. It is a consensual entity with competing visions of how it should respond to the stimuli it receives and the threats they do, or do not, give to its continued being.

In such a context organised religion has to compete for its space as effectively as it can. It can have no aspiration to ultimate total dominance. It must be restricted to responding to the stimuli proved by the environment in which it sits and strive to provide meaning that the larger consciousness within which it sits finds useful. This is no small challenge to those engaged in organizing others responses to sentience existential to human existence. One might even want to speculate as to what is the identity of such a sentience might be giving that it will emerge out of human atonement (at-one-ment).

www.theglobalsilkroad.blogspot.com

Fanaticism, Terrorism, Love and "The Way"

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 06:35:00 +0000

I was sent the paper below in a chain email. I was not sure how to react to it. It asks questions and does not provide answers. This is precisely what Socrates, Confucius and others asked of their pupils down the ages. So I thought.

The answer I arrived at was not original, “love is all there is”. Violence exists as an inevitable consequence of it's withdrawal . Mankind has existed on this planet for approximately 2.5 million years, + or – half a million years. For most of that time man was a hunter gatherer operating in loose family/tribal groups with no concept of individual property. Only since “peaceful” farmers came to be did man develop the concept of property.

Cultivating nature, rather than accepting it as it is, requires man to make three new differentiations in plants, animals and other human beings: plants become crops or weeds; animals, become food or vermin; people become friends or enemies. Only with our “own” land to cultivate and develop do we seek the exclusions from "our" part of the planet these differentations imply. We then need laws to protect "our property" from the invasion by others: weeds, vermin, thieves and enemies. This requires a state to administer the policeman, judges, lawyers, soldiers then needed.

In hunter-gather societies social exclusion is a death sentence. Without social support a child, an older person,or somebody that is ill or injured face inevitable death before their due time. Without the love of others we can not exist. It is no wonder that we fear exclusion. Ask yourself why so many battered wife's accept their situation rather than escape from it. In the modern world they can. The answer given is out of fear but ask fear of what exclusion or their husbands fist.

In the absence of love violence is the only means for the excluded to re-establish the human at-one-ment that is their right, our gift from the universe.

The Nazi's are quoted in the paper I was sent. Hitler and most of his active supporters were excludees from German society and of course after World War I the whole German people were excluded from membership of our wider human community. This was highly fertile ground for what then occurred yet note it produced one of the most beautiful loving books ever written “Man's Search for Reason” by Frankl the Jewish professor of pyschiatry at the University of Vienna who spent the war in Auschwitz and lost every single member of his family to the final solution including his wife and children but alone argued for the re-enstatement of a Nazi to the university after the war. Read this to know love.
American's to the rest of the world particularly their former enemies, after World War II, the Marshall Plan. This has all but eliminated Germany or Japan as potential enemies of the US or for that matter anybody else in the modern world.

In the paper below the silent majority are rightly observed to be the real culprits not the isolated minority of social outcasts, “terrorists who are fighting to be let back in. Love is an active business not an activity of the mind. Feeling love is not love. Love requires active unselfish giving of real things, physical succour and support, no matter the response of others. In action is thus a withdrawal of such love. The solution to the problem surely is not further exclusion but to make the excluded integral appreciated parts of humanity. America showed the way after World War II.

In the end there is only love. The Prophet himself, may his memory be blessed, knew this as no other. He saw Christians Catholic and Orthodox slaughtering each other in huge numbers in the Balkans in the name of the all loving all giving one all powerful God. He asked how this could be? God gave his answer directly, the Koran, as he had given it to Moses before in a shorter version, the Ten Commandments. Love God and follow his will as he directs you as an individual not as others interpret him and there is only love.

Conflict can not exist in a world where this is true for then there is only at-one-ment and atonement achieved. This is God's message in the Koran.

Individual human being are limited in their capacity to truly understand God's word in a language other than their own. However the people of the Book and human experience bears out that giving true love (unselfish care succour and support) inevitably results in receive love in kind as an unexpected reward. The Koran asks Muslims to do just this and no more.

Exclusion, inclusive of inaction, is as much a withdrawal of love as aggression

I BELIEVE THE FOLLOWING IS A "MUST READ."

A man whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War Two owned number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.

"Very few people were true Nazis "he said," but many enjoyed the return
of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who
just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat
back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we
had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost
everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my
factories."

We are told again and again by "experts" and "talking heads" that Islam is
the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want
to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is
entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel
better,and meant to somehow diminish the spectre of fanatics rampaging across
the globe in the name of Islam.

The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It
is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50
shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter
Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead,
murder, or honour kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque.

The hard quantifiable fact is that the "peaceful majority" the "silent
majority" is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia comprised Russians
who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible
for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were
irrelevant.

China's huge population, it was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists
managed to kill a staggering 70 million people. The average Japanese
individual prior to World War 2 was not a warmongering sadist. Yet,
Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of
killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians;
most killed by sword, shovel and bayonet. And, who can forget Rwanda,
which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of
Rwandans were "peace loving"?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our
powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of
points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.
Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up,
because like my friend from Germany, they will awake one day and find that the
fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs,
Afghans,Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others
have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too
late. As for us who watch it all unfold; we must pay attention to the only
group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

Lastly, at the risk of offending, anyone who doubts that the issue is
serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, can contribute to
the passiveness that allows the problems to expand. So, extend yourself
a bit and send this on and on and on!! Let us hope that thousands, world
wide, read this - think about it - and send it on.

The Way and Human At-one-ment :

noreply@blogger.com (The Global Silk Road) — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 03:16:00 +0000

Islam's Pivotal Role in its potential Attainment

A blog was published the other day

Steve Gardiner's AnthroBlog - http://slgardiner.com/blogs/anthroblog

on the blogsite titled Sinology. This was a response to a book by Marks on the evolution of the modern world. I can no longer access either of these or for that matter even see this blog. I wrote this response to Gardiner. I publish it so other's elsewhere may see it. Here it is. I hope Steve Gardiner also publishes it so it can be visible on his site as well. This version takes the arguments a little further than the one i posted to his site.

My own book "The Global Silk Road" takes account the issues Steve Gardner's comments on Robert Marks book raises but with an interpretation that does not rely on accident but human hubris and design. I have spent the last five years working through the arguments he and marks raise.

Accident is not, I believe, a good way to describe social evolutionary changes of the kind described in the above blog. Islam was far more vital to the story than merely being a stop to land based trade between the East and West. The continual defeat of Islam by Christian, Catholic and Orthodox forces forced a fundamentalist re-think within Islam. Muslims believe that the Prophet was given the direct and final word of God in a far more extensive and meaningful manner, the Koran, than Moses had been given the 10 Commandments. They tried hard to faithfully follow God's and the Prophet's expressed wish to unite mankind under the one true God, by following his Koranic direction. They felt they were clearly not succeeding so they acted in a manner such that it is possible God's will, as expressed to them, may now indeed possibly be achieved. By working hard to be true to God they have assisted his purpose in manner they did not foresee.

In the Koran God requires true believers to provide others a genuinely humble example to follow totally devoid of hubris and free of any Koranically (God) forbidden prozletising. They had done so but schism rife Christianity was expanding not Islam. To many therefore Islam was clearly failing to do God's will. Fundamentalism was thus born.

Up till around 1400 each individual in Islam was able to liberally interpret through his own direct communion with God what actions he should take in his daily life when not given an explicit direction by the Koran or by the saying of the Prophet. This is the principal of "ishtehad".

In this cultural context Islam nurtured the scholarship that in the end was to create the Western "Enlightenment". Howver many in Islam felt that its lack of progress against the schisms in God's world between the Jews, the Catholics, the Orthodox and the Muslims, the people the Koran calls, “the people of the book”, must mean that something was wrong in Islamic practice. So while for many centuries Islam provided the free-est most tolerant societies on the planet the Caliphates in the late 14th and early 15th Century started closing down on such freedoms - "the closing of the gates of Ishtehad".

The closing of this gate to freedom of thought did not just close the route to the East it did so in a manner that effectively passed the ball of social evolutionary change to the West in clear preference to the East. Chinese Confucian communal culture was designed to produce the social stability required for agricultural production to be at its most effective. To do this it relegated intellectual ability to the personal service of the Emperor and made trade and business the lowest form of social life. The reverse had been true in Islam. The Prophet himself was a trader. There was no place in China for free thinking independent Islamic scholars, artists business men and thinkers. Thereby China committed, as you and Mark's observe, short term socio-economic suicide.

Islamic scholars sought their freedom to be in the West. They found it in the autonomous city states of Italy. They brought with them a Renaissance of Greek culture. Very few original or often even copies of Greek texts had survived the burning of the Greek library at Alexandria in Egypt. Fortunately Arab scholars had translated them into Arabic. This included original or very early texts of many of the gospels. This knowledge had until then been denied to independent Christian scholarship only a privileged few with access to the material in places like the Vatican library could do so. It was the re-translation of these works into Latin together with the addition of five or six centuries of Islamic scholarship on top that gave us this European re-birth, then the enlightenment, then the reformation, then the industrial revolution and then the social turmoil that led to Western migration. The latter re-enforced the discovery of America forced as you observe by the fundamentalist closure of the West's former land route to the East.

The reformation is particularly interesting. Its roots were in part new access to the original Greek texts of the gospels but it was also in part to a new way of thinking about man's relationship with God, Islam. This puts each individual in a direct relationship with God. There is no intervening priesthood let alone a church hierarchy. Their is no priesthood in Islam. Their is no central organizing authority. Nothing stands between a believer and his God. In a very real sense the protestant churches came into being epitomising this aspect of God's will as set out in the Koran.

What bears even more thinking about is that the American Constitution very firmly and explicitly places "ishtehad" at the top of its agenda in providing the framework for the achievement of the American Dream. Freedom of thought and deed subject to fellow feeling and respect for the integrity of others were basic to Islam well before they became enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America.

In a very real sense the USA exists and is powerful today because those with power in Islam 7 centuries ago, in the interest of political stability and religious fundamentalism, thrust these ideas out from within their own purview. They gave them and their socio-economic consequences thereby as a gift to the West.

As we know from there they have eventually spread to the planet as a whole. This is in a manner that through modern communications has put within our grasp the unity of mankind, the at-one-ment (atonement) sought for by God in the Koran and fervently believed in as is clear from the words of the Prophet.

God, the Universe, the Way works in mysterious ways it seems for by putting into being their fundamentalist views of God's wishes and closing the gates of Ishtehad Islam as it exists today has played a huge part in putting mankind in a position to unite as one just as God desires in the Koran. Our increasing global consciousness of the common dangers we now face if we continue to destroy our planetary environment are such as to make it inevitable that we face our maker with our own destruction in prospect or come together in atonement to seek the resolution of the dilemma we and our planet now faces.

As is rightly observed in the blog that stimulated this blog China has in the end been forced to acknowledge the realities brought about by the socio-economic forces of modernism. China in consequence will return to its traditional position of economic power and authority in the first half of this century and so inevitably must have a big say in how the dilemmas facing us are overcome. This could be for good or ill. However given China's traditional predilection for adaptive communally cooperative responses to social dilemmas one would surmise this can not be anything but for the good. Especially when one realises that most of China's growing wealth and much of its huge population live along its very low lying Eastern seaboard and so China has a huge amount to lose and much to gain in working with the rest of the world to resolve the danger our planet now faces.

Mankind needs to keep his hubris at bay if we are to adopt the right globally conscious attitude to what we now face. It is very important never to downgrade the processes of "The Way" (The Dao in China, God in the West) to mere accident. I try to keep what I think in an appropriate perspective by observing that my own hubris can be put aside very easily by noting that I have only been in the systemic thinking movement for 25years while Shanghai near where I live encapsulates all the above as a Chinese-European city adaptively conceived in the face of force majeur by the Chinese emperor and built 250 years ago first by British and later many other European nationalities. On the other hand Suzhou where I live has been a powerful Chinese city of some significance for some 2500years. Note both could be destroyed by global warming in the next 50 years. Organized existentially communicating humanity has however existed for about 25000 years and could perhaps survive global warming. Humanity itself however has only existed for about 2.5million years while the dinosaurs hacked 250million years before being almost totally destroyed by the Way. All this is of course nothing as compared to the planet's rocks which have done at least 2500million years. The solar system maybe has exceeded 25000million and the galaxy a lot more than that and the universe???????? Our view back out into that ancient universe makes it clear that stars, galaxies and even clusters of galaxies are fairly frequently destroyed on the Way of the cosmic evolution of which we are an almost unobservable small part of minute duration.

Who am I in this?