I started writing this after some very enjoyable discussions Juan Rodríguez Rios and I have had over the past three or four days. As I wrote, I was very pleasantly surprised to realize that I had finally found a way to understand something Vanessa Spedding had tried quite hard to explain to me, some five years ago.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By0DVFfw6SQYWWNkdEw3bDRoT0U/view?usp=sharing
We had been having a discussion about the nature of Wisdom. In particular, the nature of the wisdom of indigenous people, which, we both agreed, must be a large part of the reason why all of the indigenous cultures we know of are ancient in comparison with the global capitalist "culture" which changes on an almost monthly basis, and seems to dominate cultures of any and every other people unfortunate enough to have to live in direct contact with it.
Vanessa had suggested that it would be a good if people could set up something like WikiPedia, but rather than being loaded with a great deal of highly dubious, reductionist science, most of which completely misses the point, it would be with the express intention of determining precisely what is the essential nature of this ancient indigenous wisdom, so that we might be able to apply those same essential principles to the future development of modern science, and thereby stand some chance of getting back on the right track, from which point we could start to put to good use some of the amazing technology which this otherwise completely misguided world-view seems to have produced, in spite of itself.
I didn't understand how that could work. The problem for me was that, despite having puzzled over the idea since at least 1990, I still did not understand what it was about global capitalism which fed its uncontrolled growth, but was apparently poison to any way of life that was eminently sensible and appreciative of the enormously valuable and very beautiful gift of life, which the rest of us seem to be forced to squander in order to survive.
My answer to Vanessa's question "What is Wisdom, really?" was not a very interesting one. I just gave two examples, one of which was the story of King Solomon resolving the dispute between the two women, both of whom claimed one particular baby to be their's, and not the other's. The other story was from Chinese Zen Buddhist scriptures, and it was about a monk who sold his wife and child into slavery, so that he could give the proceeds to help the poor. His rich friends were horrified to hear this, and promptly bought back the woman and her child, and returned them to the monk, who just as promptly sold them again. I don't recall exactly how many iterations they all went through, and I don't recall whether we were told that the rich people finally got the message. I suspect they didn't. Rich people don't seem to get those messages that are specifically addressed to them, any more easily than camels (real live life-sized, fully grown and fully loaded Camelus dromedarius) pass through the eyes of needles (yes, real sewing needles, no, not darning needles or sail needles, the sort of needle that you might use to sew on a button, if only your eyesight were still good enough to be able to get a 0.3mm cotton thread through the eye, that is.)
I tried to characterize wisdom, on this admittedly small sample. At that point I must have read Aristotle's description of induction as "the immediate perception of a universal in a clearly known particular," from which one might try to guess what was the characterization I came up with. Exactly what it was doesn't really matter, but if the Zen story is really Wisdom, then it is rather difficult to see how one could describe it in rational terms, on a web site, in such a way that those who read your description became Wise.
Vanessa's original idea was to use some of this clever technology to somehow connect the value of Ancient Wisdom with the capitalist value of money, so that those people whose cultures were the storehouses of the sorry remains of the knowledge humanity used to have about how to live in the world in such a way that one may safely assume it will all still be here next week, might receive some material benefit as recompense for their not insignificant centuries-long struggle. This wisdom will surely have future value, so we ought to be able to find a way to calculate what that value actually is in monetary terms, and then the magical powers free market economics have, which enable them to maximize the utility of money, will automatically and naturally make the right decision about the value of Ancient Wisdom.
This is something like a cultural carbon credit scheme. The problem is that if free market capitalist economics doesn't actually give anyone any reason to believe there will be a future beyond the coming week-end, which is actually a reasonable belief, given that 98% of the world's population live by the moral laws of capitalist economics, then capitalist economics is not going to put any future value on anything whatsoever, unless you count speculation on the OTC derivatives market as future value, but that might be a little difficult to justify, even to the most rabid of capitalists.
But that is not really what a cultural carbon credit scheme is. A cultural carbon credit scheme is a plan to drop dirty bombs on foreign-looking people's cities, and then to drop thousands of tonnes of napalm on other foreign-looking people's villages and fields, burning their children alive, and in return, you get to become the most powerful and richest nation on earth, on the basis of a Trillion dollar national debt that you have absolutely no intention of ever doing anything about, beyond allowing your "banks" to accumulate negative investments in derivatives which in total amount to several hundred times the value of all of the world's monetary wealth. Oh, and then you do some not so very subtle political maneuvers to push down the world oil price, and create a massive glut, because you're sure it'll screw the freekin' pinko commies' economies worse that it'll screw your own. But that's still carbon neutral, because your president spent 50 million of those oh-so-valuable US$s, just to set up the Global Methane Initiative, and whilst that didn't stop a billion or so walking McDonald's carbon-grilled beef burgers in Brazil from farting another few million tonnes of Methane into the upper atmosphere, it did result in some underdeveloped South American community getting a free methane-burning electricity generating plant, which produces enough energy to power 11,000 households for free! But it didn't say whether that was 11,000 households who each use as much electricity as an average household in the USA, or whether it was 11,000 households who use as much electricity as a household in Bolivia, which is less than some American's refrigerators consume, even when they remember to shut the door after they go get another beer. That's what a cultural carbon credit scheme really is.
That gives a better idea of what is the real emotional charge that lies behind the above essay, and hopefully anyone who takes the trouble to read it will appreciate how much effort it took to write something so positive and hopeful when in fact almost everything I see or hear around me is really bad news.
And the moral is: don't pay any attention to the news, especially from the BBC or CNN. It's worse than blatant lies, it's blatant stupidity. Do something positive instead. Learn something about the world you live in, and fight it! Fight till you win, otherwise fight 'till they finally decide they are just going to have to shoot you, again.
Ian Grant
