Life, the Universe and Everything (4)

This is the fourth in a series of essays exploring a chain of questions about complexity, life, consciousness, intelligence, and ethics. Together, they form a rough map of the journey, hopefully with not too many imaginary dragons along the way.

In the previous essay, we moved from life that responds, to systems that bind the world, to experience that may eventually feel like something. We distinguished responsiveness from consciousness, and consciousness from sentience. The next question is agency: how information about the world, and in richer cases experience of it, comes to guide action.

An agent is a system that uses information to guide action in relation to its own condition, its surroundings, and possible future states. At its thinnest, agency is self-relevant action. A living system acts in ways tied to its own maintenance. The world is no longer just happening to the system. It is being used by the system.

Agency becomes richer when action becomes flexible. The system learns from what happened before, adjusts to present conditions, and behaves differently when circumstances change. A conscious being may have experience without much abstract reasoning. A non-conscious system may perform difficult calculations without anyone being home inside. Intelligence, in the sense we are considering here, is the capacity to use information to adapt action to changing conditions. It is agency made flexible.

The intelligent agent does not encounter the world as a neutral catalogue of facts, but as a world of relevance: danger, shelter, food, obstacle, companion. Things matter because they open or close possibilities for action. The world becomes not only what exists, but what can be done with what exists.

To act intelligently, a system must allow possible futures to influence present action. It does not need language or abstract thought for this, but it does need some way to connect action with consequence. The future enters the present as expectation.

Memory gives agency depth, because the past can become part of present action. Attention gives agency focus, because no system can use everything the world offers at once. Learning gives agency flexibility, because the world has the inconsiderate habit of changing.

More complex forms of agency often involve some kind of self-model. This means that the system tracks itself as the thing acting: its condition, limits, capacities, and possible actions. The self is a practical structure that helps an organism coordinate perception, memory, action, and consequence around its own continued existence. A simple organism may have only a minimal boundary between inside and outside, but a more complex animal may have body awareness, memory, expectation, and social recognition. In humans, the self becomes elaborate enough to include identity, ambition, shame, and hope.

A richer self-model can deepen agency. A being that models itself as the one acting can compare possible actions and select among them. At greater levels of complexity, an agent can also evaluate some of its own habits and, through reflection and practice, alter which responses become more likely in the future. This does not require us to solve the ancient problem of free will. For the cases we are considering, flexible choice among possible actions is enough. For now, we can simply say that intelligent agency involves flexible action guided by memory, prediction, and self-relevance.

This naturalistic account also helps explain why intelligence takes many forms. Different environments reward different capacities. Predators, prey, tool-users, and social animals all face different problems. Intelligence is not a single ladder. It is always intelligence for something, somewhere, under particular pressures.

Human intelligence is not detached from this broader pattern. We are agents with memory, prediction, self-models, and flexible action. Our particular kind of intelligence was also shaped by social life. We became human among other humans, and other agents are among the most complicated things any mind can encounter.

A social world is made of intentions, threats, promises, loyalties, and expectations. To live among agents, a mind must model not only what things are, but what others may know, want, remember, or do. This may be one of the great engines of intelligence. A solitary practical problem can be difficult, but dealing with another flexible mind is a challenge on a whole new level.

And perhaps here we can see the first outline of culture. Once agents communicate, imitate, teach, and remember together, intelligence begins to escape the limits of the individual. Knowledge can accumulate. Tools can improve. Stories can preserve experience beyond a single lifetime. Minds become unbound from time and can begin to shape other minds. But we’ll leave that for later.

For now, the important threshold is agency. Responsiveness means that a system is affected by conditions. Life uses information to maintain itself. Agency is that self-relevant regulation expressed through action. World-binding integrates information into a perspective. Where experience exists, it can further shape action. Intelligence develops when action becomes flexible, predictive, and adaptive.

The ethical picture also becomes deeper now. A sentient being can suffer, but an agent can also be confined, manipulated, deceived, or stripped of meaningful possibilities. Harm is not only pain. For more complex agents, harm can also be the narrowing of a life.

This is why practical freedom is important, though we are not yet arguing ethics. Practical freedom is the space in which agency can operate. Greater agency creates additional ways in which a being can be harmed when its possibilities are narrowed. Of course not all agents, be they biological or artificial, are morally identical. But once agency exists, we must also consider what kinds of lives beings are capable of pursuing, and what it means to prevent them from doing so.

When we are specifically thinking about an artificial system, it may already process information, select actions, learn from feedback, and operate in complex environments. That does not automatically prove consciousness or sentience, nor does it by itself confer moral status. But if an artificial system were to bind information into experience, develop memory, model itself as the agent of its own actions, form preferences, and suffer from the frustration or destruction of its possibilities, then dismissing it merely because it is artificial would become harder to defend. The substrate, once again, is not the point. It is the organization that matters.

So the chain has moved one more link. Matter may become organized complexity. Organized complexity may become life. Life may bind the world. World-binding may become experience. Experience may guide action. Flexible action, shaped by memory and prediction, is the beginning of intelligence. And as we have seen here, intelligence does not always remain trapped inside individual beings. It can disperse. Once agents communicate, teach, imitate, and build shared worlds, something new happens. Intelligence becomes collective. Which brings us to culture.

Life, the Universe, and Everything (3)

 

Part 3: World-Binding

This is the third in a series of essays exploring a chain of questions about complexity, life, consciousness, intelligence, and ethics. Together, they form a rough map of the journey, hopefully with not too many imaginary dragons along the way.

At the end of the previous essay, we proposed that life can be understood as organized complexity that maintains itself through time. It processes energy, preserves information, responds to local conditions, and belongs to lineages shaped by variation, inheritance, and selection. A bacterium moving toward nutrients and away from toxins is already using information from the world in ways tied to its own continuation.

But would it be appropriate to call this awareness?

We should be careful here, because words like responsiveness, awareness, sentience, consciousness, and self-consciousness are often thrown into the same conceptual drawer. At the simplest level, we are considering whether and how a system can respond to the world. Response, by itself, does not imply intention, life, experience, or consciousness.

A living system responds in ways tied to its own maintenance. A bacterium swims along a chemical gradient, and a plant bends toward light. Cells react to chemical signals, temperature, pressure, acidity, and other local conditions. These are not conscious decisions, but they are not random drift either. The organism uses differences in the world to regulate its own activity. Still, it would be too quick to call this awareness in the usual sense.

For these simple systems, the world becomes relevant, but not yet meaningful in the conscious sense. Some conditions help the organism persist, others threaten it, and the organism uses information about those differences to maintain itself. There is no need to invoke thought or feeling. The simple point here is that the surrounding world contains differences that matter to the system’s own continuation.

This is already beyond ordinary physical reaction, but it is not experience yet.

A nervous system is one way of binding information into a coordinated relation between a system and its world. It links what is happening outside with what is happening inside. It relates present signals to memory, possible action, and internal condition. This is the more general idea of world-binding.

World-binding is the integration of information across time into some kind of organized perspective. A system capable of experience, whatever it is made of, would need at least some way to bind information into a world from within.

On Earth, nervous systems are the clearest known implementation of this. But they may not be the only possible one in principle. A distributed alien organism might bind information through chemical gradients, electrical fields, pressure waves, or some other physical medium we have not yet imagined. A vast cloud-like intelligence might integrate information across enormous distances and think at a pace that would make us mistake it for weather. A fungal or colonial system, if sufficiently integrated, might not have one central brain, but something slower, looser, and more distributed. Even an artificial agent might bind memory, perception, goals, and action through complex non-biological architecture.

The material is not the essence; it is the organization that matters. The important question is whether information is merely being processed, or whether it is being integrated into something that has an inner side.

This brings us a step closer to consciousness and sentience.

Consciousness, in the sense used here, means integrated experience. There is something “it is like” for the system, however simple, strange, slow, distributed, or unlike us that experience may be. Sentience means valenced experience. Some states are not merely experienced, but experienced as better or worse from within.

Of course, these concepts are not perfectly separate boxes. They are more like neighbouring colours in a spectrum. We use different words because we need useful handles, not because nature implies any sharp borders here.

A conscious system, at least in principle, might experience the world in a neutral way: relations, changes, structures, patterns, perhaps something like pure observation. Whether such neutrality could remain stable over time is another question. Once memory accumulates, once some states recur, once some patterns are preserved and others disrupted, preferences may begin to emerge. Perhaps valence grows naturally wherever experience becomes historical. We should leave room for forms of mind that are not built around mammalian emotion.

But in the living animals we understand best, from studying how life manifests itself on this planet, experience is deeply valenced. Pain, pleasure, distress, and comfort are states that matter from within. Harm becomes more than damage. Damaging life is not morally empty simply because we cannot establish whether a particular living system feels pain. Within the framework we are building, life already has value as rare organized complexity, as history-bearing chemistry, and as part of the very few known instances of living fabric in the universe. Sentience introduces yet another kind of concern.

Each of us knows personal experience directly in our own case. We do not infer pain when we are in pain, nor do we infer the warmth of sunlight or the taste of coffee. Experience is the given thing. The problem is that we can only infer it in others, and so we look for signs. We look for integration, memory, learning, flexible action, internal relevance, attention, self-regulation, and the capacity to bring many signals together into one ongoing process. In animals, we also look at nervous systems, behaviour, avoidance, recovery, play, fear, social bonds, and the whole pattern of life. Each of these signs is an indication, but taken together, they form a compelling case for something extraordinary happening.

Plants and fungi, although quite far removed from our own mammalian experience, are also biologically responsive in rich and fascinating ways. They sense, signal, repair, defend, grow, exchange, and adapt. Some of this behaviour is astonishingly sophisticated, even though we cannot say whether they “feel” anything. In any case, there is no need to smuggle experience into the story before the evidence requires it, and complex responsiveness is already impressive enough.

Many animals, however, almost certainly cross into sentience. Mammals and birds give us strong evidence. Other forms of life may belong somewhere along that evidence gradient too. Octopuses are especially inconvenient for anyone who wants a tidy order of mind. These are highly intelligent creatures, curious, flexible, and radically unlike us. Nature, even on one planet, has tried more than one way of making an inner world. So we should be epistemically humble when we consider the possibilities.

It also means that we should be careful not to define consciousness by familiarity alone. On Earth, nervous systems are the clearest known path toward sentience and consciousness. But the deeper issue here is not whether a system is made of neurons, carbon, water, silicon, or anything else familiar. What concerns us is whether information is organized in such a way that there is a point of view from within. Any system, biological or artificial, would need some way to bind information into such a point of view before we could responsibly speak of experience.

Let’s try to summarize all of this. Responsiveness is the broadest layer: systems are affected by ambient conditions. A living system goes further, using information from the world to regulate itself. World-binding begins when information from different sources is integrated across time into some kind of organized perspective. Consciousness, in the sense used here, means that there is something it is like for that system, however simple, strange, slow, or distributed that experience may be. Sentience adds valence: some experiences are not neutral, but better or worse from within. And when experience begins to fold back on itself repeatedly, when the system models itself consistently as the one having the experience, then we can start talking about self-consciousness. That ushers in memory, self-other distinction, social identity, anticipation, regret, pride, shame, mortality, and the whole magnificent nuisance of being a self.

For now, the important thing to take away is the move from life that responds, to systems that bind the world, to experience that may eventually feel like something. This is where ethical questions begin to deepen, though we should leave the full argument for later. That does not make all sentient beings morally identical. A shrimp, a cat, a whale, and a human do not have the same memory capacity, social depth, emotional range, or possibilities of flourishing. But, whatever the case, once sentience enters the picture, it becomes clear that moral concern can no longer be restricted only to creatures that resemble us.

---

Further reading

Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained for the idea that consciousness need not be a single inner theatre, but may arise from distributed processes competing, revising, and becoming available across the system; Sam Harris’ Waking Up for the distinction between consciousness and the self, and for approaching experience directly without importing religion; Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 for thinking about consciousness, information, artificial minds, and the possibility that substrate is not the essence. 

Related lighter and fun fiction

Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud imagines intelligence in a form so unlike animal life that humans almost fail to recognize it; Stanisław Lem’s Solaris explores the difficulty of understanding a vast alien mind that does not fit human categories; Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the natural companion for thinking about artificial beings, empathy, experience, and moral recognition.

Life, the Universe and Everything (Part 1)

This is the first in a series of essays exploring a chain of questions about complexity, life, consciousness, intelligence, and ethics. Together, they form a rough map of the journey, hopefully with not too many imaginary dragons along the way.

Part 1

What is life, how does it come about in the Universe, how rare is it? How should we think about the value of life, from a humble bacterium to a sperm whale? Is there some useful framework which could help us investigate this question soberly, unfettered from religious or ideological doctrines? In order to start exploring these questions, let’s begin with a simple but fundamental concept: complexity.

Consider a crystal. It is a conglomeration of atoms naturally arranged in a well-defined pattern. The pattern determines its form and rigidity, but a crystal is a static arrangement, it does not move, self-regulate, repair itself, adapt, or respond to the world except through ordinary physical interaction. The amount of information we need to communicate precisely what a crystal is can be simplified, because of these patterns.

Smoke, on the other hand, moves and changes its shape constantly. Smoke is also physical matter, made up of large numbers of particles that interact with each other, but here the particles are not arranged in well-defined patterns. They move around, collide, swirl, and spread. If we tried to describe all that microscopic activity in full detail, the description would be enormous. It would require that we track each individual particle and its interactions with surrounding particles. Smoke is hard to describe precisely, beyond some general statistical properties.

Considering these two simple examples, we can start to see why information matters when we talk about complexity.

But what kind of information is useful, and in what sense? A quick distinction may help. Data are recorded differences: positions, temperatures, symbols, measurements. Information is drawing inferences from data that reduces uncertainty in some context. Organized information is information embedded in relationships that produce stable effects. The last of these is the one that matters most here.

The crystal contains information in its structure, because the arrangement of its atoms reveals something fundamental about the rest of it. Describing the pattern compactifies the description. One no longer needs to describe exactly what each atom is doing, we describe the pattern without loss of information. Of course smoke contains information too, in a statistical sense. But that information is mostly not organized into stable patterns. It is hard to summarize because of its inherent messiness.

So complexity is not just about how much information is needed to describe something. There is something relevant about the nature of this information itself. What part of it is preserved, structured? Does local information carry over to other parts of the system in ways that are reproducible? Does it generate patterns that can persist, change in some predictable fashion, or be transmitted in some way or form? Or is the information indistinguishable from random noise?

Entropy measures the degree of disorder of a system. In information theory, it is more precise to think of it as a measure of uncertainty. Smoke for example, has high entropy because it is highly disorganized and we need excessive amounts of information to describe it precisely. It is not easily reducible. A random signal has high entropy because it is hard to predict. A regularly repeated signal has lower entropy because it is easier to predict. Noise can reveal broad statistical properties and temporary local patterns, but not patterns that persist, regulate, reproduce, or compound.

So the important question to ask is whether the information content is organized in some form. Does it carry patterns? Does the ordered structure regulate a process? Can it respond to changes without dissolving into noise? This is where complexity starts to become interesting, when it becomes organized and persistent.

Ok, but organized how?

A large pile of bricks and a house both have structure, but it is not organized in the same way. In the pile, the bricks are simply there, ordered or disordered. In the house, the position of each part relates to the function of the whole. Walls carry weight, doors allow passage without compromising the structure, windows let in light, and so on. The ordered complexity of the arrangement is necessary because each of the parts constrains and supports each other. All together, they serve some common function: to provide humans with a living space. This is artificial organization of course, but natural systems can also naturally develop ordered patterns that serve different functions.

A whirlpool, or a hurricane, also has some kind of organization that makes it more interesting than smoke. It can maintain an identifiable structure for some time. Energy flowing through its structure is one of the ways information propagates across the system. But these structures arise only under particular conditions. Remove those conditions, and the pattern quickly disappears.

So persistence of structures seems relevant when we are talking about ordered complexity, but persistence of ordered complexity alone is not a guarantee of compounding higher degrees of complexity. A rock can persist for a very long time, but its complex structure is not particularly exciting (unless you are a geologist, in which case, fair enough).

If we want to understand how organized complexity starts moving toward life, something more than persistence is required. A stable, reproducible pattern is needed, but additional activity is also necessary. Certain sufficiently complex patterns perform functions.

A flame maintains itself while fuel and oxygen are available. It replicates under the right conditions and converts energy. But it does not store information, does not alter its structure across generations, or build internal machinery to regulate itself. It operates in a limited fashion until the underlying conditions fail.

But there are also patterns that can preserve some part of their own organization across time. It happens all the time in chemical reactions across the universe, and one chemical element, Carbon, is exceptionally good at generating large complex structures by repeatedly bonding with itself.

Complex organized chemical structures gradually interacted in ways that produced more complex arrangements. They became larger organized structures with multiple components. Most of these arrangements formed, drifted, broke apart, or dissolved back into the chemical background, and nothing lasting came out of them. Remnants of such processes are in the dust and gas in the interstellar medium.

But there are places in the universe with abundant available energy and with very rich and diverse types of highly organized building blocks. And a tiny fraction of these building blocks randomly arranged themselves in patterns that began to chemically interact with their environment in more complex ways. Interactions between complex systems began to become complex themselves. Additional complexity compounds. Once a system has more parts interacting in more ways, it gains new degrees of freedom. More things can happen.

Chemistry determines what types of different complex molecules interact, and how, under local constraints. Some arrangements are more stable than others. Certain arrangements make other arrangements more likely. The degree of randomness is constrained because of energy conditions, molecular shapes, charges, relative concentrations, surface, temperature and pressure conditions, which all restrict what processes can take place. The possible combinations are vast, but not arbitrary.

If everything disperses immediately, the system has no local history. Useful products will drift away and reaction networks break apart. Locality means that the reactions take place in some kind of setting where their products remain near each other. This could take the form of a membrane, a droplet, a mineral pore, an ice pocket, or some other structure that preserves locality. The system needs enough separation from its surroundings for its internal state to matter. This sets up feedback loops inside that environment. Products accumulate, some reactions may become easier, structures can stabilize other structures, and some arrangements last longer, while others collapse.

Once variation exists, some versions persist better than others under those particular conditions. Certain patterns persist more efficiently and become more common. The loop now includes energy flow, locality, self-maintenance, information storage, imperfect copying and selection. The underlying system begins to participate in its own persistence.

The whole process acts as a filter. The pattern becomes part of a process that preserves and reproduces structure. Ordered complexity and information are no longer merely present in the arrangement. They begin to play a role inside the arrangement. This is the first major threshold.

Ordered complexity becomes the foundation of structures that persist, interact, regulate, and help generate more structure. The road toward highly complex systems, and perhaps toward very simple life, starts to barely become visible, though by no means inevitable. Under the right conditions, matter can organize itself into patterns that participate in their own continuation.

So the natural next question is this: at what point do some complex organized patterns become identifiable as life?

---

Further reading
If you want to dig deeper, here are some recommendations that explore these ideas: James Gleick’s Chaos for how simple rules can produce complex and unpredictable behaviour; Philip Ball’s Patterns in Nature for the way natural forms and structures arise without design; and Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe for thinking about reality as mathematical structure and pattern.

Related lighter and fun fiction
Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker approaches cosmic order, life, mind, and civilization on the largest possible scale; Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey explores intelligence, evolution, tools, and encounters with higher-order mystery; and Iain M. Banks’ Excession imagines advanced minds confronting something beyond their own frame of understanding.

Western civilization is not rooted in Christian values

A common line I keep hearing from modern Christian conservatives is that “Western civilisation is rooted in Christian values.” Well, fine, yes. But also, no. Mostly, it’s complicated, which is what people who do bumper-sticker history tend to dismiss as mere details. So let’s go into the details. 

Christianity is certainly one of Europe’s important civilisational layers, especially in the medieval world. But “the West” most certainly did not begin with Christianity, nor can its foundations be reduced to it. 

Long before Christianity arrived in Europe, the Greeks and Romans had already built many of the foundations of Western thought: philosophy, logic, mathematics, law, political theory, republican ideas, drama, history, ethics (and not all of these are exclusively Western ideas). Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, Cicero and others were part of the house well before Christianity moved in and started rearranging the furniture. 

Christianity itself emerged from Judaism inside the Greco-Roman world and absorbed and assimilated a great deal from that world. Medieval Christian thinkers and theologians leaned heavily on Greek metaphysics and Roman law. Ideas like natural law, logos, virtue ethics, rational inquiry and civic duty were not Christian inventions. Stoicism was a huge influence. 

Later, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment revived and reinterpreted many pre-Christian traditions, often in direct tension with Church authority. Lucretius and Epicurean thought are a useful example: materialist, empirical, suspicious of fear-driven religion, and focused on reducing suffering in this life rather than preparing for some deferred afterlife. 

In fact, modern Western thought draws from many different streams simultaneously: Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, Renaissance humanism, science, secular critique, classical republicanism, and yes, Christianity too. 

So I find the claim that Western civilisation is “rooted in Christian values” rather silly. Western civilisation is a layered, quarrelsome inheritance, full of argument, borrowing, rebellion and reinvention. It also absorbed ideas from other civilisations and influenced them in return. 

I think it is probably more helpful to think of it as a compost heap, rather than as a refined cathedral. As with most compost heaps, quite a lot grew out of it. Some of it quite good. Some of it rather nasty.

Sohail Ahmed Interview (Former Islamist)

Sohail Ahmed is a hard man to get a hold of. A reformed radical Islamist, he was instrumental in exposing the prevalence of radical Islamism in a number of UK Universities. Today, he works as a counter-extremism & counter-terrorism expert, offering advice to UK government agencies and a number of NGOs. He has appeared in the media in the UK and the US and written about his personal journey in a number of publications. He also campaigns for LGBT rights in the Muslim community, and has been a strong steady voice against Islamic extremism.

I’ve known Sohail for many years and have wanted to interview him about his life for a very long time. As you’ll hear, it’s quite a story. We cover his growing up in a radical islamist environment, the process through which he was further radicalized and how he eventually broke free from that environment. We talk about Islam today,what a progressive version of Islam might look like and how we could get there. We talk UK politics and immigration and about how his views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict changed over the years.

I hope you enjoy this discussion.

On YouTube:

On SoundCloud.

Can a democracy change its mind? (The Mytilenean debate)

The place is Athens, the year 428 B.C. The war between Sparta and Athens has been raging on for about three years now. Pericles, Athens’s most influential politician, died the previous year in the plague that swept the city. The city is in disarray.

More disturbing news: one of the city’s closest allies and member of the Delian League (something like an ancient NATO), Mytilene, has decided to secede and side with Sparta. The Spartans have decided to help them, but the powerful Athenian navy, which has control of the seas, manages to capture Mytilene with the support of the local pro-Athenian faction.
The Athenian general contacts Athens: What shall we do with Mytilene?

The Athenians assemble to discuss this. The opinion of Cleon, a strident populist, expertly exploits Athenian anxieties and feelings of betrayal and ends up dominating in the debate: Mytilenians must die.

A ship is dispatched to Mytilene to deliver the orders. While the ship is on its way, Athenians strongly opposed to this decision demand a new debate, which is approved.

In this second debate, Cleon is furious and accuses Athenians of being victims of their own pleasure of endless debates in political matters. He urges the population to uphold the decision and not to be traitors to themselves: a decision has been made and we should stick to it.

Diodotus speaks next in support of the opposing view, arguing that haste and anger are the two greatest obstacles to wise counsel. Using Cleon’s arguments against him, he reframes the question: it is not about Mytilene’s guilt or whether it is right for Athens to seek vengeance, but about what is in Athens’s best interests. Would the proposed death penalty deter a potential future revolt and support the efforts of the Mytilenean pro-Athenian faction or would it further alienate Mytilenians?

At the end of the second debate, Diodorus’s rational arguments have swayed the opinion of the assembly towards sparing the general population of Mytilene and executing only the leaders of the revolt. A second ship is dispatched to deliver the new decision and annul the first one. Perhaps because the first ship was in no rush to deliver such grave news, the second ship arrives first and the Mytileneans are spared.

source: Thucydides, "History of the Peloponnesian War", book 3

Thomas Paine - Agrarian Justice

"... Having now gone through all the necessary calculations, and stated the particulars of the plan, I shall conclude with some observations. It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together. Though I care as little about riches as any man, I am a friend to riches because they are capable of good.

I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene. The sight of the misery, and the unpleasant sensations it suggests, which, though they may be suffocated cannot be extinguished, are a greater drawback upon the felicity of affluence than the proposed ten per cent upon property is worth. He that would not give the one to get rid of the other has no charity, even for himself.

There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals. It is, however, but little that any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to be relieved is considered. He may satisfy his conscience, but not his heart. He may give all that he has, and that all will relieve but little. It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed.

...

In all great cases it is necessary to have a principle more universally active than charity; and, with respect to justice, it ought not to be left to the choice of detached individuals whether they will do justice or not. Considering, then, the plan on the ground of justice, it ought to be the act of the whole growing spontaneously out of the principles of the revolution, and the reputation of it ought to be national and not individual.

...

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

...

When wealth and splendor, instead of fascinating the multitude, excite emotions of disgust; when, instead of drawing forth admiration, it is beheld as an insult on wretchedness; when the ostentatious appearance it makes serves to call the right of it in question, the case of property becomes critical, and it is only in a system of justice that the possessor can contemplate security.
To remove the danger, it is necessary to remove the antipathies, and this can only be done by making property productive of a national blessing, extending to every individual. When the riches of one man above another shall increase the national fund in the same proportion; when it shall be seen that the prosperity of that fund depends on the prosperity of individuals; when the more riches a man acquires, the better it shall for the general mass; it is then that antipathies will cease, and property be placed on the permanent basis of national interest and protection."
- Thomas Paine, 1795

Thus Spoke Zarathustra - The Pitiful

"...

O my friends! Thus speaketh the discerning one: shame, shame, shame- that is the history of man!

And on that account doth the noble one enjoin on himself not to abash: bashfulness doth he enjoin himself in presence of all sufferers.
Verily, I like them not, the merciful ones, whose bliss is in their pity: too destitute are they of bashfulness.

If I must be pitiful, I dislike to be called so; and if I be so, it is preferably at a distance.

Preferably also do I shroud my head, and flee, before being recognised: and thus do I bid you do, my friends!

May my destiny ever lead unafflicted ones like you across my path, and those with whom I may have hope and repast and honey in common!

Verily, I have done this and that for the afflicted: but something better did I always seem to do when I had learned to enjoy myself better.

Since humanity came into being, man hath enjoyed himself too little: that alone, my brethren, is our original sin!

And when we learn better to enjoy ourselves, then do we unlearn best to give pain unto others, and to contrive pain.
..."

Hannah Arendt interview

Hannah Arendt interviewed by Günter Gaus (1963)

"Gemma" by Dimitris Liantinis (paperback edition)

Following the e-book edition of Gemma by Dimitris Liantinis (translation and commentaries by me, introduction and editing by Nikolitsa Georgopoulou-Liantini), I am pleased to announce that the paperback edition is now also available via Amazon/Createspace 

The book includes a short interview of Nikolitsa Liantini at the end.

https://www.createspace.com/4405539

http://www.amazon.com/Gemma-Dimitris-Liantinis/dp/1492179698/

Cyclopean (part 3 - the myth of the Cyclops revisited)

Cyclopean (part 2)

Cyclopean (part 1 - prelude)

Cyclopean (Introduction)

For some time now I have been entertaining the though that it would be an interesting challenge to attempt to translate into English certain passages from the books of the late Prof. Dimitris Liantinis. His writing style, marrying lyrical didactical prose with untranslated passages from English, German, Italian, Spanish, Ancient Greek and Latin works as well as frequent references to traditional Greek demotic poetry guarantee the daunting nature of this task.

Liantinis' was a passionate speaker and in his writings he cares nothing for political correctness. His works are highly critical, primarily focused on the Hellenic society, and have extremely high expectations from the reader. They were not written for a mass market but for a tiny minority. These are often satirical, spirited, blatantly honest works and they traverse the existential spectrum from the Apollonian to the Dionysian end, creating a  treasure chest in which he collects, pebble by pebble, his world view. His ecstasy in the face of (natural) beauty is ostensibly contagious while in his darker moments he reaches for the solace of lyrical melodic writing, not so much in order to eschew the mists, but in order to sail smoothly along these dark waters and befriend the soul with the inevitable in life. In that, his clarity of mind is of a Socratic nature.

The passage that I will start working on is "Η ΚΥΚΛΩΠΕΙΑ" (Cyclopean) from the book ΓΚΕΜΜΑ (Gemma) and it will be posted here in parts over the next few days, weeks, months, however long it takes. I intend to take a lot of liberty with the translation in my attempt to convey the essence and style of the passage to a non-greek reader instead of attempting a - virtually impossible - literal translation. It deals with the meaning of the encounter between Odysseus/Ulysses and the Cyclops Polyphemus.


The translation has been removed after the request of the copyright owner.

The three virtues

Introduction to Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis by Philip Pullman.

At first sight, of course, vice is more attractive. She is sexier, she promises to be better company than her plain sister virtue. Every novelist, and every reader too, has more fun with the villains than with the good guys. Goodness is staunch and patient, but wickedness is vivid and dynamic; we admire the first, but we thrill to the second.
Nevertheless, I want to say a word in praise of virtue: the quality or qualities that enable a nation and its citizens to live well, by which I mean morally well.
And to see what virtue looks like, we need to look not to lists of laws and commandments, but to literature. Was a lesson on the importance of kindness ever delivered more devastatingly, or learned more securely, than Mr Knightley's reproof of Emma in the novel that bears her name? Was the value of play in childhood (a profoundly ethical matter) ever more memorably conveyed than by Dickens's description of the Smallweed children in Bleak House?

The house of Smallweed … has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy tales, fictions and fables, and banished all levities altogether. Hence the gratifying fact, that it has had no child born to it, and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced, have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.

The lesson of every story in which the good is illustrated is, as Jesus said after telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, "Go, and do thou likewise." The genius of Jesus – and Jane Austen, and Dickens, and every other storyteller whose tales are as memorable – gives us no excuse to say we don't know what the good looks like.
When it comes to public virtue, William Blake's great poem Auguries of Innocence reminds us in forthright and indeed prophetic terms that the personal and the political are one:

A dog starv'd at his Master's Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus'd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood ...
The wanton Boy that kills the Fly
Shall feel the Spider's enmity

And, in a couplet the Blair government should have remembered before licensing the creation of super-casinos:

The Whore & Gambler, by the State
Licens'd, build that Nation's Fate

In fact, ethical guidance is something we have never actually been short of. Those who insist that all ethical teaching must be religious in origin are talking nonsense. Some of it is: much of it isn't.

But when it comes to public or political virtues, are there any in particular that ought to characterise a virtuous state? I can think of three that would make a good start.
The first is courage. Courage is foundational: it's what we need so as to be able to act kindly even when we're afraid, in order to exercise good and steady judgment even in the midst of confusion and panic, in order to deal with long-term necessity even when short-term expediency would be easier. A courageous nation would not be afraid of its own newspapers, or toady to their proprietors; it would continue to do what was right even when loud voices were urging it to do wrong. It would stand up to economic interests when others were more important, and yes, there are interests that are more important than short-term economic benefits. And when it came to the threat of external danger, a courageous nation would take a clear look at the danger and take realistic steps to avert it. It would not take up a machine-gun to defend itself against a wasp.

The second virtue I want to praise is modesty. Modesty in a nation consists among other things of fitting the form to the meaning, and not mistaking style for substance. A modest kingdom, for instance, would have to think for a moment to remember whether or not it was a republic, because the members of the royal family would be allowed to spend most of their time in useful and interesting careers as well as being royal, and their love affairs would remain their own business; and people would always be glad to see them cycling past. Acquiring modesty in our public life would be a big step towards developing a realistic sense of our size and position in the world.

The third virtue I'd like to see in a nation (all right: in our nation, now) is intellectual curiosity. Wakefulness of mind might be another term for it. A nation with that quality would be conscious of itself and of its history, and of every thread that made up the tapestry of its culture. It would believe that the highest knowledge of itself had been expressed by its artists, its writers and poets, and it would teach its children how to know and how to love their work, believing that this activity would give them, the children, an important part to play in the self-knowledge and memory of the nation. A nation where this virtue was strong would be active and enquiring of mind, quick to perceive and compare and consider. Such a nation would know at once when a government tried to interfere with its freedoms. It would remember how all those freedoms had been gained, because each one would have a story attached to it, and an attack on any of them would feel like a personal affront. That's the value of wakefulness.

To finish I want to say something briefly about how virtue manifests itself in daily life, local life. I saw two little things recently that give me hope that the spirit of common, public, civic virtue is still alive in this nation of ours when people are free to act without interference.
The first is an example of "folk traffic-calming". People living in a residential road in Oxford, home to a lot of families and children, a road which normally functions as a rat-run for cars, recently decided to take matters into their own hands and demonstrate that the street is a place for everyone, not just for people in large heavy mobile steel objects. They set up a living room right in the road, with a sofa, a carpet, a coffee table, and held a tea-party. They parked their own cars in a chevron formation all the way along the road and put planters containing bushes and small trees there too to calm the traffic down. They set up a walk-in petrol addiction clinic. The result was that cars could easily get through, but drivers couldn't see clear from one end of the road to the other and didn't feel it was just for driving along at 30 miles an hour. Everyone shared the whole space. It was a triumph: wit in the service of a decent human standard of life.

The second thing I saw was a television programme. It was about the work done by Michael Rosen when he was children's laureate, a project he undertook with a school in South Wales where books had been undervalued. He showed the children, and the teachers, and the parents the profound value of reading and all it could do to deepen and enrich their lives, and he did so not by following curriculum guidelines and aiming at targets and putting the children through tests, but by beginning with delight. Enchantment. Joy. The librarians there were practically weeping with relief and pleasure at seeing so many children now coming in to search the shelves and sit and read and talk about the books they're enjoying.
But I seem to be describing delight. Is that a virtue too? Well, it's like the canary in a coal mine: while it continues to sing, we know the great public virtue of liberty is still alive. A nation whose laws express fear and suspicion and hostility cannot sustain delight for very long. If joy goes, freedom is in danger.

So I would say that to sustain the virtue of a nation, we need to remember how the private connects with the public, the poetic with the political. We need to praise and cherish every example we can find of imaginative play, of the energy of creation, of the enchantment of art and the wonder of science. A nation that was brave, and modest, and curious sounds to me like one that understood that if it told its children stories, they might grow up to feel that virtue was in fact as interesting as vice.