Phase 1 - Literary

Possibilities and Perceptions

I like world music; especially the weird and wonderful concoctions that emerge when artists steeped in different traditions come together in search of common ground. I am not talking about cross-cultural repackaging, interesting as the reggae version of "Country Roads, Take Me Home" may be, I mean the results of efforts to communicate between languages like the blues and the Malian griot tradition, or Mongolian throat singing and the blues, or Cuban jazz and the blues, or..... interesting how the blues keeps cropping up, and I think I know why: because it is the ultimate beginner's music. The basic elements are so simple as to be crude: a gapped five-note scale, a walking beat and a story. Anyone can pick up this modest musical toolkit and many never get much further, but for some it opens up a universe of possibilities. Does the world need another song about a slamming door or a note by the sink? Sure, if it's interesting; and those who make it interesting are the ones who can remain open to the possibilities of the skills, knowledge and experiences they pick up along the way. In other words the key to being a blues master - which is not necessarily the same as a rich or successful player - is to never forget what it is like to be a beginner, be it at music, at love or at life.

Of course this applies to other kinds of music, other arts and indeed to most endeavours that involve thinking, communicating and what is broadly referred to as culture, although when it comes to the civilized world a more accurate term might be cultural property. I say this because in large, complex social situations cultural endeavours tend to be associated with established bodies of knowledge, traditions, rituals, texts and other artefacts which fall within the territories of institutions and disciplines populated by adepts and authorities whose skills range from the perpetuation of ritual and the interpretation of symbols to the illumination of texts and celebration of masterworks. The latter activity can be problematic for those who feel they should always look, act and think like experts, because when something comes along that departs from the predictability of tradition it can be difficult for the conservators of cultural possessions and territories to distinguish the sublime accomplishments of a master from the naive attempts of a beginner (of course part of being an expert is to assume that there is a difference). Sometimes cultural authorities get around this problem by ignoring novelties and innovations or by actively suppressing them, betraying attitudes that are both closed to possibilities and estranged from the modesty that springs from an awareness of ignorance. Such attitudes can produce strange and terrible results, ranging from inquisitions and reigns of terror to societies that at are dazzlingly rich in knowledge, technologies and other cultural property but despairingly poor in possibilities and restraints. Such societies may even create a world that its inhabitants come to think of as civilized and modern.

Is it a paradox to decry a lack of possibilities in a world where things can change so rapidly and radically that many despair of keeping up, even those who take pride in being ahead of the wave? That is actually a good metaphor because modern change often seems to come in waves, not so much the ripples that spread across a pool from a tossed pebble but more like the breakers that roll in from the ocean, or the bores that race along the confines of canals and channels. Some of the channels are ancient, like the ones that are bounded by ethnic and cultural barriers and periodically washed by rivers of blood. Others are more recent but just as unyielding, like the tunnels of progress that have for several generations now been relentlessly grinding their way into the future heedless of all obstacles, be they the human victims of megaprojects or the countless creatures, communities and landscapes that have been invaded, converted, plundered or cleared away. Our ancestors were masters of adaptation and exploration; now we scramble to pick up whatever gimmicks are going in the marketplace today. Communities used to have leaders; now they are designed and assembled by engineers, maintained by managers and overseen by oligarchs whose main concern is to keep everything moving along established channels. Humankind used to consist of communities, tribes and peoples meandering along many different shifting streams; now everyone and everything is being sucked into a single roaring, boiling torrent that tears deeper into the living Earth with each passing day, and our hopes for the future hinge upon.....

Sorry to disappoint, but the main purpose of the preceding paragraph was not to provide a programme for the future but an example of modern expertise in action. Today's experts typically see themselves as labouring in fields that are so abstruse that those outside the intellectual pale have little chance of understanding what is going on, even if they can learn how to cut through the esoteric haze that inevitably develops when knowledge is accumulated and systematised, thought is channelled, jargon is created and cultural territory is fenced off from competitors, interlopers and busybodies. One of the risks of this kind of compartmentalization is that people outside a particular box are liable to assume that what goes on within it is irrelevant (at best), which can be a problem for experts who require outside support - be it material, emotional or intellectual - for their endeavours, as is often the case in an age when so much knowledge has accumulated and things move so fast that it has become virtually impossible to make a worthwhile contribution without such support. So every now and then the experts reach out, not by airing the subtle quibbles and controversies raging within their communities but by reducing contentions to consensus, complexities to simplifications, principles to analogies and dynamic multiverses to static metaphors. And along with the pretty pictures, cunning arguments, voluminous references and poetic interpretations we get the prescriptions, whereby the experts tell us how they think we should live, what we should do and how we should do it - prescriptions which are as likely to be based upon representations of knowledge as on the often uncertain and limited information that the experts actually command.

If this is starting to look like an attack on experts, let me say that I have worked among them for most of my adult life, so in addition to knowing how experts operate from personal experience I also know that aside from being the most numerous in history today's experts also rank among the most effective in terms of what they know and what they have the capacity to explore and discover. This is obvious when we consider how countless individuals, communities and societies in the modern world have been influenced by the application and advance of knowledge. And like most experts I also know that in addition to dedication and creativity such advances owe a lot to conformity, not just with the traditions of particular disciplines but also with what a former Prime Minister of Britain reverentially referred to as "business as usual." Exactly what this is may be difficult to define in general but its specifics are usually clear to experts who operate in situations where the resources they require are controlled by the custodians of their local corner of business as usual.

Ah, so here's the real enemy of possibilities, then. Not exactly. Custodians are servants not masters, and regardless of the illusions they may cherish it is plain that those who transiently populate the modern world's corridors of power have little real influence over its fundamental operations. And who is in control? Call me naive but I see little evidence that anyone is, nor any reason why anyone has to be, or indeed any way that anyone could be in control of our communities, corporations, societies or world to the extent that they could substantially alter the way things are done nowadays. For me the simplest conception of the modern situation is Darwinian: ideas, behaviours, people and organizations ranging from local communities to multinational networks that go along with business as usual - as it is conceived and as it operates - have a chance to survive and succeed, while those that buck the flow are soon weeded or forced to change their ways. This is not old-fashioned social Darwinism, which was a crude attempt to use the kind of natural selection that operates on genomes to account for disparities within and among societies, rather it is a recognition of one of the more significant aspects of evolution in situations where the most immediate and important contexts of survival and success are those we have created ourselves.

This would be a trivial observation if it had always applied, and a pedantic one if there was no reason to suspect that there is anything ominous about the current situation with regards to its stability and sustainability. Taking the historical issue first, no matter where we draw the line between people like us and our lineal ancestors and relatives, most of the human story remains a tale of small groups struggling to survive and succeed in an assortment of natural situations consisting of various combinations of living communities, landscapes and environments. Some of our ancestors eventually became so good at this game that they were able to explore an unprecedented range of situations as they spread across the globe just about as fast they could walk, paddle or sail. Indeed so many learned the tricks of survival and success so rapidly in so many different places and in so many different ways that it is difficult to reconstruct their travels and travails, including the journeys that led some through the transition from adapting to nature to adapting nature to themselves. That lifestyle shift may be hard to retrace but there is no difficulty in identifying some of those who successfully made it, because they went on to create the large, dense and complex aggregations we recognize as societies and civilizations, which served as incubators for unprecedented developments in human thought and behaviour as new possibilities emerged and evolved within new situations, many of them created and dominated by humankind.

This is not to say that civilization freed those who took to it from the challenges their ancestors had to deal with in the natural world; indeed many challenges became magnified within large, dense and settled populations (e.g. the spread of infections) while new ones multiplied. Something else that increased and multiplied were the impacts of civilized populations upon their natural surroundings, their constituents and each other, and right from the beginning this rising influence had dramatic consequences. Most notably, the dawn of civilization also seems to have been the dawn of a new class of disasters which includes ecological devastation, destruction of natural resources, plagues, famines, pollution, depressions, mass migrations, wars, revolutions, purges, pogroms and countless spontaneous and organized acts of savagery. Early on such events tended to be isolated and self-contained, but the ever-increasing size, connectedness and influence of civilized humankind made it increasingly difficult to distinguish among local, regional and global developments, disastrous or otherwise, or to determine how or to what degree such developments are shaped by artificial and natural influences. In fact the planetary footprint of civilized humankind has become so deep and extensive that some experts have come to suspect that in addition to causing countless localized alterations and catastrophes we may be collectively contributing to a global cataclysm.

This is a difficult possibility for many people to accept, often for reasons that have less to do with the merits of the various scenarios the experts have proposed than with the fact that they feature events and eventualities that are well beyond everyday perceptions, conceptions and interests. There is nothing shameful or unusual about this, because it is only natural for people to focus on those aspects of their surroundings that are most relevant to their own survival and success, aspects which are commonly concentrated - or at least seen to be concentrated - within the horizon of "the here and now." The modern world also tends to present immediate and clear-cut contexts of action and interaction to its inhabitants, such as the often intense competitions people find themselves in as they struggle to obtain the things they need and/or want. Thus by nature and inclination most of us have little in the way of appreciation for possibilities that lie outside the realm of everyday experience - which is yet another observation that would be trivial if those possibilities were irrelevant and pedantic if our attitudes towards them had no influence upon their likelihood of becoming realities.

The fact is, however, that when we take a closer look at the calamities that have become consistent features of civilized life we find many that seem to be associated with decisions and actions that were advantageous in the short term but ruinous over the longer haul. Among the more prominent examples of such disasters we have the deterioration of the overstressed agricultural systems of ancient Mesopotamia and Imperial Rome, the collapse of the classical Maya civilization, the genocidal wars of the mid-20th century - which were rooted in earlier and equally myopic conflicts - and the mechanized extinction of once-abundant natural resources like the Grand Banks cod. Something else that history tells us is that while such debacles had such clear and considerable impacts upon the human and natural communities associated with them that they could easily have served as object lessons, their overall influence upon civilized humankind has been relatively modest because we still live in a world where decisions are made and habits perpetuated in accordance with a greatly circumscribed awareness of the consequences, both real and potential. This may seem a harsh assessment, but even those who have never had to jump smartly to avoid being crushed into the urban pavement by a pollution-belching, gas-guzzling, air-conditioned personnel carrier piloted by a cell-phone chatter have to admit that despite the buzz about thinking globally many people behave as if they live in their own little worlds, as do most of the aggregations and organizations that have emerged within the modern world. For instance what is widely referred to as the global community would more accurately be described as a network of trading partners who share both the belief that everyone should do things their way regardless of the consequences and the conviction that those who oppose, reject or threaten the principles of business as usual should be ignored, silenced, reformed or eliminated.

So to summarize the story so far, human civilization has a longstanding association with deleterious developments on local, regional and possibly global scales, yet the civilized world has come to do business in a way that encourages its constituents to ignore many of the consequences of their ever-increasing impacts upon each other and their natural surroundings, and discourages the exploration of possibilities that do not serve or support the continuation of business as usual. Or to put it more succinctly, the way I see it - or rather as I have come to see it after a lot of puzzling and stumbling around - the modern world has become detached from nature, dissociated from human history and dangerous to the continuation of both, and our collective commitment to this ominous evolutionary route grows stronger every day. Of course I cannot claim to have proved this proposition in a few paragraphs, and indeed under scrutiny it turns out to be less a proposition than a prop, in the sense of being an intellectual support of a perspective which admits some consequences that are commonly ignored, accepts some possibilities that are seldom acknowledged and recognizes some long-obscured connections between the way things are and the way we have made them. I think this is a perspective worth pursuing, and that pursuit is the focus of the first literary product of this project, a book called Life Within Life: A Cancer Sutra.

Voices and Journeys

How does one go about establishing a perspective on the world? For starters, you need a voice, and the one I have been using here is not the sort that can simply be put on like a coat. I achieved it via a lengthy journey, part of which is summarized in Life Within Life, which grew out of the observation that some of the things that have recently been going on in our world are strongly reminiscent of a scenario familiar to many biologists. It is a scenario where something that starts out as a well-integrated part of a larger entity sets off on an evolutionary journey that can lead it to become detached from, useless to and increasingly deleterious towards its surroundings, sometimes to the point of destruction of the host entity and its rogue constituents. When cells evolve like this within bodies we call them cancers, and unlike our impacts upon our surroundings their impacts upon us have been difficult to ignore. Indeed cancers have become so significant to the inhabitants of the modern world that an enormous investment in effort and resources has gone into exploring how and why they embark on their unique evolutionary journeys, how and why those journeys sometimes have such devastating consequences and how those consequences can be limited, avoided or forestalled. As a result we now know an enormous amount about biomolecules, cells, tissues, bodies and their interactions with each other and their surroundings, yet contrary to the prediction of one notable expert cancer has not proven to be "a problem that can be solved." Rather cancers have been found to be associated with a multitude of problems which involve everything from the most basic molecules of life to the foods we eat, the habits we acquire and the changes we have introduced to our homes, neighbourhoods and planet. Thus the stories of the cancers we can get touch upon many aspects of life in the microcosm within us and the macrocosm around us, and they also reach out towards the stories of other cancers: those we can become.

That, in a nutshell, is the beginning of the thread of the rather pompously titled cancer sutra, and where it ultimately leads is not so easily summarized because Life Within Life is not an expert report or authoritative compendium but the account of a lengthy journey through some challenging scientific, historical, sociological and psychological terrain. As far as I know the facts and ideas presented - of which there are an awful lot - are accurate, and I can say from experience that I have been as scrupulous and sympathetic as most experts to the spirit of my sources, despite the failure to actually name most of them. The omission of footnotes, references and other scholarly cues was deliberate, and it arises from something I learned during the journey to this voice. In the beginning my aim was to string together enough facts, examples, handy-dandy metaphors and clever illustrations to convince most readers that they had gained a conceptual grip on the cancers we can get and those we can become, and then proceed on to a few meaty conclusions and some plausible prescriptions - in other words the standard expert shtick. I could have assembled such a presentation - and indeed I did during the first go round - but as I went along I realized that there was an important dimension missing.

That dimension is linked to the observation that our rational faculties - those intellectual aspects which are open to concepts, bemused by arguments, impressed by authorities and receptive to logical progressions - are associated with some evolutionarily recent acquisitions in the area of neural hardware and cultural software, and they play relatively minor roles when it comes to the beliefs, sympathies and behaviour of human individuals and organizations alike. The standard intellectual state of affairs is revealed during just about any conversation concerning a course of action, be it an internal discussion or a public debate. Such conversations often begin with the rational faculties doing their impressive analytical acrobatics, then sooner or later another voice takes centre stage by making an announcement along the lines of "this is all well and good," which is followed by what might sometimes look like a continuation of the rational discussion but it is actually the expression of a fundamentally different and considerably more ancient consciousness. This consciousness is less interested in bandying ideas and pondering possibilities than in finding certainties and establishing principles for action, like the principles which underlie business as usual and the certainties which support the perception that the way we have come to do things is not only the way things are, but the way things should and must be.

These facts of intellectual life mean that if we want to explore or influence the cancerous aspects of modern humankind - or indeed virtually any aspect of human behaviour - we cannot limit ourselves to the language of reason, we must enter the domains of the ancient consciousness via its modes of communication. One of the more prominent of those modes is the poetic, which is not to be confused with linguistic devices such as rhythm, rhyme, similes, metaphors and analogies - which I prefer to avoid for a variety of reasons, not the least being that when experts resort to them it is usually a sign of desperation, like the panic that arises when faced with an audience of children, politicians or investors. These devices are dispensable because for the most part they are overt versions of elements that are implicit in the poetic mode of communication, which is based upon that most unique and significant of all human inventions: the narrative.

Narratives can be merely factual, but the most interesting and informative ones go far beyond fact into the realm of reflection, where everyday individuals reflect universal attributes, passing events reflect eternal principles and superficial developments reflect fundamental patterns. The bias of reflection can vary depending upon the attitude of the narrator. At one end of the spectrum are those for whom the here and now is a local, transient and often tainted or shadowy manifestation of the absolute, eternal, pure and luminously true; such a reflective bias is generally referred to as idealistic. At the other end of the spectrum we have those who insist that the here and now is all that there is, while generalizations, classifications, ideals and even the linking of cause and effect are phantoms, illusions and shadows imposed upon a neutral background by our limited senses and feeble imaginations; such a reflective bias is commonly known as empirical. At their most extreme neither of these stances are of much use for intellectually engaging with the world - which an ultraempiricist would consider impossible and an ultraidealist pointless - thus by nature and necessity most minds adopt hybrid approaches; for instance empiricists who are willing to accept illusions like cause and effect and idealistic constructs like classifications and logic can function quite effectively as rationalists. Since I tend to favour the pragmatic/rationalistic end of the spectrum, Life Within Life is constructed as a narrative that amuses and amazes on the factual surface (i.e. the "gee-whiz" level), recognizes deeper patterns and concepts where appropriate, follows chains of cause, effect and connections, and employs whatever materials and methods are necessary to keep things moving along, including a bit of myth-bashing, pontificating and burlesque here and there.

And where does the journey lead and what is the traveller supposed to get out of it? For starters, I would say that what any particular reader gets out of Life Within Life depends upon what they put into it. I expect that everyone should get something out of the journey but few will get everything they can get the first time through, and for those who are persistent I suppose the most they can expect to get out of reading the book is what I got out of writing it, which is deep familiarity with a perspective that extends beyond facts, connections, concepts and ideas into an understanding of how our world has emerged from our interactions with each other and our natural surroundings. This perspective is not necessarily any more profound or sophisticated than others; indeed one of its key aspects is the recognition that while many things are vastly more dynamic and complex than most people realize, some do not have to be nearly as complicated as they have been made out to be. For instance once you accept that nothing in the living world can be eternal, unchanging, absolute or predestined there is no longer any need for the Byzantine multitude of forms, forces, agents and infrastructures that have been invented to impose such unnatural conditions upon nature (e.g. biological idealists had to invent vitalistic forces to account for embryonic development). Once we abandon a few old shackles and crutches a new world of possibilities opens up, including the possibility that as we have risen to dominance over the world that sustains us we have lost our sympathy with nature and each other, and the possibility that this loss is not only unbecoming but malignant.

That prospect brings us to another aspect of the journey that begins with Life Within Life. One of the fundamental lessons that cellular cancers teach us is that while it is possible for living things to escape temporarily and/or locally from some of the standards of behaviour, survival and success that normally apply in their natural neighbourhoods, such standards have a way of reimposing themselves, sometimes violently. For example populations of tumour cells may be quite successful at proliferating, monopolising resources and colonising new sites in their host, but as their impacts upon physiological functions accumulate and intensify the cancers' short-sighted successes contribute to their eventual catastrophic downfall. This lesson tells us that if the constituents of modern humankind are individually and/or collectively behaving and evolving like cancers within the living world, then the future holds a rather limited range of scenarios, most of which differ only in the timing, extent and severity of the ultimate reckoning.

There are, of course, some critical differences between people and cells. For one thing we are much more flexible when it comes to acquiring and exchanging information, which gives us a vast capacity for discovering and propagating new habits and attitudes; for instance while cells can only acquire cancerous traits via spontaneous mutations or physical adaptations, people can also pick them up from their neighbours. Another key difference between us and cells relates to perspective: we are capable of recognizing where we are and appreciating where we may be headed, and we also have the potential to do something about it. Thus the second major aim of this project is to explore how our unique abilities, perspectives and potentials might allow us to avoid the worst consequences of our malignant tendencies.

Dharmatics

Life Within Life is aimed at developing perspectives rather than prescriptions, but near the end of the book some mention is made of practical endeavours that might come out of the exploration of cancer. One possibility concerns the development of a discipline dedicated to the deliberate realignment of the way things are done in the modern world with the way things are in the living world. Exactly how this new discipline - if it can be considered a new idea to explicitly yoke human intelligence to the cause of survival and adaptation - was to carried forward was not spelled out in any detail, aside from mentioning that it would range across the boundaries of several existing intellectual endeavours yet would not be multidisciplinary in the standard sense of the term. This is not another shot at the experts, it is simply a recognition that any effort aimed at exploring and reorienting the way humankind does business will have to do more than skim across the branch-tips of existing knowledge. Our behaviour has deep historical, social, ecological and intellectual roots, and given the importance of those underpinnings I decided to name the new discipline dharmatics, which in its simplest interpretation means "concerning supports," although there is also an obvious link to a well-known term for the underlying order of our world: dharma.

Now let me be the first to say that I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of creating yet another cultural compartment, but such things do seem to be useful in helping people to focus their thoughts and energies, and this is meant to be a practical endeavour. I also have a few qualms about the term dharmatics, one being that for many people the concept of underlying order is associated less with patterns that emerge from reality than with constructs that people have imposed upon it, like the idealistic notions that have been guiding intellects and energies along the same narrow channels of thought, perception and behaviour for countless generations. Some of those notions were explored in Life Within Life, and I tried to leave the more obstructive ones behind during the exploration of cancer and the development of the perspective that emerged from it, but in the end that perspective was still rather incomplete in comparison to some of the others that have become established within the modern world, including the one I rather wistfully referred to as fortunism (i.e. the creed of Cloudcuckooland). Thus the first aim of the second literary product of the project - titled appropriately enough Dharmatics - is to assemble a conceptual landscape through which it is possible to move with something approaching the confidence that derives from other popular perspectives.

As I see it, the way to approach this task is not to compete with other perspectives but swallow them, or at least the territory they have claimed. This is a time-honoured practice, since historically the success of world-views has depended upon how effectively they have dealt with the eternal questions of where we came from, where we are headed and what we should be doing. The traditional approaches tend to start off in the beginning, the scientific ones usually pick up the story somewhere back in the primate past and hybrid approaches can begin anywhere from the cosmic nebula to the genesis of the races to the awakening of the individual ego. I am content to follow the scientific line and pick up the story with the emergence of people like us, then follow them through the subsequent development of key aspects of human social and intellectual life such as perceptions of possessions, property and social identity. These dharmatic developments are associated with a variety of evolutionary trends, with some of the more significant being the ever-increasing advance in knowledge and influence over nature and the oft-repeated patterns of social developments; indeed the first part of Dharmatics consists of what I call the "Viconian Summary" because it was inspired by that great exploration of historical cycles, Giambattista Vico's New Science.

It is difficult to go much further into the details of the construction of the dharmatic landscape here, because it makes extensive use of concepts that took a considerable amount of effort to establish in Life Within Life, such as the concept of collective intellects. It also leans heavily upon evolutionary aspects that were explored at length in that book, including the examples of malignancy which are no doubt as depressing to read through as they were to research and describe. Fortunately, I intend for the second part of Dharmatics to be much more positive, since it will focus on an exploration of practical possibilities for resisting, abandoning and reforming malignant habits and tendencies. As with the other aspects of the project this exploration will be strongly influenced by my own experiences and interests, which have led me to focus on recent and ongoing developments in south Asia (primarily southern India and Sri Lanka). This region abounds with examples of individuals, families, communities and organizations faced with situations where long-established ways of life have been subject to rapid and radical changes, often pushing in malignant directions, yet despite enormous pressures some effective efforts have been mounted at social levels ranging from governments to the grass roots to resist and reverse ominous trends in key areas such as land and water usage, communal interactions and the introduction of modern technological, economic and social practices.

My plan is to explore what works and what does not by employing the reporting, researching and communication skills accumulated in my various endeavours (see CV), and making use of the contacts I have established throughout the region with a variety of individuals, communities and organizations, including CAMBIA, WAPRED, the Karnataka Farmers' Association, Auroville, the Centre for Science and Environment and the Butterfly Garden (a children of war rehabilitation centre in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, supported by Medecins Sans Frontiers). I make no claims to be a great anthropologist or sociologist, but I reckon I should do fairly well as a dharmaticist considering the lack of competition. Once I have the conceptual landscape of the field mapped out (and perhaps a few people have a chance to read Life Within Life) it should serve as a basis for both study and interaction (i.e. I can use it to throw out ideas for others to respond to). This is just as well because unlike proper social scientists I have no interest in being an observational cypher. I intend to discuss, debate, challenge and be challenged, both for my own edification and for the sake of the second major phase of the project, which involves getting out there and doing something!