The World in Pictures

Scrolling through Facebook—and occasionally dipping into the clickbait topics associated with it, particularly those before-and-after comparisons of the actors and actresses of my youth—I had a sudden inspiration: our world is measurably different since the invention and widespread distribution of the personal means of photography.

Taking photographs, especially in the early days, used to be a learned skill. To practice photography successfully, you needed a good camera, some understanding of film speeds, f-stops, aperture settings, and light conditions. And if you weren’t going to go broke getting your negatives and prints developed at the drug store, you had to build a darkroom, invest in an enlarger, buy a stock of specially treated paper, and become something of an amateur chemist. I know all this because my grandfather was a dedicated photographer, and he gave the bug to my brother, who sealed off one room in every house we owned and infested it with the vinegar-and-rotten-egg smell of developer and fixer. Since then, he’s invested a goodly portion of his disposable income in better and better cameras and a variety of lenses to fit them.

Everyone else, these days, uses an application that comes free with their smartphone and is built around a lens no bigger than a grain of sand and a photo chip to match. People routinely, or so the meme goes, photograph their lunches and send them to friends on social media. And along the way, they capture every stage of their children’s development, of their home renovation, their latest road trip, and whatever they can see out the window of a bus. Those with access to an old family album—or someone like my brother—will also post pictures from decades ago when their grandparents were young and hot and in love.

Think of what our future will be! One day soon, you won’t have to dig out a dusty old album or box of prints from the attic and hunt through them to make those comparisons. Instead, you will have your entire family and the highlights of your life catalogued year by year, sometimes day by day, to pull up, enjoy, and relive.

But now I imagine a time before even the dedicated family photographer or the studio professional, capturing those key moments like Christmas mornings, weddings, and birthdays for us to keep in our hearts forever. That time goes back to … when? Certainly before the 20th century. You can pick 1888, when George Eastman developed and marketed the first simple box camera using celluloid film under the brand name Kodak. Or the Civil War years, when Matthew Brady visited battlefields and encampments with his view camera that recorded on glass plates, which themselves required a whole wagonload of equipment to store and develop. Or back to the 1830s, when Louis Daguerre experimented with exposing copper plates that had been treated with a vapor of silver iodide to make them light sensitive, eventually producing the first “photograph”—or, from two Greek words, “light writing.”

Before that, if you wanted to capture the image of someone or something, you hired a person with skills in drawing, color mixing, and painting. That meant you put up with that person’s peculiarities of vision and perception, distortions from their own imagination and personal biases, the speed at which they were willing to work, and their other competing clients and interests. You could hardly capture an event or a moment at your discretion unless it was hurriedly sketched or carefully staged before the final application of paint to canvas for the full-color effect.

That is, if you wanted to document the people or events in your life, you were either royalty or immensely wealthy. For the rest of us, events happened and then disappeared forever, captured only in memory and imagination, or perhaps with a description in our own or someone else’s diary. People aged before our eyes, and we had only our memories of their faces to compare with the day-to-day reality in front of us. We couldn’t laugh or marvel at the clothing styles that our grandparents had thought fashionable unless they laid the actual articles in a trunk for us to discover and try on decades later.

For most of us, the world lived in a perpetual now. Our sense of history came from our parents’ memories and what we could read in books—accepting, once again, the distortions of the author’s imagination and biases. Things happened, and then they became part of an ever-fading yesterday that lost relevance even as you thought about it. People lived, grew up, flourished, grew old, and died, but all you ever knew about them was the person who happened to be standing in front of you in the current moment. It was a world with a lot less to think about and compare. It was a world with a fragile human memory, some dusty books, a few mementoes in trunks, and a gallery of paintings about other people.

Do we live in a better world now? Today we can access high-resolution pictures of the lunch we had three years ago. We can relive every birthday and Christmas morning even after most of the participants are dead. We can—now that our smartphone records not only still pictures but also full minutes of action with video—live in the event. We can do everything but speak to the dead and change, for better or worse, the moments we are watching.

Is that better? Or are we forced out of the now and into the remembered channels of fond feelings, lost hopes, and sometimes bitter regrets? I don’t know. I would ask my brother, but right now he’s too busy capturing and processing the moments themselves.

Transitions and End States

I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this, but I think Buddha was wrong. Or at least the main teaching of Hinayana—or “Lesser Vehicle”—Buddhism, that the goal of meditation and right life practices is the state of enlightenment, is wrong. Any final end state of understanding, where all knowledge and precepts are fixed and nothing more can be attained, is simply not part of the human experience. And no, the bodhisattvas are not some other form of being, some kind of supermen, but just regular human beings who have trained their minds in certain ways of thinking.¹

In my view, all life—human life, animal life, evolution on this planet, and by extension the life cycles of stars and galaxies—is transition. So long as you are alive, you are engaged in a process. It starts with the combination of egg and sperm and the first unraveling of the embryo’s DNA to create differentiation and development of specialized cell types. It ends with the failure of major organs that support cellular metabolism and the dissolution of the body’s tissues. Everything in between is process and change.

In the same way, stars begin when enough dust and gas collect in one place through electrostatic attraction, the collapse into a compact mass through the attraction of gravity, and the ignition of a fusion reaction through internal pressure. It ends with the exhaustion of fuel, and the final collapse into a neutron star or black hole. Everything in between is process and change.

In both cases, the only end state is death, the stilling of all processes, the unchanging forever of nothingness. Dead people cannot be detected or resurrected as dust and component atoms. Neutron stars can only collect more dust and mass, changing regular atoms into a jostling compaction of stripped neutrons, until they reach enough mass to disappear into a black hole and never be seen again, except for the effects of gravity.

Human beings with their subtle brains seem to long for a living end state. A final attainment of enlightenment, complete understanding, with nothing more to experience, no doubts, nothing more to endure, no reason ever to change again. This is a fantasy.

You can no more learn all there is to know—or all that’s important—and stop thinking than you can flap your arms and fly like a bird. You might be able to believe your brain has stopped because you have temporarily shut out the mutter of background thoughts that come with the firing of random synapses outside of your conscious, focused attention.² But even if you are very strong-willed, sooner or later the environment or your body’s needs will interrupt the silence. You will ask, “What’s that noise?” or “What’s for lunch?” And the processing of inputs and answering of questions begins all over again.

Serial enlightenments are possible. You can learn new things, resolve certain questions, gain sudden understanding of truths that have long been hidden from you. You can have insights and “Aha!” moments. But none of them will be the complete answer. None will stop your thinking and questioning, provide the perfect understanding of all things—or even just the things that are temporarily important to you—and free you from the need to think, doubt, or decide ever again.

In the same way, human societies seem to hunger for a final state of organization. A revolution that will bring on a subline method of government supplying all human needs to all people, with no dissatisfactions, no failures of equality and personal respect, no cases of privation or indignity. Plato’s Republic was ruled by philosopher kings who could make no mistakes. Communal societies are set up so that every member works selflessly and joyously for the good of all. And these are supposed to be the “end of history,” because the dissatisfactions and disruptions that make up most of the historic record—think wars, famines, invasions, market crashes, and other disasters that require dating and analysis—will no longer play a part in human life. Instead, everyone simply enjoys one long, golden summer’s afternoon, like Odysseus among the Lotus Eaters.

But, as noted above, a human being—a body of cells in process, inhabited by a mind active with synapses firing away—never reaches a state of perpetual understanding and satisfaction. And if one human can’t do it, then all of them at once will never do it. Life is change. And the cessation of change is death.

1. And, actually, I am not being quite accurate here. In the Buddhist teaching, bodhi or enlightenment is valued because it supposedly stops the karmic cycle of rebirths to higher planes of existence, if you’ve been good, and to lower planes, if you’ve been bad. Instead, when you die you go to Nirvana, which is a place of endless meditation, like Heaven without the halos, wings, and harps. Bodhisattvas are supposedly those who have already attained enlightenment, could retire to Nirvana themselves if they wanted, but have chosen to stay behind and help others along the path. Of course, if you don’t believe in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, but instead think that when you die you just “go out, like a candle flame”—to use the Buddha’s own metaphor—then … what’s the big deal?

2. See Working With the Subconscious from September 30, 2012.

Big Lies

Telling big lies and expecting them to be accepted as true is a political expediency—and it’s on everyone’s mind these days, from Trump supporters to followers of the mainstream media, and always blamed consequentially on the other party.

It was none other than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who took the nomme de guerre ‘Lenin,’ who said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” Well … Lenin was a liar.¹

My firm belief is that truth is a thing that exists separately from the mind of human beings. It may be shaded by perception. And certain things a person may hold to be true are the product of his or her own desires and imagination. But there is also such a thing as objective reality, a state of affairs or of nature that can be discovered, examined, and proven to exist regardless of anyone’s belief in its existence.

Still, political parties, from the government ministers surrounding a failed monarch or floundering oligarchy, to the revolutionaries attempting to overthrow such a state—Lenin again, and his Bolsheviks—to the opportunists intent on capturing an already crumbling society—Hitler, Goebbels, and their Nazi cohort—have used outright, fabricated, manipulative deception, lies by any other name, to attain their ends. The question is whether the strategy really works.

Sure, for some people. There are those who will believe anything that is popular or persistent. They are either too lazy or otherwise engaged in everyday life to put effort into questioning, researching, weighing arguments, thinking through probabilities, and determining the nature of reality for themselves. These are the blindly political and the stupidly apolitical, people who don’t know or don’t care.

But most of us do care about the nature of reality, pay attention to the news and the political climate, and try to think for ourselves. For us, the Big Lie will only work under two conditions: first, total repression of the truth, and second, total control of the population and its culture. That is, make the truth inaccessible and then make seeking it either dangerous or uncomfortable.

Societies where the Big Lie has gained a foothold have eliminated all independent media outlets—newspapers, radio, television, and now the internet and its spawning channels—and replaced them with those under government control. This requires either a priori censorship, where the ministry of information and propaganda establishes guidelines for what it considers “the truth” and demands prepublication review of all journalistic and artistic content, or a government shutdown of all dissenting sources and promotion of those that are friendly to its purposes. But even in countries where there are only a few official, government-friendly sources, dissenting views do get out. The Soviets had to deal with samizdat—hand-copied and clandestinely distributed literature, music, and other independent influences—for most of its existence. While nobody knew what was really going on, it seems that everybody knew.

And so, societies that depend on the Big Lie also need to erect and maintain a police state, invest in forces to track down and punish dissenters, establish prison systems into which they will disappear, and pretend that all their people wear happy, smiling faces. The Soviets had their Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, which morphed into the NKVD, which took on international counterinsurgency, followed by the KGB, which grew to control both internal and external espionage. In the same way, the Nazis had their Gestapo, and the Imperial Japanese had the Kempeitai. But even when knowing and speaking the truth could get you caught, internally exiled, and perhaps killed, all these systems did was to shut people’s mouths. They couldn’t stop people’s brains.

Many people in such a society keep quiet in the presence of the Big Lie because it is safer not to question. Some will speak it aloud because that way they can attain more certain safety, promotion at work, advancement in the party, or other material benefit. And some will challenge the lie, either quietly to themselves, or among family and close friends, or by smuggling samizdat, because they cannot turn off their minds and become willfully blind or stupid.

Which brings us back to this country, America today, and its current divisions. The Republicans and conservatives—who include a solid core of “Never-Trumpers”—as well as the Trump supporters themselves, and the Democrats and progressives, who are hardly a monolithic presence but vote together for strength, as well as the establishment media that mostly include their true believers, would all like to think that they hold onto the one, true reality and that the opposition has fallen to the Big Lie. And this is amusing right up to the point that people start burning cities and killing each other.

But the certainty is, technology has outrun the concept of the Big Lie. Gone are the dim, dark days of the 20th century, when you could shut down two national newspapers and three radio stations to control the flow of information. The internet has put an end to all that. And much as governments—the Chinese Communist Party, of course, and certain people in our own Administrative State—would like to control the internet for their own benefit, they can’t even keep down the amount of digital sabotage, “dark web” conspiracies, and free-spirited public anarchy flowing through the system, let alone compel the people toward truth and stop the spread of outright lies.

And even if there weren’t this flowering of information resources, true or not, this country still doesn’t have effective secret police—or not a force that people actually fear. The FBI has been running counter-intelligence programs for years, mostly against the whack-a-moles they identify as organized crime, drug and gun runners, and coercive religious cults, often involving elaborate sting operations, and it hasn’t done much good. So nobody in the Bureau has time to go after everyday speech offenders. The progressives in academia have been trying to enforce “hate speech” rules and a culture of “political correctness” for years without much more than laughable effect. Out of politeness, the rest of us try not to be crudely offensive, but we still have our own nest of thoughts.

America has always been an unruly place, full of scofflaws—if you doubt this, go drive the California freeways sometime—and independent thinkers. We are more cynics and skeptics than true believers. And most of us are just involved with the everyday business of living.

1. The Big Lie theory has also been attributed to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, but it appears he never actually advocated for nor admitted to it. That was probably good strategy, because the Third Reich rose to power on a wave of pervasive, all-encompassing lies and a series of staged misdirections, including the Reichstag fire and the Kristallnacht disturbances.

The Thomassian Jihad (Redux)1

In the Dune novels, the civilization of the far future is shaped by a war in the distant past, the Butlerian Jihad, that freed humanity from the lassitude and enfeeblement of being helped—to the point of near extinction—by robots and artificially intelligent machines. The defining call of that jihad was: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

In the aftermath of this war and its upheavals, the “Great Schools” arose to develop human beings who would take over some of the necessary functions that had been handled by the now-outlawed machines. They trained the Mentats, human computers, the Bene Gesserit, female protectors of the bloodlines, and the Bene Tleilax, genetic scientists who created special-purpose humans and body parts, often with destructive intent.

As the novels thoroughly explored, the Butlerian Jihad exchanged machines for human beings, who became valued, traded, and objectified solely for their special functions: Mentats for their calculating ability, Bene Gesserit-trained concubines for their seductive skills, and Bene Tleilax-created deformities for whatever the buyer desired. In the original novel, the distinction between House Atreides (the “Good Duke”) and House Harkonnen (the “Evil Baron”) lay in their treatment of these oddities. For the Atreides, Mentats like Thufir Hawat and Swordmasters like Duncan Idaho were trusted friends and companions. For the Harkonnens, everyone other than immediate family was just a commodity.

But the underlying reality from the Butlerian Jihad remains: people who have been trained or designed to perform a specific function are acquired and valued for that function and less as beings capable of personal development, surprises, and a sense of their own destiny, and so they are valued as less than fully human.²

This background inspires me to consider what I would do to ignite a jihad that shapes the entire human universe for thousands of years, the Thomassian Jihad. And I believe my central tenet would be: “Thou shalt not treat a sentient being as an object.” That would take care of a number of our current sins, as well as the underlying fault in the Dune books.

Most immediately, the call would do away with slavery of every kind: outright ownership of human beings as productive objects and the sort of wage-slavery and contrived indebtedness that traps the poor and the immigrant and fuels sweat shops and company towns around the world. It would also outlaw the treatment of women as chattels and sex slaves to their husbands. More than that, it would forbid—or at least make the practitioner feel a measure of guilt and shame—the objectification of women and children for the configuration of their faces and bodies and as receptacles for sexual appetites.

Politically, my jihad would put an end—or try—to the treatment of individuals as no more than members of a group based on a single, obvious common distinction, such as race, gender, religion, regional origin, or other useful and objective features. This kind of pigeonholing (the objectification of birds) is useful to those who would build political strength from individuals who are thereby deprived of their individuality and the sense of their own unique purpose and destiny. Group objectification turns human beings into political widgets.

I refer to “sentient beings” rather than just “human beings” because I tend to think more broadly than our current, limited understanding. One day, we will meet aliens from worlds elsewhere in the galaxy, and when we no longer have the prejudices of physical form and DNA analysis to rely on, we will have to judge them by what we can see of their minds and our measure of their conscious awareness. And this leads back to our treatment of putatively intelligent animals here on Earth: the whales we have hunted for their oil, the elephants we have slaughtered for their tusks, and the octopi we cut up for sushi. A creature that approaches humanity in its understanding and awareness—different in scale but not necessarily in kind—should get a measure of the respect in which we hold other human beings.

Does my jihad require that we approach all such beings subjectively, evaluating them for their potential to think and respond, to care and to love, to have hopes and fears, to dream and have a personal destiny? Oh, yes! That is the essence of the Golden Rule: if you would be treated as a real human being, an individual, whole and entire unto yourself, then you must treat others of your kind—and that includes those with awareness and self-actuation equivalent to your own—with the same appreciation and respect.

Of course, the Thomassian Jihad would be nothing new. Humanity has been waging it with varying success since ancient times. That Golden Rule is essential to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and most other world religions.³ As soon as people gain a full realization of themselves as thinking, feeling, self-aware, and self-actuating individuals, it becomes inescapable to any intelligent and well-balanced mind that others of like mind must think, feel, and actually be the same. This perception was augmented and rationalized during the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries that drives the scientific and technological advances that benefit us today.

To deny the common humanity of like-minded beings is to put on personal blinders, either willfully or through ignorant error.

1. This is actually a rethinking, or restatement, of a meditation I posted on December 8, 2013. The wheel turns …

2. The Dune series—and I suspect Frank Herbert’s worldview itself—radiates a sense of ultimate failure. Or rather, a rejection of easy promises and bright futures through a regression to the human mean. Republics give way to imperial monarchies. Free people succumb to ever more refined tyrannies. And the novels’ central character—Paul in the first three books, and his son Leto II the God Emperor in the fourth book—ultimately fail despite having superb physical and mental training, immeasurable self-control, the power of prescience, an empire at his command, and in the case of Leto, physical invulnerability in a pre-sandworm body and access to the details of all human history through genetic memory. No matter how good things get or how well developed a person might be, return to some ingrained human “normal” is always coming.

3. See the American painter Norman Rockwell’s notes on the commonality of the Golden Rule.