Blowing in the Wind

Montreal, May 1, 1999

http://rampages.onramp.net/~emlumley/windwave.htm

Emile: Zeus, have Western leaders ever been more at sea in your recollection, than they are in the Kosovo fiasco, ... even Canada seems to figure that today's best humanitarian investments are in eliminating mouths rather than feeding them.

Zeus: Yes, the connotation of 'peace-keeping force' seems to have stretched incredibly since the days of Trudeau, and there will be retaliatory waves I am certain,... but Emile, you are confused on the theatre of operations, ... unless the oil embargo retaliation from Russia has already kicked in, the Western leaders are fighting a land war.

Emile: Zeus, my reference to 'at sea' was intending 'adrift', ... the sea gives us many metaphors because it is the mother of us, and you yourself used one when you spoke of 'retaliatory waves'.

Zeus: I see what you mean, and yes, that is true, ... the sea is symbolic of many things including our consciousness, the quality of which seems to be somewhat suspect these days, ... and of course, the sea is an archetype for waves, ... waves, which according to quantum physics, characterize all aspects of nature, large and small, material or energy-related.

Emile: ... and when one watches the sand grains on the beach lifted by the waves, .... they go back and forth, back and forth, right? This is what Mandela was talking about yesterday, ... saying; "I blame President Milosovic for embarking on ethnic cleansing and in the process slaughtering men, women, children and the aged.", but yet saying at the same time, "But I equally blame the airstrikes by Nato. They are doing exactly the same thing as President Milosevic. They are killing innocent civilians.", and he warned that a world conflagration could be provoked by "the arrogance of NATO" in bypassing world counsel on the issue. Much is being written about the present cultivation of anger and hate which, while now latent, will smolder and grow to re-emerge in future waves of retribution.

Zeus: The physics of politics is definitely Euclidian or 'flatspace' as you refer to it, and it does not seem to comprehend the reverberatory aspect of wave phenomena.

Emile: Yes, there are definitely two very different geometrical notions about 'calming the waters' at work in the world today, ... one held by Mandela, and the other held by Clinton, Blair, Yeltsin, Chretien, and the majority of politicians in the west, ... the former which seeks to amplify the harmony of whole-and-part, and the latter which seeks to 'flatten out' the waves, or 'forcibly eliminate perceived wrong-doing'.

Zeus: You're referring to 'voyeur' geometry versus 'immersed' geometry for space-time, right? ... but do you think that adults who were taught only the voyeur or Euclidian geometry of 'things' and 'not-things', 'true' and 'false', 'right' and 'wrong' can ever re-learn curved space 'immersed' geometry, the geometry of waves and harmony?

Emile: Zeus, ... it is a question of consciousness or 'awareness'. Everyone understands 'immersed' or intermogular geometry because we 'live' it, ... we are immersed in a living, cyclical landscape, ... we look up through the atmo- or breathing-sphere and see the moon, sun and stars and we look back down into the spheres within spheres of age-ringed rock towards the center, and we know that we are all immersed together in this cyclically nesting space-time, ... we know that we all share this evolving volume and that we all co-evolve with and in it. The world is not 'out there', as flatspace geometry would imply, ... it is only since the 'Enlightenment' that we became fixated with 'perspective' and began looking out on the world as if we were detached observers, making of ourselves 'parasites of the visible' as Kunze puts it.

Zeus: But most people, even if watching the bombs fall on Belgrade on television, can't feel the 'co-evolution', ... can't feel the basic inclusionary space-time wave nature of our existence, and if they hear statements like, "quantum physics says that there is no 'outside' to space-time and that linear time is pure abstraction", ... they do not exactly feel motivated to take their vacation in the mountains to further contemplate it.

Emile: Once one has swallowed the Euclidian pill, or had it forced down your throat in the acculturation process, with it's binary reality and detached linear time reference, the symptomatic reactions you describe become part of the package. From a Euclidian flatspace perspective, 'cause' can always be isolated, and 'not-cause' is meaningless and doesn't count, .... the flatspace mindset is not easily brought to consider coherent patterns of not-cause or non-action as the source of human behavior, such as occurs in the alienation of youth or countries whose ontogenies would have them resist joining the 'culture club' which contains them.

Zeus: I know what you mean about the blindness to harmonic interrelationships which comes to us through the flatspace perspective, if you ask a Nato general how to deal with a 'wave of unrest' in Eastern Europe, ... he will say, ... 'easy, ... first you determine the cause, second you judge who's to blame and third, you get the situation under control by flattening the guilty party, and if he resists, you flatten his country with bombs and follow through with military occupation', ... and the general's 'delivery' will imply that this cause/judgement/control approach leads to full and final closure. Of course, this is his job, ... what he is being paid to do is to 'resolve' the situation, and I'm sure he knows, deep down, that with every such 'flattening' assignment, he is generating more work for himself in the future, than he started out with.

Emile: Yes, but deep down he knows that the opposite of a 'wave' is anything but a 'not-wave' or a flat calm, ... that one cannot simply 'flatten' a wave and manufacture calm seas, ... the opposite of the upwelling crest of a wave is a 'trough', just like the opposite of a mogul is intermogular space-time.

Zeus: ... and while the upwelling wave is material and tangible and bounded and of the inner sphere, the trough comes in the form of an enveloping latency which is immaterial, intangible and unbounded and of the outer, enclosing sphere. I suppose if you asked him to identify the 'mother' of an upwelling wave, he would say 'the sea'.

Emile: If he subscribes to Euclidian space, linear time and causality, he couldn't say otherwise, because these flatspace perceptions of space and time can only deal with 'material cause' and cannot deal with latent cause or 'non-cause', such as the reaction to long term systematic withholding of access to some need.

Zeus: In other words, the flatspacer cannot say, ... it is the wind or the 'withholding of air' which 'causes' the upwelling wave, ... or, ... it is the outer sphere of latency which envelopes and pulls on its inner sphere of materiality which is the mother of the upwelling wave. If he did say this, there would be no-one in particular to focus the blame on, .... to judge to be the guilty party, and therefore no clear flattening target to use his equipment on.

Emile: That's right, the volumetric or spherical space view you speak of would require that he upgrade his view of the world from the flatspace 'out there' view of the voyeur who looks at flatscreen videos of laser bombs seeking their targets, or shuffles toy troops and war machinery over a flat table-map, to the higher dimensional 'englobing' view of volumetric containment, of spheres within spheres. And if he could do this, and if the politicians could do this, they would see what Madiba sees, ... the space-time winds which stir the waters of our civilization.

Zeus: Why is this curved space reality so hard for us to see, when we are immersed in a nature which is recognizeably all about cycles induced by our containing environment, ... our own birth and life even. Does it require that everyone spend half his life in prison in contemplation of man's injustice to man to see curved space?

Emile: The flatspace view was selected for it's 'eternality' property which had much appeal to the Greeks when philosophy was being formalized in the western world, ... the simplicity and finality of closure was appealing, ... absolute 'good', absolute 'bad', ....exclusionary logic, ... the law of non-contradiction ... it's been built into the doctrine of the major variants of western religions for centuries. The pope in his current encyclical, 'Fides et Ratio' bemoans the fact that relativity is trying to creep into the system, and says; "Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its prime reality as an act of a person's intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific circumstance and thus to express a judgement about the right conduct to be chosen here and now."

Zeus: One can see many fists of righteousness rising up in support of such absolutist statements, and then, of course, rotating through ninety degrees, as they discover the relativity of 'right'.

Emile: Precisely, ... we can render judgements on the material upwelling as it is a "thing" bounded in space-time but what about the 'trough' which inevitably accompanies it? .... that is something which is unbounded in space-time, like the air over el nino, ... where does it go and what does it do, ... when did it begin and where will it end? If you want to focus your angst, one must stay in flatspace.

Zeus: In the case of the political atmosphere stirred by the NATO bombings, we can say the same, ... the policy of cause/judgement/control, of trying to flatten upwelling waves and hold them down by occupation, is the stuff that Edwin Abbott's 1880's book 'Flatland' is made of. It's like the belief in the era before Pasteur, before there was an awareness of bacteria when the prevailing theory was 'spontaneous infection', ... that that was all there was to it, ... that infection just upwelled because of innate weakness in that part of a person's body. The surgeon's intervention often made things worse, even if he employed laser like-precision in his intervention, because he was introducing infection into the region, in his process of intervention.

Emile: Yes, that's the tidy thing about flatspace thinking, ... you don't have to worry about cyclic interplay between one upwelling and another, ... 'Tony, ... an evil wave just came into being in Yugoslavia, whaddya say we flatten it!' .... 'Capital idea Bill, haven't had much chance to show off our new gear since that 'clear and present evil' sprouted up out nowhere in the Gulf'. ... it seems our western penchant for a pushy, isolated issue, cause/judgement/control to world and domestic issues is progressively pre-empting the pull of purpose in our society, and this philosophy, being so forcefully advocated by Clinton and Blair, will be something that other countries will surely model after. And since, as Nietzsche so well pointed out, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle scientifically validated, ... the belief in purpose, or the pull of wave-latency, collapses with the belief in material cause.

Zeus: It's ironic that the curved space notion of 'modelling' is so familiar to us in the case of child psychology, but we don't seem to apply it in the case of politician- and militarist-psychology.

Emile: Yes, psychologists have long known about the pre-emptive strength of modelling of behavior over structured teaching, and this topic is becoming a hot one on the internet as the effects of polarization of youth against society continue to intensify in the west. One psychologists comments; " Children model their behavior primarily on the behavior of their parents and other authority figures. Whether or not this behavior is effective at producing happiness doesn't prevent the child from modeling it; the modeling is not a result of reasoning, but is due to simple observation and imitation. This mimicry is illustrated in the old saying "Like father, like son," or now better put, "Like parent, like child." Whether parents are happy or not doesn't stop a child from imitating what he or she observes; children are like dry sponges ready to absorb the first water they come in contact with."

Zeus: Everytime one wants to flatten out an undesirable behavior in a child by judgement and control, the intervention may look successful on the surface but the child's mind has gone elsewhere, as Vygotsky described, ... he will remember it when you are around to police him but the 'correction' has been no way assimilated in his way of being, ... causal control is like chasing a snake which is under the rug. Only Mandela stands apart from those world leaders as being one oriented to purpose. Since the media emphasizes the majority, ... the advocates and practitioners of cause/judgement/control, there is little chance for youth to model themselves after leaders like Mandela who would put purpose oriented behavior in the primacy, ... to establish the conditions whereby people can become who they are by blossoming out in their pursuit of purpose. Leadership wasn't always so strongly associated with the fist of righteousness, but the purposive pursuit of growing a legacy of harmony seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Emile: The same leaders who seem blind to their modelling impact on the world front seem equally blind to the power of modelling on children even in domestic issues, because they always return to more and more structure, more control, when waves of unrest emerge amongst youth. One at a time they try to flatten out the waves, as if each were an issue-in-itself, spontaneously arising 'in-situ', and each time they end up infecting the patient so that his health deteriorates even more. Yet, it is easy to see that 'modelling' is a natural 'immersed space-time' process, which acts in the same way as the wind on the sea, ... to pull things into shape, and by pulling on the whole instead of pushing on the part, allowing what is being pulled to co-evolve in its own unique whole-and-part way. .... But but it's an ill wind that blows no good, and our progressive abandonment of purpose in favor of cause/judgement/control promises to seriously disfigure our youth in their unfolding, formerly known as 'blossoming', as they model themselves after these Western 'leadership' behaviors.

Zeus: Yes, I suspect that the energies with which we shall respond to the upwelling of socio-cidal violence amongst youth will be pipelined into yet more 'flattening' a la cause/judgement/control, and we'll probably bring in metal detectors and KGB techniques to further heighten the paranoia and alienation, and since children model after their parents and teachers, ... these will be the new profiles which they will be modelling to. Where will it all end?

Emile: As we both well know, .... the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

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