Category Archives: history

The horse harness

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I think I needlessly mixed up two concepts in my previous entry: Fame, and being important to others. Sometimes they go together, sometimes not. For instance, no one talks about the one who invented the modern horse harness, which allows horses to pull great weight while still breathing freely. Supposedly this happened in China in the 5th century. Perhaps someone there knows. It seems like such a small thing, but it revolutionized agriculture and land transportation, and thereby trade. It came to Europe around the year 800, and without it the Dark Ages might have lasted much longer, if at all moving on toward the Middle Ages (not the same thing!) and eventually to modernity.

The Roman empire did not have the full use of horses in agriculture, although they did use horses in war. Instead, they relied on slave labor. While slavery has happened later as well, we cannot really imagine how important it was to early civilizations. The Christian message of freedom for the slaves, even if weaseled out of at certain times, was greatly helped by our hairy friend the horse, harnessed by a simple invention born out of empathy. Anyone who saw a horse struggle in the old type of harness should have been aware that it had trouble breathing when working hard, but it was probably just one man – or possibly even a woman or child – who thought of how to change it. By giving the horse greater freedom, they also brought freedom to hundreds of thousands of workers through the ages to come.

From “small” things like this, our history became possible. There are many turns where history could have slipped and fallen (and sometimes, it seems, it really did). But here and there, now and then, once in a thousand years, someone came up with an idea that changed everything. Sometimes it was someone great and famous, like Archimedes or Edison, mass inventors both. But sometimes it was just some guy, forgotten by those whose lives he saved.

“I have been here”

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“I learned to be kind because of you.” That is how Unlimited Translation Works renders this line from the song “Kimi no mama de” (YouTube link). The line has also been translated as “I was able to be kind because of you”. So anyway, what have you learned or become able to do because of me?

I have been listening several times now to the song “Read my name” (YouTube link) by Chris de Burgh. I have mixed feelings about this song, and those who know me can probably understand why. Here is the chorus and the essence of the song:

“I have been here!
read my name, read my name!
With all I’ve got I’ve taken part,
I’ve made a difference to the world.
I have been here,
just read my name!”

Chris has mentioned in at least three of his earlier songs a practice of going to the graveyards and reading the names on the headstones there. I get the impression that he considers this a kind of sacred act, as service perhaps both to those who lie beneath those stones and him who doesn’t yet. Because for each such name, there was someone whose life was just as important to them as our life is to us. Someone who dreamed, and tried to share those dreams. Where we are, they have been. Where they are, we shall be. They have been here, just read their names.

I read an article on a Norwegian computer related web site the other day. It said that only a small part of the population used Twitter, and of those who did, only half actually read other people’s tweets. The other half were only interested in sending tweets, not reading them.

My reaction was that this was probably better than in the flesh, where it seems the overwhelming majority are in love with their own voice, and will use most of the time when others speak to prepare their next “message”. In contrast, as I believe my brothers can attest, I rarely have anything to say when I converse with people lately. When they speak, I am listening to them, so I usually don’t have much of a rejoinder when they draw their breath.

Yet even I have my “dance” that I wish to perform in front of the other bees, to tell them where I found my sweet flowers. This is the human condition, I think. (And that of worker bees, or so science says.)  But what does it amount to, beyond “I have been here, read my name”? What is the difference I have made to the world?

2000 years ago, when Jesus Christ lived, there was some 200 to 300 million people in the world. A number of them are still known by name, but even your high school teacher would only know 20-30. To get up to 200-300 (one in a million), without resorting to specific books on the topic, you need a classical scholar. And even then, you don’t get much further.

That is not to say that none of the rest made a difference to the world, a tiny and local difference. And due the “butterfly effect”, history might have been drastically different if one of them had made a different choice one day. But most of those lives kind of canceled out, like the waves of a raindrop hitting the sea on a rainy day. And then there was the depth charge that was Jesus Christ, who set off a tsunami that is still making waves 2000 years later. But how many would have followed his twitter in the year 25, compared to any other random raindrop?

Not so much comparing myself to the incarnate sky-god here, as just reflecting on the scope of things, and how hard it is to say who we are until we are forgotten and only the work we did remains.

Someone else’s theory, put quite simply, is this: The Savior is the light of the great saints. The great saint is the light of the other saints. The saint is the light of the heroes. The hero is the light of the good people. The good is the light of the world. -Details may vary, but in the old days, hierarchy was considered natural, and most thinking people would recognize the expression “the great chain of Being” even if they had not heard it before.

Today, we have democracy, and those who vote depending on the color of someone’s necktie have as much influence as you. Or that is the theory. But it is not quite like that. Well, it may be in elections, but most elections are much less important than people believe. If random people elect other random people, the result will not rise above randomness. And if you cannot rule your own home with wisdom, let us not mention your own body, what will you achieve even if you rise to power or fame? Randomness. Some poor forgotten widow whose feeble life has a single direction will accomplish far more.

By resource or talent I could be a hero, one of a hundred. But apart from a brief spurt of software development, my life has mainly been a raindrop on the sea, so far. Or so it seems to me. But we won’t really know until I am forgotten. As the flesh hides the bone, so does the personal life hide a man’s work. But in time it will be all that is left in this world. (I don’t mean “work” in the sense of “employment”, of course, but accomplishment.)

Back to a better future

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Modern, unhealthy food is making inroads in Japan as well. Not a good thing, but at least it beats the Middle Ages.

There are those who say that we live unnatural lives today, and suffer for it. Our genes are those who survived thousands of years of physical labor and a low-fat diet, so when we now have the opposite, our bodies don’t know how to react. The result is an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and atherosclerosis.

Hogwash, say others. The lives of our ancestors were nasty, brutish, and short. Human life expectancy is at an all-time high and still increasing, even in the mature west, with about 5 hours a day. In the developing world, progress is much faster, as people are fleeing in droves from the “healthy” life of backbreaking labor and periodic famine.

There is certainly a tendency to make the past more romantic. The people who do so tend to be on the political left, but not all liberals hold this opinion. Some liberals have actually studied history, and it is hard to think of any period of the past that was not worse than our own time in numerous ways.

That does not mean we can learn nothing from it, however. You’d think it would be the conservatives who tried to conserve the few good points of a sad time, but even these tend to yearn for a glorious past that never was: Only their imaginary good times were more recent, some time in the previous century usually. But the decades without condoms but with coat hangers were not a paradise either.

That said, there certainly are new challenges today. Childhood obesity is rampant, and unless some solution is found, it will be very hard for them to reach the age of their parents and grandparents who put on weight later in life. Every process in the body goes much faster in childhood, and this includes the harmful effects of fat in the body. We recently learned that fat has another effect apart from clogging up arteries: It acts as a pro-inflammation agent. This seems to be why autoimmune diseases are rampant in today’s high-fat population.

(Notice that fat induces inflammation when it circulates in the bloodstream. As long as it is stowed away in the fat cells, it is more or less harmless, so a person with lots of fat cells can be obese and have very little fat in the blood, and a person with few fat cells can look normal but suffer from chronic fat poisoning.)

We should certainly do our best to avoid a return to the past, with its backbreaking child labor and tooth-breaking chaff-laden diet. This does not change the fact that some physical movement each day is extremely good for your health. The question is, can we as a society do anything about this, without installing video surveillance in the homes?

Yes, we can, and we already do. In Japan, physical exercise in schools is quite a bit more frequent and more strenuous than in the US, and while children there are fatter than their parents were, they are still lagging greatly behind on the obesity wave. Here in Norway, it has become normal for schools to provide fruit for children to snack on as an alternative to bringing in chips and chocolate. As long as the child does not already have a chronic disease, the school is ideally positioned to boost public health. It is already a prison to most of the kids, after all, so a little extra torture in the form of running a few laps won’t cause an armed uprising.

For the most part, however, our lives are our own. In other words, it is up to you and me to learn from the past and the present, then use this knowledge to build a better future. This future should follow a middle way, I believe. Moderation in all things. Then again, there is a saying that “moderation is for monks”. Strangely enough, monks tend to live long and healthy lives, but the option still remains less than wildly popular.

High Spirits and history

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“The cherry blossoms have not changed at all in the last thousand years….” Some things change daily, some not in a thousand years. Telling these apart is in itself a very useful skill, and can make a fool wise.

If we are to believe Happy Science (the Japanese religion movement, not just any happy scientist) there is a limited number of super high spirits for this planet, like archangels and saviors, and they are being incarnated from time to time to put history right. So this coincides with the conservative view of history I mentioned, that history is largely the work of a relatively few people, while the rest more or less drift with the currents, unaware of their part in the larger picture.

To make it worse, each of the High Spirits will show up repeatedly, making the numbers even smaller. For instance Newton was formerly Archimedes, and Buddha was Hermes (at least to some degree). So even though most of the really important people through history was one of these, there are only about 500 in total. So far Happy Science.

According to the substantially less happy science we know from ordinary history books, things were pretty harsh in the past. Life was poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short. (Not so sure about the solitary part, since people had to crowd together with aunts and cousins in tiny houses or even tents. But nasty for sure. And smelly, let’s not forget smelly. Life was poor, smelly, nasty, brutish and short. The reason Hobbes forgot to include smelly was probably that at his time, life was STILL smelly. It was also still considerably shorter than now, on average, not least on his continent.)

If we go back a few generations from Hobbes, we also have another problem: Eyeglasses were not invented yet. Therefore the few sages who actually existed (and who did not die to war or plague or infected hangnails) were rendered unable to read on their own around the age of 50. Since those who had lived that long were likely to hang on for another 20 years or so, the invention of glasses would effectively double their time as a sage. (You aren’t born a sage, you know. Well most of us aren’t.)

Now what I am trying to say is that having even a limited number of non-idiots in the past is a miracle of Biblical proportions. Even if you could read, how many books were you likely to see in a lifetime before the printing press? And how broad would the background be of those books? What were your chances of gathering the wisdom of two or three or more different cultures or religions? Add to this that some of the great minds of the past were not scribes at all, but warriors or shepherds or some such.

While some of the famous people from the past were more known for their deeds than their thoughts, it is certainly true that some had a very high level of consciousness. They had an overview of life that is rare today, even though we are so well informed. They did not have our encyclopedic knowledge, but from the knowledge they had, they came to insights that have stood the test of time.

In contrast, many people today have a fairly low level of consciousness, even though so much knowledge is readily available. They continue to blame others for problems they could easier fix by changing themselves. They believe in random conspiracy theories that are easily disproved, and their beliefs make them unhappy.

Let me take a random example, not sure if I have mentioned this before. In the western world, a very large number of women (and even some men) believe that women are systematically paid less for their work than men. This would certainly look so if you look simply at the pay checks. But let us take a few seconds to draw this to its logical conclusion. If women were generally paid less for the same work, then you could start a business and hire only women. Businesses who hired only women, or almost only, would constantly earn more money, and eventually squeeze the competition out. This would cause massive joblessness among men and lack of female workers in the private sector, causing the men who were employed at all to mainly work in government-funded jobs where profit didn’t matter. Reality check! Is this your world?

Obviously any individual woman may be underpaid. The way to find out is to look for an employer who is willing to pay more. This is the same for women, men, eunuchs and hermaphrodites. It is also the same as a potato farmer trying to sell his potatoes. He may strongly dislike that people are paying more for wheat, even though potatoes are superior in every way and deserve a much higher price. But reality takes precedence. There is no worldwide conspiracy of billions of potato-haters, and likewise there is actually no such conspiracy of misogynists. Life if tough for everyone. Projecting the cause of our unhappiness on others may seem to help for a short time, but it also keeps us from making the best out of what we actually can change, namely ourselves.

There are many, many such projections. People blame the Jews, the Muslims, the Whites, the Hispanics, the Gypsies, the Republicans, the Democrats, their parents, teachers, employers, neighbors. All of these people who are blamed have actual, real faults. Who hasn’t? But because people have a low level of consciousness, they trip over the various faults of others which they rarely can do anything about, and forget to correct their own faults which are right there for the taking. Seen from a higher perspective, these are much like an animal in a cage, which claws randomly on the walls because it is unable to figure out the fairly simple lock to the cage.

By listening to the words of high spirits, whether you believe they come down from Heaven or grow up from the Earth, you can learn from them and become more and more like them. After all, humans are born with a phenomenal ability to learn. Just to go about your daily life you need to know a large number of things. You need to know how to dress yourself, how to find your way in a town or city, basic economic knowledge like having to pay for food, and of course you probably keep track of a large number of human relationships. By applying this learning ability toward the words and deeds of the people whose lives shine across history like brilliant lights, you can rise up to become a brilliant light yourself.

It’s gonna take its sweet time though, judging by myself. Well, all the more reason to get cracking!

Heroes and history

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If Thomas Edison had not invented the phonograph, would we still have MP3 players today?  Or would there have been no gramophones, no tape recorders, no cassette players, no CDs, a world where canned sound remained as unimaginable as it was to the Founding Fathers?

I think this may be a matter where the world looks very different depending on whether you are a conservative or a socialist. And since most of these have little or no ability to peek over the fence, I shall take it upon myself to give you something at least a bit closer to the truth.

In the conservative view, history is for the most part a result of a few well-known people who have changed its course in one way or another.  Mao, Stalin, Hitler.  Churchill, Lincoln, Washington.  Jesus, Buddha, Moses.  Einstein, Newton, Archimedes. Remove any of these or various other “main characters” and history flows in a completely different direction, leading to a world mind-numbingly different from today.

To the socialist, history is a more or less predictable flow of micro-events adding up, driven primarily by economic conditions. Never mind that Marx’ own predictions were about as accurate as weather forecasts by a five year old. After all, Marx himself was limited by the extreme scarcity of information at the time, thus proving that everyone is a child of their own time. In theory it should still be possible to make a fairly good model of how history unfolds under varying general conditions.

One socialist author wrote with sarcasm about Alexander the Great conquering the known world:  “Did he not even bring a cook?”  The point is, of course, that Alexander would not be able to conquer even a tiny village alone, much less the Persian empire, Egypt and much of India and Afghanistan. This is true enough.  But it is equally true that the thousands of men, whether soldiers and cooks, made no serious attempt at establishing a Hellenistic empire before Alexander showed up.  What he did was give them a focus, a vision, a direction for their abilities.  They did not simply flow like water – someone had to break the dam that held them.

You could say that the most typical political hero is a vessel for the aspirations of the people, acting to contain and concentrate them, directing them toward a goal they may not have been aware of but generally agree with.  This also holds true for the political villain, only with different aspirations.  The difference is not always easy to see if you are very close.  In any case, the aspirations alone are not enough to create the hero. There must also be a vessel of the required stature.  Even with tragic flaws, it is required that you be larger than life.

Cultural heroes seem to be even less predictable than military and political ones. Sometimes they seem to embody a particular age, sometimes to usher one in.  Why do a bunch of them suddenly appear at the same time and in the same cultural area, like in the Renaissance?  What kind of social engineering do you plan to do to create a larger number of people like Mozart or Michelangelo? How do you produce an Einstein? (Apart from having a number of Jews around.)

The thing is, you must be a fool to think history-changing heroes just conveniently appear when the economic “realities” dictate it, kind of like fools of the past believed that flies and rats were spontaneously created in rotting food.  (Pasteur, another hero, proved this wrong.) Then again, you are definitely not going to conquer the world without a cook. And even the greatest teacher of philosophy or faith is of little worth if there is no one to hear. It is the interplay between the guides and the guided that make history advance.  More about that later, perhaps.  It was actually that I wanted to write about, but you see what happened.

Do Arabs love their children too?

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di090430

In Japan, relatives may “facilitate” a future marriage to be agreed on some time before it can legally be consummated, and the young person may feel some degree of pressure, which we may have a hard time relating to here. But it is still pretty mild compared to some other places, and almost all other times.

Don’t read this if you are a child. Seriously, it is not good for you. It is hard enough for grown-ups.

During the Cold war, Sting famously sang “Russians love their children too”. Which is probably true, and even with a fairly similar love to what we expect around here. But this is not so everywhere, and was not so for most of our history. That is not to say that mothers did not love their children, but it was often a twisted and broken love, like the one they had received themselves. We see echoes of this when a Palestinian mother beams proudly in the background as her schoolboy earnestly tells the reporter that he wants to become a “martyr” (suicide bomber).

I don’t say this to demonize them. For one thing, they are indeed in hell, but as tortured souls rather than demons. Worse than the desperation of their outer circumstances is the desperation of the twisted and broken structures of their mind, as they were raised with the same madness as they exhibit today, if not more so.

Nor is this unique to them – this was the shared fate of mankind for a long, long time. Indeed, it was worse than pretty much any place on the globe today. In ancient Greece, at the time when they invented philosophy and democracy, it was still not only possible but actually practiced to kill babies by throwing them down off a cliff. This was the father’s privilege, admittedly. But it obviously does something to a mother as well to know that her child may be here today, gone tomorrow. Due to infant mortality, this was actually a common attitude until less than two centuries ago. Mothers were advised against getting too attached to children, as most of them would die anyway.

The notion that one should not have sex with children is also fairly new. Perhaps that is why it causes so intense feelings in our society, where the mere suspicion of pedophilia is enough to strip a man of any human rights, including the right to be considered innocent until guilty. (I refer you again to the trial in Kristiansand, the city where I work, where the suspect was depicted with photographs in the newspaper well before the trial, and as a consequence sentenced despite no evidence of guilt and some evidence of innocence.) The exceptionally intense fear and loathing is, I believe, caused by the fact that sexual abuse of children is still secretly practiced by many and remembered by many more, directly or indirectly by the irrational agitation of their own parents at the sight of potentially erotic play by the small child.

Geography is to some extent history, and returning to our Arab relatives, today we can celebrate the news that an 8 year old Saudi girl is granted a divorce from her 50 year old husband. If it sticks this time. Again I am not demonizing the Arabs – there is no need. A society in which such a thing can even happen, much less be endorsed by the courts until diplomatic relations are at stake, is already pretty demonic enough, at least for small girls. It may be paradisical for 50 year old pedophiles, perhaps, but I’m not sure that counts. Again, this is not because they happen to be Arabs, it is the original human culture.

See, this is why multiculturalists need to be put out of their misery, or at least kept away from small girls. No, all cultures are not equally valid. Even the best of today’s cultures have only come this far by millennia of painful climbing toward the light, and our foothold is tenuous even today.

If you have a strong stomach, you may peruse the Psychohistory website and see what child abuse of all kinds have done and may still be doing to society. Lloyd deMause is a rabid leftist, unfortunately, but still reasonably sane when writing about things outside his own country and century. Not recommended for pregnant readers. OK, actually not recommended for anyone but the most hardened and cynical misanthrope who expect every human to be a bastard-coated bastard with bastard filling until proven otherwise by a trial of fire. If you have children or have memories of having been a child, don’t read it, or at least not past the front page. Any link you click will take you on a tour of Hell proper.

God’s wife

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And other stories from when Jehovah was young.

Wouldn’t that be an awesome name for a book? Unfortunately for its mass market acceptance, John Day’s book has the slightly more scholarly title “Yahweh and the gods and goddesses of Canaan”. It is also written in an extremely scholarly style, with footnotes taking up about as much space as the actual text, and numerous discussions of what other scholars have to say on the matter. Still, it is a fairly easy read if you don’t get scared by the format.  (Google Books is your friend. Google Books loves you.)

It should go without saying that the book is strongly discommended for Jehovah’s Witnesses, but unfortunately many other good Christians would probably get terribly upset too if they read it. So don’t, at least until you have read the Bible enough to outgrow the static worldview in which people’s impression of God is supposed to always be the same, no matter when and where.

The Bible actually says out loud that it is a gradual revelation. When Yahweh talks to Moses, he explicitly mentions that the patriarchs did not know him by this name. Even though there are a few references to Yahweh in Genesis. It’s not like Genesis was a blog, you know, which was written down as it happened. And for us Christians, the whole idea of the New Covenant (and the New Testament) requires belief in a gradual revelation. While millions of Christians are adamant that it ended there, that’s not what Jesus says. On the contrary, he complains that he has a lot of things he could not talk to his disciples when he was around them, but had to leave it to the Spokesman, the Spirit of Truth. As far as we know, that One is still at work. If allowed to.

In this perspective, it becomes quite interesting to see that the early Israelites thought God was married. It made perfect sense to them. Everyone married, except losers. Obviously an amazing God would have an amazing wife. The wife in question was Asherah. Some translations (including the one I grew up with) named her Astarte, but if the texts of nearby Ugarit are any indication, Astarte was her daughter.

Actually that’s why I came across this book, while reading wild-eyed people who believe that Easter is named after Astarte. (Easter is named after Eastre / Eostre, a goddess of dawn and spring, worshiped during the Dark Ages. There is no historical record of the corresponding German goddess Ostara, not that this stopped German poets from letting their imagination run wild. Ostara again should supposedly be the same as Astarte, despite the languages being utterly incomprehensible to each other, having separated while the Neanderthals were still alive and well.)

Be that as it may, the Canaanite culture that preceded Israel had worshiped a pantheon of gods, the chief god being called simply El, which corresponds to our word God. For clarification he was frequently called El Elyon (God Most High) or El Shaddai (God of the Mountains, or God Almighty). The old, wise and merciful El presided on the holy mountain of the gods in the north, and his 70 sons were gods of the various countries. All of these details are found in the Hebrew Scriptures as well, so there was at least some continuity despite Yahweh’s burning hate of the Canaanites (kill them all and their camels too). In fact, cultural artifacts indicate that most of Israel actually descended from the Canaanites. In any case, the Bible attests that they were never even remotely eradicated but lived among Israel for centuries after the conquest.

So it should surprise no one that the Israelites, at least before the monarchy, believed in many of the old tales about El, Baal, Asherah and Astarte etc. In fact, there are inscriptions referring to Yahweh and His Asherah, a reasonable assumption since they were told Yahweh was God, and God was married to Asherah, the Queen of Heaven. The prophets kept trying to explain that God wasn’t like that, but it took many long centuries before it started to sink in.

Once you know the cultural context, it is plain to see how the Old Testament portrays a gradual revelation from polytheism through a phase of hierogamy before God is finally seen as spirit, not some old guy up there. (I guess this is still a work in progress some places.)

And at each point, the peasants were no doubt just as certain as we are that they had the final revelation. Nobody though “Why, I am actually blaspheming and worshiping a caricature of God, despite my best intentions.” And neither do I.