Vegetarian

When did primates begin to eat meat? Perhaps after they learned to harness fire and cook meat so it became soft enough for those with less-than-perfect teeth to chew and digest. In some areas of the world, there isn’t much of the vegetable world to choose from. The tribes who lived in the Arctic had a short season to gather fruit, seeds and roots. If there was game all around them, and they observed carnivorous species surviving on meat, their logic must have led them to adapt to a meat-only diet. The sea was a plentiful source of food, and with a hereditary knowledge that humans needed protein and fat to thrive, they added fish to their diet and saved themselves from a strict diet of roots and fruit. 

Meat-eating developed from a need to use what was available to combat hunger. Vegetarians contend that they are more evolved than these primitive people and don’t need meat. In richer countries, there is ready access to a variety of food groups, making it possible to live healthily without eating meat, but not all people across the world have the luxury of these choices.  Where is a dweller in the Sahara Desert to find a tomato?  Vegetarians may believe they are superior to meat eaters, but this superiority only applies to those who have a choice.  Having passed many periods on a strictly vegetable diet, I choose to eat meat because it is a ready source of good protein. Like most humans, I was born with a digestive system that can make good use of meat for energy. I cannot deny my biology.

Some don’t eat meat because they believe that killing animals is cruel. Depending on how the act is done, this is more or less true. Death for any living thing is tragic but inevitable. Animals die, plants die, and humans die. Humans perceive life on a limited level. Dogs and cats experience the world differently from us, and so does every living thing. I subscribe to the hypothesis that just because we can’t sense something with our limited faculties, it doesn’t mean the thing doesn’t exist. We can carry on munching carrots, deluding ourselves that nothing died and nothing suffered to feed us. But the carrot died; we interrupted its life cycle in harvest, pulling it up in the best of health. I accept that things die so that we can live. This is true whether I eat meat, vegetables, or both.

I silently say grace with every meal to give thanks for everything that gives its life so I can survive. I don’t argue that vegetarians should change their ways, but I believe they are somewhat misguided. However, if being vegetarian keeps these people’s bodies and consciences clean, they are welcome to their folly. In all aspects of life, it is important to remember that whatever we do or eat, it should be in moderation, with an ever-present awareness of what we are doing and why.

The End of the Age of Plastic

Plastic, as a word, means malleable, but when most of us hear it, we think of a bag, a cup, a container for something, a disposable thing. Plastic is a petroleum product. Considering that petroleum is a non-renewable resource, it's time we envisioned a world without plastic. What is now manufactured as a commodity as insignificant as paper, which may, in the future, become a collector’s passion.  Like a grandparent’s remark, “When I was young, we walked everywhere,” our present use of plastic will become a curiosity of a time when everything was made of this inexpensive material. Will a plastic grocery bag become a museum item?

It is difficult to predict what might replace plastic, but in our commerce-driven world, whatever replaces it must be economically viable. We already use glass and metal, which existed before plastic came along, but they have not yet regained their superior position over inexpensive, oil-based products.  Plastic is considered disposable, and though glass and metal can be recycled, it is easier to discard plastic and be guilt-free.  By the time plastic is a rare commodity, as collectable as Bakelite, our lives will have changed thanks to the effect of scarce petroleum.  Until we sort out power storage systems like batteries, travel using other power sources may be limited to short hops.  Production of what were once inexpensive items for mass consumption will be limited, and we will have to come up with alternative heat and light sources. This slow demise of the petroleum culture will cause a major shift in our lifestyle. Although we won’t return to a savage existence, we will be forced to subsist on a smaller scale, more sustainably. The items we use in everyday life may not only be metal and glass, but also stone, wood and other plant materials.  

The tools we use in our daily lives will always employ basic materials, either renewable or unlimited, but what was once considered unlimited may not always be so.  Passenger pigeons and buffalo were once thought to exist in unlimited numbers. We presume that light, wind, rock, earth, and water are unlimited resources, but they are not renewable options. What grows on earth is considered a renewable resource, but will there be enough organic material to sustain a growing population? 

Instead of plastic being the throwaway material, it may return to specialized use, which exploits its nominal value, that of malleability. It is possible that plastic could be used almost exclusively for replicating living things like the human body. Our technology may advance to reproducing simulations of life from cells of anything that lives or once lived. Petroleum products, like plastic, will simply become a rare catalyst in the construction of inventions that promise to assist our survival. It staggers the imagination that the capabilities of a natural gift like petroleum are now squandered in products like shopping bags and throw-away temporary products.  Grandparents of the future will speak of plastic pipes, furniture, clothing, toys, tires, and casings for electronic devices.  Today's rubbish dumps may be mined to recover scarce plastic that has not yet broken down, so it can be repurposed into valuable, scarce commodities. 

Situational Awareness

Situational awareness is a term often used in aeronautical and military training to instruct combatants and pilots to be cognizant of what is happening around them. It is a skill that is infrequently used by many people in their everyday lives,  "I never saw it coming."  Many people go about their business with little awareness of where they are and what is in their vicinity. Situational awareness is like a mother’s claim of having eyes in the back of her head, but actually employs more senses than just vision. When walking down the street, many people unconsciously watch where they put their feet (and some don’t) and subliminally assess anyone they are approaching.  They make a judgement about a person or situation, and adjust their stance on a sliding scale of friend or foe. This instinct comes from the animal kingdom. We humans can fine-tune this simple scale into many tones on our way to making the decision about how to react. Do we ignore them, make eye contact, cross the street, or stop and speak to them?

Our awareness and reaction are also influenced by our surroundings. Is it day or night? Am I in familiar or strange territory? Are there other people present? What are the cultural habits of the place I am in? We use this skill of situational awareness to pass safely, and to communicate whatever it is that we need or want. This helps keep us safe in our world. 

When one begins driving lessons, an instructor may raise the point of situational awareness, because it is critical to safe driving. Bad driving is a perfect example of how people aren’t observant, as it results in an inability to judge situations and act appropriately. The worst case of a driver with a lack of situational awareness is a driver with tunnel vision, who drives straight ahead, looking only in front of him, but not too far.  He doesn’t look side to side, or use his mirrors, but drives his car like he has no control except stop and go. He may be driving in Bangalore, where this is normal, but for clarity's sake, we'll stick to Western habits. The tunnel vision driver may suffer from compromised motor and observational skills, so that staying inside one lane of traffic pushes him to the maximum of his capabilities. He fears that if he looks sideways or back, he may lose control of his forward motion, which, in his state of reduced capability, may happen. Driving is a skill that requires multitasking, but some people find this difficult or impossible. Apart from some differences in speed and capacity to retain information levels, humans can be trained to multitask. A new mother learns this from necessity, as there are many rapid changes in children, and they require constant attention.  Multitasking while driving is the ability to control the speed & direction of a vehicle, while being fully aware of what is happening on the rest of the road, and trying to anticipate what might happen. Some drivers believe that multitasking while driving is the ability to eat, drink coffee, apply makeup, window shop, and talk on a cell phone, all while changing lanes, gears, and radio stations. These dangerous habits would be better substituted by thinking about where they want to go on the road, and what is the best way to arrive.  Driving responsibly requires awareness of the other vehicles on the road whose drivers have their own agenda, which may or may not make sense.

An important point about situational awareness is that those who lack it are not only a danger to themselves but  a danger to others. What will happen to a child whose mother isn’t aware of the child's needs? What would happen in traffic if all drivers thought in only forward mode? What would happen if we perceived all who approached us as an enemy and reacted violently toward them with no reason?

Situational awareness can also be used to maintain our own physical and mental health. A doctor will often tell a patient to pay attention to his own body, repeating this obvious reminder because it is too often ignored. When an obese or thin person looks in the mirror, do they only see what they want to see, or do they see the objective truth about the state of their bodies? If a person experiences constant headaches, do they examine their life and try to discover if the cause is mental, physical, environmental, or do they just take a pill to cover up the pain?

There are three stages of situational awareness: the perception of the situation, the placing of the perceived factors on our own personal scale, and the decisions we make about our actions in this situation, which usually involve projecting any situation into the future.  How will this situation play out? Several factors figure into our ability to react appropriately to any given situation. The first is experience, the second is knowledge, the third is processing velocity, and the fourth is the degree of transparency of any situation.

In the absence of professional counselling, many people are unable to apply the concepts of situational awareness to their own life choices, and many people subvert the obvious. We know from information received from the outside world, from our own experience, that smoking is bad for us, yet we carry on with an addiction like this despite all the information that it is harmful. Overeaters continue to overeat and either admit that they do this or they delude themselves about what and how much they eat, yet continue to make unhealthy choices. Even in illogical situations like this, situational awareness plays a part. We may consider our life to be valueless, so we eat, drink, and smoke to comfort ourselves while we pass the time. We all die sooner or later, and if the future doesn’t look particularly bright, we choose to indulge ourselves along the way. This bleak perception of the future is particularly prevalent in the young. Negation of the future is a common state in adolescents and young people.  They don’t see themselves as capable of great things or their world to be heading in the right direction, so why try?  It's better to put on the blinkers and enjoy the ride, even if it leads to their own destruction. It is particularly damaging when this nihilistic approach is carried into full adulthood. These people may or may not be aware of the state that their negative beliefs have brought them to, but willful self-destruction is not a tenet of life – it is anti-life.

Our society doesn’t encourage people to think for themselves, nor to examine the causes of things that happen around them. Governments know that people are more easily controlled if they are accustomed to being told what to do. This creates a world in which people often don’t know how to react to an unfamiliar situation until someone else tells them. People feel comforted when they can easily categorize an event into a box that allows them to assimilate the event, and they feel righteous when that particular box is a widely held belief in their own culture. They feel unified and validated, even if they are mistaken, since they have lost the skill of judging information for themselves. They are not encouraged to be aware, to think for themselves, to act of their own volition, to trust their own reading of a situation, and to act appropriately based on what they know. When people have lost situational awareness, their own survival is at risk. Many people live their lives so entangled in petty dramas that they lose sight of who they are, where they are going, and how to get there. Like the Tarot fool with one foot off a cliff, they don’t realize that their lack of attention to necessary things severely compromises their survival.

The Poverty of Speech

While learning the Greek language, I was surprised that in the small village where I lived, when I asked for the correct word to describe something new, I was told an old word which I already knew. If I asked how a hosepipe became detached from a faucet, I would be told that it left the outlet.  The word "leave" has the same meaning it does in English, so using it here was not a good description.  The word used for outlet was the same as an electrical wall receptacle.  It was like saying that the hosepipe walked away from the plug.  Context is everything, otherwise the explanation could mean anything.  This use of simple words is not because the Greek language isn’t as rich as other languages, but because in a village where people only need to converse with their small circle, the same words are recycled to take on multiple meanings. There are complicated, precise terms in any language, but most people have no need of them as they are too difficult to remember, and people think that their neighbours wouldn’t understand them, and perhaps in that they are correct.  I once commented while in Italy that Italian seemed like an easy language, but was reprimanded by a German speaker, who correctly pointed out that although the language may appear simple at first blush, the more one learns, the more one realizes that correct Italian is as complicated as any other language.

Not only does a language have its idioms and dialects, which are enough to stump any learner, but it also has a plethora of words that are not heard on the street every day. Think of the English we use in daily oral communication as compared to the English in scientific or technical writing. Someone who has studied a language in school would probably have an easier time deciphering technical terms than they would have understanding a grunted, idiomatic, fractured conversation. One can always tell if a non-English speaker has learned the language from lessons or from the street, because their English is more precise, even if no one on the street understands them.

Languages always evolve, but often this is for the worse rather than the better. I see nothing wrong with invented words if they describe something more accurately. Nor is there anything wrong with the habit which has developed in the U.S. in recent years of using nouns as verbs, for example, “How does this impact our budget?” or "Mrs. Smith will chair the meeting." Words change their meanings according to usage. How else did “bad” become good? Technology also introduces new words, which are necessary to describe newly encountered entities.

English has lessened its descriptive power due to the tendency to limit vocabulary. A prime candidate for this in English is the verb “get”. We use it so much that it must be accompanied by a multitude of helper words because, by itself, it means so much or it means nothing. Try describing what “get” means to a foreigner. Get out, get busy, get by, get over, get through, get down, get back – the list is endless. All of these “get” phrases have better single words to describe the same thing, but we don’t use them. Do we prefer the poorer “get” because “get” is more common, tougher, more street, or is it that in American society, to show any sign of intelligence is considered an elitist weakness? This tendency to simplify things for whatever reason causes a language to lose words. Who nowadays uses “arise” for get up? We simply don’t have a word anymore for getting out of bed – the original word has all but disappeared.

Most people who speak only English tend to believe that English is some kind of mother language, which is the best at describing everything. English is, in fact, a great thief of words from other languages, which is one of the reasons it can be so rich. When one learns another language, however, one begins to understand that English is poor at describing many things. An example of this is the word “love”. Other languages have several words for love which describe various states. English speakers blather on about how much they love their car, their dog, or their McDonald’s hamburger, using the identical word “love” for their children or their spouse. The love for children and hamburgers is clearly not the same thing, so why then do we use the same word? Love has become such a catch-all word that, in the end, it means nothing.

The word “know” in English is another example of our laziness. Most other languages have one word for “know” in the sense of understand (Do you know how to ski?) and another word for “know” in the sense of being acquainted with. Not many people use the word “acquainted” anymore and would be thought old-fashioned for doing so, but the word “know” by itself is imprecise.

So many of our words now depend on context for meaning. That is, you can’t understand what they mean unless they are used in a phrase which explains them. This leads to many words which either mean nothing by themselves or are essentially non-words like “get”. If a language fills itself up with non-words which depend on usage for meaning, the language loses much of its beauty, precision, and power. Just as some people have a habit of overusing expletives in conversation, the power of a word is diminished when it is used as a filler, and it lends nothing to the meaning of a particular subject. If we use the “F” word as our only adjective, the shock value disappears.

Years ago, when I emerged from the cinema after seeing “Quest for Fire,” which was scripted with inflected grunts instead of words, I realized that our everyday conversations have not changed much in 10,000 years as I listened to comments about the film, which consisted of, “Yeah, mmh, huh, uuh, kinda, uhuh, y’know, like, wow!"  We've become one-dimensional guttural animals who disparage nuance and learning. 

Take on Memes

A meme is a unit of cultural transmission. It takes its name from the French word “meme,” which means “same”, but also contains echoes of mimetic and memory. Whereas genes are passed on biologically, memes are units of information passed on by imitation and reproduction. Willingly or unwillingly, we absorb memes from the time we are born. Taking on these units of information is as important to our survival as a healthy set of genes might be.

From the start, people who have specific skills for childbirth, have had this knowledge passed along to them.   They weren't born with the information but have learned it from other mothers, midwives, or doctors. Beyond the latest technological tools for microsurgery, the fact that the doctor might wear glasses to help him see is itself a product of memes. When someone discovered that a piece of curved rock crystal could magnify things, he transmitted this information to someone else. This information about glass is only one of the millions of memes that assist us in our daily lives. With poor eyesight, the doctor might not have been able to attend medical school and go on to save lives. Simple eyeglasses help us see the information that helps us learn what cannot be passed on by those closest to us.  We speak, we write, we read, we learn, and we ask. Languages are produced by memes. From our family units, to our communities, our religions, our inner selves and our worldview, all of these belief systems are learned by imitation.

Memes are not new, but they have only recently been named. The study of meme dynamics helps us understand ourselves as a species on more than just a biological level. There are many branches of meme theory - meme warfare, memes as parasites, the study of macro memes (religion & theories) and micro memes (words & habits), the brain as a host for memes, the extinction & replication of memes, adaptation of memes by natural selection, and the death of memes. Memes are passed on and caught by word, by mouth, by action, by all of our senses. Memes live in us, in the media, on the internet. It has been said that “a human being is an animal infested by memes”. Humans can be faulty carriers of memes.  Computers are better at this as they can quickly calculate possible outcomes, but computers, for the moment, lack some of the tools for processing memes like morality and inspiration.

Memes mutate by re-imagining themselves in light of other memes. Much like our galaxy’s spiral form, memes, when reproduced, are not exact replicas of their seed, but are sown on another level up or down a spiral path of the long human march.

Unfortunately, many people these days consider memes to be a joke, a way of poking fun at a cultural icon.  The importance of the word and what it has done for humanity has been trivialized and discounted.  Without memes, there would be no Internet, yet the online memes that helped to create it have eaten their own mother. 

Dreaming in Bytes

The brain is like a sponge, absorbing experiences during the day that may be acted on immediately and stored for later. Knowledge is constructed by integrating this new information into a semi-permanent file.  When we weigh it up against what we already know and find it compatible, we accept it as truth. There is a critical factor in this judgment, which is skepticism.  If something doesn't seem quite right to us, these unresolved experiences often come out in dreams. Our brains have filed these preoccupations into folders where they can be accessed and put forward for resolution at a later date. When an unsettling replay resists classification, the process of dreaming tries to re-enact a scene to understand what occurred, matching it with similar settings, characters, and emotions.  If the unresolved event is eventually understood, it can pass into our knowledge base as an evidential cohesive fact. If it is not resolved, it is put back into storage so it can be returned to the luggage carousel at a future date and mixed with a different set of suitcases to see if it now makes sense.
 
Some cultures believe that dreams are an alternate reality, and this, to me, is akin to the theory of a parallel universe – neither proved nor disproved. Some believe that knowledge is passed on in dreams, and to some extent, this is true, but waking reality plays a larger part in our understanding of the world. Since empirical knowledge is stored in an area that is accessible in dreaming, the mixed salad of our dreams also contributes to our knowledge base. When some undigested experience resurfaces in dreams, it can play out in a way that helps us understand it better.  It isn't often that dreams are understood immediately, but the practice of writing them down can reveal their truth long after the fact, even if it is only to reinforce our emotional state at the time we dreamed them.  Often, we don't recognize this state until it has passed and been filed in our memory. The way experiences are processed may have a territorial factor that harks back to the disgraced belief in phrenology, but has now returned thanks to the technology of CAT scans and MRIs. When someone says something is “in the back of my mind”, common experience tells us that the brain cells used for storing more permanent knowledge are located deep in the cranial filing cabinet. Frontal brain cells, among other things, control our more immediate facial and lingual responses. When a person says something is “on the tip of my tongue,” it is an indication that the frontal engine is trying to access the dustier reaches of our minds before it can move the information forward.

Filing cabinets of memory can work like a zip file, remaining compressed, occupying little space until a trigger or command asks for an unzip and the file or memory expands. Often, this trigger occurs in dreaming.  Memory access during a dream isn’t a perfect search, but all of our memory searches in waking time aren’t always successful.  When we are awake, an unexpected memory or desire can drift forward at an inappropriate moment. Unrelated events, scenes, and people can populate dreams, sometimes causing perplexing combinations. Often, we wake from dreams asking ourselves, “What was that about?” Unless we can separate extraneous elements from relevant ones, we can’t make sense of our dreams.

Sometimes a dream - more often a nightmare - will wake us. Before we wake, our body will try to react to an event in the dream, and we will kick, move our arms, try to speak, grunt, or shout aloud. Sometimes we enter a half-waking limbo, where we know we are dreaming, wish to wake up but can’t, and consciously try to move or make a noise that will wake us. Informed by the body's need, our knowledge base tells us that we are dreaming as the body struggles to overcome sleep paralysis. Our survival instinct knows that remaining in a panic state for a long time will be traumatic to the brain, and therefore signals the brain to push us up into consciousness. This struggle can also be thought of as the workings of the frontal brain and the rear brain to communicate. It is now widely accepted that the brain stem at the back of the brain controls the motor functions like breathing, heartbeat, etc., and the survival instinct is based there. Since messages travel across protein networks, it takes time to assemble the appropriate files to travel the circuits from the back to the middle knowledge base to the frontal cortex. It can take a few seconds to wake up from a nightmare. We are, after all, humans, not high RAM computers.

Generally, our brain tries to do what is best for our body. The body is the vessel for the brain. Included in this instinctual health program are dreams. Our mind tries to digest our experiences in an automatic defrag, which takes place every night. Defrag is short for defragmentation, which attempts to re-file stray bits of information so there are more blocks of stable usable space available for new memories. Unless we defragment our brains for a period every 24 hours, we do not remain effective, rational, or sane in our waking lives.

There are computer programs that suggest the user should delete information that is not connected to any usable material or that has not been accessed for a long time. Much like a computer, our brains sometimes tell us that certain bytes of information are gone, permanently deleted, but this is not actually the case. Microsoft and other computer systems would have us believe that deleted information is unrecoverable, but those who understand computers on more than a superficial level know that everything which was once there is still there. This is also true for the brain. We don’t really forget, we only can’t remember. Sometimes what we thought we had forgotten will return to us at unexpected moments. Sometimes lost memories return in dreams.

Dreams are natural, useful, healthy, elusive things. We benefit by understanding them. The antidote to fear is self-knowledge. The antidote to communal fear lies in understanding our world. Dreams help all of us in all realms.

The Feelgood Virus Rules the West

In Western society, feeling good has become a guide for how to behave and what to buy.  The criterion for whether or not a thing has value is whether it feels good to the person who interacts with it.  The opposite of this is that if something doesn’t feel good, it has no value. In our lives, apparently, we should only keep what makes us feel good. The problem with this belief is that nothing has ever happened or been invented that advanced the well-being of mankind without some struggle, and struggle doesn’t feel good. Schools often teach that correcting children might stifle and therefore damage their creative spirit, so we must always praise everything a child does. This is not to say that criticism and punishment should flourish, but a balance between praise and criticism helps children understand the reality of the world.  Participation trophies are more damaging than helpful.

It may be that the prosperous post-war society in which parents and society indulged their children by giving them “all the things I never had” spawned the “Me” generation. If you indulge a child too much, he will expect to be rewarded with everything he wants and that he is the center of the universe. He is disappointed when his adult experience tells him otherwise. The “Me” generation couldn’t come to terms with the fact that they were not the most important people on earth. Those born after the Second War were taught to follow their dreams at the expense of everyone and everything else. It's a hard lesson when they realize that following their dreams doesn't necessarily result in success, either financially or in personal fulfillment.  Sometimes those dreams are unrealistic and unachievable.  A child can dream of being an astronaut, but if he doesn't have the intelligence, physical qualities and skills to get there, he will be disappointed. An American astronaut is required to be no taller than 190 cm, and chopping off his feet will not get him into space.
  
The isolation of individuals in a “Me” society has been exacerbated by indulgent parents, a tolerant society, the media, and a culture of fear, until almost an entire society is composed of disconnected individuals who substitute their imaginary sense of belonging for the slings and arrows of real life. There are exceptions to this world of isolation, such as participation in team sports, but only for players, since a spectator retains their isolation.  Players are indoctrinated by coaches who tell them the motive for playing is that it “feels good to win”. Pep talks are dominated by the dream of feel-good victories.  If teams or athletes come in second, it is seen as having no value. People can convince themselves that they belong to something important when, as spectators, they join together with other sports fans.  They celebrate this form of virtual belonging because it makes them feel good, but they are not doing anything active.  They count on the actions of their team or sports hero to make them feel good.  By themselves, they contribute nothing except noise. 

Pop music and films are geared to sales and encourage fans to buy products to take home. People still go to concerts, clubs, and movies, but the driving force behind the production of these events is to sell products for people to feel good with a replica version of the original.  Music concerts are loss leaders and intended to sell merchandise.  Films may not make the most money in their original cinema runs, but they bank on income from future sales.
 
The experimental drug culture from the ‘60’s onward encouraged drug taking as a way of “feeling good”. Of course, taking a drug is a personal experience as the user is the only one who feels the effects. Observers might see the results, but the experience is personal. No two trips from taking LSD are identical.  Drugs are taken for escape and entertainment. Alcohol is the same.
In less affluent societies, people have more pressing needs than “feeling good,” so the idea that this “feeling” is a reason for making decisions is viewed as an obscene Americanism. Someone who must expend all of his energy to search for food to give him strength for the next day doesn’t jeopardize his life by basing his decisions on what feels good. Most other societies have a much more solid foundation for making decisions, such as whether an act is in harmony with the society they live in, and is harmful or helpful to their community. Western society’s soul has come detached from its moorings, so it searches for something to fill the gaps left by former anchors like religion.  Religion has taken a battering from science. Worship may make a believer feel good, but so many people these days are no longer satisfied with the answers offered by religious texts. 

If a man in a poor country has scraped together enough money to buy a product, his choices would probably be based on usefulness, reliability and price. He might base his decision on what might help himself or his family, but to choose something because it “feels good” would be the least of his reasons for making a choice. It is true that choosing something for its rightness (usefulness, reliability and price) makes the buyer feel good, but choosing a product based only on its wow factor would be considered a foolish purchase.

The western marketing colossus attempts to create needs where none previously existed by exploiting human characteristics such as pride, envy, and a desire to feel superior. Television, which is watched worldwide, is an ideal medium for insinuating these new needs into every level of society. Feeling good is an easy sell, but the downside to the pitch is that we think we need these things that make us feel good because they cover up the emptiness.  This is not to say that man doesn’t have a desire to feel good, but to believe that this desire is a philosophy, a way of life, or a reason for action, makes for an empty life spent travelling between one indulgence and another.  It is an existence without heart, spirit or soul.

Sculpture in Public Places

Sculpture was born from figurines crafted at the dawn of man.  Some tribes practised cave painting, while others made their totems in stone, clay, ivory, and wood.  Egyptians cut obelisks from native rock, Greeks constructed temples with columns and statues, Romans built arches and colossi, and kings erected monuments to their battles and themselves. In the democratic age, unexpected icons like the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the Sydney Opera House appeared to celebrate industry, science, nationhood, and the arts. Those who live in the countryside have mountains, trees, and the sky for spiritual nourishment, while the citizens of cities can only hope that their overlords allow them an integrated and aesthetic environment that reflects their culture, history, and community.

Large European cities like London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin have sculptures from every era that juxtapose the old and the new.  Rome has the visible bones of the old empire flanked by Fascist parade avenues, Catholic churches, palaces of rich families, and human-scale squares which have room for neo-classical fountains, cafes, souvenir shops, chic boutiques, neon, noise, roaring motorbikes, and all the racket that a living city generates.

Anyone who has ever lived in the country knows the claustrophobia of the city and how it feels to be confined to narrow streets and towered over by buildings. Humans need open space for their souls to breathe. Those who live in large cities are bombarded with sensory input, which is responsible for the stress and the excitement of city living. Early in the development of American cities, land for squares and public spaces was set aside. As cities grew, it wasn’t practical for the inhabitants to travel long distances to get the open space they craved, so parks were created. Sometimes this land was donated by civic-minded benefactors or, in the case of many European parks, ex-royal pleasure grounds were made public.  If we accept that we have to live and work in crowded cities to support ourselves and our families, we should have input on what our public spaces will be like. Sculpture is often the last thing to be added to a park because it is expensive and subject to damage by disgruntled residents.  A park is a natural home for sculpture, as it is already a beautiful location, so even a ragamuffin piece could look handsome there. Sculptures may become favourites, go unnoticed, or become universally disliked, and as all dictators have observed from their reserved seats in hell, statues can be knocked down and dragged away. 

Street settings for sculpture are more problematic, but can have interesting solutions. West Berlin and East Berlin were both restructured after the Second World War, and have done an excellent job of incorporating sculpture into a modern city.  West Berlin has a drainage problem, calling itself the Venice of the North, and supports a network of above-ground water pipes, but sculptural solutions have been found in giant modern pieces such as Adolf Behrens “Berlin,” a loose knot of fluted stainless tubes. It's in startling contrast to the sad, truncated tower of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church or the mounted statue of Frederick the Great, but the contrasts of history live comfortably together.  Wide country streets in North America became main thoroughfares with large football field intersections that would dwarf a Roman fountain, and in a strictly capitalist society, public art doesn't generate revenue, so it ostensibly has no purpose.
 
After the war, East Berlin created its version of Soviet chic, with interminable rectangular blocks of buildings and the windswept spaces between them, which, for some, hold a severe beauty. Yet the official East German artistic vision is a retro space-age TV tower.  From almost anywhere in the city, you can find your direction by it, like navigating by the moon and stars. It fits its situation because it rises from launchpad-sized Alexanderplatz.  Appropriate sculpture can add scale, history, mystery, and importance to a place. A sculpture, however, must be chosen to have particularity and universality. It should represent its era, its location, and also have longevity, not only in design, but also in the public imagination.

Equipping public spaces to be more livable has a price. Someone has to buy, install, and maintain whatever is installed there.  Architects and planners now create spaces in front of large buildings by using corner cutoffs and building setbacks.  Depending on the size of the found space, benches & shrubs are possible. Sculpture in these locations occupies less space and is less expensive.
Sculpture in public places democratizes art by bringing it outdoors. Living with art is no longer a preserve of the privileged. Yet in a rather American way, we tend to segregate our duties and pleasures. For open space, city dwellers go to a park, go to a mall for shopping, go to a sports complex for exercise, and go to a gallery for art. This fragmented approach makes every facet of every activity suffer by dislocating it from everything else. A sane, healthy living space should be integral to its surroundings.

Public parks are good things; people need them. Sculpture parks, however, are a step backward as they reinforce elitism and segregation. We should surround ourselves with some of the best examples of what artists, sculptors, architects, and town planners can produce. It is possible to be surrounded by beauty and thoughtfulness in the street, the bank, the shopping mall, and in the workplace, without having to make a trip to a gallery.

Old can mix with new, and different interests create diversity. Variety makes a powerful statement. Look at I.M. Pei’s glass and steel pyramid in front of the Louvre, Botero’s chubby bronze characters in a Florentine piazza, Chicago’s reflective Cloud Gate known affectionately as "The Bean" planted in windswept concrete, Joe Farfards’s circular filigreed iron corral “Mind’s Garden” in a flat Regina field, the HSBC atrium in Vancouver which barely contains Alan Storey’s precise monumental motion “Pendulum” The behind-glass location of the latter, solves the problem of vandalism and protects the piece from weather, but should a sculpture be protected from being climbed on and touched? Yet the original of Michelangelo’s David is kept indoors. The Copenhagen harbour mermaid has been damaged at least eight times, but has always been put right. Like painting over graffiti, repairing damage and supporting creative alternatives to youthful self-expression is good policy in maintaining any public space and its sculptures. 

Much effort and expense are channelled toward winning garden awards, yet in the Northern Hemisphere, flowers bloom only half the year. The same applies to Northern fountains; water freezes. Good choices of sculpture to be installed should thrive in all weather. Government and business often overlook the practical and healing role that well-chosen installations have in making a place attractive and memorable. Sculpture is an ideal candidate for lifting any location from banal to sublime.
A wealth of locations for locating public art exist, but local governments, when deciding how money should be spent, often overlook the practical and beautiful role sculpture has in making a place important. They concentrate on lighting and the smooth flow of traffic. Citizens' groups, which have a tendency to celebrate themselves by erecting boosterist welcome signs that are reminiscent of frontier-town timber gateways, could spend the same time, money and effort installing something that transcends politics and commerce.  Well-chosen sculptures that make people contemplate their society and how they fit into it are more valuable than banal beautification projects like painting flowers on crosswalks.  A statue of a politician is about as enlightening as a painted flower.
  
These decorations are fads that fade quickly, while a timeless work of art should say something profound to those who see it daily.

Technology As The Fifth Element

Men once thought that life was based on four elements – earth, air, fire & water. We have now splintered these elements into particles so tiny that the primal cornerstones of creation have lost meaning to us. Yet these four elements continue to exert a hypnotic influence on humans. We can gaze into a fire, be mesmerized by a fast river running, be moved by the otherworldly spirit of a landscape, and be shocked by the power of a hurricane. In the 20th century, a new equally attractive fifth element took shape. These days, we can fly through cyberspace, feeling by turns contemplative, spiritual, stunned, and enlightened.  When developing technologies created the first radio, then TV, and then the Internet, it became a repository of knowledge, thought, beauty, power, and creation, just as earth, air, fire, & water once were to ancient man.

The ubiquity of TV and the Internet has made the world a village where all information is accessible to everyone. Some lament this fact, but anti-global demonstrators never asked a man in a third-world village for his opinion. In many countries, people are glued to their televisions and computers, watching films and soap operas from everywhere. These soap operas are understood mostly by women for the same reasons – fantasy and escape into another world that is far from their own, but with the same simple dramas of their everyday lives. It is not true that if an Italian woman watches The Bold & the Beautiful, Italian culture will be destroyed. The artificial settings of most soap operas are as foreign to an Italian housewife as they are to an average American.

Anti-global protesters take offence at the opening of a McDonald's on every corner in every part of the globe, but even if a McDonald's existed on every street, it wouldn't have much effect on people's traditional eating habits.  Dining at McDonalds is not a rule, but a choice.  A McDonalds in Rome doesn’t spell the end of Italian cooking. The anti-globalists seem to think that people are not capable of making their own choices, that when confronted with a traditional dish and a hamburger, they will choose the hamburger. This is like saying that women should be covered from head to toe because the sight of her skin might stimulate a man's appetite to such an extent that he loses control of himself. This insults both women and men. Free will exists.

The anti-globalists say that multinational companies use clever brainwashing techniques in marketing to the have-nots, and they are correct, but poor people are not automatically fooled by advertising.  We buy things based on a variety of factors – the least of which is that we've seen an item advertised on television or online. If we see an ad on television, it is never for something we need. If the ad was for something essential, the expensive hard sell wouldn’t be necessary. To say that the obesity epidemic in America is caused by the companies that sell the food to those who are already overweight is a red herring. The truth is that the cultural identity of America is consumerism, which prefers that individuals not think for themselves. Governments collaborate with multinationals in keeping individuals on the straight & narrow consumer path. Governments and companies prefer citizens who do as they are told, and use intimidation and shame to enforce this. Advertisers exploit human weaknesses, including the desire to feel superior to others. And how has shopping become a cure for unhappiness? Shopping malls on a Sunday have become the new churches, and their merchandise the new God.  Yet to say that these marketing techniques will eliminate cultural identity insults the intellect of men and women.  Rather than cry foul when multinationals attempt to export consumerism, time and energy would be better spent on teaching individuals to examine their choices, to think critically about what they do, what they consume, and why.  

Our new technologies have pushed us ahead at warp speed to absorb information and make choices based on what we know. For our advancement and survival, we have always used information passed on from others.  We build on the shoulders of the past. Television and the Internet are simply tools for passing on memes in an accelerated fashion. When an ancient man shared the concept of the wheel with his tribe, were there protesters who claimed that the wheel would ruin their society that was built on beasts of burden? Probably. Do all anti-globalization protesters walk or ride horses to their demonstrations? Probably not.  We can understand the harmful consequences of rampant consumerism by looking at our own society, even as we are in the process of exporting it. 

Our digital technology has the same power as any of the four cornerstone elements, and like the originals, it is an element that we can use to survive and thrive, or to distribute false information and do harm.  As the creators of global consumerism, it is our responsibility to educate those new to the technology about the power and pitfalls of this 21st-century element, so they don’t fall into the same traps we did. Perhaps some bright spark on the other side of the world has an antidote that will counter the sickness of greed and will use the latest technologies in ways that ensure there is enough for all, without killing the messenger in the process.