More Words!

From hillarygayle:
Retro

_{My dream office?}

The title of my blog is Unspoiled by Progress: Somewhere in the 20th Century. I’ve been using this tag on BBSes and online since the mid-1990s. Originally, this was just a conflation of two interests. “Unspoiled by Progress” is a reference to PWEI, a band I quite like. “Somewhere in the 20th century” was originally a subtitle in the opening credits of Brazil, one of my favorite movies.

In time, it has also become a more literally descriptive statement for my interests and tastes. I have an appreciation for certain retro styles and looks, though it is not tied to a specific period. I like cars from the 1950s, furniture from the 1920s, and houses and décor from the 1900s. People who have been in my house will know that I have no actual capacity to decorate that way. Our house is mostly just a pile of books with an over-sized table and an upright piano sort of… lost in the clutter.

I think that my retro tastes run deeper than surface affection for styles and looks. I have a keen interest in the technology and daily life of earlier times, and for uncovering the fine details. Humanity has produced deep wells of media and art, and even focusing on a single nation and a single decade will give you a lifetime’s worth of diversion. I am constantly discovering wonderful new authors and artists, all of whom have been dead for 60 years.

This unfortunately means that I tend to be rather out of touch when it comes to current media. I don’t have cable, and I only read the front pages of the newspaper. All my current information about pop culture comes from reading the front of magazines at grocery checkouts, and from reading my Livejournal friends list.

Mouse

_{How amarafox sees me!}

One of my internet alter-egos is a talking mouse. This persona varies from normal sized mouse with the ability to talk and wear waistcoats, to a more fantastic Steampunk sort of human-sized character. The first is really just a mouthpiece or avatar of me. The second gets involved in role-play situations that have nothing to do with reality. For a while, he was the seneschal of a Fire Goddess!

Radio(shows)

_{My basement. Some of it.}

This word is more appropriate for doc_mystery, the man from whom I have obtained nearly all the classic radio shows I own. He has thousands of them in various formats, and has gifted me with several hundreds of hours of golden age shows. They’ve been a great boon to me over years of commuting and road trips.

Of course, I had a small collection of shows on tape before meeting the good Doctor, and I was also a great fan of “Theatre of the Mind,” which was broadcast on a local station every Sunday night between 11:30 PM and Midnight. The closing credits for this show are one of the most melancholy sounds in the world for me, because they’re associated with the end of the weekend and an early morning.

Quirky

_{Do I look quirky? Nonsense! Stuff and flimshaw!}

Am I quirky? I guess I am, a bit. I like to say that I am stranger than most people realize, but a lot duller than rest of you seem to think. If I am quirky, it is at least not longer as consciously pursued as it used to be. I used to try to be deliberately weird in high school as a means of establishing myself as different from everyone else. At some point, the affectations stopped being affectations and became reality. It happens to everyone.


_{Maybe a little quirky.}

Quirkiness has settled on me like some sort of particularly ugly hat, in the same way that professionalism settles on others, or whimsy, or machismo. These are descriptors we invested in, things we all chose in our formative years, and now we’re stuck with ‘em. In a way it was an easy way out. Maybe I should have played more hockey, or tried harder to be define myself by academic success. Being quirky (which for me meant playing RPGs as much as humanly possible and reading old books and being afraid of girls) required less effort.


This puts me in mind of the “Then and Now” comparison thing I did last year. The Youth is the Father of the Man.

What I think

So, where am I on my “spiritual journey”?

What do I believe about Life, the Universe and Everything?

Do I believe in God? The Devil? Do I believe in spooks?

My standard evasive answer is to reply that all those things have, at the very least, precisely the same sort of existence as money, freedom, love, and justice. Of course, this is just a clever way of saying that they may not have any objective existence. They may not exist independently of our perceptions, and may not be real in the same way that the Sun and Moon are (presumably!) real. Love, in fact, has more demonstrable reality than God, because love is a verb. It exists in the same way that “running” and “sleeping” exist. It obviously happens, and I suspect is measurable in terms of brain chemistry and neuron activity.

God does not obviously “happen,” unless you subscribe to some very slightly tricky definitions of “God,” like, “that which was the cause for everything” or “that which is everything.” And, I fear I do at least partly subscribe to those tricky definitions. I sometimes think I should just declare myself a Classical Stoic. I certainly don’t believe in the literal existence of an enormous bearded fellow living in the clouds. Though, I also realize that most thinking religious folks have also moved past that concept.

Short answer is that I'm still thinking about it all. That's the truth, and I hope it does not unduly worry members of my family who sometimes check my blog.

So, why do I think we're here?

I have a vague and possibly old-fashioned view of Progress, as a great driving arrow or engine pointing us upward and onward, though the path forward is not smooth. I put a lot of stock in the idea of an emergent order arising from the larger chaos of population growth and even environmental destruction. As there are more of us, we are driven to ever increasing efficiencies and subtleties of production and provision. Sometimes we hit a wall of localized Malthusian collapse and everything falls apart, but the survivors don’t start from scratch. They build from a baseline, and that baseline gets higher with every generation.

The collective upward Progress is most often sabotaged by individual instinct, an innate lust for resources and power and land and mating partners that is part of every one. Ideally, however, we are progressing to a sustainable future where every person is able to satisfy their individual wants without taking from the collective good. Bizarrely, I think we are seeing some of this in modern social democracies, though it is tainted by consumerism and capitalism. The detrimental effects of these still outweigh the beneficial efficiencies of scale offered by technological collectivism.

Population growth rates in Japan and several European countries have hit a plateau or are in actual decline. Population growth in Britain and Canada is driven largely by immigration from poorer countries. Well-fed, well-cared for populations have fewer children. Urban populations consume tremendous amounts of resources, but do so much more efficiently than rural populations of the same size. In Canada, forests are growing back, endangered species are returning, and energy production becomes ever more efficient. We require less to make more.

More than this, urban populations drive advances in science, as well as culture. Rural or nomadic societies stagnate or stratify, at least insofar as I know history. I am willing to accept correction!

Unfortunately, the intensely consumerist nature of modern countries is built on the back of third-world misfortune. They suffer our Malthusian collapses by proxy, and we just keep eating burgers. Yet, even this is changing, gradually. And while we may yet fall off a cliff and suffer another collapse, the baseline of knowledge for the survivors will be higher than ever.

Our speaker in church on Sunday spoke about the unnaturalness of cities, and the hubris of man. She said the universe didn’t care if man existed, yet also seemed to think we as a species were uppity and didn’t know our place.

I disagree strongly with her. Everything Humanity does is natural. It is not always conducive to our long-term health as a species, but then, humanity is the only species with the capacity to realize this. Certain types of Geese in northern Canada are successful and breed fantastically, and then suffer population collapse because they’ve poisoned their environment for themselves and everything else. Nothing grows where they nested. Humanity can see these collapses coming, and can prepare for them, and mitigate them.

As for the universe’s interest in Mankind, I believe that Intelligence is what invests the university with meaning. The universe may wipe us all out with an asteroid or a supervolcano, but it’ll do that whether we’re living in agricultural carbon-sink communes, or coal-powered slave pits.

Where are we headed? Perhaps to the Technological Singularity, though I am skeptical of it. We are headed someplace, though. The end is unknowable, but the journey involves a constant re-evaluation and refinement of what we know as a species, and the description of ever finer grades of truth.

I strongly suspect that no single human life is long enough to unravel it all, nor any ten generations of humans. But, then, no single human, no matter how remarkable, could encompass the entirely of human learning as it existed in 1000 CE, never mind as it stands now. Our evolution has moved from biology (at least partly) into the realm of ever more efficient tools for processing information, which in turn allows us to be ever more subtle in the way we harness energy and distribute food and look for finer grades of truth.

My only current certainty is realizing that I will never know everything, yet it behooves me to keep learning. Truth is a process, Faith is a process.


The important thing is to walk the pattern.

Pyat's Lunchtime Adventures!

I had an unusual treat for lunch today. My parents were in Toronto, dropping an aunt off at the train station, and we managed to get together at the Spaghetti Factory. It's probably been about 25 years since I was there with my folks.


I love my mum and dad. :)


And my dad took this photo of me, because my head contains lead. :)