For some reason The KLF popped into my head earlier. I was musing on Twitter about how great they were when Caesar Lopez sent me a clip of the duo on The Late Late Show discussing with Gay Byrne their burning of one million pounds. The interview is fascinating – Gay Byrne is clearly mystified by the duo and their action, even going so far as to call them ‘weird people’.
It threw up some really interesting points. Byrne, speaking on behalf of the shocked and appaled citizens of the world, argues that they could have given the money to charity. Bill Drummond makes two excellent retorts – firstly, if they had of spent the money on ‘swimming pools and Rolls Royces’ people wouldn’t have been upset, which Gay Byrne concedes. The act of destroying the money is wrong – but spending it on superflous luxury items instead of helping the needy is not. This exposes an amazing hypocrasy.
Us burning that money doesn’t mean there are any less loaves of bread in the world, any less apples, and less anything. The only thing that’s less is a pile of paper.
Byrne retorts, saying there could have been more bread and apples. Drummond repeats that they did not destroy any tangible goods.
Byrne and the audience do not buy (or understand?) his line of thinking.
Joe Elliot of hair-rockers Def Leppard butts in, saying “I used to talk like that when I was 16″, and the audience also wade in with hostility, and there is a general air of bewilderment. There is also a great moment where Byrne asks “Why are you here?” to which he is answered “Because you invited us….” (It’s really worth watching…some great moments)
I never really understood the K Foundation burning the million pounds until this point. And as I watched it, I kept thinking of Alan Watts’ arguments about wealth and money
What wasn’t understood then, and still isn’t really understood today, is that the reality of money is of the same type as the reality of centimeters, grams, hours, or lines of longitude. Money is a way measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. He needs real wealth, in the form of a fish rod, a compass, an outboard motor with gas, and a female companion.
Maybe it was a really foolish act, but at the very least it gets people talking about something which is never really talked about, and now more than ever needs to be – our relationship with money and our concepts of what money really is.
Warren Buffet, the mega-rich investor and darling of capitalists and aspiring rich everywhere, caused a minor uproar (online at least) this week when he published an Op-Ed in The New York Times entitled ‘Stop Coddling The Super Rich’, in which he made the argument for higher taxes for the rich (himself included).
Coming from such a respected capitalist it created a lot of buzz. I suspect this is mainly due to many people agreeing with the argument. This morning however I came across at least one piece of dissent. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch argued that calls by the ‘super-rich’ to tax the ‘rich’ is actually a cynical ploy to protect themselves.
The super rich love to talk about higher taxes on the rich because it’s a competitive barrier protecting them from competition. If the people making a lot of money today have to pay much higher taxes, they probably won’t ever accumulate enough wealth to be “super rich.”
To be honest, I’m not going to debate the ins and outs of that argument. What interests me is generally the concept of ‘wealth’. Arrington suggests the solution to the problem is a ‘wealth’ tax.
Buffett is just fine with big new taxes on the rich because those taxes never touch all the under-taxed wealth he’s accumulated over the decades
When Arrington says ‘wealth’ however, what he really means is money, or stocks. You can tax ‘money’, but you cannot tax ‘wealth’.
Of course, at this stage I am going to bring in the philosopher Alan Watts. Watts argued strongly that our concept of wealth was completely upside down. It starts with the confusion that ‘money’ is anything other than a concept or idea.
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as for example, money. Money gets rid of the inconveniences of barter. But it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth, because it will do you no good to eat it or wear it for clothing. Money is more or less static, for gold, silver, strong paper, or a bank balance can “stay put” for a long time. But real wealth, such as food, is perishable. Thus a community may possess all the gold in the world, but if it does not farm its crops it will starve.
The argument Watts is making here is that ‘money’ is something that allows you to acquire wealth – but it is not wealth itself. Look at the recent volatility in the world economy. People who were ‘wealthy’ one day, were not the next. They didn’t lose anything tangible, they lost ‘money’ – or rather – their money lost value. Watts says money is ‘more or less’ static – you could argue this is not true, its value can fluctuate wildly. But as a concept it is static, whereas the reality it points to, actual material wealth most definitely is impermanent.
Watts addressed this in his 1969 essay “Wealth versus Money”, when he spoke of “the fundamental confusion between money and wealth”:
Remember the Great Depression of the Thirties? One day there was a flourishing consumer economy, with everyone on the up-and-up; and the next, unemployment, poverty, and bread lines. What happened? The physical resources of the country – the brain, brawn, and raw material – were in no way depleted, but there was a sudden absence of money, a so-called financial slump. Complex reasons for this kind of disaster can be elaborated at length by experts on banking and high finance who cannot see the forest for the trees.
But it was just as if someone had come to work on building a house and, on the morning of the Depression, the boss had said, “Sorry, baby, but we can’t build today. No inches.”
“Whaddya mean, no inches? We got wood. We got metal. We even got tape measures.”
“Yeah, but you don’t understand business. We been using too many inches and there’s just no more to go around.”
The problem is this confusion between wealth and money
What wasn’t understood then, and still isn’t really understood today, is that the reality of money is of the same type as the reality of centimeters, grams, hours, or lines of longitude. Money is a way measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. He needs real wealth, in the form of a fish rod, a compass, an outboard motor with gas, and a female companion.
On wealth itself:
True wealth is the sum of energy, technical intelligence, and raw materials. Gold itself is wealth only when used for practical purposes as filling teeth. As soon as it is used for money, kept locked in vaults or fortresses, it becomes useless for anything else.
So, when people talk about a ‘wealth-tax’, they don’t really understand wealth at all. This is not just simple semantics, it points to a general confusion we have between money and wealth – between symbols and reality. The end result is that people chase symbols, instead of trying to generate genuine wealth.
Arrington ends with:
We need to let people dream of getting disgustingly rich, and then let them go out there and do it. After that, we celebrate them so that more people get the idea of getting rich, too. It’s what makes Silicon Valley work. And everyone benefits, even the people who don’t end up rich.
If people are driven by the dream of accumulating money, they will be chasing a rainbow. Because as The Great Depression, or indeed The Great Recession has shown us, money is an idea, a concept. It is not real. Of course it is an important idea and a useful one, but because we have mistaken it for reality, we have gotten ourself in a lot of trouble. We no longer make ‘things’, we make ‘money’. But ‘money’ will not feed you or keep you warm. People should be driven by a desire to build great things and to be rewarded by an enriching life. Or to have life enriched because you make those things. Because all the money in the world is worthless if your life is not worth living.
Watts:
Affluent people […] have seldom shown much imagination in cultivating the arts of pleasure. The business suited exectuive looks more like a minister or an undertaker than a man of wealth and is, furthermore, wearing one of the most uncomfortable forms of clothing ever invented for the male.
The result is a destructive drive to generate profits for profits sake. And before you accuse Watts of being an unrealistic leftie hippy:
It is an over simplification to say that this is the result of business valuing profit rather than product, for no one should be expected to do business without the incentive of profit. The actual trouble is that profit is identified entirely with money, as distinct from the real profit of living with dignity and elegance in beautiful surroundings.
This is in marked contrast to dreaming of ‘getting disgustingly rich’ precisely because it focuses on the things that matter. What use is money if you cannot enjoy anything real?
There is a whole lot more to digest in Watts’ “Money and Wealth” which I may come back to in further posts.
In a chapter entitled “So What?”, Watts having spent the majority of the book arguing (in what is really the central tenant of all of his work) that we are not a separate entity cut off from the Universe, ponders what this means practically. With this knowledge, he asks – So What? What do we with that? How do we change the world?
Watts makes the claim that modern man-
Hoaxed into the illusion of being an independent, responsible source of actions, he cannot understand why what he does never comes up to what he should do, for a society which has defined him as separate cannot persuade him to behave as if he really belonged. Thus he feels chronic guilt and makes the most heroic efforts to placate his conscience.
He continues:
From these efforts come social services, hospitals, peace movements, foreign-aid programs, free education, and the whole philosophy of the welfare state. Yet we are bedeviled by the fact that the more these heroic and admirable enterprises succeed, the more they provoke new and increasingly horrendous problems.
So, despite our best efforts to change the world through political will and effort, we seem to ultimately fail. The world still has horrific poverty, inequality, wars and so on.
Holloway makes a similar point as he opens his speech:
If you look at the experience of the last century, if you look at the experience of revolutionary governments in Russia, in China, in Cuba – but Cuba is a more complicated case – or if you look at the experience of reformist governments, of governments, which have got to power through elections, then I think universally it is a terrific disappointment, a terrific disillusionment.
In no case has a left-wing government been able to implement the sort of changes that the people who struggled for its victory wanted. In all cases what has resulted is the reproduction of power relations, perhaps a change in power relations, but the reproduction of power relations which exclude people, which reproduce material injustices, which reproduce a society that is not self-determining.
So, both men offer similar bleak assessments of left/liberal attempts to fix the world through overt, political effort. And intriguingly, they offer solutions that although are very different in some respects, are also based on almost the exact same foundation.
Watts contends:
It is hard for compulsive activists to see that the vast social and economic problems of the world cannot be settled by mere effort and technique.
Holloway is more specific, and frames it in more political language
Changing the world without taking power means what it says it means, namely that we have to change the world, that is clear. And that we have to do it in a way that we must not think of the struggle to change the world as being a struggle that is focused on the state and on taking state power.
But both men are suggesting that the notion of a traditional struggle is the cause of this failure.
Watts:
The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth—urgent as they are—will destroy rather than help if made in the present spirit.
The problem with the ‘present spirit’ as both Watts and Holloway see it, is that we have become fragmented and separate, or we have become made to feel fragmented. We do not see the interdependent relationship we have with our fellow man and our environment, and this separation leads to our present problems. Watts frames this problem in terms of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, whilst Holloway uses a socialist framework. But both seem to suggest the same thing.
Watts speaks of the ego-trick, that hoax that we are separate from the Universe.
…the difficulty of understanding the organism/environment polarity is psychological. The history and the geographical distribution of the myth are uncertain, but for several thousand years we have been obsessed with a false humility—on the one hand, putting ourselves down as mere “creatures” who came into this world by the whim of God or the fluke of blind forces, and on the other, conceiving ourselves as separate personal egos fighting to control the physical world. We have lacked the real humility of recognizing that we are members of the biosphere, the “harmony of contained conflicts” in which we cannot exist at all without the cooperation of plants, insects, fish, cattle, and bacteria. In the same measure, we have lacked the proper self-respect of recognizing that I, the individual organism, am a structure of such fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being.
Holloway also sees this misunderstanding:
It is very difficult for me to imagine a doing which would not be dependent on the doing of other people. It is clear that our doing here at the moment depends on the doing of hundreds or thousands of people who created the technology we are using, who created the concepts we are using, etc. Our power to do is always a social power, is always a collective power, our doing is always part of the social flow of doing. If we think of our power to do as a part of a social flow of doing – it is clear there are no clear divisions between the doing of one person and the doing of another. One flows into another. What one person has done, becomes the precondition of the doing of others. But in a way in which there are no clear distinctions, no clear identities, there are no clear dividing lines.
We are not independent entities, what we do effects the Universe around us. The problem has been we don’t see this.
So what do we do? Here the men differ on the details, but at the same time, offer a similar core idea. We must change how we look at ourselves and our place in the world.
Watts:
If, then, after understanding, at least in theory, that the ego-trick is a hoax and that, beneath everything, “I” and “universe” are one, you ask, “So what? What is the next step, the practical application?”—I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. [...] Without this, all social concern will be muddlesome meddling, and all work for the future will be planned disaster.
Holloway:
The revolution I have in mind has to be thought of as a question rather than an answer. On the one hand it is clear that we need some basic transformation of society, on the other hand it is clear that the way that we have tried over the last century to transform society through the state has failed. So that leaves us with the conclusion that we have to try it in some other way. We can’t just give up the idea of revolution. [...] I think it is important to think that revolution is a question rather than an answer, because the revolutionary process in itself has to be understood as a process of asking, as a process of moving out, not of telling peoples what the answers are, but actually as a process of involving people in a movement of self-determination.
Again, whilst both men could be said to be worlds apart in one respect, both identify a core problem. And both solutions require us to reconsider who we are and our relationship with the world.
For Watts this is realising the hoax of the ego, of becoming fully aware of our interdependence and totality with the Universe. For Holloway this is seeing our interdependence with society. Different levels of magnification, maybe.
I would highly recommend reading both pieces. (A PDF of Watts book is available here) There are other similarities that I find running through both their work. Towards the end of his talk, Holloway says:
Capitalism exists not because we created it in the 19th century or in the 18th century or whenever. Capitalism exists today only because we created it today. If we don’t create it tomorrow, then it won’t exist. It appears to have an independent duration, but in fact that is not true. In fact capital depends from one day to the next on our creation of capital. If tomorrow we all stay in bed, then capitalism will cease to exist. If we don’t go and create it then it won’t exist any more.
This also reinforces Watts idea of ‘living in the present’ as being the solution to our problem. Capitalism appears to have an independent duration, but in fact that is not true. This is similar to the notion of impermanence in Buddhism – that we think that things have a permanent existence from moment to moment, but in fact we create them in each moment. To see just this moment, would be to break the illusion.
In a talk entitled “From Time To Eternity” Watts also talks of how we create these systems which then trap up, like time and money:
People think money has to come from somewhere, like hydro-electric power or lumber or iron, and it doesn’t. Money is something we invent, like inches.
So you remember the Great Depression when there was a slump? And what did we have a slump of? Money. There was no less wealth, no less energy, no less raw materials then there were before, but its like you came to build a house one day and they said ‘Sorry, you can’t build this house today, no inches’.
(Interestingly, Holloway also talks of our modern misconceptions of time, something Watts liked to talk of often)
***
When I first read “So What?” I found it very empowering. Although it seems to start out quite cynical and hopeless, Watts, like the Buddha, offers a method of liberation. We can transform our relationship with the world by seeing that relationship for what it is. By realising our place as part of a continuum with our environment we can begin to lose the antagonism between ‘us’ and ‘it’. Between ‘us’ and ‘them’. We can also see how we imagine things to have an independent existence, when in fact they don’t. We create them from moment to moment. And if we create them, that also means we can cease to create them. Of course, this is much easier said than done.
Slavoj Zizek has criticized Western Buddhism for allowing its participants to live in and benefit from global Capitalism whilst also maintaining a distance from it.
The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament that definitely works better than the desperate escape into old traditions. Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of techno-logical progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination. One should, instead, “let oneself go,” drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process.
This could be said to apply to Watts’ ideas, but I would disagree. Watts argues that you cannot change society until you recognise your own true nature. He does not say we should not attempt to build a more equal society; just that we cannot do so until we fully understand the nature of our place in the world.
What attracts me to these ideas is not that it allows me to placidly sit by and watch society crumble, but that it offers a way to try and change things which is different that what has gone before and failed. As both Watts and Holloway acknowledge, previous attempts at a revolutionary upheaval of the world have not worked.
Like many people I see how society is going and I want to change it, but at the same time I am put off by groups proclaiming their desire to SMASH CAPITALISM. To destroy it, like it is, as Holloway says, “this great big monster that exists”. That kind of imagery seems as destructive and pointless as that which is seeks to destroy. Both Watts and Holloway warn that if we are not careful, our attempts to change the world will simply reinforce the system. The key is to see how we create these systems – and that which we create today we can chose not to create tomorrow.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
Karl Marx
We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Any regular readers of this blog will know one of my favourite writers and one of the chief influences on my outlook on life is Alan Watts. Although he died in 1973, he has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years via the web. I believe his work and his ideas are more vital now than ever.
Chris Britt and Alan’s son Mark Watts are trying to get funding to produce a documentary about Alan, his life and his work called “In The Way”. I’ve always thought Watts, who was a colourful and controversial figure, would make an excellent subject for a documentary. Not only would his life alone make a fascinating story, but it would serve as a great platform for his ideas to reach a new audience.
They are using Kickstarter to raise funds. Kickstarter is a service where people can ‘crowd-source’ funding for projects; if they don’t make their target, backers get their money back. They’ve set themselves the task of raising $50,000 by April 27. I really hope they make it. To promote it, they have a Kickstarter page, and have made this short trailer
“It is self-contradictory when a community says to a person, “You must be free,” or when members of a family say to each other, “You must love me; it’s your duty.” What a bunch of rot! If you say to your wife, “Darling, do you really love me?” and she replies, “I’m trying my very best to do so,” that will not be the answer you wanted. You wanted her to say, “Darling, I can’t help loving you. I love you so much I could eat your.” You do not want her to have to try to love you, and yet that is the burden you lay on people when you demand their love. In almost every marriage ceremony it is said that you must love your spouse. In Christianity it is said, “Thou shalt love the Lord, they God” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” These are all double binds. Anybody who lives under the dominance of a double bind is living in a state of chronic frustration. He is devoting his life to solving a problem that is meaningless and nonsensical precisely because it has no solution.”
A lot of people who will celebrate Christmas this week are not Christians.
The Christian Church teaches that Jesus was the only son of God. Indeed, in the mystery of the trinity it is explained that he IS God. Christmas Day is to celebrate the miraculous birth of the son of God, who created the Universe. A lot of people who will celebrate Christmas this week do not believe this to be the case. A lot of them don’t believe Jesus existed at all.
Is this hypocrisy? I don’t think so. I used to. It means all that for a lot of people, but it also means a whole lot more. Its a time of rest, its a time to reunite families, its a time to celebrate many things.
I wouldn’t consider myself Christian any more, but I do love Christmas. You don’t have to be Christian to do so. But, I have found that the original story of Christmas might not be so irrelevant to those of us who might not go to Mass this weekend.
Alan Watts was a philosopher who studied all the world’s great religions, and helped introduce many Eastern philosophical ideas to the West. At one stage in his life he was also a Christian minister. He eventually left this path, not truly believing in the divinity of Jesus as the Christian Church believed it. But that’s not to say he did not believe in Jesus, nor his divinity. In later life he had a unique take on Christ
The real Good News is not simply that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God, but that he was a powerful Son of God who came to open everybody’s eyes to the fact that you too are a powerful son or daughter of God. This is perfectly plain if you go to the tenth chapter of John, verse thirty where Jesus says, “I and the Father are One.”
“Is it not written in your law, ‘I have said you are Gods?’ If God called those to whom He gave His word Gods – and you cannot deny the scriptures – how can you say I blaspheme because I say I am a son of God?”
Watts continues
There is the whole thing in a nutshell. If you read the King James Bible – the version that descended with the angel – you will see that the words “I am the Son of God” are in italics. Most people think the italics are for emphasis, but they are not. The italics indicate words interpolated by the translators, and you will not find that in the Greek. It says “a son of God.” So here it seems to me perfectly plain that Jesus has it in the back of his mind that this is not something peculiar to himself when he says, “I am the way. No man comes to the Father but by me.” This “I am,” this “me,” is the divine us.
A central tenet of Watts philosophy, that he came to via a synthesis of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, was that the idea of people as individuals separate from the Universe, was a myth. He argued that when you really thought about it we were all connected with ourselves and the Universe, to a point where we can consider ourselves extensions of the Universe itself (I’ve pointed before to similar ideas from people like Carl Sagan and Bill Hicks).
And Watts found it in Christianity too.
We must see Christ as the great mystic, in the proper sense of the word. A mystic is not someone who has all sorts of magical powers and understands spirits and so on. A mystic is one who realizes union with God. This seems to me the crux and message of the gospel. It is summed up in the prayer Saint John records Jesus speaking over his disciples: “May you be one, even as the Father and I are one, that you may be all one.” May we all realize this divine sonship or daughtership or oneness, this basic identity with the eternal energy of the universe, the love that moves the sun and other stars
That’s why I celebrate Christmas. It is Jesus’s birthday, and he, like all of us, was a child of the Universe. He just knew it.
“The cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
Carl Sagan
The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean (1980) – Cosmos (Episode 1)
I’m always on the lookout for good, short passages of Alan Watts that I can share with people to act as hooks into his work. I know soundbites may seem superficial, and people tend to groan a bit at the guru-ish quotes people fire out on Twitter and the likes, but I am interested in getting more people into Watts’ work. Truth be told, I have found it hard to find short quippy 140-character nuggets of Watts that help convey his ideas in a way that would make people want to explore more. The other thing I am always on the look out for is short clips of his work on YouTube. There is a kind of sub-culture of Alan Watts videos, clips, remixes etc, culled from the extensive collections of recordings he left behind. Watts’ son Mark actually encourages this kind of thing, as long as the author makes some kind of effort to add his or her own flavour to the clip.
Probably the best known of these are the short animations done by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker. These excellent animations help illustrate some very well chosen/edited Watts talks. Nearly every day someone on Twitter shares “Music and Life“, probably the best of the bunch. I like to think that some of the people who retweet this on see it as more than a little self-help/spiritual pick-me-up and as a gateway into the thoughts of a fascinating philosophy. Inspired by these I am always listening to recordings of Watts with an ear to finding a good, short piece that has its own, self-contained thought, but also leads the way to more. In reality, the best way to get into Watts however is too dive right in to one of his 50-60 minute audio lectures, or one of his books. The more I read/listen I think he’s finest achievements were his hour-long lectures, which balanced showmanship, humour, reality and some intriguing and very deep thoughts in a way which was accessible and fun. Still, as I say, I do like to find smaller, shorter clips for sharing to try and hook more people!
The other day I came across my first encounter with an Alan Watts Autotune video. Autotuning (that little piece of techo-trickery that turns average singers into average robotic singers) has taken on its own alternative life on YouTube. Of course, the masters are Auto-tuning The News, but there’s also the equally inspiring/entertaining Carl Sagan numbers, which pit his monologues to strange, uplifting dance music. I suppose it was only time, then, that someone did the same to Watts. The clip I found is taken from “Conversation With Myself” a programme Watts did in the 1970s. (The original is available online, and I highly recommend you watch it all). I’m not sure how I feel about it. It certainly encapsulates some central Watts ideas, but I always think of the Autotune thing as more of a goof on something. I don’t think it trivialises Sagan, but for some reason it felt a bit jarring here. Still on the whole, its a well put together clip, and I hope it will intrigue enough people to explore the ideas in more detail.
Footnote:
This particular Symphony of Science “We Are All Connected” echoes nicely the same thoughts Watts promotes in “The Real You”, but here being espoused from a different angle by some of the greatest scientific minds of our era. Food for thought.
I saw Chris Morris’s “Four Lions” last night. Very, very funny film, but also clever, quite moving, and thought-provoking. Don’t want to say too much beyond that, other than “Go see it!”. Its a comedy about Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers, so Morris has to juggle the dual balls of laugh-a-minute comedy, and well, suicide bombing. Although the film is mainly just about the suicide bombers, and the act of suicide bombing with very little in the way of political commentary, it also features a subtle context relating to the states reaction to terrorism. As the sun sets on New Labour’s reign in the UK, the post-mortems are kicking in. One of their legacies, no doubt, will be one of promoting a paranoid, Big Brother-esque nanny state in response, they say, to the threat of terrorism. The death of Jean Charles De Menezes is referenced briefly in “Four Lions” as well as the looming spectre of state surveillance. As I digested all of it this morning, I thought of the following quote:
Alan Watts:
At anytime the world is full of threats, mostly from other people. And there are monsters. There are all sorts of things that scare you, but beyond every monster is death. Dissolution is the end of it all.
And by and large the art of government is to fill that void beyond death with threats of a rather unspecified nature, so that we can rule people by saying if you don’t do as I tell you, i’ll kill you. Or you’ll kill yourself. And so long as we can be scared of that, and so long as we can be made to think of death as a bad thing we can be ruled.
Not sure which lecture this was taken from, I’m getting two books of his transcribed lectures this weekend, I think its in there. I found it via this clip, which is the longer quote set to Godspeed You! Black Emperor…
As the clocks go-forward this weekend, I was thinking about the role of the time-piece in our lives.
In a lecture to IBM Engineers in 1969 the philosopher Alan Watts was discussing the difference in thought between the Judeo-Christian West and the Ancient Chinese. One of these differences was the basic nature of man. The Judeo-Christian view, Watts claimed, is that man is essentially sinful and evil, whilst the ancient Chinese saw man as essentially good. Thus, if we see ourselves as being essentially selfish and untrustworthy we develop systems of authority and control to impose on ourselves.
[…] Therefore we need law and order. We need a control system to put us in order. We thereby project these control systems into the Church or into the police or into somebody, who are really ourselves disguised.
You see it’s like day-light saving time.
Everybody could simply get up an hour earlier, but instead of doing that we alter the clock, because a clock has a kind of authority and I would say “the Clock says its time for you to get up”. The Amer-Indians laugh at the pale-faces because they say “Paleface, he doesn’t know he’s hungry until he looks at his watch”
And so in this way we become clock-dominated, and the abstract system takes over from the physical, organic situation.
I remember Tommy Tiernan expressing a similar sentiment in a show once, that we have become slaves to our clocks, whereas in our agricultural past there was simply daylight and things to be done. Now, we have imposed this system of timekeeping on ourselves, which whilst obviously helpful in the day to day running of things, exposes its own arbitrariness via its ability to be manipulated.
The Clock has allowed us to commoditize even the Sun itself. Therein, the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez can order that all the clocks are turned back 30 minutes, so, ever the Socialist, they can allow “a more fair distribution of the sunrise”. Venezuela plans more such measures, according to the Science and Technology Minister, to “make more effective use of time”.
Thus, it is as Watts had said, instead of simply changing our habits to meet with the reality of the situation, we bow to the authority of the Clock and change it instead. It’s kind of odd when you think about it.
