Change makes reference to something that already is and implies adjustment of that.  If the subject under discussion is destructive then change may involve merely being less destructive, whereas the destructive behaviour needs to be stopped completely.  Pauli refers to the madness of awarding companies for polluting less and likens this to excusing a criminal because he is stealing less.  It is still pollution and it is still stealing.

The way we humans behave towards the degradation of the natural environment is similar to a smoker who has symptoms of lung disease – it is an addiction and giving up requires an act of will.  Within an individual the struggle, if it is a struggle, takes place within that person.  For a society the struggle is between those who benefit from the pollution and those who want it to stop, although some individuals may be on both sides of that fence.  Governments are also often on both sides, or even sitting on the fence.

The irony of people desperately holding on to activities and processes that destroy our environment is that changing the relationship we have to that environment and changing our activities within it can often lead to economic and social benefits that far outweigh the benefits of the original activity.  One example is the felling of forests which, if preserved, can be the centre of a thriving tourist industry.  But this still involves a change rather than something new and increased tourism can lead to increased pollution through car travel, extra transport of food, etc.

Governments are in a position to discourage or outlaw activities that are damaging or destructive and to encourage or mandate those that are supportive or healing of the natural environment.  Unfortunately, governments largely fail to resist the unrelenting lobbying of those who continue and want to continue to pollute and exploit.  This seems to be driven largely by a fear of losing the next election.  There is also the attitude, in government as well as in the community, that while it’s there we should be using it.  In Australia’s case, the extraction and exploitation of minerals and fossil fuels is also driven by the need for government revenue (through royalties and taxes) and foreign exchange earnings, though many of the profits are expatriated by multinationals.

There are many thoughtful people who advocate the abolition of our capitalist economy, as it inherently supports and relies on exploitation of people and of the environment².  Some advocate a society based on mutual co-operation, in which people are engaged in activities that nourish them and others – not just physically but also emotionally and spiritually.  In such a society, people would not necessarily all be involved in ‘productive’ activities – many would be engaged in creative pursuits, as these are also important to a healthy society.  People’s ‘value’ in the society would not be measured by how much they earn or own; value would be measured in less tangible currency – the contributions made to the welfare of the society as a whole, the impact made on the natural environment, and on how happy a person is.

For any of this to come to pass, we need dreamers and those dreamers need to be given opportunities and support to inspire others to dream and to anchor those dreams in the physical world.  We need to support our artists of all flavours and give room for scientists / researchers to indulge in pure research, to follow threads to see where they lead, if anywhere.  We need to teach our children to recognise the magic of daydreaming and the thrill of discovering something for oneself, even if it has been discovered before by others.  We do still need to teach what we know, but only as a platform from which to launch into everything we don’t yet know.

1. see his web site: http://www.gunterpauli.com/
2. see, for instance, Life Without Money, a scholarly examination of this idea.

© 2012 Daan Spijer

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Many countries that exist today became countries through armed struggle, which has contributed to a sense of identity.  Australia did not go through this process, though there was armed struggle on this continent involving the original inhabitants and the European invaders.  Some present-day countries were colonised hundreds of years ago (usually for commercial or territorial purposes) and were later granted independence (with or without struggle).  There are countries that gained independence and then split apart, usually, again, after armed struggle.  Other countries are amalgams of former small kingdoms, dukedoms or other ~doms.

Australia quotes the invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula on 25 April 1915 as one of its formative experiences, though Australia itself was never threatened territorially in the 1914‑18 war.  The ‘sacrifice’ of so many thousands of men is seen by many as nation-building.  Australia was attacked (by the Japanese a number of times in the 1939-45 war), but this is rarely quoted as contributing to its sense of nationhood.  It is curious that the 1915 event is considered so pivotal, as Australia’s involvement in the fighting was to a large degree as a staunch member of the British Empire and the fighting was to protect a way of life centred on England.

In 1915 and well into the 1960s, Australia considered itself a white Anglo-Saxon country.  It barely tolerated the continental European immigrants, and the southern Europeans less than those paler ones from the north.  Chinese in Australia found it particularly difficult, though many of them were sixth or seventh generation descendants of Chinese who came out during the gold rushes in the mid-1800s.

Australia has let go of the British apron strings, but is now holding those of the USA, though many Americans don’t even know where Australia is.  (“Isn’t Austria somewhere in Europe near that Red Cross country?”)  Australia used to see itself as an agricultural and manufacturing nation, but is now largely an exporter of minerals and fossil fuels.

So, what gives Australia its identity?  For many Australians it is still an almost century-old disastrous military campaign.  Generally it seems to be that military campaign and sport and Waltzing Matilda and, currently, a sense that it is in better economic shape than any other country.

Australians also see themselves as ‘punching above their weight’, in sport, science, medicine and innovation.  This leads to a justified pride in achievement – Australia performs better than most countries, per capita.  But there seems to be an absence of an overriding, compelling sense of what it means to be Australian.

Governments have talked of changing the citizenship test to include an understanding of such Australian qualities as mateship, as if this is particularly Australian.  I sense that mateship is largely a myth from the past and that, where it does exist, it does not go very deep.  Other qualities touted as being essentially Australian, though other countries would probably claim them as essentially theirs, include egalitarianism, fairness, tolerance and respect for the rule of law.  While these qualities may contribute to a sense of nationhood or identity of a nation, they cannot define a unique national identity.

While ANZAC Day is commemorated each year with passion, it is not the country’s national day.  Australia Day, curiously, celebrates the British invasion of the eastern part of the continent.  It was the start of colonisation, not the start of a nation.  Much debate, argument and soul searching went into forging a federation out of six colonies, leading to the ‘birth’ of Australia as an independent nation on 1 January (1901) and that date should arguable be the national day.  Australians would resist such a notion, because New Year’s Day is already a well-established public holiday and, falling in mid-summer, many Australians are on extended holidays.  This does not seem to stop the citizens of the USA celebrating 4^th July with fervour, though it occurs in the middle of their summer.  Australia Day, on 26 January, marks the end of the summer holidays for many people and most school years start shortly after.

Holidays are an entrenched aspect of the Australian way of life.  Most working people take a total of four weeks annual leave and there are another eight to ten public holidays (depending on the state or territory in which you live).  We protest vigorously against any attempt to deprive us of any of these.  Maybe the Australian capacity for leisure and leisure activities should be the defining quality of its nationhood.

© 2012 Daan Spijer

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I recognise there are people who are on the lookout for opportunities to help.  They need this to confirm something in themselves about being a good person and they may seek confirmation of this from others.  Many people, on the other hand, put themselves out to assist others without ever receiving any recognition.

Society depends on selfless actions.  It seems to be built into us to promote social cohesion.  It is a shame that there is a tendency to monetise the unpaid contributions people make to society, in order for anyone to place any value on what they do.  This even extends to the ‘work’ parents (usually mothers) put into rearing children.  The same attitude leads to governments monetising the value of our natural environment, including our air and water.  We are decreasingly able to intuitively recognise the value of these.  This monetisation also opens the way for private businesses to be given or sold commercial control over these essential resources.

The argument is often made these days that, if we don’t place a monetary value on a forest, it will be hard to save it from destruction because people won’t value it.  It is the sort of argument that a local council has used to declare a small park to be ‘surplus to requirements’, because too few people actually use it.  Its simple presence apparently has no value.  Things that have no recognisable value or utility seem to be invisible, as are many people who make no financial contribution.  We forget that such ‘invisible’ places are essential for our very existence and many of the ‘invisible’ people contribute in often unquantifiable ways, the absence of which would impoverish all our lives.

Australia has a very high level of volunteerism.  People give many hours freely to local sporting clubs, charitable organisations, service clubs, and even global organisations for which travel away from home is required.  In the 1970s I worked for the fledgling Fitzroy Legal Service, a free community legal advice organisation and the first of its kind in this country.  For the year that I was the (paid) co-ordinator there were eighty volunteers rostered; half of them were lawyers, half mostly local laypeople.  It grew from a grassroots movement in the local community aimed at creating something that would assist those who could not afford proper legal advice and representation.

People’s lives are kept safe in many places and in many ways by people who volunteer their time and expertise: the lifesavers at beaches, country firefighters, search and rescue teams and other emergency services.  Meals on wheels is only possible because of the volunteers who deliver meals, around the country.

One thing that is remarkable, is that volunteers will happily work alongside those who are paid to direct and co-ordinate them.  Those same paid workers may be found volunteering somewhere else.  It epitomises the egalitarianism that is the norm in Australian society.

There are secondary schools that, as part of the curriculum, have students do ‘volunteer’ work in places like hospitals, nursing homes, hospices and aged-care facilities.  I have spoken with students who have completed their stint of this and they invariably say that these were amongst their most memorable and wonderful experiences of school.

There seems to be something ennobling about doing something for others without expecting something in return, although perhaps we are designed so that such selflessness has us feel good so that we will be selfless.  There seem to be no limits to the ways in which we can give of ourselves to improve the lives of others, whether through mentoring children, driving frail older people to do some shopping or to their doctor, or taking groups of city-bound people to experience the countryside.

Some selfless action can be planned and well-organised and most of it is.  What grabs our attention and makes headlines in the media is the spur-of-the-moment pulling of someone out of a burning car.

© 2012 Daan Spijer

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In newspapers, magazines, journals and on web sites I have to navigate through acres of announcements and advertisements to read the material I’m interested in.  I have trained my brain to ignore the extraneous, but the filtering still uses up energy.

The deliberate ignoring of distractions interests me.  As a student, living with my parents, I found it easier to ignore whatever they had playing on the TV when I was sitting at the table in the same room, than when I was at the far end of the house in my bedroom and the TV provided a barely-audible backdrop.  From my bedroom I found myself straining to pick out meaning.

I find the, to me, visually superfluous easier to ignore than the auditory.  This is probably because our eyes have greater acuity in the centre than on the periphery and we can move our eyes around and focus them at different distances.  Ears are different.  All sound comes in through the same narrow channels and it is our brain that has to pick out the important.  I find dialogue in films and commentary in documentaries (TV and radio) sometimes difficult to follow if overlayed with music.  Can I train my brain to effectively filter out those sounds I want to ignore?  When flying, my noise-cancelling ear-buds do a good job at just that.

The call for attention also comes from people: at home, at work and out in public. With family we usually have tacit agreements that allow us to call each other into action for minor and major things.  At work such agreements may be anything but tacit, yet we can be called into action by others to assist with things we have no primary responsibility for and thus be distracted from what we are really there for.

As with TV, radio and music players, something can be a welcome sound or distracting noise.  Another person’s attention on their request for our attention can be welcome or distracting – it depends on our intention at the time.

How we deal with clamour and distractions depends on how we manage boundaries.  We all have boundaries, but we often don’t manage them well; we can easily allow others to define them for us and control them to their own advantage.  Negotiating our way through the clamour requires us to define our boundaries clearly and to be willing to enforce them.  The enforcement is, for many people, compromised by their need for recognition and acceptance by others – saying ‘no’ to a request could lead to rejection, to being ostracised and even to being disliked.

It boils down to becoming clear about what we want, what we want to achieve, and coming to a point where we do not need to define ourselves by how others see us.

It is remarkable how much we allow our boundaries to be pushed and pulled.  Some of this flexibility is necessary to allow social interaction and cohesion; much of it does not serve us.  As with so much in modern life, we are manipulated by commercial enterprises vying for our attention.  We have allowed businesses to impinge on our lives more and more; those barriers that were established to rein in corporate excess have been allowed to expand against such personal barriers as we may have set up.

There used to be more robust rules about the ‘noise’ that businesses could produce, but those rules seem to be progressively watered down in the interest of the businesses.  This applies to the clamour on TV and radio, on billboards and on the burgeoning electronic roadside signs proclaiming special offers, openings, events and imminent road closures.  Oh, I nearly missed that last one warning of a road hazard ahead – too much extraneous information.

When driving. Our brains have to pick out the speed limit signs, the road hazard signs, the school zone signs and the traffic lights from among the cacophony of other signs and advertisements and coloured flashing lights in the car dealerships and adverts on the sides and backs of trams and buses and the red-and-blue flashing lights in my mirror.  Damn!  What did I miss?  The one-way sign?  But officer, I’m only going one way.

The road through the day is far from straight and narrow and with all the devils trying to entice us to divert off it onto more treacherous paths, it’s a wonder we make it to bed-time still sane.  Some people don’t.

© 2012 Daan Spijer

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To launch my cult and develop a following, I will need to find or invent something about which people can be easily persuaded to adopt a fundamentalist attitude.  I will, of course, have to be the source of all that will allow people to feel satisfied in relation to their fundamentalism, if I am to live comfortably from the proceeds.  So, here goes.

My cult will be based around a split meteorite I found, inside which were 10,007 small, red pebbles and a ceramic disc with inscriptions on it.  Years of work on deciphering the inscriptions and an insight that came during meditation, led me to the discovery that I had found a gift from a higher civilisation, not of the Earth, which wanted to share what it knew of wellbeing and possible immortality with any other intelligent civilisation upon whose planet their missive chanced to fall.  It is fortunate for humanity, or at least for some of it, that it was I who came upon this beneficence and that I was able to decipher its significance.

The significance of the pebbles is that, ingested with the ‘proper’ diet, they can lead my followers to be healthier and even to hope to live for ever.  There will be one pebble per person.  Joining my cult will cost an individual $10,007 plus a tithe – discounts for couples and families.  Each new believer will be issued with his/her personal pebble.  Of course, the pebble will have to be liberated from that person’s excrement every few days.  My followers will become poo sifters, a ritual that will in itself liberate them from many of their hang-ups.

I am still working on designing all the other rituals I will need to keep my acolytes and followers enthralled.  There will, of course, be cleansing rituals for the pebbles, before they are re-ingested, and rituals to be applied before each meal.  The higher being we will direct our general supplications to is named Schist and adherents to this new religion (because a religion it will become) will be known as Nutripetrians.

I have found someone to secretly manufacture the Prime of Pebbles.  They will be inert and I expect them to survive my earthly existence.  From time to time pebbles will be lost and the losers will have to submit to special forgiveness rituals to obtain another one, at a price.

Nutripetrians will have to limit their eating to prescribed foods and drinks, or the pebbles may cause harm.  That this diet may seem similar to other, proven healthy diets is mere coincidence.  After all, the Nutripetrian diet is prescribed by the unearthly authors of the Disc and the similarities can be explained: some people have received guidance from Schist in their own way.  They will be even healthier if they now join the Nutripetrians.

In my meditations, I have communed with Schist and he has assured me a long and healthy life and a prosperous one, provided I can manifest sufficient ruthlessness to keep the growing number of believers subjugated and to mete out appropriate punishment to those who lapse.  There will be naysayers, but they will be as grist for the mill of our growing power.

There will be some would-be followers who will first have to face exorcism of Morpheus and Statin to allow the Pebble of Schist to take hold.  Some will have to forswear Al Cohol and many will have to give up getting stoned, in order to get pebbled.

I can envisage that, as the number of Nutripetrians grows, cracks will appear and small groups may flake off and form separate sects.  There may be Boulderites and Granulars, but they will all still pay homage to the Great Schist.  They will all eventually become as the grains of sand on the shore, washed by the sea of purity.  Encouraging such schisms will work to increase the spread of all flavours of Schistism as each group vies for supremacy and tries to convince nonbelievers that they will end their days in loneliness and ill-health.  Schistism will eventually rival even Narcissism.

Now I must go and pass my pebble, do some shit-stirring and cleansing.  As the Great Schist says: “Whatever your petty concerns in this vast universe, everything is alimentary.”

© 2012 Daan Spijer

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If we can’t physically deconstruct something, we attempt to do so with mathematical models.  And we attempt to understand the unfathomable through applying what we have learned from those things we do understand (or think we understand).  This is why in each age the explanations of phenomena and systems reflect the paradigms of the age.  In the age of steam engines, many things, including living organisms, were explained in mechanical terms; today there is a likelihood that things will be explained in terms of computation and information¹.  For instance, some people describe the processes going on in a living cell as the exchange of information; for instance, the movement of an electron between a free radical and an antioxidant is equated to the movement of information.

Such paradigm models are usually no better than describing one thing in terms of another.  However, they can lead to a breakthrough in thinking about processes and structures.  One example of this is the concept of memes – that thoughts and ideas can propagate and evolve in a way similar to living organisms².

While similes can be useful, they can be very limiting when used to explain complex systems; they can even be mistaken for the reality of the complex system and we can become stuck in believing that the simile is the reality.  Similes are often used when talking about the structure and workings of the human brain.  Using comparisons with computers (hardware and software) may give some insights, but these fall far short of describing what happens in the brain.  Such thinking does, however, flow the other way – results of research into the organisation and workings of the brain are informing developments in computer science.

The difficulty we have in dealing with complexity is also evident in the way much of medical research is carried out.  Typically, researchers use single entities to test their effects on health and disease.  They then attempt to make meaningful extrapolations to the effects of combined entities.  They also carry out research on the effects of single entities on healthy and diseased cells in test tubes and petri dishes and draw conclusions from this about the effects of such entities within a living body.  In doing this, they forget or ignore that in a living body there are complexities that cannot be mimicked in a laboratory.  One of these is the body’s attempt to incorporate or expel any substance in such a way that it will do minimal damage.  There are myriad mechanisms by which a living body will attempt to maintain homoeostasis (dynamic equilibrium) or to return to such a state if disturbed.  The effect of, say, a single nutrient on a bunch of cancer cells in laboratory glassware (in vitro research) may do little to inform us of how that nutrient, in the presence of hundreds of other biochemical entities, will affect the same cancer cells in the body.

We can reduce a complex system to its parts but, confronted with the parts, we can seldom reconstruct the complex system without sufficient ‘other’ information.  More than forty years ago, I witnessed someone demonstrating this.  A friend’s father opened the gearbox of a small motorbike and the machine spilled its guts, propelled by a powerful spring, onto the driveway.  What gave him the edge was his experience as a watchmaker and a list of the gear ratios of the bike.  He was also able to see where components had been rubbing up against each other.  The reassembled gearbox worked.  He said at the time that, with all his knowledge, he would not have succeeded if he had not had the wear marks to see how the parts had interacted.

It is the interactions in complex systems that are so numerous, so hard to understand or even to know.  We interfere in these complexities at our peril.  And yet, sometimes the complexity and the propensity for such systems to ‘attempt’ to return to a state of dynamic equilibrium, can work in our favour.  One example is of the doctors who are able to stimulate alternative biochemical pathways in children with Down’s syndrome, so that the effects of the extra chromosome they carry can be minimised³.

Somehow the complex system that is my body is able to ‘automatically’ respond in useful ways to the complex systems that make up my environment.  I can but wonder at it all.

1. e.g. Ray Kurzweil – some of his ideas can be seen at http://www.kurzweilai.net
2. see for instance www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
3. see for instance an article by Dr Robyn Cosford of Sydney

© 2012 Daan Spijer

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Dirty Fracking Business

I need to declare, at the outset, that I edited this book for the author in preparation for publication.  I also need to say that I am, on current evidence, opposed to the uncontrolled exploration for and extraction of coal seam gas, the subject of this novel.  I will therefore aim to limit my review of the book to the merits of the book as a work of art.

Peter Ralph has taken a topic about which there is heated debate in at least Queensland and New South Wales (and parts of the USA) and he has written a barely-disguised fiction: names of individuals and corporations have been changed, although, in some cases, only minimally.  He has turned something that is controversial to many people into a gripping drama.

In an earlier novel, The CEO, Peter Ralph used his many years of experience in the corporate world to craft a novel depicting the greed and immorality of the majority of the people caught up in that world.  In Dirty Fracking Business he has taken the results of research into a particular industry and created a fictional account of what is happening in the real world.  In the process, he has created memorable characters, some of whom are in the industry and others who are at the receiving end of it, as well as those drawn in from the outside.  Some of his characters are thinly-veiled paintings of real people in the real world and Peter Ralph makes them almost bigger than they are, which, in a few cases, is quite a feat.

It is clear that the author has an agenda in this book.  However, because it is clear, the agenda does not spoil the story.  As part of my involvement in the production of the book I have read it from start to finish about seven times, yet it did not lose its sense of drama nor its ability to engage me as a reader.  The characters are, on the whole, believable and well fleshed out.  Many of the characters carry entrenched attitudes throughout the book and others change and develop as people as a result of their experiences.  In this, the novel is true to life.

Peter Ralph is an excellent storyteller, dropping the reader immediately into the drama of the story.  Emotions run close to the surface from the start and spill over many times.  Ralph also brings humour into the telling and is sometimes tongue-in-cheek about the goings on in a small country town.

You can read this novel as a gripping yarn and enjoy it for that.  You can also have it prompt you to ask what is really going on in parts of this country and then look further.  Either way, I can highly recommend this book.

© 2012 Daan Spijer

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This man, despite his pretence at being a daring adventurer, shipwrecked in north-west Australia, was, I would argue, being himself.  The thing that upset so many people at the time was that they thought he was someone else.  They had trusted him and, on the basis of that trust, had believed what he told them.  They were excited by his stories, wanting to believe him.  If he had been an avowed teller of tall tales, his audience may have been equally exited, equally transported.

It is the transportation out of the hum-drum, local and every-day that people seek in stories – whether told in person, read, heard on the radio or watched on film or stage.  When being told a fiction, knowing it to be fiction, we willingly suspend disbelief.  We trust the story for the anticipation and the effect it will have on us.  If we are told, and we believe, that the story is ‘truth’ rather than fiction, we can be similarly affected.  Sometimes ‘real’ events are told in the guise of fiction and we accept it as fiction.

Many studies have shown that the brain cannot readily distinguish between what is real and what is make-belief.  If we react differently to these, it is because we decide to, ahead of the ‘event’.

Why were the people in England so upset that they had been conned?  I surmise this to be the result of finding out that his stories were fiction.  The suspension of disbelief is fragile and can be shattered by so many things.  If, when watching a film set in ancient Egypt, we see a wristwatch on the arm of a slave, we may find it difficult to continue to enjoy the film.  If, on the other hand, the film is a fantasy exploring what might have happened if people in ancient Egypt had some of our modern technology, the sight of the wristwatch would not have broken anything.

Our interactions with everyone are based on trust, even to the extent that we trust that the person spinning a tall, barely believable story is doing so honestly – that s/he is up-front about the verity or otherwise of what they are going to tell us.  Like suspension of disbelief, trust is fickle.  Once broken, it is hard to resurrect.

We need to be able to trust.  Without this, we would have to independently verify everything we are told, everything we are not personally witness to.  Our lives would have to be much slower, as we take the time to check everything out.  Another solution would be to have fewer interactions with others.

Despite this, many people go out of their way to put themselves into situations where that trust is tested.  If it weren’t so, scams to extract money from people dishonestly would not have so much success.  Often, the gullibility that have people take risks of trust arises from a wish that things were different than they are and those people are willing to believe someone who promises to make it so.

For most of us, our trust is not always entirely naïve – the person who sets out to gain our trust in order to then betray it, feeds us enough to have us believe them to be honest and trustworthy.

There is a difference between trust and hope.  When we buy a lottery ticket, the only trust involved is that the lottery will be conducted honestly and that, should we win, the money will be paid to us.  We don’t trust that we will win – we hope that we will.  To some extent this is also true when we are on the way into a personal/romantic relationship.  We start off being hopeful, but there comes a time when that hope turns into trust because of promises given on both sides or because of expectations coming from assumptions.  From that time on, something going ‘wrong’ in the relationship will be taken as a breach of trust rather than a shattering of hope.

To go back to the dishonest entertainer of the late nineteenth century …  People of the time knew little about this large southern continent and were open to hearing about all manner of strange and exotic creatures and to be told of fantastical adventures.  But they expected them to be true.

© 2012 Daan Spijer

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The difficulty in continuing to relate may come from the ways in which a partner reminds one of past events, often from childhood.  The reminder may not be at a conscious level – we easily and automatically react to something said or done (or left unsaid or un-done) and we are thrown back mentally and emotionally to a similar or identical occurrence in our past.  We lash out before we even know what we’re doing.  Or we freeze or retreat.

I have quoted Liz Greene before: “We are fated to the extent that we are unconscious”¹.  She, in turn, may have been quoting someone like Jung.  It is the unknown unknown that can dictate how we respond to the words and behaviour of others.  To make it more interesting, we are often attracted to someone as a partner who reminds us (usually unconsciously) of a significant figure from our childhood – and thus we so often set up the circumstances that allow us to play out the childhood traumas, again and again.

This human tendency ensures employment to legions of therapists and royalties for thousands of authors of self-help and psychology books and may ensure the survival of publishers.

There are models of the human psyche that acknowledge this propensity to react in the present to unresolved events from the past – many of them talk of an individual embodying both an adult and a child, often along with many other possible aspects of being: teacher, acolyte, tyrant, crone, etc.  There are many pathways offered to an understanding of what makes us who we are and as many tools for dealing with this complexity in a way that may lead to more of it coming into consciousness, thus reducing the unplanned and unwanted reactions to (often) innocent behaviour of a partner.

Not always innocent, though.  We can form habits of speech, behaviour and omissions that bring a particular reaction from a partner and lead to a corresponding sense of satisfaction or righteousness in us; or lead to corresponding anger or bewilderment in us, although, at an unconscious level, these may not be unexpected.

It is quite remarkable that so many of us do stay in relationships for as long as we do, because the repeated action/reaction duet can grow progressively harder to cope with.  In many cases, people become comfortable with such a duet, becoming co-dependent and mutually collusive in perpetuating the behaviour.

The truism that a relationship needs continual work to keep it healthy and vibrant is based on these dynamics.  To avoid falling into stifling co-dependency or other unhealthy situations, two people need to be brave and honest enough to keep examining their part in whatever is happening, looking for what has so far remained undiscovered or suppressed.  There are no easy remedies when the past is uncovered and named, although this in itself can go a long way to mending.

This gives an interesting perspective on the concept of past and present.  There are many things from our past that inform our present.  Another way of looking at this is that all our experiences are in the present and those we perceive as being past are our presently remembering past events or experiences.  Our ‘automatic’ reactions to what another person says or does may seem to be ‘out of the past’, but they are very much in the present.

This gives a clue about how to deal with these ‘past’ things – ‘bring’ them into the present.  We cannot change the past in any meaningful way; however, we can choose how we act in the present.  Thus, if we find a reaction seemingly coming upon us from the ‘past’, we can learn to step aside from that.  We can also accept that who we are now, to a large extent comes from our past experiences.  However, the people and places that taught us to be a particular way are, in most cases, no longer around to exert their influence.  The only way to change our past-driven reactions is to deal with them in the present.  This is one of the secrets to keeping a relationship healthy and dynamic and worth being a part of.

1. see From the Kitchen #114; #76; #65

© 2012 Daan Spijer

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Until quite recently (given the span of two thousand years since the time of Christ), the Church in Europe has been the arbiter of what is permissible behaviour and permissible thought (and it reached much further afield than Europe with imperial colonisation).  Much of the law was, or was based on, ecclesiastical law – the law of the Church.

For as far back as we are able to delve, it seems that those who taught and interpreted the will of the deity or deities also set the rules of behaviour.  It is only in relatively recent times that there has been any semblance of a separation of Church and State.  Yet even now, in Australia as in other countries, we seem to find it difficult to have that separation be complete.  Ditto in countries where the majority of the populace is Muslim or Jewish.  Maybe this is a trait of all Semites (all decedents of Shem, the son of Abraham).

Maybe we are willing to accept much of what the Church tells us is moral behaviour because much of it makes sense.  After all, the central tenet of much of moral teaching is a variation of “treat others as you would have them treat you”, along with “try and do no harm”.  Who could really argue against these?  Some people have suggested that we should be able to do away with all our proscriptive laws if only everyone would abide by the two simple rules.

I have been prompted to think about all this by the PayPal ‘censorship’ I wrote about last week.¹  That company’s moral outrage seems to be limited to written work about rape, incest and bestiality in the context of eroticism.  Rape is taboo under the ‘two simple rules’ for obvious reasons.  Incest is taboo because most societies recognise that sex between closely related people can lead to the birth of genetically compromised individuals.  Bestiality?  Apart from possibly being cruel to animals, it is the ‘yuck’ factor.

What strikes me is that PayPal has not sought to restrict the purchase by its customers of books depicting erotic stories involving sexual violence (other than rape) or works depicting violence without sex, including murder.  Why is PayPal not outraged at these?  Assault and murder are illegal almost everywhere, while bestiality is not.

What about other art forms, such as film and electronic games?  Violence is the staple of many of these, including extreme and gratuitous violence.  I would also ask why the Australian film censors will rate a film ‘R’ because it contains a graphic sex scene, but will rate a film depicting more violence that I feel comfortable watching as ‘M15+’ or even ‘PG’.

One could argue that parents will make sure that children and teens watch and read only such material as is suitable, given their age and upbringing.  Unfortunately, while this may once have been the case, it no longer is.  The internet and people’s access to it has changed that.  However, it is still not up to unrepresentative businesses to play that role.  What this situation – everything available to anyone at any time – calls for is a change in educating children, at home and at school, in how to deal with material they do not understand or are shocked or disturbed by.  It is possible.  I know of families in which the children are allowed to read anything they like, with the proviso that they frequently have discussions with their parents about what they are reading and how they relate to it.  This teaches them to be curious and discerning.  This approach is particularly constructive in the environment we have now in which children may stumble across violent or sexual material at any time.  It is akin, in an important way, to parents who do not teach their children to not talk to strangers, instead teaching them to not go anywhere with strangers.  And, when more than 90% of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are already known to the children they prey on, teaching them to tell at least three adults when someone does something to them about which they are puzzled or uncomfortable or fearful, can do more to help them be safe than censorship can ever do.

In an increasingly bewildering world in which ever more people and businesses vie for an individual’s attention, it is increasingly important to teach children how to learn to navigate safely through it.

1. From the Kitchen #145

© 2012 Daan Spijer

To receive an email each time a new piece is posted, email me: <daan [dot] spijer [at] gmail [dot] com>

CLICK HERE to download a formatted PDF of the above post

See more of Daan Spijer’s writing and his photos at Seventh House Communications