Influential Biologist or Mediocre Bond Girl

A bit late for a Wednesdays words, but I couldn't help post this about today's quote:

“One can start from the perspective of a religious naturalist or from the perspective of the world religions and arrive at the same place: a moral imperative that this Earth and its creatures be respected and cherished” - Ursula Goodenough

I feel bad saying this, but to be honest the first thing I thought about when I saw this quote was not the quote itself, but rather the originator of the quote: Ursula Goodenough. It sounds like a mediocre Bond girl’s name.

Ursula, meh; good enough.

Wednesdays Words 6 - Literary Taste and Personal Development

“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I like this quote, and unfortunately feel that it describes me to a great degree. I haven’t taken the time to properly develop myself as a person to the extent that I would like to have if my situation had been ideal (read: was a millionaire with time to spare). I don’t know all the things I would like to know, I haven’t read the books I know I should have read, and I don’t fully understand my own views about the world I live in. I feel like I am making do with a minimal set of the information I would like to have in order to be content with my own personal sphere of knowledge.

Case in point: this very quote itself. I know of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I don’t know much about him. He was a writer I believe, active around the twenties, but I couldn’t name a book he was responsible for, and I know that there was a Zelda involved, but that this has nothing to do with Link.

This Zelda though, I know quite well

I find that rather than knowing important things, I know of important things. It is like my previous post on how I just don’t get poetry, yet I still have a tacit acceptance that it must be a worthwhile thing to know.

Literary taste is likewise something I have failed to cultivate. Though I possess an extensive knowledge of book titles which I should have read, or which nonetheless have some sort of literary significance; I have yet to move very far along my list of ‘books I need to read’. Brideshead Revisted, Wuthering Heights, anything by Hemingway, anything by suitably long dead Russians; the list goes on.

I know of these books, but I haven’t the slightest idea why they are important, or what the overall gist of their respective stories are.

Is it just me, or has this title always sounded more like a B-grade horror sequel than a literary work?

But the way that the modern world can overtake you is evident all over the place. I love chess, but I don’t play chess much anymore; I haven’t cultivated that part of my life anywhere near as much as I would want. I play with my son occasionally, but in order to fully embrace the game, I would have to devote far too much time to it. Let’s face it, in these days where a half hour of chess playing could be replaced with a scroll through Facebook activities, a read of my Twitter feed, a glance at the latest blog entries via RSS, a few informative and hilarious videos on YouTube, insightful commentary from Al-Jazerra or any other activities on the web; the ancient Indian game all but certainly loses the bet.

Or perhaps I can kill two birds with one stone? 

On the other hand, if we are to look at Fitz’s quote from a more modern perspective we might be tempted to dismiss it, or at least diminish its accusations, as somewhat anachronistic.

After all while it is no doubt true that the majority of the population will not form a literary taste as such, these days literature is not the only medium with which people can form a personal philosophical viewpoint.

Nowadays we can devote our attention to the multitude of movies out there, and slowly cultivate a unique cinematic taste, which may very well help us to plumb the depths of the human condition as much as any literary viewpoint would. We can similarly turn our attention to the small screen, which these days exhibits works of such complexity and daring that it is hardly worthy of the scorn so often associated with devoting time to watching the box.

But if there is any one tool which has emerged out of the past century as the superlative force in cultivating our own personal beliefs, tastes and philosophical development, it has to be the Internet.

And it's useful for pictures of people lying face down in various situations......

Nothing else can compare to the net’s ability to pervade every instance of our personality. You can read books online, turn to articles about them, read a blog, or take part in a discussion with people from across the globe. But considering the medium I am using for this message, this should be of no doubt to anyone reading.

Perhaps this widening of the information sphere is the reason for my thoughts regarding my own apparent lack in refinement. As there is so much more available to us in this information age, and our attention spans have been stretched much further than ever before, we in a sense dilute our tastes over a variety of knowledge sources never before experienced by anyone at any point in history. In this sense, a short attention span isn’t the worst thing in the world, for while it may result in a less thorough approach to whatever is being analysed at the time, it nevertheless allows for rapid transitions from one source of attention, knowledge or amusement, to another.

I mean sure I may not have much of an understanding of the great Russian authors, or the popular British novelists of the past few hundred years, but thanks to the internet I know such obscure things as the amazing abilities of animal penises, the curious nature of infinite numbers that differ in size and how to make a trebuchet out of office supplies. And this is only a small subset of the much larger experiences I have garnered from the venerable World Wide Web.

So while Fitzgerald may have been lamenting modern mans aversion to literary and philosophical development and self determination, I think it is somewhat encouraging that today we have a lot more tools available to the everyday man to help them in their quest through life.
That's all for this late night rant dear reader. I hope this makes up for the missed Wednesdays Words last week; whats more I hope someone noticed it was missing.
Good night all.
MM

Oh and on a quick wiki, I see that F. Scott wrote The Great Gatsby. I haven't read it, but luckily come December this year I might not have to...

Wednesday’s Words – Free Will

I have decided to add a little descriptive section to my Wednesdays Words title this past few weeks because my previous entries were turning into quite long and rambling discussions on a certain topic, rather than just the quotes that spurned them forth. This has again happened this week, with a seemingly innocent quote regarding free will launching me into a diatribe against the free will argument as it is applied by religious apologists.

What can I say; I am missing my regular Christian debates now that Facebook has disabled their old discussion boards. Nevertheless, I hope this is somehow engaging. Enjoy!

“We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice” – Isaac Bashevis Singer

The idea of free will has always been interesting to me.

Looking at the world from our inevitable first person bias, our own will seems all but indisputable. Yet by the same token there are things in me that I cannot control, things that appear to be beyond the purview of my will, but which nevertheless I would consider an integral part of myself.

For instance the love I have for my wife and son is not something I have brought about due to my will, but it is nevertheless something I consider a core part of my being. Much more so than other things which are a part of me, but not subject to the whims of my free will. Things such as my automatically beating heart, or my preference to cry, if I have been sufficiently hurt.

I, like Dawson, am only human after all

But then the limits of what we mean by our will are also not so easily defined. I like to think of my will as my ability to deliberate in my own mind, to come to decisions and then to act so that these things are brought about. However as mentioned above, any decisions I make are inevitably based on further components of what I consider as central to my being. I can’t will that I love my wife, but I can will to marry her, and to devote myself in this way.

It’s like Schopenhauer said, “a man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills”.

Another reason why we find free will as central to our views on life is because it inevitably links in with our concepts of responsibility. I can be held accountable for things only if they arise from my own free will, and are not forced upon me by others.

However free will is also a common scapegoat when it comes to one of my other interests; atheism/religion debates.

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”

The above quote is one of the more formidable and pressing arguments against the existence of certain kinds of gods in our universe. This is often referred to as the ‘Problem of Evil’, and is generally credited as being put forth by the ancient philosopher Epicurus, though it may date even further into antiquity than he.

The argument has retained a place in modern culture, well within the realm of the everyman, because of a few defining qualities it possesses. For starters it is simple; everyone can remember it, and it walks forward in a nice syllogism, with steps we can all follow. It is also very pertinent to our daily lives, with the evidence of pain and suffering evident across the globe to any caring person.

There are arguments against the existence of god (or for it) that delve too far into philosophical parlance, so that we have to try and understand concepts like ‘necessary agents’, or ‘parsimonious existence’,  before we can even begin to ponder the questions themselves. But the problem of evil argument is put forth in a way everyone can understand.

It is a burning question for people trying to reconcile the way the world is, with the way gods are presented to them. If a Christian puts forth the idea of their god as a loving god; one who is all-powerful and keenly interested in the affairs of man, then there appears to be a contradiction at play when you fail to see this divine agent acting out to alleviate the ills of the world. [Then there are I suppose the worst cases of Christianity, where they ascribe natural disasters to the very same gods capricious wrath.]

So we must ask ourselves why these actions aren’t taking place; is the god unwilling or unable.

It is at this point that we find the interjection of free will into the argument, as rather than addressing the question directly, religious proponents seek to skirt the problem altogether.

Their answer: There is evil in the world, because there is free will.

Here religious apologists seek to connect some of the worst factors of existence with arguably one of its finest; with our ability to think independently, and act of our own accord.

There is evil in the world because we have our own free will, and the only way to stifle this evil, to stop it at its core, is to withhold that very same will. To take what is free, and bind it in the staples of religious dogma.*

I prefer this kind of Dogma

Something important to consider however is that not all restrictions of will are violations of free will. This is especially worth noting, as if we are to grant these gods the credit for designing the universe, then these limits on our will must be intentional, and part of the design.

As an example of restriction of will, versus removal of free will, consider a prisoner. We have restricted his will (statistically it is a he); he cannot leave his cell, he cannot choose his meals, and he cannot run for political office. However this is a restriction upon his exercising of this will; not of the will itself. He can still will these things to happen; he just cannot make them happen. If we were on the other hand to subject him to a bit of advanced neurosurgery so that even though his cell door was open, he was unable to will himself to walk through it, we have taken away some of the freedom of his will. [Does that even make grammatical sense?]

But then if we want to apply this kind of thinking to a creator god, we have to ask a lot of incisive questions regarding not only the motivations of the god, but also the nature of creation.

Under the free will explanation for the existence of evil in the universe we have a god who allows evils to take place, because it feels that this freedom of will is more important than freedom from suffering. Generally in a theological sense this freedom must be present so that we humans have the ability to choose to worship a god freely, because apparently these gods prefer voluntary submission to some form of mandatory one. Its smacks of egoism to me, but anyhow.

We thus find ourselves with the ability to do evil actions, but also to choose to do good actions. Evidently some will choose to do evil over good, and we arrive at the world we are in today.

Now ignoring the fact that Christians believe everyone must choose evil actions at some point (which is either a violation of free will, a design flaw, or else a misunderstanding of statistics), I will instead focus on the curious fact that these evil choices are even presented to us at all.

I say presented to us, because the mere presence of free will does not mean there must intrinsically be evil options to choose from. After all, this creator god is apparently (or at least in most cases) all powerful, all knowing and perfect. So when creating the world we live in, there was a deliberate design in all the options that are available to us.
Looking at this critically it brings up some unpleasant realities, as this means that things like murder, rape and physical abuse had to have been systematically made possible from a physical and biological standpoint.

Why is it I can use my free will to batter a man to death, but I can’t employ the same free will to psychically slay him with my brain powers? It’s because such things are not possible in the physical realm we reside in.

It may seem a ridiculous point to argue, but it is something that needs to be addressed. Because just as I can posit a world where we have extra abilities, and thus room to commit more evils, I can likewise hypothesise a world where such physical killings are made impossible not through the removal of free will, but rather due to a physical restriction on certain actions within the physical world. Such a world would be preferential int he sense that it contains not only less evil, but less possible evil.

Then there is the fact that you could still have a world with free will, but protect the innocent from harm. Take murder for instance. Murder is evil, is a sin, and with rational reasons behind it. However one need not remove the ability to murder in order to eliminate the suffering caused by murder.

This god could stop you stabbing someone by turning the knife into a fish. It could prevent a shooting death by making the bullets disappear. True this hypothetical god intervening universe would then lead to a lot more questions (would guns have even been invented for instance) that I don’t have room to go into here. But the fact remains that the will to do evil does not require that actions are allowed to be taken through to fruition. This is why we have attempted murder charges after all.
At any rate, I think this ramble has gone on far too long, and perhaps I best save my atheistic arguments for a more dedicated post. There is evidently a lot to say on the subject of free will, and its place within the atheist/theist debate, and I would be interested in any comments here.
Cheers
MM

*Disclaimer: I have spent long enough debating online and in person with religious people to know that it is worth making a distinction here before people accuse me of generalisation. Being an atheist, I have to argue against not just one form of theism, but all forms of theism, and as a result there are no doubt theists out there who don’t share some of the values I am ascribing to them here. So I will make myself clear now., I am not saying that the views expressed in this post as belonging to theists must belong to all theists. I am arguing against a theistic argument, not against all theism. I simply omit pointing this out overtly throughout the post, as it becomes a bit tedious to always be saying, ‘a subset of theists’, or ‘theistic evolutionists’ or some other such group within theism. If you don’t agree with the form of theist I am presenting, don’t assume it is a straw man argument; instead recognise it as an argument against some other form of theist.

That was a damn long disclaimer...

Wednesdays Words 4 - On Open Minds

For today’s Wednesdays Words, you get three quotes for the price of one. Which would be a good deal were it not for the fact these things are free anyway.

This was the quote found in my weekly offerings which spurred on increase:

“A great many open minds should be closed for repairs” – Toledo Blade

It reminded me of this quote:

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it." - Terry Pratchett

And in turn, this quote, whose origins aren’t quite certain, but who most people mistakenly attribute to Richard Dawkins, after he quoted it in his book, and tv show:

“By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”

Quotes such as this, and many others concerning open minds and freedom of thought, have been finding a lot of purchase the past decade due to the New Atheism movement, and more importantly the staunch totalitarian opposition they find in religion.

Religion runs afoul of the open mind because it has what it believes to be a monopoly on truth, and an aversion to the alternative thinking that open minds can foster.

But what do we mean by an ‘open mind’, and just how open should they be? As the above quotes attest, there are problems with open minds being too open. But perhaps what we mean here isn’t such a simplistic view of the open mind.

Rather than thinking of an open mind as a room with an open doorway, free for anyone or anything to enter, I would like to think of an open mind as still having a studious guard at the door. The guard of reason, who filters through the riff-raff of religion and superstition, after they fail to present the appropriate identification.

An open mind should be thought of as a retronym for a closed mind, not as a description in itself. It is a strike back against the idea that there is a closed system; a set of what is right to think about, and what is wrong.

An open mind is open to ideas in that it is open to consider them, much like how a single person is open to advances by potential partners; it doesn’t mean that any new idea that swaggers along will be let in.

On the other hand, we can see a bit of sharpness to the other edge of this sword and need to be wary. After all even the most open minded proponent of reason and logic will have to concede that there should be some form of thing essentially closed for debate. After all to seek to have reason as the defining filter of what enters the open mind, you would have to put this form of rational analysis beyond contestation. Sure you could argue that such a system is demonstrably reliable, and philosophically persuasive, however then you have only effectively moved your crutch back onto the reliability of these methods. The question of whether such logic and reason are known to be true, or if we are just relying on a form of inference and experimental history to show this is so, still remains open.

When forming our own personal philosophies, there are a few ways we can go about it. As in the past it seems that these days many people find it easier to defer their responsibilities in this regard, and simply outsource their philosophical development and standards off to an external source, such as religion. However as I am an atheist I prefer what I believe is the more pragmatic (though also perhaps more taxing) method of having an open mind, and putting in the effort of manning the door with reason; a hopefully unbiased arbiter who is less likely to indulge those selling divine revelation or personal experience to get inside your mind.

At the end of the day, I am not denying that there are a great deal of religious people out there who are very open minded. However somewhere in one’s mind, there must be a seed of unmovable thought which we build our thoughts and values upon; some axiom which we use to define what we are and what we believe. In this case I believe that it is best to set this kernel in tune with the rational concepts of reason, scepticism and logic, rather than faith, obedience and submission.

And that’s my rant for the day. I don’t know how coherent it is, but perhaps now that I have opened my comments up so that anyone can reply I will get some interesting rejoinders.

Well, what do you all think; are open minds good, or bad, or a bit in the middle? Click on the comments link below to let me know.

MM

Wednesdays Words – Week 3

“The average, healthy, well adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible” – Jean Kerr

I am not a morning person. I like the morning only in the sense that I naturally stay up till around 2a.m. before that voice inside my head informs me that I should probably go to bed. But the thing is, the voice I hear isn’t my inner weariness trying to overrun the part of me that wants to stay awake. I am not tired at these times. No the voice is simply the part of me that knows I live in a world geared towards those who are morning people, and the fact that these are generally those in charge of the working world (of which I am begrudgingly a part).
The morning I like is dark, not light. It’s at the end of my waking day, not the start. It’s populated by weird shows and foreign SBS films, not beaming out those crappy ‘morning shows’ that seem to want to straddle the line between news, commercial, and brain numbing inanity (but more often than not they only succeed in the last criteria).
I remember years ago during my uni days I would ponder the different Mathews that formed the gestalt entity I identify as myself. There was Drunk Mathew, Uni Mathew, Study Mathew, Morning Mathew...... the list went on. Generally Drunk Mathew had the best time; he all but killed Morning Mathew for a few years, and was the bane of Uni Mathew, who often found himself late, unprepared, and feeling a bit too seedy for a day of lectures.
A point worth noticing however is that Morning Mathew is a reluctant addition to this whole menagerie, he is a social construct; a forced part of my psyche. If I were the true lord and master of my life, morning Mathew wouldn’t exist. He would reside in a limbo, only coming back into existence when some undue force awoke me from my slumber.
This is the reason why for this Wednesdays Words, I picked the above quote from Jean Kerr, a person who I know next to nothing about, save the fact she was a playwright, and lived in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Scranton, Pennsylvania; home of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company

I chose it because I feel terrible in the mornings. Not terrible in any physiological sense, I just don’t want to be up; don’t want to be conscious.
However these days I have a new variable in my mornings, one that adds a more ambiguous quality to my waking experience.
I have a family.
I have a wife and a son who are both a lot more comfortable in the a.m. than I am. So more often than not Morning Mathew will now be pulled into existence, even on the weekends, when his son enters the room, and coaxes him out of bed. My wife too is always eager for me to forsake my world of slumber for the promised delights of the waking world.
But it isn’t all bad. Sure Morning Mathew doesn’t like this, and his temper is generally a bit shorter than Laidback Mathew. But there is a new guy on the scene now; Family Mathew. Luckily for us Mathews as a whole, Family Mathew has wrought by far the most positive elements in my life, and he is here to stay.
So though I may find myself up hours ahead of when I would ideally like to be, it is finally for a good enough reason. I am up having a family breakfast, watching cartoons with my son, or eating out at a cafe with my wife. I am keen to get out and watch my son’s karate classes, or go for a roadtrip with the family to buy some antique tools or whatnot from some obscure country town. Or just to relax at home doing nothing, but doing it with good company (not to mention the days when my wife bribes me out of bed with pancakes and waffles, mmmmm).
These benefits are enough to outweigh the negatives of missing my extra hours of sleep, and placate me as a whole, so I can shut out Morning Mathews objections for the time being.

Well that’s my Wednesdays Words done, a tad off topic this week, but these quotes aren’t always the most inspirational, and as it is just meant to be a catalyst for more writing, I guess it has done its duty.
Until next time dear reader.
MM

Wednesday's Words - Week 2

Second installment of Wednesdays Words and I already find myself running behind! Its barely still Wednesday, and I have no post on the go. I shall blame this on the pitiful quotes to choose from (“Buildings should be good neighbours” – Paul Thiry; really? Should cars be pen pals as well?).

Anyhow, I have found one worthy quote from the list that I will do my best to write a quick spiel on before the p.m. moves to a.m.

“Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

Meet Arthur Schopenhauer. For those of you who don’t know him, he is the pessimistic philosopher who gave us such gems as “Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex”, “ If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it”, and "Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people".
But as grim and sexist as some of his thoughts may be, the man did have a keen mind when it was employed in more rationale pursuits, and his philosophical writing (though over 152 years old), is refreshingly easy to read. Especially for a philosopher.

His above quote I like good enough as it is, but I also think the thought behind it would go well updated a bit for our modern era.
Newspapers, though they aren’t dead yet, have definitely been overtaken in terms of currency as a source of projecting the news of the day. Indeed, its no longer sufficient to have our news delivered daily, we need it hourly, by the minute, or updated by the second. This is the age of Twitter after all, and if you lumber behind, saving your well thought out articles for 24 hour increments, you are sure to be scooped.

Perhaps the quote is best altered by a quick reallocation of positions. Lets call newspapers the minute hand of history; slow enough to appear immobile at times, yet quick enough to notice as events move on. Perhaps the hour hand would be symbolised by more permanent and steadfast forms of the written word; by books.
So now we find the second hand of history moving much closer in sync with the flow of time in the real world; where news can be read pretty much as it happens. Whether it be the instant dissemination of recent deaths, the ability to run revolutions on the ground, or even the inadvertent tweeting of significant world events; we don't wait to hear about things the next day.

But this rapid news hand of the metaphorical clock has its faults still, and as Schopenhauer mentioned, its metal is hardly the metal of its fellow hands. As the ability to report things moves into the hands of everyday people, its quality is likewise diluted (if you don't believe me, just look at the blog you are reading; written by a man with no discernible qualifications).
Sometimes I cant help but feel that the tendency of news and events to form a self perpetuating loop these days is all the more increased as the spread of information becomes easier, and more wide-spread. News is news simply because it is news. The more people report on speculation, the more weight that the speculation seems to have. It is a worry when things can become so distorted, where news and information can spread so fast and unverified, whilst our mindsets are still set in days where we put stock in such things.
How often do you hear of Twitter and 'social media' being quoted on the news, or of the number of hits a YouTube video received, without any proper context being given (is a million hits really lending credibility here?).
The new second hand of history moves so fast and so erratically that people confuse it with the more steady motions of the minute hand. But at the end of the day, I am still much more entertained by the history this clock reveals, that I was before it developed.


Anyhow, this post didn't really have much of a point, nor much of an end; I just thought it an interesting concept.
Good night all.
MM

Wednesday's Words - Week 1

Welcome to the first installment of my hopefully weekly Wednesdays Words. The basic aim here is to spur me on in my blogging with a weekly commitment, based around my thoughts of one of the weeks daily quotes supplied dutifully by my trusty desk calendar.
So then, here goes......

“When the time is right, the answers will come” – P.K. Shaw

I chose this inaugural quote out of the seven available to me this week not because I agree with it, but because of the rant which it inspired.
I am not a fan of this quote, as I don’t like mysterious agents being invoked that ensure everything will be ‘just fine’. To say that answers will come at some mystically appointed right time doesn’t gel with me as I don’t believe there is any all powerful being at work putting our lives together. To believe such a thing raises some seriously disturbing questions regarding people whose lives were lived in less than desirable circumstances.

Destiny either isn't real, or its indifferent

But I do see the benefits in getting people to be positive about the future, particularly when it comes to the uneasy fact that it is full of unknowns. However rather than invoking some predestined path set out for you in an uncertain future, I prefer to look at the possibilities inherent in this seemingly random future.
The late founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, once gave a commencement speech to a group of students beginning their tenure at university which I previously blogged on here. In it he goes over a similar concept to that which I have been discussing (unknown paths leading into the future), that I think really hits the nail on the head.
First a little background.
After officially dropping out of his university course, the young Steve Jobs decided to hang around campus for a bit and take part in things that he was previously unable to, due to course commitments. Reed College apparently had the best calligraphy instruction available in the United States at the time, and the beautifully scripted labels and posters around the college grounds piqued Jobs’ interest. He enrolled in the class and developed an appreciation for the importance of typography in graphical representation. His early exposure to things like font families, serif versus sans-serif and proportional spacing was something that Jobs would later draw upon when developing the early Apple computers, which were among the first personal computers to display text in anything other than a monospaced, generic font.

Yes that's right, its an apple.....

Jobs mentioned this in his address to those students’ years ago to help highlight the uncertainty of our future, but also the importance of what we are doing, and of not disregarding where we are just because we don’t know where it will take us. He summed up the crux of his argument in the closing statement of this portion of his speech.

“Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

You need to trust in something, not because there is something out there working for you (as in karma, destiny, gods, or whatever), but because in trusting that there is something out there for you, you are implicitly trusting in yourself. Jobs mentioned it himself when he says that such trust in the future gives you confidence, regardless of what you ground it in. I would go a step further and say it is better to place your trust in yourself, and your own faculties, rather than in some possibly existent third party.
Don’t just trust in the future because you believe it has been laid out before you; trust in yourself because you are the one who will actually do it!
If the future were fixed, if there was some destiny out there with Mathew James Morton written on it, I am not so sure I would want it. If there was something out there withholding the answers from me until the right time came along, I don’t think I would cheerfully take them when said time did arrive.
The enlightenment taught us that human agency was where we should place our bets, not on some higher power, whatever form it may take. Trusting in foreordained events and personal destinies was so widely believed in the past that in the event of a shipwreck, people would clamber over whomever stood between them and safety, believing that God had already decided who lived and who died.
Accepting human agency as the driving force in our lives means we don’t sit around waiting for answers; we go out and find them. We don’t wait to see where our path in life takes us; we walk boldly ahead in the unknown knowing that though our path isn’t part of some divine plan, it is nevertheless our path to make, and our privilege to forge it.
I am going to close this post with a quote which I may have already recently mentioned (though I can’t remember), but which all the same seems to fit well with the topic.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard

I hope that you enjoyed this first installment of Wednesdays Words. I think it went quite well, but I have the niggling thought at the back of my mind that this is a somewhat lame attempt at regularity.
Please let me know what you think in the comments; I crave your approval!
MM

A Thoughts from the Antipodes weekly institution

I was recently inspired by my sisters installation of a themed weekly blog post (check out her Tuesdays Treasures over at Picklebug Designs), and decided to instigate my own attempt over here.

At first I wasn’t sure what I could hope to achieve on a weekly basis given that my blog platform isn’t really specialised in any one direction, nor do I consider myself having any form of expertise which might be called upon for weekly retrospection. So whatever I decided to post about, it had to be based on some quotidian thing from my life, and something I wasn’t likely to run out of material for.

In the end the answer was right in front of me, or to be specific, slightly to the right of me; my work calendar.

I have hinted in a couple of previous posts about the daily work calendar on my desk that endows my morning with a new quote, or thought for the day. Sometimes they are interesting, and prompt some (hopefully) entertaining ruminations, others are a bit less inspiring, and make me question whoever is in control of these things. Nevertheless, they help furnish my day with something to think about. The number of dull mornings where I have looked to my calendar for some form of motivation or inspiration, and gingerly lifted the previous day’s page in trepidation of what lies beneath, cannot be counted.

So with a theme decided upon, I then faced the formidable question of what to call my weekly musings.

Notable Quotables?

Wordsworthy Wednesdays?

Thoughtful Thoughts Thursdays?

Friday QuoteDay?

These were the first attempts that I came up with, and I wasn’t really happy with any of them. Rhyming failed me, alliteration offered little improvement, and my last attempt with the clunky ‘Friday Quote Day’ was just plain awful. Clearly I needed help.

I finally settled on the simpler ‘Wednesdays Words’. I was going to add ‘...of Wisdom’, but thought it might be more prudent of me to leave of this little descriptive, lest I don’t live up to the label.

As it is not yet the right day of the week to get the ball rolling on this endeavour, I would like to spend the rest of this post sharing with you some previous quotes that gave me enough pause, for various reasons, to actually write down some thoughts on the matter.

The outcome of these daily quotes are generally pretty foreseeable. It can be uplifting, at other times annoying, and every now and then it is just plain bland. I got a nice surprise the other day though when I noticed what I would like to think is a semi-hidden joke on the part of the calendars designer. I had previously lamented the lack of thought by the person compiling these quotes when they included a quote from a Christian Scientist nutjob; but this next pair of quotes gave me hope.

The first quote was an old classic:

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” – Tibetan saying

We have all heard it before, and some of us have pondered the rhetorical question at some philosophical length (even though Bart Simpson clearly answered it years ago). So it wasn’t anything new and after reading it I thought nothing further of it.

And then I found this cute Tibetan Terrier picture

However the following day when I peeled the previous entry away and revealed the current days quote, I was taken aback at what I am pretty sure was a deliberate topical reference.

Here is what I found:

“There is no sound of one hand clapping” – Chinese proverb

Is it what I think it is? Is it a cheeky juxtaposition of a Chinese authoritarian quote after a Tibetan one, in order to show the oppressive nature of these two cultures relationship? I mean I might be mistaken here, but it seems pretty to the point. Though yes, I get the validity of the Chinese saying on its own, and how it is worth noting that cooperation has virtues worth extolling as a national maxim. However, given it was put right after the Tibetan quote dealing with the same exact topic, I would be willing to wager it was an intentional gag.

Perhaps gag wasn't the right word...

The second quote I will bring to your attention is this:

“A hedge between keeps friendships keen.” – German Proverb

You will often find sayings, adages or proverbs scattered throughout such ‘thought of the day’ lists which are attributed not to individuals, but rather larger groups of humanity be it nations, civilisations, religions or ethnicities. When this is the case it always makes me wonder whether the quote is at all reflective of the group identity from which it sprung, or whether it was merely a nifty saying that was happened upon by someone of arbitrary descent, but nevertheless latched onto by the group.

So in the above example, I question if the saying is representative of German people (though from what era it originated, I do not know), or just something that was first propagated in Germany (though its handy rhyming when translated into English makes me wonder...).

Growing up as we do in a society saturated with a multitude of media influences, sometimes one can’t help but link the nation of Germany, or indeed simply the word German, with the Second World War; in particular with the Nazi’s.

The scale of these past crimes mean that such mental connections aren’t surprising, though considering that the nation of Germany has a very diverse history, as well as an impressive contemporary culture, it is still rather unfortunate. Nevertheless due to Germany’s central role in both the major conflicts of the modern era, the Germans exemplify the ‘bad guys’ of the 20^th century.

We can see this re-enforced in many facets of our lives, whether it be their lingering presence in war movies, the endless documentaries on the History channel detailing those horrible days, or finding them sitting squarely in the crosshairs of a plethora of video game titles.

So when the quote of the day came up, and it was labelled as a German proverb, I couldn't help it if my conditioned mind finds some kind of ironic link between an ostensibly innocent quote, and the darker hours of the German civilisation (though I admit, it is a stretch).

“A hedge between keeps friendships keen. A panzer division causes a friendship schism.”

Then there are quotes that make me think, and then think a bit further. Perhaps a bit further than a quote of the day calendar warrants, but those of you who know me know I am wont to exactly that form of overanalyses. Like my previous post about Samuel Johnson's ‘Language is the dress of thought’ quote, I often follow one train of thought, only to quickly turn around and see it from a completely different perspective. And I hope this second perspective is all the more astute because of this.

Take this last quote for instance:

“I can do something else besides stuff a ball through a hoop. My biggest resource is my mind” – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

At first glance I thought it a good quote. It is nice to see an athlete praising the gifts of the mind, above those of their athletic prowess. After all one is more likely to be beneficial and attainable to the everyman than the other. By which I mean we can’t all earn a living as athletes no matter how hard we practise, but the fruits of the mind are available to all, and generally bring with them an increase in one’s personal standard of living.

Plus the man fought Bruce Lee!

But then (and perhaps this isn’t really a rethink, as it is a sign of my own innate cynicism) I can’t help but note that it is handy when one of your other resources, like stuffing a ball through a hoop, is able to placate you with millions of dollars while your precious brain can remain roughly underutilised.

But I must end this before I get too carried away. Tomorrow is Wednesday, and I shall hopefully have my first weekly post ready for you to read over.

Until then dear reader, have a good night!

MM