Brave New World II

After Huxley there must be Komarek...

1988: I read parts of Brave New World for the first time. Because of our English teacher those without any sex. Hard to find...

2013: I read the whole book. It is indeed brilliant, except maybe the shift from Bernard Marx to the Savage as the central figure. The dystopia is indeed stronger than the story line. The final dialogue between Mustapha Mond and John is really fascinating, disturbing and makes you wonder about mankind and society. What is the price that we pay for stability?

2300: I will (most probably) be dead. At least in the form that I inhabit now. This Blog will (hopefully) be banned. We will live in a... oh bugger I am a bad science-fiction writer. I say, it will be different from today.

and now I am reading Alfred Komarek's "Die Villen der Frau Hürsch", very Austrian, very slow, and not very dystopian, with a hint of Schnaps and Schweinsbraten between all the pages...it is like listening to folk music after free jazz and still we walk the same planet, and somehow miss the Bauernbergpark Man, whose brave new world seems to be somewhere else now.

Brave New World

To be able to understand modern myths like test tube babes or Bokanovsky processes, I have decided to read Brave New World again. Accompanied by Captain Beefheart's "Trust Us" as soundtrack, I try to write down my impressions after the first half of the book.
Unfortunately, he got some things right, one of the true prophets. While Orwell's Big Brother has just recently made the news (NSA), Huxley's consumerism is around for a while. We throw away food in enormous quantities, buy Asian shit textiles and are too lazy to repair stuff. Globalization is something, that Aldous didn't like too much. We on the other hand still live in these savage national states. What's better?
The amazing thing about his novel is the dystopian aspect just slightly before Hitler and the Nazis left their mark on the world, proving that there is more than one dystopia.
But what can we learn from Huxley without being reactionist bastards? Now we have got IVF and Dolly. We got synthetic biology and stem cell research.
Somehow this huge electric fence around some places starts to make sense. But to protect which side?
OK. Huxley didn't get the h-bomb and the world wide web, but be aware when his book was written.
It is indeed a classic.
We want everything clean and sterile and we want to be happy all the time. This, my friends, will never work out in this world.
Calmness and peace of mind, yes, but endless joy: no. And I am only talking about individuals. It is the same with society. So forget all the utilitarian promises and wisdom. I recommend other ways.
But enough for today.
The Bauernbergpark Man is still missing. He has completely disappeared. He was my personal savage and shaman, to whom I was too frightened to talk. Maybe I will never have the chance again to do that.
What a brave new world.

Bauernbergpark Man Missing

The Bauernbergpark Man has disappeared. There is no sign of him. Only very old small heaps of gravel still tell his story. What has happened to him? Is he dead, in an asylum, in prison or just somewhere else?
I think he is gone for a few months now and I wonder who will make the sun rise tomorrow?

The Book of Questions 2

Which yellow bird

fills its nest with lemons?

Cuál es el pájaro amarillo

que llena el nido de limones?

from Pablo Neruda "The Book of Questions"

translated by William O'Daly

Copper Canyon Press 2001

London

10 impressions from SB 6.0

1.      Maria Mercedes Roca’s talk was the emotional highlight of the conference. She put an emphasis on the need for modern biology with respect to the idea of sustainable industrial agriculture. Moreover, she presented the asymmetry of regulatory power between industrialized and developing countries.

2.      The session on responsible research and innovation, chaired by Claire Marris was mainly attended by social scientists. It was a parallel session in the Huxley building that started out with defining the term. To foster scientists’ positive attitude towards such a framework, it would be necessary to have such a session in the main auditorium.

3.      Some scientists complained that there were too many talks about ethical, social or regulatory issues or about future possibilities compared to actual scientific state-of-the-art talks.

4.      Apart from Maria Mercedes Roca’s talk and the appearance of an open letter outside the conference, there was a general lack of criticism, controversy and diversity of opinions as regards the social embedding of synthetic biology, its future visions and the aspect of a possible bioeconomy.

5.      The general atmosphere for meeting people (breaks, poster sessions, conference dinner) were nice but could be improved in some aspects. Especially the conference dinner offered not much against group segregation (social scientist-table, biobricks-table, etc.) There could be a setting with randomized table cards to foster communication with people you had never met before.

6.      Sometimes the conference setting was too much of a one-way communication event with not enough interactive elements. There could have been threads with workshops on one of the three days.

7.      The field seems to have grown together in some respects but a struggle for standards is still at an early stage. However, the diversity of the SB community is something very unique. Engineers, biologists, social scientists, philosophers, computer specialists, chemical engineers, biophysicists and so forth are the audience of the conference: More than 750 delegates and speakers from 44 countries all over the world.

8.      The set-up of the poster sessions gave certain advantages to presenters with lower numbers, because their posters were hanging in the Queen’s Tower room, where coffee and lunch breaks were held.

9.      The deficit model of science communication is still pretty much in the heads of the actors at SB 6.0 although also diverse statements against it (e.g. the frightening power of the confirmation bias) were heard.

10.  A still predominant motive is the fear of the GMO-ghost, uniting the rows of scientists but not so much some of the other actors in the field. Still some pose the question: What can the SB community do better, while others declare that the diversity of participants at SB conferences and projects is already something that discerns SB from the problematic approaches in times of genetic engineering.

The Book of Questions 1

Why don't the immense airplanes

fly around with their children?

Por qué los inmensos aviones

no se pasean con sus hijos?

from Pablo Neruda "The Book of Questions"
translated by William O'Daly
Copper Canyon Press 2001

After the flood

...there is a heatwave.
The impact of both are not very severe for myself. However, the impact on my conscience are considerable.
The Bauernbergpark Man has reappeared on his new double-bed place (double park bench) and seems to enjoy the heat. For him it is probably the first time this year to get really dry.
Although I have spent two Euros on a homeless guy this morning, I failed to help an elderly lady with a walking-aid thing in the tram today. My first failure today.
My second problem is that I haven't done anything for the flood victims yet.
I would like to donate some money but I do not trust the administrative channels, the money is pumped into. So I think I will wait for a direct opportunity to help, like the one that I missed today. However, a middle-ages lady helped the other woman and showed me how it works.
Next time I will help, too, instead of being to slow and too passive.
As regards philosophy, consider this as an excursion into the pragmatics and ethics of everyday life.
C'est la vie.

Meditations

Today, while I was meditating, I had (unintended of course) some thoughts: there is a sort of analogy between the duality of some brain domains and some metaphysical views. Zen, among other things, deals with the abolition of dualities. Thus mind/body, matter/idea or other dualities could be abolished without the help of reductionism. The reductionist position always puts one before the other. But are there not connection lines like in a dynamic interaction between action and structure in social theory?

As Sociologist (and Sociogole [for all those who know what this is]) you learn to hold different opinions or perspectives, as long as you don't like to position a theory as "the" theory. Many are satisfied with the specialization in one theoretical framework, in one world of thought. But where are the bridges?
In the way that there is "ratio" and "emotio", there is also materialism and idealism, or is there a continuum in both cases, one in which we as human beings only inscribe our shameless dichotomy.
Also the relation between theory and praxis seems to be part of this problem.
Be the world will and imagination or just matter, this, for me as sociologist also only means to take a position, to hold an opinion, a perspective.

If you assume such a perspective, in one second the degrees of freedom that are left are reduced to zero, and you are trapped in a fully deterministic model: all just mind, or all just matter.
If you leave the perspective behind, the one-sided perspective and you will be accused of excessive holism.

Finally, also in this case there is a continuum, from one-sided reductionism to all-encompassing holism.
Also in this case we can, no we could, save ourselves on the island of emptiness, if it were not also a form of holism, or is it reductionism?
Voilà - we come to a subsidiary tool (emptiness), that is well understood in the East and which gives us the delight of being able to bath in the paradox. We do not like that very much in the West.
All in all, this, these thoughts from the last meditation, this debris of mind, shall be a plea for the building of bridges of thought, emotion, epistemology and perception: a way towards synthesis and convergence and a path away from dead-end-road differentiation.

Bauernbergpark News Again

The man has put two park benches together to make a bed for himself. He has a blue sleeping bag. Recently he owns a knife too, which scares me a little. However, he only seems to use it for sharpening tips of branches to stick them into the ground, or to arrange them in other ways. This arrangement of benches and twigs is almost in the middle of the path, in the lower bend on the north side of Bauernbergpark. When I walk the dog, I carefully avoid this place when the man is there for two reasons. Firstly I am afraid of him, secondly I do not want the dog to spoil the man's territory. It has been raining for the last three days and the man has not shown up at his park benches. Maybe he has a dry place somewhere else.

Vacuum

Is there a vacuum between decisions? Is everything continuous?
Is there a way to get rid of all those black and white dichotomies/dualities in the minds of people?
Is there always someone to blame?