For Absent Friends

I'm writing this for those of our friends who could not attend Kyung's service.

The Macquarie Park Cemetery Complex is large. There's sections for all faiths – a niche wall for Jews, the curious obelisks and broken pillars favoured by Protestants, angels and crosses for the Catholics, and even stelae and burrows for Daoists, Buddhists, and so on. The grounds slope gently down to the discreet main gate, and all around the parklands are dotted with pavilions, fountains, and stately mature gum trees, a ring of which also cuts off the whole complex from the noise and ugliness of the industrial parks and main road. Apart from the formal monuments, there are little personal acts of devotion everywhere. In random trees, on the footings of graves, there are small, handmade tributes – a paticular bouquet, obviously renewed daily, a carved bird, a hand crocheted heart with the single letter 'M'. It is a nice place to sleep for a while.

Kyung was farewelled in the Magnolia Chapel. I'd been there before. It's a nice enough space, with a curtained area at its head for the catafalque, screens all around, and those curiously uncomfortable seats peculiar to funeral homes. When the service started I immediately learned two important things. One was that I have never over the course of our decades of friendship pronounced Kyung's name correctly. And the other was that Kyung's family had no idea just how many friends, or just how well loved by so many, their only son was. I like to imagine Kyung laughing mischievously about both those things.

The service was pretty well entirely in Korean. It was clear that the family really only expected it to be themselves. It was also deeply Christian. All the while when the pastor was asking Jesus to take Kyung into his arms, I thought about how my militantly atheist friend would have reacted to that. Part of me thinks he would have hated it. But then, he loved his father, and I think he would have wanted them to do the thing which gave them most comfort. Either way, I think that once he'd thought it through he would have found it hugely funny – I never met another man capable of enjoying irony quite so much as Kyung was.

The service was open casket, which meant that we were all able to say our last farewells face to face. When the family invited us to do so, it was with real satisfaction that I noted that the queue went down the aisle and practically out the door. A mourning band fitted in size in some small measure to the size of his soul. I think his family were pleased too. I hope they were. They'd laid Kyung out in his finest. They didn't shave him, but just trimmed the Fu Man Chu he loved to sport. I liked that very much – Kyung will go to his long home fitted out as he always wanted to present himself to the world.

I ran into Jezza in the queue afterwards, when a long long stream of people lined up to pay respects to his dad. Jezza talked about Kyung's presence of mind, and his consideration for others. "Only K-Dog," he said, "would have had the kind of presence of mind to pull safely off the road." He was right.

When all was done, we all went our separate ways into that bright Australian sun. Some went to The Ranch, to pour a libation and remember. I suspect many, though, were like me – forced to re-enter the living stream of the day and work. But either way, you all should know that Kyung was sent off in real style, by dozens of people who loved him. I think he would have wanted all his friends to have the satisfaction of knowing that.

Vale, Kyung Un Kim

I was teaching this morning when I got a message telling me that my old friend Kyung had died. Kyung had been a big presence in my life during what I think were very dark years for both of us. We met in the midst of a mild bender in Manly, introduced by a mutual friend, and hit it off immediately. Back in those days, both Kyung and I were living on the ragged, bleeding edge of excess and self destruction, and one tragedy of his death is that I think the reason we hadn't seen each other in years was because together we tended to enable each other's bad behaviour. We seemed to be both going through a largely unspoken process of getting ourselves right, and I think we both knew we needed to be apart to get that done. It looks as if Kyung had pretty well got there, which makes his passing doubly unfair. And the other tragedy, this one for me alone, is that because of the way we interacted I don't believe anyone who loved him would ever wish to see my face, especially not at his funeral.

So this is my act of remembrance.

When I think of Kyung, what I mostly remember is his anger. He was furious – at his ethnicity, at everyone and everything that snubbed him for it, at all the world's injustice, the greed and mendacity of humanity, and at himself. I guess that's a big key to why we got along so well. I remember when we'd talk, solving the problems of the world, the incandescent rage and hatred which would flame in his eyes as his jaw muscles suddenly jumped out the side of his head, his fists and shoulders balled and rolled like he was preparing to physically rip evil from the world with his bare hands. I remember times when we'd be talking politics over a beer and staff would be shooting us concerned glances, edging towards us as if expecting a fight to erupt between us at any moment. And then suddenly we'd both stop, one of us (usually Kyung) would drop a gag and we'd be laughing like crazy donkeys and agreeing to disagree. I remember that laugh. It was a kind of high powered machine gun cackle, like his laughter was the steel capped emergency relief valve on a nuclear reactor gone critical. And I suppose it was.

Love, hate, fury, and laughter. These were the major components of Kyung as I knew him. He so hated evil and injustice. He was one of those rare – all too rare – people for whom the dichotomy of good and evil was a source of actual, physical distress. And his hatred of the perpetrators of evil and discrimination was an equally physical force. Everything about the way he reacted to the world was writ so large it was impossible not to see the immense love, generosity, and care for humanity which drove and animated him. And this wasn't confined to the abstract, either. He was a loyal, dependable, entertaining, and absolute friend. Kyung practiced total friendship in the way some nations practice total war. He would literally go several extra miles for anyone he counted as a friend. He never once failed me, and it is with bitter regret that I remember the times I failed him – failures I will now never be able to scrub out or repair. Kyung was the sort of friend you could call, tell him you were bored, and half an hour later he'd be at your front door with a case of beer, a cheeky grin, and a furious determination not to accept any money or thanks for either. Such a trivial example to illustrate such an enormous reservoir of generosity, kindness, and concern for the people in his life doesn't seem to do him justice, but it's the thing I remember most vividly.

I remember our long and heated political arguments, our twenty four hour gaming marathons, our weird and hectic night-time missions through empty, darkened streets, our clenched, angry existences seeming to be in tandem as we ate up the miles of road beneath our wheels. But I mostly remember laughing. Kyung loved to laugh, and not least of all at himself. For such a serious, intense soul, he was ever ready to laugh a great fat belly laugh at any or all of his own foibles. Another way in which his largeness of spirit outstripped my own. I remember Kyung as a man on fire, lit with profound, intense, and above all selfless concerns. A being constructed in proportions of greatness. I'll miss him, and I regret bitterly the failure of my half-thought plans to one day, older, wiser, and weirder, reconnect over a beer and laugh again about all the stupid, brilliant, and just plain hilarious stuff we'd done.

Vale, my friend. Sleep now, and be at peace.

Star Wars – You Are What You Eat

In spite of what the critics have been saying, I enjoyed the new Star Wars. Quite a few commentators panned it for being "meaningless", but without the eye of love and nostalgia, the level of meaning they expected was never an intended or actual part of the original franchise.

This made me think about the reverence in which we hold A New Hope and Empire. I first experienced these films when I was about six, and thought they were the most fantastic, unbelievably earth-shaking things I had ever seen. But then, I was six, and the list of things to which I attached the same value also included a random naked woman in some manga, my neighbour's dog, and the dead lizard behind my cupboard. In later life, I discovered that having seen these films made me a member of some kind of culture club which seemed mainly concerned with casting those who had not into social outer darkness. This was in my teens - that era of insane crushes, obsessions, and psychological cruelty. We would watch these films over and over again, reassuring ourselves and each other that they were the apogee of human creation. This reassurance became shriller and more urgent, of course, as repeated viewings exposed the real, significant, and manifold flaws of both films. They drag. They're heavily derivative. The acting is, in places, ridiculously bad.

A fair bit of my time in particular was spent desperately trying to ignore what thematic messaging there was. The franchise as a whole has a starkly conservative and practically mindless world view. The magical 'Force', a kind of re-chewed and regurgitated compound of poorly understood Zen mysticism and Protestantism is actually kind of toxic. It's deism. Or animism. Or maybe panpsychism, or spiritualism - it's really too vague and changeable to be clear about exactly what it is, but in any event it is clearly the element of the divine. So, this story element panegyrises adherence to ancient religion. We have The Empire, and The Rebel Alliance, with The Empire being evil apparently because it's an empire and for no other discernable reason. And the rebellion is in support of a dying or dead republic. Hmmm... a republic struggling to overthrow an empire - sounds strangely familiar. It's almost as if some Americans were re-imagining their own revolution, interleaving it with the history of Rome and painting it all over with a thin veneer of science fiction. With magic. And god. So the idea is that it's important to be a republic and, if we look at the way the two forces are represented, the more uniform, organised, and well equipped you are, the more evil. And then there's the basically moronic binary imagining of morality represented by the dark side and the force. The dark side is all negative emotions, which must be defeated - repressed, basically - whereas the not dark side is all about floating rocks and pashing your sister. Okay, that was a cheap shot, but the silliness of the binarism is still real.

For me, the message is one of subservience to god and a near libertarian conception of how the world should be run. This is totally unacceptable to me on both counts, and yet I spent quite a lot of mental energy on convincing myself that it wasn't so, and that these two films were the best sci fi films ever made, despite the fact that they're not really sci fi, and nor are they really good enough to justify such an assessment. It's rather like my first girlfriend. She was a nice girl, I assume (I never really knew her that well), but she certainly wasn't the paragon of all girlhood I furiously persuaded myself that she was. If I'm completely honest, she's not the one I wanted, but rather just the one I happened to get. And because she was my first, she blew my head back by relative power alone, and I spent the rest of my time with her trying to convince myself she was the best female ever begotten. Until, that is, I grew up a little and was able to see her clearly.

And it's the same thing with Star Wars. When I look at it clearly, A New Hope is a very good film. It's got so much to like, it's still enjoyable decades later, and it was clearly made with real love and care. But what it's not is a film objectively worthy of the reverence in which it's held. And it's this clear-sightedness which I think is most important. We're not just made up of what we consume, but also of the way in which we consume it. The way we respond to and absorb things like films also ripples out into the way we process the rest of our lives. The way we convince ourselves that Star Wars is the kind of masterpiece it's clearly not is exactly the same way we convince ourselves we like our jobs, can live with our partners, like our foolish and mendacious selves, and have some hope of finding meaning in our lives. We can find jobs we like, partners we love, meaning, and all the rest, but not without shedding the kind of thinking that has us desperately trying to convince ourselves that Star Wars is more than it is. Because it's this exact same thinking which, if we don't consciously attack it, we use to negotiate ourselves into accepting our own mediocrity.

Australia Day, Race, And Arguments From Non-Existence

It's Australia Day tomorrow, and the usual arguments about nationalism, the plight of the First Nations, racism, multiculturalism, and so on, are starting to warm up. I think we're all too familiar with the arguments on all sides of this often toxic and rarely productive area of discourse. Don't get me wrong - I'm not one of the Barnaby/Abbott brigade. I think it's not only appropriate but desirable, on a day meant to celebrate nationhood, to think about and discuss exactly what it means to be Australian. And I think that no such conversation can possibly be complete without considering both the miraculous prosperity of our weird little colonial project in the middle of nowhere, the horrific cost to some at which this prosperity was purchased, and everything in between.

But it's in the area of 'Australian-hood' where I think some better and clearer thinking can and should be applied. I believe that one of the reasons so many of these discussions are either distasteful or uncontrollably acrimonious is because they start from the hazy starting point of a purely instinctive and unipolar idea of nationhood. While the exact constituent elements of the concept of nationhood are debatable, it's probably not too controversial to say that the most common understanding of the term includes elements of culture, political/legal constructs, geography, and identity. Where discussions of Australian nationhood tend to spin out of control is in the areas of culture and identity.

I would argue that the vast majority of people tend to conflate individual with national or cultural identity. This is both natural and (usually) benign, but where nationalism comes into play the effects can be decidedly toxic. When we fail to distinguish the broad national ethno-cultural picture from our own culture and ethnicity, then change, dominance/growth/attrition of one sub-group or another, or any questioning or assertion of the broader national culture is perceived as a personal, existential threat to identity. A prime example of this confused and confusing kind of thinking is Pauline Hanson's inability to understand changes in Australian demographics as a phenomenon distinct from the survival of her own individual identity. What this generally creates is a furious argument over the protection or destruction of a weird national/personal hybrid territory which does not actually exist in any meaningful way.

Added to this is the vexed question of cultural memory. Australia is still very much in its formative stages, and is therefore replete with aggressively propagated myths of origin and character. I personally find that the school of thought which suggests that inherited cultural values and memory are compelling because of the fact of their being inherited is one which resonates with my own individual experience. For both native and immigrant Australians, the embrace of shared cultural memories definitive of national identity is practically universal, and these memories end up forming a major pillar of both our private and corporate identities, and one which we will all fiercely and instinctively defend. Where many problems arise is when these inherited cultural memories are not shared by all. The cultural memories of many Indigenous Australians and, to a significantly lesser extent, recent immigrants, are still very much alien to the predominant pillars of Australian cultural memory. Invasion, The Stolen Generation, White Australia, and other less than edifying episodes in our past are often aggressively excluded by defenders of conservative views of our nation from celebrations or commemorations of our nationhood.

This isn't just a matter of national conscience, to be dismissed as self flagellating black armband thinking - it speaks to the actual fabric of the nation. I agree with Bernard Yak's assessment of nationalism, where he proposes that a major part of being a nation is the "territorialisation of memory". Mnemo-narratives like Gallipoli or The Gold Rush are cut off from their global context and annexed as the sovereign culturo-historical property of Australia. The result of this is that a particular set of inherited or shared cultural memories can then be taken to define who is and isn't Australian. Where serious problems arise is when any attempt is made to exclude valid cultural memories from this sovereign mnemo-territory - such an act is, in effect, an attempt to culturally deport those who hold and value those memories. A good but extreme example of this is Germany's decades long endeavour to excise fascism from the current identity matrix of what it is to be German.

For us, it seems that there is a tendency to attempt a similar act of deportation around issues of race and Colonialism. And upon examining the (usually conservative) arguments for doing so, it becomes apparent that there is no better justification for this than a desire to put a stop to the uncomfortable feelings this raises amongst those who, like Pauline Hanson, are either unable or unwilling to disambiguate the nexus of national culture and personal identity. I'd argue that in order to sustain and build on the unusually successful pluralism we have already built, we all need to establish more firmly in our minds what it means to be an Australian. Nuanced, non-binary, and most importantly, inclusive models for building shared and inherited memories and values need to be built at an individual as well as an institutional level.

Change the date, or don't - the issue isn't, in absolute terms, all that important. But as a young nation, still consciously in control of building our national identity, we have absolutely no excuse for weaving intellectually muddled, mendacious, and cowardly lies of omission into our DNA merely in order to spare some of our feelings.

Contemplations On The Turn Of The Year

In the course of my Mystic Meg style peregrinations through life, one of the things I was most often called upon to do was to contemplate upon the sword. This was basically one of those Zen-type exercises designed to purge and still the mind. In order to fulfil the same purpose, the sword could just as easily have been replaced with a candle, a slinky, or a sex toy.

But one of the things I never really thought much about, until recently, was what lessons might be learnt from such contemplation. What gain or advantage might be accrued from paying close attention to the process as well as to the goal.

What would tend to happen would be a mental dissection. The various components of the sword would be weighed and examined, and then the whole would be put back together, and what the contemplation mostly consisted of was purpose. What is a sword actually for? By which is meant, what is it made and designed to do? This is deceptively simple. A sword is made for cutting. It is first and foremost a cutting edge, shaped for leverage, and modified for defensive as well as offensive capability. But first and foremost, it is for cutting. And because it is a weapon, it is made for cutting people. So, in its simplest and most essential form, a sword is a hateful thing.

And what if we apply the same principle to the contemplation of a person? A person is admittedly a much more complex object than a sword, but it should still be possible to determine what a person was made and designed to do. Essentially, a person is designed to create other people, to keep itself alive, and to fulfil its needs and desires. In order to do this, it needs other people, so, just as a sword is weighted and guarded to serve for defence as well as offence, a person is equipped with various delusions and chemical reactions designed to help it bond with other people. So, in its simplest and most essential form, a person is a purposeless and contemptible thing.

But neither swords nor people are limited to their simplest or most essential functions. In both cases, careful and intelligent usage, application, and refinement, can help both swords and people to transcend their base purposes. A sword can become a means for the attainment of high and complex physical and spiritual goals. And so too, a person can become an agent for real and positive internal and external transformation. And it is this transcendence, above all, which can be taken as the highest, most worthy work of being or using either.

Which I think is worth thinking about, especially on the one night of the year when, to all intents and purposes, reduction to base function - eat, drink, fuck, fight - is considered not only permissible, but desirable.

Common Sense – Neither Common Nor Sensible

I once told someone that Chinese people are more receptive to ideas like communism because the language contains no pronouns, and Chinese culture is therefore less amenable to ideas of individual liberty. This is, of course, an egregiously stupid idea, which I came up with in order to shut down a conversation I've been sick to death of having since about 1987. Firstly, there is more than one Chinese language, secondly, a lack of pronouns is neither here nor there - individual and group identities can be indicated at least as effectively through conjugation and so on, and thirdly, there is no such thing as 'Chinese culture' in the sense of a single, uniform set of ethnic practices across all people in the national construct now known as China. In spite of all these inherent, gaping invalidities, my interlocutor found this proposition to be immediately and profoundly convincing.

Why?

It basically comes down to the inherent vulnerability of 'common sense thinking' to specious argument. The whole essence of what we commonly (ha!) call common sense is one of reduction and closure. Nuance and complexity are deliberately stripped away with the ultimate goal of arriving at a simple, determinate conclusion. It's fundamentally geared towards disposal rather than contemplation – a bid to force the round peg of understanding into the square hole of definite and immutable fact. Where we most frequently see this pattern of thought is in polemic, usually of the conservative variety, but reasonably frequently across all bands of the socio-political spectrum.

I've never been able to understand our perennial love affair with common sense. As a framework for analysis, understanding, or even just simple cognition, it's appallingly unreliable. The very basis of the modus requires the thinker to isolate and subjectify - to operate in a solipsistic and essentially idiosyncratic framework, blithely selecting and rejecting elements of the subject at will in accordance with deliberately subjective, usually emotionally driven, criteria. There is an actual requirement for the creation of false equivalencies, reliance on biases (such as frequency), and deliberate or inadvertent disregard of known cognitive glitches, in order to create the oversimplified, selectively supported narrativisation and personalisation of reality which common sense thinking almost always produces.

This is especially apparent when we examine its operation in conspiracy theories. Pretty well every conspiracy theory, be it Flat Earth, Ancient Aliens, or 9/11 Truther, to name just a few, has as its central platform an appeal to common sense. How could they have made those pyramids without alien help? They're so big – it's just common sense. Buildings don't collapse like that, so the whole thing must have been an elaborate hoax – common sense. The world looks flat from where I'm standing – you guessed it: common sense again.

And this isn't limited to the lunatic fringe of cognitive dysfunction. Mainstream ideas backed by common sense have included all of the ugliest aspects of racial theory (people who look different must be innately different and therefore rankable by race), sexism (these uneducated women are uneducated, therefore educating them would be a waste), and xenophobia (the Iranian revolutionaries are crazy, and must therefore be indicative of the sanity of all Iranians). Common sense thinking is arguably responsible for the manifold survivals of prejudice, junk science, and the blatant lies and misrepresentations we widely accept as political truth.

Of course, common sense is very useful in some regards. For the kind of thinking required to decide not to run naked into the middle of moving traffic, common sense patterns of thought are admirably well suited. But when it comes to the navigation of complex, non-binary situations, it is rarely or never either appropriate, adequate, or even remotely valid, by simple virtue of its extreme reductionism. And this is important because we, as citizens, have powers and responsibilities to fulfil in a world which is unquestionably complex and non-binary.

All of which makes it very difficult to see a future any less confused and stupid than the present without a major re-examination of the insane assumption that animate bags of meat and water designed for social aggregation on the basis of emotional bonding are capable of valid rational thought by default.

Stone Age Scorpions And Our Toxic Love Affair With Data Empiricism

Gobekli Tepe was one of those archaeological finds which drastically re-wrote the history of civilisation. Located in Turkey, it is an enormous set of monolithic stone constructions which could not possibly have been built by a small, disorganised group, dated definitively to a period which pre-dated conventional timeframes for the emergence of large, organised groups by thousands of years. Of course, it's impossible to upend age old assumptions about the birth of civilisation without attracting a fair grab bag of kooks and conspiracy nutters - that school of 'thought' which cannot accept any explanation which does not involve aliens - but at a more serious level, discoveries like this also reveal the current state of thought across a broad range of specialisations.

It's a truism that interpretations of history (including pre-history) are a sort of weathervane for the contemporary concerns of the historians in question. Just take a look at the weight given to climate change and complex systems based explanations in current thinking on issues such as the Bronze Age collapse, collapse of the Roman Empire, and the origins of the world wars. What's also interesting, though, is what these discourses reveal about contemporary methodologies of thought.

Archaeology and ancient history have become unlikely pioneers in the area of multi-disciplinary studies. Unlikely because these are traditionally such conservative fields, but easily comprehensible in hindsight given the nature of the undertaking. This means that there is an admirably collegiate culture, especially in archaeology, characterised by strong openness to discussion of finds and findings from pretty well any specialist in any field. A good example of this is the recent discussion of the Gobekli monoliths as an ancient astronomical observatory.

It all started, as most archaeological controversies start, with a stupid and poorly researched news article. A whole series of articles, more or less factually incorrect, ran with a paper put together by  engineers from Edinburgh University which purported to have used statistical data analysis to match symbols on the gigantic T-Pillars to astrological signs. Apart from variously mis-describing these engineers as 'archaeologists', or vaguely referring to them as 'scientists', every one of these articles described the findings of the paper as if they were incontrovertible fact. As it happens, the team at Gobekli Tepe run an excellent and very informative blog, possibly because they're sick of all the ancient alien morons taking all the oxygen. What can also be found on their blog is the discussion they had with the authors of the report.

Some of this is a little bit abstruse, so I'll provide a quick summary here for context. Basically, the engineers decided (for reasons which are unclear) that a particular scorpion symbol was a sign for the Zodiac constellation Scorpio. Using various data analytics tools, they then cross compared a selection of symbols on various pillars with the calculated positions of constellations in 10000 BCE. Finding that they were able to associate a number of animal symbols with current astrological designations, they then wrote their paper claiming that the site must be an observatory and, further to this, decided that one of the images must represent the still somewhat dubious Younger Dryas impact. So far, so depressingly standard for the use of data in academia. But what's really revealing here is the nature and content of the discussion which ended up happening between the archaeologists and the engineers.

The team at Gobekli Tepe, to whom I am admittedly partial, reacted fairly scornfully to this paper. They pointed out various flaws in the methodology and selection of evidence, and raised a huge question mark over the scorpion/Scorpio thing, making the very valid point that Zodiac signs as we know them aren't really attested prior to approximately 2000 BCE, and that those signs, which form the basis for current Zodiac iconography, are from a very great distance away from the site. Basically, they contended that the distance in time and space rendered the very first and basis assumption invalid, or at least highly dubious. They then went on to point out that the selection of pillars seemed random, was not in any way comprehensive, and had a distinct look of 'cherry picking' about it. And on top of all this, they raised the point that the monument had been altered and reconfigured over many generations, rendering a single purpose unlikely. This done, they pointed them to their own theories about the monuments being indicative of emerging social complexity for consideration.

The response from the engineers was revealing. The engineers airily dismissed the social complexity theory in a single truncated sentence which labelled it as 'opinion'. They then proceeded to blame the archaeologists' slow publication rate (it's actually really fast) for the incompleteness of their data. No coherent defence was made of the basis assumption beyond 'scorpions have always stood for Scorpio', which is ludicrous, and they also embarked on a long, inexpert, and rather sterile discourse on the survival and transmission of stories. All of this was capped off with the bland assertion that “… given the statistical basis [of their] interpretation, any interpretation inconsistent with [theirs] is very likely to be incorrect.”

And there's the kicker. It doesn't matter that the base assumptions for their data analysis are basically pants. The fact that archaeologists and ancient historians spend their lives studying ancient iconography and mythology is utterly insignificant. The fundamental flaws in their evidence selection are irrelevant. All that matters is that their analysis is 'statistical', which must mean it accesses the highest possible level of truth because 'science'. This is unbelievably moronic and, unfortunately, symptomatic of a lot of thinking today.

We can see evidence of this malaise shot through every aspect of our lives. From elaborate psychometric testing to bizarre, data driven theories of law enforcement, the absolute bane of poorly interpreted statistics and numbers in general in politics, and the bizarre and occasionally insane conclusions of data models in genetics, linguistics, and urban planning - data would appear to be the new god. Don't get me wrong - statistical analysis and sufficient data to do it with are vital components of any scientific or theoretical inquiry, but the fundamental component of all of this is humans. Data doesn't think. And if we try to make it do our thinking for us instead of using it as it should be used - to validate or check human thinking - we risk becoming as stupid as the machines we make and use. And that, if you actually think about the last time you asked a computer a question, is pretty damn stupid.