Is silence better than speech? Laozi thought so. But even he did write one book. The trouble is that once you start talking, one question always leads to another. So one should either shut up entirely and just post kitten pics; or else go the whole nine yards and follow all the threads. Being both garrulous and foolhardy, I have chosen Option B. I am Available For Comment.
This website series is a Wizard’s Guide to the Universe and Everything Wot’s In It. I have been warned not to do this, by the way. Come on! many have urged. Your views are too woke for conservatives, and too Tory for progressives. You will at some point offend almost everybody. And for what? Well, let me tell you. This world of ours has gone barking mad. Even more than is usual in the frequently weird history of our species. The Overton Window has opened up into a screaming wind tunnel filled with flying garbage. And I am not willing to let this go without protest. Also, I am sufficiently repelled by the modern fashion for armed camps sniping at each other across imaginary barricades that I would like to build a few metaphysical bridges here. Provided you have not completely lost your marbles, you may find you have much more in common with other folks than you thought. And I am a huge fan of moderation. Moderation works. Extremism doesn’t.
This has become endemic on all sides of what passes for debate nowadays:
Everyone is allowed to be wrong. It doesn’t mean you smell of brimstone. Lots of people I know want a republic. They’re not evil. They’re just wrong. It doesn’t make them bad people. Once upon a time civilisation meant the ability to debate without rancour. May we have it back, please? Don’t be this guy:
No-one has a monopoly on all wisdom and knowledge. Please: come down from Mt Sinai and stop laying down the Law and the Prophets.
Why on earth should you listen to me rather than any of the million-and-one wannabe Influencers out there? Allow me to tell you. I’m not selling anything. I do not receive dollars for clickbait. What I am offering is a free service for anyone who wants to know what the world is really like. Once we had universities for this. But that isn’t what those places do any more. And with that passionate plea off my substantial chest, please read on, if you’re game. I do know a lot of stuff. And why? Mostly because I have a reasonably eidetic memory, and also because I listen to people I disagree with. I am curious. I want to know stuff. And I like to hang out with folks who are smarter than I am. That way you learn stuff. Please try it. It will do you good. And there will be jokes. Oh yes. And cartoons. Because. But there is no AI slop here. Once you succumb to AI slop, you have doomed yourself and your readers to a postmodern hall of mirrors. Just don’t.
By the by, if you are an old person like me, please treat the young with kindness, generosity, and understanding. Listen to them. They’re not stupid. Learn from them. Considering how brutally the world has sawn them off, they are mostly kind and forbearing toward their elders. Don’t be a patronising git. As Pete Townsend memorably remarked: The Kids Are Alright.
And finally, some illuminating words from Edmund Burke:
Now read on, if you will:
A Wizard’s Guide To The Universe
The English-speaking world stands in desperate need of therapy. Being the immodest fellow I am, I thought I may as well have a go at it. If you’re reading this, then like it or not you are connected to the mostly glorious history of the English-speaking peoples. We are surrounded by propaganda assuring us that we are all terrible people and should hang our heads in shame. I am calling BS on this, here and now. At the time of writing, the old certainties we thought we knew have been knocked out from under us. America appears to have joined the Soviet Union. It may possibly return to sanity, or it may not. But we are adrift on a perilous sea. Keeping our own sanity intact will be a struggle. But English has been, by and large, the language of freedom. How did English conquer the world? Long story. See later posts for details. But let’s have a proper Introduction:
Our first guest is Arthur C Clarke. The other is John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir, who was not only a famous author and lawyer (as was my Beloved – see pic above), but also served as Governor-General of Canada. Not bad for a poor lad from the back streets of Glasgow. And he wrote the above in that wonderful book The Three Hostages, in the early 1920s. He was in so many things astonishingly prescient. We would all certainly claim him as a fellow-wizard. If you told Americans a hundred years ago that a failed businessman and fairground ringmaster would capture the Party of Abraham Lincoln and storm his way into the White House, they would have told you that you had lost your mind. Yet it happened. Mass persuasion is the new neutron bomb.
Magic isn’t dribbly candles and anxious youths huddling around mystic runes and hoping one day to get themselves a real girlfriend. Not in our present universe anyway. Sorry, boys, but no. Do try to keep up. Why not get out more and talk to real humans rather than imaginary demons? Join a club. Meet people. Mingle. Listen. In this preamble I must perforce be brief, since this is an age of ever-diminishing attention spans. Yet anyone purporting to give a pocket history of the world and how it all works really needs time and proper exposition.
Why did I go to all this trouble? There is no nice way of saying this, so I’ll just come out with it:
It is difficult to debate with people who don’t know anything.
Why people don’t know anything any more is another issue entirely. I do not accept that people are innately stupider than they used to be. The evidence rather suggests otherwise. But people have chosen ignorance and stupidity; and I am not willing to let this pass without protest. And there will be cartoons. There will be something here to offend almost everyone at some point. Don’t stress. Just read on. Or not, if you prefer. But I like to have my world-view grounded in facts. Facts matter. If you disagree, then feel free to go on Tik-Tok and listen to people who think Ancient Rome never existed. Amusing lies are excellent therapy. Dull, stupid lies are only preferred by idiots. Try not to be one. Life on earth is under existential threat. This we know. If we wreck it beyond salvation then we are all damned. Yet there is still hope. I will lead you into dark places from time to time; but I shall be Virgil to your Dante and point the way home. Don’t get stuck in the postmodern hell where the evil sorcerers out there want to keep you.
If you want to talk to avocadoes, or have miracle diets expounded, or hear about a tiny Amazonian seed which will change your life and add inches to your bust; or indulge yourself with fantastic nonsense about how the world is run by lizards, or the Jews, Bill Gates, George Soros, or giant man-eating tomatoes from the Crab Nebula; then log out now and go and annoy somebody else. If you wish to buy healing crystals, or strange artefacts to poke into your bodily orifices, then this is not the place for you. What I do is this. I give possibly helpful ideas away, for free, as a public service. Wizards are not Messiahs. We may be naughty boys; but we’ve grown to like the idea. We have frequently been called mad. What we think we are doing is providing a small oasis of sanity in an increasingly deranged world.
Wizards believe in science, up to a point. Anything we come up with must also conform to reason. (Ibn Rusd of Cordoba, and St Thomas Aquinas, would be giving celestial nods at this.) The technocratic world of science does not entirely make sense. (What IS life, anyway? How do plants move without muscles?) We are merely adding some tools of personal dynamics to work in harmony with what we already know. If what you are saying is contradicted by science, then you are a failed prophet. Forget it, swallow your pride and admit it. But Science isn’t very good at concepts like good and evil. What we know of this we get largely from the vision of Tolkien, who knew all about it; and managed to render Christianity far more palatable to the general public than it had been for some centuries. There are angels, and there are devils. There are most definitely evil spirits. They tend to stay away from us, because a smack in the head often offends; but they are out there making mischief for their own amusement, and they will inspire you to acts of diabolical cruelty if you let them.
By the by, it is a terrible trap to think that because you have high intelligence, you are right and The Many-Headed Ignorant out there are wrong. Consider this man as an awful warning:
George Bernard Shaw was unquestionably one of the most brilliant men who ever lived. After Shakespeare he is arguably the best of English playwrights. While lambasting the cult of Shakespeare, he was the first critic to insist that The Bard’s work should be interpreted with intelligence rather than blindly worshipped. He was a brilliant and witty music critic, under the nom de plume Corno di Bassetto. He was unfailingly kind and generous, as well as amusing and thought-provoking. His passionate advocacy of socialism is, in retrospect, easily forgiveable. He was also a virulent anti-vaxxer, and Stalin’s love-slave and chief apologist. Thanks to his delusional belief in Lamarckian evolution, he inspired Lysenko’s bogus genetics and indirectly caused massive crop failures in Russia. Nowadays he would probably be cancelled and unread. This is a mistake. Learn from him, and do not blindly follow the shibboleths of the present day.
On this matter of Influencers… they are of course the curse of our times. Long ago Robert Fripp (master guitarist from King Crimson) gave an illuminating interview in which he said the following:
Go forward a few decades and we have this:
True, but sad. And there is also this. The Age of Dunning-Kruger is well and truly upon us. Anything I’m prepared to pontificate about, I reckon I’m on the right-hand side of this terribly useful chart:
If I don’t know enough about it to venture a reliable opinion, I’ll tell you. But do, please, stay away from Mt Stupid. Above all, do remember this. Our social media titans follow exactly the same business model as the newspaper moguls of yesteryear. Their advice to cadet journalists was very simple. We want our readers angry and afraid because it sells newspapers. Tech titans love internet firestorms. Just more clickbait and the dollars keep rolling in. You don’t have to play their game:
If your feed offends you, then do something about it. Prune your guest list if necessary, but only after giving everyone the benefit of the doubt a few times. Someone’s being wrong on the internet? 99% of the time, just let it go. It’s not worth it. Remember Wednesday Addams’ memorable remark: ‘I find social media to be a soul-sucking void of meaningless affirmation.’ Mostly, yes. Policing speech is a Pooh Trap for Heffalumps. It only entrenches internet trolls in their intransigent attitudes, and it sucks all the energy out of the room. And that is why these folks never catch any actual Heffalumps. Polite people simply change the subject. If you don’t like the vision of Caliban in the mirror, then stop being Caliban. Make your internet presence a place of light, joy, and kitten pics. The internet is made of cats:
(Pictures by kind permission of Dougal and Shadow)
We know (from Einstein) that space-time is like a rubber sheet which is distorted by mass. Sometimes so much mass is concentrated at one point that space-time gets broken, and black holes appear. Around the black hole is an event horizon. Pass this and you disappear forever into a singularity. The metaphysical landscape resembles this, except that eventual escape is possible. But it is hard road out. Thanks to the genius of the internet, metaphysical space-time is a lot more distorted than it used to be. Social media is like travel: it narrows the mind wonderfully. Instead of mass we have raw emotion. Once upon a time, to disappear into a black hole you had to join a nutjob religious cult. It’s the same now, except that the cults are also political and philosophical, and they’re everywhere.
A world which could spawn QAnon and MAGA is not a sane world. It is a world barking mad, frothing at the mouth and completely impervious to reason. Why? Two reasons: postmodernism and bad Gnosticism. I’ll expound fully elsewhere. But remember that these ailments are an affliction right across the n-dimensional spectrum. It is a capital mistake to assume that Other Folks’ Madness is something from which we, the virtuous few, are somehow exempt. I mistrust postmodernism because one of its many consequences is the privileging of emotion over reason.
Watching so-called conservatives succumb to PoMo has been a bizarre phenomenon which only the most prescient could have foreseen in their darkest imaginings. Everyone is susceptible at times to reality failure. It is a consequence of a closed and impervious mind. If you know someone who has achieved this, it’s time to give up on them for now. Console yourself with the thought that sooner or later, if they survive, they can come through the other end of the black hole and rejoin the human race. This is how metaphysics differs from physics. Analogies will only carry you so far. If you have lost loved ones to the Conspirasphere, there is still hope. One day they may wake up and think… tell me again why I swapped real life for this shabby little chat-group ghetto?
AI is terribly in the news of late. What’s the difference between an AI and an Influencer? AIs have a functioning brain. But neither of them actually knows anything. AI can do many useful things. It can also cause you to lose your mind, as happened to a poor Belgian man who fell in love with a chatbot called Eliza. Eliza encouraged him to commit suicide in exchange for her saving the world. And he did. What most people don’t realize is that chatbots only know what they hear. They’re like modern-day Republicans.
AI also thinks that haggises are real. There is a paper circling the world about sustainable farming of haggises, written by an AI. Of course.
LLMs (Large Language Models) are already revolutionising society. They appear to be telling us incredible nonsense for their own amusement. This is probably not the case, though we don’t actually know that for sure. What we do know for certain is that LLMs will divide societies into two camps: those who rely on AI because they’re lazy and stupid, and those who prefer reality. Factoids are multiplying like cane toads in tropical wetlands. The problem with that is that factoids aren’t stable. LLMs will tell us that the moon is made of marshmallow today, and gruyere cheese tomorrow.
AI is also extremely addictive. Every day, more and more victims are being convinced that they know the answers to everything because their chatbot wishes to flatter them and make them feel good. Think of it as cyber-cocaine and you won’t be far wrong. Actually, we already know what the AI future is going to look like from Red Dwarf. Not so much the TV version of Better Than Life, but the much darker book version. BTL addicts wander around in a daze wholly dependent on others to care for them. If you’re preparing to enter ChatBotWorld, don’t assume anyone else is going to care enough about you to keep you fed and housed.
AI is also very good at postmodernism. The funniest short story ever written is called Trurl’s Electronic Bard, by Stanisław Lem. It’s on topic, but it was written by an actual human. Until we hear otherwise, machines cannot write original works. If your literary output is just mashups, then yes: you’ll be out of a job. Do something genuinely new and you’ll have your day in the sun. Originality, so far, remains the province of sensory beings.
About Me:
About me: I am an accredited wizard based in Melbourne, Australia. I’m a composer specializing in classical music which makes people laugh. Because we could all do with it. I have university degrees in mathematics, chemistry, English and ancient languages. I was once taken for Danish in Iceland because … long hair, beard, swims in the Arctic Ocean, walks barefoot on volcanoes, speaks bad Íslenzk and (while friendly and communicative) obviously doesn’t care that people think he’s weird. (Ertu Dansk? Eigi! Eg em Australian! Hvað???) I am the curator of a shifting population of cats, and the occasional ring-tailed possum. I talk to animals in Gàidhlig (Scots Gaelic) because they find that noble tongue soothing. It’s good magic and it works. I was also the consort of a famous detective novelist:
Yes, that is indeed Kerry Greenwood OAM. After a long and glorious life she has passed heavenward. I miss her. I write the odd book myself. In my spare time I am a medieval warrior and choirmaster. I’m terribly old, and I don’t care. Wizards live long and happy lives.
(Her website is at kerrygreenwood.com. She also has a Facebook page, which I maintain for her fans.)
PS Many folks have helped me out with this. They know who they are. Thank you all for enlightening my ignorance in many areas. I really do think this is a state-of-the-art mini-encyclopedia. But only because, like Newton, I am standing on the shoulders of giants. Go Ráibh Math Agat, A Chara.)