Category: other

All posts that do not belong in the categories of buddhism or philosophy goes in here. Please check tags for more details about what the post is about.

Technology isn’t the answer

Warren Tang3 Comments

If you have been following this blog then you would know I dislike technology. You may be saying, “Well, if you dislike it so much then why are you using the internet?” A good question and one I will have to answer.

For me technology and science are not the same thing. You might be here thinking I am stating the obvious but I am not. Technology and science, of course, has a lot to do with each other. Many, if not all, of the great scientific discoveries have gone on to change our lives. But changing our lives can be done in many ways. A scientific discovery may help our understanding of our world. But there is a definite push, today, towards applying what we have learned and know to manipulate the world.

A while back I had read an excellent biography on Isaac Newton (of that title) by James Gleick. The feeling I get from this biography about the man (and the period) was that our concerns were – largely – about the knowledge and understanding of the nature of the world. While, of course, Newton was worried about credit due to him (he was a very secretive person) it was the knowledge that was important.

But this all seemed to have changed with the Industrial Revolution. Today in our concerns are on “how we can make the most everything”. Whether it is the money in our pockets, the time on our hands (or sometimes even the love that we receive). The word we use is efficiency. But our usage of it is misleading. We used to use the word to indicate little wastage. But before we can understand what we had meant by efficiency we will have to look at this word, waste, because this word also has metamorphosed over time.

It seems waste once had meant not using more than we need to. While we still use it in this sense we apply it to different values. The question is what? Not really that hard. I do not need to do an Z-score corpus analysis of the word to guess that “waste” these days collocates with “time”, “money” and “energy” (as in “a waste of time”). Otherwise it collocates with adjectives like “toxic”, disposal” and “radioactive” (as in “radioactive waste”). This second usage is interesting because it is now a product, a noun, and cannot be made into a verb. It no longer is an action but a thing.

I am just amused that no one actually has come out and say something like “All this waste is a waste”.

But coming back to efficiency. Waste and efficiency are not the same thing, though they are seen confusingly as such. Efficiency is about getting the most out of use. Waste (as a verb) is about using less of what is there. The philosophy is like the “half empty or half full” glass question. And the assumption with efficiency is that what is there is for us to use. And this way of thinking has rubbed off onto waste also. We can only see waste as mostly being about one’s time, money or energy.

No, the world around us is not there to be used indiscriminately by us. It may seem that way. But that is what the old fashioned capitalists, neo-liberalists and cultural imperialists want you to believe. Because it is about the money and the power to make the money.

I’ve strayed from the topic here a little.

If we use science to learn and understand the world we live in and how we should relate to it then we are on a safe and wise path. But we turn science into technology for profit and manipulation then we are losing our grip on the reality and respect for our home. The more I think about it the more that it is for money. The ability to manipulate the inanimate and animate world is for money.

Yes, with what I say, the livelihood of millions are at stake here. No, technology is not the answer. It is not even the real cause of all our woes (though it is the direct physical cause of the environmental problems). The origin is in the philosophy of technology which is manipulated by the philosophy of economics. This in turn has to do with our attitude. The story is complex and beyond a one thousand word post.

But let’s take a quick look at one recent article on technology and the environment. I found this in last week’s Daily Yomiuri – recordings of endangered species to use as cell phone ring tones to spread awareness. The creators of the ring tones, Center for Biological Diversity, believes that if people hear more of these sounds they will be inspired to do something about the environment.

But no, this isn’t the answer either. There are enough people out there, including me, who are getting people to notice. I wouldn’t say the message is falling on deaf ears. But rather we have dug ourselves so deep into this rely-on-technology hole that we cannot get out of it even if we want to.

That we have done without the mobile phones for a million years until now of human history, I think we can go without it for at least a day. And I certainly do not need a ring tone to know that the planet is in trouble.

So coming back to the internet. What am I doing online if I am so against it? Again, I am not against the internet as such but its indiscriminate use. I choose to use it not for entertainment but for learning and teaching (I can see the abuses coming in from this post now). Every person has a choice. I choose not to waste the tremendous energy required to run the internet for wasteful games, cheap laughs or loveless porn (no, there is no such thing as porn with love).

I choose to use it for the environment.

An Inconvenient Attitude

Warren Tang6 Comments

This month David Suzuki has kicked off a year’s schedule of talks across Canada. If you are fortunate enough to be able to get to one of the venues and hear him talk it is well worth the while. I saw a televised speech of his in Australia and I was changed by it. It is statements like this following one by him that made me understand what is wrong with the way we are living:

The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are our biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity – then we will treat each one with greater respect. That is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective. (From A David Suzuki Collection)

I think respect is the key word here. We simply do not treat the world with respect. He mentioned earlier in the same piece I quoted from that if we could see how the world has changed in four billion years to become a life sustaining planet for all life including ours then we will be humbled by what we have, and understand that is not for us to indiscriminately take as though we own it, but to share with all other life.

This week I also saw An Inconvenient Truth. It was a little late in coming to Japan (early this month, to my neck of the woods). I was also too busy with final reports to make the seventy minute drive to see it in town.

The film had stated much of what I already knew. So I do not think the film is there to convince people like me. But rather it was a film to preach to those yet to be convinced or have not heard the message yet. In that sense it is a necessary film. But why does it have to be from a former politician before we will listen? Anyone could have said it with the same evidence in hand. People are already saying it. People like David Suzuki have already said it. So it must necessarily say something about the culture of America, to whom much of it was aimed, that they will only listen if it is from someone important.

Mr Gore did make one point which I have always harped about here – that disinformation and deliberately confusing the public by false talk has prolonged the problem. We have not been playing on a level field when it comes to information dissemination. By scare tactics and other means the public has been split into two or more minds. And it comes back to the concepts of propaganda, advertising and commercialism.

So how do we deal with the agenda of others which are not the best for sustainability? In the West that is dominated by advertising, a kind of capitalist propaganda if you will, the highest bidder gets to persuade us that buying is good, not just their product but any product. This idea is therefore not about just one producer but about producers as a collective. I don’t want to sound Marxist but Karl Marx had a point. What scares me is not the fact we don’t have choices, but that we are only seemingly making free choices when we are not. So Capitalism is no better than Communism, if you look at it this way. Personally both systems fail. There are only two choices in our current paradigm so we must only choose between the two evils.

The pseudo-choice concept isn’t new of course, but it needs to be remembered or recalled. Those studies of the 1970s and 1980s on advertising have all but been forgotten. My favourite books from that period have to be Ways of Seeing by John Berger and On Photography by Susan Sontag. It has a lot to say about our use of images and imagery still relevant (if not more) to today’s advertising-polluted world.

And just a final note: the strategies used in Mr Gore’s “award winning” documentary also come from this same well-honed philosophical logo-technology (as in “logos” or “word”). It is slick, almost too slick, but you can notice its agenda if you look hard enough.

Affluence, the individual and society

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About two months ago I was diagnosed with gout. Gout, for those who do not know what it is, is a disease caused by high levels of uric acid in the blood. This acid is caused mainly by the imbalance of food intake which causes the they build up of crystals in joints. And this build up in turn causes severe pain in these joints.

Over-consumption of liver, meat, fish and alcohol (especially beer) are the main causes of gout. But what over-consumption means to each person is of course different. For me it seems to be a low-tolerance case.

Last Friday night I went to yakiniku. Yakiniku is the Japanese version of a Korean BBQ. And like all BBQs meat is the main dish to be consumed. While I am on medication to reduce my uric acid levels (the cause of my gout) I was not instructed to change my diet too drastically. My doctor had probably wanted to find out just how much my diet is the cause of it. And as I write this at four o’clock in the morning, being woken up by the pain in my left knee, I would say the yakiniku plunder last Friday night was not a good idea.

In Japanese, gout is called tsuufuu which means pain-wind or pain-breeze. And I can assure you a slight breeze is enough to cause great pain. Perhaps the English word for it is a kind of exclamation of pain (gouuut!). It is also called in Japan the disease of the affluent in reference to an individuals dietary habits which is its main cause. Yes, I am most guilty of affluence.

While my body tells me that there is a problem in fairly short notice (in my case four days) the environment is not so quick. It could take decades before we see any symptoms of the problem. The case of CFCs – the chemical used to make our fridge and air conditioner work – is a good example. CFCs release into the atmosphere is the direct cause of the Ozone hole, a problem we recognized only after twenty or thirty years we introduced it as safe. Another example is deforestation. The accumulative effects of clearing land for farming and other purposes is becoming more noticeable now.

But even though I say the environmental signs are slow to show up it is only relative. In my short life of seventy, eighty years, fours days is quick. In the course of four billion years of Earth’s life 30 years is almost instantaneous. Thirty years only seems long in our time scale.

So maybe it is time to rethink our way of seeing time and the environment. Maybe it is a wake up call, a call we should be listening to. Planning for our (planet’s) future should not be about this year, five years or even our lifetime. People like David Suzuki say planning for the future should be about planning for seven generations. And not just forward in time but backwards to the past. You might say how do we plan for the past? Well, it all depends on how you look at time. The Western concept of time is not always the best. The same is true of affluence also.

Personal Note: I will be offline for about two weeks finishing up end of year term papers (seven to be exact). Hope to see you back here then. My apologies.

Gross National Happiness is, well… gross

Warren Tang5 Comments

In my last post I talked about “Tradable Energy Quotas” or TEQs and why I dislike the term. In a related conversation with growthmadness I mentioned why I like Gross National Happiness (GNH) as an alternative to such measures as TEQ, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Product (GNP), but not its name. So I guess I better explain myself.

The problem begins with the name. Gross National Happiness is poking fun at GNP, where Product is replaced by Happiness. This seems fine, until you think about the suggestiveness of the gross national. These two words are used together as a set, and it has connotations of economy and economics. So any term which are used with it will be linked to this two-word set. And in the same manner, TEQ reeks of economist’s deodorant.

The environmentalists’ choice of Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and Ecological Footprint (EF) are milder terminology. Since progress has been enlisted into the Postmodern lexicon to have a negative meaning it has the ability to affect change.

GNH may need to be repackaged if it is to be accepted. The “karma” left by GNP must be exorcised. Apart from this Gross National Happiness is a great concept, one that may actually save us if implemented properly. The question is only, how?

My thumbs down to Tradable Energy Quotas

Warren Tang2 Comments

Lately people have been talking about “Tradable Energy Quotas” or TEQ. And I have been exchanging opinions with a fellow green blogger about it. The gist of my dissatisfaction with it is that I have seen many buzz words come and go that I do not think this one is any different.

By placing the environment in some kind of countable term and making it a national-level project immediately raises my suspicion of it. Instead of the environment being about countability it should be about accountability. And rather than it being on the national level it should be on the personal level.

Too often we are trying to make things a national or social responsibility. But it should start with each person. The more people needed to be involved in something the less effective it will be. That is why smaller groups and communities are more effective in tackling problems, not just environmental ones.

I used to scoff at family values. I used to do my scoffing most likely because I was single and I was at the minority end of the family unit. But now that I have own family I realise how important and how well it can work if there is trust. And that trust can only come from being familiar with every other member of the unit.

Community values work the same way. Growing up in the city I saw how neighbours kept to themselves, guarding their lives behind closed windows and drawn curtains. Privacy was the all consuming concern, and not how the neighbourhood, as a whole, is going. Having moved into a small rural Japanese community of three hundred people about four years ago I have come to understand how just important it is to be part of an open community and to work with people to create a better environment which does not end at your front door or property fence.

This unfettered trust can only come about by knowing the people who are in that unit or community. It is about (inter)personal responsibility, and not just responsibility by legality or social etiquette. Again the family unit is a place where this can be seen clearly; the access to personal space, finance, etc, areas open to abuse by other members are placed in check by only trust and responsibility.

Without these two factors – trust and responsibility – there can be no openness. And none of these can be measured, nor should they be.

So from which end of the wire shall we pollute the Earth with?

Warren Tang7 Comments

Why are we such suckers when it comes to electric cars? All we are really going to do is plug it into an electric wall socket so that the fossil-fueled power station at the other end of that wire can pump the same amount of – if not more – greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Haven’t we realised that the car makers are laughing all the way to the bank?

Japan… more productivity, smaller population?

Warren Tang2 Comments

In today’s print edition of the Daily Yomiuri Hiroko Ota, Japanese state minister in charge of economic and fiscal policy, is quoted as saying on Wednesday, Japan must reform its labour market in order to continue growth and increase its productivity in order to compensate for its aging and low birth-rate society. The comments were made during a discussion with Edward Lazear and Matthew Slaughter, both members of US Council of Economic Advisors.

But really should not this be an opportunity to show responsibility for ecological sustainablility by not producing and consuming more, but rather to reduce? While I understand the concern that it is important to maintain the nation’s standard of living this should not be a time to increase it. There is nothing to say that a shrinking economy moving in line with a shrinking population means a lowering of the standard of living. As long as productivity per capita is maintained then increased productivity would be unnecessary and therefore should not be the aim.

In our time of need for global environmental responsibility the government rhetoric should reflect this in their goals and actions. A missed chance for leadership in this area. It is a shame, really. How silly to talk of growth when everything else in the country is shrinking.

Don’t get confused

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My wife wrote my mother, who lives in Australia, a letter. She wrote about how warm it has been in Japan this winter, about how glad she is it hadn’t been too cold. I asked her if she knew just how bad a sign that is for our future. She said she knew but she still preferred warm weather.

I told her we could move to Malaysia but then, eventually, we would have to move back here to the mountains of Japan because the weather in a half century’s time would be what Malaysia is like now.

“I still prefer the warm weather,” she insisted.

You really can’t argue with logic like that.

Japanese government to set new “sea sanctuary” category

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The Japanese Environment Ministry has opened a 10 person panel of experts to discuss the definition and the process of designation of coastal and other water areas as “sea santuaries”. This comes after a 1992 study found that over ten percent of tidal land in Japan have been lost since 1976 and about three percent of marine forest has also been lost in the same period.

The article only gives these dates. But I would not be surpised if these are the latest figures. It usually takes about 10 years for the Japan government to act on any approved proposal. That means any action from this panel will probably only take effect in 2017 at the earliest. You can call me cynical but must also call me a realist.

Click here to read the full article from Daily Yomiuri.

Searching for Bobby Fischer’s playing partner

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My brother-in-law came over with the family for New Years as usual. And everytime he comes we play “a friendly game” of chess. But really it is all very serious. It is about pride.

This year he bought a chess set and a book for beginners for his elder daughter. But I suspect the book was for himself more than anything. But there is nothing wrong with that. You need to study chess, like anything else, to improve. I have a dozen books on chess myself and I still do not consider myself strong at all. But, at least, I am stronger than I would have been if I didn’t read them.

Flicking through the book I found it surprisingly good. It included all the basics and a little bit more to get you started. The book was by Miyoko Watai. The name caught me by surprise. Not because she is the head of the Japan Chess Association, but rather she was the one Bobby Fischer was living with when he returned to our consciousness from hiding in 2004.

Using Amazon Japan I discovered there are only 87 books on chess in Japanese. Whereas Amazon US lists 65,700 titles for chess books in English. This just goes to show how little interest there is in chess in Japan. Anyway, I recommend the book to any Japanese interested in chess. It is as good as any beginner’s guide to chess written in English. I can safely say Ms. Watai does knows her chess.

I am really looking forward to the next match with my brother-in-law.