Heaven Is for Real

 My reaction to first viewing the famous "Christian" movie from  few years back.

On the "Cultural Genocide" of Canada's "First Nations"

Apparently, European-Canadians are guilty of suppressing Indian culture, if only by their mere presence for the past 400 years or so.

Ah yes, Indian culture. 

How extensive could that culture have been, given that the local tribes had never come up with the wheel, or metals, or the domestication of animals? The early French explorers described the Indians they met, including the relatively advanced Huron and Iroquois, as “Sans loi, sans foi, sans roi.” Without law, without religion, without government.

What then did they have?

It is hard to get far as a culture with no writing system. Some things can be passed on orally, but oral witness is unreliable. Beyond the length of one lifetime, it is hearsay. What is passed on orally must also depend on a body of people able to grasp its meaning and significance, for it to be memorized and preserved. A written record, by contrast, can sit for some time ignored and forgotten, and then be rediscovered by some solitary keen mind able to receive it.

And was there any great body of oral record-keepers available? Each tribe, even each language group, was quite small, and not in much communication with their neighbours. Supposedly, wisdom was passed on by the few elders—distinguished only by being old.

Other than on the West Coast, these tribes were nomadic. They followed the game. They had no beasts of burden nor vehicles. They could not, as a practical matter, carry anyone who could not keep up. On top of that, many starved every winter, young and especially old. Often they could not afford to feed someone who could not hunt. Elders were eventually left to die. 

This tended to limit the number of elders available for cultural transmission.

And that’s not all. On top of the sparse population, it seems there were epidemics about every two generations that killed most of the tribe. Whenever the Europeans came to a new area, from the 16th through the 19th centuries, from Champlain through Lewis and Clarke, they found abandoned villages and clearings, the majority of the local population recently wiped out. How is it possible that this could all be due to first contact with European diseases, even three centuries later? By then, they should have developed natural immunity, even if they had none in 1492.

The Hudson’s Bay Company, trading with the Indians in the Northwest for several centuries, actually witnessed local tribes being devastated by repeated epidemics about every forty years.

Which is to demonstrate that the story that the Europeans wiped out the native people by disease, even inadvertently, seems to be another myth. 

There is an epidemiological advantage to a relatively high population density. It allows a virus to abide in a population and in its cattle, spreading at low levels, naturally inoculating and preserving herd immunity. When your population density is too low, as in nomadic hunter-gatherers, the virus can die out in that population in a generation or two, leaving everyone once again with no immunity. Within about two generations. 

This had probably been going on for thousands of years, with or without Europeans.

Now, what does it mean for a culture when almost all its members die off every forty years? How much gets passed on orally? 

So it is not as if contact with the Europeans could have wiped out Indian culture. After all, if learning something new wipes out your culture, if your culture is preserved only by ignorance of any other, what does that say about your culture? 

Anything of value will naturally be, and has been, preserved—the canoe, lacrosse, toboggans, moccasins, snowshoes, parkas, and so forth. If some cultural element was not preserved, it is because people found it was not useful. Culture is for man, not man for the culture.

America Derangement Syndrome

 

A week or so ago, YouTuber JJ McCullough posted a video arguing that Mark Carney’s drive for “associate membership” in the EU made no sense. He almost immediately took it down, unable to stand all the hostile comments it elicited.

Canadians have America Derangement Syndrome, which is strikingly similar to Trump Derangement Syndrome. It may be the same underlying disease. But it has endured much longer in Canada.

To begin with, McCullough is obviously right. Carney’s initiative makes no economic sense. Canada already has free trade with the EU. So the only point of the exercise seems to be to annoy the Americans, our biggest trading partner. Like his recent cozying up to China. It is all reminiscent of the early days of Castro’s Cuba. Not a wise strategy.

McCullough is also obviously right that English Canada has far more in common culturally with the US than with the 27 members of the EU. Language, history, geography, customs, sports, music, legal traditions, blood ties. We are Americans—America Derangement Syndrome is a form of self-hate.

And maybe that explains Trump Derangement Syndrome too. Trump is not just too pro-American, but too stereotypically American, for self-hating Americans. A billionaire who has carefully crafted his persona as an incarnation of success in the free market—the American Dream. He is offensively blond—even making a display of his hair. He is, God forbid, a salesman, and actually proud of it: an occupation beneath the contempt of any proper European aristocrat. He is brash and straightforward in the way Europeans have always found Americans to be brash. He is impolite, undiplomatic. 

On becoming president in 1801, Thomas Jefferson made a point of not following protocol in entertaining the British ambassador. This was the new American way; Thomas Wolfe has described it as “the birth of the American idea.” European concerns with manners merely served the interests of a ruling class. 

Is there a cure for America Derangement Syndrome? It seems impervious to either evidence or reason.

Turtles All the Way Down

A Hindu traditional image of the cosmos

I was upset, unreasonably, by a recent bit by the National Post on “Turtle Island.”  Because they were saying what I’d been saying for years. And no one has been listening. I want credit!

It was about “Turtle Island” supposedly being the traditional name for North America among the native peoples, the “First Nations.” There are problems with that idea.

First, the native people would have had no idea what a continent was, let alone having a name for the one they were supposedly on. Micmac living in Nova Scotia, say, would have had no idea there was a vast ocean five thousand kilometers to their West, nor one as distant to their North, or to their South. Nor would they have imagined this was of any significance. Continents are a fairly arbitrary Western idea, a cultural construct. Why, for example, are North and South America separate continents? More or less because Teddy Roosevelt dug the Panama Canal. In much of Europe, the Americas are still not considered two continents, but one. And what is the sense of seeing Europe and Asia as two continents instead of one? Why do the Urals split continents, but not the Himalayas or the Andes? 

When some ancient culture refers to living on a large island –as they all do -- they are conceiving of all creation, the ordered cosmos, as an island, not this or that body of land. And surrounded not by physical seawater but by the “sea” of chaos. Ancient Greece conceived it so, Ancient Mesopotamia conceived it so, and so did the Old Testament’s seven days of creation. “Turtle Island” is not North America, or even planet Earth, but the cosmos, the material world.

And according to the native people, there ain’t necessarily no turtle, either. There were thousands of different ethnicities wandering about Canada, each with their different creation myths. Perhaps one or two involved a turtle; perhaps none.

The “Turtle Island” concept as supposed native name for North America comes from Gary Snyder, West Coast Beat poet and environmental activist, who used it as the title of a poetry collection in 1974. He claimed without evidence that it was from Native American culture. He really got it from India, and from the Western philosophical tradition. It is an old Hindu idea that the world is supported on the backs of elephants who stand on a turtle. This image, misunderstood to be literal, has been preserved since the 19th century by European/American philosophers to be mocked as an example of primitive thinking and of infinite regression: “it’s turtles all the way down.”

Probably most people today claiming to be “First Nations” genuinely believe this was their own ancestral belief. How would they know? They got that idea from the TV, like the rest of us. They grew up in the same culture as the rest of us. “Native wisdom” is all a childish fantasy from the hippie movement of the 60s.

Felix Culpa

 You really need to read this. The return to nature is a bad move. The original sin is not what you think. Read it on our SubStack.

Life Is Not a Box of Chocolates

 Is it too late to write a review of Forrest Gump?

Here Comes the Cybercab

We have been promised self-driving cars for some time. Now, it seems, thanks to AI, it is actually happening. Tesla is rolling out its Cybercab, joining Waymo, already operating in ten US cities. According to the stats I have seen, operating costs are only 25 cents US a mile. Even that price might come down as we develop cheaper sources of electricity, nuclear reactors or solar power. And the self-driving cars are seven times less likely than human drivers to cause accidents—a figure that can only stand to go down as the AI improves.

This will lower the cost of insurance. It will also lower the large number of people killed or injured in traffic accidents, and not that incidentally, as a knock-on, the costs of medical care.

A century or so ago, the private automobile drastically changed the landscape. Highways, malls, drive-in everything, large areas set aside for parking. We are about to see a similar dramatic change now.

Nobody will need any longer to own a private car—a major living expense. It will make more sense to pay ride for ride; or, if you own a car, you will rent it out when you are not using it, auto-Uber, making it pay for itself. 

This will be a big reduction in the cost of living for the average family. It will be a bigger advantage to the poor, the disabled, and the elderly.

With everyone doubling up on vehicles, we will need fewer roads per capita. Nor will a self-driving cab need parking space at the destination. It can move on to the next customer, and reappear when needed.

This will free up a huge amount of prime real estate for development. Downtowns should regain advantage over malls. The cost of housing should go down, without the need to sacrifice so much to parking for residents.

In smaller cities, public transit will probably no longer be required. Taking a cybercab will be cheaper and more convenient. But we may also have cyber buses, driving costs down even lower. It may make sense for municipalities to offer the rides for free.

If you are in a larger city, and have a long commute—now you can be working as you ride. 

And as for long-distance transport—we will no doubt also have cyber semis. This will draw down the cost of transportation, making all manner of goods cheaper to the consumer. Notably food. 

And this is all about to unfold.