There Is No Inherent Meaning in the Universe

This post arose out of thinking over my sister-in-law Rachel's very valid objection to Jahweh: His Remarkable Rise that I was possibly confusing deity & divinity in that piece of writing.

Monotheism: it's not the outcome of the history of ideas, it's just another stage in that history.

I am prepared to accept a kind of ultimate divinity - but - it is one which is unknown & unknowable, in the sense of whatever you say or think about it, it is not that - like the Tao, or apophatic theology in the Christian tradition. As it says at the very opening of the Tao te Ching:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

- trans. Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English

This Divinity is beyond the capacity of human conceptualisation. It is certainly not God the father or the Trinity.

(In passing, the Trinity is never referred to by Jesus, it appears nowhere in the Gospels. You can see how it can be derived from the Gospels, but it is not actually present in them as an idea.)

So what is the point of It, this unknowable Divinity ?

There isn't one. I don't believe there is any ultimate meaning in life, or that the Universe or Nature has any intentions for us. The Universe & everything in it are simply a set of processes working themselves out. The Universe doesn't mean anything, & that doesn't matter. The only meanings there are are the ones we ascribe, individually &/or collectively. These meanings are not inherent in the Universe, & discovered by us. We put them there in the first place.

So - if the Universe is meaningless, if there's no God commanding, or Divinity to discover & conform to, what is the basis of morality ? The basis of morality is practical. Certain behaviours lead to better outcomes for everybody, & that is desirable.

What I am saying here is not The Truth, it is my Truth.

With these kind of speculations, I may not know, but I know that you don't know either. The one thing I know for sure is that nobody, neither me nor you, knows anything for sure about the ultimate purpose of life.

I am most definitely not arguing that nothing can be known. If my left foot is chopped off, that's a fact. If I leave the house at 11.26 as opposed to any other time, that's a fact. If I catch a disease & die, that's a fact. It is precisely because in my opinion there are such things as certain facts that I am arguing that the nature of the Divine, & the ultimate nature & purpose (if any) of the Universe & of human life are not among these certain facts. All there ever can be is a given individual's best guess.

So what of the gods & goddesses I mentioned in Jahweh: His Remarkable Rise ? To me, the gods are personifications of psychological forces within humans, & of natural phenomena. I do not think there is any externally existing God, or gods. The gods are metaphors. They are particularly rich & powerful culturally invested & sanctioned metaphors.

The lack of inherent meaning does not mean we are abandoned, because there never was anyone or anything there to start off with. It means we are free to discover our own meaning. Does this inevitably lead to a philosophical free-for-all ? Absolutely. The more the merrier.

Jahweh: His Remarkable Rise

"Let's reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages
Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests."

- Jim Morrison, 'An American Prayer'


Jahweh or Jehovah, if I may name that god so familiarly, has had a remarkable journey from obscure Bronze Age tribal deity to his present exalted position - if we identify him with Allah - as Boss of 3 of the world's major religions.

It's like the spread of coffee from its home in Ethiopia to its status now of being consumed throughout the world.

The spread of an idea is like the spread of a commodity. People pass it on because they like it & because it suits them, & other people new to it accept it & incorporate it into their lives for the same reason. At least, that's when it happens benignly. Less happily, ideas & commodities are also spread by force & conquest of course, & here resemble the spread of disease.

I cannot accept that Jahweh/Jehovah/Allah/God the Father/God the Trinity is the one true God. How can the Trinity be simultaneously 3 gods & 1 god anyway ? Rowan Williams might know; he is apparently one of the leading experts in the world on the Trinity. But at first glance it doesn't seem very likely; & I strongly suspect that once Occam's Razor had been to work on the reasons why the Trinity is in fact 1 god, they would be left looking pretty tattered.

I recognise Jahweh as a god, but not the one true God. I reserve the right to worship some or all of the Celtic, Norse/Anglo-Saxon, Greek, Egyptian & Romano-British gods & goddesses, all of whom are in my cultural inheritance as an Englishman and a European. For me personally I would include Woden, Thor, Aphrodite, Demeter, Isis & Osiris. More primally, I reserve the right to worship directly the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Sky, the Earth & the Sea, Sacred Animals; & to experience the sacred & the numinous wherever I find it.* You may say this is rather a mish-mash, but isn't Christianity, in terms of its ritual & iconography, just such a mish-mash ?

If we take Christianity & Islam together (I can't find a reliable figure for the current total number of adherents to Judaism), Jahweh/Allah has 3.7 billion adherents who regard him exclusively as the one true God - 2.2 billion Christians & 1.5 billion Muslims. He hardly needs me as well.

In this connection, you will be acquainted I suggest with the terms polytheism, monotheism, atheism, agnosticism, deism, animism, & pantheism. But have you heard of the term henotheism ? I stumbled across it while reading about religion in the Classical world. It means you have one god who you personally, or as a tribe or a cult, venerate in particular, but that you are perfectly happy at the same time to recognise the validity of all gods & godesses whatsoever. A position of total tolerance. It strikes me as supremely civilised. And dangerous to the exclusive claims of Christianity, Judaism & Islam, which is why I think you never hear the term. It's suppressed as an option. The options you're presented with are the ones I named at the start of this paragraph, which are in fact the possibilities of religious belief & practice viewed from a monotheistic perspective, one that regards monotheism as true, right & natural.

When it comes to Christianity, I don't hear the term henotheism. The terms I do hear are heresy, schism, anathema, excommunication & idolatry.

On the subject of idolatry, I find it singular that the Christian Church, East & West, condemns idolatry so roundly while at the very same time practicing it so enthusiastically. It's odd sometimes to see a copy of The Ten Commandments set up in a church which is simultaneously full to bursting with graven images. The proscription of graven images in The Ten Commandments is explicit & insistent, & Muslims & observant Jews in general follow it's obvious & intended meaning. The proscription of graven images from The Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 is worth quoting in full because of the stress it is given, & the prominence, being the Second Commandment:

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the the third & fourth generation of them that hate me;

& shewing mercy to thousands of them that love me, & keep my commandments.

Now, in a pagan world, not having graven images is a ready & highly visible way to distinguish your religion from all the others around you, who precisely do have graven images which they venerate.

The Christian Church defends its use of graven images by asserting it is not idolatry to have them, because the worshiper does not worship the image itself but rather what it represents. This is sheer sophistry. The proscription in the Second Commandment is perfectly clear & straightforward. There have often been iconoclastic movements & controversies in both the Eastern & Western Churches, & quite rightly so.

The Christian use of images is an excellent example of the fact that mores are vastly more important in terms of their effect on human behaviour than the official morality that people are supposed to be following at a given time. Mores shape almost everything, morality virtually nothing.

A final thought on Christianity. It has always struck me as funny, and so human, that the opposing factions in Christianity call themselves Catholic, meaning universal when it is nothing of the kind, & Orthodox, meaning 'Right-Believing', or 'Just so you're clear, We're Right & Everyone Else is Wrong.'

It's not Sacred - it's sacred to you !


With thanks & respect to Xenophanes, William of Occam & Voltaire. Further reading: The Lost Gods of England by Brian Branston.

*Before I wrote this, I had no idea I was such an old hippy. But let it stand .....

The Day I Met Jackson Browne

Although of course I remember the encounter vividly, I was extremely unsure when it exactly happened. The extent of my uncertainty is shown by this: the only way for me to tie down the date was to look back through my diaries for each year in turn, & I started off with 2006, '07 & '08 because I guessed it had happened in one of those three. But as it turns out it was longer ago than I thought (the value of keeping good records !), in 2004 - Thursday 21st of October in fact at about 15.00 hrs, that I, improbable as it seems, met Jackson Browne. I recorded it in my diary in the following words, which now seem extraordinarily laconic for such an unlikely & significant occurrence, but which will do as well as any other way:

21 Thursday

15.00 ran into Jackson Browne outside Track

Those who know me will confirm that I lead a very retired & sedentary life, like Descartes & Montaigne; I rarely go anywhere or do anything, & am a creature of routine; which makes it all the more unaccountable that I of all people should meet someone like Jackson Browne, a famous musician who comes from & lives in another country, almost a separate planet. How it came about was as follows:

That Thursday was my day off, & I was coming back from my usual walk along the river. I turned into High Ousegate, where at the time was a well-known independent record shop called Track Records (long since closed, killed off by the Internet). Track had spinners of cds to browse in their doorway, & as I turned into the street I saw a figure browsing those spinners who I realised with a shock was very possibly, of all people in the world on a humdrum autumn afternoon in York, Jackson Browne. You see, I knew he was playing in York round about this time, and, thinking about it, what could be more natural for a musician to do on the afternoon before the gig than to have a mooch in some record shops ? Anyway, the figure went into the shop. Without stopping to consider, I went up to the doorway of the shop & peeped in to see if I could get a better view of the person. I had a clear view; it was indeed more than likely Jackson Browne in the flesh. (I identified him from old footage I'd seen from The Old Grey Whistle Test, & I suppose photos I'd seen in music magazines over the years.)

So, there he was at the counter in the shop either buying something or just chatting to the staff. I was in a quandary, & had to make up my mind fast. How exactly do you accost someone so randomly ? I felt very English all of a sudden. I didn't want to bother him. Would it annoy him ? Would he find it intrusive ? Had I even got the right person ? What decided me was, this chance was presenting itself to me, & I had to take it now or lose it forever. So I waited excitedly outside the shop until he came out.

When he did so, I stopped him and mumbled in the best English manner,"I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but are you Jackson Browne?" He said "Yes, I am !", & I put my hand out & we shook hands. My heart was beating wildly. I had a great rush of adrenalin. At the time I couldn't account for this. Later, as I thought about it, I realised why it was. I can't remember what we talked about particularly. We stood there, in High Ousegate, Thursday afternoon outside Track for about 5 minutes. He asked me what were my favourite albums of his - now, as it happens I hardly know Jackson Browne's music at all, then or now - so I said the one I do know, Saturate Before Using, one of his early ones (whose title has always puzzled me - it's evidently a reference I don't get). He seemed a bit vexed, I'm not sure about this but I think so, that I was as it were 'stuck' in his early work; that often annoys song-writers, they feel the audience is restricting them in a nostalgic way which is oppressive to them, not allowing them to age, change, grow. He asked me if I was coming to the concert that night. I answered firmly that I wasn't; in those days public events of any kind terrified me. And that was that. We shook hands again & parted, he back into the rest of his life, & me likewise. All in all he was gracious, friendly & down-to-earth. In fact I was a little taken aback that he was quite small & thin, an ordinary size; he ought to have been gigantic.

As I walked home, I was puzzled myself as to why I was so blown away by meeting him. Surely it wasn't just because (to people with taste in music like mine anyway) he was famous ? As I teased it out, I realised there were four principle reasons, all to do with the complex subject of the memories music lays down involuntarily as we progress through life & then evokes later.

The first was not so much to do with Jackson Browne himself, but the milieu of song-writers of which he is a part, many of whom are great favourites, even heroes, of mine. Encountering him in real life was like meeting a living link with Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Joan Baez & all the California early-70s crowd, it was almost like meeting them all embodied in him, he was somehow a conduit or channel for them. That's how I excitedly put it to myself, hardly able to believe that I really had met him: "He's met David Crosby !" As a very young man, Jackson as I knew was involved with The Factory in New York as well before he moved back to California, so he was a link to all of that powerful medicine as well.

The second reason is to do with the song I am listening to as I write this. When I was 15, starting to play guitar & absorbing styles from those players I knew, I had a friend called Ange who played guitar & had a beautiful voice. She must have introduced me to Jackson Browne's music because she used to sing a song I thought was called Morocco, because that word occurs prominently in the chorus, but is in fact called Something Fine & is on Saturate Before Using. It's a haunting song, & her version was too.

The third reason is to do with how I learned to play the guitar. My eldest brother JP is a player, & he showed me a few chords & above all barre chords. Then I got one of those thin guitar-case chord books (I still have it, the same one) to further my education. One major method I had of teaching myself was to get scores out of the Central Library. If you think about it, only scores where I knew the music in the first place (since I can't sight-read) & were simple enough for me to have a chance of playing them were of any use to me - & of course my choice was limited by what the library had on offer. They had a copy of the music for Saturate Before Using (other invaluable ones were of The Wall & The Final Cut by Pink Floyd), & I ploughed through it, playing what I could. So, as it turns out, Jackson Browne was unwittingly one of my major guitar teachers. That deep innocent thrill of playing something that sounds even remotely, however stumblingly, like what's coming out of the speakers, what's coming off the record ! And they were records or tapes in those days; this took place in the second half of the 80s.

The fourth reason is that Jackson's song Late For the Sky is used by Martin Scorsese as the soundtrack to a very powerful scene in Taxi Driver. It's quite late on in the film, & Travis is just sat in his small apartment watching television. There's a pop programme on, with teenagers dancing to Late for the Sky. Their carefree enjoyment forms an awful contrast with Travis' isolation as he watches, & you can see the pain, anger & loneliness in his face. Late for the Sky is a very poignant song to start off with; its use in this scene heightens the effect both of it & the scene itself greatly. I used to be obsessed with Taxi Driver. The first 3-quarters of the film, before Travis goes completely nuts, I related to very strongly indeed, in a way that's hard to convey or recapture once it's gone, which it has. I used to have a big Taxi Driver poster showing Travis walking up the street towards the camera, which I loved, in my kitchen; and I always thought it was a good & healthy thing when I took it down & put it away. So meeting Jackson himself brought up in an instant all those powerful forgotten feelings associated with Taxi Driver.

It was a power moment, no doubt about it.

Written & proofed to the accompaniment of Saturate Before Using.

5 Guidelines for English Prose Style

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."

- George Orwell, Politics & the English Language, in Inside The Whale & Other Essays, p.154


Here are 5 guidelines for English prose style:


1. Make sure your choice of words and syntax accurately reflect your meaning. This is easily said, but it is basic, and a large part of the whole craft of writing clearly lies in understanding and applying this rule.


2. Spell properly. The dictionary is your invaluable companion in this and in Rule 1.


3. In general, avoid cliche, except for the purposes of satire.


4. Write in the style appropriate to your subject. For example, to get tremendously worked up over something trivial is absurd. This is a common fault of newspaper columnists, who, with honourable exceptions, are often short of meaningful material to write about.


Which leads to Rule 5:


5. Don't write unless you genuinely have something to say. What follows may sound like a high claim, but writing is a Magical art, and it is abusing that Art to engage in it when you don't really have something to say. It is trading with the Lower Powers, & no good will come of it.


Further reading:


Orwell's Politics & the English Language, where the epigraph comes from, is fundamental to this topic.

James Murdoch at the CMS Committee Again

This further to my post for Teudsay 6th September, 'Phone Hacking Latest.'

James Murdoch gave evidence at the Culture, Media & Sport Committee again today.

During his testimony, it seemed that everything wrong that had happened at The News of the World (that it did is not in dispute, just what James knew about it & when) was somebody else's fault: either that of his subordinates, Tom Crone & Colin Myler, for concealing the extent of the phone-hacking from him; or of the Met Police, for saying they were satisfied there was nothing further to investigate (John Yates on the other hand when giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee insisted that New International was at fault for blocking his investigation - & this is a running feature in much of the testimony so far in Hackgate, everyone insisting it is someone else's fault); or of News International's lawyers, again for not informing him of the evidence they had.

James giving testimony came across to me as a fluent liar, but that is not enough, it won't do. There was a mass of evidence that phone-hacking was widespread at NotW but miraculously James saw none of it, he claimed. He kept asserting that before Summer 2011 he had no knowledge of the extent of phone-hacking - he thought it was limited to Clive Goodman - & I simply don't believe him. James gave his evidence with great confidence & aplomb, but the substance of it didn't make any sense. He seemed to be giving it in Mirrorland, where almost everything he said the opposite was actually the case. The idea that James signed off on the settlement for Gordon Taylor without requesting or seeking any further details as to why the case would inevitably be lost if it came to court, as he stated over & over again in his evidence today & in July, is incredible, in the strict sense of that word.

James is either complicit in the cover-up or incompetent/negligent. I can only presume that he prefers to be seen as the latter.

Other aspects:

It was fantastic when Tom Watson said to James: "Have you heard the term omerta - the code of silence ?"

The For Neville Email is like the Grassy Knoll in the JFK Assassination, it keeps cropping up.

A parallel between Hackgate & the Eurozone Crisis is that they have both passed the point where nothing surprises me anymore.

One link between Hackgate & Watergate is that illegal surveillance & the attempt to cover-up the fact that it had happened is at the centre of both scandals. In this regard Derek Webb, the surveillance expert used by NotW who has just emerged, reminds me rather of Gene Hackman's character in The Conversation.

Good Music & Bad Music

It has just occurred to me that a common factor among almost all my friends & acquaintances is a love of music, & taking music seriously, thinking about it, discussing it; we all love what we each consider good music, and condemn what we regard as bad music.

Now, Louis Armstrong, in terms of the reach of his influence & the consequences of his career, is one of the best & most important musicians ever, certainly in the field of popular music. (This is the case, I accept no disagreement on this one, & if you don't know why you need to do some research.) Louis said something to the effect of:

"There is no classical & jazz music, there is only good music & bad music."

Classical or jazz or any other style, music has to swing, the musicians have to mean it; and the difference between being on the money & not when it comes to music is plain, even if hard to define in words. This applies to all genres. The kind of swing is just different in each, but always there needing to be found. I'm not in any way being facetious. I'm in deadly earnest. Anyone who has heard a Baroque orchestra play with verve & bite will understand what I mean by swing in classical music. It's about all the musicians coordinating so the piece begins to take off, & the audience with it. When playing, the musicians need to be tight but loose. This is a paradox in description, but not in action.

Charles Shaar Murray, who is a superb rock critic, author of fabulous books about Jimi Hendrix (Crosstown Traffic) & John Lee Hooker (Boogie Man), came up with a very funny idea, which once you start to think about it in practice actually makes you think very hard about music & its quality - he suggested a record shop in which everything was organised into one of only two categories: Good Music & Bad Music.

Remember: It don't mean a thing - if it ain't got that swing.