h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>> Acton could never accept this... He is of course
most famous for his dictum: "All power corrupts and
absolute power corrupts absolutely". <<

Thank you!

I'd always wondered who first said that and why.
So I felt a very sound and satisfying 'click' in the
jigsaw puzzle of my mind as I read and absorbed
that information.

It is such a popular and often quoted saying I had
just assumed it was one of those ancient adages
possibly formulated by some forgotten romantic
radical or revolutionary from some lost cause.

Knowing now the context of its origins fills me
with great satisfaction and a sincere gratitude.

Thank you.


~jwf~

"I didn't realise I had to give you a reason. As you pointed out, catholic just means universal. There are a lot of different catholic churches. Some are basically Judaism. Some go out of their way not to be like Judaism. Some try to be western, some try to be eastern. Some don't even try - they just are what they are" [KB]

By giving a reason, you helped me understand your point better. I was talking about Catholic [with a capital C], and you were talking about catholic [with a small c]. Many religions are catholic in the sense that they claim to espouse truths that are universal. Although I'm not Roman Catholic, I know many people who are. When I'm talking to these friends, "Catholic" can only mean the Roman catholic Church. With that cleared up, I don't have a problem with your point.

[In the last line, I meant for the word "catholic" to be "Catholic." My fingers don't always obey my mind. ]

jwf

Lord Acton was a most interesting man. His ancestors had been part of the ruling elite in Naples, important site of a British community of ships and Navy (Nelson and Lady Hamilton etc) and also Austrian aristocracy. His own historical studies had been in Prussia/Germany and he considered the great Von Ranke as his "master". But like Von Ranke he was dismayed by the events of 1870-1.
(a)The Prussian crushing of France and the declaration of a new German Empire, and
(b) the Vatican Decrees in which the RC Church compensated itself for the loss of secular/political control over the Papal States (now that Italy too became one united country based on Nationalism) by this new declaration of infallibity in spiritual matters.

Acton seems to have found exile in more moderate and tolerant Britain, and he became one of the most important members of Queen Victoria's Privy Council, often accompanying her on her foreign breaks in the South of France. His Historical knowledge was encyclopedic and he was appointed to be Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, where he taught and lectured, and also where he edited the massive attempt to compile "The Cambridge History of Europe".

But I suspect that, had he lived long enough, he too might have enjoyed this analysis of the first half of the twentieth century by Paramahansa Yogananda in his "Autobiography of a Yogi" (1946):

"Consulting history, one may reasonably state that man's problems have not been solved by the use of brute force. World War I produced an earth-chilling snowball of dread karma that swelled into World War II. Only the warmth of brotherhood can melt the present colossal snowball of sanguinary karma that may otherwise grow into World War III. Unholy twentieth-century trinity! Use of jungle logic instead of human reason in settling disputes will restore the earth to a jungle.If not brothers in life, then brothers in violent death. It was not for such ignominy that God lovingly permitted man to discover the release of atomic energies!

War and crime never pay. The billions of dollars that went up in the smoke of explosive nothingness would have been sufficient to have made a new world, one almost free from disease and completely free from poverty. Not an earth of fear, chaos, famine, pestilence, the 'danse macabre', but one broad land of peace, prosperity, and widening knowledge."

Cass

I've read a little but about Paramahansa Yogananda. I enjoyed his annotated collection of the Fitzgerald translation of Omar Khayyam's "Rubaiyyat." The quotation you cited is very fine.

[In my previous post, "but" should have been "bit." ]

Paulh

I was indebted to my wife who found a paperpack bargain new edition and gave me the book as a present, being aware of my somewhat quirky interests. I was intrigued somewhat later to discover in Ravi Shankar's autobiography [another person who did much- arguably more- to open up the West to the East]that Yogananda's book was THE thing that triggered George Harrison's interest in Eastern philosophy and religion.

I must say that it is very challenging since he recounts things that he has experienced through his eyes and against his life experience and training, and I inevitably found myself trying to understand just how this would/could "fit" in with mine.

Some of the things that I found most interesting [again today- and in the light of that Mayan prediction thread] were the footnotes that were added, especially in the chapter where he recounts meeting Jagadis Chandra Bose, the Nobel Prize winning Indian Scientist, who was knighted in 1917 for his crescograph and other inventions. The crescograph could magnify 10 million times and he used it to demonstrate the indivisible unity of all life. Bose, like many talented young men in British India, attended university in England, in his case Cambridge, but married together the Western empiricism "with the gift for introspection that is my Eastern heritage.. The telltale charts of my crescograph are evidence for the most skeptical that plants hav a sensitive nervous system and a varied emotional life. Love, hate, joy, fear,pleasure, pain, excitability, stupor, and countless other appropriate responses to stimuli are as universal in plants as in animals".

But Bose was working in a great Indian scientific tradition going back to the ancient scriptures. The section that I read recently on the Maya said that they were so advanced because their cosmology went back millions of years, when Europeans were still thinking in thousands. But Yogananda asserts in a footnote that the universal cycle in the Hindu scriptures is 4,300,560,000 years, which measures out "A Day of Creation". The ancient seers calculated the life span of a whole universe as 319,159,000,000,000 solar years "One Age of Brahma", while thousands of years BC much of the essence of modern atomic theory was presaged in the work of one great scientist.

But Mahatma Gandhi freely acknowledged that he had to come to study Law in London in order for his British student friends to introduce him to the Bhahavad Ghita in a popular English translation. The Sanskrit version became his daily guide through life, meditating at the start of each day on one of its pieces of wisdom. Apparently the day he died he meditated on "Nothing is so sure as Death for the Living and re-birth for the Dead, so over the inevitable you should not grieve".

Cass

Thanks, Casseroleon. That was very thought-provoking. You brought up Mahatma Gandhi, one of my favorite 20th-century figures.

I can't claim to have everything figured out, but I like to think about the universe expanding. Maybe someday we humans will be able to do likewise.

Paulh

Yes. I have a great respect for Gandhi right back from my teens in the Fifties.. "The Great Soul".

But this goes back to the doctrine of "real presence" that I mentioned before and the Western obsession with physically apparent reality that found its deepest expression in John Dalton's Atomic Theory- that is that everything is made of irreducible Atoms- a kind of Leggo universe. It is no wonder that the Nineteenth Century built so much in brick?

But science has gone beyond that and offers us no sense of stability, merely constant and confusing change and the possibility of Chaos.

So the real "expansion" we should seek is that of the mind, heart and spirit, which can both take us on a journey from where we are inwards into the infinity of introspection and outwards into the equal infinity of space. To be at one with it all is to find some kind of dynamic peace.

So, for example, to come back to the contoversy about "the real presence". The King Henry Bible and Cranmer's first English liturgy in the 1540's had "ignorant" and "undeveloped" people, living in mundane reality, asking just what bit of Jesus "body" was in the bread, and how come his "blood" would be in the wine.

In modern terms micro-biologists tell us that there is not one particle of my body that was there more than c7 years ago. We live in a constant inter-action with the world around us with our dna constantly physically recreating us largely through the process of ingestion and excretion.

For Jews, and many other people at the time of Jesus, the crucial daily sources of nutrition were bread and wine. Jesus the man would have been built up by bread and wine, and would have passed excreted and manured the soil too. There was nothing particularly personal about this. It was and is the common lot of humanity, and in so far as it unites us all in the very stuff of Life, an awareness of the "common ground" that we all share helps us to take both the large view of external reality, and also to feel that the potential internal chaos, disintegration and conflict can also be resolved.

The danger is to believe that we, and ours, are somehow inherently special and different and therefore more entitled. And the duality of our potential to expand was reflected in the life of Gandhi whose great struggles against the British and for a united Indian Nation was balanced by Gandhi's own struggles to achieve the highest states of being envisaged in Hinduism, the destruction of selfish and self-centred drives like the appetites and the passions.

The Maya already had this "bread and wine" consciousness, which was later important to the Aztecs. Both had a great veneration of the Corn Deity, which gave its flesh in good times so that people might renew and maintain their own flesh, which so obviously declined and disappeared when there was no maize.

All very relevant to the email that we have just received this morning from an old American Druid friend with a collection of her own and other poems to mark the Autumn Equinox and this time for taking stock of the balance of success and failure in the harvest of this year's dynamic phase as we prepare for the coming advance of the darkness.

Cass

"So the real "expansion" we should seek is that of the mind, heart and spirit, which can both take us on a journey from where we are inwards into the infinity of introspection and outwards into the equal infinity of space. To be at one with it all is to find some kind of dynamic peace" [Casseroleon]

Yes, that is what I was trying to say. I saw an exercise that consisted of lying on one's back and looking up at the sky and imagining expanding so as to fill as much of the universe as possible. At my age [64], physical expansion is not in the cards. Expansion of the spirit is the only kind possible......

Paulh

Exactly, though in order to conceive a "montrously" big humanity, I argue that it is also necessary to experience the "critical mass" of great cities. For it is great cities that inspire dreams of just what "Man" can do- hence Jerusalem, Mecca etc...

None greater, perhaps, than the great extravaganza opening and closing ceremonies of the London Games that hoped to inspire all those present, and beyond that a global generation in the "Global Village" of mass communications- but perhaps too many of those were just on their own looking at the TV window on the world. Significantly many people congregated in parks and public spaces in order to feel the congregational experience- for it makes the suspension of disbelief so important for drama so much easier.

"We are such things as dreams are made of.." Or is it "on"? No difference. Dreams and other fictions that "are not yet true" are essential to Life itself.

David Attenborough starts "Life on Earth" with a very Darwinian idea that at some stage [in a Hindu "Day of Creation"] single cell creatures emerged with this incredible capacity to live.

But evolutionary processes "taught" that cells that grouped together had a better chance of survival, not least because eventually millions of cells all highly specialized as within us Human Beings produces the best chance of all for any invidual cell to survive.

But this requires in us that "thought cells" serve both themselves and the "greater good" by inventing and working out some common purpose and direction that harnesses and directs this life to purposes that can only be achieved by an immense collaborative effort. Life without Dreams and Hope is Hopeless.

Yogananda explains that the Hindu ultimate reality for the Universe as a whole is the same as for the individual Hindu: that is an endless wheel of repetition with nevertheless the chance of working towards Heaven or Nirvana. And this is not unlike Stephen Hawkins' model of repetive Big Bangs leading to Black Holes and a new Big Bang etc etc.

Hinduism, he wrote, believes that the Universe is just the largest wheel of life that will turn round and round in these cycles of creation and destruction until human beings become either totally good or totally bad.

Cass

>>..cells that grouped together had a better chance of survival,
not least because eventually millions of cells all highly specialized
- as within us Human Beings - produces the best chance of all for any
invidual cell to survive.
But this requires in us that "thought cells" serve both themselves
and the "greater good" by inventing and working out some common
purpose and direction that harnesses and directs this life to purposes
that can only be achieved by an immense collaborative effort.
<<

Yes, cooperation is quintessential to most survival strategies.
Being imbedded deeply in our DNA it is always at least an option
on either an autonomic or conscious level.

Conscious denial of such a basic biological survival technique
will prove counter-productive to persons and systems who put
all their faith in self-will and determinism - hence the truth
that the meek will eventually inherit the earth.


~jwf~

jwf

Further to that:- I have just seen a report on Ceefax today stating that Charities are concerned that they are becoming increasingly dependent upon the over 60s, who give much more moneyper head than the under 30s.

But as it happens I have been spying the last 24 hours on some of the Facebook sites of 20-30 year old young adults that I taught, and from the photos it is obvious that they know how to enjoy themselves and have a "good time". But I know that there is "more to them than that".

It is still true,that, as I wrote to Mrs T many years ago, young people are richer in energy, enthusiasm and hope than money.. And, as I frequently point out to the call-centre agencies to whom the major charities now farm out the business of phoning supporters to try to persuade them to commit themselves to a monthly Direct Debit, it is typical of our age that even charities know believe that money is "the answer", rather than getting people to work in all aspects of their lives to contribute to making this world a better place.

Christian Aid know "believes in life before Death" and also that money is the key to life, even though Jesus said that "Man does not live by bread alone.."

Those of us who remember Income Taxes of 95% know that messing with money is not the answer, nor was increasing of the UK National Debt that recently doubled in a couple of years what it had taken English and then British Governments to build up in the previous 300 years.

At this season of Harvest, the great Dr.Johnson used to sit down and work out his own account and reckoning of the previous year.What counted for him was just how much progress he had made as a human being. That is real progress.

What I do know of those young people is that many of them have taken gap years to take on challenges in the developing world, and/or to at least travel and understand for themselves the reality of the way that people around the world have to live: and many of them have few illusions about just what can be expected from remote and mechanistic establishments. Some of my ex-pupils with African backgrounds know full well how easily money gets squandered and diverted, and are no doubt more interested in working in ways that will contribute to the building of a better world than mere Band Aid emergency patching up. Prevention is better than cure.

But we Sixty Plus people have to do what we can and hope that the energy of youth will rescue the world that we have bequeathed to them.

Cass

I don't know about the situation in other countries, but in the U.S., the unemployment rate is excruciatingly high among those 18 to 35 years old. They tend not to have any money to give away. Some have called them "Generation Screwed." Those who took on high levels of debt in order to attend college will likely find that getting the debt paid off doesn't leave them with anything to put aside toward retirement.

Apart from anything else this British idea of reviving the mighty potential of India and China has worked disastrously well... because politics and economics are not "joined up" with the real world.

British wealth owed a great deal to the time when these two Empire were fabulously wealthy and produced lots of goods that Britain and Europe wanted to import.. Trouble was Britain and Europe produced little or nothing that either great empire wished to import: and according to "Bullion Theory" this was very damaging to Europe because our gold and silver were all being exported,
leaving no real means to store wealth... These days we do not move actual gold and silver, but we worry about long term imbalance of trade, and nb, the wealth that has piled up in China.

During Mao Tse Tung's "Great Leap Forward" there were allarming reports about the future impact of this great new economic and political superpower committed to the cause of Communism.

But after the collapse of Communism the vast potential of both Empires, and the ex-USSR, became great places for Capitalism to invest. And to keep the Citizen of the West happy and content, including those who had undermined Communism and "bought into" the "Western Dream", there was cheap and abundant credit and consumerism. Mre Thatcher in the UK revived the dream of Home Ownership for all and there was a "Dream Home" building boom, with people mortgaged up to the hilt and encouraged by the increasing stream of cheap goods needed to "set up house and home". Goods taylored to "vulgar" Western taste flowed from the booming low labour cost economies like India and China, the new "Workshops of the World".

Now the Eighteenth Century position was repeated with one important difference.

The goods being imported from India and China back then were the highly prized products of great civilizations, goods of enduring value like the fine Chinaware that still commands high prices at auction. And they were brought half way around the world to sell to the ruling classes of Europe, allowing English/British producers to produce imitation sustitutes for the lower cost market.


But these days even the costly "stuff" is often mere tasteless "Bling" of the kind warn by tasteless "Barbarians",
"footballers wives", popstars etc, often people with more money than sense or taste. Much of the rest is sooner or later bound for the scrap heap,for one of the main marketing instruments is the fear of "not being up-to-date", "not keeping up with the Joneses".

It is well-marketed to a selfish individualistic "me.me. me" non-Society that has accepted the "Live now pay later" philosophy and in many cases only regrets unemployment, not because of idleness and a sense of uselessness, but because it means no money- either earned or on credit.

Cass