Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Gaia, Taoism and Chinese Landscape Painting


I originally intended this piece to be part of the anti-science week, but the week has passed, and so I suppose I should extend the theme to the entire month, or simply until I am exhausted.

Somewhere in the comments section of one of my previous anti-science posts, I remarked that, as a writer, it is usually my job to step back and try to see the bigger picture - the God's-eye-view panorama that you will find in most novels. I also remarked that that was precisely what I was not doing in my criticisms of science. However, this time I certainly would like to look at the bigger picture - a bigger picture, in fact, than that usually descried through the microscope of science.

I am in the bad habit of reading too many books at once, perhaps another sign of my reprehensible generalism, and one of these at present is James Lovelock's Gaia.

In his preface to this work, Lovelock writes:

"When I started to write in 1974 in the unspoilt landscape of Western Ireland, it was like living in a house run by Gaia, someone who tried hard to make all her guests comfortable. I began more and more to see things through her eyes and slowly dropped off, like an old coat, my loyalty to the humanist Christian belief in the good of mankind as the only thing that mattered. I began to see us all, as part of the community of living things that unconsciously keep the Earth a comfortable home, and that we humans have no special rights only obligations to the community of Gaia."

I was particularly struck, in reading this, by the phrase "humanist Christian belief". I do not know whether Lovelock ever considered himself, in adult years, a practising Christian, but my guess is that, like the majority of British scientists, he did not. What I took his phrase to imply was as follows. Christian belief has in many cases been superseded by atheistic humanism. Atheistic humanism, however, is really only an extension of Christianity in that it places human beings at the centre of creation.

If this interpretation is correct, and I believe it is, then this is quite an interesting statement for a scientist to make. In fact, it resembles confession or repentance. This impression is strengthened by Lovelock's talk in the next paragraph of a possible future science that "transcend[s] its own limits" and "find[s] itself on the border with myth".

Lovelock remains loyal to science, but his preface deals largely with the difficulties he has encountered in having Gaia theory accepted by the scientific community. Tellingly, much of this difficulty seems to centre around language. He relates that, "[n]ow most scientists appear to accept Gaia theory and apply it to their research, but they reject the name Gaia and prefer to talk of Earth System Science, or Geophysiology, instead... the new science of Gaia, Geophysiology, must be purged of all reference to mystical notions of Gaia the Earth Mother."

Lovelock, being among the ranks and used to such institutional discipline, submits to its concomitant absurdities. I must admit, as an outsider, I am not so forgiving. I am reminded of the story in The Little Prince, of the Turkish astronomer whom Western scientists did not take seriously because at first he wore traditional Turkish costume instead of a suit and tie. It seems to me that one of the fundamental tyrannies of science is linguistic. One must speak the language of science in order to engage in conversation with scientists, and in so doing one finds it is impossible to disagree with the scientist, since the language is already steeped in the assumptions of his philosophy.

However, although Lovelock does not exactly break ranks with the institution of science, considering it more important to have the power of science behind Gaia - even if he must change its name to something more serious-sounding like 'Geophysiology' - he does give us a glimpse of the possibility that there may indeed be something outside of science, and hints that his alliance with it is at least partly one of expedience:

"The community of environmentalists include many who claim an ownership of Gaian ideas and they have a case. Jonathan Porritt put it well: Gaia is too important as a focus for Green thought and action to be conscripted by science. Some accused me of betraying Gaia. Fred Pearce, in an entertaining article in the New Scientist of May 1994, captured the spirit of that Oxford meeting when he asked for Gaia to be acknowledged by science and the humanities both."

Quite an idea that - that something might be "too important" for science, or, to put it another way, more important than science.

Why does science demand such absolute authority that it can decide that we should take the word 'Geophysiology' seriously, but not the word 'Gaia'? Is it not, by insisting on such authority, placing itself at the centre of all things, declaring itself universal, and, yes, omniscient?

Herein we may discover the underlying hypocrisy of science.



Ancient peoples believed that the Sun and all the celestial bodies revolved around the Earth. In this, the Ptolemaic model of the universe, the physical centrality of the Earth also placed mankind at the symbolic centre of creation. This anthropocentric view was to prove one of the supporting pillars of the Christian church. It is a view implicit in the creation myth of Genesis, and in many artistic depictions of the Garden of Eden over the centuries. Typical of such depictions, for instance, is a certain Florentine miniature, in which the foreground is occupied by the figures of Adam and Eve, standing either side of the Tree of Life, and bound by a circle that is the world.



We are often led to believe that it was the discovery of Copernicus, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, that was pivotal, so to speak, in bringing about the Scientific Revolution and the rational, materialist doctrine that was its concomitant. In other words, the foundation of scientific thought should be that, unlike the universe depicted in Genesis, we occupy a universe in which mankind has no central place. Lovelock's mention of "humanist Christian belief" contains within it the implication that this notion is a fallacy, and looking over the development of science, we may readily see this is so. All the early architects of science were Christian, and they chiselled the blocks which are its foundation with tools of Christian philosophy. Since the existence of God was not to be proved logically, God must be removed to a safe distance. Ockham's razor of reductionism severed God from the world, and also mankind from the world. We were left with a machine, and God was outside of the machine - deus ex machina. The machine itself was one of subject and object. The subject could not truly know the object, since there was now no God connecting them. Knowledge could only be attained by experiment upon the object - a method pioneered by the likes of Descartes, Bacon and Newton. To experiment upon the object - the basis of 'objectivity' - was entirely permissible, since, after all, the object, now devoid of God, was inanimate, dead. In fact, soon enough, within this model, god itself became superfluous, and deus ex machina became simply 'machine'. Even the subject now was no better off than the object, since both were only mechanical. However, the subject did possess one advantage in being able to dominate the object through means of experimentation.

"... and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heavens, and over every animal that moveth upon the earth."

Genesis 1:28

A single thread leads all the way from the arrogant anthropocentrism of Genesis to the forceful domination of nature by science that is the greatest determining factor of life on Earth today. Science, I would therefore suggest, is actually Christian. It is specifically Christian, too, in the dichotomy it creates between body and soul - similar to the dichotomy between God and devil - except that, where Christian religion simply divides the two, science in its contemporary form takes this division futher by declaring one real and the other unreal.

If we are to judge by the disapproval a term such as 'Gaia' garners for its 'overtones' of mysticism, there can be little doubt of the scorn in which science must hold any philosophy that is mystical through and through. And yet it is to just such a philosophy that I turn now to provide us with an example of the kind of model of the universe that science supposedly (though not actually) gives - a model in which humankind does not take centre stage. The philosophy in question is Taoism. In terms of written texts, the first source of Taosim of which we have knowledge is the Tao Te Ching (pronounced 'Dow Der Jing'), supposedly written the Chinese sage Lao Tzu. We only have to consult the Tao Te Ching to see the extent to which Taoist philosophy differs to that of ostensibly objective science:

"Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.

"The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it."

However, more than Taoist writing, it is the painting that I now wish to consult to highlight the difference between scientific philosophy and Taoist. Traditional Chinese landscape painting is, indeed, infused with Taoism. Chinese painters believed that the 'qi' energy of the Tao was communicated from them to the painting via the brush. Moreover, the very landscape they painted was a natural expression of the Tao. Here we see the connections severed in Western philosophy still intact. The subject is indeed one with the object, whether that object be brush, painting or landscape, and the landscape itself is alive with Tao, not the dead machine of science and Christianity.



One feature of such Taoist painting is the way in which human figures very rarely take up the foreground. They might occupy a hut in the corner of a scroll, or be shown as a dot on a mountain trail. The explanation for this is that, in Taoism, the human being was not seen as central and dominating, but simply another tiny part of vast nature, such as the bee that pollenates the flowers. Here disanthropocentrism is acheived much more elegantly - and humanely - than it ever was by science, if science acheived it at all.

I do not think it is any co-incidence that such a humane disanthropocentric view is acheived through the panorama of landscape - of Gaia, if you will - rather than by the microscopic investigations of science. This is, indeed, a bigger picture. It is the generalism that science scorns.

As Lovelock notes in his preface, "[t]he French Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod, in his book Chance and Necessity castigated holistic thinkers like me as 'very stupid people'".

This is the attitude that modern science must take, since it is a technocracy whose jealously guarded power is built upon esoteric specialisation.

Kill Bill (Gates)




The other day I bought a fairly useless sort of book, telling myself that it was 'research' for my current novel, though I knew very well that it's not. The book is called The Encyclopaedia of Cult Children's TV, and the author is Richard Lewis. I suppose that my excuse about research has some validity, as the novel I am writing is about childhood and television, and particularly about children's TV. However, I knew that I was buying the book for reasons of pure self indulgence - nostalgia and humour. There is nothing intellectual or worthy about it. But then, is being worthy and intellectual really what life is about? Isn't what makes life worth living some indefinable emotion that we sometimes find in the heart of nostalgia (and other times in humour)?



There are some real gems amongst the entries of this book, but I am not going to share them with you today. No, today I only wish to refer to one particular entry in this book – Pink Panther:

He was thin, pink and very, very hip. He got into a kind of space-age racing car, driven by some grinning catamite in a crash helmet, who ran him around the corner to the TV studio where he got out. So what was that all about, and just who was that crazy pink guy? “It’s as plain as your nose”. He was the Pink Panther. The "rinky-dink panther", if you will. Either way he was the "one and only truly original Panther pink from head to toe".

Yes, for some reason the scent of shared experience, parochially precious beyond mere meaning, rises up from this description, and I see and feel it all again.

However, there was also a darker side to this hip pink cat cat.

It has been suggested to me, by someone else who remembers this cartoon, that the Pink Panther is a sort of animated version of Waiting for Godot. In each episode, our pink hero is imprisoned for the duration in a hell of existential, one might say Sisyphean, torment. He could spend the episode, for instance, trying, and failing, to kill a single mosquito that is playing with the remote control of his television set, or followed by a tiny cloud that rains wherever he goes. How can words describe the Modernist hell evoked by these mini-dramas? The anxiety creeps up over you in a distinctly Kafkaesque manner, until you feel that you are about ready to commit murder, if only you knew whom or what should be murdered, or thought that this might in some way alleviate your helplessness. For you realise, there is no way out of this hell, and no possibility of revenge.



Such a hell I have experienced over the past few days. You may be wondering about my relative silence – especially if you are one of my relatives. Well, I have been up until past five in the morning today and yesterday, hardly eating in the last forty eight hours, working on an editing job whose deadline I have failed to meet a number of times. (I am taking on scribe work from all comers at the moment.)



This job is not my idea of Elysium, but it means I can work from home, and gives me the opportunity to read what people have written in varied fields of human thought and activity. However, this task has been rendered, by the Evil of Mr Bill Gates and his empire of monopolising shoddiness, a nightmare similar in hue to those described above.

I recall, when I was holidaying in Malaysia some years back, that my brother and I became lost in a jungle, and, following a stream, happened upon two compatriots bearing a compass, who were similarly lost. Eventually we made it back to places where humans dwell, and had a meal together. It transpired that both my brother and the male half of the English couple worked in the same area, to wit, computers.

"Don@t you find," asked the man, "that if there are two new software systems on the market, and you think to yourself, 'Now, this one's really elegant. It's efficient, beautifully, designed, and a joy to use', and you think about the other one, 'This one's really shoddily knocked together', you know very well that in the market, the elegant one is going to lose and the shoddy one will have taken over the world in a year's time?"

This seems to be a universal principle of human existence.

Why? I do not know.

Anyway, the more I use Microsoft Word, the more I am convinced of the eternal triumph of Evil and Stupidity (the two go hand in hand).

I put a margin on one piece of text, and another, unrelated piece of text suddenly becomes double-spaced. I put it back into single spacing, and another, unrelated piece of text that should be centred suddenly becomes justified left. I centre it again, and the first piece of text loses its margin. I put the margin back and the second piece of text becomes double-spaced.

Oh, that's only the beginning. But it is such a hell of torturous tediousness that I do not want to relive it by telling of it.



However, during all this, a fantasy has come to me of a tortured pink feline who cannot take it any more. A 'groovy cat' - a gentleman, scholar and acrobat - who dons a black and yellow cat-suit and takes in his paws a samurai sword... And hacks a screaming and pleading Bill Gates into tiny pieces, starting with his extremities and moving towards the centre.

Posted by: Quentin S. Crisp / 10:54 am (3) comments

Blinded by Science



Since the 6th of this month saw the anniversary of the use of the A-bomb on Hiroshima, and today is the anniversary of the use of the A-bomb on Nagasaki, and since, also, I have for some time intended to post here a much-needed critique of science, I have decided to declare this anti-science week. I intend, work and circumstances permitting, to post on my blog this week, a number of entries giving my reasons for why I think we must re-evaluate the authority that science has in the intellectual arena.



Let me start with a small explanation related to the events of early August, 1945.

The use of the A-bomb, was, I believe, a scientific experiment. On Sunday, the BBC screened a documentary on the events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and one Dr Hida, who was near Hiroshima at the time, and treatd the casualties thereof, expressed just such an opinion. Japan was in a bad way at the time. No one had eaten white rice for months. The country could not hold out much longer. The militarists then in power in Japan, are, of course, not blameles. But they also provided America with a convenient excuse to do what they most wanted - to test the effects of the A-bomb on a densely populated city.



This is the very foundation of science - experiment. This kind of experiment is made possible because, according to science, all life is a purely chemical phenomenon. There is no soul. The experiment of Hiroshima, therefore, is essentially no different to mixing chemicals in a lab and seeing what happens. People are only objects to be used in the pursuit of knowledge and power. In science, morality has no foundation, and becomes untenable, since the foundation of morality must be the concept of the soul, which alone makes possible compassion.



On the abovementioned documentary, various people who took part in the mission to destroy Hiroshima were interviewed. None of them expressed any remorse. One went so far as to say that he had a job to do, that he did it well, and that he was happy with that. Just following orders, eh? Heard that before somewhere. It is science and its repressive rationalism that allows such a loss of compassion.

To quote William Burroughs, "No job too dirty for a fucking scientist."

The way that science neutralises compassion can also be seen on the Japanese side, in the events that took place at the secret research station, Unit 731. Here, many experiments, supposedly for the development of biological warfare techniques, were carried out upon thousands of POWs of all nationalities. When the Japanese surrendered, "[t]he US allowed these scientists to go unprosecuted in exchange for their experimentation data."

These events are chronicled in the film, Men Behind the Sun.

How do scientists get away with such exploitation? By convincing YOU that you have no soul. To quote Burroughs once more, "Convince them they've got no soul. It's more humane that way."

I mentioned the fact that I have been meaning to post a critique of science for some time. This began by chance when I posted a comment on someone's blog some time back. I post that comment in its entirety here:

Hello M,

I was going post a comment on what I believe without having any proof of its truth. Unfortunately, I've had very little time to go into such depth, and my eyes are still playing up a bit. But I will try and state it all simply. Most of the people who answered that Edge question are scientists. Science, in my view, is actually dangerous, because of its claims to objectivity. I'll try to break this down simply.

There's a quote at the beginning of a book by Burroughs from a character called Hassan I Sabbah (not sure if I've spelt that right). The quote runs: "Nothing is True. Everything is permitted." Burroughs explains the significance of this quote by saying that it is important not to beleve that anything can be true. What you have to do is take a look at who wants you to believe what, who is controlling the illusions that in turn control our lives, and then ask yourself what their motives are.

My impression is this, most scientists are the type of people who, at school, did not like subjects such as English literature and so on, because there was no 'right answer'. They did not understand how you could possibly grade something or know what to do in such circumstances. In the science subjects there were always right or wrong answers. It was easy for them to be right, and they liked being right. They liked the power this gave them, sensing in it a means of controlling life and their environment. What I'm saying here is, objectivity is a means to power in science. In other words, behind so-called objectivity is ambition.

In order to maintain the power that objectivity gives them, scientists need to see everything in terms of right or wrong, what can be proved or can't be. This means that they have to focus exclusively on the quantitive aspects of existence and ignore the qualitative. In fact, to ensure that their power really lasts, they have to convince the whole world that there is no qualitative aspect to existence. This is why scientists are adamant that there is no soul. When they talk about there being no room for any soul in the body, they reveal precisely how primitive their own thought processes are, as if they are expecting a sheeted figure to rise up vaporously when they cut open a cadaver. The quantitative aspect corresponds with the mass of the body. The qualitative aspect corresponds with the form. Mass and form. That's why scientists are so fond of looking through microscopes, and breaking things down - reductively - to their smallest particles. It's in order to ignore the form, the higher pattern. Science has a bottom up, rather than top down approach to analysing things. Define everything by its smallest particles. If we look, for instance, at a poem, we can see that the qualitative aspect is the mass of the ink on paper, and the neurons that it engages in the brain. The qualitative aspect is, first of all, the shape - where, precisely, can you get a hold of the shape? - and also the meaning. Let's start with a small one:

Old pond
A frog leaps
Sound of water

Where is the meaning of this poem? If you cut it into small pieces, would you find the meaning? The answer is no, of course. Yet to deny that there is a meaning, however valuable you think that meaning is, is to deny the obvious. But this denial of the obvious is precisely what science does. It is a pernicious way of thinking that erodes compassion and is resposible for our rape of the planet.

Objecitivy is now the new dogma. It is airtight - as long as you deny all things qualitative, where the soul resides - because it breaks everything down into what can be proved and what cannot, and this is precisely the realm where science has a monopoly. Ask youself this, Do we really want to live in a world where science's authority has become absolutely beyond challenge? Because that is the world we are heading for rapidly. We are almost there now. If I say that fundamentalists are dangerous, few people, except fundamentalists, would disagree. If I say that scientists are dangerous, suddenly I am a heretic and a crackpot - why? Because science has got so far with its hegemony of objectivity, which it guards jealously through being esoteric, so that no lay-person is qualified to tell a scientist what to do. But hear this - scientists are fundamentalists, too. They are fundamentalists of materialism.

It is good in some ways that so many of them are ready to confess to having beliefs that they cannot prove. But if you read what they say, most of them suggest that they will be able to prove them, and that they intend to.

Science has been useful to us, but I think that until it admits that it is self-limiting, and that, in essence, life is bigger than science, it has to be viewed as megolomaniac.

As I mentioned in a recent post, fellow blogger Lokutus Prime read this comment and assumed that I advocated the elimination of science. If you read the comment carefully, you will find that I do not actually advocate such a thing. However,since writing that comment, my views have hardened just a little. Dr Prime responded with entries of his own, in his characteristic verse, and now tells me he is preparing a defence of science. I am looking forward to it.

The Appliance of Science

"Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

Mephistopheles and the Modern Man

I think it's time I came out of my 'closet' (where I spend my days with numerous skeletons).

Have you ever had that experience where someone, for example, starts talking to you in a pub or somewhere and assumes you have the same beliefs as they do? A friend of mine once told me the story of how, whilst in Japan, he was approached by some American jock who extended his hand and said, "Hi, my name's Brad, and I hate fags. What state are you from?" (Why are they always called 'Brad'?)

To which my friend replied, "I'm from the one attached to France by a tunnel", and was accused, hilariously, of having "bad attitude".

Okay, so you understand the kind of situation I mean.

I find myself constantly in that situation, but not with regard to racism or homophobia. I don't know what it is about me - I suppose I have an air of mixed intellectualism and existential angst or something - but people always seem to assume I am an atheist. I'm not, okay? Please don't approach me with the assumption that I share your beliefs; it's embarrassing for both of us. The fact is, I really, really dislike talking about my 'beliefs' when I'm face to face with people, and only really do it selectively in writing. So, most of the time, when people assume I'm atheist (which they always do) I just nod along with them. I'm sure it's not the intention of the other person (??), but I always feel browbeaten in such situations. How is it, I wonder, that someone who professes to have no beliefs is so very confident in their beliefs that they will talk to me like this and steamroller any opinons I might have? The more they talk, going into great detail about what pernicious and deluded fools people are not to be atheists, the less inclined I am to confess that I am one of those pernicious and deluded fools. Look, talk to me by all means, but just don't assume I'm an atheist. You can think I'm an idiot or a lunatic for not being an atheist, if you like, as I've noticed atheists always do, but just don't assume I'm atheist. Is that okay?

I'm sure there will be many people now who immediately assume that I'm a Christian - that's the kind of world we live in. Not an atheist? When did you find God?

No, I'm not a Christian, either. Confusing, eh? Does not compute.

I'll tell you what confuses me - it's how people who can't understand others being comfortable with the restrictions of a label such as 'Christian', nevertheless feel comfortable with the label 'atheist'.



One reason I really, really don't like talking about my 'beliefs' as such, is that I don't really have beliefs. I have feelings and hopes and inclinations, but I'm pretty sure I know absolutely nothing. Another reason is, I know very well that I will be misunderstood.

For instance, some time back, I wrote somewhere on one of these blogs a kind of critique of science. Now, my good blogging friend, Lokutus Prime, seemed to take that to mean that I would like science eradicated from the world. That certainly had not been my intended meaning at the time. However, I'm beginning to wonder. I think that, if I have time, I should like to write a series of posts here about science and why I think it's crucial that its intellectual hegemony MUST be challenged.

Some time ago, my second collection of short stories, Morbid Tales, was reviewed by someone who made a number of erroneuous assumptions about my influences. He deduced wrongly, for instance, the influence of Arthur Machen in a story called 'Far-Off Things'. He also seemed to think that I was influenced by Robert Aickman. This was impossible, in fact, because I had not even read any Robert Aickman at the time. I have now. I started reading him just this week. I have the collected stories in two volumes, as recently published by Tartarus Press.

At the beginning of the first volume there is a short essay by the author, apparently written on request "upon winning the award for Best Short Work for 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' at the First World Fantasy Awards".

I found this essay quite moving, if that is the correct word. At any rate, something in it struck a deep chord in me. I quote from the second paragraph:

I believe that at the time of the Industrial and French revolutions (I am not commenting upon the American one!), mankind took a wrong turning. The beliefs that one day, by application of reason and the scientific method, everything will be known, and every problem and unhappiness solved, seem to me to have led to a situation where, first, we are in danger of destroying the whole world, either with a loud report or by insatiable overconsumption and overbreeding, and where, second, everyone suffers from an existentialist angst, previously confined to the very few. There is a fundamental difference between worrying where one's next meal is coming from and worrying about the quality and reality of one's basic being. The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe's Faust, so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain.

The words have for me something of the power of someone's dying words. In fact they were written in 1976, five years before Robert Aickman's death in 1981. There is about these words a clarity both terrible and calm, as of someone who sees simply what is important and knows what he must say before he passes into the realm of shadows.

I am reminded, for some reason, of Dennis Potter's Cold Lazarus, the last screenplay he wrote before his death, written in the knowledge that he was dying. In it a writer, played by Albert Finney, has his head cryogenically frozen in the hope that he will be brought back to life in the future. He is, indeed, brought back to life, in a future where England in nothing but a concreted-over annexe of America, and the head of a media empire wants the writer's head in order to exploit the memories in his brain tissue as fodder for virtual reality.



Indeed, it is the writer's memories that are the most precious thing of all in a world where everything else of value has been concreted over. Finally, the writer pleads with one of the scientists, in whose keeping he is, to let him die. He spirals down a tunnel of light into the memories of his childhood, whether to find eternity or oblivion we do not know.

I have no hope in the future. I do not wish to live to see a world of nanotechnology, virtual reality, genetic modification, cloning and so on and so forth. I am simply waiting for the tunnel of light to take me back to memories of my childhood in the Devon countryside, when I did not know how lucky I was.