Every generation believes it is at the cutting edge, that we know everything we need to. It appears the society we live in could be made no other way, that progress has been made to get us to this apogee of civilisation. Both the Greeks and the Aztecs appear to have believed they had found the answers, as do most “civilised” societies, wherever they may be. No doubt Christians in the middle ages were glad to have resolved the mysteries of creation and to have a book of God’s laws they could believe in. Pity the poor pagans making pointless sacrifices, or the barely civilised natives of South America, they would not be going to Heaven. For in that moment God had given us all the answers. Come the industrial revolution and modern science, huge progress was made and the daily grind became steadily more distant. There were sewers, machines that milled and a better form of transport than the horse. We finally knew the shape of the world and could communicate across it, what more did we need? All we could eat was in a shop nearby.

Now we are in a new era of instant communication, we have atomic power and have visited the moon. We understand our own recipe, DNA, and can scan our own brains. The Universe started with the Big Bang and has been mapped. We even have the power to destroy our own planet. What more do we need to know?

That is the hubris of the human condition. We only see what we know and look back in pity and despair on our deluded forebears. Yet the world moves on dynamically outside our ken, at it’s own glacial speed, in ways we have yet to fathom. While we are proud to have split the atom and discovered the Higgs boson, we already sense this this is just the tip of the quantum iceberg. When we discovered the power of splitting the atom we thought we had solved our energy needs and in the rush of that discovery huge mistakes were made. Many lives were lost. Controlling nuclear fission turned out to be much more complicated than we had ever dreamed, while the cost of nuclear waste disposal turns out to be higher than the cost of nuclear reactor construction.

Dounreay Prototype Fast Reactor (PFR) ©z360.com 1999

There is a universe of quantum effects which defeats our senses and understanding. Our logical and classical consciousness cannot comprehend matter which has properties of both waves and particles. Put simply, the quantum world is invisible, antithetical and incomprehensible to us. Einstein himself, a founder of quantum physics, had a great deal of difficulty with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, believing that “He (god) does not play dice”, and this conundrum has yet to be fully resolved. Nevertheless the existence of quantum entanglement or as Einstein called it ”spooky action at a distance” has not been disproven. Thus instead of becoming more comprehensible our sense of the world is slipping away into multiverses, live or dead cats and the flapping of a butterflies wing which can change everything. There are no longer truths, only possibilities. Maybe space itself has an atomic structure, currently unknown to us. We are moving into a world we cannot see, our senses blind to the machinations of the quantum world. Until recently we did not need to know this information to survive, the evolution of our senses has failed to keep up with our theoretical knowledge. In this situation mistakes are easily made.

Now we are aware of it, the effects of Quantum Mechanics, discovered in 1900 by Max Planck, appear all around us. Your USB stick uses quantum tunnelling, as does in effect the light switch, never mind the laser, transistor and LED bulb. That all seems quite sensible, but a new field is opening up called Quantum Biology, telling us that quantum effects are an integral part of living phenomena. So we think we know everything, but cannot explain the sense of smell. There are quantum effects at work here, and the harder you look, the more they start cropping up everywhere. It is a matter of asking the right questions. The tennis player can hit a ball that theoretically he has not had time to react to. A dog can smell things that aren’t there. A human eye can detect a single photon. Animals can navigate using the inclination of the magnetic field of the earth. These phenomena are believed to be caused by quantum effects. Indeed, quantum wave function collapse might be the root of our consciousness. Most vitally of all photosynthesis (used by all plants) appears to use quantum coherence. In other words, we really know nothing about how the world really works down at the atomic level. We may have an inkling, but there is a whole new science here to be discovered, which will in turn make what we believe now into a vaguely ridiculous approximation. Yes our descendants will laugh at our naivety, and so it will continue.

Update 09/05/21

Our profound lack of self-knowledge is explained in the book The Idea of the Brain by Matthew Cobb (2020). We have no idea how the panoply of medicinal drugs (Librium, Vallium, SSRi’s) actually work. We do know the mind invents what we perceive, just one example being the invisible blind spot where the optic nerve enters the eye. Put simply, if we do not know how the brain works, how can we really know anything.
Despite a solid bedrock of understanding, we have no clear comprehension about how billions, or millions, or thousands, or even tens of neutrons work together to produce the brain’s activity.
Or as Olaf Sporns has put it:
Neuroscience still largely lacks organising principles or a theoretical framework for converting brain data into fundamental knowledge and understanding.

Matthew Cobb finishes his Introduction with this sentence:
The four most important words in science are “We do not know”.

‡

Without countries, the whole question of nationality dissolves. Nearly all countries have been invented in the last few hundred years. Germany and Italy only became nation states in 1871. The Act of Union creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was passed by Parliament in 1800. The United States of America was named in 1776, but only became the country we know today in the mid 19th century. If you look at France it is even stranger. From a series of completely separate fiefdoms with different languages, after the revolution of 1789 they gradually became a unified country, with one language mandated by 1880. This unification and language normalisation all took a long time. In the 1940s, more than one million people in France still spoke Breton as their first language. Until you all speak the same language, you really shouldn’t really be called a country. So France was hardly what we would now call a country until maybe the 1950s. The same goes for many other countries, excluding Belgium of course, which has three official languages in various dialects. Canada also has two official languages, French and English, yet it has managed to remain a unified country. This is a complicated subject.

Does a language define a country? Well maybe it should, for how else can you do it? Obviously where someone is born no longer defines nationality. It is a matter of chance, we could be born anywhere, and often are. Place of birth does have a bearing on our cultural beliefs and behaviour, but not in a readily definable way – it all depends on our personal history. The fact is that language is a primary factor, since the structure of language already contains a hidden and unconscious stack of social rules and behaviours. You only have to look at the structure of a particular language to see it echoed in actual social behaviour –  84% of Dutch people do not believe you are Dutch unless you speak Dutch. Language has become the defining cultural factor of what we call nationality.

Following this reasoning, in a world where English is now the first or second language for most people, the so called English aka American language is about to take over. Soon we will all be “English”. Mandarin Chinese may be spoken by more people, but it is not a numbers game, it is an influence game. Many African countries are now adopting English as their first language, for economic reasons. In the light of this information the United Kingdom’s departure from any influence over the European Community seems like a betrayal of historic partnerships. We have already won the battle of language, now we retreat? However, slowly, with many bumps in the road, we are all coming together, becoming one, like it or not. News, sport, music and cinema are already global concerns.

The evident craziness of the country concept becomes obvious at the level of sport. Now the passport of the sportsman is up for grabs, following rules which can change, and are different for each sport. Many English sport-stars were born in another country, became naturalised here, and became English. I’m referring to Johanna Konta from Australia, Mo Farah from Somalia, Linford Christie from Jamaica, for example. My mother was born in Indonesia and my uncle in Peking; they both represented Scotland at university level athletics. But of course now they could represent China, Scotland, Indonesia, United Kingdom, Borneo, England or nearly any other country in the world, depending on their residency history. Neither ancestors nor place of birth define your sporting nationality, there are choices to be made. So in the recent European Championships, Israel is represented by Lonah Chemtai Salpeter, a Kenyan runner who has lived in Israel for eight years, Turkey is represented by Jak Ali Harvey from Jamaica, who previously had run for Jamaica at high school level. Of course in football, with so much money running around, the rules are even more byzantine. That is presuming a footballer worth £10 million can get a visa.

Of course if you are rich enough, the world is your oyster. Indeed for the super rich there are still no countries, nationality is just another commodity. Citizenship can be bought in over 20 countries round the world. Even in the USA, so mindful of immigration, residence is awarded to foreign nationals who invest $1m in the economy and create 10 full-time jobs for US citizens within two years of arrival. If you want to live in Europe you can buy an EU passport in Malta for only 650,000 euros. In the UK may I suggest joining the Tier 1 Investor Programme with £2,000,000 in your pocket. Come on down, join our country!

The entire concept of nationality is built on a colonialist concept of the world. Borders were invented by Victorians drawing lines on a map, now we have to live with these arbitrary lines as if they were god-given. Of course they slice through many tribes and communities, which the Victorian map-makers often had no notion of. Only 70 years ago a line was drawn partitioning India into two countries, along religious lines, and over 14 million people were displaced. The most nefarious effects have been in Africa, leading to ongoing conflicts, most recently in Sudan, but their blight can also be vividly seen in the Middle East.

We have to get over the idea of nationalism, it is meaningless. The recent DNA investigations of our genetic origins make a joke out of our petty racist behaviour. Apparently most English people came from first Northern Portugal, then Middle Europe,  Germany and Denmark. We have only been here for 6000 years and the Welsh have more right to be called English, if you follow the law of the soil argument,  than most people in Kent, who arrived from Europe more recently. Genetically speaking, Israelis and Palestinians cannot be separated, so why build a wall? We should look at nationality like supporting a football team, a completely arbitrary decision based on random cultural associations and proximity to the ground where the football is played.

It might seem as if I’m saying where you come from does not matter. It absolutely does, it defines our cultural and social identity – you might rise above it, so to speak, but you will never escape it. We are who we are, our identity cannot be subsumed. In our new modern world, our global village, the possibilities seem endless, but they are a chimera. We can’t all just go and live where we want, in our rapid transit world that is a recipe for chaos. Realistically, residency has to be a managed process, however hard that might be. We have yet to come to terms with this new reality, now that you can cross continents in a few hours. The situation where the best educated Asians and Africans came to live in the UK, to work in our National Health Service for example, should be coming to an end. They are needed in their own countries, where they can accomplish so much more. We should no longer be encouraging them to emigrate, but training them so they can return home and improve their own societies. We should all be encouraged to visit, just don’t miss the last bus home.

World government already exists, it’s called the UN, for better or worse. Since 1948 it subscribes to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is a cool document in over five hundred languages and it should be taught in all of our schools. The United Nations might still be structured in terms of countries, but the decisions they make are world decisions. That is the only way forward.

Originally stardust
Then bilateral
Now I am Human
I live on Earth, I am an Earthling
I came from Africa
I am a member of the United Nations
I am a European
I am at present a member of the European Union
I am a member of the currently privileged Western Elite
I am a Scotsman
I am a UK citizen
I have the right of abode in the United Kingdom
I was born in Romford, Essex
I may be Scenglish
I do not identify as English, except when England play football

My father was born in Dunfermline, Fife
My mother was born in Sumatra, Indonesia
My brother is a Kiwi
My sons are Jewish UK citizens, soon to become Germans

I am roughly 4% Neanderthal
Some Asians are a bit Denisovan
We are the sole survivors of the genus Homo
We are all Homo Sapiens

Forget Countries
We are the World

O

Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials Remembers

97-year-old Sgt Benjamin Ferencz, originally from a Jewish family in Transylvania, helped liberate the death camps in Europe, became a chief US prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials and was instrumental in establishing the International Criminal Court. He is the last surviving prosecutor from the 1947 Nazi Nuremberg Trials.

Following a chance encounter with this inspiring man on the BBC World Service radio programme Hardtalk I have assembled these quotations. He spoke with self effacing honesty, his direct words often laced with a bitter humour.

As he says think about it and act on it.

• I served for three years in the United States Army, in every battle from the Battle of the Bulge to the beaches of Normandy, and I tell you there will never be a war without crimes – never – because warfare itself is the biggest crime of all.
• We were trying to show people how horrible it is if you take a leader who’s very charismatic, and unquestionably follow him, even to murdering little children. These were educated people; one was a father of five children. They were not all wild beasts with horns.
• These were patriots trying to do their duty to protect either their religion, their nationality or their economic security.
• They wanted to brag about how many they killed.
• War makes mass murderers out of otherwise decent people.
• Hell would be paradise, compared to what I saw.
• I never tried to do justice in the broad sense of holding every criminal accountable, it would have been a practical impossibility.
•  Vengeance is not our goal.

• We have not learnt the lessons of Nuremberg.
• The most powerful nations of the world are not yet ready to surrender what they perceive as a sovereign right to use whatever means they perceive to be necessary in order to protect their own interests as they see them.
• No politician appears without his flags flying.
• For centuries we have glorified warmaking.
• We have not learnt that you cannot kill an ideology with a gun.
• Use of armed force to obtain a political goal should be condemned as an international and a national crime.
• The world has changed, we’re not throwing rocks anymore, we’re gonna kill everybody.
• Think of all the money we are wasting on preserving the outdated nuclear weapons, which nobody knows what to do with and which are obsolete.

• My general reasoning is that the world is a small planet. We must share the resources on this planet, so that everyone can live in peace and human dignity, and it can be done. The recognition that we have to move as a unit gave us the EU, it gave us the US, 50 states with very differing opinions. Most wars are fought against another group, the ‘other’. When you are a part of the other, you’re less inclined to attack it.
• Law is always better than war.
• Law must apply equally to everyone.
• The re-education of the human spirit on a worldwide basis is the task before us, and we are doing it.
• Fundamental things such as colonialism and slavery, the rights of women, the emancipation of sex, landing on the moon, these were inconceivable not long ago. But miracles can be performed.

References

Ben Ferencz Website
Wikipedia
The Guardian Interview
BBC Hardtalk