Pacifism Vs Technology

As technology desensitises humans,
and reduces actual human agency
by reinventing it through machinery,
one of the harder philosophical positions
to hold fast to is that of 'being a pacifist',
because of how personal a position it is.

Being a pacifist means knowing
that we can't help but make enemies,
but further knowing that by every means
we know, we must limit our enmities.

With technology comes detachment.
In peacetime, tech appears to connect
unknown others with other unknown others
in ever greater numbers and at greater distance.

What those who think they connect ignore
is that the distance through which
they presume to connect is also
how enduring enmity arises.

I feel as removed from the zero sum battle
presently going on in Gaza as I do the wars
that have Israel has fought over fifty years. 
Too many civilians die on both sides,
with many more dying on the Gaza strip
than Israel would allow on it's own territory.

The rubble of total war leave me cold.

I want images of ordinary people living ordinary lives,
which means them reducing their personal enmities,
whilst resisting the world-dividing power of Propaganda.

The Ghost Of Primo Levi Rides Again

I have tried to listen to the news,
but at present I don't know how to.
In the past I have had periods
of 'going blank', though that is
too succinct a phrase to describe
the fog of unclear thought I get stuck in.

The war that is in the news most
in my choice of media is the Hamas-Israeli
conflict, going on all across the Gaza strip.

I admit that I know little about Hamas.

If I were told 'Well ought to know about
how bad and wrong Hamas always were.'
I would not know why. I could only imagine
that that my teller wants me to be as angry
at the world, and as self righteously ignorant
of the scales of human history as he* is,
as if his message was 'Don't get numb,
be angry at the victims. They have earned it'. 

Right now all I can hear are the voices
of the population of the Gaza Strip
speaking the words of Primo Levi to me
As they quote Levi's 'If This is a Man'
their eyes ask me 'How did we deserve this?'.
All around them what were once homes
have collectively become a death camp.

*my teller is bound to be an argumentative male.

 

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (35)

The phrase 'The tip of the iceberg'
is a shorthand and introduction
used by a lot political commentators
and youtube 'citizen journalists',   
to imply that the latest dirty deed
by politicians X and Y is just one
of a long list, the contents of which
are not particularly fresh sounding,
which they then proceed to supply...

But with that many tips,
and so much corruption,
there must be a lot of criminal icebergs
that like to hide in very cold waters
such that the credulous should wonder
'Whatever happened to justice and global warming?'

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Seven - Return To Agadir

Sunday 22nd October 2023

  From the start, the day felt more like the holiday drawing to an end. The German/French couple had checked before we presented ourselves for breakfast, which seemed to be served inattentively. But the sun was out and our plans seemed simple, get some money from the hole in the the wall, pay the hotel for the room and the meals, buy some spices to take home and some pastries for lunch, pack the car with all we have with us, and get on the road to Agadir. 

  There was a queue at the hole in the wall. So I watched whilst I waited. The people ahead of me were a group of men and women from either New Zealand or Australia. There were about six of them. One by one they approached the machine to get some money and one by one the machine refused the cards of five out of the six of them. Cue minor whinges and criticisms of each other before they left not knowing what to do next on a Sunday with nothing open, whilst having no money. Whilst the tourists were not getting their money I watched as two doors down from the hole in the wall a stray dog was taking flat breads from a pile outside a bakers, and, one by one, eating most of the flat breads he took, leaving an edge of the bread on the pavement. I had tried in this visit to keep an eye out for the street dogs whilst I was in Tafraout, and this was the best viewing of any dog I had yet seen. 

  There was also a young beggar who I had no small change for, when I knew that Anthony always gave such people something to them whether he was in his now native France or as a visitor in Morocco. I got my 1000 Dirhams out of the hole in the wall and returned to the hotel to settle the bill. It was then that Anthony asked the proprietor, a cook, about the best place to buy spices. We went and of course it being Sunday morning they were not open until the afternoon when we were going to be halfway towards Agadir. We realised that we should have made the purchase the precious afternoon when we spent time looking around the small market for maybe the third time.

  Room emptied, car packed, and room checked twice again to make sure we had not left anything behind, on the way to the car Anthony met the young beggar I met earlier and gave him some loose change, which pleased him no end. I don't know why I got into a mental block about giving small amounts of money, money which meant little to me, to the poor of Morocco who seemed delighted with any notice being taken of them on their terms. I would give back home. Somehow I could not sort my head out over such simple generosity away from home and in a different currency. I observe this, Anthony made up for what I lacked.

  On the road to Agadir there was further opportunities for generosity. We picked up one man seeking a lift of alas only about twenty minutes length. But he was standing at the side of a misty road in the heights of the Anti-Atlas mountains where the clouds met the road we drove through the clouds, and we had seen no other car pass us for at least half an hour. 

  When we stopped for a break from Anthony driving, and to eat the pastries he bought from the bakery earlier whilst he was looking for spices to take home, the place we chose had to be photogenic spot. Taking pictures was part of the pleasure of the holiday. There were so many places to stop and so many sites that seemed photogenic that part of the pleasure was being being spoilt for the choice of where to stop. One factor that encouraged a sense of 'enjoy it whilst it is there' was that we knew that eventually we would be coming into huge and unphotogenic Agadir, where if we knew that we were on the right road for the Hotel Kamal we might be surprised. One of the weather effects I could not stop myself liking was the mix of sharp and soft outlines of

peaks where the clouds covered some    peaks

but did not cover other peaks, I had admired this effect  from a distance at home when I saw the Mountains of Mourne in County Down. Even if the effect looked the same the world over, with every mountain range in the world, I'd still be pleased by the sight of that effect.

  Lunch, and our last photography break over, we descended from the mountains to where the road flattened out. Apart from some small settlements and the odd rather 'sculptural' looking dead tree which would not have lent itself to the good photograph we wanted, the scenery became mundane.

  We crept upon outer Agadir through the many smaller towns that Agadir's expansion and development had swallowed up, such that we could not tell where one small town ended and another began, or when we were in Agadir proper. The weather turned grey and wet, this further added to the sense of us passing run a series of down places. The signage on the duel carriage ways was good. It was because the signage was as good as it was that over the two hours or so that we took to get through the joined up small towns into central Agadir we did not have to turn around, or reverse-though with the big roundabouts we often went around twice, sometimes three times, to make sure we found the right exit for the next roundabout. I remember for the briefest second seeing a dig curled up, looking contented and apparently asleep, on one round as we came off one exit and on to the roundabout. 

  Between the good road signing, and what seemed to me like travelling by dead reckoning we found our destination, the Hotel Kamal, much sooner than the staff there expected of us. We rolled up to sign in to our rooms and rest before 4 pm.

  Rested, showered, and refreshed, and our notes on the journey up to date, we set out to walk, partly for some fresh air, partly to find a hole in the wall, and partly to find a restaurant since we did not know the procedure for eating in the hotel. At the hole in the wall I got out 400 Dirhams, that was what Anthony said we would need on top of what was in my wallet. When looking at where to eat, the stand out choice was an Italian restaurant, not that we saw a menu or saw what it cost. But we had been eating Moroccan all week and the only other nationality of food on offer was Japanese. We saw a menu and it did not inspire us.

Me in my handmade 'Mondrian' T shirt 

  When we rolled up at the Italian restaurant we were quite hungry and tired. The presentation was rather posh, stiff white linen napkins. It seemed like a good start when we saw on the menu that we could have a beer. The rest of the menu was more opaque there were items that were listed as salads, but that could mean something light, small and tasty or, well, what arrived in the end. I ordered a salad for starter and a main course of roast aubergine and ravioli. When the salad arrived it was huge and delicious, there were medallions of roast beef in it, and a whole large avocado sliced finely. The dressing was very rich but it did not overwhelm the taste of the lettuce, tomatoes, and other ingredients over which I felt it was my duty to take my time. The way I had been brought up with food excluded eating at restaurants, but made eating at home and pleasing the maker of the meal happy by presenting an empty plate for the washing up, which as a teenager I would pressed into helping with. This salad was seriously sumptuous, and it was added to by Anthony, who had a similarly full plate, giving me the large prawns that he decided he did not want.

  If we could have changed the order and said

Anthony in Moroccan djellaba  

 to the waiter when the salad arrived 'Please, can we cancel the ravioli, these salads are big enough to be a main course?' It would have been a good thing to have done, if only for our stomachs. But we accepted that the main course had to arrive. I enjoyed my ravioli, mostly by eating it slowly, and we both had a second beer. Eating out like this was a major occasion. We rested and said 'No Thank you' to coffee or any of the small puddings in the list.

   When the bill arrives it was obvious to us that we had not calculated the costs of the meal before we ate very well. The bill came to something over 500 Dirhams, I worked it out to be the equivalent of about £45. We were not expecting that. It was lucky for us that they took credit cards, and that I had mine on me. 

   That night I slept poorly, I could not find my medication for helping me sleep and I was afraid of my snoring, not knowing I was snoring, and waking Anthony up. 

Choice With Books

has always been a complex and personal matter.
Thankfully, books are not like possessive children, 
they never  argue back when we put them down
in favour of other characterful material. 

 

My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Six - Tafraout

Saturday 21st October 2023.

  Anthony enjoyed further conversation with the German/French couple across breakfast tables whilst I felt that I did not know what to say to them. It was easier for me to be more focused on the choice of foods for breakfast, the scrambled egg with Moroccan spices, several jams, honey, and tahini that were all to be eaten with the generous amounts of flat bread. 

  After breakfast the main thing we had to do was to return to the carpet shop. What should have happened before we went to to the shop was that either Anthony should have prompted me to go to the hole in the wall or I should have known to go, unprompted. But I held back partly because Anthony had reminded me much earlier that any Dirhams we got were no use outside Morocco. So, our money counted up but no more money taken from the bank, we returned to the carpet shop to look again at the choice of wall hanging that Anthony had admired yesterday. In the shop a question hung in the air, unstated until the carpet man showed us several more carpets. That question was 'Why don't you buy a carpet, Malcolm, as well as Anthony?'. I had never bought a hand made rug before. I had been given some by Anthony to furnish the house I lived in, which he liked to visit when he lived in Ireland. But me buying a new handmade rug for wall space on one of my walls had never struck me.

  The carpet that changed all that was shown to us alongside Anthony's choice from yesterday and it took about five minutes of looking at the two rugs for the decision to buy both to seem obvious. I had known I was, ummm, 'picky' about how I liked to be sold things. I disliked being induced to haggle. I liked to think of goods as being of fixed value and worth, where the choice of whether to buy or not was a formality. There was nothing much to actively negotiate. All that was required of me was to count my cash and decide if the goods were worth the price on the label. I remember feeling a certain horror at witnessing a particular open air event where a man was trying to sell bed sheets to housewives who were unused to open sales of stock that was clearly not part of any regular trade. The stall holder presented what was meant to be an auction, but instead a limited dialogue where the housewives could bid and would be acknowledged, the stall holder made his sales pitch into a horse racing style monologue where he did all the talking, where the housewife had to interrupt him talking to buy the goods they wanted at the price they thought heard. That price may not be what the commentator eventually asked for. Seeing this display of popular machismo persuaded me that if displays of hucksterism and machismo were signs of being male, then I was not male and they were not for me, ever. 

My new rug

  To return to our carpet shop, the owner presented us with an obvious, almost self selecting, pair of rugs at prices that it was silly to query, where somebody more cautious would have wanted to ask how he seemingly plucked a price for the two out of thin air. But to do that would have been to enquire about the process of his trade, profit margins and the like, that it seemed rather too much to enquire about-as if he might not be that generous towards us if we asked for his generosity to be quantified. He gave us a price, 2450 Dirhams, when sold apart they might be worth nearer 3200 Dirhams. 

  He wrote the sum 2450 out on a piece of brown wrapping paper, which he then took from my hand and stuffed out of sight between two rugs, where even if I wanted to see it again I could not find it. We paid him in a mix of Euros and Dirhams and he rolled the rugs tight, wrapped them in brown paper and parcel tape. The common exchange rate was ten Dirhams to one Euro. I would not have known what to say if I was asked to explain why I had that many Euros on me for. At the time I was in the carpet shop I was simply relieved that they were useful as a means of paying for the rugs. 

  We were out of the shop with our parcels under our arms in the late morning sun when the first people we met and recognised were the German/French couple who seemed politely pleased for us when Anthony told them of our adventures in the rug shop. He would have offered to show them his purchase, but they declined and walked toward the market.

  Putting our rugs, still tightly wrapped in brown parcel paper, in our rooms, Anthony suggest that we go for an afternoon drive along the roads around Tafraout. On the journey I mentioned to Anthony how the carpet seller had written the number we paid on a piece of paper and then discarded it. Anthony explained that his approach to money and government had to be very different to mine, his ideas about what caution was would be different to mine. Anthony said this, or words to that effect, and he knew me. But he did not know the memory I had of the open air sheet seller who sold his sheets to housewives, using a horse racing commentary to cajole cowed housewives into buying something they would normally take much longer to consider buying, and only buy when all excitement in buying was subsumed by a sense of utility, and 'family values'.

  Soon the grandeur of the scenery we were passing through quelled any further enquiry about the carpet transaction, and we returned to the primary purpose of our being there-to feel as if we were part of a landscape that opened us up without really trying. Anthony also very much enjoyed driving because the power steering of the rental car made the car easy to steer. The brakes were very sensitive and needed a much lighter touch than his old car at home, In fact the only aspect of the car where he might have been less than ideally pleased was when he sometimes did not find the right gear, as he changed gear, without looking. But the brakes were that good that not getting the right gear first time usually happened when we were driving slowly and in controlled settings, like lots of traffic, that made the mistake safer.

  We ate out in the evening. In the small town centre there was a restaurant that Anthony felt we should try. The menus were slightly difficult to interpret at first. Yet again we avoided the chicken, beef or fish based dishes. With a lot of the spiced vegetable dishes we had been served over the week there was a clean taste to them that any meaty or fishy flavours would have diluted if meat or fish was added to the veg. 

  The portions at the restaurant were huge, and quite tasty. The meal also cost surprisingly little. And from our seats we could watch life on the street, including the traffic passing and some of the handsome young men, no doubt extended members of the same family, who seemed to have nothing more to do than hang around the general stores and fresh fruit and veg stores, even when there were few customers to serve because of the time of the evening it was.

 A lot of life in Tafraout seemed to consist of waiting and watching, rather than doing anything much. We slept well that night.

Please left click here to find Day Seven of this holiday diary.    

 

King Herod And Rev'd Mr Malthus

Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) was a perceptive and humorous writer who ever so gently drew out the absurdities that hid behind the culture of deference towards authority and wealth in Victorian society. His original idea for humour was to have dialogues between two historical characters whose ideas contributed to history and made their name...  

Herod was the king who had 4000 children killed in his attempt to kill the infant Jesus, who Herod believed was out to succeed him. 

Reverend Mr Malthus was the eighteenth century mathematician and clergyman who devised unintentionally erroneous mathematical models about population growth, in which he hid his lack of concern for the poor behind the mathematical terms he used.

     

The Reverend Mr Malthus: I am delighted to meet your majesty. I have always considered you a grossly misjudged monarch. You have my sincerest sympathy.

King Herod: I thank you. These are the first kind words that I have heard for eighteen hundred years.  

The Reverend Mr Malthus: No doubt your methods were a little violent - in fact as a clergyman of the Church of England I can by no means sanction them. But it is not your methods, it is your principles that interest me and fill me with admiration. I hail in you the earliest exponent of  the Theory of Population.

King Herod: You are referring, no doubt, to the so - called Massacre of The Innocents.

The Reverend Mr Malthus: Quite so. And do not imagine for a moment that I am deluded by the ridiculous account which has reached us of your Majesty's motives in the affair. No, no; a reasonable man knows how to discuss the childish fantasies of ignorance and superstition. You were not a bloodthirsty tyrant of fairyland; you were a royal philosopher, who  understood the great principle underlying the whole structure of the social fabric - the principle that population increases in a geometrical, and subsistence only in an arithmetical, ratio.         

King Herod: I am appreciated at last!

Reverend Mr Malthus: You understand the fatal consequences of over-population - poverty, misery, disease, vice - an inevitable decline in the whole standard of existence - and you resolved to prevent those evils at all hazards. Accordingly, you ordered that every child under the age of two in your dominions should be destroyed. The measure was drastic; yet it might well be argued that it was ultimately merciful, like the cruelty of a surgeons knife. But the instincts of humanity were against you; your name has been branded with indelible infamy; and no monarch, however enlightened, has ventured to follow your example. 

King Herod: All that you say is true. I did not take into consideration the profound irrationality of mankind. But you must admit my position was a difficult one, I saw the evil; I saw the cure; and I was possessed of absolute power. Supposing you, Mr Malthus, had been King of Judea, what would you have done?   

The Reverend Mr Malthus: As a clergyman of the Church of England, my position would have been so extremely anomalous that I hesitate to answer. But this I will say; I should have taken care to not outrage an instinct so deeply rooted in the human heart as the love of parents for their children. Persuasion is more effective than violence. There will be no need for a Massacre the Innocents when you have induced men and women to realise the folly and wickedness of bringing too many innocents into the world.    

King Herod: You think you can induce them to realise that?

Reverend Mr Malthus; I am an optimist I think I can. 

King Herod: But even supposing you can - what then? My dear sir, I cannot help smiling. You talk of my outraging an instinct deeply rooted in the human heart; but what else, I should like to know, do you propose to do ?  What instinct is more deeply rooted than that which brings men and women together ? And you quietly suggest that they should suppress that instinct - and you imagine they will indeed supress it, when once they can be made to realise that if they do not the world, at some future date will be less  prosperous! That is optimism indeed.  

Reverend Mr Malthus: Common sense and self restraint is all I ask for. 

King Herod: And that is much too much. A few stoical philosophers, a few fanatical ascetics, my follow you; but the great mass of human beings will never set a limit on begetting children, for the simple reason that the begetting of children is the result of the greatest pleasure they know of.    

The Reverend Mr Malthus: Your argument is forcible, I confess. The almost inevitable consequence -! that is also indeed - would it were not so! And yet I remain an optimist. I cannot but hope that some way out of this dreadful difficulty may yet be found.  

King Herod: Who knows but it may be ? Mankind is irrational, but it is ingenious. I too shall continue to hope.  

The Reverend Mr Malthus: There are all sorts of possibilities; and I see no reason when they, at any rate, may not be left to fruitify - if I may use the term - in the womb of time.