Our understanding of growth and a fresh approach to the dynamic will enable us to navigate our future

An adage of uncertain origin is front of mind for many today.

Tim Jackson has written
about "Prosperity
without Growth".

America is shivering and the world, including many Australians, is afraid it will sneeze.
The axiom, attributed by some to a newspaper editorial says that when American sneezes, the world catches a cold.

Today some in the world watch on breathlessly as American politicians attempt to negotiate the country into a position from which it can avoid falling off what is colloquially known as the “fiscal cliff”.

Australia is geographically remote from America, but considered financially we live in its hip pocket and some are arguing that if the U.S. trips and falls over the imagined “cliff”, the impact will be felt tomorrow in Australia’s financial markets.

The “cliff” is about budgetary matters and the legislative need for that country’s politicians to inject some imagined stability into its finances, which could be significantly worsened if existing laws remain unchanged.

America has the world’s biggest economy and when the U.S. falls into recession, which is possible if laws remain unchanged, the resultant domino-like slowdown effect on other economies, including ours, sweeps around the world.

To restore some balance to its troubled economy (its national debt presently exceeds $US16 trillion), the U.S. had legislated laws the come in effect from tomorrow to introduce possible tax increases and spending cuts and to reduce its budget deficit or; the country’s leaders could act to repeal the several laws to resolve the immediate difficulty, or simply postpone an inevitable confrontation with reality.

Any attempt to argue “this” or “that” would resolve the U.S. difficulties and so ease the domino-like trouble Australia can expect would be hollow and pointless, but what we can do personally is consider our attachment to an economic way of living that has clearly overwhelmed the human beauty of life and eroded social equality and our natural sociability.

Life has evolved to become intricately entwined with the economy and today the quality of life is wrongly judged by an accounting process called “gross domestic product” (GDP), which includes as “good” even costs associated with efforts to counter and repair such damage as that caused by floods in north-eastern Victoria, including Numurkah, Nathalia and Rochester.

Economists sensitive to what is happening in the world argue for a more enlightened approach to growth; oxygen the present and dominant ideology urgently needs for sustenance.British ecological economist, Tim Jackson, wrote about a fresh approach in his book “Prosperity without Growth”.

In the final analysis, whether America goes over the “fiscal cliff” or not, and whether we follow, is substantially irrelevant, for what really matters is being able to look beyond this impending forest of troubles, to see and understand that the ultimate solution is in ideas like those of Tim Jackson.

Turing broke the Enigma Machine and was himself an enigma

Alan Turing.

This was the year of Alan Turing.

“Ho hum, so what?” I hear you ask.

Well, despite your lack of curiosity, this is a moment in history that warrants interest as Turing’s skills shortened World War Two saving hundreds of thousands and maybe even millions of lives and today the outcome of his efforts is implicated in most of what we do.

Turing was born a century ago last June and along with breaking the German Enigma Code of the Second World War he is credited with being the founder of computer science.

Many of the thoughts that once flooded through Turing’s mind are now embedded in your computer or the intricate workings of your smart phone.

Much of the credit for the life we enjoy is attributable to Turing for as he helped cut short a damnably destructive war and was instrumental in developing the God-like technologies on which the modern world depends.

Turing was a different and sometimes difficult man who epitomized the popular idea of “nerd” and being something of a loner enjoyed the solitary world of marathon running and it was that predilection that resulted in him working pretty much alone on the German cryptography used in the Enigma machine that transmitted messages to and from that country’s World War Two submarines.

That “loner” is credited with breaking the code used on those German machines changing the fortunes of the allies in the Second World War.

Turing, iconoclastic in behaviour and attitude, paid dearly for his pragmatic approach to life that manifested itself in a logic and honesty that, at the time, exceeded the intellectual capacity of society.

Homosexuality was a crime in the early decades of last century and Turing, who had never hidden his preferences found himself, because of those desires, entangled in a potential blackmail situation, and naively went to the police only to be subsequently charged for his behaviour.

Turing, who had been a “behind the scenes” hero of Great Britain during the war was found guilty for his sexual preferences and rather than go to goal, accepted chemical castration, but then in 1954, just before his 42^nd birthday, he died of poisoning, something many considered suicide, but believed accidental by his mother and others.

However, in 2009 following a public push, the then British PM, Gordon Brown, officially apologized on behalf of his government for the “appalling way Turing was treated”.

Listening to a recent discussion about Turing, one queried whether or not the remarkably thinker, had he lived, would have continued to add to the sum of human knowledge?

Leading the discussion, Monash University associate professor, Graham Farr, said such a question was unanswerable, but he liked to imagine Turing would have remained at the forefront of knowledge.

Twenty-six die in something 'beyond normal'

Actions beyond what most consider normal resulted recently in the deaths of 26 people.

The mass shooting at the Newtown primary school in Connecticut, USA, unleashed a wave of emotion as the news broke that 20 of those killed were kids between the ages of five and 10.

The young man responsible, who first shot his mother at home before focussing on the school, ended this sorry episode when he shot himself.

However, for a moment, let’s consider what happened at the Newtown Sandy Hook Primary School is in fact becoming the norm for it was the outcome of living in a society drenched with the idea that whatever is troubling you can be resolved through violence.

The educative and humanising processes of society are swamped by this idea to become a nation-wide characteristic that sees the United States embroiled in a hegemonic rampage around the world.

Blame rests unequivocally with the young man, but it seems diametrically unfair that he should shoulder the culpability alone when the broader society of which he is a product sees violence as an attractive solution with guns as the preferred method of dispute resolution?.

The portrayed bravado of America’s wild-west from late in the 19^th Century has transmogrified to a grotesque and bizarre sense of normal today in which many Americans, and some Australians it must be noted, feel a sense of vulnerability without a firearm in the house.

The young man was unquestionably troubled, but is it just to heap all the responsibility upon him and walk away comforted by the thought that there was nothing you could do when the young man and his behaviour is clearly a product of the society we helped create?

Many shocked by events at the school see themselves as pacifists, but stand with a government that commits similar, or worse, atrocities in other countries.

Unable to explain it any better I quote Guardian columnist, George Monbiot, who said:

"Like Bush’s government in Iraq, Barack Obama’s administration neither documents nor acknowledges the civilian casualties of the CIA’s drone strikes in north-west Pakistan.

 

But a report by the law schools at Stanford and New York universities suggests that during the first three years of his time in office, the 259 strikes for which he is ultimately responsible killed between 297 and 569 civilians, of whom 64 were children.”

“Yet”, Monbiot writes, “there are no presidential speeches or presidential tears for them; no pictures on the front pages of the world’s newspapers; no interviews with grieving relatives; no minute analysis of what happened and why.”

That prompts the question: Are some children automatically more valuable than others in our eyes?

 

Was what happened at Sandy Hook Primary School normal? Considered from the perspective of what is the statistically most violent culture on earth it has to be ”yes”, but the vast bulk of Australians would say “no”.