On Olives and Sake

It’s been raining all day and night today. It’s 6am and I still can’t go to sleep. It’s been months since I’ve had a normal night of sleep. Insomnia, at its best and worst, has become a life style.

Dates pass by without the slightest effort. The most remarkable thing of my last week in Syria is that I am back here in Japan. I finished two lousy books in two days, and translated a lousier document.

She called the day I came back, and we went out for a few drinks at the little bar down the road. She didn’t have that smell on her hair, that smell that I love so much. But I was still content to sit there and look in her eyes as she tried to explain her Japanese with her favorite language, hand gestures. She said I smoke too much, and I said she drinks too much. She said she has ghosts at her apartment and she can’t sleep until she’s too drunk, and I said I smoke my ghosts away with cigarettes. She laughed and told me that that’s nonsense, and I said I agree. The last time I had to deal with ghosts, things didn’t turn out well.

At the bar they call me the Spy, and she calls me the erorist. It always makes me laugh.

I’m so self-centered sometimes that I can’t finish a book if I can’t see myself in it. And I’m such a hypocrite sometimes that I say I’m an atheist when sometimes I feel that a deity lives in my heart. I’m neither. Love, in any sense, brings me closer to reverence and blasphemy till the point where my fingertips start burning before my eyes.

I want to be a pilot. I never feel safer than when I am flying. I never feel more energetic than when I am at an airport. And I never feel more articulate than when I am talking to a stranger. I never feel closer to God than when I am cursing him.

When I was a little kid I learnt how to talk to myself. I learnt how to make interesting conversations with my alter ego. I learnt how to lie about my father, and how to smile in the face of an insult. I learnt how to love from Jubran and my mother and how to hate from my extended family, and my Watan. When I told my father that I wanted to start a company in 1992, he helped me start a journal. When I told my father that Kinda, my cousin, said that liars burn in hell, he said that liars burn with the air they breathe, with the words they hear and by the eyes fixed on them, but not in hell.

I want to survive a tsunami and to wrap my self around a bomb that’s about to explode. I want to stop a speeding train and to fly over the top of Tokyo tower. I want to dance until I lose breath then smoke a cigarette over a cliff in Koh Tao. I want to make love on a little distant beach in Latakia and then swim naked until the morning lights. I want to cut all these threads that connect me to this place called Watan, then run to it because I want to.

My Astarte said, as she put off her cigarette and headed off to bed, that she was going to be my Watan. I kissed her shivering shoulders and lulled her to sleep. I laughed, at her presumptuous offer and my inner content with it, and then cried myself to sleep. That was in October 2007.

No one can give you a Watan, not even 18,000,000 people; no one can give you a Watan if you can’t find it inside. No one can lead you to God, not even 124,000 prophets; no one can lead you to God unless you make your own.

I say, make it out of love, tears and laughter. And then rest on the seventh day, content with the fact that you have a God.

I packed my stuff in the back of the car, buckled my safety belt and tried as hard as I could to keep a polite interest in my uncle’s small talk on our way to the airport.

***

Everyone I’ve met, at some point or another, brings up that dreadful question, “What do you want to do when you finish your degree?” To which I have a very simple answer, “I really don’t know.”

***

A three-minute stroll along al-Thawra street in Damascus, can single handedly crush all disillusion in any future, present or past for this little country.

***

The taxi driver smiled as his car ran quietly over the neatly lined asphalt on the new highway to Dummar. He looked up to the mountain in the distance and said quietly, as to not let me even hear him, “Don’t you wish the presidential palace overlooked all of the streets in Damascus?”

***

A dear friend of my family lost his mother on my first day in Syria. In her eulogy, two men spoke. The Sheikh who prayed for God to have mercy on her, bring her closer to him in the heaves and to protect the leader of our nation. The other was the friend who grieved for his mother and lamented the lack of freedoms and the rampant corruption.

***

Damascus is becoming everything that I hate about Cairo and Beirut. Latakia is becoming a complete and perfect nothing. And I am falling more and more in love with airports.

…We did this:

Kundera’s question throughout the “Unbearable Lightness of Being,” was “Muß es sein?” (Must it be?), and the answer always came back the same, “Es muß sein!” (It must be!).

We carry the burden of our decisions throughout our life here. We carry our trophies, our losses, but mostly, we carry our painful compromises. Like scars, they maim us forever.

We see our existence through these very same choices. Instead of turning a page, we tear it out of our book. Then we close our eyes and we let the heavy air engulf us. We push forward and simply hope we made the right decisions.

Compromises tell of the weakness we all have. Compromises tell of our human condition.

In one week, I hugged a woman dying of Leukemia, and I closed the book on three years of my life. Now, I’ll drink my beer and go to sleep.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

Karl Marx & Frederick Engels – The Communist Manifesto (1848)

In honor of all the “insults” our fellow bloggers have been throwing against science, I could only smile and refer to Carl Sagan (quotes are from Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World):

Pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science, because distracting confrontations with reality–where we cannot control the outcome of the comparison–are more readily avoided. The standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed. In part for the same reasons, it is much easier to present pseudoscience to the general public than science.

At the heart of some pseudoscience (and some religion also, new age and old) is the idea that wishing makes it so. How satisfying it would be, as in folklore and children’s stories, to fulfill our hearts desire just by wishing. How seductive this notion is, especially when compared with the hard work and good luck usually required to achieve our hopes. (Page 14)

Religions are often the state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there is no reason why religions have to play that role. Anyway, it’s an artifact from times long gone. (Page 15)

Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise. Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced. (21)

It is a supreme challenge for the popularizer of science to make clear the actual, tortuous history of its great discoveries and the misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by its practitioners to change course. Many, perhaps most, science textbooks for budding scientists tread lightly here. It is enormously easier to present in an appealing way the wisdom distilled from centuries of patient and collective interrogation of nature than to detail the messy distillation apparatus. The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science. (Page 22)

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. (Page 25).

The scientific way of thinking is at once imaginative and disciplined. This is central to its success. (Page 27).

One of the reasons for its success is that science has built-in, error correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. (Page 27)

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science–by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans–teaches that the most we can hope for is the success of improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, and asymptotic approach to the universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always be lewd us. (Page 28).

One of the great Commandments of science is, “mistrust arguments from authority.” (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.” (Page 28).

Because science carries us toward an understanding of how the world is, rather than how we would wish it to be, its findings may not in all cases be immediately comprehensible or satisfying. It may take a little work to restructure our mindsets. (Page 29).

“Spirit” comes from the Latin word “to breathe.” What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word “spiritual” that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, only grasp the intricacies, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of the relation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. (Page 29).

Not every branch of science can foretell the future–paleontology can’t–but many can and with stunning accuracy. (Page 30).

If you want real accuracy (here, 99% accuracy), try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science. Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. … There isn’t a religion on the planet that doesn’t long for a comparable ability–precise, and repeatedly demonstrated before committed skeptics–to foretell future events. No other human institution comes close. Is this worshiping at the altar of science? Is this replacing one faith by another, equally arbitrary? In my view, not at all. The directly observed success of science is the reason I advocate its use. If something else worked better, I would advocate the something else. (Page 30).

Again, the reason science works so well is partly that built-in error correcting machinery. There were no forbidden questions in science, no matter stay sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, since the wheat from the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august, or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend–substantively and in-depth. (Page 31).

Some people consider science arrogant-especially when it purports to contradict beliefs of long-standing or when it introduces bizarre concepts that seem contradictory to common sense. I can earthquake that rattled our faith in the very ground were standing on, challenging our accustomed beliefs, shaking the doctrines we have grown to rely upon can be profoundly disturbing. Nevertheless, I maintain that science is part and parcel humility. Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on nature, but instead humbly interrogate nature and take seriously what they find.We are aware that revered scientists have been wrong. We understand human imperfection. We insist on independent and-to the extent possible-quantitative verification of proposed tenets of belief. We are constantly prodding, challenging, seeking contradictions or small, persistent residual errors, proposing alternative explanations, encouraging heresy. We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs. (Page 33).

Which leaders of the major faiths acknowledge that their beliefs might be incomplete or erroneous and established institutes to uncover possible doctrinal deficiencies? Beyond the test of everyday living, who is systematically testing the circumstances in which traditional religious teachings may no longer apply? (Page 34).

Science, Anne Druyan notes, is forever whispering in our ears, “Remember, you’re very new at this. You might be mistaken. You been wrong before.” . . . No contemporary religion and no new age belief seems to me to take sufficient account of the grandeur, magnificence, subtly and intricacy of the universe revealed by science. The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on its divine inspiration. But of course I might be wrong. (Page 35).

Hounen Penis Fertility Festival, Komaki, March 15, 2009

As I was extinguishing my cigarette 5 minutes ago, I noticed that I had accidentally burnt an ant that made its way to the ashtray. The whole thing sent shivers through my spine and my first thought was that, If God does intend to literally burn people in hell then he’s a sick, sick bastard. And I would rather suffer the wrath of a sick bastard than to actually worship one.