Making sense using Eastern logic

I’m not sure whether posting this in the way I have makes any sense.

The reason is that long postings must reach only a very small and diminishing audience. I truly believe that I, like most people, have lost the capacity to concentrate for long periods unless totally engrossed in what I’m reading, like a great novel in which I can lose myself. When people send me long documents, like a 5000 word article I promised to assess for publication in a journal like South Asia, I wilt. This is in spite of being interested in the subject, and even if it’s written well.

I decided to post it as a whole, but broke this into just five parts so that if you also wilt, you might manage a bit at a time. These five parts are each about the right length for a single blog posting.

What it’s about.

I was challenged to give a public lecture in which I could show that the original philosophy of Buddhism was entirely rational in its approach to life.

I accepted this challenge, long ago, in the days when I was foolish enough to take such things on. Here is the gist of it. I still hold to it as a fulfilling way of viewing life, fueled by a ruthless and satisfying logic. Ruthless as in consistent, of course. There is no philosophy more about compassion than Buddhism.

OK. Let's see if it flies.

PART 1.

Introduction

In a public talk like this one, I always have to try to guess at what sort of audience I might have.

Some of you might be practising Buddhists. Others may be people firmly committed to another faith, yet others may be atheistic or agnostic, and others yet again may simply be curious about what someone like me can do with a topic like this. I haven't come here tonight to convert you to a new religion, or if you claim to be a Buddhist, I'm not intending to challenge the pathway that you're now treading. But Buddhism is an intensely practical and sensible philosophy, ideal for intelligent skeptics and philosophical vagabonds, so perhaps I might try to make some tenuous connection with my topic along those lines.

You might say, with good reason, that Buddhism already makes sense without the least help from me. What I'm trying to do is to talk about Buddhist philosophy using only terms that are acceptable to ordinary people like myself, trying to live a fairly ordinary life without taking too much out of the world and hoping that when we leave it behind, the world will be at the very least, not too much injured by our presence.

The most basic propositions of Buddhism

We're told that the man who we call the Buddha subjected the human condition to a rational, dispassionate analysis. The Buddha was reputed to have lived around the Sixth Century BCE, which incidentally puts him round the same time as some of the greatest thinkers from the ancient world - Greece, India and China. He subjected himself and the experiences of those around him to this ruthless investigation - ruthless not in the sense of being cruel and heartless, but in the sense that he applied a clear and unshakeable logic to human beings and their psychology and place in the world.

For a start, let's say what he wasn't trying to do. Firstly, he wasn't trying to analyse the world in terms of a theology - by which mean, he wasn't trying to get people to believe that there was the sort of god up there somewhere who you could get a mental picture of and ask for favours, or even to thank when things were going right in your life.

Defying the Brahmins

He lived at a time when the brahmins had a stranglehold on the Hindu religion, and they were often telling people that they had the gods in the palms of their hands, so to speak, and that they could intercede for ordinary people with the gods.

This wasn't the sort of religious idea that appealed to the Buddha. He was much more concerned with principles that would give people some control of their own destiny through their own actions.

That's why he subjected the world to this rational analysis, and that's why in the end his ideas dealt fairly and squarely and directly with the issues in people's lives, and what they could do by their own efforts to find contentment. He wasn't interested in anything that would take responsibility away from individuals for their own lives and actions. He wanted people to accept what they could understand, and not rely on blind faith. The only faith he asked people to have was in themselves and in their capacity to improve their level of contentment with this life.

This analysis is about living life and finding genuine happiness in this world - because he believed that truly contented people had no need to fear anything that anyone else could do to them. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself here.

PART 2

Dukkha

The first idea that he put forward was that the essential characteristic of all existence was what he called dukkha, a word that's usually translated as ‘suffering.’ The essential characteristic of the human condition is suffering.

Now, does that cause your hackles to rise immediately? Doesn't it sound a pretty morbid proposition? Suffering, all around.

Think about it. Maybe he’s right, even if we ignore the myriad of terrible things that happen to other life forms on a daily basis. You could start by taking a fairly close look at the world today, with the overwhelming majority of its seven billion people getting too little too eat, having little or no shelter and few medical facilities. You could look at the planet groaning under the stress of the seething mass of humanity that's just about out of control in some ways.

You could see the wars going on, the sufferings of humans, animals and other creatures, and you would find it undeniable that misery and degradation are all around. And where it doesn't seem to be the dominant characteristic, that place is the exception rather than the rule. People are born amidst suffering, and die in that state. Just by being in the world today, you caused vast suffering to a myriad of creatures, from what you ate at dinner tonight to the ants your car may have run over or were crushed under your feet as you walked from the carpark to your workplace.

Now all that might be true, and you can't deny it, but that wasn't the essence of what the Buddha was getting at when he put forward the proposition that life was suffering. Or at least, that was only a part of it. In any case, you might say he was around 6 centuries before Christ - they didn't have seven billion people in the world then. And I have a right to live, don't I? If I have to watch out for every living creature, I couldn't eat, couldn't drink, couldn't move a muscle.

The Buddha, to my way of thinking, understood this very well.

Although he would still maintain that the outstanding characteristic of existence still is suffering in that sense, that wasn't the main thrust of his argument at all. He appears to have seen that suffering in that sense is a normal part of the way of the universe - the suffering of an animal killed by the lion is not evil, or the suffering which accompanies illness and death - these are simply part of the process of life - the flow and change that is the characteristic of the universe. The transience of all things - he was quite accepting of that.

In fact, he understood that one of the things that caused the most suffering to human beings was failure to accept transience as a characteristic of life. But I'll come back to that in a moment.

We have a problem with the term "dukkha". He seems to have accepted that even the natural world, which can hardly be described as sinful or careless or immoral, the natural world was one in which killing was inevitable, and dying was an unavoidable consequence of life.

PART 3

A more inclusive idea of dukkha

That wasn't what he was on about, essentially. "Dukkha" can be translated in various ways, and we don't have to accept that “suffering” is the only term we can apply to it.

What it really means is something more like "off-centred-ness" - like a wheel that isn't centered on its axle, so as soon as things start to happen and the wheel moves, it is awkward and inefficient and just plain looks and feels wrong - and by its very action generates off-centredness.

If you apply that to human beings, it has real meaning then, because we often say that we have to focus ourselves; we have to centre ourselves - we have to find our true centre - our selves - whatever terminology you want to describe the process that allows you to escape from the condition of frustration where you never feel at peace.

What he was really saying here was that most people feel frustrated and dissatisfied so much of the time they live, to a greater or lesser degree. He's not saying that everyone's suicidal about this; he's saying that we tend to experience this off-centredness just about every day of our lives. He had certainly experienced this himself - it was the very thing that made him set out on his journey of understanding of the true nature of the world and himself.

So, he accepted that dukkha, or off-centredness, is part of the human condition, and his next step then had to be to identify what it was that caused the sort of suffering that we seem to bring on ourselves.

This was the second part of his analysis, and in it he said that suffering of this sort is caused by desire. So what did he mean by that?

He was talking about the things that we think we need. Let's leave aside the essentials for the moment: things like enough food to eat, comfortable enough houses and clothes and basic health. In a society like ours in particular, these basics are easy enough to attain for most people.

Yet the fundamental fact appears to be that there are vast numbers of people out there with more than enough to eat, more than adequate shelter, and enough money to get by on - and yet they are still unhappy.

These are the people that interest us for the moment, because if you want to deal with the other sort - the starving and the homeless and the diseased - you're talking about a different part of the problem that deserves to be tackled in a different way. The ones I'm talking about now are the ordinary people who find that large chunks of their present existence make them unhappy, even when they have a comfortable lifestyle.

The Buddha himself was one of these sorts of people - you might say he epitomises their existence - he is a caricature of it, in fact. At least, the stories about his life certainly are. Brought up in a palace, the son of a raja or ruler, he had everything that life could give him - wealth, luxury, beautiful wife and family. He knew perfectly what it was like to have everything and yet feel utterly miserable.

Desire

What he came to realise was that people had been trained in their lives from the moment they were born to desire certain things and to fear others, and it was the nature of the things they learned to desire that trapped them.

What are we taught to desire? It would be interesting to see what you were taught to search for as the things which are to be valued more than anything else. Possessions, wealth, excitement, love, friendship, success, some sort of immortality. I daresay there are a few others you could add, but how do we identify the successful person in our community? Aren't these the very things by which we identify the successful person?

When we look at the objects of human desire, we see that there is one common element - they all relate to ego in some way.

This was the next logical step in the Buddha's analysis. The primary characteristic of the world is frustration, caused by desire, caused by ego. All our lives we are taught to enhance our egos. The best birthday present, the prettiest dress, the smartest car, the cleverest in the class, the most beautiful girl of them all, the strongest boy on the beach, the sexiest partner or partners, the biggest diamond, the biggest boat, the most fantastic wedding, the most prosperous business....

Of course, these are the crassest and most obvious things, and you might argue that you aren't entirely seduced by these attractions. Most of us are. And why - because every one of them relates in some way to the ego. The bright red sports convertible is a startlingly clear example of the extension of the ego of the guy on the move in more ways than one. The man who wants a beautiful wife draped over his arm is sending the message to the world that he is so attractive that he gets the best. Ego! The woman who flaunts the expensive bracelet is getting a great boost to her ego by being the chosen one. The billionaires of the world usually ooze power, ooze ego.

The problem with all these things is that they are symbols only and if all they do is to inflate the ego, they will never achieve any ultimate purpose. It’s a trap to believe it.

Ego

Ego is insatiable, and if it constantly needs the stimulus of possessions to satisfy it, however temporarily, then it will never be satisfied in the long run, and the time will come when no amount of possessions, power, money - anything that feeds the ego - none of that will be enough.

It becomes so frighteningly not enough that people who have everything often feel the need to risk it in order to prove to themselves what it really means to them. So disillusioned might they become that they search for meaning in artificial things that push the ego back further and further. Out of sight, obliterate it - in drink or drugs - anything that makes them forget the self that they're supposed to have created. Those who find refuge in drink or drugs betray the contempt they now harbour for the ego built from a lifetime of conditioning - the collapse of that paper self. They have everything possible in the world that feeds ego, and it fails to satisfy.

That must be a frightening realisation.

This sounds like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It is and it isn’t.

Losing the problems of ego

The Buddha's analysis does in fact identify that the person who has things and is still unhappy is trying to do exactly what they should when they resort to drink and drugs - to lose the ego. Clearly, if his analysis so far is right, then losing the ego will eliminate desire, which will eliminate frustration.

But according to the Buddha, the booze and the pills are not the solution. All they will do is destroy and numb the mind and the body without touching on the root of the condition - and that's what will come back to haunt you when you're sober again. What we must understand is that we are all drugged up to a greater or lesser extent in our understanding of the world, deluded by the incapacity of words and ideas to really express true meaning.

The tyranny of ignorance

By the Buddha's analysis, the other condition that pervades the human environment is ignorance. Most of our suffering is caused by ignorance of one sort or another. Ignorance and lack of mindfulness - too much concern for our own egotistical desires, and ignorance of what real happiness is about.

Surely ignorance is the one staggeringly obvious characteristic of humanity. The challenge that the Buddha set the world was to come to terms with our ignorance and to try to clarify and set our minds straight so that we would not destroy our selves and others by our ignorance - because ignorance is more dangerous and more seductive than open hostility. Open hostility - ours, or someone else's - is something we can recognise and which we are often forced to face. Ignorance lies there and quietly destroys us and those around us.

I was watching a story on TV about a woman who had spent much of her life under the mistaken impression that her son-in-law had taken her daughter away from the family and had caused the deaths of her other two sons by encouraging them to join up to fight in the war. The story revolved around ignorance and prejudice (which is ignorance by another name) and the destruction of entire lives which it had caused. She learned the truth in the end, and discovered that she had twisted and distorted her entire life around an untruth resulting from ignorance.

When we understand something after being ignorant about it, often we don't even want to let go of our ignorance because it becomes the very stuff of which our lives are made. We want to believe in the reality we make for ourselves, because of the investment in ego that we've put into it.

The Buddha had worked through all these stages of understanding, and he had come to the conclusion that if we could only correct our perception of life, then we would find peace and contentment. We'd know what we needed to change and how to change it, and if something couldn't be changed, then we'd know how to accept it and live contentedly with it. The AA motto asks for the wisdom to know the difference between things that can be changed and things that can't. The AA philosophy is pure Buddhism in that sense. This is nothing more than being practical and sensible yet we fight against it all the time.

There's a great story about the Buddha visiting a monastery and finding that one of his disciples there was limping. “What's the matter,” asked the Buddha? “I was practising simplicity in my life,” said the monk, and because I was walking in the heat of the sun, the soles of my feet became blistered. What should I do?” he asked.

“Wear sandals,” said the Buddha.

It’s another way of saying that we need to understand the problem, so that we can consider the best solution.

PART 4

You may be wanting more substantial answers. Understanding the problem isn't enough, though there's no doubt that it’s essential. What's the good of all this if you don't get a solution?

Do it yourself!

The Buddha said several things about this. One was that ultimately, all people had to work out their own pathways to happiness for themselves. No-one else could really do it for them, because it involved decisions only they could make.

But he didn't simply leave people to their own devices from that point on. He gave offered a guide to the process of freeing ourselves from the bondage of our own ignorance and desires and egos, and this is what has come to be known as the Eightfold Path.

I'm going to tell you what the Eightfold Path is, but I'm not going to go through the eight bits one by one and I'm avoiding that for a couple of good reasons. Most important is that they have such an archaic, prescriptive and moralistic tone that I'm sure you're going to get a distorted conception of what he was really on about.

Listen to them:

1. right views2. right intent3. right speech4. right conduct5. right livelihood6. right effort7. right mindfulness8. right concentration

What do they mean? Two things.

The Eightfold Path

This Eightfold Path is firstly a set of preconditions for the right way to look at things, and secondly, it's a method of correcting that perception. It's a discipline, and like all disciplines, it's something that usually comes over time and with a good deal of training.

It's not a like a recipe or a packet cake mix. It's an environment in which release from ignorance and unhappiness can be achieved. It's not about extremes or damaging your body. It's a pointer to leading a contented life and a peaceful exit from life at the end - but you've got to take responsibility for it.

The Eightfold Path encourages us to get ourselves in the right mental and physical condition to correct our perception of the world, and then practice a technique that will help us get better and better at seeing things for what they are and making ourselves content. The technique is usually called meditation.

Meditation

Meditation is a much misunderstood term. Some of you may tune out the moment you hear it. We may think of rows of people - or maybe just one person - sitting in a lotus position, eyes half closed, apparently half asleep or possibly comatose. What are they doing?

Mostly what they're doing is nothing more - but it's a big nothing - nothing more than stilling their minds so that they can experience things directly instead of through the fog of words, thoughts, concepts and sensations that constantly interrupt our chance to be directly conscious of what we are and what the world is.

This is where the eyes of some of you are going to glaze over. Get rid of words? Ideas? Why?

Ecstasy

Because we have lost the art of experiencing things directly, except in the few times in our lives when we become ecstatic for some reason or another. Our football team just won the premiership.... Or we fall in love, or win the lottery. These are ecstasies - the kind where you forget your self in the primal scream or moment of passion. These are hardly the stuff of self-realisation.

This is because these aren't the only ecstasies. There are quieter ecstasies in the world with more profound meaning than waving the winner’s cup.

Here we have to bear in mind the true meaning of the word ecstasy - ex = “out of” and stasis = “the self”. Out of self. Free of self. There are the quiet ecstasies of total absorption in something, where you lose that troublesome sense of self and maybe even experience a moment or two of mystical bliss - total identification of the experiencer and the object of that experience - a form of perfect if fleeting serenity and happiness where you want nothing more and you’d like it to go on forever.

Supposing you accepted as a hypothesis that there was a way to prolong, more or less permanently, that blissful state of quiet ecstasy - that state of total absorption. That state in which you know intuitively how to deal with the world and all the challenges that it poses for you daily? A state that would put life and death and fear and happiness all into such crystal clear clarity that nothing in life could ever trouble you again?

Would you buy some of that? Or is it such a fearful proposition that you want to cling to ego and selfish pleasures, even though you know that they ultimately end in suffering and pain and humiliation?

Buddhism challenges you to test that hypothesis. It has a word for that state of total absorption, total awareness and mindfulness, and that word is nirvana.

PART 5

Let's suddenly change the setting. Instead of me here persuading you to begin to observe the preliminaries to the practice of meditation, let's pretend that I have become transformed into a Baptist preacher. I have just convinced you that you've got to let Christ into your life, that you can be blissfully redeemed from your lives of wickedness by God's forgiveness and you can be reborn as a new, spiritually perfect person. You'll get down on your knees and pray to a loving God and thank Him for His salvation.

Why did I suddenly switch scenes and persona? The reason is twofold.

Identity and Difference

There is a strong identity between the ecstasy of meditation and the joy of freedom for the saved sinner, or the joy of prayer. But there’s a vital difference in one aspect of it and here is where all the Eastern religions part company, superficially at least, with the Semitic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

I want to make a contrast between that point of spiritual bliss that the Christian or the Muslim might reach on the moment of surrendering to God. In Christianity, for example, you can have your sins washed away by an act of genuine contrition, expiated by the love of God.

Buddhist philosophy doesn't have a parallel to that, except perhaps in the later Mahayana tradition, and I don't want to get into the sects of Buddhism. Let's stick with what I see as the pure philosophy for the moment.

Karma

What Buddhism says is that contrition for sins is a wonderful thing and certainly a step in the right direction, but that you can't undo the consequences of your action. You might make amends, but you can't wipe the slate clean because you simply can't go backwards. In the great computer program of life, there is no UNDO command!

You have to come to terms with the consequences of your actions and you have to see yourself as a part in a gigantic link of causation - of cause and effect. No-one can deny that that is exactly what we are - we're here on this earth because of all the events that have occurred since the beginning of the universe, and we're making waves, however small they might seem to be, that will reverberate to the end of time. The butterfly that flutters its wings in Beijing may set off a chain reaction that has immense consequences for the world, if I might borrow an analogy from some fundamental principles of chaos theory.

What have fluttering butterflies got to do with saving your soul? Well, Buddhism has some rather mind-boggling interpretations of the soul too, but let's not confuse the issue more than we have to for the moment. Buddhism is all about taking responsibility for your actions, because you are in control of your destiny to an important extent. You make decisions and you take responsibility - that's what the law of karma is all about.

It’s the moral law of cause and effect, that neither you nor I nor anyone can escape from, because you can't escape from the consequences of action.

Action

Karma literally means action. To early Buddhism as it comes to us, there is no God sitting up there somewhere who takes a paternal interest in you or me. There is no god to whom you can pray for forgiveness and who can intercede on your behalf. To Buddhist philosophy, such an idea of godhead - or ultimate reality or ultimate salvation - some father-like figure - is a rather child-like conception, just like the vision of a heaven where the streets are paved with gold, or the cool green and water-filled paradise of the Muslims might be regarded as a childlike one in spiritual terms.

Whatever godliness or heavenliness there is, it is within you - within us all - it is to be realised. And that is the goal of meditation - to realise truth and to act upon it. Through this discipline, of meditation, it loses its selfishness in the superficial sense and becomes a kind of mantle of loving kindness radiating from you to all creation. 

And I've only just got started!

Nano-blasting tumours - not sci-fi

Now this is something you don’t see every day – a truly promising way to blast tumour cells without damaging any other tissue.

  Before we get too excited, there’s one vital thing I know about medical research of this type, even if it works like a charm. All going well, you can expect it to take 5-10 years in development, and there’s no way to hurry this process. New drugs and techniques have to be tried and tested fully before they are released as safe for humans, and that’s how it should be. Even for purely selfish or commercial reasons, the pharmaceutical company doesn’t want their drug on the market if it turns out there’s a problem. Lawsuits can be very expensive.

  Still, given my circumstances, this is one way of tackling cancer that I wouldn’t mind being a guinea pig for, once it reached the appropriate stage of testing.

  There’s a clearly written article on it by MIT chemical engineers. It’s entitled:

MIT Designed Nanoparticles Target Tumor Cells

You can read about it there, but let me just say how it works, as far as I can see, as a Bear of Very Little Brain.

  Just about all tumour cells have one thing in common that healthy cells don’t. They are more acidic than normal ones. If I have it right, that acidity is partly why people like me with brain tumours get inflammation of the brain, causing Fuzzy Head Syndrome at best, and headaches and increasingly severe brain damage further down the track as the tumour grows.

  But its acidity can be its Achilles Heel. With this drug-delivery, a treatment can be sent via the bloodstream to attack just these targets – cells that are more acidic. Tumours, in other words.

  The key to it as described in the article is this:

  The new MIT approach differs from that taken by most nanoparticle designers. Typically, researchers try to target their particles to a tumor by decorating them with molecules that bind specifically to proteins found on the surface of cancer cells. The problem with that strategy is that it’s difficult to find the right target — a molecule found on all of the cancer cells in a particular tumor, but not on healthy cells. Also, a target that works for one type of cancer might not work for another.

  The brilliance of this mode of delivery is that it is layered. It has a stage-by-stage method of entry to the tumour cells and thus a way of attacking them, and them only, with the right drug. You can read much more about it in the article, which as I said is written clearly, is informative, and the principle isn’t hard to understand.

  An analogy that comes to my mind is to think of the mode of delivery of the tumour-inhibiting drug as a bit like a getting a multi-stage rocket into space, dropping parts off when they’ve done their job, and putting the business end of the rocket right where it should be.

  This technique has been tested successfully on living animals. Its uses are not limited to cancer, and could have a wide range of applications.

  Read all about it. It may be your life it saves. Sadly, I can’t see it happening in my lifespan, but I’m guessing it may become the new Avastin – though let me emphasise, it behaves in quite a different way, in that it’s a delivery mode and not the drug itself.

  (Note: special thanks to a thoughtful Twitter friend for digging this article out. His name is Darren and his Twitter identity is @djmer1. He can talk the leg off an iron pot but he has interesting things to say, and obviously has a very kind heart. Cheers, mate.)

Only the Now and Zen

Thursday, 11 August 2011 7:05 PM.

 I always feel best after my daytime sleep, which is the timezone I am in now, writing this, just an hour after waking.

  I would expect it to be the same feeling early in the morning, but it's not. Whatever I have done to my Circadian rhythm, it's now locked into this pattern, and has been for a long time.

  In reality it is very similar to the siesta pattern so common throughout southern Europe, and South and Southeast Asia. In the heat of the summer afternoon in those parts of the world, it makes sense to sleep, and do active things in the cool of early morning, and of the late afternoon or evening.

  It's the cold climate people and the Protestant Work Ethic that make this pattern seem 'abnormal'. 9 to 5 is alien to traditional lifestyle for half the world, especially in the tropics, although the pressures of modern urban lifestyles now change this, even in Asia and Africa.

  Air-conditioning in that part of the world has helped this change to a northern European pattern of thinking about the working day. It revolutionised life in places like New York forty years ago when it became normal to have an air-conditioned workspace. Family life at the cabin in the mountains to avoid the summer heat of the city gradually disappeared.

  You can imagine the social changes this one device has caused. We can also estimate the new pressures on the world's energy resources that such a change for the rest of the world demands. 

  But back to where I started out....

  A lot depends on when I wake on any given morning. If it's early - say, 5 AM, which isn't unusual for me, then I may exercise, eat breakfast and be active until about 10 AM, and then crash. I may sleep till late lunchtime, and then be active until midnight or so. There's no point in going to bed when I don't feel tired.

  If I wake later, say 8 AM, I may be active until anything up to 2 PM. At times it's even later. Then weariness overtakes me almost like drowning, and I sleep till nearly 6 PM.

  There no real pattern to this and there are all sorts of factors that change the rhythm. All I know is the Zen proverb. 'When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep.'

  Live in the Now. It's all we have, when you think about it.

  The past is over and can't be changed. The future isn't here yet, though you can use the present to plan for it. But if we try to live only in an anticipated future or an unchangeable past, we waste the Now.

  We have only the infinitely small speck of existence that is the Now, so we better enjoy it. The past is nothing more than a present memory of the past. The future is only a present anticipation of it.

  We have just a Now version of the Past and the Present. Even when we look at that old home movie, it's a present experience of that past. If we dream of the weekend to come, it can only be a present experience.

  And now it's dinner time, and I have some Now to spend with my family!

The last battle (pt 3 - final)

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‘You’re killing invention,’ Tracey said when she read the previous part of my Tommy Fittler saga.

  ‘Killing invention?’ I responded. My hearing has gone to pot.

  ‘I said, “You’re building the tension.”’ She had that look on her face, but she was laughing.

  Half deaf people know that look.

  I wasn’t aware I was doing that. The last two episodes have me looking slightly watery at the knees, I’ll admit, but at least you can see I’m telling the truth. Let’s push on and complete the tale.

  We were now in high school. Tommy Fittler and I had practically nothing to do with each other, as he was in the Industrial Science class and I was doing Academic. We’d seen each other a few times and glowered, but that was it. He was always surrounded by his little group of three or four henchmen, all smaller than he, one of whom I particularly detested. He looked so much like an underfed rat, his mouth pulled down at the sides. He was nick-named Macca, long before the Golden Arches were invented and a new religion devoted to stuffing up your digestive tract was born.

  This morning started like any other weekday in 1961, with us all casually milling around on the quadrangle just before Assembly. Macca and his mate had a weedy, inoffensive, scared kid flattened against the back wall of the Principal’s office, and were about to remind him in clear terms where he stood in the schoolyard pecking order.

  Flattened up against the wall. I knew that feeling all too well, at the hands of Tommy Fittler. I glanced at my best pal, Jimmy Lawler, and he said just one word. ‘Yes!’  We ran over, each put an arm round the neck of one of the tormentors, and threw them down. The kid ran off.

  I admired my work with some satisfaction, Macca lying on the ground and spitting curses at me roundly, but that proved to be a distraction. Before I knew it, I felt a severe blow to my back - the kidney area.

  Tommy Fittler had come to rescue the enforcers. ‘Mongrel. You aren’t game to do that from the front,’ I said, conveniently forgetting that I had dragged Macca off the kid by ambush from behind.

  The 9 AM Assembly bell rang, right then. Tommy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Third time lucky, Wrightey? Saved by the bell? Again?’

  My kidney was bruised and I was fired up. I wanted revenge for all the previous insults, and the kidney punch. ‘No way, Fittler. Let’s settle this. Lunch time?’

  ‘Behind the Seniors’ room. It’s out of the way.’ He stalked off to the Industrial Class line on the Quad.

  I spent an uneasy morning. I knew that fighting at school was almost certain to end in a caning, but the Calliope bus left straight after school and we couldn’t settle this out of school hours.

  The fight itself was also going to be tough. As I said, we matched each other pretty near perfectly in physical terms and I had no doubt he was going to be as determined as I was to make the caning worthwhile. I had no idea of his fighting style, except that it would be boxing, nothing more. In those days, as I explained elsewhere, doing anything to anyone on the ground, like kicking them, was just not House Rules.

  How times have changed.

  The appointed time came, as appointed times inevitably do, for us all.

  I was there first, but word had got around. Half the boys in the school knew that entertainment was going to be on offer, and where. There was a crowd gathered as Tommy and his henchmen came up. I knew I had most of the crowd on my side, especially the smaller kids who’d had a taste of the Tommy Fittler and Macca combo, though they had to be careful not to show it too openly. Such things, observed, are neither forgiven nor forgotten, especially with Macca and his mate cruising around.

  Look, the fight itself isn’t worth much of a commentary, so I’ll keep it brief. It’s what followed after that’s of more interest, I think. We were so evenly matched that there were lots of bits of both our bodies that hurt. At least, from my point of view, lifting full ten-gallon milk-cans day in and day out turned out handy when muscle was needed in a bare-knuckle stoush. I doubt he was enjoying it, and I can think of plenty of other ways I like to have fun besides collecting bruises.

  But one thing he did deflected a lot of jabs aimed at his face. He held the right arm high and could flick punches away at the last moment. That was wasted energy for me and there were no three-minute rounds or anything – it just went on till one or the other ‘cried enough,’ as Killer George would have said.

  I didn’t mind that, as I had stamina, and I could see the ‘flicking’ arm was waning in speed. I decided to try a different tactic. There was a fraction of a second when his wrist bent and relaxed each time.

  Instead of trying to go past the defending arm, I feinted with one punch and then directed a jab as hard as I could to the wrist itself as it relaxed. The whiplash effect of this single punch resulted in a faint but unmistakeable cracking sound. Something gave way. It was like the sound when you play that game with the wishbone of a Sunday dinner chook. Crack it the right way and you get your wish.

  It seems I got mine. His face blanched, but he refused to acknowledge he was hurting, far more than any normal punch would do. The arm was lagging. He could barely raise it. It was a time I could have done some real damage.

  Not so. Two teachers, 'Pedro' Noonan and Charlie Rice, appeared from round the corner of the Senior Class’s building. Pedro ordered a stop and the crowd melted away.

  The choice of venue wasn’t really that smart, as part of the area was in plain view of the staff room in the main building. A crowd like that, all boys, would leave in little doubt what was happening just out of view if any teacher saw it. Obviously someone did, eventually.

  ‘To the Office,’ Charlie Rice ordered. ‘You know you can’t fight in the school grounds.’

  The Office to which he referred was of course the Principal’s office.

  The Principal was Mr Bourke. Mick Bourke. My first experience of him was in Grade 7 when we came in from the Calliope Primary School each week to get training in the Manual Arts.

  I heard him before I saw him. What I heard was what seemed to be a vast roll of continuous thunder, and then I saw him herding three large boys off to the Office. He was waving a cane that looked to me nearly his entire height, of about 5’4” (1.6 m.) Short and barrel-shaped, he had those boys scared witless, and that voice, the loudest I had ever heard emanating from the larynx of a human being, surely terrorised me too. It was quite an intro.

  And that was where Tommy Fittler and I were heading.

  We were ushered into his office. All the adrenalin seemed to have disappeared from my body. He sat there and surveyed us grimly.

  ‘Fighting?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ we said simultaneously.

  ‘Right. What were you fighting about?’

  How do you tell the rigmarole of years of antipathy... his little thugs scaring hell out of a little kid... etc., leading up to this affair of honour?

  You don’t. The adrenalin returned and made me uncharacteristically brave.

  ‘It’s been coming for a long time, Sir.’

  ‘Right.’ He looked at Tommy Fittler, who just stood there hunched over slightly and holding his right arm.

  ‘You fight, you get caned.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Four cuts. Two on each hand.’

  I was expecting six.

  ‘You first, Wright. Put out your left hand.’

  I didn’t care. I felt strangely elated.

  Wh-i-i-p! Wh-i-i-p! Anyone who’s been within coo-ee of a cane knows that sound.

  It didn’t feel like much.

  ‘Now the right.’

  Wh-i-i-p! x 2.

  ‘Now you, Fittler. Left hand.’

  Wh-i-i-p! x 2.

  ‘Right hand.’

  Tommy was white as a sheet.

  ‘I can’t take them on my right hand. My wrist hurts.’

  ‘I think I broke his arm when I hit it, Sir,’ I said. ‘It went... crack.’

  This was a dilemma for Bourkey. He’d caned me; he figured he couldn’t not cane Tommy the same number of strokes.

  ‘Put out your left again.’

  Wh-i-i-p! x 2.

  Four on one hand you never get, but I could see Bourkey put little power into those last two. Tommy winced from the last of those but it was clear that his real problem was with the right arm.

  Another teacher, Errol Mattingly, had a Zephyr 6. He was despatched to the hospital with Tommy Fittler to get the arm checked. It was a greenstick fracture, and he arrived back at school with it in plaster. This was kudos to me. Everyone who saw the fight knew he didn’t do it by punching me, and he was the one sent to hospital.

  Mick Bourke knew how much Tommy Fittler and the snivelling rats had terrorised smaller boys, but had never caught them at it.

  Tommy was gone from Bourkey’s office but I was still there.

  ‘You better get off to your class, Wright.’

  I couldn’t believe my ears when, as he dismissed me, he came close, half whispered and smiled conspiratorially.

  ‘So tell me – who won?’

  I was shocked by the question. This was the Principal talking, not a pal, but it was an acknowledgment to me that he knew who the troublemaker really was.

  I was totally flummoxed. It was the last thing I expected him to say as he always seemed so severe to me, and I said the first thing that came into my head.

  ‘It was about even, Sir.’

  ‘Right,’ he said with a grin. ‘Off you go then.’

  That was it. Tommy Fittler never bothered me again. I doubt if the bullying of little kids stopped. But you see, he knew. He knew that I knew he had a weakness. That right arm. He’d never again face me with that in his mind.

  It was my first and only fight and caning at high school. There was another time when by the standards of the day I should have been caned, but by sheer good fortune I didn’t deserve, I escaped it.

  Maybe another time....

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The last battle (pt 2)

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No, that’s not the end of the story. If it were, you’d be wanting your money back. There’s a bit to go yet.

  Our paths, Tommy Fittler's and mine, did not cross for some time, and I despatched the showground incident to the deeper recesses of my mind.

  One Saturday morning, Dad and I drove to Gladstone from Calliope to buy pollard and chaff.  It was drought time and my father had developed a clever policy about how to combat drought, but more on that another time perhaps. He had a few jobs to do so dropped me off at the Town Library to get a new selection of books. The instruction was that I would then walk from the Library down to the house of his brother, my Uncle Frank, and wait there till he came to pick me up a short time later. Uncle Frank's house in Bramston Street was no more than a couple of hundred metres at most from the Library.

  Under the special deal negotiated between my mother and the Town Librarian, I selected my six books and started walking down towards the ocean along Bramston Street.  It was a beautiful day, with the salt smell in the air and muggy warmth of mid-morning. The last thing I expected was to hear a shout from a house just a couple of doors up from Uncle Frank’s place.

  ‘Get outa my street, Hick-boy!’

  It all came flooding back... Tommy Fittler, the wall in the old Showground pavilion, the henchmen. The humiliation.

  Eleven-year-old boys are not very inventive with their retorts, and I’m talking about me, not him.

  ‘Get lost, Fittler!’

  I was on the street, and after all, nothing could be exchanged there but insults. Or so I thought.

  ‘Say it again, cowboy.’

  ‘Just get lost!’ I obliged. Again, not the wittiest exchange of epithets.

  ‘Right’ – or was it ‘Wright’? I don’t know which and I didn’t really care, but I surely did care about the next bit. ‘I’m coming to get you....’

  He jumped down the stairs and on to his bike, and pedalled furiously towards me. It was a shiny bike with tassels on the handlebars. I thought it was a bit girly, to be honest, as we used to build our own bikes from salvageable bits of old ones we found in the shed. Tassels!! Hmmph....

  Apart from its prettiness, it was a good bike, no doubt about it. Three speed gears and handbrakes, unlike ours that might have had a back-pedal brake, or, as in the case of mine, a fixed-wheel model devoid entirely of brakes. This was a bit hairy at times, as you could pull up only by sheer muscle power on the pedals. Tour de France, Alpine section? Eat your heart out. Try Milne’s hill, Calliope, no brakes and that sharp corner at the bottom, Cadel.

  I still have the calf muscles to prove its benefit that way. Hey, maybe that's how Cadel Evans got his start!

  But this was no time for reflection on bicycle engineering and design.  He skidded to a stop, laid the bike carefully on its side just off the bitumen, and stood with arms crossed in front of me. (Isn't that supposed to be a defensive posture? It sure didn't look like it to me.) He looked at the six clear-plastic-coated books I had under my arm and sneered with contempt.

  ‘Better put ‘em down. We don’t want ‘em to get dirty, do we?’

  I was in a terrible dilemma. Let’s get it straight right now. We were still like twins in terms of physique and I wasn’t afraid of him. In fact, under any other circumstances I would have welcomed the opportunity to try to settle the score. Remember, I had had battles with Koppo that went over successive lunch-breaks, and could take a punch or two. That didn’t bother me.

  But on the street! Two doors up from Uncle Frank’s house, and with the strong chance that my father would drive round the corner at any moment and catch me... fighting on the street.

  The thought of that made me go cold. Should I or shouldn’t I? But what would the alternative be? Grovel? To him?

  I went to put down my books. Boy-honour dictated I fight. Family-honour swung things the other way. I was still undecided, but I had no desire to look gutless, particularly not in front of him. So I put down the books and then looked into his face. I’d made up my mind. I was going to say, ‘I won’t fight you here, on the street, not in front of my uncle, or my father.’

  But he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at something else with intense interest. I said nothing and followed his line of sight to see what the distraction could be. It had to be pretty important, with a fight in the offing.

  Down the side of Uncle Frank’s house, as with just about every house in Gladstone and half of Queensland I suspect, a declared noxious weed everyone called ‘side-rechoosa’ grew in profusion. Some years later, I discovered that this was in fact sida retusa, which I now find, consulting the oracle, has great medicinal properties.

  All we knew was that it was a bloody nuisance and you couldn’t get rid of it, but you could keep it under control by slashing it down every so often.

  This is where it comes into my saga. Tommy Fittler’s attention was taken completely by the figure of my Uncle Frank walking down the front steps of his house with a reaping hook in his hand. You know, a sickle - as on the Red Flag. This one.

Reaping hook

  Uncle Frank was never a fearsome figure, and he was on his way to despatch a bit of sida retusa down the lee side of the house, but it gave Tommy Fittler cause for serious reflection. Whether Uncle Frank knew the Fittlers or not, I don’t know – they could even be friends, or at least, on friendly terms. Or on the other hand, Tommy might have had an uncle who, observing someone attacking his nephew on the street, might have made good use of the sickle to put an abrupt end to the fight. I dunno, but Uncle Frank, halfway down the stairs and looking quizzically in our direction, was a godsend to me.

  Tommy seemed to lose all interest in the fight. He picked up his bike.

  ‘What’s the books about?’ he feigned interest in order to divert attention from our matter of honour.

  How would I know? I’d just picked them off the shelf quickly and checked them out, as I knew Dad wouldn’t be long. I mumbled something in a half-conciliatory sort of way. He got on his bike slowly, turned to me and said, ‘I’ll let you off this time. That’s twice, Wrightey.’ Uncle Frank hadn't moved.  I suspect he had witnessed Tommy Fittler's street activities at other times, and had quickly sized matters up. With one look in Uncle Frank’s direction, Tommy rode away, all twenty-five metres or so back to his house.

  Let me off?? I didn’t care right then that he took my relief as fear of him. Uncle Frank’s fortuitous appearance stopped me from having to say what I was going to. It was only later that I burned up at the thought that it was indeed twice now that he had made me look and feel bad, and something beyond my control had stopped me retaliating both times. At least one of us should have ended up with a black eye.

  I didn’t know that when we both went on to the same high school, things were going to come to a head. We had unfinished schoolboy business, but you never know what's ahead, do you?

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The last battle: a matter of honour

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The one story that Christian wanted me to write about on this blog concerned my fight with Tommy Fittler. Rest assured, this is the last ‘fight’ story I will tell, because I simply don’t have any more. Once this is done, you will have my entire pugilistic career before you, in various stories you probably can’t locate again even if you wanted to.

  Christian is the pacific type and I think he got vicarious pleasure from my telling him about this story when he was a kid. For him, maybe it was like it was for me reading the account of the fight between Tom and the great bully Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. I must have read that a hundred times when I was about 11.

  Lest you fear this is going to be a blow by blow account of my longstanding feud with Tommy Fittler, I hasten to reassure you that it is not so. There will be no jolly old Diggory cracking his knuckles and watching for foul play from the execrable Flashman as their seconds sponge their faces between rounds.

  This was just Tommy Fittler an’ me. The fight itself occupies only a small portion of the tale, though if there’s huge demand, which I doubt, I can give a blow-by-blow version of the fisticuffs. Reading the phone book would be more instructive, and possibly more exciting.

  For me, as for Tommy Fittler, it took place in Year 10. At Rugby College, as indeed at Gladstone State High School, that was what was called the Junior Year. The comparison between these equally venerable institutions of learning ends here. There was a public exam which, in those days, decided who was going to leave school and enter the work force, and those few who would go on to the last two years at High School as Seniors.

  It all started in Primary School. We didn’t even go to the same school to begin with. He was a Gladstone town boy and I was in Grade 7 at Calliope State School. There was an annual sports day at the Gladstone Showground where all the schools in the district sent their better athletes to battle out the points. Unlike the Boyne Valley Sports where Killer George and I had the high jump battle now forever part of blog fame and glory, the competition was a bit lop-sided as far as the points were concerned, as the Gladstone schools were much bigger than the country ones.

  Anyway, during a break in the proceedings, I was chasing another kid, and he disappeared through a hole in a wall between the pavilions at the showground.

  I burst through there after him, and ran slap-bang into Tommy Fittler. He was flanked by a group of acolytes, who grabbed me and slammed me up against the pavilion wall. I don't know what they were doing there, but it probably involved smoking, which was about the most exciting illegal activity primary school boys could get into at the time.

  I had no idea who he was. Unlike in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, where Flashman was much bigger than my hero Tom Brown, Tommy Fittler was almost exactly the same size, shape and weight as I would have been. Pinned against the wall as I was by his minions, that comparison was irrelevant.

  He walked slowly up to me and eyeballed me as only boys and tough guys in movies can.

  ‘Yeah?’ he said.

  There’s really no answer to that. If I’d known what the right answer was at the time I would have given it, as I was experiencing physical and mental discomfort. But there was one thing I wasn’t going to do, and that was to apologise. Boys don’t apologise to each other for an accidental near-knockdown. That’s... well, it’s piss-weak, apologising. Only word to describe it. This is why international diplomacy run by men is always in such a mess.

  He knew I was from Calliope by my school colours - gold and black.

  ‘Hick.’

  He spat the word out. Cold contempt. Insert any other cliché you like – hey, I’m not Patrick White or the brilliant Arundhati Roy. I’m just telling the story, and my inspiration has run dry just now.

  ‘Bloody hick.’ I heard you the first time, I did not say. I was hardly in a position to discuss the sociology of Central Queensland with him just then, so I said nothing. He had blond wavy hair, creamy olive skin and those pale blue eyes villains just have to have. If he ever went to jail he would have been called Pretty Boy, and God help him then.

  ‘Who are you, Hick-stick?’

  These days he would have called me worse, but that was the best he could come up with on the spot. I told him Who I Was. You have to compromise a bit with your pride in some situations, especially when your arms are pinned against a solid hardwood wall. It was hardly a critical revelation. It’s not like I was a spy and he was a Soviet agent.

  He just stood there staring at me.

  ‘I'm Tommy Fittler. Don't forget that, 'cause I’ll remember you.’

  He mustn’t have felt like a fight right then. I certainly didn’t. I still had the long jump to compete in.

  ‘Throw him out.’

  Such an inglorious exit. It was thoroughly humiliating, being hurled out bodily through a hole in the wall by three smaller henchmen, overseen by the Pretty Boy himself. I burned up every time I thought of it for long afterwards. Still do, occasionally.

  One of us had created a nemesis on that day, and I hoped very much it was him and not me. ('He and not I' then, grammar freaks! Which looks better, I ask you?)

  No, that’s not the end of the story. If it were, you’d be wanting your money back. There’s a bit to go yet. (cont.)

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A door that opens when another shuts

They say when one door closes, another opens. That may be close to the truth, but it doesn’t always happen quite that way. Sometimes you have to find the door and push it open yourself.

  It was a bit of both for me. When the brain tumour damaged the motor centre for my right side, I found that what had been a consuming passion for me was at a sudden end. My powerful and much loved video camera was now impossible for me to use. My damaged motor skills couldn't now cope with the delicate fingertip controls I'd used to film so many productions for the ADMS and the Armidale Playhouse, and in our filming business.

My first ever poster for the Musical Society

  Even the editing of the film on the computer, and the still graphics I was making constantly were suddenly beyond my physical powers, because most operations required both hands, one on the mouse and the other with keyboard controls. Getting out, carrying equipment, setting up a heavy tripod for a shoot... all those were no longer possible.

  I didn’t really think of these things when the effects of the tumour first hit. For many months, we were too engaged in the battle to put the brakes on it even to think of our former existence. But when we came home from Melbourne where I had had radiotherapy and chemo treatment, it slowly dawned on me what I had lost. 

  That was one of the biggest slaps in the face, apart, of course, from realising that the remainder of my life was going to be devoted to coping with the battle against the tumour and the vast change to lifestyle it meant for us all. For Tracey, it meant the loss of her performing and choreography for the stage productions we were part of, and the fun and fellowship of rehearsals and performance. We were both part of that team, and we devoted much of our lives to it. Then my constant seizures made it impossible, and my present medical condition still does.

Still from shooting A Night at the Opera Armidale August 2008

  BUT... what I could still do was write. Type, to be more precise, though I became restricted increasingly to the one hand I use today.

  It took some time to realise that this was an opportunity. The hours daily I had spent in graphics production or movie editing could be spent doing the other thing I always wanted to do, and that was write down stories from my past.

  I wanted to tell childhood stories, in particular. The mood changes when you write about adulthood, or the present. There’s a wonderful innocence about childhood scrapes and silliness that is much more attractive than the follies of adults.

  I discovered this when reading Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs. They were funny and charming when he was talking about childhood, but the going got heavy as the innocence disappeared. I remember only the childhood stories.

  So the fact that I couldn’t do filming and everything associated with it opened that door which, almost certainly, I would have left closed until it was too late. In its way, it has turned out to be as satisfying (and time-consuming!) as filming, film editing and graphics creation.

  Who knows what’s good or bad? Everything is relative. Everything in this mortal existence, anyway.

  "The Taoists realized that no single concept or value could be considered absolute or superior. If being useful is beneficial, the being useless is also beneficial. The ease with which such opposites may change places is depicted in a Taoist story about a farmer whose horse ran away.

  His neighbor commiserated only to be told, "Who knows what's good or bad?" It was true. The next day the horse returned, bringing with it a drove of wild horses it had befriended in its wanderings. The neighbor came over again, this time to congratulate the farmer on his windfall. He was met with the same observation: "Who knows what is good or bad?" True this time too; the next day the farmer's son tried to mount one of the wild horses and fell off, breaking his leg. Back came the neighbor, this time with more commiserations, only to encounter for the third time the same response, "Who knows what is good or bad?" And once again the farmer's point was well taken, for the following day soldiers came by commandeering for the army and because of his injury, the son was not drafted. 

  According to the Taoists, yang and yin, light and shadow, useful and useless are all different aspects of the whole, and the minute we choose one side and block out the other, we upset nature's balance. If we are to be whole and follow the way of nature, we must pursue the difficult process of embracing the opposites."
  — Connie Zweig (Meeting the Shadow)  

The problem with LulzSec and other ‘hackers’

Note: I was asked by Jonathan Green, the producer of the ABC programme, The Drum, for permission to reprint this piece, which I was very happy to do. I spent a couple of hours early this morning revising the piece to make it more suitable to their style (and, I confess to try to shore up some weaknesses in it). The revised version is on the ABC website. I  could replace the version below with what appears there, because it is more polished, but decided that this one should stay as it was - a bit rough and ragged, but part of my archive. Call it the historian in me to do it this way.

The content of this article is backed up by a news item on the BBC this morning. It deals with major cyber attacks in the past few hours. Quite a coincidence. DW 04/08/11

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The problem with LulzSec and other ‘hackers’

(or 'crackers'. Yes, I know the term 'hacker' is used variously! Here, I'm using it to describe those who gain entry illegally to computers via the internet, and manipulate or steal data from there. Technically, 'cracker' would be a better term, but in popular parlance, a hacker is a cracker. 'Hackers' can be the good guys.)

A major organisation gets hacked, and there’s a great outcry. There are times when I secretly enjoy the discomfort of some corporations or government bodies that have done things I don’t like and now find their secret data in the hands of people they don’t know and often can’t touch.

That unworthy feeling doesn’t last long, but there is a positive side.

In one way, hackers do a service to us all when they gain entry to the computers of organisations that should be hack-proof. They show us time and again just how poorly protected the entire web is, including strategically critical areas of corporate, social and government activity interacting with it. They demonstrate how vulnerable the whole fabric of how we operate in a modern society is to those outside a system - people who decide to exert power over it when and for how long they choose. They make their own rules, and they aren't the conventional ones. Think Sons of Anarchy. 

They warn us to Be Afraid.  

That’s the message they probably don’t mean to send, but it should be getting through to every one of us. Power is in the hands of the accepted authorities mainly because, at this stage, it suits skilled hackers not to rock the boat too much. That sounds melodramatic, but the system of electronic interaction depends on how much confidence users have in it.

LulzSec leaders have been taken into custody. Look at their faces as they are carted off for interrogation. A lot of them are no more than kids; some indeed are juveniles by internationally accepted legal definitions of that term. Many of them are simply playing the ultimate computer game: fooling around and testing limits with real targets and real opponents, and don’t have world domination in mind (though we can’t guarantee that either!)  

LulzSec is only one of a deliberately anarchic group of individuals who have particular goals in common. Some are vandals (very few, I suspect), and others have a genuine social conscience. They might want to use their talents for what they perceive to be the good of humanity. Some, I suspect, develop a social conscience purely to justify their interference in digital networks and communication.  

It’s on that mind-boggling interaction, the internet, that we now depend so heavily, or at least, those of us with access to a computer and the net. It doesn’t matter if it’s government, a corporation, or someone paying their electricity bill. You might check your bank balance tomorrow and find it’s been cleaned out, but in the grand scheme of things, you or I as individuals don’t count for all that much in this vast game of digital leapfrog.

Right now these kids have millions of usernames and passwords for all sorts of accounts on their computers. They trade them, sell them, and if they chose to, they could play merry hell with them, even if they did no more than release them into the cyberwild. Yet we know from neural research that people up to age 25 have parts of the brain as yet undeveloped, so that they don’t have the capacity or the experience to understand the nature of personal risk of their actions, let alone that to the society that sustains them.  

They represent just the tip of the greatest iceberg in the past hundred years, and the Titanic of modern society is heading straight at full steam in its direction. It is obvious that mature, highly skilled professionals are in on the act as well, and these aren't kids playing around. Their motives could be anything - pick a card. It’s not the motive that matters as much as the effect. Some public utilities and facilities are appallingly insecure and vulnerable to attack. By manipulating the program, the power grid of a major city or even a whole country could be taken down, or the water supply for a region released, or the stock exchange turned to chaos. Once access to the relevant program or data is achieved, it’s not that hard to sabotage it.

Combine that with sheer accidental damage in the digital arena. Let’s not forget that one old Georgian lady scavenging for scrap metal in April 2011 created spectacular chaos when she cut off the entire internet to Armenia by digging up and pilfering twenty metres of the fibre-optic cable. Now that’s hacking (but with nothing more than a pick-axe and no intention to send a country into a tailspin)! 

It’s not just about individual hackers. Governments are in on the act as well, in pursuit of what they regard as national interest. They’d be stupid not to be working on it, if for no reason other than to protect themselves from cyber attack either from individuals, hostile groups or the prying eyes of other governments eager to gain some sort of advantage - be it political, military, commercial or industrial. It would be the height of irresponsibility not to be. Hacked information of all kinds streams across international borders, to be used by governments, groups and individuals for their own purposes.

But that’s not the only reason governments have gathered their own professional hackers. If there is to be cyber-war at any level, then governments must feel the need to be in an attacking position and not just a defensive one. Don't get with the game, and you're pwned!

We know pretty much for certain that at least one government has developed an attack mode. It’s clear from the cyber-attack on Iran’s nuclear facility in January 2011 that they can do that. No-one is admitting anything, naturally, but... hello, Blind Freddy.

So that feeling of poetic justice directed towards nasty multi-national giant A or B doesn’t last long. The inherent destructiveness of the revelation of secrets or data sabotage can go well beyond the good it can do.

Let’s be clear. I have applauded Wikileaks for some of its revelations based on hacked data, and believe it has performed a great service for the world in some ways; but sadly, its victory is both patchy and Pyrrhic. When power goes outside recognised institutions into the hands of those with no responsibility for the consequences other than to release sensitive information, or if they have a belief in some higher purpose for their actions, then we are in the danger zone. 

How much does it cost to combat cyber crime or government hacking? Billions, maybe more. And I haven’t even mentioned the knock-on effects and the cost of those. Just look at what started as a major natural disaster as in March 2011 in Japan and the multi-billion dollar cost, and start multiplying.

The supreme irony is that hackers depend for their effectiveness on the highly organised and highly technological society that is their host, however selectively they attack it. They make it their right to choose their targets, and this is what must be contested, even when we might agree from our own moral high ground that they have attacked targets we enjoy seeing brought to public account.

They do not have moral authority for that. Even when they expose terrible human rights abuses, as they have, I may feel justice has been done, but my joy is short-lived. That sort of power is too dangerous in the hands of individuals or groups with no public accountability, no matter what their intentions. If they assume that right, then they must be prepared to accept the consequences.

World, we have a problem, and the ostriches are looking for the sand dunes. Make no mistake, if public confidence in the security of the net is shattered, it can all come tumbling down like the house of cards that it is.

(DISCLAIMER: I’ve been working with computers for thirty years. I know nothing of hacking techniques, and I don’t have the will or savvy to learn. I wish I did. Maybe I could save the world! **joke**)

An Asian Reverie

Our study, where I now sit contemplating the window, faces north. On these bright sunny winter mornings, the curtain shielding my eyes from the direct sunlight makes a screen for a shadow play that goes on throughout the morning. The apricot branches are bare but nature has arranged them perfectly, and their shadows play on the curtain. They’re still now, as if frozen by the frosty air. It’s that sort of day.

  Just by itself, this would make a pleasing backdrop for my thinking; one that Sei Shonagon would delight in and describe vividly in a whole chapter of the Pillow Book. Even the curtain is vaguely Japanese, with its horizontal lines and muted creamy colour. But wrens and several other tiny birds play amongst these branches outside, their moving shadows adding to the simple pleasure of a shadow play they don’t know or care about.

 I have my own wayang puppet show and my Japanese thoughts, all in the first five minutes of being here. Soon the sun will move on, and the screen will be empty; but that’s also as it should be. Mono no aware is the Japanese expression. Things are there for a little while, and then they disappear forever. One of the glories of the wildflower is that it won’t be here next week. Enjoy its presence while it exists. It’s the deeply Japanese, wistful version of carpe diem.

  I forget those other things, for a while at least. "It'll all be the same, a hundred years from now," so Mr Polly said. He's right and he's wrong.