Father Christmas Adventures

Father Christmas Adventures, which carries the sub-title, Unexpected Tales of Christmas Magic, is the second of my Christmas books. Here I want to explain how I came to write it and its relevance to contemporary civilisation.

Father Christmas Adventures is a piece of experimental writing. Consisting of three short tales, all involving Father Christmas, they all have one thing in common: they are unexpected, and for this reason I will not tell you what happens in each story, lest I spoil the surprises!

The first short story is called William’s First Christmas. It is the story of a little boy whose parents do not believe in Christmas and who never engage in celebrating Christmas. The story is based on what Father Christmas does to help this poor child, and, what he does is, unexpected! The story also involves a surprising twist at the end, which is characteristic of the nicely weird things that appear in my writings. Being experimental, my interest here was exploring the unexpected, and what one might expect from such a theme (a poor boy denied Christmas and Father Christmas coming to his aid) is not what happens!

Of the second tale, which is called Father Christmas and the Wolf, I will say that, what I wanted to do was to write a story based on prose only, without resorting to dialogue. And of the content, this addresses how Father Christmas is concerned about environmental matters and sets about rescuing a wolf, which humans want to kill because it is, in their eyes, a pest. Here in this tale you will also discover that Father Christmas has enemies, and the nicely weird part of the story is when one of those enemies tries to rid the world of this jovial character, but of course, fails. Once more these are quite unexpected elements to find in a Father Christmas story.

Finally, about the third tale, which is titled, Encounter with a Wise Man, this tells of a meeting between Father Christmas and Balthazar, one the three wise men who appear in the nativity story. Here I wanted to write mostly in dialogue, and this is story is based on Balthazar recounting to you, the reader, what was said during that encounter. What you will soon realise is that Balthazar is still alive, two thousand years on from the meeting – see, I did say that I write nicely weird and unexpected things! This story also involves something that I call entanglement, by which I mean that I have entangled this tale with my first Christmas book, A Father Christmas Story, which was another aspect of my experimental writing.

So what of the relevance of the book to contemporary society? The first tale is a commentary on the stupidity of a certain attitude that prevails in the modern world, that the only valid way to understand and engage in life is through the rational. One can say this story is a response to stupid statements made by supposedly intelligent people, which go along the lines “there is something insidious about believing in something for which there is no evidence”. This tale explores the possible outcomes of such madness.

The second tale is actually a critique of the damaging attitude that European-oriented cultures display towards the natural world, and the tacit belief that we, as humans, are not part of nature, and somehow (in ways that no-one can rationally explain – see the rational is not the norm!) we can survive without it. Here you will encounter another belief that needs to change: that we as humans have a right to decide which of our fellow inhabitants of plant earth, will live or die. You see, humans not only like to impose their will on other people, but also upon the natural world. But be careful, for one day the natural world will strike back! This tale hints at how we need to change our attitudes and in what way.

And finally of the third tale, which is an observation about the lack of wisdom in the modern world, and the growing tendency for people to become ideological and live their lives within the framework of a dogma. Specifically the tale mentions three such ideologies: science, religion and capitalism, and how the three, acting together are creating a world more like a prison, and one from which there will be no escape. The point of the story is to highlight this matter and the need to stop and to reflect upon how these ideologies are damaging all we hold dear, and to think about how we could begin to create a different future where people believe but without falling into the ideological trap.

So to summarise, I used this particular Christmas book to experiment with my writing and also as a way of further exploring many issues that are of interest to me, including the development of an author centric business model, and also the themes that increasingly find a place in my writing, which are motivated by the madness to be found in the modern world. And, the good news for you, the reader, is that the book is available open access, which means that you can read it for free, online, via my web site – FatherChristmas Adventures: Unexpected Tales of Christmas Magic.

A Father Christmas Story

A Father Christmas Story, which carries the sub-title, Being a Tale of How Father Christmas Came to be, is the first Christmas book that I wrote and published. Here I want to explain how I came to write it and its relevance to contemporary civilisation.

Perhaps the subtitle is enough to explain the story, for the book is indeed a tale about how, long ago, in the snow covered forests of the north, up near the artic circle, one special Christmas Eve, one person’s life was change, and Father Christmas made his first appearance in the world.

How did I come to write this story? It started to take shape in December 2006 as a way of passing some time over the Christmas holiday period. I decided to use the seasonal ambience as an inspiration for a Christmas story. This is when I wrote the first three chapters, with the fourth following on in early January 2007 after the Christmas decorations had disappeared. During the following months I undertook some further work on the book, until by the summer I came to the conclusion that it was time to abandon it, by which I mean that I had reached a point where I understood that working on the story any further was pointless as I had done all that I could with the theme, and that it was time to move on. Then I published it.

The book started as a way of practicing my writing and passing my time, and initially I was interested in exploring two quite distinct attitudes towards Christmas, these being: the one where people embrace it fully and enjoy it, and the other the one where  people are forever complaining about Christmas, making themselves miserable in doing so. But very quickly it turned into a literary challenge, especially in relation to what exists in this particularly genre – very little in terms of adult books, with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol acting as the benchmark. Being aware of this, and also knowing that Dickens managed to construct a story about Christmas, which deals with the salvation of one individual, without even mentioning that other Christmas story, the nativity, I set about writing a story that was focused on the salvation of humanity and introducing into it, that which Dickens ignored – the nativity myth complete with shepherds and wise men.

I was also motivated by the fact that a massive shift has taken place in our attitudes and approach to Christmas since the time when Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. Today, Christmas has largely become an opportunity for businesses to make money, and for many it is also time for excessive consumption. But back in Dickens’ time, Christmas was almost a forgotten event, which is why in his story the issue of working on Christmas day arises, and some shops are still open! Given such a shift towards viewing Christmas in such a commercial way, I thought it time to provide an amusing book that offered some Christmas cheer but which also reminded people that there is a more serious side to Christmas.

In addition to the above, what also emerged as I wrote the book was the idea of re-engaging with what was starting to become much easier than previously – indie publishing. I had already published a number of books, some for the European Commission, and thus I had available the necessary professional software along with a supply of ISBNs. And it was through publishing this story, both the paper and the eBook versions, that I came to understand modern indie publishing in the age of the internet and the attitude of large book retailers to stocking any book that did not return a large profit for them. I also began to realise that the traditional ways for authors to market their books, also needed to be reinvented, as most of the old ways are controlled by publishers and retailers, and are of questionable efficacy in a world increasing dominated by the internet.

So what of the relevance of the story to contemporary society? All my work is motivated by what I now called the lunacy of the modern world, and my aim to open peoples’ eyes and minds to this – as a first step for people beginning a journey to peacefully bring about positive change in the world, by rejecting this madness and changing their own lives, and in doing so, making the world a better place.

The story centres on a person, Nicholas, who is kind and compassionate, and who has respect for nature and all living things, and is not at all materialistic. On a journey to collect his yule log, this being a tradition dating back to pre Christian times, Nicholas has three mysterious encounters, and you can see here that the story is inspired by the three encounters that also appear in Dickens’ tale.

The first encounter is with a being that I called the Earth Spirit, a name I deliberately chose to ground this character in the material and earthly world, although, as his name suggests, he is a spirit, but one representing a side of humanity that Nicholas is not all connected with. Nicholas can be said to represent the soul, and all that is good about people, and the Earth Spirit all that is bad, and, as you will see when you read the story, the Earth Spirit is full ready to kill people to get his own way; he tries to kill Nicholas, but fails.

Having escaped the clutches of the Earth Spirit, Nicholas than encounters an angel, which is what one might expect on that particular night, for after this second meeting the next one is actually a visit to the mythical nativity stable, complete with all that is associated with this myth. But this is not a Christian story nor one extolling Christianity, but one that uses the elements of this to highlight, what can be found in all major religions, that, one of the purposes of religion is to help people to choose to be better (and not to impose upon them someone else’s will, which, if you read the boo, is what the Earth Spirit wants to do). In this story one can also see the beginnings of my fascination with the battle between the soul and the mind, with Nicholas representing the soul, and the Earth Spirit the mind.

So to summarise, I used the Christmas story as a way of exploring many issues that are of interest to me, including the development of an author centric business model, and also the themes that increasing find a place in my writing. And, the good news for you, the reader, is that the book is available open access, which means that you can read it for free, online, via my web site – A Father Christmas Story: Being a Tale of How FatherChristmas Came to be.

The Mind that has closed in on Fixed Opinions

In my book A Tale of Two Deserts I refer to minds that have closed in on fixed opinions. Recently, through Twitter, I had an encounter with such a mind, belonging to an atheist.

There is something that you need to know about atheism in the modern world: we now live in the era of extreme atheism; people, who, armed with an anti-religious dogma, can be as bad as the religious zealot; both are equally dangerous. The term there is no one more dangerous that he(or she) who knows the truth, comes to mind – it can be found in my book Encounter with a Wise Man, which is about the madness that often stems from those who adhere to an ideology, what ever that may be: scientific, religious, economic … And there are many people who are caught up in an ideology, but being ideological, do not see themselves as such.

One day in October (2013), through the twitter hash-tag Atheism, I encountered the dogma that is modern atheism. Here I found a tweet “…. given what religion has done.” Immediately I recognised a tweet that had derogatory overtones, and I wondered which religion was being referenced here, for there are many and some, like Buddhism, on the whole, have no record of violence (there is a notable exception to this which I will write a blog about in the future), this being totally contrary to what Buddhism aims to achieve and its theology. And of course, religion actually has done nothing, for it is religious people that have done things, both bad and good. Religious people actually do a lot of good work in communities, for such work is seen as a spiritual act that blesses both those that give and those that receive.

Another tweet that I noticed, questioned the morality of a God that allows cancer in babies. Why blame God for such, as it is not a universal religious belief that God created the universe? Indeed, there are many imperfect aspects to what used to be called creation, including humans – we are indeed highly imperfect. I thought also that a more relevant question to ask is why humans have created so many carcinogenic materials and allowed these to become a common feature of our world. The answer of course is because these are result of science and people make a lot of money out of these chemicals and materials, and whatever we do, let us not question that which we can change – the morality of science and free markets.

After looking at a few tweets I realised that I had entered a world of dogma, and of minds that have closed in on fixed opinions, where people are blind to the implications of what is being said. I also noticed a lack of compassion, love, and empathy in the tweets. What also struck me was the anger in these messages. The similarity of all this to that which sometimes spouts forth from religious (and scientific) minds that have also closed in on fixed opinions, is notable. So in response to the blind dogma of atheism, I sent a few calming tweets into their cyber-world:

1. There is God and there is religion: two completely different things;

2. Religion and science are both inventions of the human mind; both are highly imperfect, but God is not;

3. You do not have to be religious to believe in God;

4. The religious extremist, the scientific extremist: the same mind-set with different names;

5. Without doubt religion has a bad name, but so does science: both need to be made better;

6. In atheism and in religion I find a lot of angry people blinded by their dogma – please change;

7. Atheists are like theists – highly imperfect and inclined to do good things and sometimes very bad things;

8 The great mistake, seen across history, is to judge all based on the actions of some or even the many.

Then I received a message from someone who asked why atheists should be angry. To this I replied: It’s human, made worse when people believe that theirs is the sole truth. All religions are true including atheism!

This apparently was not an answer, and the question was repeated, to which I sent another reply: people have a tendency to seek reinforcement of beliefs – regardless of what these beliefs are.

Then all went quiet, but this was not the end of the matter. I decided to follow, on Twitter, the person who had asked the question, but then quickly discovered that a request had been made to Twitter that I should not be allowed to follow this person. Very interesting I thought, so I began to dig deeper, and what I found was a person so blinded by atheist dogma, a mind so closed in on a fixed opinion, that they were not even willing to hear anything that would call in to question their beliefs. And these people I have encountered everywhere in society: in religion, in science, in technology, in politics, in business, and so forth. And very frightening such people can be, being I fear, in some cases, close to the edge of doing bad things, although none would admit to such. This, you see, is the danger inherent to any dogma, for it eventually leads to the imposition of one persons will, on others. And atheists are no different from anyone else, so let us not be deluded into thinking these are harmless people, tolerant of all!

One of the interesting things about this person is that they had adopted a slogan “I think therefore I am armed.” Not so. A more appropriate slogan would be, “I once had a thought, then I stopped thinking because I found the truth and I now have no need to think anymore”. 

There are many minds in the modern world which have closed in on fixed opinions. They can be found inside the heads of atheists, priests, scientists, engineers, technologists, economists, entrepreneurs, investors, … the list is endless. And from this, great madness flows, leading to a future that must not be.

Atheism has failed. Religion has failed. Science has failed. Materialism has failed. Capitalism has failed. Socialism has failed. Technology has failed. The Nation State has failed. Experts and professionals have failed. And so on … But there is an answer to this, but it will not be found if people insist on keeping their minds closed. We need, as a species, to move forward, and to do this we must ourselves move beyond minds that have closed in on fixed opinions: A Tale of Two Deserts.

Social Collective Intelligence

At the beginning of October (2013) I attended a one day conference on the topic of Social Collective Intelligence, which according to the publicity material is:  a term used to denote a class of socio-technical system that combine, in a coordinated way, the strengths of humans and groups in terms of competences, knowledge and problem solving capabilities with the communication, computing and storage capabilities of advanced information and communication technologies. Quite a mouthful of words!

By the above definition I was most intrigued, for back in the 1980s and 1990s I was involved with socio-technical systems and also in something which can be called human-computer symbiosis, which has never been developed because it is completely at odds with the paradigm of science, engineering and technology (which sees humans as machines). Yet here was a topic possibly implying that some form of human-computer symbiosis might be coming out of the stable of the Future and Emerging Technologies part of the European Commission’s Information and Communications Technologies research programme – surely this meant that someone at long last was going to throw away all those long established beliefs and values and address human and computer symbiosis? Deep down I knew that this would not be the case, and I was not to be disappointed.

Overall the event demonstrated very well this thing I call the Prometheus Syndrome – all those researchers bound to the rock of the past by those invisible and unbreakable chains, which come in the form of beliefs, values, behaviour, taken for granted assumptions, self-images, and delusions, etc. which are the elements of paradigms.

As I expected, what I encountered at this meeting was a deeply disturbing techno-centric vision of the world, where humans are seen as being components of a bigger machine. One speaker serves well to illustrate this point: a person who perceives humans as being comparable to ants, and who was proposing to use computers, sensors, etc. to create a super-organism where people living in urban areas would be like ants, behaving in a way determined by this super-organism. This was indeed Orwellian in its nightmare vision of Big Brother control. What is wrong with these technologists? If we lived in a sane world we would be asking such people to seek the help of a psychotherapist, not giving them research funding. This is definitely a type of research that citizens should be questioning and perhaps asking their elected representatives to ensure is not funded with public money (see my blog on the matter of Digital Science and Responsible Research).

The issue though that I want to highlight here is that of the professional or expert paradigm that the approach adopted by the presenters at this conference demonstrated. What one could see in the speakers, were people with solutions looking for problems, not people asking what are the problems, and how can we solve them? If we were to ask the latter question then perhaps the answer would be to use social collective intelligence, by which I mean, us, working together, to change society, so that the problems no longer exists. This by the way is an important point, for the problems that this particular techno-solution is focussed upon, are mostly social problems (or societal challenges in European Commission jargon).

The main point that I wanted to raise is this: when experts have solutions looking for problems, or even when they try to develop solutions to problems, most often they are not experts in the problem itself. This then means that they have to talk to people who do understand the problem, and often in the world of information and communication technologies, these people are called users.

Well this is good you think. This is exactly what they should do, speak to users! In theory yes, but the experts are often looking for confirmation of their already existing perspectives on the problem. They certainly do not want to hear that their solution is not wanted, or that there are complications that render the solution unsuitable or in need of major conceptual changes. This one can say is the problem of the modern world: the expert paradigm, where experts often think that they know best. And of course they do as one can see from the mess that they have created … contemporary civilisation.

Actually it is time for a different approach where users take action and take ownership, and employ experts in a more subservient role, where experts do what the users tell them has to be done, which is far from what exists today. Of course this is not binary, a case of either/or, and there is room for creative inputs from experts, but this is a matter of power – who is in charge. At the present time it is invariably experts who hold the power, but there is a growing movement to change this, and, what one can say about the people presenting at this conference is that there was no evidence to be seen that they were aware of this.

So, Future and Emerging Technologies? I think not, just people caught in paradigm that is no longer relevant. Back to Prometheus once again! And if you wonder why Europe is in decline, look no further than those who were speaking at this conference about social collective intelligence. And what was obliviously missing from this conference were signs of intelligence in whatever form that may come; individual, collective, social. Yet it does not have to be like this.