Order,Chaos and Sanity 1.

Today is 'armistice day' - at least that was what I recall it being called the first time I attended a service in 1924 at the small church school I had entered 2 months earlier. It referred, of course, to the first world war 'to end wars', but when that turned out not to be true and it happened all over again, but on an even larger scale -62 million dead according to the most recent figures I've seen - the name was changed to Remembrance Day, and without the boast that this was really the war to end wars. Even at age 15 I realised that Hitler's recent control of Germany and the burning of the Reichstag boded ill for Europe. So the dominoes fell over one by one, entirely predictably until the only order left in Europe was that imposed by guns. I experienced the devast-
ation in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Germany as part of the British war machine, but at the end I had no illusions that this would be the war to end wars. Each 11th November I am greatly
saddened at the memories of the loss of so many friends and colleagues, made all the more poignant by the awful sense that humans seem to be no nearer an understanding of how we can live together in a peaceful, friendly, supportive way.

The questions that started for me when I was 5 years old have not
abated or been resolved, and my life ever since then has been a search for the reasons we behave so destructively on a collective level, and so frustrated and alienated individually. And should you think this does not apply to you, consider how different your life would have been had WW II indeed been the last war. The energy, activity, relations with one another, sense of purpose,
greater consciousness of the true joys of life - and your physical
well-being: all now replaced by a sense of struggle against all kinds of threats, from economic inadequacies to chronic illnesses.
What are we doing to being this series of plagues on ourselves, for make no mistake - only we could have done this. To blame a god of some kind is so utterly contrary to the qualities and power we assign to our gods.

Why then are the possible explanations for all this? A good place to start is the violence in France - or anywhere else for that matter, but France offers some clear possibilities for discussion. Two of the most conspicuous features in the reports from Paris etc., are: 1. The explosive nature of the actions of a
large number of people that quickly recruited other areas. 2 The
inarticulate nature of the comments by the participants combined with an absence of any kind of organisation, though leaders begin to appear spontaneously as time goes by. It is obvious that this was a powder keg ready to explode after accumulating emotional energy for some years with a spark that in itself was innocuous.
The response of the French authorities was entirely predictable:
suppress the violence ruthlessly and restore law and order and only when this is done will theytake a look at the causes.

Now I know nothing at first hand of precisely the trouble in
France at this particular time. But the pattern is identical to all the other similar incidents - those past and those inevitably to come. I don't need to know the details to understand that given the situation in France this behavior was entirely predictable, an although the details of the actual events was not. What we are observing is a distressing example of the ignorance of the dynamics of humans actions, individual or collective. This provides me with the basis for the next blog on the biological factors that are so powerful in affecting the way we live our lives.1