don't be suckered by theories

Jeremy Narby reports, in his excellent book The Cosmic Serpent, that amongst the Ashaninca Indians of the Amazon rainforest the worst insult to throw is “es pura teoria”- that’s pure theory. For them practica and tactica- practice and tactics are what count. They don’t talk of doing things; they do them.

In the West, especially in academia, but also within the bureaucratic entrails of any big organisation, including many businesses, they talk a lot about doing things and do little. In these places there exists an unstated reverence for theory. Theory is held in higher esteem than practice.

What interests me, though, is the way theory and practice have become divorced and treated as though they are part of two different enterprises.

It’s easy to see that mathematics, which can be used to describe a theory, usually rather well, has become interchangeable with theory. But maths is a tool, a language, that can be used in an abstract or a concrete way. Abstract patterns, made prettily with paint are not theories, they are paintings, or can be. Abstract maths, which produces a pretty pattern of numbers is also pleasing- to those who can understand such stuff but it is not ‘theory’.

Theory can only ever be theory, when it relates to something out there in the world. If it relates to nothing it is simply a pattern of some sort.

So theory and practice are always joined by their need for the world. The theoretician claims he is describing the world, or a process that would work in the world. The practical person is making it happen or testing some idea out in reality. Maybe because of some crazy idea that the man who has the idea is ‘better’ than the man who gets his hands dirty we have ended up with this competition between practical men and theorists. From my perspective, as someone with a fatal love of theory, I can say that theory attracts lazy people. Workers are more likely to go towards the practical.

But really there is no such thing as an absence of theory. Even Thomas Edison, who scorned mathematicians, and claimed all his work was trial and error, used theory. For his lightbulb he took an idea developed by Joseph Swan (a glass bulb containing a carbon filament) and just kept coming up with different solutions until he had a long lasting lightbulb. Edison had some grasp of the relationship between current and resistance otherwise he would have wasted vast amounts of time producing ideas that never had a chance. This relationship is called Ohm’s law, and is a theory about how the world works that is used by electrical engineers all the time. Also, each time he tried a new test, he was testing a new idea, a new configuration. So even a man who scorned theory had a ‘theoretical’ element in his work. Maybe not high theory, but it was there. But it was subordinate to the whole enterprise – which was about making a light bulb that lasted for more than a few minutes.

What I’m working towards is the fact that practice is the highest form theory can take. It’s useful to avoid any theory that is detached from some practical application. It’s like being immersed in failure too much. It’s like putting the cart before the horse. The project is conceived and then you come up with as much theory as you need to get things done and no more.

Why?

Because over dependence on theory does your head in. Engineers joke- "there's no problem too difficult a theoretician can't solve it." In other words, theory people live in a fantasy world. Sanity is a walk in the other direction, towards the 'realer' world with all its insoluble problems, jokes, setbacks and miracles.

downside of the rational approach

'The rational approach tends to minimise what it does not understand...it starts from the idea that everything is explainable and that mystery is in some sense the enemy. This means that it prefers pejorative, and even wrong, answers to admitting its own lack of understanding.'

Jeremy Narby

was bruce lee any good

Was Bruce Lee any good at martial arts? Ask anyone who punches, chops, kicks or throws as a hobby or even a living and the answer will be one of incredulity- isn’t it obvious? Of course he was good, he was amazing! Now you can see how people might get confused- all the cat squeaks, the ambiguous scratches on his body from the tiger claw of Han, the general kung fooey hysteria which still envelops martial arts from the Orient. And then there was his death at 32, very James Dean, just before the release of Enter the Dragon. So how do you know? How does a non-martial artist tell how good Bruce was?

Born in 1940 in Hong Kong into a family of well respected actors, Bruce Lee was in child movies from the age of 3 and by the time he left Hong Kong for America, when he was 18, he’d been in over a dozen feature films. If his aim had been to just be an actor, he could have stayed put. But acting was always just a vehicle for Lee to promote his fascination with martial arts, which initially was Wing chun kung fu, taught to him by the famous master Ip (or Yip) Man. But Bruce also boxed- becoming schools champion of Hong Kong and danced- winning the regional Cha-cha championships too. He also got into street fights, since one of the teaching ideas of Ip Man was that martial arts skills should be tested in real fights. Lee was suspended from school several times for applying this.

Lee had a half-German grandparent, and had been taunted as a youth for being part foreign. He decided to leave Hong Kong to attend college in Seattle. Here he found that the kung fu he knew, though good, had its limitations. It was a turning point . Wing Chun with its fast moves and low kicks wasn’t enough. He began to assimilate moves from Japanese and Korean arts taking everything that suited his style and physique and rejecting that which didn’t work for him. Usually this is a disaster- the equivalent of mixing curry with steak and chips- but in the hands of a master chef you also have the possibility of fusion cuisine of the highest order. This was what Bruce Lee called Jeet Kune Do- his own system that featured kicks, throws and any weapons he felt like using. In 1966 Bruce Lee appeared in the TV series The Green Hornet and this was a big hit in Hong Kong. He returned a hero to make the five feature films that made him world famous, and revealed just how good he really was.

Basically there are three ways to tell. Firstly, performing strings of complex moves is easy- look at Keanu Reeves in the Matrix- looks good but it’s all piffle. It’s harder to make a single move look good and even trickier to perform minor activities like walking, talking to others, even putting the salt down on the table. If it has pizzazz, clarity, springiness and above all timing then it’s a good sign. Bruce Lee (and Steve Mcqueen, one of his martial arts students) has all this in spades. Watch a Stallone movie- his timing is terrible. He acts in almost total isolation.

Next, you can tell how good someone is by their students. Apart from his Hollywood clientele Bruce Lee taught fighters such as Dan Inosanto and Taky Kimura, both of whom command great respect worldwide. Ever met anyone boasting of being taught by Jean Claude Van Damme?

Third- what’s it like being on the receiving end of their technique? There’s a sequence in Enter the Dragon during the outdoor tournament section when Bruce Lee kicks an opponent out of the ring. This guy is catapaulted back into the crowd. What you don’t see is the man behind who’s arm is broken by the sheer momentum of Lee’s kick at one remove. On another occasion when Lee was on Hong Kong TV, he was surprised by a test, set by the presenter, which was to push over a Tai Chi master, notoriously good at rooting themselves to the spot. In a flash the Tai Chi master has disappeared. What happened is too fast for the camera to catch. Finally the camera pans down to the master out cold on the floor. “I don’t push,” says Lee, “I punch.”

Was Bruce Lee any good? Of course he was!

paddleboarding marsa alam

In the previous post I mentioned I have just been to the ‘characters of Egypt festival’ in Marsa Alam. While there I decided to make use of the free time to do some inflatable paddleboarding in the red sea. The inflatable paddleboard is a brilliant invention as you can carry it on the plane, this time I used a collapsible paddle as my long paddle incurred a charge last time. My clothes were hand luggage and the weight of the paddle board and paddle was less than 15KG.

The flight from Cairo was less than an hour. The drive to the hotel was another hour. Marsa Alam, in trying to avoid the concentrated build up of Sharm and Hurghada is spread along a hundred km of seafront. This means each resort is huge and the beaches are clean and empty. Though rocky. Since the area is aimed squarely at divers and snorkellers the reef and the nearby drop off (you can swim out from the beach and see the deep blue after only thirty metres in many places) are given primacy over loads of soft sand. Which isn’t great for the inflatable paddleboarder in bare feet. So I made a mental note to bring slip on neoprene socks next time.

The weather was calm, very calm, hardly a wave being raised- which was fine by me- I just paddled around getting a good dose of exercise. It was warmer and more humid than other Red Sea resorts I have been too, but I would trade that any day for the emptiness and clear waters. There were more fish and more varied fish than I have seen close in to a hotel beach than anywhere else I have been too.

After taking a break to witness the musical extravaganzas at the festival, I walked back through the desert- the eastern desert is always a nice change from the western. It has plants and trees and lots more snakes. I did some more paddleboarding the next day going a long way out into the Red Sea. Emptiness and waves all around. Not so far away a dolphin fin broke the water. The sun shone. A nice place to be at the end of October.

crossing cairo roads

The key thing to remember when you launch out to cross any crazy road in Cairo is that you have as much right to be there as the biggest bus and the smallest moped. There is an essential democracy of the roads, which, though the biggest will tend to bully, they cannot take away from you. And every car driver accepts this. So if you should step right in front of something they may hoot and scream but they will stop. Not so in the West where a pedestrian’s rights only extend as far as the pavement and the zebra crossing. On the road he takes his life in his own hands. There are even countries like the US where crossing roads not at the special crossing is an offence. Get rid of that mindset in Egypt. Here, on the road, we have our right to be there, and, knowing this, one can launch into any stream of mad cars with equanimity. You will be respected, rather as a slow car is respected in the West when it tries to cross a busy road. If you launch out, cars will stop, not just because they don’t want an accident, but because you have as much right to be there as they do. Think of yourself as a very slow and very fragile car crossing a road of juggernauts. Lock eyes with oncoming drivers and never stop once you start moving, you may stall. Show decision and telegraph a clear trajectory so the oncomers can take early evasive action. Stand sideways if the gap between two headlong plunging bangers looks especially tight.

emotion and climate change

One major concern I have over climate change is that it leads to over emotional reactions to the evidence. Panicky advocates of nuclear power ‘because time is running out’ is one worrying example. They assume, for example, that the news is all bad. It isn’t. Vicky Pope, a scientist at the UKs Met Office warned the recent UN world climate conference in Geneva that recent dramatic Arctic ice loss was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming, as was previously thought. Preliminary reports suggest there is much less Arctic melting this year than in 2007/8. Climate physicist Mojib Latif of Kiel University, Gemany is an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He reported at the Geneva Conference that we are about to enter "one or even two decades of global cooling" rather than warming. He said, “People will say this is global warming disappearing. I am not one of the sceptics, however we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.” The atmosphere that surrounds discourse about global warming is emotional, not objective. All our information about climate change comes from computer models and from real measurements taken in the world. Now some of the most respected models are showing that global warming will decrease, for a while. And Arctic temperatures are confirming this. So the ‘problem’ of climate change is now one of global warming happening not now, but maybe twenty years away. This is not a strong enough reason to embrace nuclear technology as a quick fix ‘carbon emission’ solution. I disagree with any form of unsustainable energy as it seems plain greedy to want more than we ought to have. Those green activists who advocate nuclear power or weather 'engineering' (seeding clouds for rain etc) are committing a huge mistake based on misreading the often subtle evidence for climate change. The right move is directly towards complete dependence on wind, tidal and solar energy rather than setting a terrible example to the developing world by embracing nuclear technology and all its pathological implications.

characters of egypt

I have just returned from the fabulous entertainment offered by the 'characters of egypt' festival held this October in Marsa Alam on the Red sea. This festival operates every year and is rapidly growing it seems in popularity as you can actually camp on site or stay in a nearby hotel as we did. Hosted by the impeccable egyptian tourist authority the event featured traditional singing and activities by bedouin tribes from all over Egypt. I have a suspicion that this great venue will morph into a massive music festival something like the current offering in Mali- it would be wonderful to have all the bedouin musicians of the Arab and north african world meeting in such a great location as this.