“Why Do the People Imagine a Vain Thing?”

I remember our local schoolteacher warned us +45 years ago against Christmas consumerism, and in favour of a more thoughtful lifestyle. Consumerism was presented at that time as a new evil, something that would soon go away, if we all made our efforts. The funny thing is, it didn’t go away and I’m still doing my best to promote the idea of our schoolteacher. The message I hear now is not different from the one of 1975. Our society is filled with noise. People buy a lot of stuff. They chat, but don’t listen to each other. All news is about the search for Corona scapegoats. While everybody is longing for a warmer and closer society, we only seem to talk about the future realisation of this. Instead, we need to reflect and be patient. It is a very typical Christmas message. You would expect this Christmas could be different, as we are clearly discouraged by the circumstances from engaging in too many superficial activities. Why couldn’t we experience a more spiritual Christmas in 2020 and realise our schoolteacher’s dream?

It struck me while I was listening to Händel’s Messiah: the answer is very simple. The schoolteacher’s wish is exactly the reason why Christmas exists. Händel's Messiah sings “Why do the nations so furiously rage together and why do the people imagine a vain thing?”. Christmas is inherently our yearly spiritual message against the vanity that is inevitably part of our life. For our survival, we humans have no choice but to chat and fight and not-listen and buy fancy stuff. The idea of a serene Christmas is just our yearly counterweight to this chaos. Our spirituality is not meant to destroy our hyperactivity, but rather to compensate for the extreme effects of it. Our life will always be balancing between vanity and humility. We don’t need to change this. We even need vanity to survive. Let us go shopping! We only need to continue paying attention to our Christmas spiritual messages as well. Banning them from newspapers, television and internet would be a bad idea. But in the huge data stream we have today, do these messages still get a fair chance to reach everyone?

Picture: De profeet Jeremia door Rembrandt - www.geheugenvannederland.nl : Home : Info : Pic, Publiek domein, Wikipedia 

Don’t Watch the News – Look for Beauty

Watching the news is an addiction. It is a bad one, like smoking. It is bad for your mental health. You don’t need so many frequent updates to know what’s going on. We have seen this crystal clear in the Corona crisis. First of all the news is no longer news. The press became obsessed with Corona and hardly reported on anything else. That is because Corona offered an ideal opportunity to uncover suspected incompetence at all authority levels. This type of news is sold easily.

The established press is usually on one side of the polarisation trench. Countries with populist leaders were depicted as having bad numbers because of their leaders. Very often incomparable numbers were used. Moreover, nobody dared to suggest that viruses go their own way. Behaviour of leaders and people plays a role, but social and environmental factors like population density, season temperatures, travelling movements, lack of education and poverty are much more influential than political competence.

The reason is that journalists can only score through bringing disenchantment about politicians and local people in charge. This disenchantment resonates well in the social media but it doesn’t comfort people. Ordinary people may think they are smarter than the local authorities, but the truth is: they are not and they know it.

Instead of watching the news, go out to discover beauty. Beauty in art, in nature and in other people. For the corona crisis has also demonstrated the best in people: yes, we can change our life style, yes, we can take care of other people and yes, we have developed a new cure in an amazingly short period of time. Therefore, don’t watch the daily news. It’s far better to read a weekly magazine, like my blog.

See my blogs: “Triumph of Discord” and “De informatieverstrekkende macht als vierde politieke macht”.

Full Time could be Less

A full time job takes roughly 40 hours per week. This hasn’t changed in the last 50 years. The idea is that you spend your best hours to your paid job. Most employers do not want to touch this principle. After all, we are in a global competition. Indeed, but we are also in a global competition to attract talented employees. Some of these may appreciate the advantage of shorter working hours. It may be a good time to consider this. There are several reasons to do that.

1. The first reason is the generalised use of PC and smartphone at work. It has increased our availability and our productivity. Yet the gain in productivity has not been redistributed to the computer workers, but rather to the company shareholders. I remember in the early eighties the day we watched as youngsters the first PC’s with colour screens. We were convinced a full day’s work behind such a screen would make a man totally mad. Today, we can confirm this is the case. The mental fatigue of eight hours work @ the computer is enormous. Computer work damages your health.
2. A second reason is macro-economic. J.M. Keynes was convinced households needed sufficient money to keep the economy alive. Without consumption, production serves no purpose and economy is doomed. Today, we can say: households do not only need money; they also need time to consume. With increased time spent in traffic, too little time is left for households to spend money. Our consumption level has become less money-limited, and more time-limited.
3. A third reason is the nature of our work. A lot of jobs are no longer useful or productive in the strict sense. Increasing the number of working hours doesn’t lead to increased revenue. Some people can become more productive by being less in the office. We have become stressed and overactive and we would probably perform better if we had more free time.
4. A fourth reason is gender equality. After 50 years, the gender equality has not been reached yet. Yet can it be reached, as long as both partners in a household spend + forty hours per week to a job? It seems impossible to do this without the help of grandparents and this creates another inequality.
5. A fifth reason, related to the reason above, is the increased complexity of running a household. More about this in my blog time and energy in households.

The trend is towards a vaguer line between work time and free time. Work time gets mixed up with private activities and private time gets mixed up with work tasks. This is not a good trend. It would be good to have a society debate about all this. This point was already raised in my Dutch blog: “De geschiedenis van de vooruitgang” and in "Hoe beloon je een werknemer?".

Revolution is in the Air

Last Saturday, the streets of Washington DC seemed to be the scene of a new revolution. The interviewees rejected the outcome of the presidential elections and claimed Trump had won. It was  difficult for Europeans to understand as there was no reason to believe in fraud, apart from the latest tweets of America’s funniest president ever.

The media presented the street demonstration as a big mistake, but they are insufficiently analysing the root cause of the people’s anger. The deep trouble of the lower social classes already became visible through the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which was essentially a political uproar. In this blog, we already highlighted the frustration of the middle class and even worse, the middle class’ complete lack of prospects for a better future. A lot of small entrepreneurs have lost their business to the benefit of large scale organisations, usually commercial chains. These large organisations are not run by charismatic leaders with a golden heart, but rather by entire platoons of MBA graduates, who don’t leave a single crumble on the table for external small supplier businesses.

In an article entitled “Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?”, The Economist pointed to an additional source of frustration or lack of prospect: the fact that even university graduates face an increasingly difficult time in maintaining their position or moving upward on the social ladder of the public and private administrative elites. The number of university graduates have risen considerably but the number of meaningful jobs for educated graduates have not grown accordingly. As a result, a growing number of graduates have no prospect of achieving what they were told to achieve. These ‘geese’ are wandering desperately through the social media in search of recognition, knowing that they will soon be slaughtered. As the Economist article mentions explicitly: “The feeling of resentment is particularly strong among people brought up to believe that they ought to be in the elite.”. It  will take another blog to discuss why we are so many.

The power is in the hands of a few large capital companies and their privileged lackeys. The question is if the three outsider groups described above will find each other for a common cause. Some kind of French Revolution is hanging in the air. It looks like we need to push the reset-button of our entire economy. This need has been described in Tomas Sedlacek’s book “Economics of Good and Evil”. In earlier times, such a system reset usually happened through war. The Corona crisis is not as heavy as a war, but it brings about some unexpected waves and it releases hidden frustrations. I also refer to my blogs Economic Justification in a Culture of Scarcity and Guy Fawkes Night.

Picture: Washington DC 1986 ©Wim Lahaye

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

This story, originally written by Washington Irving in the 18th century, is very similar to Rip Van Winkle. It also takes place in the peaceful rural environment of Dutch colonists, in and around early New Amsterdam or New York. It is written in the same colourful English.

The village of Tarry Town or Sleepy Hollow is a place where superstition and mystery are part of daily life. It is notorious for the legend of the headless horseman, sometimes called Major André, a decapitated soldier who is believed to chase people in search of his lost head. The highly educated Ichabod Crane comes from the city and is supposed to bring reason and order in Tarry Town as the local teacher.

Ichabod falls in love with the 18-year old Katrina Van Tassel, the well-rounded daughter of a wealthy Dutch settler. He faces tough competition though, as Brom van Brunt, the local sturdy guy, also wants to court the lovely Katrina. On the dramatic evening when Ichabod asks for the hand of the lovely Katrina, he seems to be turned down and needs to drive home through the area where the headless horseman reigns. When he actually encounters the headless horseman, he runs for his life, and falls from his horse before he can reach the bridge that should have led him to safety. The story has a completely open end. It just describes the scene the next day. Only Ichabod's hat and his saddle remain. Ichabod is never seen again in the area. The scene suggests that Brom van Brunt may have abused Ichabod’s superstition to scare him off for life. (By the way, the 1999 Tim Burton movie with Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane, doesn't follow the book 'by the book'.)

The story is a hilarious confrontation between the rational city education and the superstitious country life. This is a personal opinion, but I suspect Irving's character Ichabod is based on an acquaintance of his, perhaps even a political enemy. The 'morale of the story' is not so obvious as in Rip Van Winkle. There is a short epilogue written by Irving in which he denies there is no morale to the story. True or not: there is certainly wisdom at hand. He writes: “He who races with goblin troopers, is likely to have a rough ride.” And “He who …..loses the hand of a Dutch settler's daughter, may enjoy the preferment of the state”. The basic idea is that there is always an advantage at every disadvantage. This is a very Dutch thought...and it makes me happy.

The Thin Grey Line between the Feasible and the Unfeasible

Happiness has long been considered a gift of the afterlife. In the Middle Ages, ordinary life was so tough that happiness could never be part of it. Happiness remained limited to catching an occasional big fish, or just not being killed by the next plundering army or the black plague. Otherwise, it was always wise to supplicate God for his mercy in this valley of tears, and to do his will so as to be worthy of his forgiveness in the afterlife. The world of the feasible was extremely small. Most of the world was the reign of the unfeasible and it was the sole competence of God.

The time of Enlightenment has gradually moved the thin grey line between the feasible and the unfeasible away from us, out into the universe. We see miracles happening in university hospitals, where hundreds of people are getting new limbs and new organs every day. Other people are being cured from the most recent plague. This is real progress. The downside of this is that our world creates the impression that everything is feasible. God has been chased away from daily life. We live in a Harry Potter world where you can conjure up a therapist for every little pain you feel. If you live in pain today, it is not because you are in disgrace with God but because you simply haven’t visited the right therapist yet. You still haven’t done what is doable, and the implication is that you deserve the misery you are living in. We tend to judge other people as being lazy or incapable, in case they are struck by miseries we don’t need to suffer ourselves. Even in misery, meritocracy prevails.

Therefore, let us not judge the misery of others. Just like prosperity and misery are unequally divided, feasibility is also unequally divided. What may be feasible for the strong, may not be feasible for the weak. This is another facet of the Matthew effect. We could do more for the weak. We could also expect more from the strong. Yet the unfeasible always has a place in our life whether we like it or not.

Interesting hearing this contribution of Roger Scruton, although I see the problem of ‘Potterism’ as a more general society paradigm rather than a by-product of left wing thinking.

I also refer to my earlier blog: "The Delusion of Immanent Justice".

Locus Iste

"Locus iste" is a beautiful choir song written by Anton Bruckner in the 19th century. The full first sentence is: "Locus iste a Deo factus est", which simply means: "This place is made by God".

The song indicates the sacred character of the place we are allowed to live in, whether that is our own house, our local house of worship, our village, our town, our country or simply the beautiful landscape we live in. Whether one is a religious person or not, everybody can stand in awe sometimes for the beauty that surrounds him.

It may remind us of the fact that we don't need to go far to discover wonderful things. Before we book a trip to the other end of the world, we may envisage a place nearby we never even took the time to visit earlier. At the age of 55, I'm still discovering nice places I've never been before less than an hour away from home. The concern about the environment is already a  good reason to do that, but in this peculiar year 2020, the Corona crisis offers an extra reason to enjoy more vacation locally.

I refer to my earlier blog: "The Magic of Places".

Triumph of Discord

When the Corona crisis hit Europe, it looked like science would finally prove it could beat the dark ages. The times in which Pieter Brueghel the Elder had painted this picture would never come back. Some people started dreaming of governments of experts. We saw scientists side-by-side with politicians and they would bring humanity back to salvation. 

Not quite. Meanwhile, we know it didn't quite work as expected. Instead of collaborating, the national states closed borders and presented their own doctors and rulers as expert-heroes in matters of Covid-19. There was no good reason to close the borders in Europe. The European Commission could have imposed the same measures in equally-hit neighbouring states. By turning the pandemics into a national problem, the national states started fighting for their own deliveries of mouth masks. The news media started comparing the national states statistic numbers and tried to make clear that this or this government was doing a bad job. 

The problem is: you can't compare absolute numbers of countries that are totally different in number of inhabitants, surface, people density etcetera. Moreover, the statistics were collected in many different ways and therefore incomparable. So in some way, the winner of the corona crisis was not science, but discord.

Racism is a Symptom of Social Injustice

In these awkward times, my white Kaukasian friends are sending anti-racist messages to their white Kaukasian friends. This is all being done with very good intentions. But why should we 'convert' each other if we are already convinced? Do we distrust each other? And why do we have so few 'coloured' (non-white) friends to share our concern with? Could it be that our anti-racist messages benefit more to own mental well-being than to the hard social reality? It also has to be noted that most European police forces are quite different in their conduct from their American counterparts, so why would an American scene of violence become so relevant in our daily European social media?

Some argue that racism is the problem and the root cause of the police officer's behaviour. I'm not saying that racism doesn't exist. Racism, however, is rather a symptom of a deeper problem. The problem is called social injustice. What is happening in the US is in reality a social revolt. That is why urban European minorities are also raising their voice: they feel oppressed by the same social injustice. Unfortunately the leaders of the movement opt for the racism debate rather than the social justice debate. The racism debate is easier: you can blame racism and continue business as usual. For an upcoming leader, racism is also fancier: you can portray yourself as a new Martin Luther King.

Fighting racism in social media is like offering a paper handkerchief to a Covid-19 patient. If you want to cure the patient, you have to tackle the disease and the disease is social injustice. We can only create more social justice by changing the way our economy works: equal competition for unequal starters will never work. Higher moral values and standards need to be reflected better in the way we make decisions in our economy, at all levels. Moral behaviour should become more important than financial numbers.

Not back to normal, please

Never waste a good crisis. The corona crisis is a huge opportunity to change a number of things. Therefore, let us not get back to normal! Last month, 170 Dutch scientists signed a manifesto for more sustainability and social justice. The core of their manifesto consisted of five demands:

1. Replacement of the current economic development model, focused on generic growth of the BNP, by a new model, which distinguishes sectors that need investment (energy, education, healthcare) and sectors that should shrink because of their lack of sustainability (oil, gas, mining) or their role in the encouragement of overconsumption (publicity).
2. Development of an economic policy that aims at redistribution, one that foresees a basic income for all, progressive taxation, reduction of labour time and sharing of jobs. More recognition for jobs in health care and education.
3. Transition to a circular economy, based on biological diversity, more sustainable, local food production. Reduction of meat production. Employment with social justice.
4. Reduction of consumption and travelling, transition from luxurious wasteful travelling to more sustainable, essential and meaningful types of travelling.
5. Reduction of the debt for those who have been hit hardest: employees, small entrepreneurs and countries in development.

A lot of these points have been mentioned before in my blogs about sustainability and economy. Let us not waste this crisis.

Voyager's Amazing Tales

Last Sunday, the Flemish television showed the American documentary “The Fartest”, about the Voyager 1 and 2 missions. The Voyager missions aimed at observing the outer planets of the solar system and flying into interstellar space. The Apollo missions and the Space shuttle received a lot of attention in the press and they remain outstanding achievements. The Voyager missions on the other hand got a bit lost in oblivion, because of the huge time scale (40 years) in which they delivered their results.

I find them however mind-blowing. First, there were the amazing pictures of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and some of their moons. Then we received the amazing views of these remote giants from their undiscovered side. The Voyagers made measurements in the outer skirts of the solar system, confirming the predicted cosmic radiation and the drop of the sun's magnetic field. And last but not least, the Voyagers carried the golden record, which contains a message to any finder civilisation, about the earth and the human kind. The chance that this message is received sometime someplace, is ridiculously low. And yet this message is a message of a courageous and hopeful species. 

Speaking of low probabilities, the amazing thing about the Voyager missions is that they succeeded. The Voyagers had a reprogrammable computer with a memory of around 70 kbyte. They had to be reprogrammed after each planet fly-by. The cameras needed to be adapted to incredibly weak light conditions. The communication signals were also extremely weak at such distance and arrived with several hours delay. No mistakes could be made. An amazing piece of engineering.

I refer to my earlier blog about the book Cosmos , in which the Voyager missions received a dedicated chapter. The book (+1980) already contained the pictures of Jupiter and its moons. The breath-taking pictures we saw later of the giants Saturn, Uranus and Neptune had not even been taken yet when the book was published. Carl Sagan never even had the chance to live the moment the Voyagers left our solar system, now only a few years ago.

Picture from https://images.nasa.gov/

Purgatory

In this apocalyptic year 2020, you may wonder what to do during your last days in this valley of tears, right before the ultimate cataclysm, the coming of God's Wrath, Dies Irae.

Perhaps you could enjoy your last book. Purgatory is Guido (Walter) Eekhaut's next crime case after Absinthe. Like in many crime books and television series, the successive episodes build upon the same good guys (with characterising weaknesses), in this case Eekhaut, Dewaal, Prinsen and Van Gils. As the bad guys usually end up in jail or grave, they may need to be replaced.

Amsterdam is again the city of crime to the detriment of good old Leuven town, Eekhaut's home base. To compensate for this, there is a lot of good food and dark Leffe beer in the story. As the title suggests, religious-sectarian zeal plays a driving role in the crime scene and from time to time, the main characters tend to express their opinion about the place of religion in society, something I always find most interesting.

The stories would fit well in a violent, gruesome Scandinavian crimi on Canvas on a Saturday evening. Anyway, after Liège, also our Leuven town can now claim to have its commissaire Maigret.

What Satellites Can Do for You

Satellite applications and services make up the essence of my work life. As I regularly talk about satellites and their applications in daily life for interested groups of people, I thought it would be a good idea to summarise all this in a short article. It is useful for laymen to understand how important and diverse the applications are. And it is useful for people in the satellite world to have a concise summary that helps them to overthink the multiple possibilities. Some of the topics have already appeared in this blog, usually under the label work. As this article is however close to my work life and my CV, I decided to publish it as an article on LinkedIn.