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Happy 86th birthday Windsor Davies. If you are still alive. No one will ever know.
Is the Edinburgh Fringe still going? I mean it is, just barely, mainly thanks to the poor saps who thought it would be a good idea to perform on the final Monday. It seems so long from the inside I would never have dreamt it would feel even longer from the outside. Maybe it’s because I went away as well this year and wasn’t too busy work wise myself, but those poor, poor fools grafting away up there…. And that’s just the audiences (that joke has been voted ninth best of the Fringe 2016)… that’s just the audiences.
Well done to all those of you who made it through alive. And to those of you who died, you’ll be back to die another day.
My heart bled for the three or four acts who got brilliant last day reviews. So frustrating for everyone. I understand that there’s not much reviewers can do. But oh, the pain.
Depending on what else my life throws at me I think I will be back up in 2017. Today I was even idly thinking about resurrecting RHEFP as well as doing my stand-up show. So two years away has made me completely forget everything I’ve ever learned. We’ll see. But it’ll be my 30th anniversary of my first appearance at the Fringe and the 50th anniversary of my first appearance on planet earth, so I suspect I have to do something. I am very glad to have had a couple of years away though and being outside it has given me some real perspective on what it’s like, how mentally draining it is for everyone and why you can’t take any of it very seriously. I do have doubts about immersing myself in that competitive and paranoid world again. But maybe I will go and just no immerse myself in that world, do my shows and go back to a flat out on the edge of town and see my family.
In tonight’s four hours of night time wakefulness, my mind still whirring with ideas at exactly the wrong time of day. I tried to buy a copy of Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari, which looks like it has some interesting ideas about the future (or lack of it) for homo sapiens. But it’s not out yet, so I bought his other book “Sapiens - A brief history of humanity†and got through the first two or three chapters. It’s already very interesting and readable, if largely recounting the early history of humanity which I know quite a lot about already. He expresses something very important with clarity though, that it’s our ability to imagine and believe in things that aren’t real that almost certainly gave us the edge over all the other useless extinct homos who could only discuss real things. And also allowed us to band together in our thousands and millions, when chimpanzees for example can’t work in groups of more than 150. Religious and cultural beliefs can be shared with people we don’t personally know and bind us to them. Whatever you think of religion now (and as you may know I am not a big fan) we certainly wouldn’t be the species we are without it (and most probably wouldn’t even exist). And he expressed something which I tried to do at the end of Christ on a Bike with less success. Even if you are not religious you still believe in made-up shit that binds you to other humans and which you would defend sometimes to your own death. Money, for example, is imaginary, but because we all pretend it’s real, it works as a concept (but if enough of us refused to accept it as a concept it would no longer work) but human rights, justice and morality in general - they’re good for us obviously, but they’re not “realâ€. We have imagined and accepted them as real (mostly) and we’d fight for them, but they’re the same as a religious belief. We all believe in crazy made up shit to get us through our days, to make our civilisations and cultures work. Personally I would hope that with technology we can expand our human tribe to encompass us all and find a belief system that connects us all - my guess is that Harari is not going to be as optimistic.
He also talks about the way that humanity has leapt very quickly from the middle to the top of the food chain. In evolutionary terms much too quickly for everything else and ourselves to adapt. So our minds still work with the necessary fear and paranoia of an animal that could be destroyed at any time and our powers have not been levelled out by everything else slowly evolving to keep the edge off our advantage. Our destructiveness might be our and the world’s undoing, partly because we’re just not equipped to deal with the position we find ourselves in.
Anyway, not the kind of read that is going to send you to sleep in the early hours of the morning, but I am looking forward to the rest of the book and to the follow up when it comes out. We are dealing with so many day to day worries and instabilities at the moment that it’s easy to not be able to see the bigger picture and consider the huge effect that momentous changes in economics, technology and medicine are going to have on humanity when we have AI and sex robots and the ability to prolong our lives and alter our DNA. Harari thinks we’re in the last few generations of homo sapiens, not because we’re going to be destroyed but because we will adapt into something else. And that liberal humanism will go out of the window in the process.
He might not be right, but he can’t be wrong that huge changes are on their way for us (I mean, really they’ve already happened).
