Evergreen Essays

There is very little purity in belief

2012-01-25T11:26:00.001+05:30

Re: Whose evidence to believe Ian Johnstone-Bryden

The difficulty in discussion of Abrahamic religionsis that only the fundamentalist models are completely secure and fixed. Many ofthose following these religions are not fundamentalist and do not have anydesire to be evangelical. The Christian religions are a large family of faithsthat share some aspects but can be very different. Logically the same is trueof some flavours of Islam because the position that 'no man should come betweenanother and God', implies that each Muslim is controller of his or her ownbeliefs and therefore that there must be as many forms of Islam as there arefollowers.

Probably, an overwhelming majority takes a verypragmatic view of their particular religion. However, those same pragmatistscan rapidly form up behind the fundamentalists against another religion, in thesame way that those following religions that may not be classed asfundamentalist can show very similar intolerance and discrimination.

Unfortunately, most people build a picture in theirown mind of what another religion is and that then becomes a box into which allwho say they follow that religion are conveniently placed. It makes life simpleand provides a clear focus for discrimination even though it is not logical andunfairly condemns.

To a fundamentalist Christian, only the Creation Theory is valid and this hasled to conflict in the USwhere creationists fight to exclude Darwin'stheories from schools. Some Darwinists are equally determined that creationismshould not be taught, but may also consider themselves Christian. As Darwin's Theories are nowwidely accepted by many Christians, logic says that these individuals are notfundamentalist Christians but cannot argue with the individuals that they arenot Christian.

There is very little purity in Christian belief because the faith prospered byabsorbing festivals and beliefs from pagan religions and in some parts of SouthAmerica, there are Catholic Christian communities that that would be consideredheretical and pagan by some Christians. This pragmatism can apply to Hebrews. Acolleague, who in his forties still obedient to his mother, a very orthodoxJew, enjoyed bacon sandwiches and enthusiastically enjoyed Christian festivalsbut was the model of orthodoxy at the Synagogue.

Usually what happens is that some very anti-socialpeople hide behind religion and quote only those parts of the faith thatsupport their positions. That applies to a great many religions. In LiberalChristianity, senior priests no longer believe in many of the teachings thatwere once followed blindly and some show little sign of even accepting God. ianj-b@firetrench.com

During the last forty years, we have been able toobserve a new faith emerging that claims to be based on science. How far thatproves to be a false faith will only be seen at some point in the distantfuture and even then there may be followers of the belief who refuse to acceptany proof of fallibility. The Global Warmers who became Climate Changers mayhave deliberately distorted or hidden inconvenient facts to suit their beliefs,but their new faith includes correctly observed phenomena. The questions fordebate are in the interpretation of the observations and the accuracy ofconclusions drawn from observation and interpretation. As climate science isstill a very long way from being a settled science, there will be observationsthat prove to be very accurate but interpretation may be shown to be seriouslyflawed.

As the new faith started out with a belief thathuman activity was causing a new Ice Age, it already has a questionablehistory. Those predicting a new Ice Age 40 years ago discovered that realitywas not cooperating with their computer model predictions and they started tochange their belief to blame human actions on increasing global temperatures.When the rate of warming slowed and then stopped, some scientists deliberatelyconcealed data and deliberately misrepresented other data and produced newcomputer models that were designed to distort data to support earlier trends asa continuing and increasing trend. More recently, a new group of climate changebelievers have expressed horror that human activity is delaying and may halt thedevelopment of the next Ice Age which they claim should otherwise arrive in1500 years time.

What this area of belief demonstrates is how a newfaith can develop on the basis of accurately observed conditions that areinterpreted to fit a pre-conceived belief and then for later observations to bedistorted or suppressed to avoid the faith being discredited. In itself, itmight form a part of a healthy debate of the environment and identify actionsthat many might wish to support for very sensible reasons. What makes it anextremely dangerous religion is that it includes a very aggressiveproselytizing element. What makes it even more dangerous is that it coincidesin various parts of the world with other older religions that are activelyproselytizing.

Sri Aurobindo recovered the lost mind of India

2011-08-27T19:27:00.000+05:30

Sankaracarya's influence on the Indian religious mind--A bird's eye view

Sri Lanka Guardian - Basil Fernando - ‎Aug 25, 2011‎ (August 26, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka Guardian)

India

became a society having replaced religion with humanism quite early. The Western world came to this stage only after the greater acceptance of Darwinism. Even so, until today, finding a basis for morality outside a belief in God remains one of the West’s main concerns. This issue was resolved early in India however, through the rejection of religion, which had created enormous chaos in many parts of the country due to practices such as large scale animal sacrifices—causing serious problems for farmers—and through other modes of exploitation of the people by priests. Anti-priest and anti-religious attitudes thus grew among the people. The replacement of religion was led by movements of Jainism and Buddhism, which introduced a new mode of social cooperation with reason as the basis of morality. …

In the 20th century, Sri Aurobindo lamented the death of the Indian mind and devoted the latter part of his life to recover the lost mind of

India

. Living in Pondicherry, he tried to motivate young people to regain their lost heritage. Another great Indian, Dr B R Ambedkar, attempted to pursue the same goal as Sri Aurobindo through attempts to reawaken the Untouchables, renamed Dalits by him. In an attempt to reclaim India’s lost glory, he publicly became a Buddhist together with a large gathering. …

The man who was destined to bring about the death of the Indian mind, (which Sri Aurobindo later vowed to revive), was intellectually a brilliant Sankar known as Sankaracarya, who brought about the revival of religion with his poems and hymns. He introduced a kind of theism, complete with myths and rituals. Indians of later generations were indoctrinated and immersed in such ritualism and worship. Whether there is any other nation as deeply enslaved to its rituals and religion as India is hard to tell. …

In the West, replacement of religion took place mostly due to science, and particularly due to Darwinism. In the Christian West, the belief in one God was established and all explanations regarding the world and society were based on this belief. When the belief that God created the world was lost, these religious explanations lost their validity.

The acceptance of science in India has unfortunately not led to the same result. The internal process influencing the mind has not changed due to science. Perhaps the manner in which Indian religion has affected the Indian mind is different than in the West. The kind of religion that was established in India needs to be understood better if the enterprise undertaken by Sri Aurobindo, Ambedkar and other modernizers, including the country’s first prime-minister Jawaharlal Nehru is to succeed. … ( W.J. Basil Fernando is a Sri Lankan born jurist, author, poet, human rights activist, editor. He can be reached at basil.fernando@ahrc.asia) [Indian Idea of Political Resistance: Aurobindo, Tilak, Gandhi, and Ambedkar Ashok S. Chousalkar - Dec 1990)] [God Market: How Globalization Is Making India More Hindu Nanda, Meera - Mar 1, 2009)]

Wilber divides the 20th century physicists into two batches

2011-08-21T20:43:00.000+05:30

Home > E-Library > Magazines > Sraddha > August 2010 > Contents

The Country and Nationalism Sri Aurobindo 7

Sri Aurobindo, Namaste Swami Pratyagatmananda Saraswati 10

Sri Aurobindo and The Veda Kireet Joshi 14

The Path of Nachiketa Alok Pandey 34

Veda Vyasa’s Mahabharata in

Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri Prema Nandakumar 41

Sadhana and Sahitya : The Early

Years in Pondicherry Richard Hartz 52

Sri Aurobindo and the Bengal

Renaissance Debashish Banerji 67

Sri Aurobindo’s Concept of Freedom Sonia Dyne 95

Nation and Beyond – Aspects of

Sri Aurobindo’s Political Vision Dasharathi Sengupta 103

Five Martyrs of Bengal Amalendu De 120

Beyond Mind : A New Paradigm

of Psychology Based on the Mystical

Exploration of Nature Kundan Singh 128

Science and Religion Georges Van Vrekhem 142

The Theme of Urvashi in the Indian

Renaissance : Madhusudan Datta,

Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo Ranajit Sarkar 168

Rabindranath and Sri Aurobindo :

Towards Divine Humanity and

Human Divinity Saurendranath Basu 181

Nation and Beyond – Aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s Political Vision

Dasharathi Sengupta

Sri Aurobindo stands apart from and above all other philosophers and humanists of modern India. He is also regarded as the foremost and, perhaps, the only original political thinker of 20^th century India. The centenary years of the Bengal chapter of his life provide an occasion to remember our indebtedness to this great mind. Shafts of light emanating from this source did not leave untouched even the apparently insignificant parts of human life and society. They travelled from sociology to culture, from history to politics and economics, from the spiritual to the mundane, from the problems of the body to those of mind and soul. In him culminates the tradition whose germination can be traced back to the Vedas and which flowered through subsequent ages to reach the likes of Vivekananda, Rabindranath and Gandhi. […]

Sri Aurobindo thus moves beyond the parameters of nationalism, and writing at a time when the League of Nations was still in its embryonic stage, visualises the European Union of the present UN era. Centripetal forces, comprehended and harnessed by human mind, are sure to lead mankind towards international unification. The great vehicle of this progress is human consciousness, derived from and blessed by the Supreme, the Divine Consciousness. It is not a unilinear progress, but is achieved through life expriences, through conflicts with centrifugal forces, through division and strife, through violence and bloodshed, through Kurukshetras and Gettysbergs32.

These forces operate, not on physical or vital, but on mental plane, and lead inexorably to what Sri Aurobindo describes as ‘The idea of humanity as a single race of beings with a common life and a common general interest…’33. This is the ethical essence of internationalism which Sri Aurobindo defines as ‘…the attempt of the human mind and life to grow out of the national idea and form and even in a way to destroy it in the interest of the larger synthesis of mankind’34. Nation has a space in this synthesis, but not the whole space. It cannot be made to disappear in the interest of world-unity. That would be against the law of ‘natural evolution’. But nation is not the end of the road either. The ideal it represents is destined to flower into ‘the ultimate ideal of a free association of free human aggregates’ 35.
Nobody can predict exactly as to when the process would reach its terminal point. May be there is no terminal point, an ascent with no climax. Hence there is no time-frame either. The Supreme creator of Time has plenty of it at His disposal. The concept of such a timeless process shaping human destiny is apparently Hegelian. But Sri Aurobindo, while absorbing the tenets of Hegel’s philosophy of history, outgrew the latter in his political vision. National liberation was for him a necessary step towards Human Liberation36. In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the State (in which the soul of nation finds its body) is the march of God upon earth. Sri Aurobindo would not disagree. But for him God (meaning the Divine) marches also beyond the nation, or the nation-state as its political embodiment. For He is Infinite Unity37.

Science and religion

Georges Van Vrekhem

Scientists pro and contra

Ken Wilber was one of the thinkers who reacted strongly against the thesis of popular books like The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. He “disagreed entirely” with such books “which had claimed that modern physics supported or even proved Eastern mysticism. This is a colossal error. Physics is a limited, finite, relative, and partial endeavour, dealing with a very limited aspect of reality. It does not, for example, deal with biological, psychological, economic, literary, or historical truths; whereas mysticism deals with all that, with the Whole.”29

One of Wilber’s least known books is Quantum Questions, in which he examines the sources of the thought that created 20th century physics: Einstein, Eddington, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Born, Pauli … some of whom he quotes extensively. “Everyone of the physicists in this volume was a mystic,” he writes. “They simply believed, to a man, that if modern physics no longer objects to a religious worldview, it offers no positive support either; properly speaking, it is different to all that.” It is different because physics was and is a work of the mind, and the mind is only part of the Whole, incapable of grasping the Whole. “They all shared a profoundly spiritual or mystical worldview, which is perhaps the last thing one would expect from pioneering scientists.”30

Wilber quotes Arthur Eddington: “Briefly the position is this. We have learned that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness, the one centre where more might become known.”31 A mathematical formula can never tell us what a thing is, only how it is moved. It can only specify an object through its external properties: movement, measure, mass.

Wilber also quotes Erwin Schrödinger: “The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. … In brief, we do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. … From where do I come and to where do I go? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for everyone of us. Science has no answer to it.”32

This is of course a tone which differs altogether from much that we have heard before. These physicists, among the very greatest, dared to reflect and to speak out on the essential problems of our lives and on the relation of science to them. The difference between them and the parochial reductionists we have become acquainted with, is considerable. Moreover, “their writings are positively loaded with references to the Vedas, the Upanishads, Taoism (Bohr made the yin-yang symbol part of his family crest), Buddhism, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant, virtually the entire pantheon of perennial philosophers.”33

Consequently Wilber divides the 20th century physicists into two batches: the open-minded “mystics” including all those named above, and the mathematical theorists of the next generation like Dirac, Weinberg, Feynman and Witte, plus most of the physicists active at present. As to the latter, one quote from Steven Weinberg says it all: “Among today’s scientists I am probably somewhat atypical in caring about such things [the concept of God]. On the rare occasions when conversations over lunch or tea touch on matters of religion, the strongest reactions expressed by most of my fellow physicists is a mild surprise and amusement that anyone still takes all that seriously. … As far as I can tell from my own observations, most physicists today are not sufficiently interested in religion even to qualify as practising atheists.”34

Whence this huge existential and perspectival difference? The “mystic” physicists lived on the fault line between two eras, between two Kuhnian paradigms in science. They personified the transition between the Newtonian era, as it were, solidified by the 19th century positivism we have met in the lives of Lamarck, Darwin and Wallace, and their own 20th century thinking which put everything into question. An important factor here is that religion was no longer part of the equation. Spirituality, or “mysticism”, or “the oceanic feeling,” yes; dogmatic religion, no. To Einstein, Eddington, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Born and Pauli – to name only the best-known – re-thinking the universe in the terms of physics was their life task. In their quest, time and again, they found resonances and references in the testimonies left behind by others who had undertaken a similarly daunting task, though necessarily in other terms: the “mystics” in West and East, who had put their life on the line for similar reasons: to find out about Reality. Those who say that physics (and science in general) has nothing to do with “mysticism” are ignorant of its copiously documented history of a century, and less than a century, ago.

Christian scholars are perplexed at Jesus' choice of the word "yoke"

2010-12-30T20:46:00.001+05:30

Remember Me to the One Who Lives There from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

Death represents the culmination or boundary of horizontal existence. As such, Lazarus represents pure verticality, detached from the world of sickness, suffering, and toil. In Buddhism, there is a concept that is similar to divine incarnation, that is, the bodhisattva principle. A bodhisattva voluntarily renounces his verticality for horizontality, willingly taking on the suffering of existence until all beings have achieved liberation.

Christianity takes this principle to its translogical extreme, in that Jesus may be thought of as the ultimate bodhisattva, giving up an endowed chair in the Department of Trinitarian Studies in order to take his place with the struggling creatures below.

If death is the foreclosing of the horizontal for the vertical, this is the opposite, the renunciation of the vertical for the horizontal. And as Tomberg says, "there is no greater love than that of the sacrifice of eternity for the limitations of existence in the transient moment" -- and which is why, in the words of Petey, we are grateful for this undertaking of mortality, for our daily lessons in evanescence, for this manifestivus for the rest of us.

"Christian yoga," if we may call it such ("my yoka's easy"), is a strict balance between verticality and horizontality. One does not renounce the horizontal world. But nor does one cling to it as if it were the ultimate reality. Rather, one must always be in the horizontal but not of the horizontal. Excessive entanglement in the horizontal entails one kind of sleep, forgetting, and death; giving it up entirely for the vertical represents another kind: Lazarus' kind.

Shankara refers to horizontal men -- those flatlanders who are dead to the vertical -- as “suicides” who “clutch at the unreal and destroy themselves. What greater fool can there be than the man who has obtained this rare human birth... and yet fails, through delusion, to realize his own highest good? Know that the deluded man who walks the dreadful path of sense-craving moves nearer to his ruin with every step.”

Similarly, the Upanishads say that “Rare is he who, looking for immortality, shuts his eyes to what is without and beholds the Self. Fools follow the desires of the flesh and fall into the snare of all-encompassing death.... Worlds there are without suns, covered up with darkness. To these after death go the ignorant, slayers of the Self.”

In other words, pure horizontality entails not just the end of verticality, but the death of the Self -- or banishment to a world without the central Sun (of which our sun is only a symbol), "covered in darkness."

Let's refer back to Jesus' cryptic words in John 11:10, that "if one walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him." Note that one does not stumble because of an absence of external light, but because there is no interior light: the light is not in him.

I find it interesting that Thomas is the disciple who supposedly evangelized India. Naturally, this would have been known when the gospels were written. But when Thomas says, "Let us also go, that we may die with Lazarus," he is saying something rather suggestive.

Let's set aside the literal meaning for the moment, and interpret it to convey something like, "let us all die to the world and go entirely vertical, like one of those Upanishadic seers so that we too may be reborn 'for the glory of God, that the son of God may be glorified through our rebirth' (referring again to John 11:4). Let's be his glowdisciples and bring the vertical Light into the horizontal darkness that the latter doesn't comprehend!" (Also interesting that Jesus mentions there being "twelve hours in the day," which suggests to me that there shall be "twelve evangelists in the Light.")

Now, since we are dealing with principial truth, it is surely no coincidence that the Isha Upanishad warns that "To darkness are they doomed who devote themselves only to life in the world, and to a greater darkness they who devote themselves only to meditation.”

Comment posted by: Govind Re: A Hindu View of Christian Yoga—by Rajiv Malhotra

The real Yoga of Jesus is already contained in his teaching. His teaching never originally fit into Orthodox Jewish religious beliefs and constraints and the Jewish religion has rejected it completely. The Roman religion founded in Jesus' name several hundred years after his passing was from the very beginning an imperial construct which, while appearing to surrender, in fact, quite effectively conquered the early Jesus movement and killed the spiritual by substituting it with the imperial religion.

But the yoga is there and unmistakable. So many instances can be cited. For example, his statement "Be ye perfect as your father in heaven" is an almost exact parallel of the Gita's "Nirdosham hi samam Brahma, tasmaad Brahmani te sthitaaha." What is most striking here is that Jesus uses the word "perfect" in the exact sense that Krishna uses the word "Nirdosham"... in the sense of equality of the EQUAL (Samam) Brahma. This is clear from the passage in which the teaching occurs: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

So close, almost identical, are the two that it almost sounds like Jesus is here giving a commentary on that verse from the Gita

Furthermore look at his statement "My Yoke is easy" in which Yoke is an exact translation of Yoga (latin: ieugem)... when read in context of the larger passage indicates that the Yoga of Jesus brings EASE or sukham and liberates one from suffering and again corresponds to a definition in the Gita of Yoga as "dukkha sanyoga viyogam" or which leads to "sukham akshayam". Furthermore, to this day Christian scholars are perplexed at Jesus' choice of the word "yoke" which had an almost exclusively negative context in the Biblical scriptures. In the roman world also, simply making another person pass under a yoke was a form of humiliation.

One could go on and on and on...

Sri Aurobindo has pointed us in this direction and provided all the important guideposts and guideposts to Jesus' Yoga even in Savitri. What needs to happen is the recovery of Jesus' yoga and its liberation from the grossly obscuring religious misinterpretation that has spread the mere outer word throughout the world but has also veiled the Yogic Truth of Spirit contained in them.

Undue mental and psychological burden for who follow a faith

2010-06-17T10:30:00.000+05:30

Habermas on Religion in the Public Sphere January 04, 2007 Aimee Milburn Cooper

First, Habermas has become concerned that the suppression of religion in the public sphere has created an unacceptable inequality between citizens of the state:

The liberal state must not transform the requisite institutional separation of the religion and politics into an undue mental and psychological burden for those of its citizens who follow a faith. . . . [Citizens should not have to] split their identity into a public and private part the moment they participate in public discourses. They should therefore be allowed to express and justify their convictions in a religious language if they cannot find secular ‘translations’ for them.[10]

Though it is questionable that religious speech should be “allowed,” as opposed to recognized as a basic right, I appreciate that he recognizes the burden and seeks to rectify it.

Second, he reasons that religious citizens have a burden, as far as possible, of “translating” religious reasoning into terms their secular counterparts can understand, to facilitate communication; and the freedom, if they can’t “translate,” to speak freely and publicly in religious terms. He also reasons that secular citizens have in turn the responsibility to listen for possible “truth” in religious arguments:

This requirement of translation must be conceived as a cooperative task in which the non-religious citizens must likewise participate, if their religious fellow citizens are not to be encumbered with an asymmetrical burden. . . . Secular citizens must open their minds to the possible truth content of those presentations and enter dialogues from which religious reasons then might well emerge in the transformed guise of generally accessible arguments.[11]

Note that Habermas, the secular atheist, is acknowledging that religious reasoning may contain “possible truth” that secularity should be open to. This is a far cry from the view of religion as oppressive “superstition” in the original Enlightenment view.

Third, Habermas observes that particular worldviews and religious doctrines are inherent to the formation of the person and cannot simply be laid aside in the public square, but must be taken into account in any public discourse. The expectation that they be laid aside, which he identifies as dominant since the Reformation and Enlightenment, places undue burdens on religious citizens and creates “cognitive dissonances” that, if they penetrate deeply enough into the fabric of the community, can cause its disintegration into irreconcilable segments:

In the absence of the uniting body of a civic solidarity . . . citizens do not perceive themselves as free and equal participants in the shared practices of democratic opinion and will formation wherein they owe one another reasons [emphasis Habermas’] for their political statements and attitudes. This reciprocity of expectations among citizens is what distinguishes a community integrated by constitutional values from a community segmented along the dividing lines of competing world views.[12]

His view is based on the concept of the person as having both freedom and inherent dignity, which in the public sphere manifests as both the right to speak freely and be heard, and the duty to listen to and carefully consider the freely expressed views of other persons. He speaks of the danger to pluralistic civil society when “in the case of conflicts that cut deep, citizens need not adapt to or face one another as second persons” (emphasis Habermas’).[13]

He has developed this idea elsewhere in his theory of “communicative action.”[14] This theory is consistent with recent Catholic teaching on the person and society, beginning with the documents of Vatican II and expressed most recently in speeches and statements of Pope Benedict XVI, such as the Regensburg address,[15] which call for respectful, rational dialogue between persons and societies of differing religious and philosophical views.

Fourth, Habermas has come to believe that modern Liberalism is “intrinsically self-contradictory” because it represses and devalues the free speech of religious citizens, and demands of them “an effort to learn and adapt that secular citizens are spared having to make.”[16] He is highly critical of this prevailing secular prejudice against religion:

As long as secular citizens are convinced that religious traditions and religious communities are . . . archaic relics of pre-modern societies that continue to exist in the present, they will understand freedom of religion as the cultural version of the conservation of a species in danger of becoming extinct. From their viewpoint, religion no longer has any intrinsic justification to exist. . . . [Secular citizens] can obviously [not] be expected to take religious contributions to contentious political issues seriously and even to help to assess them for a substance that can possibly be expressed in a secular language and justified by secular arguments.
. . . The admission of religious statements to the political public sphere only makes sense if all citizens can be expected not to deny from the outset any possible cognitive substance to these contributions. . . . [Yet] such an attitude presupposes a mentality that is anything but a matter of course in the secularized societies of the West.[17]

Fifth and last, he criticizes the way that reason itself is used in secular culture, calling it inadequate and a danger. He calls for a “self-critical assessment of the limits of secular reason;”[18] the “overcoming of . . . a narrow secularist consciousness”;[19]and asks “secular citizens . . . [to be] prepared to learn something from the contributions to public debates made by their religious counterparts.”[20] He states “the ethics of democratic citizenship assumes secular citizens exhibit a mentality that is no less demanding than the corresponding mentality of their religious counterparts,”[21] and so calls citizens to a much higher standard of reasoning:

The polarization of the world views in a community that splits into fundamentalist and secular camps [shows] that an insufficient number of citizens matches up to the yardstick of the public use of reason and thereby endanger political integration.[22]

In sum, Habermas is proposing no less than a “revised concept of citizenship”[23] that simultaneously restores freedom of religious speech and reasoning to the public squareand elevates the level of secular reasoning, with an equal duty of respect, listening, and reciprocity expected of all citizens. This is stunning in light of classical Enlightenment and Liberal thought on religion – and very hopeful, coming from such a prominent and respected secular atheist.

Kant, Gödel, & Rees

2010-06-14T19:16:00.000+05:30

D'oh, we may never decode the universe‎ - Times Online Jonathan Leake 42 COMMENTS Understanding vast cosmic events such as galactic collisions is one of science's greatest challenges, says Lord Rees

SOME of the greatest mysteries of the universe may never be resolved because they are beyond human comprehension, according to Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society.

Rees suggests that the inherent intellectual limitations of humanity mean we may never resolve questions such as the existence of parallel universes, the cause of the big bang, or the nature of our own consciousness.

He even compares humanity to fish, which swim through the oceans without any idea of the properties of the water in which they spend their lives.

“A ‘true’ fundamental theory of the universe may exist but could be just be too hard for human brains to grasp,” said Rees, who is also the astronomer royal.

“Just as a fish may be barely aware of the medium in which it lives and swims, so the microstructure of empty space could be far too complex for unaided human brains.”

Rees’s thesis could prove highly provocative to other scientists, especially those who have devoted their careers to understanding such mysteries.

He is well placed to understand the potential limitations of science. Besides heading

Britain

’s premier scientific organisation, he is also professor of cosmology at Cambridge University, where he is one of

Britain

’s most respected astrophysicists. He is currently delivering the annual BBC Reith lectures.

Rees’s warning, in a Sunday Times interview, is partly prompted by the failure of scientists working on the greatest problem of modern physics — to reconcile the forces that govern the behaviour of the cosmos, including planets and stars, with those that rule the so-called microworld of atoms and particles.

Rees points out how Albert Einstein was able to use mathematical theories developed in the early 19th century to build his 1915 theory of general relativity, describing how gravity controlled stars and planets.

Similarly, early 20th-century physicists such as Paul Dirac used “off-the-shelf” mathematical systems when devising quantum theory, which describes how nature works at a sub-atomic level.

The problem faced by their successors is that the two theories are deeply contradictory — and no one can find the mathematical tools needed to bring them together into a “unified theory”.

Rees points out that thousands of scientists have been working on this problem for several decades and are still nowhere near an answer.

“There are powerful reasons to suspect that space has a grainy structure but on a scale a trillion trillion times smaller than atoms. Solving how this might work is crucial for 21st-century science,” he said.

Rees believes the most promising idea is “string theory” which suggests that the particles that make up atoms are “woven from space itself”. Such particles, he suggests, could exist in 10 or 11 dimensions. Humans, by contrast, can experience only the three spatial dimensions plus time. He adds that there could even be other 3-D universes “embedded alongside ours”.

“In theory, there could be another entire universe less than a millimetre away from us, but we are oblivious to it because that millimetre is measured in a fourth spatial dimension and we are imprisoned in just three,” he said.

Such ideas sound extraordinary but Rees wonders if they can ever be proved. He suggests humanity may have reached the limits of comprehension.

“Some aspects of reality — a unified theory of physics or a full understanding of consciousness — might elude us simply because they’re beyond human brains, just as surely as Einstein’s ideas would baffle a chimpanzee,” he said.

Other scientists are more optimistic. Brian Cox, the BBC science presenter and physics professor who was awarded an OBE yesterday, said: “The idea that certain things are beyond us is quite a bleak one and history does show that we can eventually overcome the most difficult of problems.”

The mind boggles

The scientific mysteries that may be beyond us include

* Multiple dimensions — string theory suggests space has up to 11 dimensions, but mathematicians have struggled to prove this

* Consciousness — scientists suggest consciousness derives from chemical reactions in the brain but cannot explain how this might generate a sense of self

* Are we real? — Rees and other physicists have suggested the universe and humanity are part of a giant computer simulation as seen in the Matrix films

People not smart enough to understand universe: scientist Toronto Sun By QMI Agency A top British scientist says we may never know all the secrets of the universe because, quite simply, we're just not smart enough. ... Has the human brain reached its limit of understanding?‎ - DigitalJournal.com Limitations of the human brain mean we may never understand the ...‎ - Daily Mail

Is Lord Rees proving Kant right? | Matthew Taylor's blog

This is the week of my annual lecture, which as regular readers know is on twenty first century enlightenment. Madeleine Bunting has kindly written a piece.

One must let go of one’s certitudes and beliefs

2010-05-21T08:49:00.002+05:30

Looking For Right Answers Times of

India

ANIL MATHUR, May 21, 2010

As a child, questions concerning life and death would perplex me. Sixty years later, i find myself grappling with the very same questions. Is there such a thing as an ideal life? If there is, how does one know how to attain it? I tend to think that my destiny is in my hands. Experience, however, says something different. The path my life has taken is evidence enough that my destiny is not in my control; it does seem as though some kind of superpower is orchestrating the way each and every moment of my life unfolds.

I have tried my best to try and quantify how much of what happens in my life is within my power to change and how much is not. However, the answer is still not within my grasp. I have failed to find the answer. Despite knowing that as a rational thinking person i would not come to the conclusion that one has to accept total surrender as that is the only approach that will help one to stay sane i find that surrendering to the inevitable seems to be inevitable. […]

Why have religions made life and death so difficult to comprehend? Going on pilgrimages and travelling to different places of worship and religious importance has given me much joy and pleasure. I have also enjoyed meeting and knowing several enlightened souls and interesting persons from whom one can learn a lot. Despite all of this, i still have not been able to find an answer to the question: In its final form, can salvation be achieved through pilgrimages and darshans?

All roads lead to the same destination that's one philosophy i have tried to believe in. However, i do not know if the difference in quiet prayers at the Pondicherry Aurobindo Ashram and the vibrant chanting of Hare Krishna at the Vrindavan ISKCON temple are cosmetic or are marked by definite characteristics. I have enjoyed both, but cannot say which will help me reach the desired goal of salvation or peace. How does total surrender to God differ from escapism? Is being totally rational, or trying to be rational, an exercise in irrationality? […]
If you get the message that i am totally confused you are right but i have still managed to live a life of some relative sanity because of spiritual or higher pursuits. Meanwhile, i will welcome any answers to some of my questions from the readers of the column that has helped me stay afloat. anilm30@rediffmail.com

Belief and Fact May 20, 2010 by Jeff Carreira

Michael Shermer in his book “Why We Believe” describes the mind as a “belief engine” that is constantly creating patterns of belief. From fractured information and sense impressions the mind weaves together plausible pictures of reality that we believe in. What do we mean when we say we “believe” then? Things that we believe in are things that we “think that we know.” 10 Comments »

From the comments, on the inevitability of utilitarian judgments from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

Benthamite reasoning is hard to escape. Everyone relies on it when making decisions in everyday life, whether it be voting on a job candidate or buying one car rather than another or putting a bus line on one road rather than another. Even a lot of the arguments for following rules rely on an ultimate Benthamite judgment about good vs. bad consequences…Benthamite reasoning is inescapable, though it is a big mistake to make cardinal utility the only relevant value. We're all pluralists now, but cardinal utility should be a major part of the relevant pluralist bundle.

How to know the Divine Will? « Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo ... By Sandeep May 20, 2010

The Divine Will is an elusive thing for sure. The religious preacher confuses his strong beliefs with the Divine Will, the despot attributes his success to it’s action, and spiritual aspirant is supposed to surrender to it. Does any such thing as the Divine Will really exist? How can one recognize it ? The Divine Will does exist because there is a teleological purpose in evolution. Every soul is being led to the Truth through a certain line of evolution, seemingly haphazardly, and it is this Divine Will which subtly goads him to progress forward. Ordinarily, the Divine Will remains concealed due to our ignorance of our true nature but it begins to unveil itself as we gradually erase the ego through Yoga and allied occult-spiritual practices. […] Conditions for knowing the Divine Will

Purification of consciousness is necessary to uncover the Divine Will. There are certain set of practices one must do regularly as an integral part of spiritual life. First, one must let go of one’s certitudes and beliefs, and clear the clutter of opinions one has acculumated regarding the world.

Like cats, professors are naturally suspicious

2010-05-14T08:43:00.000+05:30

Advice by Rob Jenkins The Chronicle. April 12, 2010

Like cats, professors tend to be highly intelligent, deeply self-actualized, and fiercely independent. They need to be stroked occasionally, but only on their own terms and in their own good time. Mostly, they just want to be left alone to do their own thing. They might not come when called—perhaps because they're suspicious of the caller's motives—but they may very well show up on their own when least expected.

In fact, the real question isn't whether or not faculty members are like cats. The real question is, "What's wrong with that?" Perhaps, instead of constantly trying to rein in faculty members, we should be cultivating their catlike qualities.

Take independence. It's true that many faculty members, perhaps most of them, seem to view themselves as independent contractors rather than employees in the traditional sense. They sometimes find themselves at odds with administrators who definitely regard them as employees, in every sense.

For college professors, however, independent-mindedness is hardly a negative trait. Indeed, it's largely responsible for the rich diversity of personal viewpoints, teaching approaches, and classroom methodologies that makes getting a college education such a rewarding experience.

Another quality I admire in cats is that they have a certain moral integrity. The truth about dogs is they can be bought. Cats generally can't. You won't see anybody bribing a cat with a kitty treat. Oh, it might take the treat, but it will still do exactly as it pleases.

Similarly, good faculty members are not easily manipulated—much to the frustration of some administrators, who think they can persuade professors to embrace the latest make-work mandate simply by stroking them with vague promises, empty rhetoric, and meaningless awards. Like cats, professors are naturally suspicious, not because they're cynical (although some are) but because they're highly sensitive to ulterior motives. […]

Just feed them regularly, don't abuse them, don't patronize them, and occasionally they might climb up on your lap and purr—metaphorically speaking, of course. Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English and director of the Writers Institute at Georgia Perimeter College. He blogs at http://www.academicleaders.or

Religion needs yoga or practice—or spiritual technology—to help reveal and deepen it in one’s life

2010-04-27T13:56:00.000+05:30

The Beams of the Absolute and The Struts of Discipline: Religion in the Post-postmodern Age by Chris Dierkes Friday, 15 January 2010

As noble a goal as immanental transcendentalism was (and still is), it expressed itself via two major flaws in the postmodern age. Those twin errors have reaped untold amounts of suffering as well as caused nearly irreparable confusion regarding how we approach the ultimate.

The first flaw was that postmodernity had no real mechanism for differentiating between and judging amongst the various forms of immanental expression. In extreme cases, just about anything that could be expressed—anything within this world and particularly within one’s experience—was considered to be salvific.

A prosaic example is the notion, common since the 1960s, that the intellect is anti-spiritual and what you need to do to become more spiritual is “get into your feelings”—as if any old feeling were automatically more enlightened somehow than any thought. Martin Luther King Jr. you may recall had a dream, not a feeling. Dreams are visions that involve the mind.

This same virus has infected not only individual spiritual seeking but also social-political movements. By the (il)logical rigor of the position that feelings expressed are the mode of liberation, the Tea Party protests in the

United States

this year were a great enlightening event—according to postmodern thought. It was a collective form of immanence and hence therefore, according to this school of thought, salvific.

In terms of collective expression of will—if that alone is what is salvation—then there is no difference between the Civil Rights movement and the Tea Party protests. None. Not spiritually, emotionally, or psychologically.

At which point of course postmodernists—generally not fans of hard right-wing American views—would likely balk and say something to the effect of “well I didn’t mean that kind of expression.”

And the phrase “that kind of expression” shows the limits of postmodernity and traps itself in its own self-inconsistency. In other words, that kind of expression understood to be somehow wrong or immoral shows that not all kinds of immanence are equally transcendent or salvific in nature.

Yet, generically speaking, postmodernity lacked any rationale as to why it held the opinions it held regarding which forms of immanence were valid and which forms were invalid. It all became essentially a matter of emotional preference, leaving individuals increasingly alienated from one another (because of their feelings!!!). As I will argue later in more detail, alienation (i.e. the avoidance of relationship) is the primary form of sin—or the breaking of the link to the transcendent. If that is true, then we are lost in a collective practice of sin.

The second flaw of postmodernism with regard to religion was not having a sufficiently grounded yoga or practice—or spiritual technology—to help illuminate the transcendent in the immanent in a profound and really transformative way.

An example. I mentioned earlier that Jacques Derrida towards the end of his life spent a significant amount of time studying and writing on negative theology (traditionally called apophatic theology). Though the term apophatic usually refers to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystical theology, there are Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoism versions of apophaticism (though they go by a different name)… Derrida—here representing the postmodern urge and mood—never undertook those practices (so far as I can tell by his writings on the subject)…

As such, postmodernity became a “talking school” of spirituality and religion. It was still all too identified with the eye of mind. All of the postmodern writers above, though they write beautifully and at times transcendentally, have no real way of teaching how they got to the point of view that they did that offered them such a majestic vista on the life process. Without a mature intellectual understanding of the spiritual nor a practice to help reveal and deepen it in one’s life, postmodernism floundered. 6:20 PM 9:26 AM

Denying differences is a recipe for disaster

2010-04-24T13:56:00.000+05:30

ESSAY APRIL 23, 2010 A Dangerous Belief By STEPHEN PROTHERO

From this perspective, popularized by "perennial philosophers" such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith, all religions are beautiful and all are true. The prevailing metaphor portrays the world's religions as different paths up the same mountain. "It is possible to climb life's mountain from any side," writes Mr. Smith, "but when the top is reached the trails converge."

This is a seductive sentiment in a world in which religious violence can seem as present and potent as God. But it is dangerous, disrespectful and untrue. […] Of course, one purpose of the "all religions are one" meme is to stop this fighting and this killing. But this meme, however well intentioned, is neither accurate nor ethically responsible. God may be one according to the Abrahamic religions, but when it comes to the mathematics of divinity, one is not the only number. Many Buddhists believe in no god, and many Hindus believe in 330,000. Moreover, the characters of these divinities differ wildly. […]

You would think that champions of multiculturalism would warm to this fact, glorying in the diversity inside and across religious traditions. But even among multiculturalists, the tendency is to pretend that the differences between, say, Christianity and Islam are more apparent than real, and that the differences inside religious traditions just don't warrant the fuss practitioners make over them. […]

The Age of Enlightenment popularized the ideal of religious tolerance, and we are doubtless better for it. But the idea of religious unity is wishful thinking nonetheless, and it has not made the world a safer place. In fact, this naive theological groupthink—call it Godthink—has made the world more dangerous by blinding us to the clashes of religions that threaten us world-wide.

Faith in the unity of religions is just that—faith, and perhaps even a kind of fundamentalism. And it does not just infect the perennialists. While popular religion writers such as Mr. Smith see in all religions the same truth and the same virtue, new atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins see in all religions the same idiocy and the same poison. In both cases, Godthink is ideological rather than analytical. It gestates in the dense clouds of desire rather than with a clear-eyed vision of how things are in the ground. In the case of the new atheists, it springs from the understandable desire to denounce the evil in religion. In the case of the perennialists, it begins with the equally understandable desire to praise the good in religion. […]

Some people are convinced that the only foundation on which inter-religious civility can be constructed is the dogma that all religions are one. I am not one of them. In our most intimate human relationships, who is so naive as to imagine that partners or spouses must be essentially the same? What is required in any healthy relationship is knowing who the other person really is. Denying differences is a recipe for disaster. What works is understanding the differences and then coming to accept and, when appropriate, to respect them. After all, it is not possible to agree to disagree until you see just what the disagreements might be. And tolerance is an empty virtue until we actually understand whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating. Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University. This essay was adapted from his book "God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter," recently published by HarperOne.

Funeral of secular reason

2010-04-13T14:42:00.000+05:30

Does Reason Know What It Is Missing? New York Times (blog) - Stanley Fish‎

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has long been recognized as the most persistent and influential defender of an Enlightenment ... In recent years, however, Habermas’s stance toward religion has changed. First, he now believes that religion is not going away and that it will continue to play a large and indispensable part in many societies and social movements. And second, he believes that in a post-secular age — an age that recognizes the inability of the secular to go it alone — some form of interaction with religion is necessary: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”
The question of course is what does Habermas mean by “introduce”? How exactly is the cooperation between secular reason and faith to be managed? Habermas attempted to answer that question in the course of a dialogue with four Jesuit academics who met with him in Munich in 2007. The proceedings have now been published in Ciaran Cronin’s English translation (they appeared in German in 2008) under the title “An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age.”

Habermas begins his initial contribution to the conversation by recalling the funeral of a friend who in life “rejected any profession of faith,” and yet indicated before his death that he wanted his memorial service to take place at St. Peter’s Church in Zurich. Habermas decides that his friend “had sensed the awkwardness of non-religious burial practices and, by his choice of place, publicly declared that the enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rite de passage.” The point can be sharpened: in the context of full-bodied secularism, there would seem to be nothing to pass on to, and therefore no reason for anything like a funeral.

To be sure, one could regard funerals for faith-less persons as a vestige of values no longer vital or as a concession to the feelings and desires of family members, but Habermas chooses to take it seriously “as a paradoxical event which tells us something about secular reason.” What it tells us, he goes on to say, is that secular reason is missing something and without it threatens to “spin out of control.”

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

Higher realms of consciousness and deeper truths of being

2010-02-12T14:17:00.000+05:30

The Sleep of Reason Produces One-Eyed Monsters

from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

I guess I first realized this after reading Ken Wilber's Eye to Eye, in which he distinguishes between the physical eye (which knows sensory/empirical reality), the rational eye (which knows math and logic), and the eye of contemplation or intellection (which sees the higher realms of consciousness and deeper truths of being). Each of these is separate and distinct, and not reducible to the other.

It's painfully obvious once you think about it, for how can one possibly understand, say, the square root of negative one in empirical terms? Nor can you use empirical measurements to explain why the tone of Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar is so perfect. And although the Trinity is a "number," to imagine that it can be understood mathematically is the height of folly.

Regarding my own field, psychology, I've witnessed its evolution (and devolution!) on a first hand basis. One thing you will have noticed is that the higher up one ventures into the great chain of being (i.e., matter, life, mind, spirit), the greater the potential for fragmentation, schism, and competing theories.

Now, I don't happen to believe that this fragmentation is necessary, and that most of it is due to sloppy, undisciplined, and unsystematic thinking (in fact, it's not really "thinking," more like fantasy). But one of the primary reasons contemporary thinking is so sloppy is the pervasive reductionism and materialism that prevent people from ever acquiring the proper skills and methods to explore, map, and colonize the higher realms.

For the essence of science -- at any level of reality -- is the reduction of multiplicity to unity. As such, there is clearly an appropriate kind of reduction, so long as it confines itself to its own domain, and doesn't try to pull all of the other ones down with it. Even if the material realm operated under completely mechanistic principles, that would have no relevance to the manner in which the mind operates. Your Dreamer, for example, couldn't care less about linear causation or Aristotelian logic.

When psychoanalysis was invented by Freud in the 19th century, he tried to make it completely consonant with the naively mechanistic and positivistic scientific paradigm of the day, which is why some of his ideas are absurdly outdated.

America

had its own version of a mechanistic and "scientific" psychology with the development of behaviorism. Here again you see how otherwise intelligent people can be "trapped into seeing in the science of the day its ultimate phase of development."

In my view, we should begin our philosophizing with those things that will never change, or with the eye of Spirit. Nothing that occurs in science has any relevance to these truths, since they are timeless. And although they have no direct relevance to the practice of science, they certainly have an indirect relevance.

For example, if a scientist insists that Darwinism proves that there is no objective distinction between good and evil, or that beauty is entirely subjective, we know that he is a fool. And there is no reason to try to argue him out of his delusion, any more than one can explain to a blind man why he shouldn't wear brown shoes with a tux. In both cases, the eyes must be open (the eye of flesh in the case of the blind man, the eye of spirit in the case of the blind Darwinian).

A higher purpose, a transcendent moral order

2010-02-06T16:14:00.000+05:30

No Smiting By PAUL BLOOM
NYT: June 24, 2009 God has mellowed...

In his brilliant new book, “The Evolution of God,” Robert Wright tells the story of how God grew up. He starts with the deities of hunter-gatherer tribes, moves to those of chiefdoms and nations, then on to the polytheism of the early Israelites and the monotheism that followed, and then to the New Testament and the Koran, before finishing off with the modern multinational Gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wright’s tone is reasoned and careful, even hesitant, throughout, and it is nice to read about issues like the morality of Christ and the meaning of jihad without getting the feeling that you are being shouted at. His views, though, are provocative and controversial. There is something here to annoy almost everyone.

In sharp contrast to many contemporary secularists, Wright is bullish about monotheism. In “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” (2000), he argued that there is a moral direction to human history, that technological growth and expanding global interconnectedness have moved us toward ever more positive and mutually beneficial relationships with others. In “The Evolution of God,” Wright tells a similar story from a religious standpoint, proposing that the increasing goodness of God reflects the increasing goodness of our species. “As the scope of social organization grows, God tends to eventually catch up, drawing a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration.” Wright argues that each of the major Abrahamic faiths has been forced toward moral growth as it found itself interacting with other faiths on a multinational level, and that this expansion of the moral imagination reflects “a higher purpose, a transcendent moral order.”

This sounds pro-religion, but don’t expect Pope Benedict XVI to be quoting from Wright’s book anytime soon. Wright makes it clear that he is tracking people’s conception of the divine, not the divine itself. He describes this as “a good news/bad news joke for traditionalist Christians, Muslims and Jews.” The bad news is that your God was born imperfect. The good news is that he doesn’t really exist.

Wright also denies the specialness of any faith. In his view, there is continuous positive change over time — religious history has a moral direction — but no movement of moral revelation associated with the emergence of Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. Similarly, he argues that it is a waste of time to search for the essence of any of these monotheistic religions — it’s silly, for instance, to ask whether Islam is a “religion of peace.” Like a judge who believes in a living constitution, Wright believes that what matters is the choices that the people make, how the texts are interpreted. Cultural sensibilities shift according to changes in human dynamics, and these shape the God that people worship. For Wright, it is not God who evolves. It is us — God just comes along for the ride.

It is a great ride, though. Wright gives the example of the God of Leviticus, who said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and he points out that this isn’t as enlightened as it may sound, since, at the time, “neighbors” meant actual neighbors, fellow Israelites, not the idol-worshipers in the next town. But still, he argues, this demand encompassed all the tribes of Israel, and was a “moral watershed” that “expanded the circle of brotherhood.” And the disapproval that we now feel when we learn the limited scope of this rule is itself another reason to cheer, since it shows how our moral sensibilities have expanded.

1 2 Next Page » Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, is the author of “Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human.” His book “How Pleasure Works” will be published next year. [The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information Robert Wright]

Posthuman

2010-02-06T15:45:00.000+05:30

Causality and Cognition posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects

This post by Graham made me do a Scooby-Doo double take, letting out a deep confused, yet high pitched, “huhr?”, wondering why he is attributing these claims to me: I’ve encountered this claim from others ...

Religious Realities and Scientistic Fantasies posted by Gagdad Bob at One Cʘsmos

Things still haven't settled back down to normal in the Gagdad household, so I've randomly selected a post from two years ago that looked like it might need some work to get it up to speed. In it, I was tr...

Sunlight, shadows and Dhoop posted by shantanu dutta at Around and About

Perhaps it was a matter of chance that I was watching the film Dhoop which deals with the subject of the family of a Kargil martyr on Republic Day. Perhaps it was incidental that the film has a shot of th...

Opportunistic Politics In Mumbai - Take #2

posted by Sauvik at ANTIDOTE

After decades of bitterly divisive communal politics, the RSS, the BJP and even the Chacha State’s police minister, an eminent socialist lawyer, have issued a call that “Mumbai belongs to all Indians.” Thi...

Withdrawn Objects, Information, and Reflexivity

posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects .

Recently Mel’s got me reading Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, which is rewarding for a variety of reasons (Yes, yes, I know, I should have read this long ago, but damn it Jim, I mean Mel, I’m a ...

God Hates Signs! posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects .

This warms my heart. I wrote about this strategy of protest against hate groups a long while back. It’s nice to see similar strategies being used against homophobic hate groups such as Phelps. Read the res...

The social meaning of the power law posted by keith at The Memory Bank

For some time now I have tried to relate major innovations in science and mathematics to the movement of society in history. At the grandest level of generalization, there are observations such as Oswald S...

Ultrasound 3.0: Our Little Buddha’s Brain

posted by c4chaos at ~C4Chaos

Francis Raven is almost here. It’s cool to see his little brain growing at a fast pace. I wonder what he’s feeling, thinking, and dreaming at this time… Take your time, son. Keep on dreaming of ten million...

Haiti and the unseen world

posted by Elizabeth McAlister at The Immanent Frame

I have written a good bit recently about the intense religious responses to the

Haiti

earthquake, as congregations regroup in public spaces in search of meaning and mutual support. To approach such events ...

Happy Birthday, Body posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects .

Yep, as of midnight last night, I’m now 36 years younger. Aging seems to be accelerating more quickly now. More gray hairs, oddly localized in one part of my beard, etc., and other things I don’t think I n...

On Sovereignty... And Unilateralism posted by Sauvik at ANTIDOTE

India

is a “sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic.” The notion of political “sovereignty” implies that each nation-state can follow policies that are in its own interest without having to dis...

Lost & Found Cosmic American Soul posted by Gagdad Bob at One Cʘsmos

All hell broke loose with the excitement of Mrs. G.'s return last night. Wanda got a bad case of the zoomies and almost tore off a footpad in the backyard. Lotta blood. Had to take her to ...

We need private firms in defence posted by M J Akbar at M.J. Akbar - Author and Veteran Journalist - 2 days ago

By M J Akbar In theory the Republic Day parade is an exposition of our military strength. In practice it might have become an exposure of military fragility. If it wer...

What About The Indian State Police? posted by Sauvik at ANTIDOTE

Continuing the discussions of the past few days on “good government” (all these posts are now under a separate label), let me begin by recalling the definition of government – the “social apparatus of comp...

Promiscuous Ontologies

posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects

I’m pleased to announce the Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium hosted by Georgia Tech in April. You’ll find all the information here. Bogost has done a fantastic job designing the webpage. Come dressed as ...

Ethical Etymologies: Thinking Out Loud (Always Dangerous)

posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects

A number of interesting discussions have arisen in relation to questions of flat ethics. Over at Critical Animal, Scu has a post up which I have not yet been able to go through in any detail. In relation t...

John Law posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects

Hat tip to Adrian Ivikhiv. Actor-Network Theorist John Law’s After Method: Mess in Social Sciences is now available for free through aaaarg.org. I’ve heard people gush about this book for a while but have ...

Mereologies and Objects

posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects

Adrian Ivakhiv and I have been having a terrific exchange on objects and relations which really goes to the heart of what I’m trying to think about (here, here, and here). Indeed, in an earlier draft of Th...

Peace means the summer of 1965 posted by M J Akbar at M.J. Akbar - Author and Veteran Journalist

Peace means the summer of 1965 There is a duality but not a contradiction running through the complexities of the India-Pakistan relationship. Friday’s newspapers, for instance, rep...

What Is "Good Government"? Part 3 posted by Sauvik at ANTIDOTE

Bad news: LRC is off the airwaves – and I am getting withdrawal symptoms. Also, we have no water supply for 3 days. I think it is “hydraulic despotism,” typical of the oriental despot. Give these morons an...

The Politics of Objects & Relations posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects .

Adrian has what looks like a first rate post up elaborating on our debate about objects and relations in response to my recent post on ethics (I haven’t gotten to read it all yet). I have to say I’m pretty...

Nick Live: OOO, Naturalism, Polytology, and SR

posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects .

It looks like this is the week of Speculative Realism over at Indieoma. Today Nick has a brief interview up discussing Speculative Realism. I confess that despite my friendship with and admiration for Nick...

Civil religion of a different kind posted by Ebrahim Moosa at The Immanent Frame

[image: The People of Chilmark, Thomas Hart Benton (1920)]Very different from the mode of civil religion that I discussed in my previous post are the experiences of religious communities in

South Africa

. A...

What Is "Good Government"? Part 2

posted by Sauvik at ANTIDOTE

No news is good news – so I can resume the discussion of yesterday, on “good government.” Let's consider what government actually is. In truth, is not government but an institution of compulsion and coer...

Graham Live posted by larvalsubjects at Larval Subjects

Indieoma has a nice interview up with Graham Harman. I wanted to draw attention to two passages in particular, as they so nicely encapsulate the general spirit of Object-Oriented Ontology: The human-world ...

Everything You Wanted to Know About Kabbalah But Were Afraid to Ask

posted by Gagdad Bob at One Cʘsmos

Mrs. G. doesn't actually depart until tomorrow morning, so here we are. With luck, we'll have time for another post. Remember "Ezekiel," the raving Jewish sage from a couple of posts back? He says that t...

Walking in Light - a peek at Physical culture posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore

In this issue, we will tread carefully on the delicate issue of sleep. The world of science has taken multiple peeks into this mysterious phenomenon, mysterious because one probably has absolutely no clue ...

Flowers of the month posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore

The red lotus is the Avatar. The white lotus is the Divine Consciousness The red lotus represents Sri Aurobindo, the white one represents me. In a general way the lotus is the flower of the Divine Wisdom, ...

The crystal orb posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore

'A crystal globe in the center, a sun-ray passing through it the whole day' - that was part of the Mother’s vision of the interior of the Matrimandir in Auroville. It has materialized. 'No religion, nor...

Turning Points: An inner story of the beginnings of Auroville posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore

This new book is not primarily about Auroville's physical beginnings and development. It's about how the pioneers were drawn here and what keeps them here today. Christine, the editor, asked 24 Aurovilia...

The blue flag posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore

Sri Aurobindo: About the blue flag, I presume you mean the flag with the white lotus. If so, it is the Mother’s flag, for the white lotus is her symbol as the red lotus is mine. The blue of the flag is m...

Question of the month posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore

Am I right in thinking that she as an individual embodies all the Divine Powers and brings down the Grace more and more to the physical plane, and her embodiment is a chance for the entire physical con...

From Savitri posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore

The Force in her drew earth’s subhuman broods; And to her spirit’s large and free delight She joined the ardent-hued magnificent lives Of animal and bird and flower and tree. They answered to her with the si...

Editorial posted by Sri Aurobindo Society, Singapore

The Mother has said on herself, “Do not ask questions about the details of the material existence of this body; They are in themselves of no interest and must not attract attention. Throughout all this l...

Sunlit Path, Harmonies of Light

2009-12-20T21:17:00.000+05:30

The Mother: Words of long ago

Light for Students

How to Bring up a Child

A new education for a new consciousness: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on education

Education for a New Life

Memorable Contacts with the Mother

Sweet Mother: Harmonies of Light - Part Two (Part 2)

The Supreme

The Supreme Discovery

Prayers & Meditations of the Mother

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Meditation

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: Glimpses of Their Experiments, Experiences, and Realizations

The sunlit path: Passages from conversations and writings of the Mother

The moment anyone gets into the 'reaching the masses' syndrome, the problem of over-simplifying arises

2009-11-14T06:18:00.003+05:30

Shared Experiences: Rahul Dev Holistic Living - Faith: Opium or Nectar?
by Life Positive
For Indian media personality Rahul Dev, the truth of spirituality lies deep within the superficial trappings of religious orthodoxy

Spirituality is neither a hobby nor a pastime. Either you are spiritual or you are not. I have been spiritual from a pretty young age and have been meditating off and on. But I am no exception. In fact, I'm certain that anyone who senses that there is a deeper way of living has to be interested in spirituality and religion.

Religion has often been castigated as 'opium of the masses'. The fact that this label was primarily given by the creators of communism makes it all the more unfortunate, for there is no denying the innate humanism of the basic communist philosophy. If only Marx had had a spiritual experience, the world would have been a much better place to live in. Instead, the communists failed to seek the essentially spiritual core of religion and were taken in by its superficial trappings of ritual and superstition.

At the same time, I do not claim that the trappings are illusory. On one hand, there is a pristine core of faith. On the other, there is a whole body of organized religion that has, with time, lost touch with this core. This is true for all philosophies. Any mass movement, be it spiritual, social or political, always runs the risk of becoming trivial, commercial and sometimes even vulgar. Further, the moment anyone gets into the 'reaching the masses' syndrome, the problem of over-simplifying arises. The teaching has to be then made 'palatable' to all. In the process, somewhere down the line, the medium becomes more important than the message.

But then, how can you stop faith from making itself known to all? After all, anyone who has tasted the nectar of Truth will, more often than not, feel compelled to help others taste the nectar too. Only when this compulsion, born out of innate human compassion, gets mixed up with conceit and a desire for recognition does religion become, at least superficially, 'opium for the masses'.

At all times, there have been departures from the so-called 'organized religion' framework. The scope of human ingenuity and creativity is as much there in spirituality as in any other temporal field. In fact, when you really look into it, organized religion is nothing but a creation of history, which assimilates diverse streams to create a new mainstream. So, what were once revolts against spiritual hegemony come out centuries later as 'organized' faith.

Take the case of Buddhism, one of the strongest movements to have sprung up in reaction to orthodox Hinduism. Or Protestantism, a movement that was born in the lap of the Catholic faith, which it later sought to reform. In the same manner, today's New Age gurus will, say, about 50 years down the line, appear as belonging to an equally organized and codified movement.

Does this mean that there is no evolution? Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did present the concept of the Supermind. They went to the extent of saying that human evolution cannot possibly stop at the present level. The physical body itself will become more spiritualized and etheric. Unlike many New Agers that you come across nowadays, I really can't say with much conviction that such an evolution has already begun. But there is definitely a great deal of interest among people regarding spirituality and such subjects.

Clearly, the spiritual hunger in people for a deeper and more meaningful anchor has not abated. To satiate this hunger, all you need is to accept life in complete humility and be grateful for it. No single faith or science or theory can make the world a perfect place. The world was not made to be perfect. It was made to help us gain an understanding of our own Self. Holistic Living Life Positive November 1999

Sri Aurobindo’s universal and cosmic vision has much to offer to a troubled world

2009-10-01T10:34:00.002+05:30

Sunday, September 06, 2009 The dilemma of a liberal Hindu
With the rise in religious fundamentalism around the world, it is increasingly difficult to talk about one’s deepest beliefs, says Gurcharan Das

I was born a Hindu, in a normal middle-class home. I went to an English-medium school where I got a modern education. Both my grandfathers belonged to the Arya Samaj, a reformist sect of Hinduism. My father, however, took a different path. While studying to be an engineer, he was drawn to a kindly guru who inspired him with the possibility of direct union with God through meditation. The guru was a Radhasoami saint, who quoted vigorously from Kabir, Nanak, Mirabai, Bulleh Shah and others from the bhakti and sufi traditions.Growing up Hindu was a chaotically tolerant experience. My grandmother visited the Sikh gurudwara on Mondays and Wednesdays and a Hindu temple on Tuesdays and Thursdays; she saved Saturdays and Sundays for discourses by holy men, including Muslim pirs, who were forever visiting our town. In between, she made time for Arya Samaj ceremonies when someone died or was born. Her dressing room was laden with the images of her gods, especially Ram and Krishna and she used to say in the same breath that there are millions of gods but only one God. My grandfather would laugh at her ways, but my pragmatic uncle thought that she had smartly taken out plenty of insurance so that someone up there would eventually listen.

I grew up in this atmosphere with a liberal attitude - that is a mixture of scepticism and sympathy for my tradition. Why then do I feel uneasy about being a liberal Hindu? I feel besieged from both ends — from the Hindu nationalists and the secularists. Something seems to have gone wrong. Hindu nationalists have appropriated my past and made it into a political statement of Hindutva. Secularists have contempt for all forms of belief and they find it odd that I should cling to my Hindu past. Young, successful Indians, at the helm of our private and public enterprises, have no time or use for the classics of our ancient tradition.A few years ago, I told my wife that I wanted to read the Mahabharata in its entirety. I explained that I had read the Western epics but not the Indian ones. She gave me a sceptical look, and said, “It’s a little late in the day to be having a mid-life crisis, isn’t it?” To my chagrin, I became the subject of animated discussion at a dinner party soon after.“So, what is this I hear about wanting to go away to read old books”, asked my hostess, “aren’t there any new ones?” She gave my wife a sympathetic look.“Tell us, what you plan to read?” asked a retired civil servant who had once been a favourite of Indira Gandhi. He spoke casually as though he was referring to the features of a new Nokia phone. I admitted that I had been thinking of the Mahabharata.“Good lord, man!” he exclaimed. “You haven’t turned saffron, have you?”

I think his remark was made in jest, but it upset me. I found it disturbing that I had to fear the intolerance of my “secular” friends, who seemed to think that reading an epic was a political act. I was reminded of a casual remark by a Westernized woman in Chennai who said that she had always visited a Shiva temple near her home, but lately she had begun to hide this from her fiercely secular friends, who she feared might paint her in saffron.With the rise in religious fundamentalism around the world, it is increasingly difficult to talk about one’s deepest beliefs. Liberal Hindus are reluctant to admit to being Hindu for fear they will be linked to the RSS. Liberal Christians and liberal Muslims abroad have had the same experience. Part of the reason that the sensible idea of secularism is having so much difficulty finding a home in India is that the most vocal and intellectual advocates of secularism were once Marxists. Not only do they not believe in God, they actually hate God. As rationalists they can only see the dark side of religion -- intolerance, murderous wars and nationalism and cannot empathize with the everyday life of the common Indian for whom religion gives meaning to every moment. Secularists speak a language alien to the vast majority, so they are only able to condemn communal violence but not to stop it, as Mahatma Gandhi could, in East Bengal in 1947.

Part of the problem stems from ignorance. Our children do not grow up reading our ancient classics, certainly not with a critical mind as youth in the West read their works of literature and philosophy in school and college. In India, some get to know about epics from their grandmothers; others read the stories in Amar Chitra Katha comics or watch them in television serials.If Italian children can read Dante’s Divine Comedy in school, English children can read Milton and Greek children can read the Illiad, why should “secularist” Indians be ambivalent about the Mahabharata? It is true that the Mahabharata has lots of gods and in particular that elusive divinity, Krishna, who is up to all kinds of devious activities. But so are Dante, Milton and Homer filled with God or gods?I suspect Mahatma Gandhi would have understood my dilemma about teaching the Mahabharata in our schools. He instinctively grasped the place of the epic in an Indian life and he would have approved of what V S Sukthankar wrote: “The Mahabharata is the content of our collective unconscious .... We must therefore grasp this great book with both hands and face it squarely. Then we shall recognize that it is our past which has prolonged itself into the present. We are it." The epic has given me great enjoyment in the past six years and I have become a Mahabharata addict. I feel sad that so many boys and girls in India are growing up rootless, and they will never have access to these forbidden fruits of pleasure.As we think about sowing the seeds of secularism in India, we cannot just divide Indians between communalists and secularists. That would be too easy. The average Indian is decent and is caught in the middle. To achieve a secular society, believers must tolerate each other’s beliefs as well as the atheism of non-believers. Hindu nationalists must resist hijacking our religious past and turning it into votes. Secularists must learn to respect the needs of ordinary Indians for a transcendental life beyond reason. Only then will secularism find a comfortable home in India. posted by gurcharan at 1:05 PM 13 comments

OPED Thursday, October 1, 2009 Email Print A nation in amnesia Hiranmay Karlekar Why pundits ignore Sri Aurobindo’s vision

Prof Sachidananda Mohanty says in his well-written and painstakingly-researched work, Sri Aurobindo: A Contemporary Reader (Routledge), “I have often wondered why university intellectuals are reluctant to engage with Sri Aurobindo.” To this writer, the answer lies in the fact that most contemporary university intellectuals are unfamiliar with — and/or have no interest in — the Vedas, Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras which constitute the spiritual architecture of the monotheistic philosophy and monist spirituality of the Vedantic view of life. Nor are they acquainted with the Purans, the great epics, Ramayan and Mahabharat, which illustrate the application of the cardinal principals underlying this view to a spiritual and moral universe that includes gods, human beings, and non-human living beings.

There is no point in blaming Thomas Babington Macaulay and the system of Western education through English medium instruction that he introduced. Sri Aurobindo was himself a product of that system, though his exposure to it was in England from his early boyhood. Contact with the ideas generated by the post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment Western intellectual tradition through the medium of the English language contributed to the emergence of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Maharshi Devendranath and his son Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekanand, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Romesh Chandra Dutt, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and a host of other stalwarts. Familiar with the discourse at the heart of Western culture, they used the critical methods and analytical tools that evolved in its matrix, to interrogate and revive their own civilisational heritage in which they were firmly rooted. Two major consequences followed the 19th Century Bengal Renaissance and similar intellectual ferments, albeit on much smaller scales, elsewhere in India, and the reform movements of which the two main — but totally contrary in character — ones were spearheaded by the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj respectively.

There were, doubtless, others who were dazzled by the military and economic power of imperial Britain, which they attributed to the superiority of Western culture. In a parallel process, they denigrated India’s traditional civilisation which they held responsible for the country’s social, intellectual and moral degradation that led to colonial rule. They, however, constituted a marginal presence thanks to continuing surge of the national sentiment during the struggle. Unfortunately, independence blunted the edge of Indian nationalism which had been sharpened by the humiliating and exploitative character of British rule. From an active presence, nationalism was relegated to the backwaters of one’s consciousness and surged to the fore only in times of national crises like wars with China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1947-49, 1965, 1971 and 1999. The result was a decline of interest in the cultural wellsprings that to a large extent defined the national identity of a vast majority of Indians. The second reason was the influence of Marxism over a growing body of Indian intellectuals. Marx was not the virulent denigrator of religion that he is made out to be. Apart from the intellectual attraction of his philosophy, his attitude toward religion, however, influenced his Indian adherents. He wrote in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

However carefully nuanced Marx’s critique, his rejection of religion was total; so was that by Marxist intellectuals, whose influence grew in a great measure because of the support of the entire global and Indian Communist movements behind them. On the other hand, the Vedantic tradition no longer had a charismatic leader like Swami Vivekanand and Sri Aurobindo or a stalwart literary and mystical figure like Rabindranath Tagore. Finally, given the growing complexity of modern societies and the increasing importance social, political, administrative and economic activity, subjects related to these commanded precedence in the universities. Growing specialisation in the academic world left one with little time for anything-including one’s own spiritual heritage and its exponents — outside one’s own discipline. This is an absolute shame. Sri Aurobindo’s universal and cosmic vision has much to offer to a troubled world.

Confusing Ken Wilber's Integral Movement with Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

2009-08-12T13:39:00.005+05:30

M. Alan Kazlev is a self-taught esotericist and metaphysician, science fiction writer and fan, amateur biologist and palaeontologist, and student of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's teachings and yoga. His website is at www.kheper.net and he can be contacted at alankazlev (at) ihug (dot) com (dot) au (sorry – problems with spam!). For Integral World he has written two series of essays on integral philosophy: Towards a Larger View of Integral (4 Parts) and Integral Esotericism (8 Parts). In the following essay he gives on overview of the integral landscape.

Redefining Integral M. Alan Kazlev

Authors note: this essay builds upon and incorporates an earlier blog post on Integral Praxis integralpraxis.blogspot.com/ . In the process of writing it, I revised and refined my original position considerably, so that in places it is almost unrecognisable. I would like to thank everyone who commented on these posts and added their own feedback and critiques; I have tried to incorporate this into the current thesis. To help with the flow of text, I have avoided the use of footnotes in this essay. There is also a pragmatic reason for this: in order to cite everything the essay would need many pages of footnotes! Instead, important books have been referenced in the text itself. I have also included various on-line urls, but again, not a comprehensive selection. This essay updates and complements my earlier essays on Integral World

1. Synopsis
In this essay, I re-define "Integral" in a way that includes all current definitions. This involves five definitions: Religious, Theoretical, Practical, Enlightened, and Divinised. Each of these definitions is defined. Of these, the first is considered pseudo-integral, the others authentically integral. This gives us a broader framework that can accommodate, but also go beyond, the various more limited definitions. A lot of difficulty also arises from confusing the Integral Movement as defined by Ken Wilber and Don Beck with Integral Yoga as defined by Sri Aurobindo. I show that these are very different; they are radically different teachings based on totally different states of consciousness..

A sequence of stages of the evolution of consciousness and society is also presented, which includes stages beyond the current Post-Materialism and Integral stages consciousness, is suggested, and the first of these, called Post-Integral, is briefly described.

What's new? Reading Room Wilber Watch My Wilber Book Links Contact
Reading Room Essays Top 50
DIEM-LANE Recommended Readings on Quantum Theory
WILBER Ken Wilber on His Health
MARTIN-SMITH The Future of Art and Art Criticism
WILBER Ken Wilber Videos on YouTube
MEYERHOFF Bald Ambition: Table of Contents
HARRIS Aryan Patriarchy, Dravidian Matriarchy
DIEM-LANE The Einstein-Bohr Crapshoot
EDWARDS The Depth of the Exteriors, Part II
VISSER Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion
HARRIS Christianity: The Great Lie
EDWARDS The Integral Cycle of Knowledge
MARTIN-SMITH Art and Postmodern Criticism
VISSER The Wild West Wilber Report
HELFRICH Ken Wilber's AQAL Metatheory
McINTOSH Beauty, Truth and Goodness
ROSADO What is Spirituality?
KAZLEV Integral Theory
DIEM-LANE Quantum Weirdness
MARTIN The Human Growth Continuum
EDWARDS A Brief History of Holons
EDWARDS The Depth of the Exteriors, Part I
WILPERT Dimensions of Integral Politics
VISSER The Wilberian Evolution Report
MEYERHOFF Psychological Analysis of Wilber's Beliefs
DIEM-LANE Einstein Doesn't Play Dice
MEYERHOFF Poststructuralism and Postmodernism
ANONYMOUS Meditation Notes from Ken Wilber
BECK Stages of Social Development
BROUWER The Wilber-Combs Lattice Revisited
VISSER Integral Design: Wilber on Evolution
MEYERHOFF Six Criticisms of Wilber's Integral Theory
ISHAQ The Science of Sufism
BENJAMIN Integral Mathematics
VISSER New Light on the Near-Death Experience?
DIEM-LANE Bohr Plays Poker
SHEPHERD Critical Comments on Perennialist Philosophy
VISSER Ken Wilber's Mysterianism
SORENSEN Two Versions of Psychosynthesis
VISSER A Spectrum of Wilber Critics
WILBER Some Thoughts on Integral Politics
VISSER Perennialism, Postmodernism, Integralism
BENJAMIN Wilber vs. Schneider
VISSER My Critical Essays on Ken Wilber
BENEDIKTER Postmodern Spirituality, Part I
VISSER If You Meet Ken Wilber On The Road...
BENJAMIN On Ken Wilber's Integral Institute
DAWKINS Dawkins on Darwin (OU Lecture)
KAZLEV Redefining Integral
LARSSON Spiritual Narcissism
SALMON Integral Psychology Beyond Wilber-V

The first and the last thing in Sri Aurobindo is to exceed one’s own self

2009-07-07T17:05:00.005+05:30

Let our mind be free from all conventional separative thoughts including religion and nationality
Posted by Debabrata Ghosh on October 9, 2008 at 11:28am

For a long time I have severed all connections from my official religion-Hinduism. I do not participate in any religious ceremony. Not because that I hate them but because it all seem to me sheer childishness. I am more than convinced that the days of religion have gone. I do not know how one goes to a temple or a church to worship. [...] Aspiration

BABUL'S WORLD -10 October 2008 Birth of New Spiritualism After Three Thousand Years

Some personal stray thoughts: From my very childhood I have been inclined to spiritual matters. This is not to say that I felt god-ward emotion as we find in sadhus and yogis. Neither was I a spiritual seeker in my life. What interested me was to know how God exits and in what way he is related to our lives. This is also not to say that I had philosophical bend in my mind.

I was born in a very spiritual and religious family. But as the family was deeply rooted in Sri Ramakrishna –we were not conventionally religious. Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda rid many Hindus –especially Bengali Hindus, of the debris of conservative Hinduism. The disciples and the followers of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda were enlightened neo-Hindus then. My grandfather and grandmother were initiated by Sri Sarada Devi-whom we knew as Ma in our family. All the sons and daughters of my grandfather were initiated by this and that of the twelve sanyasin disciples of Sri Ramakrishna.

We lived in Ranchi then permanently. My grandfather was one of the founders of Sri Ramakrishna Mission at Ranchi. So our house was frequently visited by the different sadhus and sanyasins and they stayed in our house whenever they felt necessary. So it was natural for me to grow as a strong believer in God. There was a strong presence of Sri Ramakrishna in our home. Sri Ramakrishna was our God. He was with us in every moment –in all the events good and bad. I loved him-sincerely loved him. I still love him.

But I had questions –which grew in numbers and in strength as I kept growing in age. One day when I was ten years-I suddenly got out of my otherwise normal calm mind and asked my aunt-a very devoted woman “If India is so rich and great with her Vedas, Upanishads, Gita-and with the numerous sadhus, monks, yogis and devotees sacrificing so much for the sake of God-why is this country suffering from poverty, diseases and illiteracy? Why are we lagging behind the West? [...]

There can not be a religion with Sri Aurobindo
Posted by Debabrata Ghosh on October 17, 2008 at 8:00pm
View Debabrata Ghosh's blog

By what I may consider myself a person –free from all religions? Broadly speaking, the atheists also follow some systems of thoughts and belief that help them exist comfortably. It’s like unconsciously holding to the root of a sense of certainty of their existence. There must be an axiom which helps to prove other truths. For man this axiom is hidden and unknown to him. But he feels the urge to cling to it for existential justification. When it is said that man can not live by bread alone –the need for bread is more emphasised than other psychological requirements. But a deep insight into the needs of man reveals that the most essential requirement in him is his sense of existence. The bread is essential for physical survival –but the basic root of this survival is a sense of assertion of survival. For man this sense of survival is not merely sensory. It’s a sense that gives him an identity as distinguished from amorphous mass of life. He wants to see or assert himself as an individual that is justifiably co-related to that which is greater than him-his personal self. To be specific we may say that man wants to belong to a system-that sustains his existence. If he fails to understand that ‘required system’-he would find out one according to his nature and understanding. The scientist does not believe that he is guided by someone we call God. So he tries to discover in his own way the truths and powers that govern his life and the world. It’s the essential satisfaction of existential nature. There can be no sense of uncertainty in our feeling of living in life. If we are unable to find any –we go on creating or imagining one to adhere to. So –the most interesting thing is that an atheist also believes that he is driven by a system –and in his case –it’s not God.

This innate existential seeking has necessarily a tendency to form an external system in order to get it complied with the inner urge. Externally this is the cause of religions to meet this demand of existence of human life. Man gets relief in the fold of religion; his all is gathered into a certainty. He is given a world he is able to believe in and gets the ways and means to walk on it with his convincingly secure feeling. In religion he is justified of his physical, vital and mental instincts and perhaps is better satisfied. It’s because the sense of control over the baser impulses helps man to enjoy more under sanction of the authority of his religion. So in religion only man gets a justified ground of existence and the rightful approval of meeting his natural instincts with control. And it is this religion that sets before man a higher truth, a higher way of life. So in religion man also gets an opportunity to pursue his higher urge. So basically in this higher ideal held by all major religions as districts from the impulses of lower nature –man finds a higher and vaster sky for his possibilities. There is no doubt that in religion man finds himself more than what he is ordinarily. Here in this aspect, the gate of original inner urge of existential nature is more opened and man gets more space to satisfy the dignity of his existence.

Those who criticise religions forget that religion is an essential natural phenomenon of man’s search and fulfilment –and the consequent exteriorisation of the hidden urge of life. There is no denying the fact that it is the same religion that shackles, fetters and tortures man and prevent him to go beyond the established and fixed periphery to be otherwise for the same reason that is behind the growth of religion. Religion helps man to gather around a set of principles for grasping the reason of his existence but it never allows him to go outside this frame. The principles of life on which a religion is based –gradually turn into the rules of a structure. The tree now wants to explain the seed. The root of this contradiction lies in the overriding prominence of collective system against the urge of individual for further progress. The truth always comes through individual and through the individual it holds the collective group.

So it is individual who whenever rises against a past dogma in favour of a living truth –the collective opposition (in the form of religion) stands against it. So we have witnessed in the process of history the battles between newness and progressive thoughts- and between religions also. As I have told above that we can not afford to be outside religions-of any kind for fear of losing truths that sustain us-identify us.

This is the apparent and external truth for religions growing strength in collective human groups. But there is a force and power behind the foundation of religion which is not physical. In all the major religions and paths there are spiritual powers that form them as new ways and influences for the world in given times through Avatars, Bibhutis and other higher mental or vital incarnations for the general progressions of human consciousness. These incarnations from higher spiritual regions are essential in the progression of consciousness in evolutionary process behind manifestation of higher principles of existence. But in the process of time all the new principles go on creating norms, rules, creeds etc because of mind’s ways to grasp the newness. Ultimately –it is the principle of mind and also of vital consciousness that are responsible for the creeds of religions or the religiosity. The truth has been asked heaven’s sanction for earth’s service. This degeneration of spiritual truth in the life and mind of human beings is best described by Sri Aurobindo in the following lines of his Life Divine.

"...The religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual.”

Now let us consider this aspect of religion for the devotees of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. But before giving any opinion we must compare some aspects of existing religious communities with that of the followers of Sri Aurobindo. Basically a person to follow and believe in the path of Sri Aurobindo for a meaning and justification of life –does not require coming into any fold of a collective group or community. Actually –there is no external path at all in Sri Aurobindo. There is no creed and we may better say that there can not be any creed and ritual for a person (or a sadhak) who are in the way towards Supramental consciousness. The follower of Sri Aurobindo –if he/she so chooses may live a life without attaching himself/herself to any group or attending any ceremony –even if these are in the name of Sri Aurobindo. A follower of Sri Aurobindo must shun all beliefs, notions, impressions and preferences that he/she has learnt from the society, religion, community, nationality. He or she must make efforts to be bare of all ideas –in order to help the Divine hands to mould him/her in Its own way-contrary to the ways as conceived by human mind. For the first and the last thing in Sri Aurobindo –is to exceed one’s own self –exceeding the very manhood for the attainment of Supermanhood. There is no specific ways to attain it. One must find one’s soul for a true direction and follow it in every movement of life-as ‘All life is yoga’. One need not de-convert one’s religious identity in order to follow Sri Aurobindo.

One may argue that it’s true for all the true destination of all religions-i.e. to stand naked with God. But there is a difference here. One must accept everything that comes to him in the process of life externally and internally in order to transform them. It’s because this a follower Sri Aurobindo does not and can not have any defined form and status of his/her God. Because one must rise beyond the world of Gods and for that matter the world of mind. Sri Aurobindo –time and again warned and advised his disciples and followers –not to make any effort to understand the Supramental consciousness. One must surrender all of one’s life to the Divine. So does it not sound ridiculous that one’s surrendering everything to the Divine –is also a kind of a religion?

Secondly –it may also be argued that a follower of Sri Aurobindo or a believer of his vision of future of humanity is not necessarily a sadhak of Supramental Yoga. There are innumerable persons who are believers of his philosophy but are not active sadhakas. These people are being grouped here and there in the various parts of the world. And as they stand distinctively separate from other religious identities –they are obviously be branded as belonging also to a faith –however great that may be. Whether we like it or not, they, by virtue of believing in a separate way-are helping to form another religion with Sri Aurobindo. But seeing it in that way is missing an important truth relating to psychology of religion. Actually the people belonging to this category are elites in psychology. The very elitism with the truth of Sri Aurobindo is a deterrent to religious movements. Unlike other religious groups they will help creating a psychology in favour of union of different faiths and ways while remaining unbiased above every divisive tendency. These groups of people having a mental inclination for Sri Aurobindo are essential for the hidden Supramental urge –for gradual building of a stimulating base for its actions on the sadhakas and also the humanity in general. But the people belonging to other religions may brand them as belonging to a religion other than the religions they belong to. But at the same time they will not consider them a community harmful to any religious beliefs.

These people will walk and move in the light of a higher consciousness and will never act with any religious impulse. Sri Aurobindo appeared to lift humanity into an integral truth consciousness from this divisive world of mind. If we believe that by accepting the teachings of Sri Aurobindo –we become a part of a separate religion then there lies a serious misunderstanding in our reading of Sri Aurobindo. If any religious-minded person does not feel comfortable amongst a group of followers of Sri Aurobindo then by the person’s religiosity can in no way establish a fact that by refusing to believe in the religious ways of the person the group has its own religion also other than the religion of the person. The Christianity was once enraged by the opinion of Galileo Galilee. This fact can not be explained by a kind of strife between two belief-systems. Galileo was not a follower of any faith in his discovery. He was mere aware of the truth. Aspiration

Overcoming death, pain, and loss is the emotional driver of traditional religious spirituality

2009-06-24T21:30:00.002+05:30

Spirituality Without Faith
These remarks are based on a talk given for the Humanist Association of Massachusetts in June of 2001 and were published in the Humanist, January, 2002.

Characteristics of Spirituality
Authentic spirituality involves an emotional response, what I will call the spiritual response, which can include feelings of significance, unity, awe, joy, acceptance, and consolation. Such feelings are intrinsically rewarding and so are sought out in their own right, but they also help us in dealing with difficult situations involving death, loss, and disappointment. The spiritual response thus helps meet our affective needs for both celebration and reconciliation. As Richard Dawkins puts it in his book Unweaving the Rainbow, we have an "appetite for wonder," an appetite for evoking the positive emotional states that are linked to our deepest existential questions.

But what might evoke these states? Spirituality often involves a cognitive context, a set of beliefs about oneself and the world which can both inspire the spiritual response and provide an interpretation of it. Our ideas about what ultimately exists, who we fundamentally are, and our place in the greater scheme of things form the cognitive context for spirituality. By contemplating such beliefs we are temporarily drawn out of the mundane into the realization of life’s deeper significance, and this realization generates emotional effects. But equally, the spiritual response thus generated is itself interpreted in the light of our basic beliefs; namely, it is taken to reflect the ultimate truth of our situation as we conceive it. The cognitive context of spirituality and the spiritual response are therefore linked tightly in reciprocal evocation and validation.

A third essential component of spirituality is what is ordinarily called spiritual practice. Since the intellectual appreciation of fundamental beliefs alone may not suffice to evoke a particularly deep experience, various non-cognitive techniques can help to access the spiritual response. Activities such as dance, singing, chant, meditation, and participation in various rituals and ceremonies all can play a role in moving us from the head to the heart. And it is in the heart, or gut, after all, where we find the most powerful intrinsic rewards of spirituality, as profound as its cognitive context might be.

Although the emotional content of the spiritual response - feelings of connection, significance, serenity, acceptance – is common to all spirituality, the background beliefs and specific practices vary tremendously. Almost all of us have the biological capacity to feel spiritually transported, but the cognitive context of those moments and the techniques to induce them are a matter of our culture. A fascinating variety of spiritual traditions have arisen, ranging from the rigorous, ascetic regimes of Zen meditation to the ecstatic communal celebration of a Sunday morning gospel service, and each tradition has its own conception of the world and the individual’s place in it. Stemming from these beliefs there are a multiplicity of spiritual objects of veneration, of deeper realities to be encountered: God, Earth, Nature, Emptiness, angels, devils, ancestors, previous incarnations, the Force, you name it (for a current, pop-cultural sampling of these, visit Beliefnet). For each tradition, spiritual experience is taken to be the direct appreciation of the ultimate truth about the world, a way to transcend one’s limited everyday perspective in the quest for meaning, unity, and serenity.

Traditional Spirituality
Many, if not most of these traditions, as well as some "New Age" beliefs, involve the idea of a distinct spiritual realm, something set apart or above the everyday physical world (some types of Buddhism being notable exceptions, of which more below). The varieties of spirituality are thus to a great extent varieties of dualism, at least in their cognitive contexts (belief systems). But why should this be the case? What drives the intuition that we and the world we inhabit are of two natures, one physical and one immaterial?

Part of the answer lies in our instinctive fear of death, which many religions allay by positing an immortal soul or spiritual essence which survives bodily dissolution. We gain ultimate security by virtue of being, in our true selves, something other than the physical, something that joins with a larger, non-physical and changeless realm after death. Overcoming death, pain, and loss is thus the emotional driver of traditional religious spirituality. We want cosmic reassurance, to be exemptions from mere material, changeable nature, and our spiritual nature functions to connect us with that which is changeless and immortal. Thus the fear of death and its standard religious solution produce the dualism of body and spirit, of the natural and supernatural. Such dualism, of course, is central to religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism which have held sway for millennia in much of the world. (It should be noted, however, that some contemporary theologians have questioned this dualism, reaching nearly naturalistic conclusions about human nature, if not God’s. See, for instance, Whatever Happened to the Soul?, edited by Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, Fortress Press, 1998.)

Not just religion, but the Western philosophical tradition too has shaped the more or less commonsense view that we exist as bodies inhabited by souls, spirits, or mental agents. Cartesian mind-body dualism, although widely rejected in the current academic philosophical and scientific communities, is still the norm in lay culture. Such secular dualism comports well with the comforting tenets of religion, even if it no longer has a scientific basis. Moreover, it has to be conceded that it certainly feels, at first blush, as if we are more than strictly material creatures. Who is it, after all, that is looking out at the world, having feelings, thinking thoughts, and making choices? Surely it can’t just be my physical brain that does all that. Given these historical and psychological factors, it’s perhaps not surprising that varieties of dualism still dominate in both the secular and spiritual arenas. [...]

Difficulties with Traditional Spirituality
As much as the characteristics of traditional spirituality provide answers to the questions of death and meaning, two major drawbacks are evident. The problem of death is solved by splitting ourselves into two substances - one material and perishable, the other spiritual and immortal - but as a result the material becomes inherently inferior in its changeability. The physical becomes the merely physical - it assumes a second class metaphysical status. This in turn leads to alienation from our physical selves and indeed from the material world as a whole. Gross matter is denigrated in comparison to subtle spirit, and the material only has value to the extent that it is animated and directed by spirit. It can’t accomplish anything of significance on its own. But of course we are embodied, and our world is material, so from this alienated perspective most of our lives is an unfortunate entanglement with crass physicality while awaiting the better, immaterial world to come.

Added to the dualism of substance is the dualism of having two types of knowledge, ordinary empirical knowledge derived from the senses and confirmed intersubjectively (e.g., as in science) and the knowledge gained from the personal revelations of spiritual experience. Despite the arguments of some, such as Stephen J. Gould in his book Rocks of Ages, that these constitute "non-overlapping magisteria" which can’t conflict since they have fundamentally different concerns, the fact remains that both sorts of knowledge make claims about what ultimately exists and they reach different conclusions. Science gives us no reason to believe in the supernatural (there is no scientifically admissible evidence for such a realm), while the firm intuition of spiritual experience, as interpreted within its traditional, non-naturalistic cognitive context, is precisely that a separate immaterial reality indeed exists. If I make use of both methods of knowing, then eventually it is likely I will confront some basic cognitive dilemmas: which method, and therefore which conclusion, is correct? In deciding the momentous question of what fundamentally exists, on what grounds do I choose science over spirituality, or visa versa? When do I stick with my spiritual intuitions, and when do I stick with science?

The upshot is that these two dualisms, one metaphysical, one epistemological, put adherents of traditional spirituality in a poor position to achieve, in this world, the apprehension of fundamental unity, even if they are promised salvation in the next. And unity, of course, is the essence of spirituality. Being of two natures and two minds, the traditional spiritualist is torn between the physical and immaterial world and unified with neither. Naturalists, I believe, suffer no such handicaps in their approach to ultimate concerns.

Economics must be handed back to the humanities

2009-06-16T19:51:00.003+05:30

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Alok Sheel: Of economists and historians
Economics must be handed back to the humanities
Business Standard - New Delhi June 13, 2009, 0:53 IST
As an erstwhile keen graduate student of history who stumbled into finance and economics as a professional hazard, I was not a little bemused by the recent spat between Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson, first in public debate, and subsequently spilling over onto the pages of Financial Times.

Unsurprisingly, the Nobel Laureate and Princeton economist faulted the Harvard historian for his shallow understanding of economics, in this case the theories of John Maynard Keynes. How could fiscal deficits and quantitative easing by central banks exert upward pressure on interest rates and prices, argued Krugman, when these are merely substituting for private demand in a depression?

As it turns out, Ferguson does know his Keynes, but has also read Karl Marx the historian who was acutely aware that moments in history are never repeated no matter how similar they might appear. All historical events occur as it were twice, he argued, the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce, while comparing Napoleon III with THE Napoleon. Since this is not the Great Depression, economists have struggled to come up with the right mix of policy tools to address the current global crisis. While helpful, the lessons derived from the Great Depression seem hardly adequate.

Krugman’s judgment may well be nearer the mark than Ferguson’s, but that is not the point. It is the presumption that the science of economics is somehow subject to some universal, natural laws which is the issue. Graduate students of history in my time were all too frequently at the receiving end of such below-the-belt punches. Economists, after all, were the awesome rocket scientists of the social sciences, complete with calculus, regressions, complex equations and econometric models. The Nobel Prize Committee amplified their rocket science status. Historians were empiricists par excellence, whose explanations were intangible, long-winding and subsumed in lengthy narratives. They had no methodological tools of their own, for which they fell back on other disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy, psychology, archaeology, demography, even physics at times, and, inter alia, economics. Even the narrative was borrowed from literature. Who would even consider a historian for a obel Prize?

Historians are perennially afflicted by self-doubt, much like Woody Allen in his trademark movies: Was why things turned out the way they did any different from how they turned out? Were all historical explanations merely a particular point of view, and could there be different equally valid ways of explaining the same past? Perhaps each generation had to rewrite history since they asked different questions of their past? Can you really know the past as it really was? Are historical facts really facts or preselected events refracted through ideology? What is a historical fact anyway? Your reading this newspaper is unlikely to be classified as a historical fact, right? But what if you were the first human with whom intelligent extraterrestrials established contact, and this occurred at the precise moment you were reading this paper? Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon is a fact of history because it was a turning point in history. Otherwise the crossing would have gone unrecorded, like several crossings before and after.

Fascinating though such questions are, since they are given to philosophical self-doubts, historians generally keep to themselves and their obscure treatises. They are not given to striking back at economists who are generally precise and sure about all that they do, even though economists advising policymakers are known to spawn more than two hands. Uncharacteristically, Niall Ferguson the historian hit back. The cat was perhaps emboldened to look the lion in the eye on account of the collateral damage to economics’ status as a rocket science by the current global crisis, and its consequential relegation as a humble social science, buffeted by the unpredictable winds of human choice, cultural differences and change over time. Like history has always been. The rational, profit-maximising and predictable homo economicus that has made economics the dismal science, is simply not homo sapiens sapiens.

What is the difference between rocket science and social science? While tomes can be, and have been, written on the subject, there is a simple ‘apple’ test derived from the great philosopher, Karl Popper. Newton is famously known to have stumbled upon his theory of gravity through an epiphany observing apples falling to the ground. Because the theory of gravity lays claim to universal validity, you can on its basis predict that every apple will eventually fall to the ground, when certain conditions relating to maturity, wind strength, inertia, etc, are satisfied. The flipside of the prediction is that it needs just one apple to head skywards instead of falling to the ground to disprove the theory of gravity. You can also, on the basis of such predictions, send a space probe to Jupiter. The predictions of economists, on the other hand — just look at successive growth revisions to IMF’s World Economic Outlook — go awry most of the time. Yet the underlying theories seem to survive amongst their adherents, and continue to be used for predicting the future as if they were natural laws. There are two disciplines one can think of that continue making predictions that are repeatedly disproved in the real world, and yet continue to claim a wide following. One is astrology, and the other is theology.

This is not a plea for debunking economics for, like history, it has very powerful tools to understand the world and also give insights into our future. If history is amongst the oldest of human disciplines, trade, exchange and surplus distribution — the stuff economics is made of — are known to exist in most primitive human societies, and several ancient texts such as Kautilya’s Artha Shastra and Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah deliberated these matters over the ages, long before the classical economists of the seventeenth century. If only the socialist regimes of the twentieth century had heeded the sage advice of the 14th-century Arab part-time economist that ‘the trading of the ruler may cause the destruction of civilisation and hence the destruction of the dynasty’!

I have learnt as much from economics as I have from history not only to understand the real world but also for formulating policy as a civil servant. Rather, this is a plea for rescuing the discipline of economics from the jaws of rocket scientists and mathematicians and handing it back to macro-economists, economic historians and political-economists. Social scientists need to reclaim the dismal science and spruce it up. There are after all other social sciences, such as psychology, that economics can turn to, to make it both more colourful and this-worldly, as George Akerlof, Robert Shiller and Richard Thaler have shown recently. The writer is a civil servant. Views are personal.

Vibhuti is something between a man and an avatar

2009-06-11T13:53:00.002+05:30

Extras, Walk-Ons, and Bit Players in the Cosmo-Drama from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob
Theo-drama cannot be understood in the absence of mission. You might say that mission is to action -- or to the horizontal -- what intellection is to thought or to the vertical. Mission is a further extension of meaning. In any drama, the action is dictated by a meaning-fueled mission of some kind. For example, the other evening I watched Bergman's The Seventh Seal. It is about a disillusioned knight who has returned from the Crusades to his plague-devastated homeland, and is in doubt about the existence of God. He then encounters the figure of Death, who informs him that his days are over. However, he strikes a deal with Death, challenging him to a game of chess. So long as he can keep the game going, Death will give him more time -- the time he needs to try to find God.Thus, the film would mean nothing if the knight's mission weren't our mission...

In Vedanta, there is the concept of the vibhuti, which is something between a man and an avatar, the latter being an incarnation of God. The vibhuti is here with a divine mission, but it needn't be a strictly religious one. It can be political, aesthetic, scientific, anything that advances the Cause.

Often we may detect a vibhuti by their own strong sense of divine mission, combined with an ability to surpass themselves in mysterious ways; when they align themselves with their mission, they partake of powers that are not their own. Thus, they may appear powerful, but in reality must humbly submit to their mission. Their courage is in their submission. One thinks of Abraham Lincoln, or Winston Churchill, or Saint Paul, or the founding fathers, by no means "perfect men," but protagonists of "perfect missions," so to speak. The sense of "ultimate mission" allowed each of these men to risk their lives in their diverse actions.

Here is how Aurobindo described the vibhuti in a letter to a disciple: "A Vibhuti is supposed to embody some power of the Divine and is enabled by it to act with great force in the world, but that is all that is necessary to make him a Vibhuti: the power may be very great, but the consciousness is not that of an inborn or indwelling Divinity.... "

He adds that "the Vibhuti need not even know that he is a power of the Divine. Some Vibhutis, like Julius Caesar for instance, have been atheists. Buddha himself did not believe in a personal God, only in some impersonal and indescribable Permanent."

I'm not necessarily suggesting that Aurobindo is correct, I'm just "throwing it out there." Of course, for the Christian, there has been only one avatar, but that needn't imply that there hasn't been an abundance of lesser vibhutis. Indeed, I would suggest that the theo-drama is incomprehensible in the absence of the vibhuti principle, i.e., those vital supporting roles such as Abraham, Moses, David, John the Baptist, et al. These were hardly bit players in the theo-drama.

Sri Aurobindo committed himself mainly to the liberation of human consciousness

2009-06-06T12:17:00.004+05:30

Renaissance man of India
By Jagmohan
May 30: Every nation has its own special attributes: Germany has its organisational abilities, the United States has enterprise, Japan has adaptability and the United Kingdom has balance. The hallmark of India, in its hey-days, was the power and profundity of her mind and the purity and punctiliousness of her soul. It was this power and purity which made Indian civilisation one of the most creative and constructive civilizations in the world. In his own inimitable style, Sri Aurobindo had noted:

"For 3,000 years she has been creating abundantly and incessantly, lavishly… republics and kingdoms and empires, philosophies and cosmogonies and sciences and creeds and arts and poems and all kinds of monuments and public works, communities and societies and religious orders, laws and codes and rituals, physical sciences, psychic sciences, systems of yoga, politics and administration, arts spiritual, arts worldly, trades, industries, fine crafts — the list is endless and in each item there is almost a plethora of activity".

The saints and sages of ancient India injected power and potency in the Indian mind. In turn, this power and potency added to the capacity of the sages and saints to think deeply on the phenomena around. One of the fundamental truths discovered by them was that the universe is an organic web in which every life is inextricably enmeshed with the other and that this web is permeated with cosmic force of which man and nature were constituents as well as contributors.

A philosophic structure, in the form of Vedanta, was raised and a way of attaining elevation of mind and moving towards truth, while carrying on with day to day work, was indicated through a comprehensive system of yoga.

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, the power of the Indian mind, which had produced profound systems and structures, began to wane after the 7th century. Soon there was a near total desertification of the Indian mind, with small meadows of green appearing here and there occasionally. The "mighty evil" that had invaded the Indian mind and soul was, to a large extent, beaten back by a galaxy of profound thinkers and reformers who brought about a new awakening that led to the great renaissance of the later 19th century and early 20th century.

Out of the stalwarts of renaissance, Sri Aurobindo emerged as the strongest champion of the Indian spirit and expressed the highest confidence in its underlying strength. In no uncertain terms, he declared:

"India cannot perish, our race cannot become extinct, because among all the divisions of mankind it is to India that is reserved the highest and most splendid destiny, the most essential to the future of the human race. It is she who must send forth from herself the future religion of the entire world, the eternal religion which is to harmonise all religion, science and philosophies and make mankind one soul".

In Sri Aurobindo’s thought, the Sanatan Dharm and India always appear as two sides of the same coin. But in his famous Uttarapar speech, delivered on May 30, 1909, he placed the former at a higher pedestal:

"When, therefore, it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatan Dharm that shall rise. When it is said that India shall be great, it is the Sanatan Dharm that shall be great. When it is said that India shall expand and extend herself, it is the Sanatan Dharm that shall expand and extend itself over the world".

Sri Aurobindo makes it clear that Sanatan Dharm is designed to uplift the entire human race and not merely the Hindus:

"What is this religion which we call Sanatan, eternal. It is the Hindu religion only because the Hindu nation has kept it... But it is not circumscribed by the confines of a single country. That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion because it is the universal religion which embraces all others".

It needs to be underlined that in the post-Uttarpara-speech period, Sri Aurobindo committed himself mainly to the liberation of human consciousness. He made it clear: "Spirituality is India’s only politics, the fulfillment of Sanatan Dharm its only swaraj". A regenerated India alone, he said, could free the world from its "enslavement to materialism" and for pointing it to the "way towards a dynamic integration of spirit and matter and to make life perfect with divine perfection". He believed that a greater evolution was the real goal of humanity.

After Sri Aurobindo’s thought had undergone a subtle shift at Uttarpara on May 30, 1909, his vision was to liberate India’s consciousness and bring back Sanatan Dharm as India’s "national religion" — a religion which is all embracing, non-sectarian and eternal. His vision was to build a nation of karmayogis who would have a higher consciousness, be rid of egos, desires and attachments, have no joy over their successes and no grief over their failures, achieve inner rather than outer renunciation, perform passionless and impersonal actions and take themselves to such a height where no distinction is kept between their will and the will of the divine.

But what is position today? Has not a deep and dark shadow fallen between Sri Aurobindo’s vision and the reality in India today? Do we find karmayogis around or see signs of liberation of India’s spirit? Has there been any advance towards spirituality or higher level of human consciousness? Clearly, the answer to all such questions is in the negative.

On the centenary day — May 30, 2009 — of Uttarpara speech, let all students and teachers of Sri Aurobindo’s school of thought resolve that they would not lose heart on account of current dismal scenario and would work with a renewed sense of mission to ensure that the vision of the great prophet of the 20th century is fulfilled. Undoubtedly, the task is Herculean, the goal is distant and would take a long time to traverse. But let us not forget that even the longest journey begins with the first step. Jagmohan is a former governor of J&K and a former Union minister The Asian Age - Enjoy the difference

Sri Aurobindo’s Opposition Why the Indian establishment resisted him, MANGESH V. NADKARNI The Indian Express Thursday, March 21, 2002 12:17 PM

E Pluribus Unum by Lori Tompkins The Vedic realization of the One that is equal to the Many has been recalled by Indian sage Sri Aurobindo (1872 – 1950):. ‘We see that the Absolute, the Self, the Divine, the Spirit, the Being is One; the Transcendental is one, ... Tuesday, June 2, 2009 A Blog is Born Considering disharmony is a byproduct of forgetting what one truly has in common with others, this blog is meant as a place to remind myself and my fellow earth-mates that we are not only 'one in the spirit' as the song goes, but we are also one in body and one in time. If we leave out the last two in our quest for knowledge or spiritual growth, I think harmony among human beings will remain an ideal and not a realization. Posted by Lori Tompkins at 5:47 PM 1 comments

A yawning universe under the water, teeming with life and history

2009-05-15T16:48:00.003+05:30

A view from the water - Sagarika Ghose
Thursday, January 06, 2005 indian express

The ocean at night is still but somehow tumultuous. Waves lap against the Mila. There is a sense of a yawning universe under the water, teeming with life and history. On the night of the tsunami Allie felt a strange current. The tide, which normally takes six hours to flood, came flooding in minutes after it had ebbed. A few months ago, a huge wave knocked his boat over and he and his son spent almost the whole day swimming. A staring crowd gathered on the shore as the two swam from morning until late afternoon, when a helicopter clattered to the rescue.

Allie says he’s the smallest man in Goa, yet the scale of existence becomes gigantic on the Mila. The lights on the beach motels look ridiculously small from so far away at sea. Tiny human irrelevancies perched on the edge of acres of inky black water. The sea is a giant reclining god. If the god merely lifted his toes, avalanches of water would go skating to the shore and flood out all those little pleasure spots.

What little human virtues and vices can ever compare with this amoral magnificence? The waves are not compassionate, the sea is not sympathetic; instead the ocean is gargantuan, elemental, without any rational meaning whatsoever. Alone, Allie and his son sit framed against this beautiful malevolence. Their net is filling slowly with mackerels and sardines, the waves rock the Mila this way and that and a sudden gush of wind blows back Allie’s hair. He is elderly, tough, descended from generations of fisherfolk.

Some 30 per cent of Goa’s fishermen are Phadtes and Taris, 70 per cent are Rodrigues and D’Souza, mostly classified under the Kharvi or OBC category. As a result of Goan laws several fishermen own land but this is an exception to other parts of India.

Dawn begins to break. Soon tourists will wend their way to the shacks for fresh fried fish. Allie and Antony are happy. Their nets are heavy. Tonight they have emerged victorious against the ocean. But the ocean is only biding its time.

Rebellion against religion bears responsibility for the 20th century's penchant for mass murder

2009-05-09T10:23:00.003+05:30

Reclaiming Religion
Two new books respond to the anti-religion screeds of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. But are attempts to reclaim Christianity for humanism mere wishful thinking?
Nathan Schneider April 30, 2009 web only Current Issue Special Report Debates Chat Recent Articles Columnists Archive

Only Nixon could go to China, so perhaps it is only Terry Eagleton, the irreligious British literary critic, who can stand up for theology. It has been three years now since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins set off the New Atheist controversies with his bestselling The God Delusion. Following him has been an eager crop of fellow nonbelieving snoots, on the one hand, and no end of pious refutations, on the other, all as polemically audacious as they are cosmically unsatisfying.

With Eagleton, though, there's a glimmer of hope. His October 2006 essay on Dawkins in the London Review of Books forged an intriguing middle ground in this usually polarized debate. Doubling the fun, Eagleton's new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, adds Christopher Hitchens to the dock, who apparently contributes so little to the discussion that the name "Ditchkins" suffices to encompass them both. The book's scope may be somewhat wider, but Eagleton's claim hasn't changed: "Such critics buy their rejection of religion on the cheap." When you actually bother to grasp what religious ideas mean and have meant throughout history, you'll find guillotining them to be neither so easy nor so desirable, Eagleton argues. You might even come to like them.

For reasons he assumes are obvious, Eagleton doesn't actually believe in all this stuff. And he isn't trying to get us, his intended audience of "radicals and humanists," to believe in it either. Fortunately, he received enough of a Catholic education from people who did believe to know that religion can offer "some valuable insights into human emancipation, in an era where the political left stands in dire need of good ideas." Shy of full-on belief, and therefore somewhat parasitically, he wants to keep theology around as a resource for politics.

The kind of theology he's talking about isn't what you'll get from the Falwells and Robertsons. It is Christian, but rooted in medieval metaphysicians, like Thomas Aquinas, and in the Latin American liberation theology of the last century -- sources the present pope, by the way, would insist are in flagrant contradiction. Eagleton's God is not some nosy pedant in the sky, but a disembodied artist made of infinite love and forgiveness. In Jesus Christ he sees a radical's radical, a troublemaker who commands his followers to question authority and give everything they have to the poor: "The only authentic image of this violently loving God is a tortured and executed political criminal." Eagleton's theology -- or at least the one he mimes -- stands for total commitment and fervent hope.

Yes, he writes, "religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs." But he also confesses, as Ditchkins refuses to do, that the rebellion against religion also bears responsibility for the 20th century's penchant for mass murder. Reason is capable of justifying horrors as much as it is of uncovering marvelous truths. The difference between the two lies in the kind of faith that lurks behind reason, guiding it. "Even Richard Dawkins," Eagleton quips, "lives more by faith than by reason." Theology is a conversation about the faiths and hopes that we all reason by, whether consciously or not. Better, then, to cultivate them mindfully before falling prey to dangerous fundamentalism, whether of the religious or secular variety.

Karl Marx taught that ideologies are the scaffolding that support unjust political arrangements; to unsettle an ideology, you have to disturb its political infrastructure. Eagleton carries this instinct over to the New Atheists. He calls Hitchens out for joining with the neocons to cheerlead the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and Dawkins for "oozing moral complacency." The implication is that their triumphant atheism legitimates a regime of Western hegemony. If Muslim extremists are victims of virus-like religious delusions, for instance, there is no need to restrain our violence against them or hear out their genuine political grievances. Logical arguments about the existence of God are only part of the issue, he insists; unreflective atheism today is a close cousin of unreflective militarism.

Indeed, Eagleton points out that the religion New Atheists keep attacking is one held by nobody but the most naive fundamentalists. It is literalistic, ahistorical, and without a shred of humanism. The account of Christianity that Eagleton offers is more palatable, though at the cost of passing over the miraculous magic tricks, like virgin births and multiplying fish, that are the bread and butter of popular religiosity everywhere. The Christianity on offer from Eagleton is so thin it's no wonder he feels no particular urgency to actually believe it. The tone of what he has called the "theological turn" in his writing amounts to a string of clever one-liners: "Like a hamster," Eagleton writes of God in Holy Terrors, "he is incapable of being untrue to his own nature." Or, from the new book: "Left-wing Christians are in dire need of dating agencies." As in recent beach-reads like A.J. Jacobs' Year of Living Biblically and David Plotz's Good Book, holy writ is reduced to a punch line, even if occasionally it's a profound one. All well and good, of course, but this might get in the way of getting skeptics to take theology seriously.

However much Eagleton's theological literacy may outreach Ditchkins', in the end, being able to drop a few lines from Aquinas still doesn't cut it. And he admits at the outset that what little he knows about Christian theology is still much more than he knows about any other tradition. He cites Marx and Freud almost as much as Jesus, and certainly more than Karl Barth. In this regard, Eagleton might defer to another reply to the New Atheists, released by Yale University Press on the same day and also with "revolution" in its title -- David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.

Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, is one of those academics plagued by being too smart for his own good. His superhuman knowledge of the history of Christian thought, combined with a knack for body-slamming polemic, has rubbed some the wrong way. But his 2003 The Beauty of the Infinite, a profession of Christian teaching against its profoundest philosophical critics, may have already earned Hart a place of his own in the tradition he knows so well.

When Eagleton speaks of revolution, he calls to mind a pseudo-Marxist dream, admittedly betrayed by 20th-century history but still offering some hope of justice rolling down our earthly streams. Hart, though, means something rather more precise: a long, fraught process over the course of which Christianity transformed the West's idea of what it means to be human.

He tells of the great hospitals for the poor founded by early Christians, unprecedented in the pagan Roman empire; Gregory of Nyssa's sermon in 379 condemning the institution of slavery; and scriptures that audaciously claimed that a band of provincial outcasts could be apostles of God. Through the early disputes about the divine and human natures of Christ, Christian thinkers developed a "moral vision of the human person," one in which all people, regardless of social status, race, or sex, share equally in God's image and promise. Hart is not the first to contend that modern notions of universal human rights are descendants of this Christian insight. His erudition allows him to truly make the case Eagleton can only gesture at, that Christian thought is rich in resources and unique in its contributions to some of the West's most honorable ambitions for itself.

Unfortunately, Hart practices a triumphalism that distracts from the argument's force. His rosy concept of the true faith mirrors Ditchkins' concept of true reason -- one that is the cause of everything good and innocent of everything bad. After a few hundred pages of this, one starts to miss Eagleton's refreshing openness to both reasonable agnosticism and reasonable religious faith, combined with his eagerness to criticize their excesses.

Hart is at his most effecting, though, in an account of Julian the Apostate, the short-lived, fourth-century Roman emperor who tried to halt the Christianizing of the empire. Julian mounted a passionate assault on Christian theology and institutions. But the ideals he tried to assert, ultimately, had already absorbed Christianity to their core. He commanded his pagan priests to serve the poor and preach neighborly love, though their traditions provided little to draw on for such things. Hart writes that "everything Julian wanted from his chosen faith -- personal liberation and purification, a united spiritual culture, a revived civilization, moral regeneration for himself and his people -- was possible only through the agency in time of the religion he so frantically despised."

The New Atheists should remember Julian before thinking our religious heritage can be done away with so easily. Often the very standards by which they judge religion -- consistency, tolerance, and universal truth, for instance -- have roots in that heritage. (Richard Dawkins has the sense to call himself a post-Christian atheist.) Eagleton, too, might think twice about the prospects of domesticating theology as stock material for his political agenda. Just when you think you've got religion under control, you may find that it has got you. Nathan Schneider is co-editor of Killing the Buddha, an online religion magazine. He blogs at The Row Boat. © 2009 by The American Prospect, Inc.

The fight is on to save the commons of human society

2009-04-19T19:41:00.001+05:30

The Memory Bank A New Commonwealth — Ver 4.0
Home About Keith Hart Curriculum vitae List of Publications Papers Miscellany The Book Prologue — Alvin 1. Money in the Making of Humanity 2. The Machine Revolution Today 3. Capitalism: Making Money with Money 4. Capitalism: The Political Economy of Development 5. The Market from a Humanist Point of View 6. The Changing Character of Money 7. The Future of Money and the Market Acknowledgements Reviews of the Book Forum Press Contact « Alternative currencies at Limehouse 2005 Conversations with Abdul Aziz 6 »

Notes on the counter-revolution 13 November 2008, 2:22 am
The period since 1945 saw a revolution in world society which, by the 1990s, had turned into widespread popular emancipation from the repressive state controls installed during the Cold War. The world was becoming more connected and more unequal at the same time, but people in general enjoyed more freedom than ever before. Since the millennium, an attempt has been made, led by but not restricted to the United States, to screw the lid back on. The battle cry of this counter-revolution is the war against terrorism, its theme-song, security, security and yet again security. Freedoms that came to be taken for granted after the war against fascism are now being lost. The left is disoriented and impotent. Who is the enemy and what is to be done? The fragments below reflect the confusion of our era, but they do point to a possible political strategy. They were written in two places at different times, in Europe and in America.
We are connected at last, humanity that is. World society is a reality. It has come home to roost in America. The reduction of the World Trade Centre to rubble marked this in the most vivid way possible. The world is one. Boom. That unity is violent. Boom. The sudden shock of recognition that America is in the world, not apart from it. The curious thing about the first decade after the Cold War is that, even as America took over the world, Americans, who come from all over the world, became more insular, more separated from it than before. John Locke once wrote, ‘In the beginning all the world was America’, meaning in a state of nature. Well, now all of our world is America again, but this time it reflects the age of money and unequal property that succeeded the state of nature in Locke’s scheme. The task of establishing civil government, successor to the age of money, awaits us.
After the catastrophe, a time for rationality. But reason works better backwards than forwards. Rationalization of the past is more effective than attempts to project a rational future. Today’s terrorism has a specific origin in the covert operations of the US government under Reagan during the 80s. Following the defeat in Vietnam, the Americans fought the Cold War through Third World proxies trained to use terror as a means of subduing civilian populations: in ex-Portuguese Africa, Unita and Renamo (supported by the outlaw South African regime); in Central America, the Contras; in Afghanistan, the Mujaheddin and, as we all now know, Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the IMF opened up the rest to the predations of corporate capital and to the drain of debt interest. When the Berlin Wall fell, Bush the Elder orchestrated the Gulf War for domestic consumption by television and then everything went quiet for a decade. The interventions in former Yugoslavia were minor policing operations in comparison. The Clinton years, in retrospect, now seem like a belle époque. Wall Street contrived the biggest boom in economic history, the internet connected us in a single network and the last checks on American military power evaporated. The bobos of Manhattan turned inwards to enjoy life at the centre of the world, while the rest of America was absorbed in itself. The cracks in all this were already beginning to show principally as a collapse of internet stocks and then of the telecoms boom when Hollywood’s perennial images of spectacular destruction were enacted for real on September 11th.

So now we have an unlimited war on terrorism, waged against the same Islamic fundamentalism that the CIA once encouraged in the Mujaheddin. This Republican regime relishes the opportunity to range worldwide without consultation and without even paying lip service to international law. After 1945, the USA decided to build up Western Europe and Japan as its junior partners in a new project of collective empire. The rules of this collective were set by the American reaction to Suez: the appearance of joint decision-making and participation, but only one active policeman allowed. This was supposed to be different from the European imperialism whose replacement by nation-states was supervised by Woodrow Wilson at Versailles. It is celebrated as such by Hardt and Negri in their bestseller, Empire. It was established practice as recently as Kosovo. Yet now American columnists boast of their country’s freedom to act as it likes, a freedom prepared for by countless international treaties left unsigned. At home, Bush the Younger’s appeals to ‘the nation’ have produced a stampede to conform; anti-terrorist legislation and judicial practice promise to overthrow hard-won civil liberties; and Americans try to come to terms with estrangement from a world that resents their careless wealth and unfettered power. In the name of anti-terrorism, the satellite governments introduce their own versions of internal repression; border controls and surveillance in general are stepped up; and, while only the British have volunteered to be the Yankee imperial bag-carrier, no-one else has mustered serious criticism of the Americans’ conduct of the Afghan war.
The immediate aftermath of September 11th thus looks like a regression. For some time now, it has seemed that the old corporate bureaucracies were in retreat, when faced with the rise of a global network society. Even the capitalist corporations have gone through a frenzy of downsizing and outsourcing during the last decade in a drive to take on a more flexible network form. State capitalism, the attempt to manage accumulation and markets through national bureaucracies, has been eroded by a tide of electronic money flowing across borders with virtual impunity, while the ability of corporations to dictate terms to national governments is growing every year. Criminal markets for drugs, arms and bootleg copies of everything dominate trade in much of the world. Now we have seen a band of terrorists, employing the techniques of informal economy and network society, produce the most dramatic public theatre in memory. And how does the Bush regime respond? With B 52s bombing a country into a stone-age to which it had already returned. If the fall of the Berlin Wall was a universal symbol of the people’s triumph over bureaucratic power, this is the counter-revolution, contrived by a ruling elite threatened for a decade by increased freedom of social connection and reduced popular fear of central power. What is new is the unilateral assumption of this function by the American government. We might call it ’state capitalism in one country’. But the rest of the world’s unpopular regimes know that it shores up their own powers of rule, even if they are not being given a token role in the action.
It is convenient for the rulers of our unipolar world to focus attention on cultural politics abstracted from history on the struggle between good and evil, liberal enlightenment and religious bigotry, ‘the American way’ and a recalcitrant Islam. Our task should be to expose the social contradictions that this ideology conceals. For this is a capitalist world and capitalism is not standing still while the media hang breathlessly on every minor development in Afghanistan. What democratic forces are emerging to confront a corporate capitalism whose hegemony has never been more universal than now? This question entails another. How might we break up the idea of a monolithic America, that rhetoric of national unity on which Bush depends for popular support, in order to identify the forces within American society ready to oppose their own government and corporations? This means refusing to equate the US ruling elite with the American people and their instinct for democracy. Knee-jerk anti-Americanism leaves out of the global struggle against neo-liberal capitalism many of the elements that are best placed to play an effective part. We must distinguish between the American state and the American people, even if today in an atmosphere of perceived national crisis many Americans are reluctant to do so. Against Bush’s version of America as lawless world bully and institutional expression of corporate capitalism, there is another living tradition representing America as a self-sufficient federalist democracy, with weak central government, offering a home for the world’s oppressed peoples.

The fight is on to save the commons of human society, culture and ecology from the encroachments of corporate private property. This is no longer principally a question of conserving the earth’s natural resources, although it is definitely that too, nor of the deterioration of public services left to the mercies of privatized agencies. The information age has raised the significance of intangible commodities. Increasingly we buy and sell ideas; and their reproduction is made infinitely easier by digital technologies. Accordingly, the large corporations have launched a campaign to assert their exclusive ownership of what until recently might reasonably have been considered shared culture to which all have free and equal access. Across the board, separate battles are being fought, without any real sense of the common cause that they embody. The napsterization of popular music, harbinger of peer-to-peer exchange between individual computers, is one such battle pitting the feudal barons of the music business against our common right to transmit songs as we wish. The world of visual images, of film, television and video, is likewise a site of struggle sharpened by fast-breaking technologies affecting their distribution and use. In numerous subtle and not-so-subtle ways, our ability to draw freely on a common heritage of language, literature and law is being undermined by the aggressive assertion of copyright. People who never knew they shared a common infrastructure of culture are now being forced to acknowledge it by aggressive policies of corporate privatization. And these policies are being promoted at the international level by the same American government whose armed forces now seem free to run amok in the world.
In the case of the internet, what began as a free communications network for a scientific minority is now the contested domain of giant corporations and governments. The open source software movement, setting Linux and an army of hackers against Microsoft’s monopoly, has opened up fissures within corporate capitalism itself. The shift to manufacture of food varieties has introduced a similar struggle to agriculture, amplified by a revival of ‘organic’ farming in the context of growing public concern about genetic modification. The pharmaceutical companies try to ward off the threat posed to their lucrative monopolies by cheap generics aimed at the Third World populations who need them most. The buzzword is ‘intellectual property rights’, slogan of a corporate capitalism determined to impose antiquated ‘command and control’ methods on world markets whose constitutive governments have been cowed into passivity. The largest demonstrations against the neo-liberal world order, from Seattle to Genoa, have been mobilized to a significant degree by the need to oppose this particular version of global private property. The events of September 11th have temporarily diminished this movement, especially in North America, just as they have added to the powers of coercion at the disposal of governments everywhere. In this sense, the global movement for greater democracy and less inequality has suffered a reverse.
A large proportion of the activists resisting the corporate takeover of world society belong to the western middle classes. This is so whether we are talking about the internet, software, cultural products, food, drugs, pollution, arms control or the exploitation of cheap labour. Europeans make their own distinctive contribution, but many of these movements have their source in America. The Free Software Foundation is American. The American courts tried Microsoft. Napster was an American invention. American farmers are fighting rents imposed on food varieties by corporate monopolists. American consumers resist being made the guinea pigs of drugs companies. Of course, these activities can be and are represented by corporations, their lawyers and political stooges as ‘unAmerican’. But they are an expression of what is best in America, its democracy.
It is a widely shared and justified belief that the age of money, whose culmination we are witnessing today, is not in the interest of most human beings, that the American government and giant corporations (half of them American, a third European) are indifferent to that common interest of humanity. The rest of the world needs Americans to join them in the struggle for decent human standards in social life. They bring tremendous resources of technology, education and economic power to that struggle, but above all they bring their country’s liberal political traditions. It would be a pity if the effect of September 11th was to obscure that possibility of global democratic solidarity, leaving the world stage to Texas oilmen and Muslim fanatics, with their mutual conspiracy to divide and rule.

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?

2009-04-19T18:42:00.002+05:30

March 27, 2009 / Volume CXXXVI, Number 6 ARTICLE Culture & Barbarism
Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism Terry Eagleton

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism? Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section labeled “Atheism,” hosting anti-God manifestos by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others, and might even now be contemplating another marked “Congenital Skeptic with Mild Baptist Leanings”? Why, just as we were confidently moving into a posttheological, postmetaphysical, even posthistorical era, has the God question broken out anew?
Can one simply put it down to falling towers and fanatical Islamists? I don’t really think we can. Certainly the New Atheists’ disdain for religion did not sprout from the ruins of the World Trade Center. While some of the debate took its cue from there, 9/11 was not really about religion, any more than the thirty-year-long conflict in Northern Ireland was over papal infallibility. In fact, radical Islam generally understands exceedingly little about its own religious faith, and there is good evidence to suggest that its actions are, for the most part, politically driven.
That does not mean these actions have no religious impact or significance. Islamic fundamentalism confronts Western civilization with the contradiction between the West’s own need to believe and its chronic incapacity to do so. The West now stands eyeball-to-eyeball with a full-blooded “metaphysical” foe for whom absolute truths and foundations pose no problem at all-and this at just the point when a Western civilization in the throes of late modernity, or postmodernity if you prefer, has to skate by on believing as little as it decently can. In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism. All this, so to speak, is the price you pay for affluence.

Advanced capitalism is inherently agnostic. It looks particularly flaccid when its paucity of belief runs up against an excess of the stuff-not only abroad, but domestically too, in the form of various homegrown fundamentalisms. Modern market societies tend to be secular, relativist, pragmatic, and materialistic, qualities that undermine the metaphysical values on which political authority in part depends. And yet capitalism cannot easily dispense with those metaphysical values, even though it has difficulty taking them seriously. (As President Dwight Eisenhower once announced, channeling Groucho Marx, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief-and I don’t care what it is.”) Religious faith in this view is both vital and vacuous. God is ritually invoked on American political platforms, but it would not do to raise him in a committee meeting of the World Bank. In the United States, ideologues of the religious Right, aware of the market’s tendency to oust metaphysics, sought to put those values back in place. Thus does postmodern relativism breed a redneck fundamentalism; those who believe very little rub shoulders with those ready to believe almost anything. With the advent of Islamist terrorism, these contradictions have been dramatically sharpened. It is now more than ever necessary that the people should believe, even as the Western way of life deprives them of much incentive for doing so.
Assured since the fall of the Soviet bloc that it could proceed with impunity to pursue its own global interests, the West overreached itself. Just when ideologies in general seemed to have packed up for good, the United States put them back on the agenda in the form of a peculiarly poisonous brand of neoconservatism. Like characters in some second-rate piece of science fiction, a small cabal of fanatical dogmatists occupied the White House and proceeded to execute their well-laid plans for world sovereignty. It was almost as bizarre as Scientologists taking over 10 Downing Street, or Da Vinci Code buffs patrolling the corridors of the Elysée Palace. The much-trumpeted Death of History, meaning that capitalism was now the only game in town, reflected the arrogance of the West’s project of global domination; and that aggressive project triggered a backlash in the form of radical Islam.
And so the very act of attempting to close history down has sprung it open again. Both at home and globally, economic liberalism rides roughshod over peoples and communities, and in the process triggers just the kind of violent social and cultural backlash that liberalism is least capable of handling. In this sense, too, terrorism highlights certain contradictions endemic to liberal capitalism. We have seen already that pluralistic liberal societies do not so much hold beliefs as believe that people should be allowed freely to hold beliefs. The summum bonum is to leave believers to get on with it unmolested. Such a purely formal or procedural approach to belief necessitates keeping entrenched faiths or identities at a certain ironic arm’s length.
Yet this value-liberal society’s long, unruly, eternally inconclusive argument-also brings vulnerability. A tight national consensus, desirable in the face of external attack, is hard to pull off in liberal democracies, and not least when they turn multicultural. Lukewarmness about belief is likely to prove a handicap when one is confronted with a full-bloodedly metaphysical enemy. The very pluralism you view as an index of your spiritual strength may have a debilitating effect on your political authority, especially against zealots who regard pluralism as a form of intellectual cowardice. The idea, touted in particular by some Americans, that Islamic radicals are envious of Western freedoms is about as convincing as the suggestion that they are secretly hankering to sit in cafés smoking dope and reading Gilles Deleuze.

In the face of the social devastation wreaked by economic liberalism, some besieged groups can feel secure only by clinging to an exclusivist identity or unbending doctrine. And in fact, advanced capitalism has little alternative to offer them. The kind of automated, built-in consent it seeks from its citizens does not depend all that much on what they believe. As long as they get out of bed, roll into work, consume, pay their taxes, and refrain from beating up police officers, what goes on in their heads and hearts is mostly secondary. Advanced capitalism is not the kind of regime that exacts much spiritual commitment from its subjects. Indeed, zeal is more to be feared than encouraged. That is an advantage in “normal” times, since demanding too much belief from men and women can easily backfire. But it is much less a benefit in times of political tumult.
Economic liberalism has generated great tides of global migration, which within the West has given birth to so-called multiculturalism. At its least impressive, multiculturalism blandly embraces difference as such, without looking too closely into what one is differing over. It imagines that there is something inherently positive about having a host of different views on the same subject. Such facile pluralism tends to numb the habit of vigorously contesting other people’s beliefs-of calling them arrant nonsense or unmitigated garbage, for example. This is not the best training ground for taking on people whose beliefs can cave in skulls. One of the more agreeable aspects of Christopher Hitchens’s polemic against religion, God Is Not Great, is its author’s ready willingness to declare that he thinks religion poisonous and disgusting. Perhaps he finds it mildly embarrassing in his new, post-Marxist persona that “Religion is poison” was the slogan under which Mao launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet. But he is right to stick to his guns even so. Beliefs are not to be respected just because they are beliefs. Societies in which any kind of abrasive criticism constitutes “abuse” clearly have a problem.
That problem encompasses a contradictory fact: the more capitalism flourishes on a global scale, the more multiculturalism threatens to loosen the hold of the nation-state over its subjects. Culture, after all, is what helps power grow roots, interweaving it with our lived experience and thus tightening its grip on us. A power which has to sink roots in many diverse cultures simultaneously is at a signal disadvantage. A British defense think tank recently published a report arguing that a “misplaced deference to multiculturalism” that fails “to lay down the line to immigrant communities” was weakening the fight against political extremists. The problem, the report warned, was one of social fragmentation in a multicultural nation increasingly divided over its history, identity, aims, and values. When it came to the fight against terrorism, the nation’s liberal values, in short, were undermining themselves.
Multiculturalism threatens the existing order not only because it can create a breeding ground for terrorists, but because the political state depends on a reasonably tight cultural consensus. British prime ministers believe in a common culture-but what they mean is that everyone should share their own beliefs so that they won’t end up bombing London Underground stations. The truth, however, is that no cultural belief is ever extended to sizable groups of newcomers without being transformed in the process. This is what a simpleminded philosophy of “integration” fails to recognize. There is no assumption in the White House, Downing Street, or the Elysée Palace that one’s own beliefs might be challenged or changed in the act of being extended to others. A common culture in this view incorporates outsiders into an already established, unquestionable framework of values, leaving them free to practice whichever of their quaint customs pose no threat. Such a policy appropriates newcomers in one sense, while ignoring them in another. It is at once too possessive and too hands-off. A common culture in a more radical sense of the term is not one in which everyone believes the same thing, but one in which everyone has equal status in cooperatively determining a way of life in common.
If this is to include those from cultural traditions that are currently marginal, then the culture we are likely to end up with will be very different from the one we have now. For one thing, it will be more diverse. A culture that results from the active participation of all its members is likely to be more mixed and uneven than a uniform culture that admits new members only on its own terms. In this sense, equality generates difference. It is not a question of mustering a diversity of cultures under the common umbrella of Britishness, but of putting that whole received identity into the melting pot and seeing what might emerge. If the British or American way of life really were to take on board the critique of materialism, hedonism, and individualism made by many devout Muslims, Western civilization would most certainly be altered for the good. This is a rather different vision from the kind of multiculturalism that leaves Muslims and others alone to do their own charmingly esoteric stuff, commending them from a safe distance.
Part of what has happened in our time is that God has shifted over from the side of civilization to the side of barbarism. He is no longer the short-haired, blue-blazered God of the West-well, perhaps he is in the United States, but not in Porto or Cardiff or Bologna. Instead, he is a wrathful, dark-skinned God who, if he did create John Locke and John Stuart Mill, has long since forgotten the fact. One can still speak of the clash between civilization and barbarism; but a more subtle form of the same dispute is to speak of a conflict between civilization and culture. Civilization in this dichotomy means the universal, autonomous, prosperous, individual, rationally speculative, self-doubting, and ironic; culture means the customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective, unironic, and a-rational. Culture signifies all those unreflective loyalties and allegiances for which men and women in extreme circumstances are prepared to kill. For the most part, the former colonizing nations are civilizations, while the former colonies are cultures.
Civilization is precious but fragile; culture is raw but potent. Civilizations kill to protect their material interests, whereas cultures kill to defend their identity. These are seeming opposites; yet the pressing reality of our age is that civilization can neither dispense with culture nor easily coexist with it. The more pragmatic and materialistic civilization becomes, the more culture is summoned to fulfill the emotional and psychological needs that it cannot handle-and the more, therefore, the two fall into mutual antagonism. What is meant to mediate universal values to particular times and places ends up turning aggressively against them. Culture is the repressed that returns with a vengeance. Because it is supposed to be more localized, immediate, spontaneous, and a-rational than civilization, it is the more aesthetic concept of the two. The kind of nationalism that seeks to affirm a native culture is always the most poetic kind of politics-the “invention of literary men,” as someone once remarked. You would not have put the great Irish nationalist Padraic Pearse on the sanitation committee.

Religion falls on both sides of this fence simultaneously, which is part of its formidable power. As civilization, religion is doctrine, institution, authority, metaphysical speculation, transcendent truth, choirs, and cathedrals. As culture, it is myth, ritual, savage irrationalism, spontaneous feeling, and the dark gods. Religion in the United States is by and large a civilizational matter, whereas in England it is largely a traditional way of life-more akin to high tea or clog dancing than to socialism or Darwinism-which it would be bad form to take too seriously (the highly English Dawkins is in this respect egregiously un-English). One couldn’t imagine the Queen’s chaplain asking you if you have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. As the Englishman remarked, it’s when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it’s time to give it up. Polls reveal that most of the English believe that religion has done more harm than good, an eminently reasonable opinion unlikely to be endorsed in Dallas.
What the champions of civilization rightly hold against culture is its tendency to substitute for rational debate. Just as in some traditionalist societies you can justify what you do on the grounds that your ancestors did it, so for some culturalists you can justify what you do because your culture does it. This seems benign if one is thinking of Iceland, the Azande, or the maritime community, but less so for Hell’s Angels, neofascists, or Scientologists. In his article, “Islam, Islamisms, and the West,” Aijaz Ahmad points out that culture has come in some quarters to mean that one is how one is because of who one is-a doctrine shared by racism. An appeal to culture becomes a way of absolving us to some extent from moral responsibility as well as from rational argument. Just as it is part of their way of life to dig traps for tigers, so it is part of our way of life to manufacture cruise missiles. Postmodern thought is hostile to the idea of foundations; yet in postmodernism, culture becomes the new absolute, conceptual end-stop, the transcendental signifier. Culture is the point at which one’s spade hits rock bottom, the skin out of which one cannot leap, the horizon over which one is unable to peer. This is a strange case to launch at a point in history when Nature, a somewhat passé idea until our attention was recently drawn to its looming devastation, may be on the point of trumping human culture as a whole.
Yet there is a certain sacred resonance to the idea of culture. For several centuries now, after all, it has been proposed as the secular alternative to a failing religious faith. This is not a wholly ridiculous notion. Like religion, culture is a matter of ultimate values, intuitive certainties, hallowed traditions, assured identities, shared beliefs, symbolic action, and a sense of transcendence. It is culture, not religion, that for many men and women today forms the heart of a heartless world. This is true whether one has in mind the idea of culture as literature and the arts, or as a cherished way of life. Most aesthetic concepts are pieces of displaced theology, and the work of art, seen as mysterious, self-dependent, and self-moving, is an image of God for an agnostic age. Yet culture fails as an ersatz religion. Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired. And celebrating culture as a way of life is too parochial a version of redemption.
Some seek to reconcile culture and civilization (or as some might translate these terms, the Germans and the French) by claiming that the values of civilization, though universal, need a local habitation and a name-some sector of the globe that acts as the postal address of human civility itself. And this, of course, has been the West. In this view the West is a civilization, to be sure; but it also the very essence of the thing itself, rather as France is one nation among many, yet also the very essence of the intellect. For those to whom this argument seems supremacist, there exists what seems at first glance a rather less chauvinistic version of it. It is associated with the philosopher Richard Rorty (and, to a lesser extent, with the literary critic Stanley Fish).
Rorty’s kind of argument allows you to acknowledge that Western civilization is indeed a “culture” in the sense of being local and contingent-even as you claim its values are the ones to promote. This means behaving as though your values have all the force of universal ones, while at the same time insulating them from any thoroughgoing critique. They are immune to such critique because you do not claim any rational foundation for them; yours, after all, is just one culture among others. In a bold move, you can abandon a rational defense of your way of life for a culturalist one, even though the price of doing so is leaving it perilously ungrounded. “Culture” and “civilization” here felicitously coincide. The West is most certainly civilized; but since its civility descends to it from its contingent cultural history, there is no need to provide rational grounds for it. One thus wins for oneself the best of both worlds.

Reason alone can face down a barbarous irrationalism, but to do so it must draw upon forces and sources of faith which run deeper than itself, and which can therefore bear an unsettling resemblance to the very irrationalism it is seeking to repel. Such a situation confronted Europe during the Second World War. Would liberal humanism really prove adequate to defeat fascism, a movement which drew from powerfully irrational sources-or could fascism be vanquished only by an antagonist that cut as deep as it did, as socialism claimed to do? The question of reason and its opposite was a major theme of Thomas Mann’s great novel The Magic Mountain. In this work, life and death, affirmation and negation, Eros and Thanatos, the sacred and the obscene, are all interwoven in the conflict between Settembrini, the liberal humanist, and the sinister Naphta, Jesuit, communist, and rebel. Naphta is a full-blooded modernist in satanic revolt against Settembrini’s spirit of liberal bourgeois modernity. An exponent of sacrifice, spiritual absolutism, religious zeal, and the cult of death, he draws his life from the archaic and bloodstained springs of culture, whereas the civilized Settembrini is a sunny-minded champion of reason, progress, liberal values, and the European mind.
There can be no doubt which character in The Magic Mountain our civilized New Atheists such as Hitchens and Dawkins would find congenial, and which they would vilify. The novel itself, however, is a trifle more subtle in its judgments. The Settembrini who celebrates life is actually at death’s door, and the First World War during which the novel is set spells the ruin of his high nineteenth-century hopes. Naphta may be pathologically in love with death, but Settembrini’s buoyant humanism thrives on the repression of it. He cannot stomach the truth that to be human is, among other things, to be sick. Perversity and aberration are constitutive of the human condition, not just irrational deviations from it. It is significant in this respect that nobody in the clinic in which the novel’s action takes place ever seems to be cured.
What the novel’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, comes to recognize is a form of death-in-life which is the way of neither Naphta nor Settembrini. It involves affirming the human humbly, nonhubristically, in the knowledge of its frailty and mortality. This tragic humanism embraces the disruptiveness of death, as Settembrini does not; but, unlike Naphta, it refuses to turn death into a fetish. At the heart of Castorp’s moving utopian vision of love and comradeship in the novel’s great snow scene lurks the horrifying image of a child torn limb from limb, a token of the blood sacrifice that underpins civilization itself. Having been granted this epiphany, Hans will henceforth refuse to let death have mastery over his thoughts. It is love, not reason, he muses, which is stronger than death, and from that alone can flow the sweetness of civilization. Reason in itself is too abstract and impersonal a force to face down death. But such love, to be authentic, must live “always in silent recognition of the blood sacrifice.” One must honor beauty, idealism, and the hunger for progress, while confessing in Marxist or Nietzschean style how much blood and wretchedness lie at their root. Only by bowing to our mortality can we live fulfilled.
If culture can prove no adequate stand-in for religion, neither can it serve as a substitute for politics. The shift from modernity to postmodernity represents in part the belief that culture, not politics, holds center stage. Postmodernism is more perceptive about lifestyles than it is about material interests-better on identity than oil. As such it has an ironic affinity with radical Islam, which also holds that what is ultimately at stake are beliefs and values. I have argued elsewhere that Western postmodernism has some of its roots in the failure of revolutionary politics. In a similar way, Islamic fundamentalism is among other things a virulent response to the defeat of the Muslim Left-a defeat in which the West has actively conspired. In some quarters, the language of religion is replacing the discourse of politics.
If politics has failed to unite the wretched of the earth to transform their condition, we can be sure that culture will not accomplish the task in its stead. Culture, for one thing, is too much a matter of affirming what you are or have been, rather than what you might become. What, then, of religion? To be sure, Christendom once saw itself as a unity of culture and civilization; and if religion has proved far and away the most powerful, tenacious, universal symbolic form humanity has yet to come up with, it is partly on this account. What other symbolic form has managed to forge such direct links between the most absolute and universal of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women? What other way of life has brought the most rarefied of ideas and the most palpable of human realities into such intimate relationship? Religious faith has established a hotline from personal interiority to transcendent authority-an achievement upon which the advocates of culture can only gaze with envy. Yet religion is as powerless as culture to emancipate the dispossessed. For the most part, it has not the slightest interest in doing so.

With the advent of modernity, culture and civilization were progressively riven, and faith driven increasingly into the private domain, or into the realm of everyday culture, as political sovereignty passed into the hands of the secular state. Along with the other two symbolic domains of art and sexuality, religion was unhooked to some extent from secular power; and the upshot of this privatization for all three symbolic forms was notably double-edged. On the one hand, they could act as precious sources of alternative value, and thus of political critique; on the other hand, their isolation from the public world caused them to become increasingly pathologized.
The prevailing global system, then, today faces an unwelcome choice. Either it trusts its native pragmatism in the face of its enemy’s absolutism, or it falls back on metaphysical values of its own-values that are looking increasingly tarnished and implausible. Does the West need to go full-bloodedly metaphysical to save itself? And if it does, can it do so without inflicting too much damage on its liberal, secular values, thus ensuring there is still something worth protecting from its illiberal opponents?
If Marxism once held out a promise of reconciling culture and civilization, it is partly because its founder was both a Romantic humanist and an heir of Enlightenment rationalism. Marxism is about culture and civilization together-sensuous particularity and universality, worker and citizen of the world, local allegiances and international solidarity, the free self-realization of flesh-and-blood individuals and a global cooperative commonwealth of them. But Marxism has suffered in our time a staggering political rebuff; and one of the places to which those radical impulses have migrated is-of all things-theology. In theology nowadays, one can find some of the most informed and animated discussions of Deleuze and Badiou, Foucault and feminism, Marx and Heidegger. That is not entirely surprising, since theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world-one whose subject is nothing less than the nature and transcendental destiny of humanity itself. These are not issues easily raised in analytic philosophy or political science. Theology’s remoteness from pragmatic questions is an advantage in this respect.
We find ourselves, then, in a most curious situation. In a world in which theology is increasingly part of the problem, it is also fostering the kind of critical reflection which might contribute to some of the answers. There are lessons that the secular Left can learn from religion, for all its atrocities and absurdities; and the Left is not so flush with ideas that it can afford to look such a gift horse in the mouth. But will either side listen to the other at present? Will Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins read this and experience an epiphany that puts the road to Damascus in the shade? To use two theological terms by way of response: not a hope in hell. Positions are too entrenched to permit such a dialogue. Mutual understanding cannot happen just anywhere, as some liberals tend to suppose. It requires its material conditions. And it seems unlikely these will emerge as long as the so-called war on terror continues to run its course.
The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.

e-mail this story format for printing ABOUT THE WRITER Terry Eagleton Terry Eagleton is the author of many books, including Literary Theory and The Gatekeeper: A Memoir. This essay is excerpted from Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate by Terry Eagleton, to be published April 21, 2009, by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2009 by Terry Eagleton. Reprinted with permission. Funding for this article has been provided by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Culture & Barbarism by Terry Eagleton
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Fundamentalists crave certainty and reject complexity

2009-04-18T17:17:00.002+05:30

Overview Introduction Integral Yoga Sri Aurobindo The Mother Sitemap Fundamentalism Juergensmeyer An-Na'im Lifton Issues Reviews Annotated Documents Further Documents Standpoints Letters Bio Data Integral Yoga Sri Aurobindo The Mother
Feedback about this site may be posted in the comments section to the Announcement of this site at SCIY (login required). Introduction Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism
Most "fundamentalisms" involve special forms of identity politics, meaning, and labeling, characterized by a quest for certainty, exclusiveness, and unambiguous boundaries, where the "Other" is the enemy demonized. It also reflects a mind-set uncompromising and antirelativist, as one response to the openness and uncertainties of a cosmopolitan world, and [tries] to chart a morally black and white path out of the gray zones of intimidating cultural and religious complexity. — Judith Nagata, Beyond Theology: Towards an Anthropology of ‘Fundamentalism’ (2001), page 481.

Fundamentalism in the broader sense
The reactionary form of religion that is now known as Fundamentalism has its roots in the ancient past, but the term itself is less than a hundred years old. “Fundamentalism” was first applied to a movement within Protestant Christianity that called for a return to the perceived “fundamentals” of Protestant belief, in particular the “inerrancy” or literal truth of the Bible.

Before 1980, the term “fundamentalism” was hardly used outside this Christian context. An occasional historian or social scientist extended the scope of the term to include reactionary movements within Islam, Hinduism, and other religions, but it was not until after the Iranian revolution of 1979 that the term “fundamentalism” entered common parlance in contexts far removed from its Protestant origins. Read more...

Characteristics of the Fundamentalist: A Summary
We now are in a position to arrive at a summary description of the fundamentalist mind set. We will arrange the points noted by Marty, Nagata, Antoun, Lifton and others under two main heads: psychological (dealing with mind set) and practical (dealing with action).
Psychologically, fundamentalists crave certainty and reject complexity. They are obsessed with textual and doctrinal purity. They feel threatened by anything that appears to challenge their assumptions, and are inclined to be authoritarian and oppositional. Exclusivist or anti-pluralist, they are opposed to open discussion. In addition, they are reactionary or anti-evolutionary. Rejecting modernity as a whole, they selectively appropriate aspects of modernity that help them in their action.
Practically, fundamentalists set rigid boundaries and try to control the flow of information. They interpret sacred texts in a way that supports their convictions, and use manipulative language, by which they attempt to rouse the masses. They are not averse to the use of violence. They demonize those they believe to be their enemies, casting themselves as heroes in a great cosmic drama.
In a separate section we will see whether these characteristics are present in the leaders of the anti-Heehs movement and, more generally, among those who are trying to turn the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother into a narrow religion.

Religious Fundamentalism
The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends ... is the source of all religious fanaticism. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Once considered exclusively a matter of religion, theology, or scriptural correctness, use of the term "fundamentalism" has recently undergone metaphorical expansion into other domains and other forms of absolutist ideological expression, as the previous section has shown. In the public and media portrayal of fundamentalism in particular, political militancy has superseded concern over texts, as one gathers from the identification of fundamentalisms in non-Abrahamic religion zones such as South Asia — for instance, the Hindu Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In the present section we focus on religious fundamentalism. Read more...

An Outbreak of Fundamentalism?
Religious fanaticism is something psychologically lowborn and ignorant — and usually in its action fierce, cruel and base. — Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 490

Those who use the term “fundamentalism” to describe the activities of religious groups or individuals must be very clear about what they mean by the word. Over the last thirty years, fundamentalism has ceased to indicate merely a particular sort of textual literalism in religious matters. More and more, it is used to refer to a religious orientation characterized by certain psychological attitudes and habits of action. There are similarities and differences among the meanings of fundamentalist, traditionalist, conservative, zealot, ideologue, and fanatic. Each of these describes in its own way a combination of belief and action that has often made religion a divisive and reactionary force.

Sri Aurobindo never wrote about fundamentalism per se (the term was coined after he had completed his major writings, and during his lifetime was confined to its original context: Protestant Christianity), but when he wrote of religious fanaticism he characterized it in ways that modern writers on fundamentalism would have no difficulty recognizing. He put his finger on the nature of fanaticism and much of what is now called fundamentalism in the sentence quoted above. Though the two words are not synonymous, both fanaticism and fundamentalism tend to be seen as characterized by “lowborn and ignorant” habits of thought and can lead to “fierce, cruel and base” modes of action.

Words with negative connotations often degenerate into vague terms of abuse. Words commonly employed in this way include “fascism” and “fundamentalism”. We wish to avoid any loose and imprecise use of the latter term. We undertake our analysis of the writings of the leaders of a loud and potentially disastrous movement among followers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and practitioners or would-be practitioners of their Integral Yoga in a spirit of seriousness, marked not by enmity but by sadness. We find many troubling characteristics in the rhetoric and activities of the leaders of this movement, and believe that there are grounds for regarding their actions, prima facie, as signs of fundamentalism.

In what follows, we will see how closely the claims made and the language used by these individuals approach the characteristics of fundamentalism that are acknowledged by authorities on the subject. In our conclusion, we will consider whether the term “fundamentalism” can rightly be applied to the mindset and actions of these individuals. Read more...

Fundamentalism in the Oxford English Dictionary Read more...
The following articles deal with the issue of fundamentalism in a broader context. Their relevance to the problem of fundamentalism in the IY community is indicated in the introductory sections and, and more detail, in subsequent comments that were originally posted at the SCIY blog.

Religious Nationalism and Transnationalism in a Global World
In this essay MARK JUERGENSMEYER looks at the responses to old secular nationalisms, which are under siege precisely at a time when they have themselves been weakened by globalization. Their vulnerability has been the occasion for new ethno-religious politics to step into the breach and shore up national identities and purposes in their own distinctive ways. Some forms of ethno-religious politics are global, some are virulently anti-global, and yet others are content with the attempt to create ethno-religious nation-states.

MARK JUERGENSMEYER is professor of sociology and director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author or editor of a dozen books, including Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Third edition, California 2003), The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (California 1993), and Religion and Global Civil Society (Oxford 2005). Read more...

Competing Visions of History
ABDULLAHI A. AN-NA'IM is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. Originally from Sudan, An-Na'im is a disciple of nationalist leader and Islamic reformer and Sufi, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who was executed in 1985 by the regime of President Gaafar Nimeiry. Taha's pronouncement of his first political incarceration by the British is reminiscent of Sri Aurobindo's: "When I settled in prison I began to realize that I was brought there by my Lord and thence I started my Khalwah with Him."

An-Na'im's specialties include human rights in Islam and cross-cultural issues in human rights. He is the director of the Religion and Human Rights Program at Emory. He also participates in Emory's Center for the Study of Law and Religion. An-Naim was formerly the Executive Director of the African bureau of Human Rights Watch. He argues for a synergy and interdependence between human rights, religion, critical thought and secularism, instead of a dichotomy and incompatibility between them.

A crucial point in An-Na'im's fascinating and insightful article "Competing Visions of History in Internal Islamic Discourse and Islamic-Western Dialogue" is the hegemony of the "center" over the "peripheries" as defined in terms of the historical origins of Islam. Pondicherry is the Mecca of the Integral Yoga community. The question Angiras raises in his comment is: does this make Sri Aurobindo the property of the Ashram and India, or does he belong to the world? The attempt by defenders of the faith in Pondicherry to seize control of the representation of Sri Aurobindo on the other side of the globe resembles the hijacking of Islam by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Read more...

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
This is an edited excerpt from Chapter 22, titled "Ideological Totalism," of Robert Jay Lifton's book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China. Lifton, a psychiatrist and distinguished professor at the City University of New York, has studied the psychology of extremism for decades. He testified at the 1976 bank robbery trial of Patty Hearst about the theory of "coercive persuasion." First published in 1961, his book was reprinted in 1989 by the University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill and London). Lifton's analysis of "thought-reform" applied to cultic behavior is very instructive in our present space-time. Read more...

It's not what i've seen but what i've failed to see that remains most vivid in memory

2009-03-07T08:04:00.003+05:30

Columnists Dil ek mandir
TOI, 7 Mar 2009, 0000 hrs IST, Jug Suraiya

The inveterate tourist's work is never done. Just back from Pondicherry, i'm asked by people: The meditation room, the sanctum sanctorum, in the Matri Mandir in Auroville is amazing, no? I try to steer the conversation away from the inside of the Matri Mandir by talking about Pondicherry's French Quarter with its leafy streets lined with white, porticoed mansions, jalousied windows heavy-lidded in the somnolent afternoon. I talk about Le Dupleix, the beautifully restored hotel where we stayed, which used to be the official residence of the mayor of Pondicherry. I talk about the Ashram founded by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. I talk about...

You didn't see the Matri Mandir, did you? my interlocutors say accusingly. 'Course i saw the Matri Mandir; from the outside it looks just like a great big gold golf ball waiting for Tiger Woods to come and whack it away into the wide blue yonder, i protest. Ah, but you didn't go inside the Matri Mandir, right? my interrogators nail me down. And i have to confess that no, i didn't go inside the Mandir, to see the 12 'petal' rooms, and the central chamber, all white marble with a crystal bowl in the middle which at a particular moment of the day is struck by a shaft of sun from a roof opening and bursts into dazzling radiance, like the blinding vision of a sightless seer.

There is a very good reason that i didn't get to see the inside of the Matri Mandir: i'd have had to get onto a seven-day waiting list to gain admission, and i wasn't going to be in the vicinity for anywhere near seven days. However, such mundane excuses like waiting lists don't wash. Though i'm not a devotee of Sri Aurobindo, or indeed anyone else, when one's an inveterate tourist like me, admitting that you've been to Pondicherry and not seen the interior of the Matri Mandir at Auroville is like saying you went to Paris and gave the Eiffel Tower a miss, or skipped the Sistine Chapel when you were in Rome.

It's an admission of total and utter failure as an inveterate tourist. An inveterate tourist is the ultimate voyeur, obsessed with the compulsion to go see despite the heat of summer sun or chill of winter rain, despite daunting queues and humungous prices of admission whatever it is that lies around the next corner, the next bend of the road. As an inveterate tourist i've forced myself to wake up at the crack of gloom and go to see the sun rise over the temple at Abu Simbel in Egypt; i've skipped lunch and walked 70 blocks in Manhattan to save money to buy an entry ticket to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; i've suffered leeches and worse to look at the orang-utans in the Sepilok rainforest of North Borneo.

But for all these hits, there've been even more misses. Though i've been a stone's throw away in Las Vegas, i've not seen the Grand Canyon; despite being in nearby Hong Kong, i've not taken in the Great Wall of China; i've visited Moscow's Kremlin but couldn't get to see its fabulous collection of jewelled Faberge eggs. Curiously enough, it's not what i've seen but what i've failed to see that remains most vivid in memory. Like snapshots in a dusty photo album, that which has been seen and witnessed begins to fade and blur in the mind's eye. But that which we haven't seen but only imagined haunts and teases the imagination like a mirage, an optical illusion tantalisingly close and yet unreachable.

The paintings in the New York museum have long been forgotten; the unseen jewels of the Kremlin glitter brighter than ever in my mind. And now there's another addition to my long list of sights left unseen: the interior of the temple at Auroville. It's not where we have been but where we haven't that keeps us going. Dil ek mandir and all that, as we inveterate tourists might say. jug.suraiya@timesgroup.com

I wish Wolterstorff had given due credit to the Stoic and Roman law sources

2009-02-25T17:56:00.004+05:30

David Johnston: The Immanent Frame February 25th, 2009 at 6:53 am

Since Professor Wolterstorff chose to respond to the points I made about his treatment of Rawls, let me explain why I think he misreads and consequently brushes off Rawls prematurely. I’d like also to amplify a point I originally made in passing about the relevance of the Stoic tradition of thought to his arguments about justice—arguments that are, I repeat, challenging and serious.

In the slightly more than two pages Wolterstorff devotes to a discussion of Rawls, he argues two points: first, that Rawls’s theory of justice is an inherent natural rights theory (that is, a theory of the type Wolterstorff defends in his book), and second, that Rawls “does nothing at all to develop an account of such rights.” I believe that the first of these claims is mistaken. The second claim is ambiguous, since the phrase “an account of” can mean various things, but on most reasonable readings, this claim also seems to me mistaken.

The central piece of textual evidence Wolterstorff cites in support of his first claim comes from a footnote late in A Theory of Justice (1971) in which Rawls explains how a feature of his theory of justice can be used to “interpret the concept of natural rights.” Rawls’s central point here is that the term “natural” suggests a contrast between rights identified by the theory of justice and rights that are merely conventional; the former are fundamental, while the latter are derivative and can be overridden by other considerations. So there is an affinity between the idea of natural rights and the idea of Rawls’s theory that individuals should as a matter of justice enjoy some rights that cannot be overridden by other considerations, such as the perceived greater good of the whole.

Although Rawls is happy to point to the affinity between his conception of rights and the notion of natural rights, he makes it absolutely clear that this affinity is nothing more than that, and is not an identity, as Wolterstorff would have it. In Rawls’s view, the concept of a natural right is the concept of a foundation or premise of a theory of justice. Rawls rejects the concept of natural rights because he regards the account of the rights all individuals should enjoy without fear that those rights will be overridden as a conclusion, not a premise, of his theory.

For his interpretation, Wolterstorff leans heavily on a claim about Rawls’s theory that Ronald Dworkin published in 1977. But Rawls rejected Dworkin’s claim implicitly in his lectures on “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (published in 1980) and explicitly in his essay “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical” in 1985. In these writings Rawls makes it clear that his theory is “conception-based,” not “rights-based.” That is why, as Wolterstorff observes, Rawls was so reluctant, already in A Theory of Justice (1971), to “make explicit the natural rights basis of his theory.”

Rawls in fact consistently rejected the idea that his theory of justice is based on the idea of natural rights, though he believed that his theory provided an illuminating reinterpretation of that idea, just as he believed that his idea of “legitimate expectations” provides a reinterpretation of the idea of “desert” (which he rejects) and his idea of “primary goods” provides an alternative to the idea of “well-being” (which he also rejects). I don’t understand why Wolterstorff so readily accepts Dworkin’s account of Rawls’s theory, which Rawls repudiated not long after it appeared in print, rather than accepting Rawls’s account of his own theory.

In his response to my initial comments on his book, Wolterstorff says that if Rawls does not assume the existence of natural rights, “then it is even more clear that he is not, for me on this issue, a dialogue partner.” But this defense seems disingenuous. Wolterstorff’s book is a defense of the idea of natural rights; he does not address it only to readers who accept his conclusion. Moreover, he does treat as serious dialogue partners writers who defend the idea of justice as right order, an idea that he considers the major competitor to his idea of justice as inherent natural rights.

The principal reason why it seems unfortunate that Wolterstorff brushes aside Rawls’s theory so quickly is that Rawls does offer an “account of rights.” He offers an elaborate and challenging account of the reasons why the members of a just society would accept the proposition that each and every one of them has rights that cannot be overridden for the sake of a greater good. Wolterstorff’s account is foundationalist, while Rawls’s is constructivist in character. Rawls offers an important alternative that is neither a variant of “justice as right order” nor of “justice as inherent rights,” and Wolterstorff’s own argument could be improved considerably through recognition of the distinctiveness of Rawls’s account.

As I suggested in my initial comment, I wish also that Wolterstorff had given due credit to the Stoic and Roman law sources of natural law thinking. In De legibus Cicero, who was assassinated toward the end of 43 B.C.E., asserts that justice is rooted in “that highest law, which was born eons before any law was written or indeed before any state was established” and argues that justice is rooted in nature, and specifically in the nature of human beings. Cicero insists on the equality of all human beings with regard to justice. The reasons why Wolterstorff’s neglect of Cicero, the Stoic tradition, and the tradition of Roman law is unfortunate are twofold.

First, as a matter of historical fact, the contributions of these traditions to thinking about justice and about natural law and natural rights in particular, including the thinking of medieval Christian writers, are of tremendous importance.
Second, Cicero in particular addresses many of the difficulties with secularist accounts of rights Wolterstorff discusses. It may be that Wolterstorff would have rejected Cicero’s arguments, but it might have strengthened his argument if he had at least considered them. The Immanent Frame

Just as Socrates had played a mediating role, so too Soloviev called for a reconciliation

2009-02-05T05:09:00.005+05:30

Vladimir S. Soloviev and the politics of human rights.
Journal of Church and State: 01-JAN-99 Author: Wozniuk, Vladimir

Soloviev once wrote that, "I not only believe in all that is supernatural, but properly speaking, it is only in this that I believe."(56) The philosopher-theologian's steadfast adherence to the Nicene Creed as his confession of faith in the face of what he viewed as its increasing abandonment by those calling themselves Christians is important in obtaining a coherent picture of his writing on contemporary Russian affairs, Increasingly jaded by what he saw as a corrupt church distorting Christianity and justifying the repression of ethnic minorities, Soloviev at one point condemned the prevalent "ecclesial dogmatism, false spiritualism and individualism" in Russia, even suggesting that uniting "with contemporary unbelievers in a struggle against contemporary Christians" might be preferable to seeking Christian unity.(57)

Soloviev even augured a "great Divine fate" in store for Russia, consisting of inevitable judgment in the form of retribution against Orthodoxy and tsarism coming from the East. In his well-known poem "Panmongolism," Soloviev the prophet-poet claimed that the second Rome (Byzantium) had fallen because "Prince, priest and Emperor" had "disavowed" the Messiah, and now "flatterers of Russia" were repeating to her "... over and over, You are the Third Rome!" If Russia would not renounce her unjust imperial past, a terrible price would be exacted: "And the Third Rome lies in the dust, Yet now there will be no Fourth."(58)

III. POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS RECONCILIATION AT THE END OF HISTORY Still, Soloviev retained faith that true religious and political morality would be regenerated in human community at the "end of history." The eschatalogical dimension of Soloviev's thought did not become fully visible until 1900 and the last part of his final project, Three Conversations on War, Progress and the End of Universal History ..., which he provocatively entitled "A Brief Tale about the Antichrist."(59) This political-religious allegory is not only closely linked to his earlier darkly-foreboding poem "Panmongolism," the opening lines of which appear as an epigraph to the story, but also to several essays published two to three years earlier, and in which a number of the tale's contemporary inspirations and sources can be discerned.

Soloviev had become interested in the problems of a planned ecumenical congress scheduled to convene at the end of the century in Paris, which subsequently became the topic of an essay titled "The Second Congress of Religion."(60) Long before it would convene, Soloviev explained that the issue of "truth and error" in dogma presented an insurmountable barrier for many would-be participants, most notably Russians. Perhaps more than coincidentally, overcoming just such problems of ecumenical disagreements would emerge as one of the central themes in the tale's drama of the reconciliation of the three main branches of Christianity--Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism--and its suggestion that the churches would be reconciled to Judaism as well. Certain other elements of "A Brief Tale ..." appear to be derived from the pages of the Russian press and the annals of the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, which recorded and expressed serious concerns about various bizarre manifestations of millenarian anxieties that had surfaced in Russia's provinces.

Such concerns also became the subject of Soloviev's article, "The Spiritual Condition of the Russian People," which examined the mood of suspicion in certain remote regions of Russia regarding the census being conducted at the time, perceived by some as a harbinger of the coming Antichrist, the beginning of "sorrows and trials" forecast in the Revelation of St. John.(61) Unique among Soloviev's endeavors, "A Brief Tale about the Antichrist" operates on many different levels and has yielded a variety of not-inconsistent interpretations. The story has been viewed as representing part of Soloviev's "veiled controversy with Tolstoy," his final salvo, as it were, in an intense debate over spiritual matters which had gone on for years.(62)

The issue, of course, was Tolstoy's "new religion," which Soloviev understood to be but a variant of ancient heresies such as Arianism and Monophysitism. The story is also generally considered to be his final legacy to an unbelieving world; in it he offered his own perspectives on biblical prophecy in answer to millenarian expectations. He was obviously inspired by previous Antichrist themes, most notably Dostoevsky's legend of the Grand Inquisitor, which constitutes a key section of the novel Brothers Karamazov, and which has long been regarded by many as an important contribution to the timeless debates of normative political philosophy.(63)

Soloviev's tale should also be understood as the culmination of his efforts to refute Nietzschean will-to-power ethics directly from a biblical perspective, while at the same time outlining the inevitable consequences of human egoism outside the framework of the Divine will.(64) To Soloviev the Kantian idealist philosopher, the "acceleration of the historical process" and human progress were sure "symptoms" of the proximity of the end times,(65) in response to which he adapted the familiar Dostoevskian theme of the rise of an immoral and lawless "superman" who imposes his will upon others. But Soloviev's superman (who remains nameless) appears only at the end of history and takes on an overtly political persona. This subject had been of growing interest to Soloviev since at least 1897, when the first of several essays appeared reviewing Nietzsche and his influence in Russia.(66)

In this tale, a European "man of the future" experiences a psychotic break before he surrenders his will to a Mephistophelean spirit to become the Antichrist, who embarks on a career of intrigue that soon leads to his ascension to world political and religious leadership.(67) This characterization of a political superman who arrives in the last days to teach humanity a new morality and religion clearly harks back to Soloviev's withering denunciation of "Nietzscheanism" and those in Russia who sought to emulate Nietzsche's superman, which in his view was the product of an insane mind.(68) The tale also resonates with Soloviev's earlier warnings concerning the dangers of nationalism, the predatory politics of colonialism, and the classical European balance of power system. Soloviev's criticism of Russia's "anti-Christian" nationalism appeared late in his life in increasingly ominous tones, which can be seen prominently, for example, in a historical essay titled "Retribution."(69)

In this essay, he explained the Spanish Empire's collapse during the Spanish-American War as a direct result of its long history of repression, warning in a thinly-veiled analogy that the Russian Empire too would eventually have to face similar consequences for its continued abrogations of human rights perpetrated in the name of the Divine will.(70) European realpolitik and conflicting nationalist agendas of the day suggested an approaching confrontation of some kind, and Soloviev had long prophesied that the consequences of imitating the European powers' "politics of interest" would inevitably result in what he referred to as "cannibalism."(71) Soloviev depicted with remarkable prescience in this allegory the growth of powerful international organizations, European political unification into a "United States of Europe," and the expansion of Japanese power and influence. Extrapolating from Russia's enfeebled great power status, Soloviev concluded that the rise of Japan would lead to a confrontation and result in an explosive judgment upon Russia, prefiguring by several years the devastating Japanese blow dealt to the Russian imperial fleet at the battle of Tsushima strait in the Pacific (1905).

The story tells of a future Sino-Japanese conquest of Europe, which is virtually enslaved for fifty years before a revolt against Asian control leads up to the last stage of the historical process. The European Antichrist appears at the end of this age to unite apostate church and state at a Congress of world religions in Jerusalem by promising "prosperity" for all in exchange for subservient allegiance. However, an ecumenical remnant rejects this new world order, experiences the wrath of the Antichrist, and retreats into the desert outside the Holy City, where the truly faithful are reconciled and miraculous events produce the denouement of the world historical process at Armageddon, with Judaism playing a key role. While it might be tempting to see the idealist philosopher undertaking a pessimistic eschatological leap in this story--giving up hope for a more just political order in the here-and-now--it should be emphasized that Soloviev consistently and staunchly professed a faith that embodied an uncompromising eschatological dimension. And no one knew better than Soloviev himself the extent of the physical infirmities that had plagued him for some time; it might therefore also be suggested that he foresaw this to be his last work, and accordingly tried to make more proximate for others that which appeared to him to be an eventual certainty attested by the "signs of the times"--the end of rapacious and "cannibalistic" European politics after an extended time of troubles.

In conclusion, the allegory of"A Brief Tale ..." should be viewed as Soloviev's last public statement on the possibility of ethnic and religious reconciliation and the achievement of full, equitable rights for all. Rather than interpreting Soloviev's final work as exhibiting a late-in-life apocalyptic pessimism that does not square with the rest of the idealist philosopher-theologian's endeavors, one may understand this allegory as reflecting the light of optimism inherent in Judeo-Christian eschatology regarding the possibility of moral regeneration through reconciliation, which could only, however, become fully realized in political community at the "end of history."

How is it thinkable that there should be not a historical but a directly aesthetic relationship between us and The Divine Comedy?

2009-01-10T12:49:00.005+05:30

The best proof of that comes not from Freud but from Trotsky
Psychoanalysis and the "empty place" of psychology within Marxism By Frank Brenner It is my aim in this paper to show that a familiarity with the basic concepts and major discoveries of Freud’s psychoanalysis can be of great value to Marxists... 11:45 AM 12:24 PM

It was Trotsky, in fact, who made clear what those consequences were in the course of his struggle against the proponents of ‘proletarian culture’. Again, the issue hinged on a vulgarization of Marxism: the proletcultists treated artistic works as if they were political documents, judging them purely on the basis of their class content. Basing himself on Labriola, Trotsky argued:

"How is it thinkable that there should be not a historical but a directly aesthetic relationship between us and a medieval Italian book [i.e. The Divine Comedy]? This is explained by the fact that in class society, in spite of all its changeability, there are certain common features"

and he went on to cite love and the fear of death as typical examples.45 If these "common features" were the key to our ability to enjoy the art of the past, it followed from this that they were also the key to developing a viable Marxist perspective on art, as indeed Labriola had suggested. But the whole point about these features was that they were continuous, that they persisted "in spite of" the changeability of class society, in other words, that they were not at all like Novack’s molten glass.

Let us consider them more closely: obviously these features have to do with our being biological creatures who, though living in society, "do not cease to live also in nature". Does this mean, then, that there is some ‘natural man’ lurking underneath the veneer of our social being? If that is the case, then we are back to Kautsky’s position: human behavior is a matter of some social instinct, i.e. it is all biological. But these features clearly aren’t encoded in our genes, though obviously the fact of our biological existence is an essential precondition for them.

The difficulty is that we are used to thinking of biology and society as mutually exclusive opposites: biology is universal, society is specific; biology makes us human beings, society makes us slaves or serfs or workers. But the features we are talking about here don’t fit neatly into either category: they are social but they are also universal.

43 G. Plekhanov, "On the Materialist Understanding of History" in Selected Philosophical Works, v. 2, pp. 233-6.
44 In a 1970 book On Materialism, Sebastiano Timpanaro, an Italian radical, drew attention to the significance of Labriola’s remarks and made many of the points I have discussed in this paragraph (see pp. 45-51). Timpanaro’s book called for a revival of materialism and correctly attacked the idealism of the so-called ‘Hegelian-Marxist’ and structuralist tendencies within the radical circles of the time, but he discounted the importance of the dialectic and (interestingly in the context of the present discussion) was an opponent of psychoanalysis, devoting a book to discrediting the theory of the Freudian slip.
45 L. Trotsky, "Class and Art" in Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, pp. 67-8. 19Psychoanalysis and the "empty place" of psychology within Marxism

Take the fear of death as an example: though our experience of it has certainly changed greatly in the course of history, it has not changed to such an extent that it has become unrecognizable, which is why an ancient poem on the subject, despite being very different than a modern one, is not so different that we cannot understand what the classical poet was writing about or be moved by the feeling he was conveying. In that sense, we can speak of the fear of death as being universal. But is it biological, i.e. is it somehow a natural characteristic that we are born with?

The answer to that is quite simple: animals do not know they are going to die, only humans do. The fear of death, therefore, is not a given of our biology but an acquirement of our culture: it was only in the course of our development as humans that we became aware of it. But once we did acquire that awareness, it became a universal feature of our species. Thus, it is both social (or cultural, in the anthropological sense) and universal, and the same can be said for all of these common features. They comprise a common heritage of the human race which derives from our transition from the animal to the human state.

What we tend to overlook, however, is that this transition is not just ancient history but that it plays an ever-present role in our lives: just as we were forced to make this transition as a species, so each of us is forced to make a similar transition individually in the course of growing up and becoming a part of human society. Herein lies the key to a materialist conception of human nature, and that brings us to Freud. © Copyright 2007 by Frank Brenner. All rights reserved.

The Art Instinct; Arts & Letters Daily

2008-12-31T19:45:00.004+05:30

Showing off the life of the mind
Denis Dutton sketches out our innate artistry
Robert Fulford, National Post Published: Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Charlie Allnut, the gin-swilling Canadian boat operator played by Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, explains his drinking habits by saying, "It's only human nature." That doesn't satisfy the puritanical Rose Sayer, played by Katharine Hepburn. She answers: "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in the world to rise above."

Denis Dutton, in his exhilarating new book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution (Bloomsbury Press), comes down firmly on Rose's side. But while Rose sees humankind battling to escape its innate imperfections, Dutton outlines something grander and more complicated, the struggle of artists "to transcend even our animal selves" through their work. Evolution makes art possible by endowing humans with imagination and intellect. Art, in response, lifts us above the very instincts installed in our brains by evolution.

As 2009 approaches, let us set aside the great puzzle of 2008 ("Where did the money go?") and deal with a more pleasant question: "Why are we so crazy about the arts?" Why, for instance, did Toronto build, in the last four years, an opera house, two major museums, a conservatory and a ballet school, each of them risky and expensive? Speaking as a Torontonian, I appreciate the effort, but realize it wasn't done just to please me. This flurry of construction, like many such civic phenomena around the world, reflects an urgent need for the arts -- a need that became part of our personalities over many thousands of years.

We do all this, Dutton explains, because it's built into us. We have no choice.
Originally a Californian, Dutton is now professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He edits a learned journal, Philosophy and Literature, where he conducted a furious and much-publicized campaign against academics whose bad prose beats readers into submission just to prove "they are in the presence of a great and deep mind." More important, Dutton edits Arts & Letters Daily, a website that collates articles from everywhere on the planet and has become much more than its founders expected.
By shrewdly choosing the best material available, A&LD has emerged as the most useful intellectual magazine in the English-speaking world.

Dutton's interest in cultural evolution began in the 1960s when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in India. As a student he had absorbed (and partially accepted) the academic belief that cultures are so sealed off from each other that cross-cultural understanding is all but impossible; art is "socially constructed," the product of a certain time and place, nothing else. That suggests to many scholars that attempting to see connections between cultures amounts to a form of colonialism.

But in rural India, Dutton changed his mind. He discovered that the hopes, fears and vices of the Indians were altogether intelligible to a twentysomething graduate of the University of California Santa Barbara. And much of the cultural life of India was equally graspable. In Hyderabad he learned the sitar from a student of Ravi Shankar and found Indian music no more remote from Western music than 17th-century Italian madrigals are from the harmonies of Duke Ellington: "The lure of rhythmic drive, harmonic anticipation, lucid structure and divinely sweet melody cuts across cultures with ease."

How could this be? Were these cultures somehow connected at their roots?
In 1993 two Russian artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, organized a statistically impeccable survey of taste in 10 countries. They concluded that people from Iceland to China hold similar opinions about art: All express affection for landscapes, particularly landscapes dominated by blue, with water somehow involved. Melamid suggested that this implies that a blue landscape is genetically imprinted on humanity. It may be a paradise we all carry within us, he speculated. Perhaps "we came from the blue landscape and we want it."

Well, yes, says Dutton. In the Pleistocene era, the nomads who developed into people like us were (it's widely believed) living under blue African skies in savannas and woodlands. These protein-rich regions were good hunting grounds. Those who chose to inhabit that landscape had a "survival advantage." They prospered, had children, passed on their genes.

That process continued for a length of time that we find almost impossible to imagine -- about 1.6 million years, or 80,000 generations. In the extreme slo-mo theatre of evolution, the architecture of the mind developed. Countless minor choices, when rewarded by success, created impulses that live within us now.

Take, for instance, the universal obsession with storytelling. In all cultures (including the few remaining clusters of hunter-gatherers) narrative is an essential element. It's both a source of pleasure and a way to convey information. Those who had this inclination and talent in the Pleistocene era had a special "survival advantage." A nomad with a storyteller's imagination could weigh a group's travel plans, outlining a new territory's opportunities against its potential dangers. Storytelling, perhaps, began as a question of life and death. In detailing the complications that followed, Dutton demonstrates both his own poised scholarship and the infinite richness of the subject he's opening up.

And music? There's no obvious reason for it to exist, since the ability to perceive pitched sound provides in itself no contribution to survival. Dutton notes Charles Darwin's suggestion that musical tones and rhythm were part of courtship for our ancestors. And perhaps musical sounds were a way of inventing language. Dutton finds that plausible and suggests that music and dance also build "empathy, co-operation and social solidarity." He speculates that music, dancing, storytelling and other art forms "evolved specifically to strengthen the social health of hunter-gatherer bands."

The Art Instinct offers fresh and liberating ideas while demonstrating Dutton's profound sense of curiosity and his willingness to take risks while dealing with puzzling and largely fragmentary pre-history. He bluntly argues with fashionable theorists and the reviews of his book will not be uniformly favourable. Some will be offended and angry.

Whatever the critical response, the discussion of his book deserves to reach far beyond academics and people directly involved in the arts. His subject is the mysterious beginning of the cultural life that all of us, on whatever level of complexity, live. As he says, we resemble our distant ancestors in the way we share communion with other humans through art. "Our art instinct is theirs." Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

Sri Aurobindo’s writings are more complex than Wilber seems willing to admit on the subject of race

2008-12-24T15:48:00.003+05:30

"Such a Body We Must Create:" New Theses on Integral Micropolitics Daniel Gustav Anderson INTEGRAL REVIEW December 2008 Vol. 4, No. 2 Anderson: New Theses on Integral Micropolitics

Theology as such is not necessarily a problem or a solution to a problem. My point in this instance is that when theology is asked to perform as if it were criticism, difficulties arise (see Theses Two, Three, and Six), counterproductive and unneeded ones. Specifically, the incorporation of certain theological positions into integral theory has caused a particular methodological problem120 I have alluded to already regarding Wilber’s misrepresentation of nonduality relative to dialectical practice, as well as his proposal for a "master map," attributed to Hazelton in Wilber (2003) (see Introduction), taken up more recently in slightly different diction in Wilber (2006) and elsewhere.

Theory is inadequate to the task of resolving differences in theology, much less to the reduction of said differences to another, master theology,125 just as it is incapable of determining which of these men (or none among them) may have been God in the flesh, a position no theorist can take without becoming a theologian, an ideologist, or both at once in the process.126

This "master map" process of adjudicating the "best" and "worst" of internally coherent but mutually contradicting claims even of various progressive-evolutionary postcolonial religious dispensations—those of Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l-Baha,121 or of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad,122 or of Meher Baba, to give a representative sampling—enacts or makes possible a kind of epistemic violence that exceeds any mandate for critical practice. On one side, through an intensity of commitment to one’s teacher and tradition, one may make extraordinary, unverifiable, and in the end irresponsible theological claims at the expense of other traditions passing as criticism—theology, working as ideology, in theoretical drag.123 On the other side, through a conscious or unconscious bias for or against a particular teacher or tradition, one may attempt through theological gestures (or simply through vehement and repeated assertion) to foreclose a particular dispensation from responsible, contextualized critique.124

No single theology, master map, or God-is-on-our-side gesture has proven to be up to the task I propose of organizing a set of disparate social and spiritual movements, many of them theological in orientation, predicated on innumerable cultural traditions. History shows that adherence does not guarantee alliance, nor does simple adherence bring the subjective and objective developments needed for a comprehensive transformation to be carried out. For instance, if one seeks to draw together the participatory action of good-faith leaders from many religious and cultural traditions, and many intellectual disciplines, with a theoretical project, one immediately introduces a problem with establishing this theory on a metaphysical or theological proposition. One example: that there is such a thing as reality and that this reality "is not composed of things or processes," but is composed of holons (Wilber, 2000a, p. 41), which have their being in something of a divinized hierarchy in the form of a Great Chain that is also presented as real, as in the "ontology of consciousness" Litfin (2003) posits in her proposal for an integral macropolitics (pp. 55-56).127 This is an affirmative, ontological position, and this differentiates the coherence as propose it (see Thesis One) from the Wilberian holon: the coherence refers to a moment in a set of overdetermining processes, but is not affirmed as real or unreal; thus, it is not a litmus test of faith, only a tool at hand for anyone to use with no presumed ultimate significance or ultimate being (or non-being) as such.

What I am proposing instead amounts to a rigorously pluralistic, secular approach that invites the contributions of multiple traditions without affirming the Ultimate Reality of one over the rest by responsibly refraining from taking metaphysical positions relative to the integral project and instead insisting on the verifiable, the deductive—arguably another valence of the Big No, as I will show—the best inheritance of the tradition of antinomianism established on the North American continent by the Puritan theologian and proto-integralist Roger Williams in the middle of the seventeenth century. Further, this non-theological presentation of nonduality coincides with a radical skepticism: neither affirming nor denying the ultimate existence or nonexistence even of a category called "nondual," or of this pen in my hand (see Thesis One), therefore allowing room for all theological claim to circulate freely without favoring or excluding any, such that any responsible transformative practice regardless of its traditional origin may be of benefit according to its capacity in concert with all others, not to mention space for the creation of new values. (Of course, anyone’s irresponsibility in this regard is an invitation for criticism.)

Taken together with the minoritarianism I propose in Thesis Eight, the restraint and skepticism inherent in this proposal express my overriding aspiration for a radically democratic and ecologically sustainable social order. This is the "New Age" worth working for, worth making. As it happens, "the New Age" is another such metaphysical doctrine in much integral thought and culture about time and historicity, that the recent past and present (and perhaps near future) represent the opening of a new paradigm, world view, world order, or "omega point," a view expressed in different words and deployed in different ways (and to differing degrees) by Aurobindo, Teilhard, Gebser, and Wilber, and in Spiral Dynamics. The past has produced many such moments of apparent transformation coupled with millenarian aspiration that have come to naught; the events of 1848 in Europe demand consideration here, as a cursory example of how European post-Hegelian proto-integralists, Marx and Engels most obviously, saw a new age dawning as only more elaborate and comprehensive oppression emerged, some of it undertaken in the name of their project.

120 As with so much else in integral theory, this is anticipated in the work of Aurobindo Ghose. Like Milton, Aurobindo is a world-class poet and mythmaker, and a theologian to be taken seriously (and not only by the faithful); also like Milton, Aurobindo is a problematic political and cultural critic.
121 In the instances of the Baha’i Faith and the Ahmadiyya movement especially, one may instead begin to understand the similarities and differences between dispensations first by reference to the relationship of the faithful to the transformations brought about by the colonial process, and second by the minoritarian position of adherents in a postcolonial situation in Asia and in diaspora. Apart from a conflicted position vis a vis mainstream Islam (Shia and Sunni respectively), these are the most explicit common denominators between the two movements.
122 Situated in and from the Ahmadiyya tradition, Ahmed (1998) is worth close consideration for those committed to an evolutionary-consciousness position such as the ones posited by Hegel, Aurobindo, and Wilber.
123 Claims of this type, exemplified perhaps by Bakhtin’s (1984) hyperbolic enthusiasm for the religious conservative Dostoevsky and Wilber’s public endorsements of Franklin Jones (Da Free John, Adi Da) and, later, Andrew Cohen, along with books and publications by both (Cohen publishes "the only magazine asking the hard questions, slaughtering the sacred cows, and dealing with the Truth no matter what" [Wilber, 2002, p. xvii, emphasis added]), suggest that only this or that method, only this or that text or periodical or ashram, only this or that guru can yield desirable results—a difficult claim to verify.

Insisting on the exclusivity of Dostoevsky, for instance, begs the question: why only Dostoevsky and not, say, Joyce? Bakhtin shows a willingness to address this question, but never wholly resolves it, and in fairness, could not have read Ulysses at the time of writing his book on Dostoevsky. Analogously, one may ask of Wilber’s work: why an uncategorical endorsement of the claims of Franklin Jones at the expense of those of Shiv Dayal Singh, or Baha’u’llah, or Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, or Meher Baba, or any other, or not at all?

124 To give one example, Wilber (2001) claims it is "slander" to point out the racist overtones in Aurobindo’s writings (p. ix). But as I show in Anderson (2006), Aurobindo’s writings are more complex than Wilber seems willing to admit on the subject of race; it is not unfair to Aurobindo to insist he was among other things a product of his time, and that flickers of this time are legible in his work. By analogy, one can find moments of explicit racism in the writings of Mark Twain, even as Twain’s project was broadly and intensely anti-racist—and to say so amounts to critical honesty about Twain, not a slander to his legacy.
125 I recognize that a reader applying a hermeneutic of suspicion to this passage may object to my uneasiness about theological work as an expression of my own adherence to an explicitly non-theological (not anti-theological) spiritual tradition, Mahayana Buddhism. If the reader finds that my claims are unwarranted or otherwise problematic, and that a bias of this sort may be behind this problem, I invite that reader to demonstrate both the hypothetical failure of my reasoning and any imputed bias causing the same.
126 This distinction can be made by diagnosing the relationship of a given theological gesture to the regime at hand. If it is one of mimetic and mechanical or conscious identification, it can be said to be ideological. This analysis develops from the first positive task of schizoanalysis, to find out what the desiring machines are doing (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 322).

127 A thought experiment: imagine a gathering of representatives of many spiritual traditions, for ecumenical and peacemaking purposes. Before any dialogue has begun, before any bread is broken or coffee poured, the host of the gathering (following Litfin) proposes that all participants affirm a particular theological or ontological point—perhaps the emergence of a New Age of consciousness through evolving cosmic forms, or Kantian categories, or Hegelian World-Spirit, or Jungian archetypes, or the salvific power of X or Y guru’s grace—first. What happens? Such a gesture leaves little room for dialogue or space for the miracles that can arise under responsible leadership. At the same time, such a conversation would also be impossible without certain nontheological values in place, such as generous hospitality, a willingness to consider multiple positions at once and in context and to take them seriously, a recognition of all partial and provisional views as such even when they claim to be complete and universal, and a utopian aspiration to work collaboratively for the mutual benefit of all participants, for instance.

"I, Pencil" by Leonard E. Read

2008-12-19T09:23:00.002+05:30

"I, Pencil" Turns 50 from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the original publication of one of the most insightful economics essays ever penned -- "I, Pencil." It wasn't written by a professional economist; it was written by Leonard E. Read, founder and long-time president of the Foundation for Economic Education. Although Read was no professional economist, his understanding of the way market economies work, and his ability to explain that logic in clear and compelling terms, far surpasses that of all but a tiny handful of PhD-sporting economists.

***

I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write. Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do. You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery —more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. [...]

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human masterminding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
The above is what I meant when writing, “If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.” For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand— that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.
Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn’t know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation’s mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in free people—in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity—the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental “masterminding.”

Testimony Galore
If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it’s all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person’s home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one’s range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—halfway around the world—for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

***

Neoclassical theories Do Not Explain How Modern Economies Function
from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy

So, in the abstract world of neoclassical markets, they introduced into them a mystical, abstract, and wholly imaginary force that is their sole claim to the relevance of their abstractions for the real world, namely that “an invisible hand”, disembodied, ubiquitous and multi-talented, ‘leads’ each and every player to do exactly what they are required to do by a mysterious force (some actually credit it to God!) that guides their every transaction, of which there must be trillions taking place each working hour, irrespective of the outcomes, into a utopian perfect harmony. Not only is this wishful thinking; it is contrary to ordinary facts.

It’s nonsense, but unlike the harmless fun of the myth of Santa Clause visiting each child with presents once a year, the myth of an invisible hand is pernicious when economists, who should know better, come to believe that it exists as the guiding principle of markets.

I have sometimes felt, when addressing my peers with the gist of my paper on the invisible hand myth (downloadable from the Lost Legacy home page), that I am spoiling their party by pointing out that, like Santa Clause, it is a myth.

First of all, Adam Smith did not relate his use of the metaphor of ‘an invisible hand’ to market transactions; this was an invention of neoclassical theorists, aided by propagandists (some paid, others out of their misguided, convictions) for the activities of large corporations, which corner markets and act non-competitively, and in some cases destructively.

Whitehead strongly opposes absolute rules or principles of morality

2008-12-05T19:14:00.001+05:30

Whitehead’s Theory of Value
by John B. Cobb, Jr.
John B. Cobb, Jr., Ph.D. is Professor of Theology Emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California, and Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies there. return to religion-online

In Process and Reality Whitehead states that the aim of every experience is to attain intensity within itself and also in its relevant future. Morality has to do with this contribution to the future. The broader the future one takes into account, the more moral is the aim. Since "strength of beauty" plays the role in Adventures of Ideas that is played by "intensity" in Process and Reality, I will substitute that term here.
Consider a simple case. I am offered a piece of delicious cake. I am not hungry and have no need of more food. Yet the taste of that cake would add to the beauty of my experience for a few minutes. If the scope of the future that I consider is only that brief period, I will accept and eat the cake. But perhaps I am a little overweight. Eating that cake will tend to add to that weight. Being overweight detracts from the beauty of my experience over a long period of time. Alternately, to avoid adding weight, I will have to forego food I like at a later point, when, because I am hungry, the food will add more to the beauty of my experience than the cake will now. This broader consideration of the relevant future may lead me to decline. Whitehead asserts that the latter decision is the more moral because it takes into account a more extended future. Of course, I may recognize that I should decline, but eat the cake anyway. That would be immoral.

You will notice that the consideration I have proposed deals only with my personal future. I have offered only a prudential, which some exclude them from morality altogether. Whitehead does not exclude prudence from morality. For him, all reflection about future consequences belongs to the sphere morality. Nevertheless, considering only the personal future is less moral that considering others as well. If we imagine that my acceptance of the cake would deny it to someone else who is truly in need of food, then my failure to consider that person’s needs would be immoral.
Obviously, we all face far more serious moral problems than this. I am sometimes asked to subordinate my personal good to that of my family. To consider only my personal benefit and fail to take into account that of my wife and children would certainly be immoral. Sometimes we are asked to subordinate the interests of the family to that of the nation. To refuse to consider the well being of this larger community would also be immoral. Sometimes the interests of the nation are in tension with those of the community of nations. The wider the scope of our consideration, the more moral we are. Of course, those who do not perceive the wider scope as relevant, those with narrower horizons, will accuse one who subordinates the smaller to the larger group of betrayal.

These moral issues are of immense importance. There is nothing in Whitehead’s theory of value to minimize them. But it should be noticed that the good that is aimed at for others is an aesthetic good. It is the strength of beauty of their experience.
There can be a tension between the aim at strength of beauty in the moment and the aim at benefiting future occasions of experience, one’s own and others. Whitehead does not tell us how to resolve it. It is not the case that it is always best to sacrifice the present to the future. Living intensely in the present, enjoying each moment as it arises, has its advantage. On the other hand, the failure to consider consequences can be extremely dangerous both for oneself and for others. The purely aesthetic impulse and the moral one exist in a tension that cannot be totally resolved.
On the other hand, the tension is far less than this formal statement suggests. The relation is more a polarity in which each pole supports the other than an opposition in which they exclude one another. One’s own enjoyment in the present usually contributes more to the enjoyment of others than does a highly calculating morality. One generally enjoys oneself more, moment by moment, if one’s mode of enjoyment is contributing to the enjoyment of others and not harming one’s own future prospects. That is, anticipation of a favorable future for oneself and others adds to the strength of beauty of the moment.

Morality is often thought of as a matter of rules or principles. Whitehead recognized the need for these but also their danger. As general guidelines, rules and principles are highly desirable. Some are general enough to be useful in any society whatever, whereas others describe the behavior that is wanted in a particular society. We think of the former as the truly moral ones, but the line between the two is difficult to draw. In any case, one moral rule may be to observe social conventions unless these require behavior that is immoral in other ways. Also, even the most general ones have their limits. For example, although it is appropriate to have a general rule against lying and stealing, nevertheless, we can all think of circumstances in which such rules should be broken. This is true even for killing other human beings. Whitehead strongly opposes the widespread Western tendency to seek absolute rules or principles of morality.