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

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 I’d like also to amplify a point I originally made in passing about the relevance of the Stoic tradition of thought to his arguments about justice—arguments that are, I repeat, challenging and serious.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

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?

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

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

"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

"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

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.

I teach my ego how I can appear to "lose" a few debates by bowing out

Thursday, 3 May, 2007 For every one of your opponent's arguments, make three counter-arguments Joe Perez

In high school debate club, I mastered a technique called a spread. Do you know what that is? For every one of your opponent's arguments, make three counter-arguments. It doesn't matter if your arguments have merit or not. He or she will be so lost and simply unable to keep up with you that they will have to drop arguments. When you make your next rebuttal speech, you avoid all the arguments that the debater touched upon OR you respond with two counter-rebuttals for every one of your opponents, and then you extend all the dropped arguments and magnify them.

It's an endless loop, brought to a close in debate class only by strictly enforced time limits and the flexibility and range of a debater's vocal chords (to talk really, really, really fast).

Life is short. I've done my share of debating. Today, in my wanderings through the blogosphere, I'm content to make my views known, and the general rationale for those beliefs. I'm not interested in a proliferation of rebuttal and counterrebuttal. Once I start down that road, is there ever an end?

There is certainly rarely agreement. Often minor disagreements are traced to core worldviews and basic presuppositions about human nature. Those core beliefs are not likely to change as the result of an hour or two of conversation. I can plant a few seeds, but then I need to move on to areas where I can be productive.

I say this so readers will know there is no disrespect intended when I choose not to pursue the arguments of their comments any further than I do. I teach my ego how I can appear to "lose" a few debates by bowing out, and the world doesn't come crashing down around me. I will attempt to point readers in the direction I think they need to move to outgrow their current worldview, as best I can tell, and then it's out of my hands. Save to del.icio.us • Sphere: Related Content posted by Joe Perez at 5/02/2007 Posted by Tusar N Mohapatra at 4:51 PM Savitri Era of those who adore, Om Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Post a Comment Links Careless remarks about Sri Aurobindo’s ontology

Specificity of individual case requires a decisionist approach. “Justice is mystical”

Thoughts, Books, and Philosophy The Critical Synopses of J.H. Bowden Home About
The Seduction of Unreason Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) Further Reading:Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism This entry was posted on August 29, 2008 at 7:55 pm and is filed under philosophy, politics. Tagged: reason, richard wolin.

In The Seduction of Unreason, Richard Wolin analyzed fascist tendencies in philosophical thought. Such tendencies frequently appeal to life, preferring brute force over principles and argument. While for Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) hermeneutics constituted an art of avoiding misunderstanding, many want to replace it with a hermeneutic of suspicion — not criticism leading to truth, but outright hostility toward truth, reason, and democracy — almost a Counter-Enlightenment.

For instance, Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998) equated consensus with terror. Claude Levi-Strauss (1908- ) wrote that the goal of the human sciences is to dissolve man — every culture makes a choice that must be respected. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) enthusiastically endorsed the 1979 Iranian revolution; it was anti-modern, anti-liberal, anti-western, and fits today’s definition of progressive. This isn’t a question of personal integrity of specific thinkers, but a systemic relationship of a current of thought with totalitarianism.

The first chapter examined Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the Nazi regime’s official philosopher. Nietzsche ranted about the Jewification of Europe, preached the Aryan race, celebrated Macht politics, and obsessed about breeding and extermination. Several commentators played a critical role rehabilitating Nietzsche. Even though Nietzsche “philosophized with a hammer” and described his works as “assassination attempts,”

Walter Kaufmann transformed Nietzsche into an aesthete, a mildly morose Voltaire content with addressing inconsequential matters of style. Alexander Nehamas interpreted Nietzsche as a perspectivist, despite grand cosmological doctrines like the will to power, the superman, and the eternal recurrence. Writers recruit Nietzsche to give cover for abortion, homosexuality, drugs, prostitution and so forth. However, Nietzsche would have nothing to do with trivial matters of identity politics — his concern was with more progressive matters like conquest, rape, torture, plunder, and domination, with a nice touch of misogyny added on top. Wolin is insufficiently harsh, but reading any dissent no matter how marginal from the Cult of Nietzsche is a sign Nietzsche’s reputation is waning.

The case of Carl Jung (1875-1961) illustrates how times of acute turmoil and stress can turn people to extravagant mythological means to endow the world with order and meaning. Jung’s mysticism offers a promise of redemption, a chance to get in touch with mysterious powers that transcend one’s atomized existence. While Freudians wanted to connect people with their inner self, one might say Jung wanted people to get in touch with their inner Fatherland. Jung was a fellow traveler of the Nazis — he saw his own theories coming to life in the movement. Jung wrote about Aryans and Jews having different archetypes, the Aryan archetype naturally being superior.

According to Jung, the Jewish unconscious has a special drive toward greedy and lascivious motives. Note that no SS thugs were forcing his hand in Kusnacht, Switzerland. Jung adored Hitler; the Fuhrer was a great medicine man. Jung went to great lengths to demonstrate the synchronicity between his own analytic psychology and the goals of the Reich. While I like Jung, he exemplifies what can happen when rational thought is widely rejected for the mythological and the mystic; occult elements played an important role during the formative phase of Nazism.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) was a willing propagandist for the Reich and believed our prejudices constitute our being, not our judgments. In Volk and History in Herder’s Thought, Gadamer justified the idea of Nazi occupied Europe. Gadamer advanced, like Heidegger, that historicity is an indispensable feature of being-in-the-world. Understanding for Gadamer is not an act of subjectivity but a happening of a tradition; objectivity is a result of false consciousness. An animating idea for Gadamer is the genetic spirit and creativity of a Volk, and of course, Gadamer reminded us all cultures have racial foundations.

Wolin also placed Gadamer’s classicism and his political Plato in its German context. After World War I many German thinkers began to see Germany as Greece reborn. Hans Heyse and Werner Jaeger saw Plato’s Republic as the prototype of the Reich; Kurt Hildebrandt, who published a book on racial hygiene, advanced that like the Greek,a German becomes a man by subsuming himself in a State. Even Hitler considered the Spartan regime to be the first volkish state.

Wolin also spent time looking at French currents. Georges Bataille (1897-1962), the black sheep of the avant-garde, hated reason. Reason supposedly promotes standardization, regulation, transparency, and sameness, while a living man sees death as the fulfillment of life and pursues degradation, pollution, violence, communal bonding and self-laceration. Bataille venerated the orgiastic and excessive, and advocated sacrifice, potlatch, war, frenzy, and violence for their ennobling effects. Bataille wanted to bring ritual back to life, glorified difference and finitude– especially Hitler and Mussolini, who were the heterogenous “other.”

After war, defeat, occupation, and collaboration, there was a French will to non-knowledge to keep unsettling historical complicities, facts, and events at bay. Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) for instance wrote articles for the Petain government. He doubted the representational capacities of language — for Blanchot, literature is only about itself, a notion that influenced later thinkers.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) saw logic and reason equivalent to violence and terror. But without reason, one must seek refuge in myth, magic, illusion, and intoxication, whether Derrida liked this or not. Derrida preached that one must be open to the “other.” Like Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, Derrida thought an act of justice was a singularity. Rules could not be applied to it, since the specificity of individual case requires a decisionist approach. “Justice is mystical.”

Lastly, Wolin explores the long reaction against the ideals of the Enlightenment contained in the American government. Cornelius de Pauw (1739-1799) and Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) introduced physical explanations about the Americas making physical creatures, including men, inferior; Publius even took time to refute these claims in the Federalist Papers. Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) emphasized the irreducibility of racial difference and saw a man sinful requiring authoritarian rule. For de Maistre, mysterious, irrational forces are the ultimate determinants of human affairs and we’re incapable of shaping our own destinies.

The white supremacist Arthur Gobineau (1816-1882), a prophet of racial decline, bashed the race mixers in America. Gobineau was friends with the composer Richard Wagner; Wagner’s son in law H. S. Chamberlain went on to write The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, ur-text of Nazi racial theory. Werner Sombart criticized America for being a Jewish dominated plutocracy, i.e. a spiritually impoverished Judenstaat, something increasingly common in my time. And of course, Wolin looks at Baudrillard’s comments about America being the last primitive society — they aren’t a new development when one examines the larger picture.
Ideas have consequences. Despite the conventional wisdom, Fascism does have an ideological core.

jhbowden Says: August 31, 2008 at 6:15 pm Gerry– We’re dealing with the same Carl Jung, unfortunately.

Jung genuinely felt guilty about the entire mess, even though he was only a fellow traveler. We cannot say the same for Heidegger, who never repented.
I do not dismiss any serious thinker, including Jung. Thinkers though can be criticized and if appropriate refuted after consideration. That being said, I didn’t even attempt to refute Jung above. I simply presented Jung’s occultism as a symptom of a larger social development, specifically one he sympathized with for a period of time.
Don’t act offended– a *lot* of people sympathized with fascism during the 1930s, and even the 1920s. Mussolini at the time was its biggest star, not Hitler. Here in progressive Chicago we even have a street named after Mussolini’s heir apparent, Italo Balbo. I’d recommend the first few chapters of Jonah Goldberg’s _Liberal Fascism_ if you’re curious about a portion of history many of us would like to forget.

Divine ease is not about life being a breeze, but a strong belief in goodness, truth, intelligence and beauty

Home >> Newsletter >> Divine Ease

As life becomes more fraught personally and globally, it's easy to forget that still we remain powerful beyond belief. We exercise our innate power by continuing to invite the sacred into everything we do - at work - at - home - with friends - out shopping - when driving the car. Sacred practice is about inviting the most life-enhancing possibilities into each moment - soul people - soul food - soul pursuits. We do these things not as indulgences, but to bring each and every unique part of us alive - so we can not only be alive to the moment, but to the many solutions that await our attention.

When we get lost in despair, we block ourselves off from these wider resources, our vision narrows and life becomes progressively more difficult. We lose the divine ease with which we were endowed on incarnation.

Divine ease is not about life being a breeze, but about learning to step through the good times and those that stretch us, with a strong belief in goodness, truth, intelligence and beauty. As Dr Clarissa Estes, author of Women Who Run With The Wolves recently admitted -

'I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. The reason is this: there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here.'

We are co-creators of our human experience for the few short years we are here. As you start to consider what are you seeking to create for yourself and others, you may wish to log on to this site, http://www.whatthebleep.com/create/ March 2005

Zizek is right to suggest that Stalin was morally superior to Hitler

More electoral ruminations from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro

Thus, the Democrats’ hypocrisy is to be preferred to the Republicans’ cynicism, for good Kantian reasons (though Zizek would probably give Hegelian ones instead). As Kant famously said about the French Revolution, no matter how much this uprising might have “miscarried” or been “filled with misery and atrocities,” nonetheless any decent human being, observing the events of the Revolution from afar, would have to be caught up in “a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm”; the sheer fact of this “sympathy,” despite everything that goes wrong in actuality, itself testifies to “a moral predisposition in the human race.” In other words, the sheer fact that something like the French Revolution could occur, no matter how badly it went wrong subsequently, gives us a legitimate ground for hoping that human beings are not forever subject to the Hobbesian alternative of either continual war of all against all, or severe and violent repression...

there was an essential moral difference between Stalin and Hitler. Zizek condemns the currently fashionable habit of lumping Stalin and Hitler together as totalitarian dictators. The difference, as in the Presidential race today, has to do with hypocrisy. Stalin professed support for human rights like free speech, for self-determination, for peace, and for harmony and equality among individuals and peoples regardless of race, ethnicity, etc.; all these principles are enshrined in the Soviet Constitution of the 1930s. Of course, in fact Stalin was a megalomaniacal tyrant who ruled arbitrarily, violated all of these ideals, and put millions of people to death; but Zizek is entirely right to suggest that such hypocrisy is morally superior, and far to be preferred, to Hitler’s overtly racist and anti-democratic ideology — which he unhypocritically put into practice. It’s for this reason that American Communists of the 1930s-1950s (observers of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath from afar, just as Kant was an observer of the French Revolution from afar) are far more honorable and decent (for all their ludicrous idolization of Stalin and sleazy maneuvers against other factions on the left) than the anti-Communists of the same period.

In recent years, and especially in the weeks following McCain’s selection of Palin, conservatives have excoriated liberals for, basically, thinking that conservatives are stupid, and that stupidity is the only explanation for why anybody would, say, be enthusiastic about Palin. And I think that the conservatives who argue in this manner are somewhat correct — at least to the extent that, as I’ve said before, many liberals’ scorn for Palin has prevented them from seeing the great appeal she has, affectively, to large segments of the electorate...

[ADDENDUM: The irony, though, is that I am mourning, not the failure of some grand hope, but rather merely the continued frustration of a hope that, even in "victory," would not have been fulfilled. I am mourning, in advance, the failure of a failure. Such is the depressive postmodernist condition: in comparison, even something like Walter Benjamin's melancholia seems like the most lurid optimism, a grand modernist gesture that we cannot believe in any longer. But it is precisely in such a situation that Kant's injunction, that we must believe in, and have hope for, the prospect of an improvement of the human condition even in the face of all empirical evidence for the contrary. Our deepest moral obligation is to be faithful to this hope, even though its fulfillment cannot be foreseen, and even though it is something that can be promised "only indefinitely and as a contingent event."]

[2ND ADDENDUM: I fear that I am beginning to sound like late Derrida, with all his words about infinite deferral, democracy to come, etc. I can only repeat what I have said before; that essentially Derrida's thought is a minor, but honorable, footnote to Kant.] This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 11:58 am and is filed under Politics.

Series of sorries: Bruno, Galileo, and Darwin

Sorrier than thou TOI 20 Sep 2008, Mukul Sharma

Church officials, Christian theologians and the Vatican in particular have been doing a lot of apologising of late. It's for past errors and excesses committed in the name of religion and includes the Inquisition, persecution of Jews, the Nazi holocaust, comments that appear to link Islam with violence and for child abuse by priests. However, nowhere has this series of sorries been more forthcoming than in the field of science.

• It began with Giordano Bruno, the 16th century Italian philosopher who was burnt at the stake for saying the Sun, and not the Earth, was the centre of the solar system. In March 2000, Pope John Paul II issued a document that "regretted" it had resor-ted to violence in Bruno's case and his burning was "deplored".
• Then in the 17th century Galileo, who also advocated the Copernican model, was forced to recant by the Inquisition under threat of torture and put under house arrest for his last years. In 1992, the Vatican apologised and admitted the great astronomer, apparently, "had a point".
• The most recent is Darwin, the 19th century naturalist who was attacked by the church for disagreeing with the ‘Book of Genesis' and saying that all species had evolved from a common ancestor. A recent essay by the Rev Malcolm Brown, a senior clergyman and the church's head of public affairs in the United Kingdom says the Church of England "owes" an apology to Charles Darwin for misunderstanding his theory of evolution when it was first published and making errors over its reaction to it. A full-blown mea culpa should be hopping along any day now.

The point to note here, though, is that the apologies are coming not only thicker but also faster so that a time may soon come when they might even catch up backwards with the concerned crime. And considering that at any given time there is at least one major active battle going on between the church and science, this may not be a bad idea for both parties.

For instance, there's homosexuality. Is it sinful, chosen, changeable, unnatural and abnormal for everyone? Or is it morally neutral, predetermined, natural and normal for a minority of people? If it turns out to be the latter — bingo — that's one more apology in the in-box. There's abortion too. A hundred years from now if scientists discover the soul actually enters the foetus exactly after 26 weeks then another very very sorry would be up for grabs. And one more when time travel's discovered and they go back and take Bishop Ussher who said the age of the Earth was only 6,000 years, to 200 million BC and leave him in a real Jurassic Park.

Actually in order to avoid any more embarrassment or moral fumbling in the future it might be an even better idea to just apolo-gise in advance for everything scientific the church stands for. For it is a fact that the results of most modern empirical inquiry are always going to be at loggerheads with antiquated notions of how the world works. And also because Christianity is not like some other eastern religions which even when science exposes a particularly cherished belief of theirs as pure poppycock, still bash on mindlessly as if nothing had happened.

What's more, if they did trump the scientific community this way, no one would have to look silly later since others would not be able to point any accusing fingers at them. Of course, it goes without saying this means they would also have to give up on lost causes and losing battles instead of brawling around in there to the bitter end and generally getting all bloodied and bombed out before retreating.

But look at it this way; in times to come people of other religions will talk with envy and awe about how great Christianity turned out to be. After all, it takes a lot of courage to admit you're wrong — especially beforehand — thereby proving that hindsight is not the only thing more perfect than science. Foresight is too.

***

I am not attempting to "Aurobindo-ize" Christianity." Why Darwinists Reject Evolution from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob Sep 17, 2008

Taylor's vision of authentic religion found in communion rooted in love

Bellah on Taylor and Authentic Christianity in a Secular Age
from Mirror of Justice by Russell Powell

The newest issue of Commonweal, in addition to our own Mark Sargent's insightful review of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (which takes on even greater relevance given the most recent bank and insurance failures), contains a provocative article by Robert Bellah in which he engages key ideas from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. Instead of emphasizing the historical fact of secularism, he focuses on Taylor's vision of authentic religion that engages those formed in a culture of secularism. According to Taylor, this authenticity is found in communion rooted in love.

At the heart of orthodox Christianity, seen in terms of communion, is the coming of God through Christ into a personal relation with disciples, and beyond them others, eventually ramifying through the church to humanity as a whole. God establishes the new relation with us by loving us, in a way we cannot unaided love one another. [We love because he first loved us, 1 John 4:19.] The lifeblood of this new relation is agape [the biblical Greek word for love], which can’t ever be understood simply in terms of a set of rules, but rather as the extension of a certain kind of relation, spreading outward in a network. The church is in this sense a quintessentially network society, even though of an utterly unparalleled kind, in that the relations are not mediated by any historical forms of relatedness: kinship, fealty to a chief, or whatever. It transcends all these, but [is rather] a network of ever different relations of agape.

The universe isn't chaotic but is full of patterns and structures, coherences and relationships

To Applaud the Large Hadron Collider Science, Culture and Integral Yoga
by RY Deshpande on Sun 14 Sep 2008 06:51 AM PDT Permanent Link

Great things were done in the past and man’s history had never been dull—and this was in spite of war and struggle and rampage. Surely there is something in him which always prompts him to search and express that which lies beyond his immediate reach as if the charm of the beyond is ever beckoning him. He has built schools of thought, he has built monuments, he has built centres of excellence in arts and sciences and crafts. He gave Philosophy, he gave the Tao, he gave Vedanta, he gave Religion, even as he engaged himself in secular occupations in many richnesses of life. It is that in him which pleases us and pleases the gods too. Thus he opened out for himself fields and fields of noble activity. Today we witness some other kind of marvel...

In this march of glorious history today we witness another remarkable event speaking for the widening spirit of man. But for this to happen cruel and spiteful battles were fought and prices paid to the unappeased gods. In the 17th century Galileo, the Father of Modern Science, had to suffer for the daring act of holding views about the heliocentric world contrary to what was believed in those days. The Catholic Church prohibited its advocacy and Galileo was eventually forced to recant his ideas. He spent the last years of his life under house arrest on orders of the Inquisition. He did, but also softly blurted out what he thought to be scientific and hence right.

But the Spirit of Man moves on.

And today! Wednesday 10 September 2008! It is a golden day in the annals of physics. It marks the beginning of a new set of experiments planned on a scale that never happened in the long and troubled days of mankind. Their findings are expected to throw light on the commencement and evolution of the universe in which we live. If matter is the foundation of this vast enterprise, then it becomes our natural curiosity also to know what really is there in matter that makes it so attractive, so potentially rich to give rise to this marvel of creation...

Two things that bolster our faith in science are the comprehensibility of the universe and the well-understood laws of nature that will not dupe us on the way, will not betray us mid-stream. Einstein famously said that "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible". The universe isn't chaotic but is full of patterns and structures, coherences and relationships. It is to discover these patterns and structures, these coherences and relationships that we are willing to hold out a mighty bit of us. That is the search for truth prompting the scientist as a truth-seeker; that is the search for beauty persuading the scientist as a beauty-admirer. And the beautiful truth is, society is willing to give him that exceptional privilege—and that indeed is the truthful beauty of man.

Yet one could be screaming about the kind of costs involved in these truth-beauty pursuits which can no longer be private, not even single or national pursuits. But there is really no paradox. The inherent fuzziness of the Quantum world governed by the Uncertainty Principle means that to the finer and more subtle depths you go the more you pay for things. We have to sharpen our tools. But these are fructuous in more than one way. Witness for instance the Internet that came from such occupations. CERN itself had the privilege of giving us the World Wide Web...

But connected with this praiseworthy gigantic effort there are also a few spurious and dubious aspects and these aspects must be at once dismissed from our minds. We must first realize that the beginning of the universe from the big bang is a scientific theory and it is science which is going to judge it in terms of scientific criteria and parameters. Whether it is going to be upheld or is going to collapse,—well, it is science which will have the say in the matter and nothing else. There is a hurried tendency of the Vedantic mind connecting the big bang with the bursting of the cosmic egg, brahmāņda. But they are not on a par in several respects. For instance, brahmāņda is not going to collapse if Hadron Collider is going to dismiss the big bang. And then, and more importantly, one is a theory and the other an occult-spiritual experience. They belong to different categories and we must not mix them up.

But this mixing-up game was started in a rather bad manner some thirty years ago by Fritjof Capra when his Tao of Physics intriguingly mesmerized both communities, the scientific and the Vedantic. For instance, he writes: “Quantum theory forces us to see the universe not as a collection of physical objects, but rather as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of a unified whole.”

But what that “unified whole” really is, he does not define if it is not a physical object. Instead, he jumps to compare it with the eastern mysticism experiencing the world. Capra immediately quotes from Sri Aurobindo’s Synthesis of Yoga: “The material object… something different from what we now see, not a separate object on the background or in the environment of the rest of Nature, but an indivisible part and even in a subtle way an expression of the unity of all that we see.” ...

To compare what is interpreted of an observation based on the physical instruments with the direct observation by the supramentalised seeing, by supramental samjñāna, is the typical mix-up we see in the Capraisque formulations. Not that there cannot be correspondences between the two, but nowhere can the images or reflections or simulacra acquire the quality of realities not only of the spiritual but also the material objects seen by this samjñāna. There is a similar leap of imagination in Capra to equate the Dance of Shiva with the behaviour of the subatomic particles, their materialization-dematerialization described by the Quantum Physics, creation-annihilation forming a part of the cosmic rhythms of the God, the King-Dancer, Nataraj.

No wonder, under such an influence the India’s Department of Atomic Energy gifted on 18 June 2004 a two-metre bronze statue of the Nataraj to CERN. This was to celebrate India’s participation in the Collider experiments. This is good,—as far as it goes. But never should either of them lose sight of the fundamentals, their fundamentals, the spiritual and the material. If one is the breathing in and breathing out of the physical in the cosmic process of objectification, the other is the rhythm of the timeless set into the great movements of time. One is mental conceptualization and the other the truth-dynamism set into motion by the Spirit itself. Here our interest is not in mysticism but in physics proper, professional physics. So, as far as the Large Hadron Collider is concerned, let us applaud the startup operation and eagerly wait for the arrival of the Higgs Boson. It is a definite pointer towards what will give materiality to matter, substantiality to substance.

Keywords: Vedanta, Tools, Supermind, Studies, SriAurobindo, Spirituality, Mysticism, LHC, History, HiggsBoson, Heisenberg, Hawking, Einstein, DarkMatter, Culture, Creation, Cosmology, BigBang, Athens, Antimatter