There is an irrational drive in the German soul as Sri Aurobindo described

Discovery Channel: Nazis, the Occult Conspiracy Posted on Sep 6th, 2007 by Albert

Just want to add the documentary Ken Wilber recommended in his review of Deepak Chopras book.This is from the YouTube Poster: Nazis-the occult conspiracy is a documentary about how the Hitler and the Nazis made use of occultism to win the war, and to remind the … all Germans that they were the best humans on the planet, the master-race. There are better documentaries around, but this is a solid documentary. There are many rare pictures from Nazi-Germany to be seen here, and you get to learn more about the religous beliefs of nazi-leaders like: Hitler, Goebbles, GÃ?¶ring, Hess and Himmler. I can`t advice people enough to watch documentaries about Nazi-Germany, because they show how crazy and evil humans can be. Nazis: The Occult Conspiracy part 1 of 2 See here Part 2. Access: Public 3 Comments Print Send views (1,356) Tagged with: Discovery Channel, Occult Conspiracy, Runes, Atlantis, Aryan Race, Himalaya, Bhagavad Gita, Hitler, Goebbels, Himler, Hess, Rosenberg, Swastika, Wagner, Wholy Grail, Parcival print permalink

about 8 hours later ~C4Chaos said
hi Albert, thanks for the heads up on this. will check it out soon. i remember reading the book Beyond the Human Species which also mentioned the Nazi occult conspiracy. on the flip side, it tells the story of how Aurobindo and the Mother countered the dark side using their occult powers. i don't know what to make it of it though. it's interesting but how can we prove such things? you've probably read a lot about this topic so i'm interested to hear your *informed* opinion regarding the occult conspiracy, from an integral perspective of course :)thanks again. keep it flowing…~C print permalink

about 10 hours later Albert said
Well, first I feel the damn thing in my bones and in my life. So reading about it offers some perspektives, options of understanding and especially the demanding and brutally pressing command to transform it finally. No cheap armchair soundbytes and couch potatoe statements are intended from me. its really important to come to an understanding. I had tough experiences and discussions my whole life regarding this theme. And probably will exceed time and space here.

First: I see no occult conspiracy. I did never believe in ANY Conspiracy Theories. Some points: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother certainly achived something. Do not know what. Just see that Winston Churchill achieved the most. Contradicting Gandhi in the point of military action. Even Neville Chamberlain was no simple wip or coward. >He was a clear thinking rational acting politician.

Ken Wilber once said the Churchill agressive fighting intention was natural. It was not! Churchill was a warrior in the heart. Thanks God! Nobody wanted to listen to him in 1938! Even very intelligent European politicians. The Nazis simply followed and galvanized a certain mythology. Drawing symbold from Germanic-teutonic Wotan Cult as much as from Tibetan Buddhism and Shamanism. The Wotan symbolism was described already 1936 by C. G. Jung in his famous essay. Basically the belly of the “German spiral” wasnt “blue” enough. But I am very, very careful with such simplifications.

There is an irrational drive in the German soul as Sri Aurobindo described. I posted something about this: here…. While Scandinavia, UK, Netherlands, Belgium are more rational motivated countries Germany has a profound connection to deep subjective realms. Many people, for example Thomas Mann knew this too. Ask American speakers who come to Germany: Ask Tom Peters, Tony Robbins, Andrew Cohen, Brian Tracy and 20 more….they all report similar experiences with German audiences. No special analysis in integral terms is needed. :)

The only integral activist I know who adresses this layer of collective identity explicitly is Don Beck. See the video of his presentation in NL 2006. I posted it- he asked the Dutch to stand up and sing together the Dutch National Anthem. They did it! What would happen when Don asks a German audience??????:)):)):):

So the whole occult thing crashes and ccan be sumarized (for me) in taking deep emotional and symbolic collective mythologies very, very serious. There will never be Integral POlitics if and as long this layer isnt recognized. In fact - as I am now Co Bureau Chief of Integral leadership Review for German speaking countries together with Wendelin Küpers - all this has massive consequences why leadership isnt strongly expressed in Germany. The fear of great visions is now blocking the Geman soul. I wrote about it in WIE Fall/Winter 2002 already. So the first step is simple. To say YES to collective emotions. It happened in German during Fifa World Cup 2006. Nothing occult is necessary. For all who are interested in subtle energies I recommend Excerpt G of Ken Wilbers Cosmos Trilogy. Razorharp discriminative intelligence is needed here. No wonder Ken never dealt directly with Occultism. Thats it for the moment. In his analysis of different popular authors (17 together) on spirituality in “Integral Spirituality” Ken indirectly adresses some of these questions. print permalink

about 10 hours later ~C4Chaos said
wow! thanks for sharing your views Albert. it's good to hear from someone who is much close in proximity to this issue. i'm still watching the documentary. chilling, informative, and it shows that people don't need God to do hideous things. any (badly translated) myths will do.

I've always detected a strain of Western secular utopianism in Sri Aurobindo

Warren said... The circle is squared by traditional (ie, Catholic/Orthodox) Christianity, which I have long seen as the bridge between "this-worldly" Semitic monotheism and "other-wordly" Indic mysticism. All the major world religions contain both of these elements, but only traditional Christianity (I believe) contains them in virtually equal measure. The seeming paradox and tension between these two poles is strongest in Christianity. And as one can see throughout Christian history, there is a perpetual tendency to want to resolve this tension, this paradox, one way or the other. The origin of all heresies is in trying to lean too far to one side or the other.

This is why heresies are always more simple-minded than orthodoxy, which has a clash and a contradiction (symbolized by the cross, not to mention the impossible-but-true doctrine of the Incarnation) right at its heart. Orthodoxy is a strait (yes, I spelled that right) and narrow path between two abysses of heresy. So a properly traditional Christian view contains an evolutionary view of the created world against a backdrop of utterly static eternal Truth.

This is why the Church guards its doctrines with such rigor, sometimes extending even to violence (in the past, at least). Humans - including even some saints and Church Fathers - are not easy with this paradox and are always tending to fall one way or the other. The Church exists to prevent that from happening - because the moment one side or the other ever wins, Christianity is essentially dead, just another "religion".

With regard to Schuon, who influenced me very much, I must say that he ever really "got" Christianity, except maybe in theory. Schuon was essentially a crypto-Vedantist regardless of his outward religious practices, and he saw all the other traditions through that lens. But Christianity contains Vedanta, not (as I long thought) the other way around. Because of this, Christianity can comprehend and criticize Vedanta, but Vedanta cannot really comprehend Christianity in its fullness.

Aurobindo is another genius who influenced me very much. In some ways I think he has more of the truth than Schuon. He clearly saw the limits of monistic Vedanta and Buddhism, and tried to "broaden" them by bringing in crypto-Christian ideas (like the New Creation). But I've always detected a strain of Western secular utopianism in Aurobindo, even though its couched in metaphysical terms (we shouldn't forget his past life as a political revolutionary). As a result, his viewpoint is a bit too Faustian for my tastes. He put himself and the Mother in a place that belongs only to Christ (and His Mother). 11/19/2007 09:42:00 AM

Gagdad Bob said... Warren: Cooncur. 11/19/2007 09:59:00 AM

River Cocytus said... Aurobindo was a brilliant man from what I can see. Were he of a different bent he & the Mother might have had a Constantine/Helena thing going. - which is to say, he might've been considered a saint. But, I can't give a canonical opinion; only my personal one. 11/19/2007 10:05:00 AM

Schuon resolved to not live in the Islamic world because of its stifling cultural milieu, but as a religious form, he fully accepted it

Anonymous said... 11/18/2007 10:42:00 AM

Great post! Very open, and sincere, Bob. I don't think your spiritual research would have to stop once you've entered the Church, if you did. I think we've been "told" by general society that this is the case, and it may appear that way to many people, but if you think of some of the greatest saints and minds in the Church (Augustine or Aquinas, say), they were ones who set about to unpack more of the Truth in their times which had not yet been known in those respects, but which the Church came to recognize because they were true. Like you said, though, there are certains Truths that are non negotiable. But this isn't just a Christian ideal or narrowness, but true of of our universe with regards to mathmatics, physics, etc...

Anonymous said... 11/18/2007 02:34:00 PM

On the question of Schuon's "fitting the major religious traditions into a Procrustean bed to fit his universal theory", this seems to be more of an appropriate critique of Rene Guenon, than Schuon.

Schuon's key idea is that there is an underlying religion, a religio perennis, that is the essence of all the revelations of God. For him, this key idea was fundamental to a deepening coherence of Reality. In other words, how does one account for the clear evidence that there is sanctity, beauty, piety, metaphysical genius, etc. in so many different religions? How can one, in the face of Shankara, Ibn Arabi, Rumi, Sidartha, St. John of the Cross, and on and on, imagine that only one religion (insert here) is authentic? It simply defies credulity. This religio perennis is not an ancient religion, and, in fact, has never been on the planet. Guenon, on the other hand, posited a "primordial tradition" that existed and then transformed into the various religions. Any movement that did not fit his preconceived paradigm was discounted--like Buddhism, for example.

One should not see Schuon's Sufism as clouding his view of Islam. It is one thing to simply disagree with someone, but there is no point to imagining that Schuon was clouded about Islam. He was simply right or wrong. He lived for short times and travelled fairly extensively in Islamic worlds, had native Muslim disciples, etc. He was certainly critical of aspects of manifestations of Islam (as with all religions), but he absolutely understood it inside and out and simply recognized it as salvific. His "Sufism" was simply a question of initiatic possibilities and access. While it is true that most of the Islamic world would consider his views heretical, Islam has no "pope", so it is really a mute point.

If he had become a Catholic for the sake of his initiatic need, that would have been a very different story indeed, as he would have been speedily excommunicated. In fact, he considered Islam useful for his for much of the same reasons Bob suggests embracing Catholicism would place express limits on his quest. Since Islam has no real authoritative body, every person is free (if he can fun fast enough) to interpret his religion however he may. Now, quite clearly, Schuon resolved to not live in the Islamic world because of its stifling cultural milieu, but as a religious form, he fully accepted it, as with all the major religions. Of course, one is free to interpret, reject, accept, etc. any or all of his teachings. One does wonder, though, how could he be so right in so many areas, and, yet, be so wrong about something quite fundamental to his message.

Influencing a creative minority of deep minds or aspiring hearts or a few influential and competent leaders

Research on a New Approach to Management

M.S. Srinivasan

At present, Business and Management is going through an evolutionary transition. Globalisation of business has added new complexities and problems, which require a fresh synthesis. Ethics, values, ecology, quality, customer satisfaction, innovation, balancing the needs of local cultures with the global realities are some of the difficult issues facing multinational business. In the human dimension, an increasing number of people in the corporate world, especially the creative and talented, are seeking for something more than money and careers, for an inner fulfillment in the mental, moral or spiritual spheres. This is the context, which creates the need for a new approach to Management, which can lead to an integral fulfillment of all these trends of the future. To evolve such a new vision of management is one of the aims of our research activities in this field.

But not only Management needs a new approach, the very concept of research can be viewed in a different angle than that of the traditional research methodologies pursued in modern universities. This traditional approach to research is based on collection and analysis of data, arriving at a conclusion, or hypothesis and dissemination of the idea through publications. However, there can be alternative paradigms of research based on more intuitive perceptions.

In this series, we present two interrelated and integrated perspectives: First, an integral approach to Management based on the principles of yoga, and second, an alternative approach to management research based on the spirit of yoga and deeper insight into the ways of thought and mind.

Communicating the Vision
Making the idea and vision is only one aspect of our research in Management. The other more important aspect is to communicate the idea to people. Here again our approach will be very different from that of the traditional models of communication. The main aim of all modern communication theories and practices is to diffuse the idea through the print and electronic media. But in our approach the main aim is to establish the idea as a creative force in the mental atmosphere of humanity and allow the idea to communicate itself invisibly into the minds of the people.

Our approach is based on the perception or insight, which is closely related to what we have discussed so far. We have said that a thought is a force. However, it is not only a force, but a living entity in the mental world. A well-formulated thought is an entity almost independent of its creator, having a life of its own, and spreading its message invisibly into the minds of people. As the Mother points out:

“The mind gives a form to the thoughts. This power of formation forms mental entities whose life is independent of the mind that has formed them… One can form a thought which then travels, goes out to someone, spreads the idea it contains.”1

This happens always unknown to us. We are constantly influenced by a barrage of thoughts and feelings of others in the mental environment. But a well-formulated thought acts more consciously than the ones, which are vague and incoherent. It seeks for receptive minds and enters into them, taking different forms according to the nature, inclination, temperament and occupation of the individual minds. So the moment an idea or thought is clearly formulated it is already “published” in the mental atmosphere of our planet and begins to act in the minds of men.

For example, while reading a book on Management one may come across a thought, which in turn sparks off a new idea in the study of history. One may not pursue the idea further because of not having sufficient scholarship in history to substantiate the idea. But the idea begins to circulate in the mental atmosphere and may enter into the mind of a scholar of history who has sufficient scholarly equipment and data to validate the idea. He may write a book on it, which may initiate a new school of thought in history!

So in our approach, physical publication of the idea does not have as much importance as it has in the traditional models of communication. If we are seeking for name and fame or power and wealth for the individual or the organization or for widespread diffusion of the idea then physical publication is of capital importance. But if our aim is to feed the inner soil of the human mind with a living idea, then outer publication is of secondary importance. What is more important in our approach is to constantly enhance the inner quality and creative force of the idea through high-quality contemplation.

Thus we do not assess our research work by the number of publications. “Publish or perish” is not the formula here. We strive for an inner quality rather than outer quantity. Quality of thought is more important than the quantity of publication. In a still deeper spiritual perspective, the inner quality of the motive or attitude, which actuates thinking, is more important than even the quality of thought itself. Seeking for name and fame or for particular outer results vitiates the spiritual quality of thought.

The impact of an idea on humanity does not depend on whether it is published or not but on the quality and power of thought contained in it. A thought emanating from a deep and powerful mind sitting in meditation in Himalayas may have a much more lasting impact on human consciousness and life than a popular and published book written by a much weaker mind. As Sri Aurobindo said on French Revolution:

“If the French Revolution took place, it was because a soul on the Indian snow dreamed of God as freedom, brotherhood and equality.”2

Great leaders of thought like the Vedic sages, Socrates, Plato and Confucius founded and shaped enduring civilisations and cultures not by writing books but by the power of their ideas. In fact Plato was reported to have told his students that this higher knowledge cannot be transmitted by the written word but only by a direct transfer from the mind of the master to the mind of the student.

This brings us to the question of what those factors are which enhance the inner quality and creative force of the idea? It depends on the quality and amount of creative energy—vital, mental or spiritual—contained in the idea. The inner quality of the creative energy depends on five factors.

• First is the depth and comprehensiveness or wholeness of truth revealed in the idea;
• second, disinterestedness or selflessness with which the truth is sought and expressed through the idea;
• third, the extent to which the truth is lived by the whole being of the creator of the idea, especially in feeling and action;
• fourth, the quality of spiritual consecration of the act of thinking to the Divine;
• fifth, the spiritual realization behind the idea.

A thought which is the expression of a spiritual intuition, vision, experience, or realization of a universal truth or the Divine, has the highest power and quality of the creative force because it is closer to the very creative source of the universe. This is the reason why our ancient Indian spiritual tradition held the view that all philosophy and thinking should be based on an authentic spiritual intuition or realization. When all these four factors are there, then the idea becomes a perfect instrument of the Divine power which uses the idea according to an all-knowing Wisdom. The first two factors can be achieved within the human mind. The third and fourth factor requires a spiritual discipline. The fifth factor requires a spiritual accomplishment, Sidhi.

However, our emphasis on the inner quality of the idea does not mean ignoring or neglecting the outer needs of communication. We recognize that the idea should not remain only in the mental world but has to be thrown in the physical environment for collective contemplation. Here comes the utility of physical publication. It provides an outer focal point in the material world for collective contemplation of the idea by others. But here also the results of contemplation depend on the nature of the mind that contemplates.

When a powerful mind like Buddha contemplates on an idea, it multiplies the creative force of the idea manifold. But the same thing done by thousands of ordinary men who do not know how to think or concentrate will only lead to the degeneration and dilution of the idea. So, from the point of communication, influencing a creative minority of deep minds or aspiring hearts or a few influential and competent leaders or decision-makers who can release resources or have the capacity for execution is much more productive and beneficial for humanity than gaining the acceptance of a large majority of the masses. These are perceptions which will not make us popular with the present culture which glorifies what Sri Aurobindo describes as the “democratic cultus of the average man.”3

We may be accused of being elitist. We are not denouncing the modern democratic aspiration for equity. But we believe that true democracy lies not in levelling down the best into the average but lifting the average towards the best and the highest. This requires a creative synthesis of the needs of distribution with that of creation. We may get some clue to this synthesis from the methods of universal Nature in her management of human evolution. When we examine with a discerning eye, the intellectual history of humanity, we will find Nature uses a dual process for establishing a new idea in the consciousness of humanity.

• First is the concentrated creation, incubation and preservation of the idea in a creative minority and the other is the widespread diffusion of the idea in the average majority. While the first creates and preserves the idea in its purity,
• the second leads to the dilution or even distortion of the idea as it spreads into the mass-mind. As Swami Vivekananda points out:

“Whenever we see the most humanitarian ideas fall into the hands of the multitude, the first result you note is degradation. It is learning and intellect that help to keep things safe. It is the cultured among a community that are the real custodians of religion.”4

This doesn’t mean the idea should not be diffused. There has to be and will be the diffusion of idea into the masses. Especially in the future, there is likely to be an immense diffusion of the spiritual idea into the consciousness of the masses. This is also one of the methods of Nature and a part of the future destiny of human race. One of the positive results of diffusion is that the idea no longer remains confined to a few but becomes a common property of the mass-mind. But this may lead to a considerable dilution of the idea as it filters into the thick and obscure consciousness of the mass-consciousness, which is always at a much lower level than that of the creative intelligentsia of the community. And precisely because of this dilution, to counteract it, we need centers for preserving the idea in its purity. Diffusing the idea into the masses and preserving the idea in its purity through the creative minority are not two contradictory activities—they are complementing activities of Nature for establishing the idea in the consciousness of the race.

In all human activities it is always better to imitate the methods of Nature. So in our approach to management and communication of the idea, we follow the method of Nature. We try to diffuse the idea through the mass-media, print and electronic, and preserve the idea in its purity through contemplative research. However, as we have already explained, we believe that in preserving and communicating a higher spiritual idea, the path or approach through the creative minority is more important and also more effective than by diffusion through a vast majority. So the main objective of our research and communication activities in management is creative and preservative – to initiate and preserve a higher integral Ideal and Vision in business and management. Our aim is not to reach a large audience but a few discerning minds with a higher aspiration.

Research and Sadhana
In our organization, Research is part of Sadhana pursued for the personal development of the individual. All other aims, like publications, helping humanity, or evolving new systems of thought are secondary and subordinate to the aims of sadhana for personal development.

Research activities, when pursued with the right attitude, can help in the mental, moral and spiritual development of the individual. Mentally it can help in the development of the faculties of knowledge, like for example the capacity for deep thinking, and in deepening and widening the horizons of the mind, provided it is not restricted into a narrow specialization. When it is pursued with disinterestedness in our quest for truth and knowledge, it can lead to a certain amount of moral growth. And when it is done in the spirit of karma yoga it can lead to the spiritual development of the individual.

In our research activities in general, we do not go for narrow specializations in a single subject. For example, someone who is engaged in management research is also a student of Indian culture, sociology, history, yogic psychology, education and futurology. Similarly, the person who pursues research in Sanskrit studies is also a student of related fields like Indian culture, philosophy, literature and religion. For our aim here is not to become a narrow expert but to expand the vistas of mind into a broad and varied rainbow of knowledge. (M.S. Srinivasan is a research associate in Sri Aurobindo Society.)
Reference:
The Mother, CWM, Vol.15, p.
Sri Aurobindo, SABCL, Vol.17, p.112
Sri Aurobindo, SABCL, Vol.19, p. 1056
Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works, Mayavati Memorial Edition, Vol.VI, p.124

http://nextfuture.sriaurobindosociety.org.in/nov07/nfmay06_menu.htm

Taylor sees the Modern Moral Order as liberal and social contractarian notion of “mutual benefit,” tempered with a Humean sense of “sympathy”

A Secular Age: Human rights in a secular age? posted by M. Christian Green
[This is a co-authored post, written by M. Christian Green and John Witte, Jr. M. Christian Green is Alonzo McDonald Family Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion of the Emory University School of Law. She recently completed a three-year appointment as visiting lecturer on ethics at Harvard Divinity School. John Witte, Jr., is Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and Ethics at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion of the Emory University School of Law. His scholarly work focuses on legal history, religious liberty, marriage and family, and human rights.—ed.]

Certain observations regarding Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age made in previous posts can only be echoed—the book’s magisterial sweep, the masterful command of history, the penetrating questions about the human condition with respect to both religion and no fewer than three forms of secularity. Taylor’s recounting of the rise of the “disciplinary society,” “the buffered self,” “Providential Deism,” and the “immanent frame” have all been referenced by various contributors to this discussion. But it turns out that you can tell a lot about a book by the terms that are included in or omitted from its index.
The theme of loss is one that, while not listed in the index, is a deep undercurrent in Taylor’s account. One question that those of us working in the area of religion and human rights might pose of Taylor’s study to ascertain its implications for our field is: What is the fate of human rights—particularly religious rationales for human rights, respect for “religious human rights,” and the engagement of religious believers and religious bodies in struggles for human rights around the globe? This question may initially seem unfair, as it is not specifically posed by the author (though human rights, natural law, and such human rights precursors as Locke, Grotius, Pufendorf, and the Stoics do appear in the index). The topic of human rights is one that, while broached only sporadically in Taylor’s lengthy text, is mentioned in a way that indicates a certain depth of respect and support. It is the sense of Taylor’s own affinity for human rights that makes the question viable and compelling in the current context of pluralism, terrorism, and secularity.
Taylor’s apparent support for “our very strong universal commitments to human rights and well-being” coexists in tension with his desire to raise questions about the moral sources of our human rights and the strength of our aspiration and motivation to attain them. Indeed, Taylor seems to situate himself within “modern civilization’s ‘loyal opposition’,” whom he sees as committed to defending the idea that there is “something uniquely valuable and important about the civilization of democracy and human rights,” an idea that in some cases leads them to “pine for a really Christian moral order.”
A Secular Age is, it turns out, a profoundly Christian philosophical work, particularly reflecting Taylor’s own Catholic confessional commitments. Taylor wants to address not only secular adherents to the mind’s reason, but also certain practitioners of the faith who, like Pope Pius IX in the nineteenth century, decry “all the errors of the modern world, including human rights, democracy, equality, and just about everything our contemporary Liberal state embodies.” Taylor proclaims Pius IX “just wrong to think that democracy and human rights were incompatible with Christianity, or even inferior social contexts for the flourishing of the faith,” while at the same time reminding that “this doesn’t mean that Catholics suspicious of democracy in the nineteenth century might not have seen some of its dangers and weaknesses most clearly than we do as children of the twentieth century, who had to defend democracy against various gruesome forms of tyranny.”
One might question the precision of Taylor’s location of human rights in the Catholic tradition, particularly as he seems knowledgeable of the ebb and flow of that tradition, in which Pius IX arguably constitutes the nadir, with John XXIII taking the tradition to its later twentieth-century zenith. As other reviewers have noted, Taylor’s confinement of his study to the Christian, or post-Christian West, as important as it is for understanding the development of the secular age in that theopolitical, social, cultural, and economic context, is a limitation of the book, particularly when it comes to human rights, which are universal by definition. One wonders in particular how Taylor would recommend that inhabitants of Western liberal democracies characterized by “secularity 3,” in which religion is both optional and compartmentalized, should respond to inhabitants of other societies (Islam, Islamophobia, 9/11, and “clash of civilizations” do make it into the index) for whom religion really does operate as a Rawlsian “comprehensive doctrine,” encompassing all spheres of society and experience.
Taylor’s argument is, however, helpful in complexifying and problematizing both the “human” and the “universal” as these have developed in the evolution toward a secular age. The trajectory has been from a world in which nature and society were both “enchanted” in the sense of being “under God,” toward an “exclusive humanism” in which neither our nature nor our spiritual aspiration toward fullness are referenced toward the transcendent or divine. The new humanism has given rise to an ethic emphasizing the “active capacity to shape and fashion our world, natural and social” in a way that is “actuated by some drive to human beneficence” as a “substitute for agape,” the Christian understanding of altruistic, self-giving love modeled on the love of God for humanity. Far from embodying this agapic vision, Taylor sees the Modern Moral Order as defined by a decidedly liberal and social contractarian notion of “mutual benefit,” occasionally tempered with a Humean sense of “sympathy.” It is worth noting here that “agape” gets an extensive notation, while “mutuality,” along with such related terms as “sympathy” and “justice” (and also “liberalism”) with which agape is frequently contrasted are omitted.
In Taylor’s sense, neither mutuality nor sympathy provides an adequate motivating ethic to support even the most laudable commitments to human rights. Something is lost in the transition from agape and grace to mutuality and justice. (Indeed, “grace” is another prominently argued but unindexed term—see pages 10, 78, 91, and 542.) This may be suggestive of a gap between our aspirations and our capacities to achieve them, implied at one point in Taylor’s noting the “continuing lack of fit between the dominant, accepted notions of flourishing and the demands of the gospel,” a tension that invokes similar gaps between the immanent and the transcendent, and the universal and the particular, as these relate to human rights. Taylor takes issue on some of these points with his frequent philosophical interlocutor, Martha Nussbaum, whom he praises for cautioning us against attempts to “transcend our humanity,” while at the same time pointing certain anti-theological affinities to the transcendence project of Nietzsche and his followers. Of Nussbaum, and to those who would cast off theological (especially Christian) arguments for human rights, Taylor asks, “In view of the importance of Christian universalism and agape in the constitution of the modern idea of moral order, ought we really to hope for the utter uprooting of all the belief and desires which Christianity has inculcated in our civilization?”
Nussbaum’s arguments for human capabilities as the foundation of human rights do point to another possible avenue for human rights—namely, the grounding of human rights in an understanding of a neo-Stoic and neo-neo-Thomist understanding of natural law. As invocation of the Stoics suggests, this is not a new turn, but a very old one. It is congenial and congruent with Christian understandings, but more broadly inviting and appealing to other religious traditions, perhaps even to secular humanists of goodwill. This is not nearly the robust and reconstituted Christian agapism that Taylor would prefer, but it may be the more achievable aspiration in a world in which cosmos has become merely a universe governed by Providential Deism.
But it appears that such secularized natural rights arguments are not the ones that Taylor would prefer. For, as suggested above, Taylor’s account is both Christian and Catholic. Nowhere is this more true than in Taylor’s frequent description of the secular age as involving “excarnation,” or the “transfer of our religious life out of bodily forms of ritual, worship, practice, so that it comes more and more to reside ‘in the head’.” Human rights are grounded in—and their lack or abrogation threatens—both the mind and the body. So any references to bodies or embodiment (also absent from the index) tend to make human rights advocates take notice. References to “incarnation,” “excarnation,” “Carnival,” and the “festive” recur frequently in Taylor’s pages and are well represented in the index—a fact not lost on the co-author of this review (Green) who was born in the great, if beleaguered, city of New Orleans. Could it be that Mardi Gras is the solution to many of the problems of our era? Is this the sensibility which has been lost?
In the end, the book’s intriguing, if incomplete, index may hold the key. If Carnival is a theme that recurs frequently in the book’s first half, agape predominates toward the end. Neither Carnival (described in one place as connecting us to the “‘communitas’ dimension of society” nor agape are given particular prominence in the book’s chapter titles (and subheadings would have been a great help in a book this massive), but they are referenced heavily in the index and recur as a persistent and percussive beat throughout the text. Is agape to pick up where Carnival left off or was lost? Is a particularly antinomian variety of agape (described in one place as a “gut feeling”) to be the primary ethical sentiment and motivation undergirding our commitment to human rights? Is a free-flowing, Carnivalesque, heroic agape adequate to that task? Or, does it need the additional layer of institutionalization and legitimation that the law (an unindexed term) and human rights regimes provide?
In conclusion, we would return to that other prominent cross-cutting theme in A Secular Age—loss. Clearly, for Taylor, the transition to the secular age has involved many kinds of loss, most especially a loss of what he labels the “heroic” in a non-Nietzschean sense. In this way his narrative is profoundly sad. Taylor does an estimable job of recounting the past and present of our secular age. Prognostications on for the future on the basis of this account seem bleak—for human rights and other compelling issues of our time. Can we escape the disenchantment of the secular age and the “unquiet frontiers of modernity” to something better and more tranquil? Should we try? Transformation and conversion (both indexed) are additional prominent features of the Taylorian account. Is there an exit through these? Or are we in a new “Iron Cage”?
It is important to remember that what is lost can be found or retrieved. Taylor might take heart in efforts of those working on human rights at the intersection of law and religion, particularly in the post-9/11 context which is so pitting the secularized and the resolutely unsecularized against one another in these matters. There, many of us are working to retrieve nature, natural law, human nature, human capabilities, and pluralistic religious interpretations of these in a ways that incorporates Taylor’s earlier concerns for “recognition” (even more than “authenticity”) into a new theory of “cosmopolitanism” in building a new interdisciplinary, international, and interreligious culture of human rights aspiration and realization. Though the relation of religion to human rights is merely a subtext of Taylor’s achievement in A Secular Age, it is a contribution that is likely be studied and commented on further by those working in these fields. This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 2:55 pm and is filed under A Secular Age.

Husserl was providing more elaborate descriptions of the walls of the prison in which he was trapped

Husserl was "wandering between two worlds": the world of social epistemology and the world of "atomistic knowledge"

Anonymous said...
Husserl had some interesting things to say but all he was doing was providing more elaborate descriptions of the walls of the prison in which he was trapped. A prison which NO philosophy can even begin to penetrate, which is incapable of passing beyond knowings. Why? Because it is held in place by hell deep fear.

He was a product of his time. A time in which everybody had already become totally embedded in the reductionist "world"-view created in the image of scientism. Weber's deadly iron cage, the walls of which, were created by left brained "reason" divorced from even the possiblity of free psychic association with other beings and the World Process altogether. 6:09 AM, November 17, 2007

The only cure is the Invasion of the Divine into the human realm

Milbank’s argument that Žižek’s ontology is inadequate to genuine socialism

Anonymous said...
Ah, the Big Time Talkers of Big Time (false) "religion"---"religion" created in the long ago childhood of man.In this day and age the usual jesus death & "resurrection" show fits squarely into the urban legend category---fantastic tall stories for the credulous. Never mind that the current world crisis is a manifestation of over 3000 years of patriarchal culture and its drive to total power and control over everything. As such the crisis has a vast historical almost unstoppable momentum behind it.

And to think that some one dimensional pea-brained theory or theology is going to make any difference to the current universal insanity is worse than wishful thinking.

Speaking of leadership, what about the time honoured Tradition of turning to the Realized Saints and Sages for advice and guidance instead of the sex-paranoid Big Talkers and glamour boy adolescent "philsophers".

Traditionally, especially in India, the politicians knew that to govern well they had to maintain an association with Saints and Realizers, with people of greater and deeper experience. In times past, political leaders knew they had to go into the retreat hermitages of Saints and Realizers to balance themselves and acquire a right view by which to serve the people. They did not always succed, obviously, but such was the tradition, and some did succeed.

Nowadays it is taboo to resort to any body. TV tells people not to be so served. The one thing that can cure is anathematized, made profoundly taboo through the daily propaganda. Resort to the Pealizer is the only cure. Unless such resort once again becomes acceptable and people become transformed by it, the current trend is not going to change and it is going to get worse, and worse, and worse. The very thing that could cure humanity has been made taboo.

The only cure is the Invasion of the Divine into the human realm, through Saints and Realizers of various degrees of Realization. Through their influence, humanity has at least to some degree been cured. 5:38 AM, November 17, 2007

Anonymous said...
What does ecclesio-trinitarian ontolgy mean? Sounds like psycho-babble to me.

Is there any room for the blood thirsty bitch Kali, who eats the entire "cosmos" for breakfast in this ontology?

Or Chinnamasta the self decapiated Goddess.

And besides which the trinity that DOES govern eveyone and everything is the fear saturated trinity of active separation from the Divine Radiance, all "other" sentient beings, and the World Process altogether. These three interlocking fear based, and fear inducing presumptions, saturate every minute particle of our individual and collective existence. The ontolgy of fear rules. 5:48 AM, November 17, 2007

Inherent to human rationality is an implicit drive for utopian existence

Garrison’s World: The Irrelevance of Rational Atheism and the New Philosophy of the Non-Rational - Part 2 Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:29:05 -0800 PST by John C. Garrison

The First World War (1914-1918) marked the beginning of the end for this heady optimism of Enlightenment rationalism and its liberal/progressive philosophy, though not the end of rationalism itself. You will find a lot of academicians, scientists and atheists still clinging, as to floating remnants of a shipwreck, to the dying, futile and foolish progressive dream of rationalism. Such irrationality experienced in World War I in so widespread and brutal a scale all but wiped out the then existing Enlightenment optimism and its faith in the supremacy of reason and the inevitability of scientific progress.
The Second World War, following close behind with a greater irrational ferocity, became the final blow for many who had entertained the foolish rationalist dream. Thus, while rationalism itself survived (just barely) the headiness it received from the Enlightenment period is hardly to be seen anywhere. Moreover, quantum theory, now slowly getting to be known by the masses, continues to have a profound sobering effect on many rationalist scientists and academic scholars who are exposed to its findings and their dramatic (if not shocking) philosophical implications concerning the nature of consciousness and of objective (or external) reality.
By the end of the Second World War, the foundations for nihilistic postmodernism were already in place. The movement burst dramatically into the open with the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, bringing to an end (within rationalism’s secular culture) the “traditional” social values upheld by both Christianity and rationalism. Nonetheless, having in its beginning left behind the authority of God and Scripture, the empirical or scientific method guided by reason continued to be upheld by rationalism as that which would determine what is true, real and believable. Faith in a supernatural order was put on the same level as superstition. This was the atheistic rationalism of Sigmund Freud, who appears to be one of the last major champions of the now antiquated, rationalistic Enlightenment philosophy.

A main objective in this part of my series on rational atheism is to begin a demonstration that will put into more doubt the grandiose, historic claims of rationalism, with those of modern, atheistic rationalism particularly in mind. As already noted, these rationalist claims have involved the belief that human reason with its methodical logic is inherently capable of finding correct answers to the riddles and difficulties of life without the need to rely on anything else-definitely not religion or religious faith.
In this rationalist assumption is the naïve and totally unfounded belief that, with certain safeguards, reason can be wholly objective. As such, reason is seen as being capable of operating free from subjective bias or pre-disposition, thus necessarily yielding truthful conclusions. A great number of thoughtful people, not necessarily all religious, no longer believe this. But for the sake of die-hards who still hang on to the foolish and futile dream of rationalism, I will here give more reasons why the pursuit of utopian-minded rationalism is a fruitless, dead-end pursuit and those who follow this relic of the past have either been conned or have deluded themselves to believe such nonsense...

When we consider the drive in human rationality toward an ever improving condition of life, it is not too difficult to see that inherent to human rationality is an implicit drive for utopian existence. For our purpose here, we define utopia as a state of being where the living environment is free from anything hurtful, threatening, disappointing, or frustrating...

But the arts are not the only place where we have seen the utopian drive of rationality manifest itself in history. We have seen it expressing itself in major political movements driven by a misguided (if not evil) Enlightenment rationalism seeking to bring about a golden era for humanity. Thus, the Enlightenment-inspired, socialist movements that in the end culminated in Marxist communism are a most dramatic example of this. Marxism was a highly rationalistic movement that exalted science, denigrated religion and looked forward with the most profound naïveté to an eventual state of economic prosperity and personal satisfaction where everyone would happily contribute according to their ability and be certain to receive according to their needs.
The utopian drive in healthy human rationality can be a real blessing. It motivates people to improve their lot in life through diligent application of resources at hand and through creative innovations. On the other hand, human rationality and its utopian drive can become problematical when rationality becomes absolutized.
How do we absolutize rationality? We do it when we become so enamored and fixated on the importance we place on our rationality that we lose sight of its subjective and therefore limited or finite nature. Under such a mental state, we delude ourselves into assuming that our rationality is not merely a subjective principle limited to the confines of our mind and brain. Rather, we believe it is a principle that should rule everywhere in objective or external existence. For instance, every dictator and despot, such as Stalin or Hitler, and every dogmatic rationalist atheist, such as Marx or Freud absolutizes rationality.

Economic differences of nations rest upon a template of profound psychological and spiritual differences

Universal Religion and the Many Worlds Hypothesis from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

In fact, one of Mead's implicit arguments is that the economic differences of nations rest upon a template of profound psychological and spiritual differences. And if we fail to take these into account -- which we have more or less done in the Middle East -- then our attempts at economic and political reform will be for naught.

In a way, you might say that the left and right ignore the reality of the different psychospiritual worlds (which I will be discussing in more detail in subsequent posts) in distinctly different ways. As for the illiberal left, they would argue that it is racist to make these distinctions at all, as all cultures are equally beautiful and valuable. For example, they make no moral, spiritual, or psychological distinction between Israel and her primitive and bloodthirsty neighbors. But classically liberal conservatives also err in assuming the universality of our stage -- as if everyone wishes to live in a freedom, tolerance and diversity (in their true sense, not in the twisted anti-versions of the left, which should properly be called license, absence of standards, and lack of discrimination).

Now, we've just about completed our discussion of Mead's God and Gold, the main thesis of which is again that "the key to the predominance of the two countries [England and America] has been the individualistic ideology of the prevailing Anglo-American religion." In other words, the key to our economic and political success has been our values. But these values are not abstract or arbitrary, existing in thin air. Rather, they first must exist in minds capable of entertaining them.

For this reason, we can say -- and this should be a truism -- that America's greatest natural resource is her people, specifically, the psychospiritual software that still drives our economy and undergirds our political system. Without this same software (or something close to it), the system won't work elsewhere.

One of my constant themes is that the modern left is literally analogous to a computer virus that does everything in its power to corrupt the psychospiritual software that has made us so successful and so great. They do this in hundreds of little ways that would be too tedious to chronicle here. We all know the major ones by heart, but you have to be pretty firmly detached from the world they have created -- i.e., anchored in reality -- to see with great clarity how their toxic assumptions have insinuated their way into most everything. I mean, imagine how isolated you'd feel in the absence of talk radio and the internet, where you can still connect with people who inhabit your bright and happy Coonworld.

Instead of "Afro-American Studies," "Middle East Studies," or "Queer Studies" -- which will contribute exactly nothing to your ability to understand higher worlds -- what we are desperately in need of is WASP studies. As Mead writes, "the knowledge of this history needs to become part of the intellectual equipment of everyone, Americans and foreigners alike..." He notes that doing so may not be "universally popular" (an understatement), but that "WASP studies" ought to "return to center stage" for anyone who cares about understanding, reforming, or perpetuating the present (classical) liberal system of global power.

Our first order of business must always be to preserve the principles at home that have made us so strong and successful. But in order to preserve them, we must first know what they are. While we must of course maintain our commitment to liberty and free enterprise, Mead has shown us how "any serious decline in either the creativity of American religious faith or its denominational and theological diversity would make the United States a less dynamic society, sap its energy, reduce its wealth, and impair its ability to carry out the remaining elements of the national strategy." Only if these principles are understood can we fruitfully turn our attention abroad and determine how best to speed evolution along and turn the psychospiritual clocks forward elsewhere.

A key idea is again dynamic religion, which "corresponds to universal history, the expression in politics and culture of the call to transform the world. Static religion corresponds to particular history...." Islam -- at least in its contemporary form -- is one static religion, leftism another, for the latter faith denies the Universal Law and would have us all elevate our particular history to the Absolute, through the toxic doctrines of multiculturalism and moral relativism. In subsequent posts I hope to get more deeply into the meaning of dynamic and therefore universal religion.

A "culture" of objects, and objectified "others"

Luther's conception of Christ living and dying "for us" has radically shifted the focus of theology from God to self Anonymous said... 6:27 AM, November 14, 2007

The Reformation was part of that time in Western his-story when man himself instead of god became the focus of all cultural activities. It coincided with the rise of scientism and its associated objectification "culture" in which the Divine Conscious Light and the possibilty of Divine Life was banished from the western cultural landscape. But even that was the INEVITABLE historical development of the notion of God as the wholly other, the great object or other always apart from the Process that IS Man.

Luther gave us left brained man sitting alone in his room reading the Bible, which has now INEVITABLY morphed into the dreadfully sane every-person sitting alone at his/her computer screen or watching TV alone in his/her room---and surrounded by a "culture" of objects, and objectified "others", and in which the "external" world is appealed to as the only measure of what is true or real. And in which "jesus" is just another fake self consoling consumer product.

Schleiermacher, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Hobbes

1. Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet, by John Armstrong. The author does not demonstrate overwhelming expertise but this is nonetheless not a bad place to start on the most neglected of all the great writers.

2. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla. Why Schleiermacher really matters, how Kant painted himself into a corner trying to solve the problems laid out by Rousseau, and why it all springs from Hobbes. I found this well above average for its genre, though you must have a taste for Straussian-like books where big ideas clash at the macro level and there is little attempt at any kind of empirical resolution... What I've Been Reading from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

The liberal, capitalist, and democratic world system that the Anglo-Americans are trying to build

God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World

by Walter Russell Mead (Author) Editorial Reviews Book Description: An illuminating account of the birth and rise of the global political and economic system that, sustained first by Britain and now by America, created the modern world.

Walter Russell Mead, one of our most distinguished foreign policy experts, makes clear that the key to the predominance of the two countries has been the individualistic ideology of the prevailing Anglo-American religion. Mead explains how this helped create a culture uniquely adapted to capitalism, a system under which both countries thrived. We see how, as a result, the two nations were able to create the liberal, democratic system whose economic and social influence continues to grow around the world.

With wit, verve, and stunning insight, Mead recounts what is, in effect, the story of a centuries-long war between the English-speaking peoples and their enemies. Sustained by control of the oceans that surround them, the British and their American heirs built a global system of politics, power, investment, and trade over the past three hundred years. Along the way, the two nations developed a sophisticated grand strategy that brought the English-speaking powers to a pinnacle of global power and prestige unmatched in the history of the world.

Since Oliver Cromwell's day, the English-speakers have seen their enemies as haters of liberty and God who care nothing for morality, who will do anything to win, and who rely on a treacherous fifth column to assure victory. Those enemies, from Catholic Spain and Louis XIV to the Nazis, communists, and Al-Qaeda, held similar beliefs about their British and American rivals, but we see that though the Anglo-Americans have lost small wars here and there, they have won the major conflicts. So far.

The stakes today are higher than ever; technological progress makes new and terrible weapons easier for rogue states and terror groups to develop and deploy. Where some see an end to history and others a clash of civilizations, Mead sees the current conflicts in the Middle East as the latest challenge to the liberal, capitalist, and democratic world system that the Anglo-Americans are trying to build. What we need now, he says, is a diplomacy of civlizations based on a deeper understanding of the recurring conflicts between the liberal world system and its foes. In practice, this means that Americans generally, and especially the increasingly influential evangelical community, must develop a better sense of America's place in the world.

Mead's emphasis on the English-speaking world as the chief hero (and sometimes villain) in modern history changes the way we see the world. Authoritative and lucid, God and Gold weaves history, literature, philosophy, and religion together into an eminently important work—a dazzling book that helps us understand the world we live in and our tumultuous times.

About the Author
Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a regular book reviewer for Foreign Affairs, a member of the editorial board of The American Interest, and a founding board member of the New America Foundation. He has written frequently for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Esquire. His books include Special Providence, which won the Lionel Gelber Award (“the world’s most important prize for nonfiction” —The Economist) in 2002, and Power, Terror, Peace, and War. He lives in New York City.

They were fighting for the rights of man

Trust and Caution By JON MEACHAM NYT Sunday Book Review: November 11, 2007 They were fighting for the rights of man while we quarreled over a lockbox for Social Security. The signing of the Constitution; painter unknown. AMERICAN CREATION Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. By Joseph J. Ellis. 283 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

If at this point I were to note the familiar contradictions of the birth of the nation — chiefly the triumph of liberty, but only for propertied white men — and say that Ellis has written an entertaining account of, as his subtitle has it, the “triumphs and tragedies” of the founding, there would not be much new for me to say, or for you to read, either in this review or in Ellis’s book. It is difficult to imagine an educated American who does not know that the Revolution was selective and that the Revolutionaries, many of them slaveholders who were complicit in the bloodthirsty treatment of Indians, were flawed and imperfect.
But Ellis rescues his enterprise by going beyond the familiar critique of the founding to explore a point that remains underappreciated: that America was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them. The observation is especially relevant at the moment, I think, because of the country’s evident desperation to move beyond the Bush years into — well, into just about anything else.
Modern political campaigns talk of revolution when in fact the founding gave us a nation that prefers evolution. Despite the hurly-burly of presidential bids, with their evocations of hope (Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, John Kennedy’s New Frontier, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America, Bill Clinton’s Bridge to the 21st Century), no single election will lead us through the wilderness to the Promised Land. Short of what William Faulkner called “the last red and dying evening,” nothing will ever be finally, fully finished. The poor shall be with us always, and the world will defy our best and most conscientious efforts to eliminate evil, or even to master it for very long.
How to live in a tragic milieu and yet strive toward triumph — for while perfection may not be possible, progress is — was a consuming concern for the founders, who, led by James Madison, made a virtue of creating competing centers of power within the constitutional structure. For the new American Republic, Ellis writes, “government was not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated.” To transform disagreement from a natural source of strife into a source of stability was a crucial insight, and is arguably the great achievement of the Constitution. What frustrates the passionate about America — its creaky checks and balances, diffuse sovereignties and general aversion to sudden change — is, Ellis argues, what makes possible the triumphs we do manage to pull off.
Instead of loosely linked portraits in the manner of his “Founding Brothers,” Ellis offers loosely linked moments and issues, from Valley Forge to Indian policy to the Louisiana Purchase. “American Creation” is not a seamless narrative; it is allusive rather than immersive. In a way, the fragmentary nature of the book mirrors one of Ellis’s key points. The past itself is fragmentary, and the fundamental task for any generation at any given moment is to bring order to intrinsically chaotic forces and events. History is messy because life is messy, and politics is provisional because life is provisional. Ellis shares the founders’ tragic sensibility, finding redemption in seeking the good rather than in achieving the perfect. The wisdom of the American founding lies in the recognition that the former is possible, and the latter is not.
The acknowledgment of limitation and the appreciation that the founders themselves purposely moved with caution is hardly the stuff that emotional Independence Day orations are made of, but they are essential truths about America’s beginning, and may help explain why our revolution worked when others failed. As Ellis says, “In my judgment the calculated decision to make the American Revolution happen in slow motion was a creative act of statesmanship that allowed the United States to avoid the bloody and chaotic fate of subsequent revolutionary movements in France, Russia and China.”
The other issues he takes on — slavery, Indian removal, the rise of the party system — are handled well, and readers will find Ellis’s conversational tone congenial. (One quibble: Ellis’s voice is occasionally so informal that it can veer toward the cliché: Robert Livingston’s support for the Louisiana Purchase “sealed the deal”; conflicts “heated up”; a British expeditionary force is sent to crush the American rebellion “in the bud.” The book would have been better if Ellis had chosen to crush phrases like that in the bud.)
In all, however, Ellis has done us a great service by reminding us why America can be so frustrating. For one man’s obvious reform is another man’s nightmare. “Unlike mathematics, in politics there was no agreed-upon solution reached by sheer brainpower and logic,” Ellis writes, “but rather an ongoing and never-ending struggle between contested versions of the truth.” Making it up as one goes along, then, is in the best tradition of the American Revolution.
s the decades passed and the founders died off, John Adams grew amused — in a John Adams kind of way — by the deification of the Revolutionary generation. “I ought not to object to your reverence for your fathers” he wrote an admiring younger correspondent, “but to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different periods, I have no reason to believe that we were better than you are.” Perhaps so, but what Adams’s generation did with its moment was to create the means by which subsequent generations, including our own, could argue about ends in a largely peaceable way. “It was patched and piebald then,” Adams said of the founding, “as it is now, ever was and ever will be, world without end.” To which we may, I think, safely add: Amen. Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, is the author of “Franklin and Winston” and “American Gospel.” He is at work on a book about Andrew Jackson.

How we in the Anglo-American world got it just right in terms of religious metaphysics

I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob Well, not last night, but yesterday. I'm trying to tear through this wonderful new book by Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, but it's got so much information and so many interpretations that it's a little difficult to assimilate and rewordgitate it in the usual way. These days, most books I read are of the metaphysical/theological/philosophical/mythopoetic variety, which requires an entirely different skill set, or at least approach.

In the case of the latter, you're sort of internalizing the Dreamer, and then trying to see what the world looks like through that particular dreamer's eyes, say, Frithjof Schuon or Sri Aurobindo, two of history's greatest and most expansive cosmic dreamers. The cosmic metaphysical dream colors all the particulars of our experience, and in fact, allows one to notice many particulars that would otherwise elude us, and place them in the context of a greater and more encompassing vision. Obviously, you're not going to get much of this in a typical secular education.

Rather, in the case of most books, you're only getting the dream content, and it's up to you to come up with the dream that will synthesize it and give it meaning. When a book is too long, or poorly edited, or becomes weak or boring as it goes along, it's often because the author insufficiently dreamt the material. But most conventional scholars are not proper dreamers anyway, or else they just interpret the material through the controlling dream of the day, say, secular liberalism or materialistic scientism.

In a secular eduction, whatever else you learn, the worst part of it is that you will have internalized the Secular Dream -- which is actually a nightmare, or at least a dream unworthy of Man and that which (or Who) dreams him. As such, you will have committed spiritual cluelesside without even knowing it. Satan works in mysterious ways, but this isn't one of them. The public education system has been doing his heavy lifting for some 40 years now...

Of particular interest to me is the religious dream that has allowed the Anglo-American world to succeed where all other dreams failed, to such an extent that it is by far the most powerful dream the world has ever known. In fact, at present there are three primary dreams in competition for who will Dream history

1) American classical liberalism (i.e., conservatism),

2) European statist secular leftism (including its American variety), and

3) Islamism.

The world is not big enough for all of these dreams, and yet, only one of these dreams is big enough for the world.

Mead's book is divided into five main sections, each of which is fascinating in its own right. But of particular interest to me is the third section, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, which gets into the religious metaphysics -- our metaphysical dream -- which allowed the Anglo-Saxons to come to dominate the world over the past several centuries. Seen in the light of Mead's explanations, the Marxist counter-dream just looks silly -- i.e., that our success is based only upon oppression, or violence, or exploitation, or class warfare. Rather, our success is because our dream is much closer to reality -- or our reality is much closer to the Cosmic Dream and its Author.

Are there better religions out there, or should we treat them all as equals and respect them?

What the Critics of the New Atheists Don't See from ~C4Chaos by ~C4Chaos

As much as I applaud Dalyrmple's eloquent critique of the New Atheists (e.g. for bringing up intentionality, purpose and meaning), he didn't really advance the discussion one bit in his original essay. To me, all he basically said was something like, Oh, there's nothing new to your arguments. And you forgot to highlight the goodness of religion too. Huh?

• I wonder what Dalyrmple's argument about the state of the politics in the U.S. right now which is deeply influenced by Christian religious right?
• What are his views on the theocracy of Islam?
• What is his ranking when it comes to religion?
• Are there better religions out there, or should we treat them all as equals and respect them?

These are just some of the questions that Harris attempted to address in his book, The End of Faith. These are questions that were not addressed by the Anglican theologians in the old days. The stakes are different now because of our interconnectedness, global awareness and technological prowess. The religious beliefs that divide us, more than ever, need to get criticized based on our current moral Zeitgeist (morality in the spirit of our times).

And this is what the New Atheists are taking head on. Once again, they are reviving the old arguments on religion and the existence of God by the great philosophers and theologians, re-mixing it with the most current scientific theories, research and studies, and bringing it to mainstream attention -- a feat that was not accomplished by those bold Anglican theologians and philosophers due to the limits of science and the moral zeitgeist during their times.

It's a pity that Dalyrmple focused on a single quote from Sam Harris book and use this quote to dismiss the book altogether. Good thing that he acknowledged his intemperance, apologized to Sam Harris and then advanced his three main points for discussion.

“I understand why Mr. Harris feels strongly about the way in which I expressed myself, and perhaps I was a little intemperate, in which case I apologize.
“There seem to me three main points to discuss. First, the existence of God; second, the actual historical record of organized religion; third, the metaphysical difficulties of human existence without God.

"The arguments for and against the existence of God are by now pretty well rehearsed, and I do not think that any of the new atheists (I call them that because their books came out at about the same time) add anything much to them. They are not entirely to blame for this: it would take a very great philosopher to do so. I certainly have nothing new to say on the matter.”

That's good. Because Dalyrmple's original essay made me feel stupid, callous, and deluded for recommending The End of Faith. Thanks to Sam Harris for his rebuttal.

Gandhi’s movement to overthrow British colonialism in India. A religious movement that had political effects

Hitchens once more from Indistinct Union by cjsmith ...Think of these great events in human history.

–The Civil Rights Movement, as Taylor Branch’s multi-volume history (the best on the subject) has shown, was a RELIGIOUS AWAKENING. The secular press/academia teach that MLK was a political reformer (give him a day!!!) and the Civil Rights movement was a political movement. It was a religious movement that had political effects.
–Ditto, the abolitionist movement. It is was part and parcel of the Evangelical Awakening (2nd Awakening in US).
–Ditto Gandhi’s movement to overthrow British colonialism in India. A religious movement that had political effects.
–Aung San Su Kyi, influenced by Thich Naht Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist monk) who himself learned from Christians (notably the Catholic monk Thomas Merton) to apply Buddhism to the social and political realm. The Burmese protest movement’s backbone is religious.
–Solidarity, the Polish labor union that precipitated the Fall of the Soviet Empire was a Roman Catholic movement. Vaclev Havel was writing prayers to God in jail and the Eastern Orthodox Church’s part in the Velvet Revolutions in 1989 has yet to be properly told.
–Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa.

West is borrowing forms of devotion, meditation and worship from other parts of the world

secularism, A Secular Age: Problems around the secular posted by Charles Taylor

1. One great problem is that the term “secular” is a western term, and corresponds to a very old distinction within Christendom. Then it goes through a series of changes in order to surface in such neologisms as “secularization,” and “secularism.” But even so, some of the original meanings carry over. These terms are then applied unreflectingly to what are seen as analogous processes and ideas elsewhere, and the result can be great confusion. (Example: discussion of Indian “secularism”, whether or not the BJP is “secular”, etc.)
My way of dealing with this has been a prudent (or cowardly) approach of trying to examine the processes we call secularization primarily in the Western context. This however is not a clean and simple solution either, because a) the religious life of other cultures has impacted on the developments in the West (as Peter van der Veer has pointed out), and also one of the facets of contemporary religious life in the West is the borrowing of forms of devotion, meditation and worship from other parts of the world; and b) there has also been borrowing in the other direction, that is by non-Western societies from the West (hence the fact that certain arrangements of the Indian constitution are captured under the cover name “secularism”).
2. If we look at the Western cases first, and try to think of the changes which go under the title “secularization,” we find a very confused set of assumptions and master narratives. The narratives of what were earlier called the “secularization” thesis were often predicated on a) a simple global notion of “religion,” b) a definition of secularity as the absence of “religion”, and c) beliefs to the effect that the inevitable consequence of the changes called “modernization” (economic growth, urbanization, greater geographical and social mobility, the rise of science and technology, the greater importance of instrumental reason, bureaucratic rationality, and so on) was to undermine and marginalize “religion,” and hence bring on “secularization.” (A more recent and sophisticated variant of this narrative can be found in the work of Steve Bruce.)
A more believable form of narrative is rather this: that the developments of “modernity” did indeed, destabilize earlier forms of religious life. No-one could even try to restore the sacral monarchy of France (Indeed, when Charles X tried to restore the full mediaeval coronation ceremony at Reims in 1825—complete with cures for scrofula from the King’s touch—it fell completely flat.) No-one can restore the village parish community whose time is organized around saints’ days and festivals, even though that was still very alive in parts of Europe (not to say Québec) in the first part of the last century.
But this decay of older forms often is followed by a “recomposition” (Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s term) of new forms. Everybody has learned to identify a successive series of forms of congregational Christian life starting with Pietists and Methodists in the 18th Century, and then moving through and into (among others) the Pentacostal movements which in the last 100 years have grown in spectacular fashion (and also have burst well beyond the bounds of the “West”). David Martin has written on this.
3. So a crucial area of work is to recognize the nature and spread of the new forms. New kinds of devotion, discipline, congregational life; but also new ways in which (in some sense) “religious” markers become central to political mobilization, often in competition to more secular” markers (the two models of French nationalism, Catholic versus Jacobin; the struggle in the Arab world between Baathist or Nasserite nationalism and various forms of Islamism); and also the ways in which “religion” is seen as essential to the stability of social-moral order.
In addition, the decline of old and coming of new forms in the West has created a new over-all place of religion or the spiritual in society. Spiritual/religious life is much more self-consciously pluralistic, with ever new forms arising, and with much more scope for individual affinities and conversions.
4. Western “secularization,” properly understood, has involved the displacement of older forms, which saw society as integrated into “Christendom,” and this has a) generated in some cases a bitter struggle to overcome these forms, and marginalize the Churches and modes of faith which sustained them (again the long semi-civil war in France); and b) the resultant pluralism has made some form of public “secularity,” some “neutrality” of the state in face of different spiritual options, or “principled distance” of the state from these, more and more necessary and inescapable.
How this is to be worked out is very difficult to determine, and is the subject of constant disputes. The situation is made worse by an ideology of “secularization” which feeds off the older narrative, which starts from the illusion that “religion” can just be sidelined, e.g., that political debates in a plural society should be carried out in terms of “reason alone” (Kant’s “blosse Vernunft”), without the injection of “religious” premises or arguments; or that we can separate people’s purely secular interests from their religious ones. An outlook of this kind sees any difference arising about the place of religion as the result of an unjust eruption of “religion” into the public sphere, an attempt to set the clock back, etc.
This outlook also nourishes the illusion that there is a simple solution to the problem of religion in society (you just “separate Church and State,” or just adopt laïcité), which can be applied anywhere.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 8:01 am and is filed under secularism, A Secular Age.

Sri Aurobindo was using “integral” long before the 1960s

The integral world is in transition. For a long time, to many of us, Ken Wilber was the only game in town. In recent years, however, there has been a concerted effort among some of those interested in integral theory to create an integral theory that is not simply Wilberian theory. Among those working the integral territory is Robert Masters. In his November newsletter, he asks and answers the question, What Is Integral? He manages to talk about integral without ever mentioning Ken Wilber.

WHAT IS “INTEGRAL”?“Integral” is fast becoming a very loosely applied term, supplying a bit of contemporary heft to otherwise pedestrian nouns, while it slides ever further into that once-was-fashionable territory that has swallowed up such terms as “holistic.” This does not mean that we ought to dump “integral” or start dumbing it down or hoist it up onto a postpostmodern soapbox, but rather that we define it as clearly as possible, both directly and through comparison with related terms.“Integral” to me basically means inclusive in a radically comprehensive manner. I say “radically” for a number of reasons:

(1) What’s being brought together constitutes not just parts of a totality, but also as much as possible of that totality’s presence, in as many directions and depths as possible;

(2) such a bringing-together is far more than just a get-together or reunion or conference of partially connected items or qualities; and

(3) the circle of extension that reaches from within out beyond every part illuminates and deepens the connections between all the pieces or qualities being brought together, literally integrating them without any requisite homogenization or dilution of individual differences. (Implicit to this is the fully embodied realization that everything exists through relationship, along with the invitation to become intimate with it all.)

“Holistic” (and “wholistic”) was the pseudo-hippyish ancestor of “integral” (even though Aurobindo was using “integral” long before the 1960s), as full of New Age, anemically grounded optimism as it was lacking in genuine practicality. “Holistic” meant well, but didn’t rise for long from the kind of sloppy/fluffy thinking and metaphysical quicksand that made it an easy target for probing minds that didn’t give a damn about spiritualized cognition and its sidekick clichés.

“Integral” is a more sober term than “holistic,” more imbued with a sense of true inclusiveness, but nevertheless is in growing danger of shipwrecking itself on overly intellectual reefs, especially as it busies itself theorizing about its theorizing. Where “holistic” had an anti-intellectual quality to it, “integral” can tend to lean too far the other way. In both cases, however, there is a lack of real embodiment...posted by WH @ 7:05 AM Integral Options Cafe

Bentham's Of Ontology

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Language and Logic
Even though Bentham is best known as a political philosopher and legal reformer, he also made important contributions to the development of logic and the philosophy of language. He was acknowledged explicitly by W V Quine, H L A Hart and C K Ogden, and exercised an equally strong influence over the logical thought of James Mill and John Stuart Mill. Hart went so far as to argue that Bentham's theories were so ahead of their time that they reappeared only in the work of Frege, Wittgenstein and Russell.

Bentham produced the bulk of his manuscripts on logic and language between 1814 and 1816, although the field was an abiding interest throughout his life. Bentham stressed the practical need for a solid basis to language and logic in many of his most important writings. He believed that he had discovered this solid basis with his distinctions between real and fictitious entities, and between perceptible and inferential entities. From this foundation, he developed detailed and fascinating accounts of the relationships between thought, language and action.

Bentham left more than a thousand folios relating directly to what he referred to as 'ontology', from which he appears to have envisaged the production of two separate but related works: one on logic, and the other on language. The texts which are the basis of Bentham's current influence in theories of logic and language (contained in volume VIII of the Bowring edition) fail to reflect this fact, thereby distorting his real position and masking the true depths of his insight. In avoiding the inadequacies of the Bowring texts, the new edition of Bentham's writings on language and logic should have far-reaching implications for our understanding of Bentham's own thought, as well as raising important questions regarding current debates in logic and language. An important first step has been made with the production of a new bilingual (English-French) edition of Bentham's Of Ontology (published as Jeremy Bentham, De l'ontologie et autres textes sur les fictions, Texte anglais établi par Philip Schofield, Traduction et commentaires par Jean-Pierre Cléro et Christian Laval, Éditions du Seuil, 1997). Catherine Pease-Watkin This research is funded by the AHRC This page last modified 4 April, 2007 by [Irena Nicoll]