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

UCL Home ›› Bentham Project ›› Home Who was Jeremy Bentham The Bentham Project International Society for Utilitarian Studies News/Events/Benthamiana

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]

Why would you close yourself off in philosophy?

Tuesday, October 30, 2007 Exclusive Philosophy

Prof. Anita Allen offers some provocative comments on the discipline:

“I have not been able to encourage other people like me to go into philosophy because I don’t think it has enough to offer them. The salaries aren’t that great, the prestige isn’t that great, the ability to interact with the world isn’t that great, the career options aren’t that great, the methodologies are narrow. Why would you do that,” she asks, “when you could be in an African American studies department, a law school, a history department, and have so many more people to interact with who are more like you, a place where so many more methods are acceptable, so many more topics are going to be written about? Why would you close yourself off in philosophy? I feel that philosophy is hoisting itself by its own petard. Its unwillingness to be more inclusive in terms of issues, methods, demographics, means that it’s losing out on a lot of vibrancy, a lot of intellectual power.”

It's hard to know what to make of this. I tend to think that almost any topic can benefit from being thought about in a philosophical way (that's why I blog!), so I'm all in favour of topical inclusivity. But philosophy is already by far the most topically diverse discipline, spanning everything from applied ethics to formal logic. Perhaps the worry is that within these subfields, there are a limited number of issues that one's academic colleagues will find interesting. But what is the complaint, exactly? Is everyone else obliged to share one's idiosyncratic interests?

I guess I'm more partial to the 'marketplace of ideas' metaphor: academics should simply pursue their personal passions, and communicate the grounds for their excitement to others, and the best will tend to rise to the top. There's no obligation to support academic work you find uninteresting or otherwise not so worthwhile. There's something to be said for quality control, after all. (One should be receptive to new work, of course, but not uncritically accepting.) The only legitimate complaint I can imagine in this vicinity would be if non-mainstream ideas were not receiving a fair hearing, as opposed to being heard and just not especially well-liked.

So much for issues. Should we be more methodologically inclusive? Well, that surely depends on what new methods are being proposed. In general, I don't see that anything is gained by taking non-philosophy and calling it "philosophy". If you want to do history, for example, there's already a place for that. I wouldn't consider it a gain for philosophy if we attracted new students precisely by changing the discipline into something it's not. (It's like curtailing civil liberties in the fight for freedom.) I certainly wouldn't want to see rational argumentation replaced by wishful thinking, or political convenience, etc., as the standard against which we assess claims. Or, for a less straw-mannish example, I have my doubts about experimental philosophy. But it really depends on the specific proposal. If, for example, there are valid inferences that philosophers traditionally haven't recognized as such, then by all means bring that to our attention.

Finally, is philosophy as a discipline really "unwilling" to be "more inclusive in terms of... demographics"? I simply can't imagine anyone in this day and age willing to sacrifice "intellectual power" for the sake of maintaining white male hegemony. I mean, that's just crazy. It's another thing to be suspicious of affirmative action, but that's precisely because it seems to be elevating concern for demographics over intellectual merit, and it's the latter we care about. So, again, I'm not quite sure what to make of the criticism.

As for her earlier remarks, I think Nick at the Feminist Philosophers blog hit the nail on the head:

This is an odd list. Consider salary and prestige. If these are reasons to avoid philosophy, they’re reasons to avoid most academic disciplines. But is this right? We should encourage black women to avoid the academy because the pay is only middle-class and the prestige is only so-so? That hardly seems right.

And who says the career options aren’t that great? They’re not that great if you don’t love philosophy. But if you do, then what career options are better? Being an investment banker? Not for me, I think (and thank God).

Can anyone else make better sense of Allen's complaints? Read More... Collapse... Posted by Richard 2 comments

On October 30, Brandon said...
Finally, is philosophy as a discipline really "unwilling" to be "more inclusive in terms of... demographics"? I simply can't imagine anyone in this day and age willing to sacrifice "intellectual power" for the sake of maintaining white male hegemony. They wouldn't call it 'white male hegemony' of course. But I think one seems to find in philosophy departments the view that there is nothing really wrong with the demographics at all, so when women or minorities complain about practices or approaches that isolate them or interfere with changes they would like to introduce, they are ignored or deliberately resisted. One of the things I've come to realize is that philosophers actually tend to be very intellectually conservative -- they're not (usually) irrational, so they can be persuaded, but there's a strong tendency to resist approaches that are very different from the ones they are comfortable with, and to affirm approaches that confirm the superiority of the way they like to do things. 'Stubborn' might be a better term than 'intellectually conservative': being able to argue cleverly for whatever one sees fit is not always a good quality to have, because it sometimes gets in the way of serious listening. And one of the things this means is that while there are just a few bad eggs -- and they definitely do exist -- who are dismissive of women or minorities are never counteracted, because no one feels they have to go out of their way to make sure that women and minorities can reasonably feel welcome.
On October 30, Richard said...
Ah, okay, that's certainly a fair point.

Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Sri Aurobindo

Main Page « Previous 10 days Next 10 days »
Monday, December 26
liminality and communitas
by Rich on December 26, 2005 10:36AM (PST)
In reading the following ideas from Victor Turner of liminality and communitas please think about the ideas of integral yoga and Auroville, as the place of liminality, or the threshold between worlds in evolution. In which the authenticity of communitas facilitates the continuation of the embodied evolution of consciousness envisioned by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. On this evolutionary track we find a future in which technology is utilized in service of the disappearance of the Human into the Divine. (Life Divine chapter 2) ... more »
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Sunday, December 25
The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nilhilism
by Rich on December 25, 2005 12:00PM (PST)
The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism.
A link to the video lecture of this most important book on post-humanism. http://www.pactac.net/pactacweb/web-content/video33.html more »
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emergent being of Modernism and Nietzsche's Last Man
by Rich on December 25, 2005 11:58AM (PST)
The question I would like to put forth to consider while reading the essay by Kroker and Weinstein, is can the notion of emergent being which transcends humanity be formulated simply as a messianic modernist humanist/religious belief of progress? and how Sri Aurobindo’s message contrasts with it, and also does the emergence of a “media-net” so described here by Kroker as collective transcendent (to humanity) consciousness have any implications when considering the superamental manifestation as ... more »
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The theory of the virtual class (from data trash 1994)
by Rich on December 25, 2005 11:51AM (PST)
Published in 1994 *Data Trash* is one of the most insightful books on the post-human future being manufactured by the virtual class. By Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein.The Theory of the Virtual Class"Wired Shut"*Wired* [Magazine] intends to profit from the Internet. And so do a lot of others."People are going to have to realize that the Net is another medium, and it has to be sponsored commercially and it has to ..." more »
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Thursday, December 22
*They Thought They Were Free : The Germans, 1933-45* (review by Dorian)
by ronjon on December 22, 2005 12:44PM (PST)
*They Thought They Were Free : The Germans, 1933-45*by Milton MayerPublished: May 19th, 1966I highly recommend reading the excerpt below from Mayer's book. One would think that it was written today, with full awareness of the obvious parallels to our current political situation and the intention to draw atttention to them. However, as I've noted above, the book was authored in 1966. The resemblances to the present day are uncanny - and disquieting. - Dorian more »
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Wednesday, December 21
genghis blues
by Rich on December 21, 2005 10:36AM (PST)
I would highly recommend the film Genghis Blues.it is really sweet and will have you thinking about the reincarnation of a blues singer.rchere is the net flix synopsis: A blind San Francisco blues singer's journey to becoming a master of Tuvan throat singing is the subject of Roko and Adrian Belic's Oscar-nominated documentary. ... more »
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critical and post modern theory
by Rich on December 21, 2005 10:20AM (PST)
I found a wonderful web site from a Douglas Kellner, chair of the philosophy of education department at UCLA, (I wonder if we can invite him to the center?) which has several articles on critical theory and postmodern theory, including the differences between them. He even explores notions of the virtual call or most specifically the implications of Baudrillard and Virilio.He apparently also knows Arthur Kroker since he credits Kroker with help on ... more »
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Saturday, December 17
Auroville Architect builds hopes and houses for tsunami victims
by ronjon on December 17, 2005 03:24AM (PST)
Architect Sharukh Mistry had a providential escape last year when the first monster wave hit the coast where he was holidaying. Undaunted, he is back on the beach - to rebuild houses for the tsunami-hit victims on the Pondicherry coast.His firm, Mistry and Company, is in the process of constructing 800 permanent houses in the SOS Kinderdorf-Children's Village. On the fateful Dec 26 morning, he was at one of the beach properties in a healing centre at Auroville, along with 12 other members of his family and friends. ... more »
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Friday, December 16
Pondy forms renewable energy agency
by ronjon on December 16, 2005 11:08AM (PST)
Pondicherry, Dec 16: A renewable energy agency has been formed in Pondicherry.....After detailing the agency's activities, the notification also announced a 11-member governing body under the chairmanship of the Chief secretary. The governing body also has two non-official members, Prof C L Gupta of Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Hemant Lamba of the Centre for Scientific Research in Auroville. more »
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Thursday, December 15
"Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Religion"
by ronjon on December 15, 2005 11:41PM (PST)
Many people say that the teaching of Sri Aurobindo is a new religion. Would you say that it is a religion?The Mother:People who say that are fools who don't even know what they are talking about. ... more »
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"Yoga and Religion"
by ronjon on December 15, 2005 11:16PM (PST)
Sweet Mother, what is the difference between yoga and religion? Ah! my child... it is as though you were asking me the difference between a dog and a cat! more »
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'My inspiration from Aurobindo, Divine Mother', says Pondy theatre genius
by ronjon on December 15, 2005 05:33PM (PST)
Veenapani Chawla is the Managing Trustee and Director of Adishakthi, a theatre group based in Pondicherry. The group is working towards enlivening dying theatre works while discovering new boulevards of ingenuity. Located near Auroville, the performance company is engaged in explorations of traditional forms of theatre, dance, music and movement. Presently, the troupe is here in city to take part in the National theatre festival, Bahuroopi. Here we publish an exclusive interview with Chawla by our special correspondent Geetha Shah. —Ed more »
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Sigh of relief for clogged water bodies
by ronjon on December 15, 2005 05:06PM (PST)
Siruthuli plans to convert water hyacinth, a very good organic matter, into manure by administering microbes (micro organisms) available in concentrated liquid state.. The microbes technology has been adapted to perfection after a brief training in Auro Annam, an institute in Auroville, Pondicherry. ... more »
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Tools Found in Britain Show Much Earlier Human Existence
by ronjon on December 15, 2005 04:45PM (PST)
A chance discovery on a routine field trip to England's Suffolk seacoast led to evidence that humans reached northern Europe 700,000 years ago, about 200,000 years earlier than previously thought, scientists said yesterday. ... more »
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"Auroville - An Experiment in Collective Evolution"
by ronjon on December 15, 2005 04:04AM (PST)
Another interesting article re Auroville from Life Positive magazine:The year is 1347 BC. General Horemheb, a dictator, has sent thousands of troops from his newly revived capital of Thebes to destroy Amarna, a modern city founded by the beautiful queen of Egypt, Nefertiti, and her husband, Pharaoh Amenophis IV, now known as Akhnaton. Akhnaton is a daring reformist. He has opted for a monotheist cult and worships only LIGHT, pure and free. This new city of Amarna is situated midway between Memphis (Cairo) and Thebes (Luxor), on the eastern bank of the Nile. At the center of the city, Akhnaton and Nefertiti have built a temple to the Light. Inside, there is no picture of any god, nor any image of traditional worship.In this new city, everyone is equal: Egyptians and foreigners (many of whom are attached here), king and common people, men and women. Artists and craftsmen receive support and encouragement to express their skills fully. Money is not the sovereign ruler. ... more »
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All Life Is Yoga," Interview w. Georges Van Vrekhem
by ronjon on December 15, 2005 03:22AM (PST)
Georges Van Vrekhem is best known for his two seminal works on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. He spoke to Swati Chopra about life as an Aurobindonian and the next step in man's spiritual evolution.One finds a lot of creative individuals being drawn to Sri Aurobindo. Why?If you really study Sri Aurobindo's philosophy, you realize his profundity. He gives you a foot to stand on and look at the world. If you have worked out his philosophy, you can comprehend any topic under the sun. A book I would like to write one day is *The Fifth Philosopher—Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Sri Aurobindo* as the fifth one. He is almost completely unknown, which is good. ... more »
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'The New Utopia: Auroville,' from *Beyond Man*, by Georges Van Vrekhem
by ronjon on December 15, 2005 01:23AM (PST)
When I first read George Van Vrekhem's virtuoso book *Beyond Man: The Life and Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother,* I was moved to tears while reading his chapter: "THE NEW UTOPIA: AUROVILLE." I hope George will forgive me for sharing it with SCIY's readers by typing it verbatim and presenting it here. (I'll be seeing him at Auroville in a couple of weeks and will ask him for specific permission.)Please note Georges' copyright notices and refrain from circulating it further. If you are also moved by this quoted chapter, I hope you'll feel motivated to read the rest of the book by purchasing your own copy. I've included a hot link to its online ordering page on Amazon. ~ ronYou say that Auroville is a dream. Yes,it is a "dream" of the Lord andgenerally these "dreams" turn to to betrue -- much more true than the so-called human realities! - The Mother more »
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Wednesday, December 14
Discovery Verifies Mayan Civilization 2,000 Years Ago
by ronjon on December 14, 2005 06:49PM (PST)
Archaeologists have uncovered an elegantly painted 30-foot-long mural in a ceremonial chamber beneath a Guatemalan jungle pyramid, providing new evidence that Mayan civilization was in full flower more than 2,000 years ago. Archaeologist William Saturno of the University of New Hampshire and Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology said yesterday that the San Bartolo site, in Guatemala's Peten wilderness, is "the find of a lifetime," depicting the Mayan creation myth and the crowning of a king in vivid color on a plaster wall as though "parts of it . . . were painted yesterday." ... more »
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Auroville Winter Integral Studies Program - Jan, Feb, Mar 2006
by ronjon on December 14, 2005 04:30AM (PST)
Dear Friends,We are delighted to present you with the second Auroville Winter Integral Studies Program (WISP). This program is an experiment and initiative that attempts to offer a range of courses, classes, lectures, and study programs around the theme of transformation and integral learning. ... more »
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Tuesday, December 13
difference (3) - the Blindman's cane
by Rich on December 13, 2005 10:22AM (PST)
As these differences enter into the stream of perception and enter memory they trigger conscious awareness of recognizable patterns inspiring action. As these patterns are learned and understood by the individual, skill in the recognition of patterns increases. Once these recognized patterns are assimilated in consciousness they become part and parcel of our inner structures of knowing; they become tacit. ... more »
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Why insist on one person alone?

from Gyanchandra gc@satm.net to Tusar N. Mohapatra tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com date 28 Oct 2007 14:58 subject Re: Fwd: [Savitri Era Open Forum] New comment on Peerless Sri Aurobindo.

There is a chain of developments on earth. Whether in the physical domain or in the realm of Consciousness states. Sri Aurobindo is latest in the chain we believe but one must not isolate him in a dogmatic way. Sri Ramkrishana, Dayanand, Stephen Hawking etc. all are included in the chain and have their irrevocable places. Why insist on one person alone?

Evolution is a natural process. Even Charvak and Brihaspati the atheists have their respective value in the human evolution. Marx, Mao also can not be excluded. One must read all and then make out every one's contribution. Evolution is still going on isn't it. You the presently alive know many things more which Sri Aurobindo and Vivekanand did not know.

from Gyanchandra gc@satm.net to Tusar N. Mohapatra tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com date 28 Oct 2007 15:15

Yoga is the only Karma Alan, as Sri Krishna says only apt and able Karma is called Yogah. When one does something for the humanity and for the earth's progress without consideration for individual and personal gains and gratifications, that becomes Yoga or Yagya in the Vedic language.

But the big question is What is the destination or the goal of all this progress IF AT ALL IT CAN BE CALLED A PROGRESS. Unless the aim of life and purpose of creation is not clear, human will not understand fully his duties and responsibilities fully while living. if evolution is the aim there must be a clear elaboration on the sense of way and the goal. After all where the creation wants to reach? Can you enlighten it pl.?