What About those Looters?

Some have tried to use the pictures of looters in New Orleans to raise the spectre of the lack of education on virtue in American schools. This is a red herring. The reality is that the American economic system does not promte ethics but instead promotes an ethos where winner-takes-all and the rest eat cake.

I personally agree with those who think that virtue itself cannot be taught--otherwise, there'd be no need for God or religious proscriptions to treat each other right. On the other hand, I see much wisdom in Aristotle's idea that teaching virtue involves not just simple platitudes and cliches mouthed in rote memoriazation, but an environment--including family, society, and culture--thaT supports the maxims that one teaches.

I mean how good do you think a kid is gonna be if they hear someone telling them to be good and then they set foot outside the school and see numerous types of hypocrisy from parents, society and leaders? I personally do not see how someone who grows up poor makes it to be virtuous--that, is indeed a miracle.

Virtue cannot be taught--it must be inspired and influenced by socio-cultural paradigms. What happens in America is that you have a culture that says be "virtuous" but it rewards those who are not with golden parachutes and obscene salaries. The work environment itself rewards values that counter any decent definition of virtue, enabling the predators to win and the others to lose--big-time. we have a winner-take-all culture, which is obviously borne out by the fact that 1% of the population owns 90% of the total wealth in the country.

During the past four decades, the middle class has been squeezed, the poor have grown, and wealth has concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. I don't know where you work, but I have worked in places hwere it is impossible to teach anything to my kids because the time spent working--60-80 hours a week--both parents working has made it difficult to teach anything except what?

Growing up means slavery to the clock, not being home for the kids, that moving is a fact of life so long-term relationships and getting to know people is not even a possibility. You ask where the values are being taught--they're being taught in the workplace, where veryone is fungible, no one has any security, everyone is out for themselves. That's the reality of the culture of death.

Some may say my social critique sounds suspiciously Marxist--this sounds so hollow and obviously reflects an inability to think critically based on the facts but instead on empty slogans from an era where paranoia about commies under the bed was rampant.

What's so pitiful about this response is that it's a red herring--the fact is that the poor suffer more from the violence that appeared in New Orleans than anyone else. Indeed, one might even say that poverty itself gives rise to violence and criminality.

Be that as it may, the point we are seeing in NO is not the gangs running around firing on others. The point is that the social mechanisms set up to help everyone--no matter their social class or ethnicity--failed, and as usual it is the poor who are left to feel the brunt of gang violence and the neglect of the government. Read more!

Separation of Lambs and Goats

There is a separation of the goats and the lambs going on here. As the neo-cons and their religious apologists continue to plunder and destroy the American dream--Is that bright city on a hill we see burning now in New Orleans?--the ugly reality of what Americans call home has been exposed to the light of the day.

I imagine there'll be those who are concerned about what the rest of the world thinks. But that is simply a dodge to turn one's own consciousness of responsibility for this debacle. What is important is how we as Americans stand by and accuse the poor for being stupid and fat and deserving of the suffering inflicted on them. How does the statement go? As you treat the least of these, so you treat me?
Go to Top of Page

Government reflects the priorities of its people. Fine, if you think the government shouldn't help these people, cut back on the funding; then don't talk so self-righteously about the fact that this is people's fault--it's the fault of a govt. who feels that world domination is more important than helping its own people.

On the other hand, if the govt. doesn't want to reflect the ethic of being one's brother's keeper, then stop mouthing Xtian platitudes. Stop running on platforms that supposedly are Xtian-based. Give it up--it's all a lie and hypocrisy of a spiritually and morally bankrupt party that uses Xtianity as a facade to hide the continued rape and pillaging of the American experiment. Read more!

The poor; who are they?

The following information comes from Doug Henwood's website. Henwood is self-avowed Marxist, yet he is not of the Stalinist style or authoritarian version. Why the information that he provides is important is because it comes from US govt. sources. He meticulously documents his works and he is always cognizant of the criticisms of his position. His work always directs itself at the most important points of the leaders of those who might wish to repress the poor and the working classes.
-------------

". . . Do the poor resemble the cliche? No, as an hour spent with the Census Bureau's recently published annual povery report reveals. While almost two thirds (62.5%) of poor adults are women -- nonwhite urban single-mother families constitute a fraction of the American impoverished, 15.4%. Rural whites of all family types, account for 19.5% of the poor -- well above urban single moms. White suburbanites of all family types -- and they do come in all types -- account for an even larger share (24.1%), though you don't hear much about them.

. . . .

This is not to deny the existence of a cohort of urban teenage mothers with glum prospects; though they may account for only a fraction of the poor, their poverty rate is a scandalously high 45.8% overall -- 37.3% for whites, 54.5% for blacks, and 56.8% for Hispanics. But centering discussions of poverty on citydwelling nonwhite unmarried mothers disguises the fact that American society produces an enormous number of poor people, urban, suburban, and rural; working and unemployed; abled and disabled; young and old; and of every ethnic group. Any serious analysis of social hierarchies is quashed by the yahoo's model.

It's often said the poor don't work, but 40% of poor adults do work, though few of them do full time. But that doesn't mean the balance are leading lives of unearned idleness. Of the poor who can't work, 22% are disabled, 21% are retired (despite the alleged profligacy of Social Security), 31% (almost all women) have family responsibilities, 17% are in school, and 10% can't find work. The picture hardly comports with moral decay as the source of poverty; it points instead to scarce and crummy jobs, lousy income supports and education benefits, and the impossibility of child care."

More Henwood Read more!

What would Jesus Do?

What would Jesus do? Would he be sitting back and from his easy chair telling the poor that they "shoulda gotten out when they could", realizing that many of those left in the city simply could not afford to? Would he be sitting there like some "unsconscious racists" and saying something life. "well, what do you expect from those blacks. They're just animals, anyway"?

For those who think that Jesus just wanted us to ignore and let the poor breed; that there is no social dimension to the Gospel, I ask that they look at the following phrases. Where is the complacency towards poverty in these verses:

----------------
Mat 25:32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth [his] sheep from the goats:
And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed [thee]? or thirsty, and gave [thee] drink?
When saw we thee a stranger, and took [thee] in? or naked, and clothed [thee]?
Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done [it] unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done [it] unto me.
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did [it] not to one of the least of these, ye did [it] not to me.
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal. Read more!

Ethics Precedes Economics

Our responsibility to others goes beyond or at least subsumes the economics of the situation. In other words, ethics precedes economics. An economical model simply works in terms of what is "owed." A valid ethics, I argue, cannot be based on such an economic model, but should be based on a different basis--call it the sentiment of sympathy, to allude to Hume and Adam Smith.

This theory of ethical responsibility does not assume that self-interest is at the base of a true ethics towards others bu instead is something related to our ability to sympahtize with the true conditions of those we encounter and whom we must respond to in some way that accords wit their true condition as human beings.

Responsibility, you say, is first to ourselves. Is that a given? I imagine the counter to this is what?... that it's to others? How do I learn this assumption? Certainly, as children, we grew up in an environment where we depended on and trusted that others would support us. Without their help, for example, I could not do anything, since as a child I am only capable of so much. Now, a child sees the world in me-terms. It does not recognize, and does not have the cognitive skills to see how much that they do really depends on others giving them the "space" to do what they want to do. Often, in fact, doing just what I want to do simply cannot be true since I must learn that there are some things that I cannot do because it infringes on others and their ability to do what they want. Yet, this assumes or occurs within the context of others guiding me through the maze of wants and desires and curbing those where and when necessary. Without this guidance--without the other's care for me--I could not be me and do what I feel I need to do.

It is a very dysfunctional situation where a child grows up in an environment where there are not others to teach and nurture them as individuals--as others who care about and need to be aware of the "responsibility" rowards others. Indeed, isn't it this sense of responsibility that others feel and believe that they have towards me that allows me to be who I am? Where does this sense of reposnsibility on their part come from?

I am suggesting that it is based on something called sentiment--that is, the ability or capacity of others to sympathize with me and my joys and pains and to take a concern in me such that I accomplsih or attain those needs and desires that I have--those things basic to being a human. Read more!

Who Wants the Poor Staying with Them?

The chasm between us

Katrina has exposed the scale of US inequality, but we have little reason to be smug about our own social divide

Polly Toynbee
Friday September 9, 2005
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1566037,00.html

. . . . . . . . . . . .

"What the great Louisiana catastrophe has revealed is a country that is not a country at all, but atomised, segmented individuals living parallel lives as far apart as possible, with nothing to unite them beyond the idea of a flag. The 40 million with no health insurance show the social dysfunction corroding US capacity. For the poor at the bottom of the New Orleans mud heap, there never was even the American dream to cling to. They always lived in another country.

The born-agains absolve themselves from sympathy with the victims by explaining Katrina as God's wrath on the Sodom-and-Gomorrah sins of New Orleans. But it took the mother of the nation, Barbara Bush, to perfectly capture rich America's distance from the scene. Visiting refugees in the Houston Astrodome, she pronounced them lucky: "So many of the people were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." She let slip darker fears: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas." Katrina lifts the lid on the hidden America invisible in sitcoms, but above all shows how the rich don't acknowledge shared nationhood with the rest."

[more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1566037,00.html Read more!

"The Poor will Always Be with You"

Assuredly Jesus was not justifying the economic, social, spiritual explotiation of others. Look at both context of this verse and what follows the statement about the poor:

"Mar 14:7 For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always."

This verse echoes a verse in Deuteronomy, where it reads:

"Deu 15:11 For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land."

What Jesus is saying in this passage is that what the woman who is anointing him with precious nard is doing a service such as we are supposed to do to the poor. Read more!

Human Nature and Love for Others

Explain to me where you find this human nature explained? It seems to me that it is part of human nature to rise above its baser instincts, such as selfish love for oneself at the expense of others. These scientific studies that seem to show that humans have this or that animal "nature" all appear to me to be justifications for an economic system that is really a conscious/unconscious act of will. It's a form of self-fulfilling prophecy. Fort every scientific theory that seems to "prove" what is human nature, there either now exist or will exist in the future a study that proves something different. The Christian response is that contrary to human nature, one must transcend innate human selfishness. The eternal command to love others understands this innate human selfishness, yet asks us to accept the grace that will purify us of this sinfulness.

Personal responsibility yes... but that should reflect the responsibility towards others that forms the basis of a just and caring society, no? All of us have benefited from those who have shown this responsibility for us. Your parents, your teachers, the police, those who maintain civil order, co-workers, etc.

Certainly, the need for love is human nature, provable by common sense and personal experience. Yet, the Christian sense of loving oneself as an equal with others before God ultimately does this human need for love one better--it is not based on preference or selfishness but instead is based on an absolute command that gives one the power to rise above this self-love that turns us into indifferent beasts towards the need for love of those who are near us. Read more!

Throwing Money, Missing the Problem

Now that the wound is bared after Katrina, people will fret and dread and throw money at it, but they will not attempt to change the long-term _causes_ of poverty. That is an aspect of responsibility that Americans have a difficult time dealing with. But it is something that must continue to ring clear to them.

Responsibility falls on us all--how do we approach this responsibility? In a society based on economic self-interest, those who cannot make it for one reason or another are marginalized and shamed for their ineptitude, lack of initiative, etc. What we have to deal with is _our own_ responsibility. Have I done as much as I can to help others? Have I fulfilled or even attempted to fulfill that infinite responsibility towards others, which I believe is inherent in the ethical demands of existence itself? I know I fail every day, yet I understand that this failure is at least my responsibility--and that I must try and continue to try to fulfill it. It is an infinite task that is never done.

We as a society must work together and not simply sit by while there are those who do suffer from the disadvantages of an economic system that is inherently unfair. If you believe that those poor in other countries are gaining from this situation, I think that is a pipe dream. There are plenty of examples that show that globalization puts money into the pockets of those who already have, not those without. We see something of this in our own country--where there are some aspects of civility at work. Here the average CEO makes 400+ times more than the average worker. Imagine how that goes in other countries where there are not perhaps even the minimal safeguards there that we find in this country.

One must ask oneself honestly whether what one sees is really the type of love that accords with this command to love one's neighbor as oneself. Can one honestly and in good conscience say that this poverty is _always_ the fault of those who are poor. Even _most times_ their fault? How much does chance play in that one who's poor and that who's not? How much involves privileges that simply appear to be matters luck or chance in being born into a rich family versus another?

Another question is: for the richest country in the world, what does it mean that there children who are living in conditions equal to a third world country? Is that fair? Is it just? I answer no, and ask why again? The answer is that there is no "will" or desire to put into practice the principles of loving one's neighbor as oneself. People hold onto what they have and forget about everybody else--this is a spiritual condition of apathy and despair and calls into question the good-will of the American dream. Read more!

Who Is the Neighbor?

You have heard/read New Testament passages about loving your neighbor as you love yourself. "Neighbor" means those others who live close to you. Yet, there are those in this ountry who would rather point to the poverty in other countries rather than in our own. Hhow can we look at others and point out the splinter in others' eye when we have this big plank in our own?

The greek word for neighbor means those close to you. This is carried over in the English etymology:

neigh·bor n.
[Middle English neighebor, from Old English nahgebr : nah, near + gebr, dweller; see bheu- in Indo-European Roots.]
Word History: Loving one's neighbor as oneself would be much easier, or perhaps much more difficult, if the word neighbor had kept to its etymological meaning. The source of our word, the assumed West Germanic form *nhgabr, was a compound of the words *nhwiz, “near,” and *bram, “dweller, especially a farmer.” A neighbor, then, was a near dweller. Nahgebr, the Old English descendant of this West Germanic word, and its descendant in Middle English, neighebor, and our Modern English neighbor have all retained the literal notion, even though one can now have many neighbors whom one does not know, a situation that would have been highly unlikely in earlier times. The extension of this word to mean “fellow” is probably attributable to the Christian concern with the treatment of one's fellow humans, as in the passage in Matthew 19:19 that urges love of one's neighbor. Read more!

Who Are The Poor?

How long do we love our neighbor?

The simplest answer is: however long it takes. Again, there are some misconceptions, I believe, about who actually is poor and how long they stay that way. Many poor people in this country are the elderly, the infirm, and the working poor. It seems obvious to me that as a matter of public policy, the first two cannot simply be gotten rid of.

The problems related to the working poor call into question an economic system that promises that if you work hard and prove your worth that way, you will get ahead in America. The big question is: why isn't this happening? How much longer do the working poor have to wait? The discrepancy between those who have and those without grows every year--yet, the society promotes a winner-take-all ethos, while it hypocritically shames those who through one reason or another do not succeed to the big time.

The notion of a fair and equitable distribution of the wealth of communities has a long history in Christianity, most notably in Thomas Aquinas. It is carried through in the Reformation theologians, as well, and is passed on through modern mainline churches.

I recently came across the following quote by Luther. He is commenting on St. Ambrose's words: "Feed the hungry; if you do not feed him, then as far as you are concerned, you have killed him." Luther comments: "If your enenmy needs you and you do not help him when you can it is the same as if you had stolen what belonged to him, for you owe him your help." (in _Treatise on Good Works_, p. 106)

This has been interpreted to mean that we owe the neighbor an infinite debt. What the limitations on that are relate to the rest of the command to love your neighbor, "as yourself." Yet, this again is understood in a non-selfish way, for selfishness is exactly that part of self-love that the Christian commandment asks us to overcome. Read more!

How Much Love is Enough?

From a Christian persepctive--at least for some traditions--the example for "how much love" we owe the other does not really enter it. Why? Because this implies a different criterion for measuring one's responsibility to others. The criterion here is God's love for humans in general. God gave all, so humans a believer is expected to give all in loving others. The frameowrk within which Americans express this is often economic terms--but in Christian terms, one simply can't measure love by dollars and cents. Instead, the measures used come from the examples set, as I have noted, by God's infinite loive for humans and Jesus' love for all. Perhaps, the best example of this, and the one that jesus teaches is that of the Good Samaritan. Here we find a man helping another man--en enemy of sorts--even though many others passed up helping this person. The samaritan goes out of his way to bind the man's wounds, carry him to an inn, pay for a doctor, pay for room and board, and then leaves the man in the care of the innkeeper. The story does not say "how much" he spent out of his pocket--it simply tells that this guy saw another person, a person from another, perhaps hated, tribe, and yet seemed to allow netiehr these or economic obstacles to stop him from helping this man. This example, at least from a Christian persepctive, shows that one must overcome some pretty difficult issues: dislike/hatred of the other (eg, someone from a different neighborhood, a person of another race, a drunk, etc.), distance in getting him to a place of safety, paying out of pocket costs, etc.

Having said this, it must be realized that from the Christian persepctive there is this command to love others as you love yourself that in many ways is an infinite command to do something that goes against much in human nature, especially the desire to "look out for number one." There is also the added persepctive that when one loves the other it cannot simply be just a matter of habit or carrying out some duty--it must "come from the heart." It must be something that one understands as being part of the meaning of who one is as a person, apart from the easy task of fulfilling a social role. Therefore, for example, a rich person who might give a gazillion dollars to charity out of some desire to get others' acclaim is really, from a Christian persepctive, much less worthy of true charity than a person who gives as much as they can with a true intent to alleviate suffering and poverty. This internal aspect of love is just as important as the outward show; in a Christian perspective, the internal/external are inseprable.

I know this does not answer your question with an easy "how to" approach. But from this persepctive such an approach is simply not possible since it does call for this internal aspect that must come from within one's soul or spirit--and one's feeling of responsibility to others which is commanded. Read more!

Third World USA

Many in the US consider themselves lucky to be born in the USA--rightly so. I am proud to have been born in a country that values freedom and where I have been allowed to live a life free of authoritarian and repressive rules.

Yet many know how it feels to go without a shower, not eat for a day or two, not have a place to sleep at night. This reality is _out there_. It doesn't exist for many, because they are lucky enough to have been born in better circumstances.

Katrina has torn away the thick curtain hiding this reality from the light of day. As many commentators write, Katrina showed that for many Americans living in America is like living in a Third World country.

Related Link

• A City Fears for Its Soul

Read more!

The Wound that Festers

What Katrina did was far more than display to the world that bureaucratic ineptitude is a universal. The storm in the Gulf of Mexico also shred the thick curtain that hid an ugly truth about the USA: while many gorge themselves on the riches of the world, a significant minority live in a poverty that many Americans do not want to know about. Until Americans wake up to this fact, no solemn hymns to God and self-righteous platitudes about spreading freedom to the world will be heard without many hearing the hollow sound of hypocrisy.

The United Nations has recently documented this fact of life that many American know first-hand but which many other Americans would rather shut up in a closet like an abused child.

The embarrassing facts that you might not want to see include the following:

* Child mortality is on the rise in the United States

* The infant mortality rate in the US is now the same as in Malaysia

* Blacks in Washington DC have a higher infant death rate than people in the Indian state of Kerala

* Hispanic Americans are more than twice as likely as white Americans to have no health cover

* More than a third of the uninsured say that they went without medical care last year because of cost

* Child poverty rates in the United States are now more than 20 per cent Read more!

Nullity After 911

Alastair Hannay, from his book _On the Public_, summing up in some way the modern predicament. Discussing Ground Zero 911, he says:

"We need occasionally to step aside. Or meet in some public space where we are put in mind of how little of what we do or achieve counts, seeing things directly and without the interfering spins and refractions of the media or of their influence on our current perceptions. One such place is Ground Zero, where the Twin Towers once stood; these are to be replaced not only by a new tower, this time of Freedom, but also by something less rhetorical, a grove named 'reflecting absence'. It is only a fitting symbol of the position from which reflection over the nature and setting for human fulfillment can take place; sight of the levelled terrain and memory of the terrible events that caused it can free the mind for a moment from its normally healthy addiction to the world, a addiction that easily creates enmity and division. It is a prospect that can produce a sense of human levelling. Kierkegaard said that coming to the point where all you can say positively of yourself is that you are a human being reveals the fundamental nullity of selfhood, the ultimate anonymity, a ground zero in which you stay put but at the same time move on, letting it educate your everyday. He predicted we would end up there and that it would be a good thing if we did." (p. 122)

-------------------------------
nullity
n : the state of nonexistence [syn: nothingness, void]

It is this state which Hannay alludes to to. It is perhaps, akin to the Buddhistic concept of no-mind or no-self. But Hannay, following Kierkegaard is also talking about the state of nothingness that the current Zeitgeist of Americanism propagates as it makes its way around the world destroying cultural identity, religious systems and world-views, political systems, and various traditional notions of self associated with these cultures and traditions.

This such that the type of traditionally psychological definition of "self" and personality simply lose any meaning. Indeed, the bane of the times is the amount of self fragmentation and alienation that occurs within "modern," secularized societies. How many people require some type of medication to simply get through a day in America? The alienation self characteristic of American culture grows--it does not diminish.

So how can allowing this type of culture to continue its world advance be a good thing? Because it deos return the human to his/her basic facticity of being human--at least that is the hope. All dogmas, ideologies, socio-cultural constructs simply fade away into a world where all values are equal and none means anything.

This is the nullity that Hannay talks about. Its goodness is obviously a two-edged sword. It poses the possibility of engaging with the nothingness of the world and thereby constructing a self or simply allowing oneself to die--to go with the times, accept one form of nihilistic response or other, ie, passive bourgeois selfsatisfaction where one lives like a cow or destructive nihilism where one believes that through acts of destruction one will reach some rock solid base of authentic and real existence.

What is the alternaitve? As Hannay notes, it is to accept one's humanity and try to work from there--recognizing one's nothingness while at the same time discovering what exactly that nothingness means in terms of living a human life. Read more!

Who's responsible?

I do not think it is constructive to pin all responsibility on the troops. While some may reflect the Manson-types you draw, many (if not most) are just young men and women who either out of a sense of duty or a free ducation (and what's wrong with that) or some other concern signed up to defend this country. All well and good. I congratulate them for their sacrifice.

In this war, they have been caught between a rock and a hard place. They have been deceived like the rest of us by a corrupt, soulless, amoral regime whose only interests are consolidating power in the US and extending moneyed interests thruout the world. This regime manipulated the fear generated by the attack of 911 into a false and bogus war on some ill-defined, amorphously slippery notion of "terrorism." With the threat of a terrorist behind every bush (bad pun, sorry), the American public has been hoodwinked and deceived into believing that this regime is out to save its skin.

As Simone Weil wrote about so well, war makes objects of those who engage in it. It turns baby-faced farm boys into brutal, ruthless killing machines. There is the ugly fact that some (if not many) humans, once they get a taste of blood, like to kill. This is simply a fact about the innate bestiality of human beings. (Think fo the film _Dogs of War_ or _Lawrence of Arabia_.) It is the work of "civilization to hold these forces in check--only unleashing them in the direst of circumstances and for the most plausibly ethical reasons; self-defense being ultimately the only ethically plausible instance.

To generate a war on the basis of lies and deceits is therefore the height of evil. It brings into existence this ruthless beast in humans and unleashes it not only on "enemies" but also on innocents who die for no other reason than that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The culpability of leaders who perpetrate this ultimate crime is beyond question and must be revealed for all to see.

In the fog of war, the soldiers commit crimes and acts of brutality that most will never be able to come to terms with. They will go to their graves with images of horror and death in their memories. They will feel responsible--no matter how many parades or how many medals they may receive. If the leaders laud themselves for their fight for freedom or some other empty phrase, these men and women will always hear the hollow ring of those phrases.

This is why you find that many of the homeless on American streets are Viet Name veterans--they simply have never come to reconciliation with their actions over there. It haunts them to the bones of their beings and they are spiritually and morally frozen in time.

The ultimate responsibility, however, lies with the leaders who sleep quite well at night. They feel responsible--but self-deceptively so. They should feel the same despair as those who kill and maim or are killed or maimed; they should suffer themselves for sending these young men and women into a place where they "had" to kill or be killed and where innocents lost their lives.

The US troops in Iraq know this as much as anyone else. Morale is low, the officers are questioning the rationale for strategic and tactical decisions, and the upper echelon are beginning to see that there is no solution to this war. As I have written in this forum before, there is a real possibility that the troops will begin to rebel against the idiocy of what they are doing. Certainly, they are spurred on to this by more immediate concerns: long tours of duty, extended time away from home and family, bad weather, sickness, etc. But under the surface there is the growing awareness that they are simply pawns in a farce that no one believes in any more and whose lie is becoming more and more apparent.

The moral imperative is therefore clear: support the troops by alleviating their suffering and pain of responsibility (this does not mean to say that one should simply turn a blind eye to it; but it does mean, I think, showing some compassion); find and prosecute the egregiously bestial soldiers and the commanders and civilian ringleaders who give the orders or simply stand by and let crimes occur; undermine the leaders and expose them for the frauds that they are.

We will never be able to understand the responsibility that soldiers feel for terrible things that they are compelled by circumstances to do. But we must never, in all fairness, condemn them to coninual guilt and alienation from our love and forgiveness. They recognize and ultimately accept in one way or another their guilt--we should be forgiving therefore and help them to forgive themselves.

On the other hand, the leaders--those who think they are not responsible for deaths; who cannot face their evil, because of their lies and cant about freedom and terrorism--must be made to realize and finally accept their responsibility for the evil they have perpetrated. The first step in this is to expose their lies as lies. The next step is to hold them accountable for deceiving us. Finally, their self-deceit about ultimate responsibility for the carnage and death must be punished, if only by being thrown out of office.

Expose the lies so that all can see what this war is all about. Support the troops but get the message out that their leaders are dishonorable cowards; the troops will convey the message to their families and their families will work to bring them home. The American public listens to honest voices of despair and pain when it is communicated by those at home who suffer it. Read more!

Evangelizing the Terrorists

What is all this proselytization about and for? From my limited vantage point, what is needed in the world is not evangelization of the barbarians but evangelization of the heathen within our own midst. Jesus taught by example--were US Xtians who are out and about in the world preaching American relgion to stay at home and practice what the good book teaches in their own lives and in their own country, my guess is that that would be good news that others might take to heart and respect.

There is something seriously wrong with out culture and way of life--and the "cure" propounded by the good Xtians of our times simply does not address the real issues. And until they get it right, I do not think they should be out and about acting as though nothing is wrong at home.

The injunction to hate one's life does not imply suicide (nor did I imply this). I do not put it together with the other verse, as you do, to imply the notion that this life is meant that we are to recieve a good life now--but in the future life beyond this one. In the same vein, I do not think that it means blowing oneself up or others--the Christian notion of martyrdom, and all the examples from history, seems to show that it is an individual act that involves only the individual life. (and even this notion has moral issues that are not easily solvable.)

While postmodernsim has its serious faults (which I believe I am cognizant of), I do not see the characterization you provide as clear-cut as you do. There are so-called post-modernists who are very concerned about ethics and morality (I am thinking of the much-maligned Derrida, whose later writings are filled with profound ethical insights). Be that as it may, I am for relativism across the board--certainly not in a nihilistic sense but in the snese that one gets when one places all human moral and religious constructions into the context of original sin. This gives the lie to all human pretensions of formulating any system of values that might not be tainted by deception and self-interest.

"demanding that they follow our cultural norms...." What does that mean? Follow the laws, okay. Act civilized, okay. But to remain silent when injustices are committed in the name of these cultural norms? I doubt that you or anyone else think that a normal human being is not justified in speaking out against this. At least one impetus for "Muslim rage" is the hypocrisy of the west--while it speaks about civilized values with one side of its mouth it silently mouthes something else with the other side of its mouth. This "something else" is that unless you acculturate you are not one of us--if you don't allow your co-religionists to be slaughtered like dogs in the streets of Palestine, then you are being "unreasonable."

What I find amazing is that the same emotions and thoughts exhibited by the "terrorists" are those that we ourselves or others in our midst would feel and think were we to be in their shoes. Is this relativism? or simply realism? There is another commandment by Jesus that I think fits this context--

Mat 5:44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
Luk 6:27 But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,
Luk 6:35 But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and [to] the evil.

I have always been astonished that many Xtians, when they mouthe the commandment to love your neighbor, forget this part of the commandment. Why is that? Is it a convenient lapse of memory or simply an unconscious desire to make the gospel as easy to follow as putting on your shirt?

Did Jesus denounce or repudiate the terorists in his midst?* One can only tell what he did and that seems to have been to teach by example.

* The Christian testament notes that there were other terrorists besides Judas who lurked at the fringes of those who listened to Jesus' preachings. (Simon the Canaanite [also spelled Cananaean, Cananaean, Cananaean, or Kana`ani] and Judas Iscariot... Mat 10:4; Cannanite here is another name for the Zealot terrorists.) Read more!

Night and Day of the Living Dead

We are in a tyranny--it is just not a tyranny of one but of the many. Call it the public, the beast, the crowd--its amorphous shape takes on as many shapes as there are and yet it retains none--it is all but it is nothing. It is the "vox populi" that desires only bread and circuses and whose pit bull, the media, guarantee that no one gets any funny ideas that they are better than anyone else. Presenetly, this ghost only haunts the graveyard of western culture, upon whose carcass it currently feeds and from whose ruin it is cobbling forth an army of zombies which will march east, west, north, south... It is the day of the living dead, and we only thought it was a movie devised by the sick mind of George Romero!
------------------
Tyranny is indeed the dish of the day. Served cold or hot, I guess, doesn't matter? I suggest that becoming conscious of it is first. One might say that given the situation there is only the animal impusle of everyone for him or herself. But that only contributes to the tyranny and leads to one's own ruin and damnation.

What are "we" going to do? What is to be done?... I think the first point is to concentrate on driving home the fact of desolation as deeply and incorrigibly as possible. In some ways, this is a nihilisitc response. It assumes that nothing can be done unless and until utter desolation makes it plain for all to see that there is nothing left to salvage and the new beginning must begin. This is where Nietzsche left off, realizing that all that he could do was to serve as a clarion call for the future.

In less vague terms, there seem to be at least the following options: 1) Nothing 2) Fundamentalist religious response 3) A religious response not fundamentalist in nature 4) Some type of "new" political regime

What's wrong with doing nothing? Doing nothing is doing something. Perhaps there's a difference in how one does nothing. One form of nihilistic response simply exists at the sensory level, thrilling to the images of destruction and wiling away the time in empty exercises of self-satisfaction. The utmost one can do at this point is to weave out a regimen of incoherent and arbitrary acts that stave off boredom, much like switching channels on the TV randomly and without desire, simply to see how the different images and sounds impinge on the sensory apparatus.

As Zizek notes, this is what Nietzsche called passive nihilism. Nietzsche also noted a second form of nihilism: active nihilism. This is where "wanting nothing itself, .... this active self-destruction which would be precisely the passion of the real - the idea that, in order to live fully and authentically, you must engage in self-destruction." (Zizek) This is the preliminary notion I suggested where all must be leveled for the individual to come to birth. Faced with the desert of the real, a person begins to see and realize they are a person, but that that entails some form of task or journey that brings self-awareness and self-consciousness.

What tyrannizes these days is the belief that they belong to a group; that they are in fact simply integers whose destiny and fate go as the fate of the group goes. This can be seen in the rise of group identities, of which fundamewntalist religions and racist groups of all stripes are prime examples. What differentiates and maintains group identity sustains the integers within that group.

Of course, as leveling proceeds, the groups differences between each other begin to erode; to maintain the distinctness of group-identity it must destroy all that is different thereby hoping to become sovereign and isolated as the "only" true identity. Internally, the members suffer alienation and ennui and numerous other spiritual ailments. To provoke the illusion of action and separateness, the entity engages in bloodbaths and sacrifices, thereby hoping to sate the growing enervation of the crowds whose animal desire for life aimlessly flails for sustenance, but the reason why is not known--it is simple thirst, hunger, procreative urge. The blood sacrifice assuages the thirst for a time, until the next feeding.

In the meantime, as this surreal drama plays itself out, some individuals begin to despair to such depths that they realize a stark choice faces them: the either/or of existence, which entails complete submersion in the group or some form of existence that will assuage the despair. At first, it seems like ethics, a life lived in conformity to the old paradigms of right/wrong, family values, state religion. This is the level at which the current leaders of the nations, as well as the theorists of fundamentalist ideologies, exist. They believe that the old paradigms will stave off final extinction, not realizing that thse simply have been hollowed out from within and will eventually implode from internal emptiness.

(NB Yesterday's hippie who has been reborn as a yuppie is paradigmatic of this type. It's interesting to note how many of the leaders of conservative causes are former hippies who became disenchanted with that lifestyle. In this regard, it's instructive to read the personal accounts of Islamic terrorists and the tales of their conversion from westernized clones to fundamentalist murderer. Bin-Laden is of this type, as is George Bush.)

Yet, there will be those who realize the emptiness even of group ethics and state religion. They will continue to push the envelope of self-knowledge, and begin to break through to higher states of awareness that bring great suffering to themselves. Since the age is decadent and the assumptions required for spiritual rebirth have been annihilated by doubt and scientistic dogmatism, the rebirth of a new age will not begin until there begin to appear more of these individuals who have gone undergone this educative regime. Read more!

The E Word

A recent lecture makes a strong case for building and maintaining an American empire. This lecture is a sober assessment of the historical situation as it now stands, and as it appears to be on the verge of unfolding.

The lecturer questions, however, whether Americans have faced up to the fact of its imperial potential. As far as he is concerned, the historical factors are a "done deal": America is already the de facto empire, and its leaders and citizens just need to take control of the reins and ride the stagecoach to glory.

I do not agree with many of this lecturer's conclusions; specifically, I think that if America is going to rule the world it must clarify the moral principles that will determine the nature of this rule. This author makes it clear that these principles should be based on evolutionary psychological principles.

What would be wrong if America simply turned its back on imperial pretensions? Why would that be immoral, as this author asserts? Where does it say that a country must conform to some supposed historical inevitability? I disagree with this whole idea that America must, to be moral, take on the responsibility of imperial design.

I could see this country maintaining such a presence in the world as did pre-imperialistic Sparta: refuse to engage in any military actions unless it is attacked--and then only in defense and so far as the attacker is repelled.

Such a military isolationism does not preclude, of course, global economic activity nor cultural influence. (It is my contention that American culture is more destructive of traditional values than any economic or military activities.)

But the question remains: are Americans ready to take on the reins of empire? I think that Americans are not ready yet for this undertaking--and hopefully they never will be. But I think that the current political regime in power will try to accomplish this surreptitiously, and are doing so already (consider the numbers of "bases" being built around the world by the Army.)

In lieu of the average American supporting or denying the trend towards empire, I believe that there will arise something similar to what one might call "don't ask, don't tell" colonization. That is, the American public will not ask whether it is an empire or what it means to maintain such an entity, even though they "know" that this is occurring; and the power brokers simply will work this way, taking no questions as quiet assent. This form of silent assent will begin to burrow into everyday conscience. People don't want to know what has to be done to maintain the status quo.

Something like this is already in place--consider the lack of discussion, interest, or debate concerning the war in Iraq--the media simply have given Bush et al. a free ride and the citizens have simply been too lazy or preoccupied to care about what is happening.

The reason for this is that underneath it all, the public (that faceless, nameless non-entity) knows that the machinery of imperialism will help sustain the economic and social status quo. If I could draw an analogy: this type of indidious "don't ask, don't tell" silence is similar to the silence that occurred during Nazi Germany; that is, when one's next-door Jewish neighbor was being bundled into the back of cars and trucks, people simply looked the other way.

I know I will be accused of scare-mongering, but certainly there is what is commonly called a "disconnect" going on between what people in the US think is happening (and secretly know) and what is happening on the ground in "the colonies."

I think of the woman's daughter I had for class: she worked in the Army morgue in Iraq--what she saw and witnessed has so traumatized her life that (back here at home) she is drinking and drugging and waking up at night with nightmares. She has simply given up on bringing up her children.

It is these little "hearts of darkness" that are going to begin to eat at the fiber of this country. The question is, will we steel ourselves to the reality--continue to live as though nothing were happening?

So then who will run the empire? The "job" of colonial administartion will not fall on the "average" American. Instead, defense contractors will take up that slack. Private contractors will run the colonies either surreptitiously or semi-blatantly.

What incentive will they have? Consider the fact that the average pay for private security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is $100K/year tax free. That is enough incentive to make many soldiers in the conventional services take jobs with these companies when they leave.

On the other hand, there will arise a payment system that resembles what Heinlein called "citizenship" in Starship Troopers. Is this wild paranoia or simply a presentiment of a time when the "done deal" rises to public consciosness? Read more!

Commentary (4)

What I have been suggesting, perhaps not well at all, is in agreement with your basic contention here: all humans are born with an innate sense of self, which relates to an awareness of ourselves as ethical beings. We all have the potential to become ethical beings, which means to do the right thing simply because it is the right to do--sometimes (not always) even in defiance of custom and tradition. To be an individual means self-knowledge and awareness that one is not simply a product of a social, natural, or even cosmic system.

In this regard, what is unqiue about the modern age? I have tried to show several aspects to this uniqueness: scientific, political, and religious. Perhaps the "problem" is best summed up in the following: today, people do not accept the idea that they are born as individuals; self-knowledge simply means becoming conscious of one's place within a group or perhaps the natural processes; becoming an ethical being means learning some doctrine or some rules that exist outside one; being ethical is not assumed to be a universal given, instead one must be taught it in some way. This is contrary to the primitivity that accompanies the ethical--that is, we all know what is the right thing to do; we simply need to be reminded to search inside ourselves for an awareness of greater self that is related to an eternal principle that is the Good.

If you do not believe me, look at the many books and article on the scientific study of how we become ethical beings--the ethical is reduced to some kind of physio-biological process, and we can study this process in the same way we can study the behavior of rats.

For an artistic representation of the type of personality created by the extermination of ethical primitivity, take a look at a film called _Dahmer_, about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. What this film does well is to depict the complete ethical blindness of this being. Every inborn sense of what is the right thing to do has died. Dahmer went to work, paid his taxes, blended in well with the rest of his society. In many ways, he was a model citizen. What comes across is his ethical and spiritual deadness. Everything is an object for him--he himself moves and acts like an object. There simply is no human feeling or individuality left in the person. Read more!

Commentary (3)

In previous posts, I have dealt with the objective and spiritual sides of what I have been calling the loss of spiritual primitivity. There's a political side to this, as one might expect. In the western world, political evolution has gone through major changes since the 1500s, with the rise of the modern nation state and capitalism. Along with the fall of monarchical government in all its forms, political and religious, came the rise of representaitive government. This included the notion that everyone should has rights and that everyone should have a say in the way that political decisions are made. This push towards representational govt. has as one of its source Calvinistic theology.

This push towards political representation of the people's voice has its religious source in the notion that "before God we are all equal." This principle started out as a religious proposition, but in time, with the rise of the Enlightenment, it became detached from its religious context and became an ideal that was supposed to be self-evident merely on rationalistic grounds. Thereby, we find political philsophers of the Enlightenment espousing the view that humans are inherently equal by nature--without the spiritual context involved.

In the past, those people ruled who were gifted by nature with the talent and destiny to rule. They were the "favorites" of fate and were seen to be the ones who could manage humans their environment with the most efficacy and whose efforts seemed blessed by fate. If there was power struggle and envy it occurred on an individual level--the great man was envied his good luck at being morally, practically, and intellectually virtuous (to use Aristotle's ethical categories). One envied and resented the good favor that nature and fate bestowed on this person.

With the rise of representative govt., however, wherein all expect to share in the power and benefits of that power, envy and resentment take on a more insidious character. Mixed in with the capitalistic drive to sccumulate capital, the citizen of a representative democracy expects no one to be favored and all to gain from what nature and time can bestow. This, however, simply denies reality--there are those who have more beauty, athleticism, intelligence, practical abilities, and so on than humans in general. In a representaitive society, however, these differences are simply denied or neutralized through social measures that guarantee that the differences make no difference. On the personal level, people feel that no one is better than them and that those who are indeed different are not really different but simply the same as everyone else. Where the social and political mechanisms cannot completely neutralize difference, envy turns into resentment; this resentment begins to poison the communal life because all actions are suspect and must conform to the reigning notion that no one is better than anyone else.

Henceforth, a person's worth and identity come not from any natural gifts or spiritual sense of being unique and individual before God but rather through the associations that one has with a group. One's power and efficacy come from belonging to some group that assures them that they do indeed have the requisite entitlements guaranteed by the notion that all are equal. One acts not because one believes something to be true but simply because the group says it is the right thing to do. Individual conscience gives way to group think and the conscience of the mob. (Think Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, Taliban, the modern US culture of public opinion)

To guarantee the illusion of this equality, there arises the phantom of something called a "Public." This public does not have any existence, it is simply the empty concept of a resentful mass wishing to see its own reflection in some type of "universally valid and objectively verifiable" common essence that all members of a society are supposed to share. It is universal because everyone accepts the idea that all are equal and entitled to equal rights; it is "objective" because it can be surveyed and quantified in the form of public opinion polls and statistics.

The notion of the public is further bolstered by the popular media, which stokes the fires of envy and resentment (think of movie star worship, etc.) as well as purveys the illusion of mass values that are acknowledged as true simply because they are "public opinion."

But there simply is no such thing as a public. It is an illusion created by and sustained by envy and resentment, as well as the desire to acknowledge no authority but taht of the mass--what everyone else believes, thinks or feels. Any basis for authority is thereby short-circuited. For if no one is better than anyone else, then no one has a right to say what is right, wrong, or indifferent. There simply is no way to verify that anything is true unless it accords with public opinion, but this is a phantom and ultimately relates in no way to a real world. The "real" world is simply an illusion created by and for the masses, whose expectations revolve around some basic bodily needs and some soporific form of spiritual assurances that they, the group," are indeed guaranteed the right to exist simply because they are born.

Indeed, a human born into this socio-cultural matrix, naturally endowed with an innate sense of individual responsibility and obligation towards others, is socialized to believe that they are not anyone unless they associate with and belong to some group. They do not belong as individuals but simply as a cipher along with other ciphers in a faceless mass of equals. It is this natural sense of individual uniqueness that is stamped out and exterminated by the machinery of the modern state. The modern state does not want individuals to fill its ranks but wants lock-step conformists who assume and build on the emptiness of a party line that supposedly promotes the ideal of all being equally loved and cherished simply because they belong to the state. Read more!

Commentary (2)

Ancient Rome, US southern slavery are excellent examples of times when nurturing the soul proved extremely difficult, if not impossible, as you point out. I have no disagreement with you there. Indeed, Simone Weil writes about the spiritual repercussions of slavery in ancient and modern times. For, as she sees it, the modern proletariat are in a similar situation as the ancient slave. Weil martyred herself for this idea--to empathize and live as a slave in sympathy with those others. Yet, Weil also recognized the uniqueness of modern times in this regard as well, a time which she characterized as the time of the Beast (using the Revelation image to symbolize the modern authoritarian nation state).

The distinction I have been trying to make is that, at least in these times you speak of, people had the primitivity (this is not meant in any pejorative or colonialistic sense; it is meant simply as a way of describing a sense, a capability that all humans everywhere are born with; in this case, it is primitivity as it relates to an awareness and potential for having a soul) to potentially be aware of, concerned for, and sensing that they could be selves.

What I maintain (following Kierkegaard) is that the modern, nihilistic, postmodern age (say from the late 1700s on) has been on a course on which this primitivity has come under attack. That this very basic condition for _any_ spiritual awareness, self-consciousness is quickly disappearing under the onslaught of _ratio_ or what has become known as "reason." Now, several questions present themselves: first, what is this primitivity, beyond the simple generalization I have presented; how could reason subvert and destroy this aspect of the spirit; and perhaps more detail must be added to the bare bones statement that the modern age is distinctive in this regard.

By way of introductory remark: consider the effort by scientists and philosophers of various schools to reduce the "soul" or consciousness to simple brain chemistry. Many of these reductionist models "explain" consciousness away by stating that there is no such thing as consciousness and, by extension of the assumptions within the theory, a soul. Any such concept is simply empty and meaningless after the adequate empirical data is acquired which explains brain function and physiological phenomena usually ascribed to something that has been called an ego that has consciousness and therefrom a soul.

The preceding is an overly simplistic description of some very sophisticated and complex theorizing. It also does not do justice to the growing body of data that seems to support these theories. If this picture of the human psyche (something of a senseless phrase in this framework) is correct, then it is obvious that any such notion of a self or primitive awareness of a self cannot even get off the ground. It is short-circuited right at the start because to talk this way is, according to the theory, hyper-blown metaphysics or even religious superstition.

Given the context in which I have placed this description--i.e., the elucidation of the concept of a primitive awareness of oneself as a consciously independent being that seeks to nurture and grow its awareness of itself--it would seem to prove my point. That is, the modern age has developed a theory that simply disputes the existence of a soul or consciousness of the kind assumed by many religious and wisdom traditions. However, simply is not true that this view is unique to the modern age per se: certainly one can point to Epicurus, Aristotle, and others who do not see humans as in any way autonomous beings in the way I have described. What the modern age has done is to simply flesh out these earlier theories with greater facts and a more consistent theory that fits the facts, paring away vestiges of "consciousness" type concepts from these earlier theories.

So, it seems that the modern age is no different than others in this regard. Yet, this is not what proposal I am making maintains: it maintains that the modern age is such that humans are quickly becoming incapable of seeing themselves as anything other than biological, cultural, or socio-political units that perform a function defined purely in terms of their identification with and as a part of group. The angle of perspective here is focused on the individual and existential dimensions of human life.

Rationality contributes to this erasure of primitive self-awareness, because as it promotes objectification of life, people begin to view themselves and their place within the universe simply in objective terms, functionalistic terms. Certainly, the objectification is only enhanced as science undertakes to demolish the unscientific assumptions made by various traditional cultural matrices by denuding of value the traditional concepts and categories that provide these matrices with their ideological foundations. The scientific spirit, however, does not simply undermine concepts and categories--it also lays out plans by which a society is to be organized and plans carried out by that society. Based on rationalistic and objevtivist principles, these procedures create structures and environments within which the human is channeled and formed, as well as socialized into a way of thinking that literally is antipathetic to any inkling of a spiritual dimension to one's individual life.

I am going to digress here to illustrate my point. The possibility of such a state where the individual has no inkling of anything spiritual or anything like a self was presented to me several years ago. I once took an evening class from a Soviet emigre. He had emigrated to the United States twenty or so years before the final collapse of the Societ Union. In the course of a discussion I had with him, the subject of religion came up. (Perhaps it had to do with Dostoevsky, one of my favorite Russian writers.) I do not recall the exact conversation we had or the words we spoke, but I do remember that he seemed confused when I spoke about religion (I was something of an agnostic then, although gravitating towards Catholicism). When I say confused, I do not mean that he was a unclear or dazed in his thinking skills. The man had been a highly educated engineer in his own country. He spoke well and was well read. What I mean by confused is that he emphasized over and over to me that the words I used about religion simply meant nothing to him--he understood the words, understood that they meant something to me, but he was dead to their possibile meaning, either for himself or for me. I remember trying to explain this to him--I don't mean that I was proselytizing or spouting theological doctrines--I mean I was trying to explain to him the basic category of religion itself; the basic notion that there was something inside a human that might want to respond in some way to "something" above, beyond, outside of, (what are the words we can use here?) oneself that is of a reality and truth. This simply did not make sense to him.... the words were meaningless and beyond his comprehension--again, not because he was a stupid or insensible human being--but simply because anything related to religion had been "schooled" out of him by his life and upbringing in the Soviet Union.

Now, in the talking with people there are certain things you tend to take for granted. One of these is the notion or concept of a dimension to life that is somehow open to other realities, other ways of being that have been characterized as "spiritual" states. This man simply had "no clue" as to what I was talking about, what I might be talking about, or what I could possibly mean by the words I used. Even such a person as Bliss seems to be aware of the meanings that I or you or others might mean by "the spiritual."

I believe that this man was an ethical person--he had assimilated the idea that members of a society should act and nehave a certain way. No doubt, the way he felt and acted were highly intelligent and thought out. Yet, he lacked this one dimension to his self that you and I appear to take for granted in this discussion and in others. He exhibited no despair about this at all--as far as he was concerned, he was neither for or against any such views since they simply made no sense to him. You could see in his eyes and in his voice that there was simply a blank there (not blankness), where I assumed there should be at least "an interest," a clue, a hate or some other emotion. There was nothing... plain and simple. (BTW I have encountered this "blankness" in others from our own culture; you are speaking to them and the conversation turns towards even something remotely "spiritual" and you see that light go out of their eyes and time seems to take on the feel of blank noise; white noise perhaps. It is as though one is speaking Martian.)

To make an end to this posting which has gotten very long: when I first saw the Soviet director, Andrei Tarkovsky's film, _Stalker_, it simply made no sense to me. I had no idea what he was trying to say. While the imagery was breathtakingly beautiful, the meaning of the action in the movie simply escaped me. After numerous times watching that film, I now realize that what Tarkovsky was up to was a chronicle of a time and place (read 60s Soviet Society) where spirituality simply had disappeared in the existence of the characters. Its literalistic rendition of this blankness is what is so disconcerting--for what Tarkovsky accomplishes (and what other stories and plots on this topic fail to do) was to depict in real-time what such an existence would feel, taste, and look like.

I hope that this provides at least some indication of what I mean when I say that the modern age differs from other times in the way that it threatens to extinguish the very primitivity that is the condition upon which a self is built. Read more!

The Silence of Muffled Cries

"No good at all can come from acting before the world and one's self as though we knew the truth, when in reality we do not. Qualified silence might perhaps be more appropriate for the church today than talk which is very unqualified." -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Silence is the ultimate weapon of power." -- Charles de Gaulle

sigan ameinon taischra, mêde mousa moi
genoit' aoidos hêtis humnêsei kaka.

[Courage now; let us view their shame in silence.
Let my muse not sing the birth of this evil.]

-- Euripides, "The Trojan Women"
--------------------------------------------------------------

There are many silences I love. The sound of silence that comes with the blanket of sound emitted past mifnight when the frogs peep in the pools from the marshes and the pools left by the rain. There is the crystalline silence that lays on the fields after a big snow. The silence of an empty church; the silence of my soul in those rare times when my inner voices stop mumbling and I catch a glimpse of a silence that is joy and surrender to hope.

Recently, I hear a more ominous silence. I have heard the ominous silences before--those creepy moments when the skin crawls and you look furtively around to see what might lurk in a corner. There are the ominous silences that come from a man at the end of his rope, the day before he commits suicide. The silence of a person who looks vacantly and demonically into your eyes from the depths of inner terror and insanity.

But the more recent silence is of a special kind. It began the moment that two planes crashed into the two towers of trade center in New York. Certainly, there was the silence that one would expect to come after the shock and horror of a barabarous act. For days afterwards, the silence rose in almost reverent strains above the rubble as a nation wept and prayed for the unjustly slaughtered dead.

Only months later, the silence was broken by other cries in other lands and the bombs and bullets tearing into rock and mud huts, flesh and bone.

I wanted to prolong that first silence after 911. I thought the nation should go into mourning for a year. This time, I felt then, would have allowed the pain to sink in, allow the shock to subside and give way a silence that nurtures and promotes reflection. Each of us could have turned inward and meditated on the meaning of this loss, as well as given due consideration to the approrpriate response to those who perpetrated this act.

I do not know what outcome such a time of mourning might have elicited. My suspicion is that it would not have been the one that set into motion the events that have brought us to the recent wars and upheavals that thretaen to set a tragic stage of blood and betrayal that even a Kydd would not be able to portray.

This brings me to the silence I have heard rising from the depths of I know not what hell. I want to asrcibe the silence to the insidious lack of media coverage of the brutal deaths presently afoot in foreign lands. I do not want to join the mocking choruses that fling dung at each other from one side or the other of this issue. That does not mean that I do not take sides, it simply means that if one joins in the taunting and jibes one misses the silence that falls in between the gaps of the insults and counter-insults. It is these gaps that define the debate and perhaps will one day come back to haunt each one of us as our souls waver between life and death.

I understand why the news media might be reluctant to report news from these lands. With soldiers in the field, any reports that show war will inevitably call into question the justice of the actions undertaken to execute victory. War is not a one-dimensional or even digital, yes-no, proposition. Its gray fog threatens to engulf any meaning into opposite and even to obliterate the contexts within which meaning itself can come to birth. Our media simply cannot cope with ambiguity--and if there is one thing that war is, it is ambiguous.

Then again, there is another reason for the silence emanating from this war. And this silence I really do find insidious. It is the silence manufactured, implemented, and maintained by a war bureaucracy. The reasons for the silence have ostensibly the same rationale as that espoused by the news media--protecting the lives of our young men and women in the field. I acknowledge and respect this reasoning; indeed, anything else would be simply irresponsible and immoral.

So where is the insidiousness? The problem with this silence is that it emanates from a gray area that is not inherent to the human condition of war, nor even the inherent one-dimensionality of newspeak--the silence that has descended upon us is the one of confusion. The babel of disinformation, lies, and distortions that have been cast out as reasons for and the continuance of this was have simply laid a blanket of consternation that leaves the soul uneasy because it can't sort out fact from fiction and thereby feels incumbent to recede into itself dumb and blind. It is a kind of voiceless terror that sometimes comes in between sleep and waking where the mind is awake but the body has yet to follow suit. In this limbo state the presence of the world is there, but it is there in all its disembodied strangness and haunting familiarity.

While the dumbness of our public discourse is certainly basis for concern and alarm, there is an even more terrible and potentially ethically damaging effect of this sielnce. Among the many silences, there is one that does not register until many years pass and the devil of history lays its dust upon our lives. The tragic poets of Greece were perhaps the first and only sensibilities either willing or able to capture in their cadences and words the terror this silence brings to light. It is the muffled cries of the dying, the last gasps of those left to rot under a harsh sun bloated with flies. It is the stifled cries of one who killed blindly in fear of his life and yet the face of his victim visits his sleep and waking nightmare.

It is this silence that threatens the health of our ethos; not terrorism, not militarism, not colonialism--for were we to hear the silence emiited from beneath our contempt for suffering, these other threats simply would not possibilities in the first place. Read more!

Confessions of a Dark and Corrupt Heart

Ghosts haunt the age... they taunt us because we believe them to be nothing but the phantasms of brain chemistry. They haunt the temple of our pride and empty pleasures. Their hollow cries can be heard in the empty phrases we mouth so easily day after day. The ghosts are angry if only becasue we think we can forget them in our rush for satiety in the fruits of this world. They know that the vapors of this world are noxious and will eventually drive us insane with the empty sound of our voices. Were we to listen to them, they might indeed tell us that we can't cut the umbilical cord that ties us to the past--that burying the dead does not mean simply leaving them to rot in the cellars of our collective angst.

Raise the spectres of the neoPlatonists and the renaissance. A great age indeed--its attempt to dress up magic and mystery in xtian garb now struts our streets naked and painted like a deranged whore: she takes her drooping dugs and pouting labia as the founts of truth; she takes her spare and vacant stare, stripped bare and showing bone, as the height of freedom, liberty and brotherhood. She takes all comers and gives out for all seekers. Oh, Scientia, you have fallen into the gutters!

Characterize "the age" any way you wish--nihilist, reltivist, irrationalist, amoral, postmodern, secular, modernist. Why such negativity? Why such gloom? Certainly this mode does not provide a sufficiently heroic strain for the advent of the ubermensch. What human lurks beneath the mask of the beast? What new god sleeps in the deepest forest untrod by man? "Let the beast run wild, and I will shoot him," raved Witkacy--indeed, hunting season is now upon us.

You see all there are are these snatches of old tunes that clang around in my empty head. Is there anything new, you ask, anything new...? Nothing new, never new, there is only the old that gives way to the new for that is the way of the earth and that is the way we tread. But on the way to the new, which is an old song, the old must fester, rot, and be hollowed out. So we live in the time between, the interregnum, the terribly barren and hostile wilderness on whose sands we follow an unseen path to the land no return, seeking an herb whose scent evokes paradise.

Is the only hope to burrow into the emptiness, glory in the power to be seduced by our own self-delusions? There are no leaders to show us the way; all roadsigns are written in a language that no dictionary of the heart or the brain can decipher. There are the dustdevils on the horizon that harbinger order in their spiral down the sky, but they play out in an empty alleyways where the poor erect backetball hoops in the form of a crucifix.

And maybe it is there where I will find the voice that leads out of the wasteland... there in the eyes and snotty faces of the kids who come to think that respect comes at the end of a gun. There in the cries of those who crawl with cancer in their legs to the altar of the god who swears like a sailor and smokes cigars. There where they bring cakes and shiny pennies to invoke the names of lost ones so they can hear the voices one more time, speak in the maggoty ear those words of love that benver got said. There at the steps of the churches that have closed their doors on the dispossessed and lost and outcast--they who never heard the voice of God and who have recently visited the whore Scientia to court her favors.

Is it a voice of hope I hear? The poor know only hope--for they have no one but the wind and the rain to hear their suffering. And it is there perhaps that God lives, waiting to walk once again in the cool of the evening but this time to bring judgment upon all who heard the muffled voice at the roadside and passed by; all who set up the abomination of desolation in the churches and called it the son of God; who killed in God's name and secreted the torn limbs of children and charred bodies of mothers in the abyss of their celluloid fantasies.

And if there is hope, it is a hope born of suffering and trial; a hope torn from the nothingness of delusion and communal deception; a hope gleaned from the terror that educates the spirit in the wiles of certainty and doubt; a hope drunk from the spring whose water erases all feeling for hate and vengeance; a hope tried in the fire of a gift whose light reveals the most secret sin and the most hidden despair.

And the most glorious thing of all, the most beautiful wonder that I cherish with my inmost fiber is that I cannot and will never be able to deceive others with its truth; that I will never be able to betray its existence to the swine; that I who am the worst criminal may also one day find the face in a mirror whose scum has been cleansed free of my smut. Yes, the happiest trick of time is that this hope can never find its way into any book, into any databse, or into any algorithm.

For this hope harbors no sham and mocking pretense to be on the silver screen where all can wank away in secret harmony. It seeks no verification in the textbooks and glossaries of pinheads whose only idea of reality is unicellular and omni-dimensional. It finds rest in the heart of only a single one, finds words on the tongues of the simple and wise of soul. It finds peace in a love that is human and yet whose law defies conception.

So you see, dear Reader, there resides in this darkest and most corrupt heart, hopes and wishes that belie the derisive ghosts that stroll the margins of a gloomy and denuded age. Read more!

Commentary to Nonsense that Heralds Meaning (1)

Originally posted by tharpa: "What I got from your ... post was an excellent basis for the pull, the need, for some sort of spiritual/religious grounding in terms of the individual. Although many of the conditions you describe were of the contemporary predicament, I am not so sure if this sort of overwhelming bewilderment is not a sine qua non of the human passage during pretty much any period. That said, obviously certain cultures and times have the power to make things better or worse, oscillating between wisdom and confusion along the way as they are wont to do."

Thank you for your kind remarks on my last posting. I started a response that would do justice to your concerns about the difference between the pre-modern and modern spiritual predicament of humans; it is currently sitting at 5 pages!

Without wishing to burden you with this manifesto, I will try to simply cast my disagreement with you in as short a form as I can, hoping thereby to gather in the details should the dialog go forward.

I grant you that the spiritual primacy of the individual has been the focus of past religious and wisdom traditions. Although framed in importantly different ways, there do seem to be similarities among the various traditions. Without muddying the waters early on, let's assume that there is some agreement on the idea that it is the individual self that forms the basis for enlightenment/spiritual awakening.

My contention is that the mdoern socio-cultural matrix simply does not allow this state to manifest itself. That is, ab initio, the modern spiritual miliue is one of desolation--by this I mean that the circumstances in which modern humans might hope to come to spiritual maturity simply do not exist. I am following Kierkegaard when I state that the present age has done something that no other age has: it has obscured the aboriginal nature of human beings such that they no longer have an awareness of themselves either as ethical or individual beings. Kierkegaard calls this innate sense of being a person, "primitivity."

This sense of self, of being an individual, is the base upon which any further work at becomeing a self is built. Kierkegaard maintains that this sense of self is threatened with extinction by the modern mind-set. What he means by this mind-set is not quite clear--what it does appear to encompass, however, are social and cultural aspects which in times past if not exactly encouraging self-awareness, at least did not exterminate it at the root. This is what Kierkegaard accuses the modern age of perpetrating.

How might the modern age differ from previous ages in terms of its antipathy to individual self-knowledge? One must look at the role that objectification and the objective sciences play in this; one also can look at the role that the modern technicized society plays; and just as culpably, one can point to the overwhelming growth of rationalization in the modern state. The phenomenon can be assessed from an objective manner (think of Marx's critique of capitalism) as well as a phenomenological manner. It is the latter that Kierkegaard presents.

Important for this analysis is the loss of "inwardness." This can be seen in the emphasis that modern culture puts on objective descriptions of what it means to be human. When the human understands him or herself purely in objective terms they lose that sense of inward space which is required for self-consciousness. One becomes part of the environment, a cog in the wheels of the state, a cipher, a faceless entity whose only identity originates in indentifying with a group. At its apogee, this lack of spiritual awareness can be seen in the examples of fascism, communism, consumerism, and other totalitarianisms.

It is this primitive (Heidegger called it primordial) sense of self and its extermination by the modern spirit of desolation that I believe fuels the outrage of many fundamentalists. That is, having once been a part of the ruling modern ethos, people one day wake up as from a dream--they suffer some type of crisis in thewir lives, and through this crisis they have had awakened in them this sense of self that Kierkegaard says the modern spirit tries to exterminate. The discovery that there might be something more important to human life than becoming a cipher in the bulwark of advancing modernism, these people respond in anger against that juggernaut which 1) almost deprived them of the awareness of their true selves altogehter and 2) threatens to extinguish that new-born self in its desolating advance through time and space.

I will end this posting here. If anything, I hope it at least gives some indication of why I believe that the modern age differs in its "spirit" from other ages. Read more!

Engaging the Enemy Without from Within

One thing that you can learn from several movies on Vietnam, such as Platoon and Apocalypse Now, is that the military should be left to fight the battles and not the politicos. Indeed, this fact of modern warfare is something that most US military strategists would say was the main lesson of Vietnam. I believe this to be true, yet I also find that this truth is also the reason to limit any military involvement by the US to the barest minimum.

Like ancient Sparta, America is perhaps the greatest fighting machine in the 21st century. It is the best equipped, best trained, and most technologically advanced fighting force in history.

One reason for American military superiority--besides its technological infrastructure and equipment--is that it has learned from its mistakes. The lessons learned from Vietnam were numerous. It could be said that one reason that America left that war in disgrace was because it had met an enemy that was simply too adaptable and that could match American weaponry with improvisation and ingenuity. Or one could say that America lost that war because the will to win was not there. The troops sent to the warzone, while adequately trained and equipped, were not mentally prepared for the tenaciousness and zealotry of an indigenous army fighting for its own independence.

It has been reported that Henry Kissinger at the peace talks to end the Vietnam War confronted a North Vietnamese diplomat with the simple fact that the Viet Cong had never won one battle against American forces. "True," this diplomat responded, "but that is beside the point." What the diplomat went on to say was that America had lost the most important battle of all--the political war.

All of these things contain an element of truth and, I believe, American politicians have learned their lessons, as have the military. The generals and the officers should be given as much freedom as possible to win any combat in which American soldiers are sent to fight.

It is this lesson, however, that makes many military officers reluctant to commit to war in the first place and only as the last resort. That is, they realize that once the awesome amd formidable fighting power of our troops are in the field, then there will be consequences for any opponent, as well as any bystanders who might sympathize even remotely with the enemy.

Given free rein, the American fighting machine can devastate a country. In method it is ruhtless, if only to shorten in the long run the will of the enemy to fight. Carrying out devastating attacks meant to shatter the resolve of an enemy as well as the sympathy of sympathizers, the US military will carry out that mission with surgically correct and thereby seemingly merciless exactitude.

These words are not meant to be judgmental--in many ways, they are simply descriptive of the reality on the ground, as it is experienced by our soldiers, their enemies, and those who come within a very ill-defined radius of lethality.

Given this situation, the reluctance of US commanders to send our troops into battle is understandable. They know the "take no prisoners" mentality that they must use by necessity to achieve their two primary objectives: win the war and protect our soldiers. It is an awesome and fearsome responsibility; one, I believe, that those who command our military forces in no way take lightly.

Once in the theater of war, it is therefore understandable why these commanders are so chary regarding any intelligence that might reflect badly on their troops. They understand the need to maintain good morale. They also understand the brutality and emotionally disturbing effect that war has on those who kill--for no matter the justness of the cause, the righteousness of the undertaking, our soldiers are human beings, and human beings suffer horribly when they are witness to and must by necessity perpetrate one of the most spiritually damaging acts that a human can commit.

For no matter how justified a soldier may be in protecting his or her own life as well as the life of their comrades, they still commit acts that are not normal for any civilized human being to do. Despite the seeming winsomeness with which killing is portrayed on television, the actual act itself is devastating to the human psyche. No amount of training can adequately prepare anyone for the calculated taking of human life.

Having said this, it has become apparent that the current war in Iraq must be weighing heavily on our military leaders' souls. While they have been given the green light to carry the out this war with as much leathality as they require, they also see the political war once again rearing its ugly head. They must be aware that the moral justification for the war has simply evaporated. The strategic justification has been formulated over and over again on an ad hoc basis. Their troops have been in the field for nearly two years, and yet the insurgency against which they fight does not appear to be abating but instead seems to grow every day.

One can only imagine what is secretly going through the heads of many military commanders today. They were trained to believe that America would never enter a war without an reasonably defined end-state prepared, as well as an exit strategy. They were trained to believe in the machinery of war and the technology. They were trained to believe that the politicians would let them fight the war their way. And in most cases, they have gotten what they trained for.

Yet, again, war has a strange way of dissolving the most cherished resolve that one has inculcated during peacetime. Taht is why it is war--it never goes according to plan, it never follows the script, and it never leaves one with the sense of peace that one has hoped it will establish. For the effects of war last for years--it tells its tales in the leveled buildings and ruins, in the shattered limbs and minds of young and aold, in the nightmares of even the toughest warrior.

There must be a secret hatred stirring in the hearts of our military men and women. With the ghosts of the past and the future stirring in the shadows, they must be starting to question the wisdom of a man who they know in their hearts never had the guts to set foot on a battlefield and yet so willfully sends young men and women into danger. If the bile in their mouths has not curled their tongues to keep them from speaking, they whisper it to each other and to their loved ones at night. Read more!

Nonsense that Heralds Meaning

There are no grand unified solutions to the current political and cultural upheavals in the world as we know it today. The issues are simply incapable of being addressed on a one-size-fits-all model. Instead, there will be particular remedies in situations as the times demand. These "solutions," however, will not be real solutions. Instead, they will simply reiterate the growing destructiveness and helplessness that individuals experience before a nihislistic juggernaut.

The Internet, "reformation," fundamentalism, secularism, etc. are symptoms of a far greater and deeper problem. What many philosophers and theologians in the west have addressed, and Muslim thinkers are now facing is the phenomenon of levelling. This is a malaise whose symptoms include spiritual anomie, political and cultural alienation, and rampant materialism. Secularism is itself a symptom and not a cause. Many religionists believe that they can resolve the problem by returning to a purer form of their religious heritage--this is an illusion because the modern disease simply hollows out any meaning from these traditions and either incorporates them into a useless and meaningless cliche or serves as the armature for more evil and insidious motives.

Those who suffer from this disease--and we all do--are faced with two alternatives: either become one with the faceless masses, that phantom of secular mythology "humanity," or take on the task of finding one's self in the face of a a transcendent reality whose existence is never given and ostensibly is non-existent. If you have seen Tarkovsky's film, "Stalker," then you are familiar with the absurd emptiness of the modern spiritual landscape, as well as the individual "seeker's" status in this landsacape.

Politicians will attempt grand unified solutions. To no avail. We have seen in the past what these political solutions germinate: the concentration camps, gulags, Rwandas, cultural revolutions, education camps, rape camps--all simply represent the way that the modern homunculus envisions solution. Since all is quantifiable, then mass society itself must run according to rigorously definable formula and theorems. All must conform to a faceless anonymity, since difference upsets the calculation and produces incoherent blanks in the smoothly running machinery of political expediency.

All must achieve sameness because anything else threatens the uniformity of the solution. Difference implies specialness-specialness implies non-standard treatment--non-treatment implies a desire to get something for oneself that others cannot have.

Bin-Laden et al. represent a romantic response to the facelessness of this evil. Harnessing the energy of violence and holy terror, they hope to run the locomotive of levelling off its track. What the romantic terrorist does not realize is that they are simply manifestations of this greater spiritual void. Even were they to win, their solution would simply be a mirror image of the demon they hope to vanquish. They would create a state in which the individual supposedly would find their ultimate home; but there is no home in the void. There is simply a camp that is set up to quash all individual responsibility in the name of a greater truth embodied in a doctrine whose authority is assured not by individual experience of its truth but by communal indoctrination and totalitarian regimentation.

We in the west, of course, fare no better. We have lived with the consequences of levelling and have visited its rapacious lusts on other peoples, exporting thereby the evil that lurks in our hearts. We have hoped to cleanse ourselves of the ugly face of human deceit and murderous resentment by sanitizing our own lands and homes and casting the demons into a wilderness that we ourselves create in lands we deem unenlightened and undemocratic.

There are certainly manifestations of this evil at home, but it only lives within the hard-wired minds of serial killers. We image the truth of this evil in our stories and shows and it serves as entertainment for our young and at our evening meals. Although we know that the evil is a biological malfunction, we secretly delight in numbering how many bodies are buried under the house or discarded along the roadside like so much trash.

The greatest boost to faceless anonymity is the internet, where we can live and dream as disembodied spirits, without responsibility and without facing the consequences of our actions. Again, the dream of living a life without friction and pain is an anodyne whose unreality simply makes it more alluring. We lose ourselves in becoming what we are not, and assuming roles that we could never achieve in real life. And thereby the notion of real life loses its meaning; all becomes simply a concatenation of ones and zeroes whose meaning is that it is.

The internet promises that information solves problems. But not all problems involve information. Life's problems demand blood and sweat and emotional and intellectual harmony--but when the mind becomes a computer all is turned into an algorithmic series of routines that find fulfillment as simply as the belly finds fullness. The internet promises debate and openness so that all is accessible to all and no one is denied access to the information that they need to find answers. But when there is no one there and the questions that need to be asked are not asked, what is the use of a universe of information?

The point of this post is that these words I write are simply meaningless, but will also seem to herald a meaning that touches something that cannot be put into words. Read more!