(Click title above.)Hollow Men:
I worry about religious literalists, especially when what they take to be sacred texts encourage monstrous murder, mayhem, and myopia. I do not consider texts, to the extent their messages seek to regulate or prescribe minutia for our beliefs or physical lives, as "religiously oriented." Rather, I consider them, when urged literally, as indicative of conspiracies or rationalizations for abetting fascism and crime.
Still, in figurative aspect, invaluable historical, cultural, philosophical, and spiritual insights abound within many religious texts. I believe I intuit, and find no reasonable reason not to believe, that there is a Source (“God”) of moral purposefulness, beyond mere physics and empiricism.
To me, it matters little whether one may refer to “reason to believe” in such Source as “biophilia” or “biologos.” But, those who believe they can prove (or need to prove) the contrary, or the “probability” of the contrary, tend, I think, to be short-sighted, insufficiently formed, perhaps, often, morally hollow.
Many reasonable, moderate, spiritual believers appreciate deep, contextual, evolving, figurative aspects of their traditions, more so than hidebound literalism.
So, I worry more about their realms being invaded by know-it-all empiricists (or objectivists, materialists, rationalists, analysts, scientists, hedonists, market greedbags, and globalist sell-outs) than I worry about spiritual believers invading the hollow realms of international bankers, Republican Raiders, or Democrat Derelicts.
In any event, I do not begrudge Raiders and Derelicts in wanting to “keep to their own parties.” Nor do I seek to make common cause with them, nor do I much admire those who do. Independents need be neither Rino’s nor Dino’s.
Instead, we can pursue principles and preserve independence --- since neither Raiders nor Derelicts can make much headway in politics without eventually kissing the ring of Independents.
****
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Men.
And, from --- http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/hollow.htm :
The main parallel between "Heart of Darkness" and "The Hollow Men" consists in the theme, implicit throughout the latter, of debasement through the rejection of good, of despair through consequent guilt.
….
The hollow men are walking corpses ("Mistah Kurtz - he dead"), and their emptiness is the vacuity of pure mind detached from any reality.
….
There are no eyes in the hollow valley, and the empty men are bereft of God. Even within their own hollowness detachment is the law.
….
If "The Hollow Men" shows where idealism leads, it offers a fleeting glimpse of a way out of emptiness. Though nature, other people, and God have an almost entirely negative existence in the poem, they do exist as something outside the hollow men.
*******
PHILOSOPHICAL AND SEMANTIC DIFFERENCES:
See http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_dennett_s_response_to_rick_warren.html.
I agree with Daniel Dennett, that religions (in respect of their physical aspects), like all physical phenomena, evolve --- depending upon not pretending to have a closed or complete definition of "evolve."
In that we lack a complete definition of "evolve," perhaps Dennett, in his philosophy of morality, intuits that “Some Aspect beyond complete accountability in empiricism” may play an important role in defining the meaning of “evolve.”
If so, I wish, instead of denying “God,” that he would simply, for convenience, refer to Such Aspect as “God.”
Simply put, mere physics does not provide an empirically or morally complete accounting for our existence.
I agree with Dennett to the effect that religious texts should neither be taught as science, nor interpreted literally, as opposed to metaphorically.
Still, I fail to see much worthwhile purpose in denying God.
As I would distinguish between physics and metaphysics, much quibbling derives from inadequate appreciation of semantics.
Simply put, I fail to see much point for trying to argue or mix natural measurements of physical design with supernatural metaphors for interpreting moral design.
*****
ENLIGHTENMENT FROM THE LAND OF CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATS AND GREEN WEENIES:
Alert to Tolerant Humanitarian Leaders ("THL's"):
This just confirmed: Leftist Humanists have no need for any spiritual guiding morality or philosophy!
This is because they have their own "up your alley" utilitarian “slippery slope” morality, which they want to make the exclusive secular morality of the U.S. --- and beyond!
For your edification, from that beacon of moral culture, California, the land of deep throat thinkers, want proof?See:http://www.zombietime.com/up_your_alley_2008/part_1_full/index.php;
http://zombietime.com/.
THIS GIVES NEW MEANING TO PULLING THE DEMOCRAT LEVER!
*****
BTW, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have a running joke.
It goes like this:
"Nambla!"
Get it?
(Can't wait to see the new California flag.)
*****
Has anyone hugged / praised / prodded a California politician today?
*****
As we profess that the Constitution "lives," but that God does not, so reigns Evil.
*****
An evangelist of atheism, who pretends nothing is worth fighting for, is already closer to moral irrelevancy and death.
*****
.
Hollow Men:
It becomes:
wearisome to watch any expression of will surrender to soulless loss of faith that any quest for spiritual vison or appreciation can be worthwhile;
wearisome to watch despair sinking into co-dependent, drugged stupor;
wearisome to see cheering for badness, destruction, holocaust, apocalypse, defeat;
wearisome to endure leftist anger, spewed and dedicated to a proposition that no manifesting thing is worth appreciating, but that only an impossible ideal could ever be good, the pursuit of which leads to desperately accelerating devaluation of every emerging opportunity of self reliance.
Against the spiritual hollowness of modern “liberals,” it falls to Red Ass Moderates to sound an alarm that the ideal of International Socialism is a rat trap lie, being invited under a fascist spider spring.
.
Among prospects for Community Organizers, what character traits are sought or prized, if not traits for broadcasting blame against one’s country for not having provided all that to which one felt (by greed?) entitled?
6 comments:
Liberalism as extended adolescence -- see http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnHawkins/2008/08/15/25_reasons_you_might_be_a_liberal.
Evil: http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen/2008/08/14/war-and-democracy/ :
Machiavelli is not the only sage who recognized it, but he put it nicely: “Man is more inclined to do evil than to do good.” Rational statecraft starts right there.
The American Founders knew it: recognizing man’s innate capacity for evil, they designed a system of checks and balances to thwart the accumulation of power by any group, lest the entire enterprise fall into wicked hands. They knew the battle for liberty would never end, Benjamin Franklin famously warned we would have to fight to keep our republic.
All of this wisdom has been dangerously undermined by the foolish notion that man is basically good, that all men are basically the same, and that all we need do is to permit history to take its preordained course. Are these not the tenets of contemporary education? Are our children not forbidden to criticize “others,” whether of different pigmentation or religion? Has debate on our university campuses not turned into the moral equivalent of the Inquisition? And it rests on the sands of a demonstrably false vision of man. We are not naturally inclined to do good. Quite the contrary; left to our own devices we produce genocide in Europe, Asia and Africa. And the evil spreads, eventually it threatens us, it kills our people here at home and it is straining to kill more of us. Ask the Georgians. Ask Middle Eastern Jews and Christians, or the Iranian, Iraqi or Syrian peoples.
The basic debate needs to begin with a recognition that we have bought into a fable. Without that recognition, we will be incapable of designing the policies we need in order to survive this perilous moment.
Registered Independent --- http://www.independentvoting.org/
“The Committee for a Unified Independent Party, Inc. (CUIP) is a national strategy center and organizing hub that designs and executes cutting edge tactics to develop America's growing independent movement. Founded in 1994, CUIP mounts political, legal, legislative and organizing challenges to partisan control of the political process. It has pioneered methods of organizing independents without a political party, creating independent voter associations to project the voice of the 35% of the electorate that considers itself independent. For CUIP, independents are not "swing voters" who exist to be wooed and swayed by one or the other major party. Independents have strongly held beliefs about how partisanship and ideological labeling are corrupting and constraining progress.
Independents defy traditional political labels; what they share is support for the principle that radical structural reform of the electoral process and of government is the urgent political necessity of the day.”
WHO KILLED HOMER; AND FREUD; AND PSYCHOHISTORY; AND INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY?
Snippets from http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=D4900AB9-A320-4206-8A19-1B6AC55E01C3:
Symposium: The Closing of the American Psyche
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, August 29, 2008
....
Gutmann: Twenty years ago the philosopher Alan Bloom wrote "The Closing of the American Mind," a powerful indictment of American academia, which he charged with betraying it's central mission: to expose students to great thinking on great matters. "The Great Books" have been condemned as the corrupted products of Dead White Males, off-limits to the enlightened. The new academics, Bloom charged, were depriving students of the nutrition that their developing minds required, leaving them stunted.
But it is not only the rational mental functions that have been deprived; in the last decades the major routes to the Inner Life - the less rational side of the mind, the source of madness but also of creativity - have been blocked as well. All of the usual disciplines through which we studied the personal, social and political expressions of the American unconscious have shut down such investigations in favor of less dangerous excitements. We have witnessed the closing of the American Psyche.
Even psychiatry, a profession devoted to the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorder, ignores the unconscious processes, and concentrates instead on the biological (usually neurological) contributions to mental illness. Review the chart of almost any patient in any psychiatric ward of almost any hospital and you will see this avoidance at work: the patient's intimate history of development and trauma has been replaced by a perfunctory history of psychiatric symptoms and interventions - usually a sequence of medications. You will find little or no mention of early developmental history in the family of orientation, or of the fantasy life. Diagnostically useful descriptions of idiosyncratic fears and distortions have been replaced by the blanket term, "delusions" - the implication being that these aberrations are the product of over-excited neurons
rather than a troubled persona.
Psychotherapy has moved in the same "rationalist" direction. Under the sway of Freudian thinking we tried to restore rationality via a paradox: the exploration of the irrational; but nowadays, "Cognitive" therapists work at pointing out and correcting their patient's errors in thinking, without asking why the fearful patient needed these errors, and clung to them, in the first place. This is the new directive in Psychiatry: "Straighten out their thinking; and if that doesn't work, then drug them. And if that doesn't work, then go with electroshock." The same avoidance of the inner life is evident in academia as well.
Sociology and especially Anthropology once used Freudian tools to explore the personal consequences of socializing and acculturating practices, and to trace out the contributions of the emotional life to society and to culture. Some brilliant studies and powerful insights were the result. But here again, we see the withdrawal from the shores of the inner sea, in favor of variables external to the individual - particularly the politically correct dimensions of Race, Ethnicity and Gender. In the Psychodynamic calculus, the troubled individual was not primarily a victim of society, but of his own Motivated Misperceptions – mental constructs which, however painful, served to keep disastrous self-conceptions in check. But if the individual was the author of his own troubles, then the sources of his pain also belonged to him, and he could, with help, undo them. However, under the current Marxist regime in the Social Sciences, the troubled individual is always a Victim, not of himself but of outside forces - the economy, the capitalists, the homophobes, the sexists, George W. Bush - that he can only change through collective revolutionary action.
Today's Social Scientists run away from the frightening but fascinating realm of the inner life, and they disguise their fears by bellowing revolutionary slogans as they skedaddle.
At the Freud museum in London, a movie showed the aged Freud summarizing the history of Psychoanalysis, while crying out: "The resistances were always Inexorable!!"
In the visitor's book I wrote, "Freud: the resistances are STILL inexorable." So here is a question that I would like to propose to the symposium participants: Why, when we were learning to probe deeply into the hidden side of human nature, did we seem to turn tail and run away from what was being revealed to us? Was it indeed the power of the revived resistances? Was it fear of the unknown within ourselves? Did the new generations of practitioners and scholars entering Psychiatry and the Social Sciences bring new ideologies with them? Was it impatience with the theoretical and therapeutic errors of Psychoanalysis?
Was it a fascination with the new tools for exploring the structure and actions of the brain? Was it all of the above?
Again, those are my questions. You will no doubt have your own - as well as your own answers.
....
DeMause: Dr. Guttmann is absolutely correct and insightful when he accuses academia of ignoring the inner life and irrational fantasies in scholarly research and teachings.
....
I also founded an Institute for Psychohistory in NYC, with 30 branches around the world, and an International Psychohistorical Association that has had conventions for 31 years where scholars from many countries share their research into inner emotional life and social behavior.
....
Levin: I believe we cannot talk about the closing of the American psyche without emphasizing the corruption of American academia or, as Dr. Kobrin put it, "terrorism in academia."
....
Dr. Kobrin also notes her own experiences in encountering anti-Semitism in academia and in getting a first-hand glimpse of how Saudi money promotes intolerance and an extremist political agenda in Middle East-related studies. The corruption of Middle East Studies departments presents a paradigm that extends beyond our universities. The Saudis have also been funding, often through sympathetic university academics, the preparation of Middle East-related and Islam-related curricula, all with a biased political agenda, to be promoted for use in American public and private schools. This is one illustration, among many others readily available, that the corruption of education, the substitution of enlightenment by indoctrination, reaches well beyond our universities and is permeating our education system at all levels.
An education system that opposes, at least in much of the humanities and social sciences, students' free exploration of subjects of interest without bias and without pre-formed conclusions is hardly going to be receptive to students' free, unbiased, psychodynamically informed, exploration of their personal motivations and objectives, explorations aimed at self-liberation even as their educators seek to narrow and channel their "freedom" to illiberal political ends.
....
Gutmann: The other contributors agree that academia, particularly in the social sciences, in the humanities and in medicine, has played a major role in shutting down access to the inner life.
....
The real opposition comes from the very subject of our investigations – the American mind itself – which, in Dalrymple’s view, is an empty vessel that requires constant filling from external and (usually) electronic sources of stimulation:
“I think that the thinning of the way in which we account for the psyche (not just in America but elsewhere) is paralleled by the thinning of the psyche itself.”
....
Nevertheless, as Robinson Jeffers once reminded us, “Corruption is not compulsory,” and in America individuals and groups who elect to stand aside from a deculturating society are still free to band together, to construct their own institutes, their own schools, their own dialogues, and even their own communities.
The Irish monks in their monasteries preserved classical wisdom during the Dark Ages; those who are interested in preserving the culture of dedicated internal and external exploration, free of suffocating political dogmas, still have the opportunity to do the same.
“When the cities lie at the monster’s feet, there are yet the mountains.”
....
Dalrymple: Let me focus on Dr. DeMause’s assertion that most children brought up in the 1970s and 80s in America were battered or sexually abused, or both. I confess that I find this frankly incredible.
....
In fact, the inducement of an awareness of one's status as a victim, by virtue of having suffered almost any kind of distressing event, seems to me one of the no doubt unintended effects of the spread of psychological, psychiatric and psychoanalytical ways of thinking into the general culture. All judgment, said Doctor Johnson, is comparative; but the intense focus on the self, rather than on the world, deprives one of any ability to judge, to put one's own sufferings or disgruntlements into any kind of perspective.
....
History is now often taught as the backward projection of current discontents; there seems to me little attempt to imagine that people in the past may have reacted to the world differently from us, and our concerns or obsessions may not have been theirs. In other words, the focus on the outer world is really merely an attempt to justify and maintain our own sense of victimization, though by most counts we are the most fortunate people who ever lived. A sense of victimhood is, of course, an answer to the existential anxieties in people to whom the consolations of religion are not available, but resentment is a useless and indeed harmful emotion, though a beguiling one.
....
I would like to protest at the idea of self-esteem being a positive quality. It is not. It is solipsistic and antisocial. Criminals are full of it. I think we should, as people living in a civilized society, talk of self-respect, which is a social quality, rather than self-esteem, which is purely narcissistic.
FP:
....
One thing is for sure, however: what happens to Arab and Palestinian children as youths, for instance, and how they are abused and live in a culture of sexual repression etc., this surely has a huge influence on engendering a society of rage that seeks to strike out not only at women but also at the foreign "enemy."
Levin:
....
In earlier decades, when the principle objective of education, including in the humanities and social sciences, was not indoctrination but teaching students how to think, how to seek out data, weigh evidence and arguments, and judge for themselves, the impact of such an education, the freedom of thought it engendered, often itself led individuals to self-examination and even to psychotherapy to address what they at least dimly came to recognize as self-imposed limits on their own freedom and capacity for fully living and enjoying the lives that were available to them. Education then in this respect, too, fostered the opening of the psyche, instead of militating for its closing.
Gutmann:
....
Victimhood is the new pseudo-identity, one that implies a dramatic history, comrades who share that history, a cause to fight for, heroes to venerate and persecutors to hate. But the victim identity must be constantly refreshed from outer sources – the battle against the victimizing forces can never, must never, be finally won. The victim sponsors and even creates his victimizer.
Korbin:
....
Abused children are terrified to express their own thoughts because their survival strategy is to submit and comply. This is understandable especially since their entire lives have been under the will and domination of others.
Dalrymple:
....
I also believe, though I cannot prove, that people require or at least crave a sense of transcendence. It can come from several sources: religion, culture, family, knowledge, science, art, etc . One important source, of course, is a political cause: Marxism persuaded people that they were part of the immanence of history, or History, and this gave meaning to their lives when they could not believe in anything else. When sources of transcendence such as art and science - to say nothing of religion - are not compelling to people, and all of which necessitate the development of inwardness, the temptation will be to seek meaning in causes - some of which, of course, may be good.
....
Lachkar: DeMause is clearly at the forefront in understanding childhood violations supported by governmental abuse that supports the mistreatment of woman and children throughout the ages and various cultures. He maintains that the cause of childhood abuse is inextricably linked to child-rearing practices and offers a chilling account of life in Islamic fundamentalist societies filled with violence, cruelty and sexual exploitation of children. Although he expands this kind of violence to Western culture, I agree with Levin and Gutmann that today’s emphasis is more based on the ever changing role in the American family. There are perilous effects of the destruction of the family, divorce, single parent families, working mothers, latch-key kids, parents that abandon, neglect and deprive their children without support or extended families.
Perhaps we could label this more as emotional abuse, a form of abuse that can be just as damaging to a child as physical abuse. I guess this leads up to why the inner life becomes so limited and everything externalized for moments of pleasure. Even more dangerous for our children is to go along with professors who brainwash their minds. They target these children as puppets. Here I agree with Levin, earlier I said I would take my child out of any school that forced children to go along with certain belief systems. To be honest I feared to say that I would actually sue the school, as Levin stated. I believe my overall fear had to do with Sharia financial. Sharia laws are now not only taking over our country, our city and our schools, but now our banks.
....
Nazism, Communism, Islamo-fascism, and, of course, indoctrinating academics, all seek to recruit in part by presenting their "cause" as giving transcendent meaning to the lives of those who sign on.
ELITES: Not unlike theatrical value-added by the faux king and prince in Tom Sawyer, much of the “substantive-value-added” that elites specialize in selling, beyond snooty pretense and snobby conceit, just ain’t so. Hey, prideful “elites,” you ain’t special just because your mommies told you so. Grow up!
True Neo-Conservatism:
We have spiritual, religious, individual freedom to pursue the creation and expression of such lives as we will, subject to such competitive niches and markets as associate with that which defines us. Such freedom charges us with responsibility to pursue and try to shape such civilizing niches and markets as we intuit would best facilitate our moral pursuits of purposefulness and fulfillment.
Compare http://townhall.com/columnists/BillSteigerwald/2008/12/01/memories_of_a_neocon.
Post a Comment