May we live in interesting times

I can’t remember who said the statement above, but it definitely seems to be relevant today.  As we look around the world we live in a few observations can be made.  One, the world at large is beset by many problems.  As people look into these problems, they are finding that most of these problems are related.  Two, many of our problems don’t seem to fit into old frameworks.  Old theories don’t seem to explain things.  The maps that guide us into the future seem to be distorted.

The anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace calls these internal maps "the mazeways."  We look around and see old familiar forms falling apart.  One just has to glance at the daily paper to read about the problems.  War, crime, inflation, pollution, unemployment, the list goes on and on.  What is troubling about all these phenomena is that the old, tried and true solutions do not work anymore.  It seems as if old solutions make our problems worse.  In other words, as Korzybski said, "the map is not the territory."  Our internal maps instruct us to act a certain way.  In the past this "way" might have been appropriate, but reality is always changing.  The old ways of thought are good for a time, but as time moves on we may find ourselves rigid, static, and fearful.  Eventually, the evidence becomes overwhelming.  Change is imminent

This is a recurring cycle in history.  A society starts off with new ideas.  These ideas become the vision for the majority of the people. There is a common consensus that all will work out.   The future always looks brighter.  As time moves along though, certain anomalies keep popping up.  People begin fragmenting into different parties.  The synergy so necessary for a healthy society, starts to loosen.  Everyone  perceives their needs to be different from everyone else.  This leads to many breakdowns.  In government, powerful special interest groups become the norm.   The future looks increasingly darker.

In his book The Image of the Future, Fred Polak, a Dutch futurist, wrote that our images of the future play a crucial part in what shapes our society tales.  In healthy societies, the images were positive.  When there were weak images, the culture was decaying.  He ended by saying, ‘bold visionary thinking is in itself the prerequisite for effective change."

With a positive vision of the future, crisis opens the door to understanding.  Problems become opportunities to which we can open to new ways of seeing, to visualize new maps, maps that fit the new territory.  This new territory is much different in many ways.  It will take cooperation in all spheres of life.  In this way humans will be able to work together to solve our many problems.

The above essay is a brief description of the context we are in.  It is a ever-changing world.  We are at a crossroads.  We need a restructuring of the way we tend to view the world.  Humankind is going to have to let go many of its past assumptions.  Failure to change these basic assumptions can only lead to more problems.

Two Paths

I quote the book Stone Age Economics:

"For there are two possible courses to affluence.  Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little.  The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way, makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies: that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between  means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful.  But there is a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate.  Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty--with a low standard of living."

I feel it is the Zen road that is the wise and sane path.  E.F. Schumacher came to the same conclusion in his book Small Is Beautiful as he says, "The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom....it is also the antithesis of freedom and peace...Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war."   Spiritual teachers throughout the ages have said the same idea.  The Buddha's First Noble Truth is that humans suffer.  Duhkha is the word for the suffering that comes from asking of life what it cannot give.  

By pushing the idea of growth, growth, growth and more, more, more, we institutionalize discontent and have created a system that destroys the ecology in which all life depends.   It is time for alternative visions.  

The Machine in the Garden

 by Leo Marx

This book is considered a classic. The subtitle is “technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.”  This book is about the images that guided America in its early days and the resistance of the literary writers to the mechanistic philosophy and industrial expansion that took place in the 1800’s.  When I finished reading, I felt sad.

Certain ideas stand out from my reading of the book.  One idea is the feeling of intrusion of the machines on the landscapes of new England and America on the part of what could be called the first literary generation.  Writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Clemens. 

The other idea is the almost religious belief of machines  and progress in the view of exponents of industrialism and technology.  The latter writers regarded technological progress as “evidence that man is gaining access to the divine plan, a kind of gradual revelation…”  The author quotes Timothy Walker, who declares “an unfaltering belief in the permanent and continued improvement of the human race” which is the result of mechanical invention.  Mr. Walker was responding to an essay by Thomas Carlyle. 

Thomas Carlyle was an English writer who was in a group in England (the romantics) who were beginning to see the ramifications of the machine age.  His essay was saying that the mechanistic spirit was talking away man’s inner freedom.  Some of his phrases: “a mighty change in our manner of existence”; By arguing on the force of circumstances, we have argued away all force from ourselves…”  here he was really talking about the death of the soul and its replacement by the machine.  He anticipates Marx, Freud, Fromm and other observers that could see the meaning of what was happening.   The modern word is alienation. 

These themes were used in major works of Melville (Moby Dick) and Clemens (Huckleberry Finn).   The conflict between the pastoral ideal (in the agrarian vision of Jefferson) and the growing mechanization and industrialism.  

What Thoreau, Melville and Clemens saw in their times (increasing mechanization and dehumanization) has gone unabated into our times and has picked up so much momentum that it now threatens life on planet earth.  We have to ask ourselves, how do we stop the machine?   Leo Marx helps here.  In Manas, dated January 20,, 1971,Marx is quoted from an article in Science for November 27, 1970.  I quote him:

“The focus of our literary pastoralism, accordingly, is upon a contrast between two environments representing  virtually all aspects of man’s relationship ton nature.  In place of the aggressive thrust of 19^th century capitalism, the pastoral interlude exemplifies a far more restrained, accommodating kind of behavior.  The chief goal is not, as Alexander Hamilton argued it was, to enhance the nation’s corporate wealth and power; rather is the Jeffersonian “pursuit of happiness."  In economical terms, then pastoralism entails a distinction between a commitment to unending growth and a concept of material sufficiency.  The aim of the pastoral economy is enough-enough production and consumption to insure a decent quality of life.”

This idea of enough- is a major quality of the meta-industrual vision.  “plain living and high thinking.” As more individuals discover that the “good life” is not necessarily a “a life of superfluous good” then the wisdom of the ages will strike a chord in many of us  and we can see that our future hopes lie in what E.F. Schumacher calls the “middle way” of Buddhist economics.  This is the way to liberation.  He writes:

“while the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation...it is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth…since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.  “

It is good to see that this tradition has always been a part of our heritage ad is gaining mote adherents each passing day. 

 

 Charles Leiden

PLANNING AND PARADOX OF CONSCIOUS PURPOSE

A book entitled, Resettling America, includes a chapter “Planning and the Paradox of Conscious Purpose,”  is written by Gary J. Coates.  I read this back in 1981 when the book first was published.  I have been rereading it ever since and like most wisdom, it is timeless.

It starts by talking about the origins of human cultures.  “....Human culture has been developing in a direction opposite that of organic evolution.  Rather than moving towards greater complexity, diversity, symbiosis and stability, human-dominated ecosystems have moved progressively toward simplicity, homogeneity, competitive exploitation, and fragility.”

No other species has had the capability to alter the environment to fit its own needs.  But we lack the wisdom to know the consequences.  Duane Elgin says “we mistake power for wisdom.”  The author again:

“A civilization comes into existence through the development of new ideas, myths, and technologies and through the harnessing of energy for the exploitation of nature and the domination of other human groups.  When the limit of that particular form of exploitation is reached, the civilization declines, often having consumed the material resources upon which it has come to depend, as well as its capacity for adaptive change in the face of new social, political and ecological realities.  It is estimated that as many as 30 civilizations have followed this cycle of growth and decline through the loss of evolutionary potential, leaving behind a legacy of deforested hillsides, human-created deserts, and plains and river valleys denuded of topsoil where there was once fertile and abundant life.” Industrial civilization has speeded up this process.  It “has managed to accelerate this anti-ecological and anti-evolutionary trend and has brought the entire planet within the orbit of its destructive influence...this thin film of industrial culture that now envelops the earth, destroying indigenous cultures and disrupting the world’s major ecosystems is entirely dependent on nonrenewable resources that are certain to be effectively exhausted with the lifetime of someone born today.”

At this point, the author ask two questions:

“Is homo sapiens an evolutionary dead end?”  and

“How the human species, which is itself a product of organic evolution, could have developed into such a threat to the very forces which have created it?”

These questions lead to the “paradox of conscious purpose”.   The paradox

is this one:  “in order to survive we must act purposely.  Yet, to act purposely leads us to disrupt the systems upon which we depend for survival.  Moreover, since purpose is intrinsic to the nature of consciousness, it is not possible to renounce its use.” To understand the paradox, let’s describe “purposive consciousness.”  The author quotes Gregory Bateson here.  Purposive consciousness is a “short-cut device to enable you to get quickly what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live, but to follow the shortest logical or causal path to get what you next want....”  Wisdom, in this context, would be knowledge of the whole system, an understanding of the balances of mind and nature.

The human species starts to shape reality according to its own purposes, which are out of sync with the whole.  This lack of “systemic wisdom” creates a “cul-de-sac”.  The more we act, the more problems we create.  As modern technology has given us more power to shape our narrow purposes, the more harm we create.

A story by Gregory Bateson is told in full, his version of the Biblical myth of the fall of the human.  In brief, Adam and Eve are living in the garden.  There is a fruit up in a tree, too high to reach.  They begin to think.  To think purposively.  Adam went and got a empty box and stood on it.  Still wasn’t high enough.  He got another box and finally could reach the apple.  They were ecstatic.  “This was the way to do things.”  Make a plan and get a result.  Specialize.  Humans begin to shape the environment for their purposes.  Instead of the purposes of the larger whole.   As the author puts it:   “Adam and Eve, no longer satisfied to accept the fruits of the garden as a gift of God, make the decision to take what they desire.”   They no longer accept everything as a gift, thereby “rejecting the sacredness which they cannot understand.”  This is the beginning of the desacralization of nature.  This leads to an anti-ecological direction for humans as well as a narrow realm of activity.

As the author puts it:

“Activity is seen as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.  Any merely appreciative, contemplative and non-utilitarian encounter with the world comes to be seen as a waste of time, as useless.  But what they have failed to grasp is that, if the world of leisure, play, and celebration has no value (i.e., serves no purpose), then life is reduced to a world of total work and constant struggle.  The only reward is success in achieving goals....”  This might be the definition of economics, which shows what a finite game it really is.  It takes scarcity as a given, which is a screwy way to look at the world.

As the chapter unfolds, one can see that “human conscious purpose is not necessarily an evolutionary mistake, only a destructive potential which must be corrected and regulated by circuits of control which serve to direct human purposefulness towards goals and actions which coincide with the needs of the larger natural systems which sustain human life.  The adaptive crisis of industrial civilization is the result of the loss of these regulatory processes.”

The author asks, “What are these control mechanisms and how can they be recreated and sustained?”

These values are sanctity and community.  Sanctity means that the earth is a sacred place.  The author contrasts two different attitudes towards hunting; that of a member of a modern “primitive” culture and the white buffalo hunters of the last century.  The former makes sure they need to hunt, acting with a sense of humility.  The modern “primitive” is “acting out of a pervasive awareness that nature is a community to which he belongs and upon which he depends.  It is not a commodity to be used, not a resource to be exploited with maximum efficiency.  While violence may be sometimes required in order to exist, it should be undertaken only if absolutely necessary and, even then, only with a deep sense of regret.” The latter, the white buffalo hunters, in turn, “slaughtered millions of those great beasts and left them to rot in the sun after removing only their tongues for a quick profit.”  One is based on the sense of the sacred, the other the sense of expedient.

Community is the other quality.  The author writes:

“largely because of cheap fossil fuels and large-scale centralized technology, we no longer live within community.  We live as individuals within a mass,  superficially connected to one another....”   Some have argued that society has been a product of the corporate world and their advertising.  Lewis Hyde writes that “advertising is the culture of a commodity civilization” and gives examples in his marvelous book , The Gift.

These two ideas (sanctity and community) are combined in ecocommunities, associations of living entities living within the cycles of nature.  The author again:  The idea of ecocommunities is a symbol of wholeness, an ideal type, that in principle, is capable of restoring to consciousness and culture a sense of the circular structure of the world.  This idea can be applied at every scale.

Our modern world is suffering from hyper-coherence, an “unhealthy inter-dependence.”  If there is disruption in one part of the system, it will spread to other parts.  Decisions are made for whole regions and the inhabitants by distant authorities based on needs that could be across continents.   Is it any wonder that it is so fragile?  The modern theology of economics informs us that this is natural and healthy.  What could be more insane!  This one world idea is the opposite of a planetary culture.  In describing the solution, the author states:  “a human ecology based on the concepts of sanctity and community would be characterized by wholeness (internal coherence) at every level of organization...associations of plants, animals, microbes and people living together within the seasonal cycles of sun, wind and water that provide the energy flows and nutrient recycling necessary to maintain life.”

At the end he asks:  “How can we get from here to there?”  Another paradox. At no time do we require rapid change, but on the other hand, we can’t depend on the top-down global elite that pulls strings to the detriment of the whole. Every movement creates its opposite.  Everywhere we look we see humans attempting to create “processes of evolutionary experimentation guided by a ecological and evolutionary ethic and informed by an abiding faith in the goodness of life and the sacredness of creation.”  We can nurture these roots.

One in a series of meta-historical articles....   Understanding history

Charlie Leiden

The Image of the Human

This is the moment to wake up to the idea the world we live in is drastically dysfunctional? Why?  There was some sort of gestalt with the beginning of the scientific-economic era that redefined the human being to be a skin encapsulated ego, a singular atom disconnected in space.  We were emancipated supposedly from the moral and mythical universe of all the irrational ages that preceded the modern age of reason.  Walter A. Weisskopf helps here.   He writes:

"During the ascendency of economics, theology and philosophy declined in importance.  Assumptions about human nature in economics were incidental byproducts of what was supposed to be empirical and logical truth.  The very question of what a human is cannot be and is not answered by any segmented discipline such as economics but only by a philosophy which encompasses the totality of experience.  This philosophy of life has been destroyed by modem life.  He goes on:  nevertheless the history of economic thought abounds with statements and  implicit assumptions which put together present an image of man."  In other words the earlier theorists (such as Adam Smith) looked at the values that they felt would make the system work and wrote that these are human nature.  The author explains that there was a great need for moral justification of this new system and it came from a variety of sources.  What were once vices were now turned into virtues.  He writes:  "money-making for its own sake, the taking of interest, buying cheap and selling dear, exploiting the fluctuations of supply ad demand for one's own advantage - all these and other activities which form the daily routine of economics life in the modern were considered morally reprehensible throughout Western civilization until the advent of capitalism."  The market would act as an "invisible hand" so that private vices would become public benefits. 

It is much more complex obviously, but what emerged was a new image of the human being. 

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley wrote the famous book The Perennial Philosophy in 1945.  He writes that the Perennial Philosophy  is   "the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being- the thing is immemorial and universal."    To say that Huxley was erudite is an understatement but what is important is that he was practical.   He was a seeker of wisdom (that is what philosophy is) and sought to help others through his writings

I am reading an article about Huxley's view of the importance of art.  The essay by Dana Sawyer is very articulate about Huxley's philosophy and metaphysics.  He wasn't hesitant to challenge the limitations of materialism and positivism.   Huxley pointed out repeatedly that we need not look beyond the physical world to find phenomena that science cannot quantify.   Love and beauty for example.  Sawyer articulates several ideas from Huxley that inform the truth and the purpose of this blog. 

 I quote him  "...in the west we have assumed axiomatically that ultimate truth is a product of thinking and can be grasped directly by the rational mind via a system of ideas.  Truth is the province of thinkers and so philosophers can get directly at it.  Huxley considered this an epistemological error. In his system, the mind can only grasp an intellectual analogue of Truth, and this differs as much from the direct experience of Brahman, the Absolute truth, as a cake recipe differs from a cake..."   Brahman in Huxley's context is (the manifest source of spiritual energy, the ground of all being) 

You could say that the West separated being and thinking.  Unfortunately, many of us identify with our thought processes.     Descartes's famous "I think therefore I am"  (French: "Je pense donc je suis")  plays a part in this. 

Huxley offers a different metaphysic that rediscovers Being.     Here is a quote:

Our essential Nature is usually overshadowed

By the activity of the mind...

When the mind has settled,

we are established in our essential nature

which is unbounded consciousness.  

     -Yoga Sutras of Patajali

  

 

Silence

In an earlier post (Depth is Invisible) this was written:    The idea is this one "...as we shall see, virtually all esoteric spiritual traditions insist that human beings possess "inside information" about the universe, to such an extent that discovering what a human being truly is is the key to fathoming the implacable mystery of the cosmos itself."  In a secular, materialistic society that is the modern world this is a radical idea.  Robert Inchausti in his book The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People  gives a chillingly accurate view of what each of us is up against.   Here are a few.  He writes:

 " ...A perpetual revolution of economic life that generates endless new individual needs and endless new poverties-laying waste to the planet’s ecology...an increasingly managed information system centered around a mass media that exalts received ideas over direct experience-creating in the process pseudo-environments and modernized stupidity disguised and given credibility through the sheer pervasiveness of their presence...Under a global market economy, the practical reason of ordinary people is largely subsumed within an amalgam of money-making projects and development schemes.  There is no direct commercial pay-off to thinking philosophically and so no reason to be intellectually engaged beyond the demands of

technological innovation."    As Bob Dylan sang,  "It’s easy to see without looking too far
that not much is really sacred"   

The first step might be the hardest.   To really question what we think we know and move beyond the incredible noise that prevents us from going within. Silence is the path to the "inside information" about the universe.