Kid Week

Because I'm so behind on posts, I'm going to post in smaller snippets around a theme. The theme? KIDS! That's right. Childhood! Fun! Glee!

Yes, I'm serious. I think we all need to spend some time indulging our "child-like wonder" (as a best friend likes to put it). So why put it off?

Keep reading: Kid Week...

"Glorious Beyond Expression And Beyond Thought"

My favorite Berkeley quote (all emphases in the original). Hoorah for the real, proper idealist, in the full sense of the word ...and for theology that can still stand up to our contemporary scruples. (For those who do not know, people often boil his philosophy down to "We are all just ideas in the mind of God!") I definitely think with heavy skepticism in most situations, especially those that instinctively make me feel uneasy (such as in a short interaction yesterday with a gutter salesman who was exceedingly schmaltzy, my uneasiness exacerbated more so when my grandmother did not seem "plussed" when he tried to sell her windows, too!, and imposed on the interior space of the house, when he was only expected to work on the gutters, outside!), but not like the skeptic in his Three Dialogues.

Philonous:

"Look! are not the fields covered with a delightful verdure? Is there not something in the woods and groves, in the rivers and clear springs, that soothes, that delights, that transports the soul? At the prospect of the wide and deep ocean, or some huge mountain whose top is lost in the clouds, or of an old gloomy forest, are not our minds filled with a pleasing horror? Even in rocks and deserts, is there not an agreeable wildness? How sincere a pleasure it is to behold the natural beauties of the earth! to preserve and renew our relish for them, is not the veil of night alternately drawn over her face, and doth she not change her dress with the seasons? How aptly are the elements disposed! What variety and use in the meanest production of nature! What delicacy, what beauty, what contrivance in animal and vegetable bodies! How exquisitely are all things suited as well to their particular ends, as to constitute opposite parts of the whole! and while they mutually aid and support, do they not also set off and illustrate each other? Raise now your thoughts that adorn the high arch of heaven. The motion and order? Were those (miscalled erratic) globes ever known to stray, in their repeated journeys through the pathless void? Do they not measure areas round the sun ever proportioned to the times? So fixed, so immutable are the laws by which the unseen Author of nature actuates the universe. How vivid and radiant is the lustre of the fixed stars! how magnificent and rich that negligent profusion, with which they appear to be scattered throughout the whole azure vault! yet if you take the telescope, it brings into your sight a new host of stars that escape the naked eye. Here they seem contiguous and minute, but to a nearer view immense orbs of light at various distances, far sunk in the abyss of space. Now you must call imagination to your aid. The feeble narrow sense cannot descry innumerable worlds revolving round the central fires; and in those worlds the energy of an all-perfect mind displayed in endless forms. But neither sense nor imagination are big enough to comprehend the boundless extent with all its glittering furniture. Though the labouring mind exert and strain each power to its utmost reach, there still stands out ungrasped a surplusage immeasurable. Yet all the vast bodies that compose this mighty frame, how distant and remote soever, are by some secret mechanism, some divine art and force, linked in a mutual dependence and intercourse with each other, even with this earth, which was almost slipped from my thoughts, and lost in the crowd of worlds. Is not the whole system immense, beautiful, glorious beyond expression and beyond thought? What treatment then do those philosphers deserve, who would deprive these noble and delightful scenes of all reality? How should those principles be entertained, that lead us to think all the visible beauty of the creation a false imaginary glare? To be plain, can you expect this scepticism of yours will not be thought extravagantly absurd by all men of sense?"

followed shortly by:

"...To me it is evident, for the reasons you allow of, that sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind of spirit. Whence I conclude, not that they have no real existence, but that seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other mind wherein they exist. As sure therefore as the sensible world really exists, so sure is there an infinite, omnipresent Spirit who contains and supports it."

...to be continued!

Keep reading: "Glorious Beyond Expression And Beyond Thought"...

Living from Hand to Mouth

"He who cannot draw on three thousand years
is living from hand to mouth."

- Goethe

I've been thinking a bit about the epigraph to Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World (above).

Several notes:

1. It's definitely a poignant statement about what happens when people don't bother to learn from history (in terms of the lessons about stupid ideas, things to never do again), or at least learn about history (in order to advance with new ideas rather than repetitive ones).
2. Sophie's World might have been the first seminal work in the development of my ideology, but coupled with the second, Ishmael, it becomes clear that three thousand years is a little arbitrary in terms of human history (4 million for species' existence, perhaps 1 million, 60,000 by conservative estimates, of modern-day mettle). Why did Goethe fixate on the three thousand-year mark tied up with perhaps the origins of Abrahamic faiths and their whirlwind push around the planet?
3. What in heaven's name is wrong with living from hand to mouth? Requiring less--remember? God forbid any group live simply on meagre (by the standards of our over-consumptive culture) but plentiful (by the standards of tribal cultures, which term Quinn claims, in Write Sideways, he should have settled for in place of the shorthand of "Leavers" in Ishmael, those who leave their fates in the hands of the gods--a concept he also hashes out, clarifies, in Write Sideways) means! (Apologies on the painful parentheticals!)

Keep reading: Living from Hand to Mouth...

Missionaries

I met some Mormon missionaries today on the walk back down to the house from the end of the trail, where I'd finished my run. I caught sight of them down the block before they approached me, initially hoping that if I didn't make eye contact and stayed on my (opposite) side of the street, they wouldn't approach me. Well, that proved impossible, perhaps our encounter even seems inevitable, since they were missionaries after all.

I decided to speak to them cordially, acknowledging their human-ness as with any other fresh interaction with strangers. I have a hard enough time as it is curbing my mean-spirited streak, attitude-heavy. Before they spoke, I contemplated making some mention, rather unpleasant and not even accurate or deferential (to indigenous spiritual practice), that I believed in and practiced the original Native American spiritual traditions already, and in their proper form, thank you.

They went through what felt like an excruciatingly long introduction (since I had already taxonomized them) about being from a church in town, missionaries from The. Church. of. Jesus. Christ......(excruciatingly long pause).......of Latter Day Saints. Did I have time, blah blah blah.

I came up with the following response (not my best, but afterwards I considered how I might respond in the future, and nothing nearly as cordial or fitting came to mind; for instance, "I am a student of philosophy and theology and have spent plenty of time studying questions of faith. At this time, I feel perfectly comfortable and content with my own spiritual experience and so do not feel I need to hear any new message. Thank you. Good day." And perhaps even one day, I could say "Actually, I've read The Book of Mormon" and then see what happens!): "Well, I'm not really in a position to hear such a message right now [I had hoped my disheveled appearance from finishing a jog would have spoken well enough for itself, such that they wouldn't approach me, for apparently being out of place and not near a home in which they could speak to me, yet somehow they weren't dissuaded], but I've met with groups of missionaries in the past [which was perfectly true]. Sorry."

Then the guy asking said to me (it really felt as though he were about to fall apart), "Do you at least happen to know anybody around who might be willing to hear our message?"

Not a regular resident of the area, I had to deny them this, but I offered that perhaps since it was a nice summer evening, and there were plenty of people out enjoying it, they would find someone who was. And I wished them a nice evening.

Another exchange, in which they asked if there was anything they could do for me (I found this a bit odd, off-kilter), a bit of grandiose gesturing from me dismissing this strange inquiry, and another smiley, breathy, "No, no, I just hope you enjoy your evening."

Missionary work was one of the first big turn offs for me from the Baptist church in which I grew up, and in an extension of that swearing off, a dismissal of all of Christianity as a whole, for a time. I have chronicled my spiritual journey elsewhere, though perhaps it's time to bring it back to the foreground here in my blog. Anyhow, my early inklings as a history and anthropology student instilled in me much guilt for living just past an old creek bed in a house where no house used to sit and tribes used to roam freely, and it also aroused much suspicion and disdain in my being when, at Children's Sermon, a special interlude in the service where the pastor spoke to the kids, who came forward and gathered round for stories, magic tricks, puppets, and all sorts of marvelous, enticing stuff, little pieces of cardboard were produced, which could be turned into little houses or plain boxes with lots of colorful print about religiously-oriented mission work in places like India, quickly-assembled cardboard piggy banks to donate to such abomination organizations.

This bothered me to no end. Did not the people of India already have Hinduism, a perfectly valid religion, to follow reverently in their land? (At this time, nuances about the populations of Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, and other spiritual minorities or sects in India did not have especial prominence in my knowledge.) In any case, it was a step on my way to being swept up with Daniel Quinn's writing, which wove together so much of the uneasy feelings I'd already developed about the trajectory and ambitions of this culture into a coherent, acceptable (to me) whole. Missionaries rely on archaic views of the Other and what exactly that other needs in terms of assistance in physical and spiritual nourishment, and otherwise.

There was a lot of interesting material in the most recent part that I read of If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways about several common misconceptions of reality tied to Christianity, old premises that don't hold up to scrutiny, a topic I felt pleasantly surprised to find Quinn addressing, as I've spent so much of my time since Ishmael learning about logic, partly to find how Quinn fits into the intellectual precedent as a writer not officially of academic books, though heavily grounded in the findings of biology, anthropology, history, etc..

Keep reading: Missionaries...

"The Turfgrass Subject"

"[W]hereas the aesthetic of the lawn may be old, indeed ancient, the turfgrass subject is new: the urban person who is concerned about nature but uses chemicals, who supports the Kyoto Protocol but drives an SUV, who recycles fervently while constantly wasting more and more,"

writes leading political ecology writer Paul Robbins in his book, Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are, and continues,

"Rather than condescendingly dismissing such inconsistencies as 'cognitive dissonance' as is common to apolitical critique, the book advances an alternative, which emphasizes the range of constraints on our alternatives and that stresses the way the biochemical machines we make increasingly make us who we are."

Keep reading: "The Turfgrass Subject"...

Globalization, a Millenia-Long Process

"Globalization isn't a recent policy; it's been in place among us for thousands of years."

This one's obvious, but for whatever reason, often escapes the awareness of those bringing it up in a discussion. Globalization sounds to many like a process no more than maybe twenty years old because it wasn't discussed so much before then. That doesn't erase the processes of transformation that dispersed humans across the globe and the very incendiary processes that dispersed the culture borne of the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 or so years ago. Daniel Quinn's writing in Ishmael helped me understand this simple concept years ago, and I especially liked how he put this in If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways.

Keep reading: Globalization, a Millenia-Long Process...

Coming Soon...

Watch out for posts on 

Unschooling

Theatre and Spatial Regulation

Comics and Eschatology

The Revolution of Un

Priorities or Programs?

Five Years Post-Ish

Guerilla Gardening

Jenson's Endgame (Premises)

--all coming soon!

I said I would update at least daily, and I'm having quite the time adjusting to that schedule and responsibility, but I wanted to say that I definitely intend on keeping to that promise. I might be a little behind right now; however, I absolutely have plans about which musings to share with you next. Hang in there!

Keep reading: Coming Soon......

Reflections on Pacifism

A couple disclaimers: I've discovered that to reply to Derrick Jensen's premises alone presents some hefty work. I have a lot to say and quite the difficult time organizing how to say it. The university library nearby has a copy so I will soon look into the full scope of Endgame for myself, but other excerpts from the book are also available on the book's website. Since I have so much to say and have not found an easy way to communicate it, and also since I promised I'd be more consistent about posting, I'm going to pick the simplest and shortest of the premises and whittle away at that for you now. I don't have too too much to say about this premise, as I do about the others. I suppose as I read the book and see how Jensen expounds on these premises, I will have the ability to offer my response to the premises from another vantage point.

Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.

I'd like to know exactly what Jensen intends to imply here. Does he mean to say that there are many different kinds of love, some mixed up, contentious, violent, conflictual, imbalanced, detached, overbearing, balanced, distant, unemotional, and on and on? When I sometimes indulge my cheesy side, I can still hear Edmund in the Mansfield Park movie declare, "There are as many kinds of love as there are moments in time." We can leap from disassociating love from pacifism to talking about domestic violence and other conflicted love/non-pacifism combinations. Would Jensen like to just hop on the bandwagon here and declare that love does not imply pacifism because a devoted husband can still turn and kill his wife in a rage, or vice versa?

Pacifism itself... Part of me definitely admires Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement; the long history of civil disobedience (connecting such figureheads as Jesus of Nazareth, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and their devotees); and the refrain of "Peace, love, and justice" that inspired so much enthusiastic protest and creative (though eventually it turned destructive, apathetic, meaningless, or ineffective) action in America during the sixties (with quite the lead-in from the fifties). There are some aspects of the hippie worldview that, in a certain light, on certain days, are pretty cool--groovy, even (My father and his students would like to bring back the word so there you have my little effort). However, I don't see violence as something to overcome, even as something to wish to overcome. I think the destructive impulse resides in each of us, and mostly, we just have to figure out how best to use that capacity, to understand why we choose to use it for whichever particular reason.

I did, in fact, at one point have little interest in hearing anything directed away from a goal of something akin to "Peace on earth (and mercy mild)." But then I read Ishmael, and just as the voice on the cover (Jim Britell of the Whole Earth Review) predicted, I would end up dividing my life up into the books "I read before Ishmael and those read after." Having read Ishmael, I saw everything I encountered through the vocabulary of concepts I had made acquaintance with in Quinn's work. Not only did I continue with a lifelong impulse to question everything (already enforced the same year I was introduced to Quinn by a reading of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave"), but I questioned everything through an anthropological, evolutionary lens, with the unassuming but explosive question, "What kinds of other ways to live did and do Leavers have that get obscured by 'one right way to live' thinking?" at the forefront. Violence was certainly an integral part of life for every human culture, in some form, for, after all, even incredibly pacifistic cultures have to fend for themselves and survive somehow (broader discussions of violence and survival arise here - more material for later!). Hence Quinn's "erratic retaliator" strategy (Also more on this later; You can pretty much assume that any concept I introduce which isn't common knowledge, or on which my take isn't fully clear, I will note the instance myself and come back to it with explanations later, in future posts, eventually). So is this what Jensen is getting at? Pacifism is not the ultimate, the grandest goal for humanity as a whole (Why humanity as a whole would need a common goal is beyond me anyway, at least nowadays, this many years post-Ishmael), the greatest bit of "progress." Love and pacifism are not synonymous. You can have love as an ideal without getting it mixed up with pacifism.

He could have intended so much by this teensy phrasing. And in the end, he does imply a boatload. So what does he mean by it? I will let you know once I latch onto a copy of the book!

Keep reading: Reflections on Pacifism...