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elisaenglish · 3 years

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If the Doors of Perception Were Cleansed

Knowledge is acquired when we succeed in fitting a new experience into the system of concepts based upon our old experiences. Understanding comes when we liberate ourselves from the old and so make possible a direct, unmediated contact with the new, the mystery, moment by moment, of our existence.

The new is given on every level of experience—given perceptions, given emotions and thoughts, given states of unobstructed awareness, given relationships with things and persons. The old is our homemade system of ideas and word patterns. It is the stock of finished articles fabricated out of the given mystery by memory and analytical reasoning, by habit and the automatic associations of accepted notions. Knowledge is primarily a knowledge of these finished articles. Understanding is primarily direct awareness of the raw material.

Knowledge is always in terms of concepts and can be passed on by means of words or other symbols. Understanding is not conceptual, and therefore cannot be passed on. It is an immediate experience, and immediate experience can only be talked about (very inadequately), never shared.

Nobody can actually feel another’s pain or grief, another’s love or joy or hunger. And similarly nobody can experience another’s understanding of a given event or situation. There can, of course, be knowledge of such an understanding and this knowledge may be passed on in speech or writing, or by means of other symbols. Such communicable knowledge is useful as a reminder that there have been specific understandings in the past, and that understanding is at all times possible. But we must always remember that knowledge of understanding is not the same thing as the understanding, which is the raw material of that knowledge. It is as different from understanding as the doctor’s prescription for penicillin is different from penicillin.

Understanding is not inherited, nor can it be laboriously acquired. It is something which when circumstances are favourable, comes to us, so to say, of its own accord. All of us are knowers, all the time; it is only occasionally and in spite of ourselves that we understand the mystery of given reality. Consequently we are very seldom tempted to equate understanding with knowledge. Of the exceptional men and women, who have understanding in every situation, most are intelligent enough to see that understanding is different from knowledge and that conceptual systems based upon past experience are as necessary to the conduct of life as are spontaneous insights into new experiences. For these reasons the mistake of identifying understanding with knowledge is rarely perpetuated and therefore poses no serious problem.

How different is the case with the opposite mistake, the mistake of supposing that knowledge is the same as understanding and interchangeable with it! All adults possess vast stocks of knowledge. Some of it is correct knowledge, some of it is incorrect knowledge, and some of it only looks like knowledge and is neither correct nor incorrect; it is merely meaningless.

That which gives meaning to a proposition is not (to use the words of an eminent contemporary philosopher, Rudolf Carnap) “the attendant images or thoughts, but the possibility of deducing from it perceptive propositions, in other words, the possibility of verification. To give sense to a proposition, the presence of images is not sufficient, it is not even necessary. We have no image of the electromagnetic field, nor even, I should say, of the gravitational field; nevertheless the propositions which physicists assert about these fields have a perfect sense because perceptive propositions are deducible from them.”

Metaphysical doctrines are propositions which cannot be operationally verified, at least on the level of ordinary experience. They may be expressive of a state of mind, in the way that lyrical poetry is expressive; but they have no assignable meaning. The information they convey is only pseudo-knowledge. But the formulators of metaphysical doctrines and the believers in such doctrines have always mistaken this pseudo-knowledge for knowledge and have proceeded to modify their behaviour accordingly.

Meaningless pseudo-knowledge has at all times been one of the principal motivators of individual and collective action. And that is one of the reasons why the course of human history has been so tragic and at the same time so strangely grotesque. Action based upon meaningless pseudo-knowledge is always inappropriate, always beside the point, and consequently always results in the kind of mess mankind has always lived in—the kind of mess that makes the angels weep and the satirists laugh aloud.

Correct or incorrect, relevant or meaningless, knowledge and pseudo-knowledge are as common as dirt and are therefore taken for granted. Understanding, on the contrary, is as rare, very nearly, as emeralds, and so is highly prized. The knowers would dearly love to be understanders; but either their stock of knowledge does not include the knowledge of what to do in order to be understanders; or else they know theoretically what they ought to do, but go on doing the opposite all the same. In either case they cherish the comforting delusion that knowledge and, above all, pseudo-knowledge are understanding. Along with the closely related errors of over-abstraction, over-generalisation, and over-simplification, this is the commonest of all intellectual sins and the most dangerous.

Of the vast sum of human misery about one third, I would guess, is unavoidable misery. This is the price we must pay for being embodied, and for inheriting genes which are subject to deleterious mutations. This is the rent extorted by nature for the privilege of living on the surface of a planet, whose soil is mostly poor, whose climates are capricious and inclement, and whose inhabitants include a countless number of microorganisms capable of causing in human beings themselves, in their domestic animals and cultivated plants, an immense variety of deadly or debilitating diseases.

To these miseries of cosmic origin must be added the much larger group of those avoidable disasters we bring upon ourselves. For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism, and proselytising zeal on behalf of religious or political idols. But zeal, dogmatism, and idealism exist only because we are forever committing intellectual sins. We sin by attributing concrete significance to meaningless pseudo-knowledge; we sin in being too lazy to think in terms of multiple causation and indulging instead in over-simplification, over-generalisation, and over-abstraction; and we sin by cherishing the false but agreeable notion that conceptual knowledge and, above all, conceptual pseudo-knowledge are the same as understanding.

Consider a few obvious examples. The atrocities of organised religion (and organised religion, let us never forget, has done about as much harm as it has done good) are all due, in the last analysis, to “mistaking the pointing finger for the moon”—in other words to mistaking the verbalised notion for the given mystery to which it refers or, more often, only seems to refer. This, as I have said, is one of the original sins of the intellect, and it is a sin in which, with a rationalistic bumptiousness as grotesque as it is distasteful, theologians have systematically wallowed.

From indulgence in this kind of delinquency there has arisen, in most of the great religious traditions of the world, a fantastic over-valuation of words. Over-valuation of words leads all too frequently to the fabrication and idolatrous worship of dogmas, to the insistence on uniformity of belief, the demand for assent by all and sundry to a set of propositions which, though meaningless, are to be regarded as sacred. Those who do not consent to this idolatrous worship of words are to be “converted” and, if that should prove impossible, either persecuted or, if the dogmatisers lack political power, ostracised and denounced.

Immediate experience of reality unites humanity. Conceptualised beliefs, including even the belief in a God of love and righteousness, divides them and, as the dismal record of religious history bears witness, sets them for centuries on end at each other’s throats.

Over-simplification, over-generalisation, and over-abstraction are three other sins closely related to the sin of imagining that knowledge and pseudo-knowledge are the same as understanding. The over-generalising over-simplifier is the person who asserts, without producing evidence, that “All X’s are Y,” or, “All A’s have a single cause, which is B.” The over-abstracter is the one who cannot be bothered to deal with Jones and Smith, with Jane and Mary, as individuals, but enjoys being eloquent on the subject of Humanity, of Progress, of God and History and the Future. This brand of intellectual delinquency is indulged in by every demagogue, every crusader.

In the Middle Ages the favourite over-generalisation was “All infidels are damned.” (For the Muslims, “all infidels” meant “all Christians;” for the Christians, “all Muslims.”) Almost as popular was the nonsensical proposition. “All heretics are inspired by the devil” and “All eccentric old women are witches.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the wars and persecutions were justified by the luminously clear and simple belief that “All Roman Catholics (or if you happened to be on the Pope’s side, all Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans) are God’s enemies.”

In our own day Hitler proclaimed that all the ills of the world had one cause, namely Jews, and that all Jews were subhuman enemies of humanity. For the Communists, all the ills of the world have one cause, namely capitalists, and all capitalists and their middle-class supporters are subhuman enemies of humanity. It is perfectly obvious, on the face of it, that none of these over-generalised statements can possibly be true. But the urge to intellectual sin is fearfully strong. All are subject to temptation and few are able to resist.

There are in the lives of human beings very many situations in which only knowledge, conceptualised, accumulated, and passed on by means of words, is of any practical use. For example, if I want to manufacture sulfuric acid or to keep accounts for a banker, I do not start at the beginnings of chemistry or economics; I start at what is now the end of these sciences. In other words, I go to a school where the relevant knowledge is taught, I read books in which the accumulation of past experience in these particular fields are set forth. I can learn the functions of an accountant or a chemical engineer on the basis of knowledge alone.

For this particular purpose it is not necessary for me to have much understanding of concrete situations as they arise, moment by moment from the depths of the given mystery of our existence. What is important for me as a professional person is that I should be familiar with all the conceptual knowledge in my field. Ours is an industrial civilisation, in which no society can prosper unless it possesses an elite of highly trained scientists and a considerable army of engineers and technicians. The possession and wide dissemination of a great deal of correct, specialised knowledge has become a prime condition of national survival.

There is no substitute for correct knowledge and in the process of acquiring correct knowledge there is no substitute for concentration and prolonged practice. Except for the unusually gifted, learning, by whatever method, must always be hard work. Unfortunately there are many professional educationists who seem to think that children should never be required to work hard. Wherever educational methods are based on this assumption, children will not in fact acquire much knowledge; and if the methods are followed for a generation or two, the society which tolerates them will find itself in full decline.

In theory, deficiencies in knowledge can be made good simply by changing the curriculum. In practice a change in the curriculum will do little good, unless there is a corresponding change in the point of view of professional educationists. For the trouble with American educationists, writes a distinguished member of their profession, Dr. H. L. Dodge, is that they “regard any subject from personal grooming to philosophy as equally important or interchangeable in furthering the process of self-realisation. This anarchy of values has led to the displacement of the established disciplines of science and the humanities by these new subjects.”

Whether professional educationists can be induced to change their current attitudes is uncertain. Should it prove impossible, we must fall back on the comforting thought that time never stands still and that nobody is immortal. What persuasion and the threat of national decline fail to accomplish, retirement, high blood pressure, and death will bring to pass, more slowly, it is true, but much more surely.

The dissemination of correct knowledge is one of the essential functions of education, and we neglect it at our peril. But, obviously, education should be more than a device for passing on correct knowledge. It should also teach what Dewey called life adjustment and self-realisation. But precisely how should self-realisation and life adjustment be promoted? To this question modern educators have given many answers. Most of these answers belong to one or other of two main educational families, the Progressive and the Classical. Answers of the Progressive type find expression in the provision of courses in such subjects as “family living, consumer economics, job information, physical and mental health, training for world citizenship and statesmanship, and last, and we are afraid least” (I quote again the words of Dr. Dodge) “training in fundamentals.”

Where answers of the classical type are preferred, educators provide courses in Latin, Greek, modern European literature, in world history and in philosophy—exclusively, for some odd reason, of the Western brand. Shakespeare and Chaucer, Virgil and Homer—how far away they seem, how irrevocably dead! Why, then, should we bother to teach the classics? The reasons have been stated a thousand times, but seldom with more force and lucidity than by Albert Jay Nock in his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man:

“The literatures of Greece and Rome provide the longest, the most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. Hence the mind that has canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind; it is an experienced mind. It has come, as Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience.

Our studies were properly called formative, because, beyond all others, their effect was powerfully maturing. Cicero told the unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must for ever remain children. And if one wished to characterise the collective mind of this period, or indeed of any period, the use it makes of its powers of observation, reflection, logical inference, one would best do it by the word ‘immaturity’.”

The Progressive and the Classical approaches to education are not incompatible. It is perfectly possible to combine a schooling in the local cultural tradition with a training, half-vocational, half-psychological, in adaptation to the current conventions of social life, and then to combine this combination with training in the sciences. In other words with the inculcation of correct knowledge. But is this enough? Can such an education result in the self-realisation which is its aim? The question deserves our closest scrutiny.

Nobody, of course, can doubt the importance of accumulated experience as a guide for individual and social conduct. We are human because, at a very early stage in the history of the species, our ancestors discovered a way of preserving and disseminating the results of experience. They learned to speak and were thus enabled to translate what they had perceived, what they had inferred from given fact and home-grown fantasy, into a set of concepts, which could be added to by each generation and bequeathed, a treasure of mingled sense and nonsense, to posterity. In Mr. Nock’s words “the mind that has canvassed this record is an experienced mind.”

The only trouble, so far as we are concerned, is that the vicarious experience derived from a study of the classics is, in certain respects, completely irrelevant to twentieth-century facts. In many ways, of course, the modern world resembles the world inhabited by the people of antiquity. In many other ways, however, it is radically different.

For example, in their world the rate of change was exceedingly slow; in ours advancing technology produces a state of chronic revolution. They took infanticide for granted (Thebes was the only Greek city which forbade the exposure of babies) and regarded slavery as not only necessary to the Greek way of life, but as intrinsically natural and right; we are the heirs of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century humanitarianism and must solve our economic and demographic problems by methods less dreadfully reminiscent of recent totalitarian practice.

Because all the dirty work was done by slaves, they regarded every form of manual activity as essentially unworthy of a gentleman and in consequence never subjected their over-abstract, over-rational theories to the test of experiment; we have learned, or at least are learning, to think operationally. They despised “barbarians,” never bothered to learn a foreign language, and could therefore naively regard the rules of Greek grammar and syntax as the Laws of Thought; we have begun to understand the nature of language, the danger of taking words too seriously, the ever present need for linguistic analysis. They knew nothing about the past and therefore, in Cicero’s words, were like children. (Thucydides, the greatest historian of antiquity, prefaces his account of the Peloponnesian War by airily asserting that nothing of great importance had happened before his own time.)

We, in the course of the last five generations, have acquired a knowledge of humanity’s past extending back to more than half a million years and covering the activities of tribes and nations in every continent. They developed political institutions which, in the case of Greece, were hopelessly unstable and, in the case of Rome, were only too firmly fixed in a pattern of aggressiveness and brutality; but what we need is a few hints on the art of creating an entirely new kind of society, durable but adventurous, strong but humane, highly organised but liberty-loving, elastic, and adaptable. In this matter Greece and Rome can teach us only negatively—by demonstrating, in their divergent ways, what not to do.

From all this it is clear that a classical education in the humanities of two thousand years ago requires to be supplemented by some kind of training in the humanities of today and tomorrow. The Progressives profess to give such a training; but surely we need something a little more informative, a little more useful in the vertiginously changing world of ours, than courses in present-day consumer economics and current job information.

But even if a completely adequate schooling in the humanities of the past, the present, and the foreseeable future could be devised and made available to all, would the aims of education, as distinct from factual and theoretical instruction, be thereby achieved? Would the recipients of such an education be any nearer to the goal of self-realisation?

The answer, I am afraid, is, No. For at this point we find ourselves confronted by one of those paradoxes, which are of the very essence of our strange existence as amphibians inhabiting, without being completely at home in, half a dozen almost incommensurable worlds—the world of concepts and the world of data, the objective world and the subjective, the world of personal consciousness and the world of the unconscious.

Where education is concerned, the paradox may be expressed in the statement that the medium of education, which is language, is absolutely necessary, but also fatal; the subject matter of education, which is conceptualised accumulation of past experience, is indispensable, but also an obstacle to be circumvented. “Existence is prior to essence.” Unlike most metaphysical propositions, this slogan of the existentialists can actually be verified.

“Wolf children,” adopted by animal mothers and brought up in animal surroundings, have the form of human beings, but are not human. The essence of humanity, it is evident, is not something we are born with; it is something we make or grow into. We learn to speak, we accumulate conceptualised knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, we imitate our elders, we build up fixed patterns of thought and feeling and behaviour, and in the process we become human, we turn into persons.

But the things which make us human are precisely the things which interfere with self-realisation and prevent understanding. We are humanised by imitating others, by learning their speech, and by acquiring the accumulated knowledge which language makes available. But we understand only when, by liberating ourselves from the tyranny of words, conditioned reflexes, and social conventions, we establish direct, unmediated contact with experience.

The greatest paradox of our existence consists in this: that in order to understand, we must first encumber ourselves with all the intellectual and emotional baggage, which is an impediment to understanding. Except in a dim, preconscious way, animals do not understand a situation, even though, by inherited instinct or by an ad hoc act of intelligence, they may be reacting to it with complete appropriateness, as though they understood it.

Conscious understanding is the privilege of men and women, and it is a privilege which they have earned, strangely enough, by acquiring the useful or delinquent habits, the stereotypes of perception, thought, and feeling, the rituals of behaviour, the stock of second-hand knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, whose possession is the greatest obstacle to understanding. “Learning,” says Lao-Tzu, “consists in adding to one’s stock day by day. The practice of the Tao consists in subtracting.”

This does not mean, of course, that we can live by subtraction alone. Learning is as necessary as unlearning. Wherever technical proficiency is needed, learning is indispensable. From youth to old age, from generation to generation, we must go on adding to our stock of useful and relevant knowledge. Only in this way can we hope to deal effectively with the physical environment and with the abstract ideas which make it possible for people to find their way through the complexities of civilisation and technology.

But this is not the right way to deal with our personal reactions to ourselves or to other human beings. In such situations there must be an unlearning of accumulated concepts; we must respond to each new challenge not with our old conditioning, not in the light of conceptual knowledge based on the memory of past and different events, not by consulting the law of averages, but with a consciousness stripped naked and as though new born.

Once more we are confronted by the great paradox of human life. It is our conditioning which develops our consciousness; but in order to make full use of this developed consciousness, we must start by getting rid of the conditioning which developed it. By adding conceptual knowledge to conceptual knowledge, we make conscious understanding possible; but this potential understanding can be actualised only when we have subtracted all that we have added.

It is because we have memories that we are convinced of our self-identity as persons and as members of a given society.

“The child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.”

What Wordsworth called “natural piety” a teacher of understanding would describe as indulgence in emotionally charged memories, associated with childhood and youth. Factual memory—the memory, for example, of the best way of making sulphuric acid or of casting up accounts—is an unmixed blessing. The psychological memory (to use Krishnamurti’s term), memory carrying an emotional charge, whether positive or negative, is a source at the worst of neurosis and insanity (psychiatry is largely the art of ridding patients of the incubus of their negatively charged memories), at the best of distractions from the task of understanding—distractions which, though socially useful, are none the less obstacles to be climbed over or avoided.

Emotionally charged memories cement the ties of family life (or sometimes make family life impossible!) and serve, when conceptualised and taught as a cultural tradition, to hold communities together. On the level of understanding, on the level of charity, and on the level, to some extent, of artistic expression, individuals have it within their power to transcend their social tradition, to overstep the bounds of the culture in which they have been brought up. On the level of knowledge, manners, and custom, they can never get very far away from the persona created for them by their family and society.

The culture within which they live is a prison—but a prison which makes it possible for any prisoner who so desires to achieve freedom, a prison to which, for this and a host of other reasons, its inmates owe an enormous debt of gratitude and loyalty. But though it is our duty to “honour our father and our mother,” it is also our duty “to hate our father and mother, our brethren and our sisters, yes and our own life”—that socially conditioned life we take for granted. Though it is necessary for us to add to our cultural stock day by day, it is also necessary to subtract and subtract. There is, to quote the title of Simone Weil’s posthumous essay, a great “Need for Roots”; but there is an equally urgent need, on occasion, for total rootlessness.

In our present context this book by Simone Weil and the preface which Mr. T.S. Eliot contributes to the English edition are particularly instructive. Simone Weil was a woman of great ability, heroic virtue, and boundless spiritual aspiration. But unfortunately for herself, as well as for her readers, she was weighed down by a burden of knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, which her own almost maniacal over-valuation of words and notions rendered intolerably heavy.

A clerical friend reports of her that he did not “ever remember Simone Weil, in spite of her virtuous desire for objectivity, give way in the course of a discussion.” She was so deeply rooted in her culture that she came to believe that words were supremely important. Hence her love of argument and the obstinacy with which she clung to her opinions. Hence too her strange inability, on so many occasions, to distinguish the pointing finger from the indicated moon. “But why do you prate of God?” Meister Eckhart asked; and out of the depth of his understanding of given reality, he added, “Whatever you say of Him is untrue.” Necessarily so; for “the saving truth was never preached by the Buddha,” or by anyone else.

Truth can be defined in many ways. But if you define it as understanding (and this is how all the masters of the spiritual life have defined it), then it is clear that “Truth must be lived and there is nothing to argue about in this teaching; any arguing is sure to go against the intent of it.” This was something which Emerson knew and consistently acted upon. To the almost frenzied exasperation of that pugnacious manipulator of religious notions, the elder Henry James, he refused to argue about anything.

And the same was true of William Law. “Away, then, with the fictions and workings of discursive reason, either for or against Christianity! They are only the wanton spirit of the mind, whilst ignorant of God and insensible of its own nature and condition... For neither God, nor heaven, nor hell, nor the devil, nor the flesh, can be any other way knowable in you or by you, but by their own existence and manifestation in you. And any pretended knowledge of any of those things, beyond and without this self-evident sensibility of their birth within you, is only such knowledge of them as the blind man hath of the light that has never entered into him.”

This does not mean, of course, that discursive reason and argument are without value. Where knowledge is concerned, they are not only valuable; they are indispensable. But knowledge is not the same thing as understanding. If we want to understand, we must uproot ourselves from our culture, bypass language, get rid of emotionally charged memories, hate our fathers and mothers, subtract and subtract from our stock of notions. “Needs must it be a virgin,” writes Meister Eckhart, “by whom Jesus is received. Virgin, in other words, is a person, void of alien images, free as he was when he existed not.”

Simone Weil must have known, theoretically, about this need for cultural virginity, of total rootlessness. But, alas, she was too deeply embedded in her own and other people’s ideas, too superstitious a believer in the magic of the words she handled with so much skill, to be able to act upon this knowledge. “The food,” she wrote, “that a collectivity supplies to those who form part of it has no equivalent in the universe” (Thank God! we may add, after sniffing the spiritual nourishment provided by many of the vanished collectivities of the past.) Furthermore, the food provided by a collectivity is food “not only for the souls of the living, but also for souls yet unborn.”

Finally, “the collectivity constitutes the sole agency for preserving the spiritual treasures accumulated by the dead, the sole transmitting agency by means of which the dead can speak to the living. And the sole earthly reality which is connected with the eternal destiny of man is the irradiating light of those who have managed to become fully conscious of this destiny, transmitted from generation to generation.”

This last sentence could only have been penned by one who systematically mistook knowledge for understanding, home-made concepts for given reality. It is, of course, desirable that there should be knowledge of what people now dead have said about their understanding of reality. But to maintain that a knowledge of other people’s understanding is the same, for us, as understanding, or can even directly lead us to understanding, is a mistake against which all the masters of the spiritual life have always warned us. The letter in St. Paul’s phrase, is full of “oldness.” It has therefore no relevance to the ever novel reality, which can be understood only in the “newness of the spirit.” As for the dead, let them bury their dead. For even the most exalted past seers and avatars “never taught the saving truth.”

We should not, it goes without saying, neglect the records of dead people’s understandings. On the contrary, we ought to know all about them. But we must know all about them without taking them too seriously. We must know all about them, while remaining acutely aware that such knowledge is not the same as understanding and that understanding will come to us only when we have subtracted what we know and made ourselves void and virgin, free as we were when we were not.

Turning from the body of the book to the preface, we find an even more striking example of that literally preposterous over-valuation of words and notions, to which the cultured and the learned are so fatally prone. “I do not know,” Mr. Eliot writes, “whether she [Simone Weil] could read the Upanishads in Sanskrit—or, if so, how great was her mastery of what is not only a highly developed language, but a way of thought, the difficulties of which become more formidable to a European student the more diligently he applies himself to it.”

But like all the other great works of oriental philosophy, the Upanishads are not systems of pure speculation, in which the niceties of language are all important. They were written by Transcendental Pragmatists, as we may call them, whose concern was to teach a doctrine which could be made to “work,” a metaphysical theory which could be operationally tested, not through perception only, but by a direct experience of the whole person on the every level of being.

To understand the meaning of tat tvam asi, “thou art That,” it is not necessary to be a profound Sanskrit scholar. (Similarly, it is not necessary to be a proud Hebrew scholar in order to understand the meaning of “Thou shalt not kill.”) Understanding of the doctrine (as opposed to conceptualised knowledge about the doctrine) will come only to those who choose to perform the operations that permit tat tvam asi to become a given fact of direct, unmediated experience, or in Law’s words, “A self-evident sensibility of its birth within them.”

Did Simone Weil know Sanskrit or didn’t she? The question is entirely beside the piont—is just a particularly smelly cultural red herring dragged across the trail that leads from selfhood to more-than-selfhood, from notionally conditioned ego or unconditioned spirit. In relation to the Upanishads or any other work of Hindu or Buddhist philosophy, only one question deserves to be taken with complete seriousness. It is this. How can a form of words, Tat tvam asi, a metaphysical proposition such as Nirvana and samsara are one, be converted into the direct, unmediated experience of a given fact? How can language and the learned foolery of scholars (for, in the vital context, that is all it is) be circumvented, so that the individual soul may finally understand the That which, in spite of all its efforts to deny the primordial fact, is identical with the thou?

Specifically, should we follow the methods inculcated by Patanjali, or those of the Hinayana monks, those of the Tantrics of northern India and Tibet, those of the Far Eastern Taoists or the followers of Zen, those described by St. John of the Cross and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing? If the European Student wishes to remain shut up in the prison of his or her private cravings and the thought patterns inherited from their predecessors, then by all means let them plunge through Sanskit, or Pali, or Chinese, or Tibetan, into the verbal study of “a way of thought, the difficulties of which become more formidable the more diligently they apply themselves to it.”

If, on the other hand, they wish to transcend themselves by actually understanding the primordial fact described or hinted at in the Upanishads and the other scriptures of what, for lack of a better phrase, we will call “spiritual religion,” then they must ignore the problems of language and speculative philosophy, or at least relegate them to a secondary position, and concentrate their attention on the practical means whereby the advance from knowledge to understanding may best be made.

From the positively charged collective memories, which are organised into a cultural or religious tradition, let us now return to the positively charged private memories, which individuals organise into a system of “natural piety.” We have no more right to wallow in natural piety—that is to say, in emotionally charged memories of past happiness and vanished loves—than to bemoan earlier miseries and torment ourselves with remorse for old offences.

And we have no more right to waste the present instant in relishing future and entirely hypothetical pleasures than to waste it in the apprehension of possible disasters to come. “There is no greater pain,” says Dante, “than, in misery, to remember happy times.” “Then stop remembering happy times and accept the fact of your present misery,” would be the seemingly unsympathetic answer of all those who have had understanding. The emptying of memory is classed by St. John of the Cross as a good second only to the state of union with God, and an indispensable condition of such union.

The word Buddha may be translated as “awakened.” Those who merely know about things, or only think they know, live in a state of self-conditioned and culturally conditional somnambulism. Those who understand given reality as it presents itself, moment by moment, are wide awake. Memory charged with pleasant emotions is a soporific or, more accurately, an inducer of trance.

This was discovered empirically by an American hypnotist, Dr. W.B. Fahnestock, whose book Statuvolism, or Artificial Somnambulism, was published in 1871. “When persons are desirous of entering into this state [of artificial somnambulism], I place them in a chair, where they may be at perfect ease. They are next instructed to throw their minds to some familiar place—it matters not where, so that they have been there before and seem desirous of going there again, even in thought. When they have thrown the mind to the place, or upon the desired object, I endeavour by speaking to them frequently to keep their mind upon it... This must be persisted in for some time.” In the end, “clairvoyancy will be induced.”

Anyone who has experimented with hypnosis, or who has watched an experienced operator inducing trance in a difficult subject, knows how effective Fahnestock’s method can be. Incidentally, the relaxing power of positively charged memory was rediscovered, in another medical context, by an oculist, Dr. W. H. Bates, who used to make his patients cover their eyes and revisit in memory the scenes of their happiest experiences. By this means muscular and mental tensions were reduced and it became possible for the patients to use their eyes and minds in a relaxed and therefore efficient way.

From all this it is clear that, while positively charged memories can and should be used for specific therapeutic purposes, there must be no indiscriminate indulgence in “natural piety”; for such indulgence may result in a condition akin to trance—a condition at the opposite pole from the wakefulness that is understanding. Those who live with unpleasant memories become neurotic and those who live with pleasant ones become somnambulistic. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—and the good thereof.

The Muses, in Greek mythology, were the daughters of Memory, and every writer is embarked, like Marcel Proust, on a hopeless search for time lost. But a good writer is one who knows how to “donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.” [To give a purer sense to words of tribulation.] Thanks to this purer sense, his readers will react to his words with a degree of understanding much greater than they would have had, if they had reacted, in their ordinary self-conditioned or culture-conditioned way, to the event to which the words refer.

Great poets must do too much remembering to be more than a sporadic understander; but they know how to express themselves in words which cause other people to understand. Time lost can never be regained; but in their search for it, they may reveal to their readers glimpses of timeless reality.

Unlike the poet, the mystic is “a son of time present.” “Past and present veil God from our sight,” says Jalal-uddin Rumi, who was a Sufi first and only secondarily a great poet. “Burn up both of them with fire. How long will you let yourself be partitioned by these segments like a reed? So long as it remains partitioned, a reed is not privy to secrets, neither is it vocal in response to lips or breathing.” Along with its mirror image in anticipation, emotionally charged memory is a barrier that shuts us out from understanding.

Natural piety can very easily be transformed into artificial piety; for some emotionally charged memories are common to all the members of a given society and lend themselves to being organised into religious, political, or cultural traditions. These traditions are systematically drummed into the young of each successive generation and play an important part in the long drama of their conditioning for citizenship.

Since the memories common to one group are different from the memories shared by other groups, the social solidarity created by tradition is always partial and exclusive. There is natural and artificial piety in relation to everything belonging to us, coupled with suspicion, dislike, and contempt in relation to everything belonging to them.

Artificial piety may be fabricated, organised, and fostered in two ways—by the repetition of verbal formulas of belief and worship, and by the performance of symbolic acts and rituals. As might be expected, the second is the more effective method.

What is the easiest way for a sceptic to achieve faith? The question was answered three hundred years ago by Pascal. The unbeliever must act “as though he believed, take holy water, have masses said, etc. This will naturally cause you to believe and will besot you.” (Cela vous abetira—literally, will make you stupid.) We have to be made stupid, insists Professor Jacques Chevalier, defending his hero against the critics who have been shocked by Pascal’s blunt language; we have to stultify our intelligence, because “intellectual pride deprives us of God and debases us to the level of animals.” Which is, of course, perfectly true. But it does not follow from this truth that we ought to besot ourselves in the manner prescribed by Pascal and all the propagandists of all the religions.

Intellectual pride can be cured only by devaluating pretentious words, only by getting rid of conceptualised pseudo-knowledge and opening ourselves to reality. Artificial piety based on conditioned reflexes merely transfers intellectual pride from the bumptious individual to his even more bumptious church. At one remove, the pride remains intact. For the convinced believer, understanding or direct contact with reality is exceedingly difficult. Moreover the mere fact of having a strong reverential feeling about some hallowed thing, person, or proposition is no guarantee of the existence of the thing, the infallibility of the person, or the truth of the proposition.

In this context, how instructive is the account of an experiment undertaken by that most imaginative and versatile of the eminent Victorians, Sir Francis Galton! The aim of the experiment, he writes in his autobiography, was to “gain an insight into the abject feelings of barbarians and others concerning the power of images which they know to be of human handiwork. I wanted if possible to enter into these feelings...

“It was difficult to find a suitable object for trial, because it ought to be in itself quite unfitted to arouse devout feelings. I fixed on a comic picture, it was that of Punch, and made believe in its possession of divine attributes. I addressed it with much quasi-reverence as possessing a mighty power to reward or punish the behaviour of men towards it, and found little difficulty in ignoring the impossibilities of what I professed. The experiment succeeded. I began to feel and long retained for the picture a large share of the feelings that a barbarian entertains towards his idols, and learned to appreciate the enormous potency they might have over him.”

The nature of a conditioned reflex is such that, when the bell rings, the dog salivates, when the much worshipped image is seen, or the much repeated credo, litany, or mantram is pronounced, the heart of the believer is filled with reverence and his mind with faith. And this happens, regardless of the content of the phrase repeated, the nature of the image to which obeisance has been made. The person is not responding spontaneously to given reality; he or she is responding to some thing, or word, or gesture, which automatically brings into play a previously installed post-hypnotic suggestion.

Meister Eckhart, that acutest of religious psychologists, clearly recognised this fact. “He who fondly imagines to get more of God in thoughts, prayers, pious offices and so forth than by the fireside or in the stall, in sooth he does but take God, as it were, and swaddle His head in a cloak and hide Him under the table. For he who seeks God in settled forms lays hold of the form, while missing the God concealed in it. But he who seeks God in no special guise lays hold of Him as He is in Himself, and such an one lives with the Son and is the life itself.”

“If you look for the Buddha, you will not see the Buddha.” “If you deliberately try to become a Buddha, your Buddha is samsara.” “If a person seeks the Tao, that person loses the Tao.” “By intending to bring yourself into accord with Suchness, you instantly deviate.” “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it.”

There is a Law of Reversed Effort. The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of simultaneously doing and not doing, of combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent Unknown Quantity may take hold.

We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind in which understanding may come to us. What is this state? Clearly it is not any state of limited consciousness. Reality as it is given moment by moment cannot be understood by a mind acting in obedience to post-hypnotic suggestion, or so deconditioned by its emotionally charged memories that it responds to the living now as though it were the dead then. Nor is the mind that has been trained in concentration any better equipped to understand reality. For concentration is merely systematic exclusion, the shutting away from consciousness of all but one thought, one ideal, one image, or one negation of all thoughts, ideals, and images.

But however true, however lofty, however holy, no thought or ideal or image can contain reality or lead to the understanding of reality. Nor can the negation of awareness result in that completer awareness necessary to understanding. At the best these things can lead only to a state of ecstatic dissociation in which one particular aspect of reality, the so-called “spiritual” aspect, may be apprehended. If reality is to be understood in its fullness, as it is given moment by moment, there must be an awareness which is not limited, either deliberately by piety or concentration, or involuntarily by mere thoughtlessness and the force of habit.

Understanding comes when we are totally aware—aware to the limits of our mental and physical potentialities. This, of course, is a very ancient doctrine. “Know thyself” is a piece of advice which is as old as civilisation, and probably a great deal older. To follow that advice a person must do more than indulge in introspection.

If I would know myself, I must know my environment; for as a body, I am part of the environment, a natural object among other natural objects; and, as a mind, I consist to a great extent of my immediate reactions to the environment and of my secondary reactions to those primary reactions. In practice “know thyself” is a call to total awareness. To those who practice it, what does total awareness reveal? It reveals, first of all, the limitations of the thing which each of us calls “I,” and the enormity, the utter absurdity of its pretensions.

“I am the master of my fate,” poor Henley wrote at the end of a celebrated morsel of rhetoric, “I am the captain of my soul.” Nothing could be further from the truth. My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, direct. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger—a passenger who is not sufficiently important to sit at the captain’s table and does not know, even by report, what the soul-ship looks like, how it works, or where it is going.

Total awareness starts, in a word, with the realisation of my ignorance and my impotence. How do electrochemical events in my brain turn into the perception of a quartet by Haydn or a thought, let us say, of Joan of Arc? I haven’t the faintest idea—nor has anyone else. Or consider a seemingly much simpler problem. Can I lift my right hand? The answer is, No, I can’t. I can only give the order; the actual lifting is done by somebody else. Who? I don’t know. Why? I don’t know. And when I have eaten, who digests the bread and cheese? When I have cut myself, who heals the wound? While I am sleeping, who restores the tired body to strength, the neurotic mind to sanity?

All I can say is that “I” cannot do any of these things. The catalogue of what I do not know and am incapable of achieving could be lengthened almost indefinitely. Even my claim to think is only partially justified by the observable facts. Descartes’ primal certainty, “I think, therefore I am,” turns out, on closer examination, to be most dubious proposition. In actual fact, is it I who does the thinking? Would it not be truer to say, “Thoughts come into existence, and sometimes I am aware of them”? Language, that treasure house of fossil observations and latent philosophy, suggests that this is in fact what happens.

Whenever I find myself thinking more than ordinarily well, I am apt to say, “An idea has occurred to me,” or “It came into my head,” or, “I see it clearly.” In each case the phrase implies that thoughts have their origin “out there,” in something analogous, on the mental level, to the external world. Total awareness confirms the hints of idiomatic speech. In relation to the subjective “I,” most of the mind is out there. My thoughts are a set of mental, but still external facts. I do not invent my best thoughts; I find them.

Total awareness, then, reveals the following facts; that I am profoundly ignorant, that I am impotent to the point of helplessness, and that the most valuable elements in my personality are unknown quantities existing “out there,” as mental objects more or less completely independent of my control. This discovery may seem at first rather humiliating and even depressing. But if I whole-heartedly accept them, the facts become a source of peace, a reason for serenity and cheerfulness.

I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied, but alive and kicking. In spite of everything, I survive, I get by, sometime I even get on. From these two sets of facts—my survival on the one hand and my ignorance and impotence on the other—I can only infer that the not-I, which looks after my body and gives me my best ideas, must be amazingly intelligent, knowledgeable, and strong.

As a self-centered ego, I do my best to interfere with the beneficent workings of this not-I. But in spite of my likes and dislikes, in spite of my malice, my infatuations, my gnawing anxieties, in spite of all my over-valuation of words, in spite of my self-stultifying insistence on living, not in present reality, but in memory and anticipation, this not-I, with whom I am associated, sustains me, preserves me, gives me a long succession of second chances.

We know very little and can achieve very little; but we are at liberty, if we so choose, to co-operate with a greater power and a completer knowledge, an unknown quantity at once immanent and transcendent, at once physical and mental, at once subjective and objective. If we co-operate, we shall be all right, even if the worst should happen. If we refuse to co-operate, we shall be all wrong, even in the most propitious of circumstances.

These conclusions are only the first fruits of total awareness. Yet richer harvests are to follow. In my ignorance I am sure that I am eternally I. This conviction is rooted in emotionally charged memory. Only when, in the words of St. John of the Cross, the memory has been emptied, can I escape from the sense of my watertight separateness and so prepare myself for the understanding, moment by moment, of reality on all its levels. But the memory cannot be emptied by an act of will, or by systematic discipline or by concentration—even by concentration on the idea of emptiness. It can be emptied only total awareness.

Thus, if I am aware of my distractions—which are mostly emotionally charged memories or fantasies based upon such memories—the mental whirligig will automatically come to a stop and the memory will be emptied, at least for a moment or two. Again, if I become totally aware of my envy, my resentment, my uncharitableness, these feelings will be replaced, during the time of my awareness, by a more realistic reaction to the events taking place around me. My awareness, of course, must be uncontaminated by approval or condemnation.

Value judgments are conditioned, verbalised reactions to primary reactions. Total awareness is a primary, choiceless, impartial response to the present situation as a whole. There are in it no limiting conditioned reactions to the primary reaction, to the pure cognitive apprehension of the situation. If memories of verbal formulas of praise or blame should make their appearance in consciousness, they are to be examined impartially as any other datum is examined.

Professional moralists have confidence in the surface will, believe in punishments and rewards, and are adrenaline addicts who like nothing better than a good orgy of righteous indignation. The masters of the spiritual life have little faith in the surface will or the utility, for their particular purposes, of rewards or punishments, and do not indulge in righteous indignation. Experience has taught them that the highest good can never, in the very nature of things, be achieved by moralising. “Judge not that ye be not judged” is their watchword and total awareness is their method.

Two or three thousand years behind the times, a few psychiatrists have now discovered this method. “Socrates,” writes Professor Carl Rogers, “developed novel ideas, which have proven to be socially constructive.”

Why? Because he was “notably non-defensive and open to experience. The reasoning behind this is based primarily upon the discovery in psychotherapy that if we can add to the sensory and visceral experiencing, characteristic of the whole animal kingdom, the gist of a free undistorted awareness, of which only the human animal seems fully capable, we have an organism which is as aware of the demands of the culture as it is of its own physiological demands for food and sex, which is just as aware of its desire for friendly relationships as it is aware of its desire to aggrandise itself; which is just as aware of its delicate and sensitive tenderness toward others as it is of its hostilities toward others. When man is less than fully man, when he denies to awareness various aspects of his experience, then indeed we have all too often reason to fear him and his behaviour, as the present world situation testifies. But when he is most fully man, when he is his complete organism, when awareness of experience, that peculiarly human attribute, is fully operating, then his behavior is to be trusted.”

Better late than never! It is comforting to find the immemorial commonplaces of mystical wisdom turning up as a brand new discovery in psychotherapy. Gnosce teipsum—know yourself. Know yourself in relation to your overt intentions and your hidden motives, in relation to your thinking, your physical functioning, and to those greater notselves, who see to it that, despite all the ego’s attempts at sabotage, the thinking shall be tolerably relevant and the functioning not too abnormal.

Be totally aware of what you do and think and of person, which whom you are in relationship, the events which prompt you at every moment of your existence. Be aware impartially, realistically, without judging, without reacting in terms of remembered words to your present cognitive reactions.

If you do this, the memory will be emptied, knowledge and pseudo-knowledge will be relegated to their proper place, and you will have understanding—in other words, you will be in direct contact with reality at every instance. Better still, you will discover what Carl Rogers calls your “delicate and sensitive tenderness towards others.” And not only your tenderness, the cosmic tenderness, the fundamental all-rightness of the universe—in spite of death, in spite of suffering.

“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” [Job13.15] This is the utterance of someone who is totally aware. And another such utterance is “God of love.” From the standpoint of common sense, the first is the raving of a lunatic, the second flies in the face of all experience and is obviously untrue. But common sense is not based on total awareness; it is a product of convention, or organised memories of other people’s words, of personal experiences limited by passion and value judgments, of hallowed notions and naked self-interest.

Total awareness opens the way to understanding, and when any given situation is understood, the nature of all reality is made manifest and the nonsensical utterances of the mystics are seen to be true, or at least as nearly true as it is possible for a verbal expression of the ineffable to be. One in all and all in One; samsara and nirvana are the same; multiplicity is unity, and unity is not so much one as not-two; all things are void, and yet all things are the Dharma-Body of the Buddha—and so on. So far as conceptual knowledge is concerned, such phrases are completely meaningless. It is only when there is understanding that they make sense.

For when there is understanding, there is an experienced fusion of the End with the Means, of the Wisdom, which is the timeless realisation of suchness, with the Compassion which is Wisdom in action. Of all the worn, smudged, dog-eared words in our vocabulary, “love” is surely the grubbiest, smelliest, slimiest. Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of millions of loudspeakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced; for, after all Love is the last word.

-Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings and Enlightenment-

#quote #love #life #meaning #existential musings #all eternal things #love in a time of...#intelligence quotients #depth perception #understanding beyond thought #essential thinking #underneath it all #more than words #eyes wide open #this is who we are #stands on its own #elisa english #elisaenglish

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marsandchariot · 4 years

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Some thoughts on the natal chart of Heaven’s Gate

William Lilly (b. 1608) popularized the natal chart as a reflection of the individual, but ancient astrology was utilized more as a lens for global (relatively speaking) events like war, agricultural cycles, weather, and the longevity or character of royal dynasties. I love looking at charts in general but I especially enjoy thinking about events’ inceptions as individual narratives that are socially metabolized. Stories jump out of event charts differently than they do from individual charts. If you are someone who considers your own birth chart or the charts of others, make sure also to explore the dates of different events in your life (books, films etc are also fun to examine in this way). Any moment you select is subject to the same archetypal cast of symbols as is an individual life.

This is a bit Aquarian in the idea that we can examine the social through a zooming out from or the collapsing of individual psychologies into macro, mythic surfaces. In keeping with Aquarian themes, I watched a bit of the new Heaven’s Gate doc last night. I wouldn’t say I’m fascinated by cults etc etc, but I can’t help responding to a birth time, and Heaven’s Gate has one! For me this is an ideal reading, where most of what I know about Heaven’s Gate is largely through osmosis. It wasn’t until after watching some of the first episode that I learned that the buildup to what we consider the culminating event was actually ~20 years in the making. I have not studied the progression of--or figures central to--the movement. Some people do their best work when they are immersed in research of a subject; I myself tend toward flash or impressionism, so I want to capture this phase before I continue watching the documentary.

RISING NEPTUNE IN SAGITTARIUS

I’m thinking of this placement less as a moment of inception (the way we might read it in the chart of an individual, as the experience of separation from the body of the parent, becoming a discrete entity) and more descriptive of the way we might encounter the cultural phenomenon of Heaven’s Gate at first glance. It may feel rooted in occultism or obscurity—Sagittarius carries notions of philosophy, education, intellectual magic; I’m thinking of The Magician card and its depiction of a single figure controlling all the elements, convening heaven and earth in their alchemical process of discovery. We often characterize movements as centering around a single idea, or a powerful persona, as with Charles Manson or Jim Jones, but there is always a larger atmosphere to examine. Neptune asks us to look beyond superficial characterizations of events in order to understand their mundanity in equal measure to their mystique. Foucault refers to all research as archaeological in that it is a type of unearthing or excavation, a making-sense of objects that may no longer exist and so deliver not direct answers but different articulations of fragmented meaning. What is important too is that Neptune may represent the illusion of origins and root causes. From Stalker (1979), “I dig for the truth, but while I do, something happens to it.” Obscurity is not dispelled, but re-oriented.

CAPRICORN MOON IN 2ND HOUSE opposite SATURN IN CANCER, 8TH HOUSE

We might think of the moon as the id or the unconscious. Liz Greene describes the difference between the sun and the moon as the difference between aspiration and unconscious emotional need—the former describes an active mode of attainment or embodiment, while the latter is a pulsing lack to which one cannot help but respond. The moon is in detriment in Capricorn, in mutual reception with Saturn, who also experiences detriment in Cancer. This opposition is uncomfortable—the emotional needs are difficult to meet. This difficulty may describe the dispositions of those drawn to the Heaven’s Gate movement; Cancer in 8th may describe one who doesn’t feel “at home”—like the Gnostic subject, who pledges allegiance to the god of an entirely different realm, and must suffer alienation in this realm as a result. The moon’s placement speaks to an unsettled sense of self, a need to strive or work toward a comfortable psychological situation. This moon does not “have enough”—not necessarily in a material sense, but they do feel dispossessed, as if their history and culture do not belong to them, or they do not belong to the history they have been given.

ARIES JUPITER IN 5TH HOUSE

The 5th house speaks to creation, production, a making manifest. What Heaven’s Gate purported to give was a way forward—a strategy, a directive. It doesn’t take particularly complex analysis to guess that for the emotionally listless or dislocated, this resolve would have been seductive. Joan Didion’s collection, The White Album (1979), describes this generation far more incisively and expertly than I will attempt to do here; instead, picture the Aries Jupiter as striding confidently forward without fear, of translating subjective experience into universal understanding, resulting in decisive action. This was not just an idea, but a way to manifest one’s presence in the world; not just about joining a collective, but about using the language of collective experience to articulate higher individual selfhood.

GEMINI MARS IN 7TH TRINE LIBRA MERCURY + PLUTO IN 11TH

With two Geminis exiting the White House next month, it feels important to acknowledge the more toxic stereotypical Gemini qualities at play in tearing the country apart for the last four years (though of course the foundation for such a conflict is deeper-rooted and further-reaching than a single presidential term, as it is unrealistic to attribute the momentum of such movements to simply a demagogue). The Trump argument for a stolen election is one element of what has been described as “mass political disinformation.” Gemini cares less about the truth, and more about how a truth is expressed; less about the effectiveness of an idea, and more about being pleased by its shape. And they won’t be pinned down, held to anything they’ve previously said, if in some later context that thing no longer serves them (if you watch enough Bob Dylan interviews you’ll see what I mean—don’t ask him about folk music, don’t ask him what he believes, don’t ask him where he’s from—if you never tell the truth, then it’s almost like you’re never really lying, you’re just saying things, creating momentum through language).

We can see this stereotype on the one hand as, yes, members of Heaven’s Gate were lied to and manipulated. Gemini’s ruler, Mercury, is a slick operator in Libra. Libra quells doubt, seals holes, soothes unease—all the dynamics involved in the appearance of equilibrium or social harmony. We can see Mercury’s conjunction with Pluto as the god of communication acting in service to the god of death. The rhetoric of Heaven’s Gate is designed to ease its members toward radical sacrifice. The 11th house speaks to communities, groups, friends—the social world, and, in this case, social organization and purpose.

The 7th house is the house of the Other, and is where we may look in an individual’s chart to read their close 1:1 relationships. It would have been important for Heaven’s Gate to discredit the friends and families of their members, to emphasize that these are the people that the members should no longer trust and confide in. The Gemini stereotype here, of manipulation and dishonesty, is projected onto the Other—a Them—to consolidate the self, an Us. Mars here makes the disconnection from loved ones particularly dramatic. Mars wants to cut, to define, to separate; it is the individuating act. It is also worth mentioning Lynn Bell’s description of Mars as the protector of the moon, of the unconscious; if the moon feels threatened, it is Mars who steps in and takes over. If an increased involvement in Heaven’s Gate results in members’ loved one’s questioning their involvement, then it is the deep-seated sense of alienation (the moon) that is heightened, ameliorated by a severing of ties (Mars). If Gemini speaks to duality or two-ness, Mars is about making that division manifest.

LEO VENUS IN 9TH

The 9th House in Hellenistic astrology represents temple work or religious duties, and so for readings of individuals alive today we typically adapt this meaning to describe academic or professional institutions, but here we can really embrace the ancient associations. This is absolutely how the institution of Heaven’s Gate represented itself—transparent, loving, and in loyal service to the good, and to the happiness of its members. The “gate” itself feels as if it refers to a 9th house structure (thinking of heaven elsewhere described as a “kingdom”), with Venus at the threshold guiding members toward an embrace of institutional values. I haven’t looked at the charts for Ti and Do, but it feels significant that they are “the Two”—a platonic pair whose relationship forms the wellspring of the movement, which feels very Venusian. We might place The Lovers card beside the card of The Devil, and see the same figures in both cards. The Lovers’ equivalent in the zodiac, of course, is Gemini.

VIRGO SUN IN 10th

If the moon is the id, the sun is the ego—the conscious experience of the self, the path that is chosen, the disposition by which the self feels most connected to worldly perception. The 10th house, “the crown you wear,” positions the ego identity of Heaven’s Gate; what it thinks it is, as a public organization that is meant to efficiently serve its members—to construct and carry out a plan. It is interesting to think of Virgo and Scorpio on either side of Libra, two weights in balance on the scale; this also describes the Persephone myth, in which Virgo descends to the realm of Scorpio and returns with divine knowledge, incurring the changing of the seasons; whose being is intricately tied to the rotation of the earth. Virgo’s responsibility, then, is to bear the fate of the world in their minute actions. Heaven’s Gate in this way positions itself as serving humanity through a practical, incremental system, which relies on everyone “doing their part.”

SCORPIO URANUS IN 12TH

To me it is difficult to find more aptly conflated synonyms for death, unless maybe you replace Uranus with Pluto. Uranian matters are dramatic, revolutionary. They speak to transformative change—as does the 12th house, as does Scorpio. This placement imbues Heaven’s Gate with such an inevitability of death, but the kind of death that is cosmically resonant in that it has the power to change how death in this context is understood. This 12th house, “the bottoming out,” feels like a reservoir that feeds into the Sagittarian Neptune, the sediment that must be continuously re-worked or rediscovered in whatever form it takes in its periods of hibernation. Neptune in Sagittarius may represent the fossilization process of Uranus in Scorpio. I may have more to say about this once I finish the documentary, but I am looking forward to watching for impressions of how “death” is constructed, or re-made as an artifact of social, extraterrestrial liberation.

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crimethinc · 5 years

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Against the Logic of the Guillotine: Why the Paris Commune Burned the Guillotine—and We Should Too

148 years ago this week, on April 6, 1871, armed participants in the revolutionary Paris Commune seized the guillotine that was stored near the prison in Paris. They brought it to the foot of the statue of Voltaire, where they smashed it into pieces and burned it in a bonfire, to the applause of an immense crowd.1 This was a popular action arising from the grassroots, not a spectacle coordinated by politicians. At the time, the Commune controlled Paris, which was still inhabited by people of all classes; the French and Prussian armies surrounded the city and were preparing to invade it in order to impose the conservative Republican government of Adolphe Thiers. In these conditions, burning the guillotine was a brave gesture repudiating the Reign of Terror and the idea that positive social change can be achieved by slaughtering people.

“What?” you say, in shock, “The Communards burned the guillotine? Why on earth would they do that? I thought the guillotine was a symbol of liberation!”

Why indeed? If the guillotine is not a symbol of liberation, then why has it become such a standard motif for the radical left over the past few years? Why is the internet replete with guillotine memes? Why does The Coup sing “We got the guillotine, you better run”? The most popular socialist periodical is named Jacobin, after the original proponents of the guillotine. Surely this can’t all be just an ironic sendup of lingering right-wing anxieties about the original French Revolution.

The guillotine has come to occupy our collective imagination. In a time when the rifts in our society are widening towards civil war, it represents uncompromising bloody revenge.

Those who take their own powerlessness for granted assume that they can promote gruesome revenge fantasies without consequences. But if we are serious about changing the world, we owe it to ourselves to make sure that our proposals are not equally gruesome.

A poster in Seattle, Washington. The quotation is from Karl Marx.

Vengeance

It’s not surprising that people want bloody revenge today. Capitalist profiteering is rapidly rendering the planet uninhabitable. US Border Patrol is kidnapping, drugging, and imprisoning children. Individual acts of racist and misogynist violence occur regularly. For many people, daily life is increasingly humiliating and disempowering.

Those who don’t desire revenge because they are not compassionate enough to be outraged about injustice or because they are simply not paying attention deserve no credit for this. There is less virtue in apathy than in the worst excesses of vengefulness.

Do I want to take revenge on the police officers who murder people with impunity, on the billionaires who cash in on exploitation and gentrification, on the bigots who harass and dox people? Yes, of course I do. They have killed people I knew; they are trying to destroy everything I love. When I think about the harm that they are causing, I feel ready to break their bones, to kill them with my bare hands.

But that desire is distinct from my politics. I can want something without having to reverse-engineer a political justification for it. I can want something and choose not to pursue it, if I want something else even more—in this case, an anarchist revolution that is not based in revenge. I don’t judge other people for wanting revenge, especially if they have been through worse than I have. But I also don’t confuse that desire with a proposal for liberation.

If the sort of bloodlust I describe scares you, or if it simply seems unseemly, then you absolutely have no business joking about other people carrying out industrialized murder on your behalf.

For this is what distinguishes the fantasy of the guillotine: it is all about efficiency and distance. Those who fetishize the guillotine don’t want to kill people with their bare hands; they aren’t prepared to rend anyone’s flesh with their teeth. They want their revenge automated and carried out for them. They are like the consumers who blithely eat Chicken McNuggets but could never personally butcher a cow or cut down a rainforest. They prefer for bloodshed to take place in an orderly manner, with all the paperwork filled out properly, according to the example set by the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks in imitation of the impersonal functioning of the capitalist state.

And one more thing: they don’t want to have to take responsibility for it. They prefer to express their fantasy ironically, retaining plausible deniability. Yet anyone who has ever participated actively in social upheaval knows how narrow the line can be between fantasy and reality. Let’s look at the “revolutionary” role the guillotine has played in the past.

“But revenge is unworthy of an anarchist! The dawn, our dawn, claims no quarrels, no crimes, no lies; it affirms life, love, knowledge; we work to hasten that day.”

-Kurt Gustav Wilckens—anarchist, pacifist, and assassin of Colonel Héctor Varela, the Argentine official who had overseen the slaughter of approximately 1500 striking workers in Patagonia.

A Very Brief History of the Guillotine

The guillotine is associated with radical politics because it was used in the original French Revolution to behead monarch Louis XVI on January 21, 1793, several months after his arrest. But once you open the Pandora’s box of exterminatory force, it’s difficult to close it again.

Having gotten started using the guillotine as an instrument of social change, Maximilien de Robespierre, sometime President of the Jacobin Club, continued employing it to consolidate power for his faction of the Republican government. As is customary for demagogues, Robespierre, Georges Danton, and other radicals availed themselves of the assistance of the sans-culottes, the angry poor, to oust the more moderate faction, the Girondists, in June 1793. (The Girondists, too, were Jacobins; if you love a Jacobin, the best thing you can do for him is to prevent his party from coming to power, since he is certain to be next up against the wall after you.) After guillotining the Girondists en masse, Robespierre set about consolidating power at the expense of Danton, the sans-culottes, and everyone else.

“The revolutionary government has nothing in common with anarchy. On the contrary, its goal is to suppress it in order to ensure and solidify the reign of law.”

-Maximilien Robespierre, distinguishing his autocratic government from the more radical grassroots movements that helped to create the French Revolution.2

By early 1794, Robespierre and his allies had sent a great number of people at least as radical as themselves to the guillotine, including Anaxagoras Chaumette and the so-called Enragés, Jacques Hébert and the so-called Hébertists, proto-feminist and abolitionist Olympe de Gouges, Camille Desmoulins (who had had the gall to suggest to his childhood friend Robespierre that “love is stronger and more lasting than fear”)—and Desmoulins’s wife, for good measure, despite her sister having been Robespierre’s fiancée. They also arranged for the guillotining of Georges Danton and Danton’s supporters, alongside various other former allies. To celebrate all this bloodletting, Robespierre organized the Festival of the Supreme Being, a mandatory public ceremony inaugurating an invented state religion.3

“Here lies all of France,” reads the inscription on the tomb behind Robespierre in this political cartoon referencing all the executions he helped arrange.

After this, it was only a month and a half before Robespierre himself was guillotined, having exterminated too many of those who might have fought beside him against the counterrevolution. This set the stage for a period of reaction that culminated with Napoleon Bonaparte seizing power and crowning himself Emperor. According to the French Republican Calendar (an innovation that did not catch on, but was briefly reintroduced during the Paris Commune), Robespierre’s execution took place during the month of Thermidor. Consequently, the name Thermidor is forever associated with the onset of the counterrevolution.

“Robespierre killed the Revolution in three blows: the execution of Hébert, the execution of Danton, the Cult of the Supreme Being… The victory of Robespierre, far from saving it, would have meant only a more profound and irreparable fall.”

-Louis-Auguste Blanqui, himself hardly an opponent of authoritarian violence.

But it is a mistake to focus on Robespierre. Robespierre himself was not a superhuman tyrant. At best, he was a zealous apparatchik who filled a role that countless revolutionaries were vying for, a role that another man would have played if he had not. The issue was systemic—the competition for centralized dictatorial power—not a matter of individual wrongdoing.

The tragedy of 1793-1795 confirms that whatever tool you use to bring about a revolution will surely be used against you. But the problem is not just the tool, it’s the logic behind it. Rather than demonizing Robespierre—or Lenin, Stalin, or Pol Pot—we have to examine the logic of the guillotine.

To a certain extent, we can understand why Robespierre and his contemporaries ended up relying on mass murder as a political tool. They were threatened by foreign invasion, internal conspiracies, and counterrevolutionary uprisings; they were making decisions in an extremely high-stress environment. But if it is possible to understand how they came to embrace the guillotine, it is impossible to argue that all the killings were necessary to secure their position. Their own executions refute that argument eloquently enough.

Likewise, it is wrong to imagine that the guillotine was employed chiefly against the ruling class, even at the height of Jacobin rule. Being consummate bureaucrats, the Jacobins kept detailed records. Between June 1793 and the end of July 1794, 16,594 people were officially sentenced to death in France, including 2639 people in Paris. Of the formal death sentences passed under the Terror, only 8 percent were doled out to aristocrats and 6 percent to members of the clergy; the rest were divided between the middle class and the poor, with the vast majority of the victims coming from the lower classes.

The execution of Robespierre and his colleagues. Robespierre is identified by the number 10; sitting in the cart, he holds a handkerchief to his mouth, having been shot in the jaw during his capture.

The story that played out in the first French revolution was not a fluke. Half a century later, the French Revolution of 1848 followed a similar trajectory. In February, a revolution led by angry poor people gave Republican politicians state power; in June, when life under the new government turned out to be little better than life under the king, the people of Paris revolted once again and the politicians ordered the army to massacre them in the name of the revolution. This set the stage for the nephew of the original Napoleon to win the presidential election of December 1848, promising to “restore order.” Three years later, having exiled all the Republican politicians, Napoleon III abolished the Republic and crowned himself Emperor—prompting Marx’s famous quip that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

Likewise, after the French revolution of 1870 put Adolphe Thiers in power, he ruthlessly butchered the Paris Commune, but this only paved the way for even more reactionary politicians to supplant him in 1873. In all three of these cases, we see how revolutionaries who are intent on wielding state power must embrace the logic of the guillotine to acquire it, and then, having brutally crushed other revolutionaries in hopes of consolidating control, are inevitably defeated by more reactionary forces.

In the 20th century, Lenin described Robespierre as a Bolshevik avant la lettre, affirming the Terror as an antecedent of the Bolshevik project. He was not the only person to draw that comparison.

“We’ll be our own Thermidor,” Bolshevik apologist Victor Serge recalls Lenin proclaiming as he prepared to butcher the rebels of Kronstadt. In other words, having crushed the anarchists and everyone else to the left of them, the Bolsheviks would survive the reaction by becoming the counterrevolution themselves. They had already reintroduced fixed hierarchies into the Red Army in order to recruit former Tsarist officers to join it; alongside their victory over the insurgents in Kronstadt, they reintroduced the free market and capitalism, albeit under state control. Eventually Stalin assumed the position once occupied by Napoleon.

So the guillotine is not an instrument of liberation. This was already clear in 1795, well over a century before the Bolsheviks initiated their own Terror, nearly two centuries before the Khmer Rouge exterminated almost a quarter of the population of Cambodia.

Why, then, has the guillotine come back into fashion as a symbol of resistance to tyranny? The answer to this will tell us something the psychology of our time.

Fetishizing the Violence of the State

It is shocking that even today, radicals would associate themselves with the Jacobins, a tendency that was reactionary by the end of 1793. But the explanation isn’t hard to work out. Then, as now, there are people who want to think of themselves as radical without having to actually make a radical break with the institutions and practices that are familiar to them. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” as Marx said.

If—to use Max Weber’s famous definition—an aspiring government qualifies as representing the state by achieving a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory, then one of the most persuasive ways it can demonstrate its sovereignty is to wield lethal force with impunity. This explains the various reports to the effect that public beheadings were observed as festive or even religious occasions during the French Revolution. Before the Revolution, beheadings were affirmations of the sacred authority of the monarch; during the Revolution, when the representatives of the Republic presided over executions, this confirmed that they held sovereignty—in the name of The People, of course. “Louis must die so that the nation may live,” Robespierre had proclaimed, seeking to sanctify the birth of bourgeois nationalism by literally baptizing it in the blood of the previous social order. Once the Republic was inaugurated on these grounds, it required continuous sacrifices to affirm its authority.

Here we see the essence of the state: it can kill, but it cannot give life. As the concentration of political legitimacy and coercive force, it can do harm, but it cannot establish the kind of positive freedom that individuals experience when they are grounded in mutually supportive communities. It cannot create the kind of solidarity that gives rise to harmony between people. What we use the state to do to others, others can use the state to do to us—as Robespierre experienced—but no one can use the coercive apparatus of the state for the cause of liberation.

For radicals, fetishizing the guillotine is just like fetishizing the state: it means celebrating an instrument of murder that will always be used chiefly against us.

Those who have been stripped of a positive relationship to their own agency often look around for a surrogate to identify with—a leader whose violence can stand in for the revenge they desire as a consequence of their own powerlessness. In the Trump era, we are all well aware of what this looks like among disenfranchised proponents of far-right politics. But there are also people who feel powerless and angry on the left, people who desire revenge, people who want to see the state that has crushed them turned against their enemies.

Reminding “tankies” of the atrocities and betrayals state socialists perpetrated from 1917 on is like calling Trump racist and sexist. Publicizing the fact that Trump is a serial sexual assaulter only made him more popular with his misogynistic base; likewise, the blood-drenched history of authoritarian party socialism can only make it more appealing to those who are chiefly motivated by the desire to identify with something powerful.

-Anarchists in the Trump Era

Now that the Soviet Union has been defunct for almost 30 years—and owing to the difficulty of receiving firsthand perspectives from the exploited Chinese working class—many people in North America experience authoritarian socialism as an entirely abstract concept, as distant from their lived experience as mass executions by guillotine. Desiring not only revenge but also a deus ex machina to rescue them from both the nightmare of capitalism and the responsibility to create an alternative to it themselves, they imagine the authoritarian state as a champion that could fight on their behalf. Recall what George Orwell said of the comfortable British Stalinist writers of the 1930s in his essay “Inside the Whale”:

“To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.”

Punishing the Guilty

“Trust visions that don’t feature buckets of blood.”

-Jenny Holzer

By and large, we tend to be more aware of the wrongs committed against us than we are of the wrongs we commit against others. We are most dangerous when we feel most wronged, because we feel most entitled to pass judgment, to be cruel. The more justified we feel, the more careful we ought to be not to replicate the patterns of the justice industry, the assumptions of the carceral state, the logic of the guillotine. Again, this does not justify inaction; it is simply to say that we must proceed most critically precisely when we feel most righteous, lest we assume the role of our oppressors.

When we see ourselves as fighting against specific human beings rather than social phenomena, it becomes more difficult to recognize the ways that we ourselves participate in those phenomena. We externalize the problem as something outside ourselves, personifying it as an enemy that can be sacrificed to symbolically cleanse ourselves. Yet what we do to the worst of us will eventually be done to the rest of us.

As a symbol of vengeance, the guillotine tempts us to imagine ourselves standing in judgment, anointed with the blood of the wicked. The Christian economics of righteousness and damnation is essential to this tableau. On the contrary, if we use it to symbolize anything, the guillotine should remind us of the danger of becoming what we hate. The best thing would be to be able to fight without hatred, out of an optimistic belief in the tremendous potential of humanity.

Often, all it takes to be able to cease to hate a person is to succeed in making it impossible for him to pose any kind of threat to you. When someone is already in your power, it is contemptible to kill him. This is the crucial moment for any revolution, the moment when the revolutionaries have the opportunity to take gratuitous revenge, to exterminate rather than simply to defeat. If they do not pass this test, their victory will be more ignominious than any failure.

The worst punishment anyone could inflict on those who govern and police us today would be to compel them to live in a society in which everything they’ve done is regarded as embarrassing—for them to have to sit in assemblies in which no one listens to them, to go on living among us without any special privileges in full awareness of the harm they have done. If we fantasize about anything, let us fantasize about making our movements so strong that we will hardly have to kill anyone to overthrow the state and abolish capitalism. This is more becoming of our dignity as partisans of liberation.

It is possible to be committed to revolutionary struggle by all means necessary without holding life cheap. It is possible to eschew the sanctimonious moralism of pacifism without thereby developing a cynical lust for blood. We need to develop the ability to wield force without ever mistaking power over others for our true objective, which is to collectively create the conditions for the freedom of all.

“That humanity might be redeemed from revenge: that is for me the bridge to the highest hope and a rainbow after lashing storms.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche (not himself a partisan of liberation, but one of the foremost theorists of the hazards of vengefulness)

Communards burning the guillotine as a “servile instrument of monarchist domination” at the foot of the statue of Voltaire in Paris on April 6, 1871.

Instead of the Guillotine

Of course, it’s pointless to appeal to the better nature of our oppressors until we have succeeded in making it impossible for them to benefit from oppressing us. The question is how to accomplish that.

Apologists for the Jacobins will protest that, under the circumstances, at least some bloodletting was necessary to advance the revolutionary cause. Practically all of the revolutionary massacres in history have been justified on the grounds of necessity—that’s how people always justify massacres. Even if some bloodletting were necessary, that it is still no excuse to cultivate bloodlust and entitlement as revolutionary values. If we wish to wield coercive force responsibly when there is no other choice, we should cultivate a distaste for it.

Have mass killings ever helped us advance our cause? Certainly, reactionaries throughout history have disingenuously held revolutionaries to a double standard, forgiving the state for murdering civilians by the million while taking insurgents to task for so much as breaking a window. But as we seek transformation rather than conquest, we should appraise our victories according to a different logic than the police and militaries we confront.

This is not an argument against the use of force. Rather, it is a question about how to employ it without creating new hierarchies, new forms of systematic oppression.

A taxonomy of revolutionary violence.

The image of the guillotine is propaganda for the kind of authoritarian organization that can avail itself of that particular tool. Every tool implies the forms of social organization that are necessary to employ it. In his memoir, Bash the Rich, Class War veteran Ian Bone quotes Angry Brigade member John Barker to the effect that “petrol bombs are far more democratic than dynamite,” suggesting that we should analyze every tool of resistance in terms of how it structures power. Critiquing the armed struggle model adopted by hierarchical authoritarian groups in Italy in the 1970s, Alfredo Bonanno and other insurrectionists emphasized that liberation could only be achieved via horizontal, decentralized, and participatory methods of resistance.

“It is impossible to make the revolution with the guillotine alone. Revenge is the antechamber of power. Anyone who wants to avenge themselves requires a leader. A leader to take them to victory and restore wounded justice.”

-Alfredo Bonanno, Armed Joy

Together, a rioting crowd can defend an autonomous zone or exert pressure on authorities without need of hierarchical centralized leadership. Where this becomes impossible—when society has broken up into two distinct sides that are fully prepared to slaughter each other via military means—one may no longer speak of revolution, but only of war. The premise of revolution is that subversion can spread across the lines of enmity, destabilizing fixed positions, undermining the allegiances and assumptions that underpin authority. We should never hurry to make the transition from revolutionary ferment to warfare. Doing so usually forecloses possibilities rather than expanding them.

As a tool, the guillotine takes for granted that it is impossible to transform one’s relations with the enemy, only to abolish them. What’s more, the guillotine assumes that the victim is already completely within the power of the people who employ it. By contrast with the feats of collective courage we have seen people achieve against tremendous odds in popular uprisings, the guillotine is a weapon for cowards.

By refusing to slaughter our enemies wholesale, we hold open the possibility that they might one day join us in our project of transforming the world. Self-defense is necessary, but wherever we can, we should take the risk of leaving our adversaries alive. Not doing so guarantees that we will be no better than the worst of them. From a military perspective, this is a handicap; but if we truly aspire to revolution, it is the only way.

Liberate, not Exterminate

“To give hope to the many oppressed and fear to the few oppressors, that is our business; if we do the first and give hope to the many, the few must be frightened by their hope. Otherwise, we do not want to frighten them; it is not revenge we want for poor people, but happiness; indeed, what revenge can be taken for all the thousands of years of the sufferings of the poor?”

-William Morris, “How We Live and How We Might Live”

So we repudiate the logic of the guillotine. We don’t want to exterminate our enemies. We don’t think the way to create harmony is to subtract everyone who does not share our ideology from the world. Our vision is a world in which many worlds fit, as Subcomandante Marcos put it—a world in which the only thing that is impossible is to dominate and oppress.

Anarchism is a proposal for everyone regarding how we might go about improving our lives—workers and unemployed people, people of all ethnicities and genders and nationalities or lack thereof, paupers and billionaires alike. The anarchist proposal is not in the interests of one currently existing group against another: it is not a way to enrich the poor at the expense of the rich, or to empower one ethnicity, nationality, or religion at others’ expense. That entire way of thinking is part of what we are trying to escape. All of the “interests” that supposedly characterize different categories of people are products of the prevailing order and must be transformed along with it, not preserved or pandered to.

From our perspective, even the topmost positions of wealth and power that are available in the existing order are worthless. Nothing that capitalism and the state have to offer are of any value to us. We propose anarchist revolution on the grounds that it could finally fulfill longings that the prevailing social order will never satisfy: the desire to be able to provide for oneself and one’s loved ones without doing so at anyone else’s expense, the wish to be valued for one’s creativity and character rather than for how much profit one can generate, the longing to structure one’s life around what is profoundly joyous rather than according to the imperatives of competition.

We propose that everyone now living could get along—if not well, then at least better—if we were not forced to compete for power and resources in the zero-sum games of politics and economics.

Leave it to anti-Semites and other bigots to describe the enemy as a type of people, to personify everything they fear as the Other. Our adversary is not a kind of human being, but the form of social relations that imposes antagonism between people as the fundamental model for politics and economics. Abolishing the ruling class does not mean guillotining everyone who currently owns a yacht or penthouse; it means making it impossible for anyone to systematically wield coercive power over anyone else. As soon as that is impossible, no yacht or penthouse will sit empty long.

As for our immediate adversaries—the specific human beings who are determined to maintain the prevailing order at all costs—we aspire to fight against them without seeking to exterminate them. However selfish and rapacious they appear, at least some of their values are similar to ours, and most of their errors—like our own—arise from their fears and weaknesses. In many cases, they oppose our proposals precisely because of what is internally inconsistent in them—for example, the idea of bringing about the fellowship of humanity by means of violent coercion. Were it not for the genuinely egregious things that have been done in the name of liberation, our enemies would have much weaker arguments against it.

Even when we are engaged in pitched physical struggles with our adversaries, we ought to maintain a profound faith in their potential, for we hope to live in different relations with them one day. As aspiring revolutionaries, this hope is our most precious resource, the foundation of everything we do. If revolutionary transformation is to spread throughout society and across the world, those we fight today will have to be fighting alongside us tomorrow. We do not preach conversion by the sword, nor do we imagine that we will persuade our adversaries in some abstract marketplace of ideas; rather, we aim to interrupt the ways that capitalism and the state currently reproduce themselves while demonstrating the virtues of our alternative inclusively and contagiously. There are no shortcuts when it comes to revolution.

Precisely because it is sometimes necessary to employ force in our conflicts with those who preserve the prevailing order, it is especially important that we never lose sight of our aspirations, our compassion, and our optimism. When we are compelled to use coercive force in the struggle, the only possible justification for doing so is that it is a necessary step towards creating a better world for everyone—including our enemies, or at least their children. Otherwise, we risk becoming the next ones to operate the guillotine.

“The only real revenge we could possibly have would be by our own efforts to bring ourselves to happiness.”

-William Morris, in response to calls for revenge for police attacks on demonstrations in Trafalgar Square

Voltaire applauding the burning the guillotine during the Paris Commune.

Appendix: The Beheaded

The guillotine did not end its career with the conclusion of the first French Revolution, nor when it was burned during the Paris Commune. In fact, it was used in France as a means for the state to carry out capital punishment right up to 1977. One of the last women guillotined in France was executed for providing abortions. The Nazis guillotined about 16,500 people between 1933 and 1945—the same number of people killed during the peak of the Terror in France.

A few victims of the guillotine:

Ravachol (born François Claudius Koenigstein), anarchist

Auguste Vaillant, anarchist

Emile Henry, anarchist

Sante Geronimo Caserio, anarchist

Raymond Caillemin, Étienne Monier and André Soudy, all anarchist participants in the so-called Bonnot Gang

Mécislas Charrier, anarchist

Felice Orsini, who attempted to assassinate Napoleon III

Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst—members of Die Weisse Rose, an underground anti-Nazi youth organization active in Munich 1942-1943.

Emile Henry.

Sante Geronimo Caserio.

André Soudy, Edouard Carouy, Octave Garnier, Etienne Monier.

Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst.

“I am an anarchist. We have been hanged in Chicago, electrocuted in New York, guillotined in Paris and strangled in Italy, and I will go with my comrades. I am opposed to your Government and to your authority. Down with them. Do your worst. Long live Anarchy.”

-Chummy Fleming

Further Reading

The Guillotine At Work, GP Maximoff

As reported in the official journal of the Paris Commune:

“On Thursday, at nine o’clock in the morning, the 137th battalion, belonging to the eleventh arrondissement, went to Rue Folie-Mericourt; they requisitioned and took the guillotine, broke the hideous machine into pieces, and burned it to the applause of an immense crowd.

“They burned it at the foot of the statue of the defender of Sirven and Calas, the apostle of humanity, the precursor of the French Revolution, at the foot of the statue of Voltaire.”

This had been announced earlier in the following proclamation:

“Citizens,

“We have been informed of the construction of a new type of guillotine that was commissioned by the odious government [i.e., the conservative Republican government under Adolphe Thiers]—one that it is easier to transport and speedier. The Sub-Committee of the 11th Arrondissement has ordered the seizure of these servile instruments of monarchist domination and has voted that they be destroyed once and forever. They will therefore be burned at 10 o’clock on April 6, 1871, on the Place de la Mairies, for the purification of the Arrondissement and the consecration of our new freedom.” ↩

As we have argued elsewhere, fetishizing “the rule of law” often serves to legitimize atrocities that would otherwise be perceived as ghastly and unjust. History shows again and again how centralized government can perpetrate violence on a much greater scale than anything that arises in “unorganized chaos.” ↩

Nauseatingly, at least one contributor to Jacobin magazine has even attempted to rehabilitate this precursor to the worst excesses of Stalinism, pretending that a state-mandated religion could be preferable to authoritarian atheism. The alternative to both authoritarian religions and authoritarian ideologies that promote Islamophobia and the like is not for an authoritarian state to impose a religion of its own, but to build grassroots solidarity across political and religious lines in defense of freedom of conscience. ↩

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bambamramfan · 6 years

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The Ideology of Climate Justice

In the news because of the #GreenNewDeal and various right-wing attempts to bait its proponents (do they notice that by paying so much attention to an absurd GND while ignoring many more technocratic proposals, they fulfill the exact raison d’etre of this platform: at least you’re talking about it?) But it’s really an evergreen topic.

Any student of ideology should be very concerned about the way climate change is talked about among the progressive set. While most policy matters on the left really are talked about in material terms and how much benefit people will immediately reap (which contrasts positively against both Republican policy proposals and progressive *cultural* discourse), climate change is an arena where discussions tend far more towards the uncertain and symbolic than the concrete. And that should be a concern.

For this discussion, assume I already believe everything quote unquote “all environmental scientists believe” (as if there isn’t plenty of disagreement even when they are to the left of current policy.) Human causes are changing the atmospheric makeup enough that over the next century the temperature will rise by 2 degrees C or more, which will have massive changes in local ecosystems, and devastate coastal cities. One can agree with this, but also think progressive discourse around climate change is terrible.

The problem is that even with this empirical backing, climate change concerns can become like other causes motivated by distant future threats - extremely ideological and symbolic. If you think about movements defined around “okay if you keep doing this thing now you won’t notice anything bad, but generations from now it will lead to collapse so we need to crackdown now”... they are often pretty reactionary. Homosexuality, immigration, atheism or religious tolerance are all things that demagogues have warned “will eventually destroy society, you just can’t see it yet.” Because you can’t see if you’re having any beneficial effects or not, the “cause” easily becomes entirely symbolic and immaterial, dominated by status games among its leaders to see who can be the most pure/extreme/politically savvy.

You see this most with changing environmental issues to “climate justice” and other methods of making it part of the overall social justice alliance toolkit. It becomes one more way to beat down the “greed” of corporations, aligned with a dozen other causes, rather than about “does it have a proposed policy measure that will change material conditions of the world?”

(There’s nothing wrong with opposing corporations of course, but emphasis on the greed of the Other is pathological and generally prevents you from contemplating structural reform, and instead focuses on replacing “bad” actors with “good” ones and hoping it produces change. It will not.)

It helps to split our discussion into moderate measures, and radical measures, meant to address climate change. Moderate measures are those already implemented by many developed nations, and include carbon taxes, credits into research of renewables, etc. Radical measures are ones that would have a large impact on the economy and dramatically reduce greenhouse related outputs immediately.

--In terms of radical measures, we should be honest that no government is contemplating them (certainly the GND is not on a sufficient scale). One should not blame democracy - historically authoritarian governments are even *worse* on environmental matters than bourgeoisie republics, if only because they tend to reap the full gains of exploiting the environment. (Do not forget how often environmental preservation was considered a bourgeoisie cause, valuing pretty parks over the defense of the state and feeding the masses.)

We should also be honest that’s probably what is necessary. Scientific estimates of greater than 2C temperature rise usually come with “based almost entirely off of what we have already set in motion.” Very few researchers believe that we can just stop the train now. If the Earth is to be doomed, we have already doomed it. But activists do not promote that message, because it leads to defeatism and nihilism. Which may be true from a political perspective, but that means everything you hear downstream of that is motivated by politics, not truth. The truth is nihilist despair: the world might end or at least displace billions in the next century, and it’s too late to stop it.

--That being said, moderate measures are still possible, to reduce what damage we can, and reducing harm remains our moral obligation.

The next lament of the modern tumblr anti-capitalist becomes that capitalist is incompatible with any attempt to reign in pollution, because it is too short sighted and greedy. So it’s important to remember how untrue this is. Most capitalist nations have happily passed laws regulating greenhouse emissions - in fact in most of those nations the conservative party supports at least some version of them. In fact if capitalism was not so adaptable to so many different circumstances, it would not be nearly so damaging an ideology - it lurches from crisis to crisis where theocracy or dictatorship would fail, never fully failing nor fully fixing its problems.

It’s really only America that is the standout, with the dreadful combination of: a right wing party that has gone all in on denialism, and a veto-heavy system that has prevented moderate measures from being passed even when the left-wing party was in control. Which is terrible and has led to dysfunctional policy. But then the lesson has changed to “America has a broken system of checks and balances” and not “capitalist democracies are inherently unable to confront global warming.”

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topfygad · 5 years

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Bloomberg surrogate was PR expert for Brazil’s excessive-appropriate leader Bolsonaro

Former Michael Bloomberg aide Arick Wierson, who’s pushing the billionaire’s 2020 presidential advertising and marketing marketing campaign and attacking Bernie Sanders, helped elect considerably-suitable demagogue Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

By Ben Norton.

A Michael Bloomberg surrogate pumping up the billionaire’s 2020 advertising and marketing marketing campaign for president additionally helped to elect Brazil’s excessive-suitable chief, Jair Bolsonaro, an open up supporter of armed forces dictatorship who normally threatens violence in opposition to his political opponents.

Arick Wierson is a group relations strategist who served as a political aide and the prime communications adviser to Bloomberg when the Republican media mogul was mayor of New York Metropolis.

Wierson labored with Bloomberg for nearly 9 a number of years, he famous, “first as an aide in his 2001 political advertising and marketing marketing campaign, and in a while as his predominant media advisor at Metropolis Corridor.” Wierson is so close to with the billionaire he sarcastically refers to himself in his Twitter profile as a “Former Media Hack for Mayor Bloomberg.”

Adviser Arick Wierson (appropriate) with Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2006

In 2018, Wierson joined Bolsonaro’s presidential marketing campaign, devoting himself to softening the image of the Brazilian demagogue who pledged to imprison or exile leftist rivals and talked about in a newspaper job interview {that a} congresswoman was not “value raping she is kind of ugly.”

Contemplating the truth that coming to capability with the assistance of Bloomberg’s earlier predominant media adviser, Bolsonaro has waged a complete frontal assault on Brazil’s political course of. He has signaled his severe agenda by overtly praising Chile’s murderous dictator Augusto Pinochet and taunting the United Nations human rights chief over her father’s torture on the arms of his navy companies junta.

A critic on Twitter requested Wierson, “how troublesome is it so that you can slumber at night time being conscious of you took funds to make a fascist like Bolsonaro extra ‘likeable’ on a scale of ‘each night time time i stare right into a terrifying void of my have constructing unable to relaxation’ to ‘i’ve no soul and slumber like a child?’”

The Bloomberg surrogate replied succinctly, “I snooze simply improbable. thanks for inquiring.”

Arick Wierson advertising and marketing Michael Bloomberg on CNN

Though Wierson no for an extended interval seems to have an formal scenario within the Bloomberg marketing campaign, he’s aggressively promoting and advertising and marketing him and has turn into a preferred advocate for the billionaire applicant in firm media.

In his media appearances and on his social media accounts, Wierson has vigorously attacked self-explained socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, essentially the most well-liked presidential applicant within the Democratic predominant.

On every Twitter and Fb, Wierson posts nonstop pro-Bloomberg propaganda. He overtly fantasizes a few brokered conference, wherein the DNC palms the nomination to the oligarch. A banner on his Fb profile reads, “I’m with Mike Bloomberg 2020.”

Wierson has uncovered a trusted system to defend Bloomberg’s candidacy on firm cable information media. On February 14, he revealed an op-ed for CNN selling Bloomberg as “the appropriate regular bearer for the event in 2020, symbolizing Democrats’ biggest likelihood for getting once more the White Dwelling from Trump.”

4 instances in a while, Wierson was invited on CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin, wherever he proclaimed that “Michael Bloomberg represents the Democratic Get together’s biggest chance to amass on Donald Trump in 2020.”

Wierson portrayed the Democratic predominant as a wrestle in between the billionaire and the self-declared democratic socialist. “So far as I’m nervous, it’s a two-person race: it’s Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg,” he reported.

CNN interview with earlier Michael Bloomberg predominant media adviser Arick Wierson, who additionally did PR for Jair Bolsonaro

Arick Wierson doing PR for Jair Bolsonaro’s marketing campaign

In his CNN appearances, Arick Wierson really helpful the billionaire to keep away from the presidential debates, given that “Bloomberg just isn’t significantly a heat and fuzzy man,” he conceded, and “the possibilities of him coming off as dry, missing empathy, and to a point mechanical loom large.”

This ideas echoes related counsel Wierson gave to Jair Bolsonaro all through his presidential advertising and marketing marketing campaign. The earlier Bloomberg adviser productively sure the significantly-right Brazilian chief to skip the last word debate.

Wierson’s place on the Bolsonaro advertising and marketing marketing campaign was trumpeted by Bloomberg Media, the billionaire candidate’s explicit media empire. In an Oct 2018 puff piece titled “Bolsonaro’s Message on Like and Peace Examined in Brazil Media,” Bloomberg.com credited Wierson with serving to to melt the demagogue’s persona with a heartwarming advert about loving one explicit a unique and combating despise.

Wierson tweeted out a backlink to the publish on the time, noting that he and his colleagues on the “@jairbolsonaro advertising and marketing marketing campaign can be screening some novel tv procedures about upcoming three weeks.”

Wierson heaped reward on the significantly-right presidential candidate, creating on social media that Bolsonaro “is prone to make clear an entire lot within the Manifesto. Brazil will have the ability to snooze in peace.” He even complained that Brazilian journalists had been managing Bolsonaro unfairly— while the much-right president has gone on to threaten media shops that uncovered his soiled secrets and techniques, notably his inbound hyperlinks to the assassination of socialist feminist activist Marielle Franco.

Michael Bloomberg with Jair Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister Sergio Moro on the Brazilian American Chamber of Commerce’s 2018 gala

Michael Bloomberg rubs elbows with Bolsonaro allies as his media empire defends the demagogue

Michael Bloomberg himself has rubbed elbows with Bolsonaro henchmen like Sergio Moro, a mastermind of the political coup in the direction of Brazil’s left-wing Employees’ Get together authorities and the jailing of its chief.

In 2018, the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce held an opulent gala meal at which the potent foyer group gave its greatest award to the 2 Moro and Bloomberg.

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As a senior determine with complete ties to the US authorities, Moro oversaw a Washington-backed meant “anti-corruption” operation, considered Lava Jato, which was employed to orchestrate a easy coup in the direction of Brazil’s democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff after which imprison Lula da Silva, by far the preferred candidate in Brazil’s 2018 presidential election.

Following conspiring with Bolsonaro allies to ship the considerably-suitable demagogue to power, Moro was rewarded with a advertising and marketing to justice minister. Bolsonaro and Moro immediately proceeded to take a look at CIA headquarters.

In 2019, the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce honored Bolsonaro, selling nearly each a single of the $30,000-for every-desk tickets to its gala. Bolsonaro completed up not attending, even so, simply after LGBTQ activists pressured company sponsors to withdraw their steering, citing the extremist Brazilian chief’s raging homophobia. (When a journalist requested Bolsonaro about investigations into his son’s alleged corruption in December, the considerably-appropriate president lashed out: “You have got a really gay encounter,” he barked on the reporter.)

The hyperlinks between the Bloomberg camp and Bolsonaro’s allies additionally replicate the job the billionaire’s particular person media community has performed in shaping the 2 leaders’ footage.

When leaked recordings uncovered how Moro blatantly politicized Lava Jato with the explicit intention to oust the Employees’ Get collectively authorities, Bloomberg’s info firm printed columns defending the meant “anti-corruption” operation.

Bloomberg Businessweek additionally honored Moro in 2016 by dubbing him selection 10 in its guidelines of the 50 most influential of us of the calendar yr.

A number of Bloomberg columnists sang the praises of Bolsonaro, celebrating him because the “pro-company prospect.” Amid them was Admiral James Stavridis, a earlier commander of NATO and Bloomberg columnist, who proclaimed that the rise of “Brazil’s Bolsonaro Completes a U.S. Sweep of South The usa.”

The caption on the showcased image did absent with any pretense of subtlety: “Yankee happen once more.”

Arick Wierson writes op-ed endorsing Bolsonaro with out disclosing adviser operate

Arick Wierson has charted an unorthodox vocation route. By means of Bolsonaro’s presidential marketing campaign, he normally appeared in Brazilian media shops, talking Portuguese, wherever he was decided because the “political strategist of Michael Bloomberg.” He has even supplied interviews in Portuguese to Angolan state tv.

Wierson writes regular columns for fairly just a few web sites, equivalent to Observer, the publication previously considered The New York Observer, which was run by Jared Kushner proper up till his father-in-legislation Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, at which difficulty Kushner closed down the print newspaper and transferred possession to his members of the family to imagine obligations as a White Dwelling senior adviser.

Lots of of Wierson’s Observer columns seem like sponsored articles for corporations equivalent to Good Clips, At any time Train, Sezzle, and Revel.

Wierson’s political punditry reads like an extension of his consulting carry out. In an publish in Observer in Oct 2018, on the eve of Brazil’s election, Wierson downplayed Bolsonaro’s similarities to Trump.

“Regardless of fairly just a few makes an attempt by the media to label Trump and Bolsonaro as twins divided at starting, the 2 guys are as completely different as they’re equal,” Wierson wrote. He portrayed the Brazilian demagogue as a hard-operating navy veteran from a modest {qualifications}.

Nonetheless left undisclosed was Wierson’s get the job executed as a greatest adviser to Bolsonaro.

The one battle of curiosity uncovered within the brief article arrived on the conclusion, with the next take word: “Full Disclosure: Arick Wierson is a minority shareholder in a Brazilian political consultancy, TZU, quoted on this publish.”

In different textual content, Wierson quoted an organization he partially owns to bolster his have argument.

The specialist closed by predicting “a brand new ‘golden age’ of U.S – Brazilian relations, which I contemplate won’t solely help Brazil’s economic system get again on hold observe of, however strengthen our mutual stability concerns.”

To forge that unshakeable bond with the junta-delighted Brazilian chief, Wierson plainly sees his different former supervisor, Bloomberg, as the perfect applicant.

This brief article at first appeared at Grayzone, and is republished with authorization.

When you value the operate Brasil Wire does, please help maintain us operating with a donation. Our editorial independence depends upon our guests assist.

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charlesbrianorner-blog · 5 years

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Heterodox America

I WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND the mysterious mechanics of the universe—not like an Albert Einstein, or a Richard Feynman, or a Steven Hawking, or a Neils Bohr. I cannot see the world through the eyes of Leonardo or Michelangelo or Pollock or O’Keefe. I lack the business acumen of Jobs; the global vision of Musk; the profound mysticism of Gurdjieff. I am an ordinary man, possessed of ordinary attributes, and in the failure to reach the high places, I am, like most of us, entirely innocent.

No one expects to become Hemingway or the Pope, but each of us labors to learn and grow beyond our clumsy childhood in the sheer pursuit of survival—to become the best version of ourselves that we can be, in the hopes of living a comfortable and satisfying life. This is also entirely ordinary, and entirely innocent.

Ten seconds’ reflection reveals that there is more to this life than comfort and satisfaction, however, and those among us with higher natures in embryo pursue the perfection not only of themselves, but also of the wider world in which they live. These include the luminaries above, certainly, but also scientists and social workers; physicians and philosophers, artists and architects, journalists and the judiciary. Educators. Monks. Anyone at all who understands that the world is capricious, nothing in life is certain, and we all do better when we throw in together. Anyone who values the life of the mind, the beauty of the natural world, and the abiding wish to unburden the downtrodden. Anyone, finally, who understands that the betterment of society begins with the betterment of oneself in service to the noble attributes: honor, integrity, intelligence, and being.

Many of us understand this at some level. We are imperfect, to be sure, but we aspire to nobility, and we work in whatever way we can for a moment of kindness, or justice, or insight, or grace. The school of hard knocks is hard, yes, but it is nevertheless a school, and within its walls, people of good will are constrained to learn and improve—not only for the acquisition of their creature comforts, but for the betterment of society. Such people venerate selflessness beyond success, and compassion beyond quid pro quo. They own the mistakes that they make, and work like hell to avoid repeating them. They revere virtue, and revile cowardice. They pursue sincerity and detest hypocrisy. They respect truth and excoriate mendacity. They witness. They dream.

I used to believe that this described the essential human condition. I used to believe that many of us was in fact most of us—yea, that any of us was in fact all of us. I believe this no longer.

Today I live in a world in which the preponderant political faction of society is characterized by none of these attributes. These fine citizens have dispensed with the essence of the American experiment—compassion, inclusion, generosity, and fairness—in service to elevating one of the world’s most despicable human beings to the Presidency of the United States. I live in a world in which the aggregate power of the political class is now devoting itself to crippling the institutions that we ordinary folk have by generations labored to build and to better. These fine, fine citizens believe that education is effete, the rule of law is transactional, and the social safety net is suspect. Business is boffo, Science is sorcery, religion is Rorschach, and liberalism is libel. In fact they believe any old thing at all, no matter how preposterous, so long as it was jawboned by an obscenely wealthy white bigot with shiny teeth and shiny hair and a Brobdingnagian bully pulpit.

These fine citizens are citizens, yes, but they are only fine after the fashion of volcanic sand, or livestock manure, or the aromatic waft of a cheese factory. You can find them crooning in lemming uniformity at the guttural twaddle emanating from any one of the Cow Palace shit shows known throughout the Republic as a Trump rally. This is the circus as Colosseum; verbal violence and boorish boosterism replete with really good lines—short at the door, long at the latrine, and crossed at the cusp of common decency.

Expect profound rejoinders like “Goddam right!” and “Fuckin’ A!” and whatever the neofascist form of “Sieg Heil!” might be. The latest schoolyard swipe is “AOC Sucks!”—a devastatingly clever double entendre from people whose goose-step soliloquies ordinarily extend all the way to three words, from “Lock her up!” to “Build that wall! to the lyrics of some Kid Rock drivel, which may or may not actually have three words. Within these hollowed halls, policy is for pussies. What sells is sloganeering.

Note the tribal conformity in headwear and hoodwear and Silver-Shirted signage, but do not make the mistake of inquiring as to when, precisely, it is thought that America was great.(1) Oh no. That road can only end in tears. Note the popularity of histrionic gestures—middle fingers and O-KKK!s and the odd skinhead with his thumb up his ass—plus the ever-impressive Bellamy salute, courtesy of the hatless, hairless, brainless homunculi of Proud Boy pedigree.(2)

This is Heterodox America—angry and arrogant; entitled and abusive; full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing beyond the Dunning–Kruger Effect.(3)

Ten seconds’ endurance reveals that these are not ordinary men and women, possessed of ordinary American attributes. These are people not of the high places, and they are nothing like innocent. Einstein, Feynman, Hawking, Bohr—such inquisitive minds flee in confusion and horror. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Pollock, O’Keefe—mere also-rans in the company of Julian Raven and Jason Heuser.(4) (5)

Really, who can compete with a painting of an uzi-wielding Ronald Reagan astride a flag-waving velociraptor? Please. Jackson Pollock is just a putz. And the noble attributes? Open-carry that liberal bullshit back out the Palace orifice, pal—we have mantras to memorize.

The central message of every Trump rally is bald-faced cruelty. They exist to denigrate and debase; to fictionalize and fool; to inflame and incite. Trump pontificates and poisons, accuses and aggrandizes, and trades in the currency of fear, completing perhaps one sentence in five. He knows nothing, says nothing, lies with abandon, and his rancid mob howls. It’s ad hominem as ad lib; pusillanimous pogrom as political theater; mental illness as Mein Kampf.

It was not so long ago that Hillary was not crooked, Comey was not shady, and AOC did not suck. Pocahontas was an historical figure, Adam Shiff had an ordinary neck, and Rocket Man was the anthem of a generation. It was not so long ago I that believed in the essential goodness of the American character—that we all strive for perfection, and we all do better when we throw in together. But I have witnessed the depravity of Trump’s base, and it is base, indeed—slavish to suggestibility, inured to actual fact, and entirely absent the American values that once made this country great. These fine folk have dispensed with their innocence in favor of bigoted bread and circuses, and they belong nowhere near the magnificent, imperfect pantheon of the American experiment.

Time will eventually consign theses fine citizens and their Dear Leader to the trash heap of history, therein to molder with the likes of Benjamin Tillman, and Eugene McCarthy, and Huey Long, and every other tin-horn demagogue who has ever soiled the national stage. When that time comes, Donald Trump’s mindless minions will know only shunning and shame, while the rest of America resumes its reach for the high places. Till then, we will wait, we will worry, and we will weep.

- CBO

_______________________

(1) The Silver Legion of America, commonly known as the Silver Shirts, was an underground American fascist organization founded by William Dudley Pelley that was headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina. A white-supremacist, antisemitic group modeled after Hitler's Brownshirts, the paramilitary Silver Legion wore a silver shirt with a blue tie, along with a campaign hat and blue corduroy trousers with leggings. The uniform shirts bore a scarlet letter L over the heart: an emblem meant to symbolize Loyalty to the United States, Liberation from materialism, and the Silver Legion itself.

(2) The Bellamy salute is a palm-out salute described by Francis Bellamy, the author of the American Pledge of Allegiance, as the gesture which was to accompany the pledge. During the period when it was used with the Pledge of Allegiance, it was sometimes known as the "flag salute.” Both the Pledge and its salute originated in 1892. Later, during the 1920s and 1930s, Italian fascists and Nazis adopted a salute which was very similar, and which was derived from the Roman salute, a gesture that was popularly (albeit erroneously) believed to have been used in ancient Rome. This resulted in controversy over the use of the Bellamy salute in the United States. It was officially replaced by the hand-over-heart salute when Congress amended the Flag Code on December 22, 1942.

(3) In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.

(4) For more than two years, Julien Raven tried to convince the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery to display his 300-pound painting of Trump, with no success. Now, after failing to win his case in D.C.’s U.S. District Court, he’s threatening to take the matter to the top of the judicial system in order to get his painting placed. Raven and his huge, eight-foot tall, 16-foot wide painting of Trump, “Unafraid & Unashamed,” was the aesthetic highpoint of last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, after he displayed it at the annual conservative confab. The painting is a portrait of Trump’s head posed next to a falling American flag that’s being rescued by a bald eagle while flying in space.

(5) San Francisco-based artist Jason Heuser, who sells his work on Etsy under the name Sharpwriter, was recently honored by Representative Mike Lee, who displayed Heuser’s image of former President Ronald Reagan shooting a machine gun atop a Velociraptor holding a torn American flag in chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives.

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stephenjaymorrisblog · 6 years

Photo

The Irony of Coincidence

By Stephen Jay Morris

Friday, May 4, 2018

One Conservative, boasting about his ratings on his terrestrial radio show, is equivalent to the Captain of the Titanic, bragging about his ship. That radio your grandparents listened to was once the center of the American entertainment world. There was a time when psychologists and social-critics worried that Americans were spending more time listening to the radio than reading books!

I wrote many pieces about this subject, the radio. 1987, The Fairness Doctrine was repealed. That meant you didn’t have to give equal time on your radio show to political opponents. As a result, Rush Limbaugh was born and an excrescence of clones emerged.

Thanks to Howard Stern’s influence, Conservative radio used shock radio techniques, like name calling and crassness, to attack Liberals and anybody on the Left wing, political spectrum. What was really contradictory was their use of Rock & Roll as bumper music. Historically, Conservatives detested “that jungle music.” People like Michael Savage sounded like one of those “professional wrestlers” on television. It was so gimmick driven.

Critics labeled it, “Hate Radio.” Oh, the Right wing talk jocks despised that label. However, the angry white guy ingurgitated it like it was apple pie. I’ve got to admit that this format was successful for a couple of decades.

So, what killed Right wing radio? Was it the liberal news media? Fake News? Was it a conspiracy from George Soros and the globalists? No! It was technology! It was the Millennials! Who wants to listen to some Narcissists talk about themselves and brag about the USA? The radio is not interactive; you hear it, but it doesn’t hear you! Oh, you can call into the station, but lots of luck on getting on the air! Some people with low self-esteem like to be lectured to. However, normal people hate being treated like some stupid dolt! Terrestrial radio is becoming so obsolete, that car manufacturers don’t even install it as a standard feature unless you request it. I think I wrote that factoid in another article of mine. Whatever..

Now lets go back in time, to the 1930s, to the first Hate-Radio broadcaster. Only in America could this have occurred…it was a Catholic Priest! Not some WASP plumber from the south, but a Catholic Priest! Father Charles Edward Coughlin, originally from Canada, became an American citizen and the priest of a church located in Royal, Michigan. The church’s name was “Shrine of the Little Flower.” It is a beautiful name for a lovely church. It is actually now considered an architectural landmark! Father Coughlin, like most characters on the political Right, was a man of a million contradictions. He started as a Lefty, then took a swan drive to the ultra Right! Most Right wing apostates have an ulterior motive in making that move: the usual M.E.P.: Money…Ego…Power!

He would broadcast from his church and 30 million people would listen. This was the 1930’s, and the American people were broke and scared. They wanted answers to why they were so miserable! Father Coughlin gave them answers, but the wrong ones. He was a demagogue on the airwaves who appealed to gullible, White Catholics.

The Vatican didn’t think too much about Father Coughlin. In fact, he was an embarrassment to the Church. True, the Roman Catholic Church was conservative on moral issues, but they were liberal on politics. But, Father Coughlin went on an Anti-Semitic crusade while attacking other minorities, as well. He evoked the usual Anti-Semitic clichés: like the Jews ran the banks and the Jews ran the media. He claimed that most Jews were either Communists or successful businessmen. There was a conspiracy angle to his rhetoric, wherein he spewed that Jews were involved in political conspiracies in the U.S., with the objective to corrupt the country. It wouldn’t be long before conspiracy groups emerged, such as the John Birch Society of the late 50s, espousing conspiracy theories about the political Left. This is why we now have an Alex Jones on the air.

So, why am I talking about a virulent, Anti-Semite like Father Coughlin? I seem to have a lot of coincidences in my life, and this is one of particular note. Could it be metaphysical or coincidental? Could it be Subjective or Objective reality? One of the biggest days of my life was producing the “Rock Against Racism” free concert at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, California, on October 27, 1979. The idea was about musicians taking a stand against racism. One of the biggest racists in history died on that very day: Father Coughlin. If it was not spiritual, then it was highly symbolic! Ironically, I only learned that fact a week ago. Learning that completely vindicated me from the assumption that I had wasted my time and money on that event. I’m so at peace to realize: I hadn’t.

#hate radio #american history #father coughlin #poets on tumblr #Stephenjaymorris

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caveartfair · 8 years

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Jannis Kounellis, Arte Povera Icon, Dead at 80—and the 9 Other Biggest News Stories This Week

Catch up on the latest art news with our rundown of the 10 stories you need to know this week.

01 Jannis Kounellis, a major figure of the Arte Povera movement, has died at the age of 80.

(via The Art Newspaper and ARTnews)

Kounellis died on February 16th at Rome’s Villa Mafalda hospital, according to the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism. Though born in Greece, Kounellis spent most of his life in the Italian capital, where he worked with fellow avant garde artists and received his first solo exhibition in 1960. A titan of the Arte Povera movement, which employed common or everyday materials, Kounellis is credited with inventive and playful use of a diversity of objects—everything from jute bags to a dozen live horses. The re-staging of Kounellis’s famous equine-based work by Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York in 2015 attracted both praise and controversy as the living horses drew large crowds to the gallery space. Kounellis received numerous major museum exhibitions throughout the course of his life, including at the Tate in London, and his work has also made regular appearances at the Venice Biennale. In the gallery text for a 1987 exhibition, Kounellis wrote of his work: “I saw the sanctity of everyday objects.”

02 Photographer Burhan Ozbilici has won The World Press Photo of the Year award for his image taken immediately after the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey.

(via the World Press Photo Foundation)

The World Press Photo Foundation administers the award, which is in its 60th year and is given to the photograph that “captures or represents an event or issue of great journalistic importance.” Ozbilici’s image, which also won in the Spot News Stories category, pictures the off-duty policeman just seconds after shooting Russian ambassador Andrei Karlov in Ankara. The killing took place in an art gallery and the powerful image of the event quickly went viral. The winning photograph was chosen from 80,408 images submitted by 5,034 photographers from 125 countries. “It was a very very difficult decision, but in the end we felt that the picture of the year was an explosive image that really spoke to the hatred of our times,” said Mary F. Calvert, a member of the jury. “Every time it came on the screen you almost had to move back because it’s such an explosive image and we really felt that it epitomizes the definition of what the World Press Photo of the Year is and means.”

03 In protest of President Donald Trump’s travel ban, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College has taken down 120 works either made or donated by immigrants.

(Artsy)

This new initiative, titled “Art-Less,” runs from February 16th to 21st and highlights the artistic contributions of American immigrants. It also marks the latest art-world protest against Trump’s January 27th executive order, which temporarily prevented visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. Although lower courts have blocked the travel ban indefinitely, Trump has responded by saying that his team will soon file a “brand-new order” to achieve the same goal. At the Davis, each of the works’ labels will be marked with a tag that reads either “made by an immigrant” or “given by an immigrant.” On the list is Dutch-born Willem de Kooning, Canadian-born Agnes Martin, Cuban-born Ana Mendieta, and English-born Thomas Cole, among others. “I think visitors will have a profound awareness of the enormous contribution that immigrants have made, even just within this building, and extrapolate from that,” the director of the Davis, Lisa Fischman, told Artsy.

04 Archaeologists working in Luxor stumbled upon a 3,000-year-old tomb of an Egyptian scribe, filled with remarkably well-preserved carvings and paintings.

(via LiveScience)

The researchers were removing debris from another tomb—that of an Egyptian official who served King Tut’s grandfather, Amenhotep III—when they discovered a hole in the wall. This opening led to a T-shaped chamber, the final resting place of a man named Khonsu. A “renowned” royal scribe during his lifetime, Khonsu and his wife are depicted worshipping the gods Isis and Osiris in a painting on one of the tomb’s walls. A separate carving shows four baboons in awe of the sun god, Ra. The team of archeologists, led by Jiro Kondo of Waseda University in Japan, have not yet gained access to the tomb’s inner chamber, which is blocked by piles of stones. This marks the most recent discovery to come out of the necropolis at ancient Thebes, located in modern-day Luxor alongside the Nile River.

05 After Anselm Kiefer disavowed a Beijing exhibition of his works, the show’s curator has fired back against the artist and his dealers.

(via The Art Newspaper)

The Kiefer show at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum (CAFAM) in Beijing attracted controversy last year when the artist said it was being prepared against his wishes. The Western galleries that represent Kiefer—White Cube, Gagosian Gallery, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac—backed the artist and issued a statement declaring that “to plan such an important showcase in China without the artist’s input is disrespectful.” But now, the show’s curator Beate Reifenscheid is alleging that the dealers and the artist are impinging on curatorial freedom. “Curators must respect the artist but also be able to work for the wider public’s benefit,” she said. “If all artists and their art dealers could control when, where and why their art is displayed in museums after it’s sold, the public interest would not be fully served.” The exhibition was originally organized as a joint venture between CAFAM and the Bell Art Center, which fosters cultural exchange between Asia and Europe. A spokesman for the latter said that the objections of the dealers demonstrate “a classic case of how commercial interests in the art world can overreach and of how the profit motive seeks to control and restrain curatorial freedom.” The exhibition was originally slated to travel to other locations in China, though it is unclear if those plans will proceed.

06 The New York City Council has passed major cultural legislation meant to boost the city’s Percent for Art program.

(via Artforum)

The bill will increase financial support to the Percent for Art program, which mandates that certain funds for any public-facing, city-funded development be allocated for public art. The rule previously required that one percent of the first $20 million of capital projects (the construction of a building with a public space, for example) be allocated to public art. The new law increases that number to one percent of the first $50 million of such projects and improves the public feedback process. The bill will also foster diversity in the Percent for Art panels, which oversee the program, requiring more input from local communities. This is the first time the city council has passed legislation dealing with cultural issues since the Department of Cultural Affairs was established in 1976.

07 A foundation in Cologne is challenging Hauser & Wirth’s claim to the estate of August Sander.

(via artnet News)

Just five days after the gallery Hauser & Wirth announced it now represents the estate of the late German photographer August Sander, Cologne’s SK Stiftung Kultur (SK Culture Foundation) shot back with a statement claiming that it is the only legitimate representative of the estate. On February 9th, Hauser & Wirth had released a statement about the representation, describing it as a collaboration with the artist’s great-grandson Julian Sander (who runs a gallery in Cologne). But on February 14th, SK Stiftung Kultur responded with “incomprehension,” and outlined the history of the existing estate’s founding, which occurred in December 1992. The foundation claims the estate was arranged in accordance with the seller Gerd Sander, the grandson of the photographer and father of Julian Sander. In a piece appearing in the German magazine Monopol this week, Julian Sander explained that the photographic works included in the estate represented by Hauser & Wirth were still in the family’s possession, whereas the SK Stiftung Kultur, which is a non-profit, is not responsible for the sale of works on the global art market. Hauser & Wirth has not commented on the foundation’s claims.

08 A new pro-immigration art installation in Dresden resulted in far-right protests in the city.

(via Artforum)

The work, Lampedusa 361, was produced jointly by the city and the organization Friends of Dresden Germany. It resembles a cemetery, made up of 90 styrofoam tombstones with photographs of graves in Sicily where refugees who drowned are buried, and is meant to recall those who lost their lives during World War II in Dresden. It was erected at Theaterplatz, before the Semperoper, as part of a series of events to commemorate the city’s destruction during World War II. The work incited mass protests of the rightist, anti-Islam, nationalist group PEGIDA (the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West). Dresden mayor Dirk Hilbert was denounced by protesters and has received death threats but remains defiant. “It is a memorial at the right time in the right place,” said Hilbert during Lampedusa 361’s unveiling. Artistic directors of 16 Dresden cultural institutions issued a statement denouncing the demonstrations; an excerpt reads, “In the history of our country there have always been times when the common good was endangered by narrow-minded hate speech and demagogues.”

09 A German court has ruled that a convent must continue to display a Nazi artist’s work.

(via The Art Newspaper)

Erich Klahn’s commissions for churches included Nazi and Germanic symbols, including swastikas and runes. After discovering Klahn’s Nazi sympathies, the Klosterkammer Hannover (the public body that oversees former church property) tried to cancel a contract that it had to maintain and exhibit his work. His heirs challenged this breach of contract in court, and the Federal Court of Justice, the country’s highest court, rejected the appeal from the Klosterkammer in January. The director of the Klosterkammer told The Art Newspaper that they are “looking at what further steps we can take,” but for now they plan to reopen a museum of Klahn’s work in April.

10 Moscow’s Garage Museum has released the artist list for its inaugural Russia Triennial.

(via ARTnews)

The museum will include 63 artists and collectives in the first Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, just three weeks ahead of its opening, on March 10th. A team of six curators, helmed by the museum’s chief curator Kate Fowle, traveled to 42 cities and towns in Russia in order to arrive at a list of “some of the most active and influential cultural figures” in the country, according to a statement. All the works included have been created in the past five years. The exhibition, opening in a year that marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, will be arranged according to a series of themes: Master Figure, Personal Mythologies, Fidelity to Place, Common Language, Art in Action, Street Morphology, and Local Histories of Art. Founded by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich in 2008, the Garage Museum is invested in supporting what it considers to be an underexplored contemporary art scene—the institution has also produced an online catalogue of Russian artists and local scenes.

—Artsy Editors

Cover image: Installation view of Jannis Kounellis’s Da inventare sul posto (To Invent on the Spot) at Luxemboug & Dayan’s booth at Art Basel, 2016. Photo by Benjamin Westoby for Artsy.

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