The following clip contains a lot of material, if you are fascinated by the conjunction of personality and communication.

Here’s the transcript.

Palin: like how? What’s up?

Kathleen: You swore on your precious Bible that you would uphold the interests of this state, and then when cash was waved in front of your face, you quit.

Palin: OH, you WANTED me to be your governor! I’m honored! Thank you!

Kathleen: I wanted you to honor your responsibilities. That is what I wanted. I wanted you to be part of the political process instead of becoming a celebrity so that you could (inaudible). And if that’s the best you could do, then good for you. If that’s the best you could do.

Palin: Here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. (inaudible) That’s what I’m out there fightin’ for Americans to be able to have a Constitution protected so that we can have free speech…And ALSO there…

Kathleen: In what way are you fighting for that?

Palin: Oh my goodness!

Kathleen: In what way?

Palin: To elect candidates who understand the Constitution, to protect our military interests so that we can keep on fightin’ for our constitution that will protect some of the freedoms that evidently are important to you too.

Kathleen: By using your celebrity status, certainly not by political status.

Palin Daughter: How is she a celebrity? That’s my question.

Palin: I’m honored! No, she thinks I’m a celebrity!

Palin Daughter: That’s funny that you think she is.

Kathleen: Well, you’re certainly not representing the state of Alaska any longer…even though…

Palin Daughter: She’s representing United States?

Kathleen: Yes, I know. You belong to America now, and that suits me just fine. Yeah.

Palin: What do you do here?

Kathleen: I’m a teacher

Palin: Oh. (Eye roll and protracted grimace)

Palin Daughter: Oh.

Kathleen: I also have a few other jobs. I’m married to a commercial fisherman. And so I fish.

Palin: Oh that’s cool. So am I! I married to-we probably have a lot in common!

Kathleen: Yeah. You know, I think that we do.

Palin: Hi! (waves to camera) Are we on video?

Kathleen: Too bad. I’m more of a still camera girl myself. (inaudible) I am, I am…I will tell you I’m very pleased to meet you.

Palin: I’m honored to meet you, I really am. And, no we both agree on the freedom of speech and the-

Kathleen: Yes we do.

Palin: you know – the protection of that. So, um, no I and, you know… best of everything to you too and Yeah.

Kathleen: Thank you for coming over.

Palin: Well, okay. It’s nice to meet you anyway.

There’s much of interest here. Palin seems confident her affability will allow her to transmit a jumble of ideas to her audience, a school teacher from Alaska.

I highlighted one chunk of her phraseology because it evoked for me thoughts about what it must be like to, in effect, be Mrs. Palin having her onrush of thoughts and then instantly delivering them. There’s something roundly unmediated–in the psychological sense–going on in her.

People have said to me Palin is a cynical character. I would suggest she’s not the least bit cynical. It seems she believes her own bullshit and she also truly believes there is a common sense she is called to “front.” This common sense is wholly foundational for her–which is to suggest it trumps everything. She may feel very sorry for all those who have lost their common sense.

Yet, at the same time, Palin lives in her own world and, crucially, doesn’t experience it as anything besides its simply being the real world. From this position, she’s running her strategy on this women: befriend her and deliver the transmission, and, her job is done.

What kind of world is the transmission coming from? Borrowing from Heiddegger, this clip shows Palin coming from a pre-ontological position. In other words, her jumble of common sense is not the result of any second order choosing at all. I don’t understand Palin to give a whit about making choices and structuring her thoughts. The thoughts arise, and fall out! Her ‘cipheric’ transmission doesn’t, from the pre-ontological position, require any kind of advanced articulation, completeness, or complexity. In other words, her sense of what exists is just so, and not the result of actually trying to figure it, what’s real, out.

(If you asked Palin, “How do you mediate your thoughts?” I bet she’d ask you “what the heck you are you trying to ask me?”)

Another way to frame this is to sense she’s just being her instinctual (ID-driven,) self, just being who she is, and this unfolds with enthusiasm, even with some generosity. But, in observing this unfolding, it’s readily apparent she’s not deeply mediating herself, at all. She doesn’t think, ‘what did I just say?’

So, although it seems mildly crazed and naive (as a communication strategy,) my guess Palin simply feels she’s responding from the genuine moment, having fun, and, unlike the usual anxious idealogue striving to convince, her psychic investment doesn’t seem here to possess much anxiety.

She reminds me of a self-possessed 14 year old. When you meet a self-possessed 14 year old, usually this sort of unmediated and confident presentation is impressive. It’s out-sized too. However, thirty years later the same person issues the same kind of presentation and one thinks, ‘there’s a disconnect here.’

Much of Palin’s disconnect is concrete. She’s not of main street, is in no way a typical housewife, and, at the same time, her self-definition would have it be so. Her flux of identity and common sense is (to me) delightful and unremarkably odd.

I don’t think Palin is very attached to having to pull each and every person into her odd world. After all, as a screen for projection, she receives a ton of reinforcement. It’s not make-or-break for her. Still, a Katie Kouric or school teacher from Alaska seem to be, to Palin, somewhat alien creatures. Worth an attempt, but not worth much more! Palin doesn’t feel estranged from such creatures. She’s acting out being an emissary between tribes, as if this encounter is on a playground. As she mentioned after the encounter with Katie Couric, she had hoped they would have grounded the interview in their both being working mothers.

This was a telling reflection. Palin knows she gets it, and, seems to find it mildly weird others live in some other world where what she gets, isn’t obvious.

My sense is her internal response is along the lines of ‘Oh, well,’ ‘whatever.’ It’s not her problem people in this other world are strange, and I rather think she isn’t aggravated to any great degree that these same other people find her strange. Probably it’s much more aggravating to her that other people are wrong about the nature of the world.

Sarah Palin is, from the sweep of my speculations and biases, a very American type of psychological figure, the kind of type that understands their own self to be in a real world, where some others are in their own unreal world.

As a type, this type isn’t able to step back and see the real world as encompassing anything else besides a particular–to draw down to Palin’s point of focus and enthusiasm–common sense.

This is a mistake of consciousness, yet I find it to be a delicious aspect of our cultural moment.

Metabiogenesis (S.Calhoun 2010) click for large version

Metacosmogenesis (S.Calhoun 2010) click for large version

(chosen, appropriated frames, using Dreamlines; hat tip to Leonardo Solaas)

Give your mind to the true reasoning I have to unfold. A new fact is battling strenuously for access to your ears. A new aspect of the universe is striving to reveal itself. But no fact is so simple that it is not harder to believe than to doubt at first presentation. Equally, there is nothing so mighty or so marvel- lous that the wonder it evokes does not tend to diminish in time. Take first the pure and undimmed luster of the sky and all that it enshrines: the stars that roam across its surface, the moon and the surpassing splendour of the sunlight. If all these sights were now displayed to mortal view for the first time by a swift unforeseen revelation, what miracle could be recounted greater than this? What would men before the revelation have been less prone to conceive as possible? (Lucretius)

Separate truths
It is misleading — and dangerous — to think that religions are different paths to the same wisdom [excerpt Boston.com April 25, 2010] Of course, those who claim that the world’s religions are different paths up the same mountain do not deny the undeniable fact that they differ in some particulars. Obviously, Christians do not go on pilgrimage to Mecca, and Muslims do not practice baptism. Religious paths do diverge in dogma, rites, and institutions. To claim that all religions are basically the same, therefore, is not to deny the differences between a Buddhist who believes in no god, a Jew who believes in one God, and a Hindu who believes in many gods. It is to deny that those differences matter, however. From this perspective, whether God has a body (yes, say Mormons; no, say Muslims) or whether human beings have souls (yes, say Hindus; no, say Buddhists) is of no account because, as Hindu teacher Swami Sivananda writes, “The fundamentals or essentials of all religions are the same. There is difference only in the nonessentials.”

This is a lovely sentiment but it is untrue, disrespectful, and dangerous.

The gods of Hinduism are not the same as the orishas of Yoruba religion or the immortals of Daoism. To pretend that they are is to refuse to take seriously the beliefs and practices of ordinary religious folk who for centuries have had no problem distinguishing the Nicene Creed of Christianity from the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism from the Shahadah of Islam. It is also to lose sight of the unique beauty of each of the world’s religions. Stephen Prothero is a religion professor at Boston University. This article is adapted from his new book, ”God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter.”

This essay of Professor Prothero is amazing in a bad way. My criticism is simple: there’s a substantial and subtle literature concerned with the claim he’s arguing against, yet none of it enters into his argument. This huge hole swallows the glib attack he issues in this essay, an attack careless in its presentation of categories and domains, and, an attack launched against more than a few straw men.

It’s as if Prothero feels he can fool the discerning reader. Normally I would dig some and see if the author is through-and-through a charlatan. Here my guess is that he isn’t, but not from anything found in his intentionally misdirected essay.

He writes here about very intriguing questions. In comparing religions with one another, in what ways does this show similarities? What are those similarities about? Should the evidence show that some, or all, religions overlap in particular ways, are there, then, valid generalizations to be inferred from the specifics of any overlap?

Furthermore, such an inquiry about common features is itself framed by a variety of disciplines, and each brings different interpretive and discipline-bound practices to bear on the question. Outside of this there is also a worthy literature brought forth by non-academic experts, and, as well, there is also a long history of this very inquiry. One aspect of this history is that it evolved from the point where specific religions come into contact with each other, and thus was evoked by the curiosity of some religious persons about the possibility of commonality. This comes about long before the frameworks of modern academic disciplines existed.

It is also obvious: there is a fundamental issue begged by any theism, no matter how particularized a theism is in practice or by a its founding assumptions. This is simple to articulate: if there is a God of “All” is not this God then a God of all spirituality, irrespective of whether a particular spirituality is granted primacy or is heretical? In other words, if God of this sort does in fact exist, this God would ultimately be the God of religionist, heretic, and atheist alike. From this, if this is true, one would expect commonalities.

There are four modern perspectives, among many, which frame different possibilities for important, maybe crucial, inquiries into commonality. One is the Analytic Psychology, given by Carl Jung. Here spirituality is viewed as a phenomena of introspective consciousness. From this, (largely) personal religious experience and development is the nexus for an inquiry into, as-it-were, possibly like-minded objectives of self-realization. There is in this, a prospect that human consciousness, as a matter of its psychological constitution, in specific keys lights upon objectives that are similar or identical, yet only does this in the precise domains where this phenomena may exist, and this is located within these precise domains in specific religious traditions.

Two is the integral perspective on human development, given its most detailed elaboration by Ken Wilber; (and Wilber’s elaboration following mostly from the thoughtful work of Jean Gebser.) Integral thought expands the nexus of inquiry along a spectrum of developmental lines. Similar to Analytic Psychology, it is encumbered by fundamental assumptions about the universal nature of human aspiration. Taken as an outlook, (and “in-look,”) the Integral perspective provides a loose framework for investigating procedures for self-realization–procedures embedded in particular instrumentalities found in different spiritual and religious practices.

Third is anthropology, a modern discipline geared toward differentiation of human phenomena. Commonalities would be rigorously qualified and vigorously contested as a matter of methodology, yet, the idea that commonalities could be universal would remain a worthwhile anthropological hypothesis. This is especially so if such a hypothesis is unfolded in the context of evolutionary anthropology. Here the framing starts from the idea that religions may be dramatically different, but that human nature is not also wholly different.

Fourth, and is the argument posed by Frithhof Schuon, and echoed by a specific ilk of traditionalists and (somewhat) outsider experts, such as Mercea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Jacob Needleman, Rudolph Steiner, and others. Schuon described the over-arching aspect (and nexus for inquiry,) in the title of his book, The Transcendent Unity of Religion. I going to gloss the deep subtlety of Schuon’s argument and suggest his philosophical perspective basically holds this: where there is religion, there is also found a domain of aspirational practice where experience of the deep relationship between man and divine cosmos necessarily abides the idea that the cosmos is set up to evoke this relationship. It could be said the nexus of inquiry that necessarily follows from there being a God of All, is such–that a universality of religion in this aspirational domain is necessarily entailed by this primary assumption. Thus, given that there is a God of All and everything, we might expect to find similarities ordinated by God’s, if you will, “set up.”

(Schuon is superior to Karen Armstrong, with respect to being a source for beginning an inquiry at the abode of this nexus.)

***

Prothero doesn’t introduce any of these four vectors for inquiry into his didactic essay. For me, in not doing so, his argument is damaged out of the gate. If we break down the entire spectrum of human religious behavior, it could be incumbent upon an investigator to account for the behaviors oriented around the idea of the unity–in precise domains–of some/most/all religions.

But Prothero is mostly disingenuous in employing straw men and his attempt to wrangle an argument out of several category errors, the most grotesque of which is found in his silly statement, “To pretend that they are is to refuse to take seriously” (yada yada.) Since the point of finding similarity is to differentiate similarity from that which is dissimilar, there isn’t any ground to be gained by pretending that subtle arguments for similarity revolve around thinking different Gods (or theisms,) are said to be the same. This isn’t to say that there aren’t people who think this, its just that this is a definitive straw man.

(To the side of all this there is a contest of theisms. The ripe question for proponents of a distinctive theism within the context of the various Ambrahamic religions is simply enough, for example, ‘do you, as a Christian mystic pray to a different God than the God the Muslim prays to?’ In this the possibility of a negative answer holds another variation on the prime question about sameness and similarity. On the other hand, this is another way of wondering to what extent God owns a home team!)

The meta-inquiry is one concerned with a description, differentiation, and conceptualization of domains of human religious behavior and phenomena. This would work to tightly qualify the domains and then sort out apparent similarities. For me, anthropology, especially given the lens of an evolutionary framing, is the least inflicted by confirmation bias and tautological precepts. Still, Schuon and Dr. Jung opus, at a minimum, are worthwhile for their sophistication and depth, even if there is (for me) no slam dunk.

As it clearly appears when considering the fundamental question of the Divine Will as with other major instances of metaphysical exposition and spiritual expression, Schuon’s esoteric perspective can be best characterized as a science and discipline of objectivity that situates each reality at its own adequate ontological level and within its overarching metaphysical or cosmological context. In doctrinal as in methodical matters, Schuon’s thrust lies in a lucid perception of realities that considers both their metaphysical and archetypical meaning as well as the specificity of their plane of manifestation. Thus, in pure metaphysics, the esoterist avoids the pitfalls of confessional, anthropomorphic, and moralist expediency and sublimity by focusing on the dimensions, modes, and degrees of the theophanic unfolding of the Real. He does not confuse metaphysical realities with their partial or distorted contours as envisaged through human biases, nor does he project the limitations of human moral categories onto the Divine Order. At the same time, he perceives the roots of all spiritual, aesthetic, and moral phenomena in the Supreme, and he accounts for their meaning on the basis of the Divine, thereby describing the multileveled and multifaceted Unity of Being. In spiritual matters alike, esoterism reaches to the essential through the veil of superimpositions and accretions, while elucidating the partial legitimacy of mystical emphases, excesses, and subjective or collective detours. As such, esoterism is nothing less than the most direct and comprehensive language of the Self. jean-Baptiste Aymard-Patrick Laude, Frithof Schuon, life and Teaching; 2004 SUNY Press)

From development to liberation Sachs (1992) and Esteva (1992) argue that it is time to dismantle the mental structure and language of “development,” including that which is still attached to it in the form of opposition, such as “underdevelopment” and “counter-development.” We intend “liberation” as a holistic term that urges us to consider the links between economic, political, sociocultural, spiritual, and psychological transformation. In its holistic intent, it helps us to resist thinking that one could be psychologically liberated or individuated while economically or culturally enslaved or knowingly or unknowingly curtailing of the freedom of others. Liberation psychology links the interior with the exterior, widening its focus to include community, holding “self” and “other,” body and soul together. In doing so, our encounters and treatment of others are as carefully reflected upon as our relation to ourselves. The self is seen to be diminished if the other—person, nature, or group—is only grasped as a means to one’s own gratification: objectified, appropriated, and de-animated. There is a sustained attempt to witness the thoughts and feelings of the other, drawing back from attributions and projections upon the other that serve the ends of the self (see Chapter 10). Liberation psycholo- gies try to understand how and why others in the community as well as parts of the self are silenced or unheard. They nurture milieus that encour- age a restoration of voice. They seek to understand the psychologies of ego- defense that yield greed, hatred, violence, or amnesia about the suffering of self and others.

Toward Psychologies of Liberation; Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman – Palgrave 2008

(Helene Shulman wrote Living at the edge of chaos: complex systems in culture and psyche. [google books] It is for me one of those books–essential, hardly known at all, and the product of a modern, creative, questing sensibility. In this respect she joins in my estimation thinkerfeelers such as Arthur Young, Kirkpatrick Sales, Richard Grossinger, Marion Woodman, Paul Thibault, and a few, precious, others.

1 in 4 Americans censoring thoughts under Obama

Man, talk about priming a poll result!

This raises lots of questions aside from those about polling methodology.

Do you suppose some people would report feeling really free and thoroughly liberated irrespective of anything the U.S. government has done, say in the last 37 years since such a person first voted at 18?

How would one account for this, account for a person impervious to the tug of that which denies one their freedoms?

How would the internalized sense of one’s being free to some degree be indexed? I’m reminded there was no cogent psychology Locke could utilize. (Romantic!) notions about property and happiness, be they of Hayek or Nozick, cross over into what reasonable domain of psychology? You couldn’t go there with those fellows if you wanted to!

For example, Libertarian thought leader David Boaz:

Libertarians believe that there is a natural harmony of interests among peaceful, productive people in a just society. One person’s individual plans — which may involve getting a job, starting a business, buying a house, and so on — may conflict with the plans of others, so the market makes many of us change our plans. But we all prosper from the operation of the free market, and there are no necessary conflicts between farmers and merchants, manufacturers and importers. Only when government begins to hand out rewards on the basis of political pressure do we find ourselves involved in group conflict, pushed to organize and contend with other groups for a piece of political power. (Libertarianism: A Primer)

The leap from ‘no necessary’ to ‘only when’ hammers home the naivete. The absence of socio-psychological understanding is, obviously, implicit.

Just in case, you were wondering…

Tea Party Mission:

Fiscal Responsibility: Fiscal Responsibility by government honors and respects the freedom of the individual to spend the money that is the fruit of their own labor. A constitutionally limited government, designed to protect the blessings of liberty, must be fiscally responsible or it must subject its citizenry to high levels of taxation that unjustly restrict the liberty our Constitution was designed to protect. Such runaway deficit spending as we now see in Washington D.C. compels us to take action as the increasing national debt is a grave threat to our national sovereignty and the personal and economic liberty of future generations.

Constitutionally Limited Government: We, the members of The Tea Party Patriots, are inspired by our founding documents and regard the Constitution of the United States to be the supreme law of the land. We believe that it is possible to know the original intent of the government our founders set forth, and stand in support of that intent. Like the founders, we support states’ rights for those powers not expressly stated in the Constitution. As the government is of the people, by the people and for the people in all other matters we support the personal liberty of the individual, within the rule of law.

Free Markets: A free market is the economic consequence of personal liberty. The founders believed that personal and economic freedom were indivisible, as do we. Our current government’s interference distorts the free market and inhibits the pursuit of individual and economic liberty. Therefore, we support a return to the free market principles on which this nation was founded and oppose government intervention into the operations of private business.

One good thing is: taking personal liberty as far as the principle so stated above does put the kibosh on the social conservative agenda. As for eliminating government intervention, I suppose this would be an interesting experiment, inasmuch as the elimination of all intervention would include elimination of every last cent of corporate welfare.

My argument is simply the US Constitution is the supreme law of the land and a law has to say what it means and mean what it says. This does not allow for ‘changing interpretations based on the times and societal needs’. Source: New Patriot Journal. What We Want Part II.

Take the time and gather up the argument here. It’s enough to hint that one can’t hang a logical argument on the skeleton of a particular–and singular–normative meaning, when this itself is subject to interpretation. (Alternately, the founders didn’t provide the necessary strict guidance–they never ratified the equivalent of “this bible is only to mean what it literally means.” )

Peyton Colorado’s whacky interpretation hits its lowest point when he caps an argument against direct election of Senators with:

So, if we are truly asking for the restoration of constitutional rule in these United State then repeal of the XVIIth amendment must happen.

You mean, Peyton, the XVIIth amendment isn’t a superb example of constitutional rule?

I’m going to relish watching the principles of conservatism clash with anti-elitist populism. After all, the whole edifice of conservatism is built upon the olden foundation of strict elitism. I don’t see how of conservatism’s philosophical thought leaders–such as Aristotle, Burke, Kirk, Buckley, Strauss–can be re-interpreted to be advocates of anti-elitism and of the wisdom of mobs.

Finally Michelle Bachman echoes what Sarah Palin told Sean Hannity, when Bachman wrote the following in an otherwise mendacious fund-raising piece.

Americans will be prevented by Big Government from relying on our own wits, ingenuity, and hard work to take care of ourselves.

As Obama said during the campaign, ‘the ownership society – you’re on your own.’ Yet, this idea of Bachman’s is the entire crux of the Tea Party’s eruption.

Bachman’s piece is below the fold.

Dear Fellow Conservative,

Will you let Barack Obama KILL conservatism?

If you’re the type of conservative I trust you are, I know your answer is a resounding “NO!”

Because you and I have our work cut out for us opposing Obama’s outrageous gangster government.

What is happening in Washington right now is BIGGER than FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s “Great Society”…

…and far more dangerous to our freedoms than both combined!

Obama’s plans will do nothing less than socialize our economy and turn every citizen into a ward of the state.

As a conservative, I’m deeply concerned.

But I have some very big news. Despite what some doom-and-gloomers have been saying, there is still real hope.

And this is why I had to contact you today.

Now I just hope and pray you’ll take the next two minutes to read this letter so I can explain why your help of at least $35 is so urgently needed.

As you know, Barack Obama has embarked on the most radical presidency in America’s history.

Obama is advancing a far-left agenda of Socialized Medicine, government takeover of the private sector, higher taxes, increased welfare spending, censorship of conservative talk radio, and empowerment of radical community groups.

If government grows so vast that it gets its tentacles into every aspect of our lives, the American spirit of independence and responsibility will be BROKEN!

Obama’s socialist agenda is a dagger pointed right at the heart of conservatism. He’s playing for keeps.

Obama is a political street fighter who learned the rules of politics from the Democrats’ Chicago Machine.

Unofficial correspondence. Not printed or mailed at government expense. Paid for and authorized by ACU STRIKEFORCE.

Just consider Obama’s ties to the radical group ACORN.

For years Obama worked with, advised, and even trained ACORN and its volunteers in community agitation.

So close is Obama to ACORN that his presidential campaign relied on it for crucial get-out-the-vote drives to win.

But ACORN is a corrupt group, rotten to the core. It’s been investigated for voter fraud in 14 states and its workers have been caught on tape in 5 separate cities willing to help set up brothels for underage illegal alien child prostitutes.

Yet, Obama has used his enormous power as president to funnel millions of dollars into ACORN’s coffers to strengthen this radical group and his base.

Because Obama sees ACORN as his ideological “shock troops” leading his “revolution.”

Obama wants to use ACORN to radicalize America because he isn’t interested merely in defeating conservatives…

…HE WANTS TO ANNIHILATE US!

That’s the purpose behind ObamaCare, too.

Obama’s goal with ObamaCare is to make every American utterly dependent of Big Brother Government for health care.

Once every American citizen is on the dole of Socialized Medicine, Obama will have enormous power to decide how to “SPREAD THE WEALTH AROUND!”

And by growing government into a LEVIATHAN, he will make small government, pro-family conservatives like you and me politically irrelevant.

Americans will be prevented by Big Government from relying on our own wits, ingenuity, and hard work to take care of ourselves.

This vision for America is my nightmare.

And as long as I have breath in my body, I will fight Obama’s liberal agenda of higher taxes, Socialized Medicine, and funding of radical groups like ACORN.

But the hard truth is that right now there are simply not enough conservatives in Congress to put a full-stop halt to Obama’s socialism – we can only slow him down.

Thankfully, conservative Americans are coming together to stop Obama’s rocket train to socialism.

And today I’m asking you to please join us.

American Conservative Union Strikeforce (ACU STRIKEFORCE) is the group to TAKE ON and TAKE DOWN Obama’s agenda by rebuilding our party and helping elect real conservative candidates to Congress.

ACU STRIKEFORCE doesn’t support just any Republican candidate…

As the political arm of the American Conservative Union, the oldest and most respected conservative grassroots organization in America, ACU STRIKEFORCE is dedicated to electing ONLY rock-ribbed conservatives.

We must fight Obama’s agenda tooth and nail until we beat it at the polls.

And we must win more seats in both the House and the Senate to put the brakes on Obama’s out-of-control spending.

Now I trust you see why this group is of such vital importance. And why after you sign your ACU STRIKEFORCE PLEDGE OF SUPPORT I hope you’ll enclose an urgent contribution of $35, $50, $75, $100, $250, $500, $1,000, or $5,000.

Time is of the essence!

Your immediate support will make a huge difference by helping to strike a severe blow to Barack Obama’s plan to ELIMINATE conservatism – before it’s too late.

As a conservative, I’m sure you agree that there is nothing more important you and I could do at this time.

Please understand, Obama sees himself as a “Reagan-in-Reverse.”

Ronald Reagan’s strong national defense, tax cuts, and support of traditional values not only won the Cold War, ended the seventies’ economic stagflation, and ushered in an era of personal responsibility…

…IT DISCREDITED LIBERALISM FOR A GENERATION!

Obama’s socialist plans are nothing less than an attempt to remake America so completely that conservatives will GIVE UP and GIVE IN to the entire liberal agenda.

I’m not throwing in the towel. I’m energized by freedom-loving citizens like you who are standing up across this nation to stop this socialist agenda.

My friend, in the critical weeks ahead, ACU STRIKEFORCE will be leading the counterattack against Obama’s agenda.

The battle for America’s future is being fought today! Yes, it’s here today that we can take down Barack Obama’s agenda!

But we shouldn’t kid ourselves.

It won’t be easy.

To keep building the type of grassroots network we’ll need – ACU STRIKEFORCE and I must have your help within the next 14 days.

We must help support all the conservative candidates that are in direct opposition to Obama’s socialism, and we must do it now.

If we do this, we can pull the rug of public support right from under Barack Obama – no campaign of charisma can save his agenda!!

That’s why I really hope you will do two things before you do anything else today…

1) Sign and return the ACU STRIKEFORCE PLEDGE OF SUPPORT.

2) Send back an immediate contribution of $35, or even as much as $50, $75, $100, $250, $500, $1,000 or $5,000.

Your help will be put to immediate use as we work to attack directly Obama’s socialist agenda by helping those conservative candidates who are unafraid to speak the truth.

Remember, the more you can help today, the more damage we can do to Barack Obama’s socialist agenda. It’s just that simple.

So please be as generous as possible.
Sincerely,
Michele Bachmann

P.S. ACU STRIKEFORCE is a unique grassroots group dedicated to stopping Obama from reaching his ultimate goal of remaking America in his socialist image.

The time for you and me is now! So please sign the enclosed ACU STRIKEFORCE PLEDGE OF SUPPORT and send it back with your most generous gift of $35, $50, $75, $100, or even $1,000 or $5,000 today!

I.

Alex Gibney, director of the new film Casino Jack (& The United States of Money,) also Oscar-winning director of “Taxi to the Dark Side” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” interviewed here by Andrew O’Hehir (Salon-link)

Key capture:

“the free market agenda that intends to destroy government”

This phrase leaps out because I’ve long wondered how philosophical Conservatism, unfettered capitalism, and, Judeo-Christian morality are ever reconciled.

In 2006 the filmmaker Danny Shechter produced the little-seen documentary, In Debt We Trust. It’s at your library, folks. So is Gibney’s Enron, the Smartest Boys In the Room. Leslie and Andrew Cockburn released their documentary American Casino last year.

II.

It was a delicious moment when Justice Alito seemed perturbed at Obama stating the obvious during the SOTU. Sure, the majority affirmed the principal of free speech in certain terms.

“When Government seeks to use its full power, including includingthe criminal law, to command where a person may get hisor her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

But in this decision the majority morphed into activist* proponents of a living Constitution.

But might we not come to a point in the future where corporate money rallies to support ‘their’ law-and-order candidate so as to assure order against a surge in disorder provoked by severely economically beleaguered masses?

* There is simply no support for the view that the First Amendment, as originally understood, would permit the suppression of political speech by media corporations. The Framers may not have anticipated modern business and media corporations. (pg.44, CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION)

If James Madison were around, would he endorse concentration of power and wealth?

Loony, yet, “crazy ass sh*t, but. But, more than a few people do agree with Beck. This is so even if such people couldn’t tell you anything intelligent about what the founding fathers actually thought; what they contested among themselves; and what were their various radically liberal principles.

Here’s a conjecture (of mine) about ideology and history. There is no extant or past example of a form of governance for which it could be demonstrated that it’s procedures of governance wholly and absolutely are realized solely as a matter of adherence to ideological principles. This is falsifiable if it can be shown that there exists or has existed a form of governance for which, in its application of its principles, every instance was/is entirely consistent with principle.

Let’s imagine there are people who are committed to some set of principles in the following, narrow way:

Our endeavor is to instantiate a set of principles. We believe this for two reasons. First, because this set of principles is the best of all possible set of principles. Second, that the principles are best, is verified by the fact that their truth is the most reasonable truth upon which any possible set of principles could be based.

News for social, fiscal & national security conservatives who believe in God, family & country. We seek to uphold the rights of citizens under the U.S. Constitution, traditional family values, Republican principles / ideals, transparent & limited government, free markets, liberty & individual freedom. The ARRA News Service is an outreach of the Arkansas Republican Assembly. However, all content approval rests with the ARRA Editor. While numerous positions are reported, our beliefs & principles remain fixed. mission

Our political climate in the U.S. is very interesting in this year, unfolding now, after the election of Mr. Obama. Several developments have taken me by surprise. Obama surprised me by not partnering his financial system bailout policies with policies aimed to help right the economy of main street from the bottom up. It was also surprising that he didn’t articulate in concrete, instrumental, terms what kind of reform he would endorse, and insist upon, to end the depredations of the speculation-driven shadow economy.

Then, he moved to reform health care and laid it in the laps of his congressional majorities.

In light of these developments, I’m not in any way surprised that people have been stirred to reactionary and (called by me,) restorative activism. Nor was it surprising that they oriented their dissent positively around their patriotism, and, negatively, around their primal fear that the government is posed to strip from him or her so-called freedoms.

I’ll let Missy, writing on her blog at TCUNation, the Social Network for Conservatives, explain:

But the worst part? It allows the federal gov’t to be in charge of every aspect of your life. Every decision you make on a daily basis can be linked to “healthcare.” You drive an SUV? You’re contributing to pollution & that increases asthma…..you need to pay more! Since we have direct access to all of your accounts we know you own a 4-wheeler. That’s dangerous………you need to pay more! We see that you eat at McD’s twice a week. That’s bad for you……you need to pay more! YOU OWN A GUN??? THAT’S DANGEROUS! YOU NEED TO PAY ALOT MORE!!

These liberal fanatics will most DEFINITELY use the federal gov’ts financial stake in your everyday lifestyle choices to CONTROL THEM. Your decisions will no longer be your own, they will be decisions that will be for the “collective good.” And they will be MANDATED & CONTROLLED by the gov’t. And in order to “nudge” you into compliance with their ideology of how you should live your life, they will simply put a financial burden on you if you choose differently.

The paranoia surprised me. How does one square paranoia with a normative conservative ethos that holds its funding principles to be both first, and, last, and to be foundational, and also holds these principles are the only possible enlightened goal granted by reasoning through the problem of governance? Where does paranoia fit in? Is it possible that such foundational principles are, in fact, extremely fragile?

I don’t think so. President Obama has offered a mild liberalism. The bank bailout was extraordinary, yet a Republican would have had to have done the same thing. (Creative destruction is a notion one can practically hold only when the bombs aren’t falling on your own head.) All such bailouts tend to occupy uncertain spots in any ideology. A bailout is above all expedient and unhooked from conventional, ideological morality. They’re grotesque too.

So far Obama’s maneuvering hasn’t been much like anything we associate, historically, with truly radical presidents; especially those with very novel views of the Constitution—such as Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan, and Bush II. Nevertheless, the ideological principles survive, and this suggests underlying principles, aren’t at all fragile. This includes freedom given to be a result of, contingent upon, application of, ideological principles.

So why is paranoia evoked?

My tentative view is: affect is consequential in the current ‘social psychological framed’ ecology. Forged in the magical bake shop of projective identification, specific affect-laden estimations are on offer. So: a messianic leader is scapegoated so as to be the cause of knowing (i.e. unconsciously feeling,) that what is possessed, “freedom,” is to be stolen by the conspiratorial Other, (i.e. an alter.) This inflated threat is to be met and defeated by, ironically enough, the collective personal power of freedom-loving individualists. It’s worth noting that in some quarters, this evil goat is assumed to have super powers, or, alternately, is assumed to be the servant of hidden masters.

Putting the participation mystique aside–may Levi-Strauss rest in peace–what are the embedded chain-of-being regimes supposed in a clash between the red-in-blood red-tending-to-blue meme, and, the blue-tending-to-orange meme. These, given by Grave’s Spiral Dynamics, and, given by me in my deployment of a shadow dynamics* supposing the red shadow of blue conservatism’s ‘traditionalistic’ paternal chain of being comes to clash with the neoliberal paternal chain-of-being of Orange. Pre-modern, the red shadow of blue, collides here with the post-modern orientation toward technocratic problem-solving.

(Or, the atavistic self and identity, is felt to be threatened by the spectral, post-modern selves and identities. Perhaps, were one to dig into the narratives, one would find at their core a clash between the production of certainty and productions of uncertainty.)

Among many curious aspects of this clash, is the gravity given to an emotionalized, largely unconscious, sense of freedom. (I’ve written about this before.) What is it about a notional freedom that one can be dispossessed of, versus, other less vulnerable notions about freedom? Isn’t it interesting that the conservative concept of freedom-under-constraint, a necessary consequence of the pessimistic view of human nature, is subsumed in the shuffle through the emotionally-charged libertarian bake shop!

Then there is the conspiratorial tenor of magical narratives. Of course, it’s long-standing that the government is anthropomorphized to be a kind of beast, capable of devouring freedom. In this respect the conspiracy mongering of Ron Paul, or Michelle Bachman, comes to be of a piece with the extreme supernaturalized conspiracy advocates, David Ickes, Alex Jones, and Michael Tsarion. In turn, the current extremes are merely the contemporary waves of olden conspiracy theories. And, heck, why not share some air time with the truly deluded?

“they’ve been positioning…” they, theY, thEY, THEY!

*I have yet to go into this in detail. However, roughly, my proposal is that the vertical scale of Spiral Dynamic is configurable as a dynamic, oppositional scale. This is able to depict how higher and lower memes serve as descriptive categories, and schema, for shadow dynamics. For example, by such a dynamic scale, the shadow dynamics for the Blue Meme are discoverable as aspects of Red (below) and Orange (above). In my novel (or idiosyncratic,) view, the shadow dynamics then tend to fall (or regress,) toward the lower, more archaic order, while this unconscious propensity is galvanized by fear of the upward pull toward the newer, more complex order.

My notion here supposes that a concept of Blue freedom, will come to be defended at the lower, unconscious level of Red. Similarly, this defense is waged against a super-charged (by way of ‘social cognitized’ projection,) ‘controlling’ Orange. Grant this phenomenology, and the result is that fear of bureaucracy regresses to fear of collective control, control formulated to the scale conspiracy; “conspiracy” being the shadow concretization of Orange—in its worst form.

This is consistent—well, at least it is to me—with the mental procedures via which contested, soft conceptions–such as freedom–are reduced, reified and objectified. Then the reified conception’s opposite, in this case anti-freedom, is realized and nailed to the alter. Thus, a collective complex is constellated.

Scary, but also worth a read: For Some Seeking Rebirth, Sweat Lodge Was End John Doughtery – New York Times: October 21, 2009

The story summarizes the horrific manslaughter that resulted from a sweat lodge conducted by new age con man James Arthur Ray in Sedona, October 8. Three died, eighteen were hospitalized, and, Ray has yet to be charged. Ray herded paying customers into a dangerous environment and then—literally—allowed three to perish. His state of consciousness can easily be characterized: oblivious. On the website for the deadly new age huckster Ray, he offers bona-fides.

Throughout his life, James Arthur Ray has studied and been exposed to a wide diversity of teachings and teachers – from his collegiate learning and the schools of the corporate world, to the ancient cultures of Peru, Egypt and the Amazon. Armed with this comprehensive and diverse background in behavioral sciences, coupled with his experience as a successful, entrepreneur, and an avid thirst for spiritual knowledge, James boasts the unique and powerful ability to blend the practical and mystical into a usable and easy-to-access formula for achieving true wealth across all aspects of life.

I’ll return to this shortly.

Speaking of hucksters, here’s some excerpts of a pitch received from Ken Wilber, October 15.

This is Ken Wilber, and I wanted to take a moment to write you and tell you of the first and only organization that is the exclusive outlet of my Integral work and all projects connected with it. The organization is called Integral Life, co-founded by myself and my CEO, Robb Smith.

I’m truly excited by this organization and its development, because for the first time in history, although there are hundreds of projects and organizations and websites inspired by my work, this is the first one that has my personal seal of approval. The projects, partner organizations, academic journals and books, blogs and forums all have a quality checked by me to personally guarantee that my Integral model is being used accurately. That’s the problem with these hundreds of other applications of my work. As much as I truly appreciate the inspired use of my model by them, there are often misinterpretations of its leading ideas, resulting in less than truly Integral results.

What is an ‘integral result?’

Here’s what it looks like, symbolically speaking:

Wilber, is like Ray in a simple enough respect: if one wants to cozy up to the man and his accurate model, you have to shell out the smolians. Incidentally, this can be located in the blue-tending-toward-red memes of Spiral Dynamics. So: authoritarian, absolutistic, and, as should be self-evident from the above, able to issue a Seal of Approval. Big daddy!

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. Carl Jung, On the Psychology of the Unconciousness, 1917

Ray, as the article states, asserted his power to deadly effect. Wilber only asserts his power to stupifying effect. If you have even a mildly objective interest and view of Wilber’s Integral Model, it should be clear to you that his assertion on behalf of authenticity violates the aspirational goal of the Integral regime.

What if we took literally everything that all the various cultures have to tell us about human potential—about spiritual growth, psychological growth, social growth—and put it all on the table? What if we attempted to find the critically essential keys to human growth, based on the sum total of human knowledge now open to us? What if we attempted, based on extensive cross-cultural study, to use all of the world’s great traditions to create a composite map, a comprehensive map, an all-inclusive or integral map that included the best elements from all of them? Introduction to Integral Theory and Practice

Wilber:

Relational and Socially Engaged Spirituality The major implication of an all-quadrant, all-level approach to spirituality is that physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels of being should be simultaneously exercised in self, culture, and nature (i.e., in the I, we, and it domains). There are many variations on this theme, ranging from Integral Transformative Practice to socially engaged spirituality to relationships as spiritual path. The implications of an integral spirituality are profound and widespread, and just beginning to have an impact.

James Arthur Ray:

Just suppose I could show you a way to accomplish anything and everything you choose to accomplish in your life… You would be interested in hearing about that, wouldn’t you?

Here’s just a taste of what you’ll experience at the Harmonic Wealth® Weekend:

Break-through the unconscious chains that keep you frozen like a deer in headlights…
Literally vanquish stress and fears that have held you hostage and stuck…
Learn the nasty little trick your mind plays on you that keeps wealth and fulfillment out of reach and how to neutralize it once and for all…
Stop making excuses and start creating outrageous results…
Learn and master three little-known secrets to immediately increase your level of personal energy…
Learn to how to create true Harmonic Wealth in all areas of your life: Financially, Relationally, Mentally, Physically and Spiritually..

It’s a matter of degree. Check out Wilber’s 2007 book The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything, where the extravagant, history-shaking, claims are prolix.

New Age gurus, cults, organizations built around acceptance of the charlatan’s authority, are almost as timeless as the perennial philosophies or mystical methodologies, from which is appropriated, and ripped-off, the awesome secret of the ages recast as—hold on—a revolutionary technology. The next steps are: product line; brand; revenue processing infrastructure–in short, industrialization.

This casts the impressionable novice into the master’s hands, except, the new “post-modern” ritualistic mode, (called today: ‘a life practice,’) is, (borrowing here from Walter Benjamin,) ritual severed from its deep verity, and, instead delivered into the regimens of “personal” politics, and social relations ordinated by power.

All you need next are customers. My informed guess is such customers will be of several vulnerable types. If the technology is implemented effectively, the customer will be ‘transformed’ into an acolyte by having the most essential human capabilities with regard to the development of consciousness stripped out of their tool box: one, is their bullshit meter; the other is their ability to differentiate, discern, and, base their awareness in the gritty reality incumbent in the short human life span. At a minimum, these tools, when retained, allow a daring consumer to avoid getting themselves in the vicinity of, for example, Harmonic Wealth Weekends, or close up to the Quantum Leap or Integralproduct lines.

Consider: the cost of profound spiritual advancement is not measurable in any outlay of dollars because there isn’t any outlay of dollars that is a requisite to this kind of advancement. This is somewhat a time-honored principle given that a spiritual master is very likely to be on about the problem of the material world, rather than being a plain ol’ merchandiser, banker, or shylock.

As for Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, I mark a negative turning point happening around 2001-2002. 2001 was the year his book, A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality, was published. It was also the year he gave an interview to Jordan Gruber (e.com). From this interview—my bolded highlights:

E.com: Are any of your projects at I-I still going forward, like let’s say the Encyclopedia of Transformation?

KW: Sure, yes, we’re still funding that, we’re still carrying the Human Change Process core team forward. We also refer to it as the Human Transformation Team. They are working on an Encyclopedia of Human Transformation, a complete literature review of all known forms of transformation for human beings.

Transformation seems to be a major concept that everybody talks about but we really don’t have a good literature review of what’s out there, number one, and number two, the type of research, what evidence is there that any of these things that say they transform people actually transform people. There are a lot of different ways you can at least try to look at that and get a handle on it, and we’re certainly doing that.

E.com: In the meantime, though, the grants that people could write to I-I for, none of that’s happening?

KW: No, what’s happening right now is that one of the main things we wanted to do with the original one hundred million dollars was to get it to as many people as possible doing work in this field, the general field of integral studies and integral endeavors. That’s one of the reasons that I started Integral Institute, to act as a funding source for people doing this kind of work because the marketplace doesn’t reward truly integral studies as all. It rewards New Age approaches to it, it rewards the experiential workshop approach, as it were, it rewards the green meme and the purple meme and everything in between, but it does not reward truly integral studies.

So, the only way we’re going to get real work done in this field is, frankly, if we have funding agencies that will do it. And once the real work is done, and the research is done, and we start producing really solid texts, and presentations, and articles, and research, then we can create a market off of that. That’s going to be probably three years from now.

So, what we’ve done at Integral Institute … the biggest change in our orientation happened not because of the market, but quite independent of that, a change we would have made whether the market went up or down. And that is, we went from being a kind of community of some four hundred founding members to focusing more on producing what we call “integral product,” actual books, texts, academic material in each of the ten branches. So we’re working on books in, for example, What is Integral Politics? What is Integral Business? Integral Medicine? Integral Law? Because what we found was that there were no really strong statements about an integral approach to any of these fields.

E.com: Which is one of the reasons academia can ignore it completely.

KW: It can ignore it completely, and the other things we found is that most people with very very good intentions would simply take what they’re doing and call it integral when it really wasn’t. They were leaving out certain aspects of the human condition that ought not to be left out. We could demonstrate that to them, and they would say, “OK, I guess what I’m doing is not integral.”

So before we can build community, or create a market, or have a web presence, or have conferences, we have to produce specific texts in each of these ten branches, put together by one of our core teams of recognized scholars and researchers, saying “This is our best shot as an opening statement about what integral business is, integral politics, integral education, integral medicine, integral law, integral psychology, integral spirituality, and so on.”

E.com: I’ve received quite a few questions from graduate students in different areas saying, “I’m an anthropology grad student, what do I do to try to bring an all quadrants all levels approach into my university without completing alienating the powers that be?” Or how can a psychology graduate student become more involved with integral studies and help boost the efforts in a green meme school? It’s sort of like they are dying out there for the kind of supporting materials you’ve just been speaking of.

KW: That’s exactly what we found. Until we have a series of really well-done, well documented, textbooks, if you will … here’s integral anthropology, here’s integral law and criminal justice, here’s integral medicine … until we have this series of statements, the field has no traction. It has no way to really move forward. Whereas, if you do have a book on integral approaches to education, for example, and it’s a textbook with eight authors … we plan on having these things be three and four hundred pages long … we want to make a real academic statement, to begin with. Again, it’s not the final word, it’s the opening word. It’s our first approximation of what an integral approach would actually look like, one that is truly all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states. Anything less than that’s not going to be integral.

Once we have this kind of book on, let’s say, integral anthropology, and a student calls up and says “I’m going to Arizona State,” for example, “and I would like to take an all quadrant all level all line approach to anthropological research. My professor thinks I’m nuts. What should I do?” And we say, “Give him this 400 page textbook, and here’s three hundred references, and here are supporting documents.”

That would give them something to look at and respond to. And if they have criticisms of it, we’d love to hear it, because we’re going to keep refining these things over the years. What we have to have is a statement, a really strong academic statement to begin with, because otherwise the field is simply going nowhere. And it has gone nowhere in thirty years.

It boils down to a question:

How did Wilber’s Integral TOE go from a vision for “a really strong academic statement to begin with” to:

“All of the offerings of, and partnerships with, Integral Life have my personal seal of quality control” ???

Say what you will about the academic professionalization of the disciplines, it would not be the case that a given discipline requires its knowledge to be certified by a single person’s imprimatur. Aside from the academic world, itself problematic in many ways, all I’m suggesting is that the Integral framework would have benefitted from the jockeying of a cogent critical culture, democratization, and collegial collaboration. This requires no single-minded, single-leader, stewardship. Instead, “Integral” ended up with an overlord!

Incredibly, (to me–even to this day,) this astonishingly “blue” turn is unremarked upon within the now sealed ‘monasterium’ of wilberworld.

It didn’t have to happen. If Wilber had decided to seed his model in a select number of conventional academic environments,or done so among independent scholars, three productive and crucial developments would have followed. One, the questions begged by the model’s implicit meta-framework would have started to be addressed. (They have not yet been addressed by insiders.) Two, the Integral Model/Theory would have become democratized and pluralized, and, consequently, unhooked from the stewardship of Ken Wilber. Three, the Integral Model/Theory eventually would have come to be improved by the sociological environment and methods employed by rigorous researchers.

There’s another benefit, rolled into #3. Wilber’s own shortfalls in understanding many of his named source materials would have come to be corrected. Also, the large and diverse scholarly ongoing work in anthropology and social psychology and sociology already partially related—on their own terms—to some integral concepts could have figured in the further development of Integral studies. (For example, in anthropology, there is Henrietta Moore’s overview of meta-anthropology; and Steven Tyler’s work on antimony.*) Alas, Integral studies never was smartly promoted to, or partnered with, mainstream scholarly persons and resources.

The result is Wilber was right: the field he invented has gone, mostly, nowhere. (I exclude from this grim picture the handful of people working to advance the Integral framework from outside wilberworld. See: Integral World, for example.)

What did happen is that the self-help (ie. self-development) integral methodologies came to lead the integral charge, or, alternately, pull the integral cart. Why this came to be the main track of the integral seems to me obvious from reading Boomeritis(2003). There Wilber’s resentment of his conventional, materialistic, peers and fellow-baby boomers, not only oils much of the ranting, but comes to also fuel Wilber’s infantile jousts with his internet critics. Placing himself at the top of the Integral chain of being, (how ironic!) must seem to Wilber like the best revenge.

Yet, is there in the self-development industry a more peculiar and status-grubbing figure than Ken Wilber? What is one of Wilber’s goals? Well, he wants to “reconstruct the spiritual systems of the great wisdom traditions but with none of their
metaphysical baggage.” Why, when he could have helped in researching the variable nature of wisdom.

The road not taken; and thus the road taken:

There is indeed an Integral Revolution that is just now beginning to sweep the world, and by joining Integral Life you announce that you are an intrinsic part of this extraordinary worldwide transformation. In the history of the world, there have only been 4 or 5 truly major transformations—from magic/foraging to mythic/agrarian to rational/industrial to postmodern/internet. The Integral/meshwork is the 5th major transformation in all of humankind’s history, with the exception here being that you can actually be a direct part of this extraordinary transformation in many ways, a premiere way being to join Integral Life itself and become part of the worldwide community that is creating, right now, the very form of the future, this time in an Integral fashion.

The Integral/meshwork is the 5th major transformation in all of humankind’s history.

And we know this because it will be the very first to be spearheaded by one dude. There’s no need to unpack this grandiose vision. The Integral Theory became messianic doctrine.

James Arthur Ray:

James Arthur Ray is transforming the way the world thinks. As an internationally-renowned Personal Success Strategist, Visionary and New York Times Best-Selling Author who has traveled the globe dedicating over two decades of his life to studying the thoughts, actions, and habits of those who create true wealth in every area of their life, James delivers his practical teachings to hundreds of thousands of individuals and business leaders every year.

Hat tip to Daniel Gustav Anderson.

The work of making public knowledge has fallen into private hands. Neoliberalism has basically been a catastrophe for institutions of higher education, which effectively become corporations serving other corporations rather than sites of service to students and responsible to the public. Chomsky’s book The Knowledge Factory is as good a place to start on this question as any other.

I am entertaining the idea that Wilber’s Sham-Wow Integral Life thing represents the apotheosis of this process. It is absolutely undemocratic, and wholly commodified, for every aspect of a person’s life and learning, beginning with the most personally significant (spirituality, identity, relationships, &c). Knowledge-production, pedagogy, all of it not only under one roof but all of it with the same brand, all flowing from the top down to the lowly consumer. This is the “banking model” as Friere diagnosed it at its most baroque point of development. Maybe past Baroque to Rococo even?

I can’t think of a single reason to take Wilber, let alone Ray, seriously. The proof is in the noxious pudding, say of Integral Spirituality. That they’ve both managed to industrialize their own maniacal egotism and chalatanry, in one case to ring the register, in the other to cause manslaughter, is unremarkable. Albeit both are signs of our suckers marching-with-charge cards-in -hand times.

* There’s lots of integral scholarship which knows not the integral name. None of it is on Wilber’s radar screen.

Deepak Chopra, the new age maven, regularly contributes to the Huffington Post. Today, he starts out with this:

I.

This year, the world celebrated Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. But now that all the backslapping is nearing an end, it may be time to reflect on where things really stand. When Darwin finished writing “Origin of Species” in the fall of 1859 — exactly 150 years ago — the theory of evolution became part of the Newtonian world picture. However, since that time, major puzzles of mainstream science have forced a re-evaluation of the nature of the universe that goes far beyond anything Darwin could have imagined.

I’m trying to fathom Chopra writing his opening paragraph and not feeling as if he is about to fling into the Huffington winds something both patronizing to Darwin, and, something idiotic. Alas, to the tune of cash registers ringing, Chopra takes his insights seriously. No, this spiritual advisor to Oprah is onto to something with his colleague, Robert Lanza: the spiritualization of solipsism! Via quantum mechanics!!!

Science obviously investigates what it is able to investigate. There’s no move to re-evaluate the nature of the universe, when nature is posed as a lumpen “nature” in the way that Chopra means, and has meant in the past. Still, Chopra is playing a deceptive word game here too. He actually believes science is quite incapable when it comes to the re-evaluation he’s on about.

After this weird opener, Chopra moves on:

One new theory — called biocentrism — proposes that an accurate understanding of the world requires putting observers firmly into the equation, and that life may not be the accident of physics and chemistry that evolution suggests.

What the heck do you suppose the word “accident” means in this context? Anyway, Chopra is dancing, around the anthropic frame. Because Chopra is driving his ignorance toward the a-ha of biocentrism, he’s not going to entertain anything about what is really the case in science. Not amazingly, Chopra is mistaken twice in this sentence; but, what the heck, (he) might as well conflate both errors! First, one need not propose that understanding implies observers. This is a tautology. There are understandings by virtue of their being ‘understanders.’ Second, although randomness is a specific factor in the current model of biological evolution, the term accident is of zero import in this same model. Accident can’t do any duty in most cosmological arguments. It can do notional duty in the Just So argument, where it is the null consequent posited against the idea that this universe is the only possible universe given necessary initial features–that we don’t—yet—know anything about.

(This Just So idea isn’t held by cosmologists; as far as I know. I find it appealing. It fits one of my loosely held prejudices–that anthropomorphizing the “all-in-all” is much more boring than the alternative. So if it is unnecessary to do so, and unnecessary to pose a designer, because we live in the only possible universe, then our universe is much less boring. Although, this noted, I’m agnostic about favoring any single theory in the realm of speculative cosmological theorizing—due to my own technical ignorance.)

Chopra is superfically referring to a mash-up of controversies having to do with, variously, fine-tuning arguments, rare earth and rare biology hypotheses, and various implications of the anthropic principle. Each might be clearly differentiated, yet this isn’t entertained by Chopra.

The current model proposes that the universe was until rather recently a lifeless collection of particles bouncing against each other, and obeying predetermined rules that were mysterious in their origin. The universe is presented as a watch that somehow wound itself and that, allowing for a degree of quantum randomness, will unwind in a semi-predictable way. But there are many problems with this paradigm — some obvious, others rarely mentioned but just as fundamental. But the overarching problem involves life, even if the way it changes forms can be apprehended using Darwinian mechanisms.

Omigoodness. I suppose in Chopra’s scheme of things, 3.5+ billion years is recent, (against the age of the universe given as 13-14 billion years.) But, I don’t know of the particles bouncing aspect of any current model. And, his “allowing for a degree of quantum randomness, will unwind in a semi-predictable way” is simply meaningless.

Over-arching are many various unsolved mysteries, one of which is the development of life on a rocky, temperate planet. However, not for nothing has Chopra long been driven to explicate a universe with Chopra-esque entities at its very center!

( For me it is more interesting that Chopra understands there is a audience vulnerable to this loopy description, and, that he knows it visits the Huffington Post.)

Why, for instance, are the laws of nature exactly balanced for life to exist? There are over 200 physical parameters within the solar system and universe so exact that it strains credulity to propose that they are random — even if that is exactly what contemporary physics baldly suggests. These fundamental constants (like the strength of gravity) are not predicted by any theory — all seem to be carefully chosen, often with great precision, to allow for existence of life. Tweak any of them and you never existed.

“Physics” suggests no such thing. This is the part where my fascination with the idea that Chopra anticipates a willing audience for his blather, mixes with my sense that he actually believes he’s describing some state of affairs accurately. Chosen!!! How quickly Chopra crosses into Intelligent Design’s territory, and, given Chopra’s pedigree, into the realm of the God-of-the-Gaps. Except, Chopra, unconcerned with any precision in his own use of metaphor, and, incidentally, elsewhere a harsh critic of reductionism and scientism, here squishes his argument into ‘tweak and you don’t exist.’ (*)

Poor you! With Chopra, his next move usually is annunciated by the ringing of his cash register, because part of the appeal of an entire class of human-centric, teleological, foundationalistic system building, is that such a system can help restore a sense that we’re all god-persons and each and everyone of us has a divine universe rotating around our divinity. And, one has to buy into this, and buy stuff, and, otherwise, consume the various product lines of the guru-esque proponents. Since Chopra himself offers such product lines, in the scheme of his own probalistic assumptions, even I have to admit that if it turns out Chopra and his ilk turn out to be right, the price to be paid turns out to be incredibly cheap. By the same token, if he’s wrong, then he’s merchandising to suckers.

He’s on about biocentrism, and, Chopra will finish his strange post with arguments even more bereft of sense than what has been highlighted here. This inspires a certain direction for a few follow-up posts. What interests me the most is how this particular variety of system building always ends up collapsing the unknown—thus reduces to zero actual paradox and mystery—into a known.

The specified teleologies in any such modern system often end up in “product lines.” And, whether they do or they do not, my own survey suggests each such totalizing system require all of the consumer’s negative capability to be surrendered.

note-Nick Bostrom, PhD. Fine-Tuning Arguments in Cosmology (doc)

Rumi, version by Coleman Barks.

I hear you and I’m everywhere, a spreading music.
You’ve done this many times.
You already own me, but once more
you buy me back into being.

(*) See if you can unpack the contradiction inherent in supposing that a tweak of physical constants ends your existence with the idea that those same constants are the product of cosmic intelligence, or design.

(update: Newsmax removed the column from which the excerpts below are taken. see mediamatters.)

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 10:35 AM By: John L. Perry

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn’t the Third World.  If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

Officers swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States.”

Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.
They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.

They can see that the economy — ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation — is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.

So, if you are one of those observant military professionals, what do you do?

Wait until Israel is forced to launch air strikes on Iran’s nuclear-bomb plants, and the Middle East explodes, destabilizing or subjugating the Free World?

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

Emboldened parts in the excerpt jump out the most for me.

That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Okay–fair enough sophistry–how could it happen? To heck with why it should or should not happen. Let’s roll with what a military leadership would have to accomplish to realize military control of the country.

First, in planning out what is in constitutional and military terms, treason, this leadership would have to figure out how to insure the compliance of each and every land, sea, air, command throughout the entire military. Presumably, short of 100% “buy-in,” the treasonous top rankers  could obtain a critical mass of buy-in enough so that severe disincentives could be threatened for any resisting military personnel. The problem with this is how it could all churn into something uncivil.

Second. It’s not at all in the least bit likely, but let’s say the treason unfolds neatly enough among the military services. Now the new regime needs to re-order the domestic arena. Here the challenges are many and hideously amplified. After all, with the a freshly birthed military dictatorship, the treasonous leaders will be compelled to–at once–suspend the Constitution and, soon enough, will need to alter the day-to-day structure of the justice system. The reasons for this should be obvious enough if you train your mind on practicalities inherent in this insane scenario.

There would be no reason to assume a favorable critical mass among every category of law enforcement which exists outside of the military. My own opinion is that there are any number of clear reasons why the U.S. could not turn into a military dictatorship. That law enforcement is comprehensively decentralized would be the principle structural reason for why the military would fail in implementing a treasonous design.

Even if you assume that some law enforcement would comply because they sort out the change in which way the wind blows, there is every reason to think all sorts of skilled officers at every non-military level, wouldn’t embrace a treasonous agenda. Take northeastern Ohio, there are hardly any  military personnel stationed here, and, it’s a hot bed of liberal Democrats.

I think it doubtful the Sons of Geauga would find it worthwhile to invade the newly minted Gailic Republic of Lakewood. Nor do I think it clear Santa Monica, Burlington, Berkeley, Austin, Boston, Seattle, etc., would go softly into the dusk.

But, even if you, as member or advisor to the treasonous junta, felt it likely that any resistance could eventually be crushed, thus ‘mitigated,’ and any hot beginning would cool down, and, furthermore, could stand up an immense infrastructure  for housing new political prisoners, you and your kind would quickly come to problem three.

Three, the economy would immediately implode. The financial superstructure would devolve and disintegrate. All those global sovereign lenders would call in their loans. They’d be nuts not to. And, soon enough this would all blow up–as it became patently clear to the treasonous military men that they hadn’t counted on, for example, a drastic reduction in the food supply coming in the wake of the collapse of the economy.

How would it transpire otherwise? Business-as-usual is unthinkable; is not a rational speculation. In the wake of the coup the framework of laws is completely revised; there are millions of people resisting; you’re own henchman of liberty are killing resistors apace; and, just for ill, measure the stock market, in effect, resets itself! Then, it closes its doors for awhile.

Nope, the American economy is completely not able to be fitted to the dress size of a military dictatorship. Nor is law enforcement, nor is the military itself.

military eyes

Perry assumes that treason is right there, clipped to the belt, for the patriot who possesses military eyes. I do not believe I have ever read of a greater insult of the military than that which Perry has rendered here, keyed by his notion of a monolithic perspective named by his metaphoric military eyes.

Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.

Besides nothing being nationalized, what staggers me is the implicit suggestion of the author that his perception of the trampling of the Constitution requires the military to end, even temporarily, the Constitution. (Oh, I’m reminded, in light of this, the military’s legal codes would have to be revamped in the wake of its leadership’s sedition.)

this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012

The author assumes a singular recognition. There is, throughout US history, no extant example of any singular recognition either existing without other recognitions, or, supremely existing as a matter of its being enforced. Incidentally, the Constitution implicitly functions to prevent any such singular recognition of American identity becoming preeminent..

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration

You can’t have a coup for the purpose of defending the Constitution. A coup violates the Constitution.

Article III. Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

The treasonous would be subject to serious sanction unless they also: suspended the Federal Courts and the Congress.

Finally.

In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

Perry comes clean here. He’s a sore loser. Doesn’t cotton to the tyranny of the elected, and, he has concocted an explanatory fantasy: the liberal-socialist-marxist voters banded together, presumably because of their dream of a marxist nanny state, and elected Obama.

Anytime, you lose and the other guy wins, the morass soon enough beckons. So: the electoral majority is the basic problem to be solved.

…by a military coup. Benign, patriotic, and eventually willing to restore the Constitution..at which point, another vote will happen and another majority will get the high ground, and the losers will get the morass.

I wonder what Perry privately believes would resolve once-and-for-all the damn problem of the other guy winning?

Of all the photos I’ve seen of members of the not-at-all silent minority, each one expressing on t-shirt and sign sentiments ranging from forthright trepidation to depraved paranoia, this photo is the one that, for me, says it all. Harkening back to previous discussion about how sentiments, (and world views and framings and the sort,) may be an aspect of allowing sensibility to be programmed–thus etched, thus unmovable–the dichotomy in the idea of hard workers/everybody else, puts the object relations in relief.

This goes back a very long way, to the 19th century in America. The following cartoons are from the collection at The Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University.

IDLENESS

PROTECTING WHITE LABOR (click for larger version)

Both cartoons are from the 1880′s.

Then there’s the resurgent idea about the salutary effects of resistance.

Plucked from Jefferson’s letter to William Smith in 1787:

“Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. And what country can preserve its liberties, if it’s rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

I suspect advocates of this salutary resistance wouldn’t be able to tell you much about the so-called second American Revolution–Jefferson’s presidency–or the sweep of events leading to Jackson, then to Lincoln and the Civil War, and, soon enough to the first iteration of contemporary themes in the last four decades of the 19th century.

In our national discussion, the terminology from the right has obtained a marvelous level of conflation. What can a student of political philosophy and political economy and history say in response to Republicans musing over calling their opponents ‘socialist democrats,’ this coming on the heels of their stringing together, liberals-socialists-marxists-fascists?

However, given the demographic Waterloo the Republicans now face, rallying a few more badly educated yahoos to the rump party’s cause won’t do the trick. The Daily Show and Jon Stewart nail the actual state of the bruised Republican psyche: they’re struggling with having to cope after having lost the presidency after controlling the executive branch for 28 out of 40 years. Like it was in the era of McKinley, the country was not guided by populists, let alone Jeffersonians.

Not for nothing do some protest in knowing ways: “But, we’re not a democracy–we’re a Republic!”

The several core contradictions are delicious. I’ll gloss the context and explain why I suspect the Republican idealogues have lost their purchase on the vaunted principles of conservatism. Three features jump out above all. One, is their appeal to righteousness based in a Manichean struggle for the soul of an idealized America. Two, and related to this, is their retreaded appeal to a silent majority. And, third, is how all of this is inflected by a kind of post-modern Calvinism, and, a version of Christian ethics, removed almost completely from the communitarian Christologcal ethic, from the ethic, (so-to-speak,) of the beatitudes.

So: there is the formation of identity based in appropriation of a backward cast idealization of a monolithic golden primal age, itself–this glorious and singular past–produced by the severe Christianity of the sainted Founders. Then, it is incumbent upon the knowing patriots to–always–resist the forces of “liberal-fascist” traitors.

It goes something like this, I feel.

It is true, on the other hand, that the golden age of founding patriotism was not funded by a severe Christianity, was not in any way monolithic, (witness the gulf between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson; between Alexander Hamilton and james Madison, etc.,) and would not come to a bloody clash of divergent patriotism and between patriots, until the Civil War.

(That the extremist tea party brethren reject Christian brotherhood in favor of personal responsibility-fueled social darwinism is remarkable too.)

What ideas brought this about?

Although it could be said to be time-honored that ancient conceptions of conservatism do pose a struggle between truth and falsehood, between the superior and the inferior, between the wise and the foolish, a Manichean struggle to a finish over these points of contention is frozen out in the structuring of our Republican form of governance. Say what you will about the foundational value of olden tradition, founding American values, especially the ones about the people governing themselves–these values stand against the severities implicit in rule by a backward-facing, absolute truth knowing, prudent, wise, superior statist elite of the left, or the right. Ha! All things in moderation: ‘in the middle,’ via negotiation and compromise and sacrifice on both sides.

Yet, the powerful programming of ideas into and in the varieties of factional psyche is evident, and generates powerful effects. This is easily seen on both sides, when “principle” is employed to sucker ideological fundamentalists into supporting populist agendas, be the agenda conservative or liberal. Then, once the legislative majority is obtained, out go the principles and the populism. The principles can’t be finally and forever sorted out, but a populist agenda may be sorted out–as long as one is willing to vote the con men out of office. This doesn’t happen much anymore.

Beware the idealization of principles, and, beware of the fantasy supposing our form of government is about vanquishing ideological enemies once and for all. Against righteous ‘classically conservative’ foundationalism and traditionalism stand the contra-principles of our founding value set and, among many such principles, stands its radical principle of equality. This single principles gives the boot to any superior principle able to fuel a Manichean zero-sum battle. So it is: George Washington didn’t get crowned; whatever the flux of Judeo-Christian principles might be, no theocracy is to emerge; and, founding principles are subject to later pragmatic modification-this granted by the possibility that the major people may change their major minds.

Trusting in the wisdom of any mob is anathema to the precedents of classical conservatism. American conservatism has always wrestled with the inhering contradictions that come along with how uneasily classical conservatism rests with the funding radically liberal wisdom of the “winning” founders. Something is embraced, but it’s not the wisdom of the ancients. Sorry, but John Dewey is ideationally much closer to Jefferson, than is Aristotle.

Certainly Christological values are talked up. Not walked, but talked. It’s hard to see those ethics as centering conservative values. Jesus himself was somewhat the radical liberal liberator. Still, Christological values do not put on offer, for example: the ownership society, an avarice fueled meritocracy or aristocracy, social darwinism, and doing to others what surely one would not want done to themselves. Ironically, personal responsibility is crucial to Christian ethics, but it’s embedded in a communitarian movement, (that eventually was defused by decadent Popery and the self-serving neo-traditionalism of Christian orthodoxies.) I point this out because the value-laden collectivism made explicit in the social gospel is–how shall I say?–rather ‘socialistic.’

If not on traditionalism, and, if not on communal Christianity, then where might conservative values hang their hat?

What possibly could be attractive about philosophical pessimism morphed into plain meanness? I heard a radio commentator say a few years ago something along the lines of: “Life is hard. Any sensible person will plan for the worst. All attempts to protect the bankrupt, the persons without insurance, the unemployed, work against people being responsible for their life.”

Oh yeah, personal responsibility. Work ethic. In the second half of the 19th century the battle lines were drawn. Literally: “shut up and do your job!” Like Ivan Illich, I would suggest that allegiance to work ethic alone is contra-liberty.

Nostalgia? McKinley was Karl Rove’s favorite President, so we know about that. Reagan-some might draw him into this consideration. But he was every bit the post-modernist and post-conservative. He was: a spend and borrower on a gigantic scale; a son of Hollywood with his own post-nuclear family; a militarist and death dealer; not pious or a traditionalist; badly educated; a social engineer; a corporatist and corporate welfarist; and, to frost everything, he was an extreme anti-constitutionalist. To his credit, when caught running an illegal shadow military op, he did say, ‘The buck stops with me.’

It is not configured in any way to be wisely deployed in a Republic or democracy. In fact, modern democracy of our American kind is stood up against all varieties of precisely this, ‘Cheneyesque,’ pretention to any assertion of monarch-like, kingly, power. Any such attempts on the part of persons who self-select to the grown-up mantle, next require compliance and next require their work to be done in secret, is more fit to the rule of. . .say a place like Saudi Arabia. To borrow from Colonel Pat Lang, there’s a Jacobin streak in Cheney–rule by secret committee–and I’d like to add a bit of a Wahhabi streak in Cheney too!

I’m just following the descent. You come quickly to the crazed inanities spilt from some endless reservoir of stupid by the likes of Michelle Bachman, james Imhofe and Jim DeMint. yes, possible to be dishonest to a heavy fault. But mendacity as a marketing tactic? Are the kids really to be marched to re-education camps?

Eventually this crosses into the wickedly conspiratorial Paultardery, and conspiracy mongering, and then percolates back up to provide fumes for the Manichean meme to run on. A death match with the remnants, (apologies to Albert Jay Nock,) of the hippie era? The brew is conspiratorial paranoia.

I’m speaking here of, in our day, the already arid post-conservatism. It seems that good ol’ conservatism never reached any historical hyperion of virtue and prudence against which a measure of contemporary decadence could be quantified. Alas, post-conservatism isn’t even decadent. It’s desiccated, hysteric, paranoid, and, ultimately, buried deep in its collective psyche, is its lonely soul. Personified by Glenn Beck–the one who brings all the incoherent strands together.

Evoking bathos.

This is too bad. Russell Kirk must be spinning in his grave.

Ten Conservative Principles by Russell Kirk Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order. The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude.

It is not possible to draw up a neat catalogue of conservatives’ convictions; nevertheless, I offer you, summarily, ten general principles; it seems safe to say that most conservatives would subscribe to most of these maxims. In various editions of my book The Conservative Mind I have listed certain canons of conservative thought—the list differing somewhat from edition to edition; in my anthology The Portable Conservative Reader I offer variations upon this theme. Now I present to you a summary of conservative assumptions differing somewhat from my canons in those two books of mine. In fine, the diversity of ways in which conservative views may find expression is itself proof that conservatism is no fixed ideology. What particular principles conservatives emphasize during any given time will vary with the circumstances and necessities of that era. The following ten articles of belief reflect the emphases of conservatives in America nowadays.

First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent. This word order signifies harmony. There are two aspects or types of order: the inner order of the soul, and the outer order of the commonwealth. Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato taught this doctrine, but even the educated nowadays find it difficult to understand. The problem of order has been a principal concern of conservatives ever since conservative became a term of politics. Our twentieth-century world has experienced the hideous consequences of the collapse of belief in a moral order. Like the atrocities and disasters of Greece in the fifth century before Christ, the ruin of great nations in our century shows us the pit into which fall societies that mistake clever self- interest, or ingenious social controls, for pleasing alternatives to an oldfangled moral order. It has been said by liberal intellectuals that the conservative believes all social questions, at heart, to be questions of private morality. Properly understood, this statement is quite true. A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society—whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society—no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be. Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.

Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know. Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice. Thus the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls. Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically. The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted. Burke’s reminder of the necessity for prudent change is in the mind of the conservative. But necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to he gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once.

Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription—that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights to property, often. Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part. Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis

new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgment and private rationality. The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.

Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.

Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell. Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Upon the foundation of private property, great civilizations are built. The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth. Economic levelling, conservatives maintain, is not economic progress. Getting and spending are not the chief aims of human existence; but a sound economic basis for the person, the family, and the commonwealth is much to be desired.

Sir Henry Maine, in his Village Communities, puts strongly the case for private property, as distinguished from communal property: “Nobody is at liberty to attack several property and to say at the same time that he values civilization. The history of the two cannot be disentangled.” For the institution of several property—that is, private property—has been a powerful instrument for teaching men and women responsibility, for providing motives to integrity, for supporting general

teaching men and women responsibility, for providing motives to integrity, for supporting general culture, for raising mankind above the level of mere drudgery, for affording leisure to think and freedom to act. To be able to retain the fruits of one’s labor; to be able to see one’s work made permanent; to be able to bequeath one’s property to one’s posterity; to be able to rise from the natural condition of grinding poverty to the security of enduring accomplishment; to have something that is really one’s own—these are advantages difficult to deny. The conservative acknowledges that the possession of property fixes certain duties upon the possessor; he accepts those moral and legal obligations cheerfully.

Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism. Although Americans have been attached strongly to privacy and private rights, they also have been a people conspicuous for a successful spirit of community. In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily. Some of these functions are carried out by local political bodies, others by private associations: so long as they are kept local, and are marked by the general agreement of those affected, they constitute healthy community. But when these functions pass by default or usurpation to centralized authority, then community is in serious danger. Whatever is beneficent and prudent in modern democracy is made possible through cooperative volition. If, then, in the name of an abstract Democracy, the functions of community are transferred to distant political direction—why, real government by the consent of the governed gives way to a standardizing process hostile to freedom and human dignity. For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed. A central administration, or a corps of select managers and civil servants, however well intentioned and well trained, cannot confer justice and prosperity and tranquility upon a mass of men and women deprived of their old responsibilities. That experiment has been made before; and it has been disastrous. It is the performance of our duties in community that teaches us prudence and efficiency and charity.

Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. Politically speaking, power is the ability to do as one likes, regardless of the wills of one’s fellows. A state in which an individual or a small group are able to dominate the wills of their fellows without check is a despotism, whether it is called monarchical or aristocratic or democratic. When every person claims to be a power unto himself, then society falls into anarchy. Anarchy never lasts long, being intolerable for everyone, and contrary to the ineluctable fact that some persons are more strong and more clever than their neighbors. To anarchy there succeeds tyranny or oligarchy, in which power is monopolized by a very few.

The conservative endeavors to so limit and balance political power that anarchy or tyranny may not arise. In every age, nevertheless, men and women are tempted to overthrow the limitations upon power, for the sake of some fancied temporary advantage. It is characteristic of the radical that he thinks of power as a force for good—so long as the power falls into his hands. In the name of liberty, the French and Russian revolutionaries abolished the old restraints upon power; but power cannot be abolished; it always finds its way into someone’s hands. That power which the revolutionaries had thought oppressive in the hands of the old regime became many times as tyrannical in the hands of the radical new masters of the state.

Knowing human nature for a mixture of good and evil, the conservative does not put his trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite—these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.
Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects. The conservative knows that any healthy society is influenced by two forces, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression. The Permanence of a society is formed by those enduring interests and convictions that gives us stability and continuity; without that Permanence, the fountains of the great deep are broken up, society slipping into anarchy. The Progression in a society is that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement; without that Progression, a people stagnate.

Therefore the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression. He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.

Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.

Such, then, are ten principles that have loomed large during the two centuries of modern conservative thought. Other principles of equal importance might have been discussed here: the conservative understanding of justice, for one, or the conservative view of education. But such subjects, time running on, I must leave to your private investigation.

The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal.

Adapted from The Politics of Prudence (ISI Books, 1993

Rob Cockerham: John Marcotte. You’ve filed a petition with the Secretary of State, in an effort to get a voter’s initative on the California 2010 ballot.

John Marcotte: Yes. Filed the paperwork on September 1. It’s the “2010 California Marriage Protection Act.” I am trying to ban divorce in the state of California.

RC: Ok. So your act, if it became law, would make marriage undissolvable.

John: Exactly. The only exception would be if the marriage was “voidable” – if you married an 8-year-old, you don’t get to keep her. She goes back on the shelf. You can’t marry the mentally incapacitated, etc.

RC: Ah, ok, so most normal marriages would be irreversable.

John: 99.99% of all marriages would be set in stone. It’s a return to traditional values.

By all means check out the web site, rescuemarriage.org. Is it within the realm of possibility Marcotte is actually doing performance art?

click for large version in lightbox

Here’s Part 1 of a youtube video posted there. Part 2 is on the networkweaver blog.

I did some data entry for a network map Valdis Krebs, a member of the blog’s team, created several years ago for E4S, the sustainability and entrepreneurship organization run by my friend Holly.

Off and on, Holly and me have discussed her vision about how she develops and nurtures her network. Coming at it from the perspective of adult transformative learning (and social psychology oriented to my constructivist prejudices,) I’ve entered into our dialog at times my sense of the place distinctive aspects of personality and relationship and group awareness occupy within a vibrant human network. Although, for me, I prefer to think of this kind of social activity as constituting webs/entanglements of dynamic group relations, rather than their constituting a network, or networks.

The reason for my bias is the map of a network doesn’t depict the “3D” dimensionality of human interaction and enactment. The network maps I’ve viewed tend to reify, reduce, and erase the complexities of the underlying human relationships the map depicts. As is often the case, such a picture tilts its emphasis in the direction of representing (a kind of) flattened relational instrumentality. This is fine as far as it goes; after all, the purpose of the map is different than the purposes I can conjure!

On the other hand, in their structure, the maps I’ve seen, are–necessarily–reifying devices. There may be ways to engineer a map to depict some of the deep features of the network.

The upshot of this is: engineering again needs to be vulnerable to the infection of deeper, interdisciplinary, and, (if you wll,) “multi-modal,” analysis.This could aim to realize a qualitative model of the interplay and contingent relations discoverable when the human system is examined more closely. The point would be to elicit different manifest levels underlying the depiction of connects. This richer territory could be mapped to a different variant of the conventional map.

For example, Krebs and June Holley wrote a paper, Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving (2002-2006).

In the introduction:

Communities are built on connections. [snip] Improved connectivity is created through an iterative process of knowing the network and knitting the network.M

How are communities actually built?

Similarly:

Network maps provide a revealing snapshot of a business ecosystem at a particular point in time.

These maps can help answer many key questions in the community building process.

• Are the right connections in place? Are any key connections missing?
• Who are playing leadership roles in the community? Who is not, but should be?
• Who are the experts in process, planning and practice?
• Who are the mentors that others seek out for advice?
• Who are the innovators? Are ideas shared and acted upon?
• Are collaborative alliances forming between local businesses?
• Which businesses will provide a better return on investment – both for themselves and the community they are embedded in?

These are important questions. But they seem to me to beg even more fundamental questions:

What are the qualities of a right connection, and, per force, relationship?

What is the nature of, or, what are the possible natures of, leadership?

What are the social psychological dynamics of alliances and collaborations?

(Borrowing from James Hillman; |1|) What are additional kinds of profit found in businesses and communities? (Howabout Ivan Illich’s notion of conviviality?)

What are qualities of an innovative idea?

Ideas exist within contexts. Social action exists within contexts. Relationships exist within contexts. Analysis may be used to uncover the constructionist, sociological, ethnographical, phenomenological, and other threaded dependencies given by any rich human system.

The network map is not even about the true nature of the complex system.

The conception of the map of the network needs pluralizing.

(1) As the weaver connects to many groups, information is soon flowing into the weaver about each group’s skills, goals, successes and failures. An astute weaver can now start to introduce clusters that have common goals/interests or complementary skills/experiences to each other. As clusters connect, their spokes to the hub can weaken, freeing up the weaver to attach to new groups.

This is the most prominent exposure cognition receives in Krebs/Holley. Of course, their fine paper has different aims.

Still, from the perspective of adult learning, what flows in an idealized web of relations are learning contexts and potentials for learning experiences, and, concrete learning experiences. A weaver could employ additional tools, tools beyond those which support uniting “nodes” over mutual, complementary and sympathetic interests.

One goal of such learning within the network and via the web of relationships would be to deepen reflection, instantiate critical culture, and transform the inherent, (often overly-conventional) meaning schemes. This obviously starts to rub the network in tantalizing ways and evoke novel emergent learning.

So, too, business; just add an $ to profit–profit not only for partners and shareholders. The monotheism of the profit motive can be loosened so that it makes places for other kinds of profitability: profitable for the long term continuity of liffe and future generations, profitable to the pleasure and beauty of the common good, profitable to the spirit. The double bottom line of social and ecological responsibility extends profitability only part way. The idea of profit itself needs pluralizing. (James Jillman, Kinds of Power. A Guide to its Intelligent Uses, 1995) 

How has randomness played a key role in your life?

To which a tweet fluttered back:

How can randomness exist in a universe where everything is connected?

Okay. As I unfold the provisional conceptions given by the phenomenology of necessary contingencies, I wrestle with both randomness and connection. Randomness, event, and connects are joined at the foundation. Yet, this is not a tight join by any means. To peal away what are presumptive aspects of both randomness (or happenstance,) and connection, is to jiggle and then separate the join.

The tweet’s import obviously accomplishes this without any qualification. It provides a proposition:

Where everything is connected, randomness cannot also exist.

Everybody is familiar with this proposition’s folk social-psychological rendition: everything happens for a reason. About this, there is a question: does this mean an a priori reason is revealed by eventuation? The event happens, and reveals the reason already concealed, as-it-were, in the event.

Judith spoke of this as being effectively like the collapse of the wave function.

Or, is the reason attached to the event as a post facto rationale?

In the case of the a posteriori rationale, how would one know which among several reasons, is correct? This same question arises with the a priori reason, but in its case there would have to be a correct reason, because–after all–it’s “all ready” in the event.

The idea that randomness is not compatible with a priori reasons given in a comprehensive universe of “nothing but” connections, would need to be unpacked by an advocate of that position. It is interesting to note that proponents of the idea, everything happens for a reason, almost always hold the a priori posit. In turn, this putative position is often dismissed as a self-deception.  

Not withstanding facile dismissals, the questions begged by this position are very challenging.

Continuing from the earlier post What the Wind Blows, presenting a schema of Four Orders given as a phenomenological device. (This device captures the diversification of awareness about one’s own behavior–it ranges from the unconscious yet singularly aware First Order, to the conscious and singularly aware Second Order, to the conscious and aware-with-choice Third Order, to the conscious and aware-with-reasons-for-choosing Fourth Order.)

This general scheme may be extended to also frame a view of belief about any person’s relationships to the world. And this is extended to, specifically, belief as awareness about the objects (and objectification,) given by social aspects of the world.

Second Order – Singular; “This is what I believe!”

Third Order – Multiple; “This is what I believe, but, from other perspectives, what I believe looks different.”

Fourth Order – Multiple; This is what I believe, but I understand why I believe this–rather than some other thing. And, so, I can also see how I might come to believe this some other thing.

Note: the more diverse, the more ambivalent; the more diverse, the more available are possible choices of what to believe. Ambivalence, divergences, searching for other possible perspectives, (etc.) may work together to, in a sense, “de-certify” the absolute, non-ambivalent, convergent, certainties.

Strong Second Order features are found in the current political discourse. It tends toward singular testaments of certainty. Roughly, First and Second Order positions do not obtain the cognitive complexity inherent in Third and Fourth Orders. Second Order beliefs (or positions,) seem, in effect, programmed, and seem to converge on the program.

Someone protests,

“They are trying to steal my liberties, and, my country from me!”

In this statement of protest there are three objects: they, liberties and country. The latter two are possessed as such by the subject. Nevertheless this possession is subject to being nullified by “they.”

Consider, if you can, what it would feel like inside to possess liberty and country, and, in feeling this, also feel the deprivation were one dispossessed of same. Consider also what it would feel like to have a much looser, less associated, relationship with objects such as these.

Contemplate what are the implications of the objects discoverable as features of the belief of the sign carrier above. Do this just from considering what are the possible implications given by the photograph.

What I find gripping is to consider the object relations found in Second Order belief. This is to suggest how the combination of certainty and splitting work to support single-minded beliefs.

Conspiracy. Almost all conspiracy-mindedness reflects reduction to a singular perspective, certainty, and, require casting split-off parts, in effect, ‘away’ from the highly charged core certainties. 

Second Order belief may be very bad at evaluating evidence. Birthers, young earth and intelligent design creationists, 9-11 conspiratoids, each showcase how bad they are at this, but, at the same time, each are–in different ways–obsessed with evidence too. In this, the splitting dynamic is obvious.

Face-to-face with Second Order belief provides an opportunity to drill down and learn if there exists any fragile level of depressive ambivalence. At such a level, anchoring of the ‘First Order” belief may be tenuous because the belief is no longer rooted in the unequivocal solid ground of certainty. However, often this level is not accessible.

I find people’s fears to be poignant. It’s ironic when people’s fears are characterized as being irrational, when such a characterization itself is Second Order–comes from a singular evaluation rather than any possible alternative. A person’s belief that the governmental ‘object’ will dispossess he or she of their ‘liberty’ object is rational at the level of what is true for the particular object relations. It’s as if liberty can be stripped away. Thus, this prospect of dispossession feels frightening.

In this respect, the move to a more cognitive complex order is poignant, as is the First and Second Order fearfulness also poignant.

“However saying that, I don’t know if the “group” consciousness actually manages to effect a real conscious change in both individuals and in groups. Are these things of the moment?”

Let’s just speak of a simple hypothesis: that a group is possibly a medium for an individual to increase their awareness. There are, in this, several things we’ll need to test the hypothesis.

One, we’ll need a developmental framework that can support both the proof of the hypothesis and its falsification.

Two, given this framework, we’ll need to employ explicit criteria to make a determination about both how to test and next evaluate the results of the test. And, finally we’ll need to grapple and grip with how to interpret the evaluation.

There’s a crucial distinction I’d like to introduce. A hypothesis of this sort is concerned with the development of consciousness of an individual within a group due to the unique opportunities for this development a group may instantiate. Yet this potential for development is not proposed as a positive result of group consciousness, but, rather, is the result of people bringing their personal consciousness to the medium of a group. In noting this, all I suggesting is that consciousness is only a property of individuals; that it would be very hard to characterize what is meant by group consciousness in any normative sense.

As it has come about–in modern psychology–short of defining a framework, there are concrete terms for characterizing the development of consciousness in the medium of a group. For example, these are some of the developments afforded by groups: better teamwork, closer coordination, acceptance of and mitigation of narcissistic and infantile needs, enhanced problem analysis and problem solving, better skills for discernment and differentiation, support for withdrawal of projections, etc.. and on and on.

Also, groups make possible at times the submission of self-oriented egoic impulses to higher orders of awareness, including facilitating recognition and ownership of the shadow. So it is, to use one broad developmental mode, that an individual in a group may leverage the means for increasing their emotional intelligence.

***

I believe all sorts of artistic teams in music and dance and theatre brings lots of unique developmental potential into being. These provide excellent examples, but so do all sorts of other common groups. One such group would be–at their best–the formal or informal classroom.

Of course, my sense here presumes that consciousness itself is not a mountain to be climbed, but instead operationalizes real world capabilities. In short, to become more able at anything poses a developmental increase.

The only move toward spiritualization, would be to suppose that all such developmental increases are qualities of higher consciousness given a timeworn notion of spiritual development–when those better capabilities do no harm.

Posted by Karter, September 30, 2008 @ k’telontour blog

Comment–good example of a phenomena of what I term transformative anthropology. (This is ill-named, but I’m sticking with it for the time being.)

A phenomena of this kind is described as exemplifying the initiation of a dramatic and lasting change in a person’s life for which happenstance is a necessary feature.

After a roundtable, leaning toward my very close friend Holly, leader of the fine local sustainability organization E4S, I posed the following thought problem:

“What if it turns out ten years from now that sustainability activists came to realize that more thinking and less activism would have been more effective than the opposite?”

The roundtable was about Sustainable Business Development and Poverty. Almost since the inception of E4S I have been making suggestions to Holly about the human (and social,) system that any business system is but a part. Now E4S has widened its context to consider the how sustainability might be positively related to poverty. This is very exciting, but having contemplated something of these relations for almost 30 years, I’ll admit there a number of astringent critiques that lay close at hand.

The above thought problem is really a type of meta-thought problem. It doesn’t regard specifics, it just provides an inversion of the current normative tendencies ‘here on the ground’ which favor instrumental activism over robust and studious “social-critical” contextualizing.

In the background, there may be lots of collaborative thinking time given over to consideration of critiques and practical system factors such as leverage points, dependencies, interdependencies, and, to more foundational aspects such as core assumptions, and, certain operational conceptions/suppositions. However, if this is going on, not much of this bubbles up into the publicized open source. And, the public dialogs are almost entirely about what needs to be done and doing.

As a movement, is sustainability often one-sided in this way?

If so, there likely are a number of reasons for this, yet the most practical reason would be that, by definition, implementation, (those activities which are manifestations of instrumentalism,) always begin in real world actualities. At least in this, the instrumentalist, so-to-speak, keenly appreciates what the current, actual social system is able to provide for, produce, and support.

However, as my thought problem proposes, there’s no self-evident reasoning that supports the bias in favor of doing, (and the bias disfavoring more cogent understanding of systems,) as being, per force, optimal. In fact, there is a strong argument able to be made that a cogent understanding of systems may turn out to be mission-critical.

Let’s suppose this kind of awareness of systems, knowledge of context, and understanding could be a high value requisite of high leverage point activism and instrumentalism.

Okay. Let’s roll poverty; better: Cleveland’s economic decline into the mix. What would you need to know about the properties of a declining system?

Now, set aside the conventional inquiry into the socio-political economy.

Consider the anthropological perspective. You might need to know about various sub-cultures; about aspirational features, about social and material culture, about affectual topologies, about social-cognitive acculturated factors, etc.. It might be key to know about dependencies already extant in embedded relations between some of these same aspects with various instrumentalities and their productive and counter-productive ramifications.

Take the affectual topology; (my coinage.) In a community where do people come together to predictably experience different kinds of emotions? In what environments are people most guarded, and most relaxed? What overt and tacit social mechanisms are used to mitigate anxiety? What purposes does congregation serve? (etc..) Do we need to know about this stuff before we can claim we have a feel for a community?

All of this, once known, allows a community to be differentiated, and, ‘read.’ To do ‘differentiation’ is to learn in effect what constitutes the medial processes of a given community, how a community negotiates itself and negotiates its wider context. How, in actuality, a community contextualizes itself.

There is also the salutary consequence: these acts of knowing, even when they are done informally, disrupt the pernicious instantiation of incorrect generalizing, and, especially, disrupt projective identification and all sorts of biases inherent in the informal estimations an imperial (or dominant,) outlook brings to bear upon their view of an inferior ‘other.’

Differentiation improves sociologically-minded social cognition. This is concerned with a counterbalancing appreciation of a community’s eros, as against an oft mechanistic logos orientation. Likewise, this balances the (logo) metrical and nomothetical with (ero) idiographic and phenomenographic learning.

Instrumentalism is wed to essentialism. Which is to point out that objectives of activism are very often ‘stood alone’ and justified as being necessary and essential. I have observed, however, the attachment of a behavioristic bias in this kind of justification.

“We’re working to change the culture and change people’s behavior.”

It would then be the case: activist intervention aims here to change behavior and culture within the context of a presumptive behavioristic social mechanics.

Given that there doesn’t today exist a coherent applied social science defined in such narrow mechanistic terms, this tendency could be situated in a completely informal apprehension of whatever system is the context for change initiatives along these lines. Alas, this is to describe a bias, not a commitment to how change actually may be practically realized.

Instrumental initiatives are said to be “all and well,” despite the lack of an articulation of deep context and any recognition of inherent biases of actors. These deficits do not prevent interventions from being at least partly or more successful. Still, it might prove valuable for change actors to have a correct estimation of what are the domains the initiative is not operating within. This alone disrupts idealization; properly locates initiatives within their instrumental domains, and deposes the tendency for the “all and well” to morph into the “be all and end all.”

In turning toward the socio-political economy, and in bringing the social production of poverty, and crucially, production of wealth, into view, the learner faces systems at different scales, on up to the planetary scale.

The modes of analysis here are also aimed at adequate differentiation of features and factors. Take the example of the problem of temporal scales in an inter-system analysis of micro economics. Roughly how to correctly reckonize the relationship between the daily aspiration for livelihood with long scale economic cycles? In Cleveland, this could mean articulating the relationship between a fifty+ year old process of deindustrialization with the nature of various underground, daily micro-economies. And this is just a stark and novel example of these kind of relations.

Call these types of disciplined investigations acts of differentiation within the entanglement of differently scaled social systems and sub-systems. The goal is awareness of systems which range from the human individual up to whatever might be ascertained to be the last scale of pertinent system.

My own opinion is that sustainability advocates should appraise all the systems up to the planetary system. But, then–downside–the learner will meet the rather giant elephants in the room!

A rejoinder to these suggestions is obvious. Am I here suggesting rolling out many rounds of disciplinary research, unleashing squads of consultants, and trying to build a cumbersome intellectual engine out of all the findings?

No. Actually, I’m usually a proponent of not doing so. Rather, it seems much more worthwhile to build the analytic chops of the activist–he or she. My experience suggests this is a more expedient method than waiting to learn what the experts have come up with.

It’s also about praxis, about enacting what could well be a transformative realization about what is really the human context of the learner-activist.

So, this kind of transformative self-development of the activist, in their becoming much more systems-aware, is also a deeper methodology than pitching dimes at an army of credentialed experts.

But then I’m a big exponent of people coming to be emanticipated by the experiential actualization of their natural ability to become much better learners and readers of their own context, and of the social web. Hey, this is my own falutin’ prejudice–favoring more soulfulness!

Still, given those elephants, I would strongly suggest that it is incumbent upon sustainability activists to more fully develop their systems awareness, especially along the line of eros, especially in the reach toward the heart of matters.

It’s interesting to compare the Heights Observer with The Lakewood Observer. After listening to several presentations that paid tribute to the volunteer efforts of the sizable CHOb team, I became aware of how organized the civic journalism project is over in the inner ring suburb where I was raised. It’s impressive. The paper itself has grown up over the past year. There’s always at least an article or two in each issue that pushes past the civic cheerleading.

Because my brief participation with the Lakewood project included the inception phase, my informed guess is that the CHOb didn’t go through the same sparking rough-and-tumble wilding the Lakewood Observer went through. It seems the CHOb never was wild, thus in need of being tamed. The biggest difference between the two projects is that the Cleveland Heights Observer’s forum hasn’t reached any kind of mass or gravity at all, whereas the Lakewood Observer’s deck centers Lakewood’s civic drama. The CHOb’s forum is thin, and Lakewood’s thich, long tail whips around.

Michener is writing a book on the revival of Cleveland. He’s in his late sixties and returns to Cleveland after a professional career as New Yorker and Newsweek journalist and editor. His roots are in Cleveland Heights, University School, Yale. His specialties at The New Yorker were restaurants and opera. He’s also an expert and author of a book about the east coast society bandleader Peter Duchin.

I don’t know if Cleveland is to be soon revived, but Michener’s combination of boilerplate observations, name dropping, and, offering Portland, Oregon as exemplar of urban cool, tracked aspects of many other similar presentations I’ve fidgeted through over the years. When the term ‘brain drain’ is trotted out for the umpteenth time, it’s easy enough to figure the speaker hasn’t yet done the kind of homework likely to be revelatory. Hopefully his book will subvert my initial impressions.

Still, as long as Michener mentioned it, I’d like to reveal my own take in the form of a question:

Why is it assumed that urban advancement will come upon the heels of the kind of people who have left returning to replace some of the people who have chosen to stay?

One aspect of the answer to this question I’ve smoked out over the years is that the person who offers this prescription–almost always–never has any purchase on the reasons why people stay, let alone what is the gravity of the “long” regional historical context. It strikes me as close to absurd, then, to hobnob with civic leaders, complain about their being “siloed,” prescribe variations of innovative collaboration, without driving their journalistic/research/observer’s consciousness into the ongoing urban and civic flux of the extant individual-group-neighborhood-community “creatura and pleorama.”

Top down prescriptives follow inexorably, almost as karmic consequence, from the failure to smartly go down and gather round the ripe dis-ease, and gather pearls, and firewalk through the thicket of in-the-moment reasons being here remains vital here, and, then gather why people choose to stay.

In Cleveland. What is here is the prima materia! It’s been cooking in the stew pot fired by long cycles of economic depredation. Some idealized admixture of cultural creatives and braininess doesn’t fit the bill of enlightened forces able to reverse trends not themselves the result of lack of the same.