Easy Game

We do not always know who is predator, who is prey and how to distinguish the two, or even if we should. It is all a game, we are told, and our chiefs, whether justices or executive officers, can only articulate the corporate good — to maximize profit. Corporations are thus not corporate as bodies, which, show eventually the absorption of excess calories by a plethora of hitherto unknown diseases, ultimately leading to cardiac arrest, particularly when the electric grid shuts off. The corporate magnates who stand above it all will declare the saboteurs murderers and terrorists for disrupting the energy supply, for the only rule of the game is not to disturb the game and the “heads” of the body are not mindful of the health of any other parts, leaving them incapable of responding to even the slightest bit of pressure without immediate and complete shutdown.

We are, thus, unsurprised to find our leading corporate lights in the form of internet companies formed by the well blown bubbles highlighting the American dream of social unity via cybernetic cables, mindspheres losing distinction in democratic bliss, thousands of clicks and “likes” without a single way to dissent from ever loader public opinion, no longer articulated by stump speech or verbal assent, but remote gesture via machine formed API.

It is now well known that growth sectors in the new economy are the continual supply of medicines to those who will never be healthy, the sloshing of capital from shore to shore in the carry and drop trade, virtual instruments of deliberately opaque value, and, now a new type of American casino by pioneered by the sons and daughters of the Alamo, games deliberately engineered to absorb the mental cycles and material wealth of those last sad sons and daughters of the revolutions and all of those forced to embrace their brand of democracy by the sword.

As they will tell you, there is simply too much money to be made to make a maxim of not being evil, or, worse, formulate a positive idea of the good. And the end is what it has always been, the predators gather round while the sick and lame and easily addicted are picked off as easy game.

There are many poker chips already on the table. Those who arrived already made their killing and now sit, cards on the table, eying each other curiously — knowing that the only way the game can continue is if more are convinced to come to the table. But China has already bought in and old Europe injected with a passivity inducing drugs, trading dictators and kings for glib democrats.

Soon the game will be up and, where our executive officers can no longer find fresh meat, they will turn to carrion.

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A Weak People

Carl Schmitt quotes Vergil’s Fourth Ecologue at the close of his Der Begriff der Politischen (The Concept of the Political), “Ab integro nascitur ordo.” A new order is born from the renewal. Schmitt claimed that a world state could not exist, that such an attempt, where legitimacy rested primarily on economic means could and would lead to a dystopian world state — a system in which a people might be legitimately, according to this emerging economic order, be exterminated merely for being unable to pay their debts.

As Leo Strauss commented in response, Schmitt’s affirmation of the political “is nothing more than the affirmation of the moral” which is necessarily undermined by purely technological culture, such as that provided the anti-narrative mentioned in a previous essay (and also described by Strauss). While Schmitt ultimately falls back on a weak moral category, resistance, Strauss dissolves the possibility of the moral — there is no imperative.

Thus, we witness this dystopia emerging, not only in that the legitimacy of states is articulated by their ability to maximize the participation of their citizens in markets, as with Philip Bobbitt’s work, but where not only the default but also primary evaluative mechanism for the value of any thing, including human relationships, is in reference to personal (or corporate) utility.

Thus, in a world in which numbers, especially when cast as “science” in the field of economics, are the primary evaluative method, the default mechanism for evaluating the value of any relationship must accord with personal utility.  The same is true for all functions related to relationships (e.g. sex). Accumulation of partners may not be the goal, but, as specified by economic science, accumulation of ‘good moments’ likely will be, often taking the primacy of ‘fun’ (see our discussion of the fall of Batman).

This means that no-fault, previously the exception, becomes the norm. Every contract should be able to be broken by any party when the exchange of words/fluids leading to any other exchange is not kept. Which is to say, any purely quantitative system tends towards complete fungiblity as a ‘perfect’ state. Descriptions here serve a purely cosmetic function.  Any usage of word ‘marriage’ approaches a lie, as its origin and intention are not in keeping with the purely cosmetic function which it now serves. ‘Relationship’ would be closer to the truth, but really, any words are acceptable as the fundamental nature of the transaction and conceptions remains unquestioned.

Thus, each sphere of action becomes little more than a game, one should/must play to win in order to maximize. Is it permissible to use words with purely cosmetic function, allowing the other party to think according to old structures, while one embraces personally the new, the entirely economic? Certainly it does not make sense to be in the middle, embracing both new and old paradigm, neither fully. The probable answer within the means presented is, it does not matter — do what you need to succeed. Thus, not only do relationships and marriage cease to exist in any meaningful way, so also does the concept of a truth and a lie. There is only utility, which is frequently reducible to pleasure.

We will not comment at length on the moral salves available to those who wish to utilize them. Nicholas Kristof compares the estimated 800,000 trafficked each year with the 80,000 at the peak of the American slave trade, but advocates neither starting at home nor fundamentally rethinking, but more overseas initiatives (and lobbying!) for the globally connected. Anthony Daniels looks closer to home:

A hundred yards from where I write this, twelve-year-old prostitutes often stand under streetlamps on the corner at night, waiting for customers. The chief of the local police has said that he will not remove them because he considers that they are sufficiently victimized already, and he is not prepared to victimize them further (his job, apparently, being to empathize rather than to enforce the law). The local health authorities send a van round several times at night to distribute condoms to the girls, the main official concern being to ensure that the sex in which the girls take part is safe, from the bacteriological and virological point of view. It is the authorities’ proud boast that 100 percent of local prostitutes now routinely use condoms, at a cost to the city’s taxpayers of $135,000 a year, soon to be increased by the employment of a further outreach worker, whose main qualification, according to the recent job advertisement in the local press, will be “an ability to work non-judgmentally”—that is, to have no moral qualms about aiding and abetting child prostitution. Meanwhile, local residents (such as my neighbors, a banker, a lawyer, an antiquarian bookseller, and two university professors) who object to the presence of discarded condoms in their gardens and in the street outside their homes have been offered a special instrument with which to pick them up, in lieu of any attempt to prevent them from arriving there in the first place. And at the same time, the overwhelming majority of the work done by the social workers of the city concerns the sexual abuse of children, principally by stepfathers and mothers’ boyfriends who move in after biological fathers move out. (Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses)

In this arena one observes the previously ‘free-range’ people, the American homesteaders, struggling to adapt to their life gravitating in the same direction as the mechanized cattle industry, not realizing that the dictum “do unto others” has always related also to the animals around them. Neither die with or from a surfeit of artificial hormones, they simply cease to live in a meaningful way. Moreover, “resistance” is primarily a function of debates over cosmetics. Given this context, it is surprising they fight for the word or even discuss fighting for ‘marriage,’ a concept they have abandoned in every meaningful sense, just as they fight for “life” for those who, by virtue of physical infirmity or terrible situation will never have a “life” in any sense more than a simple binary assertion.

In fact, whether or not a copy of the Ten Commandments hangs in a courtroom matters not at all. What matters is the concept of jurisprudence applied within that courtroom, the basis of which has been abandoned for multimedia spectacles and megachurchs.  Should we be surprised when the spectacle ends and the citizens involved return to speculating on current and afterlife fortunes, rendering all attempts at “change” null and void? Or that the book supposedly at the center of their religious practice is primarily presented as tool to help them achieve this maximization?  Or that end times prophesies, the rapture, or the Jewish people are going to help them achieve this mystical jackpot?

While cattle ‘moo’ in their mechanized pens, Schmitt offers us this chilling reminder of the nature of the existential struggle which remains, even if covered in the shadows:

“If a people no longer possess the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.”

As Clausewitz notes, it is the defender of the city who will and must be the first express violence if he wishes to be successful in his defense.  The arsonist with the torch can burn down an entire village if he is not first apprehended, and this apprehension will likely require an act of violence. But as Strauss also realizes, it is exceedingly easy to go from to this point to advocacy for “dangerousness” for its own sake.

Thus, the question is not simply what constitutes a weak people, but what constitutes a people, and the failure to ask the question and, perhaps, define what constitutes a people (or race) worth preserving ultimately undermines the strength of the people in question. Consequently, the quest for the definition of the political is necessarily a question of an ideal sense. Thus, we cannot reach it simply at the extremes, and to focus solely on the extreme case is to abandon the search for the political for politics.

Knowledgeable readers will know where this took Schmitt, and, indeed, it is emblematic of the whole struggle. Liberalism, as defined by Schmitt, must be separated from modernity, which is simply the necessary multiplication of loyalties on the basis of multiplicity of communities based on new forms of connectivity provided by technology. Which is to say, it is not necessarily an ideal, it is simply fiberoptic cables lying across the ocean floor and politicians suddenly able to talk on the phone.

Indeed, if merchants pursued this connectivity for its own sake, or for their sake, does this invalidate the connectivity? It is neither a barrier nor a help towards awareness; a multiplication of contingent loyalties is not necessarily an abrogation of a single essential one.

We then affirm the importance of the search for the essence of the political, and find that we must first, in the words of Rosenstock-Huessy, go back to Descartes, hoping that we may find a new order along the way.

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The Anti-Narrative

Sexism, racism, homophobia, culturism. All of these -isms take part in the grand narrative of oppressed peoples, tied together and advanced against conservative elements of society, usually without any understanding of the elements they criticize. That is, to say, this grand narrative is essentially an anti-narrative, possessing no positive element, and ironically performing the same function Schenker accuses Wagner of musically — playing on the expectations of persons influenced by prior traditional concepts to destroy those concepts.

This is not to say that in any of these cases (women, Jews and other non-European races, homosexuals) there are not legitimate grievances against the power structures that preceded and oppressed them. It is to say that the narrative that has accompanied their attainment of greater political power has not provided any significant formative or positive aspects to replace the structures which preceded their ascent.

However, conservative values and power structures having totally eroded (America possesses the last ebb, but it is a weak and pitiful ebb), the world seems set for completely anarchy, or rather, the rule of the machine and purely quantitative apparatus which is the last bastion of competence.

What is ‘racism’ according to this anti-narrative? By definition, it is simply anything that denies the oppressed race’s journey to liberation. What is ‘liberation’ ? It is simply an increase in power relative to whomever previously possessed it. According to the narrative, a decrease of power and other social goods is acceptable so long as the oppressor ends up the relative loser. See for example, the state of Zimbabwe. Consequently, the purveyors of this anti-narrative do not care so much about the people (who have suffered far worse under Mugabe than Ian Smith) but about the emotive high felt by participation in the mass movements which accompany the spread of the anti-narrative, not dissimilar to frequent African genocides.

Consequently, it is common to accuse anyone who opposes third world dicators, even Obama, as racists, simply on the basis of the anti-narrative’s endorsement of oppressed third world peoples and sympathizer. Is this simply a yielding to the definition of the anti-narrative? Certainly, but the fact remains that for this word, as with ‘sexism,’ anti-semitism,’ ‘Islamophobia,’ there simply are no other definitions. The result is when one uses provided words or is forced to make the denial, ‘I am not a racist,’ one essentially yields all non-quantitative discourse to the violence of purveyors of this mode of discourse. One has, ipso facto, become a slave.

Why does one instinctively react with the phrase, ‘I am not a racist’ ? The reason is essentially fear. The grand narrative of oppressed peoples has achieved such cachet that not to immediately voice assent is to risk violence upon your person. Usually threat of social ostracization is sufficient. Human beings, especially when deprived of close knit communities of persons with similar cultural presuppositions (as is especially the case with the current phase of global capitalism), are unable to voice an opinion which counters such a narrative and will immediately fall back into the societal line. At a higher level, various interest groups exist in America which attempt to destroy the careers of persons who threaten this narrative.

American religion possesses two layers. The first layer is America’s civil-religion, with its own telos and pattern of ritual and law which govern the state. Accompanying priests and teachers of the law perform essentially the same function as earlier state-religions. In Catholic Spain shared holidays focus on the liturgical calendar. In the American civil-religion shared holidays are those of the civil-religion, celebrating wars and saluting past heroes for their function with the civil-religion. What is the function of a theologian in a Catholic state? Generally to determine what is and is not permitted within the context of the received tradition. What is the function of a lawyer in the American state? To discuss the permissible within the context of the more recent traditions of the American state. In the Protestant-derived tradition the code of law takes primacy. Sola Scriptura.

The second layer are the various actively religious sects which complement America’s civil-religion. Christian sects catering to the upper classes have always been well integrated into the civil-religion and have tacitly endorsed the norms of the civil-religion even when this runs against the stated traditions of their own sect. The rest participate in what essentially is revivalist religion, the focus of which is the production of an experience of God’s love. In traditional revivalist sects there is also reorientation towards telos called salvation. In American revivalist sects this telos is often subordinated to the telos for individuals in the civil-religion, namely the pursuit of happiness.

The traditional American civil-religion possessed as its starting point various philosophical principles current among Anglo and French philosophies. Because the state was founded by consensus, there was no well-defined telos. To the extent there was definition, it was found in Jefferson’s writings, which never made their way in law. Nonetheless, there remained in many sectors an active devotion to the principle of ‘liberty,’ the subject of a very large statue in the harbor of America’s largest city.

What did ‘liberty’ mean? It meant the greater extension of the American civil-religion by missionary effort. The primary selling point was that individuals insofar as they wished to follow the American telos of pursuing their own happiness they could do so better within the context of the American civil-religion. Native peoples who preferred their own traditions to the American civil-religion were not permitted to maintain them.

The ‘rights’ dialogue from the beginning (see Alasdair Macintyre) was an attempt to separate ethics from the religious tradition and present them as derived by reason alone, never philosophically sound but with other reasons for appeal. During the twentieth century, the predominant stream of effort within the American civil-religion was the greater extension of these rights, predictably resisted by the American South.

Along the way two interesting things happened. First, the influx of self-described oppressed immigrants from Europe led also to the introduction of the anti-narrative, which upon arrival was immediately directed against the oppressive ethics and rule of those of Northern European descent. The second was the increased integration between the lower layer (revivalistic religion) with the American civil-religion. The argument made was that the ethics of the New Testament are not about apolitical worship, but the love of the New Testament requires action. The direction of implied action was of course the ‘rights’ already existing as an implied good within the American civil religion.

Having essentially completed its triumph horizontally, also extending in part into Europe in the aftermath of the world wars, the American civil-religion now attempted to complete its triumph by extending its reach vertically into the lower layer of American revivalistic religion. MLKjr represents this clearly, but the key thinker is Reinhold Niebuhr, who picks up the disorganized fragments of neo-Orthodoxy and reformulates it with respect to participation in the American civil-religion, particularly an endorsement of what one might call ‘welfare capitalism.’ The liberation theologians attempted to discount revivalistic religion; Niebuhr and MLKjr attempted to integrate it with the state-religion.

Because of the pragmatism of the American populace and their detachment from the events and history on the European continent, the propagation of the anti-narrative (initially targeted specifically toward Europeans) had limited success; Marxist liberation theologians retreated to the academy or media institutions and focused on the de-education of the youth by overthrowing oppressive traditional ethical values. The language was that of violence and intimidation, especially relying on extending universally accepted wrongs within the American populace. For instance, any use of power to suppress destructive speech was labeled with Nazi similitude. If the purveyor was ethnically Jewish, certainly also ‘anti-semitism.’ Through such means the purveyors of the anti-narrative were able to extend this cachet to other subjects, including all discussion of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and sexual practices. Moreover, as typical with this approach, it was to do the opposite of the traditional ethical notion that was especially lauded and seen as admirable.

By the time of Obama’s youth certain sectors of the American academy were so overrun with purveyors of the anti-narrative (anthropology especially, as it had always distinguished itself from ‘missionary’ work) that his mother could say of her fellow countrymen while traveling that they were ‘not my people.’ In other words, the Marxist justification of violence toward the oppressors was being taught to the younger generation at almost all top-tier universities outside of quantitative fields.

Another interesting shift happened after the second World War. This was the increasing feeling of American triumphalism on the basis of the self-destruction of Europe, the American-led rebuilding of Europe and Japan, the creation of a ‘universal’ human-rights platform, and military preeminence enjoyed. Consequently (and despite the obvious derivative nature of America’s founding ideas from Occidental precedents) Americans developed a strident belief in the possibilities of the ‘new,’ complementing and providing ease to the spread of the anti-narrative even during the Cold War period. The historical account taught in American schools shifted to an exaltation of this cult of the ‘new,’ complemented by the anti-narrative wherever possible — by definition destroying the very concept of history.

Another interesting trend was the movement of purveyors of the anti-narrative under the umbrella of religion, which always enjoyed an protected status in the American state. Most recently, adherents to black nationalism realized they could more successfully prosecute their claims within Christianity; many Marxist activists also claimed Christianity and became liberation theologians. Because of a lack of centralized authority in such traditions or American academia generally, there was no way for persons of a tradition orientation to prevent the appropriation of their tradition for political means, especially under the constant threats of violence internal to these various institutions.

The political alliances later formed were a logical extension of the essential triumph of the aforementioned ideas. At the beginning of the twentieth century the American right remained populated by persons claiming the essentially negative definition of ”freedom from,’ instead of the downward extension of the American civil-religion. For instance, the civil-religion enjoyed little power over ‘marriage,’ which was essentially a stamp on the basis of the traditional religious definition. The expansion of ‘rights’ complemented by the anti-narrative led to the gradually successful establishment of a broader definition of marriage in the minds of the younger generation which has yet to be complemented by complete recognition by law (but certainly will within 20 years). Another current example is the faith based programs. Under the Obama institution, faith-based organizations receiving federal funding are to adjust their hiring practices based on the norms of the civil-religion, effectively destroying the particularity of any religious sects seeking still to provide social services as a distinct second layer.

Adherents to traditional religions generally are ignorant of these larger trends, typically working through the political/legal system and attempting create little geographical bubbles in which they can oppose the norms of the civil-religion (for instance the debate over evolution education in Kansas). In general, Catholics are less inclined to accept the American multi-layered solution. In general as immigrants from oppressed peoples, they trend towards wholesale support of the anti-narrative, although there is also a conservative faction which is essentially Constitutionalist and unsurprisingly seeks to maintain a traditionalist approach towards America’s founding documents. One especially interesting segment are the Catholic converts, many of whom support the primacy and extension of the American civil-religion but because of pessimism regarding current trends wish to extend its lifetime by the adoption of conservative Catholic principles, especially within the field of ethics.

In early first century Christian documents, ‘true religion’ is defined with respect to action on the behalf of disadvantaged persons. Although the American civil-religion has similarly always placed emphasis on action with respect to ethics, the source for these ethics has always been problematic. Figures like Lincoln grounded their actions on some combination of moral intuition and biblical sources. Obama claims to do the same, especially clear allegiance to Niebuhr’s project.

The problem with moral intuition or passion as a grounding mechanism is that there is no measurable element and it can easily become tied together with other sources for passion, especially one’s greed or self-interest. To the extent that one expresses admiration for Lincoln (as I have on various occasions), it nonetheless seems that the positive elements he hoped to foster in the American republic have been, in many respects, displaced by the triumphalism and greed of the Northeastern establishment. This pattern has continued to the present day, despite the many positive contributions made in other sectors.

It is frequently claimed that the string of conservative Catholics, bible-believing evangelicals, and Jews who support Israel for religious reasons represent a threat to the extension of the professedly secular American civil-religion, as they support what is essentially a national narrative on the old twentieth century model, which was supposed to be replaced by the ‘new’ combination of the American civil-religion and anti-narrative. This is essentially correct. Despite some who have attempted to articulate a Jewish universalism (Rav Kook) the foundation of the Jewish state in many respects no different from the blood-and-soil nationalism which preceded it, simply a substitution of ethnicities, and has not yet made a full transition to Jeffersonian democracy.

The irony is that many of the more intelligent expositors of support for this state within America do so in opposition to similar governing structures, even those with a religious basis which effectively resisted the Marxist influx. They depend on the anti-narrative in their discussion of destruction of previous models, yet without offering anything genuinely new. The interpretation of capitalism is as the great destroyer, that destroys communities and creates individuals, and then as Schumpeter predicted, leaves them unable to mount any coherent resistance to the triumph of this anti-narrative.

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Tradition and T.S. Eliot: A Journey to the East?

We shall not cease from exploration
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

What is tradition? What is orthodoxy? Wherein lies the greatness of poetry? These questions not answered, Eliot moves forward in time to new formulations, new questions. Why tradition? Why orthodoxy? Why “great” poetry? These questions easier to answer, yes, though answers no less convincing.

Why not? T.S. Eliot believes in tradition but not Tradition. He selects what is appropriate for today on the basis of his historical sense, his sense of connectivity to that which preceded him, which ultimately prevents him from reaching the beyond — Tradition as a living concept. The tension in his mind, appropriate, is between religious form and dogma and poetry, which must extend beyond it. There is very little great religious poetry, he avers, because the gifting of the poet and religious sentiment are different. This true, but what he fails to recognize is that his connection is nothing but a broader set of forms, not amounting to Orthodoxy in a sense distinct from orthodoxy, because the impulse for them is different from either truth or beauty. Community remains preeminent; poetic feeling he describes is a method of forging and maintaining such. The fire and the rose never appear in their full luminosity.

Eliot protests at the ascription that he is describing the feeling of a defeated generation in the Wasteland, but the critics are right. His orthodoxy is the remnants of religious feeling found in the neglected wainscot, in an country church, barely attended and in disrepair, not missionary monks or warriors ready to fall under the sign of the cross. It is a quaint clutching feeling, and, when it attempts to be more, fails except when in defensive posture (“gun rather loose in the holster”), or stating the problem (“farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust”).

Nowhere is this failure more apparent than in Eliot’s colossal contradiction in “Goethe as Sage” — European poetry is great because it is universal. But how can Europe, or America for that matter “invaded by foreign races,” or with its native culture “effaced,” be a representative of a universal culture? Eliot falls into a quantitative assessment. Greatness is a matter of numbers, not of the mass of men, but of the elite: scholars and men of culture. They have told me Goethe is great, the last great representative European poet, and thus I must grapple with this at, perhaps, the expense of my “orthodoxy” and Puritan sentiment.

Both are thusly abandoned as despair gives way to sentimentality and a new category, “wisdom,” that supersedes orthodoxy and does not correspond to truth, the embrace of quantity of cultured opinion, and the death of that which Eliot claims to love, Europe.

Perhaps Eliot’s failure comes early as he attempts to “confine [himself] to such practical conclusions” as are immediately ascertainable and applicable (TatIT) — this wonderful American pragmatism, which forces him ultimately to a shallow conception of greatness, consisting of nothing but abundance, amplitude, unity — and an abundantly shallow “universality” (GaS).

Did not Eliot already say on such:

“The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel toward God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can understand, but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it becomes meaningless. It is true that religious feeling varies naturally from country to country, and from age to age, just as poetic feeling does; the feeling varies, even when the belief, the doctrine remains the same. But this is a condition of human life, and what I am apprehensive of is death. It is equally possible that the feeling for poetry, and the feelings for poetry and the feeling which are the material of poetry, may disappear everywhere, which might perhaps help to facilitate that unification of the world which some people consider desirable for its own sake.” (oPaP)

Thus Eliot condemns himself and his own unified conception of wisdom — the modern age began a long time ago. We are not apprehensive of death. Death is the beginning. Seeking has no limitations, backwards, outwards, and ultimately forwards, through our abandonment of our shallow sentiment and necessary deaths. Our battle not to save the Europe of Goethe, but to find what jade remains in the ash and use it to forge new parapets — the question not whither, but whether and how to use found jade in this divinely sanctioned task.

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T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets
T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

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Finding Truth

Each man regards his pet subject as most important, most fundamental, most widely applicable.

My own private alkahest is contemplative or mystical practice.

I encourage everyone who feels even slightly inclined to investigate this realm of experience to do so, and soon. I feel strongly that, if there is to be any genuine instauration at all, whether of an individual, of the West, or of human civilization as a whole, it must be grounded in mystical experience.

By “mystical experience” I mean, at the most basic level, management of the mind that leads to the diminution of delusion. One’s attention can be stabilised and focused, improving the functioning of one’s mind and causing one to become less bewitched by one’s senses, thoughts and feelings.

Basic attention stabilisation techniques are available in all the major religions, and nowadays there are plenty of nonreligious mental training systems for the more rationally inclined.

I look forward to the day when “Ment. Ed.” is as ordinary a part of education and daily life as “Phys. Ed.” is today.

+ + +

There are those who will want to go further. They may have discovered that, as a result of mental cultivation, the habitual functioning of their mind, and indeed their heart, can undergo dramatic and unanticipated alteration. They will have realised that this means that the mind is not stable, not absolute and therefore not to be trusted as a guide to truth. Yet they still want to know: what is true?

It has been said that there is no hunger without a corresponding food. Once the hunger for truth has been awakened, the nourishment that will satisfy it must be sought. This is almost impossible to do on one’s own. A guide or teacher must be sought. How to go about this? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Get into the habit of being honest with yourself, and ever more ruthlessly so, especially about your motivations.

2. Develop the faculty of self-observation. Not self-analysis, self-judgement, or self-regard: self-observation. As you move through the day, whenever you can, bring careful, neutral awareness to whatever it is you are doing, saying or thinking. Aim always to have “someone” on watch.

3. Learn the difference between opinion and fact.

4. Look on your home turf first. Don’t go running to foreign or exotic groups merely because you feel like doing so. Mine the resources of the faith of your fathers.

5. Investigate spiritual teachers thoroughly. Ask them genuine, hard questions – the ones that keep you up at night. Study their behavior minutely.

6. Don’t jump to conclusions, unless there is some severe moral deliquency going on.

7. When you commit to a teacher, do so wholeheartedly.

8. Be aware of social and emotional phenomena attendant upon joining a group and don’t be deceived by them: the pleasures of belonging, receiving high quality attention, acquiring status and so forth, are not spiritual things and should not be regarded as such.

These are only a few suggestions that might help. At the end of the day there is no set of rules that will guarantee that you will find someone who can help you. It may take a plunge into despair and a readiness to lose one’s life before you encounter a teacher. Or the right one might be just down the block. What is important is that if you really want to learn, you must begin searching. Life is short.

++++++++++

A little bit about myself: I was raised nominally Catholic but my family wasn’t particularly religious. I began meditating in 2000 because I wanted to be able to concentrate better, and to see if I could not-think, which sounded very appealing. I read a few books on how to sit and began. I spent no time on doctrine – I wasn’t interested.

After about four months I had a powerful experience of compassion for the suffering of others. It really shook me up. I had no idea what was happening. Eventually it began to mellow and broaden into a heightened ability to relate to and help other people.

I knew I ought to look for some guidance about the experience, but I didn’t; five months later I moved house and in the process fell out of the habit of meditating. Three years passed during which I underwent a profound inner degeneration that featured things like attacks of pure inauthenticity and that left me planning my suicide in minute detail. I knew that I had to return to practice, and that I couldn’t do it on my own, so I moved into a small community of Buddhist contemplatives.

I lived there for three and a half years, did a lot of meditation under careful guidance, and got back on track. The improvement in my attitude can actually be traced on the Spengler fora – my postings there for the first few years are full of critical anger, very hostile things, but now they are much more constructive and pleasant. The pseudonym “Cioran” is no longer appropriate.

I must emphasise that I am not an authorised teacher of any sort, and I claim no level of enlightenment. I am just an amateur encouraging people to practice their religion seriously instead of playing with thoughts and feelings as is so easy to do. I only talk like this anonymously or to people who ask about it directly. If you met me socially I’d probably not bring the subject up at all.

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Time of the Nets

Alain de Benoist writes on the Internet age:

The twentieth century ended in November 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 21st century unofficially begun in 1993, with the first diffusion on a vast scale of the Internet. There is no doubt: the coming of the “global web” announces an unprecedented epoch: the Age of Net. The Internet is a net whose circumference is unlimited and whose centre is nowhere. This decentralised, interactive, horizontal medium, that connects its users at the speed of electron, establishes a sort of planetary brain whose neurons are the connected individuals. More than thirty million people have already entered this global communicating society, that easily overcomes frontiers and controls. Each month, one million new “contacts” join this system. On the “info-highways”, where writing, sound and image blend in a unique numerical language, a New World is rising, a “cyberworld”, populated by “cybercitizens”. Neither governments nor politicians have so far understood the exact measure and the consequences of this phenomenon.

Every technological evolution creates its own ideology, and this ideology drives social change. In traditional societies, human relations were mainly territorial and took place in a continuous spatial dimension. Urbanisation has deeply modified this model. To the disjunction between the place of work and the place of residence some social praxis’ have been added that daily permit to exit one’s own domicile (multilocalization). Space becomes a property like any other, that can be sold, amassed or exchanged. The advent of the net transforms and accelerates this process. While communication becomes the essential engine of social relations, the extension of the net contributes to the fragmentation and the “uninstitutionalization” of society. There is no more belonging, no more adhesion: “to be on-line” is the categorical imperative. Political parties no longer represent an efficient means of achievement for individuals, while civic associations and single issue movements overwhelms trade unions. In the world of the net there are no more nations or populations, but multiple and winded belongings: tribes, Diaspora and clans.

Walkman and mobiles are tools, among many others, that contribute to free man from steadiness. “Tomorrow streets and squares”, Alain Finkielkraut says, “will be invaded by busy mutants talking with themselves”. Thus a nomadic society is created – nomadism of tools, of values and of men – that privileges a cross-sectional modality of communication, flattening all the classical institutional and pyramidal structures. A virtual world, with no distances and no expiration is growing: a world of uncontrollable crypted net, in which unmaterialised objects circulate and return materialised at the end of the process they’re involved in; a world that could also become a financial jungle, where the Stock Exchanges are transformed into electronic casinos.

In addition to nomadism there is cocooning. Internet is a communication tool, but its form of communication abolishes the dimensions of space and time, that are(were) the context in which, until yesterday, human freedom was expressed. In this way, the net imprisons the individual in a private sphere that is more and more limited to the abuse of a remote control or of a keyboard. The progressive sliding of the job place towards the address (telework) goes in this same direction. If world can be virtually discovered remaining at home – philosopher Paul Virilio argues – why should we exit? Finally, the net emphasises all the essential features of this age: the mood for immediacy (i.e. zapping), the oblivion of history and of “the reasons”, the enjoyment is conceived as a privileged way of access to the experience. Freedom of expression is more and more restricted in its commercial form, the absolute sovereignty of the consumer. Bill Clinton defined the electronic commerce “Far West of the total economy”. In a universe in which everything is accessible through a toll (global marketplace), only the market still distracts people from loneliness.

The advent of the net also creates assemblages of a new type. When 300,000 persons are gathered in Paris for the “Gay Pride” day, when the world-wide Days of Youth inspires one million catholic young people to join in Longchamp, when hundreds of thousand persons take part in Belgium to a “white march”, when two million Basques protest in public square against the attacks of ETA, when a million Germans take part in Berlin to a “love parade”, when one million Italians demonstrate in Milan against the division of their country, when an innumerable crowd meet in London for the Ascension-day in paradise of Lady-D, former-Madonna of tabloids and instantly proclaimed Saint and martyr once dead, the sociologists refer to “unidentified popular movements”. These, more or less spontaneous, huge assemblies truly represent the type of manifestation that corresponds to the world of the net.

Besides the obvious diversities of motivations, they all are a unique phenomenon: post-modern ways of affirmation of a feeling, a belief or a shared way of life, set inside the current tendency of affirmation of communitarian identities, that go beyond the limits of the usual belongings.

So, flows replace territories everywhere.

The Internet is only the most immediately visible form of this deterritorialisation. We are only at the beginning of a phenomenon, and whoever believes that it could be reversible in the short term is probably wrong. The advent of the world of the internet is a challenging question. The state of tomorrow will depend on the way we will be able to give it an answer.

Source here. Trans. A.Boraschi.

Nomadism, immediacy, and focus on commercial forms are all characteristics of the current age. The revived Conservatory forum is intended to some degree to be an answer to de Benoist’s question. What else is possible?

That depends largely on you — or, rather, us.

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