“Nothing can be achieved without individuals, nothing can last without institutions”
— Robert Schuman (1886-1963)
Category Archives: Art and Ideas
Libertarian Living: Mirambika – Schooling with Emotional Development
“Fantasy and imagination should be allowed to flower in the child. Talk that may seem without logic may not necessarily be irrational- it could be suprarational,” informs [sic] Dr Ramesh. He further mentions that one of the serious flaws with today’s educational system is that, “emotions are most often ignored in our rigidly regulated and tightly controlled system. But it is essential to transform them to retain the best of the emotions- vitality, love and enthusiasm. This manifestation of our divine essence cannot be nurtured through rote learning. We have to create such situations where this part is also brought forward. Thus, training of the psychic voice is an important task of the teacher”. However, mainstream education completely overlooks this aspect and hence, manufactures emotionally underdeveloped children, who are made to fit into the industrialized society. These children do not question authority, they only follow suit. The result is masses of people who do not think for themselves but blindly obey. It was in reaction to this mass-production approach that the alternative education movement began.
This movement gave an impetus to those people who believed that the child had to be driven by his/her own need to learn and know. “We believe that nothing can be taught. Education is inherent in the child, we only help in stimulating it to bring out the best in him/her”, asserts Sulochana Di, one of the teachers who have spent more than 20 years at Mirambika.”
Chesterton on the Supernatural and the Unnatural
“Take away the supernatural and what you are left with is the unnatural.”
– G. K. Chesterton
Atlas Flubbed
Just to rile up market fundamentalists, here’s a sharp jab from a lefty blog at “going Galt” – the fantasy nurtured by some naive libertarians that were capitalists (theorized as financiers) to take a day off, society would collapse.
(The reference to Galt is a reference to Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a book about which I have mixed feelings. Rand is a far more complex and interesting figure than either her defenders or her critics seem to realize..)
The quote below confuses genuine capitalists and the predator financiers currently in power, but it packs some punch:
“Have you heard of the documentary, “A Day Without A Mexican?” You know why it’s not called Atlas Shrugged? Because the people who made it aren’t utterly detached from reality. Because doing actual work gives one perspective. Because spending the day going from rooftop to rooftop in a helicopter to chew the fat with other geniuses could lead you to believe you’re the glue that holds the entire planet together. People who don’t have private islands have a more realistic idea of what they do to contribute to society.
You know why the uber-wealthy don’t go on strike? Because they know there are millions of smart, hardworking people ready to take their places…..”
My Comment
What I’d like to know is why more people don’t vote with their pocket books against this predator class. For instance, I try to avoid using Microsoft Word because of my antipathy to Gates’ monopolistic practices.
The issue is not capitalism, ultimately. It’s monopoly and the absence of competition. In other words, it’s the absence of real free markets that’s the reason why “capitalism” is now synonymous with predation — and why rants like this are increasingly persuasive.
Sacrifice and Environmental Ethics
Many libertarians seem to think that environmental concern is “liberal” or “leftist” and that “having dominion” over the world implies that human beings can deal with the natural world indifferently….or even rapaciously.
They forget the notion of “stewardship” which is pervasive in the teachings of Jesus. Libertarians must balance the language of “ownership” (which they rightly defend) with this equally valuable language of “stewardship.”
Individual responsibility includes the dimension of “responsibility for...”
Reading the late Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the great historians of Christianity, I came across the Patriarch of Constantinople’s address on environmental ethics in 2002:
“We are all painfully aware of the fundamental obstacle that confronts us in our work for the environment. It is precisely this: how are we to move from theory to action, from words to deeds? We do not lack technical scientific information about the nature of the present ecological crisis. We know, not simply what needs to be done, but also how to do it. Yet, despite all this information, unfortunately little is actually done. It is a long journey from the head to the heart, and an even longer journey from the heart to the hands.
How shall we bridge this tragic gap between theory and practice, between ideas and actuality? There is only one way: through the missing dimension of sacrifice. We are thinking here of a sacrifice that is not cheap but costly: “I will not offer to the Lord my God that which costs me nothing” (2 Samuel 24:24). There will be an effective, transforming change in the environment if, and only if, we are prepared to make sacrifices that are radical, painful, and genuinely unselfish. If we sacrifice nothing, we shall achieve nothing. Needless to say, as regards both nations and individuals, so much more is demanded from the rich than from the poor. Nevertheless, all are asked to sacrifice something for the sake of their fellow humans.
Sacrifice is primarily a spiritual issue and less an economic one. In speaking about sacrifice, we are talking about an issue that is not technological but ethical. Indeed, environmental ethics is specifically a central theme of this present symposium. We often refer to an environmental crisis; but the real crisis lies not in the environment but in the human heart. The fundamental problem is to be found not outside but inside ourselves, not in the ecosystem but in the way we think.
The root cause of all our difficulties consists in human selfishness and human sin. What is asked of us is not greater technological skill but deeper repentance, metanoia, in the literal sense of the Greek word, which signifies “change of mind.” The root cause of our environmental sin lies in our self-centeredness and in the mistaken order of values, which we inherit and accept without any critical evaluation. We need a new way of thinking about our own selves, about our relationship with the world and with God. Without this revolutionary “change of mind,” all our conservation projects, however well-intentioned, will remain ultimately ineffective. For, we shall be dealing only with the symptoms, not with their cause. Lectures and international conferences may help to awaken our conscience, but what is truly required is a baptism of tears…..
…An essential element of any sacrifice is that it should be willing and voluntary. That which is extracted from us by force and violence, against our will, is not a sacrifice. Only what we offer in freedom and in love is truly a sacrifice. There is no sacrifice without love. When we surrender something unwillingly, we suffer loss; but when we offer something voluntarily, out of love, we only gain……
Libertarian Living: How Walkable Is Your Neigborhood
How walkable is your neigborhood? You can check it out here at Walkscore.com
Via Bob Sharpe´s blog, ¨Toward A Simple Life.”
Ambrose Bierce on Corporations
“Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.”
— Ambrose Bierce
Gurdjieff on Machine Man
“For a man of Western culture, it is of course difficult to believe and the accept the idea that an ignorant fakir, a naive monk, or a yogi who has retired from life may be on the way to evolution, while an educated European, armed with “exact knowledge” and all the latest methods of investigation, has no chance whatever and is moving in a circle from there is no escape…..
What do you expect? People are machines. Machines have to be blind and unconscious, they cannot be otherwise, and all their actions have to correspond to their nature. Everything happens. No one does anything.
“Progress” and “civilization” in the real meaning of those words, can appear only as the result of conscious efforts. They cannot appear as the result of unconscious efforts. And what conscious efforts can there be in machines? And if one machine is unconscious, then a hundred machines are unconscious, and so are a thousand machines, or a hundred thousand, or a million. And the unconscious activity of a million machines must necessarily result in destruction and extermination. You do not yet understand and cannot imagine all the results of this evil. But the time will come when you will understand.”
— G. Gurdjieff, quoted in “In Search of the Miraculous,” P. D. Ouspensky
My Comment
I’ve been fascinated with the influence of Gurdjieff on western artists in the early part of the twentieth century – pianists, painters, and writers (Katherine Mansfield and Aldous Huxley among them), including a large number belonging to the Harlem Renaissance.
Scholars generally dismiss Gurdjieff as a charlatan, or at best, obscurantist. Quotes like the one above don’t help. What can Western science (which wasn’t solely Western, of course, but that’s another story) possibly have to learn from “fakirs, monks, and yogis” ?
More later.
A Red and Blue Two-Part Lobotomy
“California is broke. Good. They deserve it. It’s not as if bankruptcy were an act of God, like getting hit on the head by a giant meteor. It was deliberate stupidity. Spend more than you make, and you end up on the street. I’m supposed to feel sorry for that? I’ve known roundworms with better sense. As I understand it, the Democrats refuse to cut spending and the Republicans refuse to raise taxes. See? A lobotomy in two-part harmony. Sounds like the whole country.”
Media theorist Debord and the Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle
(Lila: Apologies. Looking through my archives, I came across this broken link and just fixed it. The source is Douglas Kellner, “Media Spectacle”).
The concept of the “society of the the spectacle” developed by French theorist Guy Debord and his comrades in the Situationist International has had major impact on a variety of contemporary theories of society and culture.[1] For Debord, spectacle “unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena” (Debord 1967: #10). Debord’s conception, first developed in the 1960s, continues to circulate through the Internet and other academic and subcultural sites today. It describes a media and consumer society, organized around the production and consumption of images, commodities, and staged events.
Building on this concept, I argue that media spectacles are those phenomena of media culture which embody contemporary society’s basic values, serve to enculturate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its controversies and struggles, as well as its modes of conflict resolution. They include media extravaganzas, sports events, political happenings, and those attention-grabbing occurrences that we call news — a phenomena that itself has been subjected to the logic of spectacle and tabloidization in the era of the media sensationalism, political scandal and contestation, seemingly unending cultural war, and the new phenomenon of Terror War. Thus, while Debord presents a rather generalized and abstract notion of spectacle, I engage specific examples of media spectacle and how they are produced, constructed, circulated, and function in the present era.
As we enter a new millennium, the media are becoming more technologically dazzling and are playing an ever-escalating role in everyday life. Under the influence of a multimedia image culture, seductive spectacles fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve them in the semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, and consumption, which deeply influence thought and action. In Debord’s words: “When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs (#18). According to Debord, sight, “the most abstract, the most mystified sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society” (bid).
Experience and everyday life are thus shaped and mediated by the spectacles of media culture and the consumer society. For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a “permanent opium war” (#44) which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life — recovering the full range of their human powers through creative practice. Debord’s concept of the spectacle is integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in submissively consuming spectacles, one is estranged from actively producing one’s life. Capitalist society separates workers from the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human needs and self-directing activity, as individuals inertly observe the spectacles of social life from within the privacy of their homes (#25 and #26). The Situationist project, by contrast, involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice.
The correlative to the spectacle for Debord is thus the spectator, the reactive viewer and consumer of a social system predicated on submission, conformity, and the cultivation of marketable difference. The concept of the spectacle therefore involves a distinction between passivity and activity and consumption and production, condemning lifeless consumption of spectacle as an alienation from human potentiality for creativity and imagination. The spectacular society spreads its wares mainly through the cultural mechanisms of leisure and consumption, services and entertainment, ruled by the dictates of advertising and a commercialized media culture. This structural shift to a society of the spectacle involves a commodification of previously non-colonized sectors of social life and the extension of bureaucratic control to the realms of leisure, desire, and everyday life. Parallel to the Frankfurt School conception of a “totally administered” or “one-dimensional” society (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972; Marcuse 1964), Debord states that “The spectacle is the moment when the consumption has attained the total occupation of social life” (#42). Here exploitation is raised to a psychological level; basic physical privation is augmented by “enriched privation” of pseudo-needs; alienation is generalized, made comfortable, and alienated consumption becomes “a duty supplementary to alienated production” (#42).
Since Debord’s theorization of the society of the spectacle in the 1960s and 1970s, spectacle culture has expanded in every area of life. In the culture of the spectacle, commercial enterprises have to be entertaining to prosper and as Michael J. Wolf (1999) argues, in an “entertainment economy,” business and fun fuse, so that the E-factor is becoming major aspect of business.[2] Via the “entertainmentization” of the economy, television, film, theme parks, video games, casinos, and so forth become major sectors of the national economy. In the U.S., the entertainment industry is now a $480 billion industry, and consumers spend more on having fun than on clothes or health care (Wolf 1999: 4).[3]In a competitive business world, the “fun factor” can give one business the edge over another. Hence, corporations seek to be more entertaining in their commercials, their business environment, their commercial spaces, and their web sites. Budweiser ads, for instance, feature talking frogs who tell us nothing about the beer, but who catch the viewers’ attention, while Taco Bell deploys a talking dog, and Pepsi uses Star Wars characters. Buying, shopping, and diningoutare coded as an “experience,” as businesses adopt a theme-park style. Places like the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues are not renowned for their food, after all; people go there for the ambience, to buy clothing, and to view music and media memorabilia. It is no longer good enough just to have a web site, ithasto be an interactive spectacle, featuring not only products to buy, but music and videos to download, games to play, prizes to win, travel information, and “links to other cool sites.”To succeed in theultracompetitive global marketplace, corporations need to circulate their image and brand name so business and advertising combine in the promotion of corporations as media spectacles. Endless promotion circulates the McDonald’s Golden Arches, Nike’s Swoosh, or the logos of Apple, Intel, or Microsoft. In the brand wars between commodities, corporations need to make their logos or “trademarks” a familiar signpost in contemporary culture. Corporations place their logos on their products, in ads, in the spaces of everyday life, and in the midst of media spectacles like important sports events, TV shows, movie product placement, and wherever they can catch consumer eyeballs, to impress their brand name on a potential buyer. Consequently, advertising, marketing, public relations and promotion are an essential part of commodity spectacle in the global marketplace.Celebrity too is manufactured and managed in the world of media spectacle. Celebrities are the icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life. To become a celebrity requires recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be it sports, entertainment, or politics. Celebrities have their handlers and image managers to make sure that their celebrities continue to be seen and positively perceived by publics. Just as with corporate brand names, celebrities become brands to sell their Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or Jennifer Lopez product and image. In a media culture, however, celebrities are always prey to scandal and thus must have at their disposal an entire public relations apparatus to manage their spectacle fortunes, to make sure their clients not only maintain high visibility but keep projecting a positive image. Of course, within limits, “bad” and transgressions can also sell and so media spectacle always contains celebrity dramas that attract public attention and can even define an entire period, as when the O.J. Simpson murder trials and Bill Clinton sex scandals dominated the media in the mid and late 1990s.