Category Archives: big picture stuff

Essentials: What is Conservativism and What is Wrong With It

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Maha noted some time ago how Bush expects gratitude from the Iraqis, apparently for what wonderful things he thinks he has done for them by destroying their country. A bit more of this attitude oozed out during British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s recent visit:

Just in the last week, Bush has let people know what a privilege it is to be near him. During his brief press meet with British PM Gordon "Not-Neutered Poodle" Brown, Bush was extolling to the UK leader how wonderful America is by pointing out, regarding a reporter who had just turned 38, "Here you are — amazing country, Gordon, guy is under 40 years old, asking me and you questions. It’s a beautiful sight." Oh, how everyone laughed, Brown a bit uncomfortably, as if he realized he was standing next to someone who would feel at home with both Charles Manson and Henry Ford. We could dismiss this as a mere joke if Bush hadn’t done it so often in the past.

The Rude Pundit connects the dots on this.

I’d like to use this occasion to showcase a terrific, classic article by Philip Agre. I off-handedly linked to it in an earlier posting, which commenter Pat saw and wrote back with a few questions. I’m sure some of you have seen it. Agre’s article is called What is Conservativism and What is Wrong With It. It directly connects conservativism with aristocracy. It explains how this has been with us since human beings have had cities, and it explains how it is completely antithetical to the founding ideas of America.

Bush’s aristocratic attitude toward us, is and feels obnoxious, because it’s based on a lie. It’s a deception that’s been used by all aristocrats of all times and all places. Moreover, in this country, in our time, it’s a fiction that’s become increasingly threadbare and harder to accept. Agre explains:

…the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them.

The key to Bush’s success, apart from all his familial advantages, is his unshakable belief that others should defer to him, and his ability to get others to believe in this, as Agre explained. His glad-handling charm is a cover for manipulating people into this deception. Bush further cements this belief, when, in his narcisism, he believes he has a direct line to God. The VRWC is the mighty external machinery, a public relations effort, that vastly amplifies the power of this fiction. Agre on PR and politics:

Conservatism has opposed rational thought for thousands of years. What most people know nowadays as conservatism is basically a public relations campaign aimed at persuading them to lay down their capacity for rational thought.

Conservatism frequently attempts to destroy rational thought, for example, by using language in ways that stand just out of reach of rational debate or rebuttal.

Conservatism has used a wide variety of methods to destroy reason throughout history. Fortunately, many of these methods, such as the suppression of popular literacy, are incompatible with a modern economy. Once the common people started becoming educated, more sophisticated methods of domination were required. Thus the invention of public relations, which is a kind of rationalized irrationality. The great innovation of conservatism in recent decades has been the systematic reinvention of politics using the technology of public relations.

See Philip Agre’s What is Conservativism and What is Wrong With It.

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I have thought about doing a series on "the Essentials" – articles like Agre’s which clearly and simply express what liberalism is about and why it has nothing to be ashamed of, and why conservativism (as we know it) is so corrupt and incompatible with American ideals. Many of these Essentials are what they are, because I’ve found them very effective in equipping myself for rebutting the right wing worldview. Agre’s article is in this class. Another classic is A Day in the Life of Joe Middle Class Republican. If you would like to nominate others, drop me a link in the comments.

Be Here Now

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Leonard Jacobson, Journey Into Now:

Most humans are living in a state of unconsciousness. Even though our eyes are open and we appear to be awake as we walk and talk and live our lives, in truth we are not awake.

We are lost in the mind, which is a world of the remembered past and the imagined future. It is a world of thought, memory and imagination. It is a world of opinion, idea, concept, and belief. It gives us a sense of a life outside of the present moment. It gives us a sense of ourselves outside of the present moment. And that is the great illusion.

In truth, there is no life outside the present moment. In truth you do not and cannot exist outside the present moment. The world of the human thinking mind is an illusory world and yet everyone believes that it is real. It is as if we have fallen asleep and the life we are living is a kind of dream, from which we must awaken.

To awaken spiritually or to become enlightened is to awaken out of the past and future world of the mind into the truth and reality of the present moment.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now:

Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression…

One night, not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence. What was the point of continuing to live wit this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live.

“I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two?” If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe” I thought, “only one of them is real.”

I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words “resist nothing” as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection what happened after that.

I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I had never heard such a sound before…The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, and empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.

That day I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on the earth, as if I had just been born into this world.

For the next five months, I lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss. After that, it diminished somewhat in intensity, or perhaps it just seemed to because it became my natural state. I could still function in the world, although I realized that nothing I ever did could possibly add anything to what I already had.

I knew…that something profoundly significant had happened to me, but I didn’t understand it at all. It wasn’t until several years later, after I had read spiritual texts and spent time with spiritual teachers, that I realized that what everybody was looking for had already happened to me. I understood that the intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and deeply fearful self [or ego], which is ultimately a fiction of the mind….

What on earth do these two passages have to do with the typical subjects found on this blog? Everything, as I’ll try to show.

As Jacobson wrote, most people spend most of their time living in their minds, or more specifically in their ego-mind. The thoughts running through our minds are always taking us somewhere away from the present moment – either to the past, or the future, or to some imaginary geography. When the mind is thinking its thoughts, the mental worlds they construct seem very real, and we easily get lost in them and feel separation from everything physically around us.

By contrast, when the mind is quiet, we can be fully here in the present, right here, right now. Not only that, but we feel a connection, a unity with everything around us. Our ego diminishes and we feel a part of the universe, one that is alive and all around us. There is no separation between us and the universe.

When we are present to the now, when the mind is quiet, the mind’s contents and structures are experienced as not having all that much substance or reality. We have our viewpoints and our beliefs and our agendas, but they no longer dominate us, and we are capable of setting them aside because they’re only mental creations. We can detach from them fairly easily. This lets us be skeptical or even dismissive of our mental creations, the healthy need for which, Maha has been writing about in the Wisdom of Doubt series.

With practice, this quiet deepens and we relax into it, and it becomes our normal way of being. The mind then becomes a servant, a tool to be used as needed, and put aside when it’s not, instead of something we get lost in, dominating us with its concepts, ideas, its rush of thoughts, and its bouncing between the remembered past and imaginary futures.

When our ego mind disengages, when we are still and fully aware in the present moment, we feel a unity with everything around us. We experience other people still attached to their egos and their viewpoints and their beliefs, with compassion, as people who have yet to awaken to this larger reality, that is nonetheless innate to all of us.

This is what Jesus meant when he said to turn the other cheek when your enemy strikes you. Don’t answer your enemy from the same level of consciousness as they inhabit. Go to a higher, more inclusive level of consciousness and respond to your enemy from there. This doesn’t mean be a masochist, it means don’t answer their provocation on the same level as it is given.

This most definitely relates to the political battles we face with the right. It’s very easy to be provoked and hooked emotionally by the attacks of the right, and this is part of their intention. It’s important to learn to stay centered in the present moment, while evaluating how to respond. Many times, no response is required at all, but on other occasions it is important to interact with what they’re saying, to set these people straight, to deflect or cancel their attack. To correct them.

While I personally am aggrieved at how the right is destroying this country and this planet, and while I have had scores of negative personal encounters with members of the right, culminating in a very painful firing from a job, I also understand the importance of not getting dragged into their drama. They are, after all, only playing out the programs in their minds, often as unconsciously as a player piano. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” It’s important instead to be centered and to get busy creating the world to come. The one that is superseding their tiny, disintegrating world, which is an extension of the little self, the ego-mind. As Jacobson writes:

Because of our technological advances, we have become too destructive to continue living unconsciously upon this earth.

It’s my belief that out of the ashes of the destruction of the current order, a new human race is being born, one whose level of consciousness will be quite different from what created the current order based on fear, which is the basis for the ego. In another hundred or two hundred years, there are going to be a lot of enlightened people on this planet.

I personally believe George W Bush is unconscious and seriously deluded. He thinks he is doing the will of his Father in Heaven (truly a frightening thought given W’s narcissistic, sociopathic personality). However, consider that perhaps God / the universe / life itself really is using W, by forcing us, in a manner similar to Eckhart Tolle’s pressured awakening, to wake up. Childhood is ending, whether we want it to or not.

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Both Tolle’s and Jacobson’s books cover similar terrain, but Tolle writes with a stark clarity befitting the kind of dramatic awakening he went through. I heard Ekhart Tolle speak, a few years ago. He walked into a hall filled to capacity with about 2000 people, and spoke, extemporaneously for close to three hours. Every single person in that hall was spellbound, hanging onto each word during the whole time. Tolle is an intense human being.

Jacobson, a relaxed Australian, by contrast offers a lot of practical guidance anyone can do to become more fully present, and to make this a permanent state. His book is much more recent than Tolle’s, and his work to some extent builds on Tolle’s foundation and yet makes it very practical. Jacobson offers workshops and retreats. Tolle, being an international star, is a bit harder to catch in person.

The Selling of America

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Although we spend a lot of time looking at atrocities like the war in Iraq and the demolition of the Constitution, our government is destroying America in many other, and equally pernicious, ways. These ways include selling national forests into private hands, for example. There’s an article in the newest issue of Harper’s (not yet online) that argues the real point of the No Child Left Behind Act is to turn public schools into profit-making private businesses (profit being the real goal, of course, not education). We have a health care crisis because government favors and protects private insurance industry above the lives of citizens.

Their current project seems to be killing free speech by running small, independent periodicals out of business. Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, writes,

Half a million dollars. In postage.

In just a few short days, The Nation will pay one of the biggest bills we’ve ever faced – half a million dollars – because of a postal rate increase scheme designed in part by lobbyists for the TimeWarner media conglomerate. Mailing costs for mega-magazines like TimeWarner’s own Time, People and Sports Illustrated will go up much less or in some cases decrease, while smaller publications like The Nation will be hit by an enormous rate increase.

Teresa Stack explains,

… in May 2006 the United States Postal Service proposed a rate increase for periodicals of about 11.7 percent, an increase that would have affected all periodicals more or less equally. Instead, in February the PRC [Postal Regulatory Commission] recommended a version of the rate proposal put forward by Time Warner, which had previously been rejected by the PRC and strongly opposed by the USPS. This proposal would have a disproportionately adverse effect on small national publications while easing the burden on the largest magazines.

The decision was followed by an industry “comment period” of only eight working days, an impossibly short time for small publications to digest changes so complex that to this day there is no definitive computer model to fully assess them. Nonetheless, the new rates are scheduled to take effect July 15.

We now know that small titles will be devastated. According to an analysis by McGraw-Hill (but not, inexplicably, done by the PRC or BOG), about 5,700 small-circulation publications will incur rate increases exceeding 20 percent; another 1,260 publications will see increases above 25 percent; and hundreds more, increases above 30 percent. Some small magazines will no doubt go out of business. Meanwhile, the largest magazines will enjoy the benefit of much smaller increases and in some cases, decreases. To make matters even worse, editorial content charges will now be based on distance. The system of charging one price however far editorial content travels, which has existed since our country’s founding, seems to have been summarily dismissed by the PRC, and then by the governors, with little thought of its future impact.

The Postal Regulatory Commission, btw, is made up of presidential appointees. I assume most of ’em are Bush appointees by now. See Liza Sabater for more.

The Nation is asking for contributions to keep itself in business. If there’s a small magazine in your life that you can’t live without, whether The Nation or another one, they might need some help. I wouldn’t be surprised if some smaller publications become web-only. And then there’s net neutrality …

The Curve of Time

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Hillary is from Mars, Obama is from Venus is a perceptive article (on Salon, free, but they make you endure a brief commercial), that I’d like to use as a launching point to discuss the rebalancing of the genders, which I mentioned toward the end of Opening of the Western Mind.

First, a look at the gender swapping roles of our interplanetary presidential candidates:

In the Democratic presidential pack, the leading man is a woman and the leading woman is a man.

Throughout history, American presidents have been men’s men who puff their out chests against evil. Think Teddy Roosevelt on safari, Jack Kennedy in PT-109, Ronald Reagan on his horse, or George W. Bush with a chain saw clearing brush. If leaders show any slackening of testosterone, especially in wartime, they are quickly derided as wimps (George H.W. Bush), a Frenchman (John Kerry) or weaklings (Jimmy Carter). But on the Democratic campaign trail these days, where the first woman in U.S. history is making a serious run at the White House, gender roles are being swapped.

When Obama travels the country, he does not appear to worry much about posing with guns or wearing those khaki workman jackets that made Kerry look so silly in 2004. Instead, he sings an empowerment ballad on the stump that would make most lady folk singers proud. "The decision to go to war is not a sport," he tells crowds, rejecting the male metaphor. "We can discover the better part of ourselves as a nation," he says. "We can dream big dreams."

In contrast, Hillary Clinton has run her campaign with all the muscular vision and authority of the macho candidates of yesteryear. "I’ve seen her stand up to bullies," announced Christine Vilsack, the former first lady of Iowa, when she introduced Clinton at a rally in Des Moines last week. On the stump, Clinton repeatedly tells people that they should let her take control of the country, eschewing Obama’s more abstract calls for national soul-searching. "If you are ready for change, I am ready to lead," she says.

You probably have no trouble imagining The Duke saying that last line.

"The first woman absolutely has to out-masculine the man, kind of like Margaret Thatcher did," says Georgia Duerst-Lahti, a professor at Beloit College who has written extensively on gender in presidential politics. "Men have a lot more latitude. Just think about Ronald Reagan when he would tear up. Could a woman ever tear up? No. But a man can tear up."

One of the points I want to make is that gender roles and behavior are not strictly tied to the sex of your body, and this is borne out by our interplanetary candidates. All of us, men and women, can and do display behavior and ways of thinking that traditionally are associated with the opposite sex. In New Age parlance, each of us “runs” a unique mix of male and female energy.

Begore I go on, let me assure you that I’m not some radical feminist (not that this is bad). I’m a middle aged guy who has many of the usual “guy” interests, along with a barebones understanding of feminism, gained almost entirely through osmosis. I’m definitely not a metrosexual. What I’m writing about is much bigger than feminism, IMO. What follows is speculation, although I’m hardly alone with these ideas.

As you’re aware, we live in a time of intense polarization. On the one hand, dogmas and social conditioning of all kinds, including gender roles, are being challenged, a process which started back in the 1960s or earlier. This forms the grist for the opposite pole, the reaction, the intense need some have to maintain traditional order. We call those with this need "conservatives".

Hillary’s macho posturing notwithstanding, the feminine is reasserting itself, whether conservatives like it or not, while the traditional masculine approach is waning, and has been for some time. Rather than trying to convince you with a shower of data points (a book-length project), I’m a lot more interested in exploring the reasons why this is happening.

There has always been a tension in our race between male ways of seeing the world and acting in it, versus the feminine approach to the same. Which approach prevails at a given time is reflected in the sex of the gods of that time. The fertility gods of the distant past were a mix of males and females, and I’m not convinced that one sex consistently prevailed over the other. But at one point, several thousand years ago, in what was the forerunner to Western Civilization, the gods by and large became male, and stayed male, to this day. This coincided with a shift in consciousness that produced cities, writing, armies, nation-states, technology, space travel, and so on. These are the apparent fruits of the male tendency toward domination and hierarchies. This list also includes the subjugation of women, which feminism understands well.

Each age sows the seeds of its own demise. From "The Curve of Time", a chapter in Thom Hartmann’s inspiring semi-autobiography, The Prophet’s Way (Note: the thrilling "upward glissando" toward the end of the Beatles’ song, A Day In the Life, is an awesome musical companion to this excerpt):

He [Hartmann’s mentor] took a napkin and drew two lines which intersected to create a backwards L. "If you look at the speed of transportation for millions of years, it was the same," he said, drawing a straight line just above the bottom line of the backwards L. "Then they started to ride horses", the line went up a bit, "then cars", a bit higher, "then airplanes", higher still, "and then jets and spaceships." At that point he shot the line straight up to the edge of the vertical line of the backward L. "The same is true of how much energy humans consume. And of the population of the Earth. And of the number of evil acts committed. And of good acts. And of the destructive power of weapons and bombs. And, and, and. Always, at the end, the curve ends with this radical upward sweep, the point it cannot go beyond without collapse, and it is happening now, in our lifetimes."

The point of this, is that the power and reach of the the average human, both individually and collectively has increased geometrically, as a result of the male dominated approach to things, to the point where we can easily destroy the planet and ourselves. We’re painfully discovering that traditional military solutions – the ultimate form of dominance – often don’t work any more – they backfire on ourselves, something that conservatives have yet to appreciate. And so the traditional male approach to things – hierarchies and dominance, and all the fruits thereof – have in many cases hit the wall in terms of being able to deliver workable solutions to the problems we face. It’s debatable whether the male approach now causes more problems than it solves.

In parallel, the traditional feminine skills of intuition, empathy, and collaboration have come to be more and more prized. Because of "the curve of time", it’s vital to be able to get along, both with our neighbors and with the planet’s ecosystem. This requires respect, and an empathic working with, over dominance. Intuition has become more valued than logic, because it’s faster, and produces answers more aligned with our real, deep concerns, in an age when time itself feels sped up. Intuition is also more valued for its ability to penetrate to the truth of things in a time when we’re drowning in confusion and disinformation. How many of us simply knew in our gut that Bush was lying about Iraq in 2002, without a great need for hard evidence, or even in the face of the phony evidence that was presented? The left-brained Mr Spock seems stiff and silly these days, and probably would not exist if Star Trek were being created today.

There’s a dance that goes on between the male and female energies in our race. One dominates for awhile, and provides the groundwork or impetus for its opposite to catch up. Labor saving machinery levelled the field for women by reducing the need for physical brawn. The ascent of the feminine likewise is providing the space for men to introspect and heal their old wounds, to develop their feminine side including their own gifts of intuition and empathy, as well as to develop a more authentic, heart-centered, and mature form of male leadership.The whole planet has certainly seen enough of the immature, embarassing form of male leadership, based on dominance, over these last six, very dangerous years.

If you made it this far, I hope you understand that I’m not putting down men or male ways. Both styles of consciousness are complementary and necessary. What I see going on however, is a rebalancing between them, one that is necessary for our survival ahead. It’s interesting that neither Hillary nor Obama are being laughed off the stage (at least not by Democrats) for their embrace of their opposite energies. This wouldn’t have happened fifty years ago – they would’ve seemed like freaks, straying from the relatively rigid gender roles of earlier times.

I’ll close with the thought that all the major spiritual figures were very balanced in expressing their male and female sides. That level of mastery (and transcendence) is the goal for each of us. It is where we are going. I say this being far more personally familiar with contemporary figures (such as Yogananda) than obviously those from the distant past.

Resistance is Futile

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I usually try to steer way clear of self-fulfilling prophecies, and so this is a subject that I’m hesitant to add any energy to, but it’s also important to be clear about it. Here’s a quiz:

Which presidential candidate said the following, on June 20:

The American military has done its job. Look what they accomplished. They got rid of Saddam Hussein. They gave the Iraqis a chance for free and fair elections. They gave the Iraqi government the chance to begin to demonstrate that it understood its responsibilities to make the hard political decisions necessary to give the people of Iraq a better future. So the American military has succeeded. It is the Iraqi government which has failed to make the tough decisions which are important for their own people.

Here’s a clue. It was a woman, and a Democrat. As William Blum writes in the Atlantic Free Press (loads slowly, be patient):

Right, it was the woman who wants to be president because … because she wants to be president … because she thinks it would be nice to be president … no other reason, no burning cause, no heartfelt desire for basic change in American society or to make a better world … she just thinks it would be nice, even great, to be president. And keep the American Empire in business, its routine generating of horror and misery being no problem; she wouldn’t want to be known as the president that hastened the decline of the empire.

And she spoke the above words at the "Take Back America" conference; she was speaking to liberals, committed liberal Democrats. She didn’t have to cater to them with any flag-waving pro-war rhetoric; they wanted to hear anti-war rhetoric (and she of course gave them a bit of that as well out of the other side of her mouth), so we can assume that this is how she really feels, if indeed the woman feels anything.

There’s more in Blum’s article about how conservatives are seeing Hillary as their best chance to get what they want:

Now we hear from America’s venerable conservative magazine, William Buckley’s "National Review", an editorial by Bruce Bartlett, policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan; treasury official under President George H.W. Bush; a fellow at two of the leading conservative think-tanks, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute; you get the picture. Bartlett tells his readers that it’s almost certain that the Democrats will win the White House in 2008. So what to do? Support the most conservative Democrat. He writes: "To right-wingers willing to look beneath what probably sounds to them like the same identical views of the Democratic candidates, it is pretty clear that Hillary Clinton is the most conservative."

We also hear from America’s premier magazine for the corporate wealthy, "Fortune", whose recent cover features a picture of Clinton and the headline: "Business Loves Hillary".

Most of the liberal netroots doesn’t ♥ Hillary, and I hope I haven’t ruined your day. I want to talk a bit about Empire, which Blum briefly alluded to, above. It’s a vast subject, and one that the DC establishment struggles with, especially back when Bush and the neocons were in ascendance, although this discussion hasn’t really filtered down to the average American.

But oh, how we pay for it. We can’t have decent health care in this country, but we must have our stealth aircraft, our worldwide network of bases, and a permanent standing military. Military hardware is one of the few things our industries still make well, and service in the military has become an increasingly compelling venue for young people to advance themselves. Our media promotes fear, which discourages us from seeing any other choices in how we operate on this planet. It’s really the subject for another Michael Moore movie all by itself. Most of his films touch this theme on the way to making their main point. Chalmers Johnson has probably done the most work in popularizing the subject, and Can We End the American Empire Before It Ends Us? is a good introduction to his ideas.

It’s not that America hasn’t used its might as a benevolent force in the world, it has. These last six years however, have brought out the shadow side of our country, the monumentally bad consequences when its might is misused when placed in selfish and thuggish hands.

Empire has enormous costs, both in terms of dollars, and in terms of fidelity to the original principles of this country as laid out in the Constitution. We see this everyday in our country. It’s possible that a Hillary Clinton presidency will use our might for good in the world, but it’s also unlikely that she has any intention of scaling things back. As Mel Brooks famously stated, “It’s good to be King”. This is part of the reason why conservatives are warming to her.

Update: Pentagon Planet: How the Pentagon Came to Own the Earth, Seas, and Skies will amaze you with the vastness of our Empire:

…to begin to grasp the Pentagon’s global immensity, it helps to look, again, at its land holdings — all 120,191 square kilometers which are almost exactly the size of North Korea (120,538 square kilometers)…

Opening the Western Mind

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I was watching Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia) last night on the news say that our country’s intense focus on the Middle East has caused us to neglect other areas of the world. Webb had Southeast Asia in mind, and noted that this is a very important region to us economically. Of course, Webb is right, but I would argue that our Mesopotamian myopia has had some other interesting side effects, beyond intensifying the glaring hatreds and competition between the jihadists of all sides – theirs and our own.

If you look closely, some voices of reason are starting to make themselves more widely known. They’re having the effect of teaching the West something about this mysterious, complex, and misunderstood area, and some things about ourselves. Sara Robinson over at Orcinus recently posted Why People Hate America?, which was triggered by this recent Pew poll, and was largely based on the writings of Ziauddin Sardar, who is…

…an orthodox British Muslim of Pakistani parentage…one of the UK’s more visible public intellectuals. In recent years, Sardar has made a career out of explaining the Muslim world to the Brits, mediating and translating between the Western and Near Eastern cultures on the pages of the Observer and The New Statesman and frequently on BBC news shows as well. (It’s interesing that nowhere in the US media do we have a similarly trusted Muslim media figure who can help us bridge the most important cultural chasm of our times. Wonder why that is?) A iconoclastic outsider, Sardar is unsparing in his critiques of both cultures, issuing insights, warnings, and alternatives on either side that have made him indispensable to a European audience that increasingly sees itself caught in the middle.

I encourage you to read her whole post (as well as the comments). We have had the invaluable Juan Cole for some time now, and it’s good that others are gaining a wider audience, even if this is at times, only through blog writings such as Sara’s.

In a doctor’s office on Monday, I came across an aging issue of Time Magazine, which featured Queen Rania of Jordan. In typical, brief, upbeat, and to the point Time Magazine style, the Queen was asked Ten Questions, and I found some of her answers to be freshing and hopeful:

Q: Do you think that women will ever truly have equal rights in the Middle East?

A: Absolutely, I believe they will. I think that mind-sets are changing in the Middle East. Poll after poll is showing that men see the value of greater female participation and empowerment. We still have a long way to go, but Islam should not be used as a scapegoat. The obstacles that face women today are more cultural. It’s not about the religion.

Q: Will the Arab world ever be free of the kind of mindless violence occurring in Iraq?

A: The Middle East is not just about Iraq. The Middle East has both challenges and opportunities. Many countries in our region are experiencing a massive economic boom. It’s a very youthful region, and the young by nature are hopeful, optimistic and innovative. The world shouldn’t overlook our successes and achievements.

Q: What is the biggest negative about the U.S. invasion of Iraq?

A: The civilian suffering. This conflict has spared no one. It’s incredibly sad to see such a proud and great country broken.

Q: What’s the solution to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians?

A: First, start with will on both sides–not just the political kind but the kind that comes from the conscience and the heart. To achieve a lasting peace in the Middle East takes guts, not guns.

I was so impressed with these answers, but of course it’s difficult to know how widely held they are, and how much influence people like the Queen have in this region. Her outspokenness and quiet wisdom is emblematic of the rise of the feminine, worldwide, over the last century or so. Our country is part of this, beginning with the suffragettes earlier in this century, followed by the energizing of the feminist movement in the 60s and 70s, and culminating recently in the election of women to high office, such as Nancy Pelosi, and, in the future, possibly our first female president in 2008. I hope to write more about this shortly, and I hope I can do it justice.

Responsibility

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Awhile back I wrote a post called “Patriotism v. Nationalism,” which was followed up by “Patriotism v. Paranoia,” “Patriotism v. Francis Fukuyama,” “Patriotism v. Hate Speech,” and probably some other posts. Anyway, in the first post I repeated some quotes about patriotism and nationalism I found in Bartlett’s. Here are some of them, again:

The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war. — Sidney J. Harris

Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill and calling for larger spurs and brighter beaks. I fear that nationalism is one of England’s many spurious gifts to the world. — Richard Aldington

“Responsibility” seems to be a common theme:

What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility … a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. — Adlai Stevenson

I contend that the primary difference between patriots and nationalists is that patriots value responsibility, while nationalists value loyalty. So you know that when you read this, you are reading the words of a nationalist, not a patriot.

The “this” is Little Lulu, publishing photographs of Iranian men being bashed by the Iranian religious compliance police for wearing Western dress. They are distressing photographs; the Iranian religious compliance police represent the moral/religious absolutism I warned against in this morning’s “Wisdom of Doubt” post. For the record, I’m against it.

However, Lulu loses me when she writes crap like this:

Question: Will these photos be blared across the front pages of the international media with as much disgust and condemnation as the photos of Abu Ghraib or the manufactured Gitmo Koran-flushing riots?

Answer: Fat chance.

This is where the patriot (like me) and the nationalist (like Lulu) part company. There are many horrible things going on right now in this world, things that shock and horrify anyone with a heart. But as a patriot, I feel a special responsibility toward what my country does and particular anguish when it’s in the wrong.

Lulu refuses to acknowledge the wrongdoing and accept the responsibility; she is interested only in blind loyalty.

On some level — human and spiritual — we’re all responsible for “the whole catastrophe,” as my old Zen teacher used to put it. But as a citizen of this country, it is my duty to speak up when my country has done something wrong. This is not “hating America,” as twits like Lulu assume. It is what a patriot does.

Lulu continues,

Question: What do leftist apologists for the Iranian regime have to say about the brutal, appalling, and escalating crackdown on human rights? Yeah, you, Rosie.

Answer: Nothing.

The word “nothing” is linked to some videos of Rosie O’Donnell, whom Malkin seems to think is the designated spokesperson of the entire Left. Rosie is the new Ward Churchill.

It goes on. In fact, I don’t blog about everything that concerns me, because I don’t have time, although some lefties have spoken out against human rights abuses in Iran — here and here are two examples. I send a small donation monthly to Amnesty International because human rights abuses around the globe concern me deeply.

However, as a blogger, I focus on human rights abuses perpetrated by my own country, because I’m more directly responsible for what my country does than for what the government of Iran does. And I think if all citizens of all countries took responsibility for their own nations’ actions instead of pointing fingers at everybody else, the world would be a better place.

And I’ve been having this conversation with wingnuts since the late 1960s. It flies right over their pointy little heads every time.

The Wisdom of Doubt, Part II

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Yesterday President Bush vetoed a bill that would have provided for federal funding of some embryonic stem cell research. John Amato writes,

He falsely asked for Congress to stop politicizing Stem Cell research, but that’s what he did today and took a ridiculous moral position. This is why we need separation of Church and State. Religion cannot dictate Science. Here’s the role call of the vote … Update: Fact Check Bush on Stem Cell via The Democratic Caucus’s Senate Journal. 68 percent support funding, in the latest ABC/Post poll to measure views on the issue, in April.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times,

“Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical,” Mr. Bush said during a brief ceremony in the East Room of the White House. He called America “a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred.”

Picking up where the last post left off … Our culture places a high value on certainty and considers not-knowing a flaw. And moral clarity is ballyhooed as the sine qua non of all that is Good and Righteous.

As I’ve written elsewhere, achieving moral clarity is remarkably easy.

First, take a firm and inflexible position on a moral question. Then, studiously ignore any factors that might call that opinion into question. If the factors refuse to go away, make up lies to neutralize them.

See? Nothin’ to it.

If you are foolish enough to take all facets of an issue into account, you risk not being clear. In fact, the more gut-level honest you are about a messy, unpleasant issue, the less clear you are likely to be. And this is a problem for conservatives, who by nature cannot stand ambiguity. One of the most basic traits of conservatives, in fact, is a compulsion to sort the world into rigid binary categories — right and wrong, good and evil, white and black. Any muddling of categories sends them into nervous fits. But once all things and all issues are properly sorted, they can relax and bask in their moral clarity.

The standard way to achieve moral clarity on the abortion issue, for example, is to completely disregard women. Examples of such “clear” moralizing include this op ed by Dean Barnett and this one by Michael Gerson. See also Digby:

This is not the first time I’ve heard this argument and it’s always quite compelling to hear a man make such a stark and simple logical argument about something which others seem to find so complicated. I suspect that is because there is one person involved in this great moral question who is rarely mentioned in such pieces. In fact, if you read the whole thing you will find that this man has managed to write an entire article about fetuses, pregnancy and abortion without even noting in passing the fully formed sentient human being involved so intimately in this that the whole argument takes place inside her body.

Abortion presents a painful choice, and although I oppose criminalization I understand why people agonize over this issue. But embryonic stem cell research? Particularly when there are boatloads of frozen embryos that will almost certainly be discarded anyway? You’re balancing the “rights” of a cluster of frozen cells against sentient children and adults suffering from terrible diseases. I see absolutely nothing “ethical” in Bush’s veto.

Weirdly, people who have “moral clarity” that embryonic stem cell research is bad often are compelled to lie — to us, to each other, to themselves — about the facts of the embryonic stem cell issue.

Satyam writes for Think Progress:

Faced with the opposition of nearly two-thirds of Americans, White House spokesperson Tony Snow today attempted to spin the veto as a positive development. Snow claimed that Bush has a “unique and unprecedented role” in supporting stem cell research, and attacked critics for “misstating” the administration’s policies, claiming that Bush was in fact “putting science before ideology.”

In an attempt to drum up support for less potent alternatives to embryonic stem cell research, Snow falsely characterized the science behind stem cell research, claiming scientists “are not even entirely sure about what the possible benefits of embryonic stem cells [are].” …

…Snow’s claim doesn’t pass the laugh test. Contrary to what Snow says, Bush has held a backwards and overly ideological perspective on scientific research. In 2001, Bush neutered the ability of scientists to engage in stem cell research by curbing funding for new embryonic lines. In 2006, he vetoed legislation lifting those restrictions. Even Bush’s top scientists have criticized him for these actions.

Currently, “not a single scientist who is pursuing research on any kind of cell has said that research involving embryonic stem cells should stop.” And scientists have seen potential treatments from embryonic stem cell research for a variety of ailments.

The only thing stopping federally-funded stem cell research from progressing is the White House’s insistence on putting right-wing ideology ahead of science.

UPDATE: More on the administration’s misinformation here and here.

As I said, whenever any messy facts get between you and moral clarity, just lie about them. That’s the ticket.

There is something self-evidently screwy about “ethics” that value frozen blastocysts above children and adults suffering and dying from terrible disease. But “moral clarity” on the stem cell issue — born of a stubborn refusal to look at all facets of the issue honestly — results in myriad unfortunate side effects. As explained here, for example, thanks to morally clear policies doctors performing in vitro fertilization cannot research ways to reduce multiple births. And multiple births increase the risks for both babies and mothers.

In other words, the rigid “right-to-life” policy is killing babies.

Essentially, “moral clarity” is about bullshitting yourself. It’s about not dealing honestly and compassionately with all aspects of a moral issue. Instead, the “morally clear” begin with the position they want to take and work backward to justify it, scamming themselves and others when necessary to achieve the desired outcome. This twisted way of achieving “clarity” is founded in the dualistic thinking Glenn Greenwald writes about. This dualism assumes one side of an issue must be “good” and the other must be “bad.” Thus, in much anti-choice literature embryos can talk and women who choose abortions are either ignored or assumed to have evil or selfish motivations. But real-world moral issues often involve multiple “good” sides. It is actually quite rare for people and facts to so neatly sort themselves into “good” and “bad” boxes as the morally clear want to sort them. And by achieving “clarity” based on lies and false assumptions, the “clarifiers” actually create more pain and complication.

Moral clarity takes inflexible positions based on rigid, narrow concepts of good and bad, life and death, self and other; see the “One Watch” series for further explanation of this. The morally clear like to talk about “standing firm.” The philosophical Taoists would tell you this is a bone-headed and disastrous way to approach morality. The Tao (way) is harmonious and does not take sides. Taoists call the Tao “soft,” and like water it naturally finds its best course without having to be forced. You understand it not by its actions but by its effects. The American Right is the Anti-Tao, always striving to impose their hard will on others and refusing to acknowledge how much harm they do and how much suffering they cause.

In John Wu’s translation of verse 38 of the Tao Teh Ching (Shambhala, 1989), I think the word ceremony can be read as either “organized religion” or “social convention.” I say that because other translations use ritual or etiquette instead of ceremony. Other than that, I think the verse applies as well to 21st century America as it did to China in 500 BCE.

High virtue is non-virtuous;
Therefore it has Virtue.
Low Virtue never frees itself from virtuousness;
Therefore it has no Virtue.

High Virtue makes no fuss and has no private ends to serve:
Low Virtue not only fusses but has private ends to serve.

High humanity fusses but has no private ends to serve:
High morality not only fusses but has private ends to serve.
High ceremony fusses but finds to response;
Then it tries to enforce itself with rolled-up sleeves.

Failing Tao, man resorts to Virtue.
Failing Virtue, man resorts to humanity.
Failing humanity, man resorts to morality.
Failing morality, man resorts to ceremony.
Now, ceremony is the merest husk of faith and loyalty;
It is the beginning of all confusion and disorder.

As to foreknowledge, it is only the flower of Tao,
And the beginning of folly.

Therefore, the full-grown man sets his heart upon the substance rather than the husk;
Upon the fruit rather than the flower.
Truly, he prefers what is within to what is without.

See also: “Mr. Bush’s Stem Cell Diversion.” Click here for The Mahablog stem cell archives.